Twilo When I was Young: TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN Part I

"Sexuality is a murky realm of contradiction and ambivalence. It cannot always be understood by social models, which feminism, as an heir of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, insists on imposing on it... It cannot be "fixed" by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society." - Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

"I can't help it / if you might think I am odd
If I say I'm not loving you for what you are
but for what you're not." -- Bob Dylan, "I'll Keep it with Mine"

 Haters love to dismiss the Twilight films, sight unseen, but they do so at their own peril. The New Sincerity, you can't escape it, any more than my parents' collective rattletrap beachfront condo can escape the wrath of 2012's rising tides. Will you be drowned in the pool of tweenage tears, or stand up and be counted, neck seared by the puncturing flames of angst along the water's edge? I have my answer. I am walking on air.

When I flew down to visit my mom and grieve my late father this weekend, pictures of all white jogging outfit-clad Kristen Stewart rubbing her flat white belly were all over the USA Todays and NY Times papers floating around the airport. In the rush of pressurized cabins and the endless boarding calls, these pictures took on an unheimliche aura that I found irresistible.  Then, watching ECLIPSE and NEW MOON on my mom's huge flat screen in our off-hours, I could appreciate the films' sublime mix of gorgeous scenery, operatic brooding, and mythic family dynamics. The latter in particular is so strong --the sense of belonging or wanting to be belong, or about to be initiated into a pack of cool older kids--and so central to any alienated youth fantasy's success you'd think it would be a regular feature of teen movies, but you'd be wrong, and that in itself shows what idiots most filmmakers are. Like overpaid hack Joe Ezterhaz's Catherine Trammel, who is given Lecter-like powers of manipulation thanks to her 'Bachelor's in Psychology', Mormon author Stephanie Meyers wins by default, because her fantasy world is genuinely Jungian, not Freudian, not smarmian, not dickheadian. It never snickers or leers, and even when confronted with a bunch of muscled Native American males, there's never a wolf call. Just as the douche bags and dillweeds never make it past the chicken wire fence of our psyches, so too is the Pacific Northwest of Meyers' imagination a perfect mirror of a genuine dreamworld. That it's a 15 year old girl's dreamworld and not mine matters not. In dreams we are all ageless, and gender is as flexible as set and setting, we all dream Tiresias. All that matters for true myth to function is that the chivalry of Camelot meet the wild woods of Hans Christen Andersen; that the nightmare projections of lonely girls making out with their tear-stained pillows in the dead of night sometimes come to life in white-as-a-sheet complexioned animae; that cool music by Bon Iver and Mazzy Star-studded chanteuses find ultimate visuals in the misty mountain hops of the Pacific NW.

As an older viewer I identify neither with the Edwards nor the Jacobs, but with the moldy old-growth forest bearing witness to their duels; the Merlin-Green Man bearing fathomlessly patient witness to the unfurling events from the vantage point of the fern camera. And since most straight guys in their 40s like me wouldn't give the Twilight films a viewing even if they were forced to on a plane, I take it as a duty to flaunt my championing, even as I question the 'rightness' of it. I'm not sure I'll ever actually pay to go see Breaking Dawn in the theater, but I salute its existence eventually on DVD rental. And when I'm old and enfeebled like T.S. Eliot I'll probably buy the complete set on blu-ray to watch all alone in long sittings when I'm emotionally disturbed and afraid to leave the house. But until then, come with me into my past writings on this great series. First, ECLIPSE:

"...the realization of modern myth requires teenagers to resonate, as all fairy tales involve the very young. Never forget that in the days of King Arthur, the oldest person–Merlin–was probably in his early 30s...  Considering the sexist neoconservative consumerism-product placed orgasm-oriented flicks that predominate so-called ‘women’s pictures’ or rom-coms, TWILIGHT alone understands the supernatural power that can be had in rejecting bland hand-me-down values. The pro-virginity aspect is the 21st century Antigone move, the way not being a virgin was in the 1920s. I know very well the way a woman you haven’t had sex with can inspire like no other muse, and the way a 100-year old lecher in a teen idol’s body can wreak merry havoc on pouty-lipped teenager brain stems, and I know these things to be true, and that as an artist or writer, that kind of inspiration should always trump the pitiful and misleading call of the proprietary orgasm. Edward knows it too…. sigh (Bright Lights, 1/11)

Then, on the first two films and the general 'concerned mom' backlash over the second film I wrote the feature length (for Bright Lights Film Journal)

"Eternal virginity via sacrifice in the Twilight-verse thus equals the preservation of youth, of sparing a beautiful creature the passage into the world of cruel, devouring nature. This is essentially what Edward works towards in refusing to punk Bella out to the vampire way of life, to prevent her from having any traumatic or otherwise significant experiences, to keep her isolated from "the real." Yet the imaginary level he exists in hinges on promises of danger, sex, and being turned into a vampire for it to hold any interest at all. For Edward to, in a sense, "exist" in Bella's life, she must stay virginal; the blood he drinks is supposedly from animals or something, but it's clear his spiritual power is derived from keeping Bella sustained in perpetual adolescence." - "Someone to Fight Over Me." (Bright Lights #68, May 2010)

I bring in this Neil Diamond song as 'Shilo' is an excellent anima example, Shilo as the Edward to Neil Diamond's Bella: "When no one else would come / Shilo, you always came."And of course, Twilo (left) was a once very popular, now closed, mostly gay but extremely hetero friendly all-night dance club - the place to go when the rest of New York was finally closed, and the pink dawn was breaking, and you were still too high on ecstasy and/or cocaine and/or acid and/or shrooms to consider going to sleep.

That breaking dawn vibe of your heart beating like mad at the thought of bedding one of the three girls still up with you and how to sneak away from the others, and where the hell your keys are but you're so high you don't care, that's what the Twilight films conjure up for me, that and the aching soul vibe that my mom's LP of Neil Diamond's 12 Greatest Hits gave me as a six year old in the 1970s, where Kate Jackson was my Shiloh, and she always came, after I had to go to sleep though (Charlie's Angels came on past my bedtime)

And, from 1/7/08 (The Beautiful and the Darned) after the first film came out:

"TWILIGHT it must be remembered, has nothing to do with "real" high school or "real" horror films - it's a fantasia of maturity deferment; a snapshot of how pregnant with dangerous, giddy possibility the world seems before one gets their first "bite." It's permanently frozen at the moment of rapture/rupture, right before the disillusionment of the first sexual experience (see also: THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) with a guy who promises you the world, then splits. The idea of an ageless vampire here becomes an excuse for the eternal virgin prepubescence; an eternity dwelling at the edge of the cliff that all your friends are now beginning to dive off of (and looking kind of busted when they resurface, if they ever do).

"Aren't movies primarily vehicles for escape? In the case of TWILIGHT, what the girl demographic is escaping from is their own wooden stake penetration, the pink dawn of the mighty crowing cock. Who can blame them? I remember my revulsion at seeing hairy 1970s nudist magazines being circulated in elementary school. Could people really be doing these things with their... ? It seemed unsanitary, violent and most of all, painfully humiliating. The giddy night of the prom starts out flowers and anticipation, it ends up pig's blood and Trip Fontaine splitting before you wake up in the wet grass of the football field.

"What eased the fear of this sullied maturation when I was of TWILIGHT age? Pamela Sue Martin as TV's NANCY DREW, Kate Jackson in CHARLIE'S ANGELS...much of TV at the time fostered a dependable sexlessness, the promise of an eternity of hand-holding and chaste confessions of love and adoration, as opposed to a humiliating orifice merger."

  Finally, from 1/20/09, Tortured Longing is the New Coke:

"TWILIGHT fuels the fire of sadomasochistic alchemy wherein torture becomes pleasure, denial becomes acceptance, submission becomes freedom. Through recognition and release of the associated fear, not having becomes having it all. The girls of TWILIGHT ween themselves off desire through recognition of its impossibility. They’ve been set free, like Jonathan Pryce at the end of BRAZIL, looking out at the clouds while one of his torturers (Michael Palin) sadly realizes, “he’s gotten away from us, Jack!” These TWILIGHT girls have gotten away from us, Jack. They’ve found a streak of neo-Victorian repression that leads them clear away from Big Brother and his sublimation dream wheel."

And PS - there's nothing gay about... THE IMMORTALS!

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Pre-Code Capsules 9: BEHIND THE MASK, DR. X, TROUBLE IN PARADISE, BLESSED EVENT, THE BLUE ANGEL

BEHIND THE MASK
1932 - ***
The great forgotten Jack Holt plays the worst federal agent in the world  in this pulpy thriller, endangering his witnesses and letting himself be snowed over by any old disguise or pretense. His saving trait is a masochistic yen for weird undercover work; he's not afraid to go to jail and pose as a convict so he can win the trust of nervous flunky Boris Karloff, so he can hit him up later for a job in a racket that hides dope in caskets and is masterminded by a shadowy doctor. Edward Everett-Sloan is around and there's a vast spy network full of dark-eyed bit players.  Meanwhile Holt's girl, Constance Cummings, tries to save her dad, a doctor in 'a lot of trouble' and a little romance bloometh 'twixt her and Holt. And she's even remarkably capable with a .45, which is a switch for these things.

It all climaxes in a scene where the masked evil doctor makes a great show of refusing to give the tied-down Holt anesthetic for a planned vivisection, because he wants him to experience the magic moment when excruciating pain becomes ecstasy. Batailles-esque philosophy and dimestore pulp come together with the Universal horror stock company! But it's not until the last five minutes that it approaches the cock-eyed madness of any five minutes of DR. X (1933).

BLESSED EVENT
1932 - ***1/2
If you've been always a bit cold on Lee Tracy this is the film that will make you warm up. He's like Jimmy Cagney crossed with the adenoidal scarecrow as the quintessential fast-talking gossip columnist, ushering in a new low in journalism via the ratting out of 'blessed events' - i.e. children born less than nine months after the couple's been married, or outside of wedlock, or etc. Remember when that was a scandal? Me neither. Highlight: Tracy bluffs Allen Jenkins' mob hitman via a monologue about an electric chair execution he witnessed that brings Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY-worthy manic pantomime to some balls-out ghastly places, such as his imitation of the wobbly walk to the chamber, his voice cracking with hysteria, body spazzing sharp and jerky like a Zulawski hero as he describes the anguish of waiting in hopes of  a reprieve, the shaky steps of the last mile, puking up the last meal, the rigor mortis and hair burning. It's the sort of thing that only the pre-codes could delve into, and this delves so deep you're quaking along with Jenkins by the end, and all traces of your dislike of Tracy have been obliterated.

Roy Del Ruth directed and the rapid patter pace is awesome except when Dick Powell's lame songs slow things down. Edwin Maxwell, Ned Sparks, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Jack La Rue, and Rita Cunningham all come over to the table, adding plenty of moxy. Add references to Jews, ("Do you know many Jews there are in New York?" - "Oh, dozens!"), Amos and Andy, and a wild-eyed girl 'in trouble' begging for a reprieve herself, played with deranged ferocity and desperation by a ragged-looking creature named Isabell Jewell (left), and you have a whipsmack pre-code that makes your scalp stand on end. PS - You will also come out of this film learning what 'nadir' means.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE
1932 - ****
It took awhile for this pre-code Paramount to resonate with me, but now I dig that it doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, instead playing up the linguistic difficulties where everyone in Europe is constantly searching for the one language each of them knows just a little bit of, as in the excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room.

Many viewings later I love the elaborate conveyance of gossip, so that Miriam Hopkins is getting verification requests from duchesses mere minutes after being spotted in the lobby of her lover by a nosy count. (and it's all rot, of course). While Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or Melvyn Douglas, or even Ronald Coleman, he swoons well and convinces you through two layers of subterfuge that he's genuinely confident in his sexuality, in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him, each more beautiful than that moon.

And who wouldn't be in love with both Hopkins and rich perfumier Kay Francis? Hopkins displays her wide, loose midsection proudly in some tight-clinging dresses, giving you the vibe she moves from the center of her c-nt. I love the way their first kiss on the couch seems to make them slowly dissolve until the couch is empty--and Francis is at her most glamorous and poised, even while maintaining some of her flat-chested androgyne aura earlier films like THE COCOANUTS (1929). As always, Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles are effete, bitchy suitors; Gustav Von Seffeyritz  humbugs with gusto as the chairman of the board who suspects Marshall is a crook, just as he is. But who would be able to resist robbing Kay Francis?

"I'm a saaad panda..."

THE BLUE ANGEL
1930 - ***
BLUE ANGEL might best be understood as the chrysalis between the caterpillar of the silent era's 'deformed circus freak loves pretty trapeze artist' plot boilerplate which Acidemic contributor Budd Wilkins has termed the "masochistic melodrama" genre (See his fine Chaney reviews here)  and the sound era pre-code butterfly of the Hollywood Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations. As such it's neither here nor there, like watching Wallace Beery get stuck in the doghouse door trying to sneak out of the cast of MGM's FREAKS so he can defect to Paramount (though in truth, he went the reverse direction).

Either way, Emil Jannings is a damn unsightly kind of creepy crawler, way uglier and uncharismatic than Beery, and it's clear Sternberg can't stand him so rather than stir our sympathy, Jannings' out-maneuvered Herr Professor inspires nothing but disdain. His smug judgment of Lola and her postcards (which he finds in his student's schoolbooks) makes his downward spiral far less interesting, his slow motion expressionist pantomime reaching for grand tragedy in a way that makes you think Chaney is down to his last few faces. With his bug-eyed outraged head facing the camera from the same angle, round glasses and Satanic facial hair swirling, Jannings works very hard at keeping his head always in the center of the frame while his body twists and turns like a big old bug caught in a spider web. But to what effect? Nevah vanted doo.

 

Shot in Weimar Germany just before her Paramount-ordered nose job, molar removal, and strict diet, the Dietrich we see here could be her own sister, one who stayed in Berlin mit die schwarzwaldkuchen und bier. But Von Sternberg is in fine form; he lights the Blue Angel club like a crazy expressionist side show and if you focus in on the lighting and shadows as opposed to Jannings, it definitely does become the masterpiece so many claim.

Still, more than in any subsequent films, Sternberg's masochism in DER BLAU ENGEL is a downer. Always portraying the suitors of his lovely star Dietrich as buffoons, bug-eyed blowhards, shameless masochists, or authoritarian bullies (or else they rarely speak at all and operate as sex objects themselves, like Gary Cooper in MOROCCO), Von Sternberg's obsessions can sometimes seem the cinematic equivalent of a jealous, angry lover defacing pictures of his rivals even as his studio bosses insist he cast them. One would normally say of a Paramount pre-code that it's fun and sleazy but is it art? But in DER BLAU ENGEL we know it's art, and it's sleazy, but is it any fun?  Nein!

DR. X
1933 - ***1/2
Time and digital re-colorization has been kind to the early technicolor hues of DR. X. What used to look blurry and muddy and depressing now glitters with glowing emeralds, murky pinks and streaks of deep, bloody reds that make it like a candy fountain of shadowy death. Fay Wray is the daughter of Lionel Atwill, who gets lots of ham time as the titular Dr. Xavier, out to trap the "full moon killer" amongst his atmospherically-lighted collection of scientific colleagues, each of whom grows more indignant and suspicious the longer we hang out in their labs: Dr. Welles has made a 'study' of cannibalism and keeps a heart alive in an 'electrolysis solution' but his missing arm preempts further suspicion; Dr. Haines on the other hand was shipwrecked for years on a desert island and his tasty, plump colleague was never found; Dr. Rowen studies lunar rays' effects on criminal minds but notes that "the lunar rays will never effect you and me, sir, because we are 'normal' people." Mmm...hm.

And dig the post-modern self-reflexivity of the the climax, with the doctors all chained to their chairs, their pulses linked to vials of blood that overflow like a buzzer at the top of a Coney Island strength tester when they're aroused by the murder tableaux staged before them, just like you in the audience! Scream ladies and gentlemen! The Tingler is in this theater! In the subtext, the duality inherent in language gets a lot of subliminal attention too: Xavier's outrage over each of the new accusations of his colleague belies its antithesis: "Dr. Rowen could never never be the guilty one," means the opposite, while Lee Tracy regularly promises not to do something while then turning around and doing it, as expected by the morgue attendants and security guards he bribes to look the other way. Meanwhile, Xavier's grave pronouncements of things like "There can be no doubt about it, gentlemen - this is cannibalism!" are allowed no argument since they carry his medical weight. And now that you're not annoyed by Lee Tracy anymore (see BLESSED EVENT) maybe you wont want to tear his picture apart with your bare hands when you learn he gets Fay Wray in the end. Chained for your own amusement, indeed.

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Screams within Screens within SCREAM 4

O Courtney Cox, you were my favorite Friend, but now with lip all Howardly and skin glowing like a radioactive-luminous mask, and your Gail Weathers character still yoked to David Arquette's perma-wincing sheriff Dewey, yours truly is a SCREAM 4 for the Munch. Just as the ghostface killa mask is frozen in a 'Scream' so your once gorgeous face is now frozen in a world you never made, and which you haunt in a shadow state like that other memorable Munch painting, Madonna.

The rest of the original cast is also back, with changes reflecting the relatively longer stretch since the last installment. Sidney's a glum memoirist, Gail a struggling fiction writer stay-at-home wife to Dewey the sheriff, whose bewildered, pleading look lets you know he can't even find his cell phone yet remains determined to do all the decision-making for the community with no help from his shrewd wife. He's the sheriff! Yet in a way he's almost an accessory to the crime through his sheer idiocy. Upping the ante of hot mess women in Dewey's wife lurks a cute but also clueless deputy with DSM-IV-darkened teeth. This woman is so asking for death she doesn't even think to unsnap her gun out of its holster as she's stalking a mass murderer whom she knows in the next room!

"I love incompetent sheriffs!"

The last time a sheriff and deputy were this outmaneuvered was in Monogram's 1944 classic, VOODOO MAN (above, my praise here). As happens there and in SCREAM 4, the characters eventually learn to not even bother calling the cops, who would likely just shoot them by mistake. Still, since Dewey's refusal to accept any help even from his far more competent wife endangers everyone in town, it can't even be called well-meaning! Just lazy scripting.

But that's just annoying logic issues, what marks SCREAM 4 as the logical extension of the first three: media desensitizing, is in full swing. Obsessively watched by the local townsfolk on their iPhones or sMartPadZ, the film-within-a-film about the events in the last film/s, Stab, has led to an inexhaustible slew of sequels in which to provide a refracted meta chorus to the ongoing events, locking the future and the past in an endless trope lasso. Thank God, for this refraction is all the film has going for it, a post-modern edge used like a knife, for like few others Craven understands that self-reflexivity heightens scariness rather than detracts from it. And in that sense the films get scarier as the self-referential sequels accrue. The first SCREAM had just itself  to bounce off of in relation to other horror films, namely the 80s slasher cycle; SCREAM 2 was centered around the premiere of a film-within-the-film based on events from the first film, called Stab; 3 brought the cast to Hollywood for the making of the Stab sequel. Now that we've come back from a needed break for SCREAM 4, we find the Stab sequels have continued unchecked on direct-to-video and are up to SCREAM 7, and everyone is watching them on youtube, even while they're being stalked and stabbed in 'real' life. And now the 'ghostface' voice is actually available (within the film's diegesis) as an iPhone app, so now you never know if it's the 'real' killer and not a prank.

Focus, please.... focus

It's all meta only in the way that the characters say the word meta and pretend to be empowered even as they tastelessly prank call each other mere hours after learning their friends have been gutted. In this, strangely, they are less like slasher characters and more like the eloi in The Time Machine. No one thinks about arming themselves with a gun or a knife, or staying indoors at night, or not answering the door when the person on the other side refuses to identify themselves, or yelling for help, or calling the cops, or looking in closets in advance of dropping their guard and popping on earbuds. The film would have benefited from someone who doesn't wait before she is the final girl to pull one of the ever-present butcher knives from out its tasteful wooden counter top knife block, or gouge her assailant's eyes when being strangled instead of just overacting with the bugged-out eyes and the gasping.

Another saving grace is the metatextual terror of aging going on across the original cast, all now long in the tooth, in one way or another. And the real killer's voice sounds less scary and more just old--a Stuntman Mike from beyond the grave--hackneyed from the ax of over-familiarity. More could have been made of him sounding older, ala Hamlet's father's ghost or Charlie on Charlie's Angels. We never see ANY old people in the film so G-face's voice becomes--even though we know the voice isn't 'his' but some phone app--the film's sole representation of age and decay, and therefore more sad than scary. Meanwhile there's this smearing the lens with Vaseline and deep color washing that makes all the girl's faces glow in a CGI airbrushed blur. It can only be some stipulation in the Cox contract--she wants to be filmed in layers of digital airbrushing, therefore all the girls must do likewise--but it works since no one knows the difference between movie, anime, digital, analog, and real life anymore; the color-style gloss underwrites a miraculous disconnect that helps actors and characters hide from their own aging or sense of self-preservation. They even cheer bloody movies based on their own future deaths, like a man cheerfully devouring his own foot and working his way along the digestive ouroboros centipede until all that's left is a desert snifter of credits and end theme crunk.

The only one who sees past it all is the mighty Sidney (Neve Campbell, au natural) who, like all chastened lovers in films finds herself on a book tour for her self-help memoir. With her self-serious pout and moistened eyes she's well-aware that the only one who survives these events is the one who takes them super seriously, but even she doesn't bother to employ standard dirty fighting tricks until all of her friends are dead. The rest of the cast lives only for their death scenes and have all the survival instincts of Yvette Mimieux and company when la morlocks come calling. Suspense is ratcheted to a point but once these kids are stabbed and bubbling blood out their mouths there's no longer pain or tragedy --they become merely actors game for a throe, even tossing off bon mots before their death rattles.

The sad thing about survival is this: If you're lucky you get old. If... you're lucky! And that's a very sad, sad joke. In Hollywood it's double the pain. And is it perhaps better for your legend's longevity to not get this lucky. Marlene Dietrich and Garbo both retreated into exile to spare their fans the shocking Baby Jane-in-the-mirror moment.. Marilyn Monroe perhaps knew that if she took her life at least her fans would have what they always wanted--an immortal Aphrodite for the icon-stellation--and she could finally get some real sleep far from the flashbulb stings of gossip arrows.

The alternative to death or hermitage is not always good: Hollywood is cruel to those over 30, like that game of 'carousel' in LOGAN'S RUN! Man, is SCREAM 4 really science fiction? Imagining a future where screens and streaming have so overtaken us that we don't even have to worry about a Japanese ghost girl getting us through the screen like THE RING because we're already inside, hoping just to get as much face time with the camera as we can before we get stabbed, and to have the bloodiest, best death scene, because in the simulacrum life is measured not in heartbeats but in hit counts (I'm paraphrasing the killer here, though shan't reveal its name). 

In the end, that ducky overbite on Ms. Cox and the Streisand-ish Vaseline fog over all spells out that mummification on the altar of the image is the answer. It's pretty squirmy when Cox makes wry references to her hit sitcom, COUGAR TOWN, by coming on to nerdy film geeks but it's nothing new in Hollywood, just a scary look at the pyramid inversal created by the web, that great arbiter of eloi equality. The nerds were never meant to have this much power, or get hit on by this kind of weird, desperate onabotulinumtoxin A Mrs. Robinson. They don't know how to handle it. But handle it they shall for suddenly they run the world, like a box cutter battering ram right through the screen, with a ripping sound.

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Pauline Kael, Wonder Woman, Bright Lights #74

The latest issue of the awesome BL is up, and in it I salute Pauline Kael, the voice of madness in an age of damned dull sanity. And there's William Leung's How to Play a Superhero: Lynda Carter, Popular Culture Feminism, and the Search for Wonder Woman

"As long as popular culture has a place for a woman hero, Wonder Woman is relevant; as long as Wonder Woman is relevant, Lynda Carter is relevant." -

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

Reviewed by Erich Kuersten


"We miss her and need her today — someone with enough literary clout that her praise can define and refine the response to a movie the way she helped define and refine the responses to Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and Carrie. There are recent movies that have gone panned and forgotten but would surely have been embraced by Kael, like Observe and Report (she would have saved it from getting lumped with Paul Blart, Mall Cop), Enter the Void, and the Twilight series (panned by adults who haven't seen it or are ashamed to admit they have — she would no doubt recognize that they fill a too-long-ignored, underserved demographic). She was confident enough to get wise to Fellini's and Woody Allen's essential shallowness... she was wary of film critics who prized themselves for elitist judgments. "I don't trust critics who care only for the highest and the best, it's an inhuman position, and I don't believe them. I think it's simply their method of exalting themselves" (265)

We need her! Luckily there are some great critical voices still out there, in the Village Voice, in fact, and on websites like Bright Lights Film Journal!

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Americanus Ignoramus: RED STATE, BRIDESMAIDS

No one's ever accused Kevin Smith of being a closed-mouth man. He likes writing characters that like to talk, and talk, and talk in language so unlike actual human speech it wears out the actors unless they pace themselves. Either they go all red-faced and sleepy by the end, or we fall asleep halfway through. Smith doesn't care - camera still rolling away. RED STATE (2011)--his first venture into 'straight' action thriller--is marred by at least two lengthy monologues that stop the film so cold you may forget all about it and start playing cards, forgetting the TV is even on. The first is a long, unfocused ramble by Tarantino stock company regular Michael Parks as a crazed bible-thumping arms hoarder and leader of a 30-strong family that's a little bit Waco, a little bit Westboro Baptist.  Parks is great but he's not much of a preacher, barely talking above a mutter when he should be shaking the rafters with righteous hellfire.  The second big monologue is far, far worse --John Goodman-- unfocused, haggard, and a hundred pounds too thin--rambling out a lengthy, half-asleep metaphor and a lengthy, drop-dead dull explanation of a plot device spoiler alert decency excuses me from revealing. Goodman's usually energetic and fun, but here he takes the idea of a lumpen proletariat ATF man to a tedious extreme. You want to feed him some Twinkies just to raise his blood sugar.

The plot has the crazy Christians using the devil's tool (Craigslist) to lure a trio of fledgling high school buddy virgin douchebags way out into bumfuck country by promising them a menage a quatre with a local divorcee.  From there we get a little torture porn, a little Mexican stand-off, some tense 'won't someone think of the children' drama, and a small arsenal that most of the captured menage-hungry douchebags are too stupid to take advantage of. We get the feeling Kevin Smith had just seen the entire output of both QT and RR in one long weekend before writing the script but QT's dialogue always works in brilliant ways that Smith can't seem to grasp. Lengthiness does not equal greatness. At the film's end, as Goodman, long-winded and exhausted, attempts to tie up the loose ends a proper movie wouldn't have left dangling, what we learn is that Kevin Smith hates the bible belt lunatics and thinks shotgunning Jesus fish in their holy water barrel is some kind of righteous apocalyptic satire, but as I wrote awhile back in my take on TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL --a real auteur, a Nick Ray or Godard, harbors compassion for the damned and that's why their films endure. 

BRIDESMAIDS (2011) on the other hand, feels real and lived in and we can thank SNL and Groundlings for the breezy, lived-in rapport the two veterans of those sketch comedy ensembles, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig, share in little termite scenes at coffee shops and during mundane errands. When they talk to each other in low-key natural speaking voices it's suddenly apparent just how fake and trite most rom-com friendships are. Theirs is a quick lived-in rapport that only occurs when both parties are brilliant on their own, truly love one another, have known each other for years, and have been rehearsing and improv-ing for weeks or months beforehand.

But they drift apart when Maya marries into a cabal of rich, bland, whitey lawyers. Adept comic actress Jessica St. Clair is Whitney, the materialist wife of Maya's future husband's boss who tries to jostle Wiig out of alpha BFF position. And since Maya's real-life dad is the legendary Quincy Jones it's a nice touch that her onscreen dad looks like Quincy, and can afford the super rich wedding this unbearable (but hella hot) chick Whitney dreams of...

However, this movie has douche chill moments galore. Annie (Wiig) starts out the film in free-fall after her small business dream of a quirky bakery has gone bankrupt and her hot guy lover (Jon Hamm) only wants her as a second tier booty call. Along the way she throws over the Canadian cop who really loves her because her esteem is low, and that's all quite believable and well-done but still douche chill cliche down to its rom-com core.

That said, BRIDESMAIDS earns huge props in its skewering of the rampant materialism and bourgeois oppression that's encouraged and indulged in the name of bringing 'magic' to a wedding. Snob consumer Whitney flaunts her knowledge of expensive couture and personal relationships with haughty bridal boutiques and MELANCHOLIA-size country estates. We all know this type of girl, so naturally we relish when Annie just attacks her head on. Even if her motives are self-centered and/or lifted from MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, it's damn heroic.

But in the end the film basically undoes the anti-bourgeois take-downs that have preceded it. After Wiig tells it like it is we're supposed to champion her ability to not wince at the mega-rich tackiness of the wedding at the climax - replete with lasers and fireworks and waterfalls and a surprise performance by Wilson Phillips.

The best scene prior to is when Whitney brings all the bridesmaids to pick out a dress at this ritzy all-white boutique and the fawning silken strong arm suffocation is so well done that the vomiting that ensues seems natural and deserved -- a performance art reaction ala Penny Arcade to the peer pressure-driven bridal business. Don't deny it deserves it! Bridal biz, you suck! Playing on female insecurity and competitiveness to choke what should be a special day near to death with table flower whimsy and lovely little ribboned bits of business is a friggin crime, so shit on it, sista!

More could have been done with Jill Clayburgh's AA mom--an actress and 12-step group both dear to my heart--and how much Wiig's meltdown, hitting bottom, and subsequent redemption, resembles an AA intervention. But at least it's in there. The 'normal guy' cute Canadian cop who just happens to have been a fan of Wiig's old bakery is actually not as douche chilly as I said earlier, but why are all the men in rom-coms either adorably scruffy blank slates or smug douches? Still, for all its concessions to the rom-com world, this is easily the best chick comedy I've seen since MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING. Of course BRIDESMAIDS could use a man like Rupert Everett again, a master who transcends all stereotypical gay best friend cliches the way Jesus transcends carpentry.

Carpentry... ah yeah, RED STATE could use a man like George Downes, too, and Kevin Smith could really use a dialogue editor and an understanding of how narrative works. If Smith had made DR. STRANGELOVE he probably would have re-written the ending to have a long-drawn out tribunal about how Major Kong's A-bomb was a dud, and Kong had a parachute, and the Russians questioned him for three days before releasing him. Only BRIDESMAIDS even approaches real satire, and dares to snap at the hand that feeds it. Ostensibly another materialist fantasy like MAMA MIA or EAT, PRAY, LOVE, BRIDESMAIDS turns around and trashes the empty-headed over-done prettiness of so many bourgeois weddings with great finesse.

Too bad in the end, waterfalls, moonbeams, Wilson Phillips, and fairy tales of composting hippies and two dogs fighting are all America has left. BRIDESMAIDS fights that truth for awhile, then surrenders to it. RED STATE just jeers both sides before apologizing like a shame-faced kid caught soaping cars. America that ain't!

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Miss J. EDGAR Regrets...

Postscript 11/9/11- The Village Voice review today was pretty positive, including hints Leo didn't balk at the queer closet aspects... so maybe this wild prediction of mine is way off? I hope so.

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Was it true that J. Edgar Hoover liked to wear women's clothes or was that a communist plot to discredit him? By all accounts he was a hopeless voyeur who got his kicks listening to bugged tapes of JFK having sex with numerous shakedown starlets and the gay stuff with sheep-dipped plant Sal Mineo even more so. He had a lifelong best friend (ala Robin to Hoover's Batman?) in Clyde Tolson, who inherited Hoover's estate, and they took all their vacations together, but were just pals as far as anyone knew. Biographers theorize Hoover was too paranoid from his own copious blackmailing to ever risk doing anything sexual, gay or straight, and got his rocks off as a voyeur as a result... but that thing with Tolson...

If Leo dons a fez, I'll know I'm wrong.

I worry that in Eastwood's upcoming film the voyeurism angle will be 'neutered' and his sexuality will be conveniently arrested by his duty to a strong but ailing mother figure. I've been reading James Ellroy's awesome Underworld trilogy, wherein Hoover gives his implicit but unspoken okay to the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK and leaves the mob alone in return for their privately eliminating threats to his tenure while he waxes wroth at the safe-to-wax-at danger of communism.

Also, Hoover was allegedly also good buddies with Howard Hughes, who DiCaprio played with similar sweaty reverence in THE AVIATOR. Just as that film dismissed the tissue box shoes and long nails of his later years with a wave of piss jars and a round the clock screening of HELL'S ANGELS, so  J. EDGAR will wave away Hoover's plots against, say, Martin Luther King, through some arbitrary dialogue.  I can see Leo's personal cadre of writers noting that DiCaprio doesn't care for racism, or gaybashing, but may allow a topless shot to show off his jailhouse abs.

I predict also that any actual J. Edgar mom issues will be sentimentalized as in John Ford/Norma Bates/Spielberg sunset sanctification and since Hoover's use of sex tapes and shakedowns made him too paranoid to either approach starlets (there were rumors of him having a thing with Dorothy Lamour) or, probably, to get funky with his longtime companion Colson, sex will be shuttled to the shadows. Leo's penchant for ghostly dead wives haunting him in guilt-wracked moments of boozy self-reflection are likely to provide the alternative 'out'.

Bottom line: the current persona of the Leo DiCaprio hero as a confused, damaged tough guy reflects his use of his own box office clout to avoid genuine emotional risks in his choices of roles. That's why he would make a good J. Edgar Hoover, but I doubt it's the reason Eastwood or DiCaprio thought he'd fit. It's like his unconscious is trying to tell him hey, Leo, you need to stop trying to look tough in manly suits and raincoats and shoulder holsters standing tall on courthouse steps in high contrast blacks and start cackling like the neurotic gunsel / Richard Widmark psychos or grinning and laughing like the romantic fools you were born to play.

Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hope Eastwood's film will dare question Hoover's intentions, manhood, and moral compass in a way that's real and honest and not mere craftsmanship window dressing on a white-washed sainthood canon shot / shoe-in Leo Oscar nod. We know from the promo Leo 'ages' into a crazy old Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman would be the ideal choice to play Hoover, and wouldn't flinch from covering the darker areas Leo will doubtlessly sidestep).

Leonardo needs to throw that momma of his down the stairs and get in a real fight, Mickey Rourke-style, that would solve the babyface aspect of his persona he so clearly longss to transcend.
If he wants to return to this era in his historical biopics, he should consider playing a scumbucket racist like James Earle Ray. Now that would be a stone cold brave role for old Leo. But he won't go there, and maybe one day he'll understand why that in itself makes him perfect for the part... of the real J. Edgar!

(POSTSCRIPT: See my praise that Leo did just as I advised - as in his racist role in DJANGO UNCHAINED! In best of 2012)

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Odin's Last Stand: WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

A great experimental film premiered on TCM last week from Nicholas Ray, which he shot in the late 1960s-early 70s with his film class while teaching at an upstate NY school. Along the way Nick created a communal spirit, basically pulled his class out of their other courses and into his orbit. He drank in excess and was alternately a benevolent instructor and a manipulative tyrant. His younger wife sums it up eloquently in her accompanying documentary, Nick had the passion and obsessive focus on a film that never wavers even when the project is not working, when it sucks, when it's a train wreck, and that's the difference between an artist and a non-artist. Most of us just walk away from lost causes.

As time goes on, WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (1973-ish) becomes a self-reflexive right place / right time black hole. An old Hollywood outsider inspires and infuriates and exhausts an upstate New York crew of campus semi-radicals - and films same, and this film is the film of filming the film it's filmed. There's smatterings of Ahab, Manson, Colonel Kurz, and Long John Silver in Nicholas Ray's inexorable creative drive. He's the teacher you both hope for and fear, since he has you convinced that if you fail to follow him over the lip of madness then you must not really want to be filmmaker. Whether pretending to hang himself or coaxing tears and anguish from his actors he's a little bit Norman Maine from A STAR IS BORN, ever a stone's throw from the long swim as he grooms the next generation with a love born of mortal desperation. He could be editing and re-editing this film forever, it's a maze he created just to get lost in, and like therapy, you know you've graduated when you've worked up the nerve to leave him to it.

Maybe that's all art is, in the end, a maze because the insane need to always have an ending, a way out, open to them, at least in their imagination. I'm reminded also of the Buddhist monks brushing their elaborate sand mandalas back to muddy sand and Welles' tinkering with the edits and sound on each and every film post-KANE until it's snatched from his hands by impatient producers and hacked back into some semblance of order by a sane, orderly hack; or drunken De Kooning in his early years, painting over and over on a single canvas with the same paint simply because he has neither the money nor sobriety required to judge it finished, or to replace it with a blank one. This kind of compulsive behavior when harnessed to genuine art is unstoppable --it succeeds because it already has succeeded.  It fills the void no amount of sex and possessions ever could. Nicholas Ray's film is a success because he worked on it long enough that he could distract his mania and so could catch some winks. It's a success because he wasn't dead before he could finish principle photography.

Does the finished product of WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAN amount to anything? Compared to what? The only ideal way to see it would be at four in the morning at a small university projection room with the people who made it, a thick haze of pot and tobacco smoke, and co-eds in thick beards and glasses sitting cross-legged in the aisles, passing jugs of wine, with Nick Ray sitting behind you, yelling at the projector or the screen, entering and exiting the room to compliment his entrances and exits in the film.  But on TCM in your living room, on your modern day utopian sofa, the film's relevance will depend on where your own head is at: are you a filmmaker yourself, one who perhaps chooses self-reflexivity and post-modern metatextuality as your mise-en-scene, since it ensures the sets are always free, the actors always present?

I wish I had Ray's mania and am glad I don't. Something inside me keeps me from ever letting go of the rope as I descend into the abyss that Ray jumps into, always, headfirst and without a rope except to hang himself with. WE CAN'T GO HOME practically dares the audience to dive in after him, right through the screen. He even left us a wide open hole, surrounded by a patchwork ring of images of fire and nooses. Just stick your head through, and let his gravity snap you through the flames.

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