Some movies I've seen over the last few years

Women in Revolt: An Andy Warhol movie on which Warhol did the camerawork, but Paul Morrissey directed. I've done a bit of reading about this film, and in interviews Morrissey articulates a surprisingly conservative worldview; surprising in view of his predominantly transgendered/crossdressing cast. He intended this film (apparently made after Valerie Solanis shot Warhol) to be a satire of feminism, and it certainly mocks both radical feminists and celebrity culture. At the same time, Morrissey's process is more captious than his sociopolitics, and by allowing his performers to improvise he creates a film that incorporates a diverse array of ideas and interests, from the sneering camp of Jackie Curtis to the flawless glamour goddess riffing of Candy Darling. Warhol's cinematography is terrible by any reasonable standard, but maybe his wandering, randomly focused camera eye is an accurate reflection of Warhol's listless way of looking at life. Holly Woodlawn has an early scene where she bounces around like a jack-in-the-box, shrieking at her boyfriend, that made me convulse with uncontrollable laughter until I became frightened at my own outsized reaction.

Overnight: A behind-the-scenes documentary about the story of a Boston bartender who is suspected of being the next Quentin Tarantino, in the 90s when everybody wanted to be or have the next Quentin. He makes his movie (Boondock Saints, beloved by some) but antagonizes a lot of people along the way. After power lunching with movie stars he gets the big head and his worst self manifests. His lack of self-awareness is summed up in a scene where he rants about how being thrown out of the Miramax building proves that now he's in a power position "because now they're afraid of us." At another point he laments (all quotations from memory): "I'm Hollywood's latest hard-on, why is no one returning my calls?" Guess he forgot how long a hard-on lasts. But he got his film and a sequel made, and some people love it, so good for him.

Living in Oblivion: from that same 90s indy film boom. Catherine Keener and Steve Buscemi make a low budget film-within-a-film, and every quirk of the ensemble creative process rings true with my memories of the acting life. It's an ensemble comedy that made me want to see everything auteur Tom Dicello could throw at us.

The Real Blonde: Another Dicello film with Keener costarring (And Buscemi reprises his character from Oblivion), this is another ensemble comedy with a broader New York canvas, and a similar spacy blend of character-based gags. I thought it was a worthy followup.

Double Whammy: Tom Dicello gives up on whimsy and tries to make lurid trash, but he doesn't seem to have his heart in it, and the movie is like watching someone improvise while exhausted. Early on there's a scene where someone walks into a diner and starts shooting people; there's a gratuitous panty shot as a cheerleader crawls backward to escape the gunfire, but gets shot dead. It's all presented like an unfelt attempt at trashiness; a gloomy effort at giving the rubes what they want. The whole movie has a vibe of wanting to sell out, but not knowing how to do it with cunning capitalist commitment. Denis Leary, who played against type as a sweet guy in Real Blonde, seems becalmed in his role as a put-upon cop, left adrift by the lack of anything to do. There's a pair of callow would-be screenwriters who poke fun at all the callow boys in the 90s who wanted to be the next Great American Screenwriter but just ended up making boyish junk, and the movie seems to be a parody of their Tarantino-without-the-brains aesthetic. There's also a story about a girl who hires someone to assassinate her father, or something; some real sadness and ugliness comes through, but the film is tonally out of balance. We gave up on this one. I suspect it turns out, in a meta twist, that the movie is the product of the birdbrained screenwriting characters, but I don't expect I'll ever find out.

House Party: African-American teens throw a house party. Feels a bit like a beach movie without a beach, but lots of real talk percolates through the hip hop performances and silly hijinks. Late in the movie the protagonists, Kid and Play, get in an argument about whether or not it's manly to have sex with girls and then ditch them if they get pregnant. Neither character wins the argument; they just get frustrated with each other, exactly like all the arguments I ever had with friends in school. Also, the teens are hassled by honky cops all through the movie, but the film is bookended with a fantasy sequence in which the party house flies through the air and, with music blasting, lands on the cops like they're wicked witches. Perhaps the message is that getting a party vibe going is a workable response to authority/cultural hassles.

Melvin and Howard: an Altmanesque portrait of lower middle class American life, bookended by an allegedly (but dubiously) true story about Howard Hughes willing a big chunk of change to an ordinary working stiff. Much of the movie is really about hapless Melvin's wives, and how he loses one only to find another. Good-hearted people struggle to get by and to feel better about themselves, and the sense of Real America in the 70s takes me right back to family vacation memories. The real Melvin has a cameo, and exudes so much charm that you can see why the filmmakers believe his preposterous story.

Birds of Prey: a short-lived TV series about the bat-women of Gotham City trying to fight crime in the wake of Batman's disappearance. It's going for a colorful camp vibe with a nonthreatening "sisterhood is powerful" flavor, but it's too much a heat-and-eat TV product.. The Huntress, who is Batman and Catwoman's conflicted daughter, is a potentially compelling character, caught as she is between her parents' incompatible motivations, and resentful of both, but the actress is too much the former child pageant contestant, moeing and sparkling when she should be cutting (in several senses).

The Big Sleep: The edition we got apparently had an Original Cut on one side and the theatrical release on the other. We watched the original without knowing it, then watched a documentary that itemized all the studio-mandated changes. We concluded that the retooled version would probably be better, but lacked the will to flip the disk and almost rewatch the movie. I guess we flunked an important test of Movie Buffness. The whole experience left us as mixed up as the book left me when I tried to read it. I prefer The Long Goodbye, book and film, which seems less like the product of an elliptical random plot generator than Big Sleep.

The Yakuza: Robert Mitchum goes to Japan to help a Japanese friend fight baddies. A love triangle ensues, and stately tableaus of elegant Japanese room design keep things pretty, until the tense extended battle climax. Mitchum was ahead of his time with this Old Man Action Movie thing, and while I'm no connoisseur of action choreography I was spellbound by the finale. Like A Touch of Zen, this is an action movie that mostly plays as a talky drama into which action irrupts. I love that. Mostly I rented this to see what happens when Paul Schrader and Robert Towne work together. Not half bad. The shocking West-meets-East post-battle denouement comes as no surprise, but I don't think surprise was the point.

It Was a Wonderful Life: a documentary about homeless women whom probably no one ever expected to be homeless; functional, smart women who lost everything through divorce or economic problems, and live in cars while trying to rebuild the foundations of their material lives, almost from scratch. We see how difficult it is to maintain dignity in these situations, much less to stay employed and get one's finances in order. One poor woman rents a U Haul to sleep in, and describes it as a luxury she won't be able to afford for long. She buys a pistol because it makes her feel protected. Then someone steals it while she sleeps.

Swept Away: an Italian film in which a brutish working class guy and a high-maintenance rich lady are marooned on an island. He brutalizes her, and she falls in love with him. Then they return to civilization and her love for him evaporates upon their return to class strictures, leaving him feeling more used and demeaned than his cruelties ever left her. A woman, Lina Wertmuller, wrote and directed this; if a man had made it I'd dismiss it as a babyman "men's rights" misogynist fantasy/pity party. I suppose Wertmuller is thinking about the dichotomies between class and sex, while having nasty fun with sex and violence like movies should.

Daughters of the Dust: I couldn't really follow the plot (is that little girl doing strange lo-fi effects magic because she's the spirit of a child yet to be born? Or something?) but it's a treat to see so many gifted African-American performers working in such gorgeous photography. This movie presents us with a corner of history I knew nothing about, and is persuasively unfamiliar, yet imbued with human warmth. It immerses us in a mysterious yet utterly American cultural venue. Formalist cleverness reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's Euro-art tableaus interconnect with a humanist concern for people that Greenaway's arid highbrowness can barely understand. It's no surprise that the director wrote or cowrote two books to expand on (and perhaps clarify) this film.

Nashville: Some of the actors playing at county stardom would never have passed an audition with a real Nashville label (and the otherwise perfect Lily Tomlin's turn as a soul gospel soloist is a cringer), but that quibble aside, this movie makes a virtuosic cinematic jazz symphony out of its southern show biz milieu. Essential. And my Nashville born and bred college roommate assured me that it captures the soul of the city perfectly.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: This one snuck up on me. Effervescent charm and a tonic dose of surprising sorrow. It really replicates the sense of getting to know a group of family and friends over time.

The Spirit: There's some dazzling use of light and shade in this sinkhole, (written and directed by erstwhile comic book mastermind Frank Miller) but... remember what I said about rumors that justify themselves on the basis of how well they explain things? 3 words, in no particular order: Cocaine Miller Frank. This rumor is the ONLY possible explanation for this chiaroscuro turd. Not quite hilariously wretched enough to get me to the end.

The Singing Detective: This British miniseries reveals its nation of origin with more than accents; the darkness and nastiness goes deeper than anything American TV would have dared in the 80s. But it's not a wallow. A hospitalized pulp fiction writer takes out his frustrations on everyone around while reminiscing about his troubled childhood, and rewriting his detective fiction in gnostically autobiographical fashion. It's lucidly fragmentary and shifting, sorrowful yet full of energy. Fans of Alan Moore's less superheroic work, or of Martin Amis, absolutely must see it. Michael Gambon makes his clever but cruel character as sympathetic as can be without blunting the uncompromising critique of his failings.

Boardwalk Empire, Seasons 3 and 4: Season 3 introduces a villain of such grotesque awfulness that he makes the psychotic real-life baddies of the early seasons (Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, etc.) seem balanced and moderate by comparison. Too many scenes where we see a minor heavy who's been around but never developed in his home, surrounded by loving family, setting the table for his adoring Ma, promising to read a bedtime story to his cherubic daughter, then answering a knock at the door and getting shot in the face. I was afraid Season 4 would try to top Season 3’s Boss Monster with a villain who ate babies or something, but they took a smart alternative route with a Marcus Garvey-like prig who qualmlessly funds his activities by dealing heroin. Chalky White, the most prominent African American character in the show, owns a Harlem club and must contend with the new villain over the question of upon what plausible foundation, exactly, African-American success can be built. Also other things happen, but the struggle between idealistic yet conniving Afrocentrism Vs. All-American capitalistic compromise overshadowed the rest. As usual the look of the show is more glazed and prettified than I think works for the story, but Season 4 held my interest much better than the bang bang bang boobs bang bang of Season 3.

Girls: Everyone who hates this show is wrong. Demonize Lena Dunham all you want, but this show articulates a certain kind of entitled hipster 20something city life about as well as my actual 20s did.

The Complete Jean Vigo: this mostly-silent era French filmmaker died while he was still in his 20s, and it's a dreadful loss to cinema. There's a lot to engage with in his brief filmography, but I'd like to highlight Zero de Conduite, which follows a pack of boys at an all-boy boarding school. It's mostly like a really good Little Rascals film, but near the end a loathsome teacher blatantly gropes the most prettily girlish of the boys, right in front of an entire classroom of kids. For the rest of the film, the boy is visibly hobbled with trauma. The authority figures all enlist him to cover it up, and his desperate, profane outbursts only make the adults more confident in their dismissal of the boy's pain. So whenever some doddering authority clod gives you a load about how bishops and coaches didn't know child molesting was a bad thing until recently, point them to this film. Jean Vigo knew, a hundred years ago.

Two Girls and a Guy: Robert Downey Jr. crafts his Tony Stark and, midway through the film, indulges in an apparently improvised acting exercise (with, perhaps, a twist of drug remorse) that has zilch to do with the romantic triangle that makes the gears turn on this one. The 90s dialogue goes for screwball pingpong by way of Tarantino archness. I like Tarantino least at his archest; ditto his legion of 90s wannabes. Heather "Rollergirl" Graham was a fascinating dud in the butt end of Twin Peaks, but she's luminous here, and seems to have handed the Awful Acting baton to her voice-challenged fellow actress in this movie, who tries to get by on hotness, and might have succeeded in a less talky pic.

The Fountainhead: stunning high camp. I don't usually say things like "Check out that dress!" but I do with this movie. To my astonishment, Ayn Rand's script actually has at least one moving passage; hero Howard Roark's reassurance of a nervous client that designing a "mere gas station" is worthy of his talents has given this lefty a bit more sympathy for Rand's views. But mostly the movie is a dingdong Mary Sue fantasy, which can be fun if you're dumb or drunk.

Capturing the Friedmans: A documentary about a picture perfect family that's brought down by the husband's penchant for child pornography and the investigation that follows. The husband is guilty of purchasing and swapping child porn with other loathsome pervs (and detectives) over the mails (in the pre-internet 80s) but the investigation homes in on his computer classes for teenagers. They hire a hypnotist to soften up the kids' brains for a load of delusional false accusations, and we get to see just how eager everyone from the police to the Friedman's own lawyer are to impose all their most lurid fantasies of subhuman debauchery onto Mr. Friedman, despite a complete lack of credible evidence that the man abused any kids under his tutelage. A bizarre witch hunt, made all the more confusing because the suspect is manifestly guilty of aiding and abetting horrible abuse; there's just no evidence that he abused kids himself, other than the grotesquely fantastical confessions of hypnotized kids.

The Blues Brothers: I'm amazed that a road movie that's almost a Wim Wenders remake of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World became such a phenom as a comedy film. John Belushi seems underused; casting such a big personality as an almost totally inexpressive character is a baffling choice. John Candy is kinda handsome. Dan Ackroyd's line about glue is a lesson in how delivery can sell a joke that would be nothing in someone else's mouth.

Hound of the Baskervilles: This is the Basil Rathbone version that thrilled me as a kid. It still delights me, because I'm thrilled by British hambones, smoky black and white photography, and atmospheric models.

Predator. A Vietnam movie in monster movie guise; the camouflaged alien killer is The Jungle, man. the camerawork is every bit as proficient as the paramilitary team it follows.  The men never upstage the jungle, and the jungle never upstages the men.  The characters and the mis en scene blend. Arnold finally defeats the monster by being, y'know, Arnold.

Enlightened: A show about a woman whose nervous breakdown has led to a fall from grace. She never seems like someone who could have achieved the position of responsibility from which she's been demoted, though, so it seems more like a film about a recent college grad trying to figure things out and establish herself in the first place. Star Laura Dern's contemplative monologues give the show some real emotional power that the often diagrammatic plots need, and her costars are all terrific. The finale complicates her struggle in diverse ways while still giving her a big win.

Waking Life: Not just a superlative coffee shop in Asheville, NC. While I'm usually no fan of blatant motion capture animation, the painterly ornamentation this movie adds to quotidian life captures the quicksilver emotional resonance that flows through life as we live it. I wanted to cohost a podcast with a good third of the cast.

Lair of the White Worm: Director Ken Russell allegedly made this goofy horror/fetish flick on the quick as part of a deal to finance a more genteel art film. For some reason it was a fixture on the role-playing nerd circuit, at least in my region. It's mostly lousy, although some of the psychedelia, ulde-Britian folk culture, and theatrical carnality you expect from Russell do make appearances, along with a portly manservant who makes the most of all his leering double entendres. I'd watch a movie about him, drawing a bath for master before locking up the chambermaids.

Shoot the Piano Player: Cheerful French cinema jazz. Anyone who thinks New Wave film can't be fun should see this. Free and assured.

Tombs of the Blind Dead: In this evening's feature the role of Franco and his supporters in the Church will be played by gross zombies. At the end the zombies leave the churchyard from which they emerged to hop a train and hit the city, using then-modern lines of transportation to bring their ancient contagion to modern Urbania, just like Franco and his fascist-coddling friends in the clergy. It's not exactly packed with scare scenes, but a couple of chase sequences (both involving women on foot trying to sneak through crowds of undead) are deliciously nightmarish.

True Blood, Final Season. Producer Alan (Six Feet Under) Ball has left the building, and the show is almost unbearable. The lady who works at Fangtasia and screams a lot saves the day, but not for long. An exhausted show.

Jodorowsky's Dune: I've never understood why so many people think that book cries out for audio-visual representation. Sandworms, sure, but mostly it's people talking about really complicated made-up sociopolitics. Great for a book, but why film it? Jodorowsky's version might have been livelier than the versions that did get made, although his dipsydoodle rewrite of the ending seems more like something out of the Heavy Metal movie than anything Frank Herbert would condone.

Cranes Are Flying: touching drama about a Soviet woman and her two lovers during WWII. Not to praise the loathsome Stalinist government with faint damnation, but the obligatory Marxist propaganda doesn't overwhelm the human insight; this story could be remade with zero concessions to Stalin and still carry a powerful message about grief and community. Spoiler warning: bereft, by the end, of both the men in her lover's triangle, the heroine recommits herself to the community, and the music swells. Pretty darn Marxist, but probably not a bad strategy for dealing with grief and loss in any political/economic context.

Veep: All insults, all the time. Even at my most cynical I doubt the toxicity in Washington is this routinely blatant at the level of basic courtesy, or lack thereof. Funny but draining. Still, I prefer it to the thinly veiled BDSM fantasy of House of Cards.

The Mighty Boosh: I used to be in an improv troop; this show is like the platonic ideal of what we were going for in our longform shows, only with fewer women (my only complaint). Two zookeepers face an array of silly problems.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Star Wars for the X Box set, who can probably follow the more kinetic action sequences better than I can. Groot's last line got a single tear from me, and proves my point about the non-Marxist applicability of Cranes Are Flying.

Anna Nicole: Mary Harron working for Lifetime isn't as terrific as Mary Harron unfettered, but this surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the famous pinup presents her as a level-, rather than empty-,  headed (when she isn't abusing substances) and caring working-class mom. I can buy it. I've known a couple of women in the hubba hubba business who were very real people behind the showbiz facade.

River's Edge: Dirtball Noir about a band of confused teens who don't know how to handle it when one of their friends murders another friend for no good reason, then tells everybody that he did it. Dennis Hopper shows up and, after a little scenery chewing to remind us who's boss, underplays with unexpected sensitivity and delegates the frantic overacting to Crispin Glover, whose flamboyant metalhead scuzzball is as theatrical as some actual teenagers. Director Tim Hunter went on to direct a bunch of Twin Peaks episodes, and you can see it in every shot of this movie; it's as much a Twin Peaks precursor as Winesburg, Ohio or Peyton Place.

Seeing the Diamond Beneath the Paste

Latest viewing experience: D.E.B.S.



The trailer is a bit of a bait and switch; what we really have here is a cheerful lesbian coming-of-age story. The superspy stuff is an overlay. The two lovers are, respectively, a superspy and a supercriminal who are supposed to be thwarting one another, not sneaking around and dating, and the tale of treachery and betrayal serves as an objective correlative for the socially imposed tensions of the love that still dare not speak its name in many quarters. It's a nifty idea, this stitching together of different misbehaviors to illuminate the unnecessary dangers of same-sex love, but what makes sense in theory fails in practice because the superspy genre elements mostly just lie there. Lots of candy colors and outsized props strive for cartoonish low camp but just look stagy, and the writer-director doesn't generate any thrilling thriller tension. Cat-and-mouse sequences are carpeted with techno music that's clearly meant to drive the energy, but someone chose chill house music instead of edgy tracks, so the chases are way too relaxing. In one scene there's an extensive establishing shot of a fancy restaurant that mimics the upward tracking shot of the opera house in Citizen Kane, showing us just how immense and fancy this restaurant is, but then the scene that plays out is a conventional restaurant scene that makes no use of all that fanciness. Then there's a long sequence in which the protagonists navigate a road-to-the-batcave route to a secret exclusive dangerous nightclub... that just seems like any old nightclub. People dancing, hanging, having fun. Lots of mohawks and spikes, but it still seems as safe as an after-church reception. 

 So why am I hammering on this mediocre movie? I watched it because the writer-director, one Angela Robinson, wrote (several years after making D.E.B.S.) some of the best episodes of True Blood. Her scripts blended and interconnected comedy, action, drama and suspense with acrobatic alacrity. She earned her money and how. Her scripts were jim dandy. Alan Ball (The auteur of True Blood) and company saw and nurtured something in Robinson that, on the basis of D.E.B.S., most of us would never have guessed was there. How does one spot the potential lurking behind a failure? Clearly the producers of a campy vampire soap opera know something about talent spotting that eludes most of us.

In Passamaquoddy No One Can Hear You Scream

After more or less enjoying Prometheus I've been watching the Alien movies, excepting the Alien Vs Predator movies because enough is enough.

Part of what makes the original Alien so great is that it's full of unfolding mystery.  The alien keeps shifting, revealing new aspects of itself and new dangers.  You can't pin it down.  It's death itself, lethal, heartless, mindless; yet crafty, unpredictable, and unstoppable.  The lesson is that the cosmos is not exactly full of love for the Human, and you shouldn't mess with some things.

Aliens retorts that you can mess with any damn thing you please, so LOCK AND LOAD.  Director James Cameron, the Vincente Minnelli of monster movies, replaces the tension engendered by the polymorphing parasite's continual astonishments with the suspense of "Who will survive and what will be left of them?"  That suspense was part of the first film, too, but here it's the mainspring.  There's a bit of an addition to the aliens' characteristics, but it's more a reasonable extrapolation of what we knew (aliens have mommies too) than the nightmare twists of the original.  Furthermore, the escalation from alien to aliens robs the creature of its dreadful uniqueness (though it didn't need to; such are the urgencies of the action genre), reducing the Cosmic Godling to creepy cannon fodder.

Alien3 offers no surprises regarding the alien creature itself, other than that it can look awfully unthreatening in 90s CGI that resembles a Colorform slapped onto the cinematic image.  Also, the Alien's POV resembles an old camcorder with dubious filters.  Director David Fincher would soon do much better.

The surprises in the film (aside from "Boo!" surprises) come from the convicts with whom heroine Ripley must work; their alien religious motivations replace the unfolding of Alien characteristics.  The alien itself is thoroughly banalized by now; the Lovecraftian awe of the original film is reduced to "There's a rabid hippopotamus loose in the high school!"  Each of these films has fine ensemble work, but all the sequels feature overt thesping, while the original was nearly Altmanesque in its casual approach to line readings, etc.

At one point in the third film, a guy refers to the alien as a dragon, which inspired me to spend the rest of the film pretending the alien is actually Pete's Dragon.





This exponentially boosted the film's entertainment value.

Alien Resurrection, the last of the Sigourney Alien films, has the look of a particularly glossy Heavy Metal magazine comic.  The unfolding mystery in this film is as much about Ripley, newly reborn from hybrid human and alien DNA, as it is about the pureblood beasts.  Sigourney Weaver's cool delight in playing a bad-girl version of Ripley is one of the chief joys I found in this film.  Wynona Ryder is, as always, fun to look at, but her bitter-pixy appearance can't quite compensate for her undistinguished voice work, especially in the context of her costars. Sigourney and Brad Dourif have marvelous vocal instruments, next to which poor pretty Wynona sounds like a randomly selected person off the street.  If only she'd brought back her comical British accent from Dracula!  Brad Dourif is one of the few actors who could pull off his scenes of sensuosity with an Alien, though that's just a warmup for later developments.

Underwater aliens are fun, and we get them here, but the real return of Alien mystery comes when Ripley is lowered into a pit of distinct yet inchoate Alien anatomy in a glorious homage to Alien designer H. R. Giger's grotesque tableaus (too bad he didn't get a check or a credit for this film tho) and proceeds to have sex with an alien.  It's all presented with White-Elephant arty tastefulness, since who could bear to watch a hard-core version of such a thing?  Somebody, probably, but no one I want to have lunch with.  The death of the offspring of this union depressed me; as cloying as the creature was, it reminded me of the death of Tink; a creature that never had a chance at life, put to death to spare it further misery.

I didn't like the idea of humans and aliens merging and mating; it further undercuts the evident theme of the original film, that cosmic indifference trumps manifest destiny.  This film returns humanity to the center of the universe by showing that we can harmonize with the Alien, but better still if we kill the product of our miscegenation (not the first time inadvertent racism has crept into the franchise, as the many critics of Aliens' black-mother-with-too-many-kids can attest).

One more thing; most of the ensemble in this film seems to be a dry run for screenwriter Joss Whedon's nerd-favorite show Firefly.  I thought Firefly seemed like an advertisement for its own adorableness, so with this film I enjoyed pretending that it really was the crew of the Serenity getting gutted by monsters. It's a sad testimony that I have to pretend absurd things while watching films that are meant to take the burden of that responsibility off my shoulders, but that's franchise entertainment for you.

Prometheus, whatever its flaws, put the mystery back into the story by showing us Aliens that sprang from alternate hybrid pairings and, aside from certain basic hungers, are not like the on-model, canonical, in-continuity aliens that had become as exhausted as any other franchised monster.  Since the sense of wonder I experienced when the aliens came out looking wrong and strange and new is what I want from Science Fiction, I'm going to say that, for my purposes, Prometheus is the best of the Alien sequels.

Hands on Shoulders

As I approach my 40th birthday and my fourth anniversary, I recall something a friend told me on graduation day in 1996.  At 22, I was utterly out of ideas about how to make my way in the world, and I told her so.

"We'll have it figured out by the time we're 35," she said.

Over the years I clung to that like a talisman.  And at the age of 35, I began dating the woman who is now my wife.  Good stuff.

***

New topic: we saw a couple episodes of True Blood recently.  It's a soap about extravagant, camp vampires.  In the first of the episodes in question (Season 5, episode 3) we learn in flashback how two vampires, Eric and Pam, met; how Pam persuaded Eric to make her a vampire; why she wanted to be a vampire at all; and how they became a couple.  It's no spoiler to say that it involves some outlandish behavior, grandiloquent gestures, ultimatums, and lots of blood.

In the next episode we see how Eric and Pam formally sever their relationship.  It involves hands on shoulders; sensitive, quiet conversation; and a little tearing up.  Talk about a dropoff.

I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, so it's not like I'm averse to restrained, dialogue-driven relationship stories, but I can get hands on shoulders and restrained tears from a hundred lesser shows.  The writer or someone misunderstood what we come to this show for.

I suppose you could spin it as a demonstration of how the characters have matured over the years, but anyone who's watched the show this far know the characters have done anything but mature.  They're vicious, deadly hotheads.  That's why they're fun.

True Blood is produced by the creator of Six Feet Under, a more realistic soap that is special to me, and it had its fair share of hands on shoulders moments, but the show was calibrated that way.  For a while I was frustrated that True Blood wasn't Bride of Six Feet Under, but now I've learned to appreciate the depths that can be plumbed within the Pop Kabuki format of this show.

Homemade Yogurt, Water Engines, My Childhood, and Some Movies

Wicker Man.  A camp treat.  The first hour is basically an upright, uptight police officer sleuthing around a island-bound Pagan commune, and having a succession of tantrums about how not-Christian everybody is.  It’s spiced up with loads of bawdiness, Thistle and Psych-Rock music, and all the fruits of the filmmakers’ research into pagan bric-a-brac roughening the texture of a straightforward mystery plot. 

It reminds me of a family vacation way back when, touring around the coast of Maine, and we spent an afternoon at some Unitarian island retreat.  Everyone was very friendly, but I poked around the bookshop (as I was wont to do) and found a book of party games for consenting adults, or maybe it was supposed to be about spiritual/emotional growth, who remembers.  One of the activities involved openly, honestly, unhesitatingly telling everyone in the group which of them you wanted to have sex with.  Then and now, this struck me as a really dim idea, and I was relieved, years later, to find that Birmingham-style Unitarianism doesn’t involve such games (or if it did, I wasn’t invited.)

So watching this devout Christian fellow stomp around a lovely, sunny island and treat a bunch of sweetly smiling pagans like war criminals was deeply satisfying to my inner prig, just because that’s what I would’ve loved to do on Unitarian Sex Camp Island all those years ago.  Take that, nice people who make your own yogurt! 

Of course the movie ends with the Pagans turning out to be dangerous because horror movies always gotta take things to the bottom of the slippery slope.  Exorcist can’t just let the girl go through a sleazy, angry adolescent phase and then calm down, which is what usually happens in real life.  Texas Chainsaw has to turn its white trash creeps into cannibals, instead of just beer guzzlers who cling to guns and religion (in fact the Sawyer family doesn’t seem to have guns or religion, though they have weapons, totems and mummification.)  And the pagans, of course, of course, have to do human sacrifice, instead of just having psychic faires and selling homemade candles.  Such is horror.

Also enjoyed an item called Safety Not Guaranteed, which has been criticized for being yet another underweight quirky-cutesy comedy, but it stays with me for a couple of reasons.  For one, it understands that time travel is really about memory and history, and puts regret and relationships at the center of the narrative.  Some of the B plot romantic stuff seems weakly integrated into the film at first, but the end thematically unifies everything.  Second, the film’s tense, obsessive protagonist reminds me of a guy who did the tech for a theatre venue I used to perform in.  He was acerbic, scowly, and had a diagram of an engine that runs on water posted on the door of his office, with some notes on how They are suppressing this technology for their own greedy gain.  I went to his house one night with a group of theatre nerds, and he showed us his enormous collection of unopened Star Wars toys.  After that I tried to be warm to him, in my ungainly way, to show that I appreciated that he’d opened this part of himself to me, but he seemed even colder than before.  I felt I’d failed a test.  This movie is about a woman who passes the test.  

Finally, watched the first half of something called Modern Girls, a truly lousy film from the early 80s.  It’s well worth a look, though, if you’re interested in the more outrageous elements of 80s style.  New Romantic duds galore, chunky plastic jewelry, hair chandeliers, neon pink and blue on black, it’s all here.  As far as plot, thematics, character work, dialogue, all that stuff, it’s hard to imagine how it could be worse, but oh, it’s fun to goggle at.  I was a boy in the early 80s, and all that stuff was on the cultural periphery of my life.  Now it makes me feel like a kid again.  Maybe it felt similar to the people who dressed like that.  God bless ‘em.

The Ewgrossorcist

One of the fascinating things about the same-sex marriage cases before the SCOTUS this week is that the anti-gay marriage crew isn't using the old-school arguments of "Ewww, gross" and "As it is written in The Book of Hezekiah, Chapter Seven, Verses Eighteen to Twenty..."  I guess those arguments don't have as much currency as they once did.

"Ew, gross" has, at various times, struck me as a robust argument regarding such topics as homosexuality, girls, and vegetables, so it's time to declare disgust and revulsion to be unreliable moral guides.

I don't want to wade into religious arguments, but I would note that the story of Sodom and Gommorah, often cited as an anti-gay narrative, is a deeply weird and difficult story that doesn't leave anyone except maybe Abram looking good.  It's kind of like a Golan-Globus movie, an overwrought caricature of the big bad city, with abject, comically demonized villains   Homosexuality sure doesn't get a clean bill of health in it, but the residents of the Twin Cities are also rapists and murderers who have ceased worshiping God.  It's disingenuous, or just stoopid, to say (as so many do) that it's the homosexuality that forced God's hand.

 So what kind of arguments are they making, there at SCOTUS?  Arguments that may seem to have that New Talking Point Smell, but if you look up any article by Maggie Gallagher from 2005 or so, you'll see the current anti-gay marriage case has been copied and pasted wholesale from there, or from wherever she got it.  Still, the fixation on procreation as the be-all and end-all of marriage makes me think the Maggie Gallagher argument on this subject may be like The Exorcist or stuff about nuns... If you're not Catholic, and I'm not, it's hard to see the point.  I think this is gonna be a win for same-sex marriage, and I'm pleased, both for the right reasons (people I care about will be able to formalize their relationships) and the wrong ones (apoplexy looks delightful on my ideological opponents).

Speaking of The Exorcist, I finally saw it, but (as I've suggested) I couldn't give myself over to it.  I can accept pretty much any narrative premise, no matter how goony, as long as the storyteller doesn't go bananas trying to persuade me that it isn't goony.  The filmmakers practically grabbed me by the lapels, screaming "No, the demon possession isn't a narrative device gesturing towards parental anxiety about their children's' pubertal misbehavior... it's about REAL DEMON POSSESSION, which is a real thing that happens!"  C'mon.  I saw a recently redone cut of the film; I understand the original release was more ambiguous.

Furies in Revolt.

Recently enjoyed a few movies.

The Furies stars Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Houston as daughter and father on a ranch, and if you're not leaping right this moment to add it to your Netflix queue on that basis alone then I don't know what's wrong with you.  Walter Houston's character is an icon of everything wonderful and terrible about the manifest destiny man.  Barbara, in the manner of daughters everywhere, dates a guy her dad can't stand, and there is drama!  There is also cruelty and payback, as Barbara and her on-again off-again city sharpie boyfriend scheme to rip Walter off.  I enjoyed watching the forces in play ping-pong off the walls at each other.

Mr. Arkadin, the Comprehensive version.  This is a lesser-known Orson Welles movie available in about 5 versions for some reason.  The story is a daffy thriller, and the style is peculiar... Welle's usual virtuoso stuff is all over it, but it seems a bit jerry-rigged as well, with a charming clunkiness counterbalancing the lusher elements.  For example, there's a bunch of sequences where the camera whips away from the action to end a scene, and I imagine it was supposed to be one of those whipes, you know.   But instead of blurring as the camera veers away, everything stays super-clear, so you see that the camera is whipping around to a parking lot or some other irrelevant detail, where Welles may have wanted no details at all.  It's fun that way.  If they ever make a Live-action Ranma 1/2 movie it should feel like this.

Women in Revolt.  Can someone explain to me why Paul Morrissey doesn't have a big a fan following as John Waters?  The three drag personalities at the center of this film are a near-perfect comedy trio.  Holly Woodlawn is manic and bizarre (she made me laugh till I was almost sick); Jackie Curtis is a flip verbal pugilist, and Candy Darling channels the glamour girls of midcentury tinseltown with a blend of archness and sincerity that I find absolutely beguiling.  Andy Warhol's cinematography is terrible, but this is one of my favorite viewing experiences of the year so far.

Also, I hated Peter Jackson's Hobbit.  I'll talk about that next time, maybe.

We Need To Blog About Kevin

We saw We Need To Talk About Kevin last night.  Having read and enjoyed the book I was surprised by the film's fragmentary retelling.  The novel tells the story of a woman whose son committed a school shooting.  It's an epistolary novel in which the Mom reflects to her now-absent husband on how she always believed her son was a damaged soul.  This reflective narration allows for plenty of chronological flexibility, but Mom unspools each memory or thread of incidents in a carefully detailed and closely argued fashion.  In one of my favorite passages, the Mom, whose blend of wit and misanthropy recalls Humbert Humbert, details her loathing of a McMansion her husband bought the family.  She goes on and on about every last repellant detail of the bloated McGormenghast, and it is hilarious.  Mom is a hoot.

She's also, in another Humbertian nod, an unreliable narrator.  Is her son really as monstrous as she describes him, or is her misanthropy the root of the boy's damage?  It's a Turn of the Screw-style riddle without a provided solution.

In the movie the Mother's voice, along with her vinegar wit, is mostly excised.  No voiceover or soliloquies here.  And since the film shows what the book tells, the filmmaker (Lynne Ramsay, whose painterly and elliptical filmmaking here is a tour de force) must make a hundred little choices about how to show the boy's defiance and seeming wickedness.  He comes across as thoroughly reptillian, which tilts things in the Mother's favor.

The film is also more fragmentary, skipping through chronology in a succession of quick cuts, as if George Roy Hill circa Slaughterhouse 5 dropped acid with Antonioni circa Zabriskie Point with an assist from Resnais circa Last Year at Marienbad.  Oh, you know what I mean, quit bellyachin'.

You know what the film really reminded me of?  Anime movies based on long-running series.  These movies tend to toss linear narrative out the window and rely on a kinetic parade of highlights from the story in the original TV series/comic.  Lots of details are alluded to but glossed over in the assumption that you've engaged the source material and know the context of details that are plopped down into the movie without explanation.  If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about, by all means check out Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, the adaptation of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV show that makes utter hash of the narrative, on the assumption that you've seen the show and just want a fancy recap before the screamy, spastic, let's-throw-every-idea-we've-got-onscreen-because-we-may-never-get-another-chance-before-we-have-to-go-back-to-hackwork-for-hire film it precedes: End of Evangelion.

Anyway, I liked the film on its own gawgeously photographed terms, but I had a few quibbles.

• No spoilers, but there's a big tearjerking surprise in the novel's conclusion that the movie flattens out by choosing to remove the Mother's narrative.
• The film decontextualizes some of the novel's elements so vigorously that they seem like little more than accidental residue.  Mom's seeing her son's TV interview; Mom's work as a travel writer.  These things are alluded to in the film in a fashion that left my wife, who didn't read the book, confounded.  I don't think my wife was alone in this.  I know the director didn't want to elaborate things in the rational manner of the book, but I'm not sure the bewildering surrealism of the way these elements of the novel irrupt in the film seem like anything more than arty intrusions to viewers who missed the book.
• One of my favorite parts of the novel involves the pre-shooting teen psychopath boy befriending a witless hanger-on, and their attempt to frame an innocent schoolteacher of student molestation.  Author Lionel Shriver turns this into a screamingly funny passage about how it takes brains and guile to be a successful villain; brains and guile that hangers-on can't muster.  I missed this, is all I'm saying.  The film pared things down, and some fun sequences got lost.
• One last thing.  There's a sequence in the film where the boy takes a bow to an imagined audience in the gym just before his crime.  It's shot like something out of Triumph of the Will, which makes sense as a cinematic look at the connection between self-glorification and brutality, but as a matter of taste I'd have preferred a found-footage style presentation that replaced the Wagnerian lighting with a verite smeariness.  The subtle irony of the film's approach to this shot might be lost on people who don't get the Triumph of the Will reference, while a Who-does-this-daydreaming-little-foreskin-think-he-is? presentation might puncture the self-dramatizing more deflatingly.  

I think "deflatingly" is a good way to end a sentence or a blogpost.

Joaningo Road

I saw a movie called Flamingo Road recently.

• Michael "Casablanca" Curtiz directed, and the film does a crackerjack job of zipping around multiple locations in a small city without ever getting confusing.  I felt like I knew my way around town by the end.
• It's one of those movies where every little diner is the size of a ballroom, and beautifully lit, yet still seeming cozy cuz of all the little nooks within that expanse.  Lots of delightfully sassy waitresses and such, any one of whom could support a picture of their own.
• Joan Crawford stars as a sweet young thang, despite clearly being in her mid-forties.  She plays the part well, but still looks more like your Aunt than your crush.  Multiple scenes of guys seeing her for the first time and reacting as if she is the most desirable woman they've ever set eyes on.  Maybe this is part of her appeal for her hardcore fans; the obvious element of fantasy and role-playing.  No wonder people who are drawn to drag are also drawn to Joan; she was kinda doing drag.
• Sure, it's easy to laugh at this movie, but one thing makes it linger with me weeks after I saw it.  Joan's character wants the freedom to pursue happiness.  She gets involved in politics, not because she's drawn to the politics, but because a political power broker (Sidney Greenstreet, doin' his creepy thang) is messing with her, and she has to push back to achieve that objective.  Through jobs, arrests, love affairs and betrayals, Joan's character is never passive, never just about supporting her man, and never a Femme Fatale.  She's bold and assertive, but the film never makes her out to be wicked.  It's kinda proto-feminist; the idea that a woman can pursue happiness on her own terms isn't common enough in Tinseltown, then or now.

Picture source: http://legendaryjoancrawford.com/flamingoroad.html

Minnelli Bovary

I'm fascinated by this essay.  Robin Wood was a brilliant and idiosyncratic film critic whom I respect, so to read his heartfelt defense of Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary is an intriguing experience, since I consider the film to be a stinker.  My wife and I watched the film shortly after finishing the novel (in Merloyd Lawrence's translation).  I don't expect film adaptations to be "faithful" to the source in a pious way, but to play with it the way Charlie Parker played with Embraceable You, to wit:

So I'm a bit put off by Wood's insinuation that those of us who dismiss the film for straying from the book are demanding overmuch fidelity to source material at the expense of the film's own integrity.  I don't ask for much from adaptations, but at least read the darn book before adapting it.

Wood and I agree, though: it's fruitless to evaluate the film in relation to the novel.  I doubt that anyone who worked on the film even read the novel, except an uncredited script department drone who wrote the plot synopsis which I suspect was the true source material for the film.  After all, if you're trying to capture the complexity of Emma Bovary, you don't cast a hambone like Jennifer Jones in the role.  And poor James Mason, in the thankless role of Flaubert, gets stuck mouthing narration that hews far more closely to Ye Olde Tinseltown Hack's Guide to Purple Prose than, well, Merloyd Lawrence, through whose translating lens I've viewed Flaubert.

I don't mind that, as Robin Wood explains, Minnelli made a film that was not a Flaubert adaptation, but while he was making a film that wasn't a Flaubert adaptation, couldn't he have refrained from titling it Madame Bovary, as if it were a Flaubert adaptation?  I call it a bait and switch.  I call it rude.

It's odd that Wood doesn't talk about the casting of Van Heflin as Charles Bovary.  In the book poor Charles is a nebbish who puts his wife on a pedestal but never understands her longings or perceives her infidelity.  Heflin, whom I liked as a tough-but-sensitive hero in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (where he convincingly out-butched Kirk Douglas), isn't obvious casting for the role of a clueless nebbish, and the way Minnelli mans Charles up to suit Heflin while still sticking to the plot summary memo he'd received from the script department is rather remarkable.  Heflin plays the role like "Chuck Bovary, Gumshoe Cowboy," and a guy like that doesn't miss his wife's philandering.  No, what he does is forgive it.  Confronted with written evidence of Emma's straying, he burns the proof in front of her, letting her know that he won't hold it against her.  It's almost as if he gives her tacit permission to be monogamish instead of monogamous if that's what it takes to keep her.  As daring as the novel was, the film actually one-ups it with this striking portrayal of a man letting his wife cheat if that's what it takes to keep the marriage afloat.  It's the kind of thing that probably goes on more than anyone wants to acknowledge, so kudos to Minnelli for tellin' it like it is.

One more thing: a lot of the action in the novel and film takes place in the city of Rouen.  How do you pronounce Rouen?  I don't know, and neither does anyone in the film.

"So how do you like Rown?'

"Oh, it's marvelous!  Row-wahn is the loveliest place I've ever seen!"

"Yes, she's had quite a time here in Roo-en."

Pure community theatre.

But check out the Ball scene, which Wood singles out for praise.  Revisiting it on Youtube almost convinces me to give the film another try.

I'm Free, Captain Peacock!

It's interesting how my tastes have changed since I got married. Many cheerfully diverting shows and movies that once seemed like splendid ways to wind down at the end of the day now seem like utter wastes of time. Or maybe it's just the backlash from having watched all 6 seasons of Lost even though I was done by the end of Season 4.

We recently watched the first episode of nerd favorite Torchwood and decided to stop there. Guess my nerd card will be revoked. It's safe to say my teenage self would have fixated on this show, but now it just seems like microwaved leftovers of the same light sci-fi stuff I enjoyed... when I was a teen. We also tried a show called Monarch of the Glen. It's the upteenth BBC show about a guy who grew up in the manor house but left because he wanted to get away from all the haughty uptight stuffiness, but circumstances force him to return and set shenanigans straight. Don't forget the sassy servants and working class love interest. In the single days I would have wolfed this down like cashews. Not now.

When I'm sick, though, all bets are off. A few years back I was horribly ill and stranded in another town, far from my wife. I lay in bed watching Are You Being Served on Youtube, episode after episode. I could think of nothing (other than healing and getting back home to my love) I'd rather do than listen to Mrs. Slocombe talk about how it had rained unexpectedly and her pussy got soaking wet.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the Final

I was an extra in a feature-length movie a friend directed. It was a tumultuous production about which a sequel to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls could be written, but not by me. I had fun.

* * *

The last video project I've been involved in was a short written, directed and composed by Marc. Yes, composed; he was a composition student, and for a project he decided to do a soundtrack, and make the movie for which he'd write the soundtrack.





I'm terribly fond of this. Marc shares my love for Birmingham, and it shows.

Marc asked me to be in this immediately after the final performance of a play. Later an actress in the play asked me "Why wasn't I invited to be in this movie?"

"It's a gay porno," I said.

Pause.

"I was in a lesbian porno," she said.

Pause.

"I was kidding," I said.

Pause.

"I wasn't," she said.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the Second

I was an extra in a corny comedy film a well-to-do young man wrote, directed and produced. I've written about it before, and can only add that this rather ambitious and expensive production (shot on 35 MM film instead of video, for which the filmmaker paid out of pocket!) doesn't seem to be available in any form. Not on Youtube, nuthin. Years later the filmmaker called me and asked if I'd volunteer to appear in his latest, lower-budgeted film, which would be an angry satire of all the local films that won more acclaim that his. I was to appear in a spoof of arty films. I'd wear a diaper and boxing gloves, and box with another grown man in a diaper. I made some excuse about having to clean my apartment, which anyone who ever saw my apartment knows was a lie. Don't ask fat guys to take their shirts off unless you know they're comfortable with it.

Later I got involved in Sidewalk Scramble, this being the "Make a short film in 48 hours" competition. My friend Deb roped me into the Scramble team "Special Needs Offenders of Televideo", a local group of bored youth with prosumer video equipment.

Anyway, I went to the initial writers' meeting and was disappointed Deb didn't show up. I was stuck with two young men and a handful of givens. Givens are things one is given by the Scramble operators, to make sure you didn't spend five months making the film you're passing off as a 48 hour production. Things like a hat that needs to appear, certain lines of dialogue, a sunrise. If you turn your film in without these elements, you don't make the cut. If you incorporate these elements in a clever way, you get points with the judges. I was very excited about the Givens, because as an occasional improviser I was excited by the challenge of weaving a fresh story out of such elements; they were pegs to weave the thread around, and I liked to see what kinds of patterns we could weave. I immediately crafted an improv-style rough-draft narrative that I thought deserved, at the least, a big gold star. The guys shrugged. So we went to the team leader's house.

His DVD shelf consisted entirely of movies you could find at Wal-Mart, and I just about left upon seeing that. I'm no snob about such things, and I like Ghostbusters as much as anybody, but I do think aspiring filmmakers should cast their nets a little wider. Then he offered us food. I was glad; I was hungry. The food was Hot Pockets. I was sad. I said No Thank You. This pretty much set the tone for the rest of our collaboration.

The next day I accidentally on purpose got lost on the way to the filming, but drove around a bunch in an effort to persuade myself I had actually made an effort. A deliberately futile effort seemed ethically superior to just staying home. Nowadays, thanks to my high-functioning Wife's example, I would either show up and do what I'd committed to do, or just call in sick like a real man.

I missed the screening, but friends assured me the short was even more dire than I'd expected. The responsible parties put their every bowel movement on Youtube, yet they haven't posted this Sidewalk Scramble effort, so go figure.

P. S. Deb went on to become a fixture on the local theatrical scene and got to do some work she was proud of.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the First

I have appeared, I believe, in 6 efforts at a film or video. I’ll try to recount them in chronological order, but I don’t know that I’ll remember chronological order.

In my mid-twenties I joined a gathering of film-besotted Birmingham locals who aspired to generate content, then slap it on public access. A man and a woman who seemed to be in good with the local video scene (let’s call them Mate and Kate) set up some kind of theoretical organization, got an alleged former producer of The Waltons to drop by meetings, and solicited short spec scripts from aspiring screenwriters. Kate said, with an I-dare-you-to-laugh stone face, “My ambition is to have a Top Ten hit show on the air in a year.” I was impressed; these people were thinking big; Alabama public access was clearly just a stepping stone.

I was besotted by Donald Barthelme and Neon Genesis Evangelion; I wrote a now-lost sketch that reflected these influences (and not much else beyond a sense of humor more informed by Monty Python than Barthelme.) It was well received, and they asked for a series. I wrote a truckload more (also long lost) and they weren’t so well received; too naively obscurantist. I got my old Theatre professor to write a rave review of this stuff, then gave it to the (ahem) Heads of Production in the belief that this would sway them. Wrong.

Happily another guy had been cranking out scripts; a sitcom series that I regarded as hopelessly out of touch with either real human behavior or professional quality laffs. I couldn’t have improved them if I’d been asked to rewrite, though, which I wasn’t. A director (from B’ham’s hyperactive community theatre scene) signed on to actually direct something; he decided that of the two series on offer both were garbage, but at least one was comprehensible. And so the pilot for the other guy’s series became a low-budget video reality.

It debuted with a block of locally produced shorts at the Sidewalk Film Festival, at the same time as American Astronaut. Everyone who attended came out raving about its brilliance, the musical might of the film-affiliated band that performed at the screening, the informative yet hilarious Q and A session; it has since gone on to be a cult fave. I’m talking about American Astronaut, here. I missed it to see the short I was in.

An amateurish, forgettable thing. I was onscreen for a split second, looking like a fat fifteen-year-old.

That was the first and last production to emerge from this crew. Mate and Kate had an acrimonious split, and the contracts we signed (oh, did I mention we signed contracts?) gave Nate the rights to everything we submitted or filmed while he was involved, for a year or so out. Kate led me to believe that Mate was actively holding up production, so I used that newfangled “E Mail” to write Mate and ask what my options for getting the stuff produced were. He responded:

“Produce away. Just remember that any resulting product or profits are mine THASS RITE BI-ZITCHES MINE ALL MINE $$$$$$$$”

or something to that effect. As Kate later reexplained, Mate was no longer actively involved in any way, and Kate refused to do any work that might benefit the guy, so a halt was called while Kate ran down the clock. By whatever time the contracts were void, so was my interest.

Then I was an extra in a professional film with real live movie stars titled World Traveller, which filmed mostly in Birmingham due to its resemblence to all the world’s finest cities, plus cheapness. I was an extra in one scene, talking on a pay phone in the background of an airport. They asked me to wear a suit and carry a suitcase; I wore a musty suit I’d outgrown (horizontally) and brought a nice fabric-lined hardshell suitcase I’d swiped from my Dad years before. I’d forgotten there was a vat of Vaseline in the suitcase (for my chapped lips, wise guys) and it melted in the hot sun and/or movie lights, ruining the fabric lining. This was representative of how I was fumbling through life at the time.

I missed the film’s local premiere; I think I was rehearsing a play, maybe? I heard it was a lot of fun; even though no one had anything good to say about the film as such, apparently there were cheers throughout the screening whenever anyone recognized themselves, their friends, or familiar landmarks. There’s no business like it.

More to come… honest…

We're watching Lost. I'm not crazy about the glib O. Henry-on-amphetamines approach to character development, but I'm stuck on the show anyway.

Here's an example of why: at the end of Season Four (mild spoiler) Ben Linus turns a big frozen wheel to make some majickque happen. It's a rather Dr. Whoish plot twist and could easily have been flat mystic-shmistic hoohah but for one thing: it's been established that Linus is doing this to save his beloved island, and that as a result he will be exiled from the island. As he turns the wheel actor Michael Emerson commits. We can see just how fraught this action is for him, not in the big goofy prop wheel, but in the actor's seriously strained face. I know nothing about the actor's life, but he knows how to tap into some real pain and manifest it on his wonderful puppet face. And for once the writers didn't go overboard sentimentalizing it and trying to make us fall in love with the character all over again. The actors are better at winning sympathy than the writers are.

Color Correction and Incorrect Conning

Today I was strolling across the college campus where my Wife works when a dude in a car (I don't notice things like makes and models, but it looked pretty nice) pulled up by me, leaned out the window, and started giving me a spiel. Started with a very long, very rehearsed routine about how he was a data something-or-other-supposed-to-sound-technical-and-impressive, doing fancy-pants computer work for the college, but he was in Charlotte by mistake and needed to get to Charleston and was out of gas money and his phone was booby-trapped or something, so could I do him a favor and go to an ATM with him and withdraw some money, he'd pay me back honest, he makes $130,000 a year and is totally good for it if I'd just help him out here.

Although one fantasizes about telling off con men, I slipped into my default response to such routines, which is a sort of counterspiel, a "huh, whu, I don' geddit, no speekie de engwish, duh der diddle doo, oh look a sunbeam."

He said "Sorry to interrupt you," and sharked off.

Thanks to my wife I know a lot of people who actually do work with technical stuff, actually do travel around, and actually do make a lot of money.

Item 1: They have better problem solving skills than the kind of shmoe who stops random people on the street to get help. In a jam they'd find campus security or whoever was arranging for them to be doing a job in the first place. They have connections, and even if they are desperate for money, they don't get desperate about the money, at least not in front of strangers.

Item Two: They don't lead with a Life's Work infodump. People who do sophisticated work, like people of breeding, communicate who and what they are with their bearing first and foremost. They don't bling it, they just are it. They'll bring up specifics when specifics are called for, but if they need a stranger's help they don't start with "Hey buddy, I do XYZ and I gotta favor to ask," they start with "Can you direct me to Campus Security?"

#

The other night we saw a cheezy 80's movie; what I think of as a time capsule movie, where you're not there for the narrative or whatever, you're there for clothes, hairdos, cars, all the cultural bricabrac. And we were satisfied customers. I bring it up because, in paying attention to the bright colors of the film, I noticed something you won't see in newer films.

The heroine was outdoors on a sunny day, and the different planes of her pale-skinned face were reflecting various colors, including green and blue. She really looked like a Fauvist portrait, but one would never notice it if one weren't contemplating the color scheme of the image, because our eyes harmonize this kind of thing all the time in real life. Without looking like amateurish filmmaking, it gave the picture a little reality.

You won't see that in modern films. We watched some Lost Sseason Two) the next night, and I looked for any stray bits of reflected color on peoples' faces.

Fergit it. One thing future generations will mock about current movies and TV is that they color-correct everything to death. Got a face? It'll be beige, chocolate or orange. So will the background, if it isn't blue.

That's one reason I find myself drawn to older films (okay, it was Teen Witch, pure schlock but wonderful Eighties duds and 'dos.) Whatever may be phony or false in them, the reflections on the actors' faces have some bearing on reality.

Best Netflix rentals of my last few years, part the first.

A few years back I did a post about interesting things I'd gotten from Netflix. It is just about the only thing anyone Googles across my blog for, so here's an update on my last few years of viewing.

In 2008 I was busy falling in love, so I spent less time in front of the TV, but I did see:

Stalker: A gloomy Russian Christian arthouse darling's bleak science fiction view of the present in future drag. The imagery of industrial wreckage is Ballardian, beautiful. The bald guy goes on a rant at the end which is a thing to behold. Slow and cheerless, it's like a bad dream. Watch it instead of actually having bad dreams.

Suspiria: Revolutionary Girl Utena as a live action slasher flick, only that makes it sound awful. A stylish and berserk vision of what a horror movie can be in a stylist's hands. And by stylist, I mean hairstylist. Or maybe shop window arranger for Macy's. Essential.

The Last Temptation of Christ: clever but a bit dull. Mixing up honkeys with non-period accents and genuine middle easterners in authentic locales is a gamble that didn't work for me, but I was in tears by the end, because the film isn't playing; it really wants to glorify Jesus in a way that makes sense for Scorsese. The protesters fixated on the honeymoon fantasy when they should have been focusing on Harry Dean Stanton's breathtakingly blasphemous turn as Paul of Tarsus.

Eraserhead: Like a bad dream after watching too many 80's sitcoms. Takes me to an unsettled spot as advertised.

Gummo: Overrated yet not without merit, this is a bit like watching a slew of homemade Youtube videos back to back, with all the trash and treasure that implies. Both the fanatical fans and the fanatical detractors look a bit drama-queenish by now.

The Saddest Music in the World: all I remember now is the style. It felt a bit like my ideal Grim Fandango film adaptation, if that clarifies anything (no.)

Galaxy High School: an 80s saturday morning cartoon that starts with a male and female protaganist going to school in space, with gloriously toony aliens. The girl gets lost in the shuffle because in the 80s everyone in the cartoon biz knew girls were icky. Ignore the dreadful plots and enjoy the colorful background aliens and spaceships and such. Or don't.

Eyes Without a Face: One of many animal-testing-reframed-as-human-testing horror movies. Austere, chilly. A doctor commits atrocities to give his injured daughter a rather less grotesque face, and while she'd really rather he didn't, defying the fat old patriarch ain't exactly her strong suit. She manages in the end though, boy howdy.

Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. My kind of comfort food. Animation with a jolly Brit sensibility, like Wodehouse joining forces with Rankin-Bass.

Inferno: a companion piece to Suspiria, less coherent (if that's possible) but with bits of delightful creepiness. A little too glamtastic near the end, but enough like my nightmares to get a thumbs up.

Black Narcissus: This drama about Nuns in the Himalayas starts slow and is marred by colonialist racism, but has such enchanting acting, costumes and photography that we stuck with it. Besides the brilliant camerawork the highlight is the MAD NUN. We gasped repeatedly during the last twenty minutes of this overripe MAD NUN fever dream. If you like MAD NUNS this is the flick for you.

The Big Combo: a noir that looks like it was made for a hundred bucks but still looks way better than any self-conscious attempt at noir revival ever. The villain does some terrific villainous speechifying.

One, Two, Three. Jimmy Cagney and Billy Wilder deliver a tour de force of corny old-fashioned cold war spoofery. If you thought The Seven Year Itch was a hoot you should see this; if not, then not.

The Rules of the Game: I'm scared to say anything about this except that it bored me stiff in college but enthralled me in 2008. I was doing my first for-real professional acting job (also my last) and trying to rediscover a naturalistic yet dazzlingly skilled approach to acting. This helped.

And that was about it for 2008. My wife also introduced me to a few TV series, to whit:

Big Love: Bill standing in the kitchen, arguing with his wives: yay! Trying to be 24: boo!

The Wire: I came in midway through the last season and instantly knew I had to watch the whole thing from the start.

Heroes: reminded me of reading old issues of X-Men, which is a bit like eating Cheetos.

The L Word: The transition from single to married can be best explained by my married reaction to this show: "When are all these hot women going to stop taking their clothes off and making out? Boring."

Battlestar Galactica: I came in near the end and was totally confused. Pretty spaceships but I was more of a Roger Dean fan than a Chris Foss fan. If you know what I'm talking about you have misspent your life.

Went blueberry-picking today; not to eat them, but to freeze them for my wife's research. Had to eat a few, though. I hadn't realized that there are subtle flavor differences between different kinds of blueberry. Some are sharp and tart, others subtly sweet. Others not so subtly sweet, of course.

Currently trying to read Plus by Joseph McElroy. It's a science fiction novel by a writer who apparently doesn't routinely end up in the SF marketing category, the better to shelve it in the inscrutable modernism catagory. It seems (fifty pages in) that the protagonist, one Imp Plus, is a former human whose mind has been transferred into a ship or satillite of some kind, transformed into some posthuman state. It seems that his memories (of life, of words) have been altered or damaged, but he is slowly remembering and regaining his awareness of who he was, all while figuring out what he is now. It's a bit like waking up slowly, groggily, in an unfamiliar place. A tough read but I'm finding it rewarding; the notions of being in some bioengineered posthuman state and of being isolated in outer space are hellish nightmares for me, so watching this guy come to terms with it feels like it might be instructive in some fine-grained face-your-fears fashion.

Finally finished The Sopranos. Let me get out in front of the blogosphere with my thoughts on the final scene. By implying that Tony may be about to get killed, but may just be about to have dinner with his family, the show leaves us in a state not unlike Tony's every waking moment. If we're wondering if he's about to die a sudden violent death, we know what Tony has to wonder, all the time. Instead of leaving us with plot-point closure, the show leaves us with a final thematic point: a life of erratically applied violent punishment and retribution is likely to cycle back around at any moment. Just a matter of time. Like Morte Arthur, The Sopranos is full of fascinating lessons in the inadvisability of killing people.

Close Quarters

I was in a movie once. A locally produced comedy short. I don't think it's available anywhere, tho I haven't checked recently.

I was acquainted with the writer/director, and he cast me wildly against type as a nerd. (The premise of the film was that nerds who make computer viruses should be taught to play sports and woo women as a rehabilitation scheme, which makes more sense to me as the years go by.) My first day of shooting was to take place in the evening at a jail in a poor town. I didn't write down the address for the very good reason that I was a fool, so when the evening came I went to both jails in town and came up empty. The guards at both facilities denied all knowledge of a film shoot. The first jail told me how to walk to the second jail, anyway, and I traipsed the few blocks from one to t'other. On the way, with the setting sun turning the sky rosy, I passed a little house with a girl sitting alone on the porch.

"Mister?" she called out. "Where are you going?"

"To see some friends," I answered, which was kind of true.

"Can I come with you? Please?"

Well, I thought. That's one way to find out where the jail is.

Anyway, I pretended not to hear her because I was that smooth. Later I found out that they'd canceled the shoot without telling me in time, and it was at a third (closed) jail that I hadn't known about.

I finally made it to the musty old jail, where the cute women doing props and makeup took me on a tour of the crude pornographic graffiti they'd discovered in the urine-scented old cells. This was unsettlingly exciting. We worked almost till dawn. The next day we spent all day at a school filming (and I do mean filming; the director comes from money and was springing for 35 millimeter film, not the video so beloved of local shorts) one scene ofter another. A lot of the scenes took place outside, doing slapstick sports routines in the sun. The cute women who did makeup and props offered to rub suntan lotion on us and we all said no thanks. Clearly our brains were scrambled with sleep deprivation and sunstroke. That evening we were the color of fire trucks. Let that be a lesson to the would-be gentlemen out there: getting rubbed down by two lovely women is better than going to the burn unit.

Meals were provided by the director. This consisted of chips, honey buns, candy bars and soft drinks, because the director thought this would give us energy. I began to see the down side of amateur filmmaking.

The final scene for the evening involved the nerds learning to play "quarters," a drinking game in which one tosses quarters into cups of beer and then drinks them or something. I'd never heard of this silly thing; all my drinking game experience involved kissing and confessing. By now we were all like kindergartners who had replaced naptime with pixy stick time, so happily we weren't using real beer. We were using flat Mr. Pibb. Once we pushed through the sheer awfulness of this we discovered a strange ecstasy on the other side; we were directed to act as if we were bonding in drunken, manly fervor, and for one wonderful, sleep deprived, sunburned moment it was true.

The film went on to win the audience choice award for local short films at the local film festival, mostly because half of Birmingham was in it and came out to vote. I drank an unusual amount of stuff that wasn't flat Mr. Pibb and was very happy to hear from our director that the cinematographer had told him "Every scene with Aaron in it is gold." In return for this complement I hit on the cinematographer's wife.

Local film!

Dud in the Race

We saw a documentary called Blood in the Face last night. It's a 1991 record of a white supremist convention where they get together in a farmhouse or something, cosplay, and rile each other up with hectoring rhetoric and bogus scholarship about race issues. The thing I found most unsettling about the conventioneers (bearing in mind that many of them were leaders in the white supremacy field) is how superficially normal they seemed. I mean, they were foolish hicks with awful ideas, self-bamboozled with less than rigorous arguments, but if they were to take off the swastikas and keep their hate in their pants they wouldn't seem that different from any number of folks you'll see at the mall. There's a lot of addlepated overweight white people around who are perfectly fine people, many of whom despise racism and bigotry, and I was uneasy about how easily the hardened haters could blend in. I'm more used to the Klan kids I rode with in the bus down Signal Mountain TN every day as a high schooler.

Man, some of those kids were proud, outspoken children of Klansman, and they really wore their white inferiority up front. Faces like Halloween masks. Second and third chins, but no first chins. Adam's apples like whiskery fists. I can't help but feel pity for these products of multigenerational malnutrition and, shall we say, bloodline purity, but is it any wonder The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is such a therapeutic film for me?

Our neighborhood was a well-to-do suburb, but we weren't that far from Byron de la Beckwith, the infamous killer Klansman, who once told an interviewer that he joined the Klan because he applied for membership in every club in town, and The Klan took him (I heard it on Fresh Air (that's as close to sourcing as I get)). Maybe if The Elks or somebody had taken Beckwith it would have turned out better for everyone (except maybe The Elks).

Anyway, the haters in the film are very big on rhetoric and logic that isn't really any less connected to reality than a lot of other ideas that float around, which is pretty troubling. One woman talks about how she didn't get into the racist scene because of hate (she draws a strong distinction between separatism and hate) but because she started going to a white supremist church and picked up the ideas in pretty much the same haphazard way she might have picked up any other batch of ideas if she'd ended up at a different church. She seems harmless, but it turns out her man killed an outspoken Jewish radio jock, so her apparent mildness allowed her to play a dumbed-down Camilla to her Nazi Tony (I actually feel bad comparing The Sopranos to these mooks, but the pattern of self-deluding enabling is similar). Another guy talks about his life from childhood, and it's evident that he's led a hard life with little real parental/moral guidance. And now he dresses up in Nazi bricabrac.

One of my favorite bits is when all the preachers and such are hanging out and one guy who's crazy about pop eyed biblical numerology starts going on a complicated spiel about how numbers in the Bible prove The Race War is immanent (it must be solid logic: it's got math in it!) and the other preachers' expressions go from patient, to trying-to-be-patient, to disgusted. The two most comforting things in the film for me are that

1. not that many people were at the convention, and

2. The finest minds in the White Supremist leadership are dumb guys. Not unusually dumb, though. It gets down to George Carlin's dictum that (paraphrased for delicacy's sake) there's a distinction between being stupid, being full of it, and being nuts. Racists are all three.