The Spirit + 300

Random T-Rex!

The screen adaptation of 300 is no more or less than an R-rated Saturday morning cartoon — G.I. Joe + T&A — and perfectly enjoyable on that level. The Spirit is a bit more ambitious and a bit less successful. The problem with Frank Miller's directing debut is I still don't know what the concept is. I'm sure Frank had one but it got muscled by goons somewhere between the storyboards and the screen. Our hero is supposed to be the spirit of Central City, the embodiment of the city's rhythm, so the movie should be about painting a living portrait of those streets, evoking that rhythm. But we never get a clear idea of Central City at all. What sets it apart from Gotham City or Basin City? Or is the Spirit an everyman in an everycity? I can't tell.

Things perk up only when the movie just gives itself over to cartoonish surrealism in the Octopus's lair...Casual seppuku and Nazi regalia and a dental dance of death...Scarlett Johansson packaged into an SS uniform, snapping her boot heels...Yowza.

Valkyrie

Bryan Singer is steadily proving himself to be a competent but pedestrian filmmaker. Here is a talented studio lapdog making his reputation with by-the-numbers franchise products. Allow me to list the mainstream American directors under the age of 50 who have bolder, more daring artistic vision. You may safely pass over the next Singer release in favor of any of the following:

P. T. Anderson
David Fincher
Spike Jonze
Sam Mendes
Christopher Nolan
Quentin Tarantino
Darren Aronofsky
Steven Soderbergh
Richard Linklater
Robert Rodriguez
Rob Zombie
Wes Anderson
David Gordon Green
and a nod to comedy phenom Judd Apatow.

Valkyrie is a timid affair. Singer can handle villainy in tights but when confronted with the Führer is out of his depth. He seems to realize he has no tasteful solution for dramatizing the touchy subject matter, and so plays it very very safe. Thankfully this Joe Friday approach keeps Tom Cruise in check, denying him ascension into the Mel Gibson realm of megalomania.

It is by the way inexcusable for the international figurehead of a ridiculous cult of brainwashing hucksters to be in any way involved in a film about the Nazi regime. Epic fail, Bryan.

In Bruges

The frowniest frown in Bruges is Brendan Gleeson on a gramme of coke. The hitman-with-a-heart-of-gold is one of our favorite movie fictions (cf. Grosse Pointe Blank) and here we get three of the decent blokes all trying to off each other on peculiar principles, without animosity. Everything is unexpected yet nothing is arbitrary — screenplays don't get much better.

Brian Regan

...doesn't know anything, and he notices that mostly the world doesn't expect him to know anything. That's the premise of his stand-up comedy, which without being edgy or gimmicky or experimental or blue nevertheless manages, in an honest and hard-won fashion, to consistently knock my ass over laughing. The bighearted doofus prowls around the stage and hunkers down a lot, slinking away from inevitable humiliation. His rhythm is to set the joke up in a straight voice, switch to a moron voice for the punchline, and THEN deliver the real laughs as an afterthought stumble of moronic commentary.

Consider this written piece titled TWO GUYS ON A BUS. I'll bet Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of Brian's favorite movies.

Christ Illusion

Slayer. Bless their hearts, those guys hate religion as much as I do. But let me set one thing straight, so as not to offend anyone I don't intend to. I take no issue with faith. It seems to me you either really have faith or you really don't, and there's not much you can do about it either way. Some people can curl their tongue, some can't...no point in getting on a soapbox and rendering judgment. On the other hand I do take issue with religion, being any totalitarian system of thought invented to expand the power of a particular organization. Religion makes me angry, Hulk smash angry. That's where Slayer comes in, to smash my eardrums with some steeple-toppling catharsis. The various bands of Scott "Stza" Sturgeon (namely Choking Victim, Leftöver Crack, Star Fucking Hipsters) provide this public service as well, and Stza is not shy about quoting a Slayer riff here and there to beef up his crack rock steady. (Yet somehow no music is cathartic enough to relax those kids who burn churches in Norway...maybe they're just trying to keep warm.)

Four bands are the universally accepted pillars of thrash metal: Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer. Metallica you know. Megadeth is Metallica's less talented little brother who overcompensates by playing even faster! Anthrax has that guy with the raccoon tail beard who is constantly Loving the '80s on VH1. Slayer is the One Ring to rule them all. Metallica will always be more popular (because they are uncontroversial) but even they live in awe of Slayer's might.

But I've misrepresented the band's stance on religion — the truth is more interesting. While guitarist Kerry King is indeed an outspoken atheist and author of Slayer's most polemical lyrics, the guy actually shouting such lines as Religion is hate / Religion is fear / Religion is war into the mic is singer/bassist Tom Araya, a devout Catholic. When asked about how he reconciles his faith with the message proclaimed by the album God Hates Us All (released on 9/11) Araya replied "God doesn't hate. But it's a great fucking title."

Eyes of the Insane is the Grammy-winning track off the latest album, Christ Illusion (2006), but King has said that Jihad is the album's best. I don't dare disagree. There's something about that song that reels the puny human brain, like an angle that appears to be acute yet behaves as if obtuse. I think that mother is being performed backward.

Meatballs

But, the real excitement of course is going to come at the end of the summer, during Sexual Awareness week. We import two hundred hookers from around the world, and each camper, armed with only a thermos of coffee and two thousand dollars cash, tries to visit as many countries as he can. The winner of course is named King of Sexual Awareness week and is allowed to rape and pillage the neighboring towns until camp ends.

Meatballs (1979) is the first modern teen comedy, predating both Porky's and Fast Times at Ridgemont High by three years. The roughly sketched blueprint of raunch and sentimentality has been adhered to ever since, from Sixteen Candles to Superbad. This neglected classic deserves to be better remembered, and you can help me spread the word by scouring the web for Meatballs T-shirts and other merch.

Step Brothers

This movie has fulfilled a minor dream. I saw a chick pee in a urinal. Not squatting either. Straddling.

Otherwise Will Ferrell and his longtime writing partner Adam McKay really came up with bupkis here, lazily relying on the chemistry and improvisation of Ferrell + John C. Reilly, but the honeymoon is over. The spirit award goes to the lovely namesake of Clayton Ravine, Mary Steenburgen, who could probably remain ladylike even if cast by the Farrelly brothers.

Robert Johnson

As the story goes, night was falling on an old plantation road near Dockery and young Robert Johnson was scared. A black man with no job and no home should not in those days in Mississippi be caught out after dark. Yes he was scared, and he clutched his guitar. With a solicitor smile Old Scratch stepped forward and made an offer. Robert nodded and signed on to a very major label. He handed up his guitar and the genial stranger tuned it, turned it back over. Robert put slide to string and out came the blues. He played the blues and made his name and one night in 1938 his whiskey was poisoned by a jealous husband and three days later Old Scratch came for him. He was a charter member of the 27 Club.

It is possibly the best story in all our Americana, and we love to hear it. Cream retold it in 1966, as did Tenacious D in 2001, as did Adult Swim's Metalocalypse in the 2006 episode Bluesklok. What fortune that a blues novice like me can still hear that boy's ethereal voice and his well-tuned guitar on 29 extant recorded songs, and wonder at his enigmatic smirk in two extant photographs. The thin quality of the recordings couldn't be more perfectly suited to myth. Here is the Citizen Kane of the blues &mdash although the musical elements had been heard before here and there, Johnson synthesized them into a new and lasting paradigm. I've started here hoping to find more kinship with the blues roots of rock and roll, with the White Stripes (Stop Breakin' Down Blues), Led Zeppelin (Travelling Riverside Blues), and the Rolling Stones (Love In Vain), just to scratch the surface. Next up is Muddy Waters. I'm looking forward to getting back to the South Side, to listen with new ears.

Oh, Baby don't you want to go...

Violent Femmes

What the hell is the Philly Phanatic? No one knows. From the looks of the beast I wouldn't say it has a single thing to do with baseball. Except the jersey. It is a mascot, that's for sure, and it seems to make those fans unreasonably happy.

I suppose that's all a mascot is supposed to be — an abstraction that makes you unreasonably happy about whatever. So that's how I like to think of the Violent Femmes, as a mascot for alternative rock radio. Their coffee house acoustic rock is too stripped down to resemble the fuzzy feedbackery heard at Lollapalooza, but all the girls and boys in ZERO tees would go bananas if someone played Blister In the Sun. The sound has timeless appeal, youthful but sly and disarmingly sexy. Fully half the songs on their self-titled 1982 debut (Blister In the Sun, Kiss Off, Please Do Not Go, Add It Up, Gone Daddy Gone) were in semi-regular rotation on Q101 throughout the nineties. This I can prove by referring to the unofficial archives: The legendary Cool Stuff tapes.

Chicago's alternative rock station dictated most everything I listened to in high school, and I was a witting participant in their sales-driven musical worldview. Every night I did my homework kneeling on the floor using my bed as a table, my cassette deck within arm's reach on my otherwise unused desk. Whenever, partway through taking the limit as x went to zero, I'd hear the DJ introduce a good song I would depress the two-button record+play combination and preserve the broadcast for posterity. In this way the 17 volumes of Cool Stuff were recorded, documenting the life and times of Q101: Chicago's New Rock Alternative between 1997-2001. Among the events recounted on these tapes is the moment in late 1998 when the station re-christened Metallica as alternative and added them to the schedule (heavily) — Cool Stuff Vol. X is almost entirely Metallica. I've always suspected this programming change came at the insistence of radio personality Erich "Mancow" Muller, who had recently brought his highly-rated morning show to Q101 (Mancow's previous home, Rock 103.5, had a nightly Mandatory Metallica segment). As for the Femmes, Gone Daddy Gone for example can be found on Vol. VIII.

From the beginning the staff rightly decided that the Violent Femmes were a canonical roots-of-alternative band of the 80s. It probably helped that the Femmes hailed from neighboring Milwaukee (the station loudly supported the local scene, cf. their Pumpkins idolatry) and were enjoying new heights in popularity with the grinning aw-shucks 1991 single American Music at the time of Q101's inception.

It was kind of brilliant to take the back-to-basics ethos of punk even further by unplugging, while still attacking the strings with reckless zeal. The songwriting is in the loose limbed inward-looking tradition of the early CBGB scene, like Richard Hell and The Voidoids but without the arty New York pretension. We finally found out what the hell the Femmes were in the late 90s when American folk punk emerged on Plan-It-X Records — featuring such artists as Against Me!, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, and Defiance, Ohio — and the Femmes were recognized as the progenitors of the genre.

As if further reason is needed to love these guys, I point out that VF singer/guitarist Gordon Gano once guest starred on The Adventures of Pete & Pete (as the first substitute math teacher in X=Why?). Other singers of punk and early alternative bands to have done so include Debbie Harry, Michael Stipe, Kate Pierson of the B-52s (the redhead), and New York Dolls singer David Johansen. I should just be writing a daily blog about Pete & Pete.

Fallout 3

The pervasive, almost crushing cynicism we've come to expect from the world of Fallout has in the past been relieved only by winking gallows humor and silly easter eggs...small comfort in this supremely bleak vision of the future. But the developers of Fallout 3 have done something remarkable: They've dared to give the world a soul. The objective of the game is to bring hope to all people of the wastes not by thwarting an evil plot but by aiding a good one.

The defining masterstroke was to set the game in the ruins of Washington D.C., amid all the unmistakable symbols of what we believe is right and good about this country. Naturally the spectres of corruption are evoked as well, perfectly framing the moral tension that has always been at the heart of Fallout.

The National Mall is a warzone excavated and fortified with bunkers for trench warfare. The Capitol Building is a battleground between mutants and mercenaries, fittingly. But from the crumbling National Archives the Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta and Bill of Rights can be retrieved and preserved. Lincoln-related artifacts as well as the replica Apollo 11 Lunar Module can be recovered from the Smithsonian museums. The Lincoln Memorial is sacred ground for freed slaves who hope to literally make a new home there. The Jefferson Memorial has been converted into a massive water purification machine, promising a better future for all who live in the wastes. The Washington Monument, the tallest and most iconic structure in the city, is a rallying point for the Brotherhood of Steel (who headquarter in the Pentagon) and a broadcast tower for Galaxy News Radio's message of hope and freedom. Only the White House, a rather less revered symbol of the sitting rather than past presidents, has been completely obliterated by a tactical warhead. In a touching show of respect by the game designers Arlington National Cemetary is an untroubled location free of enemies, quests, or other objectives. Perhaps in the same spirit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is omitted altogether. Instead there is the fictitious Anchorage War Memorial commemorating the perhaps-not-ignoble campaign to reclaim Alaska from Chinese aggression.

I knew the exact moment the game won me over. The moment when I truly felt back in the wastes again. Not long after emerging from Vault 101 I came upon the roofless but upright shape of a barn and its attendant silo. It was sunset, the rusted sheet metal wrapping the barren silo gleamed like warm embers. Inside I climbed the leaning stairs to the hay loft. An undisturbed skeleton sat before a wooden table, facedown between outspread elbows and a hunting rifle fallen to the floor. On the table was a ham radio with microphone. I turned it on and the skeleton and I listened to the hiss as the sun sank. No signal.

The wasteland is a decayed portrait of Americana. The governing features are civil infrastructure — broken roads, fallen highway pylons, looming bridges, vanishing railroad tracks, trainyards, sewage and water treatment plants, caged power stations, radio towers, high tension wires stretched between steel scarecrows into the distance — as is correct for a country so aware of how it built itself. The life once supported is well represented by scattered gas stations, auto garages, diners, playgrounds, campgrounds, baseball diamonds, drive-in movie theaters, and modest steepled churches with adjoining graveyards. Our nation's pasttime in fact features prominently, both in President Eden's nostalgic radio broadcasts and in the baseballs, gloves, bats and caps that can be found to the exclusion of all other sports paraphernalia. Children's toys are everywhere. While the previous games have often seemed to parody the idyllic America of the 1950s the landscape this time is rendered in such affectionate detail as to make the relentless devastation nothing short of heartbreaking.

Whatever the cause of the Great War it is clear that the game developers still believe in the essential goodness of our democracy, and are for that reason all the more critical of its failings.

House, M.D.

They keep airing, like, marathons of this show on USA. I hate police/medical procedurals...this one has me thinking that any second my organs are going to die.

Hammer Has Been Destroyed...?

The Hard Boiled Cinema 2008 fall series is over. Twenty Hammer Horror films. Good lord. For all Peter Cushing's stoic perseverance through endless iterations of the same limp and hackneyed script, the true heroes of this series are those brave and few souls who sat in the dark with me and with good humor endured. I salute you.

As for Hammer, one is tempted to pronounce Van Helsing's epitaph: Requiescat In Pace Ultima. Then again, we know better don't we? After 32 years in the grave Hammer Horror is back. Look for two new Hammer releases in theaters in 2009, including a remake of Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In.

Have heart, friends. Think of Peter and you'll know what must be done.

Singles + Reality Bites

Gene Siskel used to ask,

Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

Unfortunately a lot of second rate actors are really really boring people, so an affirmative doesn't quite guarantee that you have a good movie on your hands, just that the raw material has been somewhat improved. Singles suggests a corollary question. I'd much rather see a doc of Cameron Crowe discussing his experiences in the Seattle music scene circa 1992 than this tedious collection of amateurishly performed drama class exercises he directed. How is it that Crowe got Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden to guest star, and Paul Westerberg to compose the score, but couldn't find one decent actor to prop up the sagging ensemble cast? One does not expect Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell to act circles around Matt Dillon, Bridget Fonda and Jeremy Piven, but there it is. Okay, so Bill Pullman is good in his 2 1/2 minutes of screen time, and there is an all-time great cameo (about 3 seconds long) by a then-unknown Paul Giamatti (with hair!) necking sloppy in a diner; I rank it up there with Richard Dreyfuss's cameo in The Graduate.

In sharp contrast, viewed 15 years on Reality Bites manages to avoid being embarrassing as a Gen X self-portrait. The same can't be said of The Big Chill, for instance, but that's probably because baby boomers are intrinsically embarrassing. Janeane Garofalo has always been sexier than she pretends, but here in her first starring role she is actually more vivacious than cynical (I still refuse to believe she did not voice Daria). Sadly Steve Zahn is wasted in a mild-mannered role, also his first.

Both of these flicks are pale cousins of Slacker.

Has there been one of these generation-defining movies lately? Should we be making one? Maybe it was Cloverfield.

I'm Riddler, dammit!

British tabloid The Sun is reporting that Eddie Murphy has been signed on to play the Riddler in Christopher Nolan's next Batman picture (working title: Gotham). This is surprising because it is widely believed that Murphy now refuses to work without a fat suit. I'm sure the FX team can troubleshoot around this...perhaps Murphy can be filmed in a fat suit that is then removed by CGI in post. In any case we can at least be confident that Murphy has the chops to embody the green-clad icon, given his definitive portrayal of Gumby.

In another surprise Spielberg's own cabana boy, Shia LaBeouf, is revealed to be signed on as Robin. This despite Nolan's previous assertions that he would not introduce the Boy Wonder in the Year One stage of the Dark Knight's career. Nevertheless the details that have just been leaked of his apparently new vision give us fanboys hope that — dream come true! — Keanu may also be coming aboard as Mr. Freeze.

Addendum: Nolan must be immediately terminated, with extreme prejudice.

History of the Punk, Part III

Everyone knows punk rock entered the mainstream with Dookie (1994), an event made possible by Nevermind (1991), which was itself made possible by a decade of shitty metal.* So commenced a period in which California punk bands that had stubbornly weathered the 80s (Offspring, NOFX, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, Pennywise, Jawbreaker, Op Iv/Rancid) finally got their shot at the big time. Even NY hardcore heroes Sick Of It All made it onto Beavis and Butt-head. The Cali groups had already been tempering their hardcore roots with more traditional song structures, slower tempos and friendlier hooks in the DIY climate that prevailed prior to Dookie, and while the jump to the majors lent a new polish they largely retained their individual identities. This window of punk revival came to an end, as far as I'm concerned, when the Offspring released a chart-topping sack of shit titled Americana in 1998, a castrated and vapid moneymaker signaling that creatively independent punk would have to go back underground.

Of the bands that formed in that era 1994-1998 — kids inspired by Green Day's example — the most inoffensive breed of well-scrubbed pop punk was determined to be the most commercially viable. Blink-182 had formed in 1992 and so, like a sophomore to all the freshmen, was older by just enough to lead this young generation of soundalikes (Mest, Good Charlotte, Sum 41, New Found Glory, Yellowcard) bred for the spotlight by corporate record labels that had mastered the trick of "turning rebellion into money". Enema of the State (1999) is the definitive sound of the years between Americana and the invasion of Iraq, and contrary to the aspersions I'm casting it is a good record.

During those same Enema years 1998-2003 despite the prevalence of pop punk on the radio almost no new punk bands were formed that would go on to mainstream success. The drop-off between 1997 and 1998 is jarring.

Punk was brushed out of the spotlight in the early millennium by the garage rock and postpunk revivals, primarily because the once-profitable formula to which it had been reduced had become stale. Oversaturation. Eight months after Baghdad was tomahawked Blink released their final album. But many pre-Dookie stalwarts soldiered on to varied success, energized by renewed political convictions. Major releases of the Iraq war era include NOFX's War on Errorism (2003), Anti-Flag's Terror State (2003), Bad Religion's The Empire Strikes First (2004), Green Day's American Idiot (2004), and Leftöver Crack's Fuck World Trade (2004). Over in the apolitical circles epic productions have been en vogue, notably AFI's Sing the Sorrow (2003) and Decemberunderground (2006) and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade (2006).

So that's the view from the charts. Now the interesting part is exploring everything happening beneath the charts, at the scattered campfires where the flame of '77 is rekindled.


* For a dissenting opinion see 80s metal apologist Chuck Klosterman. Thrash, black, and death metal are general exceptions to the shittiness rule.

Slumdog Millionaire

Oliver Twist is a totally crappy character. He is only loved by the fainthearted readers who are horrified by the infinitely more interesting villains and grimwigs that surround him. For the rest of us the story ends in Fagin's cell — we don't care about the happyeverafter of poor put-upon Oliver because we'd been rooting for the Artful Dodger all along. (Why has no one written the further adventures of AD after his deportation to Australia?)

Dickens' mistake is oft-repeated (Frodo Baggins suffers from mild Oliver Syndrome) and Danny Boyle compounds it with another. The protagonist Jamal is given a destiny in place of a personality. His only discernible characteristic is that he Loves The Girl and the only actions he ever takes are to find her or protect her. So that's nice, but otherwise he is a total nonentity. He has nothing to say and, worse yet, no reason to be so in love with her. She at least is briefly aware there is no reason she should love him either, but this is conveniently forgotten when she is needed for the big fake ending. So once again the bloke to hold our interest is the Artful Dodger, in this case Jamal's brother Salim. Only he faces any real choices, and makes them, moving the story along. And then Boyle goes and ruins that by dispatching Salim, who has heretofore been written as a real person, in an unmotivated and pointless suicide.

As the Oscars approach this is my pick for most overrated film of the year. It sidesteps a real story to pander with fake game show drama.

Fun fact! Elijah Wood has played both Frodo and the Dodger.

Withnail and I

Hunter S. Thompson's parting thoughts on attorney Dr. Gonzo, although he could equally well have been speaking of himself:

There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die.

It appears that at least one other prototype was made. Withnail comes as close as I've seen to matching the journalist in chemical intake, hyperbolic mendacity, and pathetic desperation. Although my Python is not rusty, I was unprepared to meet a barrage of inflected preposterousness, greasy with limey and period slang, rapidly skittering between subtle and blatant, that is as dizzying as Thompson's own personal dialect.

Happy-Go-Lucky

And so after my first exposure I am now committed to exploring the back catalogue of theater and indie film veteran Mike Leigh. Here is movie magic of a higher order: A picture that, with only the barest whisp of a plot, nevertheless knows exactly what it's about. Each moment is true, and the moments sum to a whole. Sally Hawkins' character takes time to observe the people around her. She looks into the faces of strangers. The same can be said of the movie itself &mdash in a scene on the boardwalk Sally & company move on out of frame while the camera pauses to regard two old men sitting on a bench. They are grimacing at nothing in particular, and we love them.

Shores In Flames

My first foray into black metal. I suppose I should've started at the beginning with Venom, but my Nordic blood could no longer resist the thunderous call of viking metal, a subgenre crystallized by Swedish lo-fi metal legend Bathory on Hammerheart (1990). Now unlike the tongue-in-cheek goofballery of Scottish pirate metal (a recent and hopefully short-lived phenomenon) these Swedes mean serious business.

There is good reason not to snicker at all the hollering about longships and invocations of Odin. The subject at hand is not Middle Earth hokum but the rape of Scandinavia's pre-Christian heritage by the Holy Roman Empire. The dominant theme of the album is the loss of a proud culture of heroes to a creeping cult of weakness. A minor revolution of anti-Christian sentiment started here, leading to the burning of over 50 churches in Norway throughout the nineties. Quite...unfortunate.

Despite my affinity for the rawest garagiest production values I'm a sucker for a concept album, and production value should be equal to the concept. With Hammerheart I think they spent millions getting the drums to sound like Asgard in your stereo and layering on the voices of actual valkyries making love to your ears. Then they threw the tapes into a fjord for a thousand years until they one day washed up on shore. The result sounds like an ancient artifact, remembered glory echoing out of the past. The vocals are not of the modern world. Bathory mastermind Quorthon looses a primeval croak such as might have been heard had Gollum conquered Mordor.

Ingrid Pitt

Born in a concentration camp, forced as a teen into smutty theater in East Berlin, her father abducted by the Stasi, Polish-born Ingoushka Petrov escaped the Volkspolizei to the US with the help of Bertolt Brecht's widow and an American GI to whom she was briefly married. Living with an Indian tribe in Colorado she learned to communicate with spirits, once contacting her vanished father. Back in Europe in the mid-60s she was drawn to budget horror productions and became a cult icon as a vamp and villainess, never a scream queen.

We're nearing the end of HBC's series of Hammer Horror films and have finally introduced Hammer's most legendary actress. I remember her slightly from Where Eagles Dare and The Wicker Man and not at all from Dr Zhivago. But after The Vampire Lovers (1970) I won't be forgetting her. One of Hammer's finest outings, VL sits at the cusp of the studio's descent into exploitation, showcasing both the sumptuously overdecorated sets and agreeably stodgy cinematography that Terence Fisher trademarked (a Hammer castle or a rustic Hammer barn are movie locales as distinctive as Monument Valley) as well as the relaxed mores and bodices that finally set loose the boobage we'd been teased with all those years.

And Ingrid, she has got the kavorka. There has been plenty of memorable Hammer cheesecake, but she alone shows up on screen with the weight of a personal history in her bearing; wise and sad, powerful and fragile. And the best beauty mark of all time (sorry Marilyn, Liz).

The MGM DVD is packaged with Countess Dracula (1971), which is like a case study in how to take the same story and the same star and totally ruin it. Why is Ingrid in old hag makeup (impressive FX, granted) more often than not? Why isn't she a lesbian? Why do the supporting cast and extras look like the Mos Eisley Cantina? Did the set designer indeed revive those twisty columns we remember so well from every Terence Fisher movie 1957-1962? If so, nice.

Being There

Shirley MacLaine is a fox. I'm gonna rewatch The Apartment.

Lenny Bruce

The surviving performance film is invaluable as a document of Bruce's onstage manner, but one must have Bob Fosse's 1974 biopic to understand the comedian's story, or at least the popular version of it. Beautiful B&W photography and faux documentary structure are correct choices for the subject, given the fragmentary (mostly audio) record of Bruce's life and especially his own fixation on the Xanadu of legal documents that buried him. Most of the time I can do without Dustin Hoffman tearing through a picture with his prestige Acting, but here Hoffman seems dedicated to the man more than to a character. Plus Fosse's intercutting flashback narrative keeps Hoffman in check by offering him only a few extended scenes and placing the burden of storytelling on the editor more than the performer. The only missing element is one of Bruce's most famous quips, which would have served as a fitting coda:

Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.

Conventional opinion is that Lenny Bruce's final performances, as he feverishly obsessed over his legal battles and read from unfolded court documents onstage, were boring and unfortunate. This is wrong. Most of the time comedians just do an act. Rarely, and almost never to popular success, does a stand-up engage in some kind of dramatic performance art. Pryor did it with his heroin impression. Bill Hicks turned his show into a satanic tent revival. Andy Kaufman, perhaps the master of audience baiting, somehow made his appearances into a joke on the world. Currently the chief practitioner of anti-comedy is Zach Galifianakis, who seems to be working on a piece where he gets fatter and beardier every year. So Lenny Bruce himself achieved something arresting in those last engagements &mdash he was a living Josef K, persecuted and destroyed for undefined crimes. It is bizarre but accurate to think of him as the sole sacrifice made to the obscure gods of decency in exchange for modern stand-up comedy.

You may now go back to Dane Cook's MySpace.

Bender's Game

After all the series has done with Star Trek over the years, this is the best they could come up with for a feature length D&D/Tolkien spoof? The use of the d12 as an artifact of power is the only inspired conceit in the story. Most of the jokes in Cornwood are arbitrary, unpointed. Worst of all the writers fall back on a tired Star Wars parody for the climax. Really? You couldn't come up with anything D&D related? One gets the sense the writers simply lacked familiarity with both Middle Earth lore and gaming culture. There was however promise in the peace-and-love centaur sequence...Perhaps a better story would revolve around the philosophical conflict between gamers of the hippy-dippy-crystal-faerie-dragon-figurine-art-fair variety and those who dip their swords in heavy-metal-hack-and-slash.

As usual Zoidberg is reliable for laughs no matter what else is happening.

Australia

If we open with a big wink, like an overstated globe-spanning title card and then a boomerang in the first shot, and then propel the first hour with fish-out-of-water comedy, we can convince the audience they're having enough fun to endure both a cattle stampede (with cliff) and an uncrossable desert. By that time they'll have been swept up in the epicness of the production and forgotten that a guileless old-Hollywood storyline, though relatively novel nowadays, still needs to justify itself by being good. So THEN we roll out the big air raid set piece and drag the fake drama through the post-attack sludge until we definitely qualify for epic running time. Throw in a wacky crocodile attack at the midpoint just to be safe.

Medias in res

Rock and roll has been known to occur in the Midwest. There is a city called Rockford, Illinois, for example, that is famous for more than its water park. But let's face it. The great prairie touring circuit is not where one goes to live fast and die young. The whole point of Axl Rose is that he took a bus right the hell out of Lafayette. No, the cocaine and cadillacs and cooze are not generally sought at church hall gigs between Duluth and Madison. But try telling that to the Replacements.

I've discovered my favorite band of the eighties. The beauteous crash of the Pixies had once assured me that someone tended the flame during the long night between London Calling and Nevermind, but honestly, who can really relate to Frank Black? Incest and aliens are not that central to my life. Somehow the insectoid yelping of the Kirkwood brothers, in all its senseless glory, speaks more clearly to the sun-fried coyote of my heart. But still, my brain will never be chemically damaged enough to love the Meat Puppets as well as they deserve. The Minutemen, aah now there's a band you want to cuddle and cook breakfast for...if only you didn't feel dirty for intruding on the perfect love of Mike Watt and D Boon. Sigh. I've yet to penetrate the shroud of fuzz that cloaks Hüsker Dü, although when I learned that both Mould and Hart are gay (formerly an open secret) some light shone through. My sense is that they prefer to be somewhat obscured, which intrigues but does not affirm me. So I've circled from Boston to Phoenix to San Pedro to the Twin Cities, and finally found them. The other gang of punks from Minneapolis.

The Replacements, like many of the best punk bands, don't seem to know or care that they are a punk band. They have no mission statement, no agenda, no uniform, no anthem. While most groups seek to define themselves with a consistent sound, the 'Mats don't even try. On their first record they frequently toy with a poppy hook, then throw it away without committing. Each LP veers in tone from vitriolic hardcore to jangly goofs to heartbreaking piano ballads. Evidently Minnesota was a long way from the skatepunk/crossover scenes gestating in California.

It is however closer to Cleveland, where the Dead Boys provide something of an antecedent; the sneering bravado on Young, Loud, and Snotty is broken up by Not Anymore, a skid row funeral hymn that lays bare the underlying desperation. It's difficult to understand the Replacements' mood swings, unless you've ever known a drunk. Here are four shambolic miscreants possessed of more talent than ambition, lead by a songwriter who fearlessly documents the emotional vagaries not of an iconic frontman but of a bitter and cocky and hopeful and broken person like you or me. Paul Westerberg's raw throated bleary eyed confessionalism reminds me of a couple of my other favorite singers, Conor Oberst and Spencer Moody.

Falling in love changes you. The thing you love becomes part of you.