You're gonna need a bigger budget

Of all the motion pictures I've seen from all the decades and all the world my favorite is still Raiders of the Lost Ark. Its constant companions are Empire and Jaws; the movies that made me love movies in the first place.

They tell me of a drive-in theater, and I'm not altogether too young to remember the sacrosanct lots of old, but they tell me of one especial immemorial night when the Perseids fell and small Tiberi-chan was parked before God and God lit up with the Empire Strikes Back. Something of that experience — of popcorn power chords struck at a significant place, a ground like to a baseball diamond where intersect the ley lines of Americana — must have been imprinted upon the courseless mush of my wee brain, a signet pressed into the wobbling raw Spielbergus et Lucas, simultaneously claiming and creating a blockbusting fanboy nascent.

Those two wayward sons of New Hollywood conspired to undo the progress made since the late 60s toward a less bloated, more artful American cinema. They invented a more profitable business and restored the imperial might of the studios. In particular, Spielberg elevated Universal Pictures from a third-rate manufacturer of budget and genre pics and television, never respected by the exalted likes of Paramount, MGM and Warner, to the stature of theme park-operating behemoth, which we nowadays take as a given. Studio fortunes in the 80s came to revolve around movies-for-boys, which is to say around me. It was the golden age of creature effects. The wizardry was mostly analog, toolshed cobbling of snips and snails, muppetry and dwarfs, with computer enhancement to excite Atari junkie kid genius. Was I supposed to lament the lost refinement and grit of the 70s? When rallied about me were mogwai, skeksis, slimers, krites, deadites, poltergeists, rancors, rock biters and toons? When I had heroes like Ash, Mad Max, Dr Jones, Pee-wee Herman, Baron Munchausen, Boba Fett, Doc Brown and Sloth? The 70s didn't give a crap about kids. The Bad News Bears, Star Wars and Meatballs are the exceptions, the harbingers, that prove the rule. Spielberg and Lucas oversaw the only decade of great and enduring movies dedicated to being a kid, and they were my heroes too*.

Which is not to say S & L are the foremost masters of their dubious craft. No one has done better work in the blockbuster/fx era than James Cameron. It's not even a competition. And before I consent to hear your appeals on behalf of Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson, let me remind you that all of Cameron's films are based on original screenplays written by Cameron himself. By design his radical fx are always an integral and purposeful component of the narrative, made indispensable servant to the story — never an end unto themselves. I wouldn't say the guy's writing has quite the psychological depth of Bergman, but he has been a student of physics and philosophy (The Abyss is a great underappreciated work of science fiction) and as a disciplined and conscientious showman Cameron is unsurpassed.

And so I graduated from E.T. and Willow to Aliens and T2, and by high school I aspired to become a CGI fx artist (at least prior to junior year when the intoxicating truth of physics re-centered my world). I pored over a monstrous glossy christmas tome: behind the scenes at Industrial Light & Magic. I was too dazzled to be cognizant of the fact that the kind of vigorous, joyful filmmaking I wanted to be a part of was already over, set to devolve into the sterile, routine and gratuitous. A decade of genuine heart had absently bumped into nineteen ninety-too-cool-for-school, and the kids once briefly indulged are now denied that wondrous admixture of respectful regard and frivolous fun. The tail end of the 80s creature movies (...Tremors, Dead Alive, Army of Darkness) petered out in 1993; what Spielberg started with one mechanical squalus he put to a halt with a stampede of digital dinos. Hollywood was dazzled by ever cheaper CGI that yielded ever higher revenues by its ever more careless application. Lucas publicly revealed the already advanced stage of his dementia in 1997 when, to my ultimate horror, Greedo shot first. That same year Spielberg dropped the first Jurassic Park sequel, the Cretaceous Turd, and so embarked upon his ongoing series of ill-conceived and unnecessary misadventures, misfires and inexcusable mistakes. To date: Lost World, A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds**, Indy 4. Dear Stevie has lost his rudder, at least in the waters of sci-fi and pulp; possibly it was eaten by a four and a half foot baby thresher shark. My milk has gone sour.

Cameron went into hiding in 1997 after Titanic, which is a great movie but lacking protein, like waffles. In his absence and with S & L bent wretchedly to the dark side it has been dark times for the blockbuster. Every season they make gobs of money and they stink. Gladiator and the latter Matrix and Pirates movies are only the most prominent heaps among the decade's catch of execrable garbage. But there have been freedom fighters. The original Matrix remains a worthy achievement, and Peter Jackson has kept the whip cracking with Lord of the Rings and King Kong; with any luck his protégé, Guillermo del Toro, will soon produce a masterwork. Sam Raimi (of all people) brought new respectability to the superhero flick with Spider-Man 2, bettered by Christopher Nolan's two Batman pictures and Watchmen. And most miraculously have appeared a pair of ragged knights, somber and quick in the dusk like Picasso's Quixote: two great, invaluable new movies about childhood that will last your whole life. On the shelf where you keep a Chewie figurine and the game ball from a little league glory, alongside the Goonies, the Neverending Story and Stand By Me, you may put Terry Gilliam's Tideland and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are.

Back to the crap. Six months ago the great and terrible Ebert, seizing the podium in a hectic fit, proclaimed Transformers 2 to be the abominable terminus of the Luco-Spielberg Folly. One can divine in the froth of his words Roger's wish that it be so. And certainly one can appreciate the fitting arc: As franchise royalty of the 80s Transformers would seem to have the right to spark the immolation of its kind. But alas (sweet mercy) Roger's wishes are not fishes. Them autobots grossed not quite a billion dollars, and so we folly on. If you paid to see the movie you are to blame.

Avatar is counterpoint to everything wrong with the blockbuster movie today. Cameron back from the Jundland Wastes, a new hope.

...

If my own wishes were fishes and copyright laws were stricken from the books I'm forced to concede the irony that Avatar would end up being the actual last of its kind. Absent copy protection the blockbuster would perish from the earth. When movies become free to distribute and exhibit a producer could never recoup a $200 million investment. Can you fathom donation and patronage supporting the summer movie season to which we are accustomed? I think the era would simply be over. Dino extincto. And you know what? I would be okay with that. To every thing a season.



* As a youngster I tended to assume my idols were just like me. When doing a report on Steven Spielberg in the fourth grade I was shocked — shocked! — to learn that he's a Jew. Really? But I thought Stevie was a Scout, like me... Admittedly thereafter the Nazi villains took on an even more sinister air, and I took greater satisfaction in their melting. I remember also my dad handing me the binoculars at a Cubs game and directing my attention to right field where — Sufferin' succotash! Andre Dawson was black.

** War of the Worlds in particular I cannot forgive. The gentle soul who created E.T. and Close Encounters, our two most humane, hopeful and beautiful pictures about making contact, had made a well known vow never to depict malevolent extraterrestrials. He felt it was a moral obligation, a chance to use the cinema not to fearmonger but to engender a more noble spirit of comity and curiosity. This gesture I felt had been Spielberg's most valuable contribution, of greater significance than Amistad or Schindler's List. So what in tarnation happened after 9/11 and the Iraq War? Spielberg reverted to exactly the kind of huddled hysterics I had long admired him for rising above — reviving our most iconic episode of baseless panic, to boot — in a time of national stress when his former clearheaded example was most needed. He betrayed us all.

Avatar

From Beggar's Canyon, March 30:

Looming over the entire year is Avatar. ... James Cameron has not released a picture since Titanic in 1997. He is the greatest sci-fi action director of all time. He has spent the last decade developing 3D camera technology and time travel from his hyperbaric compound beneath the antarctic ice cap.

From an e-mail I sent, December 7:

Remember that this is the guy who gave us The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator and T2; he personally ushered in the CGI era. ... I don't know if Cameron is going to start a second FX revolution with Avatar, but he thinks he is, and if I had to put my money on someone it would be him. If anyone can make 3D a viable technology it is him. However, it is probably easiest to imagine Avatar becoming a $400 million disaster. We shall see.

From Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, 1994:

Noble Savage Syndrome. Thrown into the company of a native tribe of any description, the protagonist discovers the true meaning of life and sees through the sham of modern civilization. Wisdom and sensitivity are inevitably possessed by any race, class, age group, or ethnic or religious minority that has been misunderstood. Such movies seem well intentioned at first glance, but replace one stereotype for another...

Charles Stardom, upon exiting theater tonight:

"Oh man, this ain't no Ferngully!"

Thirst

And here I am endorsing a vampire movie — and it's not even German. Given the sheer volume of bloodsucker cinema out there (Count Dracula alone has appeared in over 200 films, just shy of the record held by Sherlock Holmes) I'm guessing we've had to endure vampire priests on screen before now. Aside from the likelihood that every vampire iteration has been worked through, Christendom does have a particular weakness for baroque portraiture of spiritual confliction. I'm aware of two comics that explore such characters: the American Astro City and the manhwa Priest (both unread by me). I'd like to imagine the premise has been exploited primarily for caustic satire, but apologetic allegory seems more likely.

Thirst...I'm not sure which it is. Which is partly why I like it. Chan-wook Park has been artfully playing with blood for so long the vampire genre is a natural, perhaps inevitable fit. He gives us two principals pacted into a yin yang tug and fuck: the conscientious clergymen tortured by his accidental commitment to a liquid diet and the amoral hedonistic minx who mocks him. The superhuman particulars of vampirism are treated with almost throwaway casualness (of a sudden and without fanfare seemingly normal priest hops off a building), which is tasteful because by now we're overfamiliar with it all; Park knows to just get on with the story. It's a simple story poetically told, as is Park's strength, and not without its complement of twisted humor and kink.

The thing I love about Catholic priests is how much they hate themselves. They do my job for me.

Persepolis

Moldering in the depths of my queue is a movie called The Band's Visit. Israeli production, live action, about an Arab Egyptian orchestra trying to get to a gig in Israel. Supposed to be good. Positively lousy with cross-cultural pathos. I'll get around to it, honest.

Persepolis also premiered at Cannes in 2007. A French production adapting an Iranian woman's autobiographical graphic novel to hand drawn animation. So I learned about these two stories of the Middle East at the same time, but the fact of animation made Persepolis inherently more appealing and higher priority. A drawing can distill the essence of a thing, disregard the superficial. I know when I see The Band's Visit I'm going to be looking at eight particular Arabs standing around some particular dirthole village, and the specificity of it will be itself a thing of value, but the message of commonality would be better served by images more abstract and general. Better a little cartoon girl living through warfare, unrest and expatriation in duotone and silhouette.

Avatar, preliminary

I've been accused of not reviewing Avatar in a timely fashion. Seeing as the movie had its world premiere in London just yesterday, and opens in the US on December 18, this is a perfectly reasonable accusation. Therefore I am prepared to put forth an opinion:

Avatar is a load of crap. What, no Ewoks? Horseshit!

Good Night, and Good Luck

A new theater was opening in the south suburbs, one of these premium joints with dinner and drink service, and the owners had the good taste to host the public premiere with a screening of Jaws. In attendance for signing and Q&A was a stormy Richard Dreyfuss, who upon emerging from his holding area to greet the line of fans threw his cap to the ground, glared with furious indignation and shouted a few unintelligible remarks. The fans clapped appreciatively. To see the Orca on the big screen was a thrill, although I felt the busily dining audience was paying rather too little attention to the movie. Afterwards was Q&A as promised and the irascible Hooper took the stage. We sated customers could not have expected the tongue lashing we were about to receive. Dreyfuss had schlepped first class all the way from Tinseltown with an axe to grind and we were to learn from this vituperative ham that we, the American people who'd come to see him fight a shark, were failing to teach our children the value of our civil liberties and the fundamentals of democracy. Apparently our great republic is crumbling because civics has vanished from American schools and our feckless indifference made it so. This went on for some time. Finally the mic was passed to a member of the indicted audience, hand raised. "Do you have any funny stories about working with that shark?"

He obediently responded with a few anecdotes and left. Feathers had been ruffled. I don't know how they run the public schools in Los Angeles County, but I sure as shit had to pass the Illinois and US Constitution tests in seventh and twelfth grade, and the Northwest Suburban Council of the BSA awarded my brothers and me three citizenship merit badges apiece, so the next left coast crusader to make a pit stop in a flyover state should please be aware that the Midwest ain't the San Fernando Valley.

Lucky for us Hollywood has over the years provided the occasional civics lesson, and when not overly condescending we are happy to embrace the message. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is probably the first to come to mind, but the Jimmy Stewart role that actually moves me is in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of several essential Ford films to which I was introduced in a college course on ethics. (The professor happily distributed VHS copies of all films discussed, as if dissemination of valued art should be free.) Stewart is the archetypal pilgrim, come to bring order to the Old West not with a Winchester but with a stack of law books and some crazy talk about the pursuit of happiness; when Jimmy recites from the Declaration of Independence to his gathered pupils I just go all weepy. Maybe it's 12 Angry Men or Atticus Finch that gets your patriotic druthers in a dither.

For as much as he is now a movie star, George Clooney is a television man through and through. So it follows that, to him, integrity in civic duty is a TV newsman named Edward R. Murrow. Hard to disagree.

Clooney's first two films as a director are in love with the roaring heyday of live network broadcast, bringing the spontaneity and recklessness of the 30s newsroom onto the soundstage while at the same time nursing a jaded contempt for its advertisement-driven banality; Chuck Barris and Murrows share a touch of self-loathing, if little else. But whereas Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is all enthusiasm and no discretion the sober follow-up, Good Night, and Good Luck, is as concise and disciplined as if Clooney were not an actor- but an editor-turned-director. (My favorite kind of -turned-director.) The discipline befits the material of course, and I especially admire the restraint exercised in allowing extended sequences of archival footage to do the talking, rather than pointlessly re-staging. All the elements are tasty in this coarse-grained montage, from the journalists' handsome and boozy social scene to the jazz recording studio interludes and period commercials. The creamy black and white set design makes me want to get around to Mad Men in a hurry.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I'm a little worried about Wes Anderson painting himself into a corner. Perhaps you are less concerned, given that Anderson has just departed from live action to release his first animated feature, which happens to be the most unique marquee picture of the year and, as an analog stop motion side scroller, runs rather contrary to prevailing aesthetics. Perhaps now more than ever the Anderson brand seems to you a wildcard.

You haven't been paying attention. Wes's world, like Dudley's, is distinctly and marvelously his own, but from the moment Dignan cuffed a bittersweet farewell in the prison yard it has been subject to an inexorable crayon-drafted procedure for geometric collapse. Fantastic Mr. Fox is the squared, boxed, folded and flattened final product; a wonderful dead end.

Bottle Rocket was the first and last time there were open spaces in an Anderson film — the unbound prairie of his home Texas where the gang shot fireworks on the lam. Rushmore came fully framed as a stage play, complete with title curtain, and more and more Anderson has used the edges of the image to frame reality, to ontologically exclude what lies outside. Margaret Yang flies in on her remote control airplane and the boys don't notice her until she's in frame, even though she's evidently standing right next to them in the middle of an empty tarmac. They don't watch her leave either; camera cuts away and she's just gone. By the time of Darjeeling Limited Anderson had perfected the coupling of this principle to the whip-pan for comic effect. In an early sequence the brothers tour an Indian city and, repeatedly, ridiculous goings-on are revealed just off screen. So he's used framing devices to great dramatic advantage, but steadily the dimensions are compacting and the walls closing in on Dignan's confinement.

One reviewer of Darjeeling described Anderson's sensibility as miniaturist. Exactly. The Tenenbaums' dollhouse was cross-sectioned into the diorama Belafonte, then cropped into a row of boxcar viewing boxes and now compressed into slides of life in an ant farm. Unless this progression ends the next Anderson project will be the gallery exhibit of microminiature paintings from Synecdoche, New York. I miss Texas.

That said, Fantastic Mr. Fox is brilliant. Go ahead and put it alongside the collected Wallace and Gromit as the best in feature length stop motion, superior in energy and wit to anything by Henry Selick or the increasingly banal Tim Burton. (Nightmare Before Christmas is a great feat of imagination, but take a fresh look at the script and execution — aside from a few musical highlights it's rather tedious.)

As a kids movie Mr. Fox follows a trusted recipe for longevity: alcohol, tobacco and firearms. And if every instance of the word "cuss" were replaced with the corresponding vulgarity this puppy would be Restricted. Naturally the soundtrack must be owned; the customary revival of a Rolling Stones tune is Street Fighting Man. And with Clooney on board Anderson could be issuing a challenge to Soderbergh in the caper business. Here are just a few of the key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers — can you see how incredible this is going to be? — hang gliding...

Erin Brockovich

I'm having trouble telling the difference between Albert Finney and Brian Cox.

The Road (2009)

At the end of The Life Aquatic Bill Murray tearfully pardons the jaguar shark that ate his friend and, in the film's emotional climax, his crew members all reach out to touch him with a gesture of comfort. The moment does not work. Anderson hasn't done the legwork necessary to earn it, such tender and unreserved sentiment. At best we wince with slight embarrassment and at worst we snicker.

The film adaptation of The Road is compromised by too many such moments. The ashen world has been sincerely apocalypted by the production design team, and we mutant veterans of Fallout nod in appreciation, but instead of total immersion into the reality of hell we are cheated by single-setup camerawork and a fatally impatient clip; result is only a little more involving than watching a bonus disc slideshow of concept art stills. And so good performances are left out in the cold. Take another look at how the Coen brothers managed to adapt McCarthy in No Country for Old Men: Pacing is everything. The pauses between the notes is where the art resides.

Brüno

What makes Brüno a better movie than Borat is not the quality of the gags, which have actually degraded from zany inspiration (the running of the Jews is a bit to make Woody Allen jealous, and Borat's clucking suitcase is comic perfection) to obvious shock tactics (a talking penis haw haw), nor the audacity of the stunts*, which to Cohen's credit are bolder and more pointed this time around. At play is the Bond principle, by which a movie is only as good as its villain, and homophobia in the US and abroad today is far more insidious than the reclining geezer of antisemitism.

The anger here at the ignorant and prejudiced is palpable, through not only the cruelty with which Cohen dupes and humiliates his unwitting participants but also the overall hostility toward the audience as again and again he rubs your face into his freshly bleached taint. Every bit of it is justified.


* Incidentally, fuck Ron Paul, an absurd secessionist and prolific publisher of bigotry.

Sita Sings the Blues

...


I'm coming around to the stance that copyright is bullshit and all art properly belongs in the public domain. Claim: Artists are not entitled to receive pay for the reproduction and use of their art.

What do you think of that? I'm not well versed on intellectual property law and its controversies, but a certain free culture movement outlet (QuestionCopyright) lead by Brooklyn-based animator Nina Paley currently has my ear. The above logo, her invention, is intended to change our thinking about the commonplace fact that, if you create a work of art that incorporates copyrighted material, the government will silence you. A copyright is a monopoly on a piece of information, issued and upheld by city hall, with the exclusive intent to remove that information from the sphere of free speech; copyright is censorship.

The consequence we live with is an impoverishing of culture. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an actual published version of Jane Austen's novel reworked to include among the sundry proposals and carriage rides a zombie outbreak, is possible because no one holds a copyright on Pride and Prejudice; it's public domain. However, I have no hope of ever obtaining permission to publish my own like-minded novel, Bridget Jones's Zombie Diary. This chapter heading is all I am permitted to share publicly:

129 lbs. (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 4 (excellent), cigarettes 21 (poor but will give up totally tomorrow), number of zombies killed 13

The invention and indefinite extension of ubiquitous copyrighting as a Fortune 500 business model, starting in the mid-twentieth century and becoming more prohibitive every year, has ensured that virtually all creative works made since the 1920s are presently locked out of public use, not a single such copyright will expire until 2019, and all works published today will remain unavailable into the next century.

Let's bring this close to home. Tideland, Terry Gilliam's latest (most?) neglected masterpiece, has been appallingly mishandled in its DVD release by distributor THINKFilm: Transfer features the incorrect aspect ratio 1.77:1, which a child will tell you is an unacceptable substitute for the glorious theatrical 2.35:1. THINKFucker is in no hurry to amend the situation, and so I remain unable to view and share this crushingly beautiful film. Now, if Tideland were not automatically copy protected by law, but rather by default freely available in the public domain, anyone could come along and print their own DVD version (say, the Beggar's Canyon Edition of Tideland) and legally collect all profits from its sale. Doubtless one such version would be made by persons who actually cared about quality enough to preserve the original 2.35:1 ratio, and that disc I would happily buy and show to you.

Closer to home. We will not in our lifetime see an official release of The Wonder Years. The soundtrack is an albatross; hundreds of classic songs licensed for one-time broadcast use only, plus syndication. Hundreds of copyrights between you and Winnie Cooper.

...

Animators are the most creative people on the planet. When not limited to live action photography motion pictures become the freest possible mode of expression, and so attract the most dynamic creative talent. This is why Adult Swim is consistently the best block of programming on television.

Don't be misled by the staid ways of postwar Disney or the rigid forms of conventional anime: It should not be surprising that the two most prominent cultural forces in animation happen to suffer (prosper) from creative anemia. Think instead of South Park, the program that long ago punched through the frontiers of satire, then accelerated. (They're now so far ahead that "edgy", the descriptor itself, sounds as obsolete as the Borscht Belt.) Think also of the generally acknowledged greatest sitcom of all time, The Simpsons. Hell, think of SpongeBob SquarePants, the kids show that could well be the apotheosis of the sight gag, surpassing anything in the Looney Tunes catalogue and even (I feel guilty saying it) Tom and Jerry. Japan is not without its superlative innovators either. The experimental miniseries known as FLCL is a freewheeling marriage of narrative and form as densely constructed as Citizen Kane or Ulysses, telling in its brain-melting fashion a deeply affecting coming-of-age story for which I offer the suggestive but altogether inadequate subtitle, Your Erection and What To Do With It: An Electric Riff on Puberty, Space Pirates and the Home Run.

Roger Ebert's exuberant review of Being John Malkovich opens with the exclamation, "What an endlessly inventive movie this is!" I'd like to turn that exclamation into a kind of seal of commendation — call it The Malky — and stamp it on worthy new films, shows, books-games-what-have-you as my highest honor, to share the delight of something new added to the world.

Sita — if, like me, you are comfortably unfamiliar with Indian* mythology — is a much-interpreted princess of yore whose romantic legend ennobles the tragic lot of the virtuous woman. Her colorful story and, more to the point, the telling of it among contemporary Indian and non-Indian audiences is the subject of Nina Paley's animated boogie woogie breakdown, her tribute to "the greatest break-up story ever told", produced independently by donation and loan (Paley admits to falling rather badly in debt) and made available online in 2008, generously sans copy protection. The film is in violation of certain arcane state and federal copyright laws due to the unlicensed use of vintage Jazz Age recordings and faces censure in the event of public exhibition. In the event of public exhibition the public's mind will be blown by the wreck of a Hindu circus train in Toontown, throbbing psychedelia spilled into one of Gilliam's more violent Python landscapes and Sita wiggling with all the pre-Code vavoom of Betty Boop — 30s surrealism on holiday aboard the Yellow Submarine — triple-narrated by quarrelsome silhouette puppets and a scratch pad proxy for Paley herself.


* dots not feathers

Gigantic

If you ever find yourself saying, "Whoa, that homeless guy over there looks just like Zach Galifianakis," brace yourself. Because it is Zach Galifianakis. And he's trying to kill you.



New York Times Magazine article.

Criss Cross + The Underneath

One must touch base with film noir from time to time, if one loves film at all. As a genre to embody the mythos of motion pictures it is second only to horror. Little holes made by a snub nose .38 in the spider hand of a dame bleed emulsion.

Criss Cross (1949) is a sufficiently nasty from-the-files crime brief badly smudged by an all-thumbs cast, but its semi-classic status is justified by a tautly Hitchcock third act and unexpectedly brutal finale. Burt Lancaster never was good for much in his beefcake heyday but I reserve a certain fondness due to his December portrayal of Doc 'Moonlight' Graham in Field of Dreams. Steven Soderbergh's 1995 remake is a bit of an oddity in the Soderbergh catalogue. Re-titled The Underneath, it might have fulfilled the languishing promise of the original screenplay had Soderbergh known at the time to segregate his arthouse doodling from the professionally tailored thrill. Instead the flick seems to be the mistake that taught him the lesson. The sin of pride. Where should be clockwork fatalism in bowing service to the gods of noir the direction sadly falters, fails to observe the rites, straying into a self-indulgent murk of convoluted chronology and stasis. Film noir is a high calling and unforgiving at that. In a way I'm actually relieved to discover that Steven is only human. (All hail the Coen brothers!)

Alison Elliott plays the femme fatale with a hardened set to her pretty face and a cold desolation in the eyes. Bad bad news, this girl. Not quite sociopathic but close enough for jazz. Those slightly puffy lower lids remind me of Peter Sarsgaard, who seems pleasant enough in interviews as he sips coffee and casually guts a cat. Taking over for Lancaster, the leading sap is portrayed by the preposterously soap opera puss of Peter Gallagher, famous son of Wooly Willy and Mrs Potato Head. His occasional willingness to be mocked and suffer misfortune onscreen helps take the edge off my need to work over that brow with a belt sander.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

I've been admiring lately George Clooney and his quicksilver talent for comedy manner. Having finally toured the Ocean's Eleven trilogy, and now reflecting upon O Brother and this latest heehaw outing, it strikes me that Clooney's rascal mug can sell cornball slick as salvation on Sunday, then lickety-split turn and deliver a devastating roll of the eyes to the next unlucky schmuck who tries to get cute. No matter the game — Gomer Pyle or Mr Cool — he always wins even when he's losing, like limp-wristed Dr Jones in a fistfight against a shirtless Nazi pile of meat, because he's already won you over. The old comparisons to Clark Gable and Cary Grant* are apt, ace in the hole being that Clooney actually possesses subtlety.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is best viewed in trailer form, I'm sad to report. Without the scent of a story, dog will not hunt. Ewan McGregor is miscast once again...the only time he's ever been convincing onscreen is when crawling shuddering out of a toilet. Okay, I also liked him as Grimes the self-loathing coffee grunt. Understand that McGregor cannot be sold on handsome Scottishness because fundamentally he is leering and gross.


* CG, CG, GC?

Gears of War 2

I kinda glossed over the gameplay experience of Resident Evil 5, busy as I was suggesting that one might have success opening a Klavern in Osaka (Just tell the Nips that Negroes flew the Enola Gay), but I'll remedy that right now with an illuminating side-by-side comparison to the gameplay experience of Gears of War 2:

Eh, they're pretty much the same. *punt*

Sugar (2008)

The World Series stands at 3 to 2 New York and we check in hoping to see the Yankees blow it. The Cubs and Wrigley Field have a new owner from Omaha because the Tribune has sold everything down to its last pint of desk drawer bourbon. This week is last call for baseball.

Here's one for the road. A Dominican kid has got an arm. He leaves his family for the farm system riding everyone's high hopes. Progressing from training camp in Arizona to Single A in Iowa nothing goes terribly wrong, but the kid's game begins to falter. He sees the system doing what it's supposed to do: weed out. He lies to his mother on the phone about how things are going. He spends time lost. Slowly he sights his passion anew, where always it had been.

Sugar is the second indie drama from newcomer Ryan Fleck to completely stun me. Fleck seems to have an instinctive understanding for the texture of places and the people to be found there, as he proves by putting an educated white crack addict into an all-black Brooklyn junior high and displacing a monolingual athlete from the DR to the urban southwest to a Christian youth group in the heartland to a Big Apple flophouse and making each of these scenarios feel completely authentic.

Where the Wild Things Are

I know where they are. I can draw you a map.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.

— Homage to the runic (obsolete?) vernacular of Cormac McCarthy

I quote the above out of desperation. This is me reduced to flinging rubber chickens. For almost a year now I've been keeping this blog, coaxing myself to become a better writer. I've learned that flippant is easy. Sincere is hard. So I challenge myself to be sincere when the material calls for it. But I'm not up to this task. Not yet.

McCarthy saps my will to attempt to cobble a respectable sentence e'er again. Dammit, Jim, I'm a scientist not a literaturologist! In the face of such isolate mastery of the English language I am unworthy to so much as fart the alphabet.
...
I love this novel. It is as bleak a vision of our condition as possible. An unnamed apocalypse has scorched and fouled the land, the sea, the air. World over. Cows and birds are extinct and the other animals too and nothing will grow again. No hope for long term survival. The story is a one-way journey into the despair of darkness, into a cave: In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them.

On the journey are a father and son, just a small boy. The story is of their perfect love for each other. The question stirred in me, on first reading, is what to make of their love, of their choice to continue to exist each only for the sake of the other, in a world that has nothing else to offer nor ever will.

McCarthy knows truths about the relation between fathers and sons that I'm not ready to face. About the passing of the torch. A day will come when I won't be able to pick up this book at all.

Mad Max makes the end of the world look like a helluva lotta fun. Boys love the postapocalypse because it's one wild rumpus, full of crossbows and mutants and your own sweet pair of greaves. But I've discovered an important distinction. We already knew that horror movies fall into two classes: the giddy fun-to-be-scared (bring a date) experience and, well, the kind where you just feel sick. The difference between them is hope, which comes from the characters' (and the audience's) empowerment. The Road is the first example of postapocalyptic fiction I've encountered that is no fun, no fun at all. Not when there's nothing left to fight (for). Nothing even left of the world to parse. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Dante wrote of no hell so terrible and true as this.


The Road as an American novel (it won the Pulitzer) participates in the tradition of the doomed survivalist; a tradition so basic to American lit that the short stories To Build a Fire, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Outcasts of Poker Flat are standard high school curriculum. These are grim tales...such fatalism is heritage in our Haunted Land.

[Recommended viewing: Grizzly Man. Film adaptation of The Road releases later this month.]

Peanuts 1960's Collection

There is exactly one place in the state of New Jersey that I love, and believe it or not it's to be found in miserable stinking Trenton. Wayfarers Erasmus and I struck dumbly upon this refuge while haphazardly in search of sustenance for body and soul, as is our idiom.

It was a winter to depress all winters. No frosty clarity or bearlike scoops of snow to twinkle the eye. Only the sucking winter murk of the Delaware river valley, laid down thin like the trail of a poisoned slug. (You know the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, with the crystalline floes of ice and heavenly shafts of light? Artistic license.) Where the trail crooks the scum is deposited, a natural debris catch upriver from nobler Philly. South Trenton between 206 and the crook forever sours under the bitter benediction of the Lower Free Bridge: TRENTON MAKES — THE WORLD TAKES. How to feel about a city whose most prominent public fixture just makes you sick to your stomach? We ventured into those neighborhoods blighted and forgotten, once factory housing, now not even worth turning into a ghetto. We were only a little hopeful, and only because Erasmus had spent less time there than I.

Hungarians and Germans had settled there once but were mostly gone. As a granitic record of their presence they left behind a runestone in the form of a restaurant called the Blue Danube. Coming in from the wet I could feel myself swell with warm oven air. We were cozied in by heavily stained woodwork, made back when trees were bigger. On the walls hung tin artifacts and oil paintings made back when the world was dimly lit and modest in color. The whole place strung up in multicolored little fuse capsule lights — the best kind. The magnificent bar like a snub-nosed tank, long enough for six stools maybe. A peaceful handful of regulars making the music of a few people quietly and comfortably gathered. The small TV set up in the corner was tuned into a network broadcast of It's a Wonderful Life. People were watching. Two squat matrons, probably sisters, served us on china with good thick forearms and the kind of stern cordiality that is so much more nourishing than false cheer. No kidding, they were watching It's a Wonderful Life.

The approaching season bares the truth of the world, the goodness and the sadness. We bundle up because our emotional armor falls away with the leaves. It snuck up on me a few days ago when I saw that the Peanuts television specials from the 60s have just been rereleased, with all due attention to quality. I thought about the scene where Royal takes Margot out for ice cream, to make amends, and the tender theme carol from A Charlie Brown Christmas plays. The Peanuts gang is there in Wes Anderson's gang, especially in the underdog sympathies, Chuck and Linus's oft-mocked sincerity, and the Lucy-ish notion of who gets to boss who around.

The dearest symbol of the season, for me, is Charlie Brown's scraggly little Christmas tree (Tannenbaum, in Deutsch) found amid gaudy aluminum commercialism. You may not remember just how often Charlie Brown laments that everyone has "gone commercial" — almost as often as he correctly identifies himself as "depressed" or the other kids cruelly call him "stupid". People suffer a similar amnesia with It's a Wonderful Life, forgetting how brutal it really is. (Capra and Stewart had just returned from the war.)

When I keep an apartment I like to get a little Charlie Brown tree for the holiday, for cheer. It must be got by trudging to the far corner of a tree farm with a bow saw.

If Peanuts contains another symbol as powerful (and even more universal) it is the unseen Little Red-Haired Girl, object of Charlie Brown's unrequited love. Inspired by Charles M. Schulz's own lost love, of course — the one who got away. From Schulz's biography, "I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone whom you love very much. A person who not only turns you down, but almost immediately will marry the victor. What a bitter blow that is."

The Girlfriend Experience + The Informant!

Soderbergh is synonymous with shenanigans. That's the key to understanding his famously bimodal career. Half of Soderbergh's films, the ones he's most widely known for — Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Oceanses, The Good German, The Informant! — are marquee pictures about capital capers; the wily little guy vs the slippery establishment in a lively game of shakedown, fraud and con.

The other half, the indie and art house pics that cost less than Danny Ocean's third-best suit — Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Full Frontal, Eros, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience — are actually cut from the same cloth. (As are those few mid-range art house pics, like Solaris and Che.) Collectively these lower-profile numbers represent Soderbergh's own personal shenanigans, each a prank of sorts on the audience or, better yet, the industry.

I can't help but feel like Steven really put one over when Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d'Or in 1989. After all, that's the movie that invented the James Spader Experience, which is a bit like getting slapped with a dick.

Since then Soderbergh has sub-specialized in unconventional and unmarketable formats (like the miniseries and short film collections) and used his A-list leverage to actively subvert industry standards for how films are produced and released. Bubble was shot like a film school weekend assignment and released simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and via HD cable broadcast. Studio exec: He can't do that! Can he do that? Next the guy saunters off to Spain and Mexico for three months with Benicio del Toro and sixty million dollars and comes back with a four-hour biopic of Che Guevara. Studio exec: What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Steven shrugs. (A limited art house release garnered back half the budget.)

Possibly Soderbergh's most audacious con was getting Schizopolis accepted into the Criterion Collection. Make no mistake: If you watch that movie, the joke is on you.

The Girlfriend Experience is a classic bait and switch. Come see dynamite porn star Sasha Grey in her first dramatic role — as an ultra-chic Manhattan call girl! Wowie wow. You horndogs won't be disappointed, as long as you get your rocks off watching a hooker's toadlike Wall Street clients blubber and moan into her tits over the housing market collapse.

Kudos, you bastard.

Tulpan

It is impossible to resist the opportunity to use the word yurt in a sentence. Even if the movie had stunk I'd still be excited to say something like, Never have I seen so much dung heaped about a yurt!

The Kazakh steppe looks to me rather like the Oklahoma panhandle, only more so. Flattened by the immensely azure sky is a spread of chalky canvas on which to sketch an existence. Asa, a would-be shepherd just back from the Russian navy, does exactly that: sketch on the pale side of his neckerchief a camel and a modest home and some guiding stars. His own dustblown paradise. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good yurt must be in want of a wife. Except Asa hasn't yet got a yurt, which makes two problems.

Dziga Vertov II. Man with a Movie Camera

FOR VIEWERS' ATTENTION:

THIS FILM PRESENTS AN EXPERIMENT
IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
OF VISIBLE EVENTS

WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES
(A FILM WITHOUT INTERTITLES)

WITHOUT THE AID OF A SCENARIO
(A FILM WITHOUT A SCENARIO)

WITHOUT THE AID OF A THEATER
(A FILM WITHOUT ACTORS, SETS, ETC.)

THIS EXPERIMENTAL WORK AIMS
AT CREATING A TRULY INTERNATIONAL
ABSOLUTE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA
BASED ON ITS TOTAL SEPARATION
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATER AND LITERATURE

An unexpectedly extraordinary motion picture. If you know me, beware: I am going to buy this movie and show it to you. If you are a music lover, don't wait for me to find you. Watch it yourself now.

You might wonder how the above titles, which open the 1929 film, could precede anything other than a pretentious bore. My most vigorous assurances to the contrary. What we have here, in modern terms, is a 68-minute music video constructed without any specific music or sound at all. Understand how incredible this is. Of course the movie would be shown with orchestral accompaniment, but performing a piece composed afterward as with all scored films. A music video, on the other hand, does not precede the song. Point being that you know a music video when you see one by the way, even muted, the editing and the motion of the images create an undeniable rhythm.

Try watching on mute the scene in Clockwork Orange wherein Alex listens to the Ninth in his bedroom, with the chorus line of Jesuses. It's a short music video — impossible to imagine cutting those images together as Kubrick did unless he were taking dictation from a song. But that's exactly what Vertov did: create a continuous music video for an entire symphony except there was no symphony. He dictated music with film, frame by frame, note by note. I'm trying to say it's a goddamn work of genius. A summer of blockbusters is not so thrilling.


Version I saw is the 2002 Image Entertainment DVD release. The featured score is an original composed by the Alloy Orchestra in 1995, based on Vertov's own notes and instructions, and by many accounts it is the most preferred. I was spellbound.

Dziga Vertov I. Kinoglaz

Much is owed to the revolutionary thrust of the early Soviets in general and Vertov in particular for separating the cinema from older art forms. In 1924 the Jewish-born native of Białystok, from his position as editor of the first newsreel series in Moscow, issued a proclamation on film theory by way of an experimental "Non-Fiction Film Thing" (we would call it a documentary, mostly staged). Put forth under the invented term Kinoglaz — literally Cinema Eye — was the statement of a progressive dogma for the right purposes of the film camera and the proper language of motion pictures.

Lars von Trier pulled a similar stunt with the Dogme 95 movement, to name a recent and equally assholish parallel. But we need our assholes and should get to know them. We learn the most by studying extremes.

Actually while viewing Kinoglaz and skimming some of Vertov's writings I was more frequently reminded of Scott McCloud's invaluable treatise on sequential art, Understanding Comics — not in terms of scope (McCloud is far more catholic in his views on the theory of comics) but in the passion and urgency of Vertov's appeal on behalf of his medium as a distinct, valuable and respectable form.

I probably shouldn't be making comparisons to McCloud. He seems like such a nice guy, and Vertov is a lunatic. (Apologies, Scott.) Consider the fork of departure between Vertov and his only more famous contemporary, Sergei Eisenstein. Both were instrumental in advancing the significance of editing as the grammar of the medium, and both adhered to the constructivist principle that the purpose of art was to serve a social (Marxist) agenda, but while Eisenstein felt there was a future for dramatic fiction in film Vertov was vehemently opposed. As he saw it man could evolve no further by continuing to study invisible aspects of life: the emotional and psychological underpinnings of dramatic fiction. These Vertov did crazily assert “prevent man from being as precise as a stopwatch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine.” Kinship with the machine...I wonder if Cronenberg is a fan.

For Vertov the eye of the camera bears witness to an absolute and total worldview that encompasses physical motion and visible change to the exclusion of all else. The machine does not think or feel; it moves and effects motion. And that is all that matters to the camera, to Vertov, to the synthesis of man's eye and the kinoglaz.

One sees the utility of this dogma to communist propaganda. Kinoglaz, the film, documents the activities of the Young Pioneers, a Leninist youth organization engaged in camp-making, river bathing, providing charity services, proselytizing and endless endless endless postering. They are busy little beavers. Make yourself useful and do something. Anyone who isn't in motion — the homeless, tubercular, mentally ill, addicted and indolent drunk — is an opportunity for someone else to give a helping hand.

Then Vertov puts the medium to work, using camera techniques like extreme angles and editing techniques like reverse and slow motion to distance the viewer from the emotional content of the images, forcing one instead to regard the fact of motion, the visible process of change. Two lengthy sequences depict a favorite subject: the production of goods, namely bread and beef. But shown entirely in reverse. So you get to watch a beef carcass be given back its viscera and have its skin skillfully reapplied by knife, then be unkilled in the stocks before it trods its way backward into a cattle car bound for the feedlot, etc. Same deal for a loaf of bread making its way back to a field of rye. At first I thought Vertov was just using the old gimmick to astound Russian peasants who'd never before seen moving pictures, but surely his intended audience was more sophisticated. Showing a process to be reversible makes it seem mechanical.

About the postering. In addition to the sheets pasted on every wall from Magadan to Minsk the film is jammed with poster-like intertitles. (I sometimes fool myself into thinking I can transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet, but really there's only like three characters I consistently remember.) This doesn't have anything to do with motion, and indeed Vertov would phase out intertitles from some of his later work, but it would seem to be in line with a constructivist notion of text as image, imparting the functionality of one to the other. Think of the bare lines and stark shapes of Kandinsky as approaching the quality of glyph, and vice versa. (McCloud's "picture plane" says it all.) However in the last reel Vertov makes the connection by juxtaposing intertitles with cartoon schematics for a crystal radio receiver and other electric devices — static diagrams/text to illustrate the machines/principles of Russia's future.

This is the kind of thinking that led to Skynet.


PS. Come for the agitprop, stay for the silhouette animation: a brief sequence of backlit stop motion 2D puppetry à la Lotte Reiniger.

Aelita, Queen of Mars

Soviet Moscow sobers up in the post-revolution dawn of 1921, unaware that the swim of bold resolution and wincing doubt is being glassed by the restless and fascinated Queen of Mars. From her remote palace, atop the "tower of radiant energy" where hangs a preposterous array of plate glass triangles we readily accept to be a fabulous telescope, the beautiful Aelita espies a moment of affection between our good comrade Los and wife Natasha, Muscovites joyously posed on a balcony high above the vibrant winter cityscape — See how the Earthlings touch lips!

Or so our good comrade imagines. As chief engineer at the city's radio station Los has lately grown obsessed over a mysterious, indecipherable signal. His more pragmatic colleagues snort when someone posits Martian origin...but what if? Could Aelita be pining for him?

Natasha meanwhile is about the people's business, devotedly working at a checkpoint station where valiant soldiers returning from the republics are processed and essential goods are fairly distributed to the local proletariat. Patriotic pastimes like performing amateur Marxist theater and painting brightly sloganed posters keep everyone mindful of the rewarding job at hand: Build the great communist state.

But all is not well in the godless motherland. The people are somewhat less prosperous than one might hope in the wake of world war and revolution and civil war, and certain members of the former bourgeoisie are apt to remember the good old days. As a temporary measure the party has instituted a New Economic Policy with certain (regrettable) capitalist features intended as a shot in the arm. The loyal are concerned that this ideological compromise could weaken the people's resolve, and rightly so: Those former fat cats are soon up to their old tricks.

A pair of grifters befriend Natasha and acquire some office at the checkpoint. Before long the people's goods become subject to creative accounting, luxury items like chocolate and wine unerringly find their way into fat hands, and what started for Natasha as seemingly innocent perks becomes entry into an underground high society. Admirably she comes to reject such criminal decadence, but not before Los gets the wrong idea: Their marriage strained by time apart while attending to separate spheres of civic duty, she taking new work in a public orphanage and he at the construction of a power plant, Los returns home at one inopportune moment to discover of Natasha's dallyings and in a fit of jealousy and moral outrage shoots his wife dead.

Because Russians love subplots several are required at this juncture to aid now-fugitive Los in getting his ass to Mars. Fortuitously one of Los's colleagues looks exactly like Los with a fake beard and eyeglasses, and double-fortuitously that fellow has recently vanished (courtesy of the nogoodnik grifters — irony!) allowing Los to assume his identity. Hounded by a ridiculous would-be detective (enter light comic relief) who has abandoned "the case of the missing sugar" for more notable quarry, Los undeterred proceeds to hire a crew to set about the clandestine construction of a missile. Among the men is a former soldier whose own marital bliss has been threatened by boredom for lack of war; a comrade must have work to do! The endeavor is a success and, after the workers are pointedly paid for their labor, we are treated to a thrilling liftoff and interplanetary voyage, complete with flaming toy rocket crashing splendidly by zipline into a tabletop mock-up of the red planet. Los et al merrily hop out.

Aelita has been waiting! Such wonders to behold in her kingdom. The prols wear milk crate helmets and the handmaidens erector set bloomers. Art design was not done by Wassily Kandinsky, but you could've fooled me. The Martian sets and costumes are considered exemplary of constructivism, a Soviet art movement contemporary to German expressionism and similar in the use of highly abstract and spare representations. Basically everything is cut and rolled from stiff plastic or aluminum sheeting, like arts and crafts for severe kindergartners. This served the people's common agenda, I'm told.

But wouldntyaknowit: The Martian laborers are being exploited by the hegemonical elite. Such is the prols' state of woeful alienation that when overpopulation begins to concern the moneyed Elders a novel solution is enacted by way of this priceless intertitle:

So, by the decree of the Elders one-third of the life force will be stored in refrigerators.

The meaning of "life force" in a Marxist parable should be clear; witness a queue of catatonic workers slid down ramps in a loading facility and unceremoniously rolled into heaps. Upon Los's arrival revolution must be less than a reel away. Aelita readily joins to the cause — happily it seems the Queen is merely a figurehead and not party to the oppressive authority exercised by those dastardly Elders! With her backing Los pronounces:

Follow our examples, Comrades! Unite into a family of workers in a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

They do, and the yoke is lifted. But what's this!? Of a sudden Aelita seizes control of the army, turning back the tide of the people and setting herself up as a true dictator over all Mars. Los bemoans that Aelita has betrayed the revolution, just as did Natasha!

He grapples Aelita/Natasha in a death embrace, and we realize that it was All A Dream. Los comes to in Moscow, rushing home to find his dear Natasha alive and well (he shot at her but missed, you see). Oh, and that mysterious radio signal? Turns out it was just a publicity stunt — a veiled advertisement for car tires. A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch! Issue the moral of the story: Get your head out of the clouds and keep your feet on the ground, Bastian.

I wonder how effective this message was in 1924, given that the fantastical adventures on Mars as depicted are really fun and cool. It's like what Truffaut said about the impossibility of making an anti-war war movie.

A final note on Aelita and Metropolis (1927). It would be instructive to teach these two films together, to better draw out subtle distinctions in the prevailing Weimar and Soviet theories on art, science and class struggle. Viewed through the Queen's lens the significance of Metropolis's famous epigram is clearer.

Adventureland

This is a really good movie, which is problematic because I want to encourage you to see it, but yet I must grumble about the unavoidable fact that it's a boy meets girl story and well handled though it is I just don't really care about boy meets girl stories anymore. Everything else about the movie is great, so please weight my grumble accordingly.

Adventureland's best elements bear comparison to Clerks as a chronicle of the overeducated and underskilled unexpectedly employed among a wage class they hadn't imagined when writing senior theses on Gogol. Gradually the ringing shellshock of postgraduate ambitions gone awry fades into the tinny repeat of corporate-approved PA music and a lungful of fried dough aerosol alerts you to the choking sensation that someone is taking in the slack on the parental tether.


In other totally unrelated news, I'm tired of watching all these popular movies. Time to crack open some Soviet art house pics.
...
I was in Chipotle the other day and they played Waitress in the Sky by the Replacements. I heard the intro and I was like, Whoa, this sounds just like the Replacements instead of whatever shitty band it's probably going to turn out to be...it sure would be great if I wasn't the only person I know who loves the 'Mats. But then it was the 'Mats! But no one else in the restaurant looked as excited as me. So anyway, listen to more 80s college rock. The Adventureland soundtrack has some prime cuts from the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and power pop influences Nick Lowe, Big Star.

Whip It

If I were Drew Barrymore this is definitely the movie I would have made. It's good news for movie fans when an established actor turns director because actors love actors. They tend to cast by way of fan service, peopling and overpeopling their feature like the cover of Sgt Pepper.

For instance, as a former child star of the 80s I would definitely grant the role of the likable pop, an unspoken honor, to Daniel "voice of the Wonder Years" Stern. Remember that time on the Simpsons when Bart had a Wonder Years voiceover moment?

[To earn money for his comic book, Marge suggests that Bart get a job.]
BART: Me!?
VOICEOVER: Get a job? Were they serious? I didn't realize it at the time, but a little bit of my childhood had slipped away...forever.
HOMER: Bart! What are you staring at?
BART: Uh...nothing.
VOICEOVER: He didn't say it and neither did I, but at that moment, my dad and I were closer than we ever —
HOMER: Bart! Stop that!
BART: Sorry!

I wish Daniel Stern were narrating my life.

Since the flick is about Austin and Austin roller derby you've got to have an authentic local representative. Cue fully bearded Andrew Wilson, aka Future Man, the forgotten Wilson brother, as team coach. I honestly didn't recognize him till the end, having never expected to see the big lug outside of a Wes Anderson movie. Next thing you know Rob Zombie is gonna hire Pagoda.

On loan from Tarantino is that playful Kiwi stuntwoman — a no-brainer. But the most truly irrefutable choice is Juliette Lewis as the badass queen bitch of the derby. (I'm suddenly struck by the realization that in the past week I've seen both Mickey and Mallory kicking fresh butt.) Jammed as this movie is with cameo characters, a familiar assignment for Barrymore, she finds a personal moment for many of them and the cross-generation confrontation behind the rink between Lewis and Ellen Page is the best.

Naturally Barrymore takes upon herself the greatest risk of looking foolish by playing the team's unabashedly physical space cadet. (She jokes at one point about making little Ellen the team mascot, but really it's Drew who acts as mascot for her own movie.) This leaves the leadership slot open to SNL's Kristen Wiig, who deservedly adds a semi-dramatic breakthrough part to her resume of consistently spot-on comedy.

With all sincerity: Jimmy Fallon's finest hour.

The only lifeless corner of the movie, oddly enough, is our dear Junebug; Page's character feels underwritten as if taken for granted. Best friend Alia Shawkat upstages her in wryness and spunk in every scene — Maeby knows how to quickly carve out a sharp supporting role among bigger players. Page meanwhile seems to be waiting for the heavy drama to fall on center stage.

Barrymore knows how to throw a crazy party (she ought to), which is what Whip It amounts to even despite the fact that Page shows up without her dancing shoes. It's a damn fun time. As a director her feelgood sensibilities are impeccable and we should be so lucky as to have Ms Barrymore lift up and bear forward the torn denim standard of Riff Randell.

Murder City Devils at Riot Fest

They played hard. Familiar as I am with the Devils' swan song live album and its shambolic roar — the death throes of a great sad beast — I was unprepared for the focused assault of last night's reunion performance. Taking the stage the four boys on guitar and vox made a line with their backs to the audience, as if for a moment of silent invocation. The show ripped open with the challenge-as-creed Get Off The Floor (If you're not going to dance what the fuck did you come here for?) and slammed shut with Murder City Riot. It was professional. Eight years to the month since the Devils folded (at the height of their power at the end of their rope) and the raw anguish of songs written by kids has worn into well-seasoned pain. Clint Eastwood is tougher now than in his poncho days.

Spencer himself is leaner and steadier, even having secured his storm-tossed sea captain beard into a more wolfish projection. He seems to have found a measure of grace. Still he howls I heard or read the only love is lost love, but with a new preface: "I've never been so wrong."

The Devils' ode to Johnny Thunders benefited most from a live interpretation, with its tyrannosaur bass line brought to the fore and Spencer's revealing point of clarification: "It wasn't New Orleans that killed Johnny. Johnny did it to himself. He was a FOOL." The song has become a cornerstone of the Devils' message to the kids (as I see it), along with Bear Away and Bride of the Elephant Man: Struggle and empathize with the struggles of others / Use that empathy to find a way not to destroy yourself but to somehow carry on.

The unequivocal hero of MCD is Iggy Pop of the Stooges. Many people are said to have "saved rock and roll" at one time or another...Spencer told it this way: Iggy found the very lowest form of art and reveled in its utterly indefensible quality; likened to the first caveman artist to paint not a handsome buffalo but an inarticulate scribble in shit. (Relatively sober throughout the night, here the old Spencer fumbled a bit for words. Appropriately enough.) In the same breath Mr Moody identified Kenneth Anger as a parallel figure in American underground film. I'm not yet conversant with Anger's work, but now I think I've put it off long enough. I like the sound of you rolling, rolling in that broken glass.

Part of me wanted to stand back from the pit to take in the full view, to catch every nuance of the Devils' on-stage dynamic and relish the response of the crowd as a whole. I might never get to see them again. But that is the instinct of a tourist, of a person busy fossilizing memories behind a camera. I don't have any photos of the show, and already the sounds are fading away, but I know I was there and I danced.

Zombieland

Does not suck!


Well, that's it for Zombie Week (duration obviously negotiable). Until next time, remember: Aim for the head!

Resident Evil 5

Game is set in Africa and all the zombies are, logically enough, black. I'd prefer to believe that this is a reasonable design choice at a time of post-political correctness. Yet it can't be helped that the zombified residents of an African village look and behave pretty much exactly like the extras from Birth of a Nation. So after pointing my shotgun into the face of the one hundredth consecutive jiga boo the little twinges of transgression start to add up.

The really unfortunate thing is that the designers have done nothing to counter possible accusations of latent racism. The characters with speaking roles are all white, save one minor soldier who is clearly African-American. Your female partner, Sheva, is supposedly African but evidently of a more Mediterranean stock than the local sub-Saharan natives. There are no non-zombie locals. No children either (save one menaced white girl) or other humanizing suggestions of culture.

In a series that has also been criticized for its condescending attitude toward gender roles (see article, which applauds the "female gendered space" of Super Metroid) Capcom is not doing itself any favors by pleading ignorance with respect to racial sensitivities.

As usual the Japanese have stolen an American cultural item and gotten it all wrong. (Where did they get their ideas about Brooklyn plumbers?) Typically the results are more amusing. I object to the zombie being used in this way, contrary to its nobler purpose.

World War Z + The Zombie Survival Guide

Of the classic Universal Monsters five are associated with a respected work of literature (Drac, Frank, Hunch, Phantom, Invisible Man) and three were cooked up by harried screenwriters on assignment (Mummy, Wolf Man, Gill-man). The latter trio, as we know them today, are original creations of the cinema.

Not that they are without some important literary precedents. The creature from the black lagoon was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, the werewolf is an archetype owed to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and as for the mummy, well...there is Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, which is the basis for several scarifying Hammer ventures of the 70s, but it's doubtful whether the creators of the 1932 Boris Karloff stiff were familiar with the novel. Instead, the international press is largely responsible for the notion of the mummy as monster, having invented a "curse of the pharaohs" to drum up Egyptomania following the 1922 discovery of King Tut; such hoopla proved enough to pad out a hasty script.

The modern zombie is also an original spawn of the silver screen. I have mentioned that the zombie epidemic has progenitors in 50s sci-fi lit, which makes for a fine pedigree if you're willing to connect the two, but as far as most genteel folk are concerned (with reason) Zed has staggered through his forty years of life an unlettered wretch. After all, who wants to read about giving a ghoul the ol' claw hammer-to-the-forehead when you can watch it or play it? Try out this excerpt from my unpublished zombie novel: And then he killed one with a rake, and then he killed one with this old Tandy 1000 monitor, and then his girlfriend got bit so he had to stab her with an apple corer, and then he killed like three at once... It goes on, but I'm afraid there's not much in the way of romance or nuance for you lovers of vampire fiction (you might prefer my unpublished piece of Twilight fan fiction). I guess when you take away the visual splendor of the rancid neck wound a zombie does not make a very compelling character. The most "sophisticated" usage of Zed in the movies is as dummy target for satire, but even then the lurid humor tends to rely on sight gags, and the stories have always been limited to one very restrictive premise.

George Romero did the zombie a great service by creating the genre with a vein of social commentary, but also a great disservice by establishing the almost unbroken tradition of the zombie story as the story of a small band of survivors isolated from broader events. It is a perfect formula as far as low-budget horror filmmaking is concerned; by design it avoids the complex and far-reaching social, political and economic implications that a widespread plague of living death would have on the present-day global community. That is, every zombie movie avoids the most interesting implications of its subject because it is a really hard problem to figure out, and one not at all suitable for treatment on film. Someone was going to have to be brave enough to write the definitive literary treatment of the zombie epidemic, and it would necessarily be a work not of horror so much as social science fiction.

That person turned out to be the son of the guy who gave us Frankenstein's monster in tails singing Puttin' on the Ritz. If your dad spent every night at the dinner table humping himself and butchering show tunes I suppose, yes, you'd give a great deal of thought to the end of human civilization. In 2003 Max Brooks published a utilitarian-looking field handbook entitled The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From The Living Dead. The cover is adorned by an understated coat-of-arms: crossed machete and M1 carbine. Contents are direct, matter-of-fact and thorough in dispelling common myths about zombies and zombie attacks, detailing the pathology of the virus that causes zombification and the physical attributes of the infected, outlining proven tactics for defense and combat against the four classes of zombie outbreak, listing suggested weaponry and gear for individuals and groups, and instructing where and how to attempt to rebuild civilization from scratch in the event of Class 4. Included as a lengthy appendix is a record of all known or alleged zombie outbreaks in human history, summarizing archaeological evidence from every inhabited continent dating back as far as 60,000 BC and written accounts from the time of the Punic Wars to a series of documented incidents in Los Angeles in 1993 and 1994.

A strain of well-educated madness was required for the compiling of such a meticulously fabricated and utterly convincing document. For Brooks it was merely a warm-up. In 2006 we learned the true depths of his (it must be said) genius. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War should be commonly referred to as "Max Brooks' World War Z", the way we now say "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein". The Gothic flavor of those novels could not be more different from the sober journalism of WWZ, despite the structural similarities between the epistolary novel and Brooks' collection of transcribed and annotated interviews, which highlights once again my assertion that the zombie is the product of a more modern era of disenchantment and all-too-real postwar horrors (of which the television and internet media make us painfully aware, every day) that eclipse credulous Christian frettings about spooks and devils.

The book is modeled after Studs Terkel's oral history of World War II, The Good War; a collection of accounts of survivors from around the world and all walks of life that, taken together, relate the events of twenty-some years that span the initial outbreak in central China in the spring of 2011, the total collapse of global order by the autumn of 2012, the decade-long campaign waged by the re-marshaled US Army to reconquer North America from two hundred million zombies, and a further decade of rebuilding and reckoning in a shattered post-apocalypse. The Zombie Survival Guide appears as an in-world prewar publication, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Brooks covers the foresight and readiness of Israel (allow some author bias), the ironic boon of the institutions of apartheid in South Africa, the reversal of economic fortunes between Cuba and the US with the flow of white-collar refugees into the well-defended island and Castro's expedient embrace of capitalism, the evacuation of slow-to-respond Japan to frigid Kamchatka (zombies freeze solid in subzero conditions), the mysterious disappearance of the entire population of North Korea, the nuclear saber-rattling between Pakistan and India brought to a head (but not how you expect), the observation of global ecologic catastrophe by the stranded crew of the International Space Station, the deluge of refugees from the world's two most populous countries up onto the defensible Tibetan plateau (humanitarian crisis is too polite a phrase), the resurgence of the democratic Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan, the religious revival and restoration of a theocratic tsar in Russia, the reoccupation and siege of Europe's castles, the specter of German guilt in the face of mass death policy-making, the lunatic resolve of the French to reclaim Parisian sewers, the plausible appearance of a Waterworld of flotilla nations and the total autonomy and might of sovereign nuclear submarines. That's not even half the ideas sketched in this volume of bewildering creativity. I finished reading the book six months ago and still I don't have the stamina to try to fully convey its scope.

Let me reiterate that each of these events is conveyed by a different person's oral account of his or her personal story of survival, so rather than reading like a think tank's report on a hypothetical scenario every section is invested with deep and universal human drama. As comedy and tragedy go hand-in-hand, and as Brooks is inescapably his father's son, he does not leave us without the occasional moment of sublime levity, such as when Paris Hilton's latest reality show — Totally Zombie-Proof Celeb Party Compound in the Hamptons! — fails to live up to its name.

Max Brooks' World War Z reads like a symphony of commentary — a hundred individually humble voices, simple observations, many commonplace and a few profound, that when played in the context of one another gather into an immense and haunting emotional force. The book's most powerful passage reflects this analogy; talk to me after you've read it.


A Major Motion Picture is in the works... Well, if Watchmen turned out OK contrary to all my doomsaying, then just maybe there is hope for the cinema's first zombie epic.

[REC] + Quarantine

The zombie is ground zero for low budget horror filmmaking. It is the most democratic of monsters, the movie equivalent of punk rock. Anyone can learn two chords and add food coloring to Karo syrup and recruit some neighbors (everyone, absolutely everyone, wants to play a zombie) and make a decent dead pic. You don't even need a script! A zombie uprising writes itself.

Zed is therefore a natural ally of the populist (or faux populist, since the big-budget Cloverfield) microgenre pioneered by The Blair Witch Project — a movie that continues to grow in stature with hindsight. We now know that the Blair Witch crew were exactly eight years ahead of their time. Not until 2007, when every schlump on the street was toting a digital video widget, did the handheld docu-horror flick finally catch on. Three such innovators premiered that autumn, two of them thick with zombies. The third was Paranormal Activity.

That season also saw the release of Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii. What delight to discover that revolutionary gameplay had come not from a rogue upstart, as you might expect, but from the most venerable franchise in platformers! It's nice to have your trust reaffirmed. Likewise one of the aforementioned zombie docs was Diary of the Dead, the fifth volume in George Romero's flagship Dead series, a forty-year-old franchise still under original management and still breaking new ground.

The other undead innovator, however, was a rogue upstart. From Spain, of all places. I know Spain has produced a few high profile horror movies recently (The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth from Guillermo del Toro, and The Orphanage from some other hombre) but the country doesn't really have a well-identified horror tradition like, say, Italy. But all people of all nations are welcome to participate in the ongoing zombie apocalypse. So anyway, the title of this película de terror is [REC] — more of a glyph, really — as in "recording", as if to scream avant-garde. The almost-real-time running documentary approach is kind of novel, but the only truly mind-blowing aspect of this otherwise standard outbreak story is the rapid response time of law enforcement and public health officials: someone calls the cops when this old lady goes berserk in her apartment, and within like ten minutes the city has quarantined the building with a SWAT team and biohazard gear. This is absolutely unprecedented foresight on the part of municipal authorities in dealing with the sudden appearance of the living dead. Evidently the Spanish have much greater faith in the competence of their public servants.

An American remake was released one year later (again, rapid response time!), more sensibly titled Quarantine. I find myself recommending both versions. The Spanish original is better cast, with more naturalistic-looking actors; the American actors look like typecast character actors, which is what they are, spoiling the realism. But sometimes technical chops make all the difference. The higher-budgeted Quarantine is tighter, faster, more intense, with convincing gore and more brutal kills. Basically what you expect from the good ol' USA.

Dead Space + Left 4 Dead

[This week is Zombie Week. In anticipation of the theatrical release of Zombieland, which may or may not suck, several zombie-related articles forthcoming.]


The compass of the zombie is full of anger. The fundamental appeal is the idea of beating your neighbor to death with a club. That bastard had it coming, you see, because he's a stupid drone like all the others, shambling to the omnipresent tune of banality and injustice. You either fight or shuffle in step. Probably they'll overwhelm your resistance in the end.

Vampires aren't nearly so angry; petulant maybe. Disdainful. More often than not glamorously depressed: the inward obsessions of narcissism. The old superstition that vampires have no reflection is ironic, because in every depiction they only see themselves. The fascination with bloodsuckers is world-fleeing; the urge to slip away into a morphine bliss and leave a pretty corpse. Braineaters are the grim meat hook reality you face every day. The two monsters provide opposite forms of catharsis. I suppose we need them both.

But this is Zombie Week, dammit. Those dead-eyed fuckers are clawing at the door and you've got a twisted ankle, one shotgun shell and a garden hoe. Let's rock.

Suffering from extreme undeadicide withdrawal months after shelving my beloved copy of Dead Rising (best.zombie.game.ever), and forlorn in the knowledge that Dead Rising 2 is much too far away, like a health kit at the opposite end of a zombie-clogged mini mall, I hit the dealer for a quick fix.

The choice was between Dead Space, a sci-fi survival horror shooter set aboard a derelict spaceship infested by alien bugshit affixed to human hosts, and Left 4 Dead, a slick multiplayer shooter featuring the classic scenario: band of survivors versus wave after wave of hungry zedheads. The thing is, I do most of my killing solo — a partner is just a ghoul waiting to happen. I went with Dead Space.

It was the right choice. The zombie experience lives or dies by aesthetics; bone must crunch with a satisfying sound and blood must splatter with a certain joie de vivre. Atmosphere and tone must be sadistically controlled to instill paranoia and bring you regularly to the desperate blind-firing-your-last-five-pistol-rounds edge of panic. Dead Space succeeds inasmuch as it faithfully copies every page from the playbook of Doom 3, a stain-yourself terrifying game. The Alien-inspired art design is gorgeous to behold, especially during the soundless sequences on the airless ship exterior in view of drifting debris spotlit by a cold white star, as a tentacled fetus latches on to your head.

The game's primary selling point, emphasis on methodically dismembering your foes limb by mutated limb, is wicked fun*, at least until you acquire bigger guns that render precision shooting unnecessary and thereby undermine the mechanic. A major disappointment were the zero-g sequences; the prospect of floating around under attack from all 4π steradians had been a huge draw for me, but the actual implementation has your feet firmly planted on a stationary surface at all times. This is a missed opportunity: imagine in a dire situation wherein ammo is already scarce, and you've no jet pack, having to squander precious rounds to propel yourself through space, and hence every time you fire at an enemy push yourself off course. That'd be sweet.

Truth is I'm not going to finish the game. Despite initial immersion the gameplay stagnates by the halfway point with repetitive go-here-and-push-a-button missions and no compelling characters or storyline. Still, it was more enjoyable than the few minutes I recently had playing Left 4 Dead. The high-end shooter engines it uses is just too smooth for a horror game; you move and aim with unnatural fluidity, as if massless. The action is too bombastic and the environments under-designed. It's a shame, really. So few understand the art of the zombie.


* Expression not used in the Boston manner.

Paranormal Activity

Would the Exorcist be as scary without the slime chucking and creative chiropractic? No, of course not. That stuff is freaky. But we all know the Exorcist was a one shot deal; it opened and closed the book on exorcism fu. Those crass tactics would never be truly effective again (especially now with CGI, which, if you are aware of it, is always just a tad more frightening than Svengoolie) because there's just no way to top what Friedkin did. One word: crucifucking — a moment so upsetting that it's rarely even mentioned, as if people are in denial of what they saw.

The Exorcist is the most Catholic movie ever made, the culmination of centuries of fanciful gothic scaremongering. By the same token the movie represents the death of the Roman Catholic Church, its last battle with the forces of darkness, its last moment of dignity after giving up all pretense of authority in Vatican II. Father Karras and Pazuzu both go down together. I've stood at the base of that precipitous staircase in Georgetown and do you know what I felt? Nothing. The old ghosts are gone.

Since then the demonic possession beat has been little trodden by any creations original and scary. The Evil Dead series was the most important thing to happen to horror between Halloween and the Blair Witch, but the only genuine fright it provides is the thought of Sam Raimi's ex-girlfriends. *shudder* In a way Evil Dead so thoroughly lampooned the concept of the Exorcist that it became impossible to treat seriously. As recently as this summer Raimi was still rattling the chestnut for yuks with Drag Me To Hell. But then it turns out that, two years ago, someone found a way to resurrect the kin of Pazuzu.

A no-budget independent movie called Paranormal Activity, shot as cinéma vérité with a single handheld camera, premiered at a horror film festival in 2007 and since then has been searching for a nationwide distributor. A one-night-only midnight screening was held at the Music Box on Thursday for a super-capacity crowd. A great night at the movies. Don't watch the trailer — in trying to draw an audience it errs by over-revealing. If and when this thing gets a DVD or wide theatrical release it should be seen and seen cold.

The film terrorizes in the vein of recent fare like Blair Witch, Open Water and The Descent: by exploiting the visceral fear of powerlessness. It's fun to be scared when you have a way of fighting back against the monsters and a chance of survival...not so fun when you are helpless, hopelessly lost and doomed. The makers of Paranormal Activity had an insight: Keep the demon, lose the priest. Now you're fucked. This experience, something like the drowning of your heart, is amplified by the implication that you are watching "found footage". What's even worse is that often you are watching stationary tripod footage of the characters being terrorized while they sleep. And there's nothing you can do.

Korea VI. Chan-wook Park

Violence as art in the movies is conventionally dated to the blizzard of bullets of '69: Sam "Sonofabitch" Peckinpah elevated the gunfight to ballet in two sequences that bookend The Wild Bunch, introducing the slow motion death pirouette that, now, it's impossible to imagine the action movie without. This innovation was assisted by the brutal onscreen demise of Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier — the cultural impact can be felt in this passage from Roger Ebert's original 1967 review:

When people are shot in "Bonnie and Clyde" they are literally blown to bits. Perhaps that seems shocking. But perhaps at this time, it is useful to be reminded that bullets really do tear skin and bone, and that they don't make nice round little holes like the Swiss cheese effect in Fearless Fosdick.*

Personally I think it's cute to imagine young Roger, in his first year as a professional film critic, positioning himself on the vanguard of the American new wave and hyping the modernity of its attitude toward violence. (Verily, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are shot many times, but they are not by any stretch "literally blown to bits".)

If one wishes to look further back into the art of the kill (Yes, please!) it is apropos to mention one of the most enduring images of violence in all of cinema: the face and shattered glasses of a nurse on the Odessa Steps, shot through the eye. This image from Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin (1925) has become a meme, perpetuated I assume by Film 101 at every institution of higher learning; once you know it I promise you will see it quoted in a new movie or show at least once a year (spot the reference in 9 at a theater near you). The most famous homage occurs in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, wherein the grand staircase in Chicago's Union Station doubles for the Odessa Steps.

De Palma himself has been much talked about recently in the wake of Inglourious Basterds and its nod to Carrie's inferno, with Tarantino citing De Palma as a primary influence and the first of the fanboy filmmakers (see also John Landis). De Palma more than anyone is responsible for making operatic violence fun. It had been developed as art in the 70s when Hollywood was all serious and shit, but Scarface in '83 succeeded in transmuting The Wild Bunch into popcorn. John Woo based his career on this new alchemy: Hard Boiled (1992) is the last reel of The Wild Bunch miraculously sustained for two hours of improbable cool, and it set the trend for gun fu in the 90s. Reservoir Dogs was released that same year, and while its importance is primarily for dialogue, the use of a certain Dylanesque, pop, bubble-gum favorite from April of 1974 during an otherwise routine mutilation cum immolation scene cemented a popular taste for violence as absurdity, surreality.

The baton was passed at Cannes in 2004 when Tarantino personally stumped for Chan-wook Park's artfully bloody entry, Oldboy. Park had toppled Shiri from the balcony of the Korean box office with Joint Security Area in 2000, which might have been a standard military-political drama along the lines of A Few Good Men if not for Park's uncommon ability to take the sketch of a simple story — like a procedural or, the simplest of all, a revenge — and trace over it with sharp lines of beauty and pain. He traces in blood, buckets of it all told, but every ounce dispensed with clinical precision and discrimination. So you feel it.

Joint Security Area, in exploiting the thrill of intrigue in the DMZ, is somewhat creatively constrained by the delicacy of the political situation and Park's adherence to rhetoric about the hope for reunification (especially evident in light of his subsequent emergence as an auteur), but its financial success enabled him to commence a series of thematically linked projects, now codified as the Vengeance Trilogy, that established Park as Korea's best director of popular films and the most internationally famous. (Ki-duk Kim is Korea's best arthouse director; Ebert recently appointed Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring to his Great Movies list.)

The trilogy consists of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, although one should also include in this series Cut, the short film Park contributed to "Three... Extremes", a collection of East Asian horror. This inclusion with horror films should give you the flavor of Park's recipe for a dish best served cold. He sees in our nature a weakness for the belief that we can get what we want by bargaining in flesh. We are shown a recurrent series of kidnappings and hostage-takings that provoke more of the same; a cycle of transactions conducted in persons whole and in part, involving as well the literal exchange of organs, digits and the odd tongue. Invariably Park finds that neither satisfaction nor redemption can be achieved in such a market; once horrible deeds are done, they stay done.

Park has now made a vampire movie, called Thirst, to be released on DVD in November. This makes perfect sense. (I can't believe I'm looking forward to another bloodsucker.)



* It is probably necessary to explain that Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Dick Tracy that appeared as a comic strip-within-a-strip in Li'l Abner (which probably requires its own footnote, but I'll leave it up to you). He was frequently riddled by bullet holes, to mild effect. Everyone knew this in 1967.

Korea V. So Yong Kim

I walked into the Gene Siskel Film Center one day and a Korean movie was playing so I saw it. It was called Treeless Mountain and it put me into the indie doze: that guiltily inattentive state of semi-consciousness that occurs when viewing an indie film that possesses artistic merit but you kinda don't really care. You are certain that the subject matter is very meaningful to a very narrow demographic to which you have no relation whatsoever. Also, you feel there has been excessive use of the close-up.

In her first two films, In Between Days and Treeless Mountain, director So Yong Kim has made a significant contribution to the world's supply of close-up footage of kindergarten and teenage Korean girls. I hope that she has received awards from the appropriate liberal-minded associations and funds. Meanwhile I shall quietly sneak out to go watch Raising Arizona.