Dawn of the Dinkins: RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2013), BLANK CITY (2010)

I came late to the party in Manhattan, but in 1992, moving in gradually via couch osmosis, it was still, at least, a party. The white boy funk thing was big -- Spin Doctors, Blues Traveller --my band, the Mud, 2 Skinny Js.... we danced like maniacs at Wetlands, New Music Cafe, Tramp's, Nightingale's-- most now long closed or sold, rebranded. But back then there was no 'cabaret law' (it's still illegal to dance in NYC). Back then you could drink on the street (if you wrapped it in a brown paper bag - known as the "bag law") And you could smoke. It's all gone...  but at least in the early 90s the party was still raging. Disney hadn't commandeered the porn marquess of Times Square. You could still see hookers--gay and straight--loafing out on the dirty boulevard. 

You maybe read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker for letting all our lovely sleaze disappear. I predicted (or rather hoped for) a time when the city might be sleazy and crime-ridden once more, to allow cheap rents and flourishing arts.

Man, was I wrong. NYC will never slide again or rage again, There's too much $$ invested in its real estate for the 1% to let the rents drop. No one is taking the accursed city down into the artistic abyss anymore, not without a grant, (you know, to cover the insurance).

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

Brit filmmaker Ashley Cahill feels as I do about NYC. He too remembers the brown bags and dancing wherever the fuck days of old- and he's done something about it. And that something is serial murder. Looking like some weird cross between Seth Meyers and Beck, Cahill puts himself in the center a fauxcumentary where he kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping art-blooming crime wave. 

God (or rather godlessness) bless his tousled little head. He's doing this for you, for me, for US, for posterity.

The film's had more than a few titles before settling on RANDOM ACTS. It was CHARM, for example, which is moronically vague, but on Netflix Streaming, with one of those ubiquitous torture porn-looking covers, it has finally landed before me as RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE. I don't know how it made it past my usual ignoring of such things (for I dread torture porn as it leaves me dispirited for years, even decades). But I am glad I did. 

If you share my mistrust of all the nanny state health that NYC is touting these days, this is your movie!

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Godard and Truffaut T-shirts

scenebomber

It's one of those first-person meta-documentary violence deconstructions ala MAN BITES DOG, with Cahill as a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself, since both he and his character are Godard-hip and so able to use the low budget and stolen shot approach as contextual meta-commentary beyond just the subject (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller!). And though he never says so outright, he clearly shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to have Winona Ryder feel remorseful and turn on Slater in HEATHERS, or to only put her disappointing dates into comas they can one day recover from (in SEX AND DEATH 101 -see "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise?), or to have Dexter only kill other serial killers, or Edward the TWILIGHT vampire be a 'vegetarian.'

In other words, so many films or shows that want to be naughty are afraid to get all Alex and his Droogs-level challenging to our limits of audience identification. They want to be Scorsese but are afraid of telling Tommy DeVito to get his shine box. Not our boy Ashley. Once he does his first random stabbing in RANDOM, man, you know this Tommy be shine box splintered. Cahill is no kibbitzer!

After a lengthy opening monologue, Malcolm stops addressing the camera on the greatness of pre-Giuliani NYC (when it beat out Detroit as "the murder capital of the world"), and we're off the known grid of the normal disaffected poseur: Someone answers an anonymous door he's been knocking on, and we're expecting some kind of standard pre-arranged greeting scene (wherein a camera is already inside waiting for him as per so many reality shows). Instead, he grabs the unlucky inhabitant, throws her onto her couch and stabs her repeatedly and rapidly, without any drama or Bernard Hermann scissor music to let us prep for the discomfort and shock. He's suddenly moved faster than the cameraman and become a real threat. We're just not expecting it and its genuinely shocking - way beyond the usual tacky violence of Hollywood. Even though we know it's not 'real' per se, it's hard not to shiver, almost painfully. So many fauxquementaries have tried to get to this same spot, only to pull back like little pussies. Cahill dives in, and ignores our ashen complexions.


Your reaction will probably be centered around your own neighborhood: if you live in the suburbs, even our contemporary Disney-sanitized NYC might seem scary just for being unknown, but to me the suburbs are far scarier. When I'm visiting friends there, I'm awake all night, freaking out over the quietude and feeling of vulnerability. There's usually at least three doors and dozens of ground floor single pane windows that even a child could break into, so how can I fall asleep? Don't they have bars on windows and deadbolts? And it's so dead quiet after, say, midnight. Not a creature is stirring. Like Roderick Usher one better, I can hear the mice in the neighbor's walls. In NYC we have deadbolts on thick metal doors, and only one possible entry window (the one above the fire escape) and neighbors on every side who can hear any cry for help. But if your buzzer goes off or there's a knock on the door while you're watching RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE, I imagine it could be quite scary. And when Malcolm garrotes a guy for texting in what looks like the Anthology Film Archives' downstairs screening room it's fun to imagine seeing the film there and realizing you forgot your turn your phone off, afraid to even move to find it in your bag lest this guy be sitting behind you.

So even if --or because--it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave. And if he eventually turns on his own crew, and finally even his own French girlfriend, well that's to be expected. What's not expected is the deader-than-deadpan approach that never trivializes the violence Malcolm commits while never judging it either, so we end up in a very unique zone that's the opposite of HEATHERS' hypocritical inference that we're all so impressionable we need a pretty girl's buzzkill morals to remind us killing our high school enemies isn't "cool."

That's Jamie Frey (of the Brooklyn What?) at left-a buddy of mine who showed up in a random
RANDOM tracking shot, a comforting indication that the raw edge of NYC ain't totally dead

But even if our sense of identification is pushed to HENRY,  CLOCKWORK or RICHARD III extremes, we trust Cahill because he is so openly homicidal he shatters our conception of safety, of distance from the screen, in ways we rarely see; he evinces a thorough knowledge of the movies. The phrasing he incorporates into his speech conveys among other things a deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("You gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS. And I applaud how much this approach ties into true film fans' collective rejection of banal reality and his Don Quixote-esque quest to exhume the twitchy corpse of New York's grimy past. Like all great quests it's doomed to backfire, but then again NYC hasn't ever been the same, not ever. Even one day to the next, it's never the same. It's like a mutating geographical variation of THE THING. Any chance to shape its mutant growth to our liking has long since gone before we even got there. Yer we already did shape it, sometime or other, and never for the better or the worse.. Always, always both.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to, specifically NYC's underground 70s film scene. It's full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8mm and 16mm clips of the artsy downtown druggie enclaves centered around CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, Tompkins Square Park (when it was a homeless encampment) and the Alphabet City shooting galleries. The age of Youtube, Final Cut, and digital video put an end to the uniqueness of the scene. But I too remember how we used to project 8mm and 16mm films on white walls or sheets for gathered friends and/or family members. Each showing was a one-time event, special in the way no amount of today's Skyy Vodka sponsorship, rooftop screening fests, and swag can equal. And the kids then had more drugs--they could afford them living in $10 a month loft apartments with ten other people. So with ample footage from the original films (by people like Amos Poe and Richard Kern) and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, and various members of various punk bands, it's better than being there, I'm sure - at least smell-wise, and--I'm fairly sure--way better than having to see the entirety of each film.

With its good sense of humor about the poverty-enforced ingenuity of these early filmmakers, it's possible to long to return to BLANK CITY's innocence and imagine how great it would be to see the whole films, even while knowing in reality they would be excruciating for more than a few minutes, and the lack of air conditioning or clean underwear would eventually wear us down. In that sense, BLANK CITY is better than being there, while making you long to return anyway. I especially loved the snippets of ROME 78 - a re-enactment of the fall of an empire as filmed on the sly around the City's more Roman-esque landmarks, so while a kid in a toga dies in the Central Park fountain, 70s tourists walk by; a coliseum scene occurs in front of the Bronx Zoo lion cage, etc. It's the kind of gutsy shot stealing that makes New York City great!

ROME 78 - John Lurie (bottom)

And it's in that sense that the documentary's poverty-is-the-mother-of-invention reverie is so invaluable, and the scene's inclusiveness so impressive. The proletarian mix of thick New York accents, kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns like MIDNIGHT COWBOY makes for a cohesive unit of subculture that was too out there to become mainstream, but did anyway. There's also a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African-American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, dancers and street poets. All of it goes to prove that if you're literate, young, bisexual, and hot you can never be considered homeless in a neighborhood/time where everyone takes care of everyone else and the class system is part of what's being rebelled against... until of course the money starts rolling in...

And it's that money and the eighties that leads to skyrocketing rents, which means big real estate investments, which means the end of the squats and slums of the Village, which means the need to protect those investments, which means Republican mayors. So gradually, especially with the incursion of Giuliani in 1994, the herald of zero tolerance public smoking, the abolition of the 'brown bag' drink, and the Cabaret Law that Kevin Bacon fought successfully in FOOTLOOSE in the 80s but we lost in the 'real life' of the New York streets in the 90s, the crackdowns on the drugs at Limelight, the rise of swing dancing, the rise of video, DVD, FCP, AIDS, the WWW, and 9/11 and my own near death over and over from alcoholism... we lost it all. I blame Giuliani for all of it. We could use a man like Ed Koch or Dinkins again.

Lydia Lunch

Shooting your own shit is so easy now it's hard to warrant a film festival at all, hard to motivate people to go find some shady address from a hand-drawn flyer and sit on the concrete floor for three hours when the movie you're showing them is a mere click away on the home screen. Back then if you had a projector and a camera you could make a movie on Monday and get it back from Kodak by the weekend and screen it promptly for a 100 rowdy urchins. And since everyone knew everyone else and half the people were squatters and no one had TVs to compete with, and half the people were in the movie anyway. So huge crowds packed into lofts and garages and wherever and legends were born, and today these squalid art films are shown in university classes. But that will soon change as more and more class moves to the web and more and more public screenings are too unreliable. In other words, there's no word of mouth anymore because word of mouth itself has proliferated to infinity, and posting invites to Facebook is so easy that there are now so many options none of them end up being anything worth doing. If you went outside, well, you couldn't smoke there anyway, might not know anyone, just pay $14 for a mixed drink. Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital, cheap...

You know, like with Friendster. 

Basquiat (I left the red loading circle in, for art's sake)

POST SCRIPT

There's this other documentary on Netflix, WE CAUSE SCENES: THE RISE OF IMPROV EVERYWHERE (2013), about a group of NYC hipsters who do big flash mob-ish pranks and I'm a little jealous of their huge turnouts, which would seem to contradict all I've said here. But on the other hand, I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity.' It's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill in RANDOM ACTS or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY might point out as I do that it's just conformity in a new package.

Safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle of dudes involved in the 'sudden improv' concept, but the idea that whole masses of people want to join up and be led into safe, happy flash mob antics makes me realize that cigarettes are essential to true revolution (and I say this as part of Shelley Jackson's SKIN project) It lacks the 'everyone's in charge' freedom of similar movements (as in the Merry Pranksters or the Cockettes or Diggers) that relied on chaos for true freedom of the sort impossible without very strong psychedelics and tobacco. The idea that sober people eagerly participate in chances to get told what to do in order to 'break away' from lockstep drone reality makes no sense. This is how ideas like the Diggers morphed into cults like the Mansons, and how the Rolling Stone mossed, and how Times Square became 'family-friendly.'

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. His name? Abel Ferrara. At least he understood how NYC --and therefore the world--would end in 4:44: LAST DAYS ON EARTH, not with a bang but with NY1's Pat Kiernan delivering a quietly dignified sign off.

All else is just Sony... selling itself copies of its older self... through the TV mirror.

SUSPIRIA for Men... ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

Lately when I meditate all that happens is my unconscious/anima rummages through forbidden memory drawers, exposing afresh long-buried shames as far back as ninth grade gym class. I'm all cool about it, of course--"oh thank you ma'am, for saving these precious memories"--and I believe once I accept them she's going to just toss 'em out. But I doubt she will, 'cuz my unconscious is a bitch, yo. Still, my unconsicous' scathing anima is nothing like the one pulling Julian (Ryan Gosling) apart in Nicolas Winding Refn's career-sabotaging follow-up to his career-making DRIVE: ONLY GOD FORGIVES.

Yeah, but She doesn't, Blanche!

The tale of an Oedipus complex writ large by white people across the dirty expanses of Bangkok, it's more of a Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch play exquisite corpse with an Argento hotel bar napkin than it is the kind of all-too-standard Asian action-revenge thriller it pretends to be.

Then again, everything is a Jim Jarmusch plays exquisite corpse with David Lynch on an Argento hotel bar napkin for Sweden's dark lord of the Seijun Suzuki-esque macho melt-down post-modernist gangster genre, Nicolas Winding Refn. GOD is his special love letter to those Angelica film snobs who saw VALHALLA RISING and said "very good, Sven, but maybe slow it down a bit. Maybe don't have a protagonist who's such a chatterbox." There has to be one such film snob... somewhere.

Maybe it's even me.

I'm keenly aware (since I'm Swedish) that to stand out from the legions of 'corrupt but honorable cop vs. redeemable but doomed Oedipissant' Asian vengeance-athons loitering sullenly along the neon- drenched "Dark Foreign Revenge Thriller" avenues of Netflix, Refn has to import his own brand of ice and snow onto the eternally wet floors of le Bangkok Dangereuse. We Swedes know that Thai swordsman cops can out-swing us, so we have to out-stare them and, more importantly, be willing to lose a limb without blinking. That's how you get their respect!

No, please, don't get up

Critics haven't been kind to ONLY GOD FORGIVES, though some have been maybe too kind and maybe they shouldn't be. It practically begs for a beat-down, craves it like William Devane's masochistic ex-POW in ROLLING THUNDER (1977). It promises to not even fight back, just proffer its hands for good severing (or garbage disposal grind).

But for a film with such ornate and original visual style it sure is shy about saying anything, or making a single unanalyzed move, unless it's to judge misogynist ex-pats for slapping frightened little Bangkok sex workers. Unlike Devane's more macho amputee masochism, there's some much more bizarrely Oedipal form of apotemnophilia going on here, associated with the fear of the vaginal void. As in: if I stick my hand into the darkness, into some stripper's inner gates of paradise, will I ever get it back, or just pull out a stump?

In a land of bare knuckle boxing and grim black dragon wallpaper, Gosling's hand bravely goes where only Jessica Harper doesn't fear to tread.

From Top: Suspiria / Only God Forgives

And there's this thing with brother Billy who is so mad about a Bangkok dad pimping his daughters he kills one of them to teach him a lesson. Some weird karaoke-singing cop first lets the dad kill Billy for revenge, then cuts off the guy's hand right to punish him for that right. Meanwhile Julian (Ryan Gosling, apparently now the Michael Fassbender to Refn's Steve McQueen) is getting his hands tied in a lap dance, and imagining his hand cut off by the same cop.

Dude, it's all connected.... by ligaments.

So the next week (or hour- there's no sense of time on the Bangkok streets) brings in on her sky chariot the brassy Clytemnestra of a devouring Mother (brilliantly essayed by Kristen Scott Thomas)with a typically Lady McBeth-ish streak of not thinking her dark deeds through to the end. She's clearly the evil instigator who made the boys so nutty and she has an incestuous love-hate bond with Julian, and who we learn eventually-- if our TV is on loud enough and there's no traffic outside our window to mask their fetid whispers---once ordered her boy to beat his father to death with his bare hands. And he did!

You know how hands are...

But all that stuff is minor. One of those exquisite corpse bar napkins could have covered more Freudian territory purely by chance. Though feature length, ONLY GOD reminds me a lot of my own small short films: there's no time for a plot so it all has to be delivered on the sly in expository fragments. No one leaves or arrives; they just appear in one of the many dark red-lit Chinese serpent dragon wallpapered rooms like clients at the bordello of the unconscious. When the mom lets down her long, sexy hair it contrasts dazzlingly with a silk dress that both blends her into and stands out against the hotel wallpaper. It's presumably a rose on the front )above) but looks more like the kind of hole an alien or baby (Julian) would burst out of (and where we will rather grotesquely return in the final act). When mom demands to know why her son hasn't killed the guy who killed his brother, (instead of letting the severed hand be enough of a warning), Julian mentions the dead son killed a sixteen year old girl. "Well, mom snaps. "I'm sure he had his reasons."

This old broad is a real pisser.

The film's been compared to the westerns of Sergio Leone, but in Leone all those long stares were connected to hands hovering over holsters. It was more about the eyes than the hands, and eyes are more apt for movies than hands. There's the adage in RED RIVER where John Wayne tells the kid who will soon be played by Monty Clift that he knew when the other guy was going to draw by "watching his eyes. Remember that." Flash forward a few decades and Clint Eastwood and his confederates no longer look anyhere but eyes. They no longer look at their gun or even aim it, or even blink, just stare. And then WHAM, one or more guys die - the guys who look at hands instead, one presumes. Hitchcock had that line about how the only difference between comedy and suspense at breakfast is that only the audience knows a bomb's under the table in the latter. in Leone, everyone knows everyone else has a bomb under the table, and that gives their every move meaning; they don't take their eyes off each other even as they pour the coffee, with one hand, super..... slowly. Each ready for the bomb in each other's laps. In ONLY GOD FORGIVES, Refn takes the coffee away, the table, and the bombs, and most of the hands too, by the end. If it's not suspense at least it's the first violent masculine deconstruction to feminize the macho staring contest, and dissociate vengeance from the minds of tortured heroes. Now, instead of being about facing death the action movie is about Sleeping Beauty, with Gosling spending the whole movie in a glass case, waiting for God's samurai sword to cleave him free, of both that outer (glass) shell, and the inner (body) too, so the nothing trapped within him can rise rise rise.

There's a great piece comparing the film with Lynch's FIRE WALK WITH ME over on Very Aware, with a Refn interview, wherein he says: the original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God."

Note the austere white Great Wall image behind him, a more logocentric version of Julian's twisted dark red wallpaper, setting off a contrast that's about far more than good vs. evil, or right vs. wrong

Hey, I know about that! That's why I love Moby Dick's Capatin Ahab so much, and all my college poetry was about it, like my classic "The Bug that Would Swat God" - but in my case it was drunken bravado and feeling inspired by Gregory Peck's twisted oratory (see here, shipmates). Here it's less about wanting to fight God and more about doing it just to get your awful mother off your back.

And then there's the "villain," the cop in the white collar doesn't just kill people straight up, he does it with a show of torture, hand slicing offery, etc. And for all his swift brutal gestures, our homicidal momma's boy Julian is not much of a fighter, it turns out. He gets his ass kicked by this little guy. It's embarassing. The mom's confidence, and our own action film expectations, have led us to believe that once he's given the signal, Julian is going to be as lethal as Clint Eastwood in the climax of UNFORGIVEN. He's going to be like Popeye given the 101 proof spinach. But instead he gets beaten down... by a middle-aged balding Thai cop! That's like Sly Stallone losing a fight to Burgess Meredith, and Refn knows we'll feel that way and Julian's losing seems somehow on purpose, to piss off his mom, and us by extension, to subvert our and her expectations in a passive revenge plan he probably isn't even conscious of. We know Ahab is going to lose in his battle with the white whale. That's kind of the whole point, that knowing this, on some deep level of the unconscious, he still goes for it anyway is why we love him.Such crazy fighting spirit is what the East is all about! And inner demon battling, trying to drink you're way sober, etc.

It seems absurd that mom should be so eager for vengeance that she'd go up against a supernatural cop like this but on the other hand, without her around to shake things up, everyone would still be sitting where we left them, motionless, like a flock of ventriloquist dummies after their owners have all gone to bed. Refn's out to do more with his dolly shots than deliver a mere Asian revenge thriller; he's gone way past the 1967 Seijun Suzuki deconstruction of BRANDED TO KILL (above; below) and exposed the hideous mom-hating apron string hacker under the hot skin of Ryan Gosling's new Action Figure persona.

It helps to learn that Refn shot in chronological order and kind of winged it for large stretches, with Ryan Gosling and Kristen Scott Thomas both having lots of input and collaboration in their characters' outcomes, and genius DP Larry Smith (who worked with Refn on BRONSON) seems to have been given free reign with the surreal gels. There's a feeling that comes across when submitting to that kind of spontaneity, Godardesque perhaps, but more open-ended, in the moment, from second to second. The drawback? It seldom builds to any satisfying catharsis or ending. It's like that stare of the Leone gunfighter with his hand over his gun has widened and lasts the entire film, and then no gun is drawn. And there are no hands left to pull a trigger. The first credit at the end is to announce the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is pretty steep company. The man is a God himself, a shaman first class, and tellingly has much armless symbolism and actors. Look ma, no hands, indeed.

from top: Only God Forgives, Santa Sangre

All we know is Julian was pretty twisted before all this revenge got started but he quickly loses it thereafter; watching his stripper girlfriend cry jeweled tears behind the strings of a crystal bird house he hears some laughter at the other end of the club. They could be laughing at anything, they're all deep in a conversation way down there, but Julian has had a vulnerable emotion and now he thinks they're laughing at him. Next thing you know he's smashing a glass in one of their faces and dragging him around by his upper palette. Dude, that's so paranoid!

From top: Buffalo 66, OGF, B66 OGF ,The Fighter, OGF, B66, The Fighter

So paranoid in fact it reminds me of two other movies about bruised masculinity: BUFFALO 66, THE FIGHTER. The great music by Cliff Martinez even becomes Angelo Badalamenti at times (the music from TWIN PEAKS was supposedly what Refn cut the film to), linking it as a kind of sequel to THE FIGHTER if Mickey Ward and his ma set up shop at a fight club down in Thailand, and she left to do various deals, but she still flies in like an avenging angel when son Dicky the crackhead is killed. Meanwhile there's some BUFFALO 66 meets THE WRESTLER nonsense as Julian's favorite crying stripper, who gives the drowsiest lap dances in history, is supposed to wear a dress and meet the foulmouthed Madea of a mom. Interesting too that the dead son is named Billy, and had a huge, enormous cock (according to the mom). If Gallo had played him (and if we saw BROWN BUNNY you know he could), oooh synchro-gorgeousity made flesh.

from top: B66, OGF, OGF, B66

And it's clear Billy and Julian both have some seriously warped misogyny going on with women as a result of their mom and--as in BUFFALO 66's strip club owner--father figures they've killed or are determined to kill in one way or another. The Billy in both films skulks around the periphery of slow motion druggy sex dens, forever denied the presumed pleasures of full psychic abandon. Both have way too many mother issues to permit anything approaching even a feint at that sort of enjoyment. They can only take it out on women who seem weaker and more submissive somehow even than themselves, to vicariously relive their primal scene in an attempt to rewritezzzzzz zzzzz

Zzz- eh? I nodded off.... or did I?

Did I miss anything? No --they're all still just staring.

Perfect.

Screw any Man under 30: ARIZONA DREAM (1993, dir. Emir Kusturica)

"Why must you screw any man under 30?"
"Because it's normal... in Papua New Guinea!"

The above lines of dialogue give you some insight into the hysterical weirdness of Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica's first English language film, ARIZONA DREAM (1993). Don't let it get confused with other ARIZONA movies, or quirky ensemble films too numerous to name (BENNY AND JOON springs to mind, but I've never seen it). Yes, it's got an Eastern European post-structuralist fascination with America's desert 'roadside attraction' culture, and yes it's got a whimsical voiceover (from Depp), Eskimos, a hypnotist sled dog; a fish with two eyes on the same side of his face, a balloon, an airplane propeller mounted to the chandelier for a ceiling fan; Depp acting like a chicken "buck buck buckcock;" fish swimming up the sky river whenever someone dies; ambulances going over the moon; pet turtles at the dinner table --but none of it done in a corny 'faux-centric" way like a Sundance workshop "about family... about hope... and about quirks" nor is it done in an 'aren't common folk delightful?' Capra style nor inundated by Chaplin sediment. Instead, this has enough 'hysterics' to land it amongst films like Zulawski's 1985  L'AMOR BRAQUE (my piece here) or 80's Godard like DETECTIVE and PRENOM: CARMEN. In short, it's genuinely nuts, not that fake Sundance nuts-lite.

The story unfolds with nature conservationist Depp being lured by brother Vince Gallo out to Arizona to attend his uncle's wedding. Jerry Lewis is the uncle, a car dealer with a thing for pink Cadillacs, and he's marrying supermodel Paulina Porizkova! So far so good. Yet that whole set-up is dropped once Lili Taylor as a rich heiress and Faye Dunaway as her hot mess stepmom show up at the dealership and Depp and Gallo start stepping on each other's game like the Marx Brothers over Thelma Todd. Depp quickly moves on up to the ladies' remote Arizona mansion, to shag Dunaway and help her realize her dream of building a fantasmastical flying machine while crazy (or saner than everyone else) daughter Lili Taylor smokes and broods. Sure it might sound a little Wes Anderson-meets-Tim Burton but hey, any film where Faye Dunaway out crazies Jerry Lewis is all right with me. (I generally cringe watching Lewis' schtick, but he's restrained and excellent here, content to step back and let the cast each have a moment).

Fans of Vincent Gallo should note there's early signs of his BROWN BUNNY austerity, as when he performs the crop dusting scene from Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST at a talent show. Later, during a pivotal scene of bedroom-hopping upstairs, Gallo sleeps downstairs on the couch, watching GODFATHER II and reciting the whole Fredo "Don't you think I'm smaht?! speech while the hopping intercuts its way through the night. Are these moments of metatexuality meant as metaphors for desert roadside America? (French theorist Baudrillard and writer Nabokov were both fans of driving aimlessly around in the American Southwest - I'd bet Kafka would have been too, were he born in the correct egg sac). As seen by the European cinephile mind, Arizona becomes a place of endless expanse, pop culture hall of mirrors refraction, and stunted emotional connection, where space, time, and family cease to have any meaning, and one finds oneself hiding and dodging like a scarecrow at an airport. Gallo also quotes the Cowardly Lion ("I didn't bite him!") and dances around when things get too weird, which they do.

Lili Taylor has perhaps never looked sexier or seemed more relaxed as Dunaway's stepdaughter, even as she commits bungee jumping pseudo-suicide or dreams of coming back as a turtle, and even she, like fellow eccentric ham Lewis, lets co-star Dunaway--sexy cougar-style in country frock, pale denim jacket and beauty contest hair-- out-crazy her. That's love, brother!

This cast clearly has affection for each other and the chops to improv and ham it up without moving out of character or grandstanding or stepping on each other's beats. Thanks to his endless Tim Burton movies, Depp's quirkiness isn't quite as fresh as it may have been back in 1993, but Kusturica is no Burton, and ARIZONA DREAM never loses its giddy, mystical edge. Actors tend to talk a lot about the friends and collaborative energy they experienced on the set of whatever film they're plugging, but here none of that friendly collaboration feels like it needs to be mentioned. It's there --there's no need to talk about it. Let the Iggy Pop songs on the soundtrack (written by Kusturica for the film!) tell what needs telling, and leave it at that.

After DREAM, Kusturica would make his definitive politico-black comedy UNDERGROUND (1995) and you can see some of the ideas in that later film born in DREAM's scattered, hypertextual framework. Long unavailable on DVD or VHS, it's a delight to find ARIZONA DREAM on Netflix streaming! Fans of acid cinema are obliged to, if not plunge, at least wade tentatively in... before it vanishes into the fishnet ether from which it came. (P.S. 2/16/15 - it did.)