Not with a Wimp but a Banger: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

Look deep into the screen, my children. Any screen, all screens --this is your new reality: screens in the classroom -- a big one instead of a blackboard, linked to the laptop on your desk; the phone on which you secretly watch movies with a well-concealed earbud instead of watching the screen your teacher is pointing at; screens on the way home on the bus (your phone again) or car (DVD player above the dash + phone); screens at home (which you watch with one eye on the phone screen), the big flatscreen in the living room, the small one in your room, your laptop and phone still flickering as well... wake, and repeat. How many more minutes of life can the screen co-opt? There aren't any left. There's not even room for any more overlaps. You'll need ADD just to keep up with the future generations able to watch four movies at the same time without losing focus on a single one (while watching just one will drive them insane with restless leg syndrome and cell phone finger twitching). 

With their action figure and video game readiness, teenager-based dystopia sci-fi is all the rage -- and three recently-released big budget Blu-rays (I watched them all in the same weekend --consecutively) speak to this proliferation of screens, proving themselves to be great examples of what Guy Debord called recuperation. These big budget, mass-marketed teen demo-skewed tales of 'being an individual'  use the trappings of rebel youth subversion in service of the institutions they're allegedly subverting (i.e. the Che Guevara emblem used on a Bud Lite bottle: "Viva l'revolution... responsibly."), tapping deep into the product placement pulse of teen fantasy nerd America, and bringing forth all the synergy and branding money that it implies--! Piggyback on, Jackie! Wonder Twin Towers Activate! Form of Coors Lite... Ice! 

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KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there in coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of your life along the way. If that justifies dressing up in goofy costumes and sticking your pretty face harm's way, all in the name of a safe America, then Yog Soggoth blessings on you, but you're loco. On the other hand, if, like me, you loathe the hypocrisy behind the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count of the old A-TEAM show (or T2's "Casualties Zero" Arnold eye screen scrawl), then its use of plenty of blood and realistic damage done to property, life, teeth, and limb makes KICK-ASS 2 a priceless precious thing, as gleeful in its sociopathy as Wendy Kroy, Alex and his Droogies, or Mr. Blonde.

Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is the supervillain again, hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his late father's mob business to pummel, strangle, gut and maul Kick-Ass and all his friends and family. Meanwhile witless cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned ward Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more killing. He wants her to experience the 'beauty' of a normal childhood (where the hell did he grow up?) I kept praying Chestnut was one of the first cops to be killed during the massive slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin-just so Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony. But noooo.

That's the real lesson here: just because you promise something to an adult doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kid's drawers for drugs seems to be the 'in' thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search their drawers. The moral? Kids, hide your drugs outside your window, on a string, like Don Birnim's bottle in THE LOST WEEKEND!

Complain all you want, and some have --even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids to the premiere, and was shocked at all the beheading)--but to me the film's absurdist brutality-- its gleefully 'real' cartoon violence-- is a long sigh of relief after an eternity of teen-friendly action movie bullshit. That said, the romantic / sexual elements are sexist and cliche'd. Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) has a great midriff but she's subjected to a strange rape gag which I did not care for. I also don't like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your attack dog! Schwontz, indeed! It makes no sense, like an NRA member hearing burglars downstairs so quick locking up his bedside gun.

But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist qua-intentional way, or just unconsciously ultra-violent, it doesn't matter. With Hit Girl + her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and as Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much-missed 30 ROCK, Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. Unlike Jolie, whe's not squeamish about ripping someone's throat out with her teeth. Viva la revolution... irresponsibly, as Thanatos intends!

Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant, but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' (Jennifer Lawrence) as just another morose girl who likes hunky boys to fight over her, and who prefers the company of a guy shorter than her ("so he can look up to me, so I can be his ideal") but really loves a hunky taller dude. This time we barely explore that by-now dulled triangle (except as an oblique analogy to Hollywood's lavender marriages) instead Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is depicted more like the uncooked egg schoolgirls carry around during reproductive health awareness week. While her rightful man (some Hemsworth or other) is off fighting the real war; Katniss coddles and protects Peeta with the zeal of a neurotic mother hen. He's near-grown, Katniss. Let lil' Peeda stand up by himself.

What works best is how well the film nails down the nerve-shredding implication that 24/7 media coverage not only destroys stars like Britney, Amy, and Lindsay, but our civilization as a whole, leading to a globally catastrophic intensity wherein celebrity hinges on survival and failure to smile with casual joie de vivre when cameras are present--or to be convincingly smitten by some designated short guy before a live studio audience--ensures your family is killed and your village fire-bombed.

The concept is ingenious, because HUNGER GAMES is a cottage industry at its own throat, equating its depicted future dystopia with an endless flow of diegetic paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits, award shows, tedious applause, and all the red carpet press sound byte droppings that are a parallel to the grueling regimen of its meta/non-diegetic modern starlets.

Perhaps to metatextualize these implications, Jennifer Lawrence spends most of the movie caked in enough bronzer to weigh down three Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley. Her glum face beneath this load would be too much to bear without some of her old spark, and it ain't there, honey, so thank god Jena Malone shows up, a champion from one of the other districts, to pick up the badass bitch slack. Malone looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood, stealing ever scene she can while JL's Katniss mistakes glum moping for world weariness.

All the old cast is back as well, including Donald Sutherland as the evil emperor, a decadent fop whose refusal to grasp even the most basic tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader the most unrealistic thing about the film. Here's a man who genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. For a man whose reign hinges on TV propaganda, you'd think he would know enough about mass media by now that all he'd have to do to quell rebellion is give out mockingjay symbols as keychains, T-shirts and bumper stickers, and have his Stanley Tucci greet the TV audience with it (in short, komrade, to employ recuperation), the way MTV has done to every underground music movement since its inception. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolutionary symbolism, Donald! It all but ensures it. It's like dropping napalm on a peace symbol bumper sticker to end the hippie movement. You end the hippie movement by getting Nixon to say "sock it to me" on Laugh-In. 

The reason why Sutherland doesn't do that of course is inherent in the marketing for the film itself; as he lurches about on his pre-set dictatorial track, it's as if the Donald is trying to throw us off the scent of Lionsgate's own ingenious use of recuperation by showing his own obliviousness towards such a practice. As those 'mockingjay' pendants are on sale just a few stores down from the multiplex at Forever 21 or Mandees or wherever, it would be conflict of interest for the evil emperor to endorse them. They mustn't get wise, these kids. A happy consumer is an unconscious consumer, even if what's being consumed is the notion of waking the fuck up.

Other HUNGER signifiers are probably not going to be sold at the multiplex, regardless, such as the garish fashions worn by the hoi poloi. With their frills and pouffiness drawing groaningly obvious parallels to both the Reagan 80s and the French Revolution, the series offers enough hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés of the sophistos and the hunger of the peasants to make even D.W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM seem Rohmer-esqely subtle. That said, there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold trim, and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act instead of just playing the shrill press agent mouthpiece for plot exposition. I still don't like those terrible fake color eyebrows...

Then there's a rare treat, lacking in the other films discussed here: a genuine drunk hip older dude, one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens: Woody Harrelson. Advising Katniss how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, and to have a damned drink once in awhile. He also eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things other than validating Katniss' useless sulking and refusing all offered goodies, as if eating a single hors d'oeuvre would make her 'part of the problem.'

The most original element is the central bizarro twist of having to imagine spending all your time with the dude you don't like, yet must pretend to love, and he's shorter than you, while your true tall love galavants into the firestorm. And the short guy's so sweet and staid, and supportive, he only makes it worse. That tweens are swooning for him out in the real world, only shows there's still hope for short, staid guys.... and hope is a dangerous thing. 

(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)

ENDER'S GAME (2013) is far removed from all that tweenage love nonsense, but there's a lot of care and time spent getting the glistening eyes of the space bugs exactly right. Luckily Asa Butterfield's Ender is allowed to be kind of fourteen year-old Hannibal Lecter instead of just a 'normal' kid like the kind only a Morris Chestnut would think really exists. Recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts, Asa's 'Ender; is legitimately scary and sociopathically over-calm. And its awesome.

I hated LAST STARFIGHTER and its bland 'every lad' gets recruited to save the world because he plays video games well. I didn't mind the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP TROOPERS because we were supposed to think of them as caricatures, not as 'normal suburban teens' as imagined by guys who haven't seen ever seen on. But Ender is different. He's a weedy ectomorph but can defend himself with devastating Lecter-like economy. Underneath his nervous morphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer. His nebulous doubts about the rightness of his mission are played up but we never really get the full HEARTS AND MINDS story before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for sequels. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens within the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Starship Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens. And hey, it's what the military is doing right now with drone programs! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their consoles

The last thing any kid wants is to see an 'average' kid like themselves
in a sci-fi movie. We go to sci-fi to get AWAY from that shit, dumbass.

As in CATCHING FIRE, ENDER wants you to want the sequels, to get the DVD, see it again on the IMAX, in 3-D, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth through sheer will, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should buy them, like an indirect post-production Kickstarter, but it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the nerd no one else likes. You can never shake them off once you do. Besides, how much difference will my ten bucks make against that vast deficit? I'd rather invest in a film that will feel my paltry offering, even if only as a ripple in the wind.

Not to ramble off topic, but I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzan and Carson of Venus books. Also Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. 

from 1946! I got it for cover price
at the Lansdale PA Book Swap,
around 1981!

The best part about all of them? No fucking kids! No 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. No 'Boy' in the Tarzans ('Boy' ruined the later movies), no boys at all. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adults, the ones who could kill without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those adult heroes back! Imagine STAR WARS if Han Solo never showed up, replaced instead by a 12 year-old boy with really normal hair and a nagging mom?! Horrible... yet there it is...

And so it is that we must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths against unimaginative dogmatic Hollywood's glorification of 'being a kid.' Already they have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the FBI's guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing from our cinema heritage. Stop them! Stop them before they install their safety-first overhead florescent lights even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred imaginations. I say roast Morris's chestnuts on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain, in vain!

Acidemic's Best Films of the 1980s

Jack Torrance wants to say hi - but you have to see him first. See him in there - dead center?

Ugh, February, the month of hassles and cold and weariness. Slogging towards March like a slouchy Bethlehem that evaporates on clammy handed contact. Another March 2nd means another year older for your humble narrator, another step closer to the grave. I've been looking for a way out, and I found one --the past! Thirty very odd years ago, to the 80s, a time when American became, once more, tragically uncool. NatGeo is showing their entire 80s series today - Sat. March 1st -- right now they're saluting Reagan. And now skate parks... I'm watching, in soggy despair. They're missing so much!

To me, the 1980s begins the now-forgotten Betamax vs. VHS war. Before there were video stores, when you rented tapes from the appliance store back room, and it was split half-and-half with Betamax and VHS formats. That's how it began.

My generation, the non-film critics, are currently trying to assemble a Best of 80s canon, mostly crap that evokes nostalgia to them, like Ferris Bueller (which I loathe on principle) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (or acts of admittedly brilliant but manipulative bromide pap like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment.  Someone, me, needs to step in and take the best-of list pencil away before these nostalgia-bewitched old yuppies hurt themselves.

Don't think I don't love some of the aforementioned too, in my fashion. I can quote them endlessly (because of the VCR), namely, Tootsie and Raiders (we had them both on tape). Here, can you guess which lines are from which movie (these all off the top of my head): Was ist los? Warum schläfst du!? Nobody cared... nobody showed; Blow it up! Blow it back to God; That is one nutty hospital; Too bad you don't speak Hovito, you might have warned them; I could have done without the dancing. Truth is... truth is you were okay company; Why don't you tell me...eh... where the ark is, ah right now?; Michael, I begged you to get some therapy; The charmer's name was Gaffe... I'd seen him around.

Wait, that last one is Blade Runner's now excised voice over, and thank god - how we hated that damned voiceover. We hated everything about the 80s, aside from the rise of the advent of the VCR. That was a miracle and we were saved by it. Then, in 1987 of course, when--in college sophomore year-- I discovered another miracle.

 We could escape the 80s altogether.

With the right set and setting we live in the 60s.

But now, in the 10s, the 80s, especially its cinema, which now glows with tactile pre-CGI analog 35mm celluloid brilliance, having been converted flawlessly to Blu-ray... for-widescreen-HD-TVs.

(the below descriptions are taken from past posts or are new - links appear where applicable). 

Top 15 of the 1980s (in reverse chronology)

15. PASSION  (1982) Dir. Jean Luc Godard

...Godard assumes his audience has seen many films, and so comes to his with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography (and that includes the meta-iconography of 'a film about filmmakers')--he riffs on these the way Ornette Coleman might riff on "Melancholy Baby." We're made aware of how dogmatically we're conditioned by a lifetime of filmgoing and story hearing. When a film adheres too closely to predetermined narrative formulations, we have cliche, When a film deliberately screws with them we have Godard: a medieval knight on a horse is seen trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden while racing a horse around a circular spinning scenery wheel --thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: Will we see this chick being carried off? Will we see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense, used to a thousand permutations of the same immanent virginal violation. Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera; the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman; the knight rides after her; she climbs up into the lighting rigging to escape; the knight dismounts and goes to have a smoke.. The Stunt Man is suddenly as bound up in linear single-line narrative reality as DW Griffith by comprison... (more)

14. AKIRA 
(1988) Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo

The quintessential cyber punk anime, Akira occurs in a riot-scarred "Neo-Tokyo" on the verge of some massive unnamed catastrophe and peppered with amok biker gangs, conspiratorial cops, cute anarchists, riots, flying vehicles, telekinetic mutants, and teddy bear hallucinations, all so gorgeously illustrated that time melts and even the tear gas flows gorgeous enough to leave your already-dropped jaw so low it distends off your skull and HDMI-ready flesh tendrils reach out, connecting your tongue directly to the screen.

The plot may hinge in the end on one of those typical Asian male friendships between differing misfits (one of whom goes crazy) but there's a cataclysmic beer-after-liquor-never-sicker sort of apocalypse involved this time, as the government-sponsored Methuselah syndrome psionics try to reign in Akira's crazy friend who's become godlike and fallen in love with smashing half the city. When things get quiet enough you can hear Walt Disney's frozen head explode deep in a bunker beneath Magic Mountain. 

13. MOONSTRUCK 
(1987) Dir. Norman Jewison

Does a mainstream ethnic humor rom-com film like this really belong on a disreputable but oh-so artsy list like mine, you ask? How dare you? What would you put instead, Tootsie? I thought about it, but I saw it recently and it hasn't aged as well. We've grown hipper about patriarchal subtext so we're wise to Dustin Hoffman's whole 'better woman than a woman' schtick, now (re: Molly Haskell). But Moonstruck eschews stealth-patriarchal pop and instead looks to the great Italian operas (and Dino) for its soundtrack, and Cher is luminous. If you never quite 'got' the appeal, see her in this and be a believer. Her chemistry with Nicolas Cage sizzles right through the cast iron skillet. She has the best walk of shame ever; watch how she comes wafting in to her mother the next morning and as soon as she hears her fiancee has returned, starts taking off her make-up and dressing back down from the opera and into a frumpy (but still glamorous) sweater, all while engaging in several layers of dialogue with Olympia Dukakis as her mother.

A relative unknown at the time, Nicolas Cage brings so much mushmouth ferocity to lines like "Gimme da knife so I can cut my froat!" and "Get in my bed!" that we all would have fallen off a cliff for him if he asked and given us one of those hooded stares. Never before had we laughed at and with and swooned over someone at the same time. Between this and Raising Arizona (also 1987) and The Vampire's Kiss (1988), Cage became instantly iconic, akin to what Brando must have been 30 years before but harnessed to wild John Barrymore-in-Twentieth Century level lunacy: that infectious mix of madness, heat, wit, beauty, and ferocity, unleashed at the right time, electrified the house like Castle's tingler. Interestingly enough, all three of these Cage films from that era are dark comedies, though Jewison's is only dark literally. Its beautiful palette of black clothes, red roses, perfect clothing (was there ever a more beautiful--uniquely Italian/New York City-dressed couple at the Metropolitan Opera?) and silvery  giant moon-lit nights helps balances the comic-earthy hues of the characters and brings tension without need for animosity and comedy without slapstick. It all climaxes in a family breakfast where all grievances are aired, love declared, and Olympia Dukakis steals all her scenes with little more than a series of resigned sighs. Forget Scorsese, it was this film that made me proud to be dating overlapping Italian-American chicks at the time. Seeing it today, it holds up way better. The more viewings the richer its mythic sweep, allowing all the myriad details to seep in. 

12. MATADOR 
(1986) Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Already his fifth film, Matador marks the turning point of Spain's beloved Pedro Almodóvar from a post-Franco celebratory shock cinema queer anarchist to something infinitely darker, yet more tender and compassionate and above all, more brave in gamely crossing meta-borders vis-a-vis intertextual cinematic reference. After a disturbing credit sequence involving a toreador (Nacho Martinez) masturbating to a a tape editing together death scenes (from Bava's Blood and Black Lace and others I'm not familiar with), we find him lecturing a class on the proper way to kill a bull in the ring, intercut with a strange woman (Assumpta Serna) killing her lover in just such a way, piercing him in the back of the neck with a hatpin. Almodovar tacks on plenty of other links between serial killing, bullfights and sex, so we're not really sure if this is his attempt at a sun-drenched horror film. But then Bernardo Bonezzi's small minor key piano motif plays over it all and it becomes an almost Sleepless in Seattle-level romantic melancholy reverie. Suddenly we want, we need, these two sick fucks to meet. Avoiding last second 'life wins' interruptions we're in the zone between Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951 - also set in Spain with bullfighting allegories) and 1934's Mediterranean-set Death Takes a Holiday. With Hitchcock / Wellesian / Bunuelian homage, death drive-to-the-floor Freudian psycho-savvy, color-coded symbolism, a theater playing King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, and a solar eclipse, Almodovar strews roses on the path forward to a romantic lover's climax so free of the usual last-second morality and phony sentiment it restores one's faith in cinema. Dub it a downer if you want but then you'd best run back under the censor's skirts for protection, because cinema's true heart is darkness, not sentiment, no matter how remorseless beats the Spanish afternoon sun.

A very young Antonio Banderas plays Diego's psychic, vertigo-stricken protege; Eva Cobo is Diego's model girlfriend who dresses in red like she wants to be the cape waved by this once-star toreador; Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura, Veronica Forque, Chuz Lampreave also appear in memorable bits, and the astonishing drag-ilicious Bibi Andersen is a flower girl; Almodóvar himself cameos as a fashion designer. Great as they are, though, the film belongs to Martinez's cobra-hooded toreador and the very sexy Serna's femme fatale, so voluptuously bloodthirsty Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is but an ice tray-cracking naif by contrast. Most American fans of Almodóvar started out with the 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Todos Sobre Mi Madre in 2000, but rich, hilarious, brilliantly acted and subversively life-affirming as those films are, I'll take Matador... to the bloody grave!

 11. EXCALIBUR 
(1981) Dir. John Boorman

Time has been kind to this deeply Jungian retelling of the Arthur legend. It takes a few dozen viewings to really understand what's going on, especially if you see it only on a second generation pan and scan VHS dupe for 20 years. But thanks to the beautiful Blu-ray I have finally figured out most of it, and even if incomprehensible there's the beauty and the Wagner and the natural magic. A mythic interpretation of how lust can wreck the noblest intentions, it has something close to the stirring manly grace that only loyalty to a worthy king can provide, and may be John Boorman's most perfectly realized film, once you unscramble what kind of masculine Jungian shizz he's after. He also stocks the film with an array of dreamy class-A Brit thespians players incl. Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Nicol Williamson, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Nigel Terry, all drinking the same Wolfram von Eisenbach-laced Kool-Aid through glistening glasses that make armor gleam like mirrors. See it and become a fan of "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Wagner's Ring cycle forever and ever. In homage, it made it onto the climax of my own Arthurian retelling, Queen of Disks (2005).

10. POSSESSION

(1981) Dir. Andrzej Zulawski

Perhaps the only way to really understand and love this film is to be temporarily insane yourself, or at least to remember what it's like to have the terrifying freedom of flying fast and loose atop the ever-inward spiral of the maelstrom and have the experience now forever etched in your Silver Surfer memory. I'm thinking of Poe's story "A Descent into the Maelstrom," wherein a sailor finds himself on a damned ghostly boat hovering ever on the edge of a vast never-ending whirlpool wave. Our hero eventually escapes and is rescued only to find his ship mates no longer recognize him: "My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed." Sometimes that change of countenance has to happen: you've seen too much; you've peered beyond the veil and the veil has left its gnarly mark. 

Such things happen all the time, to those who dare to take the voyage into the maelstrom or walk that yellow "brick" road. Some of us are called to the curtain and bid look beyond, and some do, and they get white hair, if not a diploma. I've never seen a film before or since that made white such a violently post-modern wrenching force (not even in Kieślowski's WHITE or Argento's TENEBRE) except maybe in a humorous and romantic way, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, wherein white swallows up whole bookstores and kitchens of Jim Carey's memory. (MORE)

9. CONAN THE BARBARIAN 
(1982) Dir. John Milius

Fuck it, I'm putting this in. We now know that 1982 was the single greatest year for sci fi and fantasy, giving us Blade Runner, The Thing, Road Warrior, Cat People, to name just a few. But of them all, for me, Conan has best survived the winds of change and become a classic as enduring as that ancient king's sword. The dead set opposite of many of the artier films in this list, it uses all the narrative tricks modernism eschews but brings such a heady focus, such an enraptured attention to even the smallest details, that repeat viewings just continue to reveal facets--especially in beautiful widescreen anamorphic and with some cut scenes restored. And best of all, surprisingly enough, is the love story between Valeria and Conan, one so touching it's been making fanboys of a certain age weep for the last 30 years. (more)

 8. REPO MAN 
(1984) Dir. Alex Cox

Long before it split into a dozen subsets--straight-edge, goth, emo, and hardcore, etc--we alienated teens were all just one thing: punk, and the film that defined us was Repo Man. It had alien conspiracies (with roots in the real conspiracies rather than made up for the movie), oblique "lattice of coincidence" Greek chorus TV commentary ("He is risen!"), Emilio Estevez in the role for which we still love him (fuck Breakfast Club, man), consumer parody (everything's 'generic'), Harry Dean Stanton in the role for which he is now and forever considered cool by those who know, a Modern Lovers cover, and the Circle Jerks gamely going lounge. Along with Rude Boy, Gimme Shelter, and that great legendary T.A.M.I Show with James Brown and the Stones, this was part of a daily after-school TV party ritual for myself and my suburban punk brethren. We'd all imitate Dick Rude's whiny timbre, "let's go do some crimes" when going off to score booze or weed, and "I blame society" when we failed. When we went to work instead at our very first jobs, our very first taste of the grinding real world, Repo Man guided us like a drunk but cocksure shepherd. The Criterion Blu-ray finally reveals what we never saw on our ratty pan and scan taped-off-cable version, that director Alex Cox has a modernist knack for capturing not just the sunny desolation of L.A.'s seediest outer fringes, but its natural magic, each shot is like a piece of found object junkyard art. I still write within this film's kinetic but forlorn rhythms. And it made me a lifetime fan of the great Fox Harris ("I had a lobotomy, man!") - It's worth having Forbidden World (1982) on Blu-ray just because Harris is in it in kind of a similar role. It could almost be a prequel!

7. PLATOON 
(1986) Dir. Oliver Stone

It's impossible to describe the effect this had on America and me at the time but I'll try: I was a sophomore in college in 1986, in upstate NY, where psychedelic molds and tie-dyes grow wild and my hippie-ish posse and I were all in the class America in the 60s (which PS- I failed). We had to see it while it was still in the theater, as homework. We called for a cab, piled in, smoked a joint with the driver at his request -- and the mushrooms we'd taken an hour earlier were kicking in by the time we sat down in the dark - our heightened sense giving the amazing jungle foley work an extra 3-D surround boost. Every humming bug and footstep dripped with possible ambush menace; humanity's potential for raw violent evil felt palpable in the jungle shimmer. We howled with relief when Sheen finally finds some a tent where everyone's smoking weed. Later, my buddy Jason had to leave for awhile when Bunny says those immortal words, "Sarge, did you see the way his head busted open like that?" But by then, I was enthralled, the psilocybin in my brain giving me rare access to the feeling of "hell yeah kill 'em all!" like I was channeling the madness of Colonel Kurz as a kind of rationalizing druggy courage, the mushrooms short-circuiting my pre-set empathic response, making everything I saw seem brand new and sans social sermon. The soul fear terror of the jungle was so palpable to me that the soldiers' level of sociopathic anger and violence seemed the only way to stay sane, if that makes any sense. If you ever took 'too much' of anything maybe you know the feeling: without a warrior howl, a game face, courage screwed sticky side-down, you'd wind up strapped down to a gurney, or freaking out your parents at dinner.

and his hair was perfect.

Seeing it later, on VHS, over and over, zonked out on whiskey and 3' graphix, was never quite the same as that magical afternoon in 1986, but I still have sympathy for the hardened Tom Berenger character and think Dafoe's hippy sarge is way too naive. Some elements are downright racist, (the Asian characters are all extra-alien and inscrutable, though that works for creating paranoia there's no excuse for making the black soldiers mostly cowardly and the first to fall asleep on guard duty) and Sheen's tacky voiceover ("They're the best I've ever seen, grandma") is almost as bad as the one, now excised, from Blade Runner.

But I'd heard of vet's cathartic reaction to the film, and I actually saw a sobbing vet-age man in the audience on the way out of the theater that afternoon, and even in the low house lights I could see he'd been crying, a cathartic wave of inky aura was fizzling around him like a fading wall of gnats, replaced by a pink light. He'd clearly been keeping a dark secret venom up in his nervous system for the last 15 years, and it was now broken open, leaking all over the sticky floor. I walked out on rubber legs and gave him one of those overly compassionate shroom looks. With Platoon, the horrible secrets of a nation seemed at last exposed to light as if some glorious combination award ceremony and drug intervention. This wasn't some silly Russian roulette gambit, a Willard going up river, or a paraplegic Jon Voight, this was maybe something like what the kind of low-to-the-ground eye view only a writer-director who was there at the time, with a gun in hand and people actively trying to kill him, could tell. The last time we were graced with such a survivor's eye view was the 50s, with Sam Fuller's Fixed Bayonets and Steel Helmet. --each of which made a comparable, if less publicized, mark on a generation of vets struggling to unpack their own collective traumas. But those boys had always been heroes; before Platoon, the Vietnam vets had been outcasts. Now, at last, we could begin to welcome them home. If that sounds corny, I guess you had to be there... or emerged within a convincing facsimile.

6. RAGING BULL 
(1980) Dir. Martin Scorsese

I remember hearing a WBNC talk radio review of this film (I would have been 13) on my dad's clock radio one morning while he was in the shower and I was trying to think of a good illness to feign so I could stay home from school. The way the announcer went on I thought this landmark movie was going to crack open the world. I felt like wow, this movie sounds soooo adult and dangerous. It's sad that you don't hear that kind of literally unrestrained enthusiasm anymore, as if critics no longer trust their own instincts, or is it the pictures that got small? Maybe Raging Bull was the last time they really knew a masterpiece had landed brand new in front of their eyes. Yeah, maybe.

Flash forward a decade, Seattle, 1990: my girlfriend coming home from a traumatic day of work with a bad headache; me loafing in front of our tiny TV, drunk; LaMotta in a Florida jail pounding the wall shoitng "Dummy! DUMMY!" over and over while I drank; her raincoat angrily dropping onto the floor; I was hoping La Motta would stop beating the wall soon, as I could see what the misery of that scene was doing to her. But he kept pounding and screaming, and our apartment was too small to escape it. On and on the pounding went, breaking our relationship apart. I was to drunk to defend Scorsese's choice, or to find the remote and press stop, or remember how long that scene dragged on from past (also drunk) viewings.

We broke up. I drove to Syracuse in time for the block parties. When I came back to get my shit she was already dating a jackass hippie whose claim to fame was that he curated an open mic at the O.K. Hotel. He whinnied like a horse when he laughed and danced arms akimbo when he walked. But he was so terrified of me he ran literally the other way when he saw me comin' - I'm not gonna hurt ya! I shouted. Come 'eah!

Sure, despite it breaking up my relationship, Bull is a towering masterpiece but it's not fun, or perfect. And after the string of Leo-starring bros-behaving-badly films Marty's given us this past fifteen or so years, Scorsese's inability to depict a strong female character (even Alice should have just whacked Harvey Keitel over the head with a frying pan instead of running away) and his over-reliance on manly violence rather than exploring his castration anxiety head on and cutting through, if you'll forgive the expression, the bullshit, shows a willingness to use flashy editing and resonant masculine humor to avoid using the mirror for anything except lines, coke or poetry - makes no difference; they're the same, ain't they? Come 'eah!

The result is that now Jake LaMotta seems an odd choice for such artful storytelling. He's a thug, a bruiser, and might be suffering from paranoid derangement brought on by consistent head trauma. One last thing I remember from that relationship: trying to sleep at her place while I was in the midst of a terrible fever (Syracuse = always sick). She was in the other room, painting (VPA). I got up and in my delerium accused her of having a lover in the closet - then after I looked, I knew he was under the bed, I looked there too, nothing, but then I knew he was back in the closet. I kept looking in the closet over and over. I knew he was there even if he wasn't. Even while she was all alone in the other room I could hear her conspiring whispers and a man's voice, even though it was just a Billie Holiday album. I heard males whispering about me, laughing quietly with her about how easily they could snow me.  So when I see LaMotta all supernaturally jealous I wonder if head trauma would be the same thing as my fever.

That's no excuse though, and either way, the film is certainly rich enough with the language and pulsing rhythmic emotion of Little Italy it doesn't need great psychological insight, and yet... there's Cathy Moriarty laying out by a sparking community pool, being lured over to the wire fence by LaMotta (and in some senses the most courageous thing he does in the film) and in her breathy agreement, as much worldly romantic poetry as in any other movie on this list, .

Aside from Valeria's of course. DUMMY! 

5. BLUE VELVET 
(1986) Dir. David Lynch

I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie. I found the violent thuggery disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After a few decades of film theory and great books by Todd McGowan and Zizek helped me unravel my private relationship to its Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, that attitude began to change. Turns out the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds isn't merely his anger/anxiety over a woman being hurt, but a primal scene as understood through the mind of a child who mistrusts the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to shut him out of the bedroom at a whim. The problem was mine not the film's - I myself was Frank as much as Kyle. Damn, that's deep. It prepped us all for Twin Peaks, and therefore the '90s.

Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell, lip syncing Roy Orbison as a nightmarish gay stereotype (see CinemArchetype 18: The Aesthete) while Kyle behaves like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer to score coke in order to impress some girl, all for the very first time. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through their loving abuse. Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart - though that too is open to debate and changes as a viewer's psyche). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open,' his Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment. It endures and like a dream you'll find that it's never the same movie twice.

4. LOLA

(1981) Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

There can be no sleep for the German people unless they take Naziism as a bump in their record album and return to track one: the glory of the Weimar era of the post-WWI era. Fassbinder digs that and, for this candy-colored econo-comedy (set in 1957), he takes the mythos of the The Blue Angel (1929) and wraps it like a sticky carmel apple in a post-war restoration/corruption sagas, so that--as we do in Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)---we're watching the booming neo-Weimar weeds spring up from the WW2 rubble, leading to a whole new kind of Warners pre-code/Columbia-post-code Babrbara Stanwyck opportunity for the right kind of sauced neo-Dietrich seductress who doesn't mind pretending to be interested in Asian art if it means winning a bet for 30 cases of champagne. She just might fall in love with her mark's world-weary wisdom; he was a WW2 officer and still hasn't found a country to come home to (could she be it?) but can he forgive the way everyone already knows she's a slut?

It's perfect casting with gorgeous Barbara Sukowa as naughty Lola, whose drunken resentment of the incorruptible (but totally progressive pro-capital) Von Bohm ( Armin Muller-Stahl) leads to a typical night caught in the storm and spending 'some time' in an old barn (a pre-code hook-up spot) and a heartbreakingly sweet bit of church singing that takes them both by surprise. One of the most quietly disarming characters in the Fassbinder lexicon, Von Bohmm's gentle wit and limitless tolerance proves a perfect match for Lola, whose sloppy drunken abandon is always real and beautiful to see. A perfect third in the romance is her pimp /club owner/building contractor boyfriend Shukert (the delightful Mario Adorf) and the three of them somehow rebuild Germany through their 'only-in-the-Weimar' era level of tolerance (ala Rudi and Marlene). It's all for the best; nobody dies and everyone can get rich as part of the New Deal here in the West side of the Wall. Von Bohn gets to avoid having eggs smashed onto his forehead and crowing like a jackass; he winds up married to the lady with "the sweetest ass in all of NATO." Even the insufferably idealist protesting drummer accepts an expensive cigar and realizes there is no bad here, so where is Fassbinder aiming his cynicism? The neo-Weimar flowers are sweet with dolorous savors! (See Peter K. Tyson's great piece on Lola here and my analysis of the German economy, prostitution, the post-war black market and Blue Angel hier)

3. THE LITTLE MERMAID 
(1989) Dir. Ron Clements

If The Shining set the uncertain scary tone at the start of the 80s, then The Little Mermaid signaled the glorious start of the ending. Tapping deeply into the Jungian dream core of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, it reinvigorated Disney and sent them scrambling back to animation full time. The voiceover work is uniformly strong (the congested kid playing Flounder the only exception) especially Ursula the Sea Witch, luxuriantly voiced by Pat Caroll as a zaftig, tentacled hybrid of Margo Channing and Ethel Mermen. And what's most impressive, Ariel (Jodi Benson) breathes in the currents of the deep and her eyes dilate when she's turned on. Not to mention the prince is named Erich, all of which make Little Mermaid the best example of resonant Jungian archetypal myth since The Wizard of Oz. It's universal, yet we all feel it belongs only to us, that it's about us, and that's what myth does when it's working.

2. THE SHINING 
(1980) Dir. Stanley Kubrick

This is really a 70s movie, or rather the last movie of the 70s, virtually creating the 80s to come in its molten intellectual crucible. It even has a whole documentary devoted to critics exploring myriad paranoid deconstructions. (Room 237: See: Ripped Danny's Dopey Decal, baby). The film is open to almost anything because the space of the hotel is so vast the Torrence family each falls into a separate cabin fever --no direct link to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds, which are, for our purposes, indistinguishable from reality, and from the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel... if any. They are like an iPod that must erase its current contents to connect with a new hard drive (the family name isn't 'torrents' for nothing). Danny is erased from his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack-- in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy'--can't figure out how to erase enough RAM and so is compelled to literally sever his family ties so he can reboot; Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' connection from either of the Torrance males drives her into hysterics. There's no new hard drive waiting to fill her memory, the social connection won't erase. With each new viewing she's less annoying and more genuinely heroic. (See: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror).

1. COME AND SEE
(1985) Dir. Elem Klimov

A stunning movie that changed me absolutely, left me literally trembling in awe, and yet I never want to see it again. It's just too beautiful and disturbing, taking the Munch-ish scream of Kubrick's Shining, flooring it to the ceiling and exploding through the wall of what is possible in depicting brutality and beauty at once, telling through a child soldier's eyes of Bellarus's suffering at the hands of the Nazis until it becomes a bizarre transhumanist poetry, staggering in the way it encompasses the best of Tarkovsky, Kubrick and even David Lynch and just keeps expanding from there, widening from the unfathomable horror of war wider even than insanity's parameters.

As a side note, one thing that's kind of deeply reassuring about WWII is the way the Nazis bound us to the Russians in a forced realization of our shared humanity. We knew they were human too because they felt the same soul-crushing trauma liberating the camps. There was no way not to shudder if you were human, and that bound almost the entirety of the world together in a common cause. In Come and See we are as viewers united in a similar way, watching the sparkle in this kid's eyes gradually replaced by a twisted Munch scream, something the boy and girl stars (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova) were supposedly hypnotized to be able to provide, something beyond human, a face unseen before or since in any cinema, so haunting I can't even post a pic (except for below and top, folded into collage - can you guess which face?).  Still relatively undiscovered either here or overseas, Come and See dwarfs the more highly praised Hollywood offerings of Citizen Kane and Vertigo, or at least standing rightly amongst them, at peer-level, as the crazy genius cousin, the one whose mad artistic gifts threaten to tear the fabric between history and the present, life and death, art and reality, until it's all one giant X-ray eye.

So that's the 80s. It can be summed I think in the above collage - all those crazed purple stares into camera, the rationalization for greed and monstrous evil creating itself like Escher's sketching hands.

The First Lebowski: CUTTER'S WAY (1981)

Every once in awhile a man has to pause. Every once in awhile a man has peer into the decades behind him, take a cursory flip through Leonard Maltin and wonder... is John Heard really a good actor? I mean, is he awesome? Or is he too much too late?

The question is answered the same time as you ask: do all 1970s movies involve grizzled vet loners going after corrupt power father figures like they're lone wolves growling valiantly but for naught against the dog food industry?

As Robert Evans would say, you bet all 1970's movies involved grizzled loners growling for naught against the machine. And they all must have a big crowd scene parade, or a wedding, or a political rally, or some place where they can see some willowy female figure in a white dress representing old world innocence reduced to a symbolic lamb sacrifice against the coming storm of dread and draconian soul-eating.

Perhaps a bit shaggy, CUTTER'S WAY can't make up its mind about itself: is it called CUTTER'S WAY or CUTTER AND BONE? Is it an Elmore Leonard-ish beach bum crime drama, a Vietnam vet character study, a dysfunctional buddy comedy meets California corruption tale, or an elegy to the American dream ala DEER HUNTER? A quirky tale of a small California town where everybody knows your name and you can drink right out in the open and not be arrested, ("Hey man! I have a beverage here!") it's CHINATOWN meets MIDNIGHT COWBOY divided by BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA meets NIGHT MOVES + SHAMPOO divided by THE DEER HUNTER if Roger Altman started to direct it, got replaced by William Friedkin, who turned it over to Louis Malle. It's got a little of a lot and sure it's brilliant but by 1981 these tropes scan like quirk-by- numbers. Why shoehorn the whole evil murder plot in there at all? And Heard overplays so much and acts so drunk that a murder case seems way too much for him to handle, or care about. He should be using some of that voracious animal intellect to not piss his pants, like the rest of us!

Those pants really tied the room together.

In short, this movie could be a prequel to THE BIG LEBOWSKI, wherein a younger Dude, still played by Jeff Bridges, deals with a similar conspiracy by the much saner approach of saying fuck it and going bowling, and Bridges' Vietnam vet wreck of a buddy John Goodman but a little scrawny fucker with only one leg and an eye patch. Goodman would have shaken the shit up in CUTTER'S WAY, but Heard can't do much more than ride a horse through a window. As Sam Eliot once said: "Take her easy, Dude... I know you will, too."

CUTTER takes it too easy, way too easy. It started as a project back in 1971 and if it had been released in 1972 instead of the early nine years later it would probably have been a hit and a modern classic like your DEER HUNTER and your CHINATOWN, but studio regime changes as well as trend shifts delayed its completion and release, and by 1981 people had grown a little weary of the traumatized vet loner solving a rich man's crimes and getting nothing but alienated. I remember reading some good reviews in the local newspaper when CUTTER finally did come out, but I knew even then, at 14, that the 1970s were over. We'd all had a good laugh at the HEAVEN'S GATE debacle, and grown tired of the undignified trash talking--chronicled in PEOPLE magazine--between the stars of DEER HUNTER and COMING HOME over the 1978 Oscars, with one side bashing the other over its 'demonic' portrayal of the Viet Cong and the other side bashing the other over its idealized liberal critique of Bruce Dern. One more film about a Vietnam vet disillusioned and seeking to overturn the turtle of American politics wasn't going to make us leave our sofa, not in 1981. We craved fantasy, escape, ET!!

And lo, ET was on his way, to trade us our innocence for some magic candy--like a safety class stranger--just one year after this last gasp of 1970s corruption-venting. In 1981, being disillusioned about America was universal to the point it had disappeared from notice.

And for some of us, John Heard was just too... Kevin Bacon-ish? No denying he's ferocious here and gives it 111%, but seeing the film now, long past any due date, I honestly don't know how I feel about him, or the film. All the ingredients are there and maybe that's the problem. It's like the film was given an unlimited shopping spree at the seventies' paranoia cliche' store and just had to clean the place out.

But hey, it's worth seeing some time when you're high on 1970s Vietnam-gate, and what a double bill it would make with LEBOWSKI! May I recommend an angle on which to view them, for political meta-purposes? Just have Bridges = Blue States / right brain (far out, man) and the vets (Goodman and Heard) = Red states / left brain (guns break class barriers). The corrupt power elite figure in each equals the 'real' corporate shadow puppets (Halliburton, Enron) that capitalize on the dissonance between the colors/hemispheres to steal everyone's IRA and soul. Keep this in mind and let the bowling balls and cocktails fall where they may.

The fine and trenchant blog OUT 1 reviews CUTTER here, and draws a similar Lebowski conclusion while dealing more with the plot and production of the film itself. It makes a fine double bill with this post! Tell them the Dude sent ya. I know you won't, too... you'll forget.

I know I have.

The Bleating of the Wallies

A leading scientific journal in Pakistan, The Journal of Management & Social Science,* recently published a paper titled "A New Role for the Military: Preventing Enemies from Arising-Reviving an Ancient Approach to Peace," indicating that the military application of the Transcendental Meditation technique has merit. The paper discusses how militaries worldwide could use the Transcendental Meditation® and TM-Sidhi® program, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as a non-religious and scientifically verified way to prevent war and terrorism. When used in a military context, these meditation practices are known as Invincible Defense Technology (IDT). (Medical News Today, 3/23/10)

I saw The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) last night, then read the above article this morning. Coincidence? No such thing, my man, but then why do I have the urge to read Catcher in the Rye and go into a black-op black-out with a mission to excise all traces of Ewan McGregor's annoying narrator from the film? Seriously, was TRAINSPOTTING a total fluke? Either way, I'm glad the above article shows that meditation/druggie/hippie mind tactics in the military is not necessarily just the whimsical semi-truth of a trembling yellow (as in cowardly) journalist afraid of a little LSD-spiked water. Ewan's character in the film is the kind of guy I wrote about a few years ago [Kill All Jonesers 11/10/08] in regards to needy biographers and journalists who try to absorb by proxy the glory of their subjects after said subjects are dead or disappeared, even though said subjects have or would have scoffed at them while they were alive. In my day we had many names for them: Jonesers, Wallies, nerds, and Murphs.

Sad that his wife leaves him at the film's start (and who could blame her?), our smug self-pitying freelance journalist Bob Wilton (McGregor) heads off to Iraq to prove himself a man and teach her a lesson like a sulky boy holding his breath 'til his face turns blue to get out of eating his broccoli. Not on any assignment or associated with any publication, and terribly out of place, he locks himself to the ankle of mysterious maybe-spy Lyn (George Clooney) and spends the rest of the movie being a cranky nag as Lyn tries to complete a strange shadowy mission. Bob is a real drag to ride with, whining about every little thing, refusing to believe or go along with anything Lyn says and then presuming--after the adventures are done--that he's now some kind of super op himself. Realizing at least some of what Lyn said might be true after all, Bob finally switches from neurotic to sanctimonious, determined to make sure the story is told even it shakes the government to its foundations. And um, what? Bob ranks right up there with Leo Di Caprio's little shithead in THE BEACH and MacGregor's 'poet' in MOULIN ROUGE as one of the most entitled little pishers we were ever expected to root for at the movies.

I know, I know, you wanted to love this film. So did I. Well, if you think that Ewan McGregor stating he knows nothing about Star Wars or what a "Jedi" is makes for in-joke hilarity, then yes, you'll love it. (If you don't know that McGregor played a Jedi in the last three Star Wars films that makes you extra cool in my book) In fact, that tired in-joke goes by about five times; the director wants to make sure everyone gets it, right down to grandma in the last row.

For another painful example of this movie's level of wit, when Clooney confesses he feels bad about the time he killed a goat with his mind, McGregor blurts out: "The silence of the goats!?" as if he just decided on his entry for a New Yorker cartoon caption contest. And this guy is supposed to be a journalist? Who does he write for, Highlights? Ranger Rick? Dynamite? (left)


The goats themselves are awesome, but once again the movie shows no grasp on reality. The goats are kept in a big, dark, empty shed on the military base, labeled "top secret." Now, if you know anything about animals, anything at all, you know a few dozen goats aren't going to just stand around in a dark shed for years at a time in a stifling hot desert, waiting to be discovered by a snoopy journalist. Though they've been 'de-bleated' (yikes) so don't make noise, you would still smell them a mile away, and hear them trying to kick their way out, and then they'd all die of heatstroke or the fumes of their own piled up feces, or starve to death, within days. Goats need care, yo. Meanwhile goats wander in shepherded all over the desert. Why not just buy one from a passing herdsman as needed?

It's details like this which make MEN WHO STARE similar to one of those "earthy" romantic comedies about 'ordinary' people that were clearly made by rich Hollywood kids who've never flown coach or taken a bus and had to sit back by the toilet, or gazed into the pores of the homeless while waiting in line at a bank machine.

Thank god for Jeff Bridges, then, as the film lights up whenever he's there, onscreen, abiding. Maybe he's never had a 'real' job either, but he's The Dude, and that makes all the difference. In one of his military pep talks (he's head of this experimental psi-ops division), he says that his recruits will learn to "see and hear everything" and to "stop talking in cliches" and live in the moment. Did you hear that last part about cliches, Ewan? You remembered it enough for a flashback but --via one of the most tired cliches of all -you remembered it scored 60s protest rock-scored montage. Better stop, children, what's that sound? It's 60s rock cliche! Barefoot servants too! Something was happening here, and what it was, Ewan is sure we'll agree, aint exactly clear. Such a brave, piercing journalistic acumen!

So, if you come to this film hoping, as I did, for a psychedelic ride into the mind of the military, man will you be disappointed. GOATS seems to side more with the annoying journalist than the psi-ops kooks, making the end result a bit like APOCALYPSE NOW if Cathy (from the comic strip) played the Captain Willard role ("Day four - the river has too many bugs, and how come the army doesn't serve cake? Wauggh!")

Most journalists are way too cool to whine every step of the way as they tag along for a story. They keep quiet or ask questions and if they do ask they don't sneer at the answers if they get them. But the times have a-changed and young men these days are, apparently, well, if not all mice, perhaps unaware of their non-mice options due to a dearth of assertive father figures. Compare the bleating of McGregor's hideous wally, for example, with James Stewart in REAR WINDOW, trying to explain life in a combat zone to Grace Kelly. She might be all fashionista but she's ten times the man McGregor is... cuter too.

One plus about the film is the way it cleverly oscillates between believing in the stories of these psychedelic warriors and realizing most of it is perhaps bullshit. Any good shaman knows that all  rituals are 50% smoke and mirrors. That's not to hide the fact it's all "just" bullshit--it's not just, Clarice--but to make room in the imaginations of those present for true weirdness to manifest. 

But in the end it's okay if it's bullshit, because it's all bullshit, which is to say, there is no no exit from any of the bullshit, and no is, and no no, and therefore all is yes, which mean all is love, so love is nothing and nothing is everything.

All of this helps rope off a cordon of disbelief that allows visualization to occur. i.e. the way a child can use a dude with a sheet over his head going "Boo" as a screen on which to project real ghosts from his or her imagination, as opposed to the smartass brat who says "that's just a man with a sheet on his head." Who is more the fool, the one who thinks he's a sucker to imagine the ghost, and so has no fun, or the one who can see what may not be there, can project his ideal ghost on the sheet, and get willingly scared accordingly?

What's the point of doubting and dismissal as a lifestyle choice? And where does our projection of fantasy end and 'reality' begin? Who gets to decide where that border lies?

The flimflam aspect of psychic power creates a split which allows real supernatural events to exist--and if they exist for the subject then they exist in the universe --that's what quantum mechanics proves, o dour devotee of wallie normality, clinging terrified to the sterilized feet of dogmatic science! Rise now and embrace the pseudo-shaman... Within you and without you are the same you!

What I meant, man, is that you should see this movie, but just once, for Clooney and Bridges. They are two acting tricksters who "get" the cosmic truths behind the quackery and who each bump the film up a star.

But to reiterate, McGregor's 'Bob' is what we back in the semi-psychedelic 1980s used to call a "Wally," the sort of schmuck who clings onto your crew as you run with dilated pupils naked to the cosmic sea (or graveyard behind the dorms) like immortal lemmings, laughing and skipping. He shows up late, whining about being left behind, with normal-size pupils. And he goes "hey guys, wait up! Where are you going? Shouldn't you wait for Dan [another wally] to come back from class? Hey, wait up!" and then once there, in the cosmic sea graveyard with you, he refuses to join in the oceanic dissolving of egoic consciousness, and yet thinks he should still be able to hang all night and drag everybody down. Every time he frowns, crosses his arms and announces he doesn't need drugs to have a good time you can hear the whole universe groan and roll its eyes.

And eventually we all hide with the lights out and don't answer the door when he comes around. Then, one day, someone slips him a dose without his knowing it and, as J. Hoberman writes, "he loses a smidge of his smirk." (Village Voice, 11.3/09) and then thinks he's Gandhi times ten. He's King of humble without getting the irony. He becomes a mad prophet and then winds up insane, violent, arrested and --next time you see him, years later--he's become a drug counsellor, lecturing to you about how bad it is, what you're doing to yourself.

That's a wally my friend. Sound familiar? The oceanic realm has a beach crowded with them, all fretting along the lip of the void, pointing at watches, flipping out, and ranting about chromosome damage

Sigh, let's get some ice cream.