Scott Is NOT A Professional Film Critic

On Blaxploitation: The Mack (1973), Willie Dynamite (1974)

2012-01-13T04:50:00.000-08:00

The first time I realized that I've got a reasonably hip neighbor in my building? I'd say it was the time I walked past a window and caught a snatch of James Brown's "I was born in New York City on a Monday/Seems I was out shinin' shoes by Tuesday noon," from his eternally awesome soundtrack to the Fred Williamson vehicle Black Caesar. (Tragically, said neighbor turned out to be a guy rather than the cute, ironic B-movie-watching hipster slut he should have been.) Even better was the time I tried dozing off on the red line after a hard day of shuffling papers, only to find my eardrums confronted with some Deebo-from-Friday lookalike and his fucking Radio Raheem-box blasting "Brother's Gonna Work It Out" from The Mack — a moment both Negroliciously obnoxious and hey-wait-can-you-turn-that-up-a-bit? sublime.

And why would broadcasting these particular songs across five counties qualify one for reasonable hipness? Because a) it's fucking Willie Hutch and fucking "Godfather of Soul"-era James Brown and b) it's an ostensible raised fist and "As-Salaam-Alaikum" in salute to that gloriously tacky cultural artifact known as blaxploitation — the most mesmerizing accidental window onto a subculture that '70s Hollywood produced.

How best to convey the low-rent charms of blaxploitation to the uninitiated? Suffice it to say, it's the cinematic equivalent to a circa-'73 Harlem rent party where they're spinning scratchy copies of early Funkadelic and There's a Riot Goin' On and The World Is a Ghetto and Rasputin's Stash and Hustlers' Convention and Miles Davis' On the Corner all night, and you find yourself stoned and sinking ever deeper into someone's faux-leopardskin couch under a huge black velvet painting of Huey Newton or a raised fist, while junkies are nodding off on the side, and the corner preacher's giving a sermon on cleaning up the community, and black beret-wearing cats are mumbling to pimp-suited cats about gettin' their thang together, and Angela Davis-fro'ed mamas are runnin' it down on jive-ass suckas over by the turntable. And in the midst of all the ebonics and kinky 'dos and curious fashions and seething resentment that tend to come out when a particular class of black folks isn't under the microscope of a white America looking for kicks and model minorities, you're thinking to yourself: "Got-dayum, all that fried chicken with collard greens they got up in the kitchen smell good than a muuh-fugga."

Even at its flat-out worst — and this is a genre that gave us Blacula, Dolemite and seven-foot tall Negroes unleashing kung fu on a phalanx of corrupt cops — blaxploitation stands as a time capsule no Tarantinos or Robert Rodriguezes could ever reproduce, as grits-'n-greens authentic as an un-bleeped man-on-the-street interview with the specter of ghetto rage, as revealing an X-ray of black psyches during a troubling snatch of our American history as Miles Davis' autobiography or a Reconstruction-era slave narrative. There's a delirious, am-I-really-seeing-this? quality to blaxploitation's acid-trip mash-up of outrage and fuck-whitey insularity and fetishization of black "otherness." Its fumble-fingered approach to filmmaking conventions like focus and well-placed boom mikes combines with an anything-goes batter-ramming of taboos and good sense to put the "what the fuck?" in "what the fuck?" For audiences numbed on the plasticity of trillion-dollar budgets and Burbank back lots, blaxploitation films serve as yellowing Polaroids of a palpable time and place, thanks to a forced cinema verité aesthetic that often meant venturing where even TV news cameras feared to tread — and capturing some of the unvarnished essence of America's urban slums in the process.

It's a child only the Nixon-and-Soul Train '70s could have sired (after a decade-plus of across-the-tracks flirting), what with the era's thoroughly racialized pop culture and an exploitation market newly animated in the wake of R-ratings permissiveness, Deep Throat and pubic hair in Playboy. That the culture quickly abandoned its nappy-headed bastard to die on a '70s trash heap filled with Pet Rocks, Nehru jackets and "Billy, Don't Be a Hero" 45's — indeed, that the bastard only lived a good five years or so — does nothing to negate the amazing fact of its birth.

Now, whether or not The Black Gestapo or, say, Scream Blacula Scream represented a fully accurate portrayal of Tha Streetz Circa '73 is a discussion I'll leave to people more knowledgeable than myself. But despite what the critics and Spike Lee told you, blaxploitation contributed at least a handful of enduring, visceral classics to the Gritty '70s canon. (No matter how much we still insist on them using a separate drinking fountain from the one that Taxi Driver, The Last Picture Show or McCabe & Mrs. Miller uses.) And films about black folk produced and/or directed largely by well-meaning white guys would rarely — if ever — venture to within an Afro Sheen-smelling distance of the Real McCoy again.

Of course, blaxploitation is a coin whose two sides have to be considered in tandem. Yes, even the gaudiest American International Pictures attempt at taking hoary genre tropes and smearing them with burnt cork could contain moments of startling insight — the kind of self-realization you wish NWA or the Geto Boys would have stumbled upon in the midst of one of their Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song-derived porno-violence fantasias. And yet, for every genuine acknowledgement of socio-economic inequalities, for every queasy racial truth met head-on, you've essentially got a group of films that paint blacks in strict shades of Cadillac red — a cinematic movement that took outré pimps, street-corner hustlers and junkies passed out in rat-infested tenements, and crowned them the ghetto ambassadors to mainstream America.

Was blaxploitation Hollywood's gleeful perversion of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback and its stab at revolution on celluloid? Was it all just a cynical cash-in on black power and the post-civil rights urge of blacks to have their "own thang," which refused to dilute itself or take a Sidney Poitier power sander to its genitalia for the sake of white approval? Was it a "separate but equal" section of the genre landscape cordoned off for black audiences no longer satisfied with a Steve McQueen or a Clint Eastwood to cheer on?

Ask middle-class blacks old enough to have caught these films in theaters and you'll find the oeuvre of, say, Rudy Ray Moore to be the scourge of the upwardly mobile — little more than a compendium of nigger jokes paraded like fine furs for the "oohs" and "aahs" of snickering whites and "Niggroes" too ignorant to know better. They'll tell you that all these films added up to was the illusion of progress, merely the transfer of black America from the old prison of stereotypes to a new one — but since this new prison had velvet-lined bars, Thunderbird on ice and some Jet pinup girls on the walls, black folks made themselves right at home. What the blaxploitation culture locked up at the outset of the '70s, they'll tell you, was a Bobby Seale, an Eldridge Cleaver — forty years in the can, and yesterday's Black Panther has mutated into today's Snoop D-O-Double-G's and 50 Cents, all proud lifers on the plantation of the mind.

Here's the irony, though: blaxploitation films were quite well-attended by black audiences in their heyday. I'd hazard a guess that your average leisure-suited Afro-American of the Nixon-to-Ford era was well aware of the genre's spotlight on only the most sensationalistic members of the community (however authentically rendered), well aware that the success of the genre threatened to weld an iron jigaboo mask to the collective face of Black America. But that's how great the need for onscreen black heroes was — after decades of blackface and bug-eyed coonin' and shuffle-footed Uncle Tommin' and yassuh-nossuh, lawdy boss I's-a sho' 'nuff gittin' yo' dinna ready from a Hollywood cotton field stacked to its peachtrees with fat mammies and buffoonish servants or — later — safe, inoffensive Negroes reduced to scenic wallpaper in the great never-ending commercial for White American normalcy. (A question, when one considers the generally Semitic lineage of the old-school studio moguls who greenlit all this stuff: are Stepin Fetchit or Sleep 'N Eat or the Mantan Moreland manservant roles somehow better than, say, the hook-nosed caricatures in Nazi propaganda films?)

So blaxploitation came along and decided to combat all those nefarious, emasculating stereotypes with... well, stereotypes. Except, in this case, the stereotypes employed were the "good kind," i.e. the kind that make little white penises shrivel in spasms of envy, the kind that no black man would ever challenge. Thus, Shaft and Super Fly played up the black man's street cunning and lion-of-the-jungle sexual prowess that no woman could resist. Sundry Jim Brown and Fred Williamson action vehicles played up the black man's peerless masculinity — and lion-of-the-jungle sexual prowess that no woman could resist.

Symbolism much?

A kid in the Man's candy store...

Later, Coffy and Foxy Brown would tailor the formula to accommodate Pam Grier's tits and charisma but — obviously — black women aren't the perceived threat to the sanctity of white society (and white vaginas) that black men are. Grier's films fulfilled a comparatively safer, much less anarchic brand of fantasy. For white males seeking atonement by flogging themselves with the anaconda-like man-meat of the day's black action studs, the difference between Foxy Brown and watching John Shaft bed every color of the rainbow is like the difference between jerking to "ebony maids" clips on Porntube and gritting one's teeth in muted awe as Lexington Steele drills tunnels in fresh-faced Iowa runaways who resemble your sister.

And then, there's the blaxploitation subgenre known as the Pimp Film. "Look at Tyrone, unparalleled in his ability to bust a smooth rap on the ladies," crowed these chronicles of the World's Oldest Profession. "Watch how the sheer power of his total mental seduction can instantly bring out the natural whore in any woman — especially a white one — and have her doing the ever-lovin' hell out of thangs Daddy never thought possible." And a sea of Afros nodded a collective "right onnnn," bathed in the flickering images of woman-hate wrapped in threads loud enough to suggest a Liberace Appreciation Society in the heart of America's ghettos.

The Mack (1973, dir. Michael Campus) — saluted with an impromptu Leonard Maltin blurb in the middle of True Romance, as prayed to in the church of hip-hop as De Palma's Scarface — stands as the quintessential pimp film, perhaps the jewel of the funky, nap-encrusted blaxploitation crown. Max Julien's Goldie floats like a saturnine king through the streets of post-riots Oakland — his turf, his territory, the place where his corral of hussies on the make seduces its way into the pockets of one dumb cluck after the next. His fellow hustlers flaunt their existence to a world that's shut off all ports to traditional means of recognition, and they do it in everything from craps games to shoeshines, barking loud enough to keep up the neighborhood. Goldie, though, is a sleepy-eyed wolf — easing his way into a room, taking the full measure of a scene before he's uttered a word. You never see him coming. He's as affectless when vowing, fresh out of prison, to become the baddest pussy peddler the ghetto's ever seen as he is when setting out on a bus for parts unknown, with his empire in tatters and the stench of a few corpses nipping at his heels. In between, we get a sort of greatest-hits skimming-over of just what it takes to earn a Player of the Year trophy.

And what it takes is purring with sugar on your tongue as you gaze at a naïve rich girl like an only girlfriend on Valentine's Day and ask her if she's ready to go straight to the top. It takes becoming a psychiatrist and a hypnotist all in one — digging into a woman's subconscious to pull out her childhood dream of opulence and security, then holding it out to her as if it were a glass slipper you'd been carrying in your back pocket all this time. It takes tapping into every women's masochistic daddy complex with a very clear, very firm sense of direction: you're under my protection, my tutelage — you're mine. And in return, you'll do as I ask or I'll leave you where I found you. It means testing a woman to see how much of what she's telling you is lies — is she willing to steal for you, work herself to a nub for you, do anything for you? Can she be taught, trained, molded? Is her love for real? It means peering into their starry little eyes and telling them every lie they've wanted to hear most.

So far, he's no different — in spirit — from any man who takes that roll of the dice and sets his heart and his sanity down on the blackjack table of male-female relations. Only Goldie, like all dedicated pimps, has no heart — at least, none he's willing to gamble with. When his women make the mistake of thinking that they're friends and they come blubbering up to his car with a sucker's tale about how some crazed john made off with all their money, Goldie's jaw sets, his eyes go hard and black like a shark's and he gives them the only sympathy they're going to get from him: "Get back out there and get me my money." When one of his stable flouts the established rules of ho' conduct, he resigns himself to what he has to do — "put a foot to that ass" — even if there is the whisper of reluctance in his voice. (The closest we see him come to "checkin' a bitch" adds up to little more than him grabbing one by the arms and telling her to cool out: glimmer of Goldie's humanity or crafty narrative elision?)

It's in spite of Goldie's reluctance that he's the pimp he is: learning to put one's soul on ice, to see the world in dollar signs, to put that Almighty Dollar Bill above life itself — that's a constant vow one makes, and it's renewed with every glance at oneself in the mirror, every decision, every day spent in "the game." That's a potential future you've shut a coffin lid on, a relinquishing of the better, undoubtedly poorer person you could have been — a hell of a cost to pay for a taste of the good life. And those who pay the highest costs make damn sure they get the merchandise. That code of the street takes precedence over all emotions, all moral concerns, whatever vestiges of your smothered-but-still-breathing humanity you've got moaning muffled pleas from the trunk of your tricked-out El Dorado. It's the semblance of jungle law that keeps the animals in their places, keeps the hounds of impending chaos from snapping forward at any moment. Allow it to be chipped away — just the tiniest bit — and everyone gets devoured. And you're back to those cold cuts and that filth.

Little wonder, then, that the pimp morphed into such a ghetto folk hero, the patron saint of men at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder where the only thing that trickles down is shit. Especially at the time of blaxploitation's flowering, black men in toto lacked both the education and the employment opportunities of their white counterparts — two things that absolutely determine one's financial standing. What better fantasy for a man emasculated by his inability to satiate women's materialism than Goldie or Willie D — niggas so cool, they got bitches bringing them money? What better fantasy for a man unable to ply women with the cars and furs and baubles that other guys use to score the kind of pussy he can only dream about? What better psychic revenge for someone unable to assert his manhood in a culture that idolizes prosperity — a culture where real men aren't measured in inches, they're measured in net worth?

Willie Dynamite (1974, dir. Gilbert Moses) takes the expected crime-is-just-the-dark-side-of-American-business logic — a justification used by everyone from mafiosi to Lil' Pee Wee slangin' rocks down on the "ave" — and proceeds to bitch-slap us with it until we're seeing stars and stripes. We get a sequence of Willie's seasoned thoroughbreds reeling in horny old goats at a Shriners' convention: "The price of meat has gone up," his tallest pinch of brown sugar announces, while a financial analyst on the TV chirps about boom years for the business sector. We get Martha Reeves and her theme song — "Some say his business is cold and a crime" — with its churchy ebullience over percolating horns leaving little doubt as to where our former Vandella stands on the matter. We watch Willie's newest girl Pashen (that's "Passion" to you L7's) as Willie (Roscoe Orman, the future Gordon on Sesame Street, no less) convinces her that she's little more than an affordable, mass-produced hunk of metal and rubber — an easy ride, right? — because, just like the assembly lines of GM, Ford or Chrysler, "Willie's comin' through."

Willie attends a counsel of his fellow hustlers at the behest of Bell (Roger Robinson), an eccentric near-diva of a mack given to intense pronunciations of words like "tight" and "vision," a guy for whom the term "flamboyance" is like an old pair of swim trunks you've outgrown: it barely covers the basics. Naturally, the counsel exists as a sort of board meeting for black-market executives, with primo blow and fur-lined velvet in lieu of coffee and Brooks Brothers suits. (The scene itself is a veritable Sistine Chapel of B-movie outrageousness.) Bell wants all the pimps in "the Organization" to agree to a slicing of the pie: each hustler gets his own designated area to work, as opposed to squabbling over territory and the resultant saturation of some markets while others go underserved. Willie bristles at the idea that lesser talents might be allotted a piece of the swanky hotel turf that he's cultivated for his girls; he bristles at the thought of limiting his potential, of padding his pockets on a curve so that the marginally gifted might catch up to the top one percent. He likes the competition, the Darwinian order of things. "I thought we were all capitalists," our pimp Republican admonishes.

Like The Mack, Willie Dynamite concerns its hero's struggle to keep his Cadillac empire from caving in despite the weight of the various forces bearing down on top of it: Bell, peeved that Willie won't play ball and share the wealth, the obligatory pair of cops who hound Willie from first breath in the morning to last breath at night. Add to that this film's version of the "conscience of the community": Cora (Diana Sands in her final role), a former hooker turned social worker who visits Pashen in the slammer to try to turn her toward the light, and vows to have Willie and his King Tut hats standing on the bread line, with the help of her D.A. boyfriend (blaxploitation and black sitcom fixture Thalmus Rasulala).

Willie Dynamite takes the pimp mythology and strips it of whatever scant political context The Mack tried to drape around it — there's nothing here as shot through with the rage of the hungry as Goldie cutting short a reminiscence of childhood poverty to jump up and confront his own gaunt image in the mirror; nothing as forthright about its own contradictory impulses as the tête-à-tête staged between Goldie and his brother, a Huey Newton-style activist dedicated to cleaning up the neighborhood. ("Nobody's closing me out of my business," Goldie assures him.) For that matter, there's nothing of Willie's square-offs with the po-po that carries the raw frisson of Goldie and his pal Slim (a livewire Richard Pryor) as they face down the barrel of a shotgun and a "run, nigger, run" from the pair of corrupt detectives that's been a tick on Goldie's nuts since before he went to prison. Pryor, in particular, virtually breaks down on camera. The comedian was at the apex of his drug years here — there's a scene with Slim talking to Goldie in a bar early on, where Pryor the actor is so clearly mumbling and fidgeting on a mile-a-minute coke jag, it's like cutting into your neat little genre steak and getting a squirt of blood in your face. The suddenness of it — the reminder of the turmoil behind the finished product — is disquieting.

Willie Dynamite calls a spade a spade, though. "Being rich and black means something" is Goldie's credo to pimp by; the sweet soul tune he hums loud enough to drown out any objections while remaining all coolly exhaled chronic smoke, the proto-Snoop Dogg too laid back in the cut, too pimped-out, too West Coast to seemingly raise much of a fuss about anything. And yet, when it's down to the wire, he's a street fightin' man through and through, hurling middle-finger Molotovs at the rotted-out godhead of entrenched white authority, ultimately aligning himself with his brother's personal up-with-the-people anarchy. Willie, though, represents nothing so noble as the fattening of his own pockets — the film might as well have pulled a Patton and backdropped his "assembly line" speech with a giant fur-rimmed American flag. (And talk about a forward-thinking businessman: Willie's even got an Asian in his stable. Say what you want, but any guy who can anticipate trends at least twenty years ahead of the curve is a guy who's definitely on top of his shit.)

Where Goldie has to take that hint from an underling as to how to deal with ho' transgressions, Willie displays zero compunction about threatening Cora or giving Pashen a taste of the hand for inconveniencing him with her arrest. The cops hounding him aren't corrupt racists — or no more than was the norm for the '70s NYPD — they're a salt-and-pepper duo of Dudley Do-Rights: "good Catholic" Celli and upright Black Muslim Pointer. Pointer, in particular, makes it his mission to take Willie down — by any means necessary, natch — and, forget the law, he's got the force of the whole post-civil rights black-consciousness juggernaut behind him. ("Yeah, she's my sister," he tells Willie about a former Dynamite girl who wound up with a ticket on the O.D. Express. "She's your sister, too.")

Willie Dynamite's got a dimple in its grin, as well; a sly way with an over-the-shoulder wink where The Mack can only go all po-faced and post-high comedown on us whenever it's not lauding Goldie's scaling of the shitheap with Willie Hutch's funk symphony or typifying blaxploitation's carrying of the chitlin-circuit torch with coarse, easy comedy. (Bourgeois respectability versus "keepin' it real.") There's a running gag about Willie's pimpmobile constantly being towed away; what keeps you smiling is — naturally — the thought of a guy dressed like Willie having to share cabs or take public transportation with us regular schlubs. It's the dressing-down of a character for whom appearance is a declaration of identity; the same impulse that made Jules and Vincent going from black suits to volleyball wear so amusing in Pulp Fiction. Willie gets hauled in on a bullshit suspicion-of-armed-robbery charge and — his priorities being what they are — he launches into a flight of pique over a roomful of doughy precinct cops having the audacity not to recognize his coat as thousand-dollar lambskin. (He's like the old lady harrumphing "Well, I never!" in a Don Rickles bit.)

Cora accosts Willie's harem while he's away; she punctures their pathetic illusions about the true worth of the cheapjack wigs and dresses he keeps them in before breaching the idea of them starting their own union. It's a bitch-please reality check sandwiched with sisters-are-doin'-it-for-themslves fist-pumping that kicks out the high horse from underneath the girls only to catch them as they fall; the same earth-mama, food-for-the-soul psychology trip Sands laid on privileged white boy Beau Bridges in Hal Ashby's excellent (and criminally underseen) The Landlord. I always get a kick out of Willie threatening to report his corrupt attorney to the Bar Association or his deadpanning to a cop who wonders how a pimp knows so much about the ins and outs of the law: "I just watch Ironside."

Interestingly, Willie's pimp counsel scene, or the much-parodied Player's Ball sequence in The Mack, lay bare the extent to which the bad-ass black-buck flesh merchants of the American gutter prided themselves on their adoption of female vanity and behavioral tics. (Of course, we're talking about a culture of men raised by mothers, aunts and grandmothers; men who've had to cobble together an idol of manhood in the absence of actual fathers and viable male role models.) With their penchant for furs and jewelry and meticulously maintained perms, indeed, with their inability to go more than five steps into a cock-of-the-walk without checking to make sure their hair isn't out of place — to say nothing of the insta-violence sparked by hairline affronts to the wrong man's ego — it's high comedy that the pimp has left such a chokehold on the black male imagination.

We get scenes of our heroes dismissing challenges to their domain — Willie by waving the little palm cannon he keeps strapped next to his balls, Goldie by city dumpster, sack filled with live rats, hot dose of battery acid or a good old stick of dynamite where the barbecue ought to go. But these pimps aren't hardened killers first and foremost (that's what their henchmen are for, after all), they're preening dandies fresh from gossiping down at the corner hair salon — as reliant upon a distaff gift of gab to ward off those who might encroach upon their territory as they are to sweet-talk women into a life of sexual commodification. And while their ladies venture forth into a ruthless urban night to break their backs and bring home that bacon, our Goldies and Willie D's sit back, cleaning their nails and finding new things to complain about. (Rapper Kurupt: "Bitch nigga/You more of a bitch than a bitch")

Between the two of them, I'd give the nod to The Mack. Like the rest of its colored-section ilk, The Mack took shit — utter lack of polish, a shoot-on-the-fly aesthetic dictated by non-existent budget and only a few weeks to capture it all — and turned it into salade de merde. All of ghetto Oakland’s a stage in the film, and all the real-life pimps, card sharks, drug lords and assorted hangers-on who populate the edges of it a rather fascinating bunch of players. Oakland at the time of The Mack was a war zone fraying fast in the tug-of-war between the Black Panthers and lords of the underworld like drug-runner Frank Ward, Jr. and his brothers. Ward's protection made it possible for Campus and his crew to go where they needed for the sake of The Mack's authenticity and the production repaid him in kind: not only does Ward pop up during a scene in a barbershop and later, during the Players' Ball, but his is the first face we see — via posthumous tribute card — before the film proper even begins. (Ward was gunned down not long after filming was completed.)

Courtesy of director Michael Campus' documentary background, what we get is a roach's-eye view of the pool halls and scuzzbag bars and motel-rooms-by-the-hour where card games and the "what's happ'nin'" of everyday jive constantly flinch under the threat of impending violence (as sudden and casual as in a Scorsese film), where portly white men meet with black flesh merchants to sign tacit social covenants at the nexus of a black hooker’s secretion-slicked thighs, where "the underworld" winds up a fairly nebulous term for pimps and drug runners and hustlers who exist so openly, so semi-officially, as to be the mayors by default of whatever block they happen to claim.

Of course, that last point has been latched onto as an example of the film’s supposed critique of the civil rights movement: i.e. y'all bougie niggas done got a few lil' crumbs thrown y'all way and you done made some token-minority inroads into the suburbs and into higher-paying jobs, but you left us in the ghetto behind with cops who look the other way and politicians who don't give a damn and our kids with so few choices, such little hope, it's inevitable they'll end up turning for direction to Ray-Ray the hustler — a success in the only kind of business enterprise that's truly open to them. Campus, though, being the kind of white director who wouldn't dare impose something as gauche as a privileged white morality onto the proceedings, refuses to editorialize or contextualize what his cameras pick up. There's not much why behind the what in The Mack — predictably, like the culture it documents, the film figures it can spout a few bromides about institutional racism and growing up poor, point its fingers at a few corrupt cops, and we'll fill in the rest: "Yes, black men, due to systemic injustice and lack of opportunity, you moved in to take over the one field in American society where you had legendary primacy over all others: the sex game. Had we been in your shoes, we'd have exploited our sisters and ignored the murderous irony of it, as well."

It's a deal with the Hollywood devil: you watch these films and you ignore the implicit endorsement of their protagonists' exploit-others-because-you've-been-exploited-yourself ethos. You gloss over — as these films do — that psychological divide between the reverence that Goldie and Willie show their sainted mothers and the ice-veined capitalism they reserve for the rest of the female gender. You overlook the fact that two of Willie's girls get sliced up by rival strumpets and the emphasis isn't on them, it's on the pangs of long-buried (or newly discovered?) conscience in Willie. You forgive the way that The Mack spends all of its narrative capital on Goldie's attempts to Get Out The Game and leaves not a penny for the toll taken on the women actually going out and selling — nay, renting — their bodies. (Or, to paraphrase Jon Stewart after Three Six Mafia performed "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" at the Oscars: if it's hard out here for a pimp, shit, imagine how his hoes feel.)

The look of The Mack suits the story, suits the genre — during some sequences, it looks as if the film were decaying as it passed through the camera. It lends the film instant relic status, and that's absolutely as it should be. I don't want The Mack all spruced up and de-artifacted and brought into the present day, slapped down on a nice scratch-proof Blu-Ray for people to watch on their flat screens and impress their Aunt Martha with. I want to see the age of it, that funky dashiki-pattern '70s datedness. I want the proof of that particular print having rotted and molded away in some poorly ventilated attic over an auto garage or a rib shack in the middle of the Bronx (or wherever else the studio keeps the "second-rate" titles like this one).

Give me specks of dirt, give me faded color with that yellowish tinge, give me mono sound with no life or fidelity, take the film print out somewhere and run it between the thighs of the first spazzed-out crack-whore teen runaway you can hire for ten minutes' worth of alley work. Let me see matted coils of greasy pubic hair lapping at the edges of the frame as the film clatters and pops and threatens to come apart right there in the projector. Let today's would-be macks with no sense of historical irony see: this is a Dead Sea Scroll, a fossil from an ancient civilization.

On Pinky Violence & Japanese Sexploitation: Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl (Konketsuji Rika) (1972)

2012-01-05T23:26:00.000-08:00

directed by Kô Nakahira
starring Rika Aoki, Kazuko Nagamoto,
Masami Souda, Michi Nono

Make a drinking game out of the horrors that teen bad-girl Rica endures at the hands of men in this film, and you'll wind up dead from alcohol poisoning by the thirty-minute mark. Studio logo fades then — bam — she's spawned from the rape of her Japanese mother by an American G.I., she's walking in on her kept-woman mommy doing the work that puts ramen on the table (and groaning for "more!"), she's having her own teenage virginity raped away by the same lecherous pig she caught pounding Mommy, she's being accosted in a bar by some (no doubt) rape-eyed lust monkey and shish-ka-bobbing his hand in response. It's enough to make you hack off your own penis and donate it to some poor kid in a third-world leper colony.

To hear '70s exploitation films tell it, though, we men had quite a bit to be ashamed of. Over in the 'hood, we hooked Pam Grier's little sister on smack, then told Pam to get down and crawl like the black trash that she was before tying her up and leaving her for dead. In Roger Corman's Philippines, we kept the fairer sex chained up in our stinking, rat-infested jungle prisons, forced them into back-breaking labor under the merciless heat of the sun, tortured them when they wouldn't obey and then watched, smirking, as they turned their frustrations on each other in vicious catfights to the death. We stalked beautiful lady writers all alone at their country cabins. We turned porcelain-skinned waifs into deaf-mutes prowling the streets of New York in nun's habits. We kidnapped a concert-bound hippie, violated her, then snuffed her out like a solitary bar match before staying the night at her parents' house — and worst of all, we hee-hawed our way through a badly shot Ingmar Bergman reenactment to do it.

As a gender reflected in the warped mirror of ye olde grindhouse, we didn't just unfurl our big, veiny rape appendages and machine-gun women's guts with our bitter seed; we injected them with our inherent moral savagery, the birthright bequeathed to us by our Injun-slaughtering, slave-owning, land-conquering forefathers. It wasn't enough that we men had to maim and shoot and bomb each other, from the rice paddies of the 'Nam to the revisionist plains of Peckinpah's Old West. We had to bring the violence home to our neighbors' wives and daughters, turning the fair maidens of our own cozy American backyard into cinder-eyed vengeance zombies — debauched parodies of man's animal imperative. Oh, that judge-and-jury frontier justice we admire so much coming from the holster of a Clint Eastwood or a Charles Bronson? Let's see how "give 'em hell, Harry" we are when it's coming from a rape victim with some artfully exposed cleavage and a sawed-off aimed at the family jewels.

Of course, Japanese cinema had its own gleefully disreputable take on the heart of disenchantment beating beneath the female breast. Enter "pinky violence" flicks like Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl. Essentially, the genre was an offshoot of the pinku eiga (or "pink films") of the Sixties and the formula was quite simple: softcore nudies mated hard and sloppy with the revenge flick, digested through an old-world patriarchy that viewed deviation from the geisha archetype as titillating heresy, and then splatter-shat onto theater screens in a fevered stab at propping up a moribund Japanese film industry. To summarize the backs of a thousand video boxes: a lone woman, wronged by men, takes up sword and proceeds to slice the offending parties like so much sashimi.

Granted, this is Japan: home of schoolgirl panties in vending machines, tentacle rape hentai and porn videos where drenching a whimpering trollop in a bukkake circle of piss takes decided preference over actual sexual intercourse. So the usual '70s exploitation ingredients — rape, tits at the drop of a hat, rape, vengeance at all costs, abattoir-crude violence, rape, adorably low-grade special effects, rape, the barest of bare-bones character motivation, rape, utter howlers in the dialogue department, rape — get served up omakase in a bewildering kaleidoscope of juxtapositions straight out of Nutsville. (Or, rather: a land where mushroom-cloud fallout forever altered the genetics of basic storytelling.) Call it Kung Fu meets Yakuza meets The Samurai meets Women in Prison meets the teen delinquent film meets an endless parade of easily dispatched henchmen meets badly lip-synched musical routines by adorable Jap nymphs who'll probably have their clothes ripped off in the next scene by grinning baddies with transparently dubbed Dr. Evil laughs. Top the whole Frankensteinian concoction off with a gallon of pinkish goop for stage blood and run through it about a dozen times with a nice, sharp wakizashi. Then, garnish with an extra dollop of rape. Bon appétit.

Accordingly, Rika Aoki stabs, kicks and skulks her way through Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl like the fantasy of every pervy old businessman who's ever paid a prostitute to kick him in the balls or shit on his chest. Aoki's baby fat and baby face tell us she's an honest-to-God teenager here, caged like a go-go-booted tiger within Kô Nakahira's occasionally masterful 'Scope compositions. She's every teenage babysitter a man's wanted to diddle on the couch while the wife's upstairs — a pouty little defiance cocktail with a twist of spite; goth-chick sullen with the beady, distrusting eyes of a street cat that's unused to human contact. Page one of the script might well have read: "Rica, 17. Womanly finesse rising from an evaporating pool of clumsy jailbait insouciance." And nothing — neither Meryl Streepy "thespian instinct" bullshit nor the self-protecting distance that a real actress might have applied — could have better embodied that.

Is Aoki's performance is a particularly good one, then? Well, no. In both appearance and acting skill, she comes off as if the producers had yanked her from the street moments before filming. (Indeed, she was a first-timer who — if the internet is to be believed — fell into a black hole after completing the other two films that make up the Rica trilogy.) It's as if, rather than give her direction, Nakahira simply shouted out each situation from behind the camera, trusting her to pull up the feral rage he needed from her life's experience as a comely lass all too accustomed to velvet-voiced men in suits with their easy promises and talk of "modeling" while they size her up like the day's fish. (Feminists call it the Every Woman Is An Actress Theory.) Perhaps, she was aware of — on some level, peeved by — whatever element of personal exploitation there was in casting her as a beleaguered action heroine who shivers through a blizzard of soul-crushing indignities and spends at least a third of the film flashing wine-hued Amerasian nipplage at all and sundry.

There's a story here, somewhere — something to do with Rica busting up a prostitution ring and saving members of her girl gang who have been kidnapped by yakuza planning to ship them off to service American G.I.'s in Vietnam. Per its threadbare genesis and fast-food intentions, though, that's merely the clothesline Nakahira uses to hang one camp-yet-exemplary pulp setpiece after the next; outsized moments of cartoon bad-assery, every one of them. One doesn't take the mechanics of an expertly sketched plot away from this film, what one puts on instant mental recall is Rica strutting into the lair of a fearsome yakuza to drop at his feet the stillborn baby that resulted from him raping her friend. Or Rica clawing said yakuza like a rabies-infested alley cat during the resulting brawl. Or Rica bedding the yakuza-employed pickpocket who's been sent to kill her for having witnessed the theft of some secret documents, only to hack off his forearm and toss it at his stunned superior seconds later. Or Rica blowing up your stilted wedding with a basket of firecrackers, then riding off on a motorbike with her own theme music on the radio. Or Rica simply being Rica, knockin' Japan out with those American thighs. ("You have a big butt," the only good man in the entire movie tells her.)

Rica bounces in and out of the girls' reformatory, always finding time to roll around a dirty floor with her girl-gang nemesis Reiko. When a thrown knife during one of their brawls results in the (hilarious) death of the reformatory's warden, followed by Reiko's escape, Rica sets out to capture her in order to prove her innocence. Somehow along the way, she runs into bad-girl buddy Hanako — like Rica, spawned from the union of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., though the brown shoe polish on Hanako's face tells us her daddy was black. Hanako's trying to run off with her beau Jimmy, a black soldier (this time, an actual black actor) who ditches impending service in Vietnam only to be tracked down and shot in his back by MP's. What all this has to do with Rica's one-woman vigilante mission is beyond me — or rather, I forget. Nakahira throws pure plot at you — one breathless, comically busy development after another — until it ceases to matter. The end result: your brain shuts off, your giggle reflex goes through the roof, you develop a sudden desire to hang out in Little Tokyo and pick up Japanese girls who'll squeal like skewered rats from the slightest bit of penetration.

If a Kubrick or Woody Allen film is that tasteful blonde you marry and have kids with and proudly claim your allegiance to, then Rica and its ilk are the fat Mexican chick you bang "on the down low," the one who jets over with no questions asked after a last-minute text at 11:30 on a Friday night. Ten minutes in the door, and she's got your eyes rolling back from the kind of expert blowjob that pretty girls just don't give — straight, simple and right down to business. Sure, keep her a secret from your friends, keep her segregated from your "official" movie collection under a pile of Emanuelle DVD's. Just don't deny that the little slut delivers.

Worth a Thousand Words: Emanuelle, Queen of Sados a.k.a. Emanuelle's Daughter (Greece/Cyprus, 1979, dir. Elia Milonakos)

2012-01-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

No, I haven't changed. I'm as beholden as ever to the aesthetic pleasures of naked lady flesh on the browner end of the spectrum — especially that belonging to '70s Euro-sexploitation goddess Laura Gemser, only the most delectable woman to walk the fucking planet in the Polyester Decade.

Still, a frozen day in hell is the day I'll spend time attempting an actual straight-faced review of a goddamn Emanuelle flick. Read social context into Miss Gemser's mocha brown nips and prominent ribcage all you want — sometimes, inanely plotted late-night Skinemax fare is just inanely plotted late-night Skinemax fare.

(Special Roman Polanski perv-points, though, for the camera's shameless lingering upon the soapy wet body of the underage girl who "plays" Emanuelle's stepdaughter.)

Worth a Thousand Words: Dressed to Kill (USA, 1980, dir. Brian De Palma)

2011-11-17T02:17:00.000-08:00

Worth a Thousand Words: Sex and Fury (Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô) (Japan, 1973, dir. Noribumi Suzuki)

2011-11-14T09:51:00.000-08:00

Shampoo (1975)

2011-11-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

The Tragedy of a Dildo, in Three Acts

directed by Hal Ashby

starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie,

Goldie Hawn, Jack Warden, Lee Grant

"You think George is a fairy?"
"Well. I don't know for sure. He's a hairdresser."

Of course, that's the crux of Shampoo's comedy: the Beverly Hills hairdresser who's only the most put-upon pussy magnet in existence — no hunter but a mere fawn too accommodating to bolt from the crosshairs, using a scythe of finely honed flakiness to hack his way through the jungle of outstretched hands pawing at his jeans.

Beatty and co-writer Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Last Detail) lit their Don Juan stogie with a spark from The Country Wife, a Restoration-era romp about a man trusted to be alone with all the wives of the village since he was thought to be impotent. Here, "impotence" is translated as "suspected to be gay because he makes his living in a field dominated by mincing queens." Naturally, that's a nudge-and-a-wink to a mid-'70s public all too familiar with tales of pussyhound Warren Beatty's Tinseltown exploits. Irony-wise, it's the central conceit meant to keep us chuckling with delight as that rascal George flits from Lee Grant's married rich-cunt to shit-for-brains model Goldie Hawn to Grant's bitter Lolita of a daughter (Princess Leia!) and back to old flame Julie Christie, all under the nose of a town too busy smoothing its moustache and checking its toupee in the mirror to notice.

Shampoo's no wacky bedroom farce from the bell-bottomed-'n-shag-carpeted '70s, though. Beatty, being the politically committed granddaddy-to-today's-Clooneys-and-Penns that he is, was no more interested in providing sitcom yuks than he was in allowing us a glimpse of Julie Christie's tits. He and Towne set the story in 1968, on the eve of Richard Nixon's election to high office — and with a film made six years later, when the evening news was regularly peeling back the jowls of Tricky Dick's White House to show the maggots gnawing on the rancid, mottled corpus underneath, you'd better believe there's Intended Political Allegory in these here hills. Election Day '68, in Shampoo's eyes, was The Shot That Killed the Sixties — less a blast from a bolt-action rifle than the splash of a '67 Olds plummeting off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, the tattered carcass of an era to be laid at the feet of the "Silent Majority" Nixon voters who pumped it full of buckshot — sure — but thrown in the faces of the peaceniks and politicians-for-change who were too busy injecting sexual and emotional hypocrisy into the culture at large to bother stopping the hunters.

If all that sounds like a tall order for a movie about a manwhore who motorbikes around town with a blow dryer holstered on his hip, then rest assured: Shampoo definitely fumbles the delivery. Of ultimately minimal value are the Spiro Agnew cameos during moments of sexual largesse or the blonde chippie in a brightly-colored Nixon-Agnew hat. (Would one have seen such a thing on the streets of Beverly Hills at the height of the "Love Generation"?) Besides, Towne and Beatty shoot easy sympathy for the Buffalo Springfield crowd in the foot with the fact that the sole likeable character happens to be Lester Karp, the Nixon-voting (and almost ritually cuckolded) businessman played by Jack Warden. So forget politics. Just enjoy Beatty himself, the Olivier of playing who-me? innocent like no other actor of his era. His George Roundy is the cad you hate not to love, sweetly dumb in the lingering mist of a childlike naïveté, the bumbling fool (Beatty's forte, as in Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Ishtar, Bulworth), yet somehow still getting away with things nice boys don't even think about.

If I've said nothing about the film's director, Hal Ashby (whose work I tend to love), it's because George Roundy is clearly Beatty's ultimate auteur statement, his most plainly personal character. Beatty essentially co-directed the film, but a viewer with zero knowledge of that, or of his career-long penchant for smacking foreheads with directors over creative control, could glean that fairly easily. Those of us who consider ourselves familiar with the Beatty legend look for a little piece of it in all of his performances. Beatty is — was — a star, first and foremost. We wouldn't want him to disappear behind peculiar accents or the mustache of a railroad baron from 1896 anymore than he'd be able to. We want to sit back and grin during a scene with him and Julie Christie, as we wonder if a lovers' quarrel in his trailer that morning led her to tear into him with a bit more intensity than the script called for. All the characters he's chosen to inhabit — as well as the ways in which he's chosen to inhabit them — have been either a winking embrace or a chuckling repudiation of his image as The Guy Who's Banged Every Starlet in Hollywood. And Shampoo manages to be both.

Then again, to paraphrase Nixon himself (via Oliver Stone): when you look at George Roundy, you see what you'd like to be; when you look at Lester Karp, you see what you are. And if you're standing in Lester's wingtips, then, of course George is a fairy — that's what people say about guys like him, isn't it? Obscenely self-assured pretty boys with the audacity — the arrogance — to sample the wares of multiple needy, neurotic women rather than chain themselves to a relationship with just one? Men who, by dint of the massive balls they've cultivated, actually live out the fantasies that the socially inept and supremely unconfident jerk themselves to sleep with every night? Men who women seem to just throw it at? And when they do, it's usually right after having their dinners paid for by one of those hommes sans game who poses as the ultimate nice guy — right? — the type who thinks that keeping his car radio tuned to the smooth-R&B station and professing disdain for the Neanderthal ways of the rest of the male species will somehow provide that magical St.-Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus moment for some skank-in-a-bar who's spent the last four years' worth of Friday nights getting her cervix batter-rammed by bad boys who choke and don't call back.

As if devoting one's time and energy to bedding various women — not to mention, all the messy intimacy with female genitalia contained therein — were somehow undeniable proof that what said "player" really craves is another man; never mind that. A guy like George Roundy is too smooth to be straight — please, God, let him be gay! After all, with guys like George on the market, life for the Lester Karps of the world means being stuck in line with a dozen other schlubs cradling ground chuck past its sell-by date — lucky if they get a moment's worth of eye contact from the checkout girl — while George breezes out with all the filet mignon in the place. And half of it probably jumped off the butcher's block and flung itself into his cart — that son-of-a-bitch.

So, George has what the Oprah set would term "commitment issues." Well, as they say, one is often a product of one's environment. And take a look at George's environment: why would he settle down with any of these women, or grant them a sliver more consideration than he gives to the necessity of financial statements when applying for a bank loan? Lee Grant's Felicia is so unblinkingly self-centered in the face of propriety, such a turban-headed savage along the Western shores of dignity, that she fucks George mere minutes after he's dipped his wick in her teenage (underaged?) daughter. Said daughter (Carrie Fisher — absolutely no tape on the breasts here, Mister Lucas) oozes so much slime-green resentment for her that she drags Mommy's plaything into her pen, then blithely tosses it back — still covered in her saliva and teeth-marks. Goldie Hawn's Jill is such a whining, approval-craving ninny — cowering and crying for George at every little bump in the night ("I thought I heard shots!") — that mild-mannered George blatantly compares her to a child during one of those when-are-we-having-kids conversations that every guy dreads. (And even then, she's too dumb to be at least mildly offended.) When their climactic confrontation finally occurs, Jill's been so willfully blind that you're rooting for George to just up and dick-slap her with the truth, ready to jump up and cheer with pumped fist at his infamous "Let's face it... I fucked 'em all" speech, as if it were Elliott taking off on his bike in E.T.

Even the woman for whom he feels something closest to the L-word — Julie Christie's Jackie — scarcely bothers to hide the fact that she rents her snatch to the highest bidder, that she's with Lester for his money, that she's fully aware of his marriage to "that cunt" Felicia and cares not a whit about diving under the table to blow George — in full view of Lester, in full view of Felicia — during the returns-watching function that serves as the film's centerpiece.

In the middle of this crazed, Caligula-esque circus of me, George's "I don't fuck anybody for money, I do it for fun" rings out like the clarion call of sanity — the lone dinghy of true innocence in waters not nearly as pure as professional Sixties idealists would have you believe. It also sounds like the cold, unadorned truth. Say what you will about your local manwhore — at least he fucks for the sheer human pleasure of sliding off another pair of panties grown clammy with the dew of excitement (part of nature's programming, anyway), not for money or social status or career advancement or a good table at Spago's.

"Maybe it means I don't love 'em...

nobody's gonna tell me I don't like 'em very much..."

George is a guy who spends all his time around women — certainly, he must like them, right? Except that, in the real world, the biggest misogynists tend to be those who "score" the most, not (as is commonly assumed) bitter nerds with their dicks indefinitely stationed in Palm Springs. Anyone who's ever spent ten minutes of "conversation" time with your friendly neighborhood suburban jock can attest to this — get him alone, away from the future Playmates he's taken for granted since puberty, and "Love, Tenderness and Respect" ain't the name of the tune he sings. Of course, it might have something to do with the fact that getting a higher degree of "action" entails being around more women. And being around more women entails a greater awareness of the vagaries of the fairer sex — i.e., looming insecurities, the unceasing need for validation, the constant head games, the shallow assessments of what constitutes a good time, the shallow assessments of other people (especially, other women), the tantrum-throwing when she hasn't gotten her way, endless prattling about the most trifling minutiae of her daily existence.

Or, even less charitably: the more success one has getting into women's salty little panties, the more one realizes what great aphrodisiacs things like money and status really are. (How the fuck else could Jabba the Huts like Biggie Smalls or personality-free dorks like Tiger Woods actually get laid?) And once one tends to chance upon this gradual dawning of the consciousness, one tends to note one's increased resentment and overall lack of respect for the pretty little things one gets into bed — even at the height of one's carnal success, even as one fields whispered declarations involving the L-word, even (well, especially) as she hobbles out of your apartment with a dislodged uterus, wearing your fingerprints around her throat like a Girl Scout merit badge. (Or so I've heard.)

Beatty soft-pedals this aspect of womanizing in Shampoo, much as he soft-pedaled Clyde Barrow's alleged bisexuality, much as The Parallax View soft-pedaled the U.S. government's complicity with assassinations and cover-ups, much as Bulworth soft-pedaled the high untenability of the let's-all-be-socialists-and-fuck-'til-we're-all-the-same-shade-of-gray party line. Perhaps that's an outgrowth of some George Roundy-ish need to please (if not outright seduce) every audience member who comes along. Nonetheless, Beatty was nothing if not a guy who knew about women. And, however muted, indelible truths about Being a Guy are indeed carefully nestled behind Shampoo's hedges, waiting patiently for the scavenger hunt to begin.

The Second Most Important Lesson of the film: cater exclusively to a woman's vanity and the pussy's yours. She could have a husband, two boyfriends, a secret admirer and a kid on life support — doesn't matter. Your crotch might bear the scent of half the women in the town, the wall over your bed may sport an entire season's worth of scuff marks from high heels — doesn't matter. Devote every drop of your attention to making her feel like the best-looking woman in five counties, ensure that men slip on their own drool in her wake, that she's the envy of every catty little cunt in Nordstrom's — and most assuredly, the pussy's got your name tattooed on it. Looks have precious little to do with it — tellingly, not one woman in the film comments on George's appearance. If you need her badly enough, if you make her believe beyond any shadow of a doubt that she's the only girl on the planet who can make your back arch and your toes curl and your heart pound — then, you can resemble J.J. from Good Times and you'll still be churning in her gut like bad fish.

Now, for the flip side — The Most Important Lesson of Shampoo: What Goes Up Must Come Down. Every Dog Has His Day. Venture just one day past your sell-by without the sweaty hand of a steady sweetheart clutched in yours, and you're one for the trash heap. A faint memory to bring no more than the occasional reminiscence. Ultimately, the fate of the world's George Roundys is being cast aside for a safe bet, a man who offers the stability of a steady high-end salary to keep her shoe collection healthy and growing. It's being judged for your manwhoriness by the same women who used it to their advantage when it suited their needs — when they drunk-texted you at 11:25 at night for a little impromptu wall-scuffing because they needed the comfort of the ego boost and the orgasms you reliably provided.

Eventually, George will break down to Jackie: "I don't trust anybody but you." And therein lies the tricky part. The part where it all comes back to bite you on the ass. The part where it's initially fun to be the guy they want to fuck, until it's eating a path through your guts: "What if she were my wife? Or my girlfriend, who told me she was just going out for drinks with the girls?" And then, you realize that you can't trust anyone — not the carousel of women with whom you share your living room couch, not the men like a younger version of yourself, whose incessant offers your precious lady love will undoubtedly field the second you're not around.

If George/the '60s is the dumb-blonde innocent that Beatty intended him/it to be, then Shampoo winds up with a pretty dim view of such innocence. The confrontation between George and Lester — player vs. player-hater, young vs. old, The Silent Majority vs. Hippie Commie Out to Destroy Everything We've Worked For — is where George seals his own fate as surely as the film portends the pitter-patter of the Reagan Eighties dancing a two-step to Slick Rick's "Treat Her Like a Prostitute" on his welcome mat. George's utter resentment — "How do I know what they have against you? They're women, aren't they?" — comes spilling out at last. And that ingratiating quality he's used to keep so many balls in the air is precisely what delivers the death blow here: he convinces Lester that Jackie really likes him, that it's not all about the money for her. It's a brazen lie — and it becomes the golden chariot in which Lester dashes off with Jackie into a future George could never realize.

Lester doesn't even need to have George thumped by hired goons. This kid's a flake and nothing more — too non-committal to satisfy even himself, a shiny new toy, a dildo, a ring in the jewelry section at Wal-Mart to be coveted by teenage girls who don't know any better, before they grow up and develop a sense of what their hips and curves and batting eyelashes will net them out there beyond the confines of Daddy's House. At which point, they graduate from Sex as Mere Pleasurable Activity and move into Sex as Business, Pussy as Commodity. The Market. The Adult World. In which George — with his go-nowhere plans and his charming but empty little fantasies — is but a panhandler shivering in the cold, nose pressed to the glass, watching all the fat cats and their trophy wives sipping chardonnay by the fireplace inside.

And then, you're the pathetic forty year-old guy in the bar, the laughingstock with a lukewarm Stella in hand. And then, the Beach Boys is the saddest, most poignant music you've ever heard.

And then, you're alone.

Gimme Shelter (1970)

2011-11-06T16:58:00.000-08:00

A Trifle Too Satanic

directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles

and Charlotte Zwerin

starring The Rolling Stones, a shitload of Hell's Angels,

The Death of the Sixties

"Something very funny happens when we start that number."

That's Mick Jagger's sudden lump-throated reckoning in the eye of the storm at Altamont — a limp-dicked stab at levity as the Stones bring "Sympathy for the Devil" to a halt and try to figure out just what the hell's going on out there in the darkness, what with all the pushing and shouting, and Hell's Angels gathering like storm clouds around the band, and naked fat zombie girls trying to claw their way onstage, while high-as-a-kiters tug at the speakers, and hippies who should be blissfully tripping are instead trying desperately to alert Mick to something. Meanwhile, new guitarist Mick Taylor's hiding under his hair and Keith Richards is busy rhythm-chording his way into the ether like no one since Nero picked up a fiddle. (Jagger in a frustrated snit: "Keef! Keef! Would you cool it and I'll try an' see wot's goin' on...")

Suddenly, a huge gap opens in the crowd, like cattle bolting at the bark of gunfire. What we can't make out (but would later be reported): pool cues wielded by pissed-off Angels begin cutting through the air — each one the flick of the whip that scatters a thicket of zonked-out teenagers who made the mistake of pushing too close to the stage or being too close to the Angels' motorcycles. Kids already huddled at the feet of the band begin clinging to the stage like a raft, afraid of being sucked backward into the vortex of cracked skulls and bad-trip confusion. A crying girl nods her head in time to Charlie Watts' ever-steady beat. The Stones slog on, torn and frayed, likely counting down the minutes until they can break for the safety of their helicopter. Jagger's weary improv during "Under My Thumb": "I pray that it's alright..."

Springing from the brows of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters and Hank Williams and Southern soul, the Stones were, by far, the best and blackest of our mutt-bred pop culture's Original White Niggers. ("Monkey Man," indeed.) They taught scruffy American boys how to be American — how to pout and posture, how to hold one's guitar, how to feed the birds the perfect cocktail of misogyny and sensitivity and have 'em thirsting for seconds, how to sound just black enough to align oneself with the sex and menace of the blues while staying hard-rock enough to headline stadiums and grace the T-shirts of the kids from the 'burbs. It took Mick 'N Keef to show us how to appreciate the blues, how to acknowledge our hillbilly roots, how to rub elbows and swap sweat with our Negroes (onstage, anyway), how to dig the funk and show ourselves up as mullet-headed, sexually insecure dinosaurs when we labeled the disco rhythms of "Miss You" and "Emotional Rescue" a craven sellout.

"Turd on the Run" and "Tumbling Dice" and "Brown Sugar" and "Monkey Man" and "Stray Cat Blues" mark the Stones as the true architects of what rock ended up as — that is, if we're taking as testimony the overall sound and approach of, say, Guns N' Roses or coke-era Aerosmith or uptempo T. Rex or the New York Dolls or the Faces or the Iggy Pop of Raw Power or the Black Crowes or Little Steven and Nils Lofgren in Springsteen's band or ZZ Top or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion or any number of loud, sloppy blues-rock doo-dah merchants. The whole alt-country/"Americana" genre could send Father's Day cards to Exile on Main St.'s weary, drunken jaunts down the alleys and backroads of the South. Keith Richards' legendary fondness for dope plus the elegantly wasted grandeur of his onstage cigarette-dangling probably influenced legions of Slashes and Johnny Thunderses and God-knows-who-else in their personal acquisitions of needle-mania. Scuzz-punk malcontents Pussy Galore dedicated an entire album to deconstructing Exile. Liz Phair considered her Exile in Guyville a song-by-song response to it. Martin Scorsese can't make a gangster film without "Gimme Shelter" (the song). I used to reserve "Sweet Black Angel" as a ringtone for any black girls I was fucking.

And so, we watch the Stones-loving, Woodstock-era youth culture of Gimme Shelter with the fascination of anthropologists studying dinosaur fossils. Throughout the first half of the film, we're essentially hanging with the Stones on their 1969 tour of the States. We follow them as they check into their cheap motel rooms. (Holiday Inn!) We're treated to a work-in-progress version of "Wild Horses" during a mixing session at Alabama's famed Muscle Shoals studio. We chuckle at Keith in all his smacked-out, bad-teeth languor as he shows off his Marilyn Monroe T-shirt for the camera, seconds after swigging booze like bottled Kool-Aid.

We marvel at the ridiculously young Mick Jagger on the screen here, the one strutting across that Madison Square Garden stage in his Uncle Sam top hat and what looks like a goddamn kids' superhero costume, with his electrocuted-chicken dance moves and the sheer, genuine love of performing that keeps bubbling forth. We watch him and we see him as our parents once saw him: not the long-past-his-prime, thoroughly safe and jet-setting pop royalty who famously inspired a "get off the stage, old man" from Morrissey. No, this is a young and still-relevant Mick — fully aware of his powers, ironic to the core, and yet totally sincere in his embrace of the role of Sixties Cultural Avatar. It's Mick Jagger as the big, bad, booty-lipped Lucifer leading the youth down the pied-piper path to irreversible moral decay, who warned you coy little out-of-time cunts not to play with fire, who teased you with your own complicity in the culture that killed the Kennedys, who foretold all the rape and murder that was just a shot away, who brayed openly for coke and sympathy, who invited up your fifteen year-old sister (thirteen, if you believe the live version) and didn't even want to check her I.D. first.

This is rock as the riot-sparking madhattery that your parents and the county sheriff tried to shield you from. It's rock as a force of nature to kill or die or fuck to — as if Mick's hips were connected by invisible wire to each hit of the snare drum, as if Mick himself were nothing more than a puppet on the strings of the Charlie Watts-Bill Wyman steam engine pumping away behind and beneath him, as if the chugga-chugga juggernaut churned up by Keith and Mick Taylor were pure uncut China White being mainlined straight into his vein, all the way up to his brain, and the sheer fucking heft of the noise they're cooking up has possessed him, mind-body-and-soul. We watch the Mick of Gimme Shelter and the last thirty-odd years evaporate right in front of us: the faceless tours with 800-ft. video screens in corporate-owned arenas, the nostalgia, the classic-rock radio overkill, the graceless aging, the overly familiar crunch of those Keef rhythm chords as Mick licks his lips and gyrates his way through another tale of conquest or romantic desperation like he's still twenty-five years old.

And then we get to Altamont. And, oh, do the storm clouds gather fast.

Of course, the Maysles Brothers hadn't intended to be pallbearers at what the press would term the funeral for a generation's hopes. (If I wrote for, say, Rolling Stone, I'd probably liken the Sixties to some kind of "high" and call Altamont the "comedown.") Mundane as it seems now, it's key to remember: these guys were only there to capture primo footage of The World's Greatest Rock 'N Roll Band on what was then its first U.S. tour in three years. And so, we watch as a simple end-of-tour freebie gig at the Altamont speedway in northern California slowly mutates into Altamont — the End of the Sixties, the Death of the Innocence — piece by piece, the sheer spirit-depleting horror of the thing only gradually revealed, like a jigsaw puzzle that forms the poster for the new Rob Reiner movie.

During the Jefferson Airplane's set, the grinning death's head of impending doom materializes one image at a time — naked hippies writhing, sullen Angels sipping their beer, the musicians nodding and jamming, the crowd moving in tighter, pushing forward, then surging back. We get a jittery Grace Slick trying to still the waves of discontent — "Easy.... easy..." — that she feels coming off the crowd. Then the Airplane's Marty Balin gets knocked out by Angels and there go the floodgates — the crowd parts for some unfortunate soul meeting two or three pool cues at once, scythes cutting whip-like arcs through the pot-laced air, as if we've suddenly jerked forward into fast-motion and the film were unspooling past the gate faster than our eyes could comprehend. Calls for a doctor are met largely with indifference as the bad vibes have yet to spread out to the majority of the crowd. Mere minutes off the Stones' helicopter, Mick's greeted by a fan socking him in the eye.

And then, the queasy climax we came for: the crowd parts (again) around the spastic dance of a pimp-suited black kid named Meredith Hunter, who's either mid-scuffle or in a mad rush for the stage. For reasons debated endlessly in the forty years since — self-defense or harmful intent? — Hunter's left hand brandishes a revolver. Before we can blink, an Angel tackles him from the side and buries a knife in his back, sweeping him into the off-camera darkness to breathe his dying breath under (what was later reported as) a barrage of further blows and kicks. And thus, David and Albert Maysles' thrilling little Rolling Stones tour documentary became the evil twin to Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock, the Deep Throat of culture porn for assorted Sixties-backlashers, a snuff-flick dissertation on the impossibility of utopia.

"But where were the police?" you ask from your central air-conditioned penthouse suite of twenty-first century hindsight. "Where was security?" Well, apparently there were no cops — at least not until Meredith Hunter was already a lime-green lump on a stretcher. And all those drunken Hell's Angels going around cracking skulls and weighing down the makeshift stage? Well, they were the security.

Ah, the Sixties. That fleeting arrhythmia in the EKG of the twentieth century — a psychedelic fever dream of peace and love and brother-helping-brother before the culture yanked the thermometer from under its tongue, rose from its sickbed and continued onward in its otherwise uninterrupted march toward corporate-sponsored, conservative-voting, middle-class respectability. But what a dream it was, this era of automatic culture-cred parceled out to random longhairs, druggies and misfits due to their perceived antipathy to the Man. Didn't want to be shipped off to die in the 'Nam? You were a revolutionary, maaan. Evinced a dislike of the pigs and anyone else with the stench of authority? You were a revolutionary. Spent your days handing out pamphlets and shagging any body-painted, floppy-tittied, Buckwheat-bushed floozy who happened to spasm-dance her way into your acid-baked field of triple-vision, all while decrying the privilege that made such a charmed life possible in the first place? Oh, you were a revolutionary. (Of course, the bulk of this criteria applied as much to Charlie Manson as it did to, say, Abbie Hoffman or any kid at a Doors concert.)

And if you belonged to a notorious biker gang known more for boozin' 'n fightin' 'n runnin' trains on saggy motorcycle mamas than for any sense of social purpose or progressive political thought? Then, you were an "outlaw brother of the counterculture" and you and your sawed-off pool cues got hired to maintain order at a free outdoor festival headlined by Mick Jagger and company for five hundred dollars worth of beer.

The Maysles structured Gimme Shelter as a commentary on itself. The concert footage and the soul-crushing experience of Altamont are the movie-within-the-movie; the actual movie is the ashen-faced Stones in the brothers' editing room, after the fact. And they're on the same trip as us: watching the World's Greatest Rock 'N Roll Band go from hammer-of-the-gods cockiness to pathetic bleating and useless "brrrothers and sssisters" platitudes in the face of the kind of danger that can't be bought off or seduced with insouciant pop-idol poses. We watch the Stones as stars in their own version of Antonioni's Blow-Up, running the footage of Meredith Hunter's death back and forth to try and suss out the truth from the murk, the murder from the grain — that specter of a knife frozen in eternity against a girl's checkered dress, the inevitability of a dream's end paused and scrutinized again and again like Mathilda May's tits on a VHS tape of Lifeforce when you're sixteen years old. It's as if, by reversing that knife plunge and pausing it mid-air, the horror of a split-second decision fueled by drugs and half-comprehension — to say nothing of probable class resentment and the unavoidable racial element — could be sucked back into the portal of happenstance from whence it so rudely burst.

And maybe then, the dream would live on.

Maybe then, the acid-heads we see spinning in circles before the Airplane's set would genuinely come to know expanded consciousness and the True Meaning of It All. Maybe then, the soccer mom we see taking up money for a Black Panther defense fund ("after all, they're just Negroes") would come to see the day when black and white and brown and plaid all melted together in a beautiful pan-racial orgy of Neapolitan ice-cream togetherness. Maybe one day the Man and his outmoded way of thinking would finally shuffle off this mortal coil, and the children of Woodstock would assume his throne at last — the very ones who nattered on about changing the world (as if they were the first generation to hit upon that particular form of self-flattery) while those of lesser privilege lost limbs in Southeast Asia and had to settle for "Satisfaction" over Armed Forces radio. And — who knows? — maybe Hendrix would join Janis Joplin and the Lizard King and Danny Whitten of Crazy Horse onstage for a monster jam at the inauguration of President Ted Kennedy at the dawn of the Eighties. It was the Sixties. Time was on the side of the righteous. Anything was still possible, right?

Or maybe there's more to that cold-blooded stabbing that seemed so clear-cut on a Moviola in the Maysles' editing suite. Would history regard differently the sacrificial black lamb of the Stones' satanic white-blues communion had Meredith Hunter managed to squeeze off shots that ventilated some poor hippie chick's skull? Would it have thrown the actions of that murderous Angel into bold relief if Hunter had fired that revolver willy-nilly and sent errant bullets into one of the Stones, perhaps Jagger himself? Could the whole damnable misfortune be attributed to the seriousness with which the Angels took their job as concert security?

David Hemmings in Blow-Up knew: sometimes, the more you stare at something, the harder it is to ever know just what the hell you're looking at.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

2011-10-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

America!

written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
starring Daniel Day-Lewis,
Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciarán Hinds

There Will Be Blood may or may not be the masterpiece that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson so obviously wanted it to be — the verdict isn't yet in, only four years after its release. But there's some of the poetry of a silent-movie epic in its painterly widescreen tableaux of an American West in its bare-plains infancy, in the film's wordless, ritualistic evocations of what it meant to make one's living from the land, in the way that its chunk of the early years of America's oil industry quietly unfolds like the petals of some rare orchid opening — gradually, wondrously. Call it Abel Gance's Napoleon, maybe, or bits of von Stroheim's Greed compressed then stretched out across the arid California landscape while Jonny Greenwood's atonal Penderecki strings hiss and hum and threaten psychic disintegration à la Kubrick. Daniel Day-Lewis, in the guise of oil magnate Daniel Plainview, likewise recalls an earlier era of cinematic spectacle with his turn-of-the-century Snidely Whiplash-cum-railroad baron look and his crooked gait and his verbal conjuring of director John Huston (think Chinatown) plus any number of Woodrow Wilson-era bigwigs whose voices he studied recordings of in preparation for the role. It's museum-exhibit America given heft, blood, force — a land where men with big dreams and bigger money rushed to the edge of a cliff just to throw it all off and see if it had wings. People called them "crazy" when they failed, "genius" when their gambles took flight and became the mass-produced automobile or modern air travel or the film industry or Big Oil.

The film is rather obvious in its bid to be a Citizen Kane-by-way-of-Giant for our Crash-worthy times, though epic ambition hardly qualifies as a cardinal sin. And it does send Daniel Plainview off on a rather predetermined trip to Crazyville, the reasons for which we're expected to intuit or perhaps just accept as the natural flipside to the whole genius/father-of-an-industry coin. We're told that Daniel's spent years building his hatreds, told of his disdain for humanity. And then, we see the manifestations of that worldview — a pair of murders, the severing of ties with adopted son HW. But there's a missing link in the chain that binds these developments to the earlier Daniel Plainview, the Plainview who earned his fortune by the sweat of his own brow, who brought education and the modern age to backwater citizenry, whose work ethic and insistence on the best for HW after his hearing loss obviously had something to do with the resourceful young tycoon that the kid has become by the end of the film. Plainview kills a drifter posing as his long-lost half-brother but it's not a reaction to any sort of threat the man poses. Is Daniel merely punishing him for having coaxed a glimmer of humanity out of him, for having seduced a man who doesn't like to explain himself into pouring out his coal-black heart? As with Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson's prior effort, the screenplay often feels as though it could have used another run through the typewriter. (Magnolia, on the other hand, could have used about forty pages shaved off.)

But I get it: clearly, Anderson is going for a more suggestive, less on-the-nose style of storytelling — one that sketches out the broadstrokes of life at the dawn of twentieth-century social development (industrialization, the church as the nexus of community, the birth of Jesus-soaked modern politics) while allowing us to fill in the details. More often than not, it works — you're marvelling even when the approach leaves your head full of unanswerable questions. What doesn't work so well is the film's easy assumption of venality and two-bit hucksterism in Eli Sunday, the town's self-appointed young preacher. (Though Paul Dano labors admirably with scraps.) Plainview's practically smirking with postmodern "Religion! What bullshit!" glee from the moment he first hears of Sunday's Church of the Third Revelation, and it's a view that the film does nothing to challenge or offset. What we end up with is an echo of the lopsided face-off between Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher and Leonardo DiCaprio's Amsterdam in Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Eli's nothing more than the paper tiger of Religious Hogwash that Anderson pits against the raging Colossus of Reasonable Agnosticism, and the outcome of said battle is never in doubt; it's forecast from their first meeting.

If there's anything Anderson's filmography has shown us, it's that he doesn't shortchange his characters in the humanity department. "Come on in," his films exhort us with open arms worthy of Jack Horner. "You might be a hopeless misfit or a fuck-up or a small-timer or a dim-bulb or a coked-out porn whore thoroughly ill-equipped to ever gain custody of your kid, but there's no derision in this house, nobody here you can write off or distance yourself from or feel superior to." That was the big, beautiful heart beating away beneath all the Johnny Wadd homages and raining frogs and Scorsese whip-pans and Julianne Moore's bubblegum-pink nipples — obviously, this show-offy whiz-kid had learned something from all those Jonathan Demme films. That was what made him such a matured-soul standout, such a glorious Altmanesque throwback in an era defined by the too-cool-for-school preening of Tarantino and his pop culture-spouting hit men.

How much more powerful would Blood be, though, had it rejected the taint of postmodern hipster antipathy to Christianity in order to examine — truly, seriously examine — the psychological motivation for Eli's God complex? What if Anderson had given Eli just a smidgen of the same blemished humanity he lent to daughter-diddler Jimmy Gator in Magnolia? What if — instead of the Saturday Night Live sketch we get of Eli "casting out" the "evil spirit" of an elderly woman's arthritis — he'd endowed Eli with a genuine gift for speaking to the emotional needs of his congregation, for applying a measure of spiritual unguent to their lives? As hilarious as that arthritis bit is (and I do love it), it's little more than tent-show revival theatrics; easy laughs. You don't come away from it thinking, "Wow, at least Eli really brings something to these people's lives," you snicker along with Plainview and snort, "What a half-ass con-man! What kind of backwoods ignoramuses could take this idiot seriously?" Hell, Ozzy Osbourne's "Miracle Man" or the Jim Bakker parodies that Jim Carrey used to do on In Living Color ("Ah.... haaave... ssssinnned!!") contain about the same level of pathos.

And as far as the congregation is concerned, what is there in these people's lives that makes them so receptive to a figure like Eli and his rather narrow interpretation of salvation? Do they take his claims of communion with the angels at face value? Or do they merely dig past the crust of hokum on the surface to tap into what lies beneath — the reassurance of Old Testament order in an chaotic new world? (For that matter, what about the old lady with arthritis when she finds that her hand is still a gnarled claw? Does she still put her faith in Eli's powers of "healing"?) The Coens or Alexander Payne might occasionally render their common folk a faceless mass of simpletons and call it a day, but I expect a director of Anderson's talents to at least acknowledge that these questions exist, even if he's not terribly interested in the answers.

Of course, a masterpiece needn't be flawless; film history's Greatest of All-Time Pageant is filled with porcelain-skinned, pink-nippled, raven-haired Perfect Tens which, when undressed, reveal the scars of overlength (A Clockwork Orange, The Wild Bunch) or of sticky ideology (Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will) or of obvious calculation (virtually any Spielberg) or of individual sequences which, once fresh or shocking, have since rusted gracelessly against the roiling waters of time (too many to mention). None of this matters; the only court in which a film has to stand — the only sagging pair of tits to which a film must tether itself in lifelong matrimony — is the lair of the collective unconscious. And There Will Be Blood at its best is pure waking dream; less a motion picture written, scored and directed than a writhing, wriggling piece of our national character — as preserved in amber by muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, whose 1927 novel Oil! Anderson is partially adapting here. One of the best things that Anderson's learned from his hero Robert Altman (via Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, especially) is how to make a masterpiece that doesn't feel like one, that doesn't act as if it aspires to be one. Accordingly, Blood shakes out as Masterpiece Theater the gloriously rude American way: crazy, pitch-black humor, wild shifts in tone, coal-hearted amusement at man's folly, the out-and-out slapstick of Eli's spirit expulsion bit or the scene in which Eli calls Daniel up before his congregation to give him "the blood" and bitch-slaps him into oblivion as payback for an earlier humiliation.

And then, just when you're not looking, Anderson slips in moments of such sublime, understated beauty, you're afraid to breathe too hard, lest the magic of the moment dissipate into the air like petals from a dandelion. Mind you, I'm not talking "beauty" in the morning-sunset/rolling-meadow way that it's been taught to us, I'm talking the beauty of a fully realized, indefatigably human work of art. Anderson's version of beauty is as fraught with instability and danger as everything else in the film but it's there: in the film's early, wordless sequences of grim-faced workers so caked and painted with dirt — and, later, oil — that they look like refugees from a minstrel troupe while digging away at the earth and peering up occasionally at the blinding sunlight. It's there in the way the film casually acquaints us with the mundane details of early twentieth-century oil mining, in the way that a miner baptizes his baby son with a smudge of black oil across his little forehead, in the way that modern politics dawns in that glimmer in Plainview's eyes as he sees how Eli's vessel-for-the-Holy-Spirit act has the good people of Little Boston so thoroughly seduced.

Day-Lewis made the choice to project to the cheap seats with his Acting here and, yet, the most important things about Daniel Plainview are left for us to understand on that subconscious level where all great thespians reach us. He lets bits of Plainview's humanity dribble through his fingers in fleeting moments when he's content enough or drunk enough to momentarily loosen his grasp, in the way he ensures that little Mary Sunday will never again be beaten by her father for not praying, in the way that he accepts little HW's punches as his due as they're reunited. And when Anderson's sensibility chimes in time with Day-Lewis's impulses, we get chills no speechwriter could put into words: the queasiness of sudden realization when Henry fails to recognize a clue from the past that Daniel keeps feeding him, or the way that that wave of ocean-water-as-realization washes over Daniel and a perfectly timed cut takes us to Daniel in the whorehouse as Henry staggers up and asks for money.

And then, there's Plainview's big moment, which just might be the single best scene in the last ten years of cinema: his whiskey-sodden admission to Henry of the little hatreds that he's built up inside of himself over the years, of his furious sense of competition with others, of the way that he looks at people and sees nothing worth liking. Of course, there's absolutely nothing in his words that hasn't been thought or felt by anyone with any kind of experience with the numbing stupidity of one's fellow humans: the small-mindedness, the petty obsessions, the betrayals of friends and lovers, the endless concessions to unearned vanity, the constant need for attention or validation. Any man who can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in (thank you, Howard Beale) and not feel at least some degree of revulsion — not at least occasionally want to bash one's fellow man in the cranium with a fucking bowling pin — is a man without a brain, without a soul. If there is a hell in this world, a flaming inferno that can't be escaped or reckoned with or reasoned away, then, clearly: it's other people. And the truth of that invades Plainview's speech — the genuine climax of the film — the way that painful memories and past transgressions have a way of seeping into, and poisoning, even the most mundane moments of one's life.

But it's the cuckoo, black-comedy Jack-Nicholson-in-The-Shiningsville of the film's final "I drink your milkshake!" setpiece that properly catapults the whole enterprise into the stratosphere. If, in the real world, unfettered capitalism and Jesus-freaking are perfectly happy to swap spit and pad off to each other's boudoirs in the still of the night in order to suit their individual purposes (see: modern-day politics, Republican variety), Blood's final flourish is still a fairly evocative portrait of the forces warring for our grubby little red-white-and-blue souls. Again, Anderson tips his hand in regard to Eli/organized religion with the ending. But then again, check that title — that's a promise to the audience. And in cinema, if nowhere else in life, promises must be kept.

Altman and Kubrick wisely injected doses of tittage into the mix, but Anderson was just as wise to exclude the flaxen curls and milky bosoms of the fairer sex from his canvas here. There's something muted and dry in Plainview's psychological makeup, something that — like the Vietnam background of Travis Bickle or whether Patrick Bateman was simply imagining all his hacked-to-bits, rat-raped victims — doesn't need to be reduced to something so pedestrian as explanation. Whether or not Plainview's impotent (something Anderson reportedly toyed with in an earlier draft), asexual or simply too monomaniacally driven for common, sloppy human entanglements, it's clear that the only drilling he needs to do is into that fertile woman under his feet. The young American West is his wife, explosions of black gold the only ejaculations he'll ever need; our thoroughly industrialized twenty-first century America his spawn. On that level, at least, his antagonism toward Sunday is properly understood. Who needs all that old-time religion when Plainview is offering the new: the oil that bubbles forth as our blood of the Lamb, Plainview himself as the Jesus who'll sacrifice himself for our social advancement by getting rich beyond his wildest dreams and then dying alone and insane inside his storybook mansion. Naturally, Anderson concurs: Plainview as presented is the only prophet whose teachings we still live by, the only Jesus whose parables make a lick of sense according to our cutthroat modern world.

Audiences require layers for the mass delusion that entertainment represents, though. When the artistic impulse is nestled inside of a mass-market form like the horror film or the gangster genre, audiences more readily accept what the artist is saying about Who We Are, about this brittle paper god of civilization that we've constructed around ourselves. Peckinpah (the Western), John Huston (the Bogart film), Jonathan Demme (the comedy) and Kubrick (the war film, the Stephen King adaptation, the satirical futuristic parable) did it all the time. Sometimes, though, an artist just strips down and lets his sweaty balls flap in the wind. Robert Altman — Anderson's guru — did this by not bothering to sugarcoat his cynicism or his supreme disinterest in conventional storytelling; probably why he was never much of a hit with audiences beyond M*A*S*H (the counterculture war comedy). Anderson's displayed the heart of a Demme, the technique of a Scorsese and, now, what may prove to be the reach of a Kubrick. But his soul belongs to Altman — to whom There Will Be Blood is dedicated.

Blue Collar (1978)

2011-05-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

Detroit in the Seventies: "And Then, We Woke Up..."

directed by Paul Schrader
starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel,
Yaphet Kotto

Opening credits. A caught-on-barbed-wire howl — none other than Captain Beefheart with a paean to ass-raped working stiffs, its beat like the clanging of hammers, steel against steel. It's the pounding of a bill collector's fist on your dinnertime door, or maybe the clamp of a license plate press. It's the big-city blues of the modern industrial age: the plant, the bar, then home to the family where bills keep piling and shit needs fixing and the wife needs fucking and inane sitcoms blare away on a TV it took you three years just to pay off while the rugrats you can't afford to feed or clothe yell and scream at each other and break up everything you barely even own. That's your life. That's your working-class American Dream.

It's also your Detroit in the late Seventies, a perpetual Night of the Living Dead set in a burned-out urban cemetery strewn with condemned buildings, crushed hopes and spare auto parts, where the working poor stumble about under a permanent cloud of factory smoke in that pregnant pause before the barbarians finally broke down the gate, before the ground at the city's feet gave way to the hellfire maw of racial and economic chaos whose white-hot flames had been warming the concrete above it since before King and his dream were obliterated by an assassin's bullet.

For guys like Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel) and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), chaos crouched in waiting just around the turn of the decade. Like a sack of mangoes rocked by blow after blow — closed auto plants, rising crime rates, white flight, inept (and, in some cases, outright corrupt) leadership — good ol' Motor City would never again regain its former shape. Year by year, the carrot of basic solvency would be yanked another inch beyond the grasp of outstretched hands; year by year, in lieu of the fulfillment promised him by all the shiny happy people in the TV ads and the political speeches, Cain of the broken-backed rabble would edge ever closer toward the jugular of Abel standing next to him. Say goodbye to country tunes at the local watering hole, Hank: Detroit in the age of RoboCop would see worker set against worker, friend against friend, black against (what remained of) white, inner-city blight lashing out at the Job's hedge of nitroglycerin working-class stability that surrounded it. American Working Man, meet the hellhounds loosed by your own bed-buddies-with-state-government union. Take a hard look at the impracticability of that dream you've been paying for on layaway the last ten years. Next stop: the pasture.

In the meantime: "Buy this shit, buy that shit." In the end, "all you got's a buncha shit." That's what it all adds up to. That's all these guys know.

So, like the Paul Schrader protagonist that he is, Zeke takes an idea that's been growing in his brain for some time and decides to put it to action. The idea? Payback. A little righteous vindication, even. Not the "true force" of Travis Bickle's fantasies and not the moral cleansing effected by a Charles Rane or a Jake Van Dorn, but something rather appropriate to the downscale existence of three frustrated worker bees: why don't we rob the safe at Union headquarters? Zeke got the idea while there to file a complaint with their Union rep — the damn safe was big as day and wide open, nobody looking after it but some half-asleep geriatric. Zeke spills the plan to Jerry and Smokey during the comedown from a coke-fueled orgy that's like the only stab these guys have at rolling back the clock for a couple of hours and letting the sunshine of pre-adulthood spontaneity wash over their drab, responsibility-burdened lives. It'd be a knock-over, Zeke says — in and out. And with the bread split between the three of them, Jerry could finally get his daughter the braces she needs and Zeke could get the three grand he needs to pull the IRS out of his ass. They've certainly done worse.

Besides, they agree, what the fuck has their Union done for them, anyway? What, break their asses for Monopoly money and keep their backs strained from trying to get the tips of the ends just to kiss? (Forget about meeting.) The Union can't even take care of their most basic needs — just ask Zeke's poor little finger, cut to shit from months of him sticking it in a hole just to get his broken locker open every day. Clearly, the bitch is fucked from the asshole out — the foreman shouts abuse, the shop steward ignores it, and the Union rep just looks the other way — so fuck 'em all and let's just take what we've got coming to us.

And then, they hit the safe. Where they find nothing but petty cash — mere pocket change — plus a ledger documenting a series of illegal loans. Turns out, that's the sweet blowjob of fortune and an ass-rape from bad luck in one fell swoop. While our heroes go about trying to extort a Union desperate to keep a spotlight off of its shady dealings — to build a half-assed breaking-and-entering into a long-overdue housecleaning, a blow for the common man — Union higher-ups discover what they've stumbled onto. Well. Tricky Dick might have left the White House, a cleaned-up Iggy Pop might have been rocking synthesizers, and Star Wars and Spielberg might have just kickstarted the Bigger and Deffer '80s; but up in Murder City, it was still the Gritty '70s. Faster than you can say "downbeat ending," here comes the iron fist of Uncle Sam to hit these guys where it hurts most — boom, there goes a simple plan hatched over early-morning recriminations; boom, there goes years of friendship. And — boom — there goes life as they've known it.

After a solid run of era-defining scripts realized by other directors (Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese, Rolling Thunder for John Flynn, Obsession for Brian De Palma, The Yakuza for Sydney Pollack, plus an early crack at Close Encounters of the Third Kind for Spielberg), Paul Schrader happened upon a basic story cooked up by his brother Leonard and decided to take the reins himself. True, Blue Collar may seem at first to be an odd fit for a depressed, emotionally throttled son of Dutch Calvinism with a knack for loners consumed by messianic, suicidal redemption quests. (There's that ten-mile shadow The Searchers apparently cast over his imagination.) But it's a fit that winds up hand-in-glove. The Lord Jehovah's unblinking eye over Schrader's Midwestern childhood gets a nifty transmutation into the boot heel of that coal-hearted prick Capitalism and the economic penalties guys like Zeke and Jerry face simply for having families — hell, for breathing. (If the lives of our country's sainted poor are any indication, then Howard Hughes was on the money like Andrew Jackson: frightened at the thought of knocking any of his women up, Hughes ejaculated in mouths, never vaginas.)

Blue Collar stands tall as one of the last gasps of great '70s working-class cinema — a pantheon that includes Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Straight Time — without turning into something Barton Fink might have pulled from his typewriter. It's from an era when Hollywood still knew how to speak to its audience, from an era when Hollywood still acknowledged that bank tellers and waitresses and office drones watch films, too; that not everyone in the audience puts "cop," "criminal," or "disillusioned private eye" on their yearly tax returns. A guy like Schrader was at least two social classes removed from a guy like Jerry Bartowski, and certainly so from strugglin' brothas like Smokey James and Ezekiel Brown, but Blue Collar wastes nary a frame on po'-folks condescension. And it absolutely nails the grind of paycheck-to-paycheck living: Wednesday nights at the bowling alley, jalopies that need new gas pumps, Hamburger Helper with bread and butter for dinner (and your kid's still hungry), asshole bosses who only notice you when you pause for a breather but never when you're busting your ass. Fat cats expand their stomachs while Jerry stands around in his Big Mac T-shirt and his Archie Bunker house, giving vent to white resentment — "it'd be better off if I didn't work at all; at least then, we could collect some government welfare" — that would ripen into public discourse (and open political strategy) under Ron 'n Nancy. An auto worker trying to feed his family, a filmmaker struggling to bring his vision to the screen — either way, that ceiling you can't break through is just a floor to the guy above you.

Sure, as with any directorial debut, there's a few off-notes. There's also the occasional moment of undigested symbolism — when you see a lug like Ed Begley Jr.'s character reading Catch-22 on his lunch break, clearly, that's Schrader's hand popping out from behind the camera and waving hello. Some of the gags — a tubby worker's ongoing war with a vending machine, the masks sported during the robbery of the safe — don't jibe with the film's overall tone, although the levity is appreciated. And Lucy Saroyan is perhaps a bit too erudite for a working-class Detroit housewife.

Rarely has male camaraderie on film been better realized, though — Pryor, Keitel and Kotto don't act these guys' long-standing friendship; they wear it: in their ease with one another, in the little gestures, the knife-edged jokes and barbs that guys trade over cheap beers (and especially in front of women) the way girlfriends trade gossip and self-aggrandizement. The three of them wear Bobby Byrne's suitably grubby cinematography like fuzzy old slippers — at any moment, Schrader could cut away to another table of Joes and these guys would melt right into the mise-en-scène, just another soft-focus jumble of high-fives and shared grumbles about the boss, despite the fact that one of them just happens to resemble one of the most popular comedians of the decade. It's a sketch of doomed friendship made all the more amazing when you consider the alienated loner holding the pen, or read accounts of the three actors at each other's throats due to Schrader telling each man that he, not the others, was the true star of the film. (Drugs and Pryor's infamous volatility during the era probably didn't help, either.)

How is Pryor? Well, if you've heard anything about this film, then you already know: the man had serious dramatic chops, chops enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with another typically fine, intensity-on-the-verge-of-boiling-over Harvey Keitel performance. Of course, Pryor's comedy could have told you that, too. Onstage, acting out the movies that clattered away on the projector of his own imagination, Pryor — embodying winos, junkies, preachers, slick-talking pimps, befuddled boyfriends, flustered rednecks, sexually frustrated women, stern fathers, stuttering Chinese waiters, dimwitted boxers, cops, kids, dogs, monkeys, (hell) even his own malfunctioning heart — did exactly what he does in Blue Collar: he gave voice to the voiceless, he let you know how the "other guy" felt. He put anger inside the unthinkably hilarious, humor inside the foul-mouthed satirical rage — and never once did he spare himself. Hell, no, his greatest jabs were directed at his own gut and — if only one could say likewise about his legion of imitators — those jabs never failed to have an underlying humanity or sense of uncertainty to them. "I was a fuck-up, too," you could hear him saying when he spun comedy gold out of stories like getting his ass kicked at junior boxing or fighting with his father or his many failed relationships. Zeke Brown comes closest to preserving the real Pryor on celluloid — not the cool, jive-talking Negro there to imbue Gene Wilder with hipness and then step aside so that Wilder can kiss the girl, and certainly not the neutered funny-face-making of his wan '80s comedies.

Zeke meets Jerry on his porch one last time and irreparably frayed bonds are held to the light so as to kill all lingering doubt. It's all over now, babe — two friends, once brothers in toil and debt, now forming a "V" on divergent paths. Jerry's "thinking white" and Zeke is taking the best opportunity — for his family, for himself — that he's ever been offered. Neither man can understand — or even hear, really — what the other man is saying, what's important to the other man. It's two separate value systems, two separate histories, two essentially irreconcilable worldviews locked in combat. That's the history of black and white in an all-American nutshell. It's the reason you'll never see Oreo-style configurations of beer buddies taking over your neighborhood dive bar. And it's entirely to the film's credit that this comes off not as hip cynicism or didacticism or a junior Marx sermon in a lunchbox with your Twinkie, but as living, breathing human tragedy.

Ultimately, it's Zeke who ends up the voice of reason. Sure, "they pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white — everything they do is to keep us in our place." But revolutions — as revolutions tend to do — fail and fail miserably. Bills, taxes, next month's rent — that's the only reality. People have families, they have mouths to feed; there's no time for impotent adolescent fantasizing. "Takin' it to the streets"? Fighting "the Man"? The Sixties? Yeah, good dope, banged a few hippie chicks, but wake up, kid — that alarm clock's been blaring for years.

Are cards stacked in service of Schrader's vision here? Absolutely. Blue Collar posits that three Joes trying to make a difference will fail miserably where even a nut like Travis Bickle succeeds. It never pretends for one second to consider the possibility of any alternatives these guys could have had — education, a different line of work, the existence of anyone up in the penthouse who might genuinely address workers' grievances. And yet, it carries a much larger emotional truth, especially relevant to the tenor of our bad-economy times. As with Billie Holiday's old friend Heartache, half of America's gotten used to rolling over and bidding good morning to its financial woes and precarious employment situations. Where once we took can-do optimism and boundless opportunity for granted, mere crumbs for starving throngs are the truths we now hold to be self-evident. Behold your possible future, America: a freeze-frame on the inevitable, a cut to blood-red. Blue Collar is a new national anthem.

We Now Interrupt This Broadcast: Scott Is NOT A Professional Remembers the Days of Vinyl

2011-05-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

Don't let my snorting, rampaging bull-in-a-china-shop of a sex drive fool you. I'm old. Not just old, but fucking old. How old is "fucking old"?

Get this, kids: I actually remember a time when you had to flip the record over to get to Side Two. I remember when you couldn't just hit the next-track button to skip over all the gay, boring parts in between "Synchronicity I" and "Synchronicity II" — you had to go get your mom so she could lift up the needle and gingerly place it in the groove between songs so your Twinkie-stained, eight year-old fumble-fingers wouldn't go fucking up her turntable. And if she was busy watching Hill Street Blues or St. Elsewhere, and the shit wasn't on commercial break — then, tough. Your ass was stuck with Andy Summers warbling his way through "Mother."

Still, I've never lost my fondness for the grandeur of vinyl. I still have the slightly worn record albums that helped me through my misguided Reagan-era youth. Beat this, pop cultural archivists: my copy of Prince's Controversy still has the foldout poster of him bikini-clad in the shower, a poster that Warner Bros. only distributed with pressings from the early-to-mid-'80s. But, blind to the future market value of today's cultural gimcracks as all dumb children are, I marked up the back of the jacket, putting asterisks next to all the songs I liked. (Bad Scotty!) Never mind the fact that I don't currently possess a turntable, I swiped half of my mom's old LP's before taking off for L.A. (like she's ever gonna give Aja or Eat a Peach or Hot Buttered Soul another spin) and, in recent years, I've gone about collecting more.

From my earliest LP-hunting days at flea markets to the present, I've always enjoyed the sense of "bigness," of character that the twelve-inch album jacket lends the music inside. (Aerosmith doing the old blues standard "Big Ten Inch Record" — talk about a song that no longer translates.) Houses of the Holy — as out-of-love as I've been with classic-rock plagiarists Zeppelin for quite some time — has always been a very "orangey," sunny-sounding album, if you know what I mean. CD covers, of course, were never even in the ballpark. You need the album format to truly appreciate the way the little wheel turns inside the cover of Zeppelin III or the way that you can totally see Marilyn Cole's nips on the foldout front of Roxy Music's Stranded. And once I discovered that many of the lyric sheets and cool back covers and extra photos (et al.) of classic albums weren't making the transfer over to CD, that only hastened my metamorphosis into Vinyl Nerd Extraordinaire.

While off to dinner with a friend recently, I noticed one of those funky little used CD/used vinyl shops that one would assume has gone the way of the dodo in today's age of FLAC files and torrents — the kind that also sells twenty kinds of incense, silk Grateful Dead banners and copies of High Times. The brightly-lit interior, the grungy-yet-homey atmosphere with rows upon rows of CD's and knick-knacks, the way the place was wallpapered over with flyers for upcoming local gigs and promo posters — it called to me, you see. It conjured up instant flashbacks of the kinds of mom-and-pop stores in which I whiled away my college years back in Anysuburb, Illinois. It brought to mind endless conversations with other socially awkward Captain Beefheart fans and skateboarding-hippies-born-two-decades-too-late — endless conversations spent debating the merits of, say, Can's Tago Mago versus Soon Over Babaluma, or whether (per Lester Bangs) guys like Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp represented a legitimate carrying of the Coltrane/Ornette Coleman free-jazz torch as opposed to being a bunch of unstructured aural jack-off eaten up by no one other than gullible college white kids desperate for whatever beacon of Negroid "authenticity" that might lead them through the darkness of their formative years. In short, that little store gave me a bigger erection than Priya Rai, Lily Thai and Alexa Loren wrestling naked in a tub of green Jell-O. Investigate? Surely, I had to.

I prodded my friend to make the unplanned detour into Vinyl Geek Heaven with me. I wheedled. I cajoled. I even threatened. Unfortunately, given her gender, she had only the faintest sliver of interest regarding music beyond Top 40 radio. So, naturally, that meant she had little-to-no interest in spending the rest of our evening squinting under bright fluorescent lights as I smacked elbows with equally spastic record nerds and combed through racks of ancient slip-covered albums — everything from full-length releases to EP's to 45's to import seven-inch singles to twelve-inch extended singles with their long-lost-in-the-digital-era B-sides.

The upshot: she sat there for an hour (in a chair doubtlessly intended for the likes of her) and watched in awe as my throbbing erection burst forth and pushed its way through the force field of old-record dust surrounding me like Pigpen's cloud of funk. Brand-new reissues of 154 by Wire, the Gang of Four catalogue, and the first Dead Boys album? Rocket in my pocket. Original pressings of Bowie's Lodger, several Blue Öyster Cult LP's and late-'80s rap twelve-inchers? The rocket's now a heat-seeking missile. Exile on Main St. — 1970's pressing, double-album, gatefold jacket with postcards (presumably) intact? Missile's been launched. A twelve-inch extended version of "Let's Go Crazy" (jacket slightly frayed at the corners), backed with "extended club-mix" of "Erotic City"?

Well, that did it. I erupted in a spew of Peter Northian volume — a Mount St. Helens of little Scotts all over the walls, all over the ceiling, and fortunately none of the albums (save a few crappy shoegaze EP's). My friend dropped to her knees in a tornado of ripped fabric and flying shirt buttons, a Bauhaus import began blaring from the store's speakers, and I couldn't control it anymore. So I took her right there on the floor and, as a store employee wheeled out a few boxes of new arrivals for under five bucks, the other customers barely took notice of us in their sudden beeline for the kill — in fact, most stepped right over us. While on the floor, I caught a glimpse of some extra-rare Stooges bootlegs that were stocked just under the bin. I got excited all over again and had an orgasm so powerful that it shot up to the poor girl's cerebral cortex and effectively erased her memory for a couple of minutes.

Staggering up to the register with pants still around my ankles, I tried to block out this incessant buzz in my ear, as I took a quick inventory of the albums under my arm: all original pressings, all in very good shape, each LP as scratch-free and pristine as one could hope for, especially when one considers that three of them were pressed before I was even born. I gingerly placed my bounty before the pleasant, if slightly odorous, young clerk. And it was then that I was finally able to make out that buzz in the background: "You don't even own a turntable, Scott."

It was my friend, still naked and shivering in a pool of her own sweat over in the "S" section of Rock/Pop. Behind her, twenty hipster geeks were gnawing away at crates of new arrivals like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. In their zeal, someone had ripped off the face of the poor guy who'd wheeled out the records, and had plunked it down on a nearby turntable — expecting, perhaps, to hear some rare Krautrock groove emanating from the pores in his cheeks. Instead, the needle merely settled in the folds of his eyelid and filled the place with a low, dull hissing.

"CD covers just aren't the same," I protested while stuffing my cock back in my jeans. "You need the album format to truly appreciate the little wheel on the cover of Zeppelin III or the way that you can totally see Marilyn Cole's nips on the front of Stranded. Serious music enthusiasts know this."

She sighed. "Fine. Uh, can we go to Pinkberry now?" But I was already gone. And halfway back to Hollywood.

Scott Is NOT A Professional Plays the Film Blog Alphabet Game: A Tit-Free A-Z of Women's Faces in Cinema

2011-05-19T01:36:00.000-07:00

For those unaware, there was a meme going around the film blogosphere awhile back: name one of your favorite films for every letter of the alphabet. Several film bloggers have already rattled off a bunch of their faves in A-Z form and I thought I'd make my fashionably late entrance to the party.

But I decided to stick to a theme: a random A-Z of Scott Is NOT A Professional faves and a compendium of the expressive potential of the female face, all in one. Why? Because I like looking at women. (Even from the neck up.) To wit:

A is for American Psycho...

B is for Bunny Lake Is Missing...

C is for Cries and Whispers...

D is for Dressed to Kill...

E is for Exorcist II: The Heretic...

F is for Frenzy...

G is for Gimme Shelter...

H is for Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages...

I is for In the Realm of the Senses...

J is for Jackie Brown...

K is for Klute...

L is for The Last Detail...

M is for Mulholland Dr...

N is for Nashville...

O is for The Osterman Weekend...

P is for Peeping Tom...

Q is for Q&A...

R is for Romper Stomper...

S is for Sex and Fury (Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô)...

T is for 3 Women...

U is for U-Turn...

V is for The Vanishing (Spoorloos)...

W is for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...

X is for the way I'm totally cheating here by including Last Tango in Paris, which was rated X upon its initial release...

Y is for Y Tu Mamá También...

Z is for, well, Z...

Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) (1997)

2011-05-13T21:08:00.000-07:00

I Heard Her Call My Name

directed by Pedro Almodóvar

starring Javier Bardem, Francesca Neri,

Liberto Rabal, Ángela Molina, Jose Sancho

It's alchemy, really: Pedro Almodóvar with a camera and a gorgeous Spanish actress accomplishes what Keith Jarrett accomplishes behind a Steinway, what a mad scientist achieves with a bunch of test tubes and some bubbling green shit — his frothy concoctions don't just spume over into sublime joy, they effloresce. There's a wide-eyed, gasping-for-breath, this-happened-and-then-OH-MY-GOD-this-happened quality to the way his tales unfold. He's a bricklayer, this patron saint of the distressed heroine — just when you've adjusted to his next plot development, he throws another revelation on top of that, followed by his next twist of fate, then another revelation; finally, he tops the whole thing off with yet another of his whirligig climactic arcs. Most filmmakers are like that bitchy girl with the loose twat, the one you text during last call when all other options for the night have failed — they've got the same three mechanical moves everyone else has and one peak is all you're lucky to get. Almodóvar, though, is so sensuous, so knowing in that barely-legal-Thai-massage-girl way of his, he's got you reaching peak after peak, your virility still spurting forth, dripping down your pants leg as you stumble into work the next day with that faraway smile on your face and breathlessly describe the experience to a friend.

Live Flesh gets the ball rolling with a hilarious-on-the-verge-of-poignant opening sequence that depicts a woozy prostitute (Penelope Cruz) with just enough time to throw on her slippers before giving birth to future Pizza Hut delivery boy Victor on a Madrid bus. Then, we shoot ahead twenty years to a single night of happenstance — the axis on which the rest of the story spins. Apparently, some truly transcendental trim belongs to drugged-out rich girl Elena (Francesca Neri). The single hit of it that she's given to the now-adult Victor (Liberto Rabal) has the lovestruck lad barging into her flat while she's awaiting her drug connection. He refuses to leave — hell, he's even swiped a pizza for her nourishment — and when she pulls a gun on him, he just digs his heels in further. Bitch popped his cherry — in a bathroom, no less — and, to Victor's mind, the least she could do is explain why she suddenly wants nothing more to do with him. What she explains to him is the fact that he was a lousy lay; the ensuing scuffle attracts cop David (Javier Bardem) and his partner Sancho. Victor, of course, responds like the even-tempered son-of-a-whore that he is: he puts Elena's own gun to her head. David and hair-trigger Sancho then pull their guns and, when all is said and done, David's in a wheelchair thanks to an errant bullet in his spine and Victor's doing a six-year bid for having had his finger on the trigger.

But wait! — as the late-night infomercials like to tell us — there's more! Victor didn't deliberately fire the shot that paralyzed David, his trigger finger was squeezed by Sancho while Sancho was trying to wrest the gun from him. And then — what do you know? — while Victor's plotting vengeance from a prison cell, Elena kicks her habit, ditches the blonde fright wig, opens a center for abused children and ends up married to paraplegic David, of all people. And then — what do you know? — it turns out that Victor's still carrying a torch for Elena. And then, it turns out that Sancho's nursing a dark secret related to his own unhappy marriage. And then, Victor's released from prison, starts stalking Elena and runs into Sancho's wife. And then... (Cue organ theme and a word from our sponsors.)

I have a couple of confessions: 1) I don't find the bulk of Live Flesh particularly believable and; 2) I don't particularly care. Live Flesh succeeds according to my definition of Pure Cinema, which is: films obeying nothing but their own blissfully cuckoo logic, films beholden to nothing save the insular worlds they've spun out of thin celluloid and made as real to us as our own routine-laden, death-and-taxes McLives for two hours. Pure Cinema couldn't give a lesser crap about kowtowing to whatever mundane reality we're probably watching movies to get away from in the first place; its whole raison d'être is in exploring states of mind and emotional plateaus in as uninhibited — as unrestrained — a manner as possible. "Realism" doesn't merely straitjacket this impulse; it chains it to a dungeon wall, feeds it stale bread and ass-rapes it. Almodóvar's method — as Spanish as paella, as quintessentially European as female armpit hair — is a method that takes all the volume and color and unexpressed passions that simmer boil-like beneath the skins of our real lives and cranks them up past ten. Conventional response is turned inside out — you don't mock an Almodóvar film for its brazen tango outside the constraints of your puny workday-commute-with-cup-of-Starbucks, you curse real life for not being more Almodóvar-like.

The plot, as it were, hinges upon the actions of unfaithful wives — one Tina Turner dying to get away from her Ike, one venerated like a saint while dying to err like a good old-fashioned human fuck-up. Victor's hotheadedness is redeemed by his naïveté — his clear worship of las mujeres, a resolute refusal to judge that's like an outgrowth of his own compassion for a mother who turned tricks to put bread on the table. Perhaps, the affection shown to him by the women he juggles — despite his initial sexual ineptitude — is some sort of motherly ray of benevolence sent beaming unto him from beyond the grave. Regardless, the touch is as sure as it is satirical: one never feels the need to damn Almodóvar's women for the affection they seek, nor do you feel sorry for Sancho or cuckolded cripple Javier Bardem, who can pull a mean Mike Jordan on the Paralympics b-ball court but can't keep his bon-bon of a wife to himself.

Of course, Elena's married David not only out of some form of Catholic penitence but also to take care of him. She's not just atoning for her days as a druggie, she's atoning for being the center of the incident that ended David's career as a cop. And no matter how devoted David is to her as a husband, no matter how skillfully he'd crack someone's skull for harassing her or how expertly he gives impromptu bathroom head, their relationship is always going to be that of the patient-caretaker — hardly the stuff that moistens panties. It's crystal clear why she confesses her infidelity to him: it's gotten tiresome up on that pedestal and she wants off. Perhaps, she'd even say it's for David's own good: "know me, the real me, the fucking flesh-and-blood woman you married, not this Mother Teresa with a scrub brush that you've made me out to be."

Granted, those of a certain ideological bent may intuit a sliver of patronization toward the ladies on Almodóvar's part. And, fond of his heroines though he may be, he's never once shied away from showing how crackpot irrational, how childishly impulsive women can be; how emotionally untethered and psycho-sexually drawn to the unhealthy they usually are. Hell, his narratives depend upon it. And yet, he's so connected to the humanity of his characters that nothing he does feels exploitative or curdles in your mind, post-viewing — it feels as natural watching his characters converse over a joint as it does watching a battery-operated toy scuba diver nestling itself in Victoria Abril's nether-regions or watching the shrunken character in a faux-silent film crawl inside of a giant vagina six times his size, to be with his lover for eternity.

True understanding between the sexes beckons. Disseminate the Almodóvar filmography just a touch wider and the collective yolk of mankind may yet learn to stop rolling its eyes whenever the fairer sex utters something other than "want coffee?" or "don't worry, I'll just take my morning-after pill." The love Almodóvar invests in his panoply of distressed heroines is enough to stir the cinders of boyhood infatuation smoldering inside every embittered male. It's a love so palpable, so infectious that it just might spill over into your personal life as a man: where once you heard an incessant stream of insecure blathering on auto-pilot, an aria of me me me, you may now imagine the rolled r's and saucy purr of an adorably bewildered Penelope Cruz. What once resembled a downy-breasted succubus slurping away at the lifeforce of your precious time and energy may now take on the contours of a Francesca Neri secretly dying for the saving grace of your hardy persistence.

Of course, it's all bullshit. That's cinema's stock-in-trade, it's what our savviest filmmakers dress up and fashion into false gods, before which entire cultures — including Yours Truly — readily genuflect. Bullshit at its friendliest fuels our dreams and, hell, if a man can't dream — if he can't enjoy the occasional happy ending provided by the agreeable massage-parlor whores of Hollywood before trudging home to hatchet-faced reality — he might as well reach for the Smith & Wesson with the single bullet in the chamber and call it a day, no?

Something Wild (1986)

2011-03-26T22:04:00.000-07:00

Girls of the World Ain't Nuttin' But Trouble

directed by Jonathan Demme
starring Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith,
Ray Liotta

"You're a great girl. You've got a few problems but you're a great girl."

Any guy who says he's never done a Wile E. Coyote over the cliff in pursuit of a girl like Audrey is either lying or packing more fudge than a scoop of Rocky Road. Something Wild is the straight male experience encapsulated: it's what happens when the Girl of Your Dreams appears out of nowhere to grab you by the balls and bust you out of that straitjacket you call your normal self. One hit of the funky stuff and, before you know it, you're soaring through clouds, giggling like a schoolgirl who just got diddled by the hot new guidance counselor as you're looking down, watching your attention-less existence get tinier and tinier.

That's what Jonathan Demme captures perfectly in this light comic wheelie around the outskirts of Femme Fatale City. All it takes is one half-assed display of rebellion — skipping out on his lunch check — for Charlie (Jeff Daniels) to get picked up by Melanie Griffith's kitten-voiced wet dream Audrey. She practically kidnaps him from his day job and, as she's tossing the baggage of his white-collar life out the window of her car with a bottle of Seven Crown glued to her lips, you're wondering along with Charlie: just how far is her attention-whore-passing-as-free-spirit thing gonna go? Well, first, she sharpens Charlie's skills in the art of lying — how to bullshit one's boss while handcuffed to a motel bed, how to escape an Italian restaurant with an angry cook at your heels. Then, she tosses her new pupil into the deep end: she takes him home to Mom and passes him off as her husband.

And that's where Audrey finally emerges from under that black vixen wig. Turns out she's neither nut nor Barbara Stanwyck, but a good-hearted blonde who's made her share of fuck-ups and spent life with her legs wrapped around the wrong guys. Of course, as real life often has it, her journey of reinvention isn't complete without dragging some hapless men through the mud for fun. (So a few proprietors get stiffed along the way; so Charlie endures potential arrests and a near-beatdown — big whoop!) At least in Hollywood's version, it leads to his own personal discovery as well.

Besides, Demme pulls off a neat little hat trick. That breezy '80s comedy formula that lulled you into a sense of security — horndog impetuousness as a means of injecting life into the wrinkly gray hide of Reagan's America? (Complete with hip, lovable blacks as window dressing?) Well, it skids hard into a brick wall about halfway through. And that brick wall is Ray (Ray Liotta), a steely-eyed psycho who just happens to be Audrey's real husband, heretofore unmentioned. Hubby's a stick-up man fresh out of the can, determined like hell to get his wife back — as determined, in fact, to shed the skin of his last few years spent rotting in the pen as Audrey and Charlie are to be reborn. (In liberal Demme's view of America, everybody in mainstream — read: white — society wants to escape their pasts.)

Demme seizes the occasion of Charlie and Audrey's visit to her high school reunion to bring the past vs. present theme right to the surface. ("Spirit of '76 Revisited," indeed.) And his blend of the comedic surface with the gradual blossoming of those darker, more desperate undercurrents is so skillful, in fact, that — like Charlie himself — you don't see what's coming until it's right upon you. Ray Liotta couldn't have been better suited to the embodiment of said undercurrents if he'd been born Dennis Hopper. He clashes with all that joyous-lovebird spontaneity around him — he's all calculated eyeballing and practiced charm; far too smooth in his movements, his physicality. Clearly, the mental rehearsals for the re-wooing of his wife have gone into overtime. And we don't doubt for a second any of the sinister shit that Ray's used-car-salesman smile keeps hinting at. The key, though, is that Ray's as true-blue as Charlie is. Like Hopper's Frank Booth pining for Dorothy in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, this is true love — true love the only way a violent sociopath knows how to express it. It's that same helpless floating feeling that Charlie's just begun to experience, except Ray first felt it long before and he hasn't crashed back to earth yet. Doesn't Charlie know that Audrey probably gives most men the willingness to "do whatever it takes"? Does he really think he's the only one, that he's special?

Turns out: Ray the Ex-Con would quite literally kill for the Norman Rockwell married life that Square Charlie — the movie's true Unconventional Soul — could do perfectly well without. That's no screenwriter's cute idea of irony, that's Demme extending his clear-eyed humanity to all the characters, not merely the ones with whom we're "supposed" to identify. He's no less an auteur with this, a "mere '80s comedy," than he was at the helm of Silence of the Lambs or Philadelphia, and his touch is there with every stroke, every nuance.

The catty glances Audrey exchanges with the pregnant wife of an old classmate at the reunion? Pure Jonathan Demme. The absolute cupcake of a blonde teen stuck behind her gift-shop cash register — a future Audrey creaming her panties over Ray, hilariously desperate for a journey of her own? Pure Jonathan Demme. The way the framing suggests that Charlie's left arm has been "cut off" as Audrey seems to be sailing out of his life for one brief, miserable instant? Audrey fluttering off like a fart in the wind and sending Charlie into a Vertigo tailspin, chasing after "Lulu" lookalikes in the street? That priceless look of realization on Ray's face? Demme, all the way.

Something Wild remains an exemplar of the great cinematic theme of the Ronnie Raygun years: the previously untested values of Clean-Cut Preppie America coming face to face with the Evil Empire lurking right in our own backyards. (Drug-sniffing perverts in Blue Velvet, Fright Night's charming next-door vampire in the middle of suburbia, vigilante mobs and all-around art-community weirdos in Martin Scorsese's After Hours.) But where After Hours and Blue Velvet represented a return (of sorts) to the status quo, Something Wild at least has Charlie declining to put those white-collar handcuffs back on, after all is said and done.

And take it from a former corporate drone: young, firm-breasted Melanie Griffith or no young, firm-breasted Melanie Griffith — that stands as its own kind of romantic triumph.

Sudden Impact (1983)

2011-03-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

Sam Peckinpah, Thou Art Vindicated

directed by Clint Eastwood
starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke,
Pat Hingle, Bradford Dillman, Paul Drake

Funny how tastes change.

I first saw Sudden Impact as a wee tyke during its initial theatrical run. (Naturally, my mom took me to see it.) And, after Halloween and The Fog and watching William Hurt smash through glass to get some of Kathleen Turner's Body Heat, Sudden Impact became the film I couldn't stop babbling to my confused classmates about between sips of CapriSun. Suddenly, dust colored my E.T. doll and my collection of Hot Wheels — I was too busy playing with the right-wing vigilantism that San Francisco's downest-and-dirtiest cop so unambiguously shook his pom-poms in favor of. I bounded through the house with toy pistol in hand, pulsating with medieval emotions stirred up by the film's climactic boardwalk shootout, blowing away scumbag after scumbag (in actuality, our Siamese cat) in an awesomely orchestrated orgy of exploding squibs and backward-flying stunt doubles. Other kids wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo? Pfft, other kids were gay. I wanted to be Dirty Harry Callahan, a fucking righteous dispenser of ask-no-questions frontier justice.

Of course, I was a child then. Now, I'm all grown up — a man, alright? And this man has no choice but to grind underfoot the rose-colored shades of childhood nostalgia and publicly admit that the Dirty Harry films — with the exception of the Don Siegel-helmed original — are strictly Shit City. Gabbage.

Photo courtesy of DVD Beaver

Mind you, it's not that I suddenly object to all that wiping-out-the-scum-of-society stuff that caused critics to label the Dirty Harry franchise "fascist." Pissing off conservatives takes neither effort nor imagination — time and again, Republican hackles have been raised by the most innocuous things on the planet. Pissing off liberals, though — inducing supposedly well-read college graduates to label you an enemy of social progress — well, that was Inspector Callahan's stock in trade; something much trickier to pull off. If you're, say, Don Siegel or Sam Peckinpah, it probably means you're giving voice to a worldview other than the one held dear by the Hollywood set — and doing so in a matter-of-fact way devoid of condescension or easy moralizing. Refusing to simplify human nature for pampered idiots who never actually rub elbows with the unwashed proletariat they so passionately champion/decry from the perch of their senior-year dissertations and Salon op-ed pieces — yep, that'll get mouths foaming every time.

And it's not that I now object to the violence in these films. Violence is a needed fantasy, demanded by our own savage breasts and wet dreams of personal retribution against exes and obnoxious neighbors and needle-dick bosses. Sure, Axl Rose told us that "vicarious existence is a fucking waste of time" but let's face it — vicariously plugging a sneering rapist full of .44-caliber holes and foiling asshole bank robbers while tossing off terse one-liners is nothing less than the raging blood inside our collective morning wood. Violence in the right directorial hands is cathartic. Balletic. It's the sauce on the rigatoni, the freckles on the redhead, the guaranteed come shot that makes the guns-and-machismo porn of the action genre worth sitting through — if we're being honest with ourselves.


Photo courtesy of DVD Beaver

Thing is, the violence in the Dirty Harry sequels doesn't go far enough — it doesn't resonate. There's no social context for the wave of crime that Harry finds around every corner, in every diner and every bank — a social context that might lend some gravitas to Harry's one-man mission to clean up the streets. If Dirty Harry's world more closely resembled our own, we'd have a supercop as stymied and as troubled by sociopathy and random violence and increasing dehumanization as we are. Flashes of self-doubt — "Am I certain that punk whose sternum I just air-conditioned was the right guy?" "Am I sure I'm not twisting the law to fit some darker psychological purpose of my own?" — would not only render him flesh-and-blood but would mirror our own concerns about the potential that all cops have for abuse of power. His need to wipe out that which bedevils him would be the same impulse that fuels our fantasies of vigilance — those instincts of middle-class keep-me-safe-ism that keep us voting for law-and-order types who promise to build more prisons and put more cops on the street. And then, we might have something to chew on once the credits rolled.

In Sudden Impact, though, the baddies are so carelessly drawn that it's hard to tell whether Eastwood the director wanted to wrap things up so he could hit the golf course by 3 p.m., whether the script was a first draft scribbled on toilet paper between shit-bombs in a men's room on the Warners lot, or whether the actors were just bottom-drawer leftovers from the Bad Guys Casting Co. Even in the real world, our rapists and robbers and pseudo-revolutionaries — however worthy of lifelong imprisonment, castration or a Sundance indie marathon they might be — generally have a personal need to do what they do. They're disgustingly, uncomfortably human; the black-sheep kin that Abe the Accountant has no choice but to acknowledge with a shudder and the shame of an averted gaze. Here, though, their scumminess isn't a feature of their personal derangement or their need to make the world suffer for their drunken-whore mothers and absentee daddies — it's simply setting up those paper targets for Harry to blow holes in.

So what do we get? We get a post-Seventies black robber who can't even call Harry "sucka" and make it sound convincing. We get cackling, eye-bulging psychos who cry out "Get the biiiiitch!" and return to rekindle the rape-flame of several years past for no other reason than to conveniently place themselves within Harry's reach. Forget plausibility. Forget motivation. Forget three-dimensionality. Good little boys and girls have come to see the man with the big gun put the bad guys in the dirt, Hollywood, and we don't have time for any of your god-durned fancy-pants complications or ambiguities or moral implications.

Harry lets the Sondra Locke character go once he knows that she's been the one going around blowing the balls off of her former attackers. And the film sanctions this — stupidly. Not because said rapists didn't have some form of retribution coming, but because the film paints using the simplest fucking Crayola colors imaginable and doesn't have the brains or the moral honesty to make us question whether or not there might be the potential for something darker in this woman's psyche. Sudden Impact presents us with two supremely damaged individuals — self-righteous, humorless robots with no friends, no semblance of a normal life spent in the regular company of other human beings. Clearly, these are people who live for the almighty kill, fueled by a messianic attachment to the unquestionable rightness of their beliefs. Basically, either character is about a hair removed from your garden-variety fundamentalist whack-job or abortion-clinic bomber. So low are the film's expectations for its own audience that it figures it can just give us a killing machine, stamp "hero" on his (or her) forehead, and we'll buy right into it.

In Dirty Harry's world, only two types of characters exist: cardboard cut-outs of American regular-ness whose deaths spur Harry on to his next orgy of violence and scumbags who Harry must gun down. Harry barely even stops to notice the deaths of his friends and partners — not much longer than it takes for him to pause and scowl. The worst, by far, was Tyne Daly in The Enforcer. Here's a woman who gets gunned down her first week on the job, trying to save a wishy-washy mayor with a bad comb-over from hippie-terrorist kidnappers and all she gets for her trouble is a slight grimace from Harry as he stands rigid over her bullet-riddled body — a grimace so slight it could just as easily have been triggered by shitty reruns of Three's Company or indigestion from too many lunchtime hot dogs.

And poor Albert Popwell. He graduates from foiled bank robber who "gots ta know" in the first film to sadistic pimp who gets blown away in Magnum Force to twitchy sell-out in The Enforcer to the plot device he plays here: Harry's token black buddy who stops by just to get called Sambo by our band of thugs and have his throat slit. Well, how else are we going to nudge Harry toward that big come shot of vengeance that the film's been pumping us up for, right? (Never mind the fact that Harry actually shows more rage at what the pricks did to his still-living bulldog.) Black characters are great in that way — when they're not pimps, G's or dealers, that is. We screenwriters don't have to spend a week taking notes in Compton for "research" — we just tell the audience that Leroy is our hero's best bud, no matter how contrived or unconvincing said friendship may be. When you need to jolt the audience with a bit of tragedy, or show 'em what your villains are capable of without killing any meaningful characters (or adorable pooches), just off the black guy. Works every time.

The end result is the kind of action film that a genuine artist like Sam Peckinpah was accused of making: nihilistic, meaningless violence in service of some vague cinematic "fascism" — essentially, I Spit on Your Grave cleaned up for the Age of Reagan, with the same level of moral intelligence (bad) and none of the tits or all-around sleaze (worse). It's the kind of film that brazenly steals diamonds from the display cases of its betters and figures you won't notice the bits of broken glass inside the ring box — Hey, there's Sondra Locke shooting her mirror reflection in post-homicidal disgust just like James Coburn in Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid! How 'bout that climax on an out-of-control merry-go-round just like in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train!

Well, here's my come shot — and I can't make this any messier: it's clichéd, underwritten, lamely staged horseshit like Sudden Impact that ultimately destroyed the American action film. Bye bye, Peckinpah and Walter Hill and William Friedkin — Hello, Jackasses Who Would Pass Off Ben Affleck As a Bank Robber or Will "Clean Rap" Smith As the Pop-Eared Savior of Humanity.

So Sondra Locke killed those who wronged her and she's morally spotless. What happens when this damaged wreck of a human being decides to shift her definition of what "being wronged" is? What if, years down the road, she ends up in a relationship with a man who tires of her android self-righteousness and dumps her for another woman? What if that, too, is considered grounds for a .38-caliber hole in the family jewels — once the label of "abandonment" or "emotional abuse" has been slapped on it? What makes this wronged woman any more righteous in her killing than any other kind of wronged person — is being a victim of rape all it takes? Would 1983 audiences have been justified, then, for cutting down Warner Bros. execs in cold blood due to this film's rape of their precious two hours?

On the Cinematic Depiction of Sweater Puppies and Chest Cannons, Vol. Three (NSFW)

2011-03-21T21:38:00.000-07:00

Of course, I bitch and I moan but I know that most of you are here for the titty shots. Plus, Stanley Kubrick put new shit out more often than I do. So, in the spirit of "if you can't beat 'em, then give 'em spank material," off we go —

From Adaptation
(2002, dir. Spike Jonze)

Oh, the masturbatory fantasies of perfectionist writers
incapable of turning in finished works... (*cough*)

From Short Cuts
(1993, dir. Robert Altman)

Did I ever mention the crush I used to have on Madeleine Stowe?

From Training Day
(2001, dir. Antoine Fuqua)

How Eva Mendes made me curse the very idea of soft-focus:

From Munich
(2005, dir. Steven Spielberg)

How to Avenge Your Comrade Against a Wily Euro-Slut Assassin

Melinda Dillon in Slap Shot
(1977, dir. George Roy Hill)

Jane Adams in Happiness
(1998, dir. Todd Solondz)

Kate Hudson in Almost Famous
(2000, dir. Cameron Crowe)

Al Pacino and girlfriend get clean in Serpico
(1973, dir. Sidney Lumet)

From Death Wish
(1974, dir. Michael Winner)

Proof that we haven't had a really good, tasteless rape scene since the '70s:

From O Lucky Man!
(1973, dir. Lindsay Anderson)

I think they used this scene as part of the West Indies' Come to Great Britain!
ad campaign in the early '70s.

From The Gambler
(1974, dir. Karel Reisz)

Apparently, Sonny Corleone beelined for Harlem after being reincarnated:

From Apocalypse Now Redux
(2001, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Being that the original 1979 theatrical release of Apocalypse Now long ago made my hallowed
Four Greatest Films Ever list, I was naturally skeptical about the extended, 10 1/2-hour cut Coppola
decided to put out some years later. Of course, my skepticism waned during the following
added sequences:

Rosario Dawson in He Got Game
(1998, dir. Spike Lee)

From Seconds
(1966, dir. John Frankenheimer)

In 1966, Rock Hudson attended this real-life Dionysian-wine-orgy thing somewhere on
the coast of California — and walked out of it unchanged:

Marilyn Chambers in Rabid
(1977, dir. David Cronenberg)

The future Mrs. Warren Beatty in The Grifters
(1990, dir. Stephen Frears)

And how serious could a look at cinematic tittage be without the women-in-prison extravaganzas
churned out by the early '70s Roger Corman assembly line — complete with probably-
somewhat-exploited native Filipino lovelies and the not-yet-known-but-still-gargantuan-
breasted Pam Grier?

From The Big Doll House
(1971, dir. Jack Hill)

From The Big Bird Cage
(1972, dir. Jack Hill)

And, being both a child of the Eighties and the self-appointed President of the Brown Nipple
Appreciation Society, I would be remiss not to mention Coming to America — from a period in Eddie
Murphy's career when he probably did wake up like this every morning:

From Coming to America
(1988, dir. John Landis)

Pauline Kael Has Risen

2011-03-05T03:34:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I never cease to be baffled by people who react to my reviews by gushing about how "long and in-depth" they are. As if film criticism was never meant to be anything other than simplistic two-paragraph recitations of a film's plot followed by a listing of all the "cool" parts.

Of course, this is the Information Age. Everyone's got a much shorter attention span now, there's only a gazillion blogs out there competing for your readers' attention, and — I suppose — it's best to keep things short and sweet. Even some of the best writers I've encountered here in the film blogoverse essentially reduce their cineaste's passion to: "Hey, guys! This movie was really cool/really bad and you should totally put it on your Netflix/not waste your time with it! The end!"

What's funny is, Pauline Kael first sounded the klaxon over this infantilization of film culture that we now take for granted — and she did it over thirty years ago.

Pauline Kael was the doyenne of film criticism. A veritable Colossus. Her stretch at The New Yorker, especially during those crucial Gritty '70s, raised film criticism to an art form. She championed Scorsese, De Palma and the young Spielberg. She trashed Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry and The French Connection. She absolutely made Robert Altman's Nashville — no ifs, ands or buts. She called Woody Allen out on his Jewish self-hatred. Warren Beatty, envious of her power, wooed her away from writing with a production job at Paramount just to put her out to pasture. She sired an entire legion of film critics dubbed "Paulettes" — A.O. Scott, anyone? Armond White? Greil Marcus? David Denby? Elvis Mitchell? Michael Sragow? Owen Gleiberman?

And through it all, her dissertation-length pieces took you deep into a film's emotional by-ways and little pleasures like no one else's. By the time she was done with a Blue Velvet or a Melvin and Howard or a Casualties of War or a Godfather II or an essay on the nihilist poetry of Monsieur Peckinpah, mere reels of celluloid felt like members of the family. She was, in the parlance of today's debauched hip-hop cultcha, The Bomb. Pure uncut funk. An inspiration to anyone who actually gives a shit about film.

And for the two of you who actually check out my blog for something other than titty shots, now you have a chance to hear her speak:

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

2011-02-25T01:07:00.000-08:00

Death of a Ladies' Man

directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

starring Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider,
Jean-Pierre Léaud

Someone tell Clarence Worley in True Romance that he's got shit taste in men. Never mind that hick momma's boy Elvis — the cultural revolution credited to Presley's swiveling hips was kick-started at the dawn of the decade by Marlon Brando.

Fuck screaming teenyboppers on Ed Sullivan — Brando was lit dynamite for adults; sweating and scratching his way through the black-and-white artifice of A Streetcar Named Desire, tossing your radio out the window and tearing your Scarlett O'Hara's playhouse down and making a catchphrase out of the name Stella, to boot. If Elvis, as Lester Bangs once said, "alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives," then Brando's very screen presence — its sheer primal charge — showed the whole world that it liked it up the ass, that sex was best when taken and not asked for, that borderline mental instability with a hint of violence was the fastest way to moisten a vulva.

And that's to say nothing of the revolution in acting that he fathered — the hyper-realism too real for real life, the mumbling, the soul-searching, the uncertainty, the self-indulgent but revealing improvs, the James Deans and Nicholsons and Pacinos and Hoffmans and De Niros and Sean Penns and Val Kilmers and Edward Nortons and James Gandolfinis that squirted out every time he squatted over a soundstage to let out a fart during rehearsal. In the wake of his Stanley Kowalski and his Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and even his bad-ass biker in The Wild One, thirty-odd years of mannered acting before him suddenly seemed as authentic as Milli Vanilli limping onstage behind Curtis Mayfield. The silver screen was all the richer just for the fact of Brando's mother having ever met his father. Even in the years of his self-parodic decline, even while he pocketed million-dollar paychecks for crappy films and reduced his gift to whatever could fit inside an oddball, glorified cameo, Marlon Brando remained the father of modern screen acting — the finest goddamn thespian ever to tread God's salty green earth.

Exhibit A for the defense: Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece Last Tango in Paris.

Students of "controversial cinema" already know the basics — Last Tango in Paris. Synonymous with erotic films. A dirty grandfather to fuck-fueled filmic descendants such as In the Realm of the Senses and 9 Songs. Slapped with an X rating in the era of Deep Throat. Censored or banned in various countries. The corner where porno chic slammed head-on into the European art film. Its scandalous effect on the 1972 New York Film Festival. Maria Schneider's ample tits and ampler bush. "Get the butter."

Maria Schneider is blithe Parisienne Jeanne, all of twenty years old and set to marry a young documentary filmmaker when she breezes into the vacant flat she's just rented and discovers Paul (Brando). Paul's an American expatriate, hiding in darkness from the fact that his French wife recently slit her wrists — and his remedy for the gaping black hole of emotional numbness inside him is to take this bourgeois little French girl by force, right up against the wall. Naturally, Paul's bestial-daddy schtick — no names, no details, only sex — is exactly the spanking that baby-girl Jeanne needs deep down inside. Naturally, Jeanne comes back for more, meeting Paul for afternoon trysts in the very abode she's soon to occupy with her hubby-to-be. Naturally, Paul's psycho-sexual violation leads to both mutual-obsession-as-personal-journey and escalating acts of sexual degradation that obviously impressed the makers of 9 1/2 Weeks. Naturally, what it all adds up to is Stanley Kowalski, still pulling Stella down off them columns, twenty years later.

I say "naturally" not in the peeved tones of some cobwebbed-cunt feminist who wonders why every time filmmakers purge their psyches, we get these vengeful-schoolboy fantasies of women panting under the boot of male domination — no. Rather, I say it from the standpoint of a man who knows all too well that Jeannes exist in multitudes. I say it with the personal knowledge that fucking with desperate abandon is a stronger emotional Band-Aid than even drugs or booze; that near-rape and a bit of expert subjugation can earn an angry, wounded gent the Daddy Substitute badge with just about any needy, emotionally unformed woman he chooses.

Though Schneider's double roll-away in the aftermath of that shocking first fuck is a bit stagy, every detail bears the sweat of authentic doings — the touch is sure. Watch the way she succumbs to Brando's gorilla embrace. Watch the debauched parody of her upcoming nuptials in the way that he scoops her up before crossing the threshold of acceptable behavior. Glory in the offhanded way that he fastens his coat and picks the for-rent sign off the wall, as they step out into daylight and stagger off in separate directions with nary a word — he, of course, reveling in the joy of having just shattered her porcelain dollhouse of a world.

And who wouldn't swing the mallet? Maria Schneider is the world's cutest little monkey here — a tousle-haired, beauty-marked little Monchhichi poking her head out from beneath ruffled layers of assumed propriety, just to stick her tongue out at you while her elders aren't watching. She's a naughty, precocious brat whose mangled English and pendulous cleavage and furry Gallic twat you'd like to nestle yourself in and build a home for the winter, but only after you've bent her over your knee and hiked up her skirt and given her bare ass a proper reddening.

Sure, Jeanne's fiancé — the callow young filmmaker who can only see the world through a camera's viewfinder, who needs the relative order that a film set imposes upon the messiness of real life — is a cliché so old its beard is graying. For all we know, it's Bertolucci's self-commentary as a filmmaker, his weird, masochistic fantasy of losing his woman to some much worldlier, older gent. But it works here. Clearly, Jeanne the bourgeois little French girl is straining for some sort of authenticity in her life; something real, something that hasn't been manufactured and scripted and shaped then re-shaped for a potential audience — and if it takes getting raped on the floor of a vacant apartment by a depressed middle-aged weirdo whose name she doesn't even know, then c'ést la vie. Neat trick, that: setting up extraordinarily scripted circumstances as the emotional prison from which Schneider flees into the unpredictable arms of Brando, the King of Sweaty Improv.

Here's the twist, though: as corruptible and pliable as she initially seems to Paul, with all his worldly wisdom and graying American alpha-maleness, it's Jeanne who's able to call it a day and move on, unscathed. An older, wiser woman would have continued succumbing to Paul, conceding her mind and her soul, possibly until there was very little of her left. It would have served her needs — penance for a normal human life full of messy little lies and casual deceptions. It would have put its buttery fingers up the ass of her soul and touched a pulse that no emissary from the straight world of missionary position and Sunday-service-with-the-kids would be able to find at that point. Here, though, Paul's effect is one of psychic bruises, not scars; ultimately, Jeanne's too young and too restless — too incapable of any kind of lasting bond — for his attempted emotional decay to take root. She's nowhere near as damaged as he is — not at her age, with its attendant lack of true soul-weariness.

The bulls-eye that this self-loathing wreck of a man is really aiming at is the one painted on his own chest. He becomes ensnared in his own web, he brings himself crashing down. It's suicide via futile emotional yearning, and suicide — resting, at last, beside his pigfucker cunt of a wife in whatever eternal flophouse passes for an afterlife — is what every ounce of him is crying out for, from the moment we meet him.

Bertolucci shaped the role of Paul just for Brando and wooed him — then fought with him — just to seduce him into the performance we see before us. Brando seems very much to be Acting in certain scenes but that only adds to the intrigue and the tension for people waiting to see what the Great Improviser is going to come up with next. Tony Soprano once likened therapy to taking a shit, and that's exactly what it feels like here: we can feel Brando searching, straining — as in a long monologue about drunken parents and a farmer with a clay pipe that Paul remembers from his youth. It makes us feel like dirty little psychological voyeurs, privy to a famously guarded man prodded forward by his director, as he digs around in his guts and bares long-hidden psychological wounds. Half the time — despite Brando's disavowals (and, on occasion, flat-out dismissals) to the press — we don't know whether it's Paul coming unraveled before our very eyes or Marlon Brando himself. The fact that Brando cold-shouldered Bertolucci for almost fifteen years after Tango speaks obviously to the latter.

Last Tango ends up going rather out of its way to make Paul's depressed visage a Mount Rushmore for modern male doubt and alienation. It's all in the way that Vittorio Storaro's ace cinematography positively caresses Brando's profile, rendering him a living statue before our very eyes. Iconographic images abound in Tango, swathing Brando in Paris-au-Printemps atmosphere and rotting, late-afternoon, autumnal colors — apparently, half the movie takes place between 4:30 and 5:30 in the evening. It's the loneliness, the isolation, the fundamental separation between characters that determines the visual design here. Shadows. Shadows. Darkness. Paul's late-night visit to the body of his wife is enough to make you forget about "I coulda been a contenda" and Don Corleone with Michael in the garden. Never before had an actor dug so deep on camera, teetered so wildly and fearlessly on the precipice over self-parody and ridiculousness, just to bring undiluted human pain to the screen.

Of course, to 2011 eyes, the much talked-about sexual content isn't much more extreme than what you'd find in a thousand unrated, straight-to-DVD productions — and if you're only tuning in because you heard about the film's X rating or the infamous scene in which Brando sodomizes Schneider with the aid of some handy butter, you're in a for a serious disappointment. In which case, fuck you — this is Marlon-fucking-Brando being directed by Bernardo-fucking-Bertolucci, both in the august years of their considerable artistic gifts. If all you care about is tastefully art-directed nudie bits, go rent a fucking shitty Emmanuelle flick.

Something black and unknowable beats at the heart of Last Tango in Paris — that's what it's really about. It's like the time I was sick with the flu and scared to death about my impending move to L.A. and had Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly" on constant rotation, to the extent that I couldn't move, couldn't budge, couldn't respond to the unyielding whine of my phone, couldn't pull myself up out of the murk of why-bother-nothing-ever-works-out-the-way-you-want-it-to — to the extent that I seriously, if fleetingly, considered making a noose out of one of my neckties and pulling an Ian Curtis right there in my stuffy little suburban apartment, all alone. And I had no idea why. And still don't. It's like diving headlong into the endless air-raid siren that ends Portishead's Third, letting the blackness envelop you like a fluffy warm blanket, lulling you to sleep as you sink deeper and deeper and deeper.

Like Shampoo, Tango's an honest post-Sixties examination of just what the emotional costs of free love and no-strings sex really are — what an utter sham it is most of the time, despite the bald-faced assurances men and women lob at each other in the heat of the moment. Ultimately, all Paul wants to do is crawl back into the womb — his mother's, perhaps his dead wife's — signified by his overly Freudian love for the fetal position. Only when Paul is with Jeanne is there an emphasis on shared shots, togetherness — and even then, loneliness creeps in around the edges and dominates. Loneliness is each character's shadow at all times, even when — or especially when — naked with another human being. Paul confronts Jeanne with this, the essential loneliness of human existence — "you're all alone and you won't be able to face that until you look death right in the face." "Go right up into the ass of death," he tells her, an exhortation that could have come from his Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

Brando comes off as half-insane here, as he likely was in real life. By the end, Paul's mutated into a stalker straight out of some taut psychological thriller — suicidal provocation as a way out of a world he no longer understands, a world he can no longer bear to slog his way through. Of course, the tragedy of the film is that, despite all his bullshit about not knowing each others' names and trying to keep things as detached as possible, Paul falls for Jeanne.

Finally, after his wife's suicide, after trying every thing possible to keep himself closed off to the possibility of love — to avoid pain — he finds a ray of sunshine in this soiled French pastry, he finds himself opening up to her, finds himself falling in love with her. His fate is sealed, the moment he tells her this. And why? Well, Jeanne does exactly as Paul suggests — she looks right up into the ass of death, sees the reflection of her own future loneliness in Paul — and she pulls back, she retreats, she flees back into the arms of her callow filmmaker fiancé. It's artifice over reality, manufactured image over edifying ugliness.

It's marriage as the death of true passion, as it often is in life; marriage as the safe, well-heated, hundred-thousand-dollar, white-picket-fence womb of financial security and social respectability that Jeanne retreats to, as all women must. And Paul is left alone — truly, inconsolably alone; stuck deep up the cavernous, putrid ass of death with his own loneliness once again.

Of course, we never find out why Paul's wife committed suicide. Paul's tragedy is that he comes to understand why, only too well.

Mandingo (1975)

2011-02-10T03:31:00.000-08:00

21st Century Schizoid Man

directed by Richard Fleischer
starring James Mason, Susan George, Perry King,
Richard Ward, Brenda Sykes, Ken Norton

When it comes to defending the "indefensible," I'm like the crazy old cat lady at the dark end of Culture Street, taking stray bits of musical and cinematic refuse under my wing and nursing them into full-blown obsessions. Just ask anyone I've exposed to the "racist" country songs of David Allan Coe or the tragically uncool dork-rock of Rush or Yes — things invariably shat upon by hipsters nipping at the prune juice of assumed irrelevance, too safe inside their bubbles to actually expose themselves to what they're ridiculing. The biker-bar vernacular of those notorious Coe numbers is — like the slang of the projects or the Guido-ese spoken in Brooklyn or Jersey — a tradition-forged American tongue sanctioned neither by social propriety nor Strunk & White; a tribal self-portrait whose warts-and-all honesty one needn't embrace but which only a philistine would want silenced. Censorship via "political correctness" is one way to Windex the bum's fingerprints of a now-embarrassing past from our collective American windshield. Smugly relegating viable works of art to the trash heap of Bad B-Movie Night is another.

Such has been the fate of Richard Fleischer's ballsy 1975 slave epic Mandingo, a film that merits a place at the table with the Nashvilles and Barry Lyndons of its year, not shunted off to a crappy seat next to Dolemite over in the colored section. Set on Falconhurst, a slave-breeding plantation in 1840's Looziana, it ostensibly tells the story of rheumatic old slaver Warren Maxwell (James Mason) struggling to keep his business afloat when son Hammond (Perry King) buys Mede (boxer Ken Norton), a strapping Mandingo buck prized as the biggest and strongest around. Mede turns out to be a walking ATM for his new owners — whether ripping the Maxwells' stable of wenches in half with his Nubian man-snake and siring top-dollar babies in the process or decimating his fellow slaves in high-stakes death-matches.

Look at the film through twenty-first century goggles, though, and the axis of tragedy becomes clearer. Forget about black folk in chains — Mandingo is the tragedy of a white man with a yen for dark meat, born in the wrong era. Hammond is introduced to us as a man utterly unmoved by sexy blonde prostitutes pawing at his crotch, a slaveowner for whom the right of Massa to deflower and impregnate his wenches is personal gospel. Papa Warren wants grandbabies more than three-fifths human, though, so he presses Hammond to take a white wife (Susan George) when Hammond's perfectly happy spilling the remainder of his fertile years inside Ellen (Brenda Sykes), the brown sugar he saves his sweetest nothings for — his real wife.

Of course, the antebellum South was a bit early for a white man with the predilections of Robert De Niro. Hammond calls up every excuse in the Good Book — white wimmens ain't s'posed to like sex, wifey Blanche lacked cherry on their wedding night — to explain away his lack of interest in his blushing bride, to justify the spot his beacon of Southern womanhood holds on the totem pole beneath Mede and Ellen. Compare each couple's consummation: the tenderness he shows Ellen (at least, she's a virgin) versus the way he cruelly rebuffs Blanche — clearly smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that Blanche's severe melanin deficiency has left him limper than a wet newspaper. Poor Blanche — even Daddy Maxwell (of all indignities) shows more excitement at the sight of Mede than he does at meeting his new daughter-in-law. Not even relieving Ellen of the burden of bearing Hammond's mulatto spawn can sew up that quivering gash in her pride. Booted from her perch of privilege and landing in the mud next to slave quarters, a seething Blanche finally demands a little sugar from new neighbor Mede — forcing Hubby to take up arms in defense of affronted white male supremacy and hastening, in one fell swoop, the very end to the Falconhurst empire that her presence was supposed to prevent. Hell hath no fury like a white woman scorned.

It's a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare — however overripe its Lady Macbeth — and what's obvious, once you hose off the shit-stew of derision and nervous titters that tastemakers have sprayed Mandingo with for over three decades, is what a powerful film it is. The American history book shows race relations as a bunch of disparate, and possibly incompatible, ingredients tossed willy-nilly into a pressure cooker, sealed tight, and cranked up to 165 degrees — thusly, so is Mandingo. Our enlightened, college-educated, post-Martin Luther King minds can't conceive of a society where the ability of li'l nigger boys to drain the rheumatism out of the feet of old white men was casual dinner-table conversation. Our enlightened, college-educated minds can't conceive of a world where the impossibility of blacks having souls was common knowledge.

And yet, there it is — the hairy brown maw of unsanitized history that Mandingo spreads wide and shoves in our faces, complete with its own set of rules: 1) never kiss a nigger wench on the mouth; 2) niggers never look a white person in the eye, or address one, unless given permission first; 3) blinding a nigger in one eye is the perfect punishment for said nigger having learned to read since it learns 'em real good and, with one eye left, they can still perform their duties; 4) breeding a nigger with his own relatives isn't incest any more than it is with farm animals; 5) it's not like niggers'd know their own family, anyway, since they were most likely sold off as babies; 6) if the progeny of a nigger fornicatin' with his own kin turns out some kinda retard, well, you just kill it.

We howl with our friends at Susan George's overwrought Southern-belle jive because we're dancing on strings held by thirty years of "it's a trashy B-movie!" orthodoxy. Certainly, it's easier than breaking from the pack of hipster hyenas. Certainly, it's easier than pausing to consider George's bug-eyed hyperventilating as a performance that Blanche herself would undoubtedly give in order to maintain the chaste-maiden-of-the-South image that antebellum society expected of its white women. When your rich new plantation-heir husband figures out that you've had cock before his and calls your purity into question, you pound your fist into the bed and take your umbrage in declamatory shrieks — it's the only way to convince.

We tell ourselves to laugh at the mondo bizarro world that Mandingo presents because if it ain't funny, then it's true — and if it's true that human beings actually lived and prospered and slept soundly in a world like this, then it's too fucking horrible to contemplate. It's horrible enough to make you forget that your own ancestors didn't arrive at these shores from Europe until the 1930's; horrible enough to make you offer up your own fat middle-aged wife as sexual reparations for boneheaded, irony-free Negroes who blissfully trumpet their own status as prized bucks and then slap high-fives with their homies and crow about how the times, they are a-changin'.

All the so-called "tawdry" elements of the film? Trashy interracial sex? Whites using blacks as disposable sexual objects? White women who feel unappreciated by white men and spitefully use black cock as a two-by-four with which to bludgeon the "straight" society that rejected them? Blacks basing their self-worth on Massa's approval? Blacks maiming and killing one another for white America's entertainment? Blacks happily assuming control of the whip that keeps their own people in line? Well, that, my friends, is nothing less than the whole sorry-ass Southern-fried Gothic melodrama that's written the script for our American theater right up to the present day — a text from which we have yet to deviate. It's a history of elbows chafed from rubbing — of attempted coexistence futile enough to make the Hatfields and McCoys look like Frisco bathhouse-buddies and volatile enough to make a veritable rainbow of weary Americans toast both pre-hajj Malcolm X and George Lincoln Rockwell.

It's a nation of black men nodding out on the opiates of white club pussy and juvenile braggadocio, conjuring up images like the ones in Mandingo to justify sagging pants and grills and thug badges worn proudly to the Church of Blame Whitey, while the poise and dignity of the Civil Rights Era shrinks in our rear-view mirror like Wile E. Coyote gone off the cliff. It's the big black dick that David Allan Coe whined about. It's a white-male ruling order that was destined, from day one, to push black males and white women together, rendering them strange bedfellows in the boudoir of mutual disenchantment.

Mandingo doesn't call the collision of black and white on the minefield of capitalism "combustible," it sketches race in America as a fucking wad of nitroglycerin packed up the ass of a Parkinson's-afflicted mule that's trapped inside a rickety old truck speeding over a very bumpy road in the mountains — a bomb so potent, it's exploded again and again and again. 1863 New York, the summer of 1919, 1923 Rosewood, 1943 Detroit, Watts '65, Newark in '67, Memphis '68, L.A. '92, Cincinnati in '01, Emmett Till, O.J., hell, the election of Obama — Ken Norton's dong lit the fuse deep inside Susan George's disarranged guts, gracing each successive chapter of the American saga, both black and white, with ashes and rubble.

If you live on the South Side of Chicago, open your window — you can still smell smoke. If you're living near the burned-out shell of what used to be Detroit, or anywhere in L.A. where homeboys and cholos compete for demographic superiority and their every dialogue is a fatally serious version of the old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial, then open your window — smell the smoke. If you're living in Oakland — smell the smoke. Baltimore — smell the smoke. St. Louis? Jackson, Mississippi? Birmingham, Alabama? Cleveland? N'awlins? The Bronx? Flint, Michigan? Camden, New Jersey? Gary, Indiana — or anywhere else in America where the "burn, baby, burn" of past uprisings can still be heard, carried on the wind like the klaxons sounded at the dawn of desegregation? Well, hide your wife, hide your kids, hide your husband — 'cause there's smoke smoke smoke.

And a question lingers. As the voices of Medgar Evers and James Byrd, Jr., of Reginald Denny and the victims of the D.C. Sniper, of Nicole Brown Simpson, plus whatever old lady just got her purse snatched this week, all rise from the smoke to offer a hearty "thanks, guys" to the Hammond Maxwells that struck the first match under the cauldron way back when — a question lingers. That question:

Is all this smoke the remnant of the last dying fire or the beginnings of a new one?

The Town (2010)

2011-01-23T06:38:00.000-08:00

Serious White People

directed by Ben Affleck
starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall,
Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Chris Cooper

Hollywood, that hallowed caterer to the cultural needs of the moment, is open for business. Please bring your prescriptions forward. Is your America mired in the post-Vietnam doldrums — wishing we'd kicked a little more ass, itching for a sense of closure? A tablespoon of Rambo before bed oughta do the trick. Has your America undergone a crisis of confidence, or experienced feelings of diminished potency in the years since 9/11? Just one episode of 24, taken thirty minutes to an hour before sexual activity, and it's the Glorious Eighties all over again.

And what to make of the insta-popularity accorded films like The Departed, Mystic River, The Boondock Saints, and now The Town? Why this sudden deluge of Shamrock Guidos acting tough on the mean streets of Baahston — celluloid sons of Whitey Bulger and Mickey Featherstone who enact provincial rites of manly violence and throw the stink-eye at anybody Not From The Neighborhood?

It's simple: in contrast to their dusky contemporaries, today's middle-class white males have largely declined into a tribe of self-made eunuchs — their flag a white handkerchief, an earnestly warbled emo rendition of "Guilty of Being White" their national anthem. Angst-ridden shells, our modern sons of Europe; so ashamed at their inheritance of a privileged past that their very body language around the Swarthy Ones now spells apology — an averting of the gaze, an involuntary nod-of-the-head in deference. Hey, bro, pleads Chip's transparent stabs at forced social interaction. I'm down. I still know all the words to "Gin and Juice." I'm one of the good ones.

Why, yesterday's white man was nothing less than the flag-waving Christ of Western civilization — our gallant, pink-cheeked warrior who, in the steel-cage tournament for world domination, bodyslammed all five hundred pounds of Japan, made Mother Russia submit to his figure-four leglock, and put Germany down for the count with an elbow off the top turnbuckle. Now, he can't even wear the pants in the family on a shitty sitcom. Now, his only ticket to racial redemption is falling in love with Halle Berry or taking dance lessons from Will Smith. Now, he's little more than the vampire in the mirror of twenty-first century pop culture — with the once-resonant boom of his decades of musical sophistication and cinematic innovations reduced to a mere fart in a multicultural windstorm.

And what does he do about it, this modern white male of ours? While misogynistic black boys who preach the Gospel According to Snoop and can barely keep their own pants up are propped up by a zeitgeist that exalts willful ignorance and a twelfth-grader's idea of masculinity — what does he do about it? Jokers unable to compete in a society that prizes more than dick size suddenly become the aces of the deck as the Great American Value System stoops to mimic that of the ghetto — and what does Whitey do about it?

Well, Dear Reader, I'll tell you what he does about it: he buries his head in the sands of ironic detachment and post-feminist shoegazing; so terrified of "objectifying" the opposite sex, he can barely bring himself to approach a woman despite the half-an-evening she's clearly spent adjusting her cleavage for maximum jiggle. Girls who diddled themselves to Brad Pitt's abs in Fight Club now bestow their HPV and daddy issues on Ol' Dirty Bastard lookalikes and tell themselves they're "too curvy" for white guys. Meanwhile, said white guys are too busy standing in a hipster circle-jerk over glasses of Sam Adams, pretending to relate to drug-dealer slang in Wu-Tang lyrics, or arguing on message boards about why Omar was the coolest character on The Wire. After all, to deny such things — to be seen as having refused a seat on the Benetton bandwagon — is to be branded with a scarlet "R" and marched like the Son of Sam through the Obama-stickered town square of our modern Age of Enlightenment. And that — if one desires social acceptance, if one wishes to earn one's diversity-compliance gold star for the sake of professional viability — is The Fate Worse Than Death.

But, hey, there's always the movies! Where else can a slice of Wonder bread like Ben Affleck be a take-no-shit, bank-robbin' son-of-a-gun who, beneath all the Guinness-guzzling and everybody-stay-calm-and-no-one-gets-hurt, is sensitive enough to be the emotional savior of a woman traumatized by his handiwork? Where else can hot blonde baby-mommas be woman enough to ride stick-up boys on couches, ghetto enough to scrap with Somalians, and damn quick to refute the assumption that Serious White People all went the way of the dodo bird? Where else can yuppie white manhood get its own psycho knight in shining Notre Dame armor — a buzz-cut Ice Cube straight outta Charlestown (Jeremy Renner, best thing in the film) who wears his unyielding gangsta ethos like a comfy sweater and is willing to die in it?

Don't misunderstand me: I don't have a problem with Ben Affleck. Except for The Town, he tends to keep his mitts off the kinds of roles better left to the Edward Nortons and Ryan Goslings of the world. My impression of him is that of a guy with neither illusions about himself as an heir to Brando nor problems with that cozy seat he's been occupying on Middle of the Road Ave. since Armageddon. And behind the camera, Benny Boy is as far from hackwork as he is from genius; his first flick Gone Baby Gone, with its measured pacing and novelist's sense of emphasizing just the right detail for a given scene, was a crisp snapshot of the ethnic enclave as state of mind — compelling stuff. Brother Casey (the real actor of the family, as Ben will tell you) contributed a lived-in lead performance as far from magazine-cover flashiness as the old neighborhood is from Hollywood. Ben stayed behind the camera. What it all added up to was the kind of debut that critics tend to file under "Impressive" with a note at the bottom: "let's see what he does next."

Of course, as with all films about young males doing the cock-of-the-walk through a criminal underclass defined by shared ancestry, the template here is Scorsese's Mean Streets. Old crime boss (Pete Postlethwaite) who's lorded it over their twelve-block radius since time began and pulls the strings that make our hapless protagonist dance? Check. Characters mentally imprisoned by their ethnic tribalism? Check. A way of life so etched in stone that the very idea of branching out and starting over is as strange — and threatening — as Tommy the barkeep suddenly sprouting antlers and gibbering in Sanskrit? Absa-fuckin'-lutely. Renner's Jem, the hair-trigger childhood friend turned career-thief-and-loving-it, is obviously the loose-cannon De Niro role. And that leaves Affleck to give us his conflicted good-guy-at-heart Harvey Keitel.

Which is the problem: Rafe-fucking-McCawley from Pearl-fucking-Harbor is not the guy to take the bones of a hard-bitten career thief and put real meat on 'em. What he does is take the usual studio-movie compromises and turn his Bad White Boy into a fucking middle-class college kid: yes, he robs banks but he's never actually killed or hurt anyone! in fact, he's really a tender soul underneath it all! he works with kids and cares about the renovation of a neighborhood ice rink! oh, and also he's still nursing wounds from a dad in prison and a mother who disappeared when he was just a wee lad! See, guys? Innat better?

Ben Affleck is not an actor — he's a movie star. Movie stars busy themselves thinking of response cards at preview screenings and Entertainment Weekly spreads and appearances on Oprah and Jay Leno — and you can read it on the brows of their onscreen personas. Submitting to the iron will of a director means that you cede control of your image, that you're molded and — if the film is worth a damn — nudged into shadowy areas of your psyche, pushed to the very limits of your talent. Give a star double duty in the director's chair, though, and watch him render every stripe of drug dealer, hit man, and delusional psychotic as an energy-conserving, balanced-diet-eating, all-American Guy Next Door and understudy for Jesus.

Ben Affleck the Actor/Director is so hellbent on making his Doug MacRay a secret Cub Scout that — fwip! — out the window go both logic (how is it that the Feds know who his guys are and yet fail to have them under surveillance?) and plausibility (the whole relationship-of-storytelling-convenience with Rebecca Hall). His big chase through the streets following an armored-car robbery elicits the snap-crackle-'n-pop of a '70s policier, until you realize that no '70s film was dumb enough to have half a police force chasing a bunch of guys in nun outfits through the narrow streets of a town square and then hinge their escape on the happenstance of a lone cop who — literally — chooses to look the other way. Hell, Affleck doesn't even sell us on how an average faackin' guy like Doug would even be capable of such a death-courting, antisocial choice of career. Or how his best buddies all turned out to be sociopaths committed to the necessity of gunning down grandmas for a handful of hundreds while he's off mentoring wayward youth. Perhaps I missed it, in all that crackerjack Dolby-surround-sound excitement in the theater, but what do they do with their ill-gotten loot — do they have some sort of joint criminals' account in a.... a bank? Do they just stuff it all inside a giant shamrock-shaped mattress that they keep in a treehouse? Wouldn't the authorities be alerted to large sums deposited into local banking accounts just weeks — or even months — after yet another bank got knocked over by the guys that even the Feds know are—

—Ahh, does it matter? Jeremy Renner's up there on that screen and he don't take no shit. Blake Lively's up there and you can tell the world — including your fuckin' African immigrants — that Homegirl don't take no shit. Even Jon Hamm — yeah, he's the main Fed after our boy Ben — but he's a Fed who don't take no shit.

White males exist in such clenched-sphincter paralysis now that seeing a movie like The Town is like finding a deserted outhouse in the middle of nowhere and finally letting it all out — the sulfur-bomb stench, the fourth-of-July fireworks, the groans of relief. You've been on a first date with American society for the last twenty-odd years and, all that time, you've had to go potty. Bad. But you've been holding it in because you wanted to be polite. Because changes in society and the mores of our time demand it. Certainly, you didn't want to be crass and boorish like your oppressive ancestors — after all, that whole slavery deal was a bit of a drag. Not to mention, the stuff with the Indians.

So you've been sitting there, knotted guts gurgling since the end of the Reagan era — unable to get so much as a toothpick up your ass, it's been clenched so tight. And finally — rat-a-tat-tat goes Jeremy Renner's machine gun — you say "fuck it." Finally — pop-pop-pop goes Benny Boy as he shows muthafuckas he's the Wrong Mick Ta Fuck Wit — you say, "I'm tired of holding it in. I'm tired of making my stomach hurt for everybody else in America." Finally — whack! go pipes against bone as Ben 'n Jeremy stride boldly into the projects and show a couple of Latino punks what happens when you fuck with white yuppie broads — you stand up, fist raised to the heavens, and you shout out, "This is my shit, America. And, yes, it fucking stinks. But at least it's outta my system."

And then, the movie's over...

The Brown Nipple Appreciation Society Proudly Salutes...

2010-10-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

Laura Gemser

Sure, Sylvia Kristel, history's recorded you as cinema's first Emmanuelle. The originator. The prototype. The Apple II, without which we'd never have had our Mac PowerBooks and iBooks and iPhones. It's a grand achievement. The world-famous image of you topless in a wicker chair from the poster for the first Emmanuelle will likely grace your tombstone. No one can take that from you.

But for all your youthful circa-'74 beauty, we'd seen your face before. We'd seen your curves. That come-hither-and-explore-me stare, that creamy French-vanilla complexion, those frosty-beige-to-wine-hued nipples — many a Euro nudie-flick starlet had already put those... virtues on display, long before you'd ever come down the pike. No, you weren't exactly a dispatch from a faraway planet.

And then, those crafty Italian sexploitation producers went all exotic on us and introduced the world to New and Improved Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle 2.0, if you will. "Black" Emmanuelle — embodied to utter perfection by the pure unblemished caramel of Indo-Dutch softcore goddess Laura Gemser, the likes of which we'd never quite laid eyes on in this context.

The kind of Emmanuelle who wouldn't think twice about cavorting naked with African tribes. The kind of Emmanuelle who faced off against ancient cannibals in the Amazon in the name of the almighty scoop (and the saving of tender white flesh). The kind of Emmanuelle that impressionable suburban boys of junior high school age discovered, then rediscovered, via many a late weekend night spent in a household with an active Skinemax subscription turned down almost to mute on the family television. (Not that this was me, mind you.)

Sylvia Kristel, we hardly knew ye.

The Getaway (1972)

2010-09-29T17:04:00.000-07:00

We Can Work It Out

directed by Sam Peckinpah
starring Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw,
Ben Johnson, Al Lettieri, Sally Struthers

To witness Steve McQueen in his prime, kicking ass like it's personal — and God help you if it ever was — is to experience nothing less than the action-movie equivalent of Monica Bellucci's tits: it's a quickener of pulses, a builder of throbbing film-nerd chubbies, enough racing blood to ready your eighty year-old grandpa for a ten-girl gangbang after downing shots of Wild Turkey all night. Just the chik-chik of McQueen's shotgun in The Getaway, and Pavlov's dogs are off to toss their boxers in the wash before he even gets to the boom.

Granted, The Getaway is, at heart, nothing more than a B-movie whore stuffed inside a sequined big-studio evening gown and doused in French perfume. It’s not quite Sam Peckinpah directing "in imitation of Sam Peckinpah," as Pauline Kael opined, but no one who's seen Straw Dogs or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (or, hell, even The Osterman Weekend) would call The Getaway top-tier Bloody Sam. For one thing, Ali MacGraw ("suggested" to Sam due to her post-Love Story bankability) imbues her line readings with about as much warmth as a shell-shocked hostage forced at gunpoint to look into a video camera and convey a message from his captors. Then, there's the supporting characters — low-life marionettes jerking on strings tugged by pure action-plot necessity, despite all the shading and nuance that Peckinpah and his actors attempt to slip in around the edges.

To hear Hollywood tell it, the words "bank heist" have never not been followed by "gone awry," so you'll find the mechanics of said plot as committed to the cultural memory bank as the Beatles songs you learned in grade school. Superstar thief Doc McCoy (McQueen) is sprung from prison to mastermind bank heist for corrupt political boss. Double-crosses and "unexpected" violence ensue. Doc and his wife Carol (MacGraw) head for the border with their ill-gotten loot, fighting off disgruntled co-heisters, the political boss's henchmen, and good old inconvenient cops along the way. Big shootout before happy ending. ("After all," one could imagine McQueen reasoning, "the thing is called The Getaway, is it not?")

And yet, call me a Peckinpah apologist (a Peckinpologist?) if you must, but I don't rate this one as a sleepwalk just because the Rembrandt behind The Wild Bunch had one eye on his bank account when he signed on. All you high-minded aesthetes out there mean to tell me the man couldn't take a breather after vivisecting male identity and John Wayne's beloved frontier and then putting them back together in ways we'd never seen before? He couldn't pause to think about his market value after making the greatest contributions to the Western genre since John Ford, after pulling out a bigger dick than Arthur Penn's and, with a single jerk, wiping the slo-mo carnage of Bonnie & Clyde right off the fucking table? What, he shouldn't have considered a nice, fat piece of summer-action-blockbuster booty, with one of the biggest stars of the era, so that he might raise his cachet and buy a little bargaining power for future projects? (Not that it worked: see the following year's mangled theatrical release of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.)

The shriveled black heart of The Getaway beats inside that tattered genre frame. It's in the way that Peckinpah — like the Coppola of the Godfather films, like Huston and Ford and Hitchcock and Hawks before him — uses his wizardry in service of genre, rather than painting it day-glo orange and stapling it to his film's forehead like some Sundance-lauded whiz-kid of the double-oughts. Under and around and behind his sadistic Terminator-like villain and the obligatory car chases and the kind of ridiculously elaborate bank heist that only happens in the movies, Peckinpah still manages to stuff the chapped orifices of the standard action-flick playbook with quiet innovation worthy of the auteur theory.

Check that opening prison montage as it slow-boils to its matter-of-fact climax: Doc on the day-to-day grind of manual labor, solitude and barked orders; his interminable present intruded upon by jagged flashes of the life — and wife — he had on the outside, a life that now mocks him with its God-like remove from the shambles of his present state. Check that sequence of Doc and Carol at the lake — the way that Peckinpah and his editors use their documentary-of-the-mind technique to put us inside Doc McCoy, to lay bare his longing for the simple pleasures he thought he'd never again enjoy; to lift the hard-bitten career thief of Jim Thompson's source novel a foot or two out of the pulp-fiction muck and show us the humanity he's all but killed for the sake of his career, the humanity he'd rather kill than directly express. Take a look at the humorous, tense sequence wherein Doc retrieves their money from the train-station thief who's absconded with it. And certainly, there's the boner-inducing hotel shootout that splatters us with the film's climactic juices. Just as certainly, said climax is Peckinpah having it two ways at once: it's both another of his increasingly cynical post-Wild Bunch tossings of slo-mo red meat to violence-hungry lions drawn in by his early '70s media hype and a refinement — perhaps, even a perfection — of his technique.

Make no mistake about it: fat payday or not, Nixon was still in office, Vietnam was still raging, and The Getaway is still Peckinpah at the top of his game, eliciting the second of Steve McQueen's two greatest performances (the first being Peckinpah's own Junior Bonner, from earlier in the year).

Thing is, for such a blockbuster-action-film-of-its-time — and all the eschewing of complexity that would seem to imply — there's a remarkable amount of tension in The Getaway between what a mainstream audience expects of its hero and the hero that McQueen and Peckinpah actually give them. Step right up, folks, get'cher popcorn, grab yer seats! See Doc McCoy drop a shrieking Sally Struthers with a single punch! See Doc smack his dutiful wife around over the deal her vagina made with a corrupt official to spring him from the hoosegow! See Doc unable to get it up when finally alone again with the woman who's been haunting his daily thoughts for the last several years! And yet, there again is that struggling with humanity: Doc's all bottled up from prison life, he can't open up, he can't let go, he doesn't know how to show warmth and tenderness anymore. And to compare the likes of McQueen to what passes for an emblem of manhood in the Age of Oprah, one only need ask: what modern star is there who would allow themselves to be portrayed in such a light, in the context of an ostensible crowd-pleaser like this?

That's pure 100-proof Peckinpah* and, no matter how much the box office-minded McQueen tried to sand off the film's rough edges — firing novelist Thompson for hewing too closely to the book's cynical nobody-gets-away-clean ending, tossing out the score by Peckinpah regular Jerry Fielding and substituting a more "accessible" one by Quincy Jones, making Doc McCoy unable to kill in cold blood when the Doc of Thompson's genesis would rearrange your innards for looking at him sideways — The Getaway is essentially the same slimy, unforgiving, Doberman-chewed cunt of a world that Peckinpah's other films brought into crystal-clear 35mm focus. The difference, of course, is the degree to which Peckinpah pushes his camera in to study the pus-filled boils adorning the labia. Straw Dogs and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia take you close enough to see the camera's reflection; in The Getaway, said boils are merely wallpaper — yet, present and accounted for in every scene, nonetheless.

Doubters are referred to Al Lettieri's portrayal of Rudy, the remorseless, double-crossing psychopath who drew first on Doc but couldn't pull the trigger quick enough. (Great line: "He didn't make it... and neither did you.") Rudy's a guy who'd leave Lettieri's Sollozzo from The Godfather (released the same year) lying in the gutter with a piss-streaked face. A guy who kidnaps a veterinarian and his buxom-slut wife, then seduces the wife repeatedly in front of the helpless mook, for no other reason than to torture him and show who's got the bigger dick. Once Hubby's finally hanged himself in the shower of their motel room, Rudy emits barely a sigh before sitting down to take a morning dump and thumb through a magazine next to the body. In a nutshell: pure '70s gangsta. The kind of prick you want on your heroes' asses. And exactly the kind of urgency you need to spice up your criminal-lovers-on-the-run-in-the-heartland yarn.

Who needs a housewife to cook your meals, though, when you've got a loyal partner-in-crime and ace getaway driver all rolled into one? Carol McCoy is woman par excellence as only Sam Peckinpah could give us: right up in the shit where it stinks most, elbow-to-elbow with her man, as tough as her man and tougher in many ways. Plug a few shots in a bad guy? Carol got that, boo. Sleep with a corrupt politico to help spring your ass from jail? Carol's got'cha back. Help with your decoy explosions and your money-stashing and waiting for you all night in a decrepit train station while you take off after some half-ass con artist? Carol's your girl. Not plugging a bullet in your back when she was supposed to, all because she actually loves your hardened criminal ass? Carol's got you. Carol McCoy, the Last Good Woman on a cruel, scorched-black Earth once known as God's own, is the real treasure for Doc McCoy, the real loot that — if he can just avoid the flying buckshot and get over that border — will enable him to live happily ever after. Forget Jim Thompson's original ending; forget, for that matter, the lighthearted lyricism of The Ballad of Cable Hogue. It's The Getaway that represents Peckinpah at his sunniest and most optimistic; it's where a black hole of mistrust and gaping emotional wounds prevails for a change in the eternal WrestleMania against his personal demons regarding women, for once viewing the possibility of fidelity and long-term happiness as something more than the punchline to a cruel joke.

It's commonly asserted that Peckinpah only knew how to depict love's failures, not its endurance. And yet, The Getaway stands as likely the only truly happy ending in the Peckinpah canon — the story of a successful marriage and how a couple's love for each other perseveres, despite the bullets whizzing about, despite the double-crosses and the doubts and the fights and insecurities and side-of-the-road bitchslaps. It's only on the wings of a renewed faith in Doc's commitment to Carol — and his decision to grow the hell up and realize what it meant for her to have stayed by his side — that they're even able to get to the end of that rainbow in Old Mex. And in the parlance of the testosterone-coated take-no-prisoners-ism in which Peckinpah's films were so fluent, that ain't the slut you butt-fuck on sweat-caked motel sheets before trudging home to the little lady, it's the kind of woman you grab a hold of and hang onto for all your rotten life is worth.

If Carol McCoy is the pure white vessel for Peckinpah's dewy-eyed fantasies of that Matrimonial Castle in the Sky — What Could Be — then, Sally Struthers' Fran is, of course, our funky black representative of What Actually Is. She's probably the cleanest carry-over from Jim Thompson's noir nihilism plus Peckinpah's own worst fears regarding women, all rolled into one bouncy little ball of hot air; a walking, jiggling, giggling justification not just for woman-hate but for the Hillside Strangler and O.J., as well. Not only is Fran's craven violence-loving whoriness the flip side to Carol's selfless devotion, but it's perfect kindling for the bonfire of secret suspicion that rages inside any man's head: here's a woman — excuse me, broad — with no sense of loyalty, who's never even heard of devotion, who abandons her own husband without the slightest thought given to anything besides her own validation and selfish desires. And for what? For the very unreconstructed, hairy-knuckled, alpha-male, Neanderthal bad-boyism we've always known they wanted — despite decades of lip service paid to noble concepts like The Sensitive Male.

It's a hideously, defiantly ugly portrait of women — hip-hop-crude, in fact — but it's likely the quickest way Peckinpah had to connect his own ambivalence about relationships to the matter-of-fact criminality of the book, and it's where the bread nibbled by all great filmmakers gets buttered. It's no different in spirit from how Coppola used personal family issues to relate to the dynamics of the Corleone clan or the way that Scorsese reached down into the sewage of his own coke-laced self-abuse to pull out Raging Bull.

Fran's every pinched, shrill little tart that encourages, or brings out, the worst in men. She's the ninny in the dive bar who strikes up conversations with men behind her boyfriend's back, then prods her boyfriend to defend her honor by kicking the poor bastards' faces in. She's the reason for half the guys sitting in penitentiaries on manslaughter and second-degree murder charges, and if the King of Screen Violence refrains from sending her off in her own slo-mo death spiral framed by ejaculatory spurts of cherry-red stage paint, she's still saddled with the worst fate of anyone in the film: left with a rotting corpse of a husband whose suicide she all but encouraged, discarded by the thug who merely used her as a tool to assert primacy over another male, meeting the business end of a Steve McQueen cold-cock and folding like Michael Spinks in the first round against Mike Tyson. One needn't a crystal ball to envision Fran's life after the screen's gone black and the last Toots Thielemans harmonica riff has faded out — squint hard enough into the distance and you'll see a leathery, time-ravaged old hag still wandering the dusty byways of the American Southwest, still crying out for "Ru-deeee!" and thoroughly ignored; nothing to do in her closing years of sexual viability but throw herself at truckers and watch her tits sag from under a dingy waitress' uniform.

No, no need to make her sternum leak from entry wounds. As George Clinton once told us that the funk is its own reward, so being a treacherous cunt like Fran is — in the pitiless world painted by Sam Peckinpah's brush — its own worst punishment.

Oh, and...

*On top of that, Peckinpah once again sentimentalizes his own helplessness at the calloused hands of Hollywood. It's nigh-on impossible not to imagine Ol' Bloody Sam seeing himself in Doc's shoes as the thief (read: artist) of unparalleled talent sprung from the pen (read: his forced exile from the movie biz) by a shady son-of-a-bitch of a politico (read: producer) who promises him all will be okay as long as he pulls off the job and brings back that money, but is really plotting behind his back to have him killed off (fired/blackballed/shunned into pariahdom yet again). But instead, Doc Peckinpah perseveres and makes off for good to his beloved May-hee-co with his hide and his reputation intact.

Mulholland Dr. (2001)

2010-07-30T17:16:00.001-07:00

One in a Million, Babe

written and directed by David Lynch

starring Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring,

Ann Miller, Dan Hedaya, Justin Theroux

"It's like somebody took America by the East Coast, and shook it,

and all the normal girls managed to hang on."*

Hollywood has a penchant for supposed self-deflation, like a Warren Beatty who bumbles and snorts and self-deprecates his way to getting killed off every other movie, as if to convince wife-beating rubes in Alsip, Illinois that Being Incredibly Rich and Handsome and Catered To ain't all it's cracked up to be. Occasionally, the industry gives us a Sunset Boulevard or an All About Eve, laying bare the peculiarities of that strange, delicate species known as The Actress. Sometimes, we get a Swimming With Sharks or The Player, if a fucked-over screenwriter or director's got a voodoo doll bearing the likeness of a certain executive on his bedside table.

Usually, though, it's more along the lines of an Entourage or that short-lived TV show with Jay Mohr: a genial self-roasting (which is to say, self-tribute) that takes those dim-bulb actors and barbed-wire power agents into a headlock merely to give 'em a noogie and set 'em loose. Your average film-world power player is far too in love with the line of supplicants he has to step over just to cross the studio lot — daily ego balm for a nerdy schmuck who's likely spent half his life thoroughly ignored. Hand him the satirical blade behind yet another "exposé" of the princess that changed him from a lowly frog and gave him that cushy corner office, and he won't do much more than administer paper cuts.

David Lynch, however, is an outsider even within Hollywood. Foreign finance consistently provides the building materials for his Little Houses of Horrors and, despite the cachet of his name in certain quarters, his fractured narratives filled with backwards-talking midgets, circular endings and weird Americana don't exactly inspire hosannahs in the boardrooms of Culver City and Burbank. "David Lynch" is a name to be dropped, a signifier of personal hipness, proof of one's occasional wading through cinema's artier waters; but certainly no one expanded their swimming pools or bought their BMW's off of Wild at Heart or Fire Walk With Me.

Yet, the ABC network signed the check for about three-quarters of Mulholland Dr. — that is, the fairly PG-rated chunk that concerns perky-beyond-belief aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) as she arrives in Hollywood to stay at her aunt's and discovers "Rita" (Laura Elena Harring), a mysterious, amnesia-afflicted beauty huddling in the shower. Probably, ABC looked at the script Lynch submitted — the quest to uncover a beautiful woman's identity! shadowy gangsters on their trail! a cocky young director having his film taken away from him by possibly the same gangsters! a pair of Dragnet-talking detectives who we'd better hope get to "Rita" before the gangsters do! the friendship between Betty and "Rita" tinged with a blossoming-yet-safely-unspoken sapphic affection! — and thought they'd be getting another prime-time phenomenon on the order of Twin Peaks. Except that Peaks was only a phenomenon until Lynch the Storyteller decided to take permanent residence up his own rectum, at which point the show was consigned to the spirit realm to cavort with Leland Palmer and Killer Bob. Perhaps ABC execs suffered from short-term memory loss. Perhaps Lynch was getting some sort of private revenge with this take-the-money-and-run style of funding for what turned out to be his next theatrical release. Certainly, he couldn't have been shocked when the network took a pass on the pilot he'd shot, using the excuse that Watts and Harring were "too old" to be television stars.

What he did next was figure out a way to tie up the loose ends from the pilot — at least, as much as being David Lynch would allow him to. Then, he decided to drag ashore the clam-licking undertow of melding-feminine-personality dissertations like Persona or 3 Women (Mulholland's clearest influences in that vein) — and, unlike Messrs. Bergman and Altman, Lynch gets my penis' vote for Best Director.

Once the narrative was fleshed out to feature length, he — voilà — released it as his next feature. Which turned out to be both the quintessential David Lynch film and, thus far, cinema's definitive treatise on How The Hollywood Factory Chews Women Up and Shits Them Out.

But David Lynch films don't make any goddamn sense, you say. The majority of Blue Velvet aside, his style is far too self-consciously "weird," its logic too internal and too impenetrable for audiences unaccustomed to fugue states and radiator ladies and B-movie dialogue delivered with heartfelt sincerity and a catalogue of tics and eccentricities we're meant to be entertained by, for their own sake — you say. You took a chance on Mulholland Dr., as the unsuspecting casual moviegoer sucked in by its Best Director nomination and possibly the biggest ad campaign ever attached to a David Lynch film. And you were left racking your Law & Order-fed brain to try and figure out just what the malevolent mystery midget had to do with the mob-connected brothers threatening the callow young film director, and just what all of that had to do with the homeless man-thing living behind the dumpster or Naomi Watts and Laura Harring at the film's center. And, well, those of us who knew better just looked at you with a sort of affectionate mocking tinged with condescension. "Silly rabbit," we grinned as if watching a child finally take to the potty all by herself. "You don't go into a David Lynch film expecting logical story development and clear-cut plot resolutions."

Agreed: Lynch's status as the King of Weird Americana can make his films feel like a glossy new museum of abstract expressionism that's closed to the public, even for fans old enough to have scarfed down cherry pie and coffee at Twin Peaks parties back in the day. Rather like an Alice Cooper concert in the early seventies, at this point, a David Lynch film simply has to provide the mind-bending freakshow that paying customers have come to associate with his name. In fact, the very David Lynch-ness of a picture like Lost Highway or Inland Empire often strikes me as a test that cineastes feel they have to endure, as if it were an annual renewal date stamped on their own fading coolness — sort of like when you're twelve and you tackle that new rollercoaster ride that all your friends are daring you to try, lest you end up the "big fat wuss" of your childhood social circle.

And yet, sometimes music is more than just the same five Zeppelin and Deep Purple cuts on the classic-rock station. You also need a little Throbbing Gristle. You need Krautrock. You need Sun Ra and Primus and David Thomas of Pere Ubu. With Mulholland Dr., Lynch slid from being Captain Beefheart circa Trout Mask Replica to David Byrne during the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense phase — "weirdness" as a startlingly tangible metaphor for the inscrutability of the world, as the distorted prism through which the specters that hover over your life's frustration begin, at last, to take on recognizable shapes. Besides which, there's no longer any "straight," linear way to take on the spirit-dampening, compromise-inducing, insanity-fostering assembly line of the Hollywood grind without regurgitating truths that the likes of Billy Wilder and Joseph L. Mankiewicz ate at Chasen's before your parents were born.

Lynch's fever-dream Hollywood is cinema's truest Hollywood, simply because — forget a David Lynch film — Hollywood itself is a world where nothing makes sense, where fantasy is reality for so many of the clueless hopeful just off the bus from Anywheresville, U.S.A., where the ghosts of shattered dreams haunting Gower and Ivar like the smog that once afflicted this town are as quintessential a local experience as couches on sidewalks, pedestrians who refuse to acknowledge crosswalks during rush-hour traffic, and airhead sluts who yammer on about spiritual enlightenment before repairing to a stall in the ladies' room to do a couple of lines and blow the bartender.

Identities slip and change and merge and never seem to be fully grounded because that's L.A. Specifically, that's the way of people constantly trying on different masks as they strive to be what they believe each person wants them to be; of people who try on identities like shirts in a Macy's fitting room because they aspire to make a living being different people, because they need different things from different people with different temperaments, as they glad-hand and ass-kiss and schmooze and gently pester and fuck their way up the rear fire escape of the Hollywood food chain. It's a town of bottom feeders all convinced they're the next Brando or Meryl Streep or (God help us) the next Orlando Bloom or somebody, and they're fully prepared to kill — be it relationships or friendships or their own dignity — to keep the shards of their increasingly cracked illusions from hitting the floor around them.

When people admit to having thoughts about going back home (quite common chatter in these parts), it's generally not out of a sense of failure, i.e. "oh, I couldn't hack it in L.A." Rather, it's that every transplanted Angeleno comes to weigh the kinds of interactions and relationships that one could have here versus ones that one could have elsewhere — and here, it would largely be based on one's status, on a kind of starfucking, on what people feel they might be able to get for themselves out of being your friend or bedmate. And the question you have to ask yourself is: how fulfilling would that be for me?

Or, to put it the Mulholland Dr. way:

You moved to L.A. to follow your dreams. About five, six years ago. Your Aunt Gladys always told you you should be in movies, and everyone concurred. And you're gonna prove Aunt Gladys right — you're gonna be a big, big star. But lately, it's been tough going. You've been out on audition after audition and you're just not getting the callbacks the way you used to. Sure, you were in soft-focus in the background of a couple of shows on the WB for a few seconds and you were once thisclose to life as the perky new intern on that earnest hospital drama. But by now, your headshot's been passed around more than that "private" video that the guy at the "modeling" agency swore was just for his personal evaluation. Maybe you're not considered a fresh face anymore, maybe — to the gatekeepers of stardom enthroned in casting offices all over town — you're even damaged goods, at this point.

And so, it's a year and a half to two years now that you've logged as a waitress at Fred 62 or Mel's on Sunset. You're really getting behind on all your student loan payments and credit card bills, and that twelve hundred-a-month studio on Franklin that you're sharing with the two hippie girls you met on Craigslist isn't quite the blast you first imagined it to be. It's not terribly hard to find some spiky-haired indie-band reject or future reality-show candidate down at The Liquid Kitty or The Woods to throw some Stoli-and-Viagra-fueled dick in you and quit returning your texts, but that sweet guy you left back home — the one who took you to meet his parents and paid your Visa and Mastercard bills and hadn't already fucked twelve girls who look just like you — well, his kind's like the American Bison in these parts.

Well, hell, at least, you have a good friend to commiserate and wallow in shared La La Land misfortune with, right? Actually, she's your best friend, your oasis of sanity, your port in the storm, the only person you really feel you know in this crazy town. You met her on — oh, what was it, was it that audition for Real World Huntington Beach? Was it that one NBC pilot? Well, anyway, you've known her for a good portion of your time in town, and truth be told, you sort of bask in her glow every time you're around her — she's that vibrant, that talented, that comforting. That sexy.

Oh, sure, she's had far more success than you have — some medium-profile TV work, a couple of supporting roles in hip indie films — but you don't hold that against her. She's your friend. Oh, sure, she's started seeing that cocky asshole of a director, the guy who thinks he's the next Tarantino or whoever, but you believe her when she tells you that it won't change a thing between the two of you.

And then, she tells you that things have gotten serious between her and Mr. Genius-on-the-Rise, and you can't deny that it hurts. Being cast aside for monetary considerations, for the sake of career — and here, you thought that what you had together meant something. You thought that you meant something. Hell, kid, no one means anything in this town, not when it comes to career aspirations. Surely, you already knew that, right?

Well, now you're thinking of doing something drastic about it — something to her, that is. Even if your pain and humiliation are the last goddamn things she ever feels in her life. You're gonna make her regret ever recasting your former role in her life. And now, you find yourself in a diner on Sunset, meeting with some shady guy who takes her headshot from you and gives you a key and tells you where it will be. When it's "all done." After which, you find yourself suicidal with regret and you end up recasting your unpleasant reality as a cinematic fever dream in which you're a star on the rise, in which anyone who ever held dominion over you in your waking hours is now the picture of powerlessness, in which you and your Sapphic beau embark upon a quest to discover her hidden identity and fall madly in love — forever and ever and ever and ever. Just like people in the movies.

Except that — guess what — the movies lied to you. Hollywood lied to you. This is real life, hon'. And real life tends to gyp you on the happy endings.

Bang. Silencio.

(*Courtesy of the great Harry Lockhart in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, of course.)

On the Cinematic Depiction of Sweater Puppies and Chest Cannons, Vol. Two (NSFW)

2010-05-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

You guys are lucky I'm such a thoughtful fella. How thoughtful? Thoughtful enough to snatch the occasional screencap whenever I'm watching a DVD and a good tit shot pops up. So here goes Volume Two. Apparently, with the exception of a few shots, the theme was cinematic tittage in widescreen. (And I'm still planning that all-Asian edition someday...)

From The Hunger
(1983, dir. Tony Scott)

Bowie readies a victim...

...and Susan Sarandon enjoys a little girl time
with Catherine Deneuve.

From Slaughter
(1972, dir. Jack Starrett)

Fresh out of Sam Peckinpah's West, Stella Stevens gives a little
equal opportunity to the blaxploitation crowd...

And speaking of Sam Peckinpah...

Aurora Clavel gets amorous just before her lights
go out in The Wild Bunch (1969)...

...James Coburn tastes the rainbow in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)...

...and random party girls from The Killer Elite show us
what a PG rating meant in 1975. (!)

From The Border
(1982, dir. Tony Richardson)

Elpidia Carrillo, the go-to girl for Latinas in '80s Hollywood, shows
Jack Nicholson her appreciation for Goin' South...

...and apparently, somebody snuck Vanessa Del Rio on the set.

From Lenny
(1974, dir. Bob Fosse)

A threesome...

...that includes Valerie Perrine.

From The Nightcomers
(1971, dir. Michael Winner)

Brando gives us his idea of S&M...

From Vampyros Lesbos
(1971, dir. Jess Franco)

If Dracula were a sexy, badly dubbed European lesbian...

And...

Ludivine Sagnier in Swimming Pool
(2003, dir. François Ozon)

Mary-Louise Parker in Grand Canyon
(1991, dir. Lawrence Kasdan)

A hell of an opening scene from Y Tu Mamá También
(2002, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)

There. That ought to do wonders for my blog traffic.

Straw Dogs (1971), Part Deux: Or, Shit I Left Out of the First Review

2010-05-17T17:48:00.000-07:00

I've wandered high and wandered low. Sailed over peaks and scraped the bottoms of valleys. Consulted both oracles and fools. And yet, closure eludes me. Something still eats away at my soul, gnaws away at my very being even as I type these words.

It's the first post I did on Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs.

You see, as epic as it was, I still feel as though I left the tale unfinished. Perhaps, I was a tad defensive in my thesis on Dogs' wince-making brilliance. "Hey," I figured. "If no one since 1971 has seen fit to address the way that Bloody Sam's scabrous cinematic essay has been blamed for everything from global warming to an uptick in the numbers of schoolchildren with head lice, well, let me just don my cape and tights here and take to the sky." And yet, nothing dries out spastic fanboy ardor like a Film Techniques 101 lecture; what's more, the "why should I put this on my Netflix queue?" crowd might still be in the dark in regards to the film's sheer visceral jolt.

In any case, it ain't quite time to get off the pot with Straw Dogs; I've got some more shit to get out of my system.

A friend of mine recently popped her Straw Dogs cherry and, after about a week of soreness and bleeding, she was finally able to sort through whatever it was the film had shot up inside of her. Her verdict? Pass. Despite its undeniable technical brilliance, despite her admiration of the film's eagerness to shine a flashlight on all those cockroaches scurrying around under the kitchen sink of Civilized Society, she took umbrage at the film's suffocatingly bleak view of humanity. "I felt a million miles away from every character in Straw Dogs," quoth my friend. "I don't think Peckinpah gave a shit about any one of them, and so neither did I."

"But what about Taxi Driver?" I asked her, tearing off a sizable hunk of our mutual cinephile shrine and tossing it on the table for argument's sake. "Pauline Kael said that Scorsese got something out of his asthma; he knows how to make us experience the terror of suffocation. And under the weight of Paul Schrader's Calvinist-in-Hollywood sense of alienation, filtered through Scorsese's neo-Expressionist take on the hookers and junkies and Scary Street Negroes and porno houses of Gerald Ford-era Times Square, we're pretty much gasping for air by the halfway mark. Bleak view of humanity? It drips from Taxi Driver like a clapped-out john after a session in the back of Travis' cab; not even his self-appointed mission to save Iris keeps Travis Bickle from being one of the most repulsive sons-of-bitches we've ever laid eyes on. We look at his life the way we'd look directly into the sun. So why does Marty 'You ever see what a .44 Magnum can do to a woman's pussy?' Scorsese get the automatic wave-through while Peckinpah's held back for the full cavity search? Is it that Taxi Driver's world is seen through the jaundiced eyes of its unstable protagonist whereas Straw Dogs feels like a love letter straight from the heart of its director? Are directors not allowed to examine unfashionable thought or express their flawed humanity unless they maintain the proper distance from it and fob it off on characters we can all safely condemn and keep at arm's length?"

See, that's Peckinpah's problem right there. His David Sumner is no pallid, mohawked weirdo in an Army surplus jacket; he's College-Educated America in the Age of Aquarius, a walking oil painting of upward mobility and middle-class respectability. He's half the men that must have seen the film at the time of its release — especially in the sophisticated urban capitals of President Nixon's beloved Eastern Establishment. He's the Roger Eberts and Vincent Canbys, who apparently could sit and applaud the aesthetic dissection of every group of human beings on the planet except the one to which they belonged. He's all the Variety and New York Times critics who'd never seen themselves reflected in a mirror this large. Forty years on, he's the Rod Luries and the rest of the "Straw Dogs is macho trash!" brigade whose antennae still quiver at the basso profondo of Peckinpah's clearly stated "fuck you." The way David reaches for his hanky when having to touch anything soiled by the yahoo classes (the kind who'd flock to a film like this) must have smelled awfully familiar. His cozy denial of those animal instincts which he all too readily imputes to the Great Unwashed Them must have made them sink down in their seats a little. One look at David's pathetic stumbles in the arena of self-assertion — those festering boils of masculine insecurity papered over with mathematical equations and hallowed philosophers — and an entire social class read the message loud and clear; a social class who watched from behind books as the Sam Peckinpahs of the world got out and settled the frontiers and policed the streets and fought the wars they only read about.

Worst of all, Peckinpah via Amy Sumner touched upon their long-held fears of forever losing out when it came to women. That sinking feeling, the one that said their fiercest shouts would be forever drowned out by the primal call of "bad boys" who never even had to try; living out their lives unable to command the respect that nature so cruelly bestows upon pumped-up alpha males unable to quote hallowed philosophers and argue the merits of Kant versus Kierkegaard — that’s the bulls-eye that Straw Dogs puts a hole in, Annie Oakley-style. They looked at David Sumner's tenuous grip on his baby-doll wife and saw their own failures — their worst nightmares, in fact — writ large. And it felt good when Dustin Hoffman threw that boiling oil in the faces of his blue-collar tormentors; it felt good when he took those cock-of-the-walk assholes down with pokers and shotguns and his superior ingenuity; when he met 'em with bare hands on their own Neanderthal turf and still emerged victorious; when he took 'em for a ride on a rollercoaster named Righteous Fury and gave 'em the souvenir of a man-trap around the head for their trouble. "Jesus, I got 'em all": that's Peckinpah's mirror thrown up to the elation they felt right there in that darkened movie theatre as they watched their kind scale a hill made of the piled bodies of Nabokov's kissy-faced brutes, and plant a flag inscribed with a quote from Oscar Wilde at the top of it. The revenge of David Sumner was the original Revenge of the Nerds; the fantasy of the high-school loser who takes on the team quarterback — in front of the cheerleading squad, no less — and sails through the rest of the semester on a cloud of desirous glances and congratulatory back-slaps, head held aloft. Peckinpah called them on their secret wet-dream bullshit — indeed, made it all ring hollow in the process — and they hated him for it.

Of course, men have to "learn to be men" as Straw Dogs testifies; no Susan George on Earth respects a Dustin Hoffman who can't summon the scrotal mass to assert himself or who fails to respond to his wife's needs. But that's Relations Between the Sexes 101, not the bellicose raving of a fascist revenge flick that seeks to turn its audience into poker-wielding apes; and it's certainly not any justification for the corpse-strewn path Hoffman's mathematician takes toward "finding himself." Again, Susan George's Amy is one of the truest portraits of a woman ever committed to celluloid, but despite the hell she endures over the course of the film, she's actually the closest thing to a "hero" in the film, the character that drunken old misogynist Peckinpah actually feels the most sympathy for, the character upon whom everything in the story turns.

Just look at the way those POV shots during Amy's rape thrust you into what she's feeling, encouraging audience empathy — then, compare it to the way Kubrick handles the rape of the writer's wife during the "Singin' in the Rain" sequence in A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick's full of shit; his voyeuristic distance not only discourages empathy with the victims but emphasizes the physical details of the act — the way her jumpsuit is snipped off to let her tits get some air, the contours of her lithe body, her writhing, wriggling helplessness. I watch the rape scene in Clockwork Orange and I'm not thinking about lawlessness run amok and human capacity for evil and the necessity of free will, or any of the other pseudo-professorial, mock-intellectual horseshit Kubrick undoubtedly claimed as his raison d'être — I'm too busy blasting my TV screen with Peter Northian brio while whacking off to Adrienne Corri's pert little pink nipples. And that's Kubrick's fault; that's what he wanted. There's no horror in his rape, only sadistic elation at the victory of the lawless over the stuffed-shirt privileged. And yet, the same critics who applauded Kubrick's "daring" damned Peckinpah to an eternity of having his balls roasted over an open flame by she-devils. Why? You look at the two scenes, and you tell me which contains more abject horror, which actually lacerates you with the shattered remains of a woman's humanity; and which shows you rape from the thoroughly aroused vantage point of its foxy, charismatic assailant. Other directors learned from Kubrick. They either maintain his distance from what they're showing us or infuse their stories with so much irony and behind-the-camera commentary that a certain distance becomes inevitable (see Robert Altman, the O.G. of modern-day hipsters, with Elliot Gould's ineffably with-it, above-it-all, quip-ready Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye his patron saint). They maintain a wall between us and their characters — and they're drowned in hosannahs for it. Peckinpah puts his characters right in your face — nay, up your ass. You smell their shit, their sweat flies off onto you; you feel their timeworn fears and petty hatreds, even though you don't want to. It's everything films are supposed to do — yet, Peckinpah's thanks was to die an industry pariah, then spend the next twenty-or-so years trying to regain a mere fraction of the public notoriety he was once able to take for granted.

I've been showing people Peckinpah films since about the age of twenty. Lives were changed. Joe Six-Packs were left pondering the ambiguities of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and The Getaway; young ladies not particularly known for their refined cinematic palettes stood teary-eyed at the conclusion of The Wild Bunch. In particular, a close film-nerd buddy of mine emerged from the jungle of my apostolic zeal sporting a Pike Bishop cowboy hat and an "If they move, kill 'em" T-shirt. His sole reservation, though, happened to be with Peckinpah's depiction of his female characters. Of course, given his near-daily screaming matches with his own girlfriend, perhaps he didn't like the mirror Ol' Bloody Sam held up to the demons racing around his own head. And that is the way it goes. We tell our artists we expect unflinching honesty from them, ceaseless probings of the cobwebbed, murky little corners of the American Psyche, a grand statement on Us and The Way We're Living Today. Except that when they serve it up to us — and in a manner that cuts no sides any slack — we accuse them of embodying the very darkness they're exploring. Consequently, we downgrade them, we belittle them, we write them off, consign them to the bargain bins of the culture at large. Roger Ebert has an anecdote, in his Great Movies piece on Alfredo, about Peckinpah on a press junket during the film's release, sozzled and hiding behind the kind of shades (indoors!) that Warren Oates sports throughout much of the film. Maybe he was just living up to his cowboy-out-of-his-time press image, as he was so fond of doing. Or maybe those shades just made it that much easier to ignore the disapproving scowls and shaking heads of the critical community — at least, those that bothered to stick around past the film's halfway mark — as they gathered in one place to hurl raw meat at him and ask why why WHY he had to drag humanity through the gutter once more. Irony of ironies: by '83, some of these very same critics would adopt a "gee, hey, where'd ya go" mentality in regards to his career, and were rooting for The Osterman Weekend to be the genius comeback that it kinda was, and kinda wasn't.

Was Peckinpah a misogynist? Sure — in some ways. Of course. All men are, to some degree — part of us can't stand you bitches. Look, I've gone into this before, but it's called being an adult, getting out and growing up and interacting with real flesh-and-blood human beings, not perfect archetypes that you're taught exist. Or, as an uncle once put it, "if you're not a misogynist by the time you're thirty, then you haven't been with enough women." Peckinpah was just more nakedly honest about it than virtually any other filmmaker on the planet. His only real parallel at this time was in the literary realm — Norman Mailer — and contrary to what Pauline Kael asserted, Peckinpah not only wrestled with his misogyny, he boxed it, he raced it, he fenced with it, he fucking grabbed it in a headlock and piledrived it and gave it a flying legdrop from off the top fucking turnbuckle. And yet, in Alfredo, it's Isela Vega's Elita who's the voice of reason, of morality, of sanity, as she tries to convince Bennie that his quest for dinero can do no good; that no amount of crime-boss money is worth the moral poison he's all too willing to self-administer. Like most men, he disregards his woman and ends up with a severed head in place of his sweetie. Does this sound like a commercial for machismo?

And for all the focus on Peckinpah's misogyny, at least he had the bulging sack matter to point the finger at himself, first and foremost; to offer himself up, arms stretched out Christ-like just as his Billy the Kid offered himself up to Sheriff Garrett, for our slings and arrows and bullets. Besides which, there's not one moment in any of his films that one could read as a celebration of such. Peckinpah's males are torn apart by their inability to trust women; lessened by their doubt, their uncertainty, their petty jealousies and reluctance to let go of the transgressions and thoroughly human weakness they're holding against their women. For Bennie, for Pike Bishop, for Cable Hogue, for Pat Garrett, for Doc McCoy, what sticks in the craw is the anger at realizing just how badly they need their women. It's the realization of how incomplete and utterly alone you are without them. It's the realization that women are a drug: a man spends his whole life trying to recapture that high he once had with the one or two truly special ones, knowing it takes more and more of 'em — more sex, more careless whispers, more promises written in pencil — to come anywhere near recapturing it. If Peckinpah's men could ever truly walk away from women, then — guess what? — they would. But they can't. We can't. We're stuck with you maddening little cunts, and you're stuck with us, and the best we can all hope for is a little understanding and some decent head before the whole proverbial shithouse goes up in flames.

To publicly answer my friend: no, Straw Dogs is not a pleasant film (currency that couldn't buy a stick of gum in the economy of true cinephiles, anyway). Of course, it's confrontational and calculated to wound. Yes, it's as grim and barren as its remote Cornish setting; as ominous as the fog that watches on, like a God suddenly gone derelict, while the drunken barbarians gather at the Sumners' gate. Thing is, I doubt Peckinpah himself would disagree with her assessment. After all, he shows more feeling for the killers in any of his Westerns than he does for most of the characters here; surely, it's the umpteenth telltale trace of his reservations regarding that bad old modern world that killed off his beloved frontier, turned noble women into strumpets and rendered its men sniveling eunuchs unfit to tongue-wash Pike Bishop's spurs.

Of course, I also seriously doubt Peckinpah would give a shit whether or not you liked the film. Straw Dogs ain't some nice fuckin' fella out to hold your hand and waltz you down the promenade, Señorita, it wants to rip open your chest cavity and hold a mirror up to your inner ape. It's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? updated for the action set by way of anthropologist Robert Ardrey's African Genesis. It's a ten-inch black cock up the tender white ass of your resistance to open endings and "troubling" interpretations. The gob of spit in the face of your middlebrow taste that Henry Miller wanted me to paraphrase him on. It's filled with enough ambiguity to muffle the cheers of the Scutts and Cawseys in the audience and enough brilliantly filmed action to keep the David Sumners on the edges of their seats.

It's the best English-language film of 1971; and if I have to ready my Charlie Venner pimp hand and pay a personal visit to each and every Straw Dogs detractor out there, just to get some minds changed — well, hey, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.