I stand by the retarded theory of celebrity. For those just tuning in, the theory holds that celebrities, defined here as people that we're supposed to commonly know, like George Bush, Julia Roberts, and Manny Ramirez, are to us what gods once were. That is, we compose our modern discourse about these people. They are characters in a shared narrative of ours. And so when I met Cingy truly I walked the heavens, in the form of the vip room of a black club, knowing noone and drinking which should make the time a good time until later when you feel the emptiness of having gotten wasted and watched the black stripper with the blue jean top unbuttoned to her waist taunt the fellows outside who made grasping motions towards her tits through the glass and then when you try unsuccesfully to score drugs unaided by being the only white person in sight, isn't the sight of a large, gaudy necklace spelling out the rapper's name in diamonds a comfort, like the stars of our new home beyond the earth's mesosphere?
And here are pictures of fat renfest-type chicks with big tits. Curiously safe for work, except for the really explicit animated banner ad.
I regret not mentioning this sooner, but an odd thing happened when I went to see Bad Santa a couple of weeks ago.
For several weeks prior, I had adopted the affectation of smoking Davidoff cigarillos, which are cigars roughly the size of a cigarette, my usually preferred nicotine delivery device. Kennedy smoked Davidoff's. I normally don't, but was so taken with the romance of Clint Eastwood's nameless gunslinger in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, that I had to dabble in that character's vice. Clint Eastwood, incidentally, never smoked and found the things awful and nausea-inducing. His character, taciturn and highly skilled, displays a queerly muted morality that borders on ambivalence. Such a figure tantalizes one like myself, who feels so uncertain about life as to induce apathy and aphasia. And so I began to smoke Davidoff's.
While the flavor of the cigarillos delights, the experience tends to feel hollow to one accustomed to the inhalation of cigarette smoke. The generally accepted manner of smoking cigars and their primary derivatives suffers not the smoke to enter the lungs, only to linger inside the mouth, where one savors the soft sweetness. An enjoyable diversion which when finished leaves a taste that is less enjoyable.
I had reached the midpoint of a Davidoff when I decided to leave for the film. Knowing that I did not want to sit all through the movie with that awful taste in my mouth, I grabbed a popsicle from the freezer with the intention of cleansing my palate after finishing the smoke. The popsicle, root beer flavored, was one of the last of a late springtime purchase and had been stored so long that it had undergone sublimation.
Sublimation is the process by which a solid becomes a gas and then returns to solid form, yet never enters the liquid phase. A common process employed for purification, the effects on a popsicle are delightful. A popsicle is composed of water, flavored syrup, and a wooden stick. When long kept in a freezer, the water evaporates and then crystallizes again around the popsicle, forming small tumors of pure ice around the base, while the syrup collects at the lower end of the popsicle's wrapper. It is always best to store popsicles so that the exposed wooden stick points away from the ground, so that the syrup pools around the tip of the treat and doesn't touch the part you must touch to enjoy the popsicle. One can then tear open the popsicle's paper pouch, remove the item by the clean handle, then lick the sticky liquid from out the bottom of the wrapper, bite off some clean ice to grind, and finally eat what remains, an unusually slender but otherwise normal popsicle.
I did not want to miss the beginning of the movie and I had timed myself poorly. I clenched my half-smoke between my teeth, pistolero style, and threw my bagged popsicle on the passenger seat of the car. I would take Fee Fee to Olive to the theater.
I sat in line on Fee Fee, waiting to turn left onto Olive. It was the middle of the day, but the traffic, as usual, had backed up a bit and I was certain of a fair wait. The lights at this intersection are timed to favor the traffic on Olive, leaving those wishing to turn at a disadvantage. The intersection, which leads from the heavily traveled Olive to Fee Fee, a road which feeds several subdivisions, has two gas stations so that the hummers and such have a place to pay exorbitant prices for gasoline. It was at the station to my left that the odd thing happened.
A small blue sedan faced me from the left of the pump. A young woman I believed to be around 26 years old was filling her tank. She wore imposing rectangular glasses of thick black plastic which are, I believe, quite the style. Her dark brown hair was cut all around at the length of her chin, creating a fetching parted curtain look which well framed her carefully painted features. She wore a dark navy jacket which parted to expose a cream colored blouse of exaggerated lapels. She wore pants with a bit of a flare and a sharp crease which, along with her mostly hidden but detectably long, pointed black shoes, created the impression that her lower half had been rendered with a handful of polygons.
To the right of the pump, a high school girl refuelled an oppositely aligned SUV jeep type car. Or truck, or car truck, or jeep. She, no more than 16, sported a white blouse and blue plaid skirt which signalled her student status at a local Catholic high school. She wore a light fleece jacket, had her long dirty blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her pale complexion displayed the underlying network of blood vessels. In the cold weather, her cheeks shone purple like a drunk's.
I would like to take a moment to describe her footwear. She wore tan shoes with no socks. The shoes were of the style that resembles a stereotypical Dutch clog with the heel side of the shoe removed except, of course, for the sole. This removal allows the shoe to be slipped on and off, and it exposes the foot's heel and a significant portion of the instep. The instep, with its light blue web and wrinkled texture, resembles in these properties an erect cock. I may be influenced in this supposition by a piece of internet porn I saw some months ago which featured Mia Sweet being penetrated by another young woman's foot.
But this was not the scene at the gas station. In Neutral Milk Hotel's "Song vs Sex," 90's psychedelic songwriter and possible schizophrenic Jeff Mangum wrote about pornography's "looks of love" being "staged...a lie." Quite opposite, the looks which the two refuellers exchanged marked a tense and nervy line, they became visibly shaken as their gazes crossed. The younger woman's jacket slowly pulsed as her face darkened. The professional lost her grip on the pump as she drew her arm up as if to touch her sternum, halting midway in a tentative reach for the high schooler. Suddenly, the older woman jumped onto the concrete island and drew the copine into her embrace. The two began to kiss with no small degree of passion.
I wondered for a moment about the language used to describe the intensity of homosexual feeling. For gay men, the pejorative "flaming" is often used to describe the degree of one's homosexuality, as if such a property existed and had degrees of existence. Well, it does have a nice ring to it, I suppose, regarding ardour. Such a word, however, is never applied to lesbians, it seems, much less those in heterosexual couplings. At least, it is not used as singularly. Passion's flame may burn, but to mention a flamer is another matter entirely. In that same Neutral Milk Hotel song, a reference is made, again in a sexual context, to "pretty girls and burning men," a lyric which clearly centers sexual desire on the masculine object and uses a word which conjures up a homosexual connotation, which fits well with the rest of the song.
As for these two lovers, they kissed passionately as each wove her arm through the intricacies of the other's outfit, one slipping deftly between wide lapels, the older grasping underneath plaid decorated plaits. As the latter brushed up the thigh of the former and came close to its felonius destination, the younger woman lifted her head from her companion's shoulder and visibly gasped, then giggled. She apparently realized that she was still fuelling her car with her carnally unoccupied hand. In her coquettish manner, she found this quite amusing. She removed the fuel pump from her large vehicle and held it up in display for her companion.
The nozzle of the modern pump is a metal tube sheathed in a thick ribbed plastic which prevents gasoline fumes from seeping into the air as one fuels a car. I remember the time when these sheaths were first mandated. Previously, fuel pumps bore a sticker which warned of the dangerous nature of the fumes and the cancers they could cause. The modern nozzle saves us from this threat by loosely sealing the connection between the car's tank and the fuelling device. In fact, the pump will not dispense gasoline as long as this device is rigid and uncompressed, meaning that there is no such seal around the container. It is possible to circumvent this device for unique fueling needs by simply pushing the sheath back from the metal nozzle. Those familiar with the uncircumcised cock may draw their own filthy analogies to this process.
The high schooler, despite her age, must have been aware of the functioning of the nozzle. For the young woman began to behave in the least responsible manner possible. So taken with the novelty of her situation, she grabbed the plastic sheath of the nozzle in the manner described above. I can only speculate that she found the madness of her situation demanded that she act similarly outside reason, that she compound the unreality of the situation with an immature and unwise sexual joke regarding the fuelling device's mechanics.
Appalled at this lack of concern, I immediately threw my car's transmission into park, undid my seatbelt, exited and began to jog toward the pair. It was not until I screamed "carcinogen" that I remembered the cigarillo in my mouth, for as I reached the final syllable, my tongue dislodged the Davidoff from my teeth, causing it to flip with no small force towards the two. Quite apart from my paunch, distinctly unstylish and thorougly ungreen clothes, and none too hasty pace, I must have appeared like the cover of some World War II era comic book, screaming with such fierce determination that my butch cigar flew from my mouth. The Davidoff hit the ground parallel to my shoulders and then tragically rolled into the small pool of gasoline which wet the ground. By the time I understood the implications of this action, I could only stop my forward momentum and dash backwards lest I be engulfed.
When a human body burns, the flame's heat first cracks the skin. Newly liquified fat then catches fire as it begins to soak into clothing. There, the fat burns instead of the clothes, which act as a candle's wick, drawing fuel from inside the body. The resultant tremendous, constant heat turns the victim's body into ash.
Shaken and guilty, I thought ruefully of the popular psychedelic band the Beatles' penultimate statement on the album Abbey Road, that "the love you take is equal to the love you make." I found then as I do now that this statement is as true as it is gracefully worded, a poor rhyme for a shallow thought. I much preferred the sentiment of late 60's-early 70's psychedelic songwriter and almost certainly schizophrenic Syd Barrett, who noted "that's love, yeah yeah yeah yeah" in his song "Rats."
"Rats!" I thought as I reached for the popsicle by my side. I focused my thoughts on the opening of the wrapper and the enjoyment of the contents, rather than the grisly scene of incineration which passed beside my car. For all the drama of the conjugation and subsequent conflagration, it had not lasted long enough for the light to change, and I had thoroughly sucked the root beer slime from the paper wrapping by the time I made it onto Olive.
As for Bad Santa, I did not miss the beginning of the film, the entirety of which was quite enjoyable.
Gamegirladvance (which in a fit of radical politics presents its name in image-logo form as "game+girl=advance) has a fairly positive review of Blue Wizard is about to Die, the book compiling poetry about video games. I'm not linking the site for BWisatD, because the extracts there are in PDF form, which is obnoxious and crashes in my firebird .6. I hate PDF. Anyway, I read (more accurately, skimmed over) the Joust poem there, and found it severely wanting. So, in order to lay down the smack, superelectric proudly presents its own definitive statement on Joust in verse form. Enjoy.
Joust is Gay
FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!
get it up
FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!
come on
FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!
gotta burst those eggs, can't have any little dudes running around
what do you call those pole things the guys poke each other with anyway?
FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!
Dude, that fucking bird's here, don't touch it!
fucking pit full of hot lava
FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!
everybody dies, but how many men
leave their initials in white phosphorescence?
which is the persistent emission of light following exposure to and removal of incident radiation
FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!
Now that the web has become the main repository for detailed information about the quirkiest facets of popular culture, it's hard to imagine that MTV once provided, in a limited way, a similar service. I remember watching the Week in Rock one Sunday afternoon back in the early 90s and seeing a feature on an 60's video jukebox of sorts that played short videos on demand. The item was apparently more successful in Europe than here, or there was more European material for the box, and the piece reported on the sheer novelty of the device. I've since seen a post on this same subject on Metafilter, which of course provided more detailed information and links and so on.
One of the clips MTV showed charmed me completely. It depicted, in black and white, a young woman on a swing, singing in French about "all the young boys and girls." Pop in a 60's vein, sing songy melody with an elegantly simple arpeggiated arrangement, all sung by a curiously beautiful young French woman. I wrote down the phrase which stuck out from the clip they showed, in hopes that someday I might find the song and the singer. For days I wandered around with that phrase in my head and a half-remembered melody. The arrangement faded from my mind, but that line and the charm of the song continued looping over and over. Many years later, allmusic appeared, and then google appeared, and I could finally search for the song.
"Tous les garcons et les filles" was Francoise Hardy's earliest and probably greatest hit. It was a shock to hear the song again, this time in full. It so shocked me at first, how different it was from what I only barely remembered from the fifteen seconds or so that I heard on MTV. But it is lovely nonetheless.
This page presents a selection of Hardy's songs from the 70's in realaudio format. While I am certain that the broadband among us can simply p2p entire reams of her material at much better fidelity, for this 56k user, complete streamed songs that play immediately, even if marred by the odd quality of realaudio encoding, can be quite pleasurable, especially songs as engaging as these. My French is so old and rusty that I can't understand the lyrical content of the songs, but they are quite nice nonetheless. I recommend giving Francoise a listen, and checking out the photo of her face which accompanies her allmusic bio.
I got sucked into watching the first part of the series last night, and was surprised at how entertaining it was.
It's pretty grim, the story was about a massive cylon sneak attack that ends up nuking a bunch of colonies out in space. So tons of effective looking cgi nuke shots. Plus there was a random baby killing, which was a bit out of place dark, but dark nonetheless.
The style's pretty nifty. It's really retro. People in civilian clothes wear freaky late-60's/early 70's style suits. The tech is all very weirdly retro. People use printouts all over the place, and the printouts have tractor feed lines on them. It's very much like old depictions of computers shooting out punch cards for the actors to "read," except that BG's cards have text as opposed to holes.
The space action's pretty realistic in terms of physics. Yes, there's sound in space, but there's not a lot. It feels like a conscious decision. Also, ships move according to physics - they have momentum, and tons of tiny little thrusters all over their bodies to orient them properly. Projectile weapons are used, primarily nuclear missiles and guns. That's a cool choice, avoiding laser beams and such.
One very nice detail about the missiles...in one scene, a cylon ship (which, to be honest, is somewhat hokey in design - it has a big cylon head on it) shoots a couple dozen missles, and they all leave vapor trails and arc prettily like missles always do in anime.
The most interesting aspect about the effects is that they're shot in Attack of the Clones-style faux verite. That is, the shots are all primarily cgi, but there's simulated camera movement intended to give the feel of a handheld photographer following the action. So there are zooms, random shakiness, shots where the camera quickly pans just behind the action as if a cameraman is catching up with the action. I loved this stuff in Attack of the Clones, and I'm glad to see it have an impact.
Another nice touch - radio communications are very warped and garbly as in Star Wars (the *real* first one, which is called the fourth one).
Now, the story and writing isn't fucking awesome, but the show has personality, and personality goes a long fucking way. I'll probably write more about BG after I see the second one, but I wanted to get something up to encourage people to at least check it out, it's worth checking out.
Saw Gus van Sant's Elephant and was surpised to see that it was listening to that satanic Beethoven music that made the kids go crazy and shoot up the school. Who knew?
Details inside.
Finally Elephant came to St. Louis. I saw it at the Chase, a small theater in the lobby of a hotel. The auditorium seats 40 or so people and the screen is maybe 8 feet tall. Murals depicting St. Louis icons like anti-semite Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis line the walls, illuminated with blue lights which only dim once the movie begins.
Documentary style - No strong stories, the piece just follows a bunch of kids on their day at school. The following is quite literal - the camera mostly saunters along behind these kids as they walk around the school, occasionally saying "hey" to their friends. The only real storyline is that of a cute blonde boy who warns others away from the school and reunites with his drunk dad at the end.
The film is edited to tell its stories non-linearly. That is, each character has their own timeline, shot independently, and the order of events is established by showing the same scenes at different points of the movie from different characters' perspectives. So we see a conversation between a photographer and the Cutie Pie three times: Once during a long tracking shot of Hot Stuff, a second during a long tracking shot of the photographer, and a third during a long tracking shot of a nerdy girl running past the two.
This is one of the nice things about the movie, and it does force the film out of a documentary sense because you can see scenes from different angles. Unlike a normal hollywood film, these shots are not intercut. You would see one scene from several different angles, all spliced together within the timeframe of one event. In Elephant, you get the different angles, but at different times. That makes for a fresh take on shooting a scene from different vantage points and a pleasant mental exercise of piecing together when everything is happening.
Unfortunately, though, not much happens until the kids start shooting up the school. More than once during the film I wanted to shoot some of the characters myself, simply because I was so fucking bored with watching them spend 10 minutes developing film or walking down a hallway. There are many, many shots of people walking around doing nothing other than walking around. They are nicely shot, and they build tension, but they are overkill. The film could easily go down to the 60 minute mark and gain quite a bit in terms of dramatic impact.
Even better, some of that time could have been spent developing the characters, as these long walking shots preclude dialogue or any action (other than strolling) that could give meaning to the characters. When the film does decide to spend some time on the kids non-perambulatory activities, it too often paints the characters as annoying stereotypes. Three soon-to-be-dead girls ogle a soon-to-be-dead hunk, then have mindless chatter about shopping over lunch, followed by a cutesy scene of them vomiting up their lunch in synch with each other. The scene evoked a laugh from my audience, and it's not hard to see why, as the shot is played as comedy. You feel nothing for these one joke Heathers characters when they are subsequently shot. Off screen, I might add. Otherwise a jock makes a date with his fine bitch, a photographer asks to take some pictures, and so on. These dialogues are, at least, short and quotidian, if less snickeringly pat than the bulimia comedy.
For a film that is attempting to take on the subject of school shootings intelligently, one would have hoped for better characterization of the shooters, as well. There is hope early on, when we see one of them playing Beethoven, first Fur Elise, which he plays nicely enough, then the Moonlight Sonata, which gives him a little, though no major trouble. What trouble he has angers him to the point of flipping off the score, capping a nice scene.
Which reminds me, the Moonlight Sonata is played as incidental music in the film much earlier, during a scene showing gym class outside on a field. By this point in the film, we have not seen the shooters. One dorky girl stops on the track, as if she hears the music being played. My initial reaction to this shot was annoyance. In terms of expressiveness, the Moonlight Sonata is pretty much an atom bomb. It has an undeniable, strong emotional impact on the listener. While the film up to that point had established some vague sense of dread and tension through its soon-to-be-excruciating tracking shots, the film had not yet earned the right to play that piece of music, and used Beethoven as a shortcut to gloom.
Later in the film, when we see one of the shooters playing the piece, it's an expression of the kid's soul or emotional state in that circumstance. There I can accept the use of the piece, but there's another, different problem with the music. The kid plays the piece the day before the shooting, yet the piece is played as incidental music on the day of the shooting. While Gus can certainly just decide to play the incidental music whenever he damn well pleases, the film in other circumstances uses small cues like this, often short snatches of dialogue, to establish concurrent events in the narrative's timeline. This use of the Moonlight Sonata violates the rule and the inconsistency grates.
Though, we can at least be grateful that the shooters weren't listening to Marilyn Manson. This is one of the few times that the film doesn't paint the shooters with broad stereotypes. Of course one of the kids has to play what's commonly called a first-person shooter, that is a game shown through the eyes of a fellow with a gun who goes around shooting other people. The game that the Columbine kids supposedly played, Doom, has a marine walking around a gothic industrial complex dispatching snarling demons that approach the player, often lobbing shots of their own at the marine. The shooter played by the kid in Elephant has a nameless person walking around a beach shooting normal human beings who are just walking around.
As a sidenote, I can think of no reason that anyone would play the game in the film. It looked absolutely horrible. There was no environment to speak of, the opponent's AI seems to consist of "walk around," the character models are extremely primitive, their polygon counts about equal to that Dire Straits I Want My MTV video, ugly textures, and the death animation's absurd.
The game is in no way a realistic example of a first-person shooter. Rather, it depicts the random slaughter of innocents. One shot during the later school shooting sequence is features the barrel of a gun at the bottom of the screen and is meant to mirror this game, which is also shown full-screen on film. This use of the game is tacky and heavy-handed, no better than if Gus had come on screen to shake his finger at the audience and deeply intone, "Video games like these teach kids that it's fun to shoot random passers by. For shame."
And of course once one kid's done playing this, the other hops on the internet to buy himself a gun to be delivered the next day. How cute. One guy on the imdb's comments board notes that this is illegal except for those holding some special license. I don't know if that's true, I do know that we've crossed another item off the checklist. Let's see... played Doom, check; teased, check; liked camo gear, check; internet guns, check; Hitler, check. It's not so annoying, but there's precious little time in the film spent on anything other than walking, and it would have been nice had the rest been a little more in depth and complex than a Newsweek article.
But then the killers hop in the shower together and make out. That wasn't part of the Dylan/Klebold wrap up. Maybe Gus just wanted to see that one cute kid (not the Cute cute kid, but the cute shooter kid) make out with the other, Eminem-looking one. Though through a shower door, it's not that hot. It's also a little suspicious, since one of the other few snatches of dialogue in the movie records a class talking about gay issues. As much as Gus denies it, one very valid reading of the movie is that the kids are gay, that this doesn't fit in the high school mold, and this is one of the motivating factors of the shooting. Gus has said that this isn't what he's saying, but when a movie which gives you maybe 5 minutes of dialogue in total spends 3 of those minutes talking about social stigmas concerning homosexuality, then has its two shooter characters hook up in the shower, what the fuck else can it mean?
From there, we get a scene of the kids planning their attack, Seven Samurai-style. You begin to feel some excitement - something's actually going to happen. Of course, the plan is foiled once their explosives don't go off, so they just walk around and shoot a dozen or so students. Thank god we had that planning sequence there. Of course, once the shooting starts, the camera no longer follows the two shooters, and the resulting bloodshed is shown in a very detached, unexciting manner. I am sure that had it been otherwise, had he shown explicit violence and filmed what remained either as an action sequence or as a test for the audience's endurance of grisly horror, he would have been called exploitative. But I find it a failure of the film, especially one that prides itself on eschewing heightened drama in favor of gritty, often dull reality, to refuse to depict the climax of the film in the same way. Or to take any stance on the violence, other than the one second shot sneering at first person shooters. There can be beauty in enigma and ambivalence, but Gus refuses to engage his subject, and that's something else entirely.
One oddity during the bloodshed concerns a student who is shot in the chest outside a classroom. He falls to the ground and is pulled into the room by a teacher. While he's being pulled, blood pools underneath his body. His chest, though, shows no sign of entry wound. Which is an odd inconsistency.
There is another scene of a student being shot which shows blood spatter a bookcase behind her. In fact, this is one of the first shots in the rampage, and it again gets one's hopes for a fine bloody rampage up. Of course, that rampage doesn't follow. The killings that follow are not shown graphically, just blurry figures falling in the background. Contrast this with even still frames from the security camera footage of Columbine. The latter are so much more shocking. As I was saying the other day in talking about movie violence, these are images and stories which have entered the audience's awareness. How can you refuse to address them? Once you refuse, how can the audience take your work seriously? This is a fundamental failure of the film.
By the end of the spree, the cute killer shoots his Eminemish pal is a nice touch, and the movie's end of the sole survivor taunting two kids caught in a meat locker is scary. It would have been nice if that scene had ended before the movie itself ended, but alas it did not. Until it cops out by not showing the conclusion of the scene and refusing to depict the shooting, even though the victims were off screen, the scene is quite engaging and dramatically depicts the real taunting of the student victims that Dylan and Klebold did.
Also interesting to see that the school had a meat locker stacked with great sides of beef. Weren't the kids talking about gay cows or some such nonsense? At any rate, I doubt that there is a single school in the nation with a meat locker, but I could be wrong.
So we have a very slowly paced film about Columbine. The very pretty tracking shots are nice and do build tension, but they crowd out any affecting drama. It's an interesting little film with some nice touches, but it never reaches the point of enigmatic, remaining irredeemably shallow. One wishes Gus had actually become engaged in the story. This is a man who once showed a junkie's needle piercing a vein, who once showed a dead OD'd body. Where did his fucking balls go?
The Haunting is a 1963 horror film directed by Robert Wise of STTMP fame. OK, he also did The Sound of Music and West Side Story and The Andromeda Strain and a bunch of other films, but I wanted to impress you with my knowledge of that particular acronym. Anyway, the basic story is: haunted house, four people sleep over in the house, one of them so choked up with psychic pain that she's eventually assumed by the house, which causes her to commit suicide. Sounds great, right? Sucks dick.
The biggest problem with the film is that nothing scary happens in the haunted house. Sure, there are some creepy noises and doors that close on their own, but no demented furry action or elevators filled with blood or any of that stuff. The biggest special effect in the film is a door that bends inward, as if made of rubber. Actually, no "as if," since the effect was accomplished with a rubber door, but the effect is pretty convincing and spooky. Of course, that's the only really scary thing that the house does. Apart from creek and be filmed from wacky angles. Apparently the New Wave was thoroughly infested with poltergeists.
As for the troubled individual - she's a doormat of a woman who's taken care of her invalid mother for the past 11 years and whose life, especially her romantic life, was consequently ruined. Fans of American serial killers may remember another individual warped by constant doting care of his aged and infirm mother. Whereas Ed Gein took to grave robbing, necrophilia, and dancing in the moonlight naked save for a ghoulish garment woven from dead flesh (a fine metaphor for life, that), this chick gets googly-eyed at a professor type and offers endless insufferable voice overs that sound like they were lifted straight from the book. Much like Dune, her character's inner dialogue, which was no doubt a key part of the original novel, has been turned into a voice over which, in being dreadful, is the only thing in the movie with an iota of dread.
The movie also has Russ Tamblyn, the 3-D glassed shrink in Twin Peaks, acting as a bemused skeptic. He has a little on screen heat with Claire Bloom, who looks quite tasty in a bitter, self-loathing sort of way. She was Hera in Clash of the Titans and Gertrude in the BBC/Derek Jacobi Hamlet, but it's been so long since I've seen either of these, I can't say I remember her. Anyway, these two are barely in the film, and instead of their real chemistry, we get tons of the shitty voiceover.
Basically, The Haunting is The Shining, but bereft of anything scary, interesting, or exciting, and with a rubber door.
The doormat is played by Julie Harris, who played Ophelia in Alfred Ryder's unforgettable 1964 filmed Hamlet. Yeah, I had no clue myself about this one, either. Julie was also Nora in a screen adaptation of A Doll's House, so clearly she was seen as an exessively passive woman.
Alfred Ryder was in apparently every cop show in the 70's, and played Professor Crater in STTOS' The Man Trap. I remember the episode, but not him.
A few moments later...
Wow, after reading the imdb comments, I discover that Claire Bloom's character is a lesbian. I hate when I don't get shit like this, but in my defense, I have to say that Julie Harris is extremely unappealing, and Russ Tamblyn so charming, that I just didn't see any chemistry between Harris and Bloom. Shit, I hate missing things like that, but then I'm no good at understanding interpersonal relationships, so what do I know.
Actually, I know exactly what the deal is - being sophisticated and metropolitan and generally anything other than hick or midwestern or simple is fucking code for gay in movies from this time, and jesus, that can get confusing. I mean, I'm sitting there thinking that Claire Bloom's just cool and sophisticated, not gay cool and sophisticated. And with her little banter with Russ Tamblyn, the only other actor in the film with a fucking pulse, I just thought it was a sex deal because the other two suck so very hard. And when Bloom starts being a bitch to Harris, I just assumed it was because Harris sucked such goat testicle, not because of a spurned advance.
God DAMN, that annoys me.
Anyway, the imdb comments tend to be "excellent atmospheric horror - who needs all them cgi or all that nasty gore to be scary?" While I have no problem bashing gratuitous cgi, I do like blood and guts to a certain extent, and am generally annoyed by the disdain it's shown. Anyway, I found nothing chilling about the flick. You want a scary psychological thriller in b/w? Go see Night of the Hunter, that's a fine one. Better yet, fucking Carnival of Souls fucking rocks the party!
These people are really bitching about the rise of the slasher film, which brought with it buckets of blood and the realistic-to-surreal presentation of harm done to the human body. Think gouged eyes, decapitations, open arteries spurting red syrup. It is true that there are many very bad slasher films. The entire Friday the 13th series is unbelievably bad. But there's more there than just blood and guts. And that blood and guts stuff, it's there for a reason.
Last House on the Left comes out in 1972, and was directed by Wes Craven, who later started two different successful horror film franchises - the Nightmare on Elm Street series and the Scream series. Last House on the Left is a very brutal film. It's the story of some teenage girls who fall in with a Manson-family-ish group of whackos who rape and kill them in some really nasty, brutal scenes. These guys are then themselves whacked in equally nasty, brutal scenes by the avenging parents of one of the girls. This movie is intense in an "I Spit on your Grave" sort of way - horrible, explicit violence showing unblinkingly how awful one human being can be to another.
What happened in those 9 years between The Haunting and Last House? Fucking Vietnam, that's what. People saw graphic footage on a regular basis, in awful color, displaying just how horrific real people can be. Bloodied stumps, great red gashes, all sorts of bodily integrity violations were being depicted in news films of the war. These images entered the film canon.
Naked two year olds wandering around with half the skin burned off their bodies. Once images like this have been shown in full color in motion pictures, how can they not be used in cinema? Art is one of the ways we deal with reality, and how can images like these just exist without commentary, without interpretation? These images demanded a response. Craven will talk about it, that his style of realistic violence was a reaction to, among other thigns, Vietnam. Regardless, horror films didn't start the red red kroovy, but they certainly started using it with greater abandon as the restriction on filmed content eased.
Tom Savini has done countless gore effects for films like Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Deranged, Friday the 13th 1 and 4, Texas Chainsaw 2, and a film released in Canada as Soif de Sang (god bless the imdb). There's even a Simpsons reference to him as the master of gore effects. As a kid, he loved movie monsters and movie monster makeup, shit like Frankenstein. He also served in Nam. There, he saw a bunch of very realistic and bloody damage to the human body. In an interesting coping mechanism, he began to create artificial versions of the real wounds that he saw. His model was the real thing, and he ended up bringing realistic and extremely graphic gore to the screen through his practical special effects.
Vietnam was a horrible thing, and that horror ended up on screen. Yes the movies became bloodier and more grotesque in the atrocities committed to human bodies. But it was all firmly rooted in reality.
The other thing I want to note about the slasher flicks is that they tend to use more realistic killers. That is, their killers are generally real people as opposed to apparitions, often based on serial killer Ed Gein (who inspired, among other films, Psycho, Chainsaw, and Silence of the Lambs, three of the most notable horror films ever), or are otherwise psychologically deranged, ectoplasmless human beings.
That is, you don't have to suspend your disbelief in ghosts in order to enjoy these films. Which is a bit of a problem for me, particularly when the ghosts are doing nothing more than banging around hallways. Having heard freaky noises, I know that they're usually an unfortunate combination of one's imagination and the wind or creaky joints. A guy with a chainsaw dicing up a coed can't be explained away so easily.
Slasher flicks come from a desire to be more realistic, to show the horror that can and does exist. Perhaps it's distilled to less-realistic extremes, but the foundation is very much tied to reality. There are no such things as ghosts except in stories, whereas a grave robbing ghoul who killed people and made dresses out of human skin really did exist. His name was Ed Gein.
The other interesting point about The Haunting in the imdb's comment section argues that the film is basically A Doll's House with ghosts. That is, Harris has been so ruined by the social roles forced upon her that she has no choice but to accept ghostly residence in the haunted house. So the film is a critique of the limited social roles available to women. I can see that, I think that's kinda neat, and if I didn't want to beat in Harris' skull with a baseball bat after every single fucking voiceover telling me that she's scared and conflicted, maybe I could enjoy the film on that level. But, alas, I have been so corrupted by countless slasher films as to wish that bloody fate upon Ms. Harris. Also, the fact that she chooses, even when faced with the possibility of living a cooler, liberated lifestyle a la Bloom, to be sucked into her own neurosis kills my joy. Now, being sucked into neurosis and such, these are things that I generally enjoy in a film, but it's hard for me to see this as a critique of society when there are clearly other options available to Harris.
Anyway, I've written way more about a movie I didn't like than I intended, and I did want to hit on another movie, The Night Porter, since I was talking to Gomen about it.
The Night Porter takes place in 1957 Vienna, where Dirk Bogarde, ex-Nazi, resumes a passionate affair with an ex-campee, Charlotte Rampling. Bogarde's friends, ex Nazis themselves, decide that she needs to be whacked to prevent her from testifying. Bogarde doesn't like this, so he sets up fort in his apartment where he and Rampling fuck and fuck until they run out of food, start to starve, and then fuck some more. Then he gets dolled up as a Nazi, she as a schoolgirl, they go outside and get shot by the other Nazis. 1974 Italian.
The imdb comments that don't like the film tend to be either "trivializes the Holocaust with this preposterous relationship!" or "Soft core porn with a bit of S/M and Nazis to make it art house fare."
The thing doesn't have nearly enough sex to qualify as soft core porn, and the S/M angle is more creative than the abbreviation sounds. Yes, there is a chain in the movie, but no whips, and most of the pain stuff tends to flow pretty naturally from the scene, it's not a contrivance like handcuffs and "Who's a naughtie doggie?" spankings.
As for the reality of the relationship, well, I buy it. Victims falling in love with their tormentors? Yup, it happens. Did this scenario in particular ever happen? Beats me, but there was not nearly enough done to round up Nazis after the war, so I think the meeting's plausible enough, as is the society of ex-Nazis. The love thing? It's pretty bold, but hey, stranger things have happened. There's this one guy who lived in Wisconsin who....but anyway.
Dirk is great in the movie as a somewhat effete ol' fuhrophile. He played von Aschenbach in Visconti's Death in Venice in 1971. DiV and TNP are fairly similar films. The basic idea in Porter is that art and sex and, generally, passions consume the main characters with such power and irrationality that they end up willfully destroying themselves in their enjoyment. You'd rather be holed up under siege with your little Bergen-Belsen Betty than let her get die while you live to fuck again. Art in these films is something akin to sex, as it's presented as a similarly consuming passion. So there's also lots of ballet and opera and such that gets gone to.
Which happens in Thomas Mann a lot, too, though Mann's a lot better at making a coherent and convincing point about a person consuming themselves in art and sex. In Night Porter, there's a lot of sex and a lot of the opera, but the twain don't quite meet so well. Night Porter also toploads all the artsy faggy shit, so it can be hard to take at the beginning. Also like Mann, there's a little dalliance with discussing homosexual behavior, similarly poorly integrated into the plot.
At the end, though, you like Bogarde enough that you dig on the whole Tristan and Isolde sad, ill-fated lover deal and generally go for the film. There's also an interesting scene in which Rampling's entertaining a bunch of ss officers by singing an old Marlene Dietrich torch song at them whilst wearing pinstriped slacks, suspenders, an ss hat, long black gloves and nothing else (not even shoes! What if there's broken glass on the ground?). So she's singing to Bogarde and his crew and he presents her with the head of another camp guard she didn't like. Bogarde then talks about how this is analogous to the story of Salome. But she's really hot dressed as a sexy Nazi, so I guess I buy it a bit better than it sounds like I should.
That's pretty much what I'd say of the movie. Bogarde and Rampling are so fucking good they sell it, no matter how ludicrous it seems, and it doesn't seem that ludicrous to me. Anyway, their performances are good, and I now want to see lots of Dirk Bogarde films. I also like just saying his name. Dirk Bogarde.
So, if you've made it to the end of this extended entry, I might as well entertain you with something appropriate, a very good passage from Mann's The Magic Mountain. In it, the protagonist listens to music whilst holed up in a tb hospital/resort in the mountains. I think he's listening to Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, but I'll let you judge that. Anyway, first Hans is listening to Aida....
The consoling power of beauty to gloss things over did its listener a great deal of good and contributed much to his special fondnes for this segment of his favorite concert.
It was his habit to relax from this terror and radiance by playing a second piece of brief, but concentrated charm - much more peaceful than the first, an idyll, but an exquisite idyll, painted and assembled with all the intricate economy of contemporary art. Purely instrumental, with no vocals, it was a symphonic prelude of French provenance, scored for a small ensemble, at least by modern standards, yet fitted out with all the tricks of modern tone coloring and cleverly calculated to set the soul spinning a web of dreams.
This was the dream that Hans Castorp dreamed: He was lying on his back on a meadow sparkling in the sun and strewn with colorful asters, a little mound of earth under his head, one leg pulled up slightly, the other laid across it - and, let it be noted, they were the legs of a goat. Just for the pure joy of it, since he was quite alone on the meadow, he let his fingers play at the stops of a woodwind he held to his lips, a clarinet or reed pipe, from which he coaxed gentle, nasal tones, one after the other, purely at random, and yet in a satisfying sequence that rose carelessley into the deep blue sky, beneath which the foliage of a few solitary birches and ashes flickered in the sun as the breeze brushed past. And yet his tranquil semi-melody, his impulsive doodlings, were not the only voice in the solitude for very long. Insects humming in the hot summer air above the grasses, the sunshine itself, the soft breeze, the rustling treetops, the flickering foliage - the whole gently swaying, peaceful, summery scene around him became a blend of sounds that gave ever-changing, constantly surprising harmonic meaning to his simple pipings. The symphonic accompaniment sometimes fell away into silence; but goat-footed Hans continued to blow his naive, monotonous air and lure exquisitely colored, magical tones from nature - until finally, after a long pause, a series of new instrumental voices entered, tumbling rapidly, each higher than the other, their timbres rising in self-surmounting sweetness, until every richness, every fullness held back up to now, was realized for one fleeting moment, which contained within it the perfect blissful pleasures of eternity. The young faun was very happy on his summer meadow. There was no "defend yourself" here, no responsibility, no war tribunal of priests judging someone who had forgotten his honor, lost it somehow. It was depravity with the best of consciences, the idealized apotheosis of a total refusal to obey Western demands for an active life. To our nocturnal musician's ears, this one piece's soothing effects made it worth many others.