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December 8, 2016

The Neon Demon (2016) / The Witch (2015)

Alexander Review 2010s, Nicholas Winding Refn, Puma, Robert Eggers, Witch 0 Comments

Okay so by some twist of fate we ended up watching a couple of movies from the past year and for new movies they were pretty good??? e-GAD!

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The Neon Demon (2016) – Nicolas Winding Refn

This movie is by the guy who made Drive, which I think we were both meh about, and some shit we haven’t seen.  Yeah I literally remember 2 scenes from Drive – the elevator scene where he beats people up, and the ending stripclub scene where he beats people up. I just remember a feeling indistinguishable from staring at the movie poster for two hours.

This movie is about “fashion” “models”. A teenager named Jesse (Elle Fanning) shows up in L.A. to become an image, and we start with an art photoshoot where she’s done up as a murdered Barbie doll on a couch, which sets the persistently-artificial-and-disorienting tone solidly. Our other main character, Ruby (Jena Malone), is a makeup artist (both in the fashion industry and in a funeral parlor, doing the unsung work of making your dead aunt look like someone you’d want to remember) who helps our modelette (spell check? Why aren’t you calling my shit?  It’s an official hashtag on twitter, it checks out.) get the fake blood off, then invites her to a party. There we meet two other models and we pretty much have our whole permanent cast of characters (the male characters often make a big impression, but they kind of come into the movie, do their bit, and leave. Or rather are left.) Of these two models, one is the product of extensive plastic surgery such that she has been nicknamed the Bionic Woman, and the other is British. (pretty sure that was an Australian accent, so technically right) (bro do you even Australia? (You might be right.))

The thrust of the movie is that Jesse has this effortless “it” quality, innocent and un-worked-on but able to embody the kind of beauty the (male) photographers are looking for and that the other two models can’t have no matter how they modify themselves. Ruby, who initially doesn’t seem concerned with her own looks but only in creating beauty in others . . . am I describing The Picture of Dorian Gray? Is this movie Dorian Gray?
Give me a second.
…
OK, in thinking through the rest of the plot, this isn’t literally an Oscar Wilde adaptation but the resemblance is unmistakable, in terms of setup and core conflicts and shit. Carry on.

But so anyway Ruby is a lesbian and infatuated with Jesse and thinks she can “have” her / her beauty in that kind of way. But as Jesse comes to understand that everyone wants to be/fuck her, and accepts her own Godhead, the mortals take exception.

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But look, this movie isn’t about the plot, or thematic tensions, or possibly being Dorian Gray. It’s about bizarre, stilted dialogue and strange visual situations, set in a world of fucking neon spotlights like the Schumacherized Gotham City in Batman Forever. It’s kind of heavy handed but also gorgeously done; there’s a shot where Jesse and the Bionic Woman are sitting in front of makeup mirrors and it’s somehow lit and posed so that BW’s garish clown makeup only really shows up in her reflection and looks almost natural outside of the mirror. This shot in particular had me going “fucking hell is that cool.”

Also great is that the movie, visually and narratively, goes everywhere you want it to go if you’re a sick little piece of shit like us. Word. It gets top marks in pumas, jaguars, surrealism, corpse tits, eyeballs, etc. All the major categories of movie success.

I cannot help but compare this to the best of Jess Franco – or rather what I find right and good and awesome about his terrible exploitation movies. It is filmed with a surrealist’s eyeball,  and has all the earmarks of a man (director, photographer, rapist, or what have you) who wants to see pretty women in pretty dresses get balls deep in blood, cannibalism and ritual sacrifice. In other words – fashion?
Some reviews seem to shit on the movie for being, in the reviewers’ eyes, too purely an allegory of the fashion industry and its abuses – but that seems shallower than the movie. The fashion industry is a convenient setting for Refn to look at our obsessive, involuntary drive towards beauty – both what is consuming and self-destructive, and what is completely necessary.

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The VVitch (2015) – Robert Eggers

The VVitch is about a goat.

It starts with a family (father, mother, eldest daughter, Caleb, twins, baby) of Puritans in 17th century New England getting exiled from their community for unclear reasons, and setting up shop in an isolated farm next to a dark wood. Being out in the wilderness and away from the community is Very Bad for Puritans, and makes you vulnerable to all the evils of nature and the Devil (which you are already biospiritually inclined towards). They lose a baby to the Witch who lives in the wood (there is no ambiguity that there is a Witch there) and begin turning on one another. The livestock has mixed allegiances: the horse and dog are good, the twins are probably evil, and the billy goat, Black Philip, is I guess literally the Devil (ho-hum).

The aesthetics of the movie are a collage of history and fable stitched into a campfire story you’ve heard parts of since you were a child.  Robert Eggers seems to have a passion for the history and folklore of witchcraft that gives this eerie tale ancient roots and girth that few other ‘horror’ movies dare to glance at sideways from the next urinal.

Most modern horror movies I’ve seen, even a period piece horror movie, do not give a shit about their characters, their antagonist or their period any more than an actor can care about his green screen<3, because it is nothing but a peg to hang your hat on, a means to an end. We need a protagonist (it helps if he’s a skeptic like our audience who doesn’t believe in any of the stuff he’s about to see), some red shirts to die along the way, and some spurned spirit or Chaotic Evil-aligned child to creep people out.  Have the skeptic skeptically skept through the jump scares like a Disney ride until you either kill the spirit or the protagonist. This movie does something harder and better.

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A quote from Eggers tells us that he wanted this movie to be ‘a Puritan’s nightmare’. In order to accomplish this, he had to know what Puritans feared, believed and cared about, and communicate that to a modern audience without making the characters Little House on the Prairie clones ranting illogically about God and the Devil.
This is one of the first movies I’ve seen in forever that lets characters’ religion be important to them and shape their worldview and reactions, without it being either for the sake of mockery or to make a ultra-blunt point about the evils of Christianity.
Take for example the conversation between the pious man and his son about whether or not the infant child they lost is going to hell or not, which is painful, believable and in no ways dismissive of the very characters it’s trying to get you to understand and know.

The last twenty minutes or so get a little lost (like a baby) (ohhhh… 🙁 ), unfortunately, in a way that probably comes of having a shit ton of source material that you’re really excited to use, but knowing you’re only guaranteed one opportunity to make a movie out of it. Basically it can’t pick which horror story it wants to be – the story of the Witch in the woods terrorizing them, the story of which-one’s-a-witch, the story of them all turning one by one to the Devil, the story of… the goat being Satan? Particularly bothersome for me is that you can’t have the goat be the Tempter in disguise but also ram someone to death. These are different stories, that both have their place, but can’t coexist in the catastrophe of the same movie. In one, the goat is the Devil, insidious and disguised among you; in the other it’s a brute beast, part of the cruelty and harshness of the unredeemed world of nature. Both fine Puritan horror stories but I don’t think you can have it both ways. For me this jives well with “what is ‘Goat’?” – a goat has those same shark-like eyes that say the same thing whether they are eating grass or about to gore you to death.  It’s not that it all has to be super neat and tidy and not have any extra horrific side details – the best things in movies sometimes are the parts that aren’t “necessary.” The extra creepy detail that doesn’t need to be there in terms of the main premise is like a gift from the writer/director. But in the last half-act of this movie, it just can’t settle on what that main premise is.

Eggers still does an incredible job, though, of focusing most of the movie on the core Puritan fear – of being damned, of being lost to God’s love. The characters (even the weirdly un-shitty child actors) all speak in perfect 17th century dialect, and it isn’t just window dressing. They really act and think and fear like people from another time and culture, and there’s a horrible joy in stepping into their terrifying little world.

July 30, 2016

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon – 2013

Jeremiah Made In China, Review 0 Comments

Into the Trash: Made in China are Jeremiah’s blurbs of floundering in movies set in Ancient China (and other Asiatic locales, but for heaven’s sake let’s be reductive about this) in search of treasure and pureness of heart/gold.  These will pop up as a mini-series amidst Into the Trash normal posts, probably.
Also most will be much shorter than this.

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YDD:RSD is a prequel to Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010). The movie from China is about a court detective uncovering a conspiracy to kill the imperial court while also explaining away why a giant sea creature and a merman exist and are doing the things they’re doing.

Our super-smart detective hero solves everything by undermining the script instead of actual logical deduction, an approach I call Batman-logic:
“Holy Toledo, Batman, what’s blue and has eight legs and a menu?”, “A bird’s egg on a spider waitress!  Quickly Robin, the Riddler will rob the bank at twelve o’clock!  We’d better hurry!”

The film takes stylistic cues from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) (even borrowing the internal-body-zoom during a fight scene) mixed with things like Iron Monkey (1993 – we’ll get to that one).
Lots of wire rigging and distractingly fake CGI projectiles and debris make up the fight scenes.  They’re practical enough to be fun at times, but the fights are not about style or choreography, it’s just meant for popcorn fun, while being cartoonish at times.
The two main fight scenes with the evil old man are good – one is just a solid fast-paced close-quarters fight, the other is on the side of a cliff wall with a ridiculous amount of rope and cliff.

The movie does drag on. I might have enjoyed a good 80-90 minute cut of this.  But there’s just so little substance or character to latch onto here, making it shorter or longer doesn’t fix the problem that you’re just kind of tired of seeing stuff and want to feel something.  But color grading up the wazoo helps keep the visual interest going.

I liked the merman trying to return to his (conveniently in peril) courtesan girlfriend, (and I liked that he was just an actor in a rubber Creature of the Black Lagoon suit–that’s just my style and I found it terribly endearing) but that’s about all the ‘character’ we get in this story.  Everyone else just kinda talks past each other until the movie is over.

There are two major threads in this story: the rival detective to Dee, who is given a 10 day ultimatum to solve the mystery of a … sea monster?  (I didn’t realize how ridiculous that sounded until I wrote it) or rather to find out what or who is behind the destruction of a fleet of ships.  He conducts this maritime investigation entirely on land.
Secondly, some girl is about to be kidnapped, and upon arriving in the city Dee happens upon the kidnappers and uses his lip reading detective skills to find out about this.  He intervenes in the kidnapper’s plans just as the merman shows up.  Helping out the merman links a physician sidekick to the plot, sort of.  The would-be kidnappers are found out to be spies so that leads us to the conspiracy enemy state thing which ties into the sea monster mystery by osmosis.
My point is, these threads are less woven and more just twirled together to the point that you realize how many things and people were tangentially added to the story just so that they could bridge plot holes.  If they wanted mystery or coherence they’d have done better just re-purposing a Poirot or Sherlock Holmes script and adding sea monsters to it.

While the Pirates of the Caribbean 2 battle with the Sea Dragon himself holds the film’s best visual effects (and a shit-ton of the budget), the main threat/mystery is over by that point in the story and ultimately had little to nothing to with the monster, it’s just tacked on to the end as everyone is headed home.  But they have this giant subplothole they haven’t tied up, and you can’t in good conscience call this movie Rise of the Sea Dragon without involving a Sea Dragon.  That said, it’s hard to be sad when a horse rides underwater, jumps 100 feet from floating debris onto a ship and gets poisoned fish catapulted into its and our hero’s face.

July 28, 2016

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Alexander Review 1950s, Christopher Lee, Frankenstein, Hammer Films, Peter Cushing 0 Comments

Frankentitle

In this 1957 Hammer Films production, Peter Cushing is Frankenstein, although first some other dude is him as a 15-year-old hiring a new tutor named Paul (Robert Urquhart), and then he ages 20 years into Peter Cushing between scenes while the tutor stays the same. Together they do some science and reanimate a pretty damn cute dead dog.

Then Frankenstein decides he wants to make a new life from corpses (duh) and his Paul tutor does some qualms about it. Victor’s cousin Elizabeth (Hazel Court) shows up expecting to live with him, and Paul worries about what this means for his pederastic science-topia. Elizabeth spends a while in a nice cleavage/dress (it’s about half and half.) Otherwise, her acting is terrible.

Elizabeth

Pretty soon, a monster! (Christopher Lee in his first major role.) By pretty soon we mean 50 minutes into an 80 minute film.

The monster doesn’t talk (kind of a waste of Christopher Lee, obviously) but has some good pathetic movements, although he’s more inherently violent than the one from the book (who begins simply scared, and rapidly becomes quite intelligent and even well-spoken.  Ain’t no Paradise Lost quoting in this shit)

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Cute makeup though.

Hammer goes all-in on reshaping the plot completely to center on the relationship between Victor and Paul, a character they added (I guess he’s sort of like Henry Clerval, but not really.  At times he felt like a Watson, making me want to look up who was Watson when Cushing played Holmes.) It’s a completely different story for a host of reasons, the main one being that this Frankenstein has no genuine relationships and can’t lose people he cares about to the monster, because he’s pretty much a sociopath. They make a movie where Frankenstein is the real monster and his creation is just a bit pathetic–which, at least, they don’t throw in your face in some stupidly heavy-handed way. Still, at the end, not much of a story is accomplished.

The movie is about a conflict between these guys, not the monster.

The movie is about these pricks, not the monster.

I always just wonder why someone can’t just make a movie of Frankenstein. Dracula is long and unfilmable?!?, hyper-aware of its being a text, and cobbled together from journals, letters, and telegrams. The beginning is heavily dramatized and then the pace changes completely as the action shifts to England, so any film has to, at very least, condense drastically. Frankenstein just isn’t like that. It’s a shorter book, mostly narrated straightforwardly, with a simple (enough) human story to tell. Why not tell it in a movie?  It’d be nice.  I do like the strange cultural phenomenon of everything everyone knows about Frankenstein being from Boris Karloff’s depiction and maybe some Young Frankenstein thrown in, none of the iconic images we associate with Frankenstein are actually in the book.  And that’s a fun concept to have floating around in the whatever.  I still want to see this book’s story done sometime in more than just my mind’s eye. Me too.

This shadowy cartoon guillotine slowly lifts up before the end credits roll over it. At the end, it doesn't drop down! Fail, movie.

This shadowy cartoon guillotine slowly lifts up before the end credits roll over it. At the end, it doesn’t drop down! Fail, movie.

July 16, 2016

Spirits of the Dead (1968)

Jeremiah Review 1960s, Fellini, Horse, Italian, Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim 0 Comments

This movie is three movies (Roger Vadim / some fuck / Fellini), one rips the living tits off of costume and story and horse. One doesn’t live up to its own child actor lizard and Brigitte Bardot, the third is like a not-very-interested dementor’s dick in your mouth, by Fellini.
All three are “based on” Edgar “Allan” Poe’s “short” “stories”.

First the HORSE AS FUCK MOVIE

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This fucking shit is gorgeous, from the locations to the Jane Fonda, to her ever-changing pristine costuming, to the horses, to the coloring, to the story. Within the first minute, we see True Clothing and an ocelot baby cheetah. Every movie should be a zoo, at least a circus.
Jane Fonda is Ramsay Bolton/Elizabeth Bathory, living the sexlife in her castle of debauchery and Cheetahs. Ah, her imperious mien, her glance of insuperable hauteur!–it’s just hella.

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She has a Westley/Buttercup relationship with her cousin (this whole story is about fucking your cousin who is also a horse you commit double suicide with to be together forhorseever) and when she gets caught in a bear trap one day she incredulously calls out for assistance to her wandering cousin, who seems to only commune with nature and is–as he puts it–a happy man. We utterly believe him, and the thought that torturing slaves is not the best thing in life starts to weigh on our sexy sexy fucking hot heroine.

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After meeting him WITH A CODPIECE THE SIZE OF AN OWL in castle ruins she is spurned once again (while Sultan & Prince, their horses, elope together), and sends her henchmen to burn down his barn in her furious heat.
Being as close to a druid as an Anglican (you know this is set in like… Prussia or somewhere right?) can get, he leaps into the flames to save his horses.
This is where shit gets fucking awesome.

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Frederique (oh, by the way, Jane Fonda’s name is that) is sad to learn of her cousin’s death, but out of the flaming stables bursts a powerful black stallion, which no one has ever seen before.
There is a tapestry of said horse in her castle that is burned when the real horse appears, like the mantle torn in the temple when Jesus died.
She hires a weaver to start repairing the tapestry.
The rest of the movie is her riding the horse and wanting to fuck the horse and synergizing with the horse. “She returns to the stable, now spiritually ready to bear her cousin’s centaur offspring.” — me narrating the movie.

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I don’t think the tapestry ever gets finished, but there’s a brush fire started by a storm so she runs out on the horse and dies in the flames with it in ecstasy, as do we all.

Elizabeth Bathory, eat your fucking heart out!

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One cloak, one horse: the best sex scene of the ‘60s.

second Movie – dopplefuckthis.
William Wilson is the best sadist child I’ve seen in a movie, but as he Tom Riddles merrily through elementary school his zeniths of cruelty are interrupted by another kid named William Wilson.

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He goes on to doctor school out of sadistic curiosity where he abducts a woman off the street to try and cut emotion out of her heart, but is interrupted by his doppelnämer again.

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cough.

He goes on to military gambling school which features a nice rack (of swords) and then Brigitte Bardot.
Has Brigitte Bardot however he chooses; chooses wrong. (Having just seen Jane Fonda in billions of costumes and animals, seeing Brigitte Bardot raises your hopes and then dashes them by having her just sit there and play poker in black funeral garb.)

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This Maverick episode starring Bardot ends in super-Zorro saving her from his doppleganger, then the plot just takes a dip in the Poe and never comes back up.
This clip sums up my thoughts and emotions on this story:

Third movie – why won’t this fuck just die already. Prick dies slower than American democracy.
Fellini wastes his and our life for what seems ages.
We’re introduced to some actor/rock-star shitworm, who after a tv interview goes to the “Golden Wolves” Roman Oscars. Me, 20 minutes in: “THE SCENE IS SET ALREADY.”
He then gives a speech at the YES WE GET IT, HOLLYROME IS FAKE Oscars and rants about how bullshit everything is, then escapes to his reward for making an appearance; a Ferrari, which he drives through cardboard people in an empty YES WE GET IT, LIFE IS FAKE Rome, before FINALLY after 8 Toby Goddammit hours crashes after seeing a devil girl like we knew he would the instant he saw the fucking car.

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This cute little baby cheetah is from the Horse part of this movie. Why aren’t we watching that?

This nightmarish take on the death of an upper cruster is brutalized in its crib by tedious pacing, but I suppose it’s not helpful to say “this could have been good if it was not so boring”.

Two good things about this narrative turd:
1 – At his interview he gives all the disinterested ‘I live my own life, man’ answers to his Hunger Games-esque interviewers. This was 1968 but is eerily an impersonation of 1977 Johnny Rotten jerking off in your face, being a “rebel”.

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2- The woman who comes to him while he’s blackout drunk to offer him love and security. What this woman represents/offers him is the escape he is searching for in pits of substance abuse and fame. But he denies this search and crashes and burns in a fake world. (I get my ‘this was almost a good thing’ anger from this not being the David Foster Wallace story about postmodernism and drug recovery I want it to be, but rather just Fellini tonguing the cheek out of an already better tonque-in-cheek EA Poe Grimm Fairy Tale.)
FUCK THIS SHIT. Pretentious come on the intellectual breasts of budding young cinema. We have seen Satyricon, we know what Fellini is capable of visually, and competent with in taking a doesn’t-translate or fractured narrative and making something at least watchable – this is his George Lucas Attack of the Clones moment, this is pig shit rubbed on your naked grandma. This is like Michael Bay trying to be David Lynch. Don’t fuck with us, we know what to do with trash – rewind to Jane Fonda wanting to be/fuck a horse!

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♥♥♥♥♥♥ 6/7 ♥’s for HORSE AS FUCK, ♥♥♥♥ 4/7 ♥’s for Poe bullshit, ♥ 1/7 ♥’s for ROME IS HELL WE GET IT. For an overall rating of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 6/7 ♥’s (all that matters is the horse movie)

July 13, 2016

Cat People (1982)

Alexander Recycled, Review, The Big Picture 1980s, Cat People Principle, panther, Paul Schrader 0 Comments

Cat People Title

This film, written by Alan Ormsby and directed by Paul Schrader, is a loose “remake” of Cat People (1942), which we reviewed a few weeks ago. Hopefully future “Recycled” posts (reviews of a movie and its remake) will come closer together.

Let’s start with how this movie ends:

Shot of panther’s face. Freezeframe. Commence Bowie. At appropriate point in song, unfreeze the freezeframe. Panther roars. Freezeframe again. Roll credits.

This Crazy Ivan-esque maneuver has only been pulled off by the most daring and desperate of movie pilots. A tip of the hat to director Paul Schrader is already in order.

Ok back to how it starts.

Panther Silhouette

Credits roll over orange sands blowing across half-buried skulls. Among the desert sands of Mars Africa probably? warriors take a young woman and tie her to tree on a hill. That night a black panther approaches and rears up in front of her, but the next morning she is alive. We morph from her face into the whiter, present-day face of another young woman, Irena (Natassia Kinski) mmm. She is arriving in New Orleans from an unknown place, an envoy to our world from a better, braless one. Her creepy brother (Malcolm McDowell) stalks her through the airport and only introduces himself when she is about to make a call on a pay phone. They’ve never met as adults.

Irena and Paul have a weird relationship even before the police find the half-eaten hooker corpses in his basement. Their parents, who died when they were young, were circus people, and the siblings remember how to juggle while chanting unsettling rhymes. Paul’s also a religious fanatic involved with what looks like the circus church of latter-day clown jesus (see below).

Gah!

Gah!

More importantly, the pair are the last remnants of an ancient race of cat people, who turn into panthers when they fuck and back into humans when they kill. This has grim consequences for any non-cat people they might spend the night with. Paul knows all this (hence the hooker corpses) but Irena, as a virgin, has a voyage of self-discovery ahead of her. Both actors pull off some nice moments of cat-like movement and behavior in the movie.

Cat Pose

Paul gets stuck in a hotel room as a panther after a hooker gets away from his attempted mauling, and people from the zoo come and put him in captivity. These are our other main characters, Oliver (John Heard) and Alice (Annette O’Toole). They’re good at their jobs, but the captive Paul-panther seems constantly pissed off and scary as hell.  Firstly, the hooker attack scene is fucking amazing, scary as hell.  Secondly this entirely real panther is terrifying; it’s fearfully magical to see a giant cat bounce around a room like a pinball of furious death and furry muscle. Seriously. Did he who made the Lamb make thee, motherfucker?

Such beautiful eyes

Such beautiful eyes

Irena and Oliver end up meeting and falling for each other–even though early on she responds to an offer of aspirin with “Nah, I don’t believe in medicine,” <3 which you think a self-respecting zoologist would find a turn-off. He gets her a job in the zoo gift shop, and from there a relatively tepid love triangle starts up between Irena, Oliver, and Alice. Unlike the Alice in the 1942 Cat People, this Alice doesn’t stand for anything much; she’s a competent woman who’s had a presumably average amount of sex, but isn’t unusually liberated except compared to Irena. If the love triangle means anything, it’s just Oliver’s choice between the alluring danger of Irena and the safer Alice (it’s a conflict within a man, not between two women with different approaches to life). Mercifully, we’re spared this conflict becoming the center of the movie.

The movie’s real core is the myth of the cat people, which comes to the forefront in two magnificent lines:

Paul bursts into Irena’s room through the window, approaches her bed, kneels and says:

“Save me. Only you can stop this killing. You have to make love with me, as brother and sister.”

"We can live together as mates, just as our parents did."

“We can live together as mates, just as our parents did.”

Later, in a vision set among the orange sands of Africa Mars, he says this:

“Long ago our ancestors sacrificed their children to the leopards. The souls of the children grew inside the leopards until the leopards became human. We were gods then. We are an incestuous race. We can only mate with our own.”

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Everything else is icing on this, the meat and potatoes of this superb cat cake. Meat + Potatoes + Icing = Cake.

The myth and certain aspects of the movie’s feel remind me of American Gods. Like: the gods (cat people) were created by people’s worship of them, and now live a weird posthumous existence in America, divorced from the civilization that made them. It’s enough to make me wonder if Neil Gaiman watched this movie.

We won’t go into interpretations the way we did for Cat People (1942), because this movie is in a different mode: less about metaphor, more about beautiful fucked up myth. (Roger Ebert wrote about it: “This is the stuff of audacious myth, combining the perverse, the glorious, and the ridiculous. The movies were invented to tell such stories.” This was one of the first things I read that made me realize Ebert knew what was up and numbered among the sages.)  yeah, this movie was the first thing I ever agreed with Ebert on except Nicolas Cage, and I have since come to admire his views on many films.

I will say that the idea of ‘myth’ for me applies to 40’s Cat People more than this one.  One is witches and curses, and the other is ‘you’re a magic cat species!’ I’m talking about myth-making–this movie creates/contains a myth that speaks to fucked up little corners of our brains, rather than presenting things that stand for other things.

But we will talk about the strange relationship it has with Cat People (1942).

It’s a remake in only the broadest vaguest sense – both are about a woman who turns into a panther. There’s a zoo and some sorta love triangley stuff.  When it comes to meaning, tone, characters, plot, it’s an entirely different film. The first film’s basic idea was a springboard for Alan Ormsby and Paul Schrader that led to a completely different narrative and visual world.

But in a few places, they do lift scenes or moments from the original (the most iconic ones, that one might hope to see redone in a “remake”)– the mysterious cat-like woman who greets Irena as “my sister” in another language (only, in this one, it’s Spanish, a language irrelevant to the story), the bus halting in front of Alice with a sound blended with a panther roar, and the pool sequence.

"Remember that scene from that other movie? Let's do that, but topless."

“Remember that scene from that other movie? Let’s do that, but topless.”

Not a single one of these scenes fits in this movie, and in fact none have any effect on surrounding scenes and could all be cut without disrupting the plot at all.

This leads us to propose what we will call the Cat People Principle (CPP): In a loose adaptation or inspired work, any portions brought in wholesale from the original will be the least fitting and (in context) worst parts of the new work.
I could also call this the Wicker Man Principle.

When a filmmaker wants to or has to pick a completely different focus/story than his source material but is required to pay homage to it.  Things taken from the source material will feel as transplanted as they are, and things new will feel as alien as they are to lovers of the source material. Right, lovers of the source material are often expecting a close adaptation no matter what, so the new material will always be the bad part from a certain fanboyish perspective.

"This is the best panther autopsy I've ever seen in a movie."

“This is the best panther autopsy scene I’ve ever seen in a movie.”

The converse is called the Lord of the Rings Principle (LotRP): In a close or “faithful” adaptation, although it’s probably necessary to delete and rearrange things, any portions purely added by the adapters will probably be the least fitting and worst parts of the new work.
LIKE FUCKING GAME OF THRONES.  FUCK THOSE GUYS. Yeah it could as easily be the GoTP.

When a filmmaker goes to great lengths to preserve his perceived focus/story of the source material, but whilst dealing with the edits and cuts and woes of adaptation through some hubris decides he is equal and sly enough to insert his own content and that it will flow seamlessly in the waters of another man’s jelly.  He is wrong.  He is so fucking dead wrong.  His meddlings are the sorest of thumbs and stick out tall and throbbing.

In both cases, the logic is actually the same. Someone has a coherent idea worked out or attempting to be worked out, with its own self-unfolding logic. For the close adaptation, this is the original; for the loose adaptation, it’s the new separate idea inspired by the original. Then pockets of someone else’s idea are inserted, and while they might be good in another context, they don’t fit into the scheme of the original (in the close adaptation) or the new work (in the loose adaptation.)

There can be a murky middle between the two (because that’s how dichotomies work), when you can’t decide if something is a loose adaptation or a close one–sometimes creating the feeling of two movies stitched awkwardly together. There’s also another category to muddy the waters (I’d say it’s more of a factor than a category), which is the Factory Movie–aka, some source material (previous movie, book, comics, toys) is combined with purely generic elements, so it’s not a close adaptation, but the new skeleton the meat is being hung on is not a new, original vision, but just a set of conventions.

What makes Cat People the Younger so great is that, except these few blatantly inserted scenes, it goes so balls-out in the direction of a “loose” remake, a new original film that happens to be inspired by a previous one. Take out the few moments copy-pasted from the Val Lewton movie, and you’ve just got Ormsby and Schrader’s wild-ass vision of sex and death and PANTHER TREE.

PANTHER. TREE.

PANTHER. TREE.

July 9, 2016

Midnight Party / La Coccolona / La Partouze de Minuit (1976)

Jeremiah Review 1970s, Jess Franco, Lina Romay, sex comedy, sexploitation 0 Comments

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Jess Franco’s film about kidnapping, spies and sex but mostly sex, starring Lina Romay’s body.

In directing over 200 films our dear Jess has given birth to films featuring philosophers, monsters, spies, prisoners, sadists and religious fanatics; he also directed porn featuring the same.  More often than not he rode a line betwixt the two, but unfortunately, this one errs on the porn side of things.

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Getting Lina naked is pretty much the gravitational center for the events of this film.  Characters and scenes are orbital moons to her labia.  Most scenes gradually shift or instantly cut to Lina’s crotch, and it’s pretty clear it’s the main star of this picture, and Jess’s interest.

Lina lures us into the story with a seductive narration that consists mostly of purrs, meows and writhing, and is intercut throughout the film.  Through this and other means Jess breaks, holds down and beats the living shit out of the fourth wall.  Pretty much Jess and Lina got a hotel room and he had her wiggle around the bed and say sexy things while he filmed her – and then that footage found its way to being the narration for this film.  It’s the ‘use every part of the buffalo’ approach to filmmaking. The sexy fucking buffalo.

The plot loosely moistly follows that Sylvia (Lina) is a dancer at a nightclub, oscillating her osculating between a stay-at-home husband, a capitalist sugar daddy, and a hippie guitarist.
At a party held by Jess Franco’s cameo she is invited to a threesome by a couple who have been ogling her with the rest of us for a few scenes now.

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-Cut to Narration Lina recounting a dream about fucking a regiment of marines. We filmed it dammit, we’re gonna use it!

She wakes in the morning to find them murdered, and herself held hostage.

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Her two kidnappers decide to have another threesome with her, which despite her circumstances she is quite down with (this is filmed in fast-motion, a bold artistic choice of our mastermind Franco).
Jess enters and spoils their fun, interrogates Lina about the murder, but knowing nothing she cannot earn her freedom.

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“A foreigner with a metal leg kept asking questions, but the other two were chums!”

After a daring escape (karate chopping a captor during cunnilingus) she goes to her sugar daddy’s house and recounts the story while jerking him off, but he doesn’t believe her at all.  She seems content either way and another ass-grinding on flaccid dick scene commences.

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In the morning her shower masturbation scene is interrupted when she is kidnapped again by Jess’s people.
But this time he’s kidnapped her to apologize for kidnapping her in the first place.  Which leads to another fast-motion threesome –we interrupt this threesome to cut to Lina narration/masturbation.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled threesome:– between her and her kidnappers.

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“You went to bed with those filthy capitalists!”

She’s dropped off at her hippie guitarist boyfriend’s house, who also doesn’t believe her story, so she returns home to her househusband who has typical domestic woes.

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“You’re a funny lot you businesswomen! You think that we’re just here to kiss and to clean and to dust and scrub up the house for you? You know we have experiences in life too!”

But he lends a listening ear to her tale of mild inconvenience by murder, kidnapping and sex.
Lina is then kidnapped a third time, but hippie boyfriend sees the whole thing and even tries to enlist the help of his mortal enemy the capitalist pig (sugar daddy) to save her.
Jess delivers Lina’s unconscious body to… the murdered couple from the party, who are not dead after all and are in fact Albanian secret service!
Capitalism comes in and shoots Albania in the head, and then takes Lina out to the countryside where he declares he must kill her for meddling in the affairs of the CIA.

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But hippie boyfriend shoots the capitalist scum first, just as Jess’ kidnappers and the police die in a gun-battle.
Hippie and Lina are united once again.
Narrator Lina masturbates. (Pretty much literally framed as our reward for watching the movie.)
The end.

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Footnote on wtf: It seems that this Albanian knew Lina was a mistress to the CIA Capitalist, so with Jess’s help he faked his own death hoping that she would report it to the CIA agent and he would believe her and stop his manhunt, but he didn’t.

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Every great artist has had a muse (except the ones who don’t), and Lina was Jess’s.  He worships her body with his brush camera but unlike a painting which is studied, sketched and perfected (with ample time for muse-fucking in between), film is something you keep and use later, and Jess’s experiments and final concepts are both spliced and cobbled together into his porn film.

***

Ian Fleming once said: “I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument.”
Jess has a very rare theme that crops up in a few of his movies in which he plays with stereotype roles.
In this film it may be a complete accident*, but I believe Jess takes a traditionally 70’s male-fantasy (escape from real life into Spy Hogwarts – ie has job/housewife at home who nags him about domestic life, but through philandering around with exciting women gets sucked into spy drama through merely existing in the film) and he does a simple gender swap.

* I mean the gender swap isn’t an accident, just look at the lines you quoted from the househusband. I believe that’s played for comedy, what’s accidental is having any of that add up to a commentary on the spy genre imo. Well yeah, the gender swap is fundamentally just a joke. But it’s a play on what you’d expect to see in the genre. It’s intentional to that extent, and whether it really adds up to a commentary… I’m unconvinced.
I think he unconsciously has Fleming’s 007 concept, a blunt instrument to whom things happen, and marries that with his obsession with Lina Romay’s lips (both) and despite watching a crap film, at least I get a fun idea out of it.

But let’s not pretend that Lina’s narration scenes aren’t the best, primary, and only reason to watch this movie. They are the moist, writhing heart and soul cunt of the whole enterprise.

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July 2, 2016

Society (1989)

Jeremiah Uncategorized 0 Comments

Society

I think we can agree that this was the final goal and result of the ’80s
yeah, like the day after this movie the ‘90s started.
like this is the movie the ‘80s died giving birth to.

Society centers around a Beverly Hills teenager named Bill, as he struggles with increasing hallucinations and disturbing encounters that suggest his affluent family and acquaintances are at best incestuous murderers, and at worst what actually happens in the movie.

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Surrealistic make-up effects by SCREAMING MAD GEORGE. Eyeballs by TECH OPTICS. -Even Society’s credits hint that you are about to see something magical.

Billy’s sister is dressing up for her coming-out party (a kind of bat mitzvah for wealthy gentiles) and her creepy ex boyfriend is a chunky peeping tom whom Billy removes bodily from the family home. Billy has a basketball game and cannot attend his sister’s big day, but following their parents’ apathetic dismissal of him, Billy and his sister share a ‘zip me up’ dress moment and a body horror moment – so we’re right on track for incest and gore. So far so good.

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ain’t gonna lie, I’m really hoping for some incest. yeah, that’d be great.

This movie really shows what it’s like to be a teenager in the 1980s, playing basketball, going to the beach, getting solicited by hot girls at school, feeling adopted, wanting to fuck your sister, seeing fleeting visions of body contortion, the whole American experience.

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Bill is pulled aside at the beach by his sister’s ex, who plays him a cassette (google it, kids) recorded by bugging his sister’s earrings – in which Bill’s family discusses her party as a giant inauguration into high class orgies, which we hear for ourselves later on the tape.

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When he speaks to his shrink about this the next day the tape has been changed to a normal non-hyper-sexual family conversation and his sister’s ex has been conveniently killed in a car crash.

These occurrences are shrugged off by his family and he is sent to yet another Beverly Hills party where he hooks up with Clarissa, a fucking gorgeous girl from his school who is hot for his fresh man-junk.

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Bill is later lured to the woods by his opponent in school politics where he finds him murdered – but when he goes back with authorities there is no sign of the body, and he is doped up and thrown in the hospital. His basketballing best buddy frees him and he returns with a crazed vengeance to his home where pretty much everyone he’s ever known turns out to be in a classist secret society who start melding into one giant flesh monster orgy.

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Worth noting is that The Blue Danube is playing in this scene and it descends into a circus-sounding remix of the song.

He fists his way out of there with his buddy, and Clarissa (who is also one of them but hot, so, you know, can’t rebel against the system too much) and they flee society–the people, and the movie–in his parents’ Jeep.

Bill (played by Billy Warlock)–a sort of low-rent John Stamos with hints of Keanu Reeves–is so perfectly undersold that he becomes convincing, and once you are in the mind of a boy whose entire existence and lifestyle is run by a giant meatmonster of babyboomers trying to molest and consume you some real honest fear creeps in and you realize your mouth has been open for the past three minutes as your brain is watching aghast.

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Society is a jack of all 80’s trades, and master of few.
It’s story is the exposed backbone of many other beautiful stories and themes explored in 80’s bizarre horror; a complete sampling of the buffet while never settling on any main course.
There are loose appendages of so many good movies in this film, the subtle all-American horror of Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the debilitating uncertainty and sexual boredom of The Graduate, the secret society + body horror stuff of Cronenberg. And while the movie is by no means as good as any of these, its very simple concept does not disappoint or feel the need to complicate itself: Upper class American society is fucking terrifying and disgusting, you are born into it and consume it while being consumed – anyone not from it gets devoured by it.
This is both the literal and metaphoric meaning of this film, and it’s just really refreshing to see a movie about what it’s about.

The only reason the hero Jeep Ex Machinas out of the movie with his friends at the end is because it would be depressing if he didn’t. I really wanted it to end with him screaming as his parents, acquaintances, love interests/sister and schoolmates devoured his flesh, but no one wants to end a movie like that.

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They say ‘it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.’ Society says ‘it’s not an Oedipus complex if they’re really trying to fuck you.’

Society almost creates a new genre, as we’ve all heard of the ‘sex-comedy’ genre this may be the first true sex-horror movie.
Now already you’re thinking of a vagina monster – and that’s cute, but I’m talking about the extrapolation of that notion, not just a very real fear of a woman with teeth down there. What are you.
Society has elements you would see in American Pie, but instead of playing those bits for shitty comedy it sees the abstract horror in them: ie every time Alyson Hannigan sticks a trumpet up your ass nobody laughs, the trumpet won’t come out and is now enveloping your flesh, the room starts to melt, your parents are watching and touching themselves, and Alyson Hannigan is your sister. <3
There is a real sense that the director or writer of this film walked in on his parents during a swingers orgy at a young age and the abject horror of this scene has been floating around in his tortured mind until finally being released here on the big screen in glorious technicolor.

June 29, 2016

Grapes of Death / Les Raisins de la Mort (1978)

Alexander Review 1970s, French, Jean Rollin, zombies 0 Comments

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We caught this absurdly-titled zombie(ish) film by Jean Rollin in its last days of streamability on Amazon Prime, which is purging its service of everything good and pure (e.g. trashy French vampire movies) at the end of June. It’s not in my top 5 Jean movies, but I enjoyed it.

Some workers return through dead-looking grape fields coughing through their gas masks. Their villainously scarved-and-piped tractormaster assures them that new better gas masks are coming, and encourages them to relax.

Meanwhile alone on a train, a young brunette and her blonde friend are heading on holiday. A strange man boards the otherwise empty train, and sits by the brunette while her friend is away in the bathroom. He has a rapidly growing lesion on his face which soon becomes so gruesome that she runs away, and he chases her. She finds her friend dead in the bathroom, pulls the emergency brake and runs from the train. He seems disappointed, like his “murder her friend and chase her” pick-up strategy has failed one too many times.

What passes for a safe haven, in a Jean movie.

What passes for a safe haven, in a Jean movie.

She seeks refuge first in a mausoleum or something (locked), then in a creepy farmhouse. The creepy farmhouse inhabitants, a father (lesion on hand) and daughter, let her stay, but insist that their phone and car both don’t work. When our purple-bloused heroine goes upstairs, she finds a woman’s body, and the daughter tells her that her father has gone insane. They hatch an escape plan but the father murders the daughter after revealing that she too has the disease, then pursues the heroine as she gets in the car. He begs her to run him over and she does.

From then on she runs into more zombies and survivors (though this is a blurrier line than usual) and more grim episodes play out. The most mysterious person she encounters is a beautiful blonde woman who has no marks anywhere on her body (she proves it) but is still in league with the zombies.

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For me, the infected villagers were a lot scarier than normal zombies because they could still talk, reason, and have human reactions to things, all while becoming disfigured and compelled to kill. Oh. They’re more like real people losing their minds / acting under a compulsion, which is more frightening than the old animated-corpse cannon-fodder approach.

There’s a bit of hamfisted political dialogue shoved in (aka the best dialogue in the movie), after our heroine meets some uninfected guys with a shotgun and dynamite, who will pass for “the good guys.” The older of the men fought the Nazis in the French Resistance, and the young man briefly chews him out, suggesting that what’s important isn’t fighting the Germans, but fighting fascism, whether it’s German or French, and berating him for feeling comfortable living between a nuclear plant and a weapons plant (not pictured.) There’s definitely a thing going on where the zombie-ism represents people succumbing to a fascistic ideology–maybe a militaristic, corporatist sort of culture bleeding in from America (or wine). But probably not a very deep thing. But still, there’s something evocative about how the movie shows people caught up in–whatever–and turning violent and horrifying while remaining people, compared to how zombies are usually our cultural shorthand for “people that aren’t people anymore, it’s okay to shoot them.” (Our virtuous younger man also gives the older one shit about basically thinking this way about the zombies, and enjoying gunning them down too much.)  (this is cool and probably accurate, but I had given up on the movie and started playing guitar at this point.) (Hey man, whatever fails to float your boat.)

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My main complaint about the movie is that the female characters keep their clothes on too much. That might sound like a puerile complaint, but Jean can be kind of a puerile guy, and often really satisfies that part of us. Sex and nudity usually happen in Jean’s movies for no forced reason, just for their own beautiful sake, and at the drop of a hat. And I think that’s a healthy and joyful thing, compared to a lot of your grosser American horror movies where sex is something very bad, maybe even something that we want to see punished. This movie comes a lot closer to that, in that two of the female characters keep their clothes on until during/after their killing, bringing one of those situations where it feels like the violence is what we’re expected to get off on–not my cup of tea. In other words, the women in this movie are insufficiently sexualized, and I find that problematic.

June 24, 2016

Crash (1996)

Alexander Review 1990s, car sex, David Cronenberg 0 Comments

I…
Me t….
To note first: this is not the Crash that won Best Picture at the 2005 Oscars. This is a 1996 movie by David Cronenberg about wanting to be/fuck a car crash. It’s also much better.

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Breast, meet plane.

We begin, after the very unabridged credits, in a hangar, where a blonde woman (Deborah Kara Unger) is slowly baring her breast and laying it rapturously on a plane, communing with the plane, becoming the plane, until a man enters from behind, but he’s an afterthought to her and to us. We cut to the set of an action movie, where her husband (James Spader) is having sex with another woman in his office. His name is James Ballard, the name of the classic sci-fi author whose novel got Cronenberged into this. (Shouldn’t the character have been named Dave Cronenberg for the movie?)

They meet on a balcony for the post-coital debriefing, and it sounds as if no one has ever come in human history. “Maybe the next one,” she says, twice.
balcony
He gets in a car crash, injuring himself and killing the driver of the other car, but the other driver’s wife (Holly Hunter) survives to become our third out of four main characters. (In my head I kept calling her Dr. Melfi through the entire movie. Makes sense to me.)

Ballard’s wife jerks him off under the hospital covers while describing the car crash to him in immaculate detail. Well–now we know what his fetish is. He is drawn to where they’re keeping the remains of his car, where he runs into Dr. Melfi looking for her husband’s. They end up fucking. (Everyone in this movie ends up fucking.)

Ballard and Dr. Melfi go to a shady back-alley reenactment of the car crash that killed James Dean, hosted by a man named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) who briefly ogled Ballard’s wounds earlier in the hospital. “When I met Vaughan he was a specialist in international computerized traffic systems … I don’t know what he is now,” says Dr. Melfi during his opening monologue. We find out soon enough as Vaughan leads them into his car crash death fetish cult.

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Said death cult includes a man eagerly working on his Jane Mansfield costume for their next crash reenactment, and a woman with legs in braces like a kind of low-fi cyborg produced through bodily harm. (The prominent wounds on the backs of her legs come to some… interesting use later in the film. Her leg wound… had a clit, right? I didn’t see one. I mean just a kind of overall vaginal outline with a little nub of sorts where one belonged. I know what you meant.)

The rest of the movie has the characters do things like watching crash test tapes while jerking one another off round robin-style, cruising around getting into near-accidents for sexual titillation, and fucking one another in almost every available pairing. This is the light stuff, this is the Prancing Pony stage of this quest to Mount Doom.

Deborah Kara Unger is absolutely fucking fearless she a’ight in this movie, both in what she lets us see and the complex emotional states she’s willing to dive into. The scene of Ballard fucking her from behind (which gets mirrored at the end of the movie by him repeatedly rear-ending her? And then fucking her from behind Shhhhhh) while she questions him insistently in a dirty-talk voice about whether he wants to fuck Vaughan (also mirrored) is beyond what any actress since Lina Romay would willingly do on camera. (Yeah, I like her character, but her dirty-talk voice never shuts off and it’s kinda grating to me.)

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Additional credit should be given to Howard Shore, who provides a lot of tension with his restrained score, which is of the kind they call “brooding.” We kept imagining him saying, “So… what am I scoring today, David?” but he always finds the mood somehow, giving a dark cast to every sex scene and… other sex scene. Like the legless woman says about Vaughan’s photography, “[he] makes everything look like a crime.”
Elias Koteas as Vaughan is so great that we’re angry we don’t know who he is. His lines and facial expressions and gestures are all … taut? Like a creepy calm stretched thin over a nervous, horny, apocalyptic energy. He has the benefit of incredible lines though:

“James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal.”
“It’s not the police, it’s the Department of Transport. It’s a joke. They have no idea who we really are.”
“Did I seem glib? ‘James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal.’ I just couldn’t resist.”
“No, I live in my car. This is my workshop.”
“I use it to test the resilience of my potential partners in psychopathology.”
“This is not a medical tattoo, it’s a prophetic tattoo.”

Crash revisits a lot of thematic shit from Cronenberg’s earlier Videodrome, in that both films prove that sex and death and technology are having some excruciating orgy in David Cronenberg’s brain <3, and he can make a heck of movie out of it. (A throwaway line in this film, “That’s tape player’s fucked!” almost seems like a retrospective summary of Videodrome.)

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I really like this sequence where the convertible’s roof and windows come up around them during foreplay, like the machine is closing around them.

So Vaughan’s religion does turn out, in one scene, to have a theology. We aren’t really capable of understanding it at this time. He describes a car crash as a release of sexual energy or something. Fuck. Here’s what I’m getting: Every wound is an opening. The traumatic or explosive energy of a car crash creates an opportunity for uh…. Some kind of sexual-religious transcendence, the psychosexual equivalent of becoming a cyborg for a moment. Or um… the world of frail humans and soulless machines is broken open and all the boundaries blur and you ejaculate furiously. Orgasm, death, and becoming a machine are all just ways to break out of the quiet desperation* of your shitty little pedestrian self. Coming… becomes becoming?

Ok, so… Valhalla (/orgasm) is reached by dying in a car crash, a la the warriors who have gone before us like James Dean and (honorable mention) JFK, immortal legends of the 1960’s American Graffiti era. That’s all I know.
It is Viking warrior death meets dying in a car crash – kinda the Warboys’ religion in Mad Max Fury Road but… more like Charles Manson meets Fast and Furious.

*“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city marriage/hangar you go into the desperate country death cult, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats Cronenbergs and cripples. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements fucking of mankind. Still better than Fight Club though.”
-“Henry” “David” “Thoreau”

June 19, 2016

The Libertine / La Matriarca (1968)

Jeremiah Review 1960s, Italy, sex comedy 0 Comments

libertine

An apathetic widow learns of and inherits her late husband’s philandering ways and explores various fetishes trying to find a way to enjoy sex, she meets a doctor who loves her for her and rides him into the sunset.

Our protagoniste discovers her husband’s secret bachelor pad / sexhouse after his timely death. Upon learning of her loveless marriage’s unfaithful nature she seems more confused than hurt, wondering why he didn’t do all the kinky stuff with her, his wife, instead of a harem of other partners. And seemingly just baffled why someone would do such things at all. She starts to look into this whole “sex” thing with a succession of partners, trying on not just fetishes and kinks but styles of relationship as well. The most memorable of these men is a transparent scumbag, who gets some of the best lines in the movie:

“As a child I used to tear all my schoolbooks to shreds.”
“How did you ever graduate?”
“I switched to women just in time.” <3

“Maybe I could try to love you?”
“Don’t do that, I’m going to Africa.”

This asshole though is the only man who turns out to be outright abusive (what happens here is probably outside what some people have the stomach for in a comedy, but it’s interesting how it’s handled–she keeps up her odd objectivity, as if she simply recognizes this as one of the types of relationships women get into, and says no, this too is not my thing.), and she moves on to greener doctors, and stumbles onto both what makes her tick and an honest-to-god supportive partner.

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Hats are credited to Cesare Canessa. Thanks Ceez.

Directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile (no clue) (just some I-talian)
The version we saw seemed to have deleted scenes spliced back into the film, resulting in random unimportant shots having lower film quality. It’s distracting, but not game-breaking since   90% of the actual movie is fine quality.
Also it’d be neat to have the original Italian accents (which were evidently heavy enough to warrant dubs) since they’re clearly speaking English, if for no other reason than the emotional guise (state?) of actress and voice actress often visibly differ by miles.
The wardrobe in this movie is off the 70’s chain (Italy), and and… pink fox!

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Despite what a first glance would imply, this film isn’t a slimy-feeling playpen for a Humbert Humbert-esque director hiding in the murky waters of ‘art film’ which is what most Explores Her Sexuality movies I’ve seen end up being. Nor does it really deviate from a cliche plot structure.
Its originality (and what I find immensely enjoyable about this movie) comes from the subversion of the protagonist’s desires.
Mimi, our protagonist (played by the soft-serve-ice-cream-delicious Catherine Spaak)–who in any other ‘explores her sexuality’ movie would be a caricature of a capricious clit or a vindictive vagina–seems completely unimpressed by sex.

She is like Albert Camus’ Meursault (precisely like, when it comes to apathetic funeral attendance): her reaction is kinda like finding out your dead husband led a secret life as a taxidermist and studying it after his death to figure out why. (perfect)

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You just can’t stay mad at those ears.

Thus begins her delving into a [pretty un]helpful sex manual, and experimenting with various acquaintances and fetishes to find something, anything that she actually derives pleasure from.
The result of giving our protagonist such emotional detachment from her sexuality gives the story a huge boost of humanity and psychological meat to dig your teeth into which I could go on about for days.
It’s the kind of movie that opens conversations, not zippers. Watch it.

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