A Note on Prometheus

Please note:  this post contains spoilers, so don't say you haven't been warned.

Ridley Scott's original Alien is of course a classic, in no small part because of the scene illustrated above, which is remarkable for the way it takes the classic female fear of the terror and pain of childbirth and reverses it by inflicting it on a male character.  Given the near-universal reverence in which childbearing is held, the scene even now has a subversive edge that resonates to this day.

All of which makes Scott's kinda-sorta-prequel, Prometheus, a bit of a disappointment.  Well, it's a disappointment on a number of counts, but I'm limiting myself to one in this case and that's this:  One of the main plot points is that the Noomi Rapace character, Elizabeth Shaw, is impregnated with an alien parasite that left to its own devices will almost certainly kill her if it is allowed to fully develop.  She demands that it be taken out of her, but David, the robot played by Michael Fassbender, refuses because being a stooge of the corporation that funded the mission, he presumably figures that the critter inside her may have some sort of potential as a bioweapon.

Okay, I can buy this so far, but the film now has Shaw undergo an extremely painful Caesarian to get the alien critter out of her.  Not an abortion, which would have been traumatic enough, even if her "child" were not a grotesque alien parasite, but a Caesarian, which means that she spends much of the rest of the film doing typical Action Girl stuff while presumably held together by nothing more than a row of staples, which doesn't help the believability of a film whose credibility is straining at the seams already.  But hey, at least she didn't have an abortion, right?  Because that would totally be worse than unleashing a hoard of alien parasites that would kill every living thing on earth.

And the sad thing is, is that ridiculous as that last sentence is, there are conservatives in this country that would totally believe it and liberals who would go along with it just to avoid offending anyone.

Never Mind The DaVinci Code, Here's Rat Scabies

Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn't? by Christopher Dawes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In which Christopher Dawes, a mild-mannered music journalist, somewhat improbably discovers that he's been living across the street from one of his boyhood idols, Rat Scabies (real name: Chris Millar), the former drummer for the seminal English punk band, The Damned.  Even more improbably (this is nonfiction, believe it or not), it turns out that Scabies' father, an antiquarian bookseller by trade, is something of an amateur expert on Rennes-le-Chateau, being both a crony of Henry (Holy Blood, Holy Grail) Lincoln and a past president of the UK branch of the Sauniere Society, an enthusiasm he's managed to pass on to his son. Consequently, Scabies decides, more or less on a whim, to rope Dawes into helping him look for the Holy Grail.  His method, to the extent he can be said to have one, consists primarily of careering around southern France half-drunk and freaking out the locals, which, when one thinks about it, is probably not that far removed from the approach previously used by King Arthur.

This book is not only hilariously entertaining but it proves once and for all that The DaVinci Code isn't entirely useless, as Dawes and Scabies discover at one point when they run out of rolling papers.


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Your Weekend Dose of 70s Nostalgia

You're welcome.

The Wicker Tree

Robin Hardy's belated followup to his 1973 cult classic, The Wicker Man, isn't quite a sequel and isn't quite a remake either.  It's more a variation on a theme, using the basic framework of the earlier film to tell what starts out as a sort of fish-out-of-water comedy rather than a mystery.  It's as though he'd decided to crossbreed his original film with Local Hero, sending a pair of born-again missionaries from Texas off to convert the "heathens" of Scotland, where they end up in one of those deceptively idyllic Hammer Films-style villages where Things Are Not As They Seem (in another sly nod to its possible antecedents, Hardy plays a version of "I Know Where I'm Going", the folk song used in Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's film of the same name -- and the gold standard for Scottish-set culture clash comedies -- over the opening and closing credits).

Exactly what the point of the whole thing is, though, beyond, perhaps, a desire on Hardy's part to recapture his now-four decades past glory, is a bit harder to say:  those familiar with the original film are unlikely to be as shocked by the ending as the film needs them to be, whilst those who aren't may very well check out long before they have the chance, due to its somewhat meandering and uneven pace, which, lacking the built-in suspense of its predecessor's police procedural format, mostly just marks time until the big finish.

Still, the picture is not without its charms:  it has an agreeably off-kilter tone, and fans of the original may have fun spotting the parallels to it.  And while it doesn't contain, say, any scenes of Nicolas Cage in a bear suit punching women in the face or the like, it's still better than Neil LaBute's godawful Wicker Man remake, so there's that ....

Aqua Teen Jesus Force*

ABC's Nightline recently devoted a segment -- in all seriousness -- to three high school girls in Arizona who claim to be exorcists. The segment and accompanying online article describe them with all the hard-hitting journalistic objectivity of a Hollywood flack puffing an upcoming CW show:

Brynne, Tess and Savannah from Phoenix are black belts in karate, expert horseback riders and avid musical theater fans. And they perform exorcisms.

"We're just normal girls who do something extraordinary for God," Brynne said. "After seeing an actual exorcism in person, led by us, you will walk away with no doubt, whatsoever."

Brynne, 17, is the leader of the pack, the one the others call the "enforcer." She is home-schooled and a regular on the beauty pageant circuit. Savannah, 20, is known as the "compassionate one," a college student who likes to shop. Finally, there's Tess, "the middle man" because the others say this 17-year-old can play both good and bad cop. She also performs in local musicals.

"There is a war going on every day, being waged against us," Brynne said. "Satan hates us. We know how the enemy is, we know what he's attacking and we can fight back."

You can see the whole thing right here:

Part of me suspects that the girls, like so many others striving for easy money and media attention out there, are just angling for a reality TV show contract (you can almost hear the pitch: "It's like Mean Girls meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- only it's for real!"), which would be bad enough, but then I think that they might actually believe it, which might be even worse.

I mean, back when I was a kid and imagined what living in the Twenty-First Century (then thirty or so years in the future) might be like, I like a lot of people, imagined a world of flying cars, vacations on the moon, cures for cancer, and so on. Sure, I was prepared to be disappointed and find out that none of that would happen, but I also thought that the only reason it wouldn't, and that instead we'd be living in a time when those who thought other people's problems were caused by evil spirits were taken seriously by anyone other than credulous backwoods troglodytes would be because civilization itself had collapsed due to nuclear war or some other global catastrophe.

Sometimes I think nuclear war might have been preferable.

____________________________

*Thanks to Esquire's inestimable Charles P. Pierce for both the title and the subject of this post.

Boogie Nights Redux

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A fascinating book, regardless of what you might think of the subject matter. Most accounts of the porn industry tend to hew to obvious cliches about predatorily exploited lost souls with self-esteem or child molestation issues, and while the stereotype is common enough to have a fair amount of validity (although I'd wager it's not appreciably more common than it is in the legit film business), and while the book does depict its fair share of victims and casualties (John Holmes, for instance, seems to have been a genuinely fucked-up person, while Linda Lovelace comes across as damaged goods from the beginning, but many of the book's interviewees come across as surprisingly articulate and with a refreshingly clear-eyed perspective on their past), Legs McNeil and his collaborators here paint a more nuanced picture.

Now admittedly the book concentrates primarily on the Boogie Nights era, and the industry has changed a lot since then. Given the the near-ubiquity of porn nowadays, thanks largely to the internet, it's easy to forget the peculiar cultural niche porn occupied in the 70s: back then traditional notions of propriety were changing rapidly. The Production Code had lost its grip on Hollywood and mainstream filmmakers were pushing the limits of acceptability with pictures like Carnal Knowledge, Midnight Cowboy, and A Clockwork Orange, while plays like Hair and Oh! Calcutta! were hits on Broadway. While X-rated films like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door never quite achieved the same level of legitimacy, it did briefly seem like there was a period when porn might go mainstream.

It didn't happen of course. The hostility of the Nixon and Reagan Justice Departments saw to that. Add to that first the home video revolution, which killed off the theatres, and the AIDS epidemic, which rang down the curtain on the party, and those days now seem like a lost era. A smutty one, naturally, and one fueled by drugs and bankrolled by organized crime, but one that in retrospect nevertheless had a curious sort of free-spirited innocence that couldn't exist today and that McNeil & Co. manage to capture in all its sordid glory.



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A Public Service Announcement

Thanks to the good folks at Open Culture, this film, an early short by David Lynch, is just one of 450 films, including cinematic milestones like Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows; Hollywood classics like It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, and Royal Wedding; film-historical curiosities like Alfred Hitchcock's last silent film, The Manxman, Stanley Kubrick's long-supressed debut feature, Fear and Desire, and Quentin Tarantino's incomplete first film, My Best Friend's Birthday; cult favorites like Spider Baby and The Last Man on Earth; and a veritable cornucopia of silent, animated, avant-garde, and documentary films, all of which are available for free and are thoughtfully archived here.

John Dies at the End

Cracked editor David Wong's novel, an internet cult hit before being published in dead trees form, is a glorious mutant: a horror spoof that manages to be both funny and scary. It's a wild mixture of Lovecraftian horror, Cheech and Chong-style drug humor, gross-out gags, and outright mindfuckery. Judging from the above trailer, Don Coscarelli, the director of Bubba Ho-Tep and the Phantasm movies, seems like the perfect choice to bring it to the screen.

Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Admittedly, I picked this book up because of the tv show, since I was curious to find out just how much of it was based on actual fact. After reading it, I can say that the producers have generally stuck to the spirit, if not the letter, of the historical record, and although they've taken a fair bit of dramatic license with the material, it's not because Atlantic City's history lacks drama. From its early days, when it was planned as an upper-crust health resort (something that went by the boards pretty quickly after speculators realized they could make more money catering to the desires -- legal and otherwise -- of day-tripping blue-collar workers from Philadelphia and New York) to its boom years (roughly from the Gilded Age until the Second World War) as America's Vice Capital to its near death during the 60s to its recent resurgence since the legalization of gambling there in the late 70s, it's not a place that has ever lacked for colorful characters, certainly not as Nelson Johnson tells it (special bonus: Johnson really, really, REALLY doesn't think much of Donald Trump), and while the show's decision to concentrate on the years of Nucky Johnson's (fictionalized as Nucky Thompson in the series) reign as Atlantic City's political and criminal boss in the Roaring 20s makes for some great drama, this book proves that there are plenty more stories here to tell.



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Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars A highly readable and very interesting, if somewhat scattershot, examination of the esoteric tradition in America, from the Shakers, Quakers, Masons, and the like that played a part in the founding of this country, to the increasingly nutty offshoots that are with us even today as the foundations of the Self-Help movement, Horowitz makes a lively and occasionally compelling case for the idea that America is not so much a Christian nation as so many would claim, but and "occult" one, at least if one defines "occult" as as ragbag of assorted beliefs, ranging from the delusional to the scholarly to the outright fraudulent, with many stops on the road between. View all my reviews >>

"Sita Sings the Blues"

"Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as 'The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.'"

Nina Paley, "America's best-loved unknown cartoonist", spent five years creating this epic on her home computer. The entire film is now available online here.

"Pyelem G Vudhaus"

That would be P.G. Wodehouse to you and me: the spelling above is transliterated from Russian, where there is, oddly enough, a booming market in Wodehouse fandom. The quintessential English humorist, whose works had been banned as "decadent" by Soviet authorities since 1929, was virtually unknown in that country before 1989, when former dissident and self-taught translator Natalya Trauberg began circulating a Russian version of Wodehouse's 1919 novel, A Damsel in Distress in samizdat form (not for fear of official punishment -- the ban was eventually lifted in 1990 -- but because Russian publishers, perhaps not unreasonably, didn't think his stories of dotty aristocrats, upper-class twits, and Jazz Age ne'er-do-wells would sell to contemporary readers). To everyone's surprise, it and subsequent translations became wildly popular (and became even more so after Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's Jeeves & Wooster television series was dubbed into Russian).

Thus was born the Russian Wodehouse Society, founded by Mikhail Kuzmenko (who writes under the name Sir Watkyn Bassett), and which not only puts on regular banquets emulating the the likes of those thrown by Bertie Wooster's Drones Club, but also maintains a lively and informative website, with a bibliography and an excellent collection of links and articles (in English) as well as discussion boards (in Russian). I highly recommend checking it out.

And should you decide to go to one of their banquets, throw a bread roll for me.

A Public Service Announcement

If you're a fan of the Firesign Theatre -- and you should be -- you'll be thrilled to know that some of their best material is now available in podcast form.

"Ouch," he said.

Since just about any schmo can put up a blog these days, it's nice to see an author who can still find a new way to get her work before the public.

Oh, what might have been ...

Some test footage for an alas never-realized adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars by famed Warner Brothers animator Bob Clampett, which, had it been made, would have been the first feature-length animated film.

Patrick McGoohan (1928-2008)

As a kid, I remember being thrilled by the adventures of McGoohan's two-fisted vicar, Dr. Syn, in the surprisingly-dark-for-Disney The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. Later, like a lot of people, I was simultaneously fascinated with and baffled by The Prisoner. I've seen comparatively little of his work since then, although he brought exactly the right tone of understated menace to his role as Dr. Paul Ruth in David Cronenberg's Scanners.

I have vaguer memories of The Prisoner's immediate predecessor, Danger Man (Secret Agent in the US), but what had always stuck with me, oddly enough, was that show's art direction. The adventures of globe-trotting spy John Drake were shot on the cheap on the studio back lot, but rarely looked it because the show's producers managed to boil the essence of its far-flung locations down to a handful of shorthand visual cues: get a few pieces of rattan furniture, a potted palm or two, and a slowly-rotating ceiling fan, then throw some venetian blind shadows on the wall behind them and voilà -- you were instantly in some Graham Greene-ish post-colonial backwater.

Because, let's face it, McGoohan's intensity as Drake was all the realism you needed anyway.

A Few Words in Defense of the Indefensible....

I've always had something of a soft spot for Ken Russell's films -- sure, they're usually garish, stylistically overblown, and often in what is at best questionable taste, but I've always felt that in his case these were features, not bugs, and that if he had even the slightest amount of taste or restraint his stuff would actually be worse rather than better. As it is, if he finds a subject that fits his peculiarly florid style, he can produce a genuinely great film (The Devils, Women in Love), a camp classic (Lair of the White Worm, Gothic), or something that's a little of both (Altered States).

But on the other hand, there's also ... LISZTOMANIA.

I'd seen this years ago, in what I seem to recall may have also been an altered state, but on seeing it again, it's possible it may only have seemed like it in retrospect.

We can't know for sure until that far-off day when Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried is released, but until then, this may be the most aesthetically indefensible film ever made. Russell takes a not-necessarily-bad idea -- that Franz Liszt was the 19th century equivalent of a rock star (more or less true -- in fact, the term "Lisztomania" isn't Russell's, but a contemporary one coined by the German poet Heinrich Heine to describe the hysteria provoked by his concerts), and then proceeds to beat the life out of it over the course of 103 jaw-droppingly weird minutes.

This is a film which opens with Roger Daltry as Liszt, fighting a duel wearing only a loincloth while a pair of cornpone Homer-and-Jethro-type narrators fill in his backstory, then proceeds through a series of truly craptacular musical numbers, one of which features a chorus line of Liszt's mistresses and a twelve-foot penis (don't ask. I mean, really, just don't ask), and finally conludes with a scene that's hard to believe even if you have seen it (hey, don't just take my word for it, check it out for yourself).

The film strains to be "provocative" but, thanks to its uneven mix of over-the-top fantasy scenes and Carry On-level humor, it's mostly just strident and grotesque. And that's not taking into account the stunt casting of Daltry (with Ringo Starr as the Pope), Rick Wakeman's appalling prog-rock score ("with the assistance of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner" according to the credits, for which I'm sure they'd be grateful), and the heavy-handed attempts at satire (Wagner, first seen wearing a sailor suit whose hatband reads "S.S. Nietsche", is depicted as a proto-Nazi and a vampire -- literally), which turn every scene into a fresh assault on the very notion of good taste, until finally the film threatens to collapse into a singularity of sheer dreafulness from which nothing recognizable as art can possibly escape.

Now, I can't in good conscience recommend that any of you see this -- that's 103 minutes you'll never get back, and I ain't taking the rap for that. But on the other hand, there's something perversely liberating about watching someone throw every possible shred of restraint and dignity to the winds. I, for one, enjoyed every cringe-inducing minute of it.