Dear Wendy

"It's either a one or a five," have you heard people say that? I've heard people say that. It means the person both loves and hates the movie. What kind of movie do you both love and hate? Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy is the first movie I've seen that I would rate either a one or a five.

Dear Wendy is about five or so pacifist teenagers who form a group, which they name The Dandies, in order to cultivate their romantic interest in firearms.

It's a Danish Southern movie: the movie takes place on a Copenhagen set that, in broad strokes, is a stand-in for West Virginia. I'm not sure how this image of the American south gestated in the minds of screenwriter Lars von Trier and director Vinterberg, but the films of David Gordon Green were likely influences. Star Jamie Bell had appeared in Green's Undertow the previous year. It's kind of a drunk Dane's American fever dream, and really the film takes place in, and feels like the product of, the imagination of its creators. This is the film's problem, and also why it's sometimes fun and sometimes works as a comedic satire. You just have to detach yourself from reality, in order to have a better look back on it.

Aside from Bell, whose Tintin performance I eagerly await, Alison Pill (Kim Pine in Scott Pilgrim, Anne Kronenberg in Milk) and Mark Webber (Stephen Stills in Scott Pilgrim) offer luminous performances, and Bill Pullman plays some kind of oblivious sheriff. But it sort of feels like none of them are acting in the same movie. I couldn't build real connections with them, or consider them as real people. Danso Gordon has a great role because his job is to express bewilderment at the ridiculous gun worshipping and strange ritualization.

Vinterberg and Von Trier want to probe delicate issues in outrageous ways. I'm not sure why. The film is darkly absurd, hyperbolically humorous. Bell narrates in v.o., reading from a love letter written to his gun, which is named Wendy. Dear Wendy = Dear My Gun. A moment of jealousy over the handling of Wendy initiates a conflict that ends with death.

Vinterberg (from dvd interview): "...it is possible to study weapons, and know all about weapons, and shoot in the dark against some targets, and become experts, to obtain knowledge of something, without getting violent. You can say, 'They do shoot policeman and so on.' Yeah, but they only do that because fear enters the picture. Clarabelle is dumb enough to shoot a policeman because she is scared. It's not until ... I mean you can see them as gunpowder, there must be a spark for it to explode. In its clean form, which is how The Dandies worship it, it is merely obtaining knowledge, just like when Lars studies how the Nazis lived and so on. I cannot see anything wrong with that. There is nothing dangerous in that. It is not until you mix it with impurities like lust for power, lust for enrichment, fear and emotions like that. Which are universally human ... feelings."

The Dandies, pacifists, carry their guns ("partners") for "moral support," and one of their rules is that their partners shouldn't be brandished. But the end of the movie is a shootout. Vinterberg gets to make his point and have his fun, and he's not ignorant about the contradiction (officially there is no agenda or moral). He knows the fun he has sabotages the seriousness of his movie, but he's fine with that. As a filmmaker he isn't tormented by human messiness or paradoxes. He makes big bets on the wrong hands - think of it like poker - he makes big bets on the wrong hands, and this causes all the serious players to be like "Hahaha" and "He's not very good," but Vinterberg sees poker as just a game and thinks playing by the rules is boring and means predictable results. He's lighting the Queen of Spades on fire and sticking chips up his dirty asshole. Some people are leaving the table. Vinterberg doesn't care about the table, or he doesn't take it very seriously.

Which is why I love and hate the movie. It's like, think of movies as like a party, you know how some parties are utterly boring and there's some too-drunk person who's making a big mess of things and you're personally thinking "Why did I even come to this party?" and the next day someone asks you about the party and you say "It was awful, so-and-so was doing..." and you describe intolerable, egregious behaviors. And a couple months later all you remember about the party is that one too-drunk person. The movie is like that I guess.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Mystics in Bali!

Old Leák Queen: What is her name, and where does she come from?
Catherine: Catherine Kean from the USA.
Old Leák Queen: Hmm. And where is that?
Mahendra: Very far away.

"Here there is even a western actress playing a key role. In fact, the elusive Ilona Agathe Bastian was not an actress at all, but a German tourist holidaying in Bali. She was spotted by the wife of one of the film's producers and it didn't take much to persuade her to stay on for a few months free holiday." -production notes.

H. Tjut Djalil is a new hero of mine. This, Mystics in Bali, is the second film of his I've seen, following Lady Terminator. He is a director of keen imagination and sharp cinematic wit. Roughly a year ago I didn't even know Eastern black magic horror films existed. Which is appropriate: here I was in the house of film, and black magic was being practiced in the back yard. Of course! The ones that I've seen, including a recent theatrical screening of Boxer's Omen, are among the craziest, most enjoyable movies I've ever seen. They lack the tiresome earnestness and rectitude of Christian horror films, and their potential for engaging supernatural phenomenon is greater.

"I'm surprised that a pretty girl like you would be interested in learning black magic."
- the first line of Mystics in Bali

H. Tjut Djalil is a genre surrealist. Neutral, monotonic voice dubs and plastic-faced actors engender a strange impassiveness as the protagonists journey to learn the intricacies of Leak Bali, a black magic which could be the church of Lynch. The roots of its power seem to be joyless high-pitched laughter. The laughter is one aspect of black magic taught by the face-shifting Old Leák Queen, who takes on Catherine as an apprentice. Of the things the Old Leák Queen teaches Catherine, the most important is drinking newborn blood by way of disembodied, floating head.

Blood has a restorative power for the Leaks, and infant blood is best. Like other exploitation movies, kicks are to be had, intentional and not. Some of the dialogue exits in this movie are extraordinary. When Catherine vomits green goo and live mice, Mahendra blames the prior evening's meal! Absurd on the one hand, but true on the other: does Mahendra know of the prior evening's metamorphosis, the transformation of Catherine from human to pig (Leaks can do this[!])?

Mahendra starts Catherine down the dark path of black magic. She asks him to; she's learned about African Voodooism already, and now wants introduction to Leak Bali, the strongest black magic in the world. It ends badly, unfortunately for Catherine and Mahendra, but fortunately for the audience, and really Mahendra is a great guy who cared about Catherine and meant best.

Lady Terminator!

"The role of Nyai Loro Kidul as a Javanese Spirit-Queen became a popular motif in traditional Javanese folklore and palace mythologies, as well as being tied in with the beauty of Sundanese and Javanese princesses. Another aspect of her mythology was her ability to change shape several times a day."

Lady Terminator is an Indonesian action myth-fi, based loosely on stories of the South Sea Queen, reinterpreted with central images borrowed from James Cameron's Terminator. It shares the action spectacle excess of outrageous Hollywood action films and the sloppy short-hand dramatics of a poorly written b-film. It was my first Indonesian genre film. My understanding is that there was a wave of these types of productions in Indonesia, and seeing this movie and later learning this feels like discovering treasure chests on the seabed of cinema.

The riches of this film are found in the execution of the material, its performance as a film narrative. It's written for an audience, by a filmmaker who thinks as an audience member, particularly an audience member seeing the movie in a mall or multiplex, the populist, consumerist audience member. It's written and directed to be this kind of mainstream formulaic movie, but the filmmaker fucks it up in a thousand exciting and different ways that make the film a thousand times more interesting than those movies usually are. For me the idea of a Hollywood style film from a non-Hollywood location is richly compelling, as with genre films from the southern United States, Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, France, etc., because parts of the filmmaker's outsider personality will inherently corrode the mechanization of material that's such an annoying and artless feature of many Hollywood films themselves. The filmmakers who attempt to curb this natural tendency are the bad ones, the ones as bad as the Hollywood filmmakers. The filmmakers who make movies like Lady Terminator are gems, treasures of the film world, unconscious documentarians of the human soul in flight from reality.

The movie wisely steals several attractive features from the Terminator series: the tech noir vibe, the unstoppable murdering machine (with compelling backstory), and key scenes, including the downtown car chase (!), are directly imitated.

Most of the heavy-duty action material is performed by an actress named Barbara Anne Constable, who apparently acted in several other regional films and never expected Lady Terminator to be seen overseas. Lady Terminator is her sole credit listed on IMDb.

Constable is badass in Lady Terminator, in presence and performance. She does things no other human being will likely ever do, with a gusto and brazenness that only a skilled and daring actress could bring to a role. It's impossible to imagine her character existing in the real world, and yet simultaneously easy to sense the presence of a personality and distinct acting choices beneath her performance - qualities that bring the unreal to life! Her character is a spirit-possessed human, and this allows acting space for a role previously played, in the Terminator series, as emotionally barren by consequence of robotics.

Like many other action b-films the dialogue is dramatically perfunctory and bridges together action scenes. Unlike many other action b-films the action is frequent and engaging. Its successes are easy to calculate: play the film before an audience and listen to them. I saw it at the end of a triple-feature that began with Master of the Flying Guillotine and Gates of Hell aka City of the Living Dead and this one was my favorite - and I really like the first two - because most of the components that contribute to the perception of this film as a failure are for me very entertaining, interesting, and human, and all the little blemishes are simply stimulators for my imagination and curiosity, as with the best of films.

Tomorrow - The World.

  Tomorrow - The World, a movie that "portrays the personal effect of HItler's chilling declaration:  'Today Germany, TOMORROW THE WORLD,'" was recommended to me by a friend to whom I showed the first several minutes of Friedlander's The Raven.  What the supposed connection was I'm not sure, though this isn't the first time I've been led to a curious film by an unusual route.

  It would have made more sense if I'd been showing Mayo's Black Legion, '36, the Warner Bros film in which Humphrey Bogart discovers several compelling reasons to not be a violent racist.  Like that film, Tomorrow investigates  how 'normal' people were transformed into ambassadors of hate through the influence of community and the power of social pressure.  Tomorrow is the more interesting movie because several fingers are pointed. 

  The premise is that an indoctrinated twelve year old Nazi, Emil, is sent to live with a suburban American family.  Emil is a really horrible kid, even outside out of his Nazi spy aspirations*:  he's a deceitful, mean kid who lies and mistreats people.  His new aunt says he's a good example of why all Germans should be killed, and the German housekeeper, whom he corners and speaks to of 'corroboration,' considers him a megalomanic asshole.  He's such a crappy person that his new family wavers between strangling him and sending him to prison.  Point is, on the one hand he embodies hate, on the other hand so much hate is reflected back at him.  And he's so young, he's just a kid.  The movie's closing argument is basically that he's too young to be held culpable, and its final evidence is that he cries over his murder attempt.

  The surrogate father is Frederic March, from Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!  Like Peck in The Omen, his journey leads to the attempted killing of an evil child.  It's interesting to consider the film as a precursor to demonic children films.  There are perhaps many Nazi in America films (The Stranger, Dr. Strangelove, Marathon Man, and Blues Brothers spring to mind).  The amalgamation of demon child and Nazi spy is an inspired film idea, undoubtedly the cause of the film's longevity, more than its philosophical handling of the material.  Like the grapefruit smashing in The Public Enemy, the sight of a young boy in a Nazi uniform continues to be unsettling; and even by contemporary standards the kid is a prick.  It's easy to imagine wanting to strangle him.

  This is copyright 1944, Lester Cowan Productions.  Germany had not yet surrendered.  I see it as a discussion about the twin problems of the perpetuance of Naziism after the war, and the veil of circumstance that both protected some genuine Nazis and condemned those morally and spiritually enfeebled by the Nazis.  Tomorrow suggests a solution of tolerance and second-chances, but the situation is one of poisoned youth and corrupted innocence, of a twelve year old boy, and I see less complexity in this scenario than in others.  It began as a play of ideals, and it retains this form in the film:  its final point is obvious, its path contrived.  It's sometimes outrageous, sometimes tedious.

* Simpsons reference:  You remember when Bart was a foreign exchange student?  He went to a miserable French country farm, and an I think Russian boy/spy came to live with the Simpsons family.  This movie several times reminded me of that episode.

Friday the 13th: The Series, Episode 3.3, "Crippled Inside"

Image borrowed from Vendredi Antiques, a website devoted to cataloging and discussing the episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series, a show I had little knowledge of until last night, but now today could totally understand why there is this website and probably other websites constructed as memorials. Again, the image is:



I don't know enough about myself to be able to explain why this stands out over all the other movies I've consumed since Police, Adjective. Last month, in the 28-day February, I saw 68 movies theatrically, and for some reason I've already ordered more movies from Amazon at this point in 2010 than I did in the whole year of 2009. So I've been plenty busy, seen a lot of great movies, and been enjoying movies at an insatiable rate, but it's Crippled Inside that brings me to the computer. I read this Mel Books quote recently, a variation on a popular definition of comedy, that said "A man cuts his finger, that's tragedy. He falls down a manhole, that's comedy." This episode, to me, is about a woman falling down a glorious manhole.



Now, the girl on the left is a quadriplegic. The wheelchair remote control attached to her chin is a fantastic indicator. She enters this physical state at the beginning of the episode: attempting to escape a gang of teenage rapists (one wielding a nasty no-bullshit switchblade) she runs into the road and is struck by a car.

Then this old man, on the right, offers her a wicker wheelchair, telling her that it cured his post-stroke paralysis and is definitely the wicker wheelchair for her. It doesn't have a classy chin control, but the girl, being either a great admirer of old men or of antique wicker, convinces her mom, who is opposed immediately to the wicker wheelchair (being a middle-aged suburban housewife I assumed she was a dabbler of spiritualism and read the wheelchair's negative aura, but this isn't stated, nor is it stated if the old man embarked on his own personal journey of vendetta, as the girl will, but both these assumptions strengthen the dark currents of this episode), and so the wheelchair is brought home.

Before I continue, the premise of Friday the 13th: The Series is (roughly - I'm not an expert, yet) that an uncle who sold cursed antique goods died and went to a hell described as an endless fall. The inheritors of the antique store, a pair of cousins, want to save the uncle and also feel a tremendous weight of personal guilt, so they begin to collect the cursed objects from the unwitting purchasers. The cursed antique in this episode is the wicker wheelchair.




When the girl sits on the wheelchair, she "astro-projects." My friend Dennis tells me that what she does is called astro-projection. Maybe one word? Astropojects. Astro projects. Regardless, the term is entering my permanent and conversational vocabulary. This is what happens: a ghostlike double of herself stands up from the wheelchair.

She kills the would-be rapists one by one. The killings restore her body. The first boy is so surprised to see her, walking around, that be backs into a cabinet in the chemistry classroom (he's there to steal a test - these guys are no fucking good) and acid falls over him. His body dissolves. Being the first, everyone assumes he "dissolved himself." Well, almost everyone, because the other would-be rapists enter the room just as the boy's face is disappearing, and they hear his last word: the girl's name!

The second boy throws himself off a building.

The third boy, thinking he's going to get some fuck action from the suddenly mobile girl, lays down on the ground with her. While seducing him she ties his arms so that he cannot move, pulls out her own switchblade, asks "How does it feel??" and drops an electric chandelier on him.

The fourth boy, the worst of the worst, the wielder of switchblade, first attempts to shank one of the central characters of the show, one of the cousins collecting the antiques. This is when the cousin has come for the wheelchair, and he finds the suspicious and rapist boy (driver of red convertibles) in the girl's bedroom. He, being nearly shanked, becomes royally pissed and makes the rapist boy promise to stay away. He runs out of the house, past the old man (window peeping?). The old man has been acting as a kind of spiritual mentor for the girl, and he convinces the cousin that the girl should have a little more killing fun, and the cousin agrees. The old man says, "This is the type of boy who will always come back".

So the final rapist boy does indeed soon return. The girl (who can now move her top-half and has feeling in her legs, owing to her successful killing spree) astro-projects and strangles the boy. Just then the cousin arrives, sees the boy, and wants to take the wheelchair back. Sure, I've killed enough, says the girl, who stands up, assuming her body fully restored. But wait, she can't walk....the boy isn't dead! He rises from the floor and lunges at the girl, knocking her down a flight of stairs. They fall together, both dying by the bottom. Fucking cursed antique wicker chair, noooooo!

The cousin returns the antique wicker wheelchair to the shop. The old man comes and asks for it, saying more people need its healing powers. The cousin disagrees and takes an axe to the chair. Only the cousin never realized: wicker is forever, and the chair will never be destroyed!

The Man Who Skied Down Everest.

Like the world is a faulty piece of electronic equipment, and somewhere a person is turning dials, consulting a manual, calling a helpline, etc, smacking the machine etc, trying to smooth out the irregularities. Because just the other day my friend Richard and I were talking about nature, and anthropocentrism, and I told Richard that, largely due to watching Planet Earth on Blu-ray, I've recently begun to think of myself as sort of this upward growing mountain, or that my life is analogous to the growth of a mountain, and my hardships are the natural result of erosive elements, the wind, the melting snow, the rain, etc*.

And then last night I watched The Man Who Skied Down Everest. The film was recommended to me by a friend. She told me, "It's funny, like Night of the Lepus." It's not, or I don't get the joke. It's a serious film in which a man, Yuichiro Miura, confronts nature manifest, Mount Everest.

The film is narrated by Douglas Rain, ostensibly from material recorded by Miura in a journal during the expedition, and the intention is for the viewer to consider all the thoughts to be Miura's. The film begins with preparations for the journey. Joining Miura on his trip is a massive, eight-hundred person beast of a crew, including the filmmakers, press, scientists, and local and Japanese mountaineers. The crew dwindles during the ascent, and when Miura skis down the face of Everest only six other people are at the altitude with him (not counting the filmmakers, and I can't tell where the filmmakers are most of the time, though they seem rather gifted mountaineers).

The skiing is a hugely suspenseful final moment, but it's not the film's only great moment. The trip up the mountain is sometimes spiritual, meditative, adventurous, and humorous. Miura's journal entries lift the film above the neutrality of a nature documentary. There are terrific moments in mountainous villages and campsites, including the final village, a village of Sherpas of course. Miura's group also passes by an Everest alumni, an elderly man who tells Miura that if he was younger he'd join him on his trip, and he tells Miura that "Challenge is what makes men." Etc accumulations of introspection and existential contemplation. There's a severe tragedy. There's practicing skiing down a mountain with a parachute.

* The Long Day Closes has a classroom scene in which the teacher lists the six causes of erosion. It's either the longest scene with the least relevance, or Davies knew I'd watch his film in the future and planted it there for me to receive, so I wouldn't feel so alone in the universe. The latter is more likely I think.

Night of the Lepus.

I'm about to discuss a film featuring a full-grown adult dressed in a rabbit costume wrestling a live horse. The director is William Claxton, who I see also directed the classic Twilight Zone episode I Sing the Body Electric, and later went on to direct 68 episodes of Little House on the Prairie. It's a 1972 film set in the southern state of Arizona, with the southern side of Arizona played to a high pitch, stars Psycho's Janet Leigh and Star Trek's DeForest Kelley, alongside Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun, and Paul Fix (each with over 100 other IMDb credits to their names). I'd like to draw attention to the fact that Night of the Lepus is based upon a novel by Russell Braddon called The Year of the Angry Rabbit.

Lepus is Latin for rabbit, and in Night of the Lepus an experimental serum injection on a member of an overabundant population of rabbits results in extraordinarily giant sized killer rabbits. The rabbits, in their horrifying onslaught, attack general stores, produce trucks, families, persons, horses, and cows. Scenes of blood-dripping rabbit-fangs abound, which is to say that Night of the Lepus delivers in its b-movie premise where others do not.

While I can enjoy just about any film with a lunatic storyline, it's rare to find one that's also engaging and fulfilling. Through a mixture of convincing miniature sets and actual rabbits, and full-grown adults in rabbit costumes, the rabbits terrorize in glorious scene after scene. This satisfies me on two levels. Beyond the accomplishments of the filmmakers, there is also the pleasure of the concept being committed to with such wild ambition.

It's complete and undisguised absurdity, and for me it's like Night of the Lepus is a tune and filmmaking is a piano. I enjoy a composition of fantasy that drives my mind into the corners of possibility, where my own ideas bloom, outside the typical tracks, settled figuratively in its own small-town ways. The laws of eco-horror permit all acts in Lepus, but seldom have I seen such creative use or passionate dedication. The willingness of this film to venture into mutant-rabbit territory spurs me on forward into my own direction, god bless 'em.

Teenage Caveman.

Teenage Caveman is surprisingly another Larry Clark film in which teenagers take drugs and have sex with one another. In fact, Teenage Caveman is basically Kids in a sci-fi context, genetic mutations substituting for AIDS, a bio-tech complex instead of a random apartment, and rebel teenage outcasts from a small, post-apocalypse Seattle-based primitive-like culture as an allegory for bored, restless, fearless NYC kids. I admit the dramatic impact of Kids is far greater, specifically the now-famous AIDS revelation, but because there's nothing really beyond AIDS, and because Clark wasn't ready to up his cinematic sexual perverseness until Ken Park, exploding chest cavities work fine intermittently.

Because when you fuck in Teenage Cavemen there's a chance - a percentage - that your fucking will lead to your body twisting inward and all your viscera exploding outward. Not to mention the problem of an abundance of liquor (apparently stored for one-hundred+ years) and cocaine (one of the mutants synthesizes his own supply of cocaine). I don't know if I'm being straight faced here or not. I don't know if I really liked or appreciated this film or not. I know I liked it for a while, when I was simply processing everything I'm describing here. The problem is there's this long stretch after the introduction of these elements (and the actualization that not only is it a Larry Clark directed mutant-teenager film, but it's obviously a Larry Clark directed mutant film), and I mean after the group bath scene, the drug taking scene, the orgy scene, and the exploding body scene, after all that, in which you're meant to take the film and its plot and characters seriously. The film is front-heavy, save for the introduction of the monster at the end, which was about a five minute sequence.

As a remake of a Corman directed/Arkoff produced original, I admire the accomplishments of the film. It has a great degree of absurdity packed into a semi-coherent story (hell, the movie makes three times more sense than the other film I watched in the same day, Antoine Fuqua's Shooter), the dialogue is alright, there's narrative traction, and the characters weirdly, if illogically, develop. All the core ingredients are present.