Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Edgar Wright is a terrific filmmaker. I continue to wonder if the films he makes are any good. Part of me was worried too big a deal would be made of Scott Pilgrim, and then part of me was disappointed it appeared fourth on Friday's box office list. I don't think there's any doubt that Wright is concerned about the b.o., and as I've said in the past, things like the b.o. and award season matter to me only to the extent to which they matter to the filmmakers I care about. It's only Saturday, and Friday's numbers are likely estimates, but it might be that Wright learns this weekend he indeed has much in common with his heroes Dante and Landis, etc, i.e. he occupies a particular niche and his successes will come sporadically and based on the material he handles.

I love the lovable surface of Scott Pilgrim, a movie that moves so quickly you can like five things and hate three things about any particular sequence. Wright's talent is in manufacturing genial creative exercises, ataractic and panoramic studies of cinematic splendor. Extravagant fun. In fact, Pilgrim is too high-strung for Wright, I kept wanting him to chill out, I kept wanting Pegg or Frost to come in and take these characters by the hand and mellow them out.


And anyway, the style already proved itself with Speed Racer. I've noticed only the bravest critics have compared the two movies, which share a stentorian voice. That critics hate one and love the other is an expression of filmmaking politics, I'm sure, and I for one couldn't even say which is the better movie.

Wright works on expansive canvases, which I hate, but paints with rich textures, which I love. To me it's not even debatable that Knives Chau is the most likeable character the movie offers; probably my favorite part of the movie was her watching the band practice post-breakup from the exterior, and the hand print she left on the window afterward. For a movie with limp action scenes, my favorite was her disappearing highlights. And although I snoozed through some of the musical performances, the other band duplicating the envy and scorn of Scott's band was a great little detail as well. I'm talking about the first battle of the bands.

By the way, the currency in Pilgrim is fantasy, so why in fantasy world is it wrong for a guy to hit a girl? Isn't that fucked? I mean the implication is that it's perfectly ordinary and acceptable to start a fight with another guy - so I'm not offended on behalf of women's right to equality, I'm offended on behalf of all pacifist men. It perpetuates that like medfuckingieval (for Christ's sake) mythical vision of damsels in distress and male knights and all that shit, and I wish it wouldn't draw such clear lines on matters of violence. That's having and eating a cake. Although I guess it also empowers the female sex, because of those fight up-skirts? Classy. Maybe some people want to say it offers a complicated, multi-layered and contemporary view of sexual politics, but those people are wrong. It's your classic alpha male oriented point of view. That's not a criticism, but neither is its consideration means for applause.

Before I went to Scott Pilgrim I rewatched Shaun of the Dead. I wrote a two-parter about that film, about my love/hate relationship with the movie. Pilgrim crystallized what the Wright experience means for me. It's kind of like eating a bunch of sugary food that's my favorite kind of sugary food, and then there's the inevitable stomach ache. I doubt I'll ever learn my lesson, and I don't believe it harms me enough to try and stop. Though how much better for me would it be, if he could only give me some cinematic broccoli?

Cyrus.

Quietly, amid the flurry of Toy Story 3 and Last Airbender conversations, the Duplass brothers became the first writers/directors from the hardcore independent group of American filmmakers self-named the mumblecorers to release a bona fide movie with John C. Reilly and Catherine Keener as its cornerstones. I'd been anticipating this achievement for a while now, this breakthrough of new and adventurous young talent into the stale fabric of contemporary mainstream-indie cinema. I assumed it'd be good, I don't know, maybe a lot of us did.

I throw around that Borges quote which goes "Madame Bovary is realistic, Hitler isn't" because it reminds me of the limitations of believable absurdity and too the synthetic naturalness of fiction. Or like, simply, fiction can be easier to believe than reality. I try to keep it in mind when I watch a narrative unfold, and I look for perhaps moments in which the filmmakers are reflecting not fictional conventions but organic nonconformity. Because I believe in the validity of this concept and seek out its manifestations, part of what's been so riveting about recent American indies for me has been their allowance of ugly moments, bad people, and wrong turns. Some say this is reckless abandonment of effective creative tools and it's possible to justify truly poor creative choices by enveloping the work in a mist of freedom, and accuse the mumblecorers of being lazy at best or irresponsible at worst. I see it as creative asceticism and think it's great. There have been enough of these films now, too, to be able to tell both that indeed conscious and formal deviations are taking place, and that there are huge variations in the levels of talent.

The Duplass brothers haven't demonstrated an extraordinary talent to tower them above their peers, but until this film I always thought they were honest. Or that's kind of bullshit; tell you the truth I'd only seen their Puffy Chair prior to this. So I thought Puffy Chair was honest. I don't think Cyrus is honest. What's interesting to me is the shape of its failure, and the way certain contradictions form by considering the film through a prism of honesty and asceticism. First of all there has been a lot of criticism here in Portland about the lack of depth given to the female characters in the film - which again I stand opposed to the Portland film majority, because I think there are only single dimensional characters in the film, period. What these people probably mean is that the females, Keener and Tomei, are the objects of the story, but as characters they are hardly allowed to affect the narrative, and I'd agree and say that is one of the film's problems. Though I think they're lucky to be saved from the idiocy of the struggle between Hill and Reilly.

Second of all, there is the idiocy of Hill and Reilly, and more specifically, there is the enormous and unforgivable idiocy of Reilly. This is the contradiction I referred to - because in Cyrus there are the raw moments of emotional revelation that I first complimented the Duplass brothers for, but there is a lack of character depth that prohibits me from experiencing the force or range of these moments. So I ask them to make their film in a way they feel truthful, and then I criticize them for skimping on character design. Reilly plays the now popular manchild role, and though it's easy to mistake his dimensions as more authentic because the camera is hand held and the settings are homes and apartments, there isn't more to him than the manchild Dewey Cox, or the manchild Ron Burgundy.

His manchildness generates unearned sympathy from the audience. It's a dramatic shortcut, the kind I expected the Duplass brothers to eschew. It also forces the character to behave inconsistently, because the Duplass brothers like to have both scenes of comedic simplicity and scenes of introspection and emotional resonance. "Shawn, inconsistency itself is a huge component of reality, and earlier you referred to the absurdity of reality and expressed contempt for the dishonest veneer of dramatic form." That's a great point, but I didn't mean to say that a piece of work shouldn't have an inner logic. Without an inner logic, it's difficult for me to enter into the film and discover the broken passages and fragmented realms of the film's characters. Right?

The film plays the notes of a sincere drama, and at its core is a complex, interesting dilemma, but it plays the drama and the dilemma without exploring the characters. The plot is like an ice cream truck moving down the street and the characters are like children in the street who chase after it, wildly gesticulating for attention. Everything has a dramatic function, which makes this not a more honest drama, but simply a different type of lie. And when I say lie I mean there's a disconnect between me and the film that leads to mistrust on my end, because of course all films are lies, but the good ones don't remind you of this.

The Kids Are All Right and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.

I went to see The Kids Are All Right because it was an industry screening and because since Julianne Moore is in it I thought maybe local filmmaker Todd Haynes would be in attendance (he wasn't). Also, I wanted to see Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work at 8:55, so I expected to stay for the beginning of The Kids and then abscond midway without a concern in the world, because I had seen the trailer to The Kids and it was pretty stale and life's short, except that thing happened in which a movie slowly takes hold of you and at one point I was totally beguiled and stayed through until the end, dashing out as soon as the credits appeared and not missing any of Piece of Work.

You see how everything worked out okay? In The Kids, everything also works out okay, kind of, to a certain extent. In Joan Rivers, mostly everything works out kind of okay. In my amateur opinion that's the emotional orientation of many people in America, 2010: everything is kind of okay. Some shit's fucked and some shit's notfucked, and here and there little bits of beyond notfucked are sprinkled across our lives, moments of beauty and instances of transcendent harmony, etc.

The Kids is the type of movie that encourages people to scrutinize and dissect its social politics, by virtue of its intricate social relationships, which span sexual, cultural, and generational boundaries. I'm not above that. For example I noticed that sexual promiscuity is clearly judged, gay is represented as a complex condition of the personality not limited to carnal desires, and liberalness is more complicated than open-mindedness. Also some comparisons and contrasts on the functions of gender role models.

It's a compliment to the film that despite its slight political progressiveness it's a relatively simple film. It means that although our social order becomes more confusing, human behavior continues on as ever. Maybe that'll mean accusations of simplification or reverse- or counter- or even anti-permissiveness, as the film is smart enough to have its characters fall on one side of the line, like many people do in real life. There's this tradition of serving thematic ambiguity with depictions of alternative lifestyles - a tradition that was less prevalent in the 70s and I think is ebbing its way out of some contemporary films too.

This is a movie about a family, and it's as plotted and mechanical as most family films. The beginning is a montage with (I think) Vampire Weekend playing: the boy skateboards, the girl talks sex over Scrabble, Ruffalo fucks on the couch, and the moms are in love. Their emotions will travel, but the character limitations won't budge. Or rather, the exposing of the character traits will remain perceptive but blunt. They're fairly superficial depictions with fairly standard progressions, and it feels more like a Thanksgiving dinner conversation than a film of real people with true dimensions. The narrative surprised me a few times - the characters never did. I'd be bullshitting if I thought Ruffalo was going to be venomously referred to as an "interloper," but I'd also be lying if I said that scene is a revelation of character. I LOVED the female actresses, including the young 18 year old daughter, whom I'd never seen in a movie before I think. Though, tell you the truth, my favorite character was the gardener, and he's the only character I felt really broken through into reality, even if it was in a skewed, sortafucked way.

In that regard, The Kids is a classic Hollywood type movie. A straight story, complicated emotions, transgressive overtones, and talented actors. Piece of Work is a fairly emotional documentary that's questionably authentic - your typical documentary of an artist. The best indication of this comes from a candid display of potential emotional manipulation: Rivers in her limo gazes out the window, implications of worry and deep contemplation across her face. That is until she makes a joke of her pose and suggests the moment would have more reality if not for her just off camera assistant.

I would have thought it was a woman trapped in a lonely moment of introspection if not for the joke. What if the joke hadn't been made? How many times were the emotions forced? Because there's a lot of crying in Piece of Work, and there are a lot of tough admissions and naked moments. Naturally, I'm hesitant to match my emotions with hers unless I know she is coming from a genuine place. It's fair to say that Joan Rivers is herself a woman of extraordinary emotional depth, and her fragility is certainly on full display. She tells you though: she's always acting. She says she's an actor playing the part of a comedian, even, and she's best known for her comedy.

That's part of the intrigue in any documentary of an artist. When people choose to become performers, their lives too take on the shape of a performance. Piece of Work works though because of other things it shows us and other things Rivers does not do. She doesn't take her play to NYC, where negative reviews would once again severely harm her sensitive self-image of her acting abilities. There are clips from her stand-up performances, in which she is definitely a 75 year old woman still making anal sex jokes. She's open about her relationship with her daughter, open about her past mistakes, and open about her professional indiscretion and greediness. It's tough to judge someone for their faults when they're brave enough to publicly display them, and even sometimes willing to discussing them. Joan Rivers is 100% human.

Why did I group these two together? Well, there's the practical reason, which is that I saw both of them last night. I also think they're thematically linked, they both express this burgeoning sincerity in our culture, a fearlessness toward confronting our problems even without fully comprehending their solutions. I like that; I always have.

Friday the 13th: The Series, Episode 1.12, "Faith Healer"

astral |ˈastrəl|
adjective [ attrib. ]
• of or relating to a supposed nonphysical realm of existence to which various psychic and paranormal phenomena are ascribed, and in which the physical human body is said to have a counterpart.

If you remember, my last encounter with Friday the 13th: The Series, Episode 3.3, Crippled Inside was about a high school girl who possessed a magical and cursed wicker wheelchair that allowed her to astral project and commit physical acts of revenge on a villainous gang of high school boys.

Well this one, Episode 1.12, Faith Healer, was directed by David Cronenberg, and is about an evangelist who claims to heal the diseased and dying. Despite common sense I initially hoped it was going to be the same Crippled Inside story, told again. I hoped the whole series was just variations on that concept. It wasn't, of course, though the first scene features a young blind man in a wheelchair. He's in a church and the evangelist circles him as he explains to the gathered crowd how the ethereal hand of god will heal the boy, using the evangelist as a vessel of course, and but then just as he's about to demonstrate a party-pooper intervenes and accuses the evangelist of being a fraud. He pops a contact out of the boy's eye and asks the audience: why would a blind man wear contacts? As the crowd gasps, the evangelist dashes out of the church...

CUT TO:

In the alley an old man in a wheelchair, angry from betrayal, verbally lashes out at the evangelist. Old dude's pissed because he wanted to be healed. The lying piece of shit evangelist simply runs past the wheelchair bound old man; but despite the geriatric condition of his aggressors, he's frantic, and he falls into some trash ditch at the end of the alley. Among the garbage is a Roger Rabbit kind of cartoony oversized white glove, which for some mystical reason the evangelist immediately wants to stick his hand inside.

BIG MOMENT:

A diseased woman approaches him - her disease is a melting face of sores. Very Cronenbergian. She's pissed like the previous wheelchair man and accosts the evangelist regarding his deception and amorality and wickedness, etc., false advertising etc., and but do I have to tell you that the goddamn glove really fucking heals? Swear to God it does. He touches the woman and she turns middle-aged and red-headed and cured. The evangelist is stoked - his luck really turned around in short order.

CUT TO:

SHIT, the woman's affliction is in the glove! You can tell because it's full of sores now, too, and when the evangelist goes to pull the glove off parts of his skin rise up with the glove, exposing a bloody fleshless interior in his forearm, very Cronenbergian. The guy understandably freaks out, which attracts the attention of a policeman who is serendipitously across the street.

NO SHIT:

The fucking glove can pass on the disease to other people! And not only that, but through the science of this process, the disease is magnified and worsened and the gloved victim dies of horribleness in complete agony and terrible, ultimate suffering. Adios officer.

DUDE'S REALLY EXCITED:

Because his shtick just went legitimate. You don't see him fist pumping the air though (because this is fucking Cronenberg), you see him on a television commercial, advertising his real-deal healing powers. Those kids with their bullshit whatever recurring plot line which ties together the series see him on tv. And in this season the uncle is around with the bullshit kids and anyway for some reason I forget they need to get the glove, which is this episode's cursed object!

SOME DULL SHIT ABOUT THIS OR THAT:

Anyway the uncle, Jack, is old friends with the skeptical party-pooper from the first sequence, whose name is Jerry. And anyway Jack and Jerry

GO UP THE PLOT HILL, UNTIL:

Jerry confronts the evangelist for a second time. The evangelist is mortified at first, because of their history, but the glove has bolstered his confidence so he accepts Jerry's challenge: he'll heal whomever Jerry selects to be healed, in order to prove to Jerry that now he's authentic.

Jerry reveals to Jack, whom he's tied up, that HE suffers from a fatal disease; Jerry himself has some melted chocolate colored puss sores on his stomach. That disease is called Very Cronenbergian. HE's going to be the one to be healed.

DRAMATIC CULMINATION:

The evangelist tricks Jerry and doesn't heal him! Dead serious. Well, Jerry's pissed, and he starts firing his Marine pistol, which I forgot to mention. A security guard gets shot, and the evangelist does too. He escapes after Jerry shoots him twice.

HE (THE EVANGELIST) HEALS HIS OWN BULLET WOUNDS USING THE GLOVE:

But while running away crashes his car. Stuck in his car, he has no one to pass the disease (the disease of being shot) onto this time. This passing on of the ailment was demonstrated again before, besides the lady, which I forgot to mention. It was another lady, in an alley, and it involved a poodle in flight.

Also, Jack is tied up because Jerry double-crossed him because using cursed objects for personal gain is very morally reprehensible, and although Jack and Jerry are best friends, there's still no reason for Jack to allow Jerry to fucking use the devil's powers for personal gain, for Christ's sake. Forget about that for a moment though, because the evangelist is in the car and can't move, and Jerry is on the hunt.

CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE:

Jerry makes it to the car in time to see the evangelist die from internal gun fires, and the evangelist expires in front of Jerry's eyes.

WHICH IS FINE WITH JERRY, WHO TAKES THE GLOVE FROM NEXT TO THE DEAD EVANGELIST:



And then Jerry plans on healing himself and passing the disease onto Jack. Thankfully the cousins show up in time though.

OH FUCK:

Earlier, in that second demonstration of the glove's powers I forgot to mention but then mentioned, there's fucking pulsing face sores on a woman in an alleyway. Very Cronenbergian.

Thanks again Vendredi Antiques for the image.

Tsai Ming-liang.

Tsai Ming-liang's first movie, Rebels of the Neon God, is a vision of urban torpor in landscapes of modern decay. The title rings science fiction, a story told inside a city, in a period following electrification. The film's characters reject the dominant culture, roam the city on motorcycles, spend long hours in lamp-soaked alleys and electronic bars, and dream of escape from the machine, escape from the city. They're rebels to an idealized new world which operates on structures of idolatry and ritualization. This is close to what the movie is. Rebels of the Neon God is sci-fi's living moment.

Ming-liang captures the nightmarish surrealism of fantasy objects turned real. His symbols accumulate meaning through his filmography: e.g. watermelon, water, lonely hearts, voyeurism. He focuses a giant and curious magnifying glass on people trapped in lifestyles of strictured loneliness.

 Vive L'Amour and What Time is It There feature protagonists who are street hawkers. The job suggests proclivities toward marginal compromise and ambiguous effort; it's potentially autonomous but economically and emotionally unrewarding, and ultimately depends on social participation. It's a job for the lonely rebel. In What Time is it There, the man hawks watches, bringing to the foreground motifs about time and existence. In Vive L'Amour, it's non-specific, goods on a blanket. This hawker haunts an unrented apartment, harmlessly observing the intersecting lives of a female real estate agent and her lover. The morality of voyeurism isn't discussed. This and other narrative ellipses suggest total freedom from judgement. The value of characters intersecting in Vive L'Amour isn't stressed, and there isn't a denouement that romances criss-crossing lives.

Ming-liang's movies reject mechanisms of falsification.

The Hole is about a very singular connection, requiring matters of fate and chance, wonder and spectacle. There is a hole on the floor of a woman's apartment, and through this whole she forms a small daydream romance with the man underneath her. The film includes musical sequences in fluorescent drenched concrete hallways, interludes of beautiful women and men in retro formals; vibrantly, magically choreographed dances. Ming-liang seems ready to concede there is love.

Four years later, in What Time is it There, a vague romantic tragedy occurs over an expanse of land, in separate cities in different countries. A woman traveling from Taipei to Paris wants to buy the personal watch of a watch salesman. At first he refuses. She calls him and directly insists. They are only together to discuss the watch, but when she leaves he obsessively changes Taipei clocks to Paris time. One morning the woman leaves the bed of a lover and panics, not knowing for a moment where the watch is. The intensity of the connection isn't forced into dissection, and the viewer is allowed to decide the story's scope and density.

Ming-liang's lack of dialogue driven story is sometimes called intolerable or inadequate by members of the film community who believe dialogue drives a story and generates participation and entertainment. Goodbye, Dragon Inn quietly grieves our lost faith in movies. The film takes place in one of cinema's dying churches, and a few protagonists haunt it, as the apartment in Vive L'Amour. Ming-liang's films often express implicit compassion for lonely onlookers, and Dragon Inn is a multi-layered poem on the dimensions of this loneliness. It has strong links with the writer/director's central theme: emotional isolation.

In The Hole, the characters suffer from an overabundance of water. There is constant rain and water leakage. This overabundance fosters both disconnect and association - the characters could do without so much water, but by simply being so prevalent, the water begins to take on unintentional meaning. This surreal metaphor is upped in The Wayward Cloud, wherein the characters are ensnared by a surprisingly prosperous year for watermelon. Watermelon juice becomes cheaper than water, and everyone has plenty of watermelons to eat and make into juice and place on head and fetishise. Which is kind of sick, to fetishise watermelons, and The River is about strange sickness overtaking the body.

Warner Gangsters Collection, Vol. 3.

When I say I love a good romantic comedy, and I do, I don't mean I love your generic Hollywood romcom, I mean I love a good movie with some romance and comedy. And when I say I hate crime cinema, I don't mean I hate any movie with crime, because I don't at all: but I hate a lot of them. A lot. Just to elaborate, I'd rather watch a bad romcom, of the variety I've just lambasted, than a bad crime movie.

So that's why I don't own volume one and two of Warner Bros.' gangster collections* (volume two was once titled Tough Guys Collection…..), and that's why I did recently purchase volume three, because I heard that the gangster films weren't very gangstery, and that made me listen. I began with Lloyd Bacon's Picture Perfect (Bacon of 42nd Street and Footlight Parade), and there were things I appreciated, but as it continued it felt fragmented, in a way that ultimately projected studio assemblage. It felt like movie making. It really amounts to the true-life story of some vanguard journalist told as a crappy screwball comedy, with working-class depression-era sentiment sprinkled over the whole. Then I watched Smart Money. Smart Money is the only filmic collaboration between Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, which gives it a cocktail party trivia appeal. It's just a lame genre film. Edward G. as Nick the Barber is a local celebrity poker player who travels into the big city and gets conned by the big boys (with help from a double-crossing woman). His male ego enraged, he storms around his hometown in fits of virile chest pounds until they give him more money to go back and con the conners. This time he pulls it off, and it begins his ascent into law enforcement evasion and more gambling, with Cagney as his best friend sidekick whom he ultimately betrays for one of his beloved blondes, who is of course betraying him to the police. I thought: well shit.

Then I watched Brother Orchid (another Bacon film). Brother Orchid (with Edward G. and Humphrey Bogart) is a partial parody of gangster films, and it kind of plays out like if a writer blocked Preston Sturges wrote a gangster film. Edward G. is set-up and left for dead by crime-boss Humphrey B. Crawling through the woods, with twin bullet holes in his back, he happens upon a monastery of gardening monks. Right? From there he learns lessons and the movie isn't so bad.

Brother Orchid justified the purchase of the set. What if I had stopped, though, what if I hadn't continued on to Lady Killer. Lady Killer was directed by Roy del Ruth, whose pre-Huston Maltese Falcon was recently named one of the most overlooked films by Leonard Maltin (although pretty shitty companions on that mostly contemporary list - but he included Animal Factory too!). Lady Killer at its worst has the same inflamed male ego of other gangster films, and it famously features a hair-pulling body-dragging scene with Cagney and Clarke: a scene still brutal today, fucking years and years later, just like the famous The Public Enemy grapefruit scene (referenced in Lady Killer), with the same two actors. Watching early Hollywood films you see a lot of barbarism, a lot of sexism and racism and reverse elitism. Hollywood loves to induce and romance self-hatred (it still does). The shit is, if you love movies, at certain points you find yourself completely overlooking this bullshit. Why does it happen? Because you love cinema so much. But sometimes it's like loving an abusive parent.

Anyway, it's backwards in a few ways (it also has a few tired, tired elements of machoism and gangsterism), but it's not backwards in narrative terms. I'd call its narrative ecstatic and inventive. Cagney begins as a dopey theater usher, becomes a shady club owner, moves to LA, is arrested by the police and loses his thug gf, is set out into the world w/o a dollar, stumbles into an acting career (scenes of hilarious Hollywood satire), happens into a popular actress' trailer, cons his way into stardom and the heart of the starlet, is then blackmailed by his old crime buddies, has a HILARIOUS feuding actors scene with his semi-gf starlet, is arrested while vindicating blackmail, is bailed out by double-crossing blackmailers whom he triple-crosses, and ends up on a plane with the starlet. I didn't even mention the monkey birthday scene. It's the kind of imaginative and nimble narrative that dominates interesting cinema of today, but the juxtaposition of commonplace motifs of the 1930s and formal inventiveness and originality make the film insanely enjoyable and easy to watch. It twists and pops like any of Shane Black's films. It's the kind of gem I watch so many movies hoping to find.

I should have stopped before Black Legion, but how could I have known. In Black Legion the gang is a group of for-profit white supremacists. Bogart joins them in a series of scenes that feel like industrial workplace videos "What to do when the white supremacist asks you to enter the hidden room at the back of the general store." Bogart becomes consumed by hate and confusion, and his destructive path of hate is so destructive and hateful and confusing (is it WRONG to practice hate crimes?) that he loses his job and his wife and kills a man. And because he kills a man, I have to be punished with boring court scenes.

This spot saved for Mayor of Hell, the last film in the volume for me to watch.

* Though I own numerous film noir collections and dvds, because to reference a recent Film Comment quote I found hilarious, saying (good) film noir is about crime is like saying Psycho is about bad hotel management. And saying a martial arts film is about crime is saying you don't understand fuckall about martial arts films.

Paul Verhoeven discussing Jesus of Nazareth.

In my opinion people should be obligated to wear dress clothes when attending a serious discussion about a creative work. But then, Jesus didn't preach to crowds of ties and cuff links, did he?



If the world was shaped to my liking, there also wouldn't have been this drinking fountain right in front of me, nor would there have been an elevator just to the left (not pictured).

Not since I saw Lynch speak at UC Irvine on the topic of transcendental meditation have I enjoyed as surreal a cinephilic experience as last night: Paul Verhoeven at Powell's Books engaging in dialogue concerning the recent English translation of his novel Jesus of Nazareth (Jezus van Nazaret). Unlike the Lynch lecture, however, the focus of the night was indeed Jesus. Another difference is that Verhoeven alone answered all Q&A questions.

Twice he greatly impressed me. The first time was when an elderly-type white haired man stood and asked what was so endearing about the mythology of Jesus. Verhoeven answered that Jesus was supposedly god-as-man on earth, as opposed to god in heaven or gods in mountains. The second time a twenty-something wanted to know if there was a common divinity among prophets of different religious backgrounds. Verhoeven answered that there certainly was. The kid then asked, if their source is a shared deity, why aren't all religions in harmony? Verhoeven replied that Muslims, for example, believe that Muhammad's words supersede the words of the Old Testament, and that Christians, for example, believe the same about Jesus, and also believe you can't enter heaven unless you accept Jesus, and that doesn't leave much middle ground.

These replies impressed me because they were succinct and thoughtful. Other topics wowed me by their idiosyncrasy. Hearing Verhoeven speak, naturally, and thankfully, isn't much different than watching a Verhoeven film. He proposed the idea that Jesus was actually just a highly talented exorcist, and that he was notable most of all for this trait. He refuted the scholar whose claim was that Jesus was a homosexual (the "ultimate attack"), and suggested instead that the scholar was gay. He also stated that Jesus' libido was "annexed" by the kingdom of heaven.

The final audience question was what Verhoeven would say to all the churches and Christian communities if he was able to say one thing to them on the topic of Jesus. Verhoeven replied that he didn't write the book specifically for the Christian community or to carry a message to anyone, he simply wrote the book in order to instigate discussion, contemplation, and reflection. He said that his book represents his thoughts, based on twenty years of scholarly study (as he enjoyed saying), and nothing more. Of course he has to say this, given the nature of his book, but it's still great that he can say this. He knows what he's doing, just as I know he only wrote this book to prepare people for his Jesus movie (his favorite New Testament movie is Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew, but he doesn't feel a great one has been made yet).