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).

The Bed You Sleep In.

The letter is superimposed over the image of Jean Weiss (Ellen McLaughlin). She reads the letter aloud to her husband Ray (Tom Blair).


The implied meaning of the superimposition echoes the character-defining importance of the letter. For Jean, as for us, the letter will shape a perception of Ray, one he is quick to deny.


But the letter initiates an unalterable and irreparable new reality so strong it supplants all prior convictions. The world twists into violent, fractured, painful dimensions for Jean. Again, Jost mirrors this visually.


Ray: And you say you love me. "For better, or for worse." But you throw it away because Tracy writes some crazy letter.
Jean: It's not crazy. It is not crazy. I don't know if it's true Ray, but it is not crazy. And she's my daughter, and I love her. And I thought you did too.

Jean is shocked and repulsed by the immensity of the accusation, but refuses to allow the gravity of her pain to be allayed by platitudes, excuses, moral deflections, or tangential circumstance. This lack of personal regard defines her character and the scope of her own love. Her choice to reciprocate the emotional nudity of the letter protects her from Ray's desperate and manipulative defenses.


And since Ray is unable to directly confront the emotions of the letter, and because Jean is, he exposes to her a side of himself ugly and repulsive enough to fill in further the shades of misery and destruction.


Jost, too, chooses to reveal his characters through unrelieved honesty.


What I really like about The Bed You Sleep In is it's not the typical "hidden view" of the sins of a small town. It's much more about the dual nature and violent divisions of a single person. This to me is more sinister, and suggests not that danger lurks in the corners of the picturesque, but that the seed of sin is everywhere, in everyone, and waits to be revealed.

Gran Casino.

Buñuel's first directorial assignment in Mexico, and the closest film following L'Age d'Or, by release date, that I have been able to see, Gran Casino is a murder thriller set predominantly in a casino/hotel environment. An oil field is an intermittent backdrop, the politics of which serve as the narrative's catalyst, and there are also musical sequences. In a brief synopsis it sounds almost promising; the tragedy, in my opinion, is that Buñuel was simply a director-for-hire and the film plays out on the wheels of convention. It's all musical melodrama.

Truthfully, I wish I could've experienced the full depth of the musical melodrama, whatever it may be. Someone, Lions Gate or otherwise, pulled a real fuck you for the dvd release and only subtitled the dialogue. All musical sequences are without subtitles - so for me part of this film is missing. Some of the scenes are visually appealing and work purely visually, including the spotlight number and the flashlight dance routine, but especially during clear moments of expository driven music, or Mercedes simply singing by a piano, subtitles are essential.

And when I speak of the visual appeal of the music sequences, I'm referring also to a desire on my part to search out Buñuel in the film. I get a real kick considering what his directing of a music number would have been like. I approached the 63 year old film as a scavenger hunt, desiring to find the little objects of Buñuel's personality hidden within the film. This is one clear example:




Gerardo is in Mercedes's hotel room. Her brother Jose has been murdered by the rival oil baron. Behind the curtain awaits another murderer. Mercedes notices his feet sticking out beneath the curtains, and Gerardo approaches with a statue in hand. Gerardo strikes at the curtains, and Buñuel cuts to this shot:



The curtains superimposed over the image of a glass shattering.

There's then a scene of henchmen coming to collect Gerardo's dead body. They call up to the room from the street. Mercedes calls down that there is no body. They say something like "Oh, I guess it's better there's no dead body" (a pretty funny line), and they leave.

Gerardo and Mercedes then approach the curtains:



And Gerardo pulls the curtains open:



It's a closet, in reality there was no glass behind the curtains. Buñuel has thus used the shattering glass as a metaphor for the man's head being crushed. This visual concept is terribly arresting and creative. Its use opens my perspective on physical harm, breaking glass, and the filmic relation possible between the two. It's a total Buñuelian moment.

Other motifs in Gran Casino, visual and narrative, seldom reach this level of imagination. It is steeped in strokes of high-adventure and colossal-risk, which I don't mind (who minds oil derricks as scenery?), but the part of me that begins to accept these everyday action thriller elements is most challenged when a truly idiosyncratic and imaginative moment bursts out of the framework. And then I remember what cinema really is, what it's true potential is.

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!

Breaking In.

I wish John Sayles had written the character of Ernie Mullins (Burt Reynolds) as a homicidal geriatric, and the character of Mike Lafeve (Casey Siemaszko, whom I'm not very familiar with, but is actually the best part of the movie) as a crime-scene photographer. And they should have crossed paths, elected to go on a road trip, and then visited Coney Island.

I went searching for the Pauline Kael review of Breaking In my late 80's Kael review book, Hooked. It's not in there and I didn't search any further. What happened is I started reading Kael's review of Joe Dante's Innerspace, which luckily describes the exact same kind of film. Kael mentions that Dante goes out of his way to make Innerspace inoffensive. Do they still make films like that? I don't know, because essentially those films become films for kids, and I don't see as many kids films as I maybe (?) should.

I did watch Breaking In. I love Forsyth's Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, love them, and what's so charming and appealing about them is their ability to strip away the mechanics of their stories and expose the human innards. Essentially this is the execution of Breaking In, but the subjects of the film are a seasoned thief and a tire installer turned criminal protege. And that's film bullshit.

Film bullshit should be loud and obnoxious, overpowering, or not present at all. That's how honesty can be achieved. Film bullshit should be a pit bull. And in Breaking In, Forsyth and Sayles take the pit bull to the veterinarian, have its teeth and balls removed, and enter it into a dog show. The crime scenes are tedious, the friendship scenes are heavy-handed, and the characters' personalities are skin deep. It's not a film about criminals or people. Just some shit happens, you laugh three-to-six times, and then the credits roll. It's charming, but charming like sledding down a hill of melting snow, sighing at every patch of grass.

Police, Adjective.

Then I realized: it was odd to call the film Police, Adjective. I was at the library, and I opened up their big dictionary on the table. A transitive verb, yes, a noun, certainly, but no listing as an adjective. My MacBook's dictionary doesn't have police listed as an adjective. It does have 'police procedural', an instance I think of police being used as an adjective, although in my MacBook 'police procedural' is listed as one word and as a noun, defined as 'a crime novel in which the emphasis is on the procedures used by the police in solving the crime.' Police, Adjective is a police procedural film that deals with the ambiguity of basic concepts, concepts misshaped into amorphousness by semantics, culture, education, beliefs, etc.

And the joke is consulting a dictionary over the title of Police, Adjective. I can't begin to describe the suspended state of hysterical absurdity (punctuated by the still life bowl of fruit on the table, and chalk-drawing on the board, and a secretary's search for a dictionary) which the film ends on. Some of the film's biggest detractors claim its final moments almost single-handedly save an otherwise obnoxiously boring movie.

The movie's very boring, is what most people were saying today at PIFF, following its screening yesterday. I heard a couple local Portland critics saying it was the worst film of PIFF thus far. Get the fuck out of here, as they say.

Police, Adjective is a film in which long takes search out natural rhythms, and the temporal fabric echoes the vast moral field which is the film's playground. The film is about a policeman who contemplates essential questions with enormous consequence in the mundane circumstances of modernity. Police work is an ideal conduit for expressing everyday dullness (and habit and ritualization as obstruction from comprehension of the meaningful) because of cinema's legacy of glamorizing police work. Here is cinema's most illustrious genre, a genre which for many defines the medium, and here it is stripped bare. Which is why everyone can at least understand the semantic, bureaucratic farce at the end (another great one occurs between the husband and wife over a song, and their dispute illustrates how words can function as obstacles between raw feeling and rationality - and who understands words better, the husband, who understands words only as tangible objects, or the wife, who participates in the struggle to grasp the intangible depths of words).

The final semantic journey charts itself between conscience - law - moral - police: a policeman in a boss's office is asked to turn the dictionary pages to each word as they discuss whether or not a raid should be executed on a teenage boy (where is the teenager in your mind as this conversation takes place?). I also overheard the Portland critic tell his friend that he felt like he was being lectured to the entire film, and that the final question was simply a matter of strict adherence to the letter of the law* versus the spirit of the law. But it's more than that. It's about a buried feeling, hard to name, hard to express. Where does it originate, and how true is it? A feeling embedded in the soul. And also, importantly, how much of our lives are shaped by how well we can express ourselves?

This is the spirit of the film that goes deeper than the words debated in those final moments, and though I can try to be persuasive on this point, part of my argument will remain trapped within me, inexpressible for various reasons, owing to the words I use and the way I search to express them, and that's something Police, Adjective understands about people and their lives. I've never seen it expressed so well, so clearly, in a film.

*The film has deadpan letters of the law jokes. Visual puns that make me shit my pants from laughter just thinking about.

True Stories/Stop Making Sense/Demons.

We have cocktails and appetizers at Bar Mingo until 6:40, and I don't want to run the twenty blocks so we take a cab to the theater. Someone with us knows the cab driver. We make it just in time: the girl walks toward the camera down the two-lane road hugged on all sides by fields, great open Texas fields. Byrne begins his narration, introducing the town. His voice is mostly relaxed, with undulations of terrific joy and puzzlement.

John Goodman works in a microchip plant. He wants to find a wife. Sad music causes him to lie down on the floor. He can remember kids' names if they sit in alphabetical order. He dances (there're musical pieces, frequent but spontaneous, for example a great moment has Byrne in a field, reflecting with a real estate agent on the curious nature of housing developments, and as the camera tracks with Byrne a group of kids appear screen right; they carry instruments and burst into song). Goodman is Byrne's traveling companion through this mostly relaxed narrative tapestry (it also has undulations of terrific joy and puzzlement). Byrne's car is not leased, it's privately owned. He's a crazy driver.

It's an easy to like movie. It's critical but affectionate, and it's more curious than critical. It's more perceptive than curious. It's more funny than perceptive.

Ten minute intermission. We avoid security cameras. The movie has started when we re-enter, so we crouch as we cross the front of the theater to our seats. We're front row. I want to dance but I'm too self-conscious about it. There's seriously a dance floor in front of the screen. I notice the guy next to me keeps shaking his leg, and then I notice that I keep shaking my leg. I think that in our heads me and this guy are the purest dancers here, the real dancers. I stop shaking my leg, my theory being that the energy will grow and I will explode into a dance frenzy on the stage. Sometimes in bursts I hear the audience singing along. Sometimes they clap after the songs. I stare at the screen, mesmerized.

On the way back I call a lamp pole a lamp post, but no one says anything to me about my mistake.

We arrive twenty minutes early. The previous movie hasn't let out. We wait on the sidewalk.

It's more gory than I remembered. I try to keep a list of the types of brutality: eye gouging, face tearing, throat slashing, bulging sores erupting with green puss. I think next time I'll bring paper if I want to keep a list of types of brutality featured. Terribly creepy and visceral fang sequences. My favorite moment used to be the helicopter breaking through the roof, but now it's the girl pushing the theater screen with her hands, an effect reminiscent of Videodrome.

I keep yawning during the movie. Am I tired (later, I'll come home and watch thirty-forty minutes of Man of Aran, waiting to fall asleep), or am I bored? Maybe you can't follow Stop Making Sense with Demons. I blank out for about twenty minutes, after the pimp dies.