The tragedy of a ridiculous man

Helena Bonham Carter in Planet of the Apes: I’d bang that damned dirty ape.

In an earnest attempt to fend off seasonal Writer’s Block (if you must know, I’d rather be lying in the sun), here are some tidbits to perchance grease the wheels for my impending TOERIFC entry (given my hazy, laissez faire attitude, I shouldn’t be signing up to do anything these days) and the Claude Chabrol Blogathon which could well end up making me the laughing stock of the blogging community. So be it.

In a previous entry I farted out some pithy comments about the first three Planet of the Apes movies (my cable provider is currently offering the series free in HD), leaving all seven of my devoted readers clamoring for pearls concerning the fourth and fifth. As I’d mentioned, I never saw Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) until now, and found it the only interesting one, if not the most compelling, of the sequels. People who extend the director-as-auteur theory to hired guns like J. Lee Thompson should be ashamed of themselves, especially here. I’m convinced the Apes franchise was masterminded and guided by producer Arthur P. Jacobs, who apparently was inspired by the Watts Riots to illustrate the revolution bridging Escape from the Planet of the Apes’s talking baby chimp to the apes’ global domination. Pungent with racism, Jacobs’s ballsy correlation of simian and Nubian ethics would never survive a single pre-production story conference if it were being made today.

I had seen the fifth and final movie, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) soon after it opened, when Fox reissued all five for their “Go Ape!” festival. I hated it then, but now, thirty-six years later, I find it weirdly endearing. Claude Akins is the most intimidating ape warrior of the series, and who can resist John Huston slumming for grocery money as The Lawgiver? There’s also Severn Darden (James Coburn’s Russian pal in The President’s Analyst) as a deranged human atomic survivor assisted by France Nuyen, yet.

For the full Ape experience I rented Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001), which I never saw before. I like some of Burton (Ed Wood, Mars Attacks!, Edward Scissorhands), but a lot of it leaves me cold (Sleepy Hollow is the pits; his two Batman movies are a drag). This was pretty bad, but I’ll grant that it was never dull. Two points of interest: Helena Bonham Carter gives the best performance by anyone in any Ape movie; and Burton’s chilling visual homage to 9-11’s Ground Zero is even more frightening when you realize this movie came out two months before 9-11.

My cable provider is also offering (via the Sundance Channel) David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and Inland Empire (2006), both for free in HD. I’m no fan of the latter. To me, Lynch can be a visionary without peer (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr.) or a groping thumb twiddler (Wild at Heart, Lost Highway). I’ve little patience for Inland Empire. Eraserhead, on the other hand, is a different story. The last time I saw it was in the 1970s; I did try to watch Columbia’s dreadful VHS edition in the early 80s, but the image was barely visible. I saw Eraserhead a week or two after it opened in Manhattan at either the Cinema Village or the 8th Street Playhouse. Before I went, a friend asked me if I’d ever seen this “really weird thing that looked like it was made in the 1940s.” No one knew of Lynch back then. To see Eraserhead cold like that was a unique experience. (For an excellent summation of the film in that time and place, check out Stuart Samuels’s documentary, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream.) And here we are thirty-two years later and it holds up, well… magnificently. It’s rife with visuals and themes we’d see in later Lynch — the zigzagging floor tiles, the empty theaters, the impromptu musical breaks, the outré violence. One change for me was my take on the baby. I dismissed it as a soulless monster back in the 70s; now I think the kid is oddly engaging, especially when it chuckles over Henry’s sexual dilemma. And everything else attracts the eye like a puss-filled scab or a hideous wound you’d secretly like to fondle.

Lastly, Criterion’s Blu-ray of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button looks stunning. And the film — all one-hundred-sixty-five minutes of it — holds the attention, primarily for the eye but not the mind. Give it any thought and the thing crumbles under the weight of its own inconsequentiality. Great makeup, though, and the sets, photography and period recreation are outstanding.

Uncomfortable moments in film: T3

Oedipal wreck: Realizing he’s in love with Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), John Connor (Nick Stahl) woos her with, “You remind me of my mother.” (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)

Make the Girl Dance: "Baby Baby Baby"

Final frontiers

Zoe Saldana as Uhura (click to enlarge)

Everyone has their two cents to say about Star Trek (2009), the new action movie with glimmers of SF and characters patterned after the ones from the original TV show. I’m unfamiliar with producer-director J.J. Abrams’s television work, but he gets my vote for making the only decent Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible III (2006) — it’s the one where Philip Seymour Hoffman asks “where’s the rabbit’s foot?” — and Star Trek shares its pulsating rhythm along with buffoonish but amusing comedy relief. As I don’t get paid for writing this, and the film failed to inspire me on any aesthetic or intellectual level, all I’m gonna do is tell you I was entertained from beginning to end, but I’m not holding my breath for the inevitable sequel.

    As I write this, ABC news is asking a hardcore Star Trek junkie what he thinks of the new voyages of the starship Enterprise. Decked out in a vintage Starfleet uniform, sitting in an authentic captain’s chair from the Shatner series (in his basement, ‘natch), with a Gold Key Star Trek comic book in his hands, this 40-ish husband and father has his reservations. He doesn’t trust where the franchise has headed, he says, but then admits he hasn’t seen the new film. He really doesn’t want to. Don’t you hate cry babies like this? Sitting in his captain’s chair, condemning a movie he hasn’t seen. A movie he has an opinion on, but hasn’t seen. This potential book burner-history revisionist-censor wants everything to be like it was forty years ago. Well, fuck you buddy. It’s 2009. WAKE UP!

    (I shouldn’t be too hard on him: his kind have been around since the dawn of speech. They pine for the simplicity of their childhood, when things were easy, when they weren’t troubled by adult responsibility. I had a friend who referred to it as a generational conceit: believing the stuff of one’s formative years to be superior to everyone else’s. This Star Trek guy may think things were better back in, say, 1965, but there were people his age in 1965 who felt things were better thirty or forty years before that. It’s cyclical, it’s got nothing to do with the quality of one generation’s pop culture over another, and there’s very little hope that it’ll ever go away.)

Monkey trial: My cable provider is offering all five of the original Planet of the Apes movies for free in HD this month, so I’ve made a likely unwise decision to watch them all in order. Three weeks ago I watched Planet of the Apes (1968), which I have seen two or three times since it came out. Back in 1968 I was ten, and it was a gas. (In first run, they showed this 112-minute movie with an intermission; it followed Heston’s ‘damn dirty ape’ spiel.) Over the years I began noticing its sundry flaws, but for a mainstream blockbuster it’s OK.

    Last week I made it through Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and found it interesting that, despite the tremendous box office draw of these pictures, 20th Century Fox and producer Arthur Jacobs lowered their choice of director from the original’s Franklin Schaffner (a middlebrow artiste) to b-unit journeyman Ted Post on the sequel. No bother: there are no auteurist values to be mined here, unless you’re completely insane. It’s a useless and forced picture, the screenplay reaching long and hard for material. I remember my father groaning in agony during most of it back in ‘70, especially when the underground people sang to the bomb. Roddy McDowall didn’t make it for this one and was replaced by David Watson, a ham actor who may have studied Henry Brandon’s Silas Barnaby in Babes in Toyland (1934) too close. My eye gravitated toward Nova Linda Harrison’s mid-section; she looked a little wider in the hips than she did in ‘68. Did she have a baby in between the two movies?

    Right now it’s about an hour since I watched Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971). I didn’t like this one when it came out. In fact, I disliked it so much that I never bothered going to see the fourth Ape movie. (I’ll be catching up with that next week… if my brain doesn’t seize up on me before then.) It hasn’t improved with age. It’s better than Beneath, but I think the only thing worse than Beneath is getting poked in the eye with a flaming stick. Escape has Roddy (“I’ll take any script”) McDowall, Kim Hunter and poor Sal Mineo managing to haul Charlton Heston’s rocket ship from the deep lake it landed in back in the first movie (we don’t get to see that), filling it with enough refined fuel to send it off into space (we don’t get to see that), piloted by apes totally unfamiliar with flight (we don’t get to see that). They go through the time-space continuum and land in a cheesy TV movie set in 1973, complete with William Windom and Bradford Dillman and Eric Braden, the latter now a popular soap star. Seeing garbage like this often puts me in a foul mood, so maybe I should shut up.

    But before I go: Escape was directed by Don Taylor. I once drank with an old buddy of his who told me Taylor was a flamboyant cross-dresser. (I’d love to think he directed Escape in high couture.) Said buddy was also into ladies garments, and he sat at the bar relating the sordid details decked out in a wig of flowing blonde locks, designer dress, f-me pumps, and a rather garish string of pearls. I forget his name, but he got real nasty when he got drunk.

These are the eyes of disarray

Playing catch-up with films I’ve let slip by, yesterday’s potluck double bill was the low key Come Early Morning (2006), to feed my on again-off again obsession with Ashley Judd; and the frenetic Edmond (2005), the barbed wit of David Mamet at full tilt boogie. While neither displayed any great cinematic proficiency during the viewing, when any thematic connections between them would’ve seemed ridiculous, reflecting over the next morning’s coffee revealed two vaguely similar attempts to broach the thorny issues of communication and loneliness, ego and self loathing.

    Because I rarely read about movies before seeing them, my only clue about Come Early Morning was the DVD cover of a smiling Ashley headed for the waiting arms of Jeffrey Donovan under the tagline, “Before you fall in love, you need to love yourself.” One could read that several ways. Me? I imagined a fluff romantic comedy.

    The comedy may be, well, not entirely lacking; but there is a good amount of romanticism, albeit not within the parameters of standard boy-meets-girl. This is about a woman with unfocused determination, good at her job as a building contractor but unskilled in personal relationships (romantic and familial), relying on booze to carry her through the hours when she’s not working or visiting aging relatives. It doesn’t paint her as an alcoholic (she doesn’t carry the trademark symptoms), but rather considers the threat of idle thought within someone whose mind is constantly running.

    It’s set in a sleepy Arkansas town, which could be interpreted as a kind of prison, though I believe the picture is ignorant about the environment in ways that’d go unnoticed by anyone unfamiliar with rural life. Ashley’s Lucille — named after the song from when her father (Scott Wilson) dreamed of becoming a professional musician — is occasionally too detached for a country girl whose been in the same town all her life. She doesn’t know or ask questions about neighbors like Donovan’s relatives, or the folks at dad’s church who are virtual strangers. After thirty years in this backwater, she’d surely know them by name and reputation.

    Which is surprising, because Come Early Morning was written and directed by Joey Lauren Adams, a native of Little Rock. Better known for acting in Kevin Smith movies (watching her recite all that purple dialog in Chasing Amy broke my heart), Adams made her debut behind the camera here and the lack of experience is occasionally evident. Despite the deficiencies of the screenplay, Ashley is excellent and the country music soundtrack provides a perfect backdrop.



    A David Mamet fan, I’m trying to remember why I never got around to Edmond until now. It probably had something to do with Stuart Gordon directing. Gordon started well enough with his balls-to-the-walls horror satires Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), but what followed was dross, and Mamet seemed a disastrous detour from that shaky oeuvre.

    I shouldn’t have given Gordon that much thought. This is Mamet from start to finish, and for good or ill depending on where you stand. I’ve rarely met people who are on the fence about Mamet, it’s generally a hate-him-or-love-him deal. I’d fall in with the latter, even though I can appreciate why his detractors aren’t enthused.

    Like Come Early Morning, Edmond is a quest film, a character searching for answers, for communication, for love and its sundry meanings, for ways to exist as a simple person in a complicated world. After seeing the film I scanned some online comments and found that many people shortchanged it as an exposé of white racism and sexism. True, Mamet’s jittery titular character, played with expert neurosis by William H. Macy, overcomes his middle-class reserve to unleash inner demons and wreak havoc on blacks and women. There comes a point when his sexual preference falls under question, a repressed man coming out of the closet. But these shape the foundation for a portrait of isolation, of a voice unheard, of civilization engulfed in hazy personal pursuits at the cost of social interaction.

    Like most Mamet films, the cast is uniformly excellent. Rebecca Pidgeon (Mrs. Mamet in real life) plays Edmond’s wife, her fine body available but no longer attracting him. He goes to exotic dancers, quarrels over the price of a lap dance with Denise Richards, quarrels over a ten dollar masturbation session with Ling Bai, quarrels over a $250 massage parlor fuck with Mena Suvari. He has feverish existential discussions with an equally frustrated Joe Mantegna and cocktail waitress Julia Stiles. He has violent confrontations with Dulé Hill’s street hustler and Lionel Mark Smith’s pimp. He evolves into Bokeem Woodbine’s jailhouse concubine. With the right kind of eyes, it could make a fascinating companion piece to Eyes Wide Shut, the exploration of fallen white men distracted into submission, whose boners have been flattened under the weight of expectation.

Hold the Cinco de Mayo

Isis

(Bob Dylan & Jacques Levy)

I married Isis on the fifth day of May
But I could not hold on to her very long
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.

I came to a high place of darkness and light
The dividing line ran through the center of town
I hitched up my pony to a post on the right
Went into a laundry to wash my clothes down.

A man in the corner approached me for a match
I knew right away he was not ordinary
He said “Are you looking for something easy to catch?”
I said “I got no money,” he said “that ain’t necessary.”

We set out that night for the cold in the North
I gave him my blanket, he gave me his word
I said “Where are we going?” He said we’d be back by the fourth
I said “That's the best new that I’ve ever heard.”

I was thinking about turquoise, I was thinking about gold
I was thinking about diamonds and the world’s biggest necklace
As we rode through the canyons through the devilish cold
I was thinking about Isis and how she thought I was so reckless.

How she told me that one day we meet up again
And things would be different the next time we wed
If I only could hang on and just be her friend
I still can’t remember all the best things she said.

We came to the pyramids all embedded in ice
He said “There's a body I’m trying to find
If I carry it out it’ll bring a good price”
It was then that I knew what he had on his mind.

The wind it was howling and the snow was outrageous
We chopped through the night and we chopped through the dawn
When he died I was hoping that it wasn’t contagious
But I made up my mind that I had to go on.

I broke into the tomb but the casket was empty
There was no jewels, no nothing, I felt I’d been had
When I saw that my partner was just being friendly
When I took up his offer I must’ve been mad.

I picked up his body and I dragged him inside
Threw him down in the hole and I put back the cover
I said a quick prayer and I felt satisfied
Then I rode back to find Isis just to tell her I love her.

She was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise
Blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
I came in from the East with the sun in my eyes
I cursed her one time then I rode on ahead.

She said “Where ya been?” I said “No place special”
She said “You look different,” I said “well, I guess”
She said “You been gone,” I said “That’s only natural”
She said “You gonna stay?” I said “If you want me to, yes.”

Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I still can remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain.

AM flashback: “Mr. Businessman” by Ray Stevens (1968)

Itemize the things you covet
As you squander through your life
Bigger cars, bigger houses
Term insurance for your wife
Tuesday evenings with your harlot
And on Wednesdays it's your charlatan
analyst, he's high upon your list

You've got air conditioned sinuses
And dark disturbing doubts about religion
And you keep those cards and letters going out
While your secretary's tempting you
Your morals are exempting you from guilt and shame
Heaven knows you're not to blame

You better, Take care of business Mr. Businessman
What's your plan?
Get down to business Mr. Businessman if you can
Before it's too late and you throw your life away

Did you see your children growing up today
And did you hear the music of their laughter
As they set about to play
Did you catch the fragrance of those roses in your garden
Did the morning sunlight warm your soul,
Brighten up your day
Do you qualify to be alive
or is the limit of your senses so as only to survive

Spending counterfeit incentive
Wasting precious time and health
Placing value on the worthless
Disregarding priceless wealth
You can wheel and deal the best of them
And steal it from the rest of them
You know the score, their ethics are a bore

Eighty-six-proof anesthetic crutches prop you to the top
Where the smiles are all synthetic
And the ulcers never stop
When they take that final inventory,
Yours will be the same sad story everywhere
No one will really care, no one more lonely than
This rich important man, let's have your autograph
Endorse your epitaph