Asp hole

There are stars, mostly women — hell, probably all women — who I’d gladly watch in anything. In looking over some names — let’s take Nicole Kidman, Milla Jovovich, Angelina Jolie to start — there’s the physical and sexual attraction that you may think lures me, but the fact is I’ve seen some interesting work from them in a lot of pictures I would’ve otherwise dismissed on the grounds of something as trivial as an unappealing title, or a director who’s burned me once too often. With Nicole, I’m a fan of Flirting (1991), The Peacemaker (1997) and Birthday Girl (2001); Milla’s influence has had me soaking in Dazed and Confused (1993), The Fifth Element (1998), Ultraviolet (2006), and the Resident Evil series. Yes, I’m hip about Raccoon City and Project Alice.

    Of those directors who easily disappoint, Oliver Stone is something of a perennial. Once upon a time, those around me waited with bated breath to see what he’d do next, back when Platoon (1986), Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and JFK (1991) were all the rage… and wiped out memory of true oddities like The Hand (1981), Talk Radio (1988), The Doors (1991) and Heaven & Earth (1993). Or U-Turn (1997), his Russ Meyer movie and a very weird failure. Stone is big on sermonizing and filling time with dates, facts, fibs and figures on hot button topics. For my money, his best movie is the football flick Any Given Sunday (1999), simply because it’s the only one he seems to have had any fun making.

Angelina Jolie in Alexander

    With this in mind, I let Stone’s Alexander (2004) slip by despite Angelina Jolie’s appearance as Olympias. Truth be told, I’m not big on historic Biblical-type epics, I don’t know jack shit about Alexander the Great, and this lox hasn’t exactly inspired me to crack open the history books any time soon. Plus, the movie’s three-and-a-half hours long. At least the version that’s available from Netflix. Things aren’t like they were years ago when a filmmaker or a studio made a movie and released it as is; today there are various versions because nobody’s got the balls to commit themselves to one finished, complete vision. At least in mainstream American film. But it’s gotten way out of hand, all these extra versions concocted for additional video sales. I hate to think of movies I can no longer see because ‘Director’s Cuts’ and ‘Extended Editions’ have replaced the original release prints. As far as I know, the 1979 version of Apocalypse Now is gone, replaced by its inferior Reduxed form, a laborious effort which only succeeds in displaying what a masterful job of cutting Coppola did on the shorter original theatrical release. The Cinema V edit of Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), missing some twenty minutes for American audiences, was a vast improvement over his sluggish ‘complete’ British version. It’s also the one that got the better reviews. Alas, it, too, may be gone for good.

    I wouldn’t mind if all prints of any version of Alexander were gone for good. What a mess of a movie. I even disliked Angie in it. Let me tell you: I usually like her in anything. I’ve sat through some real horrendous cheese for that woman: Cyborg 2 (1993), Hackers (1995), Love is All There Is (1996), Playing God (1997), films I can barely remember. (I will say that one of her pre-stardom pictures, Hell’s Kitchen from 1999, was pretty raw and harrowing.) But Alexander is, in so many ways, worse than the obvious turkeys. It’s jumbled, confusing, so incredibly incoherent. There are battle scenes with subtitles telling us which side of the battlefield we’re on, right, left or center. But wherever the camera sits, it’s just a cloud of dust and swords and arrows and horses, void of tension, reason or purpose… or direction.

    And Angie seems to be there collecting a paycheck. Her performance is done by rote; there’s no sense of passion or craft. Not that Stone has ever been good with female characters. Except perhaps Cameron Diaz in Any Given Sunday — I still love her locker room scene in that. But Stone’s women are generally cardboard cutouts, superficial and dumb. Not that his male characters have ever been that much better. He’s never gone under the skin of his characters; he’s hesitant to explore them as humans. Instead, they become anonymous figures trapped by fate. Is there one human character in JFK? To me, it’s a circus of faces reciting circumstances and times and police reports. The portrayal of the marriage of Jim and Liz Garrison (Kevin Costner and Sissy Spacek) is laughably naïve. Stone doesn’t want any part of all that messy grownup stuff.

    But JFK was a lot of fun to watch, no matter the idiocy. One can’t say the same for Alexander. Within minutes, the screenplay time-trips with no tether to comprehension. Stone had so little confidence in his subject’s dramatic range that he reverted to the worn contemporary cliché of sequential disarray, which, in this case, makes things as bewildering and as dull as possible. And there in the middle of this mishegas is my Angie, playing with snakes. Just the thought of Angie playing with snakes should turn me on. But not this time.

Drill, baby, drill

One of the benefits of not reading movie reviews is that I haven’t had to slog through the heaps of praise and damnation surrounding Avatar (2009). As the rest of humanity was going gaga over it a few months ago, salivating like Pavlov’s dogs, I clearly overlooked its running for a Best Picture Oscar until the evening the Awards were handed out. (I usually like to see all the contenders before the ceremony.) As I understand it, the film has made enough money to fuel the economy of a small nation, which is entirely understandable given that the masses prefer their culture simple, base and familiar, which Avatar supplies in abundance.

    Borrowing liberally from Aliens, A Man Called Horse, and any number of other (and far less taxing) movies, Avatar has the feel of a weak feature-length Disney cartoon, one of the ‘classic’ hand drawn ones which invariably lull me to sleep. There’s little point in discussing its cosmetic merits, though I was initially wowed by the meticulously constructed new world, a visual treat that momentarily justified the ridiculous expense of my high def TV and Blu-ray setup. But the ‘Holy Cow’ factor can only enthrall me for so long and, at one-hundred-and-sixty odd minutes, I need something more substantial than a bunch of caricatures grandstanding in a way that would’ve been an embarrassment of overacting in an earlier era.

    I also gather there’s been some brouhaha over the film’s racial-ethnic-political attributes, things I’ll leave to more learned minds than mine to ponder. Except perhaps the political angle. I can only assume that the blue people in Avatar were colored in accordance with the Democrats, while a chest-thumping military and Ivy league corporate dolts represent the Republicans. As I still feel the sting of the Cheney/Bush regime, Avatar was a mostly unpleasant experience, summoning memories of the Iraq invasion, slaughtering thousands of civilians, toppling Saddam Hussein (a campaign promise The Boy President never promised in his initial campaign) and hurling them back to the Stone Age. I have nothing but contempt for G.W. Bush and his thugs, and cringe as the conservative Right currently instigates fear and loathing (through propaganda tools like Fox News) for the same tired dream of domination once sought by the National Socialists in Germany in the ‘30s. Avatar had me thinking of this ungodly shit for far too long, and by the time it was over I needed an aspirin.

Above: Members of the Young Republicans gear up to protect and defend these here United States à Jesus.

Y’all got cocaine eyes

At a recent family gathering, a relative in her thirties sat in the room with us, her eyes fixed downward to the black plastic device upon which she typed frantically with her thumbs. She was picking up on the conversation in the room while texting whomever. We weren’t discussing quantum physics, so her complete attention wasn't necessary, though basic manners would’ve been appreciated, at least by me. But I wondered how, if not why, she was opting to multitask on this day off from her job. Her mind was zipping from subject to subject, word to word, with no regard for processing or digesting. She was beyond having an opinion, yet managed, in her image and demeanor, an air of arrogance which is now called, by those with a weak command of the language, ‘attitude.’ The sight made me queasy, but the most offensive part was the thumb-typing.

    I will never own a cellphone, I will never own a texting device. I hate the telephone, perhaps more than I hate cold weather or driving. I hate being telephoned and disturbed. I’m puzzled by people who call me and expect me to invent conversation on the spot. I have a friend I lend DVDs to, but he can’t watch a 90-minute film from beginning to end because he’s compelled to answer his cell every time it rings; it takes him months to watch one movie! The only reason I’d want to answer the phone is if someone’s giving me money. Otherwise, I’m really not interested. I believe Alexander Graham Bell should’ve been burned at the stake for witchcraft.

    In several spots of Sherlock Holmes (2009), the new film in which the detective has been reinvented as an action hero, I couldn’t hear dialog. Not that I missed anything; this tripe has nothing to do with Conan Doyle… or Jeremy Brett or Basil Rathbone, for that matter. Truth be told, it’s not an isolated occurrence: ever since the 1950s, there have been films with dips in sound. It’s as if they perfected film sound recording in the late 40s and into the 50s, but when the cameras went on location, sound went out the window. Not all movies, you understand. Anyway, with Sherlock Holmes there must’ve been dozens (hundreds?) of people involved in the editing and sound recording. Didn’t anyone notice the glitches? Or were they staring down into their BlackBerries, thumb-typing?

Above: Marianne Faithfull in Irina Palm

    Catching up with Irina Palm (2007), a modestly budgeted, intriguing bit of business starring Marianne Faithfull (whose thespic skills haven’t advanced all that much since 1968’s Naked Under Leather) and Jenny Agutter, I was confused after the guy who plays Marianne’s son tells her to take back the money. The dough was for his kid’s surgery. Yet the kid still gets the surgery, even though we’re led to believe the father didn’t take the money. I don’t recall a moment clarifying this. Now, Irina Palm wasn’t made on the same $cale as Sherlock Holmes, but I’d imagine there were at least twenty or thirty people involved in the editing and continuity. Didn’t anyone notice the omission, or were they all texting on their BlackBerries?

    Which brings us to cocaine. We reached a point in the late 1970s when films began to show the influence of the drug: flamboyance, incoherence, vast sums of money put into oddball ventures which were often of interest only to their creators and their creators’ sycophants. Kenneth Anger wrote of this conundrum in his 1984 volume, Hollywood Babylon II:

“The difference between Dope Now, and Dope Then, in the Hollywood scene, is that it’s all gone democratic. I mean everyone — the go-fers, the gaffers, the special-effects makers, the guys developing the footage in the labs — is toking away like mad, and it all shows on the screen. Mistakes have happened. Stunts have gone wildly wrong. Stunt girls have been paralyzed. Helicopters have dropped deadweight out of the sky, beheading actors, and it wasn’t in the script, in spite of Hollywood’s current wallow in gore-splatter.

    “O Coke, Where Is Thy Sting?”

    (For the record, my one connection to Kenneth Anger is my old friendship with an ex-model named Italia, with whom I worked out in a gym. Back then, Italia worked out nearly every day. Anger was the godfather of her daughter, Alida, who was named after Alida Valli. The godmother was Candy Samples! The last time I saw Italia is when I welched on a bet, the payoff being me painting her guestroom — in the nude. Sorry, I just didn’t have the moxie for it, among other things.)

    I don’t think cocaine is as big a problem today as it was in the early 1980s. But there seems to be a cocaine mentality permeating the zeitgeist, where distraction and lack of focus are paramount, where people are prone to adhere to knee-jerk (and uninformed) opinions, where we type with our thumbs because it takes too much effort to use all our fingers. Jimmy the bartender complained about accelerated lifestyles as far back as 1953 in the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One — “Nobody talks anymore! They all just grunt!” — which makes me think it’s always been like this. Only now with BlackBerries.

    On the upside: there’s no need to even edit this copy. I’ll just post it as is! Who cares? It’ll all be forgotten in less than a minute!

“Style is the new content”

Above, Kate Hudson's “Cinema Italiano” number from Nine (2009). I hated Rob Marshall's film of Chicago, mostly for his new style of ‘choreography’ — non-dancers filmed from the waist-up ‘dancing’ via flash cutting. I’m surprised how many otherwise intelligent people fell for that. Nine is an improvement — not a vast improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. Marshall still doesn’t realize how much of dancing is conducted below the waist. (He could probably make a movie of Riverdance using still photographs.) Nor does he acknowledge the old school of movie choreography — dancers dancing full frame to a camera that follows them. But this kind of stupidity is rampant, like a disease — check out any TV reality program and observe meaningless images of people with stunted IQs staring pensively for the cameras, rapid cutting somehow suggesting they’re lost in thought. How profound it all must seem to the susceptible mind. Anyway, Nine has its flaws, but Penélope Cruz is always worth watching, and Nicole Kidman looks magisterial. Sophia Loren, one of my life-long icons, unfortunately appears ready for a remake of Catwomen of the Moon. As for Kate Hudson, I’ve always thought of her as hard-looking, something of a hatchet face; here, however, she’s gained a few pounds and looks fabulous. I found myself replaying her “Cinema Italiano” several times.