Separated at Birth

I can't be the only one who's thought this. Both are also well known as staples of film noir, and for their similar political stances. I've been watching a lot of crime films lately, and I can't figure out why they were never cast as brothers.

Is Knowing All That Bad?

I submit that it is not.

Famously, Roger Ebert appears to be the only major critic who not only praised Alex Proyas's film, but vigorously defended it. Having now seen the film for myself, I'm tempted to say that Ebert went a little far, but who cares? Knowing got slammed by pretty much everybody else, critics and public alike, though beyond a certain sappiness in the last chunk (said sappiness stemming from an implication of what will happen some years after the film has ended that is hard to not be a little put off by -- see the film and you'll know what I'm talking about) I cannot figure out what in the world is supposedly so bad about it.

The story is thrilling and mysterious, and kicks off in a very intriguing manner: fifty years ago, a young girl puts a piece of paper, on which she has written a series of numbers, into her class's time capsule, which is unearthed during the present day by a new class, and the student who ends up with the numbers is the son of a widowed atrophysics professor played by Nicolas Cage. Certain mind-boggling coincidences lead Cage to believe the numbers predict major disasters, culminating, he comes to believe, in the end of the world.

This is a science fiction disaster film, like The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, but it's distinguished from those two by not sucking, and by having a brain in its head and sense of conviction about its themes, among them being religious faith and the nature of the universe. It's an Apocalypse film that realizes that the Apocalypse -- religious or man-made or plain old shit luck -- is kind of a big deal.

Is that the problem so many people have with Knowing? That it's sincere? I'm inclined to think so. That's not to say that there is no room for legitimate criticism to be directed towards the film, but Ebert seems to have been the only guy to engage with the film seriously. Every other reference to the film I've seen has been casually brutal and dismissive. But Knowing, like Deep Impact, is genuinely interested in the implications of its story, and the Irwin Allens and Roland Emmerichs and Michael Bays are not. I honestly feel like that puts some people off. Also like Deep Impact, Knowing takes its disasters seriously, and doesn't treat them as eye candy, or even as things that can be stopped. Both films also attempt to deal with the grief and horror that follow. Popcorn films aren't supposed to make you feel bad.

I suggest that anyone who hasn't read Ebert's review, or his blog post, on this film do so. I'm not convinced that Proyas was as successful with this film as Ebert says, but Ebert has without question dug out what Proyas's intentions were, and nobody else seemed to care to do so. More importantly, though, give Knowing a chance. I don't claim that this is a great film, and I don't believe that every single person reading this is going to even like it that much. But I happen to think it's pretty good, and that it deserves a shot. Knowing is trying something.

A Hurried Feeling Encased His Groin

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[This post is part of The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, hosted by Greg of Cinema Style]

There's no point in lying about this -- when you pick up a novel written by Ed Wood, you want it to be terrible. Not just bad, because that it will achieve this at minimum is a given, but awful to the point of hilarity. You want lines on par with "Modern man is a hard working human" from Glen or Glenda, or "You know, it's an interesting thing when you consider: the Earth people, who can think, are so frightened by those who cannot — the dead" from Plan 9 from Outer Space to litter every page. So if the resulting reading experience is unsatisfying on that level, without actually being any good at all, what are you left with? More specifically, what am I left with, because I'm the guy in the hot-seat.
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The book I'm trying to not talk about too specifically is Ed Wood's Killer in Drag. It's an utterly bizarre and slapdash piece of work, but as a piece of prose I can honestly say that I've read worse. It's completely undistinguished, and when Wood does shoot for poetry you get lines like the one I've used for this post's title. Generally, though, the writing is very workmanlike, forgettable...which I certainly can't say about the writing showcased in his films. Why is that? It's a question I've been wrestling with, and I actually think I have an answer, but before I get to that, let's look at Killer in Drag's story, because that thing sort of is a humdinger.

Glen is a hitman. Or, rather, his female personality, Glenda, is a hitperson. This proclivity of Glen's is favored by his mob employers, presumably because it aids in keeping his identity a secret. When Glen gets a job, he dresses as Glenda, goes to a nearby bar, and gets his orders from a skeevy little low-level mob thug called the Mouse, and then he goes and does it. Glenda, it's worth noting is apparently fall-down gorgeous, and not only can no man tell that she's not actually a woman, but they all seem to fall instantly and hopelessly in love with her. Glenda accepts this as natural, and even takes pity on these poor guys on occasion. In this passage, she's just shared an elevator with the elderly operator:

The little man appeared to be gasping for air. Glenda felt sure this little man would retire to the men's room in the basement for several moments as soon as he could get clear of his elevator; so she kissed him quickly on his high forehead, leaving a big red smear of lipstick. She felt sure her kiss, and its remaining imprint, would help him later in what he would have to do.

Moving on rapidly, Glenda's first job in the book is to try to extract, from a poor old deli owner named Greenbaum, the money owed by the old man to the mob. Greenbaum doesn't have it, so Glenda guns him down in cold blood, and steals every cent she can find from the store. This isn't to pay of the mob, but to keep for herself, so that one day she can get out of this miserable racket.

Later, she goes to see Dalten van Carter, and rich and elderly homosexual. Glen/Glenda is basically angling for this guy to become his sugar-daddy, despite the fact that, while Glen will have sex with men, it seems reasonably clear that he'd rather not. This is a strange aspect of the book, though what it means, or doesn't, about Wood's own life is something I neither know nor care about. But later, Glen will have sex with another transvestite, and what little description we get has a grubby tinge to it, which is missing from Glen's relationship with a female hooker named Rose.


But I'm getting quite a bit ahead of myself. Van Carter is not destined to be Glen's savior, because before too much can happen between them, one of Van Carter's jilted lovers bursts in and murders him. Glen is helped to escape by a servant, who we later find out is also murdered, which is a shame because he was the only witness. And Glen left behind his purse, which has his ID. The ID is for Glen, not Glenda, but he doesn't imagine it will take the police too long to piece things together and wrongly blame him for Van Carter's death. Clearly, Glen has to blow town and never look back. So he buys a carnival.

Again, I'm getting ahead of myself, but that is what he does. He winds up in a town that is currently being visited by the carnival, and finds himself pressed for his biography by a couple of corrupt cops named Ernie and Mac. To get them to leave him alone, Glen claims to work concessions at the carnival, and decides to make that lie the truth by getting a job at J.M. Greater's Greater Show Attractions, which must be the shittiest name for a carnival I've ever seen. Glen can't get a job, but as it happens the owner is looking to sell, and there you have it. Then Glen meets Rose the hooker, the two of them fall in love, and then the next morning four people die in a carnival accident/brawl/murder. Mac and Ernie, who've already hit Glen up for payoffs to overlook certain non-regulation rides and performances (mocking the carnival's bad luck with weather lately, Mac -- employing everything Ed Wood knows about how bad guys talk -- says "Yeah -- that's right, Ernie. Until tomorrow. Just thought of somethin'...Maybe the sky, tomorrow, will let us wait until midnight to collect our -- rent") now demand five grand in order to get Glen off of negligent manslaughter charges. They give him two hours to raise the money, during which time Glen discovers that he has no insurance for the accident, and is informed by Rose that Ernie and Mac will never just let him off scot-free. So Glenn tries to skip town dressed as Glenda, but Ernie and Mac catch on to his little game, and chase after him, but it's okay, because they get hit by an enormous truck and die.

The morality of this book is a mite skewed, one is tempted to say. Remember, very early in the book Glenda ruthlessly and coldly murders an old man because he didn't have enough money to pay off the mob. From that point until the end, we're meant to pity him because being a transvestite is pretty rough-sledding. I don't doubt that, but need Wood be quite this glib?

"...I'm wanted for murder back east."

She gulped.

"I didn't do it. But I can't prove it. The only witness other than the murderer was also killed. Do you see why I can't be taken into custody?"

"Oh, my darling."

"And now do you see why I can't take you with me -- not like this. I've got to travel alone and fast."

"I understand now, dearest...And I believe you incapable of murder."

"I wouldn't quite say that. But I'm innocent of what they want me for. Mac and Ernie were out there."

"The lousy bastards."

Are we really supposed to feel all the sympathy we normally would for a man wrongly accused just because the man in question, while guilty of any number of previous murders, doesn't happen to be guilty of the specific murder he's being hunted for? I'm afraid my heart ain't that big.

Then again, I could be judging too quickly, because the final chapter describes the Mouse, Glen's old contact, giving orders to a new hitman -- another tranvestite, this one apparently less successful in his appearance, named Pauline (and the Mouse is so stupid that he actually has to ask Pauline what her "boy name" is) -- orders which will send him to Los Angeles. When Pauline asks who her target is, the Mouse replies "One of your own kind, doll..." Which, if I'm connecting the right dots, should lead readers right into Death of a Transvestite, the sequel to Killer in Drag, and maybe Wood has a whole reap-what-you-sow finish for his story. I don't know, but as it stands, Glen is actually the worst human being in the whole book.

As for the prose, well, you can probably tell for yourself that it doesn't exactly soar, but it's also not quite embarrassing. However, it's also fairly boring, which is far worse than what I'm used to from Wood. My theory is that, despite the cross-dressing element to the story, Wood didn't really pour his heart and soul into this book. I've heard he wrote novels to make quick money, so he more than likely just dashed them off without much thought. He dashed off his scripts, too, but I think, because film was what he really cared about, he took his scripts far more seriously. The films were his statement, and were to be, and are, his legacy. When he didn't care about the work, it comes off flat and without style. The writing is servicable, barely, but forgettable. When he did care, though, that's when Wood failed spectacularly, and that's the great joy and poignancy of the man and his work. He aimed for the clouds, and flamed out on the tarmac. But he did take aim.

Oh My...

Here's a passage from Ed Wood's novel Killer in Drag to increase your excitement over the full upcoming post on the book I guess I'll have to write because I said I would:

A moment later Glenda stepped out of the bushes. She went to the fallen man and roughly stripped him of his long underwear and with the overalls she rolled them up in a ball and took them to the car where she threw them on the floor in the front. Then she went back to the fallen man. She stripped off her own panties, urinated in them and threw them across the man's face.

"At least you'll come out of it with the smell of things," laughed Glenda. "Dry them out and maybe you'll get home somehow. You filthy bastard."

So then. That's how it's going to be, I guess. Not exactly what I signed on for, but them's the breaks.

Oh, and no, I have no idea what "dry them out and maybe you'll get home somehow" means, either.

[This has sort of been a part of The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, hosted by Greg of Cinema Styles]

Best Movie Poster I've Seen in a While

I saw this over at Dennis's place...

Ed's Hollywood: Trouble, Problems, Heartaches

[This post is part of The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, hosted by Greg of Cinema Styles]

I believe the first time I learned that, in addition to writing and directing all those films that mean so much to all of us, Ed Wood also wrote a number of books, was one day in college, while spending my lunch break leafing through Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstacy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. As I remember it, that book gave a pretty detailed rundown of the several dozen novels, and occasional work of non-fiction, that Wood churned out, beginning, for all intents and purposes, in 1963 (years later, I also read an even more thorough look at this side of Wood in an article published in Outre magazine, and though I'm not entirely sure, since it's been a number of years and I no longer have the actual magazine, I believe that same article can be read here). It was then that I discovered that the gentle soul behind Bride of the Monster also wrote books with titles like To Make a Homo, Death of a Transvestite, Night Time Lez, The Sexecutives and Forced Entry.

That list of titles should give you a pretty good idea of what you'd be getting if you chose to actually purchase, sit down, and read one of Wood's books. "Lurid" doesn't seem to quite cover it. "Sleazy" is probably a better word, although the cost of a used copy of most of these titles is so prohibitive, the majority of us are going to have to live with only an assumption of their contents. Ah, but note that I said "most of these titles". The "good" news is that a handful of Wood's books have been reprinted in recent years (although, sorry, Raped in the Grass remains out of print), and so far I've been able to track down Wood's first novel, Killer in Drag (originally published as Black Lace Drag), Death of a Transvestite, Devil Girls, and Wood's sort-of memoir, sort-of practical guide for young people seeking a life in movies called Hollywood Rat Race. Later this week, I plan on writing up Killer in Drag, but today I wanted to dive right in to the world as Wood saw it. Or, more accurately, pretended to see it.

Written in 1965 (though not published until 1998, or at least so I'm told), Hollywood Rat Race is, as you might have already guessed, an exceedingly strange book. One thing I certainly wasn't expecting was for the book to be close to tedious for almost the first quarter of its 138 pages. There's almost no end to the negative things one can say about Ed Wood's films, but I think it would be hard for anyone to justify calling them dull. But the first two chapters of Hollywood Rat Race (titled, respectively, "Hollywood and You" and "I'm Ready to be Discovered") detail -- ad nauseum and with a great deal of cynicism, if not plain bitterness -- how close to impossible it is for anyone to make their way in the film business. Focusing on the plight of wide-eyed innocent females, these chapters are full of this sort of thing:

You did not fully realize how much stronger the competition was going to be when you arrived in Hollywood only partly prepared for it. Ten thousand newcomers a year, just like you, just as handsome or pretty, and just as talented, come to Hollywood, and all looking for the same job -- yours!

And on and on with this stuff. The "You" character in the first chapter is an aspiring actress (or actor) who was trained to regard performing as their calling through high school theater work. In the second chapter, the "You" character just won a beauty contest, and one of the prizes was an all expenses paid trip to Hollywood. Other than that, the two chapters are essentially identical. In fact, Wood ends chapter one with a not-very-convincing "Good luck to you!", and chapter two with a similarly dubious "Hope springs eternal." After that, though, we get to the good stuff, in that Wood begins to drop names, relate hard-to-swallow anecdotes, and, I'm convinced, slowly go mad.
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When I say Wood drops names, I mean he drops names like "Rory Bancroft" and "Kenne Duncan". About Kenne Duncan, Wood says:

Kenne has been a villain to almost every cowboy hero you see in Westerns on film or television. At the end of the picture, he is always outdrawn by the hero -- shot down and killed where he stands.

In reality Kenne is one of the best trick shots in the world. While his films show him as the villain who couldn't shoot his way out of a paper bag, his nightclub and carnival acts depict a different story. For this stereotyping, Kenne should hate movies.

His seven-thousand-dollar house car and his eight-thousand-dollar Higgins yacht tell us differently... Who can hate the business that loves you and rewards you.

There are two things worth talking about in that passage. One is the fact that, while it might be tempting these days to laugh a little at the air of grandeur Wood is blowing around Kenne Duncan (who appeared in Wood's Night of the Ghouls and The Sinister Urge), Wood shows a very admirable sense of loyalty towards his friends here. What he's doing is using the life of Kenne Duncan as an example of a successful film/show business career. Which, in practical terms, is probably a fair argument. Duncan worked pretty steadily from 1928 until about 1965, and racked up, as Wood points out, about 300 film and TV credits. It ain't necessarily stardom, but it still puts Duncan well within the successful minority of Hollywood actors.
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One of the things that Wood wants to drum into the neophyte actors and filmmakers he imagines will be reading this book is the importance of character actors in the film business, and the need for young actors to have a broad skill-set. And, he points out, you acquire such a skill-set by doing the work, and by apprenticing yourselves to those who've already been there. To illustrate his point (which no one can claim is a bad one), Wood offers this example:

The atomic bomb didn't just happen. Many people of many trades, skilled people of long apprenticeship and longer study were commissioned for such a magnificent undertaking. Of the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of people who could have liked to work on such a project, the men and women whose names you read in the newspapers were chosen because they have their trade well in hand. They knew it and they lived it, they are their trade. Just imagine what would happen if one person were permitted to cut in line, got the job, but couldn't handle it. He makes an error and the scene is spoiled. I wonder how we'd reshoot the atomic bomb dropping.

Far-fetched? Think about it!

The other thing you might be wondering about while reading that passage about Duncan is, "Why is Wood talking about hate? Who ever said anything about that?" Well, the passage comes from a chapter entitled, in fact, "Hate", which is all about how angry Wood gets when he hears people run down the film business. He claims that these people are everywhere, and that what these people do (he actually calls them "haters") is pump up the "New York Stage" as the haven for real actors and actresses, and they announce these beliefs at such a volume that they cannot be ignored. Wood continues:

Yet I don't even care to ignore them -- I want to know these "haters". I want to know who they are with their big mouths and their small ideologies, so I won't have to hire them for my films. You'd be surprised as to how man other directors and producers feel as I do.

And who are these ignorant big mouths who wish to tear Hollywood down? Ed Wood has a theory.

Perhaps a bunch of Communists? They seem to infiltrate everything with their hate campaigns. But if people have been hating Hollywood since movies began, then how could it be a communist-inspired phenomenon? I didn't say it was communist inspired, I said "perhaps".

So I guess he's not so sure. He thought he probably had it figured out, but then he gave it a bit more thought, and now he's reconsidering.

One of the other really fascinating chapters in the book is called "Nudie Cuties". In it, he claims to be relieved that the film made from his script Orgy of the Dead turned out so well, and he also offers this picture of the streets of Hollywood that all you small-town types had better get used to if you plan on trying to make a life there:

Even some of the boys have taken to wearing light pink lipstick while the girls have eliminated that cosmetic. But isn't this, then, show biz? Hollywood is not as the fan magazines attempt to paint. You'd be surprised how many of the boys prefer girl's [sic] clothes and the girls who prefer boy's [sic] clothes! And I mean big stars, directors, producers, and writers!

Ahem. I don't know what Wood means when he says "But isn't this...show biz?", because I don't think that's what showbiz is, actually, but as for the rest of it...what's he up to? Is he in some kind of mad denial about himself? That's how I initially read it, but now I think there's at least a fair chance that this was a sort of private joke for himself and his friends. I hope that's what he's doing, anyway. Otherwise, this passage would seem to indicate that his mind was slipping a little, if not into madness, than at least into self-hatred.
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But who knows what was going through Wood's mind as he wrote this book. His attitude to Hollywood and the film business seems to fluctuate from a kind of frustrated anger, in the early chapters, to an all-encompassing love, especially for those, like himself, who existed on the fringe. His lessons for the reader range from good, practical sense to flippant and lazy (on writing, Wood says at one point "Oh, I suppose a certain command of the language is advisable"). And to say he gets distracted away from his various points is not exactly to criticize Hollywood Rat Race, but rather to highlight why it's worth reading. I've let Ed Wood do most of the talking in this post, and I'll now give him the last word. This is from the very end of the book, in a chapter called, simply, "Hollywood", in which he complains that these days (in 1965), things in Hollywood just aren't as good, aren't as fun, as they used to be, and his beloved town is on the skids (he spends the first couple pages of the chapter complaining about the sorry state of modern parades). At the end, just a paragraph or so from the book's end, he says:
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The city fathers, the Chamber of Commerce, the councilmen and civic beautification organizations are trying to do something to improve Hollywood's glamor rating, but it takes a long time. Recently an organization planted a few trees along Hollywood Boulevard, but it will take many years before any one of those trees gives shade to the midget who touts the Hollywood Wax Museum, which by the way is a very fine show.

I Almost Forgot to Tell You Guys!

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, which celebrates the anniversary of the day the United States officially gained its independence from Hawaii. Queen Liluokalani never knew what hit her.

This is a holiday where I come from (Virginia), so I'm going to take the opportunity to enjoy that time away from this cursed blog, which might be counted as a shame -- although that's almost certainly not the case -- because today I saw Michael Mann's Public Enemies, and due to the holiday I have no plans to write about it. Part of my indifference to that task stems from the fact that, while I did indeed like the film -- at times, very much -- it left me without a great deal to think about. At this moment, I kind of feel like Public Enemies, as the English say, does what it says on the tin. It's too early to say how tenaciously the film will cling to my brain, but if I do eventually find a level of greatness in it, more than likely this blog will have moved on by then, and that's a loss we'll have to share together.
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I will say that Mann's choice to shoot on HD video jarred me once (in a scene towards the end featuring Marion Cotillard alone in her apartment -- the screen image was filled with a kind of too-modern grain, if that makes any sense), but was otherwise quite striking, especially in a beautifully crisp night-time shootout involving Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham). Also, the highlight of the film, for me, was Agent Winstead, played by Stephen Lang.
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That's Lang above. I've admired him for years, but I know very little about the guy. However, after seeing him in Public Enemies, I'm going to assume that his middle initial is "M.", and on his birth certificate his last name is italicized. Which means his full name is Stephen Motherfucking Lang. That's how I'm going to think of him from now on, anyway.
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So have a happy Fourth, all my American brethren, and, to everyone else, have a plain ol' good weekend.

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Oh, and PS! When I return on Monday, it will be with a post for Greg's (of Cinema Styles fame) Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, which lasts from July 6 through July 12. Please join him, won't you?