That's a Pretty Funny Looking Centipede

.Here's what I think happened: Tom Six was struggling to think of a truly ghastly and shocking hook for his new horror film, and was coming up empty. Everything, it seemed to him, had been done already. Every conceivable bit of grotesquerie that might make an audience vomit or flee had either already been done in the 70s, or by the Japanese, or by Pasolini all by his lonesome. Disconsolate, Six tried to unwind with a little on-line pornography, when he stumbled across a particular type of video, and thought, "Well now hey..." As a result, we now have The Human Centipede. Thanks a lot, porn.
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The Human Centipede is, of course, the new arthouse shock-horror film that's now being talked up everywhere that might be likely to talk up such things, and Tom Six is its writer-director. The reason the film is on anyone's radar is because of the premise, which is very nearly described by the title. That premise is as follows: in Germany, two hard-partying American girls (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie) find themselves lost in the rain and trees of the semi-rural German countryside when they stumble upon the house of a mad doctor (Dieter Laser), who drugs them both. Adding to his new cache of guinea pigs a Japanese tourist (Akihiro Kitamura) who he kidnaps off-screen, the doctor -- who publicly specializes in separating Siamese twins -- conducts his dream surgery/experiment, and slices and grafts and stitches his three victims together, connecting them mouth-to-anus, forming what he calls a "human centipede".

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And voilá -- instant shock classic, I suppose. Because make no mistake: that premise is the movie. Well, that and Dieter Laser, who I'll admit has an undeniable presence, and provides the film with a better central performance than it deserves. But outside of that the film is curiously inert and unimaginative. Stylistically, it's positively barren, unless by "style" you're willing to count the fact that the inside of the doctor's house is mostly white. I can recall no setting of mood through framing, or pace, or anything that might indicate that Tom Six has a filmmaker's eye. The only thing he brings to the table, if you want to view this as a positive, is that centipede idea, and here's the joke about that: it's not even that shocking. On paper, yes, sure (but also kind of stupid, and strained, and inorganic), but in execution what you end up with is three people on all fours whose lower torsos are swaddled in bandages, and whose faces are connected to the next-one-along's posterior also by bandages. Besides some hint of Joker-style scarring on their cheeks, bandages do the work that, in most horror films, would be handled by the make-up department. The final effect of this is of three people not surgically grafted together, but rather tied together, and not even that securely.

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Please understand, it's not that I desired to see this idea presented in a more robust and direct manner, but I would think that if you're going to have this idea in the first place, and like it enough to base an entire film around it, you'd at least have the courage of your own convictions and go ahead and actually do it. But no, this shocking film is almost ridiculously unshocking, and I was left wondering why anyone even bothered. And it's not even that the film has other things on its mind: there is a particular biologically unavoidable bit of awfulness inherent in this whole human centipede idea that is addressed, and it's handled by having Kitamura, who plays the front of the centipede and therefore is the only one who can speak, say "Oh no, that's about to happen!", followed by a shot of the girl behind him making eye motions that indicate she'd rather it didn't happen. That's it, and this biological imperative is never made apparent as an aspect of their daily torture. Again, I'm glad I didn't see anything like that, but I say to you, Tom Six: This movie was your idea, motherfucker. You shoulder the burden of thinking things through, and showing, or addressing but not showing -- depending on the form, structure, and style (which you don't have) used to make the movie -- what can reasonably be extrapolated from your premise. I shouldn't have to do that for you.

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The final question about The Human Centipede is how we're intended, finally, to take it. Quite a few people are claiming that it can only work if viewed as a black comedy, and I'll grant that Laser's performance does feed that theory at times, but if that's the tone Six was aiming for, he misses for one very simple reason: it's not funny. Not in the "such things shouldn't be joked about" sense, but in the "I didn't laugh when I guess I was supposed to" sense. So with that out of the way, we're left to wonder how it works as a horror film. The answer is "Not that well". Among the reasons for that is the poor execution of the film's only horrible idea, and that colors everything else. I could also argue that the three victims don't exist as human beings, even before they get turned into a centipede, but that would be okay if I ever believed they were truly suffering, which, because I don't find pretty clean-looking bandages to be inherently terrible, I didn't. The closest the film comes to achieving horror is at the very end, when we reach what could probably be regarded as the inevitable punchline. This coda is pretty unspeakable, but we reach that point because one character behaves in a way that is completely illogical, and which in no way reflects their behavior up to that point. So the one moment that might actually have an impact isn't even come by honestly.

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Like I said at the beginning: thanks a lot, porn.

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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One thing I've heard more than once from admirers of The Human Centipede -- and so intended, I can only conclude, as praise for what Tom Six has given us -- is "This isn't Hostel." No indeed it is not, because Hostel (d. Eli Roth) is much better.

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There's no question that Roth's film -- about a small group of horny male tourists finding themselves up-for-sale in a Slovakian club that offers human beings as high-priced murder victims -- is a flawed film, but viewed in relation to The Human Centipede it seems positively inspired. Roth has taken a lot of flack over the years, sometimes for good reason, but I think it's impossible to deny that the guy has talent. My frustration with him as a filmmaker is that he sometimes lacks follow-through, but watching Hostel again today I was once again impressed not only by his eye, and sense of tone (the opening credits of Hostel have more style, mood, and sense of creeping dread than the entirety of The Human Centipede), and, more than anything, his ability to craft small moments amidst the over-the-top mayhem. There's the moment when one of the clients of the Slovakian murder club, a German man, realizes that his victim can beg for his life in a language that he, the client, understands (he bought an American, but the guy happens to know German), and the client then loses almost all sense of power. Or Rick Hoffman in a brilliant turn as an American client, whose aggression and sociopathy almost overwhelm his ability to speak. Or the Japanese client (Takashi Miike) , who says of the club, "Be careful -- you can spend all your money in there", as though he were just leaving a casino.

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Hostel is full of little touches like that, and when you get right down to it, I think that's the real difference, because The Human Centipede has no little touches. There's no eye for detail, or humanity, or behavior, and no ear for human speech (Roth has a bit of that, too) beyond the level of competency. Hostel is, whatever you think of it, a real movie, and The Human Centipede exists only so people can say "Can you believe they made a movie about stitching people's mouths to other people's asses?"

I Can't Tell You That, Bru

Today I watched Peter Hyams's Capricorn One for the first time, and I was struck by a couple of things. One of those things was not exactly a revelation, but is worth noting anyway (and which will, in any case, lead me to the second thing) and it is that Hal Holbrook is a brilliant actor. He has at least three big scenes in Hyams's paranoid thriller about a faked NASA Mars-landing. In the first one, Holbrook, as NASA bigwig Dr. Kelloway, is laying out the truth behind the Capricorn One mission to the three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and -- ah well -- O. J. Simpson) who, just moments ago, believed that a bomb was going to go off under their asses and blow them clean to Mars, for real. Skipping ahead to the second scene, Kelloway is conducting a press conference in which he announces that the three astronauts were killed on re-entry (they weren't, because they never went to Mars, but Kelloway is working behind the scenes to make them actually dead). Finally, in the third scene, Kelloway is visiting the sort-of widow (Brenda Vaccaro, also superb) of one of the astronauts, hoping to talk her into attending a memorial service for her husband and the other two astronauts.

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In each scene, Kelloway is working towards his only goal throughout the film, one set up in that first scene with the three astronauts: he wants to save NASA. Dr. Kelloway has dreamed of building from the Mercury and Apollo programs for decades, but a series of setbacks have put the space program in jeopardy. In his speech to the astronauts, laying out the conspiracy, Holbrook plays Kelloway's desperation, passion, uncertainty and guilt so beautifully, with such precision, that it's nearly impossible for me to describe what he does, or how he does it. He lives that scene, as he lives the press conference, when Kelloway is hoping his speech, and the press, can somehow save his dreams, which by this point in the film he can sense are collapsing. Later, when he meets with Vaccaro, Holbrook plays this man, who we now know is willing to kill for what he wants, as a genuine old friend to this grieving woman.

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His scene with Vacarro is, in particular, a great one, top to bottom. Though Holbrook commands the other two scenes I've mentioned, he has less to do at the press conference (though check out his look of hopeful, but defeated, weariness as he delivers the "you tell me" section of his dialogue), and is playing off three stiffs in the early speech to the astronauts. The less said about Simpson the better, and, frankly, the same goes for Brolin (though for somewhat different reasons), but Waterston, a fine actor, seems bored. But not Holbrook, and later, not Vaccaro, either. Both of them are playing their roles in full, not caring, or not appearing to care, that they are nailing each moment, and each word, with everything they have, to the benefit of a high-end B movie.

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Which is as it should always be, of course, and that brings me to my second observation: Capricorn One is a movie seriously divided. Holbrook doesn't have a whole lot of scenes, but in the ones he has, he's given a lot of dialogue, and it's generally very well-written. The screenplay is by Hyams, a hugely frowned-upon filmmaker these days, but there are moments in Capricorn One when you sense a true writer, writing. And then you get goofball shit with Telly Savalas towards the end, you get a plot that collapses pretty badly, you get laugh-inducing slow-motion in the last seconds, and you get Elliot Gould, who probably felt as divided filming his scenes as I felt watching it.

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My hopes were not, I must admit, especially high for Capricorn One going into it, despite being praised by my pal Greg Ferrara. I figured it would be a fun, trashy 70s thriller -- effective, but silly. And it was. What I was wholly unprepared for was the untapped potential that's trying to bust out about every ten, fifteen minutes, whenever Holbrook appears as a good man who does evil things, or any time Gould gets a good scene (he also has a couple of real winners with Vaccaro). This should have been frustrating, I suppose, but I was not expecting performance, or dialogue, at this occasionally very high level, and so, finally, I was more delighted than anything else. Except now that I think back on it, yeah, it's sort of frustrating.

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The film Capricorn One most reminded me of -- and, coincidentally, today's Collection Project Film of the Day -- is Three Days of the Condor (d. Sydney Pollack). That's a film that has an absolutely stunning opening chunk, maybe the first ten or fifteen minutes. In that part of the film, Robert Redford, as a bookish, desk-bound CIA operative, leaves his similarly bookish and desk-bound colleagues to pick up lunch. While he's gone, a group of men break into the office and, coldly, efficiently, and wordlessly, gun everybody down. These characters, Redford's co-workers, have been set up just enough for us to buy into the sedentary nature of their positions within the CIA, and to be curious enough about them to wonder how they'll figure into the larger story. And then they're all dead, in a snap. In my view, this opening is so good, so chilling, that Three Days of the Condor never recovers. From that point on, the film becomes rote, and (worse) preachy, and even the appearance of Max von Sydow can't drag it by its collar back into the world of the movie it might have been. It's true that I am perhaps philosophically disinclined to fully embrace this sort of paranoid thriller, but I still think that Pollack and his collaborators front-loaded their film with all their best ideas (which, really, was an idea, singular), and could never match it.

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I wonder if something similar happened with Capricorn One. It's tempting to say that Hyams wasn't taking himself, or his film, as seriously as Pollack, Redford, et al, clearly did with Three Days of the Condor, but I think the film's best scenes indicate that yeah, he did take it seriously, and good for him. It's just that, ultimately, Kelloway was the one guy Hyams, as a writer, really invested in. Then he went one better and, in a masterstroke, cast Hal Holbrook. The result being that I want to see the film again, but this time put Holbrook as Kelloway front and center.

Gloom

.My wife told me, when we were first going out, that I reminded her of Eeyore. Today, I am proving that assessment to be a fair one. As a result of my down mood, nothing I planned to write this weekend has found itself written, nor will it. However, I have that whole new thing going, and I can't very well start blowing it off a week in. So...

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The Collection Project Movie of the Day:.

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Among the things that make me gloomy lately is the fact that my region-free DVD player is on the blink, has been for some time, and for various reasons I've taken no steps to replace it, resulting in an inability to watch any of my foreign-region DVDs. Out of those, 10 Rillington Place (d. Richard Fleischer) is about as gloomy -- bracingly so, if "bracingly gloomy" is an achievable state -- a film as you're likely to find. It's the true story not just of English serial killer John Reginald Christie (a terrifying Richard Attenborough) and his crimes, but of the ghastly fate of Timothy Evans (an as-ever brilliant John Hurt), husband of one of Christie's victims, and, with his wife, one of Christie's boarders at the now-infamous titular address. Watching the ending of this emotionally brutal film unfold, there's a sense of outrage that is increased by the impotence one feels upon reminding oneself that you're not only watching a movie, but that the true events being depicted happened about 60 years ago, and, brother, that ship has sailed.
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It's a nasty and relentlessly hopeless movie, filmed by Fleischer -- this is his best, from what I've seen -- as a kind of kitchen-sink nightmare that seems to be saying "When you're in the clutches of despair, be careful of who you call 'friend.'"

CENSORED

Even though this happened again, it's no problem. Don't worry about it. Nothing about this situation will keep you from making fun of Christians.


The Collection Project Movie of the Day:

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (d. Trey Parker) is, in fact, a pretty funny movie. Satan's "Up There" number still absolutely kills me, and I remember seeing this in the theater, not thinking much of it, and then catching it on video and laughing myself stupid. But looking back on it now, the fact that the film was so widely embraced as sharp piece of satire seems pretty unsurprising. Which is not to say that it isn't that, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone are going after a pretty big, and pretty easy, target, which is censorship, with added shots at the military, and celebrities, and so forth. The big ones are censorship and parental responsibility, and I feel like that was all pretty low-hanging fruit, even at the time. Doesn't change the fact that it's funny, but I wouldn't call it necessarily brave. Still, critics, by and large, had the South Park film's back at the time, and it's considered something of a classic now. Parker and Stone have gone on to better things, and smarter, less obvious satire, since then, and have taken one or two stances that have taken real guts. The shit has hit the fan more than once, and the outrage tends to be strangely muted. Quiet murmurs of "Oh, that shouldn't be" followed up by a flurry of "Yes, but" qualifications tends to be the order of the day.

Stone and Parker need to change networks, or go on-line exclusively, or something. Anything to get away from this hypocrisy.

You Gotta Have an Opinion!

Do you think God came down from heaven and sto--
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That part still makes me laugh, and clearly it’s still one of Pulp Fiction’s iconic moments. But while Marvin’s death is usually discussed, if at all, as one of those troubling crossroads where violence and comedy meet, what it signals to me is the moment when Tarantino’s film becomes brilliant.

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Let me add, hastily, that by no stretch do I consider Pulp Fiction to be Tarantino’s best film. It, and Reservoir Dogs previously, haven’t aged as smoothly as I would have liked, but since Pulp Fiction is the film that knocked everyone on their ass, before most of them knew who Tarantino was, it tends (like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights), in my view, to get over-valued. Those opening scenes between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, for instance, tend to grate on me more than they used to. Not that I think Tarantino has anything to prove – the two Kill Bill films and Inglourious Basterds, not to mention Jackie Brown, have done more to confirm his vast talent for me than any Pulp Fiction-related nostalgia ever could. But I think Pulp Fiction gets a bit of a pass from some people, because they remember what it was like to see it for the first time.

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Still. Marvin’s head coming apart signals the beginning of the slow reveal of the film’s structure, and that fractured storytelling – much aped, often poorly, since the Pulp Fiction’s release – is still well worth celebrating. The story isn’t randomly jumbled up, and it’s not done so for some arbitrary reason, like it wants to “keep people guessing”. There is that revelatory moment in the diner, while Vincent and Jules are eating and talking, unwinding after the madness they’ve just been through (all that happened before noon!?), when the film repeats Tim Roth’s “Garcon! Coffee!” line, and the audience realizes what’s coming, and that opening with Roth and Amanda Plummer was not just some statement of attitude, but had a real narrative purpose. And we all began to feel giddy – expecting, let’s face it, more hilarious violence – but that’s not what we get. Later, when it’s all over, you start to think: Wait, when does Vincent die? Jules is already out of the picture by that point, isn’t he? He’s left the hitman business. Vincent hasn’t, and now he’s sprawled out in Butch’s bathtub, stitched up the front with his own gun. Huh. It would appear that, in Vincent’s case, the tyranny of evil men has had the Lord’s vengeance laid down up him. Not so Jules.

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This could have all been communicated in a linear fashion, but in no way would it carry that same resonance. The Kill Bill films unfold in the same way, with, if anything, even more audacity, but, for many filmgoers of a certain age, Pulp Fiction offered a certain kind of soulfulness in its winding narrative that was particularly unexpected, and still highly valued.

The Collection Project: You Don't Know What Fear Is

Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright was not anywhere near as stage-bound -- or backstage bound -- as I expected it to be. The film is about a woman named Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) who, with the help of her worldly father (Alastair Sim) tries to prove the innocence of a man named Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd), who is an actor, and who Eve is in love with, and who, in turn, is trying to protect the person who he says is the true killer, famous stage actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), who is also the victim's wife. So that's two actors, and Eve herself is an acting student. Furthermore, much is made of Charlotte's willingness to go back on stage so soon after the brutal killing of her husband, and Eve uses her theater skills to aid her in her amateur sleuthing, which forms the core of the film's action.

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But what I expected from the film -- based on nothing but speculation, and a sort of hope that such a film from Hitchcock would be good fun -- was some sort of murder mystery, perhaps of the And Then There Were None variety, set in the wings and dressing rooms of a London theater. Most of Stage Fright's plot exists away from such a setting, except for a few scattered scenes here and there, and the climax (which in not-atypical Hitchcock fashion calls back to what you'd think would be a throwaway gag in the opening credits). Outside of that, mousy little Eve Gill is bouncing back and forth between her home, her father's home, Charlotte's home, and various pubs and cafés in which she meets a police detective named Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding, to whom Alan Cumming bears a striking resemblance). I'll admit to being slightly disappointed by this fact, as I wanted to see the movie I'd made up in my head and then assumed Hitchcock had made, rather than the one that has existed independent of my ignorance of its true contents for sixty years.

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Of course, the film itself is quite good -- a blatant lark on Hitchcock's part, but Hitchcock's larks are quite a different thing from the larks of other filmmakers, who tend to only make such films when they feel like slumming. I've gathered that Hitchcock was a bit down on Stage Fright in later years, because he had misgivings about the "false flashback" device that sets Eve on her ill-advised path. Not to give too much away -- well, okay, this is going to give away quite a bit -- but in Stage Fright Hitchcock upends both his often-expressed fear of the police (which never got much of a full-blown expression in his films anyway, and existed most completely in answers to interview questions), and his empathy for the Wrong Man. It's this latter bit that is central to the false flashback, which Hitchock apparently deeply regretted because it was basically a lie. Some version of the "false flashback" -- in which the audience is led to believe one particular thing to be true about how the characters have reach the point at which we meet them at the beginning of the film, only to have that proved entirely false in the last minutes -- survives, and even thrives, to this day, and nobody who now uses it seems to be too bothered about it. And frankly, Hitchcock is one of the few people who can really make it work, possibly because Stage Fright is less an exercise in suspense (though there's some especially nice stuff in that regard at the end) and more of a series of fun, funny character moments, played well by a strong ensemble cast, all of which is anchored by a not-particularly-tricky thriller plot. Alastair Sim, Jane Wyman and Michael Wilding are all very good, and a pleasure to hang out with, and they're what lift the film.

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But the weak link? Marlene Dietrich. She's simply not that good in this film, and no, I didn't like "The Laziest Gal in Town", either, at least not the way she sings it.

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It's interesting, then, that some version of what I expected Hitchcock's film to be can be found in Michele Soavi's lunatic Italian slasher film Stagefright. Which is not to say that I expected to see a slasher film from the Alfred Hitchcock who made movies in the 1950s, but I fully expected, had he lived well into the 1970s, that he would have gotten there (just look at his plans for the never-filmed Kaleidoscope Frenzy). Besides, Italian thriller and horror directors often owe sizable and acknowledged debts to Hitchcock, with their often out-sized suspense set-pieces.

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This Italian take on the genre -- giallo films, as if I needed to tell you -- is not something I've historically gotten along with, outside of isolated moments, a scattering of Mario Bava films, and pretty much the entirety of Dario Argento's Tenebrae. The problem for me is often based on a sloppiness of storytelling, and an inability to believe that what I'm watching on-screen is ever happening to actual people. The genre's advocates, who are legion, would probably tell me that I'm missing the point, that the films are all about style, but I don't much like the idea of having to ignore half of the reasons I go to movies in the first place. Up to this point, one of the greatest offenders in all of Italian genre filmmaking was Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man, a highly-regarded film that, to me, was simply loaded with bad jokes and spookhouse lighting, and a tone that reminded me of Peter Jackson's early splatstick films, which I also don't like.

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So you can imagine both my dismay and delight to discover how much I enjoyed Soavi's Stagefright. Not that it's such a tightly plotted piece of work, but it is a sparely plotted piece of work. It's quite simple: a down-at-the-heels theater company is putting on an absolutely bugnuts-looking musical based loosely on a local serial killer. That serial killer escapes from the mental institution, finds his way into the theater, and begins killing everybody. That's it, so Soavi is much more free to let his film live on its truly bizarre and endlessly striking imagery, as the killer -- wearing the dark suit and owl-mask used for his character in the musical -- hacks his way coldly through our cast, without having to worry about ignoring another aspect of his film, because there isn't one.

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Soavi is not exactly Hitchcock, but one moment in the film made me think of one of Hitchcock's most icily humane moments. In Soavi's Stagefright, the killer makes his presence in the theater (the cast and crew are locked up under police supervision while they rehearse) by joining in on a scene being prepared on stage that involves the killer in the show murdering a woman in her bed. The actress playing the victim, Corinne (Lori Parell) believes she's playing the part with Brett (John Morghen), but of course she's not, and after the killer has stabbed her repeatedly and let her drop to the stage, Soavi shows her lying there, gushing blood and struggling to breathe, her eyes glassy and confused, as, in the background, the other actors and crew come rushing to her aid. This is a bleakly human moment in what is not a particularly human film, and it put me in mind of Marion Crane as she collapsed in the shower, her life swirling away from her, never quite sure what had just happened.

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But it's that owl-faced killer that really sells Soavi's film, as there is not a moment he's on-screen where the image of a man in an owl mask attacking people with knives and chainsaws that isn't also supremely effective. It's a genuinely bizarre choice, that owl mask. As it exists in the musical the company is trying to stage, it's just kind of stupid (the only explanation for it is that the musical is called The Night Owl), but once it's being worn by an actual murderer, it takes on a nightmare quality that you don't come across every day. The moment when a character shines his flashlight through a hole in the floor and illuminates that owl man carving a woman up with a chainsaw, or later, when he seats himself among his grisly trophies in one of the most grotesquely creepy scenes I've ever encountered, I knew I was watching truly unique horror imagery, the kind that many try to manufacture, or buy, or steal, but which Soavi just lets be.

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The Collection Project

Ooooh, the Collection Project! How grand! What's that gonna cure??

Okay, okay, shut up. It's just a name. Let me explain what this new project is going to be, and how it's going to work, and we'll see if, by the end, it makes any sense.

Last night, I was lying, as is my custom, on the couch, and I happened to begin an idle scan of my DVD collection. Bragging about the size of one's DVD collection is a pretty stupid, not to mention bizarre, thing to do, so please understand that's not what I'm doing when I say that I own a fair number of them. This is not unusual, or noteworthy in any way. But for whatever reason I started thinking about writing about all of them -- not writing about them en masse, but individually. And not writing about them as DVDs, but as films. Writing about each film I owned, one (or so) at a time, on this here blog, and stopping only when I'd run out of films to write about. That is what I now propose to do. I mean, not tonight, but starting now. Well, Sunday, but I think you get me.

But do you? Do you really? Once the basic idea for this project occurred to me, I began to wonder about the practicality of it, how I could do this without burning out on it after a week, and how to do it without letting it completely overwhelm what I like to think is a certain level of diversity on this blog. So this project is going to take several different shapes. The first thing you should know is that there will be no order to this -- I'll write about whatever movie or movies I happen to feel like writing about. So on Sunday, it is my intention to write about a couple of movies that jumped out at me from my shelves as possibly being an interesting little double-bill. That's one form this project will take: interesting pairings. Self-explanatory, I should think, and if not you'll get the idea on Sunday. Another, more standard-issue form will be simple, long-form reviews of a single film, not at all unlike the many others I've already written here.

Okay, so, how's this any different from what I already do? Well, I'll tell you: every blog post you see here until the project reaches its end (at which time, Ragnarok will be upon us, so I wouldn't even worry about it) will be about a film in my DVD collection. But not every post I write from here on out will be about films in my DVD collection. Right now, if I had to guess, I'd say you're probably thinking one of two things: "Hah?" or "The fuck??" Please, to explain: let's say that tomorrow I go see Kick-Ass (I'm not going to, but let's just say), and then I come home and decide to write about it. At the end of that review, after I've signed off with a righteous "Time to move off the field, gramps!" -- signalling to those who dislike Kick-Ass that they are aged -- I would then tack on an addendum, a little capsule review of a film in my DVD collection like, say, Spider-Man. Because, you know: comic books. That's the kind of left-field connection I hope to make on a regular basis.

So, every post will be about The Collection Project, even when it's not. That includes lazy-bones picture posts, where I just put up a picture of an actor or writer or director -- with this project, I will be forced to go one step further, every time (of course, if I've already written up the movie at some length elsewhere on the blog, then I'll just provide a link, and you can cry all you want on those days -- I'll be at home chomping on a big old cigar, wishing only that I could smell your misery). Of course, there is the possibility that I'll have to break off from this on occasion. For instance, if this October I decide to go another round with The Kind of Face You SLASH!!!, then The Collection Project will have to take a hiatus. That would simply be too much -- I wouldn't be able to do it. Barring that sort of special occasion, however, every day, in every way, The Collection Project shall grow. Also, not every day. I'm going to post as often, or as rarely, as I ever have. Forget what I said about "every day". That was just me lying. But if you understand anything about what I've just laid out, let it be this: the only way in which this blog will change by having The Collection Project added to it is that each post will be at least just a little bit longer. Every post will at least have a post-script. In some cases, I won't write a full capsule review, but rather some general thoughts, or I'll write about a particular scene, or performance, but I'll always write something.

The only other question I can anticipate from you, My Readers, is: "Why? Are you just dumb?" Not at all! There are a couple of reasons for this. One, essentially ancillary, reason is to lay my cards on the table. What I mean is, have you ever been in a store that sells used DVDs, and they're having a sale where you buy three and get one free, and you find three DVDs you really want, and then find yourself scraping for that free fourth title, and for reasons known only to you and your God, you eventually find yourself leaving the store with a copy of Dragonheart? You were not a person who owned Dragonheart twenty minutes ago, and now look at you. That's what I mean about laying my cards on the table: I do this all the time. I own some movies that I'm quite frankly embarrassed to admit I own, and you're going to hear about them all. Not that I think this is somehow necessary, but for some reason I do think it will be interesting and/or fun. Time will probably prove me wrong. Incidentally, I also own a lot of movies that I'm not embarrassed to own, but that I don't really like all that much. But they interest me anyway. Those should be good to dive into.

The other two reasons are more important to me (in the important-by-blogging-standards sense). This project will force me to revisit old movies that I haven't watched in years, or even at all, because I own them, and have begun to take them for granted. Movies mean a lot to me, but I own a fair number of DVDs that are just collecting dust. This is my way of dusting them off and connecting to them again (or for the first time, or not at all, as the case may be). The other reason is that, simply, I think a person's book collection, or DVD collection, is interesting. I think all biblio- and cinephiles would agree with me on that. I'm not so stupid or shallow as to think a person's DVD collection in any way measures their worth, but it does say a hell of a lot about their taste, and what the hell is a movie/book blog like this but an expression of my tastes?

So, there you go. That's my big idea. I know, it sounds stupid. But I'm doing it anyway, and we begin on Sunday. See you then.

Do You Like What You See?

And then BLAM! I'm being controlled by Satan. So to the list of things I would be useless during -- which already include quests for treasure in the Amazon and anything that would require me to become an astronaut -- you can now add 18th Century occult/Satanic-type situations involving pretty blonde ladies. I still think I'd be okay if me and a small group of friends found a bag of money, unless I suddenly turned greedy or one of my friends betrayed me. Barring either of those occurrences, though, I think I could swing it.

Chekhov's Gun

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Johnny and Lisa seem to have everything. Johnny is Lisa's future husband, and Lisa is Johnny's future wife. Johnny has a very secure job, plus he's about to be promoted. They share an apartment in San Francisco, and it has couches and chairs and paintings in it. On their roof is lawn furniture and a corrugated tin shed, and elsewhere in their building lives Johnny's pseudo-adopted son, an emotionally regressive 18-year-old named Denny. What else could they possibly need?

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Love. Love is what else they could need.

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Oh hi. The problem, it seems to me, with writing in any controlled or structured way about Tommy Wiseau's extraordinary The Room is that there isn't a single moment in the entire film that isn't worth mentioning. I've seen it twice now (the second time around, I fast-forwarded through the sex scenes, and if you've seen The Room you know what a time-saver that is), and I found myself latching on to particular moments that had to make it into this write-up, only to have them completely crowded out in a snap by an avalanche of dialogue and performance choices that each deserved an entire post of their own. Wiseau's film is, in short, a gift that won't stop giving, and by the end the attentive viewer is overwhelmed with sensation, with such a variety of experiences, that upon reflection The Room begins to seem like nothing more than a jumble of roses, footballs, wax apples, and words and phrases like "hi", "future", "best friend", "it doesn't matter", "I don't want to talk about it" and "I definitely have breast cancer".

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Shot like a SyFy Channel Original Movie, minus all the rock monsters and sharktopi, The Room is, as I indicated above, the story of a failing relationship. As the film begins, we are introduced to Lisa (Juliette Danielle) as she greets Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) upon his return home from work. Johnny gives her a present, a slinky red dress, and it is here that one of Wiseau's aesthetic hallmarks (he not only stars in the film, but also wrote and directed it, taking each job in both the first and second units, if the credits are to be believed), which is an inability to remember, or to read, what he's just written, and therefore writing it all over again. Here, Lisa has just accepted the dress:
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Lisa: Can I try it on now?

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Johnny: Sure, it's yours.

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Lisa: You wait right here, and I'm going to try it on right now.

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Johnny: Mm hm.

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After Lisa puts the dress on right now, Johnny's adopted-ish son Denny (Phillip Haldiman) arrives, to tell Lisa how pretty she looks and to ask how much the dress cost. He also asks if he can take a nap with Johnny, but after being gently rebuffed twice (not only is the nap a no-go, but he's told he can't watch Johnny and Lisa have sex, either), Johnny and Lisa make love. It is here that I believe Lisa begins to hate Johnny.

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This growing hatred, this rending asunder of a love once so true, forms the heart, soul, spine, brain and lungs of The Room. Lisa will awaken from their passionate and incredibly slow love-making to decide, abruptly, that she no longer loves Johnny, despite the fact, as Lisa's mother Claudette (Carolyn Minnott) points out, that Johnny provides for her, and Lisa can't provide for herself (Claudette, by the way, is the one who has the evidently mild case of terminal breast cancer). Lisa will begin a campaign of manipulation, betrayal, infidelity, and not-wanting-to-talk-about-things that will include seducing Johnny's best friend Mark (Greg Sestero) and fixing Johnny, a non-drinker, a potent cocktail made up of one part whiskey and one part vodka (which I've dubbed the Necktie Headband, after the couple's ensuing drunken shenanigans) so that she can later make the claim that Johnny got drunk and hit her. Since nobody cares if Lisa got punched, this is soon dropped. But the one thing that is not dropped is tragedy. Tragedy looms, and is also symbolized. I just this second decided that there's a symbol for "tragedy" in this movie. More on that later.

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If The Room was merely (merely!) a story of love gone cold, it would deserve our attention for Wiseau's indelible performance, carried by his rich, South-Northern Frenchtalian accent, and for the scenes of emotional violence between Johnny and Lisa (LISA: Women change their minds all the time! JOHNNY: Ha ha! You must be joking, aren't you!(?)), as well as the crushing tragedy that forms the story's devastating endgame (okay, the symbol for tragedy is a football, but just hold on for the rest), but, of course, The Room is so much more than that.

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Wiseau's loose storytelling method allows for a host of supporting characters to appear at random and leave a trail of rich texture behind him. Denny, in particular, has a habit of repeatedly dropping by Johnny's apartment to exchange dialogue with either Lisa or Johnny that seem to be constructed from the beginnings and endings of about a dozen different conversations. Such as:

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Lisa: Hey Denny, how are you doing?

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Denny: Fine. What's new?

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Lisa: Actually I'm really busy. Do you want something to drink?

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Denny: No thanks. I just wanna talk to Johnny. You look beautiful today. Can I kiss you?

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Lisa: You're such a little brat!

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Denny: Just kidding. I love you and Johnny!

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Early in the film, it is also revealed that Denny has some sort of vague drug problem. He is accosted on the rooftop of his building by Charlie-R, a drug dealer, who pulls a gun and demands that Denny pay him his money. Denny is rescued by the sudden appearance of every other character who's been introduced up to that point, and a long, tearful and hysterical third-degree of Denny at the hands of Lisa ensues. This conversation consists primarily of Denny saying that he owed Charlie-R money because he bought some drugs from him, but that he got rid of the drugs and it doesn't matter, and Lisa screaming "What kind of money?" and "What kind of drugs?" The answer to the question "What kind of money?" is probably "American", but the kind of drugs that Denny bought and then disposed of is one of the film's many intriguing mysteries.

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This crisis in Denny's life is never mentioned again, but, crucially, a gun, or the idea of guns -- of violence -- has been introduced into The Room's false sense of love and peace. It is with these supposedly, and so-called, meaningless scenes that Wiseau subtly shapes his tragedy (or "football"). Two other non-sequitor events lay the symbolic groundwork. In one, a character named Mike stops Johnny as he's running through what appears to be a tiny abandoned warehouse. Mike, we know, is the boyfriend of Michelle, Lisa's friend. Earlier, we saw Mike and Michelle preparing for sex -- in Johnny's apartment -- by eating chocolate out of each other's mouths, which is gross, and which I don't think you're supposed to do. They were caught in the act by Lisa and Claudette, who found Mike's underwear hanging out of his pocket. It was a light-hearted scene, and Mike recounts the events to Johnny (significantly referring to the incident as a "tragedy"), in the tiny warehouse, in a light-hearted way. Johnny assures Mike that he's not only listening to his story, but that he understands stories about underwear, and points out, when Mike has concluded, that "That's life!" At this point, Denny shows up, carrying with him a football. This football -- or possibly many footballs -- is seen throughout The Room, and leads to more than one round of catch. This is precisely what Johnny, Mike and Denny proceed to do, when suddenly Mark shows up. Mark, Johnny's best friend, is at this point well into his affair with Lisa (Johnny's future wife), and we know that he's experiencing a lot of guilt about this. When he agrees to take part in their game of "catch the football", Denny and Johnny begin to hint at Mike's crazy underwear story. Thunderstruck, Mark says "Underwear!? What's that!?", and then shoves Mike into a nearby pile of trashcans. Mike is clearly injured -- badly injured -- and has to be helped away by his friends. A "tragic" story leads to tossing the football around, which leads...to violence.

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Later in the film, Johnny, Mark, Denny, and Peter (another friend, and a psychologist) meet at Johnny's apartment, each of them wearing a tuxedo. The purpose of this evening wear is left to our imaginations, but it occurs to Denny that it might be fun to go down to the alley and throw the football around. Peter -- who knows that Mark and Lisa are having an affair, and who Mark threatened with violence -- demurs at first. He doesn't think this is a good idea. As a psychologist, perhaps he is more in tune to the emotional and phyiscal tragedy that is represented by Denny's football, but Peter's own pedestrian human nature causes him, eventually, to succumb, after the other three call him a chicken, and make chicken noises at him. So they all go to the alley and start throwing the football. Denny tells Peter to "go out" so that he can throw the football (or "tragedy") to him, and as Peter does so, he trips and falls. While he does not appear to be badly hurt, Peter never again appears in the film. The football/tragedy has led to his disappearance/death.

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Finally, Wiseau is ready to stage his inevitable climax, which revolves around the surprise birthday party for Johnny that Lisa has been planning ("You invited all my friends! Good idea!"). The well-informed viewer will instinctively recognize this section of the film as the "third act", and as he or she comes to this realization, perhaps he or she will remember, as I did, something that Anton Chekhov once said: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." And once you think of this, you think of Charlie-R's gun. How can you not?

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The birthday party goes badly, with Mark and Lisa brazenly "making out" in the middle of the room, despite the protestations of Michelle, and some brand new guy who may only have been the plus-one of one of Johnny's work friends, but who nevertheless clearly knows what the shot is. In any case, Johnny and Mark fight, Johnny announces that "everyone betray me", he and Lisa break up, and then Johnny tears his bedroom apart. After humping the red dress he bought Lisa for a few seconds, he notices his hope chest, laying among the waste of his trashed bedroom. In that hope chest, we see that he keeps a gun and, just beneath that, nothing else. He removes the gun, asks God to forgive him, and then shoots himself square in the mouth.

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When I was first planning to compose this critical essay of Tommy Wiseau's The Room, it was my belief that Charlie-R's gun -- which we see Mark take from the drug dealer -- and the gun Johnny uses to end his shattered life, were one in the same. It was based on this belief that I was able to construct my Chekhov idea. However, screengrabs of the two guns provided to me by a friend prove that they're two different guns, and I was, briefly, despondent. But only briefly, because then I thought of something Denny said, up there on that rooftop, under the blue sky of San Francisco. He said, "It doesn't matter!" And despite Lisa and Claudette's continued averring that it did, in fact, matter, Denny stuck to his "guns", and you know what? He was right. It doesn't matter. Because each of The Room's guns represent all guns, just as however many footballs they used represent all tragedies. When Charlie-R introduced that first gun, it was assured that either that gun, or another one, would go off. The tragedy of The Room -- as is far too often the case in our world, in our streets, in our homes -- is that it went off in Johnny's mouth.

Yes I Said Yes I Will Whaaaaaa!?!?

Since you asked, my energy levels are still dangerously low, so this post will be a whole lotta nothin'. You should know, however, that I have something more substantial percolating for some time on Saturday, when no one will be around to read it. But I don't write this blog so that people can read it anyway -- I write it for me.

In the meantime, while I'm waiting to see what I have in store for me this weekend, here's a picture I took while in Austin, TX a couple of weeks ago. This is inside an "Irish" "pub" (the food's really good, though) called Fado.

Because any time James Joyce found himself in Austin, TX, he made sure to swing by the Fado Irish Pub and get himself some of their delicious fish tacos.

Affinity #20

Fine. So almost nobody cares about books I claim to have written, but, in fact, haven't? Just for that snub, I'm going to make no effort to get past my complete lack of energy, resulting in a post that consists entirely of a picture of a person I like. Take that, so-called friends!

Excerpt

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Another battle lost to the network suits occured in 1980, over at ABC. Dogs of War was the original title for Too Close for Comfort. This was the idea of the late Ted Knight, who viewed the series as his magnum opus. While he had nothing to do with the creation or writing of the show at any time during its run, he felt that calling it Dogs of War would convey a sense of doom and general existential malaise, which he felt was clearly a part of the show’s subtext.

“By definition, subtext is unspoken,” remembers Jm J. Bullock, who played “Monroe” on the series. “And Ted felt that, when he read those early scripts, there was a palpable sense of unease and dread that underlay all the surface shenanigans. In those early days, the show didn’t have any title at all, and Ted believed that by calling the show Dogs of War, that powerful, sub-textual darkness would be brought to the fore. So, for instance, there might be an episode where Ted’s character needed Monroe to help him catch a mouse in the attic, and while we’re up there he finds a bunch of old letters from his wife that seem to indicate she’d once had an affair. After a series of mix-ups, though, it turns out it was just notes for a novel she’d been writing years ago, and which, by the end of the show, Ted has encouraged her to finish. All very pleasant and fun, you know. But when the viewer connects all that fun to a show called Dogs of War, they start to think, ‘Hmm…Vietnam? Racism?’ That title made anything possible.”

To add the dark tone, Knight wanted the show’s opening credits to run accompanied by Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But the network nixed both the music and the title, in the latter case opting for the more generic Too Close for Comfort.

“Ted was crestfallen,” says Bullock. “And the gloating from Nancy Dussault, who’d never liked his ideas, didn’t help matters. When you watch the show now, you can see he’s just going through the motions. For my part, I wanted to do what I could to keep Ted’s vision alive with my performance, but looking back, without Dogs of War as the title, my shrill, circus-freak demeanor just doesn’t work.”

- from my upcoming book The Alienation of the Other or Benson?: Sitcom Title Changes and What They Say About America, coming soon from Penguin Press

Oh Goodness! It is the First of the April Fools!

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Raaarrrr!!! I'm a wolf!!! RAAARRRRR!!! I eat everyone up! I turn into a wolf yesterday!!! Maybe today, I think! Around midnight, I turn into a wolf!! Midnight counts as today!!! RAAAARRRRR!!! 12:00 AM is midnight, and "AM" stand for "ante meridiem", which is Latin for "this morning"!!! I EAT YOU UP!!! Although Gene Ray's Time Cube argues in favor of a four corner day, and I think this make a lot of sense!! I eat up evil educators!!! RAAAAAAARRRRRRR!!!!
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Ah ha ha ha! You stupid! Today is the day of the "April Fool", and that, my friend, is you! For you see, I am not a wolf, and never have been! I had you! I had you so much!! But it is April Fool. I am not a wolf.