LEAVE "KRISTEN" ALONE!!!!: Seriously--she is not the person at the center of the Spitzer mess or the person who brought down a governor, etc. This is not that kind of story, the lazy-ass media is doing this as a Bill Clinton or Kwame Kilpatrick kind of deal and it's not. It's a guy who saw hookers! Cripes, if he had a regular affair he could have kept his job, since everybody who has affairs gets to keep their jobs and even run half-baked campaigns for the presidency (hi, Rudy!) But he wasn't even having a pseudo-affair with her, like she was his main pay-for-sex squeeze or something. She was the latest in a series and any previous woman in that series could have been the one WHO COST THE GOVERNOR HIS CAREER (and I'm sure they're thanking their lucky stars that they weren't the ones on the wiretap.) So please, lay off poor Ashley Alexandra Dupré, nee DiPietro, nee Youmans. Focusing on her is like focusing on the vice cop in the stall next to Larry Craig WHO BROUGHT HIS PROMISING SENATORIAL CAREER TO AN END. Or not.

Plus she seems fairly goofy based on her MySpace (not actually seen by me, "Category: Personals & Dating" is banned at work) and not really deserving of major ridicule. Then again, I don't know who wouldn't appear goofy based on their MySpace. Don't you know SERIOUS PEOPLE HAVE BLOGS???

MERRY SPITZMAS (IF THAT IS A HOLIDAY YOU CHOOSE TO CELEBRATE): Eeeyikes.

Yes, yes, victimless crime, two consenting adults, in a sane world it would be legal, etc. And I never really hated the dude that much. Still, the fact that he was involved in busting up prostitution rings at the same time (or close to the same time) he was using prostitution rings and thus allowing them to exist makes this a solid double in hypocrisy baseball terms (Larry Craig, for the sake of comparison, hit a bases-loaded grand slam. He had an amazing hitting stance--okay I'll stop.)

WE MUST REPEL THE MAPLE LEAF MENACE: Foreign interlopers in our elections! GASP! (Via a commentator at The Field, I think.) They haven't tried something like this since 1812. Yet we refused to learn the lessons of the past.....

GREAT THOUGHTS FOUND IN THE COMMENTS SECTIONS OF OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS, THE CONTINUING SERIES: "Exhibiting any discretion whatsoever in what you watch is the film buff’s version of original sin. Everybody does it, but if you any soul you’ll beat yourself up about it." --Alex Jackson, one of my favorite internerd film critics.

Watching everything you can get your hands on is something I associate with the Tarantino school of watching movies; the guy doesn't possess in any traditional notion of taste, which is pretty evident from his movies. And I routinely keep my Netlifxes out for months and then just give up and send them back and hope for better motivation with the next batch. Forgive me, cinema gods, I have sinned.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO HATE SIMMONS: He's clearly on the side of the angels with this whole Sonics debacle.

Here's something I've been having a hard time finding information about--I hope somebody in Seattle is working on whatever Cleveland did to keep the Browns' history in town.

EDIT: Googling for reasons Howard Schultz sold the Sonics in the first place got me to this, which I liked insofar as it implied that the skillset for running a large, successful corporation are much different from running a somewhat successful pro sports franchise. And I hate Starbucks sometimes and Schultz comes off like an ass in this whole debacle. Venti my ass. It's a large coffee. LARGE!

MAYBE--DON'T FEAR THE MILLENNIALS?: Kept meaning to write about this, it's your pop sociology article of the moment that the Inky published a week or so ago about the generational dynamics behind the Obama phenomenon. It fed into my Boomer hatred (or whatever flattened emotional response a card-carrying GenXer is supposed to have) as it portrayed them as an idealistic generation unwilling to compromise and thus unable to get shit done, and contrasted them with a civic generation--and they're putting the Millennials in that category--who're more low-key and--gasp!--actually capable of compromise. Previous civic generations gave us Lincoln and FDR so Obama is going to be a super-memorable president, is I guess what the take-away conclusion is. And it wouldn't be a pop sociology article without one moment of stupid overreach:

Since they started watching Barney as toddlers, the millennials have learned to be concerned for the welfare of everyone in the group and to try to find consensus, "win-win" solutions to any problem.

Yeah. And Mr Hooper taught Generation X apathy!

Note: following Kevin Drum's guide to blogging, I googled the authors and neither one is an actual sociologist and they have a book to push. Yay for pop sociology written by laymen!

RIGHTWING NOISE MACHINE NEEDS REWRITES: Not this stupid Deval Patrick thing, which is from the leftwing noise machine (when even Cap'n Ed says something is bogus.....). It's even stupider! Both Hannity and Medved had these clips of an Obama audience member fainting on multiple occasions--not the same audience member, but a front-row audience member fainting at multiple rallies. Obama responds the same way at each fainting--interrupts his speech, asks people to give the fallen space, etc. And this was evidence of PERFIDY! The Obama campaign is planting fainting people! To make Obama look....umm....more like the kind of guy who cares about fainting people! Yeah! To me, this is evidence that Obama is kind of a rockstar, something your average rightwinger wouldn't know anything about since they weren't allowed to watch the Beatles in the 60s. (WHY DON'T THEY CUT THEIR HAIR???)

A QUESTION OF POLITENESS: Is it better to let the poor lady in Hyderabad go through her whole "let's get your account activated today" routine and then say no (because you always say no--honestly, if you fall behind on your payments aren't you going to end up spending the same amount? These protection plans just take the money from you gradually, versus socking you with the fees all at once) or to interrupt her mid-spiel so neither of you waste your time? I go with the former, just because it seems nicer not to try and fluster someone--not everybody can swiftly recover from spielus interruptus, after all. And we're both working for the company store, y'know? Might as well not get mad at the wrong people.

DEFUSING THE "OBAMA LOVES CHE" CONTROVERSY (HA!) IN TWO LINES: A comment in a Cap'n Ed thread:

1...WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF THAT WAS A REPUBLICAN OFFICE?

2...WHAT IF THEY HAD A CONFEDERATE FLAG ON THE WALL?

There are as yet no replies to this comment. (Whole stupid story via John Cole.)

CLINTON RACEMONGERING NOT A RANDOM SLIP OF BILL'S TONGUE?: Not that it ever was, in reality, a random slip of Bill's tongue, but at least they could claim that and it looked like they realized it backfired since they locked in him in Dick Cheney's bunker after he said what he did. But now Hillary's doing it? Jeez. Doesn't that generate far more bad press than it does votes for Hillary?

I am an Obamabot, of course, so feel free to point out where he dismissed California due to all the Latinos or something.

ONE WAY THE SHAQ TRADE MIGHT MAKE SENSE: Riffing off this Yglesias post--if you believe the NBA to be sort of mildly fixed (mildly fixed: assigning certain refs to games when a certain outcome is desired, like when you want a playoff series to go seven games, as in the sixth game of that Lakers-Kings series a few years back; allowing refs to be influenced by star power, though this might be a problem with basketball at all levels; arbitrary enforcement of the rules, like the Horry incident from last year (Horry is one of the great on-court bastards, by the way, and he never gets enough credit for it); the general appearance of wanting certain personalities to be successful, as in the atrocious championship won by the Shaq and D-Wade Heat) as I maybe* do, and you believe the Suns sort of realize the league or the officials were never going to really reward their style of play (THE NBA IS PHYSICAL!!!! DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS!!!) you might as well roll the dice and get a guy who has been handed titles in the recent past and still might have some pull with the refs. And you weren't going to win in your present configuration.


*I know it's the Internet, and it's okay to be a total crank, but still, thinking the NBA is fixed is still just outside reasonable opinion. Because of and/or in spite of Simmons.

RECOMMENDED: Chris Bowers handicaps Hillary's chances for the rest of the race. (Via tennbengal in The Swamp.) The comments break down Texas district by district. It's good to know that not even Texans understand how the caucus part of the Texas primary-caucus thing works.

2004 WAS SO LONG AGO: And so was my Howard Dean fandom. And I thought, "Let's say we click on this Joe Trippi interview and take a little trip down memory lane, hmm?" So I did! And it's from right before Super Tuesday and I was struck by this bit:

On Hispanics, I didn't know how he was going to undo what had been baked in cake in Nevada about his appeal to Latinos. There's no better name in the party [to help him with that] than Ted Kennedy. The Kennedy name, particularly Ted. Look at Massachusetts. He was 38 points down. Now he's got Kennedy, Kerry, Patrick. He's got a real chance. He can win. No way he can win California without a big shift in the Latino vote. If he could somehow pull out California and Massachusetts, he could be right back in it. If she wins California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Arkansas, what states is he going to win? Illinois and Georgia? Then where? Alabama? Then where? She's way ahead in Tennessee, Oklahoma. You know what I'm saying?

And everything he was talking about came true--Obama lost CA and NY and NJ and even the hoped-for MA. And TN, and OK, and AR. But he still won the day, more or less, or at least tied it (tied in the popular vote it looks like, slight victory in the delegate count.) And I'm like--how did he do it, despite Trippi's points above?

My answers would be: 1. C'mon--it's Joe Trippi. 2. His "Then where? Alabama?" query was answered with CO, MO, ND, AK (sounds like Cthulhu's brother-in-law.....COMONDAK!), DE, CT, ID, UT, MN, and KS. Now--did Trippi forget about them? Not consider them a big deal since five are pretty tiny? Not think about CT or MO at all? Or think Clinton's Hispanic edge would give her CO, and so on. I don't know. CT and MO are ones he could have lost (or "lost"--proportional, proportional!) but won (or "won" in the sense that CNN will color them his color), and those were the only close races at all. That's part of the perception of Victory: Obama. 3. I'm taking Trippi out of context, he wasn't saying Obama was doomed, just sort of handicapping the race. Probably true. I was just struck by the (basically accurate) paragraph above in combination of what seems to be an Obama win. 4. Obama really is a media creation! Or an elite blog creation! (Like that would translate into actual votes.) Like the people at Talkleft keep saying. So of course the elite bloggers/talking head media think he won. I dunno, wouldn't the televised media prefer to keep the Clintons around? If they really are obsessed with them, which strongly suggests that Clintons mean RATINGS!!! 5. Trippi didn't realize the Obama caucus advantage. Which he wouldn't realize before yesterday

Eh, I'm rambling at this point. Trippi's larger point was that he thought Hillary had repositioned herself as the Change Candidate but I don't think she's going to convince the Obama fanbase of that anytime soon. And it's the same size of her fanbase at this point. Tie game! I am not looking forward to "smoke-filled rooms" being the catchphrase of the summer of '08.

SO WHAT WAS OBAMA'S MOST IMPORTANT VICTORY?: Missouri? Really? It is what they call a bellwether.

New Jersey was personally disappointing. New York was a loss but at least Obama got to 40%. California was a huge bummer. And stupid TAXACHUSETTS! But you gotta remember, it's proportional, no matter how many times Wolf mentions California going to Hillary or whatever. It's the delegates, stupid. And Missouri.

IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, THE 2007-08 NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS WERE TO BE REMEMBERED AS A HISTORICAL CURIOSITY: Holy crap.

By the way--what was up with that mindbendingly offensive animated pandas speaking broken Engrish ad? Somebody's going to get several strongly worded blog posts in the morning, if they haven't already.

SUPERBOWL XLII MENU: What a depressing season. The only rational response is GLUTTONY:

Barbecue turkey legs. My boss told me her slow-cook method (simmer a few hours, then bake for an hour under foil, then add your sauce) and it's wonderful.
I am going to attempt the Tom in Texas chili recipe. Couldn't find a chili beer in Jersey, though, and I don't think I have exactly the right dry peppers either.
This is the wing recipe I've settled on. Shamefully, I do like the wings at Applebee's or Chili's or whatever.
Bacon-wrapped jalapenos. The simplest, tastiest appetizer of all time.
Spam musubi! Must invoke spam at the Superbowl! (All references to the Superbowl are property of the NFL Corporation.)
White Castle enchiladas. Yeah. And then I make actual sliders with Asian pork patties.
Recipezaar has this recipe plastered over its front page. It looks good, so it's bound to turn out right when I make it!
Oh, there's some other stuff too. Maybe even some vegetables.

TONIGHT'S DEBATE IN FIVE WORDS: Get a room, you two!

(Sorry. Still an Obama guy, but I suddenly don't hate Hillary anymore. That may change.)

"NO SUBSTANTIVE POLICY DIFFERENCE" REDUX: After watching that debate--I'm convinced! The differences were: "I'll be long-reaching change" versus "I'll be safe change." But change is apparently on the table! Nobody was taking Wolf's bait to fight either. I think the Hillary campaign has decided that anything that looks anything like dirty trickses is not going to fly this year, and especially not against Obama, and the new strategy is: kill with kindness. It might be enough to stop the bleeding.

"NO SUBSTANTIVE POLICY DIFFERENCE": I keep hearing this (and if I wasn't a lazy, bad blogger I'd go find some links) and I'm not sure how true it is. I mean, isn't Hillary (based on Bill's record, and I guess her war votes too, and just the general Clintonian preference for taking the politically more expedient path) more likely to blow some shit up then Obama?

(Hey, if your main issue is the drug war--and it's pretty close to mine--who do you vote for? I imagine Obama would be better on it, just because--again--you know the Clintons aren't going to anything different in general, so at least with him you got a chance at something different. But Stop The Drug War says don't get my hopes up. And the Hillary people tell me Barack's an ordinary politician that the media's in love with, so I might as well just vote for Hillary. How very inspiring....)

ETA: Obama has made some noise about marijuana decriminalization, so that's something.

YEAH, JUST TO PILE ON HERE: With Giuliani out now the number one worst possible presidential scenario has been avoided, and we can all be thankful for that. Now the question becomes, who's more awful out of Hillary and McCain? (Which is why I'm pro-Obama, it's an easy decision with him versus anybody.)

IF I MAY GET EASTERBROOKIAN HERE FOR A MOMENT: The Patriots are the defining team of the Bush years. Being introduced as a team in the first post-9/11 Superbowl, just a bunch of blue collar guys not given much of a chance against the Greatest Show on Turf--it was such a feel-good moment when we needed a feel-good moment. And here they are now, the most hated NFL franchise since the 70s, having been convicted of cheating and not having to pay a competitive price for it. It's a Bushian arc! (If only in terms of approval ratings. Look--it's an Easterbrookian analysis. It doesn't have to make sense.)

The above probably makes Eli into Barack Obama, so it's utility as a metaphoric explication of the Patriots is questionable. Still--Patriots, Patriot Act, amirite?

"TESTOSTERONE TO ME IS SO IMPORTANT FOR A SENSE OF WELL-BEING AS YOU GET OLDER": Your quote of the day that made me laugh for some reason.

THAT'S JUST POLITICS LOL: I swear, there is no more annoying defense of the Clintons than that. At least Talk Left tried to make an actual argument defending their latest shenanigans--though I myself am unconvinced by one link to somebody's diary from three months ago.

A week ago I could have gone with any Dem candidate, but things start looking a little bit bad for the Clintons (Iowa, the ambiguous Nevada result) and they react like they have been....I don't want people who govern like that in power again. End of line. So let's go you-know-who (now available in Hebrew.)

MAN, THIS COULD BE TOTALLY UNFAIR: But it seems like a lot of your bigger lefternet blogs have steadfastly refused to pick a candidate, I guess so they don't say something they regret later, and it's annoying. You're telling me, lefternet, that you really don't have an opinion on Bill making skin color campaign issue number one of the moment? Or Hillary's Reagan bullshit? I feel like only the wonkier blogs have stated their preferences at this point, like Kevin Drum's Hillary love or the gang at ObWi trending Obama.

It's the ObWi gang who's got me in an Anyone But Hillary mood at the moment. Publius, then hilzoy then hilzoy again. And they'll probably end up supporting Hillary if she gets the nod, but I'm not a durn demmycrat and if anybody can get me to vote Republican in '08 it's the Clintons.

Not that I won't change my mind in the next 10 months, McCain can be a legit scary dude and "President McCain" sound like the name of a fictional President in your average 80s low-budget science fiction dystopia (the ones where the United States is strangely depopulated and most of the movie takes place in abandoned factories.) But as for right now there's an Obama beanie with my name on it just as soon as I get paid.

CAN YOU NAME A GREAT TEAM GRIMMER THAN THE 2007-08 NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS?: What are "Questions Bill Simmons would be asking if he wasn't from Massachusetts," Alex?

(Note: If he has mentioned this, I apologize. But he's become unreadable for obvious reasons so I can't really check for myself.)

MEMO TO THE PS3-OWNING INTERNET: If you're trying to format your external hard drive to FAT32 so the PS3 can recognize it, just use GParted. It's graphical, easy to use, and doesn't give you the opportunity to screw things up like with the terminal-based partition editors. Take it from one who knows.

Then again, I'm like, "Why am I bothering? You know how many copies of Q*bert you'd need to fill up 50 gigs?" But maybe I'll stick a bunch of movies in there and never have to take a DVD out of the case again. I dunno.

(Q*bert actually available at Playstation Network, the sick man of next-gen console download services.)

OH YEAH--SINO-MEXICAN WINGS: These are amazing. Via wing enthusiast Henley.

YEAH, SO REMEMBER WHEN I WAS WATCHING ALL THOSE 80S MOVIES?: Of course I crapped out on it, but I managed to finish seeing nearly everything from 1980 I wanted to at least. Ah, half-completed ambition, the Internet is littered with it.

Anyhoo, Hollinger is finally getting the DVDVR 80s Project moving again, so I might start recycling movie review content again. Note: I will not be watching every movie I want from 1981 through 1989. I will not even attempt this. I have learned my lesson. Hollinger says the deadline is November 30th, so I pretty much cannot watch--say--every Dabney Coleman or Stacey Keach movie ever. But I'll do what I can.

GRINDHOUSE REVIEW: AKA recycled message board content, but if you're coming here from Henleyland or something, I want you to know I'm still alive.

Good Grindhouse linkage:

The Outlaw Vern review.

Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich debate Tarantino.

The Dennis Cozzalio appreciation.

As for me--I thought the whole thing was fantastic. Planet Terror is closest I think Rodriguez has ever come to making a movie involving, and evoking, actual human emotions (so of course it makes sense that he legit fell for Rose McGowan while making this thing.) Something about that final scene, with Cherry and the baby on her back, and her in the role as leader of her people, sealed the deal for me. Plus he succeeded admirably at calling up the feeling of watching a very good Carpenter film, down to the Carpenter-esque scoring which was really perfect. Something about the restraints of the Grindhouse project really helped Rodriguez here, I think; he couldn't just sit down at the computer and play around because he had to think about recreating that cheap 70s aesthetic. So most of his CGI choices were in melting people, something that looks just as good using 70s technology as it does with computers, and Rose McGowan's leg, which--on the one hand--is way too impressive an effect for an actual exploitation movie, in the sense that it just looks too perfect. If they did this in the 70s, there'd be angles where you'd see Rose's leg tied up behind her to acheive the stump effect or whatever. Or they'd hire an actual legless actress. On the other hand, it's such a perfect image for the kind of movies they're trying to celebrate--hook for hand's been done--let's do leg for gun!--I can see why they cheated on the specifics. I think I read somewhere that "girl with gun for a leg" was one of the first ideas they had in mind when they were creating this thing, so there you go. Anyway--I dug Rose, I dug Rose and Freddy, I dug the scene with the one brother finally giving up his barbecue recipe to the other brother. Don't get me wrong, Planet Terror is in large part drenched in that persistent (and annoying) Rodriguezian sense of unreality (which is some combination of Bob Clampett minus the exuberance and Carpenter minus Carpenter's empathy for his characters) but there's enough of the former kinds of moments to make me think Robert is finally learning how to make movies that might mean something.

Trailers: Zombie > Roth > Wright. None of them were perfect, but Zombie had Nic Cage as Fu Manchu and seemed the most respectful of the (actually nonexistent) source material. Roth's had a lot of the details right (washed-out look, bad camera angles, ridiculous premise) but the narration was so, so wrong--it sounded like Roth himself was doing it in a really deep voice and thought that would be funny. Ugh. Wright's started strong but got too self-knowingly goofy towards the end. Perhaps it didn't help that I already knew what the gag was.

Ah, Death Proof. What a beautiful conundrum you are. If Kill Bill was his Leone I think Death Proof is his De Palma, or at least the Dressed To Kill/Blow-Out De Palma: killing off lead characters half-way through a la Psycho, exposing the guts of how a movie gets made as part of the movie (the tour inside Stuntman Mike's car, and, less plausibly in terms of the point I'm making, casting an actual stuntwoman as one of the leads; and don't forget Monica Staggs, the driver of the doomed car, is also a Kill Bill stuntwoman), just the general hey-let's-tear-a-genre-film-open-and-see-how-it-works sense I got from it. It's got the De Palman ambition of confusing the audience while entertaining the audience. But De Palma was riffing off Hitchcock (not only Hitch, of course)--Tarantino is riffing off a whole different set of genres and directors, many of which I'm sure De Palma never took seriously. Nick Schager says Death Proof is a synthesis of the serial killer movie, the "dragster flick", which I guess is where he's accounting for the Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry namechecks, and the cheerleader film, and the latter two are nowhere in the De Palma filmography. But here's Tarantino, grinding (HA!) them all together into a pretty hearty meal. The serial killer and car movie markers are obvious; the cheerleader thing is stated twice: literally in the second half (Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing an actress dressed as a cheerleader) and functionally in the first half (all the short-shorts and ass shots of women who are not cheerleaders, but it functions as T&A.) Plus the opening credits that introduce "The Girls" are like the credits of a sexploitation picture. I would argue that there is a fourth genre at work here (and I know the female revenge picture is in there too, but I haven't seen any of those so no comment,) kind of a Shaw Bros-style morality play with martial arts replaced by stuntwork, where bullies are always exposed as cowards and where the need to humiliate and defeat a villain is unquestionable. This narrative takes over right about the time where Zoe Bell says "Let's go get 'im," and I think that final freeze frame--victors raising their hands in celebration just as the villain lies defeated--is straight out of Shaw Brothers. Of course, Tarantino has to put his own little twist in by having Rosario Dawson crush Kurt Russell's face right after the freeze frame, but that's Tarantino--there's always that little nudge in there to make you think to yourself, "Say, why am I enjoying this?" Like, when Kurt Russell gives that grin to the camera and we're like, "Yay, Kurt Russell!" at the same time we know he's going to go kill Vanessa Ferlito, not too mention Rose McGowan's Pam who was the only person in that bar to give him the time of day. So, is it OMG KURT RUSSELL!!!! or is it "Stuntman Mike is an evil bastard who would rather kill girls than get lap dances from them" (the Ferlito lap dance actually exists, allegedly, but Mike is supposed to not enjoy it), or (later) is it "poor Mike, he's crying like a baby and those girls won't leave him alone"? Knowing Tarantion, it's both, or all three. His is the cinema of contradicting ideas and conflicting genre traditions presented at the exact same time, and that is why I am a Tarantino fan.

Two things "took me out of the movie," as they say: First, Tarantino's cameo in Planet Terror. All I could think of was, "any reasonable character actor/formerly famous person/70s icon would be a better choice than this." Because he was a bad, bad choice for that role, but I'm thinking now it was just part of the general mirroring between Planet Terror and Death Proof--double Tarantinos, double McGowans, double Earl McGraws, Sheltons, whatever more there were. Plus I'm sure Rodriguez enjoyed CGI-ing the hell out of him, and Tarantino returned the insult with the absolutely non-computerized car chase in Death Proof. Second, in the Tracie Thoms versus Kurt Russell duel she completely masculinizes herself--the dialogue is all "tapping that ass" and "busting a nut in that ass" and so on and we get it, she's a woman saying the lines of a male porno actor and she is strong and Russell is the real wuss, it was just too explicitly calling attention to the general role reversal of Kurt Russell from hunter to hunted. A lot of things Thoms said were a little off, but this was the most jarring to me.

(As an aside--Sydney Poitier seems to be getting all the press, but Vanessa Ferlito's Butterfly seemed to be the most fully-rendered of the doomed women, and was the only one who had that little closeup as the accident happened--the quick shot of her closing her eyes when Stuntman Mike turns on the lights at the last second. Poitier got all of the foot fetishizing--which is part of the huge self-parody undercurrent in Death Proof, along with the extra-long diner scene--but Ferlito got the massive closeups and the whole "iconic" treatment. At least where her face was concerned, and of course she was the only one of the girls who had her face destroyed, just like Poitier was the only one to be dismembered. David Edelstein mentioned something about Tarantino getting off on the contradiction between loving onscreen mayhem and being revulsed by his own reaction to it--wait, here's the exact quote: "It's also a small masterpiece, dredged up from the psyche of a movie freak who loves women onscreen almost as much as he loves to punish women onscreen, and who (this is what makes him an artist) gets off most on his own ambivalence." And that idea is pretty vividly illustrated by the buildup to the crash and the crash itself.)

So. Best time I've had at the movies in I don't know how long. Hopefully the Weinsteins release it on DVD as it was in theaters, in addition to the split versions; I really think it functions well as a total cinematic experience. Which obviously you can't replicate at home, but it would be nice to have the option to try.

JUST IN CASE MY PARENTS STILL READ THIS BLOG SOMETIMES: See--I haven't totally left the flock!

You know the Bible 88%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

And that's without having consulted the Good Book in what feels like five years. I thought I was going to get a 50%.

(Via cleek.)

WINTER ASIAN GAMES FEVER!: Catch it!

THE IRONICAL THING ABOUT FLORIDA'S BASKETBALL AND FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS: Is that both were overshadowed by historic wins by semi-unheralded teams--George Mason and Boise State, respectively. Well, I thought it was worth mentioning.

[1981] MAN ON THE BRINK: Hey--New Wave undercover cop drama! Infernal Affairs twenty years ago! Or one half of Infernal Affairs--poor Ah Chui, an undermotivated cop mysteriously picked for undercover duty. (Mysteriously because I found it mysterious that they picked a guy who was shown thinking about quitting the force in a previous scene, and let an old lady get away in the opening scene because he felt bad for her. Wouldn't you want somebody completely committed to police work for your undercover guy?) He doesn't turn out to be a particularly good thug, either--he's not quite brutal enough--but just being with the thugs begins to turn him rotten. He drives his girlfriend away as he gets more casually violent, and then he's fired from the force when he organizes a hit on his ex's new lover's jewelry store and is left a thug in name and in deed. That's just the one-sentence summary, there's a bunch of twists and turns, plus some unfortunate moments of bad comedy and errant sentiment. But overall this is an unusually character-driven film, not an exercise in plot one-upmanship or style like a lot of Hong Kong crime movies. Ah Chui isn't a bastard, but he isn't noble either; he's kind of a cop everyman who gets his girl and eventually his life stolen from him because he's forced to walk between two worlds (there's your title) and in the process of falling between the two and staggering back to his feet he gets run down to nothing. In the end he gets beaten to death by a bunch of vindictive apartment-dwellers after a botched raid, his final words something like "Is this a heroic death?" And the final freeze-frame is a friend of his screaming in rage at his friend's death--a raw ending for a generally raw film, aforementioned tonal lapses aside. A lot of the New Wave was powered by raw anger, wasn't it?

[1981] TRAGEDY OF A RIDICUlOUS MAN: Mild Bertolucci movie about the owner of a failing cheese factory (Ugo Tognazzi) whose son gets kidnapped. Or does he? Doubt begins to creep in about whether the son staged the whole thing to finance his leftist buddies, and when there's a rumor that the son has been killed that's doubtful too. All the owner knows is--if his son is dead, he can reinvest the ransom money back in his factory. His wife (Anouk Aimee--and Bertolucci loves the Anouk Aimee closeup) is of course constantly erring on the side of hope and constantly has to prod her husband into following the ransomer's wisher. And there's two of his son's friends who may be part of the kidnappers, or may be acting in his son's best interests--who can say? Bertolucci makes sure everyone's motivations are muddled or opaque (with the possible exception of Anouk Aimee, who--if she wanted anything other than her son's safe return--I didn't see it) and so when the son turns up alive in the end we have no clarification about the particulars of his kidnapping. All we know is that Ugo Tognazzi's character is one confused, passive-agressive dude. And that's what we're left with, Tognazzi running from the camera like he evaded thinking hard about anything throughout the movie (he's the ridiculous man of the title.) Like I said--it's a mild film about a mild little man that you'll enjoy but not especially rave about. It's, like, the safe artistic foreign movie retired people see at the local arthouse matinee.

[1981] ENTER THE NINJA: What?? Directed by Golan and produced by Globus? Of course that's a must-see! And it's plodding and artless and terrible, one of those things that doesn't function as trash or as art or as trash-art. Well--there are comically exaggerated death scenes, but that's the only thing this movie does well. I don't know how this thing launched the ninja craze and Sho Kosugi's career, but it did and I'm mystified. Reviews I have read have seen something menacing in his performance that I did not see at all. What kind of ninja cackles maniacally while doing a job? Maybe just the very idea of a ninja was enough in 1981? Ninjas and blood and cockfighting and Franco Nero saying "I'll be back." I will say that the variety of death dealt by Nero in the final fight was entertaining, if badly executed due to his lack of martial arts talent. And the Golanian love of nutshots was in full display in this film. But some decent death is not enough to make this even close to good trash.

[1980] FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES: Decent enough and entertaining Bergman film about nice, unhappy Peter Egermann (Robert Atzorn) who has a sudden moment of violence and kills a prostitute to the shock of everyone who knew him. Marionettes starts with the murder and spends the rest of the movie jumping around between the police investigation and sessions with Peter's psychiatrist (back when Freud was still taken seriously) and scenes from Peter and Katarina's marriage (Katarina played by Christine Buchegger--and the Egermanns themselves are supposed to be characters from Scenes From a Marriage.) Everything scene is presented--I don't know--formally with title cards indicating where they took place in relation to the murder, like Bergman was stringing together pieces of evidence and leaving it up to you at home to determine why Peter kills. And there's blame for everybody--Peter, Katarina, his mother, the psychiatrist, Katarina's business partner who introduced him to the prostitute. Their marriage was a big culprit too, one of those hate each other/can't get enough of each other kind of deals. There's almost too much evidence; in the end, all that matters is that Peter has been trapped by life, wiling away his days in a locked room in a sanitarium playing chess against a computer. I liked this more than I thought I would, given Bergman reputation for being depressing--not that this wasn't depressing, but it was pretty vital too. It's a very watchable little character study--not must-see by any means, but if you run across it give it a try.

[1981] MARTIAL CLUB: Another great little movie from Lau Kar Leung--not like My Young Auntie was great, this is simpler and probably more successful for it (though also less ambitious.) The whole of the conflicts of the movie are provided via different kung fu schools defending their honor--nearly every fight stems from Gordon Liu's school (he's playing Wong Fei-hung in this) or Kara Lui's school or the somewhat villainous school where Johnny Wang is employed. Except for once he isn't the villain--he's a visiting Northern master out to broaden his horizons by travelling among the Cantonese. He actually ends up tempering the more dishonest ambitions of the master of the school he's visiting, since he really believes in obeying the rules of kung fu. So the fights are exhibitions for the most part, nobody's out to kill each other and there's no blood coming from people's mouth and I'm pretty sure nobody got killed in this, but this made the martial action sort of more purely enjoyable for me. The final bit of sparring between Liu and Wang was incredible, and it ended in a stalemate, because kung fu isn't about winning anyway (I think that was the lesson.) And the opening had lion dancing on top of a platform carried by four or five guys, who were on top of a platform carried by eight or ten guys, who were on top of a platform carried by twenty guys--just an exciting, well-composed bit of cinema. Oh, and Kara Hui gets multiple chances to kick ass, including a couple of fights with Gordon. And it's all pure kung fu done for the sake of kung fu, so it doesn't always have the emotional impact of other kung fu movies, but Liu and Hui and Johnny Wang just on their own are a pleasure to watch.

[1980] LOULOU: This was strong stuff and not exactly enjoyable stuff, and as a tale of sexual obsession it's no Bad Timing. Pialat's Loulou is a lazy, womanizing ne'er-do-well (Gerard Depardieu, apparently the only actor in France capable of the young leading man role in the year 1980) who unaccountable becomes the object of the very middle class Nelly's (Isabelle Huppert right before she shipped off for Heaven's Gate) affections. Nelly, in turn, is loved by Andre (Guy Marchand), but the picture leaves him behind fairly quickly--it's Huppert and Depardieu's film. And they each are throwing each other into the emotional minefields, and you can't always tell who's being manipulative, or hateful--Pialat is careful to not give either one of them anything like a moral upper hand. It's practically a documentary in terms of the way Pialat never takes either Nelly or Loulou's sides for very long. It's also documentary-like in the sense that it's an observation of how a process unfolds (in this case, the process of two people inexplicably bonding together) than a dramatic narrative. We stick with these two characters until the point that they can't do anything else to each other, and then the film ends. I can't say it was the most pleasant thing in the world to watch, but it really did do a good job in making Nelly and Loulou (not so much Andre) into real, living people. It's a small, deeply realized character study of two not possibly mismatched people and you may appreciate it without loving it, as I did.

[1981] ADIEU, GALAXY EXPRESS: I'm guessing this is not the movie to watch in isolation, but I was never going to delve into the works of Leiji Matsumoto anyways, so I'm just going to be stuck with my lack of nuanced appreciation of this film. And watching this has not gotten me interested in seeking out other adventures of Captain Harlock or Emeraldas or even the original Galaxy Express. At it's best this was something like an anime Baum--well, a militarized, apocalyptic Baum where the characters pass through a variety of fantastic settings where the threat of death is always present. But the insistence of mixing constant death with whimsical fantasy does not sit well with me. When our heroes get to their destination (the heart of the empire of the machine people--and I didn't enjoy this enough to want to get into any plot specifics, it's just a kid on a space train touring the universe for mysterious purposes) it turns out the machines survive by stealing the life forces of people, and people are ran through a factory and turned into corpses so that the machine people can survive. Then, like five minutes later, a passing "machine life stealing comet" (no, it makes no sense) passes by and eats all the screaming, flailing machine people. So you have two genocides for the price of one! There's some attempt at a moral about eternal life has to come at the cost of someone else's life, and an additional one about the hero-child turning into a man because his machine princess-companion-girlfriend keeps ditching him, but it was really slight and borderline stupid. This is the kind of well-animated (really well-done in some places) but incoherent and close to spiritually empty anime that is not going to sell you on anime if you're already biased against it.

[1981] ZOOT SUIT: This was very much on the mediocre side of things, not awful but too flat to be good. Somehow Luis Valdez ended up directing the movie version of his play Zoot Suit about the Sleepy Lagoon trial (which was botched and biased and resulted in the imprisonment of several Mexican-American youths, who were freed within a year and a half.) And it's like he couldn't figure out how to make it a movie, so he threw his hands up and said "fuck it--I'm just going to film the play." And he pretty much literally did that, right down to including an audience which he goes to for reaction shots on occasion, and at one points lets the action of the play spill into it. It seemed like purposeless fourth wall-breaking to me. Maybe it happened in the actual play as well and Valdez felt like he had to leave it in? But up on the screen it just served as another reminder that what we're watching is a filmed play. The play itself isn't too bad--it focuses on Henry Reyna (Daniel Valdez), who's one of the defendants and has Edward James Olmos' idealized pachuco character living in his head and egging him on to bad decisions and an embrace of cynicism. Olmos' character is all the things Reyna thinks he wants to be, and the substance of the play is Reyna wrestling with how much he wants to become like the glowering, mean, zoot-suit-cool Olmos. So it's basically a smallish character study set during a period of actual social injustice (the trial in 1940s Los Angeles) and the social justice stuff frequently smothers the character stuff, muting the impact of both. Yeah--the play is passable enough, but as a movie it's got no reason to exist.

[1980] PHOENIX 2772: It's an adaptation of the future portion of Tezuka's Phoenix series, produced by Tezuka himself, and it's really quite good. Obviously in 1980 it predates the whole "overpowering visuals" style of anime (for lack of a better term, and I'm sure there is one, unknown by me) and gets by more on character design (and everything looks like Tezuka sketched it out before hand, it's a very true representation of his style, down to the always-jarring "graphic death visited upon cute little cartoon characters") and lush orchestration (nearly the entire film has the orchestra booming away in the background.) Storywise it's in the mystic science fiction tradition: The Earth is dying, there's this mysterious "space firebird" that can provide the energy to bring the planet back to life, or something, so space pilot Godoh takes it upon himself to get out there and bring back the bird. He's accompanied by robot-girl Olga (who raised him and is in unrequited love with him) and assorted comic relief characters both alien and human. It's a very busy movie, and that would be my biggest complaint--it tosses you from the Godoh-Olga story, to the sidekicks being goofy, to the power of the phoenix (or the corrupt dystopian government back on Earth) and back to Godoh and Olga again, without giving you a chance to take anything in. But though it moves around a lot the constant orchestration helps to give everything a consistent tone (and maybe a consistent tone was what director Taku Sugiyama was going for, as opposed to a fully coherent narrative.) The opening sequence was wonderful, though, a lengthy dialogue free sequence showing Godoh being raised by machines, including Olga. And the ending was a bit of a riff on 2001 and Pinocchio as Olga is transformed into a real woman and Godoh is reduced to infancy (a bargain he made with the phoenix to save the Earth) and they are left to reprise their roles from the start of the film. This movie isn't going to blow you away, but you're going to enjoy it because it's so solid and well-done. A movie doesn't have to blow you away in order to be really worthwhile.

[1981] WOLFEN: The other movie by Michael Wadleigh! It's not exactly a werewolf picture--the wolves here are these ancient godlike creatures that only the Native Americans remember and respect. Like Edward James Olmos' character, who's the only person who can clue cop-with-a-past Albert Finney onto what's been killing people in a very bombed out and desolate version of New York City. There's this amazing scene where we first meet EJO's Eddie Holt and Finney has to climb up to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge to meet him and they're both really up there on the top of the bridge. And Finney looks terrified and Olmos is calmly walking about without a harness and I really hope it didn't take them too many takes to get that shot because it looked like it was excruciating to film. Wadleigh sort of overuses the steadicam point-of-view shots--we almost always know where the monsters are, so there's not much reason to be afraid unless you scare easy (like me.) But I think that was intentional--Wadleigh wants us on the monster's side, to understand why they're killing both old Dutch New York aristocrats and homeless people, and he does do that pretty well. Some of the other murders--the wolves' rationale was less convincing, like when they killed a zoologist who seemed like one of the few people in the film who was on their side. Other negatives: way too many fake scares, too much of the "Native Americans equal nature undespoiled" hokum. But overall it's a quite fine account of the conflict between civilization and the eroding natural world that still wants to survive. It just takes up the natural world's side as much as it does civilization's, and is a more interesting picture for giving us the point of view of the "monsters." So: not hugely terrifying, and way too intelligent to be exploitation (despite the occasional gore.) A very different horror picture.

[1980] UP THE ACADEMY: Yeah, so Midnight Madness was worthwhile trash and this pretty much is useless trash. This was supposed to be Mad Magazine's foray into movies (to keep up with National Lampoon) and Gaines and the rest of The Usual Gang of Idiots ended up disowning the final product. I can sort of see why they did--this isn't the most awful thing ever committed to celluloid, it's just pretty blah, and pretty much unacceptable for a magazine that was still trying to be on the cutting edge of a certain type of humor. (Adolescent male humor.) And I guess Ron Leibman must've been a real Mad fan to have wanted himself removed from the credits of a film that he starred in and where he gave the most entertaining performance by leaps and bounds. And the only competent performance, as the deviant, lonely, sociopathic academy instructor Major Liceman. He was one of the few good things in this movie, along with a somewhat dignified Barbara Bach cameo (doing a terrible Southern accent, though) and Rick Baker's Alfred E. Newman mask. Oh, and the soundtrack is this amazing grab bag of 80sness. Blondie! The Stooges! Nick Cave! Lou Reed! Pat Benatar! Cheap Trick! But the movie isn't worth watching for the soundtrack (it's the only thing that keeps it interesting sometimes) or for Ron Leibman's efforts or anything else. It's just a pretty indistinct piece of cinema.

[1980] MIDNIGHT MADNESS: This was mindbendingly, transcendentally stupid--a whole new dimension of stupid--but it works so hard at being stupid that it really grew on me as it went along. I mean, the plot isn't much of anything--a Los Angeles-wide scavenger hunt between five college-age teams--and the performances aren't on their own much of anything but somehow collectively they're charming. I think, for me, I'm willing to forgive a lot of the idiocy of this thing because director/writers Nankin and Wechter are ultimately very kind to their characters. There's nerds and fat girls and the movie isn't especially mean to them like it could be; even Eddie Deezen has some kind of dignity within the Midnight Madness game. The closest any of the characters get to being irredeemable villains is the spoiled rich kid Harold (Stephen Furst) who's more irrational than anything else and is saddled with a nagging father and a nagging girlfried, and the mean old landlady Mrs Grimhaus (Irene Tedrow) who calls the cops on the game. Which doesn't work since the game is so much fun the cops want to watch too! Yeah--it makes no sense. But scenes like the nerd team extending their moped antennas in unison or a fratboy hearing a choir of angels outside the Pabst brewery (and is this the origin of Pabst hipsterism?) and the much-ballyhooed "FAGABEEFE" (don't ask) lend it all a breezy charm. I don't want to overpraise it--it's no Caddyshack, though it shares that film's flaw of dull protagonists (in Midnight Madness, it's David Naughton's forced conflict with his brother, Michael J. Fox before he figured out how to act.) As a Disney production it obviously could not be Caddyshack. But I think the Disney restraint forced it to be goofy when it should have been vulgar, and made a it a lot more memorable than it should have been. Put this with Watcher In The Woods as the interesting 80s Disney experiments--Watcher the bloodless thriller, and Midnight Madness the sexless teen comedy.

[1981] LION VS LION: Kung Fu Cinema praised the heck out of this thing but I found it to be very much a mixed bag. I think it may be a good title for the kung fu purists, in that the fights are really excellent but the plot is quite hard to follow--it's something to do with a secret list of rebels against the Manchus that winds up in the hands of conman Ah Cun (Wong Yu) and his dumb-but-noble partner Ah Yue (Lo Meng.) Johnny Wang gets to play a hero for about three-quarters of the picture, but turns into his usual Shaw villain near the end. Directors Chin Yuet-sang and Hsu Hsia really knew how to do an action scene--and Kung Fu Cinema says they were both longtime action directors before this movie, so that explains that--but building a movie out of the action they're less good at. I mean, the lion vs lion fight of the title (a lion dancing fight, to be specific) was incredible but they also stuck it in more-or-less randomly, like they had an idea for a lion fighting scene and just pasted it in there where they could. But it's a great fight, you could see this movie for that sequence alone and it'd be completely worthwhile. There just wasn't enough holding the fights together, and I'm not enough of a kung fu fan to love a movie on the basis of the fighting alone.

[1980] THE NINTH CONFIGURATION: This was quite good, like a more intelligent One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without those pieties about the crazy really being the sane or whatever. No, sane or insane, we're all in the same boat in The Ninth Configuration's universe, utterly alone in a cruel, capricious universe. Directed by novelist and screenwriter William Peter Blatty, it's definitely the work of somebody who's got literary sensibilities first and cinematic sensibilities second; for a large part of the opening of the film the dialogue dominates everything, in the form of witty monologues and back-and-forth between the guards and staff of a military hospital for the insane. I had the feeling of one of those very heavy, idea-drenched and fast-paced science fiction novels, like Bester or Harness, where people say things normal humans wouldn't necessarily say but you don't care because it's intelligent and clever and tossed off quickly, one after the other, so you don't have time to think about it either. But there's also moments of incongruity where you get the sense Blatty was trying too hard, like when astronaut Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) dreams about seeing Christ on the moon, or when a couple of the inmates decide to put on a version of Hamlet with an all-dog cast, or weird blackface solo with an actual black guy nodding approvingly. Yeah--it's definitely in that late 70s tradition of works of overweening ambition, and stands with The Stunt Man as the great lost auteurist classic of 1980. (Like Rush, Blatty went on to direct one more movie--The Exorcist III. Kids, a compare-and-contrast essay between The Color of Night and Exorcist III would make a great topic for your Films of the 90s seminar, let me tell you.) It's hard to talk much about Ninth Configuration without giving away the more important twists; suffice it to say that Stacy Keach's Vincent Kane, army psychiatrist, has a big bad secret. And the big secret isn't that great, and there's some explanatory psychobabble thrown in and the circumstances are pretty implausible, but I can forgive it, it gave Blatty the right framework to put Kane through the metaphysical ringer. Keach was fantastic as Kane, too; it's a really great portrayal of a guy torturing himself with past sins to the brink of insanity. I dunno--I think this approaches must-watch status for the year 1980. It's not entirely successful, but it's a failure of too much ambition and I can't fault Blatty for trying to stick in as many of his Deep Thoughts as he could.

[1981] SHAOLIN AND WU TANG: Yeah--easing my way back into the 80s project with a little kung fu. This was on my list because it's Gordon Liu's directorial debut (though Kung Fu Cinema says this is Lau Kar-leung joint. And IMDB has him directing another movie eight years before this. Who knows? The kung fu filmography is jacked beyond measure.) Gordon is Shaolin and Adam Cheng is Wu Tang and Johnny Wang is the DIRTY CHING! who forces them to fight. Johnny needs the Wu Tang and Shaolin secrets to ensure the continued rule of the Manchus, lest the two schools combine and become dangerous. Of course, Adam and Gordon remain friends despite the interschool conflict, and end up teaching each other the opposite school's secrets during their final fight (which is actually pretty good.) Once they've swapped styles they're both good enough to teach Johnny a lesson and win the day and give the audience a nice little take home message about kung fu being for everyone, whatever school or style they happen to enjoy. But before their last fight it's a fairly cretinous movie, though it's consistent tonally (i.e., no Shaw-style sudden bits of comedy.) And there's this bizarre scene where Adam is locked away in prison with a bunch of crazy women until he reveals the Wu Tang sword style (or something,) and the women are shrieking in bad dubbing and Johnny's planted his sister there to collect Adam's secrets, and Gordon ends up infilitrating the prison and teaching her the Wu Tang fist--it's hard to describe but it was a nutty scene, in an annoying way. The DVD didn't help--it looks liked somebody took it off a VHS tape and when it's a night scene you can't see anything. English dub only, too, so it at least has the curiosity value of being the source of quite a few of the Wu Tang Clan's samples. Aside from that--it's not anything you need to seek out if you're not a kung fu head, even with the unconventional final fight (in terms of there not being a winner or loser--kung fu itself wins!)

CINEMA INTERRUPTUS: Yeah--I've hit a period where I can't keep up my at least once a day movie pace. It's the end of the semester, for one, and for another I discovered the Asian Games, which have to be the greatest non-Olympics international competition, smoking the Commonwealth and Pan-American Games as far as I am concerned. I mean--with 10000+ athletes they're about the same size as the Olympics, and with 39 sports to the Summer Olympics' 28 they're actually a more--varied event, shall we say? And that's 39 sports without any track and field! It's regional stuff like sepaktakraw and kabaddi and non-athletic stuff like chess and billiards and the usual Olympic cult stuff like table tennis and badminton. As an Olympic-style sports fan I'm in heaven right now.

[1980] STIR CRAZY: Much like I dismissed Caddyshack as the stupid gopher movie, I always dismissed this as the stupid Wilder and Pryor in chicken suit movie--and of course they're only in those costumes for about twenty seconds, proving that I should never ever believe a studio's advertising campaign, or something. Anyway--Pryor is good in this, but it's Wilder's movie more or less. It's not that he gets all the good lines, but he gets to be the hero (sort of) and get the girl in the end. It also seemed like he was on camera more, and his charming and neurotic character is what impressed me most about this movie--it's a very aggressive New York sort of charm and sensitivity though. Sidney Poitier (who directed) for the most part just lets them do their thing, and keeps the machinations of the plot to a minimum, cutting away just when he's communicated the bare medium of whatever was needed to keep things moving. So his timing was great. Even during a mostly humor-negative stretch near the end he kept things moving well (an actually reasonably clever prison break--the boys are in prison for this one, you see; hence the title.) It's a genuinely funny movie with and because of a great performance from Wilder and I think I will leave it at that.

[1980] AMERICAN GIGOLO: I LOLed quite a bit during this and I don't think I was supposed to--some of the dialogue between Richard Gere's cynical yet vulnerable hooker and Lauren Hutton's depressed society wife was stuff human beings would not say--even human beings in a revisionist noir, and Hutton frequently looks just confused as to what she's supposed to be doing, or feeling. Once their romance gets going both of them become more grounded and likable, though; theirs is the only fairly normal, healthy relationship in the movie. And they even get a semi-happy ending. But there's so many ridiculous scenes in this thing, like Gere suddenly becoming a tough guy and writing his number on some poor schlub's forehead (in front of a poster of The Warriors with a big X through it--I didn't get that at all,) or him holding Bill Duke by his feet out a window and there being an audible pop when he slips out of his boots and falls to his death, or when Gere inexplicably recreates Gene Hackman's apartment-destroying scene from The Conversation in search of some stolen swag. It's an odd, unsuccessful thing, this movie; I get the idea that Schrader wanted to do an experiment where he'd have the noir hero also be the hooker and the femme fatale character have all the stoic, heroic virtues, plus the sexual obsessions, and I'm glad he did the experiment but the results are a mess.

[1980] FRIDAY THE 13TH: Okay--this is the Argento with training wheels (Watcher In The Woods is the Argento big wheel.) It's effective at what it does--nice scares (in particular Kevin Bacon's death and the final dream/flashback) in between long stretches of nothingness--nothing conversations, nothing lives, nothing situations, with a dash of a sense that something's out there, like when the town crazy shows up, or they kill the snake and the kid with the knife looks like a psycho, or the constant shots of the moon Cunningham keeps feeding us. Mike Bracken called it "almost a minimalist film," and there definitely isn't any evidence that it's minimalist on purpose--meaning the low-keyness has more to do with Cunningham's pretty much bland directing style and not with anybody's aspirations at doing an intentionally streamlined slasher picture. Maybe "bland" is too harsh, but he never really succeeds at creating an atmosphere of menace; he plays at it with the Mrs. Voorhees point-of-view shots but the rest of the time I felt pretty safe that a body was not going to fall into the frame. And then the final Alice-Voorhees feels longer than it should because we already know who the villain is and we're just waiting for everything to conclude already, so all the shots of Alice being scared are somewhat exasperating. Oh--and in a film filled with one-note performances (and I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, like with the minimalism question above; were they bad actors? Or just badly directed?) Betsy Palmer was the only one who did something memorable with her part. Cunningham knew what he was doing with her, at least, with those closeups on her bared teeth as she switched from Jason to Mama Voorhees. A really good bit in a fair-to-good movie.

[1980] HONEYSUCKLE ROSE: So I picked this up because Pauline Kael gave it five pages in her book for 1980 through 1982, and it's definitely on the very okay side of things. It's weird to see Willie Nelson before he became permanently stoned actually try to act, and do reasonably well with it. But he has a really good supporting cast (Slim Pickens, Dyan Cannon, Amy Irving) and his character is a version of himself--he's Buck Bonham, travelling country singer. And he's always on the road which is wearing on his wife (Cannon;) meanwhile his best friend (Pickens) is retiring and is going to be replaced on the tour by his (Pickens' character's) daughter (Irving.) And Willie starts falling for Amy Irving, who has idolized him since she was a child, and there you have the PLOT! I would say for the first 45 minutes or so this film is really good--there's lots of performances, including a Cannon-Nelson duet, an elaborate family reunion concert, and an Emmylou Harris run-in. But once the PLOT! gets going and Willie's character has to do stuff the movie kind of flounders; there isn't enough of a reason (that I saw) for him to fall for Irving, or try and get back with Cannon, or for Cannon to take him back, except for that's what would give the movie a conventional happy ending. Yeah, there's too much half-assed drama in here for me, spoiling Willie being Willie and a bucketload of Southern vignettes and "on the road" vignettes. I mean, the climatic fight is Willie versus a drunk Slim Pickens--did anyone really want to see that? I don't think even the filmmakers did, which is why they blew it off and had Slim and Willie go get drunk right afterwards. A bit more performance and a bit less conflict-for-the-sake-of-conflict would have done it a world of good.

[1980] COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER: I don't generally care about stuff like who won what Oscar, or for biopics, but Sissy Spacek really owned the you know what out of this movie. Her performance as Loretta Lynn is up there with Theresa Russell in Bad Timing for films of the year 1980 for me; where Russell was unabashed and open, Spacek is a bit of everything. She's more on the Oscarbait capital-A acting wavelength, doing Lynn's transformation from backwoods 14 year old child bride to pill-popping superstar. And Oscar loves that kind of thing--see De Niro's Oscar this same year--but Spacek is really good at being a petulant child, or a young woman giddy with being on the threshold of success, or the mature Lynn who keeps on performing and performing and being popular without ever completely excising her self-doubt. I loved the scene near the end where she breaks down on stage, the burdens of her husband (a mostly just-along-for-the-ride Tommy Lee Jones) and her fans and everything else finally wearing her down. Now dramatically, the movie is sort of iffy, as it portrays Loretta Lynn as almost entirely a creation of her husband, which may be true, but it doesn't make for a super-compelling story. But it's okay--Spacek's performance is enough of a story all on its own.

[1981] MY YOUNG AUNTIE: This was right on the cusp of greatness. Clearly Lau Kar-Leung was trying to do something different with this one--it's a Shaw Brothers kung fu movie with a strong female protagonist, Kara Hui's Jing Dai-nan, and that's different right there. Dai-nan's been rushed into the Yu family in order to keep the family's wealth out of the hands of the philandering 2nd Uncle (Johnny Wang)--so she marries the family patriarch so she can inherit his wealth and pass it onto the good-natured 3rd Uncle (Lau doing the director-star thing.) Which puts her in the position of being the "elder" to a bunch of guys in their mid-50s and being the same age as her grandnephew Ah Tao (Hsiao Hou.) Hijinks ensue; Dai-nan is a backwoods country girl, first of all, and Lau puts her in a bunch of fish-out-of-water situations in a newly Westernizing Guangzhou--wearing heels for the first time, for example (and fighting in them.) And there's a attraction between Dai-nan and Tao, which they're both too immature to acknowledge openly (never minding that she's his great-aunt) so they frequently engage in contests of one-upmanship: whose kung fu is better, who can beat up more villains quicker, etc. Hou Hsiao's comedy really grated on me in the beginning, but I think it was intentional--he was supposed to be acting like a wild kid, in contrast to Dai-nan's acting like a wizened elder. Neither persona turned out to be true as the story went on and they got more comfortable with each other. Now most of the reviewers I read singled out the following as the film's major flaw: Dai-nan gets captured, and the film turns into a bunch of middle-aged dudes (the good uncles) vs another middle-aged dude (Wang) as they fight to free her. I think it probably is a flaw, even if the final fight is a great bunch of action and wraps everything up plausibly (2nd Uncle and 3rd Uncle are an even match, but--according to Ah Tao--3rd Uncle had to lose because of his guilty conscience. And the family wealth goes to 2nd Uncle as the patriarch intended.) But it keeps Dai-nan out of the action and you keep waiting for her to get in there and kick some ass and she never does; you notice the lack of her, even when Lau and Wang are fighting. Plus it strays away from the most interesting subplot, the Kara Hui-Hou Hsiao non-romance. Like I said--it's right on the verge of greatness, but not quite sure if it wanted to be Kara Hui's movie or your regular brother-vs-brother picture. But highly recommended all the same. (The scene where everybody goes to a masquerade ball dressed as white people and they go through every foreign dance style they can think of is priceless.)

[1980] RUDE BOY: So I decided that anything that had been on Night Flight was worth watching, and I'm kind of rethinking that after watching Rude Boy. It's an attempt at a documentary-style film where The Clash play themselves and friend-of-Strummer Ray Gange plays aimless youth Ray Gange. I get that they were trying to make some overarching statement about the state of Britain on the eve of Thatcher's ascendancy to the prime ministership, and so there's racist cops and neonazis and anti-neonazis and general malaise. The problem is that the live Clash stuff (both on and off stage) is more entertaining than all of the rest of the film. I think Gange had honest intentions in writing and starring in this thing, but everytime the film cuts to him in the midst of a Clash performance--just to remind us he's in the movie--it starts to look like narcicissm. Especially when his performance is so anti-charismatic; when Strummer asks him at one point what he's going to do with his life Gange is so incoherent and not in a good way that it's almost embarassing. Luckily Strummer launches into "Let The Good Times Roll" solo on the piano right after that, which reenergizes the movie. Yeah--if you plotted the energy of Rude Boy you'd get big peaks where the various Clash members are performing and huge valley when Gange has the movie to himself. So this movie has the rhythm of a sine wave. Huh. But yeah--this one's for the Clashophiles. As the document of its time it was trying to be it's pretty incoherent (and maybe that was on purpose, but it committed the additional sin of being dull.)

[1980] SPETTERS: It's good to know that even Verhoeven's small-scale Dutch-language movies are still completely trashy and pervy and entertaining. Spetters is a little coming-of-age story about three middle-class kids who mainly want to race bikes and idolize motocross champion Gerrit Witkamp (Rutger Hauer in a small though crucial part.) And there's a girl (Verhoeven favorite Renee Soutendijk) whom they all fall for in varying degrees, and there's tragedy, and comedy, and people growing up and moving on as they do in this genre. But there's undeniably Verhoevenian touches as well; copious nudity, for one (the male member should've gotten a costarring credit.) Over-the-top yet empty male bravado. A blonde woman (Soutendijk) who's perfectly comfortable using sex to get whatever she wants, and Verhoeven forgives and celebrates this character--she's the star of the picture and the rest of the cast sort of passes through it. And--I'm remembering what Pauline Kael said about Woody Allen, that only he could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values. Well--to paraphrase her--only Paul Verhoeven could imagine an anal gangrape to be an effective way to drive a gay man out of the closet. But that's what he does! And it works somehow (just like Allen's perversions work.) My main problem is the way the movie dispatches Hans von Tongeren's character Rien, who gets crippled and left a paraplegic in an accident, and isn't able to race or perform sexually anymore, and I get the feeling the latter is more important to Verhoeven. So of course Rien has to kill himself, and half the characters don't seem to care even though they've been best pals for most of the movie. Verhoeven doesn't seem to care either--unsexuality means you're as good as dead in the Verhoevenverse. So it works in terms of the directors' instincts, but in terms of this movie and this plot it was about as necessary as Cherie Currie's death in Foxes. Yeah--Foxes and Spetters, your one-two "coming of age" punch for 1980, both flawed but very watchable.

[1980] DON'T PLAY WITH FIRE: I'm still digesting this one. Like We're Going To Eat You, it eschews traditional narrative in favor of shifting points of view where you can never quite be sure who is the pursuer and who is the pursued--it changes constantly. In We're Going To Eat You almost everyone in the remote village was a cannibal; in Don't Play With Fire almost everyone in Hong Kong is a sociopath, or a potential sociopath. Almost everyone's guilty of something, and that's why almost everyone dies in the end. So it's certainly as nihilistic as advertised, but in an energetic, entertaining way somehow, with the usual Tsuian emphasis of visuals over narrative--or using the visuals to tell the narrative, I should say. I agree with the reviewer at Hong Kong Cinemagic that the movie loses a lot of steam once Pearl (Lin Chen Chi) dies--she was it's heart, alternately sympathetic and hateful, and even though after she dies there's twenty minutes of movie and a huge apocalyptic shootout to go it just isn't as much fun anymore. I'm having a tough time summarizing this thing--it's a lot of things at once, unsettling and amusing and depressing, without being self-contradictory and while maintaining a consistent tone. You really should check it out--I bought mine here.

[1980] THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS: I loved this little movie from the post-Walt pre-Eisner era of Disney--it's like if Argento did a Disney movie, a completely bloodless supernatural thriller that still does all the scary stuff with P.O.V. shots where you don't know who's watching and a few jump scares and little girls with creepy voices. Lynn-Holly Johnson is your star of the picture who is in contact with....something, out in the woods. I knew she was a former figure skater going into this and if there's such a way as acting like a figure skater, she does it here--attractive and asexual at the same time and really, really earnest (with a cute little Chicagoland accent.) She's perfect for a Disney horror movie; she never gets too scared, so there's never any reason for anyone in the audience to get too scared, even when weird shit is happening to her like her sister's sudden possessions and a blindfolded girl begging for her help every time she looks in a mirror. Her performance keeps a damper on everything and makes this kid-safe--that's my argument--even though the director (John Hough--the Witch Mountain auteur!) is doing his best to shoot this like a traditional scary supernatural movie. Poking around the web it seems like quite a few people had a problem with the ending, which is very science fictiony (the watcher in the woods is some kind of extradimensional being trying to get home) but I didn't. It didn't have the traditional leave-the-theater-with-a-scare ending (like The Fog) and it settled everything without explaining too much, but you'd expect that from a kid's film. Yeah--this was like Carpenter or Argento or even De Palma (like with the obsession with viewpoints) with training wheels.

[1980] PRIVATE BENJAMIN: Yeah--as far as female empowerment comedies from the year 1980 go, this hasn't aged nearly as well as Nine to Five. It's not nearly as sharp, or as consistently funny. It's a weird two-act movie, a wacky basic training comedy in the first half and a light character study in the second, as Benjamin has to decide if she's going to be a princess all her life and put up with the things the movie is suggesting princesses have to put up with (like philandering husbands and a life limited to the home) or be the person who grew to enjoy army life (and the movie isn't at all clear on why that was a good thing for her--it just sort of asserts it.) You hear the term "star vehicle" tossed around a lot and this is a pretty clear example of it: it exists so that we can see Goldie Hawn do physical comedy, and a princess act, and fall in love, and stand up to her parents, and so on, and it succeeds as that--Goldie Hawn is presented in as positive a light as possible. But as a comedy or a drama (it can't decide which) it's pretty meh. (Watch for Keone Young--Storm Shadow himself--in the nigh-racist "Asian guy unsuccessfully picks up blonde white woman in bar" comic relief role.)

[1980] BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS: I'm pretty sure this is the best-looking Corman movie I've ever seen. The ships are all distinct-lookng (it's The Seven Samurai in space, you see, and every one of the seven gets their own ship) and they did a good job of approximating the Star Wars style of spacefighting (though this is a Corman movie, so of course at least one of the shots was reused about five times.) Plus there's character actors out the wazoo--George Peppard, Robert Vaughn (Fukasaku and Corman the same year!), John Saxon, Sybil Danning, John Boy Walton. (Vaughn is probably the best, or his character is the most interesting: a supercriminal who's so wanted by the authorities that he just wants a place to live like a normal person.) But even with all that and John Sayles doing the dialogue and it generally being a pretty coherent movie in terms of plot and visuals, it still never got unbland enough for me--it's not bad or tasteless enough to be super-enjoyable trash, and it's not original enough to be one of those amazing B-pictures like the original Star Wars was. It's more like the Star Wars prequels in fact, a mixed bag of entertaining visuals that gives you a a bemused blah feeling when everything's over.

[1980] GEHRAYEE: BOLLYHORROR! Well, sort of--it's a Hindi riff on The Exorcist, but there's no gore or spinning heads or anything. But there are weird noises on the soundtrack, and explosions of music when something mystical is happening, even if from the point of view of the characters there's nothing out of the ordinary. The plot was a leetle hard to follow (the subtitles were creative on the disc I got from Netflix) but basically a servant had his life turned upside down when the farmland he'd sweated his whole life away on was sold off to be turned into a factory--the current head of the family--a guy called Chennabassapa (Shreeram Lagoo)--who owned the land crushed this guy's loyalty like it was a bug. And so he took vengeance! And hired a shaman (the subtitles said "god man") to possess Chennabassapa's daughter Uma (Padmini Kolhapure) and scare the crap out of everyone and dredge up some nasty business in Chennabasspa's past. So like I said, no gore, but this is much more of a family drama than American horror movies tend to be; in our movies you can certainly read a slasher picture as embodying sublimated sexual tension or something, but the movie is ultimately about teenagers getting stabbed to death. This movie really is about a stubborn, thickheaded father ordering shock treatments for his daughter because it's something someone in the well-to-do middle class would do, and a traditional, weak-willed mother (Indrani Mukherjee) who can't stand up for herself or anyone else because that's not something she's supposed to do, and a son (Anant Nag) who as a result lacks anything like a clue about what to do when his sister starts going crazy. Yeah--it's the story of these three people's distinct failures in response to Uma's crisis, because they all end up hurting her in the attempt to reclaim her. The possession stuff is entertaining but it's not the reason for this movie's existence--it's more a device to put this family through the metaphysical wringer. Check it out if you're both in the mood for horror and in the mood for something a little different.

[1980] INSIDE MOVES: Dopey yet endearing--let's call it that. Roary (John Savage) tries to kill himself, fails but is left with a permanent limp, and winds up hanging at Max's Bar (in Oakland, according to Wikipedia) with a bunch of other handicapped people--a blind guy, a guy with hooks for hands (Harold Russell from The Best Years Of Our Lives), a guy in a wheelchair, and bartender Jerry (David Morse), a former basketball star who got in some kind of accident and can barely walk straight now. So Jerry and Roary become best pals, but then Jerry manages to get an operation done to fix his legs (through a really preposterous set of circumstances, let me tell you) and starts to taste success and leave his old buddies at Max's behind. And the movie is Jerry acting like a bigger and bigger jerk and Roary feeling betrayed until the inevitable reconciliation and happy ending. Savage is really good, though, and his performance as this wounded, yet hopeful, sad sack made me forgive some of the ridiculousness of the plot. Like Jerry getting an operation and suddenly becoming an NBA player (even if it was for the Warriors--and I hope the Warriors figuring prominently in a movie about lovable losers was completely intentional); I know the league was near its lowest point back then, but come on. But Savage is good and the weirdos are funny and there's a moral about not forgetting your friends that is close to being heavyhanded but Donner manages to be just restrained enough to make sure we're getting the message without smacking us in the face with it. It's a gentler kind of message movie.

[1980] GALAXINA: Jeez, it's low budget and everything, but it's successful at recreating parts of the Star Wars and Alien aesthetics when it needs to, and combining it with general weirdness and softcore porn and both broad and usually ill-conceived humor. It's like one of those sleazy, corny, entertaining Heavy Metal serials. Directed by William Sachs (of The Incredible Melting Man fame; the same giant power station hallway from that movie makes an appearance), who definitely didn't have much money for space stuff but made the right investments on stuff like creatures (recreating the Mos Eisley bar scene as a brothel and as a frontier saloon) and interiors and shooting in weird color stocks and doing long slow takes of the Stephen Macht-Dorothy Stratten romance (where the film becomes almost genuinely romantic.) Avery Schreiber is singularly goofy as Cornelius Butt--and it's a stupid joke but the way he says "butt" is always funny. And naming a character "Cornelius Butt" is the level of the humor in this movie, though there is a very good version of the "to serve man/It's a cookbook!" gag. I liked it, it's an endearing little piece of cheapo pop filmmaking and the 2.3 out of 10 it has at the IMDB is either a perfect score or completely backwards. (The commentary by Macht and Sachs on the DVD is super entertaining, by the way. Listen for Sachs taking shots at Peter Bogdanovich at about the 100 minute mark.)

[1980] NINE TO FIVE: It's a mainstreaming of feminist ideals into a really successful entertainment. Like Fame, it kind of globs a 70s aesthetic onto what would become 80s feel-good exuberance--both those movies began to define 80sness, in fact. And it's a women's revenge movie--another 70s staple--but the vengeance is either a fantasy (the set of scenes where Tomlin, Fonda and Parton all dream about killing Dabney Coleman) or a huge mistake. Like when Tomlin poisons Coleman, or Dolly ties him up, or Fonda ends up shooting at him, nobody's really effectively vindictive. The worst they can do is chain up Dabney in his own home--that's the extent to which he is stripped of his manhood. So it's half-assed as a feminist fable, is my argument. But it's so well-cast. Tomlin is the genuinely funny, acerbic one; Fonda is the stiff, formal, unintentionally funny one; Parton is Dolly Parton and that's the only role she ever played but she's trying her hardest here (it was her first movie.) And Dabney treads the line between masculine bluster and manly fear-of-women (misogyny is too harsh a word) really well, and the bit part characters are perfect--the office lush, the office snitch, the eccentric company president. The commentary on the 25th annual DVD is really entertaining, by the way (the "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot edition;" Jane Fonda has aged into your crazy spinster aunt, by the way, but you probably knew that already) and really gets across how much everyone involved enjoyed making this thing. And it really shows up on the screen, too--everybody's having such a good time and the film is just out to enjoy itself (watered-down feminism aside) and it's a pleasure to watch.

EDIT: Well--the commentary kind of degenerates into a string of silences and narrating-the-action after about an hour. But it's good for that hour.

[1980] THE BIG BRAWL: This has to be the oddest film in the Chan catalog, right? It starts off in a Prohibition-era Chicago that entertained itself with an early form of roller derby--which is of course not dramatically weirder than (say) the day-glo street gangs in Rumble in the Bronx. But the fights are so unlike any other Jackie Chan movie, since he's either fighting character actors or professional wrestlers. So the fights are slow and ungraceful without being especially brutal, and there's little opportunity for Jackie to do his thing. On the other hand you have Jose Ferrer (complete with foul-mouthed mob grandmother) and Mako chewing the scenery with gusto. It's not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests, but its also the most atypical Jackie Chan movie that I've seen. Clouse could not quite figure out what to do with him.

[1980] CHEECH & CHONG'S NEXT MOVIE: For the first half hour I was completely writing this thing off--all of the stuff with Cheech and Chong at home or in the van is painfully unfunny. The schtick with their straightlaced neighbor is awful. But from around the time where Chong goes off to meet Cheech's cousin (Cheech doing like a Texan (?) version of the Cheech character) and Pee Wee Herman enters the picture the film becomes surreal and sort of interesting. Chong (who directed) shot everything pretty evenly, there's no hint from the direction about when you're supposed to laugh, or even if there's something funny going on. So you get these lengthy static shots where they're doing their gags and the other characters totally have the giggles at whatever they do and one gets the idea the movie is not about being funny, it's about accurately representing the stoner experience. And I like the movie during these parts. There's this amazing scene in the welfare office that's mostly in one take where Cheech is seducing his girlfriend in the background and in the foreground Michael Winslow is breaking out the sound effects and Chong is bemused and there's a crazy old man who won't stop laughing--bizarre stuff. But the obvious gags mostly fell flat for me--I think they're really bad at slapstick.

[1980] BREAKER MORANT: I looked this thing up before I started watching it and it's based on a play, and I hope I didn't let that fact prejudice me too badly because I don't think this movie ever quite stops being a filmed play. Some of the shots are cinematic, like the execution of Morant (Edward Woodward) and Handcock (Bryan Brown.) But it's mainly a courtroom drama and it's probably hard to get too cinematic with this sort of material. I've read (in Wikipedia; standard disclaimer) that they show this in Australian history classes, and having seen this it makes sense: it's nothing too daring visually, but conveys the lesson of men being sacrificed to empire while mixing in the ambiguities of Morant's character as well (was he killing Boer POWs for revenge? Was he ordered? Was it both?) It works very well as a history lesson. And Woodward and Brown are awesomely sardonic as the doomed men. It's just not a hugely different movie in terms of style; it's better than your average teledrama but not by a lot.

[1980] ATLANTIC CITY: Hey--it's a noir about the geriatric versions of characters in old noirs. Burt Lancaster is a lifetime hustler who ekes out an existence in AC as a number-runner and manservant to the widow of a gangster, played by Kate Reid. Both of them very much think they're still what they used to be--Reid drops her husband's name at any given opportunity, even though she and Lancaster seem to be the only ones who remember him. And Lancaster--evidently a failed gangster--still thinks the good times are right around the corner. And he turns out to be right! I kept waiting for something awful to happen to the people we like in the movie and it end up with that noir everybody-loses ending, but Malle and John Guare (the screenwriter) showed their characters a lot of kindness by letting them get away with their ill-gotten gains. Most of them, anyway; Susan Sarandon's husband dies in the first half hour. I'm skipping over the plot here--Lancaster comes into possession of a lump of cocaine and it's like the first big score he's ever had, and he's selling it off and finally in possession of some easy money, and of course the underworld wants its cocaine back. Add in Sarandon as an aspiring casino dealer and Lancaster's fantasy object--he keeps wanting her to be his moll or something--and there's your movie. The dialogue was tremendous, especially Reid as the gangster princess and Hollis McLaren as Sarandon's flower child sister. Definitely a must-see for the year 1980; maybe not the most hugely important movie but it told its story very well. And as a New Jersey Studies major it was great to see a movie 1. that looked like it was filmed entirely in New Jersey (thanks for nothing, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) and 2. actually posited New Jersey as a place people want to go to, not get away from (while also positing Saskatchewan as the place people want to leave. Just as unfairly, I'm sure.)

[1980] HOME MOVIES: Hey--more De Palma! Like Gates of Heaven I am sure this only a 1980 film by some obscure technicality, but whatever. It's a De Palma comedy, which means it isn't laugh out loud funny (for the most part), more an exercise in absurdity. Like when Keith Gordon dons blackface as a disguise to catch his dad in the act of cheating on his mom so he can finalize their divorce. Or when Nancy Allen's evil alter ego turns out to be a rabbit puppet (like the Ventriloquist in Batman) who wants her to go back to being a stripper. Kirk Douglas is wandering through the picture as a film director who has made Gordon's family his subject matter--there's frequent cuts between Douglas' movie-in-the-movie and the movie itself, but there's no clear dividing line between the two. And Gerrit Graham (the Gordon character's brother) is an insane Iron John-like men's empowerment cultist. Supposedly De Palma made this with a class on independent filmmaking at Sarah Lawrence, and it definitely has a student film aesthetic to it, no split screens or crazy crane shots. But it's also supposed to be the closest thing De Palma ever did to an autobiography--Keith Gordon's Denis Byrd is supposed to be a stand-in for young De Palma (he's nerdy, technically apt, unable to get a fraction of the attention from his mother that she showers on his older brother (Graham), and he has a major crush on Nancy Allen.) Basically, you'll love this if you're a De Palma fan, and if you're not it's an amusing little curiosity.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the opening credits is done over animated versions of the actors done over as horrific caricatures--which actually is a possible metaphor for the rest of the movie. Nothing is creepier to me than creepy animation for some reason.

[1980] CADDYSHACK: You know, I always avoided this movie--I mean, I've seen it in snippets at like two in the morning on TBS or USA and I always thought it was just Bill Murray versus that stupid frigging gopher and Chevy Chase being an ass. But it's much better than that--I think Ramis was aspiring for Marx Brothershood with this, and he more or less succeeded. But it's also got that Marx Brothersian need for a straight man (though Danny Noonan is probably funnier than Zeppo was) and a rambling plot that frequently drags the movie down. The good: 1. Chevy Chase's zen golf scene. 2. The female characters, who never got to do that much in Marx Brothers movies, are at least as amoral as the men here (though less funny.) Both Lacey Underall and Maggie O'Hooligan sleep around unabashedly, and there's no point at which the lower-class and very Irish Maggie becomes more or less morally virtuous than the WASPy Lacey. 3. Class issues are sometimes front and center--note that an Irishman (Noonan) and an Italian (Tony D'Annunzio) are in competition for Lacey. 4. Rodney Dangerfield was amazing in the noveau riche role. 5. Ted Knight was amazing in the overstuffed Margaret Dumont role. The bad: 1. They had people laughing at Rodney Dangerfield's jokes in-movie. C'mon--trust the audience to know when to laugh. 2. And having Kenny Loggins songs be the musical cue for Dangerfield's populism has not aged well. 3. Oddly, I felt the film fizzled whenever they paired comedians together--Dangerfield and Chase had little chemistry, and the Chase and Murray scene in Carl Spackler's room....I know some people like it, but I found it pointless. But overall--jeez, this is a great comedy. It probably won't replace Airplane! for me for the year 1980 (which I've seen much more, but I also think it's a faster, sharper movie) but it's still a really good comedy.