The Anti-HUGO

HUGO has become everyone's darling. It's a movie with TITANIC-era gloss and pomp, with a magnificent array of schmaltz.

Schmaltz can be a good thing. I don't respond to it necessarily, in general, but HUGO is undeniably appealing to many movie-goers. Maybe in a depressed economy HUGO's the kind of movie, like STAR WARS in its time, which creates a world of fun and innocence by which people can pack up their cares and woes for a while.

In the 1940s, Hollywood turned into the singing and dancing machine, cranking out one silly shiny romantic and ultimately mass-fulfilling movie after another. In Europe, the same thing happened, except the Euro-version of Ginger Rogers was forced to dance around piles of bombed-out debris. No one wanted to see real misery during World War 2, so Hollywood and the other Allies produced sugary dreams full of leggy angels and darling quips.

HUGO is what I'd call "wisty-eyed." It's the kind of movie born of a complete lack of poignancy, yet so willing to please that you cannot fault it. You cannot dislike or remotely hate HUGO as a movie. Certainly, as I've heard, the book is brilliant and much-beloved.

HUGO in 1973, a Martin Scorcese picture.

The fact that Martin Scorcese, who has spent most of his career gut-shooting pimps and blowing up casino owners, directed this sweet delightful cookie of a movie is hardly my issue. In fact, if I hadn't known, I would have never guessed it, as Scorcese as a director or writer is nowhere to be found.

Not altogether true. Scorcese is found, in the heavy-handed fund-raising character of Rene Tabard, a film historian absolutely resolute in preserving/saving lost movies. A pet Scorcese project, for sure, and an extremely important one. Do not get me wrong on this point. But here's the thing: HUGO comes off as mechanical as the automaton at its plot core.

Two and half hours of HUGO later.

I don't write this to be contrarian, and I did see HUGO in 3-D, which I have no use for as a money-grab tech, since it's purely designed for young people who adore shiny things dancing before their eyes. Like many, I was smitten by the falling snow flakes which seemed to come to rest on my 3-D spectacles. And certainly Scorcese gives you three dimensions, if you wish to have them, with rampaging trains and clacking clock's inner workings and dizzying testicle-shrinking heights.

It's alive, and intends to stay that way.

I want people to enjoy HUGO before they enjoy most of the Hollywood tripe. HUGO is good for the culture. But I'm not sure it's a great movie, even if it is a movie of such pleasant whimsy that only a blackhearted villain could have thought, "This movie is too long. When will it end? How many more times must I gaze into Hugo's beautiful blue tear-rimmed eyes while he plaintively asks for help?"

For everyone who loves HUGO: I'm happy. I'd show this movie to anyone, of any age, fearless in the certainty that they would love it. HUGO is IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, or GUYS AND DOLLS, or SINGING IN THE RAIN. It's a movie that is wonderful, eager and playful as a puppy. And like a puppy, it can chew your shoes and piddle on the carpet. You can only sigh and put it outside to play, play on, into the cultural twilight.

Burly Movies 2011 Edition

The magic of movies, as it's referred. Honestly, I haven't seen much magic this year. I figured to at least point to all the highlights I've seen. Particularly now, right before we're deluded with the Oscar-bait bullshit over the Holidays.

The notable in-theatre flicks: DRIVE with Ryan Gosling, outstanding character study slash sequel to Walter Hill's THE DRIVER (1978). Best head-kicking-in scene ever. Top notch in every way.



Malick's TREE OF LIFE, probably one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen. Brad Pitt is consummate. Anyone who isn't devastated after this movie is a f*cking brain-sucking mutant who should be hunted with pitchforks and shotguns.

HORRIBLE BOSSES: funny, but a bit unreal even by comedy standards. You can go with it, and enjoy for the most part.

That's it for the best at-the-movies. Saw CAPTAIN AMERICA and HANGOVER 2, but wouldn't say they were worth a ticket. As with a lot of Hollywood product, serviceable and mostly forgettable.

On DVD this year:

BLACK SWAN, which didn't shatter my world but still impacted enough to leave a moon crater.
THE LAST EXORCISM was way better than I thought it'd be.
THE AMERICAN with my man crush George Clooney, way worse.
THE TOWN was solid, solidly forcing my further adoration of Jeremy Renner, of 28 WEEKS LATER and THE HURT LOCKER, mainly because he's a Jimmy Cagney lookalike pug tough with a soul.
I SAW THE DEVIL, a Korean human monster movie with OLDBOY's Min-Sik Choi, doing what he does best, which is violate your right not to be mangled by his hands.



SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD is the real high concept, the future of comic book movies if they had any creative guts.
CATFISH, touching and creepy and slanderous simultaneously. The internet can hurt you.
SOURCE CODE, loved the concept, eh on the execution, but still way deserving a look.

Of movies on DVD, in general:

Finally saw LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972.) The movie that verifies most women are evil, especially French women.
Saw three Criterion movies from director Hiroshi Teshigahara, WOMAN IN THE DUNES, PITFALL and THE FACE OF ANOTHER. Surrealist powerhouse flicks from the mid-1960s. Guaranteed you've never seen anything like them.



Lumet's PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981,) pure vicious cigarette burning thrust into eye movie, brilliant in every way.
Gaspar Noe's ENTER THE VOID (2009) doesn't unleash horrid psychological underneaths like his IRREVERSIBLE (2002) did, but attempts to reveal the circle of life. TREE OF LIFE, by way of heroin addiction.
Rhona Mitra's DOOMSDAY, pure fun. Don't even ask for reasons why, because it's obvious.
Freidkin's TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.(1985) was a movie I sort of avoided, considering the soundtrack is by Wang Chung. That's enough to keep me away for thirty years. Then I saw it, utterly blown away, just a great movie, top-five car chase, top-five 1980's naked women. Everything you want or need in a movie.
Also saw Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE (2007) , released what seems a lifetime ago. Solid science fiction, for what that's worth, definitely quality, definitely unnerving. I may not have loved it, but I've thought about it ever since.

On a side DVD tour, watched all first three seasons of "Fringe." Started off hating everyone on the show except for asylum resident Walter Bishop. But once the show's mythology took off, found an interesting set of scenarios to enjoy. Despite some television-level acting, and pure stupidity on the writing side of things, the show still engaged.

Anna Torv, "Fringe"'s Captain Kirk, didn't really affect me at first. But she has a great voice and smiling eyes, and that's usually a combination that wins me over. Amazing woman.



And that's a wrap on Burly Movies so far this year. Unless something changes soon, this will stand as the best of the year's viewings.

Burly Movies: THE NINTH CONFIGURATION

One of my favorite scenes ever from one of my favorite movies ever, the incomparable NINTH CONFIGURATION, directed by William Peter Blatty from his own novel TWINKLE TWINKLE KILLER KANE. Blatty also wrote a book about an Exorcist that was made into a seminal horror movie, but here's his masterpiece.

Burly Movies: WOLFEN trailer

Happy Halloween! WOLFEN is one of my favorite movies ever, plus it's the perfect "contemporary" horror movie. Prior to the sucktitude of Hollywood, before CGI and sequels and remakes and other horsesh*t, WOLFEN was part of a trifecta of no frills, hardcore make-up effect, story-driven, character-filled horror flicks concerning lycanthropic behavior. This trifecta included AN AMERCAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and THE HOWLING.

What seperates WOLFEN, for me, is the fantastic character work by Albert Finney and Gregory Hines. Finney is particularly feral and craggy in this movie. Also, the "wolf vision" camera work in WOLFEN is unsurpassed for making you feel like, indeed, you're experiencing what it's like to be "unhuman."

Very cool and highly recommended.

Burly Movies: What You Find in 50 Movie DVD Packs

DEVIL TIMES FIVE (1974)
I didn't expect much from this thing, but you get the whole enchilada with this one and then some. I was actually surprised to find myself riveted. Five psychotic children being transported through what appears to be the Canadian wilderness escape their seriously inept asylum orderlies. The children, including a kid Lief Garrett in bell bottoms, a teenage hottie in a nun outfit, a black "soldier" kid and a couple of other sad sacks go begging on Gene Evans' ski lodge home. Evans has a pile of people visiting, his daughter and her middle-aged stud boyfriend, his handler and his bimbo, and a mental midget in a powerful bod ala Frankenstein. The kids basically go to war on these folks, and what ensues is a plethora of 1970s mayhem.

This is an impressive little flick you'd miss while blinking, but it has guts to it. Actually pissed me off at the end, which means it got to me.

ABSOLUTION (1978)
Richard Burton aka "Swinging D*ck" was reaching his apex as a grimacing, thrashing actor with obvious drinking problems weighing heavy under each piercing blue eye. Here he's a priest running a boy's school in England, and one kid, Burton's favorite student and homoerotic fascination, meets a hippie biker in the woods (played by Billy Connelly and his Scottish accent) and accidentally kills him. The kid then reveals the murder in the Confessional, meaning Burton's priest cannot tell anyone what he knows. From that point on, there's a psychological battle between the kid and the priest, in which everything is not as it appears, and some of it is worse than either imagined.

A strange experience, well done no doubt. Burton's histrionics adds a kind of wretched excess to a story about repressed young people yearning for release.

CREEPER aka RITUALS (1977)
A pack of jaded, wealthy doctor types led by a surly and great Hal Holbrook go on a wilderness hike in a butt-remote area and end up facing off against a shadowy mountain man intent on killing them. Not only that, but the killer is giving the doctors symbolic clues as a way to terrorize them.

This is a great flick, with the proper 1970s' Existentialism and a heady dose of anger behind it, making it just as relevant today as it was then. Or relevant to the four or five people who ever saw this movie. Trust me, it's a strong movie with excellent performances that will leave you feeling exhausted and filthy by the end.

UNSANE aka TENEBRE (1982)
I haven't seen nearly enough Dario Argento movies, that's for sure. Every one of them I have seen is emblazoned in my mind like the Dragon scars on Kwai Chang Caine's arms in every episode of "Kung Fu." UNSANE joins that list, with the great Anthony Franciosa as an American writer of sexy murder thrillers who ends up in Rome for a promotional tour. The second he steps foot off the plane, people begin dying in the same methods as those in his novels. Mostly by straight razor, with the killer gleefully informing Fransciosa's character that more will die and he will know it's his fault. And that's only the beginning of the implements of death on display. About fifty people die onscreen, some twice.

Fantastic movie, with John Saxon prominently involved and a host of bloody murders and Italian boys in uncomfortably-tight jeans and Italian women with wicked evil eyes constantly pulling at your zipper, you cannot escape the allure of this thing. I defy you to even try. Magnetic, unique, and sick as only Italians can get away with.

Burly Movies: HOLLYWOOD MAN (1976), SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009) and THE WOLFMAN (2010)

I'll start with the best and work my way down.

HOLLYWOOD MAN is a story about a, well, Hollywood man who is trying to bankroll his latest exploitation Biker Movie. William Smith plays a man who is married to the sexy dame from EATING RAOUL (1982) and has the crazed Don Stroud for his main stunt man. Smith runs a tight shooting schedule to get the borrowed money back to the Mafia hoods, with percentages of the gross and anything else the mobsters can fleece him for. The Mob proceeds to send a psycho who looks like John Fogerty to ensure the shoot is disrupted and Smith doesn't get his movie made.

What happens is about 90 minutes of some interesting 1970s behind-the-scenes filmmaking, with emphasis on Smith and his old lady, the biker trash who seem way more fleshed out than usual in this type of flick, and a few subordinate relationships that are destroyed during the making of the movie. The main thing is Smith refusing to knuckle under while still "begging" for more money from the Mob, essentially cornering himself and his antagonist from Creedence Clearwater Revival. Though Smith nary pops a single bicep through most of the movie, by the last fifteen minutes, the William Smith "I'm Going to Kick the Living Sh*t Out of You" Face is broken out, mayhem happens. And then, a gut-punch ending out of nowhere, until you remember who Smith was dealing with the whole time. HOLLYWOOD MAN is worth seeking out.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is a pretty decent movie. A "fun" flick, mostly, though kind of pointless too. Downey Jr. is fantastic as always. Rachel McAdams is so godd*mn cute and bite-able that I can barely stand it. There's nothing inherently wrong with HOLMES, but it isn't memorable. It's like something that was made so the studio could retain rights to movie Sherlock Holmes, perhaps.

THE WOLFMAN is another case in point. You have to know how much I want a Wolf Man movie to work. The Wolf Man is my favorite Universal Horror icon, barely beating out Frankenstein's Monster. While watching this update of the 1941 classic THE WOLF MAN, I kept thinking about AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, mostly because the Hall of Fame make-up artist Rick Baker is involved in the update, and somewhat because I'm not sure why the movie is a "period piece." The problem is that every cliche you can think of is so hoary as to be infectious. Ignorant villagers, muttonchop Inspectors, cobwebs and the British Moors. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN glorified and ruined forever all those things. AMERICAN WEREWOLF was a fresh, upbeat, and human story about a dude who becomes a wolf when the moon shines bright. But THE WOLFMAN here is a drab, depressing, morbid tale in which no one, not a single personage in the movie, actually acts human. Unless Victorians were the saddest, sweatiest, dumbest people who ever walked, which this movie makes them out to be, I just don't see the point. I guess the moviemakers were shooting for something Serious, but instead they made a fable about how a computer-generated city cannot sustain human life or supernatural terror.

And even then, realizing this boredom, I could see some interesting stuff going on. In fact, I'm pleased to say the actual Wolfman himself is fantastic-looking, harkening to Jack Pierce's original make-up lovingly. And Baker's transformation, enhanced by the ever-present CGI, especially in the intial turn, is amazingly well-done. The Wolfman's first reign of terror is great. Someone complained about the Wolfman running on all fours. I thought it was excellently-done. Didn't faze me a bit.

What does faze me is the movie just after Larry Talbot becomes human again. It's like someone turned up the Retardo Meter and stood back to let it tilt every subsequent scene of this flick. What started off as a fairly-decent update quickly turns into a giant piece of poorly-written sh*t, culminating in "reveal" of a major character's eeeevil nature and a fight scene between two Wolf Men, which is good, but ending with a violent death that makes no sense. You'll enjoy it if you forget, as the filmmakers did, that a Wolf Man can only be destroyed by silver. For all intents and purposes, a f*cking Wolf Man is indestructible except by silver. That's what the f*cking Gypsy curse is all about. It's why becoming a Wolf Man is so tragic. You can only die by silver, and your soul can only be freed if that silver weapon is wielded by someone who loves you.

Of course, in this movie, all these poor English subjects seem to have silver coming out of their ears. They're able to have munitions of silver practically. How prevalent was silver to a bunch of villagers? That was kind of hard to swallow. I'd have bought the idea if you have a wealthy man in the town who offers up his silver cutlery to be smelted into silver bullets. But this plethora of silver bullets seems like a ham-handed way to tell the audience that Larry Talbot is Up Sh*t Creek. And you'd better start feeling the burn of sadness for his tragic plight.

Strangely, I think humor, not slapstick mind, but the humor found in human fallicy, might have helped this flick as it undoubtedly helped AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. And weirdly, the only humor to be found in the movie is in the "Extended Scenes" showing the Wolfman crashing a costume party in a huge manse and coming face to face with a blind opera singer. It's actually a scene of character development for the character whom the f*cking movie is named for. Meaning, the Wolfman himself. There was opportunities to see the Wolfman as more than a savage, gut-spilling killing machine. A chance, mind you, to create an icon out of this character, that teens and children even would remember all their lives. Because half the fun of watching horror movies is being a kid sneaking a horror movie you know you aren't supposed to see. Being scared witless but never forgetting the experience and carrying it with you always.

The Wolf Man from 1941 had that power, that supernatural mojo, which kept the character alive for over sixty years. But no one will remember The Wolfman of 2010. And that's the shame of it.

Burly Movies: INCEPTION (2010)

You'll hear a lot of people complain about how INCEPTION defies its own logic in order to have the plot plod on. Like Chris Nolan is just painting himself into a corner script-wise and has to shat out a deus ex machina to make it work.

Nothing like that really happens in the movie. You're asked to buy that a team of mind-heisters will risk their own minds and sanity and lives following their leader dude who may be leading them toward certain doom. But outside of that, nothing is contrived to the point where you can't accept it. Or at least, I did.

It's easy to read a description of INCEPTION and kind of know what you're getting. Too many are probably weighing the movie down with MATRIX-like depth it doesn't have, which THE MATRIX didn't have either. What it does have is a sterling conceit told in the most general way possible. The world of INCEPTION is a world in which technology has become emblematic instead of specific. We don't need to know how a machine that fits into a suitcase enables other human beings to enter consciousnesses that are not theirs. It's just not important, just as it's never been important with any important science fiction that has come along. And when I say "important SF", I am not talking about "Star Trek" and STAR WARS.

In movie terms, INCEPTION belongs in interesting times for sure. It's a 1960's SF movie made today. In fact, this is a "mission movie", where all the characters have a mission and must overcome every obstacle to its success. In science fiction terms, FANTASTIC VOYAGE and "Mission: Impossible" are key here. "Mission: Impossible" is pretty much the core plot structure of the movie: leader (DiCaprio) is introduced, the team is assembled, the mission is go, the audience is held suspended not by the crucial life/death dynamics nor whether the team will pull it off, but how they will pull it off.

This is not to say the stakes are not high, but they are most at their epicenter when DiCaprio as "Cobb" is forced to confront what is certainly the deterioration in his own mind. The mission is compromised by this insecurity, which the audience is privvy to early on. I've heard criticisms of DiCaprio's performance, but I'll say he's transformed himself into a Burly Man. It's official. He knows what he's doing, he knows the power of how he moves and how his words are spoken. He's a consummate male presence, an identifier, proven here and in SHUTTER ISLAND. Kudos to DiCaprio.

Everyone in the movie is dynamic without obvious cliches. As you can also read elsewhere, Jason Gordon-Levitt is a blossoming stud who owns this movie with its most incredible sequences, particularly the "anti-gravity hotel." Gordon "Don't Hate Me for Being a F*cking Stud"-Levitt is a strong, personable character within his own skin. He doesn't reach out to the audience, he lets them come to him. He seems like background fodder and yet this and BRICK, the "high-school Hammett" movie, reveal this guy's intense attention to great acting: he knows how to move, how to present thought without speaking. Great work by him, and a dude I will hopefully be enjoying for decades to come.

It also has little Ellen Page. She must taste like a dreamsicle, which is one of the two or three greatest things the Lord ever gave us.

INCEPTION is the best movie of this year, easily. Chris Nolan, the writer/director of MEMENTO, THE PRESTIGE and a couple of superhero movies, and now this thing, is producing good work time after time, undeniably. He's probably an insufferable arteest type, far as I know, but you can't argue with the effect of his movies. It's getting to the point where a Nolan movie is guaranteed to be interesting and arresting, as great movies should, just as M. Night's movies are guaranteed to stink on ice. Nolan can start chalking up a filmography right up there with some of the best. Even a second movie with a guy dressed in a Bat-dildo suit hasn't derailed him with its success. I think Nolan deserves some credit for not making a couple of arty movies and a couple of Bat-dildo movies, then spending the rest of his time on Earth snorting coke off some Hollywood skank's mons pubis. I'm sure he does some of that, but somewhere in there he does the work and we get INCEPTION. Which is fantastic for us.

Burly Movies: ALONE IN THE DARK (1982)

I remember seeing this movie when I was a kid, in the 1980s. Back in those days, in order to get cable television, you had to order a black box programmed by the cable company to allow the cable channels to appear on the television. My mother only wanted "basic cable", the new gamet of channels that were one step above "regular television." Mind-expanding channels like Music Television and Turner Broadcasting.

The cable installer, some beefy local, informed my mother post-attachment of the beetle-like black box to our TV that he'd brought the wrong box. This box was programmed to allow access to all the more expensive cable channels, the ones we couldn't afford monthly, like HBO, Showtime, and the Movie Channel. So, with a wink, the cable guy said, "Well, you don't tell, I won't tell." And thus did my fatherless household become blessed with the Holy Trinity of movie channels. And it didn't take long to figure out that late night cable television was a haven of every early-1980s videotape horror/Alien rip-off/Italian zombie/Slasher movie made up to that point. This included a vast selection of softcore porn. The 1980s cable experience was everything a young teenage boy needed to become a man.

Among other mind-blowing movies like THE BURNING and THE SOLDIER, I recall anticipating ALONE IN THE DARK and being somewhat disappointed. The big draw was Martin Landau, a bit older and returned from deep space after his adventures as Commander Koenig on "Space 1999." Here, he plays a firebug/knife-wielding maniac known as "Preacher", because as the orderly explains, Preacher was a holy man who "likes to burn churches. Only problem, they usually have people in'em." Erland van Lidth, a hulking presence in the movie and far lesser known, plays a brutish child-molester by way of King Kong. A monster, to be sure, and yet not without some sympathy. Craggy, dependable, and menacing Jack Palance rounds out the crazies as a disturbed war veteran. Additionally, Dr. Loomis from HALLOWEEN, the inimitable Donald Pleasance, is again a quirky psychologist.

So the three lunatics escape Palance's asylum in order to lay siege to their new analyst's family, trapped in their farmhouse in a reversal of the previous status quo. I don't remember being riveted by this flick when I saw it as a teen, but I found ALONE IN THE DARK very effective as a middle-aged f*cker. Surprisingly, characters act with reasonable caution and understandable stress, but unlike most '80s horror flicks, logic is adhered to for the most part.

Topping it off, the ending of the movie shows one of the maniacs integrating into the subculture of a violent, twisted society. Turns out, ALONE IN THE DARK is making some very pointed accusations about culture, and the mystery of insanity.

If you've never seen this movie, I recommend it highly. A solid, unassuming thriller with some nice jumps and solid "crazy" performances by a trio of genre veterans. Nobody will be calling for ALONE IN THE DARK to be referentially referred, but I'll call it a minor classic and leave it at that.

Burly Movies: ZOMBIELAND

ZOMBIELAND is kind of false advertising. When I think of a zombie, I think of a slow, shambling Romero zombie. Of course the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD a few years ago moronically suggested zombies can run, jump, do all kinds of neat frenetic sh*t. Boring and stupid barely covers it. Anyway, even movies involving mindless flesh-craving maniacs, like the excellent 28 WEEKS LATER, who live only to spread their virus, has been classified as a "zombie flick."

Complaining gets us nowhere in the current culture. I won't call viral outbreak movies "zombie" movies, since a zombie is technically dead and "infected" people aren't dead. If someone was really clever, they'd make a movie about what happens when infected maniacs fight Romero zombies. That'd be kind of cool.

See, the running zombie will never frighten me. It's like making a movie about vampire teddy bears. It's ridiculous unless you're afraid of such things already. Since logically there should never be a running zombie, I guess I find them hard to take seriously.

Romero's zombies, of course, creep. They are easily escaped from by another who can run fast and far. Except there are a lot of Romero zombies, and they never stop creeping. Eventually they always catch up, because you have to rest, you have to sleep, you have to forage for food. And they'll creep up, and sooner or later they'll drag you down. Not only that, but one of them will probably be your dead old dad or your toddler. You'll know their name, which you get to scream while they feast on your intestines.

That's what scares the crimson butter out of me about Romero zombies. It's all contextual and social and, well, horrific.

Which brings us to ZOMBIELAND, which is a comedy. I didn't see this until recently despite being drawn to zombies of all types, Italian and Japanese and you name it. I fear the "zombie comedy" in the wake of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, which respected the sub-genre while still telling a smart, funny story. ZOMBIELAND doesn't fall into that category, since it isn't about zombies. It's about people infected by a virus, who develop into maniacal cannibals.

Which is keen. I can deal with cannibals, even cannibals who are called zombies even though a zombie can't be a "cannibal" any more than a shark can be a fisherman. They may both eat the same thing, but they aren't remotely the same species. Not when one of them are dead. Cannibalism is a conscious desire to eat human flesh. Zombies are driven by a mysterious primitive urge buried in their dim recesses.

The cannibals in ZOMBIELAND, like many in these "running zombie" times, lack "personality." With the creeping zombie you have a chance to identify the zombie by his clothing, his skin color, or the way he was killed. This is how you get "characters" like Clown Zombie and Butcher Zombie and whatever Social Caste Zombie you want to put forth. You can individualize the zombie within the mass of flesh-eaters, providing some kind of sad identification between the audience and that monster. The realization: the monster is us.

There's nothing like that in ZOMBIELAND, but you do get a comedy which plays off the new cultural recognition of the "zombie" tropes and pratfalls. You get a story that plays like a deft, self-conscious discussion about how great it would be if human beings turned into monsters. Because in that world, any man is king of his own fate. The choices are your own. There is an ideal of freedom in taking what you want, taking what you can carry, and taking what has always been denied you. That might be self-respect, or a new car, or a particularly hot girl who'd never have anything to do with you otherwise. But it would be good to be king, even in an imposed cannibal hell.

Burly Movies: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Like with anything where you know all the beats and all the outcomes, you still hope that the sum total of something is better than the parts which are rote.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY does pull off something that hadn't been done to me in a long time. It kept me from sleeping. My skin crawled. About the only movies that still pull off that feat are THE EXORCIST and Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD. In the case of those two movies, you're in awe of the balls it took to make them in the first place. In PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, there isn't the kind of innovation of a really iconic horror movie, and yet afterward, in the dark trying to sleep, I understood how well the moviemaker's had managed to make me uneasy.

It's funny, too, that this movie is probably another example of "no athiests in foxholes." I'm not particularly pious, nor on the other hand incredulous of the existence of supernatural phenomenon. I'm a firm believer that something is out to get you, but it usually walks on two legs and bleeds. Still, when I was a kid, my mother found religion and used to scare me with devils and gods. The howling wind I envisioned as black wraiths, and striking lightning was delivered by the Lord's fiery hands. A man I knew described seeing THE EXORCIST when he was in his teens, high and drunk. The next day, he was fresh-combed and singing in church. THE EXORCIST had reached down into him and touched among his childhood terrors with a damp hand.

Despite the hype, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is very much a movie in the vein of Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON, since most of that movie concentrates on what is barely seen. And like that 1950s flick, PARANORMAL minorly undercuts the suspense and terror with some obvious choices. Which wasn't the fault in the case of NIGHT OF THE DEMON, as the releasing studio wanted to splice some demon puppet action in. This was done to make sure the audience was properly horrified by an actual monster, and not just shadows and sounds. Forget imagination. PARANORMAL isn't forced to stoop that far, but has its share of the too-obvious. And yet, for the most part, it's almost impossible for anyone not to be tense watching this thing.

I think too you have to consider the economics of this movie. Not of the movie itself, but of the characters in it. Young protagonists, with a house, cars, a pool, a fairly average living. The house looks exactly like most houses, functionally a house but devoid of age. This is reflective of what most of America's Middle Class goes home to every night. The sinister haunting is an invasion of personal space and personal freedoms. The next generation is feeling the rancid breath of an invisible threat to their homes, their lives, but they cannot define it. I think this movie will continue to terrify people who live in such homes, who are helpless to stop encroaching darkness.

For those in poverty, the idea of their loved one entering their dark bedroom in the night and becoming a demon is not unheard of. The violence doesn't surprise the children of poverty. Their fear is more ingrained, more real, and they don't distinguish between monsters from hell and monsters from the bottle. I don't imagine poor people will be frightened by PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, but they might be comforted by it. The idea that abuse is demon-borne must be a solace.

For myself, the movie played out the way it should, complete with an ending straight out of BURNT OFFERINGS. Not a bad thing at all, mind you. There's something about being watchful in the dark that is hardwired into human beings I think. At least, I'm wired that way. We're all so happy we have our electricity and our gadgets, closed doors and locks. But we have to turn them off sometime. And then nothing holds back the dark.

It occurs to me, the Cro-Magnon in his animal skin tending his fire in his cave, awake while his family sleeps, he was cursed to stare into that darkness. He wondered what was there. He feared the creeping sensation of something watching him, waiting for the fire to go out. I think he was lucky to have the fire, to have to think about the fire and maintain the fire. No electric switch would turn out his shield against the night and the groaning things in it. No, the fire was logic, and courage.

If demons walk the Earth, it makes one wonder who put out the fire to let them in?

Burly Movies: BLACK DYNAMITE!

Michael Jai White, scripter/star of BLACK DYNAMITE, will be referred to as "King" Michael Jai White on this blog from this day forward. As in King of the Wakandas. King of the Jungle. King Black Bolt. Elvis the King. He's not who would be King, he is the King.

BLACK DYNAMITE isn't a send-up of Blaxploitation movies such as SHAFT and TRUCK TURNER. It's more like a flipbook of the B-movies of the 1970s, one of those little books where the flipped pages show the same character, drawn over and over, seemingly moving as if by magic.

White, and his co-writers and crew, know they have a hell of a flipbook. They keep showing it to you throughout this movie, over and over. It's fun the first time, it's fun every time. Until the end of the movie, you don't get a sense of watching a movie. It's more like seeing the dreams of Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown and Isacc Hayes. We're plugged right into their experience as stars of B-movies in the 1970s. Dreams of the cool, the ludicrous, and the miserable conditions they worked under.


I was so happy during BLACK DYNAMITE, with a grin so big the top of my head might fall off. Not everything works well in BLACK DYNAMITE, but the stuff that does is unsurpassed by any contemporary treatment of Blaxploitation. BLACK DYNAMITE glories in the shoestring budget, the poor audio/visual, the stilted dialogue and the random lost extras whose delivery and expressions reveal amateur realism you just can't teach. The wonder of the B-movie is in its struggle to survive, onscreen, right in front of you. In that, the B-movie and your average Joe Schmuck are in much the same boat: lacking talent, money, and good looks. And yet sometimes brilliant, sometimes beauiful, sometimes sexy as hell. That's the average.

BLACK DYNAMITE has a couple of off-setting cameos from more established performers, and some welcome lost stars as well. The cameos, particularly the "big reveal" villain's wife in the Honky House, grates a bit, steals some of that authentic delight. But King Michael Jai White stays so iconic and regal in his role as Black Dynamite that you just can't care.


Sign me up to become the first Afronaut to orbit King Michael's hair and moustache. I just can't imagine anyone having a better time than with BLACK DYNAMITE.

Burly Movies: Hollywood, Suck, and Atoms

I believe that society can only be as good as its movies.

This kind of thinking might not seem clear to you. But after watching more movies than I have hairs on my body, and that being a lot of movies over the years, I see a pattern.



Short-sighted people can proclaim all they want about this being the "greatest" time in which to live in human history. Those people drive big gas-guzzling suburban vehicles while chatting on cell phones on their way to getting their hair coiffed properly. I speculate.

I don't think you can proclaim any time to be the "greatest" time in which to live. Frankly, I'd think our time would look like a chaotic hell to our past selves. People in the past used to start wars just to escape boredom. So life was pretty docile comparitively. Once the Industrial Age began, war moved beyond territory right into technological superiority. You can thank long-range war rocket capability for getting Mankind as far into space as he's gotten.


At some point, Hollywood became the focal point for an alternate world, in which mundane death, love, and sex had little reality but far more poignancy to the culture. Moving pictures represented a way to experience a new reality. A penetrating crater of far-reaching inclusion, we all could see life's high points without being vaporized by the meteor's impact.

Not only did Hollywood recreate reality unrelentingly, it recreated reality artfully. This enabled culture to bear itself, endure the ooze of time, and withstand the awful certainty of mortality.

Movies have done more than reflect or ponder their time, their era. I have begun to sense their true importance. The act of attending a movie, in a theatre, with other human beings, had a meaning to it once. When I was a kid in the 1970s, you wore your better shirt and clean pants to go to the movies. Older men and women wore evening clothes, or their Sunday-go-to-meetings, with the women in earrings and men in hats. Social responsibility extended into a movie theatre. It wasn't just you and a horde of other people. It was an audience.

The movies showed all kinds of events, square-jawed, or skeletal, but agreed as an honest assessment of time and space. The important aspect of movie-going in the past was more than escape, more than belief. The images toppled across the screen in such a way that the atoms of our bodies responded. In truth, we were shaped by the images as much as the images were shaped by us.

In the last fifteen or twenty years, Hollywood lost the shiny silver star of the authority of Earth. Among a horde of cockroaches and declining vision, Hollywood's producers suffered the alienation of the inbred. Without exposure to the outside world, to us, the regular human being, Hollywood had forgotten the simple atom.

I think people today believe society is going to get all "Star Trek" and find its higher moral/ethical balance, erasing racism, depravity, sexism, and so on. Like, somehow this enlightenment is just going to happen from the core goodness of all humanity. Which isn't going to happen. Not ever.

We need Hollywood to produce the movies it once had, with that understanding of the atom. How we, the audience, need them to show us once again what we are, truly. As ugly, petty, and vile as humans can be, they can be noble, righteous, and brave. Without the movies to remake us, redefine us, how can we hope to be reminded? With all these people thinking themselves better than any, in a time more enlightened and worthwhile, who is going to show us we are wrong?

Who is going to show us ourselves?

Burly Movies: SHUTTER ISLAND Plus One

Two movies I'd been looking forward to, one I missed last year and one I caught on its opening weekend recently: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and SHUTTER ISLAND.

Because of its immediacy, I'll talk about SHUTTER ISLAND first.

SI is a strange movie experience, perhaps a bit frustrating. It's not the same kind of strange/frustrating mixture as a David Lynch flick, but it's an odd combination of Pulp heart and obsessive direction by Hall of Famer Martin Scorcese. When two Boston cops in 1954 proceed to investigate a patient disappearance on a fortified island insane asylum, we're assaulted by some very stylized Hitchcock themes and muscular acting by a bunch of talented people. Which is all great.


Without spoiling the thing, SI belongs in a movie sub-genre that could be called "psychovestigation", which I've just coined here. This means the mysteries behind the events you're seeing are psychologically layered to deceive and ultimately to reveal a crushing truth. This psychovestigation begins with broad strokes and eventually peels away until all that is left is a single, quavering musical string. This one note will devastate everything that has come before. This is nothing new to anyone who has read a novel since the mid-1950s, let's say around the time Jim Thompson got the idea to turn a small-town deputy sheriff into a psychopathic killer in THE KILLER INSIDE ME (1952). The narration slews reality all over the place, and is often much more subtle than in the movies. Novels get it right by virtue of hard work. Movies just set up flimsy cut-outs of various symbology like targets at a shooting range, knocking them down one by one until nothing is left. It's the timing and execution of the targets which gives the audience the satisfaction of a psychological tale well told, or a complete fabrication forcing them to bleat for their money back.

Examples of "psychovestigation" in movies are widely varied, and has become more prominent since the iconic USUAL SUSPECTS circa 1995, when Keyser Soze revealed himself as a devil of inordinate imagination. This sub-genre has surrealistic elements which play to the strengths of the visual medium. JACOB'S LADDER pre-dated USUAL SUSPECTS by five years, yet works half as well and doesn't reinvigorate the psychological drama. The two movies represent, to me, opposites of measured success where the psychovestigation is concerned; SUSPECTS works, even though its revelation is sloppy, while LADDER is tightly-wound but pretentious. The psychological drama is hard enough without an overexertion of earnestness.

Other movies have played in this arena: the excellent IDENTITY (2003), the classic MEMENTO (2000), and the horrid THE VILLAGE (2004). If you're looking for older experiments of the same kind, you can find a grim Gregory Peck in MIRAGE (1965), or a masticating Michael Caine in Oliver Stone's THE HAND (1981). Both are great films, whether you can agree with their final revelations or not.

Often, it isn't what the revelation is so much how it's pulled off. Because the audience viewing the movie, "sucked in" by the psychological layering which often gets right to the heart of being human, can feel betrayed if not played "fair" with. This has been true of most "mystery"-type genres, but in this particular movieland sub-genre, the audience backlash is instant electrocution for those responsible. M. Night and THE VILLAGE being a prime example, as no one can trust that guy ever again. Not only did the revelation suck, but the way it was handled had hackneyed pecked into it by crows.

Getting back to SHUTTER ISLAND, it's hard to argue that Scorcese and Co succeed with their psychovestigation. And yet the movie is deft, precise, and superb. Watching SHUTTER ISLAND is like watching a girl in a parade juggling a flaming baton: the feat is nothing new, but you still marvel over the execution. You know what you're getting, but it isn't something you get every day. Least not all of us are lucky enough to have flaming baton twirlers in our mundane lives, anyway.

Oh, and don't forget that the inimitable Max Von Sydow has a role in SHUTTER ISLAND. That's right, the same man who starred in all those fantastic Ingmar Bergman movies in the 1960s. Great great man.

Speaking of movies with surreality at their core, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS starts off with director Tarantino's usual flair for alluringly silky-smooth genre-play and turns into a superior revenge fantasy that makes no apologies whatsoever. It's impossible to describe the movie, other than to say there is a World War Two combat unit of killer Jews running around Europe disguising themselves as Nazis and slaughtering unsuspecting Nazi troops. And then they scalp them and perform other horrendous actions to the bodies, to create utter fear among the Germans. There's a Nazi detective/officer nicknamed "the Jew Hunter." All of the Nazi high command ends up in this flick, along with a German war hero known as the "German Sgt. York." Tarantino doesn't even begin to worry about whether you have any inkling of who the Basterds are, as people. Because they aren't people, they are the rage of the murdered Jews led by a Tennessee-born hardcase named Aldo Ray (after the actor
from BATTLE CRY and THE GREEN BERETS, among many movies War and otherwise) with a hanging noose rope-burn on his throat. Or perhaps a near-strangulation scar or knife slice. The thing is, you don't know, but it's fun to speculate on exactly how Captain Ray got his scar. Because in between what we see and what we think is the truth. And no matter how critical we get of Tarantino, the man knows how to provide just enough detail to create a scarecrow worth getting excited over. And INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS turns out to be a very well-made scarecrow indeed.

2009 About Done, And About Godd*mn Time!

I still haven't gotten so old that I start to wax nostalgic about all the past years that have come and gone in my 39 pulse-pounding years of life.

No, I still see the end of 2009 and say, "F*ck it! Let's get to 2010!"

Frankly, there's nothing about 2009 to hold up and study, or reflect on. No Horatio's Skull to be found here. A whole bunch of people crying over the economy. A blizzard in Virginia for the first time since 1996 or whatever it was. I busted up with a girl. I injured the tissues in my chest and thought I had a heart attack, but it was just a sign of getting older. I'm nearer the end of my life than the beginning. These are high points in an otherwise non-detailed year.

Nothing I saw or read as entertainment utterly changed me, though I had some mind-boggling moments. The best thing I read all year was Darwyn Cooke's adaption of Richard Stark's THE HUNTER. It's a fabulous taste of severe criminal. I can't say Cooke is doing anything but the Lord's work in his endeavor to reproduce Stark's blocky, uncompromising prose into illustration. You just cannot imagine two things going together better than Cooke and Stark.

Other notables are the ongoing SCALPED trades, each one of which gets more sweaty and desperate than the last.

One of the best things I watched all year, for certain, is this made-for-Internet video from some flick called 500 DAYS OF SUMMER. It's magic, no joke.



Though not movies released in 2009, some of the more memorable, flat-out fun ones were:

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, which illicited all kinds of pissing and moaning from "fans" of the property. I dislike the Punisher visually and in conceit, in comics, but this movie provided mounds of action value. WAR ZONE is homage movie about the 1980s action genre, without all the snide self-awareness.

David Mamet's REDBELT, a well-done movie about Mixed Martial Arts, for all intents. Mamet always goes over the top and doesn't hesitate to do so here. But it's Mamet and it's almost impossible not to be thrilled by Mamet-Speak and the strong assured hand he brings to directing his own work.

Another solid action entry is TAKEN, about Liam Neeson doing what you know Liam Neeson can do: give an intense goddam stare in the seconds before beating down on a man until you hear the man shit his pants. The whole movie is just that, and I had a wonderful time. I might have shit my pants while watching it, in fact.

I watched a Chinese ecological "animals gone wild) horror movie from the early 1980s called CALAMITY OF SNAKES. If you have an aversion to hundreds of real "attacking" snakes being killed, don't watch it. If you're ready to freak out, do watch it.

Mario Bava's BAY OF BLOOD was another head-slapper. Some things have to be seen to be seen.

MORITURI with Marlon Brando and Yul Brenner was the best Man on a Mission movie I saw. Fantastic production and Jerry Goldsmith score. Just superb.


The one flick I did see released this year, CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE, was so insane and visceral that, again, it was hard to tell if it was really happening or if it was all in my head. Again, like WAR ZONE and most of the other high-point flicks here, not many are expected to love these movies. I loved them because they all did something different and affected me in different ways. They created unforgettable images, and wonderfully fun quotes, and I can't thank most of them enough.

So anyway, I'm ready to be done already with 2009. Like I was ready to be done with 2008. And like I'll be ready to move on from 2010. But at least there is the hope, the geniune hope, of some kind of unknown disaster or critical happiness or essential success, somewhere in the future. Or if not, at least the ability to say, "F*ck it! Next year will be better!"

And maybe it will.

Burly Movies: THE MANITOU

I saw THE MANITOU (1978) last night and it felt wrong.

That's not to say that's a bad thing. THE MANITOU is based on a book I've never read by Graham Masterson, who has made a habit of making money off of the gory horror craze of the 1980s. Again, I've never been drawn to his work.

But I'm a Tony Curtis man, who stars here as a huckster Tarot reader who has an ex-girlfriend who woke up with a huge lump on the back of her neck. This woman goes to some doctors who discover the rapidly-growing lump is, in fact, a f*cking fetus!

So, worse than that, every time the doctors try to operate and remove the growth, some malevolent invisible force possesses anyone in reach to hurt and even kill themselves.

This doesn't sit well with Curtis, who proceeds to use his contacts in the more legit supernatural circles to discover that the fetus is a 400-year old Tribal medicine man (and, it turns out, the baddest-ass of them all). The medicine man died in the past, but sent his "manitou", or spirit force, into the Beyond between time and space, to attach itself to a person or animal and become corporeal once more. Of course, the problem is that the innocent victim providing the medicine man's re-entry will die.

Curtis and another Tribal medicine man played by the great Michael Ansara embark on a remake of THE EXORCIST, to rid the world of the evil medicine man. And if you think you know what that means, visually, I'm here to tell you you don't.

The end of THE MANITOU is a feast of crazed late-1970s special effects, complete with 1970s tape reels, naked boobs, outer space, fireballs, killer meteors, midgets, Star Wars laser effects, boobs, midgets, psychedelic-effect Cthulhu Dark God, and explosions.

If that sounds like the greatest ending of all time, it isn't. But you cannot blame THE MANITOU for trying. And if nothing else, you will have a blast trying to imagine how freaked out people were when they first saw it. Or how embarrassed. I mean, the composer god Lalo Schifrin (MAGNUM FORCE and the greatest television theme of all time, "Mission: Impossible") does the soundtrack for this thing. Burgess Meredith appears in one of his many latter-years cameos, absolutely taking over the screen. And Tony Curtis looks like he's there to have fun and lay some dames. Which you know he did.

A crazy flick, and well worth seeking out for that Friday night when you can't imagine anything better than watching a woman give birth to a midget out of her back.

Man on a Mission Movies

I just saw MORITURI (1965) for the first time, starring Marlon Brando and Yul Brenner. Really well done flick, not the least due to the performances, and the music by Jerry Goldsmith. This is a "man on a mission" movie, where a man or men are put in a position to carry out a mission of some kind, at any cost. Usually this involves the military, during some World War or Cold War, and often involving espionage. In a lot of cases, the man on the mission is in mortal danger, sometimes from both sides of a conflict, and most of the time the man on the mission can only achieve his goal at the closest instant of death.

I love a good man-on-a-mission movie, which are basically extinct today. The adult audiences of the 1960s/1970s for whom the sub-genre emerged, had a clear understanding of the stories. They perceived, as veterans and children of War, that the man-on-a-mission story has a depth and width modern audiences cannot see. Past audiences grasped the undeniable forces which thrust ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances, as a responsibility and duty, and an oppression of their individuality. "The needs of the many..." sometimes outweigh the individual in a man-on-a-mission flick.

Modern audiences understand catalysts only when they are personal, which is why revenge is such a time-honored excuse for a mission of any type. The secret agent must break the Communist stronghold on a tiny nation not because democracy demands it, but because the secret agent's wife was raped and murdered by the General in charge.

A military personality can easily understand the "mission" as it pertains to the greater good, while the movie-going audience mostly expects catharsis. The deft handling of the two, in a man-on-a-mission scenario, is how some truly original movies got made.

For my money, some of the best examples of the man-on-a-mission are pure action movies based around specific time periods and the fields of Wars, such as FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (1978) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967). Espionage sweats out in such movies as OPERATION CROSSBOW (1965), THE CHAIRMAN (1969) and FIREFOX (1982).

DAY OF THE JACKAL (1973) introduces the concept of Terrorism and counter-Terrorism, while THE DOGS OF WAR (1981) displays the vicious cycle of mercenary involvements in Third World countries post-Vietnam.

Thematically, the man-on-a-mission relentlessly pursues his/their objective in other varied movies. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) follows the set-up of the professional civilian impressed into service by U.S. Intelligence, centered around the pre-World War retrieval of a golden trump card from the nefarious Nazis. And THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)twists the concept, as the faceless powers behind the politicians carve their ideograms and dogmas into the national consciousness.

Some odd admissions into man-on-a-mission movies are the "Disaster Movie". THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) in particular relays the impossible course taken by survivors on an overturned ocean liner. The survivors are given little hope, but the one hope they have is to reach the bottom of the ship, which is on the surface of the water, in hopes of being saved.

Another variation is ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), in which the man-on-a-mission takes on a nihilistic future society. SORCERER (1977) gives us the cumulative stories of men on the edge of civilization assigned a brutish suicide mission of transporting nitroglycerine through almost-impassable jungle, in military transport trucks.

Perhaps the most odd version of the man-on-a-mission would be BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974), which begins as an incidental plot to obtain money by people with no hope, and ends with one man's appropriation of the mission (referred to in the title) as his only remaining goal in life. A kind of madness descends on the broken man whose only sympathetic listener is the rotting head of a corpse. But in a way this is the most obvious symbol of resistance to the imposition of the mission, and the last rebellion of the hopeless.


It's interesting to note that the man-on-a-mission movie hasn't been revisited much since the early 1980s. I'm sure there have been, and I'll probably remember them soon enough. But the sampling of movies above show the deterministic streak of popular culture of that time, the will to individualism. It wasn't necessary to fully explain the consequences of the mission, just that success was survival, and failure a certain death. This is almost an incidence of existing in a chaotic world, and modern audiences are less inclined to be "put upon" for a greater good. The hope of accomplishing a secret mission, a vital struggle unseen by the public and perhaps forgotten in time with the protagonist dead in some unmarked ditch, does not set well with an audience raised on the ideal of money and fame for the most incidental and insipid accomplishments (reality television anyone?)

So it doesn't surprise me that the man-on-a-mission movie holds no interest today. Such a movie requires a internal check, a question of accepting the greater good, a fearless examination of how far an individual will go to ultimately remain an individual, even while being ground into pieces by the gears of military politics or ill-fated timing. And beyond that, to confront the fear that even the most supreme act might be meaningless. Or again, immeasurably forgotten. Submerged beneath all good intent, and all greater good.