Sunday, June 27, 2010

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

I’ve got questions. Is there one dreamworld we all share, or are they private chambers, personal hells? Are the hard nails at the end of my fingers, of anyone’s, claws? Of Edward Scissorhands, or Wolverine? Is it unutterably sad, or a liberation, when in a dream nothing holds or fixes, when the print slides off books, and light drains from rooms, when a fuck can’t find fruition, or the locations shift and switch like so many pasteboard sets? It’s like having a framed flat picture with which to comprehend a world defined by depth. So are dreams the movies? And who is in every dream? And who is at every movie? Is Freddy Krueger me?


He signifies that moment when the reality you’ve been taking for granted tips its hand—you’re really asleep. And then you must reckon backwards this dreaming-all-along. And that reckoning terrifies; it says: nothing I’ve been doing matters. Worse, I must see it through. Worse yet, waking may be no different. Unless dreams do matter, which is the promise of Freddy Krueger, who by killing you in a dream kills you in life. To submit to be his victim is to come alive, then, by dying, into mattering. The traffic between the realms guarantees both exist. And what is traded across their borders? Memory as laceration, history for ash.


We see the Goya etching, the one reproduced on the cover of Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, with the one man hanged and the soldier, reclining, taking in the view. The incredible urge to sleep. In this update the kids, trying to stay up and out of Freddy’s clutches, chug Red Bull and pop Adderall. No one mentions the men being kept up at Guantanamo, the sleep deprivation techniques from Abu Ghraib. Do they have to? That sleep realm, we know, is the last one keeping us in check. If we can beat it, our all-consuming watching will be complete.

DEATH AT A FUNERAL

All the Los Angeles mornings sucked bellini-like into a camera lens. They go in numinous and come out denuded as old tape. “Death at a Funeral”—I like the conceit, the way an eclipse says, it’s dark, but if you could see you’d know that right now everything’s perfectly aligned.


In every bourgeois tale, humiliation is the stake. Martin Lawrence is in the house, as brother to Chris Rock, grieving their father whose funeral authorizes this whole madcap goatee-fest. The revelation is, the old man was on the down-low with Peter Dinklage. I like that being small makes you arch.


The twist: gay panic manifests as a delicious symptom: thirty full seconds of James Marsden’s sculpted bare white ass in the breeze. Literally, he hangs from a peak of the roof he’s climbed after his accidental ingestion of an unspecified psychedelic drug. Of course the Avatar lady is his girlfriend. Her brother rescues Marsden from the roof—in a perfect reversal of Hot Tub, a black guy almost blows a white guy. White guys are clowns, and all the professional clowns—Lawrence, Rock, Tracy Morgan—are dead serious. Well, not Morgan, whose face, along the way, is compared to Louis Armstrong’s…


“What a wonderful world” would be a line of bad poetry. But “I think to myself, what a wonderful world”—that’s brilliant, that’s the eulogy. That’s the self talking, melancholy thing we’ve got to trip or hide or die to give the slip.

Monday, June 21, 2010

THE LOSERS

Sleigh bells, in mid-spring? No, just my big belt buckle jingling when I shake up and down in the men’s room, determined to drain the last drop. I know Zizek discusses the MacGuffin as “pure semblance” but sometimes, despite ourselves, we take one to heart.


Imagine this production showing up—lights, cameras, craft services, trailers for the talent—across half the douchebag world. L.A., Miami, Dubai. In the wardrobe truck: ironic t-shirts for the musclebound IT guy, a whole rack of henleys and fatigues for Stringer Bell. The main dude, a kind of poor man’s Javier Bardem, gets crisp white oxfords open at the collar under a fitted black suit. The Avatar lady sports combat-ready post-yoga stretch. Slo-mo walking six abreast.


I’ve got a soft spot for guards and sentries, the million little adjustments and attentions it takes to keep everything in its place. They go down in tens and twenties, here, mostly at the mercy of the team sniper. One should not be surprised to find that “Don’t Stop Believing” sounds amazing every time it surprisingly arrives, since sounding amazing is what it was meant to do. In the last reel the super-spies turn out to be good old ordinary us: one becomes a new papa, and another takes the gang to watch his niece play peewee soccer. “Hold on to that feeling.”


A Ducati roars out of a shipping container only to be sniped while speeding across the tarmac so as to transform in gasoline explosion from motorcycle to missile and destroy a Lear Jet full of billions and bombs—he who grasps the speed required for this also apprehends metamorphosis as, paradoxically, the very condition we have strangely decided to outstrip.

OCEANS


Deli coffee, the 11 am matinee: on the early side, it’s true, to contemplate the bulk of the arbitrary world. But time and tide. Disney and half of France at the helm, while Remington Steele rhapsodizes on the “vahst” power and glory. Knock knock, who’s there, an otter, an otter who, an otter nature documentary begins in wonder and ends in dread. They travel together like a shark and staccato violins.


Who let the cod out? Life’s revolting where it teems: phalanx of spider-crabs on the crawly, crunchy march. The wars they wage stage the age-old conflict between narrative and pure event. When you can take no more, luckily, humpback whales burst and breech, an orca grabs sashimi, a dolphin does a 720 for kicks. Litany of signs: cormorant and narwhal, urchin and ray. The nets of men are but a too-literal, redundant reminder of Necessity, who wields her own and cinches it tight. Wouldn’t you feel that strict wayness of the world, too, to open your eyes and say, okay, this is what I am, a clownfish, a hive-minded sardine, or some thing whose whole deal is to resemble a piece of seaweed all day.


And those penguins are too much, just like funny little people. The child sees a photograph of a tugboat in her picture-book. She goes to the toybin and gets her plastic tugboat, brings it to the book, and smacks toy against photo, as if to join, by the force of the blow, signifier and signified. Theorist of screens, she seeks a portal, a rip in the fabric through which understanding might for once unstoppably pour. So why stick a thumb in the fault? Wonder and dread, it’s one cracked dike pointlessly fixed between two vastnesses both utterly empty, entirely whole.

WHY DID I GET MARRIED TOO?

Belt, sash, girdle, crown, ring—the movie poster is mesmerizing, with two enormous wedding bands encircling, on one side, the four men, and on the other the women. This bling must be generous, given that these cock-diesel dudes could effectively man a professional offensive line. In the first act’s Bahamas trip, they sit around on jet skis with their chests bare, processing their feelings and flexing. Black aspirational Rohmer on the down low? But director Tyler Perry is Welles, Hitchcock, Polanski. In the scene at the airport, his wife brings him a coffee and for a moment, apropos of nothing, he quizzically regards its vessel, that ultimate new American icon everyone knows—the tall, slender, plastic-lidded paper coffee cup. As if to ask, Does this thing belong to everybody? Is that a reason to want it?


Stricture. Hotlanta. The welter of union, by the end, erupts. Janet Jackson is a therapist who writes about grief, and we understand it’s the loss of her real brother that leads her to take out every piece of glass in her ultra-modern house with a golf club. An homage, it’s pretty clear, to the video for “Black or White,” where Michael creams a car (and storefront), grabs his crotch, hoots and growls, a neon sign explodes and then he turns into a jaguar. Earlier, Macaulay Culkin freestyles the bridge. People’s faces morph into other race’s people’s faces. The man surveyed it all: father, brother, child, monkey, skeleton, mask. Was he Ariel or Caliban? And what does that make Quincy Jones?


He trailed pain like a pestilence, but I can’t begrudge him his peace. Mr. Bones: I feel you—now play the song.

Monday, June 14, 2010

DATE NIGHT

Couples of America, now is the high tide of your malaise. But the oceanic cabernet sloshes both ways. It’s red as blood, drawn this way and that by a killing moon. The first thing I’d do is get these two out of a queen and into a king.


All the New Yorks I’ve seen up there. I recognize this one, too—those nights when you perceive it will go on without you, without anyone. It is a machine for destroying rubes, i.e. anyone who falters. “Alphabet City,” indeed. That indefensible nostalgia for the age of the needle and the fist. Have you seen Kick-Ass? Irony floating free of meaning, you are only presence, the presence that blots out the timid, orderly heavens. That’s what she said.


How great is 4 am? The dance that fascinates our time most is the robot, in which the dancer is invited to feel and express the servos and gears in her elbows and shoulders, the rigidity of the welded wrist. In fact the cyborg grows more lyrical, her apparatus more perfectly attuned to the morbidity in the flesh to which it is rudely bonded. Tina Fey’s rejection of sex’s supposed liberations has the manganese taste of devastating truth—hence her conspicuous program of self-humiliation, designed to keep us from stoning her in the street.


A gag reel in which all are too stressed, when flubs occur, to so much as smile. One takes seriously the implication: there’s no time left to do it wrong. Archaic Torso of Marky Mark. You must change your life, like, twice tonight.

KICK-ASS

With Scott the butcher. I propose that film is cured meat, jerky, sausage: the celluloid hung in strips until richly ready, until pungent-dry. This is a carnivore’s movie, all right, bloody and difficult to digest.


If you introduce a bazooka in act one, it had better go off by act three. The prodigious slaying’s in the hands of a Bushwick-based father-daughter team—she’s eleven—who shoot, slice, or burn to death every Italian-American bit player in New York. Of course children eat worlds. And sure it’s glib and mediated, her night-vision goggle-view precisely a first-person shooter interface, on top of which cell phones, MySpace, youtube, and surveillance cameras play essential roles in the plot. All the more surprising that the tang or salt or kick of the ultraviolence remains. What they don’t tell you about the virtual is that it dulls or erodes exactly no percentage of life. It turns out, like pounds of feathers and iron, that every hour lived anywhere, doing anything, weighs just the same.


Those long, longing hours I spent gazing at Wolverine. These days it’s easy to dream up some more. How about Instant Replay, who has the power to re-experience past moments in precisely the same way they singularly unfolded. The Articulationist, who can describe stuff so well that the description stands in front of the object, and now which is the copy? Captain Longview, who’s immune to stress because of his lofty perspective. Dr. Posthumous knows the future of his several endeavors. Lady Projection explains to her enemies how their desires distort their impression of the real. And their leader, Marquee Man, knows what movies are opening this week even before they’re announced online, and is willing to be the custodian of a long e-mail thread, if necessary, to organize the whole super (and super-busy) team to go.

THE LAST SONG

The lost girl who doesn’t drink, take drugs, swear, put out, or shoplift must be furious at nothing so much as her own righteousness. Antigone, Antigone, it’s your story we Romantics fear most. Carved on the wooden counter inside the ticket booth: “Drug Free Staff.” And just below: “Ha! Yeah, Right.”


What I learn about dad vs. daughter: even if he buys a buff-gray beach house on the Georgia shore in which Hannah Montana might languish to her heart’s content, he must still compete against some local douche in cargo shorts who has applied to, and is waiting to hear from, “Columbia” (read: NYU). But Kinnear plays his ace: lung cancer—the real, ashen-faced, doorjamb-sagging-against, two-day-stubble-sporting article. He ascends, by dying, from the hospice of her adoration to pure superego, a ray of light through the stained-glass window he built for the church where at his funeral she finally plays the song he wrote for her hands. She’s a virtuoso, a fact proven more, not less, by the insistence with which the camera cuts from deft fingers to concentrating face. Fingers, face, fingers, face. “The cut, or interstice, between two series of images,” says Deleuze, “no longer forms part of either of the two series: it is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which determines the non-commensurable relations between images.” A “pure locus of the possible”—we play, and are played. A piano is a nervous system as surely as drums are lungs.


Water is the element. Baby sea turtles, run. The verge of tears. The douche, the sluice, the dad who though his eye watches blazing from all the sky may be disobeyed anytime it rains, and all night long. Spring-sick. The pear blossoms drift in the gutters like someone dumped out the reservoir of an industrial three-hole punch.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

THE BOUNTY HUNTER

“I’d rather be thin than famous.” — Kerouac.


Aniston plays a young and super-skilled Daily News reporter who, in missing a court date thanks to her dogged investigation of a fishy suicide, runs afoul of her bounty-hunter ex-husband Butler, a former cop now “kicked off the force” for reasons we are not permitted to know. He throws her in the trunk—Atlantic City montage (?!?)—craps montage—she tases him. The Spirit of Continuity herself charges their phones.


The comedy of remarriage, as what catharsis would you feel if it was announced in the gossip columns tomorrow that she’d somehow won him back? Aniston the Greek and her Pitt-Achilles, for whom Leonidas-Butler is but a momentary, puffy substitution. The amateur architect who once threatened to build her dreams is now, of course, lapdog to the peripatetic-ascetic Jolie. Jolie Medusa? And Aniston Niobe, pilates-hard as a stone, and weeping? But her children lost are children never had, and indeed, Jolie seems to steal (“adopt”) their very souls from the earth. I can’t tell how to experience the sex these sex symbols symbolize. If Warhol were here, he’d know what to do.


We love Hepburn’s shameless pursuit of Grant in Bringing Up Baby. Whereas Colbert, in It Happened One Night, is debased on the pretext of a moral education. Gable strips to the waist, hangs the blanket between them—a movie screen, duh—as if to call their separateness ontological. But Grant dons a silken robe and whoa, hold the phone. He and Hepburn huddle together before the screen on which the feared, sought, forever-Other leopard is projected. Let the wide, wild world have the screen, don’t you see? If you’re a good tv actress, be that.

CLASH OF THE TITANS (3D)

High on generic Zyrtec and caffeine. And the audience, which includes a few understandably perturbed infants—exposed on a hilltop, Oedipus-style?—is in a frenzy tonight. Everyone goes “Oooooooh” when the Queen of Argos compares her daughter to Aphrodite—so hubris is where Brooklyn draws the line? And when the heroes saddle up a few giant scorpions they’ve just defeated, the woman behind me: “Oh no they didn’t.”


Obama’s surge has been lighting up the Taliban. Go ahead and stamp that sentence “2010.” Plus I’m wearing plaid on plaid. Their questionable fashion choices—burlap, lace-up sandals—make this culture difficult to put seriously on film. But can I say something crazy? Couture isn’t Roman, but Greek. It’s gods and monsters. Check out Io’s rolled-felt collar thingy. And Medusa, whose backstory in this version involves her violation and subsequent transformation, from Athena’s disgust, into the creature whose gaze turns men to stone. It will be her severed head raised to stop the beast from devouring Andromeda, the princess whose death alone may spare the city. Roberto Calasso: “And the conflict begins with the abduction of a girl, or with the sacrifice of a girl. And the one is continually becoming the other. It was the ‘merchant wolves,’ arriving by ship from Phoenicia, who carried off tauropárthenos from Argos. Tauropárthenos means ‘the virgin dedicated to the bull.’ Her name was Io. Like a beacon signaling from mountain to mountain, this rape lit the bonfire of hatred between the two continents. Europe and Asia never stopped fighting each other, blow answering blow.” Well, I’m glad that’s over.


Trying to theorize the hero: like Alice, he just needs to get the weapon to where it needs to be. Theorizing Pegasus: a horse that can fly, i.e. a horse in 3D. And the shield in whose reflection Perseus tracks Medusa? Obviously, a movie screen. The Kraken, that “elemental monster” born of Hades: a toddler I know from the playground. On the idea of the demi-god I get stuck, until Carley: It’s a dude with a trust fund, silly.