LET ME IN

Why won’t you? It’s thrilling to travel that strange scrubby country out beyond one’s own exhaustion. In October the idea of being at the same time dead and starving makes perfect sense. In my experience, people who talk through the previews are going to talk the entire time.

Set in Los Alamos, the site of sites, unleashing-place through whose ripped-open portal we can never return. Delicious and dizzy, those nuclear fears. In the 80’s, one’s sense of oneself, in oneself, was inevitably of missile in silo, someday to be launched. Decade of Reagan, divorce, Rubik’s Cube, Ms. Pac-Man, “It’s 10 pm do you know where your children are?”, Suzanne Vega’s “Luka”—I had a mild freak-out when it shuffled to the surface of my iPod the other day, it’s always made me uncomfortable, the ethics of identification confuse and unnerve me, the difference between persona and ventriloquism is, significantly, a fist up the ass. One should really ask, first.

Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass) is a vampire but the subtext makes you squirm. Since her father turns out to be not her father but her lover, aged because still mortal. It’s her desire that drives them on, he finds her victims, and when she eats a Now and Later—to please the 12-year-old neighbor boy who likes her—she throws it up. “I’m not a girl. I’m nothing.” When all her monstrosity is revealed, when we understand she will enslave the boy, still we hope the detective will fail, still we play her guardian in our hearts. Because she rescued the boy from his bullies? “You have to hit back harder than you dare—then they’ll stop.”

Hushed moments in the eerie streetlit yard, silence of the deep desert cold. A victim discovered in the ice. In such desolation, time feels most cruel, subject far less than we’d wish to the weak tricks by which we try to make it seem elastic. See it as it is: absolute, not woven into the fabric of things but apart, and huge above. What torture, to be twelve. And yet that, that, that one, then, awkward and gleaming, that was no stage along the way, no, yes, that that that was your truest face.

JACKASS (3D)

Here I go. Here I go. Here I go again. Girls, what’s my weakness?

Men!

Okay, then. Afterwards, at the bar, Dawn and Stephanie and Carley and I have serious trouble coming up with a female version that wouldn’t shade immediately into exploitation and porn. Though one could make a case for Marina Abramovic as an honorary member of the crew. Like her recent show, this movie premiered at MoMA, a masterstroke of critique that helps us re-read the high modernism housed in that shiny tower for what it is: a succession of dumb dares (I know the feeling). Still, why pass up the chance to see it with a hundred crazed teens. Sorry MPAA. These kids crave the unsettling drama of endurance art, they too want to seize the means of production, plumb male erotics, and thrill to the anarchic energy of the carnivalesque as manifested in suburban subculture. What warning label would dare forbid them that?

If you introduce a dildo bazooka in act one, etc. Johnny Knoxville, as leader, we note, is obliged to endure the most explicit pain—buffalo and bull both slam him full-on and leave a crumpled and groaning, unimpeachable example for the rest. Bam’s the most likely mutineer. Anxious—he gets cranky in the snakepit—he’s the father-killer, the sneaker-upper who likes to play funny fate. So it’s ironic he falls conspicuous victim to the enormous high-five that is really God’s hand—reached out to us in kindness, it always clobbers us nonetheless. Steve-O is the substance-specialist, drinking (and gagging on) a cup of sweat, taking a ride in a port-a-potty full of shit. His own realistic face, tattooed on his back, says fate has its limits, too, wherever true presence abides. Chris Pontius, when he ties his dick to a remote-control helicopter, utters the crucial line: “Get it over with.” Phrase whispered, of course, by Caesar, Christ, and Jesse James. He presides as dentist when they pull their buddy’s tooth by tying it to the rear bumper of a Lamborghini that speeds off and: yank. Our pain is miniscule, pointless, and brief, and our machines expansive beasts whose capacities we can’t imagine how to test.

In the final shot, all await the inevitable, climactic sneak-attack, but when the entire set explodes and is deluged by an enormous wave it’s so total that their expectation means nothing, there’s no transfiguration, you’re bound to a few friends too crazy for you to understand, they can’t understand you, you’re forever on your guard. But come up smiling every time. Dawn and Stephanie both slapped me really hard, the other night. Get it over with, break, and be happy for once.

SECRETARIAT

“If a fucking horse can tell his story why can’t I.”—Eileen Myles

The only true genre—horse movie—The Black Stallion, Au Hasard Balthazar, Herbie Goes Bananas, do I need to go on? Because old Ed-weird Muybridge invented cinema by killing it, by proclaiming let us find a thing in motion and then touch that motion by probing its constituent parts. They slow the race to a still—pop goes the camera at the finish line—and wouldn’t you know it, all four hooves are up in the air at once.

Diane Lane plays a second-waved housewife-turned-racehorse-owner whose support team includes Lafayette from True Blood, and his ‘fro, and Malkovich (Jonah Hex) whose poochy ass and pigeon-gait are so cute to me. She strides into the country club, “Um, miss, you can’t, you can’t just…” Of Big Red, she declares, “I’m his voice.” So what is he? Her heart. “Twenty-two pounds, guesses the pathologist,/eyeballing the organ at Secretariat’s autopsy./ He calls the miracle—the still, stopped heart/tenderly held in his hands— a huge,/and perfect machine.”—Noel. Lucky she came along tonight, one’s best thoughts are always in the adjacent seat.

‘At’s a boy. “Secretariat’s not afraid.” “He sees what means something to him, what’s immediate.” Frisky colt, shining coat, loll of the head, bottomless eye, unfathomable power and from that power, rip-roaring joy. His rival: Sham. Issa: “Naked/on a naked horse/in pouring rain!” Glory’s real—I can tell you what it is—it’s the opposite of taking a picture.

LIFE AS WE KNOW IT

I’m all set to tease Philip about the hard apple cider he’s sipping from a brown paper bag when he reveals that he’s only drinking it because the store didn’t have his favorite flavor: “Sonoma Pear.” He’s apoplectic about the whole scene, here, until Carley sends him a text: “Just enjoy the company and the time alone with your thoughts.” Could it be better said? I love people, but dislike and mistrust talk. I love to dance, but why this prohibition against biting one’s lower lip while doing so, which feels so good and right? Because one day in 1986 it struck Eddie Murphy as the epitome of white earnestness, and earnestness is the seedbed of the oppression that is blithe? Did I mention I love irony? I love irony. I hate trivia and quirk.

Duhamel’s deliciously tall and I’d respectfully disagree with my companion tonight, I don’t need his arms to be bigger. He’s in sports television, while Heigl (Killers) runs an amazing bakery. Is Atlanta giving film productions tax breaks? Their dead-in-a-car-crash friends bequeath kid, house, and pack-n-play to our couple, cue the first boxing-up-your-dead-friends’-stuff montage of the year. What’s the crisis? Duhamel, start of the third act: “We’re just playing a role.” It’s a savage critique of heteronormativity, the trappings come first and then they grow to fill them, and the cultural fantasy that eros is the core of relationships is belied all the more by the film’s irrational fear of spooge.

“Life as we know it”—in other words, we can’t talk about life without appending an idiomatic recognition of our epistemological limit, which one begins to imagine not as a hole in the wall over which a heavy plastic tarp has been taped, but instead as several pads’-worth of bossy post-it notes festooning an office kitchenette. Reminders everywhere. There’s a point at which your data’s so well backed-up you can’t help but start, in spite of yourself, to give less of a shit about any of it.

IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY

A quiet drink before the film, elbows on the marble, fingertips buttressing the beer glass, when through the tall not un-screen-like windows the patrons all turn at once to watch a wind whip up the trees, and a minute later an onslaught of hail crash down. Bringing boughs with it, ice-stones the size of jelly-beans thundering on roofs and car-roofs and asphalt. A startled jogger ducks in. Could our super-stressed-ness really fall from the sky this sudden way?

I knew that particular bassline from “Ice, Ice Baby” before I knew its original—choke on it, snobs. That and an instrumental “Where Is My Mind” rule this film, the latter first played for me by a girl I met in San Diego, and explained by her, too: “It’s like, where is my mind, right? Like, where…is…my…mind?” Like, what if the truly crazy place is outside the asylum, and a weird version of sanity reigns within? Our hero finds high school (Stuyvesant?) so hectic he checks himself into the ward where Zach Galifiniakis is king. No brutal authority like Nurse Ratched or unhinged demon like Angelina Jolie, he’s rather a Falstaff to our Hal—group therapy looks like fun. To go before the circle and attest. The kind of magic Wes Anderson could make with an iPod and the DSM IV.

Inmate #3 is Daniel London, who I think is a co-op member, and in the flashback sequence the kids run right under the ol’ green neon sign. O, to after rooftop access fly out, or let the heart fly out, over Brooklyn. The crazy night’s not done, I see a car in the middle of the traffic circle, between the benches where the down-and-out go to suck car exhaust and loll, and its stove-in front end coincides with the base of the obelisk, now toppled onto its side, a war memorial someone’s just taken out, and all at once three fire engines pull up, and I stop a minute to gawk…

MY SOUL TO TAKE (3D)

It just feels weird, wearing a crewneck sweatshirt over a v-neck t-shirt. Whereas a v-neck sweater over a crewneck tee is a classic look. I suppose the sacred triangle, once evoked, ought to be maintained, and one feels this. Someone’s graffitied “FUCK NEW MOVIES” on a construction site barrier nearby. But every movie was new, once. The life cycle is complex: the marketing campaign stokes an excitement that peaks when it’s announced, the Wednesday before, that the movie opens Friday. The watching itself is a non-event, a kernel of necessity around which ordinary feeling can only be a husk. The period beginning two weeks later and lasting three-five years from then is the time when the very title cannot be said aloud without triggering an almost physical disgust. Following which the true beauty of the thing is at last and forever revealed. Not that it was beautiful all along but that it is now beautiful, now somehow become the self it couldn’t formerly be, recognizable in all its florid particularity, its all-too-arbitrary organization of its given heap of incoherence. Is this banal—commodity culture’s tireless cresting/crashing wave and smoothed-out beach? One’s inevitably a bit tart on a fall day warm in the sun, cold in the shade.

Those recently-popular soft, ballet-style women’s shoes turn out to be particularly impractical for outrunning a homicidal maniac in the woods. The original killer, in flashback, harbors multiple personalities that migrate, on the day of his death, into the bodies of seven children born that same day, one of whom is now (they’re teenagers) murdering the rest. The hero watches The Birds, but they’re called forth by guilt, whereas here a strangely calm, almost natural cycle plays out in the spirit of the carrion-fed condor, who “eats death for breakfast.” And the movie’s mirror-obsessed. They’re terrifying, right? Take a look in mine, sometime. Two of the kids do the routine from Duck Soup, going gesture for gesture—how does Harpo know what Groucho will do next? Because there is no time in the unconscious; there is no “next.” And the other famous one, obviously, is the taxi driver practicing with his pistol, taking aim at his own subjectivity, “You talkin’ to me?” The talking that never stops. He gets that pistol-draw down cold. It’s important, I was recently told, to visualize success.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

"Yer still a creep."—Lois Pain, "Superduperman"

I go alone. The movie tells the story of the founding of the popular website www.facebook.com, which probably has, like, a million members at this point. Full disclosure: I’m one. Several times a day I “log in” to see what my “friends” “like” that day, or if they have “tagged” me in their photos (assigned my name to my image, so that the photos can be cross-referenced—it’s hard to explain). What’s wild is that the movie shows how the founder of the business—a young billionaire, with a “b”—uses the website in the exact same way as anyone else. The world’s gotten strange, that’s for sure.

“There’s a difference between being obsessed and being motivated.” Humiliation to ambition is one-to-one, the dug hole and the hole filled are of the same tremendous size. Socializing in the sad flesh. A code-writing montage reliably enlivens, if you’re not writing one you’re following one, and if there’s one thing this story helps us to understand it’s that nobility is to be shed. “Clean” is the aesthetic it zealously and rightly promotes. It would be absurd, meeting Timberlake, to ask to touch his hair, but wouldn’t it be worth it if afterward, on the cab ride home, you could sniff deeply of your palm and summon both him and the way he evaporates into sparkle? The word for like is the word for corpse because bodies are mostly the same. I have sometimes found my liking too timid to warrant even that little click, as at other times it is too large and indeed, if admitted, would overwhelm the whole works.

It’s so crazy-scary when the original CFO pushes to monetize the site while it’s still building its most crucial asset: coolness. Which is exactly what I always say. But try explaining the years-long cultivation of cachet to a two-year-old who’s all, why can’t I go to the good preschool now? To like is not enough—one must choose. Some might say, this is a sorry consolation prize for having gradually and all-at-once agreed to hook ourselves up to these machines all damn day long. But I always say, think how serene we must look to whoever’s watching, aliens or God, from way up there in outer space.

YOU AGAIN

Yeah, it’s me, yeah, it’s grotty old theater seven, it’s that tray of unagi from Whole Foods, it’s fall, it’s Kristen Bell. But there is no you until there’s a you again, until the face of the excessive rises up streaked with tears and snot. I’m the over-excited type who can’t pour water from a pot to a mug or bowl without spilling half down the side and across the counter. The crisp, singular act is best traded for smudge, accretion, erosion, as this film suggests that the high-school self is never banished but persists one thin and easily-scratched layer beneath the city-self one has carefully fashioned and outfitted in good jeans. The real facebook movie, because now reinvention is impossible, because the past never looks away. Bell plays a super-successful P.R. exec in L.A. called home to discover her brother engaged to her high-school tormentor whose aunt/guardian Sigourney Weaver is a super-duper-successful hotelier and former high-school nemesis of Bell’s mom Jamie Lee Curtis. At some point someone says there are now seven billion people in the world—already? Uh oh.

Weaver and Curtis both look fabulous. The high school flashback is titled “2002” but I’d venture that the references—Hall and Oates, Queen, the lambada, Kris Kross—point to a writer coming of age c.1980-1992. You again. High-Weaver time, peak Curtis, some of us have the latter to thank for our provincial’s first encounter with intersex issues and ethics. Are we really going to start wearing our jeans backwards? No? Whew. Tony Curtis died this week—buried with percoset and an iPhone, I read—now that man could wear stockings, though Lemmon winds up more curious. “I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop,” i.e. the best of what both bits have to offer. Pull down your pants, pull up your skirt. “You again.” “Nobody’s perfect.”

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE (3D)

“I’ll take one for the owl movie, please.” The ushers wear standard-issue evening-wear pastiche: bowties and black vests over white button-downs, black pants and shoes. They guard what little love is here, unless we dare to sneak some in like so much smuggled candy (the bodega’s a block away). Alex told me they briefly considered turning this space into a music venue, a few years back. And where would I be tonight, then, some depressing AMC, or breaking my ass on a Film Forum chair?

Kidnapped, the owls trick the Circe of the moon and escape through a crack, to quest for what they’ve only dreamt. “Stories are part of our culture and history”—oh, dad. The guardians, once found, dart and glide around a world-tree, they train to fly, even storm-blinded, over the sea. The young hero has the gift, he closes his eyes and finds the single, impossible path through spiral of wind and rain as a thunderbolt splits the sky behind. It’s that very intuition that takes him, in the final battle, though the flames.

It’s exciting, and I’m alone, I never masturbate here but sometimes I’ll just sort of graze myself alert. Think of the way an owl sees the night, every rustle and breeze alive, the talon-tips impending on the panicked prey. What’s this metaphor, penis as owl or as mouse/vole? I wonder what’s the craziest thing anyone’s ever done in this place.

WALL STREET 2: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

That makes two of us. It’s hard to imagine a better film, though it could never be watched again. My cousin and I get lost in the plot a few times—maybe the whiskeys before and tall boys we snuck in were overdoing it, but we couldn’t be stopped. Oh, my credit card. Is greed good? Is Gordon Gekko a Jew? Does our young hero’s name really translate as Shia the Beef? Protégé, do not forget, of Indiana Jones. The title baffled me, then: Raiders of the Lost Ark. And what did it mean, Romancing the Stone? Because there is an eros in alchemy? Fusion as MacGuffin. When the tokamak is up and running at last we shall achieve a thread-count that is functionally infinite, and those sheets will be stamped with a graph on which a curve approaches the limit. How much liquidity do you need to get at least close enough to spit on the Real? Too big to fail. “There won’t be any history.” “The British, the Arabs, the Chinese.” I get how skyline shots are shots of people. But you can’t shoot that clipper-ship Gehry building in Chelsea without getting Bayview prison in the frame. You can’t shoot Wall Street without Ground Zero, the presence exerted by a hole is the one trope Oliver Stone comprehends. You chase the alligator, you get to wear the boots. Douglas is dying, even as he shimmers on the screen, the whole hexis of slicked-back hair and the cigars that killed him. He calls speculation “malignant,” “a cancer.” His daughter he’s named Win. Mine likes bubbles, too. So what’s on the walls at Goldman? We get Saturn Devouring His Children— Kirk, old titan-father—some Haring, one of those Richard Princes with a masked nurse. Art adorns. Tulips. “The game between people”—word. We're bills, buildings, atoms, bubbles, paintings—always together, ever apart. It’s so, so good, remember, Kathleen Turner has finished writing the book, and she goes out to the street and he rolls up through the midtown canyons astride his sailboat. [Quote some Tennyson here]. I sincerely hope he lives through year’s end.

DEVIL

It’s really the last bastion of the creep. So we can’t help but be suspicious when people act like they’re here having wholesome fun. Behind strangers in the dark, and strangers behind us, all fixated on the fantasy that the merciless flux could be framed, which is to admit to being hopelessly covetous and afraid. But it can’t work if the lights aren’t down, which seems to be a problem in theater five lately. It’s like that nightmare scenario: you’re in an elevator and suddenly it stops and you have to look up and see your fellow passengers, and speak. “There’s a reason we’re the audience,” says the security guard to the police detective, as they peer into the video monitor at the stuck elevator onto which, the guard insists, the devil himself has come to harvest souls. So is it the smarmy salesman, the cranky middle-aged lady, the priss, the angry black man, or the guy in the hoodie who turns out to be an Afghanistan vet? It’s super-awkward. Then the lights go off—not in here, though—and one turns up dead, then another. I’ve been on subway cars like that. Having to deal with each other is literally the worst thing we can imagine.

Hard to believe no one’s ever had this idea for an opening before, it’s so simple but brilliant: a vivid helicopter shot of the Philadelphia skyline, projected upside-down. As we pan across the buildings their weight is palpable, they hang—as they truly do—off the belly of the earth. That vertiginous moment when Virgil and the Pilgrim clamber up Satan’s hairy legs and find themselves right-side up. The movies are Cartesian—they think they think, and therefore exist. But like him they reject the better hypothesis: it’s all a clever demon’s trick. We feel a presentiment of damnation whenever an ending is a twist.

EASY A

"...the same way lovers leave their reputations..."—Rumi

The A-Team, Alpha and Omega, Easy A—so what does that letter stand for, anyway? She’s no adulteress, and Emma Stone confessed to New York she’d never cracked her Hawthorne (“My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.”). The tagline on the poster is that great withering phrase from youth: “Let’s not and say we did.” Weird phrase, because afterwards you neither did nor said. But in this case Stone does say, though her words collapse, the story shows, into the vacuum of the not-done. And yet isn’t our task, lately, to pursue the Act to its vanishing point, to make saying Almost All, to cede to the Avatar a reality nearly complete, and certainly more color-fast than the version it replaces? Unless the virtual doesn’t exist, now, either, because it itself has become too actual, in which case Let’s, and say we didn’t. The lie that gets the vicious rumors started involves a guy she invents, and since he’s made up he can’t really have taken her virginity, right? But what if she awoke, the morning after, to find, impossibly, the place between those long legs fucked? Not the cult of the Virgin Mary, exactly, but more like when you don’t go to the movie one night but then the next day you’ve seen it, somehow, and your wallet’s empty, and it’s already written up.

I like the way Tucci wears his bald. Clarkson can literally do no wrong. Ironic parenting, winking teaching, snarky teendom all swirl around the gravity of a few clips, on primitive stock, a black hole toward which they list. I refer to Cusack with hoisted boombox, Ferris upon his float, Judd departing the so-called breakfast club, Dempsey galloping forth on his mower/steed, and Jake Ryan, elbows grasped, ankles crossed, leaning all come-hither against the red Porsche. Mouthing “Yeah, you.” The shot that makes us melt. Is the glass table on which they sit and kiss, in the final scene, the same under which the Geek was, post-party, trapped? Carley says they don’t last—Samantha’s too smart. And those loafers below the khaki tight-roll cuffs can’t be cool forever. Then again, I just re-bought his exact plaid shirt. Breton: “The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. Kill, plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not tolerate deferment. You have no name. Everything is inestimably easy.” A is for Art—the one thing that isn’t hard.

ALPHA AND OMEGA (3D)

It seems an age since The Wolfman. Since Marmaduke, even. The space between movies is unfathomable chasms. I can’t stop thinking of “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip”—doesn’t every exchange happen over a gap like that, across which there is no taking back? Indy plunges across and calls forth, lover-like, the rolling boulder, which is of course the furious moon. Do you know why wolves howl at it? Legend has it, it’s the boulder rolling away from the cave, and with their cries they greet the resurrected Lord. “I am the Alpha and the Omega”—the bad, bad dog and the yummy, yummy lamb.

Why can’t the Justin Long-wolf get with the Hayden Panettiere one? Because she’s an Alpha and he’s an Omega, it’s the law of the pack, her kind hunts and his are their clowns, good only for romping fun. Those too-familiar tribes: the chosen and the fools—if you’re not taken seriously, what can you do? If you scream and yell, people just laugh all the harder. And you can’t mope—at a certain age, it’s a point of pride to show up and give everyone your best. To be marked as superfluous sucks. Or at least, that’s how this Alpha imagines it feels.

When some vague humans cart the couple away, by chance, to repopulate Idaho, they must set off on a dangerous quest for home. The taiga of the achieved. Wolf fist-bumps and melisma-howls—I understand entirely the urge to try to mitigate the trauma of Watership Down. It’s reasonable to decree that the beginning shall not touch the end. Malka’s favorite phrase: “Another one?” Addition, series, cycle, speed. Anything else is just woofing in the wind.