THE PAVILION PROJECT

BRIDESMAIDS

2011-05-22T17:34:00.000-07:00

How come every establishing shot of Milwaukee is of the interstate? Schlemiel, schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated. From Lucy’s conveyor belt of chocolates, to Laverne and Shirl watching the endless brown bottles shuttle by, to Kristen Wiig, depressed in her far-from-any-factory kitchen, baking herself that emblematic dessert of lonesome, luscious, childish late capitalism: a cupcake. An honest-to-goodness comedienne, with righteous gams and a face better suited, it turns out, to the big screen than to broad live t.v. sketches, the more subtly to register the little tics and crumples by which she broadcasts the ever at-the-boil anxiety of the socially fragile being who is not just in her mind but in matter of fact clipped and cut at, of the sensitive alien who is in actual fact failing at everything she tries. And in the very same way, the film itself nervously titters at its own repressed but explosive class rage, held awkwardly behind the façade of advocating taking personal responsibility for the deep fucked up-ed-ness of your modern American life.

Always a bridesmaid. But Bill says Virgos naturally avoid the spotlight. I’ll say this: the other weekend, when they parked the fifty trailers on our block and for blocks around (Haddad’s—“The Can Do People”) and assembled craft service tables and union lollygaggers and half the gawking neighborhood, and when they took the whole day to set up, leaking millions all the while, hooking fire hydrants to enormous hoses, erecting massive scaffolds from which to sprinkle rain not in an illusion-producing scrim between actor and camera but, as an eager-beaver PA told us, in 3-D, because this new Spiderman is being shot in 3-D, and when finally night fell and they turned on the battery of lights to make daylight, and filled the pleasant air with downpour, and stopped traffic, and cleared the background, then I thought about the little holy spot all the long laboring had at last created, the perfect glowing grove of action where something silly and meaningless was now going to unfold, and I thought, almost sick with it, to step into that nexus is to become the bride of death, to mouth “I do” to the groom of nothingness and lift the veil of appearance and kiss annihilation on the lips. I’d rather live forever in the overflowing dark.

HOW DO YOU KNOW

2011-01-19T17:21:00.000-08:00

“Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows him his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”—Walker Percy

Epistemology’s always been more intellectual good citizenship than felt cause—we don’t act on knowledge, after all, but rise to a beckoning, or else flounder in the awful silence. The movies favor the ontological and their ontology goes: BE MOVIES TOO, Jack Nicholson coming through the door with the axe is the movies coming through the screen for we their shrieking victims. It’s more than “media ideology,” more than being educated enough to say that what’s up there only appears impossibly beautiful and coherent so that we might be suitably undone as subjects. No—abashed, we grasp the truth: what’s up there really is more perfect, and if anything we don’t feel badly enough about ourselves.

Nicholson: “I don’t trust myself not to manipulate you.” O. Wilson: “I think I screwed up.” Rudd: “Not from my perspective.” Tracy Flick: “Gee whiz.” Love, your scant permutations allow for infinite improvisation—if only one may acquit oneself of the license to be exposed. I take back what I said. O friends! The blemish is mine!

Closure is so revolting—the hairy little stitch that seals the base of the apple. That inspired 80s kiss-off: “It’s been real.” I was just a kid but I can assure you, Legos mush, rather than click, together. The digital will oblige us to relinquish the haunting metaphor of film caught in the projector, the sudden singe creeping from center to edge, contortion of melting celluloid, an extra-narrative supernova giving way to blackness and a murmur of consternation from the seats. Just another year in the dark, finally, year up in smoke, a heap of fantasies the fuel?

But walking around my neighborhood, the streets gone quiet enough to hear my own footsteps, I think, hit your marks, now, the camera is rolling on that impossible, life-long tracking shot, that single radiant take for which each of us is cast.

LITTLE FOCKERS

2011-01-16T19:14:00.000-08:00

Keitel and DeNiro are still at it, here, still dusting up. What’s that first scene of Mean Streets all about? Recall: Keitel starts from sleep, sits up in bed (taut in his wifebeater), gets out (crucifix on the wall), crosses to the mirror—what’s gotten into him? Back to the bed, gets in, lays back, his head hits the pillow as: Boom-ba-Boom-Boom— “The night we met I knew I needed you so…” Ronnie Spector’s voice, once heard, ruins him forever, and us, too—it’s the popular itself, the ecstatic everywhere sound poor Jesus never heard, or maybe He just wasn’t listening, “Be My Baby” surely played at the Annunciation.

Erica and I are cracking up—turns out the name “Focker” sounds like a swear, and it kills us every time someone says it. The plot involves an ex-spy (DeNiro) with a genealogy traced back to 1643 who keeps unflagging watch over gay/feminine/infantile wandering-Jew Stiller. Jessica Alba (Machete) plays the year’s second or third viagra rep—it’s hard to keep track. All right, Father, we know you’re still virile, we know your giant focking thingy rules the world.

Knock knock, Who’s there?, Owen, Owen who?, Owen Wilson, Oh Christ why didn’t you say so, man, get in here, bro, I’ve been worried about you, I’m here for you, I get that stressed-out, headachy feeling too, looking at the city and thinking, how long till the damn dirty bomb goes off? But you made it this far. I get it—a pit in the world’s cheek, half-freed already from the chunk of luscious melon that’s all’s between you and getting spit. Hold on a little longer, bra, what’s magical about a pavilion is that it’s temporary, momentarily grand, suggestive of ruin even as it shrugs ruination off, it comes down somewhere and goes up somewhere else. Blue Valentine next week…at Angelika…

TRUE GRIT

2011-01-16T19:11:00.000-08:00

“You must pay for everything in this world; there is nothing free except the grace of God.” No shit, I’m broke, and oh so thirsty (“He loves to pull a cork”). I love those frontier towns in Westerns, a broad dirt road fronted by saloon, movie palace, savory pie shop. This genre—principal and full glass of which all others are but accrued interest and meniscus—is lately evolving, throwing off the laconic for every flavor of formal talk, as here we get, for starters, last-words-upon-the-gallows, horse trading, testimony, tall tales, and epitaph. (“You do not varnish your opinions.” But when did every poet up and decide that sex could only be referred to as “fucking”? Ease up, everyone, let go of each other’s hair, we’ll be plenty stony enough without abandoning the euphemisms whose rightness this enlightened cinema teaches). My own lucubrations hardly range as wide, and my concordance, sadly, falls short of the dictionary it shamefacedly courts.

Everyone knows the story: retribution. Is it totally idiosyncratic to say the girl is Death herself (Cf. The Sandman’s goth teen)? After all, she sleeps more than once among corpses, drives a hard bargain, pursues her quarry without pause, and through her particular vulnerability compels the hero to his (deferred) demise—when Bridges (Crazy Heart, Tron) rides a horse to collapse and then carries her slack, snakebit form across the starry-domed desert it essentially finishes him, he sags mortally and later, we’re told, goes into show biz. Grown hard and sexless, she collects and buries him. She is not our bride, then, but our charge, and our own sentimental solicitude serves the warrant for our spirit.

Who remembers Rooster Cogburn’s given name is Reuben—any chance he’s a, well, you know? Reins in his teeth, charging the Four Horsemen, it’s about as sweet as Albert Finney with the tommy gun in Miller’s Crossing. Who’d have thought poise so cinematic? And it doesn't preclude, we note, titanic shit-talking or getting totally, mortifyingly bombed.

YOGI BEAR (3D)

2011-01-16T19:08:00.000-08:00

The universality of the prohibition’s adoption staggers: No Movies In The Morning. But then, it is their nature to hide from the light of day. Alexander Kluge: “Our eyes…are not quick. Their power of differentiation is limited to one twenty-eighth of a second. As with film, where the eye cannot really make out that half the time spent in the cinema is spent in darkness. Out of every two hours we spend at the movies, we spend one hour in the dark, relaxing. The brain perceives this, its many synapses register it, and yet each of us will have seen an uninterrupted film. Probably this is the experience of film: We dream at the movies—In front of the TV perhaps a little less.” I never watched much Yogi, as a kid, nor entirely understood what his collar signifies. I often think, still, of Alvin (the chipmunk), accused (like Yogi) of selfishness, and wonder if he’s found his peace. Is the Jay-Z “Hard Knock Life” just a bit of stunt sampling? Or is the presence of the shrill orphans’ cries meant to mock such posturing as all men do? Or does he, on the contrary, dignify their cloying grouse with his gravitas?

It’s hard not to sympathize with the assistant ranger who’s not allowed to drive the ATV or guide tours until he’s “paid his dues.” The final humiliation: wearing a sandwich board to advertise the Jellystone centennial. Of course he’s easily seduced by the corrupt mayor, and sabotages the celebration. Let’s be honest: whatever damage done to any one of us by corporations and governments seems an order of magnitude less than that inflicted by the indifference of our own supposed communities.

The year’s first true 3-D spit-take seems shockingly late to arrive. Yogi has a bit of the Jackass in him, his ingenuity is for unstable contraptions. As the climax nears, he’s required to chase by homemade glider a pic-a-nic basket filled not with sandwiches and pie but containing a thought-to-be-extinct turtle whose revelation to the public will result in legal protection that would save the threatened park—but these stacked abstractions can mean nothing to a bear, a beast. His pic-a-nic is the plummeting. Play always goes too far.

TRON: LEGACY (3D)

2011-01-13T16:39:00.001-08:00

“Use the levels!” Okay, I’ll try! I need a word, first, for what I so fucking am—not “stoned,” as though in the proverbial village square, not “baked,” but raw, not “high” but somehow the more perfectly attuned to the axes of that cold, glowy grid. But for all that it promises precision and speed and circuit it’s a world that couldn’t be heavier or more clogged and bogged down with all we lug: the young hero finds dad Jeff Bridges vanished 30 years into his work, literally, constructing a new world that the son, transported there, must quickly master. No wonder Telemachus has no personality, he’s too busy playing catch-up, while dad’s so complex he’s split in two: gray-bearded benevolent sage (username: thedudeabides22) vs. pure, un-aged superego acting as dictator over “people” who are really programs—the easier to be erased. They shatter like car windowglass. Culture, the ultimate family business. And how does the son report the intervening three decades to the dad who missed them? “Ice caps melting, the Middle East, the rich getting richer, cell phones.” Don’t forget pretzel M&Ms, kid, I’m up to my elbow in a bag of ‘em.

Like Avatar, this film embodies what it dramatizes: the virtually-young Bridges, however deep in the uncanny valley, presages every virtual actor auditioning just around the next technological corner. Our modern conundrum and wish of wishes—The Matrix, Akira, Frankenstein, King Kong on the spire—is the animal on the grid, order laid over meat, flesh as software, mind as hardware, the cyborg’s greedy consciousness fused and fulfilled. Haunting the old arcade. “The only way to win is not to play,” cribbed straight from Wargames, is offered up here as an outmoded boomerism. “The coward is despised because he refuses to play the game, and so reminds us that it is a game, and that we have a choice of not playing it.”—Northrop Frye. And: “The strong man or successful ruler is the man who is no longer aware of a disparity between reality and appearance, and is able to live in a continuous state of self-hypnosis.” Take us to Defcon One. All those guys with their dicks (discs?) in their hands on Chatroulette are really an army-in-waiting for the war to end all wars.

Tugging those rubber pants on and off, oy. One wakes up, certain days, and feels evolution at work inside. Its way of wanting what it wants—ruthless and ingenious—teaches how impoverished our little wantings, which nevertheless echo its profounder action, really are. Americans are said to be shallow but we’re not especially fun: Do you want to know what we care about in 2010? I’ll tell you: Duty and Dystopia, stoically sticking around or else arriving somewhere awful, probably pretty soon. My New Year’s resolution will be to wear crazier clothes.

THE FIGHTER

2011-01-13T16:36:00.000-08:00

I love the episodes when they go to the movies on Seinfeld. Some drama, tonight, because the wrong time was listed on the web, but the ticket girl: “We don’t control that, they control that in, like, Virginia.” I shoot back a withering look. The fight over customer service is worth having—a way to confirm our mutual commitments—but don’t try to win. Remember when Jerry realizes he’s Even Steven? Remember what Elaine wants to see instead of The English Patient? Sack Lunch. A whole family, on the poster, stands inside a paper bag, and she, looking at it, giggling, to her date: “Don't you wanna know how they got in there?” And then, pensive: “So d'you think they got shrunk down, or is it just a giant sack?”

Like all great boxing movies, this is less about punching than punch-taking. Surely the genre that allows all others to exist, the ur-genre that authorizes our shared struggle to archive the light reflected, on a handful of hallowed L.A. afternoons, from the bodies of a few spectacular persons. Marky Mark’s unreal shoulders and vast, gleaming back. Amy (Julie!) Adams’s snow-whiteness, Christian Bale’s gaunt wolf. We sure like looking at gritty Massachusetts, don’t we, and hearing its vowels of swallowed complaint. The ramshackle avocado-green crackhouse of our reveries. The problem with deploring addiction is that suddenly one finds oneself in the position of spouting every kind of false, awkward lie about life meaning something. Whereas the taste of the crack bypasses rhetoric to freak the opalescent lens.

The fight is with the head. The fight is with the body. The fight is with the brother. The fight is with the mother. The fight is with the story. Based on a true. As in Conviction, the last shot’s of the real Micky and his bro, mugging for a camera they don’t entirely trust. “You Hollywood people…” says Dickie, and it really, really feels like he means us, too.

BLACK SWAN

2011-01-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

We don’t deserve a film this great. Based on a ballet—the art form most like poetry in that it has to convince you, every single time you encounter it, that despite your every presentiment and memory it might actually succeed. Can you imagine the movies having to stoop so? On the contrary, we like this one before the tickets are even bought. Jason and Ethan gush over all the spectacle, while Michael teases me, at the bar, telling me his male students are driving him nuts, stuck on what he calls the merely distracting question of fate vs. free will in The Odyssey. I know he knows, of course, that I’m stuck on it, too. How else can we decide if events are the crucibles of our affinity, or if they are themselves, rather, the wedges sledgehammer time pounds into the chinks between us.

WINONA FOREVER. But everyone’s bonkers for Portman, those cheekbones, that you-know-what neck, my old mentor is reported to have said that he could watch this movie “a thousand times” and I think I might know why. As Nina, she’s a frozen little girl, a Rapunzel about to awaken, cram an armload of stuffed animals into her apartment’s incinerator—how amazing was Toy Story 3?—and push, out of desperate ambition, past mere technique. And yet, Zizek: “Death drive means precisely that the most radical tendency of a living organism is to maintain a state of tension, to avoid final ‘relaxation’ in obtaining a state of full homeostasis. ‘Death drive’ as ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ is this very insistence of an organism on endlessly repeating the state of tension.” Eros and abandon, you deserve this tale’s paean, but it’s just as much a fundamental instinct that makes both she and I so spectacularly uptight.

Your paranoid delusion going down on you is like nothing else. After all, it knows your unbearable organ: the skin under skin: rashed, stippled, enflamed. I keep mine raw, too, the beds of my nails are always healing, never healed. Plier: to fold, and unfold, and enfold, replicate and duplicate and explicate. Places, everyone! In this city you’ve got to kill your double every fucking night.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER (3D)

2011-01-09T18:16:00.000-08:00

The chronic, indeed. Lady two rows back, loudly, to her date: “This feels more 3-D than Avatar.” Who wants to have depth, or be smart? I just want to feel what I feel. But where? The place-where-feeling-contends must be, as one by now expects, a world-within-this-one. Going from this land into that. In a way that 2001 didn’t, 2011 seems a frontier, a moment-truly-unto-eternal-return, with all the ambiguity that implies. Amor fati. Buy gold.

Sailing around, being tempted, manifesting one’s own deepest fears, it just gets better every time. The girl wants to be wanted; the boy calls forth from his mindscape a sea serpent/vagina dentata whose coils aptly depict the extra-moral turning-upon-oneself that makes the presence of a villain superfluous here. Aslan paws his litterbox-isle and roars the turmoil aright, then leads the kids and the rat-who-won’t-shut-up to the ceaselessly-cresting wave whose bitchin’ curl marks the border of his country, the world-within-the-world-within-this-one. “In your world I have another name,” he purrs. I tried to work it out—Arty Morty?

Writer Lewis is also known for making Satan bad again, director Apted for filming cute kids with funny accents growing up into the nightmare of adulthood. Ideology’s both a bolt from the blue and a long, painful slog. The Law isn’t all bad but it’s sad to see, in the deserted traffic circle, a lone car hit his turn signal out of pure habit. Midnight, winter solstice, full moon on the verge of a rare eclipse, I piss, brush, and plug in my cheap-shit, depleted phone.

THE TOURIST

2011-01-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

Alfie remembers that Paul Bettany once played Chaucer, which means Alfie’s seen “A Knight’s Tale,” which means he’s seen everything. I still remember when he told us, “I love repetition”—who knew you were allowed say a thing like that? He was just on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire—the emphasis is meant to fall on the first word of that question, but one can’t help shifting it to the second. As The Tourist implicitly asks, by its lush late-capitalist Grand Tour, TGV and vaporetto, why move desire around, anyway, since it’s measureless and total? Just for economy’s sake, just to grease the flow of euros? Jolie, who never stops trotting the globe, is affectless here: Lyotard: “For it is of the essence of desire to desire also to free itself of itself, because desire is intolerable.” No one is closer than Jolie to that famous object of desire—herself—so it’s no surprise she hymns a nothingness. To where would she make a pilgrimage? She gravitates toward stories about fraudulence, while Depp is the face of innocence, though he began it all, let’s not forget, playing a narc. Scissorhands, William Blake, Cap’n Sparrow, the Mad Hatter—the filmography, anyone would agree, of the oldest old soul. The red twizzler in my fist, held up to the screen, dissolves into the tumblerfull of Campari he swirls and sips.

Old friend of mine, to a (pre-Katrina) French Quarter shopkeeper: “Can you recommend a place to eat where there aren’t so many, you know, tourists?” Shopkeeper: “You mean like you?” Authenticity’s such a drag. Depp, as a Wisconsin community-college math teacher, smokes an electronic cigarette that vaporizes tobacco, thereby delivering nicotine without the smoke which it nevertheless simulates, for nostalgia’s sake, with a little puff of water vapor—and this doesn’t satisfy at all. The joke being, getting the drug agent itself is hardly the point, the real experience is of the byproduct, the delivery system, the burnt offering. He’s taken as a double for the man he actually is, Jolie’s too suspicious to recognize him at face value, she wears a medallion of two-faced Janus, Brad must have one hell of a home life. Hitchcock and Highsmith: It’s not only that you don’t know you’re really a criminal, it’s that you always knew it perfectly well. Pursued, one finds oneself all-too-proficiently running, leaping a turnstile, supplying a false name. Of course we don’t really care about any given movie but rather “the movies,” as one smokes or travels by train not to inhale that drag or arrive at that city but to find, exactly where one left it, the same profoundly comforting nausea (as of the seasick womb), the same predictably exhilarating trance.

TANGLED (3D)

2011-01-06T17:17:00.001-08:00

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, fascinating and uncanny tale of an “eighteen-year-old” agoraphobe with “long,” “blonde” “hair,” if you know what I mean, that serves as rope and prehensile tail and microcosmic spiral, and with whose “magical restorative powers” she keeps her manipulative mother artificially young until an intruder helps the girl escape from the “big erect tower” with her “little chameleon friend” to fulfill her lifelong wish to see the “lights in the sky” (she really is the homeschooled hippiechick Neil calls her) and after winning over the entire clientele of a local leather bar and “taming a stallion” and “breaking open a dam” before “hiding in a cave,” if you know what I mean, winds up finally seeing the lofted lanterns with the “man in a boat” who is actually the “thief” to whom she gives her “crown,” and finds herself a “princess,” if you know what I mean, I mean her innocence is an innocence both in story—she never imagined her own true station—and of story, since she covers the walls of her de facto prison with pictures of the world as she has gleaned it through what portals she may access, and these very images later reveal themselves to have contained all along the crest that signifies her hidden identity, in the same way anyone’s impressions, confusing and piecemeal, even to the point of sickening us with their apparent arbitrariness, also encode intuited points of contact—open sesames—that find us, if not understanding, then somehow understood, as when as a kid I used to travel home from the movie theater already in the thrall of the latest film I’d seen, so that the world would inevitably take on whatever cast or mood I’d been moved to inhabit, and I grew to love, and love still, this very way that the world takes a stamp or filter, not just the preference of a single self but the tint and hue of collective persons and the way they push and pull with what only seems to be the impassive thingness of it all (the hard asphalt of the traffic circle, set off by its forbidding curb), when actually, impossibly, the world actively marvels at our rootless self-aware flesh even as, at the same time, the year’s obsession with dimensionality aside, our communion is far from total, the couple sucking face in the back row distracts us, the lights come on, every strand is cut and slackens and we find ourselves awakened and, in the mirror, gone gorgeously but brutally brunette.

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS

2011-01-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

“How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity.”—Sheila Heti

Gyllenhaal’s always at the coffee shop, lately. And the other night, blind drunk, I staggered over to where I saw my cousin Luke and two others sitting in the corner of the bar we’d needed a password to get in (he had it) and only after I’d slid into the banquette—deep swallow of vodka, lime-meat stuck in my teeth—finally looked up and saw, across from me: one of my table-mates was none other than Dunst. Dunst inscrutable. Like finding Athena’s taken a seat in the bow of your storm-pitched boat. One wants to ask, of course, if when she’s up on screen she can feel the flicker inside, the way the 24 frames per second hiccup through her, filling (emptying) her with the gaps across which her form and visage must ceaselessly leap. Not the autofill of becoming but the possibility that one’s ghost already walks the earth, trying on completion like a stiff wool coat. I look up and she smiles her sly smile: Yes, it’s me all right, your stumbling was a stumbling-into, you must have given your dour alterity the slip…unless he slipped you. When a tray of drinks arrived, everyone looked at me, and I emptied my wallet into the waitress’s outstretched palm.

And how better theatricalize that flicker than to cast Hathaway, the nerve-queen, strip off all her clothes, hand her a video camera, and have her act the victim of rare early-onset Parkinson’s: tremors upon tremors, a quake whose epicenter is both her right nipple and the film-within-a-film she makes. Madeleine: “Why is the signifier of the artist overalls?” Don’t forget a claw-foot tub and a loft with amazing light. She falls for Jake, the charming young Pfizer rep with intimacy issues who pushes Zoloft and then that little blue pill. Has anyone wondered, is that a viagra in Morpheus’s left hand? Raising the question, does a hard-on in the matrix, since it is the essence of the material itself, by its presence re-actualize the virtual? I loved the 90s, driving to Scranton to see the Spin Doctors in my cuddly polar fleece. Because the American project is to depoliticize experience, anything intractably political bugs us—like health, like care. So why won’t this movie take a stand? But then, can we really afford to dismiss it? Because its hero hates himself and is lost and afraid to give over his life to love and nurture? Honestly, who among us would such a situation prick?

BURLESQUE

2011-01-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

Just when you think nothing could be better than life’s four fingers inside you—here comes the thumb. Pop sensation Christina Aguilera plays a country girl who comes to Los Angeles to find love and sing and dance at a burlesque-themed burlesque club, which maybe is the sort of place where people in L.A. still like to go? Do they still do the swing-dancing thing in San Francisco, I wonder, with the Betty Page hairdos and the, um, Betty Page tattoos? I was in the Castro when Ray of Light dropped, but imagine when “Song for the Lonely” blew up. Bill sweetly refuses to believe Cher’s had any work done (and later refers to a famous L.A. street as “Sunset Avenue”), but Mad and I don’t push it, I look across at her after the Alice in Wonderland reference, and also when Xtina scores the Louboutins, just like Kristen Bell wore in When in Rome, and here’s Bell herself dressed up like Cotillard in Nine, and looking unexpectedly fulsome and depraved. What’s the cruel existential joke of the movies? You’re in the dark, no one sees your hands shake, you can let your idiot jaw go slack, you’re finally permitted to stare and stare at the thing and then… cut! Cut, cut, cut!

My sole interest in fame would be in having everyone know the gods prefer me. And getting special treatment. Everything one knows of the Law says that the wealth and power to pile pleasure on top of pleasure could add nothing to one’s humanity—but hey, rules are made to be broken. The only problem with stardom: you’ve got to want it so bad. Got to break out of the all-reality-dance-program-veteran kickline, save the old diva’s club, land the cute bartender—as in Singin’ in the Rain, the weight of salvation all falls to the ugly (no, but interestingly bow-legged) duckling because the rest are too-complacently lip-synching away. Presence takes a round from pastiche, pure voice=air rights, a column to outer space, a direct line to the music of the spheres. And the melisma rumbling up from that small but mighty diaphragm quivers the cosmos, and makes the very heavens cream.

MORNING GLORY

2010-12-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

Daybreak, gentlemen! The daily five-ay-em pitch-meeting of the self. Rachel McAdams plays a 28-year-old aspiring morning-show producer hired to revitalize the sinking program on which Annie Hall daily demeans herself. The clincher, at the job interview: “I know a shitload more about news than someone whose daddy paid them to smoke bongs and talk semiotics at Harvard!” Come on, everyone knows semioticians prefer blunts. Is she just trying to get us not to read the shot that has her eating her lunch-salad from its little plastic clamshell while sitting next to the Gertrude Stein statue in Bryant Park? I mean, I only went to state school but the significance seems clear: language nibbles, rabbit-like, or laps, lover-like, at the event, it is not what is new but what is news, the for-some-reason plural (=hyperactive) nature of our encounter with the present, by which I mean that each morning we apply to our only face, or in McAdams’s case her really cute legs, the cold razor of the now, and that razor has not one, not two, not three, but four merciless blades.

And whose face has been there, who growls when aroused? She forces Harrison Ford (Extraordinary Measures) to co-anchor the show, and in return he tells her she has “father issues” and “repellent moxie,” and makes an uncalled-for crack about her bangs. Does he suspect she’s a replicant (she is, after all, a Plastic)? You’re watching t.v. and a wasp lands on your arm. He’s mad he’s not getting to do the serious television news. Huh?

You see what I’m getting at? Patrick Wilson tells her to meet him after work for drinks at “Schiller’s on Madison Avenue.” And then a little later we see the exterior shot of Schiller’s—the lemondrop-yellow “LIQUOR BAR” sign—which is of course on the Lower East Side. And why try to get away with that? Or rather, since they know they won’t, what’s the ploy? I love the mother, who at the beginning of the film tells McAdams that her career dream, by this point in her life (28!), is getting “embarrassing”—“I just want you to stop before we get to heartbreaking.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever done one of those Working Girl commutes, Carly Simon surging in your mind. Raise your hand if you’ve ever done one of those last-reel runs across New York towards the thing you really want. Or were you just running to catch a film? Actual conversation’s tail-end, overheard on the ticket line: Young woman: “So why are you doing it?” Young man: “Because you only live once.” So what if you run all the way over to Madison Avenue, only to find that Schiller’s isn’t there? Oh God, what the hell am I doing with my life?

UNSTOPPABLE

2010-12-24T05:58:00.001-08:00

The only true genre—train movie—The General, Runaway Train, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. And The Train, with Burt Lancaster, in which the flower of French art is loaded onto train cars by the Nazis and Burt has to stop it leaving France until the Allies arrive to save the day. All the while asking, are these paintings and stuff worth losing lives? With the implied, more pressing question, is anybody’s life worth as much as these artworks? “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was always really about the aura of persons more than paintings. I caught Burt on TCM the other night, this time in The Swimmer, based on Cheever’s overwrought story of a man crossing the suburban landscape of his corruption and failure by going from pool to neighbor’s pool. Interrogating his soul along the way, or having it flayed for him by everyone he encounters. Swimming pools—shimmering, silvery rectangles, placed at intervals, into which he plunges in succession. Still a little ways to go.

If Train 777 leaves Fuller yard in northern Pennsylvania at 6 am, and travels south at 70 mph, then how long before it etc. Set rolling unmanned, by every mischance, the behemoth surges to its fate, or it’s better to say, brings fate like so much hazardous cargo to where it’s preordained. Rust red, steel gray, blue-collar blue, swing-state dun. So what’s unstoppable? The climate-change those coal cars evoke? Or Chris Pine’s temper—he’s got a restraining order keeping him from his wife. Or is it the working-man’s will of Denzel (The Book of Eli)? He’s just been laid-off—our ruin, too, rolls merrily along. I remember one night Aaron and I were totally baked, and he swayed over to ask me what was clearly going to be a big question: “Dude, do you think Whitman was smart?” Jeez, admit you’re turned on by power and people will forever question your brains. Chill out, dude, and relax, Eliot, and back off, Sontag. I’m sorry it’s too late to give Susan Sontag a big, reassuring hug.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 1)

2010-12-19T19:16:00.001-08:00

“I’ll take a small popcorn.” “Would you like to make that a medium for just fifty cents more?” The origin of surplus—which is to say, jouissance—is bound up in this extortion, the way that what threatens to disappear is exactly what cannot be refused. As the poet said, nature is a language, can’t you read? The world wants hearing in the ear of you, it winks your eye. Don’t you agree that to call an orgasm a “little death” only perpetuates the fiction of its singularity, and thus simple exchangeability in the marketplace of satisfactions? As if it doesn’t have parts: the spotting of it, like seeing a man on horseback from miles off, the presentiment, like the one that signals a flock of birds to all take flight at once, the clarion-call of inevitability, the point of no return, like boarding the subway with a half-eaten apple, the rearing-up, like Secretariat, the flex, the break, like a cable snapping free of a tentpole in a gale, the rolling palpitation, like a python swallowing a pig, but speeded-up and in reverse, the final tugging loose, the ontological crisis typified by that question of questions, “Did you come?”, the primal grasp typified by that childish gesture of looking for just a little bit more jelly at the bottom of the jar, and a rush of thought returning like a dam breaking upon an unsuspecting town an hour after lunchtime. Thought replacing the grunts, as endearments will replace the thought. What’s that neat spell she does? “Obliviate.”

I read somewhere that this popular media platform for children was dreamt up by a homeless English lady. People in the audience are dressed in costumes and talking a bunch, as are the people on the screen, which is disconcerting as the film itself is disconcerting, meaning it has an avant-garde quality, meaning I have no idea what the fuck is going on. But I’ve never been more moved, both by and through the awesome. At the same time, it’s basically another internet fable: there’s a world inside this one, right, where one makes things happen by incanting words, where newspapers boast videos instead of photos, where teenagers learn to use their “wands” or “bottomless purses.” And where, isn’t it true, one fights with slithering death by testing one’s own tolerance for impermanence, for the part of life (all of it) that can be neither held nor even sniffed. Death’s avatar has no nose but a snout. I wonder who The Quibbler has published? That Luna is something else. And how have the principals fared? Radcliffe’s gone ratty, Grint broad, Watson hard. Why oh why must England age? Helena Bonham Carter, remember Room With a View, when he makes that question mark out of the leftover veg on his plate and tilts it up for her to spy?

THE NEXT THREE DAYS

2010-12-19T19:14:00.000-08:00

It sure looks like what happens here is that Elizabeth Banks is convicted for a murder she didn’t commit and that when all legal options run out, with a few years gone by and her child slipping away from her and no conjugal visits allowed and a life sentence stretched out ahead of her, her husband Russell Crowe (Robin Hood) decides to bust her out of the Pittsburgh prison and initiates a series of complicated preparations that involve crafting a big Beautiful Mind-style wall chart and procuring fake passports and busting up a meth lab to steal a bag of cash and teaching himself to break into a car with a youtube how-to and using apps and finally carrying out the plan in a tense, no-room-for-error dance in which the breathless pair switch clothes and vehicles and on an impossibly tight schedule try to evade the law, grab their kid, and make it to the airport one step ahead of being put on the no-fly list and escape to a tropical haven and be free forever.

But of course, there is no prison. The need for cash, the bank-robbing fantasies, putting the house on the market, the elaborate plans and calendars and maps, the GPS, the apps, the packing-up to go, the close shaves and slices of luck, the running to make train and plane—this is a straight-up tale of everyday American parenthood. Prison=being busy as fuck. That’s why the turning point is when they realize, mid-escape, that they may be obliged to leave their kid behind, and she suddenly tries to jump free of their speeding car, and he pulls over and with the clock thundering away they sit by the side of the road together, in perfect stillness, for the first time, thinking why are we doing this if we’re missing the whole point. And then when they go back to get him what’s the biggest mistake Crowe’s made? He misread the children’s birthday-party invite, it’s not at the house but at the zoo. And the greatest moment: Crowe recovers their son at last and the mother gets out of the car to embrace him and he sees her and reels in her pure blonde immanence. How I sob!…I don’t care, let ‘em look.

The cops are great, reconstructing what happened: “This guy’s a teacher?” says the detective, of Crowe. And his partner: “At a community college.” Hey, what the fuck? That means he’s detail-oriented and dogged and can perform when it’s called for, and man, that’s saying a lot.

SKYLINE

2010-12-19T19:11:00.000-08:00

Never underestimate the overdetermined—in the first reel, the Brooklyn artist visits his homeboy in L.A., the latter now a super-successful special effects expert set up in an opulent condo whose tackiness is only constructed to render the appeal of its creature-comforts more explicit. And so when the alien motherships (really, spellcheck?) descend and shine a blue light that hypnotizes all who look at it and draws them into the sky of their needfulness, of course it’s our Brooklyn guy who finds himself rapt, you don’t need a degree in semiotics from Harvard (see Morning Glory) to recognize that the blue light is the allure of the movie business itself, slurping up all the bagel-fed, Gorilla-juiced talent—so why resist? We’re not, we’re just waiting for the call, we’re not holding onto any pride or integrity here. Though by the same token I’m pro-slumming, that supposedly ghoulish act of fraudulent identification down the social ladder that every intellectual is supposed to deplore. Because what else besides erotic curiosity is going to make you shrug off your privilege? The privilege of loving everything.

But the motherships start sucking up thousands of people, and we see the bodies falling upwards, and automatically think, “reverse WTC” until one character actually says, “It’s like the goddamn rapture”—oh, duh—but a rapture of another sort. Because it comes out that the smaller soldier robots that fly out of the big ships each house, and use, a human brain and spinal cord, which explains the whole harvest. The fact that this is our fantasy—the true melding—is only confirmed by the way in which, at the end of all the chasing around, the hero and his girl don’t even escape as we expect but are sucked up, too, and his brain ripped free, and he becomes a robot-monster. I meant to say spoiler alert.

And then, the blue light is the light of the projector. Which makes the venetian blinds that our characters use for protection (and which, Foucault reminds us, Bentham hangs in the central tower of the Panopticon) the implied curtain that parts upon the stroke of the feature presentation. But this technology, for all its recent digital preening, was never really that robot/computer kind. The problem with cyborgs is that they’re expected to work all the time. Whereas the movies and the poor t.v. were always about a whole species taking a well-earned rest. It’s finally happened—the movies seem antique. One wishes to stay just a little while longer in the comfort of their semi-dark.

FOR COLORED GIRLS

2010-12-12T18:05:00.000-08:00

Theater-envy, the other night, at the Beacon, baroque palace whose filigreed sunburst and pendulous omphalos focus attention through astrological channels back across which they may travel to planes of elevated awareness—hey, look! On the ceiling, two enormous nets bulging with balloons, and the airy realization: later, those are going to fall! On us! Amy and I got really high around the corner, we talk about productivity at the bar, applications we like, user-friendly web-design templates, and she: “How did we work before all this? At a snail’s pace?” I suppose—so how fast can we work? Fellow lab rats, we’ll soon find out. My paranoia boils down to one unanswerable question: Can everyone see what I’m thinking just by glancing at my face?

My second Tyler Perry production. A slice of life, in which a dance teacher is violently date-raped while her young student with big dreams becomes pregnant and is forced to get a back-alley abortion from alcoholic demon Macy Gray, because she was refused the money to do otherwise by slutty sister Thandie Newton who lives across the hall from a woman whose alcoholic, abusive war-vet husband not only dangles but drops their two small children from a fifth-story window onto the Harlem concrete below, an event witnessed by the wife’s boss, tough-as-nails magazine editor Janet Jackson, whose own partner is not only revealed to be on the down-low (“the pool-boy in the Hamptons, my driver, the guy at the opera the other night…”) but has now infected Janet with HIV. Can it have been lost on her, the echo of the image? For Michael, too, once got in a lot of trouble dandling a child from a high balcony. Her cat-mask the relic of those bygone vatic choreographies. We needn’t fear drama, or heed the voice in the back of the mind that whispers like a quivering child, asking, when oh when will those balloons be released at last? They come down bombs, or babies, or stars, or lotus blossoms. That lotus-strewn island no one can remember. The sirens go by in the street. I hope my wife waited up.

DUE DATE

2010-12-12T18:04:00.001-08:00

My new friend Stephen’s got style—he stays at the bar while I go to the movie. And when I come out he’s still there, and I rejoin him as if I’d just stepped out for a quick smoke. But then, I’ve had quick smokes that changed my life. And Due Date changed my life. It’s like the Grand Canyon it celebrates—it was just another groove until someone named it, and now, wherever we are, we always feel we are on the side of it from which we desperately need to cross to the other. Addictions are, by definition, out of control.

I love trivia and quirk. But I don’t much care for Zach Galifiniakis’s web-based talk show, Between Two Ferns, in which he and his celebrity buddies wink and smirk at one another, as if it’s all a game. Fooling no one. Because how can Robert Downey Jr. not live for art, since he so clearly does? The absolutely gorgeous way he handles a Blackberry. Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. The celebrities are gods, and when we see them—I saw Jake Gyllenhaal canoodling with Taylor Swift by the Key Food near Gorilla the day before it was even in Us—it’s like the old myth-time again, when they’d swing down to mingle, and under their darkling eyelids one stole glimpses of sparrow and sickle both.

Galifiniakis heads for “Hollywood” to become a star—the birth the title promises is his, from besotted liar to karma-king. Waking up in roadside America, that washed-out light, feet cold, jeans still unzipped. Seeking sleep, he braces footsoles on the windshield and rubs one out. Driving, exhausted, he gives in to sweet sleep and crashes big. Sipping the coffee brewed, by mistake, from his father’s ashes, and discovering the truth, he sips again. What a response, what pure courage. To be father to yourself!

CONVICTION

2010-12-09T11:22:00.000-08:00

Journey: “The movie never ends/it goes on and on and on and on.” Motley Crue: “You know that I’ve seen/too many romantic dreams/up in lights/fallin’ off the silver screen.” Poison: “At the drive-in, in the old man’s Ford/behind the bushes, till I’m screamin’ for more.” Rock pays homage because rock gets it: the movies, like rock, are big, they don’t trade in those bargain-basement feelings like “satisfaction in a job well done” or “belatedness.” Time was one could speed fucking fast down Prospect Park West until one reached the theater/circle, then they put in that bike lane and yeah, sure, but it’s a whole lot harder to get your yellow light on around here.

Swank—not theater five (though it is) but the actress. Funny, I know a little boy named Oscar, I wonder if she’d like to meet him. It’s based on a true story, though I’d make the subtle point that if it were entirely real the Massachusetts accents would, well, they’d just be the way people talk. She puts herself through law school to argue against the verdict laid on brother Sam Rockwell, innocent of murder if not of the youthful trespasses through which they’d together dreamt of escape, not of unpredictable violence and excessive joyous hoots. A father. Where else can you stick ‘em, no one knows what to do with them, what’s a prison for, anyway? The DNA that exonerates him, finally, also damns him, passed on to daughter Mandy, a Leo—watch out.

The impassive face of the Law, struck at, may blink, quick as a shutter over a lens. So how fast can we move? And where hide, on a barren plain that extends to every horizon? The movie ends—reversal, he goes free, hugs daughter, thanks sis, cut to a photo of the actual siblings, statistics about the wrongly convicted. But no mention of what I heard on the radio—that six months later he was struck by a random car and killed. That they don’t tell you this! That we might sense it, instead, and understand we have but thought ourselves unblinking, when we've been too much and too often like children spared.

SAW (3D)

2010-12-09T11:20:00.001-08:00

“Commercial cinema is the totalitarian space par excellence.”—Raúl Ruiz

I would’ve been amazing under a regime—totally put-out, totally grumpy, almost never collaborating. Refusing to publish—as a point of honor. Who trusts art, anymore? Not us. It couldn’t stop Bush, he pretended it didn’t exist and poof. But have you heard the audio of the subjects (quite a few, apparently) who resisted in the Milgram experiment? The one guy’s voice, when he tells off the experimenter, has that unmistakable, all-too-familiar note in it: A Problem With Authority. The kind that rises up from the medulla oblongata and in an instant makes your throat go desert-dry.

Seventh film in the famous torture series and, one imagines, by its mind-blowing quality, without however having seen the others, the best. If Buster Keaton had made In the Penal Colony. A string of scenarios—as in old serials, or porn, or the literature of Christian comeuppance—played out by soap stars and Law and Order plaintiffs and a puffy Cary Elwes. A woman quartered by a spike on train rails. A woman who tells lies caught in a trap the key to which is attached by thread to a fishhook in her stomach, and the dude has to pull both key and hook out and if she screams a decibel-meter will advance four spikes into her throat. She screams. Later he must extract two of his own molars to find a lock combination that’s been etched on the teeth in his drugged sleep. His sin: he faked being a survivor. How we wish to be modern, i.e. cut up. And the pun is all too apt: we are split apart by what we “saw,” our complicity of vision means that we, too, are bound for a contraption, and the trap is: this, the 3-D space in which we are, by this spectacle, pierced. Come to think of it, the first time I ever even realized there were three dimensions was when I got that screensaver that ceaselessly builds the pipe, and pipe is the crude, endlessly available, and fundamental technology from which most of the evil stuff in this movie is built. Almost everyone at this Saturday show appears to be on a grim but weirdly giddy date.

MEGAMIND (3D)

2010-12-05T17:46:00.000-08:00

“Man has become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent...”—Sigmund Freud

Well-rested, a double feature, a rare popcorn, even—as I mount the stairs I like to stick my face in the bag and let a few salty buds leap onto my tongue. All nine theaters in use, tonight, and a quick calculation finds that this showing of this film’s worth around three grand, not counting concessions. While outside the fall sunset pours bright slag, gilds the architectural details clustered on the roofs of houses, or flares the crowns of trees.

Megamind and Metroman are classic doppelgangers, right down to the initials and the former’s compulsion, upon the latter’s faked death, to re-create him. In the vacuum villain Megamind rules undeterred, occupying city hall with his big brain and big ears and unexpected coloring and his face on a parody of the Shepard Fairey “Change” poster: he’s Obama (but why does Metroman look like Romney?). And what is it to have a “megamind,” in what does such a thing consist? Interestingly: ambition, a taste for theatrics, a facility with technology about whose value, however, both he and we are ambivalent. For his minion—a fish in a bowl—he’s designed an ape-shaped exoskeleton, thereby collapsing into one object all the evolution that precedes the human, with this twist: the fish itself occupies the very position (head, brain, speech) on which evolution’s most intensive processes were supposedly directed. As isn’t the technology Megamind creates precisely an exteriorization of an intelligence which he therefore in and of himself can’t really be said to possess.

The thing about Slavoj Zizek is the way his name, whenever invoked, elicits the spasm of anyone’s hang-up: he’s too serious, not serious enough, too trendy, not trendy enough, etc. And yet, are these not precisely the conundrums upon whose uncomfortable borders he wants to tarry, are these predicaments not our very own? For example, the characteristic genre of our time is not memoir but rather the hand-wringing article that asks of memoir whether it is okay, and what does it say about us, and Are We Allowed? And what kind of fucked-up subjects have we become, who choke on our own life stories even as they compulsively spew forth in the face of their every denial and degradation?

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2

2010-12-05T17:44:00.001-08:00

A couple audibly necking, another sharing their moment-to-moment impressions, another coming in—no joke—forty minutes late. It all adds to the slow, chatty build-up of the film, whose every shot is ostensibly either home-video footage or security-camera tape of one big American house in high-foreclosure style. That weird affective content of video—pure boredom, boredom copied over old boredom, something both less and more than just watching the world. As if to say, Oh God, the world. And maybe its secrets are visible, but the rewinding, the tracking to find them, while no less than six cameras multiply time until the inevitable point after which not enough new time remains to possibly review it all.

Great ordinary-looking white people, speaking in the amazing way of the moment, like the wife’s alternating sing-song, scare-quote-framed, or falsetto “black” voice. For this considerable sin a demon wants their toddler, who when poltergeisted from his crib heads right for the stairs and fucks with the basement doorknob, of course. Don’t get me started. Basement where the mother gets dragged, later, to emerge serenely murderous. So what happens down there? They have gorgeous pills you can take, these days.

Strange, that once again at the end of a horror film an audience member loudly declares, “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” But to call a movie bad is only to say, the means by which it has sought to induce me to feel the feelings I consider valid were in this instance too clumsy and bald, forcing me to admit that those feelings are not in fact real or whole or constant enough to truly buoy me out of this irritating finitude. How fine, then, to know no such disappointments. What stillness, rather, I find here, what fattening in the glow. And when the lights come on I scurry home, a bedbug, which it pleases me to be—that’s Kafka’s trip, not mine—snug and sated and among my kind, invisible to the dimensions that nourish me and myself unconcerned, except in a practical way too straightforward to be called rapacious, with them.

HEREAFTER

2010-12-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

Once the usher says “Enjoy your movie” it really is yours, in a way, or at least now it can never be disavowed. Not listening is a kind of listening. But why keep pretending we live in that bygone world that cared how everything would turn out? The only ones who care, as this deeply moving film makes clear, are the whispery backlit dead. The ghosts on the screen. And I tell you who’s up there. So that makes me the medium, i.e. Matt Damon, talented but always trying a bit too hard.

The movie’s riddle: how does a be-khakied, be-cable-knit-sweatered American get to be a British kid’s only hope, and score a hot French lady in the end? Look to the two world-historical events the plot includes: the tsunami and the London subway bombings. And our American knows death, and so gets to be a world citizen. In other words he is the boy from Remember Me, or his spiritual brother, given sufficient depth by our disastrous decade to understand what everyone else has long since learned to expect. Where do the three meet? At an amazing book fair! See, just publish your book with some random press, and good things will undoubtedly happen.

The living plead with our hero for a hint from their beloved lost. And the dead, ever destructive, clamor with the sins for which they wish to be forgiven. When she’s swept up in the tidal wave—the oceanic feeling, exactement ça—the French lady briefly goes where “you can be all things and all at once.” Coughing-up-water take. Beneath the metaphorical porticoes of this metaphorical pavilion one reels and retches, by a sea of images overwhelmed. Up on screen are all possibilities, if we can but die in our seats and sail among them. As for living, our celebrities can do that for us.

RED

2010-12-02T13:50:00.001-08:00

Not a repertory screening of the Kieslowski film. I overdid it last night, so just a little chamomile, now, bright and fragrant, both hands on the cup. I still remember when Madeleine brought me a tea, before Alice started, that lovely moment when you’re tripping and a person who’s gone off on a mission for so long you’ve effectively forgotten them returns with the thing! Odysseus has a great time but Penelope’s pleasure has been vastly underestimated, arrival transforms waiting into the harmony all seekers long to find.

“No criticism so sharp as seeing they think you need to be flattered.”—James Richardson. Another wish-fulfiller. RED’s an acronym: “Retired, Extremely Dangerous.” You gotta love those boomers, they won’t quit. Bruce Willis (Cop Out) is the ex-CIA spy to whom the designation applies, “bald, white male, fifties,” he romances Mary-Louise Parker (but it’s chaste, she’s really an estranged-daughter figure) and is forced back into action when revision comes calling. Way back when, “he retired drug lords, terrorists—hell, he toppled governments.” Now, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” Turns out he’s still got it: “Old man, my ass.” But at the same time, as Parker realizes, “You’re hard on the outside, but gooey on the inside.” At the CIA, “Things have been a lot different since you left.” Oh God, the holidays are coming, get ready for this routine up close.

It’s unclear whether or not the mystery at the heart of the film—what really happened during a botched CIA incursion in Guatemala in the 80s—is in fact a reference to the recently-owned-up-to U.S.-government-sponsored experiments infecting inmates with syphilis, in that nation, in the 1940s. Or was it just a lucky guess? Out in the traffic circle the war memorial—an omnibus tribute, it turns out—has been as if by viagra’s action re-propped. Even elegy, or especially elegy, is just one last chance to get it up.

LET ME IN

2010-11-28T14:12:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-11-28T14:05:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-21T18:18:00.001-08:00

“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

2010-11-21T18:15:00.001-08:00

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

2010-11-17T08:50:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-11-17T08:48:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-12T06:24:00.000-08:00

"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

2010-11-12T06:23:00.001-08:00

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)

2010-11-07T10:48:00.000-08:00

“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

2010-11-07T10:47:00.001-08:00

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

2010-11-02T10:58:00.001-07:00

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

2010-11-02T10:50:00.000-07:00

"...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)

2010-11-02T10:48:00.001-07:00

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.

THE TOWN

2010-10-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

Fuck atonement. It’s Yom Kippur, I’m hungover, Bill and I put away a brace of beers, you’re never supposed to say how it feels to be a Jew, it feels so amazingly great, that’s the big secret, though of course there’s kind of an edge to it too. Let my stumblings stand—if God wants to smite me, bring it on, I’m in Boston, I’m sitting in Fenway Park. Psych! The city whose biggest complaint seems to be, “You think you’re better than these people.” I wonder where Affleck’s track suit from Good Will Hunting spent the intervening years. The woman he takes hostage and then releases and then romances, when she finds out it was him all along, is super-mad, and there’s the problem (for us) of how beautiful, on her, that looks. The guy from The Hurt Locker goes out like Dillinger, near the end, and the problem is: the shit is cool.

The montage of montages would be, what, all the bundles of cash upon which we’ve ever, upon the screen, set our eyes. Don Draper we don’t buy as cop. Draper who, like any decent person, tries to sell his soul. But when he touches a commodity, there’s no helping it, it just turns into more life, he’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice when he parses language and desire and winds up negotiating all too much another riot, carnival, bender, passion, duel. The five o’clock shadow is his pavement busted up by leaves of grass. Not that he’s warm. He’s the rod in whose proximity we can’t behave. A grown-up, I suppose. I love ads.

Why does the guy live, at the end of The Hurt Locker? And how does Affleck get away? Sorry, were you going to see it? Are we admitting, at last, that the hero’s death is too easy a sell? I have to pee so bad it’s not a recognizable feeling anymore, it’s like a twinge occupies my seat, and beside me Bill’s become an exasperated writhe.

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE (3D)

2010-10-26T12:03:00.001-07:00

“Whether the soul is ruah, pneuma, anima, or breath, it is a continuous and unstoppable movement that can only acquire form through a slowing down.”—Arnaud Villani

Eileen Myles says poetry isn’t made of language but energy. I say the movies aren’t made of pictures but of dreams. And dreams are made of séances, collect calls to the dead. “Another night, another dream, but always you,” sings Real McCoy. And who is the “you” the movies try over and over again to reach? Houdini, Einstein, Kafka? Well, one of those hunger-artists for whom the crowd gathers, and will later inexorably disperse.

Field of long-abandoned light aircraft. Zombie cyberpunk girl from the vantage of falling Tokyo rain. Milla Jovovich (but imagine Ivana Fukalot) wields a gun in each hand in a stutter of slo-mo giving way to bursts of inhuman speed. She’s an Alice, dodging air-distorting bullets in tight leather in stark white rooms—we’re you-know-where, fighting the wire-fight of the virtually just. It’s worth saying, Neo and co. ostensibly want to destroy the Matrix, but of course they never would, since it’s within its permissions that they float, and flaunt. You never get dressed the same way again, once you’ve walked last at the runway show. Et in Arcadia ego.

The crazy-hard videogame on which it’s based is evoked when she mows her way through a limitless, gray zombie horde with a shotgun customized to shoot quarters, those shining stars arrayed forever in the firmament of the arcade Real. Post-apocalypse, a prison is a fort, a container ship is a haven, L.A. is exactly the same. If you need to pretend you’ve seen this film, discuss the overhead shots of the infection leaking, or the way the evil corporation trace her flight across a map. We sense already what we slowly grow to inhabit: the eyes of satellites.

MACHETE

2010-10-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

The trash compactor scene in Star Wars is really an ars poetica—a straight-up movie-serial sequence functioning allegorically to suggest that “trash” can be “compacted,” i.e. collaged at high density, to yield, paradoxically, the most satisfying escape. As scions of that legacy, the Tarantino/Rodriguez dyad free it from piety first, and second from a totalizing mythos that insists on othering just about everyone. Still, how to parse the jam-packed result? What would be the optimal hermeneutic tool for that?

Machete! The blade of the grim regime. Danny Trejo calls his “the boss.” In a Mexico-set prologue kills everyone in the house to rescue a kidnap victim he finds stark-naked in the bedroom and grabs up only to watch her pull a cell phone from her twat and signal druglord Steven Seagal, whose side she’s joined, to slaughter Machete’s wife and daughter, but Machete himself survives to turn up three years later as a Texas day-laborer pressed into an assassination attempt on anti-immigration politician DeNiro, whose best trick is still that doubletake when someone crosses him, that face comes back frowning and enflamed and you know you’re done.

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Someone’s been reading Joe Wenderoth: “The poet is powerful…because she is able to thrive in the shadow of that horizon, that border [between oblivion and order], and is able to know that it will cross over her just as she crosses over it.” Michelle Rodriguez leads an underground illegal-immigrant network out of a taco truck: her Ché-like codename: Shé. After she beds Trejo its Lindsay Lohan’s turn, then Jessica Alba’s—O abs, O freckles, O lips. Every love poem is an autopsy, unless we swing the blade that un-cuts, the scalpel that somehow slices away the slice itself. In real life Trejo’s a no-joke ex-boxer and ex-con whose face says: put nothing aside. Love the way those lowriders chomp the air. The hydraulics originated as a way to hide the illegally low height of the cars—the flamboyance is the way that every true sort of hiding finally goes.

LEGENDARY

2010-10-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

I’m alone in the theater, the unlikely abundance of our way of life is not lost on me. The dark cascades down: Baudelaire, “Her Hair”: “Pavilion, of blue-shadowed tresses spun,/You give me back the azure from afar;/And where the twisted locks are fringed with down/Lurk mingled odours I grow drunk upon/Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar.” It can get a little bit funky in here.

Opera. Cal’s a skinny Oklahoma boy whose dead-in-a-car-crash dad and since-estranged brother were high-school wrestling heroes. He goes out for the team. Lithe 135-pound boys scuffling in the gymnasium—not Western culture’s afterthought but its core, those lightly-sweating boy-chests. Big bro John Cena, I’m told, is the main WWE guy, I can see why, a monster, alpha-silverback body, huge lion-face, he destroys a giant biker-type in a barfight, oh he’s mean. He takes some convincing before he’ll help out Cal. Well, monsters do, it’s not easy to tug on the tuxedo and work out the steps to Puttin’ on the Ritz. When he softens it’s unbearably great, what if this soulful hulk was your brother and you could make him smile and he trained you in an abandoned warehouse, God it would be so amazing. And everyone would know not to mess with you, and he’d give you his baseball glove, and after a violent rampage he’d let you stroke his forehead with a cool damp cloth…

Go Tornadoes! The movies teach this: if you train blindfolded, when you later shed the blindfold you cannot fail. Patricia Clarkson cannot deliver an unconvincing line, she’s totally in the moment as the mom. When she finally shows up at Cena’s grimy dump of an apartment he thinks, my mom thinks I’m a loser, and she kind of does, but she’s also his everloving mother, and she holds all this in her face, and I weep, I dampen the armrests with my wiped-away tears. “Dad made me feel invincible.” “When you show up, things happen—I know that’s what Dad would say.” Dad. Dad!

GOING THE DISTANCE

2010-10-15T08:16:00.001-07:00

He lives in New York, she in San Francisco—whatever, it’s just a way of reminding us that nothing in this world may touch: no sign to referent, no concept to occasion, no hand to mouth, no translation to poem but also no poem to its original, you might try to approach some quality of feeling by pouring words over it, you could drizzle or drench it with language, but all that icky stuff does is slough off or pool in crevices or rage in cataracts of noise and blah blah blah, some patriarchal hang-up about possession and I’m sorry, who cares, who worries about this? Not this guy. And not Drew Barrymore, certainly not, least of all Drew Barrymore. And another who couldn’t care is Justin Long, the voice of Alvin, Alvin we miss you, remember when the Chipettes sang, “If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it.” And that “it” may be the most mischievous and miscreant pronoun ever squeaked, not to mention there’s no way anatomical or metonymical that the two “it”s they sing could even be the same “it”—and yet they are, as New York and San Francisco, though not, of course, the same place, both have people in them who regularly think, in regard to the people in the other, “They’re probably pretty cool.”

Cold town, I can imagine eating its somewhat unsatisfying food and drinking its good coffee, bundled on a balcony, writing foggy thoughts on page after page of blinding white copy paper.

Probably the first rom-com of its kind to include the line, “I want to come all over you” (during phone sex). And Drew, when they compare pop-cultural pasts, “If you even say ‘Marky Mark’ I’m gonna come right now.” Now is that any way for a “31-year-old” “graduate student” in “journalism” at “Stanford” to talk? Second scene this year (Step Up) at that diner on Wythe, the one across from Zebulon. He works at a “record label” and in one part leaves his car unattended in front of the JetBlue terminal at JFK. Applegate married to Gaffigan. My point: the movie toys with credulity at every turn because in doing so it dares us to question the central premise that resides not in it but in us: that we can have it all. Like, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it. Could Beyoncé be possessed, could Beyoncé be contained? Don’t tell me, “Jay-Z.” Because we are hardly privy to the fundamental ways in which Jay-Z would know better than ever even to try that.

PIRANHA (3D)

2010-10-15T07:50:00.001-07:00

what is blood in the water?-----it is what we have expressed-----our words as they spool out-----into the clear fluid of the sayable-----call forth misapprehension & rejection & perversion-----to mow the flesh from our startled bodies-----a skeleton has nowhere to recoil-----how sensitive is bone-----the guy in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt-----nods to me-----and I back-----are they desperate I wonder-----Jerry O’Connell Richard Dreyfuss Ving Rhames-----or Elisabeth Shue and Christopher Lloyd-----how did they face each other-----who last met on the set-----of Back to the Future II------and Back to the Future III-----(shot at the same time, remember)-----the piranha are from the past-----an earthquake opens a rift to a long-buried chamber-----primal justice flows into an amoral present-----spring break-----O’Connell a Girls Gone Wild-style video director-----for whom two pneumatic nymphs perform-----a girl-on-girl full-frontal swim-dance-----in eerie, lovely Esther Williams light-----seen on his monitor and our 3D-----and the piranha-cam (loud and fast)-----what we feast our eyes on-----they devour-----and the director they take from the waist down-----cut to his penis floating past-----and a piranha swims up and gulps it-----and burps it out again-----it works in context-----meanwhile at the dance party on the docks-----the fish attack in force-----from body shots to shots of bodies-----the carnage like a war zone-----violated human forms-----gaping wounds and severed limbs-----a bigger more collective guilt than brings the birds-----in The Birds----yet for all that somehow vague-----when Shue wields the taser-----I think what is the taser-----it must be the seizure-----“every sublime thought is accomplished”-----Baudelaire-----“by a more or less violent nervous shock”-----after which a calm descends-----after being rattled being receptive-----after being tense being talky-----after being sick being easy-----after being guilty being generous-----after having said being silent-----goodbye to summer-----cheated with the Walter Reade the other night-----perfection was in town-----I ask you-----is Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale not-----the most bittersweet fucking movie ever made?

THE LAST EXORCISM

2010-10-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

September. Litia says Virgos, seemingly put-together types, all harbor a “secret mess.” I’ve been putting my foot in my mouth a lot, lately: me, of all people, the longtime straight-A student of affront. Shelley’s monster wants to “become linked to the chain of existence and events.” You can groan that again, brutha. At least if you’re possessed you’ve always got a friend. I’ve always been pretty shallow—it’s okay to say—but a devil in you, that’s depth, the kind that goes all the way down.

After the final shot the guy behind me turns to his buddy, “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” But the movie is great, so what’s he trying to pull? Is he just seizing as the moment for blasphemy the only part of a movie God watches, when the credits roll and his handiwork crawls up the screen? What’s all the fuss of always trying to insist a movie is a collaborative effort? As far as I see, it’s that many more people trying to get between me and what I care about seeing: the camera’s lunge for a face that, as it perceives the approach, commences to tremble. Cindy Sherman knows. The possessed girl steals a camera, at one point—the conceit is that it’s a documentary—and through its p.o.v. crosses the yard and enters the barn to trap the family cat and with a few savage blows stub out its life.

She’s a bit high-strung. The exorcist was groomed, as a kid, to perform faith, to with showmanship frenzy the flock. But now he’s faced with the worst task: be what he says he is. A printout taped to the lobby door says they’re looking for a full-time manager for this place. Isn’t possession just shorthand for the fib of control? And do they really expect us to think this place is managed? It’s so clearly dice-like, which is to say not managed but rolled.

THE AMERICAN

2010-10-10T12:06:00.001-07:00

Q: How do you know you’re hanging out with poets in their thirties?

A: They’re all writing prose.

Let’s reject out of hand this panic over having “nothing to say.” Fuck that noise. You go to the computer lab, you sit down, the computer is frozen or perseverating on some weird alert you never get at home—what do you do? Exactly: get up and move to the next one over. Gmail, work mail, facebook, movie times. Mara and her sister are twenty minutes late to the show, which in retrospect delights me, though at the time they had Amy and I worried sick.

A cry for help. Spy stuff as allegory for Clooney’s grim, insistent bachelorhood. The Italy thing, he finds a working payphone in Rome (?!?), call it Skulk Glower Slay. And to test the rifle he spends the whole second act assembling he does what, shoots the tufts off pussywillows. He goes down on the prostitute, she bites her bottom lip, she’s totally sweating him, “You’re a good man but you have a secret.” Cold mountain-town puffs of breath—that scene in Michael Clayton with the horses is cheesy as hell but undeniably affecting, like James Wright, Mr. “I have wasted my life.” When he does die—sorry—the little white butterfly from the earlier scene goes fluttering straight up towards the sky.

The priest who tries to save his soul: “You’re American. You think you can escape history.” Above the theater, from across the traffic circle, one spies two beams of light striking low cloud-cover. There’s a new fall chill in the air, you want to get ultra-drunk. Of course there is no such thing as “the” American but always two, the one the world sees and the one who never forgets for a single moment his all-too-historicized birth. The crowded plane and the loaded gun. George, dude, it’s time to come back home.

LOTTERY TICKET

2010-10-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

Here’s how dumb I am: I feel sure, as I watch, that Lil Bow Wow will ultimately lose the $370 million lottery ticket he purchased on a whim and which, over the course of a scorching Fourth of July weekend in the projects, he must protect from every manner of golddigger and thug. And in losing it realize that he never really needed it, that he can start that sneaker company anyway, and earn an honest fortune, and in so doing raise up the ‘hood.

And yet when he does in fact redeem it and uses the winnings to fund a community redevelopment project in the final scene I think, a-ha, this bleak tale has us constituted by luck, and the happy ending only reifies the institution as capricious and insane, unsmashable because it feints and floats like the boxer Ice Cube plays who was denied his shot at the big time by a mugging and yet still proclaims risk-taking, dream-following subjecthood worthwhile. And the hoochie, trying to get LBW to knock her up, gestures to her endowments: “This is my lottery ticket.” It’s the soul of The Wire, isn’t it, that if Mookie threw the garbage can through the pizzeria window in present-day Baltimore the next scene would be the councilman figuring out how to spin the whole event as political capital, or some other undercutting move. The senseless of smashing what's already transparent, yet doesn't reveal a thing.

But that’s still not it. Because here the hero is vessel to nothing but the random numbers that we sense swarming like insects to any flare of thought. So no wonder the villain (The Wire’s Chris) boasts as his signature violence the squeeze—he both hugged and in the process suffocated the lovers he took to his prison bed. When he fights the local crimelord he grabs the guy’s nuts and under his tightening fist we hear an audible pop: the wiping out of stories, all those non-acts that bolster, by their potentiality, the very one that transpires. I wasn’t ready to understand those fluttering random numbers as the reality towards which these organic singularities we embody must in fact aspire, because it is they, and they alone, who cannot be crushed.

VAMPIRES SUCK

2010-10-05T18:18:00.000-07:00

I’ll name its genius straight off: it’s not a parody of the entire burgeoning vampire genre but only of Twilight, which it often mirrors shot for shot. And so its mockery is like the faintest protest against an adoration that approaches plagiarism or stalking, those cousin crimes that flirt with simply replacing oneself with an object so loved that to its superiority must be ceded the space one understands oneself to waste. Or think of Zizek’s explanation of our earnest postmodernity that can’t even realize that the quotes around a word like “love” were, in its coinage, already implied—we needn’t supply them, in the same way that this film is exquisitely redundant: they barely change the character names (but some get the Mad magazine treatment: Cullen becomes Sullen) or sometimes don’t at all. The tweens behind me go cuckoo-bananas with glee.

The leading actress does a pitch-perfect Kristen Stewart: eyes cast down and “twitchy,” she tucks her hair behind her ear and looks like she ate a bug if compelled to speak. She’s pelted and smacked, called frigid and boring, portrayed as dying for the sex the Edward character (“Edward”) withholds. At one point plucks the promise ring from his hand, pops it in her mouth, chews it up, and opens to reveal a new tongue piercing. When that doesn’t work she decides to seduce him by putting on a rubber Obama mask—now what do you make of that?

But they get it wrong when, to puncture her teen angst, they have her whine about unrequited love. Hold it—Bella and Edward are requited, just not consummated. “Requite”: to repay or avenge. Politics are useless but economics is everywhere you look. In case you couldn’t tell, I don’t think money is lifeblood. I think it is the parody of what we’re almost always too weak or afraid to say.

THE OTHER GUYS

2010-10-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

Marky Mark is so smart, he’s so vulnerable and articulate in I Heart Huckabees you can’t stand it, but why’s he have to ruin it, producing douchebag Entourage? I wonder what he and Donnie were like as kids, what fantasies articulated themselves to his punk mind, NWA or something blaring in his ears, while he wrenched the 199^th and 200^th crunch from those compliant abs in the Wahlberg’s half-finished basement. If he could see beyond drugs and ass to the big stage before him, to the lifework. He’s the male, here, unaccountably angry, floridly homophobic, incapable of communicating without sowing strife. In frustration he pulls the Sony Vaio—they’re really ramping up their placement this year, good luck with that—loose from cords and desk and dashes it against the office floor. And in the movie’s most lyrical sequence takes naïve partner Will Ferrell out drinking, an escapade rendered as a series of increasingly outrageous tableaux vivant. I hate to say it, but Hot Tub’s got some competition.

Ferrell plays a police accountant reviled by all for being “feminine”—the other cops call his Prius “a vagina,” while he speaks politeness and decorum to their absurd aggression. But busts out sometimes, in a bad-cop hissy fit and a flashback to his college career as a pimp called Gator. When MM insists he floor it in the car, Ferrell shouts “America” and promptly crashes. He’s inseparable, still, from the George W. Bush impression, or really, we see Bush through Ferrell as one iteration of the American man, which the movies this year remind us is the most pitiful, and therefore dangerous, creature on earth.

Is that very man, in his darkest soul, not a john but a pimp? Enslaver, purveyor, caretaker, vessel, bodyguard, administrator, the one who, when action occurs, and so that it may occur, stands and guards the door? Not to indulge in pleasure but to dispatch it, manage it, and scrape from its inflated surface the ooze of exchange. The pimp’s cathectic dream: let the other guys do the wanting. As if those exhaustions could be mitigated or abridged.

THE SWITCH

2010-10-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

Shitty Sunday, day-for-night skies and crashing rain, thunder like a slammed door.

A simple principle of the rom-com: through the essential nature of the supporting cast we shall discern the impediment to love. Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum—so we’re too happy being odd. Over the seven-year course of the film (2003-2010) New York doesn’t change, Aniston and Jason Bateman don’t so much as cut their hair. Its potential for fizzy stasis is the profoundest hope and fear for this place, as the hypochondriac seeks by incessant naming to ward off forever the event.

Kiss the writer who made broker Bateman’s rival, Patrick Wilson (the sperm donor to braless biological-clock watcher Aniston), an “Assistant Professor of Feminist Literary Tradition at Columbia.” It’s true, they’re so full of shit—not feminists, obviously, but people at Columbia. When drunken, besotted Bateman swaps out his own sample for Wilson’s, it’s not an act of bio-possessiveness but a rescue—the insemination of her shampoo-fresh normalcy by straight-up neurosis rather than a gender critique that would threaten her very life. Though what is a child but a critique that cuts both ways?

The kid is so sweet. Gesture persists, it sutures performance to the spirit. Prickly, bullied, afraid for animals—I can’t imagine anyone who would identify with that. The third act reveals the lie; before one may love, always, one’s fraudulence must be violently stripped away, and forgiven. Loneliness montage (treadmill, park, computer screen-lit face in darkened office). His declaration interrupts her rival’s proposal—can you imagine speaking up like that? The switch. Some days you want to just reach right out and flip it.

STEP UP (3D)

2010-09-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

At last: cinema. Its only essential genre, whose crux is the tug between shot and montage, the gaze and the blink. Pure decadence to make Luke, the leader of the House of Pirates dance crew, their videographer as well. “You’re a filmmaker,” gushes his anima, when he shows her the rough cut of his labor of love. Yeah, but their abdomens hail from the beginning of time, he python, she anaconda—if Eat Pray Love is a numb glimpse through a sealed airplane window this is a legit jungle fuck. The cast more matter-of-factly gay, brown, and global than anyone else has half-approached, the LEDs attached to their chests for the climax’s Busby Berkeley take the peace-drunk counterpart to The Expendables’ grim laser rifle-sights. The kids are all right.

To step up. When the Argentine breakdancing twins find the Zoltar machine from Big in the Coney Island practice space, they ask him if they will in fact win the World Jam dance-off’s $100,000 purse and thereby rescue their home from a foreclosure instigated by the rival House of Samurai. But Zoltar just spits out gibberish, and they laugh it off—it’s a goof on fate, whose services they don’t require—they’re gonna sweat and krump, pop and lock their way to glory, they’re B.F.A.B. (born from a boombox), nomads as who wouldn’t be always sort of waiting for the other Nike to drop renting that size Williamsburg loft? It boasts sneaker vault, boombox wall, graffiti studio, and communal eating space—is anything more fun than a crew?

That the kid from the last one is now at NYU, and winds up double-majoring in dance and engineering, is telling. Because the moves are spinning legs and moonwalk and robot, even robot zombie, because the LEDs are not just on but of their suits. All is accomplished—the Deleuzian cyborg come, no big deal, to pass. No wonder I weep like a child when the kid and the girl suddenly break into a lyrical little Gene Kelly routine on a Greenwich Village street—the perfect immanence one foolishly fails to see coming. “Oh Luke, that film academy sounds amazing.” Let him in. I’m glad someone out there, tonight, is awake.

EAT PRAY LOVE

2010-09-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

It’s about time I did something for me. But why is the answer always, I’ll do something weird for a year. What time frame could be more melancholy: too long for a mood to persist, too brief to really change. She had her sad New Yorker’s project, I have mine, it’s the curse of a place where so much vitality churns that you think you could conjure something major if you could just get the recipe right. Laugh Gulp Yelp. Buy Cry Blog.

Seems The Expendables’ Eric Roberts has a sister. That upper lip God himself wants a gelato spoon tucked under. Why-a you so sad, bella? The—how do you say?—sensual experience, she-a mean so much, but she’s-a isolating, too, she’s-a stuck inside-a the moment, inside-a the body. There is no mystic pizza. This tale indicts us all, it mocks the hubris that lights out to conquer loss. It’s not that Julia takes herself around the world but that like Carrie Bradshaw she displays, to the world to come, what awaits them—the very crater she lugs and into which their contemplation of her tumbles. Act Lie Star. Beg Flay Tan.

Nice Bollywood anthem, solid second-unit work in Bali. Madeleine shows me the EPL collection now on sale at World Market stores: tea, scarves, wicker chairs. I scan the drop-down menus for the men—James Franco, Javier Bardem—I’d like to have the latter delivered to my place, please, so he might heave his surging body on top of mine. I call him Barbarian, he calls me Rome. Melt Crush Bone. The leetle words-a, so small, but it’s like-a they some-a-how control us, capice?

THE EXPENDABLES

2010-09-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

Did you hear about the burglars who broke into Dolph Lundgren’s house? They’re just getting down to robbing the place when they see an enormous portrait of Dolph Lundgren on the wall and suddenly they’re like, Shit, this is Dolph Lundgren’s house. And hightail it out of there without taking a thing. He’s amazing in this, playing the heroin-addicted turncoat as slurring Frankenstein’s monster re-animated by old pal/director Sylvester Stallone along with Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, and a handful of pro wrestlers whose name recognition varies widely in a viewer like me. “We used to be on the same team together.” “You guys aren’t gonna start sucking each other’s dicks, are you?” So much for subtext. The other Planet Hollywood CEOs do a quick cameo, Bruce Willis as a CIA spook and Schwarzenegger as a rival leader. The Terminator, of Rambo: “He likes playing in the jungle.” Rocky, of the governor: “He wants to be president.” We once thought there’d be an endless supply of these guys, but it turns out it was just the one moment: Vietnam hangover, high camp culture, peak oil. “We’re both dead inside,” says villain Eric Roberts to Sly, right before the world explodes—or at least most of a pseudonymous banana republic, and then the credits roll over what else, “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

There’s a plastic surgery that bloats the face of nations, too. What made us think the war was on screen? Laser sights on the foreheads of Somali pirates speak to precision’s cynicism, while the waterboarding (third movie in a few weeks) of the generalissimo’s rebellious daughter exposes our hysterical dread. Only the Transporter, as a knife-throwing expert, plays alive, in the subplot where he whips a yuppie and his friends for having socked the woman they’ve both courted in the eye. “The Expendables”—but as in those old A-team episodes, no one dies. They’re zombies, the undead shells of a virtue that didn’t add up. What would happen if Rocky went down, if the Terminator called it a day? They’re all big but Stone Cold Steve Austin, it’s like the guy swallowed a whole ‘nother guy. The monster, having been called forth, must be hounded to the very Pole. And that’s the bottom line.

CATS AND DOGS: THE REVENGE OF KITTY GALORE (3D)

2010-09-22T14:27:00.001-07:00

Much has been said about Wile E. Coyote, who costars in the short before the film, but not as much about the Roadrunner. Of course he’s enigmatic (and yet why he, and not she?), but this time I felt a clue emerge where I’d somehow never noticed it before: I refer to the sound effect when he stops, the thwang of an arrow sunk in its target, still vibrating from the blow. So the question is, in that caesura of his perpetual blur, what has he penetrated, into what material has he sunk? The slack answer would be, he pins possibility to the agenda of universal law. But I’m tempted to propose, instead, that he punctuates nature’s impossible enthrallment with the machine. In other words, he tempts the coyote to wield technology so that he might circle around or double back to enjoy the spectacle of its limitations—that very quality nature cannot perceive in itself.

Not to refute that maxim of Jakob von Uexküll, the zoologist quoted by Giorgio Agamben: “No animal can enter into relation with an object as such.” The chief of dog headquarters wears little glasses, and the Nick Nolte-voiced hound deploys a jetpack. But it’s not as if the dogs built or even moved these artifacts into place, nor—and here’s the fascinating part—neither have humans done so on their behalf. The dog jetpack is not simply a human jetpack being used by a dog, no, it is impossibly but truly a dog jetpack. Little glasses—that cracks me up.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Cats are the bad guys, one is waterboarded, there’s a gag where one’s done up like Hannibal Lecter, that never gets old. “Radical felinism”—Bette Midler as Kitty Galore, and Wally Shawn as a foul-tempered Persian, Rudy wakes me up at 5:45, lately, I wouldn’t care if when I fed him he would just go back to sleep. But he keeps on crying out. Nothing is clear—cats and dogs team up against a common foe. “I shone, I was shattered, I shouted to the ends of the earth. I shivered, my shivering was a barking.”—Henri Michaux

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

2010-09-16T18:27:00.001-07:00

Madeleine’s moved to see the title on the marquee, mixed matter-of-factly with the rest. Part two of a double, and while Schmucks is slick, soundstage sets and ordinary actors, this is California spun-gold late afternoons and the most beautiful people in America wearing more leather bracelets than seems anatomically possible. They sure like those out there. But I mean, Julianne Moore, that Vanya, you watch and think, yes, when she leaves at the end, the vacuum in her wake quite literally destroys their lives.

As for Ruffalo, fuck, that hair, that lippy grin, and two or three truly excellent plaid shirts (from his own closet I’d bet). A voice somehow soft and gruff speaks the sentences he lets trail off. It’s partly about how wily this new breed of straight guy is, “groovy and together,” a good listener, earthy and laid-back, he eats a tomato like an apple and owns an organic/local restaurant called WYSIWYG. Indeed. Bening as bitch, again, but wow, that dinner shot. The only film I’ve seen with the word “interloper” in it, the only one in which “Desire is counterintuitive” can be a line. Spoiler alert: adultery. Spoiler alert: the end of James Dickey’s poem “Adultery” reads, “Guilt is magical.” Moral alert: a family is a family is a family—not the worst takeaway, so lower your hackles everyone.

Alice! She goes to college, in the end. How great was that day they dropped you off? A gorgeous film, I say again, all the desire we live for looking so late-afternoon, looking like that white sunlight coming through the interstices of a dark-green hedge, a few simple tables and chairs in a yard of chalky gravel, some food just out of the ground or off the vine that morning beside a glass of long-tended, long-waiting wine. Could that sort of loveliness be a set? And do we want the actors, the language, the wine, to dazzle us further, to take us higher and higher still, into an oblivion of bliss—or do we want them to stop? The Russian winter sneaking up, she leaves the estate, and think of what Vanya and the rest do when they’re bereft: they do the books.

DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS

2010-09-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

Part of my first double feature to date, a risk the crazy summer schedule forces me to take. Risk because, having sensitized myself, the double dose may burst me. “Sensitized”—Christ, listen to me. Based on a French film in which a group of corporate savages compete to see who can bring the biggest idiot to a dinner party. Maybe Carley and I will take the two ladies sitting behind us, who share aloud their registration of each basic fact from which the story unfolding onscreen is constructed. But the “idiots” in the movie are really just sad, devoted hobbyists, lost artists, stunted and insistent, not to say holy fools.

The Yiddish is either from “smok” in Polish: dragon or snake—makes sense—or possibly “der Schmuck” in German: jewelry, as in the idiom “family jewels.” The hero keeps pulling, from his pocket, a diamond ring his girlfriend can’t decide whether or not to accept. And he’s Paul Rudd and this is Park Slope, so everyone’s all, What’s she thinking? That clever little guy wouldn’t make it half a block, here, before the mob pulled him apart.

We trade looks when the guy from Flight of the Conchords, as a bombastic artist—Matthew Barney?—dons costume of goat horns, furry legs, and hooves not unlike the flamboyant get-up Carley helped me make one fateful Halloween. You just buy fake horns and spirit gum, eyeliner, a couple yards of fleece. When people saw the end result they predictably lost their minds, it’s just no joke to invoke misrule. Steve Carell is a cuckold who pours himself into taxidermy—glue trap dioramas. “The Last Supper!” says the woman behind us, when thirteen little robed mice at a long table appear. It’s not that you don’t know what you are, idiot or whatever, but that it doesn’t even matter once you’re told. So if the Last Supper was a dinner for schmucks, who brought the Son of God? Do the math—it’s got to be that unseen Holy Ghost.

RAMONA AND BEEZUS

2010-09-16T18:18:00.001-07:00

Just back in town, a perfect summer night, I take a detour through the park on my way to the 10:10 screening and watch the crowd watching Sonic Youth distort the breeze. All gorgeous youth and agitation, a crowd like the picture of my soul, even or especially to the extent that I stand outside it. Not cast out—I’m not being maudlin—but apart. And when I say soul I mean, not something mystical, but a kind of ordinary bodily function, a way the body organizes energy, just as when we say “mind” we mean the capability we possess to weave powers together, and when we say “heart” we refer to our capacity to channel feeling with great force. “Soul” means our sense that effervescent energy, which is somehow both ours and not-ours, bubbles up from deep within us—it’s the place where meaning abounds, do with it what you will. You don’t even need to go to the movies, in a way, because the beauty of the movies is that everyone else will go. The movies are what we none of us need to worry about. Then again, let’s go.

To take a beloved book for young people and shoot it like an Old Navy commercial is to practically beg us to lay aside our sentimentality and recognize, as in an Old Navy dressing room, what we brutally are. Oregon, where the DJ from Northern Exposure (Aidan!) is a middle-manager who gave up his artistic dreams for house, Volvo, and kids. He’s downsized and suddenly a stay-at-home. Foreclosure looming—Obama’s America, but they do have a really nice washer/dryer. Troubled middle-child Ramona still loves the big, emasculated lug. Antics. Ginnifer Goodwin pursued all the while by Josh Duhamel (When in Rome)—he pops in the mixtape she made him back in high school and out comes the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.” Oh man, fourteen years old, standing on the streetcorner with Richie Pagano, he told us “That song makes me cry,” and I didn’t know how literally to take it nor understand how that confession made him somehow cooler than ever, and now which way was up? Selena Gomez, to Ramona: “You don’t care what people think.” I’ve always found it’s more that one cares a lot, but how on earth can you ever really know?

SALT

2010-09-08T18:12:00.000-07:00

Alex must’ve given us a quality joint, since the name of the candy we bought is making me smile. “Spree”—we’re on one. And Carley keeps telling me how much sodium chloride she’s sprinkled on the popcorn, though of course she’s using its common name, and finally I’m like, “Are you fucking with me?” And she: “What are you talking about.” And me: “Salt! Salt! Salt!” We’ve been following the Angelina Jolie cover stories, and a guy on the ticket line chats me up: “I said to my son in law, when he said ‘Who else is in it?’ I said to him, ‘Does it matter?’” Grandpa’s hot for America’s anti-sweetheart. But son-in-law, check out bit player Zoe Lister-Jones’s work in Stuck Between Stations, it’s great.

Cold war nostalgia feels so good, with a Wargames-style climax and Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination restaged. The young mole grows up watching The Brady Bunch to learn American ideology, graduates Princeton, and winds up working at an oil company that’s a CIA front. North Korea, Mecca, Tehran, a waterboarding scene—hey, why are leftist intellectuals so fond of saying their work “interrogates” some position or institution or text? The word choice interests me. Do they secretly long to wield the taser or rubber hose? Why not swing wide the gate of meaning’s prison, and let it go?

So spying is acting—you’re not yourself. She’s exposed on the blind side of a one-way mirror, and later fires off a submachine clip trying to break through a bulletproof screen on whose far side Live Schreiber tells her, “You’re about to become famous.” And at another point covers a security camera with her panties, and dyes her hair a witchy black. How one woman’s abandonment issues swallowed the whole wide world. Salt: the spice of life, but also a way to kill a fertile field. She always threatens to quit the biz. She doesn’t need to do anything but be geopolitics. God, she scares the shit out of me…I guess I love her, too.

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

2010-09-08T18:11:00.001-07:00

Remember the original? Not Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (1797) but the Fantasia segment in which Mickey Mouse tries to speed up his chores (you can’t) and then the brooms go wild—he chops them up with an axe and the splinters regenerate, multiply—and the water rises with his panic, a child’s sick dread when trouble comes. His master’s name is Yensid—spell it backwards and it’s the old sorcerer himself, the dapper cipher with all our imaginations held firm in his ink-stained hands. But why imprint expansive American generations with the gnarly German forest? This remake is Arthurian legend—Cage is Merlin’s apprentice, and in turn the master to Jay Baruchel in what Chris Kraus would call a classic case of the Cowboy (Cage’s leather duster) and the Kike. So did Walt, who looked around to find himself the most influential goy in studio-era Hollywood, somehow provide, consciously or not, the modern antidote to all those dwarves and witches and dragons by way of his humble alter ego? People, is Mickey Mouse a Jew?

Add to that the intertextuality with Spielberg, Disney’s spiritual heir, as when Baruchel weighs the magic Russian-doll before stealing it back with precisely the same gesture made by Indiana Jones when he palms the golden idol. And then to cast Alfred Molina: “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip.” A perfect economy, and far simpler than the vexed moment when Indy swaps the bag of sand onto the altar and all hell breaks loose. Because he miscalculates the weight, or because the temple senses, somehow, its own desecration? The great thing about Indy is how tired and beat-to-shit he is all the time. But when he finds an artifact, his eyes light up.

Reconciling magic and science, a geek gets a blonde. They’re NYU students, juniors, which if this is present-day means they would’ve taken Writing the Essay back in 2008. But they didn’t have me, or who remembers? When Molina’s asked to provide a Faculty ID he uses the jedi mind trick, but that won’t work, I need to get mine renewed this week. “I’m not your mentor, I’m your master.” Will we ever be done with school?

INCEPTION

2010-09-03T11:04:00.001-07:00

“Fuck Icarus” —Leonardo DiCaprio

BP’s capped the oil spill, theater five has new seats, Friday night’s hopping, as Jenny said when she saw the preview, “That’s exactly the movie I want to see.” But Amy has managed to take in none of its extensive marketing, she’s been photographing nudes lately and I suppose she’s after the advantage of seeing this movie undressed, too. Stoned, we go straight for Twizzlers, and I eat mine slow as a winch pulling up, turn-by-turn, a rope thrown down to the cliffs below.

Where are we? Washed up on the beach, in medias res. Seeking the ideas embedded in dreams, our heroes are psychoanalysts for whom, however—because they operate from within—the manifest content is equal to the latent content. They need not interpret, but do need to jump levels and hold together, detail by detail, a reality that longs to explode. A top that spins forever, those beautiful roofs of Baron Haussman’s Paris bearing down from the sky. All meta-talk and story meetings—“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.” Is this an intellectual-property fable, a cautionary tale about whose idea is whose? On one level, yes, even as on another it longs to unleash the avalanche that Kafka knew one needed to blast one’s frozen insides apart.

The movie argues two things: First, it would take an entire team of crack experts, working round the clock, to convince you that your father is proud of you. And second, if you want to get with that cute Architecture grad student you’re going to need to let go the memory of your crazy, dissociated wife (Cotillard). “Who would want to be stuck in a dream for ten years?”—and it goes by in an hour, to boot. If Juno plays Ariadne, the labyrinth specialist, does that make Leo Theseus, the lover who leaves, the hero who visited the underworld, like Odysseus, to meet the dead? “You’re just a shade.” We think we know better, and call those departed friends and lovers who visit us in the dark “projections.” As in Shutter Island, guilt is the tenor; as in Nightmare on Elm Street, the question is, Are we awake or asleep? Great question, to which one should reply, well, what’s at stake? Are jump-cuts flashes of consequence, or is each a psychotic break? And what is the nature of a sun that would smite Icarus’s joy upon the hour he flies free of fear’s maze?

DESPICABLE ME (3D)

2010-09-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

No one hassles me, no one asks what I’m doing in the dark, one thinks of all the films noir in which, to escape their pursuers, the heroes duck into a theater to find themselves agreeably obscured by another reality already unfolding. As the movietickets.com ad I’ve seen sixty times has it, the movie is a train one runs to catch at the station—and may miss. As if the comparison was necessary, as if movies weren’t the ultimate modern conveyance. This is why it is not merely pretentious to say “film,” but simply not as richly accurate as that silly word “movie”—a childish stammering toward the overwhelming essence of this becoming-machine chugging unstoppable across the pitch-dark continent of our astonishment.

When we first meet Gru, the barrel-chested, hook-nosed supervillain, he’s up to inspired banality, comforting a kid who’s lost his ice-cream cone by making him a balloon animal—which Gru proceeds to pop with a pin. He parallel parks like my neighbors—bashing bumpers—and forces his way to the front of a coffee shop line by freeze-raying the other patrons. I stood behind Chris Noth at the Astor Place Starbucks the other day and felt sorry I’d compared him to Shrek.

Devastating ambition, coupled with a sense that time is running out—the younger villains coming up behind. It’s sad when he tries to hype up his C.V. for his minions, and later when the loan officer cuts him off. “Become the man who stole the moon,” says the fatherly (=demonic) inventor, but on the brink of his dreamt triumph Gru falters, he’s fallen for the three orphan girls, he’s become a real dad. What’s the most fraught ambition, the culture’s trickiest sell? Not revolution, nor art, but orthodoxy. It means spreading oneself thin, knowing full well that sick obsession is the far better lever for moving the heavens.

The minions are a masterstroke—cute, amoral bits and blobs of id. The joke is that they’re individualized, he calls them by name. What are they? The proletariat? Pills? Boogers? Gru’s sperm? During the closing credits they test the 3D, crawling so far out along the z-axis that the plane breaks and the film itself “burns” (as in Gremlins 2). All that remains are their shadows in the light of the projector, as if they were among us—we’re them.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE

2010-08-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

It’s a dick move, but every tenth movie or so I force the bored girl selling tickets to make eye contact—it’s easy, you just hold onto your cash for a beat through the moment you’d normally hand it over. She looks up, you meet her eyes, she smiles and thinks, in spite of herself, this twelve dollars standing before me is full of surprises.

I saw the last one, maybe with the same twenty-five women here tonight. Who collectively gasp twice: when vampire Pattinson proposes to human Kristen Stewart, and when she later kisses werewolf Lautner. The latter’s a puppy-dog, kind but baffled because she can’t be reached. He doesn’t understand: she’s a phantom, half-made of the possessiveness Pattinson lavishes on her virgin form. “How do we learn to covet, Clarice?” Hannibal, you old film critic, we don’t even need to wear the mouth-jail anymore, we’re as frozen stiff as this tall, awkward kid. Every metaphor for static looking—mesmerized, riveted, fixed—to him, and therefore us, obtains.

The face of Stewart, who trained—in Panic Room—at coveted Clarice’s knee. Her eyes set a hair’s breadth to the wide around that slightly-sloping nose. Ingenuously emphasized front teeth peeping out between full lips that never deign to overflow (Madeleine: “The lesbian mouth”). A trace of the hardness, in mouth and chin, she either will or won’t someday avoid. If quick flashes of pleading cross the whole, they’re extinguished so fast it’s just impossible to be sure. The entire Pacific Northwest, tinted mist-gray and fir-tree aquamarine, surrounds her glowing skin. And we sense the very thing we’re asked to imagine: how that unblemished dish of cream is a function of deep tributaries running hot blood.

How fantastically here we are, says that face, while we are all so busy being resigned, the day after tomorrow, to disappear.

THE LAST AIRBENDER (3D)

2010-08-28T11:31:00.001-07:00

I’m on a bit of a bender myself. Not to lose myself, anymore—that’s trickier these days—but to keep my nerves in shape. My friend Neil’s story about tripping: a guy they meet asks “Do you want to see me spit fire?” “Are you joking?—Fuck yeah!” I feel a similar luck in taking in the theatrical version of what some cynic clearly developed as content for mobile phones. Director Shyamalan fills his cheeks with the lighter fluid of Failure and breathes out a radiant plume of Waste.

Based on a cartoon called Avatar, with Matrix-paced fighting and Lord of the Rings sets dressed in a free-floating orientalism—all tai chi and persecuted Tibetan monks. The Fire Nation—fossil-fuel types—step to the kid whose head tattoo is an arrow pointing straight down at himself all the time. C’mon, you know what that’s like. Feelings always arise when on the brink of a dangerous adventure the sidekick or potential love interest insists: “I’m going with you.” It’s nice to have company, but it also means bringing along a witness whose presence coerces courage, who might not get how disgrace lets the world end so that it may crucially re-begin. Which in retrospect looks heroic, the same way one must re-project, in one’s mind’s eye, on the car ride home, the entirety of The Sixth Sense.

If 2012 really is the apocalypse, at least we’re in the home stretch. So why all this fuss, this late in the game, to dissolve the dimension-bound screen? Luckily the frame’s built strong, legacy of a doomed but prescient age. They knew: sacrifice is the root of all culture because one thing stands in for another. So to maintain the screen is a final gambit to see its denizens taken, when the taking-time draws nigh, in our place. What would Jesus watch? Exactly: Working Girl and A Few Good Men. On Lifetime and Spike TV.

KNIGHT AND DAY

2010-08-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

Jesus, Rajiv, what the hell did we smoke? I put too much vodka in the ghetto blasters, the whole tapering cone-part of two Gatorade bottles apiece. Before the show even starts I wander heedlessly into the ladies’ room—hey, where’d all the urinals go? “The elsewhere is the region of space-time that does not lie in the future or the past light cones of P,” wrote Hawking, way back in ‘88. Where P is the poem. Poetry is not a project, but every poem is a pastiche or commentary, a hustle or con. Bolaño thought poets shaded over into cops and pimps. For Tom Cruise, acting flirts with preaching, where the preacher is the one who has lost—lost mightily—and lived to tell the tale. He lost Goose, and he lost the egg. He lost the Rain Man. But is he himself crazy-gone? He laughs his maniacal laugh at the notion that we’d consult a movie to find out.

Frisson of someone acting inappropriate on a plane. Super-spy Cruise rolls up on beautiful trannie Cameron Diaz. Her tropical fantasy involves Cape Horn, he keeps repeating the place-name and what do we hear? Say it five times fast. “I should’ve been a fireman.” Her cherry GTO. He’s after a hand-held perpetual energy source—apparently to save the American auto industry it will be necessary to violate the laws of thermodynamics. Diaz memorizes the version of events he gives her, before she’s knocked out, to prepare for the lies—“disinformation protocols”—her captors will be sure to try. I’m like her in that, even though I don’t remember the movie, it’s inside me, it breeds in the shadows with that poem projected throughout my consciousness that for convenience’s sake I’ll call Tom Cruise. Eyes wide shut. I want the truth/You can’t handle the truth! The outpost of ambiguity, even then, was Guantanamo Bay.

Sarsgaard, I love that your wife told Us how Gorilla Coffee once refused to lend you a sleeve of cups. In my drunken notes: “The battery is modernism”—huh? Aging, we get serious. Show me the money. The squibs fire before anyone touches a gun. Windmill high-fives all around. Could one use a person as a time machine? Would one?

GROWN UPS

2010-08-18T16:53:00.000-07:00

Are the worst thing that American men, apparently, can be. About as funny as a snuff film, which is to say, pretty funny, in the sense of the question, “Does this clam dip taste funny to you?” In the end, Adam Sandler (“The Hanukkah Song”), as a super-successful agent recalled from L.A. to New England by the death of his old coach, is enjoined by the townie (Colin Quinn) into a rematch of the basketball game he won 30 years before, and Sandler now throws the game because, as he later whispers to his wife (Salma Hayek), “The Baileys of this world could use a win once in a while.” The implication being, “Hollywood” (the town that Capra built, and Quinn’s derisive nickname for Sandler) could have easily created a hilarious summer movie that would ease our minds even as it stoked a mild envy in our hearts, but out of well-deserved pity, and for our own good, they’ve left the world on screen as tedious, dispiriting, and glum, this time, as the one in which we daily wallow.

Cassavetes’s Husbands—aging man-group confronts mortality—but with the glee of possibility, the heady musk of testosterone, and genuine hanky panky replaced by pitch-perfect contemporary anomie, impotence, and desire reduced to porn. Instead of Gazzara’s growl, our emblem’s a family dog whose vocal cords were cut to prevent barking and who, in a running joke, is often wished killed. No one’s a super-spy. Recently laid-off Kevin James is overweight, sneaks food, and suffers urinary dysfunction. Chris Rock: castrated house husband. David Spade: sad, superannuated player. Rob Schneider: “sensitive.” Sandler’s ashamed to be rich. Who will pick up a dinner check, anatomized in grim detail.

But as kids they’d played Chutes and Ladders—gorgeous game of whimsical fate—and run from an arrow they’d shot into the sun. Now they find a single burst of joy at the water park where their sons do a great take—the hottie walks by and they crush their ice cream cones. A whiff of chlorine. Would we rather he put away that final jumper? Muggiest day of the year, the AC on the fritz, I bump into Diana in the theater and after the show she tells me that at one point something small and furry went running across her toes…

TOY STORY 3 (3D)

2010-08-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

Thank God it was so dark in there, I choked on a sob towards the end and wouldn’t have wanted all those kids to mark me. I’ve never seen a Toy Story, but then, I’ve lived one. I played with my batch overlong, in love with their haywire scale and serendipitous congruencies, their eloquent language of gesture and pose. Sartre: “Each object possessed, raised up against the background of the world, manifests the entire world…” The Silver Jews: “When something breaks it makes a beautiful sound.”

Woody (determined as Jonah Hex), buddy Buzz Lightyear, Jessie the cowgirl, the halfwit dinosaur, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (Jews), a soon-to-be radicalized Barbie, and all the rest wind up accidentally re-routed from a quiet retirement in now-grown Andy’s attic to a daycare center full of crazy-hyper toddlers. And find themselves at the mercy of an evil transitional object named Lotso, who rules the place with the aid of a swish Ken, an outsized doll called Big Baby, and a panopticon-monitoring monkey with cymbals poised at alarm. Our heroes’ dilemma: return to the boy whose name is etched on their bootsoles, or fulfill their purpose—be played with. Held. Or one other alternative: as Lotso puts it: “You’re a piece of plastic, you’re meant to be thrown away.” Indeed it’s their darkest moment, at the landfill, sliding down shredded-trash scree towards a fiery maw. They join hands and are snatched up by the fist of heaven—those little green fairies again. In the end Andy gives Woody to the little girl (O my Malkie, never leave me!), but only after instinctively, for a moment, grabbing him back. Selfishness is our nature, too, or so teach those Zen masters who occasionally snatch a morsel of food off a companion’s plate.

That they look, before they’re saved, so convincingly about to melt. And the gorgeously-noticed aspect of modern floor tile, outdoor light fixtures, dynamic black skin of a Hefty bag. Afterwards, in the park, one doubts the grass tousled by the hot, storm-sick wind. The sign—movie or toy—trumps the real thing every time, and even should we outgrow it promises to outlive us. Not “Lotso,” whose name bespeaks a plenitude that doesn’t wash, but To infinity, and beyond!—the ideal formulation, and still the only recipe for the sublime.

JONAH HEX

2010-08-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

Today the marquee announced six new titles: made-up movies, on closer inspection, ready to play in the world of some other movie now shooting a scene for which our theater serves as set. What should one feel? I was neither jealous nor thrilled nor betrayed. I felt that same small but exquisite displacement that occurred the first time I saw a rock song I knew from the radio parsed and printed on a piece of sheet music. And thought, oh God, it can see me, as plainly as I can see it. I’d thought the gasket airtight, but here was recognition rushing back at me like chill air from those AC vents in my car, which I always arrange to blow directly in my face.

Not one but two people have expressed dismay, to me, how handsome actor Josh Brolin could be made to play disfigured super-cowboy Jonah Hex. But of course: an Aquarius: “likes change for its own sake,” “dislikes being pinned down,” “can be perverse and unpredictable.” The cursed Confederate vet with the cow-catcher mouth wanders the frontier wreaking objectless vengeance until it turns out his nemesis is still alive and planning to use an ironclad ship to launch a terrorist attack—using Eli Whitney-designed warheads—on half-built centennial Washington D.C. In dreams Hex stalks a red-earth stage. Rescued from near-death by the Crow tribe, he wields a tomahawk and can interrogate the dead by touching their corpses—they spring to life and snitch. When Odysseus finds the shade of Achilles, the greatest of heroes says that for all the good his glory does him he’d change places in an instant with any slave. To be alive, to feel one’s stomach-lining ache after a long sleep. I wonder: Do we believe him?

The supporters: Megan Fox, and the uncredited guy who mists her bosom with a spray bottle between takes. Malkovich the villain. The man’s played Valmont, Ripley, Charlus—a gallery of seductive dissemblers. He must be what they call a good listener. Aidan Quinn as Ulysses Grant. Whoever has my copy of Blood Meridian, I need it back. Science question: how come the man in the moon is always right side up? Metaphysical question: how the fuck is there a man in the moon?