I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Permanent Midnight, currently viewable on hulu stars Ben Stiller as a scenery-chewing heroin addict/comedy writer. I watched this the other day and AV commented that in ten years, it could enjoy the camp status of a Road House.

It’s a total hambone over-the-top example of the 90s “heroin chic” movie… the music cues, Stiller’s “heroin face,” repeated sex montages, the non-linear storyline, and not just jump cuts but “jump dissolves”. Also, everyone and their sister plays a bit part in it—Owen Wilson, Fred Willard, Janeane Garafalo, Andy Dick, Liz Torres, Sandra Oh (for one line). It’s almost a dramatic “Reality Bites.”

Then, reading the credits we found out it came out in 1998, which is inexcusable. We were convinced by cliches that it must have come out before Trainspotting (96), Bottle Rocket (96), and maybe even The Ben Stiller Show (90).

By the end, AV dropped the Road House comparison, because unlike that genius film which shifts into insanity overdrive in the last act, Permanent Midnight down-shifts into boringness after a promising showing out of the gate.

The quizzes on Sporcle have become an obsession, particularly naming the countries of Africa (always forget at least two, but a different two each time), Europe (can’t spell Liechtenstein), and US Presidents (damn you, Millard Fillmore).

I have not taken a science class in 15 years, but this is still a bad showing. Remembered only through half-recall of Tom Leher’s Elements Song and the Metal Men from DC Comics.

Connoisseurs of cable access may have caught at some point this incredibly bizarre romance movie/special (it doesn’t seem to be a series) where a very visibly retarded man attempts to woo the woman of his dreams (also very clearly mentally disabled) first through a series of daydreams done in the style of early silent cinema, then through the advice of group-home custodian David Johansen (Scrooged, The New York Dolls, “Hot Hot Hot,” etc.).

Like many of you, my thought process after seeing this was three stage:

#1. Is that really Buster Poindexter?

#2. Did I dream this or actually see it on TV for real?

#3. I wonder what Buster Poindexter did to get this community service.

Anyway, I saw it two other times on MNN in the past couple years, so it IS real. It’s title is something like “World’s Greatest Lover.” If you’re not patient enough to see this Flying Dutchman of amateur film making resurface at random, go see Be Kind, Rewind in theatres now.

Mr. Gondry has directed the entire cast to behave as if they were severely retarded for the entire movie. (Not act dumb or perform badly, I mean, but behave, move and speak as if they all are mentally challenged or have some kind of brain damage.) I hope the two hours I wasted on this movie can count against my community service

Despite the fact it may forward the curse, I watched the rest of Roadhouse this weekend, then followed it with The Great Moment (out-of-character Sturges heroic dentist biopic) and Real Life (showcasing Albert Brook’s horrifying shoulder fur)

My parents were in town, briefly, and I went to the Met (museum, not opera) with them. They’ve renovated the 19th/18th Century painting area (I can’t remember what the old gallery looked like… I probably could reconstruct the layout of the National Gallery in DC from memory, though). The three temporary shows were a parade of snooze and yuck though… Courbet,Poussin, and Jasper Johns: Gray.

However, on Sunday, I have found a new obsession. I’ve been a cranky snob about the last couple years about the revival schedules put up at Film Forum. They flipflop from being paint-dryingly dull retrospectives of the third-best forgotten masters of Japanese drawing room dramas where 2/3 of the movie is people emotionlessly staring at each other or, the UA screening coming up, so broad and mainstream that every movie on the ticket is available at your local blockbuster. Although, I really do applaud Film Forum’s ability to work my favorite movie “One, Two, Three” into EVERY series. Hooray!

Anyway, due to a listing in the New York Times (that I was only reading because my parents had a copy in their hotel room), I saw the New-York Historical Society (I don’t know why it’s hyphenated) was showing a double feature of silents. Turns out this group—Silent Clowns—has been showing extremely rare silents for the last 10 years. I finally found a film series nerdy/unpretenious enough to meet my specific film needs.

They seem to have a show once a month from fall through spring—there’s only two showings left this month. Next month is some guy with a mustache but the next one after that is Laurel & Hardy (meh) shorts AND a female slapstick duo and I’m intrigued. One is tall and one is short and in the promo picture they seemed to be tied together at the waist with a guilt look on their faces—that says “comedy” to me!

March 3rd

March 6th

Sam Elliot, Ben Gazzara, and Kelly Lynch should watch their backs! These things go in threes!

AV and I went to see Violent Saturday at Film Forum yesterday.

It had a lot of “dumb” and “ridiculous” in it, but at least five moments of perfection. One was Ernest Borgnine (as an Amish farmer) stabbing Lee Marvin (as Lee Marvin) in the back with a pitchfork. It made a resounding “THUD” and the whole audience—mostly elderly upper class lunatics and a minority of college nerds—“UGH!”ed out loud.

During a bank heist a little kid shouts “BANG!” at one of the armed robbers (previously established as the coldest of the bunch), and he shoves some hard candies in his mitt and delivers this masterwork—” Now go over there, stick those in your kisser and suck on ‘em.”

For some reason it’s running for a week, despite being a pretty forgettable, sloppy, soapy mess of a movie. It’s not bad, mind you, just kind of silly and middle of the road.

When I walked by Sidewalk today, I saw an honest-to-God fistfight happening. A short black guy with eyes looking in two different directions was wailing on a long-haired Vincent Schiavellitype junkie who was screaming for someone to call the cops. Literally, right in front of them a traffic cop cruiser was doubleparked and may have even had someone in it, I couldn’t quite see into it since I was Kitty-Genovesing across the street.

I had gone to buy a jar of sauce. My roommate Bill and frequent cinematog/editing collaborator was called suddenly out of town by a funeral. I’ve been trying to pick up slack by doing marathon editing jags, usually without food breaks. I am pretty tired of Cakey and look forward to offloading it, finally, in two weeks… the experience has been more frowns than smiles, but the proper forum to air grievances of that sort is in a loud bar, at top volume while slurring words and sweating vodka.

Being the sole resident of our place has been a mixed bag. AV brought his Wii over and we played Zack & Wiki for a while, but I still prefer making crude caricatures of people I know in the Mii Editor. I watch TV whenever I want and yesterday was so brazen as to not only watch TV and a DVD of Flight of the Conchords (current opinion, 3 episodes in… “Zzzzzzzz”), but I even hooked up the VHS and watched my stone-age copy of
True Stories.

The downside is that I have no one to open my jar of sauce that I made a special trip to get, so I can not have dinner.

AV and I saw this movie last Friday at Monkeytown in Williamsburg.

If you’re not local or haven’t heard of it. Monkeytown is a restaurant/performance space/bar/screening room/lounge. It’s a restaurant/bar in the front with a kind of industrial-rustic look (dim light, knitted grapevine hanging from the ceiling, exposed steel and cement floors) and you travel along a super-fluoro, bright-white hallway with a series of primary colored doors (the toilets, I’d later discover) and into a massive (for NY, natch) dark square room with blank white walls. Around the perimeter of the room are neutral colored low futons, two to a wall, and a pair long TV-tray-style table set for four. On each wall the same looped pre-show animation is being projected simultanously. You can, and are expected to order as the movie plays, from the roaming waitress from the menus posted on each station, listing fusion-y, foodie odd combos of small plates and molecular-gastronomic cocktails (includingthe Umami Martini that featured “brine, parmesan, capers, clam broth, and pickle”).

I loved it as a sum of its parts. There’s definitely something appealing about doing something that’s an “experience” that’s totally removed from the everyday. I remember going to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in Chicago years and years ago and it was the same kind of thing. Every stage of getting to the show was a small strange experience… you waited in line, then you got a small plastic chit. Then you put your chits in a bag and they were scrambled, so the order you were in line didn’t matter. Then you were lead through a series of rooms in this brownstone-style house, each of which was filled with disturbing art or piles of furniture or actors doing something. I mostly remember the “Hall of Presidents” with abstract, garishly-colored portraits of all the presidents hung on the walls and a jumble of abused school desks you were ordered to sit in. Decommissioned old schoolbooks were heaped on the floor. There were other hoops you went through to get to the actual show, which I don’t remember nearly as well (a side from one particularly hoary awful monologue we mocked for the rest of the trip) as the process of getting there.

At Monkeytown, movies are free as long as you order $10 of drink and food. Usually their programming is unwatchable, plotless art film nonsense, though last month featured a Mickey Rourke retrospective (irony is alive in Billyburg). AV saw the listing for Funky Forest and immediately connected it to my love of Japanese weird bullshit and gave it a green light. I’ve been burned before, so I was a bit hesitant—the thing was over two and a half hours and of the many things the Japanese do well— plastic knick-knackery, street fashion, misogyny—comedy is not one of them. Intentional comedy anyway.

Funky Forest definitely has its high points and a lot of its successes are more as “art” than as “comedy.” Comedy divorced from context and culture is a really hard sell—most jokes don’t travel outside your group of friends so asking it to work across international borders is asking a lot. In the 2h30, there’s probably a pretty funny or at least satisfying 60 minutes in it. More odd than hilarious, but the Eraserhead fetus-like alien shit scenes (never explained, of course) are pretty mesmerizing. There’s a through-line across segments about various lonely men who can’t seem to meet/are obsessed by women that’s more than one note. And lots of line dancing that is confusing, then irritating, and then, eventually winning you over, totally charming.

I’ve just ruined the movie by posting the most interesting moments in this entry (that I could find on youtube… sans subtitles), but if it comes to DVD check it out (with your finger on FF). “Heightening” to the Japanese comedy mind reads as “stalling” in the American one, which is terrifically frustrating. In the mean time, I actually thing Tampopo is a better package of Japanese sketch… not nearly as self-consciously weird and mercifully shorter. It also has a “main plot” about a mysterious truck-driving “cowboy” who teaches a woman about ramen which pulls you through. As an academic nerd exercise as much as anything, I love watching outdated and international sketch comedy, just to see the mechanics at work and to get a sense of their sense of rules.

P.S. If you’re a Japanese cinema nerd (or just “nerd”), you’ll probably want to see Funky Forest just for the in-jokey cameos by actors from Beat Takeshi films, anime director Hideaki Anno and Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi

I read an article about LastExittoNowhere.com in the Times, a guy who makes logo’ed shirts for fictitious companies and products from famous movies.

He does a Hudsucker shirt (The Hudsucker Proxy is my favorite movie released within my lifetime, despite its many faults), which is weird enough since as far as I know it hasn’t generated a gen-X cult the way other Coen Bros movies have.

I actually like it less than many on the site, just because Hudsucker Industries wouldn’t make a shirt in 1959 (the year the film takes place in), and if they made it in the 80s or later, they would have changed their logo. (Hudsucker Industries still exists in the 80s because H.I. works there in Raising Arizona in the opening montage.)

Still, I was impressed the Hud’ made the cut.

http://www.foxsearchlight.com/thesavages/

I do not want to see this movie. I saw the trailer withThe Darjeeling Limited along with 5 other trailers that looked exactly like it. Earnest, shaky-cam lowfi indie film cliches. But, look at the gorgeous Chris Ware artwork on the poster! (Fanatgraphics cartoonists doing movie posters is a semi-cliche as well… Happiness, etc.)

Chris Ware portraiture! His machine-like precision lettering… slightly old-fashioned but not really placable into any “past.” The rigid sterility of the poster totally at odds at the soppy emotive family drama of the movie it represents. This poster is movie of the year.

If you need to see a movie called Savages, see this one instead… it has Sam Waterson in a loin cloth.

Last week, Mitch, Will and I saw The Darjeeling Limited. They luke-warmly enjoyed it. I luke-warmly disliked it.

Will Hines should write pull-quotes for newspaper ads and posters. As the credits were rolling, he tossed out some masterful examples like “This movie makes me want to redecorate my apartment.” and “It’s probably more fun to be Wes Anderson than it is to sit through a Wes Anderson movie.”

Despite stating that he enjoyed it, he also said, “Good thing this wasn’t his first movie.”

Last night, Will and I had a lovely dinner with the current members of Death by Roo Roo /former members of Monkeydick (and Jon Daly). Then we wanted to watch a shitty movie. I had left Dreamscape at home, unfortunately so we went to his apartment where we watched what he got from Netflix—Little Big League. In this 1994 family film, a 10 year old boy inherits and runs the Minnesota Twins. Will liked the premise but did not like the movie and said he wanted to remake it from the perspective of the players. I suggested a version where instead of a kid, it’s Dennis Hopper’s character, “Shooter,” from Hoosiers, who is the unlikely mastermind of good calls who has to win over the establishment because of his non-traditional—in this case, pathetic simpering dirtbag—appearance. That’s a family film people can get behind.

Also, Little Big League was approximately 10,000 hours long.

I’m going to DC with Mitch for the next couple days to do exciting things! Have a great weekend, internet!

I “suspended” my Netflix account for 3 months—the maximum you can put it on hold—but this morning Netflix emailed me to let me know it was back. I went to cancel my account but it had already charged the month on my credit card. So, I need to dig up a month’s worth of movies and then I’ll cancel it proper.

I got to the point with Netflix where it felt like homework assignments I had to get through so I could send back in time to catch the mail pickup. I also ran out of movies I wanted to see. My cue queue is completely empty right now, except of course for this.

I will now make an announcement that will instantly make me into a pariah whose opinions of everything will be dismissed unquestioningly:

I thought Ratatouille was boring.

I’m biting Jackie Clarke’s credit for introducing all you nerds to Forbidden Zone (1980), which is like the retarded half-brother to similar “high camp” cult film Rocky Horror. Richard Elfman made it as a vehicle to expand on the live cabaret shows he did with “The Mystic Knights of the Oingo-Boingo” (including brother Danny Elfman, who I was depressed to learn is a Scientologist). It features lots of topless women, black face minstrels, 70 year old Jewish man playing a kid and Hervé Villechaize.

Like most “cult films” most of it is boring. Either keep the hash pipe or your remote’s fast forward button close at hand for all segments that don’t feature a musical number. But the musical numbers (and some surprisingly good animation… sort of Fleisher Bros-meets-the-credits-of-You Can’t Do That On Television) are such specifically wonderful weirdness, like this one—

The bald boxers were a performance art (?) act called The Kipper Kids and as far as I can tell, this is mostly what they did (bronx cheers). One of them went on to marry Bette Midler. The “singer” was some kid they pulled in off the street and told him to lip sync to the track, but he got too nervous and just stood there. So then they had the screenwriter come in and do the mouth and they Clutch-Cargoed it on in post. And then the song gets cut off by pert-nippled toplessness… This is Forbidden Zone in a nutshell.

Netflix has the DVD (along with recent interviews with the cast, if you really want to depress yourself), but most of the musical numbers are on Youtube. Look for the delightful profanity(and disco)-laden retread of “Swingin’ The Alphabet” (a number done by The Three Stooges ), the delightful “Pico & Sepulveda,” and proto-”Oogie Boogie” Danny Elfman showcase “Squeezit the Moocher.” (Find the last one yourself)

In a final monument to selling out, I was alerted that the Dilbert cartoon (largely forgotten by pop-culture historians) used the Forbidden Zone’s theme in their opening credits (or Danny Elfman was too hungover to write a theme song and just passed that along) with lyrics and mumbling Sambo-screams edited out.

So, what’s been keeping me from hanging myself lately? Well, I’ve actually become terribly addicted to this British comedy/quiz show, which is of the model of those “Whaddya Know” and “My Word!” NPR crap. There’s hundreds of episodes on YouTube in 5-9 minute chunks and I’ve watched 3 season’s worth

I’m surprised to see the creator of “Sniglets” on this show (and many original Who’s Line players, now 15 years older and crappier looking), who apparently has become the toast of British comedy. I also learned that Matt Groening has commented in interviews that the character of Moe on The Simpsons was inspired by Rich Hall. (On Inside the Actor’s Studio, Max Azaria said the voice was an Al Pacino impression done with extra rasp)

My other apple-a-day keeping Final Exit at bay is the 1950 hit “A Smile and A Ribbon” by sister singers Patience & Prudence. It was a plot point in the comic Ghost World (and the movie as well, I think, but I don’t remember) and the flip of the 45 was the even creepier song “Tonight You Belong to Me” which was featured in The Jerk and also apparently is on John Water’s new CD. Anyway, “A Smile and A Ribbon” is the song for this pretty great British Lottery commercial and for the longest time, the only copy of the song I could find online… artificially crackled and tinny sounding as it is.

Shock Corridor is most insane movie I’ve seen this year and it’s already set a high hurdle for the next 10 months. In brief, this shit is bananas.

I just watched the first season of Creature Comforts, the UK version not the US one yet-to-be-released. It was fun… not really hilarious, but entertaining. I like the film short quite a lot. I wonder if it will be funny with American voices… all of the UK voices seem kind of “nice.” The worst of them just come off as dour or a bit full of themselves.

Americans are more aggressive in their hatefulness. They bully you into hating them. The one clip I saw of the US show (though Chad’s blog) I immediately wanted to throttle the people—

I look forward to the show though! I already know two of the people who did voices… and I only secretly hate them.

I just saw David Lynch’s Inland Empire. I don’t want to say I felt like I was being tortured, because that diminishes the suffering of actual torture victims, but I felt like I was being tortured.

Me and the movie were playing chicken to see who was going to give first. I lasted the whole three hours, so I won but in actuality, no one won because I watched Inland Empire for three hours.

If you approximate what it’s like to see Inland Empire, get a 3rd generation VHS copy of Eraserhead and play it on a TV wrapped in cheesecloth 5 times in a row. I just saved you $11.

The best thing about Netflix is digging up 1-star and 0-star forgotten bullshit that for some reason have made it on to DVD. And (Unlike Kim’s, it won’t be some shaky 11th generation copy from VHS. I saw Superstar on such a bad dub you couldn’t tell Karen was a doll.)

To save you the trouble of actually watching a shitty (though impeccibly transferred) movie, I will give you the highlights of….

So, this was retitled to cash in 70s America’s love affair with all things “Smokey.” The original title was “The Last of The Cowboys” and the content reflects that a little better… a hamfisted, snail-paced ellegy for the past. With hookers.

The movie starts with a completely black screen with a quivering line and offscreen grunting. One of my biggest peeves with movies of the 70s and 80s when I was a kid was how night scenes would be too damn dark. Maybe it was our shitty TV or VHS tapes, but TGSR has the black-for-night jazz in spades.

Into the darkness steps a glowing Henry Fonda—age one million (but before On Golden Pond)—shuffling in a hospital gown holding giant wire cutters to a barbed wire fence. He liberates an 18 wheeler, “Eleanor.” The camera lingers on the name and then on a headshot glossy of the First Lady on the dashboard so we “get it.”

And then the credits, including this stunner—-

That’s where her Rocky Horror check went.

Flashback to the least restful hospital room ever.

I mean, this wallpaper could give you cancer. And it has. Hank Fonda is “Elegant John,” the world’s most reliable honest on-time trucker until cancer made him hock his truck for chemo. He’s wasting away and dreaming of one last great haul.

Luckily, his roommate, mustache guy here, advises him in a thick community-theatre-Yiddish-accent just how to sneak out and cut the wires on the truck impound etc. Basically, he describes the scene we just saw in exacting detail.

So, Elegant John drives around. Meets evil rival trucker and eventually needs gas. Enter Beebo, played my Robert Englund aka Freddie Krueger, a Mennonite (?) who is trying to get to Florida to go to motel management school. Beebo becomes his sidekick after Hank tries to rob him and drop him the desert.

(I got bored and stopped taking screenshots at this point, so bear with me)

Cut to: a wacky Anniestyle brothel where a variety of healthy, fun whores are prepping for a big night of fucking truckers. Like the Spice Girls, there’s one in every flavor. There’s a Southern belle, a dumb blonde, a zaftig Jewish intellectual, a complainy bitchy girl with a weird cartoon voice, and Susan Sarandon. Watching over them is world-weary Eileen Brennan (Mrs. Peacock from Clue, the Colonel (?) from Private Benjamin). Then suddenly, the truckers arrive and we get a very long softcore segment of The Great Smokey Gang Bang, also featuring the “comic relief” of the cross dressing john being mocked by kitty-cat voice .

Immediately after the sex, cut to all the hookers getting arrested by the johns, who were all undercover cops there to bust them. (They had to have sex with them first to make sure they really were hookers I guess.) They’re given the order to leave the state ASAP.

Meanwhile, Elegant John and Beebo have discovered that with Eleanor reported stolen, they can’t get a “load” to haul, cramping the plan for John to make one last delivery before he croaks from his cancer. They decide to go visit the whorehouse where his old flame is the madam so he can get his cancer rocks off.

Once there, the hookers all make a lavish dinner for the visitors and with Porky’s style subtlty, make the virginal Beebo (and the audience) extremely uncomfortable. Elegant John and Eileen have implied sex (we only see “after”) and talk about this crazy world we live in and how things used to be better. John agrees to take the hookers on as his “load” (usually its the hookers taking the load, ba-dum-dum) and he will deliver them to North Carolina… where prostitution is legal? Where prostitutes roam free? Never explained.

So, hookers in the back, Beebo in the front, our heroes take off on the cross country journey. But, the evil trucker is still in the backround stirring up trouble and the APB on the stolen truck is spreading.

Enter the cackling, bumbling small town sherrif (played by Dub Taylor, the Larry the Cable Guy of his day) and his dummy son who catch Elegant John in a speed trap and then cart him and the hookers back to their small town jail. The hookers remove their duds and string them up on a clothesline in their cell (I’d take that out of cells to prevent suicide) and lure (literally with crooked fingers) the sherrif and his son into the cell. Now, in a normal movie, once they have them in the cell, they’d knock them out or otherwise trick them and lock them in. In TGSR, the hookers lure the cops into the cell, fuck them and then lock them in. Why give them a freebie? Because it’s the 70s and this is a crappy movie.

So, now it’s time for fun—

They stop off at a truckstop/bar where the hookers cut loose to “Still The One,” Elegant John and Eileen have a heart to heart and Beebo… does something. I don’t remember. The focus shifts to these guys—

The Lennon-glasses dude believes he had been abducted aliens and his sister is trying to convince him to come back east with them so he can kick his drug habit. Then the blonde dude turns around and said “I used to be an awesome DJ but the man kicked me off the air; I bet we could become a crazy duo… like some kind of white Cheech and Chong.”

Then the movie completely stops… the cops, the truck, the hooker, Elegant John are all gone and we watch Glasses and ex-DJ have this inane 100% realistic weed conversation outside the honky-tonk for like 15 minutes. I mean, at least Eleanor is in the background there to assure us that we’re in the same movie.

And then we’re back on the road. Suddenly the titular “roadblock” appears. A bunch of cops decide that if they block this bridge , they can stop elegant John. It’s 4 fake cop cars… a mere appetizer in a big-budget trucker movie chase. Ex-DJ and Glasses get on the CB and summon all the truckers, loggers, and blue color types to “help” Elegant John get through, though his 18 wheeler rolls over the 4 cars with pretty much zero effort.

Now over the bridge (but not yet in North Carolina), all the trucks full of strangers we’ve never met before all get out and dance ring-around-the-rosey. We’ve won! But… there’s 20 minute left in the movie. Back in the truck, back on the road.

Driving along, Beebo in the back with the whores. Suddenly the truck stops. Beebo races to the front and throws open the door, revealing…

...Elegant John’s still-warm corpse being snuggled by a weepy Eileen Brennan. Krueger takes over driving, the body crammed between him and (lady) in what I can only imagine is a very crampt, uncomfortable, and smelly position as he finished the “perfect run.” Switch to helicopter shot of Elanor driving along the seaside (?) as mournful Spanish guitar music plays.

Hooray for movies!