Caseus Archivelox: Porn Week, In the Realm of the Senses, & Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

2002-03-19 - 12:36 a.m.
I went to print out some papers for class. I started to look through them. PORN!!!!!!! I love this class. Actually the chapters were from a book on pornography, and the pictures were all grainy, although I am told that there was a large amount of sexual acts that were portrayed. Apparently in the original version of the book from 1989 the author said that she would not include any pictures, then changed her mind in the next ten years, and included the chapter with the aforementioned graphic pictures of sexual acts. As I said, the pictures aren't really clear, but the library almost didn't put this thing up on e-reserves. I think that's bull because I can watch "Salo" at the library, but they have a problem with really small grainy pictures on a random e-reserve link that can only be accessed by Duke IPs. Ummm, yeah.

Then I went to the class. Porn week is weird. Hey, we're watching porn, but ohh, we're not watching the sex parts, we're watching the acting parts, and we're watching it in a class of around 18 students, around 3/4 of whom are female, and I just keep wondering why I'm even watching this crap. So yeah, porn week sucks. Pun intended.

We started out watching part of Russ Meyer's first film, "The Immoral Mr. Teas". It was this thing that Benny Hill wishes he could have made if he could have shown nude women. This repressed guy who starts to see naked women all over the place, but he's just insane. Funny scenes: he sees naked women on a rubber tire swing and the narrator (because there's no diegetic sound at all in the movie) talks about the use of rubber in history, then he sees naked women asleep, then he sees naked women bathing and he takes off his shoes and wiggles his toes around in the water. Read Freud, then you'll appreciate the last one a little more. It was really tame for the opener for porn week. Russ Meyer's films are actually usually pretty funny. And softcore, lots of ass, little tit, and no bush, and certainly no male nudity, although see my earlier comment for fun Freudian implications of feet.

The next film was "Deep Throat". I'd already seen it. But we watched the scene were Linda's mom talks her into seeing the doctor, and then most of the next scene, before the actual deep throating actually begins. So no male nudity, but there were some long shots of Linda's vagina. They couldn't go to a close-up because if they did, it would have shown her clitoris and the entire movie would have been ruined. But the acting was still bad, with some really bad puns. The doctor is using a bubble maker and they pop on Linda Lovelace. She then asks him to stop getting her wet. Stop for giggling... and on with the entry. At the end of the part of the scene that we watched (i.e. right before the fellatio), one girl asked, "So did they actually show that (i.e. oral sex)?" I almost laughed out loud. Porn movies are full of worse stuff than that movie (although I don't remember any other movie with a Coke douche...). The movie was also this bootlegged copy of it.

The last movie, and one that [gay grad student teacher] didn't have time to talk about was this gay porn movie called "Technically Virtual" or something. We watched that because [gay grad student teacher] was told that gay porn was much better than current straight porn. If it was, I'd hope that there are straight porn movies that are just sex, because the acting was really, really horrible. The funniest thing [gay grad student teacher] said today was, "Czech gay porn. I was told Czech gay porn is the best." Is Hungarian gay porn different? What makes Czech gay porn better? I was confused, and I just want to say that we didn't see any real nudity from this movie, although in skipping ahead through chapters on the DVD, we saw some thrusting. [Gay grad student teacher] also expressed surprise that a movie on DVD wasn't good. I didn't want to tell him that the porn industry has been incredibly adoptive of new technologies well before mainstream Hollywood.

2002-03-20 - 5:08 p.m.
After that class, I ran back to West to watch "In the Realm of the Senses". I was lead to believe hard-core. I was completely correct in that belief. Penetration, fellatio, a facial, a bird-shaped dildo, an orgy, an egg stuck inside a woman, lots of shots of the same penis, rape, a drunk guy getting hit in his penis with snowballs by small kids, handjobs, strangulation for sexual purposes, a 68-year old woman being killed by having sex with the main man, and a fairly graphic castration scene of a fully erect penis. And I watched this in a dark classroom with about 10 other people, evenly split between men and women. Almost two hours of porn is a lot. Oh, and the movie gradually went from something of a plot to almost no plot at all. The director was trying to say something about the censor board of Japan who are so strict that he was forced to film it in Japan, and then send it to France to edit it, and I believe it's still banned from Japan. So all in all, I found it somewhat tedious. You never realize how boring it is to watch two people have sex for almost an hour straight until you do that. (ed note: I've since rewatched the movie and have a much higher opinion of the film.)

So I then went to Griffith to watch the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie. I went and was absolutely completely confused by the first bits. Nothing made sense, even though I kept asking [female friend] what the hell was going on. She said it was one of her favorite movies, and she couldn't explain most of it. Nothing made sense. There were a large amount of Freudian bits of the movie, but it didn't seem like it was internally consistent.

Caseus Archivelox: Cat People

2002-03-19
About two minutes after they were married, I immediately thought, “Irena and Oliver are not having sex.” It was really obvious. The fun of the movie is that Irena is completely uncomfortable being intimate with Oliver, and yet he still does not understand why she feels uncomfortable with him. The fact that we never see the transformation increases the sense of Irena not really turning into a panther, even as Tourneur includes slight references to “The Wolf Man” with the following of the dirty footprints leading to the conclusion that Irena (or in “The Wolf Man”, Larry Talbot) turned into the cat (wolf) and killed the sheep (the gravedigger) and almost killed Alice (Gwen). Since the movie was made just one year later than “The Wolf Man”, it is unlikely that this was just a coincidence, especially as they both deal with characters that allow their inner instincts or fears to manifest themselves in changes in appearance.

In “Cat People”, the desire to cure themselves from their monstrous condition is just continued from earlier films, like “Dracula’s Daughter”, but in this case, the interesting thing is that the “other” woman and her husband conspire to send her to a psychiatrist who falls in love with her and eventually leads to his and her downfall. As a result of her fear of sexual contact with her husband, a conjugal right, he feels the need to separate himself from her and find a woman more conductive to his masculine desire in Alice, but he does not understand that Irena loves him and becomes jealous as it becomes more and more blatant that he is sleeping with Alice (even as the Hays code would not allow adultery on screen, film viewers have to imagine the adultery that is clearly occurring as Alice and Oliver sit in dark rooms alone all night).

The movie itself is hardly a horror film, as it is a more interesting psychoanalytical look into female frigidity and jealousy. But the entire movie is about that, as there are few wasted lines or unnecessary scenes (except for that dream sequence with the animated cats) and it is very well structured for a short movie. Very few films today are as well put together, even if they are ultimately better, as some of the earlier horror-type films that are very short (something from which bloated Hollywood blockbusters such as “Titanic” or “Pearl Harbor” could learn).

The Broken West & A.C. Newman at the Black Cat 3/18

I was in the front row for the concert. My ears were ringing for quite some time after The Broken West's set. Here's the songs that I remembered... Sigh... I just didn't take anything down.

Down in the Valley
On the Bubble
Ambuscade
Auctioneer
Gwen, Now and Then
House of Lies
Got It Bad
Back in Your Head (Tegan & Sara cover)

The only other problem with being up front was that vocals were kind of hard to hear, so with The Broken West's similarity in songs, I had problems telling the difference. That said, I really enjoyed the set, and apparently, they've been playing that Tegan and Sara cover all during the tour. I did not recognize it. I'm not sure anyone else from my friends at the concert enjoyed the set as much as I did.

I got a setlist for A.C. Well, I took a picture and then gave it to someone else, because what am I going to do with a setlist? I have to say that knowing I was going to get the first three tracks from The Slow Wonder sprinkled in the set before worrying throughout whether I'd get to hear them was nice. Secretarial and The Town Halo, among pretty much all the tracks from the new album, were better live than in recorded versions. Well, maybe more accurately, seeing Carl live playing these tracks made me appreciate him more. Rockin' setlist action follows:

There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve
Miracle Drug
Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer
Prophets
Secretarial
The Heartbreak Rides
The Cloud Prayer
The Palace at 4 AM
All of My Days & All of My Days Off
Young Atlantis
Drink to Me, Babe, Then
The Collected Works
The Changeling (Get Guilty)
Submarines of Stockholm
On the Table
-------------
Come Crash
The Town Halo

Really, quite a good set, and very similar to their set the next night at The Cradle that my friend Alicia was at. And I'm getting recordings of that one and the Broken West set. Actually, they were the same sets. Unfortunately, I won't get Carl talking about how much he loves D.C. and his encouraging of people to do glow-in-the-dark shooters. Yeah, someone requested Drink to Me, Babe, Then early, and he said wait ten minutes and then told them to do some shooters, but they held off, and so others did some non-glow-in-the-dark shooters. He was disappointed. As was I.

Caseus Archivelox: The Exorcist

2002-03-19
When I was younger, I remember my dad telling me that when he saw this movie during a summer when he was living alone in New York he was afraid of walking home that night. When I first saw this movie about five years ago, I was not scared by it, but could see how it could be scary. When I saw it last year, I found it boring. Seeing it again last week has not helped the movie at all.

The beginning of the movie has little bearing at all upon the rest of it, and could be skipped entirely with no detriment to the rest of the movie. The fear of a child being possessed would have been more effective had it not been played out over such a long time. I am not normally a person who likes short movies over long movies due only to length, but it this case, it could have stood to be much shorter.

The priest who is having a crisis of confidence in God is a time honored and old tradition, and this movie just uses it as another trite way to get the audience who normally would not believe in the idea of a character being possessed believing. The problem occurs in the fact that most people do not believe in demonic possession and thus when the inevitable, from the standpoint that the good guys do have something of a victory at the end, happy conclusion occurs, viewers are happy. Many other viewers will have gone to get some much-needed sleep.

In short, the movie was too long.

Caseus Archivelox: The Wolf Man

2002-03-14
In this incredibly short and flimsy movie, I was immediately turned off by the introduction of Lon Chaney, Jr. as “The Wolf Man”, removing any doubt as to who would be inflicted with lycanthropy. I hate when movies are ruined by trailers or poor decisions by the movie studio. Even if that had not been mentioned at the beginning of the movie, the movie is not scary. The makeup was fairly weak, and the transformations were nothing special, and no advance over Dr. Jekyll’s ten years earlier. Even for a Universal Horror film, it was below par.

The shots of the fog going through the Welsh countryside were nice, but the rest of the movie was disappointing when including those scenes. Talbot’s love interest was horrible. She was obviously there because she looked nice, rather than for any acting talent, which was obviously completely absent.

Werewolf movies are about man’s baser instincts taking over, as vampire movies are about repressed sex, and as a movie under the Hays production code will ultimately fail to be about a man succumbing to his animal instincts because a movie cannot show what would be necessary in order to show that fall from grace fully.

Caseus Archivelox: Poltergeist

2002-03-05
I remember watching this movie many times when I was a kid, and consequently having an intense fear of clowns. That one short scene caused me to hate clowns for as long as I can remember. It is not that I fear a clown attacking me; it is that I dislike people with their faces painted white, big orange hair, and shiny costumes. It was nice for the fact that it told me how to tell whether the storm was moving closer or farther to where I was.

Beyond that however, it is an incredibly effective (at least until an unnecessarily silly ending scene) ghost story. Almost nothing supernatural happens on screen, depending almost entirely upon somewhat strange occurrences that happen when characters look away. That is an interesting bit of the movie, as with the exception of the scene when the tree attacks Robbie, the scenes without the supernatural aspects are more effective than the ones with the special effected supernatural.

Throughout the movie, there is no character that we see the entire movie through, and we identify with most of the characters at one point or another, even with Tangina, the psychic who has never done in what she is supposedly an expert. As a young boy when I first saw the movie, I ultimately identified with Robbie, and when watching it this time, I realized how little of it really was about him, and saw it as identifying with everyone in the family at certain times, taking me out of the movie to a certain extent, because I was not as involved with one character as if it had focused on one character.

Caseus Archivelox: The Haunting

2002-02-28
This was an ultimately disappointing film, as you hyped it up too much. It was effective, and the camera angles and sound design were good, but it was just a simple haunted house tale. Not that it was not incredibly influential upon later haunted house films, but I never really identified with any of the characters. I am not an insane, possibly matricidal spinster like Nell, or a psychic like Theodora, or a psychic investigator like Dr. Markway, or a money-grabbing youth like Luke. I never was enough into the movie to care what happens to them. And when the house manipulated Markway’s wife into just happening to show up at the two times she does after her disappearance, it rings hollow from a plot standpoint.

Wise is an obviously talented director, and it causes me to question whether I am jaded or whether the movie has not aged well. I think that it is a combination of the two, and thus I blame the remake for ruining this movie. The understated lesbianism in the movie is much better than the more obvious version in the remake. In some ways, the more obvious lesbianism detracts from the struggle for Nell between the humans and the house as it makes it more of a sexual attraction than when that is there but not emphasized.

Another problem with the movie is that the house turned bad because of what occurred on the house grounds as much as it did for what occurred within the house. I think that haunted house movies work better when the moviemakers acknowledge the silliness and make the house built over an old Indian burial ground. The lack of a real supernatural reason for the hauntings make me more likely to think that it is all within their heads and less scary for a (more) sane viewer.

Caseus Archivelox: Black Sunday, Lust for a Vampire, & Brides of Dracula

2002-03-14 - 12:16 a.m.
I spent today watching vampire films. Well, actually the first one doesn't really count, as it was "Black Sunday" the Mario Bava Italian horror flick, not the crappy movie based on the crappy Thomas Harris novel. It's a witch that was killed in the 1600s, and in the 1800s was revived and needs the blood of her descendant who looks just like her to complete her resurrection. So it was sort of a lesbian vampire film. Not as much as I had hoped though.
So I then watched the end of "Dracula's Daughter" again, and then saw "The Wolf Man". Disappointing.
I went off to Visart to look for lesbian vampire films. I failed miserably, because the selection was horrid. I couldn't find anything for a while, but finally found the second, and supposedly the worst, of the Carmilla Karnstein trilogy of Hammer Horror films, "Lust for a Vampire". It was hidden in the Samurai section, even though it said file in horror on the box. It's just basic softcore from the early 1970s. Bah. Damn lesbian vampire films. Too much nudity, not enough vampire. I doubt I'd be able to find any of the hardcore lesbian movies, as I'm not going off to Railroad Video any time soon, even if there are a few hardcore lesbian films out there.
The question I have for this movie is why a supposedly lesbian vampire would fall in love with a male writer. It makes little sense, and the film itself looks more like it was filmed on video. Problem is that the vampires can walk around during the day with no apparent ill effects, and day and night switch back and forth a lot in the midst of scenes. Of course, the women are beautiful, and look nice naked. That's unfortunately a very poor reason to watch the entire movie. If you don't have the balls to rent hardcore porn, then you shouldn't rent softcore because the acting and other qualities are similar.
The problem with these films is that they are weak on meaning, and strong on sucking. And sucky-ness.
An interesting similarity in the two actual lesbian vampire movies that I've seen is that when the women either fall in love with a man or need a man to protect them, they are well on their way to death. Society and male heterosexual love and its gaze destroys the strong lesbians. The nudity itself is, of course, there for no reason other than to titillate the male audience who is watching the movie. And the strong female characters who reject the patriarchal society are very different from most other softcore porn with females there more to excite the male viewers. The lesbian vampire turns the patriarchal society on its head, and this is why I am writing my long paper on lesbian vampire films.
But before I watched the movie, I watched "Brides of Dracula" which was a good Hammer vampire film (with no real lesbian content, even as it had some small female-to-female attraction). Peter Cushing is a great fun actor. The movie is nice and colorful, and has a great ending.

State of Play, Watchmen, Planet Man, Cruel Story of Youth, The Order of Myths, & Tulia, Texas

State of Play is a star-studded six-hour long BBC miniseries. Basically, everyone in it who has any kind of role is a great actor and does an amazing job. My only complaint was that at six hours, I just wanted to know what would happen next immediately. I couldn't watch it all in one sitting, which sucked. Definitely worth watching as it's a great twisty political thriller, with more than enough Britishisms to make my heart soar. Meat and Tweaks along with various family members recommended it to me for quite some time, and I finally saw it. They were very right.

Watchmen is gratuitous. Violence that wasn't in the book is added, the characterization of the violence is changed, and the squid is gone. I can understand some changes are needed: cutting the Tales of the Black Freighter is fine, and simplifying the backstories is as well, but some of the coolest stuff was changed for no good reason at all: Rorshach's line to the prisoners with Big Figure isn't nearly as effective in the movie, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's reactions to the plot removes another level of Moore's work. Which is amazing on a great amount of levels, but by dumbing it down and ramping up the violence ignores the point. Also, since when were any of these characters besides Dr. Manhattan superhuman? Moore's point was that they're all messed up mentally to think that fighting crime in a costume is a good idea. Ozymandias is not a crazy psychopath, but a sane man driven to extremes by the horrors of modern society and a really bad hashish trip. But Matthew Goode cannot possibly portray anything remotely complicated. Neither can Malin Akerman. She can portray "I look good naked", but not "I have emotions." Also, can we just agree never to have a sex scene to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah ever again? Actually, can we agree never to cover Hallelujah ever again? Leonard's version is quite good, and Jeff Buckley's is perfect. STOP COVERING IT, YOU MORONS! Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley are the only people in the whole movie who are consistently good. So here's what it comes down to: the movie is good due to its source material, and I imagine that the extra scenes, along with adding the Black Freighter back in to make more connections with normal people. That lack of connection hurts the movie. It's occasionally slavishly faithful to the book, but there's absolutely nothing added to make the movie worthwhile. Read the comic. You could see the movie, if you don't mind a fetishization of violence and slow-motion excess. And if you see it in the theater, you can also cringe when the entire audience cheers for the most psychotic activities of the most psychotic people.

Planet Man is a New Zealand short, starring Timothy Balme, aka Lionel from Dead Alive. It's the opposite of Y: The Last Man, as all the women on the planet disappear and the men tend to gayosity. Balme's a sort of film noir-style hero, doomed by meeting possibly the only living female left on earth. It's a pretty interesting short, very low budget, but it's available online and pretty good.

Cruel Story of Youth is a Nagisa Oshima film, seen at the National Gallery of Art as part of a big Oshima festival. It's a little story of a couple who meet when the woman hitchhikes and the driver tries to rape her. The symbolism isn't really much hidden. It suffers from a serious problem in just having a text. It's always difficult to judge acting in foreign films, especially when the language is as different as Japanese, but they were not particularly strong. The main characters are basically just there to comment upon the aimlessness of youngsters in post-war Japan. As such, they're blank slates to complain about how they're making the same mistakes but worse. Eh.

The Order of Myths is a documentary about Mobile's Mardis Gras celebrations, one white and one black. Ugh to racism and the whites who try to argue that this all is fine. Not ugh to the documentary. Really interesting, but man, just the amount of segregation that is not even commented upon by most of the people. It's extremely disconcerting. All the white people saying that there were no problems with racism because the whites and blacks knew their places pissed me off immensely. But those costumes are very fun. And the young kings and queens were inspiring. I was definitely weepy when they visited each others' balls.

Tulia, Texas is a documentary about the Tulia drug bust in 1999, where a white sheriff and undercover cop were big racists and arrested a bunch of blacks. And man, was it messed up. The war on drugs is pants. And with the economy in such bad shape, we should just legalize and heavily regulate pot, and, you know, stop going after the drug users so much and go after the drug dealers. Actual dealers, not made up ones.

TV shows & museums

Reasons for no entry in a while: Doctor Who and Torchwood. Well, a few other things (like basketball (Go Duke!) and social life (hi, friends!)) as well. I'm midway through both season 4 of Doctor Who and 1 of Torchwood. Doctor Who is much better, especially after Billie Piper leaves the show. Eesh to her. Torchwood is still sort of cheesy, but the entire thing doesn't work nearly as well. The goofiness is out of place in a more adult show. Maybe they find their feet? Speaking of TV needing to find its feet, Dollhouse is getting better, but it's still easily the worst thing Whedon has done. It took a while for Buffy to start working after a good pilot, but it certainly did by the end of the first season. Dollhouse's actual pilot (the episode with the Middleman) certainly had a lot of promise and was quite good, even if basically every other one wasn't up to snuff. They've been improving, but I hope Fox allows Whedon the chance to show the episodes. Castle's pilot was fun, but I'm not sure how long that show can last, even though I'm thoroughly enjoying Nathan Fillion having a place to be awesome. Battlestar Galactica has been mindblowing, sometimes in its cheesyness, but I'm still upset that it's basically over so soon. Like, this week. Sigh to the ending of good shows.

The National Museum of American History was recently renovated, and I went there with Ms. Albright, along with an aunt and uncle. I remembered the vague shape of it from when I was there four years ago. There were some problems with crowded areas (it was a nice weekend day, and yet, for some reason, many people were inside). The First Lady's dresses exhibit was way too packed, with lines going all over the place. I did get to see the Colbert portrait, which was nice, as was the pop culture area, with most of my favorite stuff. The war area was also neat, although a little screwed up in design, as the World War I section couldn't be visited in chronological order, and the smell section of the Revolutionary War area was kinda gross. The Punch-esque tea diorama was a highlight. I still like the museum, but I don't need to go back anytime soon, unless there's an interesting exhibit.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine is hidden away at Walter Reed Hospital. Back on Valentine's Day, they had a free lecture on syphilis history in the US. By the way, don't scroll down too far on that page, unless you want to feel as disgusted as I was when I saw the model of a syphilitic penis after the lecture. The lecture itself, however, was a terrible powerpoint presentation. 87 slides, and John Parascandola (author of Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphillis in America) just read them. Ugh. The information was interesting, but if you really want to ruin interesting, just read slides. And again, Americans really treat the sick like crap. And mercury poisoning is certainly much less bad than dying of syphilis, right? The history of syphilis treatments was fascinating. The museum less so, although there were some neat things, like a painting on plastic strips of a vivisected body. I'm not sure if it's really a great museum for those who haven't been in DC that long, unless you're interested in the subject, but for those looking for something most don't see, definitely check it out.

Caseus Archivelox: The Black Cat

2002-02-26
Few films before or since have confused me as much as this one. This is entirely because of Bela Lugosi’s incredibly thick accent. It is like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker being combined into one person, who talks with marbles in his mouth, in pig Latin, backwards, and expects the audience to be able to follow it when he reads some Judith Butler film theory. It was so distractingly hard to follow that I think I missed some of the back-story of the movie. I am not sure whether that is a bad thing or a good thing, though. Karloff was excellent, and Lugosi may have been as well, if I had been able to understand most of what he said. The major problem for the movie occurs in that, as well as with most Hollywood films, the main romantic leads are bland and the secondary characters, who are rarely given enough screen time, are much more interesting.

Also, the title “suggested by the Edgar Allen Poe story” is one of the grossest lies I have seen performed upon the American public. There was a black cat in the movie. There were no women being buried with a live cat. I was upset. I like Poe, and that movie was no Poe.

The movie was really short, but included some of the most disturbing things I have seen in a movie, let alone one that was made under the Hayes production code. Necrophilia, Satanism, a character being flayed alive, a cat being killed, incest, revenge, murder, and possibly pedophilia are all included, even if not shown on screen.

The sets were very interesting, as the art deco sets are very different from the other horror films that normally have gothic styles, with lots of stone work, although the scenes from the tunnels under the house were reminiscent of the gothic style of architecture.

The use of chess as a metaphor for the struggle between good (Lugosi) and evil (Karloff) was repeated, in my opinion more successfully, in “The Seventh Seal” so it does have an interesting place in film history beyond the first time that Karloff and Lugosi were in the same movie. However, the director, Edgar G. Ulmer, seems to have forgotten to use close-ups to break up the medium-shots that seem to dominate the film. Had he broken up the chess game for the young couple’s life, the movie would have added some much needed tension; as it is, the movie is full of great ideas, but ultimately falls short due to execution.

2002-02-26 - 9:49 p.m.
I did see "The Black Cat", and unfortunately only one cat was killed. And it was offscreen. I'm all about animals being killed on-screen. That was a major problem with "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", the cat didn't kill the bird on screen. Anyway, I found it silly, and I had problems understanding Bela Lugosi. Karloff would have been better in that role, because I could understand him. It's like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker being combined into one person, who talks with marbles in his mouth, in pig latin, backwards, and expects the audience to be able to follow it when he reads some Judith Butler film theory. To those who don't know what I'm talking about, he was very hard to understand through his thick accent.

Caseus Archivelox: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Fly, & Paris Is Burning

2002-02-25
First off, there is one too many pronunciations of Jekyll. People need to pronounce it correctly. It bothers me when I hear it pronounced correctly (as in the movie) and I cringe because of being misled and not corrected for so many years.

Also, the special effects of the dissolves for the transformations are sometimes perfect, and very impressive for the time. Although occasionally the dissolves are noticeable, I am not sure whether it was because I knew to look for them; they were nicely concealed, and subtler than most computer graphic work today.

I also appreciated the very sexual nature of the film, which, had it been released three years later, with the implementation of the Hays production code, would have been taken out and the film would have been less interesting from our standpoint. Sex is very important in the film, from the obvious lasciviousness of Mr. Hyde and semi-nude Ivy Pearson to the subtler hairy hands of Mr. Hyde (suggesting the “hairy palms” of masturbators) and the nude pictures in Ivy’s bedroom. Jekyll is an obviously sexually frustrated man, and when he is denied marriage with Muriel (and it’s accompanying conjugal rights), he “creates” the sexual predator Mr. Hyde (a play on the hidden sexual desires that he thinks are in all men) in order to fulfill his sexual appetites. With further transformations, the makeup becomes more pronounced and Hyde more disfigured. His sexual desires ultimately turn him into “one of the living dead” and destroy him.

The use of the first person camera help to force the viewer not only to see the world from Jekyll’s perspective, but also to identify with his feelings of sexual frustration and desire. When he is cornered in his lab at the end of the film, instead of using a medium or far shot of Dr. Lanyon pointing Jekyll out as Hyde, Mamoulian uses the first person shot, implicating the audience as a partner in Hyde’s crimes as well, suggesting that since the audience (presumably) took pleasure in the story, they have also turned into Hyde-like sexual deviants.

Having seen many Cronenberg films in my life (Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly, Crash, and eXistenZ), I am constantly amazed at how uncomfortable they make me feel, although M. Butterfly and Crash made me feel uncomfortable due to their not-as-good-ness, not creepy organic materials showing up in the weirdest places or head exploding. In The Fly, Cronenberg creates an organic monster that eventually becomes fused with inorganic materials (and thus must die, in Cronenberg’s organic-focused worldview). Even without the now famous “Help me” lines from the original film, Seth Brundle’s transformation into a fly is more disturbing and much more graphic than the original, and his use of his own vomit to eat and eventually as a weapon makes the audience even more disgusted than when the baboon is turned inside out. Although the plot holes occasionally get in the way of the audience (without a large amount of suspension of their disbelief), it is more enjoyable than some of Cronenberg’s later films.

The Fly is a painful story about the disintegration of a loved one in front of your eyes, which mirrors the decline of humans into old age, although it has some fun leprosy similarities, as parts of Brundle’s body fall off, and it could almost be seen as a metaphor for AIDS, but that would require some selective readings and ignorance of some of the facts of the movie. But the fears of seeing someone you love fall apart mirror the fears of other horror films of the 1980s like The Hunger, which also revolves around the fear of aging in the consumer and youth dominated culture of the 1980s.

2002-02-25 - 11:05 p.m.
So this morning, I went off to East Campus to watch two movies: "Paris is Burning" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Paris was a documentary about NYC drag queens in the late 1980s and their balls (note: not referring to their testicles) wherein they dance and strut trying to be things they're not, like being straight. It was funny (catty gay people are inherently funny (note: deadpanned to see who is paying attention)) and informative (I now know that Madonna stole voguing from the balls where it is a sort of way to insult other people by dancing rather than fighting) and eventually sad (one of the transsexuals was beaten to death and left for four days under a motel bed before his/hers/its body was found (remind me not to stay at that motel)). I waited around for [female friend] to watch "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", and enjoyed it. Neat special effects, and lots of sexual innuendo. Although I did manage to embarrass myself when I was mocking Hyde's ridiculous overbite, and [classmate] from my Sexualities class walked by. She had just enjoyed "Paris is Burning" as well. Whoops.

Caseus Archivelox: We Were Soldiers

2002-02-24 - 3:01 p.m.
When I got to the theater around 6:05, there were already a lot of people in line for "We Were Soldiers". It was the typical sneak preview Freewater people running around with our heads cut off trying to figure everything out. That was compounded by the fact that the basketball team's managers didn't show up early enough to get good seats. But it worked out fine, as they got seats. I got to rip Coach K's ticket, and I think [girlfriend] still has his stub. We almost completely filled up Griffith, which is nice, because it only took an extra half an hour before we got started.
The movie itself was fairly good. Nothing incredibly new, but it wasn't as bad as "The Patriot" or most other recent war movies. It was an interesting take on early Vietnam, with not as much crappy John Wayne style heroics (like in "The Green Berets") and more about the fighting in Vietnam rather than emotional head games (like in "The Deerhunter", "Apocalypse Now", "Full Metal Jacket", and "Platoon"). Sam Elliott was good as the cranky Sgt. Major, although his (and most other) dialogue in the movie was mixed way too low. The sound effects and music were loud enough. [Girlfriend] was made really uncomfortable by the violence (and especially by the scene where the reporter (Barry Pepper, making up somewhat for his performance in "Battlefield Earth") tries to pick up the wounded mortar guy, but ends up ripping the charred flesh from his legs, which I found disturbing as well). The movie was sort of full of Randy Wallace pounding some things into the audience's heads. But the battle scenes were well done.
After hanging around to hear Randy defend the movie fairly well, and also "The Man in the Iron Mask", which I probably should rewatch at some point, and again ramming my thigh into the armrests in Griffith (in front of one of the co-producers of the film, who nicely asked if I was ok), and also walking by Marc "Riley" Blucas, but not being willing to talk to him (because I hate Riley), [girlfriend] and I went off to the Purim party.

Caseus Archivelox: Bride of Frankenstein

2002-02-11
This is easily the best movie we have seen so far this semester, and it is probably the best of the Universal horror films. The opening scene of Mary and Percy Bysse Shelley and Lord Byron is just the perfect opening for the movie, as it sets the tone of the rest of the film as a camp version of the monster movies that had been the vogue. It spoofs the very movies that it tops in quality. There’s the screaming annoying maid, the staid butler who in unperturbed by the strangest experiences, the sinister mad doctor, the virginal bride, the doctor who does not want to create the monster, but is forced to, and the monster who learns to speak.

The bride of the monster herself is an interesting character, as in about three minutes of screen time, she manages to make an indelible impression upon the audience, and cause observant viewers to applaud Whale’s sense of humor. He has the bride recoil from the monster’s touch into Frankenstein’s arms, a small oedipal twist, with the daughter being afraid of the new man in her life, and retreating to the comfort of her father.

But before that is the best character in the Universal horror films: Dr. Pretorius. He is the best evil doctor in movie history, with a hidden homosexual coded, blatantly devilish character, who moves between Frankenstein and his fiancée again. The devil-ness of Pretorius is made explicit when he compares the mini-devil to himself (predating Mini-me in the Austin Powers movies by over 60 years). The homosexual coding, which is all that was possible during the days of the Hays Code, extends to his drawing Henry from Elizabeth every time they are alone, and when Pretorius and Frankenstein are alone creating the bride for the monster, they are shot in a series of canted angles, but mirrored, linking them together even more.

I have not even mentioned the incredible scenes of the monster and the hermit and the Christ-like capture of the monster by the mob in the forest. The movie is just filled with incredible scenes, inventive camera angles (which must have been incredibly influential on Sam Raimi, amongst other directors), and memorable characters.

Caseus Archivelox: Poison & Frankenstein

2002-02-06 - 12:02 a.m.
I went off to watch Poison. Really weird gay movie. It was for my Sexualities in Film class, so at least that fits. Weird thing is that it was the first of two movies I watched today that included disfigured characters seeing themselves in reflective surfaces with no disfigured features (the other was Abre Los Ojos). Weird.
So I saw five movies the past two days: "The Seventh Seal", "The Magician", "Poison", "Frankenstein", and "Abre Los Ojos". That's too many movies.

2002-02-07
Why is it that the movies that are based upon the original source texts in the Universal horror genres are usually not as good as the later sequels (with the exception of “The Invisible Man” which had no sequels, and was excellent in its own right)? Probably some of that is due to the limitations of the source materials, but I think that most of it is due to the problem that Hollywood has had with most sequels: they are afraid to do anything special with the first movie, in the hope that it can spawn an equally conservative sequel due to high box office receipts. Both “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” do not challenge the audience at all, with simple characters, poor special effects, and laughable dialogue. Although later sequels would succumb to the Hollywood-ization of the stories by making them only for money, both “Dracula’s Daughter” and “Bride of Frankenstein” take the original stories further than before and add in lesbianism and psychiatry, along with dry wit, to make the stories more attractive than the relatively bland first entries in the series. Another point to make is that they waited for five and four years before making the sequels, which allowed for a good script to be written and imaginative ideas to be included. Most sequels today rarely wait more than a couple years, and do nothing special with the story.

I was upset to notice that it was not Fritz in “Frankenstein” and that it was a later movie that introduced Ygor to the audience. I love “Young Frankenstein” and could have sworn that Ygor was in this one, but it was fun to see so many other scenes that had been spoofed so well in “Young Frankenstein”. And “Bride of Frankenstein” has some scenes as well that are famous and incredible.

James Whale is really the reason why “Frankenstein” has any interest to modern audiences today, besides the obvious historical interest.

Caseus Archivelox: The Magician

2002-02-05
An Ingmar Bergman thinking man’s horror film. At least that is one description of it I have read. In the movie, a “magician” (Volger) who studied under Mesmer enters 1846 Stockholm with his wife, his grandmother, a drunk and dying actor, and his handler. He and his wife (Amanda) are disguised (and he has acted mute) in order to throw off the police who want them for undisclosed crimes, but likely related to the fact that they are frauds and do all their healing with mirrors and the like. They are lead to the house of a city council member, who is waiting with a doctor (Vergérus) and the chief of police who want to expose the magician as a fraud. That night, Vergérus tells Volger he wants the magician to make him feel something. During one of their tricks the next morning, one of the servants of the house “kills” the magician. I want to write about one of the later (9 min. long) scenes that is the only scary scene in the movie. The doctor takes what he believes to be the body of the magician up into the attic and performs an autopsy on it. The magician’s wife locks the doctor in the attic at the bequest of a muffled voice and a hand, and after he finishes writing the autopsy’s findings down, the doctor begins to hear and see strange things. First, he hears an extra chime on the clock, and when he tries to start writing more, he sees an eye in his inkstand. Then his papers are knocked off the desk, and when he attempts to organize them, a hand is put on the papers. He stands up, insinuates that it is the heat that is causing him to see and experience these weird incidents and tries to leave, only to find that he has been locked in the room. When the doctor tries to find some tools to break the lock on the door, he looks into a mirror and sees the disembodied head of the magician. An interesting cut to the face of the doctor is used to show that the head is not there for the uninvolved audience, but for the doctor alone, as only after the cut to the doctor’s face do we see the head in the background of the mirror. He tries to confirm that the head is not on the body that he has just autopsied, but something rips his glasses off right before he can do so, and then steps on them to break them. Assuming that he is dreaming, the doctor then sits down to wait until he wakes up, but hears the clock chime again, unnaturally. Right beyond the clock is a mirror, and the doctor sees the magician in it, standing right behind him. As a short bass drum roll is the first music in the scene builds, the mirror cracks, the music stops, and the doctor gets up and runs to the other side of the attic to check the mirror. He backs up against a slotted wall and is choked by a hand that comes through the wall as the drums begin again, and quiet down only to build slowly except for certain startling scenes. Escaping, he stumbles to the other side of the room, and falls into a dirty hole in the floor that could be construed as a coffin. Standing up again, the doctor begins to follow the magician through the slotted wall, until the magician sticks his hand out to stop him. The magician (in the rags of the now-dead actor) then begins to walk slowly towards the sitting doctor who flees, still sitting down. The drums build again, and a tambourine joins in giving the proceedings an eerie rattle, until he falls down the stairs and starts to scream. The magician is stopped from attacking the doctor by the timely intervention of his wife. The doctor says that all he got was a slight fear of death, when it is obvious that he was more than a little afraid for his life.

The scene is genuinely frightening, as the audience is not sure whether the magician is actually dead or not. Vergérus is the pinnacle of science and the fear in his eyes at the supernatural experience that he has (with the magician coming back from the dead to exact his revenge upon the doctor, in classic gothic fashion) is an interesting look at the tendency of all people to believe what they see rather than what makes rational sense when they are threatened. As for music, there is only a small amount of disjointed pizzicato string music at the very beginning as the hand tells Amanda to lock the attic, but for most of the scene there is little dialogue or music, and so the audience focuses upon the strange goings on onscreen. Whenever something strange occurs, the drums stop.

Caseus Archivelox: The Conversation & Training Day

2002-02-03 - 12:04 a.m.
I also saw "The Conversation". I can't believe I hadn't seen that before, it was great. Gene Hackman is such a good actor. The only thing was it sort of freaked me out, because I don't need more reasons to be paranoid.
I saw "Training Day" and it was horrible. Denzel was even bad in it. Fuqua can fuqu-off. Haha, I'm clever.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, The Terror of Tiny Town, Death Note, Death Note: The Last Name, & more

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Caseus Archivelox: Aaron McGruder speech

2002-01-22 - 9:44 a.m.
Anyway, last night, I went to see Aaron McGruder (writer of "Boondocks") talk at Page, and he was witty and intelligent. For one, he wants people to read Michael Moore's "Downsize This". But he also denounced things like "Ali" (problems with both Will Smith and Michael Mann, but also with the whole idea of the movie, which was derivative and could have been done better, and of course the fact that Mario Van Peebles is still working), "How High" (I didn't tell him that it played much better to the African-American audience than it did to the whites in the audience here at Duke), most of the really cheap "New Wave of Blaxspoitation" (my phrase) movies made for $6 million and that make $25 million, and most African-American actors currently working. He did say he liked Chris Rock (he had gone to see "Two Can Play That Game" with him) and Spike Lee, although he disliked "Bamboozled" as a deliberately false view of Hollywood, when the true version would have been just as skrewed up. He also said he liked "When We Were Kings", which is an excellent documentary, if you haven't already seen it. But he was most interesting on the war, as if you haven't been keeping up with his comic, he's one of the first people to have denounced the war as what it really is, an excuse to shut down the civil liberties of all Americans in the "defense" of a war that cannot be won, as any person with access to explosives can be a terrorist, and you cannot win a war against that. But of course, Bush can never declare the war over, because it just takes one person to blow up a building, and the FBI and CIA love being able to tap more phones and everything. Anyway, the speech was funny and fascinating, and it was great that some people in the audience were treating it as a sort of church meeting, screaming out "yes"'s and such (although no one said "Amen"), and it made the speech more interesting. The problem was that there was a video beforehand, with a white male in the Medical School who said after the MLK assassination (basically, I'm paraphrasing here) "I want someone to calm down the people and make sure they don't come for me". He was greeted with howls of derisive laughter, Bruce. The best guy (from a comedy standpoint, as both Major Dean and Dr. William Turner from the Divinity department were well-spoken about MLK and other issues) was Willie Burt who, at one point, said, "Since this is the only planet that has life on it, that I know of", which got more laughter. He seemed like he was trying a little too hard to sound intelligent.
After that, Alicia and I went to say hi to Aaron at the Mary Lou Williams Center. He was nice and intelligent in person as well.

Caseus Archivelox: Brotherhood of the Wolf & Tell Me Something

2002-01-20 - 11:21 a.m.
The weather last night was pretty bad, and the fact that we were soaked didn't help the movies pass. I sat next to [female friend] for "Brotherhood of the Wolf" and we were both laughing through most of it. Although we were laughing at different parts, as she was laughing at mainly bad translations, while I was laughing at how over the top it was. All in all, one of the stupidest movies I've seen in a while. But the fight scenes were well done, if not too believable, as there was this sword made of bone that would fly out on a chain or something, and all the bad guys always attacked one at a time. 1 on 20 is much easier when the 20 attack very slowly. And since when did French peasants know Kung Fu? Or Indians for that matter? Also, way, way too much slow motion, and not just during the fighting, and the next time I see someone dissolve from breasts to mountains will be way too many for me. Could you get any more juvenile?
"Tell Me Something" was much better. Very stylish, and just confusing enough to make sure that you needed to talk about various plot points to understand it all. I like movies like that. Others didn't, and I think that one or two plot points were sort of holes rather than points, but that could have been (and I think was) intentional. Koreans are like that. (Yes, that was an ethnic stereotype. But I didn't mean it.) Also the film broke in the movie, it was just like Freewater. And the main female character was channeling Gwyneth Paltrow through the entire movie.

Caseus Archivelox: Jezebel

2002-01-18 - 11:45 p.m.
I did see "Jezebel" at Griffith though, and that was sort of eh. It did have some good lines though. It also had a great incredibly uncomfortable conversation. I like them because it reminds me of how I talk to women.
Julie: Oh Preston, you forgot your stick.
Preston: So I did. I forgot to use it, too.
Julie: So you did.
Right after Julie basically emasculated him. Funny funny.
Buck: Well, you talk mighty like a black abolitionist.
Preston: I think you know I'm no abolitionist. I believe the tide has turned against us. But I'll swim against that tide just as far as you will, Cantrell.
That was one of many lines that made me cringe. The movie was full of African-American characters with big bulgey eyes, and at least 90% of their lines were "Yessim" or the equivalent. And I'm supposed to sympathize when these slave-owning characters get killed or die? Hell, I'm happy they die. Stupid racist jerks.
Then they had some silly "Yellow Jack" intertitles, and it was sillily orchestrated.
All in all, a silly movie, but Bette Davis was good. If I were Preston, though, I would have stayed up North and kept Amy. Bette Davis's eyes are too prominent and her chin is too small.

Caseus Archivelox: Dracula’s Daughter

2002-01-31
Considering the fame of “Dracula” and the fact that I’d never heard of “Dracula’s Daughter” before, I was somewhat surprised to find that “Dracula’s Daughter” seemed like much less of a hack job than “Dracula” was. Part of this can be ascribed to the lesser importance of the actual Dracula myth (which severely limited the ability of “Dracula” to create any new ground in cinema), but I think the more interesting feature of “Dracula’s Daughter” is its importance in queer theory.
Dracula’s daughter is the first filmic lesbian vampire, and as such is historically important to see how she is portrayed in the movie. Her male helper (who looks like a mixture between Phil Hartman and Christopher Reeve) is somewhat androgynous and is unable to leave what is obviously a one-sided relationship with the countess. He does her bidding with only one short whine that she had promised to turn him into a vampire instead of another character. The only interesting aspect of his character is his similarity to Cesare from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, another reference to one of the most influential movies of the silent era.
The countess herself is a fairly strong female character who, even after the first murder of a man, has a predilection for “painting” young women in various states of undress. If this movie had been made later, I have no doubt that she would have used nude models instead of just asking for her to uncover her shoulders. But she is a predatory lesbian, who destroys all the women she touches, and thus, the countess must destroy Lili. At least, from the dominant male and societal perspective, that is what occurs, although in reality, Garth’s inability to help the countess fight against her vampiric (lesbian) tendencies is more at fault for the deaths. Zaleska is, by far, the strongest female character in the Universal horror films, and that contrasts starkly with one of the most annoying male leads in Garth. He tortures the woman who loves him unconditionally, ignores warnings, and goes after a woman who is just using him. Zaleska fights against what has been her lot in life, and although she fails, that attempt is not seen in many of the Universal horror films, let alone by a female character. But in the end, she is destroyed not by a man, but by her failure to stay queer and her falling in love with Garth.
The fact that Zaleska looks to a psychiatrist to solve her vampiric tendencies is an interesting twist on the vampire myth. But she cannot solve her vampirism by psychiatry, as it is part of her, and is destroyed by opening herself up to the male psychiatrist. The same could be an argument for accepting lesbian tendencies. She cannot solver her lesbian by psychiatry, as it is an accepted part of her, and is destroyed from a queer view because of her falling in love with a man.

Caseus Archivelox: Dracula

2002-01-29
Considering how many horror films I have seen and enjoyed, my taste for the Universal Horror films of the 1930s and 1940s is mainly limited to James Whale’s darkly comic takes on the genre’s conventions and classic scenes. This movie did not change my mind on them one bit. Besides the inevitable shortening of the plot and the horribly histrionic acting of many of the actors (which is not as necessary for sound films as it is for silent films), there is little to like in this fairly drab version of the Dracula myth. Bela Lugosi labors over every word, as one would expect from someone who did not know any English before starting the role, and his Dracula “acting” is really limited to looking at the camera with a rectangle of light on his face. If someone with more talent had been directing or writing this movie, it could have turned into something much more rewarding, but instead it is a fairly weak Dracula story. Renfield is creepy, but should not have been raised to being the star of the film (as he has been here, because the other male characters are incredibly flat and poorly acted).
Anyway, I just wanted to complain about that movie. The horrible bat effects did not help it much either.
One of the nice things about the movie is the restraint with which it deals with what is normally a main feature of vampire films: blood. The only blood that I remember seeing was when Renfield poked himself with a paperclip. I do not remember even seeing Dracula bite anyone’s neck or seeing any bite marks on anyone’s neck. It is almost as if the vampire parts of the story are being hidden behind what is essentially a creepy story of a foreigner attempting to steal away a woman from her fiancée. Almost all parts of the supernatural aspects of the story have been removed. It is more of a gothic story, with extended scenes of people arguing about the existence of vampires, than a true horror film. Very little is scary in the strictest sense, with more emphasis focused upon the fact that it is almost a story that could occur today. Ignoring the times when Dracula turns into an animal, or the times when he cannot be seen in the mirror (which is driven into the audience’s mind to make sure that they do not miss that subtle shot), it is a fairly traditional spook story.
Another thing about the movie is the fact that it is subtly anti-Semitic, as Dracula wears a Star of David on his cloak and is scared by crosses. He is also a foreigner threatening the well being of the young women of England (and the American audience). “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”, but I think that with Browning’s history, I would not be surprised if he was anti-Semitic.

Caseus Archivelox: Un Chien Andalou

2002-01-22
With little context or plot, “Un Chien Andalou” could play as a sort of insane person’s dream, and that is almost a definition of surrealism. Nothing makes sense from a rational viewpoint, and nothing is supposed to make sense. No meaning should be clear from the images. There is nothing to link any shot to the next, and, although some shots share the same characters, there is little to suggest that any shots should link to the next one. This is one of the first true surrealist films. Although Salvador Dali would eventually do more work in film, including designing the incredible dream sequence in “Spellbound” (which made sense from a psychoanalytic standpoint), this is the pinnacle of shock surrealism. The shot of the barber cutting open the girl’s eye is so shocking that nothing in film history has been able to come close in causing complete discomfort for the audience. This is, of course, precisely what Dali and Buñuel wanted to do. Although later scenes were not quite as shocking, it kept the dream aspect of surrealism very strong. Ants crawling out of hands, dead donkeys, priests, and the ten commandments on two pianos, two people almost completely buried in sand all defy any logical explanation that would be able to comfort any audience that attempted to watch the film. Surrealism is the attempt to make dreams real, and this movie does this well, as the man fondles the clothed woman, which, with a quick dissolve, shows what he really sees: her naked body. But this shot is only one of many in the film that would make sense from a logical standpoint on their own in a film of otherwise rational shots, contribute to the overall sensory and mental overload that the film forces upon the viewer.
While Buñuel has gone on to make more structured, and sensible films, this one will be his most famous as it was a very early film, scandalizing the audience, and setting out to do what it was designed to do: confuse everyone and not allow for easy deconstruction.

Caseus Archivelox: Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens

2002-01-17
This being an unofficial version of Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula, due to the copyright issues brought up by the Stoker estate, the names were changed. Even with the different names, this version of the novel is far superior to most other versions, as there is not the sense of camp that dominates most entries into the vampire filmography. The first vampire film has some of the clichés of the vampire subgenre fully in place, as was inevitable from its being based upon Dracula. However, it does diverge significantly from most vampires, as this is the first time that a vampire is shown to be destroyed by direct sunlight and Nosferatu is the ugliest vampire in movie history: nothing has come close. And most significantly, from the name Nosferatu, which means “plague-carrier”, comes a thinly disguised treatise on the dangers of sex (i.e. venereal disease).
As Nosferatu must sleep every night in the dirt from graveyards that held plague victims, he can be seen as the embodiment of the plague. As he kills, rumors of the plague surround the murders. Hutter himself is an incompetent who is unable to either stop or kill Nosferatu, and the strong feminine character of Ellen is an interesting contrast. The book on vampires also says that the only way to kill a vampire is for a woman without sin to offer herself to the vampire and make sure that he is still there when the cock crows. The effect of offering herself to the vampire can be seen as sex, and coming into contact with the “plague-carrier” must cause her death, but the fact that the plague is brought out into the open, will save many others. The animal nature of Schreck’s makeup (especially the two front rat-like fangs, rather than the more recent use of canine fangs) emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of the plague. Also, instead of the main animal being linked to the vampire being a bat, a wolf and especially rats are more closely related to Nosferatu, making him seem even more abnormal (even for a vampire) than future versions, where the foreign Count part of Count Dracula was emphasized rather than the vampire aspect.

Caseus Archivelox: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

2002-01-15
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari contains one of the, if not the, first deliberately false flashback in movie history, Francis’s dream sequence, intended to confuse the audience. The set design during the dream sequence itself allows for the audience’s discomfort over the story to be heightened, as the lack of any right angles and exaggerated histrionic acting make the movie seem more unreal. The German expressionist set design causes a cinematically knowledgeable viewer to question the reliability of Francis’s version of the events, as the set design and acting have become the classic way to tell a dream sequence. That the framing parts of the story were added later does nothing to detract from the effectiveness of the sequence. Although it does detract somewhat from the theme of questioning authority, if we are to assume that Francis is not insane, it does cause the viewer to come to the conclusion that the authority in the asylum is more insane than the patients. However, the framing also forces the viewer to look closely at how his story of the somnambulist has allowed Francis to fulfill all of his dreams. Cesare kills by stabbing, using a phallic symbol to remove Alan, the main threat to his being the only lover of Jane. Although the first murder has nothing to do with his love for Jane, it could be taken as either the random murder is the main reason for Francis to be in the asylum in the first place, or, more likely, as a way to justify in his mind that he is not the one who committed all of these crimes, because he never knew the clerk. When he, in his alternate body as the somnambulist, comes to stab Jane, he is incapable of doing so, symbolically showing his impotence, and giving insight to the viewer the reasons for Cesare killing with a knife. After he realizes that he cannot consummate his relationship with Jane, in reality because they are both in an insane asylum, and fraternizing of the patients in that matter was probably discouraged, his mind fixates on the director, the reason that he believes he cannot be with the woman he loves, and invents his version of the events that have so far made up the story, including the linking of the director with the historically insane Dr. Caligari. The parallels between his suppression (in the Carrollian sense) and the director’s in his dream show that Francis has just taken what he knows and projected it upon the other inmates and doctors at the asylum.

From Beyond, Jean de Florette, & Manon of the Spring

It's the "1986 called and it wants its movies back" film fest post.

From Beyond is pretty much a normal H.P. Lovecraft story adapted by the people who were behind Re-Animator. As such, it suffers from being nowhere near as good as that film. One bonus is that this doesn't have a head giving head. That was very freaky. And also at only 85 minutes long, it felt padded. Which is to be expected, since it's based on a short story. I always enjoy a good Jeffrey Combs performance (and Ted Sorel isn't too bad either (even after he has his head bitten off)), but this one was unfortunately dependent more on Barbara Crampton. Who, while having a nice set of breasts and not being afraid to show them off, isn't all that good. When I first saw Ken Foree, I realized he was the token black guy and was going to die. Luckily for the film and my enjoyment of it, most others died too. But not all of them ended up fighting a big sandworm-type thing in their orange bikini briefs. Really? That's how you're going to take advantage of having Ken Foree in your film?

Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring tell the story of a hunchback and his farm, which two neighbors basically steal from him by covering up a spring, and his daughter who takes revenge upon them. It's pretty good, although it's basically two parts of a single story, so you have to watch both. Meaning four hours of French, and only two hours do you get to see Emmanuelle Béart. The first two you're stuck with Gérard Depardieu as a hunchback. Not that pretty. And the ending was a kick in the balls.

Caseus Archivelox: Flirting

2001-12-31 - 5:58 p.m.
This afternoon I saw a movie I had really enjoyed the first time I saw it: "Flirting" a 1991 film with Noah Taylor (from both "Almost Famous" (the manager) and "Tomb Raider" (does it matter? I can't remember who any of them are)), Nicole Kidman (better than in that crappy movie that people keep putting on their best of the year lists, even one that says "10) "Moulin Rouge" Somebody needs to get Baz Luhrmann out of the editing room. Somebody needs to tell him that it's insane to set up one visually encrusted shot after another and then not give us time to drink it in. But like his previous film, "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet," this whacked-out musical annoyed the hell out of me and then stayed in my head for weeks. No other movie this year believes in its own wackiness the way "Moulin Rouge" does, and that gives it the courage of its heart-on-the-sleeve convictions. You could say Luhrmann's gargantuan production design is a way of disguising the simple story at its core, except that it never obscures the charm of Ewan MacGregor and Nicole Kidman, or keeps their tale of doomed love from getting to us. The most disciplined of undisciplined moviemakers, Luhrmann has made something like a speed freak's version of grand opera." I almost agree with it, except where it says that Luhrmann's style never gets in the way of the story), Thandie Newton (one reason why I thought MI:2 could have been good, but was sorely disappointed), and another girl I recognized this time around, Naomi Watts.
The only problem with it was that it was on WE so it was edited. Some sort of jumpy scenes.
Beh.

Caseus Archivelox: Naked States & Virtual Sexuality

2001-12-14 - 12:06 a.m.
I feel sort of guilty about taping over "Body Heat" with "Naked States" though. Ugh, don't watch "Naked States" anyone. It's horrible. You may be attracted by the fact that it's about a guy who goes around taking pictures of nude people, but at 73 minutes long, I felt it was waaaaaaaaay too long. It could have been about five minutes long. And that probably would have been too long. The guy was just not interesting. If people want to see nudity, I recommend "Virtual Sexuality" a British teen-comedy, with lots and lots and lots of male full frontal nudity. So much that they had to put red x's on top of the penii so that it didn't get an NC-17 rating. Not that a lot of flaccid far off (insert penis euphemism that begins with f) should be enough to get an NC-17, but god forbid, people know what the male and female anatomy look like, because there was no sex at all in the movie. Was it a good movie? Not by a long shot, but it was fairly interesting to know that Hollywood isn't the only one marketing tripe to teenagers that just isn't appropriate for them. I like to refer to this movie as "Disney with dicks", as it's just like a Disney movie, with stupid morals and flat characters, but with a ridiculously dirty mind, but I really haven't referred to this movie in any other place, or to any other people, because I seem to have given some people the impression that I'm only about nudity, when I don't even like being nude in my room alone. I just find nudity interesting when included in movies as an attempt to increase the money the movie makes, but in this movie, I include it totally in the "Gratuitous Nudity" hall of fame, not so much because it wasn't needed for the plot, but I can't figure out why the hell the movie was made in the first place.

Caseus Archivelox: Night of the Comet & Return of the Living Dead

2001-12-08 - 11:19 a.m.
Well, anyway, I wanted to say a little about the movies last night, for those of you who haven't seen it, see "Night of the Comet" as soon as possible. Very, very funny movie, with some great 80s stuff and an interesting line about the last guy on earth not coming on to a woman, so he was either a gentleman or gay. "Return of the Living Dead" was strangely unsatisfying, although the midget zombie was still very funny, and I am a big fan of cataloging the most gratuitous nudity in film, and one character just decides to dance totally nude on a grave, and then proceeds to be completely nude (except for legwarmers, as this is the 1980s) for the rest of the movie. Just sort of not worth it.

Caseus Archivelox: The Quick and the Dead

2001-12-02 - 1:54 a.m.
Another thing, don't start to watch a movie at 1:30 in the morning, even if you like the director and have seen it before, because more often than not, you'll hate the star and wish that someone with talent had been cast in that role, so that the movie wouldn't have been so supreme a disappointment. For this one, it was "The Quick and the Dead". I hadn't seen it in a couple years, and I still think that Sharon Stone is a horrible actress. There is probably a link between seeing someone's whisker biscuit and lack of respect for their acting talents. Although I still respect Jenny Agutter, because she at least has picked some great movies to be in ("Walkabout" and "American Werewolf in London"). Maybe that theory just refers to Sharon Stone. Anyway, all the quick zooms and close-ups didn't bother me as much this time. And Leonardo DiCaprio is a good actor, as is Russell Crowe, probably some of the best work that either of them has done, although "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "L.A. Confidential" are still their best. And of course Gene Hackman was excellent.

Caseus Archivelox: Peking Opera Blues

2001-11-29 - 3:05 p.m.
Here's a collection of some great misspelled and misused subtitles from Peking Opera Blues, one of the movies from the Martial Arts Series from Freewater. It not only was funny, but it was a good movie as well.
Keep in mind that I was laughing so hard I missed some.
"God, if I ever sing for a living again, I'll no longer be a man." This was a woman.
"Recarinate as a man."
"Tide him up, if he didn't, take it castrate him."
"There's a woman: knock her up."
"They tossing for the general."
"Is you? How come is you?"
"If you think this place is too crowdy, I'm going to blow up."
"Tide up the bed sheet." "Tide it up?" "Yes."
"Don't pretend to be miserious." (mysterious)
"You feel lonely. Sentence them at night."
Also, they used crowdy instead of crowded every time, knock instead of lock, and tide instead of tie. Lot's of things were crowdy, knocked up, and tided.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Cyrano de Bergerac, Protocols of Zion, & Palindromes

Cyrano de Bergerac is a filmed version of the 2007 stage play and stars Kevin Kline as the titular character, Jennifer Garner as Roxane, Chris Sarandon as De Guiche, and Daniel Sunjata as Christian. It's highly enjoyable, due to the always enjoyable Kevin Kline and Chris Sarandon. It took me a while before I recognized him. I'm a big fan of the play, having seen Roxanne many times, along with reading the play back in high school, and seeing Kevin Kline just become him was worth the 2.5 hour long run time. If you have a chance to see it (it was on Great Performances on PBS a couple weeks ago and is on DVD now), I highly recommend it.

Protocols of Zion is a documentary, and I thought it was actually going to be about the history of the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Which I guess I have to wait for some other movie, or maybe just buy the Will Eisner comic version. This was just a fitfully interesting documentary, rarely insightful, and frequently frustrating in its inability to go anywhere other than the surface. Eh.

Palindromes is Todd Solondz's film. And all that means, for better or worse. Pedophilia, abortion, Christian fundamentalism, shooting abortion doctors, and, above all, utter pretension. Seriously, there's a reason no one else would fund this film. Because it's not good. I liked Welcome to the Dollhouse, and Happiness and Storytelling were at least interesting. This was just bad, with eight different actresses playing the lead, ranging from Jennifer Jason Leigh to thirteen-year-olds to a fat black woman. The thing that pissed me off the most was the Christian fundamentalists were taking in people with birth defects, and they sing terrible Christian music. Just ugh.

Jumper, Wages of Fear, Horrors of Malformed Men, Snake Woman's Curse, & Blind Woman's Curse

Jumper begins promisingly enough, and then Hayden Christensen appears. Is there anyone who would have been good as Anakin Skywalker? Certainly not him, and he's really terrible here, as is basically everyone in the film, even the normally enjoyable Diane Lane, Michael Rooker (both of whom were given nothing to do) and Samuel L. Jackson. The only thing that makes the film enjoyable at all is Jamie Bell, as another jumper who hunts Paladins who hunt jumpers. Apparently, very little of this comes remotely close to the book. So the question becomes, who's responsible for this infanticide? The studio, the director Doug Liman, or the three writers Simon Kinberg, David S. Goyer, and Jim Uhls? Sadly, I think everyone is to blame. The film is only 88 minutes long, suggesting studio meddling in an attempt to make the film remotely sensible. Doug Liman is talented, but there is a messiness to this film that suggests no actual plan to make this film work with such a wooden cast and terrible script. Why, exactly, scriptwriters, did you need to create the Paladins? Why not just keep the NSA as the bad guys? Seriously, this movie is a completely bad idea and sometimes you just need to make fewer crap movies with good ideas that would make someone like me think it could be acceptable. This was not good, Hollywood, not good.

Wages of Fear is the original film that Sorcerer is based on. I saw Sorcerer years ago, and it was a very good and tense film. To describe the plot simply: four guys have to drive a truck of nitroglycerin across Central America. Somehow, it stretches to two and a half hours of extremely tense scenes and greatness. I like films where people just go back and forth in various languages, and this one goes back and forth from French to English a lot, and includes Spanish and German as well. As much as you might expect this film to be ridiculously simplistic, the tension mounts, due to the great direction by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and it's just a masterpiece.

Horrors of Malformed Men is the first in a series of three bizarre Japanese films I watched this weekend. And it's probably the most bizarre film I've seen in a long time. How many films can you think of that are banned in Japan? This is partly due to the title, which references the people disfigured by the atomic bombs (along with using an offensive term in the original Japanese for the malformed men), but also, there are huge sections that are very similar to the grostequeries of Caligula, but it isn't mediocre porn (just many, many topless women sewed to goats or other people). It's actually a combination of short stories by Edogawa Rampo (say it quickly, and remember these are detective stories), but it actually works quite well as a single story. Not sure it's all that good of a movie, but it's really not too much like other ones.

Snake Woman's Curse is supposed to be a ghostly horror movie, but it isn't very scary. It is, however, a condemnation of 16th century Japanese feudal society inequality. Blind Woman's Curse stars Meiko Kaji as a yakuza who accidentally blinds a woman and a cat starts to torment her. There are some weird visuals, and it's somewhat more of a yakuza than ghost movie. Eh to it an Snake Woman's Curse.

Also, I finally made it through my old blog's archives, and I have almost three years of movie reviews to include. I could even include my reviews from my horror class, which are amusing as they're written with the same attention to detail as the blog you're currently reading, but were turned in for grades. How often and how many reviews should I post? Should I just start a new category and call them "Caseus Archivelox" or somesuch, or should I backdate everything? I have around 100 pages of reviews of movies, a few I've already posted, but mainly just half-assed reviews of films I may have forgotten I've seen. I'm leaning towards posting each day as a separate post, tagged with Caseus Archivelox and the date and time of original posting for the blog entries and dates for school papers. But the problem is how many not to overwhelm? If you have any suggestions, comment, and I'll take them in to consideration.

Black Sheep, Mutual Appreciation, & Running on Empty

Black Sheep is very obviously influenced by Bad Taste and Dead Alive. Down to similar shots and gore effects. Of course, it's about as fun, and who can hate on a film that has genetically engineered sheep attacking people and turning them into Sheeple (my preferred term over weresheep, as they aren't really lycanthropes). Who start out by having hair growing out of their wounds, then turning into sheep extremities, and saying things like "baa-a-a-stards". If you liked Dead Alive, it's almost as good, just a lot of insane fun, some terrible acting, and a character named Experience. Of course, for New Zealand, the greater fear is how this would destroy the country due to amount by which sheep outnumber people there. But it's the little touches, like the sheep foot, the "baa-a-a-stards", the sheep phobia: Ovinaphobia, interspecies sex, the scenes of sheep looking very scary by either just standing there or swarming over the hills, and the fact that the special effects were done by Oscar winner Richard Taylor.

Mutual Appreciation is a little too mumblecore-y for me, although I liked the soundtrack (almost if not entirely Bishop Allen tracks). It's pleasant enough, but nothing all too good. I kinda just wanted it to be more of Alan playing shows. Those were the best parts.

Running on Empty just pissed me off. Damn you River Phoenix for dying. He's ridiculously good in this film as the older son of a couple of fugitives who bombed a napalm factory during the Vietnam War. It's not that the other actors aren't good, but River is extremely talented. Also, very attractive. The scene in the woods is amazing acting. And yes, I was a little misty eyed at the ending, even though I knew what was going to happen.

Bender's Game

Bender's Game I saw... well, I must have seen it in early November, as that's when I got it, but I forgot to write it up then, and I just noticed. It definitely doesn't work as well as the first two Futurama movies, even with me being a huge RPG nerd, as I think most of the jokes just felt a little late for a movie released in 2008. Maybe if this had come out in 2002, I would have found them fresher. It's still funny, and any new Futurama is still a treat, but it's a step down.

Nicholas Nickleby, Black Book, The Promise, Running on Karma, A Matter of Loaf and Death, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, & Away from Her

Nicholas Nickleby was actually pretty good. Charlie Hunnam, of the late and lamented by me Undeclared, stars as the titular character, and Jim Broadbent, Christopher Plummer, Jamie Bell, Romola Garai, Tom Courtenay, Anne Hathaway, Juliet Stevenson, Nathan Lane (with Dame Edna as his wife), Alan Cumming, Timothy Spall, Edward Fox, and Kevin McKidd provide able backup. Written and directed by Douglas McGrath, who is also responsible for Emma and Infamous, the less good version of both Emma and the Truman Capote story, he actually manages to make a fine film here, worth watching if you enjoy either social commentary or Dickens (probably both if you enjoy one, really). It's fairly funny, captures the spirit of the Dickens novel without attempting to fit everything into it, and just a very fine way to spend over two hours.

Black Book is a Paul Verhoeven film, so it's full of sex and violence. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It goes to show that Carice van Houten actually can act (and Hollywood had no idea what to do with her, probably because she bleached her pubes on screen here), and the others who are ok in Valkyrie are quite good here. Verhoeven gets slammed unfairly for making Showgirls and Hollow Man (neither of which are good movies per se), but he is also responsible for Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, and The Fourth Man, all great to amazing films. He is someone who makes watchable films, as long as he isn't censored horribly. I need to make an effort to see some more of his earlier Dutch films. Spetters was kind of hard for me to watch, as I was never able to find a particularly good quality subtitled (or dubbed) version when I looked a few years ago. It's out on DVD here, though, so I'm going to put it in my Netflix queue, along with Soldier of Orange.

The Promise was crap. Sorry, Chen Kaige, but terrible CGI and Cecilia Cheung are not enough to make me sit through crap. The script was a mess, and I didn't even realize that the DVD had a skip in it that made me rewatch four minutes until it skipped for the second time. Avoid like the plague this movie is on Chen Kaige's career.

Running on Karma has Andy Lau in a very fake muscle suit, and starts the movie as a male stripper, who used to be a monk and can see the future and past of people and can talk to animals. He befriends the cop (Cecilia Cheung) who was involved in a sting over his fully nude strip show and helps her solve crimes, including one of a dude who can contort himself in very small places. It is utterly ridiculous. It's co-directed by Johnny To, who's very talented, so it actually is a strange thriller, but with some very, very silly things in it to accept. And then it takes a very, very weird turn in the third act. Karma is a very important part of the film. This ending would never fly in a non-Buddhist country.

A Matter of Loaf and Death is the new Wallace and Gromit short. I am a huge fan of Aardman Animation, and while this isn't as strong as The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, or The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it's up there with Chicken Run and A Grand Day Out. I think I missed cheese. But the animation is as strong as ever, it just didn't quite do it for me as much as their best, although it was full of funny references and terrible dog puns. Still definitely worth watching whenever it actually airs in the US.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a Ken Loach film about the origins of Ireland, and the fighting between those who founded the IRA and those who took the Irish Free State way out. As such, it actually is a companion piece with Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, which I saw back in 1996 at a pre-release screening in Cincinnati for an Irish group my grandfather was a member of. Anyway, the film was frustrating, because neither the ubernationalists or the more conciliatory Free-staters were really wrong, so seeing the ending just made me pissed all over again at Eamon De Valera. Damn you. Of course, the parallels between the IRA and terrorist organizations and guerrillas of today is used by Loach very effectively to point out that the British never had a chance in Ireland, and the only surprising thing is that it took so long for them to give up. It's a very good looking film, and for those interested in Irish history, definitely worth it.

Away from Her was directed by Sarah Polley, from an Alice Munro story, and is about a couple, deeply in love, and the wife gets Alzheimer's. Depressing as hell, but beautifully shot, and great acting all around. If you can handle two hours of sadness, I can't think of a better film about Alzheimer's out there. Infinitely better than The Notebook (which I tried to watch once, but man, it was just ugh).

Valkyrie

Balls, I did it again. I forgot to list a movie I saw. Although this time it fits in perfectly with how I felt about it: Valkyrie was utterly unnecessary. For a better idea of it, and much more in depth and well-written and the like, go read the friend I saw it with's review here. There are very, very few bits of it that I don't agree with entirely. I liked The Usual Suspects?

Encounters at the End of the World, You're Gonna Miss Me, Everything's Gone Green, Starter for 10, Dynamite Warrior, Bad Guy, & Cryptonomicon

Encounters at the End of the World is a Werner Herzog documentary (which I saw some time ago, but forgot to review) about how crazy everyone who spends time on Antarctica is. So it's basically a typical Herzog documentary: fascinating. I think that this one may have ventured a little far into sneering contempt for his subjects, as a number of times, he just starts to talk over them. A little disrespectful, especially when he says that they tend to ramble on. Of course, those bits of Herzog being an ass is to be completely expected. It's the parts where he just allows the awesomeness of Antarctica to show, like following the penguins or the below ice scuba diving. Those more than make up for that, and this is a great piece of filmmaking, certainly worthy of consideration as one of the best documentaries this year.

You're Gonna Miss Me is about Roky Erickson, lead singer of the 13th Floor Elevators, the creators of Psychadelic Rock, and, as far as I know, the only band with an electric jug. He was also a huge drug user, and, as an example against those damn hippies, was arrested for possessing a tiny bit of marijuana. His lawyer had him plead insanity, and then he went into a horrible maximum security hospital where everyone else there was a murderer or a rapist, and stayed there for a few years. After finally being declared "sane", he still made some good music through the 70s and early 80s, until his mental problems (that were present well before he became famous) started to make him utterly insane. Clearly a case for serious medical help, his mother (who is crazy and was also traumatized by Roky's drug use and doesn't trust drugs, doctors, or her husband (who may have sexually abused Roky and his four brothers...)) refuses to get him the help he clearly needs. Finally, Roky's youngest brother fights for custody of Roky, and cleans him up and within a year, he's a somewhat functioning member of society. There are some bonus features on the disc that further flesh out the post-movie story: Roky played Austin City Limits in 2005 (and was introduced by that asshole Kinky Friedman), and in 2007 was declared sane enough to be released from custodial care. Of course, his youngest brother has gone slightly crazy, and now denies that there's anything mentally wrong with someone who's declared "schizophrenic" and that drugs don't help. He and his friend, a crazy "doctor" John Breeding, have a bit where they rant about how psychiatry is bull and that mental illness doesn't exist. It was a little hard to follow their "logic", as they were utterly insane. The film, beyond the interest of the story, was full of some pretty good music, although I just wanted the filmmakers to force Roky to clip his nails. Some of them were creepy long. Anyway, I'm very happy that Roky's healthy again, even with all the barriers he had to have others break through.

Everything's Gone Green is a Douglas Coupland script, who is someone I've heard much about, but never actually read any of his writing. This is a slightly smug look at a group of Vancouverites who are all trying to find their place in society, one works as a photographer and writer for the BC lottery interviewing those who've just won the lottery, his best friend is a pot grower, another works as a golf course designer, and another works as a location scout for films. It's kind of hokey, there's nothing particularly brilliant about it, it's a hugely critical of capitalism, and about the only thing I found noteworthy was it's cultural criticism of filming in Vancouver and trying to pass it off as Phoenix or California or some other place it obviously isn't. I mean, the film isn't bad, and it's watchable, but it's just nothing particularly amazing.

Starter for 10 is set in England in 1985, and is about a guy who goes off to college, knowing a crazy amount of useless trivia and wants nothing more than to join the University Challenge team. And his love triangle between the hot blonde on the team and the Jewish student he met the first day at Bristol University. I identified with Brian (played by James McAvoy with an appropriate mix of awkwardness and comfort), and thought the movie was an enjoyable film, that didn't have much to say about much. Apparently, the novel it was based on is much more about class and the non-big three characters are far more fleshed out, which probably would have helped the film a bit. But the best thing about the film was the soundtrack. A great collection of 80s rock, from many songs from The Cure to Echo & the Bunnymen, New Order, Yaz, The Undertones, The Psychedelic Furs, Tears for Fears, and the Smiths to The Buzzcocks and Motörhead. Just a great soundtrack.

Dynamite Warrior is a Thai film that has the martial arts choreographer from Ong-Bak. That has to be why I added it my Netflix queue, right? It's cheesy and over the top (the hero rides into battle riding rockets and, oh yeah, it's set in the 1850s). And the final battle ends with the hero punching the bad guy, who's on fire and being pulled up a rope, in the stomach, knocking him into a tractor, which then explodes. That gives you some idea of how subtle the film is. Sigh.

Bad Guy is a Kim Ki-Duk film, and it's very depressing. Would she really just accept being turned into a prostitute and then fall in love with the guy who forced her into selling her body? Also, there are streets in South Korea where prostitutes just line up and brow beat men into paying for sex? Doesn't this go against everything I know about this culture? Where an actress was just convicted of adultery (seriously, backwards ass country alert), you're telling me prostitutes can just be really obvious on the streets? I never understood why they can do something so obviously illegal in public and not get caught. Not that I think this should be illegal, but my feelings on prostitution and marijuana are basically: legalize it and tax heavily. Because there's a lot of money to be made, plus, neither of them is particularly dangerous unless you keep them illegal.

Cryptonomicon is a Neal Stephenson novel about codes and codebreaking. It's set in both World War II and the present day (as of the late 90s when it was written). Being a huge math and computer nerd, unfortunately unskilled in complicated math and computers, I found it really up my alley. My huge amounts of knowledge of World War II (seriously, I read so many books way back when) still mean that I have a soft spot for that section, and so both sections were very interesting. Plus, the pot shot taken at Reagan was fun. I very much loved the book, and it almost makes me want to read the Baroque Cycle, but I think I'm going to stick with borrowing Snow Crash. If you have my relatively weird combination of interests, Cryptonomicon will be absolutely perfect, but I can definitely see how some wouldn't enjoy it. For some reason, my dad read the review in the Times and bought it many years ago, and still hasn't gotten around to reading it, but I borrowed and read it.

The Da Vinci Code, Cutthroat Island, The Long Good Friday, Executive Koala, & Purple Rain

The Da Vinci Code clearly was going to be made, based on the huge sales of the book, but is there a more useless big budget film? Ridiculous, and somehow, for some reason, they changed the ending to make it much more ambiguous that Sophie is the descendant of Jesus Christ. Too bad, because that was just about the only thing that made the story remotely interesting. Of course, it's crap, based on misrepresentations and the like. Of course, I fully subscribe to the idea that Jesus was a normal dude, and the huge gap in his life in the New Testament, along with the idea that since I believe that Jesus actually did exist, it's highly unlikely that the huge inconsistencies and mistranslations in the Bible could possibly be reconciled. It's obvious that all religions are based on earlier ones, building on myths, trying to explain things that science hadn't yet explained, so a healthy skepticism of organized religion is good, but the least you can do is at least be honest. Dan Brown may be a compulsively readable author, but he's a first class liar.
Cutthroat Island is quite simply terrible in every way. But it's a different terrible from The Singing Forest. There's some talent there, but so little of it is in evidence anywhere remotely near this film that I wonder who decided to greenlight this with such a huge budget. Really, anyone who may have, at one time or after the movie, been a good actor/director/writer/anything seriously did not know what the hell they were doing. They replaced quality movie with explosions. And extra-long boring fight scenes with pirates, a monkey, and explosions.
The Long Good Friday is a great British gangster film. Bob Hoskins gives a riveting performance as a "middle-class" gangster trying to open a casino, and deal with bombings that seem to be trying to eliminate him and his woman, Helen Mirren. It also features a young Pierce Brosnan as an assassin. Really, it's quite good.
Executive Koala is a very strange film, a Koala is a salaryman at a pickle company in Japan, and his wife disappeared three years ago and his new girlfriend just disappeared. And he works for a bunny. Telling you much more about the plot would be ruining it. There's a musical interlude, some strange cultural satire, and some breaking the fourth wall. Definitely worth watching, because I have never seen a film that so nonchalantly deals with something so utterly weird.
Purple Rain has some great Prince tracks, and some terrible acting. The bluray didn't seem like it was worth getting, as it still looked like an old DVD, so maybe they just did a crappy job with the transfer? And Morris Day is supposed to be stupid, but his pants were just too high for me to take him remotely seriously.

CSS and Ssion at 9:30 12/20

So Ms. Sally Albright got me a ticket to the CSS show. I had heard their albums, and had the song from the iPod ad stuck in my head for as long as it had been on TV. With my recent (well, within the last couple of years) much larger interest in dancey electro poppy type of music, I certainly wasn't going to miss this show. Crazy Brazilian music? Yes, please.

The opener was Ssion (pronounced Shun), which she had apparently seen when they opened for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They're an art-punk music collective, led by Cody Critcheloe, from Kansas City. Apparently, there are insane people in every town. Insane people who put out amazingly catchy tracks. Saving you the trouble of googling for it, here's the video for Street Jizz (unfortunately with the correct number of z's). They played many tracks from Fool's Gold, along with a mediocre, at best, cover of Nightclubbing. Bits of New Kids on the Block and Michael Jackson lyrics also found their way into songs. Cody danced on a raised platform in front of a screen occasionally showing the lyrics of the songs, had two men in matching leotards dancing next to the platform, and the keyboardist in an outfit that reminds everyone that he is a Boy on both his jacket and hat, and a drummer keeping the insistent beat on orange see through drums. But the ending song, Street Jizz, is one of the catchiest songs I've ever heard. Just addictive to an extreme. Quite fun, and the members of CSS dancing on the balcony also seemed to be enjoying themselves.

CSS came out and put on a pretty fun show, playing all the tracks I knew (um, Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex, Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above, and... that's it), and ended with a huge group singalong to We Are the Champions. The show was enjoyable enough, even without knowing the songs, but they were kind of overshadowed by Ssion. For those of you keeping score, Lovefoxxx was attractive, but the weird outfit did nothing for me.