At the movies: Jimmy and Stiggs.

 

Jimmy and Stiggs kicked my ass, emotionally. There are times when you have to reckon with the friendships that come apart for all manner of reasons, and the ache gets so loud you can't hear anything else. This movie is like that.

At the movies: Queer.

 Take a soak in some primal gay psychedelia- it'll be good for you.

At the movies: Saint Laurent.

The best movie in town currently is this. It has lots of sex, uncompromising nudity, drug use, cute dogs, hot guys, gorgeous women, amazing clothes, seductive music, and a heap of amazing acting. It's artsy, unafraid, and essential viewing.

At the electronic outlet: The Canyons.

So yeah. This is the piece where I bring down some anger my way. I dug The Canyons a lot. Most people may very well hate it. Here's a quick test... Look at the image below. You see that '70s sweater La Lohan is wearing? If you don't feel immediately intrigued as to that combination of elements, then this may not be the film for you. 

Some thoughts on Behind the Candelabra.

This is a film worth seeing. Fortunately, thanks to the way viewing works these days, HBO Go is carrying it at your leisure. I've tried to get at everything I could possibly want to see about the film and what all it covers, but there's still something uncanny about it that feels elusive. What are your thoughts on the matter? 

At the movies: Ted.

So, for everyone who was wondering if Seth MacFarlane could bring it after unleashing Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show on the world, the answer is defiantly, yes.

At the movies: Savages.

Ah. Welcome back, insane Oliver...

I love Oliver Stone's more bonkers films, and this is certainly that. A feast of sex, violence, drugs, double-crossing, thrills, gore, mayhem, incisive performative critique, and Travoltarama! Check it out...

The Trailer Park Boys are coming to Nashville...

Julian, Ricky, and Bubbles. Coming to Nashville on October the 11th. I wrote a thing about it, wherein I got to interview Ricky. So that's something you should read.

At the movies: Rise of The Planet of The Apes.

It's rather vindicating when a good movie becomes a big hit. Especially during the summer. So here, then, are my abbreviated thoughts on the newest entry in the Planet of the Apes saga.

Also, as a special bonus, here's the abandoned beginning for the piece, which isn't even really about Rise..., but rather the thing about the Burton PotA that I don't think anyone has really addressed. But check it out, because without your unspoken validation, I am nothing.


The thing nobody remembers about Tim Burton's maligned 2001 remake of Planet of The Apes is that it was the last time he stayed true to his original mission statement as a filmmaker- embracing the strange and unusual. The beauty of its shocker ending wasn't its supposedly clever tweak of the original's shocking reveal, but rather that it punished the Artist formerly known as Marky Mark's character because of his unwillingess to expand his horizons. He could have lived a weird and extraordinary new life on the planet of the apes, and instead he went heroing it back across space to earth because it was safe and it was where all his stuff and ideology was. Well, joke's on you, you can't have that earth back...

Unfortunately, when society as a whole rejected the film (in spite of shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in tickets), it must have flipped a switch in Burton's brain, because next came Big Fish and that was it. A career built on embracing the strange and unusual now decided it was time to forgive Daddy and coast on the goodwill people had for Johnny Depp. With the exception of Sweeney Todd, it's been a dire spiral.

All of that comes into play in the way that Rupert Wyatt's Rise of The Planet of The Apes defiantly embraces the strange and unusual at every step of the way. Our perspectives are linked with the apes from the beginning of the film, and when humans become part of the story, it is as adjuncts to where the real deal is happening.

Famous People Talked to Me: Gaspar Noe.

Noe way.

Catching Up at the Movies: Going the Distance.

I still can't believe that this film was such a staggering failure. It's so far ahead of every other romantic comedy I saw all year.

At the movies: The Runaways.

I'm superspsyched- my corporate overlords have started to run some of my stuff in The Tennessean as well as Metromix, and you know me- I love attention.

So you can get all of that right here. Yay.

At the movies: Hot Tub Time Machine.

After a longtime friend (Rob Corddry, from The Daily Show) tries to kill himself (to a Mötley Crüe song, no less), his buddies (John Cusack, Craig Robinson) and a hanger-on nephew (Clark Duke) decide to head off to the mountains and revisit the ski town where they had some of their most defining moments back in the day. But add an illegal Russian energy drink into the mix, and the four soon find themselves hurled by Jacuzzi through time itself. Now, their time is short before they find themselves trapped in 1986 forever.

Blessed with a title that lays out everything you could need to know, Hot Tub Time Machine has been building on its can’t-miss premise as well as star Cusack’s own 80s nascent stardom as a way to pull in the nostalgia crowd as well as modern youngsters who don’t get why New Order or The English Beat are awesome.

Robinson has long been the secret comedic weapon of recent subversive cinema, and he gets several moments here that no one else could have pulled off. Likewise, Corddry goes for the gusto in every scene, and the two together are pure gold. Cusack underplays, which allows him to get to a much weirder place than he usually allows himself, and Duke (whose work I was unfamiliar with) is amiable and awkward in exactly the necessary proportions.

If it weren’t for a slack reel in the middle and some gratuitous homophobia (and by that I mean the duelling sports bet BJ sequence and a few F-fords), Hot Tub Time Machine would be a classic. As it is, it’s still generally an utter delight; unafraid of going to the darker side (the Greenberg-ier side?) of human despair (and laying some well-deserved blame on friends who don’t return their friends’ phone calls) or getting weird with the tyrannies of love and memory.

The 80s material seems slapdash, but the soundtrack choices are rightfully awesome; if Hot Tub Time Machine is a little off as an 80s film, it’s a superb time travel movie and well worth your time.

My only Class A-complaint is that of all the songs recorded and performed between 1986 and 2010, a character determined to wow an audience chooses "Let's Get it Started" by Black-Eyed Peas. I'm sorry, what?

Hats off to Crispin Glover and whoever did the music supervision.

Those damned very same bikers.

One of the greats.
Apologies for the uneven Basketball Diaries footage.

At the movies: The Informers.

It would be impossible to do a literal adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and no one has been able to do so just yet. Of them all, Roger Avary's take on The Rules of Attraction came closest to capturing the tabula rasa grand opera of Ellis' milieu, but even it had to scale back as far as the drugs/sex/decadence quotient.

Those three elements have come to define the literary and cinematic Ellis, and to that body of work we can now add The Informers, sprung from Ellis' 1994 collection of short stories, and the first instance of the author working on the screenplay for one of those adaptations. There's an attempt here to craft a coked-out Short Cuts, aiming for that distinctively Altmanesque sprawl that nonetheless coheres into something greater than the sum of its parts. The Informers, the film, is a frustrating effort.

It has that quintessential Ellis fixation on surfaces, with beautiful skin sliding through life greased by power and payment, and it captures that nameless sexual demiurge that privilege fuels, with participants slipping in and out of whatever bed is nearby in a gender-irrelevant pile. But lurking beneath its surfaces is an all-consuming sadness, a pervasive sense of wanting to be needed and valued in human terms, and only some of the film's cast are capable of making that aspect feel real, rather than something demanded by the screenplay.

Amber Heard, still best known as adjunct girlfriend in Pineapple Express and Never Back Down (and whose remarkable titular role in All The Boys Love Mandy Lane still remains unreleased in the U.S.), presides over the proceedings as Christie. She is desired by most of the cast, few of whom even register, and she unleashes some of the most commanding nudity since Sharon Stone's turn in the first Basic Instinct. Remarkably, Heard never seems exploited, delighting in the power of her flesh with an earthy, Anna Magnani vibe. She drives the film in a way that none of the rest of the cast can, and she gets the tone of Ellis' stories exactly right.

Similarly, Mickey Rourke continues his career resurrection with a disturbing turn as someone slipping around the lowest rungs of the Los Angeles ladder. A kidnapper of dubious reliability and razor-sharp intensity, Rourke's Peter is a character that understands exactly where he stands in the social hierarchy of 1983 L.A., and his performance, like Heard's, is spot-on.

The Informers is notable for being actor Brad Renfro's final role, and it's difficult to watch his work in the film without being aware of that fact; his character is a twitchy mess of a man put into an untenable situation who does, however, have one scene of explosive power, where he talks about the business of Hollywood, and you don't know what comes from the script and what's coming from the heart, but it burns brighter than most of the film that contains it.

In a way, Billy Bob Thornton seems to be working through some heavy issues himself- his part is quiet, a studio executive torn between a longtime affair and reconstituting his marriage and fragmented family, but there's a steely sadness to his work here that resonates long after his time onscreen is past.

But that's the central problem of The Informers- the vast majority of the cast can't bring that pain through, and a lot of the film just lies there and looks pretty. Kim Basinger and Winona Ryder both bring a nervy exhaustion to their roles, and we feel how the lives of their characters (and, to a certain extent, their public personae) are driven by endless obligations, but they aren't able to overcome the weaknesses of the material.

As for the film's seemingly endless array of blond boys with indiscriminate libidos and indeterminate ideologies, they just don't do anything to differentiate themselves. Some are sad, some run a mysterious ring of child-killers, some are numb by the lives and lies their families gave them, and none of them affect the proceedings all that much. There's a 'lonely rock star' subplot that could have been completely jettisoned and it would have made no difference whatsoever.

Anybody with a jones for 80s-era decadence can find some enjoyable moments within. It's hard not to love a film that unfolds its moral agenda to Simple Minds' "New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)" or that positions Pat Benetar's "Shadows of the Night" as the pop music equivalent of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, just as it's hard not to hate a film with this much bad hair or sloppy AIDS allegory. You probably already know whether or not you want to see this film, so the only purpose I serve is to make sure you've got your expectations properly set. Better than Less Than Zero, but without a performance like Robert Downey Jr.'s. Less of an agenda than American Psycho, but nowhere near as subversive or brilliant in its musical choices. Doesn't compare to The Rules of Attraction, but few films do.

But in our pharmacotized culture, when the cult of 80s-style awesomeness again rules the masses (and don't kid yourself, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" is the epitome of the phenomenon), with uncertain futures and a sense that the rich really are a separate species (rent Brian Yuzna's masterpiece Society for further elaboration), there's a place for Ellis and his oeuvre. The distance between the Now and the Then seems even more diminished, and sometimes you just want to feel less.

Thoughts on David Cronenberg.

This was Uncle Crizzle's idea.

I'm a chatty motherfucker to begin with, and when you bring the films and philosophies of David Cronenberg into the mix, even moreso. But he asked me some questions to help promote a DC double feature going on in Durham last night, and me, always eager for attention, went batshit and wrote back several tomes on the subject.

The edited piece can be found here, and it does a very good job of making me look like someone capable of speaking rationally and with thoughts properly organized, which, as those of you who know me may well attest, is far from the truth.

Many thanks to CDL for talking with me about it.

But now, for shits and giggles, I've decided to post my original complete responses. I do this because I think it's the most concrete illustration of how my mind works that has ever been put down on print this side of my 1992 AP exams. It's rambling, to be sure, but it covers much of where my current fascinations with all things Cronenbergian lie.

Check it out...


CDL: How did you first get into Cronenberg's work?

JS: My first actual encounter with Cronenberg's work was "Faith Healer," an episode he directed of Friday the 13th: The Series. I was and am a big fan of Horror-based TV, but at the time that that show was airing, I had little or no film-based taste or consciousness. But one of the things that I've since learned to love in film and culture is what my colleague Charles Bass calls 'the ironic distance of being Canadian.'

You'd have all of these shows that were geographically vague as to where they were taking place, so theoretically anyone anywhere could assume that what they were witnessing could be as near as the closest metropolis. And they were all made in Canada, with casts and crews that have continued to be part of our global entertainment culture.

There's never an explicit declaration of Canadianness; but because these shows were willing to explore the weird and the political and the sexual and the violent in ways that were, even for twelve year-old me, different from the Mass American culture around me. So I cultivated an appreciation for that aesthetic, which for the Friday the 13th series was initially shaped by several of Cronenberg's longtime collaborators (production design goddess Carol Spier, Editor Ron Sanders, and casting director Deirdre Bowen). I didn't understand this at the time, but having become a Cronenberg devotee, I've since gone back and looked at a lot of the old Canadian-made syndicated shows that I dug, and I've found that throughline.

I first got hardcore into Cronenberg after seeing Crash (on opening day in Tampa, Florida with my Dad). I had gone because of the scandal, because of Holly Hunter, and because I try and support any NC-17 film that looks halfway interesting. Ever since then, his films have always been a part of my life.



CDL: What are your favorites in the Cronenberg canon?

JS: Crash. Naked Lunch. Videodrome. eXistenZ. And, even though I think it's probably his weakest film on the whole, the ideas in Scanners are so amazing that I'll still show it love whenever I can.

The way he reconceives telepathy as a physical interaction between two nervous systems is one of the most radical and astonishing approaches to psychic phenomena that the fantastic has ever produced, and even if it only gets remembered for exploding heads and eyes, what I take away from Scanners is the idea of the Group Scan. When Cameron and Kim are on the run, and they meet up with the scanner underground, there's that moment when all these tormented artists and fugitives find a moment of cosmic peace by flexing their nervous systems and becoming one collective organism (until Revok's men burst in and things start dying).

It's a great concept, and certainly the aspect of the film that distinguishes it from just about every other movie that deals with telepathy- there's always power struggles of some sort, but here, for just a bit, we get a glimpse of an egalitarian cultural evolution, and it's astonishing. Pure fiction, of course, as anyone who's ever tried to get three or four artists to work together on anything will attest. But I still find it inspiring.




CDL: What do you find so appealing about his films?

JS: There is a gleaming amorality in his films that I love. His films take place in an atheistic universe, and I find that representative of modern life. Religion, ideally, should be a personal journey of philosophy and experience, and it's been perverted into a political force- a monolith of oppression. But truthfully, to even the most devout individuals in any society on the earth today, rapid and radical creation from nothingness doesn't trigger thoughts of the Garden of Eden or the Great Flood, it means cancer. When we can't even explain why our bodies do what they do, how could we even hope to extrapolate an abstract belief system completely removed from the physical?

I also like that death means more in a Cronenberg film than in almost any other director working today, and that is specifically due to his atheism. I believe it was in talking about Eastern Promises, he said that when you eliminate the possibility of any sort of afterlife, the act of killing becomes infinitely more shocking and horrifying, and he's absolutely right. So many religious movements and cults are built on the promise of some next life, and horrifying things have been done by individuals who are betting on those same odds. It's horrifying, really. That we have to look to an atheist director to show that kind of respect for life in his work says a lot about the casual acceptance of death that being part of a vaguely-religious society brings with it. Teleology is always an interesting tool with which to approach the world and art.



CDL: The double feature that'll be playing in Durham next Friday is THE DEAD ZONE and THE BROOD. Got anything to say about those?


JS: Well, The Dead Zone is the best Stephen King adaptation ever made. There have been others that work as good films (The Night Flier, Firestarter), and some where great directors have used King's material as a canvas on which to explore their own issues and styles with exciting and entertaining results (Carrie, The Mist, Kubrick's The Shining), and there's even something like Dreamcatcher, which is bugfuck crazy and absolutely true to King in a way that no other adaptation of his work is. But The Dead Zone is a remarkable work.

I love Christopher Walken, and I love when he does that thing he does now. But he is heartbreakingly good in The Dead Zone, and it's the finest performance of his career. And what he and Cronenberg do is prune a lot of frippery away and hone the dark heart of King's novel into something a lot more emotionally bleak and haunting than its source material. This is the first film of Cronenberg's where he began Brundleflying together the source material with his own aesthetic, and even after the decades of SNL skits and Anthony Michael Hall-starring TV show, The Dead Zone holds up better than any other film that came out in 1983. Because of it, there was never a time when I could seriously watch The West Wing without thinking that Josiah Bartlet was going to kill us all.

The Brood was initially a problematic movie for me. When I first viewed it, it seemed to have a primal streak of misogyny laced through it, as well as a nihilism that didn't really seem tonally right to me. I can't say that something just clicked for me one day, or that reading up on the circumstances behind the film's making made things fit into place, and that I immediately realized the film's brilliance. But I've grown to love it.

It's an angry film; Cronenberg made it coming off of a vicious divorce as well as in response to the manufactured bullshit of Kramer vs Kramer, and each time I watch it I notice something new. The whole subplot about Psychoplasmics is remarkably ahead of its time, and I would love to see Cronenberg make a movie about the narcotizing of the Western World. Do we even have a universal human biochemistry any more? But I digress…

The Brood is one of the best films about divorce ever made- it's like the splatter movie equivalent of Abba's album The Visitors, where the emotional pain of an imploding relationship alters a recognized aesthetic in a way that marks it as different. And the way it illustrates how patterns of abuse spread outward through families and relationships, even removed from the visceral wrench of the film itself, is patently devastating. I also love how it addresses the schizophrenic nature of a children; the line between sweet-faced hope for the future and mallet-wielding assassins of potential is so much finer than society wants to admit. And that's the key to what makes Cronenberg great- he admits it. His films tell us things that we know on a cellular level, and he's unafraid to lock lens on the abyss for a little while.

A Cronenberg double feature on the big screen is a remarkable occasion, not to be missed or taken lightly. I'm envious of Durham's moviegoers, and would be making the trek myself were it not for a friend's wedding. Perhaps a DVD of The Brood would make an appropriate gift?



CDL: Were you as offended as I was when people started saying that A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was the greatest thing he's ever done, after all the subversive films he has made over the years?

JS: A History of Violence is a great film, but I think the reason why it got such a rapturous response was because it felt like it could be a regular movie. There were traditional elements that any moviegoer could tap into and find some commonality with, and it made it a much easier film to like than many of his others. I've since made it my default film for introducing others to the world of Cronenberg.

I mean, even Eastern Promises is a damned weird film when you get down to it, structured almost as a seduction. It's almost impossible to even evaluate it as a film and experience until after it's over and you realize how every minor point and moment has been set up to facilitate a transition on the individual (the character of Nikolai) and cultural (Russia as an entity) levels. Eastern Promises is like one of the Dune books in that respect.


-and, as a special bonus-

JS: You don't have to take drugs to enjoy a Cronenberg film, because his films, at their best, provide all the benefits of the best hallucinogens. 'Reality' and social institutions are sloughed off, and one's experience is first and foremost that of a biological organism. The flesh is both Absolute and in flux, and all terror resolves into terror of the body. But there's an emotional purity to his work that I don't think anyone can touch. The Fly remains the most beautiful love story ever put on screen, Naked Lunch says more to me about writing than any other film on the subject, and Spider was the film that let me finally get some peace with regard to a schizophrenic Great Aunt who had died several years before. Nobody does better DVD commentaries about their films (though I would put Paul Verhoeven and John Waters just behind him), and there are very few directors whom I will put as much trust in. There simply is no finer artist working in film today.