Videodrome & Tetsuo: Iron Man

(The following was written in March '07 for a class I was taking, "Art in the Age of Electronic Media." It's an analytical essay rather than a review, but perhaps you'd like to read it while I find more movies to critique. Yes, I did get an A.)

Human culture and its reflection within the arts have long been fascinated with representations of living people created artificially, going back to the myth of the sculptor, Pygmalion, who fell so deeply in love with his own statue that it was granted life. With entry into the Machine Age, such humanoid automatons began to be depicted as the product of contemporary or futuristic technology, growing more commonplace as the possibility of true-life artificial intelligence continued to grow more and more feasible. Such a possibility is portrayed especially well within the visceral experience of cinema, in which such creations may become indistinguishable from “real” people: in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, for instance, the “replicants” are made to appear so human that they spurt blood when shot and can only be identified through psychological testing, further blurring the line between human and machine.

Two films, Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) and Tetsuo: Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), examine the concept of the Mechanical Man in a different manner. Both explore ideas of ordinary human beings who are transformed into amalgamations of flesh and technology, a transformative process that is messy, painful, and ultimately destructive to the protagonist and the outer world, reflecting anxieties about modern society.

Videodrome centers around Max Renn, owner of a local television station that emphasizes sexual and violent content. He catches sight of a pirate TV station known as “Videodrome” devoted solely to genuine footage of torture; wishing to air such footage on his own station, he gathers information from others in the TV business as to the nature of Videodrome and its creators. Renn discovers that the mere act of watching this channel has been causing him extreme hallucinations and physical changes to his body through the transmission of hidden signals. He is thus “programmed” by different sides of a cultural debate about the potential uses of Videodrome signals, becoming an ideological assassin with no mind of his own.

Tetsuo is far more abstract in its methods and may require multiple viewings to discern a legible plot. It begins with an unnamed man generally known as the “metals fetishist” forcibly inserting a metal pipe into his thigh in a cramped room full of discarded technology and paper cutouts of athletes. When he notices maggots squirming in the open wound, he becomes so distressed that he runs into the street and is hit by a car. The car’s driver, the “salaryman,” believes he has killed the metals fetishist and dumps the latter’s body into the woods. In actuality, the metals fetishist has survived, albeit with a piece of rusted metal immovably implanted into his brain that causes his body to rust. Meanwhile, the salaryman notices an odd bit of metal poking from his cheek, which causes pain and bleeding on attempted removal; he gradually sprouts more and more iron appendages throughout the day, during which he has two threatening or outright violent encounters with women (as both victim and perpetrator), ending up as an amorphous mass of soldered metal with whom the metals fetishist banters and battles. Eventually both salaryman and metals fetishist merge into a phallic mound of rusted iron.

The synthesis of these respective protagonists with the technological world is achieved through quite different means and processes. Videodrome in particular has much to say about the use of technology, specifically television, as an interactive cultural medium: for example, one of Max Renn’s contacts, a man named Brian O’Blivion, has founded the Cathode Ray Mission, which provides television cubicles for the homeless out of the belief that TV watching is a means of communication and integration with society at large. O’Blivion himself only interacts with his audience through monologues on videotape; in fact, he has died several months earlier and a large storeroom of such tapes serves to keep him “alive.” Prior to his death, O’Blivion developed a hallucination-inducing brain tumor brought on by Videodrome signals, although he believes that the visions were the cause of the tumor and not vice-versa. He believes this tumor to be a new organ, evidence of a further stage of evolution referred to as the “new flesh,” in which experience and perception become one. His rival, Barry Convex, also supports the idea of mind and body modified by television signals, albeit with a far more fascistic mindset: the use of such technology to program human beings into biological weapons. Max Renn ends up a pawn of Convex and O’Blivion as both sides “program” him to assassinate one another’s allies using videotapes physically inserted into his body and television broadcasts that speak and act directly to or upon him.

Videodrome’s human-technological fusion is clearly the result of external forces acting upon an individual under the influence of a complex network of major cultural players; it speaks of anxieties about the potential misuse of a specific, widespread medium. Tetsuo’s struggle is more intrapersonal, focused on the various torments of the salaryman’s psyche: his transformation occurs from the inside out, its origin never truly explained, possibly symbolic of sexual confusion or guilt over involvement in a hit-and-run. His antagonist, the metals fetishist, is given only a patently absurd explanation for his own synthesis, that of rusted metal in his brain “infecting” the rest of his body. This also gives him abilities that the salaryman lacks, such as his power to travel through metal pipelines and to temporarily “possess” various characters such as a businesswoman sitting beside the salaryman on a public bench and the corpse of the salaryman’s girlfriend.

The transformative processes, and indeed general themes, of both films also involve a highly literal melding of sex and violence. On a first date with radio personality Nicki Brand, Max Renn is invited to cut her on the shoulder with a pocket knife; later, during intercourse, he pierces her ears with long needles. She also states that she is so excited by Videodrome’s sadomasochistic content that she wishes to audition. In Tetsuo, the salaryman’s girlfriend is so aroused by the car accident that she initiates sex within view of the metals fetishist’s presumably-dead body. She later dies after impaling herself on a gigantic drill-penis that has sprouted from the salaryman’s torso. There is also a distinct homoerotic aspect to the conflict between the salaryman and the metals fetishist, with the latter greeting the former with a bouquet of rusted flowers at one point and taunting the salaryman in an often-flirtatious manner as they fight.

Androgynous qualities are shown as particularly threatening. One scene in Tetsuo depicts the salaryman on hands and knees before his girlfriend, who inexplicably bears a prehensile phallus that resembles a vacuum hose. She uses this to anally penetrate the salaryman, who has a distinct look of agonized pain on his face as she does so. Max Renn’s Videodrome-induced fleshly conduit takes the form of a vertical slit from chest to navel with a rather vaginal character. Others use this aperture to program him with pulsating videotapes; he also uses it to conceal a handgun, which later merges with his hand completely, and it transforms the intruding hand of one enemy agent into a literal “hand grenade.”

The fusion of organic and synthetic aspects is depicted as ultimately destructive to both the individual affected and to the greater world, with which he inevitably wishes to spread this transformation. After their final battle meshes the salaryman and metals fetishist into a throbbing tower of iron, the protruding head of the latter expresses a desire to “rust the whole world and scatter it into the dust of the universe” (which “sounds like fun,” according to the salaryman’s grimacing face); the newly-amalgamated creature then propels itself through the streets of Japan to initiate this goal. After murdering Barry Convex in a particularly gruesome manner in which Videodrome tumors burst through his skull, Max Renn climbs aboard a condemned ship (a remnant of older technology) where a television set gives him his final instructions. To fully integrate himself with the “new flesh,” he is to shoot himself (his “old flesh”), as demonstrated by a doppelganger on the screen whose action causes the TV set to explode as human organs fly out of its shattered display. Renn’s last words are, “Long live the new flesh,” as he pulls the trigger. Our own screen goes black and the credits proceed to roll; we are left to wonder if he has succeeded or simply died.

The directors of Videodrome and Tetsuo: Iron Man both return to ideas of human-technological transformation in later works, in a genre that might more accurately be labeled techno-biological fantasy rather than horror or science fiction. Tsukamoto directed the sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, a cult favorite that essentially re-makes the original Tetsuo with a more audience-accessible storyline and action-oriented style. Several of Cronenberg’s films deal with disconcerting hybrids of the organic and synthetic, perhaps most famously in his remake of The Fly; however, some of his most obvious parallels to Videodrome are in eXistenZ, released in the same year as The Matrix. In eXistenZ, players of a virtual-reality game system plug themselves into living pods through ports installed in their spinal cords. The resulting experience is essentially indistinguishable from that of reality, raising questions of whether it is safe or acceptable to spend excessive time in a mentally-based world that so closely replicates the physical, external one, and also prefiguring immersive online gaming experiences such as World of Warcraft and Second Life in which many players are known to spend nearly all of their free time.

With their usage of contemporary or pseudo-contemporary settings and protagonists who initially seem to live fairly ordinary lives, Tetsuo: Iron Man and Videodrome emphasize the idea that we must be aware of the world around us or it might come back to consume us entirely.

Funny Games and Prurient Interest

Ah yes, this review has been terribly late in coming--a full month after I saw the film--as the circumstances of my life still haven't settled down yet. I've been staying on friends' couches since January, since I lack a steady income to pay rent; speaking of which, I went to a job fair about three weeks ago, handed out 18 resumes, and only got one response . . . from someplace that could only offer a $25 stipend. I was only asked to interview by a clothing store, and that opportunity got blown when I showed up at the appointed time of 4 PM only to have the interviewer bitch at me for not coming at 12 like "everybody else": apparently, it's my fault that I was told the incorrect time over the phone. One place I applied to more recently gave me a brief phone interview yesterday, though I'm sure I blew that one royally as I was caught off-guard (weak responses) in the basement (poor phone reception) of a library (distracted by people and the need to stay quiet).

Other than my struggle with the piss-poor economy I graduated into, my birthday was last week, which gave me a brief respite from the Sisyphus-like effort to constantly disperse resumes for nothing but negative, perfunctory, or nonexistent responses. I took the opportunity to buy some DVDs, including the two-disc edition of There Will Be Blood (which, thanks to those categories meant to praise technical prowess, actually ended up winning fewer Oscars than, of all things, The Bourne Ultimatum--and I'm willing to bet that latter film will have "Winner of 3 Academy Awards!" prominently emblazoned on its DVD case). In my spare time--isn't it all spare time nowadays?--I've been shooting and editing concert footage of bands I particularly like (mostly friends' bands) that have played shows at SUNY Purchase. Really, it's in your best interest for me to like your music because I might just post your show on YouTube and give you some worldwide publicity (see for yourself: Abattoir; The Dandy Lions; Jangula; Teeny Bopper). Now, on to the review!

I’ve been known to turn up my nose at those overgrown adolescent boys who will pay to see a movie, no matter how mind-numbingly shitty it is, just because some actress or other might get topless in it: i.e., all the revenue for Good Luck Chuck from those pathetic saps who flocked to the box office for even the slightest possibility of Jessica Alba in her underwear. If you’re going to be that transparently desperate to see an unclad, at-least-reasonably-attractive female, you’re better off staying home and downloading pornography, for free, like an honest man. Hey, if you're lucky, you might even come across a pixelated image of Jessica Alba's face crudely Photoshopped onto the orange-tanned neck of a generic porn actress with a painfully-enhanced rack!

And yet, I admit, a good part of the reason why I wanted to see Michael Haneke's recent remake of his own Funny Games was because, well . . . those guys are hot.

In my defense, the premise did sound interesting on its own, and director Michael Haneke had been recommended to me by a film-aficionado friend of mine. The only movie of his that I’d seen before was The Piano Teacher, and it’s one of the extremely few films I’ve seen that I really can’t say whether or not I liked. I mean to say that the viewing experience itself was--surely intentionally--uncomfortable and not hugely enjoyable: something that begins as, what might be in other directors' hands, a relatively conventional Oedipally-tinged romance between a middle-aged piano teacher and her student becomes a study of the sadomasochism inherent in human nature. Isabelle Huppert's title character eventually gives student Benoit Magimel a detached, awkward restroom handjob; later, when she (no pun intended) whips out some fairly tame bondage equipment, he looks on her with disgust. Make no mistake, the piano teacher is pretty royally fucked-up in the psychological sense, but it's hardly due to her interest in sexual kink . . . and in the end, that "nice" vanilla boy who prefers the standard penis-vagina games reveals himself to be a different sort of sadist. (Fun fact: The Piano Teacher also features a small role by Udo Samel, the star of Killer Condom!)

But really, just look at these guys:



I mean, clean-cut, quietly-authoritarian prettyboy madmen-next-door, complete with blond Hitler Youth side parts? With the possibility of some Leopold and Loeb action (and I don’t mean lustmord)? Good god, I’m all over that. As far as offbeat, potentially inappropriate criminal-character attractions, I must admit I also had rather naughty thoughts about Alain Delon in Le Samourai and, more obscurely, Vincent Kartheiser in Crime + Punishment in Suburbia, although he was just the Loner With A Camera in that one and didn’t actually kill anybody.

Prurient interest aside for the moment, I've seen many derisive, dismissive reviews of this film that focus primarily on dissecting the "Message" Haneke intended to convey with Funny Games, often unfairly neglecting to analyze whether or not it was a good movie in general. As I already stated, Haneke's earlier Piano Teacher had a relevent message, but didn't make for a viewing experience I'd want to watch again any time soon, and I wondered if this would be the case when I went to see Funny Games. (It's worth noting that I saw the matinee showing of this film on the very first day it came out in my area--March 14th--and there were literally only five other people in the theatre with me.)

I think an important factor in one's opinion of Funny Games lies in which characters one is driven to sympathize with, something that hinges heavily on who you are as a viewer. My own perspective is that of a fairly eccentric 23-year-old who grew up with horror movies, many of the schlocky, over-the-top '80s variety, and at age 14 was interested in reading about the lives of serial killers, although I'm far from the "standard" American torture-porn fanatic Haneke supposedly seeks to scold: I tend to prefer the displays of actual violence in my horror films to be so over-the-top and cheesy as to become cartoonish (Lair of the White Worm or Hellraiser III), or just flat-out bizarre (Videodrome), and I thought Hostel was more interesting for its underlying social commentary about Western tourists than for any graphic depictions of torture and murder. And, as I said before, I think Funny Games's villains are hot and want to bang them . . . so one might say my perspective is a bit more skewed than that of, say, a fortysomething, heterosexual-male filmgoer with a wife and two kids, who found Crash (and I don't mean Cronenberg's version) to be terribly profound and subtle. Whereas I read J.G. Ballard's Crash when I was 16 and thought it was awesome.

From the moment we're introduced to the doomed family, driving to their lake house in a series of Shining-style shots while playing a classical-composer guessing game in their car, I was inclined to think of them as standard, smugly self-assured members of the sort of upper-middle-class yuppie suburbia I despised living in as a teenager. I was neither actively rooting for these people to die nor automatically projecting my own life onto theirs: I actually became much more sympathetic to this family once they were in real danger and well out of their mundane happiness.

Also, as someone with a good amount of video shooting and editing experience, I was impressed by Haneke's techniques. First of all, there is his use of subtlety. He intentionally begins the story with a sort of bourgeois banality, with repetitive, frivolous family small-talk; many shots in the first few minutes of the film focus more on the characters' hands and feet than on their faces, with a particular emphasis on the family dog, who proves a nuisance to the motions of unpacking until the gradual realization that it has disappeared. Passing the neighbors, whose words and actions seem rather stiff and strained, the family is unsure of why they seem a bit odd . . . but we, the viewers, do, because we've seen the previews and the ads, we know that those two young men standing calmly in their yard are murderers (spree killers, as it turns out). Haneke shows that he's "in on it" with the viewer. More on that later.

This blissfully banal existence continues with the initial, seemingly-innocuous introduction of Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet's characters. These killers are charismatic Nice Guys: young, quiet, handsome WASP types with impeccable manners and immaculate white polo shirts. Even Hannibal Lecter had a straitjacket and that infamous mask to make his appearance more menacing. When their sadistic manipulations begin, they act as if it were the most natural thing in the world to accuse their victims of rudeness for not showing appropriate gratitude to the torturers. I mentioned Leopold and Loeb earlier, the real-life murder case that became the inspiration for, among other things, Hitchcock's Rope and Michael Pitt's previous teen-crime drama, Murder By Numbers (ugh); Funny Games doesn't state explicitly what the relationship between the two upstanding young gents actually is, yet at times their banter seems, well, rather familiar, if you get what I mean. (Or maybe it's just me.) Their actual identities are constantly and deliberately kept in flux, referring to each other variously as "Peter"/"Paul", "Tom"/"Jerry", and "Beavis"/"Butthead;" at one point, Michael Pitt rattles off a litany of possible back stories meant to "explain" their sociopathic tendencies, inviting the family to pick whichever one appeals to them most (which reminded me of a common criticism of the movie Elephant: that it "didn't explain why" that film's own young Ambiguously Gay Duo decided to embark on a killing spree).

Pitt does make a handful of direct comments to the audience regarding the onscreen torture, but these asides were not as blatant as I'd feared: they're casually conspiratorial quips, acknowledging the audience as Pitt's second partner-in-crime. Yes, you're "in on it" with him, all right. This technique of Haneke's, already well remarked-upon by other critics, strikes some as being too overtly propagandistic and insulting in its insinuation that the audience might identify with the tormentors, but I find it far too simplistic to focus only on this attribute of the film as Haneke deliberately subverts a lot of standard horror clichés that a typically "sadistic" audience would be expecting. For instance, at one point, the family's son conveniently finds a shotgun and aims it at Pitt. Ordinarily, this would be the payoff: he shoots the killer, he survives, he presumably grows up to play football and go to college and take on a wife and kids of his own. But here, the kid not only doesn't know how to shoot a gun--Pitt cynically instructs him how--but is terrified to discover at just the wrong moment that the gun isn't even loaded . . . and that he's unwittingly given the killers another "toy."

We actually see very few acts of violence onscreen; instead, it's often clever editing during the act itself and then a shot of its aftermath. Fairly early on, Tim Roth's husband-and-father character gets cracked in the leg by one of his own golf clubs, wielded by Pitt; this happens in a split-second shot of Roth doubling over in pain. We never see the wound itself, although we do see a large, dark, heavy bloodstain spreading through the fabric of his pants, with only the power of our imagination to guess at how painful and awful his injury really is. Later, when a character is shot, we see only a blood-spattered television set broadcasting some banality. As a friend of mine remarked when I told him about this film, it's being "sadistic to the sadists" by not actually showing the violence.

Speaking of denied gratification, prurient interest is also denied the viewer. At one point, Pitt requests that Roth order his wife, Naomi Watts, to strip, or else he will torture and possibly kill their son. Here Haneke does something I thought very clever: we don't actually see Watts take off her clothing, we never see the actual nudity. Instead, the camera focuses on Watts' face, reddening and in tears, as she strips out-of-frame. This is in stark contrast to a lot of previous hey-bitch-take-your-clothes-off scenes I've watched, in which the woman's visible nudity might persuade the viewer to sympathize with her exposure and vulnerability or it could provide the viewer with a source of titillation, intentionally or not.

A couple of years ago I saw a really shitty Italian-produced movie from the '80s, I can't remember the name, about a serial rapist and his good buddy who crash an upscale dinner party to assault the guests both physically and sexually: what I most remember is a scene in which a young woman who arrives late to the party is revealed to be a virgin, to the delight of the villain, and what follows is a fairly lengthy shot, lingering on the woman's breasts and pubic hair, as he ironically sings a lullaby while tracing her skin with a large knife. Being young and female myself, that kind of exploitative ambiguity makes me much more uncomfortable than anything in Funny Games did. (There was a "payoff" at the end in which the rapist gets shot several times, but compared to all that came before, it wasn't anywhere near as satisfying as I'm sure it was meant to be.) The torture in Funny Games isn't sexy: even when Watts is tied up in her underwear, she's wearing a plain, mismatched pair of bra and panties (yes, filmmakers, women don't always wear matching bra-and-panties sets of satin or lace every time they go out), and when she later has the opportunity to escape and search for help, she grabs the first clothing item she can find, which happens to be her husband's sweater-vest that hangs off her like a tent.

I have to admit that certain aspects of Funny Games were, actually, pretty funny, in the way that a lot of Kafka is funny: it's so absurd and wrong that you have to laugh or else go mad. (Or maybe it's just me and my sick sense of humor; I sort of wonder what the guy sitting behind me in the theatre thought of my occasionally chuckling to myself.) Most of this came from various juxtapositions, beginning with an early shot of the smiling family in their car, obscured by the stark red Helvetica of the opening credits, as a loud, chaotic metal song suddenly blares away the calm Handel on the soundtrack, which seemed to me like a parody of the all the flash-in-the-pan nü-metal and "modern rock" songs that tend to clutter up the soundtracks of studio slasher movies. There's also the scene in which Tim Roth, his leg recently broken, sits at the kitchen doorway beside his terrified son, and Brady Corbet, idly keeping watch, requests that the boy make him a sandwich, "please."

I thought this movie was excellent, although it's hardly something I would recommend to everyone. Essentially, if you insist that a movie be full of fluff and smiles, wrapped up with a happy ending; if you disdain any sort of misanthropy and insist that, deep down, People Are Good And Nice; if even the hint of violence or sadism is repellent to you, I think you would probably hate Funny Games. But neither would you be that fond of it if you watch films just to see shit get formulaically blown up, or to admire the special-effects or CGI artifice of a graphically mangled limb. Funny Games is an unusual creature nowadays: a horror movie with a brain in its cracked skull.

The 10 11 movies I saw from 2007, part III

That's right, I managed to see another one in the few weeks following my last post. I saw it on TV. It was awful. But you'll have to read until the end to know just how bad it really was.

6) Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

This film was a sort of antithesis to hip crime dramas that make bank heists and other such criminal acts look slick, sleek, and sexy: here, a fairly minor jewelry theft in a Westchester strip mall absolutely ruins the lives of everyone connected with it. I enjoyed it overall--Hollywood can always use more nihilism!--though a couple of people who also saw it at Talk Cinema last fall absolutely hated it. Director Sidney Lumet makes much use of the Tarantino-esque "showing the same events from different perspectives and points in time" plot device, and while this was generally a good choice--in showing just how far-reaching and negative the consequences of the robbery turn out to be--he chose to preface these shifts in time with rather grating sound effects that I found superfluous and obnoxious (and I listen to noise music), like an attempt to drive in to the audience how "daringly experimental" his plot technique was.


7) Control

I have to say first and foremost that Control's picture quality was beautiful. It was shot in a rich black-&-white that resembled silver-print still photographs; if nothing else, it was lovely to look at. The guy who played Ian Curtis was great (and quite easy on the eyes as well, like a pre-junkie flab Pete Doherty), and it was interesting to see various landmarks of Joy Division's evolution, like Bernard Sumner's design for the "drummer boy" cover image that now graces a poster on one of my friends' walls, and recognizing scenes from the Werner Herzog film Stroszek that Curtis watches on TV before a certain major plot point that can easily be spoiled by looking up his Wikipedia entry.

I did, however, think it focused too much on the love story aspect, which is probably fitting since the film was based on a book by Curtis's widow. I wasn't especially enamored of either Curtis's high school sweetheart-turned-timid, frumpy housewife or the airy Belgian hipster he cheats on her with; throughout, I kept thinking: For fuck's sake, Ian! Just get a divorce! Perhaps Curtis might still be alive today if he had.


8) Superbad

I saw this on DVD at the apartment of friends and ended up liking it more than I expected to: it's more wittily written than most movies in the teenage-boys-looking-to-get-drunk-and-laid genre, though I'm still not among the critics falling over themselves to give Judd Apatow "the best blowjay ever." The three leads actually look like guys you might have gone to high school with, rather than obvious twentysomethings ripe for vacant pictorials on the covers of teen magazines right next to blurbs promising to inform the reader which type of jeans will make her ass look the least fat; I was glad to see it didn't have the sort of pat, everyone-gets-laid-and-learns-a-Valuable-Life-Lesson ending of something like American Pie.

Here's a movie about teenagers in which heterosexual young men openly express their (platonic) love for each other, the most squirrelly-looking kid is the first to get some, and hot women do, in fact, menstruate. It also illustrates the definitely-not-limited-to-teenagers experience of hitting on a guy while drunk, whom you're attracted to while sober, and having him reject your advances as politely as possible: not necessarily because he isn't attracted to you, but because you're just far too drunk and are probably going to vomit and/or not remember it later. (Not that I have any experience with that . . .)


9) Caramel

Critics are often comparing this to Sex and the City, which was my thought when I saw it last fall, although it's really more like Not Getting, or Denying That You're Getting, Sex in the City of Beirut. I admit I knew very little about Lebanese culture before watching this movie, like the social status afforded to those who speak French or are of partially French ancestry, or the large Christian population; the displays of cultural conflict between Eastern traditionalism and Western (particularly sexual) mores, like an engaged couple who are harassed by police simply for sitting, chastely, in a car at night, are what make Caramel interesting.

But this conflict can also be problematic, as it makes certain plot developments difficult to really relate to, or to interpret how they are supposed to impact the audience emotionally. If you don't want to read any spoilers, I suggest you skip ahead to the next paragraph, as my biggest issues with Caramel are with the endings of various story arcs. There's a Muslim bride-to-be who goes through an unnecessary minor surgery to get her hymen replaced, rather than be honest with her fiancé about the fact that she's no longer a virgin (the trip to the hospital is portrayed in a fairly lighthearted, hanging-with-my-BFFs manner). There's a post-menopausal actress with the face of an over-the-hill drag queen who struggles to compete with younger women in auditions for TV ads, eventually resorting to dropping fake blood on the rear of her skirt and on pristine maxi pads she leaves in the restrooms of casting calls so her competitors will think she can still have periods: are we supposed to be amused or appalled at this rather vile, pathetic cry for attention? There's an elderly seamstress, the caretaker of her senile sister, who gets romantic attention from a Western client, only to wordlessly start wiping off her makeup and stand him up for a date when she hears her sister's constant shouts from the next room: is this supposed to be a sad, bittersweet moment, realizing that she can never have true happiness with a man as long as she is saddled with an inappropriately-flirtatious sister suffering from dementia, or is there supposed to be a kind of relief here as she has some "revelation" about The Importance Of Family inherently overruling any possibility of romance? Then there's the lesbian hairdresser who never actually gets any, exchanging poignant looks with a gorgeous client whose hair she washes, eventually cutting the woman's hair into (essentially) a mullet; this new short haircut is supposed to represent freedom but is actually much less flattering than her previous long hair. (Okay, that one is just a matter of taste.) But, really, there were too many moments in which it was impossible for me to tell whether I was supposed to laugh with these women or pity them.

I've seen several critics praise Caramel's chick-flick format as a means to connect universally with international audiences, but I think, for me personally, that's part of the problem: I just don't like chick flicks. I find them glib, simplistic, and too unrealistic overall; they almost always bear little to no resemblance to my romantic life or that of my female friends, and thus are difficult for me to appreciate or relate to. My DVD collection is well over 200 titles strong and I can only think of a handful that might, conceivably, fit the chick flick description (for those curious, they are Secretary, Amelie, The Hours, Lovely and Amazing, and Pride and Prejudice). If I'm going to see formulaic Hollywood escapism I'd frankly rather watch something in which shit gets blown up.

As a side note: Nadine Labaki is quite hot in this movie, if you care about such things. She plays the woman having an affair with a married man; she also wrote and directed Caramel. If only more female directors would make movies about subjects other than lighthearted comedies about modern women in love (I am pointing my finger sternly at you, Nora Ephron).


10) The Kite Runner

I saw this at Talk Cinema last fall, where it apparently got something like 98% positive reviews from audience respondents in various cities. I haven't read the book it's based on (which almost everyone in my audience had), so I can't say how it compares, but the film version seems (and I'm sure I'll get called pretentious for this) rather middlebrow in execution. That is, tailor-made for a certain bourgeois sensibility that prides itself on being Informed About World Affairs and Supportive Of Independent Cinema but still falls prey to mawkish sentimentality and conventional endings and morals such as those of The Kite Runner. I mean, as soon as you see those kids flying their kites, you know (or at least, I figured) it's going to be a metaphor for something like "the innocent, simple pleasures of a childhood soon to be lost."

It would have been a stronger film if it hadn't tried to stretch itself into so many different kinds of films: it begins as a reminiscence of a childhood in a country rife with racial and cultural conflicts (I was far more interested in the violent upheaval of Afghanistan's ruling regime than I was in protagonist Amir's cowardly dismissal of his sexually-assaulted friend), then becomes a story about adapting culturally from Afghanistan to America, then ends as an action-adventure about going incognito to rescue a family member from Taliban custody. This point is especially true as there were a handful of genuinely poignant moments, as when Amir's father, who had been a prominent intellectual in his own country, is forced to work at a gas station upon emigrating to America; I just wish there had been more of that kind of subtlety and truthfulness instead of the numerous blatant and fairly conventional messages about The Importance Of Family.


11) Norbit

Is it any surprise that this was definitely the worst film of 2007 among the ones I saw? Perhaps more surprising is the fact that I saw it at all. Well, one weekend evening, decidedly not sober, I returned to the apartment where I've been staying and some friends happened to be watching it on TV. It's not a good comment on your movie when even intoxicating substances can't improve its humor.

Norbit is, of course, totally formulaic. The main joke is that Norbit's wife is fat. And of course, because this is Hollywood comedy logic, a woman who is fat and unattractive must necessarily be a total bitch personality-wise (unless she loses weight and gets a makeover later on, in which case her "inner beauty" is revealed--er, on the outside--and the protagonist realizes she's his Dream Girl). Eddie Murphy potrayed the eponymous character, his awful wife Rasputia, and his Chinese foster father Mr. Rice (get it? Because Asians eat rice! Hyuck hyuck!); my most optimistic guess is that Murphy portrayed the latter roles because no self-respecting Asian actor or woman of size would take them.

It's not even that the perpetuation of such stereotypes is offensive to political correctness, so much as the fact that they're just not funny. It reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Krusty the Klown tries to make a comeback and ends up with a slanty-eyed "me rikey velly much!" routine that leaves the audience in stunned silence . . . except The Simpsons, unlike Norbit, is actually, y'know, humorous. (There's another "Simpsons did it!" moment when Norbit makes a lame joke about Rasputia being banned from a restaurant for her liberal interpretation of its "all you can eat" buffet. I'd rather have watched the episode where Homer gets thrown out of the Frying Dutchman for a similar offense. No, I haven't seen The Simpsons Movie yet.) I cracked a smile maybe once or twice throughout the whole thing (including when it came on TV again a couple of days later and I watched the rest of it in a perverse fascination), and that was at how bad the jokes were.

Naturally, Norbit has a potential love interest who is the polar opposite of his wife: a thin, young, conventionally-pretty girl-next-door type. She's practically a saint, so warm-hearted, giving, and generous that she wants to buy the orphanage where she and Norbit grew up; I wouldn't be surprised if, instead of farting, she emitted a fine lavender mist of perfume. You know Norbit is going to end up with her the moment she first appears onscreen . . . wait, did I just spoil the movie for you? You weren't planning on actually watching Norbit, were you? Pretty much its only redeeming quality is in the advanced makeup technology that transformed Eddie Murphy into an elderly Asian man and an obese woman with cellulite and all; a shame they couldn't have utilized those sort of advancements in a better film.

The 10 movies I saw from 2007, part II

To continue with my post of a couple days ago in which I planned to rank and review all the movies I saw that were released in 2007 (beginning with There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, my two favorites):

3) Sweeney Todd

I hadn't seen, heard, or even really known anything about Sweeney Todd the musical beforehand apart from its major plot point of people getting baked into pies, so I for one am not going to whine about the exclusion of X Song or how Helena Bonham-Carter isn't as a good a singer as Y Actress was. I did, however, grow up with Tim Burton's movies. As mentioned in a previous post, I adored Nightmare Before Christmas back when it was still a darkly-alluring children's movie rather than a neverending franchise of Hot Topic merchandise, and I can't remember how many times I watched Beetlejuice before I was out of elementary school. (I watched Beetlejuice again a few months ago, for the first time in a few years, and for the first time realized how much of it was meant to satirize Manhattan art-world yuppies. Beetlejuice himself also rather reminded me of a particular young man I was in a weird situation with at the time.)

I must say, the working-class mid-19th-century London of Sweeney Todd was an excellent outlet for Burton's hyper-stylized dark, macabre, (fine, I'll say it) gothic aesthetic. Burton even finds opportunities to poke fun at his own image, as when Mrs. Lovett sings of a longing for a nice domestic life with Todd and her streetwise, orphaned bakery assistant and Todd wears the same brooding, haunted expression throughout Lovett's fantasies of a wedding and a jaunt by the seaside. Johnny Depp, by the way, was terrific (as always) in the title role, but then I have an unfortunate weakness for those intense, self-destructive loners in old-fashioned clothes. (Especially if they know about film. But I digress.)

I've heard Sweeney Todd described as a musical for people who aren't necessarily into musicals and I'd have to agree with that. The songs are there to advance, or comment on, the plot and explain what's going on in the characters' heads, which to me are the best uses of songs within musicals (as opposed to moments when songs seem arbitrarily added because the director or author decided, "It's too quiet, let's paste another song here"). I also prefer it when the use of music is either fairly realistic (as in Cabaret, where most of the songs take place onstage since one of the protagonists is, after all, a cabaret singer) or very obviously grounded in a sort of fantasy world (as in Burton's previous Nightmare Before Christmas or, in a different approach, Chicago, where pretty much every song that doesn't take place onstage is a daydream of Roxy Hart's), rather than some quasi-"realistic" scenario in which people just happen to burst into song about nothing. I love Evita, also: yeah, it stars that gifted actress Madonna, but there are so few plain-old spoken lines that it's practically an opera (and most of Madonna's lines are shouted from a balcony, so her melodramatic delivery makes sense).

Did anyone else think Sweeney Todd's daughter was really uncomfortable-looking? She had the face of a child, but the figure of a fine young lady. I mean it was really weird, Humbert Humbert would surely buy this DVD just to watch her scenes and write lyrically convoluted paragraphs about them.


4) Eastern Promises

This might shoot up to #3 if I saw it again, but it's been a few months and right now the DVD is $20 at Target, which is currently too much for my unemployed ass to spend on a single disc. Viggo Mortenson turns in a fine job here as a charismatic Russian mob man who isn't all that he seems: too bad he has to compete with Daniel Day-Lewis in all this year's big film awards.

I definitely liked this better than Cronenberg's previous History of Violence. History was hardly a bad film, but it seemed like a short story where some other movies seem like novels: turns of events where it felt like the real plot was just getting started were actually revealed to be at the climax of the movie. Eastern Promises likewise suffers from Cronenberg's seeming inability, since embarking on more "normal" fare following years of grotesque genius like Videodrome and Dead Ringers, to know when or how to really end a movie.

Ah, yes, and then there's the whole !!ZOMG ARAGORN PEEN!!! thing. Yes, there is frontal male nudity in this, and yes, it's very tastefully and naturally presented: if someone tries to shank you while sitting in a sauna, of course your fucking towel is going to fall off at some point. I only wish more filmmakers had the balls (no pun intended) to show male nudity, and I don't say that out of prurient interest: not to go on a tirade about the Male Gaze, but in most movies, if you see a man's naked ass, it's often an attempt at comedy, whereas a woman's naked ass on film is inherently seen as sexual (unless she's elderly or obese, in which case it's seen as funny because it's not sexy). Real human beings have real naughty bits, so if you're filming a scene in which it would look staged and superfluous not to include nudity, please don't crap out just to protect the poor hetero male viewer's insecurities about his wee willy winkie.

5) Atonement

This won the Best Picture Golden Globe over No Country AND There Will Be Blood? Really? It's one of those movies I described in my last post, that have general critical approval but which I inevitably consider to be good-but-not-great.

This is a rare case where I've actually read the book it was based on long before the film was even made. As such, my perspective is naturally different from someone who came into this movie as a fairly blank slate: I mean, I already knew how it was going to end, and it was interesting to look for characters and scenes I recognized from the novel. Like, there's one character who rapes a pseudo-sophisticated 14-year-old girl while the rest of the family is out searching for her two runaway brothers, and when he's first shown interacting with her, I had to think: "Hey, it's that creepy rapist! Oh, man, why are you talking to her like that? You're a creepy rapist, you creepy rapist."

The plot point this story hinges on is the misidentification of another young man as said creepy rapist. Briony, a 13-year-old girl (whom I thought, also while reading the book, was awfully naive about sex for that age, but hell, maybe it was different in an isolated upper-crust country manor house in the '30s) who aspires to be an author invents her own fanciful, simplified explanations for events earlier in the day involving her college-aged sister and the young man who has, until now, only admired her from afar. Rather than acknowleding that her sister is a grown-ass woman who wants to bang the hot servant boy, she leads herself to believe that saintly Big Sis is being menaced by a sinister "sex maniac." As a writer myself, I've often been familiar with the drive to fictionalize people and events from my own life in order to help myself explain or otherwise deal with them, but all the same, it stays in my head and on the page where it belongs, and would never be presented as truth during a police interrogation. In the end, I don't think Briony genuinely "atoned": while she did finally understand the depth of her actions and wish to atone for them, she seemed to believe that lives ruined by fiction can likewise be mended through fiction, which doesn't seem to indicate she has truly learned very much in that area.

I have to gripe that one of my favorite parts of the book, the section about Robbie's experiences on the French battlefront during WWII, was severely truncated in translation to the screen, and I felt like one didn't get such a poignant picture of the depth of his suffering as a result. I must say, though, that Atonement's director and cinematographer often make death and suffering look absolutely beautiful.

Another small annoyance: can't anyone think of a better way to indicate that it's the same character played by different actresses at different ages than by giving her the exact same haircut at age 13, 18, and 80? Who the hell keeps the same haircut in retirement age that she had in middle school?


That's it for now; reviews of the last five will be posted whenever I feel like it. And will also be generally shorter than these because I saw them longer ago.

Bastard in a basket!

From now on, The Film Vault will be online-only. I don't write for the Independent any more, for the simple reason that I don't go to Purchase any more. I graduated.

I'm currently writing this from the Purchase College library. As of January 7th, I've essentially been homeless: most of my things are in a storage locker in Port Chester while I've been living out of a suitcase and sleeping on friends' spare beds and couches, from Bronxville to Long Island and now back at Purchase since school is in session again. I haven't found a job yet and most landlords are wary of renting rooms to unemployed young people, so it looks like I may be That Guy--the one who's constantly on campus despite no longer being a student--indefinitely.

I actually made a video as my senior project. I've given out over 20 DVDs already and it looks like I may have to burn more copies; the demand was higher than I'd anticipated, considering it's 55 minutes long and not many people have seen my previous video work. The response has by far been favorable over all, with much praise in particular for the editing and cinematography (my default picture here is a still taken from my project). Thus far, I've heard from people who've seen it that it reminds them of such directors as David Lynch, Werner Herzog, and Ingmar Bergman. Eventually, when I have access to editing software again, I'm going to cut it up and post it to YouTube and MySpace. It's good to know I can watch some craptastic film and be able to say, in complete honesty, that I could make a better movie than that, considering I already did.

At some point soon, I'll make a post regarding all the behind-the-scenes bullshit that occurred in the making of my video, which probably won't make much sense or have much interest for random internet people who happen to come across this page with no way to actually watch the video itself (yet). For now, I'll discuss movies other people made in 2007: moving pictures which, unlike mine, were actually released in theatres and made their creators some amount of money.

Yes, it's that old (and by this time, rather belated) cliché of the end-of-the-year movie list. I can't even call it a top ten list because as far as I can recall, I only saw ten movies that came out in 2007: there was a slew of others I wanted to see, but movies are expensive and I preferred to save my pennies for movies I was pretty sure I would definitely like. Almost half of them were screened at Harlan Jacobson's Talk Cinema at Purchase's Performing Arts Center since tickets were only $5 for students. These are ranked in rough order of how much I liked them.

1) There Will Be Blood

Hands-down best movie of 2007.

I was, as always, skeptical when reading the glowing reviews beforehand: even the best movies often have some nagging flaw, or are overhyped into being underwhelming. The only film of P.T. Anderson's I'd seen previously was Punch-Drunk Love, and while I liked it--Adam Sandler's obnoxious man-child persona was transported to some semblance of the real world and naturally came off as psychologically disordered--I didn't equate its director with the production of Great Films. Besides, isn't that title incidentally a quote from one of the Saw movies? I expected it would probably be good, but not that good; very few films are actually that good.

There Will Be Blood is that good.

There's Daniel Day-Lewis's performance: with his oil-encrusted fingers, strong profile, brushlike moustache, and gruff-yet-gentle voice with peculiar and antiquated diction, he actually looks and sounds the way one might imagine of a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector, rather than a 21st-century attempt to imitate a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector. (Think of, say, a movie made in the 1940s about life in the 1890s, how its choice of costumes and sets, its conceptions of beautiful women and handsome men, even the way the actors enunciate their lines, clearly mark it as a product of the 1940s, and how a film made even twenty years later is going to have a radically different aesthetic interpretation of the 1890s that still, nonetheless, marks it as a product of its own era.)

There's Jonny Greenwood's score, especially with the taut, ominous string sections that one might expect from a horror film. I was glad to note the absence of quaint, generic banjo and acoustic guitar music many directors might be tempted to use in scoring a film set on the Western frontier.

There's the cinematography: the burning oil well alone is as beautiful as anything in Herzog's Lessons of Darkness.

And then, of course, there's the plot itself, the Citizen Kane-like story of a man who loses his humanity as he gains power and wealth. His relationship toward his son is clearly loving, yet deeply flawed and refreshingly unsentimentalized; the children in this movie are actually portrayed as human beings with inner lives of their own rather than idealized Darling Little Things for adults (in the film and the audience) to want to protect and coo over. His power struggle with a local adolescent preacher and would-be faith healer--himself a charlatan, albeit an extremely devout one--condemns both the former's sardonic atheism and the latter's smug righteousness and self-assurance without ridiculing the staunchly-believing townspeople (as an atheist myself, it annoys me when films hold black-and-white opinions about religion in either direction). Some people didn't like the ending, but I thought it made sense for his character, an ultimate rejection of everyone and everything who led him to that lonely mansion years ago.

This movie stayed in my head for a long time after I watched it, which happens rarely enough; maybe I'll notice more flaws the next time I see it, but it definitely ranks among my favorites, and not just of 2007. If it doesn't win the Oscar for Best Picture I will be sorely disappointed (though the Oscars don't mean as much as they used to: Crash over Brokeback Mountain?), but a little less so if loses out to:

2) No Country For Old Men

This would be the hands-down best film of 2007 if There Will Be Blood weren't around. The Coens were already among my favorite directors and No Country ranks among their best work, with its quiet-yet-involving and constantly-more-entangled plot that essentially begins with the accidental discovery of drug smugglers' bloody corpses and the briefcase full of money they died trying to obtain. Throughout the movie, many more will die for that wad of cash--like a darker Fargo, with all of its accidental or impulsive murders ending with Steve Buscemi in a wood chipper for "a little bit of money," as Frances McDormand says--through the efforts of the most memorable character, Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, a coldly-charismatic hired killer in a Prince Valiant pageboy.

This ending was more widely reviled than There Will Be Blood's, perceived as a "non-ending"--a woman at the theatre sitting near me was heard to mutter, "Um, okay?" when the credits began to roll--because it doesn't go out with a bang (I mean, aside from all the people who get shot throughout the film) or offer secure Hollywood closure. Yes, just like real life, sometimes the "bad guy" gets away, and sometimes it's after killing a "good guy" or two, and sometimes other "good guys" realize certain truths about human nature that they cannot change.


Okay, I was going to review all ten in one post, but this is getting pretty long and time-consuming and I've got Craigslisting to do. Look for part two, starting with Sweeney Todd, at some point whenever I feel like it.

Damn the Man! Edition, part II

(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on November 15th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)

Last week’s Film Vault was part one in a series of two regarding lesser-known anti-authoritarian films, spurred by Purchase’s increasingly and worryingly strict security measures. In that column, I mentioned the V for Vendetta-related graffiti I’d seen outside my apartment on Guy Fawkes Day; well, the day that column came out, I left my apartment and soon came upon another sidewalk-chalk message, saying "Thank you!" to me and the Indy, and simply signed with a V in a circle. It was pretty amusing, albeit kind of stalkerish. On to the movies!


The Ruling Class (1972)

I first became aware of this film around age 15, when sleazy occult-camp industrial act My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult was my favorite band. They’re known for heavily sampling obscure cult and horror films in their music and some of their best-known samples, regarding “the high-voltage messiah” and “the AC-DC god,” came from this movie. For years I only knew of it, vaguely, as some movie about crazy people who think they’re deities, but I didn’t actually see it for myself until about a year ago.

It quickly became one of my all-time favorite films. It’s two and a half hours long, but doesn’t feel its length. I paid $35 for the single-disc Criterion DVD and it was worth every cent. Peter O’Toole was nominated for an Oscar for his leading role as a schizophrenic aristocrat—a role the Academy wouldn’t touch nowadays, as he isn’t redeemed through love of a child or something—yet I’ve only met two people* who have ever seen The Ruling Class, much less even heard of it, without my having shown it to them.

The Ruling Class is essentially an absurdist dark comedy set in an upper-crust Britain largely untarnished by the ‘60s counterculture. It was initially given an X rating in the UK for its overt criticism of the Church and the class system (anyone looking for another reason for that rating will be disappointed as there’s maybe one brief shot of a woman’s bare ass).

When the 13th Earl of Gurney accidentally kills himself during a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation while wearing a military jacket and tutu, his insane son, Jack, is set to inherit his estate, a fact resented by Jack’s uncle, who attempts to get him re-committed. Jack believes himself to be God, advocating love and charity between napping on a big crucifix and initiating most of the film’s random musical numbers. An attempt to “cure” him by exposing him to another madman with a messiah complex only changes the nature of his madness: he’s still insane, and far more destructively so, recasting himself as a smartly-dressed Jack the Ripper figure, but nobody suspects a thing even after he commits a murder because his insanity has taken on a more respectable front.

On first viewing, I was tempted for awhile to see Jack’s insanity as simply misunderstood eccentricity, but the film refuses to hold such a simplistic notion and proves that he is, in fact, batshit crazy. This still doesn’t make the greedy members of his extended family any more sympathetic: between those who want to cure him and those who want him locked up in a madhouse, everyone has their own self-serving agenda, except perhaps for the scene-stealing drunken Marxist butler who stays on in the household despite his substantial inheritance in order to crack jokes at the aristocracy’s expense.

I’m really surprised the blatant satire and rampant absurdism of The Ruling Class haven’t made it a more widely-known cult classic. Any film in which a madman with a Jesus Christ pose grapples with a guy in a gorilla suit really deserves to be.

*--Both of them, I must admit, were young men I had a strong interest in at the time . . . and have since stopped speaking to. Boys who know film will always break your heart, it seems, but I could never force myself to fall for a guy who unironically thinks Dude, Where's My Car? or, I don't know, Big Momma's House is great cinema.


Zardoz (1974)

Have you ever wanted to watch Sean Connery grunting around in a ponytail and bright orange loincloth? No? Well, tell that to the creators of Zardoz, an exercise in how to be pretentious on a budget.

That sense is apparent from the largely-unnecessary first scene, in which a floating man’s head with a painted-on goatee warns the viewer against immortality and acknowledges his status as a fictional character by mentioning that he was created for your amusement: “Is God in show business, too?” (My, how postmodern and thought-provoking!)

It seems “Zardoz” is the name given to a giant, flying stone head that serves as deity to the “Exterminators,” including Sean Connery and his ample chest hair as Zed; these men are given free reign to rape and murder the farming class in order to control the population. Zardoz spits guns out of its mouth—the camera noticeably shakes when struck by some airborne rifles—and imparts words of wisdom to the Exterminators: “The gun is good. The penis is evil.”

Zed stows away inside Zardoz, accidentally killing the man from the first scene and ending up in the Vortex, a New Agey pastoral commune, where he is studied by a group of psychic, leisurely immortals kept alive by a sentient and all-knowing Tabernacle. The immortals have gradually grown impotent due to their inability to procreate: in one amusing sequence, they show Zed footage of women mudwrestling in an attempt to induce a hard-on.

Within the Vortex are a couple of outsider communities. There are the Apathetics, who have become catatonic from sheer ennui; they are later rejuvenated by touching Zed’s sweat, as they surround him, moaning, and begin freely banging one another. Then there are the Renegades, who have been permanently aged as punishment for any minor infraction of the Vortex’s strict status quo—one guy is aged five years for having mean thoughts—and left to shuffle around in a retirement community that resembles a dowdy perennial New Year’s Eve party; they end up running amok through the Vortex, longing for Zed to bring them death.

Zed is discovered to be some sort of genius, although you wouldn’t know it from Connery’s stilted delivery and few expressions beyond stony and bewildered. His bestial, unrestrained nature inspires the lust of many Vortex women, including the one who rallies for his death, who ends up (groan) falling in love with him and leading to a laughably unbelievable, idealistic conclusion.

This film intends to express a Big Important Message against class hierarchy and the “intellectual elite,” championing the Human Experience and “pure emotion,” but it has so much to say and with such underlying earnestness—and a lot of that message is frankly pretty conventional—that it largely comes across as ridiculous. Still, there are some moments of pure audacity that are almost admirable: how often do you see a bunch of tuxedoed senior citizens begging a half-naked man to kill them?

Damn the Man! Edition, part I

(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on November 8th, 2007, in a slightly different form. To put it in context, the administration had recently installed an assload of security cameras around campus, including some outside residential areas, without consulting the students; naturally that inspired a lot of controversy.)

As I stepped out of my apartment on Monday morning, I was confronted with Guy Fawkes-related graffiti winding along the Alumni Village sidewalk, admonishing me to “remember, remember the 5th of November.” (Oh dear. It seems I had forgotten.) On closer inspection, it actually had more to do with V for Vendetta, considering the stylized V scrawled on a manhole cover and the simplified anti-authoritarian slogans like “Do not conform!” that I would have found terribly empowering when I was about 13.

I did see V for Vendetta over the summer. It wasn’t nearly as much of a disappointment as I’d thought it would be, though naturally I thought the graphic novel was better; being a big Hollywood movie, they amped up the crowd-pleasing action and cleaned up, toned down, or entirely cut some of the darker or more risqué elements from the source, like a detective’s use of LSD in an attempt to get inside V’s head and a Night Porter-esque fascist-themed cabaret number. Still, I did enjoy it overall, though you know what really pissed me off? The fact that V’s relationship to Evie, which was that of a father figure in the book, was gradually transformed into that of a boyfriend. I’ll concede that there’s definitely something hot about a mysterious, well-spoken, well-dressed man who knows about art, history, literature, etc.—but it’s V, for fuck’s sake! He wouldn’t have a girlfriend! Can you imagine it?: some chick painting her toenails on the rim of a bathtub in the secret V lair, her hair tucked into a shower cap as she waits for the bleach of her retouched skunk streaks to kick in, shouting, “You weren’t really out blowing up the Old Bailey, you were with that floozy again, weren’tcha?! I swear, you go on and on about Guy Fawkes Day and ya can’t even remember our anniversary!”

Misogyny aside, the aim of that chalk graffiti was clearly to protest Purchase’s increasingly strict security measures of late: “Down with the Purchase police state!” read one slogan, since washed away by rain. I’m hardly a fan myself of those ubiquitous oily black hemispheres clandestinely gawping at you from various ceilings and walls like big dilated toads’ eyes; security cameras were also present throughout the halls of my Midwestern high school, although they went largely unquestioned due to Columbine. This week’s Film Vault, part one of two, brings you some anti-establishment, institution-subverting films that are a bit more under-the-radar and less slogan-inspiring than anything involving the Wachowski brothers.


Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

There’s more to German cinema than History Channel clips of Hitler shouting about things, Uwe Boll’s craptacular video game adaptations, and Killer Condom. Director Werner Herzog made a name for himself depicting unconventional, eccentric, or flat-out crazy protagonists in generally losing struggles with some greater force, such as nature or society; he’s probably best known for his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, though popular audiences would be more familiar with later films like Grizzly Man and this year’s Rescue Dawn.

Even Dwarfs Started Small is one of Herzog’s earliest films and one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot. We’re talking Holy Mountain levels of bizarre. Set in an alternate universe populated entirely by little people, Dwarfs centers around an isolated, unspecified institution—a jail? a school? an insane asylum?—in which the inmates proceed to run amok. They tear down a palm tree, look at porn mags of big people, hotwire a car and leave it running in a circle for the rest of the film, light potted plants on fire with gasoline, murder a pig while others examine a collection of pinned insects wearing wedding costumes, watch a camel shitting, and crucify a monkey, all while speaking German punctuated with demonic high-pitched laughter. Two dwarves, apparently blind, wear blacked-out industrial goggles and must feel their way around with big sticks, which they often just end up whacking things with. Some chickens—an animal Herzog seems oddly obsessed with—live on the premises, one running around with a dead mouse clutched in its beak, another pecking at the remains of a dead hen. Throughout all this, one of the “instructors,” also a dwarf, has locked himself up in his office where he waits in vain for the police, openly mocked by the inmates outdoors and the laughter of one insurgent he has tied to an office chair; eventually he, too, succumbs to madness.

As you might imagine, it’s a pretty polarizing sort of film. Crispin Glover apparently loves it, and I thought it had moments of brilliance, but I can see how people might hate it: there’s no real plot to speak of beyond the basic premise of grotesquely fascinating incidents in a rebellion against authority.

One of the dwarves was injured a couple of times during the shoot, and as Herzog describes in the terrific documentary short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (in which he does just that as the fulfillment of a bet), he promised to jump into a cactus patch if they all stayed out of trouble until filming ended. Even as he explains that some of the cactus needles are still inside his knee years later, he claims with an odd smile that “it’s not self-destructive to jump into a cactus.” This is the same man who, at age 63, was shot with an air rifle during an interview and wanted to continue because “it was not a significant bullet.” If that’s not badass I don’t know what is.