The Face Knife

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days is best understood as a period piece. As when watching a film set during the French Revolution, the Great Depression or the Roman Occupation of Jerusalem, it helps for the viewer to have some prior knowledge about the milieu in which the action is taking place. Society in the early 90s had a number of endearing yet annoying quirks. For instance, it was once considered very proper for the very wealthy not to flaunt their largesse in the form of conspicuous consumption. Likewise, the superiority of older technology, like the LP record, was taken for granted. Sharing your feelings with even your most intimate friends was gauche. It was even quite appropriate to eat highly sugared breakfast cereal for every meal. And that’s not even getting into the headgear.

Like most period pieces, Last Days is three things simultaneously: It’s a comedy of manners, a commentary on class relations, and a lens to look at, as the Grey Lady would say, ‘how we live now.’

Michael Pitt (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) plays Blake, or, as he will be known for the remainder of this review, FakeCobain (or FC), a rock star living in remote, decaying house whose peeling paint and general squalor make it the sister-school to Fight Club University. Various hangers-on float through the house and environs, but the master has strangely absented himself, preferring solitude.

The period piece lives and dies by the level of care taken in evoking the past, and from our first glimpse of old-timey grungewear you can almost smell the 90s. The raggedy sweaters, the pajama bottoms, the undershirts, the hospital bracelet that FakeCobain wears look like the spitting image of the clothes Real Cobain wore in various publicity shots, and if you were a teen during the early 90s like me, at least part of your brain is ticking off the Cobains that pass through the movie - ‘Oh, that’s “Sliver” Cobain,’ ‘That was from SPIN’, etc. The cigarette burns in FakeCobain’s t-shirt were obviously applied by a master technician, and someone probably rolled around in real, live dirt to get his clothes so filthy.

This is a problem, and it’s an ironic problem insofarasmuch as it’s directly related to the problem that led Real Cobain to his death. No, I’m not saying that the costumers on the film were all bipolar junkies. It’s the problem of Authenticity and what it means to be authentic. Part of the Cobain Problem is feeling like a phony, and being pulled into a world that wouldn’t know if you were indeed a phony from a world that is arguably more ‘real.’

And the realism of Van Sant’s film comes not from purely cinematic sources like camera placement and moving (which is actually pretty expressionist, or against what passes for realism these days) but from the meticulous recreation of setting. It’s like the still photos of the era, up to and including the infamous Chuck-Taylors-on-the-floor-of-the-greenhouse shot, have come to life. You can tell great care was taken in choosing locations and wardrobe. Too much care. This kind of ostentatious realism, like filming a movie in Aramaic and Latin, is a cheap special effect. It’s a child’s conception of what it means to be authentic and faithful to a source. It’s a poseur’s conception. There’s this conversation in the film between a private detective and a grunge hanger-on about replicas of Stonehenge and London Bridge and it’s so fucking ironic because that’s what this movie is: It’s fake Stonehenge. Maybe Van Sant knows it; I don’t think he does.

The only ‘real’ moments in the film come from the no doubt improvised dialogue of the supporting actors, which injects some humor and surrealism into the low mumble of the film. Harmony Korine talking about how Jerry Garcia is a great Dungeon Master, now THAT’s evoking a time and place. The strength in the film comes in these accidental moments - FakeCobain dropping the sauce packet in the boiling water while making Mac and Cheese, watching Boys II Men on the TV. It’s no coincidence that these moments are also funny. There’s a lot of humor in the Cobain Problem if you know where to look for it.

Unfortunately, despite the Van Sant’s avowed naturalism, he loads up the film, especially at the beginning, with fatuous metaphorical moments - FakeCobain pissing the river, FakeCobain trying to figure out which path to take in the woods, FakeCobain not taking the stairs down the steep incline and tumbling instead, FakeCobain tripping over the exact same spot twice*, cutting between the Mormon’s talking about Jesus and FakeCobain. Etc. And the truly atrocious scene where the spirit of NakedFakeCobain climbs out of real Cobain’s corpse had most of the audience giggling.

There are things to be said for the film - for one, there’s a lot to talk about, and I’ve barely touched on class issues or the difference between interpersonal relationships 90s-style and those of today (see Me and You and Everyone We Know) . The camera work is exceptional and a lot is done with what would be considered “bad” shots - blown-out windows, reflections in glass - to make me admire the DP. There’s a great woodland tracking shot that while not coming close to the one in Week-End made me think about it and sort of put the FakeCobain character in the same dead-end position as these self-cannibalizing outlaw revolutionaries, which is a pretty appropriate metaphor for the failure of 90s alternative culture.

The film could have been a lot worse - and while I think it’s sort of pussy to say that I really wanted to like it and then slag it off, I really did want to like it. I do have one thing to be greatful for in this too sacred handling of one of my own personal sacred cows: At least Cameron Crowe didn’t make it.

*Though, there a few other repeated moments in this film that sort of evoke Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel. Maybe Cobain was caught in a trap of grunge mannerisms and couldn’t get out….I like that idea. Maybe I’ll make that film. Combined with the doorbell that keeps ringing and inviting disruptive guests (mormons, yellow page salesman, kim gordon…)

Neat little article on Slate.com about the enigma that is Owen Wilson (aka, The Butterscotch Stallion). Owen Wilson has been in a lot of crappy movies (though I know people who swear by Shanghai Noon, but in addition to the Wes Anderson films he’s made one great contribution to my understanding of “Art” cinema. You see, I saw 2002’s I Spy on a plane just weeks before I saw Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 5. The two films share many of the same Budapest locations, including the the bridge where Barney commits his climatic Harry Houdini suicide scene (to the strains of the opera singer wearing the beer helmet). Unfortunately, in the Wilson/Eddie Murphy vehicle, an Invisible Jet is docked on one of the towersof that bridge, and that’s all I could think about as the plastic-manacled Barney plunged into the river below.

More later this week. I didn’t see any new releases, and I think I’m going to scuttle this piece on Video Art I was working on because I don’t know much about it. Still, that hasn’t stopped me before.

Argh! Just finally forced myself to walk over to MoMA in the humongous steam bath that is Manhattan in order to get tickets for Wednesday’s showing of The Last Days only to be told that it already sold out. I feel like such a chump, especially since I’ve been meaning to do this since last wednesday.

….

Wasn’t there an Arnold Schwarzneggar picture called The Last Days? About like Satan or something?

Adaptations are tricky buggers. Even when not inspiring vocal, maniacal fatwas from comic book guys¹, the writer and/or director responsible for the adaptation is seen as a sticky-fingered tamperer: why mess with a good or an as-good-as-good thing? And what kind of fool would dare try to re-make an adaptation? A: Yet another filmmaker with daddy issues.

Tim Burton’s movies pretty much sit up and beg for psychoanalytic criticism², and it’s no big trick to suggest that the earlier adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic, the more appositely titled Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is the clearest cinematic antedecent of Burton’s exceptional m?lange of grotesquery and sentimentality. What better way to act out the anxiety of influence than the rebuild your dad, Dr. Frankenstein style³, from the parts and pieces of your own life?

The genius animating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the brain Burton has stolen from his past - the brain of Johnny Depp. That’s not to say that Burton isn’t responsible for the amazing things about this movie, it’s just that Depp’s “choices” -to use a word from the “craft”- are the nougat that binds together the tough nuts of sentimentality and brutality that lace Dahl’s story.

The fact that those choices more or less amount to an impression of an accused child molester is more or less on point. I realize that Depp and Burton wouldn’t want association with Michael Jackson to taint their work⁴. But bracket, if you can, the intimations of kiddie fiddling on the part of Jackson and concentrate instead on his own story, his narrative of childhood lost and regained, and there you have the story of Willy Wonka’s factory, oh, and the story of present-day America as well.

It’s a story of willful disregard of hard truth and adult reality in favor of a hyper-real simulation of what you think the world should be like - in the case of childhood, an orgy of candy and doing like you feel. And screw anyone who would tell you different. Immediate gratification of your desires - which must be right because they’re YOUR DESIRES - is the only way to live. If the world fails to conform to your desires, well, either force it to or withdraw into your own fantasy land. The gummy boat on the river of chocolate had better well run on time!

The secret core of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that Willy Wonka has spoiled himself rotten, just as the parents of the ‘bad’ children have. He has far more in common with a Veruca Salt or Mike Teevee than he does with Charlie Bucket. No wonder he can’t stand those other children - it’s like looking in a mirror. Wonka is your average creepy moral hypocrite. He’s Bill Bennet on a sugar jag and Motherfucker doesn’t even floss.

Going back as far as Edward Scissorhands Burton has used repetition and similarity as a visual stand in for normality. The romantic misfits of Burton’s imagination pop out against the cookie-cutter background. It’s a neat aesthetic strategy, and in Charlie makes great use of it, from Charlie’s dad’s job in th the toothpaste factories to the Gursky-esque arrangements of Wonkabars to the most striking use of CGI this summer, the multitude of Oompa Loompas, all played by the same actor.

However, what does that strategy really mean? It means that everything outside the self is an interchangable unit; one Oompa Loompa is the same as the next Oompa Loompa, children don’t need names, and all factory workers are more or less thieving scum (did I mention that Wonka is ANTI-LABOR? I mean, the Oompa Loompa work for Cocoa beans - how can the domestic workforce compete with that?).

The high level of formalism, the reliance on CGI and the dubious moral philosophy mark Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as the fraternal twin of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, even though there’s a disappointing poverty of amputations in this children’s film. That shouldn’t surprise me. But then again, most of the films I’ve seen this summer have been children’s films in one way or another and they’ve had plenty of amputations.

If the moral of The War of the Worlds is that we (AMERICANS!!!!) would do anything to protect our children and the moral of Sin City is that there are some things that decent people (children and women) aren’t meant to see (but are nonetheless necessary for maintaining social order) the moral of Charlie is to become as a child and your wildest wishes will come true⁵ - provided that you love your daddy and mummy above all else.

The reverence Charlie Bucket shows to his cinematic parents (and grandparents) is the same reverence Robert Rodriguez showed to his source material, and is the same reverence that Steven Spielberg showed to his source material (even if he really didn’t understand it⁶). Luckily for Tim Burton, his warped personality doesn’t permit that kind of reverence, and even though the new movie is pretty faithful to it’s source (more or less), the imp of the perverse differentiates it enough so that it becomes a darker, funnier beast.

The darker aspects stem from the fascistic nature of the inner child unleashed - as well as the funnier parts. When Wonka and the bad kids are acting as (non-sexual) id unleashed, the funniest lines pop out of them. Charlie, alone, is completely unfunny and unsympathetic. Who gives a fuck about Charlie? Who would possibly want to be Charlie? Yet, he’s the moral paragon of the film, the center around which the whole chocolatey froth churns. Are we really supposed to want our kids to be like Charlie? Little fascists in trainings? Charlie and the Brownshirt Factory?

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film. It’s a great piece of cinema, and it really creates a wholly believable, self-contained world. Just don’t ask me to live there. What, no fucking snozzberries?

¹ For a current example, see this week’s New York Times Magazine for an article about the Sci-Fi channel’s Battlestar Galatica
² The scene with the Oompa Loompa therapist…
³ Maybe Bride of Frankenstein style is more appropriate, the camp tone of that movie finding great (though less homosocial) expression in Burton’s works.
⁴ But then again, why give the puppets at the beginning vitiligo?
⁵Pretty close to Me and You and Everyone We Know
⁶ the ending of the original War of the Worlds was ironic because it showed how insignifcant even higher beings are and how significant lower beings are. By making his movie into a heroic epic journey, Speilberg totally ignores the chilling, anti-human message of War of The Worlds and turns it into another heart-warmer. AND, AND! He resurrects that fucking teen soldier-wannabe son!!!! How offensive was THAT?

from New York Press’s Armond White’s half-year round-up:

War of the Worlds is Steven Spielberg’s equivalent to Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. It’s an apocalyptic vision based in how we live today, amidst worldwide trauma, but every astonishing sequence demonstrates the hard psychic work of civilized man forced to rehumanize himself. This challenge to good-time filmgoers’ expectations is the latest example of the 70s modernist urge to revise genre in order to face life more knowledgably. Weekend was based in theoretical political disillusionment; Spielberg’s road movie has the taste of bitter experience.

This is the sort of thing I wish I had written as a joke in my review of The War of the Worlds, but I was too incensed by the blithering idiocy of the film to muster a properly tongue-in-cheek response. I mean, that’s pretty funny, right?

Sadly, I think of White is serious, or serious in a different way than I would be serious. Maybe he knows something I don’t, and the “end of cinema” was really about Godard’s daddy issues. Or perhaps I dozed off during the part where Tim Robbin’s character explains subaltern politics to us. Oh, i get it now - Cruise’s character’s rejection of the hummus his daughter orders is a sly commentary on the neo-imperialist consumption habits of the upper middle class to which his children belong, in opposition to his more authentic proletarian tastes. Brilliant!

I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m pretty sure George Romero’s Land of the Dead has got to be a more knowing “revision of genre in order to face like more knowingly” that Spielberg’s crap fest. Dawn of the Dead, which I just had this week the pleasure to watch for the first time, is much more of a b-version of Week-end’s socio-political themes than maybe anything else I’ve seen.

The stupidity of White’s comment is highlighted about the most important thing that makes Week-End one of the best movies ever made - how form follows function. The cool, distanced tracking shots of Week-End, to pick the most obvious example from its formal arsenal, are integral to the polemnic in the way they frame and shape the world. Spielberg’s stupid - just plain stupid - jittery hand-held is the farthest thing one can get from that.

Should I try to engage publish critics like this in the future? or is it howling into the void? i really couldn’t resist this one, though. I don’t dislike all of White’s writing - his review of Palindromes is the closest to my own I’ve seen in print, but this performance and his prickly presence at last year’s Slate round table…

Even the goodiest of two-shoes treasure stories of misbehavior from their youth. I still love to tell the story of Sister Ludgera breaking a yardstick over my back in 7th grade, or the time I was the ringleader of a band of agitators, surrounding the elementary school chanting songs (mostly the theme song to the Brady Bunch) to protest the unfair cancellation of gym class. There’s a great photo of a nun yanking my tie out there somewhere (it was a good-natured yanking). And now, where am I? Rushing from work in forever rumpleed business casual in order to catch a screening of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct at BAM.

It may have just been the dwarf, but I couldn’t watch Zero for Conduct without thinking of Alfred Jarry. Jarry’s own anarchic, blasphemous and crude schoolboy-inspired farce appeared onstage nearly 30 years before the release of Vigo’s film, and while the overturning of order is less violent in Zero for Conduct, Pere Ubu’s redolent, over-ennunciated ‘merdre’ echoes in the protestations of the effeminate Tabard, the catalyst that ignites the scheming schoolboys into full-fledged pagan riot. The character of Tabard, with his sullen demeanor, his broken heart and shaggy page-boy hair looks like a young Kurt Cobain*. He even looks like he’s cross-dressing half the time.

Jarry’s fictional science of ‘pataphysics was the examination of the “laws that govern exceptions,” and as we all know, every schoolboy (or girl) thinks himself exceptional, until proven otherwise. Which is pretty much the action of Ozu’s I Was Born But…, another schoolboy farce (though with slightly younger children) from the early 30s that while formally worlds away from Vigo’s film, offers some great points of comparison, particularly in each film’s treatment of Charlie Chaplin.

Vigo’s film has one adult sympathetic to the boys - he’s “alright” - a teacher who imitates the little tramp, walks on his hands, and doodles while standing upside down on his desk. In contrast, the two boys of I Was Born But… are humiliated when they see film footage of their father acting like a Chaplinesque buffoon to entertain his boss, the father of their schoolmate and sometimes enemy.

Ozu’s children learn their place in the world and how to toe the line, but Vigo’s film ends on a note of infinite freedom and anarchy, with symbols of the rules of everyday life being flung into the abyss. His schoolboys burn brightly, while Ozu’s will lead lives of quiet desparation, no doubt wearing Dockers.

* If things go as planned, by the end of the next week I’ll review Gus Van Sant’s The Last Days, his fictional account portrayal of Cobain.

Looking for a low cost way to entertain a short-attention spanned out-of-town guest on Saturday, I stumbled across the blessedly $5 Coney Island Saturday Night Film Series, at, where else, The Coney Island Museum. Although most of the other films in the series seem outside of the scope of my interests, the one on Saturday, Svengali (1931) seemed like it could be good. Pre-code, horror, purportedly expressionist, directed by Archie Mayo (whose The Petrified Forest (1936) is part of the Warner Gangsters boxset and is a pretty interesting film) , and John Barrymore looked like Rasputin in the still advertising the movie.

Well, although I didn’t end up staying for all of Svengali because the sound was for shit and the movie was a little less than interesting in those circumstances, (though the sets were quite nice in a mersh expressionist way, the close-ups of Barrymore verged on Camp, and some of the main characters were fin-de-siecle Parisian painters - maybe I will watch the rest when it’s released on video) it was a pretty interesting evening, dipping into a subculture a venn diagram of which would comprise the overlapping of the Horror, Surf, Burlesque and Vaudeville spheres. In addition to limitless popcorn and water, our $5 bought us a half hour of ventrioloquism by Philadelphia’s Mr. Deadguy, though I wonder how difficult it is to ventriloquize with your head encased in a Latex skull mask. He was no Great Gabbo, that is for certain, though his dead baby puppet, Baby Cheesewhiz, had a certain cute charm to it. Half an hour was a little too much to bear, but he had a kind audience.

The next presentation was an episode of a public access TV show called Ghoul-a-Go-Go, which started off promisingly enough with a Kidz Boppy opening number featuring children dancing to the surf music theme, accompanied by the hosts, a vampire, a Quasimodo and the Invisible Man. In addition to the kids doing the “Swim,” the half-hour episode featured clips from vintage surf movies, commercials (including one for a “barbecue log” *shudder*), a burlesque performance by the “World Famous Pontani Sisters” and the most inept surf band of all time, The Dead Elvii (one of whom looked more like ZZ Top than Elvis - make sure the whole band commits to the gimmick, guys).

The last performance before the movie (and you can see why my attention span was shot by the time the feature started) was a guy who called himself Dr. Reverend Steven Strange, and began by swallowing razor blades (and cutting his tongue) and then retrieving them on a strand of dental floss. He had a lot more charisma than the ventriloquism guy - that kind of wiry energy that comes from a hard-living freak.

I have to say I had fun, and it was interesting to check out Suicide Girls and their admirers in their natural habitat. There were some civilians like myself in attendance, so non-Goths wouldn’t feel like “norms”, if you’re concerned about that. $5 well spent.

Despite the slow poison of a Jurassic Park: The Lost World or a The Phantom Menace, to take two notable examples, I’ve been unwilling to altogether abandon the tradition of the summer event film. Special effects blockbusters have their charms, and who am I to be immune: Criterion has an edition of Armageddon ^1,2. There’s always room for seeing shit get blown up real fucking good, and as long as there’s craftsmanship and a certain childlike enthusiasm involved, I can really get into it.

Then there are films like The War of the Worlds an amazingly bad film that shows just how shoddy action adventure craftsmanship can be. It’s enough to put me off recent film for the rest of the summer, which would be a shame because my chart needs updating.

Let me put it this way: You have a budget that is for all intents and purposes unlimited. You have one of the biggest stars on the planet, before he went (publicly) batshit insane. You have teams of nerds trying to build the best destruction of the Outerbridge Crossing every committed to film. And your big cinematographic idea during these no doubt very expensive and very meticulously planned sequences?

Shake the camera.

It’s nothing new, but I’m still flabbergasted I see this kind of backyard “realism” appear in a ’spectacle’ film. Does anyone see a shaking picture onscreen and think “my, this is exactly what I would feel like if there were aliens popping out of the ground on flatbush avenue?” Does anyone have a reaction other than “could he stop shaking the frame so I can see what’s going on?” What kind of literal-minded moron thinks that this is an effective way to convey action and excitement and danger cinematically?

But the retarded visuals of The War of the Worlds aren’t the worst thing about it. The worst thing, the thing that nearly made me walk out of the theater, was the fact that this film couldn’t even remain faithful to it’s own grounds of ‘realism’. I can suspend disbelief for a lot of things. A movie can make me buy that lightspeed travel is possible, that there could be androids indistinguishable from humans, that there could be a black president of the United States some day. All you have to do is remain consistent, and I’m on board.

Thus, when you say, repeatedly establish the concept of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) and what that does to electronic equipment (makes it stop working) maybe it would be a good idea NOT to show some guy using a FUCKING CAMCORDER 5 minutes afterwards, and what’s more, give a close-up of that camcorder’s LCD screen after dude holding it has been disintegrated. I can only imagine that the producers must have sold a product placement to Sony and the camera had to be worked into the story prominently SOMEHOW, and heck, maybe Sony DOES make a camcorder that’s shielded against EMP in case someone drops the Neutron Bomb on your vacation, and heck, maybe it’s also IMPERVIOUS to disintegration.

That’s the kind of film this is. The kind of movie where a jumbo jet razes a suburb and yet the hero’s minivan, parked in the driveway, would have suffered more damage if he left it in the supermarket parking lot for an hour. It’s the kind of film where we’re asked to buy Tom Cruise as a dockworker and neglectful father. It’s the kind of film where we’re supposed to buy that, in a crowd of hundreds of Americans, post-apocalypse, waving a revolver around could make them back off (and only one other guy has a gun, a pistol). It’s the kind of film where they kill a main character for rhetorical effect (the selfless heroism of our military and OUR BOYS who make it up, natch) and then bring him back for a tearful reunion at the end.

It’s the kind of the movie where, apparently no one on the planet has seen The Empire Strikes Back because man, when Tom Cruise gets sucked up into the Wicker Man-esqe underbelly of the Tripod and tosses some grenades in there, it’s a revelation.

In Sin City, there’s the repeated refrain that there are some thing “decent people” aren’t meant to see. There’s an analogous scene in this film, where Cruise blindfolds young Dakota Fanning so that he can go murder the shell-shocked dude who rescued them. It’s okay to murder, as long as it’s to maintain the sanctity and safety of the family. The parallels with our current geopolitical situation are appalling, no matter if Spielberg thinks he’s a leftist - there’s brainless references to Algeria and other ‘occupations’ that failed. The dark heart of Steven Spielberg is that he couldn’t exist without cataclysm, he couldn’t exist without powerful exterior forces that rend “families” apart. In trying to use Science Fiction as a metaphor for our own terror-stricken times, he reveals just how much of an alien he is to real human experience.

¹ A film which a friend of mine has described as a “perfect crystal of schlock. I haven’t seen it. Maybe I could get him to write a piece…
²Then again, they’ve also put out the films of Kevin Smith…