Tag Archives: Cult Film

Saturday Matinee: Robocop 

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By Seth Harris

Source: Pop Cult

Robocop (1987)
Written by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

As an adult, I have developed an entirely new appreciation for the work of Paul Verhoeven. He was born in The Netherlands but managed to create a framework for American action movies in the 1980s while simultaneously delivering brutal satire about the United States. Robocop was his second English language film and his first pass at skewering the direction of Reagan’s America. The result is a science fiction classic, a combination of themes from Frankenstein mixed with commentary on the rise in corporatization of the public sphere. It’s not as biting as Starship Troopers, but it is full of brilliant takes on the United States’ ease & comfort with war and violence.

In the future, Detroit is on the verge of collapse. Money is dwindling, and society is overrun with crime. Omni Consumer Products (OCP) now have control of the Detroit PD and have plans to roll out innovations in crime-fighting. They just need a fresh corpse to make that happen. Meanwhile, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is transferred from the suburbs to a dangerous new precinct in the city’s heart. Murphy and his partner Lewis (Nancy Allen) begin the bonding process. They respond to a call over a bank robbery and pursue the suspect to an abandoned refinery. The officers get separated, and Murphy ends up riddled with bullets when the criminals ambush him. OCP recovers Murphy’s body and rebuilds him into Robocop. Of course, they don’t tell his fellow officers or his family that he’s partially alive. Even Murphy doesn’t remember his past except for a few flashes here and there.

The origins of Robocop lie in a surprising mishmash of influences. Screenwriter Edward Neumeier snuck his way onto the set of Blade Runner and was inspired by the production design of this future world. He imagined a story set in this place about a human turned into a cyborg police officer. He teamed up with aspiring director Michael Miner to collaborate on the script. They drew on their mutual love of comic books and experiences in 1980s corporate culture. They both found it bizarrely fascinating that the Japanese book The Way of the Five Rings was so popular on Wall Street at the time as it was focused around methods of samurai in the 17th century killing more effectively. Corporate types seemed to imagine themselves as these types of brazen warriors while working in finance and marketing. They envisioned a world influenced by this type of violent thinking leading to societal collapse, as we see in the film.

Paul Verhoeven was not the first choice, but he was suggested by a producer when other directors fell out. Verhoeven reportedly read the first page of Robocop, tossed it aside, and proclaimed it “a piece of shit.” It took his wife reading the script and encouraging him to look at the subtext of what was happening to convince the director to accept the project. Because he wasn’t fluent in English at the time, Verhoeven says a lot of the satire went over his head. When Murphy returns to his home, abandoned by his wife and son, the director clicked with the script. 

For someone who didn’t understand the satire fully at the time, you can see the throughline in Verhoeven’s films coming out of Robocop to Total Recall and Starship Troopers. They are hyper-violent films where the villains are fascists. One of the best parts of Robocop are the snippets of news and commercials. They strongly emphasize the twisted psychology of this future world. News anchors smile through reports about apartheid South Africa arming themselves with nuclear weapons and U.S. forces crushing rebellions in Acapulco. Families play board games based around Mutual Assured Destruction. Everyone mindlessly gobbles up inane sitcoms that simply repeat catchphrases. The world feels rotten and hollow. Even as a kid seeing Robocop for the first time, it never felt like a movie where things would get better in the world when the credits rolled.

There’s a constant tension between the “civilized” world and devolution into wanton violence. A boardroom meeting dissolves into a bloodbath when an invention goes awry and kills an executive. Corporate heads employ some of the worst criminals to act as their muscle on the streets. 

Robocop is another subversive action movie that seemed to satiate an American bloodlust while openly mocking the culture. It’s so surprising that so many appear to have been oblivious to what is very obvious satire. Robocop isn’t a traditional hero, and the film certainly doesn’t think the police are some flawless institution. Nothing is happening to remedy the circumstances that have led to the collapse of society; instead, corporate powers seek to create more brutal unfeeling enforcers. It’s sad how close to reality Robocop has become.

Watch Robocop on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/389503/robocop-1987

Saturday Matinee: Altered States

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

“Altered States” is one hell of a movie — literally. It hurls its characters headlong back through billions of years to the moment of creation and finds nothing there except an anguished scream of “No!” as the life force protests its moment of birth. And then, through the power of the human ego to insist on its own will even in the face of the implacable indifference of the universe, it turns “No!” into “Yes!” and ends with the basic scene in all drama, the man and the woman falling into each other’s arms.

But hold on just a second here: I’m beginning to sound like the movie’s characters, a band of overwrought pseudo-intellectuals who talk like a cross between Werner Er-hard, Freud, and Tarzan. Some of the movie’s best dialogue passages are deliberately staged with everybody talking at once: It doesn’t matter what they’re saying, only that they’re incredibly serious about it. I can tell myself intellectually that this movie is a fiendishly constructed visual and verbal roller coaster, a movie deliberately intended to overwhelm its audiences with sensual excess. I know all that, and yet I was overwhelmed, I was caught up in its headlong energy.

Is that a worthy accomplishment for a movie? Yes, I suppose it is, if the movie earns it by working as hard as “Altered States” does. This is, at last, the movie that Ken Russell was born to direct the same Ken Russell whose wretched excesses in the past include “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils,” and “Lisztomania.” The formula is now clear. Take Russell’s flair for visual pyrotechnics and apocalyptic sexuality, and channel it through just enough scientific mumbo jumbo to give it form. The result may be totally meaningless, but while you’re watching it you are not concerned.

The movie is based on a Paddy Chayevsky novel, which was, in turn, inspired by the experiments of Dr. John Lilly, the man who placed his human subjects in total immersion tanks floating them in total darkness so that their minds, cut off from all external reality, could play along the frontiers of sanity. In “Altered States,” William Hurt plays a Harvard scientist named Jessup who takes such an experiment one step further, by ingesting a drug made from the sacred hallucinatory mushrooms of a primitive tribe. The strange thing about these mushrooms, Hurt observes in an easily missed line of dialogue in the movie, is that they give everyone who takes them the same hallucinatory vision. Perhaps it is our cellular memory of creation: There is chaos, and then a ball of light, and then the light turns into a crack, and the crack opens onto Nothing, and that is all there was and all there will be, except for life, which has its only existence in the mind.

Got that? It hardly matters. It is a breathtaking concept, but “Altered States” hardly slows down for it. This is the damnedest movie to categorize. Just when it begins to sound like a 1960s psychedelic fantasy, a head trip, it turns into a farce. The scientist immerses himself in his tank for too long, he regresses to a simian state, physically turns into some kind of ape, attacks the campus security guards, is chased by a pack of wild dogs into the local zoo, and kills and eats a sheep for his supper before turning back into the kindly Professor Jessup, the Intellectual Hulk.

The movie splits up into three basic ingredients: The science, the special effects, and the love relationship between the professor and his wife. The science is handled deliciously well. We learn as much as we need to (that is, next to nothing) about total immersion, genetics, and the racial memory. Then come the special effects, in four long passages and a few short bursts. They’re good. They may remind you at times of the sound-and-light extravaganza toward the end of 2001, but they are also supposed to evoke the birth of the universe in a pulsating celestial ovum. In the center of this vision is Dr. Jessup, his body pulsing in and out of an ape shape, his mouth pulled into an anguished “O” as he protests the hell of being born. These scenes are reinforced by the music and are obviously intended to fuel the chemically altered consciousness of the next generation of movie cultists.

But then there is the matter of the love relationship between the professor and his wife (Blair Brown), and it is here that we discover how powerful the attraction of love really is. During the professor’s last experiment, when he is disappearing into a violent whirlpool of light and screams on the laboratory floor, it is his wife who wades into the celestial mists, gets up to her knees in eternity, reaches in, and pulls him out. And this is despite the fact that he has filed for divorce. The last scene is a killer, with the professor turning into the protoplasm of life itself, and his wife turning into a glowing shell of rock-like flesh, with her inner fires glowing through the crevices (the effect is something like an overheated Spiderman). They’re going through the unspeakable hell of reliving the First Moment, and yet as the professor, as Man, bangs on the walls and crawls toward her, and she reaches out, and the universe rocks, the Man within him bursts out of the ape-protoplasm, and the Woman within her explodes back into flesh, and they collapse into each other’s arms, and all the scene really needs at that point is for him to ask, “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

“Altered States” is a superbly silly movie, a magnificent entertainment, and a clever and brilliant machine for making us feel awe, fear, and humor. That is enough. It’s pure movie and very little meaning. Did I like it? Yeah, I guess I did, but I wouldn’t advise trying to think about it very deeply.

Watch Altered States on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100045145/altered-states

Saturday Matinee: Car Cemetery

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By Stu Willis

Source: Sex Gore Mutants

In an unspecified place, in an unspecified post-war future, the world is divided into two factions: the brutal Government-sponsored police regime, and the punks they hope to quash.

The punks spend their days scavenging the barren, post-Apocalyptic wastelands. Their nights are spent searching for “cemeteries” – secret places where they can hide from the authorities and enjoy a taste of their former lives. Much of the action is set in the titular car cemetery, a junkyard fashioned to house people in, fortress-style. Imagine a cross between STREET TRASH’s scrap-yard and Barter Town from MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME.

The cemetery’s pig-like keeper Milos (Roland Amstutz) welcomes the latest bunch of motley punks into his haven, referring to it as “Babylon”. Through his loudhailer he tells his guests that while they are there they are free to indulge in whatever perversions tickle their fancy. That includes the services of his own prostitute girlfriend, Dila (Juliet Berto).

The young adults retire to their individual car wrecks and get busy with all manner of sexual kinks, which allows director Fernando Arrabal to wallow in some customary carnal images before honing in on 80s fashion victim Tope (Boris Bergman) and his loyal friend.

They, along with everyone else, have heard that a Messiah-like rocker by the name of Emanou (Alain Bashung) is rumoured to be headed for the cemetery. There is a buzz in the air concerning his expected arrival but Tope, who has crossed paths with the new-age Christ figure once before, intimates designs on betraying him.

When Milos demands money from his transient guests for supper, they revolt. Fortunately for all, a riot is avoided by the arrival of the enigmatic Emanou. He is able to take two Big Mac sandwiches and feed the entire flock with them.

Meanwhile, as Emanou’s story is told in flashback by awestruck onlookers and Tope plots against the sultry music man, the cops await orders from their mysterious ruler The Bunker to locate and kill the Messiah.

Ah, I get it! Dila is the whore of Babylon … the cops are the Romans … Emanou walks on water and feeds the, well, around 20-or-so extras. Yes, Arrabal is reworking tales from the Bible through the filters of post-Apocalyptic sci-fi and new wave music.

Arrabal became a prominent figure in the Panic Movement of the 1960s, penning the play FANDO AND LIS – the screen adaptation of which later became the feature film debut of Alexandro Jodorowsky (SANTA SANGRE; EL TOPO). The Spanish surrealist then went on to become a cult filmmaker of his own distinction in the 1970s, with the brilliant VIVA LA MUERTE, the even wilder I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE and his nihilistic epic THE GUERNICA TREE (all three of which can be found in Cult Epics’ superb THE FERNANDO ARRABAL COLLECTION VOLUME 1 box-set).

CAR CEMETERY then, from 1983, comes as something of a disappointment. It’s not overly bad, just not as out-there or creative as its predecessors. The religious allegories have always been rife in Arrabal’s work, but here the blasphemy seems only half-hearted. The anger appears to have dissipated along with the budget for this low-rent REPO MAN relation.

The cast are game. Bashung, a famous singer in his native France up until his death from lung cancer in 2009, has an undeniable presence: he succeeds in the effortless cool of many a rock star. Everyone around him seems overly animated, as if being directed by Andrej Zulawski. But, somehow, it helps to keep the odd atmospherics afloat.

The problem is that the script is horribly ripe. Borrowing liberally from the Bible, this is portentous claptrap even by Arrabal’s standards (I say that with all due respect: I am a fan of the man). It’s true to say that his previous films were stuffed to the brim with surreal religious motifs and visual correlations between sex and death. Nothing has changed here, but everything feels so sedate in comparison. It’s no surprise to learn that this film is based on Arrabal’s play of the same name – and that explains its clunkiness: the limited sets; the dreadfully wooden dialogue; the cheap arthouse pretensions.

Worse still, the whole thing is given a punk rock look that firmly dates the film in the early 1980s – and not in a good way. It’s like Peter Greenaway directing CAFE FLESH with no budget, or the cast of JUBILEE racing through a softcore sci-fi variant of JESUS OF MONTREAL.

Cult Epics’ disc presents the film uncut in anamorphic 1.66:1. The transfer is generally dark and colours look a tad faded. Having said that, this is an obscure and largely unseen film – it’s amazing just to see it on DVD. It’s perfectly watchable, and relatively clean to boot.

The French audio track offered is 2.0 and is a good proposition throughout. Optional English subtitles are easy to read and, for the most part, free from typing errors.

A static main menu page leads into a static scene-selection menu allowing access to CAR CEMETERY via 10 chapters.

The only extras on the disc are trailers for VIVA LA MUERTE, I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE and THE GUERNICA TREE. The first and last of these are equipped with English subtitles, while the HORSE trailer has no dialogue.

The disc is a basic one, but fair when you consider that it’s likely to be the only legitimate standalone release this film is likely to receive. Cult Epics have also released CAR CEMETERY as part of a three-disc box-set – THE FERNANDO ARRABAL COLLECTION VOLUME 2 – which also contains the whimsical family film THE EMPEROR OF PERU (with Mickey Rooney!) and a third disc of documentaries, including the recommended watch FAREWELL BABYLON.

CAR CEMETERY is a hideously dated 80s film that fails to escape from the pratfalls of its stage origins. The fashions, the sets, the allegories – its all rank. But there is something that makes it just-to-say work regardless, be it the occasional inspired image (Dila conversing with a miniature angel; Tope’s fate) or authentic squalor and subversive anti-establishment message that seeps through. Arrabal is a cinematic terrorist of considerable intelligence and even a lesser film such as this demonstrates as much. Just don’t go into it expecting the same levels of polemical art or extremism of his earlier films.

Watch Car Cemetery on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/10605045

Saturday Matinee: Urgh! A Music War

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By Rob Gonsalves

Source: Rob’s Movie Vault

I loved every second of Urgh! A Music War, even when I was baffled. Perhaps especially when I was baffled. How else does one respond to such only-in-the-early-’80s acts as Invisible Sex, who appear onstage in makeshift hazmat suits, or the late Klaus Nomi with his futuro-bizarro getup and his soaring falsetto, or the Surf Punks with their punk-nerd outfits and the simulated sex in an onstage beach shack? Dear God, what a strange and wondrous time for alternative music. This was an era in which the Go-Gos could be sandwiched between the roughhouse punk acts Athletico Spizz 80 and Dead Kennedys and somehow not seem out of place. (Belinda Carlisle, in the Urgh! footage, may be bouncy and happy, but she’s got the prerequisite short punk ‘do.)

Urgh! was filmed in 1980 at a variety of locations (New York, London, France, Los Angeles) as a somewhat scattershot attempt to capture some of the emerging New Wave and punk acts of the day. It can be seen today as an accidental Woodstock, as musically important in its way as Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning documentary was. It catches, for instance, one of XTC’s last live performances (a ripsnorting “Respectable Street,” easily one of the film’s highlights) before Andy Partridge got allergic to the stage life and announced that XTC would no longer do concerts. At the end, when the Police do “Roxanne” (a great performance — man, they kicked ass in concert back in the day) and then “So Lonely,” they invite various groups we’ve seen in the movie: UB40, Skafish, the ivory-tickling Jools Holland, and others; it’s a semi-historic jam.

When the camera moves in on one attractive woman or another in the crowd (which is somewhat often), you can tell that at the time the camera crew was just filming whatever caught their eye (and pants), but seen today it’s a cultural document: It’s fun to see how young women were dressing to go see X or Pere Ubu. From this movie, you might also conclude that the Lollapalooza generation didn’t invent pogo-ing, moshing, and stage-diving; you see it all here (most amusingly, I thought, during sets by the Go-Gos and Oingo Boingo). Urgh! also captures a deadpan-antagonistic time in rock. Many of the punk and New Wave acts here don’t seem to give a fuck whether you like them or not, yet they come to play and they play hard. When Lux Interior of the Cramps sticks his mike in his mouth and staggers around grunting as it hangs out, it’s a primal moment to rival Pete Townshend’s guitar-smashing; it comes from the same basic impulse, anyway.

You notice, too, the high level of joy in these performances. Many of the arrogant young (mostly) men onstage may have been in it to entertain themselves, but they keep things moving. The gyrations here couldn’t be further from the frozen-faced growling of today’s “alternative” rock. Dead Kennedys’ frontman Jello Biafra, spitting out “Bleed for Me,” exhorts the crowd to enjoy the freedom to hear punk rock — while it lasts (the punk rock and the freedom). Biafra has a corrosive staccato gaiety that matches Johnny Rotten at his most splenetic. Kenneth Spiers, lead shouter of Athletico Spizz 80 (doing their novelty hit “Where’s Captain Kirk?”), jumps around spraying the audience, fellow band members, and himself with silly string, then tosses the empty can over his shoulder, not caring if it hits any of his bandmates. Jim Skafish bends himself into art-rock pretzels during “Sign of the Cross,” a nerd’s idea of punk (a lot of the music here is a nerd’s idea of punk, including Devo, represented here with the relentless “Uncontrollable Urge”). Steel Pulse illustrate their song “Ku Klux Klan” with a (black) band member capering onstage in a KKK outfit. Howard Devoto of Magazine — the former Buzzcocks member who bears an uncanny resemblance to Chuck & Buck‘s Mike White — strolls around the stage as if waiting for a bus, a sly inversion of punk flailing that has its own quiet punk wit. In comparison with the carefree showmanship seen in Urgh!, many of today’s acts seem stoic, almost monastic, and far more self-involved and nihilistic than the most insular New Wave warbler.

Half of these groups didn’t seem to go anywhere after 1981, but it’s a treat to go back in time and catch the ones that did make it. Two elder statesmen of film-soundtrack composition, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo, come off here like the sweaty madmen they were back then. Joan Jett (doing an electrifying “Bad Reputation”) looks appealingly almost-chubby, before the label presumably told her to slim down for MTV; the same is true of Belinda Carlisle. Exene Cervenka nonchalantly commands the stage on X’s “Beyond and Back,” as does Gary Numan (tooling around in a little car) on “Down in the Park.” The one-hit wonders and no-hit wonders are equally alluring. I was charmed by Toyah Willcox’s jubilant hopping about, trying to be cool but too happy to pull it off. It’s a shame the exuberant Chelsea weren’t better known. Wall of Voodoo, whose lead singer Stan Ridgway resembles a crank-addled Griffin Dunne, pumps up the defiant “Back in Flesh” (no, not “Mexican Radio” — that would be too obvious). The movie is heavily male, but the female singers — Willcox, Carlisle, Jett — distinguish themselves by their clarity. Joan Jett screams as fiercely as anyone, but you can understand everything she’s saying, whereas many of the male singers rant unintelligibly (which can be its own kind of hostile fuck-you lyricism). The viewer/listener comes away thinking that Jett and the other women have fought too hard to be on that stage to waste the opportunity to be heard; the men, accustomed to being heard, let their words clatter and fall every which way.

Jonathan Demme is thanked in the credits, and much of Urgh! shares the concert-film aesthetic he pioneered in Stop Making Sense and continued in Storefront Hitchcock. Director Derek Burbidge, who made rock videos back then (including “Cars” for Gary Numan and pretty much all the Police’s early MTV highlights), is into simplicity, not flash (a useful approach when catching thirty-odd bands on the fly in three different countries). The bands are given space to work up their own rhythm — the editing doesn’t do it for them. Burbidge is as fond of the mammoth close-up as Sergio Leone ever was, and half of “Roxanne” seems to explore Sting’s nostrils from previously unseen angles. Performers like Lux Interior and Jello Biafra seem to be dripping sweat right onto you. The effect is to take you into the front row.

Urgh! doesn’t (and can’t possibly) have the cohesive brilliance or musical momentum of Stop Making Sense — the styles are simply too varied, throwing you from catatonic New Wave to thrashing punk in an eyeblink. Still, as a record of a moment and a sound, it ranks up there with the best you’ve seen and heard.

Saturday Matinee: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

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Why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Remains Unforgettable

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Source: RogerEbert.com

Despite its gently bummed-out vibe, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a sneakily powerful film. It’s so affecting, in fact, that I get a little sad just thinking about the story and characters. Even though I saw “Eternal Sunshine” twice in a theater when it came out and put it on my 2004 Top 10 list, I only revisited it once more after that (to be interviewed for a video essay that, as far as I know, is no longer available online) and haven’t watched it since. It’s not just the story itself that’s piercing; it’s the film’s visualization of memories being destroyed, which hits harder now after seeing so many older friends and relatives (including my mother) succumb to Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a truly great film that can be endlessly appreciated and analyzed for what it’s actually about even while it acquires secondary meanings.

“Eternal Sunshine” is the most perfect film ever made from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay, although Kaufman’s self-written directorial debut “Synecdoche, New York” is an altogether greater, or at least more grandly ambitious, work. Michel Gondry’s decision to shoot almost the entire film in a handheld, quasi-documentary style and have all the special effects appear to have been accomplished in-camera (i.e. through trickery on the set itself, in the manner of a filmed stage production) even when they were digitally assisted doesn’t just sell the idea that everything in the story is “really happening” even when it’s a memory: it blurs the line between what’s real and what’s remembered, an integral aspect of Kaufman’s script that informs every line and scene. The “spotlight” effects created by swinging flashlights on dark streets and in unlit interiors are especially disturbing. When the characters run or hide in those sorts of compositions in sequences, the film boldfaces its otherwise subtly acknowledged identity as a science fiction movie. Past and present (and possible future) lovers Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) might as well be rebels in a Terminator film, scampering through bombed-out panoramas and trying not to get zapped by a machine.

Star Jim Carrey was no stranger to dramatic roles by that point in his career, having starred in the media satire “The Truman Show,” the Andy Kaufman biography “Man on the Moon,” and the 1950s-set romantic thriller “The Majestic” (by “The Shawshank Redemption” director Frank Darabont, largely forgotten but worth a look). But his performance as Joel Barish (rhymes with perish) stands apart from everything else he’s done because of its staunchly life-sized approach. It’s a performance as a regular guy that’s entirely free of movie star egocentrism, unflatteringly (or perhaps just unselfconsciously) depicted from start to finish. It’s not easy to forget all the classic Carrey slapstick gyrations that preceded it, and that made him one of the most bankable stars of the 1990s, but somehow you do. He even looks different in the face, somehow. If I’d gone into it not knowing it was him, I might’ve thought, “Who is that actor? He’s excellent, and he looks kinda like Jim Carrey.”

Kate Winslet, who became an international star with Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” and a superstar with “Titanic,” established herself as a bona fide character actress in this film. She inhabited Clementine so completely that she unknowingly perfected a type: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as per Nathan Rabin’s wonderful phrase describing a woman who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate description of Clementine as a person; with a bit of distance, she seems more like somebody with undiagnosed mental illness, and Joel is probably right there with her. But it does describe how the role echoed throughout time and through other films and TV shows (including “Elizabethtown,” the film Rabin was reviewing when he coined the phrase, and that happens to costar “Eternal Sunshine” cast-member Kirsten Dunst). There’s no denying the effect the performance had on future movies, which served up endless variations on Clementine.

Gondry’s style creates an analogy for what happens when a person’s memories begin to disintegrate or disappear, in the all-over, “global” sense (Alzheimer’s), as well as for the fleeting universal experience of struggling to remember a name, or some aspect of a dream, and somehow managing to grasp a sliver of it, only to see it slip away and vanish. 

The movie also somehow captures that awful knowledge that the personal dramas which consume us go unnoticed by almost everyone else. When it came out, the movie felt so immediate that it was as if you were seeing something that was actually happening, out in the physical world. It still feels like something that could happen because of how it’s lit and filmed. The action seems to have been captured entirely in real locations even when the actors are on sets. The locations tend to be unglamorous, with the notable exception of the beach at Montauk where Joel and Clementine first met (there’s no way to make a beach seem anything less than majestic). The ordinary magic that constantly happens inside each of us – the staggeringly complicated interplay between present-tense observation and interactions; the stabbing intrusions of memory, fantasy, and trauma – contrasts against boringly regular urban and suburban settings that seem to have been chosen because they are the human equivalent of the featureless mazes where rodents of science reside. When Joel and Clementine race through memory spaces where Joel has hidden memories of Clementine to prevent their erasure, they scamper and stop, twist and change direction. They’re people in a mouse-maze.

There’s also a fascinating matter-of-factness to the way the film presents the interactions of Joel and Clementine and the (largely unseen) team of memory-erasers (headed by Tom Wilkinson, and including Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood; what a cast!), as well as the way the film un-peels the layers of casual corruption surrounding the process by which memories are destroyed. When you have access to a memory erasing machine and no legal or ethical oversight, the tech is bound to be abused. Is there even an ethical way to use it? Is it right to simply erase something traumatic from a person’s brain? Is it better than teaching the person how to process, understand, and transcend trauma?

There’s a scene at the end of 1981’s “Superman II” where Superman erases Lois Lane’s memory with a super-kiss to protect his secret identity as Clark Kent. The moment was viewed by most audiences at the time as a fairy tale flourish, along the lines of Superman turning back time to save Lois at the end of the first movie. Today it would be considered a non-consensual mental assault, like a roofie. “Eternal Sunshine” sometimes plays like a speculative drama about what would happen if it were possible to replicate Superman’s kiss and turn it into a service that people could pay for. No good could come from such a thing, which is a sure sign that some company out there is hard at work inventing it while its CEO chases billions in startup money from venture capitalists.

A crude version of the necessary technology has existed for decades. The indiscriminate electroshock therapy that was so common in mental hospitals in the middle part of the 20th century, and that often reduced patients to blankly smiling shells of their former selves, became more precisely targeted, to the point where the procedure is now considered an ordinary part of treatment. Ten years ago, scientists figured out by studying mice how to identify the places in the brain where traumatic or negative memories are kept, and “eradicate” them and/or associate them with pleasure. “In essence,” summed up a piece about the process in The Guardian, “the mice’s memory of what was pleasant and what was unpleasant had been reversed.”

The structure of the film is a rich object for study in itself. The very essence of “Eternal Sunshine” is analogous to the unstable process of remembering: remembering the order of events in a story, or the events in one’s own life. Or struggling to remember what happened. Or which thing happened first. And which thing happened after that? Did another thing happen third, or fourth, tenth? Did any of it happen, period? Are you superimposing your fantasies about who was at fault, and who did what to whom, onto events that were factual, and that could be proved or disproved in an objective record, had anyone thought to keep one? The record-keepers records might be faulty, too, or invested in lying or omitting. The movie is kaleidoscopic in its account of how things are remembered, misremembered and forgotten. The opening of the film could also be its ending, and its ending feels like a new beginning. The mouse remains stuck in the maze. When walls and corridors are deleted, and only blank space remains, the mouse struggles to remember the maze.

Saturday Matinee: Anti-Clock

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By Triskel Christchurch

Source: The Journal of Music

A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity, ANTI-CLOCK is a film of authentic, startling originality. Brilliantly mixing film and video techniques, Arden and Bond’s paranoid, psychological surveillance study of a career gambler turned clairvoyant unstuck in time captures onscreen the anxieties that have infiltrated the consciousness of so many in Western society.

Jane Arden was a leading figure in experimental British theatre and cinema, and an important radical feminist voice of the 1960s and ‘70s. With her work increasingly informed by her politics, the beginning of a personal and professional relationship with director Jack Bond facilitated the move to cinema, and the creation of a small but remarkable body of film work which is becoming increasingly celebrated. Following her tragic and sudden death in 1982, Bond withdrew these often strongly autobiographical films from circulation, only relenting decades later. Arden’s work is raw, perceptive, disturbing, vital, and beautiful.

Watch Anti-Clock on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100029255/anti-clock

Saturday Matinee: Mulholland Drive

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By Seth Harris

Source: Pop Cult

I’ve mentioned on the blog before how I discovered David Lynch as an eight-year-old who was somehow allowed to watch Twin Peaks. For a long time, I knew him as “the guy who made Twin Peaks.” Even in college, as I began to explore his greater body of work, I was like most people; I just didn’t understand the abstractness of it all. What shifted my understanding was reading Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with the director focusing on his work in chronological order up to Mulholland Drive. Through this text, I came to understand the source of Lynch’s creativity – from deep inside his subconscious and expressed through images without any implied context – and how intuitive his work is. This happened around the same time I was taking Literary Theory & Criticism, which was probably the most influential academic experience I’ve ever had.

Mulholland Drive begins with a woman (Laura Harring) being driven to a party on the titular road. However, she was never going to arrive at the party. Her driver turns on her, and before they can assassinate the woman, the limousine is hit by a car of rowdy young people. The woman stumbles down a hillside and eventually hides in an apartment whose owner has a department for a long trip. This is the home of Betty’s (Naomi Watts) aunt, where the young woman has come to stay while she auditions in the hopes of becoming a movie star. She immediately feels empathy for the amnesiac woman and vows to help her. Her unexpected guest takes the name Rita after seeing a movie poster of Rita Hayworth in the apartment.

The two women begin investigating the few threads they have about Rita’s past. Meanwhile, a film production grinds to a halt as its lead actress has been let go. The director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is put through the gauntlet, having the worst day of his life as recasting her, and is placed in the hands of more powerful people. He arrives home to find his wife cheating on him with the pool boy. And then, while bedding down at a flea-bitten motel, Adam discovers his assets have been frozen. How does this relate to Betty and Rita? Well, they weave in and out of his story along with other elements that seem detached. By the end, the truth comes out in a strange place called Club Silencio, which holds the key to understanding it all.

I am going to talk about Mulholland Drive in more depth now, so if you haven’t seen the film I wouldn’t recommend reading any further.

The story of Betty & Rita is a dream. Lynch often has his character’s waking mind and dreaming subconscious collide, and it is very literal here. Betty is, in reality, Diane, a waitress at a coffee shop with aspirations of being an actress. She even has a small part in a production, which is where she met Camilla. Camilla is bisexual and did enjoy her time with Diane. However, the director of the picture, Adam, has taken a liking to his star. She’s more than happy to go along with it, but that leaves Diane reeling as she comes to understand her love was not reciprocated. 

A plan is hatched. Diane pays a guy she knows to have Camilla killed, but the guilt of what she has done causes Diane’s mind to splinter. A dream forms, which is where the film begins, and it sees Camilla escaping her fate. And who does her hero end up being? Well, it’s Diane’s dream self of Betty. Diane imagines herself as far more innocent, caring, and talented than in real life. She also imagines that Camilla, as Rita, is wholly dependent on her. In her dream, Adam gets sent through the wringer, too. But the truth begins seeping in, little details here and there. It culminates at Club Silencio, where Diane’s conscious mind reminds her that what is playing out before her eyes is an illusion. This, in turn, forces her to wake up, and we finally see the horrifying truth of Diane’s life. 

Lynch delivers a noir film that captures every element you would expect from such a story while still feeling wholly original and fitting into his body of work. It has the dream logic of a Lynch film, yet it is his most accessible picture. The pieces are all there on screen; he’s just not going to spoon-feed you. To engage with the work, consider what is said and the connections between images. Remember, Lynch is first a visual artist before a storyteller, so you can understand what is happening. This was the film that brought Roger Ebert around to finally appreciating Lynch after two decades of turning his nose up at the work. 

But even more significant than Diane’s story is a reflection by Lynch on the nature of Hollywood as an American institution. He is an artist who didn’t start out interested in making movies. He wanted to paint. His experience on Eraserhead caused him to both love making movies and hate them at the same time. It would be Dune that helped calcify the idea of making the films he wanted to make without interest in whether they were going to be financially successful for his backers. He’s never made a movie he didn’t want to since then. 

Twin Peaks is what made him famous on a whole other level, and once again, he was forced to walk amongst the Hollywood machine again. It should be noted that Mulholland Drive originated as a TV series about Audrey Horne going off to become a movie star and getting embroiled in noir storylines. It seems evident that this idea centered around how young women are especially forced to compromise and do things that give up their power to a man to make it. This makes sense and continues Lynch’s exploration of the abuse of women in the United States, which is the thematic centerpiece of Twin Peaks. He’s not a direct storyteller, so you’re expected to find these ideas; he trusts your intelligence to do that.

Club Silencio is a comment not just on Diane’s dream over her actions but on the dreams of so many to come to Hollywood and be “discovered.” Years ago, I read Hollywood Babylon, a collection of sordid industry gossip by former child star Kenneth Anger. It was quite a harrowing read. Things like the Fatty Arbuckle trial are relatively well-known, but there was so much more. There are hundreds of people you’ll probably never hear about who were murdered or committed murder or helped cover it up within the film industry. It didn’t necessarily involve big stars but people who worked in various capacities. There was a lot of money changing hands, and people were desperate to escape poverty. These circumstances often cause people to do terrible things.

Lynch’s work always seems focused on dismantling mythologies. Blue Velvet was about the myth of the friendly, quiet small town. Twin Peaks continued that but focused even more on the myth of the happy nuclear family with a mountain of abuse hidden just beneath the surface. It makes sense because the director is fascinated with the subconscious mind. He is a big proponent of transcendental meditation, which is all about engaging with those layers of our consciousness that we mostly avoid or ignore. Lynch doesn’t see dreams as a well of chaos but as a place where profound coherence can be discovered. The language of dreams is not the same as the waking world and it is in our inability to translate that our problems arise.

It should also be pointed out that Mulholland Drive’s construction acts as a Mobius strip. There is no beginning or end, just one continuous loop. Betty and Rita find Diane’s body rotting away in her apartment in the dream. The old couple that terrorizes Diane is the same couple that ushers Betty into the fantasy version of Hollywood. They have brought her there. What we are experiencing is a sort of Hell where Betty/Diane is forced to relive the torment of delusion & revelation over and over and over and over… In this way, I consider it one of Lynch’s most horrific films.

Watch Mulholland Drive on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/385509/mulholland-drive

Saturday Matinee: The Thing

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John Carpenter’s The Thing Had An Icy Critical Reception

John Carpenter’s The Thing received terrible reviews when it was released in 1982. Critics were wrong about this frozen horror masterpiece.

By Ryan Lambie

Source: Den of Geek

It’s the summer of 1982, and director John Carpenter is on the cusp of releasing his latest movie, The Thing. For the 34-year-old filmmaker, the release marks the end of a major undertaking: the culmination of months of shooting on freezing cold sets and snowy British Columbia locations, not to mention the execution of complex and time-consuming practical effects scenes.

Carpenter was understandably proud of the results: after such independent hits as Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, and Escape From New York, this was his first studio movie (for Universal) and also his most expensive to date, with a budget of around $15m. And while The Thing had appeared in cinemas before (in the guise of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby’s 1951 sci-fi shocker, The Thing From Another World) Carpenter’s movie was a fresh adaptation of John W. Campbell’s novella, Who Goes There? – a story Carpenter had long prized.

The Nyby-Hawks adaptation took the skeleton of Campbell’s story, about scientists discovering an alien life form in Antarctica, and made it into a monster movie chiller with James Arness as the hulking creature from outer space. Carpenter’s The Thing, on the other hand, went back to the original story’s most compelling idea: that of a creature which can transform itself into perfect imitations of the people around it.

With the help of Rob Bottin’s groundbreaking effects work, Carpenter’s movie would bring this creature “out into the light” and he was understandably satisfied with the unholy amalgam of suspense and outright horror he’d brought to the screen.

THE ICY CRITICAL RECEPTION

Yet when The Thing opened in US cinemas on the 25th June 1982, the critical reception was almost as aggressive and seething as the movie’s title monster.

Writing for The New York Times, noted movie critic Vincent Canby described the movie as “foolish, depressing” with its actors “used merely as props to be hacked, slashed, disembowelled and decapitated, finally to be eaten and then regurgitated […] it is too phony to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.”

Time magazine dismissed The Thing as “an exercise in abstract art,” while Roger Ebert, in a slightly less aggressive review, described it as “a great barf-bag movie”, but maintained that, “the men are just setups for an attack by The Thing.”

Even reviewers outside the mainstream were hostile towards The Thing. The magazine Cinefantastique ran a cover which asked, “Is this the most hated movie of all time?”

In science fiction magazine Starlog, critic Alan Spencer wrote, “John Carpenter’s The Thing smells, and smells pretty bad. It has no pace, sloppy continuity, zero humor, bland characters on top of being totally devoid of either warmth or humanity […] It’s my contention that John Carpenter was never meant to direct a science-fiction horror movie. Here’s some things he’d be better suited to direct: traffic accidents, train wrecks and public floggings.”

Carpenter was left reeling from the critical reaction. “I was pretty stunned by it,” he later said. “I made a really gruelling, dark movie, but I [thought] audiences in 1982 wanted to see that.”

In terms of its theatrical performance, Carpenter’s dark vision didn’t exactly go down as either he or Universal had perhaps expected. A major summer release, The Thing scraped in at number eight at the US box office, and while it was by no means a flop – its lifetime gross amounted to just under $20 million according to Box Office Mojo – neither was it considered a hit.

THE CRUEL SUMMER

The issue of Starlog in which Alan Spencer’s review of The Thing appeared provides several clues as to why the critical reaction to the movie was so extreme. First, there’s the cover: published in November 1982, issue 64 of Starlog features the benevolent, childlike face of E.T.

Steven Spielberg’s family blockbuster E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial had, unfortunately for Carpenter, appeared in American cinemas just two weeks before The Thing came out on the 25th June, and that movie’s warm, gentle view of extraterrestrial life was diametrically opposed to the nightmarish excess of Carpenter’s, and moviegoers were still eagerly lining up to see it 14 days later. The Thing, it seemed, simply ran counter to the mood of the times. Neither critics nor audiences were prepared for the intensity or chilly nihilism of The Thing, particularly in the heat of the summer season.

The actor Kenneth Tobey, who played Captain Hendry in The Thing From Another World, summed up the general consensus after a screening of Carpenter’s movie. “The effects were so explicit that they actually destroyed how you were supposed to feel about the characters,” Tobey said. “They became almost a movie in themselves, and were a little too horrifying.”

Its gory excess when compared to the sheer cuddliness of E.T. wasn’t The Thing‘s only problem, either. As that November issue of Starlog proves, 1982 was a crowded year for science fiction, fantasy and horror. Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and Poltergeist opened on the same day – the 4th June. Disney’s hugely expensive sci-fi adventure Tron came out a little over a month later, on the 9th July.

Then there was Blade Runner, 20th Century Fox’s expensive sci-fi gamble, which, like The Thing, opened on the 25th June and was initially regarded as a financial and critical disappointment.

The Thing was therefore unfortunate to appear in a bumper summer for genre films, and it was doubly hobbled by its R-rating; had its release date been moved to the winter and away from its more family-friendly competitors (even Poltergeist somehow garnered a PG certificate), it’s possible that it could have found a wider audience in cinemas, despite all those savage reviews.

THE AFTERMATH

Bruised by the reaction to The Thing, Carpenter continued to make movies (he made Christine in 1983 and Starman the year after) but lost considerable confidence from the experience, and took some time before he’d talk openly about the earlier movie’s box office disappointment. Perhaps ironically, one of the outlets Carpenter first opened up to was Starlog.

“I was called ‘a pornographer of violence’,” Carpenter said in 1985. “I had no idea it would be received that way […] The Thing was just too strong for that time. I knew it was going to be strong, but I didn’t think it would be too strong […] I didn’t take the public’s taste into consideration.”

It was on video – and later television – that the perception of The Thing began to change. The initial shock and repulsion which greeted it in the summer of 1982 began to ebb, as the full extent of what Carpenter, and his filmmakers  – among them writer Bill Lancaster, cinematographer Dean Cundey, composer Ennio Morricone and effects artist Rob Bottin (aided in certain scenes by Stan Winston) had managed to achieve.

With the growing passage of time, it becomes easier to see the criticisms aimed at The Thing as being among its most positive attributes. The characters aren’t “merely props” but distinct individuals whose traits are introduced subtly and cleverly – a brief line here, a quirky facial expression there.

That Kurt Russell’s MacReady is slow and even reluctant to emerge as the group’s leader adds to the movie’s unpredictability. The terse dialogue and frosty tone heightens the sense of paranoia and suspicion – this is a cold war horror about the very human emotions of fear and distrust, where the Thing could lurk anywhere, perhaps even within MacReady himself.

The Thing‘s apocalyptic tone was such that, when it came to filming the conclusion, even Carpenter wondered whether he’d gone a little too far. But editor Todd Ramsay coaxed him on, encouraging to remain true to his own bleak vision. “You have to embrace the darkness,” Ramsay told Carpenter. “That’s where this movie is. In the darkness.”

THE ENDURING CLASSIC

It has been more than 30 years since The Thing first appeared in that crowded summer of 1982, and it has long since shaken off its “instant junk” stigma. Repeat viewings have exposed the rich depths beneath Rob Bottin’s spectacular mutations: to this day, there are fan sites, such as Outpost 31, dedicated to detailing the minutiae of the movie’s production and story details.

Speculation still rages over exactly when Blair (played by Wilford Brimley) was first imitated by the shape-shifting monster, or whether the victims of the Thing know whether they’ve been replaced, or whether the two survivors at the end of the movie are even human anymore. It’s the ambiguity of Carpenter’s filmmaking, as well as its obvious technical brilliance, that has allowed The Thing to endure, despite the slings and arrows of its critics.

Back in 1982, Roger Ebert wrote, “there’s no need to see this version unless you are interested in what the Thing might look like while starting from anonymous greasy organs extruding giant crab legs and transmuting itself into a dog. Amazingly, I’ll bet that thousands, if not millions, of moviegoers are interested in seeing just that.”

On that latter point, Ebert was precisely right: thousands, even millions of movie fans are interested in The Thing. It’s just taken them a little while to realize that fact.