Michael Jackson died today and so ends the career of one of the most bizarre, tragic, and talented entertainers of modern time.
I don't have alot to say about it, I'm not going to pretend I'm some raving superfan. But just watch the below video do yourself a favor.
It's easy to forget isn't it. After so many court cases, scandals, lackluster albums, and just general insanity, it's easy to forget what an insanely gifted, and joyous performer he was. A Musician with a gift, able to turn anything, ANYTHING, from a bit of flirting walking down the street to a zombie uprising into a dance.
Maybe I should write up another David Carradine film, one of his seventies classics like Bound For Glory, Boxcar Bertha, or The Long Riders. Or one of his great exploitation movies instead, like Death Race 2000 or Q The Winged Serpent. Or maybe I should write about one of the batshit crazy movies he made during the lean years, when his cache, self respect, and common sense where at a low ebb. Doing so though, would be dishonest. True more people have probably seen the Kill Bill saga then all the above movies combined, and that’s a damn shame, but that doesn’t change the fact that Carradine had his finest moment in this film.
Though Kill Bill 2 is of course spectacular fun, filled with Kung Fu, Impossible Escapes, Spaghetti Western Staredowns and crushed eyeballs galore, the moment I’m talking about is the final showdown, where after nearly four hours of righteous vengeance fueled ultra violence, the final confrontation between Bill and The Bride takes place in the form of a conversation. This is where Carradine comes in. It’s helpful to remember that you as the audience has spent two movies screaming for this rotten bastard’s blood and when you finally get in the same room with him, you’re almost horrified to find that you like him. Carradine is not only able to convince you that The Bride wouldn’t run a sword through his neck within fifteen seconds of seeing him again, he almost has you hoping she won’t. During the almost half hour long conversation, Carradine is charming, laugh out loud funny, scary as hell, vulnerable, lethal, and tender, often all at once. And when his time comes and he says goodbye with the rudest word he’s got you’re sorry to see him go out, but glad that he did it so well.
I've avoided reading Chuck Klosterman for the same reason I avoid punching babies in the face. It just seemed too easy. Did I really need to read another weary Gen Xer obsessing over the minutia of Pop Culture and then obsess over why they're obessing. Were Nick Hornby, Sara Vowell, David Sedaris, Nathin Rabin, and countless others truly not up to the task? Was there truly such a void in my soul calling out for another pretentious post modernist to come and suck all the fun out of everything? Had I not learned my lesson from the testicle shriveling anti-prose waking nightmare that was "Nobody Belongs Here More Then You?"
No, I was not particularly looking forward to jumping on the back of another Hipster Sacred Cow. I feared another book of clever oh so affected but oh so uneffected prose might actually kill me. And the fact that I could still hear the publishers orgasm after receiving a title as marketable as Sex Death And Cocoa Puffs did nothing to allay my fears.
It turns out that my fear was unfounded. While Klosterman is too pretentious, post modern and overly analytical he is also fun, in possession of a mean sense of self deprecative wit and keen sense of the absurd. While some of the essays on SDACP do take the fine art of navel gazing to unheard of extremes (Pamela Anderson article I'm looking at you). Others manage to dissect modern culture with a surprisingly sharp and dare I say even level headed style.
Whether it's formulating a surprisingly believable hypothesis that Breakfast cereal commercials are responsible for the existence of hipsters, explaining why soccer will never be popular, or examining the paradox of "authenticity" in country music Klosterman serves as a witty guide through the madness of modern life.
Watching Drag Me To Hell is like running into an old friend you thought had died and then going out and painting the town red. It’s shocking at first to see such a balls out insane old school piece of Sam Raimi filmmaking, but as the shock wears off you realize something.
Namely that the movie is awesome.
Raimi aping his old style wouldn’t have been enough, it’s just as easy to see Drag Me To Hell going very wrong, proving that Raimi doesn’t have the chops for this kind of giddy insanity anymore. That’s OK Raimi couldn’t have kept making Evil Dead 2 over and over again or he’d end up like Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper or Stuart Gordon or all the other 80’s horror wunderkids who never where able to grow up. Drag Me To Hell could have been a sad attempt to recapture something that as much as I love didn’t really need to be recaptured. Instead, it was the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater all year, and I expect it to still be holding that title come next January.
I’m a Sam Raimi super freak have been since Jr. High. I’m the kind of Raimi fan who owns For Love Of The Game and The Quick And The Dead. It would not be hyperbole for good or ill to say that Raimi has been one of the primary influences on my life. Raimi’s movies demystified the filmmaking process in the way Jim Jaramusch and Kevin Smith did for others. Movies where no longer made via alchemy somewhere in Hollywood but by real people with ideas, and a crazy kind of vision. While I knew about directors via John Carpenter, Tim Burton, Oliver Stone (I was obsessed with JFK at twelve, long story) and Stanley Kubrick (and Dr. Strangelove) Raimi was the first one I could relate to.
When Spiderman hit it was a mixed bag for me. On one hand I loved the movie and was psyched to see Raimi get that kind of success. On the other hand it definitely felt like I was losing my favorite filmmaker. Yeah part of it was “I liked it before it was cool.” Geek snobbery but it was also a very real sadness that I’d probably never see the type of film I’d fallen in love with again (That said I enjoy all three Spiderman movies. No that’s not a typo).
Until today. Drag Me To Hell is as giddy and anarchic as any slice of prime Raimi with a command of character better then any he’s quite had before. The theater I saw it in rocked between laughter, screams, and profanity laden tirades of disbelief. To spoil any of the shocks and scares Raimi has in store would make me the worst kind of Curmudgeon. All I’ll say is I can’t believe it’s PG-13.
Truth in criticism I was lucky enough to be on the set for Drag Me To Hell twice, once when I was lucky enough to see them shoot a few effects shots in the Fox Lot, and again when they came to CSU Northridge. At Northridge I actually got the chance to meet Raimi. They tell you to never meet your heroes I guess I’m lucky that one of mine is such a class act. And can still surprise me after all these years.
The First in a series of looks at the pop culture that shaped my formative years.
One of my favorite critics recently noted that “The Stuff that gets under your skin at seventeen never really leaves you.” That’s true, but it’s also true that sometimes under the skin is where it should stay.
It’s hard to describe the effect this book had on me when I thumbed through the well read copy that got passed back and forth along with the joints, around the theater group where I made a brief sojourn on in my long quest to fit in at highschool.
The novel starts out with a cuddly cartoon critter recommending the book to you as his children are tortured, which is then followed by a neglected child being terrorized by our obstinate hero ending with a schizophrenic rant as he stabs the boys teddy bear to death, at this point the comic is interrupted by a screaming stick figure who declares himself “Testicles God Of The Rash Covered Scrotum” and is popular with the insane homeless, before moving on to the wall “THAT WON’T STOP DRINKING BLOOD!!!” after which we get to the first Mass Murder, talking rabbit head, and sentient Pilsbury Doughboy who urges Johnny to kill himself with the phrase “Your body is an anchor that keeps you from flying over the stars.” At this point you’re around page 10.
This wasn’t a book it was a freaking Vaudeville review from hell. Humor so black that it actually made well lit rooms go dim, nihilism at it’s punk rock finest, A view of humanity that made John Water’s grotesqueries look angelic, a book that took no side hating all the subcultures as much as the mainstream but never making itself out to be some perfect entity either. IT flipped the whole earth, other worlds, and the after life (Heaven is a bunch of folding chairs and a taco bell, Hell a slightly dingier version of the San Fernando Valley) a very angry bird. Coupled with a uniquely simple and beautiful art style, like Ralph Steadman made horrifically clear and a sense of metaphysical absurdity to rival Achewood, all timed with a Chuck Jones like sense of the gag.
To an alienated suburban kid experiencing rebellion and weed for the first time, as well as having grown the teenage ego necessary to truly believe to the core of your being that the world is the one that’s got it all wrong, not you, this book was like a bomb going off in my head. It was like what hearing The Sex Pistols back in 1977 must have been like, dark, funny, free and more then a little truly scary. I’d never read anything so gleefully amoral, and the effect was as liberating as it was terrifying.
So you can of course understand the glee with which I picked this thing up on the 50% off table.
Of course the thing could never hold up. Nor could it ever recapture the rush of the forbidden I felt reading it for the first time. But it still holds it’s own. There are parts that are giddy perfection. If I ever grow too sour to appreciate the site of a Nun using her psychic powers to make everyone in heaven’s head explode, I know it will be time to end it all. While the book does feel a bit adolescent and mannered and our buddy Jhonen isn’t exactly afraid to hit something directly on the nose using the heel of his hand, it still does feel surprisingly subversive. Which is nice in a cultural landscape that throws that word around like it’s fucking confetti (“Look they made a funny about The President’s accent that’s raw”) It’s refreshing to see something that’s truly warped, that truly does not give a fuck. No one’s going to be co opting Johnny The Homicidal Maniac anytime soon. He’s going to remain safely under my skin.
Ah Watchmen, a movie so good that it forced me to go back and rewatch Dawn Of The Dead. Love him or hate him, Zack Synder has proven himself to be one of the most unique stylists of the modern day. I decided now was as good a time as any to go back and check out his debut feature.
Even if it’s one I loathed.
Let me explain I don’t like the original Dawn Of The Dead I love it. As well as being a damn fine horror film its one of the most blackly funny satires of America ever made. A vision of a world not unlike WALLE’s where corporate culture has infalatized us to the point where everyone from Hare Krishna to Cops to Nuns can only worship before the all mighty call of consumerism, and be devoured by their hunger. In Romero’s bleak world view we’ve voted for Mammon over God to a startling degree.
What bothered me about the remake wasn’t the fast zombies or any other such canonical nonsense, but the way this satire was stripped from the films very soul. The mall ceased to be a materialistic hellscape and became just a cool fort to hang out in. So much so that when our survivors do decide to band out their decision just seems arbitrary zombie baby or no.
Almost worse is the way the remake jettisoned the orginal’s intimate four person cast to become an ensemble piece thus losing a huge amount of the claustrophobia. The ensemble itself is a mixed bag Ving Rhames and a few others do solid work, but Sarah Polley never quite loses the “Gawd I can’t believe I’m in a zombie movie.” Indie girl vide.
At the end of the day Dawn Of The Dead became just another zombie movie, and to my mind at the time not even a particularly good one.
Watching it for the first time since theaters I can see I underrated Dawn Of The Dead. It is a particularly good zombie movie. From his opening frames Synder proved himself to be a canny stylist, taking his time building the day to day rhythms of suburbia before ruthlessly tearing it all down in one fell swoop. The carnage and the pace of the first attacks is a textbook in action filmmaking. Synder films the apocalypse with a sense of sheer scale that has never really been scene in a horror film before. Ten minutes in the viewer is left with a palatable sense of doom.
And that’s before we hit the films credit sequence scored to Johnny earth shakingly awesome “When The Man Comes Around.” Which cannily mixes real world newsfootage with staged zombie B roll until our world and the apocalypse become indistinguishable from one another. It’s a bone chilling bit of work, and for these fifteen minutes alone the film becomes worth reevaluating.
Somehow it’s even more disturbing in German.
Unfortunately once the mall is reached, theres not a whole hell of a lot that happens. As well as the claustrophobia and the intensity, the larger cast massacres a great deal of the film’s momentum as well. Dawn of The Dead keeps getting bogged down in meaningless subplot that goes nowhere after meaningless subplot that goes nowhere. Oh good! More storytime devoted to the asshole security guards power struggle. Man thank God that asshole security guard showed up because I would hate to be bored by such trivial things as THE WALKING FUCKING DEAD. Nope, Some redneck mall cop being a douche to everyone is all the drama I need.
The film has some fun moments, Ken Foree comes back to deliver his “No more room in hell.” line. There’s an intense battle in the sewers, and the scene where the characters stop to comment on what a badass Tom Savini is is pretty funny. The film picks itself up for a suitably intense finale, but it never really touches the intensity of the original ten minutes.
Perhaps the film didn’t lose its social satire so much as find a new target. It almost helps if you think of it, not as a remake of Dawn Of The Dead, but a prequel to The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman’s fantastic series, which takes the end of civilization as a chance to start following Thoreau. It’s boredom more then anything else that drives the patrons from the mall.
After all which would you rather do? Face the living dead? Or live in Starbucks for the rest of your life?
A Demon To Some An Angel To Others. Critic/Filmmaker/Factotum dedicated to engaging art on its own terms. Occasionally cruel but never incurious or dismissive. And always enthusiastic
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