“The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.” 

                                                                       -James Agee

Zinone is NOT a Vegetable

Whenever I hear the name Stephanie Zinone, I think of zucchini. The more logical phonetic association would be Zamboni.

Stephanie Zinone does not, of coarse, have anything to do with zucchini save for their slender figures, ’snappy’ attitudes, boring counterparts (Sandy, cucumbers) . . . wait a minute!

For those of you unfamiliar with Stephanie Zinone, Steph, she’s the main female protagonist in one of the greatest, least heralded films ever, EVER, made. GREASE 2.

To a certain type of young girl, this movie easily surpasses it’s predecessor. You see, GREASE 2 is for the girl who will someday walk that thin line between good and bad, rules or no rules, taste and tack. Actually no, she always has taste. She just doesn’t want to look like a cupcake. She likes to wear all black like one of the boys, just as long as the look is fitted, and there are ankle booties involved. She’s “lookin for a dream on a mean machine, with hell in his eyes.” Most importantly, she does not change for a dude, a greaser, the leader of the T-Birds. Sandy changed. She started smoking, got PERMED!, basically threw away her whole credo (goodie-goodie) for a wuss of a boy, who wouldn’t even acknowledge that what they’d shared at the beach was special, just to look cool in front of his friends at the pep rally!

All Steph wants is a guy as cool as herself. Though I’m a tad conflicted about Maxwell Caulfield (he’s more believable as Rex Manning in EMPIRE RECORDS) as a legitimate Cool Rider, the character Michael Carrington is actually a great guy. He’s intelligent, tutoring Steph on the subtleties of Hamlet, and is really sweet when she says something totally dumb (but that’s only because she’s so distracted by the mystery bike rider that keeps showing up). He’s hardworking, writing all those papers for the T-Birds. He plays the piano, builds his own bike, runs track, and he can jump!

I realized while watching this movie on television up in a cabin, in a forest in Guerneville, CA, that together with Regina from NIGHT OF THE COMET, Steph provided me with my earliest female style influences. Not just style as in clothes, though I have been aiming to achieve both of their signature looks since 1984, but in attitude and confidence, and fabulous hair. Full Disclosure: from 1999-2001 my hair more accurately resembled that of Robert Plant.

This may be the first of many posts on GREASE 2. I’ve only just begun to plunge this overflowing toilet. Thanks be to The Schlindz for inspiring this venture. Thank you to the folks as well, for allowing me to spend eighty-four dollars on a Betamax copy of GREASE 2 when I was four years old. Keep up the good work.

Beyond Borat

Several years ago, at the dawn of the ‘ousand’ths,’ there came to pass a film so modern, so slick and so incredibly strange, that it could only have emanated from one place. That place is Kazakhstan, homeland of director Timur Bekmambetov. The film is NIGHTWATCH. Borat is not involved. There are no goats or banana hammocks.

The specifics of the story are somewhat difficult to follow, as this reviewer was under the incredibly persuasive influence of a friend we’ll refer to as Monsieur Moet Chandon it trampolines through time and outer worlds with spasmodic frequency.

However, the essentials of the plot are thus:

Medieval, specialty-abled humans known as Others are divided into forces of Light and Dark. Upon agreement that warfare would result in equal extinction, the forces formulate the conversely named Night Watch and Day Watch.

Cut to present day Russia. We meet Anton, a domestically troubled everyman who seeks counsel with a mysterious old lady who claims she can induce-here we go again-abortion in his wife, as she’s apparently carrying another man’s child. Ok?The witchery misfires and it is revealed, in another jump into the future, that Anton is a member of the Night Watch. And, um, he’s hunting a vampire. Appearing in a warped, but nattily special-effected, sequence of events are: a (standard-issue) gifted, creepy young boy, a trauma plagued virgin, and many more vampires. The virgin’s curse is a swirling cavity of destruction. How’s that for vaginarific euphemisms? It literally hovers over her home. May we imbue that vaginas are the matrix of all evil? Granted Russian culture has a reputation for being a tad paternal but seriously? Our protagonist is also incessantly pursued by an evil female vampire. That’s four bad mamma-jammas (and three GRE words!) to count. The events of the story culminate in the most awkward father-son relationship since it’s obvious antecedent, STAR WARS.

Point blank, this film thrills. It is a sophisticated coalescence of modern cinema’s technological apogee and naturalistic characterization. That it is Russia’s most expensive and most successful venture is unsurprising. Perhaps it is too much to ask of Hollywood to produce a horror movie that might compete with this picture. I categorize it as horror tentatively, for NIGHT WATCH is transcendent of the genre. Thankfully Bekmambetov has also released DAY WATCH and coming in 2009 is TWILIGHT WATCH. For those of you who wish to see his work immediately there is WANTED, opening this weekend and starring that (formerly) vaguely vampiric vixen Angelina Jolie. Enjoy.

Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren’t much smarter. 

-Louise Brooks

‘Time to go, kids. Play time with the Cardinal is over.’

And so we must bid adieu to a personal favorite, Mr. George Carlin.

While not known as much for his work in cinema as on stage, George’s portrayal of Cardinal Glick in Kevin Smith’s DOGMA is a gem of hilarity and inspired casting.

I recommend revisiting this movie in commemoration of this bad-ass-muthafucka. Additionally DOGMA dares to confront “she whispers, to denote with seriousness, the seriousness of the topic of . . . ‘abortion‘.” hush! discuss!

‘I’m Not Crazy, I Just Don’t Give a Fuck’

A high summer heat wave has swept into Los Angeles. This delirious weather tends to inspire strange desires.

One. A baby pool, bucket, or largeish salad popcorn bowl filled with cold, cold water and ice. Refreshes swollen footsies, cools the rest of the body whist leaving one’s hands free to finagle a cold brew, wine spritzer, margarita, caipirinha.

Two. Highly underestimated quasi zombie movies. This weekend, let us all enjoy my personal favorite NIGHT OF THE COMET. Two sisters from the Valley survive a comet that has proved devastating to the human race. Together with fellow survivor and dashing Latino, Hector, they brave the concrete desert of Los Angeles avoiding the dead, the decomposing and the pseudo scientist evildoers along the way. The dialogue is quick and clever and intentionally hilarious. Today’s headline quote comes courtesy of one of my all time favorite characters, Willie, from one of my all time favorite scenes from this film. So listen to me, and to Willie, “Hello out there in television land!” Turn off your regularly scheduled program . . . and tune in to NIGHT OF THE COMET.

Let’s Talk About Vergewaltigung Baby

And now children . . . Let us have a conversation about pre-code Hollywood. I am referring of coarse to the Hays Code, that bastion of perversity policing that protected our innocents for some twenty years. It also begat the chastity belt still strangling the fun out of films, the MPAA.

Today we’ll examine in brief the German film DIARY OF A LOST GIRL, directed by G.W. Pabst. Yes, this is a foreign film and so is not technically a Hollywood picture. However it’s foreignness is significant two ways in particular. It provides dramatic contrast not only to the films that were produced in Hollywood during the period of regulation, but to those being produced today as well. Not to mention an influx of foreign films contributed to the eventual regression of the code. The highest court in the land couldn’t keep the burgeoning suburbanites of this nation from sharing their SUMMER WITH MONIKA, in all her glorious nubility.

So what of DIARY OF A LOST GIRL? Here it is in brief. A young girl Thymiane, the très Brooksian Louise Brooks, devastated by the sudden, mysterious drowning of her family’s dear maid, is drugged, raped by a family friend, impregnated with rapist’s child, sent to a reformatory, then to a brothel, banished from home, orphaned (and more!) by film’s end.

The most shocking aspect however would be the frankness with which said situations are dealt. The sex is not fetishized, it just exists. Thymiane, while initially punished for the pregnancy, is ultimately redeemed by her own insistence on survival and goodwill. The sole sense of shame lies within the parental figures, including Thymiane’s father and the elder Count Osdorff, for having cast their charges out to meet dire fates. This film wholeheartedly embraced the outcast, the angsty teenage rebel as hero long before Brando alighted a generation with his jaunty leather cap.

One can attribute the film’s honesty in part Brooks herself. She was an enigmatic, mature actress who possessed preternatural sexual confidence that pervaded throughout this adolescent portrayal. Today’s stars are most often girlish imps on screen, even when they are forty-something women (see SEX AND THE CITY-THE MOVIE quick crit!). Thanks then to Kates Winslet and Blanchett for giving us something to admire on screen in the past ten years. Thanks as well to Herr Director Pabst. Your images are vivid. Your love for Louise’s naturalness is obvious. And your close-ups of Valeska Gert as the reformatory director’s wife will haunt me forever.

“There is no other occupation in the world that so closely resembled enslavement as the career of a film star.”  -Louise Brooks

News Flash

    Speaking of modern ladies, R.I.P Cyd Charisse.  

Sister Carrie

Though the film has surely been beaten to death by the litany of vicious critics who surface whenever a ‘chic flick’ opens, let’s begin with that impetus of rage, SEX AND THE CITY: THE MOVIE.  I very nearly violated my strict ‘no walkouts’ policy with this movie.  The film slogs its way through every mongoloid plot device writer/director Michael Patrick King could muster while delivering but one quip of dialogue that recalled the frank hilarity of the television show. “Sweetie, you shit your pants this year.  I think you’re done.”  Exactly.  

What I found to be most upsetting was the near absolute disposal of sex in the story.  Where was the empowering, dirty, honest and funny adult sex that made the show so original and groundbreaking? Buried beneath fey allusions and a girlish blush no doubt.   The issue is not about the women’s age or appearance though many noted male reviewers have been quick to denigrate their attributes.  Samantha is but a cartoon here, a sexed up Woody Woodpecker: flashy and repetitive.  Miranda is literally sexless and punished for it by her husband and her harpy best friends. Charlotte perfectly embodies a modern woman, of the Eisenhower era, and Carrie has completed her transition into a total sap.  She is capably aided and abetted by her very own Jar Jar Binks, Louise from St. Louis.  Never has a key chain provoked so much contempt.

So where now does a woman turn to find solid, knowing female characters? Pre-code Hollywood of coarse.  Stay tuned for a trip back in time to the glory days of bathtub gin, sex and misbehavin’.