D. W. Griffith - "Intolerance" - Glib Edition

Realizing he'd perhaps insulted African-Americans with "The Birth of a Nation," D. W. Griffith decided to rectify the situation by making a movie in which he only insults gays, Jews, Catholics, feminists and people of Persian descent.



ABOVE: The haggard hand of a man-less feminist reaches out to snatch a baby from a sexy Aryan woman.



ABOVE: A Catholic's idolatrous hand reaches out to snatch purity from a sexy Aryan woman.



ABOVE: A Persian "female male," (as identified by the curly, well-groomed beard, the chic hat, and the colorful robe), all clearly intended to make him look like a sexy Aryan woman.



ABOVE: A big-nosed Jew called Jesus. As Mel Gibson has wisely warned us, Jews are responsible for all wars. This Jesus fellow alone has been behind, like, 60% of them.

George Nolfi - "The Adjustment Bureau"

In George Nolfi's "The Adjustment Bureau," dapper gentlemen led by John Slattery "adjust" reality to fit the master plan laid out by "The Chairman." Whenever free will gets a little too free, there they are, and in this extremely loose modernization of a Philip K. Dick story, they are working extra hard to prevent rising politician David Norris (Matt Damon) from pursuing the beautiful ballerina he's convinced is the love of his life.

That beautiful ballerina is played by Emily Blunt, (keep your Zooey Deschanels!) and the chemistry between her and Damon is so good that it turns what I suspect audiences expected to be a sci-fi actioner into a sweet romance, much closer to "Serendipity" than it is to "Minority Report."

In other words, they expected this:



And they got this:



Philip K. Dick was a man of many ideas, but no one would claim love was his metier, so "The Adjustment Bureau" is not sure how to go about informing fanboys of the bait-and-switch: for a while the movie flounders pretending to be a political thriller, or something in the "Source Code" vein, or a chase movie (look at Matt and Emily run and run on the DVD cover.) There IS some chasing: in one of those clever scenes Dick WAS very good at, characters run through doors that are space portals. But mostly what works here is not that, or the dopey "Free Will Vs. Fate?" philosophizing, but just watching Damon and Blunt banter and flirt and fall in love. It doesn't sound exciting, but their relationship is cuter than what I've gotten from the recent rash of terrible rom-coms written by people who appear to have no interest in either romance or comedy.

Osamu Tezuka (Sort Of) - "Alakazam The Great"

Although he didn't actually direct 1960s "Alakazam The Great," (Studio Toei just claimed so for publicity purposes), Osamu Tezuka's imprint is all over this lost little gem of '60s anime, an adaptation of his "My Son-Goku" manga that goes three ways between the Japanese master, the much-adapted Chinese epic "Journey to the West," and Walt Disney, (particularly "Dumbo," "Bambi" and "Fantasia.")

This may be idle slander, but I am sure that there was some cross-pollination: Disney animators would surely have seen "Alakazam," one of the first Japanese animes to receive relatively wide America release, (with a dubbing that found Frankie Avalon singing songs by legendary composer/arranger Lex Baxter). 1963's "The Sword and the Stone" has its most memorable moment in a transformation scene that seems to borrow heavily from a very similar one in "Alakazam." Also, watch closely: this could be coincidence, but the design for the character of Hercules in the anime is suspiciously similar to the one used almost 40 years later in the underrated Disney comedy from the '90s. (And practically all post-"Lion King" Disney movies are underrated.)





"Alakazam" is the kind of movie that only animators would have cared for at the time, though. Western children must have been baffled by the Buddhist allusions, no matter how avoided by the dubbing, and the accompanying adults must have been sneaking Harold Robbins novels to the screening to escape the pain. Their loss: the animation is above average for its day, and the character designs for Alakazam and his girlfriend Deedee are excellent and adorable, a lost opportunity for plush dolls. It's on Netflix Instant, and if you want to entertain your kids, I think you'll be surprised.

CHAPTER 139: PHILIP RETURNS

It may look like everyone, from King Louis XV to Dumas, has forgotten about handsome knight rider Philip de Taverney, (Heath Ledger in his FINAL final role). But- wait! who's that riding a proud stallion back into our story? It's Philip! Except the stallion isn't looking all that proud as it enters Versailles, and neither is Philip.



Once Philip was due for a promotion, his upwardly mobile military career was shining, and he couldn't walk into a garrison without being sucked up to by everyone. But after it became obvious that the King's favor was not forthcoming, and Philip was going nowhere, the sucking up dried out. The young man misses the days of glory, escorting Marie Antoinette into Paris; he misses the friends who once patted him in the back but now avoid him, worried he might be a carrier of a bad strain of loserness; heck, he even misses the Chateau de Taverney, the helpful servant La Brie, his dog Mahon, the soothing reactionary rants of his father.

Most of all, he misses his sister.

As we can see, fed up with his position, he's presented his resignation and returned to Paris, not without receiving some polite assurances from his military superiors: "Chin up, kid! The Army isn't for everyone! Don't think of it as 'being out on your ass'! Think of it as: 'freeing your inner job-seeker'!"

He now directs his horse towards the garden in Versailles in which we saw him say goodbye to Andree, and enters that perfumed-up little Eden, nostalgic and fearful somehow. Before, he was bemused of Nicole's hand-wringing premonitions; now, he knows exactly what they feel like.

Gilber, our young philosopher/ gardener/ stalker, emerges from the bushes, his natural habitat.

"Gilbert!" says Philip, stopping his horse. "My boy, you look like you've been living in the bushes, eating leaves in penance or something!" This is a good description of how haggard and haunted Gilbert looks. He's made a little clearing in the bushes from which he can keep an excellent guard on Nicole's room, and he tries to run back to the nest, like a frightened pigeon.

"Gilbert, didn't you recognize me? It's me, Philip! Andree's sister! I used to be your master, back in Taverney? Why are you looking so dodgy? Come give me a hug!"

"Sorry," Gilbert says, and gives him a hug so wimpy and cold that Philip is left sighing:

"I thought we were friends, Gilbert. Do I have any of those left? Maybe my father the Baron never treated you well, but you know I'm nothing like him. I was always quite fond of you. And so was Andree!"

At the name, Gilbert emits a shriek of horror and guilt, that Philip misinterprets:

"Yes, true, she could seem a little on the stuck up side. But she's all good on the inside, trust me."

Gilbert shrieks some more.

Philip clears his throat: "In any case, do you know where she is now?"

"I don't know! I don't know! Why would I know where she is? I'm not your sister's keeper! I'm not some creep who keeps tabs on her every move!"

"No, of course not!"

Gilbert points: "She's over there, though, alone, resting in her apartment, she's probably rather exhausted, what with doing her own chores because Nicole Legay ran away with her lover, Monsieur Beausire and..."

Philip recoils in his horse: "Nicole ran away?"

"Yes, just before Andree's mysterious illness."

"MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS? You fool, that's the first thing you should have said!" Philip jumps off his horse and drops the reins in Gilbert's shaking hands.

It is well-known that unhappy premonitions have a 75% chance of coming true.
Happy premonitions don't have any chance of coming true at all.

Breck Eisner - "The Crazies"

Timothy Olyphant, you my dawg and all, but I beg you, stop playing any kind of sheriff/marshal in the future. I'm already watching you on "Justified" and seeing you wearing the exact same beige uniform for Breck Eisner's remake of "The Crazies" felt like, I don't know, LAZINESS, like you didn't want to go through the hassle of showering or changing uniforms.



"The Crazies" is familiar survival horror: some magical evil liquid from the MILITARY gets in a small town's water supply, and soon thereafter zombies take over. (Yes, you can call them "crazies" all you want, but they're zombies.) Olyphant is good; even better is his deputy (Joe Anderson from "Across the Universe," here reminding me for some weird reason of Kurt Cobain). Radha Mitchell does slightly above nothing for me. A "trapped in a car-wash" set-piece is great, and a few other scares register. However, the actual mechanics of how this craziness spreads are badly worked out: when any attempt is made at establishing the "rules" something in the story will contradict them soon after. I do want to see the Romero original, which means "The Crazies" is modestly successful.

Gang Gang Dance - "Eye Contact" / Fleet Foxes - "Helplessness Blues"

I was all fur the Fleet Foxes the first time around, loved their odd Beach-Boys-in-a-winter-forest world. With "Helplessness Blues" they've done it again, and now with a tinge of regretful adulthood. "So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter. What does that say about me?" asks a mournful character as the the new album opens, and I find that simply chilling. Myself, I am a DECADE older than my mother was when I was born. By the time he was my age, my father had two boys and a divorce under his belt. (Why he kept all that under a belt I will never know.)

"Grown Ocean."



I, on the other hand, feel like I might soon look into that whole "adulthood" thing, maybe investigate about a job that has actual benefits within the next few years. I should stop being so ridiculously concerned with keeping up with all the cool new bands, (a losing battle on a steep muddy hill.) I should stop taking pleasure in Gang Gang Dance and the Cocteau Twins-meet-M.I.A sounds of THEIR new album, "Eye Contact." This is clearly intended for hip youngish bodies that won't break with crazy beats.

Ah, I'll just rock out for a few more months, and then I'll grow up.

"Mind Killa."

Olivier Assayas - "Irma Vep"

Why would you cast Hong-Kong actress Maggie Cheung to play Irma Vep, a latex-clad burglar who's supposed to embody the Parisian underground? Why would you cast Jean-Pierre Leaud, (Truffaut's Antoine Doinel and the symbolic face of the Nouvelle Vague) as a decayed movie director hoping to fake his way through a remake of "Les Vampires," a classic silent serial from 1915? Why would you want to remake "Les Vampires" anyway?

Exactly, winks director Olivier Assayas in his 1996 directorial debut, "Irma Vep." (That's right, it's an anagram for "Latex Suit.")



"Irma Vep" is a showbiz farce as assured in small ways as "Carlos" was in big ones, and such an effective, impish mockery of fatuous French movies that many a critic mistook it for a fatuous French movie at the time. (I even recall it being on a "worst of the year" list- fools! Do not make the same mistake.) Assayas skips growing pains by taking on the perspective of an exhausted show-biz beast: you would think he had 8 (and a half) movies under his belt. In the process, he shows you EXACTLY why someone would want to remake "Les Vampires"- and several ways it can be done. If the chaos of creation interests, you should GO WATCH. Not necessarily RIGHT NOW, but when you get some time.

Also, Maggie Cheung. The latex. And the camera plainly lusting after her. (Assayas and Cheung married thereafter.)

Albert Brooks - "Lost in America"

Yuppies yearning for hippiedom, Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty drop their corporate yokes, liquidate their assets, buy a mobile home, and, in Paul Simon's words, set out to look for America.

That was the plan, anyway.



A great anti-road-trip movie, "Lost in America" has rhythms that match Brooks' persona: it's simultaneously jittery and laid back, with a wit that might get pegged as "dry" but actually flows like a nervous stream. Few movies capture the spiritual resignation of the '80s this well. "Fuck 'Easy Rider.' It's 'Wall Street' time," goes the moral. In the '80s, Brooks could have crafted a directorial body of work as fascinating as Woody Allen's, if he hadn't been the opposite of prolific. His 90s movies, "Mother" and "The Muse" find that stream of wit slowed down: boring rocks poke through the jokes. But "Real Life," "Modern Romance," and "Lost in America" remain more than worthwhile.

Olivier Assayas - "Carlos"

A terrorist will talk politics almost desperately, in the hopes of forgetting that a terrorist's cause is terror and only terror. In Olivier Assayas' beyond-epic "Carlos," (an exhaustive, nearly 6 hour account of the halcyon days of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a.k.a. "Carlos the Jackal") the titular terrorist talks and talks about his "cause." He might be hard pressed to explain what that cause IS, (beyond a nebulous "Sticking It To The Man") or how the assassinations, kidnappings and bombings he orchestrated were supposed to further it.



Somewhat of a hybrid between "Che" and "Mesrine," "Carlos" is a politically complex meal that is best served in portions.

We follow Carlos through the 70s and 80s, working for "La Revolucion." Which "Revolucion" doesn't matter: Any dream will do. The point, recall, is terror. He's mostly an anti-Zionist working for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but this is the dirty end of Internationalism: a man beyond nation, and loyal to none. Born in Venezuela, trained in Moscow, his rhetoric is Cuban, his comrades are German and Japanese, his favorite hide-outs are in London and Paris, his biggest enemy is Saudi Arabia, his employers are mainly Palestinian, Syrian and Libian, he loses it all in Sudan. The filmmakers lucked out in casting Edgar Ramirez. He is an astounding talent, reminiscent of a younger Javier Bardem. This is a role that requires him to be likable and despicable, cool and paranoid, fiercely smart and politically naive, counter-cultural AND a cultured man of the world, as well as effortlessly cycle through Spanish, English, French, German, Arabic, and a smattering of others. Hell, it even requires him to be an athletic soldier and a pot-bellied slob, and Ramirez does all that just fine.

Except that the performance reveals very little, because there might be nothing to reveal. There is no "origin" story in "Carlos." I DID find myself wondering how this poly-glottal gangster came into being psychologically, but the "in media res" approach may be best: we understand that Carlos, like most human beings, is the result of seismic global confluences, not some super-villain born in an instant because his mom was killed by MOSSAD or something. You'll find no Freudian cheat-sheet here. Carlos politics are inherited, a hollow creed he repeats by rote and without passion. He's not driven by thrill-seeking, or violence, or money, (although he's partial to capitalist pig luxuries, what good revolutionary isn't?) He DOES like power and bedding impressionable revolutionary chicks. He's macho and vain, and more than once we catch him staring at his own dick in approval. His eventual capture involves - deflating but fitting - testicular failure and an ill-timed liposuction.



Olivier Assayas is to be commended, not only for the sheer size of the movie, but the almost super-human objectivity he keeps throughout. Surely no one dedicates these massive cinematic efforts to chronicling a person for whom they feel no admiration or hatred, but at no point is Carlos even remotely praised or criticized: he is simply observed, and people who would assume this is a eulogy- or an indictment- will find practically no evidence of either on the screen. "Che" clearly thought its hero was admirable if flawed; "Mesrine" thought its hero was a killer, but kinda cool. "Carlos" lets YOU do the thinking in its entirety, which is very very rare. GO WATCH the 3 part miniseries NOW.

Oh, and Nora Van Waldstatten is very good as the terrorist's disillusioned companion. "Very Good" meaning "Frequently Naked." Whatever, same thing.

Jaume Collet-Serra - "Unknown"

They took his daughter. That was personal. Now, they've taken his identity, so it's even MORE personal.

I love Liam Neeson.



He must be an exceedingly nice man, I think, very approachable and accommodating, always smiling humbly at Hollywood parties. "Hey, Neeson, wanna be in another ludicrous quasi-European thriller where you get enraged and break collarbones?" "Oh, geez, director Jaume Collet-Serra of "Orphan" infamy, I just don't know if I should get typecast." "Come on, Neeson, you don't want a rumor to spread that you're stuck-up and turn down bad scripts, do you?" "Geez, I... I.. fine, I'll do it. Is January Jones going to be in it? She's real purty! I'm a widower now, so maybe I have a shot there." "Hahaha, that's the spirit, Liam! Not gonna happen, though, she totally gives off a lesbo vibe." "No way!" "Hey, I'm just here to spread rumors. Also, she can't act at all." "Wow. That's really shocking, director Jaume Collet-Serra of "House of Wax" notoriety!" "Listen, 'House of Wax' starred Elisha Cuthbert AND Paris Hilton, so when I say bad acting, I know what I'm talking about."

Mikio Naruse - "Mother" ("Okaasan")

Again, as in Kyung-Sook Shin's "Please Look After Mom," taking a tale of Asian motherly love out of its original cultural context actually enhances it and washes out the soap from this domestic weeper. Mikio Naruse's "Mother" is so cutesy it's actually a dramatization of the winning essay in a children's contest about who has the bestest, most long-suffering mommy. That could have been unbearable, but time has made the Mother's-Day-card feelings very secondary to the valuable glimpse into family structure in post-war Japan. Naruse's deft direction, his candid mix of nostalgia and humor, his feeling for the inexorable passing of the Japanese seasons and his humanity make these parental sacrifices affecting. Fourth in the Japanese directorial altar, (after Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi) Naruse's small Western fame has something to do with his (philosophically serene) embrace of melodramatic conventions. He's basically Ozu, but more eager to entertain housewives. If Douglas Sirk can be cheered as enthusiastically as he has been in recent years, there's room for a Naruse rediscovery in America.

Christopher Smith - "Black Death"

Sean Bean just makes more sense when he goes medieval. (I need to cram on George R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" before I'm ready for the HBO show.)



While extensively researching the Dark Ages for this post about Christopher Smith's witch-hunt adventure "Black Death," I tested Google's new voice-search feature, which is WONDERFUL, because I type like a guy who's had his fingers frequently punished by mobsters.

Unfortunately, this is how it turned out.

Me (enunciating for Google Search) "Black Death."
GS: "..."
Me: (louder) "Black Death!"
GS: "BLACK DICK"
Me: "No, no! Black Death!"
GS: "MO' MO' BLACK DICK"
Me: "'Black Death' the Movie!"
GS: "BACK TO THE FUTURE THE MOVIE"
Me: "Ok, that's a little closer."
GS: "THE CLOSER SEASON 3"
Me: "No! I want that movie about witches with Sean Bean!"
GS: "NO I WANT TO MOVE IN AND OUT OF BITCHES WITH CHOW-MEIN"
Me: *sigh* Sean Bean?
GS: "SIZE OF SEAN BEAN'S DICK?

Clearly there will be improvements, but fascinating technology none the less. I love to scream at my computer already, so I can't wait until I'm screaming at it for every single command, 24/7.



ABOVE: (L to R) Sean Bean, Sir Ian McKellen, Nicolas Cage.

D. W. Griffith - "The Birth of a Nation"

It's pretty cool to be white. I mean, capital W, full-on, "Aryan-birthright" WHITE. White people can watch "Birth of a Nation" and instead of feeling insulted or horrified, they can just be bored.



No, no, no, that's too glib. 3 hours of silence, (racist racist silence) is certainly torture, but the fact is D. W. Griffith made the first GOOD movie here: good in technique, story, ambition, scope. Not "good" good, of course. Evil crackles out of the unrestored celluloid.

I want to defend "The Birth of a Nation." Its early experiments in creating suspense, the moments of humor, the inspiring way Lincoln is presented and war is denounced. I would like to praise the cast. Not so much Lillian Gish or the black-faced villains, but the others in the Cameron and Stoneman Households. Henry B. Walthall is a commanding lead. Mae Marsh and Miriam Cooper, suffering privations with chin-up attitudes, are beautiful and unsung.



Most of all, I would like to say that one can't judge yesterday with today's gavel.

But I can't say that, because this was disgustingly a-historical and racist even for its own day. Griffith knew it, half-apologizing throughout the movie, leaning on Woodrow Wilson's quotes to add credibility to his fear of the white-girl-raping Negro. The "history" is Fox-News-slanted, to say the least. Just look at the scene in which Griffith "historically" pairs Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. Lee is white, clean, shining in a halo of dignity; Grant dirty, gray, rude, puffing on a cigar and exhaling hellish smoke. How's that for fair and balanced? But then... this ISN'T history. It's a STORY, and look at what Griffith does in that scene to manipulate sympathies, just by using color contrasts and a cigar!

Still, I doubt even today's racist viewer can extract much joy from the hateful scenes, like the one, (played for a laugh) in which African Americans try to vote, and the "good guys," ghoulish riders dealing horror with their burning crosses, send them back into their houses. That scene is devoid of justice, of goodness, of humanity. It can't be defended.

3 hours of inhumanity would be unwatchable, though, even at a KKK movie outing, and "The Birth of a Nation" is NOT unwatchable. There's an hour and a half here that is great, engaging: The battlefields. The parallel love stories. The scenes of heroism. There's even amusing stuff. Some of it is racist-but-funny (The "Big Momma" that opens a can of whoop-ass on a sassy freedman while saying: "Dem Nort'ern n****s sho am uppity!") Some of it is more subtle (my favorite moment involves a puppy and a cat pawing and clawing at each other while a card reads: "Hostilities.") Some of it is unintentional (Most modern audiences can't help but notice that the North/South "chums" who die in each other's arms, practically a kiss away, are purty, purty gay. Like, "Scott Thompson from 'Kids in the Hall'" gay. "Final scenes of 'Return of the King'" gay. THAT gay.)

Certainly one thing gets proven here: a movie can be great, and reprehensible.

Two things get proven here, actually: a movie can be great and reprehensible, but as long as it's silent and 3 hours long and from 1915, it's going to be boring.

If you're white, that is.

Philippa Carr - The Miracle at St. Bruno's

First in the 19-book "Daughters of England" series, "The Miracle at St. Bruno's" concerns a stretch of years in Henry VIII's reign, tensions between Catholics and Protestants, a girl with the too-euphonious name of Damask, a less-than-holy child abandoned in a Nativity manger, and a love triangle that on occasion involves enough people to look more like a love pentagon. The once ultra-prolific Jean Plaidy / Victoria Holt / Philippa Carr (noticeably less prolific since her death) made no pretensions at literature. At least I hope she didn't, for her sake. All the same, her speedy, decently-researched historical romances amuse me.



ABOVE: The Cleveland Plain Dealer says that Philippa Carr "is also Victoria Holt." This is what they chose for a blurb? The other options:

"'The Miracle at St. Bruno's' is a book. A novel, even."- The New York Times Book Review
"'The Miracle at St. Bruno's' is not particularly expensive." - The Washington Post
"Philippa Carr is a weird name. Especially considering the writer CHOSE it." - The Spokane Herald.

CHAPTER 138: RICHELIEU'S SILLY, HIGHLY UNTRANSLATABLE, PUNS

You are fully excused for not remembering where we left off: The Duke de Richelieu (Jack Nicholson) has sped off toward Luciennes, where the lovely Madame Dubarry (Anne Hathaway) makes her abode and keeps her much visited boudoir. Our Marshal, still agile, hops up stairs and past servants to enter this sanctum sanctorum.



ABOVE: Absolutely random, but lovely, picture of Anne Hathaway.

The Countess is indeed there, along with Richelieu's nephew, D'Aiguillon, (Kevin Spacey).
"Uncle!" says D'Aiguillon, astonished.
The Countess is several degrees colder on the thermostat: "You here? I thought you were hanging with a different crowd these days, Marshal."
Richelieu meekly finds a chair: "A momentary lapse of reason. I was led astray, but here I am again for you, my young enchantress, with a big old heart-on. Mock me, mock me freely. It's so easy, because I'm old, and weak, and powerless, and..."
"Watch out, Countess," says D'Aiguillon, laughing uneasily. "The more helpless he claims to be, the better his strategy."
"I for one am glad he's back," the Countess eases up. "That means I'm winning something somewhere. It may be hard to swallow, but him here means good times ahead."
Richelieu says: "I may be hard to swallow? More like: I am a swallow, who anticipates the summer."
If looks could groan, the glances exchanged by Dubarry and D'Aiguillon would do so, but Richelieu goes on:
"Or like a carrier pigeon, who carries good news."
"The news better be good, and, just as importantly, new," the Countess says.
"I hope so! I have come to say that the King has fallen in your trap, Madame."
"A trap? That IS news, because I don't recall having put out any trap."
"Oh, you've put out alright," says Richelieu. "A trap, that is. The way I see it, the King has grown afraid. For while he went and showed too much attention to Mademoiselle Andree de Taverney, (which you and I can now agree was an unfortunate distraction) you wisely made him worry in another direction. To make him jealous, you... stung... him a little."
"I stung him?" says the Countess, genuinely not following.
"Yes. You stung him with a horny little hornet."
"I'm genuinely not following." As previously stated.
"You gave him the sting? You stung him with a stinger?" Richelieu winks meaningfully until his eyelids practically fall off.
D'Aiguillon's blushing conflicts with his groaning: "Oh, I get it. He's making some innuendo about our friendship, Countess. Because in French 'aiguillon' means 'stinger.'"
The Countess blushes and groans too: "It's odd I didn't get that quicker, given that we are all speaking French here. And who says there's anything between me and the Duke D'Aiguillon? (No offense, Duke.)"
"It's what everybody's saying," Richelieu shrugs. "The 100, 000 people who live in Versailles; the 600,000 in Paris; the 25 million in France; and possibly a couple of people in Austria, too."
"What?" Dubarry leaps up growling: "How dare they accuse me?"
"They're not accusing you! They're saying you're wonderfully brilliant," Richelieu gulps. "That it's a stroke of genius to PRETEND to have a lover, to make the King worry. If you'll recall how you dismissed me and the King waaaay back in Chapter 112, and left with my nephew, here present? I think that's where I started the rumors. I mean, where some gossips started the rumors. BUT those were beneficial rumors, because, upon hearing them, Louis XV dropped Andree de Taverney like she was a hot plate of French Onion Soup. He's positively terrified of that girl now. Hates the entire Taverney family, just to be a completist."
Dubarry and D'Aiguillon exchange glances again, but this time leaning toward shame and confusion. Finally, the Countess says: "Everyone's giving me too much credit. I would never plan something like that."
"No, of course not, my dear Countess, you're like an innocent bird," Richelieu grabs her hand and kisses it.
"Oh, so that's what a snake's tongue feels like," Dubarry shudders.
"The snake was that Baron de Taverney!" Richelieu feigns horror. "Did you know he intended to sell his daughter, pawn her out like a cheap ring? The King saw through that, though. He says the father is an opportunist leech; the daughter, a dead-playing possum; the son... he didn't say much about the son. I'm not sure he remembers there IS a son. What a crazy group! I shudder to even imagine that there are social-climbing people like that in this world, who would betray their own family...! Not like me, no. I love my family!" He runs and hugs D'Aiguillon. "And my friends, I would do anything for my friends!" He runs and hugs the Countess.
"Fine, fine, you can be on our team again," she says. "Just answer me one question: What did you think you could possibly gain from opposing me and siding yourself with some country-mouse pimp and his hick daughter?"
Monsieur the Duke de Richelieu taps his lips a few times contemplatively, and then says:
"That's a really great question, my dear Countess, and the answer is that I haven't the friggiest of clues."

Party Like It's 1999... Posts! And Here's 2000!

ABOVE: No expense was spared in the creation of this celebratory graphic.

2000 HALLUCINA posts!!! Un-be-friggin'-lieva-some-ble!!!

Dear Imaginary Reader:

For the last 2000 posts, HALLUCINA has been like... like...A trolley ride through an abandoned part of town! There have been ups and downs and unsavory passengers, but what counts is that we did it TOGETHER. We have laughed together, cried together, hurriedly wiped fingerprints from crime scenes together. Sure, some would say it's been mostly me alone. Just me. Doing all the hard, thankless work, while you just sat there getting all fatty-cat, barely making an effort to move your eyeballs as you read. But hey, that's what I'm here for, right? Just giving and giving. I don't need to feel appreciated every now and then, no. It wouldn't kill you though, to show just a little appreciation. Some gratefulness. What do I know, maybe it WOULD kill you!

ANYWAY, here's some of the recent stuff I totally meant to write about in long, revealing essays that never materialized.

MOVIES

Claude Chabrol - "Masques" - Very enjoyable thriller a la Chabrol, although I suspect its effectiveness depends on whether you feel Philipe Noiret plays a charming bon viveur or a complete asshole from scene 1.

Preston Sturges - "The Palm Beach Story" - A "divorce scare" tale in which Claudette Colbert, Joel McRea, and other Sturges regulars get some cute lines. The biggest laugh comes on the final reel, though, so instead I would much more recommend "The Lady Eve." Barbara Stanwyck is scorching in a real GO WATCH NOW that is only a beat or two behind "Some Like It Hot." Some of these scenes in which she's nuzzling Henry Fonda count as porn, if you ask me.



Jee-Woon Kim - "I Saw the Devil"- A brilliantly brutal psycho vs. psycho game. GO WATCH NOW.

Sam Seder - "Who's the Caboose?" - Sarah Silverman could have tooootally ended with a "sassy love interest" persona, had things played a little different and ANYONE had seen this recently unearthed 1999 mockumentary about "pilot season" in L.A. It features a who's who of weren't-anyone-yet : Sarah, David Cross, Jon H. Benjamin, Sam Seder, Andy Kindler. For people (like me) who spend most of their cable time with Comedy Central and/or Adult Swim, this is a fun little curio from the past.

MUSIC

The Cars- "Drive." Greatest pick-up song ever, but it only works with extremely depressed chicks who haven't got a ride home and like to scream about it.



Trey Parker and Matt Stone - "The Book of Mormon"- They've done more for Mormons than anyone since Brigham Young. Here they're not so much pulling punches as chopping off their own hands. Go watch "South Park"'s "All About Mormons?" episode instead if you want some truth. "The Book of Mormon" IS very funny, in that tourist-friendly "Avenue Q" way, and its "Lion King" riffs, though hardly topical, do result on a laugh-outloud number: "Hasa Diga Eebowai." Sing Along, Everyone!



BOOKS

Aesop "Fables" - Here's a tale from Aesop:
"When Zeus was creating mankind and assigning vices and virtues, he decided that each tradesman would have a little bit of a liar within. He poured a little of his "lie potion" on the blacksmith, the butcher, the tailor. Finally, Zeus got to the end of line, and noticing he's got lots of "lie potion" left, thew all the extra on the last person, who was a horse dealer. This is why everyone lies, but horse dealers will always lie more than anyone else."

That's right, Aesop basically took a dig at car salesmen around 600 B.C.E.

Brian Azzarello - "100 Bullets" - I'm the dissenting voice on this one, because classic though it is, I think it's overrated. The lingo is a little strained, and the big conspiracy is not striking enough when we DO get there. It's still an offer you shouldn't refuse, specially if it comes from an old man calling himself Agent Graves and carrying a suitcase full of untraceable bullets.



"The 1001 Nights" - Long before there was the Internet, people could rely on the Arabian Nights. Here's the world's best repository of dirty euphemisms, (at least in the obsessively sexual Burton version): "his bird throbbed inside her cage", "his eager fish quickly slid into her wet cave", "his camel spit deep into her well." Just like everything Barbara Stanwyck says in "The Lady Eve" sounds pornographic, everything Scheherazade says is sweat-inducingly nasty. What a great children's book.

Alfred Bester - "Re-Demolished" - Collection of odds and ends for Bester fans only.

Kyung-Sook Shin - "Please Look After Mom" - Here, taking a story out of context helps infinitely. In South Korea, this is another weepy homily about filial duty. In the West, it's a genuinely affecting tale about a world strange yet instantly recognizable.

TV

"Futurama" Season 4 - Is the ending of "Jurassic Bark" the saddest thing ever shown in an animated comedy? The set-up, for infidels: In the year 1999, pizza delivery man Fry tells his dog to wait for him outside the pizza place. Fry never returns, of course, being transported to the FUTURE. But in this episode, Fry has recovered his fossilized dog, Seymour, and has a chance to clone him back to life. After much debate, he decides not to, assuming his dog went on to have a full life without him and must have forgotten him. Not so: In a heartbreaking sequence (set to "I Will Wait For You," from my beloved "Umbrellas of Cherbourg," no less) we discover that true love is patient indeed.



"The Sarah Silverman Show" - Season 3 has Sarah discovering that, against all evidence, she's not officially retarded. Assorted crazy shit happens.

"Pulling" - I love Sharon Horgan, and I love this appallingly short-lived British series. It's basically "Sex and the City" except enjoyable. GO WATCH NOW.

Preston Sturges - "Unfaithfully Yours"

"Unfaithfully Yours," Preston Sturges' 1948 streak-ending flop, is a comedy composed from tragedy. There is cynicism a-plenty in Sturges' work (see "Sullivan's Travels") but having Rex Harrison methodically slit his loving wife's throat for comedic effect is still too much.

So why is it that the movie, about a renowned orchestra conductor nursing Othello-sized jealousy, is likely to provoke impish grin? After all, on paper, it's Hitchcock: an unstable artist, driven to insanity by suspicion, attempts to revenge himself on his maybe-unfaithful wife (Linda Darnell) via perfect murder. But the humor in "Unfaithfully Yours" comes from the distance between the plotting and the execution, between Harrison's grandiose fantasies and his clumsy stumbling through an uncooperative reality, not to mention the way Sturges captures the embarrassing, squirm-inducing truth about what goes on in the heads of lovers when they feel dumped/rejected/cheated on.



Below are the 3 ESSENTIAL FANTASIES OF THE BETRAYED:

1) Kill 'em all. Laugh insanely over their cheating corpses.
2) No, no. We are BETTER than them. We will nobly, calmly confront the unfaithful with their unworthiness and set them free, while they beg and cry for forgiveness.
3) No, no, NO. Too easy. They need to really suffer. Let's just DIE! Ha! They'll be sorry when we're dead!

Thankfully, these are balanced by the 3 ESSENTIAL REALITIES OF THE BETRAYED:

1) Did you know there's a three-day-waiting period on gun purchases? By then we'll have come down from our murderous haze. Friggin' liberals, ruining everything! That's out.
2) We are unable to do anything nobly and calmly. We're aware we're going to end up whimpering, sobbing and/or prat-falling through that scenario, so that's out too.
3) No one wants to imitate Sting in that one song, so that's out three.



"Unfaithfully Yours" was remade with Dudley Moore and Nastassja Kinski in the '80s. That's not a recommendation.

"Easy A"- "An Education" - "Dogtooth"

Between the laptops radiating my lap and the cellphones dangling next to my privates, I figure I have maybe two or three more years before I have been fully sterilized, so every now and then I wonder if I should apply for a Daddy job while there's still time.

What kind of parents would we make, Dear Imaginary (Female) Reader?

The lax-but-loving quasi-hippies played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in Will Gluck's delightful "Easy A"? Are we going to wittily show support while our hottie Emma Stone daughter gets slut-shamed by gossips? Are we going to cutesily horrify her with sex stories to show her we understand teenage hormones?



Or would we be loving-but-bourgeois, like Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour in Lone Scherfig's very superior "An Education"? Would we be fooled while a story-telling cad like Peter Sarsgaard seduces our adorable Carey Mulligan daughter right under our noses? Would we sound cluelessly out of it, reading the Nick Hornby script that satirizes our decent-but-unavoidable squareness?



Or would we be like the absolute psychos in Giorgos Lanthimos' aggressively bizarre "Dogtooth"? Would we create an alternate reality for our offspring, imprison them in childhood, tell them the Outside is patrolled by murderous kittens? Would we be so alarmed by corruption that we'll explain to them that a "pussy" is a "bright white light" and a "zombie" a "little yellow flower"?



"Dogtooth" is one of the strangest, most brilliant movies I have seen in a while, and I feel like adding gentle caveats about how "it is not for everybody" and "it may offend or disturb some," but apologizing to the easily frightened gets tiresome, and I think I'll stop doing it. Art is only offensive when it assumes you're as stupid as it is.

These three flicks are GO WATCH NOW stuff.

Forget parenthood, Hypothetical Wife, let's just raise goldfish.

Henry Purcell - "Dido and Aeneas"

I have some problems with "The Aeneid." I'm sure Virgil put way too many vowels in that word, for starters. Also, it's a horribly glorified rip-and-dip tale. Seldom has so much epicness being dedicated to such an asshole. This Aeneas dude is all like:

"Dido, baby, ever heard of the term 'hung like a Trojan horse'?"

Half an hour later he's peeling off the old sheep-skin and flushing it down to the Mediterranean:

"Hey, so... I just heard from Jupiter. I got a ship to catch in the morning. Yaaaah. I'm... uh... I'm gonna be heading out now. You gonna be ok? You need a few bucks for a taxi or something?"

The chick gets bummed, burns everything down AND stabs herself in sadness. Dodged a spear with THAT drama queen of Carthage, didn'tcha Aeneas?



As far as Baroque operas go, Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" is short, sweet, in somewhat recognizable English, and even has a hit song. Here is none other than Christina Ricci warbling her way through "When I Am Laid in Earth (Dido's Lament)" in honor of Johnny Depp.



Isn't that cool? Many other great vocalists have recorded "Dido's Lament," among them Jeff Buckley, Klaus Nomi, and Selena Gomez.

A Reptile Dysfunction

Dear Imaginary Reader:
You may have noticed that I've been AFK, ("Away From Keyboard," as all the hip kids are saying, or at least were saying back in 2001.) I have a good explanation: there's been some kind of lizard in my bathroom. This is not a cute Hollywood reptile that has a charmer's accent and sells insurance for Geico. (It would be alarming if HE showed up in my shower, because you can tell he's a little "effete," but that's a different kind of situation.)


ABOVE: No, thanks, little dude, I don't swing that way.

No, the gecko who took over my shower is of the "disturbing abomination" breed, a gravity-disdaining monster with eyes like bulging black blisters. Who knows how he got there: Sometimes he's sneaking down the shower curtain, or humping the soap, or hiding behind the Head and Shoulders, or clinging upside down from the nozzle. There is just NO TELLING where that motherfucker's gonna jump from!



So naturally I hadn't showered in a while, and I just couldn't bring myself to write for you while I was dirty. You deserve better, and I was in a funk, literal and metaphorical, hiding in my depressive, PigPen-ish cloud of dusty microbes. Been watching lots of Criterion movies, though. That may sound like I furthered my cinematic horizons, until you realize that Criterion is padded with, like, 100 early Kurosawa movies praising Emperor Hirohito's war efforts.

Anyway, I was beginning to smell like a bruised banana peel no one dares approach.

"But Hans, what's so scary about a little lizard in the bathroom, you man-shaped vagina?"

I'm not saying the thing is "scary," not exactly, but think about it: a lizard is pretty much a snake that got its shit together and grew legs. It's a little alligator that has stealth and speed. You at least can SEE an alligator coming, but this lizard has the element of surprise. Besides, the shower's just a vulnerable place for me, I'm there all defenselessly naked and soaped up, and I don't want a scaly mutated freak running up my legs, landing on my head or tackling my back.

And this isn't a thing you can kill. It's what I call an "in-between" animal: somewhere in between a cockroach and a raccoon. If you get a cockroach, you step on it. If you get a raccoon, you call Animal Control. There are no options with this mini-velociraptor. It's not like a spider, where there's an instinctive stomp reaction: if I crush this thing, there's going to be recognizable body parts splattering my shower, blood spiraling down the drain like it's a Hitchcock moment. And that's if I ever get it in a position where I can step on it: have I mentioned the lizard is into high altitudes? Right now, it was eye-level with me, chilling on top of a loofa. To get rid of it I would have to TOUCH IT! GROSS! That would like grabbing a moving turd made out of goo!

So it's lived there for a while.

As you can tell by this post, tonight I finally faced my fears- and that shrunken Jurassic face. I just showered, with the lizard on the loofa. This was a tense shower situation, like from an "Oz" episode, and it was a quick run, so I wouldn't, like, get snuggly with my armpits unless you really felt compelled to. I would have jumped out of there if this creature had made even the slightest slithering move, but it just stared at me with those nightmarish orbs of death that pass for eyes. I think it was motionless because it thought I couldn't see it, but maybe that's what he wants me thinking and he was mocking me or hypnotizing me, I wouldn't put it past him.

The lizard is as mystifying to me as folks who go on about the joyous beauty of Nature. Are they getting a different National Geographic Channel in their cable package? They talk like God went through a seminar with Currier and Ives, when the evidence suggests more of an H. R. Giger fan.


ABOVE: Bullshit.


ABOVE: Another Joyful Creation from All-Loving Heavenly Father.

Ok, well, I'm cleaner now, a little shaken, but ready to blog for you, because I just let loose an owl in the bathroom and closed the door on those two. It's the circle of life: apparently owls snap up lizards.

"But Hans! Now you have a SCARY BIRD OF PREY LIVING IN YOUR SHOWER! It's MUCH WORSE!"

*scoffs* Ever heard of owls being NOCTURNAL? All I have to do is go in there while it's getting its daytime sleep.