Getting Things The Hell Out Of My House

A list of things leaving my house this week:

Let Us Sit Upon the Ground: submissions to three theaters; two in New York, one in L.A.
The Ice Age: Fifteen query letters to agents in New York and environs.
Michael St. John and the Race for the African Stone: prepared for the Nicholl Gee Screenwriting Fellowship.

So many stamps...

Mad Max

It's sometimes amazing how much can be done on a budget that can conveniently be measured in pennies. Mad Max is one such case. This is a raw, elemental, strange, and unpredictable action picture that begins as a cops vs. street punks movie, and transforms into a revenge picture of surprising power. Mel Gibson plays Max, a cop facing a vicious gang of street thugs on the long and desolate roads of the Australian outback. The story begins with Max as a contented man, secure in his job and happy with his family. But after the gang robs him of both his partner and his wife, Max sets out to even the score.

The chase sequences in Mad Max are the movie's highlights, and the level of excitement George Miller manages to extract from his limited resources is impressive. Watch the chase sequence. Miller never lets us lose sight of who's chasing whom, and clues us in on the strategies of the players. This allows us to feel as if we're participating in the action instead of merely observing it. Michael Bay has had budgets many orders of magnitude higher than Miller had in Mad Max, but he's never achieved 1/10th as much.

This movie was dubbed into Mid-Atlantic English for the U.S. market, but I can't imagine it in any accent other than Australian. American accents just don't fit this bizarre landscape and these equally bizarre denizens of the landscape. While my memories of many U.S. action films tend to run together, it'll be hard for me to forget what made Mad Max so different.

Gotta Love That Media Expertise, Boy

It no longer amazes me that people who don't really know what they're talking about can get on TV as experts. It does, however, still burn me. Take the case of Patricia Cornwell, the mystery author whose foray into non-fiction accused Victorian artist Walter Sickert of being Jack the Ripper. Experts on the ripper case have largely debunked Cornwell's case, which oscillates between puffing up weak evidence and glossing over enormous evidentiary gaps.

To sum up:

1. Cornwell claims that she has discovered a mitochondrial DNA link between Sickert and one of the letters that supposedly came from Jack the Ripper. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? But, according to David Cohen, who researched the issue for Slate, mitochondrial DNA samples can be matched to anywhere between .1%-10% of the population. So the sample Cornwell extracted to the letter could have come from Sickert, or from thousands to millions of others. And considering that many, many people have handled this letter over the years, from the sender all the way to Patricia Cornwell and Francis the Talking Mule for all we know, the sample she recovered could have come from any of them.

2. Even if she were to demonstrate a link between Sickert and the letter, this proves nothing about Sickert as a suspect. Scotland Yard received hundreds of letters purporting to come from the Ripper. All but three are certainly hoaxes, and those three are only potentially Ripper letters. Even the "From Hell" letter, which seems to be the most promising (because it came with half a human kidney--like the kidney Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes lost), could easily have been just a medical school prank. Faking Jack the Ripper letters seemed to be, briefly, the national pastime of England. So Sickert could have just been joining in the macabre fun. That makes him weird, but not a killer.

3. Finally, the best evidence tells us that Sickert was in France during the murders. Cornwell supporters like to claim that he could have made a run into England by train and boat to commit his murders, but have yet to produce a scintilla of evidence that he did so. And honestly, why would he bother? A man who derived sadistic pleasure from killing prostitutes could certainly find targets in France. Traveling all the way to Whitechapel doesn't seem like a game that's worth the candle.

Cornwell has surely heard this before, but she still goes on the air to make her claims. That's understandable, I suppose. What bothers me is that so many people who work on TV fail to notice that this woman doesn't deserve the mic. She should be on public access with Kurt Cobain conspiracy theorists, not on national TV, and certainly not without rebuttal.

Requiem For A Heavyweight

If everything you ever knew about Rod Serling came from The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery, I urge you to take a look at this film, which is an adaptation of Serling's Playhouse 90 script. Anthony Quinn plays The Mountain, a sweet natured palooka who's taken way too many in the head over a seventeen year career. When, after a fight with a young Cassius Clay (that's right, they got future heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali to make an appearance early on, and it's hard to believe he was ever that young), the doctors tell him he won't be allowed to box anymore, his promoter, the venal Maish Rennick (Jackie Gleason) cuts him loose. Unfortunately for Maish, the Mountain lasted too many rounds with Clay, so the mobsters who bet on the fight demand Maish's money or his hide. What follows is a competition for the Mountain's services as well as his soul, pitting Maish against the only two people in the world who give a damn about The Mountain: his trainer, Army (Mickey Rooney) and an agent for the unemployment office, Grace Miller (Julie Harris).

It is a treat to see this much acting talent on display in the service of a taut, moving tale. Though in some ways the outcome is predictable--The Mountain seems to have nowhere to go but down--his motives for acting as he does are surprisingly complex, so much so that I'm still processing them a day after seeing the movie. If you haven't seen this picture, I urge you to grab it from Netflix. It's worthy of your time.

Not Sure I Agree 100% With Your Police Work, Alec

Alec Baldwin, in what is otherwise a tame blog entry at The Huffington Post, wrote this howler:

The past eight years have been the moral low point of the American experience.

Mr. Baldwin, because I like you I'll chalk this up to the blogger's disease of writing without revising because as you probably do know, in absolute moral terms this country has sunk way lower. You've got your slavery, your genocide, your segregation. Back in the 1920s the KKK ran entire states (and not just southern ones). In West Virginia, being a union organizer could get you shot, and the government would do nothing. We were into public lynchings and women as chattel. We've lent our support to dictators who ripped off their countries and killed millions. Hell, this country wasn't an actual, functioning democracy until the Civil Rights Act and the abolition of the Poll Tax in 1964. So while I'm happy to say that George W. Bush is a moral idiot, and that his administration had done damage to this country from which it may never recover, whoever wins this fall, we're still not as bad as we've been.

Change the "the" to an "a", and problem solved, Mr. Baldwin.

Oliver Stone's George W. Bush

I understand that Josh Brolin will be playing our National Nightmare in Oliver Stone's movie, and while I think I understand why Stone is interested in making a movie about Bush--like Bush, Stone had a difficult relationship with his father and a long term infatuation with booze and powder--I'd rather have Stone do an autobiography. George W. Bush, for all the damage he has done and will do before this game is over, just isn't a very interesting person. He's always struck me as empty, mean-spirited, and vain--sort of a cross between Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. And while those characters were, in their own ways, compelling, it's necessary to remember that Tom isn't the lead character in Gatsby and can afford to be flat, and Patrick Bateman, for all his depravity, has a willingness to examine himself and his flaws that makes him interesting enough to carry a book. George W. Bush has never confronted the mad, empty, swirling vortex that is his conscience, and given his stated attitudes about self-reflection, he never will. That makes him a problematic lead character for a story. The only way to get at him, I would think, would be to place him in contrast to someone with actual humanity. Sadly, no one in the administration qualifies, and no one outside of it could get close enough to him to offer some perspective.

So why make the movie at all? I'm sure at some point Stone will tell us. But it'll take a lot of convincing to get me in to watch a three-hour movie about a willfully ignorant upper-class psychopath, when much more compelling psychopaths are already in my DVD and book collections.

Goddamn It No!

The New Kids on the Block are reforming. New album, new tour. Are all you motherfucking people out of your motherfucking minds?!? Of all the achievements of the 1990s--terminating the first Bush presidency, the Internet, Grunge music, Seinfeld--the most important was the death of the New Kids. Their destruction made all of these other things possible. Now we bring them back! How dead is a culture when it's trying to resurrect this:



Okay, America, I've been patient. I've tried to preserve a sense of calm and proportion as you've allowed Michael Bay to have a career that doesn't involve mopping shitty water away from the broken toilet in an Alabama prison. I've sat there stunned while you allowed George W. Bush access to the White House twice. I've endured the idea that you're going to remake The Incredible Hulk a mere five years after its first release. But this is so clearly a cry for help that I cringe at your future. Please America, get the help you need now, because with NKOTB coming back, a Tommy Page revival can't be far behind, and I can't watch you go there. It'll tear me up inside. Please, I beg you. Stop yourselves before it's too late.

Bad Movies About Show Business

This blog post might have concerned itself with something brilliant--Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve or Robert Altman's The Player. All these little pixels could have been put into the service of extolling their brilliance, but alas, their master is a masochist, and must devote himself to that peculiar species of bad movie called the shitty show-biz expose.

We'll leave Showgirls out of this, for no other reason than that I've never actually seen the whole thing and don't want to put it on my Netflix list. Instead, we'll begin with the movie that features jerky dancing, jerky middle-aged teen-agers, and jerky oily, sleazy drug dealers. Yes, it's The Girl In Gold Boots:



As you can see, sweet bippies are out in full force in this picture, which delivers the news that some of L.A.'s sleazier go-go dancer nightclubs were under mob control. (I'll pause for your gasp.) In the movie, Michelle works at EAT, a trendy little bistro that her abusive, drunken father owns. So desperate is Michelle to escape from EAT that she hooks up with Buz, the world's oldest living dead-end kid. Together, Michelle and Buz make their way to L.A. At some point in their travels, they pick up a fey young hitchhiker named Critter, from whom flowery language pours like a flowery language spigot.

Michelle hopes one day to become a dancer, and that gives Buz the idea of setting her up in one of the mob's most fashionable joints. His sister, the titular Girl in Gold Boots, (using "titular" in this context has its hazards) dances there whenever she manages to get off the pipe. Will Michelle become the headline attraction? Will the house band play one of Critter's songs? Will Buz get a piece of the Lufthansa heist and live to spend his money? Yes. Yes, and no, not in this movie anyway.

The movie does force audiences to confront some difficult issues, such as what it says about a society that the mob can pack a nightclub with dancing this lame. Michelle is a terrible dancer. Buz's sister is a terrible dancer, though it's easy to believe that she's sullied her pretty mind with heroin. Critter is a terrible singer/songwriter. And Buz is a talentless hack of a criminal. They get two hours to pool their incompetencies to form a cascading cataclysm of ineptitude. The result is painfully dull, though it is fun to watch Buz's reaction shots when Critter punches him in the face near the end.

But there are movies that take place at EAT, and there are movies that eat the soul. And such a movie is The Lonely Lady, a film funded by Pia Zadora's billionaire husband so that America could see Ms. Zadora sexually humiliated and traumatized for its amusement. If she didn't divorce him after this, she should have:



I remember watching this flick when I was twelve. My parents were asleep and I was looking for a glimpse of premium cable skin. Little did I know the price of that glimpse was watching Ray Liotta (who I'll bet never screens this movie for friends at his house) try to rape Pia Zadora's character with a superphallifraglicistic garden hose spigot. Conservative Christians spend a good portion of their lives pushing for abstinence education in schools. I don't think we need it. Screen The Lonely Lady in a health class, and none of those kids will reach in between their own or anyone else's legs for fifteen years.

Todd Solondz's Happiness was a major turnoff, but I got the impression that it was supposed to be. I'm guessing that the producers of The Lonely Lady somehow believed that their movie was going to be a turn-on, and all this folderol about how tough it is for women to make it in Hollywood without making it in Hollywood was just a smokescreen. Well, I guess my erotic tastes differ from Zadora's husband, because, even at the horny age of 12, The Lonely Lady made me sick.

I think I will go watch All About Eve now. I need to feel better.