I wasn’t surprised to be kicked out by my new roommates, but it happened even faster than I had expected. Initially, I had moved in when they were headed for New York on vacation, and was booted over the phone before they even returned. With more than ample justification. We started drinking the night before they left and after they were gone I kept it up for a number of days. Alone, with Zach the rabbit and a collection of decent comedy DVDs. I had the time of my life drinking, sleeping, watching movies tailor-made for the oxygen-deprived brain and experimenting with Zach’s diet. Did he like raw garlic? Ginger? Fudgsicles? Yes, to varying degrees. He even ate some of my beard right off my face. Meanwhile, I drank in greater quantity than I ever had before. At some point, it became clear that I was headed for a horrible detox. Indeed, when I finally decided to sweat it out, I felt close to death. After two days of vomiting, shaking and swimming in cold sweat, I felt well enough to walk to the bank and grocery store, and to eat and drink lots of water. When you get so sick from drink that you can’t hold down water, you get pretty dehydrated. My lips had scabs on them. All of this sounds horrible, but it’s tough to put a price on 4-5 days of happy oblivion when your life sucks. I was hoping it was Zach who had pissed on the floor. I was pretty sure it was me who had fallen on the coffee table and broken it. Whoever’s piss it was, I cleaned it up pretty well and I had plenty of time left to get new glass for the table. I even managed to drive back to my mom’s to pick up my sorely needed meds. I popped a paxil and a couple of atavan, then maybe one more so that I could knock out and finally recuperate to get shit in order, both in the house and in my personal life. Things did not go according to plan.

I’ve never done serious hallucinogens so was ill prepared for the next couple of days. Apparently drinking myself almost to death so that

Andrea Dworkin

“I would rather suck dick than have sex with Andrea Dworkin,” says Al Goldstein, the founding father of Screw Magazine. Goldstein might soon be going to jail on charges of harassing a former employee,
so he may get the chance to try at least one of those options. But
readers of Dworkin’s new memoir, Heartbreak, may wonder if Goldstein
isn’t missing the point. More than anything, this book reminds me of
the New Yorker cartoon in which a wife asks her husband: “You haven’t
said anything for ten years. Is anything wrong?”

It’s been fourteen years since Andrea Dworkin published a book, so some
of our younger Ruthless Readers may not even know who she is. Along
with law professor Catharine McKinnon,
Dworkin made waves two decades ago by claiming that pornography
violated women’s civil rights. Not only did dirty pictures encourage
sex discrimination (including rape), they were sex discrimination, and
they deserved to be covered-or covered up-by the same civil-rights laws
that dealt with bias on the job. While McKinnon argued points of law,
Dworkin became the street fighter of the pair, speaking on college
campuses and attracting a small but dedicated band of young groupies.

By the mid-Eighties, Dworkin and McKinnon were the feminists men loved
to hate-but maybe we shouldn’t have bothered. The only success they
ever achieved was getting a single “civil rights” ordinance passed in
Indianapolis (of all places), which a federal court quickly threw out.
Meanwhile, their ideas sparked a catfight that almost destroyed the National Organization for Women,
and by end of the Eighties the anti-censorship faction was firmly in
charge of what was left of NOW. Those setbacks pretty much spelled the
end of anti-porn feminism in America. By eliminating Dworkin’s appeal
as a hate figure, they also brought a quick end to her 15 minutes of
fame.

Unpopular views plus bad writing don’t equal huge sales, and some of
Dworkin’s most important work (including her 1979 classic, Pornography:
Men Possessing Women) is now out of print. Like those early books,
Heartbreak is no literary masterpiece, and it may already be headed for
the remainder bin. But believe it or not, it’s worth reading. Dworkin’s
first sentence promises an intimate memoir: “I have been asked,
politely and not so politely, why I am myself”. She doesn’t quite
answer that intriguing question, but her rambling narrative evokes the
heady days of Sixties and post-Sixties radicalism-a lost world that
most of us wouldn’t want to live in, but one that shaped the world we
live in now.
One of the earliest surprises in Dworkin’s book comes from her days as
a student activist at Bennington College in Vermont. In those days
Bennington was a women’s school, with tough parietal hours to keep
boyfriends at bay:

From 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. the houses in which the students
lived were girls only. One could have sex with another girl, and many
of us did, myself certainly included. But the male lovers had to
disappear: be driven out like beasts into the cold mountain night, hide
behind trees during the hour of the wolf, and reemerge after dawn. The
elimination of parietal hours was a huge issue, in some ways as big as
the war?It was law and order versus personal freedom, and I was on the
side of personal freedom.

Dworkin’s demand for “personal freedom” eventually got
her expelled?and that’s not the only irony of this strange woman’s life
story. If you think man-hating feminists are wrong about everything,
Heartbreak will make you think again. A few of chapters may make your
head spin, in fact. Not many people know that Dworkin shares a godson
with her former idol, the Beat poet and gay liberationist Allen Ginsberg,
or the story behind their split in the early Seventies. To hear Dworkin
tell it, their final encounter went something like this:

On the day of [my godson's] bar mitzvah newspapers
reported in huge headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child
pornography illegal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be. I
did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a pedophile.
He did not belong to the North American Man-Boy Love Association out of
some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant
it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some
inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to
fuck children and his constant pursuit of underage boys…

Ginsberg told me that he had never met an intelligent person who had
the ideas I did. I told him he didn’t get around enough. He pointed to
the friends of my godson and said they were old enough to fuck. They
were twelve and thirteen. He said that all sex was good, including
forced sex…

Referring back to the Supreme Court’s decision banning child
pornography he said, “The right wants to put me in jail.” I said, “Yes,
they’re very sentimental; I’d kill you.” The next day he’d point at me
in crowded rooms and screech, “She wants to put me in jail.” I’d say,
“No, Allen, you still don’t get it. The right wants to put you in jail.
I want you dead.”

Whose side are you on now? Are you surprised?

Speaking of NAMBLA,
the release of Heartbreak is nicely timed to complement the latest
mind-blowing abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. And it’s easy for
free-speech fans to forget that Dworkin spent her career pushing two
ideas, not one. She claimed that sexual violence against women and
children was incredibly widespread, even routine? and that banning
pornography was the right way to put a stop to it. Do those two
opinions make her crazy-or only half-crazy?

But this is water under the bridge, and Dworkin knows it. As if her
agenda weren’t tattered enough in 1990, the following decade brought us
DVD players, Internet smut, riot-grrl feminism, and President Bill Clinton.
You’d be heartbroken, too. It’s a sign of her complete irrelevance that
she now refuses to use the World Wide Web, or even get an email
address. After all, cyberspace is the ultimate smut bazaar. If you felt
the way Dworkin does about pornography, you wouldn’t touch a modem with
a ten-foot pole.

Still, the author seems less bitter than you might expect. (Maybe all
that lecture-circuit money helped soften the blow. I just hope she got
out of the stock market in time.) She hints that this book is her swan
song:

I think I’ve pretty much done what I can do; I’m empty; there’s not
much left, not inside me. I think that it’s bad to give up, but maybe
it’s not bad to rest, to sit in silence for a while.

But the book’s cool, distant delivery sometimes slips-especially
when Dworkin describes her enemies in the feminist movement, the women
who eventually took her down:

There were so-called feminists who published in Playboy, Hustler, and
Penthouse and penned direct attacks on feminists fighting pornography
and prostitution. There were women labeled feminist who wrote
pornographic scenarios in which the so-called fantasies were the rape
of other feminists, usually named and sometimes drawn but always
recognizable…

That brings us back to Screw magazine. Al Goldstein
isn’t the first man (or woman) to argue that only ugly women become
radical feminists. A look at the jacket of Heartbreak convinces me he’s
wrong. Andrea Dworkin wasn’t born wearing overalls, and she can
probably afford a tube of lipstick. So the image on the book’s back
flap must be the woman Dworkin has chosen to become: the Pillsbury Earth Mother whose photograph makes Goldstein’s dick go instantly limp. (That’s the point, Al. Don’t you get it?)

But close the book, and you’re confronted with a very different
picture. The cover photo shows Dworkin as she was some time in the
early Seventies, at the high noon of Women’s Liberation. She is dark
and smoldering, her hair unkempt and–can I be imagining this?–a touch
of mascara on her lashes. She holds a cigarette to her lips, her eyes
cast down intently on something in front of her. I like to think she’s
writing a devastating press release, or a powerfully argued manifesto
to persuade the world that some male chauvinist pig needs his balls cut
off. Andrea Dworkin was always wrong–but thirty years ago she was wrong
and Ruthless, and she was sexy as all hell.

Nonfiction, as a genre that transcends modes of mass-media
communication, is taking over. It’s a not-quite-but-almost coequal
partner with fiction in popular and unpopular literature; but recently,
you’ve more likely seen the rise of nonfiction in television (and
movies, if you count the Clooneyized adaptation of Sebastian Junger’s
‘A Perfect Storm’). From MTV’s perennial ‘Real World’, to it’s recent
‘The Osbournes’, to the host of flunkifying reality-TV shows that have
been washing up and out on network television the past couple seasons,
writers have simply stopped making stuff up. If it’s not stranger than
fiction, non-fictive truth is at least as good of a story.

The granddad of this whole nonfiction thing is probably Tom Wolfe; but
granddad can be a bit crusty, and hard to relate to sometimes – so it
couldn’t hurt to hang out with the younger, less venerated but
nonetheless important uncle of contemporary creative nonfiction – Tracy
Kidder. I can’t say I know too much more about him than what was on the
inside flap of House and what others have told me in passing; but, to
get the gist of him (yeah, Tracy’s a guy), I don’t think you have to
know too much more than that.

House is the story of a house. When it begins, a young upper-middle
class family in the collegiate Arcadian hamlet of Amherst,
Massachusetts wants to build a house. They hire an architect. They hire
a builder. The builder builds the house. In the end, the family – the
Souweines – moves into the house. The Souweines are happy with their
new house, and the book ends. The real story of House is the simmering
clash of class resentments, latent anger and personality that forms a
trans-mundane three way conflict between the Souweines, their architect
and the builders.

Kidder’s talent lays in dredging the depths of his (real) characters
and bringing up subtle internal and external antagonisms that create
the real drama real people (even boring ones) really live everyday.
Even other prime nonfiction stylists, granddad included, would likely
be much more ham-fisted about it. Kidder’s talent, tragically, is
inextricable from those qualities which can make House (and lots of
nonfiction, it’s a premise thing really) a tedious read. Ultimately,
the reality in Kidder’s reality-literature can’t have the gravity of
reality sculpted for fiction plots. Unless he were to deal with, oh, a
murder, the travails of an international drug kingpin, or some kind of
spy-thriller type story – all the subtle conflict in the world can’t
compete with a made-up scenario in which the characters actually had
something to lose over the course of the narrative. Ultimately, Kidder
does a great job seeing conflict where others might overlook it, and
making those sublimated resentments breath fresh air – but, again,
ultimately, all those sublimated resentments give rise to a series of
arguments between the Souweines and their contractors over who’ll foot
the $900 for a set of stairs.

That, along with the excursions into construction history Kidder takes
and the symbolism he hints at, will be enough to hold some people’s
attention; but not everyone’s.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka is the champion of the Humanities. He is the reason
why the Humanities must be preserved, for both the sheer delight in his
deceptively shallow prose and for his demonstration of the ability of
fiction to impart truths and ask questions which may be impossible to
articulate in any straightforward or ‘serious’ manner. The very thing
which is continually under question for any reader of Kafka is the
nagging belief that there is something at work in his writing,
operating behind the scenes, which is never announced nor proclaimed by
Kafka himself. Is it possible that he is just ‘telling us a story’,
giving us some simple prose to waste away a few boring hours, and not
demanding anything of us other than the most basic ability to read? My
belief is that only a moron could arrive at such a conclusion, but if
pressed for definitive proof, I confess that I may indeed stumble and
begin talking out of my anus.

The only reason that I can come up with as to why Kafka is so
mysterious a writer is by way of contrast with another writer whose
name is not uncommonly associated with Kafka’s — Albert Camus (and the
existentialist movement in general). In Camus, be it The Outsider, The Plague, or The Fall,
there is no doubt that he is addressing The Big Themes. He practically
yells out to the reader that he is dealing with questions of the most
utmost importance: The death of God, Man’s response to an Absurd
universe, the grounds of political action in a valueless world, etc,
etc. There can be no mistaking the ‘themes’ of Camus. In contrast,
Kafka, and whatever ‘themes’ he is trying to present, only emerge in
the mind of the reader gradually, sometimes even hesitantly. The
experience of reading his work can make one suspicious of one’s own
schizophrenia — always trying to read between the lines, placing
perhaps undue importance upon certain apparently insignificant events,
seeing continuities and connections between seemingly disparate and
unrelated situations. Another major contrast that can be drawn with
Camus is that it is possible to interpret some of Kafka’s works as
addressing the very same themes that Camus is dealing with, but without
any of Camus’ certitude – the incredulity of belief in the
transcendent, the abstract awareness that there is nothing which lies
beyond the veil of appearance, and the ridiculous pursuit of such
fantasies when the possibility of success has been curtailed at the
very outset. It is indeed possible to understand Kafka through the
filters of such themes, but there is at least the space for lingering
doubt in the mind of the reader that perhaps Kafka, unlike Camus, is
doing none of these things.

Turning to The Trial, we have what is perhaps the only
really ‘complete’ novel that Kafka ever wrote. As some of you may know,
the notorious ‘ending’ of The Castle was the beginning of another
sentence. The fact that that book did not ‘end’ in a conventional
sense, at least for me, does not even register as a negative. I mention
the relative ‘completeness’ of The Trial because it seems that if one were recommend a novel by Kafka to the uninitiated, The Trial
would be the best one to begin with; only after this novel, I think,
would my remarks about the fact of the ‘incomplete’ nature of The Castle be understandable. Now although there are significant overlaps in both the structure and the mood of the two books, The Trial
is perhaps the less abstract of the two. This is partly due to its
‘completeness’, but it is also due to the setting of the narrative
within the political-legal system of the world of the novel. At least
on the surface, the characters inhabit a world of domesticity, habits,
streets and buildings, familiar structures and the reliable
predictability of everyday life. Despite the fact that the novel begins
with the protagonist, Joseph K., being arrested by agents of the Law
and subjected to an unusual interrogation, these activities are still
taking place in a familiar environment. In The Castle, however,
the protagonist (just called ‘K’) is a foreigner to the snowbound
village and cannot rely upon any of his usual devices to help himself.
This becomes true of The Trial once the novel progresses, where
K. is forced to enter into strange and claustrophobic hideaways,
apartments and offices, but these new and unfamiliar locales are only
arrived at as a result of K’s investigations. Once he had been shocked
out of his previous life of complacency and narrow-minded
industriousness by the event of his arrest, the mission to uncover and
reveal the truth of his case and the nature of the accusation that has
been leveled against him requires him to enter into the world beneath
the surface of his previous life.

In the tradition of mystery novels, The Trial is
structured around the discovery or revelation of something and the
resultant process of unraveling the multiple layers that have been
erected around the truth behind the initial revelation. In standard
murder-mystery novels, the discovery of a murder leads the protagonist
to the gradual discovery of the truth of the case through the
successive uncovering and sorting together of the partial clues that
are accumulated along the way. The endings of such novels are almost
invariably centred upon the total, unifying vision of the protagonist
– through their eyes and with the sophistication of their intellect
they are able to link all of the preceding clues into a grand schema
representing the truth of the crime. No loose ends, not a single thread
remains left over. The Trial, however, does not begin with the
discovery of a crime or even with an implicit claim that a crime has
been committed. No, the event that triggers this mystery novel is the
event of the arrest itself. K is unable to determine what he is being arrested for, only that he is
being arrested and presumably accused as well. This reversal of the
standard model of the mystery genre becomes the one unifying theme of
the narrative, for K’s subsequent attempts to learn more about his case
lead him into even deeper and darker regions of his world. K’s
steadfast refusal to accept the accusation leveled against him by the
agents of the Law is the motivating factor behind his quest to discover
the truth.

The other most obvious reversal of the standard formula of the
mystery genre lies in the progress that K. makes through the novel.
Adopting the role of the investigator and the seeker of the truth of
his case, the progression through the different layers and facades of
the legal system does not lead towards any satisfying grand vision;
there are no epiphanies, no moments of great insight, and no sense of
even the possibility of such ‘closure’. The various people that he
encounters in the hidden recesses of this underworld of the Law –
ranging from legal advocates, experienced assistants, knowledgeable
women, portrait artists, and other accused individuals — all seem to
be able to offer K. some small nugget of information, some piece of
purportedly valuable and hard-worn advice, and through the application
of this acquired information, we readers are led into thinking that
this will make a difference for K’s case. But lest you think Kafka is
going to let us have anything of the sort, rest assured that the clues
don’t fit together, the advice does not hold any hope of acquittal, and
the disparate mass of partial observations, slanted perspectives and
inconclusive testimonies do not in any way provide a solid foundation
upon which K. can make any decisions.

One of the interpretations which are offered of this
anti-mystery mystery novel is that Kafka was offering us a glimpse of
the nature of the as-yet dormant totalitarianism that was to sweep
across Europe in the years after his death in 1924. There is a case to
be made for this view, but it rests upon an overly literal analysis of
the novel. Such an interpretation is the most obvious one to draw from
the novel. The first thing that could be pointed to in response to this
interpretation is that there is no evidence to suggest that the path of
K. was disrupted by any specific malevolent agency which was
intentionally thwarting K’s attempts to the learn the truth of his
case. What I mean here is that during the course of the novel the
impression develops that no one knows the truth in its totality. Yes,
there are those who are on the ‘inside’ of the Law who could be said to
know more about the operations of things than K. does, but like K.,
they are only privy to what they themselves experience from their own
narrow, specialized and inevitably partial perspectives.

The first evidence of this comes from the first agents that K.
encounters on the first morning: when pressed to answer questions
regarding K’s case and the nature of the accusation for which he has
been arrested, the invariable response is a confession of ignorance,
dutiful ignorance (‘These gentlemen and I are of minor importance to
your case, indeed we know almost nothing about it…You are under arrest,
that’s true, I don’t know more than that.’). If this ignorance, or more
precisely, if this partial understanding was merely a version of these
agents being lackeys of the State (‘We are on a need-to-know basis’,
etc.), then there may in fact be some substance to the totalitarian
interpretation. However, with each new encounter that K. has further
within the workings of the Law, the partial understanding and
comprehension of the operations of the Law by these other agents and
witnesses becomes the defining feature of all involved. No one is in a
position to provide a grand summary of all that is involved in K’s
case. If it were a vision of the madness of totalitarianism and
unchecked bureaucracy, then this would at least be some sort of
explanation and would hold out hope for an almost Oprah-like sentiment
of ‘closure’ (but some ground could possibly be gained by a comparison
between this novel and the madness documented in The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn). It is probably unnecessary to point out that there are other aspects of The Trial which do not fit so easily within this interpretation.

Another common perception of Kafka’s writings was expressed in Orson Welles’ 1962 screen adaptation of The Trial,
where at the beginning Welles’ voiceover tells us something to effect
that ‘Kafka has given us a vision of a nightmare’ or something like
that (I don’t remember exactly, so don’t shoot me). The idea that Kafka
writes surreal, nightmare visions of a horrifying world is another
general response to his work, and in short stories such as Metamorphosis,
there is an undeniable surrealism. However, like with the political
interpretation of his work, it seems to me that once again Kafka is
being pigeon-holed in a way that leaves many other residual themes
unresolved, in particular, the shared themes of both The Trial and The Castle
– the absence of any finality, the sense of the ominous presence of
inhuman forces lurking behind every corner, the ultimate futility of
human plans and the recurrent search for the perpetually absent
Transcendent. These themes can be dug out of the two novels, and this
links him up with the existentialists, but the lack of explicit
meditation upon these ideas, only the faintest allusion to them,
prevents him from being completely identified with the existentialists.
Also, by thinking of the novel as either a surrealist nightmare or as
an examination of totalitarianism, this can serve to undermine the
reader’s direct involvement in the novel. If Kafka were dealing with
political questions of the kind just outlined, for example, then the
possibility that he is telling us something about all of our situations is foreclosed. Indeed, the notorious French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made use of The Trial
as a model of the operation of authority and the law, and presumably
this implies that in some sense, we are all in K’s position.

So there we have it: Kafka is a poet of political terror,
Kafka is a surrealist who offers us glimpses of nightmares, Kafka
telling us the truth of our relation to law and authority, and Kafka as
an existentialist warning us of the futility of human hopes and
admonishing us for chasing illusions. There is something to all of
these charges, though none can claim to fully own Kafka. When I began
this little survey of one of the works of Herr Franz I claimed that
Kafka was the champion of the Humanities. I reaffirm my claim because
only in the world of the Humanities are such ambiguities not symptoms
of failure or of sloppy work, but of the ever-present duty to
continually re-attend those things that we slide over without ever
pausing to consider. In the case of The Trial, if questions
about the nature of justice, the nature of authority, of living without
the hope of eventual redemption, and the futility of pursuing the
Transcendent at a cost to the present are left lingering in your mind
long after reading Herr Franz, then his work here is done. As any
thinking person knows (or should know), disagreement over any
proposed answers to such questions are the signs of the health of a
culture, not its ‘decline’, and it is in this space that the Humanities
exists and prospers. When this space is sold off piece by piece and
there is no public space left for ambiguities, we are all fucked. Read The Trial and learn to love the lack of ‘closure’.

THE HAUNTED MANSION

When I first heard they were making The Haunted Mansion into a movie, I was horrified. Not surprised necessarily, but horrified all the same.

This movie is a perfect example of what I like to call, “The Hollywood
Regurgitron”. The same ideas, barfed up over and over again, slopped
onto different plates, and shoved down your throat with a little parsley
on top.

Until recent years, the most prolific vomit has come by way of
television, which busily spins the thinnest of concepts into
franchises. Saturday Night Live is a big offender, pushing out such dry
turds as The Coneheads, Ladies Man and A Night at the Roxbury. But then
the vomit wagon came full circle, and movie producers turned television
shows like The Brady Bunch and Starsky & Hutch into film.

Now however, we have reached a new low. Anything at Disneyland can be a
movie.

It started, of course, with Pirates of the Caribbean, which did well.
Buoyed by their success, Disney launched headlong into this new genre,
and we can expect to see Restroom, The Movie shortly. This will be
followed by The Incredible Churro Cart, and Shit, I left My Purse on
the Teacups.

The very first thing you see when this movie starts is a title card that
read, Beware Foolish Mortals. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The opening credit sequence could be the most interesting part of the
film, particularly since Eddie Murphy isn’t in it. It’s all shot in the
mansion during a masquerade party, giving it an Eyes Wide Shut sort of
feel. That gave me a little hope, since I thought there might be some
sort of kinky sex scene coming. Unfortunately, we settle into something
more disturbing; an Eddie Murphy movie worse than Pluto Nash.

Eddie Murphy plays himself again in this film, only this time he’s
calling himself Jim Evers. Jim is a hungry real estate salesman, and
like Mr. Murphy himself, he takes on all the wrong projects just for the
money.

After missing his anniversary, he takes his wife and kids on a trip to
the lake to make it up to them. But first, they have to make a “20 minute
stop” to see an old house he’s been asked to list.

Of course, we’re all shocked when the locked gate opens by itself, and
the creepy butler pressures them into staying for dinner. Equally
shocking is the sudden storm that floods the roads, forcing the family
to stay for the night. Man. Didn’t see that coming.

It was at this point that I officially checked out of the film. Not so
much because it was boring and not funny, but there were continuity
problems that distracted me from hating the movie on its own merits.

• Why, if the family was going to the lake, were mom and dad wearing
  suits?
• Why, if the butler was not expecting the entire family, did he already
  have enough place settings for everyone?
• Why didn’t they bring the bags in from the car when they decided to stay
  the night?
• Why is Michael Eisner still in charge of Disney?

I was brought back into the action when Eddie Murphy accidentally tips
the head of a bust in the study, opening a secret passage. He walks
into the room and the doors slam behind him, locking him in (though
unfortunately, not for the remainder of the film).

This begins the most annoying part of the film for me; Mr. Murphy’s
scary trek through the Haunted Mansion. This sequence was obviously
shot inside the ride, so we’re treated the same landscape we’ve seen
a million times. I half expected to see fat tourists in Bermuda
shorts, eating carnation ice cream bars in Mickey Mouse hats.

At one point, he runs into Jennifer Tilly as Madam Leota, looking a lot
like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. She sets the room spinning, and
suspends him in the air. As he grips the chair and attempts to look
frightened, she intones, “You must first gain new sight”. Eddie replies,
“I must first gain new underwear”. Laugh? I thought I’d never start.

When he gets out of the room, he wanders the hallways looking for the
plot. At one point, he looks in a mirror, and sees a dead man. I’m sure
that’s what his agent sees, too.

This goes on like this for what feels like several hours. Eddie has to
fight off corpses to find a key to unlock the mystery of the house,
which is not such a big mystery really, since the entire thing is played
out in the opening credit sequence.

I can’t tell you much more, because I too was led on a strange journey
in my house. I found myself sitting in another room, eating low-carb
ice cream and smoking a cigarette.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the film came as Eddie Murphy’s young
son tried to persuade him to help the ghosts out.

“Dad”, he pleads, “we have to help them”.
“You can’t help the dead,” Eddie replies. “They’re beyond help”.

Regardless if the above applies to Murphy or Disney, truer words were never spoken.

Review Posted: 6.26.04

For more embarrasing photos of April Winchell, check out her site — http://www.aprilwinchell.com/

Written and Directed by Robert Rodriguez

Starring Short People

When I was four or five I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and I must say I was shocked and scared by the story. It was fun, but somewhat creepy and it actually stirred emotion while keeping me entertained. The thing is, I watch the movie now and it brings me right back to the first time I saw it. Yeah, it a movie for kids, but it doesn’t make assumptions that kids only want to watch television type entertainment.

The same goes for teen movies. If kids and teens are assumed to be morons, how can they ever get out of this rut? Last summer I taught a filmmaking class to a day camp class of 10 through 12 year olds. I showed them El Mariachi, they loved it. Sure it’s probably a little more violent than what their parents expect, but I just thought of big fat Agustus Gloop getting sucked up the chocolate pipe to an uncertain death I felt these kids could handle it.

Anyhow, they loved it, even though it had no special effects, looked grainy and they had to read subtitles. So, the question is, if a talented director like Rodriguez can make a film like El Mariachi, which is really corny, yet loveable why does his big budget “kids movie” have to fall so freaking flat? This is just a live animation cartoon, there are a few good gags, but they don’t make up for the lack of personality displayed. It’s the same old action corn action and it lacks any build of emotion that is needed to make good suspense. Be careful, don;t wanna lose anyones 10 second attention span now.

I’ll blame the studios on this one. The reason is not because kids want to be subject to condescending films, but their stupid parents will get very upset if their kids can follow a movie that they can’t. If the parents feel threatened by a film their kids like, it could be a problem at the box office.

The fact is, every “kids” movie is an instant cash machine in these days of latch key kids and Ritalin. Why not make it really good as well. So, take the kids to see Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings. At least when they get older they’ll watch it again on another level and not feel robbed of an intelligent childhood.

DVD Extras

Nothing ‘cept glitzy menus, sort of like the whole film.

Ruthless Ratings:

• Overall: 3
• Acting: 2
• Direction: 5
• Story: 3 (at least it resorts to some bathroom humor)
• Casting: 5
• Rewatchability: 0

Ruthless Special Ratings:

• Number of times someone drew a gun : 0
• Number of times I drew a gun: 2
• Number of times I wondered why the little girl changed into a tiny tank top: 30
• Number of times I thought about how bad my eyes are getting after I realized it was just a 2 tone tan on the bottom shirt: 5
• Number of times I wished Cheech Marin had more screen time: 90 (every freakin minutes of the movie)
• Number of times I assured myself it was still better than The Faculty : 10

FOX

What do you get when you cross an irate, old Briton with a room full of young, desperate, competing teeny boppers? Judging by American Idol, Hell’s Kitchen and now, So You Think You Can Dance, Fox’s answer to that question is, “entertainment.” And if “entertainment” is the kind of thing that can leave me with the sincere desire to gouge my eyes out and sever my inner ears in order to ensure that I am not subjected to it more than once, then they are right. Hey, I like Simon Cowell. His ability to reduce effeminate young narcissists to tears by simply opening his mouth and being honest was the one redeeming quality of American Idol that had me tuning in once or twice per season. But given the population’s general aversion to his style, I sure as hell didn’t expect the proliferation of Cowell-clones on every new show created by Fox. If this ominous trend is any indication, we can soon to expect a host of shows incorporating a superfluous crabby British character in an attempt to boost ratings. And if Ryan Seacrest isn’t involved, hell, it might work. Er, on second though, no it won’t.

Here is the scoop on So you Think You Can Dance: the only episode worth watching is the first one. Like American Idol, the show begins with a parade of dilettantes, hacks and mega-untalented loser dorks who have somehow developed the belief that they have talent. Gobs of it. They go on stage showing off their “skills” and hilarity ensues. But once they are weeded out, the show goes from funny to serious, and I have a hard time caring about a competition involving a group of self-important amateurs.

The list of positive qualities this show possesses was much, much shorter than the list of negative qualities, so being the economical columnist that I am — oh fuck it, I’m lazy — I decided to go with the short list. No one thought I could do it, but here we go — positive qualities of So You Think You Can Dance:

• There is no Randy Jackson to say, “You go, Dawg” every single time a contestant manages to wipe his own ass. Instead, he has been replaced with a judge who looks like the British Quentin Tarantino, except he doesn‘t talk everyone to death.
• There is no Paula Abdul to pretend she knows what the hell she is talking about when it comes to talent. Whether she was mothering the contestants, or doing the nasty thing with them, she had no place on American Idol. The token female judge who replaces her is actually a bit harsh, as she should be given the talent pool of morons on stage [Ed Note: Wouldn't it have been much more economical to have said, "There's no Randy Jackson; there's no Paula Abdul?"].
• The main judge (Nigel Lythgoe, the executive producer of American Idol) is mean-spirited, harsh, confrontational, egotistical; in other words, all the virtues I admire in a human being. He is OK but not as funny as Cowell — his jokes can border on the lame (”I’ve seen better spins on a washing machine”) Of course, with these three judges, all white and from England, the panel is about as diverse as a Klan meeting.
• There is no Ryan Seacrest. Need I explain further? He has been replaced by a Latina (Lauren Sanchez) with an unassuming personality. I barely notice her when she comes and goes on screen — always a positive quality.

If American Idol is any indication, So You Think You Can Dance will be another lesson in democracy, namely that the American public is too stupid to discern talent from Clay Aiken, who came perilously close to winning in season 2, and still manages to infect the airwaves as the poster child of androgynous people everywhere. People cannot be trusted with the vote, and his success (not to mention the American presidency) is proof that democracy has failed and should be replaced with a Ruthless oligarchy. Oh, the show? It sucks.

It has become cliché to hate MTV. It is just so easy to make fun of the damn channel. It is as easy and pointless as making fun of Creed, but we are just going to have to keep doing that too until I can safely turn on the radio and go 5 minutes without hearing their horrible renditions of plain, boring rock. When they aren’t showing one of the seven music videos currently in rotation (at least half of them featuring that dumbass with a band-aid on his cheek; likely rapping/dueting with some hot-at-the-moment female singer), they are repeating some Real World or award show program yet again, or some self-congratulatory retrospective (sure you gave Adam Sandler his start on Remote Control? what have you done lately?!). [Ed Note: What? They should be shot] And now this- another in an apparently never ending line of annoying MTV reality shows.

During the last few years, with the rise of reality television, I was always surprised MTV never tried to take more credit, having spawned the genre with the Real World ten years ago. Maybe it wasn’t a fad they wanted to take credit for. Maybe they didn’t want to bring attention to their current crop of the Real World and Road Rules, as they had stopped becoming somewhat amusing guilty pleasures and became outright obnoxious and annoying. Then again, I can only reason obnoxious and annoying is what they were going for, because from where else would this show have spawned.

MTV exec: “Well, it appears that our viewer-ship has grown over the years as each cast has become less and less likeable. Also, look around at all those other shows beating us in the ratings. Is there one single person out there on one of those shows you don’t want to kill? I propose we go towards the opposite spectrum of likeability. Any suggestions?”

Employee #1, spilling her latte: “What a about a KKK reality show?”

MTV exec: “I’m Jewish you asshole. Don’t slam the door on the way out.

Employee #2: “Real World Post Office? No one likes them.”

MTV exec: “Naw, too many ex-military types to deal with. What else?”

Employee #3: “Um, I remember in college, everybody in the Greek system was pretty fucking annoying.”

MTV exec: “Genius! We can follow a sorority around. It will be a half hour of bitchiness a week! Sure to be a hit. Now let’s all go watch Carson suck some more cock.”

None of this has addressed the show itself yet, and rightfully so- I have tried to repress any ideas of what actually happened. Also, it is just what you would expect? except bitchier. Sorority pledge #1 won’t talk to drunk sorority girl cause she kissed her boyfriend. Which “she” and “her” and “pledge” and “girl” is who? It doesn’t matter! They are all equally annoying.