The Hollywood Knights has been labeled a virtual copy of American Graffitti, which is a fair accusation in that it is a nostalgia trip through the early sixties with a constant soundtrack seemingly lifted whole from AG. There are important differences, however, as AG is a shallow exercise in milking Boomers for cash (a task Lucas would perfect over the next few decades) that reaches awkwardly for profundity as the young protagonists stumble towards adulthood. Hollywood Knights, on the other hand, uses nostalgia as a frame on which to hang dumb jokes, clever pranks, and a welcome helping of T&A as the Eisenhower 50s yields to the rebellion of the 60s. It never claims to be profound, beyond arrested adolescence screaming its last; maybe you relate to it, or maybe you are one of the fuckheads who despised the idea of peace without honor. Either way, it is more entertaining than its predecessor and is a greater movie by virtue of having better racks, a funner subtext, and a strangely hot Fran Drescher.

On Halloween night in 1965, Tubby’s drive-in is to be torn down solely due to the menace of the gang Hollywood Knights, who terrorize the moral guardians with flaming bags of dogshit on front steps or drive-by moonings. The clear and present danger from this malevolent force is like an amorphous hydra, ever present and ready to retaliate with eggs to the windshield should a compatriat fall. They are everywhere and nowhere at once. The pillars of this society consist of Jack and Jacqueline Friedman who meet with community movers and shakers in Beverly Hills. Their goal is to take down the miscreants in their midst, and they are sure of success as God is on their side. Ms. Friedman is a bit distracted from her mission from God by constantly groping and copulating with her friend Nevans in whatever hallway or car is available. Jack is also the high school prinicpal (or something) who is a source of sputtering rage whenever the Knights intrude on his wholesome plans for the school. When the pep rally is interrupted by gang leader Newbomb Turk’s transcendant version of Volare, or the talent contest is bested by a Knight portraying a one-armed violinist, Jack is apoplectic with helpless rage.

The first and last line of defense against the Knights are police officers Bimbeau and Clark, who are quick to anger and kick ass, usually of the wrong people, and using force for the sake of.  They mirror pretty much any cop you run into who got into the job as an outlet for impulse and anger control problems. More importantly, they represent the face of Nixon’s Law and Order ideology that backs the Silent Majority of the Friedmans. Together they are all-powerful yet impotent, having all the money and enough political connections to demolish a private business for personal reasons. And yet they must stand helplessly and watch as their imagined ideal society falls to pieces despite their zealotry, signified by an offending ass hanging out a window.

Newbomb Turk, as played by Robert Wuhl in the greatest performance of his career (take that however you will) is the spiritual leader of the Knights and his passion for reducing the moral majority to its proper level is equaled only by his imagination for some fucked up gags. It isn’t enough to block the public toilet at the drive-in that Officer Bimbeau is about to use; Newbomb also locks the door, detaches the doorknob, piles the doorway two feet deep with garbage, and plugs the police car’s exhaust to ensure that the cops are at boiling point when they extract themselves from the pile of rotting shit they fell into. Now, that’s being thorough. They anticipate every opportunity to spoil the well-constructed facade that decent society has crafted, all in the name of fun, and to revel in bringing everyone to the same level. As Ms. Friedman gets rogered by her buddy, the Knights are there to ensure it becomes a public event. When high society has a party, the punch is spiked by that most precious of fluids. And the caterers are carefully instructed to drive right across the garden because it will be demolished the next day anyway to make space for the Newbomb Turk Memorial Library.

There are a couple of subplots that seem tossaway until they fit into the larger picture of a nation in transition. Four pledges to the Knights are dropped off naked in the middle of Watts with instructions to 1. carry a spare tire all the way back to Tubby’s, and 2. request in person a song on their favorite radio station. On the way, these honkys manage to bond with some black dudes and score some weed on the way to accomplishing their goal. The hippie generation thus was born. Sort of. The other subplot has Tony Danza and Michelle Pfeiffer reflecting on their imminent divide. She is aspires to be a nude double for actresses who sound less bubbleheaded than her, and he is a drunken bum. This doesn’t go very far, other than highlighting the long term of being a Hollywood Knight, in that old age does not bode well for those talented only in faffing about. Danza’s friend is about to ship out to Vietnam, which is ‘nothing’ to those in the know. As California Dreamin blares from the speakers, he is coming to know fear for the first time. All these things, including the recklessness of youth and the enjoyment of time wasted, is coming to an end.

Theirs is an example of the panic inevitable when one comes to realize that upon growing up, there will be nobody to catch you when you fall. The fucking around and showing up the prudes are victories, but are bittersweet at best. On one hand, it is satisfying to watch the ridiculous policemen fail in spectacular fashion to assert their authority, and the moral guardians get caught mid adulterous coitus in a humiliating spectacle. On the other, even in defeat, these twits still rule the world, and will continue making life miserable for the rest of us. And we either become them, or rebel pointlessly at the bottom of society. Not much of a choice, but we all must make it.

The Slithis is a strange creature, indeed; borne of unchecked seepage from a Venice Beach nuclear power plant and the inbred hillbilly cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, he emerges from a drainage canal early in the A.M. to feast on local denizens. But the charming humanoid monstrosity, who is the most sympathetic character in sight, never fully comes into focus until the third act of Spawn of the Slithis. The masticated dog corpse, discovered by a pair of tykes playing a hilarious game ultra-slow-motion frisbee catch, is but an appetizer for the beast’s man course of derilict homo sapiens. This is a film that is perfectly content to plant its tranquilized ass on the couch and sloooooowly tell the tale of Wayne Connors, a high school journalism teacher, and his profound disillusionment with the current generation of students, who produce the “worst high school newspaper in the nation” under his ever more jaded aegis. Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs for the Baby Boomers reared during the ultra-conservative Eisenhower Era, who have their optimism dashed against the rocks time and time again by the hippie generation. “Teaching’s beginning to be a big turn-off,” he laments to his wife, who is a woman named Jeff, as they leave his sorry campus for their humble Love Shack and a night full of red wine and Quaaludes.

Sporadic Slithis attacks give Wayne a grim new lease on life, giving him the opportunity to use his Los Angeles press card and finagle his way into a string of murder investigations(!?). Since the LA County Coroner must have been stoned on elephant tranquilizers, the Overacting Police Chief declares that the Slithis meals are merely the work of a Mansonian “Satanic Death Cult”. If you’re willing to accept that plot contrivance, you may be functionally retarded. For those who aren’t suffering from severe cognitive impairment, there happens to be a bottled solution that comes in many flavors to suit your particular pleasure. All the actors seem to be drunk or stoned or flying eight miles high, and what’s more, director Steven Traxler’s skewed vision of LA is populated mostly by drunken transients who specifically drink economy-priced red wine. You should probably do the same.

There is an “investigation” carried out by Wayne the high school newspaper editor, wherein he illegally lifts evidence from multiple crime scenes, conveniently left open and unguarded for anyone to walk in, and sends them to his pal “Doctor John” for analysis. Since none of the characters seem to have any sort of background or history, it’s unclear whether the hippie-bearded Doc is a high school science teacher, or just some rogue biologist who spends his free time getting stoned and poring over conspiracy theories.

After a brief period of befuddlement, mandated by the script, the good doctor shows up at Wayne and Jeff’s house one night, unannounced and most likely blitzed out of his hairy gourd, and begins an incredibly insane tale of nuclear waste, stagnant marshes, and radioactive dirt. The Man is trying to play God with his unstable nuclear power plants, nature is becoming polluted, Mother Earth is bleeding, blah blah blah… but then John builds to a kicker:

“It’s one of the most important discoveries in scientific history, and they called this radioactive silt…”

…

“…Slithis.”

How and why Doctor John decided to bombard us with this info overload is a question best left unanswered. What’s more important is the actor’s hilarious, intoxicated delivery of the exposition, and the fact that said info-dump serves no purpose in Wayne’s investigation whatsoever. Sure, it sets up an unexplained scene where Wayne and Jeff go to the igloo-shaped house of a former nuclear scientist, but what comes out of that is just more crap about how Man Shouldn’t Play God. Oh, and a hilarious close-up of the scientist’s “radiation-scarred” visage.

Put as simply as possible, Spawn of the Slithis is about a monster mutated by radioactive silt that comes out at night to feast on society’s undesirables. When it finally decides to become a poor ripoff of Jaws, complete with a hardscrabble crew scraped together and placed on a lonely wooden boat, the narrative is already lying dead in the water and stinking like carp left out in the sun. The film would barely qualify for feature-length if the editing was tighter, and Traxler’s infatuation with his high-speed slow motion camera slows things down even more. There’s one fact that makes it stand out in the overcrowded pool of horrible monster movies, and that’s the basic level of competence behind the scenes, coupled with an earnest desire to make a significant work of art. While there’s no doubt that it fails to achieve any sort of depth, the attempt at subtext is as fascinating as a slow motion train derailment.

Feasting on drunken hobos by night, swimming in irradiated ocean water by day, the Slithis leads a lonesome yet unpretentious lifestyle. His choice of victims leaves plenty up to interpretation: from slum inhabitants to transients to the sexually uninhibited swingers of the Me Generation. The attack scenes are surprisingly gruesome and drawn out, complete with a subjective Slithis-Cam for terrifying split-diopter POV shots. Yet there is a gaping hole in the middle of the story: the monster drops out of sight for a half-hour lacuna while Wayne wanders the city interrogating homeless drunks and charters a boat from a black man named Christopher Columbus, who uses the word “mother” as an all-purpose noun and is obsessed with handshake etiquette. His hobo interrogations lead to a dead end, but Columbus is all too happy to aid Wayne in his thrilling quest to gather specimens from the ocean floor for thorough radiation analysis. There is little to do but bide our time by drinking or otherwise putting yourself in the same mindset as the cast and crew, waiting for the real protagonist to crawl out of the ocean once more.

Once our hero makes his triumphant return, it’s a real doozy. First, a disorienting jump cut puts us in the middle of a bizarre nightclub where patrons make drunken bets on turtle races as an MC provides moronic running commentary. It is in this hideous milieu where libidinous swinger Doug sets sights on virginal vacationer Jennifer, who is 18 but “could pass for 20″. Spirited away by this mustachioed Lothario in his blue Volkswagen Beetle, she all too easily surrenders her humble life story: a lifelong resident of backwoods Suska, North Dakota, Jennifer was just waiting for the day when she would be old enough to jump ship and immerse herself in the bright lights, spinning disco balls, Free Love and free-flowing cocaine of the Big City. And along came her knight in bell-bottoms and leisure suit and dress shirt unbuttoned down to his navel.

Once aboard Doug’s houseboat, the Casanova of Venice Beach lights a couple of candles flanking a B&W framed picture of himself and doles out the obligatory red wine. For the sake of your sanity, please follow suit. As Doug reaches behind the love seat for a switch, our minds are left racing. What hideous contraption could he possibly have hidden in this den of horrors? Lamely, it’s just a power switch for some red lights to provide the “romantic ambience” of a nuclear meltdown. Poor, poor naive little Jennifer thinks she’s reeled in a catch. The awkward, PG rated foreplay commences.

But what’s that? A knocking on the door? Surely it’s just Rex, the friendly neighborhood peeping tom, doing his daily run on Doug’s well-stocked liquor cabinet? Surely nothing could be more important than stealing third base before diving headfirst into the home plate? And yet, and yet… there always remains the possibility of a former hook-up coming to call, and after all, what could be sweeter than parlaying this successful pickup into a threesome? Hoping against hope, Doug ascends the stairs, with Traxler fetishizing his every move with Hitchcockian intensity, then crosses the cabin while bathed in sanguine light, then slicks back his hair, then sloooowly moving for the doorknob, and then

GWAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHNNNNNN

A familiar scaly hand pulls Doug from his haven of moral iniquity and into the harsh realities of life. There is much rejoicing, much spilling of stage blood, and much red-tinted Slithis action. The beast is back, and hungrier than ever! Would it be redundant to highlight, again, how satisfying this sequence becomes?

What ho? The sounds of a lass crying for her dear departed beau, in spite of all the inhuman groaning, bone snapping and flesh rending! What could be sweeter than a virginal North Dakotan for dessert? And yet… we have come to know this couple better than some of us know ourselves, shared their hopes and dreams and lusts and perversions. Paradoxically, we share the beast’s bloodlust and we want to see Jennifer obey Doug’s softly cooed command to “get naked”, which prove to be his last words uttered as a sentient being. Were it not for Jennifer’s promiscuity, she would not even be in this debacle, and were it not for her naivete in crying for a dead lover, the Slithis would not mosey on board Doug’s Love Boat for his second helping.

This is easily the most drawn out monster attack in the film, a tour de force of conflicting moralities, tragically wasted youth, nature’s inhumanity to man, and copious red lighting. As we’re immersed in the color of sin, Traxler further implicates the audience with multiple cuts to the split-diopter Slithis-Cam, lingering on Jennifer’s mortal terror and fragile, writhing form. Then the attack, inevitably, turns into a molestation, recalling the poster depicting our lovely monster with a scantily clad bride cradled in his loving arms: another paradoxical image that recalls the inner torment of the eponymous 40 foot ape of King Kong. The agonizingly drawn out attack is like some first-year film student’s tribute to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom filtered through The Horror of Party Beach. Was the monster once human, or did humans unknowingly create the monster with their unchecked nuclear power plants? Is this sequence brilliant or idiotic? Have I really gone through an entire 12 pack of Schlitz?

We end with a shot that practically oozes depth and meaning and subtext, etc.

The hilarity doesn’t let up at all, when in the next scene Wayne makes a visit to the police station to check in on the mentally unbalanced Stupid Chief, whose acting style recalls Vincent Price on bath salts. Even when he’s serving as the meat in the middle of a Bad Actor Sandwich, doing his business in the background, this nutcase chews scenery with all the gusto of a failed classically trained Shakespearean actor. The hilarity remains on a constant high pretty much throughout the rest of the film.

Now we’re on board the humble S.S. Creation piloted by the one and only Christopher Columbus, as Traxler shamelessly rips off Jaws with all the weird fever-dream logic of Jaws the Revenge. It’s kind of refreshing that nobody discovers some simple household chemical that reduces the Slithis back to his radioactive silt stage, so instead Wayne and Chris must engage the creature in a mano a mano streetfight involving a shotgun and numerous improvised weapons. For those of us rooting for the monster, the ultimate outcome is kind of refreshing; the heroes snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by abiding in the Order of Mother Nature. In other words, Christopher Columbus babbles some jibba-jabba about the infinite possibilities of the ocean, the order of chaos, and the Dismal Tide. And then… well, it’s insane. And the screen goes negative. If you have any theories as to what the last shot signifies, please let us know. If you can make it through without dousing your brain with alcohol, you are either very brave or very stupid.

“Nowhere are Misery, Desperation, and Crime more welcome than here. You, my most loyal subjects, as Louis XIV, my uncle, left you to me, I shall leave you, more numerous still, to Louis XV and his successor. For misery, desperation, and crime are fecund. Enter, and let joy reign supreme!”

If you want to examine the decadent insanity possible in the abuse of a monarch’s absolute power, you could craft a thoughtful and brutal treatise on the subject, or you could revel in the insanity and have as much fun as the monarch. The director can be as mercurial as a king, and in that sense, Bertrand Tavernier has the best of both worlds in his luminously batshit Let Joy Reign Supreme. France in 1719 was in decline after the successful rule of Louis XIV, with the largest population in Europe in the midst of unrest, rising poverty, and widespread violence with frequent conscription of commoners to colonize Louisiana. Phillipe d’Orleans is the Regent, having denied the ascendancy of the king after annulling the will of the mouldering Louis XIV. He was famously an atheist and a libertine, concerned with living the high life over the affairs of state. He denounced censorship and decreased taxation, promoting public schooling while reveling in the arts. The ashes of this spoiled kingdom, as well as that of Louis XV, concealed the smoldering coals of the coming Revolution. Though Let Joy Reign Supreme does traffic in philosophy, it is content with being as bugnuts as it is brilliant.

With the sumptuous portrayal of the Regent’s court of excess, it is cynical, anarchic, and darkly hilarious. Surreal elements abound with a sardonic sense of humor, one feels an attitude that nothing in life or death is of any worth; except to feel alive. Politics is stripped bare to its grounding in parasitism and avarice, while the opposition is made up of the most pathetic revolutionary this side of Life of Brian. There may be no central point to be gleaned from this work apart from gaining a sense of how chaotic the march of history can be, even in retrospect. This movie is not to be understood, but rather experienced. It washes over you, and afterwards you wonder what the fuck happened as you straighten up the room. To set the pace in the opening scene, a priest performs a ceremony wherein field mice are excommunicated, while a nearby pedophile attempts to kidnap two little girls. Then things get strange.

Phillipe is depressed, having witnessed the death of his favored daughter, who was as mad as she was promiscuous. The autopsy examines the body noting significant brain damage and a pregnancy (multiple births likely caused her demise), and the physicians present declare she died of gluttony. Phillipe felt that shitty doctors were the cause, but never mind. Thus distracted, the Marquis de Pontcallec hatched a conspiracy with his fellow nobles to topple the Regent by inviting Spain to use its coast to land an invading army. His land of Brittany was wracked by starvation, and so he had little funding for visiting brothels, let alone gathering an army. Boasting a regular force of thousands (in actuality only three), he failed to get support from anyone other than the Spanish army, mostly because they were kind of expecting to support an army. Instead, it was only Pontcallec, proudly armed with his fearsome weapon, the mistoufle. This was a pistol tied to a pitchfork, and was as effective as it sounds. Jean-Pierre Marielle plays Pontcallec as an amiable oaf, defiantly inscribing letter after letter to the Regent, often with subsequent corrections following a failed threat.

Phillipe Noiret plays the Regent as oddly detached, only distantly concerned with the future of his seat while surrounded by enemies. He despises the church and its hypocrisies, of the clergy’s enthusiastic culling of Prostestants, and of its profligate corruption. As one priest claims the Church is apolitical, Phillipe dryly notes that their sales of arms to Native Americans who convert to Christianity is inherently political. Still, he is no angel, and gleefully takes part in the corruption. His primary aspiration is to secure another underage girl to his harem, preferably if they are into menage a quinze.

His chief advisor is Abbe Dubois, a fellow atheist and pimp who aspires to be mitered an Archbishop. It is a practical desire – “I am a born pagan, but an Archbishop is untouchable.” He has no care for the Regent, hoping only to get the appointment before his boss dies mid-orgy, and is the source of most of the court intrigues. Fortunately, no time spent in exposition is wasted – DuBois explains his ambitions to a whore with her ankles wrapped around his head. He is a cackling twit who is too bent to be labeled a madman – who would want to appear principled in this mess? In any case, the Church endorses his mitre, and in exchange the Regent will not force the Church to sell land to the poor at a price they can afford. A plan more pernicious even than public schools. Everything about the court is rotten, from royal family who extort Phillipe for bribes to the local enforcers who round up the whores and homeless for deportation to the Americas. In one scene that amuses the fetid souls among us, a priest performs marriage rites for a crowd of scores of such people, so any fucking on board the ship has the consent of God. Soldiers and officials alike are either bribed or duped easily; this is anarchy with a bureaucracy.

The real entertainment here are the bizarre setpieces that serve to highlight ignorance and decadence in the most hilarious possible way.

- Phillipe is too busy to discuss the conspiracy against him because porn slide show.
- Pontcallec hides in a convent, leading him to hide in a tub with a hot nude lady of the cloth while soldiers storm the building knocking nuns over like bowling pins.
- The vaunted military of France demonstrates its new cannon by missing a carriage with shots at point blank range while Phillipe gropes one of his hoes. The future King Louis XV whines for the carriage to contain a condemned man, else this is no fun.
- There is a Piss Boy. One of the attendants at the court walks around with a pail.  I thought that bit from History of the World was a joke.
- Check out the banquet centerpiece.

The denouement is as bizarre as the rest, as a commoner is killed in an act of negligence, sparking an event that heralds the coming Revolution. A simmering anger from the misrule of the Regent is given release, and though the anger is directed at the elite, it is unfocused and not necessarily purposeful. This is how political change occurs, uncontrollable, amorphous, impossible to predict and driven by unseen factors. Though the masses can be manipulated, they cannot be denied when they hunger. Perhaps that illuminating exchange seems tacked on, as just about anything would when attached to a story this fucked. It does lend a feel of consequence, a word utterly alien to anyone holding power. The masses will rise against tyranny, though not necessarily in the name of justice, or in the name of anything other than anger and the driving force of the herd. In the meantime, enjoy the delirium as history marches past us, occasionally clothed, usually indifferent, and without a shred of decency or mercy.

Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect Jon Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens to live up to its nutty high concept, but as the flaccid, soulless, festering end product stands now, it’s a testament to a complete waste of limitless potential and a rock-solid cast, not to mention 165 million dollars. That obscene budget doesn’t factor in the costs of a supersaturation ad campaign or all the overtime paid to the overworked, sleep deprived ILM techies slaving away at computer consoles running the latest version of Maya, rendering photorealistic, goopy CGI extraterrestrials for months on end in order to meet an impossible deadline. While the film convincingly masquerades as a generic Western for the first reel and a half, CGI overload soon kicks in, ever escalating toward a migraine-inducing, incomprehensible, clangorous third act filled with plot conveniences, deus-ex-machina rescues, cringeworthy attempts at humor, and laughably half-assed grasping at some kind of underlying moral to the whole agonizing mess. What else would you expect from the brain trust behind the Transformers trilogy and the insipid Iron Man saga? At the same time it is kind of fascinating as a singular piece of cultural detritus, an inexplicable fusion of 1970s New Hollywood cynicism with the mind-numbing spectacle of today.

We start conventionally enough with Daniel Craig, the mysterious rugged stranger and requisite Man with No Name, awakening in the desert with amnesia, a nonfatal thorax wound, and a bizarre electronic doodad affixed to his wrist. After dispatching a trio of filthy scalphunters, he makes his way to the ironically named cookie-cutter hamlet of Absolution, and within minutes is getting some topnotch frontier surgery from drunken doctor/priest Clancy Brown, which is interrupted by gunfire from the official Town Miscreant, a delightfully weaselly Paul Dano. Turns out he’s been extorting booze from meek barkeep Sam Rockwell by bullying-by-proxy with threats of retribution from his Paw, a local livestock baron, Civil War veteran and all-purpose surly rich asshole named Dollarhyde (surely a reference to the psychotic Tooth Fairy from Red Dragon). If you’re keeping count of all the Western cliches, you’ve already used up all ten of your fingers by now and are starting to count with your toes; keep in mind we aren’t even into the second reel yet.

Right on schedule, Craig asserts his dominance and disables a petulant Dano without uncrossing his arms, enabling the grizzled yet kindly town Sheriff (a nigh-unrecognizable Keith Carradine) to throw the shrimp into lockup. But wouldn’t you know it, turns out our ostensible hero is a wanted outlaw named Jake Lonergan, boasting a list of offenses longer than this film’s credits. Needless to say, our protagonist barely has enough time to knock back a couple complementary shots of whiskey, and reject the rather aggressive advances of fair maiden Olivia Wilde (née Cockburn) before Carradine and his deputies stride in and get manhandled by the hesitantly badass hero. Apropos enough, since he rejects the lady’s advances for no reason other than his boilerplate Reluctant Protagonist Beat Sheet demands it, she knocks him out with the butt of a long rifle for no reason other than the necessity of the Act 2 Plot Point.

Rounding out the roster of Western stock characters is Harrison Ford as the one-dimensional Dollarhyde; though his dramatic introduction is meant to be both a knowing wink at the audience and a surprise reveal, the shock of seeing Ford’s craggy visage and hearing his snarling gravelly voice will be spoiled considerably by anyone who’s been exposed to the film’s relentless ad campaign. Ford is introduced during a very strange, brutal sequence in which he tortures a a helpless flunky by stretching him between two opposite-facing horses, while accusing him of “blowing up my cattle”; natch, he refuses to believe the flunky’s truthful assertion that aliens fired an explosive pulse at him and his fellow cowhands, and fixates on the cockamamie idea that the flunky somehow gets off on exploding his boss’s livestock (and fellow cowhands).

Dollarhyde’s fixing to re-enact a certain scene from The Hitcher when he gets word that Dano’s in the pokey; instead of pulling him in twain, he cuts one of the ropes and sends the lead horse away at full gallop, presumably dragging the flunky over miles of rough terrain to a prolonged, painful demise. Of course the screenplay by Michael Bay whores Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci doesn’t bother to delve into Dollarhyde’s terrifying character; he’s a stick figure there solely to drive the miserable plot forward. He doesn’t even have time to develop as an antagonist because soon, oh so very soon, the horseshit’s about to hit the cotton gin fan.

Let’s start by spoiling the obvious: Those Fucking Aliens.

Who are they? What are they? Where did they come from? Even when everything’s explained in a boring, massive, unimaginative and interminable exposition dump, the answers to these basic questions are still frustratingly oblique. One thing we do know beyond the shadow of a doubt is that they time all their attacks with clockwork precision. No sooner than Ford and his torch-bearing army of thugs are confronting mellow, peace-loving Sheriff Carradine as he loads the two shackled prisoners into the stagecoach, and the plot is threatening to become interesting, those damned aliens show up and begin decimating the Greater Absolution Metropolitan Area. Then, in the first of many lazy plot conveniences, Lonergan’s mechanical wrist bracelet begins whirring and beeping and blooping and projecting holographic readouts; for some reason Craig acts stoic and kind of bored when this magical plot device begins doing its witchcraft. Within seconds he’s blasted himself out of the stage, broken Dano’s arm, and shot down an alien spacecraft in as blase a manner as humanly possible; meanwhile all manner of townsfolk are being lassoed by these ships and yanked violently into the air, turning them into CGI stunt doubles in the blink of an eye.

Presumably because it would involve logical leaps too extreme for even this script to solve with some psuedo-scientific quasi-mystical Vietnam-was-a-just-war the remaining townsfolk are guided to the aliens’ not-so-discreet headquarters by the pilot of the shot-down spacecraft, who somehow managed to transport him/her/itself from the wreckage and flee the battlefield, leaving behind a trail of slime and comically large footprints. There isn’t even an attempt at explaining how this happens, it simply happens because the almighty Plot must be driven forward with as little downtime as possible. Anyone with half a brain can surmise, from here, where the alien track will lead the posse of survivors, who will lead this posse, the dynamics among all the posse members, and the order in which they will be picked off for the obligatory attempts at pathos.

It’s a shame that talented character actors like Clancy Brown and Sam Rockwell have to waste their formidable talents delivering exposition to a sleeping theatre. There is an early scene, clearly improvised, where the two riff off each other hilariously; a much better movie could have been made about these two clowns trying to defeat the alien menace. The lush anamorphic photography of Matthew Libatique starts off agreeably vivid and auburn-tinted, then gets progressively drearier and browner until we wind up in murky Heaven’s Gate territory.

So why do the evil E.T.’s abduct the humans? Because the Plot demands it. Because it would have been way too easy for the humans to avoid the conflict altogether by forming a wagon train and skedaddling Eastward. As we learn after a head-splittingly retarded plot contrivance, which facilitates the aforesaid Massive Exposition Dump (a scene involving a gaggle of Native American extras straight out of Central Casting, a scenery-gobbling Harrison Ford and a bowl full of peyote extract), these unnamed, personality-free extraterrestrial evildoers are little more than interstellar gold prospectors dissecting Earthlings as a kind of hobby, sort of, I guess. Like much of their motivation, save for the gold mining bullshit, it’s left entirely to the imagination and based entirely on cliches. In other words, they’re no more well-rounded than the cast of humans. At least Kurtzman and Orci are consistent in their laziness.

Favreau, too, is becoming increasingly consistent with his soulless, generic, hyper-commercial mass-market spectacle flicks; Iron Man was the death knell for this once promising indie filmmaker, but that wasteful, pointless project was Bergman-level compared to the completely whitewashed studio slickness of Cowboys and Aliens. Whereas Iron Man was consistently hijacked by a maniacal, constantly improvising Robert Downey Jr. and stood out from the homogeneous pack of superhero garbage as a result, Cowboys is entirely subservient to a deadening, formulaic screenplay that leaves precious little breathing room for characterization and a series of monotonous CGI action sequences that are every bit as soporific and inscrutable as John Ford’s action was fiery, urgent, and immaculately choreographed. He barely moves his camera, favoring boring static shots edited to a sluggish, logy rhythm. The prosaic, unmemorable, entirely generic and un-Western-like score by Harry Gregson-Williams does no favors for the film’s energy either.

By the time we lumber to the conclusion, involving alien architecture inspired by ideas lifted from H.R. Giger’s rubbish bin, more plot conveniences courtesy of the Magical Alien Bracelet, and the laughable reveal of the film’s ultimate (and only) antagonist, what little spark the film had has long since dimmed, Favreau is just feebly trying to end the damn thing, and worst of all, it shows. There’s no passion behind the scenes, no real purpose or ultimate message or creativity in sight. After a jaw-droppingly lame action beat consisting of Craig firing his Magic Bracelet into a tunnel, gorily decimating wave after wave of humanoid goopy Space Invaders with no apparent effort or strategy involved, the evil alien doctor, who I’ll christen “Doctor Scarface”, shows up and menaces our hero for a good minute or two before a deus-ex-machina cavalry rescue reduces Scarface to a pile of CGI spunk. Then there’s yet another dramatic suicide bombing drenched in pathetic greater-good nonsense (though the film would have been genuinely subversive had the Preacher survived and claimed God was going to reward him in Paradise before blowing himself to smithereens), which is starting to become kind of a disturbing trend in Hollywood movies oriented toward Westernized Christian audiences.

The cynicism mentioned earlier isn’t so much contained within the barebones screenplay as it is within the formulaic, lockstep construction of the film itself. The purpose of Cowboys and Aliens isn’t to enlighten or even subvert its mashed-up genres. This often happens with strange genre hybrids – neither genre is given its due and the ultimate product is a formless mess. This was a product to facilitate further merchandising – action figures, tie-in video games, comic books. There is not the slightest attempt to be clever, save for the final scene. The evil capitalist Dollarhyde and his son, who just needed a Close Encounter to bring them down to earth (so to speak) have inherited the town as well as the gold mine established by the extraterrestrial prospectors. Despite having a wrecked spacecraft in the middle of the town square, and a few dozen alien corpses in the desert, their technology hasn’t advanced one iota, and what should be a haven for the world’s scientific minds to contemplate and reverse-engineer inconceivable technology, not to mention examine the origins of organic life, is instead just another boring railroad town. Nobody mentions the aliens after the climactic suicide bombing. The status quo has returned, the bad guys have triumphed and will doubtless continue their legacy of corruption for generations to come, ruling over this town with an iron fist full of blood money. The film implies that the very existence of the aliens has been completely covered up.

As for our protagonist, who let’s not forget is an erstwhile outlaw and murderer, every woman who has dared accept his loving caresses has met a horrible death at the hands of aliens, and his brain chemistry is irrevocably screwed up by a potent combination of alien mind-wiping, PTSD, and alcoholism. Does he stay to become Dollarhyde’s lieutenant in his new reign of terror? Regretfully not, although that would have been an ultimately cynical way to end the picture. Instead he rides off alone to his all-too-inevitable fate as a brain-damaged loner destined for a bleak future as a deranged hermit. The ruthless tycoons win, the men of honor either die for nothing (at least disclosing the existence of the aliens would have validated the horrible deaths of all those Native Americans) or become permanently mind-fucked. Those in the audience will also be mind-fucked in the sense that more and more of their brain cells will rot away with every passing minute of the running time. As Kanbei says at the end of Seven Samurai, “They are the winners. Not us.”

Note: above is not taken from the film. The search for images stopped here.

The Satanic obsidian eyes of Gina Carano are like twin voids reflecting only the tiniest glimmers of light, revealing nothing within but somehow peering back into us like a Nietzchean abyss. She’s indistinguishable from the character she portrays in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, which is an unusual hybrid of his experimental films featuring non-actors (such as Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience) and his star-studded mainstream blockbusters. Here, the guise of a duplicity-wrought espionage yarn riddled with requisite double-crosses and globetrotting is used to examine gender roles in the cinema, with an excess of glib detachment and audience-alienating genre deconstruction.

We are dropped in medias res into a tense yet deceptively mundane encounter in a coffee shop: two former lovers and colleagues in a government-contracted wet works company are reunited after a mission goes pear-shaped. References to previous operations are bandied about where niceties would be normally; oblique mentions of “Barcelona”, “Dublin” and “Paul” hint at the convoluted plot to come, and not a single naturalistic sentence springs from the lips of either Carano (whose robotic line readings are reminiscent of those dreaded automated menus one must navigate over the phone) or sentient beef slab Channing Tatum (who looks Brando-esque in comparison). It’s a strange choice to have a cold opening like this, with mystifying dialogue reminiscent of the train conversation in The Manchurian Candidate and allusions to stuff that only makes sense after the entire convoluted plot has been processed.

More blatant, and involving, is the fluctuating power dynamic: Fridge Largemeat demands Carano “get in [his] car” less than 10 seconds after sitting down at her booth; even after being repeatedly rebuffed he repeats his order, even though he knows that she knows to accept the offer would be nothing short of a death sentence. After failing to intimidate the lady, Splint Chesthair abandons his attempts at dialectic resolution and throws a steaming cup of joe into her face and launches into his very best impression of Ike Turner in the middle of the restaurant. Only when a nearby twerp intervenes is she able to mount Blast Hardcheese, emasculate him by taking away his bulky 9mm automatic, and break his arm for good measure.

The fight scenes in Haywire are down-and-dirty brawls, with every damaging punch, every kick, grapple, head butt, and gouging or bashing with improvised weapons filmed with clinical precision. Not only are these scenes refreshingly brutal (and comprehensible to boot) but they’re also overtly sexual, with entwined limbs, gasping, grunting and thrusting in confined areas with no regard for decorum whatsoever. Carano’s specialty in the Octagon is in submission holds, which proves beneficial during one of several intimate struggles in the film, where she manages to wriggle and twist around to achieve dominant positions with the ease of a serpent and choke her male adversary almost to death with nought save her tree-trunk-like thighs. Xenia Onatopp would be proud.

Said scene occurs after a debasing mission where she is forced to “wear the dress” as one half of a “power couple” attending a social function in Dublin. The other half is the enigmatic “Paul”, played by critical golden boy Michael Fassbender, providing as extreme a dichotomy of acting ability as one could ever hope for, though one should never be confused as to which half of the couple truly possesses the “power”. There’s a meaningless tete-a-tete with Mathieu Kassovitz (who really should act more instead of directing horseshit like Babylon A.D. and Gothika) and a surprise discovery of a corpse (where Carano expresses surprise by biting her lip) before heading back to the hotel for some sweaty sex/combat.

Before their sham relationship goes sour, their brief stay in the hotel ventures into Last Tango in Paris territory when, during their respective cleaning-up times in the bathroom, each party takes time to rummage through the other’s personal belongings: he in her vaginal purse and she by plugging his short, stubby cellular device into her laptop. Alas, there’s no time to experiment with butter (though, lest we not consider Fassbender to be one of the Best Actors of His Generation, a deeper flashback features the notorious real-life pussyhound uttering with utmost conviction, “I’ve never done a woman before”) before the ginger lad is thwarted in his struggle for a blunt, blocky automatic pistol stowed beneath their unused queen-sized bed, choked with thighs after getting his face rammed into Carano’s crotch, and executed with merciless brevity through a pillow.

The remainder of the movie consists of Carano/Kane tracking down an assortment of high-profile actors who have wronged her through their involvement, however tangential, in this hopelessly tangled web of deceit, duplicity, deception, despair, and dumbassery. We have Antonio Banderas with a full-on Unabomber beard, Michael Douglas at his most weasel-like, Kassovitz, and the insufferably bland Ewan McGregor, who insists on using the same non-regional American accent in every fucking thing he does as if this will make us forget that his natural Scottish accent is hilarious. Those watching Haywire expecting Novelty Deaths or a high Corpse Count will be sorely let down; two of these treacherous men are killed off-screen and the other two manage to weasel their way out of any sort of punishment.

Strangely enough, Soderbergh has time to kill two condescending police officers, who don’t believe Carano’s elaborate tales of espionage, government wet work and double-crosses, have the tenacity to refer to her as “Wonder Woman”, and are promptly picked off by snipers during a weird, lethargic, tension-free shootout and escape. The 90-odd minutes of Haywire are filled with long, deadly stretches of plot between the handful of expertly mounted action sequences, as if Soderbergh didn’t think that the gender dynamics and bone-crushing were enough to hold our interest; he wastes interminable gobs of molasses-paced time telling a well-worn story of treachery and countless backstabs that no one who isn’t armed with a notebook and a few tabs of Adderall down the hatch could ever hope to decipher.

Even the appearance of Bill Paxton, as the one sympathetic masculine character, and the inevitable demise of Biff Rockgroin, cannot compensate for this fatal flaw. Perhaps if Paxton were screaming out poetic lines of hick profanity a la Hudson in Aliens, we could be distracted from how the climactic sequence in his snowbound New Mexico chalet doesn’t resolve any plot threads save for the liquidation of Gristle McThornbody. Then it’ s a bit more globetrotting before the movie just sort of peters out like a night of bad drunken sex. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the conclusion is that Soderbergh seems to have decided that, with all his demonstrated proficiency in directing brutality, he has decided that he’s above doing such a thing when it comes to providing plot resolution. Perhaps he might direct a great action film someday. Perhaps even a genuinely great film. But first, he should work on extracting his head from his own nether regions.

Ultimately, each and every one of Carano’s adversaries goes down like a bitch and her personal safety is never once questioned, even as she goes on the lam as a wanted fugitive and does her own stunts, bounding across rooftops and falling into alleys and manhandling a dozen aggressive dudes. She is a predator righting all the misdeeds against wronged women not only in the cinematic landscape but also the real world; every duplicitous man, no matter how well-protected, is but easy prey thanks to her limitless resourcefulness and raw brute strength. It’s telling that there are no other female characters in Haywire: to distract from Carano’s overpowering presence would be to undermine the message of the entire film. Whether or not this message will resonate with its audience remains to be seen.

“Take that, foolish African!”
-  Line from the film or Lucas to his new audience?

During the Second World War, 450 black men were sent into aerial combat, running more than 200 bomber escort missions, and during Red Tails, we feel as though we have seen all 200 in real-time. George Lucas is executive producer, and he has announced that this is his last (except not really) popcorn film. Apparently, it attracted so little interest that Twentieth Century Fox distributed only if Lucas paid for everything. If he were working a corner, that’s like paying the clients for the right to call yourself a hooker. Still, Lucas has been chipper about this foray into attracting a Black audience and their dollars, boasting about a mostly Black cast, director, producer (not himself, although if he claimed to be Black, that would have been awesome), and writers, with a score by Terence Blanchard. The deck has been stacked. At an advance screening, Al Sharpton exclaimed “It’s probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen!” Ever the voice of measured calm. Why Tyler Perry wasn’t tapped to direct is beyond me, but that would have made Red Tails a hilarious smear of histrionic twaddle. I suppose this cast was in part to enable the tower defense of RACIST against any attacks on its shitty quality, but if Red Tails is representative of the Black Community, then its production team is guilty of hate crimes. The story of the Tuskegee airmen is pretty good, but you would have no idea from this dull piece of fuck.

The acting is terrible, listless, and occasionally sounds like the words are being read off cue cards by someone at gunpoint. Terence Howard plays a Colonel who needs to give periodic triumphant rah rah speeches, except he couldn’t express real emotion if his shoes were on fire. Cuba Gooding has not been a mark of quality since maybe Boat Trip, and he chews on a pipe like a five year old went into Dad’s drawer and found a new toy. His attempt to do a ‘grim’ face is more pathetic than a worm on a hook trying to escape. The dialogue is bad enough to make the Nazi characters sympathetic. Lucas bragged that there is an hour of combat scenes, and I think that is probably true. But that means over an hour of quiet scenes of chatting and bonding where the screenwriters futilely attempt to simulate what humans call ‘conversation’. Some of these include white people who bandy about epithets to remind us idiots that there is this thing called racism, and, against all we once thought, it is indeed bad.

The characters are stock from stem to stern; the leader with self-doubt, the aggressive hotshot, the Jesus freak. The whites are all kind of the same person. There is one German character who is skilled, and hunts American pilots because he is evil, not because it is his duty as a soldier. He uses the line above, which just made my day. The rest is dull exchanges with such bon mots as “Let’s give the newspapers something to write about”, or “How do you like  that, Mr. Hitler?” During the opening credits, American bombers are shot to shit because the escort fighters ran off to shoot down enemy fighters instead of protecting the bombers. One pilot exclaims “Damn those glory grabbing bastards!” Now if only there was a group of pilots that would be proper escorts… I wonder if the film will fill that need at some point with some scrappy underdogs. And I wonder if some of these honkys would eventually have a change of heart, or if the leader develops self-confidence or the hotshot gets shot down after doing something inadvisable. Red Tails is unpredictable like LA weather. The death of the hot shot is especially funny, as a whole subplot is set up where he romances an Italian woman and they are all set to be married. It resembles that scene from, well, Hot Shots!, where one pilot is about to go on a mission and tells his wife he loves her while black cats cross his path, he walks under a ladder, she breaks a mirror, and expresses just how perfect life is. When you reiterate a storyline from a spoof in your dramatic film, there is a serious failure at the screenplay stage.

Meanwhile, the combat video game scenes are okay, but the breaking planes are as interesting as so much balsa wood, and the deeply boring execution makes the action even more listless and pointless. The sound quality also sucks, going in and out in the wrong places. I know the actions of the Tuskegee airmen were actually important during the War, but if the filmmakers don’t give a shit, I don’t see why I should. The scenes of BANTER and the love story via translator dictionary, the pointless subplot about a POW camp that barely exists and passes like a fart in a blizzard, oh god, make it stop. Even the remarks about race fail to arouse, as other films have rendered the subject with a sense of history and scope.

Lucas admitted that the legions of fanboys have worn him down about his aggressive milking of Star Wars. Who knew the random and pointless anger of the internet could accomplish something great? Still, he is planning to pursue small art films, so we will get to see CGI clouds add texture to small personal dramas or something. Well, small art films and the next, hotly anticipated Indiana Jones movie where Indy fights Nazi exiles in Brazil to establish a public health care system.

Sure, Dean is one of Hollywood’s chosen few who drank to drive away the drink; the sort for whom sobriety was a relationship best left estranged. How delightfully ironic, then, that for his best role since Rio Bravo, a performance that played sadly to elbow-bending expectation, Martin would not stand aside as duty called other, more hardened men to a cockpit unaffected by temptation or sin. As such, Dean would not be the blitzed and blinded passenger-in-peril, or the overwhelmed man on the ground who met his responsibility with the predictable evasions. No, Martin – Demerest, now and forever – would be clear of mind, hard of heart, and ready for anything the skies saw fit to throw his way. And at the end of Airport’s damn near 2 ½ hour running time, we would bow our heads in shame for having doubted him at all. No jumbo jet – no means of human transport, mind you – would ever come to harm with Dean Martin at the helm, not only because, for all the hysteria on display, he’s always the sanest man in the vicinity, but because he’s in love, dammit, and while he might bend this precious airplane, he’ll pull it into port for the pregnant mistress sprawled out near the rear, her eyesight, unborn child, and perfect hairdo all hanging precariously in the balance.

She is Gwen Meighen (Jacqueline Bisset), beautiful and 26 to Vernon’s fine wine 53, and while she knows she’s not quite enough to split apart his marriage, she does in fact carry his legacy. Thankfully, and matter-of-factly, his first suggestion is not the sentimental silliness that fairy tales will come true, but rather an abortion, preferably not in some back alley, but a snuffing of the fetal candle nonetheless. He’s heard rumors about Sweden, what with the United States still wandering about in a pre-Roe haze, and he’s offering his wallet as well as his decisiveness. This entire conversation – frank, adult, and defiantly cheerless – takes place before the big ship has set sail, making Vernon’s subsequent courage under fire ever the more the work of a master aviator. Lesser men might drop the damn thing into the drink to save their honor (and the likelihood of a messy divorce and/or child support), but Vernon owns up to his responsibilities. He might not drive the young lady to the very door of the Stockholm clinic, but he’ll pick up all reasonable expenses like a gentleman. So yes, Vernon is greeting this new, liberated age with but a shrug of caution, but like so few before him, he’ll assign his conquest her rightful humanity, rather than notching his belt like some coxswain caveman.

As if the heavens above saw fit to challenge Vernon’s commitment to choice, the pregnancy revelation was but the first crisis to be met with unflappable masculine resolve. There’s a man with a suitcase bomb aboard, his gutless inhumanity a perfect contrast to Vernon’s cocksure muscularity. The bomber, Van Heflin at his most simpering, is jobless, hopeless, and relentlessly henpecked; his only course remains the murder of hundreds to provide his dead-end spouse with a bit of comfort in her final, reckless days. In his way stands the Captain, but rather than resort to fists and hammer blows, he uses trickery and negotiation to end the madman’s quest. Vernon’s plea is stunningly absent the slur of hesitation, and Dino again becomes the only man on planet earth capable of reaching that rare reservoir of reasoned restraint. Some dopey, bitchy passenger – telegraphed as worthless throughout the film’s opening – interferes with the rescue, and for that moment, Vernon’s world is turned ass-over-end by the terrorist’s blast. Gwen may die, but so might they all, and that rush of feeling of losing the hottest ass in the Trans Global fleet is cast aside in favor of the cause. They’ve got to land for her, yes, but also the weak and timid and unworthy. Vernon is damn near God himself, but he’s not about to sort them out.

No, Vernon doesn’t simply put on that uniform as if shuffling off to the salt mines; he inhabits the damn thing like a second skin, polishing those wings like the Purple Heart of a D-Day survivor. And that blizzard socking in the runway? Or that massive hole in the plane’s lavatory? Parted, Moses-like, and sealed tight like the lips of a disobedient child meeting the backhand of justice. One glare, one arched eyebrow on a face browned under sun and heat lamp alike for the better part of the 20^th century, and despair turns to a hope unknown but minutes before. And those glass shards that threatened to turn his amour into a sightless, tin cup beggar? Nowhere to be found, as if danger ran to the hills, tail between its legs, once a real man strode into town. Curiously, Vernon would fail to appear in any of the Airport sequels (only George Kennedy’s Patroni would chomp cigars throughout), leading one to the inescapable conclusion that he hung up his wings, made an honest woman of Gwen, and moved to destinations unknown, forever the keeper of her kingdom. And like Sully, he went out on top – a Clemente at 3,000 – a man of yesteryear we haven’t quite encountered again.

It is difficult to tell whether Donald Wolfe’s lysergic Savage Intruder is trying to say something meaningful about the surreal culture of the Los Angeles film industry, or whether it’s merely exploiting old Hollywood washouts, has-beens, and never-weres. Perhaps in its own cynical way it’s expressing deeper truths that it could never hope to approach were one to take the film at face value; it’s a derivative ripoff of Psycho through and through, down to its primal Freudian tropes and triumph of its nebbish male antagonist over the ineffectual forces of Good, but Wolfe’s stunt casting proves to be his greatest strength, which is regrettably not saying much. We have not one but three remnants of Old Hollywood violently colliding against the emerging forces of Exploitation: first and foremost, there is old stalwart Miriam Hopkins essentially playing herself, Blacklisted actress Gale Sondegaard giving her thankless role as much gravitas as can be wrung from an underwritten script, and the son of the late lamented John Garfield embodying the titular Intruder with as much smarm as humanly possible.

After a flurry of footage stolen from Singin’ in the Rain (look for the marquee advertising “The Dancing Cavalier”) and various MGM newsreels, there’s a rather effective credit sequence that segues from jazzy pomp and circumstance to a ruined Hollywood sign, with a profoundly creepy silence broken only by the creaking of wooden panels in flagrant disrepair. Beneath wooden panels flapping in the merciless wind, with twisted nails jutting forth in search of soft material to puncture, a shallow grave lies half-assedly dug with the dismembered mannequin-like remains of an old woman exposed to harsh daylight. Cut to a news reporter breathlessly describing the exploits of the anonymous Hollywood Slasher, whose identity is baffling the LAPD and holding the community in a grip of blah blah blah.

We see an old drunken lady being followed to her apartment by a menacing pair of bell-bottomed ankles. Soon, Garfield enters her ramshackle abode through an unlocked window and we see his full fearsome form: a pair of reflective Aviator glasses, a brown fedora that clashes violently with his black trench coat and a red velour mailbag that clashes violently with common decency and good taste. After knocking out the frumpy old maid with a lead pipe and dragging her into the bathroom, he removes a fearsome array of phallic instruments from a suitcase within the mailbag. Opting for an electronic filleting knife, he attempts to remove her hand without anesthesia yet she wakes up with a scream and the whole thing ends rather messily via the business end of a meat cleaver. Small wonder Garfield Jr. found his greatest success as an editor before dying an untimely death of a congenital heart defect exactly like his father; he’s most effective in this opening sequence when he’s totally mute.

Although, to be fair, it’s quite possible that it was a key grip or a rigging technician dressed in the bizarre costume and this little episode was haphazardly shoehorned in during reshooting to inject a bit of tension into the proceedings, as it doesn’t serve any purpose other than establishing the killer’s M.O., which is promptly discarded in favor of a bolder technique. The dismembered body beneath the Hollywood sign was some other old woman, this particular lady’s remains are never discovered (in addition to her lacking a family, friends, or basic social network outside the bar and tobacconist’s shop), and the identity of the killer is obvious from the very first second Garfield appears on screen without his disguise. Since this was filmed in 1969, his laughable hippie getup might have allowed him to blend in, but with the benefit of hindsight, an already creepy looking motherfucker looks the part even more. Hitching a ride to Miriam Hopkins’ pretentious abode on a hill, he hops off a Celebrity Home Tour tram driven by Shemp Howard (!) in a pitiful cameo role shortly before a little girl aboard the same tour bus disembarks with her mother and explosively vomits a few feet away from him. The tone thus established, he scales the monstrous fence with absurd ease and sets off on his mission.

Since he somehow knows that Hopkins drank a bit too much of her “liquid personality” during one of her frequent hallucinated parties, tumbled down the stairs and broke her tibia on the hard marble floor of her foyer, and is consequently in need of someone to carry her around her cavernous mansion, Garfield neatly converts his Jimi Hendrix headband into a tie (with a smart Windsor knot) and offers his unsolicited services as a live-in caregiver (with no extra charge for hand-removal service). Gale Sondegaard’s head maid, who resembles the psychotic Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca both in appearance and general temperament; she is known simply as Lez (!!) and she absolutely will not abide this slimy looking man tainting the sanctity of the household, and most certainly has no affection whatsoever for her elderly employer. But, alas, Hopkins decides that a man’s brute strength is necessary (never mind that wiry, shrimpy Garfield looks like he can barely heft a sack of potatoes), and there is no way at all she’s lusting after some much younger cock, and the flirtatious glances she’s getting from the dude do not indicate a weird Oedipal complex ripped from the pages of dime-store psychology books … not at all.

Not only had Hopkins been divorced for almost 20 years prior to shooting the film, and genuinely seems to love spending long stretches of time in intimate situations with Garfield Jr., (likewise, Junior’s smarm fades away during one of the countless scenes of pushing her around in a wheelchair, replaced by something resembling genuine emotion) she doesn’t even seem to be acting when her character eventually falls in love with her caretaker. Meanwhile, Lez and the delectable Asian housekeeper (with the incongruous name of Greta) witness this creepy love story unfolding with some combination of dread and horrified curiosity. Soon, Greta’s awkward flirtations with the new caretaker are stiffly reciprocated, a midnight garden rendezvous is planned, but when she shows up expecting a little action from Junior she is instead “mysteriously” dispatched by an unseen, “anonymous” slasher in a syrupy geyser of candy-apple-red stage blood. Then all the nutty psychedelic hallucination dreams/flashbacks start flying ad infinitum and illuminate very little save for the fact that Donald Wolfe seems to have purchased several sheets of the infamous brown acid. More “mysterious” deaths transpire, and several long out-of-work actors show up in brief cameo scenes before we go back to Hopkins in her pink boa, sniping at Junior for more interminable lengths of time.

Savage Intruder can’t decide whether it wants to be a murder mystery, a character study of a Freudian nutcase, a character study of a delusional alcoholic former silent-film star, a romance between these two characters, a commentary on the film industry chewing up and spitting out its former sweethearts, or a systematic dissection of Old Hollywood using Hitchcockian tropes through hyperstylized Italian giallo sensibilities. Instead of choosing one paradigm and going with it, the film tries to do all six things at once with the finesse of a blinded cerebral palsy victim attempting to juggle chainsaws. Not to say that the film is a complete failure: there’s a great deal of subtext in a story about wooden, psychopathic beefcake passive-aggressively softening up a bunch of old women played by washed-up actresses (and one bright-eyed Asian ingénue) before dicing them up with his compensatory phallus collection in some cavernous mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Also unremarked upon is the back story of this colossal manor. The lavish palace was a monument to excess commissioned by Norma Talmadge* at the height of her popularity in the 1920s; upon the advent of the “talkies”, her gratingly nasal voice cut short a meteoric rise to fame, her career ended in 1930 and she spent the rest of her days holed up in this mansion in complete ignominy.

Not only does the former Talmadge estate provide a perfect setting for the story, as muddled as it is, but also supplies an even more surrealistic background for a sequence where the mansion is besieged by a small army of drug-addled hippies. One memorable exchange occurs where a turned-on midget offers Miriam Hopkins a snifter of cocaine, to which she haughtily replies “The only trips I take are to Europe!” Sure, it’s a far cry from her work with Ernst Lubitsch, but Hopkins has no problem with devouring every inch of scenery around her, and ultimately, the movie itself. It’s probably not the kind of swan song the former beauty must have envisioned for herself but she goes out in high style, even working in a gratuitous topless shot (at the ripe old age of 66) before giving a final, horrified look at the camera and literally disappearing into the filmic aether.

No, the clapper was not supposed to be in the movie. Yes, they left it in there.

Perhaps the proto-slasher trappings, with the unseen maniac dispatching helpless women in a methodical fashion with an array of sharp objects and abrasive musical stings, are but a distraction from the most meaningful bit of subtext. The villain isn’t Junior and his hippie buddies, or the oh-so-mysterious Slasher in his ridiculous costume, looking like a cross between The Alchemist in The Holy Mountain and one of Torquemada’s scarlet-clad Inquisitors, or even the oppressively Lesbotronic housekeeper holding the house in a Draconian grip of terror. No, the industry itself is to blame for everyone’s woes; the brutal attrition of show business elevating mere mortals to the status of Demigods before violently ejecting them to a life of delusion and seclusion, and rejecting thousands of fresh-faced hopefuls daily like an infernal machine separating so much chaff from the wheat. It’s nothing that was said much more eloquently in Day of the Locust, but give Wolfe some points for accomplishing quite a bit on such a microscopic budget. To no one’s surprise, he never directed another film again.

As a lad, most of what I knew about Margaret Thatcher – or at least what I cared to know – came directly from an episode or two of the sitcom Are You Being Served?, though it’s fair to say that the show itself acted as my sole repository for the whole of British culture (then and now). In particular, I remember some such discussion about the flailing British economy, and how, in the words of the unflappably underworked Captain Peacock, the medicine of austerity and rampant budget cuts would be bitter, and yet ultimately necessary. For the class-conscious characters, Thatcherism was, in a nutshell, supported wholeheartedly by management (and those with pretensions of same) and violently opposed by the working classes, up to and including the janitorial staff. Thatcher may not have been referred to by name (simply “PM”), but we all knew the score, and on more than one occasion, the outraged sensibilities of the non-elite were pushed to consider a trip down to “#10” for a redress of grievances.

As Captain Peacock and the rest of the hardly working upper tiers looked upon with fondness the mean-spiritedness of Thatcher’s conservative government, I reasonably concluded that she was no better than our own slash-and-burn executive, and therefore would oppose her unapologetically, even if she stirred the flag-waving hearts of men with her very own Grenada. Maggie loved Ronnie, and the sexual heat was returned in kind, and I wanted both of them slapped down by the gods of justice. That both were nearly assassinated united them further in a dance with destiny, and it stands to reason that as their flesh was burned away by the sands of time, dementia and brain rot would saddle them both with golden years decidedly tarnished. Our Mr. Humphries would be pleased, or at least thankful for the cosmic balancing act. We never heard from the IRA at Grace Brothers, but it was enough to have an element of radicalism represented by the union men who fanatically insisted on tea breaks. It was the closest I would get to the front lines of the labor debate.

And now we have The Iron Lady, a film so past an expiration date that few will know (or care) about any of the players that dawdle before us, even though the screenplay will insist on catching us up to speed with that ever-grating device  called “the highlight reel”. At various points throughout this slapdash effort, we’ll see snapshots of the Blitz, riots, bombings, and military might, all with little by way of context or explanation. But The Iron Lady isn’t concerned with historical depth or insight; it’s simply a vehicle for the Paul Muni of our times, Meryl Streep, and how she can (and will!) amaze us with her immersion in what passes for character. Her portrayal of Maggie dear isn’t really acting, in a sense, as it seeks only to bring a waxwork to life, and hit all of its marks like a dutiful seal, hoping to god it gets its fishy rewards. Streep’s Thatcher is as shallow as it is preposterous, and while some may marvel at her bitter-lemon lip pursing, or bewildering Julia Child snorting, those who give a damn about cinematic competence will be embarrassed right out of their soda-stained chairs. It very well may be that Thatcher was no more than a contrived collection of tics, mannerisms, and bellowing bon mots, but I’m guessing one doesn’t become the first female to lead the British government by parroting what passes for human behavior. She just might have to back it up now and again.

The film’s central weakness – though it’s like picking a sandlot baseball team from the mouth-breathers at a special school – is that it tells its tale, such as it is, through flashbacks and bizarre hallucinations, as if what we should take from Thatcher’s life is that for all of her landmark actions, she has spent her final years yelling at her dead husband’s ghost. Yes, Denis is around (played with the usual spirit by a wasted Jim Broadbent), though he’s reduced to yet another bitchy spouse who can’t stand that his shorts go unwashed while the other pursues her ambitions. I’m sure Denis felt emasculated at every turn by the balls-out Mags, but instead of real human feeling on this matter, we get Margaret getting dressed for work, screaming at a few members of the House of Commons, and Denis sitting at home in a huff. Some might say this is a biting commentary on gender reversal (how do you like it, hubby dear?), but that would be granting the film a wit it no more possessed than Margaret herself a conscience. And as much as I roar with delight that Thatcher was reduced to a blithering idiot after bleeding the United Kingdom dry, I’d prefer a more pointed lesson. Equally, I would hate any Reagan biopic that erred on the side of the urine-soaked, lamp-tossing, rage-filled incoherence of his final decade in the sunset rather than the murderous hypocrisy of his White House years.

Predictably, there’s a feminist tilt to The Iron Lady, as if Thatcher’s gender alone is enough to warrant our awe and respect. Hammered down with relish, as if through the skull of the retarded, we see that this tenacious daughter of a grocer fought disbelieving men again and again, which makes her final victory as Prime Minister, what, something to celebrate? Ignoring her politics except for an occasional slogan, the film says that tits alone are enough to solidify Thatcher’s importance in our collective memory, which is a bit like saying we should admire Hitler because he proved that artistic failure and grim poverty are not in fact real barriers to eventually murdering half of Europe. The unknowing might sense that Thatcher doesn’t like poor people, or that the best way to save a nation is to gut everything not related to romanticizing rich union-busters, but at no point are we asked to fully interrogate what really made this woman a point of controversy throughout the world. If you oppose her, the movie argues, it is because you are a misogynist, and would prefer that the wives around the globe cook and clean and leave political wrangling to the men. It is this apolitical, heinously chickenshit attitude that consigns The Iron Lady to the ash heap of irrelevance, even if Streep’s irritating cackle of a performance is enough to place it firmly atop the list of year’s worst. I’m sick to fucking death of her stunts, and would prefer she play human beings once again not in search of an Oscar.

It was at the moment that Thatcher went to war over the three square blocks that was and is the Falkland Islands that I sensed what could have been. Rather than hem and haw through unnecessary “motivations” (Maggie loved her dad, and seemed to despise her mother, hence her desire to strap on a penis and give it a go), it would have been grand to narrow the proceedings to a Woman at War, which would go far indeed in proving that for all the feminist twaddle about women being superior at leadership, they want to blow shit up just like the rest of us. It was a hilarious side note, little explored, that at the very moment Thatcher roared that England was going bankrupt, she spent billions gassing up the moribund navy to take back what few knew had been possessed to begin with. Unemployment far too high? Strikes piling up the trash in the streets? Stage a little distraction to get the masses clucking about empire and king and country and all that, and declare a victory that, while meaningless, also ensures a few hundred state funerals that push away the rage in favor of Union Jack tears. Brilliant, Maggie dear, and perhaps her finest hour of full-tilt insanity, but this movie believes we’d rather see her have coffee with a corpse. Or smell her dead husband’s clothes like he’s a martyred gay cowboy.

In the end, The Iron Lady humiliates all involved, and it just might push me to read more about the subject at hand, if only to see a dimension beyond rude caricature. I’m not sure a fiery polemic would have been any better, but at least it would have represented a perspective; a desire to push the audience into reasoning that not all historical figures are equal, simply because they lived and died. Shades of subtlety are, of course, preferable to the school of Oliver Stone, but I’m also certain that, upon leaving a movie, one should not tap any nearby shoulder and ask, “Um, what the fuck was all that?” Rubbish, sir or madam, and the sort that can’t even take its own stench as inspiration to become a camp classic. In more than one sense, Thatcher is ideal to play Joan Crawford in a sequel to Mommie Dearest, with a musical number or two to keep things honest. Instead, we must be content with the gutless; a movie neither here nor there and not a single reason to exist, save the lust for critical approval. To make matters worse, there’s even a nod to last year’s Best Picture winner, as if to say that Maggie too was reinvented for our consumption. A My Fair Lady of government. Or maybe just The Cunt’s Speech for a woman out of time. And out of her damn mind.

Clearly, Polanski is more than the perfect conductor for this chamber piece of bourgeois illusion, what with his direct line to the infernos of madness disguised as European enlightenment and Southern California sun. We trust him implicitly, knowing full well that mankind is often at its worst when it first insists on pleasantries. He doesn’t trust a damn bit of it, and neither should we, and his cynicism is both well-earned and effortlessly seductive. The dialogue is all Reza’s, of course, but Polanski controls events with the inevitability of death itself, which is only slightly more inevitable than our capacity for cruelty. Still, and as anyone should never forget, this brief interlude just happens to be bitingly hilarious, as is any glimpse of other people coming apart that are not ourselves. The set-up itself is a dissertation on the absurdity of the comfortable class: four slices of white bread standing before a computer as the day’s events – one couple’s kid has hit the other’s child in the mouth with a stick – are hunted and pecked into some kind of official document. All want to solve the problem without accusations or lawsuits, and perhaps if they can all simply have a chat, everyone will leave satisfied. There’s even the promise that the two young boys will sit down, shake hands, and smile it all away. Perhaps the offending boy will apologize, perhaps not, but we’re all educated and civilized, so why not put this to bed and return to our daily distractions? There’s an early sense that the bully’s father, Alan (Christoph Waltz, a master as always), doesn’t expect much from his son, but optimism largely reigns supreme, at least until appearances yield to the usual suspicions and judgment.

Not unexpectedly, Alan and his wife Nancy (Kate Winslet) are wholly unsuited for being on the same planet together, least of all the confines of marriage, and snipes and snippets reveal a further discomfort with what passes for a family. Alan, cell phone buzzing about like a beehive on fire, is consumed by his law practice, but the other end of the line may as well be dead air. He’s an immersed man in full, unwilling to come up for air because he prefers the sensation of drowning. We sense that at least his job simulates the combat he craves, and sitting idle might remind him of his craven mistakes. “A man needs to have his hands free…He needs to be able to at least give off the impression that he is capable of being alone,” his wife might add, as if he would insist he were anything but alone, only at full volume. Above all, though, Alan finds the whole matter a pathetic charade, reasonably concluding that when kids punch and kick, they do so to advance their tenuous positions in a world that will soon remind them that there won’t always be cautious parents advocating for decency. Let them have this brief dance with inhumanity, when the stakes aren’t so high and the wounds not so deep. Only Penelope (Jodie Foster, her first great role in years) doesn’t quite see it that way. Teeth were lost, nerves were exposed, and how can anyone let an injustice go unpunished? Penelope’s descent from stoic museum piece to lost soul is, as with much else, not unexpected, but what resonates most deeply is her submission to the whip crack limousine liberalism so righteously deserves across its back. She’s good intentions swept away by the tide of reality; the very sort who, without a hint of self-awareness, would honestly offer her book-filled involvement with Africa as superior to the soil itself.

Even Penelope’s husband, Michael (John C. Reilly, forever and always a Step Brother), is a casualty-in-waiting, though his “fall” is less to despair than a long-awaited embrace with the Alan within. He’s been hiding away from his manhood for years, and his expressed disgust with rodents (he casually describes setting his daughter’s hamster outside to die, prompting the first of several interrogations) is but a manifestation of shrinking before the strutting superiority of his spouse. The play’s vision, while not reactionary by design, does appear to conclude that half-assed liberalism is always more dangerous than the real deal, and in some sense, at least bigots have the courage of their convictions. At bottom, Penelope is that bleeding heart who writes books about suffering between her endless lectures, all while not having a clue about the way anyone with a pulse actually lives. For her, a lost incisor during a playground brawl can and will be equated with Stalinist purges, which is exactly the lack of perspective that largely killed off what remained of the left’s connection to vitality and seriousness. In a world where “words are weapons” and standards of conduct but rude dismissals of cultural difference, it becomes impossible for the same worldview to change a single heart, let alone a head. Alan and Michael unite for a time, much in the way two men would when the yammer of femininity burns too bright, but they aren’t the “correct” side so much as a brutal repudiation of the most insidious weakness running – that a single person absorbed in the context of their life is ever really capable of empathy. Penelope claims to get it, while Michael ultimately admits his cluelessness. And Alan, well, he’ll take his chances with oblivion.

One feels a sense of relief after Carnage, as if the movie gods at last conspired to provide a good time without redemption. There’s no pretense afoot, as it’s all a lark, but larks often come disguised as blood sport. There’s a jazzy rhythm to the piece that can’t be denied, and amidst all the insults, dirty looks, and pitiful justifications, there’s a Polish midget waiting in the wings to shrug with grim satisfaction. I love this latest turn by one of yesteryear’s masters, and after the haunting finality of The Ghost Writer (as bleak as a Noah Cross chuckle), he seems committed to the notion that life can only be worth living when we finally accept that by and large, it is not. Thankfully, rumors of a “stagy” presentation were unfounded, talk of frivolousness far-fetched, and for the first time in many a moon, I bathed in the glow of actors and filmmakers at the tops of their respective games. It just might be the film’s theme transferred to my heavy heart: expect the worst, and relish the truest form of love that can emerge, the love that is unexpected (and fleeting) pleasure.