Richard Nixon said a lot of horrible racist things, and horrible non-racist things, but it seems like people are most fond of digging up this treasure of The Tapes: “I have the greatest affection for them [blacks], but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”

Harsh to be sure, even if he is fond of “them.” But one wonders how far off the mark his prediction really was. You might even argue that the departure of those black people who have overcome stark disadvantage with exceptional talent, intelligence and/or drive to move from the margins and into the mainstream, has pushed the timeline for the rest of them to “make it” back a couple hundred years more, as the most stable members of the community, quite reasonably, launch their escape pods at the first opportunity, leaving the rest of the group structure weakened. Those who have spent a significant amount of time around the poorer black American communities, and who profess to believe that blacks, in general, might obtain a lifestyle on par with whites, in general, within the lifetime of anybody currently drawing breath are either 1) Actually delusional 2) Lying 3) Believe that something really terrible is going to happen to white America or 4) Believe that science will enable us to live to see Nixon’s 500 year forecast come to fruition.

I don’t think this is the message Frederick Wiseman wants us to take away from Public Housing. If you don’t know, he is famously of the old school of non-intrusive documentary filmmaking, so we’re fortunate that no “message” is too obvious. It doesn’t get any more heavy-handed than the recurring footage of a dreary ice cream truck that brings to mind the absence of the joy normally associated with ice cream trucks and the difficult realities of local entrepreneurship, which is touted as the golden path throughout the film. So really, we see nothing more than expertly selected footage from the projects, and the footage is methodically depressing. You can assign any combination of mechanisms to the sad interactions Wiseman captures: poverty traps, cultural breakdown, “black nihilism,” and even some of the tenets of white supremacy, if that’s your bag. The problems and the barriers facing the residents of Chicago public housing in 1997 seem intractable. And while the explanations for the intractability range from the high-minded and compassionate to the vile, they are all posited as explanations of why the problems are intractable, or nearly so. No one even bothers to suggest that a solution is around the corner.

In some ways, the reality faced by poor blacks is even bleaker than the picture Wiseman provides. It isn’t that Wiseman tries to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. He is focusing on the people working to build up their community in general and a housing project in particular. He is looking at  institutional realities, showing us individuals working hard within institutions and how little fruit their labor produces. We only get a slight glimpse of the depths of the self-destructiveness and ignorance that are commonplace in such communities. The film focuses instead on the disconnect between the programs and systems intended to help and the people they are meant to help. And maybe the unfairness of the expectations placed on those who are in need, or possibly lost.

One scene that stood out as a emblematic comes when the HUD workers hold a meeting with residents to discuss making improvements. Tenants complain that some of the lighting in the projects is frequently out. They seem to initially blame HUD for this. Is it too much to ask that we have some decent lighting at night? The HUD worker agrees that this is a problem, but points out what “we all know.” The reason for the regular loss of lighting is obviously vandalism. The meeting grows silent. The only suggestion is a new system of lights that are essentially unbreakable.  But they are expensive and will take a nice slice out of the budget, which is always shrinking as it is. There isn’t really a good solution to the problem– not to the problem of getting more kids to graduate college– the problem of having reasonable lighting in the projects. Other battles range from the prevalence of vermin to the fact that mere paperwork stands between hundreds of long-vacant government units and members of the growing homeless population, but nothing budges. Well, that’s not entirely true. We do see a confused old man being forced from his old project home. There are no immediate plans on where he is to live now, beyond “a shelter.”  And yes, that is a grape soda he has in the picture.  Don’t pretend that it didn’t occur to you.

At the most basic level, the disconnect seems to be that thoughtful, well-organized people who work for the government establish techniques based on their own M.O.s to aid dysfunctional, unstable people. Lest you conclude that I’m being racist (for the few that haven’t already done so), let me state for the record that I am worthless. I have to ramp up my self-motivation to the maxtreme of self-empowerment to fulfill my will to remember to remind my bride to pay the parking tickets that I accumulate. Had I been born into the projects, I’d never have connected with these programs either.  This is a case of the dictatorship of the responsible in our society: an apartheid privileging those who enjoy having their forms filled out and wiggle their little butts with joy at the chance to present proper insurance and registration. As Travolta in Pulp Fiction thought the chance for retribution would have actually made the vandalism of his car worthwhile, the over-responsible live for the day when their home is broken into or damaged and they can break out their full homeowners insurance with no deductible and their meticulous photographs of everything in the house worth more than $12. But the fact of the matter is that Flanderses cannot just coach Homers into becoming Flanderses.

And in so many cases in Public Housing, it seems like the responsible are setting up systems that make sense to them, meant to guide people like me. But I’d rather die in the gutter than have to attend government meetings and fill out forms just to get decent lighting on my street. Is it reasonable to ask students to take what seem to be extra classes after high school, just so they can graduate with what would be considered a 9th grade education in the middle class? Sure, one in a hundred rises above it all out of exceptional talent and will. But what is to become of the merely average student, crammed into schools that don’t teach because too many students are far below average and despise learning? Then, more extra classes, more programs, more forms… just to find a job. How many of us who coasted through college on suds and wandered into a job at the first place hiring can really say we’d be willing to deal with sign-ups, wait lists, workshops and deadlines based on the hope of scoring a temporary gig at minimum wage plus a buck? Maybe we grow up enough by the time we reach middle age that we can drag the carcasses of our useless kids through the system so that they might one day do the same for theirs (as our parents did for us), but what would most of us have done if we were not part of this middle-class cycle, if we didn’t know our fathers and our mothers were less than 20 years older than us?

The usual threats of murder, prostitution, drugs, gangs, AIDS, teenage pregnancy and prison are present, but are never the centerpiece. Again, Public Housing is more about the institution and the relationship people have with it. Maybe the reality of immobility: that most of us will stay withing throwing distance of the station to which we were born, regardless of if we are Flanderses or Homers. For the thinking viewer, this is even more disheartening than another drive-by. We see people who care begging for simple work orders to be filled out, or explaining sexual responsibility as emphatically as possible to small groups of blank faces. Cops try seemingly random searches and threats. They try reaching out on a personal level. But they always seem resigned. The world of Public Housing is nothing close to hell on earth, like say, City of God, but it certainly doesn’t look like the first world, either. It doesn’t look like anything can really fix it and the only cause for optimism in the film is that some are willing to fight for minor victories. Good luck with that…

“In a region of desperate poverty, four men are hired by an oil company to drive trucks filled with nitroglycerin down treacherous mountain roads in the hot sun.”

This is likely the greatest setup for a film ever, and the first reading of it would send a chill down your spine. The tension is palpable before the film would even begin, as one bad jolt, one tank of nitroglycerin becomes overheated, a single rock slide at the wrong time, and the truck becomes one with the vapor. Moments in silence are no less removed from danger as the volatile fluid cooks in the sun. Hitchcock once noted that if a scene has a bomb in it, ‘show the audience the bomb’. And so this bomb is in full view, and you are left waiting for it to go off. In Wages of Fear, as he did with Diabolique, Henri-Georges Clouzot has made an unforgettable impact in the cinema of tension. A stunning work to be sure, but what makes it an indelible classic is the political statement contained within, one which remains timeless, unfortunately.

The small town in this story could be most anywhere – rural towns are nearly always starving for a source of income. Woe unto those that actually have a local industry, as the discovery of oil, diamonds, or any other lucrative resource only seems to deepen the poverty. Multinationals generally move in with a large investment, and with the promise of jobs and a payoff to the right people in government, the land is broken. Inevitably, the money goes only to the necessary government officials and to the company; the locals get nothing but irreversible disease and trauma. This town is no different. As Mario (a never-better Yves Montand) remarks dryly, “It is easy to get in, but you cannot get out.” People flocked in for work, but there was only work for skilled laborers, and there are no roads out, no trains, and a flight costs far more than anyone has in this decrepit hole. There is nothing to do but drink, subsist, and await the next bar fight. Malaria and leprosy are widespread, but the most common chronic illness is hunger. The entire population lives upon delirium, and works enough to stay in debt. The conscience of the town is within one wide-eyed kid who pleads to anyone in earshot about his work visa, and begs for money to flee to the United States. The greatest aspiration is to be elsewhere.

Clouzot maintains a tight grip upon the production, and even the wide open spaces of this desert town has a claustrophobic feel. In the opening shot, a child wallows in the mud, playing with cockroaches that have been tied together with string. They struggle against each other as they pull in mutually assured inertia – one of the truly great evocative images in populist cinema. Against this rabble is the monolithic SOC, an American oil company. “Where there is oil, Americans are not far behind.” Not much has changed in geopolitics since the 1950s, apart from China emerging as a major player in the petroleum market. Industrial practices are about the same – the work is dangerous, and unskilled locals are the preferred source since they do not have labor unions. Any effort by the proles to disrupt business is met with swift violence at the hands of the company’s private security. They run a tight ship, and brought the entire works and buildings prefabricated – even the cemetery for the workers came ready made.

There is an explosion at the oil drill, and the only way to extinguish the flaming oil gusher is with high explosives. Thus our story begins; still, the stakes would not be so high, nor the extraordinary pressure placed upon the laborers as resonant if Wages of Fear did not spend the first hour in languid character development. The tedium of nowhere in Venezuela is demonstrated in the daily pointless rhythms of boredom. Mario and his cohorts shoot the shit, pass the time, eat, drink, and threaten each other with regularity. There is a woman that Mario fancies, but she is hardly the object of his affection – there is no time or place for strong attachments in this unsentimental terminus. Some have accused Clouzot of misogyny for this indifferent attitude toward women, and the way the only significant female character is treated, but this is the way it is in the harsh places of the world. Women mean attachment, and such things are dangerous when there is little in the way of income. Soft women either become wily opportunists or broken romantics. There is only the work, and the catastrophe at the oil drill means a big payday for those able to survive – US$2000 is enough to escape to a new life. The odds against making a journey across the mountains in a rickety truck without a single jolt sending your nitroglycerin into orbit are astonishingly high, but in a true capitalist system, suicide is as profitable as it is necessary. There is little point withering away in the sun when you can gamble your life away for cash – and you either end up with the means to achieve your goals, or you are dead enough not to care. The Cato Institute would be proud of such a win-win situation.

Though this appears to be a film for the class warrior only, there is a more cynical edge at work here. The lower classes are at each others’ throats in the first act; with the introduction of Jo, a criminal from France who is fleeing the law, tempers flare. The workers are ready to brandish their weapons at a slight, even one so innocuous as turning off a radio in a bar. Several characters set upon each other at first, and these differences vanish once the deadly job appears. Perhaps if a page were borrowed from Upton Sinclair, then the unemployed masses would wreak vengeance upon the company for offering little more than death to its workers. This does not happen in the real world very often, mostly due to manipulation by the company owners, or internecine fighting amidst the workers, and so such a scene has little use in Wages of Fear. The largest character in the film utters nary a line, though it drives every single action – or inaction – that occurs. This character is Fear, that great motivator. It forms that magnificent pillar of supply and demand, and drives every living soul to work their waking moments. The job is offered, and the people line up around the block. There is no class struggle here, which is also strangely relevant to the present. The combination of fear and the drive to consume against a backdrop of globalization has left the world without a labor movement; consider Wages of Fear a harbinger of this world to come.

Apart from its relevance and its stunning depiction of the human spirit placed under impossible pressure, Wages of Fear is cracking entertainment. The scenes where a massive boulder is quietly removed from the road, or two trucks navigate a slippery platform hanging over a precipitous drop rank among the great moments of cinema. Given the leisurely introduction to the characters, the way they respond to their trial resonates with the viewer. Even the reserved quality of Mario fades after he bleeds every drop of his soul in service to SOC – by the time his jittery hands drive the truck into sight of the apocalyptic fire of the drill site, there is nothing left in him. This is one of those films that reaches into you, and leaves you utterly drained by the end. At least it does for those of us fortunate enough not to live under tests like this on a daily basis. For a significant portion of the world, these wages are paid with every morning light.

Though Saving Ryan’s Privates ushered in a new era of war porn, this cinematic wave of trash has given way to a more brooding type of war film; one less concerned with the gritty realism of how awesome it is when bullets perforate flesh, and more regarding how human nature is brought closer to the surface in times of conflict. Black Book was a stellar example, as a standard-looking WWII actioner where Nazis were the least of the protagonist’s problems. Flammen and Citronen (Flame and Citron) goes deeper, abandoning the clearly drawn lines of insane villains and virtuous heroes for a vast ocean of gray. This is a bold choice, considering that the Second World War is the most popular war, movie-wise, thanks to the cartoonishly diabolical philosophy of the National Socialist Party. That is the big selling point, giving the audience pure and brave fighting boys with big chins to root for as they gun down scores of evil, subhuman Nazis in strangely explodable cars. Call it the John Ford approach. The singular genius of Inglorious Basterds was the way in which it blurred the line between the good guys and bad when it comes to cinematic depictions of violence, and just how far skewed our perspective is when it comes to how wars go down. This film is more down to earth – in the trenches, so to speak.

Flame and Citron is not an experimental film; rather it dives into the murky world of Europe in 1944 prior to the Normandy invasion. The approach is subtle, and heavily influenced by Melville’s Army of Shadows. The sharp uniforms of the German army are in full display, but disappear into the fog when it comes to true allegiances. The Third Man captured this nebulous definition of what decency might be, albeit in the postwar period. In this film, the war may be in full swing, but citizens and soldiers alike have already begun to size up ways to turn the cataclysm to their advantage. The general view is that as long as the armies are wearing uniforms, a war can be straightforward enough. Director Ole Christian Madsen aims to dispel this assumption, and there is no better subject than an underground fighter.

Flame has the face of a child and a shock of red hair, and kills without hesitation, walking boldly amidst enemies that are well aware of the 20,000 kronor bounty for his distinctive head. Citron is more than hesitant to kill, consumed by guilt and dread for a future that seems more distant by the day. Both seem to understand that there is no way out of their situation – they are wanted by the Gestapo, feared by countrymen who are collaborators, and may be viewed with suspicion by the Allies. Perhaps a way through can be perceived – but only by way of fire. Flame does not care – he survives by the bravado borne of one who has no intention of surviving. Citron lives with the hope of reconciling with his wife and daughter, and ultimately with himself for the murders of which he has played a part. Living underground, they know only a handful of people, and all they know about the outside world comes from their handlers. They barely exist as people.

The Danish resistance committed acts of sabotage, smuggled arms, and killed Danish collaborators. This latter function is the task of our subjects, and it disturbs Flame and Citron that they are not to touch German officers, in particular the detestable Karl Hoffman, the head of the Gestapo in Copenhagen. So far this sounds pretty straightforward, but unlike most action films, the heroes must deal with the aftermath of their acts of heroism. When they strike three German officers at last, scores of civilians are killed in retaliation. If they exterminate an enemy of the homeland, it is inevitable that others will take their place, or the Nazis will extract information from another source. As time goes on, the price on their heads go up, and Hoffman brings down a dragnet on Flame and Citron. Their dependence upon their handler is critical – but can they trust him? Or does he have another agenda entirely? What happens to the mind of a patriot, killing in the name of freedom for the motherland, when they find their targets were just in the wrong place, or got on the wrong side of someone who had a ax to grind? True sacrifice requires absolute resolve and a willingness to jettison everything one values (including one’s values) for a cause, and the only payoff is a better future for those with whom you identify (the homeland). Flame and Citron want to save Denmark’s future, but the very people they wish to help would alternately offer them shelter and sell them out to the Nazis for reasons even the people do not understand.

So what is the point of sacrifice? There is no easy answer, as those who do so for an ideal are not understood by family, who are more than willing to compromise. The citizens will gladly sell to the invaders; as long as food hits the table, principles mean nothing. Eagles may soar, but weasels do not get sucked into jet engines. The strangest thing about Flame and Citron is that such betrayal of one’s principles is never presented as fundamentally wrong. Director Madsen is careful to avoid the dangerously naïve attitude carried by more prosaic war films – there is no simple way through such conflagrations in a world where choices are often far more limited than we are willing to admit. If Citron had simply stayed out of the war, and protected his family, would that make him a coward or a collaborator? He seemed to think so, and once such a decision is made, there is no going back. Others may feel the braver action would be to stay home and weather the storm.

Even if heroism were easy to define, such a concept would depend upon knowing the truth, about both one’s allies and adversaries. Truth is an elusive thing, much more so when accomplices have shifting motivations. Flame discovers his next target is to be eliminated for reasons irrelevant to the war; is his handler working with the Germans, or for himself? Is his target a double agent? Do the British and Americans plan to betray them to the Germans just to have them out of the way? In the end, there is no mystery to unearth – mysteries actually have solutions. This is an impenetrable cloud, and even if the resistance fighters knew the truth about any of their victims, truth is a moving target, and changes as continuously as molecular motion. Flame and Citron gets this aspect of war correct – it is not a collision of two armies, but of tens of millions of individuals with only the vaguest of notions as to why they occupy a given side, or any side. For this reason, underground resistance makes no sense to some, and is essential to others – a choice as individual as you are.

Flame and Citron explains very little about the characters and their true circumstances, makes plain none of the motivations of the people involved (especially Hoffman, who comes off as more than reasonable), and allows no easy answers for questions that will be asked as long as humans are willing to organize into large groups to kill each other. War is catastrophic for the soldier, robbing them of limbs and sanity for the benefit of those who avoid getting dirty. Nationalism is no less damaging to the citizen, as resistance fighters will find themselves without a country, and bereft of the support of their neighbors. Perhaps this sounds too cynical to be useful, but our species is a strange one, equal parts selfish and gregarious. By the end of this film, you may find yourself wondering what the legacy of these two fighters amounts to. Were their sacrifices worth the effort? The film raises more questions than it could ever answer, just the way essential film should.

Kathyrn Davis

As the film’s resident do-gooder, hers is the life of Hobbesian brutishness; owlish idealism in a modestly furnished, curiously cheerless basement apartment, save for the twilight rendezvous that pre-dates her violent, fiery death by mere hours. Taking pity on dear Paul as if his arm-length rap sheet transformed a murderer’s heart into a puppy’s nuzzling nose, she sizes him up, rails against a broken system, and ingests what remains of Kersey’s ebbing bodily fluids, all with the resigned hunger of a woman who knows this is her last shot to feel a man press her down into a cheap mattress, even if he’s more musty corpse than gentleman caller. As played by Deborah Raffin, with eyes just this side of twinkly despair, Miss Davis is the film’s unbreakable misogyny made flesh, where women exist to scream in agony, bare chocolate breasts as the hot breath of rape lurks around every corner, and re-energize our heroes so they might continue their righteous butchery. She’s also the cinema’s final word on the efficacy of social work, where bookish liberals take their clipboards teeming with hope and meet their end via the sucker punch of urban lawlessness. It helps, too, to own the one car in Christendom that explodes on impact at a speed approximating a late-morning jog.

Richard Shriker

He’s the only cop worth a damn, striking deals with vigilantes as if negotiating sick pay with the teacher’s union. He wants bodies on slabs, and he wants them now, even if a few of them are goofy cops who haven’t the sense to drive into a war zone with bulletproof vests or weaponry exceeding the power of cap guns. And his refrain — “I’m a cop, which means I get to violate your Constitutional rights” – evokes the unvarnished masculinity of the Gipper era with tear-down-that-wall efficiency, but also speaks to any age that sacrifices its nutsack on a pyre of limp wrists and liberal equivocation. Fortunately, Shriker saves the best for last, as he damns the torpedoes, his badge, and any hope of escaping a life sentence in Rikers in order to join Kersey for the world’s most delightful turkey shoot. That final massacre, Michael Winner’s own personal reimagining of Grenada, is Paul’s catharsis, yes, but it’s Richard’s hard-on; a desk guy’s fevered orgy of revenge for every tortured cold call he had to make raising money for the policeman’s ball. With a scowl barely masking that newly found grin of a life finally lived, Shriker regains his inspiration for ever joining the thin blue line in the first place. He even lets Paul go at the end, as if to insist that he take credit, bask in the glory, and hastily announce his run for office as the Murderin’ Mayor.

Justice

An abstraction to some, an impossibly distant dream to others, it is finally given its tangibility at last in Kersey’s New York. For one screeching black mama who waves her arms at death as if asking for an encore, it means that the man who stole her purse can die with a basketball-sized hole in his chest, once again setting the universe back on course. “I’m glad he’s dead!”, she shrieks, singing the heavenly chorus of victims everywhere, and also boldly equating the loss of a few dollars in food stamps with capital murder. But her joy is nonetheless infectious, and we share in her religious fervor. For Kersey, every killing is, of course, a cry against those who were never called to account for ending his late wife’s earthly journey with spray paint, rape, and callous humiliation, but in each scene, he kills for nothing more than a cheap automobile, or even the loss of a lousy camera. “It’s my car!”, he protests, defending property rights in the only manner available to a man not twisted by feminism and homosexuality. Unarmed, fleeing, or even bowed in surrender, all must die for the crimes of others, or perhaps what they too will one day commit. Guilt is assumed, and not even God would dare sort them out.

Oh, What a Time

Was that really America? Where we could order elephant guns through a PO Box, which itself handed over its keys without bothering to ask for a name, let alone a form of ID? When a broken arm led to death because to be raped under Reagan was an admission that the pussy was acquiring too much power? Or when cowardly Mexican men sent their wives to the corner store – ALONE – because the daily gunshots, streets littered with trash, endless sexual assaults, muggings, and burning cars weren’t enough to clue you in that a woman by herself, and with nice tits to boot, just might be kidnapped by a roving gang of thieves, punks, killers, and rapists? When the biggest jugs we’ve ever seen in an action movie belong to a dehumanized black prostitute who AVOIDS rape because she’s sleeping with the director? All that, and the only time on record where a young black man was just as likely to fall from a roof to his death as receive a bullet in the head.

Chuck Cunningham, Esq.

Gavan O’Herlihy, Manny Fraker to you and me, gave up the green pastures and fat paychecks of Happy Days to play, if not inhabit, the era’s foremost villain. From his reverse Mohawk to crayola-inspired war paint, Fraker is exactly what the genre needed, and was the perfect foil to Kersey’s running commentary of righteous bloodlust. From the moment he sees Paul in the jail cell and has his lackeys bust the old man’s chops, he’s clearly in charge, using that brief interlude to convey one of the film’s most precious nuggets: “Tell you what, I’m gonna kill a little old lady, just for you…Watch it on the six o-clock news.” And I’ll be damned if he doesn’t do exactly that. He kills members of his own gang simply to exert power, has committed the entire neighborhood’s phone numbers to memory (his initial call to Paul, asking, “Hey, what are ya doin’ in there?” is a classic, considering that it comes about 15 minutes after he butchered Paul’s best friend in that very apartment), and lays claim to a queer sense of morality (despite killing dozens, he is outraged when Paul does likewise). He’s the oddest duck to control so diverse an urban gang, as he lacks the usual physical appeal and charisma, but upon his death, unseen to everyone in the street, he elicits screams of woe from his flock, as if they could sense a world without his soul. But when he dies, the violence stops forever, and the city is once again returned to kindly Jews, entrepreneurs, and Korean War vets with the pull to sneak home weaponry usually reserved for bringing down entire tank divisions.

Taurino Beer, imported from El Salvador (”Taurino Beer” is Spainish for “Airwolf”), sells for $10 per 18 pack at Fresh and Easy. Good fucking God it is bad. The upside is that if you should overdo it, you’ll already be acclimated to the taste of vomit. I mean, it seriously tastes vaguely of puke. Hold on a second while I open another one.

Oh right, I promised I would get back to other 80s copter shows. As the middle of this season of “Airwolf” is generally pretty shitty, I’ll see if I can distract you with the intro to “Riptide.” Hey! Look at this! It’s the intro to “Riptide!”

Yowzah. So that’s Donald P. Bellisario 1, Stephen J. Cannell 0 in the game of helicopter shows. Fun fact about Bellisario: He served alongside Lee Harvey Oswald during his stint in the Marines. Fun fact about Cannell: His teenage son was tragically suffocated by a giant sand castle.

Episode 10: Once a Hero

Sting and Archangel meet up with some unsavory Asians in a dodgy bar and trade money for what’s in the briefcase: pictures that place St. John in the prison camp of a Laotian warlord, whereupon String returns home and begins to hatch a plan to recover his brother which involves selling one of his many Louvre-quality paintings to finance the mission and rounding up his ‘Nam pals, one of whom is the front runner in the California senate race and the other of whom is a professional dirt bike racer, to man the mission. There are times when “Airwolf” stretches credibility. They go on the mission, the senator guy goes nutsy-koo-koo and… I won’t ruin the episode for you buy revealing if they find St. John or not. You have to admire them all. Most people go to SE Asia to fuck kids. Right?

Best Borgnine Line: Hey! This guy’s hotter than a two dollar pistol on a Saturday night!

Episode 11: Random Target

Another substandard mid-season episode, but at least we can always rely on String’s fly sense of style, even though this cap is probably from another episode. This one contains the line, “looks like some kind of big gathering of people for some reason.” I mean, overly expository dialog should at least provide some information. “We’re going to find the creator of the robot. Maybe he knows how to destroy it!” Not, “let’s go find some guy for some reason.” A guy who has another air company that the String and Borgs work with sometimes is killed after they do some filming in the desert for him. Then the lab where the film was developed is torched. Then it’s discovered that a lady and her jeep were blown up in the same area where the filming took place. Then Santini Air is torched. The police don’t see any connection. Airwolf must intervene. Though nonsensical, this is an impressively violent episode with a double digit corpse count. I can’t think of another network show nearly as violent as “Airwolf.” Like, dead bodies turn up on all of those dumb cop shows, but you never see people blossoming into their glorious becoming of death.

BBL: When they’re flying over the desert they see some chicks in bikinis and Borgnine zooms in and with a bunch of exclamations like “oooooh look at that!” I don’t know if the producers didn’t realize how creepy the image of a salivating Ernest Brognine secretly filming girls from a helicopter would be, or if they did realize how hilarious it would be.

Episode 12: The Condemned

The Rusians have engineered a horrifying bio-weapon that makes people believe that Tina Fey is funny. We’ve acquired the agent, but everyone on the Island of Research, where scienticians have gone to find an antidote with minimal risk of creating an epidemic if something should go wrong, has turned up dead. This sounds like a mission for… not Airwolf. Probably some kind of elite hazmat team that has spent years training on how to deal with bio-weapons. But they send Airwolf. A sub full of Ruskies turns up for reasons that are pretty unclear, especially since they are on U.S. territory. The story becomes a stirring cold war allegory as everyone becomes infected and the Airwolf team (it’s just String and the chick because Ernest Borgnine was having life-saving awesomeness-reduction surgery) and the Russians walk the precarious path between their national interests and prejudices and mutually assured destruction. There’s actually a very clever twist because everyone on the island seems to go insane and kill each other due to the contagion, but as it turns out, several hours of extreme paranoia is a side effect of the life saving antidote. Is the message that Reaganism was indeed the path to cold war victory and, ultimately, peace? Eventually, everyone gets smashed on vodka and does that Russian dancing that is extremely gay, even by the standards of dancing. String and Caitlin come away with the antidote and a great anecdote!

Best Borgnine Line: Look, I’m trying to move my bowels. Don’t I have enough problems as it is without people screaming at me while I’m trying to move my bowels!?

Episode 13: The American Dream

String and Dom are attending a wedding in one of California’s Central Valley Vietnamese communities. As a vet of ‘Nam String has formed many bonds with the Vietnamese people, as is bound to happen when you drop napalm on someone’s children. This is one of the innumerable similarities between me and an 80s action hero. Having worked in the gaming industry, I too have befriended this gentle and annoying people. Yet another vaguely Shakespearean smoked ham plays the criminal mastermind who threatens this small community with a booming voice coupled with an understated and cordial demeanor that scarcely cloaks his deadly intentions. This ultimately leads to a confrontation between Airwolf and a couple of crop-dusters in the worst mismatch since Charles Barkley last grappled with the written word. Finally, the Vietnamese warlord guy swoops in with a fighter jet, but Airwolf shoots him down, forcing him to parachute to the fields. The leader of the farmers proclaims “This is America! Citizens arrest!” Cut to a soaring bald eagle (really). I enjoyed this episode. Just to reiterate how much deathier “Aiwolf” is than other such shows, the bad guys kill people by spraying them with gasoline from a crop duster, then burning them alive.

BBL: (proposing a cabbage cutting race) “I’ll tell ya what! The first one down to the uh… down to that uh… ditch, down there is the winner! Let’s go! Haha!”

Episode 14: In at the End of the Road

More half-assed mid-season drek. Bank Robbers or some other kind of robbers storm into a little town and try to kill everyone by stuffing them in a meat locker with no oxygen. Airwolf intervenes. String and Dom have this big conversation about which kind of disability you’d most want a hot girl to have so that you could get away with raping her because she’d be unable to report it. String was like, whatever makes it impossible for her to report me, but leaves her body most in tact. So his ideal would be a fresh vegetable, I suppose. But Dom felt it was very important that she’d know what was happening, just not be able to report it. That was the main thing that he found erotic about the scenario–he wouldn’t even care that much if she was disfigured, so long as she was conscious of what was happening but powerless to ever tell anyone.  He concedes that he’d probably even do it to a guy if those criteria were met.

“BBL: Hey, look! Look at that family of bears!”

At this point, he is really just fucking around, now that the Oscar business is behind him. And now, with his muse Dicaprio by his side, M. Night Scorsese is crafting shit that he once could do in his sleep. Maybe this is unfair criticism from someone rendered impossible to satisfy by masterpieces gone past. Still, when the big payoff is telegraphed early on (in the first act, if not the trailer), one is left with The Shining as filtered through Silent Hill without an unstoppable antagonist like Pyramid Head to inhabit our nightmares. The only truly frightening enemy is Leonardo Dicaprio with another Bawstin accent uncomfortably stapled to his mannered visage. Shutter Island is still a Scorsese film, and even at his worst, the guy can direct a decent movie. Even so, you are left wondering why he came up with a plotline so pedestrian, and a twist that is earned but way too familiar to be interesting.

Shutter Island starts off promisingly enough, with a far fetched (for good reason) setup that two federal marshals are sent to a craggy island in Boston Harbor to investigate the disappearance of a patient who appears to have melted through the walls. This is 1954, in the early days of psychiatry as a science, shortly after the development of chlorpromazine and lithium as treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, respectively. Psychoanalysis and asylum-based treatment was in the process of being slowly marginalized in favor of biochemical methods and community-based treatment. Lest I mislead you, this film is not about science or anything resembling, but this becomes a part of the background (way the fuck back, mind you). Dicaprio plays Teddy Daniels, who has a history of violence and a drinking problem, a dead wife and kids, and who recently assisted in the liberation of Dachau and massacring the German soldiers stationed there. The flawed hero begins his story enroute to the island on the eve of a storm that will isolate him for the duration of the investigation. From the very beginning, the audience’s expectations are set on a slippery surface, as nobody acts like a normal human being or behaves in a rational fashion. The effect is disorienting, but this weirdness has good reason for being, which becomes evident as time goes on. The hero has fairly persistent migraines, nightmares, and what appears to be either hallucinations or he is the victim of directorial flourishes. Reality slips away as Teddy grows simultaneously closer and further from unearthing the secrets of Shutter Island.

If you are capable of reading between the lines, and you have seen a single thriller in the past decade, you know goddamn well what is going on, and so atmosphere becomes the sole source of entertainment. The brick buildings and well manicured lawns house most of the inmates of this institution for the criminally insane, while an old civil war fort houses the most dangerous of the criminals. The cells give way to dungeons filled with the sick and twisted, as though all schizophrenics were kept in dilapidated abattoirs of rusted iron and disintegrating concrete. But this is all symbolism at work, and none too subtle, as we descend into the tortured innards of Teddy’s mind. The parallels between the escaped patient’s life and crimes and Teddy’s are made clear early in the proceedings. Teddy the federal marshal is uniquely terrible at both interrogation and investigation with a manner infused equally by sarcasm and contempt. The director of the institution, the staff physicians, and wardens all exude duplicity and menace, but this is because of our protagonist’s perspective. So even though each character acts unnecessarily dickish from start to finish, this is intentional as filtered through that shopworn technique of the unreliable protagonist. Don’t give the inconsistencies and outright idiocies of the script a second thought; the film is entertaining enough with solid performances and some wonderfully unbalanced imagery. Forgettable, but one could find a worse distraction.

The point of view of the paranoid schizophrenic is presented in a somewhat effective way; the doctors, the drugs, and the psychiatric analysis are all viewed as fun and games set up by nefarious enemies as far as the mentally ill are concerned. Every word and gesture is seen as an attack upon an impervious exterior, making adherence to medication extraordinarily difficult for inpatients, let alone those treated in a community-based setting. Generally the paranoid schizophrenic is less of an adroit chess master than Dicaprio’s character and more resembles Sir Digby Chicken Caesar, but never mind. The overall payoff, if I may spoil the living shit out of Shutter Island, is that the entire hospital was involved in a role playing exercise to allow Dicaprio’s character one last chance to recognize the horrors of his past and the impact of his violent crimes, kind of like a massive treasure hunt with the occasional near-death experience and skull-fractured fellow patient to spice things up. The idea of letting a dangerous prisoner run riot over an island, traipse across rocky cliffs, and pummel other patients by way of therapy is intensely stupid. Still, I found this intriguing as a reflection of the decline of psychotherapy as medications became the vanguard of treatment for psychiatric illness. A second viewing will probably reveal even larger plot holes that would accommodate a jai alai field, but I do credit Shutter Island for two things. One, I found Leonardo Dicaprio less ridiculous than usual – a fine actor, but of limited range and whom should stay away from any role requiring an accent. Two, I appreciate a filmmaker even attempting to do something sensible with psychiatry, a field that has probably never been represented in a meaningful or earth-like way in film. Apart from Ordinary People, no movie has ever come close to portraying psychiatrists as anything other than Mengele interns looking to totally run some voltage through patients who don’t mop the floor correctly. Though it is true I have never met a single shrink who did not appear to have a few bolts loose, the same can be said of any physician. Or anyone, really. Mental illness and normality are all part of the same blurry spectrum. I leave you with a fun fact: frontal lobotomies were performed in the United States and Europe until the mid-1980’s.

The moviefone article has a little preamble about how Steven Seagal is not as popular as he once was and then consists of nothing more than a list of his direct to DVD movies using the exact same format: release date, DVD cover or poster, tagline, tongue in cheek summary.  To author Kevin Polowy’s credit, however, he doesn’t copy our format any further by continuing with actual writing.  So here’s the moviefone version:

I guess the similarities speak for themselves.  Oh, and yes, we did do a series on the direct to DVD videos of 80’s action stars including four of Seagal’s films. So it’s not like moviefone even came up with that aspect of it.  The format is tweaked slightly in our version of the direct to DVD reviews.  For those, we still have the taglines, but the summaries are longer.  Also, we decided not to use the box covers as much to try to freshen up the format.  I guess freshening up the format is less important if, like Polowy, you are just stealing your format from someone else and hoping nobody will notice so that it will seem fresh.  But, other than that… see for yourself.  Here’s our review of Out For A Kill.

Moviefone's Kevin Polowy

Of course the joy to be found in later Seagal has been explored in several other outlets, like The Film Fiend as well, and everybody fucking knows about these movies and making fun of them is a very common internet past time. Polowy didn’t just stumble upon this incredible discovery, as he tries to represent. He’s dumbing down and regurgitating content from all across the web and pretending to do something original. He is however, specifically ripping off our format to do it.

Obviously, this pisses me off because it involves our site.  But there’s a trend towards very big sites like this one and The Huffington Post simply stealing content from smaller sites and communities and passing it off as original articles.  In the case of moviefone, they actually bothered to rephrase our stuff rather than copying and pasting it.  Kudos to them!

The net is a huge, stupid clusterfuck and one function of the high traffic outlets should be to cull some of the better, but more obscure content out there and bring it to their readers.  But be fucking honest about it and don’t steal.  Maybe include one whole sentence saying “here is some cool shit I found at another web site” or “let’s use the Ruthless 80s Action formula for a quick glance at some of Seagal’s recent work.” Then, everyone is happy. Don’t pretend to have made it up yourself, because then you reveal yourself to be a hack with no integrity.  Or worse still, one day, you might just push the wrong man too far. Polowy, I’m gonna take you to the fone.  The blood fone.

There was also “Airwolf’s” closer cousin, “Blue Thunder,” with Dana Carvey, NFL stars Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith and in the leading role… some guy who wasn’t famous and never would be. In “Blue Thunder” the super chopper is manned by an elite LAPD unit. As far as I can tell from the intro, the crew use Blue Thunder to travel quickly between schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District so that they can give presentations to assemblies of students in which they promote their message of Holocaust denial, another theme “Blue Thunder” shares with “Airwolf.” I don’t want to get too far off track, so I’ll continue this digression at some point in the future. Let’s get back to “Airwolf!”

Episode 5: Sins of the Past

Borgnine’s estranged daughter turns up dead of an overdose. As the story unfolds we learn that Borgnine’s wife is totally psychotic, even for a woman. She absconded with his daughter when she was seven (the daughter, not the wife- it’s Borgnine, not Mohammed) and he sees his girl for the first time since childhood, kneeling before her open casket, only to have the psycho bitch walk up behind him. He doesn’t know how to react. It’s pretty heavy. Seriously, “Airwolf” is tearing me apart inside. In turns out that the town is being run by some crook who is turning it into a marginally legal gambling destination and putting the squeeze on the locals. Airwolf intervenes. I don’t think that most of the people on this show shit their pants sufficiently when String or Dom get involved in some local zoning dispute and then show up in a gun ship. Like, imagine if that actually happened. Two guys are arguing and then,  one of them shows up in the parking lot with a sock full of nickles and you turn to your friend and say, “dis shit ’bout ta get REAL!” Then the other dude shows up with a billion dollar attack helicopter. On the show, the guy with the sock full of nickles might be thrown off somewhat, but he will generally try to attack Airwolf with the sock, rather than literally voiding his bowels and fainting, which I think is the normal reaction. Generally, even the police wind up being like, “well, thanks for the help fellas. We couldn’t have done it without you.” Not “Someone in a fucking military helicopter is blowing up half the fucking city!”

Best Melancholy Borgnine Line: I suppose I should have some kind of feeling for the place that I was born. But I don’t.

Episode 6: Fallen Angel

Weird-eye-patch-but-not-as-as-much-of-a-tool-as-Tom-Wolf guy is kindernapped in East Germany. I fall asleep.

Episode 7: HX-1

Right off the bat, underrated 80s cutey, PJ Soles, the chick who played Riff Randall in Rock n Roll High School, is listed as a guest star and like 20 people are killed in the first scene, so I’m optimistic. The HX-1 is the new helicopter that is arguably better than Airwolf and is stolen by mercenaries. That means the government has developed two, unique, cutting edge helicopters and immediately had both of them stolen from under their noses.  They’ve also gone from the name ‘Airwolf’ to the name ‘HX-1.’ That would never happen on my watch. The M.O. of the mercs is the same as JMV used with his crew back in The Shit, so he wonders if his MIA brother might be involved in the theft and therefore, most likely still alive. As awesome as Michael’s evil twin was in “Knight Rider,” I was hoping for this to be the case. Lamentably, “Airwolf” takes the high road yet again and the mastermind of the attacks turns out to be a different member of the ‘Nam crew. String’s twin remains MIA, which is unfortunate, but on the upside, he is named Sinjin Hawke. Would it be worth it to spend most of your life in a Vietnamese prison camp to be named Sinjin Hawke? I think that’s one of those questions where the answer depends on your own value system. (editor’s note: Erich apparently isn’t familiar with the whole “Saint John” being pronounced as “Sinjin” thing. I can’t say I blame him, since it’s retarded.)

Best non-Borgnine line: I could have used a man like your brother.

This line is given by some toothy Brit who plays the mercenary leader and is addressed to JMV. As written, it is hackneyed at best. The delivery is great though. We could have used a man. Like, your brother. Ouch! Kudos to you, English guy whose name IMDB will not reveal.

Episode 8: Flight #091 is Missing

This one sort of reminded me of a Margaret Atwood short story, “A Travel Piece.” The premise is basically the same: people trapped at sea after an airline crash with no hope of rescue. This version is better because Airwolf intervenes, in one of the stronger episodes of the season. Hijackers land a plane on the water and let it sink, but the way the plane is designed, the water doesn’t leak in. Why doesn’t it float then? You sure ask a lot of questions. The point is that the hijackers have the passengers trapped under water, undetectable, completely at their mercy and with a deadline that cannot be negotiated: the amount of time it will take for the passengers to run out of oxygen. Caitlin is on board, but I think that is largely to make the scenes in the plane more interesting and that Airwolf would have intervened in this situation regardless of who the passengers were, as this is another mission under the direction of The FIRM. Another brutal moment by the standards of network TV comes when the guys who actually hijack and sink the plane emerge from the ocean in scuba gear, see their partners and start celebrating.”We did it!” “Huzzah!”  Their partners whip out the machine guns, open up on their pals and cut them out of the deal.

Things that negotiate with terrorists: East coast, Jewish, cosmopolitan experts.

Things that don’t negotiate with terrorists: Airwolf.

Best Borgnine line: Oh, what the heck? Hooray!

Episode 9: Once A Hero

This episode is one of the worst. I assume they dump all the turds into the middle of the season, so I made note of the Best Borgnine Line (BBL) and googled “Airwolf fan fiction” which led to http://www.fanfiction.net/tv/Airwolf/

A few postcards from the abyss:
Sleeping Beauties» by bookworm

On their first mission since Cait’s death, Dominic and Hawke go undercover to bust a drug ring and take a dangerous drug off the street nicknamed Sleeping Beauty.

Jingle Bell Hawke by Maria Thorne

BBL: Are you kidding? At these prices, I’ll pop for the sweaters!

The words “Ron Howard Presents” are unlikely to inspire confidence in even the most optimistic of viewers but if there’s one thing this film does prove, almost anything is possible.

In The Shadow of the Moon is a simple and understated documentary that splices rediscovered NASA footage that had been rotting away in the JSC archives with present day talking heads footage of the surviving moonwalkers.

As a historical document alone this film is invaluable. Only 24 people have ever seen the whole circle of the earth from space and it’s quite feasible that as the remaining 18 succumb to old age they will be the last human beings in our lifetime, ever to have done so. It’s left entirely to the Apollo astronauts themselves to narrate the story and for the most part this manages to steer the documentary away from the dreaded Discovery Channel clichés about One Small Step and Mans Greatest Adventure, even if at times it does come across a bit like Abe Simpson yammering earnestly about that time he went to the Moon.

The Krist Novoselic/Dusty Beard of the famous Apollo 11 triumvirate; Michael Collins, in particular proves himself to be exactly the kind of laconic old geezer one could happily listen to recant war stories after a few beers.

The film does not shy away from the politics of the era. The astronauts were well aware that while they were cocooned away in their NASA bubble, America was tearing itself apart over numerous assassinations, the Vietnam War and the fallout of the Civil Rights Movement. As the Apollo 8 and 13 veteran Jim Lovell states, 1968 was a horrible year. In leaving the Earth’s orbit and providing humanity with its first glimpse of how small and insignificant our home planet really is, they managed to salvage some of it. We didn’t so much discover the moon on that day. What we really discovered was the fragility of the Earth.

That famous photo by Bill Anders of Earthrise is still one of the most powerful images ever taken but in a way I am just as amazed by the almost chilling footage taken through the Apollo 8 Command Module window as the three explorers become the first to ever leave the blue planet behind them and head out into the big black.

As would be expected, much of the documentary is taken up with Apollo 11’s first landing on the moon. Far from being a smooth ride to the surface, the mission itself was a near disaster from the moment the lunar module uncoupled itself from Columbia.

With the radio transmissions flaking out and a guidance computer that had all but shit the bed, Armstrong and Aldrin were miles off target and heading into a boulder field with less than 25 seconds of fuel to save them from becoming permanent residents of the Sea of Tranquillity. The tension of those final moments is not dimmed despite the knowledge of the outcome. That the otherwise unknowable Neil Armstrong had what we came to know as the Right Stuff is not in doubt. On more than one occasion in this movie he is shown seconds, even milliseconds from death and his reaction is always unflappable.

Neil Armstrong has since become a strange old hermit who lives beyond the dune sea (Ohio in other words), and unsurprisingly he declined to be interviewed; yet he still dominates much of the conversation. This is probably for the best as in many ways he is a blank slate of a man who is best left to the imagination. When the archive footage does show him speak, it is in the faltering, hesitant manner of a person completely unused to speaking in public. He has one of the most famous names on the planet yet commendably he keeps to the shadows. What he could do was land that crate. Explaining how it felt is something he can’t or is at best unwilling to do. As an almost apologetic Collins states, the nerveless and logical mindset of the test pilot that allows one to fly and land a tin foil carton a quarter of million miles away from home are diametrically opposed to the artistic skills needed to convey how it feels to take part in such a momentous event.

One moonwalker, Alan Bean became a professional artist, albeit one who paints nothing but the grey dirty landscape of the Ocean of Storms, and a couple of the astronauts featured were affected enough by the experience to become full time Born Again God Botherers. (Mind you, the fact that Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell started and was later expelled from his own new age cult is very much glossed over.) As is reflected here, it’s not enough to show the easily bored public an engineering marvel and expect them to retain interest. They want to know how it feels, not how it works. How does it change a person? What’s it like to be able to hide everything you’ve ever known under your thumb? Why did some feel like they had an epiphany up there while others left with the nagging thought “Is that it?” rattling around their heads. The question: How does it feel to stand on the moon is maybe beyond even the sensitive Alan Bean’s reach. Just as Armstrong retreated to a life of quiet anonymity, his partner Aldrin has no qualms in talking about the depression and alcoholism that overtook him once he’d exited stage left. Others too, allude to the boredom they felt once the intense exhilaration of Apollo was behind them.

So what was the point? Apollo cost an annual 5% of the USA’s GDP at its height and apart from proving that man could go to the moon if he wanted to there seemed to be little else in it other than pride and pretty pictures for the public at large. In Apollo’s defense, unlike most of the past centuries’ famous events, Apollo presented a story about hope rather than tragedy or death and even with its steep price tag, it still cost a mere fraction of the disaster in Vietnam, with the added advantage that this was a race that the USA actually could and did win. There is a lovely anecdote by Michael Collins about how in every country he visited after the landings the people he met said, not “you did it” but “we did it”. Not just America, but the entire world felt like it had taken part. Even the French were suitably impressed. However the party line that this was a noble endeavour undertaken for all mankind is shot down by one lunar astronaut. As David Scott explains “it was really about beating the Russians”. Thanks to the rocks brought back we did find out the age and the origin of the moons birth but sadly just as the science was getting interesting, and a geologist had managed to hitch a ride up there, the money ran out and the show was over.

In a way common sense took over but with it came a certain timidity. These aging spacemen reflect an era and a people that to me seem braver and with a brighter vision for the future than the people we are today. As the Apollo 13 Commander, Jim Lovell, puts it:

“It was a bold move and it had some risky aspects to it, but it was a time when we made bold moves”