I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 14
Finally, (4) the notion that the threesome is “too pure for this world,” which presumably gives them the right to kill store owners and other bystanders, is in its classic form pure fascist twaddle about the ubermensch, or superman, whose moral superiority gives him the right to murder. Araki may not have been thinking of Leopold and Loeb when he made his movie, but I was when I watched it.
Two of the best movies I’ve seen in recent years covered material similar to The Doom Generation. They were Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers. Both were about cross-country odysseys involving young lover/killers. Both dealt thoughtfully with their characters, and the consequences of their actions. Both had a point of view and a moral position. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Terence Malick’s Badlands (1972), and both versions of Gun Crazy also had doomed young lovers on the run. All of these films were honest enough to be about what they were about—to acknowledge their subject matter.
But Gregg Araki has maybe seen too many movies, and is eager to have us know that he is above his subject matter. He’s like the sideshow impresario whose taste is too good to enter his own tent. For him, I recommend several viewings of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a brilliant film that deals with a character very much like Xavier, and is not too shy to deal with him—to see him as he is, and accept the consequences.
Was I unfair to quote so liberally from the press kit? I used it because it praises the film so openly in terms that reveal its underlying dishonesty. Directors may not write their press kits, but they are responsible for them. Further reading from the kit: “The Doom Generation is the Alienated Teen Pic to End All Alienated Teen Pics—and, oh yeah, it’s a comedy and a love story, too.”
Oh, yeah.
Dracula A.D. 1972
(Directed by Alan Gibson; starring Christopher Lee; 1972)
The friendly folks at Hammer Films Ltd., the British specialists in horror flicks, have this thing about tiny glass vials. They’ll use a vial or two in almost every movie they make. Sometimes they have crystal vials, but mostly just your ordinary glass vial.
The vials are handy for storing dehydrated blood from Count Dracula, who left so much blood behind him when he died that, alive, he would have been a godsend to the blood bank, had his blood not been overrun with vampire germs.
Public prejudice against vampires still runs at a fairly high level, unfortunately, and that is why you never hear of a vampire donating his services when an emergency call goes out for a rare blood type. With a bit of organization and a list of rare-blood donors, a competent team of vampires should be able to come back with the necessary plasma in no time. This is not the unsavory prospect it would have been in the eighteenth or nineteenth century; the widespread use of toothpaste among vampires has removed one of the age-old barriers to their acceptance.
In any event, Dracula A.D. 1972 opens with a striking testimonial to the staying power of Dracula’s blood. We remember from Taste the Blood of Dracula, an earlier Hammer endeavor, that when his dried blood is mixed with a little water and taken orally in medicinal amounts, the user becomes infected with the count’s evil spirit. That’s more or less what happens again this time.
A young man who looks curiously like Alex (Stanley Kubrick’s hero in A Clockwork Orange) wants to be a vampire. He hangs around all day in a strange coffeehouse that looks curiously like the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange, and he looks out from under a lowered brow, just like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. He seems to be a symbol of the general decay at Hammer Films, which, having brought the horror film to a peak of perfection and created the first new horror superstar in years (Christopher Lee), now seems willing to follow the artistic leads of violence-come-latelies like Kubrick. Alas.
Anyway, the novice lays hands on some dehydrated Dracula blood, liquefies it during a bizarre ritual in a bombed-out church, and sets into motion a complex chain of forbidden rituals designed to display Stephanie Beacham’s cleavage to the greatest possible advantage. This isn’t a terrific rationale for another horror flick but, given Miss Beacham’s ability to heave, and her bosom to heave with, it will have to do. On leaving the theater, I was given an honorary membership card in the Count Dracula society, and a lapel pin that I inadvertently stuck myself with. And not a vial in sight.
Emmanuelle—the Joys of a Woman
(Directed by Francis Giacobetti; starring Sylvia Kristel; 1976)
Let me, Emmanuelle, teach you the secret joys of love. I will show you how to live for pleasure . . . let me take you to a new world.—Advertisement
And on and on. Emmanuelle was a pristine innocent at the beginning of her first film, but the kid was a quick study, and now here she is in the sequel as a sort of combination sex therapist and hidden garden of desires. She’s married, but that hasn’t slowed her down; if her husband explains once, he explains a dozen times that Emmanuelle’s life is her own to lead, and that he doesn’t possess her (more than about twice a day).
The two of them live in Hong Kong now, in a vast mansion filled with potted palms and slowly revolving fans and white wicker furniture and servants who assist them in and out of states of undress. Life is pleasant. Emmanuelle’s husband has no apparent line of work, although he maintains a little office at home—primarily, I suspect, because one scene requires a desk for Emmanuelle to crawl under. Such are the demands of sexual liberation.
One day a young aviator comes to call. He was just flying through, you see, on his way to Australia, when he developed a little engine trouble. He sleeps with his propellor. During waking hours, he polishes the propellor while sitting on the lawn. We wait for two hours to discover what additional purposes the propellor will be put to, but we never learn; some secrets are not to be revealed. The aviator gets the guest room.
Then there’s the lovely Anna-Marie, whose father throws sophisticated dinner parties after which exotic dancers perform. Anna-Marie doesn’t get along with dad, and so she moves in with the Emmanuelles, too. Poor thing, it’s so hot out that she can hardly move, and so Emmanuelle and her husband take her to a bathhouse, where they receive what is advertised in the free weekly papers as a full body massage.
Emmanuelle’s search for the most distant shores of love is a demanding one, and during the course of Joys of a Woman she also (a) surprises a tattooed polo player in a dressing room and is most cruelly treated by him, (b) has her clothing interfered with by Anna-Marie’s dancing teacher, (c) is seduced in the women’s dormitory of a steamer bound for Hong Kong from Thailand, and (d) achieves orgasm by acupuncture, while the aviator looks on, propellorless for once. We wait in vain for her to discover the missionary position, but such relief is denied her.
The attractive elements of the original Emmanuelle are present here, too: the pretty Sylvia Kristel, the languorous color photography, the exotic locations, the outrageous fantasies. But somehow the characters seem to have lost track of their sanity; they wander from one encounter to another like wife-swappers at a postlobotomy ball. They have glazed looks in their eyes and think with their mouths open. And they lose track of time, of things. The aviator never does go on to Australia, and dad doesn’t come looking for Anna-Marie, and Emmanuelle and her husband never do decide whether he should shave off his mustache, and dinner’s not served . . . yawn . . . and. . . .
End of Days
(Directed by Peter Hyams; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Pollack; 1999)
There are forces here you couldn’t possibly comprehend. —Dialogue
You can say that again. End of Days opens with a priest gazing out his window at the Vatican City and seeing a comet arching above the moon like an eyebrow. He races to an old wooden box, snatches up a silver canister, pulls out an ancient scroll, unrolls it and sees—yes! A drawing of a comet arching above the moon like an eyebrow! For verily this is the dreaded celestial display known as the “Eye of God.”
The priest bursts into an inner chamber of the Vatican, where the pope sits surrounded by advisers. “The child will be born today!” he gasps. Then we cut to “New York City, 1979” and a live childbirth scene, including of course the obligatory dialogue, “Push!” A baby girl is born, and a nurse takes the infant in its swaddling clothes and races to a basement room of the hospital, where the child is anointed with the blood of a freshly killed rattlesnake before being returned to the arms of its mother.
Already I am asking myself, where is William Donohue when we need him? Why does his Catholic League attack a sweet comedy like Dogma but give a pass to End of Days, in which we learn that once every one thousand years a woman is born who, if she is impregnated twenty years later by the Prince of Darkness during the hour from eleven to twelve P.M. on the last day of the millennium, will give birth to the anti-Christ, who will bring about, yes, the end of days? While meanwhile an internal Vatican battle rages between those who want to murder the woman, and the pope, who says we must put our faith in God?
The murder of the woman would of course be a sin, but perhaps justifiable under the circumstances, especially since the humble instrument chosen by God to save the universe is an alcoholic bodyguard named Jericho Cane, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jericho and his partner (Kevin Pollack) find themselves investigating a puzzling series of events, including a man with his tongue cut out who nevertheless screams a warning and is later nailed to the ceiling of his hospital room.
Movies like this are particularly vulnerable to logic, and End of Days even has a little fun trying to sort out the reasoning behind the satanic timetable. When Jericho has the Millennium Eve scheduling explained to him, including the requirement that the Prince of Darkness do his dirty deed precisely between eleven P.M. and midnight, he asks the very question I was asking myself: “Eastern Standard Time?”
The answer, Jericho is told, is that the exact timing was meticulously worked out centuries ago by the Gregorian monks, and indeed their work on this project included, as a bonus spin-off, the invention of the Gregorian Calendar. Let’s see. Rome is six hours ahead of New York. In other words, those clever monks said, “The baby will be conceived between five and six a.m. on January 1, Rome time, but that will be between eleven and twelve a.m. in a city that does not yet exist, on a continent we have no knowledge of, assuming the world is round and there are different times in different places as it revolves around the sun, which of course it would be a heresy to suggest.” With headaches like this, no wonder they invented Gregorian Chant to take the load off.
End of Days involves a head-on collision between the ludicrous and the absurd, in which a supernatural being with the outward appearance of Gabriel Byrne pursues a twenty-year-old woman named Christine (Robin Tunney) around Manhattan, while Jericho tries to protect her. This being a theological struggle Schwarzenegger style, the battle to save Christine involves a scene where a man dangles from a helicopter while chasing another man across a rooftop, and a scene in which a character clings by his fingertips to a high window ledge, and a scene in which a runaway subway train explodes, and a scene in which fireballs consume square blocks of Manhattan, and a scene in which someone is stabbed with a crucifix, and . . .
But the violence raises another question. How exactly do the laws of physics apply to the Byrne character? Called “The Man” in the credits, he is Satan himself, for my money, yet seems to have variable powers. Jericho shoots him, and he pulls up his shirt so we can see the bullet holes healing. But when Jericho switches to a machine gun, the bullets hurl The Man backward and put him out of commission for a time, before he attacks again. What are the rules here? Is he issued only so much anti-injury mojo per millennium?
The movie’s final confrontation is a counterpoint to the Times Square countdown toward the year 2000. Only a churl would point out that the new millennium actually begins a year later, on the last day of 2000. Even then, End of Days would find a loophole. This is the first movie to seriously argue that “666,” the numerical sign of Satan, is actually “999” upside down, so that all you have to do is add a “1” and, whoa! You get “1999.”
Endless Summer II
(Directed by Bruce Brown; starring Robert Weaver, Pat O’Connell; 1994)
Endless Summer II is the kind of movie that observes, quite seriously, that if you had money enough and time, you could spend the rest of your life traveling around the world, surfing on perfect waves. And those waves, it observes, have been rolling ashore for “tens of thousands of years” (or even longer, I’ll bet), “just to give us pleasure.”
One of the charms of the movie is that it adheres so rigorously to this worldview. Man exists to surf, and waves exist to allow him to. Ultimate bliss is a “sixty-second ride,” after which, “no matter how many times it happens,” the lucky surfer feels “stoked.”
The documentary stars two young surfers, Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, twenty-six, and Pat O’Connell, twenty, who set out on an around-the-world odyssey to find the perfect wave. For O’Connell, that must not be difficult, since he is famous for finding “the greatest wave of my life” every single day. We know this from the movie’s narration, spoken by Bruce Brown, the director, since O’Connell is never heard on the sound track except to emit a creepy, high-pitched giggle.
Endless Summer II is a sequel to a movie made before either Weaver or O’Connell were born. The original Endless Summer came out, according to Brown, in 1964, although reference books cite the year 1966 and I recall meeting Brown when the movie opened in Chicago in 1967. None of this is of the slightest importance, but all through the movie I kept being distracted by Brown’s insistence on the year 1964—maybe because there was so little else for me to think about.
The movie is wonderfully photographed. Right at the beginning, we see fabulous shots of waves and surfers. Some of the shots even go inside the “barrel,” so we can see the wave curling over the head of the surfer. What a way to get stoked. These are terrific shots. We see them again, and again, and again. The operative word in the title is endless, not summer.
Seeking perfect waves, we follow the lads on their odyssey from southern California to Costa Rica to France to South Africa to the Fiji Islands to Australia and back home again, with some footage of Hawaii even though Pat and Wingnut inexplicably did not visit there. On their travels they meet the bronzed veterans of the first Endless Summer movie, all of them now thirty (or twenty-eight, or twenty-seven) years older, but still hanging out on the beach. Occasionally there is a small nugget of information, for example: “There are eight million Zulus in South Africa, but only one of them is a surfer.” Uncannily, the filmmakers have found that very Zulu, and interview him on the one subject he cannot discuss with his 7,999,999 fellow Zulus. This is a movie with tunnel vision.
Although the movie runs ninety-five minutes, it contains nothing much in the way of information about surfing. It observes that in 1964 surfers mostly used long boards, but today they use short boards. There is no mention of the differences between the two boards, or the reasons why one might use one, or the other. Nor do we discover how you learn to surf or what techniques and skills are useful. We do find out that there is a “pro tour,” but there’s no information about how the sport is scored, or how competition is held. Brown seems basically interested just in finding great waves, surfing them, and getting “stoked.”
He intercuts his surfing scenes with various bits of local color, as when Pat and Wingnut drive through a game reserve in a beach buggy and are pursued by lions. That’s risky, but not nearly so disturbing as the topless beaches of France, where the lads encounter several breasts, and ask the advice of local surfers about where to look during such an emergency.
There is such a harmless innocence about all of this that it’s seductive. Surfers, like all hobbyists, have a certain madness: They see the world through the prism of their specialty. Nothing else matters. “If you spent one day at every place where surfers ride the waves,” the movie tells us wistfully, “it would take you fifty years to visit all of them.” But boy, would you be stoked.
Eric the Viking
(Directed by Terry Jones; starring Tim Robbins, Lena Horne, Mickey Rooney; 1989)
Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes me feel like a human dialysis machine. The film goes into my mind, which removes its impurities, and then it evaporates into thin air. Eric the Viking is a movie like that, an utterly worthless exercise in waste and wretched excess, uninformed by the slightest spark of humor, wit, or coherence.
Movies like this show every sign of having gotten completely out of hand at an early stage of the production. Perhaps everybody was laughing so hard at the jokes they thought they were telling that they forgot to tell any. The movie looks obscenely expensive, but the money is spent on pointless scenes without purpose or payoff, as for example an interminable storm sequence in which the actors hold onto masts and say inane things to one another while water is splashed in their faces.
The basic comic technique in Eric the Viking is the use of the deliberate anachronism. There is a scene, for example, in which Vikings attack and pillage a village, and Eric the Viking (Tim Robbins) finds himself required to assault one of the townswomen. But his tastes do not run toward rape, and so they engage in a discussion on the economic realities of pillaging, and then he asks her to shout “Rape!” as a courtesy, so the other Vikings will think he has done his part.
