Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Film: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Director: Joseph Zito

Starring: Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover

Written by: Barney Cohen

Of all the Friday the 13th films, this, the fourth and not even close to final chapter in the series, is undoubtedly my favorite.  I get so pumped about the greatness of this film that a friend and I once drunkenly made a joyous theme song to celebrate it.  If you can sing the words “Friday the 13th: Part Four” in C major, then mention the two stars listed above, and then hit repeat for about ten minutes, well, congratulations, you’ve learned and mastered a new song.

This is one of the best horror flicks ever made.  The story’s pretty standard: a group of perved-up teenagers set up shop in a cabin on evil Crystal Lake, and Jason comes looking for blood.  For some reason, there’s a single parent family next door to the party, and the family’s two kids end up being the heroes as the other kids get picked off.  Yet there’s a lot going for this film which sets it apart from the usual hack and slash.

It’s got a brutality that is genuinely disturbing rather than gory slapstick, most notably thanks to the effects work of the great Tom Savini.  It’s infested with hormones like a rat has fleas, but Jason Voorhees’ horny victims are so well fleshed out that the heroic amount of tits and ass in this film doesn’t feel like it’s there to obscure bad acting or a poor story.  My main criteria for judging a horror film’s quality is whether the victims’ deaths leave a void in the film’s world, if there’s a sense of humanity that lessens with each demise.  Part Four easily passes this test.

Three characters in particular stand out.  A very young Corey Feldman serves as the brilliant Lil’ Tom Savini who soon gets unhinged and heroic.  Displaying both adorable glee and seething fury, Feldman is just captivating in every scene he’s in, and it was probably clear at the time that he was gonna be huge.  Feldman’s dog Gordon is also pretty awesome, and he is easily the smartest character in the film.  When the bodies start piling up, this strangely named canine randomly hurls himself through a second story window and is never seen again.  Gordon had clearly had enough of that shit.

However, the very best thing about Part Four, the thing which has earned this film its place in Bizarro film legend, is the performance of Crispin Glover.  He plays the teen group’s awkward dweeb who morphs into a ladykilling dancing machine.  Glover’s biggest moment ‒ perhaps of all time ‒ is his titanic dance scene, set to the dulcet tones of the same hair metal band which wailed out the theme song of the old, cartoon Transformers movie.  Watching Glover move is like watching a majestic (twitching, flailing, avant-garde) eagle soaring on film.  Only Napoleon Dynamite could spazboogie so well.  As the story goes, Glover took no direction here; he simply busted out the same dance moves he was already using in Hollywood clubs.  Crispin Glover, a dancing weirdo genius?  Perish the thought.

The only letdowns to this film and its inevitable, non-final sequels is that Feldman’s character, who ends Part Four as a cracked survivor, doesn’t put on Jason’s hockey mask and unleash his own bloody rampage as was teased.  That, and they didn’t make an entire movie about Crispin Glover tearing up the dance floor.  Nonetheless, Part Four is glorious, worth every drunken song created in its honor.

January 24, 2012
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Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: Danny Roane: First Time Director

 

Film: Danny Roane: First Time Director

Directed by, starring, and written by: Andy Dick

 

 

I’ve never made any secret of my opinion that Andy Dick is a comedic genius.  His old TV program, The Andy Dick Show, was a great display of sketch comedy which treated the world to such gems as Pebop the Death Row Clown, Christina Aguilera’s ugly cousin, and Marilyn Manson playing Mary Poppins.  Unfortunately (I think), Mr. Dick is better known for being a drugged-out creeper who menaces the world with his dong and then rides the rehab train.  In his directorial debut, Dick does a little of both, which works pretty well.

Danny Roane combines Mr. Dick’s weirdo comedic sensibilities with his adventures in being a lush.  Danny Roane the character is little more than a fictionalized Dick, a recovering boozer who once publicly peed on Frankie Muniz from Malcolm in the Middle and who now, in true matroyshka narrative style, is making a film about his harrowing experiences with drugs and alcohol.  Of course, the second a drop of alcohol hits his tongue he’s back off the rails, and his film’s production becomes a spastic fever dream which ends with him slapping a lady at a Jewish women’s film convention while Hitler prances about onscreen.

My favorite part of the film is when the director shows his prior performance as a slutty Cleopatra who humps the asp which does her in.  Dying, his Cleopatra sneers “What an asp!” which may be the best last words I’ve ever heard.

The surrounding cast is pretty great, with Roane’s cast and crew attempting to rein him in and not torpedo their careers.  Of special note are the director’s behemoth best friend who has to pull Roane out of many embarrassing situations (including a really creepy scene involving Maura Tierney’s dog), the gung-ho assistant director who has a yen for shaving his cast, and Roane’s set designer, a beady-eyed little man who tends to find himself shrieking for help in the midst of adversity.  The latter’s combination of sad bastard hope and spazzy irritation makes him a great character to watch.

The movie star cameos, all playing themselves, are a mixed bag.  Obliviously supportive James van der Beek shows up for a while, and he gets his hinder shaved and wears a bloody butt rag.  After Danny Roane drunkenly changes the film’s format to a musical, Anthony Rapp from Rent takes over, barfs a lot, and sings a weird song about drugs.  Jack Black plays a stoner God with clear disdain for the film he’s making.  The silver lining about Ben Stiller’s sedately disturbed cameo is that one gets to see that ridiculously manly painting of his character from Dodgeball wrestling a bull.

Yet this is entirely Andy Dick’s show, which is as it should be.  I’d have liked to see more of Dick’s weird sketch comedy sensibilities in the film and not so much of the main character stumbling around dead drunk, but there is enough invention to make this not entirely feel like a documentary about Dick’s triumphant substance tolerance.  That said, Dick does know how to play an awesome drunk.  He’s certainly had the practice.

 

January 20, 2012
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The Designer’s Drugs: Haruki Murakami – 1Q84

 

Medium: Literature

Stimulus: Haruki Murakami ‒ 1Q84

 

It’s possible that I’ve never been as frustrated with a book as I was with 1Q84.  Maybe if the book wasn’t so massive, I’d at least be less irritated about the trip through these dense woods.  Unfortunately, this would-be epic fairy tale’s length draws out the story’s primary and lesser flaws so far that they become almost intolerable.

Ultimately, the worst thing about 1Q84 is that it should be amazing.  This story of a parallel world has so much going on within it that, had Murakami focused more on its fantastic elements instead of jettisoning all of that colorful landscape in favor of making the book little more than an elaborate goddamn teenage romance, I’d have stood up on my textual soapbox and praised this book as a work of genius.  Instead ‒ and I don’t give a shit about spoiling this ending, because fuck this book’s ending ‒ the world is literally cast aside and thrown out the second the two main characters find each other.  All the big metaphysical questions are suddenly given the finger and ignored; it felt a lot like watching someone get born again and then deny that their life to that point ever happened.  I got the explicit message that the parallel 1984 world meant nothing to Murakami, that it served merely as a shiny backdrop for his mooning young lovers to have some bullshit Disney happily ever after moment.  After almost a thousand pages of investment, this sort of ending is a ridiculous letdown.

I’ll refer to the two main characters as Boy and Girl, since Murakami seems downright miserly in giving out even the most trivial details such as people’s names.  They begin as moderately interesting characters.  Girl is an assassin of wife-beaters as well as a weekend warrior swinger.  Her wingwoman in the latter is a really insipid character, but Girl’s spectrum of murder and sex creates some interesting contradictions.  Boy is a part-time math teacher, “older girlfriend” banger, and aspiring novelist who rewrites a mysterious girl’s novella into a bestseller.  This book, which initially only runs the risk of being exposed as a semi-fraud, soon creates metaphysical consequences which lead a cult to hunt down the authors.  Meanwhile, Girl is hunting down the cult leader, and soon Boy and Girl’s interests cross.

What makes these two characters implode is the revelation that Boy and Girl were classmates when they were ten, and one time they held hands, and ever since nothing else in either goddamn world they inhabit has mattered.  They’re thirty.  Despite their interesting and sordid lives, their entire reasons for living are soon exposed as finding each other despite not having seen each other for twenty years.  This quickly becomes as one-track and grating as watching a child throw itself on the ground in a toy store and hold its breath until it gets the toy it wants.

Interestingly enough, the third part of the story introduces another point of view, the welcome perspective of an insectlike private detective hired by the cult to track first Boy and then Girl.  He’s a great, pathetic character whom nobody likes, which combined with his extensive knowledge makes him the story’s most compelling voice.  Problem is, it just seems like he’s there for Murakami to grudgingly give up some more plot details, after which he’s tossed into the trash.  In a story filled with underutilized side characters, he’s the prime victim.

I really wanted to like this book, but no, I don’t.  The neat, supernatural elements are delightful but ultimately treated as unimportant.  The sordid sexy bits, perhaps owing to translation issues, are badly written with a very odd sort of technical euphemism.  And the main characters ‒ besides that sad, scuttling detective ‒ lose all their allure as they become all fucking doe-eyed.  I can’t say that 1Q84 was a total loss, but there’s no way I’d recommend this long, pointless journey to anyone else.

January 20, 2012
Categories: Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a Comment

Y Marks the Spot: It’s Not Always that Simple

 

So here’s a story from my life which has ultimately determined everything else.  It’s a good example of my view that absolute morality does not exist.  The cores of this story are childbirth and abortion, which at their mildest are divisive issues.  I have strong opinions on both; I’m very pro-choice, though my rationale is more based on population issues over women’s rights.  There are now seven billion humans on Earth.  There are now seven billion creatures which devour and shit all over everything in their paths.  My species is an intelligent plague.

My attitude is that if we don’t get control over birth, we’ll soon lose control over how we live and how we die.  We’ll simply drown in each other.  I think birth control should not only be encouraged but mandatory from adolescence until sometime in one’s twenties.  Though I don’t have much good to say about the Chinese government in general, I’m very behind its One Child Policy, especially in the context of a country with over a billion citizens.  Unfortunately, humans think they’re exempt from Bob Barker-style reproductive responsibility, and even in the most civilized, technologically advanced places where manpower is obsolete, people still baby-crap out units with the greatest of autopilot.  In such a world, I view abortion as a very necessary evil.

Still, there’s a problem I’ve come across as an occasional nihilist.  One has to exist in order to believe in the possibilities of nothing.  In that same contradictory vein it’s kind of illogical and self-centered for living people to actively deny a real future person the sort of existence that they enjoy (or at least get to experience).

But in the end, being pro-choice is about ‒ or at least it damn well should be about ‒ subjectivity.  Beyond its immediate social issue, the position should be an acknowledgement that existence is not one size fits all.  That’s why it’s not called pro-abortion.

In that vein, allow me to share my own conflicted, one in a million slice of existential subjectivity that led to me being alive today.

 

I’ve always known, even when I was a baby, that I’m incredibly lucky to be alive.  One of my earliest memories involves the knowledge that my mom was at the hospital getting a big deal doctor’s appointment as a result of my birth.  I may have been around two or so at the time, and for some reason I had the notion that she had always been in that hospital and never left it since I was born.

As a general rule ‒ though there are several huge exceptions that I’d learn about later in life, one of which serves as the focal point of this story ‒ my family has never concealed any knowledge from me.  Some of that, I’m sure, has to do with one of my sisters being ten years older than me and eager to teach me about all the world’s profane secrets.  Thanks to her, I could proficiently swear when I was three years old, and I’m probably one of the few humans who can say that they were a party to car theft while strapped into a car seat.

But it goes further than having a rebellious older sibling.  For example, my parents made sure I knew, very matter-of-fact, that I had another older sister who lived somewhere else with her mother.  I didn’t meet her until I was eighteen ‒ on an Oktoberfest day which ended in a car crash ‒ but I’ve always known she existed.  In fact, I knew about her before she knew about me.

If I had a question about anything, no matter how uncomfortable or gross or weird, my mom would do her best to give me a straightforward answer.  Thus, my family was always pretty up front about the fact that my birth wasn’t something that should have happened.

Without going into the gory details, certain cancerous complications led to the removal of some of my mom’s parts, and the only thing that kept me strapped in and carried to term was a tumor blocking the exit.  I am a tumor baby, the barely born son of a professional gambler.  Both of these facts are pretty goddamn appropriate.

The medical improbability of my birth was better explained to me later on, but even as a little kid I knew that I’d be the last child my mother would have.  After I emerged onto the scene they scraped her out, which ultimately led to an awesome scene in a crowded Christmas movie theater where I loudly asked my mom if Santa was going to bring her a new uterus.

Most times during my crappy adolescence and twenties, times when I was knuckle-deep in terrible jobs, creative frustration, romantic devastation, and many different forms of self-violence, I’d think about the sheer unlikelihood of my existence and wonder why they even bothered.  Like most things, life tends to be least valued by those who have the most of it, even if that person was a miracle baby.  Thankfully, I survived the terrible shit and have become a reasonably functional human being, glad to be alive.

People like to romanticize about living in the past or some sanitized era of predetermined life, but the stone cold fact is that I wouldn’t have even made it to childhood were it not for the medical technology of the 20th century.  Even better, I was born deformed.  My ribs curve inward, giving me the great ability to eat cereal out of my chest.  It’s a generally benign defect, but I can’t help thinking that in any other era ‒ especially in that manly Spartan age so balls-cuppingly praised by noir-redneck Frank Miller in 300 ‒ I’d have been deemed retarded at birth and thrown onto the mountain of baby skulls.  I suppose I owe my life to the fact that I live here and now, in a society which questions the disposal of unwanted babies.

Of course, this isn’t the only side to the story.  As I recently found out, my existence also owes a debt to someone else’s death.

 

My mom and I can talk for hours, and in these rambling, philosophical conversations secrets come out.  The last time this happened was last spring, back when I was still putting my life here in Washington together.  Having no job and nothing better to do, I’d call my mom and kill time lurking on the staircase and ranting about asshole Wisconsin Republicans.

I think the information I’m about to discuss came out because one of my cousins had just gotten pregnant.  (Appropriate to this story of life and death, she ended up giving birth to her son days before my grandma died.)  The talk of new babies led to talk of old babies and my birth, and by the way, says mom, you knew that I had an abortion before I had you, right?

If the fleas in my old run down house were shaped like giant question marks, one of those itchy sons of bitches would have jumped onto my head at exactly that moment.

My parents were married five years before I was born, and I’ve had the vaguest of overviews of their lives in the 70s.  The first thing my single realtor mom saw of my single realtor dad was his crotch in whatever tight disco pants he had on at the time.  Apparently those pants were a hit.  I was recently treated to my tipsy dad bragging that he banged my mom a lot in those early days, one part of a weird conversation in which he also pondered what life would have been like as a gay man.  Good to know, dad.

Mom already had a kid.  Dad had a kid whom he didn’t meet until I graduated college, yet he began to view my mom’s kid as his own.  (This has led to some awkwardness among us neglected biologicals.)  Dad really liked playing poker, so much so that he’d go pro around the time of my birth, and mom accepted it.  So things were going okay, I guess.

After being together for a while, mom and dad discovered that they were going to have a kid together.  The problem was that the same cancerous complications which made my birth so unlikely were entrenched well before I was the gleam.  The pregnancy of my older brother ‒ and when I think about this potential sibling, he’s always my brother, mostly because I’ve never had one ‒ was so malignant that there was a very real chance that my mom would have died if she tried to carry him to term.  So she didn’t.

My dad can’t deal with real problems.  His reaction to my mom’s trauma was to awkwardly joke that at least she wouldn’t lose her figure.  They broke up.  They got back together, obviously, but there was a point where their genetic swords were unlikely to cross again, leaving the potential me out in the void.  That’s another part of the story I like to creep myself out with.

I don’t know what made my fetushood any different.  I haven’t heard that part of the story yet.  Yet somehow I made it out, and I made it up, and I’ve made it to now.  I have no idea why that is.  Fuck it.  It doesn’t matter.  I’m here, and I’m not leaving.

 

As a result of these revelations I’ve developed a weird complex, not quite guilt, but an acknowledgement that someone actively had to die so that I could be born.  I suppose that this is true for anyone who has ever eaten a hamburger, but it feels different than that.  It’s just another case of a human pretending that humanity and one’s own circle are exempt and special, I suppose.  But still.

So yeah.  The moral.  The morality.  The subjectivity.  I owe my unlikely life to one abortion happening and to another one not happening.  But you know what?  I’d rather err on the side of choice.

As an adult I’ve helped an ex-girlfriend who found herself pregnant and unready through the process of abortion, and I’ve supported someone else whom I loved intensely for years through a pregnancy with someone else’s child.  Even now, life offers no easy, consistent, universal answers.

Then again, how many easy answers are worth knowing?

 

January 11, 2012
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a Comment

Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: Red State

 

 

 

Film: Red State

Director: Kevin Smith

Starring: Michael Parks, John Goodman, Michael Angarano

Written by: Kevin Smith

 

 

I imagine that the two main public reactions to the idea of the creator of such verbose yet straight-scaring comedies as Clerks, Mallrats, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno switching gears and coming out with a horror film about a murderous version of the real-life homophobic troll preacher Fred Phelps have been morbid curiosity and outright dismissal.  My own curious reaction to the proposal was a bit kinder.  Kevin Smith has mixed blood and religion before, and 1999′s Dogma was great.  I imagined Red State would be a serious, bloodier and less fantastic version of that film.  Maybe the Phelps surrogate would chase deviants through flickering florescent hallways and dispatch the unlucky with gory panache, but the ideas behind the darkness would be sound.  While I was very right about the film’s quality ‒ Red State is amazing ‒ I was fairly wrong about the premise.

The most important thing to note about Red State is that, despite all hype, this isn’t really a horror movie.  Sure, there’s blood and death and chases through those dimly lit subterranean passages, but most of the action would be considered G rated by gore geeks.  What’s interesting is that most of the real horror in Red State happens after it abandons all slasher pretense and becomes a story of domestic terrorism, a game of cops and cultists.  At this point, every character ‒ besides maybe the dirty white boys who get lured Porky’s style into the madness, and a Daisy Duke cult defector ‒ is laid bare as monstrous.

Despite expectations, Kevin Smith doesn’t turn Fred Phelps into Freddy Krueger; if anything he turns him into David Koresh.  Ultimately, this is a hell of a lot more frightening.  This is entirely because the villain isn’t played as a frothing redneck caricature.  Instead, we get a calculating, charming fiend.  Michael Parks is just brilliant in the role of Mr. Phelps-Koresh, a character who can defy filmmaking logic and turn a long, long sermon about the just malevolence of God into the film’s centerpiece.  Parks is so goddamn charismatic in the role that he makes you understand how rational people could blindly follow such psychotic demagogues.

John Goodman heads up the opposing side, serving as the head of the ATF force sent to subdue the cult with extreme prejudice.  Let me get this out of the way: John Goodman looks old.  Here, he looks like he’s had the life sucked out of him, which works in the context of the story.  His agent is a low-rung agent who gets hideous orders from his superiors, and though he may be the story’s most admirable character, he becomes a monster as he struggles to obey them and keep his humanity. In the resulting firefight, there arises a fascinating question of whom, if anyone, the audience is supposed to get behind.  The fact that Smith can elicit even the faintest possibility of human sympathy toward a cult of murderous, bigoted zealots is remarkable.

It’s got its flaws ‒ the most notable being an inclination toward claustrophobic shakey-cam action shots ‒ but appropriately enough, Red State is easily Kevin Smith’s most magnetic, dynamic film since Dogma.  You know what?  I’m going to go even further and say that Red State may be the best film that Kevin Smith has ever made.

 

January 10, 2012
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The Designer’s Drugs: Top 11 of 11

So here’s my crappy end of year list.  I don’t think I liked enough albums, books, or other entertainments to warrant separate best-of lists for each medium, so I’m just smashing everything together. Deal with it.

11.  Medium: Literature. Stimulus: George R. R. Martin – A Dance with Dragons

Finally, George R. R. Martin continues his Song of Fire and Ice series with a gigantic book that nonetheless picks up the pace and is much more exciting than its predecessor.

10.  Medium: Film. Stimulus: Red State

The guy who directed Clerks and Mallrats makes a serious movie about Fred Phelps-grade religious fanaticism and David Koresh-grade domestic terrorism.  On paper, you’d think it wouldn’t work, but it works pretty goddamn hard.

9.      Medium: Game. Stimulus: The Nintendo 3DS

Most video game systems suck and have a crappy library of games in their first year.  The Nintendo 3DS bypassed this by cutting the crap and releasing upgraded versions of the company’s best games 15 years ago, Ocarina of Time and Starfox 64.  It worked.  Add a highly serviceable port of Street Fighter IV, a Mario game that is the 2011 version of 1990’s Super Mario Bros. 3, and the requisite round of Mario Kart, and the opening salvo of the 3DS hasn’t been too bad at all.

8.      Medium: Album. Stimulus: Austrian Death Machine – Jingle All the Way

If you haven’t listened to the Arnold Schwarzenegger-themed metal genius that is Austrian Death Machine, do it.  Do it now!  Their latest release is a two-song EP based on Arnold’s epic Christmas movie, Jingle All the Way.  “I’m Not a Pervert,” based on Arnold’s failed attempt at gaining a bouncy ball from a stupid kid at the Mall of America, is the feel-good Christmas song of the year.

7.      Medium: Literature. Stimulus: Albert Brooks – 2030.

A believable, grounded account of American decline without the usual futuristic vibe.  Usually, books about the future are pretty devoid of compassion and pretty bonered out on robo-fascism, but Brooks plays it calm and presents a future with real people – and, equally important, real language.  This examination of overpopulation and boomer entitlement reaching old age is less fiction than it is frightening inevitability.

6.      Medium: Album. Stimulus: William Shatner – Seeking Major Tom

Shatner Shatners it up and sings cover songs about space.  How could this possibly go wrong?  The answer: it won’t.

5.      Medium: Album. Stimulus: Peter Gabriel – New Blood

I think that instead of the usual gathering of singles into the usual stale Greatest Hits collection, all musicians who reach such a reflective point in their careers should do orchestral renditions of their best songs.  Especially the B-52s.  Consider Peter Gabriel and this beautiful retrospective to be my prime argument for this.

4.      Medium: Literature. Stimulus: Andy Schoepp – Time Ninja

Once more, the great Andy Schoepp delivers over the top martial arts action in book form, yet this time he outdoes himself.  Time traveling ninjas, giant robots, and hot assassin babes make for an epic tale.  I’ve said it before: if Andy Schoepp’s work doesn’t kick your ass, then you don’t have an ass.

3.      Medium: Album. Stimulus: Florence and the Machine – Ceremonials

This is what pop music should always sound like: well-crafted yet forceful, ambitious yet immediate, intellectual yet emotional.  Ceremonials is titanic sonic literature.

2.      Medium: Film. Stimulus: Hobo with a Shotgun

This ridiculous, ultraviolent, pun-heavy bit of low-rent cinema made me grateful to be alive.  Seeing an old grizzled hobo dispense buckshot justice to an awesome family of gleefully murderous gangsters was a joy.  Remember: when life gives you razor blades, you make a bat covered in razor blades!

1.      Medium: Life. Stimulus: Protests!

It’s breathtaking to see people giving a shit and fighting corrupt systems of power worldwide.  In America this seems even more amazing, because we’re currently the spoiled children of the planet.  Divide that down to the Midwest, where the secondary holy mantra that follows “go [insert local NFL team]” is “don’t rock the boat,” and consider my mind blown.  My expectations for humanity this year were completely shattered, and that feels wonderful.

December 29, 2011
Categories: Album, Film, Game, Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a Comment

Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: Jingle All the Way

I'm not a pervert!

Film: Jingle All the Way (1996)

Director: Brian Levant

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman

Written by: Randy Kornfield

Sometimes when I go out trolling for the five dollar bargain DVDs which patronize my forays into cinematic absurdity, I feel like kind of a dick.  It’s not that I feel bad about making fun of these flicks and celebrating their ridiculousness.  For one, anything that costs over a million dollars to make deserves savage, savage mockery for any and all shortcomings it may have.  More importantly, I actually enjoy finding things in these totally alien and/or lowest common denominator movies that appeal to my warped sensibilities.  Consider this column a series of exercises in celebrating buried treasure and/or not being offended by entertainment.

Still, there are moments when, upon uncovering a true Bizarro gem, I get a tingle of mwahaha villainy at the thought of unleashing said film upon myself, my friends, and whatever small fraction of the world reads my ramblings.

With all this in mind, I felt like a huge dick when I found Jingle All the Way, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bid at creating the most epic Christmas movie of all time.  It wasn’t so much because Schwarzenegger was making a Christmas movie; I’ll watch the Governator in pretty much anything and not complain.  You know what you’re getting, anyway.  Yes, I would have loved to see him in his Mr. Freeze getup from Batman and Robin, his absolute zero heart finally warmed by a hero who may or may not be wearing a benippled suit.  But the reality of this film, Schwarzenegger brawling with other suburbanites to get his chronically disappointed son the year’s equivalent of the Tickle Me Elmo doll, I can live with.

No, my dickhead shame came from the idea of watching a Sinbad movie.

Actually, let me get something out of the way before I go off on Sinbad.  Schwarzenegger’s sad bastard son is played by Jake Lloyd, a kid who would have faded gracefully into child actor heaven alongside the Alex D. Linzes and Curly Sues of the world had George Lucas not decided to cast him as Lil’ Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.  I have this awesome mental picture of George Lucas, sitting down for a nice Christmas movie with his family in 1996 and putting on this instant classic.  At the moment when Jake Lloyd gets on the phone and hollers at his old man for being an absentee parent, I picture George Lucas throwing his bowl of popcorn to the floor, leaping to his feet, pointing at the kid onscreen and screaming “That’s my Darth Vader!”  I don’t know if that’s how things went down, but if this moronic thought has any basis in truth, this silly Christmas movie actually has a dire and far-reaching effect.

Behold the horror of Sinbad.

Okay, back to Sinbad.  As a boy raised by stand-up comics, I loathe Sinbad.  In particular, I remember watching one of his comedy specials as a child, seeing him saunter around a stage dressed in the fluorescent overall spawn of M.C. Hammer’s pants, going off about the difference between black mamas and white mamas (the answer: whuppins).  It was the blandest stand-up I ever remember watching.  Since then, Sinbad has always struck me as a jumpy, poor man’s Bill Cosby, without the imagination, storytelling, or wit.

I say all this because Sinbad is awesome in this flick.

Obviously, Schwarzenegger’s the focus; in fact, he takes up way too much focus.  His woes are typical in a Christmas comedy.  He must save his family with the power of presents, stop the pervy neighbor (Phil Hartman, playing with creepy banality) from hitting on his wife, and take on an army of bad Santas who want to “deck his halls”.  Okay, seeing Schwarzenegger fight a giant Santa and a midget Santa at the same time is pretty amazing.

Sinbad’s rival toy-hunting parent is so marginalized and second-tier that we never even see his kid, the child whom he’s fighting for and who (spoiler alert) ends up with the super awesome toy of the season.  Lil’ Darth, beaming with restored family joy, needs not his super dandy action figure, so he hands it off to Sinbad, who but minutes before (spoiler alert) almost killed him.  And yet there’s no payoff from the other kid, neither the bright-eyed joy from getting Super Awesome Toy 1996 nor crushing loss at knowing that dad’s going away for a long, long time.

It’s in keeping with Jingle All the Way’s theme of rabid Christmas consumerism that not only does the film not care about anybody’s problems but those of Schwarzenegger’s family – nobody else but his family really seems to exist.

With the limited time the film affords him, Sinbad does everything he can to be memorable, and he succeeds.  He’s the guy who (accurately) questions the Christmas gift racket, unlike Schwarzenegger’s hapless, overcompensating dad.  Yet Sinbad, who somehow shows up at the same diner where Schwarzenegger is recuperating from his latest misadventure, takes a swig of tucked-away booze and also notes that his neighbor, who received Super Awesome toy 1974, is a billionaire.  Sinbad’s postal worker didn’t, and thus isn’t.  This is a pretty incredible leap of logic.

The postal worker part comes into play when Sinbad pulls out a loaded package and blows up a room full of cops!  Yeah!  Jingle All the Way actually makes Sinbad a domestic terrorist!  Of course, the devastation is later revealed to be some harmless Wile E. Coyote grade charring, but there’s a second after one sees the explosion where one thinks: “Holy crap!  Sinbad just killed a bunch of guys!”

In the final stretch of the film, Sinbad and Schwarzenegger have their final showdown over Super Awesome Toy 1996, and Sinbad ends up in some green Martian superbrain getup reminiscent of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.  While in this epic conflict, Sinbad does the best thing that happens in this movie.  First, he uppercuts a pink saber-toothed tiger wearing a shiny gold thong, played by the great Curtis “Dudley ‘Booger’ Dawson” Armstrong.  After dispatching this interloper, he pursues Schwarzenegger’s kid and his Super Awesome Toy through a crowded Christmas parade.  When he reaches the part of the stream populated by walking Christmas ornaments, Sinbad shoves over a guy dressed as a present and screams: “Get out of my way, box!”  It’s meant to be a throwaway scene, but the absurdity is genius.

 

 

You know, I definitely wouldn’t have enjoyed Jingle All the Way as much if Sinbad wasn’t in it.  I may have to revise my standing opinion on his work, even if I never change my mind about his Hammer Pantsuit.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

 

 

(As a super awesome amazeballs bonus, behold this epic tune from Schwarzeneggercore band Austrian Death Machine, referencing the ball pit scene from Jingle All the Way!  I give you… “I’m Not a Pervert!”)

 

December 20, 2011
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a Comment

Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

The Grand Mal Face of Christmas.

 

Film: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

Director: Nicholas Webster

Starring: John Call, Leonard Hicks, Bill McCutcheon

Written by: Glenville Mareth

 

There are a lot of stupid Christmas movies out there, so I’m not going to say that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is the most ludicrous holiday film out there, but it’s certainly in the running.  The B-movie production values and the bizarre premise of Santa meeting extraterrestrials certainly give this flick a healthy dose of ridiculousness, though beyond the idea of sci-fi Santa, the plot is your conventional God bless us, everyone.

The element which pushes this masterpiece into the plaid is Dropo, an embarrassing specimen of Martian man who may be the greatest crackhead in cinematic history.  Characterized as “the laziest man on Mars” and looking like a cross-eyed green version of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Dropo bumbles and violently twitches around the spaceship sent to kidnap Santa and bring joy to the children of the red planet.  Of course, once Santa and some wayward Earth kids get on the Martian expressway, this bumpkin idiot starts glowing with the innocence of a child with massive head trauma.  He helps the earthlings fend off some bad green apples, Santa infects everyone with the spirit of Christmas, and due to a severe lapse in judgment Dropo becomes the Martian Santa Claus.  I feel sorry for them.

I’ve never seen epilepsy captured so convincingly on film.  Dropo’s manic, chinless antics at times become frightening in their intensity.  Half of the time I expected members of the crew to run into the shot and put a spoon in his mouth.  This is not the man I would entrust with the seasonal happiness of a potted plant, much less an entire planet.

My vote for Martian Santa Claus would go to Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 1 and 2, played by the great Randy Quaid.  Heaven knows he needs the work.

 

December 12, 2011
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a Comment

The Designer’s Drugs: Peter Gabriel/Steel Panther

Medium: Album

Peter Gabriel – New Blood

Anno: 2011

 

As the story goes, Peter Gabriel planned to follow up his last album, an amazingly orchestrated covers album titled Scratch My Back that I can’t recommend highly enough, with an album featuring the covered artists doing Peter Gabriel tunes titled I’ll Scratch Yours.  The status of that follow-up seems to be in limbo, which may have prompted Gabriel to simply remake his own songs in the Scratch My Back style, which is to say, through an orchestra.  This was a considerably wise move.

This isn’t exactly a greatest hits collection – I’d have loved to hear orchestral versions of “Big Time” and “Sledgehammer,” – but each song on New Blood has been wonderfully redone.  I’m not a fan of “Solisbury Hill” as a song – for some reason I always envision hospital dramas when I hear it – but the version here is pretty much the deluxe rendition one would expect.  I’m on the fence about this album’s version of “Darkness,” mostly because I really like the menace and beauty of the original, the former feeling a bit diluted here even while the latter is enhanced.

Still, the crawling, seething “The Rhythm of the Heat” could fuel an album’s menace quota on its own, and “Downside Up” could supply the gorgeous and pretty.  “In Your Eyes” is given an effective upgrade, whereas “Digging in the Dirt” is turned inside out from smooth beats to scratching strings.  “Mercy Street” and “Don’t Give Up” are both soft-spoken, heart-punchingly beautiful songs.

The whole is simply wonderful.

 

Medium: Album

Steel Panther – Balls Out

Anno: 2011

 

This is the sort of thing that’s either going to make you grin like an idiot or tear your hair out in offended rage.  Classy song titles like “Supersonic Sex Machine,” “17 Girls in a Row,” and “It Won’t Suck Itself” give away the game before the first triumphant chords fall.  Balls Out is every inch a collection of slithering sex fantasies of inept metalhead teenage boys from the 80s, earnest to the point of self-parody.  (“It Won’t Suck Itself,” for example, is a serious meditation on the danger of rattlesnake attacks.)  Still, if this album were playing in the background and one wasn’t paying attention to the absurd lyrics, it would simply be a kickass hair metal album.  There’s much more going on here than pubescent boner tomfoolery – though it’s still not really for most ladies, and the morals of those who get it are delightfully suspect.

December 12, 2011
Categories: Album, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a Comment

Y Marks the Spot: Occupy the Bottom

Viva la Revolucion!

I want to preface this rambling piece by saying that, in over three decades of my existence, this is the first and only year that I’ve been genuinely interested in where America is going.  Sure, seeing Obama get elected was great, but it was still the usual game of token democracy trotted out with Leap Year regularity, and I don’t get involved in that (and I didn’t).  This year, I suddenly found myself bearing an overabundance of newfound pride in Wisconsin as hundreds of thousands of my fellow Midwesterners rose up to tell their tin pot dictator to go to hell.  And then, I’d say almost as a direct consequence, the Occupy Movement turned the greedhate nationwide.  It is simply breathtaking to see Americans get so pissed off that they’re willing to inconvenience themselves to pay more than the usual lip service to our ideals of freedom – and no, joining the Tea Party and trolling the rest of the country doesn’t count as this.

I hope we’re seeing the dawn of the next economic civil rights movement, but I have one pretty big problem with all the uprisings I’ve seen this year.  Okay, two; the coordinated police brutality of recent times has been pretty upsetting.  And while we’re on that subject: who the hell gave bike cops the authority to pepper spray protesters?  Has the world suddenly become a mad version of Pacific Blue?  Is Mario Lopez the new face of the modern police state?

Deep breath.  Back on topic.  Just about every time I hear otherwise wonderful economic insurgents discuss the menace of the current climate of unchecked corporate greed where damn near everything under the sun has been made for-profit, the fears and worries usually end up in one place.  The problem, they usually say, is that the middle class is in danger of disappearing.

I don’t know about you, but my heart doesn’t exactly bleed for the middle class.  It’s a nice enough concept, a subtle endorsement of share the wealth that we peasants could use a lot more of.  It’s also a pretty meaningless term.  In a parallel reversal of the truism that none of the insufferable hipsters think that they are insufferable hipsters, a whole lot of Americans seem to regard themselves as middle class when they aren’t even close.  I’d say that middle class ranges between affording a house and a quarter million dollars, but I think the popular definition has become being able to sleep in your own room, no matter how large or small that room may be.  I disagree.

More importantly, when I think of the victims of capitalism, my first thoughts aren’t of people who can (or who used to be able to) afford a house.  It’s of people who everyday are starving to the brink of death, who can’t afford even the most basic of health care, who live in Third World conditions in a First World country.  It’s the people who live under bridges because the government refuses to divert a cent of defense spending toward feeding and housing the people supposedly defended.  You’ll forgive me if my sympathy for the so-called middle class comes a bit late.

As one of these broke-ass people who live one disaster away from financial collapse, I can say that when I see these well-meaning people wringing their hands and loudly wailing about the gloomy future of the middle class, I get a little pissed and I feel a whole lot left out.  This is, of course, unless we’re fighting to expand the cushy middle class to encompass everybody, which would be a very comfortable brand of communism.  (We are the 100%!)

I know – and yet, still, I hope – that the American protests of 2011 are based on community and kindness and wanting to help out one’s fellow man.  Yet every time I hear the term “middle class,” my certainty fades a bit.  I wonder if these aren’t movements based on social justice but on envy.  I wonder if the suburbanites are just using the proles to skim more off the top of the pyramid.  I wonder whether the poor will once again be the dupes.  In the same vein, imagine bitching about the cost of your rent in front of a person who hasn’t lived indoors for years.  Could the homeless become the dupes of the minimum wage slaves?

One of the genius rhetorical moves of the Occupy movement has been moving past this potential class infighting to paint the conflict as everyone against the super-rich.  “We are the 99%” is a much more inclusive catchphrase than “Save the middle class.”  And as much as people think they’re unwavering bastions of conviction, well, they aren’t.  We’re usually stupid, malleable sheep in public, and as such words and tone matter big time in a mass movement.

Side note: As much as I love the idea of a horde of people shouting down public displays of aristocracy, I still cringe every time I watch a repeat-after-me Mic Check, even as I cheer.  I suppose synchronized disruption is better than blind obedience, but still.

Deep breath.  Back on topic. Summation: If you say you’re going to stand up for (almost) everybody, then stand up for (almost) everybody, even the middle class.  In America alone, that includes the millions of people that you don’t know, have very little in common with, and may in fact dislike intensely.  It’s damn near impossible to maintain that level of idealism.  If you want to get anything done, attempt it anyway.

December 5, 2011
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . Tags: , . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a Comment

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