Adam Baran

Saw the two big musical movies out now this week. Mamma Mia! and Lou Reed’s Berlin. They couldn’t be further on the opposite ends of the spectrum musically, and yet now I have the syrupy pop harmonies of Abba on shuffling with the depressing tale of speed freaks Caroline and Jim. Mamma Mia is a giant messy piece of something, not as well directed as The Apple, where the cast is mysteriously NOT DUBBED, despite not being able to sing a note, thereby ruining Abba songs you’ve come to know and love. Pierce Brosnan should have fought for a voice double. It’s really over the top and campy, the audience more often laughing at than with the film. The worst bit in the movie is the abbreviated clip above where Meryl with no direction frets and shakes her scarf around to have something to do in the Winner Takes it All number that should have been cut. Meanwhile Berlin isn’t a masterpiece as the Village Voice claims, it’s just a better than average concert film. It’s not the definitive Lou Reed performance captured on film. Schnabel’s effects for the concert - the re-enactment of Jim and Caroline’s life is unnecessary and paints the stage and film in a very ugly green-orange combo. I miss concert films though, so I enjoyed it. It made me appreciate the album more than I ever did, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

Other thoughts…

Has anyone in the press used the title “BARACK-O-RAMA?” to describe a situation such as the one in Germany last week? Since I currently work at a news office, I tend to avoid this type of stuff more. Still it would be a clever turn of phrase, but I bet someone’s used it before.

I love “I Love Money” on VH1. It may not be thoroughly real, but it doesn’t matter. I love the cast. PS. When are they going to get Saphyrii back on VH1 with her own show? You think New York has some control over that? Just wondering.

A few weeks ago, BF and I went to see Jerry Schatzberg’s rare film Puzzle of a Downfall Child, which stars Faye Dunaway in one of her most intruiging and brilliant performances, along with the late Roy Scheider. It’s a strange, very seventies Waldo Salt-esque film about a model, Lou Andreas Sand, played by Dunaway who enters the world of modeling and quickly becomes on of the most famous and popular faces on the scene, only to quickly collapse into substance abuse, depression, and a nervous breakdown. There’s lots of cutting back and forth between the past, which shows her rise and fall, and the present, as Dunaway, secluded in isolation after a breakdown, is interviewed by her old friend (much in the same way Jerry Schatzberg interviewed his old friend Anne Saint-Marie - a long-ago famous model who the the film is based on). In fact, there’s so much cutting and Euro doom and gloom moodiness in the early part of the film that it could have been called Ingmar Bergman’s Next Top Model.

The film is said to have been Dunaway’s favorite film, and it’s easy to see why. Her performance is so sharp and mannered it’s impossible to forget. She embodies the character, more than that she is the character. Odd, confused, officious, haughty, needy, desperate, achingly beautiful, but also weary underneath. Her accent is insane, completely mannered, but totally unplaceable. And she’s a bit cuckoo, which is always fun to watch.

Of course the film is out of print, never on DVD or VHS, but of course, it’s on YouTube from a French DVD source, (sorry for the subtitles and quality). So here’s the first part of the film, and after the jump, if you’re so inclined and you’ve got time on your hands at work, like me, you can watch it at your leisure.

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I may be biased, or mentally challenged, depending on your point of view, and I may also be calling this a bit early, but I’m going to say that the Best Movie of 2008 is, and will be named later in the year, Rambo. FUCKING RAMBO!!!! He kills EVERYONE ON EARTH!!! He decapitates them with his home made machete, he shoots them with his super powered arrows, he guns them down with his mega-machine gun. Stallone is a genius and turns this flick into the equivalent of a really hardcore 70’s grindhouse roughie with way better special FX. Tarantino must be jealous! There’s even a moment at the end that recalls the final showdown in Kill Bill.

I know the reviews say this film is violent, but I just want to say it is not just violent, it is unbelievably jaw-droppingly violent, hence the grindhouse comparison. A whole village is massacred in the most unspeakable ways - children are stabbed and tossed in the paths of flamethrowers. Stallone rips through a bad guy’s carotid artery with his bare fucking hands. And don’t get me started on the scene where he sets of a mothertrucking H-BOMB!!! Who knew? I knew! I knew it all the time that it would be so good! I can’t get it out of my head way more than There Will Be Blood!

The plot is basic Rambo - Rambo’s asked to - oh wait - WHO CARES ABOUT THE PLOT! Rambo has to save a girl - cut to hundreds of nameless Burmese (yeah the country is never referred to by it’s proper name Myanmar) baddies getting the Rambo treatment. The dialogue is sparse, the cursory set-up scenes will often be reduced to their bare fucking minimum.

Girl: I don’t know what to say

Rambo: Then don’t say anything. Go Home. Just go home.

Stallone knows there doesn’t need to be any fat in this script. It’s a perfect piece of art. Stallone is a man’s man with so many veins in his bulging arms and thighs that at times he resembles one of those trees that throws apples at Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Seriously, I mean I don’t even think he was this bulked up for Rocky Balboa, a movie which was so perfect I didn’t know for sure if he could top it. I cried at two movies in 2006 - Shortbus and Rocky Balboa, no joke. Everyone who goofed on Stallone for reviving these franchises has to be eating major shit right now. These movies are vital, necessary, old-school kick-ass MOVIES with a capital MOVIES.

I did have to give pause at one thing in this masterpiece - the fact that as usual, the major number one bad guy is shown or alluded to, having sex with a guy. Another gay-as-villain cliche? I thought about it for a while, whether I could get over that obviously not so good decision on the part of Sly and the other screenwriter, but I decided that A. If I could come to the thinking during Elephant that Van Sant’s decision to make the two Columbine killers have sex was an unfortunate experiment that proves the one flaw in an otherwise perfect movie, that I could do it with Rambo, a movie that aims itself at audiences with far lower sophistication levels. Excusable? No not really, though it’s plausible that the villain would just HAPPEN to be gay. And B. You can’t have exploitation throughout a movie and then get upset when the group you’re in gets exploited - meaning - I gleefully watched a movie where hundreds of Asian extras are portrayed as super-bad-guys of the lowest common denominator and I let it go and just accept that you gotta have some ethnic group be the bad guy - and if I accept that then I can’t really get upset when they throw gays in the mix somehow. It’s like watching South Park or Family Guy and thinking everything is funny except when they make fun of gays. And C. The cliche of the bad guy being gay just goes with everything else that’s cliche in the movie, and all those cliches and old-school action tropes make it thusly more amazing. Yeah yeah I know there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on, and I’m open to being called on it. But if all these roided-out fratboy types can get into Rambo, why can’t the hipster fags too?

At the end of the screening, as the credits rolled, over a single image. Someone made a move that managed to describe the entire message of the movie in two seconds. First he put his hand over the light where the projector was - making a peace symbol with his fingers. Then he switched it quickly, turning it into the middle-finger gesture. Everyone cheered and the 30 or so frat guys in my audience stood up for a standing ovation. Beat that, any other movie in 2008.

Hey, as Rambo says “Live for Nothing. Die for Something.”

After I got finished watching Frightmare this weekend, I was quick to pop in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, an exploitation independent (as Stephen Thrower calls them in Nightmare USA) from 1977 that was never released officially until a DVD release in 2003. In the meantime, it was bootlegged and pirated and released in the public domain in Europe and Asia, developing a cult fan base among vidiots and cult-horror film junkies. I’m a little late to the Death Bed cult, as the kids at Kim’s have been telling me about it for years, but after watching it I’m fully on the “this movie is genius and a real work of trash-art” tip.

Here’s the Opening:

It’s the most ludicrous premise on Earth, a possessed bed, a demon’s blood seeping into the bed, making it a hungry monster - though it’s sort of no more absurd than some of the cheesy monster movies that came out of the 50’s and 60’s with tiny animals growing to monster size after coming in contact with radioactive materials. The funny thing is the conceit of the movie is that people have to lie down on the bed, which immediately sucks them in, using a sort of piss-colored acid to rot away their skin, while the spirit of a consumptive Aubrey Beardsley-esque artist imprisoned behind a painting on the wall watches and acts as the omniscient narrator, observing, and ultimately helping to vanquish the cursed bed. The film could be described as sort of a schlocky Ed Wood affair meets Jean Rollin-esque Euro Horror meets hauntingly weird surrealistic nightmare. There’s completely hilarious sequences like the bed develops an indigestion from eating too many people, and in the next sequence we see it eating a bottle of Pepto Bismol. But as Stephen Thrower points out: “Death Bed can be silly alright, but it’s humor is all over the scale, from slapstick to irony: even on first viewing it’s not something you simply laugh at.”

Unless of course, you’re Patton Oswalt, who hilariously skewers the entire production, in a completely admirable way on his album “Werewolves and Lollipops.” You can tell he really likes it, even though he puts up a good front. Enjoy.

I’m sure his hilarious bit drove many of his fans to check out Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, and that’s just fine by me. The film is truly something special, an inspired piece of insanity from the pit of the 70’s bargain basement horror bin.

Okay, that’s enough about that. Time to call it a night. I’ll just lie down here on my bed, and AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! FUCCCKKKKK!!!!

Yeah yeah yeah, no fuss no frills, here’s my top favorite movies. If something you read about on a million other lists is not here, it’s cause i probably haven’t seen it yet (no country, there will be blood).

1. Planet Terror - I didn’t enjoy any movie this year more than Robert Rodriquez’s big-budget Troma zombie action entry in the Grindhouse double feature experience. I think it’s retarded that every best of list includes Tarantino’s Death Proof over this one, which is far more exhilarating, hilarious, and ultimately more satisfying than anything I’ve seen in a long time. Death Proof seemed to be a waste of money and a let down compared to the exhilaration of this film. I don’t really understand why Tarantino made it, when all it seems he really wanted to do was tell people to go watch “Vanishing Point,” which he ripped off bigtime (sorry, homage). Marlee Shelton is genius as the nurse whose hands go numb right when she needs them the most. And say what you will about her Rose McGowan is pitch perfect - she knows her performance needs to be a little bad to make it very good. The machine gun leg is beyond genius. Loved it.

2. The King of Kong - Insane, destined to be a legendary cult film, this documentary about a rematch between a former Donkey Kong World Champion and the ultimate Underdog was probably the funniest movie I’ve seen all year, chock full of you-couldn’t-write-them-if you-tried-characters, like an old grandma who’se also a Q-Bert champ, Mr. Awesome, a gaming creep on the hunt for “poontang,” and a toddler who interrupts his dad’s world champion score by screaming for him to wipe his ass. It’s amazing.

3. Bug - After making fun of her accent and performance in the ludricrous Double Jeopardy for so many years, I was shocked to see Ashley Judd do such an utterly fantastic job playing a shellshocked woman who comes under the influence of a bizarre drifter who believes his motel room is slowly becoming infested with invisible bugs. It’s slow and labored, with quietly hilarious moments, like Ashley Judd slapping her best friend, and later ranting against dykes, and these hilarious moments balance out the sheer tension and ultimate Grand Guignol Horror that comes about at the fabulous third act.

4. Brand Upon the Brain! - Guy Maddin’s silent cinema spectacle meets avant-garde vaudeville circus was an extremely gorgeous film experience. A live narrator (in my case the unfortunately chosen Lou Reed, who though he has quite the distinctive voice, seemed bored and disconnected, and frankly didn’t seemed like he got the whole film) accompanied by live sound effects, musicians, and a supposed castrato. It was all really weird and great, and the film itself was a strange tale about a pair of siblings raised on an island orphange run by a domineering mother with a strange surveillance system built out of a lighthouse. It was one of Maddin’s best films so far.

5. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten - Though it has some problems - the inexplicable inclusion of people like Johnny Depp, Flea, Bez from Happy Mondays, and most egregiously, Martin Scorcese, who spouts a ridiculous lie that Raging Bull was inspired by the music of the Clash (”Even though uh, the film was set in the forties, the place we went to to get that feeling was from the music of the Clash.”) - the message of the music of Strummer is explored to an emotionally honest and extremely inspirational degree. The conceit of the film, that the talking heads discussing Joe are all of his friends from his various areas of residence and stages of life, gathered together around campfires, gets more honest responses from the subjects than most rock docs, though I wonder if someone will ever - and if it is even possible to - make a rock doc that isn’t just talking heads intercut with footage….Anyway, the film is good, and will undoubtedly make you tear up at the end at the sadness of a life cut short in it’s prime. I was somewhat obsessed with rock and roll comeback stories this year, so this one was a good fit for me.

Honorable Mention (if such a thing exists): Exte - a Japanese Horror film from Sion Sono that one-ups the standard J-Horror “woman with scary long hair” ghost, by telling the strange tale of a hairdresser played by Chiaki Kuriama from Kill Bill who faces off with evil killer hair extensions that grow out of the body of a very angry corpse stolen from a local morgue by a hair-obsessed creepo.

Also Liked: Southland Tales for all the character actors it stuffed into one strange movie that’s excellent and a total flop at the same time, A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory for its forcing me to rethink the standard tales laid down by most of the Warhol books I’ve been consuming for years, the revival of Berlin Alexanderplatz at Moma (a weeks worth of moviegoing bliss), Sweeney Todd, The Orphanage, Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face for making me love Ana Faris and giving us the extremely hot image of John Krasinski jacking off in the shower (though too bad he did not eat it like in The Doom Generation), The Host for showing the US how to do CGI right, the revival of Herzog’s Cobra Verde at the IFC Center for totally fucking my brain for 2 hours, Mr. Brooks, the ultimate guilty pleasure movie of 2007, totally loved it, even though it’s insane trash, especially since you get to see Dane Cook getting killed! same with Lindsey Lohan’s needs to be seen to be believed I Know Who Killed Me (so bad it’s beyond so bad it’s good good.)

Best Revival Film Series’ : Warhol’s World at the Moving Image. Though I prefer the earlier films to his later breakdown films, the chance to see these in an audience and watch and start thinking about other stuff, and then realize what you’re thinking about, and then ponder out this strange dull image of nothing made you think about all this stuff, was exactly what I think film is all about. Also I’m a sucker for noir, so the NYC Noir series this Summer at the film forum was right up my alley. Obviously I loved the Fassbinder series at Moma that went along with the Berlin Alexanderplatz screenings, though I still want them to re-show Fassbinder’s remake of the Women “Frauen en New York”, and I loved the Gerard Depardieu series at the Walter Reade.

Best Revival Film Series that I missed completely: I was in LA at the worst film festival ever, the LA Shorts Film Festival, screening my film, but I wanted desperately to be back in New York at the Film Forum, watching the Rouben Mamoulian retro. Mamoulian directed one of my favorite movies ever, the exhilarating Maurice Chevalier musical Love Me Tonight, so it was sad that I had to miss this one. Really sad. Also was bummed that I couldn’t hit the Sam Fuller retrospective at the Moving Image at least once. Why does that museum need to be in f-ing queens yo?

Best Old film that I finally got around to watching after it was on my DVR for like 4 Months: Once Upon a Time in the West by Sergio Leone. I can’t believe I never saw this before. Completely amazing, and made me love Henry Fonda, something I had never had the slightest inclination to do.

Best Film that I couldn’t get into because it was so thoroughly sold out: The legendary Raiders of the Lost Ark remake at the Anthology Film Archives, made by three kids in the 80’s who did a shot for shot remake, finishing the film when they were in college, and subsequently selling the rights to their story to Scott Rudin. The lines for this one were around the block, and each time no matter how early I went, there was no hope at all. Sucked big time. Can someone please please please here my prayers and make this an ongoing Midnight Movie? I guarantee it would make a fortune!

Best Film of 2008: Without a doubt, it’s going to be John Rambo!!! Or Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais!!!  Can’t wait!!!

Monday night I finally got around to watching a movie that’s been on my shelf for months and months: Prelude To Happiness. Released in 1974, this film is virtually unknown today. It’s an utterly fascinating piece of low-budget 70’s sexploitation disguised as an over-the-top soap opera.

The plot goes like this - Susan, played by Rose Petra, is an aspiring nurse, about to be wed to her fiancee Joe, is mangled in an auto accident, and loses her leg. Joe dumps her, telling her she doesn’t have a leg to stand on if she wants to stay with him (groan). But luckily, her doctor Steve (Gary Davis) has a crush on her, and arranges for her to get hired as a nurse in the hospital where he works. Susan begins to get her footing in life (double groan), you know, achieve some kind of balance (triple groan) - but there’s bound to be complications. Steve is already engaged to a shrill castrating harpie, played by Carol Sowa in a brilliant, blistering performance. Her only interest in marrying Steve is the status she’ll achieve as a doctor’s wife. So now Steve has to choose between the two women, and Susan has to decide whether she can really find it in her heart to accept that she could be happy in life.

In between decisions, Susan enjoys lounging around in a bikini, and the move takes a sort of perverse pleasure in showing an amputee walking around in a bikini or lingerie. Additionally, there are so many shots in this movie where the boom mike not only peaks at the top or bottom of the frame, but almost goes so far into the actors faces that you expect it to smack right into them. You can see this in the trailer above, in a few places, most notably when Susan is delivering the line “No man is going to want me when I’m only half a woman!” Throw in a crazy folk song sung by Susan at a party, and a even crazier dream sequence that rivals the one in Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (where the amputee kid runs around screaming “I got legs! I got legs!) and you’re all set for cinematic gold.