CinemArchetype 27: Androgyne/Alien

I'll confess, it's not the horror in Florida a few weeks ago, the Pride Parade this past Sunday, or the passing of the great collective of chameleonic trickster personae, artistic incarnations, and unobtrusive music genius known as David Bowie that has compelled me to re-open my CinemArchetype files once more. They could have been considered complete. Certainly the basic core archetypes have all been accounted for, aside from the obvious ones (i.e. the hero, the terrorist, rabbit, the frickin' idiot) but Jung's access to pop culture was limited by the times. If he'd have seen Ziggy Stardust he'd have a whole treatise by now. No, the reason I print this now is that I'm confused and overwhelmed by the heat, unable to finish things that hit closer to home.

So the query is, are aliens all one gender, or beyond gender, or have cross-dressers and fabulous gay culture icons conscripted the alien look to help us contextualize their gender flexibility within our known parameters? Insecure men don't beat up aliens to prove their Earth heredity, and we don't fire aliens from school jobs. We wouldn't believe they were aliens even if they told us (just like you could be totally fey in the 70s and no one would guess you were actually 'one of them' - just expresssive, artistic, which was encouraged back when I was a kid, thank god). Oh well, we gained some things in some places, lost some in other. Ask not what color the elephant is in the room, for he's electric pink. And if you can't handle it, honey, go back to Janice!

1. Tim Curry as Dr. Frank N. Furter

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

It took me a long time to see this movie after being turned off by just how lockstep all the 'call and response' stuff was at the show they had outside my dorm in college. Where if you didn't know exactly what you were doing you were glowered at mercilessly. Yeah, said I, that's real "free" of y'all. But lately I saw it at home free of liens and was so blown away by Tim Curry's wry swagger and fey gonzo cool that I clean forgot about all that. A true demonstration of the force and strutting seductive sensual freedom that's to be had when tapping into the source voltage of both genders at once, he's a walking ad for flaming bisexual transvestism, and his inevitable return to his home planet (or death) feels like our loss even more than his. We've not seen his like since, try as John Cameron Mitchell might--god knows we don't see it here on campus, where androgyny and transvestitism carries a rather noble and saintly joyless stamp, as if the PC lockstep of the post-grad young faculty and tolerance committees will turn against you just as quick as they turn on anyone who uses the wrong gender pronoun to describe you in a letter (as happened to me when I didn't address a student in their preferred plural). No matter, I don't hold it against the student 'themselves' or the lockstep Horror crowd at the RHPS, terrified to throw their rice a beat too late or soon, or even the lockstep professor nervously parroting the latest PC dogma --I'm just an old reprobate iconoclast realizing that when the old white guy old guard has collapsed and the freaks have won, I shall instantly realize those old guys were right to be alarmed, and-- like fuckin' Robert Ryan in THE WILD BUNCH-- I'll wish to god I was with 'em. Or--to slide gently back down into topic-- Dr. Frank N. Furter, who gleefully punks out Janice and Brad in the first half but-- once they're on his side and 'loosened' up--regards them with jealous suspicion.

Notes Jean Kim - 

"The moment of reckoning is the entrance of Tim Curry’s seminal character: the camera languorously showing his glamorous heels, bustier and Cheshire grin. Even as a straight female, I have to admit my breath was taken away at Dr. Frank N. Furter’s grand arrival. He oozes sensuality from every pore: raw, unadulterated, glitter-honey charisma. The teasing, rolling rhymes, the “an—ticipation” dragging you to the cliff’s edge. It’s one of those star-making movie moments where you know, as the viewer, that cinema won’t ever be quite the same... 

"Curry’s confidence riffs off similar gender-bending antics from that other fairly young, rebellious artistic arena, rock n’ roll, particularly the glam rock scene. David Bowie, Lou Reed & Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger: the rigidity of gender identities matter less than the braggadocio, the impertinence, the sass, the sexual chocolate. It is the power of the human artistic spirit: the inner fire is king and queen at once. There is power in both genders and their aesthetic wonderment to draw on, to create, to mix, to inspire." 

2. David Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton

The Man who Fell to Earth (1976)
Dir Nicolas Roeg

Coulda done Ziggy for this list but that's more a concert film, and a short-lived concept, though that is my favorite album of old DB's, listened to constantly my freshman year of college (til I learned all my punk friends were gay and hadn't told me). For this purpose though, the alien aspect fits more perfectly, especially in his home planet flashbacks, though there his wife and kids are clearly gender-specified, rather than some cloned gender neutral tribe. I like Bowie in the film, and Candy Clark, and love Roeg in general (because of Performance and Masque of the Red Death) but to me the movie never really comes together, though I do relate with becoming a TV-addicted alcoholic hermit.

Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust period in the early 1970s had a staggering influence on me. I had been writing about androgyny in literature and art in my term papers in college and grad school, so Bowie’s daring experiments seemed like the living embodiment of everything I had been thinking about. It’s hard to believe now, but when I submitted the prospectus for Sexual Personae in 1971, it was the only dissertation about sex in the entire Yale Graduate School. I completed it in 1974, while I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College in Vermont. One of the supreme moments of my life as a student of culture occurred in October 1973, as I was watching NBC’s “Midnight Special” in my apartment in Bennington. It was a taping from London of “The 1980 Floor Show,” Bowie’s last appearance as Ziggy Stardust—a program oddly never broadcast in the U.K. Bowie looked absolutely ravishing! A bold, knowing, charismatic creature neither male nor female wearing a bewitching costume straight out of the Surrealist art shows of the Parisian 1930s: a seductive black fish-net body suit with attached glittery plaster mannequin’s hands (with black nail polish) lewdly functioning as a brassiere. I instantly realized that Bowie had absorbed the gender games of Andy Warhol’s early short films, above all “Harlot,” with its glamorous, sultry drag queen (Mario Montez). Hence I viewed Bowie, who became one of the foundational creators of performance art, as having taken the next major step past Warhol in art history. I never dreamed that someday I would see that brilliant fish-net costume inches away in a display case at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where I was lucky enough to catch the V&A’s Bowie costume show two years ago. It was a sacred epiphany, like seeing a splinter from the True Cross. - Camille Paglia, Salon

Probably the key figure in helping gay teens to--if not come out--at least get flashier, more expressive, amidst my generation in particular, Bowie showed a way to stay chameleonic, undefinable --we didn't have to declare our sexual preference like some college major. More than gay, Bowie that made it OK to be an alien, beyond all dualities set by society, beyond sex yet sooo sexy. This confident, gorgeous, stylish, intelligent alien accepted us! Bowie didn't worry about us accepting him, her, whatever, because he accepted himself, and so could see us with love and without judgment. And through the example of that unprecedented generosity, the merely gay or bi or trans amongst us became easier to accept, and become. 

3. Jaye Davidson as Ra

STARGATE (1994)
Dir Roland Emmerich

Though he speaks in a deep otherworldly long-dead language, The mighty Ra is quite the fey little aesthete, keeping his weaponry, ships, and entourage decked out in a unified and very chic combination of HR Giger-style anthropomorphism and the ancient Egypt we all know. The art direction is so superior to the actual narrative the film becomes like a museum. But hey, it's fun to imagine the entirety of ancient Egyptian iconography as one crazy fashionista alien's own unique Hugo Boss meets Erich von Daniken haute couture. Davidson's Ra is a beyond-duality Apollonian super androgyne to make Camille Paglia proud. If Paglia ever does write goddamned volume two of Sexual Personae, I imagine she'll find time to mention Davidson, who alas wasn't in too many films aside from this and Crying Game, his big 'breakout.' Supposedly he found filmmaking and stardom particularly stressful - and so would you, in all likelihood. But he was the first actor we thought was a girl until the 'reveal' and as such Crying Game was a sensation. He broke the ice.

4. Slavitza Jovan as Gozer (the Gozarian)

GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
Dir Ivan Reitman

An 80s film to its giant marshmallow craw, naturally GHOSTBUSTERS' exterior dimensional villain, Gozer, is going to look like a butch hyper-glam Sheena Easton and appear in front of a giant all-seeing eye pyramid projection screen, flanked by two mighty slors. Confusing even downtown New York performance artists as to his/her gender, Gozer the Gozarian's face and demeanor are the epitome of the then-in-full effect MTV fabulous of the moment --and as such are a bold and brilliant 'distinctly 80s Manhattan club scene' choice. S/he doesn't get too many lines but when s/he does s/he speaks in an old lady Pazuzu-homage voice. "Then dieeeee!" - that's fierce, Gozer! Lavender lightning is always haute!! 

5. John Rhys Davies - 

VELVET GOLDMINE (1997)

Dir Todd Haynes 

Haynes' film unfolds in some half-awake reverie set to some great T. Rex, Stooges, Eno covers and glamsy originals, and offers a rare stunning performance by the uneven Ewan McGregor as an Iggy Pop-type, but it's the gorgeous eyes and face of Davies that lingers in even the straightest dude's locket memory. In fabulous outfits like the one above, Davies plays a kind of a Bowie/Jobriath glam alien pop meteor who fakes his own assassination, but why? That's the whole question but you know as well as I: to dodge the Thatcher-era British taxman and because fans were making life wearisome. Showing up once in awhile at the druggier glam shows, under Bowie MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH-style wide-brim slouch hats (to pout that there's still a music scene without him?), only a terribly miscast Christian Bale (clip-on costume earring and oily pancake make-up presumably lifted from mum's drawer) as a bisexual rock journalist seems to notice him. Oh Bale, you're such a square rock journalist you might as well be written by Cameron Crowe! Not only that, but when McGregor acts circles around you, like a shark coming to life at the smell of your blood, that's a sad crazy night.

My problem with Todd Haynes has always been his devotion to a kind of sickly housewife 50s color scheme, which I personally abhor (maybe it's from being very bored as a kid at the homes of various grandparents?), and his weakness for Eisenstein fetish editing collapses any kind of narrative cohesiveness or drive, If it wasn't for the ceaseless parade of songs to anchor them, Haynes' films would leave time behind altogether, and become just a particularly gay episode of MTV's 120 Minutes. While that kind of associative reverie stuff is fun to edit, it's often frustrating to watch, especially if you're not enthralled by a certain era of suburban decor and Haynes' unique 'one step out of the closet looking in' dourness. His gay pop odysseys are like a less flashy or raunchy or druggy version of Greg Araki's, which means nothing to anyone unless they've endured an Araki movie all the way to the end, a fate which I have so far been lucky enough to escape.

See also HEDWIG and THE ANGRY INCH - god knows I did - at the Jane Theater and on the screen. I still cry to "The Origin of Love." I'm oily human - it was the 90s man. Damn right that was me at Wigstock 98. Gimme danger, widdle stwanger

6. Richard Lynch (as God?)

GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)

Dir Larry Cohen 

He's an artificially transplanted alien-human hybrid who can turn people homicidal with a glance, and he has a woman's sex organs built into this burn victim chest, sort of, and he's, well I can't spoil it, let's just say he's Richard Lynch.

I'm fascinated by the life imitates art trajectory of self-inflicted burn victim Lynch... who (intentionally) doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze during a strong acid trip in the 60s--and yet works steadily, nearly always playing roles that have him dying in fire, or having something to do with fire. I mean I would never be able to get within a mile of match if I were him! Man, that's gutsy. I don't buy him as a cult leader either here or in BAD DREAMS, but I'm in awe of him anyway. A living example that some of those old LSD wives tales could very well be true (the babysitter who put the turkey in the crib and the baby in the oven, for example). Not to get off topic but let me go on record and say that LSD should be strictly monitored by the government with agent 'guides' being consigned to sell it and provide a kind of communal garden / arts and crafts room which to monitor dosage and provide a chill-out tent -kindergarten teacher- therapist - shaman - counsellor safe space. Lord knows I'm qualified from years of experience in the late 80s and would love that as a job. Instead you got people like Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern in THE TRIP.... or worse, doctors who keep you in a hospital gown in a busy ward with overhead neon lighting and intercom announcements and industrial solvents... on the other hand a kid in the throes of a depression or dared by his friends could take 100x too much practically as easy as taking the right amount - especially if it's liquid. God knows the strength of the dosage the CIA used in their unethical experiments, or Lynch was on when he set himself ablaze.

All in all, it's another fine example of Larry Cohen's unique ability to steal shots on busy city streets, full of unusual casting (Andy Kaufman, probably the only guy brave enough to march with the cops in the St. Patrick's Day parade in full dress uniform while Cohen and company filmed him guerrilla style as he prepared to pull out a gun and start shooting blanks at random people) and good tough acting with characters who all look like people instead of actors and mixing his high concept weirdness and social messages alongside it - straddling a zone between Cronenberg body horror and Scorsese urban grit poetry-- with streaks of humanism and wit all his own.

There's also a 1985 sci fi film I haven't seen called ENEMY MINE with a similar child bearing but male-ish alien played by Louis Gossett Jr. It bombed because no one wanted to imagine themselves being marooned with Dennis Quaid, least of all stuck in one of those 'a soldier from each camp during a war are marooned together and must find their common blah blah to survive' plots. I wouldn't even have known the alien wasn't a regularly defined 'male' if the film wasn't added to an El Rey Mother's Day marathon.

7.a. John "Bunny" Breckinridge - The Ruler - 

PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

7.b. Bill Murray as Bunny 

ED WOOD (1994)  

As Imdb notes: "A serious auto accident prevented Breckinridge from getting a longed-for sex-change operation in Mexico." Is his last name, "Breckinridge" linked to Myra? It is, apparently... and makes sense - they certainly ran in the same decadent glitterati circles. And then we can follow these threads outward into the universe..

"Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love." - Paglia, 521

8. Grey Aliens

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1979)

Just why do we associate greys with dudes, when they're quite clearly beyond such things as gender? Reagan famously told Spielberg he didn't know "how close to the truth this really is," after a White House screening, one thing I'm reasonably sure didn't happen at the first US-alien conference (in 1954) was the musical communication, because fuck that hack John Williams to think UFOs communicate with bassoons and known musical scales. I know a filmmaker needs visualization and audio for such things, but everyone knows communication with greys is always telepathic. You've probably picked up their signal in your sleep a dozen times, or via the galactic cell phones that drifted into our damper climates millennia ago, the psilocybe cubensis mushroom, or via Salvia Divinorum, DMT, or dying, or a bad flu, or any psychic ability not hopelessly intertwined with schizophrenia--your brain has to be clear enough you can recognize the external-internal voice in your head--and the way you feel a connection with them is very yin/yang - like their female energy courses through you as if speaking through your unconscious ego. They are facets of our constitution, like Voldemort's soul within Harry Potter (Deathly Hallows 2 is on behind me). The most important facility we have, that ESP, is denigrated by mainstream science for the same reason the church used to. That what it cannot control or measure or monetize, mustn't interfere with that which can until that position become untenable. It's not the 'see no evil / hear no evil' concept, but the refusal to consider any other form of input, that makes us blind and deaf to the alien's screaming for our attention.

9. Patricia Laffan as Nyah

DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954)

Dir David MacDonald

Leave it to the Brits (pre-Hammer) to drain the sexy potential out of the old "Martian women need Earth men to mate with" set-up (originated the year before, 1953, in the classic Cat Women of the Moon). Tall, imperious, with a voice like Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth I, (and a dashing black cowl hood combo), Laffan's Martian Nyah is, in her unsexy way, damned sexy, but it’s all too clear that the makers of this film are missing the point: alien women here to get 'specimens' shouldn't look like disciplinarian schoolmarm androgynes if they want to get recruits. If her planet's desperate enough to want to mate with men from the paltry cross-section of tavern guests, she's got my sympathy (I'd go in a heartbeat!)

10. Tilda Swinton -

ORLANDO (1992)

Dir Sally Potter 

Not every transitional or non-binary character made this list, they are maybe not alien enough, still lacking that 'alien' aspect, i.e. not adding to something more than the sum of both, but Tilda Swinton has it and rocks it, the female non-musical version of the David Bowie alien archetype in the film that put director Sally Potter on the map, and Swinton--hitherto a Derek Jarman figure--as 'the' mainstream androgyne to beat ever since. Starting as a young nobleman blessed (or cursed) with immortality by Queen Elizabeth, Orlando changes in dress, gender, class and demeanor like a snake sheds its skin, all the while navigating the social climbing/falling spheres within a surreal ever-evolving England. Speaking directly to camera, she transcends any notion of objectification or subject-as-spectacle. Through her we see how going from male to female is not a castration (a 'loss' of essence) but a remembrance of being all-encompassing, like wood rejoining fire and air rather than disintegration.

11. Brigitte Lin - Asia the Invincible

SWORDMAN 2 (1992)

Dir Tsui Hark

Lin really shines in the chance to play a role where she starts out as a guy but in her supernatural fighting ability leads to a softening of the skin and feminization of self, a side effect of mastering a rare martial arts manual that demands auto-castration, which I've heard mention in a few other films --as eunuchs were once a ruling class of immortal warriors. Without knowing both the yin and yang, male and female power centers, one can't enter the top spheres of martial arts. Once changed s/he keeps her maid lover but falls in love with Jet Li (and has them sleep together later while she's off killing his brothers). Why, Jet? Because he makes her laugh with his philosophical simplicity and deep love of alcohol (naturally I relate), preferring wine to the follies of man and his continual struggle for power and rule; Lin's sacrificed his/her balls to have ultimate power while Li's sacrificed all interest in the world (or is trying to) in favor of a continual buzz and settlement on Ox Mountain (if he ever gets there). It's really beautifully played between them, as Jet Li has such an innocent semi-bewildered look in his eyes, like he's imagining a cheery childhood moment at all times. Together they're a flutter of robes like two butterflies right before she kills them with his/her choice weapon: sewing needles.

 Anne Carlisle - as Margaret / Jimmy + Alien POV

LIQUID SKY
(1982) Dir. Slava Tsukerman

O, those androgynous women and mildly manly men who spend their 70s-early 80s nights milling around tiny black box combo art gallery / fashion studio storefronts downtown, engaging in never ending private fashion shows in vain attempts to stand out from a stable of similarly face-painted and ennui-and-opiate-withdrawal-driven clotheshorses! This is what the East Village NYC in the late 70s-early 80s was all about, before Giuliani and the internet fucked it all up. Meanwhile a German scientist named Johann (Otto Von Wernher) has followed a George Foreman grill-sized spacecraft to the roof above the East Village penthouse flat Margaret shares with her knife wielding Valerie Solanis-style performance artist heroin dealer lesbian girlfriend Adrian (Paula E. Shepherd). The alien is represented by a giant solarized color style eye POV, observing all the action through a color-twisted prism and killing those who dare reach anything so jejune as an orgasm. It maybe hides behind the white mask in the center of the weird neon hula hooped painting in the center of the apartment. When Margaret's lovers 'climax,' a cigarette burn in the celluloid behind their head sucks them right out of the film, leaving her free to resume her high fashion Fassbinder-ish moping. Her own inability to have an orgasm (due to either drugs, ennui or some combination) saves her neck, and even allows her to notice her little alien guardian with mild affection rather than distaste. Though she never sees it (them?), they form a bond as touching as that between the disembodied Virginia Leith and her similarly unseen closet monster in The Brain that Wouldn't Die!  

If this was a guy playing both roles it might just be the usual camp drag theatricality but Carlisle brings a depth of wry deadpan wit and existential sad resolve that's Weimar Cabaret-level decadent without ever descending to camp, belying her tender age of 26 with a sophistication worthy of Dietrich and an androgynous punk edge worthy of Tim Curry. When she announces she's from Connecticut ("Pilgrim stock!") in one of the film's key and classic scenes, we realize Connecticut is America's Valhalla-gone-Gomorrah and Carlisle is the persona we all hoped Edie Sedgwick would be in Ciao! Manhattan. She takes both her male and female roles over the edge, even going down on herself while fashionistas (before there was such a phrase) jeer jadedly. (more)

12. Voice of Billy Boyd as Glen/Glenda

SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)

Dir. Don Mancini

I'll never forget my ex-almost lover's wife driving me to the train after a weekend at Woodstock and her kid in the back, maybe ten or nine, announcing "I'm going to practice my box stitch," with a kind of randomness that was quite moving. When I was his age neither I nor any living boy I would dare make such a statement with such casual disregard for gender norms, especially in front of a male stranger. I knew then that we might be going to hell in a handbasket as a globe, but at least things were getting better on some levels, and kids today were growing up free and clear of those old straitjackets, at least in tony Woodstock. Practice your box stitch, kid, I thought, and sew our nation whole again.

So more and more there are 'out' kids of all ages, unable or unwilling to commit to old gender confines as they mature. It's all good, of course, as those kids grow free and beautiful while the repressed children wither on the vine.Then there's Glen/Glenda in CHILD'S PLAY. The toymaker forgot to give him/her genitals and his short hair could just be Mia Farrow-esque. Maybe the future will show him/her to be a trailblazer, too. I reviewed the film back in the day but can't remember much about it, except of course that Don Mancini's love of the genre shows in every frame and that Jennifer Tilly (as herself!) has a field day. I've never been a fan of Chucky's whole blue collar balding ginger whiny voiced giggling sadism, but I respect it, and dig that Glen/Glenda has more of a sophisto twang. 

Honorable Mention: Denver Pyle as "Uncle" Bene 

ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN (1975)

Dir. John Hough

Speaking of weird kids, this Disney classic was one of the few of their live action films I liked when mom took my brother and I to see it at the theater when I was a mere eight yars-old. That said, the brother and sister alien's long-awaited guardian, Uncle Bene--our first glimpse of these humanoid aliens as adults--proved one of my first true WTF moments at the cinema. All through the movie, we kids in the audience are imagining an array of badass alien features. The plucky orphan alien kids have been trying to reach him the whole movie long and now--as the kids stand by their good samaritan curmudgeon's trusty camper and look up yonder hill--suddenly here he comes, lumbering cheerfully over the green rolling mountain like some denim-wrapped Hoppity Hop. With a shock of blinding white hair, his male breasts and belly jiggling merrily within his tucked-in pale farmer robin's egg blue workshirt, he's as nonthreatening an adult figure as the 70s could provide. 

There was no intention, perhaps, consciously, on Disney's part, to make him seem androgynous, but time and social progress has made him so. Age and weight contribute to a male's levels of estrogen, and there's nothing wrong with an alien having plenty of both. What makes him so weirdly gender neutral is, were he to talk to the camera and wave us on in for a very special tour of the old farm, like old Mr. Green Jeans on a Captain Kangaroo vignette, we wouldn't blink twice. But as an alien we're suddenly put in that classic Freudian uncanny seat where the familiar and harmless is made strange and conspicuous by context. It works perfectly because it doesn't work at all. We expected a silver lame jumpsuit and black eyes, not this friendly fresh-shaved Saint Nick, ready to lead the kids by the hand off to their alien secret agrarian commune. By his late arrival and cheerful grin he becomes something unreal, maybe not dangerous but certainly highly strange, like Billy Gilbert with his reprieve in His Girl Friday (1941) or Matthew J. Clark with his "Repent" stickers in Twentieth Century (1934)

Even stranger is how we sigh in relief anyway to see his friendly face. After the Dickensian strife and struggling with shady millionaire Ray Milland, all the evil henchmen and callous scientists, seeing such a nonthreatening adult character come rolling along to lead us away into a bright telekinetic tomorrow is cause for merry relief. How this character can keep the kids and their community free of meddlers like Ray Milland one doesn't need to know, not anymore. As adults their powers must surely keep them as safe and off the grid as they'd want. With his big belly laugh joyousness, Pyle is a Buddha with white hair and a country and western smile that says I'll see you next Christmas... 

But you won't see me.

10 Reasons BATTLESHIP (2012)

In honor of Oscar night, here's the underappreciated BATTLESHIP (2012), which asks the question, is Peter Berg the new Howard Hawks? Unlike similar blockbuster directors, he's also an actor, writer and military historian, so there's a sense of real grassroots humility coupled to ballsy cocksureness and team spirit oomph, stuff lacking in the more "family man story"-driven guys like Ron Howard, and a good understanding of pacing and narrative lacking in sugar-addled egotists like Michael Bay. And being a classic Hawksian, I don't mind Navy recruitment ads stretched to Hasbro length if I feel the quasi-fascist thrill created when strong egos finally submerge into the altruistic whole. I also love the use of NOAA to track water displacement for the Battleship quadrants in the original game --man, that's just plan genius.

Of course for most critics, BATTLESHIP was a dog before it hatched: "Imagine, a movie about a board game," they exclaimed to one another. "What on earth is next, Monopoly starring Sean Connery as Mr. Monopoly, and Jonah Hill as 'Thimble'? or maybe Scrabble starring Chris Pratt as 'Triple Word')?" Oh. how they laughed as they unveiled their clever line of fantasy casting before the screening even began --presuming it yet another in a long line of Michael Bay-esque furious and soundful, nothing signifying. CGI-crammed circle jerks and writing their reviews in their head rather than paying attention. They wouldn't have known a gem if Berg shoved it down their throats, and he should have. Expecting shoving of this sort, they closed their throats tight to the genius onscreen like tea-totalers at a funnel time.

Some of the cooler critics stuck up for it. Video and TV airings find and unearth such gems for they arrive with no expectations. And now it's on FX in the exact right spot for it, a Saturday afternoon in February. Now on FX, they have this thing "Movie Download" where two chipper hosts link up clips from making-of extras and drop interesting facts, tidbits and interviews with cast and director between commercials, kind of like folding in DVD extras every other commercial break. A movie like BATTLESHIP is perfect for that approach: commercials and context boost its 'America strong'-ness, and giving us a look at he relaxed keyed up vibe of Berg's set--the vast complicated water action (always difficult when shot on location in real water) and minimal green screen--help contextualize a very refreshing sense of masculine inclusiveness. It's nice to see people having a good time and razzing Berg (which means they like him), rather than cautiously praising Michael Bay as they do in other "Movie Download' events (which means they don't). And so BAM! Ten reasons.

1. Taylor Kitsch
I'm a big fan of this gorgeous young buck; he's everything Tom Cruise thought he was 30 years ago, which is why I always hated Cruise, who thought he wasn't an insecure narcissist. Cruise always played the short guy narcissist with good hair who learns humility. Kitsch on the other hand can play a headstrong narcissistic prick but you know deep down he's not, sort of the way Don Rickles can insult anyone without taking offense because the love is there, while Chevy Chase or someone just comes off vicious and snide, because the love isn't  Cruise's competence seemed more like butch posturing or needling little dick overcompensation, yelling in people's faces and repeating phrases over and over like he's not standing on a box or wearing platforms. Following a similar arc to Cruise's, Kitsch's character here also needs to get humble, but that's a fine arc for a young alpha male who looks and acts like it. He blows a big preliminary soccer game with Japan by being a ball hog, leaving us to realize that no one has a harder time passing the ball in hoops then the guy who's best at 3 pointers. Terrible athletes like myself learn to be humble much earlier. When he finally does learn to be a team player, it's galvanizing. By contrast, Cruise made even other peoples' suffering all about him, and when you demand a fanfare for your gaining humility then you already lost it.

Plus, there's that name. Oh my god, it's probably the best pauvres blanc name in the world, except maybe for the actress who plays his girlfriend here, Brooklyn Decker. Between the two of them, oh what trailer parks and Williamsburg flea markets they could name. Imagine they married and she became Brooklyn Kitsch-Decker. I swoon to imagine it.

2. The Navy
Director Berg's the son of a Navy man, and conveys a contagious respect love and awe for real vessels like the John Paul Jones and the Missouri and the men who sail them. Their bulky fit bodies hustling in and out tight spaces with professional grace seasoned grace bespeaks the kind of lived-in experiential detail that can't be faked by everyday extras and character actors, the large amounts of real Naval personnel in the cast, the real ships, the real ship jargon and familiarity with chains of command, it all makes it perhaps the most vivid Naval story since maybe Dmytryk's CAINE MUTINY. And if you can't feel a stirring in your blood when the elderly WW2 battleship vets come strutting in slow motion to reignite the John Paul Jones engines at the AC/DC power chord climax then you're a goddamned Commie spy (THE AMERICANS, on FX).

3. Rihanna 
As a weapons expert / in a sexy black boarding raft / manning a mounted machine gun like she fucking owns it / bobbing up and down in the waves / in shades and blue camouflage / ready for whatever. Absolutely God Damn right.

4. Dirt Bag Aliens: 
Memories of past wars function great here as contrast with the war against the aliens, as wits and technology evolve through necessity and inspiration, to become evenly matched, ala America mobilizing after Pearl Harbor (the Japanese and Germans always envied our military's 'every man a strategist'+- intuition and free-thinking, compared to their own  'no one makes a move without an order' kind of fear-based conformity). The aliens' cool gadgets fit their Viking marauder--cum Davy Jones ghost ship barnacle-crusted crew in Pirates of the Caribbean dirt bag skate punk/biker aesthetic, like the combination bowling pall/tire chain free roaming power balls; the way they focus in on perceived threats and weapons but don't really hassle unarmed beings (like the kid playing softball). In fact, they're probably a bit like how the Germans went into France or the cavalry into the Black Mountains. As one guy says "this time they're Columbus, we're the Indians" by which to say their tech is superior to ours so we're going down to Davy Jones unless we learn some new tricks, fast. But I love that they're not so superior we can't even touch them. Resistance isn't as futile as it is in War of the Worlds. They have exploitable weaknesses and crust-punk skater goatees that are like sea urchin spikes, gecko eyes (vaguely reptilian) and slimy hands. But we've got home court advantage, a combination of hastily remembered Sun Tzu sayings, and the best of eastern and western military thought fused together on the sly.

5. Absence of Bad Dialogue (or instantly dated attempts at sass)
A film like BATTLESHIP is something I give three strikes before I change the channel or mosey on. For example, I'll stop watching once I see 1. sassy robot, 2. stuck-in-1981 misogynistic objectification and 3. there's no way that oily little pisher Shia LaBoeuf deserves Megan Fox. So Erich is GONE from TRANSFORMERS, dig? But BATTLESHIP has not one single strike against it. There's no sassy robot spouting instantly dated catch phrases ("where's the beef, ribby ribby"), no clumsy nerdy oaf grinding up on beer ad braindead bimbo hotties like he deserves them, no blithering CPO doing exasperated slow burns, no bullying captain, or snarky adenoidal teen. Everyone's cool, competent, and good at teamwork, as Hawks would say, they're professional men doing a professional job, even the women. The only guy who needs to learn to work well with others is Kitsch - and he learns it quick. There are no sing-a-longs in the cafeteria or objectifying sex scenes against a Trans-Am or fireworks, no shower melt-downs or sulky driving away from the funeral on your motorcycle. The closest thing to a ditherer is the guy up at right--the Robert Wuhl of the team--but he just has trouble getting to the point, whereas he's still an invaluable addition to the team.

6. Col. Greg Gadson
A real life Iraq war ver/amputee, he's not a great actor but that works for the character's understandable surliness; his mechanical legs make a fascinating hybrid with the mechanized suit-wearing aliens (like the lovebirds Melanie Daniels brings to the Brenners) + his interesting rapport with his physical therapist (and Admiral Neeson's daughter and also Kitsch's girlfriend) Brooklyn Decker (she's so hot but he never loses his professional respect, even treating her with the same surly reticence he'd exhibit with any man). Also, his lack of experience as an actor ensures he's not stereotypically drama-class 'heroic' or 'dejected'. He may not reach the heart-wrenching heights of Harold Russell in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, but we don't want that in a film called BATTLESHIP anyway --he's earned our respect and you feel a real hard-won if cranky courage in the face of the unknown.

7. Japanese-American relations
In the "Movie Download" part they note that the USS Missouri was reactivated for the climactic battle and it's also where the Japanese signed the surrender agreement at the end of WW2. And there's a Japanese captain (Tadanobu Asano) whose ship is, like Kitsch's, wiped out. They must work together to bring the Missouri out of retirement for one last ride - this after fighting on the soccer field the day before. For any WW2 buff, these wounds are still fresh and for historians (like Beg) provide insight into the highly competitive nature of our individual national identities . Coulda been trite, corny, or racist, but instead it's tight, bra.

8. Beautiful Hawaiian scenery
All sorts of great ocean lighting and actors really bobbing around in real ocean makes all the difference. Beautiful greenery on land and blazing blue skies above--it all chills one out. Let's face it, we don't watch BATTLESHIP for art or thought, we watch it to kick back to on a lazy weekend. We don't want a lot of feel bad eco-moralizing or Chicken Little overacting and product placement, dated slang douche chills. We want just enough action to keep us from dozing off and enough strikingly photographed scenery to chill us out without us even knowing it's working (i.e. the XENA effect).

9. Color/Gender Blind Casting
Great race/gender blindness rare in films but keenly observed and real here (one of my favorite new faces, Rami Malek is even in it). Hawaiian baller John Tui is 'the Beast', Kitsch's right hand man and a big ass motherfucker but there's no dumb jokes about him eating a lot or whatever. The black guys don't have to deliver scenes of ogling girls and blasting rap music and goldbricking --they are professionals, in a script that's good enough to not have to rely on all those tedious mixes of nervous blankness (the nonthreatening black friend with no personality), or pimp strut racism. Same with gender: Rihanna's a babe but there's no mention of it; physical therapist Brooklyn is respected by her patient Gadson as an equal, etc.

10. Creedence! 
Steve Jablonsky's unobtrusive score is leagues away from John Williams-style pomp and micro-management and the AC/DC at the end is the perfect touch, a great example of a moment 'earning' its big rock anthem send-off. Creedence Clearwater Revival? "I ain't no military son" is also apt and it's so American that the Navy would rock out to it considering it's anti-draft lyrics. Compare it to that hollowed out cocaine Moroder and Loggins synth crap from TOP GUN and shudder with relief.
--
Right after the Movie Download screening on FX this past Sunday I watched a TIVO-ed UNDER SIEGE to keep the Navy theme afloat. If that's not a recommendation I don't know what is. Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey seem to be having a ball and Steven Seagal is frickin' hilarious.

Give him all the stars...

Not with a Wimp but a Banger: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

Look deep into the screen, my children. Any screen, all screens --this is your new reality: screens in the classroom -- a big one instead of a blackboard, linked to the laptop on your desk; the phone on which you secretly watch movies with a well-concealed earbud instead of watching the screen your teacher is pointing at; screens on the way home on the bus (your phone again) or car (DVD player above the dash + phone); screens at home (which you watch with one eye on the phone screen), the big flatscreen in the living room, the small one in your room, your laptop and phone still flickering as well... wake, and repeat. How many more minutes of life can the screen co-opt? There aren't any left. There's not even room for any more overlaps. You'll need ADD just to keep up with the future generations able to watch four movies at the same time without losing focus on a single one (while watching just one will drive them insane with restless leg syndrome and cell phone finger twitching). 

With their action figure and video game readiness, teenager-based dystopia sci-fi is all the rage -- and three recently-released big budget Blu-rays (I watched them all in the same weekend --consecutively) speak to this proliferation of screens, proving themselves to be great examples of what Guy Debord called recuperation. These big budget, mass-marketed teen demo-skewed tales of 'being an individual'  use the trappings of rebel youth subversion in service of the institutions they're allegedly subverting (i.e. the Che Guevara emblem used on a Bud Lite bottle: "Viva l'revolution... responsibly."), tapping deep into the product placement pulse of teen fantasy nerd America, and bringing forth all the synergy and branding money that it implies--! Piggyback on, Jackie! Wonder Twin Towers Activate! Form of Coors Lite... Ice! 

---------

KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there in coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of your life along the way. If that justifies dressing up in goofy costumes and sticking your pretty face harm's way, all in the name of a safe America, then Yog Soggoth blessings on you, but you're loco. On the other hand, if, like me, you loathe the hypocrisy behind the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count of the old A-TEAM show (or T2's "Casualties Zero" Arnold eye screen scrawl), then its use of plenty of blood and realistic damage done to property, life, teeth, and limb makes KICK-ASS 2 a priceless precious thing, as gleeful in its sociopathy as Wendy Kroy, Alex and his Droogies, or Mr. Blonde.

Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is the supervillain again, hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his late father's mob business to pummel, strangle, gut and maul Kick-Ass and all his friends and family. Meanwhile witless cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned ward Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more killing. He wants her to experience the 'beauty' of a normal childhood (where the hell did he grow up?) I kept praying Chestnut was one of the first cops to be killed during the massive slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin-just so Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony. But noooo.

That's the real lesson here: just because you promise something to an adult doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kid's drawers for drugs seems to be the 'in' thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search their drawers. The moral? Kids, hide your drugs outside your window, on a string, like Don Birnim's bottle in THE LOST WEEKEND!

Complain all you want, and some have --even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids to the premiere, and was shocked at all the beheading)--but to me the film's absurdist brutality-- its gleefully 'real' cartoon violence-- is a long sigh of relief after an eternity of teen-friendly action movie bullshit. That said, the romantic / sexual elements are sexist and cliche'd. Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) has a great midriff but she's subjected to a strange rape gag which I did not care for. I also don't like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your attack dog! Schwontz, indeed! It makes no sense, like an NRA member hearing burglars downstairs so quick locking up his bedside gun.

But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist qua-intentional way, or just unconsciously ultra-violent, it doesn't matter. With Hit Girl + her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and as Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much-missed 30 ROCK, Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. Unlike Jolie, whe's not squeamish about ripping someone's throat out with her teeth. Viva la revolution... irresponsibly, as Thanatos intends!

Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant, but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' (Jennifer Lawrence) as just another morose girl who likes hunky boys to fight over her, and who prefers the company of a guy shorter than her ("so he can look up to me, so I can be his ideal") but really loves a hunky taller dude. This time we barely explore that by-now dulled triangle (except as an oblique analogy to Hollywood's lavender marriages) instead Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is depicted more like the uncooked egg schoolgirls carry around during reproductive health awareness week. While her rightful man (some Hemsworth or other) is off fighting the real war; Katniss coddles and protects Peeta with the zeal of a neurotic mother hen. He's near-grown, Katniss. Let lil' Peeda stand up by himself.

What works best is how well the film nails down the nerve-shredding implication that 24/7 media coverage not only destroys stars like Britney, Amy, and Lindsay, but our civilization as a whole, leading to a globally catastrophic intensity wherein celebrity hinges on survival and failure to smile with casual joie de vivre when cameras are present--or to be convincingly smitten by some designated short guy before a live studio audience--ensures your family is killed and your village fire-bombed.

The concept is ingenious, because HUNGER GAMES is a cottage industry at its own throat, equating its depicted future dystopia with an endless flow of diegetic paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits, award shows, tedious applause, and all the red carpet press sound byte droppings that are a parallel to the grueling regimen of its meta/non-diegetic modern starlets.

Perhaps to metatextualize these implications, Jennifer Lawrence spends most of the movie caked in enough bronzer to weigh down three Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley. Her glum face beneath this load would be too much to bear without some of her old spark, and it ain't there, honey, so thank god Jena Malone shows up, a champion from one of the other districts, to pick up the badass bitch slack. Malone looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood, stealing ever scene she can while JL's Katniss mistakes glum moping for world weariness.

All the old cast is back as well, including Donald Sutherland as the evil emperor, a decadent fop whose refusal to grasp even the most basic tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader the most unrealistic thing about the film. Here's a man who genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. For a man whose reign hinges on TV propaganda, you'd think he would know enough about mass media by now that all he'd have to do to quell rebellion is give out mockingjay symbols as keychains, T-shirts and bumper stickers, and have his Stanley Tucci greet the TV audience with it (in short, komrade, to employ recuperation), the way MTV has done to every underground music movement since its inception. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolutionary symbolism, Donald! It all but ensures it. It's like dropping napalm on a peace symbol bumper sticker to end the hippie movement. You end the hippie movement by getting Nixon to say "sock it to me" on Laugh-In. 

The reason why Sutherland doesn't do that of course is inherent in the marketing for the film itself; as he lurches about on his pre-set dictatorial track, it's as if the Donald is trying to throw us off the scent of Lionsgate's own ingenious use of recuperation by showing his own obliviousness towards such a practice. As those 'mockingjay' pendants are on sale just a few stores down from the multiplex at Forever 21 or Mandees or wherever, it would be conflict of interest for the evil emperor to endorse them. They mustn't get wise, these kids. A happy consumer is an unconscious consumer, even if what's being consumed is the notion of waking the fuck up.

Other HUNGER signifiers are probably not going to be sold at the multiplex, regardless, such as the garish fashions worn by the hoi poloi. With their frills and pouffiness drawing groaningly obvious parallels to both the Reagan 80s and the French Revolution, the series offers enough hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés of the sophistos and the hunger of the peasants to make even D.W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM seem Rohmer-esqely subtle. That said, there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold trim, and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act instead of just playing the shrill press agent mouthpiece for plot exposition. I still don't like those terrible fake color eyebrows...

Then there's a rare treat, lacking in the other films discussed here: a genuine drunk hip older dude, one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens: Woody Harrelson. Advising Katniss how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, and to have a damned drink once in awhile. He also eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things other than validating Katniss' useless sulking and refusing all offered goodies, as if eating a single hors d'oeuvre would make her 'part of the problem.'

The most original element is the central bizarro twist of having to imagine spending all your time with the dude you don't like, yet must pretend to love, and he's shorter than you, while your true tall love galavants into the firestorm. And the short guy's so sweet and staid, and supportive, he only makes it worse. That tweens are swooning for him out in the real world, only shows there's still hope for short, staid guys.... and hope is a dangerous thing. 

(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)

ENDER'S GAME (2013) is far removed from all that tweenage love nonsense, but there's a lot of care and time spent getting the glistening eyes of the space bugs exactly right. Luckily Asa Butterfield's Ender is allowed to be kind of fourteen year-old Hannibal Lecter instead of just a 'normal' kid like the kind only a Morris Chestnut would think really exists. Recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts, Asa's 'Ender; is legitimately scary and sociopathically over-calm. And its awesome.

I hated LAST STARFIGHTER and its bland 'every lad' gets recruited to save the world because he plays video games well. I didn't mind the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP TROOPERS because we were supposed to think of them as caricatures, not as 'normal suburban teens' as imagined by guys who haven't seen ever seen on. But Ender is different. He's a weedy ectomorph but can defend himself with devastating Lecter-like economy. Underneath his nervous morphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer. His nebulous doubts about the rightness of his mission are played up but we never really get the full HEARTS AND MINDS story before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for sequels. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens within the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Starship Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens. And hey, it's what the military is doing right now with drone programs! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their consoles

The last thing any kid wants is to see an 'average' kid like themselves
in a sci-fi movie. We go to sci-fi to get AWAY from that shit, dumbass.

As in CATCHING FIRE, ENDER wants you to want the sequels, to get the DVD, see it again on the IMAX, in 3-D, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth through sheer will, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should buy them, like an indirect post-production Kickstarter, but it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the nerd no one else likes. You can never shake them off once you do. Besides, how much difference will my ten bucks make against that vast deficit? I'd rather invest in a film that will feel my paltry offering, even if only as a ripple in the wind.

Not to ramble off topic, but I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzan and Carson of Venus books. Also Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. 

from 1946! I got it for cover price
at the Lansdale PA Book Swap,
around 1981!

The best part about all of them? No fucking kids! No 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. No 'Boy' in the Tarzans ('Boy' ruined the later movies), no boys at all. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adults, the ones who could kill without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those adult heroes back! Imagine STAR WARS if Han Solo never showed up, replaced instead by a 12 year-old boy with really normal hair and a nagging mom?! Horrible... yet there it is...

And so it is that we must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths against unimaginative dogmatic Hollywood's glorification of 'being a kid.' Already they have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the FBI's guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing from our cinema heritage. Stop them! Stop them before they install their safety-first overhead florescent lights even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred imaginations. I say roast Morris's chestnuts on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain, in vain!

The Terminator Looking Glass: THE KEEP (1983), DARK ANGEL (1990) and Planet Arous

THE KEEP

(1983) Dir. Michael Mann
***

Director Michael Mann is so busy with capturing the way backlit German soldiers cast weird light and shadow as they slow-motion run through the fog to the sound of a haunting two chord synthesizer that any semblance of story in his only non-crime opus, The Keep, sinks deep beneath the ocean of consciousness. Not that said ocean of consciousness ain't worth seeing (and hearing, via a droning hypnotic Tangerine Dream score), even though the pre-Terminator-meets-WW2 style outline coheres a little too patly, despite all the mystic portent. Fresh from playing a sympathetic U-Boat captain in Das Boot, Jürgen Prochnow once again proves he's very good at doing a war weary (i.e. sympathetic) German officer who'd rather be home mit die frau un kindern than blowing up convoys or killing Russians. This time he plays a Wermacht officer whose platoon is assigned to a remote and very old stone fortress/cave on the Carpathian mountain-border between Romania and Russia. He finds himself, for reasons forgettable, butting heads with hardline SS guy Gabriel Byrne, who easily forgets the Romanians are actually Germany's allies and not just more peasants to crush underfoot, especially when their staff start disappearing. It seems their new outpost was built thousands of years before recorded time (it's 'always been there') and --while the colorful Romanian villagers bring the food and sweep up the corridors and wear crosses for der mutter's sake by day--they never visit after dark, and advise the soldiers not to sleep there. Their warnings go unheeded!

The first night a couple of sentries decide to dig the silver cross out of one of the walls (a big no-no, according to the peasants), and what happens next will blow your mind, Mann hopes, so that you don't notice how most of the rest of the film--too--is blown...
... Blown... like dust in the slow motion wind,
sparkling like diamonds in cross-shaped rays of ambient light,
illuminating dark empty spaces vaster than the ocean within the stone blocks of the walls...
there is no bottom.

As you no doubt guessed, backwards blowing slow-mo fog machines have been absorbing German souls, using their dark energy for incarnating a grey giant with glowing red eyes and a body that slowly beefs up from accumulated evil soul steroids. Prochnow doesn't see the thing himself but does notice his men are vanishing, and Byrne, overacting mightily, never ceases busting his balls about it. Bottles are opened and drunk in existential despair. Then, a break: bloody graffiti in an ancient vaguely semitic language turns up on a wall. Only an old Jewish archaeologist-linguist named Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen), currently cooling his wheelchair in a nearby concentration camp with his hot daughter (Alberta Watson) can decode it. They brings the pair to the Keep, which leads to attempted rape by German guards who are promptly absorbed into our monster via a lengthy shot of more backwards-flowing fog machine fog while Tangerine Dream howls in the bones of your face. Is this the fabled Jewish golem, or the original Dracula or have they always been one and the same? Soon Dr. Cuza is being re-endowed with youth; he can suddenly walk and looks as young and spry as Ian McKellen was at the time, relatively speaking. What a country.

Meanwhile, the Hebrew Sex God equivalent of Kyle Reese (Scott Glenn) senses a disturbance in the force and charters a slow boat. Scored to hypnotic synths as the sky above the flowing waters of the Elbe streaks red with the dawn, this long, extraneous sequence lets you know all you need to about Mann's future Miami Vice series. Mann is a man who likes shots of boats zipping up rivers under red skies while excellent hypnotic electronic music plays. He'll figure out how to shoehorn it all into a story later, for now, make with the boats!

Sorry if that sounds snide of me to say. If I wasn't stuck seeing the film on a crappy full-frame crop on the web, I might have just swooned away as I did watching Mann's Miami Vice feature film on Blu-ray. The man loves him some sunset/sunrise skies reflected on bodies of flowing water. As long as the image is HD, restored, and anamorphic, hey- so do I.

Anyway, the being wants out, and promises to wipe out Hitler in the name of the Jews if Ian helps free him. Scott Glenn's been making sure this being stays in the Keep, for centuries, and even if it means Hitler won't be devoured in a dust storm, Glen's got to stop him from leaving.  Maybe he can shag McKellan's daughter in the process, for his no sourpuss Christian god. Man I love Jewish women!

The last time I tried to see this all the way through was in high school when my buddy Alan rented it when it first came out - he and his girlfriend (and mine) came over and we played hooky and hung out all day fooling around while my mom was out, barely paying attention. We all judged the film as terrible kind of sight unseen, just because it was so dark on the old VHS, and slow. Well, now we can see it but even so, it's still too slow --even on lots of SSRI meds. Michael Mann's career is, however, impressive enough, that we can now admire it as a fledgling auteur's first attempt at transformation, even if its ultimate hook--that all morally-compromised men and women are done in by their own unconscious manifestations of their darkest fears and desires--has been done to death and back again (if you substitute the Keep for a mysterious planet or spacecraft you have Galaxy of Terror, Sphere, Event Horizon, Solaris, and even to a certain extent Forbidden Planet). But unlike some of those films, which get way too solemn and 'respectable', for all its pomp and fog, Keep still has the mighty monster, a tall giant gray Joe Kubrick-esque juicehead with coal red eyes and charcoal shoulder muscles, and a ruthlessness towards fascism that even fascism itself might think extreme. 

Maybe if it was a shade less opaque, or Mann leaned just little less on slow motion, it would be a classic. Even flawed as it is, it's worth any price to see Ian McKellan, who is now as old as the character he plays at the start of The Keep, suddenly cast off his current age and be young again. Imagine if that were true and we were guaranteed another 30 years of magnificent sexy performances from him! Now that we so belatedly know and love him, we would not waste un minuto del McKellan! 

--

Another benefit this film has going is its accurate portrayal of some complicated interrelation between the German army, the SS, and their Romanian allies. WWII historians watching this with their less-sophisto peers can use the events of the film to pompously explain the friction between the relatively sane Wermacht and the conclave of sociopaths in the SS, and why the Romanians signed on with the Axis (to help them fight off the Soviets) which makes an interesting corollary to the deal between this golem monster and McKellen.

I'm a big WWII and horror fan and used to read a ton of comic books and this film reminded me of one of my pet imagination projects, an adaptation of DC Comics' Weird War Tales. The Keep would make a damn good middle entry in a trilogy. Its story could cut down to 30 minutes with ease. I think that's how long it would be anyway if Mann just sped it back up to normal speed. Either way it's weird enough (and played straight enough) to just about sneak by coherency's dozing sentry. And it's good enough to make me hope some day we'll get a Blu-ray HD restoration and be able to fathom what it was about this imagery that was holding Mann's attention so glacially... aside from that boat.

--------

DARK ANGEL

AKA "I COME IN PEACE" (1990) Starring Dolph Lundgren
***

Speaking of muscleheads, what about Dolph Lundgren? A Swede with nary a trace of accent, he plays a tall anti-authoritarian cop, so cliche'd in his nonconformity--cliche lines, a cliche lady cop girlfriend (angry at him), and a cliche uptight yuppie partner to annoy--he makes conformity seem like cool, in Dark Angel, AKA I Come in Peace.  Luckily, the killer is a total original: a Germanic Alec Baldwin-meets-Christopher Lambert type with Wuxia hair, shoulder pads, and serious Lugosi-at-the-end-of-Bride of the Monster platform shoes. On Earth to harvest our opiate-spike brain chemicals (they fetch a high price back on his home planet), he kills a mess of drug dealers with a flying CD, steals their stash, then uses it to shoot up random civilians via his crazy wrist snake device, and THEN then drills a hole in their forehead to harvest the ensuing mix of dopamine gushes, then accumulates it all in little crystalline vials in a wrist pack for future off-world export. Man, that's about as un-cliche deviation from the standard alien drug dealer as you can ask for.

It wouldn't be a post-Terminator film if there wasn't also a cop alien, lagging behind and always a little confused, coming after the drug dealer with all sorts of sci-fi fire power with which to turn LA. "into a war zone!" There's also a conglomerate of great evil yuppies that get shot to pieces in a satisfying side plot (always a comfort) and the end is a long cool chase through an abandoned smelting plant ala the end of Terminator 2, and just about everything is thrown into an all-out brawl that's pure Dolph!

I didn't know much about old Dolph prior to writing this, but was shocked to learn he's a Fulbright scholar and brilliant engineering student, a former Swedish Olympic karate team leader, still married to the mother of his children and looks like a damned cool dad. Check him in this picture below teaching one of his daughters some karate moves while on a family vacation!

It would have been great if he'd been allowed to act the full breadth of his Swedish ubermensch intelligence in more films, as anyone can play a dumb cop with a gut instinct for crime who refuses to play by the book, especially by 1990, the pinnacle of lame catchphrase buddy cop action comedy saturation. Alas, the drive-in era was dying by then, and where was a film about a 'think from the gut' cop--the type who finds out anything he wants to know by going to a seedy strip club and shaking down the perennial sniveling snitch, Michael J. Pollard--going to go? It had to wait until now, on the Shout disc, bathed in the neon hue of 80s nostalgia, to shine crazy diamond-style.

All that aside, if you're willing to bask in this 80s capstone's sheer muttonheadedness then you can appreciate the weird aspect of the alien drug peddler avoiding junkies (since their glands are often burned out) and saying "I come in peace" before launching his dope attacks. The film works best when trying to not be clever -- the action is easy to follow and the only distraction is how the editor prides himself on a million little clever smash cuts, from someone opening a car door to someone opening a bottle, for example; there's also the issue of the shrill yuppie smug FBI partner to get past, and the way the roundhouse kicks are filmed is such that one instantly looks for stunt doubles, which makes no sense. If your lead can do his own martial arts it pays to live in the wide shot.

But hey, it was the end of the 80s, the final entry in a long line of Terminator-aping films about heavies from another time, planet, or dimension pursued by an agent of good from the same dimension (ala everything from The Hidden to Trancers and The Keep all the way back to The Brain from Planet Arous (1957). Now that's a film you should see, oh alien brain word receiver. It's cheaper than a Jack Benny doorman tip, but John Agar, in dark contact lenses, ranting about world domination whilst under the possession of evil brain Gor? That's something even a Fulbright can get behind.