The Elektra King's Hair Complex

Now it can be told: My favorite Bond girl is Sophie Marceau in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH.

Man, it's her hair. I love her hair in this film, beyond words. After seeing it in the theater back in 1999, I almost broke up with my girlfriend because I knew I could never love any other woman than Marceau's delectably evil oil baroness, Elektra King. My girl's hair was too curly. It made me sneeze at night in spoon position. This is what comes from years of falling in love with the backs of girls' heads instead of paying attention in class.

World is Not Enough was the film that came out after Tomorrow Never Dies, which used to be one of my favorites. Last night I re-watched Never and I find it has lost a lot of shimmer through the discerning lens of 2008. For one thing, there's almost no female hotness: TV's Lois and Clark star Terri Hatcher is the first babe, the way-too-fussed-over rich bitch wife of Jonathan Pryce's hissy media mogul villain. She's sexy if you think Modern Bride magazine is sexy, where all the beautiful hair is hidden behind gossamer white veils. Michelle Yeoh makes up for the damage as the second babe, but she's an action star, not a buxom love machine. When she rubs noses with Pierce Brosnan, there's no question who spent the longest time in hair and makeup. Even after jumping off the top of a skyscraper, Brosnan's hair is Esquire perfect.


Upping the party boy ante is the way too perfume addy set design, lots of 90s blue neon, and the Calvin Kleinesche henchmen, played by Gotz Otto. With his perfect, simple velvet rope bouncer ensemble, Otto's actually the prettiest young thing in the cast. Sigh, when Pryce orders him around there's the insinuating mix of patronization and ego fetish you hear in the voices of older rich gay men with their Smithers-esque proteges. It's a marked step up from the raging homophobia in Diamonds Are Forever, but this is James Bond and they're the bad guys. When he bashes these queer-eyed characters to death, we're supposed to cheer

Back in the late 1990s, the whole chillbient-loungecore ennui trip hop aesthetic was only beginning its downtempo slide into ecstasy-warped history. I had been right in the thick of it and thought Never was just marvelous. Of course you couldn't find loads of much better Michelle Yeoh action films on DVD back then... or DVDs at all for that matter. Now it's strange to see Tomorrow Never Dies appearing so dated. It's like coming home for Christmas to find your mom rocking out to the Sneaker Pimps, or Moby on a car commercial. What? Then Casino Royale showed us what we'd been missing spending decades with a Roger Moore smirk keeping real life at arm's length. It seems we'd been giving away our gritty maturity by the bucketful since back in 1971, when Sean Connery first endured the strident yammering of Jill St. John in Diamonds. We'd been losing our way and taking the abuse of our backseat driver spouses until we emerged eunuchs in the flames of Tomorrow Never Dies, the Bond film shot entirely inside a product placement-enriched Vogue spread. Not only are all the designer hotel products lovingly displayed (and presumably available for purchase while on board the aircraft) but we are supposed to believe that OUR Bond would actually get misty-eyed with regret over losing a flagrantly materialistic trollop like Hatcher! I've nothing against her as an actress in general, but her thing is that hyper-intense TV drama acting, not the vacantly larger than life archetyping of Bond. Thus we see the sad result of our collective capitulation to the ever-shifting desires of third wave feminism: Even Bond believes he should apologize for being a man. What Never needs more than Michelle Yeoh is Camille Paglia. Yeoh's got the high kicks, but Paglia could have trounced Jonathan Pryce's media pundit with a single trenchant pop culture essay.

Which brings me to Sophie Marceau, sweet... sweet Sophie. She's got the sense of nymphonic entitlement down pat. When she turns out to be evil we only love her all the more. When Marceau lounges in gold-trimmed Middle Eastern richness, she not only fits the Vogue fantasia mold, she transcends it. Being French surely helps. She acts like she grew up in this sort of stuff, as opposed to Hatcher who looks like she'll start stealing the designer shot glasses as soon as Bond steps into the bathroom.

Representing the Americans in World is the much more age-inappropriate Denise Richards as an atomic physicist, one of the best pieces of stunt casting in the history of cinema. One look at her wandering around the abandoned Russian missile silo in sexy khaki shorts and you just feel all the doubts about the series slip away. And she pulls it off! Richard's not a great actor but she doesn't need to be. Like all the best Bond beauties she acts from her hips up, sexual in her every gesture, the archetypal transcendental, slightly-blank, uber-babe.


Next up in the series would be Halle Berry in Die Another Day, one of my least favorite of all Bond performances. When are audiences going to wise up to this little tyro? She's hot, she can act... sometimes, but she's got no "presence." She's a wisp with a little mouse voice. Granted it's not always easy to mouth the ever more immature dialogue of Bond films, but she seems uncomfortable and nervous every step of the way. She's like the girl who accepts the invitation to the Playboy mansion just to silently mock, like Midge in Vertigo. Far better is Rosamund Pike as the tricky British double agent Miranda Frost. I always root for Miranda in Die's climactic cat fight. But she never wins.

Meanwhile, Judi Dench is all well and good as M, but the scenes of high level meetings and board rooms all lack the camaraderie of the old Connery days when fraternal English upper class types smoked cigars and ripped on the Scoth as they clue Bond in on the latest super villain almost as an afterthought. When men are alone they can deal with big issues without losing their cool, acting like it's all in a day's work. Once M shows up, everyone has to act serious and freaked out. Ladies, can we lighten up? It's only life and death. Rosa Krebb and Dench should take each other on sometime, with chainsaws in the dead of night, in a spot chosen by a neutral third party. Then we could call all women equal!

Speaking of which, when will there be a decent Bond supervillain? The last good one was Christopher Walken in the otherwise odious A View to a Kill!

Happy Birthday, Sandahl Bergman

November 14 marks the xxth birthday of the sinuous and sweet Sandahl Bergman, the perfect time to genuflect on her perfection in at least two roles: sexy uberfraulein Fosse dancer and war-paint wearing, barbarian-loving, Cult of Thoth Amonn decimator. I refer of course to Bergman's two iconic roles, that of the lead dancer in All that Jazz's steamy "Airotica" number, and Valeria in the original one and only Conan the Barbarian (19982). She's done other work, but these are the roles that endure, that make her a perennial warrior woman in cinema's gallery of archetypes.

Of course by now you've guessed it: After seeing Conan at the local multiplex in 1982, I fell madly in love with Sandahl Bergman. The minute she stepped on screen I stopped worrying that this film was going to suck, and I swooned. Here was accessible beauty (that long Germanic nose is so hot!), physical grace and amazing swordsmanship-- everything a 15 year old, comic book collecting boy trapped in the sterile hell of suburban central New Jersey needed in a dream girl. As Valeria, her fighting prowess and selfless devotion to big brutish Schwarzenegger were larger than life, truly mythic, yet believable! Their on-screen chemistry easily transcended the muscle-headed boundaries of sword and sorcery cinema. In a 1982 Sneak Previews episode, both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel gave Conan a thumbs up, based almost entirely on the romantic element. It was the first love scenes either Bergman or Schwarzenegger--a dancer and a weight lifter as opposed to two pro "actors"-- had ever done, and their relative inexperience fits perfectly with their characters' own sense of wounded bird-style discovery. Chuckle in disbelief if you will, but Bergman and Schwarzenegger in Conan have the same fragile first-love sweetness that James Dean and Natalie Wood had in Rebel Without a Cause or any of the best Nicholas Ray or Frank Borzage couples, or even Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in Cronenberg's Fly remake!

Sexy as she while gyrating and grinding and having her clothes torn off in All that Jazz, there's still no topping the amount of hotness that is Bergman charging into battle in her black full body war paint in Conan. And it's always totally her in the fights; there's no cutting away to a stunt double, and you want reckless realism? She almost lost a finger in one of her scimitar-slashing skirmishes! Such healthy Nordic recklessness gained her the loyal devotion of millions of socially maladjusted young cinema goers like myself. I was so loyal that it took awhile for me to warm up to her scene in All that Jazz, actually, because I felt she was being exploited! I didn't want these dancers all pawing at her. Whoa! Easy there, killer! I had the poster of her with her sword up on my wall for years, her quizzical look at the camera while holding her scimitar, as if she wasn't sure whether to kiss you or kill you. Her muscular, super sexy thigh exposed--just enough to be hot but not enough to be sleaz--made my own German-Scandinavian blood rise up like a vengeful, anguished tide.



Alas, Bergman became caught up in the tides of the post-Conan gold rush, wherein every two bit Italian outfit that could scrounge up a few old peplum props was suddenly cranking out drivel like the Beastmaster, Sword and Sorcery, Hearts and Armour, Krull, Dragonslayer and Red Sonja. Looking for a change of pace, Bergman opted to play the evil queen instead of the lead in Red Sonja, but regardless of this twist, the film is a major endurance test-- more Supergirl than Conan, with endlessly dragged out scenes of bad special effects and way too many cheap robes. Bergman went back to the stage, TV, etc., and there you have it, another great screen presence spat through the star maker machinery and dumped in the wastelands of late-night cable. Nothing to be ashamed of in that. Nothing for her to be ashamed of anyway. The rest of us should all be ashamed, for not creating a universe wherein a whole series of cool Valeria films utilizing her natural grace and charm might have thrived. John Milius, why did Valeria have to die?!?!?!

But that's show biz, big boy, and even if she really only appears in two enduring classics (and a slew of forget-me-soon possible future cult items like Hell Comes to Frog Town and Xanadu), Bergman's effortlessly sexy screen presence, catlike grace and natural warmth are enough to ensure she'll never be just a mere cinematic footnote... especially not as long as guys who were awkward teenagers in 1982 continue to age into blog-writing pedagogues. So, Sandahl, happy birthday from one of the many boys you helped along the demon and serpent-bestrewn road to manhood. May you stay forever hot, forever sweet, forever warm, forever young... and forever lithe!

Kill all Jonesers

There's a scourge upon the land of DVD documentaries.

When I was in a band there were always creatures always hanging around we called "wannabes" or "jonesers." Dudes who had nothing to do with our band at all would see the attention we were getting and want "in" - so suddenly they would be standing right off stage (or on stage if we didn't kick them off), arms crossed, trying to absorb the "glory" anyway they could, appointing themselves the royal beer procurer, bong hit packer, roadie, manager, PR person, whatever... usually we'd never see them again after that one night, but sometimes they clung on for months, sometimes they just stayed and it took us years to figure out no one invited them.

There are people who write biographies of celebrities after three or four biographies have already been written, who can only like an artist once they're sure they wont be laughed at for doing so. They may be writing about a star who was on heroin half the time, and they worship this star and glamorize the drug use, but if they were to meet the star, on drugs, without knowing who the star was, these writers would recoil in horror; they would judge and condemn anyone they met in person who did heroin (and would never do it themselves, god forbid) but the star they worship, oh he's a different story... he's usually dead and if he was alive, that writer wouldn't make it past the elevator.

Take the case of outsider artist Henry Darger. Here is a guy who died alone and unloved in his hovel and was only discovered after he was dead for a spell. There's since been a movie and several books and bios... and they keep coming. These writers wouldn't dream of championing some other outsider artist, maybe even someone living, who wasn't famous yet. They'd never risk it! If they met Darger in person without knowing who he was they would run the other way.

I'm sure some of this rant reflects my own frustration that my brain can't sit still long enough to finish my own book, or that no one wants to write a book about me. Awww! But damnit, this is a legit frustration. These hangers-on can't even be called groupies; groupies are cool because they just want to hang with the band. The jonesers don't want to just hang, they want their name linked. We see their ugly heads all over DVD extras, blathering on in tones of sanctimonious self-importance or putting their "signature style" on via editing tricks, assuming the mantle of another's artistic output in a case of glory by association... and the network of studio production nerds behind them nod approvingly, all locked in the sad ring around the rosie of believing each other's bullshit. As the rest of us writers and artists are out there actually living and breathing, these jonesers hide indoors and wait for us to die, so they can safely approach our corpses, dab a handkerchief in our blood and tell the story to their grandchildren.

Let this humble blog entry serve to stand against this tide of pathetic wannabe-ism. I am all for biographies and read them all the time and most of them are great, but just because you write a biography doesn't make you an authority, or even an expert. It just makes you a person with some time on his hands, and maybe not even that... maybe you're just an empty shell looking for a new hermit crab. In short, DIE! DIE! DIE!!! Or else live... live your own life, and don't presume to know about a subject until you actually inhale it for yourself.

When bad scores happen to good movies

Watching WHITE OLEANDER for my fix of degenerate runaway Nordic blondeness... it would be a great movie without that sappy "American Beauty-lite" piano music by Thomas Newman.... come to think of it, so would GIRL, INTERRUPTED.

The Halloween season with its ample horror movies provides insight into this phenomena; when the soundtrack is good, as in Argento's films, Carpenter's films, some of Jess Franco's films, the movie itself is boosted from mere eye candy-ish nonsense into jazzy poetry. When the soundtrack is trite or tacky, the film is revealed for what it is, an empty calorie sugar high.

The minor key piano melancholia and punchy steel drum accented montage and driving music is all over indie cinema. It especially grossed me out when playing underneath POLLOCK, as when Ed Harris is first learning to go nuts with big canvasses; the music should have, could have been great - wild squalls of bebop and whatever else Pollock was digging at the time. Instead we've got that crisp mournful indie music, sundance music... recycled emotional responses in the key of C, from a string of films all snaking out of AMERICAN BEAUTY and SIX FEET UNDER.

What others? Man, I even have to keep the sound off for parts of Oleander. But I love it - Michelle of course, Alison Lohman, Robin Wright, all so good; I even like Renee Zelwegger in this movie. And Cole Hauser! But oh, the woebegone piano. Oh Lord deliver thine holy blonde killer footage unto someone like Stars of the Lid, Ornette Coleman or Ennio or the amazing and under appreciated David Julyan!

New Bright Lights issue posted

Bright Lights Film Journal # 62 now online
It looks swell, and there are two pieces by me. The first is my tongue through cheek look at Dario Argento's Mother of Tears: An Argento Family Reunion Special: Crying over the Spilled Mother of Tears

The other is my very first book review, on Todd McGowan's The Impossible David Lynch.

All the articles look great! Read zem!

Lusty Men & Cockfighter

Was it mere chance or some higher intuitive cosmic thing that my Monday double bill is Cockfighter and The Lusty Men, the latter because it was on TCM today, Cock cause I finally bought it at the soon-to-move Kim's ($7). I could go on for paragraphs about the self destructive but poetic and essential male traits of competition, animal languages, gambling, booze, womanizing, slouchiness, and adrenalin addiction. But no, I'd rather talk about how LAME it is that neither of these is restored for beautiful DVD releases. I'm glad Alpha Video put out Cock, and the print aint too bad. But I imagine it would look extra pretty shined up. The Lusty Men aint been out since some old VHS tape you can get on Amazon for $40. What the hell is up with that? Both these films should be taught in men's therapy groups and shown before fight club competitions, at the same time, what the hell's the difference?

How much do you want to bet that it's because the overpaid and therefore cowardly executives at some of these big labels want to shy away from "controversy" with the sexually connotative names? Can you hear them saying "Uh, we're not comfortable being associated with titles that have words like lusty and cock in them?" In that question mark at the end of every statement sort of way? Like they're paid to not take any chances? None? Not one chance that their label might be guilty by association?

And of course there's cruelty to animal issues. Those cocks are really fighting. And those bulls are really chasing and the broncos are really bucking. Ray is deep up in the nostrils of those bulls, and Hellman's colofrul cocks look beautiful fighting in slow motion.

The result of all this big league timidity is that two classics of iconoclastic male cinema by two of the great iconoclastic male artists of their day, Nicholas Ray and Monte Hellman, are coasting around the dusty shelves while the parent companies play it safe with tepid tripe. Why isn't there a Nicholas Ray boxed set? What are they afraid of? Are they afraid that men in America might reclaim the poetic warrior beauty and love that is theirs by right and not let it continue to be sluiced into blandness by lowest common denominator CGI patronizing? Or is it just that they prefer to polish films that suck rather than having to listen to jokes about cocks and lusty men? At any rate, Lusty Men would have been perfect to piggy back on Brokeback awhile ago and would look extra fine with a Criterion imprint tomorrow, and ditto for Cock, on all counts.

Don't Let a few bad apples stop you from accessing the Ungodly Power of Transdimensional Entities

Ask some dour passerby on the street, "Should I feel safe in accessing daemonic realms for personal power?" And they'll probably say no. But don't let that stop you. The Elder Gods are waiting for your call!

My own usual weekend solstice debaucheries were put on hold in favor of taping a mess of AIP 60s Lovecraft-adaptations off TCM, many of which--in the bizarre irony twist of fate sort of way which the Elder Gods adore--depicted the exact sort of ceremonies I was shamefully avoiding. It's okay though, since that fits the Lacanian idea of the Other (the TV conducts ancient pagan ceremonies so I don't have to)

THE DUNWICH HORROR (1970)is the only one of lot I've actually watched so far, and it's a grand curio from the time when AIP was the leader in hybridized hippy-horror, i.e. the EAP/LSD (Edgar Allen Poe meets lysergic acid diethylamide)genre.

Ostensibly a horror film, this is more like a chemically altered love story; a sweet tale of romance and drugged tea between a budding hippy warlock (Dean Stockwell rocking a Donald Sutherland 'do) and the daughter (Sandra Dee!) of Necronomicon lecturer and fuddy duddy supreme, Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley). This slow beginning with drugging and mind manipulation-seduction leading up to would be mating with extra-dimensional beings is a clear cut case of bending Lovecraft's source material in order to better ape ROSEMARY'S BABY, something Stockwell was against. According to TCM: "Quarreling with his director, Stockwell (a self-professed Lovecraft fan) adapted a winking attitude toward the material, playing Wilbur Whateley with tongue planted firmly in cheek… and the approach serves the film surprisingly well."

One cheek that doesn't turn well is the clashing, wildly inappropriate music from Les Baxter. For some reason, old Les seems to have got it into his head to do a "leitmotif" sort of orchestral spy theme that repeats in various forms throughout the film, ala, say Wings' "Live and Let Die," robbing the already poverty-stricken sense of atmosphere (when old Dean is doing his chants and having magic fights with Armitage, Baxter score it like we're at the climax of a Bond movie, like old IBM computers should be blowing up, and extras in blazing hazmat suits running around) That said, Stockwell's playing all his cards close to the vest does work to the film's advantage, whether he's arguing with an incredibly hammy Sam Jaffe, battling library guards to steal the Necronomicon, or gently laying Dee down on the altar of the elder gods, Stockwell's got real vaguely self-mocking hipster class, and that helps, as the mumbo-jumbo spouting takes up A LOT of screen time (something I found reassuring as I struggled with my own unholy altar). Plus, there's lots of beautiful Bava-esque gel lights employed throughout his hippy mansion, and some cool set dressing (such as some big hypnotist-aide crystals, a tangent that goes nowhere).

The monster eye view is rendered with psychedelic colors and quick edits (though some dissolves and overlays would have been nicer on the neurons) and there's a wild orgy dream sequence that's one of the better ones in AIP's vast orgy canon, with the orgiastic hippies all painted up to look like aborigines. So all in all, not too bad, and we even get some Corman regulars like Barbara Mouris and Beach Dickerson, plus a really good psychedelic credits sequence (an AIP color horror tradition!). Lloyd Bochner is a welcome surprise as a local doctor and Talia "Shire" Coppola is his assistant! You can feel the engines of the Godfather already starting to hum somewhere deep in the unborn belly of the elder gods! Yog Soggoth! O Hai! Bin Sleepin!

For more on the many good and not so good Lovecraft films over the years, check out the article over on Acidemic's main page, from writer and film historian David Del Valle. And remember, the Ancient Ones are always waiting... and they want you to vote early and often!

Terrifying Commercials from Childhood: Silent Night Deadly Night (AKA Black Christmas)

I can't remember exactly why, but I was alone in the house on an average autumnal afternoon in Lansdale, PA, and I was half-asleep on the couch watching TV... probably Dr. Shock! I would have been around seven years old.

Suddenly a weird, long commercial came on for a movie called "Silent Night, Deadly Night." I thought I was about to be murdered, it was the longest, scariest stretch of time in my young life up to that point. I was too paralyzed by fear to get up and switch the channel (no remotes in 1974).



Looking at this trailer from the distance of an ironic 34 years later on youtube, I can't be sure if it's exactly what I saw (it was called Silent Night, Deadly Night and the narration was different, that I remember) but it sure was LONG, or so it seemed.

Here I was a confirmed monster freak, with all the Aurora glow in the dark monster models, and a die-hard fan of local TV creature features, but there were no VCRs, no way to "capture" a film you liked; everything was ephemeral, one-time only... and this was the only time I saw the commercial for SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT. It sort of fell into the realm of dream... a nightmare!

But even now I have a hard time even looking at the cover to Black Christmas. Do they really have to show the chick with the plastic bag on her head? Just looking at it, my lungs feel panicky...(which is why I'm not showing it; you can link to it, though, here)