Jumping the croc.

After cringing through every minute of CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES, I’d like to, uh, not be Australian any more, please.

After Steve Irwin redefined the term Crocodile Hunter to mean conservationist and all-round noyce goy, Paul Hogan’s seedy crocodile poacher character became irrelevant. Yet CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES drags its feet to the billabong once more – and finds it dry as the Australian Outback.

The novelty is long lost – of the Australian bushman, Mick “Crocodile” Dundee (Paul Hogan) causing cutesy havoc with his wild ways in the big city. Mick is now living in the Australian outback with his wife, reporter Sue Charlton (boring Linda Kozlowski) and young son Mikey (Serge Cockburn).

When Mick’s tribal Aboriginal friend (half-naked, face-painted and carrying a spear) pulls out a cell phone, we realize technology has infiltrated even the far reaches of Mick’s stomping grounds, Walkabout Creek, yet Mick is still untouched by civilization’s forward momentum.

So when Sue has to move to Los Angeles to uncover a smuggling ring, the filmmakers (writers Matthew Berry and Eric Abrams and director Simon Wincer) see their chance to throw another ocker shrimp on the lowbrow barbie.

The first CROCODILE DUNDEE was a classic reworking of the fish-out-of-water tale; a blend of action, romance, pathos, humor and Aussie masculinity. DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES serves one purpose only – to make Aussies look like a right pack of galahs.

Aussie Alec Wilson (who played an enemy of Dundee’s in CROCODILE DUNDEE II) now plays Jacko, a mate of Dundee’s from Oz, who is the Cousin Oliver of this movie – brought in to be even more provincial than Dundee because, we presume, Dundee is apparently looking as bloated as Cindy Brady.

Paul Rodriguez cameos and tries to act funny. Someone forgot to tell him he’s not.

Plot tries desperately to be interesting but only succeeds in jumping the shark time and again as Dundee goes undercover as a movie extra, uncovers a smuggling ring and tames lions.

Not so much a fish-out-of-water tale as a crocodile out of water, out of steam, out of touch and out of ideas.

END

Women Be Crazy.

O god, why hast thou made this gleaming snare
Woman, to dog us on the happy earth?
— Euripides, Hippolytus 428 BC.

Amour Fou – love so intense it drives one to madness. Mad love.

Gloria Trillo (Annabella Sciorra, filling the TV screen more than lusciously), the latest in a long line of Tony’s mistresses, who would seem to be a simulacrum of Tony’s self-pitying, sado-masochistic mother, is truly, upon closer inspection, the archetype of EVERY woman. In the afterglow of sex, her ant-chatter so inane that not only Tony (James Gandolfini), but the TV viewer also, starts contemplating appropriate pastels for re-painting the ceiling – until she starts dancing in her underwear, gyrating sensuously to arouse the male of the species. Then attentions turn to svelte breast and satin thigh…

When will Woman apprehend that this is specifically Her sole role; that this is what She was designed for by evolutionary fashion-stance? Many a time has Woman accused me of not listening. Truth. I don’t. Woman, would it be too presumptuous to suggest leaving the talking to men? Please: Just – Don’t – Talk.

Discovering her car tires are slashed, Gloria somehow, circuitously, places the blame on Tony. I put the question to Men of Earth: is this not one – if not every woman – you know?…

For the past few hundred years, women have used violence against them like a Get Out Of Jail Free card, never more so than in this present politically-gutless paradise. The heftiest threat that men enact upon each other subliminally is the tacit threat of personal physical violence. Respect is a euphemism for fear. (This review is not the ideal forum for lengthy psycho-babble on societal duplicities, so if you would like an expansive discussion on this topic, please visit my office and I will throw you against the wall.) This is why men NEVER act as boneheadedly toward one another as women seem to believe they have the right to act towards men. (When men breach that unspoken edict, violence ensues – but it would seem that this society can more easily tolerate man-on-man violence – that, too, is another essay.)

Only women can get away with the brainlessness they so openly exhibit toward men – whenever a woman does so, its extremity is in direct correlation with how self-important and attractive she believes herself to be – working that trump card and backing up against the social stigma of violence against them, coupled with the actual unjust laws that that stigma spawned. Result: perceived impunity.

Yet they claim equality….

Mz. Trillo, in forgetting that Tony Soprano stands outside any societal law and outside any social stigma, opened up her own personal can of female whup-ass. We men should not thank Tony Soprano and David Chase and HBO for openly portraying violence against women. We should thank them for taking a stand against brazen defiance of respect and honor and plain ole Chick Bullshit, expressed in the form of Tony restraining Gloria in a manner which befits her open assault and battery of him.

Come home drunk and arbitrarily beat your woman and you’re a stupid, ignorant menace to humanity – but if that woman is physically battering YOU, psychologically attacking you, berating, threatening, destroying your property or livelihood, purposefully grinding your face into her glibness because she wields the impunity of an agricultural-age ethic anachronistically and hypocritically superimposed over feminist-age rhetoric, who are we to stultify instinctual animal behavior hardwired into us since the battle for food and procreation began in primordial swamps?

It is a glaring truth that women are only good for one thing, and most of them aren’t even good at that…

Amour Fou – when one angle of crazy love is not enough…

Carmela (Edie Falco), Tony’s selfishly-suffering wife, whose character seemed to follow an arc of complexity over the last few episodes (in questioning her moral integrity by aiding and abetting Tony’s Mob Life), has at last lifted the albatross from her neck – and proven her superficiality in the process. Though she fooled us – and herself – in braving a quest for catholic righteousness, her simplistic resolution illustrates definitively that she was not really searching for a direction out of her hypocrisy, but for someone to give her hypocrisy direction.

After visiting a Freudian psychiatrist (who advised her to leave Tony) and her randy priest, Father Phil (who advised her to change Tony), Carmela ultimately settled on the fence-sitting advice of the Nubian priest, who advised her to simply give up “extravagances,” which left her swimmingly overjoyed at her new-found chosen path – the exact same path she had been following all along! She just needed to hear endorsement from an authority figure. Absolving her from the responsibility of taking any kind of stand, the Nubian priest presented her with the path that *every* christian seeks – the path of least resistance.

Carmela’s selfishness and hypocrisy were never more evident. She never really wanted to give up The Life, so could not reconcile the advice of both the Freudian psychiatrist or Father Phil – to leave Tony or to change Tony would mean sacrificing The Life for a less enabled and less socially-ostentatious existence; instead, she would rather walk that lazy christian middle ground between good catholic and mob moll, courting the salvation that her god promises and wallowing in the material goods that Tony’s profession provides.

Of course, this is merely her perception of being a good catholic. Like every christian, she has molded her rules to suit herself; and she sought an authority figure to endorse her pitiful parameters as satisfactory. When Tony’s gift ring is noticed more than once, she imbues this ring with the symbolism of the “extravagance” that she could do without and truly believes that in getting rid of it she has shucked off her material fixations. Carmela is now content in the belief that she is living on the cliff-edge of poverty for Jesus’s sake. But here’s the clincher: as with all christians, Carmela’s limit for sacrifice…. will CHANGE, as her moods and circumstances do. Witness the apotheosis of christianity.

The wives of Tony’s crew, over an extravagant meal, banter over Hillary Clinton’s humiliating situation (having to keep her upper lip stiff for the American public through her husband’s philandering), smugly behaving as if they were not also in exactly Hillary’s position: wives to powerful men, who bear the humiliation of their husbands’ cumares, wearing fake smiles in public, in return for the benefits and social standing that their powerful men provide.

Anyone for a second helping of hypocrisy? Refusing to see that their husbands are paying for their silence and loyalty in exactly the same way that Bill Clinton’s power keeps Hillary’s trap shut, the wives bluntly come to an unspoken realization that maybe they are simply four Hillarys, bought off and kept women, able to partake of extravagant meals like this whenever the whim takes them precisely because their husbands are who they are.

They eye each other, as if to ask, Are they mad to love their husbands? Amour Fou, indeed…

To curb amour fou, to stop Gloria Trillo from hounding Tony, Patsy Parisi, one of Tony’s goons, must hold a gun to Gloria’s nipples, with a contender for one of the best lines of the series, “My face is the last one you’ll see – not Tony’s….It won’t be cinematic.”

The writers then prove the exemplary nature of this series by choosing to show us nothing happen in the very last scene. Jump-cutting to Patsy carrying groceries to his car, entering it and driving off whilst on the cell-phone to his wife, we are so geared to having scenes such as this resolve in ambush or car-bombs, that the masterstroke of mundanity rocks us out of our chairs. We are being shown the “other side” of these Bad Men’s lives, illustrating once more the multi-layered nature of every human being.

Patsy has just threatened the life of a woman with a gun under her ribs; what does he do next? The grocery shopping, of course…

Amour Food.

END

Bringing True Violence to the Simulated Screen.

Once again, THE SOPRANOS explores the nature of True Violence, impacting our atrophied sensibilities with its directness. But how is the beating to death of a stripper so disturbing to our supposedly hardened psyches?

Surely what we have seen over the years on our cathode-ray tubes and in darkened theaters has prepared us for the shock of witnessing simulated violence? We’ve seen Sam Peckinpah’s interminable, mercilessly ruthless gun-battles in THE WILD BUNCH; we’ve seen De Niro and Pacino burp 200 rounds a minute in the painfully overwrought HEAT; we’ve seen Mel slice and dice his way through English infantry in BRAVEHEART with bloodied longsword and arrows protruding from his forearm-protector; we’ve seen Arnold with twin rocket launchers in ERASER, quipping laconically as he fires off projectiles which should realistically careen him off the back walls and dislocate both his shoulders; we’ve even seen a bear-trap close over someone’s head in STRAW DOGS…

We think we’ve come away unscathed; we believe we are the tougher for having been able to digest this violence and still get on with our lives with nary a sociopath amongst us (drooling schoolkids with automatic weapons notwithstanding); oh, we really believe that we are veritably inured to violence – but the masses of square-eyed Great Unwashed should ask themselves: what kind of violence have we become inured to? We have become inured to a cartoon representation of violence. And in this sense we have been psychologically scarred into erroneously believing that we are tougher than we really are. Oh, we’re scathed all right – because though we believe we are Hard Guys in Clive Owen longcoats, when we are faced with True Violence, our innards behave as if they were amidships during the rounding of Cape Horn in monsoon.

“Cartoon violence” has developed purely because of the two-dimensionality of TV (despite all efforts to involve audiences with quadrophonic audio, vibrating seats, smell-o-rama, and foisting ill-fitting, dual-colored plastic glasses upon us, et al). Without the visceral “feel” of reality (i.e. three dimensions), filmmakers have to make up for it by overstating a point.

Overstating A Point #1: When there is a malfunction on a jet, or any kind of conveyance in which there are lots of lighted controls, something always blows up with SPARKS flying out of it. Now you know as well as I do that for your car to malfunction, there doesn’t have to be any noise, any lights flashing, any indication at all that you have been rendered powerless – if something actually BLEW UP WITH SPARKS FLYING OUT OF IT in your car, not only would you suffer a myocardial infarction, you’d return the car to the dealer and probably shoot him in the head for selling you a deathtrap. (Yes, I know – shooting in the head is hyperbole, generated from our Cartoon Violence background.)

Overstating A Point #2: In the days when it was not permitted to show the gunner and the gunned-down in the same framed shot (who can fathom the mind of the intrinsically-braindead Censor?), the victim would have to really make a melodramatic hash of his death, knocking over chairs in a saloon, falling off a flat roof – even though the force of the bullet would have knocked him backwards instead of off the roof – smashing through a glass window, etc., to alert the obviously mongoloid audience that HE was the one who had bought the farm (even though he sports no entry or exit wounds, sometimes not even a trace of ketchup masquerading as blood).

Overstating A Point #3: How many times do you knock over garbage cans when you come to a skidding stop at your destination? This aspect of overstatement was satirized viciously in the POLICE SQUAD series (precursor to THE NAKED GUN movies) with Leslie Nielsen somehow knocking over conveniently-placed garbage cans whenever he would come to a stop, no matter his location.

In modern times, overstatement has become the norm. Ironically, audiences need to see and hear this overstatement, or events onscreen will not seem “real” enough for them – all explosions are tweaked sonically, so that they resemble The Coming of The Lord, or viewers won’t feel that the explosion was a major catastrophe; there is sound portrayed in airless space, or viewers will feel disoriented, because they have only existed in an atmosphere all their lives; every knife makes a steely “shink” sound at its appearance, even if it is being plucked from a leather holster or just brandished in the air; a car has to blow up if it crashes; to be stopped, a train has to derail…

Yet the other end of the pendulum of cartoon violence is the Wile E. Coyote syndrome: Steven Seagal can jump off a moving train, roll down a rocky hillside and walk away with only a scratch above his left eye as testament to the bad day he had; a bus can jump a freeway chasm with no form of approach ramp; a punch can send a man flying through a plate-glass window, only to get up again and go at it like he was just hit with a pillow; and James Bond can do just about anything he pleases…

And then there is the redundancy overstatement (which is probably tautologous and oxymoronic): not only do we get to see a car explode, we see it from four different angles, one after the other, the same explosion thundering over the THX Digital again and again; the same train goes over the same trellis from three different angles…

So we get the idea – that we have been insulted no end with the gradual insinuation of stupidity into the movie-making community, who take it for granted that we, the viewing audience, are AS DULL AS THEY ARE. Keep in mind that people who happen to be involved in the movie industry are “only human” as well, prone to all the same foibles that any one of us outside the movie industry is prone to. Therefore, there is nothing that precludes them being the same dullards that you would encounter at the DMV – the movie industry just happens to be their job. It says nothing about their intellectual proclivity.

And the same goes for Censors, who are, without a doubt, as a collective entity, THE narrowest-minded, most hypocritical, contradictory and inept gaggle of morons ever to be granted the seed of life by an insensate god. Only Censors could conceive of this inanity (which eventually does relate back to THE SOPRANOS, I promise): creating acronyms for categorical descriptions. Graphic Violence = GV, Adult Language (an egregious tag which I won’t begin to dissect in this essay) = AL, etc. Do these bean-stems actually foresee a time when these subjective, impotent acronyms will enter common usage? Will a parent ever say, “I’d let young Berty watch CALIGULA if it weren’t for the GV, SR, PN and AL”? But here’s the point of this paragraph: There is a designation for Simulated Rape – SV. “Simulated” rape? Why does the word rape have “simulated” appended and the word violence does not? Are they implying that the violence is real? Lemme clue you in on an aspect of the movies, you Censors – the laughter is forced, the tears are crocodile, the orgasms are faked, the killings are staged, the blood is makeup, the background is bluescreen, the saloon is a soundstage in Burbank – the whole celluloid concoction is SIMULATED, you dunderheads!

With this subliminal slipup the Censors have demonstrated that they – the self-proclaimed and publicly-endorsed highest authority on moral standards – CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE between simulated violence and true violence. Any wonder that we have grown up believing that a man can rise from the dead? (Here comes Easter like a dog in heat!)

Into this vernacular of Cartoon Violence comes a show which pulls no punches in its portrayal of reality (something which even the pus-ridden ‘reality-based’ TV shows cannot achieve – after all, anything that winds up on broadcast tape is tailored to fit the perceived needs of the target demographic – and the ‘reality-show’ target demographic has grown fat on a diet of Cartoon Violence, ergo Cartoon Reality served up). Note that SOPRANOS fans are well aware that it too is only a television show; we are aware that it is only “simulating” violence, rape, murder, etc. yet it is the way that the producers have chosen to portray these aspects that leave us spent psychologically. They have chosen not to go the worn-to-shreds route of Cartoon Violence and have opted to portray the gritty realism of personal, intimate True Violence.

[N.B. True Violence and True Crime are two separate entities and should not be confused. “Crime” is a subjective term, altering with the political environment, whereas “violence,” though it may affect people subjectively, is a destructive element no matter what politics it is couched in. Buying your meat from Ralphs in neat, sealed packets is an indirect result of True Violence. How many people really want to see their family meal being butchered? Every aspect of True Violence has been slowly leached from the forefront of society’s consciousness, which is why it is so hard to face when confronted by it without a Hollywood safety net.]

In Episode 31 (“Another Toothpick”), Mustang Sally golf-clubbed an Aprile family member into a coma. Unlike other portrayals of golf-clubbings, where the victim of such an attack would come out with a small Make-Up Department scar above their left eye, THE SOPRANOS drives home the brutality and realism by putting the victim in a coma. And when Sally gets his come-uppance at the hands of a fragile Burt Young, his shooting, though a violent vignette (and almost humorous, with Young trying to focus his murderous intent over his hacking cough), is upstaged in “realism” by Young crashing his car into a pole; this car did not catch fire, did not magically leap over another car and land on its roof – it simply hit a pole, violently, and killed its passenger. True Violence. It’s just around the corner.

In Episode 30 (“Employee of the Month”) we are confronted with Melfi’s rape scene. Though we know it is “simulated,” the seeming unpreparedness of the actors’ positioning on the stairs, the brilliant terrified acting by Lorraine Bracco and the suddenness and viciousness of the attack elevated it far beyond any Censorship-Endorsed “Simulated Rape.”

And in this Episode 32 (“University”) a young stripper named Tracee (Ariel Kiley) is murdered – but not in any conventional way. She is beaten to death with full fists by her boyfriend, Ralphie (Joe Pantoliano). It was this death which made me contemplate the desensitizing nature of violence in the visual media, and how true violence is much rawer than we think it is.

Tracee’s murder was made even more tragic by the insidious way that the writers cajoled both sexes of the viewing audience into sympathizing with her. Firstly, it’s obvious how to get the male viewers onside: achingly beautiful nymphette with sob story (a guy can go all night listening to a chick’s woes if there is even the whiff of Count Dooku at the end of it. But mind: us males won’t listen too long to a chick’s woes UNLESS she looks like our flat-bellied, angel-faced, luscious-breasted Tracee). Getting guys onside? Easy.

Now getting the female populace onside would be trickier, considering Tracee’s profession is one which is usually disparaged by females in average, suburban society (and even by many who are more than willing to dance naked/hook/sell their wares, yet are too monstrously ugly to do so). But there is one universal selling-point that can get even the pointiest dyke, even the hairiest-backed truck-driver; even the filthiest, butt-cracked cement-shucker onside: get her pregnant. And make her want to keep the baby, which gets the Right-To-Lifers onside AND any guys who just want to mother her. And make her get pregnant to an asshole – an obvious asshole, not just the type who thinks it’s an unnecessary expense to re-wallpaper the baby’s room in that stunning loden pastel that you picked out after much consultation and deliberation with your manicurist. And lastly, make her realize that she needs help with her personal situation i.e. she’s not just some bim who is going to drink the baby into an early miscarriage.

The stage is set for True Violence.

When sociopath Ralphie callously kills this girl who is so obviously in need of understanding and help, we see the darkest human emotions surface onscreen. We are disturbed by it – this was never in Tom & Jerry. We see again the deep, bestial side of humanity – the side of us which, if there were no societal inhibitions imposed, may well be loosed at any time. And we realize, in our ids, in that place where we thought we had overcome the sensitivity to human suffering, that what we have been seeing in World Vision ads and Stallone movies is truly NOT what this is – we realize we have inured ourselves to nothing but fantasy and that this kind of reality is still out there. Just around the corner.

Ralphie beat Tracee to death with his fists alone. True Violence. It wasn’t “just business.” It was very, very personal. Each punch was felt like a baseball bat to the back of the head. And we see even deeper into the psyche of men like Ralphie: The baddest men take the greatest pleasure in taking life from those who most value it.

And we come away from the truthfulness of THE SOPRANOS once again… disturbed by the “reality” in its simulated portrayal of real truths.

END

The Antisocial Truth behind the Socially-Acceptable Fiction.

THE SOPRANOS leans heavily on Freud. And I’m a Freud kinda guy (over a Jung kinda guy – as I am a Nietzsche Kinda Guy over a Kant Kinda Guy – and no, I did not appreciate the shot at Nietzsche in Episode 20 (“D-Girl”), “Nietzsche wound up talkin’ to his horse”). Freud postulated that, among other things, dreams are a form of “wish-fulfillment” – and this Episode 30 conveyed that aspect in layered spades.

The popularity of THE SOPRANOS stems from its wild truthfulness – even if that truth flies in the face of political correctness. In this episode, psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) is raped, and contemplates turning to a force that she knows can wreak awesome revenge for her – Tony Soprano.

When The Law feebly admits its impotence in bringing the rapist to “justice,” we are all confronted with that naked truth that Justice is truly only a euphemism for Revenge. (We feel justice has been done only when the level of retribution has sated our desire for revenge.)

THE SOPRANOS originally staked its premise on the anti-socialism of its protagonist, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), and his attempts to ‘better himself’ through society’s prescribed means of cure – psychiatry. Though the humor in this concept was not lost upon us, the incongruity touched a deeper vein of introspectiveness. We were constantly called upon to ask ourselves, “Is this man irredeemable? If so, ‘irredeemable’ from whose point of view? And if he is incorrigible, can any form of prescribed cure work for him? And if none can, why do we continue to watch this futile exercise with such a surfeit of lascivious pleasure?” This episode, more than any before it, brought forth that hypocritical paradox that Society must face every single day of its ‘civilized’ life: though it tries to suppress (read as the euphemism ‘heal’) all those who supposedly cannot control their violent/primal impulses, ultimately it would like to be able to address its issues AS DIRECTLY AS a person in Tony’s world addresses his, without having to analyze and repress emotions. And that’s why we all marvel, mouths agape, at the intensity of Truth encapsulated within the framework of this fiction.

As Melfi was spouting non-PC retribution against her malefactor, venting to her own psychiatrist, we are forced to assess our own inculcated morals. Only now can those in Melfi’s insular caste understand the measures that must be taken – and why those measures need to be taken – in certain circumstances. If it only seemed like a worn cliché before, now Society in Melfi’s echelon can truly comprehend what Tony and his ilk mean when they say, “This thing of ours – it’s a thing of honor.”

Melfi’s son, Jason, understood – as all humans do in their reptilian brains – that the only honorable thing is grim retribution. But ‘civilization’ has decreed dysfunction on all those who would act impulsively. Why? (As Tony once said, “cos if dey got Gary Cooper in touch wid his feelin’s, then it’s dysfunction dis an’ dysfunction dat and dysfunction buh fungul!–” ) At first, Jason is made to look anti-socially impulsive – but after Melfi fell victim to The Law’s callous handling of her case (the rapist was captured and subsequently allowed to walk on a technicality), both Melfi and we are shocked into realizing that Jason was right.

No Repression, No Dysfunction, No Therapy Required.

Ironic that Melfi’s epiphany of how violence can be used to solve psychological noxae should come in the form of violence visited upon her person. Now she realizes how ultimately cogent Tony’s world view is, in relation to her fragile, sheltered existence.

She dreams of a ferocious black dog that threatens her while her hand is caught in a vending machine. Though fearful of it, in her dream, she was suddenly confronted by a greater peril – her rapist, whom the black dog attacked. It was obvious that the dog represented Tony Soprano: a fearful presence, yet with the potential to protect and avenge her.

Public perception of The Law is along these same lines, yet Melfi realizes that although it looks like it’s there to protect/avenge wrongdoing, ultimately, through bureaucracy, injustice and inefficiency, it ends up stultifying and destroying what it has been instituted to preserve.

Melfi wanted Tony out of her life because she did not want to get drawn into his world – but after the rape, she wants him as close as ever, jarred into realizing the benefits of that world.

After spending the last few years vicariously drawing titillation from Tony’s proximity (and, by association, his proximity to the underworld), Melfi now comprehends exactly how wondrously violent Tony’s world must really be. And she senses, more than ever, his potency. She now knows that the element that wounded her so nonchalantly could just as nonchalantly be decimated through the power that this man wields so comfortably. One word from her to him – and her assailant would be nonexistent. Yet she cannot bring herself to unleash that power because she realizes how all-consuming it will be. Once tasted, like heroin, she would crave that taste again and again. No indiscretion would become too small for her to avenge. Her fate, her mind, her body, would all become Tony’s possessions were she to “ask a favor” of him.

In assessing the strength it requires to AVOID acting upon every impulse, Melfi now also realizes just how powerful this man is, in refraining from those acts which he could accomplish so very easily.

Lorraine Bracco scaled new heights in her portrayal of this character whom we thought had attained a ceiling of complexity. Her turmoil was incredible to witness. Her character ultimately had to concede that since she had relinquished her will to the beast of Civilized Society, she could never set foot on that dark road that Tony stands upon, where he waits for the slightest sign from her, to lead her down it.

The episode’s last lines were like thunderheads, as Tony asks, “Is there somethin’ you wanna say to me?” and Melfi pauses, then replies with a soul-empty, “No.”

Cut to Black.

END