Unholiest, Bloodiest, Blondest.

CARRIE starts with blood. And ends with blood. Startling gouts of life-giving/death-dealing blood. And in between – menstruation, high school, and religious dementia. A true horror movie.

Director Brian De Palma brings Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel Carrie to the big screen in blood and strawberry blonde: Sissy Spacek as Carrie White, perfectly embodying the awkward teen schoolgirl outcast, Piper Laurie sufficiently deranged as Carrie’s biblically-insane religious Mama; sweet curvaceous Nancy Allen as Bad Girl Chris Hargensen; striking Amy Irving as Good Girl Sue Snell, and angular Betty Buckley as sympathetic gym teacher Miss Collins (changed from Ms. Desjardin in the novel). All blonde. All the time.

First period. Bleeding in the shower of the girls’ locker room. Terrified, Carrie cries out for help; we realize she does not understand what menstruation is. Taunted, girls jeering, tampons thrown at her, school principal callous, distraught, Carrie rushes home. We meet Mama, and immediately understand: “Why didn’t you tell me, Mama?” Instead of a sympathetic ear, wild-eyed Mama drags Carrie screaming to The Prayer Closet and locks her in, preaching brimstone for the “sinfulness” of Carrie’s period and that she must pray until forgiven by god. Bloodied Christ on the cross looking down and lending a horror hand.

With her dire ascent into adulthood, Carrie realizes she has gained telekinetic ability – the power to manipulate objects with her mind; devours books on the subject in the library. (Note for young readers: “book” – noun, a written or printed work consisting of pages glued together along one side and bound in a cover. Can be read like any online blog. “Library” – noun, a building containing a collection of books, i.e. olden days internet.)

Teen girl, anti-social, unpretty, confused, bullied incessantly, browbeaten religiously… now with the power to retaliate, with the world as her weapon…

And now – the Boys: there’s a blond (of course!) and a brunette. And like so many movies and shows that feature this duo type, the pretty blond whom we think will conquer the world falls by the wayside in favor of the dark rogue: BOSOM BUDDIES (Scolari and Hanks), STAR WARS (Hamill and Ford), MAD MAX (Goose and Max), BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (Winter and Reeves), GALLIPOLI (Lee and Gibson)… Here, the blond is William Katt as curlicued Tommy, the nonstop dreamiest boy in school and Sue’s boyfriend, whom she cajoles into taking Carrie to the prom, feeling remorse for her bullying and wanting to sincerely atone by offering Carrie an innocent night with her sought after boytoy. (So sad that Katt’s only recognizable legacy is ultimately THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO, 1981). While unrepentant Chris Hargensen dates a dark horse, a dreamy-eyed thug who can’t quite act, in his first featured film role “…and introducing John Travolta.” (In one short year, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER would catapult Travolta into the night sky amongst the panoply of stars.)

This simple tale of revenge is unfurled creatively: screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen hones King’s story to its barest emotional beats and director De Palma keeps us on edge by framing it furtively, like the angles a wild, caged animal might see. Once again disproving King’s own aphorism, “It is the tale, not he who tells it.” I’ve always disagreed with this simplistic notion. It is not the tale, but he who tells it. Were this straightforward juggernaut in the hands of a lesser director, well… just see what they did in 2002. (With that inferior remake, we can see how integral director and budget are to telling a tale. King has suffered much ignominy after his initial spate of quality adaptations (SALEM’S LOT, THE SHINING, THE DEAD ZONE), so he should be the first to admit that “the tale” is nothing without a good “teller.”)

For leading the bullying girls, unrepentant Chris is suspended from school (and the prom – heavens, no!), so plots to get even with Carrie, enlisting her Sweathog boyfriend to kill a real hog and drain its blood, planting the bucket above the stage at the prom hall. I tell ya, with all the Machiavellian plotting Chris achieves to place Carrie directly under that bucket on prom night, she should be either a politician or a hitman. Unravel one thread and the plot falls to pieces.

Thus, the iconic scenes of Carrie onstage during her one moment of joy – drenched in blood. A metaphor that teen girls and the teen guys trying to make them during the wrong phase of the moon are well acquainted with. De Palma splits his screen into comicbook frames, so we can see Carrie’s deathly stare and the results of her telekinetic retaliation simultaneously. With each mental strike, a violin shriek (PSYCHO copyrights be damned!). The school burns. All those who laughed now scream in agony. Because of its revenge premise, CARRIE has always seemed more visceral satisfaction than horror.

The horror is Jesus. And Mama’s ungodly love of him.

When Carrie stumbles home for solace in the arms of Mama, Jesus just won’t let Mama go, as he whispers in Mama’s ear that the devil in Carrie has to be killed with a big knife to the shoulder blades. Carrie’s last stroke is to crucify Mama with bladed implements. Back in 1976, these beats were not played offhandedly as nowadays they are, to a generation inured to creative one-dimensional violence. Back then, a daughter telekinetically stabbing her mother to death birthed a new horror genre. And we can see the emotional cost of each action on the characters’ faces. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie received Academy Award nominations for their performances.

And everyone lived blondely every after.

END

Conspiracy Clearly.

To sin by silence when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.
–Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

When it comes to 9-11, or John F. Kennedy, or Jesus Christ, no one cares what you think. They know what they know. And no one’s gonna tell ’em otherwise.

Oliver Stone doesn’t care what you think. He directs JFK with the hand of a gunslinger and the eye of a croupier. And you can either accept the fact this truth-seeking movie exists (note I said truth-“seeking” not truth-“ful”), or whine like a petty hyena nibbling around the kill of a feasting lion, because it’s not what you were told to think.

JFK details the deep background behind the assassination of American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, using the Abraham Zapruder film as a starting point. It doesn’t seek to “prove” anything insomuch as “disprove” the Lee Harvey Oswald Lone Gunman Theory. Again, if you are one of the close-minded who wish to accept the bent Warren Commission Report as the “official” truth, keep believing in altruistic government. But even the United States Congress officially admitted there was a “probable conspiracy” surrounding Kennedy’s suspicious murder. A title card tells us a congressional investigation of 1976-79 “recommended the Justice Department investigate further. As of 1991, the department has done nothing. And the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations are locked away until the year 2029.”

JFK will boil your blood either way. If you believe Oswald killed Kennedy, then this movie will boil your blood because it focuses on a conspiracy that you believe doesn’t exist; if you believe there was/is a conspiracy and coverup, it will boil your blood because the narrative of “Oswald killed Kennedy” still prevails in American culture, and the conspirators are still not revealed or brought to justice.

A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.
–Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, JFK.

Kevin Costner stars as U.S. attorney Jim Garrison (whose 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins inspired the movie, along with the book by Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy). Though many people at the time smelled something fishy in the whole operation – not least, the many witnesses in Dealey Plaza whom Garrison interviewed, whose reports differed wildly from the “official” Warren Commission ketchup – Garrison was in a position to do something about it. In an unforeseen irony, by putting the murdered Lee Harvey Oswald under the microscope, studying his character, affiliations, marksmanship and politics, his whereabouts and movements, Garrison and his team discover that Oswald couldn’t possibly have been the lone shooter, let alone fired three bulls eyes in rapid succession (it became doubtful he had even fired a single shot), and was probably what Oswald himself claimed to be – a patsy.

“Hey you guys, the CIA’s staged assassination of the president is on TV tonight!”

Chameleon Gary Oldman is Lee Harvey Oswald, here portrayed as a rudderless communist agitator. Everyone surrounding these two main players in this drama is a familiar face, a recognizable character actor, if not an A- or B-list star: Jack Lemmon, Ed Asner, Michael Rooker, Vincent D’Onofrio, Walter Matthau, Laurie Metcalf, John Candy, Jay O. Sanders, Frank Whaley, Wayne Knight, Kevin Bacon as a rentboy, Sissy Spacek as Garrison’s long-suffering wife, and Brian Doyle-Murray as Jack “Ruby” Rubinstein, Oswald’s killer. (With Oswald’s murder, more questions: Was it a simple revenge killing? Or – before any legal testimony could be coaxed from him – was it a sanction?)

Joe Pesci is David Ferrie, an unbalanced Cuban sympathizer (when is Joe Pesci not unbalanced?), with a wig that just won’t stay straight; Tommy Lee Jones is Clay Shaw, a whacked-out homosexual businessman who, through a circuitous association with Cuban sympathizers, is the only person ever brought to trial for the assassination of Kennedy. A large part of the movie’s dialogue-driven intensity is the Shaw trial, Garrison prosecuting, laying out assassination details step by step. Donald Sutherland makes a covert cameo as a black ops agent who explains the deep background on the government’s and military’s involvement in the assassination, reinforcing our suspicions of the ubiquitous “They.”

As “Mister X,” Sutherland details how events played out that day to a script written by They: Kennedy’s security detail quashed, his motorcade taking an unplanned turn into Dealey Plaza which was not properly secured, the car slowing to 10 mph against protocol, the roof down, the three angles of ambush, his own department sent on a wild goose chase to avoid stepping on the assassination, and so on. In some countries, the “official” versions of the event were made public before they actually happened! A patsy. A setup. A plan falling into place. The lone gunman theory forced into the world media. “They” put forward the Theory and made Oswald fit that theory.

In testimony, Garrison outlines where all the other shots strayed that day, deducing that, “A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds on Kennedy and Connally [Texas Governor in the front seat of Kennedy’s limo] – but rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse a theory put forward by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Specter; one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We’ve come to know it as the Magic Bullet theory.” [Magic Bullet theory: a bullet that turned in midair twice in order to create the entry and exit wounds on the two men.]

Yes, that Arlen Specter (1930-2012). The senator from Pennsylvania. In 1963, he was a Democrat, flipping to Republican in 1965, then flopping back to Democrat in 2009 (because he knew he couldn’t win reelection as a Republican – how’s that for snide, hubristic and arrogant?). Just as Garrison used diagrams and real people to illustrate the path of the “Magic Bullet,” Specter made people sit in various positions to illustrate how one bullet might have somehow done all that damage. Specter died just recently (Oct 2012), which means there was a modern politician who knew guarded secrets about the Kennedy assassination. It is obvious to any rational person that the Magic Bullet theory is a grand illusion, meaning Specter himself knew this, meaning he knew the morbid truth behind the assassination. Did no one think to beat the shit out of this guy to get some answers?

The term “conspiracy theory” has developed into a negative-baggage hammer against anyone who contests the milky, full-of-holes “official” version. (Like the term “grassy knoll” has entered the vernacular as a gag, cited in relation to something not quite kosher.) In the end, the lone gunman has become its own conspiracy theory, because those who endorse it also believe there is an organized group of contras trying to disabuse them of their “faith” in it. But consider these Conspiracy Facts:

“They” ordered the limo full of blood to be cleaned and reconstructed; They ordered the attending doctors not to report correctly on their examinations of Kennedy’s wounds; They superseded all the surgeons’ protocols with military procedures, They spirited away Kennedy’s body before an independent autopsy. Testimony of witnesses was either ignored, edited or destroyed – provided the witnesses themselves did not mysteriously die; arrest records of all the vagrants in the area directly after the shooting went missing… and on it goes. No truth anywhere. None.

Who are “They”? Because there are no answers, everyone is implicated – from the CIA to the FBI, from Cuban sympathizers to the American military and the White House.

During this trial, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Then Bobby Kennedy. Imagine the tenor of the times – the world was coming apart at the seams. The killers of both men would be claimed as scapegoats to conspiracies, which the film never pursues. It’s too big. Too big to nail. How deep does it all go? We’ll never know. Garrison would later ask his jury, “How many more political murders disguised as suicides, overdose, heart attacks, car crashes….?”

The Zapruder film is its own character here. In essence, JFK is a film made about that film. If it didn’t exist, the Kennedy Assassination would have been an entirely clean sanction.

In carefully staged match-cuts, Stone expands the original grainy footage to take in many angles to give us a more complete perception of the tableau: in Zapruder footage, we see a little girl skipping along next to Kennedy’s limo – cut to closeup of the little girl (Stone’s footage); in Zapruder long shot, a woman waves frantically near the president’s limo – cut to closeup of the woman (Stone’s footage), and so on. It is the most intimate we’ve ever experienced Zapruder, and thus the most disturbing: to see either side of that moment when a human possessed Life and then did not. One minute, he is smiles, expectancy, plans, aches, anxieties, breeze in the hair, memories – the next, Life is gone. Zooming into blurred closeup, we see skull shattering, the infamous “red mist” spoken of by bloodthirsty American sharpshooters, a flap of red skin flying off the head, yet still connected by tissue, the body moving in concert with bullet impacts – sideways, downwards, and then “back and to the left.”

Back and to the left.

Garrison belabors this point for his jury: Back and to the left. Physics. Action-Reaction. When bullets come from different directions, a body will move in reaction to physics laws. Garrison reasons that if there was more than one bullet – and every frame of Zapruder film and resultant reaction points to more than one shooter – then it must by definition be called a conspiracy. That’s all that conspiracy means – more than one person involved.

As his closing argument, and closing the movie, Garrison gives a thunderous Movie Speech; he cajoles, he weeps, he NETWORK‘s, he BRAVEHEART‘s, he Sermon-On-The-Mount‘s… and then does a throwback to the 1950’s “moral tale” movies (when mankind was “tampering in God’s domain”) – he looks directly into the camera and says, “It’s up to you.” The American people. “Do not forget your dying king; show the world this is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people…” Of course, it falls on the renowned deaf ears of the American people. Garrison, to this date, is the only person to hold a trial in relation to Kennedy’s murder. Clay Shaw was acquitted. It was later revealed he was ex-CIA…

The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.
–attributed to Joseph Goebbels.

Whodunnit? We’ll probably never know. The fact is – it was done. And more than one person was involved. And for that to happen at such a national level, and for the coverup to be so extensive, those involved had to be in positions of unimpeachable authority. Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy, 9-11. You believe what you want to believe. Next you’ll be telling us the Earth is flat…

END

When bromances go bad.

Four times the noxious.

FOUR CHRISTMASES would be nothing without Jon Favreau dry-humping Vince Vaughn‘s twisted arm. Best part of the movie. I laughed out loud. Then the movie kept going. Unfortunately.

In this uneven comedy, Brad (Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) are a boisterous, adventurous young couple who studiously avoid visiting their dysfunctional families every christmas, opting to take wild vacations – and lie to their families that they are instead doing volunteer work for underprivileged kids overseas. This year, they get busted, and must visit all four of their divorced parents (and extended families) in one day.

Now if this were a wonders-of-christmas movie, it would be bilious enough, but FOUR CHRISTMASES combines the nausea of a christmas movie with the gut-belching dementia of a marriage-is-awesome movie. Ultimately, christmas is just a device to drive the unmarried couple into the cloying proximity of family and married life. And to discover the wonders therein. Cue shining rainbows and angels singing.

At first, the couple resist the insidious madness. In Brad’s words, “You can’t spell families without lies.” We soon learn he picked up that axiom from his cantankerous dad (Robert Duvall – like Favreau, could carry the movie on his wild boar performance alone!). Brad and Kate have no desire to tie the knot and end up like their dissatisfied and divorced parents. But this movie doesn’t leave well enough alone and allow Brad and Kate their fun-loving life of taking impromptu dance lessons or role-playing picking each other up in bars. In the process of visiting their varied families, they come to realize truths about each other and – so the movie tells us – how dysfunctional THEY are for not wanting to end up married!

(Nuance: It may be missed by the Great Unwashed, but the message of the movie is not EXACTLY “to be married” but to “be together,” which is tantamount to marriage, in gutless modern pc parlance.)

I spit on this movie’s message! Written by – surprisingly – four guys (Matt Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) and directed by Seth Gordon, all of whom we can be sure have been pussywhipped into marriage and are now suffering cognitive dissonance, as they promote “married bliss” even whilst showing us every parent in the movie unhappily divorced!

To top it all off: disrespectful, unruly kids! Every child in this movie is a brawling, loudmouth brat that deserves to be abandoned in a parking lot. Yet the cognitive dissonance in full swing: Kate gets all swoozy with the desire to have kids after being browbeaten and physically beaten by them. I spit again! Ptuh!

Like Mighty Mouse, Jon Favreau saves the day. Favreau is Denver, one of Brad’s thick-necked brothers, a tattooed, redneck wrestler who takes every opportunity to bodyslam Orlando (Brad’s given name, from the city where he was conceived). Favreau’s scenes, along with Duvall’s scenes as Brad’s father, are like the magic of christmas and kwanzaa and chanukah and martian-snow-day all rolled into one.

Other parenting roles feature Mary Steenburgen and Jon Voight as Kate’s separated parents. Then there’s Sissy Spacek as Brad’s mom, now sleeping with Brad’s best friend Darryl (Patrick Van Horn – Vaughn’s and Favreau’s pal from SWINGERS, 1996!).

FOUR CHRISTMASES does have its hilarious moments – installing a satellite dish on Duvall’s roof, Brad playing Joseph in a Nativity Scene that he saves with his latent Community Acting talent, Brad’s delectably uncomfortable meeting with his mom and her lover – his best friend/step-dad. And any scene that Jon Favreau is in. I love that man!

END

Snot Rod.

Here’s one you can watch with a straight face, with a script so bad, even Will Ferrell wouldn’t be in it.

There are two laughs in HOT ROD.

1. The Punch-Dance. Stunt rider Rod (Andy Samberg) “needs to go to his quiet place” and before anyone can say Kevin Bacon, he is footloosing a passionate, overwrought bodyswerve to the strains of a band who wishes they had the big-hair faux-metal chops of Europe.

2. John Farnham‘s You’re The Voice. In one of those epic sequences where the star and his cohorts do The Slomo Walk down Main Street and the townsfolk follow on their heels in support, the soundtrack is the gag. How did the filmmakers even come across this Aussie recording artist? A major Australian vocalist (and a genuine talent) who shot to fame in the early ’70s covering Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head, then disappeared until 1986 for The Big Comeback with You’re The Voice, John Farnham’s anthem is so bewitchingly cheesy, it leveled mountains in Switzerland.

Besides these two high points in the film – both ruined anyway with slipshod writing – the rest of the film is like choking on someone else’s vomit.

Rod is a stunt jumper who has never made a jump. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact he’s driving a moped into the heart of darkness. Or his fake mustache. Yeh, someone actually thought that was funny. One of the instigators of comedy team The Lonely Island, Samberg is actually a funny, funny guy, but has yet to find a movie role and director that can bring out the best in him.

With only wipeouts and missed ramps under his starry belt, Rod plans for a 15-bus extravaganza – which would surely kill a lesser bad comedian, like Jason Biggs or Rob Schneider – to win the day and save his stepfather (Ian McShane, SEXY BEAST) and simultaneously wipe out cancer and whatever… Who watches these movies for plot anyway? Along the way (as usual for moronic leads in these comedies), he scores a salubrious chick (Isla Fisher), who must surely be retarded to consider swapping chromosomes with this loser. Will Arnett is Rod’s nemesis. Bill Hader and Danny McBride play the stupid supportive friends, and Jorma Taccome (also Lonely Island alum) is along for the crash-prone ride.

Sissy Spacek (CARRIE, 1976) has so little to do as Rod’s mum she almost phoned in her performance – then changed her mind and just hung up. Ian McShane must’ve lost a bet to be here.

Akiva Schaffer (the third leg of Lonely Island) is director – but helming a feature film is a far cry from Dick In A Box.

END