48.
Total fucking Recall! Hell to the yes! Hmm. Wait. Huh. This movie is pretty good. God, those sets. Charm really leaked out of the movies. CGI takes away as much as it gives. Why do we need verisimilitude on Mars? Paul Verhoeven. There’s a name we don’t hear much anymore. One of popular cinema’s real strange ones. Mind behind Robocop, Starship Troopers, Showgirls. Did he direct Basic Instinct? I used to know this stuff. Damn you, Internet! Wait, he did. Of course he did. Now there’s a crazy goddamn movie. Was it BJ I argued with about this? He said the whole movie was in Quade’s head, and that the film tells us this in the first 5 minutes. I kept saying movies don’t really work like that, and when they do, they suck. He said it was all a dream, or a fake memory. I said, then why are we watching all these gunfights and chase scenes? (Logic wasn’t my strong point.) Classic Philip K. Dick set up. Not one of his strongest stories. Fun, interesting—even his bad work is good. I wonder what brought the talent to this story. There’s something true and important about Recall, but I can’t quite put it into words. Oh yeah—Ronny Fucking Cox! Michael fucking Ironside! There’s a pair. And the argument I always had with Robert, who had the better career: Stallone or Shwarzeneggar. I always argued for the latter: The Running Man, Commando, Predator, The Terminator, and True Lies. Robert countered with First Blood, Rambo II, Rocky, Rocky IV, Tango and Cash (I discounted this one), Over the Top (one of the greatest terrible movies ever made), and Copland. Robert would say Junior was wretched and dangle Jingle All the Way to hammer home his point. I would counter with Stop or My Mom Will Shoot, a movie Stallone wrote, and Oscar. My ace in the hole was Conan the Barbarian. This always ended the discussion. I could give a shit about the argument now, one of a thousand things that used to matter and now means less than zero. The things our minds remember.
49.
Beth and I try to watch the best picture nominees. We don’t quite make it. My new standard is: is the movie better than Saltburn? Let’s apply it. Killers of the Flower Moon? Nope. Barbie? Definitely not. The Holdovers? Nah. Anatomy of a Fall? About the same. Oppenheimer? Yes. Poor Things? I can’t decide. Past Lives and The Zone of Interest are in the queue. For the record I think Oppenheimer was the best film in a very good year for movies.
50.
Beth has hilarious things to say about the movies she dislikes but I’ll leave those for another post. I’m busy with writing projects so the blog is shorter, leaner, faster, less substantial. Of course, making a thing no one reads smaller means little, but there it is.
51.
I watch Ishtar, Beneath the Cherry Moon, and Freddy Got Fingered on Criterion. I’ve been wary of Ishtar for years; it has its champions, but a terrible reputation. Well, let me tell you, it is wretched, a putrid piece of cinema that fails on every level. Hoffman and Beatty are miscast; they try way too hard to be funny, filling each overacted scene with cringe-inducing histrionics. The story is dumb, in essence a remake/revisit of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road movies. But those films relied on the singing talent of Crosby and the rat-a-tat one-liners of Hope, as well as the mores of a more innocent time. Hoffman and Beatty aren’t up to the task. I hated it. Moon is somehow worse, a Prince vanity project ruined by his execrable acting and endless screen time. It’s an intriguing outsider movie, but it is terrible, as bad in its own way as Ishtar.
52.
Freddy Got Fingered is something else. Having a cult TV show, Tom Green wrote and directed this scabrous neo-Freudian mess, following a not-so-young man struggling to make it in a world he doesn’t understand. Green shares some cultural space with Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. Carrey is all wiry theatrics, a fleshy, living cartoon, anarchic and unpredictable. Sandler embodies the equal parts vulnerable and dangerous man-child, tentative one minute, smashing furniture the next, always on the knife’s edge of an epic tantrum. Green’s onscreen persona takes elements from both but is far stranger; there’s something deranged and deracinated to his work. His jokes are askew, odd—a running gag is his employment at a cheese sandwich factory—and his affectless features distort into grotesque mimicry of normal human behavior in a series of unpredictable scenes.
53.
The movie is out there. On a first date, a woman lifts his shirt to find a rotting umbilical cord taped to his stomach. His date recoils. “It’s taped,” he says. “Just for fun.” He later cuts the skin off of roadkill and plays dress up with the bloody carcass. Then a truck hits him.
54.
Green’s appeal on TV was his taboo-breaking antics. He would insert himself into regular society and break the rules, all the while often acting bewildered or lost, a precursor to Borat. His show had an element of satire, of unholy innocence, mixing the slapstick with the bizarre. His movie . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t read like satire, but there’s something hateful and misanthropic about how it feels. A seething intelligence rumbles about in Fingered. I didn’t like it, but can see how it’s earned critical defenders over the years. It’s sui generis, filled with nastiness and revulsion, with flashes of misplaced uplift. It’s the best of the three by far, but that’s not saying much.
55.
I’m tracking the beginning of the presidential campaigns with fear and trembling. Trump grows meaner with the passing days, bloviating and blustering in his cruel, foul, deranged way. So far he’s promised mass deportations; a Russian victory in Ukraine; a federal 16-week abortion ban; right-wing militias sent into blue states as shock troops; mass incarceration of political enemies; the end of NATO; a (partial or otherwise) gutting of Social Security; the persecution of the press; shooting protestors; mass firings of federal employees; rolling back environmental regulations and progress; and a dictatorship on “day one.”
56.
His words, not mine, and it’s a hell of a list. Let’s add all manner of backdoor illegalities, quashing the various criminal investigations into the 85 indictments he is currently facing. And, looking for cash any which way he can to cover the enormous costs he’s incurred through losses in American civil courts. And his hostile, total takeover of the RNC, putting his daughter-in-law and an election denier at the helm.
57.
It’s goddamn terrifying, and all the comedy and satire and literary criticism—the Jon Stewarts and Stephen Colberts, the Amanda Sealeses and the Samantha Bees—none of it seems to be doing anything. I feel like Stefan Zweig or Kurt Tucholsky, that satirist in 1930s Berlin who wrote and wrote and wrote about the perils of the Nazi regime and it all amounted to nothing. In 1935, clearly seeing the writing on the wall, he took his own life. Zweig killed himself seven years later. Both were living outside Germany when they committed suicide.
58.
And, yes, I’m comparing Trump to the Nazis, a fool’s game, but what other models do we have? Berlusconi might be closer, but Trump is meaner, swept up with grandiose visions of his gargoyle handlers. He has something to prove, and cruelty is his metier. Racism and a return to America’s glory days sit at the core of his appeal. These are key components of fascism. What am I missing?
59.
Meanwhile, buff old man Kennedy is running on weird science, voter apathy, and a family name. He’s a strange, mean little man and a terrible public speaker. How he has any appeal is beyond me. The top two choices floated to the press are whackjob with a golden arm, Aaron Rodgers, and flamboyant, punch-drunk ex-wrestler, Jesse “the mind” Ventura, perhaps the oddest figure in American politics. As of this writing, some former google exec looks likely.
60.
“In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral.” Olga Khazan wrote that. I can’t think of a truer statement about America during Covid. I’ve been grappling with those dark days myself in two separate works, and it’s hard to remember how dire, how apocalyptic it all was. Trump was the overseer of those disquieting days, with spiraling unemployment and riots everywhere, the virus killing up to 5,000 people a day at its worst.
61.
Fuck. I’m rambling. Let’s move to music. Soundtrack to March 2023: “Unshaken” by D’angelo; “The Outskirts” by Trampled by Turtles; the Numero Group’s no-hit sixties girl group records; The Beaches cover of “Boys Don’t Cry”; everything by boygenius; Itzak Perlman’s selected violin concertos; “Perfidia” by Phyllis Dillon; “All the Debts I Owe” by Caamp; and “Vegas” by Doja Cat, when I’m feeling frisky.
simoneandthesilversurfer 