Favorite Music Videos Ever...Sorta...Kinda...

My internet bud Phil Dellio asked me to participate in an ILM music videos poll and I quickly obliged. The only way I could think about voting systematically was by going through my liked videos on YouTube. So forgive the lack of anything from this century. Apparently, I haven't clicked like in a while so a clip as hypnotic as The Knife: "Pass This On" is missing. As far anyone claiming some of the below don't count as videos, all I can say is, "come at me, bro."

Sonic Youth: “Death Valley ’69”
Skatt Bros. “Life at the Outpost”
The Replacements: “Bastards of Young”
The Village People: “Sex Over the Phone”
George Grossmith and Edmund Payne: “The Two Obadiahs”
Joi Lansing: “The Web of Love”
Damita Jo: “Silver Dollar”
Alluring Girl: “Working as a Waitress in a Cocktail Bar”
T.S. Monk: “Bon Bon Vie”
Billy Joel: “Allentown”

The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968)

Loathing serial killer films as much as I do, I had no high hopes for The Boston Strangler. But it reminded me of nothing so much as M (Fritz Lang, 1931). It's not quite up to the level of that greatest-film-ever contender. But I'm completely astonished that it comes as close as it does. The Boston Strangler is one of the very finest feature-length Hollywood films of the 1960s and it has single-handedly kicked off a Richard Fleischer obsession. 

The gimmick here is Fleischer's use of split-screen and multiple images within the frame which some critics adjudge a dated device. Instead, it's a moral triumph along the lines of the famous track back in Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972) or the lack of walls in Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003), i.e., it resists the temptation of stargazing at the serial killer by centering on the city/populace as a character. Indeed, Fleischer refuses to focus on Albert DeSalvo, the titular murderer, (a career performance from Tony Curtis) until exactly an hour in. Boston is as much, if not more, the subject of the film as the strangler. The split screen ventilates each murder so that the viewer cannot ignore the immediate socioeconomic context or overindulge in gazing at violence. An ethos of care pervades the film, reminding us that it takes a village to create a safe environment for us all. 

Far from a gimmick, the split screen structures that ethos. Fleischer spends the first half of the film on four suspects with varying degrees of sympathy including a glimpse into an in-fighting queer community with Dorian Gray himself (Hurd Hatfield) as a debonair gay man enraged at how the police comb the gay bars whenever a unsolved sex crime terrifies the city. Henry Fonda and George Kennedy are on board as detectives trying to outpace the strangler. But Fleischer never stays on even these potential heroes for long as when he tracks back to catch two other detectives (Mike Kellin and Murray Hamilton) crunching facts to assist in the investigation. Desperate to capture the murderer, all four are at an airport to meet the wacky psychic Peter Hurkos (George Voskovec) who is afforded his own five minutes of screen time despite the fact that his premonitions lead nowhere. Most astonishingly, there's a fascinating literalization of the split screen when Fonda is interviewed on television, the busy footage of his office forming a frame within the frame of the broadcast. And I cannot even begin to process all the talk about eminent domain between Fonda and Attorney General Edward W. Brooke (William Marshall). 

Plenty of students have given me serial killer scripts to critique. I will strongly suggest they watch this complex, intoxicating film before writing their second draft.

The Boston Strangler: A

Fresh (Mimi Cave, 2022)

Damn straight I was on the edge of my leather recliner at the climax of Fresh. But this is yet another awful horror film I've been suckered into watching, so insulting in its sloppiness that I rue the expenditure of time and emotional energy. The hook here is a supposed feminist reworking of misogynist 1980s slasher film tropes. So instead of one final girl, we get three although director Mimi Cave and/or Lauryn Kahn couldn't bear jettisoning the idiotic trope of "let's split up," not to mention the idiocy of the main character winding up in such a hideous situation in the first place. All of which might be forgivable if Cave/Kahn didn't waste our investment committing several Storytelling 101 errors at the end. An important secondary character peaces out in an act of insulting narrative convenience (and I'm being generous here - it's more baffling and random than anything). And one of the bad guy's lackeys is left unaccounted for as the end credits roll. Did Cave/Kahn forget he existed? Why was he included in the film if he served no narrative purpose? No one on the set or in preproduction brought this up? The oversight is not even used to amplify the horror in an unrealistic manner as with the rewind in Funny Games or the supernatural powers of Jason, Michael, Freddy, etc. There should be some sort of payoff for fear. In its absence, I'll gravitate towards more rewarding works of art such as the filmographies of Roberta Findlay and Doris Wishman, Birdemic: Shock and Terror (James Nguyen, 2010), and The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968) which I saw for the first time last weekend and oh. my. god.

Fresh: D

A Tale of Two Andersons

Wes Anderson reminds me more and more of Paul McCartney, an undeniable talent who finds it difficult to resist a brand of insular whimsy. And with The French Dispatch, he drowns in his own little sandbox. Easily his worst film, The French Dispatch is a curious love letter to The New Yorker, a bastion of insularity all its own that Anderson professes to adore. But he approaches his homage as a child would a playground crush, through endless teasing because you're too underdeveloped to articulate your feelings.

I'm averse to synopses on this blog because the reader can get them elsewhere. But to recount the insufferable story of The French Dispatch here would be truly criminal. It's taxing enough to observe that the titular journal is the French bureau of the Kansas Evening Sun in the postcard ville of, wait for it, Ennui-sur-Blasé. Ya know, cuz French. The film then proceeds in this groan-worthy manner to recount the creation of three storied articles. The first, about a murderer who paints nifty abstracts in prison, echoes the philistine position that a monkey or a child or, hey, even I can produce modern art and the community of dealers and academics conferring value upon it are the lowest of shysters. The second is somehow even worse, an absolute disaster proving Anderson admires the look more than the radical politics of Godard films like La Chinoise as he transforms the student revolts of May 1968 into a game of chess over the rights to access the girls' dormitory. By the third and most successful tale (ugh must I synopsize?), the torrent of proper nouns and exhausting inventiveness comes off like Family Guy's Stewie badgering Lois in the classic "mom mum mommy" scene.

Anderson might have pulled off all this tweeness he had not avoided the emotional implications of each story. But, in what one must assume is a fit of growth stuntedness, he constantly retreats into whimsy when things gets too messy as in the third story when he details a complicated meal in the midst of a potentially harrowing child kidnapping. The "No Crying" sign that hangs in the French Dispatch offices thus applies to the film itself. Too much of an open heart gets in the way of the perpetual irony or satire or whatever the hell Anderson is up to here.

I salute any film that respects the written word. Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the pater familias of the French Dispatch (Bill Murray), nurtures his writers and is even willing to cut ads in order to give them the space they need. Brought to life by Anderson's familiar stock players, it should have displayed all the markings of an ars longa, vita brevis collectivity. Instead, it reeks of privilege and an unwillingness to engage with the world. Anderson needs to pull his thumb out of his mouth (or nose) and film someone else's screenplay for once. 

Where The French Dispatch is implosive and self-absorbed, Licorice Pizza is porous and inexhaustible. Easily Paul Thomas Anderson's best film, Licorice Pizza combines the fever-dream experimentalism of Inherent Vice with the crowd pleasing antics of Boogie Nights. Anderson never once gives you the assurance that his take on San Fernando Valley in 1973 is any kind of final word. Quite to the contrary, the clipped conflicts, episodic structure, and intoxicating sound/image dislocations, the latter especially energizing in a scene at a teen expo with Herman Munster in attendance, suggest a honeycomb for further exploration. And explore we might given how much of the film concerns the rotten glamour of the Hollywood TV and movie industry. Subsequent, obsessive viewings will bring forth exegeses that I, for one, shall welcome on the personalities Anderson parades before us: Lucille Ball, William Holden, Mark Robson, Jon Peters (a hilarious cameo from Bradley Cooper that just might be his best performance to date), as well as names new to me such as child talent agent Mary Grady and Jerry Frick, owner of the Mikado hotel and restaurant. 

And within this maelstrom stands Alana Kane (Alana Haim, from the superb sister act Haim), a directionless twentysomething trying to self-actualize in a field of toxic masculinity. Alana's affection for 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), whose confidence and independence are both alarming and attractive, makes sense given the creepshows she has to deal with including mayoral candidate Joel Wachs (Safdie bro Benny), a closeted gay man who uses Alana as a beard during a dinner date with his frustrated boyfriend Matthew (Joseph Cross). Based on child actor/producer Gary Goetzman, Valentine is a horny teen whose sexual politics are hardly pristine. But the pragmatism he displays in his crazy business ventures into water beds and arcades renders him a perfect partner to Alana in self-actualization. That it never comes for either character gives Licorice Pizza that illusion of unfolding into eternity that is the hallmark of so many great art films. Consistently surprising, endlessly watchable, with a riotous moving truck sequence lifted from the Mike Judge animated series King of the Hill (or is that the 1954 Lucille Ball vehicle The Long, Long Trailer), Licorice Pizza awaits your obsession. 

The French Dispatch: C (and slipping)

Licorice Pizza: A (and rising!)