You know you're in trouble when the director doesn't have a Wikipedia page and, upon further inspection, has only one feature film to his credit. You know you're in deeper trouble when your boyfriend proclaims while watching, "that's a cool shower head." Given the widespread references to chuds in popular culture (my favorite is from Marge to Homer in the great NYC episode of The Simpsons: "Of course you'll have a bad impression of New York if you only focus on the Pimps and C.H.U.D.s."), I assumed C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, 1984) would prove gently creditable. But the title is far more memorable than the film itself. It's all too competent with a excruciatingly dull first act that fails to prep you for the lame cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. Cool new wavey score from OMD refugees Martin Cooper and David A. Hughes, though.
As a non-narrative type, I prefer a generous portion of process to help a biopic go down, some sort of explanation about the function of those institutions that surround the principals and their personal dramas. It's why The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006) remains my favorite biopic/middlebrow film - damn near every nanosecond concerns process. House of Gucci (Ridley Scott, 2021) dives deep into the sordid relationship between Patrizia Reggiani (a perfectly fine Lads Gaga) and Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver). But even though their squabbles lead to murder, they make for conventional drama, especially when there's not much camp to spare (apart from some fab outfits). I was much more fascinated to learn that Gucci flooded the market with fake Gucci goods to pump up the brand, a subject that could've filled at least an hour of screen time. Instead, we're treated to 158 minutes of soapsuds. Too bad we can't set James M. Cain on this to watch it snap.
Aline (Valérie Lemercier, 2021) seemed promising since the trailer appeared to hoodwink us into thinking its story of Québécoise chanteuse Aline Dieu had nothing whatsoever to do with Celine Dion. But a fatal lack of camp (or even kitsch) allows for few yuks. Lemercier, who co-wrote the screenplay and stars as Aline, hits all the highlights of Dion's life with Wikipedia-worthy dutifulness. The sole perversity is 57-year-old Lemercier's decision to play Dieu at all ages of her life, even as a child, which makes for some eerie CGI moments. I wanted to stay in the record store where Dieu records were flying out the door and learn more about the Québécois music industry. But of course, Dieu/Dion transcended locality and then some and so soon we're off to Vegas and the Oscars and a good nap.
1.The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Cited by Sontag as part of the canon of camp, Compton-Burnett's novels are comprised almost entirely of dialogue. To borrow film terms, there are few long or even medium shots and no establishing shots. Close-ups dominate such that the reader has no clue who else may be in the same room with the characters chattering at present. They exist only as they speak, closely miked, as it were. This is the camp component. The characters, families engaged in financial squabbles with the help and select neighbors providing mordant commentary, exploit linguistic style to gain an ever-shifting upper hand. Each thesis is met with an exacting, exhausting antithesis in endless verbal skirmishes. The perceived self matters not a whit in Compton-Burnett's world. What counts is the presenting self's ability to wield language as protective armor as epitomized by this astonishing exchange from Darkness and Day (1951) between Bridget and Edmund, a married couple with children who have just discovered that they are not, in fact, father and daughter [sic]:
"We have one gain, an ordinary daily life. Did we like it so much when we had it?"
"We shall like it now. We shall rise and speak and move in the common light of day. Our words will have their meaning. They will have none that is for ourselves. We shall not be afraid of what sounds beneath them, of what is heard through them." (164)
The tragedy here is not the threat of incest but rather the loss of a public self with which to shield oneself from convention. What then emerges across nineteen similarly styled novels published between 1925 and 1971 (I've downed three - the aforementioned Darkness and Day, 1925's Pastors and Masters, her first novel in the style, and The Last and the First, published posthumously in 1971) is not only a respect for camp as a survival strategy but a palpable intelligence behind such extreme emissions. The reader longs to get to that self underneath these battles in dialogue, an unattainable goal that ensures an obsessive drive to consume the next Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. My strong suggestion for newbies is to have Violet Powell's A Compton-Burnett Compendium (Heinemann, 1973) nearby which provides straight-forward synopses of each novel. You're going to need them.
2. Elizabeth Taylor, Angel (1957). Angelica Deverell, "too good a name to be true," indulges in no social niceties ("ignorant of convention as she is scornful of it") and cannot read sarcasm. She trusts not her senses but her idealistic imagination and reality be damned if it impinges on her dream womb. She's altogether insufferable to anyone in her orbit. And despite, if not because, of all this, she becomes a successful romance novelist. As befits someone who counts kitschmeister Frederic Leighton among her favorite painters, Angel writes novels of a gargantuan floridity. We know because Taylor provides a hilarious parody of her style (a "nay" on every page and "coruscating" attached to dozens of nouns). Critics ridicule her, editors try to curb her more rococo flourishes. But Angel holds fast and sells mountains of books. This affords her the potential to live the romantic life of her characters. Unfortunately, pesky reality has other plans. Her husband, a talentless painter named Esmé, keeps a mistress in London. The world wars are inconveniences, especially when Esmé enlists against her wishes. She pens antiwar screeds which tanks her popularity. And her palatial estate, Paradise House, devolves into a Grey Gardens. Even the peacocks she purchased fail to fan their feathers and instead shit all over her terrace. Taylor traces Angel's decline with a tart, Flaubertian irony. But she sketches Angel's uncompromising nature so indelibly that you can't help but admire the punk Barbara Cartland that results. "Always too busy writing about what she thought of as ‘nature’ to go out of doors to look at things," Angel reminds one of Peggy Gravel bitching about trees stealing her oxygen in Desperate Living (John Waters, 1977). And in her claiming that “we may all be equal in the sight of God...but we are not all equal in my eyes,” one spots Patti Smith's "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" on the horizon.
3. Angel (François Ozon, 2007). Ozon gets it. In this savvy adaptation of Taylor's novel, he gives Angel (Romola Garai) the romantic mise-en-scène she craves so much. Cheesy rear projection lets her travel around the world. Esmé is played by an irresistible Michael Fassbender. And right before Angel drops dead, she lets forth with a preposterous "I am Angel Deverell!" But no matter how hard she tries to live in one of her novels, she cannot escape her rotten personality, leaving the Harlequin romance existence forever out of reach.
4. Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943). More difficult people including a Miss Goering who is “used to forcing people into conversation, her fears never having been of a social nature.” Tennessee Williams' favorite novel, Two Serious Ladies is peopled with characters who, when they aren't being mean to one another, exhibit baffling motivation. In bad decision after bad decision, Mrs. Copperfield and Miss Goering go on separate tawdry journeys, the former falling in love with a prostitute in Panama, the latter shacking up with a series of no-goodniks possibly on Staten Island. These two serious ladies are after transcendence, a going to pieces which grants them authority and daring. They meet in the last few pages but the summit yields only more insults. Alone at the end, Miss Goering fancies herself a saint. But she has no followers, a code she doesn't use, and in the last sentence, deems the matter to be "of no great importance." In short, a Fassbinder film avant la lettre.
5. Jonny Gators, Kodachrome 40 Super 8 reversal processing first attempt. Not good. Beach. (YouTube, 2022). Not good, indeed. Great! I learned such terms as "lomo tank" and "caffenol reversal process" from this apparent failure to develop a bit of Super 8 ("Worst roll yet, ugh"). But it turns out to be an absolutely gorgeous experimental film. "Could use some pointers at this point, I suppose." Sure, keep fucking up!
6. Diana Hubbell, "How America Embraced Aspics With Threatening Auras," Gastro Obscura(May 10, 2022). As a veteran of the jellied pork at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, I was hungry for this serious inquiry into the past and future of aspics. Formerly a method of food safety, aspics are now haute cuisine at finer establishments. Check out the takoyaki-inspired aspic with baby octopuses in sake-infused jelly below. But most intriguing was the suggestion that the mid-twentieth-century gelatin horrors we love to ridicule today were the product of home economics pioneers like Lillian Gilbreth and Ellen Richards frustrated at being locked out of the "masculine" realms of science.
7. Ozark (Netflix, 2017-2022). The inability of serial television writers to take larger narrative arcs into consideration reaches its sloppy apotheosis here, one hopes. An office is blown up in season two but the destruction is completely forgotten as season three begins. No mention of clean up and never ever any indication of how such violence might impact the characters. Just keep the stay-at-homes streaming. Luckily, I stuck around for the series finale which offered an unforgiving glimpse into how the white, middle-unto-upper-class central couple of Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) manage to retain their privilege. And helping it all go down was Julia Garner in a performance for the ages as Ruth fuckin' Langmore as my friend Charles rightfully calls her.
8. The Lion King, Minskoff Theatre (September 4).Dump your second acts, Broadway! I begrudgingly admit that the spectacle held me for a good half hour. But then the story kicks in and soon, I was making common cause with the fidgety nine-year-old in front of me. And this was before intermission at which point I heard a mother tell her even younger child, "there's a whole other part." Tragic but true, kid. And yet, I did get choked up, not during the lethally dull second act but when Scar took his bow at the end. I honestly assumed everyone would boo him. Instead, he received just as much love as Simba and Mufasa. Poke fun at the musical all you want, Hell, I'll join you now and then. But no other genre has that capacity for community formation and collective regard.
9. Alfredo Jaar, 06.01.2020 18.39, 2022, video projection, sound, and fans.
This installation at the 2022 Whitney Biennial evokes the National Guard helicopters flying low enough to disperse Black Lives Matters protests in Washington D.C.'s Lafayette Square before Trump's photo op in front of St. John's Church. Patrons were allowed in only at certain intervals so as to experience the five-minute video document in its full horror. But Jaar needn't have worried about diluted impact. It's the sound of the six overhead fans that made us feel the chaos of that day, a sound one could hear roaring at any point on the sixth floor of the Whitney.
10. The Paranoid Style: For Executive Meeting (Bar/None, 2022). At first, Elizabeth Nelson doesn't seem like your bohemian compatriot. Her music is unfashionable demo-style pop-rock. She recently dissed chattering class bands like Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire. And worst of all, she likes golf. But if there's someone recording brainier, more boho songs, gimme their Bandcamp. Did you know that Steve Cropper played guitar on Big Star's cover of "Femme Fatale"? Did you know that the Box Tops recorded a version of "A Whiter Shade of Pale"? Do you know who Barney Bubbles was? You can learn all this and more on For Executive Meeting, Nelson's latest full-length. Oh you knew all that? OK, then how about a mind attuned enough to describe home ownership as "houses pre-haunted"? She ain't heavy, she's your sister.
As with serial television, so with feature-length film - the longer a show/movie goes on, the better chance it has of shitting the bed. This is one reason why I gravitate towards the classical (pre-1960) era of Hollywood before running times (and budgets) grew tumescent. For instance, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) is so taut you could bounce a quarter off it. But Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake tacks on 35 minutes during which his version, well, shits the bed. The interior scenes evince an assured hand transforming the first half into a prismatic wonderland. But Kaufman loses control once the film moves outdoors for more workaday imagery. The climactic destruction of the pod lab is visually drab compared to the hypnotic moments in the mud spa. And while Denny Zeitlin's score works in burbling electronic mode, it's preposterously inappropriate when it adopts Star Wars clomp. Why the initial swirling of spores on a distant planet needed Valkyrie volume levels remains a mystery.
As a key tentpole of the New Hollywood, The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) was tumescent to begin with, a roided-up exploitation film drunk on The Method. So it's not as if Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977) had a model of economy to work with. But at twenty minutes shorter than the first entry, it feels forty minutes longer. It pains me to admit this. As yet another example of my "perverse" readings, I'd always felt it trounced its predecessor. But a recent rewatch had me wishing I bailed at the forty-five-minute mark. Much of it still amazes. The psychiatric institute where Regan (Linda Blair) continues to heal is a dazzling honeycomb of windows and reflections and peripheral activity. Her NYC apartment sports a shatter of mirrors and opens out onto the most dangerous patio in Manhattan complete with incomplete railings and an Op Art birdhouse. And even zanier than the locust-eye views of Africa are the hypnosis sessions bathed in pulsating white light and low electronic moans. Too bad Boorman had to fashion a story out of all this scintillation. With a production plagued with rewrites and a frequently MIA director, the film loses its narrative footing and begs to be put out of its misery by the halfway point. Still, I'd rather have this playing in the art-porn theatre of my dreams than the first one. Easier to treat it like a piece of architecture rather than an absorbing drama.
Standing apart from all these films is The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980) even though it supposedly forms part of Blatty's "Faith Trilogy" novels of TheExorcist and Legion. Good luck getting horror dorks on board with this sui generis wonder. Dave Kehr likens it to "wacky personal" films like William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders From Mars or James B. Harris’s Some Call It Loving. There's definitely a lot of the latter in The Ninth Configuration's setting (a creepy castle), style (dreamy freeze frames, cognitive shifts), and, especially, score (De Vol with a hangover). The worst I can say for it is that the insane asylum conceit affords Blatty a convenient excuse to parade around the wackiness. But it morphs into an unexpectedly moving portrait of PTSD as a motley crew of Vietnam vets try to make sense (and nonsense) of their lives. Unexpected because you've been treated to tryouts for an all-animal production of Hamlet, an astronaut encountering Jesus on the moon, one of the wildest bar fights in cinema history, and dozens of purple one-liners available for obsessive quoting.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956): A
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978): B+
The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973): B+
Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977): B
The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980): A
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