Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream (Virgin, 1993)

This landmark alternative album sounds better once you place it in a 1970s hard rock tradition instead of lineage closer to 1980s goth/post-punk. Makes it easier to forget the speed and power of the Pixies and swallow the slower, sludgier moments when a power chord sustains and sustains instead of getting on to the next measure. Billy Corgan justified his control freak status with a generous display of guitar-god posturings. The production is so luscious and high-relief that you can hear the windings on each of his six strings. 

But Siamese Dream epitomized why “alternative” became such a joke. What alternative was it providing? Quite to the contrary, one could chalk up its popularity to a blandification of shoegaze. Even rejecting a comparison with a truly landmark album like My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 Loveless, one must concede that Siamese Dream makes few demands on the listener. Lovers of "Mayonaise" [sic] [rolls eyes], often voted the best song on the album, claim that the feedback squeal amounts to a hook; others will wonder how something so brief and infrequent could be called any such thing. Listen to the flutter at around 0:22 in "Rocket." THAT'S your hook, Billy (or Butch Vig or Alan Moulder)! Bring it to the fore more clearly! Then repeat it! Why is it buried so deeply in the mix? Compare a song from the same year - Yo La Tengo's "From a Motel 6." There you have a fetching descending guitar figure that gets installed in our hum jukebox via...wait for it....repetition and foregrounding. And yet the Pumpkins sold buckets more records. Why? Because their music requires only minimal investment. In fact, with all the non-snarkiness I can muster, I assume that’s precisely why millions of alt.folk love them so much, just as with Coldplay and Tom Petty  

One more thing: Plug-ugly cover and font     

Grade: B-minus 

 

Barbenheimer! Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023); Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

Greta Gerwig's transformation from mumblecore darling to Oscar-bait writer-director has been smooth and triumphant. I adored Lady Bird and Little Women and was excited to learn that she was helming a Barbie project. I gleefully bought into the Barbenheimer hype and carted my ass to an actual theatre to see the thing on opening night. And now, with both excitement and hype dissipated, I'm left feeling empty as so often happens when wrestling with contemporary Hollywood cinema. 

Part of the problem is that I naively, if not flat-out stupidly, ignored the potential for Mattel to exert a heavy hand over the proceedings. This is not to suggest that Gerwig failed to make the film she wanted to; everything I've read suggested she won most, if not all, of her battles with Mattel, e.g., deeming Margot Robbie's character Stereotypical Barbie instead of Original Barbie as the corporate overlords wanted. But more than even Gerwig's bid to compete with the tentpole franchise flicks, Barbie's most decisive identifying characteristic is its status as a cog in Mattel's burgeoning intellectual property empire. 

To be sure, Barbie is spunkier than such airless slabs of synergy as The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie, and the freakishly overrated Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. The film opens in Barbie Land, a matriarchal utopia done up in gauche Pepto-Bismals where every day is the same. Barbie needs no water to shower, no food to eat, and goes disco dancing every night with all the Kens and other Barbies. The closing credits (and IMDb) neglect to distinguish between Barbies; they're all named Barbie. But Wikipedia provides more product differentiation - Issa Rae plays President Barbie, Hari Nef Dr. Barbie, Dua Lipa appears as the Mermaid Barbies, etc. All is shiny and happy until Margot Robbie Barbie wonders aloud about her mortality. It ruins the disco vibe and so she must seek out Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) for advice on why she's suddenly feeling gloomy. 

Weird Barbie is so named because she's the mangled Barbie that results from children getting too bored with their dolls - body defaced with markers, hair chopped up, appendages twisted out of their sockets, etc. In a sugar-rimmed Twilight Zone turn, she tells Barbie that Barbie Land is the imagination of the children playing with Barbies and whoever has taken charge of Stereotypical Barbie has grown disillusioned with her. So she must travel to the real world and find the child playing with her in the hopes of inspiring her to keep on playing.

A+ up until this point. The plastic life in Barbie Land is indeed fantastic as per Aqua's catchy dictum. It feels queer even though there are no overtly queer characters. The Kens are all cute and dopey. Ryan Gosling damn near steals the film as the main Ken ("often referred to as 'Beach Ken'" as Wiki helpfully notes) and will later provide the comedic highlight leading all the Kens in a hilarious rendition of Matchbox 20's vacuous himbo anthem "Push." And the female empowerment themes are so welcome that they elicited applause at my screening and many others so I've read. 

But while Gerwig and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach initially keep the real world distinct from Barbie Land, working in the grand tradition of The Brady Bunch Movie and The Addams Family, they jettison the world building and the two realms blend into one another imperceptibly. As someone who despises world building, I am not longing for any more here. But the person playing with Stereotypical Barbie is Gloria (America Ferrera), not only an adult who has taken command of her teen daughter Sasha's (Ariana Greenblatt) Barbie doll but also an employee of, wait for it, Mattel. She learns that the CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell) plans to put Depressed Stereotypical Margot Robbie Barbie back in her original life-sized box. Barbie resists and flees with the CEO and his board of directors in pursuit. And in the weakest story development, Gloria and Sasha decide that the best escape route for Barbie is back to Barbie Land. There's no indication about the rules governing passage between the two realms. The characters, whether real or plastic, simply employ a variety of forms of travel - snowmobile, convertible, tandem bicycle, camper, spaceship, all with real world (or is that plastic?) counterparts on store shelves - to arrive at either side of the divide. As the real world characters filter into the plastic fantastic, the story becomes governed less by narrative than corporate logic and it sucks the oxygen out of the film. The smooth flow between realms mirrors the smooth flow of Mattel commodities into our lives.

What's excluded from Barbie is an outside, a realm away from playing with and purchasing Barbie dolls and accoutrements sold separately. Mattel has colonized Barbie Land/the imagination so absolutely that the atmosphere grows as stifling as those venal Lego films. One can glean this from how deftly Gerwig fashioned a movie that could be all things to all people except right-wing lunatics, some of whom purchased tickets anyway and contributed to its “record-breaking” box office numbers. It’s queer, DEI-certified, open to trans allegorization, and forthcoming with feminist critiques of Barbie’s unrealistic body standards, all while causing no damage to Mattel's bottom line. The balance is so careful, perfect really, that it often feels as if Gerwig shot the film while holding her breath for fear all plates could spin out of control.   

No spoilers but I read the ending as a canny way to kick off a franchise. That's why it rings false when  Screen Rant titles an article about Barbie's historic box office take "Barbie Box Office Breaks Records With Biggest Opening Ever For Non-Superhero Movie, Sequel, Or Remake." Because it will engender sequels off its status as an already-proven property. And if it hadn't, no matter. According to a New Yorker article by Alex Barasch that reads like a battle plan, Mattel is aggressively pursuing I.P. filmmaking. At least one attempt has been made at a screenplay for Uno (yes, the card game). But Barasch perfectly summarizes the suffocating nature of the intellectual property arms race when he notes that, "Some of the projects have an ouroboros quality. Tom Hanks is supposed to star in Major Matt Mason, which will be based on an astronaut action figure that has been largely forgotten, except for the fact that it helped inspire Buzz Lightyear."

***

"Nothing permits everything. To have a narrative logic is to pattern out inclusions and exclusions," wrote my Facebook friend Charlie Conway in a recent post. Plot must delimit characters and events in order for an audience to perceive a story which then governs what kind of stories get told. Any given narrative film will ignore this demographic or forget that history and in response, film critics applaud the inclusions and/or damn the exclusions.

For many critics, a remedy lies in inserting positive representations or underrepresented demographics - Total Recall but with gay characters, as I once thought I longed for until I saw a film like D.E.B.S. (Angela Robinson, 2004), a sort of lesbian Charlie's Angels, and felt empty. That emptiness results from what Kristen Warner calls, in a super-useful article I never tire of quoting, plastic representation - the characters change but the oppressive structures, e.g., the stories that ignored them in the first place, remain in pernicious place.

All these thoughts came to the fore when watching Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who spearheaded the Manhattan Project. Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer is a feat of deftness as surely as Barbie. Nolan jumbles temporal order throughout most of the running time, flitting back and forth largely between Oppenheimer (played with impressive concentration by Cillian Murphy) leading his crew in the creation of nuclear weapons during WWII and the subsequent attempts by U.S. Atomic Energy commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. in his best performance to date) to discredit Oppenheimer and relieve him of his highest-level security clearance. The editing is in keeping with the dictates of intensified continuity in contemporary Hollywood cinema. For the first few minutes, I honestly thought I was watching a trailer for Oppenheimer so fast are its editing rhythms. Where intensified continuity would typically result in de trop editing, however, Nolan uses it to keep his 180-minute film moving briskly. For a project that threatens to be consumed by elephantiasis, Oppenheimer is remarkably fleet, almost light on its feet for such a grim project.

But as plenty of critics have pointed out, Nolan remains blind to certain demographics. He has little feel for the interior lives of his women characters although Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh acquit themselves admirably as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty and doomed paramour Jean Tatlock respectively. More damningly, the impact of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are relegated to a few photographs; Nolan never took his camera to Japan, saving his third act for the white man's guilt over birthing a weapon of mass destruction. 

As Warner would no doubt concur, peppering in Japanese characters would not automatically result in a better ventilated film. But allow me to suggest some structural inclusions that might satisfy the demands of both politics and aesthetics. The fulcrum of Oppenheimer is the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 when a nuclear weapon was detonated in a New Mexico desert. Shot without sound and bathed in light requiring SPF-500 until Nolan unleashes the full sonic assault on us, it's likely to go down as Nolan's finest moment ever. But what if after the successful test, the story switched to Japan...never to return to Oppenheimer or even America again?!? Instead of centering the story on one individual, what if a dual-structure narrative took over? After watching Oppenheimer, I was thirsty for a Japanese perspective on the end of WWII and saw a remarkable film called A Night to Remember (Kôzaburô Yoshimura, 1962) about a reporter trying to trace the effects of the bombs on the Hiroshima populace. Guess what - no one wants to talk about it and those too young to have experienced it fail to treat the event with any gravitas (the Japanese title translates, ironically one assumes, as I Will Never Forget That Night although it also goes by Hiroshima Heartache). 

Now imagine how rich and dialectical a fusion of Oppenheimer and A Night to Remember could be! What would 1945 Los Alamos have to say to 1962 Hiroshima and vice-versa? I don't want positive representations; that way leads to more Hallmark Christmas movies. I want different foci, dialectics, broken gestalts, indigestible, unconsumable images, structures so porous as to trigger trypophobia.

Addendum: I'll take no questions about the format in which I saw Oppenheimer. I saw it in a theatre and that's all ye need know. After the debacle of seeing Dunkirk in IMAX laser, the theatrical experience has no corner on ideal screening conditions. And given many viewers who are younger and have better hearing than I do have complained about the difficulty of making out bits of dialogue in Oppenheimer, the film is sure to benefit from closed captioning at home.

Barbie: B+

Oppenheimer: A-minus

1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)

What about this particular story or historical event dictated that it be filmed in "one take"? The gimmick turns Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) into a video game and, as such, I found it insufferably goal-oriented. There's a vaguely psychedelic moment in the middle where the hot-thank-gawd protagonist played by George MacKay holes up in a village on fire. It looked like a sound stage and I was fond of this brief bit of artifice in a film praised for its realism. But if Mendes has any insight into what makes WWI a unique disaster, then he's hidden it quite well under his dexterous camera movements. A dreary slog.

Grade: C+ 

Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Gerwig's arty play with time keeps the material fresh even for those intimate with the property. Every bit of preciosity is balanced with a grim set of limits and compromises. The moral? Hell isn't, in fact, other people, including a slew of cute boys (Timmy! Louis!) who admire smart women. And Laura Dern has firmly settled into Hollywood actor royalty. She's remarkable. All that and it's a hit (of sorts)! For two hours, the world seems right. 

Grade: A 

The Lego Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017)

Inbred and lacking even the first one's (groans) chickenhearted critique of Big Business, this hebephrenic followup is pure teaching moment for a media studies professor. It blends content and commercials almost as shamelessly as a Hallmark Christmas movie. Damn near every image and sound is a property of Warner Bros. (a division of Time Warner) such that the movie is nothing but a marketing hall of mirrors (quite literally at one point in yet another dreary ripoff of The Lady From Shanghai). And when Gotham is cleaved in two at the climax, the Lego characters bridge the two sections together by locking into one another to remind us how Legos work (and to get the toddlers up to speed). Were I not repulsed by untrammeled media conglomeration, I'd call it genius. But I might still have to append an "evil" to it. 

Oh and apparently it has some lessons to teach about the importance of family or not going it alone or whatever. But don't forget to ask your parents for some more Legos, kids.

Grade: C 

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)/Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)

I see three canny ways to approach Argento's Suspiria. You can bask in its vertical pleasures, namely, the gorgeous set design and unmotivated lighting, by accessing a series of well-chosen screen grabs. You can listen to Goblin's classic carpet-bombing score on your playback device of choice, a sort of aural screen grab, if you will. Or you can waft in and out of it perhaps as the legit feature film at your local porn theatre, checking in between conquests and abandoning ship as Argento descends into torpor (in five, ten minutes tops). But subjecting yourself to the dreary horizontal pull of Suspiria in its entirety? Do even its legion of fans insist on the absolute necessity of such an endeavor?

The problem is a simple yet overly familiar one. There's nothing at stake in Argento's stylish set pieces. He situates them in a context so paltry that they sit there like a jewel-encrusted tchotchke. You ooh, you ahh, and then you check Wikipedia to learn if Alida Valli is still alive (nope, sadly - 2006 at 84). Each murder is akin to a drag performance wherein the queen bursts onto stage in a fabulous outfit. But then you have to suffer through a lip sync of a Celine Dion ballad after the initial surprise, shiny baubles maybe catching your eye for a fleeting moment or two. 

Take the murder of the blind pianist, Suspiria's narcoleptic nadir. It takes five minutes of screen time in a 99-minute film to dispatch with this character. And here, we don't even have the benefit of Argento's visuals to distract us, no doubt because the scene takes place outdoors where Argento cannot paint his canvas so readily. A few shadows, some nifty extreme long shots, and Goblin's score battering our ears cannot compensate for the fact that the man just stands there for the entirety of the scene. Dario, let's moooooove! Perhaps a screenplay longer than ten pages might have provided the context for this scene (and most of the others) to terrify or even intrigue us. But as the 2018 "cover version" proves, a tight narrative need not be the only tool for getting the sausage into its casing.

I infinitely prefer Guadagnino's pass at Suspiria if only for its punky refusal to indulge Argento stans. It stints on gore, moves even more glacially than the original (clocking in at over an hour longer), and looks as if it spent weeks tumbling in a cement mixer with Eastern-bloc browns and dull crimsons dominating the color scheme. And yet it conveys a palpable hyper/sleepwalking tension associated with not midnight movies but 3am movies, those quasi-psychedelic moments in which the ambient hum of the projector provides the only safeguard against a confusion of waking and dream states. I don't quite know what Guadagnino means by introducing a Mennonite past and a Baader-Meinhof present into the proceedings (something about policing women's bodies maybe?). But they offer enough context to lend the stasis some savor. You want to solve its mysteries rather than look at your phone for the tenth time. And the irony here is that it works even better than the original as a film to flit in and out of. Porous, seductive, and more than a bit preposterous, Suspiria 2018 has all the makings of my favorite genre - the film maudit. Have a hypnagogic time with it today!

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) - B-minus

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018) - A-minus

A double feature of both at my beloved Fair Theater in Queens - A

The Cassandra Crossing (George Pan Cosmatos, 1976)

I watched The Cassandra Crossing a few months ago on the strength of film scholar David Melville Wingrove's Facebook description of it as "[a] movie that transcends its own awfulness and becomes a perverse work of art." As you might suspect, it didn't live up to such hype. But I don't recall hating it either. The problem is I don't recall much at all about the thing, an increasingly frequent and frustrating reality for a film scholar of advancing years such as myself. So when the title came across my feed recently, I took it as a hint to revisit and pin down the film for good (if possible).

Turns out it's that most dreaded reminder of mortality - the okay movie. I'm baffled by the contemporary pans of the film which label it "an unintentional parody of a disaster film," "[a] sometimes unintentionally funny disaster film," and "so awful it's unintentionally hilarious." My experience clocks it as a solid thriller/disaster flick and little more. Sure, some of the performances from the all-star cast might be a tad overripe. But I see nothing to challenge Maria Montez's or Divine's status as queens of camp. And structurally, it's relatively straightforward, lacking the demented construction of, oh, Voyage of the Rock Aliens (James Fargo and Bob Giraldi, 1984). 

Three pieces of evidence support my conclusion. The Cassandra Crossing appears in neither Michael J. Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983) (where such disaster movies d'estime as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and Rollercoaster sit proudly) nor his 1996 follow-up The Psychotronic Video Guide, thus weakening the film's trash profile. It enjoys a respectable but rather dispassionate 6.3/10 rating on IMDb. Most importantly, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, that indispensable arbiter of the status quo, gives it three stars (out of four) and dispatches it in one indifferent sentence: "Entertaining disaster epic as train carrying plague approaches a weakened bridge" (220-221). Of course, camp, trash, and its myriad cousins result from acts of reception - one queen's so-good-it's-bad is another's meh. But this post commemorates the fact that I need never revisit this film again to determine its psychotronic verities. 

Whew! One down, 150,000 more films to go before I sleep.

Grade: B (downgraded a notch to prevent further viewing) 

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2022)

Paul Schrader's cinema is nothing if not frustrating. For 3/4, even 15/16 of their running times, his films hypnotize. But then, often in the very last scene, he defaults to the most mechanical trope in mainstream movie history - the formation of the heterosexual couple. As with First Reformed (2017) and, to a lesser extent, The Card Counter (2021), all of which he wrote as well as directed, he sees nowhere else to go after his dénouements. You have to wrestle with this trope unless you're going to forsake even remotely mainstream cinema altogether. But you're free to rage when it's part of the unthinking mechanics of the film, especially given the age disparities between the older men in First Reformed and Master Gardener and their younger objects of desire. 

From the perspective of waiving this particular bee from my bonnet, it's of little use to differentiate the story of this film from any of Schrader's others. Besides, narrative is not my strong point and the imperative of rehashing synopses on what is essentially my film diary deflates me. So, you should absolutely check this out - terrific performances, palpable hothouse atmosphere, savvy pre-dénouement story construction that keeps you hooked, even a précis on getting in deeper touch with the earth (see pic below). But Paul, pretty please - go somewhere different with your preoccupations next time! Maybe work on not getting so preoccupied!

Grade: B+