Five At A Time #3: A Toilet Seat That Smokes A Cigar (Forever That Is What You Are)
#11 Fire and Ice
Cleverly, in an instance of what one of those gaming Youtubers might refer to as “themeing,” the story is childishly simple, and the basically-nude princess is almost constantly on screen, and what that means is that you can basically just start masturbating whenever you feel like it and not lose track of what’s going on. One of the character designers did us the favor of making the racist subtext of fantasy orc-vs-human warfare into regular text by just straight up giving one of the neanderthal monster people a Caesar haircut. Thomas Kinkade drew some of the backgrounds. What I’m trying to say is that there’s nothing good about this movie. It’s not like you need more things to masturbate to, you nasty fuck.
#12 Ghost in the Shell
The racism stuff is definitely here, it definitely has ScarJo trying to pronounce her own character’s name “Makoto” and having it come out as the most dismally pathetic noise to ever leave a human mouth, but these things are actually only the 72nd or 73rd worst problems with Ghost in the Shell. Modern Hollywood blockbusters are horrible in a way I’m totally incapable of wrapping my head around. They have enough of a budget, and exist at a time in history where their primary audience’s attention span is decimated to such a degree, that they have no excuse to be anything except some dope shit happening for 95 minutes, but they are never, ever anything like that at all. Example: Ghost in the Shell has a scene where the Major is having an invisible karate fight in the middle of a man made river. There’s no reason for this movie to have any less than 15 or 20 scenes like that, but instead most of it is about a big robot baby woman looking for her estranged robot papa or whatever and her dipshit compadres philosophizing about how it’s good to be unique. Neat.
Even the things that are sort of interestingly bad about it — like how there’s never a moment when Takeshi Kitano and Juliette Binoche don’t look visibly, suicidally bored with their own performances — are strangled under the density of its homogeneity, its defiance towards having even one memorable or interesting element as a story. If you’ve seen any of the Captain America movies then you know what I’m talking about, this compulsion our films seem carry now to cut out their own tongues whenever they start to speak. There was a moment when Robonzo Douglas The Dark started his “we’re not so different, you and I” speech and I realized the film was trying to be some weird cliff notes version of the original Star Wars trilogy, that maybe Vader’s speech to Luke at the climax of the battle of Cloud City was the worst thing to ever happen to popular film because it doesn’t seem like screenwriters have been interested in portraying familial relations between protagonist and antagonist in a different way ever since.
American cinema is obviously, glaringly much worse than it’s been in generations but you see something like Ghost in the Shell and realize the problem might run even deeper than one would assume, that this is an infection that may not be cured since perhaps it’s been our great works that have been spreading the virus all along.
#13 Burn After Reading
On first viewing Burn After Reading struck me as a top 10 Coen Bros. movie, and upon repeat viewing I find it safe to bump the film into the top 5. Was the world so different 10 years ago that we could have found this movie too coarse or too cruel, too far beyond the realm of possibility? Maybe; the pain of satire is that it can’t be judged a success or failure until its predictive qualities are shown either to falter or come true. Burn After Reading came true. I have a theory that the title refers both to the instruction as to disposing of classified information as well as something that literally happens to everyone after reading the files, i.e. they all go to or else realize that they are in Hell. I think having Clooney and Pitt play second-rate pretender scumbag versions of themselves was a stroke of genius and I think John Malkovich gives one of the best comedic performances in the history of the screen. I think if you haven’t seen this movie in a while you should watch it again now that we’re living in its world of evil absurdities and endless, preemptive gallows wisecracks.
#14 Devil’s Express
I wrote a lot more about this one over here. Truly aspirational grindhouse.
#15 Light Sleeper
I’ve been having a bizarrely difficult time finding something of substance to say about Light Sleeper, and I think that’s because (as you may have noticed) I don’t really like talking about the plot of a movie when I’m assessing it because that’s frequently the element least open to instructive observation. For all its character drama and meditation on loneliness Light Sleeper is mainly plot; it’s not about very much except for what occurs on screen. This isn’t to say it’s shallow, just that it’s very specific unto itself.
So…hmm. Paul Schrader. He made a movie very close to this one a decade prior to it called American Gigolo. In fact, to borrow video game terminology, you could almost call Light Sleeper a pallette swap of American Gigolo, as it follows a close-to-identical trajectory and only trades its surface visual aesthetics in order to differentiate itself: grey Manhattan instead of neon Los Angeles, stony-faced Willem DeFoe instead of stony-faced Richard Gere, sad rich drug dealer instead of sad rich escort. American Gigolo is the better film, without question; it’s more visually enriched, the relationships are easier to connect to, the soundtrack isn’t the singer-songwriter/jazz-funk nightmare jamboree that Light Sleeper inexplicably decided to utilize.
But they’re both worth watching in the sense that it’s sometimes worthwhile to listen to the same piece interpreted by different composers. Light Sleeper is maybe easier, quieter and more sentimental, but that might coincide better with a particular mindframe at the right time than American Gigolo would. It’s a very demure film, in a lot of ways. It’s hard to discuss but not hard to think about, and while it’s not flawless that alone gives the movie a lot of value.
