Wonder Women

I finally caught up with Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman (2017) and found it much better than what I think most superhero movies tend to be. Full disclosure, I really don’t see superhero movies. The 3 Iron Man films, for various reason, were my fill up to now.

What’s most interesting about WW, and less discussed lately than a couple months ago, is how political a woman-centric superhero movie was. Not because it was particularly transgressive, except it automatically is by dint of its mere depiction of gender roles, let alone treatment of them. And even from my limited POV of a white male, there remains a strong sense of empowerment to have Gal Godot take up the (slightly adolescent) ass-kicking mantle peppered with an oh-so-serious alternate history, proto-Spongebob Nietzschean philosophy, fake retro fashion, geek trainspotting, and plenty of beefcake cameos.

This is the superhero film the women have been asking for. Or is it? Is it enough to switch the cast sheet, or as Carol Clover argues, maybe it doesn't even matter your sex if we all want is the protagonist to fight the evil they're facing, and get out at the end to star in the sequel.

There was a similar inkling during The Force Awakens (2015), when Princess Rey wields that light saber. I saw at least one post how ecstatic it was for women viewers to finally see a heroine positioned squarely in the center of the current popular culture myth.

This isn’t the place to analyze women in traditionally male roles, or even to discuss why there have to be such things in our entertainment. I wish we were past all this. I’m just noting that in geek culture lately, you got some cross-dressing that gets a lot more political attention and resonates beyond what it might actually deserve.

Don’t get me wrong. But I'm afraid Gal Godot in that short skirt sold as many tickets as the filmmakers' feminist creed.

Men have been getting this wrong for a long time. Angelina Jolie with hand guns and Gina Corano kicking guys in the balls appeal to 12-year-old impulses in male audiences. Not gonna convince your wife to come see those on a Saturday night.

James Cameron sticks a horse-cock in his heroine’s hands and he thinks he’s doing feminism. Even Kathryn Bigelow thinks that makes characterization. She's wrong, too.

 

A long time ago (in a galaxy far away), Aliens was playing at the movie theatre I worked at. Giant hit,  you’ve heard of it, and the dynamic of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) protecting the young Newt (Carrie Henn) from the bad ass mother alien was powerful emotional stuff. The big moment near the end that James Cameron engineers so well, Ripley appears in the mechanical Transformers-style skip-loader and snarls, “Get away from her, you bitch!”

A scream filled the theatre, the ultimate sense of female empowerment and maternal catharsis. And the scream was from the women. There was an emotional connection beyond a simple action-movie beat.

Hell, just look at the poster. I wasn’t sure Cameron knew exactly what he’d inadvertently stumbled onto there. (After True Lies, I was sure he didn't know.)

Now, with the huge positive financial responses to Rey and Diana, Hollywood have decided maybe they're onto something. And -- I now might be seeing more superhero films.

The Buffalo Roam

We miss Hunter S. Thompson more than ever recently. His journalistic viewpoint aside, his character is as large and as imposing as any on the political landscape, although it's generally considered he deteriorated into a sideshow (back into a sideshow?) after Nixon's fall from grace, which he took partial credit for.

Shout Factory has just released Art Linson's 1980's "Where The Buffalo Roam" on blu-ray,  previously MIA in its original form because of some troublesome music rights that couldn't get cleared until now.

It's Hollywood's first foray into codifying Thompson's unique brand of journalistic anarchy, a vein with a rich history in movies I've written about before. Newspaper writers are outsiders, colorful, generally "good guys" and tend to find themselves in the middle of the action. Without having to shoot anybody.

The film is loosely based on his article in Rolling Stone ("The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat" in 1977) about the disappearance of his friend/lawyer/partner in crime Oscar Acosta. You may know Acosta by Benicio Del Toro's depiction in Gilliam's Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. I think this article was about the time in which Hunter became unreadable to me. At this point he'd become Hunter-exclamation-point (trademark pending) and was more concerned with playing the brand cashing the checks than in adding to his written legacy. Nothing wrong with the Examiner columns. I just like his earlier funnier work. As it is, this first version of history is instructive and on its face much more transgressive than Gilliam's strangely conservative take, and is poking down at HST himself as the asshole he really is. Even though he was listed as a consultant.

It's the first directorial effort of Art Linson, who previously produced rock'n'roll stalwarts as Car Wash and American Hot Wax, and starred Bill Murray, still not sure what he wanted to do with his SNL fame (this just before Meatballs and Stripes). Later he'd figure out he wanted to be in Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch movies.

The film rides the supposed anti-establishment charm of HST and a weird Nixon nostalgia, produced forebodingly at the beginning of the Reagan era. It ends up, accidentally, as a paean to a mode of press coverage we didn't know we wouldn't see again.

And it's packaged as a buddy film. Murray gives a coked-up Snagglepuss performance that Johnny Depp would channel in Gilliam's Fear and Loathing, hanging, fighting and increasingly focused on the yin-yang of his relationship with Lazlo (the "Buffalo"). As in any good buddy film, Peter Boyle (as Lazlo) goes one way while Hunter tries to pull him in another. Lazlo veers increasingly out of his lane while Thompson, determined to bring down his man (Nixon), gets closer to the white-tiled corridors of power, with many antic stops along the way.

The Buffalo is the metaphor of chaos HST is either siding with or fighting. Lazlo's more radical than the radicals he's representing, while meanwhile, Thompson screams at phones, breaks statues, drinks with apparent ill effect, shoots guns, gives his press credentials to total strangers, slips drugs to straights. It's all slapstick background to his real goal, which is to get a story, or simply, to be in one more exciting than the one he's assigned to cover.

And Linson in 1980 pulls it all off with straight-faced incorrectness. Gilliam's version, 10 years later and behind the curve, seems too reverential to embrace Thompson's true thuggish nature, too anxious and guilty to let loose, even as it falls head first into the shiny neon of CGI hallucinations. If only Alex Cox had stayed on the project.

Linson is just happy he got Bill Murray. He should be. It's a velvet-smooth performance, a barrel-aged sing-song Venkman, deeply flawed with his insecurities completely under the waterline. He's a crooked top that seems to gain momentum with each careen off the bumpers of authority.

Spoiler alert. Near the end, HST finally comes face to face with Nixon on the campaign trail, at a urinal in a men's room. Apparently based on HST's single true-to-life encounter with Nixon, the most powerful man in the country and the clown reporter make small talk. Thompson, having appropriated the credentials of another reporter ("Harris from the Post") strips down while he talks. People in this world are either "screwheads" or doomed. Is this an existential identity crisis?

The scene both belittles and raises both men, and beat journalism and high-stakes politics, to the level of inscrutable metaphor and myth.

The film is busy and sloppy. Grunge-period Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix pepper the soundtrack. But the film is trying to get at something. The final scene has Thompson's wearing the disguise that got him the farthest, the suit and tie in his Harris persona (hair all slicked back), having gotten closer to the innermost bowels of power he ever has before. And that's in a goddamn men's room.

His triumph is ephemeral. Thompson ends up standing on a lone airstrip, pleading with his gonzo friend Lazlo, trying to talk sense. But the Buffalo is onto another journey, heading for a far-off jungle to fight another vague rebellion. This time he'll disappear for good, having (literally) lost the map, unable to convince Hunter.

Who would? Thompson's original article insisted Acosta was the crazy one. No one could control the buffalo. And he's left alone on a runway, the wind swirling his tie and fire extinguisher foam spattered on his ill-gotten suit.

The movie suggests he goes on fighting the good fight. But reading it differently (and now we know Thompson drank himself into obsolescence, and in an era where journalism is now more embattled than busman's folly), Thompson had been co-opted by that 3-piece suit. It's as if he's realized, "I'm crazy, but not that crazy." He's been tamed, trapped by his appetite to get inside -- and his own inability to break the rules that really matter. The ones that really meant something.

Thompson's childhood pranks are just that: adolescent, sexless and ultimately inconsequential.

The film, loose-limbed and compelling as it is, both holds up Thompson as a figure of anarchic fun and damns him as someone who didn't have the conviction to, maybe, be crazy enough. Don't worry, it's all an act.

The film didn't do well when it was released. No one knew what to make of it, or Murray. And Hunter Thompson was no popular Woodstein hero figure. A cinematic footnote because of some Motown tracks (and possibly Murray's singing a couple bars of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"), now resurfaces 35 years later, a completely different kind of history lesson.

Linson directed one other film, The Wild Life, Cameron Crowe's follow-up to Ridgemont High, and would produce The Untouchables, Dick Tracy and Fight Club among a respectable array of films. Hunter S. Thompson stopped his own presses in 2005. Bill Murray reportedly bad-mouthed the film, even though it may be his best sustained performance.

As a comedy, it's a bit of a failure. It's one of those films that only get really funny the third time you see it like Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's really a drama, with funny people in it. Now it has the unexpected subtext of showing the downside of being a counter-cultural icon, before anyone involved quite knew what kind of prison that could end up being.

No wonder Thompson didn't like it. He saw his own future, and it wasn't playing himself.

Fellini In Order

I haven't been able to find anything worth watching on Netflix lately. All old shows and flashy fake sitcoms.

Amazon Prime's selection, beyond the darts at a more meaningful new internet TV, is a disaster. They even took off Take This Job And Shove It last year.

So for the last month or so I've been watching old stuff again, like I've been promising myself for years. My own personal film festival.

I always told myself I should really revisit was Fellini's oeuvre; I'd seen maybe half of them over the years, out of order of course and mostly the classic middle period. Some of the early neo-realist ones eluded me and most of the tired later films never made it to my attention.

He directed a couple dozen films along with a handful of shorts; not insurmountable to get through the entire list. Most all are easily available at the local video store -- if you have one. The local video store without a Fellini section isn't in business anymore anyway. And if you have to, there are streaming options.

To follow an artist with such a signature personality and outlook as Federico is to newly understand his development as if it were preordained. His work breaks down into 3 distinct phases. The neo-realist/rural vs. urban cautionary tales, going from Variety Lights (1951) to La Dolce Vita (1960), is the first, where his characters are invariably diminished in social stature while aiming at something much larger and likely impossible to attain, whether it be fame, understanding of a spouse, to simple grace. La Strada (1954) is the closest to a parable outlining his concept, highlighting what people do what they do, even if they don't know they're doing it.

This is the meat and the heart of Fellini's stature, the awards and the international recognition. The second phase begins under what must have been the growing fame and an existential crisis first hinted at in La Dolce Vita. In his first entry post that glorious signature bummer, "The Temptation of Dr. Antonio" in the portmanteau film Boccaccio '70 (1962) he's magically developed (perhaps helped by access to more money) the baroque camera moves and surreal design sense that not only defies narrative but, somehow, will soon become it. Nothing can be taken literally anymore.

The fragmented and fanciful episodes of 8 1/2 (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965), incomplete searches for identity and meaning, are better served embodied in his larger historical epics. The hippie Fellini Satyricon (1969) and Fellini's Casanova (1976) (both using the possessive in the title, not an accident) are parables and have little to do with history as much as Fellini's own personal artistic crises. The title "Fellini Satyricon" places the creator on equal footing as the source work, while "Fellini's Casanova" reasserts the fact that both these sources, actually age-old classics, were more known by their authors ("Have your read your Petronius today?") until being appropriated and re-authored by a new maestro.

A film near the end of this cycle, Fellini's Roma (1972) (that possessive again), highlights the friction he's exploring with narrative from the other side of history. He's taking on the documentary form full-face, and, starting with the film-maker as character in 8 1/2 through A Director's Notebook (1969), a behind-the-scenes film for television, Fellini has moved off graceless savages and is increasingly interested in how film itself constructs the story. Even a story presumably "autobiographical" and true.

Since La Dolce Vita with a journalist at its heart, to 8 1/2 which treats film-making as existential burden, to his short in 1968's Spirits of the Dead, about a decadent actor who sells his soul to get out of the business (and of life), Fellini investigates how film tells lies about itself. "I'm a born liar." Roma is Satyricon's good twin, not really about Rome, and not really a documentary. It's self-consciously staged, and includes a character called Federico Fellini who's the director of the film you're watching, played by Fellini himself.

How meta can you get? The process doesn't seem to matter anymore. Casanova is arguably the most lush, decadent, personally depressed treatment to assert that the "artiste" is no longer happy when he does it too long. Whatever you may define "it" to be.

This middle period is soaked with self-disdain, a surprising lack of fun (in spite of the color of Juliet and 8 1/2's circle-of-life finish, which seems forced and half-hearted, I'm now reminded, ending on a minor key with that out-of-tune rag-tag band as light fades).

Was it the money? The girls? The drink? Film-making used to be so much more fun when people (and the producers) weren't paying so much attention.

The last period goes from Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) to the final The Voice of the Moon (1990). The budgets are shrinking, the triumph of Amarcord (1973) had been waterlogged by the failure of Casanova, and his themes seem less relevant, playing in minor keys with limited aspirations. Had Fellini taken the criticism of extravagance and arrogance to heart? Amarcord certainly seems a mature and measured melting of what we liked before, the perfect marriage of La Dolce Vita and Roma without the crazy bits, his nostalgic Limelight.

But -- Chaplin didn't stop making movies after that either. City of Women (1980) reads as a weak-wristed swipe at feminism by a provincial misogynist who's not sure he wants to change his ways, and his takes on television, both Orchestra and Ginger and Fred (1986), are grumpy and begrudging, considering it was TV money that got them funded in the first place.

The familiar playfulness with the documentary format reaches its naked apogee with Intervista (1987) which adds Fellini's nostalgia about being "Fellini" with poster-topping cameos of Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, awkwardly wishing they were younger, in a film that makes you wish they were, too.

I found it astounding how many of Fellini's themes persist through his 40-year career, many present from the start. The mode of attack and resources at his disposal changed dramatically after La Dolce Vita's success, and then again 10 years later with Casanova's failure. Yet you can watch a film from the mid '50s and see its echo in the '80s. He continually shows a curiosity about people, a gentle hand against questionable behavior, a willingness to explore how art can reveal the heart of the most ugly character.

In all of them, Fellini "hates the sin but loves the sinner." And not one of these felt a chore to sit through. Okay, maybe The Clowns (1970). That one was tough. I don't get the clown thing he's trying for.

And, it's a misconception Fellini was obsessed with clowns. This isn't something we see through his entire career. Sure, there's a thin layer of grotesquerie, really a showman's distraction, and side characters with too much make-up and funny hair inserted for effect, and certainly all with an underlying threat of artistic anarchy.

Maybe that was his point. Maybe I took it too literally. Maybe I should watch again.