Velvet Buzzsaw

Art critics can be bitchy.  The year Andy Warhol died, Barbara Rose began a review:  "Andy Warhol has sunk back into the commercial ooze from which he emerged."  Dan McCoy's horror satire, Velvet Buzzsaw (Netflix 2019), chronicles the richly deserved comeuppance of a fickle, bitchy art critic, a man whose capricious reign of terror is, paradoxically, ended by his encounter with something like true art.  The film has a primitive ("unhip" one might say) allegorical premise:  the protagonist and his corrupt cohort regard art as a commodity, an investment for the ultra-rich, but real art insists on authenticity and takes a grisly revenge on the characters.  Curiously, the glittering, decadent surface of Velvet Buzzsaw conceals a moral.  McCoy, whose previous film featured Jake Gyllenhal as a vicious, tabloid reporter (the movie was Nightcrawler) has a didactic purpose -- he wants to impress a moral point on his viewers.  True art raises the stakes -- it makes demands on us:  great art doesn't fail us, we fail it.  Unfortunately, McCoy's narrative in Velvet Buzzsaw isn't exactly up to the demands that he places on it -- the film disperses its energy in lots of subplots that don't cohere into any meaning and the movie's horror film aspects are more than a little cheesy.  Nonetheless, the movie makes some interesting points, has very funny caricatures of art world luminaries, and affords an interesting peek into a world of privilege and decadence that most of us can imagine only imperfectly.

 Velvet Buzzsaw involves three competing galleries.  We meet their owners in Miami at the Art Basel exhibition.  Striding through the show like an emperor is Morf (Gyllenhal), a witty, fearsome, bisexual art critic.  Morf's reviews can make or break artists and he's completely corrupt -- he inflates reputations for his own benefit or at the urging of the art galleries; he is willing to destroy an artist merely because his girlfriend of the moment, Josephina, wants an ex-lover humiliated.  Although he has a good eye, the merits of the work are less important to him than the power that his internet-posted reviews brings.  The three galleries involved in the film compete with all sorts of blandishments for artists that they deem "bankable" -- they are disloyal and as corrupt as Morf, mistreating their staff as wholly disposable; one of the movie's jokes is that the mousy receptionist who keeps finding mangled corpses in the galleries bounces back and forth between the three enterprises --  the bosses abuse her and she keeps getting fired.  Morf's main task, performed in cahoots with the galleries, is to extract from the public eye valuable works of art so that they can be locked-up by wealthy investors.  People have storage units full of art -- Morf keeps a Twombly in his unit -- and to avoid a glut of valuable art deflating market prices, the characters are willing to hide works, secrete them away, and keep them from public exposure:  it's all about supply and demand.  (Public institutions, here LACMA in Los Angeles, collude in this process -- inflating and deflating art prices by what they agree to exhibit.) This bluntly satirical portrait of the art world gives rise to several subplots:  an older alcoholic artist (John Malkovich) has lost his edge when he stopped drinking -- in one scene, an eager-beaver gallery owner tours the artist's big factory where prints of his earlier works are being manufactured only to find that during the past year the old painter has only produced a single canvas, and an unsuccessful one at that (it looks like two ten foot colored tadpoles on white canvas) -- instead, he spends his time in his huge empty studio shooting baskets.  Morf leaves his boyfriend for Josephina, an employee of Rhodora (Rene Russo), the owner of the biggest and most powerful, gallery, Haze.  Josephina, who uses sex for power, betrays Morf for an up-and-coming graffiti artist.  The characters conspire to place a room-size silver sphere in the LA museum -- it's a little like a Henry Moore version of the big globular mirror in the park next to Chicago Art Institute.  Another artist has built a mechanized hobo, a homeless man who is wired to begin conversations:  "Once I had a train..." a reference for those in the know to the one of the early gold-diggers musicals in which a hobo says:  "Once I had train...made it run on time...buddy can you spare a dime" -- this is part of the famous "Forgotten Man" musical number that ends the show.  (This element of Velvet Buzzsaw is indicative of what makes the film alluring, although in a shallow way -- it's got a lot of inside information that only the cognoscenti will appreciate:  I assume that the characters in the movie all refer to real gallery owners ("Haze" for "Pace" for instance) and that the more you know about the art world, the more titillating the film.

Destructive to this corrupt milieu is the influence of real art.  An old man, Vetral Dease (everyone in this movie has picturesque Thomas Pynchon-esque names) drops dead.  He turns out to have left an apartment full of spectacular paintings -- most of them menacing and sinister images of small children playing with fire or fighting one another.  Dease has left instructions that this art work, some of it painted in actual blood, be destroyed on his death.  But Josephina who enters the man's apartment recognizes that it is a gold mine -- the painting is so fascinating and its back-story so horrific (torture and child abuse) that the works will be immensely valuable.  So she empties the apartment, hides the paintings, and sketches, and, then, is forced into an alliance with the vicious Rhodora to put these works on the market.  (Dease is modeled on Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor, whose apartment was discovered to be filled to overflowing with strange manuscripts and thousands of paintings and collages -- Darger seems to have been obsessed with little girls and there is a suspicion, unfounded, I think, that he even murdered a little girl.  He was an orphan, state-raised, and had been horribly treated as a child himself.  But he had a drive to make art that is astonishing in its sheer nightmarish power -- one of his works is a 15,000 page novel about a planet on which child slavery is endemic and the violent revolt of the child slaves.  Darger's work is too disturbing for a relatively slight film like the Velvet Buzzsaw and the canvases featured in the movie look like a baffling blend of paintings by the British artists Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon.)  The problem is that Dease's painting have occult powers.  And they can activate other art works to take revenge on human beings as well.  One by one the principal characters are slaughtered by the art that they have (to use George Bush's term) "misunderestimated."  Authentic art has power -- it can change lives -- and this is what the venal characters in the film have forgotten.  Dease's terrifying pictures fascinate and hypnotize people -- and they bring to life other art works, inspiring them to kill their owners.  This horror aspect to the film is creepy, but not really scary and the deaths are elaborate, gory, and supposed to be funny.  And, in fact, it's fun to see the monstrous folk in the movie harried to death by their own art.  McCoy's point is that authentic art poses real risks -- art isn't merely decorative:  it can establish criteria by which we lead our lives:  There is an element of ecstasy and doom in great art.  Dease's paintings are memento mori that have the literal ability to inflict death on those who behold them.

There's a famous story about Andy Warhol.  The famous art critic and curator, Henry Geldzahler, looked at a painting by the artist and said:  "You've left the art out."  Warhol replied:  "I knew I forgot something."  The people in Velvet Buzzsaw have forgotten what art is supposed to be about.  And, so, this is a lesson that they have to re-learn. 

Alita Battle-Angel

A friend of mine is a connoisseur of "come from behind" fight scenes.  These are scenes in which a character is assaulted, almost beaten to death, but, then, rallies to defeat his enemy.  The granddaddy and progenitor of this kind of fight scene occurs in Shane when the ranchers almost kill Van Helfin's sodbuster before Alan Ladd intervenes wielding an axe-handle.  The best sequence of this sort in modern memory is the bloody fight between the prostitute Alabama and a hulking hoodlum played by James Gandolfini in the 1993 film True Romance.  Both of these sequences shrink into insignificance when compared with a "come from behind" fight that occurs midway through Robert Rodriguez' sci-fi film Alita Battle-Angel (2019).  Alita is a cyborg, a warrior robot, with "core operated by an anti-matter reactor strong enough to power a whole city with a million inhabitants."  At the time of the fight, Alita has huge eyes, a waif's features, and the body of pre-pubescent 13-year old girl.  Menaced by an enormous, forty-foot high battle robot, Alita takes a punch delivered by the machine's metallic, spear-pointed tentacles -- the punch smashes her robot body into about six parts:  she loses both legs, one arm, a most of her torso.  (Unlike humans hit by explosive as described in Hemingway's memorable story "A Natural History of the  Dead", robots always break along natural lines of cleavage -- that is, they come apart at the joints.)  Poor Alita is reduced to a head attached to a fragment of a torso with one operable arm.  But she is undeterred and valiantly keeps fighting, much like the unfortunate knight in the Monty Python movie -- she balances on her one good arm, uses it as a spring to shoot her high in the air, reverses direction and drops on the head of the killer robot where she proceeds to bury her fist deep in his eye, disabling the enemy.  Surely, this is the greatest "come from behind" victory in the history of cinema.

Alita Battle-Angel is derived from a Japanese battle-bot manga.  The script, which is idiotic, is said to be by James Cameron.  (Giant battling robots have been good to James Cameron.  Wikipedia reminds us that he's worth 700 million despite four divorces and made his fortune on 1984's Terminator and, then, Aliens in 1986 in which Ripley operates a towering battle robot to defeat the house-high mama monster who is defending her eggs -- "Leave her alone, Bitch!" Ripley cries out as the monster threatens a little girl, thus precipitating the Mother of all Robot versus Monster battles.)  Alita is creepy in a lot a ways and awful.  There are wonderful special effects and lots of violent, effectively directed, action but the movie is sub-literate -- it would be best shown with no dialogue and just a thunderous soundtrack of punk rock'n roll.  Christoph Waltz plays Dr. Ido, a gentle pacifist robot repairman who moonlights as a cyborg-killing vigilante at night.  (Waltz seems completely baffled by the movie, most of which presumably involved him emoting to a Green Screen -- he stands around with a dazed look on his face and seems almost inert).  Ido finds fragments of a pre-adolescent girl robot in the garbage dump -- above the city of the future, which seems modeled on the Mexico City of today, there is a vast floating metropolis called Zalem that drizzles garbage from an anal proboscis down onto the place where the characters live.  It's not certain who, if anyone lives in Zalem -- but no one is allowed to go there.  Ido reassembles the girl robot using a pre-pubescent cyborg body -- it seems his own daughter of the same age was slaughtered for some obscure reason and Ido is trying to bring the girl, or, at least, her memory back to life.  (Ido's ex-wife, who has a Hindu dot in the middle of her forehead is lounging around in black lingerie with Vector, a super-villain played by Mahershala Ali.  (Ali is the star of HBO's True Detective  this season-- in that show, he plays a cop so traumatized that he mumbles constantly in a voice so deep that you would need a seismograph to pick up what he is saying.  I'm only able to understand about one-third of his mumbled dialogue in the HBO show, most of which consists of the most dire, pessimistic declarations possible.  In this film, Ali is brash, well-spoken and you can understand everything he says -- he even seems a little cheerful in his villainy.  Accordingly, all of the dismal muttering and moaning in True Detective is apparently due to the way that show is plotted and written.)   Little Alita, who can eat like a human (query: where does the food go once it slides down her robot throat) falls in love with a local hoodlum -- this is notwithstanding the fact that her sleek robot body is as sexless as the plastic torso of a Barbie doll.  She joins her Geppetto, her Dad the kindly robot repairman and vigilante, on his midnight excursions to kick the metal asses of various murderous robots.  As previously noted, in her great "come from behind" fight, she gets completely discombobulated, disassembled totally, and, then, has her fractured body replaced by a special battle-robot rig that is far more curvaceous, has bigger breasts and a more slender waist, and that is so preternaturally powerful that she can win every fight with everyone hands down.  (Once Alita gets her rockin' super body, all suspense leaches out of the movie -- since we know she can defeat any enemy whatsoever, there's really no point to watch the last third of the film in which she flies around ripping enemy robots to shreds.)  It turns out that there's some super-scientist still living in Zalem and that he has some kind of interest in Alita.  Alita signs up for a sort of murder-version of the Roller Derby, the same game played in the old 1975 James Caan movie, Rollerball, and, of course, immediately eliminates all rivals because of her super-warrior titanium alloy, self-healing, self-regenerating body powered by her anti-matter reactor heart.  Her boyfriend, then, ascends toward the hovering city of Zalem, climbing a big garbage vent that looks like an elephant's tusk made of grey metal.  Nova, the super scientist, floating overhead wears weird goggles over his eyes.  There's a big reveal -- he yanks off his goggles and, what to our wondering eyes should appear, but the fact that Nova is none other than Ed Norton.  This reveal -- the fact that Nova who looks a little like Elton John during his glory days is actually Ed Norton is (for some inscrutable reason) the climax of the film.  The movie is stupid beyond belief, has sinister sexual overtones (what does the no-genitals Alita do with her boyfriends -- some kind of robot oral sex?), and has very good special effects and impressive action scenes.  I guess it rates 59% positive on Rotten Tomatoes and just edged out the Lego movie for top box-office gross this last week -- I saw the movie with two heads who seemed stoned out of their mind, Jack, and someone far in the back of the theater who shuffled back and forth a couple times, sniffling softly, but otherwise was silent. 

The Aztec Mummy versus the Humanoid Robot

Dilation of time is an experience that everyone who has smoked weed understands.  The way it works is that the cannabis-affected mind spawns ideas prolifically and at lightning speed.  Since the speed of thought so dramatically exceeds the speed of events in the real world, the dope-smoker, periodically checking in to see what condition his condition is in, will find that nothing much has changed in the exterior world.  Notwithstanding a staggering volume of thoughts, cogitation that would usually require several minutes or an hour, the dope-smoker reverting from reverie to the real space and time around him finds that no physical progress has been made -- he has advanced only a few dozen paces along the sidewalk or driven less than a block.  Thus, there is a dislocation between interior cognitive time and time as measured in the progress of events.  This effect can be produced by certain works of art -- the 1958 Mexican film, The Aztec Mummy v. the Humanoid Robot is so bad in such a peculiar way that it generates this sort of disconnect between reverie and the ostensibly real space in which reverie occurs.  All sorts of things are crammed into the film, but individual sequences seem to linger as if in a haze of marijuana smoke -- the plot advances somehow lurching forward like the titular mummy, but individual sequences stall out, entrapped in a labyrinth of repetitive shadowy imagery. 

Mummy v. Robot ranks close to Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, the greatest and most mind-boggling of all bad movies.  (Plan 9 represents the absolute maximum ambition applied to an absolute minimum of film technique and an absolute minimum of budget.)  In Mummy v. Robot, Almada, a mad scientist, is fooling around with "past life regression".  He hypnotizes his voluptuous assistant Flora into dreaming a past life in which she was a Aztec princess in love with an Aztec warrior.  The two are consecrated to the god Tetzlipoca.  But they run off to consummate their love with the obligatory consequence that she is sacrificed and the warrior gets buried alive.  (These plot elements are familiar from the various versions of The Mummy produced in Hollywood.)  Flora hallucinates a map to a secret chamber in "the old pyramid at Teotihuacan" in which the warrior's priceless breastplate and helmet are hidden.  When Almada goes to get the breastplate and helmet, traipsing around in dark tunnels with his whole entourage (including the comely Flor), the mummy warrior is aroused and he menaces everyone.  I forgot to report that Almada had earlier presented a paper about past life regression to a scientific society where he was disdained by his arch-enemy Professor Krupp aka the master criminal "The Bat".  (The Bat is like a masked luchadora.)  The Bat lurks around and gets into a fight with the mummy -- the mummy flings one of the Bat's henchmen ("Tender") into acid disfiguring him; he then pitches the Bat into his own "chamber of death", a euphemism for a snake pit.  The Bat is repeatedly savaged by his own vipers but escapes into a conveniently located tunnel opening right next to the rather torpid-looking serpents.  The Bat returns and uses mind-control to lure Flor out of bed and into an "old cemetery" guarded a hapless peasant who gets popped on the skull and knocked unconscious.  The Aztec mummy is taking his repose in a mausoleum built by "the last Aztec prince of Oaxaca".  The Bat goes into the mausoleum, finds the sleeping mummy, and, in a very weird scene among other weird scene, does nothing but denounce the mummy -- he doesn't want to rouse the corpse by trying to wrest the breast-plate away from him so instead he just rants at the sleeping zombie.  Instead, the Bat invents a humanoid robot -- made from a corpse, a human brain, and radium.  The Bat sends the Humanoid Robot to steal the mummy's precious breastplate and a spectacular fight ensues.  Almada appears, shoots the joy-stick robot controller out of the Bat's hand, and the mummy destroys the robot, takes his breastplate back and, after killing the Bat and Tender, returns to his crypt bed. 

This is a lot of action crammed into a 65 minute movie but the film gives the odd impression of being slow-moving and languorous.  Near the beginning of the movie, someone knocks on a door.  The camera is located at the far end of a big set that seems to be about 45 feet deep -- the set represents a lavish sitting room in Almada's mansion.  A maid enters and walks the entire length of the room to open the door.  Then, when Almada enters the shot, the same fixed image also shows him walk all the way across the set to greet his visitors.   (The people who edited the film seem to have no idea that this inconsequential shot could have been broken into one or two short images to convey the same information.)  The story is told as a series of flashbacks and the eponymous "Humanoid Robot" doesn't appear until the last fifteen minutes.  This mise-en-scene is bizarre and, even, mildly delirous -- in fact, I'm disappointed to observe that the movie's bizarre structure is due to the fact that it is the culminating picture in a trilogy and that the director has simply reprised the first two films by cutting them into the third picture as flashbacks  -- at least, two-thirds of the movie, accordingly, is made from re-edited imagery already seen by viewers of the earlier pictures.  This also explains the peculiar lacunae in the film -- in one scene, the beautiful Flor is sprawled in the clutches of the mummy; we have no idea how she got there although the narrator who is recounting the flashback says the mummy kidnaped her from her bed.  Long sequences are devoted to images of people slowly stumbling forward in dark tunnels.  Again, the editors of the film simply show the people crossing the image, then, cutting to a different angle to let them cross that image again and so on.  When four or five people climb over a dark threshold, the camera simply waits for every one of them to complete the action.  Characters often stumble and fall over obstacles and things are always dropping off the sides of the flimsy-looking sets -- these appear to be mishaps that have not been edited out of the picture.  When the mummy first appears, we hear an ominous scraping.  The principal characters are each afforded a four or five second shot but from behind -- do they or do they not hear the scraping?  We, then, see a dark alcove and a shadow moving -- it's the source of the scraping.  The Rueckenfigure shots of the characters nearby, hearing, but not reacting are repeated -- this is a sequence of five shots, showing each character poised, listening, but not turning to the camera.  This pattern of shots is repeated a third time before the Mummy makes his appearance.  (The principle seems to be that if you have a good idea repeat it over and over again until it ceases to be a good idea.)  When the Humanoid Robot is activated, we are provided a bargain basement montage derived from the old Universal Frankenstein films:  weird equipment sparking sparks, levers, bubbling flasks, etc.  The Bat gives a spectacular harangue that is oddly impressive if you don't know Spanish.  The effects would embarrass a High School drama club:  the Humanoid robot is made of cardboard tubes and boxes and the disfigured Tender looks as if he had a bad encounter with a waffle-iron.  The Mummy is pretty ugly, but obviously just a man wearing a loose-fitting fright mask.  All pre-Columbian cultures are described as Aztec although the film involves a Oaxacan nobleman's tomb, the pyramid at Teotihuacan, and opens with a montage of Monte Alban -- none of which could be called Aztec.  I suppose that one could interpret the final battle as a fight to the death between the forces of modern Capitalist industry ("the Humanoid Robot") and Mexico's ancient past ("the Mummy") but that would be gratuitous.  It's best to ignore the details and just luxuriate in the film's torrent of unrelenting weirdness.

Sally4ever (Julia Davis) and Russian Doll (Natasha Lyonne)

Sally4ever and Russian Doll are cable series that both feature an alarming and charismatic heroine.  The shows are both derivative in many respects, although, certainly, not predictable -- each veer off-track in an interesting way.  Both shows rise or fall according to the viewer's perception of the central female character.  In each case, the shows are produced by the woman who stars in the series.

Sally4ever (HBO) is a production of Julia Davis.  Davis is a British actress known for her previous series, Camping -- that program was adapted by Lena Dunham into an HBO series with some success.  The first episode of Sally4ever was compelling but so sadistically mean-spirited and nasty that I didn't take any pleasure in watching Davis torment her characters.  The premise of the show is that Sally, a drone in an advertising firm, has endured an unsatisfying relationship with her simpering boyfriend for a number of years.  Just as Sally's dissatisfaction with her boyfriend reaches its climax, he proposes to her and, of course, she accepts.  The same night, Sally meets Emma in a bar -- Emma is beautiful and seems to be a free-spirit. Sally and Emma have sex and Sally is smitten.  She abandons her pathetic fiancée and the two women decide to live together.  Emma proposes marriage to Sally and, in fact, plans to have her inseminated so that the couple can have a baby.  There is only one problem:  Emma is completely insane, violent, and promiscuous.  We learn this at the end of the first or second episode when Sally unintentionally does something that annoys her lover, Emma kicks her very hard in the shins.  The male characters in the show are uniformly loathsome -- a "horn-dog" inveterate sexual harasser in Sally's workplace ends up getting drunk at an office party with an old man and, after all the women reject them, the two men sit in their befouled hotel room in their vomit-stained underpants morosely masturbating together.  This is characteristic for the film's characters -- they are all vicious, backbiting, narcissistic, cruel, and cowardly.  One woman uses a wheelchair to seduce her victims -- when a fire burns at the hotel where she is staying, she abandons the wheelchair and her phony disability, fleeing on foot.  Sally's boss turns out to be a lesbian rapist and attacks Sally -- fortunately for Sally, she is deterred by diarrhea and projectile vomiting.  In the third or fourth episode, the show veers into surrealistic obscenity -- the program contains several scenes that are far filthier than anything that I have seen in mainstream pornography.  The effect is more emetic than titillating and, indeed, the last episode, wholly "over the top", is devoted almost entirely to aggressively detailed "poo" humor.  Apparently, this sort of thing is popular -- the show was praised by both critics and audiences.  I thought it was too wretchedly cruel and unrealistically critical of its characters (none of them seem to have any redeeming value at all;Sally, the heroine, is what the Brits would call a "dumb cow") to be watchable.  And, yet, notwithstanding these criticisms, I faithfully watched all episodes of the show, transfixed with a gruesome fascination -- just how putrid and rotten are things going to get.  Well, they get very rotten and putrid indeed.  At the risk of seeming prudish, I should be clear:  Sally4ever is well-made, the characters, although grotesque caricatures, are interesting, and the sexual perversion, pervasive to the show, is explicit -- there's no beating around the bush.  I can't recommend the program because it is fundamentally dispiriting and dehumanizing -- it's worse than most porn in which, at least, the participants are pretending to have a  good time. 

It is tempting to overthink Russian Doll (Netflix).  The show involves a 36-year old woman, a denizen of New York's Soho or Tribeca or East Village scene, who is trapped in some kind of time loop.  The premise is a macabre variant on the old Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day.  At a party in a spectacular apartment (it's a Gothic-looking space in an old Yeshiva), the heroine, Nadia, leaves, much to the distress of her Gay hostess.  (It's Nadia's birthday party.)  On the street, searching for her cat Oatmeal, she gets hit by a cab and killed.  Suddenly, she's alive again at the party, always in the same peculiar bathroom -- it has a gothic pointed door with a gun as its handle and a strange crystal nebula of light on the door panel.  She tries to leave the party again, falls down the steps, and is killed.  All told, she dies about six times in the first episode, always reviving in the toilet at her birthday party -- sometimes, she drowns or gets hurled under oncoming subway trains or is crushed by falling objects.  (Of course, she keeps encountering the same people -- an ex-boyfriend, her one-night stand from the party, a homeless man in the park.  In one touching scene, she tries to help the homeless man, who cuts her lavish, frizzy hair, and, then, freezes to death with him sleeping on the street.)  Each death yields resurrection in the toilet at the party where she encounters various guests and tries to make corrections in the scene in an attempt to avoid her demise -- none of the resurrections is exactly the same as the preceding one and, gradually, the heroine discovers that she can exercise some agency, she can make some changes, although, it seems, impossible for her to avoid death and an immediate revival at the birthday party.  At the end of the third episode, Nadia encounters another man in an elevator torn free from its tether and falling down the shaft -- the man, a handsome athletic black dude, is strangely unafraid and he tells Nadia that he has also died many times.  Together, Nadia and the good-lucking Black man try to solve the mystery of the time loop in which they are trapped -- what have they done to deserve this?  The show proposes various hypotheses -- Nadia is a computer programmer and we see first-person shooters in which the characters die and, then, revive to continue their quest.  Is she trapped in computer program or is this some sort of punishment, a purgatory, for her sins?  Some things change as the cycle of deaths and resurrections continue:  fruit rots (or seems to rot -- it's interior remains fresh), flowers decay, characters begin to vanish until the party and the streets are eerily empty, and the principal characters begin to physically disintegrate:  they start bleeding and hemorrhaging.  None of this is satisfactorily explained and the ending to the first 8 episodes, although cautiously uplifting, is enigmatic.  (Spoilers now follow:  skip the rest of this paragraph and go to the next if you don't like spoilers.)  The last episode is called "Ariadne" and this suggests a labyrinth in which there may be a minotaur.  The minotaur actually appears as "Horse", the homeless man -- some explicators say that "Horse" dons a "deer's head" at the end :  this is wrong -- it's a bull's head and the bull-man hybrid, of course, is the minotaur in the center of the maze.  Nietzsche called Cosima Wagner "Ariadne" in his last insane letters to her and, of course, his "deepest" idea was the concept of "the eternal return of the same".  Something like "the eternal return of the same" -- that is, willing one's life to repeat even with all of its pain and tragedy and, in fact, willing it to repeat exactly and in all details was a concept crucial to Nietzsche's metaphysics and ethics.  But Russian Doll doesn't really follow this model -- I don't know what the minotaur in the maze of time-loops means: the show ends with a sort of triumphal parade of Gigantes, that is, figures wearing huge paper-mache heads, who seem to represent the various archetypes of the people who appear in the show.  But it's not clear at all how we are supposed to interpret the parade led by the minotaur, a character who has morphed from being pathetic to sinister.  The real model for the show, I think, is Freud's notion of the Death Instinct, that is, the compulsion to repeat.  In fact, the show's solution, to the extent anything is resolved, is disappointingly trivial -- Nadia has suffered a terrible childhood trauma and the repetition seems therapeutic, it's a way for her to control the experience.   When she was a child, she was helpless but, now, it seems that by a course of repetitively re-imagining the same situation again and again she is led backward through the maze to the source of her sufferings and alienation, her relationship with her schizophrenic and, ultimately, suicidal mother (played with terrifying intensity by Chloe Sevigny).  The show is so clever, ingenious, and with such brilliant dialogue that it's a little disconcerting to find out that the whole thing may be a trope for therapy for PTSD.  But in light of the cynicism that pervades TV today, Russian Doll is refreshingly upbeat and, even, didactic -- the show suggests that we redeem ourselves slowly, but surely, by doing good deeds to help others. 

Russian Doll succeeds in large part due to Natasha Lyonne's performance as Nadia.  Apparently, Lyonne has been around for many years -- she was a child actress back in 1996.  She looks radically different in every part -- I don't know what this means, but I must have seen her in lots of shows and movies without noticing her.  Here she is indelible and seems completely new and fresh in this role.  Like a character in a video game, she always wears the same clothing and looks, in fact, like a figure you might find animated by your Nintendo play-station.  She has huge kewpie doll eyes, a broad, pale face -- we have no sense for what her body looks like, because she is always swathed from head to toe in black.  Yet, she is fantastically sexy and alluring.  There is a leering voyeuristic aspect to the dirty stuff in Sally4ever; by contrast, the perversity in Russian Doll is casual, incidental to the plot, and never in the foreground.  In one scene, Natasha wakes up on a couch next to a pile of people passed out on the floor -- some of the people are naked, others wear bondage gear and strap-on dildos although oriented at curious angles.  A woman lying on the heap of corpse-like orgy participants wakes up, blinks, looks around her and says:  "I don't remember this but it looks like something ...wonderful...happened here last night."  Nadia picks up a man at the party for sex only -- she knows the guy is no good but that doesn't bother her:  she is casually hedonistic.  Everyone uses drugs all the time and chain smokes.  Smoking now on film seems more of a perversion than coprophilia.  (And there's a touching scene in which an old widower whose wife died of cancer reprimands Nadia for smoking and she points out that the quantum universe contains many worlds in which smoking isn't bad at all.)   Nadia and all the characters seem polymorphously perverse -- everyone seeks pleasure unashamedly.  But most of all Nadia is highly intelligent -- she plays the part a little bit like an elderly Jew:  sometimes, she seems to channel Rhoda Morgenstern from the old Mary Tyler Moore show.  And Lyonne has a great voice, a whiskey-rasp, deep and husky and seductive all at the same time.  Although Russian Doll is very clever, the best thing in the show is Natasha Lyonne. 

The Death of Stalin

The Death of Stalin is a large-scale historical epic directed by the British film maker Armando Ianucci.  The 2018 film seems to have involved complex funding -- the movie is produced primarily by the French studio Gaumont (it's logo now says "born with the movies"), but a variety of other production companies are also credited, including the Belgium Tax Shelter enterprise and Canal.  The picture is derived from a French comic book -- that is, a graphic novel or, in this case, a graphic history.  The actors (with one exception) are all Brits who speak with rich plummy accents -- a little disconcerting, at first, but, then, quite acceptable.  The exception is Steve Buscemi who plays Nikita Krushchev, a curious casting choice but also very effective:  he seems a feckless schlemihl at first, but, then, grows in sinister stature as the movie progresses.  Conspicuous by their absence are any Russian actors, again with one exception -- a beautiful female pianist has a Russian name and she looks the way you imagine Natasha in War and Peace.  The film covers some of the territory claimed by Alexei German's great Krushtalyov, My Car, a picture that dwarfs all other films and that, of course, puts Ianucci's picture to shame.  That said, Ianucci's film is surprisingly lavish -- it's like Dr. Zhivago, full of trains disgorging panicked Russians, rife with murders, assassinations, and riots.  The movie seems to have been partially filmed in the Kremlin and there are images containing what seem to be hundreds of thousands of people, simple Russians in mourning for Stalin.  The great monster lies in State in the Hall of Columns where there is much antic byplay among the lesser monsters vying for control of the State and the set, if it is one, seems astonishingly accurate and detailed.  Ianucci's film is a sort of screwball comedy of horrors -- the various Soviet officials all talk as fast as possible, spewing forth every sort of Baroque threat and insult, and its all quite amusing in an awful sort of way.  On reflection, the current film that the movie most resembles is Yorgi Lanthimos' perverse The Favorite.  The similarity resides in the fact that The Death of Stalin lovingly recreates the interiors and Kremlin locations where the events shown apparently transpired:  everything looks scrupulously authentic, but the actors speak in like characters in an exceptionally bawdy episode of Seinfeld (or like the people in Veep, which is, I think, connected in some way to Ianucci).  In The Favorite, everything looks convincingly like the Court of Queen Anne in the age of Alexander Pope -- but, again, the people speak like mobsters in a modern crime film.  This is an interesting strategy and gives these films an electric charge.  I'm not a big fan of a lot of Ianucci's invective -- it just seems gratuitous:  he has people speak in a way that is as affected and unreal as Shakespearian iambic pentameter except that it's not uplifting, just a cacophony of the wildest and most outlandish insults and threats.  In one scene, for example, a character denounces someone else in these terms:  "You're not even a man.  You're a testicle."  But the description doesn't make any sense, isn't even arguably metaphorically accurate, and just seems gratuitous and, in fact, more than a little stupid.  (In defense of the film, it should be observed that the character who makes this proclamation is an alcoholic idiot.)

Ianucci doesn't stint on horrors.  There are plenty of scenes in dank NKVD torture chambers and many people shot point-blank in the head.  Beria, the film's one unequivocal villain, orders people to torture wives in the presence of their husbands, merrily telling one henchman:  "Shoot the wife first and make sure he sees it before you shoot him."  (Beria also seems to be some sort of child molester -- we see him with little blonde girls; this is creepy and disrupts the cynical merriment that is the tone for most of the movie.) Supernumerary characters are killed just because they are in the same room where something important happened and no one wants any witnesses around.  Stalin, an ineffectual-seeming little fellow looks like everyone's favorite uncle -- he tells inane jokes to his inner circle, the same verminous crew that we see contending against one another after his death.  He makes his boys watch a John Ford Western, apparently for the tenth time -- some of them fall asleep.  If you make a verbal slip, Stalin apparently will have you killed and, so, all his courtiers seem desperate to please him.  Indeed, everyone in the whole country is desperate to please the tyrant -- when Stalin misses a radio broadcast of a Mozart piano concerto, he demands a recording.  But the studio staff hasn't recorded the broadcast and, so, the whole program has to be redone -- the conductor has passed-out from fear and so another man has to be recruited in his pajamas to direct the orchestra.  The pianist is a Christian; Stalin has killed all of her family and so she doesn't care about her own fate.  She sends a written note to the dictator denouncing him and Stalin gets a big laugh out of it before collapsing on the floor in a puddle of his own urine, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage -- Ianucci's cinema is a theater of cruelty:  we see Stalin's skull sawed open, his face peeled down to expose the bone, and his brain exposed.  (It's a rather pointless sequence.)  Stalin's death induces a violent power struggle between Krushschev and Malenkov (played by a baffled-looking Jeffrey Tambor), Stalin's anointed successor.  Ultimately, Krushschev outflanks the hapless Malenkov by summoning both the war hero General Zhukov and the public to Stalin's funeral -- this result in a massacre:  the NKVD has shut down the city and they shoot into the crowds of mourners killing 1500 people.  Zhukov stages a coup for the benefit of Krushschev and Beria is beaten half to death, shot in the face, and his corpse doused in petrol and set on fire.  In the final scene, we see Krushschev at the concert listening to the same piano concerto with which the film began -- behind him his murderous successor Leonid Brezhnev looks on hungrily.  Some aspects of the film are unsettling:  Molotov (Michael Palin) is so badly broken by his fear of Stalin that he has denounced his own wife and, even after the Beria sets the woman free, continues to denounce her reflexively.  Stalin's children are pathetic enough:  his son Vassily is a moron and a drunk; Svetlana wants Beria to bring back her boyfriend who has been sent to the Gulag.   At last, Beria has to apologize, admitting he had the military officer killed in 1949.  Vast numbers of peasants come to Moscow, convinced that Stalin was a great man and their benefactor.  It's all very funny and also horrific -- you feel a little ashamed of yourself for laughing at this stuff.  (The extras on the DVD note that the film was made before anyone thought that Donald Trump would become president, but, if you want, there are certain parallels -- an inane remark that doesn't do justice to what we see in the film.)

The Italian Straw Hat (Minnesota Opera, February 2019)

The Italian Straw Hat is a comic opera composed in 1945 by Nino Rota.  (Rota is famous for his scores for Fellini films and the theme from Coppola's Godfather)  The composition is a pastiche -- Rota, who was about 25 when he wrote the piece (with a libretto by his mother), imitates the merry perpetual motion music of Mozart, particularly the overture to The Magic Flute, the gallops that we hear in Donizetti and Rossini, and, even, throws in a little circumspect jazz for a good measure -- at one point, the tenor sings a gorgeous aria that could have been made by Puccini:  the music is yearning and heartfelt and rises passionately toward a high vibrato C, but the subject matter is the hero's yearning to obtain an Italian (Florentine in the original) straw hat from the woman to whom the song is addressed.  The opera is mildly amusing and frenetic with action, but, for some reason, never really succeeds in gripping your attention -- it's all a little abstract, remote, and pointless.  With a couple of exceptions, I didn't think the piece was funny and, in fact, there is a surreal, nightmarish urgency to the second half that is, precisely, the opposite of humorous.  The libretto is based on a French farce written for the stage around the time of the American Civil War.  The plot is fantastically ingenious and represents a classic example of the so-called "well-made play" popular in European theater at that time -- there are vestiges of that kind of theater in Ibsen:  everything is very carefully worked out with all the climaxes, both final and subordinate deployed "just so" -- it's built to last, every block securely grouted in place.  But, for some reason, the whole exercise seems just a wee bit hollow.

If you are interested in narrative, The Italian Straw Hat has two moments that are sheer genius from the perspective of clever, unanticipated plot development.  The pretext for the story is simple enough -- it is the morning of Fadonard's wedding, a petite bourgeois Parisian who is marrying a girl from the boondocks.  On the way to perform some minor errand, Fadonard loses his whip -- while retrieving it, the horse wanders off and eats a straw hat left dangling on a shrub.  The straw hat belongs to a married woman involved in a dalliance with a soldier.  The show is replete with Freudian symbols and, of course, it's pretty clear what the hat represents -- something that should belong, more or less, the lady's husband.  Fadonard is told that he must replace the hat with an identical one or face a duel with the soldier.  This backstory is not represented but rather told to an elderly uncle who has come to the wedding bearing a neatly wrapped gift.  The elderly uncle is totally deaf and responds to Fadonard's tale with cheerful non sequiturs.  (This sets up one of the brilliant plot machinations -- it's similar to the beginning of Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards in which we think the villainous German is speaking in English as a mere convention but later discover the more horrible truth.)  Fadonard goes to a factory where chirping female milliners are making hats.  He is told that an identical hat was delivered to a baroness a week before.  Fadonard, then, goes to the Baroness' palace where he is mistaken for a violin virtuoso imported for the pleasure of the lecherous noblewoman and her homosexual courtier.  Fadonard allows the woman to try to seduce him to get her to give him the hat.  In the first of a number of openly surreal scenes, the wedding guests and Fadonard's father-in-law (the wedding has occurred off-stage) appear -- they have been chasing the errant bride-groom.  They mistake the Baroness' palace for a restaurant, the Suckling Pig, and began eating her food -- this leads to a big chaotic finale to the first half of the opera:  two dueling choruses with the leads howling out their parts above the roar.  (It sounds like Mozart or Rossini).  The Baroness finally tells Fadonard that she has given the hat to her niece.  Next, we see an old man who we know to be the adulterous wife's husband -- he sings a suitably growly aria, far down in basso profundo range, about his jealousy and madness and brandishes a gun.  This aria threatens the opera with turning serious but, suddenly, to our surprise Fadonard appears.  This is the first plot point that seems brilliant to me -- what we know, but not the characters onstage, is that the Baroness' niece, the possessor of the Italian straw hat, is none other than the philandering wife of the old man.  Again, all of the wedding guests and the father-in-law (who keeps declaring the marriage as "off") appears, all of them disoriented and totally drunk and, then, of course, also the soldier and his girlfriend, the old man's wife.  Everyone then decamps for Fadonard's home pursued by the murderous old man brandishing a gun.  There are some Keystone Kop guardsmen marching about like little tin soldiers so that Rota can sneak some martial music into the story and the erring wife even dresses up to imitate a sentry although nothing is made of this subplot.  A storm ensues and the wedding party has become increasingly cold, wet, and bedraggled.  All the characters end up together for a big confrontation and, at that point, Fadonard's elderly uncle produces his wedding present which turns out to be ... wait for it! -- an Italian straw hat identical to the one eaten by the horse. (This is the second plot development that seems divinely ingenious to me.)  Everyone is reconciled and Fadonard goes to bed with his new bride. 

The show is staged robustly with very bright colors and surreal enlarged fruits and wedding cakes stacked on a raked ramp-like stage.  The backdrop is decorated with posters from shows including Chantones Pare Pluvia (Singing in the Rain) establishing that the action is supposed to be occurring in the fifties.  The old jealous old man is a stereotyped character who was ancient at the time of Plautus and Menander; he has a long beard and sore feet.  The Baroness and adulterous wife are big zaftig women is garish dresses -- the homosexual courtier wears a pink suit with pink shoes and has mutton chop sideburns.  (He menaces the hero with a huge banana).  The millinery ladies all wear identical outfits and chirp their pretty little aria in perfect unison.  The bride is virginal in her white outfit and the wedding guests are bourgeois in top hats and drab suits and dresses.  Despite its slight subject matter, the opera requires a huge cast, has fifteen or so major singing roles and uses several large choruses.  As befitting the opera buffo style of the proceedings, everyone enters through trapdoors:  there are, at least, three under the raked ramp of the stage and, sometimes, characters even crawl out from under the ramp.  One chorus is performed after the William Tell-like storm  interlude with the singers in the center aisles of the auditorium  It is all, in fact, convincingly grand.  But there is something slightly awry and the show is never really funny -- it's oddly brilliant but cold and empty. 

Annihilation

Annihilation (2018) is reputedly Barack Obama's favorite film produced during the last several years.  The picture has a complex and vexed history.  After being completed, the producers wanted rewrites and parts of the film re-shot -- the argument was that the picture was too cerebral and needed more action and a clearer resolution.  Director Alex Garland had "final cut" approval in this contract and so he declined to revise the film.  The producers retaliated by burying the picture -- it had a limited release and wasn't widely shown in theaters.  The movie is compelling and reasonably scary -- although I have to admit that I frighten easily.  It's fascinating throughout although grim, portentous, and fundamentally incoherent -- the film has the audacity to make its incoherence thematic:  an alien force is discombobulating nature, rewiring genes and creating nightmare hybrids -- ultimately, the survivor of encounter with the alien entity describes it as annihilating everything it encounters by scrambling the DNA in the living beings that it infects.  Thus, elements of the film that don't make much sense can be rehabilitated by being seen in the context of the fundamental disorder that the entity creates. 

Critics correctly characterize Annihilation as a sort of poor-man's Stalker -- and, indeed, the picture invokes many elements in Tarkovsky's masterpiece (a film that seems to prophecy the catastrophe at Chernobyl).  A streak of light from the heavens has crashed into a lighthouse seemingly amidst marshes next to Chesapeake Bay.  This intervention from outer space has created a zone called 'the Shimmer' by the military personnel monitoring it -- in Stalker, the affected territory was called more prosaically "The Zone."  The heroine, a doctor and medical researcher played by Natalie Portman, has lost her husband in Afghanistan or one of our other wars used as convenient plot devises in films of this kind.  During her husband's absence, the woman has engaged in a love affair with a colleague -- something that seems to haunt her.  (This aspect of the narrative is ill-conceived and doesn't fit well with the rest of the film -- I'm unclear why this plot element was introduced.)  Suddenly, the heroine (her name is Lena) discovers that her husband has returned, appearing out of nowhere, it seems, and unwilling to discuss where he has been.  Suddenly, he begins to violently hemorrhage.  On the way to the hospital, the ambulance is surrounded by black SUV's (today's equivalent of the ubiquitous "Men in Black") and Lena ends up in some kind of military compound supervised by an icy dominatrix conceived a bit like CIA chief Gina Haspel.  Her husband is dying -- his organs are shutting down.  Four women, including the base commander, have volunteered for a mission into the "Shimmer".  As it happens, the "Shimmer" is expanding and now covers a territory of many miles -- mostly forests and swamps with an evacuated village about two miles from the lighthouse that is the center of the disturbance.  Groups of soldiers have been sent into "The Shimmer" for months -- but no one, except for Lena's husband, has ever returned from within phenomenon.  (This sort of explains the man's sullen and uncommunicative manner -- but we don't know how he got out and made his way to Lena's house.)  Of course, Lena also volunteers for the sortie into the area, an incursion that is generally thought to be a suicide mission.  Each of the five women on the patrol has a backstory involving some sort of insanity or suicide or trauma -- they are all "damaged goods" otherwise why "would you volunteer for a suicide mission.'  The women enter "the Shimmer", portrayed as a zone of diffraction grating-style iridescence in the tree line.  The interior of the zone is full of strange cross-hybridized flowers and various monsters -- there is a massive crocodile, a giant lethal bear, and, in the overgrown village, strange forms of vegetation that look like human beings.  One by one, the women are killed by the monsters or simply go insane.  Lena is left alone.  She makes her way to the lighthouse where there is an anal aperture, a sort of borehole into what seems to be the intestinal belly of the beast -- the inside of the cavity is rippled with glistening black tissue and looks like the interior of the space craft in Alien.  The Shimmer creates a duplicate of Lena.  Lena is allowed out into the world where she rejoins her husband -- he's recovered apparently.  Lena and her husband embrace but their reunion is problematic because they are both aliens now, genetically unstable simulacra. 

The film is handsomely produced, although some of the effects in the Shimmer seem a little bit on the low-tech and cheap side.  The all female patrol is an interesting innovation -- a riff on the all male patrols in films like Stalker or Predator.  Everyone talks in whispers and there is scary music always playing under the action -- the scariest music is an inexplicable pop song that accompanies some early flashback scenes showing Lena and her husband in happier days. (Another inexplicable error in judgement -- the film abounds in strange cross-breeds.)  The camera tracks ominously over the disfigured landscapes full of huge bouquets of what looks like artificial flowers and the director uses jump-cuts to disorient the viewer.  When Lena is interviewed in the super-secret military-CIA compound, she is seen by one man in a Haz-Mat suit -- he is then multiplied into a number of such men and there is a weird Greek chorus kind of crowd of people outside the glass chamber where Lena is being interrogated.  The film uses other techniques from horror films including things jumping out at you from the margin of the frame and a technique in which a shot from the hero's perspective is suddenly cut to a shot from an odd, remote angle making the hero seem to be an intruder into his own solitude.  (Since Annihilation is about entities being duplicated and cloned, this kind of imagery makes thematic sense.)   There are a number of genuinely disturbing images -- walls of houses are covered with Day-glo mildew; in one instance, a carpet of mildew has grown around a corpse and created a thick gargantuan fungal torso atop which a shattered skull seems to burst upward in bas relief.   A number of other grotesque and baroque effects enliven the proceedings.  The monsters are convincingly horrible, hybrids like something from the island of Dr. Moreau.  This is an amusing picture and, certainly, intended as a sort of cerebral horror film, an objective in which it succeeds.