Sacred Journeys (with Bruce Feiler)

On the evidence of the 2014 PBS six-part series, Sacred Journeys, people who embark on religious pilgrimages are not particularly pious -- indeed, they are not even really religious.  At least, this is the reassuring message of the first two of six documentaries presented by Bruce Feiler on world pilgrimage sites.  Pilgrimage seems to involve lots of strenuous travel, much hiking, coping with crowds and inconvenience and hardship and, accordingly, not a lot of reflection, prayer or theology.  The first episode, which chronicles a trip to Lourdes by twenty or so wounded American soldiers is particularly mindless and egregiously disingenuous.  Lourdes seems to be a high-priced Vegas-style resort city with an impressive cathedral built atop a craggy bluff pierced by grottos and medicinal baths.  There is a cavernous underground basilica -- it seats 25,000 -- and the world's most elaborate and ornate wheelchair ramp leading from the riverside grotto up to the cathedral on the top of the cliff.  Not surprisingly, the Hispanic soldier raised Catholic who lost half of his body in a IED blast in Iraq experiences the healing balm of the holy waters most literally. -- his pain goes away and he seems to be at peace with his mutilation. The other soldiers, many of them non-Catholic, regard the experience as metaphoric and consider the holy water as incidental to fellowship, including the consumption of lots of beer in the taverns and bistro's adjacent to the pilgrimage site.  Feiler, who gapes at everything with annoying gullibility, doesn't comment on the obvious incongruity of hordes of soldiers descending on a city sacred to a religion ostensibly pacifist and devoted to peace.  Indeed, much of the film is turgid "wounded warriors" stuff, a "thank you for your service" public service announcement, screened by a public television network that is resolutely liberal, non-violent and, undoubtedly, vehemently opposed to the very wars in which these poor fellows lost sizeable chunks of their faces and bodies. The visual information about Lourdes is interesting; the interior shots of bathing stations in the grottoes are fascinating.  But there is no bite to the program.  Feiler takes everything on face-value and the documentary seems carefully designed to not give offense to anyone, including the atheistic secular humanists in the audience.  The second episode is better -- an account of vigorous pilgrims hiking an 800 mile trail on rainy, windswept island in the Japanese archipelago.  The trail is sacred to the founder of Shingon Buddhism, an eight century monk named Kobo Diashi.  The landscapes featured in this program are spectacular and the Buddhist temples have a splendid weathered beauty.  Feiler provides next to no information about the doctrines taught by Kobo Daishi -- as far as Feiler and PBS are concerned, one religion is as good as another and a general, tolerant aura of moral equivalence underlies the show.  The Japanese Shikoku pilgrimage involves competitive walking, although equally efficacious is making a bus tour of 88 temples located along the coast line of the rugged island.  We see some impressive rituals, including the Homa or fire ritual, and the people watching the rite seems duly impressed and sanctified -- it's all very moving until you remember that there's a camera crew with sound engineers scrutinizing these "private" encounters with the sacred.  Feiler, the "presenter" as the Brits would say, is the kind of man whose mind is so open as to wholly vacant.  It would not be out of character for him to praise a hike to Nuremberg to attend the rallies in that City, or, perhaps, a pilgrimage to the temple of Baal to observe the ritual incineration of infants and toddlers -- it's all the same to him. 

The Lines of Wellington

The Lines of Wellington is a historical drama written by the great Raul Ruiz, a Chilean film maker who died a couple years ago.  Ruiz' wife, Valeria Sarmiento, directed the picture released in 2012 and the movie is a baffling combination of soap opera, prestigiously mounted costume drama, and made-for-TV (or Cable) mini-series.  The cut of the film circulating on the Film Movement DVD runs about 150 minutes; however, the movie contains odd ellipses and scenes introducing new characters who vanish as quickly as they appear, episodes that suggest dramatic arcs that seem to have been edited out of this version of the film.  Some footage is inserted as flashbacks to provide narrative context, as if the editor were trying heroically, if unsuccessfully, to motivate peculiarities in the characters and story that would otherwise be inexplicable.  (I understand that the film was released in Canada on cable-TV as a mini-series and suspect that it may have been shown in Spain and Portugal in much longer versions.)  The movie is handsome, impressively shot with excellent actors, many of them, apparently, TV stars in the Iberian peninsula.  In the Film Movement version, the film provides an interesting counterpoint to Ruiz' The Mysteries of Lisbon, an engrossing four-and-a-half-hour costume melodrama made for Portuguese TV and the late director's greatest commercial success.  In The Mysteries of Lisbon, a fantastically complicated plot proceeds through a series of riddles that the narrative gradually solves; no loose ends are left unresolved -- every mystery is ultimately explained although on the basis of concealed paternity, fantastic coincidences, and mistaken identities.  The Lines of Wellington presents the opposite case:  in this film, plot-lines are abandoned, characters appear for a few moments and, then, vanish from the story, conflicts are left unresolved while important protagonists are unceremoniously killed or left for dead.  Whereas The Mysteries of Lisbon posited a narrative that was tightly closed and involuted, The Lines of Wellington presents a series of scenes that are not only fragmentary and unrelated, but, also, in some instances, digressive -- a sequence may be fascinating to the viewer but it leads nowhere.  (For instance, early in the film, Sarmiento puts Michel Piccoli, Isabelle Huppert, and Catherine Deneuve in the same shot -- the characters are Francophile Portuguese nobility quarreling about whether Napoleon's invasion signifies progress or barbarism.  There is a lot of star-power in the scene but we never see these characters again after their five minute cameo.)  Ostensibly, Sarmiento's epic concerns the Peninsular War fought between the French and the English in 1811 in the mountains north of Lisbon.  The film begins with carnage, the aftermath of a battle that the British, with their rather hapless Portuguese allies, have won against the French invaders.  Immediately, however, the movie operates against audience expectations:  although the British, led by the foppish Wellington (John Malkovich), have won the battle of Bucacao, they, nonetheless, retreat, withdrawing through the mountains to a series of fortifications called the Torres line.  (The film's title is an adaptation of this name for English-speaking audiences -- the Wellington line is the fortified heights extending for 20 km across the peninsula and protecting Lisbon from the French advance.)  During the retreat, Ruiz' script introduces the viewers to about a dozen characters:  Pedro, a valiant Portuguese fighter has been shot in the head and is convalescent, Bardolo, a poet and French deserter leads a group of Poles, also defectors from the French side in a guerilla war, Vincente is searching for his wife, lost in the retreat, Percy, a red-headed Irish officer, is enticed into sex with a depraved British girl whose previous lover was her own brother -- and there are warmhearted prostitutes, women driven mad by gang-rape, and savage priests who butcher French stragglers while shouting:  Death to Liberty.  (The conservative Portuguese call the French "Jacobins".)  Wellington frets about how he is being portrayed by a Portuguese artist and provides the recipe for Beef Wellington.  There is little violence in the film and no battles are depicted.  When the English reach the Torres line, they continue to strengthen its fortifications and, ultimately, the French simply melt-away -- they vanish.  Throughout the film, people die but mostly by accident -- they are killed in ambushes, hit by stray shells, perish in landslides when the fortifications collapse, or dies from disease.  The movie is mostly a study in landscapes -- the photography is lush and beautiful, composed of panoramic shots of large numbers of refugees doggedly trudging along the Portuguese hilltops.  This is a film about war that cleaves very close to the facts of Rwanda, Syria, and Iraq:  armed conflict is portrayed as shells falling at random from cannons fired at great distances and immense crowds of ragged people dragging their belongings over muddy and rugged roads.  In the end, the Portuguese have prevailed but at what cost -- in a Stalingrad-style defense, they have burned their own villages, vineyards, and farms to deny the French provender:  the final scene shows survivors gazing out upon the ravaged and charred landscape.  The film is interesting and well-made, but, ultimately, it's pointless.
  

Much Ado about Nothing

In Renaissance slang, "nothing" was cant for female genitals.  The notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, uses the word in that way a couple generations after Shakespeare and, on the basis of the play's content, I suspect a bawdy pun in the comedy's name.  Joss Whedon, the director of such things as the meta-textual Cabin in the Woods and Tv shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, adapted the Shakespeare comedy for the screen in 2012 and his version of the play is better than Kenneth Branagh's  1993 film, an elegant, intelligent, and beautifully acted entertainment.  Many critics damned the play with faint praise:  like a woman preaching or a dog walking on its hind legs, to quote Dr. Johnson, it was not how well the thing was done but that it was accomplished at all.  In fact, I think Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing is one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare for the screen that I have seen.  Whedon has shortened the play and clarified its plot:  in an elegant mansion in the Hollywood hills, some rich and privileged gentlemen and ladies have gathered to celebrate something, perhaps, a military victory -- we see a couple of characters brought to the party with their wrists fettered.  Benedick, a confirmed bachelor, loves Beatrice, an affection that she reciprocates; but Benedick and Beatrice are too independent, cynical, witty and intelligent to admit their mutual desire and conceal it within a brittle badinage, the "merry" combat betwixt the two of them.  The older, but not wiser, members of the company perceive themselves to be "gods of love" and decide to manipulate Benedict and Beatrice into admitting their love.  At the same time, a younger couple becomes engaged with the marriage scheduled for sometime in the next couple days.  But the girl is defamed and her fiancée denounces her violently at the wedding, accusing her of being "wanton."  (It is all libel advanced for obscure reasons by a traitorous bastard step-brother, a man who has conspired to seize the throne of the Prince of Messina.)  The girl seems to perish from grief.  Some of Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals," in this case a security agent named Dogberry and his sidekick, discover the truth and expose the plot.  Beatrice who is more fierce than any of the men demands that Benedick avenge her kinswoman.  Murder and suicide is narrowly averted and the play ends on a sunny note with a double wedding.  Of course, the dark and irrational aspects of sexual desire cloud the play's happy ending and the comedy barely escapes becoming a tragedy of jealousy and violent revenge on the order of Othello or the later romance The Winter's Tale.  Shakespeare's double plot demonstrates the extreme fragility of love and its dependence on the good will of the community -- the self-styled "gods of love" can immediately trick Benedict and Beatrice into acknowledging their mutual desire...after all, it was there all the time.  But, similarly, the deceitful calumniators can also instantaneously change the young fiancée's love for his espoused into hysterical madness and jealous hatred...those passions were always there as well. As in all of Shakespeare's plays, there is a wild, nightmarish and hysterical intensity to the jealousy that his characters experience.  And everyone shares the ineluctable conviction that women are fundamentally fickle, untrue, and that their desire is erratic, hair-trigger, and fatally capricious.  This note is sounded almost immediately in the play when someone remarks that Hero, the young woman, is Prince Leonato's daughter -- "That," Leonato replies, "is what her mother hath often maintained to me" or words to the effect.  No man can reliable know whether the woman he loves is true to him and so the double marriage at the end of the play carries with it the inevitable specter of deceit, jealous rage, and cuckoldry.  Whedon shoots the film in an elegant modern house, apparently, his own home in the mountains above Los Angeles and the movie is exquisitely composed and framed.  Shot in black and white, the film seems sober, even when it is very funny, and like all Shakespeare's comedies the mirth has a "dying fall" -- the faintly sorrowful aspect of the comedy is expressed perfectly in the film's renunciation of color; the black and white gives the picture the sense of being classic, like Woody Allen's Manhattan, a film that is similarly wise, and melancholy, about sexual love.  The movie is mostly impeccable.  My only quibble is that the film's best known innovation -- showing that Benedick and Beatrice have earlier "hooked-up" or fallen into bed together -- although clever, and, although making sense of their mutual distrust, is inconsistent with the rigid, and vehemently patriarchal sexual morality to which the character's subscribe and that, even, the brilliant and enlightened Beatrice endorses when her kinswoman is defamed. After all, the film almost climaxes in an "honor killing" of the kind that continue to vex primitive places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. But this criticism aside, I highly recommend this film.   

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Based on a bestselling novel by the Spanish writer, Vicente Blasco Ibanez, Rex Ingram's 1921 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was one of the silent era's top-grossing films.  The film, directed by Rex Ingram, is sumptuously mounted and was the movie that introduced Rudolf Valentino to the public.  Rex Ingram is a puzzling figure in film history, an Irish-born director who made a number of financially successful picture in the twenties but was unable to navigate the transition to sound films.  In 1933, Ingram, who was comparatively young, retired from pictures to become a professional sculptor.  Earlier in 1927, he had converted to Islam, certainly an oddity in the "Roaring Twenties." (He lived until 1950).  Ingram had brooding good looks and was much more handsome than most of his leading men -- he would be an ideal Heathcliff.   His sexuality seems to have been ambiguous.  At the time of The Four Horsemen, he was closely associated with the studio producer and screenwriter, June Mathis.  Mathis was squat and homely, with coarse features and avid, glittering eyes and she seems to have been a consort to several gay men, or, at least, men who appeared to be gay -- her close companion was the vaudeville female-impersonator, Julian Eltinge.  (Mathis was also intimate with the lesbian actress, Alla Nazimova.)  Mathis, who wrote The Four Horsemen, was undeniably talented -- her florid but effective intertitles are on display in the 1921 film -- and she had a clear understanding of the passions and interests of the popular audiences for whom she produced films.  Until her sudden death from a heart attack in 1927, she was reputed to be one of the most powerful film executives in Hollywood.  Mathis also had an interest in spiritualism and reincarnation, an aspect of her personality incongruent with her reputation has a ruthless and hard-headed studio producer and motivating much of the action during the second half of The Four Horsemen.  The film is a lavishly produced family chronicle that begins on the Pampas of Argentina and concludes in the shell-wracked moonscape of the Marne during World War I.  Ingram uses vast sets, often augmented by matte painting in the upper half of the image to extend his landscapes and interiors to lofty heights.  This lavish imagery fails on a small screen -- Ingram's characters often seem lost in cavernous drawing rooms and huge circus-like cabarets.  His mise-en-scene alternates between close-ups, two- and three-shots, and establishing shots showing amphitheater-sized sets, scenery that looks vaguely like the furniture and backdrops of a well-made Broadway play but blown-up to immense size.  (This was a characteristic of some expensively produced silent films; even the restrained Dreyer uses cavernous, outsized sets in his novelistic chamber drama, Michael made in Germany in 1924.)   In the famous tango scene about ten minutes after the film's start, Ingram stages the action in a dance-hall that is the size of basketball court, curiously imagined as below-grade -- through an upper arcade, thirty-feet above the dance-floor, we can glimpse people and traffic moving outside of the ballroom.  Since the scene focuses on Valentino's prowess as a dancer and, accordingly, requires tight shots on the star and the woman accompanying him on the dance-floor, the camera dollying back to capture the action as they promenade toward the lens, the huge size of the set is not only pointless, but, also, distracting and, even, counter-productive.  Shots from the vantage of the establishing image show the star and his tango companion dwarfed by the huge set and attenuate the effectiveness of the scene -- everything is too far away.  Valentino is nothing much to look at in this film.  He  has a puffy face and slit eyes that give him a vaguely oriental appearance.  His hair is slicked down and he has a surprisingly inexpressive body -- the tango scene, although perhaps damaged by the way Ingram stages the sequence, is remarkably unimpressive.  To my eye, the Great Lover looks a little like a seal -- he has a white inexpressive face that seems to have been flattened and smoothed and airbrushed until it is almost illegible; he is like a mammal that lives under the water with a round sleek head configured from swimming underwater.

The content of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is mostly family chronicle, the intertwined fates of an extended Argentine family, who have split into two clans and unluckily emigrated to France and Germany.  After an initial half-hour set in gaucho territory, the two feuding cohorts of the cowboy family, the Germanic Hartrott clan (Teutonic father and three grinning blonde sons) and the French Desnoyers (French papa and his raffish son, Julio played by Valentino) settle down in old Europe and, of course, become enemies when the Great War begins.  The first two-thirds of the film involves Julio's adulterous love affair with a young woman married to a much older diplomat, a man named Lauriers.  Just as the affair is disclosed, with dire consequences for the lovers, war conveniently breaks out:  the cuckolded Lauriers goes to the front where he is promptly blinded by mustard gas and committed to the care of his repentant wife -- there are many intertitles invoking the idea of atonement.  Desnoyers, who is a kind of hoarder, travels to his castle in the Marne valley, where, of course, he encounters the Hun, brutish Germans led by the Hartrott eldest son who are looting his estate.  There are battles and rapes, German transvestites dancing drunkenly on smashed pianos and long columns of marching men; a panning shot of men about to murdered by a firing squad invokes Goya and establishes a template for many later scenes of this kind in other films.   Desnoyers, who is a sort of miser, watches as shells destroy his castle.  Julio, chastened by his girlfriend's devotion to her blinded husband, enlists and finds himself in the mud and gloom of the Western Front.  Just as he is about to kill his Hartrott cousin, a shell lands on the two men and puts paid to both of them.  Julio's ghost obligingly visits his former girlfriend who is on the verge of abandoning her helpless husband.  The ghost nobly tells the woman to stay with the crippled man.  An insert shows a caged squirrel running hopelessly on a wheel, presumably a forecast of the young wife's hopeless future.  All of these calamities have been foretold by a enigmatic figure, a sort of wild-eyed religious mystic who looks, more or less, like Rasputin.  This figure studies Duerer's engravings of the Apocalypse and sights the Four Horsemen hurtling through the cloudy skies.  In the film's visionary final sequence, the surviving members of the Desnoyer's family, mutilated by the war, gather in an enormous cemetery, innumerable crosses studding an implausibly steep and barren landscape.  A young woman stands at the crest of the mountain, the sun shining through her garments to reveal her lissome body -- her husband is badly disfigured and has lost his arm.  The wild-eyed religious mystic spreads his arms and seems to assume Christ-like stature as the celestial horsemen depart through the clouds.  The ending is similar to the final reel of Intolerance as well as Ince's Civilization and Vater und Mutter Hartrott, mourning the death of their three sons, pronounce the implicit moral of the work:  it would have been better for these natives of Argentina to have remained in the New World remote from the nightmarish entanglements of European politics -- the film's slant is decidedly isolationist.  Much of this is wonderfully impressive.  This is the terrain of Tolstoy's War and Peace as refracted, of course, through D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, combat, family, weddings and funerals and, of course, adultery.  Ingram can't edit his film to achieve the rhythmic set-pieces that Griffith was able to achieve -- his cutting is a little too obvious and pedantic and he has an unfortunate tendency to allegorize his action by cutting away to animals, usually family pets or Julio's capuchin monkey whose antics mimic the human actors.  But he stages many scenes with a vivid intensity that matches Griffith and his images -- for instance,of wounded soldiers at Lourdes -- have a sober elegance and sophistication.  The film is too long and not well-preserved, particularly in the famous interlude that connects the domestic tragedies of the film's first half with the war scenes that conclude the picture -- these are the images of the four horsemen emerging from a demon's fiery mouth and, then, catapulting across the sky.  But it's worth watching and, for people interested in silent film, Ingram's mise-en-scene and technique makes an interesting counterpoint to Griffith.

La Danza de la Realidad (The Dance of Reality)

Here is a measure of the e ccentric brilliance of Alejandro Jodorowsky's 2013 The Dance of Reality. Consider this scenario: in a remote Chilean seaport, a Jewish dry goods merchant, Jaime Jodorowsky, feuds with fellow firemen.  Jaime worships Stalin and is a True Believer in the Communist Party.  When the local miners strike, they march through the village to the beach and assemble by the sea.  The miners are a horde of men and haggard women dressed in funereal black and carrying battered black umbrellas. They stalk across an unbelievably desolate moonscape -- the gorges and bare peaks of the Atacama Desert, parading finally through Main Street and onto the beach with a bunch of mangy dogs leading the way.  The firefighters, who are also the local police, aim their guns at the strikers and refuse to give them water.  Jaime harnesses his two burros and courageously transports several large barrels of water to the beach.  The miners are also hungry, however, and they butcher his two donkeys and eat them raw.  "You've killed my donkeys," Jaime howls. "How will I bring you water tomorrow?" grasping, it seems, the illogical logic of violent revolution. Horrified, Jaime hobbles back to his dry goods store crying out that the firemen are going to "burn (him) to death."  He collapses on the floor of his shop, police battering at the door to arrest him.  Jaime's wife is a woman who looks somewhat like a Botero painting come to life:  the woman is heavy with enormous creamy breasts that overflow her too-tight blouses.  This is young Alejandro's mother, the mother of our director -- for the film is, in fact, a sort of spiritual autobiography.  She never speaks but rather sings in the mezzo-soprano voice of an opera diva.  Alejandro's mother squats over the dying Jaime -- his skin looks burned and he is twitching as if with a seizure.  She prays for God to overflow His banks within her and grant His healing waters to poor Jaime.  Then, she lifts up her dress and urinates all over her husband's chest and groin.  This act restores Jaime to health and, in fact, emboldens him to action:  he decides to assassinate the dictator of Chile, Carlos Ibanez del Campo.  The scene in which Jaime's wife drenches her gravely wounded husband with her urine is weirdly moving and, in fact, her micturition takes on a religious, even, sacramental character.  Jodorowsky, who is now 84, directed two cult films that were hugely successful in the late sixties and early seventies -- El Topo and The Holy Mountain.  Too uncompromising for the studios, Jodorowsky's career foundered; indeed, his ill-fated attempt to adapt Frank Herbert's Dune may have stigmatized him as a director simply too extravagant, unpredictable, and scandalous for the industry.  He made a couple of other movies, including the bizarre Santa Sangre and, then, vanished.  (He lives in Paris where he has worked as a Shamanistic therapist and written several dozen metaphysically oriented, if action-packed, comic books; he has also published books on psychotherapy and the Tarot.)  The first half-hour of The Dance of Reality doesn't feel like the work of an eighty-year old artist.  Indeed, this part of the film is so bursting with energy and so densely patterned with extraordinary visual imagery that the movie seems, at first, to be one of the best films ever made.  The picture is 130 minutes long and can't sustain the frenetic, surreal attack of its first half hour, but it remains compelling, frightening,and convincingly visionary throughout its entire length. Jodorowsky isn't interested in consistency and the film divides into two halves that seem mutually incommensurate.  In the first part of the film, Jodorowsky's father is monstrously cruel, a martinet who puts out cigarettes on the palm of his own hand to demonstrate his courage.  He slaps little Alejandro until his tooth is knocked out -- it's a test of courage -- and, then, forces the dentist to repair the injury by drilling in the child's mouth without any anesthesia.  A huge portrait of Stalin graces the dry goods shop, something called the Gran Casa Ukrana, referring to the family's origin as Ukrainian Jews.  Little Alejandro has girlish long hair and he consorts with a Theosophist on the beach, a naked man with a shaved head whose body is covered with cabalistic tattoos.  He also itches the back of a double amputee, a worker whose hands were blown off in an mine explosion.  The double amputee is part of a Greek chorus of about a dozen amputees, some of them sans both arms and legs who haunt the streets around the shop, evidence of the brutal industrial practices in the mines.  Jaime hates the cripples and in one scene that derives from Bunuel kicks the quadruple amputee like a soccer ball.  Jodorowsky is imbued with Latin American machismo and his brutal father-figure turns out to be heroic.  The director regards filmmaking as a species of war and calls his actors and actresses his warriors and this attitude is evident in the way The Dance of Reality develops, shifting gears in its second half after the father's resurrection by urine into an account of Jaime's heroism and, finally, conversion into a kind of Christian mystic.  Jaime decides to assassinate Chile's dictator, fails in that endeavor, and finds that his hands are paralyzed, frozen into hideous-looking claws.  He forgets his identity and is aroused only months later when his buxom wife sends him a message by stone lofted into the air incongruously by white balloons. Jaime wakes up in bed with a hunchbacked female dwarf, abandons her, and, then, embarks on a spiritual pilgrimage. (The scenes involving the dwarf and her love for Jaime are powerful, poignant, and emotionally effective:  the poor creature knows that God will take Jaime away from her and so she hangs herself.)  Jaime encounters a saintly carpenter, attends a Church where the Chilean parishioners sing "How Great Thou Art," and, finally, is captured by Nazis and tortured horribly.  Curiously, Jodorowski ends the film on a note of conventional, if outrageous, Christian piety.  Jaime's great-bosomed wife lifts her wounded husband into the air like a sort of voluptuous pieta and, then, the family departs the village, Tocopilla, on Charon's boat, a purplish vessel vanishing into a white sea, piloted by a skeleton. (The scene is similar to the equally visionary ending of Boorman's Excaliber.) Throughout the picture, the exceptionally handsome and charismatic Alejandro Jodorowsky appears cradling the young boy in his arms and offering him lyrical spiritual guidance -- the film is a family production, Jaime is played by Jodorowsky's son, the naked child in El Topo almost fifty years ago, and many of the cast members are Jodorowky's grandchildren, including the little boy who plays the wide-eyed Alejandro as an eight-year old.  Jodorowsky's ideas verge on Jungian kitsch -- he regards the world as a "vale of soul-making" -- but his imagery is so surreal and compelling that one can overlook, I think, the stupidity of many of his philosophical and shamanistic ideas.  In some ways, Jodorowsky's film resembles the work of Dusan Makajayev, particularly the excremental imagery of Sweet Movie or the Reichian sexual adventures in WR:  Mysteries of the Organism.  But Jodorowsky's sensibility, compounded of Latin American machismo and Jungian psychodynamics is completely and undeniably singular.  On a purely visual level, there is no doubt that he is one of the greatest of living film makers.  And who can resist a movie that begins with Louis Prima's "Sing, Sing, Sing" as a sound-cue for gold doubloons, a golden shower, as it were, streaming out of the sky? 

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The late, great Mike Nichols' directorial debut, his 1966 version of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? established the film maker as a force to be reckoned with and the movie remains bleakly impressive today.  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton play Martha and Sam, a married couple locked in a vicious cycle of alcoholism, recrimination, and loathing.  The reasons for their mutual hatred, rage that verges on folie a deux is never established and, indeed, remains somewhat enigmatic since they are an attractive couple and seem intellectually well-matched.  On the simplest level, I suppose that they would do better if they consumed less hard alcohol -- everyone swills gin, brandy, and bourbon. Albee's play, and the film based on it, preserves classical unities -- it takes place between two am and dawn during a single night and plays out in a single location, the home that Martha and Sam share.  (Nichols has opened the play up a bit by staging a scene at a local road-house unconvincingly open for business at 3:00 am.  This addition to the play allows the characters to drive drunk and provides a basis for a lascivious juke-joint dance involving Liz Taylor and George Segal.)  The film's casting is precise and perfect:  Taylor and Burton, who were famously troubled as a couple in real life, provide charisma, terror and pity as the doomed Martha and Sam, figures whose lust and rage and violent antipathy seem like something out of a Greek tragedy -- they are like gods impersonating mere mortals:  nothing can make Liz Taylor look unattractive, even as she sneers and whines and chows down on a drumstick of chicken (which she bites a couple of times and contemptuously tosses aside in her filthy fridge); similarly, no matter how much Burton squints and allows Nichols' savage, analytical lighting to rake across his acne scars, the man remains a great actor, indeed, a great Shakespearian actor with voice and intonation to prove it.  Burton and Taylor bring the inflections of both classical tragedy and Hollywood legend to the film and their sheer star-power can't be eclipsed and accounts for much of the film's emotional force.  Sandy Dennis and George Segal are both irritatingly shallow and callow in comparison to the volcanic eruptions staged by Taylor and Burton -- and this is, also, precisely the effect required by the film.  The young couple make the mistake of visiting Sam and Martha after a drunken faculty party.  Sam and Martha recognize that unless they can entice the young, and innocent (and also troubled) couple into their spectacular sado-masochistic games, they will have no one to torment but one another, certainly a stale pleasure for them by this time.  And so Sam and Martha contrive to keep the young folks on hand as spectators and, sometimes, participants in their dance of death.  The stages of this passion are named after party-games:  Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, Hump the Hostess, and, then, a final nameless bit of theater that involves a fiction contrived between Sam and Martha, the notion that their fruitless and savage union has somehow resulted in a child, a beautiful son.  The first three stages of the Cross, as it were -- host-humiliation, get the guests, and hostess-humping -- are played out with convincing fury.  On occasion, the characters end up strangling one another in cartoonish, but alarming scenes, that look a little like Homer administering parental discipline to Bart Simpson.  The film's denouement, involving Burton's verbal execution of a fictional son that he and Martha have invented, is unpersuasive and a serious flaw in the both the play and film.  By this time in the morning, after the heroic consumption of booze shown in the film, no one would be able to speak as eloquently and, indeed, with such majestic intonations as the two movie stars.  I can accept this with a willing suspension of disbelief but have greater difficulty with the entire conceit.  Albee, and Nichols start the film on a level of frenzy and rage that would be the culmination of most movies -- there is no "slow-burn" here.  Burton and Taylor leave the party in the film's first shot and warily cross a quadrangle, walking with the wide, rolling gait of punch-drunk fighters, somehow both together but, also, desperately apart.  In their home, Taylor immediately begins to harangue Burton and they start clawing at one another.  The film sounds a single note over and over again and so there is really no way out of it, no exit to the characters'infernal dilemma.  Albee ramps up the antagonism, but can only go so far -- after Segal cuckolds Burton with Taylor, only to be dismissed by her as a sexual "flop" and "house-boy," there's really nowhere else for the film to go.  Indeed, one longs for a little physical violence as a respite from the remorseless emotional carnage.  So Albee has to come up with something even more disturbing, hence, the invention of the imaginary son and his murder by Burton. But none of this makes any sense and so, to use Martha's expression, the film and the play "flops" at its end.  But the movie is essential viewing.  If you haven't seen this picture, you owe it to yourself to take a look.  A lot of people associated with this film won Academy Awards -- none is more deserving than Haskell Wexler for his vividly desolate black and white photography. 

The Come-Back (2005)

HBO produced 12 shows in this 2005 series starring Lisa Kudrow.   The series is available On-Demand, revived to complement the ongoing 2014 HBO series of the same name and format.  Both programs are exceptional and absurdly addictive.  Fame and celebrity are subjects of importance in their own right.  It seems that there have always been beautiful people famous for being famous -- the Kardashians occupy this niche of ineffable, inexplicable celebrity today.  When I was a child, I recall people like Bennett Cerf, Orson Bean, and Kitty Carlisle who appeared on game shows and were, seemingly, famous merely for being famous.  And, perhaps, you recall Pia Zadora, a habitué of late night talk shows, and, later, the unfortunate and grotesque Anna Nicole Smith.  These people represent celebrity in its purest form, celebrity as a matter of publicity without anything really to publicize, the idea of celebrity as a Ding-an-sich.  It is difficult to understand the fascination of this subject -- perhaps, it has something to do with the ancient Greek concept of "Thumos" -- that is, "spiritedness" and the desire that each of us has to be recognized for our own individual excellence.  Curiously, even people who are afraid to speak in public, who have stage-fright crossing a crowded room, seem to recognize the impulse toward self-aggrandizement, the drive toward achieving recognition even at the cost of other more humane values.  In essence, I suppose, the notion of celebrity and fame is inextricably connected with the desire that each of us has to be loved.  Most people are satisfied by being loved and admired by a small coterie of people close to them:  celebrities differ in that they have a need to be loved and admired by everyone -- and this impulse is simultaneously grandiose and profoundly pathetic:  it is a tragic impulse because it desires a state of affairs that is mostly inaccessible, certainly unsustainable, and, probably, toxic if achieved.  In The Come-Back, Lisa Kudrow plays a has-been actress named Valerie Cherish who desperately seizes upon the opportunity to perform as a minor character in a vulgar sit-com.  She seems to be happily married, is radiantly beautiful and obviously not only intelligent, but very hard-working -- we see her laboring on the sit-com until two or three at night.  She doesn't have friends, only admirers and it's apparent that her life is meaningless unless she occupies the public-eye.  Although she is monstrously egotistical and self-absorbed, she has many fine qualities as well and inspires slavish devotion in her homosexual hairdresser, Mickey, a remarkable character in his own right -- he is playing a variant of the curmudgeonly but loyal old man, something like a gay version of Walter Brennan bespangled with rings and without the shot-gun.  The 12 episodes aired in 2005 have a satisfying dramatic arc and, indeed, a sort of satirical profundity.  Valerie's nemesis is Pauly G., the writer on her show and a demented, sadistic heroin addict.  Pauly's hatred for Valerie inspires him to construct as many ways to humiliate and insult her as possible in the context of the lame sit-com that he is writing with his partner -- the two men are Tv stars in their own right having earned an Emmy for an episode of The Simpson's that they co-wrote.  Pauly is a character like Iago -- he embodies motiveless malignancy; certainly, his loathing for Valerie goes beyond all reasonable bounds and is inexplicable.  But great art always has an irrational core and Pauly G's hatred for Valerie has a metaphysical dimension.  Kudrow's performance is impeccable:  she is annoying, chipper, pert, witty, and generous but periodically the mask slips and we see that she is panicked about her age and on the verge of some sort of break-down.  We discover that she suffered from scoliosis as a child, was humiliated by her peers, and, now, compensates by basking in adulation of the public.  Pauly G. makes her wear unflattering costumes, climaxing with a routine in which Valerie has to fall down repeatedly, risking injury to her back and dressed in a giant and hideous cupcake suit.  The sequence is a reprise of a famous moment in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd, a scene in which Cecil B. DeMille praises the aging and hysterical prima donna played by Gloria Swanson for her courage in performing painful slapstick routines thirty years earlier when she was a Mack Sennett bathing beauty.  Valerie throws herself at the floor with desperate abandon, apparently willing to savage herself to get a laugh.  When Pauly G. insults her she punches him on-camera (a reality TV show is filming her every move) with horrible and grotesque results -- he vomits and, then, she vomits.  This seems to be the ultimate humiliation and when the incident is broadcast as part of Valerie's reality show, and cut in a way to make her look foolish and vain and cruel, she is horrified.  But, of course, the public is astonished and thrilled.  The reality TV show is a  hit and Valerie is invited back on The Tonight Show, even allowed to smoke in the Green Room.  Like Anna Nicole Smith or the Kardashians, she has become famous once more, and, even, it seems beloved by making a complete fool of herself.  The show's ending is simultaneously happy and horrifying.  Ultimately, celebrities are people that we love because we despise them.