The Current State of Mind

For the past few months, I've found writing about movies a difficult proposition. Only one film, Sion Sono's brilliant Himizu, has truly captured my head and heart; the rest -- and I'm talking The Dark Night Returns, The Campaign, Lawless, The Expendables 2,  The Master, and Samsara -- have fallen short.

Is good cinema in decline, or have I become jaded after hitting close to 5000 movies seen (!)?

I'm afraid I can't answer that one.

I'm looking at X-rated cinema with different glasses, too.

For the first time in decades, explicit depictions of sex are boring me to tears. In the past, I'd pick up special editions of Golden Age porn flicks like Inside Annie Sprinkle as soon as they hit the stands. Have I put money down for the same company's  The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann? Not yet. Does the upcoming restoration of Chuck Vincent's Roommates and Misty Beethoven excite me? Somewhat. And I'll pick it up eventually. But the thrill has diminished.

Then there's my recent reaction to another type of porn

My face hit the pavement two years ago when a good friend introduced me to a series of really harsh web porn segments going under titles like Facial Abuse, Deface Her Face, etc. I've always been curious to see everything I can get my hands on as a type of tolerance test, but these vids just depressed me. They depressed me even more than usual. I expose myself to a lot of traumatic material, and I never know how I'll react to it, but these vids made me sad for the "performers" who are paid probably next to nothing by asshole porn producers who get off on debasing these girls.

Yes, the girls are getting paid and are signing release forms, so I'm not saying that anything illegal is happening, although that could be debated, but I am saying I don't find it titillating or engaging to watch a bullying asshole belittle, verbally insult, and ruin a young woman's day (or month, or year) under the cover of a "professional job".  As a human being, I find it hard to watch such harsh treatment of fellow human beings. This stuff isn't "acting" -- it's mean-spirited reality.

I don't think most porn is debasing. The majority of it is pretty vanilla with little actual "abuse" content. The depressing part was seeing cute young ladies "abused" with no thought to their pleasure at all. These are not roughies like Forced Entry, Hot Night in the City, or Weekend Fantasy -- they're just cheap vids shot in a room with crappy production values, a single camera, and a single male hurling abuse, while having his ugly penis sucked by a crying girl.

What bothers me most about porn of the face-fucking variety is its totally one-sided construction. And most of the guys in these videos come across as bullying assholes, which they clearly are, and I never get any sense that they actually like women. Remember the late Jamie Gillis? He made some harsh movies, and many of them involved rape scenarios and brutal games. But one never felt that Jamie actually disliked the women. On the contrary, he was deeply into these women, and the scenarios always came across as even-handed, even when one partner was dominant and the other was submissive.

Yes, there's a market for this stuff, but that doesn't mean it's not depressing to watch, especially if you view sex as the most fun when its reciprocal or at least "controlled" by both parties.

The one thing I've never liked about porn of any kind is the emphasis on blow jobs. I hate porn blow jobs. I don't want to watch some guy's penis being sucked in a big close-up. I also don't want to see a close-up of another man's hairy balls swinging as he saws in and out of a lass's insides. I prefer the emphasis being on the women. That's probably why lesbian porn appeals to men. It's totally female-focused. We see the female body without some guy's ass crack obscuring the view.

Personally, I love seeing women pleasing other women with their tongues. It's super-intimate and the women usually love it if it's done right. For me, at least, it pushes the right buttons. I have no trouble deriving vicarious pleasure from the act of one woman loving another.

My current blah attitude to porn has a lot to do with the lack of true affection on screen. I want to see people who are really, really into each other. When a guy is hot for a gal, there are no limits, no boundaries, no excuses. That's true desire, true lust, true passion. How many current porno flicks reflect that? How often are deviancy and fun mixed together? How often is the passion out of control? Not often.

The Facial Abuse flicks are the opposite of passion for me. They're mean spirited. They're about hurting people. About dominating vulnerable women without her express co-operation or "permission". They're not even bad Sado-Masochism. They're just ugly and monotonous.

Even Max Hardcore had more style, game, and humor than these guys.

As my tolerance for seriously one-sided hard porn diminishes, my affection for classic porno novel covers, extreme art, guro, and Japanese erotica intensifies.

Why?

Context. And it's all in the imagination.

Perhaps I'm going full circle.

How about you?

Pulpy Porn Flies Again

Having recently suffered through a slew of disappointing cinematic experiences, which I will discuss in the next post, I feel it's time to resurrect the ever-reliable pulpy porn paperback covers because nothing satisfies like these do.

At a time when I've become rather bored with explicit pornography, these take us back to a time when sex was fun, art suggested everything but showed very little, and pleasure could be found in reading, not just looking.

A shame that this era has past.

What's replaced it hasn't made for happier humans.

The Saddest Labyrinth of Grim Life

 

Jun Hayami's  Beauty Labyrinth of Razors has been somewhat of an untouchable, Holy Grail publication for me. It is said that Creation Books released a version of it limited to 69 copies, but I've been unable to acquire it because I refuse to pay the current eBay asking price of $400. My primary objection to handing over four hundred bucks is a story that the work is partially censored for "highly objectionable content". Creation Books has been sheepish about all aspects of the book's release, so the truth of their edition remains elusive.

 

Fortunately, thanks to the amazing akatako.net, I've finally acquired the original, totally uncut Japanese edition of the book.

Expecting unbridled extremity, I was a little disappointed in the content, but now that I've perused it several times, looking for clues to its infamy, I can confidently say that it is one of the saddest, darkest, most wretched tomes of true horror I've seen in many a blue moon.

 

It is a collection of close to a dozen tales of heinous behavior directed mostly towards women. Men are depicted as lecherous, foul beasts, and Hayami's world view is bleak and anxiety-ridden. Although the women suffer terribly, the men often end up as crushed, gaping shells of viscera.

Some of the art is detailed and some of it is spare and simple. Various pieces feel like they've been hijacked from Panorama of Hell, Hideshi Hino's earth-shattering last word on grim.

If you've already exposed yourself -- God help you! -- to Japan's Guro genre, some of the content of Razors will not be unfamiliar. Although artists such as Waita Uziga, Horihone Saizou, Kaneyama Shim, and Shintaro Kago have produced equally graphic, incendiary content, few of their works have bled from the soul as furiously as this one (with the exception of the same artist's Maggot Hole, An Ugly Daughter Like Me, and Hentai Shounen.

 

Sometimes we don't understand why we take the journey, but we are mindful of the need to at least consider what represents a destination.

Not a manga or even Japanese, Joseph Scott Morgan's Blood Beneath My Feet is a fine companion piece to Razors. 

Exploring mortality from a coroner's cold perspective, it finds literary salvation in steaming human fluids and splattered DNA.

Morgan writes with the direct poetry of Jim Thompson and the candor of Selby Jr. and Bukowski.

RIP, Tony Scott

Film director and producer Tony Scott stepped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, California yesterday at noon. His body was fished from the mud beneath three hours later.

His death stunned me. Only last week, I watched and listened to his commentary on Unstoppable, his last released film. It left me with the usual impression that Mr. Scott loved his work and brought the best out of people. In all his behind-the-scenes materials, Scott always came off as jovial and wise and forthcoming.

I wasn't a huge fan of his bigger hits like Top Gun, but I loved many of his films including True Romance (his best, in my opinion), Revenge, and The Hunger. Man on Fire had great pulp elements, too.

Seems he may have had inoperable brain cancer. He left behind two sons and a wife. There has been some on-line criticism of his decision to take his own life. People should consider that no man can walk in another man's shoes. What Mr. Scott did was his decision only, and he's entitled to that. Whatever was plaguing him is plaguing him no more.

Although some of the man's films suffered from style over substance syndrome (I'm looking at you, Domino), Scott was a master craftsman, and, as I've mentioned on this blog before, he managed to bring a great deal of pulp perversion and subversion to Hollywood pedigree films.

After watching any one of his works, I always felt that he gave each project 100% effort. Like many other filmmakers who have toiled in the Hollywood trenches for decades, Scott's work was not showing signs of lethargy. He clearly maintained the energy of his young, artistic self.

Ironically, the bridge he jumped off is the same bridge that William Peterson threw himself off of in William Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA. Peterson survived, because his action is revealed to be a bungee jump. Mr. Scott's action was a permanent one.

I visited the bridge and drove across it early this morning. It was an eerie but important act for me. I'll miss this guy. So will many others, I'm sure.

RIP, Tony.

The Dark Brilliance of Senno Naiff

The work of Japanese manga/guro artist Senno Naiff exceeds the exceptional.

These scans, taken from Shoujou Pandora and Sister only hint at the darkness to be found in his work.

Artists like Naiff, Junji Ito, and Horihone Saizoua occupy a rarified plateau in the world of dark and  intensely troubling art.

Explorations of their work always bring surprises, so please take the plunge.

Hideshi Hino's work surely influenced Naiff. This illustration bears Hino's hallmarks.

Ultimately, Naiff reworks his influences and produces work so terribly unique like this.

Island Orgasms on BluRay

 Merian C. Cooper, the King Kong producer, needed another picture while Kong was enduring rewrites, and animation was being finalized by Willis O'Brien. They bought the rights to Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game (one of the earliest 'hunting humans' concepts on literary record) and shot it on Kong's sets, used Kong's leading lady, Fay Wray, and even completed filming before Kong.

The film, a true treasure, has been remade several times, and it's inspired a torrent of other films right up to the recent Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, its icky, bland cousin.

Despite its now much-abused concept, it still stands as a masterpiece to me, a tale of grand adventure, jaw-dropping discoveries, and exotic, forbidden bastions. It resembles Ernest B. Schoedsack's Kong (he directed a couple of scenes here, altho the director credited with most of the work was Irving Pichel), but it feels more like Erle C. Kenton's Island of Lost Souls, made the same year (1932). Its style is formal, its sets are lush and evocative, and it layers in a good deal of lurid grotesquerie. Note the severed heads hanging in the trophy room and out in the corridors of the maniacal Zaroff's hideaway.

Plot is straightforward. Sole survivor of a wrecked ship (Joel McCrea) finds himself on an unchartered island that has become a human game reserve for Zaroff (Leslie Banks), a crazed hunter who's gotten bored chasing things on four legs. McCrea, a hunter himself, becomes Zaroff's target after the men differ on principles -- to put it mildly. Wray, the survivor of a previous beaching on the island, rides shotgun with McCrea as he creates elaborate traps for Zaroff and ducks his sharp arrows.

 Flicker Alley's Blu-Ray of The Most Dangerous Game is a must for any cinephile's collection, and a double-must for those who choose to combine vicarious island intrigue with suspense cinema. The transfer is probably the best we'll ever get, and though it's slightly below Criterion standards, the difference is marginal, so Flicker Alley should raise a glass of Fosters and make a toast to a job well done.  Watching this on a big TV blew me back against the cushions of my sofa. Sound is very crisp, there's little evidence of electronic image tinkering, and the accompanying liner notes are awash with terrific tidbits such as: the film cost $150K.

 These past few years have been a a golden era for restorations with classics such as Kong, The Island of Lost Souls, and The Most Dangerous Game arriving on Blu-Ray. My cup of gratitude runneth over.

Not inconsequential is the second feature included on a separate BR disk in this package. It is the 1928 Gow, The Head Hunter, an early example of 'mondo' cinema that arrived in picture palaces a few years after Nanook of the North and Congorilla. Made by man-of-adventure Edward A. Salisbury, it's a fairly modest look at "primitive cultures", but that didn't stop it from being cleverly exploited for decades to come.

My love of islands and everything they evoke has been well served again this month by this superb BluRay release.

The only other thing that's come within a whistle of the above for its ability to provide sheer pleasure is Mike Dash's extraordinary Batavia's Graveyard, a tome so amazing, so unexpected, and so disturbing, I'm determined to utter nothing of its fearful contents.  

Triangles and Joy

 For the last couple of days, it's been bothering me that my mostly negative review of Oliver Stone's Savages has led the charge on this blog. Such nonsense keeps me awake at night. A little obsessive-compulsive I guess, but that fact doesn't make it any easier to tolerate.

Best to address the issue by posting art from a book I love, have loved, will love forever, Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs. Not only are the words inside completely hypnotic and entirely magical, but this art is the stuff of dreams (and nightmares) for me.

When I was a kid, I dreampt frequently about being chased by a little man with a triangular head. Mr. Triangle never managed to catch me (if he had, I probably wouldn't be writing this!), but he had a tenacity about him that scared me silly, and made me afraid to close my eyes. Most of the time, he was waiting for me in the area of the yard we called the sideway. The sideway, which was beside the house (obviously), was an enclosed space reserved for money-producing hobbies such as collecting empty beer bottles, collecting old newspapers, and stashing black and white pictures of breasts and vaginas (with that hobby I din't make jack) I wouldn't stash them openly up the sideway; I'd slip them under an abandoned lawn mower that my father kept in an asbestos shed. Now and then, the lawn mower would become the focus of my father's tools. Half an hour after that, I'd become the focus of some harsh questions.

 In my dreams, Triangle lurked behind my rows of beer bottles, his oily eyes tracking me as I entered the area with a fresh wheelbarrow full of bottles. Usually, he wouldn't wait for me to stack them. Nope, the cunt would jump out and take after me like a locomotive. I'd scramble for the fence and swing myself over it, his face and its bad breath just inches from my heels. The chase would take up most of my night's sleep, or so it seemed, and when I'd finally snap awake, I'd be elated to discover that I was dreaming.

The ice cream-eating Mr. Triangle on the cover of the Ace edition of Carroll's novel doesn't look like he'd come after me. He looks friendly. Hell, I'd love to eat an ice cream with him.

If you haven't read the book, I envy you your first time.

 Another fantastic read is Marcel Pagnol's My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle. Both were made into beautiful movies, and both capture growing up at a particular time in a very particular place. Pagnol's childhood was no Angela's Ashes, so don't expect beatings, Catholic guilt, poverty, and brutal father figures. But do expect a superb tome that captures the magic of childhood adventure, the special gift we call friendship, and the disappointment of discovering that those you most admire are human just like you.

Read the books, see the movies, or see the movies, read the books. You can't go wrong with these exceptional poems to joy. Joy doesn't always live long, but when we experience it, we're grateful it stopped by.  

Oliver Stone's SAVAGES

 Oliver Stone used to make tight, economical, sharply written films such as Salvador, Talk Radio, and Wall Street; they're my favorites of his. I enjoyed JFK, Platoon, and Natural Born Killers, too, but Salvador and Talk Radio remain, for me, his most powerful, fat-free films. They had something relevant to say about the soul, about the enemies within ourselves.

His newie, Savages, set in Laguna Beach (where I reside for most of the year), is a tale about two successful dope dealers, the woman they both love, and a Mexican cartel that threatens to ruin their piece of paradise. Trailers sell the film as a return to previous form for Stone, impactful, fresh, and rife with simmering surface detail. For the most part, they lie. The surface detail is there, though, and that's about it.

Despite Stone's insistence on playing with looks (hot, cold, black and white) and fabricating a 60's aesthetic in a Laguna that still exists if you squint a lot, the source material (from a novel) feels much too familiar to engage one's curiosity. Breaking Bad has been doing this stuff for four seasons, and tonight it will do it again for a fifth. Stone's biggest miscalculation with Savages is its protagonists: They're dull and cliched. One is a fella who, while not supervising marijuana crops, builds schools for the poor in foreign lands. His partner is a guy who isn't afraid to pull a gun to solve a problem. The girl they both love is a mentally delayed flower child who's a crashing bore with a hot body for two. When it seems that the three may have to leave the country in a hurry, her idea of saying goodbye to California is going shopping. Granted, this may be an authentic portrait of a certain type of Californian female, but do we have to witness such vapidity? Aren't characters supposed to be compelling?  Even worse, the bitch narrates, and what you'd expect from someone whose underworked brain has turned to mush is what you get. It's nausea-inducing.

 It's hard to imagine anybody concluding that the script for this should have millions of dollars thrown at it. The situations are stock, the resolution is typical, and the taste it leaves in your mouth will be familiar to anyone who's suffered through recent Stone efforts such as Any Given Sunday, World Trade Center, Alexander, and the hideous Wall Street sequel.  

For gore fans, there's a recreation (without the flesh-tearing) of the video that did the rounds a year ago of two Mexican drug couriers having their heads shaved off with a chainsaw. Other than that, Savages already exists as pieces of your video collection. Best to rent Breaking Bad, a show that's achieved greatness with  characters we give more than two shits about; even better, we're fascinated by their human journey, and human traits we recognize in ourselves.

I recognized people I once met but would never want to meet again in Savages. That's not a good thing.

As the far superior Cannibal Holocaust once asked its audience, this film also asks: Who are the real savages? In this case, who cares! 

Very Special People (I Mean It!)

Let's can it with the "everybody's special" bullshit. It's patronizing and nauseating. SPECIAL once signified something extraordinary that distinguished one thing from another. If you had one leg, but managed to hop your way around, you were special. If you ate glass instead of hamburgers, you were special. And if you were born looking totally hideous and eating through your ear, that made you special. Winning a race doesn't make you special. Neither does existing. If you figure out a way to exist forever, that'll make you special. Try it.

Frederick Drimmer, the author of Very Special People, knows a thing or two about special people, and wrote a very fine book about them. It's my kind of book, and perhaps your kind of book, too. I know a person or three who will dig it as much I did.

And as I am presently preparing a feature film, Circus of Dread, on this very subject starring Bill Oberst and Domiziano Arcangeli, my interest and fascination level is off the bloody meter.

What makes this book about human oddities unique is its straightforward focus on the day-to-day lives of over a hundred extraordinary human beings such as Kobelkoff: The Human Trunk, Carl Unthan: The Armless Fiddler, The Two-Headed Tocci Brothers, Swan and Bates: Two Giants in Love, Zip and Other Pinheads, General Tomb Thumb, Tommy Jacobsen: The Armlessd Pianist, and Robert Wadlow: The Alton Giant.

Writer Drimmer first saw folks of this persuasion in the circus, and sourced documents and letters from all over the world before beginning work on this love letter to being different and "special".

Today, extraordinary people like these do exist, but they are more likely to turn up on youtube or theync.com than your local midway. Unfortunate, really. The recent story of Indonesia's smoking baby provided some oldtime thrills, although a follow-up piece on the lad by the 'Vanguard' documentary program (highly recommended series, by the way) reported that he's quit smoking and has returned to childhood. He's still a weighty blighter, but his days of chain smoking are behind him.

Let's be under no illusion that, if the old freak show were still in operation, there'd be no freaks to fill it. On the contrary, human birth defects are alive and well, and if you factor in the damage that big business is doing to native environments (Chevron's polluting of Ecuadorian rain forests, for example), many generations of birth defects are assured.

Recently, my brother sent me a link to a gallery of photos of people suffering from "Treacher Collins", a syndrome that creates a distinct appearance. Notable characteristics are an underdeveloped jaw, missing cheekbones, eyes slanted downwards, and ears not properly formed or missing.

It is the Google image gallery that has replaced the circus and the sideshow as a showcase for exotic human beings who are but only a step away from those who are not so special.

In Very Special People - The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities, Frederick Dimmer opens with a terrific quote from William Lindsay Gresham:

"On their faces was a strangely luminous smile.
I know now what it indicates --
they had met tragedy and fought it to a standstill;
they had taken a handicap
and turned it inside out,
making it work for them;
with courage and patience
they had built themselves a life."