Movies: His son killed Hitler.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact.

Sheldon Roth is the father of director and actor Eli Roth. Over at Patheos, an online religious journal, Roth has an interesting post about what it felt like to see his son assassinate Adolf Hitler in the spelling-challenged film Inglourious Basterds.

From the post:

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, Inglourious Basterds. I watched my son, in his character of "The Bear Jew," machine-gun the Fuhrer's face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief, and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

And later:

It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one's life. Feelings are just as much reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real -- they cannot be dismissed because the story is "historically inaccurate."

Quentin Tarantino understood that it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded, and dies a forgotten work. So, where do Inglourious Basterds and my reactions fit into this picture?

At Passover we read of the sages who urge us to tell the tale of the Exodus tirelessly -- one cannot say enough to describe that devastation in the lives of the Hebrews. However, time has laid dust on the tongue's capacity to be fluent in those events. How historically accurate is the story most Jews repeat not once, but twice a year, for some of us even four times, every year of our lives? Reciting the plagues of Egypt is quaintly interesting, but watching Eli turn his armed fury on Hitler in a cinematic oven of burning Nazis is awesome and much closer to my own history.

The Holocaust provides anew an endless capacity to relate Jewish history. I am in my 70s, and all my life I have studied the Holocaust. But I am still startled by the unthought-of newness of stories. I cannot hear enough; it never ends. Inglourious Basterds partakes of the Passover injunction to tell our story. The feelings evoked while watching this film contain our history -- personal and group. The film, though not "factual," represents a psychological reality. This psychological reality is a fact, not empty fantasy. Uncannily, unbidden, a gift-giver, Eli was acting out my dreams, dreams based on my life -- through a film.

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Movies: "A human volcano of unpredictable terror!"

I suspect The Sadist, the James Landis helmed 1963 cheapie that features a trio stranded travelers in the clutches of two teenaged psychopaths, is actually more interesting now that it was when it was first released. Made to cash in on Psycho fueled mania for crazed killers, on it's release, the flick must have simply looked like another kooks on a rampage flick. Now, from a distance of more than 30 years, The Sadist stands out far more clearly as stumbling, but still strangely prophetic step down a path to a more purely American horror cinema: a cinematic vision of fear that stripped away the last vestiges of the European Gothic mode that dominated the imaginations of American horror filmmakers until the twilight of the 20th Century and rooted itself in the features of our distinct landscape.

In this respect, Psycho is a great liminal film. Hitchcock's masterpiece has one foot in new paradigm, with its distinctly modern landscapes of cities, empty highways, and seedy motels. It's a landscape of anonymous transience that mirrors the inner rootlessness of the film's protags and victims. But, true to his own Euro roots, Hitchcock never fully shook off the Gothic trappings that, for centuries, defined European horror. The film features a rotting family manse on the hill, a sickly Victorian vision of sexuality that is at once titillated and morally repulsed by deviancy, suggestions of family sins, and fluid sense of identity as a symptom of a world order in chaos. One can even read into the geography of the Bates homestead and business Hitchcock's judgment as to the value of the two paradigms: The Gothic mansion towers over the brutally characterless motel. Psycho belongs, along with American Notes for General Circulation and Lolita, in that genre of works by Europeans both in fascinated and sickened by the vibrant, uncultured barbarism of the Americans. In Hitch's case, he has the ghosts of the old world shred the avatars of the new. He even buries the poor saps in that most American of symbols: Norman puts the corpses in the trunk of a car. Then the car sinks in a swamp. A bunch of corpses in a car, sinking in a cesspool. There are few more pointed satires of American life than Psycho.

Many of the flicks that followed kept that weird split in their genetic make-up, though one imagines that American filmmakers viewed more as a formal and it lacked, for them, Hitchcock's energetic, visceral punch. Coppola's Dementia 13 features a return to an ancestral castle home as a major plot point. William Castle set his Homicidal in a rotting family mansion and tangled the plot up in an inheritance issue. Ancestral blood guilt, one of the pillars of Gothic horror, rears its head again in Taste of Fear, which features a young woman returning to her father's estate. It wasn't until The Sadist and Violent Midnight, the former beating the latter to the theater by just a month, that filmmakers injected a strain of American youth culture into their flicks and inoculated them against the influence. And of those two films, Midnight's visual language borrows so strongly from Psycho that it near fully breaks free from its influence. In contrast, The Sadist seems oddly fresh, both narratively and visually, even today.

The logline is spare and simple: Three travelers ended up stranded at decaying gas station in the California desert and find them selves at the mercy of a pair of Strakweather-inspired teen psychopaths. Watching it now, we can see the flick hit all the necessary marks: the travelers search the place, missing all the signs of trouble that the viewer catches; shots from the stalking killers' POV, including a gun hand shot that strangely presages the standard POV of first-person shooter games; police officers who represent the victims' best chance at freedom, but who turn out to be little more than killer fodder; and a final girl who, in her flight, stumbles across the killers' previous handiwork and is, Chain Saw Massacre-style, saved by a deus ex machina when the film gets fatigued by its own brutality. Oddly, its the very familiarity of these tropes that give them punch here. You don't expect to see this worn pattern played out against the backdrop of the early 1960s. Our male travelers (headed to a baseball game instead of rock concert or summer camp) are in white shirts and skinny ties. Their female companion wears dress and has her hair done-up. They're adult presences that fool you into believing that a certain moral order will prevail. But, as the grim pattern slowly falls into place, you recognize these three as doomed emissaries from a gentler time.

Visually, the film is noteworthy for its total rejection of the lingering Gothicism present in so many of its contemporaries. Gone are the shadow-drenched castles and mansions. The Sadist is set entirely in a sun-blasted service station and wrecking yard. Gone are the themes of blood guilt and family secrets, the backstories of the killers and the victims are almost entirely irrelevant: the film plays out their random, violent encounter in near real-time. The soundtrack mixes jazzy pop and hillbilly country music, often from diagetic sources. Landis's minimal approach was, no doubt, dictated by a nearly non-existent budget, but within those limitations, Landis found a stark and unrelenting style that matches the harsh simplicity of the story.

Though, already, I'm probably over-selling this thing. There's a giggle inducing intro of psychobabble. The acting is often wooden, sometimes to the point of comedy (though, on occasion, the inert face of the young female killer, the product of her inability to act, seems like the perfect expression of amoral soullessness). I personally enjoyed the over-the-top performance of Arch Hall Jr. as the male psycho; but he really chews the hell of what scenery there is and I expect viewers' milage will vary greatly. The pacing in the early stages of the flick drags some. Also, the flick's only available on pretty gnarly transfer, so viewers will have to put up with odd, random visual and audio artifacts throughout the film.

The Sadist would be worthy of recommendation if only for its status as a curious ancestor of the slasher cinema and torture porn that would follow decades later. Happily, it is much more than that. It's a snapshot of an under-discussed moment in American horror cinema, the transition to wholly native sources of fright. It's the moment cinema shook off the ghosts and specters of Europe, the contrived monsters of the mad science lab, and fanciful invaders from beyond, and instead took a long, hard-boiled look into the madness that Jim Thompson said was the birthright of all the pure products of America.

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R.I.P.: These are the words that I manifest.

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Movies: Just wild about Harry(hausen).

The Telegraph has a charming profile of stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen.

From the article:

Ray Harryhausen, the greatest stop-motion animator in the world, met the writer Ray Bradbury when they were both at high school in Fifties Los Angeles. Every Thursday they would see each other at Clifton's Cafeteria, a kitchily exotic spot where the weekly meeting of the Science Fiction League took place. The boys would dream about rockets reaching the Moon or Mars, or of men living on space platforms, leapfrogging their way across the galaxy.

The two Rays were also crazy about the prehistoric past. One day they made a pact that Bradbury remembered in a speech decades later. "We said: 'We're going to grow old but never grow up'," Bradbury said. ''We’re going to stay 18 years old and we’re going to love dinosaurs forever.'"

Sadly, Harryhausen thinks modern effects can get the hell off of his lawn:

Harryhausen's films were storyboarded to a neurotic degree. "We usually took six months to lay our pictures out, so there would be a minimum of waste," he says. "I made 400 little sketches which were published in the script." Understandably, he's dismissive of the extravagance of modern directors. "They don’t seem to care today," he says. "They spend $200 million on pictures, which is just pathetic! It's a waste."

So has he been to see Avatar, the most expensive film ever made? "No, I haven't. Films meant everything to me at a certain age, but as you get older you lose some of that drive." What about something that touches him more personally – the 3D remake of Clash of the Titans? "I haven't been involved with it at all. I was surprised when I heard about it, because I thought we'd made the definitive version!"

Harryhausen made some experiments in 3D himself in the early Fifites, but swiftly realised that it would make the already tortuous process of animating figures completely unbearable. Today, he doesn't find the idea of 3D particularly exciting. "It's another means of entertaining. If somebody can work a yo-yo and make people interested in it – that’s entertainment!"

Worth the quick read.

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Music: An American Werewolf in America.

I'm not hip enough to the symbolic economies that regulate the balkanization of popular music to actually know, but I'm going to theorize that every cultural movement instantly produces a mirror image to counter it. Unlike a physical shift, these opposite forces are rarely equal. Case in point: The rise of post-sincere corporate pop, epitomized by figures like Lady Gaga, to something like a national style has, oddly, coincided with the resurgence hardcore punk. The latter's sudden shot in the arm has hardly raised it to the level of significance of the former. It's hard to imagine, no matter how far this trend might go, that sponsors will ever scramble to pony up cash for product placements in a ten-minute short film featuring Toronto's Fucked Up. (Whereas LG's "scandalous" video features three direct pay-to-play placements and at least two placements that are the result of corporate connections between her label and other corporate entities.) Still, this unexpected boom in hardcore sounds might be the best thing Gaga LLC did for music.

Today's twin blast of of hardcore comes from the All American Werewolves, a nicely ragged unit from Lexington, Kentucky. The first tune is "The Devil Rolls On;" the second is "Alligator." Neither feature autotuned vocals or conspicuous Miracle Whip placements.

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Movies: "Are you the guy who keeps calling?"

I should begin this review by stating that D-War, the '07 CGI-heavy action fantasy Korean import had a major strike against before I clicked the "Watch Instantly" button. Prior to that, it was implicated, through no fault of its own, with one of the least pleasing video shop customers I ever had the joy of encountering.

I crossed paths with this dude may nearly three years ago at the my neighborhood video shop. Before he lumbered in, there were three folks in the shop. I'll set the scene.

The clerk is thin. Maybe in her late twenties. She's got dark hair – almost black – and large brown eyes. Pale skin. She always wears purple. It isn't something you'd notice on your first trip, because her clothes are always very nice and you don't get the sense she would wear something ugly just because it was her signature color. Still, after a couple of trips, that's what she does. I've never asked her about it. Once you do realize it, the odd fact can't be ignored and it gives you the sense that she's got some kind of uniform. It contrasts with the otherwise casual atmosphere of the place. This curious formality combines with her quiet manner and always seemingly alert eyes to give her this unshakable aura of slumming it. She should be behind the reception desk of a fashion magazine, or discussing Stoppard with her younger sister over brunch at Five Points, or in some sort of situation where she could say, without a hint of irony, "You ride with such audacity, Miss Tennent."

But no. She's not being told "Darling, Karl never has to wait" or picking at tea-smoked trout with orange, red onion, frisee, mint and lemon pressed olive oil while her sister discusses the passions of Vissarion Belinsky or riding with the Margot Asquith. Instead, she's here, waiting for you to decide whether you feel more like watching Good Luck Chuck or revisiting Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

We'll call her the Duchess.

I hasten to add that the Duchess is never anything but polite. She never comments on the obvious lameness of your selections or acts as if you're bothering simply by being there. She's quite nice and polite. The feelings of inferiority are the product of something pre-behavioral. She's got class and you don't. And you're more aware of this than she is.

I've realized that I actually upmarket my choices when the Duchess is chief officer on deck. My familiarity with modern Norwegian cinema is almost entirely due to the fact I don't want to be the recipient of the tolerant and graceful pity shown people who drop Torque on the Duchess's counter.

Anyway, that's the Duchess.

The other guy, Stawberry, is searching the shelves. He wears a light brown winter coat and an olive drab jeep cap.

I don't know him.

And me, you know me.

So around 8:00, this couple walks in. The man's big – in all directions. He's got a shaved head, and his pear shaped body is constrained by a pair of jeans and a black leather jacket covered in punk band patches. He looks like he just busted out of an anarchist fat camp.

The woman who is with him is slightly less plump, but she makes up for it by wearing the clothing of her pre-teen cousin. The faux valor jogging suit and black-and-pink-with-sparkles Baby Phat winter coat strain and cut into her ample form, giving her the shape of a helium balloon on its last legs, when touches leave irregular dents and lines across its surface.

"Hey," says the man in a loud voice that fills every corner off the rental joint. "You guys got that dragon movie?"

"Are you the guy who keeps calling?" asks the Duchess.

He walks past her without answering and goes to the new release shelf. "Shit. Where's the dragon movie?"

"It's checked out. And late. Like I said on the phone. Many times."

"What's wrong with the guy?"

"He's usually very good about due dates."

"Well he's not now. Can I call him?"

"No."

"'Cause I'll be like, 'Man, what's up with the dragon movie, bitch? I'm trying to see it, man.'"

"Sorry."

"Man," he says dejected.

"We don't need a movie," says his female companion. Her voice is nasal and flat, and she pushes her words through what sounds like a deep reservoir of mucus in her throat. It sounds like somebody trying to plow a vat of Vaseline with an electric razor.

"What else is new - that's good?" The man adds the last bit with a touch of wise bitterness, as if he wants her to be well aware that he knows a tsunami of DVD are "new" simply by accident of time-space, but he is demanding something that lives up to the aesthetic standards of the dragon movie. You won't be able to shovel any crap off onto him, Duchess.

The Duchess, not willing to be implicated in this man's selections, gestures to the new release shelves and says, "Anything labeled new is new."

By this time the Incredible Bulk has been joined by his lumpy lady.

For the next fifteen minutes, the Bulk and Bumpy will alternate between the following three actions:


Thing the first. With her voice like a desperate insect trying to fly out of a pitcher plant, Bumpy will suggest a movie and the Bulk will shoot it down by stating that they've already seen it. He will then try to remind her of the flick by recounting choice details.

"What about this one?" she gargles.


"We've seen that one, remember? It's got the guy and he's got a car. And there was a cop who saw a guy die."


Or . . .


"You remember: the house and the girls like you did this and he goes there and she gets killed later. Remember?"


Or . . . 


"That's the one with screaming 'Daddy! Daddy!' while that guy's chopping up guys in the woods."


Or, most cryptically . . .


"That one's got a face."


That last one makes him start up in this strange braying laugh. His companion starts yelling at him to stop. For several minutes the sounds, like a donkey being tortured with a band saw, fill the shop.


Thing the second. The Bulk is also fond of holding a DVD box high above his head and then shouting to the Duchess, "Have you seen this?" Then he lowers the box again, as if he'd already forgotten what he's held up, then hoist high the box again, and shout out the title.

Whether she answered in the affirmative or negative, he'd ask if it was any good.


"Hey! Have you seen this? . . . um . . . The New Adventures of Old Christine, season 1."


"No, I haven't."


"Is it any good?"


"I couldn't say."


Thing the Third. Occasionally, the Bulk stumbles across a movie so good, so important, so crucial that he just has to have it for his own collection. After determining that he can order movies from the shop, he would simply shout his orders to the Duchess. 


"Holy shit," the Bulk says.


"What?" strangles Bumpy.


"This is Caligula. It's like the greatest movie of all time. It's go that guy who played in Clockwork Orange only this is better cause its got like porn in it."


"You want to watch it?" Bumpy says, her words rising from the muck like the undead Nazis of 1981's Zombie Lake.


"You don't watch this! You've got to have this, to own, for yourself. Hey!"


"Yes," the Duchess, still tolerantly reserved, says.


"Can I order Caligula?"


Apparently he has a two-flick cap because he finds a new movie and then swaps out one of the two films he's just ordered with the new one. It is a slow process involving what seems like thousands of titles. Eventually he manages to narrow it down to National Treasure II and Freddy versus Jason. The latter actually beats out The Big Lebowski which, while quite humorous, lacks the archetypal resonance that FvJ delivers.


"Wow," says Bumpy, congealingly. "You know a lot of movies. How can you remember all these movies?"


"I'm like a cinimaste [rhymes with fin-eh-paste - CRwM], you know? Movies are important."


As is good lighting. Before leaving the store he asks the Duchess if they could also order him a lamp like the one the shop had at the clerk's counter. She says she'll look into it.

Finally, movies ordered and rental selection in hand - The Dark Crystal as it turns out – the Bulk approaches the counter.


"I might get a job here," he says.


"Really. Did you leave a resume?"


"Yes." Pause. "No. But I talked to somebody. You know, I can always use a night gig, right?"


"Was it the owner? Sabine?"


"Is she a big fat chick?"


"No."


"Then it wasn't her. And it was a guy. And I really didn't say anything about it. Not until I get
my resume together, right?"


"Of course."


"Maybe we'll work together."


"Maybe."


As he is turning away from the counter, he notices a small plastic figurine with a bright yellow push button in its base. When he presses it, the figure repeats one of a trio of phrases. I know there are three phrases because he pushes the button seven times before Bumpy gasps, "Let's go."


He pushes two more time after she leaves.


"See you later."


"Goodbye," says the Duchess.

The end.

So I watched D-War fully aware that it was the kind of movie this gentleman was all about.

And I saw nothing to change that grim assessment.

However, because I watched this fully aware of the level of suck I was most likely getting into, I feel it is uncharitable and slightly disingenuous to hassle the flick. So, instead, I'm going to focus on an aspect of the film I actually enjoyed.

About two-thirds of the way through this flick, a giant dragon, a squadron of mini-dragons, and an army of magical knights on lizardish steeds goes up against the U.S. Army. The scene plays out like a particularly nifty cut scene in a sadly unreleased video game.

What I liked about this scene was the hastily assembled military resistance to the magic dragon army is hopelessly outnumbered, but not useless. The film shows that modern military hardware, wielded by competent soldiers, is devastating. Too often, filmmakers assume that big monsters (I'm looking at you Clover) reach some sort of magic size where they simply shrug off the effects of conventional weapons. This ignores the fact that large-scale conventional weapons are capable of obliterating an unbelievable amount of mass. So if your monster has mass, it isn't just shrugging off tank shells and air-to-ground missiles as slight inconveniences. Even if we assume these weapons are mere pin pricks to outsized beasts, with modern rates of fire, we're talking about potentially thousands of pin pricks a second. That's gotta hurt.

It makes what would normally be the perfunctory "it's winning" scene into a genuine fight.

And that's the one good thing I have to say about that.

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Books: Your Twi-hate is strictly amateur hour stuff.

Sure Twi-bashers talk about Twilight, but are they ever going to do something about it? Well, somebody out there is trying: According to the American Library Association, Twilight made 2009's most challenged books list.

Here's the winners:

1. ttyl, ttfn, l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: Nudity, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs

2. “And Tango Makes Three” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: Homosexuality

3. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Anti-Family, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs, Suicide

4. “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee
Reasons: Racism, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

5. Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

6. “Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

7. “My Sister’s Keeper,” by Jodi Picoult
Reasons: Sexism, Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs, Suicide, Violence

8. “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things,” by Carolyn Mackler
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

9. “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

10. “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Nudity, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

Now that's how you hate on something, ladies and gentlemen!

Admittedly, the folks who hate the fact that vampires sparkle and the folks who object because they find the neo-Victorian relationship of Bella and Ed "sexually explicit" probably agree on little else, but the enemy of the enemy is your friend and all that.

On a sidenote: Just listing these titles with the objections made against them, and no other info, makes all of them sound really awesome. I've never had any interest in the work of Jodi Picoult, but "Sexism, Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs, Suicide, Violence" all in one book? Hot damn.

On another sidenote: I wish they'd been more specific with the charge against And Tango Makes Three: "penguin homosexuality".

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