Tag Archives: Jack Nicholson

Three days.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Three days. That’s how many are left in 2010.

That is so wild, right? The end of the science fiction year that wasn’t too science fiction-y, sadly. Or maybe it was and I just wasn’t paying nearly enough attention. Or maybe I’ve just gotten so accustomed to the very pedestrian and incredibly mundane and boringly sexy science fiction-y aspects of my normal life?

from here.

I’m sure it’s something like that. Absolutely. Definitely. Whatever.

Also, this:

from here.

In this year, in this world of internetting and bloggery and social media, I had five very simple goals that I laid out at the start of 2010 and wanted to complete by year’s end. In order of my own personal interest and their importance, they were:

1. Not going to tell you (you’re not ready for this one yet, folks)(and neither am I).

2. Not going to tell you (forthcoming).

3. Not going to tell you (total abysmal failure).

4. Not going to tell you (worked, but was embarrassing and not worth mentioning again).

5. Getting 2,010 tweets in 2010!

The fifth one is the one that I’m going to definitely accomplish. Unless I lose both hands sometime in the next three days. Or lose my phone or computer or both. Or unless an EMP just wipes out all technology in the country/world.

But, well, I just don’t twitter much. And getting 2,010 tweets in 2010 was a silly, frivolous goal that I jokingly threw out on my twitter sometime back in… I don’t know what month, but sometimes those things you only jokingly declare are the ones that stick with you. It was somewhere around the start of the year, I believe, and I think I had less than a thousand tweets then and was probably tweeting an average of four to five tweets a month, roughly.

And eventually I just thought, yeah, I can do this shit, why not? Because it’s stupid? Stupidity has not stopped me from doing anything ever in my life.

Also, this is the 825th post on your friend neighborhood Counterforce. That’s wild. We didn’t make it to 1000 posts this year, but that’s perhaps for the best.  Personally, I’m just shocked that I managed to ramble on for nearly 2,010 tweets. I mean, what a silly declaration. Thinking back upon it, at first I was like this:

And then I was like this:

You understand.

Oh man, how creepy is this photo below?

Right?

Also, New Year’s Eve is almost upon us. Time to celebrate!

Also, this is fog porn:

from here.

And this is the first x-ray picture of a lightning strike:

from here.

Speaking of “science fiction,” the recent Doctor Who Christmas special was fucking wonderful.

So fun and smart and a nice little twist on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol cause, hey, why can’t the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future be time travelers and holograms?

Michael Gambon was brilliant, but ruthlessly mean and joyously funny in places. And while the show did play around with some of it’s own rules towards time travel (and that’s why we have rules about time travel, folks: so they can be broken!), I found the idea of one watching their own past and memories change before their very eyes to be fascinating. Plus, the interesting but slight references to “the silence.” And I had to love the nice little nods to the recent JJ Abrams Star Trek movie with the copious lens flares on display of the crashing starship’s bridge.

Honestly, it was just nice to have Doctor Who back. The trailer for the upcoming season at the end of the special was a nice little tease as far as potential goes. Can it be April already?

Also, I’m worried that this (below) is what women must think of me whenever they see me…

from here.

Sigh. And I’m just trying to be normal and cool and down to earth and approachable. We can’t all be perfect, can we?

from here.

Oh well. Remember this always:

from here.

This is a picture from Tron Legacy…

…which I hear was pretty terrible, but that Olivia Wilde was the best part of. Is it me, or is Olivia Wilde totally the new Angelina Jolie?

I mean that based on a lot of things, like her acting ability, her potential, the type of roles she’s taken in the past, but also based on her seemingly having that same ability that Angelina Jolie has to turn straight girls a little curious.

You know?

This is an abandoned theater in Detroit:

from here.

This is a monolith:

This is some good solid crazy fun rough housing:

And this is some old school adorable chillaxing right here:

The last six months or so on this blog and in my life have been… weird, to say the least. I’d go into more details here, but quite frankly, I don’t want to. I’ll just say that due to illness in my family, my life got a bit… derailed and I’m astonished that I’m seeing the end of this year without having gone totally insane. Or maybe I have already gone totally, stupendously insane and it’s just helping me see the end of this year more clearly? Like 3D glasses? That’s a comforting thought, right?

Anyway, at some point this will all be over and I’ll get back to some kind of semblance of “normal,” whatever that is. Are we still doing that? “Normal?”

Hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll be right back to asking “Who’s your daddy?” in no time flat.

This is what religion looks like:

from here.

And this is my basic worldview in a nutshell:

This is an example of the happy medium between sanity and fear:

This is an example of how Batman is both a master of surprise and also quite probably a huge pervert:

And sadly, no matter what we say or do, Lost is still over and done with:

Oh well. Three days to go. And then…

Fingers crossed about something exciting happening in those next three days (after all, a good deal of people on this planet thought that their magic wizard man came back from the dead in that same amount of time) but not holding my breath. Exciting, but not too exciting. Wow me, thrill me, blow my mind, fuck me over and fuck me up (but in a good way, please), but remember that when the sun comes up, I’ve still got bills to pay and TV shows to catch up with. Three days to go, promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep, and a long journey sprawling ahead of us through mountains upon mountains. This is both the place we made together and the journey we started together and I’m gonna be there with you. And wherever we end up, whatever new definition of home or normal we excavate, when we do we’ll turn to each other and say, “This must be the place!”

Samhain.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Another year, another Halloween.

The inevitable is upon us: the year is almost over.

You find yourself out somewhere, you’ve got a drink in one hand and your cell phone in the other. In your stomach is chocolate and booze. On one side of you is a girl in a leotard with cat ears on and she’s telling you what an asshole her ex is. On your other side is a girl dressed up as sexy Mother Teresa and she’s sleeping with the other girl’s asshole ex. Trick on one side of you, Treat on the other, and your drink is almost empty. It’s getting colder now outside and darker earlier and earlier. It’s time to start self reviewing and battening down the hatches.

via Google today.

Last night I got into a conversation with someone who told me that they hated Halloween. They didn’t see the point of it anymore, they said. I have to say that I wasn’t exactly super enthused about this year’s festivities but in a way, I still feel like Halloween is one of the last pure holidays available to us.

The various Halloween decorations sold to you  leading up to tonight feel more welcome in your home, I feel, than the Christmas ones. And the fact that the Christmas decorations start rolling out in store aisles as early as October now doesn’t make the sentiment that comes with them feel any more genuine or less hollow. But there’s still a kind of joy in those who put up something around their house with the intent of scaring a person or reveling in a bit of annual darkness.

Then there’s the candy. That one’s self evident, I think.

The movies. Halloween movies, or the movies that they play on TV around Halloween or the ones you specifically seek out because of this holiday, they aren’t just seasonal. They’re timeless, in their own special, twisted, beautiful way.

from here.

There’s always a mood that can strike a horror fan for movies about witches or demons or zombies or psycho killers or what have you and that mood isn’t solely isolated to Samhain. It’s just amplified there, maybe.

Besides, there’s just a handful of true, genuine Christmas cinema classics and the rest is bullshit. A movie can feature Rob Lowe in a pullover standing in front of a Christmas tree or feature an orphan meeting an angel who cures his syphilis or whatever, but that doesn’t mean I want to watch it. And as far as “holiday cinema” goes, Christmas is Halloween’s only real competition, and just like the holiday itself, it’s an empty category.

Never mind the fact that Halloween is the last real holiday where you can be yourself. You can be independent. Maybe you need to put on a costume and go out and get drunk and pretend to be someone else for a few hours after the sun sets, but it’s worth it. Maybe that’s how you need to express yourself. Either way, it’s your time. Enjoy it. After this it’s Thanksgiving and your circa Christmas fare, and you’re surrounded by family and you have to pretend to be someone else. No, you’re not a disappointment to your parents or extended relatives who know nothing of the real you but have some concerns based on your facebook status updates. No, this year hasn’t been a disappointment despite all the big plans and hopes you’ve had for it. And no, you’re not a disappointment to yourself, you hope.

Just to reiterate, Halloween is nothing but: Candy, booze, spooks, thrills, sexy costumes, ghosts, goblins, ghouls, an excuse to break free and have a little fun while leaving a little bit of your dignity behind. That sounds amazing. It also sounds like your average day on the internet just IRL.

Oh well, right? October is over, and another holiday has passed. Here on Counterforce the past month has been about the words of dead writers and witches and vampires and comic books (and comics on the web) and television shows (and television shows based on comic books like The Walking Dead) and actresses and wondering where they’ve been and who they’ve been fucking and all sorts of ridiculous shit on the internet in it’s silly labyrinthine ways. So, business as usual, I guess.

And tomorrow is another day. And probably more of the same.

Public relations.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Thank fucking God that Mad Men is coming back, right? Right? After the end of Lost, I kind of felt like I wanted to take a break from TV, and for the most part, I have. The only shows I tune in regularly to in any regard are Party Down and Doctor Who, though by “tune in regularly,” I do, of course, mean via the internet. Oh, and True Blood too. And yet, all that said, it’s funny how I realize what a Mad Men-sized gap there’s been in my life once I really start to visualize the return of the show. Does that make sense? Do I care? Either way, I think we can all take a vote on it and it’ll come out unanimous that it’s time for Mad Men to return, yes?

Mad linkage:

This is the greatest story you’ll see today.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, The Runaway General?

Alleged fugitive drug lord arrested in Jamaica.

Wikileaks founder emerges from hiding.

It’ll be good to have you back, January Jones.

Serial killers, religious cults, human hair.

Various upcoming movies: Inception, The Green Hornet (which looks, if possible, more terrible than I could’ve imagined in my wildest dreams), Pumzi (a short film by Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu about a world decimated after “water wars”), and A Topiary, the second movie by Shane Carruth, who directed Primer.

Oh, and just so there’s no confusion: According to Wikipedia, “Public Relations” is currently listed as the title of the first episode of Mad Men‘s upcoming season.

Adam Mckay directing Garth Ennis’ The Boys? Whatever.

A tale of Anne Frank’s fictional sex life.

Gigantic green algae slick heads towards China.

Just click here for your moment of daily zen.

REDRUM.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Puberty sucks hard.

I’m in a mood tonight to watch The Shining. Well, tonight or tomorrow sometime. I’m a scary movie mood, I guess. Something festive. Something seasonal. And I’m open to suggestions. Conrad Noir suggested The Exorcist which, no joke, I’ve never seen. Occam Razor suggested The Wicker Man remake with Nic Cage which, unfortuanetly, I have seen. And Benjamin Light made a joke about some new movie about a reanimated zombie pop star called This Is It.

All work and no play puts Marco Sparks in a mellow Halloween mood. The Shining, it is. Martin Scorsese agrees with me. Trick or treat, you sons of bitches.

This is roughly my mood as of this moment.

There is no there.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Raditude is what happens when you let Dwight from The Office name your album.

The female orgasm.

MRI reveals organs during sex.

from here.

Rapper’s revenge: Getting your record label to pay for your Ph.D.

Your boyfriend is a groper.

The Muck Monster.

There are no rules to office dating, but repeating a Seinfeld joke can get you fired for harassment.

“When you get there, there isn’t any there there.”

-Gertrude Stein

Mega black hole is twice as big as we thought.

Lance Reddick’s Myspace page, no joke.

Woman hits child with riding lawn mower.

Cop charged with pretending to be twin, then sexually assaulting woman.

The Dutch prefer toilets to friends and sex.

An extravagant entrance to your trial for stealing the works of Shakespeare.

Tweet God.

And now I leave you with my favorite scene from Antonioni’s The Passenger:

The Auteur Theory, part four: Film lovers are sick people.

Posted by Marco Sparks & August Bravo on

“Film lovers are sick people.”

-Francois Truffaut.

Here we are again with part four of our films that we love, and perhaps even adore, that we feel should make the jump over to the Criterion Collection, if, for no other reason, just to make ourselves a little happier. Or maybe we just want to talk about them because we like them.  Or because we’re sick, sick people…

August Bravo: Taxi Driver, 1976, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Travis Bickle is probably one of the most astonishing film characters in the history of movies. Martin Scorsese directed this palme d’Or winning masterpiece. The first time I watched it, I really didn’t care too much for it. It wasn’t until I felt lonely and full of despair that it made a lot of sense. What drives a man to do what he does? One of the most deperessing movie’s I’ve ever seen, maybe. How can a man just slip through the cracks so easily? And how could Scorsese potray it so damn well? Travis seemed like a simple guy, but he’s just disgusted. Disgusted with all the scum and trash that fill the city. With himself as well, maybe? A man so devoid of attention he resorts to talking to himself in the mirror in probably one of the most memorable scenes in film history.

What spirals this movie into a need for Criterion fame is his desolation. I think that’s what really drives him mad, and what drives him do after going mad. It’s a haunting image to see Robert DeNiro sitting there towards the end after his attempt to rescue child prostitute Jodie Foster, blood everywhere, holding a makeshift gun to his head just wanting to pull the trigger. By far the best line from the movie: “Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man…”

Marco Sparks: I’m ecstatic that you picked this movie, which as distasteful as it can be, is a true American classic, and not something like… I don’t know… Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, which people are always trying to tell me is a “classic.” Scorcese has a winning formula here and I feel like he basically remade it in 1983 with The King Of Comedy, a film that I like a hell of a lot more.

For my pick today I am going to happily suggest: Chinatown, 1974, directed by Roman Polanski.

This is another movie that I’m almost afraid to start talking about for fear of talking way too much about it. If you haven’t seen this film yet, then I have to assume that you’re still a toddler. But unless you’re a blind toddler, or in a coma, then you need to be seeing it. If you’re an adult or near the age of making adult mistakes and you haven’t seen this yet, then… put simply, you don’t deserve cinema.

“My sister! My daughter! My sister! My daughter! My sister! My daughter!”

Polanski, despite what anyone may think of him personally, is a master filmmaker, and he’s particularly good with one single element of life: That sense that something is off and just not quite right. Sometimes it’s paranoia, and suspicion of one’s surroundings, but that’s if you’re lucky to nail the feelings his films inhabit so perfectly down into words. Repulsion had it, as did Knife In The Water. The Tenant had it, and of course Rosemary’s Baby had it, as did Death And The Maiden to a fair degree. Hell, his pure amazing shlock demonic thriller The Ninth Gate had it in perfect, crazy overabundance. It worked perfectly in all those films and especially here in this neo-noir masterpiece.

The film, with it’s brilliant script by the always excellent Robert Towne, was based on the real life water wars in California, but is so twisted and wonderful and captures that perfect essence of feeling like it could be a true story word for word.

And do I even need to go into how perfect Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway are in this film? Not to mention John Huston. This film, which was to be originally titled “Water World” is a rare, amazing example in Hollywood of everything going perfectly right and the end result is scary brilliant. The sequel, The Two Jakes, directed by Jack Nicholson himself, isn’t too shabby either, but it’s a sequel to one of the best films ever produced in this country, so there’s no way it could’ve gotten close to the original.

If you truly have never seen this, then part of me wants to show up at your house with this and maybe a bottle of wine. In fact, let’s do that. I’ll be over next week sometime. Which goes better with popcorn, white wine or red?

Personally, I love that August picked a movie about how fucked up New York is and that I followed up with a film that says essentially a lot of the same things about Los Angeles. I’d love to counter that with something sweet and sentimental about either town or tell you that no matter where you live, home is where the heart is, but let’s face it, you’re just going to get your heart broken no matter where you go. So instead I’ll just say… We’ll see you next time.

“Hustlers, get your guns/This shadow weighs a ton…”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

It’s going to be a busy next few weeks for the ladies and gentlemen of Counterforce as most of us go on a vacation of some sort or another. We’re going to try to keep coming at you with regular updates but just understand that if we don’t post as much as we normally do… well, it’s because we’re off having loads of fun away from the internet. Sorry. We’d love to take you with us but there’s really just not enough room.

from here.

But for now we invite you to take a trip down memory lane and remember why you love as much as you do and get caught up on some of our old posts…

Occam Razor loves America and is going to tell you how to survive in a post peak oil world. Also, there’s pictures of Esther Baxter.

Lollipop Gomez is remarkably like David Frost, Barbara Walters, and a sexier Geraldo Rivera all wrapped into a tiny glasses wearing package. Take a gander at her hard hitting interview series where she puts only the best and the brightest in the hot seat and asks them probing questions about food, card rooms, and wacky religious cults.

Benjamin Light talked about the Oscars earlier and really disgusting “film reviewer” types a while back, but catch up on some of our earlier film reviews:

X-Files 2: I Want To Believe.

The Dark Knight.

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

Jack Nicholson and The Witches Of Eastwick.

And Hellboy 2 and the death of the modern action flick.

Quantum Of Solace.

The Candidate.

Let The Right One In.

And why Point Break is one of the great films of this time or any other.

And film remakes to be terrified of.

And don’t forget that August Bravo and myself get a bit pretentious (well, a little) about films that we’d consider super duper classics, which you find here and here and here (and parts four and five coming very soon).

Plus, Benjamin Light does a nice counterpoint to that with films that he considers to be hidden indicators of bad taste.

Oh, and politics! Back during the campaign season, this site used to be just filthy with political trash talk. Now, it’s just filthy.

And Lost. Yeah, I guess you could say that we have Lost mania. Or something.

And that’s not to say that we don’t talk about literature and music and art as well, cause believe me, we do. In fact, we talk our asses off about it. About all of it and more.

And don’t forget we have Peanut St. Cosmo too.

So, just remember, we’re not going anywhere. We’re still here and we still love you. Sort of. We’re just going to go on a little vacation and we invite you to join us.

The Auteur Theory, part one: Truth at 24 frames per second.

Posted by Marco Sparks & August Bravo on

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.”

-Jean- Luc Godard.

Marco Sparks and August Bravo consider themselves to be armchair cinemaphiles, probably just like yourself, but they’re just more arrogant (and sometimes, more knowledgeable) about it than you. But like every good poor man’s film critic, they regard the Criterion Collection with the highest of regard because, well, how can you not? Some of the world’s finest cinema in just about every genre is collected there, meant for the true lovers of film. And for the idiots. And any and all between. But sometimes, just sometimes, you come across a film that’s excellent and you have to ask yourself, “Why isn’t this in the Criterion Collection?” Join us as we do a little bit of that ourselves.

August Bravo: Blow-Up, 1966, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The best kind of movie is the one with no real ending. This movie is exactly that. Blow-Up (or Blowup) follows a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings. After taking pictures one night he wants to take those and publish it into an art book. Whilst living his daily life in swinging London he comes across a beautiful park with a beautiful couple in it. He photographs them. The film makes it almost seem he’s done something like this before. Photograph couples unknowingly, I mean. After getting the sufficient photos, he leaves and notices himself being stalked by none other than the woman from the pictures he was taking in the park. Her reaction to him taking pictures is what spirals the movie into something entirely different. It’s a very quiet and slow film. You almost wait for the exact moment where everything catapults into something action packed, but it doesn’t. Not to me, anyway. What movies this movie is the two girls that want to get their pictures taken earlier in the film. Why put these girls in the movie? That’s something I think about endlessly with films. Why did the writer put this in the script? What importance did these two innocent, young girls have? Also something you need to find out for yourself. The cover may give it away, but it may not. I was reminded of this film a couple of years back while watching a movie called Cache, or “Hidden” in French, directed by Michael Haneke (of Funny Games fame). I got the same unusual feeling I got at the end of that movie as I did with this one. Yes, I realize thsi movie is a bit pretentious, once again to me, anyway, but very well deserving of criterion status. Although, it is no Fool’s Gold.

Marco Sparks: I like how you threw in Fool’s Gold there, FTW. But, damn straight Blow-Up should be a criterion classic. They’ve done a wonderful job with Antonioni’s L’Avventura and L’Eclisse and they should definitely expand to his other films like this or even Red Desert or Zabriskie Point (by now it has to be worthy of crazy cult status, right?) or even La Notte, the middle film in the unofficial trilogy that L’Avventura and L’Eclisse bookend. Also, Cache. An excellent mention there, Mr. Bravo. A great film. The kind of movie that would probably leave Hitchcock unsettled.

But for my first selection: Blissfully Yours, 2002, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

This oddly lovely Thai romance film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (but you can call him “Joe,” like his friends and critics do, since there’s a Thai tradition of adopting nicknames rather than hearing people butcher their long names) is a bit of a weird pick for this, I know. But that is why I picked it. No description of the plot will do it justice since it’s literally about the love affair of a man and a woman, and the slightly older woman who’s jealous of them (and there’s lots of sex), but more so than plot, this is a mood piece. A tonal work if ever there was one. One thing I like about the Criterion collection is not just that they’ve expanded a lot of people’s knowledge and ideas about film to include foreign disciplines, but they’ve also shown you that film as art doesn’t always have to have a ridiculously complex plot, nor be a life or death matter. How one judges life and death is different from person to person, the same with the art we love and appreciate. With that in mind, I would definitely include this film by Joe, or perhaps his first film, Mysterious Object At Noon, a half documentary, half neature narrative exploration of the exquisit corpse party game.

August: La Dolce Vita, 1960, directed by Federico Fellini.

What Fellini movie shouldn’t be made into a Criterion classic? Well, a few, but this isn’t one of them. I prefer 8 1/2, but as most, or maybe just some of you know, that’s already in the collection. The title literally translates into “The Sweet Life,” this movie offers you insight on the life of the famous. Anita Ekberg gives a dashing performance as Sylvia. And Marcello Mastroianni is always riveting. Spawning probably  one of the most famous phrases, “paparazzi,” named after Marcello’s friend Paparazzo, a photographer of stars. This movie shows the life of a reporter, who’s just trying to find a meaning for life. After many flings with a great many women he’s still left confused. The endingis one of the best I’ve ever seen. With almost no structure, the film is probably meant to confuse the shit out of everyone, an initial reaction that Fellini probably not only expected but counted on. As probably one of the most imaginative directors there were, I’m sure he had many reasons to make this the way he did. And I wouldn’t change a thing.

Marco: Well said. The previous releases of this film were quite nice, but they do deserve that extra little Criterion stamp of approval. It’s so weird to see so much of our contemporary society still so familiar with the world of 1960′s Italy, and yet there it is. And as for the ending, which is brilliant, this film reminds me a great deal of Seinfeld in that sometimes in nothing we can find everything. Fellini was certain man who had issues with woman, and his career was all about that, being in love and in war with those issues and those women. I can’t help but think of “Asa Nisi Masa,” the words that make the pictures move.

For my next pick: The Passenger, 1975, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

When I tell you that I’m an Antonioni fan, you’ll understand that I’m serious. It’s no joke, it’s the real deal. I could talk for hours about this film and I could talk your ears off, but what I’ll say here instead is that I’ve done a lot of reading on the filmography of this director, and this period in his life was especially interesting. Around this time, Antonioni was trying to capture a certain feeling, to make a certain idea of his come to life. You can see it in the scripts that he wrote right before this, the films that never came to life and eventually evolved into this project, also called Professione: Reporter, starring Jack Nicholsonson and Maria Schneider. Antonioni was desperate to tell the story of a man so lost that he hoped to find himself and who would just keep going until he got there. Or somewhere. The title here takes on a different meaning altogether due to one cast members’ refusal to any driving in the film, thus switching roles in an interesting way.

August: Trainspotting, 1996, directed by Danny Boyle.

Don’t we all just need one more fucking hit? I do. So does Ewan MacGregor. I don’t know what first brought me to watch this movie. Maybe you, Peanut? Regardless, this is one of my favorite films. It starts off with some junkies, literally willing to inject/do anything to get get high. Sounds like a lot of people I know. Renton (played by MacGregor), or Rents, as everyone likes to call him is the focus of the film. After trying to quit, he goes through a tumultuous journey where he gets back on and off the heroin wagon. But heroin isn’t what this movie is all about. It’s about life. It’s about trying to be somebody, kind of. One can’t go on their entire life being a junkie, which is why Rents quits in the first place.

The fact actually made it’s way into the halls of Criterion on laserdisc, but I only mention that because what the fuck is a laserdisc and who the fuck cares? It’s got some positive reinforcement as it shows Rents actually succeeding in life. But it just comes to a crashing stop, ultimately showing you that you can quit a drug, but you can’t quit your friends. A lot of this movie is about growing up, especially towards the end. That sounds reasonable that the growing up takes place in the second half of the movie, yes, but this isn’t your ordinary drug film. Or any film. Probably one of my favorite soundtracks ever as well. The score leaves a lasting effect on how you perceive this movie and it’s characters.

Marco: for my last pick today, I give you Visitor Q, 2001, directed by Takashi Miike.

There’s a lot of cinema from Asia that I would suggest here, including Oldboy, which is soon to be remade here in America, Last Life In The Universe, Miike’s own Audition, Battle Royale, and probably even Lust, Caution. And that’s not even to mention the other fine foreign movies that didn’t make the list here just because of space such as Amores Perros and A Clockwork Orange.

But I picked Visitor Q for a lot of reasons. Firstly, when it’s all said and done, this is a good movie. But that gets lost in just how fucked up it is (it is Miike, after all). This is a film that starts incestuous sex and ends with a man and a young woman being breastfed by their wife/mother. In between those two points you get a lot of violence, sex, drug use, and necrophilia. But it all ties together (not so much nicely, but semi-completely) in a message about maternal nurturing and what it takes to heal a broken down family. But let me put it this way, if it’s content was toned down and this was released forty years ago in either Italy or France, it’d already be a known classic just hanging off the lips of scholars, not just cinematic perverts like you and me. But still, you ponder, too risque for the Criterion collection? Well, they did put out a version of Salò, didn’t they? And after you’ve released an art film with people eating shit in it, well… you can release a lot of different kinds of art after that, I’d imagine.

Okay, that’s enough from us for today. We decided to break this down into two posts, foreign and domestic, so tomorrow or perhaps the next day we’ll bring this a little closer to home. Until then…

STAY TUNED!

Marco Sparks has nothing against a good fuck, but there’s danger here!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“Men are such cocksuckers, aren’t they? You don’t have to answer that. It’s true. They’re scared. Their dicks get limp when confronted by a woman of obvious power and what do they do about it? Call them witches, burn them, torture them, until every woman is afraid. Afraid of herself… Afraid of men… And all for what? Fear of losing their hard on!“

“I always like a little pussy after lunch.”

The Witches Of Eastwick, 1987, directed by George Miller, and based on the 1984 novel of the same name by the recently deceased John Updike. I watched this film the other day (or, more accurately, a few months ago) and instantly knew that I wanted to talk about it.

The plot is simple as can be: Three women in the sleepy little New England town of Eastwick are living, quiet unfulfilled lives. Alexandra (Cher) is the widowed sculptor with one teenager daughter, Jane (Susan Sarandon) is the very book-ish music teacher at the local school who’s just finalized her divorce whose husband left her because of her inability to have children, and Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer, at her sexiest here) is the younger free spirit whose husband left her because she kept getting pregnant, resulting in five children.

Together the three of them concoct the perfect man, the man of their dreams: somebody from out of town who’s nice and who you can talk to, handsome but not too handsome, a man who’s cock isn’t big, isn’t small, but is in the middle. The catch? That man of their dreams is Jack Nicholson. Oh, and he’s the Devil.

With all this talk of women as witches and Nicholson essentially playing himself as a “horny little Devil,” the movie is ripe for biting satire and an interesting dissection on pop gender roles. And don’t get me wrong, you do get a little of that, but at the same time, it wants to be everything to everyone. There’s some Ray Harryhausen/old school Sam Raimi-esque stop motion special effects happening in parts to add a horror quotient (and kind of a silly one) and one of the longest vomit scenes I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing in film. If I didn’t enjoy this movie as much as I did, then I’d say that the last part of the previous sentence was the ultimate meta comment on what’s on display here.

The women find themselves seduced by Nicholson’s character, a different method for each one, and soon the three of them are sharing the role of inamorata to the Devil. And for a while, everything is happy, until it isn’t. The women are liberated, but at the cost of being the talk of the town and not in a good way.

Normally I’d heavily criticize the idea that these women need a man to help them be happy, but I guess you could make the argument that sometimes everyone needs a little help to come out of their shell. But maybe not from the Joker though. When when he uses some of the ideas of feminism as the ultimate tools of seduction against these women at points, always danging ideas of empowerment in front of them like a ball of yarn, but of course never wanting them to reach true liberation of any kind.

And liberation is the key here, but in degrees. Because of the emergence of Nicholson’s satanic figure, Darryl Van Horne, into this once quiet, peaceful community (Eden before the serpent slithered in, we’re told), there has to be a counter figure, the person who’s infused with the spirit of the opposite company: the God proxy, “There is evil here!” prophet. That comes in the form of one of the more uptight ladies of the community, played wonderfully by Veronica Cartwright, who suffers quite physically (and you’ve never seen so many SNL-worthy vomit gags in a serious film as you do here before) for her goodness. It’s not the crazy sex that’s going on among the three women that bothers her, it’s that it’s all done in the name of evil. “Oh, Clyde,” she tells her doting, push over husband played by Richard Jenkins, “I have nothing against a good fuck, but there’s danger here and somebody has to do something about it!”

Nicholson though, for as big and ridiculous as he plays this role at times, and as much as he seems to basically be playing himself, is perfect in his portrayal of how sleazy men can be at times, and how sad they are. His main attraction to these women is that they will make perfect mothers to his offspring (isn’t that what the Devil is always after these days, his infernal knocking boots confined to a mere means to an end?) and though he seems to really appreciate these women, he never loses sight of what they can mean for him.

And when they leave him, he becomes cruel and petty. He’s taken these women to the depths and the heights of both pleasure and perversion, and in return, he’d like to be appreciated a little. And without it, he becomes ruthless in his punishment of them.

But, of course, it’s just because he’s terrified of them. And the power within them.

Back in 2002, there was a pilot made based on the book starring Marcia Cross, Kelly Rutherford, and Lori Loughlin as the three “witches.” Sounds interesting but probably wasn’t, hence it never being aired let alone going to series. And the story has been made into a musical, an idea that fascinates me given the story itself (but hell, they made Evil Dead into a music so anything goes, right?), but it’s also probably not that great.

Nicholson cheated on Lara Flynn Boyle, pictured above, with a ballet dancer so she showed up at the Oscars that year in a tutu. Lollipop just told me that story and it blew me away. That’s a great response, I think, on Boyle’s part, and is just another step closer into making me feel that Nicholson was not only perfect for his role in The Witches Of Eastwick, and let’s not bullshit around because he is a great actor, but he is also the poster child for all those horrible qualities that the male gender can possess or not quite grow out of.

I got a copy of Updike’s sequel, The Widows Of Eastwick, not longer at it came out, but have yet to read the original novel, sadly, but I’m very curious to. I’ve read that it’s quite misogynist and I’ve read that it’s an obvious satire of misogyny. I’m curious to see which it since, from what I’ve read, it’s the first time that Updike really took the time to flesh out female characters, and I have to wonder how good of a job he did or was he the Darryl Van Horne of this little world?

Counterforce After Dark: Can’t imagine the world without me.

Posted by Marco Sparks & Lollipop Gomez on

Well, here it is, kids. The long and winding road of Britpop week has lead us here and what a long, strange journey it’s been. And if I could’ve packed that sentence with more references and cliches, then by God, I would have. But for our conclusion, I (Marco) think Lollipop and I would like to kick it old school (like we have all week, really) with just a few more of our favorite songs…

And I’ll let my co-blogger kick it off. Lollipop?

Lollipop Gomez: Yes, we are finally fucking done with London. We have no money, we’ve already gone through every flavor of potato chip, the novelty of buying diagonally cut sandwiches from Tesco for 98p has worn off, Yorkie candy bars no longer make us laugh (yeah we get it they’re not for birds. Shut up!), we no longer jump onto the Tube when she tells us “Mind The Gap!”, and we wear so much black we’ve been asked for directions from 4 different earnest Americans already, so we kind of, sort of feel like we are one with London. It’s time to move on, one last hurrah, one last cup of tea, one last English breakfast, one last curry, one last pack of Silk Cuts.

“Ask” by The Smiths.

Marco Sparks: Women, women, women. I think I’ve had probably more failures in romance than I have had successes (especially circa the Britpop era) but I did have one English girlfriend a long time ago and, I’m not going to lie to you, my friends (if I can sound like John McCain for just a moment there), this song…

…more than reminds me of her. That’s “Female Of The Species” by Space, and having never seen Space before watching some of their videos just now, I never knew what chavs they were. But damn talented chavs, for sure.

Lollipop: Like Marco, I haven’t done very well with ladies either. Maybe that’s because I date men. I was dating a man when I was in London. Traveling with someone you are in love with is simultaneously the best and worst thing you can possibly do for your relationship. You’re far away so you feel so close to this person, but you’re also spending every waking minute with them and you want to push them into the River Thames. Or you just want them to leave you alone as you check your e-mail at Burger King (which for some reason, has Internet). But, as you walk through Covent Garden or the cute little shops of Notting Hill or you sit in a basement eating fish & chips with the one you love, you can’t help but feel mostly love. Love that they’re there, love that you’re sharing this experience with them, love that they’re drinking that gin and tonic and they light your smokes in the pub and you can’t help but feel the way you did when you first  met…which is like this song (“Temptation” by New Order):

Marco: Another excellent choice there, Lollipop. Much like the reader, I’m following along on your vacation with you, not so much a tourist in the sense you are, or were, but more voyeuristic, like a tourist on vacation in your memories. I love that you used “Temptation,” an excellent song, and I’m going to use one by the same band that makes me think lyrically of similar experiences to the adventures in your continuing travelogue.

“Ceremony” cover by Radiohead on their “Thumbs down” webcast on November 9, 2007.

This is from the last batch of songs that Ian Curtis wrote before he died when the band was still Joy Division and thus it became the first New Order single. It’s an amazing song from a band with a full catalog of amazing songs and I really like cover by the experimental one hit wonder band that went on to have a few more hits and experiments, Radiohead.

Lollipop: I love New Order so much as well as Joy Division that I’m going throw it back, Sparks and give you a little bit of Joy Division. On those nights at karaoke when I’m crying into my Jack Daniel’s, there is no better song to sing than this one. And in any case, it’s so true, love will tear us apart. Again and again and again.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division.

Marco: And now it’s become my duty to cheer up Lollipop. Love will tear us all apart, bit by bit it’ll devour our hearts if we let it. But you have to. You have to make yourself available to the cannibal urges of romance, because that special love, that something perfect will only find willing victims and will never, ever sniff it’s way to the carefully guarded cautious boring types. You can’t stay still, you always have to be ready to move again, to get back on that metaphorical dance floor…

“Ready For The Floor” covered by Duffy.

There was a new movement thrown together years and years ago called poptimism to semi-ironically combat rockism. Basically, as the afterword to Phonogram states, it was just an excuse to dance, which is something you never need an excuse to do. Right now dancing makes me think of Hot Chip, (I feel honor bound to mention that the singer dresses up like the Joker in that bizarre video because the lyrics refer back to Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the character in the 1989 Batman movie) and gets me thinking of this song, of which I actually prefer the cover by Duffy. Duffy (whose producer on her debut was the guitar player in Suede, thus buying her ample Britpop cred out her Welsh wazoo) is unabashedly an attempt to cash in on a little of that Amy Winehouse train wreck vibe, but personally, I’m okay with that since I’m not really that in the Winehouse club (she looks like something that goes bump in the night, honestly)(bumping for crack!). Duffy strikes me as just as talented, but more enthusiastic about music (despite very talented singers like Estelle and Allison Goldfrapp slagging off on her), and a hell of a lot better looking with a tinge of a young Brigitte Bardot thing, which is never a bad thing.

Lollipop: I’m going to have to disagree with Sparks, as the original version of “Ready For The Floor” is way better. I do an excellent version of it at karaoke (no video exists, but ask me after next Saturday, I may be
able to reproduce it). One way to combat rockism is with hot synthesizers and very few do it better than Dave Gahan and Depeche Mode. Continuing our la-la-la love fest, here is a song about giving in to sin, because well, you have to make this life liveable.

“Strange Love” by Depeche Mode.

Marco: Not surprisingly, Lollipop goes and ups the ante on me. But am I scared? No, not at all. Marco Sparks always has an ace up his sleeve. Or, barring any sleeves, he has one somewhere in a pants pocket. And here it is:

“A View To A Kill” by Duran Duran feat. Mark Ronson.

I do sometimes have to question if Ronson deserves the level of attention he gets, but another thing you should know about me is that I love Bond films. And as a non-limey, how can you talk about British music/culture and not talk about how the Bond phenomenon has impacted both? I love this live version of one of my favorite Bond tunes (to one of the most ridiculous of the movies) because it’s a wonderfully fresh take on the tune and is preceded by a fancy little Bond theme medley. This is me dancing into the fire and all over Lollipop’s face.

Lollipop: Get your dirty shoes away from me, bitchface! My next song is Pulp’s “Common People” which I stole from Marco by pointing at a shiny object in the opposite direction. It works every time. I stole the song, he started to cry, I slapped him for being a little bitch, he kept crying. I play the song as loud as possible. It’s so good!

Marco: And there’s Lollipop, yet again, trying to use me as a toilet. And using one of my favorite songs to do it. Sigh. You have to admire Jarvis Cocker as a musical icon, despite his essentially having Brando’s voice but with an English accent tacked on, just because he is so very professorly sleazy smart. Plus, there’s the weirdness of “the Michael Jackson incident.”

But I guess that leaves me to end it, and on somewhat of a high note, if possible. Bloody hell! We hope you enjoyed Britpop week as much as we did and are left drooling madly at what new, weird shit we’re cooking up in our sodding TARDIS. Well, as the British would say, Piss off!

…with a great song: “On And On” by The Longpigs.