Why Dave and I no longer wish to leave the house

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I think I’ve accepted my hatred of Tinto Brass. If I had been reminded that Brass made Salon Kitty, which I found violently annoying, I would have thought twice about going to the Egyptian Saturday night for the supposedly Italian grindhouse festival. After gritting our teeth and making angry fists while suffering through The Howl, I said two things as we left: “Well, that’ll teach us to leave the house” and “I haven’t seen a movie that annoying since Last Year at Marienbad.” And that was 18 years ago.

Why did we sit through the whole thing? For one thing, we (he) paid $20 for our tickets and we paid $15 to park so I felt some obligation to see if the movie we dragged ourselves away from the gatos and the squirrels for had any redeeming value. It did not.

Here’s what it was supposed to be:

“A surrealist classic by Tinto Brass, filled with eye-shattering imagery, visual jokes, impossible characters, riotous comedy and punk rock well before its time. A bride escapes her wedding with a stranger, and together they trek though increasingly bizarre lands. They come across talking animals, mournful exhibitionists and a psychedelic hotel, instigate a prison riot, escape from cannibals and battle a wind-up midget dictator!”

Sounds kind of awesome, right? If you substitute “annoying” for each of the adjectives in that synopsis, however, you get a much more accurate picture. Visually, it was interesting at first; I liked the rythym of the way Brass’s Mod-ish, moody shots were edited together. But the annoying characters, absence of plot and even irritating score became too much to bear about 10 minutes in. A lot of prancing and whimsical, hippie skipping and lightning-fast, irksome nonsense dialogue like “A is B! B is A! To be an actor in movies, one must know English: to break, broke, broken, to break, broke, broken…” Oh, and don’t forget the most irritating and omnipresent element: unappealing, pasty nude people–EVERYWHERE!

I know I should consider that The Howl was made in 1970, not THAT long after the French New Wave directors were doing the self-reflexive thing of pointing out again and again that you’re watching a movie, but still: Annoying. So, so annoying.

After the main characters inexplicably steal a boat and it blows up (off camera), I got excited and whispered to Dave “I’ve been hoping they’d be killed.” But no such luck. The two are pulled into a row boat by some band of weirdos we never see again, then deposited on a rock.

When I wasn’t wishing the main characters dead, I compiled a list of pretentious points I felt Brass was making, or bashing us over the head with. To wit:

1. Boobs are good.
2. Sex is good.
3. Orgies are even better, however.
4. Violence is bad. War is also bad.
5. Anarchy is good.
6. Marriage, as one of our many societal institutions and therefore a prison, is bad.

Movies are good, as long as you don’t enjoy them too much, I guess. I felt as I watched this that Brass was jabbing me in the asshole with a needle, taunting, “You like movies, do you, you bloated, pseudo-intellectual middle-class swine? You wish to be entertained, you lazy, good-for-nothing sheep? Well, here’s a big fat man burping and farting repeatedly, how do you like that, eh? And now he’s going to smash the little white mouse in his hand, while you watch! Pretty entertaining, huh, you American pig!

“And now we’re going to move through some trippy white rooms where some ghastly, flabby naked people are going to chop the head off a goose! Watch us break boundaries right and left and know that we are guffawing into the heavens at your shock and dismay right now! Hurray for cinema!”

I kept seeing American flags here and there, on the hat of some bearded goof playing a drum, for example, and wondered what that was about. I didn’t know what year the movie was made while I was watching it so was like, “what, Vietnam? What did we do now? Is this criticism for WWII? If you’re against the Allies in WWII, doesn’t that mean you support fascism? I don’t know what the fuck the flags meant.

Needless to say, after this seemingly endless movie, Dave and I longed for the comforting idiocy of I Love Money and the Coreys. And we didn’t have long to wait.

‘bag contest winner
Feldman won a handy victory in last night’s douchebag contest, with a Valentine’s Day serenade of his wife by screeching some power ballad in her face. And who would really be wildly turned on by a rose-petal path to her bedroom, seriously? It’s like a 5th grade girl’s idea of hot romance. I would just feel bad about all the roses that were wasted. But anyway, I was in and out cooking and I guess the gist was Haim’s loneliness and pattern of picking the wrong type of woman. I guess? The whole show was quite a cringe-fest, as usual.

The big highlight of I Love Money was that Chance and Mr. Boston were expected to kiss, for “at least a nanosecond,” but the confines of Chance’s homophobia proved too great to overcome. The other team taunted him that the footage would replay endlessly on tmz, etc., which is probably true. So once again, Chance’s unacceptable refusal to compromise his dignity won him the enmity of his team. Chaos ensued. The Entertainer was able to move in on Heat’s (snort) claim on Destiney…I just can’t see it. There is NO WAY Destiney, the nearly empty-headed rock chick, would be into this Long Island tool who lives in his parents’ basement. I call bullshit!

It is entertaining enough, though, to realize that in this universe, The Entertainer is the voice of reason, one of the few to see through the transparent manipulations of the other contestants. Yikes.

Steve-O: “We are all God’s children.”
Nope, I’m not kidding. I mean, good for Steve-O getting clean and sober and some help with his problems, but for christ’s sake (heh), why do people in recovery almost always get so fucking Jesus-y? It’s so scary to think that people are so desperate to believe that there is a reason for our existence, a reason for our suffering and importantly, in this case, a reason to bother recovering. It seems more like going with the herd to me than a great epiphany, but anyhoo, here’s what I saw on Steve-O’s website when I was checking the url for one of his dvds we’re putting out. Needlessly pasted below:

“Hello Everyone,

I’ve been out of the looney bin for a few days now, still completely nuts, but feeling much better. I was talking with someone today about God, and shared something that I think makes perfect sense. Our parents are our creators- we are all a part of our parents. They are all parts of their parents, and so on. If you follow everyone’s family tree, each one has to lead to the same source, which would, logically, be called “Prime Creator”, or “God”. I want to be careful not to offend anyone, but, I see this as irrefutable. We are all God’s Children. Beneath this video clip is some very interesting text from the Keylontic Dictionary which, in terms of The Freedom Teachings, defines “God” (and indicates that “God is not a far-distant, or perhaps “dead”, patriarchal authoritarian creator that “once upon a time created us”.) I really like the idea of a God that is very alive, that I am connected to through my conscience- which makes me feel good when I do good things. I felt very good on my mission to go ride this whale! Enjoy! I Love You All,

Steve-O…

“God Source

——————————————————————————–
Last update:
September 20, 2006
(God – God Mind – ONENESS)

The Eternal Force, Heart-Mind of God, is an unquantifiable construct of energy, consciousness, cognition and identity. (See: Yunasai)

Pure, sentient, creative force. This force perpetually expands through new manifestations of itself though it remains perpetually the same. (See: Krist Code)

This is so, since the perpetual expansion of creation is balanced eternally by reciprocal contraction – eternal stillness, the Great Void.

The Force contains within itself, as a natural attribute of its being, a balance between stillness and motion, expansion, contraction, order and chaos, darkness and light, creation and the void… within which creation takes place.

Together, these attributes represent the eternal state of “Is-ness”; without end, the very Beingness of God…”

Again I say: Yikes.

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Filed under Random movie reviews, fartsy artsy

Tags: arthouse, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, destiney, egyptian italian giallos, god source, Grindhouse, i love money, mr. boston, prime creator, salon kitty, steve-o, steve-o jesus, steve-o sobriety, the entertainer, the howl, the two coreys, tinto brass