When you see Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass in a thrift store, you buy it. Just to have it. It’s like a membership card into the club of cheap-bin record hunters (all of us have it). This LP in your possession says that you’ve been there. You know the fluorescent lights. You know the dirt. You know the smell. You know the pain.
The Basics on BASIC INSTINCT
BASIC INSTINCT (1992; director: Paul Verhoeven)
This early 90s meisterwerk is so dedicated to being trashy, sleazy, steamy and light on the logic that it’s real easy to love if you have a taste for the tasteless. It’s slick in that Paul Verhoeven way, which means that there’s a faint smirk underneath the perfect Hollywood lighting and the troubled cop/femme fatale cliches. Everything is over the top. Verhoeven lays on the close-ups and the opulent San Francisco views. The Joe Eszterhas script is hard-boiled to the max, all snap and innuendo, with scarcely two lines of dialogue in a row that sound like anything that an actual human would say. Meanwhile, Jerry Goldsmith’s booming orchestral score lays countless exclamation points all over this cinematic purple prose.
You’ll know in the first twenty minutes if you enjoy this movie or if you think that the original film negative ought to be fed to rats. I’ll lay it out for you.
Vampire Brats
Poppy Z. Brite
Lost Souls
Dell Publishing, 1992
At my advanced age I felt like a real drip reading (and enjoying) this novel of angst-ridden vampires and goth kids.
On the other hand, I’m glad that I didn’t read it when I was a teenager because I would have been INSUFFERABLE afterward–and I was annoying enough already back then. I know how obsessive I can get. This book would have effected me. It would have changed my life. I would have started to wear all black. I probably would have gotten into eyeliner. I would have dug deep into Sisters of Mercy B-sides. I would have spent my senior year prom night hanging out in a cemetery. There’s not a doubt in my mind, no sir.
Rebelling Against THE OUTLAW
THE OUTLAW (1943; director: Howard Hughes)
As a sordid “sex western”, this hasn’t aged well. Also, there’s not one soul on Earth who praises it for good acting, tight pacing or making a nickel’s worth of sense.
Even Jane Russell’s legendary bra for this film, custom designed by hornball Howard Hughes to cantilever Russell’s already-abundant breasts to look like nothing short of two Boeing B-17 bombers in her dress, wasn’t actually used on camera (according to Russell).
See this in the 21st century and watch one of the cinematic scandals of the 1940s reveal itself as clumsy and quaint, impotent and befogged.
With its shocks worn down to nothing and its gasps turned into yawns, what’s left today is still one strange piece of pulp, nonetheless.
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Devil Got My Martian
DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954; director: David Macdonald)
Every new generation of film history buffs eventually ask themselves the same question: Is Devil Girl From Mars anywhere near as good as its title?
I Don’t Believe in Ghosts, But I Do Believe in A GHOST STORY
A GHOST STORY (2017; director: David Lowery)
In 2017, we could use a reminder that movies don’t have to be loud enough that your ears ring for three days afterward. Movies don’t all need to shove you onto a rollercoaster that loops through a dozen explosions before it careens into a brick wall. No one needs to overact their way to an Oscar. An entire CGI city doesn’t need to blow up. Musical crescendos don’t need to pound you into cerebral dislocation. We don’t need a cut every three seconds. Movies don’t need to be filled with noise like an amateur radio show that’s terrified of one second of dead air.
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The Importance of Female Wrestlers for a Growing Boy
GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012; director: Brett Whitcomb)
The women of GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling will never forget the years from 1986 to 1990 when they grappled with each other every week on syndicated national television while dressed in skimpy showgirl outfits.
I understand completely.
I was a preteen when GLOW was on the air and I can’t forget it, either. Never in my life have I been as big a sports fan as when I sneaked peeks at all-girl wrestling on TV when I was 11 years old. It was a challenge. GLOW was not the kind of thing that you could watch with your family (or at least I couldn’t). No, a boy had to spend time with this alone. It was all girls in skintight costumes flinging each other across a wrestling ring and, for that, a young man needs some privacy in order to properly sort through his feelings. That’s just how this particular path works. In retrospect, I think I only got to watch GLOW twice back then, but both experiences made valuable contributions to my pubescent years. Especially when that blonde in the little denim shorts showed up.
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Discovering the REAL YOU with The Platters’ ENCORE OF GOLDEN HITS
Sometimes I get to thinking that I’m a real mean guy. A hard ass, a walking scowl, one gruff customer, a storm system coming in from the south, a beer bottle that’s been pissed in, a bruised banana, a carcinogenic soul with an abortion clinic dumpster for a heart, a dead dandelion in a winter field, a tornado that carries away your kitten, a broken cookie jar, bad news in old blue jeans, a hair in your fettuccine alfredo, a spoonful of bitter medicine that doesn’t help, a straight-up jerk, a bad dream, a bus station restroom, a carton of curdled milk, a human skull that you find in the grass on your Easter picnic, a soiled towel, one foul fella.
I think you get the picture.
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The Pretty Good PIGGS by the Pretty Great Neal Barrett, Jr.
Subterranean Press, 2002
In literature, I love dirty, sleazy, white trash Texas.
I love sweaty, bloody, cum-stained Texas.
Barefoot, whiskey-breath, evil-eyed Texas.
Strip club, gun rack, conceal carry Texas.
Big-talkin’, neon sign, tornado warning Texas.
I love books that make all us Texans look like felons with barbecue sauce stains on our shirts. Or good Bible-thumping people just one cool breeze away from scandalous sex with the church organist.
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It Feels Good to Be Obsessed Again
SPOILER CITY AHEAD
I mean it in the nicest way possible when I say that I LOVE the stories that I’ve read about people who threw retro parties for the May 21, 2017 premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return with cherry pie and coffee and cosplay—and then their soiree went sour when the show started and they got walloped with David Lynch’s art.