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How's your nuns?

This is just a little endorsement of Inquiring Nuns, a 1968 hour-long documentary, which unleashes a pair of nuns (Sisters Marie Arné and Mary Champion) on the streets of Chicago armed with a cameraman, a mic and a simple question: "Are you happy?" The concept is based on the 1960 movie, Chronique dún été (Chronicle of a Summer), in which filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin's had two young, non-nun women do the same in Paris.

It's fascinating to take in cinéma vérité of the '60s through our current freak-show norms. The closest thing to a contemporary sensibility is the fish-out-of-water set-up. It's generally hilarious to watch people take on a task that they don't have adequate skills for (see any songwriting challenge on any reality show) and the resulting questions that these nuns ask their subjects for the sake of investigation and/or banter at times verges on hilarious (my two favorites: "Do you think thinking happy makes you happy?" and "What do you think causes you not to do the thing that you believe you should do?"). There's a How's Your News vibe going on as well. Since the nuns were obviously asked to do this because they're nuns, the film is just as much about people's reactions to them as it is their ability. I don't know if it was the times or what, but many of their subjects seem to feel obligated to talk about God (one dude swears on the joy-distributing properties of daily communion). The Vietnam War the most talked-about subject, which is pretty eye-opening (I mean, today a lot of people care or at least will say they do when you turn a camera on them, but not this much). My favorite moments are the rare off-color ones, like when the girl in the picture above tells the nuns her band is named Bubblegum Orgy, and nuns respond with polite laughter.

Anyway, there's a clip of my favorite three-interview stretch below. The first woman reminds me so much of Sifl & Olly's Chester ("I ain't too smart at [math]," is such a crescent fresh thing to say!). The guy in the second spot is the most formal person I've ever heard talk in my life. And all I have to say about the last guy is: "I makin' living and that's all! What the difference?"

Inquiring Nuns is fun and full of amicable quirk, but what really blew me away is the 25-minute update interview included in the DVD's bonus features. Both of the nuns have since left their orders (hearing one talking about wrestling with whether she actually believes in God after obviously being immersed in faith is moving). Most fascinating is their assertion that the sisterhood made them into strong women -- the former Sister Marie Arné attributes her time as a nun to her feminism (!), since women ran everything in their day-to-day dealings. "In a lot of ways, it gave me a lot of faith in myself and my intelligence," she explains. That's a result of a devotion to dogma that I never would have expected, but I don't doubt its truth. Way to tear down the patriarchy from the inside, sisters.

Martyrs

Not to defeat my own purpose, but I'd advise against reading my thoughts about Pascal Laugier's super-horror movie Martyrs if you haven't seen it already. "I would like you to be a virgin," says Laugier in his intro to the film on the just-released DVD, and with good reason. As Bloody Disgusting puts it: "The only negative thing about Laugier's film is that once you see it, you'll never be able to see it for the first time ever again..." Really, if you don't go into this thing as ignorant as possible, you're cheating yourself, and in order to discuss this film, I have to spoil it entirely.

Also, I will fawn all over this movie and I don't want to over-hype it for those who haven't seen it, because you might end up latching onto any of the several reasons to loathe it. Laugier also says in his intro, "Feel very free to hate me. I’m not especially in love with myself, so I would understand."

But really: OH MY GOD.

Staunch characters

I know that last week was unofficial Grey Gardens week on the Internet, and five days after the HBO movie premiered, I've yet to post anything about it. Do I just move on like time, or am I so passe as to write about something that should already be in the yellow room, eating cat-food pâté, according to Internet time? Like Little Edie says, it's awful both ways.

But look, the movie is such a gem that I've grown increasingly anxious as each day goes by without getting this out. So, let me quickly say: wow. At its heart, Grey Gardens (2009) is a movie about a movie. I believe that this is the primary reason why it shares its name with the 1975 documentary (it's eponymous like Gandhi). It begins with the Edies Beale watching the Maysles' work, and continues returning to the filming of the doc throughout its duration. This makes sense, too, as the documentary was the climax of these natural entertainers' lives. Of course, the draw of this cinematic biopic is its display of how former society dames came to live in squalor. They had their cake, loved it, masticated it, chewed it and then became extremely sick from food poisoning.The film devotes itself to the cause of how and, as such, is a building of the ruins.

It seems to intuitively know what the fans care about and hone in on that. We meet Gould. We understand the melancholy in Big Edie's voice when she talks about her "terribly successful" marriage. We see that Little Edie isn't quite the dreamer that her mother makes her out to be: that the "chance" she missed out on to become a professional entertainer really did seem attainable at one point, and that the "married man" really was quite fond of her (he outfitted her with the coat she's wearing in the film's poster).

As much as it all satiated my natural curiosity, though, it sort of had the opposite effect on my primal amusement at the documentary: so much of the 1975 film's appeal is wrapped up in the WTFness of these women's language. It is at times impossible to tell what they're talking about (and that's why the original documentary comes off as boring at first, because it's much easier to tune out this buzzing nonsense than to parse out the absurdity of it all). Watching the Maysels' 1975 Grey Gardens with no outside knowledge of these women's lives makes them seem a lot crazier. While Little Edie's speech pattern was naturally expository (a device brilliantly employed in both the documentary and the 2009 film), she clearly wasn't capable of conveying the extraordinary circumstances that led to their destitute. Watching the fuller story, I couldn't help but wonder if the slice of life the Maysles offered was, in fact, half-baked.

But you know, it does little to diminish my love of the original film, I just now see it for what it is: a piece of the pie that is the Beales' legacy. What's so wonderful about this new movie is that it fits so well onto that plate. I would have thought it impossible to create something worthy of these phenomenal women, and yet first-time (!) director Michael Sucsy did just that. From the structure (rigid, to compensate for the house's) to the appearance (so gorgeous it's a pity that most of us never got the chance to see it on the big screen) to the pacing (as deliberate as decay, just like the original) to the performances of Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, which have received heaps of praise and deserve mountains more. These women have the Beales down to the gesture, like when Big Edie touches her face twice before rhapsodizing singing while sitting in bed, or when Little Edie glances up ever so slightly after informing the Maysles that she and "Mother" had "quite a fight" over a kimono earlier that morning. The attention to detail is ecstatic. I've seen people recommend watching the original doc before seeing this; I recommend loving it before seeing this. It's your only shot at truly appreciating its greatness.

I love that it keeps you on your toes, like when Big Edie comments to Gould that the sky is the color of saaphire (she says that, in fact, to Edie in the first film), or when Edie does her spiel about being afraid of locks on the beach (she says it on the porch in the movie). But even more than the little winks this movie gives fans, I love that Little Edie gets a happy ending...and then a happier one. To know little Edie is to know why this is crucial. If you don't get that, well, you wouldn't understand: it's a Grey Gardens thing.

RIP, Marilyn

I was genuinely saddened all day yesterday after reading about the death of porn star Marilyn Chambers. She starred in my favorite adult film of all time, 1980's Insatiable. I'm not into straight porn like that, but I do enjoy that flick for its kitsch and porno-chic factor (I know it's a very gay thing to say about a straight porno, but the wardrobe is great!). She also starred in Cronenberg's Rabid, in a very early (1977!) and thus unfathomably bizarre porn-to-mainstream crossover. As an adult-film actress of yesteryear, she was a definitive underdog. I think that finding out that someone so dirty-glamorous back in the day died in a trailer park is what affected me the most. The fall seems further than the ascent. Per the 2006 2-disc special edition of Insatiable, which includes a really fantastic film-long commentary with Marilyn, she seemed like a nice lady. I clipped part of another of the set's special features, an interview in which she talks about that film, Behind the Green Door, her softcore work and her life and its disappointments. The segment below might as well be her own eulogy. Bucking the stereotype associated with her career ever so slightly, I'm glad she was at least reasonably eloquent:

My favorite of Marilyn's pop-culture contributions, though, was her music. She didn't record an album or anything, just some tracks here and there that managed to encapsulate the seediness of disco and her industry. I went on at length about Insatiable's theme, "Shame on You," a few years ago, but I recently found an extended re-edit of the track. You can listen to it here. That song still regularly pops into my head. Not bad for a cheesy porno theme! There was also the slightly inferior "Benihana," which Michael Zager of "Let's All Chant" fame produced. I love that it could have been named after the restaurant. This woman fucked, sang and ate kitsch! Save me a space next to that great teppan in the sky, Marilyn.

Blow it out your War Zone

If you have an inkling that you might enjoy a movie in which a man literally gets his face punched in with a single blow (as in: fist meets face, makes hole), and you haven't yet seen Punisher: War Zone, what are you doing with your life? Actually, I'll make it easy and answer that for you: YOU ARE WASTING IT. This film is magnificent. I never really read The Punisher comics, but I know they went for relative realism (which is always a funny thing for a cartoon to do). War Zone seems to adapt that appropriately as a candy-colored symphony of brutality (nutshell imagery: the streams of blood that flow from people's mouths look like Twizzlers). It's an approximation of what would happen if Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher got together to have 90 minutes of rough-yet-quip-filled sex. I don't know if I've seen garbage own itself as steadfastly since, I don't know, Pink Flamingos, and tonally, this is Robocop's fuck-up little brother. Win-win-winwinwinwinwinwin!

This film already has its fans, and I'm happy to join the cult. It's such a visceral experience that I'm not going to go too deep into it. This is not rocket science. It isn't even when the scientists find out things about space. Instead of a full on review, I'm just gonna fuck you up with some truth:

Let the right one in the remake

I just watched last year's much-hyped Swedish vampire pre-teen drama, Let the Right One In. The biggest impression it left on me is that Mariah Carey better fucking be cast as Eli in the forthcoming English language version. For you see...

 

 

...Mariah, too, is eternally 12.

I thought the movie was cool, but truly overrated. It wasn't all that, and at the same time, too much. The pacing is so deliberate, it feels like the movie is constantly taking a step back to admire itself. It unfolds so slowly that watching it, I felt like it would have taken just as much time to fly to L.A., and observe the action at Les Deux to learn the film's ultimate point: it's all about who you know.

Oh, but the scene below is completely classic. I mean, it's poorly placed in a movie that's so bleak and serious, but in the end, I'd welcome a live action Crazy Cat Lady (hurling felines and all!) even at a funeral.

It's so weird that something so campy could make it into a film that is otherwise so unsmiling, but shit, I'll take camp where I can get it.

Gabe and Rich watch a movie: Goodbye Uncle Tom

To cap this historic week, who's up for an examination of the most tasteless movie about the slave trade (and possibly race, period) of all time? No? Well, whatever, that's what's below anyway.

As a self-conscious (as in the talent talks to the camera) "documentary" of slavery's many aspects (from middle passage to breeding), 1971's Goodbye Uncle Tom is a movie I've long found fascinating. Why, you know? Just why? To make sense of this morbid interest, I asked my friend and eternal object of admiration Videogum's Gabe Delahaye to watch this garbage with me and put me in my place. We did this before with Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, though instead of chat format, we exchanged a series of emails (over a few months, actually...). What follows is long and maybe inconclusive, but getting it all out sure felt good! (And this isn't any normal catharsis: it's cross-posted catharsis.)

[Note that the English-language version is the one discussed here. Though the Italian version contains a variety of differences that give it a more Mondo and, paradoxically, balanced feel, the film was shot in English so watching it dubbed in Italian with English subtitles just feels weird.]

[Oh, also, there's a shot of a boob below and other NSFWish screenshots, so beware.]

Just a suggestion

If you enjoyed Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, a kind of That '70s Show meets The Hills Have Eyes meets the worst case of gonorrhea you've ever heard of in your life, check out Fear(s) of the Dark. It's a black-and-white French anthology of horror-ish animation. It's hit-or-miss as a whole, but Burns' 17-minute segment falls squarely in the former category. To explain it would be to give it all away (it is, after all, a short film), but I can tell you that it's pretty amazing seeing Burns' style translated to a sort of flat 3-D moving image (I think the technique is called cell-shading, and if it's not that, it's very close to that effect). Anyway, this played in, like, a theater in America, and I have no idea if it's coming out on DVD or what. I tried to upload the segment to YouTube, but I guess the subtitle file made my file wonky because it wouldn't convert. It's for the best: it would have gotten taken down and my secondary account would have been deleted. After all, that's what secondary YouTube accounts are for. Or at least, mine is.

Whatever. Fear(s) is available for your viewing ahem nonetheless.

More reasons to watch this (i.e. screen shots) are below, but beware: they're spoilery.

I've seen the future and it looks like this:

Continuing on the thread about the ravages of fame, I'd like just briefly to consider Edy Williams, an old Hollywood starlet back from when there was such a thing, who scared the shit out of everyone in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but went on to marry Russ Meyer anyway. She tried for over two decades to carve out an acting career, and when that didn't work, she resorted to wearing outrageous, often nipple-revealing outfits at Cannes and on the red carpet of the Oscars. Funny that she resorted to reality TV tactics only after she'd been discarded by the system. These days, it's usually before.

And that's the thing: there are a lot of similarities between yesterday's b-movie scene (particularly those in Meyer's camp) and today's reality TV counterpart. Both groups were cultivated in a self-sufficient bubble whose participants had/have little chance of escaping. Moreover, it struck me while watching scenes from Edy's 1990 embarrassment Bad Girls from Mars, that being made to rhapsodize the aphrodisiac qualities of the smell of garbage is about as humiliating as your average ANTM challenge. 

Unlike the rest of Meyer's stable of weirdos (non-actors who seem as though they'd be perfectly content in their freakishness with or without the movies and who seem to look back on their "heyday" with humor instead of desperation), Williams strikes me as particularly tragic, as sort of a broad that time forgot, who tried so hard and failed so spectacularly (you know things are bad when one of the highlights of your resume is a People's Court case that you lost). I feel like she could very much be a human forecast for the sadness ahead of the half- and quarter-stars (I hope you read that in an Ed McMahon voice!) that populate our pop culture today and please me so. At least we laugh now?

It makes sense that the Internet is lacking in Edy footage, but it still saddens me. I recently dug up the Russ Meyer E! True Hollywood Story I taped in college and clipped the footage of her talking. Note that she compares herself to not one but two major stars in the course of, like, two minutes:

But you need to look no further than the photo gallery on her site for the biggest delusion of grandeur:

 

Attributing "glamor" to that shot pretty much says it all.

The real Wrestler

Despite my immediate unabashed love for it, The Wrestler left me feeling a bit disoriented. Besides a character study, it's angled to be a cultural one, as well, via scenes of wrestlers outlining choreography before matches, barely attended would-be conventions in V.F.W. halls, a post-match party replete with groupies, etc. Its investment in reality made me wonder who exactly the Randy "The Ram" Robinson referenced. His real-American, eternally victorious persona in the ring reminded me of Hulk Hogan, but then, Hogan was able to parlay his popularity into ongoing exposure (I hasten to use the word "relevance") and millions. At no point would you catch the Hulkster begging the manager of his trailer park to open his bolted double wide so he could grab his ice packs (now, that is a reality show I'd want to see). After some research online (since my knowledge of professional wrestling barely extends beyond Hulk), people have compared the down-on-his-luck Ram to Ric Flair, Lex Luger and Bret Hart.

But the most salient parallel must be with Jake "The Snake" Roberts, whose downward spiral is chronicled vividly in the 1999 wrestling documentary Beyond the Mat. I watched that movie recently and holy shit is it entirely amazing: instantly one of my favorite docs of all time. You want extreme human behavior? This one has it not just in spades; it's also in tights. While I suggest taking in the whole thing, especially if you are a fan of bitch tits and people who naturally exude a Revenge of the Nerds Boogerishness (i.e. Mick "Mankind" Foley), I discovered that someone uploaded all the Jake the Snake footage to YouTube, so you can watch just that stuff below.

From his family history (he says he was conceived by rape, his sister was kidnapped and murdered, and his stepfather was electrocuted) to his open pissing backstage at a mat to his easy distraction (a lot of people regard this as the film's highlight), there's a lot to gawk at here. Enjoy!

Next to, "...The hell is this shit?" my favorite quote comes when he describes the experience of the young girl he invites into the ring with him. The hubris is so tragic, I'd swear he's Greek. "She was just such a kind, little thing, y'know? And right there'll probably be...y'know, she's gonna live for the rest of her life, probably and have seven kids and seven husbands and whatever and wind up being a lady truck driver that cross-dresses or something, but she'll always remember tonight, man. That's why I enjoy the small town, man, because they really dig it. They really appreciate it. You come to a place like this, my god, I could be mayor here, if I wanted to be. They could keep the one they got and just put me in power. I'd be like a dictator-mayor, y'know? And they'd love it. That's what really scares ya."

Not gonna name names, but in my travels, I've heard quite a few stories smacking of this barely veiled false modesty from those who fancy themselves to be in the public eye. It's never not amazing.