p e n g u i n d e v i l

Ohh, shivers! Tonight we watched a documentary that was very through-provoking in a number of ways. It was The Business of Being Born
(which is a very accurate title for the subject matter) and it basically covers the difference between “regular” hospital births and midwife attended, both at home and in the hospital. As someone who was involved in a birth the straddled these lines, both in the sense of planning on a midwife attended natural childbirth, but having it be a conducted in a hospital, and who watched the progression of suggested interventions, this did ring quite close to home.

The Business of Being Born
is told mainly through interviews with OB/GYN’s (both American and European) and midwives, with lots of footage of births and birthing processes, both at home and in the hospital. It is very blunt, both in its message and its methods. Starting with the basic fact that the United States has: the industrial worlds highest rates of hospital births, highest rate of cesarean sections and also the most expensive births. From which this country ends up with about the worst rates for infant and mother mortality in the industrialized world! The filmmakers look at the smear campaigns against midwives in the early 20th centuries and some of the horrible practices used against women going through child birth in the decades since then (some of these are too much to stomach watching). There is one troubling segment where they discuss how once medical intervention is begun (generally under the guise of relieving pain for the mother), each step of intervention leads to effects that pretty much require a further step of intervention. All of which ends up in an unhealthy, expensive (and for some, quite disappointing) viscous circle of even increasing intervention.

They thoroughly point out that only in a small numbers of cases is there any reason for childbirth to be a surgical procedure or even a hospital event, yet in this country that it what it has become in the vast majority of cases. It becomes obvious that they are using the ever-present American tactic of “giving direction through fear” to keep childbirth a profit center (for many: hospital profits, insurance companies profits, ensuring enough highly billable work for doctors) and to undermine (if not quash) traditional, logic and natural means of doing that for which the human was actually designed to do. Of course to me it all brings to mind the old RIAA philosophy of seeing anything that doesn’t feed these good old boy profits centers as some kind of evil or ignorant foolishness.

Anyway, I digress. The Business of Being Born is a project of Ricki Lake (but no, she is neither irritating or obnoxious here) which she was inspired to make after undergoing a hospital birth. Conveniently, the director got pregnant while the film was in production and her experience was worked into the film. All in all, even for one as skeptical of the Establishment as I am, it was still quite eye-opening. And unsettling, and maddening. The fear that people are saddled with (to bring gain to the greedy), and the limits of what the Establishment will do to defend itself against reason can be a little hard to take in such potent doses.

Ah yes, I finally got around to re-watching Truck Turner. Though it comes across pretty good, not having terrible cheap sets and horrible acting, it’s certainly not one of my favorite 70’s action films as it has a rather standard storyline and nothing particularly remarkable about it, well, nothing remarkable except for some great casting! Any weakness is more than made up for by the stars… First off, the incomparable Isaac Hayes is reason enough to watch it many times over! In fact, my first knowledge of this movie was when I found an LP of the soundtrack in a record store while browsing the Isaac Hayes records. Though the LP was sadly missing one of the two records, I bought it anyway and then went out and found the movie. And while it doesn’t have Pam Grier, it does star Nichelle Nichols, here playing a much, much different role than Lt Uhura…





Ike plays Mac “Truck” Turner, a hard-boiled bounty hunter who will go after any target if the price is high enough. One of the assignments that he and his partner take on is going after a violent pimp named Gator. After he and his partner end up taking Gator down, his “all business and serious as all getout” lady Dorinda (that’s Nichelle) goes for vengeance and basically offers up a big piece of their stable of girls to whoever can kill Truck.





Of course much bloodshed follows with people being blown away left and right, lots of fighting, girls in terrible Ho-clothes and some rad pimp outfits (try and avoid though laying your eyes on Desmond, though… a skinny white pimp who tends to go around in awful western style clothes with a matching eye patch). So it is a lot of fun!

I did watch it with a 13 year old, which made me somewhat uncomfortable with the endless foul language and rather overt subject matter. I think it was his first pimp movie viewing… Also be on the lookout for a small role for Scatman Crothers and a big role for another one of my old favorites, the always intimidating Yaphet Kyoto following up his awesome role as Mr. Big in Live and Let Die!



Yes, yet another classic from Pixar. As I have never been much of a fan of animated movies, nor of kids movies in general, I have always had some skepticism towards Pixar… Especially as I have always view computer animation to be some evil step-child of “actual” animation. But, admittedly, their films are the best modern American animated kids movies, bar none, and Wall-E was no exception. Not only are their animations utterly eye-catching, but the stories are sincere and interesting to a depth that other studios just can’t seem to manage.

For Wall-E we take a look into Earth’s future, where humans live purely consumer lives, aided by the horrible mega-corporation that controls everything, Buy-N-Large. After years of this, there comes a point where the world is basically covered in trash. Buy-N-Large decides that things need to be cleaned up so they come up with the idea of sending the worlds population on a multi-year space cruise, during which they will set an army of robots to clean up all of that trash.

Cut to 700 years later and one poor little robot, Wall-E. This little robot (his name is actually just his model, he is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class) seems to be the last one left cleaning up the trash in an otherwise empty world. The cruising population never returned and the other robots broke down so he wander his cities with his only friend (a cockroach) and compacts trash and collect trinkets.





One day though, a ship comes to visit. And not only does this ship come, but it brings with it an object for Wall-E’s attention… Something to focus on besides his towers of trash and his collections of knick-knacks. Of course, it also brings with it all of the other things that mysterious ships bring: danger, excitement, love and confusion and, possibly, a chance to take an adventure like no other!





Very reminiscent of Idiocracy with its big mountains of garbage, portrayals of ridiculous levels of mind-numbing consumerism and a statement of the terribly shallow (yet not implausible enough) future for humanity. They might actually make a fun double feature! But on it’s own, Wall-E is great fun to look at, quite entertaining and has some very nicely done science fiction elements.



Ah yes, recently I sat down to a most entertaining documentary. Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox. And an apt name it is for, while it is about Dr Bronner. It is also about his company and his soap and his son Ralph. Dr. Bronner is, of course, the wonderfully idiosyncratic, brilliant genius behind Bronner’s Castille soap. A product that has been, without question, the most constant and consistent product in my home since I was a wee tot. I remember being fascinated by the labels when I was little and remaining fascinated until the current day. But about the movie…

I poo poo all of those who say that he is crazy, or say that this film makes him seems crazy he is just an intelligent and brilliant man who I feel always had the hope that people would start to wake up and see the world and people around themselves. Sure, he did tend to rant and rave, coming across as some kind of a fascist rabbi school teacher, and he certainly starts to seem a bit repetitive, where you feel like he has spouted slightly altered versions of the same few paragraphs for 40 years. But I’ve always been one to subscribe to the notion that the importance lays “not in how you say it, but in what you say”. And his message (regardless of the god stuff and the anti-communist ranting) says the right things about the earth and the environment and community. Argh! I digress! There is lots of film of him and his family members (who continue to run the company) and some footage from some terrible looking hippie documentary called “Rainbow Bridge” but we mainly follow around his son Ralph (who is pretty much the company’s one man marketing machine) as he travels the land giving away free soap, copies of the Moral A.B.C. and making speeches about his father. Ralph is truly one of those folks who can talk to anyone, and also get anyone to accept a hug.

Even though I have noticed that they have added a lot of products recently, seeing his grandsons running the company gave me the great feeling that his product line will continue the Castille soaps (peppermint and eucalyptus being my favorite) until the day I pass on. I found the documentary to be inspired and quite inspiring.



Speaking of odd old ducks, I also watched Surfwise… another story about a man on a mission who brought his family along with him. This time though, the mission was surfing and avoiding the middle-class thing. Dorian Paskowitz was a successful doctor in Hawaii who, in the 1960’s, decided to abandon his career and life-style and take his family (wife and 9 kids) away from it all… But which we mean “move them all into an RV and spend the next few decades driving around surfing”. On the way, they avoided school, stability and all of those other bourgeois things that other families do. It actually comes across as a fairly positive move, at least in the early part of the movie. But, in all honestly, the 11 of them did live for many years in the confines of a succession of small RV’s. As the film progresses the children (of course, all adults now) talk about an assortment of issues that came from being raised as part of a terribly close-knit group of 11 people living for many years in a privacy-free environment and not having the same reality as most children. But the parents certainly feel confident in their choice of family lifestyles and, now in his 80’s, old Doc is still going strong.

I know, we’ve all seen Say Anything so many times that there isn’t really any reason to comment on it. But I will anyway. Though to make it interesting, this time (admittedly the first in many, many years since I’ve watched it) we watched it with the Commentary (from Crowe, Cusack and Skye). it was only the third DVD I’ve watched the commentary on (the other two being This is Spinal Tap and Roger Ebert’s great commentary track on Dark City), and I thought it was alright, it felt very natural, like they really did enjoy making this movie and it is certainly worth sitting through if you are a fan of this movie, though I started to wonder how many times Skye was going to mention that if they hadn’t both been romantically attached during filming that they probably would have become so.

To me, this is the film that straddles the line between Cusack’s dorky teen comedies of the 1980’s (The Sure Thing, Better Off Dead) and his more mature roles of the 1990’s (The Grifters at least, though his delightful portrayal of Caspar the Food Pirate kind of invalidates that theory). Say Anything falls in here as a very serious comedy. Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut is one of those great films that is very funny, but not with the usual “cheap jokes a way as to make you laugh all the time” style, and is also very serious but not in a way that you feel like they are trying to be serious. The movie really just has a natural flow between ups and downs, all gravitating around John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler, who is also generally both up and down. It is the story of a very individual fellow, a dorky and very charmingly serious kickboxer who falls for a girl that most would considered out of his league and pursues her until, well maybe not the ends of the earth, but the ends of the movie at least. The love interest is, of course, Ione Skye, who portrays an uncomfortable “brainy beauty” just about as well as you could expect her too. She has an interesting role as she isn’t so much a major character as she is the pivot between John Cusack and John Mahoney’s great and touching portrayal of her obsessive and overly-protective father. There are many great and now iconic scenes (though I’ve never found the “In your eyes” scene to be that great) and everything really does work together well.





Say Anything also features a fun turn by Eric Stolz, a great, scene stealing role for Lili Taylor as Lloyd’s best friend Corey (certainly one of the key roles in the film, and most entertaining with her now infamous obsession with her ex-boyfriend Joe) and a very early appearance of Jeremy Piven.

If you are trying to survive a Noir film, doing so isn’t a case of watching out for your enemies, getting away with the dough or beating the cops in that car chase. The key move you need to make is to outsmart your Femme Fatale. If these guys could only see the ends of their movies, they’d snuff those broads the first time that they cross paths and the sad thing in these films is when the mark is too dim to even know that his girl has gone bad on him until its too late!

Luckily, in Out of the Past our lead fish isn’t that big of a fool. Robert Mitchum is Jeff Bailey, a once-detective, now gas station owner living a low-profile life (under a fake name, even) in an out of the way California town. When his old “friend” Joe wanders by the past comes calling… And not in a good way. See, years ago Jeff would do some work for the local kingpin about town, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas!) and the last job that he did for him was to hunt down Whit’s girl Kathie (Jane Greer) and bring her back. Well, Jeff did hunt her down in Mexico, but he didn’t bring her back. In fact, he never came back either and, instead, he moved on to a new life and tried to leave his past behind. As we all know, those peaceful new lives can only last for so long, especially as this Joe fellow still works for good old Whit and says that he would like to see Jeff something fierce… So back into the past he steps.





Out of the Past is a good Noir from 1947 directed by Jacques Tourneur (who earlier brought us Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie!) and it has all of the classic elements: missing money, a femme fatale, tough guys, murders, double-crossing, gunfire, fisticuffs and, most notably, an endlessly hard-boiled dialogue of smarmy one-liners! I thought it was better than most Noirs that I’ve seen and, though the dialog did seem a bit much in the early scenes, the story kept me involved from start to finish.



How about a film about the Murder City Devils? While I have quite a liking for this band, I didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect from a movie about them. here was Rock & Roll Won’t Wait, and I just had to see. It turns out to be not so much a documentary but rather a tour diary of sorts or, better yet, a home movie that gives them a lot of chances to talk about themselves. Rock & Roll Won’t Wait is filled with a lot of “backstage” moments, live footage and then the guys in the band talking about being in the band.

I didn’t really find it that interesting. And of course there is a bit of the pat old stuff… “we’re not in it for the money, who joins a punk band for the money”, “we don’t have tattoos to be part of the tattoo thing”. They do just ooze that Seattle Rock/Punk hip look in their appearance, and while I don’t take issue with what they are saying, it just seems like it should go unsaid and stating it makes it sound a bit defensive.

Regardless, it is a short movie (under an hour) and a nice document of a great band… And a great live band, though that doesn’t really come across in the footage here. When I saw them Spencer seemed almost too drunk to stand up, but it was a hell of a show.

Also, we watched Starting out in the Evening. A good movie, mainly due to Frank Langella (yes, Dracula [or for the kids out there, Skeletor]). Frank plays a retired Literature professor who is also an old and ailing “literary novelist”. He had published a number of novels many years back, all of which are basically unknown and out of print and he is quietly living and working on his most recent novel (10 years in the making). Suddenly he is approached by a young graduate student (Lauren Ambrose from Six Feet Under) who wants to write her master thesis on his work and hopes to revitalize his career. She becomes quite the pest, trying to insert herself into his closed off world, analyze aspects of his life that he doesn’t want to talk about and basically become a bit much for an old fellow to handle.

Though Lily Taylor (as his daughter) and Lauren did good jobs, I found both of their characters to be somewhat annoying. Frank Langella was certainly the meat of the movie, not only did he do a really great and moving job with this character, but I found the character very compelling. I really loved his dedication to his art and with all of the pop fiction crap that is out now, it is nice to see a movie that is basically a homage to the (seemingly) dead art of literary fiction.

Based on a silly and fun looking preview that I saw this weekend, I ended up netflixing an odd little film called Hamlet 2. This nutty comedy is the story of a failed actor with stars in his eyes who has become a rather failed (and quite frustrated) drama teacher in a high school in Tuscon. He is rather an odd duck, always with a short-temper, a flair for the dramatic, traveling by roller skate and faltering at the “family” thing with terribly and wonderfully caustic wife. In all of this, the major trauma for him and his class of two devoted students seems to be the continually terrible reviews of their plays by the drama critic of the school newspaper. But this erratic little scene gets a life-altering shake-up when, due to school program cutbacks, a the class is suddenly filed with a mob of seemingly street-wise toughs who are completely disinterested. As they are quite nonchalant about the drama class it works to inspire his desire to make something of himself, so he tries to taken on the role of being the acting teacher who will inspire to try and get the class to create something great.





Working in desperation to save his program and also satisfy his creative needs by doing a play that is both original and big, he sets out to write and produce Hamlet 2! That being somewhat of a combination of Grease, Hamlet and Jesus Christ superstar, which features: Jesus and Hamlet in a time machine (the plot device to make up for the all of the lead Hamlet characters dying in Hamlet), the Gay Men’s Chorus of Tuscon, topics unfit for decent company, lots of dancing and the classic tune “Rock me Sexy Jesus”. Anyway, it is a ridiculous comedy that is irreverent, un-pc, completely and quite entertaining and has some seriously funny moments. In the midst of that, they manage to be crude, crass and make fun of just about everyone (though support everyone at the same time). Keep in mind that it was written by Pam Brady, who also did writing for: Team America, South Park & South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut… And it shows.

Back in the early 90’s my friend Lucy had (or so I recall) a videotape of a Russ Meyer movie. I’d never seen one (and in fact, was only vaguely familiar with who he was) so one day we got around to watching it and I wasn’t terribly impressed. The movie was a rather silly and corny one and I had a hard time really paying attention after a half hour or so. Now, after many years and many Russ Meyer movies, I find that I still think that I have a hard time rally giving it my full attention. But, as my RM project must proceed, I watched it again on classic, washed VHS quality dvd. This film is, of course, Motor Psycho!

While it has a classic name and is by the Great RM, I would certainly say it is a mixed bag. Yes, low production values… filmed almost entirely out of doors, washed out and the feeling that someones vision exceeded their pocket book. But that is pretty much on par with all of these things. While half of the story is campy and serious that the movie somewhat redeems itself, in between it does get a bit dull.

Motor Psycho is the story of Brahmin, Slick and Dante, three young toughies driving their motorcycles across the desert to Vegas. Well sort of, though they’ve got the groovy lingo (don’t wig out man, I’m hip), they drive mopeds and have a transistor radio and are rather unconvincing in their appearance.





While they are gallivanting across the desert looking both harmless and obnoxious, they come across a couple out fishing and sunbathing and we learn that, appearances aside, they are seriously out to rape and pillage. These poor folks are just the first of a string of couples who they menace in a most serious fashion.





As might be expected, their actions incur the ire of some of the survivors of these meetings and so Alex Rocco (yes, Moe Greene) and Haji (yes, the Haji) set off in pursuit. While they are exciting cast members to have on the screen, the movie is a bit light on the usual suspects of RM’s films. Though, to make up for it, there is even a cameo by the man himself!





So yes, another Russ Meyer story of sex, sin and the bad folks who are out to cause troubles to the good folks of the world. Lacking the montages, narration and nudity that are somewhat the calling cards of early Russ Meyer films, it is still an alright film, though somewhat more of a standard 1960’s “youth gone wild” type of film.

And, as one might expect, this joy ride doesn’t end well for anyone involved…



Ah yes, the Coen Brothers… I had always been one of those fans who saw all of their movies, as among those films number two of my all time favorites (Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink) and one of my favorite somewhat-guilty pleasures (the Big Lebowski). But the last 10 years or so, it hasn’t seemed quite as necessary. Though I did think that No Country For Old Men was good, I had started to lose my interest with the release of O Brother, Where Art Thou (while I thought the soundtrack was quite good, I was not fond of the casting of George Clooney and the movie just seemed a bit flat to me). And The Man who wasn’t there? Well, I thought that was a bit dull and unmemorable. On the basis of those two movies and the two following movies seeming a bit too Hollywood (though I haven’t seen them), I no longer felt the need to see all of their movies. Then, last year, due to a profusion of interesting movie posters and an entertaining trailer, I decided that I wanted to check out Burn After Reading. It took quite a while, but we finally netflixed it and ended up watching it last night. It was just the sort of movie I needed, both dramatic and funny, light but dryly serious, and predictable but with some fun surprises. And really quite entertaining.





Anyway, Burn After Reading is the story of how some government people and some gym employees come together with generally disastrous results: John Malkovich (recently departed from the CIA) and his wife (who is having an affair with…), George Clooney (a treasury agent) all end up tangling with Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt who play two workers at a local gym looking to make some money. It all starts when Osbourne Cox quits the CIA and decides to write his memoirs, which will be filled filled with details of his CIA analyst life. Unfortunately, some marital issues and some lack of care lead to a CD-Rom of some of his spy details getting out into the world and into the hands of the staff at the local gym. Two of those people decide that they can turn this “sensitive shit” into some easy money. Of course, as it is a black comedy of sorts, rather than easy money they find themselves falling into a web of murder, deception, infidelity (oh so many, all around and interwoven), surveillance, internet dating and mass confusion. Though I thought it started off somewhat slow, at the halfway mark or so it really picked up and threw in some great and surprising violence… And you come to easily understand what they meant in the rating when they state “Pervasive language”… That rating could just be for Malkovich’s relentlessly hostile dialogue alone.





But Malkovich is great as the “always on the verge of great anger” CIA analyst who feels that he has suffered fools for far too long and won’t let them get him down anymore, Brad Pitt as the brainless gym trainer whose big dreams set the train rolling, the always grand Frances McDormand as the gym employee seeking happiness through plastic surgery and internet dating and, of course, George Clooney as the self-obsessed, irresponsible and philandering treasury agent who hasn’t fired his gun in twenty years on the job. One of my favorite aspects though is the portrayals of the officers at CIA headquarters once they start following what is going on, J K Simmons especially has an entertaining character who always has intriguing suggestions for solving all of these problems..





As an addition, as it is somewhat movie related. I suffered a foolish DVD loss in the move out to the east coast. As 7 months have now gone by and I am convinced that no resolution is coming, I put together a page about it… So if you want to read the pitiful details, look here at: Lost causes.