The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant

Tell me Bruce Dern circa 1971 doesn't bear a striking resemblance to a young Will O (sans the schnoz).

Ladies' Night

Will Oldham, guest programmer @ Cinefamily L.A. January 7, 2010.

Waking the Dead

We watched The Howling night before last. Having seen it at the way-too-early age of about eight with my older brother I remembered being scared to death, so during one particular scene where his breathing was becoming labored and his feet were inching closer and closer to me, I asked The Kid, "Is this okay?" "Yesfineitsfine" was his reply, eyes glued intently to the screen.

Yesterday I asked him about the movie again, this time in relationship to the Italian zombie movies for which he has absolutely no tolerance. "It was fine. The scariest part was the fully naked woman and whatever they were doing by the fire."
"Yes, but what about the werewolves? When they changed, that was pretty scary, right?"
"No. Not really. It was cool the way they pulsated."
"But zombies are still too scary?"
"Mom, don't you know that the undead is a lot more scary? The undead are real. Werewolves are just fantasy." And with that, he swiftly moved on to asking to see An American Werewolf in London.
To think that I was once somewhat proficient in the folklore of demonology. Not anymore, apparently.

Riget

The Kingdom.
The best hospital-based television drama ever, ever, EVER.

Wicker Man

Wow, what a great movie. An ethnographic account of paganism and the movie from which Burning Man was born, apparently.

During one ritualistic scene full of phallic representation (and the like) by way of the Maypole, The Kid says, "Pole dancing!"


"Um....noooo....not exactly," I say.
"Oh... Polish dancing!"
Okay. Close enough.

Invisible Costume

The Kid was so pissed this Halloween when no one knew who his costume was supposed to represent. What? Hasn't every other ten-year-old wanted to dress up as Claude Rains in the 1933 version of The Invisible Man?

Every time someone asked, "And what are you supposed to be?"
He just stared ahead blankly as if to say, "What is wrong with you people?"

Lang & Cravat

Burt Lancaster is a new fave. And it's not just the face. Nor is it just the physique. Actually, this is my favorite part of his biography: Nick Cravat. This life-long friend of Lancaster was also his partner in a doubles acrobatic/trapeze routine in the mid 1930s and 1940s. He starred alongside Lancaster in nine films. In most he was mute. Cravat's daughter attributes this to his incredibly strong east-coast accent.

Cravat died in January and Lancaster in October of 1994.

A great aside is that the Circus Center has a fabulous doubles acrobatic act. Weirdly, our strong-man base bears a striking resemblance to Lancaster. Take a look for yourself.

Kozure Ōkami

From the manga of the same name.

Army of Shadows

This is an excellent movie.
Left speechless.

Return, Stroszek

If you know Bruno S. or even know of him, this* will be of interest. Particularly poignant is his rendering of Mamatschi.

If you are not familiar with Bruno S. you can see him in Hertzog's Stroszek (1977). The saddest, despite the dancing chicken. And don't forget the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974).

*It's from the NY Times, old news. I forgot to make a timely posting. Sorry

When Words Fail

For a class in Effective Communication this past week, we watched the opening scene from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I, aghast and somewhat stunned, learned that no one, not one, of forty-some people had read the book. I hadn't seen the movie, pretty much because I fail to see how such a profound experience can be turned into something so banal, and because I generally lack appreciation for Julian Schnabel's love of French cleavage. While I see the point in the exercise (for us to have the experience of the patient's perspective), I wonder how such an amazing document (aka: 132 pages written with the blink of a single eye!) doesn't have more power than some crappy, post-modern cinematic reenactment. Super sad social commentary for a Wednesday afternoon.

The White Ape

Tarzan the Apeman is an action-packed adventure, circa 1932. And racy! Who knew that the implication of sex is far more sexy than the real thing? Elephant graveyards, juju, five-time Olympic gold medalist Johnny Weismuller, a super cute and hilarious chimp named Cheeta, actual ethnographic footage and weird allusions to colonialism make an evening with Tarzan worthwhile. Did I mention Johnny Weismuller?

Feminist theorists love this movie because Jane, woman, is given voice. It must be mentioned, but who even wants to go there? I'm much more satisfied sticking with the weird ethnography and loincloths. It may say more than the theory. Then again, it may not.

Iraq in Fragments

If you see one independent film this year, this should be it.
The three part documentary by Seattle's James Longley is clearly made by a filmmaker with a story to tell. Forgoing the role of the "neutral" participant observer, always a moral dilemma, Longley makes no bones about his intention to convey a very clear point-of-view. Whatever your perspective on that approach, it makes for a pretty powerful movie.

From Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir: "Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair. It offers no prescriptions, and the ideology you bring to the film may well determine what you see in it. If it has a lesson for Americans, it might be: We bloodied our hands in this place. Before we try to wash them off and walk away, we owe these people the respect of seeing them as they are."

I Am Become Death

The number of nuclear warheads in the US, according to a 2002 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons Databook Project is 10,600 (7,982 deployed, 2,700 hedge/contingency stockpile). The amount of plutonium still in those weapons is 43 metric tons.

Watch The Day After Trinity and Kuroi Ame and then ask yourself why.

"I remember the line from the Hindu text, The Bhagavad Gita: Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
- Robert Oppenheimer, The Day After Trinity

Swamp Girl

"She is a legend. She is a myth. She is Swamp Girl. Growing up on the Okefenokee, abandoned by her parents, Swamp Girl was raised by a black man she calls Pa. Trouble reins for Swamp Girl when another girl who happens to be a psycho prison escapee and her boyfriend force Swamp Girl to be their local Swamp guide. Things get nasty when Swamp Girl battles Convict Girl in an all out catfight." That, a little Ferlin Husky crooning, and more bad ass snakes than you can shake a stick at, makes for fine Sunday night respite.

We do indeed have the double feature including Swamp Country (1966), which we've saved for a rainy day. Sadly, we missed out on the extra added attraction, Swamp Virgin (1947). What gives?

Role Reprise

Which two male characters from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks shared the stage in a dance musical in 1961?

<--*hint.

Tom Thumb

Like Jan Svankmajer? Try The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (bolexbrothers, 1991). Stop-motion animation combined with pixilation, wherein claymation figures and actors share the same frame, makes for a pretty creepy film. Add that to the generally bleak narrative, and you've got yourself a darn good movie -- especially for someone who's supposed to be studying pharmacology and a nine-year-old who, under a different roof, would probably be watching Mary Poppins.
The Kid tells me he identifies with Jack, the seckel character who disables and robs people with hypodermic needles.

Justine Kurland

I have a deep fondness for the work of Justine Kurland, so I thought I'd share this nicely packaged website that exhibits her recent work. I'm still favoring her older photos, stage right.

I was pleasantly surprised a few years back when Kurland's work illustrated the book Old Joy by Jonathan Raymond. The book was later made into a film featuring the inimitable Will Oldham. That's a lot of good stuff in one place.

The book is hard to find, but the movie is not.

Gwangi

This is the perfect movie for a nine-year-old boy. Or for anyone who wants to see a stop-motion animated eohippus. Or cowboys fighting dinosaurs. Or for lovers of great dialogue.
"So, Lope tells me you're an anthropologist."
"Close. I'm a paleontologist. We dig deeper."

Making a Mother

The documentary The Business of Being Born (Rikki Lake & Abby Epstein) has been made available for viewing online. That's nice. What's not so nice is the message. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. But as my partner and I sat down to watch, it was pretty clear within the first two minutes that all of the positive popular press this movie has received has been seriously undeserved, and worse, uncritical. (A crucial exception is this Slate piece.) Not only did I not like this movie for its dubious historical, epidemiological and professional commentary on birth in the United States, I also didn't like that it was horribly elitist, classist and, yes, racist. This in all of the worst ways that information packaged for general consumption can be: coercively.

The underlying message of the film is that the right birth is a normal birth (the film’s term, not mine) and a normal birth is one that happens at home, unmedicated and without any intervention. There was absolutely no call to concern for women with no access to insurance or perinatal care, women with pre-existing conditions, women of advanced age or with high risk pregnancies, teen moms, et al. Basically, anyone that didn’t fit the bill of perfect health and fall into the category of upper-middle class American woman, was bound for the label of “bad mother”. That is shameful.

My partner referred to it as the NY/LA “boutique” image of the perfect childbirth. Of course, we all want women to have this intervention-free option. But for some of us, there may not be the luxury of an uncomplicated pregnancy and childbirth. And that can make us feel like we've lost control. It became pretty clear by Rikki's third hat change and overly dramatic forward-leaning, finger chapelling attentiveness, that this movie was primarily about women trying to either regain or maintain that control. Not until I was 1 hour and 9 minutes into the movie did I realize that it was not about control of one’s own childbirth experience, as the film lauds, but about control of other women and their experience. Sadly, 'expert' clinicians are also used to meet this end. At one point in the film, Dr. Michel Odent (the OB who also believes men should not be present at childbirth) makes the claim that when a woman gives birth by “caesarean section she does not release [the natural] flow of "love hormones" [oxitocin], so she is a different woman than if she had given birth naturally...and the first contact between mother and baby is different.” Here Odent compares women to monkeys who will reject their babies if delivered by c-section. Upon hearing this, I quite astonished myself and my poor partner, by bursting into tears.

Childbirth is a wonderful, moving, emotional, life-changing event for every woman; the amazing birth footage in this documentary attests to that. What is worrisome, however, is the shocking amount of misinformation the film conveys about childbirth, accompanied by a self-affirming (and often righteous) adamance about the importance of the “right” birth and becoming the “right” kind of mother. This is interspersed with an extreme lack of criticality in regard to the 'big picture' of various practices by those interviewed, including women, social scientists and health care providers. (I should say here that there was a striking absence of L&D nurses in this movie. Not one was interviewed!). Neither was there even a smattering of sympathy for women who have births that don’t go as planned. As a twenty-five year-old first time mom, I had a complicated pregnancy and The Kid was, in the end - thankfully - delivered safely to my arms by cesarean section. But I have known women who have had horrifically complicated pregnancies necessitating close monitoring of both mom and baby; mothers who have had perfectly normal pregnancies and lost their babies in what seemed to begin as an uncomplicated birth; husbands and children who have lost their wives and mothers because of unforeseen problems.

The empowerment of women is not as simple as demedicalizing childbirth. But it is as simple as avoiding shaming women into taking chances for fear of being a “bad mother.” Empowering women doesn't mean demanding we all make the same choices and become the same kinds of mothers; it means allowing us to empower ourselves to become the mothers we choose to be.

Two thank-yous: First, to the nurse midwife Cara Muhlhahn who in the movie describes her own difficult first childbirth, and of whom we get to see footage as she goes into the pain-induced dementia of despising everyone around her. It’s the best footage in the entire movie. And to all of the good docs and nurses out there who have blogged more accurate information about childbirth practices in the United States, inclusive - and even encouraging - of home birth.