The Love Divine

I notice that before Christmas, I mentioned that I was trying to bully my mother into making a doll of Divine in Pink Flamingos for a friend of mine. Well...

She's a little thin, looks a little like a random contestant from RuPaul's Drag Race, and the dress looks a little more "Mahalia Jackson" than it does "Filthiest Woman Alive," but I'm pleased that we were able to make this work. My mother did all the sewing, naturally, while I painted the face. I was really pleased with how the eyes turned out.

My friend has it on the table next to his bed, so it's the first thing he sees when he wakes up in the morning.

TV Party Tonight?

I've noticed recently that I haven't been watching as much TV as I have been. Partly this is because of my schedule: I work two nights a week, and those nights (Wednesday and Thursday) tend to have the programs I am most interested in watching. At the same time, I am going out more on Monday and Tuesday nights: the guy I've been seeing -- we're not dating, but I think that by the fourth month, if you meet up at least once a week, you can properly describe yourself as "seeing" someone -- is generally free on those nights, and those tend to be the nights we hang out. Which is not a bad thing at all, mind you, but it does mean that I haven't watched How I Met Your Mother at all this season. And that's the type of show that I've sort of quit watching: not great art, but entertaining, diverting television shows. So I am pretty diligent about catching up with Parks and Recreation on Hulu (usually on my lunch hours at work; I love having my own office), but less so with shows like Raising Hope. It's not a major loss or anything, it's just that the circumstances of my life have changed, and I find it interesting.

What also might have contributed is the death of our flat screen, which necessitated the rearrangement of our TVs in the apartment, so that now instead of a larger TV in my bedroom, I have a 10" TV that my roommate had in his closet, which I have not turned on for weeks. This also coincided with our getting Roku, which allows us to stream Netflix and Hulu Plus to our TV downstairs, so we're much more inclined to watch something like Portlandia or Better Off Ted when I get home from work than to watch the middling police procedurals that seem to take over in the 10 o'clock hour.

Naturally, I should be reading more. I know I should be. Putting aside the stack of books chiding me from my desk, I have a pile of comic books that need to be attended to one of these days. Or I could be watching movies, which would at least give me something to blog about here, right? But as of late I've been burning up my free time by playing The Sims 3, which is of absolutely no interest to anyone but myself.

Travellin' Fool

In which I participate in a meme where you list every city that you spent at least one night in during the preceding year. This year has apparently been all about me travelling up and down the east coast. There are worse ways to spend your year, especially when you don’t have a whole lot on money. But next year I want to make it to Portland, OR.

• Richmond, VA
• Henrico, VA
• Durham, NC
• Spencerport, NY
• Monticello, IN
• Mooresville, IN
• Annapolis, MD
• Livonia, MI
• Camden, ME
• Boston, MA
• Athens, GA
• Savannah, GA
• Portsmouth, VA
• Anna Maria Island, FL

May this next year be a travel-rich year for us all!

I am currently trying to figure out a strategy for trying to convince my mom to make a stuffed doll of Divine from Pink Flamingos for a friend of mine for Christmas.

I probably should have thought about this earlier in the year.

He'll Save Every One Of Us

So it's nice to remind yourself occasionally that your first impression can sometimes not be the best impression, particularly when that first impression occurs when you're a child. Tonight, in what might have been an effort to try to get my roommate to go to bed so I could watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 in peace -- SPOILER ALERT: it didn't work! -- I started watching Flash Gordon on Netflix. I remember the movie from when I was a child: mostly, what I remember was the theme song (naturally), and that it seemed like a lame rip-off of Star Wars. Well, and I remembered the pulsating slimy scorpion creature inside the stump on Arboria, because frankly, that was gross. But my point here is that my associations with the film weren't great. But people whose opinions I respect seemed to like the film, so I figured I would revisit it.

So we start watching the movie, and almost immediately my attitude towards it improved dramatically. Yes, Sam J. Jones as the title character was a bit of a meathead, but the movie seems perfectly cognizant of this fact, and plays it for laughs. Seriously, attacking the imperial guard as if he's trying to make it through a defensive line? HILARIOUS. But the rest of the cast more than makes up for it. Melody Anderson is much better than I remember, and plays Dale Arden as if she really is in a serial in the 1930s. And when we get to the other actors -- Brian Blessed, Topol, Timothy Dalton, MAX VON SYDOW?? -- there is absolutely nothing to complain about. And the costumes and scenery are actually kind of gorgeous: as my roommate said, it's Star Wars if George Lucas were a gay man. Everything that turned me off as a kid -- the clearly artificial special effects, the Rococo ornateness of the sets and the costumes, the knowing winks to the audience -- are precisely why I enjoyed it so much as an adult. It's so over the top, with such a peculiarly retro-futuristic aesthetic at work within it, and so much fun to look at. Instead of seeing it as an attempt to cash in on Star Wars, it sort of strikes me that it's almost an antidote to it, an attempt to try to take the space opera back to its roots. And I appreciate that.

In Which I Complain About The Muppets, And Kill All Joy

So this afternoon, I went to see The Muppets, because the Muppets are awesome. I was watching Sesame Street extremely early in life: the first word I ever spoke was "cookie" because I saw Cookie Monster on the back of the newspaper my dad was reading. I even used to refer to time increments in terms of Sesame Street whenever we drove to my grandparents' house, i.e., "How many Sesame Streets until we get there?" And I remember very clearly gathering around the console TV with the family to watch The Muppet Show every week. The soundtrack to The Muppet Movie was one of the first albums I ever owned, and I used to listen to it ad infinitum. The older I get, the more I realize how much the Muppets aesthetic influenced my taste: my affection for old Hollywood spectacle and artifice, for musicals and surreal humor, all seem tied to my affection for those two television shows. In other words, I am the target audience of The Muppets.

And that's a problem. This should be a movie directed towards children, with stuff to appeal to adults. That was certainly the case with the original Muppet movie. But this seemed almost exclusively to be an exercise in nostalgia, with frequent references to that first movie. I don't have a problem with them breaking the fourth wall -- they ALWAYS did that, and I love that about them -- but jokes would rely on a recent re-watching of The Muppet Movie, and that shouldn't be the case. The whole movie seemed to almost evangelize on the Muppets' behalf, trying to convince the audience that there were culturally relevant once again. Except, and here's a problem: WE'RE ALREADY IN THE AUDIENCE. We're the people who think that they can be relevant, we're the ones willing to overlook that the Muppets don't sound quite right, we're in the theater. Now give us an exciting, amusing story about the Muppets to justify that faith!

The music for the film was problematic, as well. There were four new songs by Bret McKenzie, of Flight of the Conchords, and these were pleasant enough. But they lacked that spark that you had from The Muppet Movie soundtrack. Then they used "Rainbow Connection" (twice), as well as the original version of "Mahna Mahna" at the conclusion. Which, is fine: I find myself wondering why they couldn't just write new songs, but at the same time, "Rainbow Connection" has proven remarkably durable over the years. But then, several times in the movie, they just used pop songs -- "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," "We Built This City," "Bad to the Bone." And that just struck me as wrong: the Muppet movies (or at least the core three) always seemed to be in a somewhat timeless place, a world of its own. Couldn't songs have been written to accomplish what these songs did in the movie? The "Bad to the Bone" cue in particular seemed profoundly hacky, like something you would expect to see in a Chipmunks movie. (I actually had less problem with the Muppet-izing of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Fuck You," because at least those were integrated into the action, and besides, The Muppet Show used to do that sort of pop music re-purposing pretty regularly. The first time I ever heard "Copa Cabana" was when Liza Minnelli performed it on that show.)

Don't even get me started about the cameos. The best thing about the cameos is when they're able to integrate it into action without making a big deal out of it. Sarah Silverman as a waitress works, for instance. Zach Galifianakis as a hobo? It was the role he was born to play! But trotting out Whoopi Goldberg, Selena Gomez, and the kid from Modern Family as themselves to answer phones in a donation drive? Two of these individuals currently work on shows on ABC (a Disney company), the other is a hideous monster straight out of the Walt Disney clone farm. This is incredibly lazy, and it is not going to help the movie age well.

Did I laugh at this movie? Heck yeah, although sometimes the laughter was a bit more strained than I would have liked. Did I cry at this movie? Yes I did, although it seemed to spring less from the story than it did the accretion of nostalgia that has built up on the property for me. The re-enactment of the opening of The Muppet Show literally had tears streaming down my face, which, I admit, didn't make a whole lot of sense. But I was mourning lost youth, and the loss of Jim Henson. This movie provoked an emotional reaction, but only because the emotions were already inside me when I entered the theater. It made me nostalgic for how ambitious the Muppets used to be.

Body Snatches

I had first heard of Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell at Halloween a few years ago: Turner Classic Movies was showing it as part of their horror film marathon, and something about that title just sang to me. Because, let's face it, that's an amazing title. I had had it saved on DVR, but something went wrong, and by the time I finally sat down to watch it, it was no where to be found. Since then, I've checked Netflix fairly regularly to try to see if it had been released, with no luck. I despaired ever even getting the chance to see it.

Then the other day, my roommate and I were fiddling around on Hulu Plus -- he has suddenly decided that he wants to start watching movies on his motion picture bucket list, and a good proportion of those movies are available through the Criterion Collection. So we were just going through the movies, putting all the ones he wanted to see in the queue, as well as a couple for me. Suddenly, what comes up but Goke! "What sort of witchery is this?" quoth I, staring in wonder at what I saw on the TV. Could it be true? Could it have been released by Criterion?

Short answer: yes, but not on DVD or Blue-Ray. It appears to be something that is solely on the Hulu Plus channel, which is a nice bit of added value for those who subscribe. Personally, I think that it probably will be released as a physical product eventually, especially after the success Criterion has had with House. In this blog post, it's mentioned that it had been posted on Hulu the same week that Godzilla and Quadrophenia had been posted: the former is set to be released on disc in January, and I expect that the latter won't follow too far behind. It's an interesting marketing maneuver, especially for films like this which may not have an existing audience yet.

So I watched it. And it was good. The movie I see it compared to the most is Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, which I can totally see, both plot-wise, as well is the director's clear indebtedness to Bava's over saturated style. But the horror in this movie is significantly more effective than in the earlier movie. Maybe it's the fact that I didn't watch this movie on the office computer over the course of my lunch hours over a couple days -- such was my online video experience before we hooked a Roku box to the TV -- but this one just worked much better for me.

**HERE THERE BE SPOILERS**

A summary, since it isn't a particularly well-known movie: an Air Japan flight is on it's way from Tokyo to Osaka, when there are some ominous events that begin taking place. The skies are orange and full of lights, and pigeons keep smashing into the windows of the aircraft. As this is going on, we are introduced to the crew and passengers, including one particularly nefarious passenger who then proceeds to hijack the plane, as nefarious passengers are wont to do. The plane is re-routed, but then a UFO flies by, and suddenly nothing works. The plane goes down on what seems to be an uncharted desert island.

On that island, it takes all of 23 seconds for the entire group (with the exception of the hero and heroine) to go full on "Lord of the Flies" mode: seriously, the introduction of the titular monster only hastens a process that by that point is well under way. And the eponymous horror is introduced in an effectively memorable way: the nefarious passenger takes the heroine hostage to try to get away from the rest of the survivors, only to encounter the UFO. The heroine passes out, and nefarious passenger enters the UFO, only to have what can only be described as a vaginal slit open up in his forehead. (Seriously, I'm admittedly not an expert, but take a look at that picture up top and let me know if I'm wrong here.) Then the alien, essentially a metallic-looking slime thing, oozes into the wound and takes over his body. Which, seriously, ew.

Well, for reasons that remain unexplained, it turns out that once the body is snatched, it hungers for human blood, and the Snatched Body Formerly Known As Nefarious Passenger is no exception. He goes around chomping on fellow passengers whenever they haven't been dispatched by one of the other, seemingly non-nefarious survivors. There's a lot of pessimistic metaphors to be found about government corruption and corporations being in bed with politicians, and even some Vietnam War stuff from the sole American on board, a young war widow who constantly talks like she's gasping for air, and never understands Japanese until the other passengers start talking about killing her. Although, in her defense, if you could only understand Japanese in one specific situation, that would really be the situation to go with. One passenger is possessed by the alien and used to explain its goals to the survivors -- namely, to kill all humans and to take over the earth, simple enough -- before she jumps off the cliff and becomes a thoroughly unconvincing dummy in midair. Looks like somebody threw a Raggedy Annie off the cliff and filmed it.

So blah blah blah, everyone's dead except for the body snatcher and the hero and heroine, and the couple finally manage to escape him and stagger back to civilization, where they discover that *GASP* EVERYONE ON EARTH IS ALREADY DEAD. There is some stock footage to suggest that it was a nuclear war that done the deed, although I remain somewhat dubious that nuclear war wouldn't have also killed all the passengers on the plane. But while I'm puzzling this out, there's a shot of the earth from space, showing a huge number of UFOs descending upon it, ready to make it their new home. And the ghost of Rod Serling quietly nods in approval.

**HERE END THE SPOILERS**

So was this movie worth the wait? ABSOLUTELY. It is an incredibly vivid, profoundly pessimistic film that, in a lot of ways, is as relevant as ever. Sure, a lot of it looks kind of crude, but it's effective in a way that a more sophisticated film might not be able to be. I do plan on seeing it again, and might even buy it on disc, if and when Criterion chooses to release it. Do I think this will receive the same amount of attention as House? Not really: House is just completely batshit, and a lot of the word of mouth had to do with people just not believing that a movie like that existed at all. That movie is almost relentlessly singular. Goke , for all of its weirdness, is still a fairly standard horror movie, albeit an entertaining and depressing one.