Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass: This is a one joke movie. . .but it’s a pretty good joke. An eleven-old-girl (played by a kid named Chloe Grace Moretz, in the best tween girl performance since Natalie Portman in The Professional) is a potty-mouthed, conscienceless killing machine Super Hero-ette named Hit Girl who, costumed in plaid schoolgirl skirt with pink utility belt, black mask and purple wig, mows down (in hyper-speed) rooms full of colored drug dealers and mafiosos to a blaring Banana Splits soundtrack. The story of how this kid became Hit Girl (and all the rest of the film’s Super Hero-cum-teen angst back story, which encompasses more than a few uninteresting characters), isn’t worth bothering with. Asian filmmakers wouldn’t even have tried to construct a story line, they would have just shot 90 minutes of school girl mayhem, flavored with a more potent blend of the pedophilia that is clumsily half-hinted at here. Excepting the presence of Nicolas Cage, who gives a retro-Cage quirky performance as Hit Girl’s Adam West-imitating faux-Batman Big Daddy dad (which I guess elevates this movie to one-and-a-half joke status), the movie becomes an exercise in tedium whenever Hit Girl makes an exit. In fact, I almost gave up on this thing as just another overdone post-modern comic book movie. . .at least 40 minutes must have passed before Hit Girl made her genuinely spectacular entrance, and I was just about to hit the eject button on the dvd, but then, well, Hit Girl happened (see the crappy video copy below), and I stayed for the rest. . .though drumming my fingers through all the non-Hit Girl and Big Daddy scenes. Is there enough here to keep most mature viewers *engaged?* Probably not. But then I’m the type who gets all mushy for the expressionistic family sentimentality that sustains the Hit Girl/Big Daddy relationship (nicely contrasted with the sterile relations between Kick-Ass, the movie’s teen boy Super Hero, and his parents), and the Big-Daddy-burning-to-death scene nearly moved me to tears. . .so, you have to be sick-and-tired of what passes for AmerICKan screen realism (see the lifeless-but-critically-lauded Winter’s Bone, for example, with features the soul-less family love which the critics must experience in *real life*--the love which is posed) to enjoy this kind of thing. Let’s just hope Kick-Ass II resurrects Big Daddy and sends all of Kick-Ass I’s tiresome teen angst straight to Hell.

[I would be remiss, as they say, if I did not mention the disturbing *The Passion of the Hit Girl* scene near the movie’s end, wherein our little hero-ette becomes a mafia punching bag. In a movie full of obvious comic book violence, this short scene degenerates into something ugly. . .it’s a nasty little scar on an otherwise happy bit of nonsense.]

Do Ye Even So To Them

It turned out the night I learned my brother died, in fact, at almost exactly the same time I learned my brother died, the two-year-old son of a Sergeant who works at the very same jail I am employed at, in fact, a Sergeant who had been my supervisor when I worked on the day shift, the two-year-old son of this Sergeant was drowning in a bathtub. The child died. The details of the terrible event are unknown, although from jail gossip it is considered certain no *foul play* is (or was) suspected.

It is a terrible event. A parent’s *worst nightmare,* as is said. Upon hearing the news, I had tremendous, and, I believe, genuine sympathy for the Sergeant. I prayed for the Sergeant and his family (a wife and three other children). Yet as I felt this sympathy, which I believed to be genuine, and as I prayed for this Sergeant and his family, I was always aware I had never really liked this Sergeant. I had found him to be an overly *fussy* supervisor--a little too eager to run a *tight ship,* in, I suspected, an attempt to gain favor from his supervisor, a deranged Lieutenant who *lives in a jail of his own.*

An example of this Sergeant’s fussiness: as part of my jail clerk’s duties, I have to write tickets to released inmates who cannot pay their twelve dollar jail booking fee. I would fill out the ticket completely and accurately, yet this Sergeant would complain my handwriting could be neater. Consider the work environment: telephones are ringing off the hook, jail gate intercoms are buzzing constantly, you have a belligerent perpetrator of domestic violence in your face unhappy at the dumb booking questions you must ask (“do you believe that other people know your thoughts and can read your mind?), you have a backlog of other new arrests waiting to be booked, releasable inmates are whining “what’s taking so long?”, arrogant lawyers are demanding their inmate clients be brought down for interviews, and here is this Sergeant interrupting the barely functioning process to nitpick about handwriting. Go back into your fucking office and stop bothering me--those were my near-daily sentiments concerning this Sergeant.

And as each day passes, I have less sympathy for this Sergeant, and he is no longer named in my prayers.

God, of course, knew my true heart at the first moment I heard of this Sergeant’s tragedy. God knew those first moments of sympathy, the first prayer, when I had heard the awful news, those first *seeds* of sympathy and prayer, were akin to the seeds from our Lord’s famous parable: the seeds which fell upon the stony places, where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth, and when the sun was up, the seeds were scorched, and because they had no root, they withered away.

My sympathy and my prayers for this Sergeant had no root, and they withered away.

The human soul, at the least, my human soul, can be a stony place. . .

What a horrible *thing*--to have your child drown in a bathtub! Besides the cruel death itself, impossible enough to deal with, imagine all the recriminations (whether voiced or not), the guilt, the never-ending *if only. . .* A remaining lifetime shadowed by a grievous death.

I suppose in a week or so this Sergeant will return to work. Return to work with all the so-called *emotional baggage* of a truly dreadful death of a child. Returning to work would be bad enough in an ordinary job--but to return to work in a JAIL? Which is, after all, nothing more than BABY-SITTING society’s worst children. This Sergeant now has to baby-sit our worst brats, those of us who haven’t grown up enough to sufficiently conceal our wickedness. JAIL is a depressing place to work--24 hour DAYCARE for madmen, drunks, deviates, the violent and the rapacious. While this Sergeant considers the atrocious fate of his small son, he must listen to grown men throwing temper tantrums over missed sack lunches and being allowed only one free phone call. . .

To be depressed and then have to work in a depressing place--this thought revives my sympathy for this Sergeant. . .for a moment or two. . .then I remember his grating personality, his absurd obsession for a fastidious jail house.

I know I won’t be able to say a caring word to this Sergeant when he returns to work. I will not be able to manage anything more than a slight nod of the head and a “morning, Sergeant.”

The only self-justification I can manage for my hard heart is wrenched from our Lord’s command:

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. . .

If I were in this Sergeant’s place, I would not want my sympathy. . .

I Seen Some More Movies

Machete: Ugly, horribly pock-marked senior citizen hispanic character actor Danny Trejo makes out with a nude Lindsay Lohan in this fairly amusing splatter satire of border politics. Decapitations, mutilations and other assorted mayhems soak the viewer from first-to-last frame in this triple-cross tale of former Federale-turned-day-laborer Trejo’s battle against corrupt US and Mexican officials, and a Mexican drug lord (played by washed-up gringo martial arts *star* Steven Seagal in campy brown-face). This is 21st century Walking Tall, Billy Jack stuff, meaning it’s full of blood-drenched laughs and de rigueur gratuitous nudity. Curiously for a flick this over-the-top, the acting is surprisingly flat, and not up to the cynical black comic script--with the notable exception of Jeff Fahey, who shines as an ultra-Machiavelian political fixer. Robert De Niro looks hopelessly lost playing a trigger happy Texas state senator--the former Raging Bull looks like an old Jew codger stuck alone and forgotten in the corner at a tasteless, hyper-carnal bat mitzvah party. Despite the poor acting, Machete manages low entertainment, as it feeds our 21st century appetite for junk culture, demanding nothing more from the viewer than our need to have 105 minutes of our empty lives cinema-graphically killed. This isn’t much, but it’s infinitely preferable to:

A Single Man: Set in early ‘60s Los Angeles, a melancholy UK faggot pouts for 99 minutes over the death of his long-time *partner.* We watch as the glum middle-aged English English professor (played by a bland limey with the bland limey name Colin Firth, who apparently just won an Academy Award for a more recent bland performance) makes his meticulous and rather prissy plans for suicide--though the yawning viewer knows full well the homo will never do him the merciful courtesy of following through. . .and yes, in this film’s ped-ictable and queer-jerker script, the poof professor’s will to live is restored by the completely carnal charms of a pretty blonde boy student who is positively desperate to *explore* his inner Freddie Mercury. Whereas Machete was a tolerable waste of time and will be regarded as an honest cultural artifact of our age, A Single Man is nothing more than a dreary offering to the priests of the cult of gay who hood-twink our sexually indiscriminate century. [Julianne Moore, who has done nothing since flashing her red beard in Short Cuts, is absurdly cast and ridiculously plays a limey slut aching to be poked one last time by the ex-bi, now total boylover drama queen *hero* of this drop-the-soap opera.] [We must also note the crudely propagandistic use of supermodel Aline Weber, cast as a Bardot-like icon of female sexuality reduced to tag-along platonic friend of the pretty blonde boy student in this film’s *alternative* universe. The gorgeous Weber is presented as a near-deaf-and-dumb dummy in this bizarre movie, a mannekin lacking even the plastic charms of a sex doll, so lifeless the pretty blonde boy student prefers to commit sodomy with a cranky old poncy professor. This is cinema for abberants.] In contrast to the pseudo-suicidal tendencies of A Single Man, we have:

Bad Santa: Apparently released way back in 2003, I just now got around to watching this holiday masterpiece which features a remarkable performance from Billy Bob Thornton as a self-loathing low-life seasonal shopping mall Santa/safecracker. Thornton’s Santa is one of the great drunks of screen history--a bitter, gutter-dwelling loser painstakingly (and rendered in unrelenting black humor) engineering his own death. Empty save for psychic torment, our bad Santa staggers bleary-eyed and hungover through the holiday season, half-listening to the mass-marketed pleas of the freshly-scrubbed plastic children of mall AmerICKa whom he rushes off his lap as he bides his drunken time until he and his colored dwarf *elf* partner can rob the department store of just enough cash to keep him alcohol brain-dead until the next Christmas. The greatness of Bad Santa is the dark script stays true to its comically bleak soul while still serving up a small helping of holiday redemption. Bad Santa’s heart grows a size or two larger while he grudgingly aids the one person in the world possibly more tortured than himself: a pathetic, picked-on, semi-deranged fat boy living in near-total neglect. Bad Santa is a spot-on sardonic character study of the empty AmerICKan soul, and I can’t imagine many other actors capable of pulling off the performance Thornton gives. He never winks at the camera, as most *movie stars* would. He remains true to his character’s sick soul, and allows the black humor of the script to arise not from any *comic acting,* but from his deadpan delivery of his disturbingly funny clashes with the supposedly healthy AmerICKan mall automatons who cross his path (or his lap). After sixty years of ever-increasing AmerICKan degeneracy, Bad Santa emerges as the true heir to It’s A Wonderful Life.

On Dangerous Ground

Robert Ryan, always one of Hollywood’s best at playing violent misfits, seethes as Jim Wilson, a big city cop slowly being suicided by the job. After years of performing the thankless and soul-crushing task of collecting the city’s human garbage, Wilson’s skin is worn dangerously thin, and he rages at the slightest provocation.

Like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle twenty-five years later, Jim Wilson is sickened by the depravity of the city, and lives an isolated existence. Whereas Bickle sought release for his sexual frustration in pornographic theaters, Wilson appears to indulge in kinky sex with gutter girls, judging from one classic scene in which he appears to oblige a masochistic girlfriend of a gangster he is chasing. (In another similarity to Taxi Driver, On Dangerous Ground briefly sports an underage prostitute, played by Nita Talbot and looking like a jailbait cross between Gloria Grahame and Lauren Bacall).

As Wilson’s temper spirals out of control, his police captain sends him out of the city for a cure. Wilson is sent upstate to help the yokels track down a teen girl’s killer. The bleak snow-covered landscape is a kind of Magic Mountain for Wilson—he can breathe in the clean cold air, after years of choking on the city’s sewer fumes. Wilson is finally able to let his guard down a bit, and actually seems less trigger happy than the local vigilantes (though when one of the hicks gets a close-up look at the face of death, his innocence bewilders the calloused Wilson).

In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle believes his ministering angel is Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy, and he becomes obsessed with her. On Dangerous Ground’s Jim Wilson has a fixation with Mary, the blind sister of the teen girl’s killer. Mary is not nearly the worldly princess of Taxi Driver’s Betsy. Mary lives nearly as isolated an existence as Wilson, having sacrificed her own happiness to look after her disturbed brother. Quirkily played by Ida Lupino, Mary is frail and sad, and also a bit of a dreamer. . .she’s kind of a northern woods version of one of Tennessee Williams’ southern gothic girls.

Wilson and Mary, recognizing the desperate loneliness in each other, communicate in fits and starts, never quite fully connecting. Had On Dangerous Ground ended one scene earlier, with a teary-eyed Jim Wilson driving alone back through the dark and ugly city streets, instead of turning back for a tacked-on and phony happy ending in Mary’s arms, this would have been one of Film Noir’s greatest entries, a character study of two emotional exiles, doomed by their contrasting environments. The Smiley Face ending scars an otherwise powerful portrait of alienation.

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The Last Trumpet

Received today news of the death of David Meyer, age 60.

"David Meyer?"

Few knew of him. And of those who did, most laughed at the Christian *nut.*

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of His coming?

Meyer published a newsletter: *Last Trumpet.* Sent it out faithfully every month for the last twenty-nine years. He’d sift through the news and pick out the stories he believed heralded the nearness of the *End Times.*

I didn’t agree with all of Meyer’s theology. For example, if trouble hit New Orleans, it was usually because the city sponsored a Faggot’s Day parade. Well, if that were the case, why weren’t San Francisco and New York and some of the other premier faggot enclaves similarly troubled? Such doctrine fails to square with our Lord’s teaching (Luke 13:1 – 5).

Meyer, as he dutifully informed his readers every month, was *saved out of the occult,* and hence he had an eye for the witchy shadows creeping across America. The sheeple see only the lying vanities of the world, while Meyer had a pretty good eye for the unseen *rulers of the darkness of this world.* That was his trademark, so to speak, reading the events of the day as the signs of the *End Times.*

Unlike the vast majority of red, white and blue Christians, Meyer understood America was under a Satanic spell, and that the majority of those Americans who call themselves Christian are either hereticks or apostates, and the American *church* is a spiritual weakling composed of shameless materialists, sensation seekers, Jesus compromisers, and spineless pew-warmers who buckle under the small weight of their daily cross, and pout over their imaginary persecutions.

In the June or July 2001 issue of *Last Trumpet,* Meyer related a vision he received while on a trip to New York. He saw Manhattan choked with flames and smoke. The vision would turn out to be eerily similar to the famous events of *9/11.*

Meyer’s time on this side is over, and I would imagine he is now with our Lord and Savior. He devoted nearly half his life to a newsletter warning the *End* was near, and sinners should repent and receive the gospel of Jesus before that Door was shut.

Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are. . .

I wonder what it is like, over on Meyer’s side, out of the Big Lie, secure in Eternal Truth? His labor done, his soul rescued from this burning rubbish heap of time, the Adversary must not seem quite so alarming.

Satan will continue gathering the world until the Last Day. With Meyer gone, there is one less faither standing in his way. And that is how the *End Times* clock truly ticks down—one faither at a time, until there are so few left, our Lord, looking forward to that Day, could well ask:

Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?

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The Box

Gimpy Norma and hubby Arthur are a fairly successful 1976 prototype yuppie couple. Norma teaches English at a fancy Virginia prep school, and Arthur is a NASA scientist who helped design the camera for the Viking Mars probe (Mars and the Viking mission are important to the movie’s plot—somehow.). They live a little above their means, and though not in desperate financial straits, money is a little tight. One chilly Christmastime morn, as they sleep peacefully in bed (better is little with the fear of the LORD than great treasure and trouble therewith), Norma is awakened by the ringing of their doorbell. She groggily goes to answer, looks through the peephole and sees a black limo drive off. Opening the door, she discovers a package on the step. At breakfast with Arthur and their eleven-year-old son, Norma opens the package and finds a pyramid-shaped box capped with a red button, along with a note stating that a Mr. Steward will come to their house at 5 pm.

It turns out to be a rather rough day for both Norma and Arthur. Norma is viciously teased about her gimpy foot by one of her (weird) students, and then is informed by the principal the school can no longer provide a discount for her son’s tuition. Meanwhile, Arthur goes to work at NASA, and receives the news that he has been rejected for the astronaut program (his life’s dream) because he failed the psychological exam.

Back at home, a depressed Norma mopes about, and then as the clock strikes five, Mr. Steward arrives. This Steward, who will turn out to be quite a mysterious figure, indeed, has a mug one will not soon easily forget, as a good portion of the left side of his face is gone, marked off by a large and gruesome burn scar. After recovering from the sight of Steward’s unsettling visage, Norma lets him in, whereupon he explains the meaning of the box:

If you push the button, two things will happen. First, someone, somewhere in the world, whom you don't know, will die. Second, you will receive a payment of one million dollars. You have 24 hours.

Naturally, Norma and Arthur debate the pros and cons—though Arthur is skeptical about both the money and the death, believing the situation will turn out to be nothing more than an elaborate prank. Norma thinks the money will make their life better, and is therefore more inclined to have *faith* in the box (for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also). Arthur is then prompted to ask if Norma really thinks they need money to be happy (for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?).

As the deadline approaches, Norma yields to temptation and pushes the button (and the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me). Steward once again appears right on time, delivering the million dollars and taking back the box. Before he leaves, however, he issues a cryptic comment that may imply Norma or Arthur will be the box’s next victim. Immediately, Norma and Arthur regret Norma’s decision, and Arthur tries to return the money (then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw that He was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders), but, alas, too late! The deal is done. . .

Certainly one could say of the plot to this point it requires a fair degree of credulity. And yet these opening scenes are as close as The Box gets to *realism,* as the eccentric script takes one increasingly bizarre turn after another. As Norma and Arthur try to unravel the mystery of Steward and the box, the viewer learns the following:

Steward also worked for NASA on the Viking Mars mission, and while on duty, he was killed when struck by lightning (I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven), but, in a rather sinister miracle, he returns from the dead, though with a good portion of his face burned away (and I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast).

Steward now works as a glorified errand boy/messenger for those who brought him back to life, and whom he enigmatically terms his *employers.*

Steward’s *employers* may be from another dimension. . .or from Mars. . .or from Hell. There are clues, I suppose, as to the precise identity of the *employers,* and these clues might seem more obvious upon closer or repeated viewings of The Box, but, to me, IDing the *employers* didn’t seem particularly germane to the spirit of this curious movie.

There are many other lesser *employees* of the *employers,* and, seeming to accord to the degree to which they have become indoctrinated into whatever the *employers* *mission statement* is, they exhibit symptoms ranging from nose bleeds (when they step out of line) to total mind control.

I must also mention the feel-good subplot involving Arthur’s attempt to construct a prosthetic foot for gimpy Norma (and if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched).

Indeed, The Box is thoroughly implausible. . .and yet it is, without doubt, the most realistic American movie of recent memory. No film has better captured the chilling spirit of beguiled America. It depicts Americans undergoing trance-formation, the victims of an unknown power (for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places).

The Box offers an artfully crafted surreal mix of SciFi, horror and metaphysics, yet at heart it presents a simple parable of a people who condone the killing of nameless, faceless others in exchange for material comfort. The Box, quite simply, renders the *American Dream* as gnostic nightmare.

As one observes America choked with ‘Who Would Jesus Bomb?’ patriots willing to push America’s red war button, one must conclude The Box presents America exactly as it is:

A Crypto-Christo Creepshow.

A vastly under-rated film (by both viewers [5.9 on IMDb] and critics [47 on metacritic]).

PS: The Box’s vision isn’t totally bleak, as the movie’s Sophie’s Choice-esque conclusion offers hope for redemption (but, unfortunately, The Box’s soteriology finds no parallel to the gospel).

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The Hangover

This is the new standard for excellence in Hollywood. This type of film reflects, as in a Fun House mirror, the early 21st century American character: adolescent, and craving bread-and-circuses. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood's highest art was found in Film Noir--dark, gritty tales of the newly post-Christian soul. Now, sixty-to-seventy years later, and fully and unashamedly carnal, we have Film Cirque, the circus films which revel in American arrested development and the nearly single-minded pursuit of the basest pleasures.

There is no denying the great humor of The Hangover, a tale of a Las Vegas bachelor party that strays far from the usual track of liquor and titty bars, and ends up in a roofies-fueled comic nightmare of (among other weirdness) auto-dental-extraction and insta-parenthood. This is a jester's The Lost Weekend, in which the delirium tremens of four juvenile American males result not from withdrawal, but from the tasers of the clown police. This is the 21st century America in which the terminally sophomoric male can have both his madonna and his whore in a single female soul (played here by a remarkably well-preserved Heather Graham).

That the hero of this American folly should be an obese child molestor is entirely fitting. There is room under the Big Circus Tent of American Uncritical Hedonism for every debauchee. It is a testimony to the cleverness of the script that the audience laughs good-naturedly at the pervert antics of the pedophile character Alan, including his infant masturbation simulacrum. American dysfunction is presented as essentially harmless, the aberrant characters have a joie de vivre which immunizes them against their own stupidity.

The Hangover is well-written, well-directed, well-edited, well-acted and fast-paced freak show comedy. It's a cotton candy movie, the only kind Hollywood still excels at. It dazzles with its demented action, the audience laughs easily at its kOOky characters (you know you have a movie chock full o' kOOks when Mike Tyson, playing himself, seems the epitome of reason)--and when it's over? No thought has been provoked. But there's no point in criticizing The Hangover for its limitations. It's a movie from and about severely limited people, and it must be applauded for its lunatick honesty. This is America, in the Looking Glass.

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