…B-horror and exploitation films that aren’t yet out on DVD. The kind folks at DVD Talk have listed a few dozen of them (Freaks, Jaws 3-D), along with some past listings that finally made the digital leap (Squirm).

Like you, we have many dreams and hopes for Ought-Three. We’d like to think no year could be more awful than Ought-Two, but the pro-war politicians keep promising otherwise.

Still, we must hope. Our first hope, natch, is that the purveyors of Armageddon Lite (in this and other countries) be thwarted from their dark dream. We’ve other dreams as well. In our ideal Ought-Three:

• The architects who design ugly, inhospitable office buildings would have to move their own offices into them, instead of hogging all the remaining funky old buildings for themselves.
• Some bigshot economist will realize you can’t maintain a national economy that depends on consumer spending if you systematically decimate the spending power of all non-zillionaires.
• Corporate de-consolidation will begin naturally, without the need for legislation, as unweildy conglomerates (particularly in the media) continue their steady march toward fiscal collapse.
• Indie films will cover topics other than the supposedly wacky lives of indie filmmakers.
• Kazaa and QuarkXPress finally come out for Mac OS X.
• Looney Tunes finally come out on DVD.
• Somebody figures out that if “freedom” is what makes this country distinguishable from the alleged bad guys, then our people should have more freedoms, not fewer.
• City Hall figures out that the answer to every problem is not necessarily a subsidized construction project.
• G.W. Bush finally doesn’t get something he wants. Like a war, for instance.

IT’S BEEN OVER A WEEK since our last post to this site. (Sorry.) Things that have gone on during that time:

• The Chubby & Tubby hardware-variety stores were put up for sale, and simultaneously began a liquidation sale. Wanna help me buy and preserve ’em?
• The Sonics continued to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in game after game.
• A&E reran its Cleavage documentary, an excuse to show seconds-long clips displaying 50 years’ worth of minimal attire. In true American-repressed fashion, the show censored all nipple and see-thru shots—except during icky surgery scenes.
• The two-years-in-the-making eighth issue of the literary tabloid Klang came out, with a long story by yr. obd’t web-editor about the Alasdair Gray novel Poor Things.
• I’ve continued to work tirelessly on assembling the next print MISC, which should wow and wonder you any week now.
• I viewed Scarecrow Video’s copy of the unjustly obscure Mexican film Sexo por Compasion (Compassionate Sex) Made in 1999 by director Laura Mana, it deftly applies the neopagan “sacred prostitute” legend and sets it in a lethargic little Catholic town.Our heroine Dolores (Lisabeth Margoni) is a plump, middle-aged barmaid who’s so conscientiously pious, her husband splits town rather than face her “excess of goodness.” This only prompts her to redouble her efforts at do-gooder-hood, until she overhears a male barfly complaining about his own straying wife. She offers her sympathy in the best way she can imagine. While there’s no on-screen sex in the film, we’re told the man learns from Dolores that a little sin isn’t so bad; and that he also learns how to satisfy his own wife.

  With the speed of small-town gossip, the town’s men all line up for Dolores (who’s renamed herself Lolita!). She soothes and consoles all (middle-aged virgins, widowers, the lonely, the misunderstood). She asks nothing in return but donations for the church building fund.

  Director Mana switches from b/w to color. The men are now energetic and serene. Their wives don’t like that they’ve been barred from Lolita’s bar, but adore their hubbies’ new sexual knowledge and doting tenderness.

  Everybody’s happy and well-adjusted—except the now underworked hookers from the next town and the priest who goes mad when he learns the source of the parish’s new riches. But Lolita gets their heads set straight soon enough.

  Even Lolita’s returning hubby eventually learns to stop condemning her love-sharing ways, after the town wives draft him into giving them some compassionate sex. The film ends with the happy announcement that Lolita’s going to have “our child,” the “our” referring to the whole town.

  That’s all cozy and uplifting. It’s also neatly confined somewhere in the outer provinces of Latino “magical realism.” Could anything like its premise work out in real life, in jaded urban civilization? I’ve no answers. Even the authors of New Age essays about the “sacred prostitute” archtype seldom come out and advocate reviving the practice. (They mostly ask female readers to take the legend as a lesson for individual self-esteem.)

  I do know the film’s penultimate plot twist is comparable to my own mini-essay in this space a month or so back calling for a men’s antiwar movement, which I only half-facetiously christened “Peepees for Peace.” It would refute “alternative” culture’s frequent denunciations of masculinity, instead proclaiming a positive role for yang passion in the building of a better world.

  None of the “sacred prostitute” books I’ve seen mention men providing sexual/spiritual enlightenment to women—only women healing men and women healing themselves.

  What if there were more women like this film’s Lolita—and more men like her husband at the film’s end, healing the planet one clitoris at a time?

…email me links to the same site, I know there’s a buzz goin’ on. Such is the case with DubyaDubyaDubya, a Flash animation comparing the ongoing political-military nonsense with a home-electronics breakdown.

PASSAGE (from Radley Metzger’s 1976 film The Image🙂 “I remembered clearly the look Claire had given her. It was the look of one viewing a rerun of a successful film one had directed oneself, whose plot couldn’t possibly have any surprises.”

On one of Cinemax’s tertiary channels late Monday night, I finally saw Highway, a pathetic little action-thriller movie filmed three and a half years ago under the working title A Leonard Cohen Afterworld.

It’s an awful low-budget (yet completely corporate) “Gen X” movie like hundreds of others. It starts in Las Vegas with Jared Leto getting caught schtumping a mobster’s wife. Leto and pal Jake Gyllenhaal run from the mobster’s hired thugs by taking a road trip, ending in Seattle. Along the way they have unimaginative misadventures, punctuated by unimaginative cuss words that are apparently meant to be funny just because they’re really loud.

It only qualifies for mention here because of one scene toward the end—a full-scale re-creation of the Kurt Cobain memorial at the Seattle Center International Fountain. I saw it being filmed—that’s the only reason I can tell you it was a full-scale re-creation. All you see on screen are a few close-ups of the actors. Leto is heard complaining that Kurt’s death meant nothing to him compared with the demise of “that Led Zeppelin guy.” The thugs promptly show up. The dudes run off. One shot later and we’re a mile and a half away in Pioneer Square, where the thugs (in cars) finally catch up to, and beat the metaphoric crap out of, the dudes (who’ve presumably been running all that way).

Naturally, neither Nirvana nor any other Seattle act is heard on the soundtrack, a pseudo-“grunge” guitar pastiche created by a member of the more Hollywood-acceptable Black Crowes.

Not only does the story have nothing to do with Cobain, it contradicts almost everything he stood for. It treats its characters as one-dimensional stereotypes. It treats young-adult males in general as a target market to be cynically marketed to. It insults the intelligence of its would-be audience. It glorifies violence and stupidity. Its “heroes” are just the sort of jocks-in-punk-clothing Cobain had repeatedly denounced.

A much better version of the same premise can be found in the 1998 Canadian indie drama The Vigil (for Kurt Cobain).

The guys n’ gals on that film’s road trip are depicted as human beings, who loved Cobain’s music and learn to love one another. The Vigil doesn’t actually show the vigil. To re-create it the way Highway did would’ve busted The Vigil‘s tiny budget. So instead its road-trippers show up in Seattle a day late, but decide they’ve had an invaluable learning and coming-O-age experience from the journey itself.

Nobody learns anything in Highway, except perhaps not to get caught schtumping a mobster’s wife.

…have a fish head and derive his powers from Kikkoman soy sauce? Watch this flash movie and see for yourself. (Found by Memepool.)

…indeed the best show on TV thus far in this decade.

The CBC’s Zed (named, of course, after the Great White North’s pronounciation of the alphabet’s last letter) is a magazine show of experimental video, animation, and performance art. That capsule description could apply to a dozen or more past shows on PBS and other Stateside channels. But the Vancouver-produced Zed is far different, and far better, than those. Some reasons:

• It’s on its country’s premier network, in a premier time slot: 11:25 p.m.-12:25 a.m. every weeknight, commercial-free. It’s cutting-edge, but it’s not “fringe.”
• It’s carefully curated and sequenced, despite the enormous amount of material it requires. Canada has vast short-film and animation scenes (due partly to arts grants and to the world-renowned National Film Board of Canada), and Zed could consume all its output in a grab-baggy way. Instead, each episode carfully curates a mix of dramatic-narrative shorts, outre comedies, odd cartoons, mini-documentaries, modern-dance clips, spoken-word snippets, avant-garde musical performances, and items too odd to classify.
• Elegant, erudite emcee Sharon Lewis deftly weaves common threads around each night’s selections, without resorting either to support-the-arts hype nor to PBS-style smugness. She knows these are engrossing, captivating films, and she knows she doesn’t have to hard-sell them to you.
• Under the slogan “Open Source Television,” the show solicits viewer contributions. One of my favorites in this category was a tape of a 10-year-old boy trying hard to stay awake to watch the show.
• The show welcomes viewers of all ages, but doesn’t pander or clean things up for them. In keeping with the Film Board’s heritage, the films on Zed can include quite heavy subject matter (abortion, poverty, bereavement, loneliness). The cartoons can range from the gross-out to the incomprehensibly symbolic. Nudity and cuss words are left intact. One clip featured the writhing of a nude male modern dancer; its soundtrack consisted of the dancer discussing the kind of man with whom he’d most want to fall in love.
• The show’s segments have MTV-like credit screens at the beginning and end. These titles include “Web ID” numbers for each short. Anything you see and like (or want to decipher), you can see again online. And if you live where CBC isn’t on cable (i.e., the United States south of Tacoma), you can see and hear the show’s component parts online, though one piece at a time and without Lewis’s introductions.
• But the most important aspects of Zed are its confident attitude and Lewis’s honest rapport with her viewers. The show presumes a universe in which the sorts of ideas and expressions it presents are fully-accepted and respected features of a sophisticated urban society. Zed is neither elitist nor pandering. It fully respects its viewers’ intelligence. It doesn’t divide the populace into “cultured” and “uncultured” castes. It fully expects you to “get” whatever it shows; and if you don’t, or if you don’t like it, something else will be along in less than six minutes.

Zed’s site doesn’t mention how many episodes are in its current first season. CBC series often have short production seasons. But Zed mostly consists of pre-existing (i.e., relatively cheap to acquire) material, so theoretically go on year-round (albeit with rerun weeks here and there).

My advice: If you’re capable of tuning in to it, watch as many Zed episodes as you can now. See what highbrow-arts TV can really become.

Gus Van Sant’s movie My Own Private Idaho envisioned Portland street gangs with colorful names, strict internal codes of conduct, and allusions to classic literature. Apparently the town’s real teen thugs are much like Van Sant’s fictional ones. Where he referenced Shakespeare, the author of the above-linked newspaper story tells of “a subculture that resembles Fagan’s gang in the classic tale of Oliver Twist.” Just don’t romanticize ’em: These teens and young adults exist in a milieu as sad as Dickens’s, and as prone to (figurative or literal) backstabbing as Shakespeare’s.

…the entire Preminger Archive of Ephemeral Films (industrial films, early commercials, educational, and government PR) is now online. Utterly fascinating material throughout, exposing the social mores the filmmakers either assumed their viewers held or wanted their viewers to learn.

David Halberstam’s 1972 book The Best and the Brightest

vividly describes the steps by which the Kennedy-Johnson administration, chock full of Ivy League thinkers and respected analysts, stumbled into the morass that was the Vietnam war. Among the most important factors in the stumble, according to Halmerstam, were the limited perspectives these operatives chose to view. They decided early on that theirs was a winnable war to defend a stable, pro-democracy ally; they chose to ignore any analyis or research that differed from the scenario. (I’m naturally vastly oversimplifying Halmerstam here; read the book itself for the whole sad story.)

The same thing’s happening now. Only the people doing it know they’re doing it. Our current battle-criers decided long ago they wanted to conquer and colonize Iraq. (An Australian newspaper story claims they’d started plans for an Iraq war even before Bush’s inaguration.)

We’ve got a whole Executive Branch establishment that, for all intents and purposes, proudly only listens to Rush Limbaugh, only watches the Fox News Channel, and only reads The Weekly Standard and books from ideological publishers like Regnery. This establishment does have staff people who scan CNN and the NY Times, but just to learn what its “Others” are saying in order to craft virulent rebuttals.

This establishment loves to scoff at liberals’ “political correctness,” but is fetishistically devoted to ideological conformity within its own ranks. It believes it’s always right, not because it’s smart but because it’s pure.

Actually, “pure” isn’t the right word, because it implies a sense of moralistic self-denial. These guys (and a few gals) want everybody else to do all the sacrificing; while they grow ever wealthier and more powerful.

We started with a book reference; we’ll move now to a film reference.

There’s a film, based on a stage play, set in an era in which a ruling class lived as libertine wastrels and the masses were subjected to strict authoritarianism.

An era enmeshed with domestic turmoil and colonial wars. An era of fierce political name-calling and backbiting. An era in which defenders of the corrupt social order will do anything to maintain their privileged status, despite the hindrance of an unelected ruler who often talks nonsense and behaves absentmindedly.

In short, an era with resemblances to our own.

Yes, we’re all currently suffering from, and for, the madness of King George.

THIS PAST SATURDAY was proclaimed “Car-Free Day” by certain local lefty advocates. Certain other lefty advocates mounted a day-long political fair the same day, at a site approximately two miles from the nearest public transportation.

The “Rolling Thunder Down Home Democracy Tour,” a summer barnstorming chataqua revue whose organizers include Jim Hightower (pictured above) and Tom Hayden, set up its elaborate show at Prtrovitsky Park, deep in the Renton/Kent suburban sprawl. At least 6,000 humans came for all or part of the event, braving 88-degree temperatures and problematic parking to take their Volvos and minivans (many festooned with environmental bumper stickers) to the large county park. Hundreds of others came by chartered shuttle buses from Seattle.

Once there, they got to listen to many speakers and musicians (including the Pinkos, seen below), toss objects at caricatures of Enron execs in a “Carnival of Oppression and Fun,” stroll among literature booths hawking every cause from unionism to veganism, and participate in forums and workshops teaching how to organize grass-roots campaigns in your own community’s sod.

It was a fun time, and an opportunity for left-O-center types of many assorted persuasions to come together and share, if nothing else, a sense of I-Told-You-So about today’s corporate embarrassments and political anti-freedom attacks. More than that, it encouraged all these folk to come together, to take action, to work toward a better world instead of just protesting against the one we’ve got.

One of the smallest and most curious displays at the event was a small table offering stickers, badges, and pencils on behalf of an unofficial, unauthorized “Cusack for President” campaign. The women running the table didn’t know that the John Cusack silhouette on the badges is an image from Say Anything, nor that that film had been set in Seattle.

The image of an undefeatable Cusack in Say Anything, wooing a reluctant Ione Skye by lifting a Peter Gabriel-blaring boom box up toward her bedroom window, is a great metaphor for what the left needs. Director Cameron Crowe’s commentary track for the film’s DVD release invokes Cusask’s undying love-quest as representing “positivity as a rebellious stance.”

For too long, we’ve let the conservatives get away with branding liberals and progressives as cynical spoilsports who only see the negative in anything and anyone. But these days, it’s the Right that’s pushing the bad-attitude envelope. They’re openly selling political policy to the highest bidder, running roughshod over Constitutional rights, and rumbling about trying to start another war for oil. They tried to hound Clinton out of office over sins much more minor than their own. They’ll use any demagoguic tactic to win elections, from borderline-racism to libel to hypocritical religious pieties.

A few of my more cynical leftie acquaintances have, to date, been content to sit around and scoff that this is simply the way it is. I prefer to think it’s not the way it has to be.

Or, as Hightower puts it, “For too long progressives have walked fearful of their shadows, whimpering and whining about what’s wrong and fighting amongst themselves over crumbs. That time is over. It’s time to sing and work and build a new community dedicated to hope and real change. And good beer.”

IN OTHER IDEOLOGICAL NEWS, one guy claims the 9/11 attacks might not have been an act of war (intended to conquer ertain territory or overthrow certain regimes) but of “fantasy ideology”–intended mainly for the perpetrators to live out “a specific personal or collective fantasy.” In this case, the fantasy of being a wrathful deity’s servants of vengeance. (The writer also claims the same justification’s behind less-lethal political-theater acts, such as disruptive protests that turn bystanders’ opinions against the cause supposedly being promoted.)

THE NEXT PRINT MISC finally reached the printer today. It should be out to subscribers by the end of the week. One of its features will be a short history of softcore sex-comedy movies.

But movies about a certain other life-fulfilling passion have been much less thoroughly documented over the years. Here’s a link to an effort to rectify this discrepancy, listing “118 Movies About or Featuring Food.”

DIGITIZED VERSIONS of those music-video precursors briefly shown in film jukeboxes in bars, Scopitones!

…to Rosemary Clooney–singer, actress, aunt of Batman, mother of Twin Peaks’ Agent Rosenfield, and ex-wife of Cyrano de Bergerac.