In the honorable tradition of Tarhearted's favorite films like The Apple or Samurai Cop, comes The Room (2003).
What is there to say about this movie, other than "wow?" The Room is a seemingly earnest art film written by, directed by, executive produced by and starring Tommy Wiseau, who is the head of the production company Wiseau Films, natch.
He's also very swarthy:
The Room is becoming a cult classing via screenings in L.A. and New York. I can't really describe the plot to you with any accuracy, but let me just say that everything about The Room gets it wrong. Literally every aspect is horrible: the writing, the acting, the cinematography, the costumes, the sets, the lighting.... all epic fails. Oh, what a happy accident!
I would also be remiss if I didn't bring up the many loves scenes between Tommy's character "Johnny" and his female love interest, whom The Boyfriend aptly pointed out resembled a "dollop of mayonnaise." There is something wrong with Tommy's skin, you guys. I don't know what it is, but it doesn't look right. It's... discolored? And loose? And he has a lot of sex scenes.
Apparently, Wiseau now claims that the movie is a black comedy and intentionally bad. I don't buy it. Either way, what a delight! Please put The Room at number one on your queue.
House of the Devil gave me a craving for early 1980's horror films, so I'm seeking out ones I haven't seen. This is no small task, as I've seen a lot of bad 80's horror films despite my cruel, cruel mother's attempts to block her baby boy from seeing gems like this:
(Footnote: one of my acting teachers was in this movie. He was also in Car Wash. Awesome!)
Anyway, I've collected a few trailers of movies that look amazing.
The first is He Knows You're Alone, a movie about a killer who knocks off women on the nights before their weddings. I love, love, love this trailer. From the looks of it, the only thing that could make this movie better would be to add musical numbers.
Don't Go in the House also looks amazing. Apparently it contains a discotheque scene as well, so earns extra points, especially since disco was totally passe by the time this came out. Hilarious.
They had Blood Beach at my video store and this is the movie I specifically remember begging my mother to rent for me because I liked the cover.
Please keep in mind that I was about four years old, which is hilarious to me in retrospect. I really felt it was unjust that my mother wouldn't let me see this. Her is the gorgeous trailer:
And this is the creme de la creme, the ultimate in aesthetic candy, Killer Workout aka Aerobicide. This movie combines two of my great loves so brilliantly: 80's horror and 80's aerobic culture. (I once wrote an in depth essay on the psychology behind Olivia Newton John's video for "Physical".)
Thanksgiving was beautiful and I'm back to work and feeling renewed. The Boyfriend and I had ten people over and managed to throw together a lovely Thanksgiving meal. Now, here are four things I'd like to bring your attention to:
1. I watched the beautiful french musical, Love Songs, or Les chansons d'amour if you're so inclined. It made miss miss Paris so hard. It's still my fantasy to live there somehow. Too bad it's near impossible. Anyhow, it's a beautiful film with hot boy-on-boy action and it stars this hot piece:
The music is stunning and at a lot of moments it really reminded me of one of my favorite films of all time, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Here is the trailer:
2. I'm so in love with this San Francisco band, Girls, and their single "Lust for Life."
"The Girls" was always one of my band names on reserve, in case I ever had one. I won't, so I'm glad to gift it to them, sans "the."
The video is also adorable. The dude with the short hair who mouths the lyric "maybe if I really try with all of my heart..." is super cute.
I love New York a lot, but I'm a West Coast boy at heart. I would love to live in San Francisco, but I'm afraid that I wouldn't be able to find a job there.
3. I wrote an episode of Hooray! Confidence. This is a web series that my friend Nikole and I want to make about two alcoholic, hateful, loser shut-ins who embark on a journey of self-improvement. It'll be kind of a ghetto Absolutely Fabulous. Or something? Anyway, fun stuff! details to come.
4. Episode One of my soap opera, Sinking Hearts, is finished. I don't want to say much about it yet, but inspirations include Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and The Metamorphasis by Kafka.
This interview only cements Mary Woronov's place as one of my favorite people of all time. It's also nice to see somebody else who feels the same way I do about acting.
A few weeks ago The Boyfriend was walking to the subway when he ran across Michael Douglas and Shia Labeouf. A quick glance at IMDB informed him they were filming Wall Street 2: Money Never Dies.
I know I have weird obsessions and bizarre aesthetic tastes when it comes to movies (or anything.) That's why I was surprised to see that so many of them had been compiled into one movie, House of the Devil. Everything about it is candy for my senses.
Sam (Jocelin Donahue) is a pretty
college sophomore, so desperate to earn some cash for a deposit on an
apartment that she accepts a babysitting job even after she finds out
there is no baby. Mr. and Mrs. Ulman (cult actors Tom Noonan and... oh my God... Mary Woronov!)
are the older couple who lure Sam out to their creeky Victorian mansion
deep in the woods, just in time for a total lunar eclipse. Megan
(Greta Gerwig) is Sam's best friend, who gives her a ride out to the house,
and reluctantly leaves her there despite suspecting that something is
amiss. Victor (AJ Bowen) at first seems like just a creepy guy lurking
around the house, but quickly makes it clear that Sam will end this
night in a bloody fight for her life...
Did you get that? Mary Woronov! She's one of my all-time favorite actors and is in so many or may favorite movies: Rock n' Roll High School, Eating Raoul, Death Race 2000, Rock n' Roll High School Forever etc. And there's also a cameo by Dee Wallace! Awesome!
What the synopsis fails to mention is that the film take place in 1982 and the shots and cinematography take great pains to recreate that era of horror film, which has always been my favorite. (In my opinion, horror was at it's best between 1974 and 1984, give or take a few years.) If I didn't know the movie was made this year I would swear it was a lost classic straight from 82.
Here is a list of things that are beautiful about House of the Devil:
1. Mary Woronov
2. There's a scene where the two teen girls, in beautiful high waisted jeans, drive around in a Volvo singing to the Greg Kihn Band's "Breakup Song." One of them has bleached out Farrah hair and chain smokes a lot. That's beautiful.
(Greg's shirt totally gives me a boner, by the way.)
3. The main character, alone in a totally creepy house, orders a pizza, puts on head phones, and dances around the house with "One Thing Leads to Another" by The Fixx blasting in her ears.
4. I don't know why, and much to James' bewilderment, I'm sure, I like my horror movies slow, slow, slow. Halloween, Don't Look Now, Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, Black Christmas. I guess it just leaves more time for gorgeous wallpaper, and inane conversations between nasty teenagers, and bell bottomed women to taking angst ridden walks down wind blown streets. This movie is like that.
5. Satanism. Glamorous, glamorous Satanism! What can I say? I'm obsessed with America's obsession with Satanism circa 1960s-1980s. Say You Love Satan is a must read, if you haven't. By the way, I'm an atheist, but if worshipping Satan meant I could have an apartment in The Dakota a la Rosemary's Baby, I'd be drugging your chocolate mousse as I write this. I love you, but I love a pre war classic six even more. Hail Satan!
6. The tagline is: Talk on the phone. Finish your homework. Watch TV. DIE! Just try to write a better tagline. I dare you.
7. Dee Wallace mother fucking Stone.
Enough said.
Everybody is gaga over the end of this movie, which for me was just fine. I actually loved the whole build up more than the explosive final fifteen minutes, but that's often the case with me.
In closing, this film contains all the glamour and magic of a Halloween themed Sweet Valley High novel.
Anyway, rent it now or continue having a life that's awful.
I finally saw Observe and Report after hearing and reading so much about it. It was a hateful, disgusting, and totally depressing little comedy. I loved it! I love dark comedies, and it's rare that I see comedies that are this dark, so whenever I hear somebody mention that a particular film is a dark comedy I go running toward it. What can i say? I just like them. I have a memory of being shushed for laughing too hard in an audience full of horrified onlookers during Todd Solondz's Happiness that I will always cherish.
There was one scene in particular I was a little worried about. Some of the feminist blogs I read regularly were livid over a scene in which Ronnie (played by Seth Rogan) is fucking Brandi (God I love that name- played by brilliantly by Anna Faris) who is passed out drunk and high in a pool of her own vomit. Ronnie stops in the middle of the act to ask if she's okay and she wakes up long enough to shout, "Why'd you stop mother fucker?"
It's a totally offensive scene, to be sure, but the whole movie is hateful and offensive. And I'm not sure if it's more or less offensive in a movie that has already spent so much time setting up what an awful person Brandi is. The film seems to have a strange relationship to its female characters. All the women in the film are terrible people and not just because they're being stalked by a flasher in the mall parking lot who shouts "Touch it, slut!" and "See my dick!" at them. No, it's more that they're manipulative and wholly self-serving.
It's not like the men are spared. Every single character, including the hero, are pretty much the most pathetic, self-involved monsters you could ever imagine. The movie almost seems to be daring you to hate it. I guess that's probably why i loved it. Like John Waters' films from the 1970's, it asks you to delight in awful behavior. (It's been way too long since I've seen Female Trouble, by the way.) It's just that Brandi is especially nasty and self-serving. So why was she my favorite character?
This probably isn't very politically correct, but I wonder: do gay men hate women? Look at the women who are gay icons. They are universally over-the-top and often unkind or laughably vain. Sometimes even alcoholics or drug addicts. I wonder why that is. Do gay men idolize a strong woman and a dramatic story, or do we like laughing at train wrecks? Or is it both? The female characters in my play are often very tough and out spoken and crude while men tend to be more meek and thoughtful. Some of this is my background, as I come from a huge family of tough broads and quiet men, but that doesn't explain why I love Amy Winehouse so damn much.
In the end it seemed like the movie kind of hated Brandi, but her nasty behavior had the opposite effect on me. I rooted for her. But does my rooting for her condone movies in which women are betrayed as shallow and cruel?
I was thinking about all of this when I went to IMDB to read up on the movie. Slightly off the subject, but I don't think anybody hates women as much as this lovely IMDB commenter, who wrote the following of the controversial scene:
First I'm a PSY major so I know what I'm talking about...
Face it, girls like the Brandi character are a dime a dozen, slutty
parasites like that are everywhere, and they deserve to get used for
sex, most especially if they get overly drunk to the point of passing
out. Let's face it, girls like that/her are no mother Teressa...Brandi
was only out with the dude for free food and free booze!!! Girls like
that, take and take and take...with zero consideration, they're used to
having orbiters around them at their beck and call, and used to skimmin
drinks and other things from guys, with zero in return...so yeah, they
deserve whatever cummms to them. Besides, chicks like that tend to be
pretty screwed up anyways...probably mollested as a kid, or
whatever...lots of issues, and probably addicted to semen too!
Seriously, a lot of girls are addicted to semen, it's in psychology today! Check it out.
Sometimes I really like my day job. This morning it became necessary for everybody on my team to compile their top twenty list of the best horror films of all time (and it actually was necessary... not just for fun!) Mine is somewhat standard I think, except for a few that I think might raise some eyebrows and number twenty, which is a wild card but a personal favorite nonetheless.
After a lifetime of wanting to see Urgh! A Music War I discovered by pure accident while at Videology that it had been released on DVD. First Shock Treatment and then Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. How lucky can I get? What's next, a Little Darlings release?
Anyway, I'd seen some of the performances on YouTube and the amazing Klaus Nomi performance was in the documentary about his life, The Nomi Song (which I highly recommend, by the way.) There were some really obscure bands on there! Surf Punks, anybody? Splodgenessabounds? Invisible Sex?
What surprised me was how some of the bands I love I wasn't so into live. OMD's performance of "Enola Gay" was a total bore, and I really love that song. On the flip side of this were the performances that totally knocked me out. I'm fucking obsessed with this performance by The Cramps singing "Tear It Up." How fucking sexy is Lux Interior here? holy crap! Pay special attention to his guitarists, who are both rare beauties.
I was never really that into The Cramps, but now I think I'd better reconsider my position. That performance was bananas.There was once a time when I wasn't really into The Gossip either, until I got to see them live. It's hard to believe Lux was almost 40 in this video.
Another performance I loved was by a band called Chelsea, whom I'm ashamed to admit I'd never heard of. Some internet research tells me that lead singer Gene October, who deserves his own Boner Jams entry based on this video, lost his original band when the formed (along with Billy Idol) Generation X. Here is Chelsea singing "I'm On Fire" which is a straight up class warfare jam, a sentiment I've been feeling a lot lately myself.
It's funny. I was starting to think I grew out of punk in favor of more modern and sophisticated rock, but lately I've been revisiting it so much. It seems to be all I really want to hear. I wonder what that's about. It's certainly having an effect on my writing.
I recently attended a party full of movie buffs, when the circle I was sitting in began talking about our list of the most under seen and underrated films we could think of. This was a party thrown by somebody who works in horror film, so mostly people's lists skewed in that direction, but I was thrilled when several people brought up Shock Treatment. It's one of my top ten favorite movies, and being a fan of it can feel pretty lonely.
If you're not familiar with it, Shock Treatment is Richard O' Brien's 1981 follow-up to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Some call it a sequel or a semi-sequel, but that's not really fair. The movie's production seems to have been cursed with bad luck. Originally intended to be a more straight forward sequel entitled The Brad and Janet Show, the creators completely rethought it when industry strikes in the United States forced them to shoot entirely in an English film studio. Their solution was really fucking clever and ahead of its time.
In Shock Treatment, Brad and Janet (now played by Cliff De Young and the AMAZING Jessica Harper) are visiting their hometown, Denton, which you may remember as being held up in RHPS as the ideal American town and the beacon of normalcy. In actuality, Denton is a town that exists completely within a film studio, where half of the townspeople have their own series' and the other half of the townspeople sit in the audience all day watching them. It's very bizarre and unnerving and the lines between what is real and what is fiction get blurry.
Brad and Janet are plucked to appear on "Marriage Maze"- a game show for couples on the rocks- which results in Brad being sent away to "Dentonvale" (a medical drama) and Janet going to live with her parents (who have have their own series, "Happy Homes".) Meanwhile, Janet doesn't know that DTV's new owner, a fast food kingpin, has fallen in love with her and wants to make her "Miss Mental Health", a ploy to sell sanity to the people of Denton in the form of absolute mind control. Confused? Yeah, that's normal. you'd have to watch Shock Treatment about a hundred times to really understand it, if you ever really can. The last minute changes make it kind of convoluted. Still, it's pretty fascinating that this little movie accidentally predicted what reality television would do to the American psyche two decades before it actually happened.
I actually prefer Shock Treatment to Rocky Horror, which is an unpopular opinion to say the least. I think it's fascinating to watch the glitter and overt sexuality and rock and roll of Rocky Horror (and the 70's) give way to the minimalist, cold, self absorbed, new wave aesthetic of Shock Treatment (the 80's). Also, it's no secret that I love new wave music more than just about anything, so there's that.
I really, really wish Richard O' Brien would make another musical. I love, love, love his two movies and the pair of them have been some of my biggest influences on my aesthetic as a playwright. This style and music and aesthetic of this past decade would have been perfect for Richard O' Brien to make another movie and now it's almost over.(Is it weird that I miss this decade before it's finished?)
