As cool as a Fruitstand

You'd think the label "worst director of all time" would be, well, hard to live up to. It's a form of overly high expectations, after all, what if people come to your films expecting terrible and getting merely mediocre?

Don't worry though, "Glen or Glenda" is anything but merely mediocre. The reason it is this terrible, and fascinating, is because it's so incredibly earnest, so filled with ideas and good intentions, so convinced of its own importance. It's a movie that has no lesser goal than to spread understanding and acceptance of transvestism (a term which is defined, in almost the same terms, twice, as if to pound it in our head, or maybe Wood had simply forgotten he'd already done it).

But what a strange movie this is. It's hard even to talk of "scenes". Glen himself gets some lines with his Barbara, but as Glenda he is mostly just followed through the street by a voice-over. There are multiple framing devices: a doctor who tells the story of Glen "and all the other Glens" to a concerned policeman, but also strange bits with Bela Lugosi as some puppeteer going nefariously on and on about "pulling the string" and "puppy dog tails and fat big snails". There's even a scene of him in a lab, but what he's mixing we don't know. It produces a lot of smoke though.

There are weird dream sequences too, and then, there's his love of stock footage. When we see Bela, for example, it's framed by shots of lightning. The story of Alan - also told by the doctor- is mostly narrated over war footage. A shot of a highway, cars streaming through, comes back over and over again with only a mere excuse for it the first time.

It's a totally bizarre film, and while it can be applauded for at least trying to make transvestism normal, it spoils that by being thoroughly homophobic. It confirms that Wood might, indeed, be the worst director of all time, but also a director with so much ambition and so many ideas that it's amazing none of them turn out to be good.

So do yourself a favor. Don't go see the merely mediocre "I know who killed me" or anything like that this weekend. Treat yourself to something truly terrible instead.
Originally posted on:As cool as a Fruitstand

I saw Goodfellas 4 days ago already, but I kept putting off writing about it. Why? Well...I'm afraid I'm going to blaspheme.

Oh, not blaspheme in the "fucking show yourself, you goddamn bloodsucker" way I was talking to the hiding mosquito in my room on my hunt after the movie, infected by the language. No, blaspheme as in: I didn't really like it all that much.

Oh, Scorses is definitely a master filmmaker, so I did find much to admire: there are some breathtaking tracking shots, the dialogue snaps like it should, basically every technical aspect is perfect. Somehow, though, I was unaffected.

One thing might be that it's long, and that I didn't find the story particularly engaging or suspenseful. To put it crudely, I didn't really care who lived or died. It might be that I found the switching between the perspective of the voice-over from Henry to Karen and back distracting and unnecessary. More importantly, I think it's from a lack of affinity with Scorsese's take on the mafia as a topos.

It's interesting that almost every director to take on the genre of mob movies has his own take on it. To Coppola, the family aspect, the traditional side, was most important. To Tarantino, gangsters are just the epitome of cool. In Mann's movies, being a gangster is just a job like another, with it's own rules and ethics, sure, but not all that different from being a cop, a journalist, a cab driver.

To Scorsese, it's a calling.

And see, that's where he loses me, because I can't for the life of me understand Henry. He describes it in detail: he likes the respect he gets, the perks, that he doesn't need to wait in line.

I mean really? To not have to wait in line you're ok with hurting and killing people? You're happy to exploit people?

Of course, the element of the film that is intriguing, I have to admit, is the unreliability of the narrator. Henry justifies a little too much, tries too hard to justify the mafia as a not-so-evil form of business. They protect these people after all, see? Also, in the voice-over he seems reluctant to use violence, quite a nice guy actually, but he seems just a little too eager to hit his wife for that to be true.

I'm almost scared to type the above, to justify myself by saying "it's not the movie, it's probably just me". After all, this is #92 on the most recent AFI list, #18 on the imdb top 250. But I'll be bold, and say it outright: I think Goodfellas is overrated.

If you'll excuse me, I'll go run and hide now.
Originally posted on:As cool as a Fruitstand

Oh why oh why did I not see this film when I was, say, fourteen or fifteen? I might have truly loved it then, watched it over and over and memorized every line. Now I was merely fascinated by it's bizarro twist and turns and the absurd grandiosity of its ambition. I was laughing out loud at some moments (the whole "eskimo" business is amazing), shaking my head at how far they were pushing the boundaries of logic in others.

I don't think any movies get dated as quickly as high school movies. It's the need to differentiate between the popular people and the geeks, I suppose. We have to see who belongs to which group right away, but while geeks look more or less the same throughout the decades, the popular kids go through at least one fad every year. This is so clearly an 80's movie, with the shoulder pads and big hair, it's a little bit of a distraction.

But I shouldn't whine. I can't think of any high school movie so deliberately strange and dark, so nasty. The only one in recent memory that comes close is "mean girls", which has a similar trio of "heathers" at its center. I loved the baby-faced and totally psycho Christian Slater here (admittedly, when do I not love Christian Slater, but that's another story), with his ambition to destroy society by destroying the high school he sees as a representative of it. I even liked Winona Ryder: her character is not very consistent, but the look on her face as she stands straight at the end, like the action hero at the end of a film,bruised, bleeding, and blackened by smoke but triumphant, is priceless.

Too bad I've grown to realize high school's not that important or representative, after all...
Originally posted on:As cool as a Fruitstand