Cinecult: The Thin Red Line

Originally published on the Entertainment page on 28 September 2009.

If you’ve never heard the name Terrance Malick before, there’s probably a good reason. In the past forty years, directors like Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola, have been involved in dozens of movies, while Malick has only directed a grand total of four. Despite this, among critics and terminal film nerds (like myself), he’s regarded as one of the great auteurs of the age. His films Badlands and Days of Heaven are regarded as some of the best films ever made. Considering this pedigree, if you watch The Thin Red Line, it shouldn’t be hard to understand why he’s so well respected despite his slow gestation time.

The Thin Red Line, despite being nominated for Best Picture has since fallen by the way side. There’s some pretty good reasons for this. First off, this slow-paced, but elegant war film had the misfortune of coming out the same year as one of the biggest action movies of all time: Steven Spielburg’s Saving Private Ryan. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it’s a sprawling, self-indulgent mess. It’s often plodding and it’s covered in scars from being cut and re-cut (and despite this it’s still probably too long). It also doesn’t have one main character—or even a handful of main characters-- that the audience can hold on to. The James Jones novel that the movie is based off of has the same massive cast of characters, but at least the book gives names to the people in it. Roger Ebert describes the movie as “hallucinatory” and that’s about as good of a one word summation of this film as there could be. As we should all know, hallucinations aren’t for everybody.

Despite the rough spots in the movie, there’s still plenty of beauty to be gleaned from this film. The Thin Red Line follows one of the bloodiest battles in American history, which takes place on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. Malick pays just as much attention to the horrors of war as he does the beauty that these battles take place in, and that alone makes this movie an interesting anomolly in the genre.

The dialogue is also fairly wonderful. Admittedly, most of it has no place in a war film (Would a character being shot at really consider the morality of nature? Probably not.), but it can’t be denied that, in and of itself, the writing is beautiful. That’s what most of the film is like and that’s what makes me love it so much. It isn’t quite a visceral war film and it isn’t quite a poem. It doesn’t do either of these things perfectly, but the failure that results is probably more interesting than most movies.

The Thin Red Line isn’t all poetry, though. The action scenes are among the best I’ve ever seen. Unlike the rest of the film, which moves with the swiftness of dream, the action scenes are as tightly plotted and assembled. Combat has a frightening weight that few other movies ever seem to execute. Part of this is because the Japanese aren’t just enemy soldiers, they’re ghosts. They slink out of the forest without a sound, kill something and leave just as quietly. In Saving Private Ryan, the Germans were something we could understand, they were in tanks or behind machine guns. In this case, the enemy is a mystery. How are these men supposed to defeat the enemy if he’s nothing more than a muzzle flash two hundred yards away?

The Thin Red Line isn’t for everyone. As I’ve said, it isn’t perfect and it’s probably the one of the spottiest movies that I would consider “great.” But in between the rough spots are some truly beautiful pieces of film making. If only for these quiet moment Malick’s movie is worth giving a shot. Plus, the loud ones are pretty goddamn good, too.

Image via Google. As usual.

Artist Profile on Charles Addams

Originally run on the Culture page of the Union Weekly on 28 September 2009.

Charles Addams is a spectacular weirdo, the kind of weirdo we should all emulate ourselves after. Besides being an accomplished cartoonist, he also collected antique crossbows, used a little girl’s tombstone as a coffee table, and would conduct interviews with journalists while wearing a full suit of armor. While the majority of his antics were more than likely a persona he used to impress the public and whatever journalist that happened to be interviewing him. This bizarre aura makes perfect sense though, since he is the guy who came up with the Addams Family.

Besides spawning two live action series, a cartoon show, and two feature films, the Addams Family were featured in single panel cartoons that Charles drew for the New Yorker. His cartoons weren’t all of the family, the rest were one-shot jokes that looked not unlike a version of The Far Side written by Edgar Allen Poe.

Addams’ art is also featured on the cover of Ray Bradbury’s 2001 short story collection From The Dust Returned, a novel which features any equally strange, gothic family called the Elliots (the two men previously worked together, but eventually went their separate ways). Unfortunately, most of his work seems to be in various phases of being out of print, I can’t imagine having a childhood without pawing through books filled with his drawings. Then again, my dad did buy the house we live in because it looked like the Addams Family manor.

What might be the most interesting aspect of the comics is that they’re a looking glass into the past. The ‘40’s and ‘50’s is a time we usually associate with conservatism, xenophobia, and generally being no fun at all, but Charles Addams stands against this stereotype. He shows us that the past that was just as interested in bare breasts, shrunken heads, suicide, and psychopathic children as we are. Or at least I am.

If you’re a fan of cartoon art, laughter (and who isn’t? Jerks, probably), or if you want some sort of indie-goth credibility, the collections of his work are well worth hunting down. Charles Addams is an artist everyone should know about, because he’s the kind of weirdo we could all learn something from.

Art via Charles Addams, clearly.

Cover of the Union Weekly!

Originally run on 28 September 2009. Colors by Clay Cooper.

Tales of Poltroonage

Originally run on 21 September 2009 for the Comics page.

Hey! There's art here too!

Thirsty, Thirstier, and Thirstiest

Originally run on 21 September 2009 for the Entertainment page.

More art found here!

Matrimony and Baby Making

Originally run on 21 September 2009 for the Opinions page.

Matrimony and Baby Making:
Why People Under 30 Shouldn't Get Married

I’ve noticed a recent, horrifying trend on the Facebooks and rumor-mills surrounding high school acquaintances of mine. I’ve noticed that far too many of them are getting married and having kids. It’s awful. I’m twenty-two and I’d like to consider myself fairly level-headed and I can’t even begin to comprehend marital vows or spawning a brood. I don’t get it any more than I get quantum physics or the mad scrawlings of a homeless man, written with his own filth. In every single case of these people getting married, their decisions seem to have two causes in common: Stupidity or religiosity. Or both.

I’m not here to harangue religion, though, that’s hardly any fun. I’m fairly certain that God doesn’t want any part in these marriages. He created the moon, the sky, and the seas, so why would he want to lower His batting average with marriages that are as certain to end with arbitration as it is certain that Oedipus is going to get ruddy with his mom? Maybe He’s just got a better sense of humor than I do. He did create the platypus. And the manatee. And the Irish. It’s a distinct possibility.

The best example of someone who shouldn’t get married at this age is a fellow I went to high school with. His name was Chaz and he could easily be described as a guy that looked and acted like someone named Chaz. There was never a more perfect Chaz than this one. He had the kind of effulgent demeanor that caused many people to ask him if he was high. He never was, which was almost worse, because if you’re stoned, you can sober up, but there’s no amount of time that can keep you from being a desert of personality.

When we heard that he was expecting, my friends and I laughed it off as an insane rumor, drummed up by a sick mind. There was no way fate was cruel enough to let someone as un-ideal for parenthood like Chaz have a baby, much less the twins he was rumored to be expecting. I wouldn’t be comfortable letting a guy named Chaz hold my baby, much less actually have one. Well, as it turns out, he married the gal he knocked up and they’re on Facebook. The once funny rumor is now a chilling testament to human mistakes online.

I think there’s a few more guys from my high school class with bastards running around, but they’ve at least got the good taste to obscure any progeny they accidentally made. You’ve got to cover that up, brick it up in a wall, and burn the evidence, too. It’s one thing to ruin your life by not knowing proper pull-out procedures, but it’s quite another to dress your mistakes up and take portraits of them at Sears.

Children. Marriage. Ugh. No thanks, I’ve got shit to do this decade. Marriage and having babies can wait. Or it can at least wait until I’ve got my own and I stop caring about what people from my high school do with their lives

On Death

Originally run on 9 September 2009 for the Opinions page.

On Death: Not a Fan
How Loss Teaches Us What We Should Already Know

Death, I’m realizing, is the worst. It tears people up inside, it ruins their days, and it’s a complete mystery. Death, like most important things, can’t be understood until you actually experience it yourself. Even for the living, there’s no amount of prep work or training that can make sense of it. I’ve come to this conclusion, because last Thursday, my uncle died.

I can make a good omelette and I can out-score my parents in a game of Jeopardy, but when it comes to something as basically important as sending my cousins a condolence e-mail, I’m entirely out of my depth. This matters like so few things do. If I can’t write more than a couple of sentences to comfort someone how am I ever going to deal when death strikes closer or harder? The things the matter most in life, I seem to be least equipped for.

The past hasn’t prepared me for this situation, because I’ve never been so close to a death like this one. When my grandparents passed, it didn’t exactly come as a shock. My grandmother on my mom’s side was the first to die, but I was so young it barely even registered. She died in her sleep and, as I learned by hearing it over and over again in the weeks after, “That’s the way to go.”

When her husband died, it wasn’t exactly a horrific shock. He went out as most people only dream of. He was 92, sharp as a tack, he had a girlfriend, he traveled the world, and wasn’t haunted by any dark secrets. He was a good man who was survived by nine children and who knows how many grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Even the manner of his death could almost be considered gentle. He didn’t contract some disease that sucked him dry and robbed him of his mind like Alzheimer’s did my dad’s mother. When he died, he pulled his car in front of his house, put it in park, and died. The engine was still running when his neighbors found him. My grandpa on my dad’s side was even less of a shock: He died years before I was even born.

It wasn’t that way this time. We knew he was sick for a long time, but I didn’t know he had been this sick. He was only 63 years old, two years younger than my dad, a far cry from 92. The man who was married to my mom’s twin, who fathered three of my favorite cousins, who we watched Old School with at Thanksgiving is just gone. He’s gone and the most profound thing I can come up with is “You must feel like hell.”

I guess the most disconcerting thing about this is there’s no changing it. If you’re sick, you can get better. If your car breaks down, you fix it. If you’re in debt, you get a job. There’s a solution for all of these things, but not for death. With death, that’s it. There’s no solving this problem and that’s probably the scariest part of it. Not only is someone you love gone forever, but we’re suddenly made aware of our own mortality like no other event can make us. We can’t do anything except remember the good times we had with the departed. Thankfully, in this case are plenty. Of course that lesson, someone else taught me.

World's a Mess

Originally run on 9 September 2009 on the News page.

In Soviet Russia He Who Controls the Past Controls You!

Last week was the 70th Anniversary of the invasion of Poland by German forces and the start of the second world war. Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev , never one to miss an opportunity to look like a villain from a John Milius movie, made a claim that Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin had nothing to do with the start of WWII.

While we’re certainly thankful to Stalin for throwing millions and millions of under trained, under armed peasants at the Nazi menace, we also recognize that he was a complete heel. Besides killing twenty-million of his own people via starvation, work camps, or executions in his spare time, he also secretly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler that would allow the two of them to dissect Poland and a handful of other nations without harassment from the other.

Considering Russia’s history of mysteriously executing journalists who report on the government, crime, and big business (which are basically one and the same in the Big Freezy, as the locals call it) it’s a pretty disconcerting for an elected official to unapologetically deny the nature of reality. Also, even if Mr Medvedev is correct about “saving Europe,” the USSR also didn’t spend a lot of time after the war debating whether or not they should crush half of it under their boot heel for fifty years.

MERCENARY HOOOOOUSE!!!

Last week an independent watchdog group exposed private contractors working for a company called Armor Corp for hazing employees and other activities that one might describes as “lascivious.” But don’t just take the watchdog’s word for it, there’s a bunch of photos of these jerks. One is of a Mr. Clean looking guard wearing nothing but a lei and half-of a coconut pounding away at a mysterious red cup that probably isn’t full of buttermilk and guards eating potato chops out of each others’ asscracks (there has also been accusations of doing shots out of said asscracks). Oh, and also there was something about procuring hookers.

When you compare the stupid, confusingly homoerotic antics of the Frat Boys of Mercenary House to other private military corporations like Xe (formerly known as Blackwater International formerly known as SPECTRE) which has been accused of multiple counts of murder by the Iraqi government and sports connections to various right-wing and Christian supremacists organizations, the embassy guards’ actions seem, well tame.

All in all, they’re really just harmless pranksters (remember that time they accidentally killed that horse in the dean’s office?), harmless pranksters that makes us look like assholes in front of a country that’s only eight years away from stoning women to death for wearing blue jeans. So while ArmorCorp’s actions might have been careless, insensitive, and irresponsible, they don’t seem to have done anything more wrong than being dumber than hell in front of a camera and I’m sure more than a few of you can sympathize.

Image by Boris Vladmirski.

Screw the Medals, I'm Here for the Fashion

Originally run on 3 September 2008.

The Olympics, if you hadn’t heard, happened over the summer. As spectacular as the record breaking feats of athleticism were, nothing was as amazing as the opening ceremonies. They not only demonstrated that China is leading the world in replicant technology, but it also showed that only about a third of the world can dress themselves.

I guess I should start with Saudi Arabia, which was a walking, talking sausage-fest. There wasn’t a single woman on the team. I’ve seen gay porns with less dudes involved, which is odd considering that possession of a limp-wrist is punishable by death over there. So way to go, Saudi Arabia! Leave it to you to make the Chinese government look like a drum circle at Haight and Ashbury.

Niger I couldn’t help but feel bad for. Their procession was literally only one man holding their flag. He had the body language of a kid called up to the front of the class to solve a math problem, except that the class is an audience of several hundred million. God speed, dude.

Italy, rakish as ever, proved that you can travel five-thousand miles, spend untold millions of dollars, and still look like you were scraped off the bottom of the Euro-dumpster. Seriously, cargo pants? Were zip-off jeans too formal?

By the way, who knew that there were so many screw-ball sounding island nations there out there? Islands like Kiribati. I didn’t know that Hannah-Barbara cartoons had Olympics teams. And Portugal? Who ever heard of a Portugal? That’s got to be bogus. But, I did get an idea for when I’m rich and crazy, like Richard Branson or Bono, I’d just buy a tiny island for the express purpose of having an Olympic team. Now that’s vanity!

Someone needs to tell the Netherlands that just because your national color is orange, doesn’t mean you need to cram it onto the outfit. They look like they bought their suits from an outlet mall that specializes in surplus costumes from The Prisoner. Ireland has green, but you didn’t see them sacrificing their dignity for the sake of nationalism. And was that a caveman the Dutch had in their procession? How progressive.

Britain didn’t look too bad. They could hold their heads up high with the knowledge that they’re the best tanned team in the whole stadium. A significant achievement considering that Margaret Thatcher stole the sun from them in the mid-eighties.
Germany looked like they were having fun, but as my grandpa said, “If there’s anything I learned from the war, it’s never to trust a smiling Kraut.” Which is odd because he served in Korea.

Us Yanks we looked dapper as all-get-out this year. The silly newsboy caps almost compromised the ensemble, but luckily they had those sharp navy blue blazers with them. With those things on, they look like friendly Marines, the kind that help old ladies across the street, not the kind that fly in at the speed of sound, turning stone age nations into Oliver Stone movies. I’m just glad they’re on our side.

It must have been embarrassing for the French to have the Americans kick your ass in the fashion department. Fashion, historically, just isn’t our thing. The Gauls look like they rolled out of bed and into a suit my grandpa rented. Half of them didn’t even button up their blazers. Trés brut. The ladies in the French crowd looked fairly cute with their berets and sashes, but that’s just because they get credit for looking like the most likely to have crazy, anonymous sex with you while drunk on butter and wine on a park bench. That could just be me, though.

Last, but not least, we’re left with China, who is one scarf short of being the largest assemblage of House Gryffindor alumni in world history. It’s a shame the losers on the team are going to be melted down into low-grade cattle feed and cheap automobiles. They knew the risks. Luckily they managed to pull off the neon red and yellow look, unlike Spain who looked like a bunch of refugees from a theme park I’d never want to visit.

The spectacle of the whole thing was really quite amazing. The massive procession of countries really opened my mind to just how different we can all be and still be, at our core, the same. It was almost enough for me to stop being afraid of the coming century of Sino-hegemony that will surely crush us all into dust. Almost.

Image from a google search of "Spain," "2008 Olympics," and "Utter shame."