...is explained a lot by my thought processes regarding the title of the preceding post.
I knew that I wanted to include something about "candy stripers" in the header, just because that peculiar form of headgear was so indicative of the poorly-thought-out situation of the Special Forces in the early Eighties.
The problem was that my brain immediately seized onto the craptacular 1978 porn movie of the same name, which may well have been my first encounter with the genre as a junior in college; remember, in the Seventies porn was not the ubiquitous magilla it is today, where the entire Internet is effectively a monstrous vehicle for conveying into your home images of two strangers fucking. You actually had to go to a real theatre to see these things and encounter the trench-coated masturbaters and speculate on just exactly what on the floor was so sticky. It certainly made the whole business less...businesslike, and a lot more ridiculous.
So as I was recounting the history of the SF, circa 1981, every so often I would break out in spontaneous chuckling thinking about the, um, intersection of the hard men of the Green Beret and the hardcore women of the Silver Screen.
There's no real excuse for this, and I have this problem a LOT; it's just how my mind works like flypaper - anything and everything sticks to it, and is likely to get stuck together in inappropriate ways.
My bride has - not one - but two master's degrees. So, like the song says, she can spell s-e-x!
Just sayin'...
Caught the first half hour of "Get Yourself A College Girl" last night on TCM; a complete and utter shriek, and you can say I said so.
The title song above is so awful that it seems an almost intentional joke on what were known as "co-eds" back in the day. And compounding the joke is the scene a bit later where "Terri"'s fellow "co-eds" insist that she's, like, Joan of Arc leading them into this brave new world of female liberation. To have s-e-x, apparently. Which is, well, sorta not a real "Joan of Arc" thing, but, whatev'.
I understand that the rest of the film features some early Sixties musical brilliance (the reviewer at the link discusses perhaps the most famous; the appearance of Astrud Gilberto performing The Girl From Ipanema):
"My friends, what any viewer of this sequence has just experienced is pure -- repeat, untainted in any way -- musical perfection. Incredibly talented artists, at the absolute peak of their careers, captured on well photographed 35mm format performing their single most famous number.
It just doesn't get any better than this."
Plus some early British Invasion from The Animals and the Dave Clark Five...well, let's say that if I'd been perkier and the flick on earlier I'd have tried to watch the rest.
Instead I am left with the indelible impression of the 1959 Miss America crooning about how intellectual women are better because they really know how to screw.
Which is not how I recall it, but perhaps I went to the wrong school.
Portland is a funny place to live sometimes.(This, by the way, is something called the "Urban Iditarod" and is best left further unexamined)
One of those times is whenever we turn up on the electronical television or in the glamor of the Silver ScreenTM.Other cities accept that they are, well, cities; notable places where many people live, work, and play, and that the notion of such a place appearing in a movie or a television show is not inconceivable or even unusual.
But for all that we live in a city - the largest in our state, and the second largest in Cascadia - a lot of us are rubes about getting on camera.
For one thing, we are utterly foolish about our contributions to film despite our track record as the location of some of the most craptacular shite ever to curl down out of a projector.
I'll sort of give you "Goonies", although I'm not a fan and have never managed to make it through the entire thing in one sitting. And there are several Portland locations in a very sweet and funny little film called "The Favor" with one of my favorite comic actresses, Harley Jane Kozak; it's silly and clever and well worth a look in my not-so-humble opinion. But...Madonna's "Body of Evidence"?
Seriously, this may be one of the worst movies of all time. It's hard to make a film that makes sex look so unpleasant that getting a root canal or getting your legs waxed appears preferable, but this one manages. Come to think of it, there IS wax involved in the thing, and not in a good way.Yike.
Throw in some of the worst acting and worst dialogue ever filmed, and Portland should be ashamed to get hung with this dog. It's really awful. Beyond awful. Unspeakable. Eye-searingly horrible. Satan's stool sample.
It's BAD.
And the rest of our resume isn't much better, although I'd love like hell to get a look at "The Fisherman's Bride" from 1908 Astoria; it has to be better than "Kindergarten Cop". For "Jackass, The Movie", "Twilight", and "Mr. Brooks" we should ALL get a spanking; even "Coraline" can't save us from immortal shame.With that sort of record you'd think we'd shy from more public exposure, but, no; the latest Big Thing is the comedy series "Portlandia"and Portlanders, unquenchable, are once again in our silly swoon over all things cinemagraphic.
I've seen a couple of these. It's sketch comedy, so it's hit and miss; some of the little scenes work terrifically. Some fall flat, some are cringe-inducing awful. Some are just strange; the creators are getting better in their second season at nailing a certain type of Portland; hipsters, the earnest and twee, the ecoNazis (the sketch with the twenty recycling containers each carefully identified by color for every possible subcategory of material was perfect).
But the quality of the material seems...immaterial. What matters is that in the "Timbers Army" sketch the two comedians appear at CopyPilot - the copy store right down from our house! Squeeeeeee! - and at our soccer match with our very own Timbers Army! Squeeeeee!And the New Yorkers and Los Angelinos, used to seeing themselves on film and television, sniff audibly and pretend to find something interesting in the middle distance. They are the sophisticates, and we have just shown ourselves to be gormless, hopeless, shallow goofy rubes.
So we're watching this truly bad kaiju movie last night; the kiddos and I (Mojo is somewhere spending her time more productively, picking lint out of her navel or something)."Rebirth of Mothra 3" is REALLY bad. Epically bad. Even-for-kaiju-monster-movie-bad. There's been a whole lot of really confusing, bizarre plot (which we've laughed at) and really confusing, bad acting until at one point one of the excrable Japanese kid actors (EJKA) gives another EJKA a stunned look as he tries to get an explanation for just what the hell has happened (which I'm still not sure about involving time-travel and multiple kaiju monsters) by asking his pal;
"Mothra?"And as the second EJKA looks back dumbly my son turns to us and drawls what should be his line:
"Dude. It's complicated."
You know your kids are growing up when they crack you up.
I giggled my ass off, the Boy preened for the rest of the night for winning the Snarkiest Comment Award, and his little sister was totally confused.
The past and the present collide in peculiar ways.
For example, a friend of mine posted to Facebook that she is planning a "Tron party" to celebrate the release of the new installment, "Tron: Legacy"(I'm unsure - IS it a new installment? The trailers I've seen have been bafflingly incoherent. I'm honestly not sure whether this ia a remake of the 1982 original or a "sequel" or what. Whatever, it apparently sucks pipe, at least according to the critics collected over at "Rotten Tomatoes".) Meghan, creative lady that she is, is sure to have some cool blacklight/glow stick gimmicks and cool pop-culture riffs on the original flick.
Which brings me back to the past; specifically, to 1982, when my buddies Alfie and Woodus and I had a Friday evening without dates, or plans, other than to get ripshit and go watch the original Tron down at the Alvin C. York Theater on post.
Now let me begin by saying that drunken GIs were probably not the target audience for Disney's product. But even drunken and in rude company, I'm typically pretty capturable. Twenty-eight years later I was as delighted by "Tangled" as my four-and-a-half-year-old; I tend to suspend disbelief fairly willingly when the house lights go down. So it was probably not a good sign for Disney that twenty minutes into the old Tron I was looking for distraction because the film, well, "sucked" would be the concise way of putting it.
Distraction came in the form of actress Cindy Morganin a light-up spandex leotard. I'm sorry to say that the three of us spent most of the rest of the film shouting lurid and suggestive computer-related abuse at the screen. We were mightily impressed with our hilarity - the mere mention of the term "floppy disk" nearly sent us into convulsions. We were also fortunate that we were perhaps half of the entire audience that Friday, and that none of the other viewers (perhaps as bored by the non-tale being not-told on the screen as we were) objected to our humor. Or perhaps they were even entertained; the spectacle of a high-school-drunk medic shouting "I love you, sweetheart! Let me put my hard disk in your floppy drive!" was probably about as diverting as the flick, from what I recall of it...So a raucous evening was enjoyed by our three heroes mocking the pioneer computer-graphic-image film, and it was only in researching the long-forgotten name of the actress who was the recipient of our rude behavior that I discovered that Ms. Morgan
"whose father fought in World War II, is passionate about supporting the US military and helping to alleviate the financial hardship felt by those who have been called upon to serve in the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. She was director of the Caddyshack Reunion Golf Tournament in 2006, which reunited some of the cast of Caddyshack (Morgan included), along with other celebrities. Subtitled "Playing For The Home Team" and hosted at Willow Crest Golf Club in Oak Brook, Illinois, the tournament raised funds (and awareness) to benefit the Illinois Military Family Relief Fund, an organization that helps the families of National Guard members and reservists on active duty."
Oh. Oops.
Well, now I feel kinda small. Nothing like abusing someone who has done nothing but help you and others like you. GIs, I swear - we shouldn't be allowed out in public without a keeper.
So Cindy Morgan is helping GIs, and Meghan is having fun kidding on Tron, and I'm still a the sort of dope who gets pie-eyed and shouts at films, except now I have little kiddos to make me more responsible; thus does the present repair the failings of the past.
Okay. So we've established that geologists are generally cool people who do cool things.
But did you know that we're also secretly the world's sexist spies?Yep. As shown here in that cinematic triumph, Dante's Peak:I love everything about this movie, starting with the name; Dante's Peak - Dante's Inferno, get it? Subtle as a hammer to the face?
Oh, yeah.
The odd thing about this flick is that it is clearly meant to drag up the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helen's. You've got the small town (supposedly Washington but actually filmed in Idaho) literally in the shadow of the great volcano, all the flannel-and-latte trappings that the rubes associate with the Great Northwest, at least after David Lynch got through with them, and even a Harry Truman like-a-look in "Grandma Ruth" refusing to leave the upper slopes of Dante's hell-Peak because she knows "this ol' mountain won't hurt me..."
Riiiiiiiight, Grandma.
But does anyone other than me think that the entire notion of making a "Mt. St. Helen's" movie in 1997 was totally whack? Seventeen years after the eruption that made the national news wasn't exactly "ripped from today's headlines". I suspect that most people sorta-kinda remembered the events of May seventeen years earlier, but how did that help sell this flick? I suspect that the long remove from the historical event helped sink this turkey at the box office.
Geologically it's not a complete wash. The volcano does go from dormant to Plinian eruption within weeks rather than months, as is the actual case. And, no, entire mountain lakes don't really turn to acid, or hot springs suddenly boil skinny-dippers to death.
Although the dummies should really know better; anytime you get naked in a disaster/slasher flick, you're gonna die. Horribly. You know that. Grow a brain, people, and keep your damn skivvies on!
But there's some reasonably-close-to-accurate stratovolcano geology, and the final pyroclastic explosion is pretty damn cool.
And you have Linda Hamilton, all craggy-beautiful, stone-washed wholesome, and foofily serious as the mayor of this fictional small town as well as the proprietor and sole barista of the local coffee spot, acting all intent in a sort-of-spacey disaster-movie fashion to provide both the required local viewpoint and the Love Interest.
Why a love interest in a flick about volcanic death, you ask?
Because the hero hunka-hunka burnin' volcanologist who comes to the rescue is none other than Double-Oh Seven. Bond. James Bond.Seriously. James Bond, U.S. Geological Survey. Pierce Brosnan; the late-Nineties Bond himself, bustles onto the scene in his whompin' cool U.S.G.S. SUV (complete with snorkel for driving through rivers - you knew that all federal geologists are issued these, right?) to bark warnings to the ignorant hicks (producing much alarmed headshaking) and argue with complacent superiors (to be first reprimanded and, after the inevitable eruption, ruefully deferred to). Oh, and to conduct a "romance" with Linda the mayor/barista, naturally, although from the weak decaf they brew together it seems that Mister Kiss-kiss-bang-bang has left his Walther in his other pants and that Sarah Connor is still looking for Mr. Right rather than Mr. Right Now.But he's fucking James Bond, people. And he works for the U.S.G.S.!
How cool is that?
So to review; cool flaming volcano death, parboiled naked hootchie, Linda Hamilton necking with James Bond, acid lakes, lattes, driving government vehicles through raging rivers.Let's face it; geology is just flat-out, stomp-down, shake-your-moneymaker cool, and that's all there is to it.
Caught the 1942 MGM chestnut "White Cargo" the other night.
Hard to try and discuss the thing, what between the bad acting, wooden directing, terrible script and, particularly, the amazingly out-front Forties racism and misogyny. All it lacked was some dancing pickaninnies and a comical John-Wayne-variety wifebeating. Seriously. It stunk just that bad.
The racism was so bad it wasn't even Forties-tolerable. The original New York Times reviewer called White Cargo "that antique lot of bunk which could, with the proper treatment, be made into screaming farce—you know, that lurid business about white men in darkest Africa going to pot from the heat, too much booze and the charms of a dusky native girl."But the "dusky native" girl" is, of course, the only reason to watch this dog anymore, since Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler - better known as Hedy Lamarr - was a native of Austria and dusky by virtue of whatever Metro used as spray-tan in the war years (since the genuine spray-tan was needed to make GI boots or something...) but was certainly all girl, or woman, and slinks about the film in cocoa makeup and a sarong speaking a bizarre sort of pidgin. Although the film is set somewhere in British colonial Africa Hedy's character, "I am Tondelayo" is said to be Egyptian/Arab, probably to get around the Hays Office issue with portraying white-black sex on screen.
And thats "White Cargo" summed up, really. Sex. Forbidden, blacky-white sex. It's about the stalwart White Man's burden; the slinky, scheming Dark Woman, who wants only to mulct him for the benefits of his White Progress by enticing him with her irresistible dusky poozle. Of course, Whiteness triumphs in the end, as the scheming Hedy/Tondelayo is forced to drink the Vile Puggle she is using to poison her white husband and runs screaming off to, presumably, Do The Right Thing and die in lonely agony in the jungle.
Hedy is both wonderfully scenic and monumentally awful, though her thigh-slapping Tonedlayo Dance really has to be seen to be appreciated. It's hard to believe she can't act, as she did well in other pieces both before and after this, and it's difficult to guess whether it was the rotten script or the bad direction that makes her so bad, or whether she just really hated the film and the part. Certainly the reviewers did, but at least they got some vicious entertainment value from it. From the NYT, again;
"...Metro has chosen to play it for Drachmae and implications of sex—or, at least, as much as the Hays office would let pass, which is mostly wiggles and leers. It has given Hedy Lamarr a mahogany finish, a limited vocabulary and a few dry goods and turned her loose to play Tondelayo with whatever else she happens to have. It has called upon Richard Carlson to be the sap who cracks up at this display, and it has set Walter Pidgeon, Frank Morgan and several other able actors to sweating and shouting the most abusive and ridiculous twaddle that has been heard in a long, long time.
As the gentlemen keep telling one another, the dry rot has set in—on the Capitol screen. Or is it the damp rot? We can't remember. But it is some kind of rot; that much is sure."
You write that today, Jackson, and you've got a hell of a lawsuit on your hands, but I have to agree - "White Cargo" sucked pipe.
The injustice hidden underneath all that makeup is that Hedy was, in her way, a really brilliant woman. Her adventures, beginning with her escape from Europe and a beast of a first husband, are as good as a storybook, and she seems to have been something of a minor genius with a knack for invention, developing an early version of radio frequency-hopping that eventually became the SINGCARS radios I used in the Army in the 1990s and Oughts.
I'm not kidding. Got it patented and everything. Smart woman.She was also a difficult person, too, apparently, with all sorts of personal and money problems. She was broke a lot later on, and was caught stealing several times. She sued a lot of people later in her life over use of her name and image; she never really managed to transfer her wartime-era glamor into a career in films that survived the Next Hot Girl and she seems to have become pretty damn bitter about it. She had a very up-and-down sort of life after the stardom years, and died in Florida ten years ago this January in relative obscurity.
But she was riding the crest the year she made "White Cargo", and as bad as the film is it's hard to watch it, and her vamping sullenly in her ridiculous makeup and imagine the hard years to come. In the flickering monochrome darkness of my living room in Portland, 2010, it was still 1942, the war was waiting outside, and the gorgeous woman with the lissome figure was still smiling up succulently and husking "What Tondelayo want, Tondelayo get."
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