Ars Amatoria

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.

Revirginated

Turner Movie Classics is having a Doris Day week all this week.Probably because Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born 89 years ago yesterday. Y'think?

Anyway, I have a funny thing with Doris. In a lot of ways I enjoy both her public person and her work.

She was, and is, a very gorgeous and talented woman and I'm a sucker for smart, funny, handsome women.And while I think she's often pigeonholed in the "Fifties Crinoline" ghetto of leading ladies of the late studio period, assumed to be a sort of one-trick genre pony because of her bedroom farce work with Rock Hudson, she's a genuinely watchable actress, a hell of a singer, and a fairly gifted comedian. She did a lot of good stuff during her movie period, and her place as one of the divas of the American Songbook she earned her props.

But, at the same time, I really dislike her bedroom comedies. It's not just the now-infamous mismatch between the on-screen cliche ravenous-playboy-and-tightassed-virgin and the behind-the-screen cliche gay man and clueless (supposedly - Day has said publicly that she had no idea her co-star liked boys, too) het starlet.

It's the whole revirgination that the studio, their publicists, and the public foisted on Doris.

It's my understanding that she had the perfectly healthy sexual appetite. Doris was young and attractive in a place full of other young, attractive people; she was financially successful, making enough money to support herself, and frankly had no real reason not to enjoy any number of liasons, friendly, romantic, sexual, or all three if she so chose.

Doris herself later (in 1975) claimed that she liked to get busy, didn't try to hide that (beyond the normal public duplicity required in the Forties, Fifties, and early Sixties), and had no part in the "virgin-girl-next-door" maskirova:

"The succession of cheerful, period musicals I made, plus Oscar Levant's highly publicized comment about my virginity ("I knew Doris Day before she became a virgin.") contributed to what has been called my 'image', which is a word that baffles me. There never was any intent on my part either in my acting or in my private life to create any such thing as an image."

Sadly, what she did seem to have is a terrible run of luck - or terrible choices - in her long-term relationships. Her husbands (and she had four) were almost uniformly either wretched bastards or fools. At least two of them were Christian Scientists - which IMO qualifies as both - whose goofy woo-wooism nearly got her killed when she went for years with an undiagnosed breast cancer.So I can't get away from thinking about the woman's off-screen life when I watch her romantic comedies. The sexual double standard a Doris Day romcom hammers on is the mirror image of Doris Kappelhof's sexual life.

He's supposed to be - and usually is - a tomcat on the prowl. She's supposed to be - and usually is - this simpering missish little bit of fluff - but one who succumbs to his devilish charm.

He wants sex from her and throws out "love" (or a simulacrum of love) to try and get it. He tricks her, fools her, abuses her - in a sense - and she loves him for it.Meanwhile, she doesn't - and isn't supposed to - even think about sex until she realizes she luuuurves him...and then she finds a way to trap him into marriage to get both.

Her own welfare, her own business, are not even important enough for her to worry about, let alone him!

(For what it's worth, the worst one of these things I've come across wasn't a Hudson picture but something called The Glass Bottomed Boat she did in 1966 with Rod Taylor; it's also called "The Spy In Lace Panties", from which you get the idea. The worst insult is the point where Doris literally overhears Rod telling his crony that she's an idiotic life support system for a vagina that he's tricking into bed - and she ends up in bed with him anyway. It's a wretched mess, and it seems to have been a box-office hit. Ugh.)

So while I enjoy watching many of Day's films, she sometimes makes me uneasy. I just can't help watching Rock and Rod (not gay, those names, eh?) make a fool of her on the screen without thinking of her husbands beating on her and stealing from her and making a fool of her in life.

Art imitating life? Or life - in the persons of those husbands - learning what art told it it was supposed to do?Sometimes I wonder if Doris herself, walking alone through the rooms of her house in Carmel with only her pets for company, wonders that, too.

Rubes

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 Screen^TM.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.

Cat-faced Eagle

Jim Fallows posted this, with the comment

"...owls are cats that happen to have wings. And thanks to various Chinese friends for the reminder that the Chinese word for owl, maotouying, is written 猫头鹰. Which character-by-character is "cat head eagle," or more vividly "cat-faced eagle." Long before slo-mo they got the point.

And that it's a good thing they are not much bigger than their real size."

Ummm. Yep. That'd make the whole "you humans REALLY need to get up earlier and put the fucking cat food in the fucking bowl" issue a lot more fraught.

Anyway, it's a cool video.

Passover!

Because you know it when you feel it......Chag Sameach Pesach, Yo!

The Ugly 'Merkin

It's late, I'm still at work, and I really need to get food, family, and sleep not neccessarily in that order, but before I logged out at work I was perusing the blogsphere and found this;

“The film is set in the 50s, I couldn’t have just had a landing strip! I had to grow the hair down there. But because of years of waxing, as all of us girls know, it doesn’t come back quite the way it used to. They even made me a merkin – a wig – because they were so concerned that I might not be able to grow enough.”

Dear.
God.

There are times when I am apalled at the horror that is mankind. War, murder, rape, genocide, syrupy coffee drinks, Uggs. And there are moments when I am stopped, mute, overwhelmed by the exuberant beauty that is the world and everything in it; birdsong, the unthinking caress, thunderstorms, a sleeping cat, blueberry cheesecake.But...merkins?

I cannot honestly decide what to think.

Greetings, Programs

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.

Unsplit Ends

Took Little Miss out to dim sum this morning and then to her first real movie in a theatre.

Dim sum was good, as always; Wong's King doesn't disappoint.

But the pleasant surprise was that the movie didn't either.

I don't have much left in the way of expectations from the Disney factory. Outside of the Pixar shop, most of the horses trotted out of the Disney stable lately seem to have been the broken-down get of the old sire Walt. Given that the man has been dead for decades, it's not surprising that his progeny are starting to get more than a little, well, sickly looking. So I expected something that would be barely tolerable for a four-and-a-half-year-old.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The story was nothing surprising - you can't exactly break the mold with fairy tales, right? And the "spunky princess" and the "rogue with a heart of gold" are chestnuts off many a tree other than the one in the Disney backlot.But the animation was lovely; bright and cheery in the Disney style but still rich with detail. The main characters, stock company troupers that they were, were rendered with loving care, well-written, and nicely voiced. The supporting "actors" stole the show (as they often do) in the form of the stalwart guard-horse and Rapunzel's little tough-guy chameleon pal.

Even the Bad Guy, who in this case was a Bad Gal, was rendered with care and attention; she was a villainess, yes, but one with flair and relish, a very diva of demonesses.So all together it made a really delightful hour-and-a-half for a dad and daughter to spend as part of a midday Saturday.

I think what made all the difference in "Tangled" was the sense I got of a genuine love of its creators for the two cartoon leads and the world they inhabited. I've sat through some of the worst of the Disney dreck - a father sacrifices for his progeny, sigh... - but much of the recent stuff the outfit produced since losing the Great Helmsman in the middle Sixties wasn't just bad, it was really soulless. By-the-numbers commercial crap with the heart of an adding machine and the soul of a cash register. The people making it hadn't just forgotten how to make a good movie; they'd forgotten how to make any sort of art at all.To make something of worth, you have to care. Your caring might come from love, or hate, revenge, anger, or desire. But if you don't care about your creation it will show, and it did.

The people who made Disney's latest picture may have had one eye on the bottom line; commercial art has to pay for itself, after all. But the other eye was on the characters they brought to life on the screen, and that eye was full of love.

Why I Love Geology 2: 007

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.

Holy shit, Boots!

As someone who has 1) a preschooler who loves her some Dora the Explorer, and 2) been trying to figure out the rather bizarre trailers for this movie...
I completely endorse this message.

(h/t to Jezebel for the link to the video)

I no shit you, GI.

Coming this Saturday
The anime version of one of the most bizarro Japanese series I've ever encountered: "Cat Shit One", a.k.a. "Apocalypse Meow". I blogged about it back in May of last year.

Well, looks like the thing is finally airing - on YouTube. Go figger.But if the notion of mercenary bunnies whacking camel jihadis is your groove, go for it. War porn? Yep, but the very least, the animation looks terrific. And I love the idea that I was once a soft, fluffy, lethal little usagi - U.S.A. GI, get it?

Domo.

Your Kung Fu is not fattening.

Speaking of China, the kiddos were watching "Kung Fu Panda" again last night, and I was reminded that this:

may possibly be one of the classic bits of movie business right up there with Chaplin's Dance of the Bread Rolls, Groucho's mirror scene in "Duck Soup", and Debra Messing's delivery room scene in "The Women" remake.

Nothing serious about it. Enjoy.

(Although, having stumbled across the 2008 "The Women" I should really do a post about it and the original, which is perhaps one of the most delightfully awful Thirties movies of all time. Come to think of it, I will. But that's for later...)

Kamisori Stanzō

And speaking of General McChrystal...Since the man got the top job in Afghanistan, we've been slathered with accolades to his manly manliness and his warriorish intellectuality:

"...the ascetic workaholic seems to have modelled himself on a classical ideal of the warrior straight out of Herodotus or Thucydides. Eating once a day, it is said, and often sleeping little, he was noted during his time as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for running 12 miles a day, part of his rigorous fitness programme conducted while listening to audio books on his iPod."

"Mastermind the hunt for Al Qaeda in Iraq and plot stealth raids on Taliban strongholds in the Hindu Kush while getting just a few hours of sleep a night, exercising enough to exhaust a gym rat and eating one meal a day to avoid sluggishness. One meal. Who was it who said an army runs on its stomach?"

“He’s lanky, smart, tough, a sneaky stealth soldier,” said Maj. Gen. William Nash, a retired officer. “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.”

"The friendship (between McChrystal and GEN Petraeus) that ensued stands at the heart of the transformation of the U.S. Army in recent years, from the world's most fearsome conventional-warfare force to the world's most sophisticated counterinsurgency force."

An uncompromisingly innovative, ruthless and manly man among men? Terror of terrorists and brilliant warrior-ascetic. It took me a while, but I suddenly realized who GEN McChrystal really was.Hanzo the Razor.
I wonder if he had a bale of rice with a hole in it stashed somewhere in the ISAF HQ CONEX?

As my old first shirt would say; there's some good training.