SUPERMAN

SUCKS

Superman Returns (Grade: C-)

Though Warner Bros. handed him a production budget of over 200 million smackers, hit-or-miss director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil & X-Men) managed to make a cheap looking and dramatically lifeless addition to the Superman franchise. The acting is abysmal, with especially awful performances from Brandon Routh as the hunky but totally uncharasmatic hero, and Kate Bosworth in a brain-numbingly vapid incarnation of Lois Lane.

Kevin Spacey fares a bit better as the nefarious Kryptonite hoarder Lex Luther, but the only real scene stealer on hand is Parker Posey. She plays the kinky-haired Kitty Kowalski, Lex's secretly softhearted partner in crime. I wish I could say her performance justifies the price of admission. But it just ain't so.

Stay at home and watch the Spiderman movies or Tim Burton's Batman films instead.

REELING IN THE YEARS:

CHAPTER THREE EXCERPTS

THE HORROR, THE HORROR!

My partner Drew has been afraid of spiders since he was a little kid. One day at school, the story goes, he stumbled upon a Weekly Reader story about a woman who paid the ultimate price for never washing her hair. A family of spiders took refuge in her dirty doo, and ate her brains in return for free lodging.
Drew freaked out. Like an obsessive-compulsive who can’t go to sleep at night without checking the stove burners five times, he washed his hair several times a day. At bedtime he fashioned turbans out of blankets to ward off eight-legged scalp-hunters.
His mother, Bonnie, must have thought he was some beauty school refugee when she kissed him goodnight. She removed the blanket from his head, only to come back in the morning to find that he had reoutfitted his skull during the night.
Drew couldn’t deal with spiders, and he still turns into a scream queen if he sees one on the kitchen counter or, even worse, on the ceiling above our bed. For other kids, fear comes in the shape of a flesh-eating monster who just might come out of the closet for a midnight snack. But most of my childhood fears came from watching horror movies that I was way too young to be seeing in the first place.
I did have some defenses against these movies, mind you. I got so scared during a commercial for Jaws that I ran to the living room, where joined my family for a viewing of Animal House. So I liked to think that I knew my limits, that I was smart enough to flee when confronted with the stuff of nightmares.
This little theory first failed me during a TV broadcast of The Shining one night with my mother and my sister. Why my mother was letting us check into the Overlook Hotel is beyond me, but there I was, glued to the set. I was so petrified that I couldn’t even move when the blood poured out of the elevator, or when the ax-wielding Jack Nicholson character chased his son, Danny, into a snowy hedge maze.
On Friday nights ABC showed horror movies. I was only in second or third grade, but I stayed up and watched them. My parents never gave outright permission, but I’d sneak in to watch them with my sister and her sleepover pals.
The Shining was harrowing for me. Apart from the obvious things - like Jack Nicholson running around with an ax, or the deluge of blood cascading from elevators- nothing frightened me more than the twins. By “twins” I mean the two young girls dressed identically with bows in their hair. They first appear to Danny early on when he’s throwing darts in the recreation room at the hotel. He turns around and they’re standing there holding hands. It’s such an eerie image because their skin is pasty white. They look like they’ve been dug out of a Victorian wax museum. Their expressions are sour, with no hint of glee or childhood joy.
I hoped that this would be the last time I’d see them, but lo and behold Danny comes across these girls in the hallway. One time they toss him a ball, other times they just stand there and utter the dreaded words “Come play with us Danny. Forever, and ever, and ever.” Their voices are eerily harmonious, accentuated by the music. They’re very still, almost as if they’re dead and being held upright. Danny attempts to cover his eyes so he won’t have to see the girls, especially when he saw bloody carnage visions of the girls after they’d been axed to death by their father, who went crazy.
The girls are in pieces, in puddles of blood on the hallway floor. I could never shake this image. The movie itself teemed with horrible images, particularly Jack Nicholson chasing after Danny with an ax and trying to kill him in the hedge maze. These things disturbed me, but no where near as much as these girls. They had the power to appear wherever, whenever. There’s no way to determine when they’ll “arrive.” At the time I had the fear that these girls would appear to me when I least expected it. If they did, it would obviously be a bad sign – a signal of my impending death or something.
There was an event from my early childhood that instilled a lot of fear in me. It was an indicator that I spooked easily. I lived in my first house till I was five. When I was about five there was a kidnapping in my community. The police advised parents to advise their kids not to go with strangers or to walk alone. My father matter of factly broke the news to me one morning over breakfast. He told me not to trust or join anyone I didn’t know.
This little newsflash had major consequences for me. It clung to me till I was 13 or 14. When I was in bed at night I imagined someone would put a ladder up to the house and climb up to my bedroom window. They’d whisk me away. So no matter how careful I was in my day to day life, no matter how many times I avoided dark alleyways or walking in the woods alone, I could still be fetched by a kidnapper. Beyond being stolen I’m not sure if I was scared of anything else. I didn’t imagine myself being tortured. Just the concept of being “taken away” really frightened me. I sensed that I would never come back home if I were taken away. I wouldn’t necessarily die, but I’d never return to life as I knew it.

I’m going to shift to a TV movie called Don’t Go to Sleep. There was a link to this movie and my fear of being abducted from my own bedroom when I was supposedly safely sleeping. Nighttime became a time to stay awake for fear that something awful could happen at any second.
Regularly my sister’s friends slept over on weekend nights. At the time I was in second or third grade, so my sister was in middle school. She’d invite friends from her sports teams, or friends from the neighborhood. On one night she had Betsy Andersen over. She was a loud, tall athletic girl known for being boisterous and for consuming vast amounts of candy from the neighborhood Cumberland Farms.
Her parents let her see R-rated movies, something my sister and I didn’t have access to yet. We were limited to PG movies. Betsy lorded it above us that she’d seen Stripes. She was a firsthand witness to the naughtiness. Patty and I had seen movies like Animal House on TV, but those were edited and it would be awhile before we’d actually see the original version complete with boobs and glimpses of supple male asses in the fraternity house.
Betsy came over. My folks went to bed fairly early, and I was supposed to go to bed too. Once my parents went to bed all bets were off. And Patty and Betsy didn’t particularly care if I got scared to death.
I was in my pajamas. The movie du jour was Don’t Go To Sleep. It was a TV movie with Valerie Harper of Rhoda fame and Dennis Weaver and Ruth Gordon. I hadn’t seen Harold and Maude or Rosemary’s Baby yet, so I didn’t know that with Ruth I was in the presence of a goddess.
I remember being let out from school that day, and I really looked forward to the movie. Most of my friends said they wouldn’t be allowed to watch it. So I felt like bragging because I’d be watching a program that was off limits to everyone else. To my parents’ credit, I’d watched quite a few spooky movies that hadn’t done a number on me. I don’t think there was any reason for them to suspect that this particular movie would demolish me. And I was so stubborn and proud that I didn’t talk about my anxieties after I had seen the movie.

Don’t Go To Sleep is a spectacle of schlock about a family that suffers big time in the wake of a terrible tragedy. They lose their teenage daughter in a car accident, and we don’t find out the details of the accident till later.
They key event that we learn about at some point in this movie is that the family went on a road trip. The two youngest kids (boy and girl) are in the backseat, sitting on either side of their older sister. As a prank they tie up her shoelaces and tie her shoes together so she’s immobile. Everyone else vacates the car after the car crashes and starts burning. When the car explodes, the girl’s still in the car.
Ruth Gordon plays the grandmother who lives with the family. The dead girl comes back as a ghost starts killing off each member of her family. She wastes her father with an electrical device in the bathtub, and throws her brother off the roof so his head splits open like a Hermiston watermelon on the Fourth of July.
One member of the family, the younger sister, becomes something of a confidante to the ghost. She has a nice big bed and discovers that Ghosty lives underneath the bed, coming out for periodic visits to haunt her. The whole movie freaked me way out, but it wasn’t until the very end that I realized that I was truly traumatized.
After she kills the father, she goes after Valerie. The chase involves a pizza cutter and, of course, a car that won’t start for Valerie. But she eventually gets out. All of this happens. And at the very end most of the family members are dead. Valerie has experienced this major trauma but she goes home and gets in bed. In the very last scene of the movie she discovers that the murderess daughter ghost is in the room with her. There’s NOTHING this family can do to make amends for the tragedy. The ghosty girl looks pleased as punch.
There were some moments that were so scary that I had to leave the room. Betsy stayed in the room and watched all of this with no difficulty. I’d duck out to avoid the really scary scenes, and my sister joined me. All of this avoidance was useless because I still saw the final scene, which scared me more than everything else combined.
I didn’t have to mull over this movie for it to become scary for me. It immediately scared the hell out of me. I went up to my bedroom, wishing I could go sleep in my parent’s bed instead. Patty and Betsy slept downstairs, so I would be alone at my end of the hallway upstairs, except for the ghost who I was convinced now lived underneath my bed. I got into bed, wide awake with fear. I thought something would grab my foot or that I’d see a presence at the bottom of the bed. If I saw that I thought I’d just die right on the spot. I specifically pictured the bitch from the movie. It would be like being so scared that my hair would turn white, except I’d be too dead to notice.
I started to carry my fears into the daylight hours. If I were the last person to leave the house in the morning I’d hear chilling noises and leave the house extra early to escape a confrontation with someone or something from beyond. If I was home alone in the afternoon or evening, I’d watch TV and place a steak knife next to me on the couch.

REELING IN THE YEARS:

CHAPTER TWO EXCERPTS

Two weeks ago I posted a few passages from the first chapter of my memoir-in-progress. Each chapter touches on a major life experience and the movie (or movies) that influenced me at the time of those events. While the first chapter focused on a genuine cinema classic (The Wizard of Oz), chapter two moves us into true celluloid trash territory with a nostalgic look back at Smokey and the Bandit Part 3:

SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT PART 3

I never wanted to see Smokey and the Bandit Part 3. Thank Christ, I never had to.
My near collision with the car chase caper came in 1982, the year I turned eight and my parents took a two-week trip to England without my older sister, Patty, and me. Their vacation threatened to end my family as I knew it. I felt it in my bones. Their plane would take a nosedive into the icy Atlantic. Or, even worse, my folks would abandon us and become Princess Diana groupies. I got this notion from my mother, who slapped her paws on any magazine with big beaked Di on the cover.
“Don’t worry,” my mother assured me. “Papa will take care of you.”
My mother’s father was known as Tom in most circles. But to his three grandkids – my cousin, Jaimie, my sister and me– he was Papa, a boisterous, balding, blubbery kisser who reportedly excelled at golf.
If the Three Stooges ever needed an alternate, They could have called Papa. He often fell asleep while reading the newspaper, waking up with splotches of ink on his face. He messily gobbled down sandwiches, howling when, on more than one occasion, his teeth fillings connected with pieces of aluminum foil that he’d neglected to peel off his sandwich meat. If he spilled scalding coffee in your lap, he’d make it up to you by tossing a wet paper towel on your crotch and muttering so many apologies that you’d forgive him just to get him to shut up.
Papa, to quote Ralph Nadar, was unsafe at any speed. But his no holds barred affection – not to mention the way he spoiled us with cash handouts and neon green glow sticks on the Fourth of July – left us grandkids with no other inclination than to worship him like a cult leader. He laughed loudly, frequently, and infectiously, a walking anti-depressant.
Still, his bottomless enthusiasm for a dumb joke could be annoying. On one of his visits to Connecticut, when I was four, Papa saw me standing naked at the top of the stairs. For years to come he found ways to tell strangers that he caught me wearing my birthday suit.
Ever since my grandmother, Nana, died in 1979, Papa dwelled alone in his big brown house on Park Street in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Easthampton is a working-class town, a regular Hicksville compared to nearby Northampton, home of Smith College, New Age bookshops and infinitesimal lesbians.
Easthampton may have been Northampton’s ugly stepsister, but it had a carnivalesque charm all its own. Oddball businesses lined Main Street, like a combination bakery & laundromat and a dilapidated X-rated movie theater that played Kinky Ladies and other “art house” favorites.

Spring break arrived in April. As our parents fled the country, Papa picked up me and my sister Patty in Connecticut. Per usual, he wore plaid pants and an Izod golf shirt. “I planned a fun time for you two!” he said, rattling off activities with the urgency of an auctioneer. I guess he knew that if he spoke any slower Patty and I would figure out that his proposals were pretty shitty. There was not much fun to be had, after all, at my elderly Aunt Vicki’s house. More than a little bit demented, she wriggled like a lightening victim and pooped in a portable toilet. When it was time to leave her place, she’d slap me hard on the hand and say the words “Last tag!” with an unnerving cackle.
He had some rotten eggs up his sleeve, but Papa obviously hoped to cover up the blemishes and create the illusion that the time of our lives awaited Patty and me.
“We’ll go to Mountain Park,” he promised. “You can ride the kiddy coaster. I’ll even take you on the ski lifts and buy you cotton candy if you’re lucky.”
He scored some big points there, since I was too young to distinguish Mountain Park, a threadbare amusement center in Holyoke, Mass., from Disneyland.
Back at Papa’s big brown house, we’d have complete access to his freezer, which overflowed with pints of Haagan Dazs. And we could raid his moldy refrigerator, where pop cans, not broccoli, inhabited the vegetable crisper.
The candy drawer was the kitchen’s next best feature. Located next to the oven where Papa once left a piece of leathery kielbasa for a whole year (he didn’t cook much) this drawer sheltered M&Ms and shrink-wrapped party packs of king sized candy bars.
Sugar binges at Papa’s led to lots of teeth fillings and humiliating jabs from my dentist (“Do you brush your teeth with Tootsie Pops?”) But the looming threat of preadolescent dentures never thwarted my candy cravings. I’d gum my mother’s desiccated pork chops if need be.
Patty and I said goodbye to my parents, hopped into the backseat of Papa’s sedan and resigned ourselves to two weeks’ exile in Easthampton. I calmed my nerves by letting a simple, reassuring fact sink into my brain: If things got really bad, I could always eat my way into a sugar coma.
Papa seemed to think that I, being young and apprehensive, needed extra incentives. Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a cap, he gave a bright-eyed smile, chuckled and told me that, one lucky afternoon, he would take me to the Hampshire Mall movie theater to see Smokey and the Bandit Part 3.
Even at nine– and even though I hadn’t seen the first two installments in the Bandit franchise - I recognized this upcoming cultural outing as bad news. My parents had already introduced me to vintage comedies like Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Peter Sellers’ A Shot in the Dark, and I really loved them. No spoof starring Burt Reynolds and a dead fish strapped to the top of a car could possibly compare.
Mind you, it was a good ten years before I feasted my eyes on Mr. Reynolds’ famous nude spread for Cosmopolitan magazine. Maybe I would have been more revved up to see the movie if I had a mental picture of Burt’s strangely alluring, hair-upholstered body.
I would have put the grueling melodrama of Sophie’s Choice on top of old Smokey any day. But Papa had been planning this surprise for a long time, and he counted on me to shit my pants when I heard it. So I pretended to be excited, figuring that, depressing as it sounds, two hours of tedium might be the high point in a highly unpromising Spring Break.

Even though I managed to dodge the Smokey and the Bandit bullet during the first week of the visit, Spring Break started off with a definite thud. Problem #1: There was nothing to do. Jaimie, an older cousin who doubled as a beguiling cabaret act, was stuck in school, so we had to stick it out until the weekend to see her.
Problem #2: Oldsters abounded. Papa deposited us with one of our elderly, sofa-bound relatives while he went to work. Aunt Gen sat in a recliner watching painting instruction shows on PBS. Her deviled egg-filled refrigerator and her decorative trays of stale licorice hardly piqued our interest.
Our jolly and generous Uncle Frank, a recovering alcoholic who leafed through issues of Playboy when he took us “shopping,” fed us kielbasa and queasily aromatic turnip casseroles. At least my Aunt Antone’s house was an amusement park. She lived upstairs from the funeral parlor she owned and operated. We’d sneak downstairs when she drifted into a nap, climbing into the latest models in caskets. With equal parts hope and fear, we even thought we’d stumble upon an embalming procedure.
Problem #3: Papa, a reliable source for cheap thrills whenever we visited him on the weekends, was not his usual charming self. Instead of rollicking with us when he got home from work, he poured himself a drink and stared blankly at his TV/radio console while Patty and I prowled for hard old sticks of Juicy Fruit in our dead grandmother’s purse collection. We also splashed on designer perfumes of yesteryear, pungent chemical weaponry that no bath or shower could neutralize.
That brings us to Patty’s big spring breakdown. One night Papa left us in the car while he fetched some clothes from the drycleaner. She started crying the moment he walked away, comparing Poppa to the wicked guardian aunts in James and the Giant Peach.
I was catatonically bored, not emotionally demolished like Sis. “The visit is almost half over,” I said, some Boy Scout trying to score a merit badge in the art of cheering people up. “And we get to see Jaimie soon. I think.”
You see Jaimie – our raven haired, comedienne cousin – was the key to our freedom. She always showed us a good time, whether parading around half-naked to K-TEL compilations or shoving us down grassy hilltops in games of King of the Mountain.
Except for the time she gave me a goose egg by hurling a black plastic hairbrush at my forehead, Jaimie was easily my favorite relative. From her vampire eyetooth to her long black hair, I always considered her more of a glamorous starlet than mere kin. The fact that she once attended school with Tatum O’Neill and trained with Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby made her even more of a dynamo in my eyes.
As ringleader of our romps at Papa’s house, Jaimie schooled Patty and me in the art of wildly inappropriate behavior. For a game called “The Blob,” she instructed us to draw hideous faces on paper bags and chase one each other around the house. Sometimes she’d grab a six pack of 7-UP bottles from the fridge and lure Patty and me to one of the upstairs bedrooms. We took turns lying on our backs with a towel wrapped around our necks, relaxing our throats to make way for the flood of cool, sweet fizz that we poured in each others’ mouths.
On hot summer days we gathered around the barbecue pit, waiting for charred hot dogs and hamburgers. Jaimie put her own spin on popular songs of the day. A Sheena Easton hit became: “My baby takes the morning train/He wears his underwear and then/When he gets home he takes them off/To find me waiting for him.”
Jaimie adored ham-fisted theatrics. Papa stored old toys on his back porch, and Jaimie dug through them until she found the most damaged doll or model car in the heap. As soon as she saw a neighbor strolling down the sidewalk, she’d run out and try to sell her wares for shamelessly high prices. No one forked over any cash, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm on her part.
Jaimie lived with her parents, Tom and Laurie, in nearby Williamsburg. But the arrangement was that Jaimie would stay with Patty and me and Poppa’s place once her school let out for Spring Break

Business with Papa was boring as usual the first night Jaimie stayed with us at his house. It wasn’t until 10 p.m., or so, that we took matters into our own hands. After Papa sent us to bed (Patty and Jaimie shared a bedroom, and I slept in one of two twin beds in Papa’s room), we met secretly in the upstairs hallway and decided to play The Blob. We each got a turn to decorate a paper grocery bag with hideous monster facial features, stick it on our heads, and chase down our victims.
Once we were sure that Papa and his nightcap were down for the count in the TV room, we let loose. Jaimie chased after us, her paper bag mask filled with bloody smears she made with Cray-Pas.
Apparently our ruckus was a bit loud. Papa yelled “Get to bed!” from the bottom of the stairwell. To his credit, he said this several times before he finally bounded up the stairs to tell us to shut up in person.
By the time he got upstairs, Jaimie, Patty and I had sprinted back to bed to feign sleeping. For some reason Papa bypassed Jaimie and Patty’s room and made a beeline for me.
“I told you to get to bed!” he bellowed in my face. The rest blurred together in a muck of spit and screaming, but I’ll never forget his concluding line: “I’m not taking you to see Smokey anymore. Nope, no Smokey for you!”
I hated Jaimie and Patty for escaping this tongue lashing, and I hated myself for incurring his wrath. I must have done something really wrong to make my generally peaceable grandfather mad, I figured. I couldn’t believe I felt so bad about not getting to see a movie that I didn’t want to see.
I had only seen Papa snap once before. It was a hot summer day when I was six or seven. When my family pulled into the driveway, Poppa greeted me with a wet kiss and handed me a white envelope.
I ripped open the gift to discover a greeting card and ten smackers. It wasn’t even my birthday – it was just one of Papa’s spontaneous, generous gestures.
Jaimie and Patty had already kicked into playground mode, starting off with a round of King of the Hill that would inevitably segue into a game of indoor hide and seek.
So I darted off to play, clutching the booty in my hand. About a half hour later, the fun and games hit a brick wall. It turned out that, in my hastiness, I had dropped the ten dollar bill in the driveway, and that an unusually vigilant Papa had discovered my sloppy error. Waving the evidence above his scantily-haired head, he tracked me down in the yard, his face flushed red as borscht.
“I’m taking it back!” he roared. “If you can’t hold onto money you don’t get to keep it. I’m taking it back!” Whenever flummoxed, Papa tended to repeat himself with brain-numbing persistence. He didn’t hit me, but he looked like he might. And he wasn’t kidding about taking the money back. Even at the height of his fury I just presumed he’d go soft and give me the money after all. But he just left me in the driveway, startled and empty handed, as he stormed into the house.
The Smokey and the Bandit episode and $10 fiasco made more sense to me later on, after Papa's sudden death from a heart attack in 1986. I learned, mostly from my mother, that the grandfather I had idealized – the man who hugged my fiercely and let me stuff my face with sugar at Mountain Park – was actually quite a brute at times.
When she was growing up, my mother woke up many nights hear him screaming at my grandmother at the top of his lungs. He’d come home late from a day of golfing and drinking, out-of-his-skin with anger at any suggestion that he wasn’t a good family man. My mother has trouble sleeping to this day, and she attributes this problem to the nights she spent sitting at the top of the stairs, pleading with her parents to stop brawling.
So yeah, as an eight-year-old kid I felt responsible for screwing up Papa's plan to take me to see Smokey. But at least now I know it wasn't my fault. And, at the very least, I got out of seeing a bad movie.

WHISTLER CONFIDENTIAL

Operation Whistler was a success for Drew, Liza and me despite a harrowing white water rafting trip with jerkoff tour guide who flipped us into a lake of 39 degree water.

Some highlights of the trip:

1. My up-close-and-personal photo shoot with a black bear cub.

2. Liza's sighting of a young woman's shaved cooch in the changing room for the rafting trip.

3. Taking a series of ski lifts up Blackcombe Mountain, affording us dizzying and dazzling views of the region.

4. Tasty feasts of sushi, Mongolian stir-fry concoctions and swell pub grub.

5. A pitstop in Vancouver on the way home, culminating in a cupcake feeding frenzy on a park bench near the beauteous English Bay.

6. Imitating Sissy Spacek's "Dirty Gertie" laugh attack from 3 Women.

NORTHERN XXXPOSURE

From June 17 to June 25 I'm taking a vacation from ye olde blogging duties. My dear college pal Liza is visiting from Boston and joining Drew and me for a trek up to Whistler, British Columbia, and we may tack on a night of debauchery in Vancouver's gay-as-all-get-out West End neighborhood. I tried to make y'all jealous with a stellarly beautiful photo of Whistler, but this washed out vista of ski trails was the best image I could find.

THE BOOK I'M STILL READING

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

(The Dial Press, 25 bucks)

I'm really enjoying my first encounter with Jewish writer Allegra Goodman, a National Book Award finalist whose previous books include The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls. Her new novel Intuition is a rare bird that delivers intellectual stimulation and instant entertainment gratification - a page-turner with brains, in other words.

Most of the action unravels in a cancer research facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Under the thumbs of codirectors Sandy Glass and Marion Mendelssohn, the institute bumbles along in desperate need of funding until a postdoc researcher named Cliff discovers a way to curb cancer rates in lab mice. A favorable media blitz ensues, seeming to ensure a prosperous and distinguished future for Sandy, Marion and company. But a female research assistant discovers inconsitencies in Cliff's research, raising gynormous ethical questions that could topple the lab.

When I started the book I worried that I wouldn't be able to (or wouldn't care to) keep up with the scientific lingo. It's obvious that Goodman has done a ton of research, and she says in her acknowledgments that cancer researchers even allowed her to watch them at work. Her zippy writing makes the "science lesson" portions of the novel painless, and she does a brilliant job balancing the academic subject matter with depthy character development and funny, engaging descriptions of the characters' private lives. Goodman also deserves high marks for a fluid omniscient narration that frequently and artfully switches the point of view. In case I haven't made my point already, Intuition is a very solid achievement, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's up for major literary prizes at the end of the year.

COMING TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU ON JULY 7:

A Scanner Darkly
Grade: B-

Richard Linklater directed this uneven adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel, revisiting the rotoscoping technique he used in Waking Life to layer trippy animation on top of live action. The visuals are stunning, and the underlying critique of the war on drugs is intelligent and provocative. But from a dramatic standpoint the film is often inert, hampered by meandering dialogue and a flimsy premise about druggie friends who spy on each other to appease the government of California in the not-so-distant future. Keanu Reeves leads a solid cast that includes former burnouts Robert Downey, Jr. and Winona Ryder.

REELING IN THE YEARS:

CHAPTER ONE EXCERPTS

For quite awhile I've been cobbling together a memoir that's tentatively titled Reeling in the Years. The concept, in a nutshell, is to present significant events in my life (such as early childhood obsesssions, coming out of the closet, "wild and crazy" college adventures and coping with my mental illness) in relation to movies that have made a huge impact on me. I'm not necessarily focusing on the best films I've seen. Smoky and the Bandit Part 3 plays a pivotal role in one chapter, for instance, though my capacity for true film appreciation shines through when genuine winners like Nashville and Maurice make their way into my real-life bildungsroman.

I enjoyed a burst of productivity last summer and fall, but for the past six months my first draft has sat on the bottom of my desk drawer along with dead batteries and unread health insurance forms. In an effort to recharge the lifeless battery that this writing project has become, I'm going to periodically post excerpts from the memoir on my blog. This way I can refamiliarize myself with the material, (hopefully) get fired up again and maybe even fish some feedback from my loyal readership.

The book is more or less organized in chronological order, and starts off with an essay about my early childhood and my unbridled passion for that 1939 Technicolor extravaganza about a green bitch and her flying monkeys.

Here are a few passages from that chapter:

THE WIZARD OF OZ

Some boys play with trucks, and some boys play with action figures. When I was a kid, no toy gave me a bigger kick than my deluxe Wizard of Oz play set.
By the time I was five years old, I had seen the movie once or twice on TV. I don’t remember many of my first impressions of the film, but it obviously captivated me because I could hardly sleep the night before the broadcast.
In the summertime I made my mother read to me from Oz storybooks on the front porch, and I was the proud owner of a cheap board game that looked like an off-yellow Yellow Brick Road.
Then I encountered the Rolls Royce of Oz paraphernalia, and all bets were off. Mary Beth Romano – a neighbor who was a few years older than me – invited me over to play one afternoon. Her large bedroom was a den of kiddy privilege, complete with a canopy bed, dollhouses and highly coveted board games like Mousetrap and Operation. My parents never deprived me of toys, but I couldn’t help but feel neglected and covetous when I saw all her loot.
“Do you want to play Wizard of Oz?” Mary Beth asked me when our play session started to lag.
Of course I immediately perked up at this prospect. I figured we’d dive into some Wicked Witch and Cowardly Lion role-playing games, but Mary Beth clearly had something more elaborate when she opened her toy chest and dug out my new best friend.
It was a really ornate Wizard play set which included plastic-coated replicas of the Emerald City, Munchkinland and the Yellow Brick Road. Best of all it came with action figures. Everyone was represented: Glinda, the Wicked Witch, Dorothy, the Scarecrow etc.
I remember coveting this and wishing to Christ that I could have one too. In a turn of events that cemented my early childhood belief in God, the payoff to my prayers came later that day. I was in my family room and Mary Beth came over and she was holding something behind her back. Then she brought out the Wizard playland and offered it to me. For keeps, no less! It was an outrageous surprise that made me very happy.
Every night I couldn’t relax and go to sleep until all of my favorite Wizard characters had been tucked in alongside me. I took the play set all over the house and the yard because I liked experiencing OZ in different places. It was a treat. As much as I loved that thing I have no idea where it is today. It must have been tossed out or maybe it was sold in a tag sale.

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My biggest period of Oz intensity was between the ages of 7 and 10. When I was in first or second grade I looked forward to the broadcast for weeks. When the final week arrived a countdown sounded off in my head. I hated taking baths every other night, so I counted down my remaining baths like a prisoner counts the days by drawing lines on his jail cell wall. When I was down to one or zero baths that meant the movie was near.
When the show was on I felt catapulted into a different world. What’s funny is that, as much as I loved the movie and as much as I thought about it, I was never a huge fan of the musical numbers. I liked “Over the Rainbow,” but it didn’t melt my knees or anything. The songs by the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion kind of bored me. The worst part is when they’re waiting to see the wizard and the lion sings “If I Were the King of the Forest.” I didn’t like anything about that one.
So there were whole chunks of the movie that I wasn’t wild about, but I adored the sheer inventiveness of it and the craziness and the brightness of the colors and the gnarliness of the trees that throw the apples at Dorothy and the Scarecrow. All of it was so exciting that I didn’t care that there were aspects I didn’t like. I think it’s a testament to how well I liked the story.

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I felt like I identified with Dorothy. Her sidekicks seemed very gay, especially the Tin Man. I don’t know if the actors actually were gay, but I remember not feeling threatened by them. This was refreshing because the people in my life that I felt threatened by were mostly men.
My wicked witch, if I had to name one, was Paul Thompson. The Thompsons lived at the top of Olive Lane, which was a street near Hany Lane where I grew up. Mrs. Thompson was lovely, and she was good friends with my mom. There were four or five sons, and they were all older than me by at least four years. There was no one my age, but I got swept up in some of the Thompson antics nonetheless. They were rough-housers, and according to my father the eldest kid, Chris, placed me on his shoulders one time and rode down the steep hill on his skateboard. Any car or any slip wouldn’t have probably been the end of both of us.
We often congregated on Olive Lane. The Thompsons lived on a cul-de-sac, where all the kids would play. I was only four or five and in a way I was a young kid playing out of his league, dipping my toe into the older kids’ lake. Some horribly awkward things happened thanks to the tyrannical reign of Mr. Thompson. One time I literally shit my pants because I was so afraid of him. He was so stern and gruff. I was afraid to go inside and ask to use their bathroom. I tried to hold it but I couldn’t. I remember crying hysterically. Someone walked me back to my house where I cleaned up and tried to shake off the humiliation.
My worst collision with Mr. Thompson happened on time when I was playing in their yard. They had a lamp post and somehow I was hanging on it or leaning on it, and it broke.
He came out and completely lit in to me. He yelled as loud as he could, with no recognition that I was just a kid. It didn’t haunt me at the time, but I am so mad when I look back on it. That no one stopped him from being such an asshole.
He was the wicked witch because if I saw him driving down the road or if I saw him walking it created a chill in me. There was always an awkwardness later on because my parents continued to socialize with him. He’d be at Christmas parties and weddings. I had no desire or inclination to be polite to him, even 25 years later. He was probably the first person I knew that, had something horrible happened to him, I might have been happy. Had he been hit by a bulldozer I might have celebrated or tried to make it a Federal holiday.
That’s what it felt like to have my own wicked witch. I could really relate to Dorothy as she battled Elmira Gultch and the Wicked Witch.

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Recently my partner Drew and developed a strong fondness for Judy Garland. I was at the library one day and they had Judy Garland Show DVD on the shelf. It was a collection of CBS broadcasts from 1963-1964.
I didn’t even know she ever had a TV show. I of course knew her from Wizard, and I had seen Meet Me in St. Louis, I had seen A Star is Born, and I was aware that she had been in a bunch of movies with Mickey Rooney back in the late 1930s-early 1940s.
I also knew that she had died in 1969, around the same time as the Stonewall rebellion. I believe that people were gathered at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village to mourn her death, and that’s when the riots started. The police intended to arrest them and they refused to budge.
Drew and I started watching the show. Part of the kick was the guest list: Ethel Merman came out looking like a drag queen. A very young Barbra Streisand appeared in one episode and sang “Get Happy” with Judy. There was a really big variety of guests. I immediately found myself fascinated with Judy. Mind you, she was the center of attention, the showpiece. What fascinated me wasn’t so much her showmanship, though she had an amazing ability to belt out just about anything from the encyclopedia of American song.
What really interested me was her transparent vulnerability. As everybody knows she was drunk or affected by pills a lot of the time. She often stuttered when she talked with guests. She was slow to respond to certain comments. She also seemed really nervous. She didn’t make eye contact with the camera for very long, preferring instead to talk to her guests in profile.
Judy seemed very human to me. I later learned by watching the Judy Davis TV movie about Judy that American audiences in the early 60s didn’t like Judy very much. Although the show got great reviews, she made people nervous. People didn’t like having her in their home.
The more I watched the more I became enamored with her showmanship- even though I’m not a huge fan of American standards. So Drew and I developed this interest in her and we went on a Judy Garland spree after that. We rented the Judy Davis movie which was quite sensational. It implied that Judy was drug addicted and miserable and suicidal 100% of the time. I don’t deny that she was these things at various times, but the movie failed to convey the joy that’s very apparent on her face on the show. She was a lifelong pill addict, which must have been miserable.
But there had to have been a happy side to her personal life too.

TRIPLE LUTZ

Here's a trio of recent film reviews. The Puffy Chair is in very limited release, so it might be awhile before you can actually sit in it. As for Drawing Restraint 9, director/star/megalomaniac Matthew Barney swears that he'll never release his "opus" on DVD, so get thee to the movie theater if you want to embark on this warped cinematic odyssey. Methinks District B13 is playing all over creation.

The Puffy Chair
Grade: B+

This indie road movie gets off to a bumpy start but soon kicks into gear with funny and touching vignettes about romance and the humiliating restrictions of traveling on the cheap. Up-and-coming filmmakers Jay and Mark Duplass tell the deceptively simple story of a failed musician who hits the highway with his girlfriend and his brother, stopping along the way to pick up a La-Z-Boy recliner that he bought for his father through a grossly misleading eBay ad. Nominated for two 2006 Independent Spirit Awards.


Drawing Restraint 9
Grade: B-

Avant-garde poster child Matthew Barney shows an alarming lack of restraint in this overlong and pretentious follow-up to his famed Cremaster Cycle. Despite these near-fatal flaws, the film has considerable visual appeal thanks to odd and unforgettable images of pearl divers and bloody blubber. Alternately hypnotic and mind-numbing, the virtually dialogue-free story portrays a man and a woman (Barney and his real-life partner Björk) who board a Japanese whaling ship, have tea together and mysteriously morph into whales. Björk is stupendously photogenic as always, though her musical contributions to the soundtrack suffer from the same little girl preciousness that has plagued her recent albums.


District B13
Grade: B

This adrenaline rush from France delivers a few scenes that rival Run Lola Run and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for sheer action ecstasy, but the sublimely choreographed chase scenes and gunplay can’t make up for mediocre storytelling and one-dimensional characters. Set in Paris in 2010, the occasionally disjointed plot follows a hunky convict and a cop who team up to dismantle a gang and defuse a bomb in a walled-off ghetto known as District B13. Co-written by Luc Besson, the man who brought us the superior action flick The Professional.

I'D RATHER EAT GEFILTE FISH

No report on the new movie Keeping Up With the Steins is worth the cyberspace it's etched on, but I feel that I'm performing an important public service by warning y'all to steer clear of this cinematic abortion. At all costs. I saw this "comedy" with about ten other critics, and I didn't hear one laugh the whole time. Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs up, but then again they're the guys that thought Crash deserved to win Best Picture.

Keeping Up With the Steins
Grade: D-

This excruciating exercise in ethnic comedy desperately wants to be the Jewish version of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but it misfires on every imaginable level. Daryl Sabara (Spy Kids) plays a shy 13-year-old caught up in his wealthy parents’ scheme to throw him an extravagant bar mitzvah party at Dodger Stadium. Scott Marshall’s aimless direction makes ace comic actor Jeremy Piven (Entourage) look like an amateur as the kid’s father, and Daryl Hannah and Doris Roberts fare no better in their supporting roles.

SAVING THE PLANET

ONE CROSSWORD PUZZLE AT A TIME

Screw Superman and the X-Men! I mean, who needs genetically mutated freaks when we can see real life heroes in this summer’s bumper crop of good documentaries?

People are flocking to see Al Gore talk about imminent environmental catastrophes in An Inconvenient Truth. Last weekend, in fact, the film earned more money per screen than anything in the schlocky blockbuster brigade. I haven’t seen it yet, but my friend Meg invites you to her blog to read her reaction: http://willworkforearth.blogspot.com/2006/06/bars-of-gold-or-whole-planet-hmm.html

But I did catch a screening of an eco-friendly documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? Scroll down a wee bit and you’ll find my review.

Turning from earth warriors to geek squads, today I saw Wordplay, a terrific and suspenseful documentary about The New York Times crossword puzzle and its legions of addicted fans. Director Patrick Creadon gives a generous chunk of screen time to celebrity puzzle whizzes Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton and the Indigo Girls, but most of the attention goes to the quirky and frighteningly intelligent folks who make an annual pilgrimage to a high pressure national competition in Stamford, CT. I highly recommend it, especially if you liked Spellbound (the documentary about kids in the national spelling bee, not the Hitchcock movie) and Word Wars, a portrait of highly competitive Scrabble players.

Who Killed the Electric Car? (Grade: B+)

Martin Sheen narrates a documentary that will leave you feeling guilty every time you fuel up at the gas station. Director Chris Paine’s informal interviewing techniques sometimes yield annoying gab fests instead of cold hard facts. But his research findings leave us with no doubt that the U.S. government and big business have successfully - and nefariously - railroaded efforts to bring environmentally safe vehicles to the general population. Along with Al Gore’s somber environmental outlook in An Inconvenient Truth, Electric Car is the antithesis of escapism at the movies this summer.

PRAIRIE BOUND

Go ahead and call me Laura Ingalls Wilder, cuz I'm in a prairie state of mind these days. I've been listening to Neil Young's CD Prairie Wind, and I noticed that his recent concert film is coming out on DVD on June 13. I kept the prairie winds a' blowin' by scooping up the soundtrack to the new Robert Altman film A Prairie Home Companion, featuring performances by Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Garrison Keillor and other cast members. The movie hits theaters very soon, but if you can't wait to see it why not treat yourself to a juicy sneak peek with the DVD that accompanies the deluxe edition of the soundtrack. About 10 scenes from the film are on the disc, along with a few outtakes.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Grade: B+

Set in Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, Jonathan Demme’s intimate concert film makes you feel like you’re sitting in Neil Young’s living room and he’s playing especially for you. Backed by spectral songstress Emmylou Harris and other musicians, he starts off with songs from Prairie Wind – his latest album - and transitions to standbys like “Harvest Moon” and “Old Man.” The fact that Neil recently bounced back from a brain aneurysm makes the show all the more poignant. But if you’re not a diehard fan, you might find that the set list seems to stretch on forever.

A Prairie Home Companion
Grade: B+

This charming adaptation of Garrison Keillor’s legendary radio show is no Nashville or Short Cuts, but octogenarian director Robert Altman proves that he’s still in fine form. Still reeling from the announcement that their longstanding variety show is toast, a bunch of small-time musicians perform their final gig. Even trashy tabloid queen Lindsay Lohan manages to hold her own in a well-oiled ensemble that includes Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen and Keillor himself. But the real standouts are Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as a loopy pair of singing sisters.

COMING OF AGE QUEER STYLE

The Boys and the Bees by Joe Babcock (Carroll & Graf, $12.95)

I would have killed for a book like The Boys and the Bees when I was twelve.
The year was 1986. I was a regular on the honor roll, a right halfback on the school soccer team, a huge Madonna fan and - you guessed it - a total homo. I avoided detection by feigning eagerness at my friend Jennifer’s spin the bottle parties.
To my delight and occasional shame, I had a boyfriend on the sly. My neighbor Johnny Singer was a budding sexual misfit, too, and it didn’t take long for our play sessions to escalate into a naked romp we called “Capture the Prisoner.”
Johnny knew that I was gay and I knew that Johnny was gay, but we never said the word out loud. I had no one to talk to about my sexuality at home or at school, and in all my reading I never came across a book that broached the topic of queer kids.
The best praise I can give the new young adult novel The Boys and the Bees is that it’s exactly the kind of book that would have made me feel less alone and scared when I was twelve. It’s written by 26-year-old Minneapolis writer Joe Babcock, a Lambda Award-winner for his first novel The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers.
Narrated by a closeted sixth grade boy named Andy, The Boys and the Bees is a short, funny and generally realistic novel that’s ideal for any middle school-aged child questioning his or her sexuality. The book is also a great resource for parents who want to discuss sexual identity issues with kids in this age group.
The plot concerns a love triangle between three boys. Andy, an aspiring writer, attends a Catholic school with his best friend, James. Andy loves to fool around with James during sleepovers, but he keeps his distance from James at school for fear that the popular clique will think he’s gay. Mark, a handsome basketball player who may or may not be queer, completes the triangle.
The plot may lack ingenuity, but Babcock’s writing is lively and enjoyable. Best of all his prose is life-affirming, transmitting the powerful signal that being gay is nothing to be ashamed of.

BAD OMEN

If you're looking for a wicked and fun way to spend 666 (June 6, 2006), you'll have to look further than the new remake of The Omen - a horror film that wasn't all that great to begin with, if memory serves. Save for a few cheap scares and a rather impressively orchestrated beheading incident, there's nothing genuinely scary about the atmosphere, the obtuse symbolism or the convoluted plot. Julia Stiles, who to my mind is tone deaf and excruciatingly dull in all her movies, fits right in with the general smelliness of the whole endeavor. But it's painful to watch talented actors like Liev Schreiber, Michael Gambon, David Thewlis and Pete Postlethwaite drag their way through this swamp of shit. In a maneuever that is nothing short of miraculous, Mia Farrow somehow manages to rise above the muck and deliver a sinister and memorable performance as Damien's demonic nanny.