Drive

This past November, I found myself moving in with a friend without a job lined up. I wanted to take some time off to recenter myself and so spent the better part of the Holiday season living the hipster bum lifestyle, playing videogames and writing and watching movies. While I've always enjoyed films, I had been going through a spell where I mostly watched action movie schlock or so-bad-they're-good movies like the masterpieces by Neil Breen. At some point, though, after so much junk food, you start to crave a decent meal, and I began to add quality like Raging Bull, Mulholland Drive, and Hard Boiled to my diet. The world of cinema began to bloom inside my mind, as if I was reconnecting with a lost lover. I then made a point of beginning to whittle down my Netflix queue, in particular the movies I had been putting off for years because I never seemed to be in the right mood for them. Drive sat at the top of the list, and the viewing experience was so affecting that I almost couldn't get to sleep because I immediately wanted to talk to people about it. I also wanted to watch it again as soon as it was over because it was the rare film in which everything works in concert, like Pulp Fiction or The Big Lebowski.

The opening scene of the nameless driver (hereafter referred to as Driver) talking on the phone and then executing the getaway instantly grips you. Its rising and falling tension is expertly shot and edited, with the literal ticking clock of the watch being mirrored in the ending of the basketball game on the radio. Eventually it's made clear why he has the game on, timing the escape from the police so that they arrive at the arena as the crowd is pouring out. Since the music isn't the usual overly dramatic Hollywood crap, the tension arrives organically as the basic electronic beats rise and fall, often quieting down entirely as if following a sigh of relief. In terms of its style and the Los Angeles setting, Driver reminds me of Michael Mann's Collateral, which also features plenty of driving at night and mysterious characters up to no good. Mann's 80s aesthetic is a clear influence on Drive, from the soundtrack to the pink font for the title cards to the cold/precise color palette. Anyway, Ryan Gosling immediately establishes Driver as a meticulous person who says little and betrays no panic or fear during this whole sequence. When the title cards hit and we switch to 'Nightcall' and lingering shots of Driver going about the streets, you know this is his passion. As he himself puts it in response to Irene asking what he does for a living, “I drive.”

The movie's cinematography and overall aesthetic are both stunning. It has a precision in its angles and arrangement of characters and objects in scenes. There are shots that make use of Kubrickian one-point perspectives, such as when Driver is wandering through the grocery store aisles or when he enters Cook's strip club. Drive also has multiple helicopter shots of Los Angeles at night, which are used as moments of calm and reflection. Praise must also be given to the use of color and lighting in the movie. Several scenes reveal the emotions of the characters through the clothing they wear, favoring blues for cool/collected moments and reds/oranges to underline the energy, violence, or passion taking place. All of the driving scenes, even at night, use naturalistic lightning and colors, so that as Driver wanders through Los Angeles he's bathed in neon blues, red/oranges, and yellows. During the first daytime driving scene with Irene and her son, the golden sunshine mirrors the romantic happiness of the characters. These two elements come together in one of my favorite shots in the movie: after returning to Irene's apartment after the aforementioned sequence, they talk about how her son had a good time, a conversation suffused with meaningful glances and pauses. Driver is wearing a basic white shirt, with a white window frame behind him. Between them is a light blue wallpaper, suggesting the thawing of Driver's cold exterior and emotional distance/incompatibility with other humans. Irene, meanwhile, is lit with orange/red light from behind, suggesting her positive influence on him and/or her growing affection toward him.

The soundtrack is utterly essential to the success of the movie. It helps to establish the emotion of a scene, of course, but it also helps state the movie's themes. Even the opening song, 'Nightcall', has lyrics that relate to the story and characters. Just as music is crucial in Tarantino films, Drive makes similar use of it as an important component of the overall feel and atmosphere. Some of the short scenes of Driver, well, driving are hypnotic and stick in your head long after you see it because the synthwave music is so effective at matching the look of the film. Whenever I think about my favorite movies, certain scenes or sequences play out in their entirety—dialogue, music, cinematography, etc.—in my head without any specific attempt at recollection on my part. Wes Anderson films have their slow motion walks set to classic rock songs, Mulholland Drive has the dreamlike Spanish language performance of 'Crying' in the Club Silencio sequence, Aliens has the climactic queen alien vs. Power Loader fight...I could go on. Suffice it to say, Drive is no exception, with vivid memories of Driver's face in the rearview mirror as he prowls through the streets at night set to synthwave or electronic ambient music.


I appreciate how Drive avoids cliches whenever possible. When Standard has his first conversation with Driver, we immediately get another masterfully choreographed spike of tension because we are expecting him to find out about the affair and confront/attack Driver. Instead, he ends up accepting the help of Driver in trying to get himself out of debt and keep his family safe and unaware of his misdeeds. Furthermore, I love how the main protagonist, Driver, and main antagonist, Bernie, are parallel characters, in that the 'hero' is committing crimes and has a violent psychopath hidden inside, while the 'villain' is not an outright murdering thug. Bernie is shown as being legitimately excited about getting into stock car racing and subsequently sorrowful when he knows it'll never happen. When he kills Nino's thug, he does it in a violent, exaggerated way to vent his frustration, whereas when he slashes Shannon's arm/wrist, he comforts the dying man. You can tell he feels pity for Shannon earlier in the movie when he talks to Driver about him, mentioning how he's never had a lot of luck in life. In a strange parallel, Driver brutally kills several no-name thugs yet merely drowns Nino and stabs Bernie.

The violence in Drive is intentionally over the top and shocking. While director Nicholas Winding Refn may have his own reasons for using it, my feeling is that it calls attention to itself to shake up the complacent audience. We're so used to seeing people get merely shot or stabbed, often seen from a distance, and it has a desensitizing effect. Refn seems to intentionally linger on some violent acts and not others—indeed, the ending co-stabbing sequence happens so fast, the first time I saw the film I barely noticed that Driver had stabbed Bernie. When people are shot in the film, such as when Standard is killed, it's initially seen from a distance to give us a surprise moment because we were instead expecting something from the mysterious car that pulled into the parking lot moments before, not from the pawn shop. After the first gunshot, Standard stumbles to the ground in disbelief and the camera moves in to capture his reaction and the subsequent gunshots that kill him. In the motel when Blanche is killed, her gruesome death is emphasized to show how ruthless the people coming after them are. This entire sequence reminds me a lot of similar hotel scenes in No Country For Old Men, with the also meticulous Anton Chigurh dispatching criminals and having a cat-and-mouse shootout with Llewelyn Moss. As Driver checks his surroundings following the bloodbath to make sure he's safe, he recedes into the shadows of the bathroom with blood all over his face. We as the audience have come to see the other side of his personality for the first real time. The 'scorpion' emerges and he retreats into darkness where he belongs. There is a crucial earlier scene where someone he did a job with before approaches him at a diner and we get the first hint at the 'scorpion' he is underneath.

Despite not saying very much throughout the movie, Driver is one of the more magnetically compelling characters of modern cinema. Gosling does so much with his physical performance and mannerisms like tightening his fists or breathing deeply. We never learn Driver's name though between the New Jersey accent that pops up here and there and Shannon mentioning his arrival in Los Angeles a few years back, we get the sense he may have done some bad things back home and fled to Los Angeles. Between the scorpion jacket, toothpick, and the driving gloves there is a theatricality to his persona, and in general you get the sense he has a romanticized notion of the world. Working as a stunt driver in Hollywood, he perhaps sees his life as being like a movie, so that his violent murders are justified by the fact they're committed against “bad guys.” His scorpion jacket is a sort of armor or uniform that he wears mostly at night/while doing crimes or violent acts. We often see him from the back when he's wearing it, suggesting a duality of his nature. The non-'scorpion'/human side of Driver is shown as being awkward around other people. When he first helps Irene get home she offers him a glass of water and he says “okay”, not “yes, thank you” or “no, thank you”, as if he took it as a suggestion and not a question. He often smiles in response to people talking to him or about him, much like a child would, as if he's shy and not fully matured. Indeed, he has several important moments with Standard's son, Benicio, suggesting he relates to and understands him more than the adults. When Standard is assaulted by Cook's thugs, Driver immediately goes over to check on the son and walks right past Standard.

Driver's theme song in the movie, 'A Real Hero', is one of the movie's obvious themes: is he, or perhaps can he be, a real human being/a real hero? When, before stalking and killing Nino, he dons the mask he wore earlier in the film to be a stuntman stand-in for the hero of the movie, it isn't to hide his identity. Rather he seems to be trying to transform himself into a hero. Just as donning the scorpion jacket indicates something about his nature and what he's doing, this scene has him wearing something different to indicate a different context and intent. It's true that he drowns Nino but this is one of the least violent kills in the movie. Contrast this with the famous elevator scene, where he has a moment of fantasy, kissing Irene goodbye before we snap back to reality and the dark side of his character, the 'scorpion', is finally revealed to her. He viciously stomps and stomps the man sent to kill them, and we again see him from the back, the shot lingering on the scorpion jacket. She stands outside the elevator and looks horrified, seeing the other side of Driver for the first time. It's in this moment that we perhaps get the sense he tried to change his character by wearing the 'hero' mask and exacting revenge on Nino but inevitably the 'scorpion' reemerges and ruins his chance to be with Irene and Benecio. While setting up the final meeting with Bernie, Driver mentions the parable of the scorpion and the frog, perhaps acknowledging he knows he can't change his nature. When meeting with Bernie at the end, you get the sense again that they're parallel characters: Bernie is shown being meticulous in cleaning his razor blade, and also in murdering people in equally brutal ways to Driver. Earlier in the film they both mention having dirty hands, and like two scorpions they can't help but stab each other instead of just walking away from the situation like they could have if they chose to. It's left ambiguous in the end whether Driver survives or if we're just seeing another fantasy (like the kiss with Irene in the elevator). I like to think it's up to the audience to fill in their answer. If he was able to change, he survives and drives off to somewhere else in order to continue his heroic path. If he can never change, he dies as the 'scorpion' he always was deep down.


The title of the film can be taken in a few ways. For one, yes, it's a movie about a driver who drives. But it can also be taken in another meaning of the word, that of the psychological definition of an innate, biologically determined urge to attain a goal or satisfy a need. As a 'scorpion', is Driver “driven” to be violent and to help others commit crimes by his very nature? The final meaning of the title also relates to this idea, that the true “drive” of Driver is to see if he can be good, to be a real human being/a real hero. When he notices Irene's car broken down in the grocery store parking lot, he could just as easily ignore it and leave, yet his drive to be good compels him to walk over and help her. He even tries to give her the stolen money before he leaves town for good, and it's made clear throughout the film that money is not a motivating factor for him, simply a necessity. I also like to think the title has a dual identity, just as Driver does. More than any other motivation, Driver is driven to drive. Everything he does in life—getaway driver, stuntman driver, possible stock car racing driver—is centered around driving. His romantic scenes with Irene primarily take place in a car, and when she tells him the news about Standard being released from jail, they're suddenly at a stoplight, a metaphor for their budding affair/relationship coming to a halt. Most importantly the film has many scenes of Driver aimlessly driving around the city at night, as if he can't sleep and can't stop moving. So much of the movie is spent seeing him in motion, whether it's in a car or in a grocery store or in an elevator, that you wonder if he actually is capable of “stopping” in a metaphorical sense and settling down with Irene somewhere.

One of Drive's other central themes is the notion of fate. We see Driver's keychain a few times and it has a lucky rabbit's foot on it, suggesting he believes more in luck and that not everything is predetermined. Luck means there is a chance to change your fate. Bernie mentions that Shannon never had much luck in life, though in some sense Driver disputes this later when he tells Shannon that he “fucks everything up”, thus that Shannon's problems are the result of his actions and choices. Nowhere is this theme of inevitable fate vs. changing your luck more embodied than in Driver himself. You get the sense he starts out the movie accepting his status living a dual life as a 'human' during the day and a 'scorpion' at night. He seems resigned to his fate, yet in helping Irene and Standard you see him start to believe that he can change, that his luck can change, too. He isn't fated to always be a 'scorpion', and he might even be able to have a happy life by changing his path, going into a career as a stock car driver and possibly settling down with Irene and her son. The ending of the film might suggest he believes he has changed because his theme song plays again. Yet I believe that true change has to come from within, not because we want to change for other people, to placate their desires or to be what they believe we are on the surface. So as a whole I interpret Drive as saying that we can't change our fate, we only delude ourselves into thinking we can/have. Driver ends the movie after revealing the other side of himself to Irene and (assuming he survives Bernie's stab and the ending shots aren't a death dream) he subsequently leaves Los Angeles because he's lost everything (well, and because the police will be after him). He hasn't really purged the 'scorpion' from himself and become a real human being/a real hero, though he seems to think he has. You could even argue he's back to square one, in the same boat as he was when he arrived in Los Angeles, possibly fleeing something back home in the Jersey area. Who knows? Drive leaves the ending purposefully open and ambiguous, so your interpretation will differ from mine.

The brilliance of Drive is that it's both very stylistic and very substantive, too. Some early reviews and reactions to the film focused solely on the surface level, praising it for its seductive aesthetics but lamenting it was so busy with its style it had nothing to say. Obviously I disagree with these assessments. To me Drive is a film, like Pulp Fiction, that marries the artistic craft of filmmaking—action, direction, production design, narrative style, themes—with pure popcorn entertainment. Both films can be mistaken for style over substance, but this is due to people not engaging with the ideas and philosophy of the world and the characters. To me, Drive is that perfect ideal of a movie that can be as shallow or as deep as you want or need it to be.

30 For 30: Jurassic Park

I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 8, we consider what makes a truly great popcorn film, and how entertainment can be artful.

Dinosaurs have enjoyed periods of popularity since paleontology began, but at no point were they so ubiquitous as in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe this is a product of my own myopic view of the world, since I grew up during this time and was obsessed with dinosaurs from a very young age. But I don't think you could argue against the impact Jurassic Park had on a generation of moviegoers. It is as important a cultural touchstone as Star Wars and Jaws were for their time, and likely inspired many of those who grew up to pursue paleontology and other scientific fields. In another lifetime, I wouldn't be writing this; I'd be in Montana or Alberta on my hands and knees, cleaning away dust and dirt from fossils with a toothbrush.

In fact, I took a class in college called Jurassic Physics, and one of the weeks we focused on the scientific inaccuracies in Jurassic Park. It's funny that as a kid I was a little bothered by the movie's depiction of Velociraptors, since the film clearly patterned their creatures more after Deinonychus, but that was only the tip of the problems, as it turned out. Still, considering some of the liberties taken, Jurassic Park's point isn't to be completely accurate. Keep in mind, we can never really know how much it got right. Paleontology is, after all, a science of inductive reasoning because we can't concretely test any of the hypotheses without a time machine. The point, then, of Jurassic Park's science is the same as in any science fiction: that it serves the story in a way that is not only plausible, but also believable. I can't speak to how realistic the technology is in Star Trek but because of the way it's portrayed I never question it. The same goes for the T. Rex in Jurassic Park. The movie works so well as entertainment, science fiction or otherwise, that you don't even question the illogic of the T. Rex somehow sneaking into the building, without notice, during the ending fight with the two Velociraptors.

Ironically, this was a banner for a museum retrospective on the TV show Dinosaurs

Steven Spielberg gets away with this kind of thing a lot in his films but other than Internet nitpickers, who gives a shit? When movies are trying to be entertainment more than art, you need to have Chief Brody blow up the shark at the end of Jaws even if the ending in the original novel is far more plausible. After all, we are talking about an absurdly large shark that is smart/vengeful enough to not only attack their boat when they're drunk and singing, but to, against all instinct, throw itself up onto the deck of a boat that is already sinking. As a movie Jaws isn't going for gritty realism; it's a popcorn flick, not an expensive-five-course-meal-and-bottle-of-wine flick.


So I have to wonder why it is that I think a popcorn flick like Jurassic Park still holds up, even gets better with time, while other popcorn flicks from my youth have atrophied into guilty pleasures. Let's even keep this somewhat relevant by contrasting Jurassic Park with the film Independence Day, both of which Jeff Goldblum appears in. I used to love both movies when I was younger but I think Independence Day is just a dumb, dumb movie when I watch it with an adult's perspective. I'm not even talking about the scientific accuracy or anything like that. I simply mean that I still get lost in Jurassic Park's world and characters but I never believe anything about Independence Day.

To put it simply, I see Ian Malcolm when I watch Jurassic Park and I only see Jeff Goldblum playing himself when I watch Independence Day. It goes beyond writing or acting. It's something intangible, a quality that Spielberg manages to bring to even his most maudlin and poorly executed films, like The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Even if he seems to be doing a project for the money or to appeal to a wide audience, I feel like Spielberg cares about his movies and wants people to like them. He has a vision he wants to execute and succeeds at doing so. If some of his films are filled with one dimensional characters and don't have any interesting ideas that linger with you once they're over, you feel as though it was his intention to have those things but something got muddled along the way. Meanwhile, Independence Day tries to have characters with some kind of emotional arc and development, but it feels like the usual Hollywood hack crap. It tries to have something to say, but does so in the most clumsy, ham fisted ways—consider the over-the-top speech given by Bill Pullman at the end, or the groaningly obvious scene where Israeli and Iraqi pilots join forces.

This one's for the ladies...

I think the reason Jurassic Park continues to grow on me is that it features so many interesting ideas and messages without having to force feed information or opinions to the audience. You could argue that some of its messages—technology is bad! Man shouldn't try to play God!—are overly obvious, but that's not really the film trying to say that to the audience. It's the characters arguing about these ideas with each other. What the movie does present to the audience is all the good and bad things that can happen and lets the viewer think about them afterward. Sure, genetic engineering dinosaurs is portrayed as a foolhardy use of science, but the movie isn't saying that all genetic engineering is bad. Ian Malcolm makes this point during the dinner argument scene in response to John Hammond suggesting he wouldn't have a problem with using genetic engineering to create a flock of endangered condors. Malcolm responds by arguing that Man playing God to correct the mistakes of Man is one thing; Man playing God to correct the mistakes of God is quite another.


Ultimately, though, you're left to decide for yourself. Even something as simple as the villain of the movie isn't as cut and dried as it seems. I mean, yes, the dinosaurs do kill people, but isn't this due to the hubris of Man to re-create them and try to control them in the first place? Isn't this also due to the greed of Man, or anyone one man, who doomed his employers for money from an even-less-ethical rival company? Meanwhile, Spielberg wisely avoids making the dinosaurs into vengeful killers. What I mean is, the dinosaurs may seem to be the villains of the film when you're a kid, but really, it's the humans who play the good and evil roles. Yes, the T. Rex and Velociraptors come after our heroes, but this isn't portrayed as being their sole intent. At one point our hidden heroes are witness to the T. Rex chasing down and eating other dinosaurs, giving it the believability of a carnivorous animal instead of just a movie monster out to get the main characters. Were Jurassic Park handled by the people behind Independence Day, the T. Rex would have somehow noticed our heroes and came after them instead.



Mostly, though, I think Jurassic Park continues to mean something to me because it demonstrates that, just as you can do artful things in an entertaining way, you can do entertaining things in an artful way. Spielberg manages to give us a sense of awe at the majesty of nature throughout the film, whether it's the first reveal of the dinosaurs—to which even the cynical Ian Malcolm reacts like a stunned child on Christmas morning—or the way the sheer enormity and dominating force of the T. Rex turns cars into something akin to a chew toy for a dog. Perhaps more important is Spielberg's artful way with characters. Consider the way Dr. Grant gradually warms up to the two kids throughout the movie—we are shown that he becomes attached to them, and by implication more comfortable with the idea of having children of his own, without there needing to be a scene where Ellie looks at him and says “so I guess you're ready to have kids now!” Consider, too, the way the movie bucks the Hollywood trend and has kids in it that aren't annoying and worthless; just as the film is empowering to women via Ellie's character, it's empowering to children, too. As much as I love Aliens, it bothers me a little bit that Newt is portrayed as this little girl who survived on her own without weapons but then turns into a kind of damsel-in-distress as soon as adults are on the scene. In Jurassic Park, not only are Lex and Tim able to escape the Velociraptors on their own, but Lex is established as a “hacker” whose computer skills prove just as useful as any of the adult men from the earlier parts of the film.

Too bad he doesn't have a lightbulb in his mouth, that'd make for a great Uncle Fester impression

With movies like Jurassic Park and Back To The Future, you don't need me to tell you how good they are. Everyone has seen them and already knows. The interesting thing to note is that they aren't just dumb popcorn flicks. There's things to consider and talk about afterward, ideas and ethics to debate. This is why modern popcorn films like Transformers and older ones like Independence Day leave such a little impression on you once they're done. They're all surface and flash with no heart or brains; any thinking to be done is done for you or ignored entirely. Jurassic Park may at first glance seem to be in line with these films; it was, after all, renowned for its then-cutting edge special effects. But so was Terminator 2, and neither film neglected their story or characters, whereas with most popcorn films, they would probably have less story and characters, and more action and special effects, if they could get away with it. As George Lucas once said, “a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” As George Lucas often demonstrated with the Star Wars prequels, a boring story with pretty special effects is a shitty thing. Here's hoping the people behind Jurassic World have learned this lesson.

30 For 30: Alien

I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 4, no one could hear me scream...because I was hiding in my room playing Sega Genesis instead.

 If you really wanted to define each art form, the most accurate way to do so is to reduce them down to their constituent parts, until you arrive at what it is each does best and is most essential to its nature as a medium. For example, there can be a visual component to music (concerts, music videos, album covers, etc), but it is obviously all about what you hear. For music to work best, as entertainment or art, it has to do so as an audio experience. Videogames couldn't exist without visual, and to a lesser extent audio, components but their interactivity is what sets them apart. It's what they do best and should focus on. BioShock could function as a film experience because of its sound design and the art direction, but it is most fully realized as a videogame because you are experiencing its world by interacting with it, determining (for the most part) the pace and what you're seeing.


With books and films, their strengths are diametrically opposed: books are the best at telling you something, films are the best at showing you something. Alien will always hold up as a classic film because it shows you very little for long periods of time, demonstrating that not showing isn't automatically boring, and that what is not being shown can be just as crucial as what is being shown. I don't even just mean the alien creature itself, I also mean the way the first 1/3 to 2/3's of the movie utilize a lot of long, slow moving shots with very little happening to continually build atmosphere and momentum until the last few scenes are constant anxiety and dread. Alien is like a haunted house set in a spaceship and it needs those periods of slowness, of not showing much at all, to work properly. Constant jump scares and action aren't worth much compared to how effective it can be to instead dole out these things at a slow pace and gradually increase their frequency as the film goes. The sequel does this at a more accelerated rate; Aliens rightfully gets the credit for being akin to a rollercoaster, but just calling Alien a haunted house is selling it a little short. The ending sequence of Ripley running through the ship's corridors, all flashing lights and disorienting smoke, is a brilliant little action sequence. I always seem to believe that she just might turn off that self destruct in time, too.

"Hmm, maybe if I yell at it, it'll go faster..." 

In addition to showing and not showing, lately when I rewatch Alien I'm struck by how little it tells you. Everyone who writes about this film focuses on the obvious effectiveness of how you only get a few good looks at the alien creature, and most of them at the very end. So what about all the unanswered questions, the things it never tells you? If you'll permit a digression, I think this is why my opinion of Prometheus soured so much over the days and weeks after watching it. The entire movie's premise is about answering certain questions, then it adds more questions, and then it never answers any of them. This frustrates a viewer because if all you're left with at the end is more questions than you had at the start of the film, then you may as well have been watching a nonsensical surrealist art film. Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou doesn't pretend to have a plot or any overt meaning yet this doesn't mean you can't take any meaning or motive from it. By contrast, Prometheus pretends to have a plot and some kind of meaning yet it ends up feeling like a series of things that happen to people because...I don't know. Anyway, Prometheus isn't supposed to be directly connected to the Alien films, despite the constant cross-references that only ended up confusing the shit out of everyone, so let's get back to what I was starting to say.


What Alien doesn't tell you is most of the things Prometheus seemingly promised to tell you. You're left to work out the grand details for yourself, and this is why Alien has always meant so much to me. It trusts in the intelligence of the viewer to think about its riddles as much or as little as they want to. Just as we didn't need to know that The Force in the Star Wars films came from midichlorians, we didn't need to know anything about the crashed ship and its contents in Alien. Whatever information is necessary for the rest of the movie we either pick up as we go—discovering the rest of the lifecycle of the alien creature, for instance—or it's left up to each viewer to fill in the blanks with whatever satisfied them. There are no wrong answers when you're answering questions without any answers.



Just for the fun of it, here are the things I ask myself when I watch Alien, the things I'm neither told nor shown that make me love the movie on a deep level such that I still find myself thinking about it from time to time. So, OK, how did the alien ship crash, and why? Why don't we see any other crew members? If an alien burst out of the pilot-looking dude in the chair-looking thing, where is it at now? What exactly is that weird blue laser field covering the eggs? Have these been lying dormant for awhile and somehow re-animate when they sense a living thing nearby? If the species who created the ship were advanced enough beyond human technology to be transporting the eggs as some sort of biological weapon or scientific research project, why didn't another of their ships reach the crashed ship first to recover/salvage it? Is this ship like their version of those various boats and airplanes that have seemingly disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again, on Earth? Jeez, I haven't even gotten to the other, far more important alien species in the movie and I already have enough questions to write an entire essay or fanfic!

"Hey mister, wanna buy some Girl Scout cookies?" 

One of the most unique plot aspects in Alien is that the characters spend no time wondering about the origins of the crashed ship or any questions similar to those I posed above. There isn't a scene where they discuss the religious implications of not one, but two, alien lifeforms. There isn't a scene where they go back to photograph the crashed ship and everything inside. Ultimately, they were on their way back home and that's what is most important to them—other than some debate about extra pay for setting down on a planet and doing something that isn't their job. This is the key to the movie's “space truckers” realism. If it were written by anyone else, all the characters would turn into wide eyed pseudo-scientists and philosophers, losing all their personality and perspective, spouting expository dialogue that does the thinking for the audience. In fact, Parker (played by Yaphet Kotto) seems like he's more surprised by Ash being a robot, as if the existence of advanced cyborgs is more outlandish to him than alien parasitic lifeforms. He seems like he doesn't give a shit about the alien as long as he's getting paid and going home. Until it kills his buddy, that is, at which point he only wants revenge.


When I originally sat down to write this piece, I wanted to work in so many different topics it got to be overwhelming. I intended to write something about Alien's far reaching influence on pop culture, about how it helped me discover the art of H.R. Giger, about how it works equally well as a standalone film as it does part of a series, about how the opening title sequence and music give me chills, about how it's one of the reasons I developed a taste for strong no-bullshit women, about how much it lives up to its title, etc. But since this 30 For 30 series is ostensibly about me and what these 30 things mean to me, or the things they do/have done for me, I thought I should end with two stories, both based around the chestburster scene.


The first time I watched Alien, I was probably 8 or 9, and I had already seen the sequel several times. Aliens was one of my favorite movies, largely because I also incessantly re-watched the Terminator films and it felt more action packed like those (not knowing anything about directors, it's interesting that I picked up on the similarity since I had no idea who James Cameron was). I always used to fastforward past the chestburster scene from Aliens because it freaked me out too much, and I'm not sure why. I had watched it the first time I saw the movie, so it's not like I didn't know what I was getting into on subsequent viewings.


At some point my parents suggested I watch the first movie, and they described most of it in great detail so I could tell if it'd scare me too much. I made it through OK until the chestburster scene, which my parents had built up as being one of the most shocking things they ever saw in a movie theater. I knew what a chestburster was because of Aliens, and I knew it was coming in Alien because my parents let out an “uh oh, here we go” after the scene when Kane wakes up just prior to dinner, yet something about it happening in a more realistic looking place was too much for me. Think of it like this: in Aliens it happens in front of futuristic Marines with guns, in a poorly lit alien nest. You almost kick yourself for not expecting it and for being so busy freaking out that it doesn't occur to you that they're just going to kill it within seconds. They're powerless to help the poor woman, but they aren't powerless to deal with the chestburster: it's brief remorse at a failed rescue, followed by the immediate satisfaction of a successful flamethrowin'. But in Alien it happens in front of regular people in a well-lit area, and the only weapon they have is a fork. Not only that, it happens to one of their crew members; indeed, a friend. It feels awful to be unable to help a random stranger but it is a much worse feeling to be unable to help a loved one. You have to wait to the very end of Alien for any kind of relief from the way this scene makes you feel, and that's only after everyone else but Ripley dies, too.



But I digress. The unbearable tension of the whole scene was probably so much worse because I knew what was going to happen but I hadn't seen it yet. To tie back into the earlier theme of this piece, seeing it was more important than being told about it. The anticipation was like that moment just before the rollercoaster starts its descent, and I felt equally terrified and sick to my stomach. So as Kane started to thrash about and scream, I couldn't take it anymore and ran upstairs to play a Sega Genesis hockey game my parents had rented for me along with Alien on VHS. For this reason I will always associate hockey with unbridled terror.

Pictured: unbridled terror

The second story is shorter but no less memorable. One of the very few times in my life I had done magic mushrooms, I ended up watching Alien on Bluray. By this point in my trip I was already coming down but the movie still seemed to take on another life. You might expect I'd have been scared out of my mind, but I became oddly fascinated with the idea of the lifecycle of the alien. I had never before considered that this was a species that, technically speaking, “hatched” twice: first from an egg, and then from a living being. In fact you could put it better by saying it's a species that hatches and later gets born, too. I began to go further with this idea. If these aliens existed in reality, would some scientists or TV shows study this species, as we do real violent and creepy animals on Earth? Suddenly the chestburster scene took on the feel of watching a nature documentary in which brutal animal-on-animal violence isn't edited out. I thought of nightvision footage of lions or hyenas, their face and fur wet with blood, or of orcas forcing an infant whale away from its mother only to cruelly drown it and not bother eating any of it. I thought of that parasite which crawls into a fish's mouth and replaces the tongue with itself, still helping the fish eat by behaving like a tongue but also feeding off its blood directly from the source. I could already hear a British accented voiceover speaking in grave, hushed tones about how from the moment it's born, the xenomorph alien can defend itself thanks to its acid blood, and about how the host it burst from is arguably as much its parent as the facehugger or even the queen that laid the egg the facehugger came from...

...and then I started laughing hysterically, because it struck me as strange that the little boy who ran scared from this same scene had grown into a man who was now watching it under the waning influence of a psychedelic and not remotely frightened. There's facing your fears, and then there's thinking about your fears to such a ridiculous extreme that you forget you were ever afraid in the first place.

Pictured: not unbridled terror

Glengarry Glen Ross

Renowned as much for its profuse and prolific profanity as the brilliant performances of its ensemble cast, Glengarry Glen Ross is one of those movies you see referenced and parodied everywhere to the point that watching the original is almost irrelevant. But I say 'almost' because the writing and acting is so consistently good that, like the similarly over referenced/parodied Pulp Fiction, if you can get past the fact you already know a lot of the things that happen and are said, you'll be delighted by one of the best movies ever made.

I think another good point of comparison for Glengarry Glen Ross is Full Metal Jacket, insofar as both films peak with their opening scenes. The boot camp sequence that opens Full Metal Jacket is definitely the best known and beloved part of that movie, and the drill sergeant played by R. Lee Ermey steals the movie even though he isn't around for the last 2/3 of it. Similarly, Alec Baldwin's legendary tirade against the loser real estate agents played by Ed Harris, Jack Lemmon, and Alan Arkin all but steals the entire film and makes the remaining hour and twenty minutes seem irrelevant because you feel like there's no way any of them can impress the sort of guy who swings literal brass balls at one point and liberally calls the men "fucking faggots."

It's always great to see a film where an older actor is peaking and a younger actor is just starting out, and Glengarry Glen Ross gives us this in the form of the above pictured characters played by Kevin Spacey and Jack Lemmon. You can see the seeds of outstanding future Spacey performances in Se7en and American Beauty in the uptight, deadpan office manager John Williamson.

And of course, Jack Lemmon's desperate older salesman character inspired recurring character Gil Guderson on The Simpsons. It's worth noting that Lemmon himself voiced a similar character in the episode where Marge starts the Pretzel Wagon business. You know, the one with the Asian mafia fighting Fat Tony's gang at the end--"But Marge, that little guy hasn't done anything yet. Look at him! He's gonna do something and you know it's gonna be good!" Anyway, if you've ever known someone who is pushy in an upbeat way and just won't take "no" for an answer, you'll delight in Shelley Levene's descent into madness and utter doom.

Jackie Brown

I remember reading somewhere that Quentin Tarantino saw Jackie Brown as his "old man" movie, and I've always wondered what he meant. It has far less violence and pop culture references than his normal  fare, but other than the lengthy run time, methodical pacing, and older actors/actresses, Jackie Brown has always struck me as a 'hang out' movie more than anything.

'Hang out' movies are, to me anyway, the sort of films where the the overall plot is subservient to getting interesting characters together to do and say interesting things. They may be criminals, drug addicts, murderers, losers, etc., yet there's something oddly compelling about them all the same. 

They're bad people in good ways, perhaps. 

These are people we wouldn't mind hanging out with, for certain.

I guess what I ultimately mean is, everything memorable about films like The Big Lebowski and Clerks is due to the characters and things they say/do than any kind of plot or big important movie-style commentaries on, I dunno, guilt, man's own inhumanity to man, capital punishment, and so on.

The best scenes in Jackie Brown are top flight 'hang out' movie material. Robert DeNiro and Bridget Fonda are my kind of people: they lounge around a beach house smoking pot watching TV, drinking in the early afternoon, rambling about their pasts, saying incisive things (paraphrasing Bridget Fonda on Samuel L. Jackson's character: 'He moves his lips when he reads, what does that tell you?') and randomly deciding to fuck.

Still, there's something naturalistic about every interaction in this movie, from the way the two ATF agents (one played in wonderful eccentric style by Michael Keaton, who at one point eats a steak wearing a black leather jacket, which is worth infinite points on any critical scale) working with Jackie have an awkward semi-argument about the color of a shopping bag, to the way you know Max is falling in love with Jackie by the way he simultaneously falls in love with the music of the Delfonics, to the look and sound of genuine empathy and disappointment when Samuel L. Jackson's character kills Robert DeNiro's character near the end.

I guess that's a spoiler, but if you're really upset about that, you've missed everything I just said. You could go read the Wikipedia entry for this movie and get the entire plot and it would still be a delight and a pleasure to watch based on the performances and writing. I just love all the little details in the locations and set designs, too. Pay particular attention to Jackie's apartment.

Like the best 'hang out' and cult films, Jackie Brown improves with every subsequent viewing as you surrender to the familiar flow of the pacing of scenes and the rhythm of the conversations, DeNiro and Fonda's a sort of stoned, pleasant apathy, Pam Grier and Samuel L. Jackson's a tense, hypnotic, oddly calm game of wits.

Alien

I feel like I must've written about Alien before, especially for the Halloween themed posts I used to do, but nope. Never the original anyway. Which is odd, because along with the Terminator series, it's probably my favorite film series. I even love and appreciate the flawed-or-downright-awful entries, like Alien: Resurrection, Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem and Terminator: Salvation.

On a side note, if odd numbered Star Trek films are always the bad ones, I think subtitled instead of numbered Alien and Terminator films are always the bad ones. This is why Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines is only half awesome and half awful, because it has a number and a subtitle. Hmm, wait, Terminator 2 had a subtitle, too. But I digress.

All I really want to do today, since so many others have covered this movie exhaustively in so many other reviews and essays of the film, is talk about how I think H.R. Giger's design for the adult alien creature is the most original in any medium, ever. Certainly Star Trek and Star Wars have some great ideas, even some that aren't humanoid. Yet Giger's alien, based heavily on his painting Necrom IV (above; which inspired director Ridley Scott to contact him in the first place), is so nightmarish and, well, alien looking, that even now, having seen the shit out of these creatures in well lit shots in other movies, the original Alien film has the power to transfix and terrify me. Even when I can frame-by-frame an HD version of it, it still isn't quite clear in enough of the frames to get a really good idea of just what the hell it is.

I would rant about how CGI ruined movies like this for me since for some reason my brain knows the monsters aren't "real" yet old, primitive practical effects in the first three Alien films still creep me out...even stuff like John Carpenter's The Thing is still creepy for this reason...but I'd just be ranting. You should still go check out some more of Giger's stuff, if only his published sketches/designs for the series and other movies he worked on.

Hobo With A Shotgun

There are some movies which transcend normal ratings of 'good' or 'bad' in the same way that, say, the sugary sweet pop music of bands like Hanson and 1910 Fruitgum Company transcend such metrics. In the case of something like Hobo With A Shotgun, I think it transcends any kind of critical scores simply because it quite literally is-what-it-is: a movie about a hobo with a shotgun. The premise alone is enough to make you want to watch it, and if you do, you know what you're getting into.

A movie made because someone won a trailer contest for Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse double-movie, Hobo With A Shotgun is an exploitation film through-and-through. I will give this movie genuine thinking man's/art film credit for the overly saturated Technicolor style and also for taking its sweet time to get the titular weapon into the titular character's hands, and all along both playing to and against type, as often bowing to cliches and tradition as it does upsetting them. There's a scene where the hobo wants to buy a lawnmower for $49.95 from a pawn shop, and we see a rack of shotguns on the wall behind him for the same price...but he doesn't end up buying either. Well, kind of.

This film's particular genius lies not in the dialogue, which in all fairness will offer a couple of in-joke gems for you and your friends who watch it with you ("Welcome to fuck town!" is my pick of the litter), but in how creative it is with its violence. At a certain point in films like Tokyo Gore Police and, I don't know, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the violence becomes so over the top as if to be almost ballet-esque. Hobo offers up some gems, such as a scene where one evil dude plays 'Disco Inferno' while his even-more-evil brother uses a flamethrower to immolate a schoolbus from the inside, children and all. Cleverly, this image wraps back around when (spoiler!) said evil child-murderer gets his (spoiler!) package shot off by the titular hobo and presumably bleeds to death in a phone booth, the school bus representative of death and/or hell as it appears from nowhere to take him away.

There's also a part near the end where a chick stabs a dude with the broken off bone sticking out of her arm...yeah.

All that said, my friend Richard, who suggested we watch it, admitted later if he was watching it alone he would've given up 1/3 of the way through. I don't really know what that says about him or this movie. I said earlier that 'good' or 'bad' don't apply, and I think that's true. Hobo With A Shotgun is certainly an entertaining movie, and I doubt that anything you'll see, outside of Tarantino or Rodriguez's Grindhouse contributions, ends as seemingly abruptly and borderline-carelessly as this film. Imagine if Terminator or Aliens ended right after the big evil baddie was finally offed, with no epilogue, and you've got the right idea.

But damn if it wasn't entertaining, at least to me. Richard may've fallen asleep off and on during it, but:

1) he was in the process of moving that weekend and we were both pretty tired

2) he and I are both creaking up on 30 and thus becoming old men who fall asleep at 11, even on Fridays

3) he didn't enjoy it much, as I just got done saying, so perhaps for some people sleep is preferable to watching Rutger Hauer get stabbed by ice skates (did I mention this film is a Canadian production? and has a brief appearance by Ricky from Trailer Park Boys as well as some obvious accents?) or chew on glass to make money from a sadistic cameraman who I assume is a satirical reference to the deplorable but-I-bet-at-least-one-person-you-know-has-seen-them Bumfights videos.

I want to close by saying that this movie is as transformative for Rutger Hauer as any of his more critically respected roles. I would never have known it was the guy from Blade Runner if I hadn't accidentally confused him with Dolph Lundgren for the first 40 minutes and looked up the movie on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn't crazy. No, I wasn't crazy, just confused.

Actually, that might be a a better way to end this, and a good way to sum up my reaction to the movie: I wasn't crazy about it, but I was certainly confused. I more than a few times laughed out loud at the sheer spectacle and absurdity of it all, never knowing where it was going to go next. At least it was an entertaining kind of confusion, like when you first see Commando and can't decide if it's the cheesiest 80s action flick ever or the greatest. Well, can't it be both?

Alien Resurrection

There's a period lasting from a couple days before Christmas to a week or so after New Year's Day during which I take a break from writing reviews and thinking about things with a critical lens. It's a time for me to “just have fun” and do whatever I want without attempting to prune some of my experiences and transform my reactions into reviews or articles. This year I took a little longer than usual to get back into the swing, but that's neither here nor there. What matters is that some thing—videogame, movie, album, book, etc.—eventually tickles my critical nerve and I am compelled to write again.

So here we are.

Alien Resurrection was generally regarded as the absolute nadir of the Alien franchise upon its 1997 release, supplanting Alien 3 as the worst entry in the series. Mind you, we had no idea that the Alien Vs. Predator franchise could make things even worser. Anyway, as more time has gone on, fans and critics alike have warmed up a bit to Alien 3. With the knowledge of its problems during seemingly every stage of its development, it's something of a miracle that the film is even halfway decent. I'd have to go back to it to form a more coherent opinion, but I do recall appreciating it more with the aforementioned knowledge about what they were originally going for, what they ended up going for, and how things were mishandled along the way.

With Resurrection, though, it's hard to say where things went wrong. Objectively speaking, the project looks like some kind of fanboy's wet dream: Joss Whedon wrote it! Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed it! Stars a fantastic cast of great character actors! The result? A confused mess that only intermittently satisfies. The two main reasons Resurrection failed are its the confusing tone and the way it fits into the larger Alien canon. Or shouldn't have fit into it, perhaps.

I saw Resurrection in theaters and while I enjoyed it, even my limited 13 year old critical faculties were enflamed by it. Those flaws and puzzled questions remain 14 years later and after more viewings. Why did the aliens try to hurt/kill Ripley early in the film and then suddenly capture her near the end? If they used a “blood sample” to clone Ripley, they would only have cloned her, since having an alien in you doesn't change your DNA. Also, I don't get why the scientist guy turned on them...it felt contrived, a way to echo Burke from Aliens and artificially provide a villain. Still, even if, at 13, I couldn't explain why I didn't like Resurrection as much as the other three films, I knew there was something bad and “off” about it.

What I couldn't explain is this: the tone of Resurrection is all over the place, leaving the viewer confused and mildly irritated. There were jokes and some light-hearted stuff in the other Alien movies, but the original was clearly a horror movie, the second was clearly an action film, and the third was, err, a combination of a prison film, a horror film, an action film, and an abortion commentary (well, that last one is just my opinion). But Resurrection is, what? Jeunet brings his keen visual eye and whimsical style, but it feels completely inappropriate for the Alien series. This movie is simultaneously the most light hearted of the quadrilogy and also the most dark and violent. We get scenes of Ripley saying funny lines and the wacky hijinks of Johner and Vriess, but we also get a scene where a dude is shot, starts to have a chestburster come out of him, is shot multiple times, beats the shit out of someone, and subsequently holds the other guy so that the chestburster explodes out of not only his chest but the other guy's head. And then they both get shot multiple times for good measure. Other times the movie tries to combine these two tones—the silly General character is saluting some dead soldiers when an alien bites the back of his skull, leading him to comically pick out and see a piece of his own brain. Hilarious!(?) This is the very same reason people hate the dinner/brain eating scene at the end of Hannibal. In both cases, you can't tell if it's played for a laugh or to be creepy. If it's supposed to be both at the same time, than most of the film should be this way instead of vacillating between the two extremes. Think Evil Dead II: it's violent and horror-y yet it's always kind of slapstick and funny, too. Alien Resurrection tries to be violent and horror-y, then it tries to be slapstick and funny, and then it tries to be everything at once.

Still, the thing that ruins Resurrection is that it was even made. It's one of the least essential sequels ever and no one was clamoring for more. For all its faults, Alien 3 wrapped up the series in a satisfying way, killing off both Ripley and the aliens while tying up other loose ends. But here comes Alien Resurrection with all of its plot contrivances in tow! It felt like an excuse to re-use that beloved character and those remarkably designed creatures, and I think it shows. Joss Whedon claimed years after the film's release that it wasn't a matter of not following the script, but that everything was executed poorly. I disagree; I think you could have done everything differently and it still wouldn't be any good. The very premise of the movie is lame and unimaginative, and they should have either done a prequel (which, hey presto, they are doing now) or gone with different characters. Of all the main Alien films, it has the least artistic cred and aspirations, instead coming off as crass and commercial.

Resurrection is indeed so crass that it picks up the subtle theme of motherhood running throughout the series and beats us over the head with it by having us witness the birth of an alien/human hybrid baby. Never mind any of the scientific improbabilities of how this happens or why the “baby” is fully grown when newborn. It's enough to hate this part of the movie forever that the alien/human hybrid baby is so poorly done, stupid looking, and unnecessary to the plot. I have to imagine it was added in to give the movie something “new” when it came to the alien creatures. Aliens introduced the Queen alien, while Alien 3 introduced an alien creature from a non-human host. But having some kind of bizarre sex scene with Ripley that results in the Queen giving birth to a badly designed hybrid? That is not a good addition to the Alien canon! I can't even enjoy its death because this scene is one of the worst in movie history. It's obnoxiously loud and pointlessly gory and we feel nothing for either it or Ripley. Within moments of its implausible-physics death, we get another hilarious scene with Johner and Vriess yelling “shit!” as their ship catches fire entering the Earth's atmosphere. Again, another bizarre tonal shift that doesn't work.

You'd be hard pressed to come up with a larger gulf of quality between this movie and what both Jeunet and Whedon went on to do. Jeunet's next film would be the amazing Amelie, while Whedon would go on to become one of nerdom's most beloved figures thanks to the ongoing Buffy series and Firefly. As for what I went on to do, I've spent the past 14 years wondering where the blame for the failure of Resurrection should go. Yet it occurs to me now that the project was doomed from the start. Sigourney Weaver and series producers David Giler and Walter Hill had no interest in it; Danny Boyle, Peter Jackson, and Bryan Singer all passed on directing it; Jeunet seems to have only done it for the money.

Resurrection feels like a product of the Hollywood system and its inertia. Someone did a calculation about how much money another Alien film would cost to make versus how much it would make, regardless of quality. Since this calculation came out in the positive, it was made. To put it another way, this is one of those cases of a studio caring too much, in all the wrong ways, about a film. While you can feel elements of the distinctive styles of Jeunet and Whedon in it, there isn't enough of either for the movie to be a success. More importantly, it all feels compromised and confused because they aren't good fits for the franchise.

To make a decent sequel to Alien 3, you would have to have scrapped everything about Resurrection—the script, the director, the main character, the tone. It may not be an awful movie, but it is an awful Alien movie.

The Holy Mountain

While I can't cite any specific studies, I do know it's widely acknowledged that the human mind always attempts to organize and structure our experiences, even when they seem completely obtuse and non-sensical. People are inherently wired to want to tell stories, or hear stories. When relating the series of events which led to a failed relationship, for instance, we generally do so in a linear, chronological way, each sub-story or event along the way leading to the next. This is why, I would argue, most of the highest grossing films of all time have such prototypical, strictly linear and traditionally structured narratives. Understand that narrative and story are not interchangeable terms, so while the Lord Of The Rings trilogy has an epic and relatively complex narrative, the actual story it's relating can be as happily reduced to archetypes as the Star Wars trilogy, itself famously influenced by George Lucas's study of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

However, entertainment, or art if you will, that seems to willfully buck any notions of accessible narrative, story, or meaning captures the imagination of everyone. Even if their reaction is to look at the surrealist and absurdist branch of movies, music, literature, and art and say “this is weird and pointless”, I think it still interests them on a subconscious level. By which I mean, they have a negative reaction to it, but it provokes such a strong reaction because their mind is attempting to piece things together or decode some meaning even while they consciously reject it. The common reaction to watching just the trailer for Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, judging by the YouTube comments seems to be “what the hell is this?” and/or “I bet they were on drugs” and/or “I want to watch this while on drugs.”

Yet there is more to this reaction, and more to the film itself, than just weird-for-the-sake-of-weird or, to paraphrase the Spacemen 3 album title, taking drugs to make movies to take drugs to. To the average viewer, most of David Lynch's films are impenetrable messes that tease some kind of logical, knowable story but obscure it via surreal narrative conceits. Even though I've watched Inland Empire a half dozen times and still can't quite say for sure I know what the plot is, I—and this is crucial—do believe there is some kind of simple story to uncover. It may sound like bragging, but if, as I try to, you spend enough time with willfully perverse or “difficult” entertainment (or, again, art, if you will), then you can more and more easily tell the difference between weird-for-the-sake-of-weird versus weird-but-with-something-to-say-that-couldn't-be-as-effectively-said-in-a-more-traditional-framework.

So, The Holy Mountain. This is an infamous cult film, and easily the most psychedelic movie I've ever seen. It is not psychedelic in the cliched 60s flower power sense, but in the sense of dreamlike, symbolic, spiritual, and philosophical motifs and story fragments. To put it another way, it's the difference between hallucinogenic drug use of the Sgt Pepper's/Summer Of Love sub-culture and the hallucinogenic drug use of Huxley's The Doors Of Perceptionand the avant-garde music/film/art scene of the late 50s/early 60s. So while you might go in expecting a seemingly random and arbitrary collection of hippies freaking out, doing drugs, and having sex, what you actually get is something like a scene wherein frogs and toads re-enact the Conquistadors coming to the New World and the systematic genocide that resulted. Or a scene where a group of people push piles of money into a fire in the middle of a table in some sort of weird, Buddhist-like acceptance ritual of leaving behind property and material goods. Or a scene where an old man with only the left half of a beard/mustache is breastfeeding a dude, but then the breasts turn into growling jaguars for some reason and...I don't know; I think it's supposed to be a dream sequence or some kind of projected distraction meant to keep the dude from ascending the titular mountain and...you know what, forget it.

This is definitely a movie that is impossible to explain or summarize in all but the most vague and lucid of terminology. It exemplifies all that is possible in the film medium, because it would not remotely be the same thing if translated to a novel or album or videogame. It defies categorization or traditional scored reviews because it simply is. Even if you don't do any drugs before, during, or after watching The Holy Mountain, there will be sequences that have you saying “is this really happening?” at least every 10 minutes. You may consciously reject it and say it's pretentious, inscrutable bullshit, but somewhere in the deepest recesses of your mind, Alejandro Jodorowsky is speaking to a part of you that not only wants to listen, but wants to understand. And I don't know about you, but I am much more excited by things I want to understand than by things I can too easily understand, are in fact, mundane. With an open mind and/or ready access to some of nature's finest psychedelic smoke-ables and eat-ables, The Holy Mountain may already be waiting for you, beckoning for your first steps up its strange facade. Just don't get distracted by angry jaguar tits.