Mmm Bop

Going through some content mill website yesterday I came across something like,

"This will make you feel really old! Mmm Bop by Hanson turned 20 today!" The story was accompanied by a picture of Hanson today, looking as rosy cheeked, cocksure and wholesome as ever.

Actually, seeing this didn't make me feel old. Feeling old happens when you start to find yourself surrounded by adults born when you were in high school. What it did do was remind me of what this awful fucking song meant to me when it took America by storm in 1997, and when it unfortunately re-entered my life on one fateful evening years later.

When I was in high school in the early 90s, the airwaves were dominated by heroin-fueled grunge rock. It had an edge to it, and it felt legitimate and real. It was great. My dad even started buying rock albums again. Then Cobain died in 1994, and it seemed like he took the music with him. It wasn't really his death that did it, but a sequence of events in the mid-90s followed on his suicide that largely ruined rock music forever. Pearl Jam took on Ticketmaster and lost, and then decided to pick up their toys and go home, which for them meant disappearing deep inside their own asses. Clinton de-regulated radio in 1996, killing independent FM stations nationally and giving rise to the monster that is Clear Channel overnight. Douchebag A/R guys who had been chomping at the bit for years to push manufactured commercial garbage again started filling our ears with crap like Ace of Bass.

And then came Hanson, to announce that it was all over, and that popular music (at least white pop music) was going to suck from now on. For months, you could not escape these saccharine-sweet Tulsa Aryan Jackson Five wannabes. I consider myself lucky to have survived 1997 with my sanity. Hanson's Operation Rolling Thunder-esque carpet bombing of the national musical consciousness paved the way for its wholesale surrender to the likes of Backstreet and N'Sync a few short years later.

None of that is why hearing Mmm Bop fills me with unutterable loathing to this day. There's a very personal reason for that.

In 1999, I went to Switzerland, my first ever trip abroad alone and my first trip to Europe. I was 22 years old, hopeful and expectant. When you come from a hick meth lab of a town whose sole claim to fame is what is alleged to be the world's tallest barber pole, you tend to put the Old World on a pedestal. For the first time in my life I felt like I was where I truly belonged: surrounded by cosmopolitan, interesting, well-educated people in a place steeped in history. Then one night, I was at a party in an ancient guild hall under Bern when the DJ put on Mmm Bop. I groaned aloud, expecting everyone to join me in getting him to put on another record. It was obvious to me that no thinking human being could possibly want to hear Mmm Bop ever again.

To my horror, all those around me - these people I wanted so badly to impress - started to smile and get up to go and dance. To Mmm Bop, in 1999. I was aghast, and actually angry. I felt betrayed. Having had a few, I actually tried to stop some of them from dancing. They angrily brushed past me and took the floor, dancing horribly, as Europeans do, loving every second of the song I hated so, so much. I sank back into my seat and held my head in my hands. Mmm Bop had come back from the grave to crush another part of my soul, and I was completely helpless.

That's why, to this day, whenever I hear Hanson, I'm not nostalgic. I'm not annoyed. I'm upset. Somehow, this shitty fucking song managed to alienate me from two cultures. It has actually harmed me.

And now it's stuck in my fucking head AGAIN.

The Incredibly Strange Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis

Movies have always been a huge part of who I am. My parents are both film buffs and my grandfather's substitute for human interaction when I was a kid was putting on a film from his humongous collection of VHS tapes. I jockeyed a counter at both an independent movie theater and an independent video store in my first two part-time jobs. I've seen more movies than nearly anyone else I know across the full spectrum of genres, eras, countries and styles. I say this not as any sort of brag but because the filmmaker I'm about to fete in this post is a place you reach only after you trudge down all of the well-worn paths. He's an alley that you notice while you're on your way to some more respectable destination; a garbage-strewn, malodorous alley. Something impels you to investigate despite the smell - or because of it.

Having somehow seen eight of Herschell Gordon Lewis' films, I feel like I'm ready to respond. I found him in the most innocuous of ways: a fan-made list of horror films on the internet. I'd already done all the usual 1980s slasher fare, so I was digging deeper, and the title of Lewis' first and most well-known film jumped off the screen at me: Blood Feast.

Fuad Ramses, Blood Feast

Blood Feast (1963) is a good place to begin the HGL experience. All the elements of his best splatter flicks are here: buckets of blood and gore, bold color photography which stands out amid often shocking technical improficiency, and bad acting by a collection of "actors" who look like, and probably were, scum willing to work for next to nothing. 

This is a movie that knows that it needs to function only on a very crude level to be effective, like a stone axe fashioned by an early hominid. Inspired by the cheap faux ancient Egyptian decor of the fleabag Miami hotel Lewis had been staying in while working on a nudie film, Blood Feast had no script. That's not a humorous exaggeration to illustrate how bad the script was: it literally had no script and was freestyled by cast and crew on a daily basis. I won't go into a long exposition of the plot, which you can find elsewhere. I'll just say that despite transparently existing solely to set up the gore, the plot is actually fairly engaging.

Notice what I just did? This is something that begins happening to you when you repeatedly subject yourself to some of the worst-made films of all time: you begin apologizing for deficiencies and emphasizing dubious merits. Your perceptions and standards begin to warp as you gaze into the abyss, for the abyss gazes back. You're not here for the highest quality cinematic experience you can get. You're here because despite their obvious shortcomings, these movies are surprising. Lewis' films are made in ways that run counter to nearly every reasonable expectation.

Firstly, the gore scenes in Blood Feast are some of the more revolting Lewis ever put on screen. It's all pig guts, blood and meat from a butcher shop, but that makes it no less effective. This isn't a Hollywood horror film, where you nearly always sense a certain embarrassment on the part of the filmmaker where gore is employed. The blood is fleeting; blink and you'll miss it most of the time. Lewis has exactly the opposite tendency. His camera sits there, static and unflinching, producing something reminiscent of crime scene or autopsy footage. Hands reach into the frame, play with the gore, and slowly withdraw. It's near-pornographic, it's crudely done, but that doesn't stop it from being viscerally disgusting and strangely compelling.

Connie Mason, Playboy Magazine's Miss June 1963, ladies and gentlemen

Blood Feast was a smash hit, to the great surprise of everyone involved. Galvanized by success, Lewis set out to do something special for his second film, Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) - always a dangerous goal for a filmmaker. This more self-conscious work isn't as effective as Blood Feast. Think Brigadoon, only with murderous, deranged hillbilly Confederates intent on avenging the Civil War. Maniacs unwittingly pioneered the scary hillbilly trope that reached its apex with Deliverance almost a decade later. Regrettably, the bold primaries of Blood Feast's claustrophobic gore-splattered interiors have given way to a lot of mundane, washed-out looking exterior shots. The camera doesn't linger over Lewis' travesties nearly long enough to achieve the desired effect.

Maniacs is where you begin to notice one of Lewis' calling cards: everything seems to go on more than a couple beats too long. Enter the unforgettably torturous bluegrass theme song, written by Lewis himself, played by a band at the beginning of the film in its entirety. In fact, like John Carpenter later, Lewis composed all of the music for all of his films, and it's generally strange stuff. But where Carpenter's spartan and effective synth scores show real talent, Lewis' are alarming. They generally sound like what they are: a non-musician's half-baked notion of what a score should sound like. They're weird, ad hoc facsimiles, copies of copies. Yet somehow these god awful scores only add to his films' pervasive oddness.

The Man-Eaters get down with their studs, She-Devils on Wheels

After spending most of the 1960s churning out cheap entries in nearly every genre imaginable, including a children's musical, Lewis made two very interesting films: She-Devils on Wheels (1968) and The Wizard of Gore (1970). In She-Devils, we have Lewis, a director responsible for all manner of crass, on-screen exploitation of women, helming a feminist biker film with a screenplay written by a woman - his frequent co-conspirator, Allison Louise Downe. Biker films of the late 1960s are as a genre notorious for their sexual violence, but this biker gang is all women - the Man-Eaters - who consciously devalue and sexually objectify men. The Man-Eaters hold a race among themselves to determine who gets the first pick from their stable of kept men - their "stud farm" - which is populated by a collection of scuzzy miscreants repulsive even by the standards of a Lewis film.  Lewis brings his signature bloody touch as well, including a truly glorious decapitation. Is there at times shockingly bad camera work? You bet. Crap acting? Absolutely. Still a remarkably fun film to watch and a clever upending of classic biker cinema.

Montag the Magnificent, The Wizard of Gore himself

The Wizard of Gore (1970), made very near the end of Lewis' film making career, is his most ambitious splatter film. It opens with an (unsurprisingly) overlong harangue by the wizard himself, Montag the Magnificent, on the nature of fantasy and reality. The gore is indoors, rank, and brutal and the prosthetics are hilarious - the scenes of hypnotic murder are a lot of fun to watch, as always.

What sets this film apart among Lewis' other gore films, however, is the surprisingly engaging plot, which is trying to do much more than simply set the stage for the blood and guts. Without giving anything away, the film brings Philip K. Dick's reality-bending novels to mind. The off-kilter nature of Lewis' films is on full display from the moment this one begins. If Lewis should be remembered for any single film among his strange oeuvre, this is it.

The 2016 election as of January 26, 2016

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

- Niels Bohr

That aside, I'm prepared to say today that the president will be either Hillary Clinton or Michael Bloomberg.

The reigning king named no successor on his deathbed, making civil war inevitable among an even more repellent field than is ordinarily the case. Pressing the claims of the White Rose, an unfathomably crude, overtly racist P.T. Barnum, willing to cheerfully plumb depths of political discourse so abyssal that he will soon need a bathysphere. Lurking in the shadows, a Torquemada who wants an ideological cleansing and a crusade feared no less by his own party's greybeards than by his would-be opponents.

For the Red Rose, preparations for the coronation of female Nixon - without his charisma or political acumen - continue amid growing concern. Despite every conceivable advantage, her mere presence has animated with real life the joke candidacy of an ossified, neckless scowl knowingly hawking an agenda preconditioned on a "political revolution," a distortion of American political reality so absurd that Aaron Sorkin would struggle not to laugh. Hillary's unmatched reptilian charmlessness has allowed a terrifying prospect to crystallize into view: Trump v. Sanders. This would be an apocalypse, because the only human who would lose a national election to a figure as appalling and ridiculous as Donald J. Trump is Bernie Sanders.

Whispers of plots for world domination by NYC's Bond villain ex-mayor are hardly surprising given the circumstances. He'll watch and wait until early March, and if Sanders has real momentum after Nevada and Trump is sewing up the GOP, he'll intervene and likely win the presidency. If Hillary manages to fend off the children's crusade on her left, he'll stay out. Bloomberg's base would be those Democrats too conservative to vote for a communist and those Republicans too sane to vote for a racist clown. I believe it's a coalition that would be large enough to win against the rump Democrat left and the Tea Party. We'd be left with a serial misogynist whose greatest legacy is the transformation of NYC into a gentrified, racist police state. Although preferable to a world in which Trump has nuclear weapons at his disposal, the naked purchase of the presidency by a fascist oligarch would complete America's transformation into a plutocracy in both name and fact.

"Beasts of No Nation" was a much better film than I was expecting although not particularly groundbreaking. I didn't know going in that it was the second feature film directed by Cary Fukugawa, whose "Jayne Eyre" (2011), with Mia Wasikowska and Fassbender, I liked a lot. It's photographed beautifully if conventionally. As with all child soldier war films, a lush and happy pre-war childhood is used as a counterpoint to the sickening brutality of the later conflict. However, like a lot of current cinema, TV and music (e.g. Mr. Robot, Star Wars Episode VII), it's also at least in part shamelessly and unapologetically derivative.

I'm referring to the sequence in which Agu and the rest of his militia take "gun juice" - some kind of unnamed hallucinogenic drug - and sack a village. It's one of the most important parts of the film, and it's colorized to deliberately bring to mind Richard Mosse's classic Kodak Aerochrome infrared film documentary on the Congolese civil war, "The Enclave," and his still work across a variety of African conflicts using the same technique. It's unfortunate and dishonest of Fukugawa to not acknowledge the extent to which the central, violent sequence of his film is derived from Mosse's work. Presumably he's waiting for Mosse to file a copyright lawsuit before disgorging any credit, much as Drake did with James Turrell's after jacking his light installations in his Hotline Bling video. I really liked this film, but this lazy copying we're seeing across the arts has got to stop. This is probably the most visually memorable part of the film and it's straight up ripped off.

That aside, there is great work here. Attah's performance is one of the best ever by a child actor and Elba is brilliant as always. There are great supporting turns here too, by Francis Weddey as Agu's older brother and by Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye as Strika, to name a couple. It deserves consideration among the best child soldier films I've seen. I'd like to revisit a few of them here to put "Beasts" in its proper context: Die Brucke ("The Bridge," West Germany, 1959), Ivanovo Detstvo ("Ivan's Childhood," USSR, 1962) and Idi i Smotri ("Come and See," USSR, 1985).

The Bridge, directed by Bernhard Wicki, probably best known for directing the German sequences in "The Longest Day," is very good. The biggest flaw here is that the necessary establishing work of showing the pre-war lives of the characters goes on far too long in this film.

Die Brucke (1959)

A good hour is spent reminding us that the characters are children via much not terribly well-acted domestic melodrama before the battle is joined. Once it is, it's very well filmed. It's also the most similar to "Beasts of No Nation" thematically because the battle the boys find themselves in is as completely pointless as their cause is unjust.

Contrast this with the two Soviet films featuring child soldiers during the Second World War, "Ivan's Childhood" and "Come and See." In these films, the children have no choice but to fight; their enemy, the Nazis, is so pitiless and inhuman that their only other option is death. As such we don't get any rumination on the morality of the boys' casus belli. However, as "Ivan's Childhood" is helmed by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time in Tarkovsky and "Come and See" by a very good one in Klimov, we also don't get simplistic jingoism.

Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Tarkovsky's genius is evident from the first moments of "Ivan's Childhood," which find Ivan dreaming of the happy days before the War, floating through the treetops of his bucolic country home, while he's actually hiding from the Germans in an abandoned building. Child soldier war films need this kind of establishing sequence, but Tarkovsky's is the most skilled and probably the shortest. He doesn't overdo it; he tells it in these dream-like flashbacks that really have the visual power of beautiful memories because, as you would expect from Tarkovsky, the film is shot with staggering power. There are shots in this film that made me gasp, they were so astoundingly gorgeous. The film does become unnecessarily sentimental in the end which cuts into its overall impact, but as a work of original visual photographic and cinematic genius, this is the best film on this list.

Elem Klimov's final film, "Come and See," hits the hardest of all of these movies. It's said to have inspired Spielberg's "Schindler's List," but Spielberg is too much of a wimp to be this brutal for almost 2 and a half hours. Klimov pulled then 15 year old Alexei Kravchenko out of school to play the lead - something only a Soviet director could do - and put him through such an emotional and physical wringer that he was physically transformed by the experience from an apple-cheeked kid to an androgynous, hollow-eyed wraith.

Before

After

In one scene, Klimov had live machine gun rounds fired just a few feet over this kid's head. An entire forest was dynamited around him. His hair turned grey in real life. The brutality of the German onslaught in Belorus is depicted in unflinching horror, a truly shocking miasma of violence, torture and death that even left me feeling wrung out. Klimov himself, and many others who had actually lived through the events, said that he had to water it down because if he'd shown it as it actually had been, no one would have been able to watch it. "Come and See" is Klimov's epic mic drop. He never made another film, and he didn't have to.