International ScarJo: GHOST IN THE SHELL, LUCY, GHOST WORLD, Black Widow

Turn the cable on at any given time and there she is, as: as KGB-enhanced warrior "The Black Widow" in THE AVENGERS; a neurochemically-enhanced girl who achieves 100% brain usage in LUCY;  (voice only) a sexy Siri Mach 2050 who achieves the technological singularity in HER; an alien who lures Scots to the slime in UNDER THE SKIN; an alienated Tokyo tourist in LOST IN TRANSLATION; an alienated high-school graduate in GHOST WORLD.... on an on, aliens, augmented humans, ghosts (in worlds or shells), and AI. Her wry half-smile and husky voice transform any enhanced, artificial, alien or weird character into something warm, tangible, iron tough yet all-forgiving. She's Captain Scarlett Johansson, and she was born in the Bronx (and an inheritor of all the tough chick rasp that implies).

Ever ready to use seduction or a mixture of the kind of martial arts (Muay Thai, Kali, etc) that involves swinging around people's necks like an ice ballet starlet, in Ghost in the Shell she also has a great 'across the thug-filled room' saunter, shoulders low and hunched, as if primed for a sneak attack, and a unique way with sussing potential trouble out of the corner of her eye without breaking stride or cool. She seems always a notch above her material, yet she doesn't step on its toes as she climbs. Gingerly she even brings it along behind her. No easy feat, to redeem and solidify shaky CGI realities. It's OK, too, if she can't quite pull off some of the more encompassing moments of grandeur, for she has the brains to underplay rather than ham it up. Hers is the same cool savvy of 80s (male) action stars like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger --if she lacks their self-deprecating doofus undercarriage, she at least doesn't wink at the audience or start doing funky dances like Cameron Diaz. That shit doesn't age well (just watch those two Charlie's Angels movies, or Knight and Day), but Scarlett is built to last.

Though adept at smaller scale comedies (where she'll occasionally dust off her Jersey-Bronx-LI accent), since becoming an A-lister, ScarJo hasn't labored for respectability in prestige pics too often, content instead with her lot as the poster girl for a Tyrell Corporation-sponsored Time-Image sci-fi future. The first girl to hang glide all the way across the Uncanny Valley, she's part Hawksian 'one of the guys,' part 'your older sister's one cool friend who's nice to you.' When we see strange new sci-fi worlds through her eyes, they seem livable; their furrowed scalps are gently but robustly tousled by her maternal (but not bossy) fingers. Be they Seoul's skyways, the post-riot despair of 3 AM Glasgow, jet-lagged Tokyo, futuristic Tokyo, some other Tokyo, Paris, mall culture America, the empty rose-colored void, she can bring humanist warmth. 

Turn on any channel and there she is, making the future seem not only real, but inviting, even survivable. 

Her gaijin hair is Asiatic hipster grrl cool. (Ghost in the Shell)

GHOST IN THE SHELL

I'd heard the 'white-washing' accusations (1) before going to (open the Netflix envelope of) Ghost in the Shell, but that only helped lower my expectations, which were low to begin with, for it seemed like Aeon Flux meets Ultraviolet x Resident Evil all over again. But after seeing it I was a fan. Ghost in the Shell is actually a goddamn great film. It's so rich in ambient futuristic detail --from the ingeniously animatronic reptilian geisha girl assassins to the visualized 3-D streams of bit data (they make the green columns in The Matrix seem like the dos prompts in War Games --insert snorty nerd laugh)--its generic cop vs. corporate corruption clunkiness is forgivable (and certainly no more perfunctory than that in Ghost's most obvious template, Blade Runner) and maybe even necessary, since the mise-en-scene itself is so densely layered we need the story to be familiar enough we're not totally alienated.

In a role originally played an anime pixie (and ink has no race, people!), Johansson stars as "The Major," an advanced cybernetic cop chick chassis (the shell) housing a Japanese girl's ghost. Fronting an elite group of cops, she investigates AI-related crimes, and is a bit of a hothead. She regularly gets told not to rush into danger by her concerned chief (Takeshi "Beat" Kitano), which is almost as tired a cliche as M. Emmett Walsh tossing back whiskey and cigars while talking about "beauty and the beast - she's both." As in Blade Runner, some advanced robotics engineers are the target of a splinter group of amok replicants, or something (shades of Shelley!). Their next target seems to be Major's own creator, Juliette Binoche (which is funny if you've just seen Clouds of Sils Maria).

(Spoiler Alert!) The killer /bad guy, 'Kuze', a cyberterrorist robot-human, played by another gaijin, Michael Pitt, is a marvelously intricate character in both acting and CGI senses of the word. he seems to be constantly reconstituting himself from surrounding bit rates, only half alive and half virtual at any given time, his tortured voice wracked with auto-tune and static, his awareness of his past at odds with the Major's computer generated amnesia. Once they start talking, Major starts 'going rogue' while the evil robotics CEO turns the bullets their way. Luckily, the cool thing about being a robot: she can get shot to shit and still be ready to dive slow-mo backwards off the parapet and come crashing upside down through a skyscraper window with both automatics Woo-style blazing in just a few dissolves. The future is nothing to fear as long as hangdog toughies like Beat Kitano carry teflon briefcases and can shoot from the hip. It's an unusually upbeat, even tidy, Robocop style resolution, but it hardly matters - the greatness is in the details, the startling HD clarity that makes the film seem ready for a VR headset 2020 remastering. Compared to the new Blade Runner movie, it's a goddamned masterpiece - maybe even better than the original Blade Runner or, gasp, even Akira! Time will tell.

But getting back to the race cards: the casting of Johansson and Pitt as formerly Japanese eco-terrorist twenty-something lovers (arrested and mind-wiped) presumes if any Japanese person could create their own ideal robot shell, they wouldn't look Japanese, or at any rate even if the ghost/soul was Japanese, the white (French) engineer would give her shell a white face, and she'd automatically speak English (the universal corporate language) rather than Japanese. This strange but sadly (if conveniently) conceivable decision reaches a peak subtextual moment when Kuze and the Major, remembering their Japanese teenager past, take off each other's facial covers, revealing the circuitry beneath; in the process they seem to be showing the maze of sociopolitical awareness vs. box office second-guessing at work in their mask's lack of epicanthic folds. Is it racist, sure? But is it the cause of - or a statement on - ?

In her hirers defense, ScarJo has ample experience for the job, including that of being alienated in Tokyo (as 2003's Lost in Translation); having her face dissolve into bits of digital programming, also in Tokyo (in Luc Besson's Lucy); disappearing altogether and becoming just a SIRI-style AI voic (in Spike Jonze's Her); growing up as a rich person's clone, for future organ harvesting in a Logan's Run style enclosed citadel in The Island - etc. I'd also say that, though white-washing is a long and shameful cinematic practice, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee didn't just play Fu Manchu because they were white, but because they'd played evil megalomaniacs successfully in the past. Fu is more than just Asian - he's also evil and a genius. Those three things are not always interconnected and in dicerning Fu's chief trait as his Chinese decent one does China a disservice as much as the other way around. In the same way, ScarJo the actor has a resume of successfully conveyed artificial intelligences, test tube babies, amnesiacs, assassins, and substantial fight training that keeps the obligatory hair in the face stunt doubling to a minimum. She's a global star. She's sanded her psyche down for mass appeal, ready to be on the cover of everything from Italian Vogue to Japanese iPhone keypad ads for fragrances based on the novelization of the German film based on a Chinese fable.

There is one way to avoid all the conflicts when watching Ghost, a way to amp up the subtextual resonance until it rings like freedom's bell: watch it on Blu-ray with a Japanese dub language track. Hearing a Japanese actress speaking from inside ScarJo, as a Japanese ghost trapped in an artificial gaijin shell, will likely make all the difference.

I don't know why I'm sticking up for the casting decision- except that I, like everyone else of the SWM variety, needs to prove he's not racist, even if it's only to himself, and the filmmakers clearly went for distance in re-imagining both their holy bible Blade Runner and the original 1995 anime classic. There are multiple viewings worth of layered space and evocatively wrought Black Mirror future shockiness, and I'd hate for all that to be lost like tears in rain just because the producers were scared Maggie Q. wasn't enough of a household name. The level of artistry and detail on display is jaw-dropping, and for once it actually serves a narrative purpose: cluing us in on--not only the world of a very conceivable, maybe even inevitable, future--but the foreign/alien way that future will be perceived, i.e. when VR and 'R' merge inextricably.

I can hardly wait until it too is on FX or FXX and comes punctuated with commercials for 4D, the 'next word' in high-definition television. Ghost in the Shell seems clearly meant for it.

As an anime from 1995, all its cyberpunk detail often seemed to get lost in the overwhelming rush of negative and positive space (ink can't be layered the way blacks shadows in HD can) and--let's face it--the internet was just getting rolling in '95 --AOL still connected via whirring phone modem. A lot of all that internet stuff was still just on the (printed pulp paper) page of Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson novels. Shell's anime style (left) used a lot of rotoscoping and 'real' lights and--unless you were an anime devotee familiar with the narrative tics and traits, ahead of the curve on the dawn of cyberspace--it seemed a kind of over-the-top cartoonish reliance on animation shortcuts rather than segue/linking micro-movement (i.e breathing). That over-the-top literalness in this live action version lives on only in the 'tactical' eye adjustments of Batou (Major's right hand man, he loses his human eyes in a bomb blast, and opts for two telephoto / infrared lenses that make him look like Little Orphan Annie's jacked uncle). Aside from that, nearly every image is sublime and best of all, at least semi-subtle and subdued. Since the actual actors and lighting provides some measure of corporeal relativity, the VR super-impositions stand out yet are so fully meshed, at times reminded me of last February when I had the DTs. While the slow-mo glass shattering and frozen water diving splashes have long been cliche (thanks to The Matrix), here they actually fit the post-modern future on display, as she comes through a window that's also a giant video screen - as if turning the pixels of the image into glass shards.

The ultimate takeaway is that, when the virtual world is as valid and 'real' as this one, (and the Uncanny Valley bridged), one of the side effect developments will be time travel along personal axises and the ability to replay our sensory recording of a single event, which can then be slowed down until the whole world stops on a fraction of a nanosecond for all eternity, and those watching/reviewing can wander into the middle of your 3D retinal projection display and see around corners and read the names of files left on the dresser. Weirder still, these memories could be hacked, so that around the corner too might be a VR assassin ready to--if not actually stop your heart and kill you--at least steal your mental capacity, leave you a stunned amnesiac while he makes off with your internal hard drive. We see bits and pieces of this future in various Black Mirror episodes, but here it all fits together in a blast that's like an atomic bomb trapped inside an orchid.


If social-racial progress gets knocked back a peg by ScarJo's presence in this film, beauty parameters takes one step forward due to her lack of fear at presenting to the world a genuine womanly shape in bodysuit --not zaftig or shapeless mind you, but filled out like a mix of Marilyn Monroe and a UFC fighter -- her lower center of gravity and sinuous synchronized shoulders and pelvis betray evidence of long-term fight training ala Cynthia Rothrock in her earlier films and of Gina Carano in her current ones. She keeps her head perfectly balanced, like a Steadicam, when she weaves around a room, shoulders slinking cannily back and like a combination alley cat and see-saw.

It makes a huge difference. Watching Rothrock throw down next to Michelle Yeoh for example in Yes Madam! is to see the difference between a dancer, lithe and fast (Yeoh) and a genuine kickass fighter (Rothrock); Johansson has grown into the latter. You just can't imagine yourself getting back up from a fight with ScarJo as easily as you can one with Maggie Q.

At the same time, Johansson's modulated low-key acting (as demonstrated first in Lucy) fits both this fighter stance parameter and the role of a soul who's basically had her identity stripped away; her brain has been washed white and enhanced with micro-processors that record and play back memories that can be, as in the Tyrell corporations' most gifted Nexus edition, Rachel (Sean Young), artificially implanted or removed. Her whiteness and blank performance reflect cultural meaning in an era where the digital and analog are no longer separate, where humans can be hacked and turned into weapons just by touching the wrong door knob during a live action interior chip role playing game. But it's her daringly 'real woman' body, unhidden and unashamed, that becomes the unassimilable remainder, an assertion of humanity against the machine, and her micro-gestures of awakening vulnerability accomplish a gravitas Sean Young never could.

What makes Ghost in the Shell work for me, too is that, like Blade Runner, it keeps its ambitions and goals for narrative resolution low-- cliche'd, linear, resolved--to better focus on the visuals, mood, ambience and subtext. Compare with, say, the disastrous Matrix sequels where vast reels trudge across with abstract thesis dissertations on the collapse of space-time vs. the simple Wizard of Oz meets the Pusherman mythos of the first. Macking out between the cop show beats in Ghost are fascinating throwaways, such as a go-nowhere but still interesting scene where she touches the actual flesh(?) of an androgynous, only partially-human, 'mixed race' freckled prostitute (above). In a very touching--but not quite sexy--scene their faces touch close enough the heat is there, but there's no need to go all the way into some gratuitous cyber-lesbianism. Instead we have that curiosity with which a human might gaze into an animal's eyes (as in the cliche'd scenes with Batou's stray mutts) or vice versa, each fascinated by the mystery of a separate, never quite-knowable intelligence on the other side -- as beautiful, as de Lautréamont's saying goes, as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table. For Major it's the unknowability of what makes us human, metered out with the fascination of the machine for the human and vice versa; each enraptured, envious, even, of the other: a human with artificial augmentation seen through the eyes of the reverse.

And then there's the weirdest, most strangely vivid and human--portion of Ghost in the Shell: Kaori Momoi a Major's mom. It's clear English is not Momoi's first language but she attacks it with a stunning, raw innocence- as if in forming these strange words she's creating some new kind of polyurethane fiber: even across the divides of language and digital artificial shell recombination, and even race, she quickly recognizes her long lost daughter without ever having a big reveal. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from that. Probably not.

IRON MAN 2 / AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON / CAPT. AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER: BLACK WIDOW needs her own damn movie, Marvel. 

A nurturing friend to the Comic-Con geek, ScarJo likes to get right up close to the Hulk and rub his fingers or invade his puny Banner's personal space, or fall on top of him in a sexy silk dress behind the bar, telling him "don't turn green, ok?" She ends up trying to help Capt. America find a girlfriend even while they unfurl a dastardly Fourth Reich Paperclip conspiracy deep within the CIA (I mean HYDRA within SHIELD) and finally does the direct approach with Banner when he won't take please for an answer, and he ends up running away instead. The smart move, that, because Black Widow is single for a reason: Marvel 'gets it' -she belongs to us all. She's who we, the lovelorn teenage male demographic, imagines coming home to. We know she wouldn't be turned off by our living in mom's basement and spending our disposable income on mint condition action figures. Were Marvel to saddle her up with some dude like Luke Wilson, bringing her flowers and making hangdog eyes, that, sir, would be a major miscalculation in how fantasy works to allay and soothe the hormone-tortured adolescent mind. 

 Marvel's too smart for that. Marvel gets it, and clearly posits Black Widow (it's in the name) as the girl we can imagine ourselves with (lord knows I did, back in the days of her character's large-size black and white comics when I was at a nerdy high school freshman). Or at the very least she stays single and we stay best buddies.

That said, I wonder just how many young boys and lesbians actually do imagine themselves with Scarlett Johansson. I don't think it's that many - she's more like our badass fantasy friend. Maybe it's her Bronx upbringing, but Scarlett's one weakness is that she can't do 'weakness.' She can never quite tap the accessible vulnerability (emblematic in, say Heather Graham or Patricia Arquette) that brings out the lusty aggressor in a man, so essential to his sex drive. Instead, we love her at a respectful distance, and like her style; as a pal, she boosts our ego without having to get awkward about it.

There's a scene early in the first Avengers where she's tied up and  getting slapped around by a cadre of Russian mobsters in an abandoned warehouse and her cell phone rings, it's Fury who wants her to come in, and she says something like Hold on, I'm almost done interrogating these guys. In the calm collected way she says it, the men realize she's never not been in control of the situation like they thought. She easily escapes her bonds and beats the shit out of them all with pieces of the broken chair, then sashays away. That scene to me illustrates the breadth of Scarlett's range, for she is not the most giving and exhibitionist of actresses. This scene plays her dramatic weaknesses into strengths the way Neil Young overcomes his limitations on guitar, through a kind of advanced depth primitivism. We can buy her as vulnerable only if it comes packaged with the idea it might be a ruse.

On the other extreme of the acting intensity range, for example, we might consider Noomi Rapace, who acts her pain and anger so vividly in films like Prometheus and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that she leaves any concept of 'fun' far behind her. In her hands, that scene in the Russian warehouse would be a grueling drag. She'd make the pain and trauma of her slapping brutally real - she'd make it our problem, the post-Fury call thrashing would be cathartic but we'd still be left irritable and clammy. Rapace forgets we come to movies to be entertained, especially movies about space monsters and girl avengers. We don't need to feel traumatized, or to hate ourselves worse than we already do. The only thing tempering our pain at Rapace's automated C-section in Prometheus is that her character has been such a self-righteous drag we're happy to see her suffer. She makes her own pregnancy issues everyone else's problem, then gets pissy when the ship's crew don't drop everything they're doing to ram an alien space craft on her command even if it will kill them all. ScarJo by contrast implicitly understands the parameters of a scene in ways beyond mere chops and intensity; she's her generation's Angie Dickinson, she's Lauren Bacall x Alice Faye. 

Dig the way her shoulders hunch and move with her eyesight like a canny
low-center boxer snaking through the crowded disco as the ecstasy kicks in.

In Lucy (2014) there's a great bit where, after she's been spending the first 1/4 of the movie crying and pleading, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking open a kilo of high-end brain boosting Limitless-style super drugs she's been muling. Peaking on these blue crystals, she ably escapes, kills an array of bad guys, gets shot, goes to the hospital and--while a doctor removes the bullet as she holds him at gunpoint--she calls her mom to explain that she remembers being in her womb and the taste of her milk and how much she loves her.

Good lord! Delivered by Johansson in a flat whispery monotone, Lucy's call to mom will bring uncomfortable recognition from anyone who's ever had a mind-opening drug trip / manic high and decided to call their mom out of the blue to re-'connect', and explain they've cracked it wide open, broken the code, that they 'get it now' and can see past the limitations of time and space and realize all the interconnected love etc. etc. This will either move their mom to tears of gratitude or have her ready to call the psychiatric clinic. I know I've had a few of those back in the 80s-90s, and was always grateful for my mom's sense of denial, for I'd never hear about it later and forgot most of what I said/promised. Since then, I've been on the other end, watching younger generations do the same thing and I've been privy to how crazy these sorts of phone calls and explanations sound, both pretentious and deluded, egotistical and full of fragility masked in bravado, as if in convincing me of their discovery their discovery becomes permanent, rather than just the flash of illumination - eternal only in the memory. It's like they try to etch these fleeting feelings into the consciousness of those around them, rather than where they should go- onto paper, magnetic tape, and hard drives- but, what might be trippy in art, brilliant in theory, sounds nuts in verbal rants to your sleepy friends and parents. Profound insight doesn't translate out of the blue, just like hearing about someone else's dream never has the same dizzy power as telling our own.

It's perhaps the sadder truth of enlightenment, especially via the poison path, that the more brilliantly the ideas cascade inside your mind, the more the tongue can barely keep pace. Ideas, insight and inspiration may all flow out into brush strokes on canvas, words on the screen, words from the mouth - but try to talk normal to a friend or parent and you don't sound like someone who's cracked it wide open and broke on through to the other side. You sound like an amok egotistical maniac, a frothing lack-of-sleep meth-addled grandiose version of James Mason in Bigger than Life and maybe, a little bit, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy would if she didn't wisely underplay to such a dry extent. It may seem at the time like bad, flat acting, but any other way would be far worse. And besides, soon her Lucy can back up her words by remote controlling all media and gravity via telekinesis and shit in ways that make her more than a match for Neo in The Matrix, but she does it all without leather and dark glasses.

For Lost in Translation (see A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula)

Ghost World

It was in 2001's Ghost World, Scarlett J. first showed the world a most endearing smirk that set her in a class somewhere off from/above the zero sum hipster anarchy of her self-destructive friend Enid (Thora Birch). They start out as equals in sardonic incredulity but by the end Scarlett looks upon Enid with the same kind of bemused indulgence Enid looks upon Steve Buscemi. When, with that not-yet patented ScarJo kind of halfway grin that can--if tried by amateurs--smack of snide dismissal, she finally turns against Enid in favor of a job and some semblance of normality, we feel a chill in our guts. We don't want Scarlett to do that to us - we'll be normal if that helps, for we realized too that Enid's rebellion is a dead end. Sure her options were all soul-sucking drone work, but she needed to knuckle down and do it, to let her soul die just a bit, to reign in her wild mare, and then let it loose at night, in basement art, like some John Cheever character, instead of sticking with her snider-than-thou posturing straight into the 'isolated drifter -one dollar' bin. Poor Enid.

Scarlett J. was right to do dump her because Enid's world view and attitude is, in the end, not self-sustaining. There's nowhere to go, and that--I think--was the film's big flaw, it didn't know how to end itself. It should have zapped the title up to a blast of punk anarchy when the old man gets on the bus that wasn't supposed to come and leaves Enid alone on the bench. Bam! She looks out at camera, Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. Kafka-esque, man: the bus out of here never comes - oh wait it came after all these years - and now it's gone again! Forever! A Winner. They probably tried that ending, but test audience asked what happened to Seymour, so the film checks in with Seymour again, letting us know--not that we cared--he's doing just fine, getting professional help, as if we needed to know that rather than to experience his and Enid's fall both in that one bus stop moment. The utter pointlessness of rebelling against life outside the beef jerky and nunchucks of prefab American reality while still living within in it, Scarlett mutes it all down and gets excited about a fold-down ironing board in the apartment she's renting with Enid (if Enid gets the money), and that's really the film's one emotional payoff. The terror that flits across Enid's face as she suddenly realizes she truly is alone in the universe. Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. Another key winner final shot.

Scarlett's never really given us that ironing board moment since, thank goodness, and has become instead a global scale avatar of a kind of mirror reverse nerd gaze - reflecting the geeky adoration of the Comic-Con Cos-play Kid back upon itself, with a wry half-smile that says "I know you would run in terror if I came onto you in real life, and so I'm not going to, because if I did, and you ran, you'd hate yourself and then when you saw me onscreen again you'd jut get the sting of shame at the memory of when you ran away, so I'll spare you the shame and me the lack of your movie ticket royalty. But otherwise, I would totally hit on you as you're cute in a geeky way. We both know that, so let's never say another word about it." 

This is the gaze that boys want to see mirrored back, for it acknowledges their gaze as something other than a toad-like imposition; even as it gently rejects, it flatters; the male gaze is returned without the Medusa stone surcharge so usually associated with 'real' women. The fanboy's gaze is not judged sexist, misogynist, evil, gross or all the other judgments breathing mammalian women make on men who leer way out of their league, nor is it returned with a come-on directness like a prostitute meeting their gaze across an Uncanny Valley casino bar, the type where you look away in fear instantly, before you consciously even realize what just happened. Even if you've never seen a high end prostitute in the wild, you still instinctively don't kick yourself for being chicken, because you suddenly realize a beautiful girl's sudden reciprocal stare is terrifying, your gaze can't help but flinch if it's not used to being gazed back at the same way that it gazes. It's like Delilah springing forth with a garden shears to cut your balls or hair off the minute you spot her in the Waldo crowd.

ScarJo doesn't bring the shears. Her stare says, hey man, relax, the parts of us that are human are so far apart I can look back at you as insolently as you look at me in the hidden darkness of your roost. The shell you gaze into may be owned by Sony, but my ghost is my own, and I promise you this: no matter what else the future may shear away, you can keep your hair on.

Further Reading:

Skeeved by an Asian: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, MASK OF FU MANCHU, ETC. 
It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR
Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT
CinemArchetype 16: Automaton / Ariel 
A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE

NOTES:
1. Blair, Gavin J. (April 19, 2016). "Scarlett Johansson in 'Ghost in the Shell': Japanese Industry, Fans Surprised by 'Whitewashing' Outrage". 

Milla Jovovich: God's Own Avatar (+ Laymen's Guide to the Resident Evil Series)

No modern actress has spent more time running in slow motion while firing guns backwards than Milla Jovovich, which considering her start as a neo-hippie musician with a small part in Dazed and Confused (1993), reflects cosmic levels of disillusionment. And I love her, from a safe distance. She's the female post-modern Brundlefly (i.e. Jeff Goldblum) slowly dissolving into CGI replication, from hauntingly gravitas-endowed folkie to warrior queen of the Uncanny Valley -- fighting for her last shreds of un-pixelated humanity with a world-weary sequel-after-sequel determination.

I didn't seek them out, but the first four Resident Evil films have been all over Syfy lately, usually on Saturday afternoons, and I've secretly enjoyed them in a half-asleep lollygag. Repeat viewings don't make the films better, but nor do they get any worse and sometimes that's better than being good in the first place. Having the violence spread between an array of intercut commercials is awesome too. Nothing beats seeing corrupt corporate goons machine gunning civilians / smash cut to the new Mitsubishi Turbo. The pulse of the afternoon advertising blocs entrains to the throbbing din of Milla's battles, creating a symphony of post-modernist random meaning generation.


Mee-la YO-vo-vitch, as her name is pronounced, plays a character with many clones and lives enough for an afternoon of multiple person play, and considering the amount of blue screen this poor woman has to slog through, that she keeps it all real and engaging remains quite a feat, especially considering English is not her first language, or French either. She was born in the Ukraine, wherefrom a genetically superior breed of humans seems to flow, like a 'wirgin spreeng.'

I still listen to her The Divine Comedy-- a 1994 album, equal parts Kate Bush, Arthurian bard, Nordic alien-hybrid, and Jane Birkin, and purer than a crystalline decanter full of airy Scotch--but it came out ten years ago. Does she even have time to pick up a guitar now, with so much zombie blood on her hands? I wish she would. The zombies have suffered enough, and my heart has too -- it needs her swoosh of a voice and 'tick-tock through the medieval graveyard' tromp pop to swain and swillow through the once-more wood.

She gave us only one other musical document, when she quietly plays and sings at a party and tries to light a joint and misses by a few inches to hilarious effect in Dazed and Confused (1993). That lighter may have missed the target but even with this small, mostly dialogue-free part. she established herself indelibly as one of those hauntingly perfect hippie-style goddesses that stir feelings deeper and more ancient than mere attraction, closer to the vicinity of chaste courtly love, wherein the main desire is to be her champion in a joust. The film didn't need her to be great, but with her it was able to break through, like a midnight sun, and it was a great echo of similar moments in films like Marianne Faitfhfull's a capella cafe "As Tears Go By" in Godard's Made in USA (1966).

Bigger movies beckoned, as they will when beautiful, talented, otherworldly girls present themselves and talented Frenchmen take notice their muse hath come. First, there was Luc Besson, commencing with The Fifth Element (1997) to weave Milla into existence from a chunk of raw material into 'the perfect being' and allowing her to speak her own (self-invented) bizarre language. She made a great savior of the universe, we wanted her to save us and so felt guilty and ashamed when she found our dirty little genocides on the historical microfiche she scanned. People mainly remember the crazy orange hair and Gautier white tape suit, but she was never objectified in it - she was more Pris than Rachel, and Besson clearly felt that same courtly joust vibe we did and it carried over to Bruce Willis' cubicle-dwelling cab driver.

In Luc and Milla's next film together, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), she continued the savior angle and evinced great androgynous schizophrenia. You can all but feel some Old Testament-style God rattling her ossicles with shouted orders like an impatient, sugar-addled schoolboy. I know the feeling: every third autumn I become a supernaturally enlightened Taoist monk crazy man: power flows through me and all is love and holy light. But that light has a price, it's difficult to slow down for the normal unconscious and asleep people, but one must, otherwise they think you're merely manic. And one must not give away all one's money and possessions to the first needy homeless man along the road, lest the next one stab you when you can't provide the same for him. Milla gamely and bravely lets that same level of crazy flash across her beautiful features. She takes it all very seriously, commits fully and dangerously, which annoyed the unconscious and asleep critics, used to highbrow roles like Joan being played demure and ladylike and gimme an Oscar-ish. And Milla is too busy foaming at the mouth as the visions and auditory hallucinosis overtake her. For Milla, committing never means being placid or lady-like; she'd rather encourages us to wonder if maybe France was saved by the novelty of her androgynous holy girl madness. The French, unlike Americans, have a great sense of humor when it comes to their own mortality, and they worship gamins in a way America still hasn't grown up enough to understand.

Many critics felt that this was Milla's vanity project, that she had Besson wrapped around her finger and that she was out of her depth and Besson was letting her get away with it. But that's crap, my brothers. The turf is hers by right. For me, there was the sense that she's perfect for the role because of her courtly chaste love-inspiring beauty and grace, ala the loyalty she inspires as the perfect being in The Fifth Element. Messenger was the culmination of a slow build of global devotion. We were ready to storm castles in her name. On the other hand, the film couldn't help being a solid downer, with Milla's terrible bowl haircut and being sold out by the Dauphin in the name of diplomacy and caution and everyone in the French and English armies look so alike it's hard to know who to root for or what's going on. A third is that Milla plays Joan as such a schizophrenic, replete with eye twitches and brown outs, it's hard to know whether to root for her, join the fight, or move to a different table and hide behind a menu. But her notion of God's intervention is so like an alien abduction that it's all looney tunes enough to make one wonder why Besson felt the need to show the royal court scheming and intrigue behind her back at all. Why not just stick with what she sees and feels, so that the betrayal seems to come out of nowhere? The court stuff is a well-photographed bourgeois super snooze compared to Milla's wild jerky eyes and the awesome grey mud and blood.

Ancient Aliens enthusiasts such as yours truly love to contend that benevolent Nordic aliens and fifth dimensional projections from Arcturus have intervened at key moments in our history in order to keep the spirit of a free democracy alive. A Nordic 'angel' appeared to Washington at Valley Forge to convince him to keep going, there's the mysterious storm saving Washington DC from the British in the War of 1812, the surge of storm waves sinking the Spanish fleet for Elizbeth I, and Joan's spirit guide/life coach might well be the same weather-controlling Nordic angel. Recent theories on 'star children' as a newly emerging race of genius ESP children sent here to lead us into a brighter tomorrow might actually play out if one such star child kept her ESP brilliance into adulthood, and was charismatic and enough of an innate showman to genuinely lead an army to victory. I already know her initials: MJ

The idea of Milla as someone to fight for in a gallant Arthurian way (rather than as some obtainable 'prize') has continued into a long and financially lucrative collaboration with current husband, director Paul W.S. Anderson. So while we're here, let's take a gander at the entirety of the RES series, bearing in mind the importance of rock bottom expectations and intercut car commercials:

Resident Evil 
(2002) **1/2

Before it slides into overtly first person zombie shoot-em-up number punching this first film offers an elaborate set-up that promises better things: the Umbrella underground facility is laid out in impressive vertical tracking shots; the uncertain allegiance of the 'Red Queen'--and her projected image of a young girl with an evil (i.e. British) accent--and her gassing all the employees to prevent spreading; Alice waking up in a bath tub with amnesia with a "property of Umbrella Corp." stamp on the inside of her wedding band and slowly remembering how she got there in little expository flashes; the impeccable Michelle Rodriguez as a SWAT team member; the laser grid slicing up SWAT guys, etc. Alas, it's important (to someone) the movie match the feel of the game, so director W.S. Anderson makes sure the Red Queen exposits like announcing the mission of each new Raccoon City level, and each new floor has a new monster or challenge. Anderson gets so hung up on perfecting the MATRIX-cam tracking Milla's slow mo kicks at mid-air pouncing zombie dogs that he forgets any kind of narrative momentum. Still, if Milla's kiss with Michelle Rodriguez had gone on for a few seconds longer, that film would be an enduring classic. Still, it's no worse the fifth time as it is the first.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse 
(2004) **1/2

Bonus points for picking up right where the last film left off, with the zombie plague spreading all through Raccoon City, and for turning one of Alice's old SWAT buddies into a giant killing machine programmed to keep the peace. There's a fascinating moment where this shambling freak massacres a whole SWAT team surrounding a strutting black dude (Mike Epps) who isn't even scratched because as we learn from the monster's video game-like monitors, he's unarmed and hence deemed a civilian, a wry statement right up there with the one in Angels and Demons, on how carrying a gun is much more likely to get you killed than save your life. The cast here includes Jared Harris, late of Mad Men, as a doctor who has a cure and will help our locked-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-gate heroes escape (these including cop hottie in black boots Jill Valentine played grandly by Sienna Guillory [below]) if they find his daughter (Sophie Vavasseur) who happens to be the source model for the Red Queen hologram. So there's layers here, people!

Bonus Points: Some of the big money from the first film's box office shows up in large scale scenes along the wall built to keep the contagion from spreading and there's some natty wall-climbing CGI demons, a motorcycle through a stained glass window, and a big final brawl between Umbrella's top two killing machines, flanked by cool troop helicopters, and an interestingly Teutonic corporate villain (Thomas Kretschmann). Anderson seems to figure out some of his own weaknesses and gives up trying to be the action movie Kubrick and the film opens up a result. Never underestimate breathing room, and enigmatically evil children.

Ultraviolet (2006) - *

Then, in between Resident Evil films, this...  The feeling of flop sweat pervades, with nary a single interesting fight or character or uncliche'd moment and every actor glazed over with enough slick CGI 'make-up' to cause viewers to wonder why they didn't go full CGI animation as they'd clearly feel more comfortable. Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, a hack who clearly has some mojo magic that convinces money to throw itself at him (he also wrote the dismal Salt and wrote and directed the underrated but still pointless remake of Total Recall), more than anything this film, along with the Charlize Theron movie version of Æon Flux from the year before, serves almost to make W.S. Anderson Walter Hill by comparison.

Resident Evil: Extinction 
(2007) - ***

The contagion has spread all across the world by this installment - and Alice rides across the Road Warrior-inflected deserts of the American southwest in search of answers before coming to the rescue of a band of hearty young survivors (including Ali Larter) who in the film's best scene are attacked by a murder of zombie crows. Meanwhile a crazy industrial scientist spies on Alice from satellites and prepares his own magic invulnerable monster formula. It ends on a pretty wild cloning note, to become the best in the series up to that point, perhaps because it's directed by Russell Mulcahy, an Aussie behind such 'hits' as Highlander and The Shadow, and way more grounded and skilled as a storyteller and director of actors than Milla's husband, series overseer Anderson. Bonus points for a joint lit in a very moving moment by a SWAT survivor from the previous installment (Oded Ferhr) whose dimly smug smile annoyed me in the previous film but is finally put to good use in his moment of stoner triumph. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife
(2010) - ***

The series was on a roll now and Anderson steps back up to the plate, as if inspired by the lurch forward in quality delivered by Mulcahy in Extinction. It's inspiring to watch a director like PWSA slowly learn from his mistakes and criticism to deliver sequentially better work. Offering much more than the usual slow-mo 3-D shoot-outs and zombie hordes, there's a weird aircraft carrier finale involving monsters and freezer tubes; a hundred Alice clone attack on a Japanese corporation; a crash landing on a roof reminiscent of Escape from New York; cool trilobite-style gem-studded mind control devices; a gigantic axe-wielding monster, and detailed attention to continuing human story lines from the past films. It all adds up to the best entry in the series, not sure if it's still based on the video game by this point but if so, must be some game! I'll stick with the films, though, my wrists can't take too much excitement, too many years typing this shiite, and before that, Atari, and before that DOS programs for the TI-94A.

Speaking of age, after eight years of playing Alice for husband Anderson, and having born unto him a child, Milla actually looks substantially older and wearier than she did in the previous entry. Less and less are the CGI airbrushes able to disguise her slightly curled down nose, weakening chin, crow's feet. I mean this only as a high compliment. The younger girls here are airbrushed to near Maxim levels as part of Umbrella-Disney Corps continued process of filling in the Uncanny Valley with a billion CGI-make-up smoothings.

Despite wildly uneven, even cheap CGI and a dim grungy look (CGI is always easier when you don't have to worry about shadows or contrast), I give Afterlife high marks because it seems at times made by a John Carpenter fan, with a solid stretch of the action--from Alice's crashy rooftop landing onwards; low-key, naturalistic acting with Ali Larter, Boris Kodjoe, and Kacey Clarke to the from the ominous simplicity of some parts of the score to the idea of trying to escape from both a prison and a city rolled into one place: San Francisco. At one point I swear I could hear Kurt Russell hissing "Maggie, he's dead, come on."

BY NOW, 2010, the 'under siege' zombie narrative, with a ragtag dwindling group of survivors dealing with an external threat, was an inescapable cliche within the genre of horror, with the ultimate deadly serious and self-important Walking Dead series being the official last nail in the empty coffin. The arc of banding together with fellow survivors after the apocalypse is comforting to fantasy-retreated loners, of course, the types who watch these films over and over, and if Anderson doesn't quite get to the deadpan layered satirics of Verhoeven's Starship Troopers or basic rules of film (as opposed to PlayStation) at least he's really run with the whole insidious corporation angle until it hums almost meta. If you think I'm off the mark here, see if you can get a few minutes into Ultraviolet and Afterlife will seem like Citizen Kane.

Resident Evil - Retribution 

(2012) ***1/2

As with all the installments, RETRIBUTION continues immediately where it left off from the first, backwards in slow motion across the under-attack aircraft carrier until Alice wakes up from falling overboard and into a suburban idyll mirroring the one at the start of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. Herein Alice is married to Oded Ferhr and they have a deaf child who Milla must hide from the invading undead--seemingly on a loop--until she slowly realizes it's all part of a weird sprawling simulation-lab underwater lair. Explaining too much of the plot loosens it's 'anything can happen in billionaire corporate black box research, cos' vibe so I'll say no more except to recommend you see it with headphones blaring, at night with the lights off, on a big home screen, without your judgmental friends or lovers around, who are bound to snicker at the terrible video game upgrade exposition ("your mission: collect all the pink circles and escape to the surface--good luck!").

The story line manages the return of all Alice's allies and other avatars from past films: Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez and the always vaguely familiar Boris Kodjoe, not to mention the bad guy from the previous film is now on Alice's side and sends super spy Ada Wong (Binging Li) to her rescue. There are new monsters and old and I appreciate that Anderson has the good taste to make the simulations real, rather than just some Matrix or Sucker Punch bit of nullification and as with the third the idea of all the dead Alices from past 'simulations' adds an eerie metatextual edge, positing the viewer as just as much the evil Umbrella, bringing suffering Alice avatars into the world (3 for a quarter?) to vent your pent-up teen angst through. Milla seems game for these new roles within roles, though I'm not crazy about the leather bustle. Is Anderson abusing her like Welles did Hayworth for some imagined transgression? It just doesn't look comfortable, or particularly practical unless, like the western gunfighters did, you use belt holsters.

A bit like the Beckinsale-Wiseman Underworld series, there's a sense that the married director-star filmmakers are like hey, whatever we do the critics are gonna hate it but the fans are gonna see it over and over - so let's please the fans, layer it with detail only multiple viewings will bring out, and not worry about pleasing the bored second stringer critics, already resentful they had to see this Friday afternoon in the multiplex (as I had to) instead of in a press screening (which films like this never give, smartly).

Thus it is perhaps that filmmakers like W.S. Anderson, who began as tired hacks with a formulaic video game-based franchise, become, in a sense, slowly improved, along with the digital technology they use, through a decade of experience, benefitting from the rare opportunity of getting to work again and again with their same people, needing to find new things to do to keep their fanbase intere$ted. And I love that the big final battle is almost all women on both sides, and yet it never feels like some sexy catfight but a genuine dangerous showdown. Keep up the good work, ladies!

Milla's done other stuff, some of which I've written about:

The Fourth Kind (2009)

*

Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off and Milla's blamed for everything! Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable." (full piece here)

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

***1/2

I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of TURISTAS! (more)

Faces in the Crowd (2011)

***

Milla witnesses a murder from the infamous 'melancholy slasher,' gets knocked out, and wakes up with face blindness; her husband is soon being played by an array of different actors, changing with each shot; her clique of cool girl friends don't change much (and one of them,Valentina Vargas, steals all her scenes as a lady so badass she says of one night stands: "when you wake up and don't know for a minute where you are or who is sleeping next to you - I live for that!") but half the time Milla doesn't even see herself in the mirror, and when you're as hot as Milla that's tragic, but even scarier is that if the murderer came into her house and said he was her husband she wouldn't even know he wasn't. And Milla expertly evokes that horror, showing the end result of a life in films that has not been joyous. She's fought and dealt with horrors for quite awhile. She's scrappy, but by now hasn't she paid her dues? Dear God, please give your favorite avatar a nice warm rom-com break, and a chance at another album.


And if you do nod lissen... den to hell mit you!

The Boy who Pissed Fire: GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE

When I read all the crappy feedback I knew GHOST RIDER 2 was a movie for me --and I was right. The problem in the first film--too high on its own supply-- is solved by setting it in Europe where the highways have no speed limits and are free of cops. So when 'the Rider' speeds through to Italy and the deserts of Turkey we dig a new kind of hero: the American outlaw stereotype as the ugly tourist, the rider of the freeways between brown sugar-crystal deserts and the oil refinery ports that love them. This adds a thick glaze of laddish 'Luc Besson doing coke with Guy Ritchie and sketching the storyboards on bar napkins' kind of grope-for-broke Euro-fecundity, which is code, by the way, for a bunch of well-armed muscle-boy three-o-clock shadow-sportin' thugs led by a young guy in an expensive black suit (Johnny Whitworth), chasing after a European model in a red raincoat and heavy black eyeliner (Violante Placido) and forced to confront this wild bag of mannerisms and CGI fire effects they call Johnny Blaze.

And Nic Cage, sensing the change in the wind for this installment--nostrils flared to savor the asphalt and brimstone tang--decides to tap into some of that madness he conjured up in stretches of THE VAMPIRE'S KISS (1988) and all of BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009). He gives it both barrels, and spits liquid gold like he melted down and drank his 1995 Oscar. (1)

Cage has had to deal with some very narrowly defined action hero roles lately, but for GR:SOV he's up against a real big impasse: how to personalize a flaming skull head--the CGI equivalent ceramic bong at an 8th Street head shop? How to bring some personality to this biker tattoo come to life they call 'the Rider'? Cage leaps that impasse like it's Snake River Canyon, by going back to the classics and studying the original masters of psychomorphing and Satanic mugging: Michael Keaton as BEETLEJUICE (1988) and Jim Carey in THE MASK (1994).  Cage's moves are so herky here I kept waiting for him to cock his head, shoot some flame out of his ears and shout, "Ssssssssssmokin'" but then adding "Meth!" and giving an Illuminati two-finger salute.

Writer-director duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor also wrote and directed both CRANK films, GAMER, and wrote but didn't direct JONAH HEX, another schlock 'ghost hero' vengeance grabber I felt was underrated  (it should have been longer but got cut by squeamish studio heads--see my startling, raw review, Hex and Taxes), and redeemed by Josh Brolin in the lead, a man who never says 'phone it in' - and one can imagine that HEX would have rocked had Taylor / Neveldine (as they bill themselves) directed it, because SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE, for all its cliche and impassive emptiness, does rock. Not like a hurricane, mind you, but like a gaudy carnival ride playing "Rock Me Like a Hurricane" over and over as you're whipped around a rickety metal wheel. Sometimes that's enough, especially if you're on that wheel with Cage. He's the Stones to Johnny Depp's Beatles, in other words hammy and aggressive, truly crazy, whereas Depp's cautious, prone to muttering, demure. Imagine what Cage would have done in all those Depp roles for Burton? Cage as the Mad Hatter! Cage as Willy Wonka! If you're not grinning like a maniac thinking of it, you're the one who's crazy, man. Crazy sobesky.

With his brains in ever-hangin' mode, Cage shows just how very much Depp holds back as a persona. Where Depp stands on the edge and sort of halfway falls in, then leans backwards and flails his arms, Cage dives in, head on fire, shouting "I'm a prickly pear!" As such he is the 21st century's first true drive-in actor, an icon who should be proud to stand next to Tiffany Bolling, Tura Satana, and Klaus Kinski, even James Remar.

That's because Nic Cage refuses to phone it in or play it safe. He'd rather suck on full blast then phone it in from a vantage point of smug safety. There were several scenes in SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE where I was almost rolling on the floor in hysterics like I was the first time I saw FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL! and rarely since.  The peak moment--a peak in the Cage oeuvre-- being outside an underground boxing match where Blaze--his eye sockets warping into skull pits and flames shooting out of his nose--threatens a shady promoter that the 'rider wants to come out...'  As thoroughly awesome as Cage's rant against the elderly woman in Herzog's BAD LIEUTENANT or against the cleaning lady in VAMPIRE'S KISS! Seeing Cage go this nuts is truly liberation: Junk cinema has been needing scenes this crazy for decades, and you're not going to get them from any other American actor. GHOST RIDER's sheer psycho-cycle balls out, hanging brain, pissing fire off the back of a pick-up truck as it speeds down the highway reckless giddy oil-stained freedom is all him, and his obliging directors of course. It's clear Taylor and Neveldine work very well with the right actor, like Statham in the CRANK films, tailoring the madness to fit their leading man, encouraging each other like bad influence friends into progressively more dangerous and foolhardy endeavors, to all our benefit.

Perhaps the problem with so many of the modern trash films made today is that they don't even have a pair of rails to go off of as their insurance won't allow it. So the filmmakers shoot for the moon in a bid to cast as wide an international audience as possible, and this plan always fails, because a good trash film doesn't shoot for the world, it just shoots for the nearest plate glass window. It used to be if you wanted plate glass-busting raunchy thrills you had to go to the drive-in, VHS and cable were distant dreams. It all had to be remembered instead of recorded, and in the process became inextricably bound in myth, and associatively linked to greasy exhaust fumes, and rocking tires, echoing speaker boxes, and that's where VENGEANCE belongs. As far as the theater, it might please a row of teenagers who've snuck in some beers and aren't afraid to shout at the screen, but just thinking about seeing this in a dark mall multiplex in 3-D gives me a headache. And if I was a mom taking my sci fi kid (Ghost Rider was the first comic book I ever bought as a kid). But with low expectations--at home with your drugs and buddies, moms and scouring girlfriends in bed long before--you can 'let the rider out' and appreciate the finer details, especially the care the CGI folks took in showing the shimmering heat waves from the rider's fire against the clear blue sky, or the black crud that gets all over Blaze's unholy bike after a night of burnin' large. And that's all you need, presuming your expectations are as low as they should be. This ain't THE WILD ONE, after all, this ain't THE WILD ANGELS. This ain't REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, this is a big buggy mess. What makes it great is that it doesn't try to be 'good' or even 'fun' - it just tries to kick everyone's ass.

That's the thing - because we have so many options our films are becoming more and more moment and audience-specific. Something huge like DARK KNIGHT RETURNS needs to have crossover appeal so we can bring moms and daughters and girlfriends to it and they can appreciate it even if there are kids texting in their peripheral vision --as a result it's got something for everyone but no one ends up satisfied. But a film like GHOST RIDER is made so your brother, his buddy Glen, and you have something to watch after the women have gone to bed and the real drinking has commenced, and it gives just enough of the illusion of being a real movie that all the asides and bizarre touches seem like they hinge on something rather than just the free floating junk that they are (2). But isn't all life, and the art that imitates it, like that? Don't we live for speed so we don't have to stop and look back all the bad impressions and small brush fires we leave in our wake as we tear across the tourist towns of Europe? By the time the locals realize the paintings we sold them are fakes and their daughters are knocked up but still unmarried, honey we're already gone, sailing over the Atlantic on a big silver bike-like bird, dreaming of bottles, burgers, crank, coffee, and the Bounce-softened sheets that are America to thee.

America: it's not just a destination, it's a journey. Only when going 90 mph... on a Harley... without a helmet... while on fire, have we even halfway 'arrived.'

NOTES:
1. For Leaving Las Vegas 1995
2. the way the similar Drive Angry failed to do

I aims to scan your big bald head: HITMAN and the new Male Chastity

So I had to review the Luc Besson-produced, video game adaptation HITMAN and it wasn't near as bad as some of them critics said it should be. Of course low expectations will get you through every time. Yeah it's stupid enough, and derivative, but aren't they all? What save its ass is its French n'cest pas...

Naturally the actors all speak English and whatnot but what I mean is the film has a French producer, Luc Besson, who invented the "model with a gun" genre with LA FEMME NIKITA back in 1990. He's riffed on the same sexy mix of perfume ad nonchalance and bloody violence (raw, as zee Americans love eet) ever since, gradually giving up the director reins to focus on producing and--presumably--living the high life.

What's cool with Besson is that his Gallic intellect and compassion are not subsumed by the junk food overkill that flattens most Hollywood action pics. Underneath the polish, NIKITA was genuinely warm and mythic: she starts out as a junkie punk, dies and is reborn as a mature woman. In the Besson films that followed, tough men with bald heads took care of runaway runway girls and often died for their troubles. Bruce and Milla in FIFTH ELEMENT aside, they were platonic relationships. Mon dieu! For a man to just say no, he must be some kind of already sex-saturated Frenchman.

TV-blinded America is presumed to be standing at erect attention whenever Natalie Portman or any other beauty with too much black eye-liner steps onto the killing floor. The super-model as signifier is the glitter-covered cardboard angel atop capitalism's overloaded Xmas tree. Friends, family and the French know the truth: gorgeous looks have their drawbacks and all is balanced in the end on the serpentine scales of karma. For the mules who haul the gravy train however, this is considered too "unsexy" and therefore uninteresting.

The hot model white Russian white slavery victim, then, is the angel on top of the "other" Xmas tree, the sordid shadow of the other, where sex is shown for its ugly criminal bestial truth. Besson's decorated both of these trees and is here to tell you, don't touch a present under either one, they're all booby-trapped. So Besson tears them down as fast he puts them up. He slyly lets you see the barcodes on the products; he may traffic in rehash like his Hollywood peers but the post-modern spirit of Godard darts through his mise-en-scenes, adding little touches of the truth. The best part of HITMAN is when the Russian white slave girl (Olga Kurylenko) has finally learned to trust, or whatever, that our Hitman is not going to molest her or hurt her, etc., so she climbs on top to seduce him in what would normally be a steamy montage of gloves coming off, tattoos, lips, breasts, thighs, and implied trust-bonding. Instead, our hero zaps her with a jet-gun injection knockout drug and gets up and goes about his business (but not before making sure she's comfortable, with blanket).

I imagine that at some point in the original script there was a lengthy DA VINCI CODE-ish explanation for this ungrateful behavior, but it was airbrushed out. I'm glad. Now what his refusal to make love to her deconstructs to is nothing less than a full rejection of modern consumerism. The last time something this big happened in an action movie was in THE WARRIORS when Swan (Michael Beck) said those immortal words to his scavenger hunt gang deb, "you're just like everything else that's been happening tonight... and it's all bad!"

Swan wasn't condemning her of course, but "everything" that's been happening, which is all bad. He is recognizing his and her part in the web of delusion that is "all our turf" and thus he is able to take a stand, as a man instead of a punk to the genetic con job perpetuated on us by the DNA reproductive "system." As long as we think sex will solve all our problems, we're rubes, our biological drive hijacked by consumerism and gussied up so we forget it's not the be-all, end-all. The French, being so much more laid than we in the States, perhaps are in a better position to understand and eschew accordingly.

For another excellent and sadly underseen movie wherein a recovering junky says no to temptation and in doing so heals both himself and a cool young European girl whose been kicked around through the white slave drug mills, please Netflix Neil Jordan's amazing THE GOOD THIEF, starring Nick Nolte. Old Nick don't need a barcode... he's a priceless treasure.