Category Archives: films

On The Mole People (1956)

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Filmed and released in 1956 as a B movie, The Mole People, is one of the Saturday night camp films starring John Agar that is both good and bad at the same time. Production standards were card board cutouts and paper mâché boulders. As a movie goer you were required to suspend all of your disbelief regarding a plot line with more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. Even as a twelve year-old I thought this movie was awful, but perhaps even in its extreme awfulness one needs to contemplate the enslavement of the mole people. The plot is irrelevant, but the story is an old one, one group enslaves another, using force and violence to get another group to do all of their dirty work. The “mole” people are grotesque monsters, brutes and savages, and they are enslaved by more normal-looking humanoids, light-sensitive Sumerians as it turns out. The film is drenched is various levels of gratuitous violence and inexplicable adventures. The improbability of the storyline is only matched by the horrendous special effects, which turn out to be a flashlight. As a kid, we called this genre of film a “monster” movie in our own naive and simplistic way. Monsters were everywhere back in the 50’s and 60’s when this movie was made–middle of the Cold War, actually. We couldn’t defeat our monsters in real life, so we created troubling rubber-masked non-human monsters to populate the twilight zone of our subconscious. The weird light-fearing albinos and their slaves are thwarted, and the modern world of science and reason are re-established before the crowd walks back out into the real world of mutually ensured self-destruction of the nuclear age–slavery of another kind.

On the Borg

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Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.

On the Borg

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Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.

On Mae West

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She was clearly ahead of her time. Mae West was a liberated woman who loved sex and didn’t give a damn who knew it. Unshackled by the bonds of matrimony (although officially married twice), she had as many boyfriends as she cared to have and was completely unapologetic about any of it. Feared by many, despised by some, men wanted to be with her (and so did a few women) and women secretly wanted to be like her. Her blond hair and hourglass figure were her luxurious trademarks, and she made no bones about being an actress or that her acting was any good. She was just herself and that was enough. What gave her freedom from the repressive American society out of which she grew was her debonaire attitude of sophisticated charm, her sexy double entendres, and that shape. She was an original and that is what made her special. She was unashamedly and unabashedly herself regardless to whom she was talking. Hounded by groups who would censor her act, she never feigned decency or politically correct behavior because she didn’t care what the world thought of her. She knew that men desired her open and blatant sexuality, and she also knew that women feared her independence and liberation from the shackles of a repressive society that normally did not allow her kind of lifestyle. She rejected the hypocrisy of puritanical America, shunned monogamy as anachronistic and limiting, had sex with whom she wanted. What is so remarkable about her as a person and an entertainer is her charismatic ability to charm, entice, seduce just about everyone in the room. She was dead sure of herself as a woman, and she wasn’t going to let anyone around her forget who was in charge. The Hayes Bureau tried, often, to censor both her language and actions, and they often succeeded, but having watched her movies, I realize that it was her personae as the independent, liberated, sexual being that they could not contain, hold or censor. Her famous tag line, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime” is loaded with sexual innuendo and bravado: she is the sexually active predator looking for some new action. This is her pick-up line. She says, “Honey, when I’m good, I’m good, but when I’m bad, I’m very good.” Implicit in her double entendre is a flawless reference to her own raw sexuality. When a young lady sees Mae for the first time, she exclaims, “Goodness,” to which Mae responds, “Darling, goodness had nothing to do with it.” The liberated sexuality of Mae West lies in stark contrast to the repressed Victorianism of the early Thirties that was just recovering from flappers and the wide-open partying of the Roaring Twenties. No one could contain Mae West, and she could steal a scene from heavyweights such as W. C. Fields or Cary Grant simply because she was so outrageously open about who she was. Contemporary performers such as Madonna or Cher could only wish they had the energy of this all-star diva.

On Mae West

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She was clearly ahead of her time. Mae West was a liberated woman who loved sex and didn’t give a damn who knew it. Unshackled by the bonds of matrimony (although officially married twice), she had as many boyfriends as she cared to have and was completely unapologetic about any of it. Feared by many, despised by some, men wanted to be with her (and so did a few women) and women secretly wanted to be like her. Her blond hair and hourglass figure were her luxurious trademarks, and she made no bones about being an actress or that her acting was any good. She was just herself and that was enough. What gave her freedom from the repressive American society out of which she grew was her debonaire attitude of sophisticated charm, her sexy double entendres, and that shape. She was an original and that is what made her special. She was unashamedly and unabashedly herself regardless to whom she was talking. Hounded by groups who would censor her act, she never feigned decency or politically correct behavior because she didn’t care what the world thought of her. She knew that men desired her open and blatant sexuality, and she also knew that women feared her independence and liberation from the shackles of a repressive society that normally did not allow her kind of lifestyle. She rejected the hypocrisy of puritanical America, shunned monogamy as anachronistic and limiting, had sex with whom she wanted. What is so remarkable about her as a person and an entertainer is her charismatic ability to charm, entice, seduce just about everyone in the room. She was dead sure of herself as a woman, and she wasn’t going to let anyone around her forget who was in charge. The Hayes Bureau tried, often, to censor both her language and actions, and they often succeeded, but having watched her movies, I realize that it was her personae as the independent, liberated, sexual being that they could not contain, hold or censor. Her famous tag line, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime” is loaded with sexual innuendo and bravado: she is the sexually active predator looking for some new action. This is her pick-up line. She says, “Honey, when I’m good, I’m good, but when I’m bad, I’m very good.” Implicit in her double entendre is a flawless reference to her own raw sexuality. When a young lady sees Mae for the first time, she exclaims, “Goodness,” to which Mae responds, “Darling, goodness had nothing to do with it.” The liberated sexuality of Mae West lies in stark contrast to the repressed Victorianism of the early Thirties that was just recovering from flappers and the wide-open partying of the Roaring Twenties. No one could contain Mae West, and she could steal a scene from heavyweights such as W. C. Fields or Cary Grant simply because she was so outrageously open about who she was. Contemporary performers such as Madonna or Cher could only wish they had the energy of this all-star diva.

On daydreaming

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Can it really be that bad? I mean, it´s only a few minutes, to let your focus go, to let the mind drift, your eyes close a bit, and at least for a short while, you really don’t care about your surroundings. You slowly relax, your muscles go slack, your blood pressure drops, but you aren’t quite asleep either. You are dreaming wide awake. Background sounds do not disturb you, and other people and places invade your waking dream–a street in another town, a sunlit terrace in another country, a foggy mountain meadow, a neon-darkened subway, a busy county fair, a smoke-filled bar in an eastern port, an air-conditioned kitchen with an apple pie cooling on the counter, a rainy Sunday afternoon in May, a dark alley in a small Midwestern town. You tumble through time and come out in another life, a dingy office that smells of stale smoke and sweat. You don’t know the raven-haired beauty that just walked into your office, but she spells trouble. You can smell her perfume, lilacs and roses, and you don’t like it. That skirt couldn’t be tighter or shorter and still be a skirt. She wants to smoke a cigarette, and she fidgets with a lighter, but you have no ashtray. Her voice is husky and rough and you have no idea what she is talking about, but she reminds you of a case you solved in Chinatown, and you’re already thinking you want no part of this fiasco. A stiff drink would go down pretty well about now. The siren of an ambulance haunts your conversation. Something about her little sister, something about an older man, but none of it makes much sense. A sad song that plays too well on the mean streets of this city of angels. I recognize the surname and wonder what she’s doing slumming here in my office. Dirty work is only done by a dirty detective. She’s the daughter of a retired oil tycoon, she needs help, but this can only end badly…and the phone rings. “Hello, no, this is not the ticket office, no, I don’t know the right number. Yeah, bye.” And it’s over.

On Clue (game and movie)

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I think that Miss Scarlett did it with the revolver in the library. Clue is a very funny board game, and an even funnier movie. Everything is based on the conventions of the standard detective novel a la Christie or Hammett, and both game players and viewers expect that a solution will be reached, the guilty discovered, and punishment doled out. We depend on the conventions of detective fiction to rebuild our broken and chaotic world. We cannot depend on real-life crimes to be solved, so we resort to the world of fiction where the truth can actually be known. Clue is a fantasy in which players work to reorder a world that is torn by conflict, strife, and betrayal. The game is played out on board which is the floor plan for a rather extravagant large mansion, including secret passage ways, a billiard room, a conservatory, a lounge, and a ballroom. I dare say that most players cannot relate to this floor plan, further pushing the game into the realm of fantasy and further removing it from the verisimilitude of daily life. In other words, solutions to real problems are not forthcoming, but in the fantasy world of the extremely rich, crimes get solved and the world has order. Not only would players love to live in an orderly world where the wicked are punished and crime does not pay, they would also like to live in the opulent world signified by the game board. The real world, which has nothing to do with the “Clue” world, is filled with unsolved crimes, violent murders, and the daily grind, which includes work, family and routine. The game of Clue is about solving a murder, but there really is no blood or gore or tragedy. After the first game is over, you simply reshuffle and move on. The 1985 movie, Clue, inspired by the board game, is a wonderfully subversive commentary on opulence, corruption, power, violence and treachery. All of characters are there from the board game, but this time they have back stories, their paths are inter-related, everybody lies, no one is innocent, and the entire movie completely subverts the detective novel genre by offering three possible endings with three possible culprits. In other words, there is no way of really knowing who did it. The characters are all cynical and dark, sarcastic and jaded. In the end, there really isn’t a solution since they are all guilty and a solution that would put one or another in jail is foiled. None of characters is worth salvaging, communism is a red-herring, and they all amount to a bunch of lying, corrupt capitalists who are neither redeemable nor worthy of further consideration. The movie is a wicked spin on the board game because it doesn’t resolved a crime, murder is just convenient, and people are disposable. Further, this entire dead end scenario is played out in the opulence of decadent free-wheeling capitalist success. People are meant to be used and thrown away, murder is most foul but it happens, and redemption may not be possible. Although I do suspect Miss Scarlett, I also think Colonel Mustard is looking awfully suspicious as well.

On airports

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Oh, how I love going to the airport. I both love and hate airports at the same time. On the one hand, the aesthetics of airports are horrific at best, at worst they are cross between the Inquisitions dungeon and public courthouse designed by drunk engineers (why are there nothing but foyers in this building?). I am imagining that airports are hard to design because you have to be able to park airplanes outside the building, but you also must manage foot traffic to the tune of hundreds of thousands a day. These requirements are not compatible. So the architecture stinks, the chairs are not comfortable, the bathrooms are lousy, the restaurants, with a couple of exceptions, are awful and expensive, a beer costs twelve dollars, Micky D’s makes the hamburgers, the bookstores only have the latest bestsellers, the candy is overpriced and stale, and those little carts that run up and down the concourses are trying to run you down. Even going to Starbucks is of little comfort. And then there are the endless gate changes and waiting, the flat-screened televisions tuned to CNN, the crying babies, the announcements for other people’s flights. I swear if I didn’t know any better that this is the second ring of hell in Dante’s Inferno, right next to the hedonists and the gossips. All of this after you passed through security. And the dramas: airports are full of lost people, lonely people, sad people, crazy people, crazy business people, people who should be on meds, in a hurry people, passive people and strange people. And what about the first time flyers who think they have just landed in the middle of an insane video game with no way out? The cast of characters is almost inexhaustible, but if it exists, you will see it an airport. If I run into Captain Renault and Rick, I’ll take a picture. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, the problems of two people really don’t amount to a hill of beans. And the people carrying the family chihuahua in a neat little case? Finally, I will get in line, go through the gate, and get on my plane, and isn’t that the ultimate function of any airport? Get me where I’m going? Enough said

On "The Hunger Games" (movie)

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My son is a huge fan of The Hunger Games trilogy, so the family went to the movies last night. Though I wouldn’t say that the film is brilliant, it is very good, and although “subtle” is not the word that most would use to describe the movie, there was a lot of subtle commentary on the culture of television, reality tv specifically, fascism, slavery, personal sacrifice, class conflict and the role of violence in pop culture. Indeed, the movie was very violent and ended up being a riff on itself and the exploitation of violence as a marketing tool to get people to watch something so sponsors can sell their stuff. I took careful note last night as to whom was sponsoring commercials in the movie theater before the movie began. The Hunger Games is about a completely secular society that represses and exploits others so that they may lead a life of leisure and luxury; imagine if Rome had never fallen but had continued to flourish into the 21st century. The “Capital” culture exploits the outlying “districts” so that they may follow a life of wealth, power, hedonism, and luxury. The outlying districts are, more or less, living hand to mouth to do the work that ensures the luxurious lifestyles of the Capital. The movie starts in District 12, the designated coal mining region which supplies all of the coal which keeps the lights on in the capital. The exploitation of the workers is ensured by a faceless army of thugs and brutes which rule through violence and fear. The government is fascist writ large. There is no democratic process to ensure any kind of representation, and there are no checks and balances which might curtail corruption or exploitation. The actual “Hunger Games” is an exercise in ritual murder turned into a reality television show, and the participants–all of whom will be violently murdered–are chosen via lottery (wink and nod to Shirley Jackson)–two from each district. The last man standing is turned into a pop celebrity for “winning” the Hunger Games. Tip of the hat to Woody Harrelson for bringing life to a cynical alcoholic ex-winner of the games from District 12. The main character is a reincarnation of Diana the Huntress, who begins the film by sacrificing herself to save her little sister who has been chosen to participate in the macabre reality show of violent death, mutilation, suffering, and cruelty which is being staged for the entertainment of the Capital, and for the humiliation of the districts. No spoilers here. Watch it, read it, but remember, this is strong stuff–not for the weak of heart.