Gummo (1997)

Sometimes, a work takes on a significance far beyond that of its creator and, morseo, beyond its creator's "intent," artisitic or otherwise. Harmony Korine's Gummo is such a thing that, while buried in the hipster tradition of dogme95's DIY style over substance, endures as an artisitc statement a decade or so after its initial release. Following from the conceit that the critic is the superior judge of meaning and value, what makes it so is its religious submission to a greater will - Nature/God - that washes away the dregs of the world, these unfortunate situations and circumstances of disgust.

South Park - Best Ever (47 - 50)

47. Pre-School (Season 8, Episode 10)

The voices of angels and the mouths of sailors. Indeed, and the pre-school versions of the boys are no less the little bastards we’ve come to know and love.

“What do you shitheads want?” -4 yr old Trent Boyet


48. Weight Gain 4000 (Season 1, Episode 02)

Already with this the second episode to air in the show’s running history, the platform is laid out for Cartman as the antagonistic anti-hero who calls it like he sees it, and the boys + Wendy to keep him in line and keep the show PC.

“Dolphins, eskimos, who cares. It’s all a bunch of tree-hugging hippie crap.” -Cartman
“Dolphins are stupid. […] If they’re so damn smart, how come they get caught in those fishing nets all the time?” -Cartman


49. Cartman’s Silly Hate Crime 2000 (Season 4, Episode 02)

Crap jokes really are the best, and Cartman proves here that elaborate crap jokes are the way forward for humanity.

“Why don’t you chicks go wash some dishes or get pregnant or something.” -Cartman


50. Chickenpox (Season 2, Episode 10)

Got herpes? Get it while you're young.

"See that X-Ray, that's your ass. See that line, that's your ass collapsing." -Terrence, to Philip

"Seriously, you better stop being so poor or else I'm gonna start hucking rocks at you." -Cartman

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Series: Beauty and the Beast (2012 -)

Shows like these are what makes - I'd imagine - being an elitist media critic worthwhile: every scene is an open invitation to be reamed several layers of new asshole. From the plastic performances of the lead actors to the general inane tone of the whole charade, it makes you wonder why anyone other than 13 year old girls would watch (my excuse: someone else had it on, I just happened to be there).

A cute guy concedes with embarrassed indignation: "I'm not Batman," not once but twice, then explains how he goes out into the night NOT looking to save others from trouble but, you know (helldamnit!), it just finds him. Later, we cut and pan to a man/beast concealed in a dark corner, "vulnerable" and ready for the heart melting Disney moment.

See, it's Smallville meets Monk meets Twilight, but it's probably worse than all three. If Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman from the 80s original were Gorgeous and Powerful (probably not, but we're talking comparison), Kirsten Kreuk and whatshisname are Faint and Curious.

There's absolutely nothing to like or recommend about this. At all. Probably there are 100 other similar series that are better. Every emotion is phoned in, every plot point is a rehash of dumb things you've seen before, every conclusion is a painful wince (see piles of reaming above). Even its "innocence" (the naive romance) cannot compare to the original series, because if it's not insincere, it's still plastic.

Kirsten Kreuk the person is blessed with physical beauty, and AnonymousBeefcake is surely a beastly presence in his own right/mind, but that's about all this massive feast of pointlessness can attest to. And they say nihilism is for the marginalized.

Punch Drunk Love (2001)

Punch Drunk Love is what Anger Management could have been: a careful study of the explosive and hilarious effects of pent up anger and frustration as best exemplified by the enigma that is Adam Sandler. More than that, it's a genuinely funny romantic comedy that has the audacity to find meaning in a simple but interesting tale of two people looking for love, instead of, as is par for the course, hamfisting through genre conventions to reach foregone conclusions. It also has the piece of mind to be restrained enough so as not to pull a single unearned gag, yet boasts tragicomic hilarity to rival or better any comedy of the past few decades.

Barry (Sandler) runs his own business, supplying as it happens, among other things, decorative plungers, and comes to work in a brilliant blue suit. He's a lonely guy, naturally, whose quiet resentment of the bullying of his (seven) sisters occasionally explodes into childish but violent fits of anger. Meanwhile, lonely Lena (Emma Watson) as much as forces Barry on a date, because he's too retarded to act on her obvious carnal calls. Similarly, she must be crazy or desperate to chase after this wacko who shows every sign of being unstable. Or maybe it's the nerves of meeting cute, rattling them to overlook the negatives and jump in and go for it: punch drunk love. In any case it's chaos, but it's organised, and it's funny. As the torrent builds, we get a series of confessions of quaintly, faintly, and truly embarrassing secrets.

Sandler's best performance - ever - thanks to director P.T. Anderson whose pacing is, as always, painfully precise, yet ebbs naturally, most notably with Sandler and his bursts of anger. The quirks, from the clarinet like a bottle out of the sky to the improv "ticks"* to the clickety urban jazz score to the seeming random camera pans and low angle shots and... you get the picture, they're many, and on multiple viewings they amalgamate the manifold uniqueness of a P.T. Anderson showing.

It's always a risk deeming a resolution well earned, but it's thoroughly so in this case, with a narrative that binds itself to a bacchanalial celebration of awkward romance. A true classic.

(* including those from a superb Phillip Seymour Hoffman who manages somehow, in his exchanges with Sandler himself, to draw out the unbridled animal rage of Robert Carlyle's Begbie from Trainspotting (1996))

There Will Be Blood (2007)

The silent opening sequence is an unholy baptism in the black gold welled from the hellish underground of the earth, hinting at the battle of wills in the Hell of Greed to come later on. There's an overhead shot of a pool of black death reminiscent of the birth sequences from David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977), sublimely punctuating the dank torment in an otherwise dry desert. When the conflict reaches its higher points later on, this baptism in the riches of oil and its associated evils in a burgeoning industrial age becomes first a baptism in the dregs of black shit, then a more traditional washing tainted with power politics, the outward product of both being humiliation.

Daniel Plainview, the evil bastard who sees the worst in people because he sees the worst in himself, started out just like you and me, scraping and clawing hard for "success," that vague little thing we're told will make us content. He went too far, greed got him, and all that was left was hatred (and your milkshake).

P.T. Anderson utterly impresses here, particularly with his signature use of sound and silence, and with this flick cemented himself as one of the best directors of the decade 2000 to 2009.

Videodrome (1983)

If Star Trek is for prepubescent geeks in mom's living room, and Star Wars is for the easily swayed teenage and adult-stuck-in-adolescence variety, then Videodrome is for nerds of a more refined kind, those who love the psychology and philosophy of mind and its allure to the beyond where true transcendence lay.

Max Renn wants a real looking sexual torture show called Videodrome for his sleazy television station, but when he gets hold of the elusive tape, it puts him in an ever mutating dizzy fit of headaches and hallucinations. The more he finds out about it, the more dangerous it sounds, the more he's enticed, so he confronts the people behind it, as Cronenberg adds plumage to the idea of masses of idiots getting subtle programming from the TV in delightfully bleak fashion.

"Watching TV will patch them back into the world's mixing board."

-Bianca Oblivion, Cathode Ray Mission

The first act is a sexual conception of the Videodrome virus, the second a mandatory exposition seeping it into conscious apprehension. Conscious apprehension, where it sits, waiting, as you sit inert, ready to lull you into hallucination? Perhaps, and in this way contributing, if you like, to Baudrilaude's simulacrum in an appropriately meta way: our controllers program us with media, and this film is not far from the same. But Videodrome can at least attest to some form of artistic integrity.

"The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the Videodrome."

-Brian Oblivion

Of course, Cronenberg takes it a step further to develop his metaphor of the "new flesh," the sexually initiated fusion of our technology, biology, and ideals; our ultimate destiny (desire?) being disembodied Word.

"The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. [...] television is reality, and reality is less than television."
-Brian Oblivion

"[...] public life on television [is] more real than private life in the flesh."

-Bianca Oblivion

Max is now confronted by Videodrome co-op Barry Convex, who manages to invoke the Controllers from Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World (warm, charismatic authority helping you to your quiet, sedated demise). The Videodrome tumour well into malignancy, it takes over as Max's new reality.

"Open up to me, Max."

-Barry Convex

In a memorable scene that converges the prescient running theme of virtual reality with video games itself, the crux of the "Videodrome Problem" is defined: change the program and stop the evil plans of the would-be oligarchs. In its place, the new flesh, "man's next phase as a technological animal," seems to propose little better.

"Don't be afraid to let your body die."

-Nicky Brand

Cronenberg's highpoint may well be The Fly, harrowing in its simplicity, as if a humble Kafkaesque narrative narrowed down the essence of his ideas with a brutal honesty befitting them. With Videodrome though, for a thing of its kind, there are few comparisons, as it's really one of a kind. Its catharsis is a void because it does not exist, instead requiring repeated viewings for any real meaning to be extracted, which will therefore ring intellectually. If anything, it’s a landmark film that predicts the mass hypnosis of the populace as an ever-increasing rate of proclivity toward epileptic visions of sex and violence.

"Long live the new flesh."

-Max Renn, avatar of the new flesh

The Ghost Writer (2010)

Anonymous was a hollow shadow entangled in a ghost mystery, washing down the poison of the demon with hard spirits, achieving a great secret desire of immortal ghost, finally lost in the wind as pages of stories his own only by association as shadow: so reads the epitaph of The Ghost Writer.

The plot is well detailed, but seriously non-serious. Prime Ministers suspected of foul play and putting on a face? Politics as a puppet show for the masses while secret agents conspire off-stage? All too familiar for comfort or social commentary. More interesting is The Ghost Writer as a well strung rope of Hitchockian mystery and suspense, and the comedy of a writer caught in the middle of an episode of Marriage on the Rocks. Cheers, Polanski.

The Pianist (2001)

As Adrien Brody's Wladyslaw Szpilman desperately scavenges for scraps of food in his makeshift hideout in Nazi Poland, Roman Polanski's The Pianist risks slipping into the predictable action movie it threatened to be with its run of the mill plot about the undignified oppressed, not to mention the borderline cliché classical score. Just hang in there, as the climax proves worth the suffering (yours, and Szpilman's).

How important Chopin is to the canon of Western classical music is less important than its suitability to its use in the film. The last of these you want to call the best moments of the film, but this author reserves that distinction for a sunset behind a smoky valley, full of unspoken, intangible, painful, yet satisfying, resolution.

(A man cornered against his will but keeping his reserve is also invincibly suave because he has nothing to lose. Somehow, that's what Adrien Brody's performance betrays, incidentally, but importantly.)