The Power of Bad Movies

I always seem prone to picking up new popular cultural obsessions and giving my life over to them.  Right now I am doing this with podcasts about bad movies.  This summer I discovered The Flop House, and during the week I took care of the girls while my wife was out of town, I probably listened to the bulk of the episodes.  Recently I have also picked up on the different but equally stellar We Hate Movies.  Both have the same essential premise: three guys get together and make jokes and wisecracks about a crummy movie they saw.  The Flop House looks only at newly released critical and commericial failures, whereas We Hate Movies only takes up films made more than ten years ago (except for special request month.)

I tend to have seen more of the movies that the guys at We Hate Movies rip, because I grew up in a small town where the video store provided the locus of entertainment.  For that reason, I saw a whole lot of movies of varying quality released between 1983 and 1994.  My whole family did martial arts for a few years in the 80s, so I saw a lot of films along the lines of Best of the Best and No Retreat, No Surrender.  These days my tastes are discerning, so The Flop House reminds me that I'm not missing much by limiting myself to art house and foreign films.

That said, these podcasts have given me more appreciation for bad movies.  Watching and hearing others talk about these films is a great way to think about what makes good movies good.  For instance, I re-watched LA Confidential recently, and noticed more than before the narrative and cinematic choices  made by the film-makers.  It avoided easy melodrama, allowed for moral ambiguity, and steered clear of cliches.  These podcasts also help me think about how many great films have bad elements that they are able to overcome.  For example, the dialogue in Star Wars is pretty laughable at points, but it's something I chuckle about, not fixate on, unlike the awful dialogue in Attack of the Clones. The other elements of that film were pretty rotten, too.

I also get a kind of strange kick out of seeing a truly awful film, since the worst of the worst are unique in their wretchedness.  There is simply no other film that duplicates Manos, Hands of Fate.  Nothing in this world will ever be as good as that film is bad, which is a true statement about the fallen-ness of humanity if there ever was one.

Five Bad Movies I'd Recommend Seeing
Some of these films are so bad that they have to be seen to be believed, while others are awful movies with flecks of truly transcendent goodness in them.

1.  Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
I wrote one of my favorite blog posts about this one once.  It both desecrated the Beatles album of the same name and helped wreck the careers of the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, which I guess was only karmic payback.  Ever wanted to see George Burns sing "Fixing a Hole" or Billy Preston perform a resurrection or Carol Channing dance in a big musical number with a bunch of C-list 70s celebrities?  Well this is the movie for you.

2.  Roadhouse
I am still amazed that this was made by a major studio in the 1980s.  It's wall to wall booze, boobs, and brawls with a monster truck crushing cars and Patrick Swayze tearing out somebody's throat.  Roadhouse is basically the magnum opus of dumbass, cornpone backwoods hick culture.  (As someone who comes from the boondocks, I feel I am specially qualified to make that assertion.)

3.  Manos, Hands of Fate
This was most definitely not put out by a major studio, and I was first introduced to it through Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Watching it is actually painful, it hurts.  Someway, somehow this awful still manages to be scarier that The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby put together, in that you wonder about how the people who participated in it survived with their sanity intact.  (Evidently the guy who played Torgo suffered injuries from his fake goat legs and later killed himself, a fact that I can't avoid when I watch this.)

4.  Convoy
Sometimes a great film-maker falls on hard times and has to do a little hackwork.  By the late 1970s Sam Peckinpaugh probably had more tequila than blood running in his veins, and had pretty much pissed off and alienated everyone he worked with.  With the runaway success of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977, Convoy appeared a year later as the inevitable rip-off/cashgrab, and Peckinpaugh was pulled off of a barstool somewhere to helm it.  Instead of Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, and Sally Field, it features Kris Kristofferson, Ernest Borgnine, and Ali McGraw in a bad perm.  The movie looks awful, it's way too long, and the pacing is way off for an action film.  It's as if Peckinpaugh took the anti-authority message of the film way too seriously.  In objective terms this movie is hack, rip-off rubbish, but when viewed as the dying statement of a great artist working with crummy material, it moves me.

5.  Heaven's Gate
This 1981 Michael Cimino western epic became famous as the biggest flop in Hollywood history, and contributed to the decline of the power of directors in Hollywood.  It has become fashionable among cineastes to defend it as unfairly vilified.  However, make no mistake, Heaven's Gate is still a really bad movie.  The pacing is awful, the characters thinly drawn (especially the immigrant farmers), and the whole thing is just as ponderous as an elephant with gout.  However, it is shot beautifully, with some of the best cinematography I have seen in any movie, ever.  This is one where I like to watch individual scenes and just luxuriate in their beauty, and lament that such sublimity was not paired with story or acting.  It's one of those few bad movies where I watch it and think of how good it could have been.

Two Tactics For Dealing With Your Reactionary Relatives Tomorrow

I come from a very large extended family where the vast majority of folks are very conservative, which means political conversations end up with me being ganged up on.  The election of 2000 pretty much ruined Thanksgiving that year because the topic kept coming up in conversation, and I kept getting into fights about it.  After that I learned two tactics that have led to more peace and enjoyable holidays.  Perhaps they can help you, too.

Tactic #1: Pacifism
This is the stance I tend to use the most.  There is actually an informal truce between my parents and I when it comes to talking about politics, but my other relatives are not as mindful.  When they start bringing this stuff up I usually first tell them "I don't want to talk about it."  If that doesn't work, I say "I disagree with you, but I'd rather not get into it."  In the very rare cases where that does not bring an end to it, I just get up and leave the room.  It can be very difficult to take this course, since it means holding one's tongue in the face of outrageous or even offensive statements,  Over the years I've learned I can't change their minds, that they take any political arguments personally, and that deep down we love each other and just want to have a pleasant time together.  Why destroy that trying to reason with someone who spews Fox News talking points?

Tactic #2: Massive Retaliation
Sometimes I resort to this tactic, usually when someone brings up something political apropos of nothing, and in a way that is offensive or a personal affront.  For example, one of my cousins responded to the use of racial slurs by one of our uncles by yelling at him to knock it off and never use those words in front of her children again.  (It actually worked!)  This summer another uncle was goading me about how great Chris Christie is, and after refusing to relent when I tried to change the subject, I just unloaded about how insensitive he was to the fact that my wife is a New Jersey teacher and that he has been scapegoating people like her with his blustering rhetoric and that his policies had actually taken money out of my family's pockets.  He was pretty taken aback at my passion, and just dropped it.  This tactic doesn't work well with things like the Affordable Care Act, but sometimes is necessary when confronted by birthers, Christian dominionists, or Trayvon haters.  You shouldn't even have to listen to that kind of bullshit.

Packing My Winter Survival Kit

It looks like winter has come early this year, if the recent cold temperatures here in New Jersey are any indication.  The older I get, the more I dislike winter.  I actually really loved it growing up, since it meant building snow forts, sledding, and staying indoors to play Connect Four and Battleship during recess.  Nowadays I have a little PTSD from my two winters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where over 100 inches of snow fell both times and the sun came out maybe twice between Halloween and Easter.  After living in Michigan I spent three years in Texas, and really got used to not really having winter.  That experience has drastically reduced my tolerance for cold and lack of sunshine.

To survive winter with my mental state intact, I've started assembling a winter survival kit of things that will make the next few months bearable.  It follows, organized by category.

Food
Certain foods seem to be meant for winter, where they warm both the body and the soul.  Oatmeal and grits thus become especially important at breakfast, when my stomach requires something hot.  This time of year I make a lot of chili, which always seems to lift my spirits.  In recent years I have also delved into the world of root vegetables, whose hearty warmth spreads throughout my limbs whenever I eat them.  My favorite is carrot-rutabega mash, but I also like to make parsnips, turnips, and sweet potatoes.  Soups and stews beyond chili are necessary for survival, and this time of year my shadow haunts Vietnamese restaurants, where I can savor a big old steaming bowl of pho.  There's practically nothing better on a cold dark afternoon, except maybe lamb stew.

Beer
Speaking of lamb stew, dark beers are a winter favorite for me as well.  Something about stout and porter especially fit the cold short days and freezing long nights, but I'll grab a bottle of Bell's Brown Ale in a heartbeat.  Other favorites for this time of year are the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter by Great Lakes Brewing Company, Yeti Imperial Stout by Great Divide, Samuel Smith's oatmeal stout, and The Kaiser by Avery, which we used to call "the ole ass-kicker" when I lived in Michigan.

Whiskey
I don't really drink a lot of whiskey during most of the year, but I go through quite a bit in winter time.  Many a night in a frigid apartment has been soothed by the golden glow of Irish whiskey.  While Jameson and Tullamore Dew were my first whiskies, recently I have been delving into bourbon, and the right kind of bourbon can unlock the same glowing fire inside.  These days I have become a fan of Old Grand-Dad, which has a wintry flavor (can't quite explain it) that survives mixing and costs only twenty bucks a bottle.  It's what I call a switch-hitting bourbon, in that it's good for mixing but rough enough not to make mixing a travesty, and yet smooth and tasty enough to stand on its own.

Music
The right music is absolutely essential for making it through winter.  It has to speak to the season's difficulties, and the sad feelings that are more likely to wrap themselves around my mind.  I tend to listen to a lot of folk-inflected music, especially Leonard Cohen's first album, Tim Buckley, Fairport Convention, Richard and Linda Thompson, and Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan's first album, which is just about as perfect as winter music gets.  In addition to this stuff, I also go with The Smiths, Joy Division (super wintry), The Velvet Underground (whose drones are like a space heater for my soul), and early Miles Davis.  I have spent many evenings shivering under a blanket listening to 'Round Midnight, which is less an album than a kind of medicated musical balm.

Clothing
Keeping warm is the operating principle behind my winter survival kit, and clothing its most crucial component.  I tend to wear a lot of sweaters, the thicker the better.  A cable knit sweater my wife got my for my birthday has reminded me why I like that genre of sweater so much for the winter time.  Over the years I have also built up a large supply of cardigans, which are an easy thing to grab when you need a little warmth.  I also go with lots and lots of flannel, shirts in the day and pajamas at night.  At those times when it is necessary to venture outdoors, I always have on a hat (tweed usually) and scarf.  Until the last few years I was not a scarf-wearer, but my two winters in Michigan cured me of that shortcoming right quick.  Slippers always get lost, so I like to slip on a pair of wool socks, they certainly make walking on the cold tile in the kitchen and bathroom less trying.

Anything in your own winter survival kits that I'm missing here?

Track of the Week: William DeVaughn, "Be Thankful For What You Got"

In the past six or seven years I've spent a lot of time listening to obscure soul music of the 70s.  It all started one day at a record store in Grand Rapids where the clerk was spinning a Brunswick Records comp that I immediately picked up after hearing the amazing "I Had It All The Time" by Tyrone Davis.  That era created so much great soul music that the oldies and R&B stations I've listened to over the years could barely scratch the surface.  For that reason, I keep falling in love with new songs from the genre.

I heard "Be Thankful For What You Got" on WFMU this weekend, and was instantly transfixed by its tight groove and cooler than cool feel.  I also thought it had an appropriate message for this Thanksgiving week.  Sometimes I wonder if the message of Thanksgiving serves the powers that be, in that we all focus on what we have, and not on what's being taken away from us.  I then remind myself that I am pretty damn lucky.  I have a true life partner, two healthy daughters, a job I love, and a lot fewer money worries than I used to.  It's when I say these things that I worry that Thanksgiving can quickly turn into a smug exercise in self-satisfaction. I guess I'll just tone down the "I'm so thankful for" stuff and groove to this song while wishing y'all a happy Thanksgiving.

The Pleasures of a Good Diner

This morning I went with my wife and daughters to a local diner for breakfast, one of my favorite Saturday morning traditions.  When I was single I would walk or drive down to the diner with a newspaper and read and eat at a leisurely pace, enjoying the onset of the weekend.  Nowadays I appreciate diners because they are very kid friendly.  The food comes out fast, it pleases my daughters, and the loud noise of the diner makes any crying or fussing much less embarrassing to me and bothersome to others.

A good diner is truly something to be cherished.  Our diner of choice this morning was Tops, in East Newark near the mighty Passaic River.  Unlike many other diners, their coffee is really good, and the interior is sophisticated and kept spic and span.  Just down the road in North Arlington sits the North Arlington Diner, where my wife and I had shared some important conversations in our early courtship.  I'd much rather have moments like that in a place with advertisements for local businesses on the placemats, rather than a swank joint with fancy napkins and low light.  You can take the boy out of the rural lower-middle class, but you can't take the rural lower-middle class out of the boy.

It is a truly lucky twist of fate that I have landed in New Jersey, where diner culture is still going strong.  In other places where I've lived my diners went into extinction, here they thrive.  Outsiders i.e. snooty New Yorkers, might take the proliferation of diners in the Garden State to be a sign of Jersey's lack of sophistication, but I see it as quite the opposite.  Instead of going to Applebee's or McDonald's, people here would rather have a homier, higher-quality breakfast experience.

Over the years I've put some thought into what makes a good diner, and here are the criteria I've come up with:

Friendly Atmosphere
When I lived by myself diners were the kinds of places where I could eat out alone, but not be alone.  I would strike up conversations with the other customers at the counter with the wait staff.  Nowadays this friendliness comes out at places like the Parkwood Diner in Maplewood, where folks will smile at our daughters or ask how old they are. This is the type of thing that doesn't happen at other kinds of restaurants.  The classic Barry Levinson flick Diner is centered around diner conversations, I could never imagine a film called Bistro or Gastropub.

Skilled Staff
Since diner food is pretty predictable, the service at diners is what really distinguishes them.  In my experience, I've had the best service in diners, even though diner staff get lower tips because the food is cheaper.  (Which is an argument against tipping and for paying wait staff a higher base salary, but I digress.)  At my old place in Chicago, The Salonica, they pretty much knew what I was going to order when I walked in the door.  At the Grand Coney in Grand Rapids I don't think I was ever allowed to get to the bottom of a cup of coffee before it was refilled.

Decent Coffee
One regrettable fact about diners is that many of them have been slow to reflect the Great American Coffee Revolution of the past twenty years, where even gas station coffee has improved.  Some places, like the aforementioned Tops, actually have good coffee, but at most others it's bland, watered down Folger's crystals.  Sometimes I would just have my coffee at home, and then go to the diner and just have water or orange juice.  If you happen to find a diner with legitimately good coffee, hold on to it.

Unique Menu
Diner fare is pretty standard, but the better diners will have some menu items unique to their establishment.  At Mary Ann's in Champaign-Urbana they have a heart-clogging mechanism called the haystack which consists of a hamburger over biscuits topped with a haystack of hash browns slathered in white gravy.  It sounds gross, but hits the spot at 2AM.

The Corned Beef Hash Test
I have been to good diners, but I've also been to the kind bad diner described by Tom Waits where everything comes out of tin cans.  At the good places the food tastes fresh and made with care.  To determine whether a diner does take the proper attitude towards its food, I give it the corned beef hash test.  It's a dish I love for breakfast, but is so often just dumped out of a can at lesser diners.  At a fine establishment like Tops, however, you can actually see and taste real pieces of corned beef.  Many diners have passed this test, and they live on in my heart like old friends.

The "Nuclear Option" Should Just Be The Beginning

Today Harry Reid finally utilized the so-called "nuclear option" to end the unprecedented number of filibusters of executive appointees by Senate Republicans, which have hampered the president's basic power to govern the country.  I laugh at the term "nuclear option," since most people would term it "common sense."  How does it make any sense in a democracy for a minority to prohibit the basic functions of government because it wants to throw a temper tantrum?  Republicans warn Democrats that they could well soon be in the minority, but so what?  Isn't it about time we recognized that we shouldn't govern purely based on partisan concerns?

Our system of government in obviously broken, something easily proven by the federal shutdown this fall and the ability of individual Senators to put "holds" on nominations without even providing a reason.  The Senate likes to think of itself as "the world's greatest deliberative" body, which is a complete joke.  Can anyone tell me the last time we had a profound debate of any sort in the Senate?  Has there ever been a use of the filibuster which was not negative?  I ask the latter question having recently read Joe Crespino's fantastic Strom Thurmond's America, where the titular Senator used the filibuster to slow down civil rights legislation and defeat card check union elections.  The Senate consists of a bunch of venal blow-hards who love nothing more than the sound of their own vacuous voices.  Despite acting like a bull in a china shop, Ted Cruz fits right in there.

I would be happy to find a way to scrap the current set of Senate rules completely.  They are a relic from a time when the Senators were not even elected by the people, and these rules have traditionally been manipulated by reactionaries to stop popular legislation that they don't like.  Make the Senate like any other legislative upper house, and force it to actually do its job.  It needs to generate laws, not hot air.  In any case, these rules were never voted on by the people, nor are they part of the Constitution, and thus seem to have little to no democratic validity in my eyes.

The House could use some changes, too.  Above all, it actually needs to be representative of the people.  The current partisan mess has left Congress just about as popular as athlete's foot and root canals, yet the same shysters get re-elected.  The iron-clad nature of legislative districting has a lot to do with this.  When the founders gave state legislatures the power to create districts, I don't think they had any notion of gerrymandering, yet 200 laters we still haven't fixed that awful mistake. California has put districting in non-partisan hands, and this has both made districts more representative, and politicians more responsive.

When it comes to political and social reform, our nation seems to be sleepwalking.  Instead of holding onto moldy, failed political traditions like the Senate rules or state legislatures setting up legislative districts, we need to break free of them.  Rather than bitching about the awfulness of Congress before pulling the lever for the same old jerks, we need to find ways to make Congress more accountable.  Hopefully today will be a solid first step.

My Top Five Favorite British Character Actors

On a whim this not so long ago I decided to watch the original Star Wars (I absolutely refuse to call it Episode IV: A New Hope), and realized how the film's often silly dialogue is saved by the talents of British actors like Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness. Just think about how hokey phrases like "The Force can have a strong influence on the weak minded" would sound without Guinness' masterful delivery. As Grand Moff Tarkin (what the hell is a Grand Moff, anyway?) Cushing's rolled "r"s and clipped diction manage to skirt the border with camp without quite crossing it. British actors who scored lead roles like Guinness, Laurence Olivier, Richard Harris, and Michael Caine are well known, but we should remember the lesser known thespians who in some ways are just as memorable. In that spirit, here are my top five favorite British character actors.

1. Donald Pleasance. Was there ever a creepier voice in the history of cinema than that of Donald Pleasance? Only Peter Lorre comes close. (Don't believe me? Listen to him in this scary British PSA.) Pleasance was in a bajillion movies, but I'll never forget him as the president in Escape From New York (in my opinion the best of all the post-apocalyptic films of the early 1980s.) Not only is he believable as the president, he is actually believable as the president spraying machine gun fire at the Duke of New York, not an easy thing to pull off. He was perhaps the only think about the Sgt. Pepper motion picture that did not completely suck. And oh yeah, he was the first actor to fully portray the ultimate Bond villain, Blofeld.

2. Rachel Roberts. Roberts appears in two of the greatest British realist films, one of my favorite genres. As I mentioned awhile back, Roberts' performance in This Sporting Life is one for the ages. Nobody has ever done a better job of portraying someone whose self-hatred destroys her ability to love. She does a great job in a less gut-wrenching role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Her best performance, however, came in Picnic at Hanging Rock, where she managed to center one of the most mysterious films ever made as a bitter school headmistress.

3. Christopher Lee. Of all the great Brit character actors of the World War II generation, none has had as much recent fame as Christopher Lee. He managed to get sizable roles in the two biggest film trilogies of the last decade, the Star Wars prequels and The Lord of the Rings, as Count Dukoo and Sauruman, respectively. In the latter roles he wrings every inch of menace out of lines like "you have chosen the way of pain" (which pretty much sums up a decision to go to grad school.) As Dukoo he was one of the few things that made Attack of the Clones bearable. This prominent work has introduced him to generations wholly ignorant of his many classic roles in the old Hammer horror films, which alone get him on this list. His Dracula is a pitiless killing machine who would eat Edward for lunch and have Bella for dessert.  I also highly enjoy his turn as the titular Bond villain in The Man with the Golden Gun, which he saves from utter crapitude.

4. Tom Wilkinson. After watching, of all things, Duplicity a few years ago I remembered just how great an actor Tom Wilkinson is. (I know of no other Brit so good at portraying Americans.) I first saw him as the uptight former supervisor in The Full Monty, where he managed to play a sympathetic ass, which is quite a tightrope act.  His puffy, pompous interpretation of General Cornwallis is also the only redeemable thing about The Patriot.

5. Denis Lawson. Okay, so he may not be the most distinguished guy on this list, but Denis Lawson did indeed play Wedge Antilles in all of the original Star Wars flicks. Wedge was the only minor character to appear in all three films, so Lawson can definitely hold onto that. (I'm sure sci-fi convention appearances will pay for his retirement.) During my Charles Dickens craze in the late oughts I looked up the most recent British TV adaptation of Bleak House (my fave Dickens novel), and he absolutely nailed the part of John Jarndyce. How many other people can look natural both in an X-Wing cockpit and wearing a Victorian cravat?