MEASURING FLICKS from the Depths of Detox

Here I sit, muddle-headed with my second day of the Keto flu, coming off a three-year jag of hard, dirty, unrepentant sugar addiction. Ask anyone who was with me through those bacchanalian years: I could put down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with the best of them. Sometimes two pints in a day. I’ve walked to gas stations and eaten secret pints while my wife was at work, then hidden the dead carton at the bottom the trash, so when she asked in the evening if I felt like ice cream...why, sure. Sure, I felt like ice cream.

But one can only slump half conscious in midday beds with ice cream cartons hanging out of their arm for so long, I suppose. Even the hardened sugar junkie must cry off eventually, if they’re serious about surviving their forties.

And things were starting to get a little weird.

So. Bird and I are trying out the Ketogenic diet. Switching your metabolism from carbohydrates to fats as a primary fuel source is a bit of trick, especially if the staples of your diet to date are chicken breast, spoonfuls of sugar, loaves of bread, and scotch.

Muddle headed. Weak.

Resilient.

(You’d think I banged dope half my life, the way I’m coming down off of the evil White American Powder--sugar--right now. Christ.)

Now that I’ve updated you on my diet, what else can I tell you about? Blogs are incessant streams of inanities, so...my sex life? The assorted firmnesses and/or viscosities of my last dozen shits?

Sorry: I’m feeling crappy. (Rimshot.)

Here’s the real scoop: I’m podcasting regularly again, a weekly show called Measuring Flicks that I do with my friend and fellow film-nerd, Karl Hartley. We’re watching movies that people probably haven’t seen, or, if they have, maybe didn’t fully unpack. Weird movies. Powerful movies. Complicated movies. Westerns, exploitation films, independent films, foreign films, whole runs of directors (Sophia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino are both on the docket for this season), snapshots of unusual performances by exceptional actors....

You can listen here, or on iTunes.

(I just did a quick search and discovered that you can also listen to it over on Player FM, which is odd, because I did not put it there. Ah, well, the more the merrier.)

The conversations I’ve had over the past month with Karl have been incredible. Edifying and enlightening and mentally acrobatic in a way that I don’t always get to be. It’s a rare bird that can chat its way through the sociopolitical implications of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance one day, and enthuse about the incredible mesmerism inherent in the performances of Nicholas Cage the next. Karl is such a bird.

(Bird is such a bird, more in the direction of comics and art.)

Speaking of Bird (parenthetically. Lord, I’m cheeky today), Karl and I are planning a bunch of episodes with her sitting in as a third set of particularly feminist eyes. The main show is on iTunes, but we’re doing a bunch of Patreon-exclusive episodes as well: stuff that might be a bit too much for the general public, or which doesn’t neatly fit into the boxes we’ve laid out for the first season.

The first Patreon series is going to be all four movies in the I Spit On Your Grave franchise: horror films about horrifically victimized women taking horrific their revenge on their victimizers.

It seemed timely.

So there’s Measuring Flicks. You should check it out, if you like movies (or films, or cinema), or if you like any of the other stuff I’ve done. It really is like putting my brain on display, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I have other stuff I want to tell you about, but right now, I’m fairly sure I’m dying, so racked am I by cravings for a pint of the good stuff (The Tonight Dough, my drug of choice), a lighter, a spoon.

Pray for me.

If I survive, expect lots more soon.

--Max Peterson
From the top room of an impromptu detox facility somewhere in northern southern Michigan.

V for Vendetta (2005)

I resisted seeing this movie for years. It took a glowing review from a filmmaker I respect, and steady, friendly prodding by wife (along with a Ben and Jerry’s bribe), but I finally sat down and watched it.

Context is everything with this film, so let me give you some. V for Vendetta is based off a ten-issue comic book written by Alan Moore (who so hates Hollywood’s filthy fingers on his projects that he refuses to be paid or credited for any adaptations of his work) with art by David Lloyd. It was published in the late 80s. I got a collected edition--and four volumes of The Walking Dead, another comic book that’s transitioned well to the screen--for Christmas when I was thirteen. I got the books early, at a wedding: I had the flu, and spent most of the reception in the bathroom of the hotel room I shared with my younger brother. I suppose my grandmother figured I needed something to read on the floor.

I didn’t get around to reading V for Vendetta until one o’clock in the morning. I didn’t finish it until five, delirious with exhaustion, cold medication, and the vicious little virus swirling around in my guts.

That comic book changed my life.

This was two years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, during the absolute peak of the homeland-security paranoia that followed: people were disappearing, bustled off to secret prisons; Muslims, even those born in America, were undisguised targets of racial fear and hatred everywhere we cared to look, from the street to the evening news; phones were tapped, emails were read, electric eyes watched everybody, everywhere, all the time.

And here were Alan Moore and David Lloyd, telling me all about it, shouting to me from 1989. Reading that comic changed the way I thought about government, about the relationship between consent and control, about the media, about religion, about a citizen’s responsibility to his or her fellow citizenry...about everything. So when I started seeing trailers for what seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, a slick Hollywood action movie with the same name as the political masterwork I cherished--by the makers of The Matrix, no less--I vowed never to watch it and went on with my life.

It’s actually not directed by the Wachowski siblings, and outside of some silly and unneeded use of “Bullet Time,” their influence keeps mostly to the screenplay, which they co-wrote. The film is actually directed by James McTeigue. It’s his first directing credit, and easily the best of his films.

V for Vendetta shows us the breaking point of a totalitarian England from the point of view of Evey (Natalie Portman), a timid cog in the machine. This breaking point (as well as Evey’s character arc) is instigated by V, an antihero-cum-anarchist who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and plans to fulfill his kindred predecessor’s plan of blowing up the Houses of Parliament. V is played by Wachowski favorite Hugo Weaving, who is masterful in the mask. I particularly applaud McTeigue’s resisting the mortal sin of Movies with Men in Masks: showing us the actor's face and ruining the effect our imaginations worked so hard to build. In V, the mask stays on. We never see Weaving’s face. Where many other movies fail, V succeeds, and the titular hero is transformed into something more than “the actor who played Elrond and Mr. Smith.” V becomes a symbol.

In fact, the entire cast is superlative, from Portman’s nuanced transformation as Evey (foreshadowing her Oscar-winning performance in 2010’s Black Swan: many of the same notes are played here, and almost as well) to Stephen Rea’s dogged Detective Finch. (Rea mastered Resigned Determination in a Hopeless Situation playing Fergus in 1992’s The Crying Game. It shines in, here.) Stephen Fry manages a beautiful balance of humor and pathos as the oppressed but defiant Deitrich. The only note that clunks is, surprisingly, John Hurt as the giant shouting head-on-a-screen leader of the fascist (read: Nazi stand-in) government: he plays Angry and Evil and not much else, and feels flat in a gallery of gradient, shadow, and depth.

Speaking of gradient, shadow, and depth, the cinematography in this film is exceptional. I don’t know whether to credit McTeigue, Adrian Biddle (director of photography), or the Wachowskis in the wings, but there are layers of influence and homage here that resonate with each other without muddying up the broader picture, and the final effect is, for true movie lovers, intensely gratifying. Yes, there are Matrix moments (the aforementioned “Bullet Time” knives, a few one-versus-many martial arts fights, and V's meeting with Evey feels a little "red pill, blue pill"), but the film is far more in debt to the Big Brother, Dystopian Future films of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Many of the shots look like updated nods to paranoia-cinema like A Clockwork Orange (1971), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1985, which starred, perhaps not coincidentally, John Hurt), and Fahrenheit 451 (1966). It’s nothing so gauche as winks and nods; rather, Biddle and company manage to capture the feel of those films through shot composition, lighting, lens selection (a fair portion of the film is shot wide, showcasing the gorgeous texture and detail in the sets), and quietly shifting color palettes.

In the end, what I liked most about V for Vendetta was what thirteen-year-old me most hated about the idea of a film version: the movie strays away from the source material. Perhaps in twenty years this movie will have lost its relevance, but I doubt it. Released just four years after 9/11, the fingerprints of Capital-T-Terror are all over this: homosexuals are swapped in for Muslims, persecuted under a wave of nationalism, media-inspired fear, and fear-inspired religion, whisked away in the night to hellish secret prisons and usually subsequently executed or experimented on. Seeing Deitrich’s hidden room of fine art and homoerotica juxtaposed with V’s Gallery of Shadows--consisting of sculptures, music, and fine art stolen from government storehouses--is a bit unsettling when you consider the context. These garrets of Things That Offend ring like technologically-advanced versions of Anne Frank's attic: beauty hiding in the shadows from the monsters outside. The film goes a long way to illustrate the myriad similarities between the Bush Administration’s Patriot Act Nationalism and Hitler’s Third Reich.

Watching V for the first time in 2016, in the midst of Trump’s Hate-Fear-and-Bigotry campaign for the White House, let me tell you: the parallels are even more frightening. It seems we’re always reading or watching cautionary tales of dystopian futures...yet as a society, we keep running straight toward them.

If we can’t learn from the past or listen to the alarms sounding in the present, what chance do we have for a future?

Perhaps Detective Finch poses the crucial question at the heart of the film: If your government is the parent who protects you from the monsters under the bed...but is also the monsters under the bed...would you want to know?

Food for thought.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

I know, I know. This movie's already out of theaters. This review is late. Mea culpa. But I haven't seen Batman v. Superman yet, and besides, there's enough ink in that particular pool for now, I think. I'll watch it and let you all know what I think when there's a little less blood in the water.

In the meantime, I've decided that I don't do nearly enough with this wonderful website I bought, built, and (supposedly) run, and I'm semi-constantly immersed in (as I always have been) a plethora of cinema, so I'm going to see if I can review every film I watch for the rest of the year. Honestly, I don't see why not, and I could use the practice. Apparently if you get good at this sort of thing, it can be a "job."

So. In the parlance of our times: SPOILER ALERT

(Jesus, the movie was released in 1989.)

When Robin Williams died, I spent a week watching all of his films. At least, all the ones that were on Netflix, or in my collection. Good Morning Vietnam, World's Greatest Dad, Good Will Hunting, and so on. My friend Adam and I sat down and poured out our hearts about Williams in one of the best podcasts I think I've ever recorded. (Since Morning Word went dormant, the episode isn't up on the site anymore. I might re-release it as a Chat-Man and Robin in conjunction with this.) There was only one movie that I actually bought, in the wake of his suicide: Dead Poets Society. I found it on Vudu, saw that it was at least tangentially about poetry, and that was that.

I just never got around to watching it. I'd actually forgotten that I had it until Bird suggested it a few nights ago.

I loved it.

And I'm sure I would have loved it no matter when I watched it, or with whom. That said, I'm glad that I watched it with some distance between me and Williams' suicide. His death brushes a certain patina over all his films, now: pure comedy has become bittersweet, his dramatic turns lent more poignancy by actual tragedy. Try watching Bicentennial Man again. You'll see what I mean.

The hardest thing about watching Robin Williams in a post-Williams age is trying to leave the on-screen suicides on the screen. Watching Williams scream "All suicides go to hell?" in What Dreams May Come was powerful the first time I saw it. It's a heartbreaking moment. But it's difficult now to keep from crying straight through that film, and near-impossible to keep Williams' actual tragedy from coloring the context the writers and director had in mind. With absolute objectivity, World's Greatest Dad was pretty average: a watchable film with some good moments. But I first saw it the week Robin Williams hung himself. Watching him grieving over the body of his dead son--who accidentally hung himself--was devastating in a way that had nothing at all to do with the movie I was watching. Objectivity out the window.

But watching Dead Poets Society, I realized something: I don't live in a world where Robin Williams is a good actor anymore, tragically dead and lost forever. The dust from the titanic blow of his death has settled, and all around us are the amazing things he left behind for us to marvel at. Like Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin, and Jimmy Stewart, Robin Williams was a good actor, but the wound has knit, and I'm not watching Eulogies anymore...I'm watching movies again. That patina, that poignancy will always be there now, but it isn't so overwhelming that the work gets lost beneath it.

I ran into my former poetry professor (and current guru) at the bar yesterday, and he said something that stuck in my head and changed my perspective on things. (That's literally all he does: blow your mind over and over again. Talking to him is mental vertigo.) He said, "Never make a decision based on Guilt or Shame. Life's too short. Make your decisions based on Love."

Which is weird, because that's basically the premise of Dead Poets Society. Williams plays Professor Keating, the new English professor at a buttoned-up, conservative private school. (Is there any other kind?) "Keating" is a nod to Romantic poet John Keats; indeed, the professor seems to identify with and admire the Romantics, and is--until the third act's tragic twist--a mercurial, puckish character. I found it odd that while Keating preaches the Romanticism of poetry, he actually teaches very little Romantic poetry. The poet Keating quotes most often is Walt Whitman, who is primarily a Realist.  Most of the Romantic poems are read by his students, during their Dead Poets Society meetings, where they recite Tennyson, Byron, and Shakespeare. This dichotomy works well for the film, and helps add nuance to the broad-stroke tensions between the Students and the Establishment.

Early on in the film, Keating's anti-authoritarian lessons and encouragement of free-thinking catch the attention of Professor McAllister, who warns Keating against making waves. Keating accuses him of being a Cynic; McAllister replies that he's a Realist. Thus, the lines of the film are clearly drawn: the students, spurred out of the doldrums of a paint-by-numbers education by Keating's Romanticism, begin "sucking the marrow out of life," thinking for themselves, and letting themselves face and feel their emotions, thereby equating them with the Romantics. The Establishment--the gray, clockwork faculty of the school and the career-focused, empathetically-void parents of the students--are the Realists. Of course, the tension between the two groups is drawn in broad, moviegoer-friendly strokes...the students are creatures of whimsy and passion, full of vim, vigor, and hope, while all the adults are basically wrinkled old fogeys portrayed as being nothing so much as emotionally dead and so completely motivated by money, status, and success that they are literally impossible to empathize with. Heroes and villains.

Williams' Keating actually isn't in the movie as much as I thought he would be, but his presence rings throughout: Keating is the fulcrum upon which these two disparate groups teeter and weigh. Keating was once a student at the school, a firebrand free-thinker who raised hell and lived life. What we should also notice, though, is that he didn't retire to some garret over the Seine, drinking wine and scribbling poetry to beautiful women. He returned to the school and become a professor. While he lauds the Romantics and comports himself with the air of a Romantic, the poetry he returns to time and again is Realism, along with the practical, grounded verse of poets like Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost. Keating as a character is a liminality: he represents the space between the Students and the Establishment. Between Youth and Austere Adulthood: in fact, Keating is the only character of his age in the film, so far as I could tell: the old men are old, the students no more than fifteen, but Keating appears to be in his early thirties, poised, again, between the two. He is the middle ground. The third way.

The brunt of the film is spent, however, watching to see what side of the line Keating's class will fall on. (A young Robert Sean Leonard is brilliant as Neil Perry, but Ethan Hawke's Todd Anderson never really seems to develop as a character, though I suspect in the case of the latter, the writing is more to blame.) Some of the class is reluctant to let themselves step off the path to male-pattern baldness and stable careers, while some--Leonard's Perry the best example--dive headlong toward their dreams, finding the freedom the didn't know they were looking for in Keating's philosophy. While Hawke's Todd Anderson is ostensibly the protagonist, it's Neil Perry's journey I followed and fell in love with. It's also in his arc we find the root note of the film: let yourself be led by Love.

Perry follows his heart with wild abandon, deciding he wants to be an actor. Of course, Red Forman--I mean, Mr. Perry, played by Kurtwood Smith--fucks it all up, angry that his son won't be the clay for his vicarious sculpture. Again, a script complaint, but Perry's father rang so one-note to me ("Your mother and I have sacrificed a lot for you, you're ungrateful, you're going to be a doctor like I never could be blah etcetera blah") that it was hard to see him as a real person. His emotional disconnect from his son was hammered home every time he was on-screen. Still, watching Neil try again and again to get through to his father, to be brave, to follow his heart and trust in love, only to break and wither beneath his father's stoney glare was heartbreaking. The climax of the film, for me, is when Neil realizes that he can't be brave, can't stand up to his father, and recognizes that despite all his Romantic notions, he'll be trapped in the ruts of Reality until he's as old and gray as his father. Watch the moment when Neil's father confronts him with the prospect of military school: young as he is, Robert Sean Leonard's performance is absolutely masterful. You can literally watch as the passion, fire, and hope fades from his face, and an entire gamut of resignation takes its course. The totality of this moment of defeat and despair makes the famous final moment that much more emotional.

(Oh hell yeah: Bird and I cried several times during this movie. Not as much as we cried during Big Fish--Jesus, that movie is a knife in the feels--but still.)

Dead Poets Society is by no stretch of the imagination a perfect film, but there are few enough films that tackle poetry with such love and seriousness, without leaving you feeling emotionally gutted. (Sylvia, anyone? The Libertine?) The highest praise I can give is this: when the credits rolled, Bird turned to me and whispered, "Can we have our own Dead Poets Society?"

In today's world of screens and vapid, transient entertainment (I'm thinking Vines and compilations of cat videos), any film that stirs poetry, beauty, and Capital-A-Art back into our blood, even for a moment, is worth the time. These days, very little is, but Dead Poets Society deserves a watch, if only to remind you that there's a difference between living and being alive. To remind you of the importance of dancing, and of always being led by Love.