on being gwyneth

i saw The Hellstrom Chronicle only once, the year it was released. at 11 years old it impressed a heavy dread on me, and i never quite got over the ambiguity of its presentation. the sequences that really stuck with me were the ant onslaughts, and of those the scene that i have always recalled most vividly was one of its many excerpts from other films – in this case that of a central american man caught and swarmed while trying to escape, finally toppling to his hideous death.

it was many years later that i watched The Naked Jungle, a film that struck me at the time as being a bit disjointed. starring Charlton Heston – of whom i am a fan, as some know – the first half told the story of a plantation owner hacking out a living in south america who receives – and has to accomodate his attitudes and lifestyle for – a mail-order bride. about halfway through, this fairly typical romantic drama takes a permanent and heavy-handed turn for the weird, when the plantation turns out to be directly in the path of a massive phalanx of army ants, tearing through the jungle on their periodic march of ruin.

it’s in that second half that the remembered scene occurs, and it wasn’t until just a few weeks ago that i finally learned why the film had the odd paste-together quality i’d observed: it is itself based on what is apparently considered a classic short story, Leiningen versus the Ants, which has nothing whatever to do with the title character’s romantic life, but is in fact entirely about the confrontation of the hard-minded individualist with brute nature.

this discovery came about because i’ve been listening to audio books recently, prompted by a suggestion from a friend of mine. at first i heard renditions of stories by HP Lovecraft, which then led me to seek other radio plays of the weird and fantastic, research into the sources of which revealed the original adventure story.

and so listening to the play leads me to read the story which served as the inspiration for the film which itself was excerpted in another film which creeped me the hell out when i was a child. and the path of the ants takes a nearly forty-year cycle through my life, touching on all the media in which i have always immersed myself.

i wonder if they’ll make a video game?

by way of explanation:
barney is our Nerd Hero. yes, he got the scut work on Mission Impossible, while most of the rest of the cast did the high-visibility glam superspy stuff. but he also did all the cool shit. his was the expertise on which all those insane plots relied, and we watch the show in gleeful anticipation of each episode’s Barney Delivery – now in a magician’s trunk, next in a filing cabinet – which sets up the show’s absurdist clockworks geared toward the mindfuck: the shifting of their target’s reality by misdirection and transposition. and yes, all the characters were cartoons, but skilled Barney – not charismatic Phelps or alluring Cinnamon or suave Paris – is the one alison and i cheer.

by grabthar’s hammer, you’d think the damned suits would learn.

blade runner is, among my crowd at least, probably the most famous victim of Executive Meddling… the voice-over and fake ending being screwups so universally loathed that any sane person would have reason to expect a certain degree of circumspection on future projects of similar scope and genre.

oh, but no. according to tvtropes (quickly becoming a house-favorite website), one of the things that always bugged me about the matrix turns out not to have been a wachowski fumble at all, but yet another instance of the stupid beancounters apparently believing that the real audience for the work would be just as stupid as them:

In The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers had wanted to have the machines use the humans plugged into the Matrix as a gigantic neural network computer. However, executives thought that the audience wouldn’t understand this, so they changed it to using the humans to generate electricity, even though this violates the laws of thermodynamics and creates several plot holes.

Die Hard totally nuked the fridge with the “riding the jumpjet” sequence.

as part of our ongoing review of old television programs re-released on DVD, we are now watching the mod squad.

as you’ll recall, clarence williams III – whose acting is so understated that when he smiles it’s as if he flicked a switch somewhere in his head: “engage smiling apparatus, now” – plays the “deep” apollonian Linc Hayes, across from the emotive dionysian, Pete Cochran.

(between them, of course – or alongside – is Julie Barnes, who seems to be there mostly to soften the group, but who remains oddly ill-defined for a feature character.)

As the moody, observant one, Linc usually gets the best lines… but also the darkest, one of which struck me last night like the doomsday weapon of misanthropy:

Julie (reacting to a particularly unpleasant undercover gig): “It was horrible. How can people be like that?”

Linc: “Why else would they call them people?”

now this is the kind of activism i can get behind: a petition to get uwe boll to please, please just make it stop.

RIP, chuck.

as i’ve mentioned before, i love cognitive dissonance, and take particular pleasure in disturbing surrealism.

apparently i’m not alone.

this unsettling sequence from barton fink is one of my absolute favorites.

i tell you, this guy has the most impressive set of onscreen teeth since brian blessed:
Read more

watching the original mission impossible again on DVD, i am reminded, not just how bad the tom cruise vehicle that stole its name really was, but that it was also somewhat racist.

recall that the signature scene in the film is the acrobatic number, in which cruise is suspended over an alarm-triggering floor. now consider the episodes in the series where anything similar occurred (and there is at least one nearly identical scene i can think of). who always performed those actions? barney. and in fact, while the show was notable for its ensemble work (dispensing with which, in favor of the celebrity vehicle for cruise, was one of the film’s most egregious sins), it was always barney who did the most complicated physical work upon which the missions relied. at the time the show was aired, this was still culturally significant, and this significance still has resonance for anyone who actually appreciated the program.

if any symmetry at all with the original had been sought, ving rhames would have performed the stunt. but no. rhames is too heavy-set, so it had to be the cross-eyed wonder himself.

how convenient.

Read more