Fall 2010: The Walking Dead and the end of the golden age

What Shakespeare meant figuratively, I mean literally: Now is the fall of our discontent, at least when it comes to television. The golden age is over, the empire is crumbling, and the huns at the gate look conspicuously like zombies.

Yes, that is a shot at the bag of clichés known as The Walking Dead. Frank Darabont’s name didn’t scare me away, but boy, do I wonder why I keep coming back to a less fun Lost. It’s so lifeless, you see, because it’s on the very serious prestige network once home to Rubicon, an infinitely smarter show about epistemology, and still home to the drama of our times Mad Men. But Dead is empty as art, boring as thriller, and obvious as horror. What I appreciate about The Walking Dead has nothing to do with this particular incarnation as cinema. The best parts are conceptual, though it’s some kind of triumph that Darabont and company crafted a zombie story without sociopolitical commentary.

Now, I’m behind on several shows, like Friday Night Lights and In Treatment, that may well be the remedy I’m looking for, and plenty of greats are on hiatus right now, like Mad Men, Archer, Parks and Recreation, and Treme.  I’m also behind on a few that, from what I’ve seen so far, are pretentious hype monsters. It’s hard to build up the caffeine level required to catch up on Sons of Anarchy and Boardwalk Empire.

So I admit that I'm probably overstating.  That said, there are precisely three good comedies on the air. Well, two, now that Bored to Death has completed its fantastic second season. You already know what I’m going to say: 30 Rock, in something of a resurgence that further separates it from the pack, and Cougar Town, an endlessly inventive show that’s all the more so for being set in the real world unlike other obvious contenders.

But since you brought it up, are you really digging Community this season? Despite remaining one of the most promising comedies on the air (and despite airing the phenomenal bottle episode), the space parody was unfocused, the zombie parody spare, and much of the rest depends upon unbelievable characterization. It’s not The Office, which has one virtue and her name is Mindy Kaling, but it’s not living up to its potential, either, and your mom and I are just worried about you, that’s all.

What else you got? Modern Family? Even the mainstream critics are starting to admit it’s the latest incarnation of Full House. How I Met Your Mother? The good episodes are hollow victories, and I can’t even watch old seasons any more. Glee? As scattershot as ever, though it’s certainly capable of scoring higher highs than most of this mediocrity. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Is anyone seriously going to hold up this season next to its first couple? Weeds? Okay, Weeds actually had a fantastic season, but only relative to itself, not television entire.

Even Conan is only excellent sporadically, good if unsurprising news for Jon Stewart. There is one bright spot, the excellent documentary series Moguls and Movie Stars on TCM (which airs the ‘40s episode tonight along with Casablanca), struggling like Atlas to carry the rest of this dead weight. It’s always tough to make an end-of-year top 10 list. This year it’ll be even harder, and sadder.

127 Hours: The final film in Danny Boyle's Hallmark Trilogy

As I sit here on my laptop at 4 AM post-jog on my holiday of plenty celebrating my citizenry of this obnoxiously wealthy superpower, I’m having trouble taking Danny Boyle’s latest lesson, however emotionally overwhelming, to heart. Of course I take things for granted. If I appreciated every benefit of company and civilization all the time, I’d be ejaculating on my laptop right now instead of writing on it.  Which (see if you can spot the segue) would feel great but have no lasting impact, just like—waddyaknow!—Danny Boyle's recent works.  Our entrenched ideological divergences aside, 127 Hours is phenomenal for a Hallmark card.

It opens with this eye-rolling montage of crowds. It’s not until you’re pinned by a boulder in a Utah slot canyon that you realize why. Danny Boyle’s kineticism is a perfect match to Aron Ralston’s constant adrenaline fix, and James Franco may not set the standard for acting forevermore, but he does a damn good job putting us in the head of our perhaps overstatedly (or underarguedly) selfish adventurer. The arm-chopping scene wasn’t faintworthy thanks to something like observation bias, but it was just gory enough to live up to expectations. If the loud cracks don’t get you, surely the tendon will.

Still and all, despite being better than Slumdog Millionaire by virtue of being competent, 127 Hours is hardly a Great Work. It’s pretty, and handsome, and maybe a little sexy, but essentially it’s your basic motivational poster with a wagging finger to appreciate what you have before it’s gone or whatever. It’s the best version of this story someone could make without invoking Prometheus, but at the end of the day, it’s a well-made picture of almost no significance. So, good for Danny Boyle and James Franco, but I’ve already forgotten what film I’m talking about.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One: Down-sizing

While the Harry Potter series is capable of some tight plotting—Alfonso Cuarón managed two climaxes in as many hours—Deathly Hallows Part One, which is, of course, half a movie (for the price of a whole one!), sees our heroes flying by the seat of their pants because apparently only Dumbledore really had any clue what was going on, but nowadays he’s getting his jollies leaving cryptic clues from the beyond for reasons that have nothing to do with writerly notions of irony. So the entire plot is built on a tenuous mountain of guesswork, yet still we feel let down by the slog. I know we’re in lean times, but the destruction of a single horcrux does not a plot make.

There are fataler flaws: Daniel Radcliffe goes through the motions of every line like an alien trying to mimic human behavior; Rowling’s debt to Tolkien grows ever clearer, and Deathly Hallows 1:  Rising Action even features a necklace that feeds on negative thoughts; Harry and friends are so lost that you’re constantly thinking how much more competent you’d be in their shoes, and this on top of the teen soap. (I feel compelled here to note that Rupert Grint admirably sells the histrionics, overcoming the dreadful dialogue in a genuinely electric performance.)  Not to mention the film’s dangling Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, and David Thewlis in our faces. Worst of all, none of its cutesy feints toward political commentary hold water because it’s all so simple: Freedom is good and right and triumphant, and racism is bad and poorly dressed.

For all his moments of inspiration, which peak here in a spellbinding animated sequence, David Yates’ Harry Potter reign has been one of reliable competence attended by overwhelming praise (relief?) and diminishing returns in the screenplay department. Setting aside the essential question—say it with me: what’s it all about?—the dialogue is utterly lifeless. In case you were wondering, seventeen year-old British boarding school boys, no matter how twee, and wizarding is certainly that, are far too creative with their epithets to be content with a “Hey, losers.” Splinch-dick, on the other hand,

End of Part One of this review. Pay again next year for the rest.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Still the one

I’m not going to inspire any fainting spells by saying Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the best film in the franchise. I might when I say that the other six are barely watchable. Why is the Alfonso Cuarón entry so much better? Glad you asked.

It starts with the source material. JK Rowling’s artistic command peaks in the lean, mean Prisoner of Azkaban (the third book, in which an escaped murderer is after Harry), before entropy drives the series to senility and beyond: Goblet of Fire is equally elegant but infinitely longer, Order of the Phoenix is an ambitious mess, Half Blood Prince is bipolar, and Deathly Hallows ties together all the loose ends into one obnoxious friendship bracelet.

But narrative isn’t everything. What Cuarón does with it is. In Azkaban he builds a fantastical universe of colorful characters (Aunt Marge, Stan Shunpike), comical details (the ravenous textbook, the seasonal changes), and an overarching spell of doom (complete with overcast weather). With his playful eye and expressionistic style, Cuarón has made not just a great Harry Potter adaptation but a genuinely unified film.

It’s all about Harry’s haunting—the Halloween iconography, the Macbeth song, the motifs of time and prophecy, the gliding shots, the dark mystery. Everyone is a threat to us, or so it seems, not least the good guys, and something about being an escaped murderer whose victims left behind body parts makes Sirius Black a more palpable danger than the ethereal zap-master Voldemort. Azkaban demands several new characters, but for the first and last time in the series, everyone has a substantial part to play, from Emma Thompson’s batty prophecy prof to David Thewlis’ ragged, suspicious defense teacher, which is to say Azkaban has exactly as many characters as it needs. This is not a film where they pay Michael Gambon to play dead or shoot Miranda Richardson strictly for B-roll footage, and Cuarón certainly doesn’t waste the series’ most interesting character and greatest performance in the hilarious Alan Rickman, who can't even sit in the background without stealing the scene.

Similarly, every element of the mystery is introduced in the first act, often in innocuous ways. By the same token, what we learn in class actually helps us crack the case for the last time in the series, which would be less odd if the series weren't set at a school, revolving around the school year. This is also Harry’s last unadulterated victory—is there a more exhilarating moment in the series than when he rushes out of the grove shouting, “Expecto Patronum!”—since, for the last time, the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and nobody dies. And still Azkaban is more morally complicated than the later films which swarm with villains, all of whom are black-to-the-core, autocratic racial purists who couldn’t even spell “nuance” if it were a brand of eyeliner at Hot Topic.

I've heard the complaints.  The show-don't-tell camp wanted something more like the Deathly Hallows animation than the Chamber of Exposition we get, and the three-act anal-retents started dry-heaving as soon as they could make out the double-climax.  Sorry, but the only rule in art is to be true to yourself, and this ghostly film clearly befits a snake-eating-its-tail structure. 

The Harry Potter franchise is not without its cinematic joys.  David Yates mesmerizes with his bleeding of the wizarding world into muggle Britain, Christopher Columbus successfully constructed a kid-friendly fairy tale, and Mike Newell fearlessly plunged the series into the black. It's just that Cuarón did all these things and better, and in just over two hours.

Four Lions: Boom goes the dynamite

I admit I was a mite concerned by the concept of Four Lions—a self-proclaimed “jihad comedy” about bumbling terrorists—though less for any faintworthy controversy than for the unshakable image of a Benny Hill type running around London trying and failing to blow things up, Wile E. Coyote-style. I should have known better. Chris Morris (aka the original Jon Stewart) is a master of whipsmart absurdism, and if his directorial style isn’t likely to prompt any revolutions, his indiscriminate satire explosion more than earns him those 72 virgins in heaven.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Morris unfunny. He’s probably best known nowadays for his performance on The IT Crowd, a show whose sensibility is so broad there’s no room for laughing, and they do it for you, anyway. But in the ‘90s he co-created, wrote, produced, starred in, and fluffed a string of magnificent fake news shows, The Day Today which attacked the obnoxiousness of the news and Brass Eye which targeted media-fueled hysteria. His co-creator on The Day Today? Armando Iannucci, he of The Thick of It and In the Loop fame, which I bring up partly because Four Lions shares many of the same writers as 2009’s sharpest satire but mostly because Iannucci and Morris are our foremost political satirists.

It should be no surprise, then, that once Four Lions gets going, like another picture out this week, it’s an unstoppable train of laughs. After all, this is the story of five British Muslims seeking eternal paradise through the not-at-all arbitrary or verifiable conduit of suicide bombing. Hilarious! For real, once you get into its rhythms, Four Lions is a delicious confection of physical comedy and obvious idiocy atop some serious meat: smorgasbord piety, a feckless police force, aloof friends and neighbors, vague jihad, and, naturally, more cognitive dissonance than a foreign policy meeting. Serious irony undercuts the thoroughly western jihadists, turn-on-a-dime shocks keep us constantly mindful of the life-and-death stakes, and genuine pathos floods the final act, thanks in no small part to one of the year’s best performances, lead Riz Ahmed as the only intelligent character in the film, the would-be terrorist who can see the logical fallacies but can’t quite rethink his premises.

You could talk about the implications of Four Lions for days, but it would require a whole lot of spoiling of a whole lot of funny. Suffice it to say it’s the yin to Carlos’ yang; where Olivier Assayas finds some modicum of ideological justification on all sides, Chris Morris sees only ignorance. He’s cheery that way. Most of all, after an acclimation period, it’s a masterclass on tone. Morris precisely modulates the dials for maximum impact right through to the end credits, a montage of absurdities in the political game called the War on Terror that would be funny if they weren’t so chilling.

Megamind: Dark city

The rumors are true. Megamind is just The Incredibles crossed with Despicable Me and squeezed into Superman’s spanx. In the end, those extremes, i.e. a hilarious drama that uses superherodom to critique society and a morally repugnant, idiot cartoon, balance out in Megamind, a sort of funny, sort of interesting take on the supervillain mythos that rides Dumbledore’s life lessons about choices and goodness right into a violent showdown.

The only thing really remarkable about Megamind is its weird civic identification. It’s a bizarre conflation of morality (goodness, evil) and civic responsibility (promoting city institutions) that’s basically no worse than the patriotic propaganda we all learn in elementary school. But seeing that indoctrination fleshed out—Megamind is evil because he crash landed in a prison and was raised Bret Harte-style by convicts who teach him that evil is good, because all inmates are just miswired sociopaths and all cops are virtuous heroes; Metro Man is a city institution, without whom nobody stands up to evil; evil is apparently wrecking infrastructure, but Megamind’s reign of terror results in zero deaths or injuries—is uncomfortably statist.

It's not The Wire, and the year's great civics film remains The Other Guys, but morality does not flow forth from government, thank you very much. It’s quite enough that we make children pledge allegiance every morning without knowing what it means (see Salt). There’s no reason to subject them to Megamind, too.

Carlos: Almost legal

Is there a better symbol for our historical moment than a tabloid terrorist? I don’t mean trash-mag doodler Perez Hilton; I mean a bona fide violent terrorist whose persona is more celebrity than revolutionary, whose exploits and impact are approached with bemused spectatorship in place of active engagement. Pop history has had years to streamline a narrative for the Cold War, but the new world order—talk about a term for the history books, coined, truly, for the self-conscious era—resisted easy alignment until the dawn of the Age of Terror, or whatever we’re calling the bigger-than-Bush struggle between Islamic terrorism and the imperialist West. What Olivier Assayas’ rise-and-fall rock star/geopolitical epic Carlos illustrates, in words and images that call back to World War II and reach ahead to our brave new world of war criminal punditry, is the obvious. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Carlos opens in 1973 with a character—the European honcho for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—whose assassination produces a vacuum that sucks our charismatic young rebel into power positions that vastly exceed his intellect if not rhetoric. Over the next five and a half hours, Edgar Ramirez as Carlos transforms from active young militant to bloated narcissist in a story—indeed, the story—that takes us from European capitals to the empty deserts of Yemen to the shores, or at least air strips, of Tripoli, and back again. Ramirez’ evolution is incredible, and casting Carlos as a rock star—he actually signs autographs and enjoys a paparazzi moment after his most ostentatious performance—subtly belies his incoherence. The New Wave soundtrack, centered on Carlos’ self-mythologizing New Order anthem “Dreams Never End,” isn’t just there for period; it lends grandiosity to the punk rebels.

It will be no surprise to Assayas acolytes that Carlos is an authentic, obsessive portrait of globalization. It’s a struggle between an interconnected network of global terrorist cells and an interconnected network of “legitimate” governmental bureaucracies, and Assayas speaks to the game’s complexity by limiting exposition to chirons (which, granted, come fast and loose in this constantly traveling film). Between the rich sequences of exciting, funny, or cool action come even more invigorating battles of ideology, including a running thread connecting modern police methods with terrorism practiced on individuals. The film covers more territory than James Bond (and speaks more languages, besides), but the talk expands the net to include Pinochet’s US-backed Chilean coup and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Ceausescu’s Romania and Hitler’s Germany. Because this Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous episode is really a trenchant look at the relationship between states and terrorism.

What it boils down to is the chilling reminder that terrorism is only illegal when performed by individuals. Carlos gets away with his many and thrilling acts of violence—which he justifies as “the minimum military requirement of any political struggle”—because he’s working for state governments. States, even ostensibly democratic ones, can do whatever they want, as anyone paying attention to President Bush’s celebrity book tour (specifically his assertions that waterboarding need no justification but here’s one anyway) can attest. Assayas peppers Carlos with shots of airplanes for obvious reasons, and some of the most powerful moments are the cuts from the inside of a DC-9 holding the kidnapped ministers of OPEC (the world’s most agreeable cartel) and Carlos’ terrorist gang to a silent exterior of the plane.

Just before the where-are-they-now montage, Carlos lands the terrorism/plane motif in a confrontational closing argument. It’s 1994, the world now in the hegemonic shadow of a single state, and terrorism is still an active, if off-the-grid recourse for the world’s anti-imperialists. We’re on an airplane in the midst of a crime, only this time, the perpetrators are the Sudanese government embarking on an under-the-table extradition deal with the French. It’s vengeance dressed as justice executed by the state.  The low angle of the state official looking down at us says it all.  As one of the governed (as in the mythical catchphrase "consent of the governed"), I don't feel any safer knowing Carlos is behind bars and the state has usurped his methods.  Do you?

1902: "Barbe-bleue"

The Best Years of Our Lives #14.

Oh, Méliès. Much as I adore the early comedy shorts, I have been dying to get to the era of (the previously seen and therefore ineligible) Porter’s "The Great Train Robbery" and Méliès’ "A Trip to the Moon," an era of shorts with story, spectacle, cinema.  Georges Méliès’ "Bluebeard" is as expert as you’d expect. There’s elaborate art direction, actual plot, a dissolve or two, and special effects out the wazoo. “Barbe-bleue” est un film vrai.

You may have discerned that this is the story of Bluebeard, that old Perrault lord who killed so many of his wives. When he goes away, his current wife discovers his crimes and is haunted by the ghosts. Upon his return, he freaks the geek out and nearly kills her, but the other aristocrats and the spirits of the wives join forces to defeat him.  And they all lived happily ever after.  Or something.

At nine minutes, this is nearly as long as all the other shorts put together, but I couldn’t believe it was over already. Let’s just say a lot happens at a quick clip—smoke here, acrobatics there, phantoms here, a fight there—and Méliès fills our screen with such spectacle that it flies by. The discovery of the dungeon is an eerie delight, as is the revelation of the spirit of the key, but every scene is brimming with joys, including our introduction to the volatile Bluebeard and his court of admirers. More filmmakers could use Méliès’ economy.  Welcome to cinéma.

1901: "The Big Swallow"

The Best Years of Our Lives #13.

Out of the gutter, children. “The Big Swallow” happens to be the story of a man who spots another man watching him, approaches him, opens his mouth, disappears, and swallows him. I don’t see what’s so funny.

But really, “The Big Swallow” is a delight. For the first half, this chatterbox is just getting progressively closer, swinging his cane every once in a while for emphasis. I guess he doesn’t take kindly to being filmed, because eventually, he’s so close that when he opens his mouth, the frame exists completely inside his lips, although we can only see black. Cut (seamlessly) to a long shot of the ostensible cameraman. First the camera falls into the black gullet, and then, try as he might, the cameraman falls in too. What seems like a zoom out but is actually the subject walking backward reveals him to be chewing his meal and preparing to swallow before giving us one last, triumphant laugh.

In a way, it’s just another comedy based on the magic of editing, like “Explosion of a Motor Car” and “Santa Claus.” But the simplicity, the unclutteredness unifies the mis-en-scene—it’s just one joke and we’re out—and the zoomlike effects and closeup place “The Big Swallow” (and director James Williamson) a cut above most trick-photography.

1900: "Explosion of a Motor Car"

The Best Years of Our Lives #12.

Cecil Hepworth's “Explosion of a Motor Car” is a nice prototype for the silent comedies, a bit that could become a full scene under Keaton’s supervision. As it stands, it's just a chuckle.

The gist is: a car comes barreling up the street toward us until POOF! It’s gone, replaced by a crumpled pile of tires and general car detritus. By the time the policeman comes to investigate, foreign objects propelled skyward by the explosion are falling back down to earth, comically one at a time.

Basically, it’s just more editing magic that anticipates the great silent comedians, but the light-hearted humor makes it worth a minute of your time.

The Best Years of Our Lives: Now back to your regularly scheduled program

As you’ve no doubt noticed, I took an impromptu gentleman’s intermission from my Best Year of Our Lives project, which is against the rules, but come on, I was only twelve movies in and hadn’t yet broached the 20th century. I promise it shan’t happen a-gain. My break was forced by Halloween aka annual horror movie ketchup time, but it turns out to have been a smart move.

See, TCM has annexed the remainder of the year to tell the story of Hollywood. Every Monday, Turner’s airing an hour of its documentary series Moguls and Movie Stars alongside a few films from the era under discussion, winding from the invention of the camera on up to the ‘70s, when the first generation of moguls (and the first great era of Hollywood) passed on.

This week, Moguls and Movie Stars began with Edison in 1888 and drove all the way until 1907. Which is to say, Turner learned me some context for all those old shorts I watched and babbled about. Armed with the facts, I’m ready to dive back in and behold the early works of Griffith, Chaplin, and Keaton. In fact, I’m more excited now than I was a mere month ago. 1900, here I come!

The Gay Vote: Not just a '30s musical any more

Case you haven’t heard, the gays jumped aboard the Republican ship disproportionately more than other demographics this year. Granted the sample size is about 110 voters and exit polling is less reliable than a California voter, but that hasn’t stopped the sky from falling in liberal circles. Like I said, this election changes everything!

What is the meaning of this phenomenon?!  Election analysis can be so hard, sometimes, you guys! (Once more with feeling: people vote solely based on their perceptions of their own financial liquidity.) I have no idea why gays abandoned the Democratic Party. Maybe there was a better one with cuter guys across the street?

Or maybe because the Log Cabin Republicans are fighting for their rights. Maybe because the Obama Administration is defending the status quo. Maybe because Clinton signed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell into law and finished us off with the Defense of Marriage Act (a lowly Congressional bill with the nerve to illegally reverse a Constitutionally enshrined mandate known as the Full Faith and Credit clause). Maybe because Schwarzenegger wouldn’t even fight to uphold his state’s gay rights infringement, and gay marriage is significantly less popular in California than DADT repeal is nationally. Maybe because people are dying, and his highness thought a Youtube video would suffice. Maybe because the Democrats in power up to and including President Obama would sooner bomb Iran than simply proclaim support for gay marriage, which is not only actively anti-gay but tacitly complicit in the sham that gay rights are up for debate. I don’t know, that’s just off the top of my head.

So how are Democrats different from Republicans again? Oh, right, the Republicans aren’t asking for my vote with one hand while they sell me up the river with the other. The Democratic party is not my friend, but I have no reason to expect a Republican House of Representatives to be any more favorable to human rights. Boehner weeps only for himself. The point is we have two parties inasmuch as Eggshell and Ivory differ on how exactly white should look.

Hereafter: Clint Eastwood and le vide éternel

I told myself that Clint Eastwood and me were fuckin' done professionally.  We don’t all have to love every filmmaker. But then Hereafter started earning praise from trusted corners. So I sat down with the consolation that even if the film was as empty as his usual fare, I could at least find concrete details of Eastwood’s supposedly invisible style. Well, you know what they say: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me ten times, Clint Eastwood, stop ruining my life.

Hereafter follows some people rendered cripplingly monomaniacal by tragedy (a series of unfortunate accidents, and then a terrorist attack, but don’t expect any political perspective). The object of their obsessions is the afterlife, a reality in Hereafter denied by science, journalism, and all but the most gullible and/or desperate survivors. Naturally, this evil must be rectified by our stout heroine.

The bigger myth, though, is the invisible hand of Clint Eastwood. You know it’s an Eastwood film when a character gets home at night and keeps the lights off. Shadowy faces are the hallmark of Eastwood cinematography. Don’t even mention color—what do you think this is, a Spike Lee picture? No, the art direction lives or dies by the diversity of its neutrals, and colors must be sparse and muted. This is very serious, you know.  Shots are long but practical; no showy tracking when a cut will do just fine. Eastwood’s mercifully unfussy that way.

When you get down to it, I suppose Eastwood is a classicist, for better or worse. Exposition guides us, the music swells at dramatic highs, and the special effects are clunky. Characters are archetypes to be fleshed out. They’re terminally incapable of hiding their feelings, and subtext is always on the verge of becoming text. And like the old studio directors, Eastwood is a great moralizer who can’t resist a sentimental ending, however bizarre.

Like all late Eastwood, not to mention psychic testimony, Hereafter is all pretense, a false front repurposed from his other awards bait. Surely something’s going on upstairs, you protest. Hate to break it to you. We see a journalist fulfilled by her pursuit of support that the afterlife is, too, real, and you can’t prove otherwise, so there. We see grief play out with help from the beyond. We see several people desperate to believe in life after death, but since the afterlife absolutely exists in Hereafter, it's not an endorsement of faith.  It's the kind of quasi-spiritual, folksy, “family values” film everyone’s grandma might make.

Eastwood’s films are comfort food dressed as veggies, but you’re not fooling your body. In Million Dollar Baby, Clint is learning Irish so he can read Yeats in his original language—but Yeats wrote in English. In Hereafter, Matt Damon is reading The Mystery of Edward Drood, whoever that is. These might sound like details, but both examples are the kinds of accoutrements films like this include to look smart. Truth is, the only exercise emptier than thinking about the afterlife is watching a late Eastwood film.

John Boehner's Tears: 7 lessons from Election Night 2010

As you know, this is the most important election in the history of “democracy,” the moment when our national reality show host (I’m thinking Dan Rather) freezes the frame, steps into view and gravely says, “Tonight, everything changes.” While we’ve known for months that the Republicans will win the House of Representatives since their team competed so well in the quickfire challenge while the Democrats lost the immunity idol and that the Democrats will retain the Senate because California is so god-damn wishy-washy and maybe they don’t actually want to oust Boxer after all, yes, while all our predictions are coming true like we know what’s in each Christmas gift, in spite of reality conforming to expectation, this is HISTORIC NEWS! Here’s what we’ve learned from this monumental event.

1. This is a de facto impeachment of Barack Hussein. He has two options going forward: resign the office, or stop being so intractable and work with the plethora of bipartisan Republicans that have been aching to reach across the aisle these past two years only to be met with upturned noses and racist epithets.

2. Americans overwhelmingly oppose every tenet of the Hussein regime and accordingly support each individual word of the Republican Pledge on America. It’s time to embrace some core Republican ideas, like deregulation which in no way contributed to the decline of the wealthiest country the world has ever known.

3. Or job creation. American voters’ number one priority and primary voting issue is job creation, and they elected Republicans to do something about it. Republicans like Rand Paul, who keeps touting that the government needs to get out of the way of job creation, and if all that doesn't make the most sense, well, he also railed against The State despite becoming one of its chief operatives tonight. But basically, the government needs to make sure America creates more jobs, chiefly by not doing anything about creating more jobs and letting businesses do it themselves. Because if the past two years have proven anything, it’s that American businesses are proactive about job creation!

4. If there was a common thread in the victory speeches, other than pale echoes of Obama’s lean-times message, it was that this is the greatest, freest, richest, most god-fearingest, sexiest, war-wagingest country in the history of civilization. Which is in no way a reversal of every candidate’s position last week that America was headed down the toilet.

5. Americans are sick of having gay men shoved down their throats, unless they’re in amicably subservient roles like illegal labor and Tim Gunn. Iowa’s equal-rights-loving justices were thrown out of office, and New Hampshire’s all set to erect a border fence between actual marriages and the cheapo Wal-mart version. CNN says DADT repeal is DOA and DOMA's off the table entirely with a GOP House. Which will be oh so different from when the Democrats were in power.

6. If I can get serious for a moment, this election proved one thing beyond the obvious (that people vote for one reason: money). It proved that California is officially the biggest poser in world history. They claim to love their gays, then they’re all set to decriminalize pot, man, and meanwhile they’re making all kinds of threats against Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer, but when push comes to shove, California crumples like a misguided teenager trying to go punk without ceding vanity.

7. Finally, this LANDSLIDE FUCKING VICTORY for the Log Cabin Republican Christian Tea Libertarian Party (the biggest tent of them all, you know) has restored power to the myth that America is a center-right nation, whatever that means. John Boehner, after the sunburn states swept their natural spokesperson into office, openly wept thinking about (what else?) his own rise to power. America truly is the land of opportunity. Unless, of course, you’re gay, illegal, or from one o’ them raghead countries.

A Slasher Halloween: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Leopard Man, & House of Wax

I know, I know, Halloween’s over and you’re all ready to start celebrating Election Day or Guy Fawkes Day or The Holiday Formerly Known as Armistice Day or something, but I could hardly have told you how I spent my Halloween before Halloween. So, without further ado, brief thoughts on the evolution of the film slasher in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Leopard Man, and House of Wax.

First up is the one I had seen before, the mother of all German expressionism, Robert Wiene’s 1920 classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The framing device is pure gothic lit, sold by the eerie wandering of an Ophelia figure and the unsettling non sequitur, “That’s my fiancée.” With that we’re thrust into the tale of Dr. Caligari and his sideshow sleepwalker whose arrival in town coincides with nightly murders Don’t Look Now-style. Caligari apparently marks the advent of the creepy circus cliché (compounding Tod Browning’s debt to Wiene), not to mention everything about the asylum drama; I don't think it's unfair to say that without Caligari, there would be no Shutter Island (or Shock Corridor or you get the idea). Throw in its elements of perfect-crime flicks and policiers and you realize just how essential Caligari is to cinema’s dark side. The horror is unspeakably augmented by the art direction, everything from the sets to the blocking to the selective irises reflecting the mad memories of a Kafka hero, and the editing never forgets to insert a closeup at just the right moment of a bug-eyed villain or grotesquely contorted hands. If there’s a horror flick more masterfully unified, I haven’t seen it.

A few decades later, after Universal strip-mined literature for its monster movies, Jacques Tourneur began establishing a more impressionistic kind of horror flick unique to cinema, a dark, mystical, modern world whose secrets shine only at night, a neighborhood where you could find yourself in Cat People as easily as I Walked with a Zombie. The Leopard Man is the least acclaimed and probably best of these, building on the noirish if fantastic urban jungle of Cat People and the gothic exoticism of Zombie in this story of a serial killer preying on young women while a leopard’s loose in the city. Tourneur isn’t as bleak here as in his noirs, which perhaps owes to the omnipresent supernatural forces (whereas nothing will save you in Out of the Past). It’s natural then that The Leopard Man humanizes its murderer and delivers a climax that’s less exciting and spine-tingling like the first hour than it is simply haunting and gloomy, a melancholy with staying power.

Andre de Toth’s House of Wax also treats its serial killer subject as a tormented figure, a tragic hero who accidentally survived “The End” and has come out the other side a deranged villain. Naturally said Phantom is Vincent Price, and what’s really unsettling is watching him as a sensitive artiste in the first few scenes, before his wax museum is destroyed and he goes mad. Villainous Vincent I get; the Dr. Jekyll routine is just confounding. House of Wax is especially delightful as a meta spectacle, given its role as a pioneer of 3-D. Set at an artistic attraction, the film has its fair share of red carpets and several sequences where we are part of the onscreen audience beholding the presentation. The 3-D demands a handful of groundling moments (like the various points where objects are thrown at the camera or the lingering shot of headless dancing girls), but they never distract from De Toth’s gothic horror.  At the end of the day, House of Wax is a serious tragedy, decorated with shocking moments, Scooby-Doo haunted house gags, and one mesmerizing chase sequence, but essentially a tragic spiral about a Frankenstein turned Raskolnikov whom not even De Toth could save.  Now in 2-D!