“Fighting Terrorists Since 1492″, is a lovely throwaway bumpersticker rimshot I noticed in an early episode of Breaking Bad, a while back.  It’s the property of an Indian (Navaho?) deputy sheriff, and it belongs in an honored place as the mission statement of Cowboys & Aliens, which it, of couse, isn’t.

Never mind the tactical imbecilities that dot the storyline.  This movie eventually facilitates the unceremonial burial of old tomahawks as Chiricahuas, outlaws, townsfolk and the romantic leads join together into an improbable fighting force to defend Earth against an exploitative scouting party for extraterrestrial conquistadores.  Jack Kirby told this story brilliantly, very long ago, without the, you know, western stereotypes.  Loogey-honking.  P’ding!

It’s entertaining, once, but Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Clancy Brown, Adam Beach, Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine and Walton Goggins can’t stand up against the tower of pointless hooey, which is, in the final analysis, Cowboys & Aliens:  A movie that needn’t have been quite this vapid, raggedly paced, pseudosuspenseful and politically insignificant as this one was.  It coulda and shoulda shone a little insightful light on American history.  And didn’t bother.

Any extenuating cirumstances that might mitigate the harshness of my evaluation of this attempt-at-a-film were unavailable (as were the commentary and all of the other Special Features) on the “rental disk” I got from NetFlix, because that’s how the studio executives in charge of schlock want to play.  As if I’d pay-to-own a copy of a movie I didn’t particularly enjoy watching – because the commentary and behind-the-scenes content are its saving grace.

In all fairness, I was irate at the conclusion The Final Cut until I simmered down enough to catch its director’s commentary in the course of a reluctant second pass through the film, but I wouldn’t have bought the DVD based on the unexplained execution of the intent that only becomes explicit with commentary.  The Final Cut has become one of my favorite films, because of the intent that drove its execution.  My copy of The Final Cut DVD came very close to being destroyed.  I’m saying that filmmaker intent can be the saving grace, unless the special features are made, as a matter of moronic studio policy, strictly unavailable.  With regard to Cowboys & Aliens, who the fuck gives a shit?

• The camera should be written, managed and handled as though it didn’t exist.
• Fastidiously smooth pans that stop before the editor cuts.
• Long, unbroken takes of events that unfold in a given scene from the least-possible number of points of view.
• Dialogue delivered clearly over spare music that never intrudes upon, muddles or confuses the audience’ apprehension of every single word spoken by performers whose obligation and gift and duty is to enthrall the attention of the viewer in stories that are too deeply layered and too complex for words alone.

Neame expressed his belief that the current trends in camera operation, editing and sound mixing will eventually be reversed in the elevation of cinematic technique to create great work in a cohesive and collaborative manner that works to the perceptual and comprehensive advantage of the audience, unlike the priorities of the current fashion.  He also said that the current trend toward freneticism in visual storytelling began with television’s insistence that the viewer IS the camera.  With that last parallel I’m forced to disagree because the camera has always represented an epistemoligical nonentity.  I think the current trend favors the absurd, confusing nonentity.  I hope he’s right, that fashions change, and that the light at the end of this long tunnel isn’t a camera aimed in the wrong direction, vainly attempting to find the action behind the scense, offstage; reality tv as the ultimate blunder in the struggle between art and commerce.  Ignore the skilled, professional actors — watch the producers/distributors pick the pockets of the numbskulls in the theater/studio audience.  Neame also produced Lean’s Oliver Twist.  A tiny joke.

A movie about the 1500 mile return journey in 1878 of fewer than 300 Northern Cheyenne Indians to their ancestral homeland in Montana from their year-long internment in Oklahoma starred Sal Mineo, Dolores Del Rio, Victory Jory, Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Roland, as the primary Indian representatives.  Monument Valley, on the border of Utah and Arizona, stands in for Oklahoma.  Richard Widmark and Caroll Baker head a cast of compassionate, ineffectual white people whose indecisive ambivalences result in the gradual near-extermination (by cavalry, inclement weather and illness) of a whole lot of pseudoCheyenne in the forms of Navahos, Mexicans, Italians and Whatnots.  No Cheyenne, and none of the Navaho extras speak.  They’re scenery, but what kinds of subversive, postmodern things might Ford-subsidized Navaho have to say if they were allowed to speak?

When Dull Knife and Little Wolf speak to one another in their native tongue, Montalban’s and Roland’s words aren’t subtitled in English, because the filmmaker didn’t give a screaming shit what those characters actually thought.  And sometimes the speak English to one another, for reasons that don’t make much sense unless those central characters are simply shallow plot devices that nudge the story along, kinda like scenery.

Cheyenne Autumn is a very odd kind of apology for Ford to have made approaching the end of a long career laden with extremely-familiar, creaking stereotypes forged in 4.5 dozen successful, self-serving American films about cavalry, cowboys and Indians.  It’s a movie about the destruction of people beneath the wheel of an oblivious political machine controlled by people so remote that the stifled anguish in our foreground is inaudible to anyone who isn’t present, yet the pseudoCheyenne representatives remaing largely impenetrable masks of stoic resignation, even to the attentive audience that paid to see this story unfold.  It might as well be a tale of Irish Nazis following crazy-lethal orders as a revisionist western set in OklaUtah.

John Ford made history.  John Ford also made history stupid.

Our modern tendency to repeat mistakes previously made whenever The People square off against The Wealth would be more predictable and less disaster-prone without the screen of self-congratulating obfuscation John Ford dropped between us and the American Indian.

The inevitability of Manifest Destiny and the inevitable offshoring of American jobs are not separate processes.  People unite to protect Life and Liberty, but the protection of Property requires a draft that’s organized by people with jeopardized property.

In the twentieth episode of the fifth season of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (May 2001), the Sunnydale crew holds hostage a general of holy knights who spills a bunch of backstory about Glory, the season’s BigBad.  It seems Glory is The Beast, a powerful god who was overthrown in an unspeakable hell dimension ruled by a triumverate of jealous and capricious gods before she was imprisoned in the body of a newborn male whose identity was (and remains) unknown to the knights who mean to topple Glory once and for all.

If that wasn’t sufficiently complicated, two years later (in February, 2003), Angel faces The Beast, who covertly serves the scheming Cordelia Chase, who will bear and give birth to Jasmine, the incredibly powerful god-in-transit from at least one unspeakable hell dimension.  Oz?  My head’s starting to hurt.  But hey!  The Beast awakened from rocky inprisonment  deep in the bowels of the Earth to emerge from the ground in Los Angeles in the very same alley where Darla gave birth to Connor.  What?!

And let’s not forget Illyria, whose (A Hole in the World) backstory sounds remarkably similar to that of the other two gods whose ultimate objectives involved the apocalyptic dissolution of natural barriers between familiar definitions of chaos, paradise, heaven/hell and unspeakable hell dimensions in which people are no longer discrete packets of private, unique identity…kinda like The Master’s plan to be the mass-production Henry Ford of Sunnydale/BtVS in the first season, with an irresistible vision of billions of beastly HappyMeals in denim served piping-hot to all the vampire beasts and hellishly-beastly demons drawn toward the Hellmouth.  Wasn’t there a Beast among the X-Men?  Maybe The Beast took some kind of part in building the hole in the world:  Idle speculation.  Slime and antlers.

I think looking for stinking plot holes in Mutant Enemy products is an absolute waste of time.  It’s far more interesting and exciting to attempt to connect deliciously-harmonious points of reference across arbitrary divisions (like those erected by competing broadcast networks; nonsequential presentation, content [standalones vs seriality] meddling, budget curtailment and eventual cancellation).

This post is only a remark, a gracenote for somebody’s preliminary investigation of probable interseries resonance between a couple of complex, compact and fascinating supernarratives and Yeats’ gyre, and realwold information/privacy controversy, and the seeming-inevitability that The Beast would eventually have made itself evident in Firefly.  Reavers?

Grushow/Groosalugg?  Of just how much invaluable realworld/fictional woven resonance is one small underfunded production company capable?  Whither Mutant Enemy? Check that question out!  They’ve infiltrated most everything interesting in recent American television.  And why aren’t those amazing motherfuckers federally subsidized?  That‘s a band I’d love to see reunited.

Also, whither Beauty?

In a better United States, Captain America, appearing before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, could freely state that his real name was Shlomo (not Steve) Rogers, or Chaim, or Aaron, without creating a ruinous sensation in the press.

Imagine, if you will, Hayward, Wisconsin in 1915; and a lone, exhausted, Ojibwe woman giving difficult birth to her terribly premature son, in the snowy field behind the outbuilding of a redneck bar.  Perhaps it’s a daughter.  Chinatown.  The alley behind a mosque.  The back porch of a juke joint, cantina, Armenian restaurant…pretty much anywhere that pits the principles articulated by the Declaration of Independence to the ultimate test of commercial success in the actual Land of the Free.

I’m prejudiced.  Kind of partial to the tale that thoroughly expresses the indomitable spirit in a scrawny, little, victimized Indian kid who becomes the personified emblem of a global struggle to resist total war (an American invention first practiced on Confederate sympathizers and Plains Indians) and all “permissible” variations on the theme of human extermination.  How would Hiawatha do it?  Taking coups from Hitler.

I’d like to live in that other America.  Maybe it’s the native america.  The question that persists is how to go about making that relatively ideal America synonymous with this crappier one.

I suspect the 8 minutes trimmed for time, and moments removed to appease Standards & Practices might make this episode still more sublimely satisfying than the produced version already is, but putting them back wouldn’t alter the look that comes over Angel’s face at the very end of the episode as he gazes kinda-lovingly around the lobby of the haunted, insecurity-riddled hell of an old hotel he’s just liberated from the fascinating/abhorrent paranoia demon.  It’s a legible look of homecoming that foreshadows Malcolm Reynolds’ first, enraptured visual study of Serenity, at the end of Out Of Gas, my favorite episode of Firefly (also written by the same remarkable guy).

Tim Minear’s fine-toothed commentary doesn’t go much out of its way to itemize each of the chewy allusions he wrote into this episode, beyond the mention of Chinatown.  I noticed/imagined quotes from a host of hotel-based horror/noirs; The Shining, Barton Fink, Psycho with fond nods to Rebel Without A Cause, The Defiant Ones, Ox-Bow Incident, Pinky, Advise and Consent, and possibly The Manchurian Candidate, with strong tonal resonance with Bad Day at Black Rock and Shock Corridor – but then, the content and the context of this episode is steeped in still-topical issues that bleed from most episodes of The Twilight Zone; prejudice, self-interest served at cost to others, alienation, mob violence, lethal secrets, insupportable shame and manipulated insecurity – it’s as though Tim Minear were Serling’s unsung son.  Temporal variations in our collective sociocultural attitudes toward racism, homosexuality, miscegenation, communism, lynching, scapegoating, crowdsourcing, and bullet-headed stupidity play tacitly, deep in the viewer’s imagination without crowning The Present Day with bullshit awards for enlightened, progressive platitudes (except for one unfortunate line that Minear explicitly regrets).  It’s an amazingly tidy, nonlinear, meandering, complex and contradictory, yet beautifully-managed, profoundly-disturbing episode.  HUACpaTooie!

In the interest of candor, I might as well report that I find Angel (one of my favorite television series) a real chore to watch because of the

1. aforementioned, blinding and deafening interstitial transition thing,
2. mumbled/whispered dialogue alongside BIG musical score and (industry-standard bogus) violent sound effects,
3. the increasing prominence of the Cordelia Chase character,
4. 80% of the Pylea excursion,
5. most things involving Connor,
6. and the mercifully-rare instances of crossover in which the hit&miss chemistry of Geller/Boreanaz usually leads me to gag on the smarm.

But it’s worth it because these shows are almost always about something real and pending that deserves to be re-evaluated regularly.  And Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?  is certainly one of the best of them, right up there with The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.  And there’s Billy, Skip and the indescribably delicious Alexa Davalos.

24DEC2011:

Jasmine’s the personification of the internet, the singular server of an ever-widening social network, the adversary of oldschool privacy, free will, and both the highest ideal and the ugliest dreads of humanity.  The interstital transitions persist more intermittently after Jasmine’s vanquished (in the Whedonverse, where death isn’t necessarily terminal).  Jasmine’s termination may have been instrumental in the liberation of Illyria, lest two monumentally-powerful higher largely-female powers converge on Earth kinda simultaneously to vastly overshadow the vampire from whose name the show derived its title.

Given the vicissitudes of unexpected preganacy (in season four), network anti-seriality notes and series cancellation, Mutant Enemy ground the standalone form of season five to an incredibly satisfying halt.  Perhaps its a little more accurate to say they modified the course of a streaking killer-asteroid into a stable orbit.

The Black Death is difficult to watch because of all the fashionable camera movement (even in extended dialogue scenes).  Action scenes apparently give filmmakers unlimited license to disorient and nauseate a manipulated audience, but this film takes those liberties whenever talking heads are babbling or silent or severed.  I also hated the fashionable editing practices that go hand-in-hand with wobbly camerawork.

The Black Death, however, has a significant advantage over The Season of the Witch; it’s about something I find far more interesting than neutralizing the diabolical machinations of the malicious imps of Satan.  The Black Death is about the rightness of righteous intolerance.  It comes right out and describes The Church as Power unjustly dedicated, for thirteen unbroken centuries, to pervasive sociopolitical dominance, the subjugation of women, and of the faithful, and the merciless extermination of disbelievers/heretics and unChristian infidels.  That’s a littly ballsy for exploitainment.  It also installs Sean Bean as the leader of a tiny band of sociopathic felons tasked by The Church to determine exactly what ungodly, necromantic force prevents an isolated village from falling prey to the catastrophic plague that’s ravaging everybody else.  It’s a film about the plural shadow of devout belief (rather than doubt) hidden in a bloody, exploitation movie that really coulda/shoulda been better made.

Inevitably, our “heroes” find the plague-free village peopled by ________________ (that would be prejudicial spoilery).  It’s probably sufficient to say there are zero signs of Satan-worship, aliens, nor people from the future.  The unChristian inhabitants make cogent and interesting talking points regarding faith in the invisible, implaccable, vengeful Lord of Christian creation and orthodoxy — which sets the heavily-armed, sociopathic killer-Christians, in their midst, on edge.  It’s probably enough to say that an isolated village of pissed-off infidels in the plague-ravaged bowels of Papist England in 1348 aren’t a single hair more pleasant company than psychotic fighting men hellbent on roasting bleeding heretics at the bidding of The Cardinal.

Don’t read this:  (The [global] village is inhabited by lying, two-faced, manipulative, sophisiticated, self-serving, murderous agnostics:  very much like Us!)

Were it not for the intrusive and excessive camera-movement/editing quirks of this film, The Black Death would deserve the kind of careful attention it clearly attempted to provoke.  Unfortunately, the film also wobbles to its bloody and irresolute conclusion with a ludicrous voice-over epilogue designed to inflect the thrusts of serious conversations of patrons leaving the theater away from universal parallel witch-hunts, toward the isolated personal issues of a vengeful monk…Hollywood schlock.  Expecting to be nauseted, I might revisit this one.

First pass; intense satisfaction, patience fabricated from pure Wakandan vibranium, and ridiculously keen anticipation.

Tutonic legend freak, The Red Skull, gets Cosmic Cubed (perhaps) to Asgard, meets Loki, Tutonic legend, and a pair of fascinatingly-complex villains devise new junk that merits endless speculation.  Good Golly this stuff is fun, but it needs lots more Agent Coulson.

Third pass 30OCT2011:  The Red Skull is an antiquarian.  He’s Indiana Jones, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Campbell — dusting off the cobwebs to reveal long-forgotten practical power.  During their climactic fight, he accuses Captain America of pigheaded, myopic, nationalistic imaging of their common Destiny; a future in which there are no flags.  He may well be a ruthless egomaniac, but the Skull is, nonetheless, interesting, visionary.

Steve Rogers (the sickly, undersized, constant victim of other people’s abuse of superior power) suddenly beomes The First Avenger because all the other Avengers were born later (with the probable exception of THOR), but the suddenly-mighty Captain America isn’t remotely interested in wreaking vengeance on the many individuals who victimized weak Steve Rogers (most of whom probably died during his 70year nap).  Captain America’s mission is (chivalrously) saving the planet from the abuses of superior power, he’s the prototype, the foundation upon which S.H.I.E.L.D. was built from the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the primary narrative representative of which is Peggy Carter:

Courtesy of Wikipedia, actress, Hayley Atwell;

An officer with the Strategic Scientific Reserve and the love interest of Captain America.  Regarding her preparation for the role, she said,

“I’m training at the moment six days a week to make her a bit more military and make it convincing that I could kick butt.”^[8]

About the character Atwell stated,

“I likened her character to that famous Ginger Rogers quote. She can do everything Captain America can do, but backwards and in high heels. She’s an English soldier through and through, although she always looks fabulous. She might stand there with a machine-gun shooting Nazis, but she’s obviously gone to the loo beforehand and applied a bit of lipstick. She doesn’t need to be rescued.  That’s exciting to me – her strength”.^[9] “I think she’s quite stubborn, a slightly frustrated woman who struggles with being a woman in that time. But more importantly she’s a modern woman and she sees something in Captain America that she relates to, and becomes kindred spirits. He treats her very differently to how she’s been treated by lots of men, in this kind of dominated world she lives in. So she’s very much a fighter.”^[10]

The transition from one secret government institiution, S.S.R., into another, S.H.I.E.L.D., is an intriguing thread of continuity (across fascinating decades of recent [male-dominated?] adversarial history) made manifest in the point of view of Peggy Carter, who appears in 2011 at the end of this film looking almost exactly as she did in 1942.  I wonder why.  If Peggy Carter lost Stever Rogers to his noble decision to sacrifice himself (or New York), that choice had deeply-tragic consequences, for her.  If, in 2011, Steve Rogers awakens in a simulated 1942 hospital bed, greeted by the (identical) granddaughter of Peggy Carter, true love gets fucked.  If it’s The Original Peggy, fresh out of preserves in 2011, there‘s a shitload of valuable personal (gender-polarized) history sacrificed in the name of the Carter/Rogers romance.  Ginger wasn’t Fred’s automatic, natural doppelgänger, maybe that was Hermes.  They worked (choreographed, tried, failed, revised, rehearsed beyond exhaustion) until they worked like nobody else.

There’s an enormous body of unproduced (perhaps unwritten) masterwork detailing The Potts Perspective on Stark, Carter on Rogers, Watson on Parker…It’s written from the shadowed, ordinary side of unqualified, superheroic celebrity, and it hands the bullhorn to people who REALLY know how to communicate something all of us will eventually come to regard as invaluable.  How to thrive while being eclipsed.

(Never mind that suspended animation wasn’t widely known to be an available option in 1942.  Steve hops into a few utterly-unfamiliar, foreign cockpits and flies expertly, too.  This film is richly-inlaid with the usual bullshit, but the stink is offset by the charm of noticing at The Red Skull’s Flying Wing [the MacGuffin that opens the film] is buried in snow an ice, very like the saucer in The Thing, and that David Niven’s introduction into Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death resonates beautifully with Steve’s and Peggy’s radio conversation as both guys plummet to their respective deaths in their respective films.  And heroes of the myopic view of culture pigheadedly wave copyright pennants as an impediment to Progre$$, while the biggest A-List creators in Hollywood are also the biggest fans/tributers/borrowers ["pirates"] who ever studied pedicure at the feet of recognized masters.)

The point I’d like to make here is that Captain America:  The First Avenger isn’t just mindless, escapist entertainment.  Its excellences, failings, quirks and logical inconsistencies point directly at stuff that’s worth thinking about and fixing in real life while waiting for the next Marvel spectacular to hunker down on our faces and bathe us in its investors’ ecstatic delight (on its way to the bank).  It’s also a crucial installment in an ongoing cultural event that may provide significant and valuable information to Scmidts and Jonses and Tolkiens and Rogers (both Steves and Gingers) in centuries to come.

Something about this particular time in American history smells like it was accurately predicted from between the dusty covers of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.  To misquote Livia Soprano, “Poe us”.

It’s a film about ass-coverage, fanaticism and ubiquitous, fanatical ass-coverage – inronically, buttfucking is the central bone of contention in a tale that reaches around several unexpected corners to expose whole herds of sacred cows unflatteringly on the horns of legitimate, current dilemmas; realworld problems, skanky heroes, and precious little conventional, Hollywood bullshit.

While there were moments of prolonged yammering that rang ever-so-slightly false, they were generally screamed over the sound of semi-automatic riflefire, which makes up for an awful lot.  I didn’t know bigtime lethal pandemonium came so easily to Kevin Smith.  Now I do.  Red State is a chewy, thoughtful kickass film that wipes feces and sputum off it’s testicles with wit, elan and an inimitable appetite for violent, colloqual charm.