JOE'S GARAGE: SCRUTINIZING THE STAGE INCARNATION OF FRANK ZAPPA'S RUDE DYSTOPIAN MASTERWORK

Jason Paige and the Utility Muffin Chorus bring the bawdy bile of Joe's Garage to brilliant life

How you react to the Open Fist Theater’s first-time-ever staging of Frank Zappa’s satirical rock opera Joe’s Garage, or even simply the news that director Pat Towne and producer/co-writer Michael Franco have taken on the long-thought-unstageable project, will depend almost entirely on your affinity/reverence for Zappa’s music. Attending Joe’s Garage is not likely to make a convert to appreciation for Zappa’s singular talent out of anyone who doesn’t know “Catholic Girls” from “Jewish Princess,” or what the hell means Waka/Jawaka, or the story of Bobby, the very potato-looking ne’er-do-well who resides in Zappa’s San Ber’dino. But for those, like me, who consider Zappa an epic musical genius often misunderstood and/or dismissed by both the star-maker machinery behind the popular song and the general audiences who never, beyond the occasional novelty hit, cottoned to his avant-garde leanings or his penchant for holding a foul-mouthed mirror up to the basest stupidities of human society, Open Fist’s production of Joe’s Garage (extended through December 21) is, literally, a dream come true, made flesh. The wonderful thing is, for those of us who have navigated and examined the soundscapes of Zappa’s seminal three-record set since its two-part release in 1979, the new production in many ways surpasses the dream.


What you’ll see on stage for your ridiculously reasonable $25 ticket is a dark-hearted satiric revelation disguised as a smutty carnival, the embodiment of what was a speculative social nightmare nearly 30 years ago, based on what Zappa postulated as our society’s apparent trajectory toward a Reagan-inspired fascist theocracy, staged at a time in our history when we are even closer to that speculation being realized than ever before. In the aftermath of the Obama election, one might be forgiven for breathing a little easier over the “alternate reality” Zappa suggests in Joe’s Garage, in which that fascist government creates the straw dog of music as a force that opens up the soul to its ultimate destruction and uses it for across-the-board legislative and moral oppression. (The governmental forces at work against freedom of expression in JG are not strictly borne of theocracy, but they certainly lie down with that particular breed.) But one only need to recall the name of the instigator of the Parent Music Resource Center controversy against which Zappa was a prominent and vocal resister—Tipper Gore—to realize that the cautions of Joe’s Garage are as much rooted in battling the complacency we can most often find in ourselves or those ostensibly aligned with us-- complacency, say, borne of relief over dodging a devastating election result, for example-- as they are rooted in the forces from without that work to strip our lives and individuality and turn us into lobotomized muffin factory workers.

Here’s Zappa from the Joe’s Garage liner notes (1979):

“Joe’s Garage is a stupid story about how the government is going to try to do away with music. (A prime cause of unwanted mass behavior!) It's sort of like a really cheap kind of high school play ... the way it might have been done 20 years ago, with all the sets made out of cardboard boxes and poster paint. It's also like those lectures that local narks used to give (where they show you a display of all the different ways you can get wasted, with the pills leading to the weed leading to the needle, etc., etc.). If the plot of the story seems just a little bit preposterous, and if the idea of The Central Scrutinizer enforcing laws that haven't been passed yet makes you giggle, just be glad you don't live in one of the cheerful little countries where, at this very moment, music is either severely restricted ... or, as it is in Iran, totally illegal.”

The “stupid story” finds Joe (Jason Paige), a garage rocker whose band makes a bit too much noise for the neighbors and who ends up tossed into Catholic school in the hopes that he'll eventually ease up on the power chords a bit. There he falls in love with Mary, who eventually betrays him by becoming a “crew slut” for another rocker. Joe finds out about this betrayal and rebounds with a fast-food waitress who gives him an unpronounceable disease (something like “ginococcocochus”), which itself leads to Joe falling prey to a preacher for the First Church of Appliantology. This Hubbardesque evangelist determines that the way out of Joe’s personal doldrums (as well as his little venereal problem) is to come out of the closet by going back into the closet and having sex with the various and sundry electrical appliances he finds there. Joe’s subsequent torrid love affair with a magical pig-shaped toaster device (Open Fist's version looks more like Robby the Robot) goes horribly sour when he short-circuits the machinery during a passionate golden shower episode. Having destroyed private property and being stuck for the cash to make repairs, Joe’s “offenses” are conveniently blamed by the government on his passion for music. (The government is embodied by the piece’s narrator, the Central Scrutinizer, itself embodied by a genius bit of puppetry that sets the perfect unsettling/grin-inducing tone right from the start.) Joe is thrown into a prison which houses other musically oriented “criminals” where he is repeatedly gang-raped by some of the pokey’s foulest citizens, including many fiendish and corrupt record executives. Joe gradually retreats into a fantasy world of imaginary guitar solos (and, in a hilarious bit of business, imaginary rave reviews written by imaginary rock critics) that sustain him through his nightmare of incarceration, but do nothing to stave off encroaching insanity when he is released into a world that he discovers has almost totally given in to the mechanistic prerogatives of governmental control. (“I can hardly wait to see what it’s like/On the outside now,” sings the increasingly mournful chorus as a zombified citizenry greets Joe on the street.) After one final glimpse into the ethereal musical landscape happening underneath Joe’s crumbling exterior (“Watermelon in Easter Hay,” one of Zappa’s most achingly beautiful solos), Joe’s mind finally gives way and he is subsumed into the assembly line culture, drooling and staring into space while working a menial job at the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Here he dutifully “poots forth” little green rosettas, icing on bland muffins that will provide as little nutrition for the public as anything else, artistically speaking, in this increasingly neutered society where empty calories are king, all the better to keep the thoughtless masses docile and in their place.


Zappa’s chosen mode of expression was, of course, music, and his ribald talent served him well in grafting the telling words of this no-holds-barred social critique, itself the end result of a lengthy and bitter legal dispute with Warner Brothers records in the late ‘70s, to this soaring, mathematically challenging, desperate and soulful guitar-based, jazz-influenced rock symphony. But it is readily apparent watching Joe’s Garage (perhaps more so than listening to it) how much of a pretext music is for the pretenses and agenda of this government. The real interest is suppression of ideas—one gets the feeling that innocuous music, in Zappa’s vision, is a perfectly acceptable mode for the propagation of the kind of nullified emotional and political behavior that is, after all, the ultimate goal. The white elephant in the room during Pat Towne’s staging of Joe’s Garage is the notion that the real M.O. of Joe’s government, or of a government like Iran’s (1979 and 2008 variety), or of the post 9/11 Bush cronies, is the discouragement or discrediting (via outright suppression or other means, like, say, the demonization of intellectualism) of a potent artistic expression or vision. And that can come through music, or writing, or film, or theater, or anything else that one is poised to invest of oneself entirely. And one of the reasons why this version of Joe’s Garage seems such a cathartic and exceptional visualization of a beloved, well-known album is that it itself feels explosive; the shards of broken glass from the mirror the production holds up to this society, post-Bush, in the current economic crisis, still cut deep when they make their way into the audience. Zappa’s attacks on mechanized sex (Girls Gone Wild on Internet porn are available in every home), religious fanaticism and hypocrisy (Ted Haggard and the Catholic buggery scandals are so much more freshly stinging than Jimmy Swaggart, aren’t they?), greed (Haliburton and Enron, anyone?) and every other form of bad behavior you can think of (including bad music—the name Toto is invoked, however briefly) seem at once rooted in their time and deeply prescient as well.


The genius of Open Fist’s production is how well the music—brilliantly performed by a seven-piece band just off stage left—meshes with the Hunter S. Thompson-Circus Circus bent of Jennifer Lettelleir’s ingenious choreography and Towne’s limber, let’s-put-on-a-show aesthetic. Zappa, who likely harbored a measure of his own guilt about feeding the rock and roll beast while trying to live past it and break through its strictures, would have appreciated the way this show dances along the razor’s edge where eroticism and dehumanized porn coexist. (The ghastly sight of that chorus line of Catholic girls in their plaid school skirts fellating those future Knights of Columbus is simultaneously hilarious and chilling, a blow-up doll aesthetic writ on embossed C.Y.O. stationery, and Lettelleir’s dancers weave throughout the show from number to number with similar effect.) Similarly, crude humor is made to serve a subtly subversive and serious consideration of the price one can pay for having a specific vision, much less the freedom or the balls to make it come alive.

Too much praise really cannot be heaped on the cast, who with unflagging energy wrestle this difficult beast to the stage floor and pop up on their heels with infectious energy. Jason Paige, a formidable singer (and not a bad guitar player either) plays Joe with an appealing mixture of smart-ass devilry and potent empathy—his is an Everyman that jacks into the audience’s desire to see a satiric representation of themselves as powerless and slightly dopey. Joe suffers no messiah complex; his suffering is specific and personal, and more powerful for the actor’s (and the director’s, and the composer’s) resistance to making him a symbol. By the second act Paige marshals an impressive stage presence, even as Joe dwindles, and the production achieves the scale of tragedy that seems befitting. (And if you sit in the third row you might just become involved in Joe’s “impromptu” bit of audience participation, as I did. Be prepared to in some way be violated. You’ll love it! It’s a way of life!) Also excellent are David Castellani as Father Riley; Becky Wahlstrom as Mary, Joe’s ill-fated girlfriend; Michael Dunn, the unctuously imposing voice of the Central Scrutinizer; Ben Thomas as Joe’s slick band mate (his big number, ”Crew Slut,” is a dirty, disturbing highlight) and Mario Moseley as the Reverend Ike-ish leader of the First Church of Appliantology, L. Ron Hoover (“Well, you have nothing to fear, my son!/You are a latent appliance fetishist, it appears to me!”). It should also be noted that as brilliantly as the music is performed (and the Joe’s Garage band, under the direction of Ross Wright, provides as much reason as any to see the show—to hear the music, rarely performed live, in person), the dancers and singers, breathing life into Lettelleir’s inventive choreography and Zappa’s music simultaneously, are in a class by themselves. Nicole Disson (pictured above), Matt Crabtree, Crystal Keith, Lindsay Loesel, Pip Lilly, Maia Madison, Jonny Marlow, Franci Montgomery, Herbert Russell, Laura Sperrazza and Glen Anthony Vaughan all have reason to enjoy the high spirits they artfully spin from this dark, bitter comedy.


Restrictions on the performance of the music insisted upon by the Zappa estate, and dissatisfaction with proposed treatments, led initial pre-Open Fist attempts to successfully mount a production go unrealized. (Gail Zappa, the musician's widow, has however been a staunch supporter of this production, leading the theater company to bestow upon her the credit of Consultant on All Things Zappa.) But one significant legal hurdle hindering the live performance of Joe’s Garage ended up, for director Towne, resulting in one of the musical’s most sublime, transporting moments. Designated by the composer as one of the three signature guitar pieces that he decided should never be played by anyone else, “Watermelon in Easter Hay,” the piece that represents Joe’s final interior guitar reverie before he trades in his sanity for an icing-caked apron, was the one piece that the band could not interpret themselves. Towne and company were faced with one choice, and depending on their own performance up to that point in the show, it was a potentially risky choice artistically. At the point where Joe drifts off, the lights go down and the Open Fist stage space is plunged into darkness, as apt and spare a representation of Joe’s benumbed brainscape as anything set designers Franco and Charlie Otte (himself another producer) could have likely conjured. It is here that the live aesthetic gives way to around eight minutes of the original recording of “Watermelon” from the Joe’s Garage album, and the transporting effect of the imaginary guitar solo transfuses itself directly to the audience. It is a sublime moment of eyes-closed contemplation in which the nimble strains of Zappa’s guitar seem perfectly, tonally emblematic of those within every soul which tries to connect with a sense of being, of purpose, of self-worth, of the necessity for music to once again mean something apart from the acrobatic ability of its performers and its unerring capacity to separate us from our cash. As much as the original recording was in 1979, this stage version of Joe’s Garage is a vital, brutal, scorched-earth social commentary wrapped up in some of the most moving, funny, challenging music Frank Zappa ever wrote. The show has been extended through December 21, and one can only hope that it will have a long and utterly unexpected future beyond the friendly confines of the Open Fist Theater. This is a production and a vision, based on a great, messy, funky, angry, shattering original work, that deserves a long life all its own.

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SIX DIRECTORS WHO COULD CONCEIVABLY PUT JOE’S GARAGE ON FILM:

KEN RUSSELL: At 80 I bet he’d still have the visual chutzpah to bring to the table; his biggest hurdle might be dealing with the obstinate and protective Gail Zappa, as rigid in her vision of her husband’s work as Paddy Chayefsky was in his.

JOE DANTE: He’d connect with Zappa’s anti-establishment themes and would have a good time making the stage production’s carnival quality all his own.

STUART GORDON: An original member of the Steppenwolf Theater Company, he’d have unique insight into how to make what worked on album and stage translate into film. He’s an unknown quantity with music, but the sinister comedy of Re-animator and Stuck suggests grisly social satire of Zappa’s ilk might be well within his grasp.

ALEX COX: Hard to say how this avowed punk sympathizer would connect with Zappa’s decidedly D.I.Y., but anti-punk sentiment. But his sense of social outrage and fearlessness as a filmmaker might be just the spark for a filmed version of Zappa’s rock opera.

GUY MADDIN: Could Maddin’s faintly antique-feeling surrealism be made to gibe with Zappa’s sensibility? Might be interesting, in a masterpiece or a folly sense, to find out.

DANNY BOYLE: Perhaps this director’s chameleon-like approach, combined with the fresh film technique he brings to each project, would yield a Joe’s Garage that could bridge the 30-year gap between the original work and modern audiences with ease.

Anyone else have any other ideas?

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FOR FURTHER RESEARCH:

Buy your tickets to see Joe's Garage here. (The show has been extended through December 21.)

Variety's Terry Morgan writes appreciatively about Joe's Garage.

Steven Leigh Morris' L.A. Weekly cover story about the production.

Two stories on Joe's Garage courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.



Behind the scenes as Open Fist prepares to unveil Joe's Garage this past summer



FZ debates Tom Braden and Robert Novak on Crossfire circa 1986. The discussion of Zappa's notion that the country was even then moving toward a fascist theocracy leads to considerable condescension (especially from Novak), but it goes a long way toward making clear Zappa's seriousness as a social satirist and commenter, as well as the presience of works like Joe's Garage.





Here are parts 1 and 2 of FZ on The Mike Douglas Show circa 1976, promoting Zoot Allures. On the panel are Jimmie Walker and a very appreciative Kenny Rogers.

And finally...



FZ and the Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life performing "Watermelon in Easter Hay" in Barcelona, 1988.

LAUREL AND HARDY'S MAIN STREET

Updated!


Laurel and Hardy filming Perfect Day (1928) on Vera Avenue in Culver City, California

A pop culture historian and Laurel and Hardy fan in excelsis by the name of Piet Schreuders has undertaken to design and create a digital version of 1920s-era Culver City as it appeared in countless Laurel and Hardy classics and other films made by the Hal Roach Studios at the time. The video documents the project, an off-shoot of Schreuder’s exhaustive book The Shortest Main Street in the World, which is dedicated to those themselves dedicated to the history and cinematic antics of Mssrs. Stan and Ollie. Take a look.

(And thanks for the tip to Scott Hewitt, who passes along this link to further reading on the subject of what Los Angeles and Hollywood looked like during the era of Chaplin and Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy, of course.)



And this by way of friend and reader Sal Gomez, a tour of the Culver City locations for Laurel and Hardy's Big Business 75 years later:

DEAR ENNIO, HAPPY 80th BIRTHDAY!

Ennio Morricone reads a giant Happy 80th Birthday card from all of us

Dear Ennio,

Just a quick note to say happy birthday and thank you for all those notes you’ve managed to put together over your career that, when combined, have resulted in some of the most sublime, giddy, thrilling music ever written for the movies. If you’d only written the theme from Once Upon A Time in the West, well, we might have begged for more but would have had to admit that such haunted loveliness would be far in excess of what we could ever expect from the average composer. But then you did give us so much more. Some of my personal favorites would have to include the mournful dread of your scores for Brian De Palma, including Casualties of War and Mission to Mars (and, of course, the thrusting toughness of The Untouchables); the playfulness of your melodies for Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! which underscored the ambivalence we were feeling about the situation of the characters on screen; the soaring stories of the countryside and the people that infuse your beautiful music for Days of Heaven and 1900; and of course the inimitable (though so many have tried) whistles and blasts and twangs and cresecendoes and sudden silences you created for the Dollars films— music to score a life by, and many of us have done just that. So much to get lost in amongst the aural streams of those works alone, yet those are not even the tip of your iceberg. You have given us so much musical pleasure, so much musical challenge in your 80 years. It would be greedy to hope for 80 more, and yet I cannot resist the impulse, and so I do. May you not see the end of this day without knowing full well how much your work means to those of us who listen with our hearts as well as our ears, those of us who cannot wait to the experience the tales you tell us with your exceptional and unique talent each time we see the credit, “Music by Ennio Morricone.”

Happy birthday, old friend.

Dennis

(As always, Green Cine Daily points the way toward myriad tributes to Morricone on this special day, including fine pieces by Tim Lucas and Robert Cumbow.)

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: THINGS MY DAUGHTERS TAUGHT ME

During these times of my ever-more-fractured attention span, I have found it more difficult than ever to devote the kind of time that my instincts, and my sense of guilt and duty, however misplaced, seem to insist upon when it comes to blog writing. The fourth anniversary of this enterprise will be marked on November 15, and when I started it my life was considerably different, less hectic—to continue the evocation of outdated politics, I barely had a pot to cook a chicken in, obligation-wise, much less the actual chickens to cook. But the work I’ve been able to take on because of this blog, to speak nothing of the career changes I’ve initiated in my life outside of it, have made regular contributions to SLIFR in 2008 far less regular. (It’s a shame that with less profligacy greater keenness of observation has not necessarily followed.)

That all said, I’ve still been catching up on as many movies as I can, and a lot of thoughts have been clanging around that I probably should stop imposing on unsuspecting friends in otherwise unrelated e-mails and form into some sort of post-worthy material. I’ve decided to take advantage of that the fact that, though I still feel like I’ve been shrunk by fever and muscle aches down to about ¾ of my actual size (a viable diet plan?), I’m able to sit up straight in bed and type. So here I am, faced with several daylight hours during which I can write, and you, Dear Reader, must now, if you have the will to continue, pay the price.

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As a relatively responsible movie-going parent, I’ve always been curious as to how much of an influence our children’s responses to the movies we take them to works to color our own. One of the first movies I ever took my first daughter to, when she was two years of age, was Monsters, Inc. Of course she loved it. She even reached up midway through the movie to give me an unsolicited kiss, as if to say, “Thanks for taking me to this movie.” I came away convinced that Monsters, Inc. was a masterpiece of children’s entertainment, and that sublime ending, with Sulley peeking through the doorway at a sleeping Boo, did nothing to dispel that notion. (Neither did my daughter’s resemblance to Boo at the time do anything to dampen my happiness over our experience.) Thus began a history of taking my daughter(s) to the movies, one in which we’ve endured plenty of duds (any chance I could trade in our two screenings of Open Season or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for one more shot at Wall-E on the big screen?), but one which I’ve also had some genuinely lovely experiences. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed movies together (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D) that are unlikely to end up on anyone list of children’s classics. And I’ve been blessed to be able to turn them into fans of the drive-in movie, thanks to that quintessentially American format’s unlikely local renaissance courtesy of theaters like the Mission Tiki Drive-in, the Vineland Drive-in, the Rubidoux Drive-in, and the Van Buren Drive-in.

(There exists somewhere a videotape of me and my then three-month old daughter taken in 2000 at the now-defunct Foothill Drive-in in Azusa, CA, in which I guide her on a tour of the near-deserted lot just before movie time and express my regret that by the time she’s old enough to see them drive-ins will likely be completely extinct. Thank God for my inability to suitably conjure Nostradamus for my inaccurate prognostications.)


Finally, this summer we definitely rode that same wavelength in our mutual adoration of Speed Racer. After spending the movie’s opening day simmering in a downtown jury room awaiting the call that would ultimately never come, I spent a goodly portion of my downtime reading the Los Angeles Times and various other sources (accessed on the courtroom’s $5.00-a-hour Internet access computers) as they proclaimed Speed Racer to be an incoherent dud the scale of which could ultimately bring down its studio, Warner Brothers, after an epic botch of the movie’s marketing. (These were, after all, the bleak days before a certain Dark Knight came and cheered up everybody on the WB Burbank lot.) To celebrate my release from jury duty sans commitment to an actual trial (the system works, folks), I called my daughters and told them to make plans—we were gonna head out to see Speed Racer, my thinking being that if nothing else it would be a boatload of fun witnessing just how far off the rails a major studio movie can go in this age of buttoned-down, micro-precise marketing strategies. At dinner before the movie, we encountered a waiter who overheard us talking about seeing a movie afterward, and when he found out what we were seeing this rather tall, imposing gentleman immediately revealed himself to be a hyperactive member of the uber-geek community. He’d seen Speed Racer earlier in the day (remember, this is opening day) and was hard-pressed to contain his enthusiasm. He implored us to come back and let him know how we liked it, and I thought to myself, “You’re a nice guy, Bub, but you’re not gonna want to hear what I’m probably gonna think about this movie.”

I couldn’t have been less surprised when my daughters began immediately squealing with delight over the candy-colored antics of the Wachowski Brothers’ movie splashing with abandon upon the wide screen. But I kept waiting for that moment when, rather than giving in to the abandon, I had to shut down in the name of self-protection and begin actively rejecting the nonsense. That moment never came. And about three-quarters of the way into the movie, sometime either during or just after the movie’s spectacularly disorienting Fuji race, its track deliberately evocative of the loop-de-loop Hot Wheels tracks of my youth, I turned to my oldest daughter with a huge grin on my face and admitted, “I love this movie!” I spent the remainder of its short summer theatrical run returning to Speed Racer, five times in all, and twice in IMAX, with my daughters and my friend Don, the only other grown-up I know who seems to understand. (The night of the movie’s release on DVD I got a message from him that stated simply, “Have you watched it yet?”)


But then, my kids also loved Open Season. And Indiana Jones and that cheesy crystal skull. And Steve Martin’s remake of The Pink Panther. And Madagascar. And countless other crass movies pitched primarily to their demographic which I, either proudly or sadly, cannot abide. This is the group into which I have traditionally lumped the High School Musical phenomenon. Despite featuring an abundance of tunes that seem to have sprung directly out of a hit-making machine, so insidiously, preternaturally catchy are their hooky melodies, HSM just seemed too Disney-prefab for anyone old enough to be able to draw the line between the adventures of Troy and Gabriella and those of Frankie and Annette. Of course, the entire raison d’etre of HSM is giving the elementary school set a freshly scrubbed look into a universe that they’ll soon be experiencing, with all its real-world complications, soon enough, thank you. And of course that universe doesn’t resemble reality in any meaningful way beyond the carefully marketed multiculturalism of its casting, which is, I suspect, an issue of far more importance for those who don’t have kids or are looking for an easily accessible ax to grind with the movies. High School Musical is simply the wrong place to go trolling for evidence of social reality, and to knock the series for the absence of cholas in the hallways of whatever the hell that high school is called, or because the movies don’t deal with the hard-hitting issues like pregnancy or premarital sex that face today’s teens, is to miss the point entirely.

(Peter Travers’ appalling review of High School Musical 3: Senior Year, in the pages of Rolling Stone, seems to me a particularly egregious and desperate attempt to pander to the demographic and presumed tastes of his magazine’s readership, not to mention their prejudices. “If you're gay and/or eight years old, HSM3 is the movie event of the year,” Travers opines. “From the first leering close-up of Zac Efron shaking off sweat on the basketball court before bursting into sappy song, the movie — like the two TV movies that preceded it — is a nonthreatening sexual marshmallow.” Does that sound like an opening sentence written by a man who isn’t in some way threatened by this fairly innocuous entertainment? Okay, we got ya, Peter--- you’re way too smart, and too butch, for this shit. Sadly, Travers’ review is not an isolated instance of his continued assault on the credibility of film critics, not to mention the music of the English language.)


High School Musical is, again, fantasy, the kind that many of us grew up on in various forms, whether it be Annette and Frankie, or the Tammy movies, or even The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. I don’t see a lot wrong with my daughters having someplace to hang their hopes in a pop culture framework for the life they eagerly anticipate as they get older and school gets tougher. It seems to me they have a right to a fully romanticized idea of high school they can revel in, one which will undoubtedly be snatched away from them far too quickly in any case. (And anyone who subscribes to the Entertainment Weekly-fueled enthusiasm over shows like Gossip Girl or the new 90210 and doesn’t admit that they are simply fantasies of another kind, built on puerile sensationalism and exploitation of trendy attitudes instead of googly-eyed innocence, is conveniently deluded.) I have yet to see the first two TV movies, so the duty of taking my daughters out to see HSM3 fell to my wife, who has indulged the girls’ enthusiasm to a far greater degree than I ever have. (I have been, up to this point, exclusively the one who needles my oldest about Zac’s hunkiness and how I far prefer the perpetually plaid-clad Ryan.) Of course my daughters loved the movie—I would have been foolish to expect anything else. (If somebody would have concocted a big-screen version of Jonny Quest when I was eight years old I probably would have similarly flipped out.) What was surprising, however, was the report brought back to me by my wife regarding the reaction of my eldest, the eight-year-old. Patty said that, about midway through the movie, during an emotional number in which Troy, Gabriella and Troy’s best friend Chad confront the reality of Gabriella moving to Stanford (“Just Walk Away”), my daughter, never one to hide her emotions, began weeping openly, uncontrollably. Patty attempted to comfort her, but it was clear that our daughter, to whom these characters were close to real people she has seen grow up over the course of three zippy, poppy movies, was taking their dilemma utterly seriously. And it was breaking her little heart. (It made me think of Pauline Kael’s comment about how, for many people whose primary experiences in the movies were the Star Wars trilogy, it’s understandable how, no matter how raggedy the last chapter, the fates of Luke, Han and Leia might be experienced on a deeper level than some might be willing to concede.) My daughter’s emotional outbursts were not confined to the scenes involving the separation of her friends—the tears continued to flow through the end credits, along with the presumably real tears of the actors on screen who, in taking their final bows, couldn’t help but acknowledge their own emotional responses to the ending of a series that has framed their entire teenaged lives. It was this summing-up that my daughter was finally reacting to—she got to experience, through the power of this prefab little musical phenomenon, feelings about a series of movies that has been hugely important to her. Though they scared her a bit and she didn’t initially know what to do with them, those feelings somehow found an outlet and she felt safe enough to express them.

The following Saturday it rained in and around Los Angeles. Stuck for something to do while my wife spent the afternoon working, curiosity got the best of me and I suggested we three go see High School Musical 3. Both my daughters were shocked that I even wanted to see it, and they extracted a promise from me that I would not openly mock the movie throughout. I agreed, and off we went to a Glendale auditorium packed exclusively with moms and daughters, and me. (I feel confident in asserting that I was the only male of any age in attendance that day. Take that, Peter Travers.) Turns out that, for this non-veteran of the HSM experience, the third chapter is a pleasant-enough diversion. My tolerance for chirpiness was tested from time to time, and there was a patch when I was fighting off slumber—a frequent occurrence whenever I hit the matinee circuit—but both my daughters helped me through that rough patch (“Dad, you’re snoring! Knock it off!” cried my youngest, and I don’t think I dozed a wink after that.) As I suspected, HSM3 is very much a product of Andy Hardy-Annette and Frankie lineage, and it has the same kind of enthusiasm mixed with blithe ignorance of how silly it all must seem to those outside its hermetically sealed universe that is either wearying or cheering, depending on your perspective. As a director, Kenny Ortega proves himself to be a fine choreographer. (Hairspray's Adam Shankman was far more limber and adept at mixing the two vocations.) It’s a good thing that the movie is as packed as it is with catchy, well-staged tunes, because all that people-interacting-with-each-other-sans-backing-track stuff seems beyond Ortega’s reach—- most of the interstitial scenes between production numbers are as flatly lit and imagined as a Swedish pancake, with Ortega seemingly content to turn the camera on in sit-com style proximity to his actors and hope that their toothy grins will carry the day. Fortunately they usually do, at least long enough to get to the next musical outburst. And at least they neatly capture the kinds of dilemmas young people find earth-shattering—divided allegiance to life pursuits and the difficulty of leaving friends behind are this glossy picture’s meat and potatoes. Thankfully free of the pretension and exploitation that pervades most modern depictions of high school life readily available on cable TV, HSM3 is a movie any adult could see through with little effort. But it’s one that this adult can also fairly effortlessly enjoy, with no ties to the previous installments, and I credit that to the movie’s commitment to its retrograde charms in honoring the emotional pact it has forged with its young audience.

Speaking of which, the moment came when Gabriella must leave for Stanford, and sure enough, my lovely, open-hearted little girl let fly the sobs as she tucked herself in my arms for the duration. And I know I was simply reacting to her reaction, but I didn’t resent the fact that I ended up crying too. Any movie that can touch my daughter without resorting to cheap tactics, but instead by allowing her to get to know a group of kids, the corollaries of whom she’ll likely never meet in real life, kids with little else on their mind but their personal loyalties and that intense need to sing and dance, is okay by me. It doesn’t matter that I don’t necessarily think it’s a great movie. This time it’s enough that she does.

KEVIN SMITH MAKES A DOODY

I had openly hoped on this page last week that Kevin Smith, master promoter, perhaps less than a master filmmaker, might have come up with a movie that would be worth talking about a week after its release instead of just the week before. Well, it’s my sad duty to report that Zack and Miri Make a Porno may be an even bigger disappointment than the smug, inept Clerks 2 because, ostensibly, Smith is not simply coasting here on past laurels but supposedly striking out in new territory. However, Zack and Miri feels desperately old-hat, and not only just for a Kevin Smith movie but for one made by Judd Apatow too, of which this potty-mouthed, envelope-stretching romance is but a pale imitation. David Edelstein aptly suggested in his review that Smith has overextended his cleverness beyond his ability to write blue banter with this movie by openly aping Apatow’s approach. Irony being ironical and all, it was Smith movies like Clerks and Chasing Amy that paved the way for Apatow's bromantical escapades. Now Smith finds himself in the unenviable position of creating a milquetoast shadow within in the shadow of a filmmaker who has basically eclipsed his own single-minded take on modern heterosexual relationships. (That Apatow and the whole outrageous-comedy-with-a-sentimental-heart-of-mush syndrome is already, just two short years after the release of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, teetering on the brink of cliché, speaks volumes.)

Best friends and slackers nonpareil Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks), faced with a Pittsburgh winter and no electricity, lights or running water due to their inability to pay their utility bills, decide to dabble in the sex trade and make a porno, which they are convinced will be their ticket to, if not fortune, then at least keeping a roof over their head. They recruit a motley crew of compatriots, including ex-porn royalty Traci Lords, as well as Smith regulars Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes, and vow to film themselves having meaningless sex, an activity these two platonic pals have avoided their entire lives, in service to their dire financial straits. But long before I got annoyed at the obvious trajectory of what will happen when our two foul-mouthed protagonists finally copulate (what’s the over-under on them discovering how they really feel about each other?), it became apparent that Smith himself was operating on autopilot. A large portion of the movie is devoted to tossing out possible names for their porn epic (none of which are half as funny as the ones bandied about in the original Clerks) and then to an extremely tired and uninspired porn parody of Star Wars, and it’s all only slightly less funny than the average Mad magazine movie satire. (If the utterance Star Whores and endless plays on character names like Princess Lay-her tend to slay you, then by all means buy your ticket now.) After production on the actual movie resumes—the Star Whores soundstage is demolished and the porno becomes a far less ambitious affair shot after hours in the coffee house where Zack ekes out a living—we’re left with nothing for the movie to do but bombard us with F-bombs and other sundry, overly clever nasties while we wait for Zack and Miri to reveal its creamy center.


Turns out that’s plenty of time to think about how much flack Smith has taken for his one true attempt to do something different within his oeuvre—the unfairly maligned Jersey Girl-- and how much slack he’s been cut for just about everything else since Dogma. I appreciated Smith’s attempt to take his sensibility, born of his new experience as a father, in a different direction than his carefully cultivated fan base might expect. And the reaction—tainted by the tabloid response to stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez and their affair, and by the perceived notion that Smith had made a mealy family picture with no place for the fanboys to dig in their dirty nails—assured the movie’s quick and painless box-office death. But, speaking as a previously enthusiastic fan of Smith who even enjoyed the inside-out navel gazing of the relatively clunky (for a Smith joint) Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, it has to be fairly evident that ever since Dogma, a picture I still admire for its engagement with some serious subject matter not usually found within the body-function purview of most modern American comedy, Smith has been cruising-- on Clerks and on his own rep as a raconteur. (The Evening with Kevin Smith DVD series is enough to test even the biggest fan’s constitution— by the release of An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder I had happily left the director’s self-generating cult of personality behind.)

And I think it’s high time to hold Smith’s feet to the same fire that Diablo Cody’s were held (I being one of the primary inquisitors) in regard to the screenwriter’s much-lauded ability to write dialogue. Clerks had a profane jauntiness that influenced an entire generation of film writers, in much the same way that Quentin Tarantino did. But with each subsequent movie Smith’s writing has become further entrenched in that Jersey-fied, self-referential, insular universe, and it’s becoming readily apparent that Smith is incapable of writing characters that don’t sound like himself and his chatterbox buddies, each one at the ready with some wild and crazy variation on “cocksucker” or “fudge-packer,” but bereft of a smidgen of individuality or personality that might leaven the effect of the obscenities and give someone other than a card-carrying member of the Movie Poop Shoot faithful a pathway into the movie. All of this casts an interesting light on the movie’s ultimate box-office reception. The $10.5 million opening for Zack and Miri may or may not be a career highlight for Smith—on some level I take a certain pride in not knowing—but it must irk Smith, so proud in the parading of his characters’ crassest tendencies, that his movie got beat by a week-old Disney musical. And I’d be curious if he wonders at all, given his professed confidence in Zack and Miri as his most commercially viable project yet, whether or not general audiences have not offered a referendum of indifference re the Smith worldview, certainly in comparison to Apatow’s. (Even the relatively tepid and tepid-performing Forgetting Sarah Marshall made more of a splash than Zack and Miri seems poised to generate.) Could it be that commercial concerns might ultimately force this most complacent of directors to finally strike out in a new direction?

HAUNTED, BELATED HALLOWEEN

I had really hoped I’d had time to address some thoughts I had on horror movies in time for Halloween, but the hour of the wolf grows nigh and I’m going to have to settle for providing you with links that will slake your blood thirst for great reading material about this most resilient and adaptable of genres. Jonathan Lapper’s Cinema Styles has really come into its own as an excellent read over the past year, and Jonathan spent the last month luxuriating in the extremities and excitement of the horror genre. Similarly, Bill R. recently launched a blog entitled The Kind of Face You Hate (it’s Dr. Mabuse’s, not Bill’s), the attendance to which hopefully accounts for his recently scaled-down appearance in the comments columns here. (My lack of posts might have something to do with it too.) It’s been worth Bill’s efforts, though—his blog has quickly become one of the best, and at the risk of being too reductive about such an ambitious project, he spent the entirety of October discussing the vast array of horror literature, much of which you don’t know about (I didn’t either). Finally, if getting a great overview of the entirety of the blogosphere as it engaged with the horror genre this past month is your cup of brew, then please check out Green Cine Daily’s multi-post “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” series, spread out over the course of a very busy Halloween month for this most excellent of websites.


My own Halloween movie fun ran far more on the trick-ish than the treat-ish side. Things began inauspiciously enough with Alexandre Aja’s skittish, cluttered Mirrors (2008), which misinterprets horror as a constant state of jittery camera movement, splintered editing (no doubt justified by the visual motif of all those broken mirrors), and sequences of Kiefer Sutherland glowering and baring a flashlight through darkened halls, all the better to orchestrate a plethora of cheap “boo” gags and distract from the low-rent, Shining-rip-off storyline. Oh, and Amy Smart gets a truly gruesome death scene in a bathtub in which her jaw is broken and hyper-extended by the unseen ghoulies hiding out in her medicine cabinet mirror. (Aja uses some of the movie’s longest, most loving takes here.) Movies like this and the wretched The Haunting of Molly Hartley (2008), which lifts its plot (but not its lack of energy) from formulaic, and much better, ABC TV Movies of the Week like The Initiation of Sarah, are made by people who betray not a lick of reverence for or facility with the horror genre and its possibilities, its power, its fun.


Then I revisited John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1988), a pseudo-religious post-Exorcist thriller-- Argento by way of Carpenter touchstone Howard Hawks-- in which a group of no-nonsense physicists (headed by no- nonsense TV actor Jameson Parker) lock themselves in a church basement to do battle with (and get zombified one-by-one by) a whirling Day-Glo substance in a jar that just might be Satan himself. Yes, it’s as dumb as it sounds, made even more tedious by Carpenter’s deadpan directorial torpor and patented matter-of-fact approach to the most absurd material—the movie plays like a greatest-hits album for a director whose best tricks weren’t all that good to begin with. Alice Cooper is the leader of a group of street people turned into shuffling flesh-eaters in the presence of the Day-Glo jar, and the singer’s perpetual glower is played entirely straight, which would be fine if anything in the movie was remotely scary. The movie’s only juice is provided by Donald Pleasance as a priest saddled with the script’s most portentous expository dialogue—it’s the exact same performance he delivered in Halloween, only wearing a clerical collar.


I want to spend more time than I have here extolling the virtues of the mournful and visually brilliant Swedish import Let the Right One In, which was the highlight of my cinematic Halloween adventures. I vow to write more about this movie in the very near future. But I will say that, along with The X-Files: I Want to Believe earlier this year, the movie makes an excellent case, in a completely different context, for the atmospheric dread of winter that has gone, to my mind anyway, greatly underexplored in modern horror films. Director Tomas Alfredson has an uncanny instinct for the chilling effect of quiet and he never pushes his individual sequences, frightening as they are, into excess. This atmospheric tale of a spectral young boy who is befriended by an equally mysterious girl apparently his own age—a girl who doesn’t seem to eat and is strangely unaffected by the incessant cold—turns what could be the merely gruesome into a evocative, visually rich fairy tale which is as much a haunting tale of finding one’s true soul mate as it is one of a quiet town whose adults fall prey to a 12-year-old vampire. Let the Right One In put me in mind of the somber fairy tale atmospherics of Val Lewton’s Curse of the Cat People (directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch), a movie in thrall to the interior fantasy world of the similarly adrift young girl at the center of its story. I finished off Halloween weekend with Lewton, Wise and von Fritsch’s beautiful movie, and combined with Let the Right One In (a strong contender for movie of the year) it proved the most perfect corrective for the misapplied technology that is the only possible justification for a folly like Mirrors. (Prince of Darkness, on the other hand, seems merely harmless and dated.)


I’m not sure if I share Noah Forrest’s sense of despair over the condition of the horror film in general—it seems like there’s always someone like a Tomas Alfredson to breathe new life into wineskins that would seem, after a century of cinematic storytelling, to be exhausted. But seeing too much crap like Mirrors and Saw 5 can make you start to believe that the people who control the production of modern horror movies are the ones least qualified to delineate precisely what makes a good one. (Does Alexandre Aja really believe he made a scary movie when he looks in his own Mirrors, or is he just as cynical and manipulative as his film suggests?) That’s why I’m excited by what I’ve heard about the upcoming Splinter, and why I look forward to what my friend Don Mancini, as knowledgeable and talented a caretaker as any horror movie could have, will do with his upcoming projects, including his own remake of Child’s Play. These are the kinds of movies that tend to respect horror’s past and promise to take it in new and unexpected directions-- projects that true horror aficionados can’t help but get excited about.

NOTES ON POLITICS AND KINDERGARTEN

Well, the Satanist Muslim cat is out of the bag. The American people provided this generation with the spectacle of one of the most impressive voter turnouts in a century for a presidential election that could hardly be mistaken for anything other than a rousing call for change. For many African-American voters of a certain age, and those of every color who have built their lives around adherence to the basic tenets of civil rights in this country, it may have seemed that a day like this would never come. But for just as many younger African-Americans interviewed coming out of polling places and into the celebratory night last evening, their awareness of the historical reality of what kind of hindrance the color of their skin has been for those that came before them did little to temper the difficulty they had understanding how such a world could have existed and operated, so apparently different is the one they live in today. The election of Barack Obama is an indication of that difference, a marker of the reality of true possibility that does not exclude the awareness of how many entrenched, institutionalized attitudes are left to be enlightened. Those who are so excited about Obama’s historic win (myself included) would be well advised to temper expectations of the effects of some magic Obamaesque wand that will be put to use against overt racism, a crumbling economy, and the management of two expensive, deadly wars, one of them pointless as well. But it is hard to begrudge anyone the sense that we’ve seen something important and historic in the past 24 hours, experienced a sea change in the body politic that more accurately reflects the personal politics of many voters, Republican and Democrat, than have very many elections past. It is a moment on which to speculate, but more accurately build upon the opportunities that have been afforded us through the electoral system.


Sorry, but I just couldn't publish a picture of that woman...

Why, even the conservative radio talk-show host Al Rantel, whom I listened to in the shower this morning, was talking conciliation. This man, who has been harshly critical of both the Clinton and Bush administrations in the past, is to my ear one of the more fair-minded voices on a Los Angeles AM radio frequency (790 KABC) which the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Larry Elder and Tammy Bruce call home. Rantel was able to see the forest for the trees this morning. He called for “the haters” to examine fairly Obama’s words and actions in the next couple of years and join in working together with a true rainbow coalition of voters to help Obama to begin fulfilling some of the promise of his candidacy, not to undermine it before it even begins. Is this kind of reaching across the gap possible? It would be, from my perspective, had John McCain won. Most of the people I’ve talked to never held much animosity for McCain, outside the general perception that he would extend the war in Iraq indefinitely. Most of the hesitation I’ve personally felt toward a McCain presidency was mired in questions about his health, and those questions would have been moot had he chosen (or had chosen for him) a running mate for whom I could have held an ounce of respect or confidence. But the prospect of the shockingly inept weirdo Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and that oh-so-tempting button was just too overwhelming. What looked like a crafty, typically cynical play by the Republican Party to steal Obama’s thunder (gender trumps race, right?) and get a big push by the People/Us Weekly contingency got exposed for what it was—a shell game on the national stage in which, thankfully, a majority of American voters followed the rotten egg under the cup, exposed it and tossed it to the curb.


But maybe the most immediately gratifying thing for me about the Obama win is thinking about these bigots, closeted and out in the open, who have been including me in strings of anti-Obama e-mails leading up to the election. Their missives are always couched in language that reflects their level-headed, heartfelt concern about Obama and his ties to Muslim terrorists (well, with a name like O-BOMB-a, right?!), the Muslim faith (well, with a middle name like Hussein, right?!), and how this insidiously charismatic man, the color of whose skin is, naturally, of no concern at all, will surely lead our nation away from the righteous Christian faith it has claimed to have been based in since its inception and down the primrose path toward pagan idolatry, the formation of terrorist cells in your neighborhood and, perhaps most vile of all, race-mixing-- you know he’s half white, right?! (One can only chalk it up to a failure of imagination that these clowns managed to miss the opportunity to raise our hackles about Obama’s grooming habits based on his undoubtedly demon-inspired initials.) To think of these fretting cowards having to face up to a truly new world where Barack Obama is undeniably their president is satisfying indeed. It’s also frightening—from this kind of thinly-veiled fear can often blossom the true fruits of hate. But if the election of Barack Obama can signal a change in a country whose history is littered with the corpses of people of all colors whose lives were taken in the name of God and American sovereignty, then maybe there’s room for change in those who still hold out the fears that have otherwise been so effectively diminished by this current generation of voters.

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The tree, the spider web and the “Kindergarten Votes!” sign are my contributions to the hallway decorations at R. D. White Elementary School in Glendale, California for Election 2008

I spent Election Day in bed, listening to the returns on TV as they clanged around in my fever-wracked head and got all mixed up with the howls coming straight out of my aching, constricted musculature. This was my body saying, “Okay, enough.” I’m in the final week of my first six-week leg of student teaching, and as I was teaching my lesson yesterday morning (my last kindergarten observation by my supervisor too, so there was even extra added pressure there) I started to feel rundown. At lunch my supervising teacher, the one in whose classroom I have been working since early September, took a look at me and thankfully sent me on my merry way. But before I did, I was able to turn my own voting into a teachable experience for my kindergarten kids. It just so happens that the elementary school where I teach also doubles as my polling place. So round about 11:00 a.m. we all trudged down to the auditorium where the kids got to watch Mr. C. cast his vote for Rock Obama, as he is widely known in the primary grades, and against a ballot measure that would call in question the right to gay marriage in the state of California, a measure which, unfortunately, did not ride the coattails of the state’s Obama endorsement. (The measure was approved by about a four-percent margin.) The election has been a lot of fun for us in class this year—the kindergarten teaching team even set up an election in which the wee ones were able to cast their own votes and encourage the kids to get familiar with being involved in the process. (Results: Obama, 86 votes, McCain, 26 votes, and four ballots disqualified when the voter decided to check off both boxes.)

After all this, it was time for me to shut down for a while. I haven’t been sick in bed for quite a while, but I’m not surprised that it happened during this fairly rigorous schedule which I find myself in as I complete my journey to become a teacher. The amount of work required in school, coupled with the amount of work I have to do just to bring in a fraction of the amount of money I’m used to at my day job, finally caught up with me yesterday. But it’s been a grand journey so far, and as I close out my time in kindergarten I thought I’d show off a couple of pictures and offer special thanks to kindergarten teachers extraordinaire Beth Hank, Teresa Peplow, Bonnie Lewis, Mariena Jacobs, Heather O’Dell, Pam Andrissani and fellow student teacher Kathryn Nishibayashi—these folks have offered me nothing but friendship, support and cogent criticism which I can take directly back to the classroom the next day (or the next minute, sometimes) and directly improve my teaching skills. But most of all, I offer my gratitude to my supervising teacher, Dotti Soghomonian, who has never let our friendship (she was kindergarten teacher to both of my daughters) get in the way of being the best, most constructive advisor I could ever hope for. There have been days I’ve walked out of school thinking I was in over my head, but Dotti never let me forget her confidence in my skills and my ability to relate to the children, and because of that I have been able to come back in the next day, regain my footing and keep on truckin’. My experience in her classroom has me seriously considering a career in kindergarten, which I would have never thought about before. And if I end up with a tenth of her skill as an effective, empathetic, concerned and proactive teacher, then I will have a grand second-half career in teaching indeed. Thanks, Dotti.

Here’s a look at the classroom under the guidance of Mr. C.:


Halloween day: Dotti’s costume was a big hit; unfortunately, I could think of nothing to wear and ended up, as you can see, in my street clothes…


Mr. C seizes the occurrence of some actual fall-like weather outside to teach the class about clouds (For Jonathan Lapper and anyone else concerned, note the absence of the baseball cap)