Dick Gets The Arnold Treatment

Title: Total Recall

Rating: 3 Stars

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post on Robocop, I’m taking a look at Paul Verhoeven’s films from the 90s that are his glimpse into what a near future might look like. Viewing such films from a distance of thirty or so years seems like it could illuminating. Total Recall is the second in this series. I’m hoping to get to Starship Troopers soon.

As with Robocop, I’m old enough that I originally saw it in the theaters. This was a time of peak Schwarzenegger. I remember being excited watching the film. It was action packed, full of what at the time were amazing special effects and extreme violence.

So, I probably had about the same response watching it in theater as I did watching Robocop. When I recently re-watched Robocop, I came away with a renewed appreciation for the themes that Verhoeven was presenting.

Did I come away with a similar appreciation upon watching Total Recall some decades later? I’m afraid not.

This could have been a happy marriage. You had Schwarzenegger, who as I said, was at the peak of his popularity. You had Verhoeven who, alone among action film makers of that time, was willing to insert social commentary into his films. And you had Philip K Dick. He wrote the short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”, upon which the film was based.

Philip K Dick was a brilliant science fiction writer whose stories spawned a remarkable number of films. Films based upon the work of Dick include Minority Report, Paycheck, The Adjustment Bureau, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, and most famously, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

I haven’t seen some of these and in most cases, even for the ones that I’ve seen, it’s been many years since I’ve watched them. It’s fair to say that Dick wouldn’t have been thrilled with most of them. I couldn’t find the quote, but Dick became so disenchanted with Hollywood that he said something along the lines of, that the only way that he’d go back to Hollywood was if he died, they put lipstick on him, and strapped his corpse into the driver seat of a speeding car.

Dick was dead when Total Recall came out, but it’s fair to say that he would not have been pleased. His small story about a nondescript man with deeply hidden memories that when resurfaced prove unsettling and a twist ending that comes out of nowhere disappears in the action tsunami of an Arnold action film.

Make no mistake about it. This is not a Dick film. This is not a Verhoeven film. This is a Schwarzenegger film. Despite taking a huge Austrian body builder and first trying to first position him as an everyman laborer, there’s no doubting that he’s going to quickly shed that skin and become the killing machine that we all know him to be. It is his job to save Mars from the evil Cohaagen (Ronny Cox, hilariously the same actor that played the evil corporate executive in Robocop; he sure had the monopoly on evil executives there for a while), and there’s no doubt that he will do so. The only question is what the body count will be.

There are glimpses of some issues that Verhoeven might have been able to delve deeper into in a different film. The Mars citizens are oppressed by the corporation that is mining valuable minerals there. There are certainly statements that could have been made about resource exploitation of indigenous people. However, by centering all of the action on Cohaagen, it makes it seem like the actions of one evil person as opposed to the more typical systemic exploitation. It becomes a film about a bad guy doing bad things and the good guy that is trying to stop him.

There are also important ideas that could have been explored in the film surrounding the idea of reality. Quaid, bored by his daily life, goes to the Rekall corporation to get a memory implant where he goes to Mars as a secret spy. As the memory was being implanted, it opened up his repressed memories of actually being a Martian secret spy. All action unfolds from there. A question can be asked, is the reality that Quaid is experiencing the true reality or is it the actual implanted memory that he paid money for? This question isn’t ignored in the film but is not explored to the depth that it could have been.

It also suffers from how special effects age with time. What were state of the art effects in 1990 now look pretty cheesy in 2022.

The bottom line is that while Robocop, through the lens of time, still has importance, other than as an 1990s action film, Total Recall not so much.

A Preppy Liberal-Arts Murder

Title: The Secret History

Rating: 4 Stars

This is one of those novels whose background is perhaps more famous than the actual story itself. It’s a story of two murders committed by a group of students studying classics at a small semi-prestigious liberal arts university in Vermont. While there, they fall under the spell of a classics professor.

The reason that the background is somewhat famous is because Donna Tartt, the author, attended Bennington, a small university in Vermont, majoring in classics. While there, she met fellow authors Bret Easton Ellis (famous for Less Than Zero and notorious for American Psycho), Jonathon Lethem (famous for Motherless Brooklyn), and Jill Eisenstadt (writer of a couple of novels and many short stories). Tartt studied classics with Claude Fredericks, a long running and legendary professor at Bennington, who also started a small press that featured innovative writers like Gertrude Stein.

Since at least the milieu appears to be autobiographical, people read the novel hoping to get inside dirt on life at such a small, prestigious liberal-arts institution. This is reminiscent of Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Light, Big City, which was a fictional insider’s look at the somewhat secretive The New Yorker magazine, where McInerney worked as a fact checker.

The story is told from the point of view of Richard Papen, a young man desperate to escape his home in California. With financial aid, he’s just barely able to get into Hampden college. Not sure what to do but having two previous years of Greek under his belt, he tries to get into the classics program. However, the classics program is essentially one professor who takes on a very small number of students. He eventually manages to weasel his way into the program.

Once there, he thinks that he’s in way over his head. The other students appear brilliant. The professor is nontraditional. His sessions seem more like Platonic symposiums than traditional lectures. They open up entire new worlds of ideas to Richard.  Although he feels like he’s flailing, Richard is thrilled to be having what appears to be a true liberal arts experience.

Slowly, the layers start to peel away. Although all of his fellow students appear wealthy, that is not the case. Bunny, in particular, steals common food and just assumes that someone will always pay for him. Francis has family wealth but is on an allowance. The twins, Camilla and Charles, rely upon small sums given to them by their grandmother. Henry has a modest trust fund.

One night, in Richard and Bunny’s absence, the other four attempt to recreate a Dionysian bacchanalia. While in a frenzy, Henry accidentally kills a Vermont farmer.

At this point, the novel begins to go down a path similar to Doestevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment, with high minded purpose, Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker and her half-sister Lizaveta. After the murder, Raskolnikov, overcome by guilt, becomes emotionally overwrought and falls apart.

Similarly, after the murder of the farmer, the group falls apart. Bunny discovers the murder and proceeds to blackmail the other four. Charles descends into alcoholism. Francis becomes emotionally unstable to the point of near hysterics.

In all of this, Henry appears steadfast. He becomes worried that Bunny is going to bleed all of them dry. After an abortive attempt at a new start in a different country, Henry becomes convinced that the only solution is to murder Bunny. After they successfully murder Bunny, the group decomposes even further as local police and federal agents descend in a search to find Bunny’s body.

Before this is all is over, there is another attempted murder, a suicide, and a hospitalization. All pretense to higher learning or attempts to live by ancient aesthetics have been abandoned. The professor abandons the students. Only one of the six students even graduates. In the last where are they now chapter, it appears that no one is happy.

If Hampden is indeed a stand-in for Bennington, it’s fair to say that Bennington does not come out looking good. The student body is awash in alcohol and drugs. It’s a school where wealthy parents send their misfit children that can’t succeed anywhere else. Two of the biggest problem students are both children of wealthy patrons. They continue attending without consequences, regardless of their behavior.

The Secret History is the inspiration for a literary genre known as dark academia. It contrasts the image of these wonderfully austere places of higher learnings with their classical ideals and gothic buildings with the dark rot that lies underneath them.

I enjoyed reading it. For those of us who attended a university that had similar aspirations, especially in the time in which this was set (the mid 80s), we can probably relate both to the setting as well as the actual reality of attending such an institution.

Narrative History Reading Like Gripping Fiction

Title: Hellhound On His Trail

Rating: 5 Stars

This is the second time that I’ve read this book. Generally speaking, I’m a fan of narrative history. This very well might be my favorite read of this genre.

The book is broken up into three parts. The first part are the struggles that Martin Luther King goes through in the months preceding his assassination. At the same time, we follow a mysterious recent prison escapee as he meanders through his life until the two fitfully meet on April 4, 1969.

The second part is the FBI investigation. J Edgar Hoover detested Dr King, had him under regular surveillance, harassed him, including but not limited to sending him anonymous notes encouraging him to kill himself. In the immediate aftermath of his assassination, there were many riots in major cities. This was a crime of national importance that could only be handled with the resources of the FBI. Even though Hoover wanted no part of it, the Attorney General ordered the FBI to take over the investigation. To their credit, they did. It took immense resources and significant luck, but eventually they identified the assassin as James Earl Ray.

The third part is the manhunt. Ray, knowing that he was the target of our country’s biggest manhunt, was pretty much constantly on the run. He holed up in various places in the South, made a run to Canada, fled to England, went to Portugal, went back to England, and was trying to get to Belgium so that he could fly to the sanctuary of the white supremacist government of Rhodesia. He was picked up by Scotland Yard as he was trying to clear customs to get on his flight to Belgium.

All of these facts can be easily read on King’s or Ray’s wiki page. Hampton Sides uses a deep body of research and his literary skills to create a narrative fiction that will leave you on the edge of your seat. It’s seldom that I read a history where I can’t seem to help myself from reading the next chapter, and then the next chapter, and so on.

Dr King was at a significant crossroads in his life. Having been instrumental in the passing the significant civil rights bills, he began preparing to embark upon his next big project. In addition to opposing the Vietnam War, he wanted to broaden his movement to include poor people of all races. Although he still dominated his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, younger, ambitious leaders such as Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson were trying to step up and take a larger role. At the same time, after the previous summer’s city riots, many were beginning to question Dr King’s approach of nonviolence. Many felt that Dr King was from a older phase of the civil rights movement and that time has passed him by. He wanted to re-establish his leadership position by leading a Poor People’s March to Washington DC to highlight the problems of poverty across all of America.

As this was unfolding, there was a strike by predominantly Black garbage workers in Memphis. At first, Dr King was just going to do a quick speech, but inspired by their passion and determination, he saw this as an opportunity to treat this both as a civil rights issue as well as an economic issue. His first march in Memphis ended in violence. Horrified that this violence was going to derail his plans for the Poor People’s March, he agreed to come back to Memphis for yet another march.

In all of this, the man known as Eric Galt was scuffling along at the edges of society. He spent some time in Puerto Vallarta. He moved to California. Weirdly, he took dancing lessons. He made a couple trips to the South. He joined the George Wallace presidential campaign as a volunteer. All along, he regularly read newspapers to keep current. Knowing that Dr King was going back to Memphis, Galt headed there with a newly purchased rifle. He rented a room at a boarding house that had excellent sight lines to the Lorraine motel room that Dr King was staying at. Seeing his chance, he took his shot and fled, ultimately invoking an international manhunt.

Hampton Sides maintains taut narrative suspense. Obviously, I know that Dr King gets assassinated by Ray. This is history. There can be no other conclusion. It’s telling that I became so consumed with the story that I found myself hoping that Ray would miss or that Dr King would leave the balcony and head out to his planned dinner. I found myself shattered all over again at the opportunities that were missed by Dr King’s tragic death.

Along with John and Robert Kennedy, Dr King’s assassination seemed incomprehensible. How could one lone gunman end such a significant life? So, along with Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, various conspiracy theories have been built up around Ray. Ray, a manipulator, had enabled some of these conspiracies by referencing some shadowy Raoul character.

With Sides giving a day by day and at times nearly a minute by minute accounting of Ray’s time, he goes a long ways towards dispelling these far fetched theories. Even so, there are still some questions. He did spend several thousands of dollars on his travels. He did occasionally engage in mysterious long distance phone calls. However, Sides makes clear that these questions do not mean some deep conspiracy. It’s estimated that Ray made several thousand dollars selling drugs while he was in prison. Others that might have helped him or possibly provide funds to him include one of his brothers and an acquaintance that had publicly expressed interest in putting a price on Dr King’s head. Even if he had such low level support, there’s really no question that it was Ray, a known racist who had expressed hatred of Dr King, that had pulled the trigger.

Ray was born in a family of crime and squalor. Ray’s great-grandfather was hanged after killing six men. His uncle was a convicted rapist. Ray’s father abandoned the family. As a result, two of his siblings (including one that was mentally disabled) were given up for adoption. Two of his siblings died young. In the winter, they’d cannibalize their wooden house for heat until finally it collapsed. In addition to Ray, two of his brothers were convicts.

The tragic irony of all of this is that Dr King’s commitment to addressing the causes of poverty, regardless of race, was directly targeted at the multi-generational poverty that was experienced by the Ray family. Ray cut short the life of the one person that possibly could have changed the trajectory of families like his own.

Supreme Injustice

There have been several recent shocking Supreme Court decisions. First of all, there’s Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned Roe v Wade. In the immediate aftermath, multiple states passed bills banning abortion. Some of these bans do not include exceptions for rape or incest. There is already a report of a pregnant 10 year old child having to cross state lines to get an abortion. Some of these laws don’t even include an exception for a woman’s health. There are already reports of women with serious medical conditions being prohibited from basic medical treatment.

It doesn’t stop there. In the opinion, it opens up the door in the future to allow the banning of such things as contraception and same sex marriage. The legal theory that it knocks down forms the basis of a broad array of other protections (eg interracial marriage).

In my memory, this is the first time that the Supreme Court has taken away rights that have been in place for decades.

Next, in West Virginia v EPA, the Supreme Court limited the EPA’s ability to curb emissions from coal burning plants. Given that we’re in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave, that the Southwest is starting to run out of water, and that major fires are now an annual rite, restricting the federal government’s ability to manage climate change seems to be, longer term, an even more disastrous decision.

Given the composition of the current Supreme Court, this would appear to be a harbinger of things to come. Over the next several years, a rollback of rights and a further restriction of federal oversight seems inevitable.

Understandably, there have been cries of outrage. Rights that were considered ‘settled’ law are now back in play. People wonder how it can be possible that a regressive Supreme Court can roll back laws and policy that are approved by a majority of Americans. How did this Supreme Court become so horrible?

Well, here’s the thing. We’re all victims of something called Recency Bias. Recency Bias is a cognitive concept where a person puts more weight on recent events over historic events. The fact is that the composition of this Supreme Court isn’t an anomaly. The Supreme Court justices from the 1950s through the 1970s, which laid the foundation for so many of the rights that we have today, were the anomaly.

Except for that narrow range of time, Supreme Court decisions have been consistently anti-individual and pro-corporate interests. An interesting book called Injustices, by Ian Millhiser, covers this in detail (I wrote about the book here). I think that what we’re seeing is a reversion to the mean.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a walk through some of the all time worst decisions made by that august body.

Dred Scott v Stanford (1857)

This case always tops the list of bad decisions, and for good reason. This decision explicitly said that white people are members of the ‘citizen race’. Black people (and indigenous people got thrown in as well) had no standing in the United States. It mentioned, with horror, certain unspeakable scenarios like Black people actually having the right to free speech and hold public meetings. By the way, it also undid the Missouri Compromise, which was the very fragile structure that the North / South relationship was hanging on.

It’s hard to imagine another decision coming along that will supplant its top status.

Plessy v Ferguson (1896)

Always a top contender, this decision upheld segregation as long as it was ‘separate but equal’. Of course separate but equal lies in the eyes of the beholder. It’s fair to say that significant more emphasis was placed on separate than equal. This decision ensured that Jim Crow laws would have another 60 years of life.

Buck v Bell (1927)

This one still shocks me. It ruled in favor of eugenics. That is, the Supreme Court had no problem with forced sterilizations of those with limited mental faculties. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered one of the great justices, wrote the majority opinion (decided 8-1!) and concluded it with the words, “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Nazi Germany modeled many of its eugenics laws from US law. So, we have that going for us.

Korematsu v United States (1944)

This said that the whole let’s imprison Japanese people in internment camps just because they look different than us white people is just fine.

Lochner v New York (1905) and Hammer v Dagenhut (1918)

I’m just going to combine these two cases into one discussion because they both concern labor laws.

New York had a law limiting bakers to 10 hour days. The state was sued and the law was overturned by the Supreme Court. The basis for the decision was that bakers should be able to voluntarily contract to work as many hours as they want. I mean, if a baker wants to work 22 hours a day, then there should be no law to preclude them from doing so, right? This is one of those decisions that was apparently decided in an ivory tower so high and impregnable that no reality at all could shine in. Bakers were being forced to work brutal hours. They had no choice in the matter at all. To think that one baker could somehow find the best job for himself while the entire industry was colluding against him is laughable.

It’s a good thing that the Supreme Court was always there whenever some individual tried to pick on one of those helpless corporations.

Thankfully, Lochner was later overruled. However, don’t get too comfortable. Revisiting Lochner is a goal that Clarence Thomas has specifically called out.

In Dagenhut, the Supreme Court decided that Congress couldn’t regulate child labor in a cotton mill because the child’s labor does not take place intestate (but the product of that labor definitely does, so the decision is bizarre). With that decision, federal child labor laws were declared unconstitutional. Put those kids to work, everyone!

Citizens United v FEC (2010)

Back to my reversion to the mean argument, not all bad decisions were 100 years ago. Some are actually quite recent. This notorious decision said that money equals free speech, and therefore cannot be regulated. So, we’re now in a situation where billions of dark money are being spent. Politicians are basically full time money gatherers. Our political process has become completed corrupted by the injection of limitless money.

That’s a lot of bad decisions! The point of writing this post was to disabuse those of you who think that the Supreme Court is some hallowed institution where our rights as citizens are protected. For a relatively short period of time, this was true. However, historically, it was never true and we’re now back in a place where it is no longer true.

If you want to protect your rights, you have to fight for them. There is no supreme law of the land that is watching out for you.

Masters of the Universe Go Berserk

Title: Barbarians at the Gate

Rating: 5 Stars

This book is a bit dated (it was published in 1992). Even so, it’s one of the non-fiction classics of the business world. Just like Too Big To Fail is a great depiction of the financial meltdown that caused The Great Recession, this is a great view of the merger madness of the 1980s. Reading this in conjunction with the corruption exposed by Den of Thieves will give you a brilliant, if jaded, picture of a time when junk bonds ruled the world.

For those of you who weren’t around during this time, during the 1980s people started to realize that some corporations were dramatically undervalued. These corporations were conservative, staid companies that had existed for decades. They were institutions in company towns. They considered themselves part of the community. They weren’t great risk takers but they produced significant cash. People bought and held the stock, not expecting great returns but understanding that their investments were safe.

Some smart people on Wall Street understood that these companies were actually worth far more than the stock market valued them. From this understanding, the idea of leveraged buyouts (LBO) was born. A consortium could, based upon the company’s assets, get a huge loan. They could then use that loan to buy the company and take it private. They would then sell the individual components of the business and ruthlessly cut costs on the remains. Great riches would result. The fact that in so doing thousands of jobs would be lost and that those company towns would be decimated did not enter into their calculations.

RJR Nabisco was such a company. The cigarette company RJ Reynolds was started in 1875. Nabisco, originally called National Biscuit Company, was started in 1898. Nabisco is most famous for Animal Crackers, Fig Newtons, and Oreos. Not dramatic businesses, but RJR Nabisco generated billions of dollars of cash every year.

Its CEO was Ross Johnson. Johnson appeared to be interested in two main things. One was the high life. He did love his private jets, New York apartments, limousines, and rubbing shoulders with celebrities. The other thing he seemed focused on was his next adventure. In fairly short order, he’d become the CEO of Standard Brands. When Standard Brands merged with Nabisco, he eventually manipulated his way to CEO of Nabisco. Similarly, when Nabisco merged with RJ Reynolds, he forced the board to oust the current CEO and install himself.

Now, he’d reached the pinnacle. There weren’t other mergers that could reasonably be contemplated from which he could emerge on top again. Other than working deals, he didn’t appear too interested in the actual execution of business (a bit unfortunate considering that he was, well, the Chief Executive Officer).

He was also frustrated with the stock price. Floating in the 40s, he knew that the stock was actually worth much more, but this was during the time when the tobacco industry was under heavy fire, so no matter how well the company performed, it seemed that the stock price was stuck.

There’s really no other word for it. Johnson was bored. Someone came to him with the idea of a management led LBO. He was immediately excited. This would be a huge deal, and with no board or shareholders, he could run the company however he wanted (and oh yeah, get filthy rich in the process).

Thinking that this would be a great adventure, he kicked off the process. He took on Shearson Lehman Hutton as his banker. Shearson was so desperate to get into the LBO business that it accepted his somewhat insane terms that would have left him with both tremendous power and wealth.

However, once LBO blood is in the water, the frenzy will start. Specifically, KKR, the kings of the LBO, heard that RJR Nabisco was in play and began to create their own bid. First Boston, once the LBO king itself, wanted to put in a bid in a play to put themselves back on top. With a deal expected to be around fifteen billion dollars, even more sharks jumped in. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers, Drexel Burnham Lambert (the junk bond kings), and many other specialty firms got into the frenzy.

Once the dust settled, the initial management LBO offer of $75 (remember, the stock price was in the 40s when this started) was greatly overshadowed by the final bid made by KKR of $109. It goes without saying that this final bid was financed largely by junk bonds and having to service the junk bond interest rates would result in a fire sale of subsidiary companies and a couple of thousand layoffs. The surviving workers at RJR Reynolds felt that they’d been taken over by a conquering occupying army.

Ross Johnson ended up resigning immediately. He got a generous golden parachute, but he lost use of his precious corporate jets and housing. Although very well compensated, he was buried in the avalanche that was of his own making.

I shouldn’t be surprised by now, but it still is shocking how much of the drama was caused, not as a result of some intricate, complex business analysis, but by short, stocky, emotionally crippled men compelled to prove their manliness. This is a story of grudges, greed, daddy issues, boredom, and spite.

For real, a merger between the two main bidders, which would have saved them so much money and hassle, was derailed over an argument over which firm would get the cherished left hand side of the tombstone announcement of the deal.

At another point, when the RJR Nabisco board was meeting to decide between the two remaining offers, members of KKR would stand outside the men’s room. Every time a member of the board would come out to use the bathroom, one of the junior members of KKR would sidle up to the adjacent urinal and try to glean details of the discussions.  These are grown men probably being paid six figures to do this.

It’s ridiculous. Keep in mind that when you’re watching some news articles about some high minded, seemingly intricately complex transaction, behind the scenes the same kind of activities are happening that wouldn’t be out of place in an elementary school yard.

A Titan Among Mortals

Title: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Rating: 5 Stars

I watch a lot of films. Since the beginning of 2019, I’ve watched nearly 400 films. Since the beginning of this year, I’ve watched over 60, including French, Mexican, Japanese, Hitchcock, and even silent films. Over the past three months, I’ve awarded a five star rating to a grand total of four films. Fascinating to me, three of those films star Nicholas Cage.

I know that he’s had a lot of grief over the years with some truly over the top performances and then some performances where, even if he was fully committed to whatever role he was playing, he was doing it for money to get the government tax man off of his back.

Even so, there’s no denying that, in the right vehicle, a Nicholas Cage film can be a wonder to behold. The two earlier 5 star reviews were for Con Air and Pig. It would be hard to visualize two different films. Cage was amazing in both.

This brings us to the third 5 star Cage film that I’ve just watched, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. I know that these are big words, but this might be my new favorite Nicholas Cage film.

Nicholas Cage plays an actor named Nic Cage, famous for such films as Con Air, Face/Off, Captain Carolli’s Mandolin, and Mandy. His career is at a crossroads. He’s living at a fancy hotel and his bill is now many hundreds of thousands of dollars. He’s up for a part that, if he gets it, will re-launch his career.

Meanwhile, he’s in a problematic relationship with his ex-wife and daughter. Narcissistic, he wants to be close to his daughter but feels that he can only do so by dominating her. In his world, he simply doesn’t have enough room to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of others.

He does not get the coveted role. In despair, he decides to retire from acting. To clear his debt, he agrees to accept a $1,000,000 personal appearance to attend a birthday party in Majorca for the extremely wealthy Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal).

Hungover and surly, to his surprise he finds himself becoming friends with Gutierrez. Gutierrez is a true fanboy of Cage and fawns over him. They find that they have similar tastes in film. Majorca is beautiful and they have a magical time together. However, Gutierrez has a secret agenda. He’s written a script for Cage and wants him to read it.

While this is happening, two FBI agents intercept Cage. They tell him that Gutierrez is a notorious, violent drug lord and that he has kidnapped the daughter of a politician. Cage can’t believe it but he agrees to work with the FBI to locate the young woman.

So that he can stay in Majorca, Cage convinces Gutierrez that they should work together and co-write a script. Gutierrez, thrilled, agrees. The script starts off as a sensitive story of two men becoming friends but, for box office appeal, they begin to add plot complications like a kidnapping. Over time, the script and reality begin to blend. By the end of the film, what started off as a character study of an actor in his twilight becomes an over the top Cage action film.

In a word, glorious. You want a portrayal of the price of stardom and the corrosive cost of fame on a psyche? Check. You want to navigate the troubled journey of an out of touch father and his estranged daughter? Check. You want to watch a buddy movie? Check. You want to watch a silly comedy that leaves Cage drooling on the floor after accidentally wiping his forehead with poison? Check. And finally, do you want to watch a Nicholas Fucking Cage action film where his daughter throws him a knife, he catches it in mid air, and he stabs the bad guy holding a gun to his head? CHECK!

Although it’s not, this film reeks of Charles Kaufman. In fact, it’s obviously reminiscent of the awesome Being John Malcovich. In both cases, you have two fearless actors taking on their strangest role, themselves.

In fact, Cage does double duty. Not only does he play the actor Nic Cage, he also plays the actor’s id named Nicky Cage that manifests itself as a CGI de-aged Nicholas Cage that only Nic can see. Nicky Cage is a wild man apparently based upon the character that he played in Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

The film has fun with some of the excesses of Cage’s life.  Gutierrez has a room that’s an entire shrine devoted to Cage’s career. The highlight is a statue of Cage holding his two gold guns from Face/Off. The statue is truly a hideously done caricature of Cage. Cage is horrified by it and Gutierrez is a bit embarrassed. Cage asks Gutierrez how much he paid for it. Gutierrez says $6,000. Cage, despite his known money problems, promptly offers $20,000 for it. In real life, one of the reasons that Cage got in so much financial trouble was his purchases. Among other things, he bought dinosaur skulls, the Shah of Iran’s Lamborghini (?!), the first Superman comic, and two European castles.

Not to get too high brow or anything, but this film also made me think of the second part of Don Quixote. If you don’t know the plot, the first part of Don Quixote is the deluded Quixote going out on adventures and then being routinely beaten up and treated as a mad man. In the world of the second part, the first part of Don Quixote has already been published. Therefore, when Quixote goes out again, the people that he encounter have already read the first part and this prior knowledge informs how they treat him (hence an argument can be made that the 17th century Don Quixote is the first true post modern novel). When Nic Cage goes to Majorca, he’s in a similar situation. Everyone already knows who he is and this knowledge informs their treatment of him.

Casting Neil Patrick Harris as Cage’s agent is inspired. For those unfamiliar with Harris’ career, he started off as a child actor playing the doctor Doogie Howser. Struggling to become accepted as an adult actor, the role that broke him free was when he played a wild, womanizing, drug addled version of himself in the Harold and Kumar films.

It goes without saying that Cage does great work in this film. However, Pedro Pascal does amazing work as well. Alternately appearing to be a fanboy and a ruthless cartel leader, Pascal and Cage form a great comedy team as their bromance blossoms.

I just might have to go back into the extensive Cage cinematic backlog and find some more of his work to enjoy.

 

A Pre-Code Femme Fatale

Title: Baby Face

Rating: 4 Stars

In the 1920s, the film industry was considered a modern day Gomorrah. With various scandals regularly popping up in the news, most notorious of them all being the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the industry was under pressure from political, religious, and civic groups to reform.

Faced with the real possibility of government regulation, in 1927 the film industry started something known as the Hays Code. This was a set of rules that all Hollywood films were to abide by. Among other things, the Code prohibited:

• Any inference of sex perversion
• Ridicule of the clergy
• Miscegnation
• Licentiousness
• Arson
• Prostitution
• Rape or attempted rape
• Sympathy for criminals
• Brutality and possible gruesomeness
• Deliberate seduction of girls

And so on. You get the idea. All films were now to be wholesome, family friendly fare. At first, enforcement was pretty desultory. In 1934, when Joseph Breen took over the office, the Code got teeth. He was able to force studios to make changes to films (eg there was no way that Rick was going to end up with Ilsa in Casablanca). From that point on, the Hays Code pretty much had a stranglehold on Hollywood films until 1968, when it was replaced by the MPAA and the more familiar G, PG, PG-13, and R.

As a result, when you think of films from the 1930s or 1940s, most people have a mental image of sweet little films with virginal ingenues falling in love with their leading men and chastely living happily ever after.

However, there were films made before the Hays Code was fully implemented that definitely do not fit that mold. Called pre-Code films, they provide an interesting point of view of how Hollywood might have progressed if it didn’t force itself to live under the Code for some thirty years.

A great example of a pre-Code film is Baby Face. It stars a young Barbara Stanwyck (her most famous film was probably the film noir Double Indemnity).

Wait until you hear the plot (we’re talking 1933 here, not 1973). Stanwyck is Lily. Her father runs an illegal speakeasy. Lily is kind of a waitress there, but her father has been, apparently for some time, prostituting her out to his customers. It is implied that her first sexual experience was with her father.

After paying her father off and the father, with a smirk, leaving to give them time alone, one of his more prominent customers tries to get from Lily what he paid for. When she fends him off, he tries to rape her. She busts a beer bottle over his head. As he leaves, he rages at her father that he’s going to get the speakeasy shut down. Fortunately for Lily, her father’s illegal still then starts to smoke. He goes down to investigate and he dies in a violent explosion.

Lily is free of her father, but has no idea what to do. One of her kindly customers takes her aside and, believe it or not, quotes from Nietzsche’s philosophy of Will to Power. He encourages her to go out into the world and to use her sexuality to acquire everything that she wants.

She proceeds to do exactly that. She and her best friend, a black woman named Chico, head off to Chicago. They steal onto a freight train and are immediately caught by a railroad worker. She successfully offers her sexual favors in exchange for staying on the train.

In Chicago, she sees a skyscraper and decides that this is where she’s going to make her mark. She marches into the personnel office. She seduces a clerk there by taking him into a vacant office. That got her a job in the filing department.

From that beginning, you can see her quite literally sleeping her way to top. She seduces one man (a very early John Wayne role!) into making a recommendation to his boss (Brody). She then promptly dumps him and takes up with Brody. A bank executive named Stevens catches the two of them in the act at the bank. Brody is fired. Lily throws herself at the mercy of Stevens and tells him a story of how Brody seduced her.

Stevens and Lily then begin an affair. Stevens is engaged to the bank vice president’s daughter. Lily arranges for his fiancé to walk in on the two of them.  She goes running off to her father (JP). Stevens, now discredited, leaves the bank. Lily tells another sob story to JP. Yep, you guessed it, she starts an affair with JP. Stevens later catches the two of them in the act, and in desperation he shoots and kills JP and then turns the gun on himself.

The bank, seeking to avoid scandal, try to buy Lily off. Instead, she manages to seduce the bank president, Trenholm. Starting at the first floor, she has now reached the corner office of the top floor. At each move, you can see her dressing better and acquiring more sophisticated manners.

By the end, she has half a million dollars and is married to Trenholm. Will to power indeed. If the film stayed true to itself, it would have stopped there.

However, even in the pre-Code era, apparently that would have been too much. In the final minutes of the film (spoiler alert for a 90 year old film), the bank is in trouble again and it appears that Trenholm is going to jail. He shoots himself but is not dead. Seeing her true love near death causes Lily to realize that her love for Trenholm is more important than any amount of money. The two of them embrace.

Except for that tacked on final bit of morality, this is a great example of a daring pre-Code film. It has at least implied incest, prostitution, murder, suicide, rape, licentiousness, and sympathy for criminals. I’m probably missing others.

Lily is a force of nature that will not allow any man or moral code to stand in her way. She is determined to acquire wealth and ruthlessly uses whatever gifts that have been bestowed upon her to succeed. Stevens’ murder of JP and subsequent suicide barely even register to her. The fact that it is the philosophy of Nietzsche that directly inspires her path of conquest from speakeasy waitress / prostitute to living in a penthouse with a butler and chauffeur is pretty hilarious.

It’s a short film, somewhere around 76 minutes, so other than the A to B to C plot machinations, there’s not a lot of character development. Therefore, it’s not a great film, but it is still a great example of a pre-Code film.

Predicting Our Law Enforcement Military Industrial Complex

Title: Robocop

Rating: 4 Stars

Some months ago I wrote about Basic Instinct. I’ve decided to take a bit of time and dive into other Paul Verhoeven films. Specifically, I’m going to focus on his near future films: Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers. Considering that all of these films are at least thirty years old, I’m interested in determining how prescient these films were.

I started with Robocop, the oldest (1987) of the three. Set in the near future, Detroit is a dystopian mess. Cops, feeling neglected, plan to go on strike. Violence is rampant. Into this chaos steps the mega corporation OCP (Omni Consumer Products). The city grants OCP control over the Detroit police force. OCP has plans to build a brand new city named Delta City on the site of decrepit Detroit. However, to do so, it must bring the crime rate down.

As a solution to the crime problem, OCP starts the Robocop program. It’s a cyborg that’s a combination of human and machine. When police officer Murphy is brutally shot down, they have their prototype candidate. Murphy’s consciousness is apparently removed and his body is fused with robotic technology to become Robocop. At first, he achieves great success in stopping crime. Over time, Murphy’s consciousness awakens, providing him glimpses of his previous life, which gives him great cognitive dissonance. At the same time, an OCP executive reveals his evil plans by teaming up with the same criminals that shot down Murphy. Robocop must take on both the criminal gang and the OCP executive.

I saw this film in 1987 in a theater. I went with my best friend at the time. We were thrilled with the action, shocked by the violence, and laughed at the silliness. There’s a good chance that Verhoeven would have been disheartened by our response.

Thirty-five years later, it’s clearly much more than that, and yes, it seems prescient. To accommodate a greatly diminished attention span, news is broadcast in three minute increments. Even tragic news has no depth and is read by news readers with bright voices and dead eyes.

Verhoeven was apparently fascinated by American’s love of violence. Therefore, the violence in Robocop is comically over the top. Murphy is riddled with bullets. His hand is blown off and and he suffers grievous wounds all over his body. A shoot out at a drug warehouse is an orgy of bullets and violence. The criminal gang acquire comically (again!) large weapons that they can barely hold. Interesting that all of these years later, the violence is really not all that more graphic than a typical R rated action film.

Where Verhoeven really hits the mark is the relationship between OCP and the police force. In our post 9/11 world, police departments are provided with all kinds of military grade technology and weaponry. What modern police force doesn’t need an armored vehicle? Apparently, some police departments even have grenade launchers. Having lived in the downtown of a large city, I can personally attest to the fact that the police nowadays look and act more like soldiers than peace officers. I have little doubt that if the Robocop program was a real thing, that there’d be police departments lined up out the door to get their own.

OCP has the hallmarks of being a fascist organization. The CEO, who everyone calls The Old Man, is lionized. At the board room meeting, applause is as scripted as at a politburo meeting. Caring nothing about the actual problems facing Detroit, OCP is only interested in doing whatever it needs to do to maximize its own profits.  The intersection of military, corporate priorities, and police in Robocop is pretty much the world that we live in today.

Verhoeven is also making a statement about the future of technology and its possible impact on humanity. Murphy is struggling to regain the humanity that was stolen from him by OCP. In my opinion, this was the weakest part of the film. Murphy’s struggles were done in a heavy handed manner that didn’t really strike a chord with me.

Despite that, it’s dark humor, prescience, and social commentary make Robocop a decided cut above the typical action film, especially for its time. Robocop proved to be such a success that multiple sequels, a reboot, television series, animated series, video games, comic books, and even a pinball game were created.

I am not familiar with them, but I’m guessing most lack the humor and social commentary that makes Robocop such a great film.

A Foodie Elegy

Title: Pig

Rating: 5 Stars

On the surface, this is a slight film. A scant 92 minutes, it flies by. Nicholas Cage stars as Rob, a hermit that makes his bare living by finding the best truffles with the help of his pig. One night, people break into his rustic cabin and steal his pig. The rest of the film is his quest to retrieve it.

Over time, the complexity of the film unfolds. We learn the reason for Rob’s isolation. Some time ago, his wife Lori died. Once a renowned chef in Portland, Rob’s grief overtook him and he abandoned society. Now he sits in his cabin and listens to old tapes of his wife’s voice.

Rob sells his truffles to a young man named Amir (Alex Wolff). Amir’s act of cool sophistication belies his obvious inexperience and lack of confidence. Amir’s father, Darius (Adam Arkin), is overbearing and dismissive of Amir. Darius was similarly overbearing to his wife, who later attempted suicide and is now in a permanent vegetative state. One of their few happy memories together was a meal that Rob once prepared for them.

The theme running through all of this is loss. Rob is lost without Lori. Amir is adrift without his mother and the affections/approval of his father. When Rob recreates the meal that made Darius and his wife so happy, we see Darius’ real grief at the loss that he’s suffered.

Loss touches even the minor characters. Rob and Amir’s search for the pig leads them to a hip and busy restaurant specializing in nouvelle deconstructed cuisine. There they talk to the head chef (Finway, played by David Knell). When Finway first meets them, he is full of himself and brimming with success. It turns out that he once worked for Rob at Rob’s restaurant (where, much to his embarrassment, Rob remembers that he fired him for overcooking the pasta). As Finway brags about his success, Rob begins to probe him. Rob remembers that Finway never wanted to own a fancy restaurant serving pretentious cuisine. He just wanted to have a simple English pub serving honest food. As Rob continues to ask him about the death of his dreams (essentially deconstructing Finway), you can see Finway slowly deflate. By the time that Rob is done, Finway is just glumly staring at the table, feeling the loss of the person that he once was.

As I said, the film is spare. It was a very low budget affair, requiring that actors do their work in one or two takes. Working under these conditions seemed to bring the actors to a state of emotional honesty without mannerly baggage. Cage in particular is quiet here. With his long hair mostly covering his face, he embodies a man that ran away to suffer his pain in isolation.

Apparently the original cut was an hour longer. The distributers forced the director to make substantial cuts. You can say what you want about the money guys forcing their way into the creative process, but here it works. That much additional bloat would have greatly detracted from the core simpleness of the film’s theme. To me, it seemed to be the perfect length.

Really the only discordant note in the film was a semi Fight Club scene held in some subterranean cavern known only by those in the restaurant industry. For reasons that were not clear, Rob, by allowing his ass to get kicked, was able to glean another piece of information to aid in his search for his pig. It just seemed to be an odd choice for this film. That’s another reason why I think that the decision to cut an hour was a wise one. I have a feeling that some (most?) of that time might have been similar disconnected way stations to move the plot along. Perhaps the film maker had an idea to put Rob through some kind of labors of Hercules or Odysseus returning from Troy.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Finlay’s fancy restaurant was called Eurydice. For those of you up on your Greek mythology, you might already know that Eurydice was the wife of the musician Orpheus. One day Eurydice stepped on a viper, was bitten, and died. Lost in grief, Orpheus played so mournfully that he was encouraged to go down to the Underworld to retrieve her. He does so, but as is typical with Greek tragedies, it does not end well for him.

In their own way, most of the major characters in Pig have their own Eurydice that they are mourning and trying, anyway that they can, to keep alive.