Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Ride Lonesome!

Some spoilers below.

"But Pat, in this movie they all ride together!" Filtered by the very title. For shame!

If John Wayne's finest moment was Tall in the Saddle (and pay no attention to consensus; it was), Randolph Scott's must be Ride Lonesome, one of a number of low-budget, character-driven pieces that brood over such concerns as trust and betrayal, guilt and redemption, and whether the past can be overcome or will persist in haunting us indefinitely. None of this sounds like much fun, but Ride Lonesome never lets its weighty themes overpower its merits as an entertainment spectacle.

Have you ever actually seen smoke signals used in a western before? You have now.

Scott plays the coolest-named western hero, BEN BRIGADE, a bounty hunter who, in the movie's opening, faces off with reckless young outlaw Billy, whom we will later learn has a still meaner big brother: the ubiquitous Lee Van Cleef. Brigade hopes to escort Billy to justice, staying one step ahead of Van Cleef, but his plans are complicated when he's forced to team up with outlaw Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts, whose name is "Pernell", in a standout role) at a waystation beset by local Mescaleros, who soon reveal their design to purchase the waystation's lone female occupant (Karen Steele) as a bride for the low, low price of her late husband's horse, in a cross-cultural faux pas reminiscent of the time the Aztec tlatoani married the princess at Coatepec only to receive the in-laws for a social call wearing her flayed skin after sacrificing her.

Was it autism?

When Steele reacts with horror at this revelation of her husband's death, the Mescaleros sense the deal is off, so our motley collection of antiheroes find themselves pursued by the Indians as well as Van Cleef's gang. To pile on still further, Brigade must keep a watchful eye on Boone and Billy, against the threat of treachery and an escape attempt respectively, while Boone and his sidekick keep their eyes fixed squarely on the pulchritudinous Steele.

Don't you think it's time we all just admitted busty blondes actually are the correct genre of women?

It's an elaborate Jenga tower of risk and tenuous alliances, threats from within and without, keeping the viewer guessing how the blocks are going to fall until the final minutes of the kino. As we get to know our cast of desperadoes better, our feelings toward them gnarl and complicate. Pernell plays Boone with a knife-edge balance of charm and threat. Scott, typically poker-faced, reveals a tightly dammed-up pain as secrets of his past and future plans are drip-fed to the viewer. By the time the fateful third act rolls around, no more cinematic portent could you ask for than the movies' most foreboding tree:

Watch Ride Lonesome today.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The 6th Day!

TWO Ahnolds? I'm seein' double ova heah!

In the 90s, cyberpunk-inflected scifi action was a doggedly persistant genre that produced hits and flops in equal measure. From the strangely Bergmanesque meditations of Ghost in the Shell to the lolsorandumb antics of Johnny Mnemonic, existential angst about technology, transhumanism, corporations and dorky scenester attire was low-key omnipresent. 1984's Terminator and 1990's Total Recall were hits for Arnold Schwarzenegger that dipped toes into the cyberpunk aesthetic and thematic paddling pool, but it was only in 2000's overlooked The 6th Day that he fully committed to the bit. Schwarzenegger plays the on-the-nosely named Adam Gibson, a 2000-vintage CGI-futuristic-helicopter pilot in the vague near-future of 2000 that has doubtless since passed and been wildly different from the movie.

The most obviously dated aspect is the film's unshakeable conviction that 90s X-TREME sports culture would endure into the realm of science fiction, instead of immediately being forgotten.

But Gibson's idyllic life is about to change, for he runs into trouble with an Evil Corporation scheming to lobby the government to make human cloning legal, with the inevitable tweest that they wind up cloning our hero. While the tone of the movie is broadly tongue-in-cheek, it does explore some pretty interesting questions about individuality, memory, transhumanism, scientific ethics, consequentialism, and what-doth-lifery in general. Perhaps this odd mix was unmarketable - too smart for Commando fans, too much fun for monocle-adjusting critics - as it flopped and was instantly forgotten, but if there's no market for a movie that's half-smart, half-fun, then what good are the mass of midwits in the middle of the bell curve?

The lone Gothic spire standing tall amid the sterile modernistic skyline is as wordlessly eloquent an image as you'll find in many a more boring and pretentious vehicle.

Comparable movies telegraph their intentions way too hard: as soon as you hear that there are rebels against the government in the main part of Total Recall, you know they're the Good Guys. But The 6th Day is savvy enough to judo-flip the Pavlovesque conditioning of audience expectations in a more interesting direction, as its Evil Religious Fundamentalists wind up largely vindicated, while the slick, virtue-cloaked CEO lobbyist acts like the real villains of this world, name-dropping Martin Luther King as an example of the sort who should be cloned to push his malign transhuman agenda. He could be Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and more rolled into one, and the actor (Tony Goldwyn, son of Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.) plays it all off with a well-observed unctuous earnestness and never falls into melodramatics even when declaring himself God.

Imagine being Arnold in that scene and having to be all like "damn, Joe Biden, you fuckin' fine, all presidential with your malformed clone body and horrific Karloff mummy face. I would totally vote for you, both my character and the real me." when all he really wants to do is fuck another 16 year old in his dressing room. Like seriously imagine having to be Arnold and not only sit in that chair while Joe Biden flaunts his late stage dementia in front of you, the favorable lighting barely concealing his drool cup and crackhead son, and just sit there, take after take, hour after hour, while he perfected that speech. Not only having to tolerate his monstrous fucking visage but his haughty attitude as everyone on set tells him he's STILL GOT IT and DAMN, JOE BIDEN LOOKS LIKE THAT?? because they're not the ones who have to sit there and watch his blank fucking cryptkeeper face contort into looks of confusion you didn't even know existed before that day. You've been fucking nothing but a healthy diet of blondes and supermodels and later alleged rape victims for your ENTIRE CAREER coming straight out of the boonies in Austria. You've never even seen anything this fucking embarrassing before, and now you swear you can taste the drool that's hanging from his jaw as he rotates it wordlessly, smugly assured that you are enjoying the opportunity to get paid to sit there and revel in his "lucid (for that is what he calls himself)" oratory, the oratory he worked so hard for with personal trainers in the previous months. And then the director calls for another take, and you know you could kill every single person in this room before the studio security could put you down, but you sit there and endure, because you're fucking Arnold. You're not going to lose your future political career over this. Just bear it. Hide your face and bear it.

It's rare for a movie to capture convincingly how evil actually functions with good PR - the vast majority of people in this world see Drucker's corporation as good; he affects sympathetic goals and motives, uses connections to get his way and can disappear threats with the help of his goon cadres led by perfectly-typecast Michael Rooker like a still-much-less-evil Clinton, while the fundamentalists who oppose him are seen as cranks, but join the ranks of vindicated reactionaries going back to the Luddites. Tell 'em, Greta:

"How DARE you?" - oh come on now.

Contrary to my contrarian principles (and therefore in keeping with them), I don't hate all social commentary. I hate when it's wrong, and sucks, and serves to bolster the axioms that undergird our loathsome and retarded zeitgeist. The 6th Day injects some thoughtfulness into, of all things, a Schwarzenegger action caper, and has aged beautifully, while its contemporaries (like The Matrix) have further beclowned themselves with sequels. While its aesthetic style is more 2000 than anything more "futuristic" (accurately or otherwise), it does have a neat line in laser guns that, rather than puncture or burn, surgically sever enemies' appendages:

*Turns to camera* "something's afoot."

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Adventures of Hajji Baba!

Joining the James Bond series and others in the just-plain-fun subcategory of escapist entertainment, The Adventures of Hajji Baba is such an airy confection it might have been a half-remembered daydream, but for the file sitting on my hard drive giving proof to its existence. Loosely based on an ostensibly satirical novel by British diplomat James Justinian Morier (never read it; never will either), Adventures stars John Derek as a barber in Qajar Persia who himself daydreams of excitement, travel and romance.

Noone this good-looking or heterosexual literally exists anymore. It's like looking at a perfectly-preserved mammoth or some shit.

For blah-blah reasons, haughty hottie Princess Fawzia (Elaine Stewart) disguises herself extremely unconvincingly as a boy to sneak her way out of the palace at Ispahan to meet with Nur-El-Din, a prince who seeks her hand in marriage but (spoilers that will surprise no one) turns out to be a heel. Hajji the barber finds himself her escort through the perils of the desert, including the pursuit of her father's cool-looking but sadly useless guards and the Amazonesque Turcoman women, harem escapees who raid caravans and capture men for snu snu.

Adventures might as well be a checklist of clichés, from the feisty princess/charming rogue romance at its core to the black-clad villain, femme fatale dancing girl and aforementioned Amazons, but like a blues scale there are many variations to be mined from such staple ingredients, and like a mixed metaphor it's impressing no one but you get the point. What instead elevates Adventures is its dreamy stylisation, all colour-coded old-Hollywood orientalism and strikingly weird California landscapes that could as well be antique Persia or the Moon.

They clearly dyed the water an impossible shade of blue just to heighten the aesthetic exoticism of the mise-en-scène.

Given how cinematic the scenery right next door to the main hub of U.S. film production is, it's mind-blowing how underused it all is in favour of CGI greenscreens of featureless rooms and ugly, muddy purplish "alien worlds" that take more Koreans than will exist in 50 years thousands of hours to render just to look like ugly CGI slop anyway. RETVRN!!!

♪We could've had it aaa-aaall...

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Miraculous Virgin!

Me reading my own blôgge posts.

I first saw Czechoslovak kino Panna zázracnica, or The Miraculous Virgin, on YouTube without subtitles. Given that the subject matter orbits the now-obscure nadrealist scene - a Slavic cousin of surrealism - this was an entirely appropriate way to experience it and one I recommend unironically. The Dalí himself was fond of saying that confusion was the best and purest form of communication, to which end he would speak in four different languages, switching abruptly mid-sentence like a Mr Bungle song. Dalí's erstwhile dickriders tried to kick him out of the surrealist mOvEmEnT for the thoughtcrime of preferring Franco over the inarguably far more murderous alternative, to which he replied thus:

Posers eternally, irrevocably stumped, schlonged, rekt, shrekt, BTFO the fuck out and on suicide watch.

Nadrealism likewise did away with much of the prosaic safe-edgy hipster commie baggage that weighed down the less notable pretenders to the surrealist throne in severing the perceived umbilical cord between surreal art and the discredited theories of Marx and Freud, allowing it to easily outshine the more western-based iterations of surrealist schtick, and The Miraculous Virgin is withering in its contempt for the red orthodoxy that had overseen and crassly micromanaged artistic expression in the eastern bloc cinéma prior to the Czechoslovak New Wave. In one scene a pompous party hack lectures a hapless sculptor that his statue of the red tyrant du jour looks too much like a priest and not enough like a secular bureaucrat BUT TOTES AWESOMESAUCE.

The kino is loosely based on a novel but is as close to pure cinéma as it gets in its flights of celluloid fantasy through the world of an art scene neither you nor I (be honest) had remotely heard of prior. The plot, not that it matters, concerns Anabella (Jolanta Umecka), a dream waifu clad in mourning black who becomes archetypal muse to the nadrealist clique as they agonise over their art and the absolute state of society and so forth.

>tfw gf nevermore

In the end the crowd of horny artistes chase Umecka away, to the consternation of Michael Ironside doppelgänger Raven, who peevishly sulks at their behaviour as ungracious. While it's clear that he's supposed to give voice to the auteur's pretentions of sensitivity, this angle has aged poorly and plays into the modish prudism of the soyjak/chudjak Yin-Yang that makes up the currentyear+9 zeitgeist. Better to see the artists' lamentation of their irrepressible libido in the bittersweet terms of myth - for, after all, what makes it sad that they chase her away is precisely that she's a hot goth girl to begin with.

Sure, the right woman brings out the animal in man, but animals are noble and cool.

In this context, they're like Orpheus, doomed to lose his Eurydice by the very love that compelled him to seek her rescue. This isn't even really a stretch, since one of the protagonists is named Tristan, after another famous avatar of tragic male infatuation. Still another clue might lie in the kino's repurposing of Jean Cocteau's famous mirror gag from The Blood of a Poet - the first part of, you guessed it, the Orpheus Trilogy.

This sort of intertextual wiki-walking is what "media literacy" might mean if it hadn't been co-opted to mean licking the boots of didactic H*llywood scolds.

Unsurprisingly, Virgin was banned following the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and remains little-known in the west and the English-speaking world. If you're a fan of Dalí and Cocteau (and if you're not, why are you here?), you owe it to yourself to Czech it out.