Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Legend of the Lost!

Theme: Subcutaneous Phat - Desert Sessions

In the meme years, Sophia Loren is now chiefly remembered for this historic mogging at the hands of Jayne Mansfield:

M*n will never understand the murderous rage of a Casey out-Stacied.

But if being in even a single good movie were a category (it sure isn't at the Oscars), Loren takes the W hands down. Batjac gem Legend of the Lost (one imagines the word "City" might have rounded out the title before some clever clogs realised the title could refer to the protagonists as much as what they seek) sees Loren play petty thief and men-resenting thot Dita, whose hard-knock life in the alleys of Timbuktu must be self-imposed, as anyone who looked much like Loren could easily marry the first rich tourist she meets, but never mind. For some reason, like every Tinder foid, she's never met a moid to satisfy her laundry list of high-falutin standards until clean-cut idealist Paul (Rossano Brazzi) enters her life and introduces her to the radical notion of not being a resentful thot.

The hero we need.

But who's that other - why, it's John Wayne himself, of course, playing himself once more as "Joe January", a Dionysian cynic whose rough edges contrast sharply with Paul's goody-two-shoes schtick and whose disdain for wahmen matches Dita's for men. This unlikely trio seem an all-too-likely cast for an odd-couple (or odd-triad) action-adventure to find a lost city in the Sahara filled with jewels, an impression bolstered by the early scenes of obligatory good-natured broad humour typical of Batjac's unpretentious populism.

One early scene has a comic sleazoid seek out Wayne in this club (he's not even there; the scene is otherwise pointless) just so we can see this chick do this swimming dance:

I have no idea whether they do this dance in Mali IRL but I hope so. Email the government of Mali at MaliGov@whatever.com and ask.

But Legend soon strikes out in a surprisingly profound psychological and theological direction. Foreshadowed action scenes between our heroes and the Tuareg are deferred in favour of the elemental antagonists of heat, thirst, temptation and madness. Paul's goodness and Joe & Dita's badness are all tested. Featureless desert yields strange, beguiling beauty, and elaborate sets moan emptily with wind, which is appropriate because Legend has less in common with the Duke's thousands of crowd-pleasing westerns and more to do with Sjöström's silent psych-western opus The Wind, with its flawed men, neurotic women, and strangely cathartic hints of hope for their reconciliation.

They might not all make it, but we can.

RANKED: The Greatest Metal Album Cövers of All Time!!!

In the world of album art, the line between great and hilarious is fine indeed, and nowhere moreso than the niche of heavy metal. Sure, a million srs bsns bands with names like Aphonic Threnody (real) or Somnolent Vasectomy (made-up, I think) might play it safe with chiaroscuro lighting and a rotting skull or pentagram or some such bullshit, but if you don't take the risks, you can't expect to qualify for the rewards. With that in mind, here are the album covers that dared to dream.

1. "Easy Prey" - Predator

Watch out, unwary beachgoer! This homeless bum with a condom on his head will grab you! What's most fascinating about this is the perfect placement of the swimmer out at sea, creating a triangular perspectival composition that suggests way more effort went into this shoot than the concept might incline you to believe. Is there a happy ending for our unsuspecting heroine?

No!!!

2. Mutiny - Dammaj

A pirate getting hit by lightning via his guitar sounds pretty metal to me. Too bad this off-the-rack Halloween costume was the best the record company would deign to splurge for. But just look at his enthusiasm for the role! In my book, this dude belongs up in the pantheon with Eddie and Vic Rattlehead.

3. Battle at Helm's Deep - AttackeR

AttackeR: "you've read Lord of the Rings, right?"

Gigachad: "yes." *Draws He-Man fighting a green lobster-bat*

4. Pink Bubbles Go Ape - Helloween

????

Just kidding. For me, it's Better than Raw:

>tfw no goth gf who gets wet af stirring my dinner

5. Lion and Tiger - Fire Strike

"I want a tiger, a lion, a sorceress with rocking cans, a crystal ball and her hair on fire" - Brazil's Fire Strike, correctly.

6. Ravening Iron - Eternal Champion

From the pyramidal composition to the characteristically "cat-like" features of the enthroned exhibitionist, this is a textbook case of doing it right vis-à-vis Frank Frazetta pastiche. Naturally, we give it to you censored to avoid offence. Honourable mention must go to Ültra Raptör's efforts in the same spirit, which simply rip off the master's poses wholesale, and throw in a dinosaur atop a Mesoamerican-style step pyramid:

A band after my own heart.

7. Tooth and Nail - Dokken

As the title implies, this was a do-or-die bid for superstardom from the hair scene's GOAT ensemble. How best to let the world know what manner of virtuosic axework and superlative songwriting were to be found within the album sleeve? If you ventured "the Creature from the Black Lagoon's claw bursting through the aluminium waves from a fiery pit below to grab the band logo rendered in shiny chrome", you share an eerie counterintuitive genius with some based cokehead whom I can't be bothered to look up.

8. Soldiers Under Command - Stryper

Looking like something out of Games Workshop's Necromunda, Soldiers' album cover will make you pray for a Christian Mad Max ripoff starring a hair metal band tooling around the post-nuke world dispensing justice from their yellow-and-black striped armoured vehicle. Now you want to see it too, don't lie.

9. Killing is My Business...and Business is Good! (eventually) - Megadeth

It's only fitting that the greatest GOAT metal band of all time (deal with it, tastelets) should have rung in his, uh, their career with this majestically edgy design featuring Vic in what can only be described as what the doodles in the back of my schoolbooks looked like in my head. Too bad the fuckups at the record company lost the original design and so for years it was released with this cover instead:

Presumably they got this plastic skull from the same Dollar Tree where Dammaj got their pirate costume.

No World Order! - Gamma Ray

This, on the other hand, looks precisely like the type of shit I used to doodle back in school (still do, too). The world is at war between an evil Grim Reaper leading the Illuminati and a good, Buddhist Grim Reaper (????) each armed with shamshir lightsabres (lightshamshirs; OC DO NOT STEAL). I have no idea what the fuck Kai Hansen meant by this, but I'll take it over a band photo anyday.

Do ÿöü have a favourite album cover??? Share in the comments!!!

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Pale Rider!

Article theme: Sinnerman - 16 Horsepower

Clint Eastwood might have put the western out of its misery with Unforgiven, but first he gave it a more dignified sendoff with 1985's Pale Rider, a distillation of the thematic and archetypal core of the genre that leans into and loves the mythic side of it that Unforgiven would less interestingly repudiate.

Because Eastwood rarely bothered much with lighting for his exteriors, his face is often in shadow as he rides around, making him even more like Death on his horse.

Pale Rider is largely a retread of Shane and borrows moments from that film so brazenly we say "go for it", out loud to our PC monitors (you don't still have a TV set, right?). It also nods to Once Upon a Time in the West (the one that got away for Eastwood, who was the first choice for Bronson's role), in these guys' uniform dusters:

>tfw no friends to walk around with dressed like this :(((

No doubt a bigger western NERD could point out other little homages, but Pale Rider is also somewhat of a spiritual sequel to Eastwood's own High Plains Drifter. With his characteristically gritty, naturalistic style of filming, Eastwood might seem an unlikely candidate to delve into /x/ territory, but it's evident that Drifter's flirtation with the supernatural stuck with him. Both films concern a mysterious stranger coming to dispense terrible justice in a town afflicted by greed, corruption and sin, who may or may not be a ghost. In Drifter, Eastwood's stranger befriended a dwarf and made him mayor of the town; in Rider, his Preacher faces off with a giant (Richard Kiel, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker), evoking David Lunch's giant and dwarf casting in Twin Peaks in a subtle thematic pairing of the two films and a hint of kinship between the ghostly strangers and people verging on the look of fairytale beings.

This is the look I give manlets too. Not heightist, just don't like 'em.

With its red town and dream flashback sequences, High Plains Drifter is more overtly, garishly surreal, but it's the very subtlety of Pale Rider that makes it so unsettling and atmospheric, to say nothing of its brooding S-tier score. Moreover, Drifter caricatures its bad townsfolk, while Rider skewers a very real type of scumbag in its LaHood (Richard Dysart):

LaHood embodies the selfish boomercon businessman devoid of noblesse oblige, who sees his own people as kulaks in the way of line going up on chart. Preacher's righteous renunciation of his slimy materialism is invoked and catalysed by a young girl's prayer. LaHood's dark interiors contrast with the snow-white mountaintops whence Preacher rides. When his work is done, he rides back off into the white, perhaps until the next time, when the trumpets sound.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak!

Article theme: Are You Ready for the Sex Girls? - Gleaming Spires

Have you ever felt there just aren't enough movies with chase scenes between chariots pulled by models in fetishistic sports gear? Of course you have.

This is what the Kurukshetra war actually looked like.

Well despair not (OK, less), for once again I have done the immense labour of finding you a movie better than the latest Net Flix slop to watch tonight before you cry yourself to nightmares of tomorrow. The Perils of Etc. Etc. which we'll just call Gwendoline (1984) is a poz-free erotic camp fix for that old-school adventure flick jones you've been harbouring since first seeing The Mummy (1999) five hundred years ago.

And that hair metal groupy fix you've had since you first learned Dokken and Ratt were more fun than Pavement and Nirvana.

Whitesnake music video car-dancer Tawny Kitaen stars as the titular heroine, whose first peril takes place in Hong Kong, where she's found in a crate and captured by a mess of gangsters for some plot reason or other that I don't care about. Fortunately, she's saved by Chad, who makes the following explosive entrance on the scene:

Just to establish his credentials, Chad immediately BTFOs discount Bruce Lee here. r/asianmasculinity on suicide watch, so no change there.

In a generous gift to the one woman who will ever see this, just as Gwendoline appeals to the male fantasy, Chad (Brent Huff) appeals to the female fantasy: he's insanely violent. When the above altercation lands him in gaol along with Gwendoline and her hyper-competent maid Beth (Zabou), he escapes in part by doing this to a guard:

A thousand incels saw this and became the Joker.

Gwendoline and Beth enlist Chad to help them find a rare butterfly known as lepidoptera mcguffina. Despite the prospect of ready cash for a boat trip in the company of two perfectly amiable hotties, Chad is initially reticent, yeeting them off his boat twice.

"I'll have no beautiful women on MY boat, bitch ass slut!" - Chad, for some reason.

But you win no prize for guessing their unwarranted antagonism melts away to sexual and thence romantic feeling, as the trio brave a tribe of blow-dart-armed Yik Yakers, poisonous desert winds, and a lost civilisation of diamond-mining Amazons, who spend their days practicing surreal MTV BDSM and fighting to the death in gladiatorial combat, just as women always do when men are not around to see it.

"We do?"
"What happens in pledge week stays in pledge week, Tawn Tawn."

Finally, a sport I'd watch.

The production value, visual direction, dreamy synth score, breezy pace and deftly balanced humour, action, romance and character detail make this easily as fun and well-made an adventurekino as any more mainstream iteration of the genre, but because it's hilariously-dubbed French softcore, almost no one will have heard of it, less seen it, and of those few no one will own up to it and give it the props it deserves. The end credits suggest it was adapted from some DevianTART tier fetish comic, so its prospects of breaching the mainstream are zero, despite the fact the drooling masses consoomed the far more explicit content in Game of Thrones because they were told to. But if you want a spiritual sequel to such adventure fare as Chandu the Magician and The Phantom, and you've freed yourself of your performative hangups by growing up, give Gwendoline a spin like you're a car in a Whitesnake video.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Third/Sister Lovers!

Article theme: People Ain't No Good - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

"I want a circle of ten bathing beauties overlapping hands, but then the same thing but smaller, under the album title, which should be rendered backwards, overlapping the band name" - someone, correctly.

Big Star's first two records were largely the sort of slick popcraft that should have ignited radio had they been marketed properly. Sadly for Alex Chilton but happily for the rest of us, that never happened, and by Third, the wheels came off and the band cranked out a rollercoaster of despair, elation, calm, despondency and manic energy all the less navigable because it was never actually released with a proper track listing, so you'll bounce from one wild extreme of emotion to a totally different one depending on whether you spin the disc as you received it or hit shuffle or your iPod (I'm a millennial, OK? Give me a break). My version opens with "Kizza Me", which could have been found on #1 Record, but then lurches into "Thank You Friends", the most caustic assault on the uselessness of everyone around you one could hope to write (I'm going to make them play it at my funeral). Shortly thereafter, a dirgey ode to depression segues into an unironic Christmas song celebrating the birth of Christ with lyrics like "the wrong shall fail/and the right prevail". Mr Bungle doesn't cause this kind of whiplash.

"Blue Moon" is achingly tender, "You Can't Have Me" makes defiance lighter than air, "Dream Lover" sounds like an OD victim slipping into unconsciousness, and "Stroke It Noel" is blissful with a surprisingly merry string section out of nowhere. With such a wealth of bangers dripping with the resonance of each human emotional state, it's no wonder David Lunch's favourite goth supergroup project This Mortal Coil covered at least three across two of their albums. But for me the greatest cut of all is "Nightime" (sic?), an endlessly haunting ode to a gf in mid-breakdown, in which it sounds like Chilton shares not a little of the anguish. Imagine cranking out your towering, epochal masterpiece in the very act of giving up.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Star Trek the Motion Picture!

Article theme: A Love From Outer Space - A.R. Kane

Most famously, but least interestingly, Star Trek showed us a multicultural liberal utopia of the future:

Oh wait, no, sorry, that was from reality. In Star Trek it looks like this:

San Francisco, famous for its low crime and perfect sanitation.

Fortunately, haters of by far the best thing to emerge from the franchise - 1979's Star Trek the Motion Picture - are correct in their main beef with it: it's Star Trek in name only. The production design gives the nod and a wink to this, as the familiar crew's famous uniforms from the 60s TV show have been replaced with deliberately generic duds, as if to say this could be any show we're commandeering for a grander purpose. Sure, there's the absolute bare minimum acknowledgement of the series' legacy, but after the first half hour or so the Star Trek stuff basically melts away into the background, and the stage is set for some real, surprisingly cerebral, cinéma.

Cheer up, Leonard. Everyone remembers you as errr in ummm...

You could even say the conflict between Kirk, taking control of the refurbished (repurposed) Enterprise, and its new captain Decker, was a sort of meta nod to this brazen co-option, except it probably wasn't, but if it works that way, that's good enough for me. Likewise, Spock's arc seems like an extended raised eyebrow in the direction of the whole Vulcan concept, which kind of neatly demonstrated Roddenberry's blind hubris in that perfectly logical characters as written by imperfectly logical human writers will be imperfectly logical, and come across as laughable caricatures to anyone with any grounding in logic at all.

Hey grandma, what's the FACTS and LOGIC behind these dorky fucking robes?

But the anti-Star-Trek stuff is just icing and not too heavy-handed, for the movie's ponderous grandeur gives the impression of an overweening confidence content to speak for itself. Dropping two years after Star Wars, there must have been no small pressure to speed things up and throw in some old-fashioned brainless shootouts, but Star Trek the Motion Picture proceeds at a glacial pace compared to Lucas's Flash Gordon knockoff. An immense cloud of energy, possibly concealing an ayylmao vessel of vast and mysterious powers, is heading toward Earth, and Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chekov and the rest are heading out to see what can be done about it. At this point we have to get into spoilers, so tear yourself away from my blo§ and 23 tabs of reduced price Temu bat'leths and amputee porn, watch the movie, then come back (to the blô§).

...But I can't seem to see the little man in the canoe anywhere.

Sure, everyone can make the obvious joke about the giant space vagina symbolism, but there's an archetypal subtext I suspect bypassed the filmmakers' conscious intentions entirely. A feminist NPC might pompously declaim that the ayylien space vag signifies those awful m*n's othering of the feminine (while feeling transparently pleased to include herself in the cool, exotic category of The Other), but the film-in-itself actually undercuts this hilariously self-aggrandising narrative by framing it within the recursive gnosticism at the philosophical core of the franchise: the dIvInE fEmInInE is a child-queen; a godling revealed to be made in man's own image.

Following Spock's mind-meld with V'Ger, he reveals it has no concept of beauty, but when V'Ger clones Ilia to communicate with the Enterprise crew, it swaps her bland space scrubs for an outfit that shows off her legs, complete with high heels, meaning the feminine-coded V'Ger subconsciously moulds its presentation to the all-powerful Male Gayze. We can't keep getting away with it!!!

In the even-less-regarded Star Trek V, Kirk faces down another demiurge claiming to be God. What tends to fly over hipster gnostics' heads is that the gnostic tradition reaffirms the exceptionality of God by correctly identifying small-G gods as not-God, and thus basically just people with extra powers, like any baron, mob boss or tribal chief. Man, made in God's image, makes woman in his, who then makes him a demiurge (tHe PaTriArChY, or whatever), who then makes her a goddess (tHe DiViNe FeMiNiNe), and so on, in an idolatrous feedback loop that can only be broken by retvrning to the First Commandment. You're supposed to be a soul-patched gnostic douche in college just like you're supposed to be a fedora-tipping reddit atheist until midnight before your 14th birthday (but not a second longer).

>tfw no bald gf (to hair-mog)

After an infamously slow buildup, Star Trek the Motion Picture pays off in a Jungian Kubrickesque orgasmic finale in which anima and animus become one, not unlike Lifeforce, Fight Club, Kontroll and others. Psychological archetypes, 3deep5you philosophy and an affirmed religiosity resound from this unlikeliest of kinos.