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

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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!

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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!

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"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!

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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.

The Best of Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5!!1

Because my bl☺g is now over a decade old and I forgot about the anniversary like a husband in a sitcom (but more importantly because I'm lazy), here's a trip down memory lane in lieu of anything new:

How Do I Get a Restraining Order?

Vic and Eddy

Everyone Loves Ants Too Much

Travel Broadens the Mind (Warrington Kills It)

Where's Wallie in the Garden of Earthly Delights

Academia is Carving Out New Frontiers in Flimflam and Chicanery

This is What Disney Princesses Would Look Like as a Horse

Neon Maniacs!

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge!!!

Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan!!?

The Real Slim Stayvun

The Stayvun, by Edgar Allen Poe

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 12. The Caves of Chicomoztoc!

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Screaming Mimi!

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

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Hot Spot!

RANKED: The Greatest Sideshow Stars of All Time!!!

RANKED: The Top 10 Animals!!!

Pulping in the 90s: The Shadow and The Phantom!

"But Pat, isn't this basically your entire blôgg?" Yes, gentle reader, but I cannot tell a lie.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Excalibur!

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Real Männerbund hours are now in effect.

Undoubtedly the greatest cinematic treatment of the Arthuriad, John Boorman's Excalibur eschews any modish notion of realism (read: everything looking grey and brown) for downright psychedelic aesthetic excess. Smoke, fog, flames, lightning, weird green glows emanating from the titular sword (or nowhere in particular) combine in a deliriously heightened fever dream. Performances are almost childlike in their raw emotion. Dialogue has a way of being pertinent to everything while specific to nothing, as in a dream you sense is laden with meaning you can't articulate; as when you briefly glimpse the worlds beyond the veil.

It's my position that Arthur was a real historical figure *and* his Britain had this stylised aesthetic, and I'm sticking to it.

Arthur (Nigel Terry) himself is decentred, appearing late in the game, a symbolic figurehead whose rise is engineered by scene-stealing upstart protagonist Merlin (Nicol Williamson) after the disappointment of his efforts to steer Uther (Gabriel Byrne) toward the same role. Merlin, against his reservations, helps Uther bang Lady Igraine (Katrine Boorman) on the condition that their child will be his - for this Merlin is all but stated to be a faery in the classic, pre-Disney sense of the word: an enigmatic woodland spirit who steals away human children for mysterious ends. He can see somewhat of the future, perhaps influence it in some ways, but for all his wisdom and insight cannot altogether change the course of fate.

Damn, Merlin, I'm on thin ice with the ADL as it is.

Under his guidance, Arthur sees off Saxon raiders and presides over a fleeting golden age (golden while?) which is doomed to end in dissolution and darkness. The essence of Arthur's arc is apprehending the true nature of his role, not as a man but as a beacon by which future generations, lost in the abyssal ocean of horror, might find their way.

It's never over.