Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tabu!

Theme: Leah - Roy Orbison

Hipster objections aside*, Robert J. Flaherty invented the documentary with his Eskimokino Nanook of the North and F.W. Murnau cut such all-time classics as Faust (but is better known for accidentally ruining vampires with the death-by-sunlight gag, which later halfwits would play literally, in the biggest nerf ever suffered by a stock monster). It may come as no surprise then that when these two titans of silent cinéma teamed up, they unleashed a kino for the ages. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, set on Bora Bora, is the best movie of all time you'll see this week, and concerns the doom incurred by two young lovers who breach a Tabu (1931)!!!

>tfw no etc. etc.

Reri (Anne Chevalier) is the young maiden selected to replace a late vestal virgin on a neighbouring island. I'm not sure if this was a real tradition but the Society Islands did have an elite caste of Arioi, who were permitted sex but not children; any that were born to them were ritually killed. Anyway, this de facto abduction-in-tribute of a daughter of Bora Bora is framed as a great honour by the foreign emissary, which I find hilarious. But Reri's bf (Matahi) is heartbroken and defies the Tabu (1931) to run off with her, prompting sinister old fart Hitu to hunt them down as they seek refuge among sailors on another island, where this dude does the best dance of all time of the week:

>ywn bust these sick moves why live?

WILL our young lovers outrun their destiny? CAN Hitu recapture Reri? IS the Tabu (1931) a lazy metaphor for Murnau being a bumboy? Fortunately, NO to the last one: whatever the great filmmaker's extremely dubiously alleged proclivities, he had the Tolkienian taste to avoid clumsy allegorising in favour of a nonspecific but endlessly applicable and thus timeless idea. Tabu doesn't even stipulate whether the Tabu is meant to be a good thing or a bad thing. It's the one-in-a-zillion film that's actually content to let the viewer ponder it over for himself. Perhaps Murnau shed his didacticism as he did his intertitles: all the text in Tabu is artfully framed as actual writing in-story.

There's no intertitle for what this kid yells so you're free to assume it's the funniest slur.

Also, Murnau was said to be exceptionally tall, with heights from 6'4" to 6'11" variously cited, so even if he did rail dudes that's basically like a normal guy railing bitches, but in this house, Murnau was a STRAIGHT king.

The wet dresses, topless chicks and Baywatch bounce per reel of footage tells a distinctly hetero story, and for 1931? Forgetaboutit.

Flaherty only directed the opening sequence and seems to have become quite disillusioned with the project and ceded it mostly to Murnau, but it was his familiarity with the locale and love of the world cultures first ignored and then homogenised away by the steamroller of libshit modernity that fired the project and made it viable to begin with. None of these cultures can exist on their own terms anymore, as every manifestation of them is now filtered through self-consciousness and anticolonialist self-righteousness, like when those Māori assclowns do the goofy haka dance in the New Zealand parliament while wearing suits**. Only le problematic shitlords like Flaherty or Mel Gibson can pay authentic tribute to the great and terrible cultures of the world that was.

"Check these dubs" - Bora Bora anon.

*Waah, waah, he broke the rules of documentary filmmaking that were made up after the term was first coined to describe one of his own films! Shut up, bitch!

**The Māori eagerly adopted European technology from the off, specifically muskets, which they immediately used to murder one another en masse, most egregiously the pacifistic Moriori of the Chatham Islands. You'd think this would make them by far the least sympathetic anticolonialist hypocrites, but the same sort of thing happened throughout North America too, so they're more or less average in that ignoble regard.

Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays: Barbarian Queen!

Theme: Warrior Queen - Visigoth

Perhaps the most cheerfully tasteless of the brief sword and sorcery cycle of the 1980s was Barbarian Queen, whose first rape scene takes place in its first minute of screentime.

Wow, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast.

If The Warrior and the Sorceress was the first sword and sorcery western, Barbarian Queen is probably the first sword and sorcery rape/revenge flick, which concludes the plot summary. Deathstalker's Lana Clarkson stars as the titular heroine, who leads three more barbarian women (not to be confused with Amazons!, I guess) to avenge the raid on her village that saw randos slaughtered left and right, her groom-to-be captured as a slave for the gladiator pits, and everyone else raped by a faction of generic goons and also Karl Marx:

"A spectre is haunting Euraaaagh not my neckerino noooo pleeease help meee *gurgle* *sob*" - Karl Marx (Berenstein timeline).

In the flick's most haute-trash sequence, Clarkson finds herself bound in a torture dungeon to be raped by, to put it as diplomatically as possible, the happy merchant:

*balding movie analysis YouTuber voice* you see, the rack represents the casting couch, and the Jew represents err, umm, please stand by, we are having technical difficulties.

Was this the first flick written by /pol/? Astonishingly, yet not astonishingly at all, no! For the credited screenwriter is named Howard Cohen, making this drooling pervert his self-insert, making this one of the more damning cases of:

HOW will our heroine escape this average Hollywood screen test? If you guessed "by squeezing the torturer's dick with her barbarian vag muscles, forcing him to free her hands, then shoving him into a vat of acid he carelessly left directly behind him", you might just share the sadomasochistic paraphilias of Mr Cohen.

There are like twenty jokes I want to make here that my lawyers have advised me not to make.

Barbarian Queen may be the graveyard of good taste, but (therefore?) it was a hit and spawned a very nominal sequel (it has nothing to do with the original besides Clarkson returning) in which Cohen fails to beat the allegations by having her strapped to yet another rack. Hilariously, the sequel actually tries to pretend to be a stronk womyn empowerment flick, which I doubt even the densest gendyr stydies majyr bought for a second. Clarkson's career may never have escaped the bargain-bin ghetto of these flicks, but you may have heard of her for an even sadder reason: she was fatally shot by Phil Spector in 2003, in the most evil act of his career since producing John Lennon's Imagine.

RIP to this Farrah Fawcett tier hair game.

This is a true story.

There I was, fired again. This time from the hospital after replacing your newborn with a dwarfìsm baby, then a phocomelia baby, then a tetra-amelia baby so you'd think its limbs were slowly receding into it.

And I'd have gotten away with it too, if I could find four the same hue.

Penniless and destitute, I moved back into my uncle's crawlspace, where the rats and cockroaches were plentiful and free. I had my fill of food and friends, yet, somehow, it just wasn't quite the same. They say you can't stand in the same river twice, and that holds true for laying down in a crawlspace filled with piss bottles and skeletons. "I'm 46!", I guessed out loud, "it's time for me to make my own way in the world".

Filled with energy anew, I set out to discover my dream job and purpose in life: municipal ratcatcher? Homeless bum? Movie critic? The possibilities were endless. But where to start? Foolish question: you can only start where you are now. But where to make my next step? First, I looked at my CV: four years making Stephen McDaniel edits, eight years defeating minors in /tv/ debates, twelve years not learning the guitar, and two and a half weeks at the hospital, where I took the initiative of promoting myself from assistant janitor to chief surgeon. With a bit of creative license, that was twenty-four years of freelance video editing, combat experience and self-care expertise. Armed with this cornucopia of qualifications, I marched into the Job Centre Plus, for I am in the Yookay.

The chief matriarch of the Job Centre Plus gave me the Kubrick stare over thick-rimmed glasses. "Mr Bastard", she intoned (which is a feat for a wahman), "I'm afraid you've squandered your life, such as it is. Let me guess: at school you were gifted-but-lazy?"

"Half-right", I affirmed, ambiguously, but, with the low cunning you must expect from these functionaries, she saw through my artful word choice. "Look, Mr Bastard, I'm afraid we don't have any jobs for you, because every company in the city has called us unprompted with requests to blacklist you in particular, because everyone hates you". This, however, I had anticipated.

"So you'll slap me on the dole and furnish me with a council house?"

"No", she replied, halfway through "so".

"Squirrel!" I shrieked, pointing past her in a valiant effort to distract her and steal a pen from the unwashed mug of pens gathering dust on her desk. No dice - someone had tipped her off that there was no window behind her.

I had no choice: I had to turn to crime. But where to source a crew to rob the bank? The parole directory would furnish me with the information I sought! "To the phone book!" I cried, standing up, giving myself a head rush. Dizzily, I slumped back into the chair, further nonplussing my Job Centre caseworker.

A cheesy sitcom transition later, I was in the phone box, but no yellow pages were to be found; doubtless lifted by some vagrant. Undeterred, I sought to call the operator to demand the parole office, but I couldn't remember the number for operator. Deterred, I went back to the crawlspace where I wrote this bløØ☼*g.

Would you like more of my Dickensian prose? No??? Well, who asked you? Leave a comment, and subscribe to Disparu.

Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays: Amazons!!

Theme: Song of Women - The Hu

Actual character in Amazons!.

A clear precursor to Xena Warrior Princess, but R-rated and sans the cringe Three Stooges humour (Xena had its moments; it's just that they were all Ares or Callisto scenes), Amazons! stars nobody you've ever heard of and does it wrong by being somewhat competently made and having its two female leads get along (I know it's fantasy, but there are limits).

This sounds like something wahmen ask each other at the end of yoga class or whatever it is they do when they're not having pillow fights and purging.

Queen Budget Judy Dench As M sends Amazons! (1986) to find the only magic sword that can save their people from doom, for the queendom of Whateverland is menaced by Evil William Shakespeare:

"O, that I wore a glove upon mine wang, that I might clap thine cheeks" - Evil Shakespeare.

Bad Will Hunting has a pet lioness, which at first I surmised was just a nod to the curious Frazettaism of leaving big cats lounging around places, but it turns out it's actually a shapeshifting woman, or werelioness(?), whom he despatches to hunt down our heroines and bring him back the magic sword.

I aim to furnish my pad with a big cat just as soon as I can procure one.

I can't remember any of the characters' names, but I think you'll agree it doesn't matter. There's an evil traitor Amazon who sends her young-Britney-Spears-looking daughter along with our main protagonist to backstab her and steal the sword, but the two bond and become history's first genuine female friends. Will Brit Brit be able to slay her new bestie, or will guilt cause her to hesitate at the climactic moment???

"People can take everything away from you, but they can never take away your truth. But the question is, can you handle mine? They say I'm crazy, I really don't care. That's my prerogative."

"That is so deep."

If you remember Wonder Wahman and Captain Marvel releasing in more recent years, you will recall being amazed that the first ever action movie to star a wahman dropped twice in your lifetime. It must then be more astonishing still to learn that movies like this were commonplace and unremarked-upon decades prior. The Amazons! (1986) fight both against and alongside men, have their own internal conflicts, and never have to clap back epic style against a strawman secksist. Sure, it's pure cheese, but compared to the sovlless, sexless turboslop of the enlightened 21st Century, this disposable wad of fluff might as well be Good Shakespeare.

"All's well that ends with a happy ending" - Good Shakespeare.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Wrestler!

Theme: The Crusher - Dee Dee King

RIP Hulk Hogan. While it's true my interest in professional wrestling extends about as far as Miss Hancock's legs, that's pretty far (42.5", or an entire Warwick Davies). But I laud the Hulkster for an unrelated reason: he one-shotted evil gossip rag Gawker in court after they illegally posted his sex tape and refused to take it down. If I were Pope, I'd offer absolution of sins for anyone who puts a j**rnalist out of w*rk, but I'm not sure Hogan ever did anything wrong to begin with (no, saying a popular hip hop word while of the wrong caste isn't doing anything wrong; grow up). Since I know nothing about wrestling, let's celebrate his legacy with this 2008 kino instead.

This movie taught me not to do coke with a mid or you'll wake up in her firemen-themed shrine.

Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish) stars as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, whose 80s heyday was as far behind him at the time of this movie as this movie is behind us now, but feels more ancient if not mythical, because not even I was alive for most of it. Still, Randy never traded in his ancient console for something as newfangled as a PS1 or Dream Cast, nor his Ratt and Cinderella records for Nevermind.

Uhhh based?

Sadly, Randy's career went off the rails and he's now stuck in a shit job with a snarky hairlet boss and working what looks like a dwindling indie circuit with much younger talent on the weekends, between drowning his sorrows at a strip club, showing off his pixelated likeness in an ancient vidya to half-bored kids, and trying awkwardly to reconcile with his amazingly obnoxious estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, as herself).

Evan, honey, I'm not the one who failed to convince the world that Marilyn Manson was a creepy pervert.

But could Randy make a comeback with a twenty-year-anniversary rematch against his most famous heel, The Ayatollah (Ernest Miller)? While they almost certainly just made the heel The Ayatollah as a pointed stab at the low-status jingoism of the downscale plebs who watch wrestling, it actually works on a few levels: just like the news, the audience are marks, the shoot is a work, and the real enemy isn't Iran, but your own regime of which the entertainment industry is a consensus-fabricating appendage. You can even get into a more esoteric neo-Platonic reading of the kayfabe as the cave, but all that would go over Randy's head. As the ties that bind him to the outside world fray and snap under the pressure, he's both lost and set free. For him, it's the ""real"" world that's fake and gay, and he's not altogether wrong.

Scenes wahmen will never understand, thy name is this one from The Wrestler.

The ubiquitous Bush-era shakycam may have aged like ass (inb4 >implying it was ever good), but it fits better here than in a lot of other movies from the 2000s, and there's a running motif of tracking shots following Rourke around like a third-person vidya that gives it a bit of a visual signature. It's a rough, gnarly little gem that's sometimes hard to watch, but I return to it at times and it holds up. Had I ever had a heyday of my own, he'd be a literally me up there with Vincent Gallo and Tom Noonan in Manhunter. Watch The Wrestler.

Stop Motion Dreams: Q the Winged Serpent!

Theme: The Aztec Rock - The Aztecs

And speaking of David "Is That Rigor Mortis Or Are You Pleased To See Me" Carradine, it must not pass without comment that he was in Q, a movie whose premise sounds like something I would have made up: in the New York City of the early 1980s, an Aztec cult offers sacrifices to the god Quetzalcoatl, whose name I presume the producers thought no one who wanted to see this flick would be able to pronounce, hence the truncated title.

If nothing else it raised the bar for Halloween costumes.

It's widely believed that in the original lore Quetzalcoatl was supposed to be the one god who refused human sacrifice, making this whole premise a nonsense of routine Hollywood proportions. Furthermore, since the victims are flayed, it would have made more sense to have them offered up to Xipe Totec, as Aztec priests would wear the flayed skins of their victims in his honour.

There's a neat little bit of foreshadowing here with the waiter slicing some meat before the big gore payoff of the next scene. Never let it be said they phoned this one in.

Xipe Totec was the Tezcatlipoca of the east, while Quetzalcoatl was the Tezcatlipoca of the west. Just to confuse and annoy you, the Tezcatlipoca of the north was simply named Tezcatlipoca. That Tezcatlipoca's victims could be voluntary: if you had the dubious distinction of being chosen, you could cosplay as him for a year, serviced by four wives, themselves LARPing as Xochiquetzal, Atlatonan, Huixtocihuatl and Xilonen, before being dispatched to meet the real deal. Most sacrifices, however, were of slaves (tlacotin) taken in flower wars, and thus not voluntary at all. But fuck all that, because making it Quetzalcoatl allows the filmmakers to do this:

And you thought you'd go to the grave never once seeing Shaft yeeted to his death by a stop-motion dragon-bird-thing. Actually, you probably never thought that specifically.

The main plot actually involves this Norwood scale victim discovering Quetzalcoatl's giant egg in this nest in the Chrysler building, presumably because King Kong already used the Empire State.

This scene is like the ending of Lovecraft's The Outsider for dudes with thinning hair.

I can't remember the guy's name but he gives a stellar performance as a terminally annoying no-hoper roped into a heist who loses the money and leads the goons hoping to beat it out of him to their deaths in the nest before revealing its location to Carradine and Roundtree's bickering detective duo. The male pattern baldness poster boy is quite the charmer: an ex-junkie who we're told beats up his gf when he's not crying into her pillows. On learning he has an incredible secret to trade to the cops for his freedom, he has the brass balls to angle for a book deal and a cool million bucks too.

He's literally me (just kidding, I have a great hairline).

You watch the flick not knowing if he's going to have some kind of redemption but he never does, even when saved by Carradine from the Aztec priest, making him the most authentically repulsive protagonist ever to get away scot free after all his bullshit. Amazingly, after shooting the priest dead in baldie's hotel room, Carradine takes a do-not-disturb sign from the opposite door and hangs it with the please-enter side facing out on the room with the corpse inside. I don't know why he did that, other than to prank the hotel staff like the world's biggest dick.

"Lol" - David Carradine.

Alas, Quetzalcoatl itself (they sort of hedge on whether it's the actual god or a near-extinct animal simply worshipped by the cult) gets shrekt by heavy machine gun fire and craps out on this building that looks pleasingly sort of like a step pyramid. No sequel ever emerged, but the creature lives on in the hearts of stop motion and shitty B-movie enjoyers everywhere.

"No, it wasn't the airplanes...it was getting shot 5,236 times that killed the beast" - actual dialogue.