Nobody Knows Anything

Warning: contains boobies. Lots and lots of boobies. And adult content. And all life’s plenty in a chocolate box of delight. May be unsuitable for neuters. Once again, whatever facts about Meyer and his films I may possess are drawn from Jimmy McDonough’s excellent 2005 biography. Buy it here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bosoms-Square-Jaws-Biography/

A Dirty Shame (2004)

Only John Waters could make a warm, loving film about sex addiction. Selma Blair, one of America’s most flat-chested actresses, turns up knowingly wearing an enormous pair of fake plastic breasts, in undoubted tribute to Russ Meyer and his own personal sex addiction (as an aside, Blair reports that when wearing the prosthetic, she felt perfectly clothed and would flounce around the set “topless”, disconcerting the teamsters). As a report from the more open, more accepting and more decent side of the Manichean divide that may or may not exist in American culture, A Dirty Shame is indeed a throwback to Waters’ earlier, filthier pictures, as if he was concerned that with Hairspray the Musical et al, he was losing some of his edge. Considering that the film is basically an encyclopedia of perversion about the quest for a new sex act, it is engagingly wholesome and oddly respectable. It’s the proponents of decency who come across as hypocritical assholes, and that’s just as it should be.

Motor Psycho (1965)

It’s a biker movie set in the desert. The three male biker leads are plain bastards, they talk in hep dialogue, one of them’s a Vietnam veteran before that was a fashionable character motivation, and another carries a transistor radio so Meyer can fill the soundtrack with trashy rock ‘n’ roll (which sounds great, by the way). The bikers harass anyone who looks at them funny, especially women, which leads to the Clockwork Orange (1971) style home invasion that sets in motion the rape/revenge element of the plot. The film is more ambitious too, it has car chases and an explosion (and you can bet that explosion made it into the trailer, possibly several times).

Let there be Haji, one of the few Meyer women who would hang around his world for more than one film. In a classic Meyer cut-to, we meet Haji and her appalling older husband as they’re in the middle of a full-bore marital spat, tearing chunks off each other as they barrel down the road. There’s no subtle character introduction, it’s just here you go. One of the first exaggerated low angle camera shots on a top heavy woman appears here; these would become such a Meyer obsession that entire scenes would be filmed from a low perspective in later works. The male violence presented here is genuinely unpleasant, and yet the female-instigated violence that would appear in Meyer’s next film is cool because the bastards they’re up against are even worse than the women are.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966)

“Russ’ tenth film is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” (John Waters, Shock Value (1981) p.192)

And doesn’t this movie have the best title that’s ever been given to any movie? If you ever wondered what the go-go craze was all about, check out the first few minutes of this film where some demented sad sack yells, “Go! Baby! Go!” as Varla, Rosie and Billie grind on stage. The crucial difference between this film and Motor Psycho is that what the girls do is a whole lot more fun than what the guys did. Three hoodlums breaking into a house to rape a woman who’s looked at them funny isn’t campy or funny, it’s a sick type of very macho violence. When Varla breaks the back of Tommy, the capped-tooth pretty boy who thinks he can outrace her, you cheer because Tommy has behaved like a dick since he first drove up to the trio and he deserves it. The kidnapping of Linda is also strangely acceptable because Linda’s such a whiny brat, and it’s not like they torture her or anything, and Linda later escapes from them twice and they don’t seem that bothered about it.

It helps that the action is more obviously cartoonish as well. When Lori Williams bristled at being asked to lie across a Porsche to deliver her dialogue with a “Who does that?”, Meyer snapped back, “You do.” The girls are all attitude, filmed with an excessive amount of low angles and high angled cleavage shots, but there is no actual onscreen nudity. This means that Faster, Pussycat! is the easily recommended film for the curious outsider who’s heard about Meyer but never actually seen one of his films. It also means that against all the odds, Faster, Pussycat! is a film of female empowerment. It’s not a feminist film, obviously, but in an odd kind of way, it’s proto-feminist (in that the women are independent and assertive) and post-feminist (in that the women are feminine but strong, in control of their own destiny). To the naysayers who doubt that this can be so in an exploitation film I can only offer this: What’s the matter? Don’t you like girls?

Meyer ran his sets like a military boot camp with a limited crew and expected the actors to pitch in and carry equipment and hold reflectors and “things of that nature”. Far from being an autocrat, there was nothing he liked more than dialogue lines or pieces of action suggested by actors. The only thing that Faster, Pussycat! is guilty of is being ahead of its time. It was a financial failure on its initial release in early 1966, but film buffs will be aware that this is one of the classic prerequisites for cult movie status. This didn’t make Eve Meyer happy though, and she demanded a sure fire hit which Meyer managed to deliver.

Mondo Topless (1966)

First shot of Mondo Topless: a sign that says Twin Peaks.

Young people will be unaware of the Mondo craze of the early 1960s, in which outrageous footage from around the world (including animal abuse) was glued together with portentous narration and issued as a serious documentary, when it was nothing but exploitation by another name. In the warm tradition of those films comes this striptease absurdity that contains nothing but a natural setting (or a theatre stage), a transistor radio (or a tape recorder) and a topless woman with large breasts (or a topless woman with very large breasts). And that’s it. For an endless hour. It’s proof, if proof were needed, that there is indeed such a thing as too much topless. The narrator seems on the verge of a hysterical explosion, edited in soundbites from the women are banal and uninteresting, and the garage band rock ‘n’ roll just keeps on rolling, right on the edge of psychedelia but not yet fully committed.

There’s no story, no content, just more topless, and in his 1988 interview with Jonathan Ross, Meyer correctly identifies it as “a piece of crud”. No one is going to mistake this as female empowerment. The only slight piece of cultural interest is that as a time capsule of style, the topless dancing, the big hair and the makeup are all very 60s. The summer of love was just around the corner, times had shifted again in just two years, and a movie with lots of boobies could be a big hit instead of being prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Meyer would shift with the times again and embark on the next phase of his career: five films in glorious Eastmancolor which would lead to the unthinkable: a shot at mainstream Hollywood.

Common-Law Cabin (1967)

Although it only runs 70 minutes, this has the feel of a two hour movie hacked down at random to fill a TV time slot. Although it has the appearance of an actual plot, various plot points pop up like someone was dealing a hand of cards, and individual moments don’t necessarily connect to what happened before or what happens next, prefiguring the narrative anarchy that would turn up in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). It probably wasn’t the smartest move to cast Babette Bardot in a lead speaking role, as her French-Swedish parentage renders her accent incomprehensible.

Alaina Capri (”It’s the bitch in me, dear”) is much more like it and is clearly the best thing in this movie and its follow-up; she’s definitely got that witchy attitude of utter disdain and contempt for all men that Meyer found such a turn on. And the men are such a bunch of sweaty, desperate creeps that her venom and distaste makes perfect sense. Part of what renders this movie so nuts is it takes place beyond the middle of nowhere at a shotgun shack dressed up as a Hawaiian hula joint to rip off very gullible tourists with more money than sense. Characters tear strips off each other verbally when they’re not trying to strip clothing off each other for kicks. That it all climaxes in an almost Shakespearean bloodbath that includes death by speedboat is merely a consequence of the hellacious conditions under which the film was made, a palpable insanity that has crept into the celluloid to astonish unsuspecting DVD viewers 40 years later.

Good Morning and Goodbye! (1967)

This movie begins and ends with slow motion footage of first Carol Peters and last Haji running around the countryside stark naked for no reason whatsoever. The narration then introduces 11 characters who will couple and bitch in any number of combinations throughout. Haji is the first of Meyer’s ethereal characters, a non-speaking witch who will restore Stuart Lancaster’s mojo with some special brew. Alaina Capri continues where she left off in Common-Law Cabin, playing a stepmom with big needs which her husband (Lancaster) can’t fulfill so she satiates her appetites by playing away from home with the rest of the town.

For nostalgia buffs, Alaina and Stuart’s daughter, Karen Ciral (who looks older than Alaina Capri), has a boyfriend with whom she communicates entirely in 60s argot: groovy, lay it on me and “things of that nature”, that is, when they’re not frugging like only 60s teenagers can frug. It’s like a crazed episode of Dallas where everybody hates everybody else, but cannot resist the compulsion to slag off, have sex with and fight each other because they’re utterly unable to control their passions. Years of soap opera have lessened the film’s impact, and the final fight scene where Stuart Lancaster reaffirms his machismo is more cute than intense.

One cinema visit this week marked with a *. Warning: contains boobies. Lots and lots of boobies. And a few naughty words. So then, Russ Meyer. Back in the late 70s, there was one of those buy every week builds into a collection things called The Movie, and over the weeks I bought the lot. I think that this is where I first read about Russ Meyer, because The Movie was the kind of movie encyclopedia that left no stone unturned. There was no area of cinema that The Movie did not cover, and this includes what some would call pornography, what others would call erotica, and what Russ Meyer would undoubtedly have called the fantastic American cultural blind spot that enabled him to become a millionaire.

My first Russ Meyer screening took place in dubious surroundings. There was a cinema in Station Street in Birmingham called the Tivoli (now it’s the Electric, an altogether classier joint), and back in the 1980s, the owners had a second-run screen upstairs (this was where I first saw The Thing (1982) and Cat People (1982) on a double bill) and downstairs, they showed dirty movies. Now, these were cut dirty movies, of course, but it was softcore smut all the same. For the most part, I had no interest in what was shown, but on 2nd December 1985 and for the week around it, they had on a Russ Meyer triple bill. My curiosity had been further piqued by the short section on him in Kim Newman’s highly recommended book Nightmare Movies (1984). Because I followed the example of The Movie encyclopedia in my own moviegoing, there was no area of film in which I had no interest, I had to go. I was not exactly prepared for what I saw.

The films were Vixen! (1968), Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969) and Up! (1976). They had been censored and projectionists had removed frames they’d taken a fancy to (my favourite in this area was a print I once saw of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) in which nearly every frame of Georgina Hale’s brief topless scene had been removed by a generation of projectionists). But there was still something incredible going on here. Quite clearly, Russ Meyer is not a great filmmaker. I would go so far as to say that he isn’t even a great pornographer (all those quick cuts hide more than they show). But in many ways, and as the films themselves demonstrate, he is a filmmaker of note who should not be readily dismissed.

If there are moments in all this where I seem to be unusually knowledgeable about the odd twists of Meyer’s life and the unusual ways in which his films were made, it is all down to Jimmy McDonough’s excellent 2005 biography: Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film. In a first for this blog, I’m actually going to supply a link to the paperback on sale at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bosoms-Square-Jaws-Biography/

This sequence of films is taken from the 12 disc set of Russ Meyer films as released in the UK by Arrow Films along with my copy of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). I’m not following the discs, I’m following the chronology of Meyer’s filmography. I may occasionally break off from Russ Meyer movies to watch some proper films because all of the bouncing flesh has started to get to me, so I apologise in advance. If we make it out the other end, we may all have grown as people and reached a new place in our lives. At the very least, we will have seen the largest breasts known to Man, tracked down and filmed for us by a man for whom they were the be all and end all of all existence.

If he even liked women, if he wasn’t gay, if he hadn’t had a serious mother complex, if he wasn’t who he was, and all the rest of it. I will also be approaching this blog in a completely different way. I won’t be making it all up on Sunday (or indeed Monday), but I’ll be adding to it after each film daily in my WP of choice but only posting on Sunday. It won’t seem any different to you, except it will be much longer, but I’ll know the diffference, and, you know, I’m okay with that.

Trailer Reel

All 12 of the Arrow Films DVDs include this, and I urge you to check it out if you haven’t already. Since Meyer’s films are in many ways already trailers for themselves, and occasionally pause to deliver absurdist monologues on the activities of the leading characters in order to pad out the running time, they’re an essential addition to the canon. In addition, Meyer, “the rural Fellini”, supplies many of the priceless voiceovers himself. A couple of the trailers include the phrase “The management of this theatre urges you to see…” which is a lovely insight into how exploitation movies were sold in the 1960s. This ballsy phrase wasn’t added by cinema management, it’s part of the hype of the distributors. My favourite trailer is the one for Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969): three minutes of incomprehensible monologue about marijuana abuse allied to endless footage of naked flesh that makes it completely unnecessary to see the actual film, since the actual film doesn’t in the end consist of anything more in the way of content than that which is in the trailer. Genius!

Titles

The titles of the films here are taken from the title cards of the films themselves. Some of them have exclamation marks, some of them don’t.

The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)

Well of course it’s terrible. The improvised music score is cheap and irritating. There’s no sync dialogue, just endless narration intoned by a voice awfully close to South Park’s Mr Garrison, and when the nudity around a lake sets in and the narration starts dispensing facts about water and sailors, you start losing the will to live. It all looks pretty terrific, though, like a risqué postcard from the 1950s or a Bettie Page session. The initial nudie fantasy dream sequences take place in front of pastel coloured backgrounds, adding a surreal touch of Pop Art to the proceedings. It certainly doesn’t look revolutionary, and yet it was. The reason is that Meyer moved beyond the nudist camp premise of earlier let’s film naked people movies, and added a shade of narrative, a touch of voyeurism and no attempt to hide that what Teas, this movie, Meyer himself, and the great unwashed American populace that would be his audience wanted: naked women and lots of them. The film is Playboy with moving pictures; it may put its female characters on pedestals, but it ensures that its male characters remain harmless schlubs. There is no sexual threat to this film (Meyer knew that any hint of actual sex would have been disastrous) and the end result is all rather innocent. Almost Edenic.

In America, no one had ever done this before. Ever. Shot in 4 days for $25,000, this film grossed a million dollars plus in 1959. By accident, Meyer had started American cinema on the road that would lead to Paula Prentiss’ full frontal nude scene in Catch-22 (1970) and Chloë Sevigny’s much-debated on-screen blow-job in The Brown Bunny (2003). Meyer started by being ahead of his time at the right moment in history, and he would end his career behind the times, out of touch in a world that no longer needed his brand of outré sexuality when they could rent hardcore on VHS from their local store.

Eve and the Handyman (1961)

There was one thing missing from Russ Meyer’s first film, and that was his second wife, Eve. Theirs was by all accounts a tempestuous relationship which became a solid business partnership that degenerated into divorce when Eve finally tired of Meyer’s relentless philandering. The follow-up to Teas is a slightly loopy combination of film noir and bad comedy, signalled by a corny music score that goes for the full Carry On and signals the arrival of each hot babe with a blast of raspy trumpet burlesque stripjoint style bump and grind. Classy it is not.

Sporting Amy Winehouse’s eye makeup, Eve is the first of Meyer’s strong woman archetypes, and she plays multiple roles in her only onscreen performance for him. One of the many contradictions of Meyer’s oeuvre is his interest in casting women as the active protagonists of his films at a time when this was unusual while also requiring them to play a more passive, decorative role. The film still doesn’t have sync dialogue, but does have some unsubtle foley work and great views of San Francisco at the beginning of the 1960s. It’s episodic and slight and has a quite stupid twist ending.

There’s now a slight gap in the filmography as three of Meyer’s next four films have been out of circulation, withdrawn by the director himself, since their original theatrical release: Erotica (1961), Heavenly Bodies (1963) and Europe in the Raw! (1963). They are apparently little different from the other three films to which we do have access.

Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)

The exception is this, yet another entry in the nudie-cutie series. It is basically an excuse for Meyer and his chums from the 166th Signal Photographic Company to run around an ancient B-Western set dressed up as cowboys and indians alongside a bunch of naked women. The Topanga Gulch Players, as they are billed, all have multiple roles. There’s still no recorded dialogue, but signs of the distinctive Meyer style have started to appear. The editing is much faster, someone is dressed up in a gorilla suit for no reason whatsoever, and the onscreen action has become deliberately rhythmic and repetitive. The absurdist frenzy has begun.

A particularly outrageous sequence opens the film in which the history of the West (sort of) including cavalry charges, indian attacks and gunfights is conveyed by single props: a trumpet, a spear, a gun and a palette of oil paints and shots of clouds, wild brushland and running water. It’s the first bona fide Russ Meyer “what the fuck?” moment. For no doubt budgetary reasons, the interior sets have all been drawn on coloured backings, including a piano keyboard painted on a plank of wood. The film climaxes with a surreal “sex” scene of abstract natural images and shots of an empty bedstead swinging past the camera. It’s all very out there.

Like all fads do, by 1963 the nudie-cutie genre had burnt itself out. It was time for something new.

Atonement (2007) *

But not quite that new. I did say I’d be watching some proper films as well, didn’t I? Joe Wright’s second film is a pitch perfect adaptation by Christopher Hampton of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel. The leisurely buildup of the opening 1935 section could lull you into thinking you’re in solid Merchant Ivory territory, unless you’re really paying attention or are already familiar with the book. Clues and hints are dropped subtly into the mix of looks and gestures between the characters. The film is also able to pick up on the novel’s concerns with what happens and what you think has happened, and what has actually happened. Nothing is certain. Only one thing is for sure; Russ Meyer would never have cast Keira Knightley in one of his films.

Lorna (1964)

Filmed in black and white because it was cheaper (and not because it was more artsy), Lorna finds Meyer moving into his second filmmaking phase: deranged gothic melodrama. Lorna almost looks like a real movie. It has sync dialogue at last, 35mm stock, a title song, a jazz score that actually complements the images (except for the irritating drums that bang away with every cut to the escaped convict) and a wish I was in the big city neon sign montage as Lorna yearns to escape from her rural prison. There’s a lot of yearning in this film, and the times have moved on just enough for there to be bedroom scenes that would have been unthinkable five years earlier.

Everything else is way more problematic, however, for there is now violence to go along with the sex. Lorna’s hoped for better life arrives in the form of an escaped convict who rapes her in a rape that she eventually extracts sexual fulfillment from in the way she hadn’t from her husband, all of this seven years before Straw Dogs (1971) would present similarly complex themes. Although the violence against women in Lorna is unpleasant (the Iago character Luther is introduced as he follows a drunken woman home to have sex with her, but beating her up will do just as well), there’s a certain amount of unfiltered, exploitation-style honesty about the man/woman relationships presented here. This is the war of the sexes taken literally, and more episodes will follow. It’s like Meyer is aware that women have sexual and emotional needs as well, but this has to be presented alongside a gratuitous nude bathing scene. In an attempt to appease the Southern distributors, Lorna has an absurdist, moralistic, sermonising ending along the lines of a Cecil B DeMille picture: as long as the sinners pay in the end, they can sin as much as they want to on the way there.

There then follows a disastrous interlude in Germany working on Fanny Hill (1964).

Mudhoney (1965)

Hal Hooper starts here as he left off in Lorna (1964) playing another mean old bastard who rapes his own wife. This is a period film set in the Great Depression (though you can barely tell) adapted from a novel that takes place in Meyer’s favourite location: a desert shithole a long way from anywhere, containing more rural madness and passion, more abused wives and more violent husbands. The toothless Princess Livingston plays a character called Maggie Marie, the slutty mother of two sluts, who basically runs a whorehouse on the outskirts of town, hopped up on homebrew. Stuart Lancaster appears for the first time as the farm owner over whose inheritance the slim plot takes place.

It’s much more downhome than Lorna, the accents are stronger and the supporting players are stranger. The exaggerated, cartoonish elements are played up and the low budget realism is played down. There is nothing apologetic about Mudhoney, it plays everything to the hilt and beyond, climaxing with a burning, a shooting and a lynching. Meyer has arrived at the pitch of hysteria he was to spend the rest of his career exploring and repeating and remaking again and again.

One cinema visit, marked with a *.

INLAND EMPIRE (2006)

So, does it still work on DVD? As long as you watch it in the dark. And crank up the sound system. Interestingly, once you claim to have figured it out, the film gets right up and baffles you all over again. Interpretation isn’t what this film’s about at all really, it’s like an ongoing negotiation between you and the experience you’re having. I found myself less interested in the rabbits and more interested in spotting how and when various characters recur. And, really, there is no experience more strange than watching David Lynch host a cooking programme: now there’s a niche market BBC2 are missing out on.

The Simpsons Movie (2007) *

The mantra about The Simpsons, endlessly repeated by disaffected thirtysomethings with a voice on the web, is that it ain’t what it used to be. That The Simpsons has now become too silly and unbelievable, that it has betrayed itself, as if an animated TV show where nearly everybody has yellow skin was somehow a paragon of realism. To me, the only thing that matters is this: is The Simpsons still funny? Answer: yes. So you can take your disaffection and shove it where the sun don’t shine. And yet, after all’s said and done, is there really any need for a Simpsons movie? Doesn’t the whole enterprise strike you as somewhat unnecessary? Well, it is awfully funny and it does have a song called Spider-Pig. What more do you want?

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)

I’m a big fan of Tartan’s Asia Extreme label, and in particular of a number of films that have been produced in South Korea over the last ten years. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that South Korean cinemas are stocked full of dark, twisted thrillers, brutalist takes on the cop genre and unimaginable horror pictures. They make ratty comedies just like the French do, it’s just that it’s the dark stuff that has found a worldwide audience. Take this film, the first in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, it didn’t do well at the Korean box office at all, and only found an audience on export. Possibly due to budgetary constraints, there are a lot of static camera shots and an overly oppressive soundtrack, but Park makes it all work for his own chilly purposes.

Oldboy (2003)

As a sign of how psychotic Cho Seung-hoi was (he was the instigator of the Virginia Tech massacre earlier this year, you may recall), here is People’s Exhibit #1, the evil DVD of the evil film that “inspired” this evil twat to kill 32 people and then himself. Except of course it did nothing of the kind. Only if you were a psychotic, could you claim this film as an inspiration, because if you actually watched the film and continued to function as a normal human being, what you would take away from it is the idea that vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and lives will be ruined and minds will be broken and body parts will be compromised. If you’re psychotic, you don’t care about any of that stuff anyway, so you’ll pose for pictures holding a hammer and guns and then set about your filthy work. Oldboy did not make anyone kill anybody else. All Oldboy provided Cho Seung-hoi with was justification beforehand; the damage had already been done to him and the signs were sitting there waiting to be read - it is the failure of the people who were treating him, and the failure of the university authorities to deal with what was happening that led to all those deaths. And of course the failure of Cho Seung-hoi himself. Another loser looking for something to help him make it through the night. And he found Oldboy, a film he quite clearly never began to understand.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)

The vengeance trilogy of Park Chan-wook has one concern at its heart. There is a doubling of the vengeances in all of the films. Those who seek vengeance fail to realise that a vengeance is being sought on them as well. So, given that the third film is, as they say, one for the ladies, does this mean any softening of the focus or any pulling back from the extremities of the earlier two films? Oh no. Park sets up an intervention into the current debate on what to do with murderous paedophiles and comes to his own ambiguously disturbing take on what society calls justice and what the parents of a murdered child would call justice, and leaves his audience to swim in the immoral soup that results. And then there’s that title. It’s a great title. And boo hiss to Tartan for attempting to sell the movie in the UK as Lady Vengeance, as if that was what the film was about. Thankfully, Park was way ahead of them, and has titled all of his films in both English and Korean. So sympathy it is.

No cinema visits this week.

Vanilla Sky (2001)

In which Tom Cruise continues to prove that he’s an actor not just a movie star, and the consequences of success are examined at some length. This film also tests the limits of what a mainstream audience will take when it comes to different levels of reality. And it doesn’t have any kung fu, wire work or bullet time to distract an audience from the angst of its central character and the memorably nasty sequence in which someone is killed.

The Matrix (1999)

For the record, I watched the original R1 DVD rather than the one in the box set. What you notice the most is that the ending of the third film is set up very early in the first. “You’re my own personal saviour.” Indeed. The film is proof positive that a grabbag of influences can work and will flow together to form a cohesive whole. The more that’s layered into the film, the better it becomes.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

The two sequels to The Matrix are brilliant, but not necessarily in the way that The Matrix was brilliant. For a start, there is no attempt whatsoever to bring anyone up to speed with what is going on. If you didn’t see the first film, whole chunks of the sequels won’t make any sense at all. There is no attempt to re-explain the divisions between the real world and the world of The Matrix. The sequels are also really abstract. They are more about the stranger behaviour of programs in a computer system than they are about regular human emotions. And yet it is the regular human emotions within the computer system that are causing all the mayhem. What the Wachowskis have done is they’ve managed to con Warner Brothers into funding a two part $300 million art movie with philosophical digressions as intense as those in an Ingmar Bergman movie combined with ass kicking on an absurdist scale.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Because, amusingly, what the sequels boil down to in the end is two guys in a hole in the ground hitting each other. It’s the WWF on a cosmic scale. These things aren’t called burly brawls as a matter of convenience, the Wachowskis really mean it. Among the things that the Wachowskis must be fans of is Alan Moore’s run on Miracleman. I don’t know if they’ve ever come out and admitted it, but the final confrontation between Neo and Agent Smith at the end of Revolutions is awfully similar to that of Mike Moran and Johnny Bates in Miracleman #15. And they must also be familiar with the marriage of heaven and hell at the end of Swamp Thing #50 and the cosmic endings of Japanese anime. This is why Revolutions doesn’t end with a tubthumping victory, but with a highly unamerican concept in 2003: peace. There is a sense, particularly in the battle for the dock, that this is a film that goes too far and gives you too much to look at. On the contrary, I wish more films were as ambitious.

eXistenZ (1999)

The Matrix wasn’t the only mindjob of a movie released in 1999, there was also David Cronenberg’s first original script for a number of years. Somehow, Cronenberg’s films have remained away from this blog all year, possibly because I was saving them up for a full career runthrough at some stage. eXistenZ pulls a wonderful trick on its audience that is impossible to discuss without spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Suffice it to say that it matches the exposition of The Matrix for its ability to mess with your head.