Juliette Lewis is a Lunatic

I'm seriously convinced that Juliette Lewis is crazy. And Natural Born Killers did not change my mind. Not only did she actually have corn rows at one point in her life... but the characters she plays are always nuts! I don't know if anyone else has seen the movie Kalifornia, where she co-stars with Brad Pitt, but it's a lot like Natural Born Killers. Pitt's character is crazy and kills people on a whim, usually for no reason. And Lewis' character is the adoring girlfriend who goes along for the ride. It was an incredibly disturbing movie that made me have nightmares about Brad Pitt... something that I never thought was possible.

I am in no way surprised that this story was written by Quentin Tarantino. His movies always disturb me. There is always excessive violence, drug use and graphic sex. I'm not really a fan of violence; I'm not yet desensitized to it. And the way it is used in Tarantino movies is really peculiar.

The diner scene reminded me of the diner scene in Pulp Fiction. The intensely in-love couple works together to commit their crime. Except in Natural Born Killers, they kill everyone for no reason. In Pulp Fiction, they just wanted to rob the cash register and I don't believe they actually murdered anyone, if my memory serves me.

The way the movie was filmed was really interesting. Sometimes it would be in color, but then it would cut to black and white. And in countless scenes, there would be flashes of another picture (like Woody Harrelson covered in blood). And sometimes in the backround there would be another image playing. It was really strange. It made the movie what it was, though.

After discussing the movie in class, I realized that the flashes of Mickey and Wayne covered in blood represents the "demons" that they are. They were either smiling or screaming while they would be covered in blood. It would only be for a split second, but it made an impact.

An aspect of the movie that I really liked was the incorporation of the media. It showed how the media was glorifying the murderous couple. They committed unspeakable, horrible crimes. No one in their right mind would think this was honorable. It's creepy when people worship serial killers like Charles Manson. And how about when women write to murderers in prison and fall in love with them? That's beyond weird. The film shows how the media portrays serial killers and how they end up glorifying them. They take the horrible occurrences and use it to improve their ratings or be a break in someone's career.

Robert Downey, Jr's character reminded me of Nancy Grace. You can see her on her show, acting very outraged at certain situations but it is so obvious that she is full of crap. Anything for a story right? I was actually watching a Law and Order episode the other day. Some teenage girls were missing and the police were trying to find out what happened to them. A Nancy Grace-esque woman was acting like a friend of the parents to get exclusive interviews and juicy footage. It irritated me then and it irritates me now. I do believe that we need the media and we need journalists. But those talking heads with their own television shows where they just yap yap yap are not true journalists. They are looking out for their ratings. Downey, Jr's character shows this exceptionally. He was obnoxious and would do anything to improve his ratings. He even put himself in a very dangerous situation by interviewing Mickey in jail.

The creepiest character, though, was the police officer. I think his name was Jack. He was supposed to be tracking down the murderers. He should have been the moral force. Instead, he was a sexual deviant who murdered a young woman and was obsessed with Mickey and Mallory. I felt that he was turning himself into Mickey in a way. He hated the pair and was devoted to catching them, but then he strangled a young woman while he was in an intimate situation with her. That was, in my opinion, parallel with the scene where Mickey has the girl he kidnapped bound and gagged.. then subsequently rapes and murders her.

So... to the reading. I was surprised when I began reading the part about incest. It was obvious in the film that Mallory's father had been raping her for quite some time. It actually gave me the creeps that they talked about all those horrible things while there was a laughter reel in the background. But I guess I never watched those old sit-coms and felt that their was an incestuous undertone. However, the author points this out. There was usually a "Daddy's Girl" in these old television shows where the father was the patriarch. I'm not sure if I buy that there was intentional incestuous undertones, though. Though I do think that's an interesting thing to look into. I'm also not sure that the movie is actually promoting incest. Maybe the movie is promoting our male dominated society, since Oliver Stone is known to be quite the womanizer, but I don't think (or at least I hope not) that the movie is promoting something such as incest.

Tarantino and Stone are obviously very complicated people. As the reading reveals, Stone considers himself to be an inherently violent person. And I think it's pretty scary that the author refers to Natural Born Killers as a prayer or worship to the "god of violence, a feeding of the 'demon'". If Stone modeled Mickey after himself, or saw himself in Mickey, I'm not sure what that says about him...

"Let's Go Get Sushi and Not Pay"

So at first I thought Repo Man was just going to be one of those weird, post-modern 80s flicks. It was that... but then it turned into a freaky sci-fi 80s flick.

I've heard of "post-modernism" but I guess I never really understood what that meant. According to Mary Klages' article, post-modernism deals with rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Okay.. so we want to make fun of stuff and reject what used to be embraced as genres. Klages also says that post-modernism celebrates the idea of fragmentation, provisionality and incoherence.

Repo Man was strange just for the fact that it centered around the job of repossession. That's not typically the type of employment that you would see for a main character. A lot of the movie was really random, too. Like in the beginning when Otto fights with that one bald kid and then that really odd scene in the beginning where his lady-friend ends up in bed with another guy while he left the room for 5 minutes. Really strange.

And the whole incorporation of aliens?! This movie seems to be about some teenager who happens to become a repo-man and then all these people with tyvek suits show up and people get incinerated just by looking into a trunk. So weird.

I liked that whenever Otto ate or drank something, the container just said FOOD or DRINK on it. I thought that was going to be common throughout the movie- rejecting commercialism, but then I saw Bud Lite represented in the film later. So much product-placement exists in movies today. It almost takes over a scene sometimes. I was hoping Repo Man would be rejecting that type of this but it didn't end up doing so.

This movie was a lot like other 80s movies I have seen. There is the same type of dialogue. The cursing it really on an upswing here. Creative cursing, too. Of course there is the girl with the mohawk and Otto has that silly dangling earring.

It is obviously a movie that goes against movies such as Rebel Without a Cause, as Professor McRae said in class. I thought it was perfect, when the one criminal was dying at the end. He tries to blame it on society and Otto says "that's bullshit". That is a blatant rejection of the idea in Rebel Without a Cause, when they blame a child's outcome on their parents. I don't know how I personally feel about the idea.

Romance without Finance is a damn Nuisance

Petey Wheatstraw was... interesting, to say the least. I'm not sure if it's the genre I would really enjoy. I don't have an urge to go find more of its kind like I did with some of the other films I've watched. Maybe it's the exploitation aspect that I didn't really like.

Or maybe it was the bizarre ridiculousness. The first scene was crazy, with the woman giving birth a watermelon first and then to an 8 year-old child. She didn't seem very surprised, either.

I'm curious as to why there was so much of a Kung-Fu aspect to this film. None of the characters were Asian, even the dude who taught Petey everything he knows about Kung-Fu. And the fight scenes were pretty bad. I liked the fight scene in Manchurian Candidate better.

I'm not a huge fan of violent films. I can handle watching violence, I just don't prefer it, especially if it's unneeded. It was pretty crazy when the men opened fire on the funeral procession. They didn't try all that hard to convince Petey to postpone his show before they killed him and all of his friends.

And then Lucifer came into the picture. What?? At least he didn't have anything to do with the funeral massacre, right? I'm not sure if I'm interested in watching the rest of the movie. Professor McRae's quick explaination of Petey being almost forced to marry Lucifer's ugly daughter and being given magical powers to do "good in the hood" was enough for me to imagine how the movie would finish.

I'm not entirely ruling out seeing more movies of this genre, but the first half hour of the movie didn't really intrigue me.

Clint Eastwood is a Pimp

How a woman can be dragged into a barn, forcibly raped and then end up moaning and clinging to her attacker is beyond me. I guess Clint Eastwood has the power to woo the women whom he disgusts the most. I personally found him to be quite the hunk at first. There just is something about bad boys.....

However, when he attacked the blond woman (and no one did anything but WATCH) I felt very uncomfortable. When he first grabbed her and started dragging her, I couldn't help but laugh. She antagonized him right off the bat and smacked the cigar out of his mouth after telling him he needs to learn some manners. I thought he was just dragging her away to hush her up. But then when he tossed her into the barn stall and got on top of her, I realized what was happening. It was very strange to see the main character (seemingly the future hero) force himself sexually upon a woman. I was hoping someone would stop him or that he would stop himself... but that didn't happen. And then the woman started to moan and stop fighting back and even started to hug him. That was really freaking bizarre to me. I wasn't sure how to feel about it. Was that supposed to make people feel better about Clint Eastwood raping the woman? She ended up enjoying it so it doesn't count as rape? I don't know, but it really made me uncomfortable and confused.

And then the hotel-owner's wife ended up being seduced by Clint after trying to stab him with scissors?! Granted, Clint Eastwood was pretty sexy in this movie, but she'd seen him murder several men, he was taking over the entire town like a big jerk, and she knew what had happened with the other woman. I'm not really sure what it means. I could tell she had something going on in her head about him from the beginning. She was always watching him strangely... but I don't know. I guess women can't resist a sexy bad boy? Is that the message?

I can see what Professor McRae was saying when she mentioned the anti-hero. Clint Eastwood's character was anything but charming. He took anything he wanted, including women. He didn't hesitate to kill. Everyone in the town hated him (except for the "runt"), yet they were all looking to him to protect them. The only ones who tried to stop him were the ones who would be losing money because they profited from the mine. And they just wanted to kill him. No one else really stood up to him when he was being a jerk and taking everything for free and tearing down barns and such.

I still wanted Clint Eastwood's character to be successful, though. I'm not a proponent of violent revenge but I wanted the towns people to get what was coming to them. Once we saw the scene of Clint Eastwood being whipped by the three men, all the while everyone is watching, but no one is moving to help him. The one woman, Sarah, tries to do something but she is silenced and shoved into her home. I think it's interesting that Clint Eastwood was making a statement about Kitty Genovese's 1964 murder. Dozens of people heard her being attacked but didn't do anything about it. Anyone could have stopped her murder very easily, but no one did. It makes me sick because I cannot comprehend it at all. None of them even got in trouble because of the American Bystander Rule. This is a legal rule that says that no person has to step in to help, or summon help for another person who is in danger, even if no harm will come to the person trying to help. No one can be held legally responsible for not doing something to help someone, unless they have a legal responsibility to do so (lifeguard, caretaker, policeman). I think that's abhorrent. Just the name and content of that rule says a lot about American society, I think....

That's why I wanted Clint Eastwood's character to get back at the townspeople. They were so corrupt and cowardly. As was said in class, he first humiliated the town by making Mordecai the sheriff and mayor. The town treated Mordecai badly and bullied him and Eastwood stuck it to them by putting him in charge. Then he took whatever material thing he wanted. Eastwood then had them paint the town all red, which was silly and he left when the 3 bad guys entered town. They all expected him to help them fight off the bad guys. He taught them what to do and then they didn't even do it themselves. They all ran off, even when they had the upper hand. That was so frustrating. How 3 losers can take over an entire town is bizarre to me. It's like when one dude comes in to rob a bank and everyone cowers on the floor. If a few other people attacked the guy, the situation could be ended very quickly and probably with minimum violence. But a single person has the power to paralyze a group of people. It's always confused me.

I still don't get how they didn't recognize the Stranger as Marshall Jim Duncan. And I guess I missed the reason why Duncan was whipped in the first place. The whole whipping scene twisted my stomach. It was so violent and seems like it would be horribly painful. I don't know how Duncan would be able to keep standing up to fight them off after being whipped so many times. The 39 lashes of Jesus came to my mind during this part.

Overall, I thought High Plains Drifter was a terrific movie and Clint Eastwood is obviously a wonderful actor and director. I really really really like that he was making a political statement here about Vietnam, Nixon and Kitty Genovese. Everything is better to me when there is meaning behind it. I am going to make it a point to see more movies directed by Eastwood.

"Are you Arabic? Let me put it another way, are you married?

The Manchurian Candidate was incredible. I saw the remake several years ago but I obviously did not appreciate it for what it was supposed to represent. The remake is updated to revolve around the Gulf War rather than the Korean War era. And I was only 16 when I saw it so I didn't see the underlying message.

I'm glad that Professor McRae put the Cold War and McCarthyism and momism and behaviorism in our heads before we watched the movie. I knew that the movie was supposed to have a lot to do with Communist fears. But if I wasn't reminded of certain things, I'm not sure if I would have noticed them as much in the movie.

All of the actors in this movie were incredible. Frank Sinatra was phenomenal in his role as Major Ben Marco. He was so believable and respectable that it didn't even seem far fetched that he would figure out that someone was controlling Raymond Shaw by telling him to play Solitaire.

Laurence Harvey was great in the role of Raymond Shaw. It really creeped me out when he would just go blank and be under complete control of other people. He would do absolutely whatever he was told to do and then have no conscious memory of it. That gives me the shivers right now just thinking about it. It reminded me of White Zombie, when someone can just make you their slave and you can't do anything to save yourself. There is definitely a deep fear in all of us that someone will take away our free will and have complete control over our minds and bodies. That is why no one likes to give up their control in situations. That is definitely why brainwashing is such a scary thought.

I'm so glad Janet Leigh was in this movie. I really enjoy her as an actress. She doesn't play that idiotic airhead woman in anything I have seen her in. She is always intelligent, independent and strong. Her role in The Manchurian Candidate was slightly peculiar. She met Ben on a train and immediately dumped her fiance? I guess I give her some props for following her... heart. At first, I was suspicious that she had a part in the brainwashing plot. But I guess she was there to be the supportive love interest of Ben Marco.

Angela Lansbury was another one who gave me the heebie geebies in this movie. She was so plotting and conniving that it made me sick to my stomach. I definitely saw how the fear of "momism" was portrayed in her character. At the end of the movie, she confessed that she did not know that Raymond was supposed to be the instrument to all of this destruction. However, she still went along with the plan! She was a hideous character. And the Freudian kiss at the end was really bizarre.

Senator Johnny Iselin was obvious a caricature of Senator Joseph McCarthy. However, he was a blithering idiot most of the time. He was always drunk or drinking. I really don't think he knew about the plot to kill the Presidential candidate, though. Mrs. Iselin always told him what to say and when to say it. I also noticed the major incorporation of Abraham Lincoln in almost every scene that the Iselins were in. I'm not sure if Senator McCarthy invoked Lincoln's name in his war against Communism, but I am going to look into that. I'm assuming it has something to do with saving the Union by irradicating Communism and any Communist traitors.

I was personally very upset when Raymond had to kill Senator Jordan and his new bride Josie. Senator Jordan's character was incredibly likable. He was sensible and honest and I was not pleased to see his life ended that way. Also, Josie was Raymond's one chance for happiness and OF COURSE his mother took it away from him for a second time!

It was both shocking and pleasing to see that Raymond shot his step-father and mother at the end of the movie, instead of the Presidential nominee. Though I really didn't see his suicide coming. I felt very sad for his character.

I want to look more into the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. It seems so bizarre that the fear and anxiety was so strong that McCarthy could get away with as much as he did. I will definitely be writing my final paper on this movie and this era.

Oh My Darling, Miguel

So... seeing Charlton Heston in brown face was quite the surprise. It reminded me again of another movie he was in, The Far Horizons, where he played Clark of Louis and Clark. His character was in love with Sacajawea. Sacajawea, coincidentally, was played by a white woman, Donna Reed, who was also in brown face. It was a cheesy movie that was obviously very historically incorrect and the fact that they didn't cast a Native American woman to play a very important Native American character irked me. I believe that is what they are doing again here. They want to represent the Mexican population but they did not cast an actual Mexican to play the lead Mexican role.

I found it interesting how people basically just had to cross the street to move from America into Mexico. I've never been to a border city but I was under the impression that it didn't work that way. When I think of the border, I think of vast desert land that Mexicans have to cross in order to get to the American border. I don't actually know how it works. But I highly doubt it is really as easy to move from country to country as it seemed in the movie. Perhaps that is how it was in the 1950s, though...

I kind of liked Suzie Vargas. She was also refreshing. She seemed intelligent and strong and didn't even have any evil qualities about her! She also seemed pretty sexual but not in a trashy way, which was very pleasing to see. She was a white woman who married a Mexican man, which in itself is pretty cool to see portrayed in an old movie (even though Charlton Heston was anything but Mexican). Then she seems to know how to stick up for herself (though going off with those guys to "skid row" was pretty silly). It also bugged me that she didn't know any Spanish and called the young Mexican man "Poncho". She assumed that the Mexican boy only wanted something sexual from her. Perhaps if she had bothered to learn Spanish, she would have known what he really meant. Even though she is married to a Mexican man, she still harbors some racist sentiment. I'm not saying that she is an evil racist, but with some of her fears and comments, it seems that the sentiment is lingering in her mind.

I'd like to focus on the colonial aspect that is mentioned in Calvo's reading and that was discussed briefly in class. It really is bizarre that white society holds the anxiety of Mexicans and Blacks being rapists of white women, since the white explorers and slave owners were the rapists of Native Americans, slaves, etc. The fact that their land was taken from them is metaphorical rape but then they were physically raped as well. And then white society holds the rape anxiety? I don't think that's fair. It's just like when a child who is feeling guilty about a bad act blames that same act on someone else. Or when an unfaithful partner starts suspecting the other of infidelity.

Luz Calvo really expands on this theory well in his article. The reversal of the bad act in popular culture. It's interesting that the anxiety is present in A Touch of Evil, while Suzie perceives that she will be raped by the Mexican boys, yet it is the white American police officer who is the real bad guy in the film. So by this, I think that Orson Welles is trying to overcome certain Mexican stereotypes. The Mexican boys do not actually rape Suzie.. they just drug her and drop her off to be framed. But Hank was the one who orchestrated the whole thing.

The movie was pretty interesting. At first, I felt that it was kind of slow. And it was hard to get over Charlton Heston in brown face. But I liked the fall of the mighty Hank Quinlan. It was sad but it was needed. His corrupt ways were finally exposed- though it was sad that his partner had to die in the process. The race relations were definitely interesting. Orson Welles did a good job.

"It will have your looks and my brains"

Wow, Blackboard Jungle. Blatant hating on teenagers, I do believe. I'm pretty sure that Americans had some anxiety about rock 'n' roll loving teens. That much is very very clear in this film.

Whenever I hear the song Rockin' Around the Clock, the absolute last thing I think of is mis-behaving teenagers. But I guess back in 1955, this was considered to be a rock song that was turning kids into hoodlums.

As soon as this movie started and the plot was laid out, I was reminded of that Michelle Pfeiffer movie Dangerous Minds. I believe the song Gangster's Paradise was the them song of that film. Rap was considered the scary music for teens at that time. Of course, there is the well-meaning teacher, coming into the inner city high school, determined to make a positive difference for the kids. At first, there was nothing but trouble, but then thankfully, some of the kids turned their lives around.

In class, we talked about Ms. Hammond and I believe she was called a "whore". I'm so frustrated by the portrayal of women in films such as these. There are exactly two women in Blackboard Jungle. One is Ms. Hammond. She is the typical working woman of the 1950s. She is a woman out of the home, which in a movie like this means she is not a conventional America woman. Which also means that she is overtly sexual. Which obviously means she has to be portrayed as a slut because we can't have positive sexuality in American films.

When Mrs. Dadier suggested that maybe Ms. Hammond deserved her almost-rape, I was livid. A lot of people talk like that about women. If they happen to dress in a way that shows off their figure, if they like men and are obvious about it, it is assumed that they somehow deserve to be raped or disrespected. It drives me absolutely crazy. But I think that is a common sentiment in our society. It's really unfortunate.

And then the second woman of the film. Mrs. Dadier. Ugh. She is the obedient, stay-home, blonde wife of the 1950s. At first, she frustrated me because she was insecure and jealous in her marriage. And THEN, when she actually apologized for letting her husband down by having a miscarriage, I almost lost it. I found her to be weak and frustrating. I hate that there is the annoying weak woman and then the slutty strong woman. Why can't we just have strong, intelligent, positive female characters?

Moving on from my rant... I really liked Miller. At first, I barely paid attention to when he was in the bathroom, questioning another student about making another boy cry. I guess I didn't realize that he was the one who said it, but I do remember liking that someone said it at all. But then Mr. Dadier enters the bathroom and Miller antagonizes him. I liked how he called him "Chief". That would have driven me crazy if I were Dadier. It's like when people my age or younger call me "hon". It's very condescending. So, as I said in class, at first Miller seems like a punk just like the rest of the kids in the school. However, I started to feel differently about him.

Dadier singles Miller out as a leader. However, he also believes him to be a problem child. That is kind of bizarre. He looks to him as both the problem AND the solution. Dadier suspects Miller in a lot of the bad acts that occur when it actually turns out to be West. I hold a bit of pity for West. One of my first thoughts about him was that his parents must not have loved him enough or else he would not be acting out as much. West says later that he is acting out so that he won't be accepted into the military. I don't really buy that. I think he is just a very troubled young man and does bad things in order to get noticed.

I think that West was jealous of the relationship between Miller and Dadier. And I do not agree with the reading. I don't think it's because West is gay or anything. I think that West is truly the character who needs to be rescued. He is obviously very troubled and lost. He should be the one that Dadier is trying to rescue, not Miller. He is jealous of the attention Dadier is giving to Miller and that is why he does so many things to get Dadier's attention. Yes, he does really bad things to get his attention. And Dadier is still oblivious to it. It's really sad, actually.

Overall, the sexism in this film really frustrated me. But I appreciated the interracial aspect of it. I liked that one of the main protagonists is Miller, a young working-class black boy. Dadier views Miller as a problem, but I think that the audience can see just how good Miller really is. The film shows the cultural anxieties of the time. Integrated schools probably scared a lot of Americans. Rock 'n' roll and juvenile delinquents definitely were a fear. That is very apparent in this film.