39: Alice Goodbody (1974, Tom Scheuer)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released in 2017 by Code Red, packaged with Those Mad Mad Movie Makers (the sanitized retitle of the film better known as The Last Porno Flick).

Acquired: Late in 2017 or early in 2018 from Diabolik DVD.

Seen before?: No.

After the deep diving of the last couple pieces, it feels a bit refreshing to splash around in a puddle. Alice Goodbody is a silly Hollywood sex comedy about a sweet, naive woman sleeping her way up the ladder of fame in exchange for an ever-mounting big break in an epic about Julius Caesar. It has nothing grand to offer aside from the breathtaking body of Sharon Kelly. It is instead content to tell the same joke with slight variations - Alice finds out who she has to sleep with next while going down on "2nd assistant production manager" Myron Mittleman (that last name, I know I know), tries to accommodate the weird sexual proclivities of whomever she's been given with a modicum of success, finds her role subsequently increased and then suffers an on-set accident that puts her out of commission and demands a delay on set. This goes through five cycles, after which Scheuer hits the blackout on a hoary eye-roller of a punchline.

Much to my surprise, I found it kind of charming.

A lot of that has to do with the wide-eyed gee-shucks charm of the voluptuous Ms. Kelly, who has the difficult task of playing this material light and cheeky without letting the innate misogyny sour it or making Alice seem like too much of a dupe. She is blessedly more than up to the task, making Alice into a sunny and optimistic sort who's up for whatever because, hey, you gotta pay your dues and who wouldn't want to be in the movies? Or maybe I'm just responding to the fact that Scheuer skirts the edge of dizzy-dame stereotypes by turning Alice into a hardcore, omnivorous cinephile - if she's spacey, it's not that she's stupid but that she's lost in her head thinking about the film she just saw or looking forward to the one she's going to see later. Seriously - her first line of dialogue sees her waxing rhapsodic about Borzage's 7th Heaven, her fateful date with Mittleman sees her exclaiming, "This is exactly how June Preisser was discovered!" and one injury is met with, "I bet nothing like this ever happened to Maria Montez!" I'm just saying, I relate to being at your job and thinking about whatever you stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to watch, how could I not, I'm weak like that.

Ms. Kelly, with her open face and big easy smile, also serves as a beacon towards the script's feathery cheer. The light touch is critical in that it manages to differentiate it from the reams of contemporaneous comedies that come off as flat sitcoms, all sledgehammer jokes and dead-air timing (e.g. the film with which it shares a disc). It feints towards setting up a dichotomy between the wonder of the movies felt by Alice and the cynical sausage-grinding that actually produces those movies, but it never gets too insistent on that cynicism - it's too busy being goofy. There's a point-of-view shot from inside Alice's vagina. The director is a dime-store spoof on Erich Von Stroheim about whom is said at one point, "He thinks De Mille mighta made it if he didn't think so small!" The legendary George "Buck" Flower figures in a food-slathered sex scene that either doubles down on Tom Jones or prefigures Hot Shots!, I can't quite decide. Flower also has a bit where he spies on a neighbor of his having sex with a man in a gorilla costume. The accidents on set, as they get more elaborate and Scheuer starts to have fun with the fact that we know a crack-up is inevitable, start to seem like a lost Final Destination entry. An elephant psychiatrist boasts of having shown a frigid female elephant pornographic films. ("Of people?" "No, of elephants!") Hell, scratch that - all you need to know is that there is an elephant psychiatrist in this film. I can't defend Alice Goodbody on any real merit. I can't say it holds up over feature length. I can't even expect I'll ever watch it again. But it was a nice surprise to actually enjoy a '70s smutcom, to a degree, and that's more value than I had expected.

38: Akira (1988, Katsuhiro Otomo)

Owned version: The two-disc DVD released by Pioneer in 2001.

Acquired: Most likely around Christmas time in 2001, either from the Times Square Virgin Megastore or the Tower Records that was next to Lincoln Center. (Neither storefront is there any more, to my everlasting chagrin.)

Seen before?: Four times - once in the early '90s from the old Streamline dubbed VHS (the original version, not the later version co-released with Orion), once in probably 1998 or 1999 from the subtitled VHS Streamline released in the mid-'90s, once in April of 2001 during the theatrical re-release that featured the new Pioneer dub and once from this disc on March 9th of 2010, which led to this sorry punt of a review. As I'm typing this, I'm noticing that without meaning to my fifth viewing of Akira occurred exactly nine years after my last one.

The impression I feel I'm giving here is that everything on my previous Tumblr was tossed-off garbage. Which... I dunno. There's a lot of quick-sketch nonsense there, that's true. I was having trouble balancing my work demands with my viewing desires, as I often am. So a lot of what I threw up there was to get stuff out of the way so I could feel good about moving on to the next film. I feel less able to do that nowadays - if I'm writing something here, I want it to be worthwhile, and if I want to just toss off a bit of snark I've got Letterboxd for that. That said, there's a few times I went longer over there that I'm still a little proud of. In particular, I got a few decent pieces off the idea of the "Rosetta shot," a shot capped from a film that seemed to sum up the whole of the endeavor, whether for good or ill. (Here's an NSFW example.) To start my trip through Akira, I'd like to resurrect that idea. So here it is:

This is, in the middle of a melee, a riot cop shooting a protestor point-blank in the chest with a gas grenade. I'd never really registered this moment in my previous runs through this, because it's not really meant to be noticed - it's a small touch, a quick dose of grim color with which to add definition to the world Otomo has built. But it stuck out for me this time, if for no other reason than my brain kept entertaining the slim possibility: What if this guy wasn't a protestor? What if he was just an urban scavenger who happened to be in the vicinity, saw a piece of piping and a helmet that would be useful to him, and tried to make off with it before the situation exploded around him? And even if he is a protestor... does that mean he deserves a gas charge to the chest at point-blank range when he's already clearly affected by the gas from previous charges? This is, at bottom, a stark illustration of the heedless exercising of power; that it's quietly tossed off in the middle of a larger setpiece does nothing to water down the elemental truth it gets at regarding Akira. For this is absolutely a movie about power, about those who wield it and what they do with it and how that leaves any number of relative innocents crushed under concrete and steel.

Otomo is not subtle about this. His characters are aware of the forces they're given to control (or not control) and often discuss the morality of that duty towards these forces. (Upon being presented with Tetsuo's brainwaves by excitable Einstein-looking egghead Dr. Onishi, "Maybe we shouldn't touch that power," is the response of Colonel Shikishima - the closest thing to a good guy on the governmental side of the story, and even he stages a military coup later in the film out of what he deems necessity.) But... well, let's take a look at the context for the above shot. The protestor comes staggering out of the cloud of gas, head bowed, unable to see the cop. The cop sees the protestor, who poses no clear threat, takes a minute, draws a bead and fires away. This is not a heat-of-the-moment snap decision - this is as considered an attack as can occur under these circumstances. The cop knows not who he's firing upon, just that he's firing upon someone who isn't a cop, which means therefore in this situation they're an automatic enemy, something less-than. He's under the grip of The Suspicion. The Suspicion is enough to warrant action, to reaffirm the right of the strong over the weak lest the weak become the strong. The Suspicion is never wrong.

So it goes with any figure in this film with a certain level of power - they must demean, dismiss or otherwise dehumanize their targets so as not to feel conflicted about their actions. Onishi overlooks Tetsuo's humanity for the sake of advancing science, realizing too late that he's unleashed something uncontrollable; the ministers on the government board downplay Shikishima's authority and ignore his fears so they can justify their own station; the bike gangs fight as squadrons rather than individuals, in the manner of any war or biker film. By the time Tetsuo's immense rage (borne of a life of being bullied, of being seen as less-than) manifests into immense psychic powers, he's learned thoroughly how not to consider the effect - the crucial test is his first attack on other humans, in the hallway of the hospital where he's being kept, and Otomo depicts it from the far end of said hallway, in the distance and at a remove that matches the casual, almost accidental way Tetsuo turns what he views as his adversaries into streaks of blood on the ceiling.

This sort of power, this ability to kill with a thought that turns men into callous gods... the application of such seems a logical end point for the post-WWIII society depicted by Otomo, a society on the edge of disaster hurtling heedlessly towards another attempt at self-extinction. One of the shriveled children who serve as one of the lines of defense against Tetsuo has a premonition of this extinction, proclaiming, "The city will crumble, and so many people will die..." Yet it can be said that the city is already crumbled, already gone to seed under the weight of anger and political discord and grotesque self-interest and The Suspicion. Decay is all around, over and under and through the remains of the old city left to fester alongside the gleaming neon distraction of Neo-Tokyo, because all flesh will die and all flesh will rot and even a god can be reduced to component body parts hidden underneath a stadium. And if all flesh will die, and the world built by people can said to be an extension of them, what does that say about the permanence of the world? Skin splits, glass shatters, stone crumbles, metal buckles - everything is impermanent in the face of the kind of power that can crack the earth in two. That kind of power... should it even be in the hands of people? What positive application could it have? What could it be other than a gas grenade into the chest of society?

Yet Otomo also finds beauty in the destruction. His stirring compositions, skewed and emphasizing the enormity of the edifices and the lack thereof of the people dwarfed by and wandering through them, are consistently gorgeous. When windows blow out, the glass floats down like crystal rain; when smoke billows it does so in enveloping clouds like cumuli crashing to the firmament. His indulgence of body horror has a grotesque and memorable poetry, whether it be bodies erupting in blood like fountains, milk leaking from nightmarish evil toys or Tetsuo's flesh ballooning into an undulating mountain of undifferentiated slime-tissue. A brief jaunt into space is a beautifully silent ode to breakdown. More than a visual beauty, though, there's an emotional beauty in the ways its characters find to push back against The Suspicion. If unchecked power reigns free and gruesome self-interest is the way of the ruling class, defiance is still an option - a foolhardy one, but that's better than no option at all. Kaneda ropes a group of revolutionaries into trying to free Tetsuo and nearly succeeds. Ryu, head of the revolutionaries, gets betrayed by and shot by the government mole who's been feeding him information, yet still manages to outlive the man who shot him, however briefly, and achieve a sad sort of grace. Shikishima fires his pistol at the rapidly mutating Tetsuo, knowing he'll be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of flesh and willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the three psychic children; his selflessness is repaid when Akira is reborn. And Kaneda rides into battle with just a laser gun and the knowledge that Tetsuo was once his friend, trusting that this will be enough to save him, willing to even leap into the heart of a cataclysm to try. If this does all lead to destruction, maybe something new can be built from the wreckage. Maybe something better - the birth of a new universe. One where The Suspicion holds no sway. We can dream.

37: After the Rehersal (1984, Ingmar Bergman)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released by Criterion as part of the massive Ingmar Bergman's Cinema box set they released this past November.

Acquired: Christmas gift from my mother, though it didn't arrive until late January due to the overwhelming interest in the set.

Seen before?: No.

"Many directors' paths are lined with the corpses of actors. Have you ever tried to count your victims?"

Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehersal does not open with a title card. It instead opens with the above image, a shot that drifts over the length of a dressed stage to find its protagonist, director Henrik Vogler, with his head down on a desk. Is he dozing or just collecting his thoughts? No matter - at any rate, he slows stirs himself into upright, conscious life. Soon Anna, the lead actress in the production of Strindberg's A Dream Play Vogler is currently rehearsing, will arrive on set, claiming to be searching for a lost bracelet. Vogler assumes this to be an excuse, that's she's actually looking to talk to him - and he's proven right in quick order. Their two-handed verbal and emotional sparring, with a midfilm break for another back-and-forth between Vogler and older actress Rakel, comprise the body of After the Rehearsal. Just as Autumn Sonata was built out of the sparring between Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, and as Persona was built from the tension between Ullmann  and Bibi Andersson, and as Scenes from a Marriage was crafted from the arguments between Ullmann and Erland Josephson... who plays Vogler in After the Rehearsal.

So this is familiar ground for Bergman - indeed, why should we expect anything less from a late-career work from a master with such an identifiable stamp? The value here is in how Bergman embraces the familiar - indeed, weaves it into the fabric of the work. Anna, played with beautifully by Lena Olin, is the latest muse for Vogler, but her connections run deeper than a simple working relationship - one of Vogler's previous muses, Rakel, was in fact her mother, and the role she plays in A Dream Play was one that her mother had previously played for Vogler. This is, in fact, the fifth time Vogler has directed A Dream Play, and there is much discussion not only of Rakel but of another actress, Maria, who had also performed the role previously. Both these actresses, it's revealed, are deceased. Further, it's not just the material that has been reused - the set dressing is also a hand-me-down, with the centrally-placed couch in particular cited as being a holdover from a production of Hedda Gabler. Ghosts and echoes abound this production, and that's even before a literal ghost drifts in for a chat.

But there's something else, another angle that I think makes the idea of old, repetitive material into something productive. Early on, Vogler chastizes himself in voiceover for "...this parody of conviction that's gone sour and crumbled," speaking to a weariness with something well-trod; when he follows this up with, "Why justify myself to this young person who doesn't care what I say?" there's a sense that he's struggling to find his place in the modern way of things. Making Vogler a theater director invites a temptation to read this as autobiography of sorts for Bergman, a temptation the material certainly encourages when, say, Vogler tells Anna, "I make sure the audience loves you," and the film cuts to an over-shoulder shot from Anna's point of view, placing us in Anna's shoes as The Director Himself talks directly to us. But it's more than that - there's a feeling that this is all foregone, that these arguments are not new, that the carpet on the stage has a path worn into it that is currently being followed because that's the way Vogler (and by extension Bergman) wants it. Olin follows in the path of her mother because Vogler demands it; even when she protests about her ability to tackle this demanding role, he responds with, "You can only be that bad if you're talented." Rakel shows up because Vogler incarnates her as a way to expunge lingering issues regarding her and her daughter, and when he says, "Not a day goes by that I don't think of you," is he working out his guilt for having let the elder woman irreparably down or justifying why he's sucked himself into her daughter's orbit? When Anna throws a wrench into the narrative Vogler has dedicated himself to playing out, he responds by charging ahead anyway and narrates in full a fantastic love affair for the two, directing it down the cruelest possible path that results in maximum misery for both parties no matter how Anna tries to get ahead of or redirect this narrative. There's a telling moment during this long sequence where the two are strolling around the stage as Vogler spins his preferred future - at one point, Bergman lets them walk off frame and then zooms down to the stage floor, highlighting the swatches of gaffer's tape that serve as marks to be hit during the play. That's quite the hand-tip there.

If Vogler is then controlling the narrative, as a director is wont to do, sending it along a certain line that satisfies him, it's instructive that we come back to the first shot. Vogler is at his desk in repose. Maybe he's thinking, maybe he's slipped into a cat nap. The film that follows is inexorably tethered to his perspective - he's the only one who we hear on voiceover, he talks to Rakel even though she's dead (with Anna out of focus in the background), and when the story doesn't go to his liking he starts telling a different one. With all the back-and-forth about sadness and aging and death ("I breathe decay. You think I don't know that?"), combined with the pointedness of making the central production A Dream Play and the openly-fantastic interlude with Rakel, I suspect what we have here is not a case of a director breaking down the psyche of a young actress but a director breaking down the psyche of an old director. This is, on at least one level, a feature-length argument Bergman is having inside his own head, and if the chamber up there leaks out some echoes onto the stage where his characters are standing, so be it. Everything around him has gone silent save for the voices in his head yelling at one another; when Vogler muses right before the blackout, "What worried me most in that moment was that I couldn't hear the church bells," it suggests that even God has gone silent. Bergman might know something of that.

36: A.K. (1985, Chris Marker)

Owned version: This is included as an extra on the 2005 Criterion DVD of Ran, of which this is a chronicle of that film's making. Of sorts.

Acquired: Probably in April or May of 2009, shortly after Criterion announced that the disc was going out of print, from my then-local Borders.

Seen before?: No.

"We will try to show what we see the way we see it."

I really should have written about this back when I saw it at the end of January. But I waited too long, and now most of what I thought I could say is lost in the fog of my brain, much as the horses that fade into the fog in a striking shot captured by Marker in this, a stirring and unique portrait of one great artist observing another great artist and creating art from what he sees. All I have are my notes, which are as always a rough sketch of things that caught my interest, meant to provide a path forward for the piece I intend to write. Try as I might, I cannot grasp the shape of that piece as of now. So, I'll put in pin in this. I'll note that Marker's resolutely observational approach here, an inspired choice, reveals this sort of epic, expansive filmmaking to be as arduous as stop-motion animation and not too far removed besides - both involve laborious, time-consuming setups meant to capture mere minutes of footage at best. I will refer to a few images that caught my eye - a series of extras being made up and armored for a battle scene, with one man stretching his jaw in a way I found worth comment; the film's composer strolling through the mist like a purposeful phantom; a period-appropriate army marching past a small cadre of parked cars, two time periods smashing together at an odd angle; a man carrying a sheaf of grass painted an absurd and eye-catching shade of gold; lighting rigs framed and shot so that they appear to be closeups of suns hanging in a fading blue sky; Kurosawa himself in the midst of all this chaos, exuding an extraordinary calm.

If the typical making-of featurette is a demonstration of how something came to be, it stands to reason that they exist as testaments of activity - memory aids for things that happened, films made to help us remember. In that, Marker exploits this, draws it out, makes it text - tape recorders, VCRs, these "imperfect inventions" are devices of remembrance. And, as befits this project, they are then objects of creation. As Marker says at the outset, "Memory is what you create from." His creation stands interlinked with Kurosawa's creation. And my writing about his film about Kurosawa's film would then be a further responsive act of creation. Yet I fall down at this task. My memory, in this instance, fails me. But I must move forward or stagnate. I will come back to this another time. It deserves better.

35: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)

Owned version: The two-disc DVD released by Dreamworks in 2002.

Acquired: In 2002, from a used bin at a Blockbuster.

Seen before?: Three times before this. Once during its original theatrical run in 2001, most likely on July 1st, and twice from this DVD - on July 2nd, 2018 and on March 8th, 2010. (The latter led to this review, and as is now par for the course a glance over that piece makes me wonder why I thought I was any good at this whole writing thing back then.)

It's funny how the Dr. Know scene has always been my least favorite piece of the film - Williams' faux-German vocal mugging as the bouncy cartoon search engine never quite seems to fit with the rest of the film, not even amongst the searing garishness of Rouge City - yet this time around, it strikes me as the skeleton key to the whole endeavor. As robot boy David and smooth sexbot Gigolo Joe try to work around the multiple potential meanings of words so as to find the precise question that will bring forth the answer to David's Blue Fairy conundrum, they get at the heart of the story's tension regarding dual natures and shifting contexts - appropriate given the film's existence as a collaborative work between two of the 20th century's great artists.

The ability to exist in two distinct states within one object, even if - especially if - those states conflict is all over this. It's seen on the macro level through the nature of David, the little robot boy who wishes to become human, and by film's end does - indeed, the driving action is on one level David's search for the Blue Fairy and on another level David's slow, painful progress towards humanity. David starts as a shell, a pure machine running on programming without emotion; once his "mother" Monica activates his imprinting protocol and thus fires up his emotional circuits, the bulk of the film is then David's journey out of the safety of the home into the big bad world. This physical journey doubles as a gradual enlightening, a march through various emotional achievements until his final ascendance into full humanity via the embracing of mortality. And, until this very last moment, David is always defined by both the amount of humanity and the amount of mechanization he carries within him. The latter is always emphasized at the expense of the former - even the evolved robots at the end of the film define him as One of Them, a more primitive version but Them nonetheless, while also seeing him as a bridge to the world of the human, a world they were never present to witness - but David feels the former acutely and uses it as, essentially, his self-definition, produced via aspiration in absence of legitimacy. He's not "human," strictly, but he feels and thinks as acts as one. At what point does the artificial intelligence stop being artificial?

But in the period before that question is allowed to hang, David is a robot. Unquestionably a robot. In this space of the film, this film that is among the best Spielberg has ever made, exists the finest of fine work - the period before David's imprinting is spectacular, creepy, beautiful, unsettling and altogether perfect, maybe the most spine-tingling evocation of living with a new life this side of Eraserhead. In this early segment, Spielberg does his best to play up David's mechanical unnaturalness - in shots like the one where his face is refracted through a beveled closet door, or the God's eye shot of him at the dinner table, isolated in the frame from his "parents" by a large circular hanging lamp, or in beats like the payoff to the hide-and-seek gag where it's cut like a jump scare, this might as well be a horror film with David as the monster. Yet what he's doing is explicable in context; he's absorbing the world around him dispassionately but with an insatiable curiosity much in the vein of any young child, and if the extraordinary dinner table scene culminates in another horror-worthy sting - the barking forced laugh - isn't this essentially the logic of a child, thinking that Mommy and Daddy react positively when I laugh? And if we were to invert that emotional reaction into crying, wouldn't its inexplicability, its welling-up completely without an observable inciting incident, seem completely normal for a baby, which is the basic plane of logic David is working on at that point?

Another important beat in this early segment expands the idea of duality outside of David, as a precursor to where it ends up - there's a scene shortly after David comes to live with Monica and Henry where he's observing framed family photos, and he ends on a picture of Martin, their comatose young son whose absence David is meant to soothe. We see David's reflection in each photo he comes across, and his image seems to merge with Martin's in the final photo, emphasizing his status as an overlay, an inadequate Band-Aid stretched across raw throbbing pain. But there's something else there - David's ghostly reflection mirrors Martin's own state as a ghost within his own life. Martin is neither alive nor dead; he's instead in a place where he's both, denying his parents the ability to properly grieve even in the face of hopeless odds, which leads to rash but understandable decisions like Henry's acceptance of his company's request to test out the David robot or Monica's leap of faith when she puts forth the imprinting protocol. Duality strikes again. (There's also something to be said for replacing a boy who can't wake up with one that can't sleep.)

Once Martin does wake up, David's days in the household are numbered - a machine, even one that's bonded to you, is going to lose when the choice is between it and your flesh-and-blood progeny - and that's when the notion of duality and contrast becomes weaponized. Once David is left in the woods by Monica, Spielberg changes from shooting him as the monster to shooting the world as the monster, overwhelming and hostile and uncaring. Where David's guilelessness marked him as inhuman pre-imprinting, it merely casts him as an innocent once things get dangerous, and the mutability of that is the point - the light in which an action can feel justified can easily shift and reveal the action as less than (e.g. the climax of the Flesh Fair, the incident that turns Gigolo Joe into a runaway ["You killed me first."]). I do mean "light" literally in at least one sense, inasmuch as the rising moon, normally a benign sight, turns out to be a harbinger of genocide, and how after that every moment of threat or destruction is prefaced by a pale blue light similar to that of the Flesh Fair abduction craft. (A nice change of pace from the typical "red = danger," methinks.) It's in the film's harrowing midsection that David's innocence is most played up - a literal babe in the woods - and it's meant as a contrast to human cruelty, an impulse that David is not capable of at that point; when, in his search for answers, he encounters a threat that is less physical and more existential, he proves that he can also be violent and cruel, that's another marker on his progress towards being human. And then he gets to meet his maker (Gigolo Joe: "The ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them.") and have his illusions shattered. Osment's performance in this is eerily good, pantheon-level work from a prepubescent, and the quivering, broken way he delivers, "I thought I was one of a kind," is possibly the best choice in a performance full of great choices. That William Hurt's Professor Hobby reveals the circumstances of David's creation makes him not so removed from Martin after all is another telling flourish. (God so loved the world that he gave to it his only begotten Son, right?)

The midsection really cranks up the cruelty and short-sightedness assumed of humanity, and no one could be forgiven for thinking that a cynical position on Spielberg's part. But beyond this outsized horror being needed as one end of a pole to balance the purity of David's quest on the other end as well as serving as a model for David's eventual behavior in Professor Hobby's office, I feel the cruelty serves as a misdirect of sorts, a big ugly manhole cover for the subterranean tunneling Spielberg is quietly setting up in the film's ending (one Kubrick himself admitted he could never quite get to to work the way he wanted it to). What's important when dealing with the human world here, I submit, is not the grand gestures of fear and anger but the small ones of kindness and empathy. When the advanced robots at the end tell David, "We only want for your happiness. You've had so little of that," it's a truthful sentiment but it's also a quiet watchword - within the shit and horror and chaos of modern life, there's still moments where we can be good to each other. We see it in a big way at the end of the Flesh Fair, when the crowd rejects the ringmaster's call to melt a little boy to death. We also see it in the bit where a hotel clerk warns Gigolo Joe about the Flesh Fair being in town, in Monica choosing the lesser of two evils when casting David to his fate knowing how difficult it will be to do so ("I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world" is an all-timer of a heart-ripping line of dialogue), in Gigolo Joe rescuing David from his despondent dive into the ocean. And we see it early on, before David even comes into the narrative, in the fairy-tale figures that have been plastered onto the walls of the ICU ward where Martin is being held in suspended animation. It's a tiny, mostly futile gesture, but it stills smacks of the best possible version of humanity, one that tries in any way to bring a sliver of light to even the most agonized places. The use of those figures also presages David's ultimate encounter with the Blue Fairy in the submerged Coney Island, and both times the appearance of fairy-tale characters heralds the delayed granting of a long-held wish, an impossible dream as a bulwark against misery magically made real. Martin wasn't supposed to wake up but did. David wasn't supposed to become human but did. Why wouldn't a machine aspire to be part of a species that could maintain hope in the face of everything that says it isn't worth it?

34: Adventures on the New Frontier (1961, Richard Leacock & Albert Maysles & D.A. Pennebaker & Kenneth Stilson)

Owned version: The 2016 Blu-ray released by Criterion under the heading of The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates - a fascinating set of short films.

Acquired: This past July 4th at a Barnes & Noble as part of their semi-annual Criterion half-off sale. Seemed appropriate.

Seen before?: Once from this disc on the July 4th in question.

Part of me just wants to write just, like, "wow, so refreshing to watch a president being presidential!" and move on, but snark is only one tool in the box and overreliance on it can rot the soul. Besides, this film and its predecessor Primary make an impressive case study in how to critique a subject without overtly appearing to do so. While I plan (obviously, given the nature of what I'm doing here) to write at length about Primary down the road, I'll briefly note now that what struck me about it is how quietly but firmly the filmmakers aligned themselves with Humphrey over Kennedy without harming the project - indeed, the thrust of the film seems to demand Kennedy's triumph even as, during filming, it would have not been a foregone conclusion. It's a piece about the evolution of political campaigning in this country, and while Kennedy had issues and platforms he ran on and talked about at length, Drew and company hold that close until the final push towards primary day. They're more interested with his presence, his image and the near-messianic reaction he got from crowds, as opposed to poor Hubert Humphrey who's mostly seen doing old-school legwork for small groups in North Wisconsin farm country and greeting potential voters individually - the "man of the people" versus a man who seems to exist above the people, in a rarefied and inspiring space of his own. If we take that as the truth, Adventures on the New Frontier follows from there into the realities of JFK's ascent to governmental Godhood. It's easy to be inspiring; it's damned hard to be effective.

It's not just important, in the context of this project that you know about this difficulty. The filmmakers want you to feel it, to understand it in a bone-deep way. Adventures sets the stage for this in its opening minutes, with it first following JFK from behind, as though the camera were tethered to his neck - a newsman literally following the story before him as he walks down the halls of power. When the narrator says, "Now you will begin to move with the President," the double meaning of "move with" jumps out - that we are following the President as he goes about his day, and that we move as he moves, step as he steps, swing our limbs as he does... in essence, that we are forced into an identification with the President as he transitions from Great New Hope into, y'know, the actual fucking President. And, thanks to the miracle of then-modern access reporting, you will get to be in on that transition too! Given the thesis, it's then telling about the nature of the job and funny in a vacuum that we see much less of JFK than would be expected. While this is an act of media-blitz burnishment, made because JFK liked the work done on Primary, it prints the legend not by making its central figure seem godlike and perfect but by making him a regular dude with an irregular job, the white-collar boss of an office building full of diligent workers whose product is the fate of billions. He can sit in the Oval Office and smoke cigars and discuss, in calm and rational tones, a plan for nuclear disarmament as though there's nothing unusual about that, that he isn't discussing weapons that could vaporize entire populations in seconds, because that's the job. And because that's the job, it's not the sort of thing a man can do by himself.

So in addition to popping into the Oval Office to see JFK do things like create the Peace Corps, we follow Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg as he testifies to Congress about the weak economy and the plans to get things rolling, especially in grossly depressed places like the coal country of West Virginia, where unemployment is over twice the national average. (Coal country: dead now, dead then.) We jump to Puritan, a small coal-centric village in WV to see what damage this downturn hath wrought. And we follow Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs G. Mennen Williams as he prepares for, and ultimately attends a conference in Addis Ababa regarding the emergence of several newly independent states and a general push towards African self-governance. In following Goldberg and Williams, there emerges a clear interest in the space between stated policy and real-world application, between rhetoric and efficacy. I find the many ways in which the filmmakers pointedly use irony and contrast to drive home this idea that words and intentions are easy but action is much tougher. The most pointed example of this is likely a spirited bit of narration that concludes with, "The president is looking ahead," which had been preceded by an interlude in which a young Puritan boy hopes to get a shirt from a government-sponsored donation drive and is then followed by more testimony about the dire nature of the economy by Goldberg; meanwhile, Williams's preparation for his trip involves him discussing his diplomatic aims with Barrett O'Hara, the chairman of the subcommittee on Africa who boasts that he has been to the continent all of twice, and with Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender, who had been to 38 African countries that year alone and gets off the amazing line, "Anyone with common sense knows you can't raise chickens in a rain forest." This echoes further when a member of the African coalition at the conference states, "American opinion... was somewhat parochial before." Through it all remains a portrait of a flawed machine made up of men working towards something bigger than themselves, stumbling towards a sort of optimistic future and hoping the path they're on will get them there, working through disagreements of approach and policy via a shared understanding that this job is fucking impossible but equally fucking necessary. When the narrator speaks of JFK and "decisions he must make alone," well, that's another irony for you, since we see that no decision exists in a vacuum here. This is the kind of myth-making I can get behind.

(Retrospect also offers a look at a quieter form of myth-making that would have been unknown to all but the President's closest - check the stiff gait and tight-shouldered posture on JFK around the 18 or 19 minute mark and reflect that we know now about the panoply of ailments afflicting a man who was always sold as an acme of youthful vigor.)

33: Abduction of an American Playgirl (1975, no director credited)

Owned version: The DVD released by Vinegar Syndrome in 2014 as a kick-off to their Peekarama porno-double-feature line

Acquired: From Vinegar Syndrome this past Black Friday after the trailer caught my interest.

Seen before?: No.

The title and general knowledge of the evolution of the genre around this point foster expectations that this, like its discmate Winter Heat, will be a grimy, soul-killing wallow in rape-fantasy porn. The opening moments, where two downtrodden dudes (mustachioed Fred and his friend Will) looking to score decide on a whim to spirit away Jackie, a fashionable young woman in a tight chartreuse dress they spy walking out of a local grocery, seem ready to fulfill that promise.

That goes out the window almost immediately afterward during the abduction promised in the title, when the playgirl in question gets a good kick to the nuts in on Fred and he staggers around uselessly while Will awkwardly drags the woman into the back of their car. It's that kind of movie, the kind that would be queasy were its male protagonists not hapless dorks with grievous overestimations of their station and permanent "KICK ME" signs pasted on their backs by life and fate. There's nothing at all threatening about these jamooks; Will, the dopier of the two, turns getting the boots off the unconscious woman into an IKEA-level exercise in mechanical frustration,  while Fred gets flustered instantly and leaves the room when their prisoner starts weeping ("What the hell ya cryin' for... cryin' turns me off!"). They can't even get on the same wavelength when trying to stretch this situation out into a harebrained kidnapping scheme - Fred gives instructions to Will about what to say, ignoring his friend's repeated cries that he hasn't a dime to make the call.

So, they're total buffoons. Laying this groundwork, the film then presents its central joke: in avoiding one rape fantasy, it curiously flips inside out into another, one where two stereotypically-cocksure '70s males find themselves at the mercy of their literally insatiable object of their desire. (To put a button on it, Fred gets to yell, "She raped me!" after he's tied to a coffee table by Jackie.) It's essentially the only joke the film has, as it repeats multiple variations on Jackie fixing breakfast for the two and telling them, above their exhausted protests, to be in the bedroom in ten minutes, but it unexpectedly gets a fair amount of mileage out of that joke. (Best variation: the double-team that runs at double speed and is overlayed with a piano-centric silent-movie-style score - call it slapstick-and-tickle.) It is, in fact, when the film wholly uses up its two hapless cockswains that it loses its bearings; not having its central duo to beat into the ground, it then settles for a brief bit of lesbian incest and an indulging of the Virile Black Man stereotype that leads first to a punchline that can be seen from space, then a mild gay-panic joke as a topper. (Though it is interesting and appropriate, in light of the film's constructions of its sexual power games, that the Virile Black Man gets the film's only popshot.)

Part of me wonders if this was always intended as a comedy or if circumstances of production steered it in that direction - the industry was grinding them out like sausages at this point, and there's a certain exhaustion visible in all the semis and softies on display during the fuck scenes. The other part of me is like, who cares, I laughed. The actors playing Fred and Will have a solid dumb-schmuck chemistry, Darby Lloyd Raines is gorgeous and convincingly energetic and I can't help but respect a film that, intentionally or not, turns its male actors' inability to keep it up into genuine text.