Demolition Man (1993)

USA, 115 minutes

Director: Marco Brambilla

Writers: Peter M. Lenkov, Robert Reneau, Daniel Waters

Photography: Alex Thomson

Music: Elliot Goldenthal

Editor: Stuart Baird

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Benjamin Bratt, Bob Gunton, Denis Leary, Jack Black, Jesse Ventura, Adrienne Barbeau

Demolition Man belongs with that genre of jokey science fiction action shows that includes RoboCop and Total Recall: come for the stunts and fistfights, stay for the laughs and scratchy high concepts. It’s not Schwarzenegger in the starring role in this case (or Peter Weller either), but Sylvester Stallone. And he’s not your dad’s Rocky but a triangular-shaped specimen from his neck to lean waist, in supremely good shape and inclined (or director Marco Brambilla, otherwise unknown to me, is inclined) to show off the impressive pecs and overall physique. He is well supported by a manic Wesley Snipes, a very funny Sandra Bullock, a strange Benjamin Bratt, and a handful or more of hey-that-guys from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I’m here for Demolition Man, a little against my will, because it seems to understand the sweet spot of action, humor, and science fiction—and I wasn’t prepared for that. In fact, I was astonished to see that Halliwell’s gives it two stars whereas Searching for Bobby Fischer, for example, does not even get one, and I thought maybe it deserved at least that.

Demolition Man is set in 2032, in a justice system that freezes the guilty for the duration of their sentences and then feeds them subliminal training based on their aptitudes so they will have a skill when they awake for parole or release. Detective John Spartan (Stallone) has been trained for knitting and sewing. He’s in for accidentally letting 30 hostages die. Oops, as he might say. The 21st century of this movie has turned into a paradise for hippie lovers of peace, harmony, and political correctness, a panacea of woke we would say nowadays. Everything bad, including swearing, smoking, drinking, and eating meat, has been outlawed. But when supervillain Simon Phoenix (Snipes in a blonde dye-job and high Joker hysterics) breaks out of his ice cube they have to get real (as one does) and turn to Spartan, who’s not a bad cop but a good cop who is brutal, if you can exactly tell the difference. Just go with it.

“The Monkey” (1980)

Overall I like this longish Stephen King story pretty well. It focuses on a wind-up toy monkey I know from the Close Encounters movie and elsewhere, a 1950s-era toy that had a resurgence in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Maybe even because of this story, although first I would like to know whether King was influenced by the Spielberg movie. King and Spielberg are both very strong on 1970s-era middle-class, young, usually suburban family life. In this story King makes the toy a harbinger or perhaps somehow the agent of doom by insisting on it. It’s true he’s really good at evoking the toy, particularly the sound of it: jang-jang-jang-jang accompanied by gears or springs working. I picked one up myself in the ‘80s at a garage sale or thrift store or something, although it never scared me (and I didn’t know this story anyway until much more recently). The wind-up gyrations even charmed me, which unfortunately makes it an obstacle for me to overcome in this story in terms of believability. Sure, I can see the creepy side of the thing, but it just reminds me again that King often depends on the spaces of novels to work most effectively. The late scenes in this story, with a man rowing to the deepest part of a lake and the sudden storm and all that, reminded me of the furniture-moving pulp styles of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a really big scene, almost ridiculously so, e.g., the cloud formation, the rowboat falling entirely to pieces, etc. I just noticed there’s a movie version coming out next month directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daugher, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House)—might be interesting. I wasn’t particularly moved by the family elements in the story, the father and son business, but that again might speak to King’s greater strengths as a novelist, where family stuff is often prominent and effective, with the space to breathe life into it. Here it is more like reflexive, with the jang-jang-jang-jang as a signal for anxiety and Pop and Junior a signal for pathos. King is going for the epic qualities of “The Great God Pan” and “The Dunwich Horror,” which have little of family feels. So he’s not quite getting it right in the story format, but he’s on the right track in many ways. David Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, discusses, in his introduction to “The Monkey,” “... the extent to which [King] is synthesizing and mutating, from his voluminous reading on horror, the entire historical development of the field.” That is absolutely true enough. After my teen exposure to the Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies in the ‘60s (including the magazine), King was my next jolt of experience in horror literature, both for his novels and, even more importantly, for Danse Macabre, which was very inspiring even if I could not really connect with Frankenstein, Dracula, or other landmarks he brought to my attention. I think the subtle problem in this story is a matter of overthinking it, or possibly trying too hard. It’s not that I have problems anymore with the ponderous, pulpy furniture-moving style.

Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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The Substance (2024)

I had fair warning that The Substance would be gross, and it is, living up to its body horror and monster horror labels. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging movie star now celebrity aerobics instructor with a line of videos and cable-TV show appearances (think Jane Fonda, I guess?). Moore was around 60 when this picture was shot and, while “she’s in great shape for her age” (and still likes taking it all off too), it’s not hard to see, all things considered, why Elisabeth might be tempted by the appeal of the mysterious “The Substance” product, an underground drug and procedure that produce ... Margaret Qualley, as “Sue.” There’s a lot of detail associated with this premise—only one activation per person, seven days of a stabilizing regime, and mandatory switching back and forth every seven days. As usual with anything that involves seven days in a horror show, they’re not fooling around with these rules. You really shouldn’t break them. But break them, of course, they do. The Substance is associated with a lot of “You Are One” mumbo-jumbo messaging with the instructions that the principals pay no attention to. We, the helpless viewers, can’t help thinking they really should abide by the rules. There’s not very much that’s original in The Substance, a mash of stories involving Cinderella, Carrie, and others. Break the rules and your horses turn into pumpkins in the middle of the prom. But The Substance has its moments. In fact, at two hours twenty minutes, it has at least 30 minutes of too many moments. If you’re there for the special effects you might enjoy every minute of it. I was intrigued by a lot of it. The whole way of getting the drug is suitably big city (Los Angeles) urban nightmare, though implausible. The problems between Elisabeth and Sue and how each can harm the other are interesting surprises. There’s not much by way of characters. Dennis Quaid is notably bad as Harvey, their manager. At least he seems to be having fun, but I winced every time he was onscreen. In many ways The Substance is just the latest chapter in the story of Demi Moore’s love for her own body, which I think ultimately has to be taken as wholesome. Margaret Qualley does not appear nearly as comfortable with the nudity but she’s a trouper. The Substance was nominated for the big prize last spring but ultimately only came away with a Cannes Film Festival award for Best Screenplay, and most recently got some Oscars love too. Worth a look if you’re not particularly squeamish.

“Just Before the War With the Eskimos” (1948)

This story by J.D. Salinger, published first in the New Yorker in 1948 and later in his essential Nine Stories collection, seems likely to typify much that people don’t like about him. It involves a bunch of semi-miserable adolescents crabbing about things from the center of their vastly comfortable lives. Their circumstances vary—certainly in their self-consciousness they calibrate themselves on different levels in terms of wealth and class. But the high-school girls, squabbling over cab fare, attend a private school in Manhattan, and the two guys are college educated. I think? I see that some on the internet take one guy, Franklin, older brother of one of the girls, as a Jesus figure. That never occurred to me. He struck me more as an early version of Holden Caulfield (and let’s please not get into any Jesus implications thereof). He complains a lot and he’s quick to dismiss or judge people as snobs and phonies. Selena is Franklin’s sister and Ginnie is her friend, or anyway her nemesis on the cab fare issue. While Selena is in another part of the house very slowly getting Ginnie’s money, Franklin enters with a bleeding finger (just like Jesus!) and goes off on a monologue. Franklin is a few years older than Ginnie and I take the arc of this story to be Ginnie developing a crush on him. The recent war has a presence here. Franklin says he couldn’t get into the army because of a heart problem. He has been working at an airplane factory for three years. So I guess he’s not college educated? He comes across like he is, meaning, I guess, that he’s obviously intelligent and informed and a little neurotic. This story is basically very slight. Salinger makes it work with his voice and all the great dialogue. They are the two features that rarely failed him and always make him a pleasure to read. No, I don’t have much use for spoiled rich kids. But I know, with Salinger, with movie director Whit Stillman, and with a good many others, that they can be thoroughly entertaining in their pretensions to being wearied seen-it-all adults. For that matter, Salinger’s adolescents usually have profound undertones that are felt as much as read in the text.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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Into the Pink (1999)

I’m not sure how many Nirvana knockoff bands were still around by 1999, but this trio out of Birmingham, Alabama, is a real dilly. And no, I don’t think it’s just because Dave Grohl is the producer on hand, though surely that couldn’t hurt if that’s what you’re going for. Verbena tend to be more into the stripped-down speedy roar of 1977 UK punk than the roaming woolly mammoths of grunge anyway, which makes the persistent influence, heard all through, more a matter of seasoning. Into the Pink is Verbena’s second album, first on a major, and, after a soporific opening interlude, rocks like a little machine set to never stop. All lucky 13 songs are credited to Scott Bondy and the band, Bondy being basically the head honcho and art director on guitar and vocals. The band’s makeup had some gyrations over the years—sometimes they were a quartet. Anne Marie Griffin, playing bass here, switched off with second guitar, depending on circumstances. Her vocal riffing with Bondy is a key element that sets Verbena apart. Les Nuby is the drummer on this session. Two singles were released from the album that should-have-done-better-than-they-did. “Baby Got Shot” rolls in moody on a terse drumkit and throbbing bass and quickly gets to the point: “I really don’t care, I really don’t mind, but my baby baby baby got shot.” My sense is that the singer does care and does mind but is having a hard time, for whatever reasons, owning it. (Note, because we must, that the song comes from when Columbine was still a freak show one-off.) Besides being a terrific raveup, “Baby Got Shot” is one of the best examples on the album of Griffin’s ability to track and underline Brody’s vocal like an angry cat that just fell in the water. The other single was “Pretty Please,” whose undertowing structure reminds me of a rocked-up Ultravoxx that hits notably hard. It’s mostly all good durable stuff on this album. In case you’re wondering why the Nirvana comparison comes up so quickly, refer to “Bang Bang,” which hits too eerily like an outcast from In Utero. At the same time, as the song develops, Bondy and Griffin getting to their repetitive uh-huhhs may be their single best vocal interplay on the whole album. You take what you get. The excellent comes with the other.

“King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905)

Wow, what a crazy long piece from Mark Twain this is. Published originally as a pamphlet, it presents itself as a first-person ranting defense by Belgium’s King Leopold II of his colonial adventuring and the Congo Free State. Everything about the Congo Free State I know I basically learned by reading this. Of course I know how terribly Europe has treated Africa for quite some time. The Congo Free State was chiefly about harvesting rubber. Leopold and his private corporate entity enslaved natives for the purpose, and they were brutal about it. My Delphi kindle product version of the pamphlet includes at least some of the original illustrations, which include photos of men, women, and children with amputated hands and other limbs—punishment for not working quickly enough or to quota or whatever. As political satire, this piece is far more bitter than witty. Leopold is an empty vessel of pompous rationalizing. He claims some advances in the quality of native lives, but has no defense for the brutality beyond being within his rights. I should also mention that the piece is a mess on my kindle version. Also, full disclosure, after reading all of the Twain material I’ve written about (and a couple more) the dang kindle product froze up on me and has never worked since. Another $2.99 wasted! (actually, the majority of these invaluable Delphi “shelf” products that I’ve picked up—everything in public domain by a single author in one place—have been very useful and worth every nickel and penny of the $2.99) Some of the text from the pamphlet was printed as sidebars in text-boxes, which were incorrectly converted into largely illegible pictures and thus mostly lost. Not to worry—the online Gutenberg version is correct and available in numerous formats. The HTML looked good. But to the point, I appreciate Twain’s outrage here. The things he describes are terrible, and arguably even more terrible because the Congo Free State for whatever reasons was left out of my education. Twain’s piece is more a long, bludgeoning rant than true satire. You’re likely to imagine some spittle landing on you as you go. Say it, don’t spray it, Mark Twain. Now to find out a little more about the Congo Free State.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

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Music From Big Pink (1968)

I’ve always found the Band generally overrated (usually by boomers) and a little pretentious too—start with the name, where a lot of people feel constrained to capitalize “The.” Don’t do it, I beg you. It feels like a majority of the songs on this tiresome debut album are from Bob Dylan bootlegs circulating in the late ‘60s, notably one called Great White Wonder, later collected for the official 1975 release The Basement Tapes (and then on a 2014 box, The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete. Note that all Bootleg Series releases are legitimate Columbia label products). It’s actually only three of the 11 songs on this album, all written or cowritten with Dylan, but they’re in the important sequencing positions at the start and end: “Tears of Rage” (a terrible start to the album, my notes say), “This Wheel’s on Fire” (also weak), and, last (literally last on the album), “I Shall Be Released,” a song about not wanting to be a bootleg, and which, again according to my notes, should not work but does. So you can see I don’t hate this stuff, it just seems underwhelming after all the hype. The Rick Danko song “Caledonia Mission” strikes me as generic Band, with the shambolics and help-me-keep-up vocals and harmonies. If it tickles your fancy, there’s 10 more songs here for you. I do have to agree with the consensus that “The Weight,” by Rick Danko and Levon Helm, is an undeniable, bone-shivering classic from the opening line on: “I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling ‘bout half past dead” (am I the only one who hears this as “half past 10,” like he’s making a corporate staff meeting?). I’ve heard a lot of covers of “The Weight” and they always work and so does the original, absolutely. The other song I like is not really typical of the album, which puts me in a place that feels awkward. It’s like calling “Moral Kiosk” the best song on Murmur. But “Chest Fever,” written by Robbie Robertson, hits with a fancy heavy-rolling organ keyboard attack (Garth Hudson doin’ it!) that feels like something from the Phantom of the Opera story accompanied by tornado warnings. It loses focus when the singing starts and then it goes to familiar Band places, but you can’t have everything and eventually the majesty makes a brief return. Last, I don’t mean to be gratuitous, but “Long Black Veil” is one of the worst versions of that lovely and truly haunting song I’ve ever heard. For god’s sake cut the yowling for once. I recommend Bobby Bare on this one, which I understand might be telling on myself somehow to country aficionados. I am merely a dilettante in the realm, but I think it’s fair to wonder whether the Band might be too. Cover art by Bob Dylan.

Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Steven Zaillian

Writers: Fred Waitzkin, Steven Zaillian

Photography: Conrad L. Hall

Music: James Horner

Editor: Wayne Wahrman

Cast: Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Max Pomeranc, Ben Kingsley, Lawrence Fishburne, Robert Stephens, David Paymer, William H. Macy, Laura Linney, Dan Hedaya, Michael Nirenberg

Searching for Bobby Fischer is a feel-good sports movie about chess. So you know, it doesn’t have much to do with the eccentric chess genius Bobby Fischer (who died in 2008), except that the real-life chess prodigy the movie is about, Joshua Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc), idolizes, in whispered voiceover, Fischer and all his mystique. For his part, the typically rancorous Fischer thought the movie violated his privacy by using his name without his permission and he reportedly called it “a monumental swindle.” Yeah, OK. If feeling good is what you’re looking for, you can do worse. The main problem here is the specific subject at hand. It’s possible to do chess as a sports movie—the TV miniseries The Queen’s Gambit made a pretty good job of it a few years ago—but it’s not easy. Searching for Bobby Fischer abruptly gets very “chessy” in places, with fast shots of the board and obscure chatter and jargon about openings and “bringing out the queen” and such.

But I, for one, can’t just glean the situation from the position of pieces on the board, especially when they come at us so fast. Chess is complicated and hard to dramatize visually. Making movies about it is a bit like making movies about computer hacking activities. There’s only so much you can do with someone sitting at a keyboard in a darkened room and looking up to say, “We’re in.” Fred Waitzkin, Josh’s father and a New York journalist published in the New York Times, New York magazine, and Esquire, shows his seasoning (or maybe that’s cowriter Steven Zaillian?) by injecting a fair amount of sideline nostalgic baseball lore into the story, knowing that’s easier for most of us to grasp. Ken Burns’s Baseball would come out the following year, but this movie is already onboard with the idea of New York as the capital of baseball (and everything).

“The Fetch” (1980)

This long story by Robert Aickman is reasonably conventional horror business, given that little Aickman did was ever conventional. It’s more like folk horror, as “fetch” is an obscure 17th-century term for “the apparition or double of a living person, formerly believed to be a warning of that person’s impending death.” It’s not hard to see how that sense of the word could come to be. The fetch in this story is less of a doppelganger and more of a wraith, an old woman who hides her face and trails dripping seawater wherever she goes (as she evidently comes from the sea, and to the sea must we all return). Aickman’s stories tend to be long and he takes his time getting to his points. It works because his language, however dreamlike, remains clear and straightforward, and the payoffs do come. In this first-person tale the narrator details his three strange sightings of this particular fetch, which do indeed augur deaths or, in one case, a disappearance. My favorite detail about this apparition is either the turning of the fetch’s face or the dripping seawater. She simply keeps her face out of sight, even if she’s turning to look at a far wall as she climbs a staircase. Aickman might be leaning into the smell of the seawater a little hard for him. It’s not as overbearing as the recurring “fishy” smell that we get, for example, from H.P. Lovecraft in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but it seemed unusually pushy for Aickman. He is generally more reserved and holding back as a rule, setting a leisurely pace that slowly becomes hypnotic. As an article of folk horror, “The Fetch” is specifically focused on sightings of the apparition. They are the high points even when they are approached somewhat sidewise. Sometimes I think everything Aickman does is sidewise. But it’s also, when you think about it, the way most people experience the supernatural, if they do. It always happens kind of in the corner of your eye, and rarely when you go looking for it. Whatever you believe it seems most of us experience the strange and inexplicable one way or another. Most of us have an anecdote. That confusion and uncertainty about how to take it is where Aickman’s stories live.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
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Infinity Pool (2023)

It’s customary to say that director and writer Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, is a chip off the old block. His first feature film, Antiviral (2012), involved obsessed fans seeking viruses that had previously infected celebrities. Skip ahead eight years to Possessor (2020), which is about assassination via a technique of body possession. And now Infinity Pool, which takes place at a resort for the ultra-wealthy in the fictional island country of Li Tolqa, a bit Central America junta and a bit Eastern Europe satellite state. The political climate is menacing and unstable, let’s put it that way. Novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing there, coping with his years-long writer’s block. They meet a woman named Gabi (Mia Goth, the secret sauce in this stew) and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), who are familiar with the resort and island country. Gabi says she liked Foster’s novel and wants to get to know him. The next day, even though the resort warns its guests that they should not leave the resort grounds, the foursome takes a day for touring and debauching. Gabi and Alban have been there before and seem to know their way around Li Tolqa. On the way home Foster, who is the least drunk, takes the wheel. But he hits a local farmer with the car and kills him. Gabi and Alban advise fleeing, which they do post-haste. But within hours police are at Foster’s room pounding on the door. All four are taken in for questioning and, to cut to the chase, Foster is quickly found guilty. The punishment is extremely unusual and represents the science fiction element here. It’s there to be discovered. As it happens, Foster and a handful of others find something to like about it, even though it’s pretty horrible. It’s what brings Gabi and Alban back, for example, committing crimes to experience it again. Mia Goth, previously a revelation in Pearl, though maybe not X (and I haven’t seen MaXXXine yet), might be even better here as a young rootless rich woman with an unsettling kink for power. Cronenberg had to endure rounds of edits to get the picture’s rating down from NC-17 to R, which might give some idea of what you’re in for here. Hallucinogenic drug use is a staple and some of the picture’s best scenes and visions take place inside heads with the music playing. Brandon may not yet be up to some of the heights of David, but it looks like he might get there yet. He’s a real chip off the old block.