#33: Nanook of the North

(originally published May 10, 2010)

Two words: Inuit porn.

That’s not a knock on Nanook of the North. Or pornography, for that matter. I’m admittedly a  conflicted admirer of porn—with the caveats that it be consensual and non-exploitative. (Also, it helps when the performers actually look as if they’re enjoying themselves. Nanook, for instance, stares directly into the camera, grinning as he chomps down on raw walrus meat.)

But let me explain my analogy of Nanook and porn: long before the short-attention-span-friendly fragments of disembodied body parts littering the Internet, full-length ‘adult’ videos oftentimes were preceded with the ridiculous disclaimer that the film was for education purposes. And while I’ve learned certain things from porn (for instance: how to react when the pool boy approaches, the proper way to tip the pizza delivery man, what really happens in automotive garages), the educational gloss is merely an excuse to make entertainment seem respectable.

And so, one could approach Nanook of the North as an ethnographic examination—look at how much I’ve learned about igloo construction—or as entertainment. Or even both simultaneously. Whereas most porn producers know their work is only nominally educational, Robert Flaherty did intend Nanook to be instructive. The fact it’s also entertaining speaks to its value beyond the appearance of two sets of Eskimo boobs.

My Nanook/porn association continues into Flaherty’s method. Though he’s acknowledged as a progenitor of documentary film, Flaherty filmed Nanook in a way that doesn’t necessarily fall under the category as we understand it today. Flaherty, after a previous failed attempt to make a movie of Eskimos in their natural habitat, returned to Hudson Bay to re-stage the film. So while it has the appearance of ‘real life,’ there’s an admitted artificiality to Nanook. (Its subtitle, A story of life and love in the actual Arctic, emphasizes the constructed, narrative dimension.) Compare this to subcategory of “gonzo” pornography—a form that purports to be ‘real life’ but is as artificial as, uh, the other kind.

One aspect of the film bothered me, however (and this reveals a personal squeamishness more than an inherent flaw in the film): the butchering of animals on-screen. And this comes from someone who’s watched both Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust (albeit with my fingers laced in front of my eyes during the animal-death scenes). With Nanook, the animals are pre-deceased when they’re flayed, though that doesn’t make it easier to watch. This is why I’m not a hunter. This is also why I’d classify the two Cannibal films exploitative, and Nanook not.

I admit, analogizing Nanook to the North to pornography probably reaches too far, so here, I reformulate my critique in a more family-friendly way: Nanook of the North shows man’s indomitable spirit against the forces of nature. (This, of course, could also describe my attempts to watch a midnight showing of Birdemic:  Shock and Terror, as I wandered the streets of Center City Philadelphia, dodging the ladies in short skirts and knee-high boots—blubbery seals waiting to be harpooned.)

#32: Oliver Twist

(originally published May 8, 2010)

Problematic Jews: Shylock; Bernie Madoff; Charles Krauthammer; Matt Drudge; Henry Kissinger; Ayn Rand; Rabbi Yehuda Levin; Dracula; Ariel Sharon; Bill Kristol; Watto from Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace; Richard Perle; Michael Savage; Barabas; Kyle Broslofski; the woman at the deli who makes you pay for her fat thumb every time she weighs out a pound of brisket; Caspar Weinberger; Bernie Goldberg; Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Norman Podhoretz; militant West Bank settlers; David Horowitz; Geraldo Rivera; Ahasver; the international cabal of bankers and entertainment executives planning the takeover of the world financial system; Douglas Feith; that scruffy haired Jesus of Nazarene fellow.

And, of course, Fagin.

I approach Oliver Twist with trepidation, because I have difficulty processing racist stereotypes. And while Alec Guinness doesn’t overtly identify Fagin as a Jew, he does have an unfortunate habit of pronouncing Oliver “Oy-iver.” Plus: the fakest nose in the history of cinema, only recently surpassed by Nicole Kidman’s proboscis in The Hours. (Describing a Jew as having a “hook-nose” is one thing, but attaching a wedge of Brie to their face is another. Also worth noting: Fagin runs a gang of young boys living together—sort of how I imagine the goings-on in the Bel Ami house. But with fewer rags. And no artful dodging.)

I’m of two minds on how to engage with literature and films with racist depictions. On the one hand, you can’t ignore the real damage that these stereotypes have done. The Shylock and Fagin-type figures, in particular, have been used to perpetrate systemic discrimination—and worse, obviously—against Jews. (Yes, some Jews do have those sharp hawk noses, but that just means that you have to tilt your head more to kiss them properly.) On the other hand, you want to forgive one element in otherwise engaging and important works. I adore Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for instance, despite the feeling that Mickey Rooney is going to hell for his portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi.

This is a long-winded and roundabout way, I suppose, of cautioning myself not to ingest my media blindly.  Given that art is already an imperfect medium, it doesn’t hurt to attach an asterisk. Thus:  Triumph of the Will is a stunning film.* Listening to Wagner will stir your soul.** Middlemarch is a really long book.***

So, as my huge asterisk in talking about Oliver Twist, I duly note that Dickens, in later revisions of the novel, removed references to Fagin as “the Jew.” He also later took pains to include positive portrayals of Jews in Our Mutual Friends. I haven’t seen the Roman Polanski’s recent version of Oliver Twist, I understand that Ben Kingsley did his best to make a full character out of Fagin. Also, I have never seen any iterations of Oliver!—but this is less my avoidance of Fagin-related materials and more that I don’t really like musicals. Hey, we all have to resist our stereotypes and caricatures somehow.

*if you don’t mind all the dancing Nazis.

**especially if you blot out the anti-Semitic elements.

***written by a woman in drag!

#31: Great Expectations

(originally published May 5, 2010)

A friend recently remarked to me, apropos of me making little headway on my novel, “Why, didn’t you know that Charles Dickens wrote [x number of words] in [y number of days]?”

To which, I replied: “Yes, but Charles Dickens didn’t have to teach freshman composition.”

“Touché,” said my friend.

Great Expectations was the assigned book for my 10th grade English class. Every year, the high school English curriculum consisted of one canonical novel and one Shakespeare play—regular as running laps in the gym. Our teacher, Mrs. Francis, was about 50. She had the round eyes and cheeks of a goldfish—a pet one tries to pretend is fun and entertaining even though it isn’t. I remember once she wore a white polyester shirt with a 70s-bold, geometric print—angular slashes of red and brown blocks. She had a head full of tight gray curls kept in a round, meringue-shaped mass.

I say this not to mock Mrs. Francis, but to acknowledge how years of teaching 10th grade English—a thankless task if ever there was one—may have worn her enthusiasm for the material down to a nub. For 10th grade, Romeo and Juliet was the Shakespeare of choice, and the class watched the Franco Zeffirelli film version. During the post-coital scene, when Romeo stood at the window, his buns bathed in golden sunshine, Mrs. Francis fumbled with the remote of the VCR, but quickly gave up. “Oh, well,” she said. And the next thing we knew, Juliet’s breasts flashed on screen. The class tittered.

There’s no boob shot in Great Expectations—though if there had been one, I’m not entirely sure it would have kept our adolescent attentions any better. The closest we get is a shirtless John Mills punching Alec Guinness, who does his best to keep his loafers from becoming airborne. (He generally fails.)

I dutifully read for about two weeks, but once Pip left for London, my attention flagged and waned. Oh, I know the novel is an insightful look into class mobility, but, dammit, I just couldn’t be bothered. I passed by getting daily updates from my friends, and briefly opened the book to read Ms. Haversham’s fiery death before putting it down again. Dickens, I fear, will remain a literary blind spot for me, but I’m reminded that David Lean himself hadn’t read Great Expectations when he set out to make the film. Vindicated by liner notes!

If nothing else, Great Expectations at least helped me solved an eternal mystery of cat food etymology: what the hell is a ‘Tender Vittle’? Early in the book, Magwitch demands “vittles” from Pip, which, according to the handy-dandy glossary, is a bastardization of ‘victuals.’ At the time, this was not a clarification, since we didn’t know what ‘victuals’ were either. As I’ve learned, ‘victual’ has a verb form too, which means ‘to feed,’ but no similar debased version (if I say I’m going to ‘vittle’ my cat, this sounds like I’m traveling to Germany to shave him). Ah, the transformation of language: an actual word falls out of favor and gets consigned to a footnote, while its spawn becomes famous for its semi-moist consistency and slight nutritional content.

#30: M

(originally published May 3, 2010)

Welcome May Day! Welcome M Day! I’ve seen M several times now on various mediums (late-night PBS broadcasts, small theater revivals), but the last two times I’ve watched it on DVD, I’ve dozed off at approximately the same spot—as the police and the criminal underworld decide on a course of action. In my defense I’ll say that the first of May was the first hot day of the year, rising into the high 80s. The green stalks of day lilies rampaging over the front lawn like Mongols. And on the third floor of the house, where my “home theater” is, the heat is as thick as a wet towel. Jelly beans melt in my hand. My cats assume the “let’s trip Daddy on the stairs and break his neck” stretch.

Once Peter Lorre appears on-screen, however, M becomes a completely different creature. Lorre has forever ruined Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” for me. While I was growing up, I had my share of child-safety lessons in elementary school: don’t trust strangers, don’t get lured off the path on the way home, travel in groups if necessary, don’t hitchhike. But we didn’t have the same level of hysteria as today. No Amber alerts, no Code Adam. (It’s tempting to assume that people weren’t as crazy back in the good old days, but more and more, I subscribe to Will Self’s Quantity Theory of Insanity.)

Every precaution my parents took seemed at the time sensible, though in retrospect, I wonder how effective they would have been. One idea that never caught on: parents should have a ‘password’ with their child. So, for instance, if my parents were in the hospital and had to dispatch someone to pick me up, the person was to give this ‘password’ before I went with them. Though I’m sure my parents and I had agreed on a password, I forgot it—by the next day, most likely. Besides, if something terrible had happened to my parents, my aunt and uncle who lived not-too-far-away would have been the ones to ferry me around. No password needed.

The other thing I remember doing was making an ‘identification card.’ Our local Safeway sponsored the cards; they consisted of a passport-sized photograph pasted onto a 4×6 piece of blue cardstock, a short description, and the location of prominent birthmarks (I have a dime-sized one on my left hand, which depending on the angle, can be described as a rider on a horse or a turtle). Maybe there had been a high-profile kidnapping around that time. Oh, I’ve heard the horror stories: someone follows a young girl into the restroom, drugs her, shaves her head and passes her off as an ill son. But these weren’t enough to stop the range of my wanderlust: from Wheeling St. into the grassy field at the end of the street. Before long, I roamed from Peoria to Sable and would soon enough discover Colfax Ave. My wanderings never brought me into contact with real danger, of course, but it’s not necessarily comforting to think that mere luck separated me from poor, doomed Elsie Brinkmann.

#29: Picnic at Hanging Rock

(originally published Apr. 30, 2010)

“Nobody disappears into thin air,” says the policeman’s wife in Picnic at Hanging Rock. “Not without good reason.”

My senior year, the Hinkley High School drama class put on a show of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I hung out with them, the usual assortment of misfits and oddballs, though I was never really a part of the drama clique. My closest association with the drama department was as the accompaniment for You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and a brief appearance as the black eyelinered Valet in No Exit.

But there was one girl in the drama crew whom I gravitated towards: Neala. She was the embodiment of a free spirit: long red hair, a willowy build, a fiery temperament. She listened to Sarah McLachlan and had full-on Celtic pride completely unrelated to basketball. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, she played Sara, the young girl who falls to her death, possibly murdered by the headmistress.

In the auditorium, the set builders went about constructing a mountain out of 2x4s, chicken wire, painted canvas and papier-mâché. They spray-painted the edifice gray, and it rose almost 10 feet into the air. When lit from above, the mountain cast huge, jagged shadows onto the stage, but from behind, you could see how it was a hollow shell, like a cream puff that’s been licked out. A rickety set of steps lead to the top, and it seemed stable enough, until you reached out steady yourself and found the rock crumbling in your hand.

I had a crush on Neala, but whether or not my attraction Neala had a sexual component remains unclear, even to my 30-something gay self today. I want to say no, though I could just as easily say yes. High school was—perhaps still is—a haze of sexual confusion. I want to say that all my attraction to her was sun-dappled and full of warmth, but the more I examine it, the more I revisit it, the more it seems like a mystery that isn’t meant to be solved.

In my senior yearbook, there’s a full-page spread for Picnic at Hanging Rock and features a photograph of Neala, as Sara, dressed in a white nightgown, sitting on the ground, looking up pleadingly. The caption reads: “Doomed Sara regrets her life,” and beneath that, in pen, Neala wrote: “Does she?”

I got in touch with Neala about two years ago, during one of those jags where I trawl the Internet in search of old friends, half-remembered names, fleeting acquaintances. I came across Neala’s mother, who then put me in touch with her. She finally wrote me an email under an assumed name, because she had been scrubbing her presence off the Internet because of a stalker. I replied, saying how good it was to get back in touch with her, that we should stay connected, that nobody should disappear into thin air. I’m waiting to hear back from her, and until I do, I will imagine her at the top of a hollow mountain, arms outstretched, as if to beckon me closer into the void, into the mystery.

#28: Blood for Dracula

(originally published Apr. 28, 2010)

In Blood for Dracula, the titular count suffers withdrawal and cries out for “wergins! I must have the blood of wergins!” Anything less makes him puke.

I can relate. Until this evening, I had a sealed, mint condition copy of Blood for Dracula (now out-of-print). With trepidation, I peeled away the skin of cellophane like it was a prom dress and picked away the top edge sticker. The DVD breathed a sigh of relief, and it was done. Breaking that seal lost me $50 on the resale market—it was no longer pure. I had deflowered my DVD.

I blame the fetishization of purity on comic books—the collecting habit for young obsessive-compulsives. I had never worried about keeping my toys in pristine condition. Out of the package they came, and I abused them until their decals wore off and the plastic weapons broke off in their hands.

But once I got into comic books, it was less about the content than the condition of the object. Bent spine?  That’s $5 out of your pocket. Corners bent? 30% of value gone. Accidentally spill your drink on the cover?  My friends, you now hold nothing more than colorful wood pulp in your hands. I referred to the price value guide books like they were a holy codex. The book itself became sacrosanct, something to protect, reliquary-like, in poly bags outfitted with acid-free backing boards.

Then, in the early 90s, comic book publishers decided it would be a good idea to pre-bag comic books with trading cards or such. But that meant you couldn’t read the comic book without opening the bag, which would downgrade the value from mint condition to near mint, at best—much like taking your clothes out of the dry cleaning bag make them slightly less clean. So for those of us obsessed with intact comic book hymens, that meant buying two copies.

But the real problem was that I had fooled myself into thinking that these comic books would be worth more than I had spent on them initially. Someday. I heard stories all the time about secret treasure troves of comics, worth sums that would comfortably pay for major surgery in the  United States. The comics I had organized and filed away in long, white cardboard boxes were a retirement fund. A four-color 401(K).

Of course, I hadn’t counted on that fact that millions of other kids probably had the same idea. As well, their comics books were most likely in better condition because they had had turned the pages with tweezers under a low-radiation light bulb. In short, the market was flooded and my four-color investment was entertaining but worthless. Better I had learned about complex derivatives instead.

But all this presupposes that the primary motive for collecting is for financial gain. People collect things in order to enjoy them (psychological disturbances notwithstanding). With that in mind, I undertook this project knowing that all those perfectly sealed discs would have to be opened. I had two choices: I could be snobby and say that I own the entire Criterion Collection, or I could be unbearably pretentious and say that I’ve watched the entire Criterion Collection. Let it be said that I’m always interested in ways I can be more insufferable.

#27: Flesh for Frankenstein

(originally published Apr. 26, 2010)

I’ve struggled with what to say about Flesh for Frankenstein for several days now. Should I talk about how I once taught The Bride of Frankenstein in a film class? Or about gay adoption? My interactions with tall, lumbering men with “abby normal” brains (or, for that matter, my love of Young Frankenstein)? None of these seemed to work.

Now, I realize why: in the classic monsters of Hollywood pantheon, Frankenstein runs dead last. Behind vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and zombies. Behind the mummy, for God’s sake. All the other creatures have had recent spates of popularity. Zombies, for instance, seem to rule the direct-to-DVD horror movie market lately; vampires see their fortunes come and go but are, for better or worse, omnipresent. And both werewolves and the mummy have had big-name remakes, as well as mini-resurgences here and there. But Frankenstein? Frankenstein is the red-headed step-child, sitting quietly in the corner, waiting to be picked to dance.

This is why I have to go way back to Bride of Frankenstein to find a Frankenstein movie that has stuck with me. The Bride nearly killed Jennifer Beals’ career (what a feeling!… but somehow Sting continues to find work?). Frankenstein Unbound veers towards the ridiculous. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version is, much like Coppola’s Dracula, too pretentious and overwrought for its own good. Certainly, films deploy the Frankenstein tropes often: the mad scientist meddling with God’s law, genetic overreach, the creature escaping from its master’s plans. Any movie in which the government creates the perfect bio-engineered killing machine tips its hat to poor, doomed Victor.

Part of the reason might be that other subgenres are packed with symbolic possibility. Vampires are, of course, all about seduction, while werewolves struggle to contain the beast within. Zombies nowadays can represent almost anything (and those who argue that zombies aren’t erotic merely haven’t watched the right films). But Frankenstein is and will always be a creation myth—Mary Shelley’s subtitle for Frankenstein is, after all, A Modern Prometheus). The horror of Frankenstein isn’t the fact that the doctor created life out of death, but that he created life outside out sexual activity.

Flesh for Frankenstein gleefully tosses all this aside and instead introduces scopophilia, nymphomania, scar tissue fetishism, necrophilia, and—I’m not sure what the psychological term for an untoward sexual attraction for gallbladders is, but there it is. Our poor Slavic Frankenstein makes longing eyes at lusty peasant Joe Dallesandro—possibly the gayest Frankenstein movie since Dr. Pretorius pranced across the screen in The Bride of Frankenstein. All of which is to say that Paul Morrissey has somehow stitched together this movie from numerous spare parts. And it lives! It lives!

#26: The Long Good Friday

(originally published Apr. 24, 2010)

Most gangster movies suggest a moral imperative: no one who receives ill-gotten gains will prosper. Witness Bob Hoskins’ decline in The Long Good Friday: despite his high-rolling lifestyle (yacht! champagne! a young Helen Mirren!), his and his compatriots’ lives seem to be shorter, more nasty and more brutish than most. But few people watch gangster films for moral instruction (at least, I hope not). They go to see a pre-Remington Steele Pierce Brosnan. Wet! In a Speedo!

My own gang knowledge remains thankfully non-existent. During the mid-90s, I heard about Vietnamese gangs terrorizing Little Saigons around the nation, but I never suspected Denver had a problem. Asian gangs were, after all, a California phenomenon. I remember my parents talking about a brazen robbery during a Catholic Mass: the gang members made everyone lie on the floor and went through the congregation’s pockets, one by one. No one was killed, but Vietnamese communities coast-to-coast were on high alert: these could be your neighbor’s gelled and spiky-headed sons! Not your own, of course. Never yours.

Before I went to high school, my family faithfully attended Tết (New Year) and Tết Trung Thu (Mid-Autumn) festivals sponsored by the local Buddhist temple. After dutifully bowing to my parents’ friends and acquaintances—arms crossed, back sore from the repetitive stress injury, I got to mill about with the other bored kids. The smell of spent firecrackers hung in a colloidal suspension with oil spritzing off the egg roll frying vats. You could hear dice rattling and cheers of excitement and disappointment as people played bầu cua cá cọp.

There were always handful of white people at these events—befuddled but patient spouses, hip-before-their-time Buddhists—and one tall guy who always stood out. He wore a polo shirt tucked into his acid-washed jeans with no belt. Armed with a few halting words of Vietnamese, he circulated, courteous but watchful, like a guard dog looking for scraps. My sister, who, at the time, went to the University of Colorado-Denver, a hotbed of Vietnamese pow-wows, told me, That’s James. He’s a cop. The liaison for the Vietnamese community—gang patrol.

James was personable, good-looking. A trustworthy face, as my mother might say. He would have had a hell of a time going undercover, but engaging the community was the next best thing. He tempered his easygoing camaraderie with a firm handshake and steely voice, as if suggesting, You know what I am, I know what you are, let’s all play nice. I always wondered if he was packing. But it seemed excessive: Colorado was not California. No one had inducted me into a gang.

But chalk this up to my lack of gang-desirable qualities. As I’ve since learned, the Viet Pride Gangsters (VPG, not to be confused with their nemeses, Asian Pride) have operated in Denver since the 90s. In 2003, they took a major hit when the police arrested 23 gang members (including one white boy). Ironic: they call themselves “Viet Pride” but victimized primarily other Vietnamese. I suppose nothing says pride like burglarizing neighbors, friends, family. But not your own, of course. Never yours.

#25: Alphaville

(originally published Apr. 21, 2010)

Funny: I’d always assumed that, in the future, there’d be nothing but techno (see, for example, the subterranean rave in The Matrix Reloaded). But Godard loves defying expectations. So, in Alphaville, instead of the futuristic soundtrack one expects from a film nominally set in the future, we get ominous horn stabs as Lemmy Caution goes about his dirty business. (Of course, Kraftwerk doesn’t put out Autobahn until nearly a decade after Alphaville—so while supercomputer Alpha 60 has the vocoder thing down, it still needs to work on the bangin’ beats.)

There is, however, a more explicit reason why I link Alphaville with techno. During my “industrial” phase of high school—my junior and senior years—my music collecting began in earnest. I kept an index card of band names that I wanted to check out between the pages of a dictionary. I came across most of these on Teletunes, a music video show that played in the wee hours on Denver’s secondary PBS-affiliate, KDBI, or on the local “alternative” radio station, KTCL, long before it got gobbled up by Clear Channel and changed formats. In bookstores, I scanned the magazine racks for angry, glowering Germans who wore studded leather jackets and stood pouting with their arms crossed. That, I thought, has got to be a cool band.

So with this, I hunted down Laibach. I knew little about them except that they had released an album, Kapital. So I made a pilgrimage down to Wax Trax to pick it up, not knowing that Laibach is Slovenia’s second-best export after Strast chocolates.  Indeed, the band is probably best known for their possibly Leni Riefenstahl-inspired version of the Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” On Kapital, I was drawn to their militaristic rhythms and Wagnerian bombast.

But the track that most grabbed my attention was “Le Privilège des Morts,” an ominous track with a deep sub-bass and a distorted, computerized voice speaking French. With my busted, high-school French, I understood maybe every other sentence, but listening to it—with headphones late at night, lights off, eyes closed—evoked suffocation, claustrophobia, especially with the repeated last phrase: “La porte est blockée.” I didn’t realize it, but “Le Privilège des Morts” was composed primarily from snippets of dialogue and sound effects from Alphaville. The song takes its title, for example, from Lemmy Caution’s first interrogation by Alpha 60. When Anna Karina reads from Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la Douleur, mid-song, she whispers it like a cri de couer, and, when they lift the condemned man’s speech on the diving board wholesale (before he’s dismembered by synchronized swimmers, no less), I didn’t comprehend the man’s harangue, but I knew some bad shit was going down.

So when, almost a decade later, I finally watched Alphaville, it was a moment of déjà vu (possibly déjà ecouté?). I didn’t experience the film as much as I re-edited it to fit my memory of “Le Privilège des Morts”: Here’s where this bit came from. Oh, so that’s what that meant. I don’t think Godard would mind, given his own penchant for cobbling together disparate parts—detective noir, science fiction, futurist architecture—into a memorable, haunting whole.

#24: High and Low

(originally published Apr. 19, 2010)

Attempt #1 to watch High and Low: Long day at work, followed by returning to campus for Ben Yagoda‘s lecture about the “truthiness” of memoirs. Yagoda lambastes what he terms “schtick lit,” which he traces to Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia. These memoirs feature an author who document his attempts a certain feat for himself (for example, live according to the Bible for a year, become an environmental douchebag) over a certain time frame. I squirm uncomfortably and later steal a wedge of brie from the reception afterward. At home, I pop the movie into the player, get 15 minutes in, and decide to close my eyes—for a little while, I tell myself. I wake just in time to stop a missile of drool from hitting the couch and officially go to bed. Matthew is shocked that I come to bed before midnight.

Attempt #2: Wake up in the afternoon, then lunch at Costco. Hey—even Julia Child liked their hot dogs. Pay my phone bill, walk around Christiana Mall. Later, dinner at a friend’s house to celebrate Matthew’s tenure and promotion. Matthew has a glass of brandy (not cognac, my friend insists, since it didn’t come from the cognac region), and I take a sip off of his. We watch the season finale of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and, after hearing so much hype about it, I’m disappointed there aren’t more penises. Get home, too tired to concentrate on Akira Kurosawa. So instead, I watch Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman. My cat head-butts my mouth.

Attempt #3: A warm day that turns cold. I stop into by a store for Independent Record Store Day and pick up my limited edition 4AD 12″. I’m unable to secure, however, a copy of the Mountain Goats DVD, so I console myself by going to the Video Americain closing sale in Newark, where I pick up 4 Krzysztof Kieslowski films for myself and 4 Merchant-Ivory films for Matthew. Then off to a pizza party with Matthew’s colleagues. After two slices of pizza and a large piece of Carvel’s ice cream cake, I feel soporific, but still go to a beer-tasting, at which I taste no beer. We arrive back home at 8 p.m., and I promptly and uncharacteristically go straight to sleep.

Attempt #4: High and Low!  ts viewing remains somewhat in doubt throughout the day: an afternoon in Philadelphia, a dinner of hand-drawn noodles in Chinatown. At home, Matthew wants to watch Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, and knowing his love of Merchant-Ivory, we do. But I still have energy for a film about child kidnapping, heroin overdoses, seedy Yokohama alleys, and bars that cater to shore-leave sailors and dope smugglers.

If nothing else, High and Low introduces what I now call the “Mifune” test: a pair of shoes must be “comfortable, durable, yet stylish.” And if they don’t pass muster, Toshiro will tear them apart in with his bare hands. The Japanese—they have that quality control thing down to a science.

#23: RoboCop

(originally published Apr. 15, 2010)

Everyone—particularly lovers of genre movies—needs a movie buddy. Certainly, there’s something to be said for watching a movie by yourself, especially if the film is cerebral and requires focus and concentration. But genre movies lend themselves to the buddy system, because, for the most part, their premises are absolutely harebrained. Take Robocop, for instance. I can’t even write the sentence dead cop gets reconstructed as a cyborg to be the ultimate law-enforcement machine without rolling my eyes. Every now and then, you need a buddy to lean to, to tap on the shoulder and whisper, I can’t believe that crap I just saw.

I remember seeing Robocop in the theater. When it came out, I was barely out of middle-school, having finally packed my Transformers and Gobots, still in robot form, into cardboard boxes and stashed them in the basement of our house—where memories go to die. My sister, who is nine years older than me, was my ticket into R-rated movies. Not that theaters were more strict about their age policy back then, but I wasn’t about to take a chance. I was a good boy.

So my sister, in effect, was my movie buddy. I’m not sure who had convinced whom to go see Robocop, but most likely I was the guilty party. When, during the movie, the fake ad for the board game “Nukem” came on, we howled with laughter: Are you serious? Surely, they can’t be serious.

As I entered high school, our buddy system continued, but in a new incarnation. We no longer saw movies together; instead, we merely told our parents that we did, which allowed: 1) me to see a late-night movie, and 2) her to go out with her friends. So, on Friday and Saturday nights, she dropped me off in downtown Denver, at the brand-new Tivoli Center with the 12-theater AMC. I saw mostly schlocky horror (The Guardian, The Exorcist III, Repossessed), while she went to any number of downtown Denver nightclubs (23rd Parish, Fish Dance). Afterward the movie, I go next door to the diner and order a plate of atomic fries, eating them one at a time, until she arrived to pick me up. For the life of me, I can’t remember what made those fries ‘atomic.’

On the nights my sister was late or didn’t show up until the clubs had closed, I wandered the bowels of the Tivoli, following side halls and stairways that seemed to go nowhere. The whole complex seemed to be a work in progress: exposed pipes, floor tiles waiting to be laid, plastic sheets taped floor to ceiling to indicate that I shouldn’t go any further (I did). I dodged security guards and often found myself standing before the boiler room—not The Boiler Room, the brew pub on the other side of the movie theater—but the room that hissed and sighed like it was full of deflating balloons. On those nights, I became my own movie buddy, leaning against a sheet of drywall and asking myself, Remember that scene where the guy gets covered in toxic waste? so that I could reply, Oh, yeah, that was cool.

#22: Summertime

(originally published Apr. 12, 2010)

In the first half of Summertime, Katherine Hepburn experiences Venice through the viewfinder of her movie camera, changing lenses, popping in new film as the previous reel runs out. Ah, the age-old tourist stereotype.

This is not to say that I don’t snap pictures myself when traveling. I’m the type who waits for the shot to be perfect once all the damn people move out of the way. But, as Susan Sontag argues in On Photography, taking pictures don’t merely capture an event—it becomes an event in and of itself. “Most tourists,” she writes, “feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter.” So it’s no surprise that when Hepburn finally forgets her camera, she falls in love with an Italian silver fox.

So, yes, I have a pictures of the winged lion above St. Mark’s Square, as well as ones of green canal water gnawing away the bottom of wooden doors or stenciled piece of graffiti agitprop. But I haven’t looked at those pictures since I took them almost two years ago. Maybe Sontag is onto something: photographs are slices of life cut free from context. Photographs are memento mori.

I never saw someone throw rubbish into the water like Hepburn does, but I did  see the empty plastic cups in the street, the remnant of revelry. And if, for Hepburn, the streets were filled with Italian love songs sung from every rooftop, I instead was treated to ABBA’s “The Winner Takes it All” blaring out of a window as I made my way through winding alleyways.

Still, two years later on, I struggle to remember everything that happened in Venice. I remember crossing a bridge several times, in both directions, because I had gotten turned around. I remember having prosciutto e melone for lunch (though this could have been any random day in Italy). And I remember the brightness of the sun on the lagoon surface, black boats darting back and forth like water striders.

The photographs I have don’t help me remember my trip more vividly. Aside from the must-see checklist (The Bridge of Sighs, The Doge’s Palace, the Rialto Bridge), most of the pictures I have are of people—men, to be specific. The pictures are somewhat artless and less surreptitious that I would like: a tanned gentleman adjusting the ropes on his boat; a souvenir hawker listening to his iPod while waiting for customers to approach; an artist with a sketch pad on his lap, a pencil dangling from his fingers, waiting for the proper inspiration to strike. In some, the subject looks straight at me, as if to say, Hey, what the hell are you doing?

But for me, these images become, as Sontag writes, “invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” (A boatman off to see his lover; an artist in the agonizing pangs of creation.) If images bring the imagination to life, can one describe them as memento vivere? I click through the pictures and see two policemen, frozen in place mid-conversation, white slashes of belts across the chests, endlessly circling the arcades of St. Mark’s Square. The policemen don’t move, but, just outside of the frame, the pigeons cooing on the ground rise in unison, a feathered curtain, and the sky overhead flutters away.

#21: Dead Ringers

(originally published Apr. 10, 2010)

Queer theory puts forth the concept of triangulation, wherein two nominally heterosexual men displace their homoerotic desire onto a third person—a woman. In Dead Ringers, when twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot dance with a woman wedged in between them, this can be understood as Elliot’s attempt to seduce Beverly and consummate an unrealized sexual relationship.

Johns Hopkins in the mid-90s didn’t have a gay and lesbian studies minor; women’s studies was the workaround. I hadn’t planned on minoring—I already had my hands full with a double major—but the opportunity arose, like the academic equivalent of supersizing your meal. “Did you know for just 6 more credits, you could have a women’s studies minor?” “Really? Sign me up!”

Once you learn about triangulation, you begin seeing it everywhere: in cop movies where the partners in blue share sexual banter; in horror films where the rebel and the square must band together in their tattered clothing to rescue the cheerleader from the monster; in war movies where two ace pilots must blow up a fuel depot to impress the Army nurse. Everywhere you turn: guys wanting to get it on with each other, but finding a surrogate instead. It’s a sad state of affairs.

During my junior year, I began dating D___, whom I’d met at a gay writer’s conference. He fancied himself a poet and got along famously with my friends, especially T___ (a female).

One night, T___ threw a “Jane or James” party: T___ dressed as Jane Seymour in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and D___ came as James Joyce. I threw on a non-descript dress and called myself a plain Jane. Drinks were served and consumed. I made the mistake of drinking Kool-Aid and vodka because I didn’t know any better. After the other guests had left, D___, T___ and I collapsed together on the bed, while another friend, G___, who was famous for occasionally donning a kilt to play bagpipes in a copse of trees near campus, crumpled into a heap on the floor. As G___ snored, the three of us made out. But it was an incomplete ménage:  D___ and I, check; T___ and D___, check; but my friendship with T___ was too much for me to see her in a romantic way. (Also:  I’m extremely squeamish about girly parts: early in Dead Ringers, one brother invites his twin to examine a woman with three cervical openings. Nothing we did approached that level of creepiness.)

Maybe G___’s slumbering presence made things more exciting than they otherwise would have seemed. We stifled giggles all night long, and, intermittently, I went to the bathroom to dry heave into the toilet before returning to bed, gingerly stepping over G___ on the way.  he next morning, we could blame alcohol or we could blame darkness, but we knew that our relationships with one another had shifted. We were now less a triangle and more a simple angle: a single pivot connecting two rays.

Here’s the thing about triangulation: at the end of the movie, heteronormativity reigns. The hero marries, and if the outlier to the happy couple hasn’t been conveniently been killed off, he usually gives his consent.  So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that D___ and T___ hooked up, but since life can’t always be theoretical, I broke up with D___. Towards the end of Dead Ringers, one brother says to the other, “Separation can be a terrifying thing”—right before he plunges a “gynecological instrument for operating on mutant women” into his brother’s torso.

#20: Sid & Nancy

(originally published Apr. 7, 2010)

How much of teenage rebellion is driven by boredom? While watching Sid & Nancy, I was struck by how many young punks kept saying that they were bored. Attending a concert? Bored. Spray-painting a room? Bored. It seems as if being young means vacillating between boredom, misery and fits of hyperactivity. Oh, and heroin.

I missed the heyday of punk by dint of my birth. Oh sure, I could have been punk at the tender age of 5, but I don’t think my parents would have cottoned to the idea of me sporting a green mohawk in preschool. Instead, I adopted musical tastes directly from my parents (classical, Vietnamese pop songs), my brother (radio R&B, disco), and my sister (New Wave, more disco). Later, I used a tape recorder the size of a toaster to record the theme songs to my favorite cartoons (Danger Mouse, the Smurfs, the Mighty Orbots). Punk never appeared on my radar.

By the time I reached high school, punk had disappeared almost entirely. Sure, in downtown Denver, along 13th Street, you’d still see that metal studded leather jackets, the gelatined and Manic Panicked hair, but they were as likely to be industrial heads as punks. So while I now knew what punk was (with the implicit understanding from my parents that punks were the “bad elements” of society), the appeal of the music was lost to me. It seemed overly loud, dissonant, angry. (Of course, I would very shortly fall under the sway of industrial music myself, which is nothing if not loud, dissonant and angry.)

But I did get a small exposure to the Sex Pistols via Public Image Limited. All I knew at the time was that the album had been produced by Stephen Hague (and his association with New Order meant that he could do no wrong) and that the track “Disappointed” got heavy rotation on MTV’s 120 Minutes.

My sister: “That’s Johnny Rotten!”

Me: “I don’t think so. Dave Kendall said his name was Johnny Lydon.”

My sister: “No, it’s the same guy. He used to be in the Sex Pistols.”

Me:  “Sex Pistols. Huh. Odd name.”

My only other exposure to the Sex Pistols was through a cover of “Anarchy in the UK.” No, not the Mötley Crüe or Megadeth versions. This version was by Frazier Chorus, the dream-pop band who had a minor hit with “Cloud 8” (the track appeared as a b-side on the “Cloud 8” single). So from nihilism and violence to sweeping synthesizers and lullaby-quality lyrics. Well, it makes sense: by the 90s, punk had become a moribund genre. Other forms of music had come up to supplant punk’s role in the hearts of rebellious youths everywhere. Hip-hop, heavy metal, grunge, New Kids on the Block—these were fierce slaps in the face of The Man. I think that even Sid & Nancy realizes the unique but temporal place of punk: its final image shows Sid slipping into a cab with the now-deceased Nancy as three African-American kids boogie to a newfangled style of music. Anger always seems to fade away into a dance.

#19: Shock Corridor

(originally published Apr. 5, 2010)

I think that instead of having the typical angel-and-devil duo on our shoulders to represent conscience and temptation, we would benefit more by having a burlesque Constance Towers offer moral guidance. Added bonus: her feather boa doubles as a cottony ear swab.

After college, I worked for a year as an intern at the Washington Blade, in Washington, D.C., but I just wasn’t much of a journalist. I certainly didn’t have the gumption to get myself committed to a mental institution as Johnny Barrett does in Shock Corridor. And if I were attacked by a group of female nymphomaniacs… let’s just say that the Internet makes it seem much more pleasant than Samuel Fuller does.

The Blade, sadly, no longer exists, having fallen recently in the great gay print journalism implosion of 2009. The parent company of the Blade, Windows Media, also folded five other regional publications. The mighty news magazine, The Advocate, became an insert in Out, which, for all its strengths, is more a lifestyle magazine—it features, after all, a “nipple count” for each issue. News you can use, people.

Couple this with the closing of gay bookstores around the country, and it almost seems to augur the end of “gay” as a discrete community, if, indeed, it ever was one. But consider that this is happening to African-American magazines. And when was the last time you remember seeing a feminist bookstore—or better yet—bought something from a feminist bookstore? These are still businesses, and businesses collapse all the time. The failure of a business doesn’t necessarily equal the failure of a community. (Though if a community fails to support its businesses, bemoaning it during the liquidation sale is somewhat short-sighted.)

So no last rites for gay journalism just yet. The Philadelphia Gay News seems to be going strong, and back in Denver, Outfront Colorado still pumps off the presses regularly. While I was an intern for the Blade, one of my jobs was to read through gay newspapers from around the country and photocopy interesting stories for the managing editor. The gay newspapers had a sharing mechanism; if the Blade saw a story from, say, an Atlanta paper that they wanted to publish, they’d call up the editor and pay a licensing fee.

One of my stories, for instance, was re-published in the Houston Voice (obviously, this was long before Windows Media owned both the Voice and the Blade). I had followed the members of the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians in the annual Roe vs. Wade protest march. It was like finding a nest of ivory-billed woodpeckers. During the march, a pro-life (or anti-choice—pick your preferred terminology) woman looked at the group’s sign, rainbows and pink triangles and all, and said, seemingly without irony, “You should have been aborted.”

“Do you get a lot of that?” I asked the group’s leader.

“Yes,” the leader said. “But it’s usually more vitriolic when it’s the gays criticizing us.”

There’s a famous character in Shock Corridor, an African-American patient who believes himself to be a white supremacist. His identity can’t hold up against the double whammy of a violently racist society at large and the black community’s expectations of him. I wonder how pro-life gays handle being minorities several times over.

#18: The Naked Kiss

(originally published Apr. 1, 2010)

Poor Kelly, the kick-ass prostitute (and, really, I prefer my prostitutes kick-ass, rather than simpering,  naïve or strung-out) who tries to make a new life for herself in The Naked Kiss. In spite of the pimps and child molesters that she beats up, she never can escape her past, and even when she tries to do the right thing, it usually turns out wrong. Except for shoving the money down the madam’s throat—that was pure genius.

But I can relate to her want for a fresh start, even though I approached it from the opposite direction. Whereas Kelly tried to leave behind her checkered past, when I went to college, I wanted to shed my more recent history of—well, of nothing. I had been a good boy, scrupulously good. I remember being shocked at the realization that the other high school couples around me were having sex! It wasn’t all tongue kissing and heavy petting. I was a sophomore at the time, and I was playing the accompaniment for the production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Our high school’s golden boy, playing Schroeder, had missed a rehearsal—and curiously, his girlfriend, had been conspicuously absent from choir practice.

“Oh, I said, they must have gotten each other sick,” I said.

The choir director and the musical director looked at one another.

“That must be it,” the choir director said, in a tone that wouldn’t have fooled even the most sarcasm-deaf.

Shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

By the time freshman year of college had rolled around, I had concocted a new identity for myself. Not only had I had a girlfriend, but I’d had a boyfriend too. And we’d done—stuff! And because this was a foreign environment—half a country away from Denver—who was there to say otherwise? With those imaginary dalliances, I had become more worldly, more experienced, and whether or not this garnered respect among my newfound friends, I would never know, since they took me at my word. If that’s who I said I was, that’s who I was.

But, as everyone knows, you can’t escape your identity that easily, not even if you’re in a David Lynch film. The life I had created for myself collapsed towards the start of sophomore year. I met my first boyfriend, Bill C., and I told him the truth about my virginal past, and he and my friends compared notes, and then there was a reckoning to be had. I begged for forgiveness and somehow managed to keep both my friends and my boyfriend. (Later, of course, I lost both the boyfriend and the friends, but I tell myself that had less to do with my fabricated identity and more to do with their all being sociopaths. But that’s a story for another film.)

#17: Salò; or The 120 Days of Sodom

(originally published Mar. 28, 2010)

My avoidance of grading papers stems much from the same place as my avoidance of watching Pasolini’s Salò; or The 120 Days of Sodom. First, they’re both something I feel very much that I should do, but don’t feel particularly compelled to do. And while I don’t equate reading composition papers with sexual degradation and Fascist violations, I have to say that sometimes those papers leave a shitty taste in my mouth.

I’m a self-professed horror movie aficionado (admittedly, I’m mostly agnostic towards the recent “torture porn” phase, which seems to have thankfully passed), but Salò makes me react the way horror movies should. I wince, I hide behind my fingers, I recoil. Hostel and the Saw series don’t elicit anywhere near the same reaction. Indeed the torture porn filmmakers seem to issue a challenge: oh, think I can’t top that?  Try to watch this. And I do. And I go, Meh. (Fingernail trauma, however, does make me cringe.)

This is where the “porn” designation of “torture porn” come in. Pornography is meant to titillate; as you watch it, you imagine yourself as one of the participants. Same with torture porn—it’s effective because you imagine yourself enduring the same bodily dis-integration as the victim (or, for the sociopathic, inflicting bodily harm). But the tortures in Salò are too detached, too aesthetic, too farcical to allow any audience identification. Never before have handsome young Italian boys engaging in gay sex seemed less erotic. The power dynamics that invigorate pornography and “torture porn” are carried to an unbearable extreme.

The DVD version of Salò has its own storied history. It was originally released in 1998 for a short time before it had to be withdrawn for copyright reasons.  nd, until its re-release, it was the hottest commodity on the Criterion eBay racket, fetching prices of hundreds of dollars. One of the first editions sat on my shelf for the longest times, begging to be watched. The cover featured a still featuring a boy getting his tongue cut off. The movie that dare not speak its name.

Then the re-release came out, and prices tanked. This is why I don’t play the stock market.

This is the only film I’ve seen that suggests a reading list in its opening credits. And not just any reading list, but one that includes Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir. Cliff Notes knowledge of the Marquis de Sade and Dante help as well. As Jean-Pierre Gorin mentions in his interview, this is the opposite of a research paper, where the bibliography comes at the end. (And yet, my yearly entreaties of ‘MLA style parentheticals will save your soul’ go unheard.) Here, the film pushes its influences at you before the first scene has unspooled. But book learning does little to prepare you for what follows: dog collars and spiked cheese (or, alternately, meandering paragraphs and unattributed quotations).

But here’s where avoiding Salò and avoiding grading papers most resemble each other: even though I’ve reached the end of a grueling ordeal, I don’t feel triumphant. Instead, I feel tired, demoralized, and despairing at the state of humanity.

#16: Samurai III—Duel at Ganryu Island

(originally published Mar. 22, 2010)

Sequels. Not a summer goes by without sequels buzzing around like thick, bloated horseflies. Some are become a part of the atmosphere, annoying but harmless, content to go their own way and to have you ignore them. Others insist on being noticed: flying in front of your face, landing on your food, zooming by your ear—in other words, begging for you to reach for the flyswatter.

Samurai III:  Duel at Ganryu Island should nominally be considered a sequel, but since it’s part of a larger work—the life story of samurai Musashi Miyamoto—it can be given a pass. The same goes with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But how many sequels are conceived with a narrative arc that encompasses several films, and how many simply add on the Roman numerals like unsightly deposits of fat on their waistlines? Can anyone justify the existence of the Star Wars prequel trilogy?

When I was in high school, I was an avid reader of genre fiction—particularly of science fiction and fantasy. But I was lukewarm towards series, particularly the canonical ones. I took to some of them, but rejected others. Thus, I finished Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series but never got into Frank Herbert’s Dune series. I read through the first two trilogies of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever but stopped Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings midway through The Two Towers (too many damn songs). I hear Piers Anthony’s Xanth series continues even after his death. And V. C. Andrews has been writing via ouija board for years now.

In the shopping center near my high school, there was a small used bookstore that specialized in paperbacks. They offered a deal: trade in two paperbacks, take out one. When I could, I stopped there after school. Most of the shelves were packed with Harlequin Romances, the author names repeating in different shades of soft colors. But there was also a small science-fiction/fantasy section against the wall, still with a number of recurring author names, but with more fanciful fonts on the spine. I took my sister’s romance books—she had more than she needed, believe me—and traded them in for sci-fi novels. And more often then not, when I got home, I would discover that I had somehow picked up “Book 3 of 7” of a Series Fill-in-the-Blank.

Even after I learned to open to the “Also by this author page” and scan for the “Other books in this series” column, I found that it became increasingly impossible to find stand-alone novels. Everything seemed built around the franchise model. So I found myself drawn more and more towards short story collections and “legitimate” literature. But that doesn’t meant that I sometimes don’t still dream about cashing in on my as-yet-unrealized 10-volume fantasy epic. With any lucky, it’ll write itself after I’m dead. After all, it worked for Robert Jordan.

#15: Samurai II—Duel at Ichijoji Temple

(originally published Mar. 20, 2010)

After grad school, I worked at a movie theater in Colorado in Tamarac Square. Madstone Theater was a movie chain that also had aspirations as a movie production company as well. But the production end of the business folded (not enough naked Michael Pitt in its only feature, Rhinoceros Eyes, would be my guess) and took down the theater chain with it.

One of the last films to play at Madstone was Kill Bill, Vol. 2, and for months after the theater had closed, when I walked through the mall, I saw the Kill Bill poster from behind its plexiglass. If ever a samurai sword could seem forlorn, this was it. And now, Tamarac Square itself is slated to be demolished. Luckily, my favorite Indian restaurant in Denver, India’s, moved across the street to Tiffany Plaza, where it will be sheltered by the gargantuan Whole Foods, like an egg under a mother bird.

Tamarac Square was never glamorous or particularly noteworthy; it rose up in the early 80s heyday of mall-building and lingered like a weed in the crack of a sidewalk—unsightly, but still alive. Even when Madstone was there, half the mall seemed deserted: there was a Starbucks, an optician, an eccentric old lady accessories shop, a shop that specialized in spine-saving footwear, and, nearer to the end of Madstone’s life, a sari emporium. When malls die, they die slowly, one shop shuttering after another, the gated and empty storefronts like missing teeth in a smile.

I bring this up because Quentin Tarantino should pay Hiroshi Inagaki royalties. Tarantino is a notorious cinematic magpie, filching bits and pieces to build his own nest. But in this case, Kill Bill, Vol. 1‘s two most spectacular set pieces borrow directly from the two most engaging set pieces of Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple.

In particular: Kill Bill‘s duel between The Bride and Go-Go Yubari reflects Samurai II‘s opening duel, in which Toshiro Mifune pits his ni-ten-ichi-ryu against a chain-and-sickle wielding warrior. But while a chain-and-sickle isn’t quite as flashy as a bladed metal ball at the end of a flail (not to mention that Eijiro Tono can’t quite compete with Chiaki Kuriyama in a schoolgirl outfit), the general idea is the same.

Later, Toshiro Mifune must dispatch 80 or so Yoshioka-school disciples, much in the way Uma Thurman must dispatch 88 mask-wearing, Lucy Liu-worshipping disciples—only not in a rice paddy, with better lighting, and with copious arterial spray. Mifune realizes that discretion is the better part of valor, while  Tarantino, of course, would never have one of his protagonists back out of anything, but the truth for both of our heroes is that they need to survive—for the sequel.

#14: Samurai I—Musashi Miyamoto

(originally published Mar. 15, 2010)

I make no secret of my love of Chinese buffets. While in the hinterlands of Wyoming in January, not a week passed that I didn’t want to go into the Dragon Wall restaurant, next door to the Albertsons in which I bought provisions. On the way to the liquor store at the end of the strip mall, I’d peer in the windows, trying to judge what they might have bubbling in their steam trays.

And just this afternoon, on a trip to ShopRite, I noticed a sign announcing that Hibachi Sushi and Buffet had moved in. No one can resist the siren’s call of seven meat products (chicken, beef, shrimp, pork, etc.) mixed with seven possible sauces (black pepper, Szechuan, black bean, mysterious goopy red stuff). Five different colors of Jell-O! When the heat lamp hits the Jell-O just so, it almost looked like a stained glass window.

I also like the democratic nature of buffets. More than any other restaurants I’ve been to, you see what seems to be an authentic cross-section of Wilmington: African-American women still dressed in their church clothes, Hispanic clumps of men, Caucasian families—all of them served by brisk, smiling Chinese waitresses with nametags that read “Tina,” “Layla” or “Cherry.”

All-you-can-eat buffets are Papal dispensations for gluttony; what seems like a ridiculous amount of food at home becomes acceptable—no, a requirement. When I was younger, my parents would mentally keep track of how much food I’d eaten to make sure that I had at least made back the cover charge. Otherwise, that would have been a waste of money, somehow a greater sin than a waste of food. We ate until we had to slouch in the booths and undo the top button of our pants.

When my relatives from Oklahoma came into town, and the whole family piled into a restaurant like a ravenous horde of Vietnamese locusts (my dad sneaking in a bottle of nước mắm), my cousin Truong and I engaged in competitive eating, with a stack of empty plates bearing witness to the endless capabilities of our intestinal capacity, jaw strength, and metabolism. Though once, as we left the Hans Brinker smorgasbord in Denver, he had to stop on the wooden bridge beneath the windmill to vomit. I was elated. That meant I won.

My metabolism isn’t what is used to be. Must cut down on the coconut shrimp next time.

Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto is somewhat of a Asian cinematic buffet. It has all the elements you could want, all steaming hot: grand war battles, samurai-on-bandit violence, crafty Japanese women, pursuits through green forests, totally passive Japanese women, wild renegades, wise monks, chastened warriors. And it’s all on one plate. Best of all, if you haven’t had enough, you can return for seconds. Thirds, even. Go on. You paid for it.