In Which We Enter Hell Through The Back

Onwards Satanic Soldiers

by ELEANOR MORROW

I still remember being dragged to the movies by a boy I had liked, or thought I liked. I knew absolutely nothing about what we were about to see. That would never happen today - the vast majority of films we see we know something about: a trailer, a story from the set, a history. But I was more interested in the boy than the film. This is what I surely thought, but turned out to be wrong completely.

It's rare that critics totally miss on a film, but from the moments that Wojciech Kilar's haunting score takes over in one of the greatest title sequences in cinematic history, these hacks missed on The Ninth Gate. God knows they should never underestimate Roman Polanski, one of our finest working directors, but they did, and North America missed the best film noir since Miller's Crossing.

I don't blame them, or the boy I saw the film with, for not getting it. Most people can't accept drama and comedy together, and adding a dash of horror stirs the pot to an almost unrecognizable place. There's the example of David Mamet's The Edge: director Lee Tamahori flatly misunderstood the script, and a hilarious satire never got the laughs it deserved.

An unsympathetic protagonist is the common element in both of these films. Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is a specialist in the rarest of rare books. The opening scene of the film has him appraising a family's collection, picking off what he likes from it, and telling them all the rest of the collection is ten times as valuable as it really is. Critics have no use for sleazy antiheros, because their business is the sleaziest of all.

Depp and Polanski didn't argue about how he should play the malignant tumor that is Dean Corso, but Roman later admitted he didn't know his star would be so laid back with his performance. What was in the director's head might have made The Ninth Gate more money, but it would have made it a lesser film. Depp made a brave choice, and in doing so, created a hilarious not-Philip Marlowe that is more entertaining to watch than a debonair Daniel Craig. Understated is so rare in our cinema today that we should throw a party every time it happens.

Boris Balkan (a pitch perfect Frank Langella) hires Corso to appraise the four extant copies of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book by a writer named Torchia that contains nine engraved illustrations. When correctly deciphered and matched, the illustrations are supposed to raise Lucifer himself.

This is Balkan's goal, so believing only one of the copies real, he gives Corso one of the copies and asks him to prove it genuine or fake. He covers his expenses to find out if the other two copies are real, too. Corso immediately hangs out with an antiquarian bookseller, who is murdered in short order in a fashion that simulates one of the engravings in a book. He is treading a dangerous path, but who is after him?

From then on, Corso meanders through Europe on Balkan's say-so, while himself trying to figure out what exactly Balkan wants, and what sort of book this is. It's a mature premise, and that's where Liza Schwarzbaum's impossibly tiny brain got tripped up. Who could guess that this was a comedy? Since I didn't even have a college education at the time, I can vouch that it didn't take much.

I don't say I have such a great sense of humor. If I find something funny, I laugh, even if the music is dramatic and Johnny Depp has an expression on his face like he just smelled Kate Moss after a coke binge. The Ninth Gate starts as one kind of movie, and then it becomes several more. It resists genre, flauts genre, answers to something that is at once sillier and all too real. Everyone is evil and crazy here, which adds to the ludicrousness of the proceedings. There are more laughs in this movie than in the entire first season of Parks & Recreation.

People behave according to their baser motives, and they're not terribly good at hiding them is one of the lessons of this tale, and that's why Depp is right to hold back - we must at least guess what the mercenary Dean Corso is thinking and doing. Most of modern drama depends on us knowing more than our protagonist. In The Ninth Gate, compared to Dean, we know less, much less.

Connection with the devil herself is always dangerous business, but why should it be? We speak to God every day, or some of us do, but we can never commune with the devil. Do our interests never coincide with those of the devil? What if the devil found Amy Adams' nude scene from Sunshine Cleaning and posted it on its blog? Would we be violating ourselves if we viewed it and left a comment like, "thanks for the upload, devilbro"? Answer: not in the least.

At the beginning of the movie, we can't imagine why someone would want to go to Hell, to know the power that it offers and willingly set out on this dark road. By then, we're totally sure we want exactly what all these insane book collectors do - a method to the madness, a way out of the starched dullness of modernity, to a darker and more destructive future, near the setting of the sun.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages on the subject of The Hangover.

"Cut The Cake" - The Fiery Furnaces (mp3)

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In Which We Are Underneath The Ground, Hoping To Grab Your Feet

Hell Is Other Loan Officers

by ALEX CARNEVALE

For me, hell is being a loan officer at a California bank. For others, it's a delicate heaven, and Justin Long is a trained psychologist and also your boyfriend, and his mother wants him to marry a lawyer, and you're not good enough. Sam Raimi's incredible return to the horror genre takes this basic dismaying premise and makes things so much worse I was begging for sweet relief.

'i sense that you are juno's understudy...does this word 'juno' mean anything to you?'I have never been particularly good with horror films. A book can be put down; you can't see it, anyway. A light can be turned on in a dark closet. A grizzled old man who brushed against you accidentally on a crowded train can be reported to the police. But a film - that is a different story altogether. The only way to get around the diegesis, in this case, is to realize that the only thing that lurks in those shadows is death, and death is not really all that scary - in fact after watching an episode of Nurse Jackie, it's a welcome revelation.

Sam Raimi and his older brother Ivan have gotten around this by creating a series of hells, all of which exist in the real world, and have to be dealt with. There is actually something in all those shadows, there's no Macguffin making it all happen, no trick ending waiting. There's just eternal damnation, and running from it as fast as you possibly can.

sup?Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is in the pickle I described, and she has to think of a way out of it. She's a bright, well-meaning young person, the kind of woman that under other circumstances you'd like to know or even impregnate, but not these particular circumstances, no. Her face is perfect for Raimi's purposes - even in quiet confidence it betrays an inner fear. Replacing Ellen Page, Lohman is a dead ringer for the androgynous young person, and she's as talented an actress.

go ask obama, I'm totally sure he'll write you a checkAfter denying a disgusting Gypsy woman another extension on her mortgage to impress her boss (David Paymer), she gets cursed with an object that marks her as fodder for a demon called Lamia. Demons! They just don't understand fiscal responsibility. The fact that Raimi turns this into a joke is hilarious, but there is also a major truth underneath this well-timed setup.

The banks were blamed for targeting the weak, for okaying loans that couldn't possibly be repaid. Little condemnation has come in for those who couldn't make their payments. Probably there is blame on both sides, and since the government bailed out only one of those sides, I'm not even sure who to be sympathetic to. That is where we are in American life - there are no winners, just different levels of losers in hock to a federal government that has no idea when to stop spending.

Thankfully it is in Drag Me to Hell that Judgment comes, Raimi-style. It doesn't matter who you are: if you have a button on your shirt, you're going underneath the ground where Hell is.

this happens at every single seance i go to

In order to avoid this fate, Christine gets barfed on, she kills animals, she throws up, she bleeds out, she tries anything to get herself uncursed. And as funny as this all should be, it's seriously frightening to know it's not in her head. She's a dead woman, but she won't die -- she'll live on in Hell.

By the end of the film she's trying to find a reason to justify condemning someone else to her fate, even wanting to bop off her sniveling Asian coworker before thinking better of it. The decision she comes to, and the ending the film spirals toward in the 99 minutes it holds you I won't spoil here, but it is more exciting than anything else that will hit theaters this summer.

lamia also nabbed david carradine recentlyWhat makes Raimi such a masterful director? When he's taking himself seriously instead of delivering another hammy Spiderman sequel, he is the best at stringing together action and humor, a relentlessly eye for how things should pile on top of each other to create something surprising and funny, but wholly real.

With Spiderman, he took a series of increasingly nonsensical scripts, and made a film completely foreign to them out of their mediocre dialogue and situations. He turned the superhero genre into comedy, and in doing so made all other like movies over-serious and dull. As in Spiderman, everything here holds a demonic menace: a messy psychologist's office, a medium's goat, the button on Christine's shirt. The next day, you can't even look at a doorknob without imagining yourself going through it full bore. There is no one better in the genre, and we can hope he finds reason to come back to horror again after Drag Me To Hell.

The film's had some moderate success at the box office, and while it is devoid of big stars, I think I have some idea why audiences didn't exactly flock in droves. It's pretty much the September 11th movie all over again. We have no desire to relive these horrors when worse is befalling us every day, in the seeming safety of what was America. We won't be safe again, not here. We will tear each other apart even if big banks lend more and people are able, again, to buy beyond their means. Once you've been cursed, you can't go back.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Reborn as a Wind Chime" - Silent Paper Radios (mp3) highly recommended

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Silent Paper Radios myspace

In Which We Still Have Not Recovered From This Particular Hangover

The Docile American Bachelor Party

by ELEANOR MORROW

God forgive me in advance for what I am about to write. A.O. Scott chickened out; it had to be me.

It is a phenomenon, it is the new Big Lebowski, it has everything we require from entertainment and more. "I haven't seen it, but I heard it's the new Old School" crooned Bill Simmons. Shut up, Bill, you're over forty with two kids and no grasp of English.

Men can't express their true feelings, so they express themselves by being away from women. That is the sterling message of Todd Phillips' 90 minute attempt to kill comedy, The Hangover.

A dentist loses a tooth. A loser schoolteacher almost forgets his head. The guy from the Kanye video acts slightly irregular. These are the "wild" dreams of middle-aged men. They are not wild, no more wild than a 16 year old's spring break, or a vibrant afternoon of text messaging. Our idea of the crazy has became crazy.

In Judd Apatow's seminal boy-on-boy-on-boy-on-boy love story, Knocked Up, Leslie Mann believes her husband Paul Rudd is cheating on her, perhaps with Phoebe Buffet. She tracked him to a magnificently empty house in the Valley, where he's participating in a fantasy baseball draft with a bunch of other repressed homosexuals. She's upset at finding out she's married a gay man? I couldn't think of any other reason she started crying in the driveway, on a movie set, in front of Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen. Maybe she really had her heart set on seeing Spiderman.

According to this way of thinking, women are just prostitutes waiting for kind and generous dentists to walk into their lives. Heather Graham looks too much like a Barbie (or admittedly a whore) to be anything but Ed Helms' paramour; a comic actress on the level of Rachael Harris is a high-strung betch who can't cheat and get away with it like Bill Clinton. Justin Bartha was in a fucking Geico commercial and NBC's horrific sitcom Teachers. He deserves no second life in the American cinema just because he banged Ashley Olsen and Lydia Hearst.

A woman places obligations on a man. Her job is to look good and hold hands at a wedding. A woman is capable of forgiveness but not of understanding, and that is the terms the "men" of The Hangover must deal with their women on. At this they don't have much of any success. That is why they are men to treasure: they can't even excel at having a good time.

Men when reduced to their primordial urges, get married and promise to take care of whores. What sorts of men are these? Where can they be found? Everywhere: capitalism has compromised their masculinity, like the eunuchs of Greek times. Men used to be able to play with boys, ask Camille Paglia and Sophocles. Now they just play with themselves.

Now they play with baseball players on Yahoo! and ESPN and they draft Hideki Matsui even though he's an aging slugger who can't play the field. Paul Rudd has two kids and wants to bang models; Bradley Cooper hates being a teacher, gets laughs for it. Seth Rogen can't grasp the good fortune that is putting his penis inside of an E! reporter -- he has to whine about it to his father, who is even more of a joke. Ed Helms can't even tell his girlfriend he's going to Vegas for a bachelor party. By the end, he wrests free of her to be the babysitter for some other, identical woman.

Erstwhile poker player Todd Phillips directed this return to more pedestrian fair. It came from a real life hangover suffered by a friend of one of the movie's producers! Just when you thought it was impossible, Entourage is becoming more like real life in retrospect. Men love stories about other men going to Las Vegas, Las Vegas likes this as well, tourism goes up, women go down. Eventually we will be sexually segregated by preferred form of entertainment. Shouldn't the sexes become more like each other instead of less? Wasn't Ellen Page an inspiration to us all?

Then again, there is a passivity bred into these creatures. They just want the weekend; the rest of the time they are totally psyched to cave in, to live a life of small-time, Adam Carolla-esque complaining. We can assume despite his history as a boxer, despite his puffy grandstanding on Los Angeles-area radio, that Carolla is a total pushover for his wife. They're family men at heart, "some guys just can't handle Vegas." In between we must suffer every measure of overdone joke imaginable.

Here are some jokes I can do without going forward:

A strange animal approaches a drug-addled male as in Harold and Kumar. A tiger isn't funny simply because it's a tiger. It's even less funny if it's Mike Tyson's tiger, especially in light of the loss of his daughter in recent weeks.

When a person is saying something inappropriate about another person and they are present, he says, "Excuse me! I'm right here!" I'm pretty sure Neil Simon wrote this joke, and I'm just as sure it's not funny.

Bradley Cooper is not funny, at least not unless Ryan Murphy is writing his dialogue. This rule also goes for Joe Rogan, but I don't think he was in The Hangover.

The all-star comedy super special cameo: I am tired of Mike Tyson, of Valerie Bertinelli (not relevant here, but still), of Frank the Tank, of Snoop Dogg in Starsky & Hutch. I blame test audiences for all of this, I blame them for being surprised so that we can't be surprised. I blame test audiences for Star Trek and The Dark Knight. It is actually possible to make a work of art that is not offensive to any particular sensibility, and not challenging to any of them. The fact that we can all agree something is entertaining is the number one indication that it's not very good.

This does not make The Dark Knight or The Hangover bad per se; it doesn't make them art either.

One comedic sensibility is learned from the previous generation. If middle-aged men find their childish man-boy escapes to the city of sin a welcome release from the economic grind of this age, fine. But good for Todd Philips for imposing an R rating. I'd rather our kids be Pixar funny than Old School-funny.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and tumbls here.

"Heavy Cross" - The Gossip (mp3)

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