In Which You're The Only Woman I've Been Dreaming Of

Chinese or Pizza?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Two Lovers
dir. James Gray
100 min

Ah, yes. The choice between the wealthy shiksa and the wealthy Jew betch. It is the choice that every young Jewish man (Joaquin Phoenix???) must make at one time or another. It is the choice at the heart of James Gray's Two Lovers, which takes place in Brighton Bay.

"you're not embarassed by our height difference, are you michelle?"I have a friend who is currently dating two women. He was upset this film was released, and so am I. The deepest desire of the male Jew must not be exposed at all costs. We are a secretive breed of hairy animals that live purely for black and white photography and rooftop intercourse with privileged white women.

"leonard, if you put it in me while my overcoat is on, i'm never gonna winslet an oscar" The shiksa in question is the famed acting virtuoso Gwyneth Paltrow playing Michelle, a troubled blonde temptress who lives in the same building as an unsuspected Jewish family with an older. troubled son. Watching women age is always a kind of justice, and even more so since that American Express commercial proved for a fact that Gwyneth is a larger tool than her fair trade husband. To be fair, she actually looks good in this movie, proving more women should wear hoop earrings and take drugs when they're pregnant.

"I'm so lost, Leonard," Michelle is constantly saying. She's seeing a married man, the absolutely awesome Elias Koteas. She never makes you forget for an instant who exactly she is, rendering the entire situation a tad unbelievable. But that's okay, because we want to know Leonard has no business caring about her just because she's a tasty little blonde treat. Gwyneth's idea of acting is saying Leonard a lot. She also shows her left tit, but only once, and you more feel sorry for her than anything. This is something like reality. Every time I see a left tit, I tend to feel quite upset afterwards.

in the end, jane goodall had a similar problem

At one point Leonard says, "You think if I got to know you I wouldn't love you, but I already know you and I love you even more." I laughed my balls off. The rest of the theater was not as amused. Really Leonard loves his mother (Isabella Rossellini) but he's unable to marry and wed her: his damnable laundry-owning father already has. My non-Jewish reading audience will never understand just how annoying this is — their mothers don't look like Rossellini, and they shop at Pottery Barn.

"and this one is my taint...look at the way the light catches my left testicle"

Amidst the slight tremors of anti-Semitism, Leonard's father encourages him to date the daughter of a rival Jewish launderer, even sending her to fuck Leonard in the man's own home. Soon enough Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) is telling Leonard that she'll take care of him, that she loved him ever since she saw him ask his mother to dance. If I even could recall how often people have told me that.

Like most Jewish males, Leonard believes himself to be one f'd up little piece. If I had seen this movie in the mid 1990s, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. Leonard's implausible backstory is that he dated a woman for whom he was a Tay-Sachs match, so her family broke it up. (This is probably in itself a fake sad story to appeal to new women, but a lie is a fashion by which the Jew is able to procure a shiksa, and it makes for a convincing story when Leonard tells it by rote.)

The second lover, Sandra, is a made to order Yiddish female, notable more for what doesn't distinguish her than what does. She's a pharmaceutical rep for Pfizer, and she bores poor Leonard to tears. Played by the stunning Shaw, I immediately tracked down this woman's Maxim gallery after the film was over.

The Jewish female is typecast to me, but a revelation to other people who might not have the extensive, priceless information I have learned by rote in how Jewish woman view marriage, sex, and their respective future. I would just as soon marry a Jewish woman as stick a knife in my arm, an inevitability that Leonard has already accomplished, with a CGI scar to show for it.

this betch's original surname was schwartz...don't hide who you are Vinessa!Choosing between the shiksa and the Jew betch is finally one onerous process, let me tell you. Since my father is Sicilian, he doesn't understand this dilemma. You can't really understand a Jewish woman unless you're a Jewish man. You came from her. It doesn't get any more real than that.

It's unfortunate that being slightly more believable than the incredible implausibilities of most movies now accounts for realism. Does anyone even watch Cassavetes or Rohmer? Nevermind. This is the only movie out I would ever dream of seeing. I'm just a sucker for Jewish fantasy stories. It's why I love E.T.

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

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we will be together isabella

In Which We Explore Existential Carnival Horror

LIVE NUDE THRILLS

by JOHN DAMER

The Funhouse

Dir. Tobe Hooper

1981

Directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), The Funhouse is an imperfect horror movie.  It’s ten to fifteen minutes too long, and it features a Psycho reference that would make even Brian DePalma groan.  

Yet because it contains there are genuine and troubling ideas, there's enough in The Funhouse to save it from the junk bin. It’s not a movie that just wants to scare you; it wants you to feel horrible about the nature and existence of exploitative entertainment.  It evokes those pre-code Hollywood horror movies (i.e. The Island of Lost Souls or The Black Cat). It demonstrates that fairground carnivals are grimy hellholes that should be avoided at all costs.  

Funhouse is standard for a Horror-film: some young people go somewhere and do something for fun, and then terrible things happen (which is also the basic story of Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The young people in the movie are stock characters of the genre:  there’s the main character Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), aka the Good Girl; the Alpha-Male Hunk Buzz (Cooper Huckabee); the Promiscuous One, Liz* (Largo Woodruff); and the Sycophantic Nerd, Richie (Miles Chapin).

*Guess what happens to her.

The fun activity that these four do is go to a Carnival at night where they (surprise!) hide out in a Funhouse ride and, after witnessing a murder committed by a freakish yet strangely sympathetic ride attendant, find themselves trapped and hunted like animals. (There is also a slight sub-plot of Amy’s younger brother Joey (Shawn Carson) sneaking-out to follow Amy going to the Carnival and getting caught by a harmless carnival hand.)

There's a prologue in which Joey pulls a prank on Amy while she takes a shower at their family’s house.  In a rage, Amy gets out of the shower, finds Joey taking refuge in a closet, curses him, and promises brutal revenge.  During this flurry of vindictiveness, Joey takes Amy’s picture with a Polaroid camera, which falls to the ground. As Joey scurries away, Amy finds this photo on the ground and picks it up. Seeing her angry face reflected in the picture, Amy is horrified by her sadism.

The camera then pans and zooms into a nearby poster of the iconic image of Frankenstein’s Monster played by Boris Karloff, and then there’s a cut to a TV showing the famous moment in Bride of Frankenstein in which the Bride (Elsa Lanchester) is revealed. A visual linking of cruelty to two iconic images of the Horror genre, this is a reflective moment that can be interpreted as an implicit commentary on how Horror is often consumed.  It posits Horror movie viewing as something that is rooted in sadistic pleasure. 

This associative visual idea signals one of the basic themes of The Funhouse: exploitation, as a means of entertainment, is a dark and twisted practice. (Ironically, this idea does contradict how The Funhouse works on the surface.)  Yet, Amy being shocked at her own likeness signifies another idea that Hooper and many other Horror-directors support:  the Horror Film can be used as a mirror that displays unfortunate yet true aspects of human-nature and existence.

Horrible things are displayed through out The Funhouse.  For instance: I can’t think of any other movie that better renders the sad, seedy world of a traveling carnival.  The movie’s atmosphere is full of skeaze and dread. The carnival worker characters might as well be wearing T-shirts that say ‘dirty carny’.

Many traditions of the Traveling Carnival are each given their own scene.  There’s a Barnyard Entities scene where the four teens see a two-headed cow and a human fetus in a jar (both foreshadow a bizarre reveal that happens later in the movie):

A near-unnecessary Magic-Show scene:

There’s a scene set in the tent of a Fortune Teller of indeterminable Slavic origin:

There’s a scene set in and around the Nudie Booth:

And of course, there’s the ominous and eponymous Funhouse, where father (grizzled ride operator) and son (creepy Monster-masked son) run the show.

And to bolster the scopophilic nature of what The Funhouse is about, throughout the movie are Point-of-View shots that show what characters see as they spy on sex and violence through holes or cracks between floor-boards. 

The Carnival functions as a microcosm for the graceless world of adulthood that a teen like Amy becomes become an autonomous person.  Shown at the beginning, Amy and Joey’s parents are the only ‘clean-cut’ adults in the movie; all of the other adult characters are are threatening, run-down, and depraved in nature.

Also taking into consideration that Amy loses her virginity to Buzz when the teens first hideout in The Funhouse, it becomes clear thatThe Funhouse is also about someone’s (Amy’s) Innocence not so much being lost but being ripped-away from them during one disturbing and violent night.    

Extending off of this, there is a chilling scene late in the movie in which Amy sees her parents retrieving Joey to bring him home after he snuck out.  However, she sees this while trapped in the Funhouse and through one of the rides’ operating industrial fans, and her subsequent cries for help aren’t heard over the noise. If they don’t already, it’s a moment that intends to remind the viewer that he or she will one day no longer have their parents to rely on for any form of support.  This is a sobering, even terrifying fact of growing-up.

The final scene and shot of the movie is similar. The following morning, traumatized Amy emerges from the Funhouse after enduring the terror inflicted by the ride operator and the ride attendant.  Out of her friends, she's the only survivor. 

As the camera cranes up to a bird’s eye view to reveal that the carnival is being torn down, Amy stumbles away. Creepy carnival music comes on the soundtrack, and the movie ends with a fade to black.

As a coda, this final shot is as unsettling and haunting as anything in The Night Of The Hunter

Out of all of Tobe Hooper’s movies, not much else comes close to the classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  (And if you’re thinking Poltergeist, then its time for the truth to come out:  it’s obvious that Spielberg at least co-directed that one.)  Nevertheless, because it’s a horror movie that has something interesting and thought-provoking going on beneath its surface, the film indicates that the man isn’t just a one-trick pony as a filmmaker. The Funhouse is Hooper’s near-masterpiece; 

John Damer writes The Blog Of Imagination.

This is his first piece for This Recording.

In Which We Really Wish We Didn't Know

Albino Aliens Destroy My World

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Nicolas Cage's receding hairline has contributed to some of the finest discoveries of our time. Despite moving to the equator of his scalp in its latest mission — the Alex Proyas retarded thriller Knowing — it is more perceptive than ever. Knowing ascended to the top of the box office because Hollywood literally could not be troubled to make anything more challenging than an alien movie with this bald fuck for a weekend in March.

It is a challenge to make a movie this stupid; it is an almost impossible feat without some kind of help from the government or Roger Corman. Cage's character is a professor of astrophysics at MIT. In one of the film's early scenes, he's teaching his class. Whoever wrote this scene has to not only be completely unaware of what astrophysics is, he also has to never have attended a single college-level class in anything. As such, we can only assume this film was written by Jerry Bruckheimer and/or a sleeping german shepherd.

In Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, we witnessed an unprecendented series of events. An otherwise intelligent person created a feature-length movie that absolutely no one could enjoy without the benefit of LSD. Even under the influence, The Fountain almost exploded of its own stupidity. This was a movie so painful the studio that released it dumped the idea of a director commentary.

Here the achievement is far more impressive. The creators of this film must never have even seen anything more complex than a music video. They must never have fathered a child. They probably did watch The Fountain.

John Koestler (Cage) has fathered a child, although we know he is not really the father of a child. He finds out the location of three coming transportation accidents. Like any good father, he heads right toward them. He's a single father, mind you.

The trouble began when a precog named Lucinda Embry started hearing whispers in her head. Despite the fact that major wars on this planet have taken lives in the hundreds of thousands, a bunch of aliens have taken notice of small house fires as a precursor to the apocalypse.

The aliens manifest themselves on Earth first in a car, where they hand Cage's son a smooth stone that we later come to find out lacks any meaning at all. The aliens are albinos, perhaps in tribute to the albinos of Africa, many of whom were slaughtered for their body parts about which there existed a number of superstitutions.

The aliens desire Cage's son to restart humanity on another world. It's unclear why exactly humans are valued as a sentient species. Maybe it's because of the ease with which they perish in tragic accidents.

After realizing you paid for a film this stupid, you look for someone to blame. Much like Bernie Madoff is taking their entire responsibility for our economy's collapse, Steven Spielberg must be held responsible for this raging piece of shit. Without him, would we really have to endure interminably long movies that justify their existence by the alien spacecraft descending to Earth at the end?

We can also hold Francis Ford Coppola to be somewhat at fault. Without his tacit endorsement of his young nephew Nicolas Coppola's career, we wouldn't have to deal with this film or the prospect of a third National Treasure sequel.

And in fact those movies, searchingly obtuse though they may be, have the genial fun that is missing from the pretend seriousness of this dreary film. In fact Knowing is a secret laugh riot. We watched the film with a drunk black guy who was keen to comment on the hair on Nicolas Cage's son's balls. Fortunately the death of everyone on the planet was loud enough to drown him out by the end.

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

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