GIRLS (1968), CHE (2008) and other threats

Man, it was really disturbing on a metatextual level to finish watching THE GIRLS (1968) a Swedish intellectual feminist sex farce about a touring company of Lysistrata, and look online for reviews only to find one or two reviews, and a few hostile male dismissals. And barely any pictures (hence my off-projector screenshot, above)

Considering how deftly the (female) director, Mai Zetterling, plays off smug male dismissal (all the male actors react towards their female counterparts attempts at equality with conspiratorial snickering both on and off stage) you would think these "critics" might realize the extent to which they are metatextually hanging themselves by saying things like "stridently grrl powered" (Fernando Croce, Slant) and urging readers to see "George Cukor's LES GIRLS instead." Why, Mr. Croce? Because both have "girls" in the title? Gosh darn it, I would ask anyone who automaticallly labels "grrl power" as strident to examine their own feelings of being threatened by truly liberated women.

There were a few other little bits of condescension out there, but now I can't find them.

Then there's Soderbergh's CHE, recently premiered at Cannes. A four and a half hour epic, it will be cut into two halves (like KILL BILL!) I read some ignorant comments here and there, but I wont name no names this time. They're too big for that; they could smite me like an ant. No wonder they're threatened by CHE! He'll topple them, for sure, and us ants will rise.

I mean really, could there be a better casting choice in all of cinema than Benicio Del Toro as Che? I was rooting for this union since 2000, when I first saw him on the big screen in YEAR OF THE GUN (and TRAFFIC, of course). He couldn't be more... Che-ish?

I know a lot about Che, because I was married to a highly opinionated intellectual Argentine documentary filmmaker for five years. And yet, after all that socialist posturing, nagging and bossing around and being expected to shoulder the guilt of my country's, race's and sex's capitalist crimes (insert patriarchal snickering on my part), I STILL dig on Che! What better testament could there be?

Whatever fine shadings of character Soderbergh fails to etch out, I'm sure he'll do the saga justice, and keep it in Spanish with English subtitles. Que bueno y re un flash!

As Mr. Toro put it when receiving the best actor award at Cannes earlier this week: "I'd like to dedicate this to the man himself."



Damn! Can you even tell them apart?

Sydney Pollack (1934-2008) - Good Director, Great Actor

One of the best, certainly one of the most unusual, episodes of the half-hour anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was 1960's "The Contest for Aaron Gold." Directed by Norman Lloyd and based on a story by Philip Roth, it’s about a camp counselor, a teacher of ceramics, who observes a special talent in Aaron (Barry Gordon), one of the boys he is instructing in arts and crafts. While the other boys are using their clay to make crude snakes and pots, Aaron is making a finely detailed sculpture of a knight. But there’s a problem. The sculpture is missing an arm, and for some reason, Aaron refuses to complete it. The night before the boys’ parents are due to arrive, the counselor decides to complete the sculpture himself – with unexpected results.

I recall this episode today, among other reasons, because of the extraordinary natural performance by the actor who played the camp counselor. It was the late Sydney Pollack, and to see him in this role is to wonder why he didn’t have the major acting career of a Hoffman or a De Niro. Instead, of course, Pollack became a director, and - not surprisingly - directing actors was one of his greatest strengths. As the various obituaries that have appeared over the past couple days have shown, nearly everybody has their own favorite Pollack film. Mine is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), a terrific allegorical closed system melodrama (like 12 Angry Men, or any other dramatic work in which a group of characters interact within a narrowly confined time and space) about a dance marathon taking place during America's Great Depression. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? captures the emotional and economic desperation of the Depression far better than most films about the era, and features stunning performances from an ensemble cast that includes Jane Fonda, Susannah York, Red Buttons, and Gig Young - the latter winning an Oscar.

Eventually, Pollack did return to acting, at first in films he directed himself like Tootsie (1982), later in films by others, most memorably Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992) in which he played the lead opposite Judy Davis, and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Tootsie and Eyes Wide Shut, in particular, demonstrate how Pollack’s welcome presence could anchor a film in reality, no matter how far-fetched the context.

In addition to his work as actor and director, Pollack was one of Hollywood’s finest producers. The IMDB lists 47 films on which Pollack was credited as producer. I will mention just three: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Michael Clayton (2007) in which he appeared, and Recount (2008), a smart, thoroughly engrossing, and (as you might expect) well-acted film about the 2000 election that premiered on HBO only two days ago. I never met Pollack, alas, but I miss him already.

Best Title of 2008

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA. So succinct. Efficient. Tells you exactly what you're going to see. Kind of like CELINE JULIE BOATING or HAROLD KUMAR GUANTANAMO.

[Thanks to House Next Door for the image.]

Dear DVD Companies: Give up the good stuff, otherwise, no more money!

With so many great classic titles still nowhere to be found on disc, it irks me that in the last couple of months (and the summer looks even worse) even top notch DVD companies like Criterion are just re-issuing old titles (do we really need a new version of Thief of Baghdad, or any version of The Red Balloon?) and/or putting out a lot of second rate product and westerns.

Lots and lots of westerns being released these days. I'm sure some of them are good, like the Anthony Mann/James Stewart westerns. But man, do we really need so many, so many of which are clearly second rate filler that might be okay if discovered accidentally on the western channel at 3 AM drunk as hell with your dad over Christmas, but certainly not something you'd ever want to own and watch again.

Clearly the companies release these dull time-wasters only because they are in color and "market research" shows color sells better than black and white, but you stupid fucks, that's like saying salt sells better than pepper so lets stop selling pepper, but we're not going to license out the pepper rights to other companies either, so everyone will just have to do without pepper. I say down with the pepper oppressor! Pepper to the people!

In short, please sirs, may we have some more lurid pre-1934 black and white films? You know, like how they pack em in at the art house theaters, the pre-code festivals that are always such hits?

If anyone from the Paramount/Sony octopus is listening, I'm going to do a favor and steer you to these here titles for a nice pre-code boxed set that any true cineaste would snap up in a hot minute:


Disc 1. SHANGHAI EXPRESS / DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON (Anna May Wong double feature)

Disc 2. ISLAND OF LOST SOULS / WHITE WOMAN (jungle horror/Laughton double feature)

Disc 3. RED DUST (Gable and Harlow and Astor in the jungle with rain barrels and monsoons and wet dresses clinging!) Make this one a stand-alone and give it extras.

4. LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT / GIRLS ABOUT TOWN (Stanwyck! Kay Francis!)

5. STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE / DANCERS IN THE DARK (Miriam Hopkins double feature!)

6. DISHONORED / MILLION DOLLAR LEGS - (Mata Hari-esque double feature! Dietrich, Fields!)

And here's a thought - put it in extra fancy wrapping, in a limited edition and then charge extra $$ for it, that way the "niche" market becomes lucrative, as even the casual fan will buy it to sell later on ebay once its out of print (ala Disney).

That's just for starters... aw, gee whiz. I must be dreamin' to think this could ever come to pass... but aint Hollywood all about dreams? Hmmm?

3 (or 4) Versions of Howard Hughes

Hughes as Narcissist - Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man

Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008) has been universally praised for what it is, a well done but fundamentally generic superhero film. It’s also a pretty good Howard Hughes film. What makes it work on both levels is the inspired casting of Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark, a multi-millionaire/industrialist/inventor clearly based on Hughes.

Downey plays Hughes/Stark as a charming narcissist, a man admired and envied by the public - like the real Hughes - for his wealth, his engineering accomplishments, his willingness to test his inventions personally (the real Hughes test-piloted the aircraft he designed), and his playboy lifestyle. The narcissism of the pre-Iron Man Tony Stark manifests itself in the way he sees other people, i.e., he hardly sees them at all beyond their immediate use to him as workers to be exploited, investors to be conned, or women to be fucked.

That is, until he is captured by Afghan terrorists (Vietnamese Communists in Stan Lee’s original comic story) and a fellow prisoner, Yinsen (Shaun Taub), literally and metaphorically gives him a heart – literally in the sense that the glowing battery Yinsen installs in Tony’s chest (above) keeps shrapnel from entering his heart and killing him, and metaphorically in the sense that Yinsen’s selfless actions inspire Tony to become a genuine armor-clad hero.

The metamorphosis of Tony Stark from heel to superhero reflects the ambivalence the American cinema has always felt toward its capitalist entrepeneurs (see, if you haven’t already, There Will Be Blood). Iron Man gives us a classic good capitalist/bad capitalist dichotomy with Downey as good guy capitalist Tony Stark aka "Iron Man" battling a bald, bearded Jeff Bridges as bad guy capitalist Obadiah Stane aka "Iron Monger."

I can't help seeing the casting of Jeff Bridges here as a nod to Francis Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) in which Bridges plays the good capitalist, Tucker, and the bad capitalist is Hughes himself, played as a deranged genius by Dean Stockwell.

Hughes as Obsessive-Compulsive - Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator

Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) attempts to capture the many contradictory aspects of Howard Hughes within a single film and succeeds, more or less. We get Hughes the movie producer/director escorting Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow to the premiere of his Hells Angels (above), Hughes the womanizer romancing Cate Blanchett as Kate Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, and Hughes the fearless test pilot memorably crashing a plane into a residential neighborhood of Beverly Hills (a helluva montage sequence).

Best of all, we get DiCaprio as Hughes the obsessive-compulsive recluse, collecting his urine in bottles, watching that image of Jane Russell in The Outlaw projected over and over again in a continuous loop, overseeing and endlessly redoing every detail of his aircraft designs while muttering to himself, "The way of the future, the way of the future, the way of the future ...."

Hughes as Paranoid Control Freak - Robert Ryan in Caught

Max Ophuls’ Caught (1949) looks at Hughes from the outside, specifically, from the point of view of a small-town girl (Barbara Bel Geddes) who marries him, thinking that his money will buy her happiness and finding, to no one’s surprise but her own, that it doesn’t.

Caught is one of two brilliant underseen film noirs directed by Ophuls in the late 1940s. (The other is 1949's The Reckless Moment.) The unusually intelligent screenplay is by Arthur Laurents, who also wrote Hitchcock’s Rope and Wise’s West Side Story. Caught’s noirness mostly emanates from Ryan’s characterization of Hughes - fictionalized as Smith Ohlrig (as in "oil rig") - presented here as a neurotic monster, a man who keeps his wife a virtual prisoner, and who is psychotically jealous of any other straight male with whom she has contact. Even more disturbing, this is a man who cannot ever be told he is wrong. He marries Leonora (Bel Geddes) simply because his psychiatrist tells him he cannot.

Just as Ophuls used a pair of diamond earrings to chart the spiritual growth of his heroine in Madame de... (1953), in Caught, Ophuls uses a mink coat to illustrate the character arc of Leonora. The coat first appears as an image in a catalog ogled by Leonora and her girlfriend in the film’s opening sequence. When Leonora becomes a Los Angeles model, she gets to wear a mink, but doesn’t get to own one until she marries Ohlrig. The coat then becomes a symbol of her material imprisonment, which she abandons simultaneously with her abandonment of Ohlrig. Similarly (and Freudianly?), Ophuls associates Ohlrig with balls, the kind used in pool and other games, that an agitated Ohlrig rolls obsessively back and forth. Later, when it looks like Leonora is going to leave him, Ohlrig suffers a psychosomatic heart attack, and collapses under a pinball machine (above).

I’d always assumed Caught was produced at RKO - Hughes’ own studio - mainly, because it looks like an RKO production. Caught was, in fact, an independent production, but it has the RKO noir atmosphere and, in Robert Ryan, one of RKO’s best known and most talented leading men. Barbara Bel Geddes had worked for RKO - until Hughes fired her. Ophuls was also a former Hughes/RKO employee, fired after working for a short time on Hughes’ Vendetta. So Ophuls, Ryan, and Bel Geddes had all known Hughes personally. Even more surprising, Hughes apparently coached his friend Ryan on how to play Ohlrig, which is kind of like Charles Foster Kane finishing the negative review of Susan Alexander Kane begun by his friend Jed Leland - a connection I’ll bet film buff Hughes recognized and appreciated.

How do I love thee, Vera Farmiga Vera Farmiga.

I have to wonder if some of the same reasons I love Vera Farmiga are the same reasons the Academy and Hollywood seem to have such ambivalence towards her. Perhaps its her mix of being super thin and super hot and also being such a dynamite, powerhouse actress. Imagine Meryl Streep chops poured into a demure heart-melter like a young Nicole Kidman and I bet you 60% of Hollywood right there is pissed off. Not only does she anger them by trying to be hot AND a great actress, she's THIN. This is not to say Kidman isn't a great actress, but her range is limited (not a bad thing in and of itself) and she's always Kidman, the vaguely off-putting, regal bonny lass, needing a false nose to really get Oscar notice--as in THE HOURS. Farmiga on the other hand is more like a De Niro of the RAGING BULL era, or a Dustin Hoffman of the MIDNIGHT COWBOY era; she's got impeccable range, searing charisma and fearsome commitment, and thus is a living reminder of Hollywood's current failure to provide strong, complex female characters worthy of her awesome ilk.

In her strengths, she reminds us there once was a time when such roles existed... that's right! I of course mean the 1970s.

In the 1970s, feminism was still at the door kicking-down phase, so there was no time or inclination to indulge in third wave housewife fantasias and bling parades. Films starring Meryl Streep (KRAMER Vs. KRAMER, SOPHIE'S CHOICE, FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN), Jessica Lange (FRANCES), Sissy Spacek (COAL MINDER'S DAUGHTER), Sally Field (NORMA RAE) or Jane Fonda (KLUTE, JULIA) were heavy-duty sagas of repression, sexuality, regret, triumph and change. Comedies were full of drama: Jill Clayburgh was in AN UNMARRIED WOMAN and even Marty Scorsese made a woman movie (ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE). These were "Important Pictures" given long-term runs and heavy commercial time. I know because I remember all the hoopla, reviews, and Time articles, and since I was a young kid with nothing but contempt for any movie that didn't have monsters or army men, I certainly didn't go looking for them.

Of course there are still such "heavy women" films, and now they tend to be about druggie moms either dealing with rehab or fighting for custody after they get out. One such gem is DOWN TO THE BONE (pictured above). The story of a cocaine addicted mother of two, it miraculously sidesteps all the usual child-worship in such films, to present a mom who is neither perfect nor abusive. (She's just a mom, for fuck's sake! Imagine, a movie where it's not "all about the children" in this dark age!) AND Farmiga looks drop-dead lovely in her shiny black Halloween witch's costume. AND there's some great shots of a writhing pet corn snake, eloquently and Eisenstein-ishly edited in amidst the junkyhood, indicating presumably the serpentine nature of addiction.

Other shining Farmiga films: her postpartum-suffering mother of two (including one smooth sociopath) in the underrated horror indie, JOSHUA (which I write about here), and a caffeinated police shrink with poor taste in men in THE DEPARTED (which I write about here).

But the problem here is that you have probably never heard of DOWN TO THE BONE or JOSHUA until now. You know THE DEPARTED though, and that's the one where she's shoe-horned into a pointless, obligatory nude scene. The former two are just shuttled to DVD as Sundance also-rans, too slow, disturbing or "depressing" to make for a fun evening's blockbuster rental. And won't somebody think of the children?!!!

Farmiga already has a lot of the smarter critics beating their chests and hollering about how unfair it was she missed an Oscar nomination for BONE. But that doesn't mean I can't add my holler to the gentle din: VERA FARMIGA, J'TAIME!!

Great Dads of the Seventies #13: Jack Nicholson in THE DEPARTED

Just because THE DEPARTED doesn't really seem to occur in the 1970s doesn't mean Nicholson's amazing performance as the Irish criminal top dog villain, Frank Costello, doesn't count. Nor doesn't it count just because Jack isn't really a father to either Matt Damon or Leo DiCaprio in the film. The reasons for the choice will soon be clear, but first of all Jack is SO MUCH like my own dad used to be (in the 1970s) here that he instantly heads the A-list of cinema dads, period. Let's look at some of the traits:

1. A dad to all needy children, not just his own: A good 1970s dad is just that, a dad to all. Nicholson sticks up for abused choir boys (by telling off a priest), encourages his "entourage" to go to college ("Maybe one day you'll wake the fuck up," he tells a goofily "faux-macho" Leo), gives good presents and praise ("You earned it," he tells Matt who gazes on some big ticket gift --rolex?--when he graduates into the staties). And so forth.
2. A wicked sense of humor (racist, perhaps, sexist certainly, but deliberately enjoying and aware of the wrongness of his ways. He's the relic of a bygone era and he knows it, and is not afraid to trumpet his own offensive horn).
3. A large appetite for women, booze and cigarettes (he doesn't bother to curb his habits in front of the kids, nor in anyway put on fronts of hypocritical posturing)
4. The ability to intimidate via voice and attitude alone. (If he raises his voice, people listen, because he sounds like he will fuck you up and not give a shit, and that's enough most of the time)

Right on! Favorite moments include Nicholson's loving look at his right hand man, Mr. French, when he says "Arthur, you're one in a million") ("Ten," Arthur replies. "Ten million.") and his interplay with Damon at the X-rated theater (see above), wherein Matt reports "I have to find myself," to which Jack quips "Oh, you're telling me, Sonny boy!" ... there's a constant sense of menace radiating off the old man, and it gives the jokey interplay throughout the film an edge of tough reality. A good 1970s dad loves you in a way that's just a little scary - I don't mean pedophile or abuse scary, I mean scary in a little kid whose cheek is reddened by a sweep of the old man's whiskers for a goodnight kiss, the taste of whiskey and cigarettes emanating from it - thrilling in its sensory overload - too rough, too strong, too everything, for comfort, but not too much that you can't handle it (the overload is what stretches you - you don't grow from comfort).

You might be a little afraid of him, but you're sure as hell not afraid of anyone or anything else when he's in the room.

The Greg Kinear/Jason Bateman-style 2008 super-dad of sensitive indie cinema/TV by contrast is more like a co-dependent guidance counselor. You live in the shadow of his weakness; his terror is that he will lose you or you will no longer love him. He's "trying" to be a good dad. but he doesn't see how his "trying" puts all this pressure on you as the kid to justify such clearly strenuous effort.

A 1970s dad will always put himself first, presuming you are not in physical danger that is--he may dive off a cliff to save you, but won't even stir from his easy chair if you are just crying and moaning for no reason up in your room. Without that sort of benign indifference how would you ever learn to be independent? How would you know that eventually you would stop crying on your own; that you'd be okay even if no one came? That's the most important realization of a young person's life and nowadays, and more and wind up in rehab because they never learned it.

So, the 1970s Dad society salutes Jack Nicholson, the embodiment of that hedonistic intellectual charismatic devil who follows his own drummer and expects all his kids to do the same. Jack, you're one in ten million. Twenty. Twenty million...

JPL is RIP

If you’re a fan of the films of Otto Preminger, Roger Corman, or Mario Bava – or, like me, all three – you will be saddened to learn of the death earlier this week of John Phillip Law, who was an iconic presence in the films of all three directors.

For Preminger, he played a poor white farmer in Hurry Sundown (1967), and an acid-dropping hippie in Skidoo (1968).

For Corman, he played the symbol of Germany’s best, Baron von Richtofen, supplanted by Germany’s worst, the Nazis, in Von Richtofen and Brown (1971). He also appeared memorably for another Roger – Vadim – as the blind angel Pygar in Barbarella (1968).

Equally iconic, if not more so, was his appearance as the jumpsuit-clad comic book villain Diabolik in Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik (also 1968, above).

For a far more detailed consideration of Law’s legacy, see Tim Lucas’s Video Watchblog here and here.

The Morphology of Mojo

The New York Times, out to prove that it can still rock your world, cranks out a trés fabulous neo-geological time chart of boxoffice receipts from 1986 to the present. The graphic, which looks like striated taffy, is color-coded to show each film’s total receipts. And it's even adjusted for inflation! Height shows weekly receipts, while length reveals whether a film had legs. I’m not sure if I believe all I see, though. Did Gangs of New York (Dec. 2002) really open bigger than Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers? Anyway, check it out.

Bright Lights Film Journal 60 posted

Issue 60 of Bright Lights Film Journal just went live.

from the editor

Our bad!

features foyer

Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game Reconsidered — Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos?

Twenty-One Years in the Midday Sun: Revisiting Roger Ebert's Cannes — Here's lookin' at you, Roger

articles antechamber

What's Your Function? How Movies Are Made — You mean you've tried panicking?

One Culture, Two Systems: The Rules of Spanglish and Twice Upon a Time — "When talking to others, what needs to be articulated?"

Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a Hollywood Myth — On the manifest destiny of Civil War tricksters and gun-slinging corpses

Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grand Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures — "To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it's a physiological act, it's urban guerrilla" — Marco Ferreri

Serpentine Evil and the Garden of Eden in DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) — Samson, meet Adam; Delilah, meet Eve

cellar of silence

Looking at Charlie — The Circus: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin — Life in the ring

recent cinema roundabout

Critics Cornered: On Reviewers' Reactions to David Ayres' Street Kings — "Anyone who speaks unsanitized thought is going to lose."

the empty guest room

Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame — "I'm a girl who loves to be manhandled! After all, what are a few contusions or abrasions if you get the man you love?" — Gloria Grahame, 1953

interrogation alcove

Birds Do It, Bees Do It: Isabella Rossellini Talks About Bug Sex, Human Sex, and Green Porno — "A laugh and information!"

From a Line of Ancestors: Talking with Doris Dörrie and Natasha Arthy — "We in the West trample on them."

A Quiet Storm: Charles Burnett on Namibia and His Post-Killer of Sheep Career — "Each film requires for me its own approach."

Man with a Movie Camera: Visiting Jonathan Caouette — "I could somehow control my own story"

documentary dormer

What's Up, Docs? Nonstandard Operating Procedures in Recent Documentaries, and Interviews with Patricio Henriquez and Doug Pray — "Why didn't you just stick to the truth?"

there will be blood, and more blood

Bowling for America: Robert Warshow, There Will Be Blood, and the Topography of Desire — "The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist. But the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it." — George Gordon, Lord Byron

The Human Monster: On Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood — "There are no good and bad men, there are only damaged men . . ."

vale of video

Dream Documents of Civil War: Three Films by Miklós Jancsó — "Jancsó's controlled aesthetic acts as a dissonance that vibrates expressively with scenes of violence, torture, and shame."

film festival flying buttress

Plus Ça Change: The 2008 Rendez-vous with French Cinema — Gingerly moving out of the 20th century, not quite into the 21st

bright sights

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Harry Langdon: Lost and Found, Postwar Kurosawa, I Am Cuba, The Dragon Painter, The Wrath of the Gods, Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema — An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

hiding in the stacks

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris

Mother's Day Salute to Cinematic Blonde Moms... of DEATH!

It's mother's day and as I was watching MULHOLLAND DRIVE just now for the millionth time, it occured to me that my love for cinema would not be nearly so fierce if not for my own mother was not a natural blonde, Swedish to be precise, and if you don't know what that means, it's a mix of tenderness and disinterest, the teutonic fire that burns not out nor warm nor long... and it's what cinema is! For psychological subtext there's Hitchcock and Lynch - Naomi Watts, the mother of mirrors hallucinating in her dirty bathrobe while we hover as camera lens ghosts at her hem line, or Marnie in PSYCHO or Melanie in THE BIRDS, creating this sense of unfulfillable longing-- we can never please her so we spend our lives creating shadow plays to distract ourselves... stuffing birds... a curious hobby, and not as expensive as you'd think, until they attack everyone as manifestations of Jessica Tandy's ferocious id. Imagine an Oscar clip montage devoted to psychotic moms! All sharp instruments and flashing blue eyes... cans of soup on the stove, Ultra-Man on the TV, a vague sense of doom, comfort, coziness and futility all commingling in your pre-school genius mind.

So without further ado... five great blonde mothers in five great films:

2. Michelle Pfeiffer in WHITE OLEANDER -- aka Hannah Belle Lechter, mom kills a boyfriend and later drives her daughter's step mom to suicide with just a few well placed words, all from the cozy confines of her prison. In one of her giddy pieces of praise for this pic, Kim Morgan writes: ""We're not like that. We're the Vikings," says sociopathic blonde mother Michelle Pfeiffer to her crying teenage daughter Alison Lohman in White Oleander. One of cinema's great blonde-semble pieces, this melodrama is supposed to be, in part, about the foster-care system, but Oleander really shows the varied, sometimes insane incarnations of blonde womanhood. (read full article here.) In a different piece praising Pfeiffer's best roles, Morgan notes: "By artfully melding her gorgeous Grace Kelly qualities with the cold eyes of a Ted Bundy, Michelle creates a classic performance for a real "Woman's Picture." (read that one here.

3. Liv Ullmann/Bibi Andersson in PERSONA - The poor bespectacled son can't even make it out of the morgue of pre-egoic identification to be with his mom in this nutty gem from the Great Swede himself, Ingmar Bergman. While the son resides in some bizarre synaptical cine-womb, ever reaching for her projected image, Liv prefers to merge vampirically with the blank hotness of Bibi Andersson (pictured below, with glasses off). Mirror these two up to Betty and Diane in MULHOLLAND and you got yourself a four-way trip to the bughouse of the pre-differentiated self. Incidentally, of all these blondes, Andersson is the one I am most attracted to and yet she also is the one who most resembles my mom. For what it's worth, maybe too much information for you... I'm just throwing that in the stew for extra frisson.

5. Leopoldine Constantin in NOTORIOUS. The old school hausfrau to a Nazi son (Claude Rains) with bad taste in women, Frau Constantin is willing to stay in the background as a stock character, but when Rains finds out he's "married to an American agent!" he knows he can relax, as his mom sheds her homey front with a sigh, like a wolf grateful to cast off its sheep's clothing and feel its fur in the wind again. Lighting a cigarette, Rains' mom paces back and forth puffing tobacco and forming a diabolical plan. For her, the chance to plot the slow accidental death of her daughter-in-law is like the sudden arrival in the mail of a juicy book of sidoku would be to my own mother.

4. Cheryl Ladd in POISON IVY. As the grandly dying mom up in her red silk bedroom, cringing at the touch of her ugly duckling daughter (Sarah Gilbert), Ladd is great in a weird role that she pulls off with aplomb. The movie would have been perfect anyway, as it's got Tom Skerritt as the alcoholic dad, sneaking vodka shots out of the kitchen cupboard after realizing he's fooled around with his daughter's blonde nymphette friend (Drew Barrymore), but then Ladd comes along as the icing on the cake, clutching this homewrecking hottie to her chest like Cleopatra with an asp.

1. Natasha Henstridge in SPECIES! This mom is the ideal for both humans and H.R. Giger-designed aliens. I've written extensively about my love for Henstridge in an article for Acidemic on one of my favorite films of all time, GHOSTS OF MARS. I also discuss SPECIES, noting that Henstridge "played Syl, an alien/human hybrid who escapes her medical lab upbringing and hunts for a "breeder" partner, to mate with, mantis-like. Thanks to Henstridge's startling beauty and sex appeal, this death/re-birth by vagina dentata becomes horribly desirable. A femme fatale with no pretense of not killing you, but so hot you can't resist. Her allure is thus now and forever linked to the key Freudian primordial fantasy -- to die and be reborn into a nicer mom's womb, to move from outside the screen to inside the actress. This is the death drive’s actual goal realized via cinema, and she is its ultimate goddess, the modern Kali, ripping your heart out with one hand, and pulling you out of the void into life with the other." (read the rest of this crazed rant here). So... Syl has Alfred Molina's baby mere minutes after fucking him, running off to an underground oil well to do so. Granted the bastard gets fried by flame throwers... oh wait, how bad does the climax of this movie suck? Pretty badly. The trick is to drink lots of vodka during the first hour and a half, so that by the time the underground cavern climax rolls around, you're passed out cold. Then when you wake up, just press play and watch from the beginning, that way the film goes on forever in a weird version of the mobius strip called "quantum immortality."

Of course there are great moms of death who aren't blonde too. I'd like to give a shout out to Asia Argento (HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS), Kate Hepburn in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER and LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, and of course, Mrs. Bates... Happy Mother's Day!