ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #52: THE STONE KILLER (1973)

Charlie Bronson’s rogue cop flick features psycho-Vietnam-vets-as-mob-mercenaries; a racist dipshit cop who almost burns down his own police station; Martin Balsam as a Wario-esque mafia boss; John Ritter as a hapless uniformed bullet catcher; Bronson channeling his inner Scanner to psychically shatter a mirror; and a reckless Blues Brothers-worthy car chase in which a bicoastal detective pursues a bisexual criminal-it’s too much of a good thing, I tells ya’!

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #25: THE EXORCIST (1973)

 

Technically, it's the first and the best of the franchise, but I still prefer Richard Pryor's two minute stand-up reimagining.

BOOK REVIEW: THE BOX MAN (1973, 1974)

by Kobo Abe

English translation by E. Dale Saunders.

Published in 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Original Japanese language publication in 1973 by Shinchosha.

. . .

"It would be better for you not to forget that you are merely my scribblings. You say that I tend to cling too much to the box? As soon as I dispose of it as you advise, you too will completely disappear with the scribblings."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

In Tokyo, middle-aged men are abandoning their lives to become Box Men, which entails giving up their jobs and their families-if they had such relationships in the first place-to don modified refrigerator boxes and shoot at each other with airsoft rifles modified to shoot lead pellets. So, if you see a tall cardboard structure with a pair of legs and a rectangular opening at eye level-hey, it's a thing now, so know that you're not hallucinating.

Of course, a Box Man might be hallucinating. It's possible that one could be quite detached from reality in order to become a Box Man. And if you are indeed a Box Man yourself, and you start seeing Box Men everywhere, well, maybe you're just seeing what you want to see. Or you're just picking up the signal of other Box Men from the noise of mainstream existence because you're focused on hanging around other people who are like you. 

There's also this thing where when someone sees a Box Man they may be filled with a kind of cryptic fear and loathing at the sight of such a strange being, and so they seek to attack a Box Man . . . but then the attacker finds themselves compelled to become a Box Man themselves, perhaps upon finding the remains of a modified refrigerator box abandoned by an injured Box Man. Every shell needs a snail, right? 

The Box Man is a novel which starts out describing what seems to be a bizarre but semi-plausible social phenomenon. But read into it deeper and it spins out into a fractured yet recursive narrative that gives one the sensation of a novel in the process of rewriting itself. The Box Man starts with a news article about the oppressive cycle of police round-ups of homeless people in Ueno. This article comes across as an inspiration for what follows-what if disenfranchised people made their own way of life as Box Men as a fuck you to respectable society? But then the narrative seemingly collapses down into the mind of some authorial figure-Kobo Abe himself?-who burrows deeper into the labyrinth of his own imagination. This author seems obsessed with a pair of recurring figures in his ongoing narrative: a doctor whom he considers a Fake Box Man and the sexy stripping nurse who is the doctor's consort. We get variations on themes of voyeurism, guilt-ridden masturbation fantasies, and endless arguments over who gets to be a 'real' Box Man as opposed to a fraudulent Box Man. Abe once studied to be a doctor but never practiced medicine, so perhaps this is the author confronting some leftover regret about abandoning a mainstream life to become a weirdo artsy writerly type. 

All of this is, according to the author-or one of the identities assumed by the author-being meticulously scribbled all over the inside surfaces of the modified refrigerator box. Occasionally, addenda are written upon different colored sheets of paper, and there are also various marginalia scribbled between and among different blocks of text. 

The Box Man is a restless, frustrated text that starts out as social satire about capitalist alienation, drifts into ruminations upon sexual fantasy and sexual humiliation, and seemingly recapitulates themes of postwar identity abandonment from other Abe works such as The Woman in the Dunes. And then it changes the ground rules. It spins variations on the idea of being a Box Man. It glories and/or despairs in the absolute solipsistic power of an author endlessly re-authoring his own tale. Dreams, nightmares, and tawdry pornographic stroke-off fantasies collide. The authorial presence flies free into abstractions and visions and animal transformation fantasias only to come crashing down into peeping tom scenarios worthy of Letters to Penthouse. To don the armor of the Box Man is to enter into a state of transformation both powerful and isolating. Think of the towering anthropomorphic battlesuits from future war anime mecha franchises such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Armored Trooper VOTOMS, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, wherein humans gain power but suffer psychological trauma on the battlefield. Now think of the contemporary phenomenon of the hikikomori-people who isolate themselves by seldom leaving their rooms, sacrificing normal relationships and careers as they are disabled by extreme social anxiety. The Box Man could well be adapted into an anime titled Mobile Suit Hikikomori, in which one achieves an ambiguous freedom from the rat race by merging with a bizarre kind of armor that marks one as an outcast even as it facilitates grandiose visions and hallucinations.

MOVIE REVIEW: WORLD ON A WIRE (1973)

 

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

Screenplay by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

From the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye 

Cinematography by Michael Ballhaus

Edited by Marie Anne Gerhardt 

Production designed by Kurt Raab 

Costumes by Gabriele Pillon 

Music by Gottfried Hüngsberg

Produced by Peter Märthesheimer and Alexander Wesemann 

Starring 

Klaus Löwitsch as Fred Stiller

Mascha Rabben as Eva Vollmer

Karl-Heinz Vosgerau as Siskins 

Adrian Hoven as Professor Vollmer

Ivan Desny as Günther Lause 

…

"Sorry, I've never heard of a Lause."

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

World on a Wire is one of those science fiction stories that asks We the Audience to play the Reality Game: "What if the world as we know it is just an elaborate, interactive deception? What if We the Inhabitants of this deception are just simulated beings with bogus programmed memories and personality constructs? What would we do if we discovered the illusory nature of our world, our selves? Could we become real on the basis of such insight?"

Amusingly, World on a Wire uses artificial sets, discordant sound effects, voyeuristic camera placement, hypnotic music, and overly precise phrasing of dialogue,framing of shots, and timing of montage to convey such a simulated world. The people here are more like the iconographic avatars of Second Life or The Sims-collections of gestures, wardrobe, and obsessively goal-focused patterns of thought and speech, lacking the emotional fuzziness and warmth of a more natural acting style. 

This world is a simulation, after all, and simulations are typically constructed at great expense to achieve some sort of instrumentality, usually economic, political, entertainment, and/or military in nature. Therefore, the idiosyncrasies of emergent, evolutionary humanity are streamlined to suit whatever variables are deemed significant to the project's decision makers. 

Our-the Audience's-video game avatar is a computer engineer named Fred Stiller, who has helped build an elaborate simulated virtual world called Simulacron-3. Stiller's motivations are pure science and the public good. But Simulacron-3 could only be realized via a convergence of corporate, governmental, and idiosyncratic psychological interests. Big business wants a leg-up on the competition via omni-variable economic forecasts. The government most likely desires some sort of intelligence and surveillance level-up, though this aspect is  muted in World on a Wire. The project is being underwritten by tax revenues from the public, who, as per usual, don't seem to have much democratic control over the process. Technocratic daydream believin' elites seem to trump a skeptical public as per usual in science fiction. 

Stiller loses his grip on reality when a colleague is seemingly erased from everyone's memory except his own,  a man named Lause.

Before we meet Stiller, we witness a scene wherein Lause has to make sense out of the sudden inexplicable death of Dr. Vollmer, the chief architect of Simulacron-3. So, We the Audience are led to believe in the objective existence of Lause.

Later, Stiller sees Lause in a nightclub. And then Lause disappears. Moreover, no one seems to remember the very existence of Lause . . . except for Stiller. 

Nowadays, this plays like a blatant "Glitch in the Matrix." Someone or something has rewritten the reality all around Stiller while neglecting-or failing-to change Stiller's memories. 

Stiller cannot deny the reality of his memory and so he pursues this phantom Lause to the uttermost distance, beyond job security, beyond the law, beyond the limits of his own sanity. 

Of course, another reading of World on a Wire is that Stiller is actually losing his mind due to some combination of work stress, undiagnosed mental illness, and maybe some kind of substance abuse. The corporate/governmental intrigues surrounding the Simulacron-3 project are intense. Stiller's boss tries to replace him with a new hire with loyalties to a steel company. The steel company wants privileged access to the economic forecasting powers of Simulacron-3 by means of what amounts to an industrial spy. The idealistic Stiller could be suffering from a growing disillusionment as he bears witness to this chicanery, which might feed into some type of paranoia.

I think the intention here is to get the audience on Stiller's side. He keeps his cool. He's intellectual. Even his frustrated outbursts are carefully modulated. We already know that Lause existed outside of Stiller's memory. We want Stiller to solve the mystery. 

However, science fiction can and does work on both the literal and metaphorical levels. Even if we believe in Stiller, World on a Wire could be read as a commentary on the pressure and duplicity one must endure in a high stakes technology start-up. The confusions over what's real and what's illusion could be a critique of the hype cycles surrounding the advent of any new and fashionable gadget or process or management doctrine. 

If you ever have the time, go to a big university library and browse the stacks with the business school texts. Take note of the titles and trends and fads. As an American, I'm always amused by the volume of titles predicting Japan's impending takeover of global capitalism. Plenty of smart, well educated, well trained people get caught up devising trendy scenarios pandering to the financial titans of the moment. Maybe it is this crooked process that drives Stiller nuts since this is a direct assault on his core identity as a socially conscious champion of pure, unbiased scientific research. 

Mirrors are everywhere in World on a Wire. A biased simulation just reflects back increasingly distorted images of what we desperately wish to be true. And unfortunately, even a distorted simulation can be used to inflate consumer and, more importantly, shareholder confidence. 

World on a Wire also mixes in elements of film noir, hard-boiled detective fiction, and James Bond. Stiller is a two-fisted computer nerd who dresses in tuxedos and pinstriped suits, drives a sports car, and always gets laid. Plenty of fighting and fucking in this techno-thriller. These macho cliches also point up the artificial nature of what transpires with a high degree of self-aware camp. The fact that Stiller's executive secretary also seems to function as a concubine is a clue that there's something weird about this reality that seems to pander to a specific set of desires and corporate fetishes. 

As Stiller gets deeper into things, we have scenes set inside a nightclub where a Marlene Dietrich impersonator sings in the face of impending execution by Nazis who march while singing television advertising jingles. Before she is shot, the Dietrich doppelganger looks at her reflection in a sword and freshens her lipstick. Is Simulacron-3, this carefully crafted simulation, attaining self-awareness? Is it evolving a counterculture with a fuck you attitude to corporate capitalism? World on a Wire has fun with these possibilities. 

MOVIE REVIEW: WESTWORLD (1973)

 Written and Directed by Michael Crichton

Director of Photography Gene Polito

Edited by David Bretherton

Special Effects by Charles Schulthies

Visual Effects Coordinator Brent Sellstrom

Automated Image Processing (Robo-Vision) by Information International, INC. and John Whitney, Jr.

Make-Up by Frank Griffin and Irving Pringle

Art Director Herman Blumenthal

Produced by Paul N. Lazarus III

Music by Fred Karlin

Wild West Saloon Brawls and Shootouts by Dick Ziker

Starring

Yul Brynner

Richard Benjamin

James Brolin

Norman Bartold

Alan Oppenheimer

…

This is the problem of the way we get into and out of the play or game . . . what are the codes which govern these entries and exits?

-Brian Sutton-Smith, Child’s Play (1971) (by way of Rules of Play(2003) by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman)

Those who had not destroyed themselves had sought oblivion in ever more feverish activities, in fierce and suicidal sports that were often indistinguishable from minor wars.

       -Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End(1953).

“Central mechanism psychosis?”

-an actual question posed by some tech support nerd in Westworld (1973)

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Delos is a futuristic amusement park that allows you to inhabit three different kinds of mythologized pasts: the American Wild West, debauched Roman Times, and a Chivalric European Medievalism Trip. 

So, you can be a gunslinger or a sheriff or an outlaw or a knight errant or a king or a queen or a Roman emperor or empress in an elaborate live action role-playing game (LARP in today’s terminology) facilitated by full-size authentic environments populated by interactive robots that you can pretty much treat however you want. 

You want to shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, burn ‘em, torture ‘em-you got it. There are robotic prostitutes, concubines, slaves, gladiators-you can make ‘em do whatever you desire. 

You want ‘em to fight to the death in a guilt-free spectacle slaughter? Done.  

You want to stage a big robo-orgy? Hey, no risk of STDs, so toss all the robo-salad you please. 

Maybe you want a robot to whip your ass? It can be done, friend, and you don’t even have to tell your significant other. 

They’re just robots. 

Fuck ‘em, right?

Except . . . hey, can I ask you a question?

You ever watch a movie or read a story or comic book with robots . . . and not want ‘em to go berserk and rise up and wreck all the shit? 

I know, I know, I know-it’s stupid. 

WE build the robots. WE program ‘em. Why would WE allow them to go off the rails? Asimov resolved all this decades ago. 

But . . . maybe I don’t want Asimov. Maybe I want a dumb robot rebellion story. Maybe that’s my desire, okay?

You set up the pins. And then you want to see them all get knocked down. 

You build the Lego castle, and then you demolish it with your Godzilla action figure. 

You spend months meticulously composing a mandala out of different colored sands only to ritually obliterate it when the time comes.

All in good fun. 

That’s Westworld. It was a movie written and directed by Michael Crichton ten thousand goddamn years ago-same guy who wrote the novel Jurassic Park. 

You want a version of Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs don’t go on the rampage? 

Whaaat? 

Seriously? 

Why bother, then-just, umm, here . . . read these stereo instructions. You’ll have a ball. 

We good?

Okay . . .

. . . what was I talking about again?

Westworld. 1973. About a place called Delos that uses future robot technology to allow you to live in a historically questionable version of the past that really only existed in dumb western flicks and boring-ass costume pictures-I mean, how many layers of phony nostalgia are we getting wrapped up in here? We’re gonna be a goddamn Nostalgia Mummy-and just as fragrant-by the time we get to the end of this thing. 

Westworld is amusing to watch because it’s not a million miles away from immersive time-suck video games like Fallout 4 or World of Warcraft or Red Dead Redemption or Evercrack. And this is back in ‘73, well before video games existed in the way they do, now; and yet this film has so many elements that have become cliches of gaming:

You have the boring Whiteman Protagonist who goes from innocence to experience while being handheld by a tutorial expositional character.

(But I gotta give lead actor Richard Benjamin credit: his epic porn-stache could probably deflect both bullets and the clap.)

You have superfluous sex with robo-babes to restore the Whiteman’s health bar just like in a Grand Theft Auto game.

Yul Brynner plays a creepy recurring boss battle gunslinger reminiscent of, say, Nemesis from Resident Evil: Nemesis. There’s even a protracted multi-stage final boss battle where the Whiteman has to navigate an unfamiliar environment and figure out the final boss’s weaknesses and implement a counterintuitive strategy to win. 

(Yul Brynner’s robo-gunslinger even anticipates later ruthlessly stalking, nigh-unkillable movie villains such as Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, the T-800, the T-1000, and Agent Smith.)

You even get to play both sides of the law in the Wild West simulation. One day you’re the sheriff and the next day you’re a desperado. It can all be done, amigo!

Now, there is some fun expositional techno-babble to explain why everything is going off-program. It’s not badly done for what it is. I especially appreciated the line about how many of the more advanced robots are designed wholly by other robots, and, therefore, the project is very definitely getting away from total human control. 

It even gets eerie, and just a touch philosophical, in the final scenes. Nothing too overbearing. This movie knows it’s mostly having fun with you. But it still has enough creepiness to allow it to stick in your memory. Maybe you’ll even create your own tabletop role-playing campaign with your friends based off of Westworld. For all I know there might have been an actual officially licensed rules set or GURPS worldbook or something like that back in the day. That would be pretty cool. 

So have fun with all that.

Just don’t actually shoot or stab or torture or enslave or oppress each other, okay? We got enough of that shit in real life.

Ya’ll play purdy, now!

(Horrifying scream choking off to a wet, squelching, cracking, crunching set of noises as powerful robo-hands crush William’s skull.)

BONUS: If you watch Westworld with the French soundtrack it plays like an extremely quirky sequel to Alphaville.

MOVIE REVIEW: PAYDAY (1973)

Starring Rip Torn

written by Don Carpenter 

Directed by Daryl Duke

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Rip Torn plays Maury Dann, a country singer who is the stuff of VH1 Legends. He boozes, pops pills, and treats women like property. Disposable property. He mostly lives on the road, in the back of his low-rent limo, flanked by his long-time girlfriend on one side and a new pick-up on the other: a young woman who works as a store clerk in some podunk town he and the band played a couple jumps back. Maury isn't too big on names. Of places or people. 

He's a decent musician. But this isn't a concert movie. Mostly this movie just observes Maury's behavior towards the people around him. He's a bit of a despicable douchebag, but he has talent. Rip Torn performs a couple of times in this movie: once, at the beginning, for a crowd at an anonymous shitkicker bar, and again, later, by himself. Both times he acquits himself well. The later performance is especially poignant, as it is the only time you get to see him working on his music, which is presumably his passion. He's all by himself in a hotel room, swilling Coca-Cola to jazz himself out of an alcoholic funk, and strumming on his acoustic guitar. He consults legal pads with lyrics scribbled on them. There's a closeup of his face, as he plays, eyes closed, his ragged voice barely stage worthy. Is the music an escape from his pain? Maybe his pain is an escape from the music. 

There are other people in his caravan: a slick, reptilian, hard-driving agent from the big city, who tries to keep Maury on task; fellow musicians; Maury's deranged mother; a youngblood wannabee musician who begs Maury to let him join the band; and later on we even get to meet the wife and kids Maury abandoned.

The movie presents a damaged character, in thrall to his addictions, his appetites, and does not water down his vile attitudes towards women, or his profound, dangerous immaturity. Rip Torn doesn't so much perform the character, as embody him. His approach is rather low key, which is also the approach of the movie: not a lot of yelling, or soul-searching speeches, just behavior, keenly observed. It's all in how Maury gets up in the morning. It's in his diet of fried chicken, Coca-Cola, amphetamines, whiskey, and the occasional marijuana joint. It's the way Maury carries himself, like the pain is never far from the surface. It's in how, even when he sleeps, he never seems to get any rest. The movie seems to suggest that a guy like Maury is constantly on the road because he needs the sensation of constant movement. The music really does seem like an afterthought at times, though Maury plays very well. Maybe he feels he has to live the Life in order to be authentic to the fans. Maybe it's something else. 

The movie gives a realistic sense of what it was like in the 1960s and 1970s to be a country western band on the road, and all the shit work and drudgery that goes into being on tour: negotiating the nightly wage from the venue manager, popping in for a guest appearance on local radio stations, partying and playing poker all night in ratty motel rooms, etc. But at the heart of it all is Maury Dann, and the revelation of his tormented character.