o hand in hand

the bassist for the dead milkmen passed away today. and as a fellow philadelphian, i thought i'd jot down some recollections or something...

the milkmen were arguably the first punk band that i ever heard of (ok, maybe the exploited or the sex pistols or black flag)... growing up in philly, you had a kind of vague awareness of them, punk or not. and in high school, i spent many an hour with their records (metaphysical graffiti especially). they were sort of gabe's band to me, being that my friend gabe was obssessed with them. i can remember bopping my head along with him as he recited all the lyrics to "stuart" (our skate-rat bangs swaying in the breeze). i only knew the bit about "what the queers are doing to the soil"... hahahaha... gabe was more hardcore about them.

i saw the milkmen a few times in the early nineties, and i was even at their second-to-last-show ever, at the trocadero, in '94 or '95. i remember they opened with the very un-PC "rc's mom" ("gonna beat my wife/ hehehehehe"). the whole crowd sang along to, like, every song. very philadelphia. and a lot of fun. they were great live.

one of the things that i liked about the milkmen was how they managed to be really crass and cheap without coming off too macho. this, in my estimation sets them a bar above bands like fear or the meatmen. they were sorta like a more innocent (and apolitical) version of the dead kennedys in a way...

(i dunno, i'm not really an expert on punk.)

suffice to say that when i think of myself in my early high school days, the milkmen are always one of the key nostalgic ingredients... and that nostalgia just got a bit more bittersweet, i guess.

i finally saw roman polanski's the pianist last night, and i must say it surpassed my expectations. it has many of the usual conventions of a film geared towards a large audience ("everyman"-ish lead character, emphasis on the personal over the political-- at least for the most part), but it manages to steer clear of the heavy hand that generally marks dramatic films that clean up at the oscars. i think what distinguishes it as a real class act is the way spatial arrangements are orchestrated throughout the film. i'll explain...

the pianist is largely about exile, and likewise actor adrien brody spends much of his screen time in hiding. unlike the majority of WWII epics i've seen, the focus is less on major events (battles, etc.) and more on the schematics of brody/szpilman's survival. this makes it by-and-large an "indoor" picture, as brody makes his way from his initial home in poland, to his home in the warsaw ghetto (a particularly engaging segment of the movie), to a series of hide-outs as his predicament grows increasingly grave. polanski shows great restraint in sticking to a singular narrative. when atrocities do appear on screen, they are often from brody's perspective, and lacking many typical cinematic embellishments.

a favorite moment of mine is during an uprising in the polish ghetto, which is shot entirely from the point of view of brody in an apartment window. through this birds-eye view, one watches as guns are shot and grenades are thrown. but there is no slo-mo... no close-ups of hacked off limbs... what emerges is similar to the sort of camcorder footage that shows up in news footage alongside current atrocities (in its lack of editing, zooming, etc.), but without the staged grittiness that a deliberate attempt to mimic such a thing might entail. the conflict is rendered with understated dignity, as well as a clear faith in the viewer's ability to process its content (as well as its intensity).

when the time is finally right for a more sweeping panorama of war-torn ruin, it is all the more effective because of such understatement. the single wide shot of brody entering the abandoned, apocalyptic ruins near the end of the film (where he will eventually meet the nazi officer portrayed by thomas kretschmann), maintains its dark sublimity because it is not the latest in a series of lord-of-the-rings-esque spectacles. it earns its legitimacy by waiting for the proper time to arrive. again and again, the film seems borne not only out of great emotion, but great respect as well. which is probably why it's increasingly on my mind now that it's over.

hundreds of virgin skulls gather together and make a kind of virgin-skull-snowball-thing. pointy horns start peeking out of it. the inside is glowing red and smoke is pouring out. sammo hung, in an attempt to contain the forces of evil through some sort of magical power he exerts through his eyebrows (which are about a hundred billion miles long) proceeds to wrap his grey eyebrows, along with his long grey hair and beard, around the skull thing like a spider trapping a fly in a web. the skull thing takes flight.

there are a lot of movies in the world, but there is only one where you get to see a giant skully thing drag sammo hung across the sky by his eyebrows. that movie is zu: warriors from the magic mountain, and-- having recently seen it for the second time-- it remains by leaps and bounds the weirdest martial arts/kung fu movie i've ever seen.

zu is one of the earliest efforts of chinese/vietnamese director tsui hark (read this link, it's very good), who can be credited for oodles and oodles of the magical effects us folks in the states know from crouching tiger and the matrix series (and just about every action movie on the planet these days). zu itself was apparently the direct inspiration for john carpenter's big trouble in little china. its usuage of hollywood style special effects made it a landmark in hong kong, where hark is often referred to as "the steven speilberg of hong kong" (here's another link).

i guess there's the temptation to chalk the "weirdness" of zu up to cultural ignorance-- of which i'm 100% guilty-- but i fear that does a dis-service to the vitality of the film. zu is so excessive in its innovations that it sets aside all concern for coherence, logic and budget. every action is garnished with a ribbon or an electrical shock or a sex change or an explosion. people bang around sherbert-colored studio sets like pinballs. and, uh, good eventually conquers evil. the rest is rather confusing.

but it's that good, drunken, don't-give-a-fuck confusion that makes finds like this so exciting. it's also a reminder of how boring sticking-to-the-plot can get in the action genre. zu is a giant, 80's-psychedelic banquet of a movie. put a few beers in the fridge, and strap on your wire harness (hehehe).

(sorry. that's an awful line to end this post with, but i can't think of anything else, and it's getting late...)