Clive Barker's Nightbreed Director's cut

I was one of the first thousand to preorder it. I saw the movie back in 1990 and wasn't entirely pleased with it. Warners billed it as something like a slasher at the time, which is not. What Nightbreed was and now is again is the Citizen Kane of monster movies where the tables are turned--or that's what it was supposed to be, an epic tale, a metaphor for discrimination against LGBT people, and much more, a lost classic now found and restored to its former glory before the suits got their hands on it. 

A comparison is in order here: This is like the achievement of a full restoration of the first gay-positive movie ever made, Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919, starring Conrad Veidt, the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) or The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), it is historic.

I should receive the set by this weekend or early next week. A sprawling review and reflection on the new cut is coming. I'll also be doing a similar essay on Breaking Bad as a cultural and historical phenomenon in time now that the series has concluded and the dust has settled a bit. Expect the unexpected.

Postscript, 10.10.14: It's arrived! This is going to take some time to digest, but I should have my first observations up in about a week. The set is pretty amazing and the new artwork for the 3-BD set is better than the promotional art at the time. David Cronenberg should be pleased, he gets more screen time.

10.11.14: After watching the director's cut last night, I can say that we have a new classic.  What's most surprising is how what Barker intended most is a great, epic love story, a tale of universal love. Nightbreed has finally arrived to the audience it was intended for all along. There are so many things to say about it, and I will shortly. 

Audio and video quality are superb--it looks & sounds vastly better than its theatrical debut which is saying something. Yes, David Cronenberg has more screen time. I won't be printing any spoilers. 

Karl Rove, a pussy? Who woulda thunk? Me.

Word has it that Karl Rove's new book has a stunning admission: that he got his ass kicked by a girl as a kid! I know, hard to imagine considering he already looks like a muppet disguised as Heinrich Himmler (fuck you and the "law" you rode in on, Mr. Godwin), wrapped in an enigma, smothered in danish.

But look...OK, don't look, especially if you've eaten already, fuck me.

Is Karl Rove not the poster child for the squirming pathology that is most Republicans and the worst-of-the-worst in the corporate world? Yes, yes, rumor has it that Karl is gay, but does it really matter in the final analysis (and let's remember that "anal" is part of the word)? We all know that most of the last 30 years of Republican domination of the national dialog is hate-based, but it also has a weird revanchist quality underlying it (note that "lying" is a part of the word, made flesh). It's also not especially sexy and reeks of the socially-retarded dork.

Can this piece have more digressions? Yes. So, Rove gets his ass kicked-in decades ago by a little girl. Do you think he had it coming? First, let's recall that this was a little girl, they were both nine, and it fifty years ago. Could he be more of a pussy? Sure. Why would a little girl want to kick his ass in? Keep in mind that he horse-laughingly titled his Book of Lies (fuck you Crowley!) Courage and Consequence, which considering this "revelation," makes it more bizarre and funnier than Mein Kampf. "Revanchist"? Yes, he lost masculine territory to the liberal skirts, and so, he would "get even" with them and "liberal America" after that fated day in 1960 when she punched him in the nose, and rightly so. Yes, the die had been cast, the gauntlet thrown down, and life would never, and could ever, be the same. It was war. Never mind that he was dumb enough to support Nixon at nine, so we have to assume his parents did poor job rearing him...

New York Magazine writes:

At age 9--and already a political nerd--he became a spirited supporter of Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential smackdown against John F. Kennedy. So intense was his devotion that he landed a coveted Nixon bumper sticker and displayed it proudly on his bicycle basket -- until a little girl in his neighborhood who favored JFK beat the stuffing out of him, bloodying his nose and ego. "I've never liked losing a political fight since," Rove writes. ("Karl Rove Was Once Beaten Up By a Girl," New York Magazine, Daily Intel, 03.06.2010)

You gotta be fucking kidding me. If you're that into politics at nine, you're not just a "geek," but violently retarded. OK, I love women, and I would never admit to this in a million years, seriously, that a little girl kicked my ass. Yet, Rove queerly thinks that this little anecdote of his is normal and jokingly wears it as some kind of badge of courage as though it were some epic moment in his life...uh, erm, point taken, but now we know when his and his supporters' emotional development stopped.

I keep telling my friends this over and over again and have written the same here many times: scoundrels are perverse and they'll tell you everything lame, pathetic, and damning about themselves if you give it time and just watch and listen with the right eyes and ears. This is why monsters like Rove hide from the public eye so much and only appear groundhog-stylee at "friendly" venues with hand-picked audiences brimming with their allies. Fine, but the shoehorn fits. All that said, why in the hell would anyone outside of the acquisitions department of a library buy this worthless piece-of-crap book that's very little more than self-serving lies? What the hell is the point or reading it when it's almost nothing but bullshit?

I would imagine, though, that this one part of the book is its truest part, Karl Rove's "rosebud," the crowning rosette of his pathetic political epitaph. What a clown. He's just given historians the final blow, and he's already roundly hated by them and the rest of the world. Being forgotten would be a far better fate.

Horselaughs for all: Karl Rove Was Once Beaten Up By a Girl -- Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/03/karl_rove_was_once_beat_up_by.html#ixzz0hRE2evPn

A note to anonymous commenters...

WWW--Hey, read the comments policy: if you want to sling, you gotta sing. If you don't post under your own identity and you have nothing relevant or constructive to add to the dialog, it's not going to published, period. Don't like it? I don't care.

I'm "restricting [your] rights to free speech"? Puerile (look it up) B.S., go create your own blog and write about what "an awful human being Matt Janovic is," go for it, I might even agree with you in-part and help you out! ;0)

However, if you're entertaining enough, I might just publish your comments to make yet another example of you and the typical moron demographic overpopulating A'murka today. If none of this makes any sense to you, I don't really care and find most of your comments very amusing indeed.

But if you think yours truly is as stupid as you are and that I'm going to get into a fistfight with the Invisible Not-a-Man (or woman, thanks Monty Python!), you're mistaken, and recall that I've got a bag of flour for just such occasions. You're hopelessly outgunned here, you will lose.

All death threats will be forwarded to local law enforcement authorities, and I will come after you. But rest assured that I've had them before thanks to my own past antiwar activities and that I wasn't deterred then and won't be now, so don't bother. Also, if you think your comments are demoralizing, you're mistaken, they're going to have the opposite-effect--just as the federal government's prosecutors...

Today's postscript: Apparently you morons down in Indy have reading and comprehension problems. I don't care about your comments and won't be posting any of them without an identity, period. However, if I feel like making an example out of you, I will, so you might watch what you write--you will live to regret it. Literacy: it's not just for breakfast anymore. Edumacation ist gut!

I'd ask what Reason magazine has to say about this, but I don't care what they or any Libertarian thinks or has to say.

Fictional Newsflash: Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems" execs belatedly found in DC Madam's phone records, questions rage on

Grover's Mill, New Jersey--According to new findings from Blah-blah-blog--a watchdog website--a Mr. "John Bigbootay," "John Ya-Ya," and several other individuals curiously named "John," have been identified, tagged, and bagged by Blue Blazer regulars, Pinkie Carothers, and Buckaroo Banzai himself. CBN (Chemical-Biological-Nuclear) methodologies have been observed throughout the entire process without incident.

The Republican Party was evasive about the raid whose genesis came from small-time internet researchers, then forwarded to the federal government who tapped Team Banzai for the raid. The phone numbers were previously overlooked and disguised through unknown technological or biotechnological methods.

The Obama administration's Robert Gibbs has also offered no explanations in the matter, and it's unknown if the new president personally tapped Team Banzai as private contractors in the extraction operation, ostensibly within the purview of the INS. Sources close to the case affirm that President Obama was in direct contact with the president during the entire operation, and at every stage.

In recent years, there has been controversy surrounding the use of private contractors by the federal government in military and law enforcement operations, but constitutional experts are at a loss currently regarding jurisdiction. The illegal aliens will be housed at Guantanamo Bay until further scientific tests and a torture regimen have been conducted. Journalists have been unable to get a comment from President Obama on the matter.

Team Banzai is referring all questions about the raid of Yoyodyne's facilities to the Justice Department for further review by Attorney General Eric Holder. Red Lectroids are known to engage in torture, an act which is illegal under international and intergalactic law, as well as covered by the once secret interplanetary treaty at Trieste in 1949.

Yoyodyne has been the subject of numerous congressional committee and subcommittee investigations over the years covering anti-trust law, corruption, falsifying contract information, and allegations of treason and the ferrying of illegal aliens from one planet system to another without proper documentation.

Imaginary Corporations, by Adam Baulderstone

Ed.--This is a letter sent to me by a friend. It's not meant to be scientific, only observational. But the observations are excellent ones...

That whole interlocking grid of TV shows was pretty impressive. I remember the end of St Elsewhere from back in the day, but I had no idea it was connected to Homicide. It really gets baffling when you work Newhart into it as that whole series turned out to be an extended dream sequence from The Bob Newhart Show, and Mork was a character from a dream of Richie Cunningham from Happy Days.

I thought it was funny that the Doctor Who / Hitchhiker's Guide crossover I just mentioned to you came up in there, too.

They were limiting themselves to just TV shows, but I noticed a few connections that lead into other media. They mention the Weyland-Yutani Corporation as client of Wolfram and Hart, a satanic law firm in Angel and as a weapons manufacturer in Firefly, but it's original appearance is as "The Company" in Alien. It is never mentioned aloud, but the name and logo can be seen around the Nostromo and on beer cans. The name was invented by Ron Cobb, the designer of the Nostromo. He originally wanted to call it Leyland-Toyota, imagining it as a merging of British and Japanese businesses, but for legal reasons changed the name. In 1979, we hadn't reached the point where real companies were so eager to have their names in movies they would agree, even if the movie was just trying to make the point that their product was designed for morons, like Gatorade in Idiocracy. Weyand-Yutani is mentioned by name in Aliens but the logo has been made significantly blander in accordance with James Cameron's artistic vision.

From Alien, there is the obvious leap to Predator 2. You could lead in to comics by way of DC's Batman vs. Predator or the execrable Aliens vs.Superman, possibly the worst-conceived crossover ever, but I'm going to go with Predator vs. Judge Dredd, not that it is much better, but Judge Dredd teamed up with a time traveling Johnny Alpha. And who doesn't want to see Strontium Dog as the distant future of Homicide.

Of course once you've entered comics almost everything bleeds into everything else, especially when you toss Top 10 and League of Extraordinary Gentleman into the mix, so this is all a little to easy. The real danger is if the Munch Meme breaks into the world of comics all that interconnection could allow it to expand exponentially in only a matter of issues. In no time at all racks will be overflowing with Munch: GCPD and Judge Munch comics.

That's as far as I want to go down the Weyland-Yutani path. There is another corporate client of Wolfram and Hart you might remember: Yoyodyne. They also identify it as the builder of the run down bus depot where The John Larroquette Show is set, as well as a contactor building starships for Starfleet in Star Trek: the Next Generation. But if you delve deeper, Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems appears in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension, as a company infiltrated by the Red Lectroids, aliens that landed in 1939 at Grover's Mill in New Jersey (5 minutes from my sister's house right by an excellent Indian restaurant), using Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast as a diversion.

A sequel was written, Buckaroo Banzai against the World Crime League, in which the hero Buckaroo Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers are assisted by a trucker named Jack Burton. But, despite picking up a dedicated following amongst nerds, the movie tanked, being released in 1984 against Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters andStar Trek III (two Yoyodyne related movies in one summer!), and the sequel went unmade. W.D. Richter instead went to work writing Big Trouble In Little China.

But all this is just a detour from the true origin of Yoyodyne: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, V., and Vineland in which it is a thinly-veiled version of the real-world Rocketdyne Corporation, a company formed in the wake of WWII to reverse-engineer Nazi rocket technology, specifically the V-2 rocket, whose parabolic path would give Gravity's Rainbow its title and primary theme.

Much like comics, once you've hit Pynchon you can tie pretty much anything in. For instance, William Gibson took one line from Gravity's Rainbow, a description of a mirrored wall, and used it word for word in Neuromancer. I'd quote it but I don't have a copy ofNeuromancer and it could take me a few days to find In Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon paid him back by taking a TV worshiping trailer park cult that Gibson created in Virtual Lightand used it in Vineland.

Vineland also contains Eddie Enrico and his Hong Kong Hotshots an obvious reference to Buckaroo Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers. To highlight the reference he also mentions Ramon Raquello on the same page. Raquello was the fictitious bandleader whose show was interrupted by Orson Welles to bring news of the landing at Grover's Mill.

There is some debate as to whether Yoyodyne was spread through nerd culture directly by Pynchon's work or through Buckaroo Banzai. In the case of Star Trek it seems someone there is a Pynchon fan as unlikely as it might seem. Episode 523(!) of Deep Space Nine involves various conspiracies swirling around the auction of an ancient baseball card of Willie Mays. Oddly both Pynchon and Mays were born on May 8, and in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon obliquely calls baseball, "A sport also well-spidered with suggestions of the sinister."

With all these new revelations about the Homicide Universe, it makes me wonder about Crosetti's "suicide." Just what did he find out about the Lincoln assassination?...

CNN: "KUM-BI-YAH" FACTOR

CNNOSPHERE--No, that image isn't Truman Capote, it's Anderson Cooper, and he's not a journalist, he is the moron-baby of Gloria Vanderbilt. Cooper is a joke, a male bimbo. Read this transcript excerpt to understand why. The event was the Nazi Pope's intrusion into-Turkey (a country with a 1% of 1% Christian-slice of a population of 70 million):

Cooper: For someone expecting sort of a -- a Pope John Paul II kind of visit, with -- with hundreds of thousands of people, this is not that kind of trip. It's almost more of a diplomatic trip.

Aslan: It's not really that -- this pope's M.O., really. Look, you know, yesterday, we were talking about the fact that, let's not -- let's not think that this pope's message is going to change, but perhaps what will change is the way he delivers that message. Today was a perfect example of that. I think that he's going to continue to push for a very robust dialogue with the Muslim world. He's going to continue to push for a resurgence and revival of -- of -- of Christianity throughout Europe. But I think, now that he recognizes how important it is for him to watch how he says things, you're going to see a much more conciliatory, much more measured response from him. [Ed.-Pope Benedict was the head of the Office of the Inquisition for over 20 years. It now has a friendlier-name.]

...Cooper: But, you know, I mean, dialogue, that's one of those diplomatic words. What does it actually mean? This pope has very strong beliefs about -- about Christianity, about Islam, about violence within Islam. What does a dialogue really look like?

Gallagher: It's a big point for the pope. In fact, he's talked about it before, that he thinks dialogue has to include straight talk, the hard questions.

Cooper: This is not everyone holding hands, singing kumbaya [my emphasis].

Gallagher: That's right. ...

Exactly what does any of this have to do with journalism? I don't care what they "think" or were handed by their boss, that isn't journalism. "Just the facts" is journalism, not this blurring of commentary and coverage pioneered by...CNN, not Fox News.

This is analysis, fine, but why go there at all? It's misleading, and suggests these talking-necks are actually doing investigative journalism. All a journalist is supposed to be doing is reporting the facts, not editorializing. But, far-worse than this, CNN took-up Cooper's "kumbiyah" aside--they're running-with-it as a catchphrase now!

Today, they were talking-about whether Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki was "singing Kumbiyah (the proper spelling)" with the Bush administration, or the "Kumbiyah factor." Right, is Al-Maliki singing the same song? Instead, we get these stupid catchphrases. CNN can shove it. And thanks-again, Anderson, for reporting rumors and hearsay amidst the misery of the people who were stuck at the Superdome in New Orleans. It helped the Bush administration demonize the victims of our neglect. Fuck you CNN, and fuck you Anderson Cooper.

While I'm at it: fuck you Ted Turner, you dumb asshole. You are Charles Foster Kane, you moron. Give one billion to the UN, goddammit, that's what you promised. Idiot.

The Original Irritant:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/28/acd.01.html

The Wicker Man (1973/SPOILERS) review

'Oh Christ, oh Jesus Christ!'

Christopher Lee is dismissive of a lot of his screen-work, but this is one of his favorites (along with The Whip and the Body). It's hard to call this a horror film, but I guess you could say it is, depending upon who you root for. There really are no villains in this film, and hardcore religionists who would say the pagans who inhabit the island are evil are just flat-wrong.

Western civilization still has its sacrifices in our American death penalty, and in warfare.

Almost every generation is called-up to give of their numbers to Mars and the bottom-line. So-called conservative economists argue that a minimum-of-poverty is needed to maintain the tyranny of consumerism, the New Fascism.

There are sacrifices-aplenty in our 'modern' world, and the results are hardly-removed from pagan-sacrifices, just physically-removed and indirect from our daily lives (what could be more modern?). Oddly, the film is critical of both the ancient and the modern.

No, this is more a thriller with a 'horror reveal' at its climax, as it was originally conceived by director Robin Hardy. Sadly, the producers of the failing UK studio balked at his cut, and we have been left with cobbled-together theatrical and 'director's-cut' versions of the film with many of the scenes and insert-shots restored, but from shoddy sources like videotapes. The original-negatives of deleted material were hidden in a hole on an English country road according to Christopher Lee and others close to the production.

Why? Why did RKO destroy an hour of Orson Welles's 'The Magnificent Ambersons'? Revenge for Citizen Kane, of course. This is done as retribution by some producers, so that a director can never reinsert the footage. Why? Partly because producers cannot usually create movies like a director does, and some of them resent this fact. It also gives them a chance to legally-assert authorship, and thus solidify their ownership of a 'property' based under international copyright laws.

Due to the butchering of The Wicker Man, Christopher Lee has attempted for decades to do a remake, but it appears that this isn't going to happen with him now, and he refuses to discuss the Cage version.

The Nicholas Cage remake can only suffer from this fact, since it doesn't improve-upon the original. It actually does a poorer job, yet has a budget almost twenty-times the 1973 version. The remake basically says nothing-new, and actually takes a very wrong-headed attitude towards women.

Literally 'stealing the show', Lee plays the enigmatic and charming Lord Summerisle, and he haunts the entirety of the Wicker Man until the brutal ending. The other protagonist of the film is the character of Sergeant Howie, who has been sent by the mainland-Police to investigate the disappearance of young-girl on the island, namesake of the Lee character.

This island is Lord Summerisle's domain, and he has re-instituted various pagan beliefs alongside the island's agricultural-base or fruit orchards in the cold and hostile environment of the Hebrides. Temperate fruits aren't supposed to grow there, but miraculously, they do. The cop is entering a world he (and we, the audience) never knew existed. Unlike the remake, I'd say the Summerisle seems inviting and sensual. It's a place you might want to call home. As a stodgy-Christian, Howie doesn't really get this, and it seals-his-fate, creating a nice touch of irony.

It appears the 'new-beliefs' (really ancient, British-ones) are working, for the crops are abundant and the people of Summerisle seem happy and prosperous. There are numerous references to fertility symbols, and the musical-numbers are both inviting and haunting (if not a little goofy), and they lull Howie and the viewer into a complacency (as pagan rituals do to their sacrifices). Seargeant Howie (a daft-name, chosen so the audience doesn't fully-identify with him) is being tested by the pagans for his purity, and the gorgeous Britt Ekland is the bait, though her acting is a bit 'wooden' (or is it 'Wicker'?).

Still, she and her body double add a great erotic flavor to the film that makes paganism seem pretty inviting. Well, unless you're the sacrifice, though believers would likely have no-problem. This then, is the horror component of the film, a non-believer sacrificed by believers in an irrational-rejection of modernity. This kind of romanticism fueled the rise of Nazism, and the burning of the scapegoat.

There are many-reviewers who have said this is about a battle-between paganism and Orthodox Christianity. This is accurate, but there are some nuances to this, and comments on the surrender to irrationality by the pagans and Sergeant Howie.

Let's face it: the cop isn't likable, and we aren't really supposed to identify with-him until the end of the tale as simply another human-being caught-up in something he never wagered on. But that's where it ends. The current version of the 1973 Wicker Man is definitely flawed.

Like a pagan initiation, the story begins as a mystery, both tempting-and-warm, even human. The initiate penetrates more-and-more layers of the mystery of the cult until...you'll have to watch the movie, it is an ending for-the-ages. There really isn't any gore here, just a little-blood, so gorehounds won't like it, but who cares what they think? This is inverted-horror.