The Notorious Bettie Page
dir. Mary Harron

"You can't advertise that, Larry."
"Why not?"
"You just can't."

- The People vs. Larry Flynt

We're a society learning to embrace its vices. I don't say this in a judgmental or preaching way, just a matter of fact. I've always believed that just as in politics, where it's never the crime but the cover up that undoes you, that vices are mostly harmless in themselves. It's our rationalization, shame and denial around our vices that inspires bad behavior.

And that's why there will never be a movie called The Notorious Jenna Jameson. Pornography was a clandestine, underground secret thing until the wizards of the coast invented a pornography delivery machine that could be installed in every house and (get this), has a myriad of OTHER uses so profound that no one can stand to be without one!

The pornstars of today are much more accomplished than their ancestors, yet none will likely inspire the same sense of mysterious notoriety as Bettie Page, not in a world where hardcore S/M porn like "The Fashionistas" can become a mainstream Vegas hit.

Bettie Page is the third film along with I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho in Mary Harron's "notoriety" series. The first two films were told from the point of view of obsessive, anti-social narrators, one an extreme misanthrope and the other an extreme misogynist.

Valerie Solanas and Patrick Bateman make the perfect couple: Patrick embodies the vapid, shallow, libido-driven masculinity Valerie condemns in her "SCUM Manifesto" and Valerie is the perfect self-involved, socially tone-deaf victim of Patrick's constrained rage.

In moving on to Bettie Page, the S/M pinup queen of the 50s, it would be tempting to give her the same treatment: an intense narration.

But, instead, we get very little insight into Bettie herself. She poses for photos, downplays the sleaze, tolerates some leers and some awkward moments, comes out without regrets and moves on with her life.

Because, unlike Bateman or Solanas, Bettie Page is not obsessed with society, society is obsessed with HER. Bettie Page was our collective schoolyard crush, the first pube of America's sexual awakening, a shadowy wet dream whose legacy was the hot, hot morning sex of the 60s and 70s, the patron saint of the Boogie Knights.

And, like all icons, what matters is not what she truly WAS, but what we see when we look at her.

Three stars, Jason says we're going to be taking some pictures today, if that's okay, don't feel any pressure, but if you want to join in we can pay you $100. And then maybe someday, who knows, you might end up on a stamp or something.

The Prestige
dir. Christopher Nolan



"Grifter's got the irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothing to whipping a fool; hell, fools were made to be whipped. But to take another pro, even your partner, who knows you
and has his eyes on you, that's a score."

- The Grifters

There are three parts, Michael Caine tells us, to every magic trick:

1) The Pledge, wherein the magician introduces an "ordinary, everyday object" like a deck of cards, a coin, an animal or a human
2) The Turn, wherein the magician does "something extraordinary" with that object (usually makes it disappear)
3) The Prestige, wherein the magician returns the object to its original (or perhaps improved) state

There's nothing to making something disappear, it's making something come BACK that earns the applause.

The Prestige is another puzzler from Christopher Memento Nolan. Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are two apprentice magician's whose partnership turns to rivalry after the on-stage death of Angier's wife.

The two men pursue each other across Victorian England and into the mountains of Colorado, trying to out-do one another. They read each other's diaries, they steal each other's tricks, they hire Nikola Tesla to build fantabulous contraptions.

But, as with any good trick, you know you're being set up while you watch. You can't believe what you see. Something is coming.

In The Pledge, Nolan introduces us to our "everyday, ordinary" stage performers.

In the Turn, he ups the ante on their professional and personal rivalry, switching loyalties, reversing roles, introducing body doubles and misdirecting us with beautiful assistants.

And The Prestige? Well, you'll have to see the movie.

One of the things that can be distracting with a film like this is that you don't know what to make of the emotions you see onscreen. In Memento, the amnesiac Lenny describes his condition as being like waking: you feel guilty or angry and you just don't know why, so you latch on to certainties like the weight of an ashtray or the solidity of wood.

The only problem is that life isn't filled with certainties so you begin building sand castles of supposition and then something comes along (The Turn) which knocks those castles over and you just have to have faith that The Prestige will set them aright once again.

This emotional alienation didn't hurt Memento much, for at its heart it is a noir thriller/actioner and a highly narcissistic one at that. Lenny lives in a world where other people's feelings pretty much don't matter at all. It's just him, his dead wife and John G.

The Prestige, however, is a story about multiple characters caught up in a web of obsession. Everybody's either in love or trying to steal something or trying to bait or trap someone at every minute. Given all the intrigue between the characters, you find yourself fidgeting in your seat, not knowing if an expression of love or hate is sincere or just all part of the misdirection.

In the end, when The Prestige comes, as with Nolan's other work, we are forced to re-examine and re-evaluate our impressions of the main characters. On this level, the film succeeds. Seeing it once, you want to see it again.

In this, Nolan undoes one of his primary theses: no one cares about the man in the box, it's the man onstage that gets the applause. Why do magicians never reveal their secrets? Because, the beauty of a trick is not in the secret, but in what you DO with that secret and once audiences know your secret, they don't need YOU anymore.

But Nolan has defied this in both Memento AND The Prestige. Knowing the secret to these films enhances the joy of rewatching them.

An odd turn of phrase, a quick glance between lovers, a matchbox left on a bar table, a pen hidden from view, a black eye, a spent shell casing on the seat of your car. Nolan introduces these little items into his films, any one, two or three of which might be perfectly ignorable. Like Lenny, rummaging through the ashes of his wife's personal belongings, we wonder what meaning we best can apply to these items.

And then comes The Prestige, and we see that the truth has been staring us in the face all along. And we laugh like it's Buddha's birthday.

Three stars. The Amazing Jason says, "are you watching closely?"

The Departed
dir. Martin Scorsese
2006

"Ordinary fuckin' people; I hate 'em. Ordinary people spend their lives avoiding tense situations. Repo man spends his life getting in to tense situations. Let's get a drink."

-Bud

Don't get me wrong: I liked "The Aviator." The performances were dynamic and engaging, the story was compelling, the tone of the melodrama wasn't too heavy or too glib (both dangers when dealing with a figure like Howard Hughes...or John Hughes for that matter.)

But...

It was a film that pretty much any decent director with adequate budget and a good drama coach and DP should have been able to pull off. There was little in it distinctly Scorsese!

Not so, The Departed.

From the opening segment where Nicholson explains how a Mick like him survived in an underworld full of Guineas to the slow strum of The Stones' signature gangland piece "Gimme Shelter," you know that Marty is fuckin' BACK.

The Departed is a remake of the 2001 Hong Kong cop thriller Infernal Affairs. Fans of the genre will know Hong Kong cop thrillers (City on Fire, Hard Boiled) to be bullet-riddled over the top macho frag fests. Fans of the genre will not be disappointed with the Americanized Departed.

Unlike GoodFellas and Casino, which paint a somewhat appealing image of the mob and then reveal the violent horror, or Raging Bull in which the characters are just fundamentally trapped in their amberlike borderline existence, the characters in The Departed all seem to be forcing themselves into tense situations for no readily apparent reason. This is no narrative flaw, however. The nihilistic determinism just signs us up for the rollercoaster ride.

There's no Ray Liotta pining for the good old days ("I always wanted to be a gangster"), no Robert DeNiro or Joe Pesci elaborating on their complex mob ethos: there's just cops, robbers and guns. And, of course, some of the robbers are really cops and some of the cops are really robbers.

But, as Uncle Jack says: "what difference does it make when you're facing down the barrel of a gun?"

The performances are a flat out joy to watch, all around.

Matt Damon is very believable as the corrupt State Police detective who seems too clean cut to be that clean cut. He's making quite the career for himself being "the guy who talks to you like you're an idiot." From "how'd'ya like them apples?" to "why do you think poker is gambling?" to "it's running out, you Arab retard" to "Jack, you have to give me what I need and let me run this my way," I only hope that Damon and I shuffle off this mortal coil at around the same time so I can watch him explain to St. Peter how things work in Heaven.

Nicholson is just having too much fun being Nicholson. But he takes the Nicholson thing to some new places the likes of which we haven't seen since Batman.

Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin play "the guys whose every conversation ends in a fistfight."

But, gotta say, the real standout is DeCaprio. His burned-out undercover suicide trip makes Prince of the City look like Officer Friendly. He's bloodshot, he's tense, he's ready to snap.

Quibbles:

1) This is a sausage festival. The only female character of any note is Vera Farmiga's Madolyn (the love interest.) Performance was fine, but they didn't give her much to do. This is a very plot-heavy film for Scorsese, so it would been nice if she was, you know, part of the story. Instead she sort of sits there and uses her therapy words as Damon talks to her like she's an idiot and DeCaprio screams at her like she's an idiot.

2) We get a lot of scenes of people running down the street screaming the details of sensitive police operations or organized crime into their cell phones. It really made me miss the velvety tension of Keifer Sutherland's Jack Bauer. THAT man can work a cell phone.

3) There are a number of things that flat don't make any sense. But, then again, from what I've heard of FBI/local cop joint mob investigations, this isn't unrealistic.

Four stars, Uncle Jason sez check it out before I ram this cell phone down your throat you lace curtain Irish drunk-ass motherfucker. Yeah, I'm talking to you, shithead. Fuck you and say hi to your mom for me and tell her I'm sorry I had fuck her in the ass but her cunt's just too nasty.

Fuck you.