Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989):

When I was in college, in the dying embers of the sixties, there were about five books that you had to have read (or at least claimed to have read) in order to maintain intellectual credibility within the university-educated portion of our generation. I'm not talking about "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "Catcher in the Rye" or any of the books that we all had to read because they appeared on our mandatory summer reading lists in prep schools.  Quite the opposite. The books I'm referring to would merit detention and a phone call to your parents if you were caught reading them in a poncy high school. That list included such boho fare as "On The Road," "Naked Lunch," "Tropic of Cancer" ...  and "Last Exit to Brooklyn."

In "Last Exit," Hubert Selby, Jr. wrote about the lives and problems of the disaffected urban poor. This was back in the days when the pre-gentrified inner cities were totally run-down, and were still filled with poor, ethnic white people wearing cheap hats and smoking several packs per day. Selby specifically focused on the problems of Brooklyn longshoremen struggling for a decent life amid the heroin addicts, street gangs, and prostitutes that defined their squalid neighborhoods. Of course, many of them used to be in the gangs themselves, and they were generally hard men who had abusive upbringings, and very often dropped out of school. They were racist and hateful, in that special way that uneducated, downtrodden people with dead-end lives can be. Selby's book showed all of that. It shocked middle America back then in many ways, not the least of which involved the colorful vocabularies employed by his characters. Their language was ... well, kinda salty. English has an expression "swears like a longshoreman," and that cliché didn't gestate without reason.

It's a depressing movie. Here are some of the events you can expect to see:

A father finds out his daughter his pregnant, then beats her boyfriend up, only to embrace him as a new son-in-law. He only beat the kid up out of love. That goes on fairly well until they get into another drunken fistfight at the wedding, and carelessly knock a baby on the floor. But they only did it out of love.

Then a prostitute is dumped by her one and only gentle lover, a naive army lieutenant. In order to drown her sorrows, she gets drunk and offers herself and "the best tits in the Western world" to every man in a bar. Oh, sure they gang-rape her violently. But they only do so out of love.

I'm really having a hard time remembering why we felt it important to read this book back in the sixties. I guess it was to expose us to the seedy underbelly of America, which was filled with lives very different from the ones we shared with our suburban prep-school friends. In fact, we didn't even know that people like this existed. Some of us had blue collar dads, but they weren't like the guys in this book. My dad was a machinist who grew up in the inner city, but he wasn't violent, even when he drank too much, and I can't even remember him raising his voice in anger. I never heard him use a cuss word until I was in my forties, and even then I was the one who started it. Some of my other friends had dads who worked in one of the Kodak plants or at the Genesee brewery, and some of my uncles were regular working Joes, but they were all decent guys, guys who helped out with Boy Scouts when they could, mowed their lawns, paid their bills, bought Christmas presents, and generally disqualified themselves from becoming Hubert Selby characters.

I knew only one down-and-outer, an uncle who became a hopeless alkie and ended up panhandling. It's kind of a sad story. He had been our family's most decorated war hero, but adjusted so miserably in civilian life that he re-enlisted when he was in his early thirties. Even though it was the Vietnam era, the Navy drummed him out when that term was up because he was nearly forty and there was still a draft in those days, churning out an endless supply of young guys. The family gossip was that he had simply disappeared, or maybe that's just what they told the young 'uns. One night when I was sixteen, I was wandering through downtown Rochester on my way to pick up my girlfriend from ballet class when my long-lost Uncle Joe approached me. He failed to recognize me (he hadn't seen me since I was ten, back before his re-enlistment), and asked me for spare change. I recognized him, of course.  He was the guy who taught me how to shoot pool, and he was still only 39 years old when I saw him that night. Hell, he looked about the same as the last time I had seen him. The sad part is that he was still wearing his navy uniform - his whites, no less, with the cuffs all soiled by slush - and he had no overcoat, although it was the dead of winter. His situation was heartbreaking, but the point is that he was the only low-life I had ever known, and he was basically a decent guy who turned out pathetic, not dangerous - no needles, no violence - so Selby's Brooklyn world seemed completely fictional to me. It seemed like an ugly fairy tale, and frankly it still does, even after I lived in and even taught school in places like the Bronx.

In that respect, I guess the film has some value, because it manages to give shape to the world of its characters, whereas I never really could have pictured these lives on my own.  On the other hand, I wasn't really convinced by it. I'll give you an example. The prostitute Tralala was gang-raped in multiple locations by dozens of guys who carried her from place to place. When the ordeal was over, she was still wearing her skirt. Huh? You mean after so many guys did whatever they wanted to do to her, not a single one of them ever wanted to just rip off that skirt and see the goods? I'm not buyin' it. In addition, her hair wasn't even messed up very much. By lowball urban hooker standards, she looked fresh enough to do a Summer's Eve commercial. Does this mean that drunken, uneducated, violent men have a certain standard of respect for womanhood, or does it mean that the director tried to create the "mean streets" and just didn't know how to go about it? My guess is the latter.

So, it's a very ugly and depressing movie, virtually devoid of any hope or optimism for the lives of its characters, and yet it still seems like a bit of a whitewash, in a way.

The film has one characteristic that is kind of noteworthy. Although it was lensed in 1989, it is about the fifties and the director not only tried to re-create a fifties atmosphere, but also used fifties-style film technique, including the pre-Strasberg acting styles, the neatly posed group shots, and the big, symphonic Broadway-style musical score. All of that was reminiscent of the similarly themed films of that era. (Let's say "On the Waterfront," for example.) Of course, the real fifties movies didn't have any nudity or truly hard language, so this is more like what the films of the fifties would have been like without all the artificial restrictions of that era.

The critics generally admired this movie, so I guess it must be good or something. Let's assume that their 93% agreement must mean something. I know that I'm a hard sell, but frankly I didn't like it much at all, and the Region 2 DVD is just atrocious. It offers no widescreen version, and has no features of any kind. The film itself is very poorly mastered and filled with motion blur. The movie would get a C if it were properly mastered, but the DVD score has to be F. Unfortunately, there is no Region 1 DVD available at this time.

Jennifer Jason Leigh

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

"Starship Troopers"

Starship Troopers (1997) is the strongest anti-war film ever made. Paul Verhoeven adapted it from a Robert Heinline anti-war novel, and chose to pattern it after WW II propaganda films. It is a future society where all barriers have dropped, including racial, gender and national. We are one world, The Federation, and things seem to be working well, until a group of Mormons colonize another region of space populated by arachnids. In this society, only "citizens" can vote, and you must serve in the military to become a citizen. There is little or no social stigma attached to not being a citizen. Indeed, most wealthy merchants are not.

The story centers around the son (Casper Van Dien) of one of these wealthy families. He is the football captain, in love with the prettiest and smartest woman in his class (Denise Richards), and is the object of lust for his quarterback, Dina Meyer. Since Richards wants more than anything to be in the military and fly space ships, Van Dien followers her into the military, but as his math skills are low, he only makes it into the mobile infantry, while Richards goes to flight school, along with another footballer, Patrick Muldoon, who has eyes for Richards as well. She is clearly not immune to his charms, either, creating one of the more controversial ideas in the film with test audiences.

While our main characters are completing basic training, the bugs destroy Buenos Aires with an asteroid, and war is declared. We must eradicate all bugs for the good of the human race. What follows is a series of blood and guts battles interspersed with relationship stuff among the four main characters.

The genius of the film, ironically, is proven by negative reaction to it. The critics nearly universally panned it, some for not following the themes of Heinline, but the most heard criticism was that it glorified war, and was pro Fascist. They were almost there, but it went over their heads. The keys to understanding this film are small moments at the beginning and again at the end of the film. Near the beginning, we learn that the bug problems began when we invaded their world with a Mormon colony. The bugs were simply defending their homes. This is reaffirmed at the end, when someone psychically listens to the brain of a bug, and happily announces that it is afraid of humans. The war went badly up to this point, as we knew nothing about the bugs, and assumed that they had no intelligence and no society, and deserved extinction.

Both Verhoeven and writer Ed Neumeier, as their first comment in the commentary track, state unequivocally that the message of the film was that war turns people into Facists, and that is a bad thing. One might say that they completely failed, in that audiences generally did not come away with that message. However, as was the case with WW II propaganda films it was structured after, they were sucked into the belief that it was a battle of the good guys (us) against unspeakable evil guys (the bugs), never even considering that it was the humans who started the whole thing, made no effort to understand this other race, but set out to annihilate them. In other words, the average audience member, and most of the critics as well, missed the few facts about the bugs, and bought into the propaganda. No wonder they reacted so badly when Verhoeven made the military seem Fascist, as they took this as a personal affront to their country and belief system.

It was also somewhat confusing for audiences that the soldiers were made to seem so heroic. There is currently some lip service being given to the idea that you should hate war, but not the warrior. The fact that the Starship Troopers here were fighting an immoral war that their leaders instigated does not make their actions any less heroic. The film shows very well how you turn youth with moldable young minds into soldiers. The mobile artillery here seem heroic and altruistic here because they are.

Test audiences raked Verhoeven over the coals for having a female character who not only picked career over a relationship, but also had feelings for two different men. I find it fascinating that audiences could not accept a female character who was more ambitious than romantic, and found more than one man desirable. Clearly, there is still a double standard at work. These same audiences never questioned Van Dien and his relationship with two women in the film.

Some found the film a good popcorn movie with lots of neat action and special effects, but marred somewhat by the inclusion of a love story, and they were a little bothered by the fact that us, the good guys, sometimes looked uncomfortably like Fascists. Others thought it was glorifying war. The special effects and visual effects are extraordinary. The action sequences are top notch. But to me, the greatest achievement of the film is that they did such a good job on the military propaganda aspect of the film that most people were sucked in, and never noticed that the Federation was the bad guy here.

There are many buns, male and female, in a shower scene, including Dina Meyer. Meyer also shows breasts in a love scene.

This is a film that gets better every time you watch it. I saw it first with no pre-conceptions, as I had never read the Heinline book, or read any reviews. I can't help but wonder if the public reaction was not at least somewhat caused by some initial reviews. The correct score is C+. People who like this kind of action film can enjoy it at that level. I would encourage those of you who may have seen it once to watch a second time, especially in light of my theory as to what it is about.

Dina Meyer Unknowns

2 actresses, 2 movies, 7 clips. Playing today.

Schtonk! (1992) was German Veronica Ferres' de facto film debut. The movie won or was nominated for several awards, including an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film in 1993. Since then Veronica became a big star in the German speaking part of Europe. In this year's "Klimt" she stars alongside John Malkovich, but according to messages on the IMDb, the film is struggling to find a distributor. Anyway, in these three clips you can see Veronica as we like her best...

Scoops...

A few things I found on the web of the most attractive actress, Benedetta Valanzano. A couple of them are scans from Interviu magazine. The rest are the fruits of the paparazzi.

Benedetta Valanzano