Tag Archives: movies

Running on Fumes

In the course of a discussion which begin with the how-to of inserting video clips into blogs, some of my students and I watched the following:

• “Steamboat Willie,” the original 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoon, in which Mickey was much more rat-like and nasty than today’s dumbed-down, cuter, and neotonous version. Not to mention that the chewing-tobacco part is so un-PC.

• The “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech scene from the 1930s-fascist version of Richard III, the one starring Ian McKellen.

Several of them had already seen it in Professor B.’s Shakespeare class, but they were ready to see it again. As for me, the opening scene of that film — the teletype machine — held me spellbound when I first saw it. (But I was thinking, “Run, dog, run!” very soon.)

• Jeff Dunham doing his “Achmed the Dead Terrorist” routine, holding the jihadists at bay with laughter.

I was the only who did not already know about Achmed. What will I do for popular culture when I stop teaching?

Gallimaufry to Fill Space

Back from a week on the road to a full inbox and a desk covered with bills to pay, I offer a few links for your kind attention:

¶ Attention Kemetic reconstructionists: Don’t let your temple-builders become anemic.

¶ A list of things that offend Muslims. Anyone want to try the Pagan equivalent? I think it would be a lot shorter. Piggy banks and Easter eggs don’t bother me. Can you imagine Pagans rioting in the streets over the crappy remake of The Wicker Man and giving director Neil LaBute the Theo Van Gogh treatment? I can’t either. We prefer to just make fun of it.

¶ This will go onto my must-see list: Jason Pitzl-Waters notes an upcoming movie about the philosopher Hypatia. An uncompromising Neoplatonist, from what I understand, she was murdered by a Christian mob after some bishop put out a fatwa against her.

Gallimaufry with Big Rocks

¶ My copy of Fire Child: The Life & Magic of Maxine Sanders, ‘Witch Queen’ arrived, and I will post a full review soon. Short version: Better than I expected.

When the Goddess Ruled the Earth is a new quasi-documentary film on hypothesized Neolithic religion. The trailers are all shots of ancient megaliths with a “voice of God” (sorry) commentary. Looks like orthodox Gimbutas-ism.

My point is that you cannot necessarily tell by looking at a structure the religious views of its builders. You might be able to make an educated guess by analogy with known cultures, but without extensive, obvious archaeological evidence — and better still, written evidence — you cannot say. Is the “Venus of Willendorf” a religious artifact or a Paleolithic Barbie doll? Will we ever know?

¶ Fiacharrey, “the Bayou Druid,” is making YouTube videos on Celtic Reconstructionism. Here is one.

Shroom the Book, Shrooms the Movie

Still on the entheogenic theme …

Andy Letcher, author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, lent his expertise to a horror film in this YouTube video:

I liked his book, so I suppose that publicity for it is a Good Thing.

Actually, Shrooms — now on DVD appears to fall in the category of exploitation film, in the fine tradition of Reefer Madness.

Review: Apocalypto

Not one to rush into things, I finally watched Mel Gibson’s slightly a-historical movie of Mayan imperial collapse, Apocalypto, a gory but amazing adventure story.

My father was a big fan of historian Will Durant, so I got the impact of the Durant epigram about the fall of empires at the beginning.

I know that a few blowhard Chicano Studies types complained about the movie, but face it, all those things such as slave raids and the sacrifice of prisoners to the gods were happening, there and of course in Tenochtitlan.

Ever since I took a graduate seminar in Mesoamerican religion with Davíd Carrasco, I have been suspicious of cultures with large, astronomically aligned buildings. They always seem to reflect a society where the king is the Son of Heaven and the Few rule the Many with a heavy hand.

I suspect that Stonehenge might have been produced by a Neolithic version of that cultural template too, for all that Pagans revere the place.

Or you might say that polytheism + imperialism = imperialism.

Along with prisoners of war, the Maya apparently favored sacrificing boys.

Gibson being Gibson, the movie’s final message apparently is, “The world is a corrupt and violent place, so you are better off dying as a Catholic.” Extra ecclesiam nulla salus and all that.

Review: Beyond Lemuria

Imagine that cult film director Ed Wood was also a ceremonial magician.

Or imagine a merger of Dion Fortune and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. She would be perfect to introduce this film.

Imagine giant caverns underground filled with degenerate descendants of the Lemurians, accessible from the lower slopes of Mount Shasta.

If you can imagine all that, you should watch Beyond Lemuria.

Written by Poke Runyon, well-known in West Coast Pagan and magickal circles, and including several other veterans of that scene in its cast (as well as some much younger and cuter actresses to balance the mostly mature male cast), the movie was clearly a labor of love, with the director and cast enjoying themselves almost too much.

You can’t have an occult thriller without swirling visual vortices or bits of Central European menace: a black magician with a “broomhandle” Mauser pistol strapped over his robe, or a sinister Romanian carrying (oddly) the Hungarian name of “Zoltan.” And black magic must work, because that particular cabal seems not to need California license plates on their black SUV. Evidently they are invisible to the cops.

At the heart of Beyond Lemuria are a 19th-century occult bestseller, A Dweller on Two Planets, by Frederick Spencer Oliver and the “Shaver Mystery,” which sustained the sales of the old SF pulp magazine Amazing Stories for years, not to mention being a staple topic in Fate magazine as well.

Anyway, the good guys are all good and seek enlightenment. The bad guys are bad and seek power. “Other members of the expedition were expendable,” sneers the chief baddie.

A young initiate must choose between two paths. But evil is never permanently defeated.

You will have to buy it from the filmmakers or from Amazon, because you won’t find this occult thriller at Netflix or showing at the local cineplex. But once you own a copy, you can add it to your “midnight movie” collection. Think of it as Plan 9 from Inner Space.

Best line: “Now I don’t care how politically correct and liberal you people are, believe me, these aliens are not people you want to have for your next-door neighbors,” delivered by Poke Runyon’s character of an over-the-top anthropology professor.

The Scary Countryside

Jason Pitzl-Waters notes an upcoming Guillermo del Toro movie:

The duo will be co-producing Born, a film adaptation of [Clive] Barker’s story about a family who gets more than they bargained for when they move to the English countryside.

The scary countryside is a staple of British–and frequently North American–film-making. Perhaps that cliché is the flip side of the Frazerian notion of the countryside as repository of ancient beliefs and practices.

In movies, ancient practices are always scary. When my book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America was in production, the first cover design (not used) was referred to as the “Children of the Corn cover” in honor of the movie stereotype.

Urban directors make these pictures for urban audiences — who already harbor odd fears about nature and wildlife, like purse-snatching elk.

In British film, every picturesque village is controlled by a secret cabal of child-sacrificing Satanists, disguised, for instance, as the local branch of the Women’s Institute.

The editor and publisher of our county newspaper came to dinner last night (they are married to each other) and we got to talking about this very cinematic phenomenon.

We decided that the secret cabal in charge hereabouts would have to be the [Blank] County Cattlewomen. Don’t get yourself on their bad side.

Gallimaufry with Geats

¶ Slate reviews the new 3-D Beowulf movie in heroic verse! I liked Beowulf and Grendel. Comparison will be fun.

¶ Staying in a San Diego waterfront hotel is like living in a Tom Clancy novel. Marines in dress blues suddenly fill the lobby. Helicopters and jets dash overhead. On Saturday morning I woke up to see the USS Nimitz moored across from us at Coronado Island.

But from the convention center I look over to a certain apartment complex on Coronado, where someone once important to me lived. Vanished youth, etc. M. is wryly accepting. She has her nostalgia moments too, after all.

¶ Jason Pitzl-Waters links to a news story about what happens when a church is “marital property”.

The Cinematic Otherworld

About three weeks ago, I dreamt I was sitting with a group of people around a table in some sort of parapsychology lab. It was sort of like a séance, only instead of contacting spirits, we were trying to “make something happen.”

After one session, I went into an adjacent room full of computer equipment, etc., and found a a group of electronic cables had all fused into a big ball. Somehow this was significant — and somehow the affect of the dream was such that my unconscious dream controller pressed the “Abort!” button, and I woke up suddenly.

On some level, the dream reminded me of the 1990 movie Flatliners, in which a group of medical students try to create their own near-death experiences. There is Kieffer Sutherland as the bold leader (“Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it’s time for medical science to try.”), Oliver Platt as the over-intellectualizing Jew (“I did not come to medical school to murder my class mates no matter how deranged they might be.”), Kevin Bacon as the angry but good-hearted skeptic, and Julia Roberts as the girl who is one of the guys.

Sutherland’s character is actually expressing a very 19th-century notion, but let’s set that aside. Set aside too why some demented set designer felt that Bacon’s character should drive an Army surplus M751 truck — in Chicago.

All of the medical students who “flatline” find themselves in an Otherworld where they must confront people whom they wronged. On some intuitive level, I always felt that the movie might have captured a sliver of the after-death experience, just as The Cuckoo has an interesting shamanic sequence.

Or am I kidding myself? Is it possible to portray the Otherworld realistically on film? And what does “realistically” mean in such a context?

The Occult Experience

In my office with the fast Ethernet connection, I downloaded the 1987 documentary The Occult Experience. It is available on various bittorent servers, such as here. (There was tie-in with Nevil Drury’s 1987 book of the same name, I believe.)

Lots of the film is actually older. Some footage goes back to the 1960s, such as a brief appearance of Isaac Bonewits during his Church of Satan experience. There’s Selena Fox and Dennis Carpenter and her coven trooping through the Wisconsin snow and some New York Witch mispronouncing “Samhain,” Alex “king of the witches” Sanders, The Temple of Set, and Janet Farrar teaching some students while Stewart smokes cigarettes in an armchair before robing.

One of the Farrars’ initation rituals is shown at length, and there is also a segment on the Australian Witch and artist Rosaleen Norton.

Also included: Z Budapest and her Dianic coven of the time, explaining how women used to curse warmongers, Luisah Tesh talking hoodoo, the Fellowship of Isis at Clonegal Castle, and Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. But what the filmmakers really love is the work of H.R. Giger.

What those Australian Pentecostals are doing in there, I’m not sure, except for the speaking in tongues and the exorcism. The latter just goes on and on (“Push it, Petra. In the name of Jeee-zuss, come out!”). Talk about savage rites!