The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Naked Lunch (1991), directed by David Cronenberg

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'Heroin' by The Velvet Underground

       As I wrote in the Fear & Loathing review my tastes in literature skewed towards the odd, and one of the oddest in the bunch was William S. Burroughs. While my peers, if they were aware of the Beats at all, were drawn more to Jack Kerouac, I quickly became more interested in William S. Burroughs. Kerouac was the James Dean of the group, the freewheeler who made rebellion look cool and hip, but Burroughs felt like a true break from the miserable conformity that has come to define American culture in 1950s. Graphic depictions of heroin addiction, frank discussions about gay sex, frequent dips into science-fiction all of jumped out out of the page like a shotgun blast to the head. Kerouac and Ginsberg always felt like the writers that were cool to read, but Burroughs is the guy that you shouldn’t be reading, so I chose the latter.

       Released in 1991, Naked Lunch was written and directed by David Cronenberg and produced by Jeremy Thomas and Gabriella Martinelli through the Recorded Picture Company, based on the 1959 novel by William S. Burroughs. Peter Weller plays William Lee, a writer turned bug exterminator who ends up getting addicted to the powder they use to kill roaches through his wife Joan. After getting busted by the cops on a narco rap, a giant bug reveals to Lee that he is actually a secret agent, that his wife is an inhuman agent of the evil organization Interzone Inc., and that he must kill her. Lee balks at this, but after shooting up some black centipede dust, he ends up accidentally killing her anyway. Unsure of what to do next, he meets with an alien creature known as a Mugworm, who gives him his next assignment: infiltrate Interzone, insert himself within their ranks and carry out his missions, making sure to write reports along the way. Which he does, but Interzone is far more dangerous than Lee first realizes. Enemies and intrigue lurk behind every corner, a vast web of conspiracy grows larger by the day, and the centipede dust flows like water. A lesser agent might falter at such a monumental task, but Lee is just the type of guy who can pull it off.

       Yes, that actually happens in the movie.

       There’s obviously some parallels one can draw between Naked Lunch and our previous entry, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Both are infamously bizarre works of literature that deal heavily with substance abuse, and both were made into films by popular genre film directors with a penchant for extreme visuals. Fear and Loathing was an adaptation of the original novel however, while as far as I can tell Naked Lunch…isn’t. Some of the names are the same, terms like Interzone, the conceit of Lee being an ‘agent’, but as far as I can tell it’s not actually an adaptation of the novel so much as it is an amalgamation of parts of the book along with portions of Burroughs’ own life, in particular the murder of his common law wife Joan Vollmer and his time spent in Tangier (which is referred to solely as ‘Interzone’ in the film). While it’s hard to blame Cronenberg for not adapting word-for-word a novel that’s intentionally obtuse, the fact that the biographical moments are also riddled with untruths makes things even more muddled. Joan wasn’t a user of morphine or heroin for example, clearly what the bug powder is meant to symbolize, but amphetamines, and she was killed in Mexico not New York City, in fact the entirety of Burroughs’ time in Mexico and South America is removed entirely. So it’s not really a proper adaptation, and it’s not really a proper biopic, so what is it?

       Weird, as it turns out.

       Yes, up until this point Cronenberg had built his career on pushing the boundaries of horror and science fiction cinema, but that doesn’t mean they were always the most straight-forward movies in the world. Sometimes you got The Fly, and sometimes you got Videodrome. So when Dave got the chance to bring Naked Lunch to the screen, he used it’s lack of coherent structure to write this semi-biographical, pseudo-detective story built around William Lee’s relationship with Joan Lee rather than Burroughs’ relationship with Joan Vollmer. All of which seems like a lot more work than necessary, but hey, I’m not the famous director here.

       I mentioned Gilliam, but after watching a good portion of Cronenberg’s films, especially Crash and eXistenZ, I’d say the director he most wants to emulate in Naked Lunch is David Lynch. The noir influences, the surreal art design, the way the score breaks out into discordant saxophone solos (courtesy of legendary free jazz musician Ornette Coleman), the dazed, almost emotionless way Peter Weller delivers his lines all feel like Cronenberg trying to evoke the dreamlike atmosphere that is irrevocably attached to Lynch. For any of his faults however Lynch crafts worlds with a painter’s brush, time and space and reality and metareality all melding together into one sensory experience. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch on the other hand is largely linear, going against Burroughs’ own ethos of crafting stories to be read in any order, and the weird turns the story takes has a robotic utilitarianism to it. Weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and compared to what Cronenberg did in Videodrome, and would do later in Crash and eXistenZ it doesn’t feel as weird as it could have been. That being said we do get to see Peter Weller rubbing a bug sphincter with morphine, so it’s not all bad.

       Speaking of bug sphincters, the visuals were always a major part of Cronenberg’s early success as a filmmaker, and that’s the case for Naked Lunch as well. The set design for both 50’s New York and Tangier is excellent, but it is of course the practical effects that are the most striking. The bug typewriter, the Mugworm, birdcage scene, the giant centipedes carved up like steaks, it’s unmistakably Cronenberg. On the other hand you could argue it’s a lot less sexually charged than several of Cronenberg’s other films, and that most of the eroticism we do get is of the heterosexual variety. That Burroughs struggled with his sexual orientation could certainly have been the case, I’m not a scholar on the man, but one of the books he wrote before “Naked Lunch” was literally called “Queer”, so I think he was less confused about his sexuality than this film would imply. A demand from the studio heads, perhaps, whose tolerance for LGBTQ people ebbs and flows with the tides of the stock market, and who were afraid that too much support for ‘the gays’ would drive away moviegoers driven into a paranoid frenzy by the propaganda surrounding the AIDS crisis. Or maybe Cronenberg just can’t write a good gay sex scene, I dunno.

       Regarding the casting, Peter Weller is an interesting choice as he feels both right and wrong for the role. I mean I like Weller, he’s in the A-list of cult movie actors and a prime catch for Cronenberg, but arguably he’s too good. Too suave, too cool. If he were supposed to be Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe it’d be fine, but he’s supposed to be playing a heroin junkie who thinks his typewriter is a bug and dabbles in teenage boys. Even that listless way he delivers his lines can’t distract from the fact looks like a marble statue given life. Judy Davis as Joan Lee is more in line with the tone of the story, a woman who could be called beautiful before drugs robbed her of the vitality that accompanies beauty.

       Naked Lunch gets the recommendation. As an adaptation of an unadaptable novel it has its issues as I mentioned, but for those Cronenberg faithful it delivers those grotesque visions that they knew and loved, and would have to subsist on as the director would take a break from the bizarre for a few years with his adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s Madame Butterfly. If you’re a fan of the dream noir of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet or the vicious chaos of Catch-22, then Naked Lunch might be up your alley. And do not under any circumstances try to inject bug killer into your body, it will not turn out well for you. You probably shouldn’t proposition North African teenagers for sex either, just to be safe. Unless you yourself are a North African teenager, in which case go nuts.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Fisher King (1991), directed by Terry Gilliam

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Fish and Whistle", by John Prine

      We're getting down to the wire here folks, only one more movie before we get into the Final 10, which means revisiting one of our first ten directors: Terry Gilliam. Strange to think now that I was barely aware of the entire Monty Python idea back in high school, the prime Monty Python years, and yet years later I find myself waist deep in Python adjacent media, all because of Terry Gilliam. I’ve tried for a while to describe the source of that phenomenon in this paragraph, try to compose some sort of thesis on the nature of cinema but I think the simplest answer I can think of to write here is that I like his style. I’ve loved his films (Baron Munchausen) and I’ve hated them (Doctor Parnassus) and everything in between, but the reason I keep coming back is because I respect his cinematic vision. So it is with Lynch and Carpenter; Even if their movies aren’t perfect, whatever perfect means in an imperfect, I find myself drawn to the way they tell a story because they approach things in such a novel way. Is that how auteur theory works? I think that’s how it works. I don’t know much about movies, even though I’ve reviewed about two hundred of them.

Released in 1991, written by Richard LaGravenese, The Fisher King was directed by Terry Gilliam and was his only film to be released through TriStar, otherwise known as that one company with the flying horse. Everyone’s favorite uncle Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, an inflammatory New York shock jock in the vein of Howard Stern, because who else could it be? Jack is on the cusp of mainstream success, that tantalizing primetime sitcom fruit is within arm’s reach, when one of his listeners takes his flippant comments seriously and goes on a shooting spree, killing seven people as well as himself. Three years later, Jack is a broken man mooching off of his girlfriend Ann, using copious amounts of booze to try and drown the demons. One inebriated night, Jack is mistaken for a homeless person and almost set on fire by a couple psychopaths when he is saved by a homeless man named Parry (played by Robin Williams). Parry isn’t just a homeless man, though; He’s a knight of the Aruthurian persuasion, tasked by God to retrieve the Holy Grail, which just so happens to look like a trophy sitting in local business tycoon Langdon Carmichael’s study. At least that’s what the invisible cherubim tell him, and they also say that Jack happens to be the Chosen One who will facilitate that request. Invisible naked babies know best after all.

Well Jack is ready to get the hell out of Dodge after that revelation when he learns the truth: ‘Parry’ isn’t actually Parry; His name is Henry Sagan, a former college professor of medieval literature at Columbia University. He was at that bar during that rampage, where he got a front row seat to his wife’s face being blown to pieces with a shotgun, causing him to go into catatonic shock and ultimately leading to the state he’s in. Holy intervention, or just a really big coincidence? Either way, Jack decides to try and find some way to help Parry, some way he can pay him back in order to assuage the overwhelming guilt that’s hanging over him. Recompense, but perhaps it should be more mutual aid, as it turns out Jack might be in need of fixing just as much as Parry.

In the case of music, oftentimes the case is to lead with some grand and high-energy song, and then follow it up with the quiet, emotional ballad. So it is in a way with Gilliam here. His last film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was that grand, high-energy ballad, with the over-the-top special effects and costumes and sweeping vistas and what have you, so it makes sense that he would pull back in his next film (also the fact that it made back less than half its budget at the box office). Still The Fisher King feels magical; the use of saturated colors and New York’s gothic architecture, and the occasions where we slip along into Parry’s delusions really gives the film a magical realist tone, sans the magic. Proof that Terry Gilliam could still make a Terry Gilliam without the trappings of genre films per se, and considering this film made almost double its budget at the box office, I’d say that I’m not the only one to think as much.

Moving onto our cast, we of course have Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams as Jack and Parry respectively, Mercedes Ruehl (who has appeared in The Warriors and Last Action Hero) as the girlfriend/video store owner Ann and Amanda Plummer as Parry’s love interest, Lydia Sinclair. Bridges and Williams give exactly the performance you’d expect from them, rugged/too cool for school and manic with a core of pain respectively. Mercedes does the put-upon assertive Italian woman role that you’ve probably seen hundreds of times in films based in New York, but she does it with heart and she does it well. Amanda Plummer similarly seems like an actor that you’d bet dollars to doughnuts would be a regular in Tim Burton or the Coen’s filmography and so it’s surprising that she never has been, and similarly she does great work as Parry’s very own Dulcinea del Toboso. I find it hard to describe, but it’s as if she projects the exact opposite of charisma. Everything about her, the way the acts, the way she eats seems tailor made to ward off the audience, and to reiterate the fact that Parry ‘sees’ things that other people can’t see, just as he does with Jack. It’s a shame she doesn’t get more screen time.

      Which ties into what might be the key issue of this film, which is the romance. Parry and Lydia’s romance being underdeveloped, they only get one real scene together before we’re thrust into the climax of the film, so it doesn’t hit as hard it might have otherwise. The Jack and Ann romance...while it is given a build, I could see the argument that it’s a one-sided, even toxic relationship that’s never really treated as such in the film. Ann is put behind the figurative 8-ball right out of the gate, being put-upon financially and emotionally, and she never gets past it and stands on her own two feet. Even the ending which is framed as sweet and romantic comes across as weak because it's framed around Jack making the smallest possible concession and Ann forgiving him for all past transgressions. I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to romantic entanglements, but I dunno, their whole arc didn’t ring true to me.

      Then of course there is the depiction of homeless people (as in a bunch of old mentally ill guys) and mental illness (as in talking fast and acting eccentric), which is treating with a bit more humanity than some but still reeks of Hollywood standards. I don’t necessarily mind it in the case of Parry, as there is a clear line of influence between his character and that of Don Quixote, and anyone who knows Terry Gilliam knows how he feels about La Mancha’s favorite son. If that is the case however, I wish then that we did get to spend some time with Parry and that we got to see more of his hallucinations brought to life. Really get to see him at work as the knight, or fail to work as quixotic tradition would have it. Then again I guess pushing Gilliam to go crazy with it would contradict my praise for doing something down-to-earth after Munchausen, so clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about.

      As much as Gilliam’s movies tend to lean towards the cynical and the sarcastic, I think The Fisher King has a sentimental core. The importance of love and of forgiveness; Forgiving others, and allowing yourself to to be forgiven, loving others and allowing yourself to be loved. The Fisher King gets the recommendation, it’s a solid film that plays to Gilliam’s artistic vision while leaving you wanting more, and considering how this blog functions that’s not an empty statement. Grab some Chinese food and a date this Halloween and enjoy. Just remember to avoid any red knights.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), directed by Nicholas Meyer

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", by Leonard Nimoy

      Talk about a legacy, huh? When I covered Star Trek: The Motion Picture all the way back in Marathon ‘15, that I would even do the other films was still a vague concept in my mind. You never really know what your situation is going to be in the future after all, and it’s certainly possible that in the intervening time between Octobers I could have lost interest in Star Trek, or found some other film to fill that spot on the card, or just covered them in a separate review altogether, or just fucking died and never got to watch them.  But no, every year the Marathon has come and gone, and every year for the past five years we have borne witness to the adventures of Captain Kirk and the USS Enterprise, for better or for worse (looking at you Star Trek V). Now, after three seasons, an animated series, a couple albums and a shipload of homoerotic fanfiction, we’ve reached the end of the road. This is the end, my beautiful friends, the end.

      Released in 1991, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country shows it’s not kidding right out of the gate by putting Nicholas Meyer in the director’s chair, who had previously brought great success to the franchise through Wrath of Kahn (Marathon buffs will also known him from Time After Time). With a tip of the hat to the then-recently departed Gene Roddenberry at the start, we join the USS Excelsior, where Captain Sulu is enjoying his ‘three days away from retirement’ status. Those good vibes are soon interrupted by the Excelsior being rocked by an energy wave, which as it turns out was the Klingon moon Praxis blowing the fuck up. Praxis was the main power source for the entire Klingon Empire as it turns out, their entire civilization is set to collapse in a couple decades with it gone, so with the sword of Damocles looming above their head they finally sit down to talk. The long conflict between the Klingons and the Federation seems to be coming to an end, but there are some among Starfleet that balk at the thought of diplomacy. Folk like Captain Kirk, who seems to be leaning towards the ‘genocide’ option, and thus the natural choice to break the ice with Chancellor Gorkon (played by David Warner is his second Trek role in a row) of the Klingon High Council before transporting him to a peace conference. When Gorkon is later assassinated and all the evidence points to the Enterprise being responsible, Kirk and McCoy (who was with him at the time) are arrested and put on trial for the crime. Yet if the Enterprise was not responsible for the attack, as the crew seem absolutely certain of, then that begs the question of who did? With the clock ticking ever closer to the start of the peace conference, it’s up to Spock and the rest of the crew to discover the true culprits behind Gorkon’s death, rescue Kirk and McCoy, and save both the Federation and the Klingons from falling back into war. All in a day’s work.

      With this film being released the year it was, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between the situation between the Federation and the Klingons with that of the United States and the Soviet Union, with the destruction of Praxis resembling the Chernobyl disaster and Gorkon being a stand-in for Gorbachev. What I appreciate about this story though, especially with the benefit of hindsight, is that Leonard Nimoy, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal do not make the Federation pure-hearted heroes or the Klingons dastardly bad guys, and in fact give the Klingons many reasons not to trust the Federation. Kirk outright advocates for the extinction of the Klingon race near the beginning of the film (I guess a dead son you talked to twice is equal to a couple million dead infants), and most of the crew is casually racist towards Klingons even up to the end of the film. The Klingons bring up how the Federation is a ‘humans-only club’, mirroring that of the U.S. and certain European countries influencing world affairs, and indeed as we see from later Trek series about 90% of the people we see are humans. The Klingons bring up that collaborating with the Federation will destroy their culture, and while they’re still going strong later in the Trek verse, in real life the U.S.-backed Boris Yeltsin regime caused such economic chaos and widespread misery that Russia to this day has never fully recovered, to say nothing of the other former Soviet Republics. Really the worst thing you could say about the Klingons in this film are their penal colonies, a reference to the infamous Soviet gulags, but considering the Federation also has penal colonies it seems like something of a moot point, and we’ve talked on the blog before on the United States’ hypocritical views on prison. You could argue that this goes against Gene Roddenberry’s vision of utopian human society, but I do prefer a Federation that isn’t perfect but is willing to do the right thing and go for peace over the Federation in The Final Frontier, who half-ass a planet-sized vanity project and then leave its citizenry to basically live like animals in a blighted wasteland.

 

      Speaking of The Final Frontier, hoo boy, what a difference a change of directors makes. I’ve heard that William Shatner had requested and was denied an increase of budget for Star Trek V, which was why the special effects by the end weren’t that spectacular, but that doesn’t explain all the shitty attempts at comedy and the fact that a movie titled Star Trek spends most of its time in a desert. Not only does The Undiscovered Country look better all around (the Enterprise looks sleek and futuristic rather than a broken hunk of shit), not only does the story flow better, not only is there a bigger & better cast, not only do the crew actually get some dialogue, but Nicholas Meyer did it all for 6 million dollars less than Shatner. Hell, Wrath of Kahn, often regarded as the best Star Trek film, only cost 12 million! It worked, just as Star Trek VI works, because Meyer tells simple stories in extraordinary settings. Wrath of Kahn was a revenge story combat inspired by submarine combat, Star Trek VI is a mystery story and a political thriller. There are still the trappings of science fiction there, you’re still dealing with outer space and aliens and what have you, but the special effects are more enhancing the story than dominating it. Which has always been a major point of contention in the argument between Star Trek and Star Wars, but I think that sixth Star Star Trek movie has got me more invested in the political drama it was telling than the sixth Star Wars movie ever did, even if it had less pew pew lasers. 

      Hell, Nicholas Meyer even gets Kirk better than Shatner did during his time in the chair. Kirk in The Final Frontier was in full-on smarm mode for most of the film, and after a while he came across as a jackass. Kirk in The Undiscovered Country not only gets the denouement of his arc that’s been brewing since the second film, dealing with his son’s death and his feelings towards the Klingons, but in general he just feels more in line with the character we know as James T. Kirk. Stuff which doesn’t really play as well in 1991 than it did in 1969, like him beating 7 foot tall aliens and making out with sexy ladies, but since was to be the last ride for the OST crew you can forgive trotting out a bit of nostalgia.

      Of the rest of the main cast, Spock is the only other person to come out of this series a different person/Vulcan than when he went in, having mastered the ability to express his emotions without becoming a nutbar like other Vulcans (also Sherlock Holmes is real in the Trek universe and Spock is related to him). McCoy is just McCoy, and the rest of the crew, while more active this time around are just the crew, quirks and all. Again, if the intent is to play on OST nostalgia then it would be fine if we returned to the old characterization, but we never left it! In fact in some ways we’ve gone backwards, as that whole Uhura/Scotty romance thrown around in earlier movies has been completely dropped. It’s nice to see Sulu the captain of his own ship, even though it’s also a convenient excuse to write him out of most of the film, but one of the major things I wish these films had done was to utilize the opportunity to deepen those characters which might have been considered shallow in the original series rather than devote so much attention to Kirk and Spock. Trek has always been an ensemble-based show and I believe the writing should have reflected that in the transition to film, especially if they were planning on making half a dozen of them.

      I admit I also wasn’t all that impressed with our two major non-main cast characters in the picture, helmsman Valeris (played by Kim Cattrall) and the *SPOILER* antagonist General Chang. Apparently Kim’s direction on how to play a stoic alien zen buddhist was ‘regular person speaking at a formal function’, way too similar to Spock in temperament without having earned that development. As for Chang, visually he continues the theme of nostalgia by making him an OST-style Klingon, which means he basically looks like a dude dressed as a pirate in a room full of dudes dressed like aliens. His whole ‘quoting Shakespeare’ gimmick makes him more memorable than Christopher Lloyd’s character in Star Trek III, but he does it so often it gets tedious, and comes across as kind of a Kahn-lite. While the story itself has multiple layers to it, Star Trek VI opts instead to undercut that by making Chang into the tired ‘dastardly Klingon’ cliche. They could have easily used the mutual enmity between the Federation and the Klingons to make Chang a nuanced villain, a dark mirror of Kirk perhaps, but instead they have him twirling his metaphorical mustache (as opposed to his actual mustache) doing bad things for seemingly no other reason than that he’s an asshole. Rather bland when you consider that you could see more interesting Klingons just by staying at home and turning on TNG.

      It could be that extreme dislike of Star Trek V is causing my brain to overcompensate, but I’m going to give Star Trek VI the recommendation. Nicholas Meyer doesn’t blow the roof of the joint but he does manage to close this series out on a high note, and while I might have personally wanted more, it’s nice to see the crew of the old Enterprise ride off into the sunset one last time. Overall I’d say my experience with the OST Trek films hasn’t strayed too far from the popular consensus: I liked Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the only one on the planet seems like), liked Wrath of Kahn, can barely remember anything about Search for Spock, liked The Voyage Home, hated The Final Frontier, and now liked The Undiscovered Country. An above average experience! Does that mean then that next year’s Marathon will see us digging into the Next Generation Trek films? Maybe, but before that we’ve got one more book that needs closing…

Delicatessen (1991), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Meat Grinder" by Madvillain

       It’s always something of a treat when you see a couple of creative people just click together on a project. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor for example: Great on their own, and absolute dynamite when put together. Or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, although I’d give anybody credit for hanging out with Jerry Lewis for any length of time. People who may not be friends per se, may not even like each other, yet they are not only understand each other but elevate each other to heights they may not have achieved on their own. It’s a fascinating thing to see, and as someone who is often trapped in his own head and unable to get any creative writing done, thoughts racing ahead of my ability to act upon them, it’s something I’d like to experience myself at some point. Of course some of those famous pairs ended up hating each other, but I figure if you go in hating yourself you won’t have anything to worry about.

Those of you who understand where I’m going with this might not agree with the idea that French-born filmmakers Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro fit this description. They only really worked on three films together after all, one of which was Alien: Resurrection of all things, and Jeunet’s most successful period both critically and commercially didn’t come until afterwards, while Caro’s film career is basically non-existent as far as I can tell. Not much ‘elevating’ going on. Yet City of Lost Children was a big, Ron Pearlman sized treat, and I feel like I’ve name dropped these two enough times over the years that it’s finally time to cover the film that introduced me to these two in the first place. Years before the blog got rolling in those halcyon days when hulu actually had stuff you could watch for free, I stumbled upon a strange little film by the name of Delicatessen, and decided then and there to never shut the hell up about it. And now we’re here.

Released in 1991, co-written by Gilles Adrien, Delicatessen was the feature-length directorial debut of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. France, and possibly the entire world, has been reduced to a blighted, miserable wreck, much like your average town in the Rust Belt. Meat has become scarce, and rather than switching to a vegetable-based diet, the landlord of an apartment building (who happens to be a butcher and the owner of a delicatessen) and his tenants have arrived at the most sensible solution: Lure folks in with the promise of room and board as the maintenance man, murder them in the night and cannibalize their bodies. Such is the fate intended for Stan Louison, ex-circus man, eternal optimist, played by Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon, and at his best when pan-fried and served with soup or a fresh garden salad. However poor Louison is not without allies in this den of wolves; Julie, the butcher’s daughter (played by Marie-Laure Dougnac) is determined that this handyman will not suffer the fate of the others before him. He’s gonna get out, and this apartment building is never going to be the same. Partially because of the severe water damage.

Delicatessen was one of those films that, in hindsight, seated as it was in that collection of weird surrealistic fantasy and science fiction films that have since become my wheelhouse. Our tenants are as motley a crew of misfits as you’d ever see, even if they weren’t cannibals . There’s the woman plagued with voices in her head who plots out elaborate suicides, the brothers who make those little cylinders that moo when you flip them, the pistol packing postman, all folk that would seem right at home in your average mental institution. It’s also nice to see the ‘debut’ appearances of several actors that we would later see in City of Lost Children and Amèlie, like Dominique Pinon, Rufus (who played one of the cow box brothers here and Amèlie’s father) and the late Ticky Holgado. Pinon especially, who so projects this aura of the everyman schlub that it allows him to slip from the likable clown Louison here, to the moronic minions in City, to the misogynist loser in Amèlie without ever skipping a beat. 

Despite that, things never quite come together as it feels they should with this movie. There’s the core of good satire there, that in a time of crisis these folk would literally kill friends and family rather than give up the morning sausage, but it never really comes together in a way that’s completely satisfying. The setting feels a bit too self-contained for the world they’ve established, which makes plot points that happen later feel too convenient. Louison never feels like enough of the doe-eyed optimist to counteract the negativity around him, and while things move towards that direction it feels less like his worldview being challenged and more things happening to him. Which is fine if he’s more of a plot device, a catalyst, and Julie was the main character, but it never definitively moves in that direction either? Delicatessen is a movie full of people moving in a straight line it seems like, they're the exact same person when they come out as they were when they went in. Which I guess doesn’t matter if they all died an agonizingly slow death from starvation after all this, but then that’s true of everything.

Thinking about how to wrap things up, and my mind instantly flashed with comparisons to Jabberwocky, Terry Gilliam’s first proper movie outside of the Monty Python umbrella. Ok films, films that have that spark of something unique that make you perk up your ears and take notice, but trip before the finish line. A prelude to something better, in hindsight. So it was with Gilliam, who proved himself a few years later with Time Bandits and so it was Caro and Jeunet, though to this day it unfortunately has been their last. Delicatessen gets the recommendation, and maybe this short, barely coherent ‘review’ will be what you need to get interested in the works of Jeunet, just as this film was all those years ago. Or at least it might slightly tip the search algorithm in his favor, because apparently he’s hard up for movie-making funds at the moment and needs all the help he can get. I dunno, the internet doesn’t make sense.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- Cape Fear (1991), directed by Martin Scorsese

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Cape Fear River", by American Aquarium

     Normally I have a little paragraph setting up the article. Well I’ve been feeling a little out of it today and I decided to skip it. The movie this time is Cape Fear, so let’s get to it.

     Lawyer Sam Bowden has about everything a man could ask for: A beautiful wife, a lovely daughter, an expensive house and even a woman on the side to play squash and potentially have sex with. Then one day, a man named Max Cady rolls into town, a man that Bouden actually represented in court. Seems that Cady was recently released from prison after spending 14 years there for battery (also some rape and murder), and after a decade to think about it, Cady is convinced that Bouden is responsible. So he’s going to do everything in his power to make Bowden's life a living hell, and he’s smart enough to do it without getting caught. With his life and his career threatening to crumble down around his ears, Bouden must confront the fact that sometimes all the fancy laws and policemen in the world can’t do a damn thing to protect you. Sometimes you have to stand on your own to protect what’s yours, even if it goes against everything you thought you believed in. Every man must go through their own hell to reach salvation, and Cape Fear is Sam Bowden's hell.

     Now I don’t research the films for this Marathon prior to viewing, so I actually didn’t know that this Cape Fear is actually a remake of the original Cape Fear made back in 1962, directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Martin Balsam, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum (who all make appearances in this film). However, once you do know that, you get the impression that Scorsese is making a conscious effort to not just retell the story of Cape Fear, but to replicate the feeling of old-school thrillers as a whole. Robert De Niro’s portrayal of Max Cady, which had to be inspired by Mitchum’s performance in Night of the Hunter, the abundance of orchestral musical stings, the way Scorsese frames certain scenes and lingers on certain shots (the bit where Bouden is brushing his teeth while his wife is in the background feels incredibly Hitchcockian), it all fits together with that Hitchcock/Laughton style in mind. Which is pretty cool, I mean Scorsese is one of the biggest director’s to come out the ‘New Hollywood’ wave of the 1970s, which redefined the role of the director and changed how stories were told through film. To see the man so intimately connected to filmmaking as we know it now deliberately reference an older style like that is certainly interesting.

     I dunno though, as much as I can appreciate an attempt revisiting that style, I feel like there are points where it ends up undercutting the emotional impact of what’s happening on screen. The musical stings and the repeated shots which picture the roiling (and for some reason purple) clouds, which may have been effective in 1962 just end up feeling unbelievably cheesy in 1991. This is a movie about a rapist and murderer terrorizing a family, who actually does some raping and murdering in the film, so you’d expect a certain level of tension that carries throughout the film. Most of the time Scorsese works it out and Cape Fear manages to be a chilling and uncomfortable experience, even managing to capture the classic thriller atmosphere that he’s aiming for (mostly in the second half I’d say), but then those stings or something else pops in and it feels less like you’re watching a descendent of Vertigo and Rope and more like the Twilight Zone movie. Melodramatic at best and goofy at worst is the best way I can think of to describe it, which is the exact same problem I had with another film of his, 2010’s Shutter Island. If Scorsese had approached Cape Fear in the way he approached Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, gritty, dirty, rather than riding the nostalgia tip, I feel like it would have been a lot better off.

     Like I said though, Scorsese manages to hit the mark about 80% of the time in Cape Fear, and he managed to collect a pretty impressive list of names to act in it. Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker, Robert De Niro, high class talent that put on a pretty high class performance. So I can see why it’s earned a spot in pop culture, and that’s why it gets a recommendation from me. Just try not to wait 14 years before you see it, alright?

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: The Guyver (1991), directed by Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", by Daft Punk

     In this day and age, we are all very well-acquainted with the idea of the ‘comic book movie’. Well, ‘superhero movie’, to be more precise. What with all the cinematic universes and television universes and netflix originals and all that shit, it’s easy to forget that comic books still exist, or that there are comics that aren’t about people in silly costumes punching each other in this world. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a good cape book every now and again, but at some point I realized that the vast majority of discussion around superheroes weren’t about the comics themselves, or even about the heroes really. It was arguing over box office numbers and Rotten Tomato scores, and how everything was sexist or racist or rants about those darn ol’ SJWs and I just didn’t give a shit. Or I did to some extent, but not enough that I wanted to be subjected to that white noise of the same shit over and over. So I stopped, and don’t feel like I missed out on all that much.

     Still, what with the enormous popularity of ‘CBM’s’, it’s a bit surprising that not many attempts have been made to capitalize on adapting manga for the Western market. There’s been a few obviously, Fist of the North Star (starring Malcolm McDowell for some reason) and Dragon Ball Evolution (starring the crushed dreams of anyone who was a young boy in the mid-to-late 90s) come to mind, and the Hollywood rumour mill always threatens us with a version of Cowboy Bebop with Keanu Reeves or an Akira that takes place in Vancouver, but rarely do these plans seem to come to fruition. Maybe the studio heads don’t want to put money into a property that hasn’t already been driven into the dirt, or maybe they’re afraid that the culture gap is too great and Western audiences wouldn’t be able to relate, I don’t know. Seems to me that if you’re so convinced that something won’t work that you don’t try then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but then I’m not in the movie-making business. I’ve also seen a bit of Dragon Ball Evolution, so maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie after all.

     Moving on to The Guyver…

     Based on the 1985 manga by Yoshiki Takaya, The Guyver (co-directed by Screaming Mad George and Steven Wang, they also did some of the monster designs), shares the basic premise of the source material but is otherwise it's own thang. In it, the film posits that thousands of years ago, aliens arrived on Earth in order to create the ultimate organic weapon, which happens to be man (suck it xenomorphs). Some humans found out about this alien influence however, and through genetic manipulation were able to produce the Zoanoids, humans with the ability to transform themselves into monstrous super-soldiers. The strongest of all the Zoanoids, the Zoalord, then established the Chronos Corporation, not only to hide their army under a public facade but also to research the bizarre alien relic known as the ‘Unit’. The only known device of its kind on Earth, it supposedly grants Zoanoids a great defensive power. In the hands of a human who can activate it however, it can transform them into a living weapon of unimaginable power. It transforms them into...The Guyver.

     You find all this out in the first two minutes, by the way. Just felt like giving it here.

     One dark night, Dr. Tetsu Segawa learns of the world-domination plans of the Chronos Corporation and decides to steal the Guyver unit and hand it over to Max Reid (Mark Hamill, of Mark Hamill fame), an agent of the CIA. Before he is murdered by the Zoalord’s goon squad Tetsu manages to hide the device, where it is ultimately discovered and activated by Shawn, the boyfriend of Tetsu’s daughter and grade-A whiny fuckboi. When the Zoalord decides to send in his goon squad to capture the daughter (I honestly never caught her name. Mizzki? Mitzi? Mizuki? Something like that), Shawn must master the abilities of his bio-boosted armor and eliminate the Zoanoid threat once and for all.

     When you watch The Guyver, the first thing that comes to mind is that old Pizza Bagel commercial, you know the one. Not because there are any pizzas or bagels, but because of this pervasive air of ‘Hey kids! Isn’t this cool?!’ that permeates this film to the core. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II also came out in 1991, so you can’t help but think this is a case of The Guyver trying desperately to compete and just utterly failing to be in the same league You’ve got wacky sound effects, Scooby Doo-esque chase gags, motherfuckin’ Jimmie ‘J.J.’ Walker (what 90’s kid didn’t love Good Times?) doing his best impression of what white people thought rap was in those days, just...I don’t even know what to say about it. If I were a young boy at the time I might have eaten that shit up like it’s sherbert, but in the modern day it’s that right amount of awkward and unfunny that it’s actually not funny in an ironic sense. I’ll watch TMNT II any day of the week, invite a bunch of friends over, but if even one person came in and saw me watching The Guyver, I’d have to go chop woods or do taxes or something. Just to prove I’m still a man.

     You want to make a movie that’s fun for the whole family to enjoy? Fine. The trouble is that Guyver is a seinen manga, meaning it’s geared towards adults, and the violence is at a level considered suitable for adults. Rather than dropping the kiddie and going for a teen-geared film or toning down the violence for the kiddies, The Guyver attempts to mesh the two into one cohesive whole, which ends up making it a surreal experience. In one scene you have Mark Hamill and Vivian Wu running from a goofy rat creature, and in another you have Guyver tearing himself out a monster’s stomach. Not to mention SPOILERS Reid’s transformation into a Zoanoid, otherwise known as the creepiest fucking thing outside of a John Carpenter movie SPOILERS. I’m not a parent, so I don’t give much of shit, but I can’t imagine Cronenbergian body horror is the selling point that will drive parents to get little Timmy a Guyver action figure for X-mas.

     In The Guyver’s defense, the work that went into the design for this movie is worthy of praise. In an era where Tim Burton’s Batman was so rigid that he couldn’t turn his neck, the Guyver suit not only looked damn close to the source material, but offered a much greater degree of mobility, so fights could in fact look more flashy and complex than simple punches. The Zoanoids also look pretty top-notch, and a lot more diverse than you might expect a B-movie to attempt. I guess an emphasis on special effects is what you should expect when you get special effects guys in the director’s chair, but when it works out it works out.

     The Guyver is a dumb movie, but unlike movies like Nightbreed, it doesn’t pretend it’s deeper than it is. So if you the type of person who doesn’t mind early 90s cheese movies like The Monster Squad or Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, or you’re not such a diehard Guyver fan that the idea of treating it like a joke sends you into fits of rage, then you’ll probably be okay. It’s not something you need to rush out and see, but if you ever need a movie to make fun of with your rifftrax buddies, keep it in your back pocket.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: The Rocketeer (1991), directed by Joe Johnston

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Rocket Man (I Think It's Going To Be A Long, Long Time)", by Elton John

     This might be surprising to some of you movie fans out there, but there was a time when comic book movies existed that weren’t connected to Marvel or DC at all. It’s true, after the explosive success of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 showed Hollywood that maybe there was some money to be made in these funny book things, suddenly we started seeing more and more of them popping up in movie theaters. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, Spawn, Men in Black, The Mask, Guyver, The Shadow and later on movies like Hellboy and From Hell, a sizable portion of comic book adaptations from less mainstream sources, while DC was running the Bat gauntlet and Marvel was tossing properties off the boat in a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy. Some of them may not be well-regarded these days, hell most people probably don’t even realize some of these films were comics at all, and only a couple could be said to have earned enough money to be considered successful, but the fact that they were made at all is a testament to corporate Hollywood’s drunken stumbling towards the next big thing actually working out for the better.

     In the early 90s Disney was looking to get some of that sweet dosh as well, and to that end they optioned the rights for and subsequently released The Rocketeer, based on the indie comic by Dave Stephens. A golden age adventure taking cues from the Commando Cody film serials of the early 50s, Doc Savage, and proto-dieselpunk sensibilities, The Rocketeer centers around the life of Cliff Secord, a down on his luck (yet with movie star good looks) stunt pilot that comes across a jet pack developed by aviation mogul Howard Hughes. What seems to be a boon to Secord and his ragtag airfield soon proves to be a burden, as the mob (under orders from famous actor Neville Sinclair, played by Timothy ‘Muh-Fuckin’ 007’ Dalton) threaten to tear apart his life and that of his naive actress girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer Connelly). Seems that this town is in need of a hero, and with the aid of Howard Hughes’ jet pack and a fancy new costume, Cliff Secord just might be that hero. He might just be...The Rocketeer. Coming this summer.

     Plus this is a movie set during WW2, so you know what fascistic military force is going to make an appearance.

     The Rocketeer doesn’t really make any turns you don’t expect, and being a movie with the Disney label on it, you can’t really expect it to move far beyond that ‘fun for the whole family’ labeling, but as these things go it’s a decent action/adventure movie. Personally I have a fondness for those movies that kind of idealize and even cartoonize that era of American history, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Dick Tracy, etc., and Rocketeer manages to scratch that art deco itch for mobsters and Ford Packards while managing to be entertaining throughout. It could have leaned a bit more heavily into the action and Rocketeering side of things, there’s a lot more talking about the jet pack than actually using it for my liking, but it is what it is. I’m sure some of you out there have kids, so if you need a movie this Halloween that’s not spooky but still has the essence of sci-fi and nerdiness that has come to define the holiday, pop in The Rocketeer and see how it goes. Who knows, you might plant the seed of nerd in their heads on the spot.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: Drop Dead Fred (1991), directed by Ate de Jong

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Living Doll", by Cliff Richard & The Young Ones

     Here’s yet another film that was originally on the docket for last year’s Marathon of the Soul, Drop Dead Fred. At the time, I was at the height of what you might call my British Comedy phase: Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Red Dwarf, QI, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Jeeves & Wooster, old school Who’s Line Is It Anyway? and of course The Comic Strip Presents…,The Young Ones and Bottom. I consumed them all, wholly and voraciously, and in so doing I decided to reflect that in my choice of films. Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits made an appearance, but at the last minute I decided to go with Guest House Paradiso instead, starring Bottom stars Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson (pretty fun comedy, by the way). Since this list seems to be headed towards a retrospective direction, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and toss it in. See what happens, you know?

     The story to Drop Dead Fred is something we’ve probably all seen before: A schmuck who is currently at the bottom of shit valley has their life turned upside by a wacky character who by the end of the film manages to give the schmuck the confidence to succeed and so everyone lives happily ever after (except for those dickhole antagonists). The schmuck in this case is Elizabeth (Phoebe Cates), a girl so cowed by her domineering mother and her scumbag ex-husband that she seems one stapler away from being Stephen Root’s character in Office Space, and the wacky character is her manic imaginary friend Drop Dead Fred (Rik Mayall playing virtually the same character he played in almost every role he’s had, except with bizarre costumes and cartoon physics). Encino Man, My Favorite Martian, Mallrats, it’s a tried and true formula for comedy films, as much as ‘silly foreigners’ and ‘two people of opposing beliefs and personalities must work together to accomplish a shared goal’.

     This is a weird one, though. From the surface you expect it to be some kind of goofy, Halloweentown style Disney original movie, but then it turns out to be closer to an early Tim Burton joint. But it isn’t quite like Burton either, because that high level of whimsy isn’t there.to compliment that faux-goth darkness. If I had to put a term to it, it’d be ‘try-hard’. Phoebe doesn’t seem like a Potter-esque figure to pity as she does a co-dependent masochist, quietly mumbling about her stapler as the Bill Lumbergs of the movie move her ass to the basement. Fred is the same frenzied petulant twat that Rik Mayall perfected over the years, which works out for a bratty child like character, but he doesn’t seem like an actual friend either. The moments where we touch upon Fred and Lizzie’s friendship seem few and far between, and 90% of the time Fred comes off as some violently schizophrenic asshole, compelled to insult and assault the person he exists to befriend. Every other major character seems like some sort of exaggerated caricature, generally dickish, and I’m pretty sure that Mickey has a collection of human heads in his basement. I’m not the most social man in the world, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how humans are meant to act, even if they exist in a black comedy universe.

     However I really do enjoy Rik Mayall as an actor, which is probably what saves this movie honestly, as he provides the lion’s share of the comedy and sentiment. I also quite like design aesthetic, the costumes, the effects etc., a slightly unhinged vision of how a child might view the world. Plus seeing Carrie Fisher is always pretty cool. So if Halloween comes around and you’re looking for something with your significant other (maybe not with the kids ironically, as there is a bit of language you might not appreciate), I think Drop Dead Fred might be a good, relatively inoffensive choice. It won’t even matter that she’s imaginary this time.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991), directed by Lam Nai Choi

I watched this movie instead of Crocodile Dundee 2. Don't ask.

Trailer

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Appropriate Tune: "Prison Song #1", by System Of A Down

     “By 2001 A.D., capitalistic countries have privatized all government organizations. Prisons, like car parks, have become franchised businesses.”

     Quite a dystopian way to begin a movie, wouldn't you say?

     Ricky Ho Lik Wong (Fan Siu-Wong), 21 years old, has been sentenced to ten years in prison for manslaughter. We know little about him at first (because that’s how movies work) except that he is an orphan, a former music student, and mysteriously disappeared for two years prior to his arrest. A x-ray scan indicates that he he has six bullets lodged within his chest that he has refused to remove for some reason. Ricky is clearly an (androgynous) man of many mysteries, and also what looks like a slight uni-brow. We don’t judge.

     The prison, as can be gathered from the intro, is a horrible place, more a encampment for slaves than an institution for rehabilitation. It’s run by the equally-as-mysterious-as-Ricky-if-not-more-so Warden and his vice-warden Dan, a sadistic, snobbish, one-eyed, hook-handed bastard with a fondness for general dickery. Their rule is maintained by the Gang of Four, prisoners who are leaders of the four wings of the prison. There’s Oscar, the tattooed leader of the North Wing, Brandon the blond, needle throwing leader of the South, Tarzan, the burly leader of the East, and Rogan (Yukari Oshima), the leader of the West, overall leader of the Go4, and the most androgynous man in the film. For the (relatively) innocent prisoners, horrible death is commonplace, and misery is omnipresent. If only, they surely think, there were some kind of super badass martial artist around who wasn't a total dick. They could totally take out those 4 assholes and two superior assholes, and prison could be fun and exciting again! Except for the shower rape, of course.

     As it turns out, Ricky is a super badass martial artist, and he’s not a dick at all. With a mastery of the secret/ancient art of Qidong and a hatred for injustice so intense that the average superhero feels inadequate by comparison, Ricky is one man against an army of truncheons and guns and fists. The army better start writing up their wills, if you know what I'm sayin'...

     So ‘the lone martial artist fighting against injustice’ is not what you may call a unique plotline, seeing as it and ‘lone martial artist seeks revenge for the death of master/loved one’ comprise 90% of all martial arts film plots, so what is it that sets Riki-Oh apart from its peers? Gore. Riki-Oh is easily the most over-the-top violent martial arts movie that I have ever seen, and the extent to which these special effects are utilized remind me more of The Evil Dead or Re-Animator than Return of the Dragon or The Drunken Master. People don’t just get punched in the head, skulls are pounded in from the sheer impact of the fist, blades don’t just cut, they rip through flesh like a hot katana through butter, etc. Almost every single fight, hell, even physical interactions between characters is a explosion of blood and viscera just waiting to happen, and often does. Which sounds like it would get old, but Riki-Oh springs it on you in such unexpected ways, at the same building and building up the excess that you end up looking forward to how exactly folks are gonna get jacked up every time.

     It’s fun for the whole family.

     The excessive violence is obviously a part of what makes this film popular, but the part that drives it home is how stupid it is. Not bad stupid, of course, but pure undiluted camp, that lovely feeling that comes with people doing ridiculous things without a trace of self-awareness or irony. It’s what helps the violence turn from unsettling to hilariously cartoonish, because it’s being done by people who don’t see the question of physics that arise with a small Asian man that can karate chop human limbs off. Character development either doesn't exist or come out of nowhere, which doesn't really matter because the characters are so bizarre and exaggerated that it wouldn't really help things at all. Ricky’s backstory, which are presented in flashbacks, are such a model example of stupid things done seriously that it boggles the mind. The origin of the bullets in Ricky’s chest, which is given in the later half of the film, literally left me speechless in how ludicrously it was shown to us in the film. Eraserhead gave me a similar feeling of being unable to wrap my head around what I was seeing, but in that case it is intentionally being presented in a surrealist manner. Whereas here it was more like walking down the street and passing a woman who was walking a poodle, and that poodle was wearing trousers. No context, no warning, just a dog wearing pants for a split second and then it’s gone. That’s the easiest explanation I can come up with, which explains why I don’t explain things that often. Explain explain explain.

     Perhaps all this campy violence can be justified by mentioning that this is in fact a comic book movie, or a manga movie for all you Japanophiles out there. Yes, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is based on a manga by the name of Riki-Oh, created by Saruwatari Tetsuya and Masahiko Takajo and published by Shueisha in the late 80s. Although perhaps excessive by modern standards, comics about ridiculously overpowered fighters killing random bastards by the truckload in a hyper-violent fashion was actually a market in that time. Buronson’s Fist of the North Star, Hagiwara’s Bastard!!, everything about the actual story could be bonkers, as long as you had some badass fight scenes and graphic death scenes. Which I guess makes Riki-Oh accurate to the tone of the original manga, but it means that you have human beings playing crazy characters that were likely even more crazy on paper, with storylines that were likely built up for months being condensed within a 90 minute film. Which is not an uncommon thing for comic book movies, most notably previous Thunderbird entry The Crow, but is the very same reason why it’s very hard to see a good comic book movie. The Crow is, like Riki-Oh, a comic book movie that tries serious and ends up camp, but as well as from the flaws I mentioned in that entry, the direction is skewed far too much in the boring lost love subplot, and less on the crazy atmosphere and action, that it ends up evening out to a C-grade at best. Riki-Oh is an almost nonsensical train wreck that wraps right around to success, and the eventual romantic doesn't distract from the fact that you’re seeing guys getting their eyeballs knocked out of their sockets. It’s a schizophrenic gumbo that you can’t help yourself from eating, even though your brain can’t make sense of it at all.

     Yeah, I enjoyed it. If you love gore hound effects, cheesy action, grab some beer and a couple friends and spend a Friday evening with this film, and you won’t be disappointed. If you don’t have any friends, for whatever reason, you still might like this movie, but it sounds like you are probably more suited towards The Crow and leather pants. Also the music of the Smiths.

     Morrissey knows your pain, middle-class white people. Morrissey knows your pain.

Result: Recommended