Goofing around, I told Siri and Apple Music to play the top ten songs of 1997.
Holy shit, that was a mistake.
Category: Broken Girl Media
Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming
The mating call of the Lonely Tumblr Dom.
Crossed
This qualifies as the least fucked-up thing ever written in Crossed, and only because I’ve taken it out of context.
For those who are unaware, Crossed is more or less the comics franchise equivalent of The Aristocrats; it’s a gore-soaked, rape-happy, one-joke premise that dares each writer/artist team to somehow exceed the raw depravity of those who came before. It’s also a bit like The Walking Dead, if Rick were forced to watch a gang of grinning psuedo-zombies fuck Carl’s headless torso while they rape Michonne to death with her own severed arms and legs.
It’s a questionably acquired taste, but serves as an ongoing reminder that my freak-flag is flying at half-mast compared to Garth Ennis and friends.
Gone Girl
[SPOILERS for Gone Girl]
Gone Girl was better than I expected, in unexpected ways.
There aren’t enough clear-eyed, female sociopaths in movies or television. We’ve got fuck-tons of crazy bitch characters, certainly, and countless man-eating succubi; in recent years, we even have a growing collection of AARP-eligible she-monsters, out to rip a hole in the world. (Your efforts have been noted, Jessica Lange.) But we don’t have many chicks who get to be complete bastards, just ‘cause.
That’s the first thing GG delivers. Not for our titular girl will there be a traumatic backstory, womb madness, or an abandonment complex run amok; she’s all unrepentant self-interest, self-aggrandizement, and self-sufficiency, wedged into a sexy-when-she-feels-like-it blonde package. She’s a rare beast, and nicely written to be the smartest person in the room, in every room. Gillian Flynn deserves credit for never degrading her creation with more than a narcissist’s delusional self-pity, and denying her any access to truly relatable tragedy. She’s just a horrible, fascinating, infuriating human being for no good reason, and that’s enough.
But there’s more: Flynn pulls off an equally surprising achievement in somehow tricking David Fincher into making a legitimately funny film. (Perhaps House of Cards empowered him, too.) IMDB may deem GG to be a “drama/mystery/thriller”, but I call it a dark comedy. It’s nasty in all the right ways, and wears a half-concealed grin while doing its dirt.
I watched Into The Woods this weekend, which generated these thoughts:
- Johnny Depp leverages his career investments better than any actor on the planet. Aside from the goings-on at The Viper Room, he spent most of the ’90s as a pretty, vulnerable, quasi-sexual weirdo, building up a massive stockpile of quirky good will, which he now uses to infuse his array of murderous barbers, hateful chocolatiers, drunken pirates, bizarre racial stereotypes, and child predators with what would normally be an incongrous hint of harmless whimsy. He gets away with roles few actors of his stature would even attempt, largely because he dedicated his youth to seeming innocuous. Genius.
- How is it that everyone lost their collective minds over Fifty Shades releasing on Valentine’s Day, while pretty much ignoring ITW coming out on Christmas? Given their MPAA ratings and the age-ranges of their respective audiences, I’m guessing more fragile minds were warped by watching a twelve year-old girl’s trip through the Rape Forest –and what basically amounts to another female character’s death-by-slut-shaming in said forest– than by sitting through two hours of Dakota Johnson trying to look nervous and excited.
- I was surprised by how little we hear from Rapunzel, until it occurred to me that emotionally-stunted kidnap victims –who have spent their lives with the matted yoke of oppression growing from their heads– probably deserve a bit of post-rescue downtime. She’s basically a brittle-haired Kimmy Schmidt, after all.
“Wonderwall” – Cat Power
Given that the Gallagher brothers from Oasis resented and despised each other even more than the members of the Eagles and Beatles combined, it’s easy to overlook how much they hated everyone else in the world, too. As with their spiritual forefathers, they had a knack for packaging bile, jealousy, and selfishness in musical camouflage so radio-friendly that it seemed natural to sing along.
What I love about Cat Power’s acoustic cover of Wonderwall is that it strips away the song’s indignant-frat-boy-anthem aspects and lays it bare as the rambling of a manipulative, delusional misanthrope who wants you to know that you’re completely worthless and hopeless, your life is –generally speaking– an existential sham, and your love for him is literally the only thing that justifies your continued consumption of oxygen on this planet.
No one understands the intricacies of romance quite like a bitter asshole.
“Addicted To Love” – Robert Palmer
Your lights are on
but you’re not home
your will is not your own
Robert Palmer’s original Addicted To Love was a smirking, grinding celebration of shameless desire that —in retrospect— seems like an absurdly calculated, on-the-nose bookend to his 1979 cover of Moon Martin’s Bad Case of Loving You. When coupled with its iconic, misogyny-chic video —powered by a quintet of swaying, empty-eyed, interchangeable sex-mimes— it was right up there with the Flock of Seagulls haircut, Don Johnson’s Miami Vice wardrobe, and Robert Downey Jr.’s painfully prescient performance in Less Than Zero as an evocative artifact of pop culture in the ’80s.
But when Florence Welch got her claws into the song, she rifled through its guts and found the affliction hiding within Palmer’s addiction. She took his taunting of a pathetic, cock-drunk lover, and without changing a word, made it a resigned recitation of weaknesses chanted into a judgemental mirror.
Personally speaking, I can’t wait to watch life tear you apart.
I’ve never found Nicole Kidman particularly attractive. Part of that is no doubt due to my instinctive aversion to any vagina that has been sullied by that psychotically-grinning, couch-bouncing, Thetan-nuzzling nutjob to whom she was once wed. But it’s probably more about how damned cold she is as an actress. It’s the same issue I once had with Charlize Theron, before she showed her chops in Monster; her beauty always seemed to lack passion, or at least obscure it.
But in Stoker, I absolutely loved her. And it was all down to this moment, this scrap of performance where she took full ownership of that icy persona and channeled it into an expression of bitterness and spite so visceral that it made a generally dream-like, otherworldly film snap into sharp focus.
Yeah, I’m a pervert, so I loved all the saddle-shoed, incestuous piano-playing and murder, but it was Kidman’s magnificent little monologue that made Stoker one of my favorite films of 2013.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
“Crazy Bitch” – Buckcherry
Baby girl
You want it all
To be a star
You’ll have to go down
Take it off
No need to talk
You’re crazy
But I like the way you fuck me
Buckcherry’s Crazy Bitch was my ringtone for about six months in the mid-2000s, which probably says more about me as a then-thirtysomething man than I should be comfortable admitting.
But hey, look: sluts dancing around urinals!
“Victim of Love” – The Eagles
What kind of love have you got
You should be home, but you’re not
A room full of noise, and dangerous boys
still makes you thirsty and hot
Long before any of us wandered on to Tumblr, The Eagles were out there in the trenches, bringing Southern California-style misogyny to the masses. Don Henley and Glenn Frey didn’t exactly invent slut-shaming, but they damned near perfected it over the course of the 1970s.
Seriously, in these dudes’ inner worlds, every woman was a femme fatale or tainted meat, ready to wreck a man’s dreams from the inside out. Which actually sounds bad-ass and empowering when I put it like that, but that’s never how they execute the material. The Eagles’ version of a Bad Grrl is always sad on the inside, secure in the knowledge that she’s a moral cadaver, rotting in the damp moonlight of masculine disdain. The general attitude seems to be: “women would be great, if they weren’t all such whores.”
Little did they realize that the great ones are the whores. With The Eagles series of smash-hit temper tantrums, they basically wasted the ’70s, which, for the record, was unequivocally the greatest decade for loose women and the despicable men who justify their existences. There was no AIDS, man. No internet to help them track you down. No DNA tests to prove you’re their babies-daddy, even if the bitches did find you. If you ever wanted to experience the raw thrill of taking a sexually-aware woman in her nascence, using her up in a drug-fueled orgy of eroticized contempt, and then disposing of her on a park bench at 4AM, I’m thinking sometime around 1974 had to be the perfect time to be alive with an erection. And yet here’s Don Henley, whining like a bitch about the sea of emotionally-stunted nymphomaniacs he was dog-paddling his way through. Gimme a break.
Spoiled old white guys are the fucking worst.
Victim of love, I see a broken heart
You got your stories to tell
Victim of love, it’s such an easy part
and you know how to play it so well