My cooperative bowels

I have only ever had to leave one movie, in my entire movie-going history, because I had to go #2.

I thought The Creator might be the second.

The infamous first time came during Mulholland Dr. in 2001. I went to see it with my friend PJ, which, incidentally, is the only time I can remember the two of us seeing a movie without anyone else. I think we might have had Mexican beforehand, though whether that had anything to do with it, or was just a coincidence, I don't remember at this point.

I like to joke that this was the reason I didn't get Mulholland Dr. the first time ... sort of still don't, though nowadays I like it despite not getting it. As if missing any one five- to ten-minute period of that film is going to be the key to unlocking it. (Probably closer to five. Even though I was not nearly as obsessed with movies as I am today, I would have been horrified at the prospect of missing any of it, and would have been racing to complete my business as quickly as possible.)

My condition going into The Creator last night did not seem promising. There was a familiar unstable gurgling in my stomach and bowels. I knew what was coming, it was just a matter of when.

And yet I didn't quite have enough time to take care of business before the movie started.

I left my house earlier than I sometimes do, but that meant arriving at the Sun in Yarraville five minutes before showtime, rather than right as the trailers were starting. And the Sun is particularly customer-focused in that it usually plays exactly two trailers, and one two-minute "film" made by a guy who works with the Sun, showcasing some aspect of the community. It's cute and I enjoy watching these films. 

So you really only have maybe six to seven minutes after the scheduled start time before the movie is actually playing. 

If you are going only by the times I listed above -- where I talked about quickly wrapping up my business to get back to Mulholland Dr. -- I probably had the time to do what I needed to do. 

But I never liked to rush a bowel movement, and I like that even less as a nearly 50-year-old. Then there's the fact that for all the Sun does wonderfully, their bathroom is gross. It has to do with maintaining the original bathroom from when the theater first opened more than 80 years ago, but that also means the ventilation is poor and there always seems to be a sheen of urine hanging over everything, its smell quite potent. Not the ideal circumstances for any more than getting in and getting right back out again.

This story has an anti-climax that I already previewed with the title of the post. Despite eating a box of Swedish fish and drinking a Pepsi Max, I was no closer to needing to relieve myself when the movie ended than when it started. In fact, it quite clearly went in the opposite direction, as the gurgling stomach completely calmed itself, the crowning BM climbing further back up into my guts. (Sorry, that was gross, but I couldn't resist. It wasn't really crowning, which is a lot more of an urgent situation.)

In fact, I am only remembering to write this post because it took until 9:30 the next morning, after coffee and cereal, to finally do this business that I thought might become impossible to suppress as early as 9 o'clock last night.

So if there's a difference between the me of now and the me of 2001, I think it might be bowel maturity. I have noticed that I almost never have to take a shit in a situation where it's highly inconvenient for me to do so, and then it will suddenly become incredibly urgent at the exact time that all the necessary creature comforts in terms of time and facilities are available to me.

There may be no greater example than watching a movie. In the theater is the greatest potential danger, of course, since you have no way to pause, and will inevitably lose some of your experience. But I don't think I can even recall a time at home when I was watching something and had to stop to run off and take care of my needs. It's like movies just complete anesthetize my bowels.

Oh, and unfortunately, I didn't really care for The Creator, and I found it overly long, so having missed part of it wouldn't have been a significant detriment. (Though maybe I would have wondered if I'd missed the best part while I was gone.) Here's my full review in case you're interested. 

And with that, I return you to reading about less gross things. 

My number two Mulholland Drive viewing

Before Friday night, I hadn't seen David Lynch's Mulholland Drive since I saw it in the theater back in 2001. That would make this my number two viewing of Mulholland Drive.

Yet that viewing was also a number two viewing, because I had to leave the theater to go number two.

That's right -- to this day, Mulholland Drive remains the only theatrical screening I can remember having to leave in order to take a shit.

I can't remember why I had to go. I mean, with these things there is not always a why, but what I mean is, I don't remember having drunk an inordinate amount of coffee beforehand, or being sick. But sure enough, I had an intestinal emergency and I had to leave, sometime in the first hour.

If memory serves, I did my business quickly and returned within five minutes. But ever since then, I've joked (in company with which I felt comfortable, anyway) that the reason I didn't get Mulholland Drive was because I missed five minutes in the middle.

Friday night I finally watched the movie for the first time uninterrupted, and of course, it didn't make all that much more sense to me. With this movie, that's to be expected. I did, however, feel more interested in it this time, enough to check out a few theories from this massive collection of them: http://mulholland-drive.net/studies/theories.htm. I might even check out a few more in the coming days.

If pressed to tell you which part I might have missed the first time, I'd probably say it was the hitman scene, because I did not remember that at all. And if so, that would be a funny yet fortuitous scene to have missed, because it is the single scene that seems to have the least to do with anything else that happens. ("Seems to" is the key part of that phrasing -- I'm sure many of the theories make quite a bit out of that scene.)

The other unique thing about that viewing was that it was the only time I can remember seeing a movie with the guy I saw it with. I mean, we're still friends to this day, but never before or since did we go to a movie just the two of us. Perhaps Mulholland Drive scared him away from my suggestions.

I don't care to tackle any of the theories or present any of my own in this post, but I did want to share a couple random thoughts:

1) Mulholland Drive featured any number of actors I did not expect to see in this movie. Let's start with Billy Ray Cyrus. Huh? Totally random. Then there's Brent Briscoe, in exactly one scene I believe. I tend to think of this guy as the hick from A Simple Plan, so he seems out of place as an L.A. detective. I didn't think Melissa George came on the scene until years later, so seeing her as Camilla Rhodes was also a surprise. (Huh, she also played Terence Stamp's killed daughter in The Limey two years earlier.) There were some others, but those were the big three.

2) As I did recently with Se7en, I'm still struggling with this one on the proper typographic representation of the title. There I capitulated, as you'll remember, and started writing it with the numeral in the middle of the title. Here, though, I can't quite make the transition to writing the title as Mulholland Dr., which is how I see it listed more often than not. With Se7en I deferred to how the title appears in the movie itself, but I can't remember how it appears in Lynch's movie -- I know it appears on a street sign in abbreviated form very early on, but I can't remember if the title ever appears as a non-diegetic element. That argument would suggest I should start writing it abbreviated, and in fact I did at first when I included it in my Most Recently Re-watched section to the right. But then I saw it written out in full in a couple other places, and changed it back. Mulholland Drive it is.

Sorry if you came to a blog post about Mulholland Drive hoping to find a discussion that was a bit more profound. This is all I got.

Is naked the same as nude?

So I joked on Thursday about "dirty old men" being one of the intended demographics for Red Riding Hood. That may have been a somewhat subjective assessment of the film, and it may be closer to the truth than I'd like to admit. (Most good jokes are, aren't they?)

You see, I seem to have developed something of a fascination with Amanda Seyfried. There's just something unique about her. She's beautiful, there's no doubt about that -- but she's not cookie-cutter beautiful. Her big, round eyes set her apart, and there's something girl-next-doorish about her. I guess you'd describe it as an unconventional type of beauty, but that's not exactly it either, because unconventional beauty is not traditionally agreed upon by everyone -- and I think almost everyone can see the beauty in Ms. Seyfried. (Sigh-fred, not Say-freed, as I've learned just this past week.)

And so I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the promise of Ms. Sigh-fred appearing nude in Chloe was one of the reasons I prioritized watching it. Fortunately, since I am also a follower of the career of director Atom Egoyan and have seen most of his movies, that wasn't the only reason. But I try to be honest with you, my dear readers, and I know you won't hold it against me if I admit that I wanted to see what Ms. Sigh-fred's boobs look like. (She's 25 years old, or only 12 years younger than me, so it really doesn't make me that dirty.)

Only I didn't get to see them, or I didn't really. I never got what you would call a clear look at them.

And that made me ponder the difference between "appearing naked" and "nudity."

Seyfried is definitely naked, a couple times, in Chloe. But I wouldn't say she's ever actually "nude." And that's because there are lots of ways to film/photograph people being naked, without showing "the good parts." It's why celebrities appear "naked" on the front of countless respectable magazines, but never appear "nude."

In order to have actual nudity, you have to have show one of the following:

1) The right nipple;

2) The left nipple;

3) Public hair;

4) A penis (men only, ha ha).

And if it's male nudity, only the fourth one really counts -- male pubic hair is not real nudity.

This introduces a lot of paradoxes. It means you can spend an entire movie without a stitch of clothing on, and never once actually be "nude," depending on how cleverly you're shot. It also means that you can have all your clothes on, and still be "nude," if the action calls for one of your nipples poking out of your shirt (and only if you're a woman; male nipples, of course, are not nudity).

Another paradox is that showing your butt is no longer considered nudity. It was at one time. But possibly around the time Dennis Franz showed his butt on NYPD Blue (which was probably 20 years ago now), the derriere was officially no longer nudity. This is why when we saw Jennifer Aniston's butt in The Break-Up, no one really got all that excited about it. Yeah, there was talk about how Aniston was showing her butt, but it couldn't properly be characterized as a "nude scene" -- even though Aniston was naked in the scene, and she showed her butt. Nor could it be characterized as a risk on Aniston's part -- it was just keeping with her career-long attitudes toward showing her goods.

And so yeah, not much that you could characterize as actual nudity on Seyfried's part in Chloe. A lot of butt. A lot of back and legs. A lot of "side boob" -- another kind of one-time nudity that has since been de-classified as such. Even one shot from the front that's so brief and so obscured that it doesn't really qualify. You couldn't walk away from Chloe saying that Seyfried wasn't naked -- she most certainly was. But nude? Not really.

You do get nudity in Chloe, but it's all courtesy of Julianne Moore, who practically has a clause in her contract requiring nudity. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Moore has appeared nude in a third of her films, and at least half the films she appeared in that had an R rating. In fact, one of the most famous bottomless scenes in movie history is from Robert Altman's Short Cuts, when Moore has something like a five-minute argument on screen, all the time completely naked from the waist down.

And this brings up another interesting thing about nudity, something I am certainly not the first person to observe. Why is female pubic hair considered the Holy Grail of nudity? Again I am not the first to say this, but it's just hair. There shouldn't be anything inherently titillating about hair. Yet when a woman goes nude below the waist in a movie, it doubles or triples our notion of how daring she is, how much she's willing to expose herself. And of course it sends ratings boards into a tizzy. Just from a little hair.

In an era where a bikini can be shown on TV as long as there are teeny, tiny patches of fabric covering the nipples and the pubic hair, it makes me wonder if the societal opposition to nudity will one day fall entirely, just as the word "fuck" may one day be permitted to play on TV. I guess I have to say I doubt it. The political groups on both sides of the aisle who oppose indecency, for different reasons, may have less and less of a leg to stand on, but it'll be a long time before they allow themselves to be legless.

But here's the real thing about nudity -- it's not even really what we're looking for, per se, when we watch a movie that's meant to titillate us. One of the sexiest performances I can think of in a mainstream film is the performance submitted by Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. As far as I recall, Watts is neither naked nor nude at any point during the film, though she's done both things since then. And she does have a famous scene of masturbation in Mulholland Drive, but that's not even what I'm talking about when I say her performance is sexy -- that scene has more to do with a weird kind of violence against herself. No, I'm thinking of the scene where she's on that audition, and she's involved in a kiss with one of the other auditioning actors -- who I think may also be one of the producers or something, creating a weird power dynamic during the kiss. I saw the movie only once, ten years ago, and frankly, did not like it very much. But that scene sticks with me because of how hot Watts made it, and probably always will.

So, Chloe. It had some of what made Mulholland Drive sexy, but it also ended up feeling fairly banal to me in many other respects. It's what I'd heard about Chloe, with one exception -- another blogger whose opinion I trust. Well, if you're reading this, sorry -- I just didn't see it. Mild thumbs down for me.

But it was fun to see Amanda Seyfried's side-boob. ;-)

Too Shebulba

It was exactly five weeks between when I received Youth Without Youth in the mail and when we finally watched it on Saturday.

My wife and I both knew the critics had railed against Francis Ford Coppola's movie. But the reason I originally moved it to the top of my queue was that she had expressed some interest in seeing it. Since that made two of us, I knew it would get watched, eventually. Had I had my way, we would have watched it weeks ago -- I like to keep my mail rentals moving back and forth. She, on the other hand, was daunted not only by the expectation of poor quality, but by the running time. It was only just over two hours, but she had it in her head that it was pushing three.

It may just as well have been. When the credits started rolling, I turned to her and said, "You know, that film kind of reminded me of--"

"Shebulba?" she finished.

There's a reason we're married.

"Shebulba" is our nickname for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. In The Fountain, Hugh Jackman's character is floating through space on a crop of land enclosed in a bubble, which is dominated by a giant tree. We're never told quite what to make of this tree, but we know Jackman's character is immortal, because we see him as a conquistador, as a doctor fighting to cure his sick wife (Rachel Weisz) in present day, and presumably in the future, when it's possible that the only parts of Earth that remain are him and this tree, floating through space for eternity. At several points, he looks up at the tree, or outer space, or something, and reverentially whispers the following word: "Shebulba." Who or what Shebulba is, we also don't know.

Youth Without Youth was definitely a little too Shebulba.

(Some minor spoilers ahead.)

There's no immortal man or immortal tree, but a 70-year-old Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) does rejuvenate into a man half his age after being struck by a bolt of lightning that basically incinerates his body. Instead of dying, he's suddenly younger, he grows a new set of teeth, and he has the ability to absorb all the knowledge of a book just by passing his hand over it. This is to say nothing of his new ability with languages and his unexplained telekinetic powers. Oh, and did we mention that he now has a doppleganger who may or may not be imaginary? But the comparison with The Fountain really kicks into gear when Dominic's decades-spanning soulmate is introduced. We learn at the start that he loves someone named Laura, and later he meets her -- though she's now known as Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara) -- just before she's about to be struck by lightning herself. The lightning doesn't have the same effect on her -- instead, it makes her think she's someone living in ancient India, who can speak only Sanskrit. She eventually shakes herself free of the split personality, but only temporarily. Each night she awakens speaking a more and more ancient language. It's an epic love story, these lightning strike victims with their very different powers.

If that last paragraph left you wondering what the hell Coppola was thinking, you're not the only one. (He didn't actually make up the story -- the movie was adapted from a story by Romanian author Mircea Eliade.) I actually found this one more watchable than The Fountain, but not by much.

So it got me thinking which other films are way too Shebulba for their own good. Without any further ado:

1) Solaris (2002, Stephen Soderbergh). Ponderous existential sci-fi movie in which characters may or may not actually be there, and people may or may not actually be having the experiences they may or may not actually be having. You heard me right. I don't know if Andrei Trakovsky's 1972 original was any more clear, nor whether it was even supposed to be. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who worship Solaris, but I'm not one of them.

2) Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch). I'm not sure if it's fair to call David Lynch's films "Shebulba," exactly -- he's got a whole brand of weirdness going on that's unique to himself. But Mulholland Drive deserves the designation if any of his films do, though I may be saying that primarily because the whispered word "Shebulba" reminds me of the whispered word "Silencio" that factors into the ponderous third act of Mulholland Drive. I understand The Lost Highway is pretty Shebulba, but I haven't seen it so I can't attest to that personally.

3) The Tree of Life (2010, Terrence Malick). Okay, I'm cheating a little here. This movie has not even come out yet, so I can't possibly know what kind of movie it is. However, it does involve an actual Shebulba in the title -- a life-giving tree, an immortal tree, something like that. And having seen a couple Malick films and written quite a bit about Malick recently, I'm convinced that he's got a Shebulba in him, even if his films so far have had the kind of surface-level realism that should logically remove them from the Shebulba realm.

4) Lady in the Water (2006, M. Night Shyamalan). There are no time jumps or alternate layers of reality in this movie, but all the discussion of narfs and scrunts and other mythological creatures takes this movie into the same la-la-land of inscrutable ambitiousness as Shebulba. Plus, I like any opportunity I get to dump on this movie, which I consider one of the worst I've ever seen.

A couple films I love despite their potential Shebulbosity: The Cell, Donnie Darko

I'm sure there are more, but all this thinking about Shebulba makes my head hurt too much for a Monday morning. I'd love to hear of any Shebulba films you might like to add.