After more than a half year hammering out quotas and reconciling truly foreign interpretations of the exact meaning of the tag “dance music” (I say that from all angles; I wasn’t the only one who had to capitulate on stuff that felt like dilettantism to me), Slant has finally published the songs that Ed Gonzalez, Sal Cinquemani, Rich Juzwiak and myself could agree on to represent some of the greatest dance songs from the dawn of disco to the present. While we came to a lot of unanimous conclusions (alright six, to be exact), the first comment on Slant’s blog entry about the feature (from Martin, the deep house aficionado) probably sums up the way all of us feel coming down from the truly exhausting process:

Loving lots of it, hate lots…

While I’ll only cop to outright hating about five or six songs on the list, there are easily a few dozen that wouldn’t have even placed on my own personal list of the top 1000 dance songs. (Love you, Donna, but I’m looking your way, “Love to Love You Baby.”) As the list crept closer to its finalization, I realized that I’d have to use this blog to redress some of the more upsetting omissions. And by omissions, I mean not only songs that didn’t make the final list, but songs that I either forgot to nominate or songs that I first heard too late in the process. Because I entered into this project still coming to terms with my relationship to dance. The brightest spot on the whole affair has been that I now fully accept that dance music — specifically disco, garage and house — is my single favorite genre, on the whole. No longer do I cop to rockist pressures and say “soul” or “funk” as if either of said qualities are absent from the world of dance. At its best, dance music is soul/funk squared, cubed, and dimensions beyond. So, because I’m satisfied my bandwidth can handle an ongoing, open-ended series of mp3 shares (especially with traffic at a new low thanks to my week-long absences), I’m hereby initiating the new “Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah” category with the first in a series of songs I wish could’ve been canonized along with “Flowerz,” “Can You Feel It,” “Put Your Body In It,” “I’m Every Woman,” “Love Sensation,” “Got to Get Your Love” and “I Can’t Get No Sleep” (even if I wouldn’t wish any of them to be canonized alongside Moby). A series that could go to ten, twenty, or (ideally) will never end. (Caveat: Anyone who recognizes more than a third of the titles on the Slant list will probably already be well enough familiar with everything I have to offer. My collection of rare mp3s takes less time to catalog than my collection of Americana CDs.)

Syreeta, “Can’t Shake Your Love” (1981)

Only fitting to begin with one of the tracks that I finally downloaded even after the final list had been locked down for months. Syreeta Wright was Stevie Wonder’s first wife. The two albums that Stevie more or less wrote and produced for her — Syreeta (1972) and the just a little possessively titled Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta (1974) — both came on the heels of their divorce. While they’re both astonishingly up to the level of Stevie’s unimpeachable string of ’70s masterworks, Syreeta’s vocals always sounded a little bit too plaintive, too restricted to really compete with Stevie’s end-of-act-one-showstopper compositions. (On the earlier album’s “What Love Has Joined Together” and the latter’s entire Abbey Road-inspired song suite, he’s still working his way through the late ’60s Broadway counterculture feel that marred his first otherwise self-actualized effort Where I’m Coming From, only to much better effect.) Both open with undigested funk chunks that Syreeta’s pinched, breathy delivery can’t dissolve.

So you can imagine my surprise when I first heard the Hal Davis-produced, Larry Levan-mixed “Can’t Shake Your Love” and got to that point at about 1:30. The beat cuts out once, Syreeta mutters (almost Mae West on ‘ludes) either “oh, suga” or “oh, shit.” The music restarts, cuts out again and there’s a second of dead air. C’mon, Syreeta! Larry’s giving you the spotlight. Syreeta inhales, and:

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-yah!!!”

Mother of God! Not only did she just squeal my name, but she leapt at least two octaves higher than I’d ever heard her reach without fading into a lady falsetto. The Cheryl Lynnesque howls repeat a few times as the blazing, gospel-tinged number (a bridge between garage and hi-NRG) whirls to Larry’s EQ tweaks. And (unless it’s an amazingly vocal-sounding synth effect) she even jumps higher for a few echoing “bop-bop”s that I’d expect only dogs could hear clearly. Goodbye, heartbroken lyricist and Wonderlove backup singer. Hello, disco diva! Sad to say, but this was unfortunately sort of a one-shot for Syreeta, and that very same year her pretty but uncommitted duet with Billy Preston, “With You I’m Born Again,” would seal her unfair reputation as Stevie’s MOR ex.

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I shouldn’t write anything. Lord knows I don’t want to. I didn’t see any of the three movies I’d intended to watch this week — The New World, Munich and Match Point — but I did see this one:

Yes, even half-writing a post about American Idol’s own fabricated anti-star of this season’s auditions is pointless at this late date. Four days down the road and I might as well write about James Frey or this year’s roundup of the the 50 most loathsome people in America. Hell, I might as well write about William Hung. In blogs, 15 minutes really is just 15 minutes. But I can’t just pretend that she didn’t skip right into my heart cavity.

I’m still envisioning myself in this camera’s place, and that she’s pumping her haunches to dance a little bit closer my way. I don’t even need to swap out that streetwalker concrete for emerald grass meadows. I accept my fantasy women in their natural habitat.

I can only hope she’s looking to find me beyond her V’s for Vicious.

I forgive her for coming into her audition looking like ten bucks. I had to when I saw her getting demure in the presence of Seacrest, trying to pull down on the equator:

And north above the Himalayas:

Not to mention the fact that I’m almost 10% sure that Fox decided to tarnish her image further than she could muster her own damned self, putting blurs and AI icons in her choadal area whenever her moist-towelette skirt flipped. C’mon! I know she’s fond of her own worst assets, but there’s no way this bitch showed up to an audition on national television without no damned panties on.

Then again, maybe she did.

Another reason I’m so hesitant to even bother discussing Rhonetta was Fox’s incessant sandwich-boarding on her behalf. I mean, every last commercial leading up to the auditions had her snatch in it. Every last bumper to commercial breaks went: “Coming up, you don’t want to miss this outburst that still has Paula Abdul choking with fear.” On the positive side, it gave her time for more quips that didn’t fit in the actual segment at the end of the two hour special. My favorite.

Her audition was a miracle of awkward pauses and controlled aggression. She came in and faked them out with a little Britney, before laughing it off as a joke. (Paula’s on-the-beat “oops” sounds like a disproof to my theory that she was actually wearing underwear.) I thought maybe she could actually sing and all that build-up was just a spectacular fake-out.

But…

Um…

I gotta give her credit, she apparently refused to join in on the “Fame” montage at the end of the show. Her disregard for Randy’s attempt to cast her audition in a normal context was hysterical. I squeal with pleasure at how she sings “I wanna pick another song.” And her blocking on her performance of Mary J.’s “You Remind Me” reminded me of something.

Though her patter reminded me of a different Guffman hopeful.

I love AI’s strictly Kuleshovian approach to editing and juxtaposition, though. Even deaf people could tell her audition wasn’t going anywhere fast from this angle:

Rhonetta’s post-audition assessment (I mean right before she went batshit ghetto DJ Assaultive) actually began on a note of guarded receptiveness.

But I dunno. I think that her voice could probably work alright in a certain context.

In any case, she left with a flourish that proved she at least had the “stage presence” part of the AI equation down, despite the producer’s decision to film her exit with the Rear View Cam.

Yeah, I’m sure it’s waaay too late in blogtime to even mention Rhonetta, but if Rhonetta doesn’t care what urryone else things, then I join her in handing all yawls a big “Whatevurrr.”

[Incidentally, I probably won’t do any more animated GIFs until I can find a program that’ll put the frames together without making it all look like A Bill Morrison Joint.]

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The wet, brutal torture scenes and cheap sociological jabs at Europeans’ hostile view of ugly American bluster are dutifully nasty. And the economic satire equating the world’s wonton wealth bracket grinding up into gristle the teeming throngs of upwardly mobile youth is… well, it’s a start. But only the first half hour of Hostel is actually terrifying. And that’s only because Eli Roth’s follow-up to Cabin Fever (a feverishly schizoid flick, almost necessitating a new genre classification — “neo-screwball splatterpunk,” or something) spends way more time than you’d think necessary to confirm Roth’s heterosexuality. To quote executive producer Quentin Tarantino’s words from another self-fulfilling gutterbrow wannabe: “This is a pussy blow out! We got white pussy, black pussy, Spanish pussy, yellow pussy, hot pussy, cold pussy… Naugahyde pussy… If we don’t have it, you don’t want it!” Hostel’s three protagonists — a pair of American students and an Icelandic lothario traipsing across Europe from one hothouse hostel to the next — are in perpetual pursuit of the Brandenburg fleshgates. The stench of it is so pervasive that it’s actually surprising that Roth aligns himself with the horny trio. (He’s shown in a cutaway at an Amsterdam hash bar, grinning his oversized frat smirk, while our lovable sexual conquistadors conspire to get their pasty, newly dumped sissy friend some poon — not so much to help him get over his old girlfriend, but rather to set their minds at ease that they’re not sharing lofts with a fag.) What’s with this homo panic, dude? Was is the fact that some read AIDS iconography in your last film’s subtext? Or could it be that the same Rider Strong-starring film was campy as Liberace clutching a lace hanky to his mouth while fighting consumption? Or maybe you’re just trying to pretend that you don’t dig turning your copious photo ops into your own bloody fashion spreads more than anyone else in Chelsea on Halloween night? (Provided that Cabin Fever, and not Hostel, sets the tone for the rest of his career, Roth will undoubtedly go down as the first GQ Master of Horror.) But maybe I have this movie completely backwards? Is Jay Hernandez and Company’s sex-fiendish, Uncle Sam-approved pursuit of Euro girls meant to be looked at from askance, considering that their co-ed hostel honeys are leading them directly to the maw of Iron Curtain hell? Even if it is (and, judging from what appears to be a Maniac homage on the film’s crotch-centric German one-sheet, it’s not), that only adds insult to the injury when Hernandez goes all vigilante in the final reel. Fine, Eli, you’re not gay. Congratulations. Now can you go back to being a cool, campy straight horror auteur, like Sam Raimi?

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I was notified only a couple days ago about a Showgirls blog party being thrown in honor of the 10th anniversary of the film’s premiere in the Netherlands. (As you no doubt know, the Netherlands was the first nation where the otherwise universally maligned film found its audience, being not only the site of the first sold-out matinee showing but also the first American film to sweep the Hollandian equivalent of the Oscars: the Golden Dikes.) I already wrote about the film — easily the most significant film of the 1990s — somewhat extensively from a serious critical angle, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to contribute to the first significant round-table on the film’s still underfulfilled legacy since Film Quarterly’s ought-to-be-canonized anthology. I’m guessing that Verhoeven will (rightly) get the lion’s share of the accolades in the blogosphere this morning, so I felt compelled to offer twenty sound bites in celebration of the Hollywood Simian himself, scriptor Joe Eszterhas, as well as the uniformly excellent ensemble cast, a cast that could’ve scarcely been better if Altman himself had directed them. I made a conscious choice to try and avoid some of the more obviously canonical quips (“We make the cash, we cash the checks,” “What do they call that useless piece of skin around a twat?”) and focus in on the minor miracles of screenwriting/acting or, in a few cases, extremely subjective favorites. (Click on the icons to hear the dialogue for as long as my bandwidth stays erect.)

20. Gay: Annie.
Annie: WHAT?!
Gay: … You’re naked.

First off, having a character named Gay and having said character not be the nelly choreographer is brilliant in itself – why she’s surprised that an almost-stripper in a tittie extravaganza is naked in the dressing area is a ludicrous non-sequitor. Second, Ungela Brockman’s Annie has all the double-edge diva sadism as the headliner Gina Gershon, but makes room to pack it all into her three or four scenes by leaving out precision, measure and tact. Her “WHAT?!” comes right out of the gates and lets you know that this bitch is going to mess shit up down the road.

19. Cristal: To about here… maybe—No, no! A little less. I want my nipples to press, but I don’t want them to look like they’re levitatin’.”

Another first line (or close enough, in this case) that sets up an important character with enviable economy. In contrast to Nomi, who is taken aback when asked “what’s wrong with your nipples?” and offered ice, Cristal is professionally sentient to what her breasts are communicating, and makes sure her t’s aren’t crossed and others eyes are dotting her way. The way Gershon glides into the Lone Star patois at the tail end gives her an immediate, brash geographic history.

18. Molly: What’re you gonna do, watch TV and eat chips?
Nomi: Yeah… Where are the chips?
Molly: (hums “I don’t know.”)
Nomi: You ate ‘em, didn’t you?
Molly: (hums “Uh-uh.”)
Nomi: Yes you did.
Molly: No I didn’t.
Nomi: (giggling) Yes you did! You did!
Molly: (giggling) Stop.

As the erotic sigh at the end of this clip suggests, most of the female camaraderie in Showgirls is at about the same level of realism as Johnny LaRue’s Pajama Party. Girls are apparently just happy to be around other girls. They can’t help but lie on top of each other and paint each other’s nails and giggle a lot. Without drawing too broad a point of it, Eszterhas has established Nomi’s junk food diet and managed to tie it in with her junk food friendships.

17. Annie: Julie you fucking slut! You take my make-up again I’ll fucking kill you!
Julie: Oh, I’m the slut? You fucked that kid from the pizza place!
Annie: Well you fucked the meter reader!
Julie: (squirting moisturizer on Annie) Bitch!
Annie: Oh, you’re fucking dead!
Gay: Jesus Christ! Stop it, settle down, it’s done!
Faggy chorus boy: Rowr!

I didn’t say all female camaraderie was giggles and sighs. But if it isn’t, it’s apt to be quick-flaring wrath, like that old EC Comic horror story by Bernie Kriegstein (I think it was called “The Pit” or something) about two cock-fight entrepreneurs who are basically decent men driven into squalor by their back stabbing, social climber wives (?!). The poetic justice twist ending comes when the two husbands loose their harpy wives into the pit and let nature take its course. Because, as my good friend Sara once emailed me, womankind’s evil towards womankind knows no bounds. Speaking of social castes, note how pathetic a position The Gays hold. I could’ve clipped that “can I have my knuckle sandwich anally?” bit of tokenism, but Eszterhas doesn’t really care about the glitter boys, so why should I?

16. Cristal: I don’t know how good you are, darlin’. I don’t know what it is you’re good at. But if it’s at the Cheetah, it’s not dancin’, I know that much.
Nomi: You don’t know shit!

Up until this point, Nomi’s tantrums could’ve still been taken as an anomaly, a vomiting overreaction to the theft of her suitcase at film’s open. Now we discover that she was probably already churning the bile at the suggestion of a casino leech that “sooner or later” she’d be selling it. Cristal likes dog food, and she has her bitch tagged and shelved before she can even get start cold creaming her levitatin’ nipples. This is one of the two or three quotes I’ve chosen that could arguably be declared canonical, mostly because Cristal’s snipe is so classically structured. Ben Hecht might’ve written this line after a bender.

15. Nomi: I have my period.
James: Yeah, right.
Nomi: Check.
James: (puts hand down the front of Nomi’s stretch pants) Oh…
Nomi: (unmounting herself from James’ lap) See?
James: ‘s alright. I’ve got towels.

Nomi uses her period as a deflective maneuver more than once in the film. When she does the first time, in some bizarre form of coquetry towards her gargoyle Cheetah boss/pimp Al to explain her hooky the night before, we think she’s lying. When she turns out to be telling the truth to further tease James’ dick, we’re almost left with the impression that she can will herself into heavy flow. Either that or Nomi (metaphorically speaking, at least) never stops bleeding.

14. Nomi: I get a headache from champagne.
Cristal: Oh this isn’t champagne. This… (making the sign of the cross on Nomi with the fizzy spray) is holy water!

After declaring that she can’t order anything from the menu at Spago, her complaint about getting headaches from champagne sounds to me like her head hurts from contemplating how to spell the word champagne. Any food more complicated than burgers gives her the spasms. (More on that later.) I love the way Nomi tries to make champagne “work” for her by scooping it into her mouth with her nails. Those leitmotifing nails.

13. Nomi: Cristal Conners, please.
Hospital receptionist: Room 319.

Why this clip? Remember what Nomi was stripping to at the Cheetah when Cristal and Zach waltzed in and made her their whore? That’s right. Prince’s saucy “319.” That’s what’s called attentive screenwriting. Incidentally, thank God this movie got made before Larry Graham and his JV gospel got Prince. “Rainbow Children” just doesn’t have the same effect on a pole routine as “Ripopgodazippa.”

12. James: Man, everybody got AIDS and shit.

I like this line removed from context better than when it comes as part of James’ “it’s not right” anti-whore diatribe, accusing Nomi of using her nude lapdances at the Cheetah as a zipless trick as though she doesn’t actually know that. Standing alone, it’s so preachy and Debbie Downer that it feels like it’s coming from some crusty sea captain telling of nasty fantasy worlds of yore. Of course, Eszterhas is foreshadowing a tad. To clarify, no one has AIDS and shit, but eventually some people do have anal rapes and then can’t shit.

11. Cristal: I like nice tits. I always have. How ‘bout you?
Nomi: I like having nice tits.
Cristal: How do you like having them?
Nomi: What do you mean?
Cristal: You know what I mean.
Nomi: I like having them in a nice dress… or a tight top.
Cristal: Mmm… You like to show ‘em off.

Alright, I stole that Jesse M. pec implants icon gag from some gay message board awhile back. It still makes me laugh more than the coy lesbian by-play.

10. Molly: Where’re you from?
Nomi: Back east.
Molly: From where back east?
Nomi: (launching her basket of fries into the air) Different places!

It gets understandably lost amidst the floor show of tossed fries, violent ketchup bottle masturbation and 108-ounce sodas, but Elizabeth Berkley’s simultaneously pathetic and heartrending read of “different places” turns one of the movie’s first memorably goofy scenes into an early indication that Showgirls is a “white satire” (as opposed to “black comedy”), the least likely masterpiece of humanism.

09. Annie: (gritting her teeth in pain) It’s my leg or something.
Gay: (digging her hands into Annie’s knee) Tell me when you feel something.
Annie’s knee: SNAP!
Annie: Ah!
Gay: It’s her knee.

Eszterhas had obviously been watching a few episodes of the then-still-fresh hit TV show ER when he came up with this bit. Obvious, blatant exposition sounds better with him.

08. Gay: Work it!
Marty: Hold it! Nomi, what kind of turn was that? Do a pique turn! C’mon… that’s it!

Patrick Bristow’s Marty is the only man in Showgirls who could slap Nomi on the ass and get away with it. Unlike his showboys, his homosexuality plays as nothing more sexual than a job requirement. His albino visage and his “just going through the motions” prissiness make him the least sexual creature in the entire film, by a country music mile. It’s for that reason alone that I sidestepped his assessment of Nomi’s dancing style (and one of Showgirls many autocritiques) – “She’s no butterfly, Tony. She’s all pelvic thrust. I mean, she prowls!” – and instead selected this slice of bitchery masquerading as professionalism.

07. Molly: Alright, let’s go.
Nomi: Where?
Molly: You know where.
Nomi: YEAAA!!

Most of Nomi’s mood swings skew downward. But, a few valence arrests and indignities aside, Las Vegas in the film’s first half-hour is Nomi’s oyster. Within thirty seconds, Nomi’s gone from banging the roof of Molly’s sedan in shame to squealing orgasmically (aided by a nice musical segue from Verhoeven) at the mere prospect of flailing and beating her arms against her chest on the dance floor. I don’t know how good she is, or what it is she’s good at, but Nomi knows the joy of dancing ugly, I know that much.

06. Henrietta Bazoom: Hey… goddammit. You’re the only one who can get my tits poppin’ right.

It says a lot that the film’s moral compass is the blubbery woman who, with a flick of her latissimus dorsi, sends her gigantic, waxy boobs cascading over the top of her strapless curtain-gown. If you think Eszterhas is anti-feminist, you clearly missed the obvious fact that Ms. Bazoom is the author’s alter ego. How many other big-balled superstar screenwriters cast themselves as females?

05. Stardust secretary: Date of birth.
Nomi: Seven three… um, seventy-three.

Hey! Unless she’s European, she shares her birthday with Tom Cruise, Franz Kafka and yours truly! This movie was made for me and me alone. Unless she’s lying, I guess. But it’s pretty hard to lie about your birthdate (though not birth year). Speaking of Cruise, I wonder of Nomi’s born-almost-on-the-Fourth-of-July kid self used to get excited like I did over the fireworks that occasionally showed up on her birthday.

04. James: You like that burger.
Nomi: Mmm-hmm.

I’m not up on my Barthes, and I don’t know the death of the author from the guy who used to swat flies in the greasy spoon kitchen on You Can’t Do That On Television, but Nomi’s pattern of cheeseburger consumption strikes me as a ceaselessly rewarding textual pleasure that refers not only to itself but to the receptive members of Showgirls’ audience. We like cheeseburgers, too. Nomi knows that and her mouth-full affirmation sits right on top of that over-a-billion-served epigram. Mmm-hmm. Like brown on rice.

03. Al: Must be weird not having anybody cum on you.

The most canonical line of the group in a walk, but I can’t deny this bite its due reward as one of the film’s most hysterical punchlines, but (as the long pause before Al and Bazoom’s departing foley shoe taps suggests) also one of its most devastating and poignant. I mean, I don’t expect anyone to cry or anything like when Judy Garland tells the boy next door “I don’t hate you. I just hate basketball!” I just hitch up a little and wonder with remorse if any of us can really know what it’s like to not have anyone cum on you.

02. Molly: We’ll celebrate. I’ll buy you a burrito. I’ll even buy you some… fajitaaas.
Nomi: Oh, fa-hee-tath.

If number three knocks down the most established quip, number two represents the most purely subjective, personal pick of the lot. I guess explaining it would be beside the point. Suffice it to say that it’s the line I quote most frequently with my sisters. (I think Nomi’s attempt at a Meh-hee-Cannes accent has something to do with it.) That my sisters and I quote Showgirls to each other probably says a lot about my family. We like our cheeseburgers.

01. Cristal: On second thought, I’m not so sure I want you to do mine. I’m getting a little too old for that whorey look. (fanning her fingers) I’ll think about it.

I gave this scene a hearty reference in the Slant review, but I had to give Gina Gershon’s one-for-the-vaults performance the list’s number one spot. Her grin is lewd, her “be gone” fingers are fabulously cruel, her rapists’ prowess intoxicates with the promise of guiltless sexuality. Her diction on the last dismissal is harder than Nomi’s nails. Harder than Tony Moss’s erection. Harder than Vegas itself.

There you are. Twenty proofs in support of the thesis that you haven’t truly visited Vegas until you’ve heard Eszterhas sing.

Flesh, Trash, Heat, Lists, Lists, Lists | 1 Comment »

David Edelstein took a moment out from staging his own long farewell to the year-capping Slate Movie Club to actually address a few movies, and mentioned at one point:

Serious film criticism—which I don’t write but do read—rarely devotes much space to acting, which is why I want to mention some of my favorite performances

I don’t consider myself a serious film critic, nor do I recommend anyone read what I write, but either Edelstein’s challenge or my lack of actual exposure to the films of 2005 (at last count I was sitting at just over 50) compelled me to jot a couple completely cuff-offed top fives: favorite leading performances, favorite actors in minor/ensemble roles, and great one-shot scene-stealers. I actually drafted the lists a couple weeks ago, and now feel like E! Television’s The Soup year end round-up has stolen some of my thunder (especially in the last of the three categories), but great pop culture junkie minds think alike.

LEAD PERFORMANCES

5. Timmy Treadwell, Grizzly Man — For sticking his hands in mounds of grizzly dung, for talking to full grown bears like they were two years old, for being able to successfully camouflage his thinning hairline, for working at a jousting restaurant, and most of all for realizing that, if you’re going to stage your own personal one-man show, you’d better have the foresight to surround yourself with a cast of terrible actors who couldn’t possibly steal your thunder. (I’m not referring to the bears, but rather all of Herzog’s interview subjects.) Grizzly man, nothing. T-squared was a Renaissance man.

4. Dina Korzun, Forty Shades of Blue — My compadre at Slant Keith Uhlich (i.e. the single biggest fan of Forty Shades of Blue in the critical community… i.e. the only people who apparently saw Forty Shades of Blue) compares Korzun’s resolutely ocular presence, and the fact that she can’t not lead with her cheekbones, to the bondage feminism of Marlene Dietrich. I’ll take it. But did Dietrich ever look at herself in the mirror so often?

3. Luigi Lo Cascio, The Best of Youth — Sure he ages three or four decades over the course of the film, but that’s only the beginning of his achievement. I can’t think of much more forboding a challenge to an actor than Lo Cascio’s role here. The task: to represent generosity, kindness and decency in the face of an entire generation’s communal and political history. And to do so for six hours. On endurance alone, Lo Cascio’s performance gets tagged “all time.”

2. Mathieu Almaric, Kings & Queen — Looking a little bit like Luigi Lo Cascio on the days not shown during the duration of The Best of Youth (i.e. the days where he was not decent, not kind and frequently an insufferable hipster ass), Mathieu Almaric is the devilish yang to his sister Emmanuelle Devos’s ying (who is, again like Lo Cascio, a prime example of self-serving Sirkian morality, and it’s destroying her from within). Almaric is the personification of Kings and Queen’s tonal fragmentation, and I’m hardly surprised when people who don’t like the film itself in turn dislike Almaric.

1.

“I laaah-ve this baaaaah-sss!”

SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES

5. Jean-Marc Barr, Cote d’Azur — The screwball sexcapades of Cote d’Azur are mostly so much froth, and so I was riveted when Jean-Marc Barr showed up to pour some straight up, no-latte espresso into the bowl. Playing the horny family’s patriarch’s secret gay lover from years back, Barr’s chrome-domed sensuality turns Dad, the film’s most prominent hold-out, into a quivering puddle of post-coital gush. The unfortunate pair of tight orange vinyl slacks Ducastel and Martineau force him to wear in the dancing and prancing finale aside, Barr is all man. And when he unfastens Gilbert Melki from his bedpost handcuffs, flexes his bulging, throbbing thighs and purrs “I’m not letting you leave without a cup of coffee,” it puts Heath Ledger to shame.

4. Eric Bogosian, King of the Corner — A tactless Rabbi with a soft spot for discussing impending funeral plans by taking the bereaved to the race track, Bogosian is in great form and terrible function, providing the earnest but microscopic King of the Corner (the press materials of which, by the way, started me out on my burgeoning career as a blurb whore by taking “a Yiddish Sideways” only slightly out of context) its catalyst. Apparently, there’s such a thing as being too Jewish.

3. Sharon Wilkins, Palindromes — Until Sharon Wilkins emerges from the toy boat that takes the multi-faceted, multi-faced Aviva down the river towards righteousness, I wasn’t really sure whether or not I was supposed to want to abort Aviva and her desperate, infantile obsession over giving birth. And then Wilkins appears on screen, portending a sea change towards large and in charge independence. How typical of me. Almost as though Solandz was targeting me personally with the expectations of appearance, Aviva as embodied by Wilkins is (if anything) more vulnerable than before, tugging at the bottom of that ill-fitting tube top as though hoping she can disappear within it and reacting to a pile of aborted fetuses with the weight of a shattered dream.

2. Robin Wright Penn, Nine Lives — I’d say at least five or six of Rodrigo García’s one-take vignettes in Nine Lives merit euthanasia, but I have to concur with the hyperventilating majority who were blown away by Robin Wright Penn’s ten-minute tour through the gauntlet of repressed emotions and deferred attraction (the same crew who curiously left her relatively high and dry on the Village Voice critics’ poll — what, I ask, what was so fantastic about Catherine Keener in Capote? or, for that matter, what wasn’t completely embarrassing about William Hurt in A History of Violence?). Even buoyed by her full-term stomach and her squeaking grocery cart, Penn unleashes a decade’s worth of regret in a performance that is nudity itself.

1. Sid Haig, The Devil’s Rejects — “Tutti-fucking-fruity!” If it weren’t for Sid Haig… well, The Devil’s Rejects would still be a wonderland of dust devilry, a remake of Capote only starring Charles Manson as Sam Peckinpah and directed by Tobe Hooper channeling Monte Hellman. But it would be missing its Warren Oates… its Dub Taylor… its Jack Elam. And what would be the point of that?

CAMEOS, WALK-ONS and ONE-SHOTS

5. The stagehand who uses Sarah’s animated tear as lube for jacking off backstage, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic — The stagehand now has no hand to assist with the staging. OMGWTFLOL!

4. Elsa Woliaston, Kings and Queen — The only psychoanalyst I can picture being able to get my shit straight, and I do mean straight.

3. Lil’ Kim on the VMAs — On the eve of her incarceration for not being a snitch bitch ho, Kim faced an even more daunting challenge: pretending not to be pissed off by the anti-comedy of Jeremy Piven, who thought it would be chivalrous to put our heroine in the MTV blockbuster equivalent of the public square stockade. From the first digression away from the safety of the TelePrompt script, Kim’s eyes spoke the wrath she wisely kept in check.

Lame jokes about Martha Stewart were followed with even lamer jokes about Hollywood executives, and the Queen Bee (whose attire suggested she was gearing up for a cut on her term for good behavior) let her façade drop away and the incredulity surface.

“I think I’ve suffered enough!” she finally snapped, halting Piven’s psychosexual white boy power trip in Celebrity Roast clothing and sending his cock of the walk upstage to peck up his scattered ego.

The fans reacted with approval befitting a sitting Queen. As though her triumph weren’t tasty enough, she capped it by giving Ludacris’s moonman win a cute personal spin that quickly became one of my catchphrases of the year.

2. Nile Rogers and his ventriloquist’s dummy, TV Party — I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip a hop and ya don’t stop a rock on baby bubba to the boogety bang bang the boogie to the boogety beat. [/helium]

1. Marguerite, Trading Spouses — Marguerite, a fat, self-righteous, intolerant Christian with an axe to grind, took the final minutes of a heady set of Spouses episodes by the throat. This is the moment the show has been waiting for ever since the first-season switch between a rural Pentecostal housewife and a modern, urban Jewish yenta. Not since Cleo King in Magnolia have I been blessed with so bounteous a cornucopia of enraged catchphrases, spilling forth like cellulite.

“She’s tampered in dawrk-sahded stuh-fff! She’s NOT A CRISH-CHEN!!!”

“This is mah house, I want no money! I want mah Gawd and mah family! I’m a God warrior!”

“I’ve been educated. I’ve been educated on… stuh-fff! I’m the one who asks. Why am I the only one who asks? Why am I the only warrior?”

“I want these crew members out of mah house. Gawr-guyles! Psychics! Everything’s un-Godly! Get the hell out of my house in Jesus’ name I pray!” (note: the non-punctuation in that last sentence is verbatim)

“I spoke that into existence, every one of them. I planted that seed and I will see the harvest — GET OUT OF MAH HOUSE! Every dark-sided person get out of my house! If you believe in Jesus, you can stay here.”

Everyone loves to take note of the bitchiness of the producers’ last title card swipe at their own pudgy Frankenstein’s monster: “Upon further reflection, Margaret decided to keep the money.” But anyone who still gets tickled by the hypocrisy of the moral majority hasn’t seen the winning end of a feather lately. I prefer what, exactly, the other mother decided to delineate a significant portion of the reward money towards. Talk about below the belt:

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