The Swimmer (1968)

The Swimmer (1968)

Frank and Flip make circles around Cumberland Heights, Tennessee. Siri had taken them on an ill-advised short cut around Clarksville, a small city on the Cumberland River. Rumor has it the Monkees’ song is peripherally a war-ballad.  That is, take the last train to Clarksville…so we can see each other one last time before I am shipped out of nearby Fort Campbell to Vietnam.

Fun stuff.

On this early autumn day, Graveyard and Flip have decided to avoid what probably amounted to a minor rush hour traffic jam. But they are on what amounts to a leisurely trek out to Memphis anyway so it doesn’t matter much. However leaving Route 41 puts you in a largish bend in the river which is easily entered on the east  and not so easily exited west side, with purported portages outdated, private, or even mislabeled rail road spurs associated with some of the industrial plants along the river. Finally dead ending at a zinc refinery, Frank and Flip have to double back. Frank takes one last ditch effort when out of the corner of his eye he spots River Crossing Road, heading west.  River Crossing twists and turns its way deeper and deeper into Cumberland Heights and lord knew it must hit the river soon.

But coming around a wide, blind bend, Flip suddenly screams, and Frank both jams the brakes and swings the Impala onto the shoulder and around two kids standing in the middle of the road. The kids, a boy and a girl, do not move. "What the fuck?!” Frank curses. Fifty more meters down the road, they hit the orange striped guardrail indicating this road went no further. They’d hit a bunch today and Frank automatically glides into a U-turn. He slows on the return so as to both not hit the kids but also slow enough to bitch them out.

This time the kids are gone. Frank and Flip stop and scratch their heads wondering where they got too. There’s a steep grade up and down on either side of the gravel road. If they went anywhere, they must of ran. Comparing notes, Flip and Frank agree the kids where in the neighborhood of about ten years old, blonde and wearing white. Flip can specify the boy had a collarless shirt and suspenders, the girl a peasant sack dress. What she most recalls is their dead stare.

Flip is convinced they were ghosts. Perhaps warning them of the dead end. Frank thinks they were the so-called black-eyed children. Who would’ve sucked out their souls if they had slowed down more. Or perhaps they were just creepy Tennessee feral hill folk fucking with them.

That was six months ago. And a lot has changed. Frank went on that Memphis trip a great man-child and has found in truth has had to grow rapidly. It was later that evening, Flip announced, nonchalantly from a deckchair in the West Memphis LaQuinta pool that she was pregnant.

My, a lot had changed since he was last here.

Frank was stunned and Flip disappeared into the pool to give him a chance to collect his thoughts.  Frank hated swimming.  Hated that wet cat feeling of being pissed off and not knowing who to violently take your rage out of. Always had.

If he had already hated swimming it would have been Burt Lancaster’s The Swimmer (Perry 1968) that put him over the top.  This film is what Frank is reminded of, pool-side suffering from sudden-onset of a midlife crisis.  

The Swimmer is a sad and creepy tale of a ne’er-do-well spending his midlife crisis swimming across the swanky Connecticut burbs. That is, making his way home by hopping pool-to-pool yard-to-yard and having a sad and creepy adventures at each neighbor.  It’s a must see if you want to ogle Burt Lancaster’s (From Here to Eternity; Zinneman 1953) package for two hours. It is an expanded reimagining of a John Cheever (The Wapshot Chronicle 1957) story of the same name. And a first effort at a film score by Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line; Attenborough 1985) and acting debut of Joan Rivers (Spaceballs; Brooks, 1987) to boot.

Don’t misunderstand. The summer-of-love creep factor is the film’s success. Not its failing. It tries and delivers an uncomfortable movie. A weird balance of meditative and off-putting that is worth the price of admission. In particular it’s cinematography that captures a lot of this. The garish colors ought be vibrant but somehow feel stale. The dialogue is the same. A little dead inside. It was re-released by Grindhouse Releasing in 2014 and currently not hard to get a hold of if you want it.

What’s brilliant to Frank is the serial climax of the film. Each embarrassing, awkward interaction, surely is the punch line of the film, but no,  there is more and more. We learn more about Lancaster’s Ned Merrill at every fence hop.  He has problems with his wife, his, job, his finances, his kids and his exes.  What starts as a new adventure for a new day drags Ned down at every turn. Here along the way the allegory slowly but violently slaps us in the face. It is a young vivacious Ned who sets out on his journey a sunny spring morning. He makes it back a broken and alone. Night. Raining. He curls up and cries. Such is life.

But Frankie is a big boy. Squeeze’s “Up the Junction” (1979) has eked out the Bee Gees “Specks and Specks” on Frank’s turntable. Such is life. Life turns on a dime. A wrong turn.  A causal disclosure at hotel poolside. A new adventure calls. Frank Jr. would be on the scene soon. Unlike the dead end ghost kids there was no driving around and turning back.

And who wanted to?

Graveyard Frank had never turned his back on a new adventure, and wasn’t about to start now.

Eden Log (2007)

It is Christmas time in Puerto Rico. Improbably. Halloween has been packed in and Thanksgiving skipped right over. Apparently.

Someone should inform the Occupy San Juan crowd who are chanting something or other in the courtyard below, as Frank and Coqui Esperanza idle in the old city, waiting for a stack of photocopies to be made at Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. It was too hot and tiring to watch a balding civil servant shuffle papers around the office in a red and green sweater while alternatingly finding his favorite carols on a Perry Como CD and gasping for air in front of an ancient electric fan. The old metal kind with the wide finger accepting holes. The law suit attracting kind you don’t dare see in the CONUS anymore. Silver tinsel taped to the top fluttered before it. Papers littering the man’s desk were held down with what were no doubt pre-Columbian potsherds. An Elenoid appliqué bat head appeared to be keeping some excavation permits from littering the room.

Frank and Coqui were in town doing some background research on a commercial lot in the Cañabón Ward for which the contractor would require a wetlands permit before erecting a Mofongo Express. The food at an ME wasn’t the best or healthiest but the little Styrofoam mortars the shit came in were ingenious. Besides when you are trying to dine in the Caribbean on 27-dollar a day, you couldn’t go wrong. Especially not when you blew most of your walking around money on strip clubs down by the Luis Muñoz Marín Airport strip.

In any case, when he’s shoved a flyer about Troy Davis, Frank decides its time to head back to the government offices to see if his Xeroxes are ready. They are. With empty pockets they head back to the Rio Arriba motor lodge on the outskirts of the city to pack it in for a quiet night. Expense accounts and progress reports done for the evening, Frank tucks down for a movie and several tall glasses of Don Q and mango juice. Coqui meanwhile chats up the prostitutes working a Medalla beer commercial production on the street outside.Frank chose a little number called Eden Log (2007) to watch from the pile of loose DVDs the front desk clerk keep in a shoe box under the foosball table. He’d been trying to download it at least since it was released in May 2009 by Magnolia Home Entertainment. Yes, in the economic turndown, Frank was a slave to the whims of the torrents. Oh what vicious seas they could be.

Downloading Eden Log resulted in a lot of files that were in truth rather barbaric and amusing pornos. A few times he also got Frontier(s) (Gens 2007) another French horror film. This one about a group of crazed neo-Nazis who prey on traveling youngsters. But that’s a topic for another blog. Anyway, he’d have to watch Eden Log dubbed Spanish with English subs that didn’t quite sync. But whatever, it was free. The film didn’t appear to have much dialogue anyway.

Eden Log is the 2007 freshman feature of Franck Vestiel. It came to Frank’s attention when it got slapped into a bunch of film house scenesters’ top ten lists. It wasn’t as bad as all that though. Just not too fresh. It has some redeeming qualities, though, Frank would have just assumed skipping the last five minutes.

He admits the first five minutes intrigued him. A man, Clovis Cornillac (Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles [Jeunet 2004]), regains consciousness at the in the mud at the bottom of a cave, with a dead man at his side. He doesn’t’remember anything. He has to piece together along the way, avoid some monsters, meet a chick. Blah blah. It takes him 98 minutes to find out. (Cool story, bro.). There’s some twists and turns you might understand if you cared to pay attention. But you don’t much. Frank managed to hang on until the first appearance of mutants. Ugh.

At the outset, Frank had hoped the film might do for Caves what Don’t Look Now (Roeg 1973) did for Canals. [Sic; from FT’s notes. No idea what that means-ed.]. The faux black and white filming and detailed sets are excellent but not unique. But it’s all sufficiently cramped and surreal.

And it ends with some half-baked green nonsense involving a CGI tree.

Fuck. Read the IGN Review. They hit this dead on. It’s fair and Frank couldn’t say it better. It has the feel of a video game (ala Doom [Bartkowiak 2005]) and presents a cluttered view of the future has been done to death. Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1996) leaps to mind out of numerous others. The photography has Gaspar Noé (Irreversible 2002), all over it. Add a dash of Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) and ta-dah, you’ve got Eden Log.

The morning found them a middling pleasant hike into the Cañabón mountains where the lot in question stood. Frank had decided their rental vehicle need not risk getting bogged down in the wet, unpaved clay roads. To his dismay, there were occupiers there as well. Squatters at least, living in an abandoned community park. They had taken up residences in the pool houses and cabanas and all peered suspiciously out at them as they scoured the surface for artifacts or hacked away the jungle foliage to inspect possible evidence of old sugar cane harvesting equipment from the last two centuries.

They were cheered however by the Christmas decorations, amazed by the good Catholics hauling out boxes of garland and lights from their hovels to sting across the falling fences and crumbling changing rooms. They scratch their heads and wonder if the folks at ME knew they were going to have to boot these people out of the property. Happy early holidays.

Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005)

Frank and Flip-Flop are getting onto a bus in Tel-Aviv when they hear the explosion. They were on their way to a Shlomo’s rent-a-camel place anyway, so they just looked at each other in mute concern and booked, never looking back. The blast had been in the city but distant, probably 20 blocks, or on the other side of the world in Middle Eastern terms.

When they got on the road towards Ein Gedi, Frank flipped on the car radio for news and Flip translated. She said there was no news of any violence in the city. Of course, she may have just been covering up. A little embarrassed or self conscious, about the unquiet in her homeland. Not speaking an ounce of Hebrew (except, “Shalom,” “Kaki,” and “Hatoul.” All of which he got plenty of mileage out of.), for all Frank, knew the whole world may be in chaos, cities burning, army’s clashing.

So what better place to go when with WWIII raging, than the West Bank?

The Dead Sea is quite simply a trip. A head trip.

Frank had been told you could float on the Dead Sea, but he had not been told that you had to. No choice. The water at almost 10 x the salinity of the ocean literally pushes you out. Walking ankle deep is profound, with the water repelling your feet at each steep. Easily overcome but a unique feeling nonetheless. Once sufficiently submerged, the sea takes over, spitting you back unto the surface any time your guard is down, which is often as you loose balance, cutting your feet on the jagged salt crystals making up the bottom of the sea.

And oily? No one ever warned you the Dead Sea is slimy.

Hadassah says that its changed a lot, with diversion of water away from the already puny Jordan River ever increasing, and the sea dropping a meter or so annually. The water is below what once was the beach, and you have to climb down a rocky slope, and cross a field of more crystals before hitting the water.

Back up at the beach, frying in the sun like turkey bacon in a pan (but non-stick, thanks to the oily water) Frank checks his email, and is delighted that no one back at work is having a crisis. He does get a message from Angry Jamie with his  must-see movie picks, many of which he’s seen, such as the over-hyped (not without reason) Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy 2011) or the perplexingly entertaining bad zombie flick, Dead Snow (Wirkola 2009), and the drab retro-styled House of the Devil (West 2009).

The one that sparks his interest, though, is an odd Japanese pastiche, entitled Funky Forest: The First Contact (Ishii, Ishimine and Miki 2005). This one is news to him, and it is soon zipping its way through his download queue. After all, the hostel they were staying in, though satisfyingly simple and offering fantastic views across the sea to Jordan also had only local Israeli TV.  It was released on DVD by Viz in March 2008; but for those of you wanting a slightly more legal way to purchase, act fast, Amazon seems to have only 17 left in stock right now.

Funky Forest, to Frank and Flip curled up together on a metal cot watching Frank’s little lap top screen, did not disappoint in that it was totally disappointing. Jamie offered the selection as one some-trippy-shit-movie-to-watch-while-you’re-fucked-out-of-your-mind. Frank was comfortable after some Mogen David and vicodin (after a17-hour plane ride JFK-TLV and a tumble over a wall, his back was killing him). But apparently not in a state to really appreciate Funky Forest which requires psychedelic mushrooms and Sudafed and Thunderbird to even begin to guess at its meaning.

First and foremost, it’s long. Two and a half hours, this is really way too long to be incomprehensible. Honestly. Unless you are of course in some mind-bent stupor. Heroin or oxycontin would be best, something that would allow hours of headache free dead attention that you may or may not remember after.

The film is a conglomeration of numerous vignettes, musical and comedy numbers, animation etc. these range from droll little conversations between secretaries to extracting things from bellybuttons and televisions with rectums. The scenes in this latter are straight out of Naked Lunch (Cronenberg 1991), without the thin semblance of a plot. Funky Forest is, in short, a lot like the Dead Sea. It’s an odd thing, and it pushes you away rather than try to draw you in.

But it is oddly entertaining in that Japanese-British way of sticking average button down people into bizarre situations.

Still, if you require a plot, don’t go straying into the Funky Forest, and probably stop reading this blog, whose attempts at both story telling and movie review are tenuous at best.

Funky Forest takes a good deal of the night, followed by some restless hours on the cot as the vicodin wears off. But Frank and Hadassah were up early to se the sun rise over Jordan, before scaling Masada, which is a wonder in its own right, and subject for a blog of another day.

Shalom, kaki shel hatoul!

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Francis Trautman and Hadassah Pomegranate were touring the petting zoo in the village of Kafr Al Shams in the Golan Heights when the trouble began.

Specifically Flip Flop was trying to help separate bunnies from snakes in the reptile house; while conversely Graveyard Frank had been trying to decipher which restroom, the one marked with a bunny or a gorilla was right for him. He had given up and was now explaining to a little girl by the fish pond how the Israeli catfish had little payot instead of whiskers. She was asking why the little tref were bottom feeders (and Frank was resisting telling her that they were looking for loose change) when it happened.

Frank looks away from the pool when he hears a commotion at the fence, which was backed up against the Syrian border. A crowd had gathered on the other side and was working at the links with wire cutters. Those milling in the zoo began to yell and high tail it to the exit. Frank scooped up the little girl and shoved her into the arms of a screaming couple coming toward him. I hope those were her parents, he thinks quickly then turns to look for Flip.

It was perfect addition to their trip, already cut short by the jet fuel shortage at Ben-Gurion. It had been initially blamed on the Palestinians (it you followed the tweet-scene) but turned out to be a fuck up by some contractor. By the time it was cleared up it was Shabbat. No travel, of course. But they got in in time for Yom Hazikaron; it was now a leisurely Yom Ha'atzmaut.

Frank spots flip shoving a snake back into its cage. A section of fence is down and 20 to 25 Arabs are streaming through, chanting something or other. Frank doesn’t know or care what it specifically is, it seems angry and that’s all he cares about. Then the rocks start flying. The plan is to grab Flip and get the hell out of al-Dodge before stones turn into Molotov cocktails.

Of course as in many places, there is no lack of IDF about. In the spirit of the holiday, they had no small amount of equipment laid out for demonstration, mostly for the benefit of the kids who’ll all (more or less) be picking up arms in defense of the Jewish state when they reach eighteen. Or the old folks curious to see how the gear has advanced since the Enfield rifles they had been toting in 1948 or the Kalash in 1967. Now it’s noonish and many are lazing in the grass eating kebabs and pita. They drop the grub and grab their sparkly new Tavor bullpups and advance on the scene. To their credit they fire over the heads of the intruders trying to scare them back across the border.  

Frank fights against the tide to the reptile house. As more and more pour through the fence. Given the black head scarves and green, black, red and white flags some carry, tourist Frank assumes they are Palestinians though he’s not sure why they are steaming out of Syria.

The ugly bruiser that stands between him and Flip Flop wears a Code Pink T-shirt (“Arrest the War Criminals”). “Nice shirt” Frank chirps as he brushes past him, too late to notice the brick he pulls out of his satchel and bashes him over the head. Frank is aware of collapsing over a stone wall into the goat enclosure before blacking out.

While out Frank dreams he is…one of the hapless victims in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 snuff-epic, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. It’s out on blue ray October 4 so you can catch all the senseless rape and coprophagia in crystal clarity…of course the dismal, muted film stock is really kind of the point of it all but whatever. The stills available online are spectacular.

In any case, some artsy friends had invited them to an advance screening in Tel Aviv at Universitat. Seems the young, much like Pasolini himself, thought they could find some understanding of the fascist horrors of the works of deSade.  If flip flop had any idea what this film was about she would have said, “No.”

Of course, guilt of not telling her (his curiosity was admittedly piqued by the event. After all, who would show and what would they think?) led to the unfortunate dream of violation and depravity.

Frank is a film buff. He get’s what Pasolini was going for. It’s so bleak its almost fitting he was killed shortly after finishing it. Anyway, if you want a bit more lighthearted adaptation of deSade, try Jan Svankmajer’s Lunacy (2007). It still has a little edge, but some whimsical animation to boot.

When he comes to, Code Pink is going through his messenger bag and looking disappointed to find a mess of post cards and a stuffed camel for his nephew. Flip has come behind, when he hears her he turns and begins to stand, but flip delivers a quick right hook. “Layla Tov.” She smirks as he splays out in the dirt. Krav maga is a wonderful-thing.

But Frank better warn her about Salo before she Krav maga’s him.

Later Frank’s head is bandaged, most of the protesters have been herded back into Syria, and a few squadrons are combing the hills for stragglers. He gives a quick sound bite to Mabat which is soon on the scene. Frank doubts you will see any of this on MSNBC.

Antichrist (2009)

Ding. Dong.

“GD Kansas! Again!” scowls Frank, brushing the rain from the brim of his cap.

Ding. Dong.

Frank rings again. He can still see the old guy inside through the window. He’s sitting in an easy chair staring off into space or more likely an unseen TV in the corner.

Ding Dong.

Perhaps the man is deaf? Afraid? Dead?

Ding Dong.

Frank tries one more time, and then dashes back down the path to his ’73 Impala, still purring in the drive. He throws his soggy hat on the dash and beats the steering wheel. Annoyed. The lady from the historical society had told the house was condemned and empty. He dials the radio and looks for something that isn’t static with a sigh. It doesn’t really matter; it had been a long day and he should just find a motel. Frank had been hired to check out the basement of the beaten old house in Freemont, Kansas by the town planning committee who had recently acquired it. They planned to tear it down and replace it with low income housing. So, he’d left a sleeping Flip-Flop behind in Atlanta early, early Monday morning, and had raced 900 or so miles, stopping only for gas and egg salad sandwiches to make it to Freemont at a decent hour. He did. It was a decent enough hour that he’d figured he’d do a little reconnaissance, not expecting someone to be home.

He’d just assume get the investigation over with and race back across six states, to slide back under the sheets with Flip. Instead, he’d prolly have to drive into Lawrence for the night and tackle this thing in the morning.

The old Johnson place was a modified old cottonwood shack dating to the Bleeding Kansas years. The first homestead in this part of the county in fact, set on the uplands where it could look either down on the Kansa River to the north or across the barren prairie on every other side. That made it the perfect lookout point to watch for either parties of escaped slaves (maybe even in the company of John Brown himself) along the Lane Trail to Iowa or perhaps angry bands of slave owners from Missouri looking to recapture their lost property.

According to local legend, the Johnson’s had moved to the Kansas territory in 1858 in order to help establish the Underground Railroad in eastern Kansas. As such, the location would have been a good one, and the local historical society claimed to have documentary evidence both establishing that the Johnson’s built the place and that they were agents of John Brown, a couple of stops north on the railroad from his home base at that time in Osawatomie. That was all well and good. Prolly the house’s infrastructure was that old (Frank would know better after poking around a bit both inside and out) and Mrs. Rosegreen of the historical society had the documents to support all that.

The bigger question was whether or not the Johnson’s had an escape tunnel in the basement. Urban legends abound about all “Underground railroad” locations. The first one is always that it was quite literally underground. And don’t underestimate people’s skewed ideas of history. Frank has even heard it from quite a few old timers that the UGRR was literally a train that drove underground from Charleston to Toronto.

In this case the locals were convinced that in the space of a few months the Johnston’s dug down through their basement, through the dense clay, then one mile north to the banks of the Kansa. Just in case, some one snuck up on their cabin from across the prairie. Not bloody likely.

But local pothunters had torn up the basement floor and believed they had found it. Checking it out as a historical consultant was a quick buck anyway. Not that it was that easy. Nothing ever was, was it? Well, Frank could think of a million reasons why there probably not a tunnel in the old Johnson basement. But on the way to find an Econolodge, Frank mostly stewed about the old man on in the chair who wouldn’t answer the door.

Mrs. Rosegreen was parked in the drive when Frank returned the next morning. Frank was bitching as soon as he pulled up behind her:

“I thought you said the place was empty!” he barked at her as he climbed out of the Chevy.

“What? It is!” she stammered, and Frank suddenly felt bad, and told her of his stop here the night before. She explained that old Mr. Johnson had been stuck in a rest home in Topeka by his remaining family when the house was condemned. Earl Johnson was the great-grandson of Hank and Emma who had built the cabin. Aside from a short stint at Paris Island and Chosin Reservoir with the Marines in the 1950s, Topeka was about as far as he had ever gotten away from Freemont. The eighty something year old went quite against his will; he passed away his first night in the home.

But she is also not too surprised by Frank’s story. Seems the city crew who boarded the place was a bit freaked out as well. They heard some shuffling footsteps in the parlor, strange shadows etc.

Wonderful, Frank scowls, more ghosts. “No, they probably heard some squirrels in the attic, and I was just very tired,” he explains to Mrs. Rosegreen of the ladies historical society, “Let’s just go get this over with.”

She unlocks the door but that’s as far as she goes. But she hands Frank a flashlight and a hardhat. He goes in. It’s creepy. But not as creepy as the old cabin in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009). This cabin had at best, a grumpy old man’s spirit, some mice and possibly a tunnel. Von Trier’s cabin had self-disemboweling foxes, still-born fawns, swarms of ticks and acorns, subterranean zombie crows, and, oh, Willem Dafoe. Shudder. Creepy.

Of course, the craziest thing about Antichrist is that Willem Dafoe (Shadow of the Vampire; Merhige 2000) is not the crazy person. Oh, sure, he’s been Jesus (The Last Temptation of Christ; Scorsese 1988), but even that was controversial. No, here Dafoe is more the victim, an odd triumph in itself. Frank has been a fan of von Trier for years, ever since The Kingdom (1994, 1997) before Stephen King crapped it up for American TV. Von Trier has a knack for the gorgeous, when he wants to film it that way, but also always, always, an eye for the disturbing, albeit sometimes much more subtle or slower to the punch in films like The Five Obstructions (2003), Dancer in the Dark (2000) or Dogville (2003). And of course, the Dogme95 stuff and its ilk have been mentioned in this forum before.

Antichrist in all its unrated pseudo-pornographic glory was released on DVD by criterion on November 9, 2010. It centers around Dafoe and unnamed therapist and his wife heading off to a cabin in the woods to deal with the grief of loosing their toddler son. No more spoilers here.

The Johnson cabin is a mess. Totally looted. Cabinets opened, their contents vomited everywhere. Furniture overturned and holes, of course, torn into every wall looking secret passages or Nazi gold or something. Oh well. It was about to be torn down in a few days anyway, unless Frank found some UGRR evidence to save it. The house had already been deemed not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, as it had little architectural integrity. Changes and additions by the Johnson family over the last three centuries had altered it far beyond recognizable as a 1850s farmstead; also the recent years of neglect had not been kind either. And, a typical suburban neighborhood had grown up around it. You could no longer see the river valley or the prairie from the second floor windows.

And everything creaked. No wonder people thought they heard stuff. It was pitch black, given the boarded up windows and the shut off power. Frank snaps pictures as he goes and the flash helps a bit lighting up the place. Cobwebs and loose boards everywhere. Frank finds the basement door with the help of luck and the poor flashlight beam and slowly creeps down the rickety stairs to the basement. There in the center of the concrete floor he finds the gaping hole he is looking for, he crouches and pulls back some of the broken concrete slabs. Just as he thought. Just a cistern. Concrete lined also by the look of it. Maybe five or six feet deep and about four across. Not unusual. And it was possible the Johnson’s, if they were UGRR agents, even hid a slave down there sometime. But a cistern is not a tunnel either. Footsteps on upstairs now behind him.

“Get back outside Mrs. Rosegreen! It’s no safe down here!” He yells, “The floor’s all torn up and the ceilings about to cave.” No answer. Anyway the cistern doesn’t look too deep and since he’s come all this way he might as well hop down and make sure there no tunnel leading out of it. With any luck (for the historical society, at least, not the city) they might have left some sort of evidence of a mid nineteenth century fugitive slaves in the bottom when they sealed it off. Footsteps on the stairs now.

“Goddammit, Mrs. Rosegreen!” he yells and jumps down clunking his head on a pipe running under the floor.

Frank winces and shines the beam around in the cavity. He’s getting too old for this. Hissing now. Coming from the pipe. The idiots busted a gas line digging up the floor. That should have been shut off with the other utilities. Good thing he’d used a flashlight and not his Zippo. Footsteps in the basement now. With a gas leak no wonder people are seeing ghosts. That is a reassuring thought as the footsteps reach the edge of the cistern and Frank can make out a shadowy figure above him just as he passes out unconscious.

The White Ribbon (2009) Somewhere On the Path of Least Resistance… It was shaping up to be quite a period of beginnings and ends and odds and evens, for Frank, whose metaphorical fork in the road, had just come across a very literal alligator in the path. Yes, a literal one. Improbably but decidedly accurately and true to life, there was an alligator lying on the way to his room in the Lafayette Hilton. The Yankee in him would have none of it. But what was one to do? He stares dumbly at it as his full ice bucket beads and drips down his arm. Somewhere up the path ahead a warm bottle of Ron Barrelito was awaiting his return. Down the path behind him his sister’s wedding party (her second) was an unforgivingly cheery event refusing to cease. But now his escape was in doubt. Maintenance had thrown up snow fencing around the swamp to curtail just this sort of thing from occurring. Where do a lazy bunch of conasse get a pile of snow fencing in this tropic anyway one might wonder. And Frank had asked them just that but his answer not forthcoming due to the language barrier. For one thing, there was no snow down here in the bayou and thus no reason to and he didn’t have another name for the wide slatted iron mess dangling in front of the leading edge of the swamp, making a half-hearted attempt to keep its seussian creatures inside its marshy confines. And now one was in his path. And he stared at it open mouthed, lit cigarette pasted to his bottom lip by spit, dropping ash from the corner of his mouth to the front of his polo shirt. It was a big bull of a thing; a male, slime drying to grey battle-scarred armor in the sun. The unblinking reptilian eyes of this fanged speed bump are trained on Frank’s every move. Its body was 12 feet long if it were an inch. The tail another 15 feet at least. Frank and a family of four could rest comfortably in its mouth. Resting on the pink sofa of its tongue. Perhaps playing the teeth with a mallet, like a gruesome xylophone. Or with the extra hands of the children, spin china plates on every fang like the most demented vaudeville show the world had ever imagined. Instead, the thing swiped out at Frank with a turn of its enormous head and a gnashing of its huge jaws, and snapped off Frank’s left shoe, and now sat chomping it down. Frank fell over as one would expect. It was terribly inconvenient and probably would have been painful too when the adrenaline wore off. Now he lied there and fretted and waited for the thing to gnaw off his foot outright. Stacy Adams were expensive god damn shoes for one thing after all. No matter how his Sugarloaf thought. And what of her? What would Sugarloaf think of him limping home sans left foot? She was a hot mess and a joy to make love to. But she was also more than a bit of shallow thing too. She’d leave him as soon as he couldn’t manage the dance floor any more. Or when she realized he never go jogging with her in Evangeline Park again. They would never be able to at it doggie style again, him standing at the foot of the bed. Her favorite position. There were prosthetic things too of course. But creepy pink-orange rubber gadgets. Really not sexy at all. That was crazy. Sugar, was dead, of course, Frank had heard the news earlier, but hadn’t yet had a moment to process it. Spike had filled him in over vodka gimlets this morning in the hotel bar before the wedding. With the oil drilling ban on, he had little else to do than stop by and dish what had been going on whilst Frank had been in the Middle East. It seemed she had broken her neck falling off the bed while ‘making love.’ As Spike told it, she had jumped when her dearest Barry had taken the initiative to slip a couple of fingers into her anus. She had only agreed to one. Live by the sword die by the sword. And so it was now almost with relief that Frank, sprawled on the pavement saw the Louisiana sun blotted out by the upper jaw of the croc—no a gator—he ought keep those straight—and the bottom teeth gingerly slip themselves down past his ears and clamp unceremoniously down on his neck. It was a shame he had gotten his hair cut yesterday. Of course, if the alligator in the path is our current metaphor for life, it begs the million dollar question (if this can in fact still be called a movie blog after all): What film is just like an alligator in the road? What film is an unnerving, unwavering mass of teeth and scales that won’t get out of your way?: Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s Das Weisse Band: Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte aka “The White Ribbon - A History of German Children" (2009). Of course.

A film that subtly if not diabolically portrays the German, Nazi generation as children. Very naughty children at that. It seems with films like this and 2005's Cache, Haneke is coming into his own. Far from the passé shockumentary Benny’s Video (1992) from the past decade, typical of the hit me over the head shock of things like Dogme 95 or Gregg Araki, who with Mysterious Skin (2004) may also be growing up. And Frank is growing up too. Fear not, intrepid reader. Frank was not going to lie down and let an alligator gobble up is head. Not after countless close calls and a bottle of duty free rum waiting for him. Instead He wedges the remaining Stacy Adam(s?) into the gators jaws, buying him enough time to muscle through an azalea, and then hop the fence into the pool. It was there that he found the intriguing Hadassah Pomegranate in a chaise lounge attempting to tan but mostly burning. Frank dubbed the cute Israeli au pair, “Flip-flop,” given the pile of thongs she had in her suitcase “just in case,” the largest of which she offered to replace Frank’s lost Stacy’s. Flip-flop had an infectious giggle, an ample bottom, and a wealth of witty conversation. So, in the end, Frank was able to wait out the hungry reptile with a night of delightful company. Many more, it seemed would ensue.

Synecdoche, New York (2008) [Fans: Seems like good news of the Graveyard Frank front. Received our first direct correspondence in some time. An unusually cheery post card at that! More to come I suppose~ the editor.]