Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989)

Ubiquitous digit clickers flying from globurbia to capture screened glamour perch atop Sephora, BCBG Max Azria, Gap, American Eagle display windows, aside 5 story Little Mermaid alluring us to "Keep Oceans Clean," gaze down confused at Hollywood and Highland residue of vagabonds, after two hour samba de la paz, chants rising from spirit of Persian Queen/ revolucionaria salvadoreña, estrella blanca, montaña roja, sueño bolivariano de Ali Primera--
Dale salvadoreño, ¡Dale!
Que no hay pajaro pequeño, ¡Dale!
Que despues de alzar el vuelo, ¡Dale!
Se detenga en su volar--
final ujjayi cry at Reagan death squads fueled through 8 years of missiles raining on Mesopotamia--mustard gas with a shake to Saddam, BGM-71 TOWs to Khomeini--a hundred thousand corpses picked at by crows, thousands more limbless vets, orphans, refugees, 20 years later, born again in never ending war, taking shavasana.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

Dark red morello cherries in light syrup spooned on to vanilla bean Breyers, bright pink spills onto drugstore plastic table cloth, white painted wood chair, linoleum floor.

On the surface, a recycled domestic drama of marriage dry limping from corporate careerism with same pseudo-subversion of 1983 masters of the universe Trading Places denouement: surprise surprise, money does buy happiness after all.

Not small kitchen coffee can coinage--bent black wood Danish barstools, Carrara island, Bertazzoni 8 burner range, Gagg double wall oven, Northland 72" stainless steel wrap door side-by-side furnish 40 x 40 breccia oniciata floored Williams-Sonoma gallery, showered by Smiths' gleeful ketchup in cheek high caliber squirt-out.

Phantasmagoria of the interior decorator's ars erotica as in Pitt, Norton, Bonham Carter ménage à trois égale ménage à un Fight Club compels scale of extreme s/m pleasure unmatchable outside octagon of Ultimate Fighter 1 Finale, Griffin v. Bonnar--Brangelina foreplay Muay Thai style.

More darkly, through another homage to 1970s Dirty Harry vigilantism we defend terror to its last ticking IED, as long as the thugs are multi-millionaire A-list white beauties with a couple of Jags in the garage.

The River (1997)

思惟轉昏汨亂精魂
將心止動轉止轉奔
心銘, 牛頭法融 (Xin Ming, Niutou Farong)

Thinking brings unclarity,
Sinking and confusing the spirit.
Use mind to stop activity
And it becomes even more eratic.
--Translation Master Sheng Yen

Thinking will cause confusion, and confusion will give rise to all kinds of emotions.
If by grasping the mind one tries to stop agitation, then with this movement the mind will be even more active.
--Translation Henrik H. Sorensen

The meditation transfers the dusk flowing chaotic spirit
Stops the heart turns stops the extension to rush
--Translation Yahoo! Babel Fish

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

Those who deride Adorno's readiness to equate Hollywood dreck with fascist propaganda consider this box office smash apologia for imperious exceptionalism. Beneath the grease of sentimental hilarity rubs post 9/11 bubba jingoism smearing the face of patsy Continentals with freedom fries to defend carbon based obesity with unilateral militarism.

Feminine Frenchy Sacha Baron Cohen, specialist in junior high school foreigner mockery, norms NASCAR good-ol'-boy gender, firecrackered by rebel flag on roof of Luke and Bo Duke's '69 Charger smoked in scent of roasted meat resting over idyllic southern town square, one morning after lynching picnic.

The same scent spreads from Disney's Main Street U.S.A., with mascot Mickey's welcoming white gloved hands, nostalgia for Song of the South's "happy darkie," Br'er Rabbit comforted by briar patch.

Lacking cartoon bigotry, Disney's pixelated version of racing romanticism, Cars, holds equally pernicious patriarchal lessons for my Lightning McQueen pajamaed, wall-papered, bedsheeted 5 year old nephew: cars are either boys or girls, and boy cars are real men.

In this autotopic country, collapsed mines don't kill, oil canals don't erode Louisiana coastal marshland and vital organs don't spurt from endoskeletons onto highways because machines build, repair and fuel themselves. And when Ford GT40 Stickers jacks off at the thought of rough sex with Carrera Sally we have a charming embodiment of Lukacsian reification: no more wet dreams.

The Firemen's Ball (1967)

Milos Forman: "In the totalitarian system that I lived in the pressure was ideological . . . On the other hand, here in the West, ideological pressure doesn't exist at all, at all. But there is a commercial pressure, because a film is a very expensive undertaking and everybody who puts money into it wants money back."

But isn't commercial pressure ideological precisely because of its non-ideological pretense?

Isn't the allegory of rampant thievery applied to 1960s Communist Czechoslovakia equally applicable to contemporary Wall Street? Instead of the poor stealing from the poor the rich steals from the rich.

And which is the greater crime: pilfering a head cheese for future jellied meat treat or plundering a national treasury to furnish Montana ranch manor, South France coastal villa , 6 car garage of Hollywood Hills home, W Hotel beach front Fort Lauderdale condo and Upper East Side penthouse overlooking 40,000 shelter scramblers, dragging dirt stiffened clothes in punctured plastic bags through streets of outer boroughs? Poor schmucks.

Damnation (1987)

Dreaming CK guides me in a deliberative dolly shot through her top floor flat on Spring Street, "slowly, slowly," she tells me, "let the scene speak."

Lens pulls back to reveal french doored bedroom, sweater sleeve hanging from half open dresser drawer, overcoat from mahogany tree, remains of fifteen year absence from narrow flight.

Give permission to the silence, the anxiety for narrative purpose found in first generation Nyugat poets--Endre Ady, Árpád Tóth, Mihály Babits--broken only by squeak of industrial gondola lift, Bartók inspired sounds of Hungarian avante-garde.

The forced gaze at luscious rain trickling down stucco brings longing for the beauty of a Budapest post-wall rave, where CB--now Bruce-Lee--broke an ankle to hobble on my shoulder after last Metro through streets of le sixième arrondissement.

Dark drenched front legs of black khakis, cotton socks soaked through loafers, side winding water, yard long gutter puddles must be met without nylon pant shell, duck shoes but with eyes of Minnesota's Strand, Minor White: frenzied serenity.

Kicking and Screaming (1995)

Five minutes in, I understood the title's meaning.

Noah Baumbach is to filmmaking what Rod McKuen was to poetry, except that McKuen made me laugh.