Props out to Ezra Buckley for hooking up a recent story about the death of Wilhelm Reich at Remnants. According to the Freud Quotes site the good doctor was…

Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies and prophet of the sexual revolution died 59 years ago, on November 3, 1957.

Here’s their word on his controversial career…

Author of several influential books – most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936) – Reich became known as one of the most radical practitioners of psychiatry.

Reich’s idea of “muscular armour” – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – influenced innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he invented the phrase “the sexual revolution”. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.

Reich’s theories are fascinating as were his colorful life, his pioneering of the sexual revolution, his persecution and imprisonment by the U.S. government, and his controversial death. Read the whole story at the Feud Quotes site, and watch W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism – a confoundingly poetic celebration of Reich and his ideas. Here’s a bit from Roger Ebert’s review of the film…

In a real way, Makavejev is his films. Like Andrei Tarkovsky, Guy Maddin, Russ Meyer or Alejandro Jodorowsky, he cannot help but make the films he makes, and no others. In his early career in Yugoslavia, in movies like “Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator” (1967), he delighted in sneaking political parallels past the censors; he was not anti-communist but anti-authority. The man in charge of film funding in Yugoslavia was an old classmate of Makavejev’s. Faced with one of his scripts, the man sighed: “Dusan, Dusan, Dusan! I know what you are really saying in this screenplay, and you know what you are really saying. Now go home and revise it so only the audience knows…”

“WR,” for example, begins as a documentary about the Austrian analyst Wilhelm Reich, once Freud’s first assistant, later a communist, later an anti-communist, eventually an American, who believed the orgasm was the key to freedom and happiness, and possibly a cure for disease. His Orgone Accumulator was a box the size of a phone booth, wood on the outside, lined with metal, which he believed concentrated orgasmic energy within anyone sitting inside of it. Reich’s science was condemned by the FDA, his books were burned by the U.S. government, and he died in prison. You see how dangerous sex is.

Here’s the film…

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Continuing the spooky Halloween posts, here’s the 1987 Martin Sheen thriller, The Believers. This freaky little gem finds a widower surrounded by a threatening secret society after he and his son move to New York City. I think of this film as a charming occult thriller with the automatic kitsch of all things 1980′s. Add Marathon Man and Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger to the mix and what could go wrong? Roger Ebert gave it two stars…

I am as ignorant as most people on the facts about such religions, including the ancient Cuban cult in “The Believers,” which keeps its diabolical gods a secret by disguising them as Catholic saints. I would like to imagine that most Caribbean religions, like most religions everywhere, are a comfort to their believers, and hold up a prospect of a saner, more joyous life.

I would like to believe that, but the movies give me little reason to. Every voodoo movie ever made has depicted bloodthirsty cults of savagely sadistic murderers, vengefully thirsting for innocent blood. There has been a lot in the papers recently about “Arab-bashing,” the practice of creating strongly negative stereotypes of Arabs on TV and in the movies. I’m in agreement. But what about voodoo-bashing? Isn’t it just as prejudicial?

In “The Believers,” which is an awesomely silly, tasteless and half-witted movie, Martin Sheen plays a psychiatrist whose wife is electrocuted by touching the coffee maker while standing barefoot in a pool of spilled milk. This event has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story. It’s simply a pre-title sequence. So much for the wife.

After Sheen and his young son start anew in Manhattan, they attract the attention of a Cuban cult, which sacrifices children in order to gain all sorts of fringe benefits, such as success, a better mental attitude, etc. Sheen has these benefits explained to him by an old friend who secretly is a convert, but demurs at the opportunity of sacrificing his own child.

Meanwhile, he has a tempestuous pre-AIDS-era affair with his gorgeous landlady (Helen Shaver), while a police lieutenant (Robert Loggia) investigates a series of child-killings. (One of Loggia’s big scenes involves missing his coffee cup with the little plastic container of cream, so that Sheen can stare at the puddle on the desk and have a flashback to his wife’s death.)

This is one of those movies that use the paraphernalia of expertise instead of the expertise itself. “Are you a Catholic?” people keep asking Sheen, who is, and there’s the implication that his church affiliation somehow will protect him or endanger him – it’s not clear which. There are lots of shots of ashes and blood and weird little voodoo charms, but no real explanations of what’s going on – possibly because it doesn’t matter. The movie is so hopelessly bankrupt of new ideas that it even ends with the obligatory shot suggesting that the evil will continue. “The Believers” has been phoned in from the repository of weary movie ideas, and it should be ashamed of itself.

Here’s The Believers…

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Today we remember American actress Jean Seberg who was born on this day in 1938. Seberg isn’t a household name, but her iconic turn as an unlikely femme fatale in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless made her a screen immortal even if her activism and the FBI harassment it attracted proved she was all-too-human.

Here’s Roger Ebert‘s take on this fascinating, impressionistic documentary about the actress, From the Journals of Jean Seberg…

If it is true, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, that “cinema history is the history of boys photographing girls,” then one task of movie historians should be to find out what happened to the girls in the process. Mark Rappaport, who uses the Godard quote in his new film “From the Journals of Jean Seberg,” takes it to heart in a unique way. He presents Seberg as the narrator of her own life.

Some of it may be based on things she said or thought. Most of it, incon women in the movies, politics, and her fellow actresses, is invention. Rappaport’s mixture of fact and fiction is more audacious than Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” – but the movie makes it perfectly clear that it is using both history and imagination, and the result is a tough, intelligent look at the grueling job of being one of those girls photographed by the boys.

Here’s the film…

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This spring we’re celebrating the 23rd birthday of Richard Linklater’s counterculture classic, Slacker.

Capturing the way-out fringe of his Austin, Texas neighborhood, Linklater put himself on the map with this rolling conversation of a film that’s as subtly sophisticated as it is endearingly odd, smartly self-conscious and deeply human.

Here’s some nice words on the film from the Indie Beat site:

Although festival masterminds and film critics like Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby found something intriguing and exciting in the film Slacker, slacker as a word was seen as something of a negative in the media of that time. As such Slacker was labeled as a film for and about ‘Generation X’, which is in large measure amusing for Linklater himself was at the tail end of the baby boomers. Linklater himself would later say in the commentary for the Criterion edition of the film that he used the word in an affection manner, and never felt that the denizens of his film were lazy or apathetic people, they just chose to strike out on very non-traditional paths compared to most of the population. Indeed if one looks at the film today its wandering philosophical debutants of Austin’s counter culture (equally grunge and folk or metal as coming from no scene at all) feel just as fresh and exciting, if not possibly more so considering the backdoor compliance to consumerism that befalls the current hipster. Composed in what almost feels like one long, fluid take, the camera bobbing along the river that is the collective unconsciousness of Austinites, Slacker is visually impressive for its acute simplicity and preciseness. To this day, Linklater’s technique is never showy nor flashy (even in his far-out animated projects), but to call his images dull is the ultimate misstep in how to look at his pictures. Like Nouvelle Vague-er Eric Rohmer, there is a no-nonsense nature to Linklater’s compositions, as if he is making sure there is enough space for his characters and all their multicolored thoughts and feelings to fit on screen with enough space left over for us to stand side by side with them. His images account for the existential in a way that is rarely abstract, surreal or fantastic. So yes, while they may appear to be more or less practical in nature, that should not mean we are taking them in without wonder. Linklater is a craftsman who builds minimalist structures which house complex constructs, often on the everyday, if strange, beguiling and even miraculous nature of life itself.

Here’s the film…

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With the tragedy of the JFK assassination marking its 50th anniversary this month, I’m continuing my regular posts exploring that dark day in Dallas.

Not only was the assassination of JFK one of the most important events in U.S. history, the mystery that surrounds the tragedy created the modern conspiracy theory and continues to plague us with questions five decades later.

For a contemporary audience, it’s impossible to separate filmmaker Oliver Stone’s masterpiece JFK from the killing of the president in 1963. Both celebrated and scourged, Stone’s “counter myth” about the killing of Kennedy continues to divide audiences, sticking a bold, pointing finger directly into that wound in our national consciousness.

Oliver Stone’s son Sean played Kevin Costner’s son in the movie and here he sits down with his famous father and Buzzsaw host Tyrel Ventura to talk about Hollywood, conspiracy theories, the JFK film and the secret history of the assassination.

Here are Roger Ebert’s comments on the film’s superb cast and stunning editing in his original review of the 1991 film:

As Garrison, Kevin Costner gives a measured yet passionate performance. Like a man who has hold of an idea he cannot let go, he forges ahead, insisting that there is more to the assassination than meets the eye. Stone has surrounded him with an astonishing cast, able to give us the uncanny impression that we are seeing historical figures. There is Joe Pesci, squirming and hyperkenetic as David Ferrie, the alleged getaway pilot. Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw, hiding behind an impenetrable wall of bemusement. Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald. Donald Sutherland as “X” (actually Fletcher Prouty), the high-placed Pentagon official who thinks he knows why JFK was killed. Sissy Spacek, in the somewhat thankless role of Garrison’s wife, who fears for her family and marriage. And dozens of others, including Jack Lemmon, Ed Asner, Walter Matthau and Kevin Bacon in small, key roles, their faces vaguely familiar behind the facades of their characters.

Stone and his editors, Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, have somehow triumphed over the tumult of material here and made it work – made it grip and disturb us. The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche. John F. Kennedy was murdered. Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone. Who acted with him? Who knew?

Here’s the full interview:

What do you think? Do you have a theory about the assassination? Leave a comment and let’s see if we can’t come to our own conclusions.

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