MOVIE DIARY 2023: GO FIND YOURSELF A NICE LITTLE COWGIRL AND MAKE NICE LITTLE COWBABIES AND LEAVE ME ALONE.
Ok yes, this is a good one! They’re all good ones, in my opinion, but this week we’ve got cartoonist Pete Toms returning to MOVIE DIARY 2023! Pete is one of my favorite writers and cartoonists, and I am always excited whenever he puts out something new because there’s absolutely no one out there who captures the absurdity and the quiet horror of simply being alive in this moment we’ve chosen to be born into the way that Pete captures the absurdity and the quiet horror of simply being alive in this moment we’ve chosen to be born into. Anyway, I’ll shut up and let Pete talk about Octopussy.
Octopussy (1983) - dir. John Glen
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: PETE TOMS
Like you, I live in a state of constant confusion. Things are pretty wild right now! Often I’ll catch myself getting nostalgic for simpler times. Those breezy old days that appeared to be a little less bleak. When the fiction we call reality seemed simply like a Brechtian play performed in a locked and haunted school by vindictive kindergarten bullies. Those murderous ghostly children in their old man makeup gesturing at an implied system that doesn’t exist were quaint compared to what increasingly feels like an “Oops-All-Jokers” circus that is fast burning to the ground. Especially because, in the midst of this carnival of carnage, you’re still expected to go to work, and run errands, and have an amicable political debate with your friend on Facebook who, in an attempt to stay ahead of current AI trends, is baptizing a gun that shoots USB sticks.
Certainly the correct instinctual human response to our current reality would be to spend the rest of your life crawling around your apartment floor on your stomach like a big, slow, moaning worm. But that’s frowned upon! The world of flaming chaos wants you to engage, standing upright on two feet, like everything is as normal as it ever was. But what’s normal now? What does a normal person look like in the midst of swirling bedlam and constant meaningless death? How do you live as yet another clown in the grim circus? Luckily for us, many of the answers to these existential questions can be found in the 1983 film, Octopussy.
I have a very clear memory of the first time I saw this movie. I was in my grandparent’s basement, surrounded by the ten to twenty endlessly screaming voices of my family, and had pushed a chair inches away from the TV so that I could hear it. Of course, I could not believe that it was called Octopussy. The only explanation I could then come up with for how they got away with that title was that 1983 was a simpler, more naive time. Perhaps the old-fashioned citizens of the past simply didn’t know what it referred to, or, even more likely, in that innocent era, “pussy,” simply referred to a pussycat. To a modern six year old two years later in 1985 though, it was a shocking name for a shocking movie.
After a cold open that contains a hundred stunts, a huge explosion, a decoy horse’s ass that flips open to reveal an experimental flying jet car that seems to actually fly, and an aged Roger Moore going undercover in a very fake disguise as someone named Lois Toro and saying, “Toro? Sounds like a load of bull,” Rita Coolidge sings “All Time High”, and we suddenly find ourselves in East Germany.
A weeping and very stressed man in full clown makeup and costume, helium balloons tied all over his body, clumsily drops over a barbed wire fence and runs into a dark and otherworldly-seeming forest. He’s being pursued by a circus knife thrower in a flowing blouse and vest who has nice hair and pervert vibes. The balloons pop as the clown stumbles through the spooky woods. A knife slams into a tree right by the clown’s tearful and horrified face. It’s already a confusing and strange scene, but then, as the clown starts to put some distance between himself and the knife thrower, he runs directly into… the knife thrower?! At first it seems the dream logic of this sequence has allowed the pursuer to use the twisted techniques of Droopy Dog against his victim, but we soon realize these perverts are identical twins.
The clown finally makes it out of the woods and climbs up the side of a bridge. A huge knife slams directly into his back. His silly-looking body falls into the water and floats downriver, balloons still tied to his ankle. He washes up in front of the mansion home of the British Ambassador, who’s having a black tie party. Barely clinging to life, the clown drags himself towards the house, appearing outside the french doors of the Ambassador’s bedroom. The clown screams for help. The Ambassador’s wife sees the bloodied clown in the mirror and yells in terror as he falls, smashing through the glass doors, dead. A beautiful Faberge Egg rolls from his unliving, outstretched hand.
This is all bleakly funny and has the aspects of a comedic scene, but while there are plenty of funny scenes in this movie, this is very obviously presented like a horrifying nightmare. It is also extremely relatable. Who among us, especially recently, hasn’t felt like a weeping clown cradling a fancy jeweled egg to our chest, as murderous perverts pursue us through a dark wood?
We soon learn this clown is Agent 009 and, with his death, Agent 007 is going to have to finish the case he started. Though 009 only appears in that short mysterious sequence and we follow Bond for the rest of the movie, the differences between the two of them are pronounced. Bond immediately has no respect for the egg that 009 gave his life to smuggle out of East Germany, tossing it around, gambling with it, switching it with other eggs at an auction house. And not only is he not really interested in the egg, he literally has no real interest in any aspect of the convoluted plot. Because he knows he’s in a James Bond movie.
Though he looked much older to me when I was a kid, and probably looks ancient to contemporary audiences who are so unused to the analog British face that they had to digitally smooth The Beatles in that Disney documentary, Roger Moore is too old in this to really convincingly play the young hunk that they’re writing him as. And he wants you to know he knows this by mugging and standing outside the events of the movie and not taking anything that happens seriously.
The first time they mention the titular Octopussy’s name, Bond looks directly into the camera Office-style and is like, “LOL wat.” He’s so aware he’s in a movie, that to get his attention, a fellow operative plays the James Bond theme on a flute. Though death surrounds him, and a bunch of real stuntmen are putting their real lives on the line by driving, running, jumping off, and fighting on top of, crashing, and blowing up every type of vehicle you could possibly imagine, to James Bond, it’s all a joke. And all the characters laugh along with him! From the dudes he makes racist jokes at the expense of, to the woman he harasses by using a camera with a zoom lens to make her cleavage appear on his closed circuit watch. They all love him like he’s a shitposter, or a podcaster, or a senior, British Deadpool.
And not taking himself or his job seriously is also what makes the titular Octopussy fall in love with Bond. He was supposed to arrest her criminal father years ago, but Bond was like, “I can take you to jail tomorrow instead, in case you want to commit suicide or anything in the meantime. IDC.” A laid-back attitude that allowed Mr. Octopussy to honorably kill himself.
After hours of hijinx and one-liners, Bond ironically finds himself in the same exact clown costume as 009. He must stop a nuclear bomb from going off at the circus. He yells for help as the audience of children and important military men laugh at his clown visage. His sarcastic aloofness begins to slip as he begs them to listen. As the clock ticks, he starts to actually panic. He’s mobbed by a group of other clowns and cops that hold him back from the bomb. He’s now certain they’re all going to actually die. In the guise of 009, he can suddenly see that death is real. Bond is panicking for the first time. Octopussy realizes how weird this is and helps him to disarm the bomb. Crisis averted, he immediately goes back to joking around, but there’s an underlying sadness. He has been touched by the disease of real fear. He has seen the truth.
It’s hard not to relate to Bond during this climactic scene. Watching an aged man in a ridiculous second-hand circus costume screaming in terror while other clowns hold him down and children laugh at him speaks very directly to a popular feeling in contemporary culture. But I think the complex moral lesson the film contains is that we currently have two options. We can choose to stand apart from the world and have a few laughs, and hopefully make friends with women who run a circus cult of acrobatic female jewel thieves whose father we helped commit suicide, or we can choose to embrace fiction, running through a fairytale wood, scared and alone, clutching a counterfeit Faberge Egg to our heart as we’re pursued by identical perverts, until we’re screaming outside the house of a tuxedoed public official who couldn’t care less about us. No matter our path though, Octopussy explains there’s no escape. Even in the funhouse mirror world of James Bond there is one thing that is real and true and tangible. In the end, we all become sweaty clowns staring horrified into the face of our actual death.
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Pete Toms is a cartoonist and writer who lives in Burbank, CA. You can find many of his books in the beloved pdf format on his Gumroad page here: petetoms.gumroad.com
Band of the Hand (1986) - dir. Paul Michael Glaser
Have you guys heard of this? I didn’t know anything about this movie til my buddy Tony brought over a copy that he rented from a video store. The movie is just ok, and there’s definitely some interesting, worthwhile stuff in it, but really the true hero of all this is video stores that are still out there fighting the good fight and renting out weird obscurities like this to the twisted little freaks who get off on that. Shoutout to video stores. We at MOVIE DIARY 2023 salute you. (Honorable mentions to the STARZ app and Tubi, the two streaming services that I feel most embody the video store experience.)
Band of the Hand is a movie about a group of criminal teen boys who get locked up and who are too violent or crazy to be mixed into the prison’s general population, so they’re forced into an experimental rehabilitation program. The program has them dropped off at a Florida swamp where they must learn survival skills from a mysterious special forces commando named Joe. Also, they have to try to not kill each other, which is hard because some of them really fucking hate each other, and they like to express this with both a string of racial slurs and with their fists. After a too long stretch of these city boys roughing it in the swamp and strangling each other when they’re not busy getting bitten by snakes or doing a terrible job of building shelter, they all learn to work together which earns their way out of sleeping in the swamp. Then Joe promotes them to moving into a house in Miami where they’ll have to live together for the next stage of the program. Don’t worry, the house is super rundown and it’s currently occupied by crack fiends, warring gangs, and one poor Haitian family that’s caught in the middle of it. That Joe sure knows how to make a team-building exercise!
The boys are tasked with fixing up the house, setting it up with heat and electricity, kicking out the riff raff, and keeping the poor Haitian family safe from the lurking gangs led by criminal Cream (Laurence Fishburne, here credited as Larry Fishburne, which in my opinion always signals that we’re gonna get a fun performance from Laurence Fishburne’s young and hungry years, and this movie continues to prove that). They succeed, but in the process they draw the ire of Cream’s gang, which leads to a massive shootout that results in Joe’s death and their newly fixed up home getting set on fire. The boys decide that they must avenge Joe together, so they come up with a plan to attack the headquarters of Nestor, the crime boss above Cream and his gang. By killing Nestor they will avenge their mentor Joe, shut down his Miami drug ring, and solidify a bond of friendship and brotherhood that will change their lives forever. They’ll also definitely learn their lesson that revenge absolutely does not beget more revenge and also that revenge is pretty much the same thing as justice if you don’t think too hard about it. Just as Joe would have wanted.
There’s also a subplot where one of the boys, Carlos, used to work for Nestor, and he’s trying to rescue his girlfriend from Nestor’s clutches. It kind of falls flat because Carlos is just such a blank slate of a character among a group of cartoonish psychos. That kind of dynamic (vacant lead and/or love interest that you inexplicably have to spend a lot of time with even though he’s the least interesting character) works for Walter Hill movies, but it doesn’t really hit here. No one’s favorite Suicide Squad character is Rick Flag.
Again, it’s a mostly fine movie. Michael Mann was the producer on this in the middle of the peak of Miami Vice’s popularity, so his influence and that Miami Vice flavor are obviously all over this. I think what kind of makes this weird and interesting is that under all the cursing, casual racism, action, and violence, essentially what we have here is the shape of a “kids have to save the community center” type of movie. It kind of works, but it’s also just got such a strange tone to it since we recognize a lot of the beats from those sorts of movies where the kids are lovable misfits who band together to achieve a goal and create an inseparable bond with each other in the process. In this case we get the misfit kids banding together, but their shared goal is shooting up a drug packing facility. This is made extra weird by the fact that John Cameron Mitchell is one of our boys here, and he spends a good bit of the last third of the movie running around shooting an uzi. Do you want to see a movie where John Cameron Mitchell shoots an uzi? Because I think this might be the only game in town for that.
The Last Seduction (1994) - dir. John Dahl
So close to being a fully good movie! I don’t think this movie ever finds the right balance between twisted rom-com camp and noir thriller, but it’s trying, I guess. I think if John Dahl were able to walk that tightrope just a little bit better, I would have loved it, but it sort of felt more like a confusing rollercoaster ride than it did a successful genre subversion.
Bridget (Linda Fiorentino) is on the run from her husband Clay (Bill Pullman) after she’s stolen $700,000 in cash that Clay got by selling stolen pharmaceuticals. She takes off from their New York apartment and heads to Chicago, but on the way there, she decides to stay in Beston, a small town outside of Buffalo, NY til things cool down a bit. It should be the perfect hideout because no one would ever think of finding her caught dead in a place like this because Bridget is a notorious Big City Bitch. Her Big City Bitch attitude puts everyone off, with the exception of Mike (Peter Berg), who’s drawn to her despite her without even knowing her name. Mike is originally from Beston, but after a move to Buffalo and a very brief marriage, he’s returned with his tail between his legs. He doesn’t ever want to get into what happened out in Buffalo and the details of his ended marriage, but he’s dying to escape small town Beston, and he sees Bridget as a chance to start over and get out of this place.
Bridget’s lawyer tells her that in order to keep the stolen $700,000 and any assets that she buys with it Bridget needs to officially divorce Clay, otherwise he legally has the ability as her husband to make a claim on any of her property. Since things are still too hot in New York for her, and since she knows that Clay will be looking for her in all the big cities, Bridget takes her fed up lawyer’s advice and opts to live in Bridgerton til she can finalize her divorce from Clay. She quickly gets a job in some office under the alias Wendy Kroy, but it turns out it’s the same office where Mike works. Things escalate in a really sort of silly way as the more Bridget chafes at having to be in Beston, the more her lawyer tells her to dig her heels in, advising her to do things that inevitably have to bring her closer to Mike. This bit feels sort of like an old screwball romantic comedy, and for a second it seems a bit like maybe Bridget’s Big City Bitch exterior will start crumbling, but then it takes a darker turn as Bridget manipulates Mike into a byzantine scheme to murder her husband Clay. With Clay dead, she can keep her money and get away from Beston, away from Mike, and back to New York City.
The plot gets complicated as you wonder whether Bridget actually does deep down have feelings for Mike, and you have to ask yourself whether what she’s doing with Mike is genuine or if it’s yet another complicated manipulation tactic. By the end you see that everything she’s been doing has been the latter. She’s just a natural at telling lies and manipulating everyone around her into getting what she wants. It’s so fun to watch Linda Fiorentino be a huge bitch, and to catch on to her schemes as she’s putting all the pieces into place. Bill Pullman pops up throughout the movie as Clay tries to pinpoint where Bridget’s been hiding, and we get some truly wild character choices from him as well as some Adam West Batman-level detective skills when he figures out what name Bridget is using as an alias. Peter Berg is pretty good too, but he’s really just sort of there to be a patsy that you’re supposed to feel bad for.
The performances are really great at carrying you through this movie, and I honestly think I wouldn’t have minded my problems with balancing the tone as much if hadn’t been so repulsed by the ending. I think at a certain point later in the game, I was starting to turn around and kind of accept the rollercoaster of tone, but when the big climax of Bridget’s plan actually happens, all that goodwill and acceptance that had been building up went completely out the window for me. Bridget’s big plan falls apart at the 11th hour when Mike, unable to go through with murdering him, begins to actually talk to Clay. Clay tells Mike the whole story of what’s actually been going on, then Bridget comes on the scene, assesses the situation, then kills Clay herself by spraying an entire can of mace into his mouth. To get rid of Mike, she quickly hatches up a scheme to frame him for the murder (impressive how well she works on the fly, you gotta hand it to her), and here’s where it just kind of got to be Too Much for me.
At some point, Bridget has learned Mike’s big secret about what happened in Buffalo. He married a trans woman and they got divorced because Mike couldn’t deal with his own homophobia. Bridget pushes on this masculine insecurity, purposefully driving Mike into a rage and manipulating him into fucking her to show her what a real man he is, and while this is happening she’s stealthily dialed 9-1-1 and all the operator hears is her screaming while Mike shouts about how he’s killed her husband and now he’s going to rape her. It’s extremely over the top in a way that just feels disproportionate with how the rest of the movie has been. Even though it’s wildly all over the place with its tone, this ending still felt too extreme, and the added layer of transphobia just made it worse. I think more than the violence and scumminess of this scene, what actually put me off on it was the idea that we’re supposed to maybe feel bad for Mike in this moment. Like, yeah ok, sorry you married a trans woman and you hate yourself because you think you’re gay for doing that and that’s the button that anyone can push to make you… rape someone?? No thanks. He honestly should have just taken one of the many many hints from her early on in the movie and just left her alone. Mike’s whole character is driven by his feelings of inadequacy and wanting to prove himself as being better than the small town hick that he seems to think everyone sees him as, and I think it comes off more as pathetic than it does as sympathetic. I’m fine thinking that he’s pathetic, and I get feeling bad for him (even though I myself actually don’t), but I think it’s insulting to place Mike as the audience’s point of identification.
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
I saw some other movies this past week that I didn’t write about here: Collateral (2004) and Nightcrawler (2013), a great one-two punch of nighttime movies led by toxic positivity guys imposing their worldview on the people around them. We’ve been talking about these movies on the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord so make sure to join up so we can talk about how Tom Cruise’s Vincent in Collateral is maybe what he’s most like in real life.
That’s all for this week, so thanks again to Pete for joining us, and thank YOU (the girl reading this) for supporting my blog, and by extension the very idea of blogging.