Ed Wood

Ed Woodⁱ is an overpoweringly sad (and ungodly saddening) film. It purports to be about a fringe-yⁱⁱ obscure director and his assorted malversations ; but it ends up being about the depiction of Bela Lugosi being old, and obsolete, and just simply expended. Exhausted. There's nothing ex-er than an old man, you see, a really old man.ⁱⁱⁱ An old man from the old country gearing up for his come-back. A strange, gaunt and ghastly, grim, ungainly, ominous bird of yore depending on unemployment benefits to pay rent on the repository of his great -- once great -- persona. And ever croaking, “Nevermore”.

It marginally also ends up being a little about Johnny Depp's incomprehendingly demented attempt at creating a character out of (what he thinks is) enthusiasm and a whole shipwrecked pile of watercooler "wisdom". In a way (that I'm certain's unintentional) the mess ends up strangely resembling a stereotypical Ed Wood production on the strength of... well... if you confront narrowbrowed muricans & such salt-of-the-earthers with the really big problems, the flat "solutions" their flat brains pass out will be similarily turtite.

Really, Wood's originals are a lot better than this sort of facebook-y crap. Terrible as they were, cheap as they were, confused, meaningless, pulpy drivel, still, nevertheless : way the fuck preferable to the "middle of the road" vomit of organized, self-aware and self-loving^iv mediocrity.

1. 1994, by Tim Burton (at the time just starting fucking Lisa Marie), with Johnny Depp, Martin Landau (and his sorta-perky kinda-pasible Illeana Douglas substitute daughter), sweetly sad Patricia Arquette, Vincent D'Onofrio, Bill Murray etc. [↩]
2. Though alcoholic, rather than transvestite -- but such is the drive to appropriation among the scum-calling-themselves-mainstream, real alcoholism wasn't "sexy" enough. Alcoholism conflicted with their political investments. Transvestitism though, now that's good, that's exactly what the "hell no we won't go" party understands by "freedom of speech" : the supposed "freedom" of the pulete to disobey Daddy. [↩]
3. In their completely decerebrated, aluminum siding salesmen's glee, the contemptible imbeciles actually put in the closing "what happened to everyone" explanations (as if this were a fucking "coming-of-age" highschool movie, because d'oh, everything's a hishchool reunion to the spurious simulants going about pretending to cheap humanity on a sixteen year old's mental budget) that Bela Lugosi figurines outsell William Henry Pratt (aka Boris Karloff) figurines 10:1 or something like that! As fucking if either of the two old men's supposed to give a shit which one of their images does Disney/Hot Topic have a better time exploiting. It's like closing a Goebbels biopic by mentioning that ten times as many pigeons shit on his grave as compared to Elmer Davis'. Da fuck ?!

   It really, really, really makes no difference to anyone who you extras have an easy time digesting ; and fuck you with a flaming red hot strychnine-coated barbed pole for even daring to contemplate the matter at all. [↩]

4. How the fuck they managed to make an "Ed Wood" without nudity is still an open question. The dude's pretty much the inventor of the porno in his (admittedly small, narrow and irrelevant) native US. But whatever, to Depp-the-sockpuppet and his baptist handlers Necromania never fucking happened, or something.

   If they were people they'd be long dead from shame. But, they're still around, and... really, that's proof enough. [↩]