FSF, January 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  * * * *

  When Kimberli Fallon showed at New Beginnings, it was the media circus everyone had feared. Cameras, vans, uplink dishes crowded the streets on two sides of the complex, and Kimberli, of course, arrived in a limo escorted by her attorney, Michael Braden, and her current rent-a-phallus, Manager Richard Evan Garvey. Kimberli was all blond, spectacular makeup, sheared beaver coat over hip-huggers, spiked gold sparkle heels, and maximum wiggle. The mouthpiece and the manager were turned away at the main entrance, as expected. Both then proceeded to deliver prepared statements to the media after a small spat over who would get to deliver his statement first.

  As the different media blow-dries were sending their pieces off to satellites and around the globe, Kimberli was taken to a room in which she was unceremoniously shucked of everything but her underwear and issued New Beginnings blue pajamas and slippers. Her bags were searched and all cell phones, electronic devices, money, jewelry, over-the-counter drugs, herbal remedies, prescription drugs, and an ounce and a half of crystal meth were removed. The legal items were placed in a bin to be returned to her upon release. The illegal items were confiscated.

  She was given a physical by a female physician and her screening was done by a female psychiatrist. Once all the testing was done, it was early afternoon. She was hustled down to the ambulance loading bay by three males who looked like street thugs, save for the New Beginnings nametags on their upper wear. She was loaded into the ambulance along with her bags and her three companions. The doors closed and the ambulance left the bay, no sirens, no Christmas lights. The slender blond guy with the sad blue eyes and nervous smile sitting next to her handed her a small package of cheese and crackers along with a Diet Coke. His nametag said his name was Ted Franks. “What's this?” she demanded, holding out the fare.

  "That's lunch. It'll be a while before we get to the unit.” Ted opened his own pack of cheese and crackers, placed two complete cracker sandwiches together into his mouth and bit down. After a couple of chews, he opened his own Diet Coke and took a slurp.

  She looked across at the two men sitting on the bench seat facing the one upon which she and Ted sat. “Where are you taking me?"

  "Old Overcoat Unit,” said the tall dark one. He was rugged looking with an easy smile and wearing black denims, white Air Jordans, and a Mets cap. His name tag identified him as Luther James.

  "I didn't know anything about any move. No one told me. My attorney didn't say anything about moving me elsewhere."

  "Nobody knew, ‘cept the unit,” answered Luther. “In a few minutes somebody from the rehab will announce your treatment won't be taking place at New Beginnings."

  "Where?” she demanded.

  "At an undisclosed location,” said Ted. “No media, no visitors, no interviews, no calls, no complications."

  "You get to concentrate on your recovery,” added Luther.

  "I have to be able to talk with my attorney,” said Kimberli. “There are legal matters, court, business—"

  "Frito?” said Luther to the fellow sitting next to him.

  Dark brown complexioned, black hair, dead black eyes, the man called Frito had a thick ropy scar on his left cheek that went from his eye almost to his chin. He wore a black knit cap down to his eyebrows that covered his ears and he had a simple gold ring dangling from the left corner of his mouth. His nametag said his name was Alfred Tomas.

  Slowly Frito reached to his side and picked up a red backpack. Taking a manila folder from the bag, he held it up and wiggled it. “You signed the papers, Kimberli. We got you for three weeks—"

  "I'm paying for this,” she snapped. “I can leave—"

  "No, you're not paying for this,” Ted interrupted quietly. He held up another pack of crackers. “Want some more?"

  "What do you mean I'm not paying for this?"

  "We are.” Ted nodded toward Luther and Frito. “All of us. The members of the Old Overcoat Unit. We're paying for your treatment. You only have to pay if you don't complete treatment."

  "In any case,” said Frito leaning forward, his elbows resting on his thighs, “We got you for three weeks. You going to detox and maybe get a new start."

  "This is not what I agreed to,” she protested angrily.

  Frito grinned widely and tapped the file folder. “Want to read your copy?"

  Luther leaned forward and handed Kimberli a couple pieces of facial tissue. After a chilly stare, she took them. The muscles in her cheeks flexed. “I'm a prisoner?” she said at last. “Is that it?” She looked at Luther. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his denims and slouched back against the wall of the ambulance.

  "You are definitely a prisoner, Kimberli. And the first step in escaping from a prison is—” He arched his brows and looked at his two companions.

  "—To accept that one is in a prison,” they replied in unison.

  "Why ... that's just stupid,” said Kimberli. “That doesn't make any sense at all."

  "Give it time,” said Frito. “It's going to sound real smart in a few days."

  * * * *

  An icy night wind came up Sixth Avenue driving tiny sharp particles of snow before it. Cheri Trace waited for the light to change, one hand making certain the wind left her cute white beret on her head. She was wearing a white coat over a wine-colored top and dark slacks as she stood looking across the street at the naked trees in Bryant Park. Once the light changed she crossed almost at a run, her cheeks burning from the cold. Hardly anyone in the park. Cuff was doing business beneath Luther's old tree and not looking well. Very thin. Two diehard joggers in sweats with towels over their heads rounded the corner from Sixth and continued down West Forty-second. Cheri got on the path that put the trees between the street and her, the rows of chairs getting just a dusting of white.

  A fellow collecting newspapers to pack in his clothes for insulation, the sharp laugh of a working girl as she pulled at her john's arm. There was a well-dressed man in a blue pin-striped suit sitting in a loveseat, his overcoat wrapped around what looked to be a child of about seven or eight. Cheri tried to feel fear or wonder at the man's manifestation. It was, without a doubt, Jack Fallon. She looked at the child wrapped in the Monopoly Man's overcoat. A girl. Cheri smiled, thinking of what Luther must have looked like at seven, lost in that overcoat.

  "How are you doing, Jack?” Cheri asked.

  "Hello, Cheri,” he said without looking up from the girl's dark innocent face. “You're looking well."

  "I am well.” Cheri sat in the chair to the man's right. “We've got her in treatment, Jack. Kimberli's in the middle of detox. The media thinks it's a big laugh and the paparazzi are going crazy trying to find out where she is."

  His eyes closed for a moment, then they opened. “How is she doing?"

  "She's having a rough time. She's out of stuff, thinks she has all the answers, wants her own way, and right now that means getting some heavy medication and getting the hell out of treatment.” Cheri smiled sadly. “She's refused medication for withdrawal because, in her opinion, she doesn't have a drug problem."

  "Is she in a lot of pain?"

  "Yes and getting worse by the minute. You got a tough girl there, Jack. It's going to take her a while to realize her pain is self-inflicted. We have her at least for two and a half more weeks."

  "Cheri, is that going to be long enough?"

  "Maybe. Pain is the teacher we listen to. Maybe not.” Cheri smiled and bundled herself more deeply into her coat. “Kim's in a good group, Jack. Luther's assistant counselor, Ted and Frito are interns, and the rest of the group are made out of return visitors and new patients you know.” She looked down at the sleeping girl. “Everyone in the group slept where she's sleeping."

  "And you're the group counselor."

  Cheri nodded. “Jack, I came here to tell you something. You've done all you can do for Kimberli. It's up to her now. Even if she completes treatment and makes a good try at staying clean, it won't be easy. The media will never leave her alone, they'll neve
r regard anything she says or does to aid her sobriety as sincere, and any Twelve Step meetings that she attends are going to have anonymity tested like nobody's business. If she wants it, though, she can have it."

  "And?” he prompted.

  She glanced at him. “Jack, if you want, you can rest now."

  The apparition stared into the distance for a moment, then smiled at Cheri. “I don't need rest. Besides, I've got to watch over my fortune.” He nodded toward the girl wrapped in his overcoat. “My daughter's name is Sabrina. She's had a remarkably tiring day and she wanted to rest for a bit. I don't have the heart to wake her."

  Cheri stared at Jack Fallon and the charge he had taken on. Everyone knows you get to pick your own Hell. What only a few lucky ones get to find out is that you get to pick your own Heaven, too. “Then you have a good visit in the city, sir,” said Cheri.

  "Thank you officer,” answered Jack with a grin.

  They sat that way on the chairs in the falling snow for several moments when a sleepy voice asked quietly from the depths of the overcoat, “Is everything okay?"

  "Everything is fine,” answered Jack.

  "Is your fortune safe?"

  "For now.” He patted the girl's shoulder. “For now."

  Cheri placed her hand on the ghost's arm and was not surprised to find it warm.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Films: Pride Goeth Before ‘The Fall' by Kathi Maio

  I must admit I find the increasingly common show-biz practice of identifying one's self by a one-word name dreadfully pretentious. I'll give a pass to old time Mexican actor Cantinflas and his career-long clown persona. But with modern performers like Madonna and even directors like McG—who actually feels the need to abbreviate his one-word name—it seems to simply be a matter of arrogant branding. Coke. Madonna. Brands you know and love. (Or hate, as the case may be.)

  It is perhaps understandable, then, that a director whose greatest wealth and recognition has come from making commercials for brands like Coke, Nike, Smirnoff, and Lexus—one word name recognition for all—should take the same route. Tarsem (formerly known as Tarsem Singh, and before that as Tarsem Singh Dhandwar) also achieved early success in the music video field. His fresh-out-of-film-school REM video for “Losing My Religion” brought him fame, lucrative employment, and also set his style—possibly for life. To wit, mix an obscure storyline in dark shadowy tones with flashes of archetypal figures wearing showy costumes in artsy, colorful settings.

  Splashes of color and obscure but eye-arresting visuals do work well in advertisements (where you have only a minute to sell and brand-imprint your audience) and music videos (where you have a more expansive two and a half minutes to do the same), but shock-and-awe shill games do not completely serve the filmmaker's craft, which should always bring art, commerce, and performance to the service of an actual narrative.

  That last bit is the part Tarsem has struggled over during his transition to feature film director. His first full-length movie was the serial killer extravaganza, The Cell (2000), in which the pulchritudinous Jennifer Lopez incongruously portrays a social worker turned therapist who uses a space-age laboratory (and a red-ridged bat suit with super breast definition!) to enter the unconscious states of comatose boys and men. In the case of her first patient, it is to help a tormented young son of a wealthy couple come out of his coma. In the case of Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), she attempts to penetrate the mind of a man who tortures, drowns, and bleaches—yeah, you heard me right—young women, to assist an FBI team (even more incongruously led by Vince Vaughn) in locating the unconscious killer's last victim before she actually perishes.

  The concept is predictable and dopey, and the science is ludicrous, but the costumes and dreamscape settings are so arresting that they almost make you forget the stupidity playing out before you. Since most of the action occurs in the nightmarish landscape of Stargher's damaged brain, viewers are presented with scene after scene of surrealistic nastiness. The settings are either stark or baroque or American gothic, and the outfits are to die for. It's Silence of the Lambs meets Project Runway. J-Lo gets to dress up as everything from a Scarlet Virgin of Guadalupe to a possessed temptress in see-through black lace and red S&M collar.

  In many ways, The Cell was the perfect movie for modern audiences with their short attention spans and desire to be constantly over-stimulated. Therefore, some viewers were enthralled and delighted by the spectacle. I, myself, was both impressed and appalled by the film. And I thought, “If this filmmaker can ever put his extravagant visual sense to good use within a real story, he will really have something to offer."

  Therefore, even though I was more than a bit dubious, I was also hopeful as I approached the second feature film of Tarsem; he, now, of one name. The movie is one the director claims to have been prepping for and making his entire career. It seems that many years ago, as a student, he saw a 1981 Bulgarian film, written by Valeri Petrov and directed by Zako Heskija, called Yo Ho Ho. In the original, a hospitalized and crippled young man befriends a young boy and weaves a marvelous fairy tale for him, hoping to manipulate the lad into acquiring for him the means of suicide. In the end, the friendship between the two is so heartfelt and genuine that the man rejects suicide and decides to embrace life again.

  Tarsem liked the way that narrative within a narrative played out and how well it illustrated the interactive and collaborative nature of storytelling, with both the teller and the listener contributing to and transforming the plotline.

  Yo Ho Ho sounds like a charming movie. Perhaps I'll get to see it someday. But stories within stories are certainly nothing new. (The Princess Bride is one most fantasy fans know and love.) Nor is the concept of the teller's ulterior motive. Shahrazad (Scheherazade) spun tales to beguile the royal bridegroom intent on cutting off her head. Spinning fantasies to get suicide drugs pales in comparison to that.

  Still, Tarsem seems to have had this basic plot in mind over seventeen years of scouting locations while helming exotic advertisement or video shoots. And all the while he collected striking locales, bizarre vignettes, and scenic wonders he hoped to put together in his dream movie project. Since he planned on shooting his uninsurable movie over several years and numerous continents, using an unknown cast and no screenplay—despite three credited writers, including Tarsem—to speak of, it is not surprising that the movie ended up as a self-funded “indie” (read: “vanity") project.

  Over four years, he would fly his cast and crew out at the end of commercial jobs to capture a place or a scene in his elaborate story within the story. This was after a twelve-week shoot in a South African hospital (substituting for a 1915 Los Angeles institution) to capture the framing tale.

  In the set-up, we are introduced to a depressed, paralyzed young man, Roy (Lee Pace), an actor in early Hollywood, now hospitalized and heart-broken after a stunt goes very wrong and his starlet girlfriend leaves him for the leading man. Roy meets, befriends, and weaves an epic adventure for a young Romanian immigrant girl, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), who like him, took a fall. In her case, she fell from a ladder in the orange groves where she toiled with her mother and sister and broke her arm.

  The “real-life” story is not without its charms. Lee Pace, although largely unknown at the time he started the movie (but now the star of ABC's quirky fantasy series, Pushing Daisies), is a wonderful actor with a timeless look suitable to both period pieces (like last spring's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) and the most challenging of modern roles (like the transgendered Calpernia in 2003's Soldier's Girl).

  In Tarsem's film he needs to play both the self-pitying yet sympathetic story-teller and the dashing hero of the epic, the Black Bandit. He does the former with morose sensitivity and the latter with rakish, silent-film-like elegance. Pace also does a lovely job in helping to guide the artless performance of his co-star, Catinca Untaru, a young girl with supposedly no acting experience and even less English when she was hired for the film.

 
The naturalness of young Untaru's performance is no accident, it seems. The director shot the hospital scenes, in sequence, at the very beginning of work on the film. And he freely admits that his aim was to achieve a performance as realistic and haunting as that of tiny Victoire Thivisol in the 1996 French drama, Ponette.

  He achieved this, to my mind, by being a liar and a scoundrel. To create the kind of naturalism he wanted from the girl, she was informed that her role was actually in a documentary, and her interaction with co-star Pace was with an actual disabled performer. (And to make sure she stayed in the dark, the paralysis lie was actually told to the entire cast and crew!) In addition, Tarsem used limited cameras and put them behind curtains and outside windows in the early hospital scenes, to keep the movie-making hidden from the girl. In short, he wanted to trick the tyke, with her limited language skills, into giving the unstudied performance of her life.

  Such arrogant manipulation seems unnecessary, and wanders into the realm of sadistic when you see scenes, late in the movie, in which a drunken and suicidal “Roy” seems intent on killing himself and every character in his fairy tale, to the obvious distress of little “Alexandria.” It's probably easier to get away with child cruelty using a foreign moppet in a foreign country, but that doesn't make it right. However, I do think this backstory of the film's process tells us something about the god complex Tarsem exhibits as an “auteur."

  And if you need any further proof, all you need to do is descend into the story within the story that Roy expounds for his little friend. It is a showy and overblown affair, more spectacular than any fairy tale, dime novel, or film anyone in 1915 would ever be likely to dream up, even in a morphine-induced hallucination.

  The lead character is the Black Bandit (Pace), who joins forces with an escaped slave, Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley), an Italian anarchist and explosives expert, Luigi (Robin Smith), a mud-caked mystic (Julian Bleach), as well as naturalist Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) and his little monkey sidekick. The motley yet extravagant crew have all, for various reasons, sworn deadly vengeance against the supposedly evil (yet oddly absent, until the final scene), Governor Odious, who ends up looking exactly like the movie star (Daniel Caltagirone) who stole Roy's lady love away.