Meat Is Murder
-or-
Pleased to Meat You
The wily and wry Mad Cowgirl would like to have you for dinner.
BY GREGORY
Apart from Cat Juggling, I'm hard pressed to think of any social taboos not explored (and eviscerated) by Mad Cowgirl,
the feral second feature from director Gregory Hatanaka (Until the Night). I mean, Jesus...er... literally: If you haven't
noticed that Priests Are Bad, you obviously haven't been watching movies for the past few decades, but this time we've
got a doozie: Mr. Nuclear Wessels himself, Walter "Chekov" Koenig from the original (and best; happy 40th!) Star Trek,
going utterly gonzo here as Pastor Dylan. He's lecherous, he's crazy, and he's just one of many targets (or are there?) for
our eponymous lead, a petite and apparently harmless (yeah, right) brunette christened Therese (Sarah Lassez), about
whom this movie is.
Volumes could be written covering the multi-tiered themes of this absurd, dirty, powerful and disturbingly hilarious
movie, and I hope over time the academic circuit sees its fair share of term-paper references (please notify me if anyone
writes one called, "On Devastating Misuse of E.L.O."). For Mad Cowgirl is, essentially, what motion pictures were
supposed to be in the first place, namely, experimentation, exploration -- a window into the collective soul (one could, at
times, think of Mad Cowgirl as Workers Leaving a Factory II -- it is that much of a bold new step in entertainment --
with an eye to the foibles of the proles, anyway). Although it also features some snazzy ensemble performances and
exceptionally twisted mise en scène and montage, Mad Cowgirl also leads a life beyond mere style, becoming all at once
Post-Feminist Salvo, Grindhouse Trash, Polycultural Manifesto, Splatter Flick, Adolescent Gross-out, Protracted Music
Video, Chop-Socky Extravaganza and...horrors...Serious Drama? If it ain't a window into a good chunk of The World In
Which We Live (Like It Or -- More Likely -- Not), then I'm the President of the United States of America.
(Incidentally, a former friend at CNN has stated that Dubya requires movies screened on Air Force One to be edited to a
PG-13 level or lower, one supposes because he cannot think for himself; it would be such fun to pop in Mad Cowgirl
sometime -- presuming that the guy ever leaves the ranch for the rest of his term.)
But I digress, for that is my job. Getting back to the matter at hand -- which is actually quite related (would extreme
entertainment be so prominent in a sane world with halfway-intelligent "leaders" who are not filthy liars? I doubt it!) --
Mad Cowgirl deliberately sets out to shock as many of the viewer's synapses as possible, and scores high in this regard.
Opening with a disco overture and then what appears to be an archive print of a Hong Kong PSA regarding bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (which -- foreshadowing! -- we are told manifests in humans as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease;
sounds more like a talent agency), within a minute or two whatever thoughts we had upon entering the cinema have been
superseded by the notion that the human brain is a piece of meat which can be reduced by a few microscopic
thingamabobs to a badly malfunctioning grey sponge. Nice. We also see close-ups of lots of cow's maws in the act of
masticating. Wouldn't it be awesome to behold that pitch, say, up at Universal?
WRITER
Okay, so there's this girl, and she does sex things and goes apeshit and kills a bunch of people.
DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE WITH MERCEDES SUV AND RESERVED PARKING
(tapping on calculator, picturing Charlize winning again, examining real estate listings in Portugal out of corner of eye)
Love it. Love it!
WRITER
(encouraged)
And the movie starts off with a definition of Mad Cow Disease in Chinese, accompanied by a lot of close-up stock shots
of cows chewing their cuds--AUGGGHHHHHHHH!
DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE WITH MERCEDES SUV AND RESERVED PARKING
(releasing trap-door button)
Next!
Proceeding with Mad Cowgirl, we discover that something obscure but terribly violent happens involving Therese, and
then flash back to her adoration for Pastor Dylan in his mostly empty church, delivering an impassioned sermon about
our world of sin then receiving, post haste, a "happy ending" for his efforts. Shatner spent a lot of Trek making
retarded-orgasm faces, but now, thanks to Lassez and her director, we may all relax and need no longer merely imagine
Chekov -- or, a very pleasant Russian Jew from Chicago pretending to be a crazy L.A. priest -- receiving apparently
pretty good fellatio.
Hel-lo!
("How terribly strange to be seventy...")
And then they smoke. Oh my god, don't they know???
It turns out that Therese doesn't merely blow priests for a living (this seems to be handled gratis), but holds down an
actual job as a meat inspector. A sexy meat inspector, whom the butcher boys all like. She also happens to partake of a
frequent morsel of muscle herself. Beef, beef, beef. Pardon the crudity (as if), but the term Hot Beef Injection (thank
you, Judd Nelson; how's parole?) seems to have been coined for Therese. In the manner of our current crop of young
"ladies," she's a hungry, hungry gal with a thing for carnage. This jones could have been kept in check with regular
Sizzler visits, but Therese, a lost soul in the role usually taken by male protags, gets so caught up in her work that she
ends up with some bad beef herself. Delirium starts to set in. And worse.
We now pause for a couple of this reviewer's personal beefs: First of all, blatantly criticising young women, there seems
to be a movement afoot to network as much as possible, to collect as many "friends" as one can -- and then to complain,
vigourously, about one's lack of intimacy, the harsh manner in which these random contacts do not harmonise with one's
crucial whims, etc. Therese is a textbook example of this plague, which makes her all the more interesting.
The other beef is Movies Employing Answering Machines (And/Or Voice Mail) To Convey Copious Exposition And/Or
Advance The Story. Can't stand that stuff. While the device showcases our heroine's loneliness (or is she in fact an Inner
Feminine? -- since the movie was directed by a man and written by men, including Hatanaka's co-writer Norith Soth), it's
nonetheless a lazy and non-cinematic way to go, best used sparingly (it's used way too much here) or even left entirely to
film-school productions.
Much more successful is the film's interplay of reality and television -- hardly a new idea, but done extremely well here
with dramatic and memorable visuals, featuring zany Kung Fu mixed with chilling beef-and-disease oriented newscasts
mixed with all manner of Therese's delusions, real or imagined. "Prayer Time with Pastor Dylan" is handled particularly
well (more on that in a bit). Also, apparently there's a new law in Hollywood that requires nuns to be presented onscreen
during newscasts in some insane or derogatory manner (as in Superman Returns). Here, the nun is sexy and cooing
whilst sonogramming her hugely pregnant belly. Certain to help with the next pitch at Universal. On it goes.
As with the best work of a host of avant garde directors (Takashi Miike, Jim Jarmusch, Ken Russell, particularly David
Lynch), it is wise to allow the viewer to consider the rest of this thick, juicy movie without some Award Winning Critic
getting in the way of personal interpretation. But I'll dish up a few highlights:
---
*NOTE: Despite the highly unorthodox nature of this technique, Part Two of this review will be integrated here very
soon.
Love,
Frazzled Writer
Mad Cowgirl
Entertainment Value: 11/13
Style: 11/13
Philosophical Insight: 10/13
-Gregory Weinkauf
-or-
Pleased to Meat You
The wily and wry Mad Cowgirl would like to have you for dinner.
BY GREGORY
Apart from Cat Juggling, I'm hard pressed to think of any social taboos not explored (and eviscerated) by Mad Cowgirl,
the feral second feature from director Gregory Hatanaka (Until the Night). I mean, Jesus...er... literally: If you haven't
noticed that Priests Are Bad, you obviously haven't been watching movies for the past few decades, but this time we've
got a doozie: Mr. Nuclear Wessels himself, Walter "Chekov" Koenig from the original (and best; happy 40th!) Star Trek,
going utterly gonzo here as Pastor Dylan. He's lecherous, he's crazy, and he's just one of many targets (or are there?) for
our eponymous lead, a petite and apparently harmless (yeah, right) brunette christened Therese (Sarah Lassez), about
whom this movie is.
Volumes could be written covering the multi-tiered themes of this absurd, dirty, powerful and disturbingly hilarious
movie, and I hope over time the academic circuit sees its fair share of term-paper references (please notify me if anyone
writes one called, "On Devastating Misuse of E.L.O."). For Mad Cowgirl is, essentially, what motion pictures were
supposed to be in the first place, namely, experimentation, exploration -- a window into the collective soul (one could, at
times, think of Mad Cowgirl as Workers Leaving a Factory II -- it is that much of a bold new step in entertainment --
with an eye to the foibles of the proles, anyway). Although it also features some snazzy ensemble performances and
exceptionally twisted mise en scène and montage, Mad Cowgirl also leads a life beyond mere style, becoming all at once
Post-Feminist Salvo, Grindhouse Trash, Polycultural Manifesto, Splatter Flick, Adolescent Gross-out, Protracted Music
Video, Chop-Socky Extravaganza and...horrors...Serious Drama? If it ain't a window into a good chunk of The World In
Which We Live (Like It Or -- More Likely -- Not), then I'm the President of the United States of America.
(Incidentally, a former friend at CNN has stated that Dubya requires movies screened on Air Force One to be edited to a
PG-13 level or lower, one supposes because he cannot think for himself; it would be such fun to pop in Mad Cowgirl
sometime -- presuming that the guy ever leaves the ranch for the rest of his term.)
But I digress, for that is my job. Getting back to the matter at hand -- which is actually quite related (would extreme
entertainment be so prominent in a sane world with halfway-intelligent "leaders" who are not filthy liars? I doubt it!) --
Mad Cowgirl deliberately sets out to shock as many of the viewer's synapses as possible, and scores high in this regard.
Opening with a disco overture and then what appears to be an archive print of a Hong Kong PSA regarding bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (which -- foreshadowing! -- we are told manifests in humans as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease;
sounds more like a talent agency), within a minute or two whatever thoughts we had upon entering the cinema have been
superseded by the notion that the human brain is a piece of meat which can be reduced by a few microscopic
thingamabobs to a badly malfunctioning grey sponge. Nice. We also see close-ups of lots of cow's maws in the act of
masticating. Wouldn't it be awesome to behold that pitch, say, up at Universal?
WRITER
Okay, so there's this girl, and she does sex things and goes apeshit and kills a bunch of people.
DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE WITH MERCEDES SUV AND RESERVED PARKING
(tapping on calculator, picturing Charlize winning again, examining real estate listings in Portugal out of corner of eye)
Love it. Love it!
WRITER
(encouraged)
And the movie starts off with a definition of Mad Cow Disease in Chinese, accompanied by a lot of close-up stock shots
of cows chewing their cuds--AUGGGHHHHHHHH!
DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE WITH MERCEDES SUV AND RESERVED PARKING
(releasing trap-door button)
Next!
Proceeding with Mad Cowgirl, we discover that something obscure but terribly violent happens involving Therese, and
then flash back to her adoration for Pastor Dylan in his mostly empty church, delivering an impassioned sermon about
our world of sin then receiving, post haste, a "happy ending" for his efforts. Shatner spent a lot of Trek making
retarded-orgasm faces, but now, thanks to Lassez and her director, we may all relax and need no longer merely imagine
Chekov -- or, a very pleasant Russian Jew from Chicago pretending to be a crazy L.A. priest -- receiving apparently
pretty good fellatio.
Hel-lo!
("How terribly strange to be seventy...")
And then they smoke. Oh my god, don't they know???
It turns out that Therese doesn't merely blow priests for a living (this seems to be handled gratis), but holds down an
actual job as a meat inspector. A sexy meat inspector, whom the butcher boys all like. She also happens to partake of a
frequent morsel of muscle herself. Beef, beef, beef. Pardon the crudity (as if), but the term Hot Beef Injection (thank
you, Judd Nelson; how's parole?) seems to have been coined for Therese. In the manner of our current crop of young
"ladies," she's a hungry, hungry gal with a thing for carnage. This jones could have been kept in check with regular
Sizzler visits, but Therese, a lost soul in the role usually taken by male protags, gets so caught up in her work that she
ends up with some bad beef herself. Delirium starts to set in. And worse.
We now pause for a couple of this reviewer's personal beefs: First of all, blatantly criticising young women, there seems
to be a movement afoot to network as much as possible, to collect as many "friends" as one can -- and then to complain,
vigourously, about one's lack of intimacy, the harsh manner in which these random contacts do not harmonise with one's
crucial whims, etc. Therese is a textbook example of this plague, which makes her all the more interesting.
The other beef is Movies Employing Answering Machines (And/Or Voice Mail) To Convey Copious Exposition And/Or
Advance The Story. Can't stand that stuff. While the device showcases our heroine's loneliness (or is she in fact an Inner
Feminine? -- since the movie was directed by a man and written by men, including Hatanaka's co-writer Norith Soth), it's
nonetheless a lazy and non-cinematic way to go, best used sparingly (it's used way too much here) or even left entirely to
film-school productions.
Much more successful is the film's interplay of reality and television -- hardly a new idea, but done extremely well here
with dramatic and memorable visuals, featuring zany Kung Fu mixed with chilling beef-and-disease oriented newscasts
mixed with all manner of Therese's delusions, real or imagined. "Prayer Time with Pastor Dylan" is handled particularly
well (more on that in a bit). Also, apparently there's a new law in Hollywood that requires nuns to be presented onscreen
during newscasts in some insane or derogatory manner (as in Superman Returns). Here, the nun is sexy and cooing
whilst sonogramming her hugely pregnant belly. Certain to help with the next pitch at Universal. On it goes.
As with the best work of a host of avant garde directors (Takashi Miike, Jim Jarmusch, Ken Russell, particularly David
Lynch), it is wise to allow the viewer to consider the rest of this thick, juicy movie without some Award Winning Critic
getting in the way of personal interpretation. But I'll dish up a few highlights:
---
*NOTE: Despite the highly unorthodox nature of this technique, Part Two of this review will be integrated here very
soon.
Love,
Frazzled Writer
Mad Cowgirl
Entertainment Value: 11/13
Style: 11/13
Philosophical Insight: 10/13
-Gregory Weinkauf
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