Some night, when you're all alone and feeling particularly alienated and forsaken, close your eyes and cup your hands to your ears. You'll hear a kind of muffled roar. That's the cumulative sound of 30 billion souls -- one from each human body that's ever walked the earth; each now alone on its own individual tiny desolate planet, furnished with couch, telescope, minibar, and self-replenishing hoagie -- laughing, crying, and belching as they watch their lives loop endlessly in universal syndication.
- Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville
The Story Before, Part 5
Sludge is Made of Quality Gravy
If you asked me what my favorite book was in the year 2000, I would have said, Mark Leyner's The Tetherballs of Bougainville. Actually, I probably would have gotten real defensive for no reason, and given you a flip answer out of hand. I don't know why, but I really resented being asked any questions back in teenage wasteland.
Nowadays, if you asked me what my favorite book was, I'd say -- I mean, if I don't do the usual waffle, saying something like, "Every book offers something different, and I've yet to read one that speaks to me on every level of life as I know it, though if I did, I'd probably end up building a whole religion around it or something. And I bet certain factions of that religion would use random lines from the book to justify the most radical actions, and liberals would use the rare examples of these zealots to dismiss the entire religion as a whole...", but anyhoozle, I'd say -- Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. My actual favorite book is probably Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, considering the fact I've read it three times. I think we can all agree, however, that anybody over the age of 22 who says Oh, the Place You'll Go! is their favorite book is either a total poser, or somebody who doesn't really like reading all the much...
Jesus. What was my point again?
Oh right. Tetherballs.
The Tetherballs of Bougainville is everything a 17-year-old wanna-be writer could want in a book. Every sentence is stuffed to the periods with fever-dream concepts, esoteric diction, and visceral pornographic imagery. It's all about style over substance, and the kind of thing you read and think to yourself, "I could do that!" (Which is total hubris on your part, but this is how we grow, isn't it?)
The basic plot in twenty-words-or-less is this: at the age of 13, Mark Leyner goes to his father's execution by lethal injection. It doesn't take.
But like I said, it's all style over substance, or, if you want that connotated a little more positivily, innovative craft and daring execution over overarching cohesive expression of theme. The first half of the book is prose. The second half is written as a screenplay, and half of the screenplay is Leyner reading a movie review he's written of the screenplay he's planning on writing... which brings us to the topic of Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk.
I thought the idea of telling a story in the form of a movie review of a flick that can't exist beyond brilliant and have used it twice or thrice, and Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk was my first go at it. (My second go was the five page, 6-point font review of McDavid's Sphincter which I submitted to Purple fall semester 2002, realizing it was far too long to actually go in... (So, why did I do that? Oh right. It was a fucked up semester.) I would have posted the McDavid's Sphincter review, but I don't know how well it'd hold up outside of the context of the fucked up semester, and it sooo post-Little Black Duck, and the whole point of "The Story Before" is rebuilding a better Clark for a stronger loving world...)
Of course, when it comes to this odd little sub-genre, I think my greatest accomplishment was Will Honley's review for Dangerous Chaos: The Movie. Did I write it? No. But that's what's great about it. I got somebody inspired somebody else to copy another man's crowning achievement, and I doubt he ever knew about it. Talk about your legacies...
"Sludge is Made of Quality Gravy"
In his directorial debut Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, Brent Jones manages to shock, amaze, horrify, dumbfound, enrage, and (inappropriately) touch his audience. One would have thought that it would be impossible to do all of this in a film lasting two hours, and they would be right. Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk is a five hour and thirty-seven minute experience that jostles the viewer back and forth violently.
Of course, it's impossible to really expound upon the merit of the film without discussing the screenplay's back-story. Written by Lenar Clark, a former staff writer of The Lenar Show, Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk was originally sent to Disney by the young screenwriter in hope of having it becoming the studio's next full-length animated feature. Disney rejected the script, however, condemning it as pure and utter dribble that could single-handedly destroy Western civilization if put into the wrong hands. After trying to farm the story to Dreamworks and Miramax, Clark finally remembered that the only reason he'd written the script was to give his friend and wanna-be-filmmaker Brent Jones something to do. The result of this collaboration is the five hour and thirty-seven minute independent feature that was consistently the most walked-out of film at both the Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals.
There's probably a good reason for that; the first thirty minutes of the film make absolutely no sense. The first five minutes, however, contain ultimately the most confusing sequence in the entire movie. The film begins with a shot of a suburban home on a starry night. The camera then zooms in slowly on the house, as labored breathing fills the soundtrack. The camera focuses on a single window of the house, and continues to zoom in. Then, the labored breathing pauses for a moment, a voice says "My sweet Anna," and suddenly and without warning, there's a sound like splintering wood, and the camera abruptly pans to the ground, where we see a barely breathing form crumpled over a broken branch. This scene is followed by static for a period of roughly two seconds, and then a completely different scene starts that leads into the title sequence.
I spent a good forty-five minutes during one of the movies calmer moments trying to figure that first scene out, and the best I could guess is that someone was sitting in a tree, filming the house, and then fell down. This scene has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film... it's almost as if the first five minutes aren't really part of the film, and were left on there unintentionally. Whether this is a cinematic device employed by Jones to shock the viewer, or truly an accident, I'm still not sure, but ultimately, given the nature of Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, it doesn't really matter.
What follows after the opening sequence is a twenty-five minute barrage of vague plot lines, a multitude of varying characters who have little too nothing to do with each other, and unintelligible dialogue. Eventually, however, the viewer comes to a realization: what you've been watching for a half-hour isn't the beginning of a simple independent film, but actually thirty-seven short films told within thirty-minutes time. What truly makes this section of the film so disorienting, beside the constant change in characters and settings, is the fact that these thirty-seven individual films (a majority of which don't even contain dialogue) aren't separated in any discernable way. One film leads directly into another without so much as a fade in or out. One particular confusing example of this is the transition between a film focusing on an acid-using cow and a film in which two men beat each other to death with feminine hygiene products. One minute, the cow is convinced that her hooves have fallen off, and the next, there's a man trying to suffocate another with a tampon, while he pokes him in the eye with an applicator.
The truth of the matter is that Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk is really about one hundred and seven short films that loosely tie together. It's almost as if Clark, pressed to write a screenplay by Jones, simply searched through several years worth of various unfinished writings ranging from short stories to skits to poems to expository essays to lab reports and adapted them for the screen. After the initial Thirty-Minute Hate (which ends with the particularly disturbing image of a young adolescent male swallowing a live grenade), the films are finally separated by title cards.
Due to this unusual format, Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk can come across as an eclectic drunk with MPD jacked up on speed, as it jumps between all genres. The film can't seem to decide if it's a comedy, a romance, a horror film, a character study, or a documentary, and that can grate on anyone's nerves.
One film, entitled "All the Dog Days," follows a day in the life of a stray mutt known simply as Son of a Bitch as the canine wanders through the suburbs barking, howling, eating his own feces, and indiscriminately humping various French poodles and mailmen (both male and female). The film ends on a dark note, as Son of a Bitch darts into the street and is hit by a speeding garbage truck. (Oddly enough, immediately following this scene, I distinctly heard someone in the theater yell "Oh shit!" and then start guffawing at the scene... an occurrence that followed every instance of physical harm in the movie.)
Another film, entitled "The Apotheosis of Dogma" focuses on two high school students named Corby and Bob who argue over the Hunter S. Thompson poem "Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog" while they travel to a video store to purchase a copy of the Kevin Smith film Dogma... And that's it.
A lot of the shorter films are even stranger. "The Other End" is simply fifteen seconds of a woman sitting on a toilet in a public restroom to take a dump while eating a sub sandwich and reading The Scarlet Pimpernel. "You Are Here" lasts no longer then it takes for a young man to scream "Mmm... Java!"
As you can see, the titles of the films serve several purposes. In some cases, the title sets up a joke, in others, it creates a mood, but too often, they make absolutely no sense at all. For example, "I Read Great Expectations But I Was Disappointed," is a parody of one of Charles Dickens' greatest novels, but it's A Tale of Two Cities. [Clark's Note: Which we all know is actually minor Dickens. Oh my God! I just remembered... During the hiatus I came up with this entry I wanted to do that was nothing but a series of short vignettes about a character named "Minor Dickens." Stuff like "Minor Dickens was born in the back of a bus during the earthquake of '94 in the City of Angels." "Minor Dickens lost his virginity to Leggs spokesmodel at the tender age of nine." "Minor Dicken's college days are a blur." "Minor Dickens woke with a start one hot and humid morning in the summer of his forty-second year with a devastating hangover and a hankering for some spankering." "Minor Dickens killed them. He killed them and he's not sorry." "Minor Dickens meandered toward a bench one December morn as snow fell on the Village. He sat down on a bench in Washington Square Park, let out a huge sigh of relief, and passed on." That kind of thing.] Then there's "The Last Temptation of Abraham Lincoln" which centers on a young lady doing calculus homework while Korn's "Blind" plays.
This leads to another point: the soundtrack. The musical selection, while a collection of the greatest hits of the last century, including Van Morrison's "Philosopher's Stone," Van Halen's "Right Now," and the Van Trapp family singing "Hadelweiss," often actually takes more from the film than it gives. This probably stems from the fact that a lot of the songs are needlessly played in their entirety. There are several examples in which the director goes to great lengths to achieve this. Case in point, in "Joseph Carpenter Crosses the Street," a young man named Joseph Carpenter does just that... He crosses a street in a scene that took roughly ten seconds to film. This scene is one of the best ones in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, as it's obviously supposed to symbolize St. Joseph's acceptance of Mary's claim of virginity, and his decision to take the responsibility of being the Stepfather of the Son of God. During this scene, Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe" plays. The ten second footage of Joseph crossing the street is slowed down so that the entire three minute and twenty-nine second song can be heard. Oddly enough, for four of the ten seconds, Joseph is playfully squeezing himself inappropriately, and that translates into one minute and twenty-four seconds of Joseph walking and groping himself while Hendrix repeats "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?" The film "The Gospel According to Judas" is almost exactly the same thing, this time utilizing the Paul McCarthy song "Hey Jude."
Sometimes, however, the music works perfectly, like in "Who Loves the Sun?" which takes its name from the Velvet Underground song of the same name. In that film, a powder blue 1988 Nissan Sentra is inexplicably floating in space, drawn slowly into the sun's gravitational pull. As the Sentra's two passangers, Bruce and Selina, saunter slowly toward certain doom, Bruce tells Selina of his undying love for her while she responds with romantic disinterest while the song plays on the radio.
"Selina," Bruce (played with conviction by director himself) says to her, "everything I have ever done since the day I met you, I have done in the hopes that you would love me... So if I'm meant to die here today, I just want you to know that I'm honored to die at your side."
To which Selina (played superbly by up-and-comer Kathleen Storms) replies coolly "Um, right... could you roll down the window? I'm getting a little hot."
One can't help but notice that in one scene, the Sentra's license plate reads "MITHRAS" and in another, it reads "UWALE." The significance of this seems miniscule, until you realize that if you unscramble the letters, it spells "I AM THE WALRUS," which makes the ending of "Who Loves the Sun?" make so much more sense.
Now, as you can undoubtedly ascertain by the preceding descriptions, the films contained in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk are completely unrelated. This is untrue, however. Some of the films are actually part of a series of films, like the Batman movies. The problem, though, is that like the Batman movies, each additional installment to these series tend to get worse and worse. Also, they're rarely shown in any logical order and are spaced out by crops of different films. For example "The Middle of the End" is followed by seven films before "The Beginning of the End" which is followed by forty films until "The End of the End." Why can't these films be played in simple order directly after one another? The only possible answer is that the editing was done by a brain-damaged, inbred, slobbering oaf while he hammers nails in his feet.
However, when you actually can piece these series together in your mind, you'll find that they're brooding and compelling forays into the cinematic arts. Take "The Erotic Misadventures of Dicky Dickington III: Shape-Shifting Sexual Outlaw" Parts II, III, VII, and XI (Parts I, IV, V, VIII, IX, and X are never shown) for example. In them, a man who can assume any form becomes involved in several acts of tantric sex. While many critics saw this as no more than an excuse for three different actors and one actress to each deliver the line "If you think it's big now..." before a montage of semi-erotic images, the series is so much more. It's obviously an indictment of traditional family values in sexually liberated America, while at the same time calling for some semblance of order... some type of new morality. The apocalyptic potential of not heeding these warnings is best exemplified in "The Erotic Misadventures of Dicky Dickington III Part VII: 'You Ever Seen That Show Alice?'" The film is nothing more than five minutes of Dicky making bizarre and vaguely inappropriate love to an unseen partner followed by a thirty second post-coital scene in which it's revealed that he's just slept with Bea Arthur. Some say that single half-minute scene is the reason for Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk's OMUPI (Offensive, Morally Unethical, and Physically Impossible) rating in The Catholic Key. [Clark's Note: The Catholic Key, for you Protestants and other members of the hell-bound masses, was a newspaper published by the Diocese that would review movies based upon the moral implications of characters actions that I absolutely loved reading in high school.] Reportedly, this scene was supposed to be cut, seeing as it induced vomiting at the test-screening of the movie as well as the special screening attended by myself and several other movie critics, but it was left in due the fact the film was indeed edited by a brain-damaged, inbred, slobbering oaf while he hammered nails in his feet.
This served as the two-hour mark of feature, at which point several of my fellow critics, including Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times, then jumped up screaming "They don't pay me enough for this!" and similar exclamations while scrambling for an exit. They were intercepted by ushers brandishing cattle prods, and lead docilely back to their seats. The only critic who left the theater at any time, however, was Joel Siegel of Good Morning America, who tried to go to the bathroom and was beaten to death by Robert Butler of The Kansas City Star while myself and Rolling Stones critic Peter Travers laughed our asses off.
Siegel had been sitting in front of us, and during a particularly tense scene in "The Last Temptation of Abraham Lincoln" in which the calculus student had mistakenly written the derivative of "sec x" as "-ln [cos x]," he turned around to ask "What the hell is this supposed to mean?!"
"It's an examination of the limits of the human mind in executing the abstract, as well as a dissertation on existential dilemma. The young lady has mistakenly integrated 'sec x' rather than differentiating, but we must ask ourselves if she's truly wrong. How are we so certain that the answer is truly 'sec x tan x'? There's no tangible evidence to support this belief. In the end, the answer is 'sec x tan x' because we believe it is. So, one must ask themselves how our lives are any different than that equation. Are we here only because we believe we are, or are we the products of some higher power? Is the entire universe no more than a tangent line curving sweetly toward infinite? Are we no more than calculus homework of some omnipotent differentiator?"
Siegel simply blinked for a moment, then he asked "What the hell does that mean?"
At that point, I said "Turn the hell around and shut up." I mean, like we needed to deal with that! What is this?What is that? We were having hard enough of a time simply following the film, we didn't have time to do his job for him!
Siegel was killed during "The Confessions of Karl Van Der Bloom," a ten minute film that is easily the worst in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk. This is due, in no small part, to the horrific acting of Karl Bloom, who portrays Karl Van Der Bloom in a performance more forced than Elian Gonzalez's videotaped plea to his father. It doesn't help that Van Der Bloom is an irredeemably lame character who spends the entire time explaining to anyone who'll listen an assortment of obscure, ultimately irrelevant facts. Van Der Bloom is convinced that his colorful commentary on these useless information is somehow insightful, but in reality is nothing more than the mutterings of a complete and utter jackass convinced his some type of "human being." It wouldn't be so bad if Van Der Bloom didn't repeat the exact same things ad nauseam, as if doing so will magically make what he's saying intelligent or witty.
Van Der Bloom's shortcomings, however, prevail throughout Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk. While some of the films present new and exciting ideas, a lot of them rehash the same old cliches. Several of the films are simply excuses to plagiarize dialogue from popular syndicated sitcoms, while others are nothing more than actual scenes from sitcoms edited into the film as if they had been shot by Jones. This includes the film "Good Times" in which Bill McNeil, the late Phil Hartman's character recounts the following tale:
"My father had been out on one of his 'nights on the town,' which of course had turned into a week. When he came back, my mother said, 'John, is there anything you won't drink,' and he shot back 'Poison! I'm saving it for you!' Ah... good times."
There's also "I Am the Man... I Was There" which is nothing more than a clip from The Simpsons episode in which Homer meets his long lost mother. The featured scene involves Homer kicking the tombstone of famed poet Walt Whitman while screaming "I hate you Walt freakin' Whitman... Leaves of Grass my ass!"
Then there's "Hamlet Part II: This Time it's Personal" which is an entire episode of Duckman taped off of Comedy Central, commercials and all.
What it loses in oddball hack work, Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk regains in its subtle attacks of the fourth wall. One film, "What the Hell?" is actually the story of a group of teenagers who are trying to put together a film. In a particularly poignant part of "The Perils of Percy Peckinpish," which is narrated elegantly by Justin Smith, Smith pauses to say that he doesn't think that he pronounced something coorectly, and "could we try that again?" Then, there's "I'm Not Crazy" featuring Lenar Clark's only acting performance in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk in which he portrays a young screenwriter who's visiting a clinical psychologist because of the twisted and disturbing script he's written.
"Why did you write all this?" the doctor, played by a woefully miscast Mary Kate Olsen, asks him.
"Because if I hadn't we wouldn't be having this conversation write now," is Clark's cool reply. "We're in my movie right now."
Before Olsen can say "You desperately need help," Clark gets up and flogs her to death.
Unfortunately, not all of the films are so entertaining, but what makes Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk worth wading through all of this, and suffering the odd visual choices made by Brent Jones (during "A Wuthering Heights Essay for Mrs. Roder's Class," in which one character delivers a monologue explaining why Heathcliff isn't a villain, Jones decides to focus the camera on the recently repainted wall in the classroom, and the viewer is subjected to actually watching the paint dry) is the fact that somehow, Clark manages to write these stories so that, as seeming different as they are, they actually do all come together in the final film "A Stronger Loving World".
Undoubtedly, this would not have worked if not for two characters. First of all, Father Ecklestein, a satirical character who's a Catholic priest despite the fact that he's clearly Jewish. Played with devilish wit in a cameo appearance by Jerry Seinfeld, Ecklestein appears sporadically throughout Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, with his best appearance being in "The Erotic Misadventures of Dicky Dickington III Part III: 'Father May I?' or 'Oy Vey, Boy May!'" Secondly, there's the unnamed character wondrously portrayed by Danielle Schwartz. The character first appears in at the beginning of the film, when she's abducted by a subversive neo-nazi group operating outside of Great Falls, Montana. The abductee is tied and gagged and forced to watch thirty-six straight hours of TV wrestling. She eventually goes nuts, escapes his bonds, and takes off sprinting. For some reason, it never occurs to her remove her gag, and she just keeps running. She is the only character who appears in all one hundred and seven of the short films that comprise Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, and she figures strongly into the movies conclusion in "A Stronger Loving World."
If you want to go to a nice, normal, enjoyable movie, stir clear of Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk as though it were the bubonic plague, because your puny mind will undoubtedly be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the picture. Go rent Titanic, sit down, shut up, and let a few more brain cells be sapped by one more fecal foray into film. If you want to experience the true depth of the human condition, or if you've just got five and a half hours to kill, go see Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk.
NEXT:
Strange Lost Snippets from Jones' Laptop
- Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville
The Story Before, Part 5
Sludge is Made of Quality Gravy
If you asked me what my favorite book was in the year 2000, I would have said, Mark Leyner's The Tetherballs of Bougainville. Actually, I probably would have gotten real defensive for no reason, and given you a flip answer out of hand. I don't know why, but I really resented being asked any questions back in teenage wasteland.
Nowadays, if you asked me what my favorite book was, I'd say -- I mean, if I don't do the usual waffle, saying something like, "Every book offers something different, and I've yet to read one that speaks to me on every level of life as I know it, though if I did, I'd probably end up building a whole religion around it or something. And I bet certain factions of that religion would use random lines from the book to justify the most radical actions, and liberals would use the rare examples of these zealots to dismiss the entire religion as a whole...", but anyhoozle, I'd say -- Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. My actual favorite book is probably Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, considering the fact I've read it three times. I think we can all agree, however, that anybody over the age of 22 who says Oh, the Place You'll Go! is their favorite book is either a total poser, or somebody who doesn't really like reading all the much...
Jesus. What was my point again?
Oh right. Tetherballs.
The Tetherballs of Bougainville is everything a 17-year-old wanna-be writer could want in a book. Every sentence is stuffed to the periods with fever-dream concepts, esoteric diction, and visceral pornographic imagery. It's all about style over substance, and the kind of thing you read and think to yourself, "I could do that!" (Which is total hubris on your part, but this is how we grow, isn't it?)
The basic plot in twenty-words-or-less is this: at the age of 13, Mark Leyner goes to his father's execution by lethal injection. It doesn't take.
But like I said, it's all style over substance, or, if you want that connotated a little more positivily, innovative craft and daring execution over overarching cohesive expression of theme. The first half of the book is prose. The second half is written as a screenplay, and half of the screenplay is Leyner reading a movie review he's written of the screenplay he's planning on writing... which brings us to the topic of Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk.
I thought the idea of telling a story in the form of a movie review of a flick that can't exist beyond brilliant and have used it twice or thrice, and Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk was my first go at it. (My second go was the five page, 6-point font review of McDavid's Sphincter which I submitted to Purple fall semester 2002, realizing it was far too long to actually go in... (So, why did I do that? Oh right. It was a fucked up semester.) I would have posted the McDavid's Sphincter review, but I don't know how well it'd hold up outside of the context of the fucked up semester, and it sooo post-Little Black Duck, and the whole point of "The Story Before" is rebuilding a better Clark for a stronger loving world...)
Of course, when it comes to this odd little sub-genre, I think my greatest accomplishment was Will Honley's review for Dangerous Chaos: The Movie. Did I write it? No. But that's what's great about it. I got somebody inspired somebody else to copy another man's crowning achievement, and I doubt he ever knew about it. Talk about your legacies...
"Sludge is Made of Quality Gravy"
In his directorial debut Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, Brent Jones manages to shock, amaze, horrify, dumbfound, enrage, and (inappropriately) touch his audience. One would have thought that it would be impossible to do all of this in a film lasting two hours, and they would be right. Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk is a five hour and thirty-seven minute experience that jostles the viewer back and forth violently.
Of course, it's impossible to really expound upon the merit of the film without discussing the screenplay's back-story. Written by Lenar Clark, a former staff writer of The Lenar Show, Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk was originally sent to Disney by the young screenwriter in hope of having it becoming the studio's next full-length animated feature. Disney rejected the script, however, condemning it as pure and utter dribble that could single-handedly destroy Western civilization if put into the wrong hands. After trying to farm the story to Dreamworks and Miramax, Clark finally remembered that the only reason he'd written the script was to give his friend and wanna-be-filmmaker Brent Jones something to do. The result of this collaboration is the five hour and thirty-seven minute independent feature that was consistently the most walked-out of film at both the Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals.
There's probably a good reason for that; the first thirty minutes of the film make absolutely no sense. The first five minutes, however, contain ultimately the most confusing sequence in the entire movie. The film begins with a shot of a suburban home on a starry night. The camera then zooms in slowly on the house, as labored breathing fills the soundtrack. The camera focuses on a single window of the house, and continues to zoom in. Then, the labored breathing pauses for a moment, a voice says "My sweet Anna," and suddenly and without warning, there's a sound like splintering wood, and the camera abruptly pans to the ground, where we see a barely breathing form crumpled over a broken branch. This scene is followed by static for a period of roughly two seconds, and then a completely different scene starts that leads into the title sequence.
I spent a good forty-five minutes during one of the movies calmer moments trying to figure that first scene out, and the best I could guess is that someone was sitting in a tree, filming the house, and then fell down. This scene has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film... it's almost as if the first five minutes aren't really part of the film, and were left on there unintentionally. Whether this is a cinematic device employed by Jones to shock the viewer, or truly an accident, I'm still not sure, but ultimately, given the nature of Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, it doesn't really matter.
What follows after the opening sequence is a twenty-five minute barrage of vague plot lines, a multitude of varying characters who have little too nothing to do with each other, and unintelligible dialogue. Eventually, however, the viewer comes to a realization: what you've been watching for a half-hour isn't the beginning of a simple independent film, but actually thirty-seven short films told within thirty-minutes time. What truly makes this section of the film so disorienting, beside the constant change in characters and settings, is the fact that these thirty-seven individual films (a majority of which don't even contain dialogue) aren't separated in any discernable way. One film leads directly into another without so much as a fade in or out. One particular confusing example of this is the transition between a film focusing on an acid-using cow and a film in which two men beat each other to death with feminine hygiene products. One minute, the cow is convinced that her hooves have fallen off, and the next, there's a man trying to suffocate another with a tampon, while he pokes him in the eye with an applicator.
The truth of the matter is that Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk is really about one hundred and seven short films that loosely tie together. It's almost as if Clark, pressed to write a screenplay by Jones, simply searched through several years worth of various unfinished writings ranging from short stories to skits to poems to expository essays to lab reports and adapted them for the screen. After the initial Thirty-Minute Hate (which ends with the particularly disturbing image of a young adolescent male swallowing a live grenade), the films are finally separated by title cards.
Due to this unusual format, Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk can come across as an eclectic drunk with MPD jacked up on speed, as it jumps between all genres. The film can't seem to decide if it's a comedy, a romance, a horror film, a character study, or a documentary, and that can grate on anyone's nerves.
One film, entitled "All the Dog Days," follows a day in the life of a stray mutt known simply as Son of a Bitch as the canine wanders through the suburbs barking, howling, eating his own feces, and indiscriminately humping various French poodles and mailmen (both male and female). The film ends on a dark note, as Son of a Bitch darts into the street and is hit by a speeding garbage truck. (Oddly enough, immediately following this scene, I distinctly heard someone in the theater yell "Oh shit!" and then start guffawing at the scene... an occurrence that followed every instance of physical harm in the movie.)
Another film, entitled "The Apotheosis of Dogma" focuses on two high school students named Corby and Bob who argue over the Hunter S. Thompson poem "Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog" while they travel to a video store to purchase a copy of the Kevin Smith film Dogma... And that's it.
A lot of the shorter films are even stranger. "The Other End" is simply fifteen seconds of a woman sitting on a toilet in a public restroom to take a dump while eating a sub sandwich and reading The Scarlet Pimpernel. "You Are Here" lasts no longer then it takes for a young man to scream "Mmm... Java!"
As you can see, the titles of the films serve several purposes. In some cases, the title sets up a joke, in others, it creates a mood, but too often, they make absolutely no sense at all. For example, "I Read Great Expectations But I Was Disappointed," is a parody of one of Charles Dickens' greatest novels, but it's A Tale of Two Cities. [Clark's Note: Which we all know is actually minor Dickens. Oh my God! I just remembered... During the hiatus I came up with this entry I wanted to do that was nothing but a series of short vignettes about a character named "Minor Dickens." Stuff like "Minor Dickens was born in the back of a bus during the earthquake of '94 in the City of Angels." "Minor Dickens lost his virginity to Leggs spokesmodel at the tender age of nine." "Minor Dicken's college days are a blur." "Minor Dickens woke with a start one hot and humid morning in the summer of his forty-second year with a devastating hangover and a hankering for some spankering." "Minor Dickens killed them. He killed them and he's not sorry." "Minor Dickens meandered toward a bench one December morn as snow fell on the Village. He sat down on a bench in Washington Square Park, let out a huge sigh of relief, and passed on." That kind of thing.] Then there's "The Last Temptation of Abraham Lincoln" which centers on a young lady doing calculus homework while Korn's "Blind" plays.
This leads to another point: the soundtrack. The musical selection, while a collection of the greatest hits of the last century, including Van Morrison's "Philosopher's Stone," Van Halen's "Right Now," and the Van Trapp family singing "Hadelweiss," often actually takes more from the film than it gives. This probably stems from the fact that a lot of the songs are needlessly played in their entirety. There are several examples in which the director goes to great lengths to achieve this. Case in point, in "Joseph Carpenter Crosses the Street," a young man named Joseph Carpenter does just that... He crosses a street in a scene that took roughly ten seconds to film. This scene is one of the best ones in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, as it's obviously supposed to symbolize St. Joseph's acceptance of Mary's claim of virginity, and his decision to take the responsibility of being the Stepfather of the Son of God. During this scene, Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe" plays. The ten second footage of Joseph crossing the street is slowed down so that the entire three minute and twenty-nine second song can be heard. Oddly enough, for four of the ten seconds, Joseph is playfully squeezing himself inappropriately, and that translates into one minute and twenty-four seconds of Joseph walking and groping himself while Hendrix repeats "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?" The film "The Gospel According to Judas" is almost exactly the same thing, this time utilizing the Paul McCarthy song "Hey Jude."
Sometimes, however, the music works perfectly, like in "Who Loves the Sun?" which takes its name from the Velvet Underground song of the same name. In that film, a powder blue 1988 Nissan Sentra is inexplicably floating in space, drawn slowly into the sun's gravitational pull. As the Sentra's two passangers, Bruce and Selina, saunter slowly toward certain doom, Bruce tells Selina of his undying love for her while she responds with romantic disinterest while the song plays on the radio.
"Selina," Bruce (played with conviction by director himself) says to her, "everything I have ever done since the day I met you, I have done in the hopes that you would love me... So if I'm meant to die here today, I just want you to know that I'm honored to die at your side."
To which Selina (played superbly by up-and-comer Kathleen Storms) replies coolly "Um, right... could you roll down the window? I'm getting a little hot."
One can't help but notice that in one scene, the Sentra's license plate reads "MITHRAS" and in another, it reads "UWALE." The significance of this seems miniscule, until you realize that if you unscramble the letters, it spells "I AM THE WALRUS," which makes the ending of "Who Loves the Sun?" make so much more sense.
Now, as you can undoubtedly ascertain by the preceding descriptions, the films contained in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk are completely unrelated. This is untrue, however. Some of the films are actually part of a series of films, like the Batman movies. The problem, though, is that like the Batman movies, each additional installment to these series tend to get worse and worse. Also, they're rarely shown in any logical order and are spaced out by crops of different films. For example "The Middle of the End" is followed by seven films before "The Beginning of the End" which is followed by forty films until "The End of the End." Why can't these films be played in simple order directly after one another? The only possible answer is that the editing was done by a brain-damaged, inbred, slobbering oaf while he hammers nails in his feet.
However, when you actually can piece these series together in your mind, you'll find that they're brooding and compelling forays into the cinematic arts. Take "The Erotic Misadventures of Dicky Dickington III: Shape-Shifting Sexual Outlaw" Parts II, III, VII, and XI (Parts I, IV, V, VIII, IX, and X are never shown) for example. In them, a man who can assume any form becomes involved in several acts of tantric sex. While many critics saw this as no more than an excuse for three different actors and one actress to each deliver the line "If you think it's big now..." before a montage of semi-erotic images, the series is so much more. It's obviously an indictment of traditional family values in sexually liberated America, while at the same time calling for some semblance of order... some type of new morality. The apocalyptic potential of not heeding these warnings is best exemplified in "The Erotic Misadventures of Dicky Dickington III Part VII: 'You Ever Seen That Show Alice?'" The film is nothing more than five minutes of Dicky making bizarre and vaguely inappropriate love to an unseen partner followed by a thirty second post-coital scene in which it's revealed that he's just slept with Bea Arthur. Some say that single half-minute scene is the reason for Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk's OMUPI (Offensive, Morally Unethical, and Physically Impossible) rating in The Catholic Key. [Clark's Note: The Catholic Key, for you Protestants and other members of the hell-bound masses, was a newspaper published by the Diocese that would review movies based upon the moral implications of characters actions that I absolutely loved reading in high school.] Reportedly, this scene was supposed to be cut, seeing as it induced vomiting at the test-screening of the movie as well as the special screening attended by myself and several other movie critics, but it was left in due the fact the film was indeed edited by a brain-damaged, inbred, slobbering oaf while he hammered nails in his feet.
This served as the two-hour mark of feature, at which point several of my fellow critics, including Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times, then jumped up screaming "They don't pay me enough for this!" and similar exclamations while scrambling for an exit. They were intercepted by ushers brandishing cattle prods, and lead docilely back to their seats. The only critic who left the theater at any time, however, was Joel Siegel of Good Morning America, who tried to go to the bathroom and was beaten to death by Robert Butler of The Kansas City Star while myself and Rolling Stones critic Peter Travers laughed our asses off.
Siegel had been sitting in front of us, and during a particularly tense scene in "The Last Temptation of Abraham Lincoln" in which the calculus student had mistakenly written the derivative of "sec x" as "-ln [cos x]," he turned around to ask "What the hell is this supposed to mean?!"
"It's an examination of the limits of the human mind in executing the abstract, as well as a dissertation on existential dilemma. The young lady has mistakenly integrated 'sec x' rather than differentiating, but we must ask ourselves if she's truly wrong. How are we so certain that the answer is truly 'sec x tan x'? There's no tangible evidence to support this belief. In the end, the answer is 'sec x tan x' because we believe it is. So, one must ask themselves how our lives are any different than that equation. Are we here only because we believe we are, or are we the products of some higher power? Is the entire universe no more than a tangent line curving sweetly toward infinite? Are we no more than calculus homework of some omnipotent differentiator?"
Siegel simply blinked for a moment, then he asked "What the hell does that mean?"
At that point, I said "Turn the hell around and shut up." I mean, like we needed to deal with that! What is this?
Siegel was killed during "The Confessions of Karl Van Der Bloom," a ten minute film that is easily the worst in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk. This is due, in no small part, to the horrific acting of Karl Bloom, who portrays Karl Van Der Bloom in a performance more forced than Elian Gonzalez's videotaped plea to his father. It doesn't help that Van Der Bloom is an irredeemably lame character who spends the entire time explaining to anyone who'll listen an assortment of obscure, ultimately irrelevant facts. Van Der Bloom is convinced that his colorful commentary on these useless information is somehow insightful, but in reality is nothing more than the mutterings of a complete and utter jackass convinced his some type of "human being." It wouldn't be so bad if Van Der Bloom didn't repeat the exact same things ad nauseam, as if doing so will magically make what he's saying intelligent or witty.
Van Der Bloom's shortcomings, however, prevail throughout Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk. While some of the films present new and exciting ideas, a lot of them rehash the same old cliches. Several of the films are simply excuses to plagiarize dialogue from popular syndicated sitcoms, while others are nothing more than actual scenes from sitcoms edited into the film as if they had been shot by Jones. This includes the film "Good Times" in which Bill McNeil, the late Phil Hartman's character recounts the following tale:
"My father had been out on one of his 'nights on the town,' which of course had turned into a week. When he came back, my mother said, 'John, is there anything you won't drink,' and he shot back 'Poison! I'm saving it for you!' Ah... good times."
There's also "I Am the Man... I Was There" which is nothing more than a clip from The Simpsons episode in which Homer meets his long lost mother. The featured scene involves Homer kicking the tombstone of famed poet Walt Whitman while screaming "I hate you Walt freakin' Whitman... Leaves of Grass my ass!"
Then there's "Hamlet Part II: This Time it's Personal" which is an entire episode of Duckman taped off of Comedy Central, commercials and all.
What it loses in oddball hack work, Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk regains in its subtle attacks of the fourth wall. One film, "What the Hell?" is actually the story of a group of teenagers who are trying to put together a film. In a particularly poignant part of "The Perils of Percy Peckinpish," which is narrated elegantly by Justin Smith, Smith pauses to say that he doesn't think that he pronounced something coorectly, and "could we try that again?" Then, there's "I'm Not Crazy" featuring Lenar Clark's only acting performance in Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk in which he portrays a young screenwriter who's visiting a clinical psychologist because of the twisted and disturbing script he's written.
"Why did you write all this?" the doctor, played by a woefully miscast Mary Kate Olsen, asks him.
"Because if I hadn't we wouldn't be having this conversation write now," is Clark's cool reply. "We're in my movie right now."
Before Olsen can say "You desperately need help," Clark gets up and flogs her to death.
Unfortunately, not all of the films are so entertaining, but what makes Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk worth wading through all of this, and suffering the odd visual choices made by Brent Jones (during "A Wuthering Heights Essay for Mrs. Roder's Class," in which one character delivers a monologue explaining why Heathcliff isn't a villain, Jones decides to focus the camera on the recently repainted wall in the classroom, and the viewer is subjected to actually watching the paint dry) is the fact that somehow, Clark manages to write these stories so that, as seeming different as they are, they actually do all come together in the final film "A Stronger Loving World".
Undoubtedly, this would not have worked if not for two characters. First of all, Father Ecklestein, a satirical character who's a Catholic priest despite the fact that he's clearly Jewish. Played with devilish wit in a cameo appearance by Jerry Seinfeld, Ecklestein appears sporadically throughout Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, with his best appearance being in "The Erotic Misadventures of Dicky Dickington III Part III: 'Father May I?' or 'Oy Vey, Boy May!'" Secondly, there's the unnamed character wondrously portrayed by Danielle Schwartz. The character first appears in at the beginning of the film, when she's abducted by a subversive neo-nazi group operating outside of Great Falls, Montana. The abductee is tied and gagged and forced to watch thirty-six straight hours of TV wrestling. She eventually goes nuts, escapes his bonds, and takes off sprinting. For some reason, it never occurs to her remove her gag, and she just keeps running. She is the only character who appears in all one hundred and seven of the short films that comprise Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk, and she figures strongly into the movies conclusion in "A Stronger Loving World."
If you want to go to a nice, normal, enjoyable movie, stir clear of Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk as though it were the bubonic plague, because your puny mind will undoubtedly be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the picture. Go rent Titanic, sit down, shut up, and let a few more brain cells be sapped by one more fecal foray into film. If you want to experience the true depth of the human condition, or if you've just got five and a half hours to kill, go see Sludge at the Bottom of My Glass of Chocolate Milk.
NEXT:
Strange Lost Snippets from Jones' Laptop
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