Build Date: Tue Jan 14 23:40:09 2025 UTC
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
-- John Perry Barlow
Communion Anal Probe Scene Museum
1999-08-24 05:31:51
Many people consider Christopher Walken's finest acting job to be his roll in The Deer Hunter, the 1978 film about the effects of Vietnam. He garnered the Best-Supporting-Actor Oscar for it. However, his true tour de force is Communion, a greatly under appreciated film about bad, buggerin' aliens.
Communion is the film adaptation of nebbishy author Witley Strieber's true story of alien abduction. "The Visitors," as they are called, repeatedly kidnapped him and performed horrible probing maneuvers on him in their spaceship. Christopher Walken plays Witley Strieber.
What makes the film interesting is that Christopher Walken manages to make Witley Strieber seem like a normal person. Walken is so good at playing evil freakouts, that its hard to remember sometimes that he can also play the Everyman quite well.
What makes the film INCREDIBLE is that Christopher Walken is basically cast against a bunch of paper mache puppets, yet it works. Sometimes the aliens look like cardboard cutouts on sticks. Some of them look like midgets in Halloween masks. But Walken manages to make them all ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING (I mean more terrifying than midgets in Halloween masks already are). His roll amounts to a series of fantastic monologues. The monologues of a desperate man trying to reason with aliens. Talk to them. Persuade them from going for his bunghole.
And now, some Web site calling itself "The Doogieland Amusement Park" has a page devoted to one of the most horrifying scenes in Communion, the anal probe scene, complete with pictures and wav files. It is a wonderful museum.
Go there now.
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