As spring approaches yet another of my major, and possibly unhealthy, obsessions begins to rear its ugly head. This obsession is America’s pastime, baseball; specifically the Milwaukee Brewers. The smell of the grass, the crack of the bat and I am off to a perfect blending of sports and statistics that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.
While I grew up in the Midwest I didn’t have really any close major sports teams that I could follow as a kid. But I soon discovered that I could rather easily pick up the radio broadcasts for Milwaukee and either of the Chicago teams. And on especially clear evenings I could even pickup Kansas City, Minneapolis, or even Cincinnati. During a childhood that had a mere three network television stations it was unbelievable to me that I could have contact with these towns hundreds of miles away.
But while I had my pick of professional teams to listen too, their were few options in terms of games I could attend. The only game in town was the Cedar Rapids Reds, a minor league franchise of the Cincinnati Reds. And while this was a dream come true for my father who grew up a Reds fan, I didn’t exactly love the idea of watching players for a year only to leave me at the end of the season for another team.
But a few years later my chance of finally watching a Major League game was fulfilled when we moved to a suburb of Milwaukee, WI. With Wisconsin my new home the Brewers became my official team, and with that years of miserable failures and untapped potential would be witnessed by my eyes and ears. But while the Brewers struggled to find altogether new ways of not reaching the postseason I still continued to listen on the radio, content that one day they would finally be worth my years of heartache.
As I grew older I eventually left for college in Minnesota, quite happy to find another team I was able to attend regular games of, and still get to occasionally watch my Brewers when they came to town. And as the years passed by a new invention by Al Gore called the Internet began to redefine what it meant to be a Milwaukee Brewers fan. I soon discovered their were dozens of us out there who loved Milwaukee Brewer baseball. And not just the Major League roster, but the prospects, and the draft and some of us drooled over on base percentage while others coveted “tools”. And as we continued to talk we began wistfully thinking about what it would be like to have our very own place to meet and discuss the nuances, beauty and inherent nerdiness needed to be a Milwaukee Brewers fan. And soon after, Brewerfan.net was born.
But while we finally had a place to sit online and talk Brewers baseball, we began to notice something else. Interest in the Brewers was building. New stadium was erected in Milwaukee, prospects started to pan out, they even started to actually win. And as this happened people began coming out to watch baseball, but rather then the play on the field what to this day still garners the most interest among fans and visitors alike? The Sausage Race.
What is the Sausage Race? It is an event held during the 6th inning of every game at Miller Park, in which 5 sausages (bratwurst, polish, Italian, hot dog, and chorizo) race around the bases to see who wins. Fans get to “bet” on who wins, but in reality it doesn’t mean anything other then being one giant ad for Klement sausages. Well, and that people are obsessed with watching enormous phalices race around for seemingly no reason what so ever, which surreptitiously brings us to Zardoz.
Even a week later I can’t quite wrap my hand, err head, around Zardoz. It’s a bloated and girthy mess of a film, that continually tries to spout out its message, yet rather then do it with any effectiveness, simply leaves you to stew over what it leaves behind, which is to say, not a whole hell of a lot.
Zardoz is a God created by the Eternals as a way of controlling the violent, sex crazy Brutals that roam over what remains of Earth. Zardoz teaches the Brutals to worship the gun while also condemning the penis as evil (this moment was punctuated by my girlfriend Anna turning to me and oh so innocently inquiring, “So why did you think I wouldn’t like this movie?”). By doing this Zardoz is essentially foisting a form of quasi-religious population control upon the uneducated Brutals so that the Eternals may continue to live in chaste splendor.
But the Eternals run into problems when the delicious man-animal Zed (Sean Connery) finds away to stow away aboard the monument which represents Zardoz and rides it into the Vortex, a complex shielded from the outside world where the Eternals reside. From here the film begins to show that its criticism of the penis may have been a bit premature, as for the next half hour Zardoz revels in the glorious nature of Zed’s uncontrollable phalice. In fact, Zed’s manhood seems to be the only thing that interests the Eternals whatsoever. Since their society has given up sex entirely some years ago, with the women too arid to want it and the men too swishy to care and everyone deeply enamored with navel gazing, they are fascinated that Zed rapes women for pleasure. Zed’s untameable nature is cause for concern for Consuella (Charlotte Rampling), while a group led by May (Sara Kestelman) and Friend (John Alderton) are fascinated by him and wish to commit him to scientific studies.
Along the way they realize that Zed is not what he appears to be. He seems to be the perfectly bred human, and over time he begins to learn how to ward off their psychic attempts at controlling him. For Consuella this only furthers her belief that he is a vicious animal who is a threat to their banal society, and as she gathers followers to her cause, Friend and May must try and teach Zed as much as they can so he can save the Eternals from the eternal damnation they created for themselves.
Sounds exciting and new doesn’t it? If only it was. Rather, Zardoz plods along as if it was some sort of bureaucratic ballyhoo overtly put forth by Vogons. It rambles on and on and on about every single theme it wants you to examine and destroys any of the interest one might have developed in the initial scenes of the film. I’m all for pontificating, but it doesn’t take 100 minutes of laborious lecturing that penii are evil, James Bond’s proboscis is irresistible, and hippies suck. Outside of those three ideas Zardoz struggles to maintain any sort of direction, aimlessly wandering through a ridiculous science fiction/religious premise all so it can bring back another penis reference the first chance it gets.
It is pretty easy to see that director John Boorman was given a bit of leeway to make a film after the success of Deliverance, but unlike Excalibur which is high on pageantry yet still maintains a bit of direction, Zardoz is just Boorman tossing ideas and opinions at a wall and seeing what sticks and trying to connect the splatter patterns together with crappy set pieces, ridiculous costumes, and inane psychobabble. Rather then being artistic and defiant, it comes across as a flaccid mess of self-eroticism. And as an audience member, I think I speak for most everyone when after an hour of watching Boorman on his back I say, “John, we appreciate the effort behind this epic work of self-fellatio you call Zardoz, but please stop. It’s undignified and you’re just making everyone grossly uncomfortable.”
