F L I C K H E A D

My 50 favorite films of the first decade of the 21st century

2009-11-20T21:56:00.003-05:00

Elisha Cuthbert in The Girl Next Door

To quote That Little Round-Headed Boy:

“This list means nothing, except to me. It's a list of 50 movies that gave me pleasure over the past decade. I can say without reservation that I would watch any of these again. Would I say that all of them are great films, however great films are supposed to be defined? Probably not. But that's nothing you need to worry about. Because it's my list.”

Why not? I’ve listed mine alphabetically:

1) Australia (2008)
2) Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
3) Birth (2004)
4) Black Book (2006)
5) Bowling for Columbine (2002)
6) The Boynton Beach Club (2005)
7) Casino Royale (2006)
8) Catwoman (2004)
9) Code Inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000)
10) A Decade Under the Influence (2003)
11) The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
12) Eastern Promises (2007)
13) Factotum (2005)
14) The Fast and the Furious (2001)
15) Um Filme Falado (A Talking Picture, 2003)
16) La Fleur du Mal (The Flower of Evil, 2003)
17) Ghost World (2001)
18) The Girl Next Door (2004)
19) A History of Violence (2005)
20) Honey (2003)
21) Hors de prix (Priceless, 2006)
22) The Hours (2002)
23) I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)
24) I Heart Huckabees (2004)
25) The Illusionist (2006)
26) In Her Shoes (2005)
27) The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)
28) Juno (2007)
29) Lie with Me (2005)
30) Laurel Canyon (2002)
31) Lucía y el Sexo (Sex and Lucía, 2002)
32) Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2004)
33) Midnight Movies (2007)
34) Mulholland Dr. (2001)
35) Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006)
36) No Country for Old Men (2007)
37) Open Range (2003)
38) Open Water (2004)
39) Pollock (2000)
40) Roger Dodger (2002)
41) Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007)
42) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
43) Spun (2002)
44) Sukkar banat (Caramel, 2007)
45) The Sweetest Thing (2002)
46) An Unfinished Life (2005)
47) Va Savoir (2000)
48) Wanted (2008)
49) Where the Heart Is (2000)
50) X-Men (2000)

AJ's next

2009-11-18T22:13:00.003-05:00

Those lips, those eyes...

Yeah, I'm hooked. So sue me...

Luis Buñuel’s Death in the Garden

2009-11-10T19:49:00.005-05:00

New on DVD from Microcinema International, Luis Buñuel’s Death in the Garden (1956) stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel and Michel Piccoli in an adventure of political uprising, lust, deception and jungle hell. And in the grand tradition of its director, any and all conventional themes and genre trappings have been systematically corrupted by his sardonic take on fate, chance and human nature.

Filmed in Mexico, it was one of a handful of what would become relatively obscure Mexican-French co-productions Buñuel was involved with in the late 1950s. (The film didn’t open in the United States until 1977; Vincent Canby was there.) Its budget allowed for Eastmancolor, the director’s second in color after Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952), and his first with international movie stars. Marchal and Piccoli were just establishing themselves, but Vanel had prominent roles in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1953) and Les diaboliques (1955), and Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955); and Signoret was famous for Les diaboliques, Max Ophüls’s La ronde (1950), Jacques Becker’s Casque d'or (1952) and Marcel Carné’s Thérèse Raquin (1953).

Buñuel wasn’t happy making the picture nor with the finished product. “I almost don’t want to talk about [it],” he told José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent in their book of interviews, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel:

“The production was torture; there were difficulties from the very beginning. The producer was bothered by censorship and asked me to modify some things. The star of the film, Simone Signoret, felt uncomfortable because [her husband] Yves Montand was far away from her in Italy and she wanted to join him; she looked for any excuse to return to Europe. When she entered the United States, she deliberately showed a passport with visas showing trips to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, but the immigration agents — rara avis — let her pass. So many things were changed during the production that scenes often had to be rewritten minutes before the camera began rolling, and furthermore Gabriel Arout had to translate the text into French. I suffered a lot with Michele Girardon, the actress who played the deaf girl; she was only working on the film because her parents wanted her to, and, of course, she was completely ignorant of the craft. I had a lot of problems. By the end of the production I had had enough and I didn’t even have a hand in the music. I let them put in whatever they wanted.”

Had he envisioned doing a ‘straight’ adventure à la King Solomon’s Mines? Buñuel was fairly faithful to Defoe on Robinson Crusoe, but Belgian author José-André Lacour’s novel Death in That Garden was rank with the kind of superficial moralizing the surrealist abhorred. However, his frustrations with Death in the Garden probably stemmed more from burnout than anything else. It came after an astonishing run of activity, Buñuel directing thirteen pictures from Los olvidados (1950) to That Is the Dawn (1955). Indeed, after Death in the Garden wrapped he took a three-year hiatus from the camera.

Above: Simone Signoret in a publicity photo for Death in the Garden — click to enlarge. Despite her pedigree (or perhaps because of it), Buñuel found her tediously high maintenance: “Her behavior was at best unruly,” he wrote in My Last Sigh, “at worst very destructive to the rest of the cast.”

    In a book review published in 1959, Time magazine felt that Lacour “brought off with literary flair and an almost savage imagination” the two-part story that opens in a South American village where local government is evicting a community of diamond miners, some of whom flee to the jungle to escape jail and execution. Buñuel wisely sidesteps the novel’s purple prose “symbolism, its irony, its implicit plea for man’s humanity to man” (Time) to examine breakdown and survival, the stifling tropical backdrop a prediction of the inescapable dining room in The Exterminating Angel (1962).

    The screenplays to that later film and Death in the Garden were co-written with Luis Alcoriza, Buñuel’s frequent collaborator throughout his Mexican period. Alcoriza offered a counterbalance of satire and optimism to Buñuel’s caustic wit and fatalist view — a creative partnership similar to the one he’d share with Jean-Claude Carrière in the 1960s and 70s. They worked together on ten pictures, often using groups of characters (as opposed to single protagonists) to observe personality traits within the herd: Los olvidados, Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953) and Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959).

    With Lacour’s novel, they reduced the hero’s role and enhanced secondary characters, affording equal time to all: Chark the drifter-adventurer (Marchal), Djin the prostitute (Signoret), Castin the delusional, displaced restaurateur (Vanel), Castin’s deaf mute virgin daughter Maria (Girardon), and the naïve, haunted Catholic priest, Father Lizardi (Piccoli).

    Gruff and sweaty, Chark is introduced giving the finger to a platoon of armed, trigger-happy soldiers. It’s humorous, shocking and uncharacteristic, for both 1956 and Buñuel (who deplored vulgarity), a moment I’m inclined to credit to Raymond Queneau. Novelist, poet and one-time member of the Surrealists, Queneau dabbled in films, and worked just this once with Buñuel on the script. Was their combined effort so brilliant it flew over the heads of the producers, prompting all those last minute changes Buñuel mentions? Or had the gifted triumvirate concocted a mess of concepts necessitating alterations for the sake of coherence?

    In his DVD commentary, Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz demerits the picture as “minor Buñuel,” but is there such a thing? Author of Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema, he nearly retracts his own statement when discussing Death in the Garden’s characters, their outward façades and the “devolution from civility to savagery” as the action moves from village to jungle — a trip he equates with Marlow’s odyssey in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “Death in the Garden is one of the classically structured Buñuel movies,” he says, “but even within the classical structure it violates conventions of narrative.”

    Or, typical Buñuel, a surrealist true to his principles. “The narrative in Death in the Garden does not advance,” Acevedo-Munoz notes, “it simply repeats itself.” It shares The Exterminating Angel’s use of repetition, a leitmotif haunting the director’s work from Las Hurdes (1933) through That Obscure Object of Desire (1977); and concludes that fate is determined not by government, class, self will or divine intervention, but by crazy, blind chance, rendering everything — from politics to religion, economics to social values — impotent. Whether they’re caught in the town’s revolution or trapped in the jungle, the deteriorating group is constantly redirected, tested and mocked by chance, a portent of things to come in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

    Other references abound. The characters of Castin and Maria are a forecast of the incestuous father and daughter in The Young One (1960), with Maria bearing a resemblance to Key Meersman’s Evalyn in the later film. (Plus, both Girardon and Meersman were nonprofessional actors.) Lizardi can be likened to The Young One’s Rev. Fleetwood (Claudio Brook), or any of the hypocritical clerics dotting Buñuel’s oeuvre, the director a devout atheist steeped in Catholicism. And Castin’s pursuit of Djin recalls the older men lured to their doom by duplicitous younger women, what Acevedo-Munoz terms the “monstrous feminine,” in Susana (1951), El (1953) and That Obscure Object of Desire.

About the color in Death in the Garden

Above: Marchal and Signoret — click to enlarge. The lighting and cinematography of Jorge Stahl Jr. captures the soft decadence of the whorehouse. (Image swiped from DVD Beaver.)

In his review at DVD Beaver, Gary Tooze has mostly good things to say about the video transfer but adds, “It may be a shade yellow/green and tend to look a bit frail.” Included with the DVD is a booklet featuring two articles, one a humorous anecdote by Buñuel’s son, Juan-Luis, the other a scholarly essay by author Susan Hayward on the Eastmancolor in Death in the Garden:

“In terms of color and to give meaning to his mise-en-scène, Buñuel plays with the flexibility of Eastmancolor by either adding or subtracting color (through using different filters). In the first half of the film, the exterior colors are bleached out to the point of pale yellow hues, reflecting the heat of the beating sunlight. Interestingly, at this stage, we only see [Simone] Signoret in interiors — and here, as opposed to the exteriors, the color has tonality and depth. The overall impression is one of great realism. In the second half of the film, however, when Signoret and the four other fugitives flee into the rain forest (the ‘garden’ of the film’s title), the color — predominately an oppressive green — takes on a deep, at times, thick and unguent quality, which, coupled with the choice of shots (in particular, the close-ups of the flora and fauna), brings it far closer to a visceral, surrealist painterliness.”

For more information, go to Microcinema International.

Buy Death in the Garden from Amazon.

Posters of my yoot’: Double-Oh Flickhead

2009-11-08T10:02:00.003-05:00

Click this and the other posters to enlarge

This week, from November 9 through the 13th, Mr. Squish at Filmsquish will be hosting the Double-Oh-Thon, a celebration of all things Bond, James Bond. Providing me with an excuse to revisit what I consider the l’age d’or of movie marketing, the punchy Bondian graphics of the mid to late 60s.

    When I was but a wee Flickhead, my parents were sharply divided over the series. Papa Flickhead dug all the babes and martoonies and guns and explosions; Mama Flickhead hated them for those very reasons. Strictly old world, she loathed From Russia with Love for the Lotte Lenya character. (In Mama’s view, women were incapable of homosexuality: “Only men do silly things like that,” she informed me.) ‘Pussy Galore’ in Goldfinger had her expressing outrage in a letter to The Long Island Catholic and a plea to the Catholic Legion of Decency to have the movie condemned. Even though she only went to church on Easter Sunday, Mama used their stilted rating system as a barometer of what we could and could not see, one of many reasons why Papa Flickhead drank so much.

    None of which deterred us from Thunderball in 1965. By that time, Bondmania was in bloom, and we headed out with my older sister and her husband on a cold Saturday night in December to the luxurious, balconied Freeport Theater, where all the Bond movies played. (If you wanted Matt Helm, you had to go down the road to the Grove.) It was opening weekend, the line went around the block, the place was selling out, and Mama persuaded everyone to ditch Bond and drive over to the Wantagh Theater for The Great Race instead. Dad was miffed until he got a load of Natalie Wood, then all was forgiven. Me and him checked out Thunderball a week later.

    It was the first movie ad to grab my eye. I’d stare at it, entranced by the content, style and vibrant color. Back then I had no idea who the artists were, but years later found out that both Robert McGinnis and Frank McCarthy were responsible. I cut out the newspaper ads and bought the soundtrack lp — a rather pricey acquisition for an eight-year-old on a thirty-five cent allowance. (Yeah, yeah: I stole the money from my parents.) My friends and schoolmates were buying Beatles records for three bucks and 45rpm singles for thirty-five cents; but the Thunderball album, like most movie soundtracks, fetched a whopping $4.99, a princely sum.

Two years later, the poster for You Only Live Twice (1967) blew me through the roof. The image here is the one that was mostly used where I lived (the two other styles were this and this), ad art Mr. Squish describes as “batshit insane.” He may be onto something.

My teachers in elementary school and junior high determined the influence was negative. In the margins of book reports, tests and other written projects I’d include pencil drawings of evil SPECTRE frogmen and secret agents flying in mini helicopters over erupting volcanoes. Mama Flickhead got calls from the principal alerting her that her son was either ‘different’ or ‘difficult,’ and sent me off to Rorschach tests and counseling sessions. I was around ten-years-old. Just a few years later, I would be taking classes in commercial art, a passion fueled by McGinnis and McCarthy and other movie poster artists like Mort Drucker, Frank Frazetta and Jack Davis. All I learned in school was, a) the other students were as good as or better than me, b) it’s a ridiculously competitive field, and c) without contacts or connections, if you want to eat you should plan on waiting tables or selling tube socks out of the trunk of your car.

There’s a common misconception that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) bombed at the box office. Yet, budgeted at $7 million, it grossed $87 million worldwide within a year. That would be like a $70 million movie today grossing $870 million, figures that would make the suits get all hot and bothered. Still, Sean Connery had ‘become’ James Bond, so a lot of people had a hard time with George Lazenby in the part. But the public back then would’ve had problems with anyone playing Bond. I didn’t mind Lazenby at all; I thought the movie was excellent then, and still believe it’s one of the best in the series.

The one-sheet for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the first Bond poster I owned. I never took care of my posters as a collector would. One-sheets, window cards and lobby cards were tacked onto my bedroom walls with total abandon, a barrage of eye-popping images that I’d shift around every so often for a change of scenery. I loved staring at the skiers shooting at Bond, the snow, the explosions, the helicopters. Unfortunately, it would be the last of its kind: you can see the difference in the rendering in the ad for the next film, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), below. It’s a softer, less direct style. The film, too, was a turning point. In previous Bonds, humor accented the action, but in Diamonds you get the feeling that the action’s accenting the humor. In the next movie, the cheap and hollow Live and Let Die (1973), Roger Moore would effectively kill Bond with prep school arrogance, effete jokiness, conservative condescension and the posturing of an unmitigated candy ass. Naturally, the mainstream thought he was just marvy. Me? I had to slog through seven of his movies until Bond regained his balls in The Living Daylights (1987). (To these eyes, Timothy Dalton is the closest to Ian Fleming’s Bond.)

Mention should be made of the great Bond reissues. Before home video, before they were shown on TV, the real Bond movies were re-released in double (and one triple) features. United Artists would sneak these in every so often, necessitating a diligent scouring of the newspaper’s entertainment section each and every week. These posters also adorned my walls. I’ve included trailers, because they were pretty cool, too.

Someone made a documentary about Robert McGinnis. I’ve never seen it, but if anyone can lend me a copy, I’d love to check it out. Here’s the trailer:

Posters of my yoot’: trick? Or treat?

2009-10-30T11:16:00.004-05:00

Click to enlarge

Endless thanx again to the curator(s) of Wrong Side of the Art, this time for posting a beloved relic from 1965. Sitting here forty-four years later, the lettering, the side of the astronaut’s face, the ‘See! See! See!’ doodads… all of it sucks me right in. For a lot of you, I’m sure it just sucks, period.

    It’s not my earliest moviegoing experience (that golden moment belongs to the 1961 Steeve Reeves Thief of Baghdad), but Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is the first movie I saw repeatedly in the theater. Sure, I’d seen some movies on TV over and over (our New York Chiller Theaters and Creature Features had limited selections), but the theatrical experience was a different gig. By 1966, I believed that The Bellmore Playhouse bought a print for their Saturday matinees, they showed it so often.

    But not with Curse of the Voodoo. I never saw the bottom quarter of the poster until I bought the one-sheet in 1979 for ten bucks from a memorabilia dealer in San Francisco. Back in ‘65 and ‘66, the Playhouse (and, once or twice, the The Merrick Mall Cinema) paired Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster with anything but Curse of the Voodoo, and covered up that portion of the poster with a half-sheet from another movie. I remember seeing it with World Without End, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Terror from the Year 5000 and Horrors of the Black Museum. (FYI, the star of Curse of the Voodoo was Bryant Halliday, co-founder of Janus Films.)

    On one occasion, the newspaper ad for the Merrick Mall Cinema said they were showing Frankenstein on Saturday. I got all excited, because I’d never seen the Boris Karloff Frankenstein. On TV I saw Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein, but not the original. When I got to the theater, there was this one-sheet staring me in the face again. Eegah!, thought I. By that time I could recite the dialog in Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, and I knew all the words to the song “To Have and to Hold” by the Distant Cousins:

You can read a review of the movie on my website. Please note that the actor who plays the head Martian (Nadir) is Lou Cutell, who essayed the role of Assman on Seinfeld:

As if to screw with my head, the frikkin’ Museum of Modern Art will be showing Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:30pm (matinee hour!) as part of their series, Nuts and Bolts: Machine Made Man in Films from the Collection. Unbelievable.

“He wasn’t a million dollar man, he was a three-ninety-nine special”
Meeting the Space Monster, Michael Zimmer’s short interview with Robert Gaffney, director of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster and Stanley Kubrick’s Monument Valley DP on 2001 (!):

Part One

Part Two

The original trailer:

Halloween housecleaning, by George!

2009-10-29T19:25:00.001-05:00

Via Looker.

A trixie Halloween treat

2009-10-26T19:23:00.002-05:00

It moves at a pace that’ll have the Ritalin generation upping their meds, but Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (1981) works as both a remembrance of 1950s lily-white idealism and a component of late-70s/early-80s New Wave. It was originally (and barely) released by the short-lived World Northal Films. I caught it in first run, prompted by enthusiastic notices in The Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice, along with its snazzy poster art (see below). Twenty-eight years later I finally revisited the bugger, on widescreen DVD from Synapse Films, and it hasn’t lost any of its fractured charm. Laughlin co-wrote the screenplay with a young Bill Condon (later of Gods and Monsters fame), resuscitating the mad scientist genre with an actor (Arthur Dignam) who had me thinking of J. Robert Oppenheimer. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of the cast — Dan Shor (from the little-known Kubrick valentine Strangers Kiss), Dey Young, Louise Fletcher, Michael Murphy, Charles Lane, Scott Brady and an intoxicating Fiona Lewis — are close to excellent. There’s a Halloween party, tacky costumes, a Tor Johnson mask, and a choreographed dance number set to Lou Christie’s “Lightening Strikes,” all of it unspooling in a quiet Midwestern town… filmed in New Zealand, many years before hobbits and rings. It’s also worth watching with the lively DVD commentary by Condon, Dey and Shor. (You may want to avoid Laughlin and Condon’s très cheesy follow-up, Strange Invaders [1983]; it received some positive reviews back in the day but time has dimmed its gaudy sparkle.)

Available from Amazon

Original poster art; click to enlarge

Flickhead's lysergic driver's manual (in German)

2009-10-22T14:25:00.004-05:00

New in print

2009-10-21T15:18:00.002-05:00

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber

The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies

Love and Death off Long Island

2009-10-17T11:58:00.003-05:00

“Leafing through some of Irene Dobson’s papers recently, I came across a 1998 review of The Daytrippers (1995), an American independent feature which, like so many of those little movies, seldom gets shown on British television these days and even more rarely written about. It was a lackluster review. It was not that Dobson didn’t like it; she did and wrote in glowing terms of the acting and the richly observed conceit which propels its day-long tapestry of familial dynamics and lovers’ betrayals. It was lackluster because, as she leant over and confessed to me that afternoon, she hadn’t actually seen the film before she reviewed it.” Read the new piece by Richard Armstrong now on Flickhead.

Flickhead's psilocybin flashback

2009-10-15T07:57:00.002-05:00

Hat tip: Seth B.

Three women

2009-10-07T12:37:00.002-05:00

I was going to extol the merits of Stephan Elliot’s Easy Virtue (2008), but the good Film Doctor has jotted down nine reasons for liking the picture, winning my agreement on most points. Critically and commercially unnoticed, it’s that rare thing, an improvement on a Noel Coward original boasting a superlative lead performance by Jessica Biel (yes, that Jessica Biel), to say nothing of excellent work by both Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. Hitchcock made a version of it in 1927 — a silent film of a Coward play — and I must admit that Elliot has indeed bested The Master.

I’ve long wondered why Maria Bello’s career hasn’t generated any heat. Mostly relegated to secondary parts since making her film debut in 1992 at the age of twenty-five (she initially studied to become a lawyer), Maria didn’t catch my attention until A History of Violence (2005) and The Jane Austen Book Club (2007). She’s capable, talented, attractive… so where’s the beef, the money shot? I thought I’d find it in The Sisters (2005), Arthur Allan Seidelman’s film of Anton Chekov’s The Three Sisters as reinterpreted by playwright Richard Alfieri. Not only was I wrong, but I found the thing to be depressing evidence of her thespic limitations. Alfieri’s dysfunctional family drama is ridiculously overwrought and artificial on its own, owing less to Chekov than to All About Eve, but Maria has been disastrously cast adrift in the Margot Channing part. Alfieri is no Joe Mankiewicz and Maria is most assuredly no Bette Davis. To borrow from the haughty vernacular, what’ta dump!

Above: Angie distracts Flickhead, Nelhydrea Paupér and Newton C. Smildge at their favorite diner

Needing a fix for my Angelina Jolie jones, I checked out Mojave Moon (1996). It’s a variation on the Something Wild formula, a square dude (Danny Aiello) swept up in the maelstrom of twenty-one-year-old free spirit Angie (as ‘Eleanor Rigby’). Michael Biehn overplays the Ray Liotta part, and lovely Anne Archer wanders about in a haze. It’s nothing special, but AJ shines in three or four choice moments, going the distance for her art by appearing gloriously topless in a shower scene. Her mountainous orbs are truly magnificent and without peer. On a related note, I’ve never been blown away by tattoos, but hers interest me. Here’s a site which deciphers them all!

Something’s happening but I don’t know what it is

2009-10-05T16:02:00.001-05:00

“I’ve just been introduced to an incredible band,” someone emailed me. “I haven’t heard anything this good since the 60s.”

Any thoughts?

Farmgirls and hitmen

2009-10-03T08:15:00.003-05:00

Among their free movies on demand, our cable company has been offering Burt Reynolds in Malone (1987). Throughout the 70s, his mustached grimace was on display seemingly every other week when pictures like Shamus, Fuzz or The Longest Yard played on the second half of any given twin bill. Ten years later, after double features limped off into extinction, I rarely bothered with his new films, so I missed Malone until now.

    It could be interpreted as an existential parable concerning a lost soul searching for inner peace, or a pleasant reminder of when movies — even action movies — moved at a casual pace with fully rounded scenes and professionally composed shots instead of frantic jump cuts and blinding image snaps, those inane gimmicks any good filmmaker should outgrow by sophomore year in film school… but which have recently, and most regrettably, become de rigueur.

    Malone’s plot is simple: stalled in a jerkwater town with his car under repair, gunman Burt (sporting a weighty tar-helmet toupee) ferrets out a sleeper cell of conservative fascists led by laconic Cliff Robertson, fighting to protect their purity of essence from non-whites and liberals. Filmed during Burt’s Lauren Hutton phase (the gap-toothed beauty plays a kindhearted assassin), Malone’s platonic love interest is Cynthia Gibb as the jailbait daughter of local grease monkey Scott Wilson. The wholesome tomboy falls for Burt and, unless I was imagining things, so does her crippled, misty-eyed dad, humbly hobbling about on his long, hard, phallic cane.

    Essentially a variation on Shane and a dozen samurai films, Malone is based on the novel Shotgun by William P. Wengate. Christopher Frank adapted the screenplay for director Harley Cokliss, with Rudy Wurlitzer allegedly helping out on the script without credit. Mr. Cokliss’s career fails to inspire, but props to Mr. Frank for writing and directing the softcore wonder, L'année des méduses (1984). As for Rudy, the world waits with bated breath for the arrival of Candy Mountain on DVD.

    I don’t know who to credit for Malone’s one odd, prophetic element, the use of a prehistoric internet for the invasion of North America. In the catacombs ‘neath Cliff Robertson’s sprawling ranch is a nerve center, PCs lining the walls, each connected to terror cells across the continent. When Cliff says, “I’m online,” the words went out to an audience blind to their meaning, still several years shy of the Information Superhighway.

Semolina Pilchard Climbing Up the Eiffel Tower

2009-09-30T19:34:00.002-05:00

The Beatles: Rare and Unseen 90 minutes. Produced by Paul Clark. Directed by Chris Cowey. Distributed by MVD Entertainment.

Review by Newton C. Smildge

In this crazy mixed up world in which we live in, there are few certainties we can always count upon. One of them is that any newly unearthed audio or visual material involving the Beatles will, by hook or by crook, come out in some form. Whether the material is authorized or, more likely, unauthorized, the generation that grew up with the Beatles, and a smaller but equally dedicated group too young to actually remember the group, are grateful for whatever pieces of time get re-discovered and released.

    A slew of CDs and DVDs have been issued over the years that compile public domain film clips and audio interviews which were never intended to be released in any venue besides the local nightly news or popular teen magazines. 1960s Beatles press conferences, once cut down to a few sound bytes (before the term was popularized), held in, say, Minneapolis or Los Angeles, can now be found in their entirety on various DVDs or YouTube postings. Magazine interview tapes made by journalists for print transcription make their way onto CDs that announce NO ORIGINAL BEATLES MUSIC IS INCLUDED. The market demands more new material from the group that changed the world and split up nearly forty years ago. How can we miss them if they won’t go away? It’s as if the Beatles were the Undead. The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield.

    The unfortunately named Wienerworld company has released The Beatles: Rare and Unseen, a DVD that collects brief clips of home movie footage, some shot by Beatles themselves, in Liverpool, on tour in Scotland, filming Help! and Magical Mystery Tour, and more, including snippets of a 1970s John Lennon interview on French television. These silent clips — the raison d'être for this DVD — are interspersed with interviews, some of which are with people who had genuine connections to the early Beatles — tour managers and press officers, friends, fellow musicians. Some of the interviews are rather charming (Gerry Marsden of Gerry & the Pacemakers) and some insightful (press agent Tony Barrow), while others are typically marginal for these efforts (I don’t get why comedian Ken Dodd or ballroom dancer Len Goodman are here at all). The biggest name present is Phil Collins, whose main Beatles claim to fame is that he was an extra in A Hard Day’s Night. Collins gives a straightforward account of how he found himself working on the film despite ending up on the cutting room floor. He also, in the bonus interviews, gives a nice drummer’s appreciation of Ringo’s too readily dismissed drumming.

    One section of the DVD is devoted to Mickey Jones’s home movies from the Paris Olympia Theatre eighteen-day run in early 1964. Most of this footage, made while drummer Jones was backing Trini Lopez, is already available on another DVD that Jones put out some years ago, most prominently featuring footage he shot while touring with Bob Dylan. But this recounting of the Olympia shows is better, with the added plus of an interview with co-star French pop singer Sylvie Vartan (who still looks pretty damn good at 65). Between Jones and Vartan we get a good sense of the Beatles as individuals literally days before they left for America to play their first Ed Sullivan Show. After that nothing would be the same.

    This collection is chiefly for Beatle maniacs (and maybe Phil Collinsiacs). But it is entertaining and, aside from some self-consciously Beatlesque background music that comes oh-so-close to plagiarism, the DVD and eight-page booklet written by Tony Barrow are far more enjoyable than sitting on a cornflake.

Text copyright © Newton C. Smildge

20th Century Foxes: The Full Monti

2009-09-26T22:50:00.002-05:00

I haven’t seen The Brain since it came out in 1969. It was a caper comedy (big stuff in the post-Topkapi era) starring David Niven, Eli Wallach, Bourvil, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Italian dish Silvia Monti. I’d love to see it again! Silvia was briefly busy: after her debut in Fräulein Doktor (1969) she had supporting roles in several (mostly forgotten) European pictures before Lucio Fulci’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971). She then played alongside Bud Spencer and Terence Hill in Blackie the Pirate (1971), with Franco Nero in The Fifth Cord (1971), with Ben Gazzara in The Sicilian Connection (1972), and perhaps her meatiest part in Alberto Sordi’s While There’s War There’s Hope (1974). After The Last Desperate Hours (1974), a spaghetti rehash of Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, Silvia married the wealthy Carlo De Benedetti and retired. Meanwhile, the music in the background of this scene from The Brain is “Cento Giorni” by Caterina Caselli. Ciao bella!

Click images to enlarge

With Terence Hill

With Carlo De Benedetti

Posters of my yoot’: ‘I Dig a Pygmy’ by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids

2009-09-23T11:19:00.004-05:00

Nothing looks that cool in the movie; click to enlarge

Hats off again to the way kewl Wrong Side of the Art for these two items from my fifty-cent matinee years. Some cockeyed sage over at Amazon calls They Came from Beyond Space (1967) “a classic movie directed by Freddie Francis, and starring Robert Hutton; Jennifer Jayne; Zia Mohyeddin. It is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest classic films of all time. This great film will surely attract a whole new generation of classic movie fans. And for seasoned cinematic connoseuirs [sic], They Came from Beyond Space (1967) [sic] will rekindle an era of film making at its best. For others who simply enjoy watching timeless pieces with icons such as Robert Hutton; Jennifer Jayne; Zia Mohyeddin, They Came from Beyond Space (1967) [double sic] is highly recommended. Re-released by Reel Classic Films this movie would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone’s personal DVD library.” Dude! WTF?!?

The first and only time I ever saw this British movie was in 1967 at the Bellmore Playhouse. All I remember is that it was really boring. (No monsters!) Even at the age of ten, I was sort-of a fan of Michael Gough because he’d been in Horror of Dracula, Konga and Horrors of the Black Museum, but he didn’t show up in They Came from Beyond Space until the last few minutes. The star was granite-faced American Robert Hutton, who I knew from stuff shown over and over (and over) on Chiller Theatre: The Man Without a Body (second-billed to a very needy George Coulouris), The Colossus of New York, Invisible Invaders, and the remarkable Slime People, which he inexplicably directed as well as starred. In They Came from Outer Space there’s a metal plate in Hutton’s head preventing his abduction by Gough’s aliens. A quick fix for insomnia, you can watch the whole sorry thing in eight creaky parts on YouTube.

For their Saturday matinee, the Playhouse paired it with…

Click to enlarge

The Terrornauts (1967) was also made in the UK. Both films were produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, the founding fathers of Amicus Productions, known among horror Pupkins as ‘The Studio That Dripped Blood.’

Based on a novel I’ve never read, The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinstar, The Terrornauts seemed downright groovy in 1967. When it came out on VHS twenty years ago, I still found it amusing, stupid, and undeniably spirited. It’s about a science lab lifted off the ground, building and staff, transported to an alien space station where they’re handed instructions on how to prevent an intergalactic war… or something like that. The intriguing British cast includes TV star Simon Oates as the scientist-time traveler, former Bond girl Zena Marshall as his main squeeze (Miss Taro in Dr. No, Zena passed away this July at the age of 83), Benny Hill regular Patricia Hayes as a Cockney cleaning lady (“Aww, go’on, ducks!”), stiff-upper-Brit Max Adrian as a villainous authority figure, apple-gobbling Stanley Meadows (Rosey in Performance), and — be still my beating heart — Charles Hawtrey, stone-cold sober in the role of ‘Joshua Yellowlees.’ Charles frikkin’ Hawtrey!! In outer space! How can you resist?

Two-Moon Junction: Anyone born after a certain date would find its special effects sub-cheesy, but The Terrornauts held its pre-teen viewers spellbound in 1967. I remember the first shot of the planet with two moons elicited a few “Wow! Cool!”s from the pubescent audience.

Terrornauts trailer!

A citizen no less peaceful than his neighbors

2009-09-19T21:30:00.004-05:00

New on DVD, Trumbo (2007) isn’t your typical documentary about writer Dalton Trumbo, but rather a film of his son Christopher’s play which rifles through the man’s family life, his achievements as novelist and screenwriter, his Communist ties and his crucifixion at the hands of HUAC. All of which helped to make him something of an icon late in life, first during Vietnam (when he eventually filmed his 1939 anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun in 1971) and today as conservative ideology threatens to regress to McCarthyism.

    Comprised of home movie and interview clips with Trumbo (who died in 1976 at the age of 70), his children, friends, filmmakers and journalists, Trumbo pays scant attention to the whys and hows of his tumultuous career. His support for the Communist Party — because they “opposed the rise of fascism in Europe” — goes unexplored and unchallenged; the political and social ramifications of post-WWII anti-Communism are oversimplified; and Trumbo’s heyday in Hollywood is summarized in a fleeting montage of title cards from the pictures he wrote. The backlash of the Blacklist, Trumbo’s inability to get work and his family’s suffering for his principles, could’ve filled a feature film on its own.

    Yet all of those things have, over the decades, obscured the fact that Dalton Trumbo was amusing, erudite and an exceptional writer when moved by his subject. Christopher Trumbo seizes the moment to celebrate the raconteur and artiste through his writings. With input from Helen Manfull, the editor of Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962, Dalton’s correspondence with colleagues, friends and even a utility company are read aloud by stars: Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Liam Neeson, Nathan Lane. Inundated with pathos, cynicism and acerbic wit, the letters, memos, and excerpts from novels and scripts form a portrait of a man shaped both by his ethics as well as the intolerance of his persecutors.

    His enemies weren’t limited to Washington and Hollywood, nor did they target him exclusively. David Strathairn reads Trumbo’s plea to the local PTA for leniency toward his young daughter Mitzi, a bright and popular girl shunned at school by classmates and neighbors swayed by the HUAC hearings. Paul Giamatti recites a lively communiqué to the electric company; his insolvent family faced with the nagging necessity of overpriced power from a greedy monopoly, Trumbo plants tongue in cheek in a caustic appeal he opens with “Dear Burglars.”

    Say what you will about the Blacklist; for good or ill, it assured Trumbo’s place in history. (How many other screenwriters have had documentaries made about them?) He refused to name names on the grounds that the hearings violated his First Amendment rights. Christopher’s apparent concern, to portray Dalton as a caring, albeit idealistic, father and husband rather than simply a whipped martyr lends Trumbo a benevolence and humanity generally missing in other works about him.

Trumbo with wife Cleo at House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, 1947

Trumbo is available from Magnolia Home Entertainment

Order from Amazon

For Nelhydrea...

2009-09-17T16:21:00.004-05:00

Hat tip: Kat

RIP, Mary

Posters of my yoot’ #1: Our man in Africa

2009-09-09T19:54:00.008-05:00

Image swiped from The Wrong Side of the Art; click to enlarge.

This hopes to be the start of a new series, prompted in no small measure by the indispensable Wrong Side of the Art. As a kid, I loved hanging out in movie theatre lobbies and checking out the posters. This was during the 1960s. I began to lose interest in poster art by the mid 70s, a subject we may get around to in forthcoming installments. I haven’t the patience to arrange this series in any kind of order, so I’m going to begin with Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966). The artist was Reynold Brown, who did a lot of work for American International. I saw the film at the Bellmore Playhouse on a late Saturday afternoon with my father. He was big on Tarzan, read all the books, and felt the best ever screen Tarzan was Elmo Lincoln. When Tarzan and the Valley of Gold opens, we see Tarzan Mike Henry in suit and tie, going over papers in his attaché case on an airplane. Understand, this was made at the height of the James Bond craze. (Double-0 Ape Man.) Once the 727 hits the tarmac, Tarzan dons his loincloth, encounters Bondian villains (it’s been forty years, but I recall an intimidating bald henchman) and an exotic hottie played by Nancy Kovack, who was a 'Slay Girl' in the Matt Helm movie The Silencers the same year. (Quite fortuitously, Nancy moved on to become Mrs. Zubin Mehta in 1969; her acting career shriveled up shortly thereafter.) My father just shook his head for 90 minutes. Me? I hated Tarzan; I just went because the old man wanted to.

Sacrilege? Eff you!

2009-09-09T14:33:00.001-05:00

David Bowie & Candy Clark

Anyone know where I can get a DVD of the original, edited US version of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)? You know: the one that got all the great reviews when it came out. The ‘true’ version of the film may be superior for everyone else, but, quite frankly, I think the one that Cinema V released at 119 minutes is preferable to Roeg’s 139-minute snooze-fest. I fell in love with that film back in the 70s, but now I can’t find it anywhere, I’m stuck with the Director’s Cut.

Romy rising

2009-09-04T19:44:00.012-05:00

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Claude Chabrol’s L’enfer (1994). His heart was probably in the right place: he was resuming an unfinished project begun twenty years earlier by Henri-Georges Clouzot, one with ties to Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and the noir staple of a horny schlub getting put through the wringer by a conniving femme fatale. But Chabrol gets bored easily with conventional setups, so when his protagonist (François Cluzet) goes off the deep end, there’s very little reason to feel for him. We’re just watching an actor floundering. I will give Chabrol props for casting Emmanuelle Béart, however: she looks smashing.

In Clouzot’s 1964 version, Romy Schneider was the sultry wife. The clip here is probably dream imagery Clouzot was going to use to drive the husband bonkers. To me, it looks like a Kenneth Anger movie. I’m sure people will be talking about the Slinky for years to come (nice touch, Henri-Georges!), and if anyone knows what the superb music track is, be sure to drop me a line.

Update: Bruno Alexiu composed the music for this clip from L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot, a new documentary by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea on the making of Clouzot's unfinished film.

Buy Chabrol's L'Enfer from Amazon

Hackin' sackers

2009-09-04T19:41:00.006-05:00

Thanks to Erich Kuersten’s cool review at Bright Lights After Dark, I was motivated to rent a Baghead double bill of The Strangers and, of course, Baghead, modern concepts in horror. Back in the olden days, makeup artists created monsters. Today, all you gotta do is throw a bag over somebody’s head and hand them a big knife.

Starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, The Strangers (2008) is Bryan Bertino’s debut as both writer and director. There’s an interview with him on the DVD where he explains that this is not a horror film so much as a terror film. I guess there’s a difference but, quite frankly, nothing here struck me as being all that original. Headed for a romantic breakup, an unmarried couple get trapped in their remote house by a trio of masked and bagged sadists. And for the first forty minutes, Bryan successfully milks the terror angle for all that it’s worth, especially with some creepy sound effects. The only drawback, of course, is that there’s another forty-five minutes left to go and the gimmicks do get tiresome.

Supposedly made for one thousand dollars (the actors must’ve been getting points), Baghead (2008) is the brainchild of writers-directors Jay and Mark Duplass. Shot on high def video, this is also set in a house in the middle of nowhere, where two couples collaborate on a screenplay for an indie movie. I’m not sure where Baghead was (or is), uh, headed, but an interesting idea about their relationships is cut short for a horror (or terror) situation featuring an anonymous killer wearing a shopping bag over his face. I was kind of taken by the unrequited love angles between Steve Zissis and Greta Gerwig, and Gerwig and Ross Partridge (the embarrassing dilemma of Zissis’s character’s yearning deserves a film of its own), but the Duplass bros. gloss over the messy emotional stuff. I’d like to say they go for the jugular, but that ain't the case.

Buy The Strangers from Amazon

Buy Baghead from Amazon

In ‘select’ theatres: Irene in Time

2009-08-08T05:34:00.002-05:00

In Irene in Time, Tanna Frederick (here at the premiere) often had me thinking of Baby Jane Hudson’s “I’m Writing a Letter to Daddy”.

For nearly forty years Henry Jaglom has worked with miniscule budgets to make films based on his interpretation of women’s issues, or films about women with issues. Mostly set among the nouveau riche of Los Angeles and Manhattan, he’s cast them with friends, acquaintances and actors of all stripes with varying results. He has a formula which extends scripted drama into improvisational group therapy sessions. You could call him amateurish, naïve, enigmatic, irritating, brilliant, annoying and a genius all at once and get no argument from me.

    Henry is hung up on women and his present muse is Tanna Frederick. She follows Victoria Foyt, a one-time Mrs. Jaglom who gave excellent performances in Babyfever, Déjà Vu and Going Shopping. Tanna made her debut for Jaglom three years ago in Hollywood Dreams, and he probably committed more time and energy promoting her in that picture than perhaps anything he’d ever done before.

    They’re back with Irene in Time (2009), about a woman with unresolved father issues, her failure in the dating game, and the comfort she takes in conversing with women and singing in a female band. Yes, it’s pure Jaglom, but Tanna is pure torture.

    Apparently incapable of delivering ‘less’ to the camera, she plays at a level bordering on psychosis. The inverted concentration clouding her eyes, the overbearing mood swings, the overdone, giddy grimace: is the director exploiting the mentally ill? He certainly seems fixated on her ungainly schnoz: the poor woman is mercilessly photographed in profile.

    Irene leads a one-woman crusade to ‘find’ her deceased father. He died when she was five- or six-years-old. (Lucky stiff!) Who was he? What was he? Questions that should’ve been addressed ages ago are hashed out to the point of tedium. Has this bovine wench been harboring destructive (incestuous?) obsessions for thirty-five years or more? (Tanna’s bio says she was born in 1979, but this ‘ingénue’ could be pushing forty.) By the time she pulls a Norman Maine at the finale, it feels as if a huge weight has been lifted.

On DVD: Quid Pro Quo

2009-08-08T05:31:00.002-05:00

Is it my imagination, or was the term ‘quid pro quo’ virtually nonexistent in movie dialog prior to Silence of the Lambs? Ever since Jodie and Sir Anthony’s tit-for-tat, QPQ has maneuvered its way into the vernacular, though I doubt I’d trust anyone who’d ham-fist it into everyday conversation. First-time writer-director Carlos Brooks uses it often in — what else? — Quid Pro Quo (2008), wherein beautiful twenty-somethings employ the thousand-yard-stare while uttering it as a challenge. They’re part of an alleged subculture of paraplegic wannabes lining the streets of lower Manhattan in their wheelchairs, and on more than one occasion the whole thing had me thinking of David Cronenberg’s Crash. I love that movie, because it’s about pain, sex, degradation and mutilation, the cornerstones of my pickled brain. Quid Pro Quo, on the other hand, is about delusion and metaphor and the colorless victims of self-inflicted, guilt-ridden whimsy. It’s also one of the few times I felt embarrassed for actors (Vera Farmiga in particular — although she often looks wonderful) who seem to be straining to believe all this nonsense.