Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

THE SLIFR 5th ANNIVERSARY WINGDING!

2009-11-17T20:57:00.000-08:00

Way back when, in the dark ages just after the turn of the century (21st), when the word “blog” was more likely to conjure images of congested sinuses than opportunities for personal expression on the Internet, I began reading Jon Weisman’s Dodger Thoughts, a blog devoted to analyzing and processing the experience of being a thinking Dodger fan (not, as some of you might be thinking, a mutually exclusive proposition). As I followed how Jon used the format to consider and critique not only the Dodger organization and individual games, but also the intricacies of the game at large, and also to interact with his ever-growing readership, I began to think about starting my own blog. Finally, in November of 2004 I screwed up enough courage to create a template, come up with a name (The Good, the Bad and the Dodgers) and dedicate my first post, an introduction and a sort of mission statement which was designed to clarify my purpose as much to myself as to anyone who might actually stumble across this embryonic, anonymous site. I wrote that I did not want to “contribute to a junk Internet culture that values quantity, immediacy and accessibility over genuinely considered thought, cogent analysis and good writing” and expressed a hope that “after time there might be… a coherent feeling and approach on this blog that might attract a readership with a reasonable anticipation of what I might be up to and, of course, a desire to follow along.”

But at the beginning I knew I was only writing for myself and for what few friends and relatives I could cajole into occasionally checking my new project out. And before the pixels on the first post were even dry I reconsidered that title, which I felt was going for a certain evocation and juxtaposition of subject matter but hadn’t quite made it there. The title I replaced it with worked better, I thought. It is the one that remains on the header to this day. My first real post, an article previously written for my own amusement and practice, came in at just over 7,000 words. I assured my reader afterwards that it was an anomaly, that I didn’t have the energy or drive to write articles of that length on a regular basis. And I got a lot of free advice from friends who suggested I keep my average about 6,000 words shorter, at least, because surely no one would ever have the patience or attention span to slog through a blog loaded with similarly logorrheic epics.

It took nearly seven months of sitting online for that article to generate a comment, and when it did the comment seemed to confirm the wisdom of my friends’ advice. The author was one Frobisher, and here’s what she/he said, in its entirety:

“ After reading your blog may i be presumptious enough to say you could have done with serious sub-editing. It was long-winded and bloated, sometimes less really is more!”

My response, either consciously or unconsciously, framed the terms of debate that I hoped would stand as more and more comments hopefully began to come in:

“ Frobisher: You may. Thanks for checking in. How did you get here? And what did you think of some of the other pieces?”

I didn’t care that she/he thought the piece was overlong and long-winded nearly so much as that she/he somehow got here, read it and was willing to talk about it. My dear wife, however, took umbrage under the assumed name she decided to use when responding on the blog and stood up for her husband in her typically sharp-tongued manner:

“ Frobisher, may I be presumptuous enough to introduce you to capitalized words and Webster's 11th edition?”

And a little over two years later, someone named “Frank Booth” (much nicer than his PBR-swilling rep) felt compelled to chime in, and he started his comment with a nice bit of encouragement:

“Nice blog. Long-windedness be damned--it's your party, ramble if you want to.”

It was May 2007, two and a half years later. The train was a-rolling. We were halfway then to where we are now. November 15, 2009, two days ago, marked the fifth anniversary of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and as Frank Booth suggested in evoking the anguish of Leslie Gore, I’m throwing a party. I never thought I would still be writing this blog five years after I started it, and I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t made a lot of excellent friends along the way. Along with everyone who might be reading this now, I’ve invited some of those friends, old and new, to join in our little anniversary wingding. And there will be music, comedy, some odd and lively and strange moments to watch and savor, some of which are directly related to things I’ve written about here, and some only representative of the spirit which I hope reigns here and runs untethered. But most of all I just want to send out thanks to anyone who ever read anything I wrote here over the last five years, and especially to those who then wrote back with their own thoughts and started a real conversation. It’s that desire for communication, inspired by the investigation and understanding of what movies can mean when they are at their best, and what it means when they’re not, which I hope carries this blog into the next five years, and beyond.

“Everyone has a few websites they visit frequently, especially movie lovers. Among the very best of these is Dennis's eccentricly titled SLIFR, which I've become pretty addicted to. In addition to providing links to other worthy sites and Blog-a-thons, Dennis provides informative commentary and opinions on everything from Eurohorror to indies to TV and current releases. Best of all, it's fun. One of my favorite sites, and not just cuz he says nice stuff about me. Honest. (Okay, I admit it, I do like that part)” – Joe Dante, director (Gremlins, Explorers, Matinee)

"Dennis Cozzalio might truly be the most remarkable figure in the film blogosphere: a man of indefatigable energy and admirably broad tastes who somehow manages to seemingly see everything, and to write about it with wit, grace, passion and depth. On top of which, he is as humble and good humored as anyone you're likely to encounter on the Internets. That shimmering landscape he calls Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule exists to remind us all of what the blogosphere could be, if we only relaxed and engaged with our peers in a spirit of open, seemingly endless generosity. Dennis makes writing about film seem like a party, and everyone is invited." – Brian Doan, Bubblegum Aesthetics

“It was, as I recall, the late summer of 2006 -- a very dark time. My friend and colleague Roger Ebert had suffered an arterial hemorrhage July 1 and nobody knew what the prognosis for recovery would be. Or, if they did, they weren't saying, and like many others I was wracked with anxiety, worried sick about his condition. Meanwhile, I was running a web site called RogerEbert.com… without Roger Ebert. This is an impossible thing to do, let me tell you.

A few months earlier, we had moved my blog Scanners out from under the RogerEbert.com URL and onto an actual MoveableType blogging platform, and I was able to persuade the Chicago Sun-Times to let me open it up to reader comments, something we'd never done on the main site. Frankly, working alone in Seattle, with Roger incommunicado, was making me not only worried but lonely.

Something had to be done. I decided to reach out to the movie blogging community, under the naive assumption that there was one. Turns out, there was, and one of the first people I reached out to was Dennis Cozzalio at the delightfully named Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. (I had been a huge baseball fan in the mid-to-late 1980s -- especially the 1986 Mets and then Tommy Lasorda's Dodgers after I moved to Los Angeles in 1987.) I came across one of Dennis's wonderful quizzes -- but the thing I liked most about it wasn't his clever questions, but Dennis's own answers. I mean, this sounded like a guy who could be a friend of mine. I wrote about it on Scanners.

Today, even though we've never actually met face-to-face, Dennis is a friend of mine. And through him (or in concert with him) I've found some of my other favorite hangouts in the movie blogosphere: The House Next Door, That Little Round-Headed Boy (who's been through several other incarnations), girish, Self-Styled Siren, Cinebeats, Flickhead, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger…, Cinema Styles, Arbogast on Film, Like Anna Karina's Sweater, The Kind of Face You Hate… There really is a community of serious-minded (but funny), knowledgeable (but not ostentatious) movie writers out there, and Dennis seems to be at or near the heart of it all.

If you've spent much time at all at SLIFR, you know why. The guy is amazing: smart, inexhaustible (how about those periodic, comprehensive LA repertory round-ups?!), articulate (clean, too), incredibly generous… and just fun to be around. Not a month has gone by since that day in 2006 that I haven't learned something really valuable from something Dennis has written. And this is a guy with a full-time job, a Lovely Wife and two Lovely Daughters, who went back to school to get an education degree, who actually teaches, and who also enthusiastically devotes himself to the celebration of drive-in movie culture. I get exhausted just thinking about him. In a good way.

What more can I say? Dennis, my most heartfelt congrats on five years of SLIFR. Long may its marquee glow!” - Jim Emerson, Scanners

"Dennis Cozzalio embodies everything I look for in a film critic. His writing is honest, informed, open-minded, sensitive, exuberant, analytical, passionately opinionated but never, ever condescending. For filmmakers, he's the perfect audience. For the rest of us, he's the ultimate movie guide." – Peet Gelderblom, filmmaker, cartoonist

“Why is SLIFR such an exemplary blog? Because Dennis Cozzalio combines a veteran historian's erudition and a great critic's perceptive eye with the infectious attitude of a lifelong enthusiast. It's a rare, heady mix that always makes for exhilarating, provocative reading. Happy anniversary!” - Glenn Kenny, film critic

“There are close to 115 million blogs out there. Technocratic estimates that 60-80 percent don't make it past the first month. Dennis has been blogging tirelessly (well, I bet he gets tired sometimes) for five years. It's hard to keep up the momentum, not to mention the creative energy. As a fellow blogger, albeit a reluctant blogger, I salute Dennis and wish SLIFR a happy 5th and many more.” – Lauren Kessler, author (Dancing with Rose, Stubborn Twig, The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes)

"Dennis obviously loves to write and he's damn good at it, but I find his generous spirit and willingness to support his fellow bloggers truly inspiring. He has gone out of his way to offer me words of encouragement when I really needed them and I've seen his graciousness and kindness extended to other bloggers on numerous occasions. Even though we might occasionally disagree about a film I know Dennis is more than willing to listen to my opinion and take it to heart even if we don't come to the same conclusions. His hospitality is apparent at his blog where he welcomes newcomers and old friends in an equally friendly fashion. He is truly a gentleman's blogger if there ever was one and I take off my sombrero to the man!"- Kimberly Lindbergs, Cinebeats

“In 2006, I came across Dennis's review of my movie Seed of Chucky. The review certainly was no rave. I'd call it a tepid half-appreciation. At best. But after browsing the site (and by "browsing" I mean staying up all night to rabidly consume the site's entire contents up to that date), I quickly recognized a kindred spirit -- someone whose enthusiasms could encompass both Nashville and The Boys from Brazil. I sent Dennis a note; he invited me to meet for coffee; and we've been friends and moviegoing pals ever since. As his many readers-- fellow bloggers, print critics, filmmakers, and fans alike—can attest, Dennis is one of the finest writers about movies to have emerged from the blogosphere. And as a proud member of the SLIFR community, I have had the pleasure of getting to know (at least electronically, and in a few happy cases, three-dimensionally) the various unique voices and attendant points-of-view of my fellow citizens. I also have had the pleasure of getting to know Dennis's family, and enjoy my new identity -- given to me by his daughters -- as "the guy who always watches Speed Racer and Hairspray with us."

Regular readers may have clocked, over the past few years, Dennis's seemingly growing appreciation for Seed of Chucky. If I were cynical, or even the slightest bit realistic, I might at this point question Dennis's objectivity about this particular movie. His status as a true friend, however, has never been in doubt.” – Don Mancini, writer-director

"Dennis Cozzalio could sneeze a thousand words! And some of it's actually intelligent." -- Mystery Man, screenwriter

“I started commenting on Dennis's site about two, two and a half years ago, I think. If memory serves, my first comment on SLIFR was the first comment I left on any blog, and SLIFR was the first blog of any kind I ever followed. There are several reasons for this. One is that Dennis may well be the most welcoming blogger on the planet. Every comment is appreciated, as is every opinion -- I know this, because Dennis and I have a history of disagreeing on movies, politics, and whether or not the entire sport of baseball is a complete waste of time. But Dennis has never talked down to me, or to anyone that I've ever noticed. And given how vast his knowledge of film is, he probably could have found a couple of pretty good angles for doing just that, but he never did.

So he's a very friendly guy, so friendly, in fact, that despite the fact that I've never met him in person, I do consider him a friend. An actual friend. But since SLIFR is a movie blog, it's worth repeating that Dennis knows a shit-ton about movies. I think the first time he and I ever really connected was in the comments of a post he wrote about Jonathan Rosenbaum's post-mortem takedown of Ingmar Bergman. It was a really good conversation, and at one point I said to Dennis that, because of his writing, I'd been spurred to track down and watch Raw Meat, Charley Varrick, The Man Who Never Was, The Emperor of the North Pole and The Plague of the Zombies, all of which he had praised in the preceding months. I didn't agree with his verdict on all of those films (although I didn't actively dislike any of them, and The Man Who Never Was, for example, I thought was really excellent), but Dennis had been able to communicate his enthusiasm for each in a way that made me think, "I really need to see that." And not one of those films is any kind of high profile "classic", in the institutional sense of the term -- each has a cult big enough to keep it on video, but those films are still rarely talked about. Dennis knows that this is completely irrelevant to the quality of a given movie, and he loves stumbling onto great, forgotten genre films.

Further, his complete lack of ego regarding his own tastes is truly admirable. What I mean is, if Dennis likes a film, he doesn't give a damn what the majority opinion is. He'll go to the mat for it. Not to be contrarian, but because he enthusiasm for it is genuine. And, as I said, he communicates that. He communicates it so well, in fact, that I still feel a bit of honest-to-peaches guilt over the fact that I still haven't given Speed Racer a shot. Really, I feel bad about that. I will get around to it, though, I promise. As soon as Dennis finishes reading Flicker.

Later, I started my own blog, and a few months ago, when Inglourious Basterds came out, Dennis sent me an e-mail and asked if I wanted to join him in an on-line, co-blogging conversation about it. Brother, was I honored by that. Really, of all the great film bloggers he could have asked, he asked me. I still don't know why, apart from the fact that, despite our occasional differences of opinion, Dennis and I do have a particular affinity for various genres, but the same could be said for a whole host of film bloggers. So I was truly flattered, and jumped at it. The resulting four part series of posts is an enormous highlight of my so-far brief blogging career, and not just because we got Jonathan Rosenbaum to swoop in and defend certain statements he'd made about Tarantino's film (you can all judge for yourself how successful his defense was). That series was also a highlight because for about a week I was joined at the hip with Dennis, one of the best and brightest and justifiably revered (and justifiably beloved, on a personal level) film bloggers out there. I wouldn't have been able to write half the words I ended up typing out for Inglourious Basterds if Dennis hadn't set the standard in each post, writing gleefully and intelligently about a film too many people were willing to dismiss out-of-hand. I had to step up my game, to be worthy of the association with Dennis. Whether I did or not, I don't know, but I did my best, because the last thing I wanted to do was let Dennis down.

So happy fifth anniversary, Dennis! Callooh, callay! I hope you and SLIFR hang around for about fifty more.

Also, you're a miserable bastard.” - Bill Ryan, The Kind of Face You Hate

"Dennis Cozzalio isn't just a dynamo who's running a great blog, he's also doing some of the most engaged, robust and rewarding writing about movies to be found anywhere." – Ray Sawhill, writer

“Dennis Cozzalio blogs about film the way Manny Ramirez bats on steroids, with power, timeliness, and superhuman pizazz. Cozzalio deftly expresses his cinematic insights with the verbal virtuosity of a Vin Scully, appealing to a wide-ranging audience of movie mavens and film-viewing novices." – Ivan Simon, high school teacher, San Luis Obispo, California

“SLIFR IS FIVE! In my head, a voice says ‘Slyffer.’ SLIFR, that not-a-word acronym for Sergio Leone (and the) Infield Fly Rule, is how I mentally pronounce Dennis Cozzalio’s web log. Maybe everyone does. Of the curious (and long) title, one might observe that SLIFR contains a superabundance of commentary on neither baseball nor Leone. Nor is it fixated on the Manly Pastimes of sport and violent Westerns. Why is it even called that!? Rather than a description, is a title about the feeling and spirit of the thing.

The spirit of the infield fly rule itself is to place emphasis on talent and gamesmanship rather than, say, infielders dropping pop-ups to force out pinned-down runners. It also involves the better judgment of an umpire who is paying attention to determine if the fly ‘could’ be caught. Maybe I’m exerting extraordinary effort, but there you have it: judgment call —criticism — invoked in effort to make the game more fun for everyone.

I’m just guessing again, but I believe I first read SLIFR in September of 2006, while patrolling the Internet for reactions to Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia. De Palma is one of my favorite filmmakers, one I hold near and dear — I spent a good chunk of 2006 playing De Palma in a sketch comedy revue — and over time I’ve learned deal with the usual set of blanket dismissals leveled against the director (plagiarism, misogyny, plain meanness and whatever ‘style over substance’ is supposed to mean) by dismissing them right back. I have no need or desire for critics to echo my personal opinions back to me, and if anyone feels that way, I imagine they run out of critics to read, and quick. Anyway, Dennis did not like The Black Dahlia as much as I did (i.e. — not much and very much, respectively), but that is hardly important. The piece on Dahlia starts with a mini-essay on divisions in the way the critical community grapples with De Palma, followed by reviews of reviews by esteemed SLIFR pals Matt Zoller Seitz and That Little Round-Headed Boy. And THEN he goes into lengthy notes on Dahlia’s problem areas before circling back to its place in De Palma’s filmography. This is all cool stuff that you can’t do in newspapers, and at which a good blogger excels.

See, SLIFR is a generous blog. It is not a multiple-posts-a-day place, but it is generous in a far more useful way. The Dahlia post is just an example among hundreds, but it contains an extended, engaged essay, which wrestles with the film, acknowledges personal response, and conveys a sense of community. As any regular reader knows, each season is greeted at SLIFR with an exhaustive guide to Los Angeles revival theatre screenings and an open-entry, no-prizes movie quiz. Though I am already aware of L.A. theater schedules, and the quiz responses run into triple digits, I end up reading every last word. Every time. I have to guess at when I found SLIFR because when I bumble onto an Internet spot I enjoy, I read through the archives in full.

In November, 2006, when I learned that Robert Altman had passed away, my first thought was: I wonder how Dennis is going to take this. We become invested in the tastes of our favorite critics, even if we don’t share them. All it takes to be a good, competent film writer is a sturdy knowledge of film history and skill to articulate thoughts with words. The rarer talents are ability to forge connections to other experiences (film or literature or the social sciences; whatever), see into the code that composes the text, and apply an evaluative eye with some acumen and panache. Dennis’s writing has all those qualities, but the complete mystery factors are those SLIFR offers in spades: honesty of opinion and the ballsy seductive skill to make a reader want to hear you out. That’s what it takes to put Mandingo on your 100 Favorite Movies List and to write approximately once a week about your abiding love of 1941.

I find 1941 almost impossible to finish watching, and my favorite De Palma is Body Double, a film for which I know Dennis has no great enthusiasm. The majority of the time, and on the important matters, our tastes seem pretty well aligned... but that’s not really the point. One of the reasons I tend to prefer academic film writing and critical analysis over review-oriented writers is the willingness to spend energy and effort thinking seriously about films the writer does not like. To generalize, reviewer types and most bloggers are at their weakest when faced with movies they hate or adore. Dennis’ Black Dahlia piece runs, what, 6200+ words? It is not a sin to have an opinion about movies, even a very weird opinion. The art of criticism is one of backing it up. The next morning you may realize you don’t agree, but while reading SLIFR the point of view is always thoroughly argued, well reasoned, and damned if it isn’t convincing. At the very least, the mission outlined in Post #1, has been realized: for five years SLIFR has delivered ‘genuinely considered thought, cogent analysis and good writing’ without junking up the Internet.

In addition to passion for the noble pursuits of film and baseball, I hear that Dennis has what they call a “real life,” finding time for things like jobs and enjoying his city, outdoor activity and a family he clearly cherishes. Don’t we all have those? Real lives? And it seeps into SLIFR in the best possible way. It is in pieces about taking his daughters to see Duck Soup or High School Musical 3, or boosting for local drive-in theaters, or the epic tragic-comic-romance story of chasing down Screen World volumes, that it matters that we know — or feel like we know — something about the man who holds the opinions. Intimate personal details aren’t necessary (or necessarily desirable — honestly, I know more about Harry Knowles’ digestive system than my own), but a sense of the writer’s personality, values and extracurricular interests provides warmth and context even in deep-contemplation film criticism. The focus is still on the movies, but long-term Cozzalio readers inevitably have a picture of the master of ceremonies as a well-rounded, funny, hard-working, kind and humble human being. Even if we don’t know him personally, those are qualities put forth in the content of SLIFR itself.

More succinctly: Last year a coworker asked me, ‘Hey, do you have a movie blog? You were linked by Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. It’s one of my favorites.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘mine too.’” - Chris Stangl, curator, The Exploding Kinetoscope

“I'm not sure when I first became aware of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. I believe it was in the early months of 2006, perhaps sometime before that. In any event, the very title, the wondrous range of topics it implied, was something this reporter found instantly intriguing. It drew me, like a paper clip to a magnet; and passing it by simply wasn't an option. Thus did I first venture into what fast became, and remains, one of my favorite haunts in this man's blogosphere. Four years later, I still visit and read SLIFR regularly, enthusiastically . . . though admittedly I rarely comment (this is just my somewhat introverted nature at work; I often can't bring myself to leave comments on my own blogs); and still it amazes me. Not the volume of Dennis's writing, nor really with its always superb quality (the man knows whereof he writes; far more than some other, more celebrated voices in this concord). No, what continues to impress me no end about this blog is that it has created, and maintains, something very like a communal spirit within the film blogosphere; a true sense of Welcome. It is the least insular film blog in creation. I could try the patience of everyone reading these words by developing that point; detailing what an achievement that truly is. But I think everybody knows (or ought to know) the full context of what I'm saying here. To paraphrase something Gore Vidal once said about a certain print publication, SLIFR is the only film blog that more-than-adequately services its readers. I'm proud to testify before this committee that I am now, and will always be, one of them. Happy Anniversary!” - Tom Sutpen, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

“By now, is there anything more tiring than to listen to the web cheerleaders who, like digital-age descendants of Captain Video's gee whiz cadets, tell us all about how the internet is going to make everything just swell, tell us this even as venues disappear and the ones left have no place for writing that is anything more than an impotent knee jerk?The Internet has fucked us good and proper, and film criticism may be the most fucked of all. No longer do we have to listen to the loudmouth behind us at the multiplex because now he has his own site. Now every Ben, Luke, and Harry gets to blurt about what's wicked pissa this week with a sense of history that makes the guy in Memento seem like Henry Steele Commager.

Where the web has given us something can be found in the sites that are written, not just squirted out like canned cheese, where the writers are ignoring what's current (ie., what will be forgotten on Monday morning) in favor of what obsesses them, angers them, inspires them, makes them dream, overwhelms them. Writers like this, and Dennis Cozzalio is one, combine the fan's avidity, the critic's attention to nuance, the conjurer's ability to evoke, and the sense of interwined awe and recklessness that makes criticism worth reading and writing. It starts, I'm guessing, with a sense of being in thrall, of standing up, like a man facing a hurricane, to what thrills you, and respecting movies enough to know that what doesn't achieve that formidable power is a paltry thing. It was never easy to do this in print, never easy to write criticism that doesn't depend on fashion. But with discoveries being made all the time via DVD (and still, thank God, in rep houses) what's "old" can seem more vital, more alive, more pressing than this week's releases. I love Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule because it operates out of that loving demand for movies to be worthy of the power we've invested them with. If some time in the future, film criticism gets to throw away the crutches, it will be because people like Dennis kept making offerings to the movie gods. Screw the heathens! God save the believers. – Charles Taylor, film critic

"SLIFR was one of the first blogs I stumbled across when I entered the world of film blogging and it still remains one of my favourites. The quizzes, of course, are a big reason - answering them is fun, but even better is reading the great responses from the very long list of contributors to the SLIFR community. The main reason, though, is that Dennis brings the 'personal' to each of his posts that makes his writing and criticism so much more interesting, entertaining and, for me anyway, useful than many of the other writers out there. I prefer film criticism to inject the personal reaction to the art form and SLIFR provides that with each and every post. I may never forgive the Dodgers for "Dodger Blue Monday" (against my beloved Expos), but I can almost see myself rooting for them in your honour, Dennis..." – Bob Turnbull, Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind

"The subject is always a surprise at Dennis Cozzalio's blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Predictability is criticism's cardinal sin (and it's easiest trap), but the only thing you know for unwavering certain when going to Dennis' site is that you're going to get something up-close, in-depth & personal. Of most I'd ask forgiveness for invoking a bad Michelle Pfieffer movie to offer praise ("She eats the lens!"), but I won't with Dennis because it's entirely likely he'll publish an extended defense one day. Hey, you loved The X-Files: I Want to Believe (my brother!) and at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, anything's possible. Happy 5th Anniversary!" - Keith Uhlich, The House Next Door and Time Out New York

“There is no blog comparable to SLIFR. Bridging the gap between academia and entertainment better than any other of its ilk, Dennis C.’s sometimes endless cinemaniacal ramblings always fascinate, intrigue and amuse—without ever being self-righteous, self-serving or snarky. The film school prof you wish you had is now set to dominate a blog-niche you never knew you needed. All that, plus the best name ever! – Mike Werb screenwriter (Face/Off, The Mask)

“All good blogs are, I think, honest extensions of the personality of their proprietors. SLIFR is, by acclamation, one of the very best, and not only among cinephile sites. A scholarly, goodhearted place run by a scholarly, goodhearted fellow that takes us everywhere from the dankest realms of exploitation cinema to the joys of family and friendship, to the geekiest and most wholesome forms of bone-deep, all-around movie love, readers are hooked on SLIFR because they sense it reflects the truth of what Dennis Cozzalio is all about. There are lots of very sincere pumpkin patches on the web, but something tells me that SLIFR would be the Great Pumpkin’s favorite hangout.” – Bob Westal, Forward toYesterday and Premium Hollywood

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BUFFALO BOB AND THE INFIDEL: ALTMAN'S LEGACY vs. SCHICKEL'S POISON PEN

2009-11-11T08:57:00.000-08:00

In the introduction to new his book, Robert Altman: An Oral Biography, Mitchell Zuckoff describes his friendship with the director, whom he met near the end of his life, and how Altman initially resisted the idea of doing a book with him. But the conversations Zuckoff had with the director convinced him that there was a book that could be wrangled from all those wide-ranging talks. Altman didn’t like the idea of self-analyzing in public, but he eventually caved in to Zuckoff’s suggestion on the condition that the book be largely about filmmaking and Altman’s work—anyone who has ever heard one of his gregarious DVD audio commentaries knows he has little difficulty talking about that subject—and less about his personal life. “The deal was… that we’d talk film, not life,” writes Zuckoff. “He didn’t want stories of his past deeds or misdeeds to fog the lens, and he didn’t want anything to hurt his family, especially his wife, Kathryn Reed Altman. His one concession was a chapter that would sketch the broad contours of his past.” Zuckoff goes on to say that “The films he eventually made weren’t overtly autobiographical… He didn’t need to make movies about himself because the entire process of filmmaking was his adult life, a stage for his passions, his rages, his triumphs, his humor, his visions, his failures, his gifts.”

But when Altman’s death put an abrupt end to their collaboration, through the mourning and sadness a new theme emerged. “Our talks, Robert Altman’s final sustained interviews, would form the backbone of a book about his work and his life, rough edges and all,” writes Zuckoff. “Kathryn agreed, recognizing that to understand the films Bob made and the man he was, the man she loved, mean examining the whole, remarkable, complicated, combustible package.” Altman fans and scholars (myself included) hoped the book would be a valuable addition to Patrick McGilligan’s equally warts-and-all biography Jumping off the Cliff, which was published in 1989 just before Altman’s career renaissance with The Player in 1992.

When Robert Altman: An Oral Biography was published three weeks ago the reviews were largely positive. Mark Harris, in his fine, comprehensive piece for the New York Times reveals that by the time “this scrupulously intelligent and entertaining biography” has taken 150-or-so pages to get up to M*A*S*H, the director’s career breakthrough at age 45, “we’ve come to learn a great deal about how the director’s life shaped the art that followed” and that the book “is, appropriately, more likely to restart arguments about Altman than to resolve them, and to send both the director’s admirers and his detractors racing to their DVD shelves to make their cases.” (Which is how it should be.) Finally, Harris concludes that Zuckoff’s oral history format works “not just because the form he has chosen mimics so elegantly the boisterous cacophony of a really good Altman movie, but because he lets the contradictions, reconsiderations and regrets play across his pages with no agenda other than to clarify and illuminate the up-and-down-and-up career of a brilliant, erratic film artist.”

Of course among the boisterous cacophony of praise not only for Zuckoff’s book but for Altman’s films and his standing as a great film director one must necessarily make room for opposing views. In that light then, to Zuckoff, and probably to Harris, Richard Schickel would like to offer, “Says you!” Or something like that. Schickel’s nasty and derisive review of the book published in the Los Angeles Times on October 22 surprised Altman fans and just about anyone else interested in good criticism, not because he dared to dislike a book which everyone else seemed to hold in high regard, but because he used the book, which, incredibly, is mentioned with only glancing interest in the review, as a soapbox from which Schickel proceeds, from the very first sentence to deliver an angry diatribe not only on the uselessness of Altman’s films (and, presumably, the deluded state of those of us who continue to cherish them), but also Altman’s notorious resistance to sobriety. “It appears that from the beginning of his career until almost its end (until illness slowed him),” Schickel intones, “Robert Altman never passed an entirely sober day in his life.” A few lines later he observes with disapproval that “Mitchell Zuckoff, who interviewed 145 people for the long, insanely admiring Robert Altman: An Oral Biography, never comes to grips with the effect this had on his films.”

Schickel spends the rest of the review denigrating Altman’s reputation as an indiscriminate wrangler of “spur-of-the-moment” behavior,” a purveyor of deliberately muddy overlapping dialogue which was intended “to make sure the audience never quite understood what was going on." He concludes that the director was a misogynist and a misanthropist, two tired ideas that don’t seem to gel either with the director’s famous love of actors or his desire to spend time in their company and that of the many other humans (male and female) with whom he worked. (And even if the charges of misanthropy were true, isn't it possible that one could enjoy spending time with people while being severely critical and disdainful of their tendencies as a whole?) Yet for Schickel, this alleged distaste for humanity “essentially substitutes for ideas in his movies and his characters are, in effect, characterless.” We also learn from Schickel aboard his pedestal that Altman was “a man with no interest in the fundamentals of film,” a permissive, passive-aggressive man “addled by his addictions” who was unable to direct our attention to anything that was on his mind. Finally, Schickel concludes with the finality of a puckered and constipated professor that “(Altman’s) films do not transcend their times; even the best of them remain trapped within those times.”

This was undoubtedly news to those of us who continue, in our delusion, to find ways to relate to and understand and interpret Altman’s films as something more than time capsule artifacts. Is there anyone beside Schickel who cannot see how Hal Phillip Walker’s Replacement Party platform not only presaged the ascendance of Ross Perot but also the entire idea of a government headed by Bubbas who were just like us, a government secretly operated by shadow puppeteers who were only just beginning to emerge into the public spotlight in 1975 when Nashville was released? Exactly how do the three decades that have passed since the complicated identity crisis of Millie and Pinky was dramatized in Three Women prevent us from understanding it? Admittedly, there are elements of M*A*S*H that I find discomfiting, and I’ve never shrunk from saying so. But to trash it so completely as being witless is to be willfully ignorant not only of its representative qualities as social satire-- satire that, though it is anchored in observations about the Korean War and, of course, Vietnam, is not sealed off from relevance to our current situation—but of its importance in establishing Altman’s variations on the fundamental elements of film language that he, of course, had to know and master before he could so effectively break and reshape them.

But Schickel isn’t satisfied with trashing the films. That act of destruction is part and parcel with destroying the reputation of the man as well. Zuckoff’s assertion that the book had to be about Altman’s work and his life serves as a permission slip in Schickel’s eyes to focus on his own projections about the man’s drinking and drug abuse, and by extension his finger-wagging disapproval of the whole counterculture environment in which Altman thrived and made his films. Of course, for Schickel, a moralistic biography hag in a film critic’s tweed jacket, this kind of hatchet job is nothing new. In 1990 he used almost the identical tactics to dismiss Scott Eyman’s well-regarded volume Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford and to inform all of us who have been, for some six or seven decades now, operating under the misguided notion that John Ford is some sort of cinematic master, one of the founding fathers of narrative film, that we were all wet. Oh, and yeah, John Ford’s besotted lifestyle and disregard for many of those around him is at the rotten, squirming heart of such failures as The Quiet Man and The Searchers too. As Brian Oard commented during Jim Emerson’s discussion of this matter over at Scanners, “I'm reminded of what Abraham Lincoln reportedly said of Ulysses S. Grant's drinking: ‘Find out what he drinks and give it to the rest of my generals.’"

"Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em!"

I’ve been reeling over this absurd campaign for the last couple of weeks, still incredulous that a critic of Schickel’s apparent stature would indulge in such an irresponsible, dunderheaded attack. I also wondered aloud to some friends recently if there had ever been such asinine non-thinking display from someone who I assumed would know better. And I don’t mean “someone who disagrees with me,” but someone who ought to be able to see through such flimsy tactics—someone who would see through them if they were evident in anyone else’s work. One friend responded that I have seen this kind of nonsense at work before, but, as he put it, it usually comes from someone on The 700 Club or from someone whose IQ is smaller than their belt size, not from an alleged critic. It is that “alleged” attachment that I find more appropriate than ever for Schickel, in light of this carpet-bombing of Altman’s life and career, and in light of Schickel’s own “long, insanely admiring” overview of Clint Eastwood’s work-- a director who I also admire greatly but whose conservative working methods clearly appeal more to this Time magazine schoolmarm with a haircut than do Altman’s more flexible ones.

I only wish it hadn’t taken me this long to marshal the time and resources to write about Schickel’s comments myself, but it has, so call me irrelevant and behind the curve if you will. (For a great overview see Jim Emerson’s ”Reviewing Altman,” where a portion of this piece originally appeared as a part of the ongoing discussion.) It was suggested by one of Jim’s readers that to broach a defense or a response to Schickel’s comments at all is tantamount to protesting too much. If Altman’s achievements are so solid, then they will surely be able to withstand the carping and mewling of a speck like Schickel. Surely Schickel’s observations will dry up and float away on the breeze generated by the applause of a new generation of filmgoers as they discover Altman for themselves. I don’t doubt these things are true. But, to paraphrase Jim’s point, I felt a strange kind of obligation, as someone who has been thrilled and inspired and moved to tears repeatedly by movies as disparate as Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, California Split, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Three Women, Popeye, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Secret Honor, Tanner ’88, The Caine Mutiny Court-martial, Gosford Park, The Company and A Prairie Home Companion, to reiterate, in the face of willfully ignorant or agenda-riddled criticism, that the movies did and do have value, and as living, breathing creations, not museum pieces, and that they were willed to life not as a by-product of debilitating chemicals but despite them, through the rigors and inspiration of a true artistic vision. Unless you believe (as Schickel apparently does) that Altman was shit-faced 24/7 on one substance or another, alcohol and drugs simply cannot credibly account for the consistency of style, and the mutability within that style which allowed for so many different approaches to so many different styles and themes that Altman wove into a career as one of the great filmmakers.

For Schickel there is apparently no need to separate the artist from the art on this fundamental level, even though most all of us learned a long time ago that there can often be a gulf between what a man produces and the way he regards another person (or a substance) in social interaction. But to even consider this apparent truism so far as to have to mention it at all is to lend credence to Schickel’s fatally flawed point. The critic never approved of Altman’s lifestyle or the kind of hazy, dissolute quality he saw in his films, which he then couldn’t help but connect in his head. One might as well say that Jeff Spicoli would have turned out movies that looked and felt like Altman’s because, like Altman, he was a raging pothead. Yet that notion is only slightly more absurd than the one that Schickel peddles, which is that Altman’s substance abuse crippled his instincts as a filmmaker, and if we look back on them now, in sobriety, we’ll inevitably see Altman’s films as time capsules with nothing to say to our modern generation of filmgoers. They’re no good! Why? Because I said so!

This is precisely the kind of huffy, baseless dismissal that some print critics, including Schickel, have slammed bloggers and other Internet-based film writers for—shoddy journalistic tactics and the inability or unwillingness to back up their grandstanding, attention-grabbing claims. It’s incredible to me not only that Schickel would construct a dismissal of a major filmmaker’s career on such flimsy grounds, but that the editor responsible for printing it in the Los Angeles Times would not call him out on it and simply reject the piece on grounds of insufficient journalistic standards. (To his everlasting credit, Times blogger Patrick Goldstein objected to Schickel's rant in print, and he also provided a forum for Alan Rudolph, longtime Altman associate and filmmaker in his own right, to respond to Schickel’s charges by printing Rudolph’s long and eloquent testament to Altman’s on-set methods and the man he personally knew.) Schickel’s review does nothing to prove his own cranky premise, but it sure does drive another solid-gold nail in the coffin containing what’s left of his credibility as a critic.

In his piece, Jim Emerson makes a crucial point:

“…Altman carefully assembled his movies (and most of all their fine-tuned Hawksian soundtracks) so that you weren't left with the spectacle of actors flailing away for something to do or say while the camera rolled, as is pointedly the case, for example, in Jaglom's insufferable movies. If an actor wasn't in character, or wasn't doing something worth keeping, Altman would lose interest, his camera would wander away, the dialog would disappear into the sound mix, or he would cut around the moment. If you watch (and listen to) Altman's movies closely, you can see the intelligent choices he's making, even while the experience itself feels open, free-wheeling, sprawling, chaotic, bustling or any of those other Altmanesque adjectives critics are inclined to use to describe his work.”

Matt Zoller Seitz, in a blog-a-thon a number of us participated in several years ago to mark Altman’s 81st birthday, memorably described going to a family party. As he surveyed the roomful of people gathered together, he found himself emulating Altman’s roving camera eye, sorting through the assemblage, choosing what to focus on with his eyes, his ears, noting the effect it had to choose a visual focus and yet emphasize the overheard conversation coming from nearby, unconnected to what it is he was seeing. It’s incredible to me that Schickel would even come close to implying that what Altman did was akin to letting the camera roll and dull-wittedly waiting for something to happen, to reveal itself. This was a notion that I gave credence to when I was 15 years old, when I had comparatively little life experience, when I wasn’t capable yet of processing, of understanding the complexity of vision that Altman had composed and was offering on his audio-visual canvases. I’m not suggesting that Schickel must appreciate everything that Altman does (even we Altman acolytes aren’t so blind), or that there is only one way to understand Altman’s films. But what is Schickel’s excuse, as a critic who presumably knows something about the way films are created, that allows him the luxury of such a thoughtless dismissal? What is his excuse for not having a greater cognizance of Altman’s methodology than a 15-year-old?

I once had the privilege of asking Altman himself, at a screening of The Long Goodbye at UCLA in the days just before The Player came out, whether or not he thought his films were manipulative. I asked the question because I’d been having heated discussions with someone who was intent on dismissing his visual style because of the way he used the zoom lens and other techniques to direct our attention toward certain aspects of behavior and performance. To this person, Altman’s directorial manner was too emphatic, too on-the-nose, as if Altman were saying, “Whoops, you won’t catch this unless I italicize it for you with my zoom lens.” My response to this argument was similar to the scenario Matt so memorably described, though no doubt not as cogently presented or argued. And I also countered that to suggest that Altman was manipulative above and beyond the methods of any other director in cinema simply because of this noticeable stylistic technique was to be willfully ignorant of the myriad ways in which directors as disparate as Hitchcock, Hawks, Godard and Herzog—in other words, just about any director you can name who can cut and juxtapose film or make a choice as to where to place the camera—use film to express their vision of the world. It was a joy to hear Altman respond to my question by saying, “Of course it’s manipulative! I want you to see things how I see them!”

And he’s right—Altman’s movies are distinctive not exclusively because of their hazy, laid-back rhythms but because of how Altman employs that seductive pose to frame his investigative, searching, sometimes chaotic, nearly always visually thrilling approach. That approach is not, by the way, directly transferable from film to film, even though anyone paying attention could see that the same man who directed M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, California Split, Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians also directed the relatively sparsely populated and meticulously observed Images, Three Women and A Perfect Couple with their relatively more tightly focused visual range. Without that manipulation, you’re left with Henry Jaglom, who disdains film technique, or at least the appearance of smoothness that technique would serve to create, who literally does seem to think that his duty is that of camera operator and that “the truth” will be revealed not by him but through the rambling improvisations of his actors. Could Schickel honestly look at a movie like McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Secret Honor or Buffalo Bill and The Indians or The Long Goodbye and truthfully suggest that these films came together not because of an artistic vision but in spite of a mediocre director’s pot-addled sensibility? Apparently. After all, he put his name on the review. It’s a shame that this punk excuse for criticism had to be the last thing of Schickel’s that I will ever read. Altman’s reputation remains unsullied in my eye, while Schickel’s—well, Schickel’s is in the tank.

Oh, and by the way, I’m well into Zuckoff’s book right now, and guess what—it’s terrific.

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GODSPEED, ROYBOY: ROY MATCHETT 1924 - 2009

2009-11-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

Roy Matchett, a man I’ve known for close to 40 years, the father of a close friend in high school and college, died this past Saturday, October 30, at the age of 85. Roy was not a man of great renown. He was not a famous film director, an esteemed screenwriter, a gifted cinematographer or a beloved actor, though I always thought he resembled a best-of-all-possible-worlds cross between Paul Newman (those piercing blue eyes) and Mel Brooks (he was more physically imposing, but shared the great comedian’s raucous humor). So why, if all of the above are true, is he being eulogized here? Well, simply because Roy was that rare animal, the parent of a pal who eventually became a pal himself. I spent a lot of time running around Roy’s house with his son Ron, and I can’t remember even a split second when Roy and his eternally good-humored wife Jeanne didn’t treat me just like one of their own boys. I never felt like I was the intruding sidekick that had to be endured for the sake of their own boy’s bad taste in choosing friends. Whenever I visited their house, whether it was for dinner or just to hang out and take up space, I was made to feel like I belonged there. At the same time, if we did something dumb Roy dished out his disdain in a manner which ensured we both felt chastised—he wasn’t about to let me off the hook due to anything as easy as biology.

Roy’s temper, in addition to being a source of genuine fear (he never raised his hand to anyone as far as I ever knew, but he had a voice that sounded like the kind of thunder that would gather together into its own kind of fist), was also an endless source of comedy for me and Ron, and Ron’s older brothers Lee and Kevin too. Part of the fun of hanging around with the Matchett boys was the stories with which they would regale eager listeners about their dad’s often profanely eloquent tirades, and more often than not these stories were told in the presence of Roy himself, who was always up for having a good laugh at the expense of his reputation as a human volcano. From my perspective, growing up around Roy Matchett was like being the little egghead chicken toddling around at the feet of Foghorn Leghorn. He had the capacity to be endlessly interested in what was going on in my life, and he would talk to me at length about my family—he knew my grandpa well—and all the things I was captivated by—and then the next minute he might just as easily find himself in a fit of stuttering exasperation by something I might say, or something I didn’t understand about what he was trying to tell me. And Roy was never satisfied with understatement in getting his point across whenever outrageous exaggeration was an option.

One of the funniest anecdotes illustrating Roy’s benign Foghorndom came when his family took me along on my one-and-only Hawaiian vacation, on the island of Kauai, during the spring of 1980. Ron, his then-girlfriend (now wife) Janell and I flew independently from the rest of the family out of Eugene and met everyone at the airport in Kauai, where Jeanne immediately burst into tears upon seeing us arrive safely. Roy burst into something else when it was discovered that (again, for the one-and-only time during my whole history of commercial flight) my luggage had been lost (accidentally left in Honolulu would probably be more accurate) and took it upon himself to ride herd on the local airport staff until my bag reappeared a day later. The Matchetts had secured for us all a lovely two-story condominium right on Poipu Beach for our week-long stay. Their only mistake was that they rented a property in which the only unit large enough to house Ron, Janell, his brother Lee and wife Jeannette, and myself was the one at the top of the stairs. All was fine until Roy, lounging in his quarters below, got an earful of five young people treating one man’s ceiling like their own hardwood floor. The first two days were peppered with complaints from the elder statesman directed at all of us for making stampeding noises when we were moving about the condo. One morning he came upstairs, sat us all down on the couch and actually conducted a seminar on how to walk across the floor without disturbing the downstairs neighbor. (Of course no one was downstairs during this demonstration to affirm whether or not Roy’s techniques were effective.) Confident that we now possessed enough knowledge of basic physics and acoustics to avoid such transgressive behavior for the rest of the trip, Roy returned to his lower dominion while we got ready for the day’s adventures.

Perhaps a half hour had passed and we were almost ready to leave for the beach when the front door to our condo flew open and a red- faced Roy burst in (accompanied, I’m fairly positive, by a dramatic musical soundtrack stinger). “All right, who the HELL is up here STOMPING back and forth across this floor??!!” he bellowed. There wasn’t much time to do anything but try to suppress laughter, which I knew was probably not the best response to share in this situation, before he continued. “Cozzalio, didn’t I show you how to walk across the floor?! There’s no need to smash your feet down full force every time you have to take a piss or go get something out of the refrigerator!” I also remember some vague threat involving being tossed into shark-infested waters should we not be able to get our pounding heels under control. And then it was off to a fun day with Roy as our tour guide, and his jolly demeanor bore not an ounce of recall about the outrage that started his day. Later, just to tweak the master, we three boys shot a lovely photo of our bare feet as a special souvenir for our benignly grumpy patriarch. I like to think he treasured it.

Roy knew I thought he was hilarious, and I always got the impression that he really enjoyed making me laugh. He enjoyed watching me laugh too, I think. He and Jeanne took me to Reno one weekend when I was probably no older than 15 to see Don Rickles—my first big show. Rickles was hilarious, of course, but Roy seemed more tickled about how funny I thought Mr. Warmth was than about the show itself. (“Hee-hee-hee! I looked over and thought the spaghetti vendor was gonna split a seam!”) As I got older, I remember the conversations I had with Roy as being characterized by emergent respect, a lack of condescension that one might naturally expect coming from the older, wiser father of a best friend (which I definitely experienced from other parents). I think that as my high school years gave way to college I began to think of Roy, and Jeanne too, as real friends rather than necessary attachments who came along with knowing their son.

The last time I saw Roy was around 1992, when I brought my wife to my hometown for Christmas and we went to their house to visit. I talked to him on the phone a couple of times after that four or five years later. Then, around six or seven years ago I got a call from Ron telling me that his dad had suffered a devastating stroke and had lost his capacity for speech. It was around this time that the dreams began (much like the ones I still continue to have after my grandmother had been killed in a freak car accident), in which I come to visit the Matchetts and Roy, of course, is not frail and incapacitated but vital and booming and irreverent, just how I always knew him. At the end of the dream—and I always somehow know that the dream is ending—I am filled with sadness and dread because, like the times when I am reunited with my grandma, I don’t want Roy to go away-- I know that, however convincing my dream, his reality was something far different than the pleasant concoctions of my mind and my memory.

And now, after a long and difficult time in which his physical capacity only weakened and his awareness of even his closest family members was inconsistent and unreliable, Roy has passed away. I will always regret that I never got to properly say good-bye, or that I was unable to spend any more time with him, either before or after his stroke, for selfish reasons as much as any others. But in this hour in which everyone who knew him contemplates the pain he had to endure, the commitment and love and support with which his family surrounded him during his most arduous years on this planet, and the relief which he surely now enjoys, it’s easy for me to think back on Roy Matchett as one of the most influential people in my life. Without ever intending to, he did much to shape my sense of humor, its saltiness and irreverence and warmth, and the loyalty and respect he offered to people, specifically to the nerdy, bespectacled buddy of his youngest son, is a model to which I am, if I am living my own life correctly, constantly referring. When I think of Roy Matchett, from this moment until I am incapable myself of remembering, I will think of a man who I loved at times as much as I did my own father. Godspeed, Roy Boy. And if the Lord makes too much noise stomping around up there in that mansion on the hill, don’t hesitate to tell him to knock it off. You deserve your rest.

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HALLOWEEN LEFTOVERS

2009-11-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

There seems to have been an unexpected enthusiasm about Halloween this year around our house and around the neighborhood which, in addition to the kid-centric holiday falling on a Saturday, seems to have added a certain happier dimension to its celebration than in past years, as I remember them anyway. It was nice to be able to spend the day with my girls decorating the front of the house-- even though our decorations were meager by the standards of some of the other nearby houses, they were downright garish and pagan placed alongside the majority of them which, it being a neighborhood of older retirement-age folks for the most part, noted their participation in the spirit of the evening mostly by leaving their porch lights on. And though the expected downturn in the number of those houses who usually grab the holiday by its prickly tail was apparent—the neighborhood haunted houses that can be counted on to go all out were a little more subdued this year, no doubt because of the tightness of everyone’s budget—there was a marked uptick in volume of candy distribution, if my daughters’ trick-or-treat bags can be counted as representative samples. My youngest couldn’t even carry her bag home. (We picked through the 25% of really good stuff and donated the rest to the needy coworkers in my office who will, as it turns out, consume even Willy Wonka Fun Dip with only the slightest hesitation.)

Halloween 2009 just seemed like more fun this year, and there are three reasons I can think of that might help to explain why.

I DISCOVERED THAT MY KIDS LOVE THE UNIVERSAL MONSTERS

This was the year the girls found out about the Universal Studios monsters in their element, and it was due mostly to getting to see Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein on the big screen a couple of weeks ago. The movie couldn’t be more kid-friendly, and yet it packs a few moments within and in between comedy bits that a young audience could conceivably rank as scary. Not only did my daughters eat up the adventures of Chick (Abbott) and Wilbur (Costello) avoiding these creepies, they also found the creatures themselves compelling. They knew not from wolfsbane and the seductive menace of Bela Lugosi before this past October. But now they’re ready for the real thing. I took my daughter to see Tod Browning’s Dracula at the New Beverly just a week later, and she was shivering and hiding her eyes from Lugosi’s piercing stare like it was 1931. I’m not sure why, but classic comedies from this period (Duck Soup, The Lady Eve, The Awful Truth), and now the slow-paced insinuating horrors spawned by the Universal backlot, have managed to pierce the attention-deficit shield constructed by video games, manga and the other more modern action movies she also loves and improbably found a place in her heart. I have promised to screen the entire Frankenstein series for her next—James Whale’s original, most assuredly the The Bride of Frankenstein, and then Son, House and Ghost, with a special place reserved for one of my favorites, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman-- unless we get really lucky and some of them show up on the big screen again soon. And given all this interest, it might just be time to break out the old monster model kits.

I WAS REMINDED THAT IT’S GOOD TO REVISIT THE CLASSICS (AND SOME NOT-SO-CLASSICS TOO)

I had the opportunity to look at several movies during the Halloween month that I either remembered fondly from my horror-loving boyhood or had never fully warmed to the way others had seemed to, and the results were a little bit surprising. I spent a long time enjoying the anticipation of digging into the delights offered on MGM HD’s “Dying for the Weekend” series of horrors, because there were a couple of old favorites in there as well as a couple I’d never run across before. But the cruel fact is, I just wasn’t able to see everything I wanted to see from their line-up. (And when, in the history of my film-watching or anyone else’s, has this truism ever not been a truism?) And it was a disappointment to discover that one of the pictures I was most looking forward to seeing again, The Return of Count Yorga, was a bit of a wet noodle. The first movie was an important movie in the development of my taste for modern horror films and I still think it stands up pretty well today. But the sequel, which I characterized from my memory as “very good” in the article previously linked, turned out, to these eyes which are 37 years older than when they first gazed up on it, to be somewhat sleepily paced and far too dependent on a bevy of nightgown-clad vampire brides infected by what appears to be a plague of rampant bed hair lurching at the camera and smacking their oversized dime-store vampire fangs. Robert Quarry as the titular count seems disinterested here too—he should be out ravaging early ‘70s party types, but instead he spends the entire movie pining for the bland Mariette Hartley, an unappreciative recipient of Yorga’s attentions who also ends up on the receiving end of the movie’s shock ending, wholly warmed-over and gender-flipped as it is directly from the first film.

Much more enjoyable was Grave of the Vampire, a movie I never gave much of a chance when I was growing up and scouring the movie pages of the Portland Oregonian and the San Francisco Chronicle, because the ads looked so cheap and unpromising. But the movie has a certain crude power, is relatively well made (by John Hayes, an exploitation director responsible for titles like Up Yours—A Rockin’ Comedy, All the Lovin’ Kinfolk, Mama’s Dirty Girls, Jailbait Babysitter and Hot Lunch) from a script by David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, and is not just a little bit mean and punchy to boot. Michael Pataki plays Croft, a notorious vampire who rises one night to terrorize and drain the blood of a boy and his girlfriend, and then proceeds to drag the girl screaming into an open grave where he proceeds to rape her. The girl, improbably, survives the ordeal and gives birth to a son who has no taste for milk but certainly enjoys the drippage when Mom accidentally cuts herself while mounting another doomed breastfeeding attempt. Up to this point (about a third of the way through), the movie has a certain mournfulness to it, and well as a creeping morbidity that is unusual and affecting. But then Grave takes a hard left past the logistical booby traps one would think would be inherent in growing up a vampire and jumps straight to the boy’s adult life where, against all likelihood, he turns into lantern-jawed exploitation star William Smith. Smith, none too happy about the way Dad treated Mom or about his own undead situation (which the movie sets aside until its gory conclusion), has tracked down the bloodsucking patriarch—he’s teaching night classes on the occult!—and is out for some stake-in-the-heart-type payback. Grave of the Vampire remains engaging largely because of Pataki’s barely contained contempt for the daylight dwellers that surround him—he’s actually pretty damn good in this role—and for the juice and surprising cruelty the filmmakers bring to their own tawdry premise. It doesn’t really add up to much, but in terms of the drive-in fare amongst which it was spawned and ran in the mid ‘70s, it’s a fang or two above the usual fare.

Even better is the 1971 Hammer entry Twins of Evil, another of the studios “expansions” upon the J. Sheridan LeFanu story “Carmilla” which, in addition to the original Dracula novel, also stoked the fires (if you will, and I insist) of rather more openly erotic Hammer vampire films such as The Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire, among countless others. Here Le Fanu’s ageless and undying Carmilla is resurrected just long enough to pass along her undead thirst to one Count Karnstein (the insinuatingly effective Damien Thomas, whose manner reminds me of no one more than Corey Feldman). Karnstein casts a black pall of hedonistic intimidation over the citizens of a small village, most of whom despise him but cannot bring themselves to oppose him for fear not only of his alleged Satanism, but also—and perhaps more immediately of concern—his connections to the country’s ruling government. One of the few not intimidated is Gustav Weil (Peter Cushing), leader of a local group of religious zealots called the Brotherhood, who spend their free time accusing sexually alluring women of witchcraft and then burning them alive in order to save their souls. Weil senses trouble immediately when his twin nieces from the city (played with not just a little sexual allure by Mary and Madeleine Collinson, hot off their tour as Playboy’s first duplicate Playmates) arrive for an extended visit. Maria is sweet and compliant with her uncle’s restrictive demands regarding their behavior, but Frieda recoils from him immediately and is soon sneaking out of her bedroom window and up the hill toward Castle Karnstein, where she soon discovers that nights in the country can be pretty lively too. It has been noted that Cushing had lost his beloved wife Helen not long before shooting began on this picture, and it’s genuinely moving to know of his personal anguish and see Cushing grapple with the humanity in his tyrannical, unsympathetic character. His behavior is abominable, but you don’t for a minute discount his conviction as simple demagoguery—Weil is frightening because he believes in the terror he and his “brothers” unleash on the community spun out of little but their own fears. And when he is finally confronted with evidence that his zealous persecution of Karnstein, who he sees as just another transgressor, is grounded in actual, as opposed to imagined horrors, his own sins come seeping into his visage like spiritual sewage. Twins of Evil (the lurid jokiness of its reference to Hammer’s typical heaving cleavage quotient finally given literal as well as lascivious expression) is a first-rate vampire tale, one of the studio’s best, and Cushing’s performance takes it deeper, into the shadowy territory where religious hysteria and intolerance intersect with the collateral damage of familial consequences. Beside his work as the terribly wronged and poetically justified Arthur Grimsdyke in 1972’s Tales from the Crypt, this may be his best performance.

Finally, I caught up with three pictures, none of which I had seen in probably 20 years, one of which I dismissed as a failure when it was first released, and found that all three were, to these aged eyes, solid horror movies in their own right. Blacula (1972) bucks all the odds and wrings some genuine fright out of a potentially preposterous premise—an African prince (William Marshall) is condemned to eternal thirst by a plantation-owning Count Dracula and is resurrected in present-day Los Angeles where he goes all Ardeth Bay in search of the reincarnation of his beautiful princess bride (and yes, I too would rise from the dead for Vonetta McGee). Anchored by Marshall’s utterly straightforward performance, Blacula sidesteps the occasional embarrassing stereotypes (blacks, gays and honkies will all avert their eyes over various bits) and manages to get to a surprising depth of feeling amongst the scares. The undead sacrifice that ends the movie goes after the same sort of emotional heft that Anne Rice occasionally reached for, but it would hardly count as sacrilege to suggest that Blacula does it better.

It was really nice to see Child’s Play again after so long and discover that—and again, we’re talking about overcoming a potentially preposterous premise—a movie about a doll possessed by the soul of a raging killer works some real magic in the goose bump department. The screening, at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater, was augmented by a terrific Q&A panel moderated by screenwriter Mike Werb (Face/Off, The Mask, Firehouse Dog). Guests included the film’s principal writer Don Mancini (who wrote the film’s four sequels and directed Seed of Chucky), producer David Kirschner, special effects designer Kevin Yagher and the film’s star, Catherine Hicks. The discussion ranged from the origins of Mancini’s concept, to the difficulty of executing the movie’s complicated animatronic effects, to finding love on the set (Hicks and Yagher met there and have been married for 15 years), to the tricks and traps of playing such a potentially campy concept utterly straight, right on through to working with children, specifically the convincing work done by Child’s Play’s Alex Vincent, who finds himself the focus of Chucky’s campaign of terror. Kirschner and Mancini were particularly enlightening on the subject of how difficult it is to shepherd a project, even one with as much initial enthusiasm as this one had, through the production system while maintaining resemblance to the script’s original concepts. And Mancini got the evening’s biggest laugh--When asked by a member of the audience to elaborate to what he had up his sleeve for the proposed Child’s Play remake to return the franchise, which had become notoriously irreverent and satirical in its last two chapters, to its frightening roots, Mancini waited a beat then simply replied, with an impish grin, “No.” If Hollywood teaches us anything, it is the value of keeping secrets. But on the strength of seeing Child’s Play on the big screen again (not far from where I saw it in Westwood on is original release), Chucky unleashed in 2010 in full-on terror mode ought to be something grand and gory to behold.

Finally, on a whim one night as I cruised down the aisle at my local Vons, I noticed a copy of John Carpenters Christine (1985) on the shelf for $5.99. Added attraction: inside was a coupon for $7.50 toward the purchase of a ticket to see Zombieland. Gee, depending on where you see it that’s a little over half price to see a big, new hit. Combine that with the rock-bottom price of the DVD and the fact that I hadn’t seen Christine since I dismissively sniffed at it the night it opened, and there’s a deal I just couldn’t pass up. I remembered Carpenter’s conception of the Stephen King story as being turgid and overly literal-minded in 1985, too lightly sketched in compared to the rich excessive pleasures of King’s bloated but undeniably exciting novel. But it’s been 24 years since I read that novel too, so what bothered me about what Carpenter either left out or couldn’t convey is certainly less in the forefront of my mind now, and without those concerns I found the movie to be streamlined and compelling, and blessedly free of the smash-cut-gasp-and-run techniques of the modern horror film. This might just be Carpenter’s most visually confident and arresting movie, in terms of composition and in terms of patience—there are some beautiful long takes in Christine that orchestrate dread and suspense like nothing else the director managed since The Thing in 1982. And again, the pleasure of seeing effects executed in real time and space is exemplified in this movie’s approach t the tactile seductiveness of Christine herself. We can completely relate as Arnie (Keith Gordon) steps back from his beloved vehicle, which has just been trashed by the requisite band of thugs, whispers “Show me,” and stares in awe as Christine, through the pre-CGI magic of physical effects, reconstitutes herself before our eyes. This sequence is perhaps even more impressive in 2010 than it was 1985 because we know, in a neat reversal of CGI's tendency to throw us out of a given sequence by literalizing the impossible, that somehow the effects whizzes at work here did it in physical space.

As for the casting, just about everybody, especially those thugs (led by William Ostrander, who was 26 when the movie came out) look at least 10-15 years too old to be high school kids. But John Stockwell and Keith Gordon have an interesting rapport, especially at the beginning. As one who was often the beneficiary of friendly behavior from those outside and above my social standing in high school, it’s nice and believable to see Stockwell’s football star and the pitch-perfect mixture of disdain and respect, embarrassment and relaxation he evinces in his relationship with Gordon’s Arnie. Gordon often overdoes the nerdy clumsiness at the beginning of the film, but he nails the desperation and the alienation from his well-meaning but often hostile and overbearing family. When his new girlfriend finally casts her spell, all that previously tamped-down hostility is transferred to Arnie’s headlights (no longer shielded by the giant plastic frames of his glasses), and we can see by Gordon’s contemptuous stare than everything he perceives is colored not only by that hostility, but also by his auto-erotic connection with Christine. It’s a shaky performance at times, but ultimately a satisfying one. Christine’s supporting cast is also better than I ever gave them credit for, headed by Robert Prosky as a delightfully profane garage owner, and filled out by the demented duo of all-American eccentricity of Roberts Blossom and Harry Dean Stanton—if only Tracey Walter had shown up, it would have made for the ultimate whack job hat trick. Carpenter can’t figure out how to sell the ending of Christine, and its confrontation between Arnie, Christine and Stockwell operating a giant earth mover, like Sigourney Weaver at the end of Aliens but sans anything like the maternal subtext of that movie to offset the fundamental silliness of the imagery, ends up unavoidably flat. But the director tweaks everything with a terrific final image and a line, delivered by the movie’s oh-so-‘80s ingénue, Alexandra Paul, that will make you giggle while you shiver.

I REALIZED THE $12 I SPENT ON MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME LAST YEAR IS THE BEST INVESTMENT I’VE EVER MADE

I always thought my Tor Johnson mask was the shit. But have you ever tried walking around in one of these heavy latex bastards for an hour? Recommended only if you like hyperventilating and/or accidentally slurping up your own condensed sweat from the inside of the mask. Believe me, two air holes where the nose goes ain’t enough. Nah, I can’t say enough about traipsing around the neighborhood like a life-size Der Weinerschnitzel escapee. You get lots of candy offers, lots of laff-laden compliments, and the awe of your kids, who can’t believe they have such a weird dad but are secretly glad (on a night like this) that they do.

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ALL HAIL ROBERT MORLEY!

2009-11-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

The flat-out funniest thing I managed to see, on screen or in 3-D life, during this past week, one which was largely bereft of even the most forgiving smile? Robert Morley as Undershaft, the armament magnate and alienated patriarch of a household of idealistic children, among them Wendy Hiller’s ambivalent Salvation Army major, in Gabriel Pascal’s 1941 adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, is berating his son for having no idea what to do with his life and ambitions. After suggesting the arts, philosophy, the army, the navy, the church and the bar, and concluding, after the young man’s every rationalized rejection, that there's not much left but the stage, the son replies, "I do know the difference between right and wrong." Morley's eyes widen, he wheels his girth toward the boy and lets fly with a gloriously sarcastic and hilarious tirade straight out of Shaw:

“You don't say so! What? No capacity for business? No knowledge of law? No sympathy with art? No pretension to philosophy. Only a simple knowledge of the secret that has baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business and ruined most of the artists-- the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you're a genius! A master of masters! A god. And at 28 too.”

Shaw or no Shaw, Robert Morley is one of those actors I put in a very special category, the one occupied by the actors and actresses I will watch in absolutely anything, who crystallize the glories of whatever production we happen upon them in and raise the level of even the most tedious mediocrity for the time they’re on screen. An accomplished stage actor and playwright as well as one of Britain’s most recognizable and unique screen acting talents, Morley was in his share of stinkers, to be sure-- Around the World in 80 Days, anyone? Major Barbara was only his fourth film appearance, and lucky for us he still had the likes of Partners In Crime (1942), The Small Back Room (1949), The African Queen (1951), Beat the Devil (1953), The Good Die Young (1954), The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958), Oscar Wilde (1960), Those Magnificent Young Men and Their Flying Machines (1965), The Loved One (1965), Theater of Blood (1973), Great Expectations (1974), Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978) and Little Dorrit (1988) all waiting along his lifeline before he died in 1992. The haughty demeanor of some of his most memorable characters, his precise delivery of the most chewy lines, and the degree to which such a large man could internalize and project such delicacy across such a wide range of roles both silly and sublime—all of these would serve as the template, in my mind at least, for anyone who came after and tried to create the same kind of vivid character work in his prodigious shadow. Some succeeded, some didn’t, but none would be as memorable as Robert Morley.

Your favorite Robert Morley performance? Your favorite British character actor?

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HALLOWEEN PURSUITS

2009-10-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

Happy All Hallows Eve, devils and angels!

(Images courtesy of the Riptheskull collection, which I became aware of through the excellent Halloween-themed site Season of Shadows.)

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FOR THE ITALIAN HORROR BLOG-A-THON: LUCIO FULCI'S DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING

2009-10-31T09:45:00.000-07:00

The following essay is my contribution to Kevin J. Olson's Italian Horror Blog-a-Thon, which features multiple links to all manner of fascinating and fun reading on this rich, Halloween-appropriate topic. Kevin writes the essential, and now eternally-Inglourious Basterds-linked blog Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. Thanks for the invitation to participate in this gathering, Kevin. It has been all kinds of fun!

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I come here not to bury Lucio Fulci (he died in 1996), but to praise him. At least this once. It’s time to admit that I’ve never much been one for the all-stops-pulled brand of zombie horror that gained Fulci his greatest degree of notoriety, at least here in the States among hard-core horror fans. I saw Zombie (originally known in Italy as Zombi 2) on its original run through America back in 1980 and have seen it a couple of times since, and I’ve never been able to key in on what his fans found to be so special about his work, beyond his coal-black take of humanity (a brand of nihilism that has always seemed to be too easy to come by and perhaps a little too fashionably adopted by some of his faithful) and his willingness to push the limits of the spectacle of gore. In the years since I’ve managed to see The House by the Cemetery and The New York Ripper, which both seemed pretty repellent to these eyes, and The Beyond, which was as visually spectacular as it was deeply silly. So while not particularly offended by the work of Fulci’s that I’ve seen (okay, there are moments in The New York Ripper I wouldn’t be too quick to try to defend), the word I would use to describe my feeling about his movies would probably be “indifferent,” which is why I thought, given his following, he might be a good candidate to write about for Kevin Olson’s Giallo Blog-a-thon.

But when I went to IMDb to begin my perfunctory research of the director I discovered that, before he became noted for the zombie pictures he had quite a career behind him already. Fulci’s first picture was released in 1959, and among those movies there are the requisite thrillers, of course, a comedy or two, a James Bond knockoff, even a couple of westerns. And more than any of his movies I’d seen so far, I really enjoyed discovering some of the titles for Fulci’s movies, their Italian names and especially the monikers with which they were dubbed in other countries. Some of the juicy nuggets I found include: Come inguaiammo l’esercito (known in the U.K. as How We Got Into Trouble With the Army), Colpo gobo all’italiana, a.k.a. Getting Away With It the Italian Way, which was translated literally in the U.K. as Hunchback Italian Style (!!!), Tempo di massacre (Massacre Time), The House of Clocks, The Ghosts of Sodom, A Cat in the Brain, a little morsel called The Senator Likes Women which, translated from its longer Italian title in the U.K. became The Senator Likes Women… Despite Appearances and Provided the Nation Doesn’t Know, Una sull’altra (a.k.a. One on Top of the Other which became in France Perversion Story), and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. These last two titles come highly recommended by Fulci enthusiasts who note their placement at the roots of the giallo genre, which were initially much more closely entangled with murder mystery than the onslaught of bloody guts which characterized the later zombie films.

The third giallo directed by Fulci, immediately following Una sull’altra (1969) and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), was the equally perversely titled Don’t Torture a Duckling (1971) which, in Italy, was known as Don’t Torture Donald Duck. (Undoubtedly fear of reprisals from the Mouse House was behind the adopting of the more generic water fowl featured in the U.S. release title.) And beyond my curiosity about a movie with such a weird name, I was very interested to see what a Fulci movie sans the living dead would look and feel like given that everything I’d seen of his to this point was all grime and nastiness and general ineptitude decorated with buckets full of grue and shock effects. And from the very first striking images, Don’t Torture a Duckling announced itself to this cynic as something very different from what I’d experienced before. In a series of gorgeous Panavision long shots over which the credits play, we see the rolling hills of a beautiful Italian countryside and how they have been interrupted, violated by a long, elevated highway (itself strangely beautiful) which snakes its way through the landscape announcing the impact of modern civilization on the tiny village over which it runs.

It’s a memorable way to introduce the movie’s overriding theme of a clash of cultural assumptions which reveal that the forces of modernity may be no more enlightened than the village’s superstitious, intolerant and relatively atavistic citizenry. The movie’s thematic strands are expanded when we witness an anguished woman unearth the skeleton of a tiny baby, perhaps stillborn, perhaps murdered, her hands bloodied by tearing at the earth as she carries it away. Later, a child is abducted from this rural Southern Italian village, and the carabinieri, a team of local police augmented by city officers, arrest Guiseppe, a local simpleton, when he is caught collecting the ransom money. But as it will become apparent in Fulci’s narrative, what appears to be true may not be, or may have hidden angles, truths within truths. Giuseppe admits the extortion but claims that the boy was already dead when he found him, and while he is in custody another child’s body is found.

The focus immediately shifts to two other suspects: Patrizia (the luscious Barbara Bouchet), a well-off, spoiled and decadent woman who has returned to the village where her father was born to wait out the heat from a drug scandal of some sort, and Maciara (Florinda Bolkan, superb and fearless), the woman we saw earlier digging up the bones of her baby. Already looked at with suspicion by the locals, Maciara has been driven to the brink of madness over grief at the loss of her own child, and on top of that she may be a witch. After a third body is discovered, she attempts to hide but is soon captured. It is here that Fulci drops his first narrative bomb: Maciara, already seen covering the corpse of one of the victims with earth, her hands bloodied in the same way we saw them earlier, confesses to killing all three boys with her black magic. But when it soon becomes apparent that she couldn’t have killed the third child she is released, an act of legal justice which nonetheless condemns her to a horrific death at the hands of outraged locals who have perhaps always hated or been frightened by her and who now have moral grounds (however specious) on which to unleash their rage.

One of the rural officers advises against releasing Maciara out of fear of just such a result, and it is from this reluctance of the urban-based officers to understand or fully comprehend the differences which operate within these two worlds that Fulci wrings the richest thematic juice out of his narrative. The observation of stereotypes streak straight through Don’t Torture a Duckling, whether they be the guttural behavior of a mob screaming for revenge, or the salacious tendencies of a slinky, somewhat perverse seductress as she torments a horny 10-year-old boy (who has been hypnotized by the sight of her nude body) with suggestions of a sexual initiation, or the superiority (or even simple functionality) of civilized morality in a setting where other mores and codes may more strongly apply. But Fulci gives more than a suggestion to their flip sides as well. Are the stereotypes justified, or do they reveal degrees of opposite truth? We’re asking the questions right up to the point where the movie forces us to face our own presumptions as audience members, and those of the characters, about the capacity of a mentally challenged girl to understand her situation, as well as our faith in figures of religious authority. (Rest assured, Fulci has none, and though his point of view got him and this movie into trouble in Italy in 1971, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that a large portion of the population—though perhaps still not in Italy—has caught up to his cynicism regarding men of the cloth.)

Don’t Torture a Duckling (the title refers to a doll purchased for the aforementioned mentally challenged girl by Patrizia) is a tight, fascinating, visually acute thriller which, for all of its relative sophistication in the Fulci oeuvre, reveals a filmmaker who was, in 1971, considerably more than the uninspired hack whose career devolved into ever more lurid and inept gross-outs. (Fulci’s zombie fests were apparently heavily tampered with, so it’s possible that I’ve never been exposed to a true representation of his genius in this field, but honestly, what’s left on screen that is clearly of his origin doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.) My most immediate frame of comparison, given my limited exposure to Fulci’s work, is to look at Duckling up next to The New York Ripper which, incredibly, features a psycho who disguises his voice by quacking and imitating Donald Duck. Ripper is grindhouse grimy and lumpy, and prone to extended episodes involving the lovingly observed evisceration and nipple-slicing of naked and bound female victims which make it hard to refute charges of misogyny against the director. Duckling, on the other hand, is brutal and visually elegant, sometimes even funny, and in it Fulci clearly harbors more sympathy for the women than the movie's often barbaric or self-righteous men. Duckling also highlights far more narrative sophistication than I would have ever thought possible of Fulci. The last half of this movie had me reevaluating characters and situations and processing visual clues and red herrings at a highly pleasurable rate.

And the evidence of Fulci’s visual mastery is everywhere—from the beautiful, corrupted landscapes (that elevated highway is inexplicably haunting), to the director’s frequently witty graphic continuity in the film’s visual connective tissue (imagery of fetuses and small babies abound), and the fluidity of his use of split-frame deep focus in which two impossible close-ups are married in wide-screen Panavision and given equal emotional and graphic weight. This last trope in particular recalls the heights to which Brian De Palma would eventually take the same technique, and as I prepared for this blog-a-thon by watching Duckling and also Giuilano Carnimeo’s The Case of the Bloody Iris, the influences on De Palma became fascinating to note. Carnimeo stages a couple of murderous set pieces, one in an elevator, that present evidence of his film’s influence on Dressed to Kill, and in Duckling Maciara’s horrific beating at the hands of a group of men led by the father of one victim, and her struggle to find help as she drags herself up a hillside and beside a road, has some of the same agonizing visceral power and emotional laceration one experiences witnessing the ordeal and eventual death of Oanh in Casualties of War. I can think of no higher praise for a director who has been accused of enjoying the tortures he has inflicted upon his female characters. Would that the evidence to refute such claims n Fulci’s work extended beyond Don’t Torture a Duckling. (That’s an invitation, Fulci fan, to write in and lead me to more evidence to the contrary, by the way!)

On the strength of Don’t Torture a Duckling I am confidently off to discover what else about Fulci I might be ignoring as others rush to celebrate the excesses of his tedious (to my eyes) late period. In particular, I cannot wait to see the two gialli that preceded Duckling-- A Lizard in a Woman Skin also stars the magnificent Florinda Bolkan—and I absolutely must know what a western by Lucio Fulci looks and feels like. But I also have to admit being kind of tickled thinking of what rabid fans of Fulci’s hard-core decayed flesh opuses might make of this movie. It definitely has its blood-splattered highlights (including what must be the funniest fall from a great height ever committed to film, Fulci’s official calling card re the gory standards to which the rest of his career would aspire), but it is so much more subdued, so much more concerned with what have to be considered classical cinematic values (as least in comparison to Zombi 2) that, Kevin J. Olson excepted, I wonder if the Fulci faithful would be as patient with this one. Don’t Torture a Duckling also features the best cast of any Fulci movie I’ve seen—in addition to the pulchritudinous delights afforded by Barbara Bouchet and the freaky, heart-wrenching performance of Florinda Bolkan, there’s Tomas Milian as a sympathetic reporter who initially suspects Patrizia of the crimes and then teams with her to seek out the real killer, Marc Porel as Don Alberto, the priest of the local parish who anguishes over several things, perhaps the least of which is the disappearance of the three boys, and revered Greek actress Irene Papas as the mother of the aforementioned duckling-bearing retarded child (as well as another of the cast of characters), whose own mental stability is shrouded in secrets and doubt. Best do as I did: put aside your distaste for the Lucio Fulci of Zombie and The New York Ripper and give this one a spin. The title may seem perverse and silly, but Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling turns out to be one of the crown jewels of the Italian giallo genre.

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For further reading, I recommend essays by Tor at BloodyGoodHorror.com, Nik Allen at 70sFastRewind.com, Christian Sellers at RetroSlashers, and a rather brilliant visual exegesis of the movie’s visual motifs, including the rural vs. urban, pagan vs. Christian dichotomies, as well as a look at that fall from a great height I mentioned previously, from Howard S. Berger and Kevin Marr at the wonderful (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) blog Destructible Man, devoted to "The Theory And Practice of Cinematic Prosthetic Demise (a.k.a. The Dummy-Death In Film)." DM is where I appropriated some of the great screen grabs featured in this post. Thank you very much, gentlemen.

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WHERE THE DIRTY HIPSTERS ARE

2009-10-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

Plenty of other stuff to get to and no time to do it until after work tonight, but even so, this one was to good to pass up. Thanks for the tip on this one go to Andrew Blackwood, who in addition to being a good friend and one of this blog's original loyalists also directed a short film comedy called Kumar's Day at the Park (featuring my two lovely daughters in pivotal supporting roles) which is set to have its premiere this coming Sunday. Hopefully there will be an uploaded version I can share that will become available soon. Until then, pity poor Max, who can't get a rise out of these sullen bastards even dressed like a Wild Thing. ("Is that vintage, or is that faux designer chic?")

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THE RESTLESS SPIRITS OF MARION KERR’S GOLDEN EARRINGS

2009-10-27T14:36:00.001-07:00

There are a couple of restless spirits swirling about the turbulent emotional center of Golden Earrings, and though one in particular haunts the characters within the fabric of the film itself, it is the second that haunts the viewer long after the movie is over. Directed and written by actress Marion Kerr (who plays one of those spirits), the movie begins, as so many independently financed and produced movies that must make do with readily available settings seem to, as a group of friends gather in an apartment for a going-away party. Sara (Kerr) is off for a long weekend to visit her mother after a fight with her estranged boyfriend. Sara is somewhat distraught over the decision to take the trip and she tries to hide her nervous tension, but the five friends who are there to support —three men (John T. Woods, Teddy Goldsmith , Anthony Dimaano) and two women (Julia Marchese and Lauren Mora)—pick up on her ambivalence quickly. At first the gathering looks like it’s going to be yet another occasion for post-Tarantino slacker gab over pizza and beer, but the writer-director disarms this fear with relative ease. The rhythm of the group’s chatter may seem familiar at first, but as Kerr’s calm inquisitive attitude toward the dynamics of the relationships at the kitchen table begins to reveal itself it becomes clear she, thankfully, has something else up her sleeve.

Ronnie (Julia Marchese) is taking Sara’s departure with a heavier heart than the others, and her interaction with Sara as Sara prepares to leave reveal the bonds of a long, perhaps tense, but meaningful friendship that, at least as Ronnie sees it, may be being threatened by Sara’s decision to consider reuniting with her boyfriend. There’s a suggestion of sexual attraction on Ronnie’s part, but that element is part and parcel of the kind of intense relationship that often develops between women which often goes unspoken, unacknowledged, and is only a fraction of what forms the bond in the first place. Kerr and Marchese are comfortable with the suggestion, but it doesn’t overtake their conception of how the two women relate to each other. With a few short strokes in the film’s first 15 minutes they fulfill what Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox could not in the entirety of Jennifer’s Body-- that is, conveying to the audience the understanding of how two clearly different women—one confident, the other insecure-- could survive everyday adversity and interpersonal tension while remaining friends, as well as what would compel that friendship in the first place. (And there’s no need for the tease of hot girl-on-girl action to fill in the holes in the characters left by the writer and director in Golden Earrings.)

Sara leaves and the group is left to their own devices for the evening. Ronnie suggests they have a round on the Ouija board and they all jump in, save Goldsmith who abstains (his elucidation of his reasons why is an early highlight). The group apparently makes contact with a recently deceased spirit who, to their horror, reveals itself to be that of Sara. Attempts to contact their friend via phone are unsuccessful and the group begins to suspect the worst—that Sara may have had a fatal accident shortly after leaving the apartment. But no one fears more than Ronnie, the depth of whose attachment to Sara begins to reveal itself, along with even darker undercurrents, as her terror begins to intensify and it becomes apparent, after her other friends have departed and she waits in her apartment for news of Sara’s fate, that something else may be going on. That Ouija game box won’t stay put away. A record of an old jazz vocalist keeps cueing up and playing on its own. Ronnie may not be alone.

Golden Earrings is a bit of a revelation on two counts. This is Marion Kerr’s first effort as a feature director. It is astonishing in that regard for its confidence, for the assurance she expresses through her use of the camera and for her ability to construct solid, emotionally suggestive scenes without the requisite visual gimmickry that is the typical hallmark of a first-time filmmaker. Kerr’s patience here (and her appeal and ability as an actress to hint at the tremulous inner-life of the outwardly strong Sara) are strengths which inform the movie as a whole and allow the creepiness that moves in like a silent, insistent fog to settle into the viewer’s bones. As Golden Earrings begins to reveal its psychologically anchored horrors in a manner befitting a minor-key Repulsion, Kerr’s directorial nuances, and restraint, become even more critical and impressive. Kerr turns the screws, all right, but at a slightly different angle and speed than what we may be prepared for. Like a deceptively tossed breaking ball, her talent for chilling an audience’s spine is right in the groove. She has the sharp instincts of an old pro, the curiosity and openness of a youngster, and a bright future in which to hone her relatively raw talent into something resembling a veteran filmmaker’s unique vision.

But even more impressive is the performance Kerr gets from her lead actress, Julia Marchese. In reality the two women are old friends, and they are able to channel that sense of experience into a very believable connection between Sara, who we sense is struggling to gain footing in life outside the sphere of her relationship with her best pal, and Ronnie, who is perhaps more comfortable in the existing dynamic between them than is advisable. So when Sara leaves the limited parameter of the world according to Ronnie (as we experience it), it’s not too surprising when that world begins to unravel. The real pleasure in watching Marchese here is that the unraveling is never ostentatious, showy or theatrical. Quite the opposite, Marchese seduces us into accepting what Ronnie sees, as she sees it, by underplaying the creeping unease and disorientation, never projecting beyond what we already have experienced ourselves through Kerr’s patient design. In the process, she proves herself to be an actress who rewards patient observation with a richness of empathy, and she has a lovely physical screen presence that proves integral to getting the viewer on her side. There are moments during which all we are given to register the unmoored fear Ronnie feels over Sara’s disappearance and her apparent reappearances is the contrapuntal placidity of Marchese’s expressive face as she surveys a trashed, empty room or stares off into ostensibly unoccupied space from her bed. But when the fear begins to surface in ever-more disturbing fashion, Marchese proves up to the task as well, offering the audience a classically modulated template of terror over which plays the conflicting emotions of hallucination, the cold fear of visitation from a deceased spirit, and the even more complicated prospect of a mind coming undone. It’s really a superb piece of acting, no less so because it comes in such a modest production, and it matches the movie’s ability to conjure emotional power from apparently meager resources. If Golden Earrings is any indication, however, Marchese’s resources are far from meager. Her work as Ronnie is astounding in that she manages aggressive, lapel-grabbing desperation at the same time as she begins to recede and curl away into memories of a world that was probably never exactly as she imagined or needed it to be. At no time does Marchese aim for the rafters, yet what she does here has a personal power to hit you in the chest as if she felt even the rafters weren’t high enough. Hers is the spectral presence that stays with you after the movie’s final frame.

If and when this movie makes it to the festival circuit, don’t be surprised if Julia Marchese is a name you start hearing more often. This is the caliber of acting that independent films often strive for, but rarely achieve. And Golden Earrings is proof positive that independent films can still sidestep the traps that have made the shortcut term “indie” synonymous with myriad D.I.Y. mediocrity and clichés. It’s a solid, affecting thriller with a star-making performance (in a perfect world) at the eye of its hair-raising emotional storm, and I hope you get a chance to see it soon

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The trailer for Golden Earrings

Go to the Golden Earrings site for more information.

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OOOOOOH! THE ADVENTURES OF WOODY AND BUZZ ACROSS THE THIRD DIMENSION!

2009-10-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

There used to be a day when parents complained about the dearth of G-rated family fare suitable for kids and adults who wanted to go to the movies together. Nowadays the G rating is as much a stigma as ever, only slightly less so than the NC-17, consigned mostly for animated fare from Disney, the only studio that recognizes its asociation with the rating and seems least hesitant to embrace it. However unfairly, “G” has become synonymous with “toothless,” a warning to tweener mall rats who wouldn’t be seen swarming into anything less potent than a PG, itself a rating which suggests a higher level of sophistication, a promise of ever-so-slight naughtiness to viewers who may see themselves as too grown-up to march off to a G-rated movie with their entourage in tow. For most CGI comedies and other family-oriented movies, Disney included, PG is the new G, and PG-13 is, of course, the new PG-- which, as it is written, was begat of M, which in turn begat GP, which, of course begat PG. (Rimshot!) But whatever the rating—G, PG, PG-13— in today’s market, pitched as it is to an increasingly younger demographic whose parents have proven their willingness to turn everything from Wall-E to Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs into huge must-see hits, there is no lack of movies to which parents might (relatively speaking) safely bring their children. Right now if you’re an adventurous parent you have Where the Wild Things Are and Astro Boy from which to choose, with The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog and A Christmas Carol (the last two products of the Disney factory) looming on the horizon. And if these don’t fill the bill, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is still in theaters, and you can always rent the DVDs or Blu-rays of movies like Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens, big hits from earlier in the year.

But with all these choices, it is, if not exactly ironic, then at least somewhat reassuring, that the best choice for family entertainment in theaters right now, the greatest bang for an economically beleagured parent's entertainment budget, is a double feature of two movies, 14 and 10 years old, respectively. When it was first released by Pixar in 1995, Toy Story was the first salvo in a new wave of feature-length computer animation which initially asserted that the key to great animated films for children and adults was not the technology, which was constantly evolving, becoming ever more sophisticated, but instead the passion that should be devoted to the art of storytelling. By the time Toy Story 2 arrived in 1999 the technology had already moved along enough to make its predecessor look the slightest bit visually stodgy, although still miles ahead of what other companies, like Dreamworks, would cook up later with the likes of Shrek in apparently bottomless attempts to duplicate Pixar’s formula for success. To take advantage of the current vogue for 3D, Pixar has retrofitted their two Toy pictures with the latest in depth simulation, and it is pretty cool to see Woody, Buzz and company jump off the screen to the degree that they do. Never ones to just repackage and let live, Pixar has stitched the two pictures together with a spiffy 10-minute intermission created especially for this re-release featuring a countdown clock, more wacky “outtakes,” trivia and other fun stuff to make the time between features pass more quickly, and to make it harder to tear yourself away and hit the little boy’s room. (Go ahead and stay for the intermission, then take a whiz during the opening credits of Toy Story 2-- you’ve seen ’em a million time s anyway.)

While watching the movies again, with giant plastic glasses attached to my face, I became fascinated by how unaware I was at times that I was watching a 3D movie. Initially I chalked this reaction up to the notion that the movies didn’t originally lend themselves to the kind of visual gimmickry that could be exploited by 3D. But later, in reflecting upon them afterward, it became clear that the reason I “forgot” I was watching a 3D movie was that the experience didn’t seem appreciably different from the one I remembered having seeing them flat in 1995 and 1999 (and on DVD countless times since). In other words, the movies had already been rendered so lifelike, with such attention to tactile detail and congruity, even with the limitations of the 14-year-old pioneering technology, that in my head they were already 3D—the addition of spiffy Real-3D wizardry to “upgrade” the experience seemed superfluous, unnecessary. However, 3D or not, you may be saying to yourself, “I’ve had it with Pixar and the ancillary Toy Story marketing created to part me from my dollar on behalf of my insatiable kids.” And it’s true—after seeing Buzz and Woody on everything from lunch pails to towels to shoes to phones and everywhere else, one could be forgiven for crying “Enough!” So then the best thing about seeing Toy Story and Toy Story 2 on their current re-release (which was originally scheduled for two weeks only but has been, as the parlance used to proclaim, held over by popular demand) turns out to be the opportunity to be reminded, despite supersaturated exposure via DVD and every other pop cultural outlet for exploitation Disney and Pixar could brainstorm over the past 14 years, just how genuinely terrific these movies are as filmmaking, as beautifully modulated stories. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and yes, your appetite will be whetted for the upcoming Toy Story 3 (this one created with 3D in mind), which looks to keep mining the same vein of emotionally rewarding exploration of the relationship between a child and the artifacts of his or her childhood. The folks at Pixar are awfully smart. And it turns out they always were.

And both movies are still proudly rated "G."

See for yourself: the trailer for Pixar's Toy Story 3

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SINISTER SHADOWS OF LIGHT AND PRINT: Goose-pimply Halloween Reads and The Horrors of L.A. Repertory Cinema

2009-10-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” Edgar Allan Poe

“What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.” John Carpenter

“It's as much fun to scare as to be scared.” Vincent Price

Remember when you were a kid and Mother’s Day or Father’s Day would come around, and you decided to feign a little jealousy just to see what it’d get you and you asked your mom or dad, “You’ve got Mother’s/Father’s Day, so how come there’s no Kid’s Day,” and they would invariably reply, “Because every day is Kid’s Day”? Remember that? Well, that’s how I imagine movie genres get to feeling around this time of year. Poor old Westerns, poor, neglected Romantic Comedies, poor, sad dejected old Crime Thrillers and Glossy Hollywood Blockbusters, why, they have no one month they can call their own, where one of them is singled out for celebration, and that’s primarily because, in the world of Internet film sites every day is dedicated to the exploration of one or all of these staples of narrative film genre. The horror film, however, in addition to the plethora of sites and niche bloggers devoted solely to the celebration of horror, from its critically acclaimed aspects to the most corrosively underground and in-your-face, and all the various shades of red in between, even gets writers not usually indulgent in scream fare to sit up straight and dive into the spirit of the Halloween season. And so it is here at SLIFR as well. I’ve got a few scare-oriented posts planned between here and Halloween, but I really felt like I wanted to kick-start the hard-core last two weeks before the holiday with a gathering of goodies to read and see, especially if you’re here in Los Angeles, that will help open your movie-going soul to the massaging, manipulation and eventual mastication at the hands (and claws, and fangs) of all the movie monsters available this year. Let’s not delay any longer. Crypt-keeper, take us away.

READING

As you will have probably figured out by now, there are plenty of places on the Internet to go should you have the jones to find out about just about any aspect of the horror genre. If you’re reading this, you probably already have 40 or 50 of them bookmarked on your browser. So I’d just like to recommend three places out of the thousands you could investigate that might lead you to hours of pleasure and/or conversation about Creepy Things.

First off, there is the annual 31 Days of Horror festival underway at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, a site devoted, as you might have already guessed, to the celebration of films that tend to fly under the radar of the usual star-maker machinery, films that, until the advent of DVD and Netflix, were largely unavailable not only in flyover country but also in the major urban areas, where lip service is often paid to independent, repertory and foreign cinema but spotty distribution and meager public awareness is still the plague of the day. The 31 Days of Horror feature extends that exploratory philosophy to the excavating of worthy horror treats that might not be foremost on most people’s minds as they trudge to Blockbuster to rent scary flicks for their Halloween parties. You will not find a list of “The Ten Scariest Horror Movies,” topped inevitably by The Exorcist, Psycho and John Carpenter’s Halloween on this site. Just a screen grab of their home page will lead you to sharp, quick, entertaining and thoughtful considerations of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Two (a movie oft celebrated on this blog as well), Mexican director Rafael Baledón’s The Man and the Monster (El hombre y el monstruo), Italian exploitation director Alberto de Martino’s Omen knockoff, Holocaust 2000 (starring Kirk Douglas!), Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness, Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim, Fraser Clarke Heston’s Needful Things, Jon Fasano’s rock and roll nightmare Black Roses, Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond and Christopher Theis’s Winterbeast. You can backtrack to reviews posted from October 1-10 as well, with 14 more to come. One obscure horror movie for each of the 31 days of October, get it? And each well-written review also features some further credits on the featured production as well as what company has made the movie available on home video, if such a luxury has been afforded to it. Not Coming to a Theater Near You is an essential bookmark for the entire year, but The 31 Days of Horror is ground-zero required reading for the discriminating horror buff who is quite sure she/he has seen it all, because delights will surely lie waiting within even for the horror completist crowd.

Fellow bloggers/writers Greg Ferrara and Bill Ryan have made a month of it as well, and the treasures they offer during October are not be dismissed as so much hokey vampire lore either. Greg’s Cinema Styles blog has devoted itself entirely to horror for the month, which means the blogmeister is approaching the genre from all kinds of different angles, from his ongoing Creepy Moments series to worthy reconsiderations of less-respected titles like John Carpenter’s Christine and John Moxey’s City of the Dead, to fine essays on beloved icons of the genre like Peter Cushing. Greg’s writing style is energetic and self-reflexive, and Cinema Styles has an inviting home-grown atmosphere that makes it perfect for his remodeling of the manse into its haunted variety this month.

Toward a decidedly more literary bent ventures Bill Ryan, his The Kind of Face You Hate renamed, for his October exercise in horror literature criticism and commentary, The Kind of Face You SLASH!, brings his natural born wit, sliver of crankiness, incredible profligacy and sharp observational wit to bear on an entire month’s worth of horror reading. He profiles authors like the Elephant in the Room (a.k.a. Stephen King), as well as writers with whom you should be—and will be, after Bill is through with you—familiar, such as John Collier, David G. Hartwell, T.E.D. Klein and Joe Hill. It’s enough to not only inspire a self-described horror aficionado like myself, but to make me feel downright illiterate as well. What these two blogger/writers are doing this month seems to these tired, yet nourished eyes, excessively devoted, herculean and especially admirable amidst a sea of jokesters who are as afraid of writing fully fleshed-out pieces as they assume their readership is of reading them. These two blogs, along with Not Coming’s series, offer the kind of serious, yet never dry or pretentious, examination of horror that would tend to give the genre a good name in more intellectual circles if those in those circles would only take time off from condescending to monsters to pay attention and take a longer, deeper look.

Finally, from the world of blogging, comes Kevin J. Olson’s sure-to-be-excellent Italian Giallo Blog-a-Thon, underway now and running straight up through Halloween at Kevin’s superb and ever-so-timely-named blog Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. Those of us who have always enjoyed the excesses of Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Umberto Lenzi, et al are guaranteed to have a good time reading and writing pieces for what is sure to be a widespread and wide-eyed celebration of this gory subgenre. And if you’re unfamiliar with giallo films Kevin’s blog-a-thon will be a good place to get familiar with the basics and discover strange and barely-beaten paths on which to stray from the “mainstream.” I will be contributing some thoughts on Fulci’s early and well-regarded Don’t Torture a Duckling (yes, you read that correctly) and a terrific 1971 thriller called The Case of the Bloody Iris (a.k.a. What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body), directed by Anthony Ascott (Guiliano Carnimeo), in which the lines connecting early giallo pictures to the De Palma of Dressed to Kill may actually outweigh the incessant comparisons to Hitchcock. The movie is also a spectacular fashion show, an incomparable showcase for the slight-off-balance beauty of giallo icon Edwige Fenech, who probably never looked more beautiful (or had so many wardrobe changes) as she did in this movie. Kevin, grazie for the brilliant blog-a-thon idea. We are all looking forward to the great list of references and links and all the reading and recommendations that will surely be the result of it.

(And even though it won’t happen until late November, here’s word on an upcoming Boris Karloff Blog-a-Thon sponsored by the mind-boggling blog Frankensteinia.)

Finally, before we turn our attention away from the electronically printed word, I wanted to point the way to some further links that will undoubtedly provide the horror-minded readers with some great bathroom literature and more good ideas for what to rent (or scavenge from some back-alley DVD company) for the Halloween season.

First, it’s not exactly a horror site, but writer Toby Roan, on his keen site 50 Westerns turns our attention to a long-forgotten Universal-International oater-horror hybrid entitled Curse of the Undead. No doubt in the same vein (sorry, I actually didn’t mean to do that) as those William Beaudine-directed clunkers Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Toby claims Curse of the Undead, in which a vampire and a gunslinger go toe-to-toe, to be a favorite from his childhood, and I must say I’m intrigued. It’s never been available on anything but VHS, however it is available digitally (can’t vouch for the source materials) right here.

Boy-y-y-y-y-y! Those for whom the preceding shout raises hackles of fear, as it echoes through the halls of a particularly creepy metaphysically challenging mausoleum in Don Coscarelli’s happily low-rent Phantasm, will be interested in this round table discussion on the movie. Featured are the imposing Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm, director Coscarelli and unlikely horror icon Reggie Bannister, who has appeared in all the subsequent Phantasm films with Scrimm, as they talk about the movie’s 30th anniversary this year.

And finally, if you’re in Los Angeles and want great links and details to all the areas Halloween celebrations, whether they film, book or party-related, you should familiarize yourself, as I did this afternoon, with Creepy L.A. Los Angelenos will never have to go wanting for things to do during this time of year ever again, not with this blog bookmarked and virtually dog-eared.

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SEEING

“I like to watch.” – Chauncey Gardener

The act of watching is by nature and definition a passive act. But there’s Last Year at Marienbad passive (I’m talking physical inertia, not alleged brain function, Resnais-heads) and then there’s horror movie passive which, even if you want to turn your brain off (and that’s a hell of a lot harder to do than the anti-intellectual lobby would like to believe it is), deals in the physicality of frayed nerves, goose bumps, hands tensed around an arm rest (or someone else’s arm) and the sudden need to jump out of your seat or hit the floor behind the seat in front of you. Even absent the theatrical experience which, if you’re lucky enough to be in the right audience at the right venue, is as important as the cinematography and editing and sound to a nerve-racking night out at a horror movie, a good scary picture absorbed at home can still deliver the chills and make you want to hide under the covers, or at least pace nervously in front of the big-screen TV.

And there is, during this great month of monsters, so much to watch, and the irreplaceable Turner Classic Movies is as great a place as always to start. If you’re planning on staying at home during the next two weeks and need your horror fix, avail yourself of TCM’s amazing lineup and crave no more. They have several horror-themed series in October from which to choose: Directed by William Castle, a tribute to the schlockmeister that airs October 20 featuring five of his most representative works, including The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, Mr. Sardonicus, Strait-Jacket and Castle’s 1963 version of The Old Dark House. October 25 is Meteor Night, in which the phenomenon of deadly creatures from outer space delivered via meteors crashing onto farms throughout middle America is exhaustively examined via a schedule which includes The Blob, Die, Monster, Die! and Riders to the Stars. On October 27 TCM brings us a Psychic Powers marathon, featuring such classics of the genre as Poltergeist, The Power, The Haunting (1963), Village of the Damned and, um, Escape to Witch Mountain.

As TCM inches us closer to Halloween, the programming gets even better. October 30 is a day and night devoted entirely to The Films of Boris Karloff, during which you’ll see 11 Karloff thrillers including The Ghoul, Before I Hang, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Isle of the Dead and several others. If you know Karloff only from his incarnation as the Frankenstein monster, or even as the familiar old icon from Targets and scores of Roger Corman-A.I.P. pictures, oh, what a world is about to open up to you courtesy of TCM.

Then, on Halloween Day, beginning at 6:00 a.m. EST, a lineup of classic terror as only TCM could assemble it in their annual Halloween Marathon. Starting off with the gothic mystery The Woman in White starring Eleanor Parker and Gig Young, the schedule just gets better and better, with such titles as Dead of Night, The Haunting (1963), and two excellent Vincent price starrers, The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Diary of a Madman. But that’s not all. The marathon continues with Kent Jones’ superb documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, followed, of course, by two of Lewton’s greatest achievements, Cat People and its subtly creepy fairy-tale sequel Curse of the Cat People. This is a lineup that truly embodies the essence of Halloween at its most unnerving and quietly imposing, well worth TiVo-ing or sitting straight through with bag after bag of popcorn and, preferably, a hand to hold onto, or crush in terror.

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Another network worth paying attention to over the Halloween weekend is the MGM HD Channel, available on DirecTV and other satellite services. The channel, which frequently offers premieres of movies not previously available in high-definition incarnations (their screening of Convoy earlier this year was, for me, a revelation), has a real trick-or-treat bag of gory goodies and believe-it-or-not baddies in store during their Dying for the Weekend HD horrorfest, which will run all day Saturday, October 31 and Sunday, November 1. There’s a fair amount of dreck tossed together with the real treats, but some of the highlights include HD showings of notorious ‘80s shockers like The Burning, The Believers and The Video Dead; a nod to the ‘70s American grindhouse featuring Roberts Blossom in the Ed Gein-inspired Deranged, Wes Craven’s original Last House on the Left and William Smith in Grave of the Vampire; a dip into classic-period terrors like John Carradine in Revenge of the Zombies and Vincent Price in the original adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, entitled The Last Man on Earth; a Hammer vampire mini-festival with good HD looks at Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers, plus Ralph Bates in Twins of Evil and the rarely-seen Vampire Circus; and, for good measure, the A.I.P. sequel The Return of Count Yorga, featuring Robert Quarry and Mariette Hartley, never before seen in HD. For a full listing of the schedule and times for each movie, including many not mentioned here, check out the Dying for the Weekend page on the MGM HD web site.

If you’re looking for inspiration for some of your Halloween rental choices, don’t forget that Trailers from Hell features new cult and horror trailers every week, along with commentary by directors like Joe Dante, Allan Arkush and Stuart Gordon, screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Josh Olson, among scores of others, laid directly over the trailers themselves. (You can also opt to just watch the trailer sans commentary.) It’s a safe bet that many of the movies often discussed in posts like this one, as well as hundreds of others that aren’t, are covered in the ever-growing Trailers from Hell archive. You can spend hours in there clicking and laughing and taking notes.

Photos by Lisa Rose.

Dante, a key part of the Trailers from Hell brain trust, has a new 3D horror film called The Hole which played the Venice Film Festival, but will not be ready for harvesting goose flesh this coming Halloween. Another Dante project will, though. It’s a series of Internet webisodes in a decidedly horrific vein entitled Splatter, created in collaboration with Dante’s mentor Roger Corman, their first creative collaboration in several years. Splatter, produced by Netflix, stars Corey Feldman as a rock music genius, Johnny Splatter, who accumulated as many enemies as hit records on his meteoric rise to the top. When Splatter’s sudden death is ruled a suicide, a small circle of professional parasites and hangers-on drift to his Hollywood Hills mansion for the reading of his last will and testament, ready to pick clean the bones of their late colleague. But Johnny unexpectedly returns long after what should have been his final curtain for a very bloody encore.

Photos by Lisa Rose.

The decidedly EC Comics vibe that a simple plot synopsis of Splatter exudes should be no surprise to fans of either Dante or Corman. What makes Splatter even more interesting is its interactive aspect. The first episode, scheduled to debut on October 29, two days before Halloween, can be seen for free on Netflix, and after each episode viewers will be able to vote on how the storyline should unfold, which basically translates as-- which nasty bastard licking his chops over Splatter’s coffin (where the undead rocker spends very little time) should next die a horrific and protracted death at the hands of the title character? The second episode will be available on November 6, and the finale, fittingly enough, on Friday, November 13. (You can learn more about the series and how to vote from the official Splatter press release.)

Roger Corman discusses Splatter> and working with Joe Dante

On the set of Splatter with Joe Dante

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Of course, if you’re anywhere near a first-run multiplex in the United States you’ll be able to celebrate Halloween in the company of .mainstream horror pictures like Saw 6 (!!!), Zombieland (which I still haven’t seen), the remake of The Stepfather (which I choose to avoid at this juncture), and, if you’re lucky Paranormal Activity, which I am dangerously close to having heard too much about for its much-talked-about freshness factor to be fully effective. It should be noted too that Lars Von Trier’s controversial psychological horror film Antichrist begins its two-week run at the Nuart on October 23, just in time for Halloween. And just in time for the holiday, Warners releases Orphan on DVD and Blu-ray on October 27.

But being in Los Angeles does have its advantages revival cinema-wise, and during the Halloween season can seem even more pronounced and exciting than they do during the rest of the year. For example, if you have cable TV you have a couple of opportunities to catch Robert Wise’s superbly unnerving 1963 thriller The Haunting on Turner Classic Movies. But if you’re in the Los Angeles area next weekend, you can see the unmatched creeps of Wise’s atmospheric classic in an authentic movie palace, the Alex Theater in downtown Glendale, a theater that is, according to the good and true folks at the Alex Film Society, perhaps itself haunted. So why tempt fate by showing a superb spook show like The Haunting there? Well, because it’s Halloween, dummy. The AFS has upped the ectoplasmic ante by inviting noted psychic medium Michael J. Kouri to not only introduce the film but also talk about his personal encounters with ghosts, “read” the audience, and talk specifically about who—or what—might be haunting the historic theater. The movie screens at both 2:00 and 8:00 p.m. on October 24.

Speaking of gorgeous venues and ghastly frights, the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles will feature a screening of F.W. Murnau’s seminal silent vampire classic Nosferatu, to be augmented by renowned accompanist Clark Wilson on the Disney Hall organ. Tickets are on sale now for the Halloween night performance.

Of course, if you’d rather trick or treat in the company of “real” movie monsters, there’s always Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. You can test your ability to withstand the fear factor of creepy mazes and in-your-face icons of fear inside four new mazes this year, built around the Saw franchise, the Rob Zombie-fied Halloween mythology, and My Bloody Valentine, whose ultra-dank and unnerving mine sets should prove to be daunting and scary as hell to navigate through. The fourth maze is devoted to Chucky, the cackling, profane and aggressively homicidal doll from Child’s Play and the subsequent sequels. Previously Chucky’s appearance at Halloween Horror Nights was as a master of scare-emonies of sorts—you could always find Chucky holding audiences’ attention in a central courtyard with a post-Don Rickles onslaught of insult comedy that always had terror-hungry audiences bowled over with laughter. But this year Chucky gets to jump off the stage and into your lap, where he will attempt to bury some sort of sharp cutting instrument as you make your way through his special circle of Universal Studios hell. Now, that’s what I call a promotion.

But if the idea of Chucky jumping into your lap is just a bit too interactive for your taste, yet you find the prospect of spending some time in the company of this killer doll and his creators attractive, then the option offered by the UCLA School of Film and Television may prove to be one for which you might readily trade the Halloween Horror Nights experience. Thursday, October 29, the school will play host to screenwriter and alumnus Don Mancini, producer David Kirschner, and Brad Dourif, the irreplaceable voice of Chucky, for a free 20th-anniversary screening of Child’s Play (1988), the original killer doll movie. The screening will be on a first come, first admitted basis and will likely fill the James Bridges Theater at Melnitz Hall quickly, so be sure to be there early on October 29 for the 7:30 pm. start time. Mssrs. Mancini, Kirschner and Dourif will conduct a Q&A as part of the evening as well.

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As always, the good folks at the Cinefamily have provided an excellent menu of holiday Halloween fare, and they’ve been at it all month. I could talk about all the delights that have already passed us by, but that would be morbid and unproductive (and yet another reminder of how I should have had this post ready at least three weeks ago!). Instead, a glance at what is left to come in the two terror-filled weeks before Halloween at the Silent Movie Theater should be more than enough information to either fill your calendar or make you curse the laws of physics that prevent you from being in two or more places at one time. Here we go.

The Cinefamily has devoted Wednesdays in October to The Sounds of Horror, which in these programming hands doesn’t mean sound effects so much as how music can be used, as accompaniment to silent film imagery, or as text to make arguments for and against the soul-ensnaring qualities of Satanically-inspired rock. Coming up on October 21 is another screening of Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, which I saw last month at the New Beverly in a version narrated by William S. Burroughs and scored by Jean-Luc Ponty. Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s strange, visually arresting mish-mash of documentary footage, “re-enactments” and representations of Satan-obsessed wood carvings and other art, is actually quite a pliable work when it comes to soundtracks (several other than the Ponty score have been recorded for it). Thankfully, the Cinefamily will be taking full advantage of the films’ receptivity to aural interpretation when it invites experimental electronic musician Eddie Ruscha to perform the score he recently wrote for the film, which was performed at the Billy Wilder Theater when the film screened there earlier this year. This is a can’t-miss event.

The Sounds of Horror completes its journey on October 28 with a “Mondo Remix” of the Christian documentary Hell’s Bells which purports, in a rather convincing Craig Baldwin-esque manner, to lay out just how heavy metal squeezes, contaminates and otherwise corrupts the souls of the youth (and the aging rockers too, I suppose) under its evil spell. According to the Cinefamily’s liner notes, you will “witness how rock and roll mocks Christ, tempts the libido and promotes the worship of Satan, all through album covers, music videos, backwards messages and occult iconography.” Add to that a live performance by “hell’s houseband” Nilbog, rocking a set full of covers of favorite horror movies, and you’ve got yet another unforgettable night of fun at the Silent Movie Theater.

Thursday’s Slashers! series, co-presented by Arbogast On Film (which has its own very cool “31 Screams, 31 Films” series underway right now) and Bloody Disgusting.com, has a full head of steam rolling into Thursday night, October 21, with perhaps its best triple feature of the month. The evening begins with a rare screening of the uncut version of 1981’s My Bloody Valentine, with director George Mihalka in person for a Q&A and introduction to the film. I just got a look at this one myself last week, after vague memories of a VHS screening some 25 years ago and the memories of the 3D remake fresh in my head and I must say, as post-Jason kill movies go, this is a pickax above the usual fare. There’s something about the way the movie resides in the dead-end lives of its characters, stuck in a seaside mining town, and the way it exploits the atmosphere of dread in the town, and of course deep down in that mine shaft from whence the gas-mask-wearing Harry Warden rises to wreak havoc on those who would dare to celebrate Valentine’s Day, that is pretty effective. It’s silly, gory and, unlike so many of the movies that were cut from the cheap fabric of Camp Crystal Lake, it isn’t an inept cheat. For that, give thanks and have fun! It comes packaged at the Silent Movie Theater with yet another highlight/aberration from the ‘80s Jason era horror film, Fred Walton’s clever, self-aware, but never smart-assed horror comedy April Fool’s Day, which shares its good-natured spirit of fun amongst a terrific cast including Deborah foreman (Valley Girl), Amy Steel (Friday the 13th Part II and Thomas G. Wilson (Back to the Future). This one is a real treat. The third part of the evening’s trilogy of terror is a VHS screening of an obscure British video nasty entitled Don’t Open Until Christmas, in which a busy London overcrowded with street Santas finds the holiday herd being thinned by a psycho who has no love for the jolly old fella in the red suit. The Cinefamily, Arbogast on Film and Bloody-Disgusting.com all assure us that this one is a hoot.

The Slashers! Series concludes on October 29 with another gore-soaked triple feature—Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall, the notorious psycho primate thriller Shakma starring Christopher Atkins (“Two-time recipient of the National Association of Theater Owners’ Star of the Year Award”), and a brand-new HD transfer of Night of the Demon (1980), about which I will, as I often do when dealing with films showing at the Cinefamily, defer to their own calendar notes, which I could never surpass:

“Night Of The Demon breaks major slasher conventions by introducing one of the most unusual and allusive psycho killers of all time -- BIGFOOT! Who is Bigfoot, and why is he doing these terrible things? Our furry friend has gone completely homicidal, leaving a trail of dead girl scouts, castrated bikers and raped teenagers in his wake. This Z-grade doozy packs a bloody wallop-- one of the most absurd and comically gory movies we've ever seen. The audience reaction to this film is gonna be half the fun. DO NOT MISS IT. Director James C. Wasson and producer James B. Hall will be here in person!”

Due to my relative inexperience with The Strange World of Coffin Joe, the first career-spanning series devoted to Brazilian horror icon Jose Mojica Marins and his atheistic undertaker protagonist Coffin Joe (Ze do Caixao for our Portuguese speaking readership) that occupies Friday evenings at the Cinefamily, I will once again defer to the Cinefamily and their excellent notes on the filmmaker and his films:

“Like some kind of demented amalgamation of a Ghoulardi-esque horror host and a Sam Fuller self-styled total auteur, José Mojica Marins doesn't just write and direct his macabre cinematic poetry, but stars in it as well -- as Zé do Caixão, aka "Coffin Joe", a solipsistic Nietschze-spouting godless undertaker sporting a snazzy Dracula cape, top hat and the theatrically long fingernails of an unkempt corpse. Raised from childhood to adulthood in a movie theatre where he literally slept behind the screen as a child, Marins has an instinctive and natural filmic ability to manifest his own ghoulish obsessions; Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha called him "a primitive artist...and pure filmmaker." An icon of horror in his native Brazil, Coffin Joe's far-reaching status as a pop culture folk hero manifested in movies, comics, television shows -- even his own brand of nail polish! At once surreal, psychedelic, spooky, and gruesome, the strange world of José Mojica Marins must be seen to be believed.”

Friday, October 23, see Awakening of the Beast and Finis Hominis (End of Man), and on Friday, October 30, do not miss Embodiment of Evil, the long–anticipated completion of the Coffin Joe trilogy coupled with Marins’ one-of-a-kind Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind, “a flat-out freak-out multi-movie montage of the most insane footage censored from Marins' entire career up to this film's release, and framed by a self-reflexive plot about a man driven to madness by the films, who's convinced that Coffin Joe will come to steal his wife” (Cinefamily Notes). Sounds strange, all right, but how it could be stranger than Embodiment of Evil, which I was lucky enough to see when it screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival earlier this year, I cannot imagine, given that Embodiment features some of the most perverse and disturbing imagery I’ve ever seen in a film. I'm thinking of the moment when Coffin Joe finally finds a female sex slave weird and willing and soulless enough to meet his standard for the ideal woman to bear his demonic progeny-- we are then treated to the sight of Coffin Joe mounting and groping the unfortunate woman, the entire grotesque spectacle culminating in penetration by the filmmaker/star as seen from inside the violated vaginal canal. Believe me, it’s even creepier than what you’re imagining right now. It’s a genuinely bizarre film, and according to those in the Coffin Joe know it is entirely of a piece with his primitive prevailingly twisted vision.

For more information on these films, please check out the exhaustive and entertaining information provided by the Cinefamily, and also this excellent piece on Jose Mojica Marins by writer Christoph Huber recently published in L.A. Weekly.

Finally, Saturdays at the Silent Movie Theater in October are devoted to great double features of Technicolor Terror, another series programmed in collaboration with Arbogast On Film. Technicolor horror films were a rarity, the prevailing wisdom being not only that black-and-white was more traditionally associated with being more effective for atmospheric horror and science fiction films of the ‘40s and ‘50s, but also the budgetary concerns of such films often precluded using the more expensive color photographic process. Enter the wildly popular Hammer Films horror series in the mid’ 50s, which proved almost instantly that color was well-suited to their more lurid-leaning take on horror classics—rich red blood, gray-green decaying flesh and the seductive dark tones of night and evil. Such a continuous palette of color would become the studios’ bread and butter and pave the way for two decades of building on a legacy of visually sumptuous horror that would become synonymous with the Hammer brand.

Unfortunately, by the time this article is posted all but one of the Technicolor terror series will have already passed. (Click here for a list of those titles.) But Arbogast and company have truly saved the best for last: an October 24 double bill of Terence Fisher-helmed Hammer classics that set the template for the blood-gushing seductive thrall that these films would cast over an entire generation raised on the relatively sedate Universal horror pictures. Horror of Dracula (1958) made Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee into both movie stars and indelible horror icons—Cushing as Van Helsing, the indefatigable vampire hunter, and Lee unforgettable as the virtually silent Count Dracula, his eternally bloodthirsty prey. The movie is coupled by Fisher’s The Revenge of Frankenstein, a follow-up to the studio’s wildly popular Frankenstein remake, The Curse of Frankenstein, in which Mary Shelley’s source material finally becomes irrelevant to the pursuit of Hammer’s exploration of the darkest corners of her literary creation. Cushing is probably even better as Baron Frankenstein, the obsessed creator of perverted life, than he is as Van Helsing (a relatively one-note role in comparison to the variations he was able to work on Frankenstein over his career). Revenge, however, features not Lee as the monster (as did Curse) but instead Michael Gwynne, who brings a fascinating pathos all his own to this accursed creation. This is a double feature to truly be grateful for, and of course an unmissable one.

Please refer to the Cinefamily website for all the pertinent information, including dates, tickets and show times, on these films and many more.

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The Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood is probably not the first place you would think of when images of haunted houses and other Halloween tropes of terror begin coming to mind. But the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Hammer has a rare treat (and no tricks) planned for horror movie buffs on Halloween night. It’s a cobweb-laden evening devoted to Amicus Productions, Britain’s other studio/force of evil (founded by two Americans, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg), which existed successfully alongside Hammer Films for nearly 20 years. The studio produced a slew of terrific scare pictures, including a run of E.C. Comics-style anthology horror films (Tales from the Crypt, Asylum, Vault of Horror, The House That Dripped Blood) whose influence is still being felt today. And two of their finest will be screened at the Wilder. The first is John Moxey’s City of the Dead (1960) (a.k.a. Horror Hotel), revolves around a student researching a small town’s history of witch burning whose disappearance causes an ancient satanic conspiracy to come to light. Greg Ferrara has already offered some perceptive words about the movie’s low-budget creativity and agility with an atmosphere often so thick it seems tactile. City of the Dead is a rare treasure in any format, but since it can be seen here in a gorgeous 35mm print, the opportunity UCLA and the Wilder are affording really is one of which any serious horror aficionado really should avail themselves. Starring Patricia Bessel, Betta St, John and Christopher Lee, City of the Dead proves what an extensive filmography or simple geography cannot—that Hammer was not the only game in town creatively as well. Showing in 16mm is another Amicus gem, The Skull, this one boasting the acting acumen of Peter Cushing as a collector of occult objects who becomes possessed by the Marquis de Sade when he obtains the writer’s bone head. Lee pops up again as the collector’s colleague, who knows what his pal has gotten hold of and tries to warn him before the spirit of De Sade moves in full-time. The Skull was directed by my all-time favorite Hammer and Amicus director, Freddie Francis (Tales from the Crypt), the famous cinematographer who shot another great horror classic, Jack Clayton's The Innocents (based on Henry James' Turn of the Screw) and who gave up realizing other people’s films in favor of a directing career that flourished under the critical radar for nearly two decades, until David Lynch began hiring him in the early ‘80s again for the passion he brought to such visually sumptuous movies as The Elephant Man and Dune. The Skull amply displays how Francis was able to translate his facility with creating and realizing images into the pulp passion of the fearsome genre with which he was so closely associated.

For more information on the full schedule at the Hammer, click here.

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The American Cinematheque is turning the Aero into a fine specimen of haunted house this Halloween as well with exceptionally good Halloween weekend programming. Friday October 30 is a double dip into “House”-era Universal monster classics, House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). Both movies do monster team-ups to great effect-- HoF features the same Dracula/Frankenstein’s monster/Wolfman triple-header that would be so effectively used for laughs with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein four years later and marks the last time Karloff would appear in a Universal Frankenstein film, albeit this time in the mad scientist role; House of Dracula focuses on John Carradine’s appearance as the legendary vampire (he also plays the count in HoF) alongside Lon Chaney Jr.’s iconic (and perpetually brow-furrowed) Larry Talbot. The late-period Universal horrors rarely get unveiled on the big-screen (I wish someone here or elsewhere had included my personal favorite, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman), so this kind of opportunity really should be taken advantage of. This double bill makes for a much better horror outing than some of the cheesier triple and quadruple features lurking out there for your terrified approval.

But the Aero really has it all over the competition when it comes to Halloween night itself and its 4th annual Halloween Dusk-to-Dawn Horrorthon. It starts at 7:30 and God knows when it’ll actually end, what with the planned between film free food, giveaways, trailers, “crazy shorts” and lots of other surprises. Bringing your jammies and a pillow is probably not as frowned upon as you might think! But on top of all that fun, the schedule of films is actually much stronger than the cheesy ‘80s vault-diving that often characterizes these kinds of programs. The Aero has one masterpiece, three very interesting, if flawed, social satires, one notoriously grimy grindhouse “classic” and the obligatory unknown quantity, probably included more to make sure the house clears out early in the breaking hours of dawn than for any reasons of quality or notoriety. The night starts with Wes Craven’s weird and downright absurd Reagan-era satire The People Under the Stairs, and then moves on to probably the most grossly underrated chapter of George A. Romero’s apparently endless zombie saga, Day of the Dead. Then Brian Yuzna’s Society, which plays like the ultimate ‘80s artifact, actually has some pretty interesting things to say about Reagan-era class warfare—it’s kinda like Caddyshack with incest, cannibalism and surreal makeup effects replacing golf. And it stars Billy Warlock and his high hair.

Around 1:00 a.m., just when you’re starting to get a little delirious, the Aero hits you with David Cronenberg’s The Brood, a movie plenty frightening enough in the sober light of day—good luck in the middle of the night after three movies in a row and a stomach cavity bulging with free popcorn and diet soda. By the end of The Brood you’ll be ready for something completely disgusting and without redeeming value of any sort, and William Lustig’s Maniac! might be just what the nurse on duty ordered (you know, the hot Cathy Moriarty look-alike in the tight white uniform distributing the phony insurance policies and barf bags in the lobby). And I do hope someone videotapes the undoubtedly surreal 3:00 Q&A between director Lustig, who will be at the Aero in person, and the punch-drunk (and perhaps even drunk-drunk) audience. Finally, to make sure 5:00 a.m. doesn’t roll around fast enough, there’s the somewhat generically titled Crown International Pictures entry Terror to make sure this 4th annual Halloween Horrorthon ends with a whimper instead of scream. Admission is $20 ($15 for Cinematheque members), and remember, that price includes a dark night of gut-busting snacks. Who could resist?

For more details, including tickets, go straight to the Aero web site.

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Finally, the vibe at the New Beverly this Halloween has a definite retro Universal/A.I.P. appeal running through it, but although movies from those two horror studio traditions are prominent, they are not the only courses being offered. Michael and the gang got the season off to an official start down at the New Bev this past weekend with a wonderful double feature of horror comedies, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Don Knotts flailing through the terrific Universal comedy The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Both were perfect family fare, and judging by the throngs of parents bringing along their kids, myself included, that showed up Sunday afternoon, the double bill definitely reached its intended audience. (While the kids were laughing at Don Knotts, I was noticing his love interest and thinking, where have you been all my life, Joan Staley?)

And speaking of intended audiences, those of us seated for the trailers before the 3:55 show of A&CMF got a Tyler Durden-esque surprise to go along with our thrills and chills. Just after the charmingly cheesy trailer for 13 Ghosts, introduced by William Castle himself, had finished, up came another preview for a typical ‘80s-type horror flick with a bunch of hard-partying jock and cheerleader types being fattened for the kill when they break into a funeral parlor for some gnarly partyin’ and encounter a decidedly Dr. Frank-n-furter-esque prom queen demon in a low-cut dress and tiara. A smidgen or two of cheaply done gore effects in the preview went unnoticed. But then, about 30 seconds in, a two or three-second shot of some female frontal nudity! Whoa, gasped my leaping eyebrows, that was unexpected, as I became vaguely aware again that my nine and seven-year-old daughters were on either side of me taking all this in. A family of five seated near the front of the auditorium—father, mother and two or three young ‘uns—made a hasty exit to the lobby and did not return to their seats until the trailers were completely over and the feature was ready to commence. Which was fortunate on their part, because the trailer for Night of the Demons, one of three of the New Beverly’s Halloween night features, had one more shot of nubile nudity to offer up before it was finished. As it wrapped up, my oldest daughter turned to me and said, “Hey, I thought they weren’t supposed to show beeps” (her word for boobs) and I just told her that someone must have made a mistake. (Apparently it was an accidental holdover from the trailer reel for the previous night’s midnight screening of Dario Argento’s Inferno.) I’m not exactly sure who “they” were (The filmmakers? The New Beverly?) that my daughter was referring to, but since she didn’t seem overly concerned about the mammarian exposure I certainly wasn’t about to make a big deal out of it for her. (She was far more upset when we saw the Inferno trailer before an Indiana Jones double bill last month.) Most amusing, though, was the reaction of my seven-year-old. After the preview was finished I asked her if she thought there was anything odd or unusual about it, and her response was a deadpan classic: “The monster guy at the end looked kinda fake.”

In his typically concerned and considerate fashion, Michael Torgan, the New Beverly’s owner and chief programmer, caught up with us as we were making our way out into the evening after the show and was extremely apologetic about the trailer being shown during what was billed as a family-oriented affair. I have a feeling that the dad who hauled his kids up to the lobby may have read Michael the riot act, or at least made his displeasure and level of uncomfortableness clearly apparent. But really, was it such a big deal? No, not really. It’s the age-old choice of protective parents everywhere to get upset over their kids glimpsing a two-second shot of someone’s plasticized tits while thinking nothing of sitting through a gory trailer for a silly, gory thriller where dismembered arms and snarling, mutilated agents of Satan spewing black goo is the moment’s real emphasis. In the immortal words of Carrie White, “They’re not dirty pillows, Momma, they’re breasts, and every girl has them… and I don’t wanna talk about it anymore!”

But what of the rest of the schedule leading up to Halloween night? If I were to program a series of horror pictures taken directly from a list of my childhood favorites and early influences, it might look a lot like what the New Beverly has in store for this coming season. Here’s what’s coming up:

Brian Quinn and Eric Caidin kick off successive Tuesdays with the Grindhouse Film Festival; tonight, Tuesday, October 20, with a wonderful double bill of blaxploitation horror thrillers from the American International Pictures stable. First, J.D.’s Revenge stars Glynn Turman as a quarterback who becomes possessed by the spirit of a murderous mobster from 1940s New Orleans. Turman is scheduled to appear for the Grindhouse crowd to take part in a Q&A after the movie and lead straight into a wild and wooly screening of Blacula, a surprisingly scary picture due in no small measure to a terrific performance by William Marshall as the titular bloodsucker, a.k.a “Dracula’s soul brother.” This is a guaranteed good time at the movies with two of the loosest, funniest and most entertaining of blaxploitation horror films.

Then it’s on to October 21-22 and my dream double feature of the month, overriding just about any program referred to above for sheer happiness, nostalgia and wit, a Vincent Price two-fer of arguably his two greatest movies. The first, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, casts Price as Anton Phibes, a supposedly dead musicologist exacting biblically inspired revenge on the nine surgeons he holds responsible for the death of his wife, is a seminal movie for me in my developing appreciation of contemporary horror movies. My mother drove me and a good friend two hours to the neighboring town to see this first-run for my 11th birthday, and it remains a touchstone for me, not only for its elements of tragedy and horror, but also for my discovery, upon seeing it later in life, of its black humor. (Phibes was directed by Robert Fuest, who was instrumental in creating the sensibility of the TV classic The Avengers, which shares the same droll humor found in this feature.) Every time I hear the organ music heard in the trailer, or hear Price as Phibes intone, “You can’t… kill… me… Doctor… I am already...dead” the goose flesh comes up right on schedule.

It would be worth seeing all on its own, but the New Beverly has paired it with a movie that may be even better than Phibes, even as it shares the theme of spectacularly staged acts of vengeance. In Theater of Blood, Price plays a hammy theatrical actor who takes revenge on a guild of critics for a series of bad reviews by devising deaths derived from the plays of Shakespeare. (One corpulent reviewer is force-fed to the point of bursting a meat pie made from his beloved poodle, a la Titus Andronicus.) The connection to The Avengers here is the casting of Diana Rigg as the angry actor’s daughter and collaborator in murder, yet the tone is even blacker, more grisly, though by no means less fun. It’s simultaneously the acting out of what is surely a very common actor’s fantasy and a rude, bloody rumination on the often tense, synergistic relationship between the actor (or any creative artist) and the critic. Seeing these two top-notch Vincent Price classics together on one bill, on the big screen, will be bliss indeed and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

The empire of William Castle, one of the movie’s greatest, or at least most unembarrassed and unapologetic showmen, is the focus of the New Beverly’s program on October 25 and 26. First off is the keen and spunky documentary Spine Tingler! The William castle Story, featuring testimony about the producer/creator of Emergo! Illlusion-O and other old-fashioned interactive shock gimmicks from such luminaries as John Waters, Leonard Maltin and Forrest J. Ackerman. Then you get to see what all the fuss is about firsthand by way of one of Castle’s signature schlockers, 13 Ghosts and get a mainline shot of horror carny hucksterism from the man who embodied good-natured, money-grubbing exploitation like no one else in the history of the movies.

Grindhouse Night Part Deux for this Halloween season is another trip into the darkest corners of the American International Pictures catalog, this time for a real head trip—two heads, that is. The (very brief) vogue for two-headed A.I.P. creature features lasted for exactly two movies, and Brian and Eric have ‘em both for you on October 27 on “A.I.P. in the ‘70s: Two-Headed Horror Night.” First, the ultra-low-rent “thriller” The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant features Bruce Dern and Pat Priest chasing terror after the head of a murderous criminal is grafted onto the body of a backward 300-pound farm boy. Yes, it’s just about as good as the trailer makes it out to be. (Coincidentally, TITHT was the second feature when I first saw The Abominable Dr. Phibes back in 1971.) But the apex of the two-headed trend has to be the conjoining of good-natured giant Rosey Grier with the head of virulent millionaire bigot Ray Milland in A.I.P.’s pretty darned wonderful The Thing with Two Heads, a two-head-spinning restaging of The Defiant Ones that replaces handcuffs with biracial head transplant surgery and a distinctly Archie Bunker-esque sense of humor. Grier and Milland are game as hell, and the movie, though at times a tad sluggish, is over all a prime hoot. (I wrote about it fondly on New Year’s Eve nearly five years ago.)

One should never take for granted the appearance on the big screen of any of the Universal classics, and I’m not about to start now. October 28 and 29 meet me at the New Beverly to pay homage to the originals, Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s masterfully creepy Dracula (1931), and Boris Karloff in perhaps the genre’s pinnacle, James Whale’s brilliant and unexpectedly moving The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

The New Beverly’s Halloween weekend fare, programmed by Julia Marchese and Phil Blankenship, highlights two distinctly different theme triple features. Julia’s baby, on October 30, is a festival of ‘80s horror in a comedy vein. The comedy starts deep black with Dennis Christopher as a movie-obsessed killer in Fade to Black, and then lightens up considerably with Jim Carrey and Lauren Hutton in Once Bitten, and Michael J. Fox in the hair-raising Teen Wolf. If you haven’t had enough synth-laden pop scoring and post-Huey Lewis rock after these last two, then you never will!

Then, on Halloween night, October 31, Phil brings a demonic triple bill to the New Bev—the aforementioned Night of the Demons, plus Lamberto Bava’s far more interesting Demons (1985), co-written by Dario Argento, and Bava’s ultra-bizarre follow-up Demons 2 (1986). These two are very well regarded giallo zombie pictures that aren’t often screened these days, especially together, and so if you have any fondness for the gooey, gory pleasures of this particular branch of horror cinema, you really should make your way out to the New Beverly on Halloween night. There might not be free candy and other treats, but you probably won’t feel much like eating during these movies anyway!

And don’t forget, Phil will also be ushering in a splashy new print of Conan the Destroyer (1984) to the New Beverly Midnight Movies on October 24. It’s the 25th anniversary of the unapologetically cheesy sequel to Oliver Stone and John Milius’s weight-of-the-world heavy (and heavily inept) Conan the Barbarian (1981), and I’ve always appreciated that cheesiness, and its evocation of the Italian Hercules/sword and sandal epics, as well as the rubber monster aesthetic of the A.I.P. Land That Time Forgot series, over Stone and Milius’s grim self-seriousness. Director Richard Fleischer knows how dumb it all is, but the movie never spends too much time winking at the audience or itself—it has the wide-eyed, go-for-broke attitude of Saturday afternoon fun that is very hard to fake. And any movie that gathers together the future destroyer of California alongside the likes of Wilt Chamberlain, Grace Jones and Mako automatically gets me on its side. Conan the Destroyer is, of all things, a light, silly, rambunctious pseudo-epic, and I bet you it goes down just as easily at midnight in 2009 as it did, against all odds and good sense, when it made me giggle so happily during a Saturday matinee 25 years ago.

Get more details about show times and prices, and maybe even a sneak peek at some of the stuff coming in November, by visiting the web site for the New Beverly Cinema. And have a nerve-racking Halloween!

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'TIS THE SEASON...

2009-10-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

My big fat post on Halloween-themed reading and Los Angeles repertory cinema selections to celebrate the season of the witch is coming in a few hours, but I felt like there was no better way to start off an unofficial salute to the horror holiday than with this piece from renowned Internet song parody maestro Goldentusk. Here he gives us the essence of John Carpenter’s Halloween in a very special, kinda mind-boggling way. He’s… coming… home….

Thanks for the tip, Don!

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CRASH AND BANG: FREEBIE AND THE BEAN

2009-10-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

American moviegoers take the buddy action movie for granted. After two episodes of 48 Hrs. and four incarnations of Lethal Weapon, after everything from The Blues Brothers to Bad Boys (parts un and deux) to long-forgotten comedies like Dan Aykroyd and Gene Hackman in Loose Cannons and Martin Lawrence paired with Luke Wilson in Blue Streak, it is, I think, assumed that the comedic formula of two guys bonding together over a cocktail shaker filled with mutual distrust and respect-- all mixed up by the perpetual motion and turbulence generated during nonstop pursuits by foot and all manner of vehicles-- is one that is as old as the movies themselves.

But the popularity of the modern buddy action comedy as we know it today can probably be traced straight back to what director Richard Rush, writer Robert Kaufman and stars Alan Arkin, James Caan and Valerie Harper et al did on their summer vacation back in 1974. Released later that year as a Christmas present to unsuspecting moviegoers, Freebie and the Bean became a smash hit, despite the multiple warnings heard emanating from a dog pile of bad reviews. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby decried the movie as the worst of the year’s crop of flop cop comedies, “probably because it has a cast of otherwise good actors doing bits of business (sometimes called acting) as if they thought they could upstage all of the movie's automobiles, which are seldom still.” The cherry on top of Canby’s dismissal came when he admitted “finally get(ting) the feeling that a car directed the picture —it’s as sensitive as a door knob and as witty as a bumper sticker — and maybe one did, though the title credits list Richard Rush,” who, as Canby is quick to point out, earned his reputation in Hollywood directing low-budget motorcycle dramas.

Canby’s point of view was not uncommon among people who were paid to see movies back in 1974. But as far as the public was concerned (and even some directors—Stanley Kubrick was an out-and-proud fan of the film) Freebie and the Bean was gold. In an era when such matters didn’t much concern either the intelligentsia or the great unwashed, Freebie and the Bean was about as un-P.C. a comedy as one could possibly imagine. The movie is a product of a time that recognized the reality of an emerging multiculturalism and the relatively unquestioned societal bigotry that was all tangled up with that new social reality. Yet Freebie, unlike, say, All in the Family, wasn’t a satirical attack on those prejudices. It existed, then and now, as a reflection of them, of how people (and filmmakers) recognized, ignored, and sometimes reveled in the impatience and fear and anger people from opposing points of view had for each other, fearlessly spelunking for the comedic tension that arose from those conflicts, and from the mutual respect that struggled to balance them out. Arkin and Caan artfully walk this tightrope while blasting each other with the funniest bile-soaked, rapid-fire, semi-improvised dialogue ever to grace an action comedy. These two really seem like they’ve spent an adult lifetime dodging each other’s verbal onslaughts. And their partnership is one with real dirt under its fingernails, a long-abandoned model of movie friendship cut from the moth-eaten cloth of interpersonal paranoia, suspicion, respect and, yes, the sneaky subtext of homoerotic romance and, of course, panic-- exactly the kind of treat most often flattened-out or outright buried underneath the THX Dolby super-soundtracks of modern play-it-safe crash-and-bang contraptions.

And make no mistake-- Freebie and the Bean is a crash-and-bang contraption. All that talk of social reality is neither to try to pretend that the movie was ghost-written by Athol Fugard nor to ignore the exhilaratingly high percentage of vehicular mayhem that it showcases. Indeed, some of the funniest, most breathtakingly hilarious car stunt work in the history of the movies is contained in this picture. But what’s ultimately rewarding about the movie is that the struggle Canby suggests the actors are engaged in, trying to upstage Rush’s constantly accelerating automobiles (Is there a more aptly named moviemaker?), is one that, through their own accelerated interaction and awareness of each other as performers, and their own brand of sensitivity to what the other is doing, the actors win hands-down. Nothing in Freebie and the Bean is as chokingly funny as Caan and Arkin, as the two eponymous and antagonist detectives, pitching the movie’s central plot mechanism—a proposal to protect a local crime boss from an impending hit just long enough so they can get the evidence to arrest him themselves—to the apoplectic San Francisco D.A., played with brilliantly discombobulated disbelief by Alex Rocco. These two are their own multi-car pile-up, walking all over each other, finishing each other’s sentences, stutter-starting and stopping mid-sentence as they try to weasel Rocco and avoid yet another in what one suspects is a long line of shout-downs from a superior. And nothing in the movie is as moving or engaging as Arkin’s scenes with Valerie Harper, the two decidedly non-Latino stars expertly play-acting married urban lower-middle-class Mexican-Americans who can’t decide if they love each other more than they are impatient with or suspicious of each other. How the two of them avoided Oscar nominations is probably written in the fine print of the marketing of this loud, obnoxious, hilarious picture, the kind which the Academy Awards are likely contractually predisposed to ignore.

The relative depth of Arkin and Harper’s work together comes in a movie that is, above all, a love story. (It says so right on the one-sheet.) But the undercurrent of love in Freebie and the Bean is subtext, and of the dare-not-speak-its-name variety. What’s genuinely outrageous, especially for 1974, is how that subtext slowly becomes text as the movie progresses. We’re ultimately encouraged to view Freebie and the Bean as the male version of a warring married couple, the kind with the sort of passion to live out their lives in arguments as well as romance—or, um, mutual respect, you know. More problematic for some viewers is the movie’s portrayal of one of its peripheral villains, a transvestite by whom the boys are clearly repulsed. Paul Matwychuk, in his positive assessment of the film, is of two minds about the movie’s portrayal of this character. He writes: “The character is portrayed as an object of disgust; but on the other hand, he nearly beats up Caan without thinking twice — and in high heels to boot.” I think the movie’s “disgust” with the character is one that, like its racism and sexism, is very typical of the time, and certainly Rush doesn’t over-exert himself trying to challenge the attitudes the two cops display toward their threatening (in more ways than one) nemesis.

But given that typical representation in movies of the day, Freebie has been hastily singled out and misrepresented, most notably by the documentary made from Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, as Exhibit A in the case against Hollywood’s history of homo hatred. And Paul’s point that the transvestite does put some serious hurt on Caan’s ass shouldn’t be discounted. The gay villain’s physical prowess, coupled with the emerging comic subtext of the homoerotic tension between Freebie and the Bean, lifts the portrayal of this transvestite baddie out of the realm of the typical macho fear of faggotry (and the need to amplify that fear for anyone who happens to be within eyesight or earshot) and onto a plane where the two characters must interact with equal ability and strength. The villain’s fate isn’t portrayed as anything more or less typically violent than what ‘70s baddie Paul Koslo undergoes earlier in the picture—the transvestite isn’t killed, as he might have been in other pictures, because he was a “fag” and threatened James Caan’s manhood, but because he was a force that had to be dealt with the same way Caan would deal with anyone trying to take out his kidneys and break his neck in a public restroom. Yet The Celluloid Closet takes the gory clip of this guy bloodied against the bathroom wall, in a dress and high heels, and uses it to make its not-unnecessary point that Hollywood has historically gone out of its way to marginalize and/or punish homosexuals. There’s a difference, however, between integrating gay characters into the world a film conjures (and all that is possible in that world) and simply punishing them for having been there in the first place.

There are so many elements of Freebie and the Bean that are disarming, foremost of which is its own forward momentum, the relentless insanity of the way Rush makes a crash-bang universe out of the streets of San Francisco (no stranger to car chases even without this classic), and the way Caan and Arkin live in the skins of their characters, performing the way two aggravated brothers do who are forced to spend too much time together, unsure of their desire to keep company with anyone else. Of all the movies that have come in its 35-year wake (35 years?!), only Michael Bay’s underrated Bad Boys II comes close to capturing its unique mix of wanton (yet spectacularly choreographed) destruction and the rat-a-tat byplay of its lead characters. But even so, there is and can be only one Freebie and the Bean, a great, cacophonous, hilarious ‘70s artifact that might play even better now than it did when it was first unwrapped on Christmas Day 1974.

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Freebie and the Bean has been playing here for Los Angeles audiences at the New Beverly Cinema since Sunday, and tonight is the final screening. If you missed it on Sunday and Monday and somehow didn’t know it was there before reading this, I apologize for not getting the word out in a timelier manner. But this evening’s screening would be a good one to catch, because Freebie plays with Midnight Run starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, another great action comedy that could be said to have roots in the model of character and action that Freebie and the Bean forged 14 years prior to its release. Midnight Run’s screenwriter, George Gallo, will be in attendance and taking questions in between films tonight. And since I feel so bad about my journalistic standards and being so late on posting this piece, if you can’t make it to the New Beverly tonight, feel free to come over to my house sometime and watch the recently released Freebie and the Bean DVD, which was recently made available in a no-frills edition from the Warner Archives Collection, on my IMAX-sized big-screen TV. (B.Y.O.P.)

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Here's Josh Olson giving Freebie and the bean the old Trailers from Hell treatment! (So big and wide one blog couldn't contain it!)

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O HAPPY DAY! DODGERS SWEEP CARDINALS!

2009-10-10T21:45:00.000-07:00

The Cardinals go down. I don't think I unclenched my teeth for three hours. I'm either delirious or suddenly about 150 pounds lighter, but eiher way it feels pretty damn good. What an amazing way to finish this series, with Either and an apparently rejuvenated Manny leading the way, flying high while Vicente Padilla, just the latest in an ever-increasing line of Dodgers Who Weren't Dodgers in August, stepped up to take the stage and prove himself an essential postseason player. Padilla did it by muscling a steady diet of fastballs past the heretofore prodigious Cardinals lineup with amazing swagger, reducing Pujols, Holliday, De la Rosa et al down to the effectiveness of triple-A onlookers as they watched their World Series hopes take flight on battered wings of red and disappear into the chilly midwestern night.

I have to say, the Dodgers have the better season record against the Rockies (14-4) and have proven they can beat them in the games that count—you remember those games when the Rockies moved within two of first place, only to be repelled by Dodger wins and Rockies losses, and, oh, yeah, that division-clinching series on the first weekend of October. So sure, I think a Dodgers-Rockies NLCS might go down pretty easy indeed, and might also go a long way toward quashing the insistent line that the National League West is a soft division. With the Cardinals KO’ed today, and know-it-all pundit favorites like the Red Sox down for the count, and the Phillies no better than even after two in their series, the prospect of all those East Coast-biased teams dropping like flies is like catnip to my fantasies of the Dodgers making it back to the World Series at last. With this kind of steam built up as they roll into the NLCS, I wouldn’t be averse to a rematch from last year either, and a chance to dish out some payback for last year against the Almighty Phillies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll say it for you, nonbeliever: What about Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels? Okay, they’re damn good pitchers. Who would say otherwise? But so are Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright. And as good as those Cardinal hurlers are, look where it got ‘em—a ticket to stand on the outside looking in as the Dodgers’ starters, whom absolutely no one gave more than a whisker’s chance in a blast furnace of surviving the La Russa-led gauntlet, are celebrating and still damned happy to be considered underdogs when it comes to that 2008 NLCS rematch. The Phillies have a big, power-hitting first baseman too who could be toppled just as easily as was Prince Albert over the course of the series-- the Dodgers lead the season matchup against Philadelphia four games to three-- and slingshot slingers like Randy Wolf, Clayton Kershaw and Vicente (El Hombre) Padilla are already picking out their rocks.

But that’s what might be. When the ice is finally chipped away on that chilly Rockies-Phillies series, then we can talk about the real thing. Now is for the savoring, and savor we shall, Dodger fans. Well done, gentlemen. Bring on Thursday.

Here’s former Dodger broadcaster Ross Porter on today’s game 3, and Los Angeles Times writer Ben Bolch with all the details.

(Photographs by Alex Gallardo, Gina Ferazzi, Los Angeles Times, and Jeff Roberson, Associated Press)

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ONE TO THE GUT: DODGERS 3, CARDINALS 2

2009-10-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

So much to think about, to process, so many vocal cords already in need of healing, and we’re only two games into the NLDS. Watching the Dodgers go down to their last out in the bottom of the ninth last night, facing a 2-1 deficit against the Cardinals, apparent winners of a well-pitched, hard-fought game that by all statistical logic they should have won, was a trip to the darkest recesses of the valley for this follower of the Blue. Ethier was taken care of by a Cardinals lefty specialist who was then replaced by closer Ryan Franklin, who induced a deep fly out from Manny Ramirez, and now Dodger Fan could be forgiven for chalking up the team's chances of pulling this one out of the fire to less than shining. I was dutifully watching the game from the dining table, peering over the screen of my laptop as I paid a few bills off the family ledger, and I remembering exhaling and trying to form thoughts that would make swallowing a 1-1 series going back to St. Louis a little easier. And here it was, the short liner to left field off the bat of James Loney, the final out.

Destined to be absorbed into the gaping maw of Matt Holliday’s glove to end the game, physics and bad luck seemed to conspire to change the story as they changed the final resting place of that fly ball. Instead of getting gobbled up by Holliday, the ball squeaked over his glove and pounded him either in the bread basket, or perhaps a region slightly further to the south, the act of trying to gain possession of it throwing the fielder’s equilibrium into the tank and sending him flying face first into the shaded evening grass. Instead of a trip to the showers, Loney got two bases out of that swing. Suddenly, in addition to the bank of stadium lights (Holliday’s explanation for his costly error) or a sea of Dodger fans waving white towels (Wainwright’s rationalization for Holliday’s troubles, which is not borne out by the video replay—Dodgers fans seemed to have been waving them after Holiday dropped the ball, but not in the dark, seemingly inevitable downer moments immediately before), the Cardinals had the first glimmer of the headlights of a postseason freight train shining in their eyes. A walk to Blake. Belliard lines a single over second base to score Juan Pierre, pinch-running for Loney. The game is tied. With first base open, Franklin walks Martin to get to Mark Loretta, Dodger utility man with a record of 0-15 against the closer. Loretta dumps one into center field for a game-winning base hit. Game over. It’s a true wonder my neighbors didn’t call the police, and a real blessing that my wife and daughters were out at a concert so they were spared the sight of the man of the house jumping on the furniture and inviting some sort of coronary capper to the evening.

But don’t take my dry account for it. If you weren’t lucky enough to be there, if you missed it on TV, or if you just want to relive it a few times between now and Saturday afternoon, here’s the irreplaceable Vin Scully calling the events on another night where the improbable and the impossible intersected and became indelible for Dodger fans. Baseball can be cruel and unforgiving and damningly unpredictable—just ask Tony La Russa. But it can be glorious too, and even if this is the last great moment of the season for the Dodgers it will have been worth it. But I’m betting this is far from the last.

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THE CRITICAL GRADE

2009-10-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

This week has not been a kind one when it comes to doling out time to write, but I promise there is some actual content on the way before Friday. Until then, this from the brand-new issue of The Onion:

Entertainment Weekly Critic Lets Director Redo Sorority Row For Better Grade

HOLLYWOOD, CA— Critic Kate Ward told reporters Monday that she has given director Stewart Hendler a chance to reshoot his horror-thriller Sorority Row and improve upon the “D” grade he received in her recent Entertainment Weekly review of the film. "Stewart came to my office to talk about his grade, and we discussed where he went wrong with his production," said Ward, who is often described by filmmakers as a "tough-but-fair" reviewer. "He seems to understand the problems with his use of gratuitous nudity and has promised to fix some of the larger plot holes. If he applies himself and gets Carrie Fisher to sign on again in a bigger role, he could very well get a 'C' when I average the two grades." Hendler said he will use more crosscuts in his second attempt at Sorority Row, a technique he claims helped "ass-kisser" Steven Soderbergh earn a “B” for The Informant.

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EXHALING AND YELLING IN CHAVEZ RAVINE

2009-10-03T23:59:00.001-07:00

James Loney celebrates as the Dodgers clinch the National League West for the second straight year. It sure looked good from where I was sitting, above the Rockies bullpen on the reserve level. Even the Wookiees were loving it.

T.J. Simers tells the story-- Dodgers 5, Rockies 0. Bring on St. Louis.

And here's all the video highlights (and one lowlight) from Saturday night's game.

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MEL BROOKS' ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

2009-10-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

This one's for you, Campaspe!

(A laurel and hardy thanks-- and a shitload of dimes-- to Patrick Robbins for sending this along and pointing the way to an Empire magazine feature on "The 50 Best YouTube Movie Mashups.")

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IN SEARCH OF THE ELUSIVE NL WEST CROWN: CAN THE BIG BLUE EMPIRE STRIKE BACK?

2009-10-03T11:34:00.001-07:00

I bought tickets for my wife and daughters and I to see the next-to-last game of the season at Dodger Stadium tonight about a month ago. We haven’t been out to the stadium much over the summer, despite the team’s phenomenal season, because we’ve just been too cash-poor. But when the Dodgers announced a Star Wars-themed section up in the reserved level for the night— where wacky Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker costumes would be welcomed, where all-you-can-eat Dodger Dogs could be consumed, and where each ticket-holder would get a Yoda-themed “My Town This Is” commemorative Dodger T-shirt-- I figured, all three of my girls being Star Wars fiends/nerds/enthusiasts, that it might be a memorable experience for them, a way for them to enjoy a baseball game more on their own terms. Besides, a month ago I assumed that the Dodgers would have clinched the National League West title by then. The game will be a lark. Right?

Then came the darkest, longest, most inexplicable losing streak of the year. After pummeling the Pirates 14-2 at the start of a nine-game tour of the three worst teams in the National League, Jonathan Broxton gave up four runs in the process of blowing his seventh save of the season in that second Pirates game, and the Dodgers have been gazing at their shoes ever since. That road trip went 3-6, and the Dodgers, having lost again last night to the Colorado Rockies, are mired in their worst losing streak of the season—five in a row as of about 11:00 p.m. last night. The Rockies have steadily crept up from 15.5 games back and now find themselves, with two games left between them and the Dodgers to finish the season, exactly one game behind Los Angeles. A Rockies win tonight would tie the National League West division title up. Then a Rockies win on Sunday, and that first-place position the Dodgers have held for all but one day of the 2009 season will have evaporated at the worst possible time. A month ago it didn’t seem possible. But over the last four games the Dodgers cannot see the ball, cannot catch a break, cannot get up off the floor, scoring a grand total of six runs and wondering where the mojo went.

So tonight’s game is, after all, about as meaningful as it gets. My partially facetious theory has been (until last night, that is) that the Dodgers were trying to ensure, by coming up so short on this last road trip, that they would clinch in the front of their fans at Dodger Stadium. Also, they were trying to contrive to be seen, by the baseball press and everyone else, as underdogs, putting them in a position to “surprise” everyone and roll into the postseason punching. Well, as I said, all that made about as much sense as it was ever going to if the Dodgers came out and won the first game of this Rockies series in definitive fashion and got the clinching business out of the way. That didn’t exactly happen, thanks to Troy Tulowitski’s two-run homer, which made the score 4-1. Had Randy Wolf been able to avoid dishing up that fat pitch, the Dodgers would have overtaken the Rockies in the seventh (assuming one event doesn’t affect all the others in a sort of stadium-sized butterfly effect) and I wouldn’t be sweating it out right now.

But a five-game losing streak being the low-water mark of a season in which they still, thanks to the also-slumping Phillies and Cardinals, hold the best record in the National League, I gotta believe that tonight the Dodgers will find a way to bust out of this self-created mausoleum they’ve been hiding out in for the past week. If the Dodgers win tonight, I will think of it as payback for having been in attendance last year when the Phillies clinched a World Series berth at Dodger Stadium, and my family will be so relieved to not have to ride home with the surly, depressed bastard they’ll be stuck with otherwise. However it shakes out, the Dodgers and the Rockies are both in the playoffs, so we’re basically playing for bragging rights tonight (and possibly tomorrow). But winning, and winning big tonight, might be just the spark this listless team needs to get the pendulum swinging back in the other direction at just the right time. May the Force and the Schwarz be with them. Do it they can.

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(They're talking about tonight's game at Dodger Thoughts too...)

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TARDY, WITH NO WRITTEN EXCUSE: Dennis Submits His Answers to Professor Snape's Film Quiz

2009-09-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

The good professor registers his disdain at Dennis' lack of urgency...

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It’s a damn good thing I don’t blow off my real homework like this…

Well, here we are, just about to flip the calendar into Rocktober or Jocktober or Shocktober or whatever bad pun you can come up with, and I am only now finishing off the homework assignment given out by Professor Severus Snape near the middle of July! If I’d let this actually drag into October, with as much as this month usually holds in terms of things to do and talk about and write about, I probably would have ended up letting it slip away like I did my blue book sheet for Professor Peabody’s quiz, which had some questions on it I was really looking forward to answering. And of course going in I promised myself that I would be shorter and to the point this time around, so as to not have to spend what feels like a week writing out 38 fairly simple answers. (No real hard ones this time around, am I right?) Well, look how that turned out-- like these kinds of pledges usually do for me. So be it. As I write less frequently these days, I guess I shouldn’t beat myself for the occasions when I take my time and let the words have a chance to actually flow. So here comes the gusher.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this past summer’s quizzical extravaganza. I apologize for that new comment character limit that Blogger imposed the very day I posted the quiz, which made it annoying for a lot of you who had to post three, even four times to get it all up there. But it was worth it. The answers were, as always, unmatched fun to read, as well as yet another occasion to marvel at the smarts what the readers of this here site done got. The best will be highlighted before the publication of the new quiz, which we’re probably still about another month away from. So work out those pencil-graspers and get ‘em in shape for Thanksgiving.

And now, my answers to Professor Severus Snape’s Sorcerer-tastic, Muggalicious Mid-Summer Film Quiz:

1) Second-favorite Stanley Kubrick film.

For years the favorite would have been Clockwork Orange. Throughout my university days the movie seemed to strike me differently every time I saw it—one time I would be enthralled by Kubrick’s irreverent and vibrant electrification of Antony Burgess’ futuristic morality play, the next time I would be disturbed by what Pauline Kael I think accurately described as the movie’s pornographic tendencies when it came to the horror-show sex and violence (a dilemma I never experienced the two or three times I read the book). Yet I would see it every time it came around, which was quite often during in the midnight movie days of the late ‘70s in collegiate Eugene, Oregon. Thirty years or so later Kubrick’s filmography is one I respect more than one I feel compelled to return to with regularity, but the one I will watch again now at a moment’s notice, the way I used to consume Clockwork Orange, would be Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. So, number two. I thought about Full Metal Jacket, which is a movie I think gets better over the years, partly because of the weird, detached quality lent to it by the director’s perversity in staging the Vietnam sequences in Britain. I also had to consider 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that’s a landmark more than it is a personal favorite. Which leads me to Lolita, perhaps not the most faithful adaptation of Nabokov one could ask for, but it’s got that irreverent, satirically inquisitive spirit, channeled by Peter Sellers and James Mason, a smiley face pinned to the blackest of hearts, that makes it irresistible. And Sue Lyons may not lead me to approve, but she sure makes Humbert’s agony easy to understand. All that said, it’s been 34 years, and I cannot wait to see Barry Lyndon again.

2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil.

The accelerated pace of editing. It does seem to go hand in hand with the more long-term implications of the bloated franchise blockbuster hole Hollywood seems to be digging for itself, which is, I would guess, most likely the bigger and more important problem. (How we gonna get ‘em to come out for Get Low, Harvey, when all they want—we think-- is a bigger G.I. Joe sequel?) But the kind of impatience for the nuances of storytelling and mistrust of what images can do, and how they can enrich our experience by the simple act of being allowed to take the time to seduce us, rather than bombard us, is the kind of concern that can permeate even the films furthest away from the budgetary scale and visual aesthetic of a Michael Bay movie. And for every young filmmaker who respects the power of the image, like David Lowery or Lucas McNelly, there’s a hundred point-and-shooters whose career hopes far outweigh their love of film, and the best way they see to get noticed is to emulate the most obvious traits of the films made by the big boys. (Films like these, usually shot on video, often end up looking and feeling like mediocre TV shows.) It’s heartening for many reasons to see the success of a movie like Inglorious Basterds, one of which is how Tarantino creates a heightened sensual quality while at the same time anchoring his camera to a much more classically composed visual strategy, which allows the subtleties and the richness of the often lurid, tactile and seductive imagery to take hold and work its magic. Of course Tarantino utilizes quick editing too, but judiciously, not relentlessly. You emerge from Inglorious Basterds elated, not pummeled, by the movie’s respect for what the movies can do well, as well as its tacit understanding of how the power of film can be undercut by a director who uses hyperactive editing merely to distract the audience from the deficiencies of the story he’s decided to tell.

3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)?

Each passing year seems only to add to the unique charm and poignant moral conviction of Eastwood’s movie, and the character. But for sheer richness of conception, conviction, and the unapologetic pleasure of audacity, it’s hard to beat Newman’s performance, centered as it is in one of Altman’s most undervalued and marvelous creations.

4) Best Film of 1949.

My number one pick from this year, assuming correctly that I haven’t seen anything close to everything that came out in 1949, has to be Kind Hearts and Coronets. Numbers two through five? White Heat, The Third Man, The Set-up and The Heiress.

5) Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)?

John Barrymore was, it seems to go without saying, a better actor than Jack Benny. And though he’s not the first person I think of when I think of a “movie actor,” any hand that held titles like Svengali, Topaze, Dinner at Eight, Grand Hotel, Twentieth Century, True Confession, Midnight and even The Invisible Woman would have to be said to be a strong one. Benny, on the other hand, was a great comedian who made a minor splash in pictures—titles like The Meanest Man in the World and George Washington Slept Here are funny, if slight, but not too many, I would think, pine for his Charley’s Aunt. However, his one inarguably great, shining moment in movie comedy, as “the great, great actor” Joseph Tura, a ham-fisted hambone who leads his Polish acting troupe under the sniffing noses of invading Nazi forces and into a very special engagement of theatrical espionage, is so great that it dismantles even the comic tornado that is Barrymore’s Oscar Jaffe. That they both got to play opposite Carole Lombard raises the question of just how much each man took inspiration from the inestimable talents of this great Hollywood comedienne, but that is a poser for another professor’s quiz.

6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché?

One of my favorite movies of last year was Rachel Getting Married, so I don’t think I can be fairly accused of not understanding how this particular aesthetic can be used purposefully and well. (And obviously that isn’t the only example of a hand-held camera being employed in a way that obviously worked—I think the first time I was consciously aware of the technique, in something other than a quasi-documentary narrative like, say, A Hard Day’s Night, was in Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae.) But I do think the style is used WAY too much in modern filmmaking, and modern television, particularly advertising. It is a cheap and easy way to create the illusion that something is happening, even when the reality of the scene may just be two people sitting around talking—most 21st-century TV shows to date would be lost at sea without the ability to put all their weight on this particular crutch. These days, whenever I see a film or TV show directed with enough audacity and confidence that the camera holds still, even for just a little while, I am much more likely to sit up and notice and get involved. I guess it makes some kind of sense, then, that my favorite TV show is a baseball game, even subject as those are these days to Fox-inspired overreliance on visual tweakery and distractions from the game.

7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw?

I’d like to say it was Seven Samurai on a Saturday night on PBS back in my high school days, or perhaps The 400 Blows in the presence of a parent who wanted to introduce me to the world outside my tiny hometown. Alas, neither is true. As far as I am aware, my hometown movie theater never showed a movie made entirely on foreign soil that was also entirely in a foreign language-- no Fellini, no Bunuel, no Bergman. The closest we ever got to a French film was Barbarella (Roger Vadim) or Viva Maria! (Louis Malle), or maybe Fahrenheit 451 (Francois Truffaut). So, the exotic fruits of world cinema would have to wait until college. On my first day at the University of Oregon I started writing down every movie I saw in a journal (which I still update t this day, 32 years later), so I have a pretty reliable chronicle of what that first foreign-language film was, and it was a doozy. While others around me at the time were having their eyes and ears opened with La Strada or Wild Strawberries or even Aguirre, the Wrath of God, I somehow procured a ticket at the Waco Twin Cinema, just behind my dorm room on the east end of campus, to see In the Realm of the Senses. So, two milestones occurred during that screening! It is a wonder that I am the relatively well-adjusted person I am today, with that kind of cinematic introduction to Japanese culture and hardcore sex.

8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)?

As fond as I am of old Hollywood’s fear of The Other in its many forms (usually Black, sometimes Asian or Mexican—oh, and that’s “not very,” by the way), I also have a sort of real fondness for both of these on-the-cheap 20th-Century Fox series because despite their being mired in some of the typical suspicious, fearful and often contemptuous feelings that were prevalent in society at the time they were made, they were also showcases for Asian characters (albeit played by non-Asians) who commanded respect because of their even-handed presence, intellect and, in the case or Mr. Moto, irascibility and physical ability with judo. Of course, you could also argue that the Asian characters should have been played by Asians, which brings Hollywood economics into play with prevalent social prejudices and makes the whole thing a kind of Fantasy Baseball-type discussion. The reality is, Peter Lorre was of Austrian birth and Warner Oland was a Swede. That’s who they were in real life. On screen, I prefer the impatience and cagey intelligence of Lorre’s Mr. Moto over Oland’s placid Charlie Chan. And maybe also because to use the name today “Charlie Chan” is still a recognizable short-cut to a racial slur, whereas Mr. Moto, because it was probably a less popular series, still flies under the radar for most modern audiences and for any knuckle-draggers looking for a derogatory name to shout out in a Japanese restaurant.

9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970).

To stick with the totally arbitrary time boundaries, I might have chosen Kelly’s Heroes (1970), or The Dirty Dozen (1967). But I think my actual pick would be the vivid, searing imagery and immediacy of Sam Fuller’s Merrill’s Marauders (1962). It’s my favorite example of what, in a journeyman’s hands can be a dreary, by-the-numbers genre, but in the hands of a pulp artist like Fuller becomes singularly powerful and heartfelt.

10) Favorite animal movie star.

I couldn’t decide between real animals and fabricated ones in initially thinking about this one. My first thought went to Old Yeller, the next went to Kaa the snake, as voiced by Sterling Holloway in Disney’s The Jungle Book. Conflicted! Eventually I returned to three dimensions, but I couldn’t be any more decisive about real versus fake. So I went for one fabulous fantasy based on a reality of nature, one fantasy made up of equal (?) parts puppetry, computer magic and honest-to-God evolution and came up a tie: Bruce the shark and Babe the gallant pig.

11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema.

I think I can say, without being even slightly snarky, that you could throw a rock and whatever Oscar-winning film from the ‘80s that you hit, from Ordinary People straight on through to Driving Miss Daisy probably has some degree or irresponsibility in it worth working over with a perforated woodshop paddle. I know this is kind of a snarky answer, but really, I think back on the ‘80s as such a bad period for American films, at least the ones that were available for me to see (of course, there are many exceptions that disprove the rule), that I can barely think of the decade without slipping into bored disinterest. And doesn’t lulling the general public into a deep sleep with the likes of St. Elmo’s Fire and the collected works of the Brat Pack, as well as Footloose, Flashdance and the umpteenth variation on the Animal House/Spring Break formula count as irresponsibility? I also like Daniel L’s answer, that Bruckheimer and Bays decision to recreate the tragedy of Pearl Harbor as a gee-whiz action movie whose most devastating moments were sometimes told from the point of view of airborne munitions as they dropped toward their targets definitely qualifies as irresponsible.

12) Best Film of 1969.

Little doubt here. The Wild Bunch.

13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray.

Theatrically: I can’t believe my timing is such that I find myself entering the words “A Nora Ephron Film” into the first slot in this category, but enter it I must. Julie & Julia is absolutely half a terrific film, and that half is populated by Meryl Streep’s sublime impersonation of Julia Child which, in swift fashion, becomes a fully fleshed-out portrayal of an earthy woman of intelligence and, yes, appetites that one would have thought had long slipped past the possibility of such a rich parody-free representation. Stanley Tucci as Julia’s husband, who seems as sweetly in awe of her as we do, and Jane Lynch as Julia’s even taller, physically imposing sister, round out a story that deserved its own film. These players are marvelous, but it is Streep who rules here. After her show-stopping turns in The Devil Wears Prada, Doubt and now this, all is almost forgiven for the atrocities committed by that Meryl Streep impersonator in Mamma Mia. Unfortunately, Ephron has conceived the movie as a duet, the other half populated by Julie Powell, a rudderless, self-absorbed cubicle drone who decides to cook her way through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year and blog about it as a sort of self-realization exercise. The movie is based on Powell’s book, which was itself adapted from her blog, and let’s just say her adventures cooking in a Queens apartment are not as compelling as Ephron and Streep’s imaginings of Child’s life in postwar France. Just when we begin to settle into the cadences of Streep’s performance anew and get absorbed in her journey toward becoming “Julia Child,” Ephron cuts back to twerpy Julie (Amy Smart), who is supposedly a bitch (ask her husband and friends) but comes off like your average Nora Ephron self-absorbed cutey-pie. The movie builds through her relationship problems with her endlessly understanding husband to Powell’s deboning a duck as her ultimate achievement, then underplays the moment to such a degree that you may not even have noticed that it happened. The height of excitement in the Julie portion of Julie & Julia comes when our blogging heroine gets 23 comments, “none of them from people I know!” I get that. What I don’t get is the tenuous connection between these two women that Ephron tries to sell as some sort of spiritual communion (albeit one-sided) via cooking. The idea never transcends its own flimsiness. Fortunately, whenever we’re stuck in Julie Powell land, we know that we’re only a few minutes away from going back to the real movie, the half of Julie & Julia that stars Meryl Streep.

On DVD: Calle 54, Fernando Trueba’s musical extravaganza consists of a little documentary context here and there on Latin Jazz, a half-hearted sop to Buena Vista Social Club to whet your appetite. But the interstitial documentary stuff sets the table for a series of mind-blowing performances, shot by Trueba on studio sets, that record spectacular performances by the likes of Tito Puente Paquito D’Rivera, Gato Barbieri, Eliane Elias and a ton of others, all apparently at the top of their game. It’s a rush of brilliance that will make you feel while you’re watching it, if you don’t already, that Latin Jazz as played by these artists is as good as music gets.

At work: Ernst Lubitsch never completed his fantastical romance That Lady in Ermine-- he died during production, and the movie was finished by that flighty chronicler of the heart Otto Preminger. But I’m not sure if Lubitsch had lived, assuming that he was satisfied with Samuel Raphaelson’s script, that it stood much of a chance of ever being any good. Betty Grable can’t help but be luminous in a dual role—as a ruling countess of the small fiefdom of Bergamo and her great-great-great-great-grandmother, the Lady in Ermine, who pops to life out of her portrait every night, along with the rest of the familial gallery, and haunts the waking and dreaming life of an invading Hungarian general, a rapscallion played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Fairbanks moons over grandma while trying to seduce granddaughter, whose own newlywed husband (Cesar Romero) fled during the invasion and returns to the castle in the guise of a gypsy in the hopes of getting into the general’s good graces. No matter the wattage your leading lady, a romantic comedy with Fairbanks and Romero as your male leads had better be pretty sharp in the writing department. But That Lady in Ermine is musty where it should be melodic, snoozy where it should be snappy, and frankly confusing from a character motivation standpoint. It’s a shame that the genius who gave us Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, To Be or Not To Be, That Uncertain Feeling and Cluny Brown would end his brilliant career with such a stiff.

14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film.

King of the hill has always been, ever since I discovered the world beyond M*A*S*H, the incomparable Nashville, one of the rare movies which only seems to gain in my estimation with each passing year. But Altman is, if not my favorite director, then at least in the top two or three. I don’t blindly love everything he came up with in his long career (as this four part overview should attest), but there is a lot of brilliance to choose from, even amidst his more uneven films. At any time the second spot could be occupied by ‘70s masterworks like The Long Goodbye, Three Women and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, less consistent but appealingly bat-shit entertainments like M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, Pret-a-Porter and O.C. & Stiggs, strong work from the ‘80s like Popeye (yes, goddamn it, Popeye), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Secret Honor, or late-period wonders like Tanner ’88, Gosford Park, The Company and even A Prairie Home Companion. But of all these, at this moment in my long-standing appreciation of Robert Altman’s career, the movie that I think about almost as much as I do Nashville-- my second favorite Altman film, then—would have to be his sublimely critical, acerbic, hilarious and haunted bicentennial show business satire Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. Not for nothing my choice for question #3. Like Nashville this is a movie that just seems to get better and better, smarter and smarter, even though it was never granted a hallowed place in the director’s canon by critics in the first place. Altman always used to claim he loved his most neglected and derided “children,” like Brewster McCloud or Images the best. My love for Buffalo Bill… is kind of like that, but more so because I think it truly is a great film.

15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print?

For film reviews, I most often refer to Stephanie Zacharek and David Edelstein, not because I always agree with them, but because I think they’re among the best writers, if not the best writers working on weekly deadlines, at accessing and assessing their feelings about a movie quickly, intelligently, with the kind of circumspection not often afforded a writer who must try to have essays ready for a looming opening weekend. But I also read them every week because they’re damn good writers, never fussy, always sharp, never sealed off from other points of view, and their reviews always feel like a lot of time was spent crafting them—and I mean that in a good way, not a calcified, predetermined way-- when the reality is they probably didn’t, or couldn’t have spent as much time on them as they would have liked to. As for a broader perspective, I like the magazine umbrella style of The House Next Door (always something interesting going on between those walls).

But one of the first blogs to demonstrate to me how broad the canvas for writing about movie could be was Jim Emerson’s Scanners, a site that remains probably my favorite place to go to discuss and think about movies, politics and all the grey area in between. Jim and I share favorites (Miller’s Crossing and Nashville, to name just two) as well as a disdain for the films of Alan Parker, but we often disagree as well-- Speed Racer comes to mind—even though I don’t comment nearly as often as I’d like. But I appreciate the way Jim’s mind operates—not much seems to escape his gaze, and he always has a fresh, comprehensive take on the most interesting movies. (His series on Inglourious Basterds was unimpeachable and sharp-eyed.) Jim has always been supportive and encouraging to me in my writing and blogging, so to some it may seem like log-rolling, but the truth is, Scanners has been the most consistent bookmark punched in my five years of movie blog awareness, and as Jim continues to expand his canvas into other realms of social discourse it will likely stay that away.

16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji? (Thanks, Peter!)

Meijo Kaji is inarguably striking, physically imposing and lovely, but Angela Mao (Deep Thrust, Deadly China Doll and, of course, Enter the Dragon) was my first. She taught me—and oh, how I loved the lessons!—that tough women could be sexy, and that sexy women could be tough. There have been many who have travelled down the path she helped create—Michelle Yeoh seemed to channel her directly in Wing Chun-- but Angela Mao showed me, and maybe you too, the way.

17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)?

Oh, man. Why do I do this to myself? Okay, speaking strictly in terms of character, even though that knowledge of cars is impressive Mona Lisa Vito seems more of a cartoon, whereas Olive Neal strikes me as more of a real person (and the pathos with which her fate is imbued doesn’t hurt either). So it’s Olive Neal for me. Thank God I didn’t make this a contest between Marisa Tomei and Jennifer Tilly, who have to be two of the most talented actresses working (not nearly enough) right now, as well as the two of the best exhibits of evidence that women over 40 can be sexier than the faceless, curveless strumpets on the CW or reality TV even on their “worst” days.

Sorry. No particular reason to post this. I just wanted to!

18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence.

Go with your first instinct: Strangers on a Train.

19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date.

I tend to favor the strategy of using high-definition video to replicate the texture and richness of film, so in that light Zodiac and A Prairie Home Companion, a movie I didn’t even know was shot on video until the second time I saw it, remain the high-water marks for me. (Altman’s The Company, one of the first films shot on video I ever saw, was equally spectacular.) I thought Rachel getting Married was one of the few times that the whole whip-the-0camera-around home-video aesthetic worked, given the context of the situation and the freefall experienced by the main character. Michael Mann’s experiments in rich, high-contrast video—video that looks like video—are at times expressive (Collateral) and fascinatingly beautiful (Miami Vice), but Public Enemies, which never seemed to construct a bridge between the received imagery of Depression-era ‘30s as related by Hollywood film and even familiar, low-tech photographs of folks like Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, and the up-to-the-minute digital video processing through which we were experiencing the story. For video that looks and feels and acts like video, I appreciate that Cloverfield caught me up in its partially observed world without ever making me nauseous or annoyed, and I really like the direction that experimentation has taken in movies like Diary of the Dead and District 9, where the immediacy of video is incorporated into a more logically imagined, consciously crafted visual palette.

20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre.

Well, I think the gold standard here has got to be the way Leigh Brackett and Robert Altman (and Elliot Gould) transposed Philip Marlowe to early-‘70s Los Angeles, creating a critique of easy living, the mythos of Hollywood, and the perforated nature of personal morality, all rendered with Altman’s beautifully constructed laid-back, tossed-off vibe, which disguises the formal rigor with which the film is actually constructed and resonates richly with the more familiar incarnations of Raymond Chandler‘s world in evidence up to that point. The Long Goodbye is a personal artistic statement, a great, loosey-goosey genre thriller, and a comment on genre thrillers that forces you to look at the model in a completely different way.

21) Best Film of 1979.

I knew going into this that there had to be movies from 1979 that I liked better than Manhattan, Apocalypse Now or All That Jazz, which are all good movies, but not, in my estimation, great ones. But when I started digging I remembered just how good a year 1979 was, and I‘m sure I still haven’t seen an eighth of the good stuff that came out that year. Here are 17 movies from 1979 that I liked better than the three mentioned above (in alphabetical order):

Alien
The Black Stallion
Breaking Away
The Brood
Buffet Froid
Escape from Alcatraz
Going in Style
The Kids are Alright
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
1941
North Dallas Forty
Real Life
Richard Pryor Live in Concert
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School
Time After Time
Winter Kills

And of those I would pick, as the best of 1979, Albert Brooks’ superb media satire Real Life which, in its crazed riff on the Loud family seemed over the top back in the day, much as Howard Beale and the UBS Network once did. But Brooks’ movie, having long since been surpassed by what we now know as the reality of reality TV, has remained brilliant for its droll insights into what drives the American desire for fame, as well as the punishing price of the trampling of privacy. I would fill out my top five, in no particular order with 1941, Richard Pryor Live in Concert, Winter Kills and The Brood.

22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.

There have been plenty, both romanticized, realistic and horrifying-- To Kill a Mockingbird, It’s a Wonderful Life, Shadow of a Doubt, American Graffiti, Roxanne, Straw Dogs, Local Hero all come to mind. But the one I recognized most clearly, from my own experience and from its depiction of the experiences of others who surrounded me when I was growing up, is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. The movie completely understands how the rhythms of high school are linked to the world of everyday life outside of school, how they inform it, undermine it, make it breathe. It uses the last day of school in 1976 as a perfect distillation of this idea, without setting up the false dramatic sense that these kids had any self-conscious, portentous ideas about meandering through an important stage of change. Dazed and Confused isn’t about the haunting last days of seniors who express trepidation and excitement at what’s just over the horizon—it disarms this notion by focusing on kids at every grade level, their hopes, their dreams, their cynicism, their desire to survive to simply become sophomores. The hell with life—what’s 10th grade, what’s 12th grade gonna be like? And, oh, yeah, no matter what happens, we’re still gonna be living here. The movie’s most touching and eloquent sequence—the kids looking out over their town from the perspective of that water tower high on the hill-- is shot through with enough humor to deflate any high-minded poetics or grandstanding in which Linklater might feel like indulging. It is enough for Dazed and Confused to stay true to the free-floating sense of maintaining one’s perspective in a place that seems so grounded, so tangibly mundane, a constricted world which dictates the way these kids (and the kids where I grew up during the mid ‘70s) so often seemed to look at life—as full of possibilities that seemed just out of reach.

The small town of Dazed and Confused is in no way idealized—it is nothing if not a place from which to escape—yet there is real feeling, unburdened by nostalgia, for what it was really like to be in a place like that, when one had no idea what was next, when any direction away was good enough-- fondness borne of the perspective of the rearview mirror. As one who experienced it too, Linklater never takes time to moralize. He wants us to remember, to feel it, to respond to the tribal rhythms (as realized by Aerosmith and Foghat) that keep us in the small towns of our memory. Dazed and Confused is great because it captures the boredom and well as the silly exuberance of feeling like the whole world was within the city limits—no need to go anywhere else just yet-- and it was time to go cruising.

23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).

The most recent A-1 candidate I’ve seen that would qualify in this category is the one I’m going to go with-- Isabelle Fuhrmann as Esther, the 11-year-old hellion with a past deeper and darker and more disturbing than you could ever guess, in this past summer’s neglected Orphan. Esther would give Patty McCormack nightmares. It’s been three months since I’ve seen the movie, and I can still barely stand to look at the poster.

24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film.

I’m going to indulge the common practice of not making myself choose between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II as my favorite Coppola film and choose them both, as if they were one film, which I think they essentially are (The Godfather Part III, not a terrible movie, having been left to the remainder bin of film history). I could say Apocalypse Now, but I have a history as checkered with I as that of Clockwork Orange. And The Conversation is a great movie that I in no way enjoy, so it could never be considered a favorite. Given those caveats, there aren’t many other Coppola films I like, to be honest—not The Rain People, Finian’s Rainbow, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Youth Without Youth, One from the Heart, Tucker, and certainly not Jack or his portion of New York Stories. I do really like Tetro, though not nearly enough time has passed for me to think of it as a favorite. And I thoroughly enjoy The Rainmaker without any guilt or any need to find some way to wedge it into the parameters of Coppola’s auteurist concerns. All of which leaves the one Coppola movie I found to be thrilling on a formal, experimental, and purely cinematic level that no one seems to think much of these days. No matter what you think of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder—and I happen to think I’ve seen less believable actors, as well as ones who don’t take chances on looking foolish with the degrees of sincerity and commitment both show here—and no matter the pretense to some clearer, deeper connection to Bram Stoker (which isn’t exactly true, not that Stoker is all that hot a property anyway), Bram Stoker’s Dracula remains a thrilling pleasure, told by a man who wasn’t, at the time it was made, at all sure of his place in the machinery of American moviemaking mainstream. And this movie feels like it—gaudy, impassioned, bloody, full of visual trickery and arcana, lustful, ornate, absurdly romantic, obsessive and frightfully over the top, shot through with silent movie-derived tropes and stylization, BSD feels like no other movie in the Coppola oeuvre. Gary Oldman embodies Dracula as a freakishly sophisticated descendant of Vlad Tepes, and the movie’s downright bizarre finesse, lifting grandiose and quietly creepy visual motifs from Murnau and Browning and twisting them into shadow puppet-style shapes unique to this film, supports his wildly creative, hammy interpretation of the seminal vampire and sends the movie into gushes of gory romanticism. This movie was my first laserdisc, and I hope to see it flowing red again very soon on Blu-ray.

25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see.

Near the end of Steven Spielberg’s 1941, dazed and confused gunnery sergeant Dan Aykroyd, standing with the rest of the cast amidst the rubble of Ned Beatty’s seaside property after Beatty’s house has slid off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, surveys the damage and assesses the situation to Robert Stack’s bemused General Stillwell. Akyroyd says, in a line obviously intended to pave the way for the sequel that would never be, “But, General, 1941 wasn’t the really big year of the war. No, I think the really big year is gonna be 1942!” Thinking about Spielberg amassing another Panavision-sized production from a Zemeckis and Gale script, this one taking on the second year of America’s involvement in World War II, why, it just makes my mouth water. How about one big super comedy for each year straight through 1945? A fella can dream, can’t he?

Also, I’d love to read sometime in the near future that some benevolent lunatic has given W.D. Richter a ton of cash to make Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.

26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film.

With all props to the bridge sequence in Blow Out and about the last 45 minutes of Carrie, everything in the final 10 minutes of Dressed to Kill, known by its soundtrack album music cue as “The Asylum/The Nightmare,” is so perfectly imagined, executed and sustained by De Palma, with an utterly essential and inspired contribution from composer Pino Donaggio, that once I start thinking about it, hearing the music, seeing the sinuous, surreal, diffuse Panavision imagery, it takes days for me to stop running it through my head. From the languid, shocking strangulation of the nurse, seen from above as Michael Caine opens her uniform with detached curiosity and framed by a rogue’s gallery of guffawing mental patients, to the strangely unreal, luridly teased-out duration of Nancy Allen’s very own shower sequence and its terrifying denouement, this sequence is an undeniable masterpiece that caps off a masterpiece of a feature.

27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.

Hard to argue with anyone who says the moment in which Dorothy emerges from the interior of her black-and-white Kansas home onto the shockingly beautiful Technicolor land of Oz. But I think any random frame from either Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes would have the power, the glorious imagination, the sensate wonder to match anything that Judy and friends encounter on the yellow brick road.

28) Favorite Alan Smithee film. (Thanks, Peter!)

Probably Death of a Gunfighter (1969), wherein Alan (Allen) Smithee stood in for Don Siegel and Robert Totten. The movie is a solid, if not particularly memorable western, and not at all bad. It’s certainly not a disaster on the order of which the Smithee pseudonym has become associated, like, say, Burn, Hollywood, Burn: An Alan Smithee Film which was, by design or by the blackest of comic coincidences, a movie that really lived down to the talents of its credited director as well as its actual one, the mind-bogglingly mediocre Arthur Hiller. A movie bad enough to inspire Hiller to defer credit is a bad movie indeed.

29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)?

I like Crash plenty, but Morris Buttermaker is the worn-out soul of baseball. He’s the schlumpy, beaten-down coach in the best movie ever made about baseball, a movie that debuted in America’s bicentennial year, when everything about this country had a feeling of fatigue and disillusionment about it, when remembering what was great about the game and what it meant was a hard thing to do as we were upended by the disorienting waves created by Vietnam and Watergate that were still crashing onto shore. This is the reality refracted through Walter Matthau’s untouchable comic brilliance, the understanding of what the game could mean, and what it shouldn’t, and why one self-loathing man should even care-- a highlight amongst a career of highlights, courtesy of The Bad News Bears.

30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film.

I like Bullets Over Broadway, Don’t Drink the Water and Deconstructing Harry just fine—these are the works of an artist engaged in his art. (I reserve the right to go ape over Shadows and Fog someday too, just for perversity’s sake.) But given how embalmed the rest of his career has been since Crimes and Misdemeanors, I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the quality of Manhattan Murder Mystery, his reunion piece with Diane Keaton, in which the spark ignites after years of dormancy and we get to see what Alvy and Annie might have been like in middle age together. Allen never condescends to the genre construct, even as he has Alan Alda and Angelica Huston at the ready to deflate it—he actually allows it to room to expand into not just a construct, but a means by which to explore the way his character and Keaton’s are integrated, how they live together. It’s a movie many have mistakenly dismissed as minor in the rush to bow down before something more obviously autobiographical and pained, like Husbands and Wives. But the charms and joys of Manhattan Murder Mystery have outlived and outshone the exposed tabloid wounds of that other movie, and certainly the noodling time-wasters that have dominated the director’s output over the last 20 years. Watch it again and see.

31) Best Film of 1999.

Without digging any deeper into the archives, the movie from 1999 that I still go back to, the one I think is an obvious classic, has to be South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. David Edelstein was right—it is this generation’s Duck Soup.

32) Favorite movie tag line.

I always loved the ads for biker movies of the early ‘70s, most of which I was too young to actually see, but whose ragged energy was always transmitted just fine by (and probably often surpassed by) the newspaper and TV ad copy that came along with the picture. I remember being terrified seeing ads on TV for the fairly routine and forgettable Chrome and Hot Leather-- there’s no way I could take a movie that intense! But I always loved soaking in the newspaper ads, where my imagination could run free and not be tainted by actual footage from the film itself. And it was the ads for this movie that featured one of my favorite lurid catch phrases: “Don’t mess around with a Green Beret’s mama—He’ll take his chopper and ram it down your throat!” Holy shit! There’s no way I could take a movie that intense!

33) Favorite B-movie western.

Without a doubt, it’s John Wayne and Yakima Canutt in The Sagebrush Trail (1933), in which an on-the-run Wayne infiltrates villain Canutt’s gang of desperadoes. I loved it as a kid, and then rediscovered it about 15 years ago—much to my delight it was maybe even more fun for me as an adult with some sense of the history of westerns, and of these two performers in particular. But I love the whole B-western non-aesthetic aesthetic anyway. Just give me a cowboy, a sidekick, a villain, a girlfriend, a couple of horses and a low budget, and I’m pretty much happy.

34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of her or his work.

Before last weekend I probably would have said Peter Benchley, whose bloated novel was vastly improved upon by the movie version of Jaws-- a sow’s ear becomes an all-time box-office champion silk purse. But after having just seen the wonderful new animated movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (soon to be a classic, I’d guess), I’m going to say Judy Barrett (writer) and Ron Barrett (illustrator). It’s not that directors/scenarists Phil Lord and Chris Miller are slavishly faithful to the book. How could they be? It’s an elliptical children’s picture volume that runs all of 30 pages and doesn’t ground its fantastic events—the sudden availability of food from the skies-- in anything other than the unbridled imaginings inside a beloved grandpa’s bedtime story. The movie literalizes some of the book’s most incredible whoppers (a pancake big enough to blanket a school, for instance), but it translates Ron Barrett’s texture-rich, etch-style illustrations into the smooth, wide-eyed, exaggerated cartoon renderings that look fairly familiar to CGI 3-D animation. This might register as a disappointment if the movie didn’t match the book’s feats of surreal visual landscaping with its own clever inspiration.

In CWACOM, the filmmakers indulge narrative tropes—there is an explanation for how the rain of burgers begins that is not in the book, courtesy of a well-meaning inventor—as well as both the soaring excitement of food dropping from heaven and the nagging worry about what the physical reality of such an occurrence might be. It’s this nagging feeling—the insistence of the logical that the movie, on its own terms, is more than glad to address—that powers the inevitable turn for the worse, which has its corollary in the book. But where the book remains lyrical and whimsical—the citizens of the overwhelmed town take to the sea on boats made of giant pieces of stale toast—the movie escalates into a parody of disaster films that will have devotees of Irwin Allen, the Food Network and even Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe) weeping with laughter. The book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is a deserved classic—it takes the overscaled, the surreal, the slightly nightmarish, and plugs it into a warm, slightly cracked vision that makes the details of the world seem more interesting, more accessible to kids. The movie is perhaps less subtle, but it is completely engaging, an honorable reimagining and expansion of themes that the book glides over with amazing grace, with voice casting (Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Mr. T., Bruce Campbell, et al) that hints at just how sneaky smart it really is..

35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)?

Not to be too predictable or anything, but any contest like (Insert Name Here) vs. Carole Lombard is no contest. Irene Bullock is a brilliant, head-spinning creation, a fractured princess from a family that seems to have no end of fissures and splinters and shards of ebullient madness to share. In other words, a role beautifully suited to Lombard’s sparkling talent. I do love Bringing Up Baby (more, perhaps, than I love Katharine Hepburn, or even My Man Godfrey, for that matter), but even so, Lombard wins.

36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie.

The USO dance number from 1941.

37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping?

I actually think the movie works best as a satire of the relentless pursuit of even the tiniest sliver of fame. In that regard, the aggressive (and aggressively funny) homosexual farce at the heart of Bruno might almost be superfluous. But as uneven as the end result is (and you have to admit that Cohen’s guerrilla tactics are yielding less provocative results—if I were Paula Abdul or Ron Paul, I’d probably storm off the premises too), any movie that can make straight guys who bill themselves as progressive when it comes to gay rights this uncomfortable probably has something on the ball, even if the prevailing feeling is one of a sermon pitched directly at the choir.

38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet. (Thanks, Rick!)

Pauline Kael

Howard Hawks

Karl Freund

Peter Cushing

Claudia Cardinale

Now that would be a fabulous dinner party or, even better, a series of one-on-one conversation. That invitation list would pretty much cover the whole of film history, as I would be interested in it, anyway!

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THE SLIFR WEEKEND JUKEBOX: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MEET KATHLEEN EDWARDS

2009-09-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

I don’t remember the first time I ever heard Kathleen Edwards sing. It must have been that my wife had downloaded a track or two from her album Back to Me (2005), and every time her iPod coughed an Edwards tune up on shuffle (most often the title track) I would always be intrigued enough to ask her who it was. After repeating this pattern for a couple of months (and driving the missus to distraction with my short-term memory loss), I decided that further investigation of Edwards was warranted. I loved the driving rural-tinged rock of “Back to Me,” the way the plaintive, unstudied quality of her voice collided with the occasionally profane, no-nonsense spirit of the wounded persona so often woven into her lyrics. But no moaner Edwards—the woman has a tart sense of humor to go along with all the other aspects of her talent that makes it so much easier for the lilting, moody and downright raucous elements of her melodies to co-exist and, more importantly, latch a serious hold onto my brain. And best of all, her voice didn’t dictate to me a picture of what she looked like. I listened to Kathleen Edwards for probably a year before I ever saw her picture. Something about not knowing what she looked like let her music an extra veneer of the ethereal, a quality that again coexisted without contradiction with that tender, unpolished, very real voice.

It was with genuine surprise when I finally did see a picture of Edwards, round about the time her album Asking for Flowers was released in 2008, that I realized I had formed a mental picture of her and that her actual physical presence was a perfect match to her voice, yet somehow not quite what I had imagined. I’m not sure what all this projection of imagery has to do with appreciating Edwards’ estimable talent as a singer-songwriter, but somehow, for me, it does. Not to get to metaphysical, but there’s a ghostliness, an extra-dimensional ripple, a supple tactility of the notes she sings, combined with a slightly rural way her vowels are rounded off and taken on expected intonation (she is Canadian, if that fact is at all pertinent), that makes her voice breathtakingly beautiful yet not the slightest bit precious. As a singer-songwriter she is as likely to undercut the anguish of lyrical themes like self-doubt and one-sided, crippled relationships with a dash of self-deprecating humor (“I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory”) that strengthens her own sense of clarity upon looking in the mirror. But when the shadows darken, as in the shudderingly beautiful “Scared at Night,” the rich darkness of childhood fears are deepened not by hackneyed nighttime imagery but by expressions of fear drawn from the sometimes random and awful intrusion of everyday life and a child’s first brush with death-- that is, the real seeds of nightmares:

“As a young man you were shooting rats
By accident you hit the farmyard cat
He ran for the fields and
Came back the next day
You had blown out his eye
And you could see his brain
Your dad said "Boy, there are some things in life.
You don't want to do but you know is right.
So take him out back and finish him off."
You got your gun off the shelf
It only took one shot

Believe me
All the days you're unsure
Believe in me
I don't want to anymore
In the dark
Picture me in your mind
And i'll lay with you
So you don't have to be scared at night”

Kathleen Edwards avoids all the pitfalls and clichés of precious navel-gazing and wounded frailty that can and does often dilutes the power of even the strongest of modern singer-songwriters. Her voice is strong but not impenetrable or strident, and the aural pictures she paints of curdled, buoyant and indifferent love mark her as a major artist after only three albums. Crawdaddy described Asking for Flowers as “filled with darkness and snow and bolts of lightning across the horizon… arguably the best record Lucinda Williams never wrote.” Her songs are cinematic in the best, most unforced and unstudied way, tapestries for a multitude of tones and inflections and points of view. And I look forward to many years so seeing and hearing the world through her artistry.

The marvelously acerbic and evocative name-checking of ”I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory”

Kathleen Edwards rocks the roots in “Back to Me”

Ms. Edwards knows her way around a cover too, as she demonstrates with this qwistful, haunted take on Neil Young’s “Only Love (Can Break Your Heart)” (Glasgow, 2008)

Another cover, this one showing off her spiky humor as well as her way of injecting emotion into a delicious slice of cheese—Listen as she bites into the Outfield’s “Your Love”(Kent, Ohio, 2009)

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"FREDRICK ZOLLER, QUITE THE HEARTTHROB!" The Making of Nation's Pride

2009-09-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

The burning embers left over from this summer’s vigorous and downright enjoyable debate over Quentin Tarantino’s new picture just won’t quite wink out. SLIFR reader Lee Jones has tipped me to a short clip dug up via that fascinating technological tool called the Internet which gives us privileged access to the thinking of the artists behind the movie within the director’s scalp-hunting, linguistically and narratively complex masterpiece. Imagine the results if unctuous would-be movie mogul Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), actress/translator/Goebbels mistress Francesca Mondino (Julie Dryefus), Nazi Germany’s answer to Audie Murphy, Fredrick Zoller (Dnaiel Bruhl) and Nation’s Pride director Alois von Eichberg (Eli Roth, channeling Peter Lorre with mustard and ketchup) had survived that fateful night at Le Gamaar and went on to sit down for a series of up-to-the-minute-style junket interviews, which would then be stitched into a “making-of” featurette, one of many extras assembled for the undoubtedly splashy Region 2 German DVD release of Nation’s Pride.

Okay, done imagining? Now press play below and you can see it for yourself. It’s a peek behind the velvet swastika curtain which reveals that members of the National Socialist Party can be gaseous and self-congratulatory about their upcoming film projects just like your favorite actors and directors! My most treasured moments here belong to Zoller, all cleaned up and sincere, going on about himself as if he’s just another character in a routine action picture (“You have this invincible enemy, and you have this young guy who fights for his ideals”), and his zany German-inflected pronunciation, accents in all the wrong places, of the story to which he compares his on-screen and “real-life” plight. (“Is a fight, like DAVid against GOliath…”) And it’s easy to see how Mondino could charm the pants right off even the most psychotically unhinged war criminal when she waxes on about the hero of the picture (“Fredrick Zoller… quite the heartthrob!”). It's enough to make Mel Brooks stand up and salute.

The piece is a whisker short of three minutes, just enough to whet your (or at least my) appetite for what should be a very entertaining DVD of that other movie, Inglourious Basterds, when it comes out later this year. Thanks for the tip, Lee!

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THIS IS HOW THEY USED TO BOOK 'EM BACK IN THE OLD DAYS...

2009-09-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

Now playing at the Vineland Drive-in Theater in City of Industry, Los Angeles County, California. Delicious.

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