tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-190148002024-03-13T07:10:13.077-07:00The Cabinet of Dr. CriddleDr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.comBlogger150125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-51661271307755895542009-12-24T15:34:00.000-08:002009-12-24T15:59:39.645-08:00My 100 Favorite Films of the Decade<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', serif; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); white-space: pre; "><a href="http://s859.photobucket.com/albums/ab151/cinqcentcoups/?action=view&current=184015__royal_l.jpg" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><img src="http://i859.photobucket.com/albums/ab151/cinqcentcoups/184015__royal_l.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></span></a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all! The past ten years have been an exciting time and a scary time for cinema - it seems that the divide between the exclusive, thinking man's cinema and the populist fare has grown enormously since the turn of the century, and yet as the same time, there have been numerous masterpieces that exist in both spheres. CGI special effects have become so commonplace in our escapism that we've come to expect them to be flawless, leading one to wonder what the final frontier is. Digital cinematography has also taken a steady foothold in the industry, creating new shortcuts and innovations, but also new drawbacks and stumbling blocks for filmmakers.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">What follows is an ordered list of my one hundred favorite films of the past ten years. This is not a scholarly list of "important" movies, nor is my opinion intended to reflect the contemporary audience and critical culture at large. If any of your favorites were left off, it's either because I haven't gotten around to seeing them yet (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">In the Mood for Love, Far From Heaven</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">) or I just don't care for them as much as the pictures listed here (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Lost in Translation, A History of Violence</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">.) All it is is a list of the films that moved me and spoke to me. Having said that, here you go.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><ol><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, John Cameron Mitchell)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Incredibles (2004, Brad Bird)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">No Country for Old Men (2007, Joel and Ethan Coen)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Munich (2005, Steven Spielberg)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Punch-Drunk Love (2002, Paul Thomas Anderson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Sideways (2004, Alexander Payne)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003, Peter Jackson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Let the Right One In (2008, Thomas Alfredson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Bubba Ho-Tep (2002, Don Coscarelli)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Ghost World (2001, Terry Zwigoff)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003, Peter Wier)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Chuck and Buck (2000, Miguel Arteta)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Amelie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Zodiac (2007, David Fincher)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (2001, Shinchiro Watanabe)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Before Sunset (2004, Richard Linklater)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">25th Hour (2002, Spike Lee)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000, Joel and Ethan Coen)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Fountain (2006, Darren Aronofsky)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Linda Linda Linda (2005, Nobuhiro Yamashita)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Sexy Beast (2000, Jonathan Glazer)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">High Fidelity (2000, Stephen Frears)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Downfall (2004, Oliver Hirschbeigel)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Minority Report (2003, Steven Spielberg)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Y tu mama tambien (2001, Alfonso Cuaron)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Wrestler (2008, Darren Aronofsky)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Synecdoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Expired (2008, Cilillia Miniucchi)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Chop Shop (2007, Ramin Bahrani)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Wall-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Beaver Trilogy (2001, Trent Harris)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Spirited Away (2001, Hayao Miyasaki)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Dead Man’s Shoes (2004, Shane Meadows)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Up (2009, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Hot Fuzz (2007, Edgar Wright)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">In Bruges (2008, Martin McDonagh)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Oldboy (2003, Chan-wook Park)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Talk to Her (2002, Pedro Almodovar)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I’m Not There (2007, Todd Haynes)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Hero (2003, Zhang Yimou)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Finding Nemo (2003 Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Squid and the Whale (2005, Noah Bambauch)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">24 Hour Party People (2002, Michael Winterbottom)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Ginger Snaps (2001, John Fawcett)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Once (2007, John Carney)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Baxter (2005, Michael Showalter)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Collateral (2004, Michael Mann)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Nosey Parker (2003, John O’Brien)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Guillermo del Toro)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">May (2002, Lucky McKee)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Departed (2006, Martin Scorsese)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! (2001, Shusuke Kaneko)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Super Troopers (2001, Jay Chandraskhar)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Big Fish (2003, Tim Burton)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">You Can Count on Me (2000, Kenneth Lonergan)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Proposition (2005, John Hillcoat)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Best in Show (2000, Christopher Guest)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Black Book (2006, Paul Verhoeven)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, Wes Anderson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Happy-Go-Lucky (2007, Mike Leigh)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Kill Bill (2003, 2004, Quentin Tarantino)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Bug (2007, William Friedkin)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Million Dollar Baby (2004, Clint Eastwood)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">A Serious Man (2009, Joel and Ethan Coen)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Bad Santa (2003, Terry Zwigoff) </span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2003, Guy Maddin)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Suzhou River (2000, Lou Ye)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Almost Famous (2000, Cameron Crowe)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">X2: X-Men United (2003, Bryan Singer)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Wet Hot American Summer (2001, David Wain)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">King Kong (2005, Peter Jackson)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Five Obstructions (2003, Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Cache (2005, Michael Haneke)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">American Splendor (2003, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">JSA: Joint Security Area (2002, Chan-wook Park)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Moulin Rouge! (2001, Baz Luhrmann)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Good Girl (2002, Miguel Arteta)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">A Mighty Wind (2003, Christopher Guest)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Paprika (2006, Satoshi Kon)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004, Danny Leiner)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Persepolis (2007, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Open Range (2005, Kevin Costner)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Sin City (2005, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez)</span></span></li></ol><ol> </ol></span></div>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com155tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-34883185584271192372009-12-03T16:51:00.000-08:002009-12-03T17:52:16.192-08:00Projects on the Drawing Board<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZO6brBJskrI/SgN7XDhPdNI/AAAAAAAACTI/M7Ocu2pKqhQ/s400/varney.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 286px; height: 316px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZO6brBJskrI/SgN7XDhPdNI/AAAAAAAACTI/M7Ocu2pKqhQ/s400/varney.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />At this point, it's pretty redundant to apologize for neglecting this blog. I'm halfway through with my last year of film school, and I've been about as creatively prolific as I've ever been. I'm not really all that sorry, since the main reason I started writing this blog four years ago, during my year off before college, was to keep my self busy writing about films because I was a little bitter I wasn't making them. Now, I'm so busy with making films I don't even have much time to watch them. So here's what forthcoming projects you will be seeing soon from me.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Good Doctor</span></span> - a silent movie set in New York in the 1920's. An idealistic young doctor makes a house-call at the home of a Russian Jewish immigrant family, only to discover that they are a coven of vampires who have set a trap for him. This was the first time I ever shot on film - on 16mm using the Arri-S. The film is still in the developing lab right now as we speak. It needs to be cut together and delivered by the Wednesday after next, but after it's handed in I plan on working on an original score for the picture.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Dwain Esper: King of the Celluloid Gypsies</span> - a short documentary about the unscrupulous, hucksterish, mastermind director of the 30's exploitation classics <span style="font-style: italic;">Maniac, Sex Madness,</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Marihuana: The Weed With Roots in Hell, </span>and the producer/distributor of <span style="font-style: italic;">Reefer Madness</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Freaks</span> (aka <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature's Mistakes!)</span> I cut this film together for my documentary class last year, but wasn't completely satisfied with the class's imposed 5-minute-maximum running time. This new cut will be a couple minutes longer, more leisurely, and a bit more lurid and lewd.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">For Sale/Wanted</span> - an offbeat romantic comedy which is my planned thesis film. An introverted, slightly grumpy young cinephile finds a VHS tape of an incredibly rare Mexican vampire film/melodrama from the 40's in someone's trash pile. However, he needs to buy a used VCR on Craigslist to watch it on, and the machine's owner turns out to be an earthy old hippie who tries to flirt with him, complicating his plan and causing him to reflect on the merits of cinephilia vs. companionship.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com176tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-64303471324433989932009-10-13T10:26:00.000-07:002009-10-13T11:14:19.007-07:00Van Damme Day Afternoon<center><img src="http://www.darrenbyrne.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10001/JCVD002.jpg" height="400" length="300" /></center><center><br /></center><center style="text-align: left;">Just finally caught up with last year's <i>JCVD </i>on DVD, a satirical yet empathetic look at the Muscles from Brussels that stands head and shoulders above anything else he's ever done. Van Damme plays a fictionalized version of himself, who, after his career falls apart and he loses a child custody battle in Hollywood, returns to his homeland for some rest and recuperation. Once there, he inadvertantly finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a bank heist situation. The bumbling criminals decide to use Van Damme as their pawn, making it look like he is the one holding innocent civilians hostage inside and demanding a ransom.</center><center style="text-align: left;"><br /></center><center style="text-align: left;">Van Damme gamely allows himself and action films that have been his bread and butter to be liberally made fun of: his agent tells him he lost a part to Steven Segal because the other promised to cut off his ponytail, and his wife's lawyer cites the ways in which he's killed fictitious bad guys over the years to build a case against him. While locked up in the post office, one of the crooks makes him demonstrate a fake-fight move on another hostage. However, the film also provides a great deal of empathy for the faded star, such as a Godardian scene in which he rises above the set and delivers a heartfelt autobiographical monologue directly to the camera. To see man who once acted pretty much exclusively with his fists and feet let his guard down and give a real performance is something of a revelation. His haggard face sometimes resembles Humphrey Bogart's as his day gets progressively worse.</center><center style="text-align: left;"><br /></center><center style="text-align: left;">It's interesting how many films in 2008 were about old, big-screen tough guys getting back into the saddle for one last ride, bittersweetly reflecting on their piss-and-vinegar days. Clint Eastwood atoned for the slew of casually racist urban vigilantes he'd played over the years in <i>Gran Torino</i>, Indiana Jones settled down, got married, and passed the torch in <i>Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</i>, and Mickey Rourke found such a kindred spirit in <i>The Wrestler</i>'s Randy "The Ram" that it was hard to tell where the character ended and the actor began. While not quite on the level of these films, <i>JCVD</i> is perhaps the most nakedly earnest out of the bunch; one minute winking at the camera, the next minute pleading to it on its knees. Though it occasionally plods during its lengthy plot-mechanics banter between the criminals and the police, it's still a profoundly moving study of a man that most of us had long since dismissed.</center>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-1630388174266448262009-09-24T10:15:00.000-07:002009-09-24T10:27:01.237-07:00Cinema Nolita S.O.S: an update<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SruqXc_BoII/AAAAAAAAAIk/U1llB2SRM-c/s1600-h/videostore.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 190px; height: 148px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SruqXc_BoII/AAAAAAAAAIk/U1llB2SRM-c/s400/videostore.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385085099345813634" /></a><div>Clearer skies may lay ahead for the Little Video Store That Could. Even though we are still closing our shop at 178 Mulberry Street, the proceeds from our two recent fundraisers, and the generous help of Mr. Abel Ferrara and the members of Animal Collective and The Beets, have allowed us to keep the movie collection together rather than selling it off. It will be moved into a storage graciously provided by the <a href="http://www.acehotel.com/newyork">Ace Hotel</a>. Hopefully come mid-November, the store will reopen at a new space inside the Hotel, which is located at 20 West 29th Street, between Broadway and 5th. <br /></div>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-81826062452056035312009-07-24T12:37:00.000-07:002009-07-24T14:03:49.349-07:00Fare thee well Cinema Nolita<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SmoPaQ0TCMI/AAAAAAAAAIM/NGyB11mrLio/s1600-h/n706176500_2071443_76899.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 255px; height: 339px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SmoPaQ0TCMI/AAAAAAAAAIM/NGyB11mrLio/s400/n706176500_2071443_76899.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362115250203330754" border="0" /></a><br />Apologies for my recent absence from this blog, as I've been enormously busy, my girlfriend and I having just moved into a new apartment together. I wanted to share the sad news with readers in the New York area that Cinema Nolita, the video store where I have worked for the past summer and been a loyal customer for the previous three years, will soon be closing its doors.<br /><br />Parked between two ladies' dress shops on 178 Mulberry Street, the store is only one of many hubs of cinephillia that have gone belly-up in recent years, along with the West Village's Evergreen Video, Two Boots' Pioneer Theater, and the third floor of Mondo Kim's at their old St. Marks location. Although Cinema Nolita boasted a loyal throng of devoted regular customers, unfortunately it proved to be no match for the allure of Netflix and Blockbuster's no late fee, unlimited renting plans, nor for escalating rent prices and the steady transformation of the surrounding neighborhood into a vacation spot for the young, idle and wealthy.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SmoeFQBexJI/AAAAAAAAAIU/kDTdfr3RZBs/s1600-h/n706176500_2071444_6931400.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 260px; height: 347px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SmoeFQBexJI/AAAAAAAAAIU/kDTdfr3RZBs/s400/n706176500_2071444_6931400.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362131381887354002" border="0" /></a>Gradually, as the Soho/Little Italy neighborhood became a safe, Madame Tussauds waxworks museum version of its bohemian former self, European and Middle American tourists began to dominate its foot traffic, passing the video store by in favor of the designer boutiques and trendy bars. Even so, Cinema Nolita's collection attracted cinephiles from all over lower Manhattan. Abel Ferrara could often be found rifling through the Italian Neorealist films. Customers could sit on the leather sofa by the window and engage in all manner of cinema-related banter. And the staff, always happy to reccomend things, would show meat-and-potatoes filmgoers to the latest blockbusters and prestige pictures and direct hard-core obscurists to the stores untold number of rare titles, some of them available only on VHS or bootleg DVD-R. In addition to this, its weekly Saturday Night Screening series showed a bevy of unknown classics, and invited local filmmakers to share and talk about their work.<br /><br />The fact that Netflix doesn't and probably will never stock copies of Andy Warhol's <span style="font-style: italic;">Chelsea Girls, </span>Elaine May's <span style="font-style: italic;">A New Leaf, </span>John Carpenter's <span style="font-style: italic;">Elvis</span>, or Trent Harris' <span style="font-style: italic;">The Beaver Trilogy</span> is only the the least of the many injustices of Cinema Nolita's closing. Lower Manhattan has lost a true community center for lovers of the cinema, a place where the soon-to-be lost art of face-to-face discussion still transpired. The slow road to film's death as a communal art form is peppered with Starbucks establishments where independent video stores used to be.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SmogMrEvdNI/AAAAAAAAAIc/LvaboAKn8Cc/s1600-h/n1210963851_30319645_667.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 333px; height: 222px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SmogMrEvdNI/AAAAAAAAAIc/LvaboAKn8Cc/s400/n1210963851_30319645_667.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362133708431127762" border="0" /></a>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-16138735886322724812009-06-12T12:30:00.000-07:002009-06-12T13:17:46.486-07:00Reading the Movies<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0312131496.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 267px; height: 354px;" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0312131496.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><a href="http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2009/05/reading-movies.html">The Dancing Image</a> has encouraged its readers and fellow bloggers to share the film-related books that have had a special significance for them. The original poster encourages the tagging of five friends to do the same; I won't, since it always seems like a guilt-trip if you happen to be too busy to participate. Let us just say you're free to join in if you want to. At any rate, here are my picks:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In the Blink of an Eye</span> by Walter Murch. A friend of mine lent me his copy some years ago, which I read from cover to cover in one sitting and promptly ordered my own copy shortly after. Murch's film editing credits include <span style="font-style: italic;">Apocalypse Now, Godfather Part III </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Cold Mountain</span>. His book is probably the single best volume I have ever read on what a film actually is, and how an audience responds to it psychologically and emotionally.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi</span> by John M. Gibson and Chris McDonnell. This sumptuous, coffee table-styled volume has a sentimental meaning for me, because Mr. Bakshi signed my copy when I got to meet him at a gallery event in Soho. Moreover, though, this is an incredible, career-spanning scrapbook full of animation artwork, and a sometimes hyperbolic but always sincere and passionate biography of one of America's most misunderstood and underrated film artists.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cult Movies</span> by Danny Peary. One of the finest collections of film criticism essays that I own. Peary uses "cult" as a pretty broad umbrella term, reviewing <span style="font-style: italic;">Casablanca, The Searchers </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wizard of Oz</span> alongside fare like <span style="font-style: italic;">Two-Lane Blacktop</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Honeymoon Killers.</span> His Freudian reading of King Kong, wherein Kong is the manifestation of Carl Denham's sexual frustration a la the Id Monster in <span style="font-style: italic;">Fordbidden Planet</span>, is one of the most fasctinating I've ever read. Like all of my favorite critics, Peary's writing says just as much about him as it does the films in question.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Making Movies</span> by Sidney Lumet. A real gift of a book: one of America's finest filmmakers candidly sharing his experiences from a storied career. This book details the nitty-gritty experience of directing, the importance of each aspect of production, and instructions on how to use every single tool in the filmmaker's toolbox to better tell your story. A must-read for anyone interested in getting into the business.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Hollywood Babylon</span> by Kenneth Anger. And speaking of books by respected filmmakers... while Anger enjoys a reputation as one of the fathers of the post-modern cinematic language, his famous written work is really little more than enjoyable, mud-caked load of the famous and the dead's dirtiest laundry. Every grain should be taken with a grain of salt and simply enjoyed. More than anything, this is a secret-handshake book for cinephiles, something that automatically starts conversations when people see you reading it on the subway. Did I also mention that it's just a hell of a lot of fun?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Gilliam on Gilliam</span>, edited by Ian Christie. I got this as a birthday present when in my early teens, when Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton were my greatest cinematic idols. Gilliam is remarkably candid here and recalls his career and his many battles with producers and studio chiefs with great clarity. It's a fascinating portrait of a very neurotic but highly intelligent and creative artist.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Psychotronic Video Guide</span> by Michael J. Weldon. The most tattered and battered book on my shelf, this is the Leonard Maltin guide's black sheep brother. No B-movie (or A-film with B-ish roots) is left unreviewed, from horror to blaxploitation, martial arts and grindhouse pictures of all kinds. Though most video guides of this nature have been rendered obsolute by IMDb, this book is still probably the only place you'll find any info a great number of unloved genre pictures.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Hitchcock/Truffaut</span>, by Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut. When one great, young filmmaker interviews an even greater, older one, the results are one of the finest film books ever committed to print. Hitchcock starts off very joke and anecdotal but eventually starts to probe deeply into his own work and his methods of working. An indespensible volume.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-39944349522996237752009-06-06T12:30:00.000-07:002009-06-08T10:59:18.001-07:00It's part of the race: David Carradine 1936-2009<div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 356px; height: 517px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/death_race_2000_poster_03.jpg" /><br /></div>The untimely death of David Carradine came as a shock to everyone, from youngsters who knew him as the eponymous assassin squad leader and father figure in <span style="font-style: italic;">Kill Bill, </span>to the baby boomers who watched him on TV as Kwai Chang Caine in <span style="font-style: italic;">Kung Fu</span>, to cinephiles the world over, for many wonderful roles over the years. He was Cole Younger, leader of the Younger gang in Walter Hill's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Long Riders</span> (alongside real-life siblings Robert and Keith), an existential circus acrobat in Ingmar Bergman's underrated <span style="font-style: italic;">The Serpent's Egg</span>, and Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's <span style="font-style: italic;">Paths of Glory. </span>But out of all the roles of his long and storied career, my personal favorite is the wackily nihilistic, low-budget, subversive Roger Corman opus, <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Race 2000.</span><br /><br />The film was recently given a toothless and irony-free remake treatment by Paul W.S. Anderson and Jason Statham, but the original, directed by Paul Bartel of <span style="font-style: italic;">Eating Raoul </span>fame, and scripted by the brilliant Charles B. Griffith, is undoubtedly the superior picture. By the year 2000, the United States have dissolved and become a totalitarian state. Population control and popular entertainment are handled simultaneously in the form of the Transcontinental Road Race, a cross-country automobile rally in which the contestants score points by mowing down innocent pedestrians. In keeping with the theme of fascistic empires, several of the racers have names like Mathilda the Hun (who sports a German helmet decked out with swastikas) and Nero the Hero. A pre-fame (and hilarious) Sylvester Stallone is Machine Gun Joe, the tommy gun-wielding, short-fuse bad boy that the fans love to hate. And David Carradine is Frankenstein, the unchallenged champ and star of the show.<br /><br />According to Carradine, he sought out the role in this film to distance himself from Kwai Chang Caine as much as possible. Frankenstein wears a black leather bodysuit and gimp mask, and talks in a monosyllabic <a href="http://drcriddle.blogspot.com/2009/05/tarzan-vs-ibm-une-etrange-aventure-du.html">Alpha 60</a> voice, although this is revaled to be a front for a suave and philosophical individual. Striving to outwit his opponents as well as a ragtag group of liberal revolutionaries who set booby traps for the racers, Frankenstein, like Lemmy Caution, is a poker-faced anti-hero in a farcical, dark-witted spoof. One of the film's many highlights is a scene in which the elderly and terminally ill are lined up in the middle of the road outside a hospital for "Euthinasia Day," and Frankenstein displays his "red-blooded, American sense of humor" by driving up the ramp and taking out the doctors and nurses instead.<br /><br />With its mix of sci-fi satire, grindhouse violence, Benny Hill "Yakity Sax"-inspired sped-up car chases, and 70's post-watergate sentiment (Peter Fonda reportedly turned down the lead in this film... his loss) <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Race 2000</span> is a deliciously poisoned cupcake for any cult film fan. And Frankenstein may well be the ultimate David Carradine performance - never winking at the camera and always acting like a professional, no matter how loopy things got. He was an actor of immense talent and charisma who will be fondly remembered.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-39959788881875875432009-05-29T13:55:00.000-07:002009-05-30T09:00:45.599-07:00Tarzan vs. IBM: une etrange aventure du Jean-Luc Godard<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.elanso.com/U/P/01/41/17/16633472228202656250.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 332px; height: 245px;" src="http://www.elanso.com/U/P/01/41/17/16633472228202656250.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> Jean-Luc Godard’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Breathless</span> was an expectation-defying cherry bomb thrown in the face of conventional narrative cinema in 1960, combining a Brecht-inspired mistrust for escapist storytelling with a genuine love for Hollywood’s output. In the years that followed, he continued to turn out pictures that denied audiences the cinematic cliches and conventions they were used to. His ninth feature, <span style="font-style: italic;">Alphaville; une etrange aventure du Lemmy Caution</span>, may or may not have been conceived as a form of artistic competition with his friend Francoius Truffaut, who would be summoned to Hollywood to adapt <span style="font-style: italic;">Fahrenheit 451</span>. With this film, Godard would create his own dystopic science fiction story, but he would do it his way.<br /><br /> The film’s opening scene is a perfect signifier that we are not in for a traditional ride. Secret agent Lemmy Caution checks into a hotel under a false name. A pretty young chambermaid leads him upstairs to his room. Several members of the hotel staff offer to take his suitcase for him, and he grumpily refuses. To French audiences in the early sixties, this was nothing out of the ordinary. Eddie Constantine had already portrayed the hard-boiled Caution - a character originally invented by pulp novelist Peter Cheyney - in a successful series of Cold War espionage thrillers between 1952 and 1963. They had probably seen him behave in this fashion before.<br /><br /> It doesn’t take long, however, for things to swerve into uncharted territory. The chambermaid offers to run Lemmy a bath, then strips down to her underwear, exposing a number tattooed on her back. Out of nowhere, a fedora-hatted goon attacks Lemmy, smashing clumsily through three fake-looking and easily avoidable plate glass doors. Lemmy shoots him, while the chambermaid sits in the tub, barely batting an eye. She then tells him that she is a Seductress, Second Class. What exactly was going on here?<br /><br /> Without warning, Godard plucked a well-known b-movie character out of his established 20th century setting, and into an otherworldly futuristic one reminiscent of Orwell’s <span style="font-style: italic;">1984</span>. However, in another expectation-defeating (and budget-saving) turn, it’s a future without gadgets of any kind. The film was shot in modern-looking locales around Paris. Alpha 60, the evil supercomputer that rules over the planet, is actually a window fan voiced by a man with an artificial voice box. To simulate space travel, the characters merely drive their cars down the highway, watching the street lights zoom by, and commenting on how lovely the stars look.<br /><br /> In terms of D.I.Y. aesthetic style, <span style="font-style: italic;">Alphaville</span>’s closest cousin is probably Chris Marker’s <span style="font-style: italic;">La Jetee</span>. However, where Marker’s film was a poingant study of love in the face of Armageddon, <span style="font-style: italic;">Alphaville</span> is a fascitious spoof, albeit one grounded in a love for what it criticizes, with a few ideas of its own as to what those things mean to us as a culture. Characters make seemingly contradictory references to 20th century events: despite this being the future, Caution claims to be a veteran of WWII’s Battle of Guadalcanal. There are also (most likely deliberate) factual mistakes, such as when Caution and his partner discuss light years as a measure of time. The point of this crazy exercise, seemingly, is to show how willingly we as an audience will follow storytellers like lemmings off of a cliff, no matter what nonsensical horseshit they feed us.<br /><br /> The story is steeped in layer upon layer of wry meta-humor. Using found urban locations points out how the real future never ends up looking like the future of sci-fi cinema: as a result, most of them end up looking inevitably quaint and indicative of the time in which they were made. In Godard’s mind, there seems to be no point in spending millions of dollars on a picture like <span style="font-style: italic;">Metropolis</span>, if 20 years down the line, audiences will have to make allowances for the sight of bi-planes flying around your art deco skyscrapers. This explains the presence of a film-noir gumshoe protagonist, an archetype that was already somewhat dated by 1965. To his wonderful credit, Constantine performs his role with complete, poker-faced seriousness, no matter how ridiculous his sitation becomes.<br /><br /> Caution’s surname is becomes an ironic joke in relation to his actions. In his mission to destroy the totalitarian Alpha 60, he shoots every complacent technocrat unfortunate enough to cross his path. What’s more, he ends up being fairly useless in his mission to thwart the evil supercomputer, which uses a death ray to annihilate everyone on the planet. (Humorously enough, the working title of the picture was <span style="font-style: italic;">Tarzan versus IBM</span> - which just as well sums up the plot John Boorman’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Point Blank</span> and<span style="font-style: italic;"> Zardoz</span>.) What Godard seems to be poking fun at here is how real life often reminds us of allegorical science fiction stories of literature and film, when it really ought to be the other way around.<br /><br /> The way in which we filter our experience of the world through escapist media is examined in numerous instances. Characters have names that are drawn from pop cultural sources to a distracting extent. Caution asks his partner about the whereabouts of Detective Dick Tracy. The inventor of the Alpha 60 goes by two monikers: Dr. Von Braun (after the Nazi-era rocket scientist) and Professor Nosferatu - two famed German boogeymen, one real, and the other fictitious. His assistants are dubbed Dr. Heckle and Dr. Jeckle, after magpies from the Terrytoons cartoons.<br /><br /> What’s fascinating about watching Alphaville today is that many of the concepts it pioneered as parodies of science fiction have been re-worked in serious films and other media. The Alpha 60 appears to be directly related to <span style="font-style: italic;">2001: A Space Odyssey</span>’s HAL; its perverse plan to save the world by destroying it also employed by Adrien Veidt in Alan Moore’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span>. And of course, <span style="font-style: italic;">Blade Runner</span>, almost 20 years later, would once again meld dystopic sci-fi with film noir into a much more scarily possible setting. Despite Godard’s facetious treatment of the material, we still cling to allegorical sci-fi as an expression of the times. In creating a sci-fi story that went out of its way to be a product of his time, Godard ended up creating one that will always be ahead of it.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-86757376128184183012009-05-13T10:06:00.000-07:002009-05-16T21:09:44.080-07:00The Celluloid Gypsy Chronicles: The Frank Henenlotter Interview<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8tuK44ymI/AAAAAAAAAHM/93f6kXV7BgQ/s1600-h/Henenlotter03.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 265px; height: 184px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8tuK44ymI/AAAAAAAAAHM/93f6kXV7BgQ/s400/Henenlotter03.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336534354677516898" border="0" /></a>Frank Henenlotter knows a thing or two about exploitation movies. His best-loved film, the brilliant <span style="font-style: italic;">Basket Case</span>, is a satirical splatter pic that unfolds in a pre-gentrification New York City, back when 42nd street was home to hundreds of XXX theaters. The picture's two sequels, and the seminal <span style="font-style: italic;">Brain Damage </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Frankenhooker</span> also lovingly paid tribute to the exploitation flicks of yesteryear while simultaneously poking fun at their politics.<br /><br />In the many years spent between 1992's <span style="font-style: italic;">Basket Case III: The Progeny</span> and last year's yet-to-be-released <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad Biology</span>, Frank has done untold amounts of research and film preservation work with Something Weird Video, the DVD company which has earned the meant-in-a-good-way nickname "the Criterion of Crap." For the past two decades, Something Weird has restored and released movies from all unloved subgenres: skeezy sex hygiene shorts, nudist camp features, drug scare propaganda, dated and racist jungle documentaries, burlesque show compilations, and pre-home video pornography. They have lovingly cataloged the works of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Doris Wishman, Dan Sonney, Harry Novak, David F. Friedman and Dwain Esper. So when a mutal friend (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Pleasure of Being Robbed</span> actress Eleonore Hendricks) offered to introduce us, I sought to pick Henenlotter's brain about Esper in particular, and 1930's, faux-educational exploitation pictures in general.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8reouq4uI/AAAAAAAAAGk/EnBnz-K5KLg/s1600-h/basket_case.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 202px; height: 260px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8reouq4uI/AAAAAAAAAGk/EnBnz-K5KLg/s200/basket_case.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336531888786563810" border="0" /></a>We spoke in the the living room of his Lower West Side apartment, which houses a bookshelf containing more monster movie DVDs than you've had hot dinners. Posters for <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crawling Eye</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Please Don't Eat My Mother</span> adorn the walls, and Belial, the rubbery, deformed star of <span style="font-style: italic;">Basket Case, </span>sits silently in the corner. Henenlotter is portly and jovial like a favorite uncle; his demeanor puts one almost immediately at ease. The first thing he asked me after I'd introduced myself was "So why the heck are you doing a documentary about Dwain Esper?"<br /><br />I told him I simply found his films to be fascinating time capsules, and enormously entertaining to boot. I in turn asked him why he loves exploitation films in general. "Well, if you're gonna study one kind of film, you've got to study them all," he replied. "If one kind of film is valid, then they're all valid. And these bottom-of-the-barrel movies we're talking about, that's the underbelly of Hollywood, which is probably a lot more fascinating. I think they reveal a lot more about people and their values, and what times they lived in. The fact that they're not well made, well, that's beside the point.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8s8GlHRxI/AAAAAAAAAG0/16Sm0GRjLB8/s1600-h/maniacx%2Bcopy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 255px; height: 193px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8s8GlHRxI/AAAAAAAAAG0/16Sm0GRjLB8/s400/maniacx%2Bcopy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336533494527379218" border="0" /></a>"On the other hand," he added. "They're really just a hell of a lot of fun. I think the first ten minutes of <span style="font-style: italic;">Sex Madness</span> is madness! The idea that you could go to a burlesque theater, then suddenly come under the clutches of a veracious lesbian, and then go out and rape and kill a child, I think one guy does - and then a whole bunch of guys go out and, 'hey fellas, let's go get syphilis!' It's just wonderful!"<br /><br />Our conversation turned to the social and political climate that these films flourished in. Essentially, the market for these films sprang up due to the Hays Code, much the same way that the bootlegging industry did in response to Prohibition. "This is a country that has never escaped the clutches of the Church and morality, and we're still fighting that today," Henenlotter sighed. "You know; naughty naughty naughty, even though everyone goes home and closes the curtains and does whatever the hell they want. It was all total hypocrisy.<br /><br />"But there was a commercial aspect to these films too. They'd only have a couple of thousand bucks for their budget, what can we do with that? Well, we can show a girl in her brassire. Okay, that's good. How about she gets sold to a whorehouse? That'll give us an opportunity to have girls laying around in lingerie. And maybe we'll be able to throw some glimpses of bare breasts in there. Now, a movie like that isn't going to play at a theater that just showed a Paramount film last week. But a lot of these small towns with independent theaters would have been open to that sort of thing, and I think audiences were thrilled with these movies."<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8tL-xhdsI/AAAAAAAAAG8/0WEmKFYJfeY/s1600-h/frankhooct.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 230px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8tL-xhdsI/AAAAAAAAAG8/0WEmKFYJfeY/s400/frankhooct.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336533767309850306" border="0" /></a>I observed that while modern audiences may scoff at the dated and over-the-top nature of 30's exploitation films, the popularity of "Flavor of Love," the <span style="font-style: italic;">Saw </span>movies, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Two Girls One Cup </span>suggests that really not much has changed about humans' attraction to the forbidden, lowest-common-denominator images. "I think you're absolutely right," said Henenlotter. "And that's especially what I love about Esper's stuff. He would try to fit in as much taboo stuff in his films whether it was related to the story or not. For example, in <span style="font-style: italic;">Marihuana</span>, there's a shot of a guy sitting at the bar pouring a beer, but from the angle it's shot, it looks like he's taking a piss. What a sick little turd of a joke! And in <span style="font-style: italic;">Maniac</span> - the cat eating a human heart, the guy eating the cat's eye, the women fighting with the hypo needles. You just make a checklist of everything that shouldn't have been done, and it's in that film!"<br /><br />I went on to ask Henenlotter about Dwain Esper the man, of whom there is significantly less written than Dwain Esper the filmmaker. "You've gotta read Dave [Friedman's] book [<span style="font-style: italic;">Youth in Babylon</span>,]" he said. "He and this other guy we interviewed, a roadshow guy named Claude Alexander, both said the same thing about Esper - that he was probably the crookedest guy on the face of the earth. Alexander was burned by him - Esper sold him some childbirth footage that had been duped from another source. Alexander was pissed - he wanted to sue him, but Esper said 'No, no, don't do that, come over to my house for dinner, and we'll sort this thing out.' So he went over there, ended up staying there for a couple of days, and grew to love the guy. And he said that that was the work of a true con man."<br /><br />There are scores of other tall tales about Esper, from being drugged and stripped naked by Illinois puritans to suing Dan Sonney over footage from the gorillia picture <span style="font-style: italic;">Ingagi</span> (which Esper did not own) to inexplicably getting his movies played in the most uptight parts of the country. Henenlotter admits to having always wondered how he managed to roadshow <span style="font-style: italic;">Freaks</span> as an exploitation film when it was currently under a self-imposed studio ban at MGM in the 40's. "I think it was like a lot of the movies he showed: he talked the talk, so people just assmumed he had the rights."<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8qCyXeB8I/AAAAAAAAAGU/GHYU5nbTFok/s1600-h/streetcorner.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 158px; height: 224px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8qCyXeB8I/AAAAAAAAAGU/GHYU5nbTFok/s200/streetcorner.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336530310825641922" border="0" /></a>We went on further to discuss the circus sideshow-like promotion and exhibition of these types of films in the 30's and 40's, and then Henenlotter went to his DVD shelf and pulled out Something Weird's double feature of <span style="font-style: italic;">Street Corner </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Because of Eve</span>. "The roadshow guys had to make it seem like they were doing a good deed by showing these films." He popped in <span style="font-style: italic;">Because of Eve</span>, which starts with a couple visiting a grandfatherly doctor. The doctor says something along the lines of "Hi there, Johnny - that case of VD clearing up I hope? How about you, Mary? How's your baby, why, she must be about two years old now." Needless to say, both parties are rather shocked and uncomfortable. The doctor proceeds to give them the straight-up birds-and-the-bees speech, illustrated with copious imagery of STD-ridden genitals.<br /><br />Just then, the film stops, and cuts to a color video meant to simulate the intermission of the film. David Friedman steps onscreen and launches into what Henenlotter told me was a memorized speech from his days as a promoter for exploiteer Kroger Babb. Sexual hygiene, as Friedman tells us, is the most important issue among young people today. He implores us that we should purchase a set of sex-ed pamphlets, which he believes belong on the living room mantelpiece, right next to the family Bible, in every house in America. "We shot this right over there, in front of those curtains," Henenlotter told me.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8q879jjLI/AAAAAAAAAGc/jNceQu5DG20/s1600-h/9641.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 237px; height: 178px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8q879jjLI/AAAAAAAAAGc/jNceQu5DG20/s200/9641.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336531309833718962" border="0" /></a>I asked Henenlotter if he believed that exploitation films had paved the way for the serious treatment of taboo subjects in later years - after all, <span style="font-style: italic;">Marihuana </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Child Bride</span> were made long before <span style="font-style: italic;">The Man with the Golden Arm</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Lolita.</span> Henenlotter said he didn't think so. "The thing you have to understand is, these films were in a ghetto. They may seem tame today, but back then, that was the height of pornography. Pornography has never really crossed over into the mainstream, except arguably for Russ Meyer's films in the 60's, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Deep Throat</span><span> in the '70's</span><span style="font-style: italic;">.</span> But Esper didn't influence Otto Preminger or anybody like that. He didn't knock down any censorship walls, those walls were comin' down anyway."<br /><br />Just before I left, I asked Henenlotter when the general public will finally get to see his latest film, <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad Biology</span>. He told me that the film's co-producer, rapper R.A. the Rugged Man, is currently negotiating with Media Blasters for a DVD release. "[The movie] is a lot of fun," Henenlotter smiled. "It's an exploitation movie in an era when there shouldn't be any exploitation movies." I'd argue that that's is exactly when we need them the most.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8tb8tCYAI/AAAAAAAAAHE/62Q4QcNGI5c/s1600-h/bad_biology_mb01.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 192px; height: 246px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/Sg8tb8tCYAI/AAAAAAAAAHE/62Q4QcNGI5c/s400/bad_biology_mb01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336534041632071682" border="0" /></a>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com320tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-80826764209884711202009-05-10T07:09:00.001-07:002009-05-10T07:10:17.169-07:00Happy Mother's Day!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.iconocast.com/00010/L9/News5_0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://www.iconocast.com/00010/L9/News5_0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-83436425627487955342009-04-12T06:59:00.000-07:002009-04-17T18:54:15.445-07:00Never as Good as the Second Time<img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 290px; height: 450px;" src="http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/MG/144231%7ENosferatu-the-Vampyre-Posters.jpg" alt="" border="0" /><div style="text-align: left;">Everything old is seemingly new again in this day and age. The studios are remake-crazy, especially when it comes to glossifying up old drive-in films: now, seemingly every horror film made between 1972 and 1988 will have to be preceeded by "the original" when talking about it. Of course, I'm not a knee-jerk elitist who always assumes that the original has to be the best - let's not forget that the best-known versions of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Wizard of Oz </span>and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">A Star Is Born</span> were not the first, and that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Last House on the Left </span>was actually a contemporary update of Bergman's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Virgin Spring.</span> However, it does seem today that they don't remake 'em like they used to. Here are six remakes that are not only truly great, but I feel, superior to their original counterparts.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/dvd/Fistful.jpg"><img src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/dvd/Fistful.jpg" alt="" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 227px;" border="0" /></a><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">A Fistful of Dollars (1964)</span><br /></div></div><div>Kurosawa's samurai films were famously influenced by John Ford westerns, so it's ironic yet fitting that two of his best films would be remade in the very genre that inspired them. For my money, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Magnificent Seven</span> is a wonderfully fun film but it really can't hold a candle to the beautiful nuance and majesty of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Seven Samurai.</span> On the other hand, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Yojimbo</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">A Fistful of Dollars</span> are about equally great, Leone's film just ever so slightly more so, for kick-starting the spaghetti western subgenre and launching the careers of Clint Eastwood, possibly the only human being tough enough to inherit the crown of Manliest Man Ever from Toshiro Mifune. Though Leone would later indulge himself a little too much on his film's runtimes and pace, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Fistful</span> is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am affair, which makes its bleak and nihilistic outlook all the more satisfying.</div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.wileywiggins.com/adams.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 305px; height: 220px;" src="http://www.wileywiggins.com/adams.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Phillip Kaufman)</span><br /></div><div>Don Siegel's original Invasion was one of the best sci-fi movies of the 50's, and has been read as both an anti-Communist parable and an indictment of McCarthyism. Phillip Kaufman's re-do used this framework for one of the best subversively conservative genre pictures ever made: by shifting the action to flower child-populated San Francisco, his film is a sly satire of hippie herd-think, as the permissive, anything-goes attitude makes for the ideal setting for an alien takeover. The imagery is some of the most terrifying in any film and the cast is top-rate, the standout being Leonard Nimoy as a touchy-feely psychiatrist who is secretly in cahoots with the aliens.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);"><img src="http://mmimagessmall.moviemail-online.co.uk/kinski_k.jpg" alt="" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 219px;" border="0" /></span></div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog)</span></div><div>Max Shreck's Count Orlok was the cinema's first great boogeyman, and master director F.W. Murnau's film one of the few silent films that still has the ability to make you want to hide behind the couch. Werner Herzog's updating of the tale is almost devoid of shocks: a haunting and lyrical work that depicted a vampire's wrath as part of the universe's cyclical coming and going of chaos and entropy. And as portrayed by his man-muse Klaus Kinski, the titular character is less a nightmare beast than a truly pathetic, pitiable creature, for whom eternal life has brought nothing but loneliness and misery. Likewise, the film's horrors do not pop out from the shadows, but can be powerfully felt in the lingering shots of mummies during the opening credits, on the faces of nonchalant townsfolk in a village overrun by rats, and upon the milk-white brow and bottomless eyes of Isabelle Adjani's Lucy Harker. </div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/021018/12122__thing_l.jpg"><img src="http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/021018/12122__thing_l.jpg" alt="" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 270px; height: 236px;" border="0" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)</span></div><div>Carpenter's best film is both a more faithful adaptation of Joseph Campbell's novella <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Who Goes There</span> and an homage to his hero Howard Hawks, producer (and allegedly, also director) of the original. Here is a film that truly gets better with each viewing because it is so marvelously steeped in ambiguity. We're never told exactly how the titular body-possessing, shape-shifting creature works, whether it is capable of overtaking a human entirely or slowly possessing them, and how much of the characters' actions is caused by alien intrusion or by their own paranoia and anger. Puppetry and prosthetic effects had reached their peak with this film, although the gross-out shocks never feel gratuitous or overwhelm the story. It's really a shame that Carpenter has gone into semi-retirement, because we really need him today to show us just how masterful horror films can be. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139);"><img src="http://www.channel4.com/film/media/images/Channel4/film/F/fly_1986_xl_01--film-B.jpg" alt="" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 306px; height: 230px;" border="0" /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Fly (1986, David Cronenberg)</span><br /></div><div>While the original Vincent Price film, is adored by the F<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">amous Monsters of Filmland</span> generation, I was never really that impressed with it - apart from the brilliant "help me!" scene, it's rather dull. Cronenberg's re-working of the tale, however, is a true masterpiece and one of the great films of the eighties, and one in which all of his body-horror hangups came together into a film that is deeply moving and profoundly human. Jeff Goldblum's slow transformation into a half-human-half-insect beast, to the horror and alienation of his girlfriend, becomes a metaphor for cancer, but the brutally unsentimental film avoids the syrupy trappings of almost any other movie ever made about sick people. Though the film is undeniably a yuck-effects masterpiece, the scenes of baboon implosions, fingernails falling off and maggot births wouldn't be as resonantly powerful if not for the deeply felt performances by Goldblum and Davis. Unlike the original, this isn't a movie about monsters, it's a film about human beings.</div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.sundancechannel.com/UPLOADS/films/320x240/c/cape_fear.jpg"><img src="http://www.sundancechannel.com/UPLOADS/films/320x240/c/cape_fear.jpg" alt="" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" border="0" /></a></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Cape Fear (1991, Marvin Scorsese)</span></div><div>Scorsese's most beaten up-upon film is a glorious and hysterical pop-art experiment masquerading as a big budget summer blockbuster; as drunk with cinema-love as his equally underrated <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">New York, New York</span>, only more fun. In the original classic by J. Lee Thompson, Gregory Peck is a decent family man pushed to extremes who must defend his angelic daughter and wife from cooly sadistic rapist Robert Mitchum. Scorsese keeps the plot essentially the same but drastically changes the characters: the Bowden family are dysfunctional and miserable behind the facade of their white picket fence, and De Niro's Max Cady, while insane, is a still more moral and virtuous than the supposed good guys. It's as if all of American fear cinema comes together in a blender here: the thrillers of the 60's are mixed with the bunny-boilers and unkillable slashers of the 80's; Cady's wardrobe pays homage to 70's kitsch and his tattoos to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Night of the Hunter.</span> Scorsese even reused the original's Bernard Herrmann score and gave Mitchum and Peck cameos as a kind-hearted cop and an Atticus Finch-style lawyer who unwittingly becomes a monkey wrench in the works. Of all the remakes that are indulgent homage/love affairs (like Jim McBride's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Breathless</span> and Peter Jackson's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">King Kon</span>g) this is one that really works beautifully.</div>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-55103739963844280252009-04-11T11:43:00.000-07:002009-04-11T18:58:47.316-07:00The Celluloid Gypsy Chronicles: An Introduction<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SeDlL-lgOlI/AAAAAAAAAFs/ajOnG8Wm2cc/s1600-h/manhimself+cropped.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 194px; height: 248px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SeDlL-lgOlI/AAAAAAAAAFs/ajOnG8Wm2cc/s320/manhimself+cropped.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5323506753493547602" border="0" /></a>These past few months I have been beavering away hard on a short documentary about Dwain Esper, legendary exploitation filmmaker in the 30's and 40's. Like his contemporaries, he made numerous very cheap and dubious films on taboo subjects expressly forbidden by the Hays Production Code: drug addiction, venereal disease, adultery, prostitution, homosexuality, and other forms of debauchery. Some of these films had nudity in them, while others had various geek-show attractions like filmed births and disgusting VD symptoms. In order to make money without attracting the attention of local bluenoses and censor boards, these movies had to make a claim of educational value. Whatever sick, depraved nonsense they were showing had to be packaged as a decent, patriotic act of educating the American public.<br /><br />Some of the most famous exploitation films of the day were Kroger Babb's <span style="font-style: italic;">Mom </span><span style="font-style: italic;">and Dad,</span> William O'Conner's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Cocaine Fiends</span>, and Louis Gasnier's <span style="font-style: italic;">Reefer Madness</span>, which Esper actually bought from him and turned into a roadshow attraction (more on this later.) But the fact is, these films look like David Selznik-produced epics compared to most of the stuff Esper helmed himself. Some have labeled him a 1930's Ed Wood, which isn't far wrong. Esper's movies are so ridiculous, so staggeringly, insanely bad, so genuinely cheap and scuzzy and completely bizarre, that they almost seem to have been beamed in from another dimension.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SeFCG7uNy-I/AAAAAAAAAGE/3rrqiryckD8/s1600-h/esperfront.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SeFCG7uNy-I/AAAAAAAAAGE/3rrqiryckD8/s320/esperfront.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5323608921406819298" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SeFCNvazQ7I/AAAAAAAAAGM/qXUgV7itilE/s1600-h/esperinside.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 326px; height: 392px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SeFCNvazQ7I/AAAAAAAAAGM/qXUgV7itilE/s320/esperinside.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5323609038363247538" border="0" /></a>Esper was a former circus sideshow barker who became a successful real estate agent. He got into filmmaking purely by accident, when a business deal went sour and he got a film processing studio out of the deal. He and his wife, Hildegarde Stadie, collaborated on a number of early, scandalous, envelope-pushing films in the pre-Code erea. The earliest film of theirs that survives is 1933's <span style="font-style: italic;">Narcotic</span>. Unlike most of the drug-scare films that would come later, the protagonist is not some impressionable whelp, but a middle-aged doctor who really should know better. He gets starts taking opium to help with the stress of his job, and begins the downward spiral. The film is actually a pretty accurate biography of Hildegarde's great uncle, a medicine show huckster who sold a miracle cure called "Tiger Fat" in the late 1880's. Part of his act, at one point, featured a prepubescent, completely nude Hildegarde onstage with a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.mk-magazine.com/reviews/archives/maniac.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 290px; height: 288px;" src="http://www.mk-magazine.com/reviews/archives/maniac.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Narcotic</span><span> is interesting because it's a drug-scare film that features a pretty sympathetic main character, a comparatively well-written script, and an unusually high level of intelligence. The pair's next film, </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Maniac</span>, from 1934, would be almost the complete opposite. This is a film so bizarre, nonsensical, and utterly amazing that it staggers the mind. The plot, which concerns Maxwell, a mentally unstable former vaudeville actor who kills, then impersonates, his mad scientist boss, segues off onto weird tangents whenever it sees fit. There's a raping psychotic next door who thinks he's the orangutan from <span style="font-style: italic;">Murders of the Rue Morgue.</span> His other neighbor farms cats for their pelts. Two women fight with hypo needles and splintered two-by-fours in a scummy basement. Maxwell pops a cats eyeball out of its head and eats it. He and Professor Miershultz revive a dead woman by giving her a shoulder massage. There's implied necrophilia jokes, rape, naked boobs, and intertitles dropped in seemingly at random that describe the symptoms of mental illness. This film is truly a sight to behold.<br /><br />When first released, <span style="font-style: italic;">Maniac </span>was a flop, until Esper re-titled it <span style="font-style: italic;">Sex Maniac</span> and played up the more risque aspects of the story. His next two features, <span style="font-style: italic;">Marihuana</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Sex Madness</span>, would strike a clearer balance between <span style="font-style: italic;">Narcotic</span>'s somberly moralistic seriousness and <span style="font-style: italic;">Maniac</span>'s boundless sensationalism and gleeful depiction of bad taste. Esper also found he could make more money if he acted as the booking agent and exhibitor of his films as well as the director and producer. <span style="font-style: italic;">Sex Madness</span>, a sometimes over-the-top but mostly frank portrayal of a young woman who contracts syphilis. This film, and others like it, would've been shown to audiences segregated by gender. There would have been an intermission in the middle where some scamster pretending to be America's foremost sex hygenist (possibly even Esper himself) would give a lecture and sell brochures on maintaining a healthy sex life.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 319px; height: 471px;" src="http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i33/tintarchive/dvdm/freaks.jpg" /><br /></div><br />For years, Esper roadshowed films he'd directed and others he'd acquired from other sources; some legally, like <span style="font-style: italic;">Reefer Madness</span>, which was formerly a church group produced feature called <span style="font-style: italic;">Tell Your Children</span>, others, almost certainly illegally, like <span style="font-style: italic;">Freaks,</span> which was also sold under the title <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature's Mistakes </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Love Among the Freaks.</span><span> He retired from directing after unleashing <span style="font-style: italic;">The Strange Love Life of Adolf Hitler</span> onto the public, with which he toured across the country in a '37 Mercedes that he claimed was Der Feurher's car. He retired from the business sometime in the forties; just as the world of exploitation films as he knew it started winding to a close. After World War II, it would seem that audiences' attitudes changed to a darker and more cynical one. It's more than likely that after seeing the outcome of the war, Esper and his ilk's goona-goona tactics ceased to be as shocking and scary as they once were.<br /><br />In any case, my mini-doc, which will be titled <span style="font-style: italic;">Dwain Esper: King of the Celluloid Gypsies</span>, will illustrate the man's life and work, will feature clips from his movies and a 30's jazz soundtrack including Cab Calloway, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman and Jelly Roll Morton. I will report on my progress here and post the occasional little nugget of Esper-related goodness. Below are some links to a number of his pictures which are now in the public domain, and can be downloaded free of charge from the incredible Internet Archive.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/Maniac">Maniac </a>(1934)<br /><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/reefer_madness1938">Reefer Madness</a></span><span><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/reefer_madness1938"> </a>(1936)</span><br /><span><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/Marihuana-the_Devils_Weed">Marihuana</a> (1936)<br /></span><span><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/sex_madness">Sex Madness </a>(1938)<br /></span>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-80054126531720023512009-03-22T17:11:00.000-07:002009-03-22T19:07:28.858-07:00Postcards of the Hanging<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/watchmen-comedian-window.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 344px; height: 177px;" src="http://screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/watchmen-comedian-window.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span>'s trailers and billboard ads have proclaimed director Zack Snyder a visionary, but if there were any truth in advertising, they ought to promote the movie as coming "from the huckleberryish journeyman director of <span style="font-style: italic;">300</span>." Snyder deserves a hefty pat on the back for translating Alan Moore's rabidly beloved graphic novel to the screen under the pressures of fans whose expectations were almost as high as those of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lord of the Rings. </span>I am not embarrassed to include myself among the hardcore <span style="font-style: italic;">Watch</span>-geeks, and would have rather not see it get made at all than done badly. Generally speaking, I was impressed.<br /><br />The story, for those who aren't in the know, takes place in an alternate 1985 where superheroes have existed since the 1930's and have helped win the Vietnam War, then subsequently driven into exile by president-for-life Richard Nixon. The murder of one such retiree, the Comedian, (a.k.a. Edward Blake,) sets off a domio chain of reopened old wounds among his former teammates: Nite Owl, an impotent Clark Kent type, Silk Spectre, a second-generation, superheroine dedicated to fighting the sexism her mother endured, Rorschach, a Travis Bickleish misanthrope with uncompromising beliefs, and Dr. Manhattan - the only member of the group with true superhuman powers - whose exposure to radiation transformed him into a god-like, <span style="font-style: italic;">Man Who Fell to Earth</span> type.<br /><br />Snyder introduces us to the alternate history timeline during the magnificent opening credits sequence, as the story of the original Minutemen is intercut in slow-motion, along with "what if" reinterpretations of the VJ-Day Times Square kiss,the Kennedy assassination and other events, to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'." If Snyder's skill lies anywhere, it's as a condenser, taking only a few minutes, but never wasting a second, to convey things that take up almost entire chapters of Moore's novel. He doesn't have enough time delve into the psychological profiles of the characters as richly as they are conveyed in the book, but he and the cast do a splendid job in the time they're given. Patrick Wilson, in particular, makes Nite Owl the most three-dimensional character in the picture: a sad but empathetic dork who can't get it up unless he's just saved a bunch of people from a burning building. Jackie Earl Haley's turn as the filth-speckled, unhinged Rorschach is equally impressive, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Comedian, for the limited screentime he's given, is a testosteroney, trigger-happy scumbag that Sam Peckinpah would have loved.<br /><br />My initial fears that <span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span> would turn into the same sort of endless cock-fest that <span style="font-style: italic;">300</span> was were laid to rest early on in the picture. It seems that Snyder was truly humbled by his source material in both cases and strove to translate them as best he could, even though the rhythms and storytelling styles of Frank Miller and Alan Moore couldn't be further apart. Though <span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span> does contain the occasional slow-mo-fast-mo-slow-mo shot that Snyder is so very fond of, for the most part, the film's action sequences feel like an afterthought: the film is less a CGI-addled actionier than a hybrid of political thriller and contemporary noir that just happens to feature people in capes.<br /><br />Snyder recreates some of the comic's most iconic images, such as Blake's assassin hurling him through his penthouse window, and Adrien Veidt seated before his dozen's of TV monitors in his Antarctic lair. He even includes several of the songs which are directly alluded to in the book, like Billie Holiday's "You're My Thrill" and Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower." Such devotion is touching to see in a fellow <span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span> fan, although it does risk placing the picture in an odd kind of audience no-man's-land. Try as he might like to lovingly reproduce the comic in the cinematic form, time constraits dictate a lot must be left out, including, most controversially, changing the film's ending. No doubt a lot of fanatics will be angered at this, the same way every <span style="font-style: italic;">Lord of the Rings</span> fan has their favorite part of the trilogy that was eliminated from Jackson's films.<br /><br />On the other hand, Snyder's dogmatic faithfulness to the source material will no doubt alienate a lot of people unfamiliar with the source material. Aside from a really lame My Chemical Romance cover of Dylan's "Desolation Row," there is little attempt to reach across the aisle and draw some of the newbies into <span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span>'s universe. At the Times Square AMC showing my girlfriend an I attended, there were several walk-outs some 20 minutes from the end: no doubt folks who dug <span style="font-style: italic;">The Incredible Hulk</span> and<span style="font-style: italic;"> Iron Man</span>, who were hoping that the previous two hours of existential hubris, sexual neurosis, philosophical chatter and luminous blue penises would add up to a satisfyingly bone-crunching, action-packed climax. <span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span>'s faithfulness makes it a treat for fans of the graphic novel, but it's also the reason why the picture never reaches to the level of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Incredibles</span>, which used a similar outlaw-superhero plot to fashion an original story, or <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dark Knight</span>, which <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> plumbed the depths of the philosophical implications of superheroes and supervillains. <span style="font-style: italic;">Watchmen</span> is a limited film compared to these, but I still enjoyed it immensely, and I'm very glad it exists.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-42708842556278644792009-02-15T17:57:00.000-08:002009-02-15T20:06:12.085-08:00Shine On You Crazy Armond<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2004/features/images/critic.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 224px; height: 208px;" src="http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2004/features/images/critic.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Of all the film critics I read on a regular basis, few make me want to crumple up said publication into a tennis ball-sized wad, shove it into my mouth, spit it out, and jump up and down upon it, than the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Press</span>'s Armond White. A contrarian among contrarians, White's reviews typically combine the cheap baiting tactics of the most attention-starved internet message board troll, and the nonsensical rantings of a mental patient plagued by visions of malicious gnomes. Most tiresome of all is his continuous one-man war on so-called "hipster cynicism" - pictures that suggest a dark side to human nature (<span style="font-style: italic;">There Will Be Blood</span>), families (<span style="font-style: italic;">Before the Devil Knows You're Dead</span>), and economic poverty (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Wrestler</span>), while championing lowbrow horseshit like <span style="font-style: italic;">Norbit</span>.<br /><br />In addition to his just plain wonky taste in flicks (his recent year-end "Better Than" list concluded that <span style="font-style: italic;">Transporter 3</span> > <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dark Knight, RockNRolla</span> > <span style="font-style: italic;">Slumdog Millionaire</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">CJ7 </span>> <span style="font-style: italic;">Wall-E</span>), White is guilty of just about every fallacy in film criticism, from continuously damning certain filmmakers no matter how much they mature (David Fincher) and rigourously defending others no matter how low they sink (Luc Besson), to explicitly stating that anyone who might like a film he dislikes is a complete moron. In his own mind, he doubtlessly sees himself as a Richard Matheson-inspired <span style="font-style: italic;">Last Man on Earth</span>/Messiah type, ranting from his high tower at the mindless zombie hordes that they should be rediscovering Eric Rohmer's films or buying tickets to the latest Tyler Perry Jesus-fest, rather than killing their brains with the help of Tarantino and Todd Haynes.<br /><br />And what's more, most of his arguments are just as easy to poke holes in as wet tissue paper. After recieveing numerous complains that he never reviewed <span style="font-style: italic;">Wall-E</span> during its initial run, and that it seemed a little cheap to simply write it off as "ugly, end-of-history cynicism," Armond went on to damn it a little more in-depth in his review of <span style="font-style: italic;">Coraline.</span> That film, he insisted, along with <span style="font-style: italic;">Monster House, Persepolis</span>, and<span style="font-style: italic;"> Waltz with Bazshir</span> , elevated the medium of animation, wheras Pixar's recent efforts maintained its status as a "babysitter's ghetto." Mr. White doesn't go into why he feels compelled to call a teriffic depiction of the ups-and-downs of family like <span style="font-style: italic;">The Incredibles</span>, or a beautiful tale of personal achievement and artistic integrity like <span style="font-style: italic;">Ratatouille</span> "ravishing junk." He does, however, take a lot of time call out <span style="font-style: italic;">Wall-E</span> on its apparent cynicism: the notion of human beings reduced to hover chair-bound sloths, leaving our planet to go to waste.<br /><br />I've got to wonder- does Mr. White not believe that we are slowly destroying this planet? Does he not believe that Americans are natural resource gluttons, when the cold hard evidence proves that we consume staggeringly high percentages more than other countries? The roly-poly spaceship inhabitants of <span style="font-style: italic;">Wall-E </span>are a caricature of ourselves - they aren't meant to be taken literally, but they do have their basis in what we can see if we look right out of our windows. The reason that Wall-E ends happily is because, duh, it's still a kid's movie. They're not going to end a kid's movie with "so, eventually, you'll get like wicked fat, and you'll die. The end." The bulk of the film still carries a powerful ultimatum for young and old alike to get off our asses and take care of this planet. The fact that <span style="font-style: italic;">Wall-E</span> looks to the future, whereas <span style="font-style: italic;">Coraline</span> looks to the past with its Grimm Brothers-inspired plot and reassertion of dependency upon one's parents suggests that Mr. White is probably uncomfortable with the reality on his doorstep butting heads with his militantly rose-tinted worldview.<br /><br />The Press's Feb 11-17 issue contained White's review of <span style="font-style: italic;">Gomorrah</span> - a recent Mafia pic/art movie from Italy - where he once again falls upon the same hackneyed "wasn't as good as such-and-such-a-film" rhetoric, this time with pathetically laughable results. <span style="font-style: italic;">Gomorrah</span>, he asserts, is weak tea compared to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Godfather</span>. Holy shit, really?! Stop the muh'fuh'in' presses. A recent crime film that just came out in select theaters is not as good as a movie that almost everyone agrees is one of the two or three greatest films of all time. Taking up a full page of newsprint to say this makes about as much sense as writing an op-ed about how water is wet. I haven't seen <span style="font-style: italic;">Gomorrah</span> yet, but imagine if you asked me "Hey Jack, how was <span style="font-style: italic;">My Bloody Valentine 3D</span>?" and I said, "Psshaw, it wasn't no <span style="font-style: italic;">Casablanca</span>, that's for darn tootin'." You'd probably, and correctly, think I was an asshole, even before I preceeded (as Crazy Uncle Monkeyshit does in the same issue) to compare Luis Bunel to <span style="font-style: italic;">Nacho Libre</span> and mean it as a compliment.<br /><br />So why the hell do I keep reading the guy? Every Wednesday I skip merrily home from work and pick up the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Press</span> from the news kiosk across the street with the blind glee of a puppy bounding toward and eight-lane highway. And I only read the Press for Armond's reviews (and for Tony Millionaire's comic <span style="font-style: italic;">Maakies</span>): Lord knows that the sophmoric gibberings of Josh Bernstein only come in handy for me when I run out of lavatory paper. So why do I keep reading this guy if he pisses me off so much? Could be a lot of reasons. First and foremost is his steadfast defense of Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma, two of the critical consensus' biggest mainstream-auteur punching bags - he even summed up exactly my own feelings about the not-great but still hugely underrated <span style="font-style: italic;">Black Dahlia</span>. The second is the sheer outright hilarity of some of his most nonsensical writing: his reviews for <span style="font-style: italic;">Hellboy: The Golden Army </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Hamlet 2</span> actually made me wonder if he had scrawled them while drunk, which is to say nothing of his assertation that the terrible C. Thomas Howell vehicle <span style="font-style: italic;">Soul Man</span> predicted Obama's presidency, nor his long-running man-crush on Jason Statham.<br /><br />But no, the real reason I have this silly love-hate relationship (or more of a love-hate-hate-hate relationship) with Armond White is because the guy, shithouse-rat crazy he may be, is intelligent and always fiercely honest. In a field where most film criticism is little more than "the acting is very strong" or "it could have been a reel shorter here or there," Armond White is one of the few who really consider what popular entertainment means. Even though I disagree with him, like, 85% of the time, I keep reading him for the ones where he gets it right. And when he does, boy does he ever. So thank you, Armond White, for keeping film criticism interesting and colorful, at the very least. Keep on shinin'.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-79599066751099593982009-02-07T15:18:00.000-08:002009-02-07T15:27:05.772-08:00Masked and Anonymous<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://content8.flixster.com/question/31/60/19/3160198_std.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 334px; height: 270px;" src="http://content8.flixster.com/question/31/60/19/3160198_std.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>The tempestuous juggernaut of thirty-odd trillion fanboys continues to rage on over the fact that <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dark Knight</span> failed to score a Best Picture nomination. My sympathies go out to them - I think Nolan's picture is superior to all of the nominated films, though I'm much more annoyed at the befuddling snub of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wrestler</span>. However, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about another film starring the Caped Crusader from way back in 1992: Tim Burton's marvelous, twisted fever dream, <span style="font-style: italic;">Batman Returns</span>. Much less universally loved than Nolan's second outing, but for my money, the most fun and consistently interesting superhero movie ever made.<br /><br />What is fascinating to me about the film is that most fans' criticisms are indeed exactly what I like so much about it - chiefly, that Batman isn't really the central character, he's really just another weirdo who dresses up in a costume and goes prowling around at night. His behavior is shown less as a duty to the citizens of Gotham City than an unfightable urge - a fetish, even - that he is powerless to stop. Given the success of 1989's <span style="font-style: italic;">Batman</span> (a solid and enjoyable feature, if only that), Warner Brothers gave Burton the proverbial keys to the castle in directing the sequel. Having behaved himself the first go-around, this time he and <span style="font-style: italic;">Heathers</span> scribe Daniel Waters fashioned a baroque tale of coded sexual deviancy; a work of deranged pop art that examines what a strange and kinky thing it is to be a masked vigilante.<br /><br />It's not only the most debauched film that ever had a McDonald's Happy Meal tie-in, but also, probably, the most mature and psychologically rich film of Burton's ouvre. Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle, and the Penguin are not alienated schoolyard kids like Edward Scissorhands, Willy Wonka and Pee-Wee Herman; they are adult outcasts. Danny DeVito's wild, Pied Piper-like Penguin is a hedonist, sexually and otherwise, and a man who believes in his own life as a Dickensian underdog tale. Years of being surrounded by clannish fellow outcasts and circus folk, watching the beautiful people from afar, has given him the false impression that he will be able to fit in with them. Christopher Walken's Max Schreck, on the other hand, is a bully who seems to find pushing people around, male or female, to be a greater thrill than any sexual indulgence.<br /><br />Bruce and Selina, on the other hand, are victims of deep-rooted repression. This is most obvious in Selina's case: a post-women's lib career gal who is still relegated to making coffee and enduring humiliation from her cheauvanistic male superiors. Her uniformally pink apartment is full of stuffed animals, dolls and other goody-two-shoesy knick-knacks. It looks like either a little girl's bedroom or somebody's grandma's house, but either way, a sexless purgatory. When Selina is literally pushed too far (out of a window, by her boss,) she is reborn as Catwoman: a Hyde/Id/Venus in Furs uberwoman who is the culmination of all Selina's withheld longings over the years.<br /><br />The scene in which Selina goes berserk and destroys her apartment after her “rebirth” ranks with some of the best of Douglas Sirk: a pitch-perfect marriage of camerawork, editing, Danny Elfman's drivingly-maddening score, and Michelle Pfieffer's performance (indeed, she would never be this unbridedly perfect ever again.) Shoving her teddy bears down the garbage disposal and covering the walls with black spray paint, she searches through her closet for the only thing that isn't oppressively dainty – a black PVC raincoat – and begins to fashion it into her unabashedly dominatrix-styled catsuit. Her subsequent midnight prowlings include beating up a rapist, then berating his victim for her self-imposed helplessness, and whipping the heads off department store mannequins (man-made emblems of female domesticity) and disrarming a couple of mookish security guards (a symbolic act of castration.) Her ultimate decision to partner up with the Penguin to frame Batman seems motivated by little more than the fact that Batman appears to be the biggest, toughest alpha-male on the block.<br /><br />As played by Michael Keaton, however, Batman is really anything but. He relies on his gadgets in this film even more than Adam West with his anti-shark spray, spending most of his screentime inside the Batmobile or seated at the Batcave's computer. Wheras Christian Bale played Batman as a singular-minded crimefighter for whom the Bruce Wayne persona was a mere put-on, Keaton is the opposite: a nebbish, shy doofus incapable of relating to other people. He puts on the Batman suit to make himself feel like a big strong man, but deep down, he is really just Bruce Wayne. This is why the relationship between him and Selina Kyle doesn't work out: because she is a true deviant, a creature of the night, and he's just a bookworm who pretends to be one because he is incapable of a normal romantic relationship.<br /><br />It's pretty easy to see why comic book fans don't like this version of the Caped Crusader: most people want to see their heroes doing the right thing for the right reasons, not Freudian weirdos trying to work out their sexual hangups. But I, for one, am fascinated by such explorations, if there's a gifted auteur like Burton at the helm. Christopher Nolan gave the fanboys the Batman movie they had been waiting for all their lives – a film that treated the inherantly ludicrous premise of Bob Kane's comics with the intricacy and nuance of a great detective thriller. But Burton opted instead to explore the twisted allure of masked crimefighting, especially among the more shut-in set. Rather than give the fans what they want, he held up a grotesque funhouse mirror to them, and needless to say, not many of them were comfortable with what they saw.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-55150194887049705552009-01-22T16:26:00.000-08:002009-01-23T14:20:47.693-08:00Dr. Criddle's Top Ten of 2008<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXkPS4mcPyI/AAAAAAAAAD8/bpBCtxCF6wE/s1600-h/0fed55b64207bfbf5120e876f54d.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXkPS4mcPyI/AAAAAAAAAD8/bpBCtxCF6wE/s320/0fed55b64207bfbf5120e876f54d.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294279654056410914" border="0" /></a>The general consensus seems to be that 2008 wasn't quite as strong a cinematic year as 2007, with the incredible one-two punch of <span style="font-style: italic;">No Country for Old Men </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">There Will Be Blood</span>, as well as well as <span style="font-style: italic;">The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Once, Zodiac </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">I'm Not There</span>, among others. However, what seemed to truly categorize '07 year's finest films was how filmmakers injected a lyrical, art film sensibility into such well-worn genres as the police procedural, the celebrity biopic, the musical and the western. The tradition seemed to continue in '08, as films about superheroes, urban vigilantes, robots, vampires, and even pro wrestlers astonished audiences with their unexpected soulfulness. If any kind of theme categorizes 2008's films, it's the profundity of pulp, as the pictures that superficially appear to be more user-friendly proved infinitely more rewarding than the "important" films. So, without further ado, I present my personal top 10 of 2008:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1) Let the Right One In</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXkTG7zE51I/AAAAAAAAAEE/R4qbjNemVDk/s1600-h/LETRIGHTONEIN_STILL041.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 334px; height: 187px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXkTG7zE51I/AAAAAAAAAEE/R4qbjNemVDk/s320/LETRIGHTONEIN_STILL041.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294283846802794322" border="0" /></a>Few outside of hardcore horror buffs saw this marvelous little picture - the David to <span style="font-style: italic;">Twilight's</span> Goliath - which is a real shame. It's a horror film that is really the day-to-day hell adolescents go through, and is the best film of that nature since <span style="font-style: italic;">Ginger Snaps</span>, maybe even since <span style="font-style: italic;">Carrie</span>. Director Thomas Alfredson doesn't short-change genre fans - the film delivers in spades such beloved cliches as blood dribbling from lily-white lips, attacks in the shadows, cats that hiss in the presence of the vampire characters, and bodies that spontaneously combust when exposed to sunlight. However, at the real heart of the picture is the delicately rendered love story between two young outcasts: Oskar, a viciously bullied 12-year-old boy, and Eli, his mysterious new next-door neighbor whom he only sees around when the sun goes down. From her, he gains the courage to stand up to those who push him around, and from him, she recieves love for who she is as opposed to fear for what she is. It's a refreshingly morally ambiguous tale and a profound character study of such quiet and subdued power that drew me in, and by the end, had me beaming from ear to ear in spite of myself.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2) The Wrestler</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXn21nykM3I/AAAAAAAAAEc/NUx26W0_elY/s1600-h/thewrestler.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 206px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXn21nykM3I/AAAAAAAAAEc/NUx26W0_elY/s320/thewrestler.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294534238025298802" border="0" /></a>If you'd have told me five years ago that I would have been brought to tears by a Botox-addled, lime green tights-clad Mickey Rourke delivering a monologue over the top of a Guns N' Roses song, I would've probably thought you were insane. But that's exactly what happened the moment that Randy "The Ram" Robinson, about to step back into the ring, despite warnings from his doctor regarding his weakened heart, tells his girlfriend, Pam (Marisa Tomei) "The only place I get hurt is out there" - gesturing to the dressing rooms, the building lobby, and the rest of the uncaring world outside. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wrestler </span>shows professional wrestling for what it is - a planned-out fiasco more spectacle than sport, yes, but an incredibly physically gruelling one that abandons its older athletes to become wandering nomads in their autumn years. Rourke is utterly emotionally naked in the role - thank god Nicholas Cage turned this part down! - giving the finest performance of the year. And the fact that Axl Rose licenced the pivotal and poingant "Sweet Child of Mine" to Darren Aronosky for free almost makes me forgive him for the travesty that was <span style="font-style: italic;">Chinese Democracy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">3) In Bruges</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXn9xBuFI8I/AAAAAAAAAEk/KLNQ9COzkWk/s1600-h/in-bruges2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 212px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXn9xBuFI8I/AAAAAAAAAEk/KLNQ9COzkWk/s320/in-bruges2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294541855667856322" border="0" /></a>One of the numerous wonderful films this year that was dumped onto an uncaring public in the dog days of early spring. Advertised as yet another Guy Ritchie knockoff, it is indeed closer in spirit to <span style="font-style: italic;">Waiting For Godot</span>, if Beckett's Didi and Gogo were Irish hitmen who curse like truck drivers and really, really do not like Americans. Playwright and first-time director Martin McDonagh weaves a story that starts off deceptively simple (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson's characters are told to hide out in the titular Belgian, cobblestone-paved, tourist-attracting city, after Farrell badly botches his first kill job) - but takes numerous unexpected turns, weaving an often darkly funny, sometimes heart-wrenchingly soulful tale of moral redemption, honor, brotherhood and remorse. Colin Farrell does the best work of his career here as beagled-eyed Ray, alternately swaggering and tough-talking and guilt-wracked and childlike. Brendan Gleeson is similarly exellent as his fatherly partner Ken, and Raph Fiennes injects soul and humanity into the well-worn archetype of the furious and potty-mouthed crime boss. And there's also a racist, cocaine-snorting dwarf. What's not to love?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">4) The Dark Knight</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXoFnx0qahI/AAAAAAAAAEs/bVjaFJASAGA/s1600-h/heath_ledger_the_joker.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 191px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXoFnx0qahI/AAAAAAAAAEs/bVjaFJASAGA/s320/heath_ledger_the_joker.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294550492874697234" border="0" /></a>For a film of this nature to even begin to live up to the ridiculous amount of hype it received from fanboys is alone remarkable, but Christopher Nolan's brilliant sequel to <span style="font-style: italic;">Batman Begins </span>exceeded my expectations in every way. His Gotham City is not the colorful phantasmagoria we've seen in other media, but the setting for a profoundly rich, viscerally philosophical, post-9/11 detective story that just happens to feature a man in a pointy-eared mask. The star of the show, of course, is Heath Ledger's Joker, who, like Stephen King's Pennywise, is a creature seemingly born out of the moral decay of a corrupt society. With no past nor backstory, he is merely an agent of chaos, as Michael Caine says, someone who simply "wants to watch the world burn." The hype over Ledger's performance has nothing to do with his tragic and untimely death - even if the young actor had lived to be a hundred, his brilliant characterization would still be worthy of rank among the cinema's greatest villains. Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhal and Gary Oldman all do similarly strong, if considerably subtler work here. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dark Knight</span> is the first comic book adaptation that is truly as great as a great graphic novel, and arguably the finest superhero film ever made.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">5) Synecdoche, New York</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXoWKijVHQI/AAAAAAAAAE0/4w-uWFvvaW4/s1600-h/synecdochepostertop.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 182px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXoWKijVHQI/AAAAAAAAAE0/4w-uWFvvaW4/s320/synecdochepostertop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294568682256932098" border="0" /></a>Admittedly, I only saw <span style="font-style: italic;">Synecdoche, New York</span> once, which I'm sure is about ten or twenty times too few to fully get my's brain around it. Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut is as cryptic as they come, making his pervious screenwriting efforts look positively straightfortward in comparison. A film about the process of creating which mirrors <span style="font-style: italic;">8 1/2 </span>in its confusing but beautiful mix of dreams, fantasy, and reality, it is simultaneously self-loathing yet celebratory, cynical yet optimistic and bursting with life. Phillip Seymor Hoffman, plays theater director Caden Cotard as a man at war with himself, disgusted with himself for his masterbatory artistic aspirations while the world outside his door goes to hell. It's sometimes overreaching, sometimes pretentious, but never boring and always captivating, as Kaufman proves once again that he is one of the finest storytellers of contemporary motion pictures.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">6) OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXoeagg_fVI/AAAAAAAAAE8/Y01eSiVhB18/s1600-h/oss117caironestofspiespic.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 208px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXoeagg_fVI/AAAAAAAAAE8/Y01eSiVhB18/s320/oss117caironestofspiespic.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294577752681184594" border="0" /></a>Funnier and better than all three <span style="font-style: italic;">Austin Powers</span> films put together, this French import is one of the finest genre spoofs since the heydey of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker. It is both an esquisitely detailed parody of the Cold War-era exotic-locale espionage thriller (complete with a 50's setting, rear projection screens behind cars, and a lush, Ye Olde Technicolor palette) and a pointed satire of post-colonial French arrogance and ignorance toward Muslims and Third World people. Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (aka OSS 117,) created by pulp writer Jean Bruce, became France's answer to James Bond in a series of seven poker-faced spy films in the 1960's. Michel Hazanavicius' revamping of the character as a comic buffoon is a pure stroke of genius, and as played by Jean Dujardin, he is a perfect mix of the suaveness and casual misogyney of Connery's Bond, and the stupidity and unwitting offensiveness of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat. And in an age when a presidential candidate has to actually explain why his middle name is Hussein, it's a film all Americans should see, but unfortunately, most would probably not get.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">7) Stuck</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cache.reelzchannel.com/assets/content/article/stephen-rea-stuck.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 310px; height: 207px;" src="http://cache.reelzchannel.com/assets/content/article/stephen-rea-stuck.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>A contemporary b-movie by <span style="font-style: italic;">Re-Animator</span> director Stuart Gordon, one of the modern masters of the genre. Literally ripped from the headlines (it was inspired by a female hit-and-run perputrator from Fort Worth, Texas, who got a homeless man stuck in her windshield and left him there to die,) Gordon melds this morbid supermarket tabloid fable into a sublime concotion of true-crime entertainment and blackly hilarious, fucked-up situation comedy. Mena Suvari is the corn-rowed, none-too-bright Brandi, a caregiver at a rest home for the elderly, who, driving home drunk from the club after her boss announces her consideration for a big promotion, hits the recently homeless and supurbly down-on-his-luck Stephen Rae with her car. Fearing that word of this getting out will compromise her career, she leaves him in her garage, bleeding like a stuck pig, while continuing to go about her life. Hilarity ensues. Richly human, thrilling, and even political - one of modern horror's finest autuers proves that human beings are much scarier then zombies, demons, or anything else the imagination can conjure up.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">8) Gran Torino</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXosnFW-F3I/AAAAAAAAAFE/asnNApyyCGE/s1600-h/610x.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXosnFW-F3I/AAAAAAAAAFE/asnNApyyCGE/s320/610x.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294593361892480882" border="0" /></a>The past couple of years have witnessed the big-screen returns of Rocky Balboa, John Rambo and Indiana Jones, but none of those pictures proved quite so memorable as Clint Eastwood's gleefully subversive, sort-of-but-not-quite dusting-off of his <span style="font-style: italic;">Dirty Harry </span>persona. Acknowledging, as Sylvester Stallone failed to do with the messy <span style="font-style: italic;">Rambo</span>, that the iconic action stars of yesteryear really don't gel with our oversensetive, politically correct climate, Eastwood plays Korean War vet and ex-assembly line worker Walt Kowalski as a kindered spirit to Harry Callahan, but a more nuanced and three-dimensional human being. He's a bitter, crusty, racist old bastard, and like Mickey Rourke's Ram, a relic of an earlier time who has outlived his usefulness. Though a bigot he may be, he is ultinately a good man - not a popular notion for today, and truth be told, there are few actors and directors besides Eastwood who could pull such a character off and still have the audience on his side. He's one of the few true Movie Stars we've got left, and if <span style="font-style: italic;">Gran Torino</span> really is his last acting role, it's a goddamn shame.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">9) Wall-E</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXozm27k7hI/AAAAAAAAAFM/xmF9UebohAU/s1600-h/Wall-E_3_600x380.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 202px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXozm27k7hI/AAAAAAAAAFM/xmF9UebohAU/s320/Wall-E_3_600x380.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294601054600883730" border="0" /></a>While not my favorite film from the geniei at Pixar (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Incredibles</span> is still tied with the first <span style="font-style: italic;">Toy Story</span> for that honor) it is undeniably the most offbeat and experimental work they've ever done - who but Pixar would have the stones to mix live-action clips from <span style="font-style: italic;">Hello Dolly </span>with robots falling in love in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? The titular droid is as instantly iconic and adorable as R2-D2 or Huey, Dewey and Louie from <span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Running</span>, and like Douglas Trumbull's greatly underrated film, it packs an environmentalist allegory of human responsibility. Magically blending the silent comedy of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd with the lived-in sci-fi aesthetic of <span style="font-style: italic;">2001, Star Wars</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Alien</span>, it's a rare form of children's entertainment that marries high art with Happy Meal tie-in-inspiring cuteness. It's as unpandering as a G-rated film can get, and I couldn't be happier that audiences and critics have embraced it so lovingly, even if the muleheaded Academy has refused to grant it a seat at the grownups' table.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">10) Hellboy 2: The Golden Army</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXo5wzcv-bI/AAAAAAAAAFU/AQfsAxWdKhU/s1600-h/hellboy_ii_the_golden_army_movie_image_ron_perlman_as_hellboy_with_big_baby_gun.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 295px; height: 241px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXo5wzcv-bI/AAAAAAAAAFU/AQfsAxWdKhU/s320/hellboy_ii_the_golden_army_movie_image_ron_perlman_as_hellboy_with_big_baby_gun.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294607822534736306" border="0" /></a>Guillermo del Toro is one of the most delightfully unabashed geeks working in the cinema today, and while <span style="font-style: italic;">Hellboy 2</span> may not have the dark thematic richness of his masterpiece <span style="font-style: italic;">Pan's Labyrinth</span>, it is an improvement over the franchise's first installment in every way, and one of the most fun times I had in a theater all last year. The urgent-mission style pacing of the previous film is jettisoned (along, thankfully, with Rupert Evans' boring Agent Meyers) in favor of a more leisurely plot that focuses on the quirks of its monster characters. The picture boasts some of the coolest lookin' monsters in a good long while - all latex and rubber, like in the good old days. A particular highlight takes place in a Mos Eisley Cantina/Diagon Alley-ish alcove beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, which plays like Rick Baker's mad wet fever dream. The real pleasures of <span style="font-style: italic;">Hellboy 2</span>, however, come from the main characters - Ron Perlman's tough, construction workerish but also childlike titular demon, Doug Jones' effete Gillman-type Abe Sapien, and Selma Blair's troubled psychic arsonist Liz Sherman - and the film's rhythmic pace, which makes us feel like we're one of the gang. Scenes like Hellboy and Abe's drunken sing-along to Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You" would never have worked if not for the characters' effortless charm, which is at the heart of what makes <span style="font-style: italic;">Hellboy 2</span> so enjoyable.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-44683696527684093902009-01-17T20:26:00.000-08:002009-01-17T23:42:53.174-08:00Guilala: The Later Years<object height="239" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/W89YXGQShCI&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/W89YXGQShCI&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="239" width="425"></embed></object><br />My friend Jules over at <a href="http://cinematicdamnation.blogspot.com/">Cinematic Damnation</a> posted this and I had to share it with fellow fans of goofy Japanese monster movies. It's been well-publicized recently that American movie stars have a habit of moonlighting in embarrassing <a href="http://www.nerve.com/CS/blogs/screengrab/archive/2008/05/06/japandering-the-five-most-embarrassing-celebrity-commercials.aspx">Japanese commercials</a> for a quick and easy buck, but who ever thought that long out-of-work Japanese rubber monsters would be doing the same over on our shores. Here, Guilala, the star of the wonderously silly 1967 debacle <span style="font-style: italic;">The X From Outer Space</span>, can be seen plugging an American job search website.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-33600806449657277652009-01-16T17:02:00.000-08:002009-01-16T20:20:26.614-08:00I Know I'm Human: Identity and Skepticism in The Thing<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXEzyinVeTI/AAAAAAAAACQ/kXnpgQBQ1a0/s1600-h/title+the+thing.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 139px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXEzyinVeTI/AAAAAAAAACQ/kXnpgQBQ1a0/s320/title+the+thing.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292067980515309874" border="0" /></a>(The following was written for my Philosophy of Film class last semester. It's kind of longwinded and a wee bit dry, but for those of you who are genre fans thought I might share it with all of you. Spoilers follow if you haven't yet seen Carpenter's picture, and if you haven't, what are you waiting for?)<br /><br />"I think, therefore I am," one of the most famous statements in philosophy, was the conclusion reached by René Descartes, who sought to navigate through the murk of global skepticism by finding a rock-solid foundation for what he could be utterly sure of. What's more, <span style="font-style: italic;">if</span> I think, I know that I am human - whatever that may mean - but I cannot be so sure about anyone else. This issue is at the heart of John Carpenter's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Thing</span>, the 1982 film based off of Joseph W. Campbell Jr,'s novella <span style="font-style: italic;">Who Goes There</span>?, in which the members of an Antarctic research team are overtaken by a shape-shifting alien creature. Like Descartes, each character in the picture is forced to strip away all they know from sensory knowledge, common sense, and the relationships between them, in order to try and fight the Other within their midst.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFYewFjjcI/AAAAAAAAADM/hYrygSTqaZc/s1600-h/800+large+the+thing+blu-ray4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 331px; height: 148px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFYewFjjcI/AAAAAAAAADM/hYrygSTqaZc/s320/800+large+the+thing+blu-ray4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292108322464566722" border="0" /></a></div><br />"Body snatchers" (that is, not ghoulish Dwight Frye types who dig up consecrated burial grounds, but shape-shifting aliens and other malicious creatures who steal the identities of their human hosts) are popular antagonists in science fiction. Films such as these were especially common during the tempestuous, who-can-you-trust McCarthy-era 50's. The Red Planet stood in for the Red Menace in pictures like <span style="font-style: italic;">Invasion of the Body Snatchers</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Invaders from Mars</span>, which played to packed houses of wide-eyed kids, all of whom had been warned that their best friend, their neighbor, their schoolteacher, even their mother and father could be conniving disciples of Joseph Stalin. More often than not, the setting for the beginning of an alien takeover was a Midwestern small town, making the contrast between good, decent Americans and the evil, drone-like, disguised intruders very morally black and white. Carpenter's film shows his obvious affection for this subgenre, as well as for the original adaptation of his film's source material, Howard Hawks' <span style="font-style: italic;">The Thing From Another World</span> (the titular creature of which was not a shape-shifter, but still single-minded in its quest to destroy our way of life.) However, he uses these genre trappings to fuse a much more morally murky and philosophically interesting story, wherein each character is forced to adopt a Descartian outlook on life in order to survive. The ones that do survive are the ones who have matured, in a philosophical sense, and the ones who don't are either overtaken by the Thing, or killed by their teammates in a fit of confusion.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXE1V4nBqcI/AAAAAAAAACc/lag_vl5iFp4/s1600-h/Descartes.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 245px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXE1V4nBqcI/AAAAAAAAACc/lag_vl5iFp4/s320/Descartes.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292069687226640834" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXE1V4nBqcI/AAAAAAAAACc/lag_vl5iFp4/s1600-h/Descartes.jpg"> </a></div> <div style="text-align: left;">One of the main criticisms of global skepticism (at least it was a criticism of mine, when I first read Descartes in CCNY's first-year philosophy course) was why exactly should one care if one cannot fully trust one's senses? To wonder if an evil demon has created for me a false dream-state world, or if I'm plugged into a <span style="font-style: italic;">Matrix/Dark City</span>-like computer program, or if I'm simply a brain in a vat being fed information, seems to have no bearing on my immediate situation beyond simple curiosity. Supposedly, if he exists, this evil demon wants me to be relatively happy and well-looked after, to go to college, to have two loving parents and a wonderful girlfriend, to make enough money to live off of, and not starve and suffer. What's wrong with that, even if it isn't real? The Thing, on the other hand, is only capable of a smaller illusion. Typified as a "chameleon that strikes in the dark," it is not omnipresent nor capable of mind control, only of disguise and deception. However, unlike Descartes' demon, it poses a direct and immediate threat - it kills those it imitates, and plans to steadily take over the world. (Curiously, Carpenter would later make a film much more in keeping with the hypothesis of the evil demon: 1988's <span style="font-style: italic;">They Live</span>, in which Rowdy Roddy Piper discovers that the prison of the American classes and economic system is also an elaborate mirage, perpetrated by aliens posing as Republicans.)<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFVVtu01fI/AAAAAAAAAC0/H4E18I-PYk0/s1600-h/kurt.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 285px; height: 231px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFVVtu01fI/AAAAAAAAAC0/H4E18I-PYk0/s320/kurt.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292104868678653426" border="0" /></a></div><br />As I mentioned before, the men in the film are characterized when we first meet them as philosophically immature. Though part of a science team, they are, for the most part, blue-collar types, much like the space crew of <span style="font-style: italic;">Alien</span>. Before the arrival of the Thing in their base, we never see them working on any scientific projects, instead playing ping-pong, listening to rock music, smoking joints and watching videotaped reruns of "Let's Make a Deal." MacReady, the film's hero, is introduced drinking scotch and playing chess with a computer, and when he unexpectedly loses, he dumps his drink into the inner wiring, proclaiming it a "cheatin' bitch." Since MacReady is played by Kurt Russell, we initially read this act as "badass" and it causes us to side with him an admirable cool guy. But it has a deeper significance, as MacReady, in the beginning of the story, is too proud to admit defeat at the hands of a non-human entity. Over the course of the picture he gains perspective and enlightenment, and his final strike against the Thing is one of noble self-sacrifice, even though he is unsure if he will be successful.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFV3MlQjbI/AAAAAAAAAC8/c836xn-otTk/s1600-h/800+large+the+thing+blu-rayx3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 136px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFV3MlQjbI/AAAAAAAAAC8/c836xn-otTk/s320/800+large+the+thing+blu-rayx3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292105443895709106" border="0" /></a></div>The only other survivor is Childs, who is skeptical of both the other men and the reality of the Thing itself right from the start. For a start, he calls the theories of the Thing's shape-shifting usurpation "voodoo bullshit" even after he has seen the creature gorily assimilate the station's huskies. He continues to have his doubts even as his team members are subsequently picked off When MacReady forces them all to participate in a blood test - drawing blood from each of them, then using a hot needle to determine whether the blood is simply lifeless tissue or a seperate entity with its own consciousness and nervous system - Childs insists that it "doesn't prove a thing." He has good reason too. For all he knows, MacReady could be a Thing, deliberately orchestrating the test as a smoke and mirrors act. The fact that MacReady was outside alone for an extended period of time, and that his ripped clothes were discovered in his furnace, further support this theory. Childs is singular in that he does not philosophically mature throughout the course of the film, (as several other characters, who fall victim to the Thing, also do not,) but he already has the maturity necessary for his own survival.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFWDhXzmhI/AAAAAAAAADE/TCS7WCGRFu4/s1600-h/800+large+the+thing+blu-ray3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 136px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFWDhXzmhI/AAAAAAAAADE/TCS7WCGRFu4/s320/800+large+the+thing+blu-ray3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292105655634860562" border="0" /></a></div>The other characters are fascinating in their own right. Copper, the doctor, is a compassionate man whose Kantian sense of responsibility towards others proves to be his undoing. He states the Americans' duty to go and check out the Norwegian base as a simple fact of life, even though the weather conditions would make flying the helicopter dangerous. He is assimilated by the Thing while operating on Norris. Similarly compassionate towards dogs, though not so much towards humans, is Clark, the husky expert. His quiet and withdrawn nature and his preference for the company of dogs makes him a red herring to the audience as well as the other team members. He tries to stop Childs from using a flamethrower on the dogs even though he can clearly see they are transforming into something else. Eventually, his odd behavior causes MacReady to accidentally shoot him in the heat of a Mexican standoff, though his blood test proves afterwards that he was human all along.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFYsovEGYI/AAAAAAAAADU/867TvVJ4vPQ/s1600-h/spider+on+fire.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 274px; height: 183px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFYsovEGYI/AAAAAAAAADU/867TvVJ4vPQ/s320/spider+on+fire.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292108561009351042" border="0" /></a></div>Bennings, the Thing's first victim, is a meteorolgist. It is apparent that he looks down his nose at many of the other members of the crew when he complains at Nauls, the station cook, to turn his music down, and when he and Norris share a knowing, "oh, look at the teacher's pet" glance when Fuchs asks to talk to MacReady in private. His position of superiority gives him the false illusion of better strategic and survival skills. Nauls, on the other hand, is relatively young and naive, and similarly trusting and compassionate in the same way Copper is. Though he masks these traits in a "cool" persona, roller-skating through the hall and playing Stevie Wonder on the boombox, when the Thing begins to claim more victims he becomes more and more like a child looking to an adult for guidance and protection. When he, Garry, and MacReady are in the catacombs, he strays too far from his mentor figure and the Thing (in the guise of Blair) claims his life.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFY8_K7thI/AAAAAAAAADc/ALbM-TwdPqo/s1600-h/rio+bravo+bar.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 354px; height: 198px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFY8_K7thI/AAAAAAAAADc/ALbM-TwdPqo/s320/rio+bravo+bar.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292108841909728786" border="0" /></a></div>Carpenter has long expressed his love of westerns, particularly those of Howard Hawks. Both <span style="font-style: italic;">Assault on Precinct 13</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Thing</span> have the same overall plot arc as <span style="font-style: italic;">Rio Bravo</span>, with a small band of men holed up inside a building, defending it from an outside intruder. Garry is the character most representative of the black and white morality of the American western - his favorite philosopher, it seems, is John Wayne. When the commotion with the Norwegians chasing the dog finds its way to their front door, and all the other men run outside, Garry crouches in the cellar and smashes the window with his six-shooter, as if the perpetrators of this disturbance were marauding Apaches. He later steps outside when the Norwegian begins frantically shooting at the camp, and pops him squarely in the head. He goes from the gut, shoots first and asks questions later. But both he and the other men know that he is an anachronism in this world, as evidenced by Windows' line "I was wondering when El Capitain was going to be able to use his pop gun," and when he reluctantly hands the weapon over to MacReady, begrudgingly acknowledging that the other man is better suited to lead. One wonders why lonely old cowboy like him signed on as part of this expedition. Probably it was that Antarctica represented the last frontier for him, the last wilderness on earth where one could still live out the fantasy of a man against the untamed land.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://media.canada.com/gallery/dose_10remakes/070118remakes_thing2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 202px; height: 202px;" src="http://media.canada.com/gallery/dose_10remakes/070118remakes_thing2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></div>The Thing itself is every bit as fascinating in its nature as the men. Truly, there have been few better examples in science fiction cinema of a lifeform that fully demonstrates Frederich Nietzsche's doctrine that for living things, the will to live was secondary to the will to power. The Thing wants to become all-powerful by assimilating all non-Things it comes into contact with, and it seems that it would rather do this sooner rather than later. However, it also very wisely looks out for its own survival, and tries not to expose itself until it is forced to do so. Like the titular creature from <span style="font-style: italic;">Alien</span>, the Thing is both intelligent and instinctive. The beast that Ian Holm's android Ash described as a "perfect creature" really can't hold a candle to Carpenter's monster. At least from a biological standpoint, it is a flawless combat machine. From the outset, we know it is more than a mindless beast, as we see it in husky form nonchalantly exploring the base, exploring every nook and cranny to better use to its advantage. Every molecule of its genetic makeup is capable of breaking away and acting as its own separate entity. When it imitates a human being or another mammal, it adopts all of their traits, down to their mannerisms, their way of speaking and acting, even their various illnesses and other quirks. Consider how, when the creature takes over Norris, who has a weak heart, it has a heart attack, and must be taken to the operating room, even though this accidentally puts the it in a tight spot it hadn't foreseen. Also consider Palmer, who had been completely overtaken by the Thing at the same time. When he delivers one of the picture's most famous one-liners at the sight of a severed head which has sprouted spidery legs and antennae, he is speaking as the Thing, completely in character as Palmer; the other men fully believe the words were uttered by the drug-addled ne'er-do-well that they all know. However, when MacReady is about to administer the test on Palmer's blood, we see a look of anticipatory terror on his (or rather its) face. It is the Thing acknowledging that it has been backed into a corner, and if it does not act fast it will be bested.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFa8_T9MvI/AAAAAAAAADs/iAMea98yBHc/s1600-h/thing_from_another_world_poster_02.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 291px; height: 227px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFa8_T9MvI/AAAAAAAAADs/iAMea98yBHc/s320/thing_from_another_world_poster_02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292111040970830578" border="0" /></a>Blair, the station's senior biologist, is by far the most interesting character in the film. It is deliberately ambiguous, both to the audience and to the rest of the men, whether or not he is infected by the Thing, until the end of the film. His treatment at the hands of the other characters is key to understanding the ethics of the story. Personally, I like to believe that Blair was slowly infected by the Thing during his performance of the autopsy. It worked its way into his blood gradually, in contrast to the way that Norris and Bennings were quickly and violently assimilated. When Blair sits at the computer, calculating how long it would take to infect the whole planet if the Thing reached a civilized area, he is dreading an end of humanity that he himself is becoming a pawn in. He smashes the radio equipment, the tractor and helicopter in a John Stuart Mill-inspired act of sacrifice (both of himself and the reluctant others) to quarantine the men from the rest of the world. The symptoms of his gradual transformation are further evidenced in the scene when MacReady goes to check on him and finds him sitting on his bed with a noose tied to the ceiling. When MacReady asks if he has seen Fulchs, Blair, simply states that he is all better now, and wants to come back inside. Here, I believe that the Thing has taken over Blair almost completely, but he hasn't quite grasped the man's nuanced behavior enough to form a logical argument. He also seems comically unaware of the noose hanging beside him, suggesting that the Blair half of him contemplated suicide before the Thing half took over and decided against it.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFZzJCE0AI/AAAAAAAAADk/hO3OCIWoy_Y/s1600-h/campbell-who_goes_there.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 149px; height: 234px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFZzJCE0AI/AAAAAAAAADk/hO3OCIWoy_Y/s320/campbell-who_goes_there.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292109772269867010" border="0" /></a></div>However, in Campbell's original story, it is made clear that Blair is infected early on, and that the Thing fakes his nervous breakdown in order to be put into isolation, so that it can build its spaceship in peace. Carpenter keeps things deliberately inconclusive. It makes just as much sense that the Thing, disguised as Blair, might have destroyed the radio equipment to prevent the men from seeking help, hoping to infect all of them and then move on. If this is true, then the close-up on Blair's face as he looks at the computer is extremely chilling; a cold and calculating beast figuring out precisely how long it will take him to carry out his mission. It's a testament to Carpenter's direction and Wilford Brimley's great performance that such opaqueness was preserved, but either way, the Thing is a monster that Nietzsche would have loved - intelligent and crafty, yet utterly monomaniacal in its will to power.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFb28E3_oI/AAAAAAAAAD0/zavUS0y6LCM/s1600-h/thething02.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 281px; height: 226px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SXFb28E3_oI/AAAAAAAAAD0/zavUS0y6LCM/s320/thething02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292112036534681218" border="0" /></a>There's no denying that The Thing is a seminal sci-fi picture, and the reason I think it works so well is that, while the philosophical subtext is certainly the backbone of the film, it is largely subliminal. Those who see the film, for the most part, just see an incredibly strong film about a small band of men fighting an alien creature; even the most die hard fans of the picture are often times at a loss of words to explain just why it is so great. And like all philosophy, it offers more questions than answers, leaving us to decide for ourselves what the future holds. We know as little as the characters do about the Thing's true nature, whether it will spell the end of humanity or it has been stopped. Like any great philosopher, Carpenter can only show us the evidence and then let us decide for ourselves.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-87478072761018109642008-12-26T23:05:00.000-08:002008-12-27T00:44:36.940-08:00Questions from SLIFR<a href="http://exclamationmark.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/giantclawtitle.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: undefinedpx; height: undefinedpx;" src="http://exclamationmark.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/giantclawtitle.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />I encourage everyone to participate in Dennis Cozzalio's new, recent, fun-filled quiz over at <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/">Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule</a>. My answers are as follows.<br /><br />1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?<br /><br />Theatrically - Role Models. On DVD - My Favorite Year.<br /><br />2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice?<br /><br />I prefer to think of it as a choice between emotional and honest or saccharine and syrupy. I'd just as soon snuggle up by the fireside with Bad Santa (or better yet, Blast of Silence) as It's a Wonderful Life or A Charlie Brown Christmas.<br /><br />3) Ida Lupino or Mercedes McCambridge?<br /><br />Lupino was a better actress and director, but McCambridge was the voice of little Reagan in The Exorcist, so I'm afraid she wins.<br /><br />4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks<br /><br />Kyle McLachlan<br /><br />5) It’s been said that, rather than remaking beloved, respected films, Hollywood should concentrate more on righting the wrongs of the past and tinker more with films that didn’t work so well the first time. Pretending for a moment that movies are made in an economic vacuum, name a good candidate for a remake based on this criterion.<br /><br />Even lousy movies are products of their time, and as such, unless the remakes in question have the distinction of being as good as Cronenberg's The Fly, I'd still kinda prefer that they left well alone.<br /><br />6) Favorite Spike Lee joint.<br /><br />The 25th Hour<br /><br />7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady?<br /><br />"Let's go to woik." Tierney all the way.<br /><br />8) Are most movies too long?<br /><br />No. Some, but not most.<br /><br />9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.<br /><br />Cheating here, but nothing else really comes to mind: Ossie Davis as John F. Kennedy in Bubba Ho-Tep.<br /><br />10) Create the main event card for the ultimate giant movie monster smackdown.<br /><br />The Kraken vs. The Giant Claw!<br /><br />11) Jean Peters or Sheree North?<br /><br />Peters for Sam Fuller's seminal Pickup on South Street.<br /><br />12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?<br /><br />Because, I dunno, you like it? I know Pauline Kael was against this, but really, I've never paid that much attention to what Pauline Kael had to say about anything.<br /><br />13) Favorite road movie.<br /><br />Y Tu Mama Tambien<br /><br />14) Favorite Budd Boetticher picture.<br /><br />Seven Men From Now<br /><br />15) Who is the one person, living or dead, famous or unknown, who most informed or encouraged your appreciation of movies?<br /><br />My high school photography teacher, Jason Whiton<br /><br />16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.)<br /><br />Coonskin<br /><br />17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar?<br /><br />I'm not sure who Kenneth Tobey is, but I'm sure I've seen John Agar in some monster beach party movie or another. So, him.<br /><br />18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other.<br /><br />I don't think Jean-Luc Godard's crankiness is mutually exclusive from his rightness or wrongness of any given subject, but that's beside the point. Great movies are popular (The Godfather) and so are crummy ones (300). I think it's just highfalutin' nonsense to try and say a film's popularity is disproportionate to its quality, especially since popularity is statistically mesaurable and quality is extremely subjective. That's not even taking into account films whose reputations has changed over the years - The Wizard of Oz tanked when first released, now it's the most beloved film ever. Does that make it it a worse movie now than it was in '39?<br /><br />19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie.<br /><br />Stop Making Sense<br /><br />20) Tatum O’Neal or Linda Blair?<br /><br />Paper Moon is my girlfriend's alltime favorite movie (and a film I dearly love too), so, Tatum.<br /><br />21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.)<br /><br />The ending of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.<br /><br />22) Favorite Claude Chabrol film.<br /><br />I'm afraid I've only seen his most recent, A Girl Cut in Two, but I liked that one.<br /><br />23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid.<br /><br />I really don't see why everyone hated on My Blueberry Nights. It's true that Wong Kar-Wai hasn't got a great ear for English, and Rachel Weisz does a pretty poor Southern Accent, but I found it an incredibly sweet fable of a confection and Norah Jones is just too cute.<br /><br />24) Dennis Christopher or Robby Benson?<br /><br />Dennis Christopher, for a little film called Fade to Black which every self-proclaimed cinephile should see as a cautionary tale.<br /><br />25) Favorite movie about journalism.<br /><br />His Girl Friday<br /><br />26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?<br /><br />The interviews I've seen with Sam Fuller are even better than the movies themselves. What I would've given for this man to record a commentary track.<br /><br />27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood.<br /><br />Unforgiven, although I really also love Play Misty for Me.<br /><br />28) Paul Dooley or Kurtwood Smith?<br /><br />Kurtwood Smith.<br /><br />29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.<br /><br />That I will have seen (or will have any interest in seeing) fewer of the nominated films than any year in recent memory, but will still watch the ceremony anyway, because I'm weak.<br /><br />30) Your hope for the movies in 2009.<br /><br />2009 is probably askin' a bit much, but for the near future, I sincerely hope that Ralph Bakshi manages to complete his ongoing project The Last Days of Coney Island.<br /><br />31) What’s your top 10 of 2008? (If you have a blog and have your list posted, please feel free to leave a link to the post.)<br /><br />#1 is Let The Right One In. #'s 2 through 10 have yet to be determiend. I need to catch up on my movie watching, but Synecdoche, New York, Pineapple Express and WALL-E all factor pretty highly too.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-17452004486503643742008-12-23T01:10:00.000-08:002008-12-23T01:20:33.985-08:00The American Father Christmas - A Childhood Destroyed<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SVCsAregYzI/AAAAAAAAACA/GVW7K6SrTs4/s1600-h/fatherxmas.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 170px; height: 280px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Afwz4ozp0wU/SVCsAregYzI/AAAAAAAAACA/GVW7K6SrTs4/s320/fatherxmas.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5282911490576245554" border="0" /></a><br />Every English kid knows and loves the work of writer and illustrator Raymond Briggs, whose books are offbeat hybrids of the picture book and the graphic novel. The two animated adaptations of his most famous works – the heart-wrenchingly sad <i>The Snowman </i> and the comical <i>Father Christma</i>s - are staples of British TV during the holidays.</span> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">The latter film, based off of Brigg’s book of the same name and its sequel, <i> Father Christmas Goes on his Holidays, </i> depicts a year in the life of Old Saint Nick. Unlike the perpetually jolly old elf that is the stereotypical American vision of Santa Claus, Briggs’ character does not live at the North Pole, but on a pretty regular-looking Everytown, England street. He only has two reindeer, whose names we never learn, as well as a cat and a dog. I don’t think he utters a single “ho,” although he does say “bloomin’” a lot. Ex: “bloomin’ snow, bloomin’ toys, bloomin’ kids, bloomin’ Christmas!” In Great Britian’s swear word vernacular, “blooming” is pretty mild - about the equivalent of saying “darn” over here.</span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">In the beginning, Father Christmas breaks the fourth wall, explaining how one year the pressure of his job was so great he decided to take a summer holiday. He converted his sleigh into a Winnebego, he set off on a camping trip in the south of France, but found that the French food gave him diarrhea. He decided to relocate to Scotland for its fine beers and whiskeys (the English Santa likes to drink. It is customary to leave him a glass of whiskey rather than a plate of milk and cookies) but becomes disenfranchised by the rainy weather and the shark-infested lakes. He travels once again to Las Vegas, where he enjoys himself immensely, but runs up a huge hotel bill. So finally he travels home, to resume business as usual. </span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Another running gag in the film is that we continuously see fleeting glimpses of Father Christmas’s buttocks when he pulls up his swim trunks, or sits on the toilet during his nasty bout of indigestion, or bends over to put presents under someone’s tree. He doesn’t seem to really care for children when he encounters them face to face, and once or twice he is overly snappy and short-tempered: when he picks up his red and white suit from the dry cleaners, the clerk asks if he’s “off to a fancy-dress party,” to which he replies “I should be so bloomin’ lucky!” </span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">His character’s voice was provided by the great Cockney comedian Mel Smith, an actor best known to Americans as the albino from <i>The Princess Bride</i>. Father Christmas is humanized – Briggs’ intent was to make him a harried, working class Johnny Lunchpail type; like a belovedly grumpy uncle. And all British kids have an uncle who cusses (albeit midly,) drinks, gambles, and shows his plumber’s crack.</span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">We had both <i>Father Christmas </i>and <i>The Snowman</i> on tape when we were young kids, and when our family moved from England to the United States, we had all our videos transferred from PAL to NTSC by one of my father’s friends. These dubbed tapes have been watched so many times, not only by my sister and I, but by my parents friends’ and coworkers’ kids whom my father leant the tape out to. So imagine our surprise when our neighbor, Ken, came over to our house one day and produced a store-bought copy of <i>Father Christmas</i> with a picture on the cover. </span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">“Thanks,” my dad said, puzzled. “But we’ve already got this one on tape.”</span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">“Not like this, you haven’t,” said Ken, with an air of facetious doom in his voice. So that evening, my dad, my sister and I sat down to investigate.</span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Imagine, if you will, how upset Americans would be if anyone from a foreign country re-edited <i>The Grinch</i>. If someone out there thought Boris Karloff’s voice-over was too scary for children, and didn’t approve of the idea of stealing toys, so they recut the story to make it seem like he was only “borrowing” them. Or better yet, imagine if they redubbed <i> It’s a Wonderful Life</i> to make it seem like George Bailey wasn’t contemplating suicide, but was a cold water swimming enthusiast. If you do this, you’ll have some idea of the offensiveness of the American re-edited version of <i>Father Christmas</i>.</span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">The titular character is no longer the gruff Bob Hoskins type – gone is Mel Smith’s wonderful voice work. Instead, they have given him a “posh” accent, like someone impersonating Richard Harris or Richard Attenborough. His grumpiness is severely neutered. He is no longer the cantankerous old codger we know and love, but a good-natured toy-bearing martyr who explicitly states that he “does it all for the children.” Uses of the word “bloomin’” are all cut out, including the changing of the song he sings as he sets out on Christmas Eve – “So jump up on my sleigh / And we’re on our way / To another bloomin’ Christmas” has been changed to a horrifically tin-eared “another mer-ry Christmas.”</span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">The producers of this video have left no stone unturned in completely emasculating Briggs’ vision of the old man. In the British version, when Father Christmas leaves his cat and dog at the kennel while he goes on holiday, he sniffles a bit and mutters “Bloomin animals!” under his breath. In the American cut, he overtly sobs and cries “I’ll miss you guys!” Watching with my mouth agape, I felt a little part of my childhood die. </span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Needless to say, all the shots featuring Santa’s bare buttocks are removed, as are any references to him drinking. The sequence that takes place in the pub in Scotland is totally eliminated, making it seem like when he lands in Scotland he goes out, buys a kilt, and then flies off again. The most insulting change takes place at the end, when Father Christmas climbs into bed just as the sun is breaking on Christmas morning, and opens his own presents – an “awful tie from Auntie Edie, the usual socks from Cousin Violet and,” to his great happiness, a bottle of liquor from “good old Uncle Bob.” In the American version he smiles and says “ah, lovely – a bottle of fine cologne.” It was probably at this point that I got up and left the room in disgust.</span></p> <p style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">I realize that America is a much more politically correct society than Great Britain, and that the idea of Santa Claus as someone who grumbles, complains about his job, enjoys a nice drink in the evening and sometimes even has to go number two does not fit with the American idea of what Christmas is all about. I also realize that buying the rights to a foreign cartoon and re-dubbing it is a great way to make a quick buck. But I implore Americans – please leave we Briton’s most beloved animated films alone. Keep your mitts away from <i>Watership Down</i> and <i> The Wombles of Wimbledon Common</i>., because Americanized versions of these will inevitably be sanitized and neutered shadows of their former selves. When you mess with our cartoons, you mess with our heritage. Please leave our heritage be.</span></p>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-72103222661468137072008-12-09T15:43:00.000-08:002008-12-09T16:08:58.047-08:00On the horizon........ the YouTubification of my new short film, <span style="font-weight: bold;">Dummy Love</span>.<br /><br />.... thoughts on <span style="font-weight: bold;">Synecdoche, New York</span>.<br /><br />.... Yeti or not Yeti? An Appreciation of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Shriek of the Mutilated</span>.<br /><br />But for now, here's a woman on the internet who makes cartoon characters out of food. <a href="http://annathered.wordpress.com/">Check it out!</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3200/3049875111_66b7cfed9c.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 385px; height: 288px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3200/3049875111_66b7cfed9c.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3180/3070218210_d0e963d611.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 388px; height: 292px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3180/3070218210_d0e963d611.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a>That vaguely frightening cat-bus from <span style="font-weight: bold;">My Neighbor Totoro,</span> and Totoro himself<span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3007/3091297387_c809a9e05c.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 385px; height: 256px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3007/3091297387_c809a9e05c.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a>A severed <span style="font-weight: bold;">Yoshi</span> head garnished with an assortment of mushroom men.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/wallesushi.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 384px; height: 267px;" src="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/wallesushi.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">WALL-E </span>and <span style="font-weight: bold;">EVE</span>! Way too cute to even think about eating.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-67206291536641547512008-10-02T11:12:00.000-07:002008-10-02T12:05:56.714-07:00Fare thee well Paul Newman.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img5.allocine.fr/acmedia/rsz/434/x/x/x/medias/nmedia/18/65/42/30/18908265.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 372px;" src="http://img5.allocine.fr/acmedia/rsz/434/x/x/x/medias/nmedia/18/65/42/30/18908265.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />We all gotta go sometime, but when someone like Paul Newman dies, memories of his films flood back to you like moments you experienced in life with a beloved uncle or a dear friend. Newman was a living legend, as iconic in the Hollywood mythology as Bogart, James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, and yet we felt as if we knew him. Like when one loses a friend, we can pick the one day or experience with said person that seems to resonate the most with us. For me, in regards to Mr. Newman, this could only be <span style="font-style: italic;">Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</span>.<br /><br />A fantastic actionier, a poignant study of friendship, perhaps the seminal film of the sixies, but more than anything, it was the film that made me appreciate westerns. As a reclusive kid, I had never had a friend who was as close to me as Sundance was to Butch. These men respected each other's abilities and weaknesses and stuck together through to the very end. I thrilled at their boxcar-blasting, cliff-jumping hijinks, was heartwarmed by their tender relationship to Katherine Ross's Etta Place (has a love triangle ever been better explored on film? You can have your <span style="font-style: italic;">Jules and Jim</span>, I'll always stick with "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head") and shed tears at their last stand against the Bolivian army. For me, <span style="font-style: italic;">Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</span> is the film against which all other movies about male relationships are measured, which is in no small part due to Newman's nuanced performance - the sarcastic banter with Redford that masked his insecurity and the fear of obsoleteness.<br /><br />If Newman had only made <span style="font-style: italic;">Butch and Sundance</span>, he would still be a legend - but thankfully he graced us with many more amazing and iconic performances in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Hud</span>. He displayed a brilliant talent for comedy in <span style="font-style: italic;">Slap Shot </span>and the Coen Brothers' underrated <span style="font-style: italic;">The Hudsucker Proxy</span>. He evolved with American film from a defiant young anti-hero with a fuck-you smirk on his blue-eyed face into an introspective, world-weary legend in his own time (see Robert Altman's brilliant <span style="font-style: italic;">Buffalo Bill and the Indians</span> and John Huston's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean)</span> and finally into a respected elder statesman of the pop cultural pyramid. Between managing his food products company, Newman's Own, which donated 100% of its profits to charity, he was still one of the few actors of his generation who resisted the urge to simply coast through roles in his autumn years.<br /><br />Pure and simple, a great man, whom the world loved like an uncle and whose legacy will never be forgotten.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-50096807631981936462008-09-09T19:53:00.000-07:002008-09-09T19:54:43.658-07:00A thousand words....<center><a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/?action=view&current=article-1045159-0249107900000578-66.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="width: 397px; height: 460px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/article-1045159-0249107900000578-66.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a></center>Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-83324744316655321922008-09-09T10:34:00.000-07:002008-09-09T15:03:42.349-07:00Coming to America<center><a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/?action=view&current=hamlet2_1.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="width: 311px; height: 207px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/hamlet2_1.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a></center><br />In a recent interview in The Onion AV Club, Steve Coogan described his reasons for adopting an American accent to play <span style="font-style: italic;">Hamlet 2</span>'s failed actor-turned-high school drama teacher Dana Marschz. Coogan said that the character had an open-armed love-me quality which, in his opinion, was not characteristic of the British. His previous roles(TV's <span style="font-style: italic;">Alan Partridge</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">24 Hour Party People</span>'s Tony Wilson and <span style="font-style: italic;">Around the World in 80 Days</span>' Phileas Fogg) all possessed a snarky, sarcastic demenor, and a firm (if sometimes ill-informed) belief that they have the upper hand in any given situation. While Marschz is just as much if not more of an egotist as his British characters, his unfailing optimism, touchy-feely self-indulgence, and wide-eyed innocence that sometimes borders on the psychotic, are all thoroughly American.<br /><br />What <span style="font-style: italic;">Hamlet 2</span> may lack as a structured comedy it makes up for in a brilliantly broad-stroked comedic character study. Marschz is introduced to us, <span style="font-style: italic;">Tropic Thunder</span>/<span style="font-style: italic;">Grindhouse </span>style in the beginning of the film, by a series of commercials and clips from his acting "career" - a hilarious Herpes medication infomercial and thirty-second stint as a quickly-dispatched Red Shirt-style extra in an episode of "Xena." Now, as a drama teacher in Tuscon, Arizona, he rollerskates back and forth to work in lieu of owning a car, and puts on incredibly mediocre, biannual Max Fisher Players-style stage adaptations of movies like <span style="font-style: italic;">Erin Brockovich</span>. When budget cuts threaten to axe the drama department, Marschz inspires his class, which consists of a loveable bunch of tough Latino gangbangers, as well as a couple of over-enthusiastic theater geeks, to perform an original work which will save the school - a ludicrously oedipal musical sequel to Shakespeare's masterwork.<br /><br />The contrivances of the inspirational-teacher subgenre is first to be laid down on the satirical chopping block - surely, there are more people like Mr. Marschz in the American school system than anyone resembling Denzel Washington in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Great Debaters</span>. Behind the facade of Marschz's gollywhillickers enthusiasm is a denial of his own failures so labyrinthine that you'd need a weed-whacker to untangle them. His marriage could at best be described as sadomasochistic (Catherine Keener, as his wife, makes her character in <span style="font-style: italic;">Being John Malkovich</span> look positively sweet in comparison,) he can't have children, and no-one takes him remotely seriously. He also has daddy issues by the truckload - like the Great Dane, he sees the specter of his father everywhere, from the high school's gruff principal who thinks the arts are a waste of time, to the pint-sized 14-year-old drama critic for the school paper who mercilessly lambasts his directorial efforts. The play itself - a musical in which Hamlet and Jesus Christ travel back in time to save their loved ones and forgive their fathers, is in itself a form of therapy, of exorcising paternal demons. If the product of his efforts - which involves Octavius as a bicurious cowboy and the Tuscon Gay Men's Choir singing "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" - isn't quite as memorably distasteful as "Springtime for Hitler," it was only because Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom produced that play as a deliberate attempt to offend and shock. "Hamlet 2," on the other hand, is a heart-on-its-sleeve, deeply personal work according to its creator - even if everyone else quite rightly sees it as ridiculous schlock.<br /><br />Marschz is a buffoon, to be sure, but thanks to Coogan, a lovable one, in spite of all his flaws. Though we laugh at him when he rollerskates into a wall or tells one of his Hispanic student's very wealthy and well-educated parents that they "can't let their ethnic small-mindedness" prevent their son from performing in the play, we are still compelled to cheer when he moonwalks across a cellophane water set made up as an admittedly rocking sexy Jesus. We want to see him succeed. Like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubistch, Coogan has a brilliant eye for detail, satire and subtlety, which allows him both to mock and celebrate an American archetype - the new-agey, self-important, deluded schmuck with the heart of gold - from a foreigner's arm's length. Although the Bard famously said "To Thine Own Self Be True," I'd be hard pressed to think of an American actor who could play Dana Marschz with the complexity that Coogan did.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19014800.post-13599529769819430492008-09-04T15:50:00.000-07:002008-09-04T17:33:16.632-07:00The passing of the torch.<center><a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/?action=view&current=PH2008090201337.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="width: 150px; height: 226px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/PH2008090201337.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a><a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/?action=view&current=drew84.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="width: 157px; height: 225px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/madscientist2787/drew84.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a></center><br />Legendary voiceover artist Don LaFontaine, whose gravelly voice could seemingly be heard in every single trailer made in the 80's and 90's, <a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5heecGKGkvVOeQRKdE1oWT_LW8F7QD92UP5102">recently passed away</a> of complications from the treatment of an unspecified illness. Though Mr. LaFontaine's career spanned over 40 years of radio, film promotion, television and advertising, he will be remembered as the man who made cheesy-on-paper, sensationalistic catchphrases ("only one man can stop him!") sound not only giddily awesome, but a lot of the time even more iconic than the movies themselves.<br /><br />So ubiquitous were his narrations of the coming attractions, and so distinctive was his voice, that he became one of the most famous people in show business despite the fact that few people knew his name or face until he spoofed his image a Geico commercial in 2006. To moviegoers, especially young and impressionable ones like I was back then, attracted to the visceral thrill of action movies, horror pictures and thrillers, we did not care to know. LaFontaine sounded like a grizzled, completely bad-assed Old Testament God, "in a world" where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme were firearm-toting Samsons and Goliaths. For more on the great Mr. Lafontaine, <a href="http://www.aintitcool.com/node/38150">Ain't It Cool New's Quint</a> wrote a nice obit with many YouTube samples of his work.<br /><br />Less sad than Mr. Lafontaine's death, but still something that will come as a bummer to genre cinephiles, is the retirement of celebrated <a href="http://www.theraider.net/news/fullstory_miscellaneous.php?id=908">poster artist Drew Struzan</a>. Like LaFontaine, the average man on the street did not know his name, but would have had to live under a rock to not have seen his work. They always say never to judge a book by its cover, but when I was a prepubescent kid, I found I could very safely judge a movie by its one-sheet or VHS box - if it was painted by Drew Struzan, it was probably worth my time. Many years ago I saw an exhibition of the man's original paintings at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, where they had many of the works used for posters of <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars, The Thing, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China</span> and even <span style="font-style: italic;">Harry and the Hendersons</span>. It really was an awe inspiring experience to be in the presence of pieces of my own personal history.<br /><br />Trailers, of course, are still very much in effect today. They've got a less ballsy-sounding DonLafontaine soundalike for the action films, a more upbeat and sing-songy Don Lafontaine soundalike for the romantic comedies, and cuddlier-sounding Don Lafontaine soundalike for the children's movies. They're alright and they get the job done, but they're a pretty pale substitute for the real thing. Hand-painted movie posters, on the other hand, are sadly going very quickly the way of the dodo. Typically, a movie poster today is simply a big, bland photograph of the leading actor's head, and the only work Mr. Struzan has done in the past decade has been for films like <span style="font-style: italic;">Hellboy, The Mist</span>, and the first couple of <span style="font-style: italic;">Harry Potter</span> films (as well as the <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars</span> prequels and <span style="font-style: italic;">Indiana Jones 4</span>) - movies that hearken back to an old-fashioned, disbelief-suspending style of entertainment.<br /><br />More than anything, having to bid farewell to these two icons of movie promotion makes me feel old. When I passed the local cineplex as a kid, the sight of a new sci-fi or fantasy film with a Struzan-illustrated poster would immediately fill me with a sense of juvenile, dorky joy. When my friends and I gathered after school with a rented video, whoever went to the kitchen to grab the microwave popcorn and 2-litre bottles of soda would yell at the rest of us not to start the tape yet, for fear of missing a really cool trailer narrated by the kickass-sounding voice dude. The world will have moved on, and these experiences will be as foreign and antiquated to our grandchildren as newsreels and double-billings are to us. The torch is passed, but to whom or what? Those of us who find poetry and magic in popular cinema will have to wait and hope.Dr. Criddlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05181732644649615771noreply@blogger.com0