The Cabinet of Dr. Criddle

My 100 Favorite Films of the Decade

2009-12-24T15:34:00.000-08:00

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.

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 (In the Mood for Love, Far From Heaven) or I just don't care for them as much as the pictures listed here (Lost in Translation, A History of Violence.) All it is is a list of the films that moved me and spoke to me. Having said that, here you go.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, John Cameron Mitchell)
The Incredibles (2004, Brad Bird)
No Country for Old Men (2007, Joel and Ethan Coen)
Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron)
Munich (2005, Steven Spielberg)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright)
Sideways (2004, Alexander Payne)
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003, Peter Jackson)
Let the Right One In (2008, Thomas Alfredson)
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002, Don Coscarelli)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik)
Ghost World (2001, Terry Zwigoff)
Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird)
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003, Peter Wier)
Chuck and Buck (2000, Miguel Arteta)
Amelie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Zodiac (2007, David Fincher)
Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (2001, Shinchiro Watanabe)
Before Sunset (2004, Richard Linklater)
25th Hour (2002, Spike Lee)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000, Joel and Ethan Coen)
The Fountain (2006, Darren Aronofsky)
Linda Linda Linda (2005, Nobuhiro Yamashita)
Sexy Beast (2000, Jonathan Glazer)
High Fidelity (2000, Stephen Frears)
Downfall (2004, Oliver Hirschbeigel)
Minority Report (2003, Steven Spielberg)
There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Y tu mama tambien (2001, Alfonso Cuaron)
The Wrestler (2008, Darren Aronofsky)
Synecdoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman)
Expired (2008, Cilillia Miniucchi)
Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku)
Chop Shop (2007, Ramin Bahrani)
Wall-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)
The Beaver Trilogy (2001, Trent Harris)
Spirited Away (2001, Hayao Miyasaki)
Dead Man’s Shoes (2004, Shane Meadows)
Up (2009, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson)
Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch)
Hot Fuzz (2007, Edgar Wright)
In Bruges (2008, Martin McDonagh)
Oldboy (2003, Chan-wook Park)
The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)
Talk to Her (2002, Pedro Almodovar)
I’m Not There (2007, Todd Haynes)
Hero (2003, Zhang Yimou)
Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly)
Finding Nemo (2003 Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich)
The Squid and the Whale (2005, Noah Bambauch)
24 Hour Party People (2002, Michael Winterbottom)
Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)
Ginger Snaps (2001, John Fawcett)
Once (2007, John Carney)
The Baxter (2005, Michael Showalter)
Collateral (2004, Michael Mann)
Nosey Parker (2003, John O’Brien)
Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Guillermo del Toro)
May (2002, Lucky McKee)
The Departed (2006, Martin Scorsese)
Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan)
Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! (2001, Shusuke Kaneko)
Super Troopers (2001, Jay Chandraskhar)
Big Fish (2003, Tim Burton)
You Can Count on Me (2000, Kenneth Lonergan)
The Proposition (2005, John Hillcoat)
Best in Show (2000, Christopher Guest)
Black Book (2006, Paul Verhoeven)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, Wes Anderson)
Happy-Go-Lucky (2007, Mike Leigh)
Kill Bill (2003, 2004, Quentin Tarantino)
Bug (2007, William Friedkin)
Million Dollar Baby (2004, Clint Eastwood)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)
A Serious Man (2009, Joel and Ethan Coen)
Bad Santa (2003, Terry Zwigoff)
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2003, Guy Maddin)
Suzhou River (2000, Lou Ye)
Almost Famous (2000, Cameron Crowe)
X2: X-Men United (2003, Bryan Singer)
Wet Hot American Summer (2001, David Wain)
King Kong (2005, Peter Jackson)
The Five Obstructions (2003, Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier)
Cache (2005, Michael Haneke)
American Splendor (2003, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini)
28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle)
JSA: Joint Security Area (2002, Chan-wook Park)
Moulin Rouge! (2001, Baz Luhrmann)
The Good Girl (2002, Miguel Arteta)
A Mighty Wind (2003, Christopher Guest)
Paprika (2006, Satoshi Kon)
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004, Danny Leiner)
Persepolis (2007, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud)
Open Range (2005, Kevin Costner)
AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)
Sin City (2005, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez)

Projects on the Drawing Board

2009-12-03T16:51:00.000-08:00

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.

The Good Doctor - 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.

Dwain Esper: King of the Celluloid Gypsies - a short documentary about the unscrupulous, hucksterish, mastermind director of the 30's exploitation classics Maniac, Sex Madness, and Marihuana: The Weed With Roots in Hell, and the producer/distributor of Reefer Madness and Freaks (aka Nature's Mistakes!) 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.

For Sale/Wanted - 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.

Van Damme Day Afternoon

2009-10-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

Just finally caught up with last year's JCVD 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.
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.
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 Gran Torino, Indiana Jones settled down, got married, and passed the torch in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Mickey Rourke found such a kindred spirit in The Wrestler'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, JCVD 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.

Cinema Nolita S.O.S: an update

2009-09-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

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 Ace Hotel. 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.

Fare thee well Cinema Nolita

2009-07-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

The fact that Netflix doesn't and probably will never stock copies of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, Elaine May's A New Leaf, John Carpenter's Elvis, or Trent Harris' The Beaver Trilogy 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.

Reading the Movies

2009-06-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Dancing Image 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:

In the Blink of an Eye 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 Apocalypse Now, Godfather Part III and Cold Mountain. 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.

Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi 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.

Cult Movies 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 Casablanca, The Searchers and The Wizard of Oz alongside fare like Two-Lane Blacktop and The Honeymoon Killers. His Freudian reading of King Kong, wherein Kong is the manifestation of Carl Denham's sexual frustration a la the Id Monster in Fordbidden Planet, 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.

Making Movies 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.

Hollywood Babylon 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?

Gilliam on Gilliam, 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.

The Psychotronic Video Guide 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.

Hitchcock/Truffaut, 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.

It's part of the race: David Carradine 1936-2009

2009-06-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

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 Kill Bill, to the baby boomers who watched him on TV as Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu, 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 The Long Riders (alongside real-life siblings Robert and Keith), an existential circus acrobat in Ingmar Bergman's underrated The Serpent's Egg, and Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's Paths of Glory. 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, Death Race 2000.

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 Eating Raoul 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.

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 Alpha 60 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.

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) Death Race 2000 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.

Tarzan vs. IBM: une etrange aventure du Jean-Luc Godard

2009-05-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless 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, Alphaville; une etrange aventure du Lemmy Caution, 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 Fahrenheit 451. With this film, Godard would create his own dystopic science fiction story, but he would do it his way.

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.

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?

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 1984. 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.

In terms of D.I.Y. aesthetic style, Alphaville’s closest cousin is probably Chris Marker’s La Jetee. However, where Marker’s film was a poingant study of love in the face of Armageddon, Alphaville 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.

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 Metropolis, 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.

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 Tarzan versus IBM - which just as well sums up the plot John Boorman’s Point Blank and Zardoz.) 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.

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.

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 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL; its perverse plan to save the world by destroying it also employed by Adrien Veidt in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. And of course, Blade Runner, 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.

The Celluloid Gypsy Chronicles: The Frank Henenlotter Interview

2009-05-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

Frank Henenlotter knows a thing or two about exploitation movies. His best-loved film, the brilliant Basket Case, 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 Brain Damage and Frankenhooker also lovingly paid tribute to the exploitation flicks of yesteryear while simultaneously poking fun at their politics.

In the many years spent between 1992's Basket Case III: The Progeny and last year's yet-to-be-released Bad Biology, 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 (The Pleasure of Being Robbed 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.

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 The Crawling Eye and Please Don't Eat My Mother adorn the walls, and Belial, the rubbery, deformed star of Basket Case, 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?"

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.

"On the other hand," he added. "They're really just a hell of a lot of fun. I think the first ten minutes of Sex Madness 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!"

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.

"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."

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 Saw movies, and Two Girls One Cup 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 Marihuana, 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 Maniac - 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!"

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 [Youth in Babylon,]" 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."

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 Ingagi (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 Freaks 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."

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 Street Corner and Because of Eve. "The roadshow guys had to make it seem like they were doing a good deed by showing these films." He popped in Because of Eve, 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.

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.

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, Marihuana and Child Bride were made long before The Man with the Golden Arm and Lolita. 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 Deep Throat in the '70's. 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."

Just before I left, I asked Henenlotter when the general public will finally get to see his latest film, Bad Biology. 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.

Happy Mother's Day!

2009-05-10T07:09:00.001-07:00

Never as Good as the Second Time

2009-04-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

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 The Wizard of Oz and A Star Is Born were not the first, and that Last House on the Left was actually a contemporary update of Bergman's The Virgin Spring. 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.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

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, The Magnificent Seven is a wonderfully fun film but it really can't hold a candle to the beautiful nuance and majesty of The Seven Samurai. On the other hand, Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars 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, Fistful is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am affair, which makes its bleak and nihilistic outlook all the more satisfying.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Phillip Kaufman)

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.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog)

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.

The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)

Carpenter's best film is both a more faithful adaptation of Joseph Campbell's novella Who Goes There 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.

The Fly (1986, David Cronenberg)

While the original Vincent Price film, is adored by the Famous Monsters of Filmland 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.

Cape Fear (1991, Marvin Scorsese)

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 New York, New York, 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 Night of the Hunter. 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 Breathless and Peter Jackson's King Kong) this is one that really works beautifully.

The Celluloid Gypsy Chronicles: An Introduction

2009-04-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Some of the most famous exploitation films of the day were Kroger Babb's Mom and Dad, William O'Conner's The Cocaine Fiends, and Louis Gasnier's Reefer Madness, 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.

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 Narcotic. 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.

Narcotic 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, Maniac, 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 Murders of the Rue Morgue. 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.

When first released, Maniac was a flop, until Esper re-titled it Sex Maniac and played up the more risque aspects of the story. His next two features, Marihuana and Sex Madness, would strike a clearer balance between Narcotic's somberly moralistic seriousness and Maniac'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. Sex Madness, 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.

For years, Esper roadshowed films he'd directed and others he'd acquired from other sources; some legally, like Reefer Madness, which was formerly a church group produced feature called Tell Your Children, others, almost certainly illegally, like Freaks, which was also sold under the title Nature's Mistakes and Love Among the Freaks. He retired from directing after unleashing The Strange Love Life of Adolf Hitler 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.

In any case, my mini-doc, which will be titled Dwain Esper: King of the Celluloid Gypsies, 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.

Maniac (1934)
Reefer Madness (1936)
Marihuana (1936)
Sex Madness (1938)

Postcards of the Hanging

2009-03-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

Watchmen'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 300." 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 Lord of the Rings. I am not embarrassed to include myself among the hardcore Watch-geeks, and would have rather not see it get made at all than done badly. Generally speaking, I was impressed.

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, Man Who Fell to Earth type.

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.

My initial fears that Watchmen would turn into the same sort of endless cock-fest that 300 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 Watchmen 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.

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 Watchmen 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 Lord of the Rings fan has their favorite part of the trilogy that was eliminated from Jackson's films.

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 Watchmen'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 The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man, 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. Watchmen'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 The Incredibles, which used a similar outlaw-superhero plot to fashion an original story, or The Dark Knight, which really plumbed the depths of the philosophical implications of superheroes and supervillains. Watchmen is a limited film compared to these, but I still enjoyed it immensely, and I'm very glad it exists.

Shine On You Crazy Armond

2009-02-15T17:57:00.000-08:00

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 New York Press'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 (There Will Be Blood), families (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), and economic poverty (The Wrestler), while championing lowbrow horseshit like Norbit.

In addition to his just plain wonky taste in flicks (his recent year-end "Better Than" list concluded that Transporter 3 > The Dark Knight, RockNRolla > Slumdog Millionaire, and CJ7 > Wall-E), 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 Last Man on Earth/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.

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 Wall-E 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 Coraline. That film, he insisted, along with Monster House, Persepolis, and Waltz with Bazshir , 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 The Incredibles, or a beautiful tale of personal achievement and artistic integrity like Ratatouille "ravishing junk." He does, however, take a lot of time call out Wall-E on its apparent cynicism: the notion of human beings reduced to hover chair-bound sloths, leaving our planet to go to waste.

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 Wall-E 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 Wall-E looks to the future, whereas Coraline 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.

The Press's Feb 11-17 issue contained White's review of Gomorrah - 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. Gomorrah, he asserts, is weak tea compared to The Godfather. 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 Gomorrah yet, but imagine if you asked me "Hey Jack, how was My Bloody Valentine 3D?" and I said, "Psshaw, it wasn't no Casablanca, 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 Nacho Libre and mean it as a compliment.

So why the hell do I keep reading the guy? Every Wednesday I skip merrily home from work and pick up the New York Press 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 Maakies): 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 Black Dahlia. The second is the sheer outright hilarity of some of his most nonsensical writing: his reviews for Hellboy: The Golden Army and Hamlet 2 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 Soul Man predicted Obama's presidency, nor his long-running man-crush on Jason Statham.

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'.

Masked and Anonymous

2009-02-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

The tempestuous juggernaut of thirty-odd trillion fanboys continues to rage on over the fact that The Dark Knight 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 The Wrestler. 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, Batman Returns. Much less universally loved than Nolan's second outing, but for my money, the most fun and consistently interesting superhero movie ever made.

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 Batman (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 Heathers 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Criddle's Top Ten of 2008

2009-01-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

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 No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, as well as well as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Once, Zodiac and I'm Not There, 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:

1) Let the Right One In

Few outside of hardcore horror buffs saw this marvelous little picture - the David to Twilight's 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 Ginger Snaps, maybe even since Carrie. 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.

2) The Wrestler

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. The Wrestler 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 Chinese Democracy.

3) In Bruges

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 Waiting For Godot, 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?

4) The Dark Knight

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 Batman Begins 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. The Dark Knight is the first comic book adaptation that is truly as great as a great graphic novel, and arguably the finest superhero film ever made.

5) Synecdoche, New York

Admittedly, I only saw Synecdoche, New York 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 8 1/2 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.

6) OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

Funnier and better than all three Austin Powers 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.

7) Stuck

A contemporary b-movie by Re-Animator 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.

8) Gran Torino

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 Dirty Harry persona. Acknowledging, as Sylvester Stallone failed to do with the messy Rambo, 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 Gran Torino really is his last acting role, it's a goddamn shame.

9) Wall-E

While not my favorite film from the geniei at Pixar (The Incredibles is still tied with the first Toy Story 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 Hello Dolly 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 Silent Running, 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 2001, Star Wars and Alien, 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.

10) Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Guillermo del Toro is one of the most delightfully unabashed geeks working in the cinema today, and while Hellboy 2 may not have the dark thematic richness of his masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth, 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 Hellboy 2, 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 Hellboy 2 so enjoyable.

Guilala: The Later Years

2009-01-17T20:26:00.000-08:00

My friend Jules over at Cinematic Damnation 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 Japanese commercials 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 The X From Outer Space, can be seen plugging an American job search website.

I Know I'm Human: Identity and Skepticism in The Thing

2009-01-16T17:02:00.000-08:00

(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?)

"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, if 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 The Thing, the 1982 film based off of Joseph W. Campbell Jr,'s novella Who Goes There?, 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.

"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 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars, 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' The Thing From Another World (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.

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 Matrix/Dark City-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 They Live, 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.)

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 Alien. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Carpenter has long expressed his love of westerns, particularly those of Howard Hawks. Both Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing have the same overall plot arc as Rio Bravo, 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.

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 Alien, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Questions from SLIFR

2008-12-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

I encourage everyone to participate in Dennis Cozzalio's new, recent, fun-filled quiz over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. My answers are as follows.

1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?

Theatrically - Role Models. On DVD - My Favorite Year.

2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice?

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.

3) Ida Lupino or Mercedes McCambridge?

Lupino was a better actress and director, but McCambridge was the voice of little Reagan in The Exorcist, so I'm afraid she wins.

4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks

Kyle McLachlan

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.

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.

6) Favorite Spike Lee joint.

The 25th Hour

7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady?

"Let's go to woik." Tierney all the way.

8) Are most movies too long?

No. Some, but not most.

9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.

Cheating here, but nothing else really comes to mind: Ossie Davis as John F. Kennedy in Bubba Ho-Tep.

10) Create the main event card for the ultimate giant movie monster smackdown.

The Kraken vs. The Giant Claw!

11) Jean Peters or Sheree North?

Peters for Sam Fuller's seminal Pickup on South Street.

12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?

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.

13) Favorite road movie.

Y Tu Mama Tambien

14) Favorite Budd Boetticher picture.

Seven Men From Now

15) Who is the one person, living or dead, famous or unknown, who most informed or encouraged your appreciation of movies?

My high school photography teacher, Jason Whiton

16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.)

Coonskin

17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar?

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.

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.

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?

19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie.

Stop Making Sense

20) Tatum O’Neal or Linda Blair?

Paper Moon is my girlfriend's alltime favorite movie (and a film I dearly love too), so, Tatum.

21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.)

The ending of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

22) Favorite Claude Chabrol film.

I'm afraid I've only seen his most recent, A Girl Cut in Two, but I liked that one.

23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid.

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.

24) Dennis Christopher or Robby Benson?

Dennis Christopher, for a little film called Fade to Black which every self-proclaimed cinephile should see as a cautionary tale.

25) Favorite movie about journalism.

His Girl Friday

26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?

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.

27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood.

Unforgiven, although I really also love Play Misty for Me.

28) Paul Dooley or Kurtwood Smith?

Kurtwood Smith.

29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.

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.

30) Your hope for the movies in 2009.

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.

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.)

#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.

The American Father Christmas - A Childhood Destroyed

2008-12-23T01:10:00.000-08:00

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 The Snowman and the comical Father Christmas - are staples of British TV during the holidays.

The latter film, based off of Brigg’s book of the same name and its sequel, Father Christmas Goes on his Holidays, 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.

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.

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!”

His character’s voice was provided by the great Cockney comedian Mel Smith, an actor best known to Americans as the albino from The Princess Bride. 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.

We had both Father Christmas and The Snowman 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 Father Christmas with a picture on the cover.

“Thanks,” my dad said, puzzled. “But we’ve already got this one on tape.”

“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.

Imagine, if you will, how upset Americans would be if anyone from a foreign country re-edited The Grinch. 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 It’s a Wonderful Life 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 Father Christmas.

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.”

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.

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.

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 Watership Down and The Wombles of Wimbledon Common., 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.

On the horizon....

2008-12-09T15:43:00.000-08:00

.... the YouTubification of my new short film, Dummy Love.

.... thoughts on Synecdoche, New York.

.... Yeti or not Yeti? An Appreciation of Shriek of the Mutilated.

But for now, here's a woman on the internet who makes cartoon characters out of food. Check it out!

That vaguely frightening cat-bus from My Neighbor Totoro, and Totoro himself.

A severed Yoshi head garnished with an assortment of mushroom men.

WALL-E and EVE! Way too cute to even think about eating.

Fare thee well Paul Newman.

2008-10-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

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 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

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 Jules and Jim, I'll always stick with "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head") and shed tears at their last stand against the Bolivian army. For me, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 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.

If Newman had only made Butch and Sundance, he would still be a legend - but thankfully he graced us with many more amazing and iconic performances in The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, and Hud. He displayed a brilliant talent for comedy in Slap Shot and the Coen Brothers' underrated The Hudsucker Proxy. 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 Buffalo Bill and the Indians and John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean) 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.

Pure and simple, a great man, whom the world loved like an uncle and whose legacy will never be forgotten.

A thousand words....

2008-09-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Coming to America

2008-09-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview in The Onion AV Club, Steve Coogan described his reasons for adopting an American accent to play Hamlet 2'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 Alan Partridge, 24 Hour Party People's Tony Wilson and Around the World in 80 Days' 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.

What Hamlet 2 may lack as a structured comedy it makes up for in a brilliantly broad-stroked comedic character study. Marschz is introduced to us, Tropic Thunder/Grindhouse 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 Erin Brockovich. 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.

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 The Great Debaters. 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 Being John Malkovich 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.

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.

The passing of the torch.

2008-09-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

Legendary voiceover artist Don LaFontaine, whose gravelly voice could seemingly be heard in every single trailer made in the 80's and 90's, recently passed away 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.

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, Ain't It Cool New's Quint wrote a nice obit with many YouTube samples of his work.

Less sad than Mr. Lafontaine's death, but still something that will come as a bummer to genre cinephiles, is the retirement of celebrated poster artist Drew Struzan. 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 Star Wars, The Thing, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China and even Harry and the Hendersons. It really was an awe inspiring experience to be in the presence of pieces of my own personal history.

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 Hellboy, The Mist, and the first couple of Harry Potter films (as well as the Star Wars prequels and Indiana Jones 4) - movies that hearken back to an old-fashioned, disbelief-suspending style of entertainment.

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.

Questions, questions.

2008-09-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

God bless Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule 's Dennis Cozzalio and his much-loved movie quizzes. His most recent, Dr. Zachary Smith's Lost in Space at the End of the Summer Movie Quiz, is online for anyone who wants to join in the fun.

1) Your favorite musical moment in a movie

At the risk of being completely unoriginal, the "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head" sequence in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

2) Ray Milland or Dana Andrews

Milland, definitely, one of the great workmanlike actors. I'm being completely sincere when I say I think he's just as great in The Thing with Two Heads as he is in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend.

3) Favorite Sidney Lumet movie

Sadly, here's a great director of whose work I have seen embarrassingly little.... although I was really amazed with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

4) Biggest surprise of the just-past summer movie season

I was fairly certain that The Dark Knight would be a blast, but I was wholly unprepared for it being as great as it was.

5) Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth

Smolderingly sexy and very potentially deadly Tierney all the way - the deciding factor being the canoe scene in Leave Her to Heaven. Shit gives me chills.

6) What’s the last movie you saw on DVD? In theaters?

On DVD - Before Sunrise, a long-time favorite of mine, which I watched with my girlfriend who had never seen it before. In theaters - Elevator to the Gallows, at Film Forum's recent French crime series.

7) Irwin Allen’s finest hour?

You know, I really like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It ain't great, but it's a nostalgic childhood favorite.

8) What were the films where you would rather see the movie promised by the poster than the one that was actually made?

The poster for the Corman-produced The Killer Shrews, which depicts a big, wormy, phallic shrew's tail squirming over a bloodied woman's shoe, is a simple and direct in its ability to illicit terror as the one-sheet for Alien. The movie itself, though, is pretty silly. Fun, but not the least bit scary.

9) Chow Yun-Fat or Tony Leung

Not really a fair contest if you ask me - Yun-Fat is a wonderfully badass, charismatic action star, but I don't think he's ever reached the level of closely guarded and complex emotion Tony Leung has in movies like Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love.

10) Most pretentious movie ever

Lady in the Water.

11) Favorite Russ Meyer movie

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

12) Name the movie that you feel best reflects yourself, a movie you would recommend to an acquaintance that most accurately says, “This is me.”

Probably Rushmore.

13) Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo

Gotta be Dietrich.

14) Best movie snack? Most vile movie snack?

Best - turkey and swiss sandwich that I sneak in myself. Yeah, I'm bad. Worst - hard to decide between red Twizzlers and radioactive gunk-covered movie theater nachos.

15) Current movie star who would be most comfortable in the classic Hollywood studio system

I'm probably not the first person to note this, but I can very easily picture George Clooney palling around, drinking scotch, and pinching waitresses on the ass with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

16) Fitzcarraldo—yes or no?

A resounding yes - my favorite Herzog film.

17) Your assignment is to book the ultimate triple bill to inaugurate your own revival theater. What three movies will we see on opening night?

Carnival of Souls, The Last Waltz, and Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic, for the purely selfish reason that I've always wanted to see them on the big screen (and in the case of Heaven and Earth Magic, to see it at all, period.)

18) What’s the name of your theater?

I love romantic, old-fashioned sounding theater names like "The Ziegfeld," "The Egyptian," "The Beacon," et al, although I'd hopefully play a mix of old-time studio product and more psychotronic cult films. In honor of Kenneth Anger, I might call my theater "The Hollywood Babylon."

19) Favorite Leo McCarey movie

Duck Soup

20) Most impressive debut performance by an actor/actress.

It's a tie between Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore and Fred Tuttle in Man with a Plan.

21) Biggest disappointment of the just-past summer movie season

Without the slightest shadow of a doubt, Argento's Mother of Tears.

22) Michelle Yeoh or Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung fo' sho'.

23) 2008 inductee into the Academy of the Overrated

Iron Man - I enjoyed it, but seemingly not quite as much as everyone else.

24) 2008 inductee into the Academy of the Underrated

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which I think people will remember with a lot more fondness in the next ten years.

25) Fritz the Cat—yes or no?

In terms of influence and its place in history, an enormous yes - without it we'd never has seen Bakshi's later, more fiercely personal films (of which Heavy Traffic is my favorite), and without those, we'd likely never have seen "The Simpsons," "South Park," or indeed any adult-geared animation here in the West. Having said that, though, it's not exactly a great film - a little too boorishly crass and obvious in its satire for my tastes, although there are a handful of moments of brilliance throughout.

26) Trevor Howard or Richard Todd

Trevor Howard.

27) Antonioni once said, “I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.” What filmmaker working today most fruitfully ignores the rules? What does ignoring the rules of cinema mean in 2008?

As the great Gene Hackman once said, "There are no rules!" In all seriousness, though, I don't really think it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules. You look at a lot of films today of both the mainstream and indie variety and see a lot of them are the same; a checklist of cliches and second-guessed notions of what viewers want to see. What a great filmmaker realizes is that these rules are merely in place for hacks who lack the confidence to make a movie their own way - more guidelines than anything else. The films that deviate from the rules, and do it successfully, are the ones we end up remembering.

28) Favorite William Castle movie

The House on Haunted Hill.

29) Favorite ethnographically oriented movie

I'm going to say To Kill a Mockingbird, although I'm not really sure what this question means.

30) What’s the movie coming up in 2008 you’re most looking forward to? Why?

The Road - the novel left me unable to speak after I'd finished reading it, and I'd be hard pressed to think of a better filmmaker to helm it than The Proposition's John Hillcoat.

31) What deceased director would you want to resurrect in order that she/he might make one more film?

Truffaut.

32) What director would you like to see, if not literally entombed, then at least go silent creatively?

Scott Derrickson. Preferably literally entombed, and preferably before his remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still comes out.

33) Your first movie star crush

Ariana Richards in Jurassic Park.

Bungle in the Jungle

2008-08-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

In his cameo in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou , the great filmmaker Samuel Fuller said that "film is a battleground," a whirlwind of love, hate, violence, and among all other things, emotion. It's a metaphor that conjures up images of the near-madness experienced by Francis Coppola making of Apocalypse Now, Sam Peckinpah's booze and cocaine-induced brawls with actors and studio heads, and Werner Herzog playing referee between Klaus Kinski and hordes of spear-wielding natives on his various jungle films. The location-shoot set of Tropic Thunder's film-with-in-a-film (a Vietnam picture based on the memoirs of a grizzled, hook-handed veteran) is also a battleground, but a very different kind -a war between squabbling egos, petty disagreements, and delusions of grandeur.

Among the motley crew are Tugg Speedman (Stiller), slightly past-his-prime action star, and Jeff Portnoy (Black), an embarrassing, heroin-addicted comic, both trying to get a stab at some critical respectability, and Kirk Lazarus, a method actor so pretentiously dedicated to his craft that he dyes his skin black in order to play the platoon's African-American seargent, refusing to come out of character "until the DVD commentary." British filmmaker Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan,) who recalls Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross in The Stunt Man minus the fear and respect from everyone around him, is having trouble reconciling all the whiny, self-centered egos, much to the anger of fat, disgusting, foul-mouthed studio boss Les Grossman (a mind-blowingly hilarious turn by Tom Cruise.) As the picture gets further and further behind schedule, Cockburn decides, at the suggestion of Nick Nolte's loopy survivalist vet author, to drop the boys "into the shit" - rig the jungle with hidden cameras and film their reactions to surviving in the jungle. Unfortunately, the group of actors strays offtrack, into the midst of a band of very real, heavily armed, and not entirely welcoming band of drug lords.

The premise of placing dull-witted characters into a dangerous situation that they think is all just an act is a well-worn comedic plot - indeed, when Tropic Thunder's trailers came out, I feared something along the lines of the awful Bill Murray vehicle The Man Who Knew Too Little in a Platoon-style setting. But Stiller (directing here for the first time since the much-loved Zoolander) uses this formula as a vessel for one of the most bare-knuckled Hollywood satires in a good long while. Even when it becomes all but completely obvious that the the moronic, camouflage-fatigued quintet that they are not making middle of a fly-on-the-wall war picture but caught in an incredibly dangerous, life-threatening situation, they still refuse to break character, in the off-chance of being awarded an Oscar for their troubles.

Another thing that makes Tropic Thunder so enjoyable is its stars' gleeful willingness to relentlessly make fun of themselves and their peers. Taking a note from Grindhouse's book, the movie opens with a series of fake trailers: Jeff Portnoy's "The Fatties: Fart Two," an Eddie Murphy-styled fatsuits n' flatulence fiasco in which he plays every character, and "Satan's Alley," with Lazarus and Tobey McGuire as a pair of homosexual monks. Black manages to make heroin addiction hilarious through the character of Portnoy, underscoring our society's tabloid obsession with tears-of-a-clown stories. Cruise's Weinstien-esque producer is the most hateful, egotistical megalomaniac he's played since Magnolia, which, as we've learned from recent incidents of couch-jumping and other shenanigans, apparently didn't entail that much actual acting.

Most hilarious of all is Downey, whose "dude playing a dude disguised as another dude," reaches all-new hights of Brando-disciple method actorly pretension. Downey had already elicited controversy before the film was released, both for his donning of blackface and an Otis Redding-style afro, and for cautioning Stiller's character never to "go full retard" (Tuggman's in his previous endeavor is shown to have been a life-affirming weepie called "Simple Jack," about a stuttering, severely mentally handicapped farm boy who says things like "Goodnight, mama. I will see you in my head movies.") Frankly, I don't think a protest group has missed the point of a comedy this much since the churchgoing set who tore Life of Brian a new one - Tropic Thunder does not mock people of color nor the mentally handicapped, it mocks self-important twit actors who see these groups solely as fodder for the harvesting of accolades. Of course, it takes an immensely skilled (not to mention ballsy) performer to make the joke work without being inflammatory, but Downey nails it pitch-perfect.

Lensed by John Toll (who also shot The Thin Red Line) and boasting a soundtrack of worn-out-their-welcome classic rock tunes, Stiller proves himself once again to be a keen-eyed director when it comes to making a spoof that closely resembles the real thing. Every Nam-flick cliche is present and accounted for. It's somewhat ironic, then, that Stiller the actor wound up being my sole quibble with the movie. While Downey and Black perfectly play highly satirized versions of themselves, Stiller seems miscast as a beefy musclehead, reverting essentially to playing his Mr. Furious character from Mystery Men in combat boots. It's certainly not enough to spoil the whole film, and I'd rather see Stiller in this than the scores of Meet the Fockerses and Along Came Pollys. But I couldn't help thinking how much funnier someone like The Rock or Vin Diesil would have done at balancing the tough-guy persona with the comical stupidity (I'm not kidding, I think these two more than proved their respective knacks for comedy in Get Smart and Find Me Guilty.) Even Ben Affleck, who I'm still holding out hope will come back and do something as great as Dazed and Confused someday, would have been better suited than Stiller, whose strenghts lie mainly in playing neurotic, tightly-wound dweebs. Even so, it isn't enough to spoil an otherwise hilarious and surprisingly scathing satire of the well-treaded subject that is Dream Factory pomposity and horseshit. It may not be remembered alongside Sunset Boulevard and The Player, but it's still a hell of a lot better than Hollywood Ending.

The four best movies of 2008 (so far)

2008-08-15T13:10:00.001-07:00

I apologize (again) for my abandonment of this blog - I've been without a working computer for the past several weeks. Until I wind up taking my iMac to the vet, it will probably be slow sailing here at the Cabinet. To capsulate nearly a month's worth of watching, here are, in my opinion, the four best movies of 2008 (so far.)

1. The Dark Knight

Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm such a knee-jerking, traditionalist old fart, and hardly ever one to label any new film "the greatest of its kind," "the best thing so-and-so ever directed," etc. Well, The Dark Knight is the finest superhero movie ever made. I'm not kidding. Nolan has one-upped Bryan Singer's stellar X-Men films in terms of favoring believability over comic book stylization, creating a film that's more like a great detective thriller that just happens to feature a man in a pointy-eared mask and cape. While it treats it's subject with reverence and seriousness, it doesn't get bogged down in the dreary martyr-angst of Superman Returns, crafting a surprisingly philosophical study of heroism in a gritty world of post-9/911 turmoil (the Joker's tapes to the police eerily recall the Abu Ghraib photos, Bruce Wayne and right-hand-man Lucius Fox debate the ethics of spying on Gotham citizens via their cell phones, and Aaron Eckhart's D.A. Harvey Dent is an uncannily Obama-like agent of goodwill who gives way to corruption.)

And Ledger's Joker is an absolute revolation - I don't think I've ever been quite so sad that a young actor is no longer with us than the scene in which he visits Dent's hospital room in a nurse's uniform. Unlike Jack Nicholson's performance (which was really just a Ceasar Romero impersonation injected with the occasional "here's Johnny!" moment), Ledger is a force of nature, a pure "agent of chaos" who is utterly terrifying, totally disgusting, completely charismatic and impossible to take your eyes off.

2. Pineapple Express

As more and more negative reviews of this film seem to pile up, I feel compelled to defend it, as it it were my scrawny, mildly retarded kid brother. The chief buzz-phrase among paid critics (i.e. eggheads) is "If you're high, you'll probably find this movie funny, but I certainly didn't hurrumph hurrumph hurrumph...." If you ask me, they've missed the boat on this one. By combining the shaggy dog narrative of the buddy-stoner comedy and the homoerotic ridiculousness of a Reagan-era drug-war inspired action flick, Rogen, Apatow and co. have side-stepped the trappings of both genres, creating a wholly original concoction. As an action film, the movie has an oddly political angle - whereas Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundregen were probably justified in hunting down the foreign-accented sleazebags who were trying to push heroin on preschoolers, Rogen and Franco's characters are haplessly drawn into their high-adrenaline catastrofuck because of marijuana's needless illegality. You've got to stop and think for a minute - if only weed were legal, none of this would have ever happened.

Of course, it's as a buddy movie that Pineapple Express truly perseveres - there is more chemistry between the leads than most cinematic romantic couples, and Franco especially shines as the loveable, child-like, puppy dog-eyed drug dealer Saul. David Gordon Green (admittedly a weird choice to direct a Judd Apatow-produced frat-schlub comedy) fills the picture with unexpected moments of pathos and weird beauty, such as when Saul and Dale play leapfrog in the woods. I agree that most stoner movies aren't that funny. Movies like Half Baked, that seem to think smoking pot is an inherently funny act, usually aren't funny. But James Franco, wearing grimy pyjama bottoms, stoned out of his gourd on a swingset, crying hysterically and eating a sandwich at the same time? That's funny.

3. Shine A Light

Although it isn't a patch on Gimme Shelter or Scorsese's own The Last Waltz (in my opinion, the finest rock and roll film ever made), Shine A Light is still, whether intended or not, a fascinating portrait at the commodification and commercialization of rock and roll. The Beacon Theater's audience, full of wealthy yuppies, privileged, cellphone camera-wielding trust fund kids, and the Clintons, has about as much in common with the unwashed hippies cheering on The Band in The Last Waltz as aliens from outer space. A brief backstage prologue sheds a good deal of light on how much red tape and organizational bullshit is involved in getting a bunch of dudes onstage to sing songs of rebellion and crazed tomcat sexuality, and the picture meditates on the irony of the Stones themselves, no longer dangerous, swaggering tigers-on-the-prowl, now respected elder statesmen of the pop cultural pyramid.

At the same time, Shine A Light can also (fortunately) still be appreciated as a straight-up, balls-to-the-wall, pull-out-the-stops rock and roll film. In their sixties, the Stones still rock harder than bands a quarter their age, especially Jagger, who relentlessly leaps about onstage with the energy of a small army of Red Bull-chugging 17-year-olds. The band (as expected) rocks the shit out of their well-known repertoire of hit songs, as well as a couple of underrated goodies. The moment when the boys salute the blues tunes that inspired them by inviting Buddy Guy onstage for a smoking rendition of "Reefer and Champagne Blues" (after which Keith Richards hands Guy his guitar, saying "It's yours!") is the best moment of the film. Mick's "Loving Cup" duet with Jack White, whose face is fixed in a permanent "pinch me I'm dreaming" expression, is another highlight. Although far from the best rock film of all time, I'd be tempted to call Shine A Light the best rock film of our Rolling Stone magazine/mp3 intant gratification/ridiculously expensive concert tickets/hero worship/starfuckery age.

4. Wall - E

Pixar, once again, prove themselves to be the undisputed kings of children's animated cinema that respect its target audiences intelligence and ability to get what's going on. After the marvelous, character-driven culinary comedy Ratatouille comes Wall-E, a post apocalyptic, near-silent love story between a couple of automatons that mixes live-action and animation. While the story, which deals with social laziness and environmental irresponsibility and abandonment on a colossal scale, has echoes of Douglass Trumbull's Silent Running and Mike Judge's Idiocracy (human beings have abandoned earth, now living in a space station, drinking cheeseburger-flavored slurpees in a hoverchair, watching their holo-screens all day long, leaving the titular robot to clean up the planet,) the story here is ultimately optimistic, seeming to say that all society needs to get back on the right track is a little reality check.

And of course, this being a Pixar film, everything is gorgeously detailed, from the dusty junk that makes up Wall-E's dust cloud-beaten abode to the gleaming spaceship interiors and the eccentric quirks of all the various robots. As well as an ecological parable, it is also a tribute to what director Andrew Stanton called "the golden age of science fiction" (1968 to 1982), with affectionate nods to 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner and Alien. Cute, heartfelt, and beautiful to watch, Wall-E is the closest CGI animated film since Sam Chen's Eternal Gaze that comes close to the realm of pure cinema.

Stan Winston: Farewell to a Legend.

2008-06-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Stan Winston was responsible for more of my childhood nightmares than anyone else in the motion picture business - and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. The robotically methodical, yet gleefully sadistic velociraptors from Jurassic Park. The grotesque titular beast in Predator, whose tusk-mouthed, dredlock-topped puss made Arnold Schwartzenegger's assessment ("You ah wahn ahgly mathafucka!") the understatement of the century. The hideous Penguin from Batman Returns, whose physical corruption mirrored his moral decay, though he still remained oddly sympathetic. Most terrifying of all, of course, was the Queen from Aliens - even as a 21-year-old today, I still think there are few scenes as underwear-shittingly nightmarish as when Sigourney Weaver first walks into her lair, and comes face to face with the fat, insect-like matriarch of the whole colony, sitting comfortably on her sinewy throne, squeezing eggs out of her engorged abdomen.

As little Newt said in the film, "mommy always said there were no monsters - no real ones - but there are." Truly this is something that everyone my age who grew up watching Stan Winston's cinematic monsters can relate to. As much as our parents tried to convince us that these creatures were merely imaginary, built by the skilled hands of Hollywood special effects artists, there was still a degree of unease that remained, even when we re-watched the films in question, for with Stan Winston's creations, you never saw the strings. Unlike the beautifully rendered but unmistakably fake cyclopses and hydras of Ray Harryhausen, or the fun but never truly scary giant monsters of the patented Japanese rubber suit variety, with Stan Winston, you never had to suspend your disbelief. It wasn't necessary. His monsters looked so convincing that you never saw a special effect. You saw a living, breathing, terrifying thing.

That is not to say that Mr. Winston and his talented team of artists only exceeded at creating horrific nightmare creatures - he was also responsible for Johnny Depp's iconic Edward Scissorhands makeup, the reinvisioned versions of the classic Universal monsters in the cult favorite The Monster Squad, the robots in the massively underrated Artificial Intelligence, and most recently, Robert Downey Jr.'s armored suit in Iron Man. As special effects today continuously lean towards more cost-effective but very rarely convincing CGI images, artists of Stan Winston's caliber are sadly a dying breed. Mr. Winston left countless unforgettable images on our collective psyches, and he will be sorely missed.

Happy Father's Day!

2008-06-15T19:15:00.001-07:00

It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage.

2008-06-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not a masterpiece. It will never be confused with Citizen Kane or Ikiru or even There Will Be Blood or No Country for Old Men. And its sole reason for being made seems to be to remind moviegoers that it has no reason to be. It is a purely fun, action-packed adventure - a cinematic ice cream sundae smothered in the hot fudge of nostalgia.

The Indiana Jones series was born out of nostaligia - Spielberg and Lucas set out to create a modern update of the cliffhanger serials they had loved in their youth. Thankfully, they made Raiders of the Lost Ark in a time before DVD, so they weren't able to revisit Ace Drummond or The Jungle Menace to use them as reference points. The reason Raiders is so much better than any of the 30's and 40's serialized adventures - even the very best ones directed by the gifted and underrated William Witney - is because Spielberg and Lucas had a rose-tinted view of said films, having watched them before the jadedness of adulthood kicked in.

How fitting then, that the cycle should continue, and the Indiana Jones series would become such an enormous part of my generation's childhood. Like so many other movies in my life, I am completely unable to look at them objectively in any way - they are so intrinsically tied to my own nostalgia. I often wonder if, for example, what I might think of films like The Goonies and Beetlejuice if I had never seen them before, and were watching them today, at the age of 21. I saw Star Wars when the trilogy was re-released in theaters at the age of nine, and it is the reason I decided to become a filmmaker - but I wonder if I saw it for the first time right now, would I think it was ridiculous and silly? I would like to think that Raiders of the Lost Ark is a strong enough film that it would still enthrall and captivate my hypothetical, somewhat cinematically ignorant, alternate-universe self - but I really have no way at all knowing.

Crystal Skull is seemingly made for viewers exactly like me. Nobody who didn't grow up loving and idolizing Indiana Jones has any business seeing this movie. This is our party, and they're just not invited. Although Spielberg's direction seems to indicate a faint air of bittersweetness that audiences are more interested in seeing him make popcorn films than uncompromising, adult fare like Munich (indicated at the very start of the film, as the Paramount logo fades into a mound of dirt surrounding a gopher hole), he still seems happy to be back in the saddle again, as we are right along with him.

Nobody has tried to hide the fact that a decade and a half has passed since Last Crusade, and yet the film still has heaps of nostalgia for the Eisenhower era. We revisit American Graffiti's universe of malt shops, greasers, poodle skirts and leather jackets, while replacing the Nazis as foes are the two things it seemed everyone in America was most frightened of in the 50's - Commies and little green saucermen. For all the fuss people whipped up about how Harrison Ford would fare in the role as an "old man," every doubt was pretty much rendered moot from the moment he first appears onscreen. Indiana Jones was always rather cranky, sarcastic, and world-weary, and if anything, he only seems to have grown into those qualities. He has one of those faces that doesn't seem to have gotten wrinkly, just more leathery and weatherbeaten. Like Clint Eastwood, he is one of those actors who will never cease to be a pillar of cool. The hat still fits.

The titular crystal skull feels like something of a macguffin, more like the mystical glowing stones in Temple of Doom than the more metaphorically weighted quests for the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail in the first and third films. Having said that, it is still one hell of a fun adventure with almost everything you'd hope for. John Hurt and Ray Winstone's supporting characters are a trifle underwritten, and it was a bit much to see Shia LaBouf swinging through the jungle vines like Tarzan, calling on the aid of his monkey friends during a lethal jeep chase. But, to paraphrase the second-greatest Harrison Ford character, the film has "got it where it counts, kid." Where it really counts, here, is the love story between Indy and Marion, which couldn't have been handled better. From their first meetup after many years and the continuous barrage of Hawksian banter that flies back and forth from thereon afterwards, you know it was fated to be - as if there was any doubt anyway. And Karen Allen still looks beautiful, by the way - it's a testament to how much so that when she was standing right next to Cate Blanchett, who plays a Russian-accented, saber-wielding dominatrix with a Louise Brooks haircut, all I could think to myself was "Damn, Karen Allen is so gorgeous!"

It's not a film for critics, for Spielberg naysayers who go in hoping to see a fluffy mess (of which there are many - and if you ask me, they are the same people, who had they been around in the 50's, would've lambasted Hitchcock for being too user-friendly), and it's not even a movie that will please all Indiana Jones fans. But for me, it was a blast, and made me feel like I was ten again, which is what I believe is exactly what it set out to do.

Happy Friday the 13th!

2008-06-13T12:34:00.001-07:00

Review: Mother of Tears

2008-06-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

What exactly went wrong with Dario Argento's latest offering? The conclusion of his "evil mothers" trilogy which also includes his masterwork Suspiria and the underrated Inferno leaves a great deal to be desired. It makes the viewer wonder if the great Italian horror maestro simply called "action" and then walked outside for a smoke or to get a pack of cheez-its from the vending machine. It's still early yet, but I'm willing to label Mother of Tears the biggest cinematic disappointment of 2008. In fact, I'd even be willing to call it one of the lousiest films I've ever had the misfortune of seeing in a theater.

Anyone who's seen any of his films will be able to tell you that plot and character development aren't Mr. Argento's strong points. Most of his films are full of gaping plot holes, with wooden performances by actors reciting dialogue that could've been penned by George Lucas in full-on Attack of the Clones mode. But that doesn't matter. The real reason to see an Argento film is the atmosphere - indeed, his 70's and 80's pictures are some of the few horror films that can be considered masterpieces of the genre due to atmosphere alone. Utilizing an acrobatic camera, a gorgeously poisoned-candy color palette, and some truly Rube Goldbergian death scenes, Argento movies operate not on a sense of regular logic, but a weird, nightmarish dream logic.

This is the problem with Mother of Tears. It doesn't look like an extravagant madman's nightmare. It looks like an episode of CSI. Whether this was intentional on Argento's part to ground the film in realism, or if he's simply getting sloppy as he gets older, the film is a visual bore, devoid of any of the wonderful atmosphere he brought to his earlier pictures. The visual ugliness causes us to focus instead on the plot, which is exactly where your attention shouldn't be focused when watching a Dario Argento movie. Those who previously hailed the man as one of the finest living horror directors, who would rather turn to their Anchor Bay DVD copies of Deep Red and Opera than blow their disposable income on the latest entries of the Saw franchise, will, after seeing Mother of Tears, find themselves cast into the abyss. The legions of Fangoria readers who uphold Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake as a pinaccle of modern horror will soon be at their door, torturing them with the jeering chant of "where's your Messiah now!?!"

Where was I?

Mother of Tears opens when a construction crew discovers a wooden trunk buried outside a rural cemetery. The priest sends the box to his associate Michael, the curator of the Rome Museum of Ancient Art. Upon opening the box, one of his interns is pounced upon by demons and strangled with her own innards. Her death doesn't look like an "Argento moment," but more like a clumsily-lensed third-rate Fulci imitator.

After the box is opened, a wave of violence spreads over Rome (i.e., small groups of unpaid extras appear to have been offered donuts in exchange for pretending to strangle each other). Groups of witches, who look like they took a time machine from a 1985 Siouxsie and the Banshees concert start arriving at the airport. As we come to understand, this is all the doing of the mostly-nude titular Third Mother. Meanwhile, Asia Argento slowly learns that she has psychic powers, such as being able to open doors with her mind, and to appear invisible if she concentrates real hard and rubs her temples. She is egged on by the hovering specter of her mother, a la Chef Linguini in Ratatouille. She also takes her clothes off and takes a shower, which seems a little odd in a film directed by your old man. I wonder what her home life was like.

Udo Kier, who shows up in a brief cameo, and an evil monkey, respectively, give the best performances in the film. Makes me wish the pair of them had stuck around longer. Argento looks genuinely confused and sometimes stoned, and everyone else seems to be reading their lines off of cue cards. Argento seems to have tried to attempted to inject the low-key immediacy of The Exorcist into a Fulci-styled end-of-the-world film, but Mother of Tears lacks the firm grounding in reality that Friedkin's film has, and Argento can't really come close to the genuine misanthropy and mean-spiritedness that raised Fulci's work above the rest of the crop. You can't fault a director for trying something new, but truly there seems to have been something in Argento's mind that did not successfully make it to the screen. It's something I'd really only reccomend to fans of the director, if they want to see how badly a great genre filmmaker can go wrong.

I'm not dead!

2008-05-20T15:58:00.000-07:00

Not yet, anyway. Just up to my eyeballs in finals. You will hear from me this weekend, hopefully with some new film reviews.

Happy Mother's Day

2008-05-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

Top Ten: Second Features

2008-05-01T17:32:00.000-07:00

1. Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
2. The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
3. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
4. Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1962)
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
6. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
7. Heavy Traffic (Ralph Bakshi, 1973)
8. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
9. High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1972)
10. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

2008-04-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to point you all to the DeviantArt gallery of my sister, Phyllis, who just recently got accepted to the Ontario College of Art and Design, and is a better draftsperson and painter than I could ever hope to be. Her extensive online portfolio contains her portraits, anatomical drawings, sketches, cartoon drawings, and her amazing fashion design work. Congratulations, Phyllie, and good luck!

And speaking of art, the Ralph Bakshi book signing last week at Soho's Animazing Gallery was a tremendous experience. It was great to see the man's paintings up close; they have much of the same energy and vibrancy that his animated films do. When I timidly approached the desk where he was signing copies of his book and told him that Heavy Traffic was my favorite of his works, his eyes lit up and he bellowed "Finally! Someone else who likes that fuckin' picture! I thought I was the only one!", which pretty much made my whole month.

Much of his family was present there, including his daughter and publicist, Victoria, who my friend Steven and I asked about Bakshi's upcoming film, Last Days of Coney Island, a story about dirty cops, prostitutes, and other colorful characters in Brooklyn's deteriorating amusement district. According to her, Ralph had been experimenting with new 2D animation software with the help of some close friends and family, but when he went to seek funding from various studios, they tried to get him to make changes and tone down the story, so he put it on the back burner for a while to return to his painting. At this point they have about five minutes of completed animation, and are looking for funding to make the film on his own terms. Let's hope we get to see this film in the eventual future.

Bakshi in NYC!

2008-04-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

Animation legend Ralph Bakshi will be in New York next week, on Thursday, April 18th, to sign copies of the lovely new coffee table book Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi. at Soho's Animazing Gallery. If you want to go you'll need to call them up and RSVP.

As a filmmaker, Bakshi is about as polorizingly "love him or hate him" as it gets.... I've only just recently started getting into his stuff in the past few months, but I can say I am firmly in the "love" camp. His work is a rarity in the typically very collaborative field of animation - personal, raw and truthful. His early "street" films - Coonskin, Hey Good Lookin', and my personal favorite of his works, Heavy Traffic, have more in common with pulsatingly individualistic slices of cinematic life like Scorsese's Mean Streets than anything Disney ever put out, and even when he did make cartoons for children (his brilliant fantasy epic Wizards and the hilarious Saturday morning cartoon Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, a collaboration with a pre-Ren and Stimpy John Kricfalusi, they still contained cracking wit and did not look down upon their young audience.

I will certainly be at the event next week, and what's more, it's a great excuse to post some YouTube clips!

The Heavy Traffic trailer.

The WWII sequence from American Pop, which marries footage of soldiers in battle with clips of swing dancers, a brilliantly set to Benny Goodman's "Sing Sing Sing."

The trailer for Fire and Ice, Bakshi's collaboration with cult artist Frank Frazetta - an unabashedly manly tale of warring barbarian clans.

"Mighty's Benefit Plan," one of the funniest episodes of Mighty Mouse: Thew New Adventures, lampooing "Alvin and the Chipmunks." The Dave Seville counterpart (here called Sandy Bottomfeeder) is an overbearing, exploiting, psychologically unsound megalomaniac, whose adopted pop-star sons Elwee and the Tree Weasles live in total fear of him - not unlike the parents of many child stars in the 80's. I recently bought this entire short-lived series from an online bootleg seller (I was too young to remember it ever being on TV in England) and there were many jokes like this that would've gone right over the kiddies' heads. Unfortunately, the show didn't last long after an Evangelical TV watchdog accused the titular rodent of sniffing cocaine (he actually smells a crushed-up flower given to him by his crush).

Give 'em hell, Heston

2008-04-07T23:38:00.000-07:00

I was greatly saddened to hear of Charlton Heston's passing - not just because he was a gifted actor whose work I greatly admired, but because he was truly part of a dying breed - he embodied the spirit of two-fisted, no-nonsense manliness that sadly seems to quickly fading away in today's Hollywood. While today's movie screens are populated by wind-swept hair-sporting underwear models like Matthew McConaghey, and goofy "big teenager" types like Will Ferrel and Adam Sandler, Heston, like Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen and John Wayne, came from a time when Men were Men with a capital M, and the bad guys better get the fuck out of his way. Whether he was leading the Jews to freedom in The Ten Commandments or battling hordes of the undead in The Omega Man, Heston did it all with muscle-bound, squared jawed gusto.

Personally, I'll remember Mr. Heston for three distinct roles: the first, of course, is Taylor in Planet of the Apes. With his rugged physique and hot temper, it's no surprise that his simian captors regarded him as a brainless neanderthal, but he's such a truly rugged guy, that you can't help but cheer when he snarls the now-legendary line "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" - not to mention getting a chill up your spine at the film's finale. The second is Mike Vargas in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, a film I actually prefer over Citizen Kane. Although the film gets a lot of flack for Heston's not entirely convincing portrayal of a Mexican-American detective, the character was originally written as white - it was Welles himself who changed the character's race to Hispanic. Heston was responsible for convincing the studios to allow Welles to take the director's chair in addition to playing the corrupt, racist cop Hank Quinlan, and also the one who managed to hang on to Welles' encyclopedic editing notes, which were used for the recent restoration of the film. Plus, if you ask me - he somehow made his character work.

The third role is as the titular melancholy, aging cowboy in the most underrated 1968 western Will Penny. In this picture, Heston gave one of the finest displays of sad and wounded humanity as a former cattle runner hired as a guard on a wealthy rancher's land, who decides to protect Joan Hackett's character and her young son even though they are squatting there illegally. This is the film and the performance you show to people who dismiss Heston as a ham - of course it also doesn't hurt that the movie features Donald Pleasance as a renegade preacher so utterly diabolical and completely bugshit he makes Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell from Night of the Hunter look like a big kitten.

Heston gave many other great and memorable performances too - the soul-saving, chariot-racing ex-slave of Ben-Hur, the empathetic yet two-fisted hero Detective Thorn of Soylent Green (the third chapter of Heston's unofficial end-of-the-world trilogy, along with Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man) the depressive, cigar-chomping emotional train wreck of Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee, the noble Spanish conquistador in El Cid - hell, the guy was even fun to watch in the mediocre fluff he sometimes appeared in, like The Greatest Show on Earth and Alaska.

It's hard to discuss Heston without discussing the guy's politics - I've always been a proponent of seperating the man from the artist, but in his case, I don't even think that's necessary. Despite his often being labeled as a conservative boogeyman, Heston routinely stood up for causes on both sides of the political fence. During the Civil Rights movement he marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, and even picketed one of his own premieres in Oklahoma upon discovering that the audience would be segregated. He also opposed the Vietnam War, and while I may not necessarily agree with his views on gun legislation and other Republican causes, I respect the fact that Heston stood up for what he believed in - if you ask me, activism on either side of the issue is better than ambivalence. Heston stood up to the arguably right-headed yet often sheeplike liberal majority of Hollywood with the same square-jawed stones with which he stood to Pharaoh Rameses and Dr. Zaius. If anything, Michael Moore's treatment of the man in Bowling for Columbine - in which the documentarian barged into the actor's house, demanding he apologize for the death of a young school shooting victim - completely backfired, making Moore appear the bigger asshole of the two, and a very confused-looking Heston the victim.

With Heston's passing, we've truly lost a legend, and I'm sure he's giving the egghead do-gooders in the next life a hell of a time. Farewell, Mr. Heston, you shall be missed.

Happy Birthday Quentin Tarantino! (and me.)

2008-03-27T11:44:00.000-07:00

Quentin Tarantino and I share the same birthday - and I think that is pretty cool. Coming to terms with the fact that I myself am a Quentin Tarantino Fan is something that took several years and a lot of introspection. As with being labeled a Star Wars Fan, there is a lot of "dork baggage" that comes with such a label, and people make assumptions about you based upon it, but utlimately, you've gotta go from the gut and like what you like. As Luis Guzman says in Boogie Nights, "wear what you dig," well, I think a similar philosophy applies to watching what you dig. And I dig Mr. Q.

There's no doubt that Tarantino ushered in the contemporary era of (supposedly) auteur-driven cinema, as well as inspiring a wealth of less-brilliant pictures featuring gangsters, guns, and clever dialogue. There's also no doubt that he borrows liberally from older films, but if you ask me, there is a lot more to his pictures than a movie dorkical parlor game of "spot the reference." Every obscure karate picture or unheard-of Italian giallo slasher that Tarantino name-drops is of personal significance, and in my opinion, the chief among the director's finest skills is his ability to mix the fantasy and artifice of cinema with the beautifully observed nuance of real life.

The opening scene in the diner in Reservoir Dogs is a beautiful example of this. Although the Maddonna speech has probably been quoted by nerds more frequently than the entire scripts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Star Wars, and The Big Lebowski combined, this still does not detract from its quality. Here are eight guys all duded up like Jean-Paul Belomondo, but they talk and act exactly like working-class guys. They aren't "going over the plan" one more time like criminals do in every single other heist picture you've ever seen - they're taking a well-earned break before their big day. They look like they stepped out of a French New Wave film, but they talk like a bunch of construction workers. What's more, the social status of each member of the group, how well they know or don't know each other, is perfectly established even before we're shown their flashback scenes.

Death Proof, Tarantino's second segment of Grindhouse, confused and put many off, including myself, after I first saw it. Watching it directly after Robert Rodriguez's pus-splattering zombie extravaganza Planet Terror it felt almost like a practical joke - forcing the audience to calm their asses down and try to focus on a chitchat-heavy stalker flick, for which most of the duration Kurt Russell's killer Stuntman Mike lurks in the background while groups of women banter back and forth about relationships, their favorite gearhead movies, and other assorted topics. It was only after watching the expanded version of the picture on DVD that I really wrapped my head around what a wonderful, personal, and even somewhat autobiographical film it is.

When Stuntman Mike rattles off his list of shows and movies he's worked on as a stuntman, only to be be faced with the blank stares of the local hipsters in the Texas Chili Parlor who have never heard of any of them - one can't help but imagine that Mr. Tarantino had many similar one-sided conversations about about obscure pop culture before he became a hot-shit movie director. And then there is the exchange between Eli Roth's character and his dweeby companion about getting the girls drunk on Jagermeister so that they can take advantage of them - a scene which seems like filler in terms of its relation to the plot, but thematically it is quite central to what Death Proof is all about. These two are meant to be regular, all-American joes - not sociopathic killers who get a chubby off of crashing into young women in a souped-up automobile - and yet their plotting and scheming comes off as almost as sinister. Tarantino seems to be suggesting, rather scary notion that it is, that there is a little tiny bit of Stuntman Mike inside every man.

I know many people who have beef with him as a taste-maker: people become interested in things like surf music and old grindhouse movies just because of him, and I think people feel a lot of bitterness, like he personally taking ownership for these things. I never saw him taking ownership so much as sharing the things he loves - and the guy really does love a lot of movies. He's clearly not limited in his love for 70's b-films, if you've ever heard him talk about Rio Bravo, the guy said he considered Howard Hawks a father figure through watching his movies, because he never had a real one. I read a wonderful New York Times article a while back in which he sings the praises of an obscure Roy Rogers vehicle, The Golden Stallion. The man's taste and knowledge is seemingly boundless (aside from Martin Scorsese and possibly Joe Dante, I can't think of any other director more film-smart), but coming from a background of being these wonderful, dear-hearted dorks you find all the time working in video stores, and eventually becoming a celebrated auteur, Tarantino has the unique distinction of knowing films first, and people second. True to form, once the geek's social skills start to live up to the magnitude of his artistic, entertainment and pop-cultural knowledge, he becomes unstoppable.

Jackie Brown, which Tarantino liberally adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, has long been my favorite of his films, and it's interesting to hear the director talk about that film retrospectively, as it seems he doesn't care for it as much as his original stories. I love the film for its Hawksian scenes of downtime and characters hanging out - there is a sense of loneliness and quiet desperation that seeps through every frame, and its heist plot is placed on the back burner in favor of character exploration. The nagging fear of growing old alone is very present in this film, probably more than Tarantino would like to admit, or maybe even more than he actually realizes. And personally, I've always found great artists entirely capable of creating art that was About Something (capital A, capital S) and not actually be aware of it; after all, John Ford insisted all throughout his life that his films were nothing more than solid western adventure yarns, and anyone who thought there was anything to try and read into them was a effeminate, latte-drinking, Frenchified pinko.

Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction are two films I find myself not revisiting as often as the aforementioned three, but despite them being the most prominent examples Tarantino's detractors hold up for reasons to knock him (he's an empty reference-chucker, he gets off on violence, he's just a big overgrown toddler who's seen two many grindhouse movies and needs to take a walk outside), I think there is still a great deal of introspection and depth here. In Pulp Fiction, the notion of the gangster hierarchy is dismantled beautifully. The biggest, baddest sons-of-bitches aren't the mob bosses on the top of the food chain, who, although they live a life of crime, they still live by a somewhat ethically slanted moral code - the real ones to look out for are the mouth-breathing rednecks, the itchy-trigger-fingered knuckleheads, and the young punks who think they're hot shit: these are the ones who are truly threatening, because they have no moral code whatsoever. Also, like reservoir dogs, it beautifully blends real-life minutia with tried and true genre trends. In Tarantino's universe, a Mexican standoff in a hotel room is moderately thrilling, but what's really exciting is how his two hitmen characters will manage to clean up their blood-stained car before their connection's wife gets home and sees the mess.

The operatic Kill Bill is a different animal. We first see Uma Thurman's Bride as a blank slate of scorned anger. We cheer her on slashes her way through Japanese Yakuza Land, Shaw Brothers Kung Fu Land, Spaghetti Western Land, and Gritty Rape-Revenge Flick Land, the same way Pee-Wee Herman is chased on his bike through the various sets on the Warner movie lot, uninhibited by our bloodlust, because we know that after each of the film's extras got their limbs chopped off and shed their respective bucketloads of fake blood, they got up back up again once the director yelled 'cut' and helped themselves to a donut from the caterer's table. But Tarantino turns us on a nickel at the end of his epic, when it is revealed to the Bride that her daughter is alive and living with the man she has sought to kill. Like Pinocchio's transformation into a real boy, she stops being a blank slate of scorned-woman badassery and becomes a flesh and blood being, a transformation so powerful that she utterly breaks apart.

So happy birthday Mr. Tarantino: for marrying the personal and the universal, the artificial and the incredibly real, for your generosity in sharing so many obscure and neglected older films and filmmakers, and just in general, for being a gateway drug and a starting point for many young filmmakers like myself. Many happy returns.

Arthur C. Clarke 1917 - 2008

2008-03-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

Here's some recent news that rather saddened me: Arthur C. Clarke, whom I will not need to tell lovers of science fiction was the author of the short story The Sentinal, and co-author with Stanley Kubrick of the film's adaptation, 2001: A Space Odyssey, passed away yesterday at age 90. I confess I have not read any of his printed works, but I consider 2001 to be the greatest and most spiritual film ever made. Since learning of his passing, I picked up a copy of his novel Childhood's End, at Barnes and Noble, after having read about the numerous unsuccessful attempts to film the tale.

I'm eternally greatful to Clarke for one of the greatest contributions to cinema. Even those who don't personally care for 2001, I think, can still admit that without that film, science fiction probably would never have been taken seriously as an art form. A true titan of the medium, he will be fondly remembered.

The Best of YouTube: Ormond & Pirkle

2008-03-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

Who're Ormond and Pirkle? Well, for those of you who aren't up on your dementedly wacky backwoods Godsploitation pictures, here's the skinny. Ron Ormond was an exploitation film director in the 50's and 60's, whose junky, low-budget schlockers had titles like The Mesa of Lost Women, Teenage Bride and The Monster and the Stripper. However, after a plane crash in the late 60's, Ormond became a born-again Christian, teaming up with the state of Mississippi's most batshit insane Baptist minister, Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, to do the Lord's work. Among those those lucky (or unlucky) enough to have seen them, the duo's fire-and-brimstone scare films are regarded as making Ed Wood's movies seem like David Lean epics in comparison.

From the 1977 short The Believers' Heaven. Rev. Ormond describes mankind's eternal reward ("bigger than New York City!") with the help of a terrifying singing midget. Does this excite you?!?

From the Ormond/Pirkle team's most well-known film, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, which proclaims that if America keeps on going with her sinful journey of premarital sex, dancing, skipping our on church, and other forms of debauchery, God will lift His protective shield, leaving our nation wide-open for an inevitable communist attack. Communists are experts at mind games, as evidenced in this clip, wherein this insidious fellow presuades a classroom of impressionable schoolkids into denying Jesus by tempting them with candy.

Here's another classic clip from If Footmen, in which another garden-variety mean bastard commie (notice how he switches back and forth from a Sesame Street's The Count Eastern European accent to a Foghorn Leghorn-esque Southern drawl) decapitates a plucky-cheeked tot when he refuses to step on a portrait of Jesus.

Another scene from The Burning Hell, in which Ormond and Pirkle sought, on a budget of what looks like about twenty-five dollars, to depict to the unsaved what the fiery inferno is really like. In the above clip, King Balthazar of Babylon is befuddled and surprised to find himself end up in Hell. As of yet, this film is the only Pirkle film available commercially, through the Reverend's estate: although the prices for renting a VHS or 16mm copy of the film (for congregational purposes only) is ridiculously high. It can also be seen in its entirety (for now, at least) on YouTube.

They killed Fritz!

2008-03-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

It finally came in the mail today: the brilliant new coffee table book Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi. This is really an amazing piece of collected history for any animation nerd. Co-authors Gibson and McDonnell (the latter of whom studied under Bakshi when he taught at New York's School of Visual Arts) have had full access to Bakshi's personal archives, from his doodles and sketches to the animation cels from his films to some of his (really, really weird) non-film related paintings. Best of all, the profits from this book (and from all the goodies in the online store of Mr. Bakshi's website, including original film cels if you happen to be a very wealthy animation nerd) will go towards the budget of his upcoming animated feature: a gritty, urban return-to-form entitled Last Days of Coney Island.

The dopest dope I ever smoked.

2008-02-19T22:57:00.000-08:00

Some important news:

First and foremost, I encourage everyone and anyone who reads this to go out and see Charlie Bartlett, which opens this Friday nationwide: a teen comedy directed by John Poll, the editor of the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents movies, starring Robert Downey Jr., Hope Davis and newcomer Anton Yelchin (who is going to play Pavel Chekov in J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek film). Poll is an alumni of my high school and I was fortunate enough to be invited to a screening of the movie there last year. It is a brilliant teen movie, worlds better than both Superbad and Juno (both of which I enjoyed,) about a well-meaning but clueless rich kid who is kicked out of private school and goes to public school, where he becomes a self-appointed psychiatrist to his peers and starts selling them meds. The picture mixes the quirk and pathos of Rushmore with the unpretentious emotional honesty of John Hughes' films. I got the biggest kick out of seeing this movie in an auditorium packed with 14-to-18-year-olds, and I really hope it finds and audience. It's a film that doesn't talk down to teenagers, but tells them it's okay to screw up, a long as you admit to your mistakes and take it upon yourself to put things right, which, if you ask me, is a great message. This movie is almost a Breakfast Club for the "if there's something wrong with 'em, feed 'em some ritalin" generation.

Also - I'm probably late to the party reporting about this, but the upcoming stoner adventure comedy Pineapple Express just shot up the top of my list of most anticipated films to see this summer. The film, written by Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow, involves a stoner and his dealer who witness a murder and must go on the run. It co-stars Rogen and James Franco, which is almost as good as a "Freaks and Geeks" reunion. Furthermore, the film's director is none other than David Gordon Green - yes, he of George Washington and All The Real Girls fame. Recently a red band trailer was leaked online, and most of the copies were promptly removed by Sony Pictures Entertainment's lawyers - but fortunately, they didn't detect the one below because the description is all in Russian. Be quick about watching it, though, because they're liable to take it down any day now.

In other news, Woody Allen has cast Larry David in an as-of-yet untitled project. 2009 should be a pretty cool year, if the universe does not implode from so much neurosis. Evan Rachel Wood, star of Thirteen and Across the Universe is also set to star as the director's latest blonde-headed lolita cherub.

Finally, if you'll begrudge my plugging of a family member's non-film-related artistic endeavors, my father Richard Criddle was interviewed recently for a Berkshire Fine Arts article about his recent exhibition of sculpture and drawings entitled It's Rude To Stare, which will be on display at Kidspace at MASS MoCA through February 24th. Great article which is a companion piece to a really spectacular show (and I'm not just saying that because he's my pop.)

Happy Valentine's Day...

2008-02-14T19:56:00.000-08:00

...courtesy of Dr. Criddle and the late great Tex Avery.

I can do anything, I'm the chief of police.

2008-02-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

The news of Roy Scheider's passing came as something of a shock to me, not just because he was an actor I greatly loved and admired, but also because I had no idea that the guy was 75 years old and had been suffering from staph infection. For me, he always seemed to be immortally 35-40 years old, a figurehead of 1970's American cinema, and the role I will probably always associate him with is that of Chief Martin Brody in Jaws.

Smart-alecky film critics typically accuse Jaws of being the hammer that drove the first nails into the coffin of the "Easy Riders & Raging Bulls" era, drawing audiences like the Pied Piper away from downbeat, gritty, and character driven fare, and towards bankable studio blockbusters. What they often overlook, however, is although Jaws has a straightforward monster-movie plot, its execution is pure 70's character study - and it is Scheider who is mostly responsible for this. Brody is a flesh-and-blood human being, filled simultaneously with verile toughness, guilt and new-guy insecurity. He wasn't a John Wayne or an Arnold Schwartzenegger, he looked and acted like your best friend's dad. Indeed, I consider Chief Brody one of the greatest father figures of the cinema alongside Atticus Finch: he's not a suphero, and he knows he doesn't have Matt Hooper's education or Quint's nail-chewing grit, but he has something to do, and he's going to go out and do it.

Scheider displayed equal amounts of depth throughout the 70's playing a variety of roles: a soul-broken ghost of a man at the end of his rope in the asshole of the world in William Friedkin's underrated Sorcerer, Dustin Hoffman's mysterious CIA agent brother in Marathon Man, and Popeye Doyle's slightly more grounded partner in The French Connection. A friend of mine had a pet theory that Jaws was actually an unofficial sequel to the aforementioned film, and that the reason Russo/Brody moved out to the supposedly quiet seaside resort of Amity Island was due to too many stressful years of palling around with a loose-cannon Gene Hackman.

Regrettably, I have not yet seen All That Jazz or Naked Lunch, but I plan on doing so, right after I return Sorcerer and The Seven-Ups to the video store. But 70's cinema is just as much indebted to Scheider, one of the greatest actors of that decade (and consequently, one of the best of any decade) as it is to Martin Scorsese or Francis Coppola. I'm sure he's battling great white sharks somewhere in the next world. Farewell, Mr. Scheider, we loved you and shall miss you.

Weekly Movie Poster #4

2008-01-29T09:17:00.000-08:00

The poster for Allen Barron's brilliant, forgotten late-period noir masterpiece, which Martin Scorsese claims is his favorite New York City movie. This is a film that has it all: striking cinematography, authentic Manhattan locales, terrific acting (well...), misanthropy, grit, and a thoroughly bad-ass second person voice-over narration by grizzled character actor Lionel Stander. Those who've never seen this film, and those who've had to rely on dubious bootlegs in order to see it will be pleased to know that the Criteron Collection is releasing it in April.

Dr. Criddle's Top 15 Films of the Year

2008-01-27T22:26:00.000-08:00

You heard me right. Not some wussified top 10, but a top 15. Why am I doing this, you may ask? Because it's my blog, and I make the rules. No, in all seriousness, 2007 was a fantastic year for cinema. Most years, where for the first eight months of the year, going to the theater is about as appealing a notion as smoking a cigarette in a wading pool filled with lighter fluid, then they cram all the worthwhile ones into December January for Oscar season. This year, as if eerily prophecizing that this year's Academy Awards ceremony will consist of Jon Stewart making jokes in an empty auditorium, it seemed like every other week this year, something was playing at the movies that I absolutely had to go rush out and see, and nine times out of ten, my expectations were exceeded. Truth be told, I could have crafted a pretty darned solid "best of" list in mid-October.... and this is coming from a guy who still somehow didn't manage to get out to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Margot at the Wedding, Into the Wild, Eastern Promises or Evan Almighty (yes, I am kidding about the last one.) Much the same way that Ellen Degeneres honored the nominees, rather than the winners, at last year's Oscars ceremony, it seem's that 2007 honored the summer releases, the animated cartoons, the shlockers and slashers (or at least those advertised as such) dumped out in March and April, and the plucky newcomers as well as the seasoned auteurs. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, here are the best films (in my humble opinion) of 2007.

1. No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Joel and Ethan Coen are back again, showing cinema's true believers like myself why we fell in love with their movies in the first place. Taking place in the wind-swept deserts of Texas, we have, in true Coen fashion, a whole lot of trouble and anguish occurring over "a little bit of money." Josh Brolin is simply fantastic as Lewellyn Moss, an unremarkable man flung into an uncanny situation, and Tommy Lee Jones is heartbreaking as an elderly sheriff who wants to be a John Wayne but knows in his heart that he doesn't have it in him. Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, of course, is destined to enter the pantheon of great cinematic villains, less a man than a pure, unstoppable harbinger of death. It's a genre deconstruction - I saw a lot of people walking out scratching their heads when the end credits rolled - but at the same time it's one of the finest examples of the thriller genre (with pinches of the western and film noir) ever created. If this movie had been made exactly the same, shot for shot, in 1980, which is when the story takes place - people would be referencing it when they say "they don't make 'em like they used to."

2. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)
2007 was a good year for habit-breaking in cinema.... and one of the most irritating habits of recent years is the emergence of the "Paint By Numbers" musician biopic. Unlike recent films which explain that Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Edith Piaf all basically lived exactly the same life, Todd Haynes portrait of Bob Dylan is a kalidescopic visual feast of truth, fiction, speculation and myth. In addition to the much-covered stunt casting of six actors of varying age, gender and race to play Mr. Zimmerman, Haynes switches seamlessly back and forth between the filmic styles of D.A. Pennebaker, Frederico Fellini, Sam Peckinpah, A Hard Day's Night and A&E's Biography. He's a smart storyteller who understands that not only is Dylan so mythical he's damn near close to being the Billy the Kid of the 20th century, but that there are so many different myths, and he's remembered for different things by different people .... he's like Billy the Kid, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed all rolled into one. Not only could one actor not do the man justice - neither could one "regular," linear movie.

3. Zodiac (David Fincher)
Calling Fincher's most recent venture a procedural is like saying Charles Foster Kane was somewhat ambitious. It's not a procedural, it's THE procedural. Like his protagonists, who feverishly obsess over what many may consider the boring nitty-gritty details -handwriting samples, fingerprints, codes, and ciphers - so does Fincher, whose careful anthropologist's hand we feel on every detail of the film, from the tasteless sideburns and big lapels to the washed-out, Doy Day Afternoon/All the President's Men-styled cinematography. The only difference is our protagonists (real-life newspapermen Robert Greysmith, Paul Avery, and Police Inspector David Toschi, played wonderfully by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo) will never be satisfied until they catch the Zodiac Killer (and if you know your history, you'll know they never do), but as the audience, we are more than completely happy to be taken along for the ride. And I know I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm damned if I'm ever going to be able to listen to Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" in my car ever again.

4. Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright)
Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and co. continue to show those Date Movie guys how parodies are done (and by the looks of their next film, Meet the Spartans, it seems they haven't learned a thing.) As if the concept of a no-holds-barred, adrenaline-fueled thrill-ride of a buddy cop action movie set in a picturesque little English village wasn't funny enough, Hot Fuzz also tips its hat to Agatha Christie and the tradition of the British rural mystery, treads much more delicately and hilariously on the subject of hetero man-love than Chuck and Larry could ever hope to, and is truer to the spirit of the original Wicker Man than that abominable Nicholas Cage remake. Dare I admit I actually liked this better than Shaun of the Dead? I'm not even sure I can believe it myself. I'll have to watch them both back to back and get back to you on that.

5. Ratatouille (Brad Bird)
Brad Bird continues to make magic, proving once again that he is the greatest living auteur of animation in these United States. When I call Ratatouille a feel-good movie, it's not to lump it in with twaddle like The Great Debaters, it's because I went to see it on a somewhat bummerific day, and walked out of the theater feeling like a million bucks. It's a rare breed of children's animated films that is devoid of ass jokes, Smash Mouth songs and pop culture references that are dated before they hit the screen, but instead respects the intelligence of its audience, trusting that kids will get the joke and invest in the story. It's a celebration not just of food, but of taste, and of artistic triumphs, with a great message for people of all ages: that with enough determination and faith in oneself, anyone can become a great artist. It's very rare that I say this about a movie I didn't personally grow up with, like Dumbo or Star Wars, but I can't wait to have kids so I can show Ratatouille to them one day.

6. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven)
Verhoeven's best film since Robocop is an audacious, bold, and utterly compelling masterpiece. Were it not for No Country For Old Men, I would be tempted to call this film the year's best genre decon- reconstruction. The storytelling of this picture, the twists and turns, the double-crosses and the cliffhanging suspense comes right out of the Michael Curtiz and Howard Hawks espionage movies of the 40's and 50's. But on the other hand, Verhoeven eschews simple notions of good and evil for a portrait of a much more complex and multi-faceted worldview - a rare thing in movies about the Nazis, especially "entertaining" ones. Also true to the Verhoeven form the movie is filled with the very best kind of T&A - the kind that is thought-provoking as well as titillating. You can keep your English Patients, your Cold Mountains and your Atonements - I like symbolically significant scenes of pubic hair painting in my sweeping war epics.

7. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
While I don't think P.T. Anderson's most recent opus is quite up to the standard of his last three films (which, to recap, are the "everyone seems to love it, yet it's still somehow underrated" Boogie Nights, the "so many jackasses claim it's overrated, that it's actually underrated" Magnolia, and the just plain criminally underrated Punch-Drunk Love), it is still a great film, and the fact that it has shot to the top of so many critics best-of-the-year lists gives me immense joy, if only for the fact that I think it's remarkable that such an odd, elusive, and "analytically angry" film can gain such widespread acceptance. Daniel Day-Lewis gives what is without a doubt in my mind the finest performance of the whole year as Daniel Plainview, bloodthirsty, brutal, and black-hearted American Capitalist. Equally impressive is Paul Dano, whose portrayal of skeevy false prophet Eli Sunday was one of the biggest surprises of the year, and I'd be tempted to call him the finest young actor of his generation. When I call this film Kubrickian it's not to accuse Anderson of imitation, but rather emulation: There Will Be Blood is as good at peering into the dark heart of the human soul as the films of the late, great Mr. K.

8. Paprika (Satoshi Kon)
Japanese anime maestro Satoshi Kon dives deep into the human subconscious here and invites us to go swimming with him in our own lucid dreams. Kon seems to cover it all in one beautiful, fluid, feverish 90 minutes: the similarities between dreams and cinema, limits and of technology and the dangers of its misuse, and the relentlessness of human beings to try and put a harness on the parts of their brain we have no control over. What if a device was created that allowed us to tape, play back, rewind and freeze frame our dreams? What if the misuse of such a device caused our dreams to spill over into reality, blurring the lines between the two? Kon is not so much seeking the answers to these, but using animation to beautifully illustrate the questions themselves. Whether you claim to love anime or to hate it, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

9. Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino)
Contrary to popular opinion, I felt that Grindhouse was a wonderful treat for audiences who went out to see it. Ultimately, though, both films are better viewed separately and on their own terms, and the best thing to come out the whole package was the extended version of Tarantino's Death Proof. The irony here is is that when I first saw Grindhouse, I really didn't care for Tarantino's film... I just found it way too jarring to try and readjust my brain to to pay attention to a dialogue-heavy automobile giallo after just having sat through Robert Rodriguez's deliriously nutty, bullets-and-pus zombie extravaganza Planet Terror. This may be exactly Tarantino's point: grindhouses and drive-ins of the 70's would often pair something like Erotic Nights of the Living Dead with a more meditative, yet still borderline-exploitive film like Two Lane Blacktop or Rolling Thunder, and while you might have enjoyed one more at the time, the other one might very well be the film that stuck with you years later. Even so, I still retain that the extended cut of Death Proof is as good as the film gets, giving us more on the psychology of Stuntman Mike (who is easily Kurt Russell's best creation since his heyday with John Carpenter), and presenting a fascinating study of male predatory nature in general. Part feminist statement, part action, part horror, but all cinema.

10. Bug (William Friedkin)
Cruel irony is up to his old tricks again. William Friedkin comes out with his best film since The Exorcist, and it is distributed by Lion's Gate Films, who put out a trailer that might as well have been cut by the same guy who made that joke trailer for The Shining, released it in the dog days of late spring with a handful of their other junky horror movies, and leave it to wither and die. It's sad, because Bug is a great film, a searing psychological horror that leaves it up to the audience to decide what to think. Are there tiny, microscopic bugs eating the protagonists' flesh, or are the protagonists just bat-shit insane? Ashley Judd earns my respect as the best actress of the year for her devastating performance as Agnes White, a desperately lonely, drug-abusing, grieving mother who gradually transforms into a paranoid lunatic. At its heart the film is not so much a scare flick about the titular creatures as it is a beautiful, demented love story: he's a former military human guinea pig looking to spill open his heart about surgically-implanted, radio-transmitting aphids, and she's so fragile beneath her tough exterior that she'll humor him to the point of starting to believe it herself, just as long as she can keep him by her side and not have to be alone. Whoever said love was easy?

11. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson)
Anderson's latest picks up, thematically, where The Royal Tenenbaums left off, as three estranged brothers take a "spiritual journey" across India. As well as being a heartfelt film on the notion of family, and a gentle social commentary, Darjeeling is also a crypic self-criticism on Anderon's part - a flipside of the coin to The Life Aquatic, which seemed like a bitter attack on his audiences and critics. One of the most common cases people make against Anderson is his obsession with contrived minutia, much like Jason Schwartzman's character, Jack is. In many ways, this is true, but dammit if that dark chocolate doesn't taste so good right after having sex with a strange woman to exactly the right song on your iPod. Of course, once the brothers are kicked off the train, and lose the help of their trip-planning assistant, their world opens up: as Anderson seems to be declaring that his is too. Despite the obviousness of the metaphor, it is truly a glorious moment when the brothers throw away their baggage - and Anderson seems to have done the same with his (not that his baggage really bothered me to begin with), making the ending of The Darjeeling Limited one of the year's most upbeat and uplifting.

12. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet)
God bless Sidney Lumet. The guy's a thousand years old and he still made a film that rocked me to my very core. Before the Devil Knows Your Dead is easily the bleakest film on this list. Whereas the Whitmans of The Darjeeling Limited find simultaneous happiness, coexistence and independence, the Hanson family in this film collapses into itself like a black hole when two brothers - sniveling wimp Hank (Ethan Hawke) and conniving rat-bastard Andy (Phillip Seymor Hoffman) get the brainy idea to rob a jewelery store owned by their parents. Things of course go wrong, resulting in one of the most screwed-up family dramas in recent memory. I don't think either Darjeeling or Devil is "wrong" in its presentation of familial relations - they merely have drastically different things to say about how how we respond to those who were always closest to us.

13. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Peronnaud)
What a splendid year 2007 was for animated movies! In addition to new offerings from Brad Bird and Satoshi Kon, last year welcomed comic book artist and first-time director Marjane Satrapi, whose autobiographical film, based off of her series of graphic novels, is a rare animated treat for adults. It's ironic that it took a cartoon to put a human face on a geographical region that the average American considers to be simply full of terrorists to get audiences in this country to actually sit up and pay attention. This is not a soapbox film, it is a story of human beings, gorgeously rendered in a unique style completely alien to that of Disney or Japanese anime. It's a treat for animation fans, but moreso a film that should be viewed by all Americans.

14. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton)
As a young filmmaker, Tim Burton was my idol throughout my early teens, although it ought to be said that in much of his work post-Ed Wood, any real meaning seemed to drown in the director's obsessions: lonely manchildren, goth fetishism, and faux-darkness masking a cutesified blandness. Seeing Sweeney Todd made me feel like I'm sure every longtime Red Sox fan felt when they won the World Series... having stuck by his side all along, going to see every one of his movies, Mr. Burton finally delivered. Sweeney Todd shows Burton at his most gleefully misanthropic since Batman Returns, as he meticulously constructs a monochromic vision of Victorion London and proceeds to paint it that especially bright shade of Hammer Horror blood red. I can't claim to have ever seen a stage version of musical before I bought my ticket, but as a longtime Tim Burton admirer, I wasn't let down.

15. Superbad (Greg Mottola)
Despite its screenplay containing an amount of curse words that rivals that of Goodfellas, this destined-to-be cult favorite is a sweetly innocent tale that lends god-like power to the virginal teenage penis. While detractors mocked the film's implausibilities - nerds can't just show up at a party and start talking to the babes, and cops never, ever act like that - I found that the beauty of the film was in what I call the "little moments." The way that they botch up their pick-up lines when talking to members of the opposite sex, and humiliate themselves due to an inability to hold their liquor - it reminds me so much of me and my friends when we were in high school that at times I had to look away from the screen with embarrassment. That's how good Superbad is. From its pulsing 70's funk soundtrack to its honesty about male dork-on-dork emotional attachment when there are no female to be had - Superbad is the real deal. I laughed, I cried, and I laughed some more - now really, what more can you ask?

Heath Ledger 1979 - 2007

2008-01-25T10:50:00.000-08:00

My younger sister, like many girls her age, had a crush on Heath Ledger in the late 90’s and early 2000s. As such, she would often play his movies on our living room TV, and I would make a bowl of microwave popcorn and sit down on the couch with her. Unlike Ryan Phillipe or Shane West or Ricky Martin, there was something I liked about this guy. He had a quality that elevated otherwise-disposable fluff like 10 Things I Hate About You, A Knight’s Tale, and The Four Feathers. He seemed like a guy I’d like to sit down and have a cheeseburger with. He was magnetic, charming, rugged and real.

As no doubt was the case for many filmgoers, the film that made me sit up and really take notice of Ledger’s talents – and realize that he was not merely an uncharacteristically earthy Tiger Beat stud, but one of the most truly brilliant actors working today – was Brokeback Mountain. Ledger was the heart and soul of that film, ceasing to be an actor playing a part and completely becoming Jack Twist – a doomed, sad grizzly bear of a man who keeps his cards close to his chest. Though mostly held up as being an allegedly important “gay” movie, - and had any other actor played the part, it would likely only have been just that – but thanks to Ledger, Brokeback is a universal story, a tragedy about lovers who are forced to hide their feelings due to social prejudices.

I was equally impressed with his recent work in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, in which he portrays a James Dean-esque Bob Dylan during his marital collapse just prior to the creation of Blood on the Tracks, and completely tickled pink by his new, terrifying-looking incarnation of the Joker in the trailer for the upcoming The Dark Knight. Upon first hearing of his death, my first feeling was disbelief, followed by sadness and a sense of universal unfairness. Heath Ledger was only seven years older than I am now. He will never get the chance to see his daughter grow up, nor will the world ever see him leave behind a decades-spanning legacy, during which he only continued to grow as an actor – as I’m sure he would have were he still with us. All we are left with is a handful of great performances, and the question of what could have been.

Usually when I write on this blog about the passing of someone in the motion picture business, I make a habit of saying “so and so will be fondly remembered” rather than “sorely missed,” because most of the time, I’ll be talking about someone like Ingmar Bergman who had a terrific run, lived to a ridiculously ripe old age, and left behind a cinematic legacy of staggering quality. Heath Ledger, on the other hand, will be sorely missed, as well as fondly remembered. He will be fondly remembered for the handful of roles he left behind, but we will miss seeing him on our movie screens, and we will miss his unique brand of emotional honesty he brought to each of his characters. We will miss knowing that if we went to see a movie he was in, we were in for something good, or at least interesting. Heath Ledger was 28, which is too fucking early to lose anyone, especially one of the finest actors in the world. He will be sorely missed.

The Best of YouTube: Black and White Cartoons

2008-01-18T22:03:00.000-08:00

Decided to start this as a regular feature, because as anybody who loves film and has a computer knows, there's a lot more to the revolutionary, world-changing universe of YouTube than amusing skateboarding accidents and teary-eyed monologues requesting that we leave Britney alone. This feature will showcase the best of what YouTube has to offer, from film clips to musical performances to assorted pop culture nonsense.

For this first edition, I thought I'd do an animation blog, because seeing Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's wonderful Persepolis last week. Wonderful film .... unlike any animated film to come from Disney or out of Japan, and more like the intimate, emotionally earnest, independent short film work of someone like Michael Sporn. It got me thinking about how beautiful hand-drawn animation can be when it's in black and white.... it's not something that's really been commonly done since the 30's and 40's, but there are some real classics of the genre. I thought I'd take this oppotunity to share some of them with you.

Porky in Wackyland (1938)

Directed by Bob Clampett, who was perhaps the greatest genius of the Looney Tunes in their "golden age," the 30's and 40's. Daliesque landscapes and all sorts of weirdness abounds when Porky travels through Wackyland in search of the last Do-Do (who would make his first of many appearances in this film.)

Swing You Sinners! (1930)

One of the most utterly out-there cartoons that the Fleischer Bros. company put out in the Pre-Code era. In this film, Betty Boop's frequent canine companion, Bimbo, is up to no good stealing chickens and running from the po-po. He gets his comeuppance, however, when he runs into a graveyard and is given an ultimatum by a bunch of ghosts, rubbery talking tombstones, and an anthropomorphic farmhouse. It's amazing to think that this kind of utterly surreal, whacked-out fare was quite normal for the Fleischers to have been churning out at this point, and that the only types of mind-altering substances they used to be able to imagine such things was the occasional martini after work.

Piano Tooners (1932)

The Van Beuren Studio was one of the many animation houses in the late 20's and early 30's that eventually had to call it quits because they were no match for the titanic, snowballing enterprise that Disney was fast becoming. Their animation was quite crude, but personally I think there is a lot of quirky charm in these films. This short features their characters Tom and Jerry - not the famous cat and mouse, but a human duo. They were the first Tom and Jerry, a mischivous couple of ragamuffins, and here they wreak havoc at a classical piano recital. Got to love that Valkyrie-esque pianist, she looks like a cartoon version of one of Russ Meyer's bosomy, Amazonian superwomen.

Astro Boy - TV Show Introduction (1963)

This noble-hearted robot boy was a hero to Japanese and American kids alike in the early 60's. Cartoon Network airs reruns of these on Adult Swim in the wee hours of the morning every once in a blue moon, and I wish they would more often. The jerky animation here makes "Speed Racer" look like a Pixar film, but the show is still very charming and very adorable.

The Ghost of Stephen Foster (1998)

Finally, here's the music video for one of my favorite Squirrel Nut Zippers songs, "The Ghost of Stephen Foster." The Zippers pay tribute here to the Fleischers with another spooky haunted house tale. There is even a little nod to Cab Calloway - who appeared in and did the music for several of the Betty Boop shorts - in the little live-action prologue featuring Johnny Mathis doing a crazy zoot-suited dance.

Eternal Gaze (2003)

Part 1

Part 2

Now here's something you see even less frequently these days than black and white cel animation - black and white CGI animation. Eternal Gaze is animator Sam Chen's tribute to the great Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, and it is an utterly lovely and moving short film. It's not often that I am really emotionally stirred by CGI animation outside of Pixar's films, but this short, which Chen produced, directed, and animated by himself over a period of several years, is just a wonder to behold and a true work of art.

I drink your milkshake!

2008-01-16T00:41:00.000-08:00

There is a defining moment in almost every film where you "get" the movie, and completely understand what it has to offer you as a viewer. Call it a small, cinematic epiphany. There were several mini-epiphanies in this year's films. In Ratatouille, it was the much-lauded sequence during which Anton Ego sits takes his first bite of the titular dish. In Hot Fuzz, it was Simon Pegg's bike-ride to work on his first day on the job, set to the Kinks "We Are The Village Green Preservation Society." In There Will Be Blood, the epiphany came at the very end, at the deliverance of the last line of the film, whereupon it cut to the white-on-black closing credits. It was then that it hit me, pardon the cliche, like a ton of bricks. "Holy shit..... it's a Stanley Kubrick movie!"

Of course, you can superficially compare any movie to any other movie, and since Paul Thomas Anderson has thus far elected to try different styles of filmmaking, rather than sticking to a consistent aesthetic like many of his contemporaries, each of his films is more often held up against movies directed by other people than movies directed by the man himself. Boogie Nights' constantly moving camera and wall-to-wall period-specific soundtrack echoed Martin Scorsese, and the mosaic-like plot structure of Magnolia seemed a direct nod to Robert Altman. There Will Be Blood is quite a great deal more subtle in the ways it echoes the great Kubrick's output, but it does indeed feel like a movie that he himself might have directed had he lived this long.... or at least would have greatly enjoyed if he had seen it.

The opening of the picture, with its weird, atonal score soundtrack, is incredibly reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey's "Dawn of Man" sequence. We see Daniel Day Lewis's Daniel Plainview in a silver mine shaft, hulked and neanderthal-like, relentlessly digging away at the rocks. He then inserts a stick of dynamite into the rocks, climbs out, but being unable to pull his toolkit up on his pulley rope, is almost blown to pieces. Returning back into the hole, he slips and falls painfully on his back, breaking his leg. He's in serious agony, but he has found gold. He later returns to the spot with a team of men, continuing to mine for gold, but finding instead something much more valuable - oil. When one of his crew is crushed to death in an accident, Plainview elects to raise the man's son as his own. This whole sequence is entirely free of dialogue.

Like A Clockwork Orange, this film seems to have been tailor-made for its lead actor, and watching it, one can imagine nobody else in the role. And like Alex, Daniel Plainview is utterly detestable in any "normal" sense - he is obsessed with success, yet the film is not judgmental or damning, but instead regards him with a genuine curiosity. This man is a Capitalist (capital C) in the very worst way (or best, depending on your point of view), but rather than preaching and punishing, we are drawn in, wanting more than anything to know what makes him tick. His desire for success is driven less by a lust for money than it is by pure competitiveness - Plainview wants nothing other than to be the best oilman in the business, even if it entails the death of the occasional worker, the rape of a landscape and a community, and the alienation of his young son. Even so, he his hardly the one-dimensional supervillain who profits from the sweat of others. Unwilling to ask any of his workers do do something he wouldn't do himself, he's a nuanced flesh-and-blood individual, equal shares scumbag and champion ideal of the American self-made entrepreneur.

Anderson also seems to have adopted Kubrick's patented distain for organized religion, and its influence on western society's perceived notions of morality, in the way he presents Paul Dano's budding minister, Eli Sunday. At first, he seems like a righteous chap, even someone to root for as a possible adversary for Plainview, but gradually, all the pretense is stripped away and he is slowly revealed to be every bit, if not more of a scumbag than Plainview himself. If Plainview is a snarling wolf, who sometimes dons a sheep's clothing to fool the rest of the flock, then Eli is a crafty fox, appealing to the townsfolk's fear of eternal damnation to further his own devices. Both men have black hearts, but only Plainview has the iron set of balls to give himself the upper hand.

In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, There Will Be Blood could have been a simple, instantly dated soapbox allegory about ruthless entrepreneurs and corrupt religious extremists, complete with a whole lot of "history repeats itself" allusions to the Iraq war. Anderson is interested in none of this, but instead with the nuances of character study and with the greater question of human nature. It's an unquestioningly bleak portrait of human nature, as many of Kubrick's films are. Now, I had roommate once who criticized Kubrick relentlessly because he felt he was a nihilist. I disagree. I've never found Kubrick's worldview to be nihilistic, but rather humanistic - it's just that he shows the human heart is capable of going to some very dark places. Sometimes his characters make it out of the dark to the light at the end of the tunnel (think of Frank in 2001 or Dr. Harford in Eyes Wide Shut) and sometimes they don't (like Jack Torrence in The Shining), but that's not nihilism, just simple truth.

Similarly, There Will Be Blood is tinged with black-heartedness, but Anderson shares Kubrick's gifts to evoke empathy in the absence of sympathy. Emotional disconnect between the characters, and a lack of way for the audience to "relate" to them (whatever the fuck that means), is used as a strength rather than a weakness. The scenes between Daniel and his adopted son, H.W., are utterly heartbreaking. He adopts the boy merely because he finds that in business dealings people find it easier to trust a family man. In my opinion, he does indeed love his child, he just has no idea how to express it, because love for him is something you do on the weekends and in your free time, when you aren't ruthlessly manipulating people for profit. He constantly hugs him and pats him on the head, and teaches him the finer points of swindling gullible saps, but there's no emotional connection. When H.W. is left deaf after being injured in an oil rig explosion, the already-wafer-thin parental ties are completely shattered.

It would be criminal to reveal the ending of the film, even though it is probably the most Kubrickian scene in the whole picture, especially the delivery of the last line. It isn't a nihilistic film, because nihilism suggests hopelessness, and that anyone with a shred of optimism in them is a complete fool. This isn't that kind of film. This is a film that allows us to see the blackness of men's hearts, maybe even the blackness of our own - and to come out of the experience a little better for it.

Weekly Movie Poster #3

2008-01-15T15:54:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know. They've hardly been "weekly" as of late, but I'll try to work on that. In any case, I hope you enjoy this French poster for Mudhoney, Russ Meyer's wonderful saga of booze, babes, and sadistic, evil, backwoods rednecks.

Happy New Year!

2007-12-31T09:43:00.001-08:00

Thank you, BleedingSkull.com.

Weekly Movie Poster #2

2007-12-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

This week's poster is from the brilliant 1954 gangster flick Black Tuesday, which I saw last year at Film Forum's "B-Noir" retrospective. The film boasts one of Edward G. Robinson's most badass, barking-mad gangster performances. Set for the most part as Robinson is holed up in a warehouse after busting out of the joint, the claustrophobic atmosphere of this picture is reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs. The cross-hatching in this poster illustration reminds me of Robert Crumb.

Top Five: Blue Christmas

2007-12-18T05:16:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that Christmas a bummer for some people. Maybe the Yuletide season opens the floodgates of memories of a less-than-wonderful childhood, maybe you're a college student far too swamped with finals to feel the least bit merry, or maybe it boils down to the simple fact that your heart is two sizes too small, but your general disposition disposition during the month of December makes Ebeneezer Scrooge look a blanket-clutching, St. Luke-spouting five-tear-old. If this is the case, it's a safe bet that watching anything starring James Stewart or a stop-motion animated elf who aspires to be a dentist is only going to make you feel worse. Instead, pour yourself an eggnog and enjoy some of these malice-filled holiday movies.

1. Blast of Silence (1961)

This film noir-meets-French New wave lost classic is available only from online bootleg dealers and the occasional eBay auction, and that's a shame, because not only is it perhaps THE great lost American noir masterpiece, it's also the ultimate bummeriffic Christmas movie. Writer-director Allen Barron stars as Frankie Bono, a misanthropic hitman, is sent back to his childhood home of New York City in late December for a killing job. But when his target, a mid-level mob boss, heads off on a few days' vacation with his family, Frankie has to wait around for him to return, with nothing to do but wander around the tinsel-laden Manhattan cityscape, bumping into people he wished he'd never see again, and be painfully forced to remember his miserable childhood. It's one of the most fantastically shot films ever made, with on-location Manhattan cinematography, and hard-boiled second-person narration by Once Upon a Time in the West's Lionel Stander. Barron, unfortunatley, would only go on to direct one other feature that is even harder to see, and episodes of Charlie's Angels and Hawaii Five-Oh.

2. Gremlins (1984)
Critics often regard Phoebe Cates' grim Santa Claus anecdote as being out of place in this film, but in reality it's merely the holly leaf on top of Joe Dante's deliciously poisoned figgy pudding. It's a brilliantly biting satire of everything from the small-town sentimentality of Frank Capra's films to the commercialization of Christmas by bigwig corporations. It's a wry critique of Spielberg's "fantastic things taking place in the suburbs" subgenre, and a cautionary tale to parents who might think it's cute to bring home that puppy to their kid on Christmas morning, not taking into account that their child might not be up to the responsibility of taking care if that puppy, and will make the mistake of feeding it after midnight, causing the puppy to asexually reproduce a bunch of mean-spirited demonoids who will wreak havoc upon their lives.... metaphorically speaking. Plus, how can you not love a Christmas movie that has an old lady being flung out of a second-story window?

3. Batman Returns (1992)
The centerpiece of Tim Burton's unofficial "Christmas Trilogy" (beginning with Edward Scissorhands and ending, of course, with The Nightmare Before Christmas) is a strange animal, and probably the darkest film he ever made. Comic book fans and typical moviegoers must have scratched their heads, wondering why the Penguin they had come to know as a monacle-wearing, portly evil genius had been transformed into a perverted Quasimodo, why the Caped Crusader took something of a backseat to the exploits of the film's three villains, and most of all, why the hell a Christmas movie was being released in June. The film is certainly more Burton than Bob Kane, but that's exactly why I love it. The Penguin, abandoned on Christmas by unloving parents, almost makes you root for him in his devilish, King Herod-inspired plot to round up and slaughter all the first-born children of Gotham City.

4. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
It's been almost a year since the release of Stanley Kubrick's final masterpiece, and sadly, it still seems this film is misunderstood. For some reason, the PR campaigns of the film thought it would be a good idea to subtly infer that Kubrick was helming a record-breaking budgeted porn film starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and audiences were angered and confused when the final film turned out to be anything but. What it really is is a brilliant odyssey, earth-bound yet thematically on par with 2001 - and it just happens to be set around Christmas. While the kids are fast asleep, visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, the grownups are out angrily prowling in the night, getting in way over their heads with the wrong people and discovering things they never should, after finding out that there was one time their spouse came this close to cheating on them. Nicole Kidman's last line, delivered amongst the rows of teddy bears in FAO Schwartz, is the perfect end to this film.

5. Silent Night, Deadly Night
Admittedly, I have not seen this movie. But I plan to remedy that fact soon. Because any Christmas movie that features a scene like this, in my book, is pure solidified Yuletide gold.

Weekly Movie Poster #1

2007-12-07T16:15:00.001-08:00

Thought I would start something new on this blog which would be a weekly regular feature - the sharing of unique, beautiful or just plain snazzy movie advertisement art. This brilliant poster for Army of Darkness is, like many created by the Japanese to advertise western films, so very much cooler than its U.S. counterpart. Retitled Captain Supermarket in the East, it pays homage to Ash's humble day-job as a clerk in S-Mart's sporting goods section before he became one of Medieval England's most legendary kickers of undead heiney. It has a lovely, spastic Warholian quality and I love the touch of the soup cans bearing Bruce Campbell's name, not to mention the shopping bag with the chainsaw and boomstick poking out of the top. I'm really not sure why there are dolphins in the background, though.

Scariest Film Scenes, Part 2

2007-11-08T15:02:00.000-08:00

The second half of the list of film scenes which have made me want to sleep with the lights on will commence shortly. But first, an important piece of recently-discovered kickasserly: John "K" Kricfalusi, the genius behind Ren and Stimpy, has a blog. Entitled All Kinds of Stuff, it's a treasure trove of artistic and technical advice for aspiring animators, character sketches, personal rememberences of sources of inspiration, and many other goodies.

Alright, on to the rest of the list

1. Carrie (1976) - Carrie Comes Home
For those of us, like me, who saw this Brian De Palma classic decades after its release, the fact that Carrie uses telekenisis to anihillate everyone at her senior prom was considered common knowledge, like truth about Norman Bates' mother. But no-one ever told us about what happens after the fateful celebration, and what Carrie's mother does when she comes home. As one of the most chillingly insane female characters since Norma Desmond, Piper Laurie's Margaret White is the embodiment of religious fanaticism run amuck. Laurie reportedly thought her character was so over-the-top that the film had to be a comedy... that is, until she saw the final product.

2. Suspiria (1977) - Death By Seeing Eye Dog
Although much (justified) hoopla is made about the spectacular double-whammy death in this film's beginning, the one that sticks out to me as most memorable is the death of the blind piano teacher. Walking across a village square at night, he hears strange sounds around him, stops, and cries out "who's there?" Just as whe are expecting something to run up from out of the distance and get him, he is jumped by his German shepherd, who rips his throat out. I've had two shepherds in my life, and they were both wonderful creatures, neither of whom would've hurt a fly. So the numerous scenes in Italian horror films (there's a similar one in Fulci's The Beyond) where these animals, become posessed by some kind of evil spirit that turns them from amiable Rin Tin Tins into ravenous killing machines deeply freak me out on a personal level.

3. Alien (1979) - John Hurt Feels Unwell
It's been referenced to death, and parodied ad nauseum (most memorably as a Michigan J. Frog impersonator in Spaceballs), and yet the famed chest-burster scene in Ridley Scott's masterpiece has lost none of its power to make you want to hide behind the couch. The whole concept is a perfect metaphor for both women and men's subconscious fear of rape and impregnation by a malicious outsider. Hurt conveys this perfectly, as do the rest of the cast. During the filming, none of them knew that this was about to happen, so their reactions are completely genuine.

4. The Shining (1980) - Dog Suit Fellatio
I haven't read the Stephen King novel that this film was based on, so I don't know if the mysterious man in the dog suit (speaking of Spaceballs, he looks a little bit like Barf), and the tuxedo-wearing elderly gent he is is briefly seen blowing, have any kind of backstory or thematic significance in the book. But if you ask me, it doesn't matter. As a film, The Shining is one of the most horrifying examples of pure, snowballing terror ever created, which makes it hard to single out any one scene for this list - except for this one, one of the all-time great "WTF" moments in cinema. Poor Shelley Duvall's Wendy runs frantically around the Overlook Hotel on the brink of insanity, namely because her husband has tried to kill her with an ax, her son has retreated inside himself and will only allow her to speak to his imaginary friend "Tony," and they can't escape due to being snowed in. The last thing she needed on a day like that was to see the apparition of a man in a dog suit giving someone a blowjob. And yet, there it was.

5. American Werewolf in London (1981) - Demon Nazi Nightmare
Throughout most of John Landis's beloved werewolf film, the horrific events are infused with black comedy, making them simultenously scary and funny. All except this scene, a vivid nightmare that David Naughton experiences while in hospital. While enjoying a quiet evening back home, watching "The Muppets" with his family, his dad goes to answer the door, and his home is violently ransacked by demonic, pointy-toothed, humanoid monsters in SS uniforms. The sequence is so jarringly disturbing and we're so glad when it's over, and David wakes up, at which point Landis ingeniously delivers another "gotcha!" scare to freak the shit out of us.

6. The Evil Dead (1981) - Raped by a Tree
For horror movie fans, the First Kill (capital F, capital K) in a film is the one we relish like the first bite of a $15 steak. In the first of three brilliant films, Sam Rami seems to want to punish us for this bloodthirsty urge by subjecting his First Kill subject to one of the most just-plain-wrong sequences in horror film history. He sets up the character of Cheryl as doing all the wrong things. Upon hearing noises in her room, she does not rush back into the living room to join the others, but runs way out into the forest where they couldn't hear her if she screamed for help, demanding that whatever is tormenting her show itself. We can't wait to see what fate awaits her silly ass - until, that is, until she is forcably raped by none other than a tree. If she'd simply been impaled or decapitated, naturally, we would feel that she was justly punished for her bubbly stupidity. But tree-rape really seems like too much... and it brilliantly causes us to question whether we want to see these college kids gorily bumped off, or to triumph and survive their ordeal.

7. Poltergeist (1982) - Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Strangle Me
I hate dolls. And I hate clowns. So naturally, the clown doll that attacks the little boy in Poltergeist makes me want to run screaming from the room. It's just kind of a no-brainer.... if you want to make me cry with fear, have a kid get attacked by a clown doll. If only there'd been a chicken in a birdcage in this scene, Poltergeist would have been the scariest movie ever made. There are numerous disputes about who "really" directed this film - but if you ask me, it's the marriage of artistic sensibilities that makes it great. The supernatural events taking place in suburbia feels very Spielbergian, similar to Close Encounters and E.T. But scenes like this, and numerous others, are pure, visceral, horrific Hooper.

8. The Fly (1986) - Congratulations, It's a Maggot
Along with Alien, here's another great scene involving being impregnated by a sci-fi mutant (and subtextually, of course, it could be someone with an STD, an unwanted sexual assaultist, or any other number of things), although this time, in Cronenberg's hands, it's made a hell of a lot more overt. This film would probably make my top 20 list of films about relationships for the nuanced and realistic way it handles the interactions of a couple, one of whom is slowly transforming into a giant bug. Naturally, after finding out that she is pregnant with his baby, Veronica (Geena Davis) has one hell of a disturbing nightmare where she gives birth to a maggot the size of a baguette. The chaos that ensues, both biological (as Seth Brundle continues to transform) and psychological, only gets more devastating from there.

9. Exorcist III (1990) - Off With Her Head
Author William Peter Blatty took to the director's chair for the third entry of the famous devil posession saga, in what was originally planned to be an adaptation of his novel Legion, but, with the usual studio interference, a lot of footage cut out and a little bit more reshot, it became Exorcist III. It's a bit of a mess, but still a very good and underrated horror film, boasting a fine performance by George C. Scott and at least one scene that is more terrifying than anything in William Friedkin's 1973 original. A nurse is doing her rounds in a creepy mental institution. After being falsely boo-scared once, there is a lingering static shot during which she proceeds to go about her business, tidying up, fiddling with objects on her desk, then going to check on a patient. After a couple of seconds, she emerges from the room as if nothing happened, then, with a frantic "BWAAAAA" violin chord on the soundtrack, a white-robed figure runs up behind her with a gigantic pear of shears aimed at her neck, then the film cuts to a headless statue of the Virgin Mary. It's a beautifully orchestrated fright moment, that, if you ask me, should be studied extensively in film classes.

10. Mulholland Drive (2001) - The Man Behind the Winkie's
With the exception of The Silence of the Lambs, was hard pressed to think of many films from the 90's or the 2000's that truly terrified me - the previous decades have presented us with many great "deconstructions" of genres (Ginger Snaps, From Dusk 'Til Dawn, Shaun of the Dead), films that deliver gore without a real sense of suspense (the Saw series) and overrated twaddle that I really couldn't see the appeal of (The Ring, The Descent), but not many films that actually made me afraid. Then a friend reminded me about a brilliant scene early on in Mulholland Drive, where a gawky man calls his friend to a Winkie's restaurant to describe a nightmare to him: he is sitting in the diner when he realizes he is being watched by a face he hopes he "never [sees] outside of a dream." The two men then proceed to go take a look behind the restaurant dumpster, where they do indeed see the man in question: a dredlocked, deteriorating zombie of a man with eyes like Darth Maul. What's brilliant is how everything happens just as Dan describes it in his dream - you'd think that put a damper on the suspense, but it actually enhances it all the more. The makeup job on the mystery man's face doesn't disappoint either. In fact, it's so frightening when he finally appears, the audience hopes they never see his face again outside of a David Lynch movie.

Dr. Criddle's Scariest Film Scenes, Part One

2007-10-31T23:53:00.001-07:00

Okay, so Halloween's been over now for about a week. But you know what? I don't care. I'm still in the spirit. Not unlike the ungrateful kid who regards his piles of opened Christmas presents and asks "is that it?", I see no reason to confine the celebration of monsters, ghouls and goblins to the month of October. So I decided to make a list of what I think are the top twenty scariest film scenes of all time. Here's part Rather than try to order them in terms of scariness (these things are always objective, aren't they?) I thought I'd place them chronologically. Here's part one. Part two will follow soon after.

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) - Cesare Opens His Eyes
Conrad Veidt had one of the scariest faces ever captured on film, and it was never put to better use than in this German Expressionist classic. During a sideshow performance, the sinister Dr. Caligari commands his somnambulist slave, Cesare, to open his eyes and predict the fate of members of the audience. In one of the cinema's great close-ups, Cesare slo-o-owly flutters his eyelids to nearly a third of the way open, then thrusts them open without warning, locking the audience in a blood-chilling stare.

2. The Phantom of the Opera (1925) - The Phantom Unmasked
Although he told her she'd be better off resiting trying to get a glimpse of his face and trying to appreciate his "inner beauty," Mary Philbin's Christine just could not hold back from unmasking the mysterious and generous Phantom when he let his guard down while playing the organ. The result, if not one of the cinema's first "boo scares," is surely one of the few in silent film which still has the ability to put the fear of God up in an audience today. I had the good fortune of seeing this film on the big screen, with an audience of people who, unlike me, had not seen the film before on video and therefore knew about the scene in question. At the exact moment Christine rips off his mask, bearing the anguished face of Lon Chaney, I let out bloodcurdling scream. I doubt there was a dry pair of underpants in the room afterward.

3. Pinocchio (1940) - Lampwick Becomes a Jackass
Everyone, while growing up, it seems, was terrified of a scene in a Disney movie, and it's hardly surprising. Like the Grimm Brothers fairy tales that inspired many of them, these were stories of high stakes, genuine risk, and grotesque supernatural terrors; stories with real suspense and drama, not flatulent ogres. Many will cite Snow White's Wicked Queen, the death of Bambi's mother, or the alcohol-induced visions of Pink Elephants from Dumbo as the scariest scenes to come out of the mouse house, but for my money, Pinocchio was always their scariest film as well as their overall finest achievement. Most frightening of all is the scene in which Pinocchio's new friend Lampwick turns into a donkey right before his eyes, his hysterical cries turning into frantic hee-haws. Pinocchio then flees with Jiminy Cricket and finds out the secret of Pleasure Island; that hedonistic, anarchic young boys are transformed into donkeys by the sadistic Coachman and sold into hard labor.

4. Cat People (1942) - Jane Randolph Goes for a Swim
Producer Val Lewton was one of the cinema's great geniei of low-budget B-pictures. For most of his career, he was given lurid dreamt-up titles like "I Walked With a Zombie" and "The Body Snatcher" by his superiors at RKO studios, and then sent off with one his frequent directors to make a profitable, yet beautifully rich and artful films based on them. His masterpiece, for which he teamed up with frequent director Jacques Tourneur, is a parable of female jealousy-fueled animal transformation which brilliantly builds suspense around the titular monster (there's really only one Cat Person) but never explicitly showing it. In the film's finest scene, Simone Simon's perceived rival Jane Randolph takes a dip in a hotel swimming pool and is menaced by an unseen feline beast. She manages to calm herself down, convinced she just imagined it... until she gets out to dry herself off only to find her towel covered in clawmark-shaped holes!

5. Black Narcissus (1947) - Sister Ruth Does Her Makeup
Question: how can a nun putting on her lipstick be scary? Answer: in the hands of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, anything can be scary. This story of a group of nuns whose faith is severely tested by weather conditions and other freakish acts of nature around a mountaintop convent is one of the all-time great films. This scene, in particular, is utterly, pants-soilingly terrifying. It'd be a shame to ruin the movie, which was released in a lovely package from the Criteron Collection, so I encourage you to go check it out yourself. The film has some of the best use of Technicolor I've seen this side of Kwaidan and truly boasts one of the scariest, most emotionally intense endings ever.

6. Night of the Hunter (1955) - "Chilll-dren!"
This obscure delight of a film is the lone directorial effort by Charles Laughton, and boy do I ever wish he made more. I go back and forth as to whether this film, the original Wicker Man, or Kubrick's 2001 is my favorite film of all time. It's equal parts film noir, horror, and Grimm Brothers fairy tale, starring Robert Mitchum as an insane preacher who does the Lord's work by bumping off Bible Belt dwelling widows and stealing their money. Having found out about a large sum of stolen money from a death row inmate, he proceeds to get chummy and win the trust of the local yokels in the man's hometown, marry his widow, then murder her, and reveal his true nature as a wolf in sheep's clothing by turning on his two children, the only ones who know the secret of the hidden dough. In the film's scariest scene, Powell stands at the top of the stairs as the two "little lambs" hide cowering in the root celler. "Chillll-dren!" he gleefully croons. "Chillll-dren? I can hear you whisperin', children, so I know you're down there. I can feel myself gettin' awful mad." Reportedly, while casting this picture, Laughton described the character of Powell to Mitchum as "a diabolical shit," to which Mitchum replied, "Present!"

7. The Birds (1963) - Tippi Hedren Goes Upstairs
This film has a special place in my heart as the very first Hitchcock movie I ever saw, and, at the tender age of eleven, it scared the everloving bejeezus out of me, and I still give large groups of pigeons and crows a wide berth when I see them in the park. Among many things, Hitchcock used natural sound to a stunning effect, or in this particular scene, the lack thereof. Trapped in a house that is boarded up against the hoards of oncoming orinths, Hedren's character Marion goes upstairs to check out a noise she heard in the attic. In one of the cinema's greatest "don't go in there, bitch!" moments, the only sound we hear is the creeeaking of the stairs as she slowly ascends, and goes through the attic door, where she is promptly attacked by birds. In a rather revolutionary move, Hitchcock opted to have no musical score to speak of, only the ominous, layered fluttering of wings. It works wonders.

8. Repulsion (1965) - The Finale
And speaking of Hitchcock, if anyone deserved to inherit the crown of "Master of Suspense" from him, it would be Roman Polanski. His films explored the nature of fear both psychological and supernatrual, and Repulsion, his first English language feature, deals with both. Sexually repressed virgin Catherine Deneuve holes herself up in her sister's apartment, where she is plagued by fantasies of rape, rotting flesh, cracking walls, and arms protruding through the ceiling. This film is probably the scaries motion picture I've ever seen in my life - it grabs ahold of you and never lets go, making the viewer feel like he/she's going insane along with the main character.

9. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - Chicken in the Birdcage
Tobe Hooper's masterpiece is a roller-coaster ride of low-budget, backwoods horror, but there is one scene in particular that stands out to me because of its clever incorporation of one of my many phobias. Afteer Pan (Terri McGinn), runs into Leatherface's house, she comes careening into their living room, which is filled with human and animal bones, lamps and furniature made out of body parts, and a chicken in a birdcage. You see, I have a strange and irrational fear of chickens. Putting a big, fat white chicken in a cage intended for a much smaller parakeet or budgie just ups the ante that much, making an already-terrifying scene even worse.

10. Jaws (1975) - Quint Shares a Shark Story
Although there are numerous scary moments in this film achieved with severed heads, underwater POV shots, and an animatronic shark, the most blood-chilling scene is Quint's monologue, wherein he explains his dislike of sharks, due to the fact that he was a sailor on board the U.S.S. Indianapolis. His monologue (which was penned by John Milius) is so vivid, and so convincingly delivered by Robert Shaw, that we feel as if we've witnessed a film of the events in question as opposed to having just heard about them. Anyway... we delivered the bomb.

I Don't Want To Live My Life Again

2007-10-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

The following is a paper I wrote last year for Writing About The Humanities class. Since this was intended to be read by academics types and "horror laymen," I apologize if anything in here seems completely obvious and painfully spelled out to people who love the genre in general and Stephen King in particular. Sorry also for the weird and inconsistent paragraph spacing, I've not yet mastered the art of copying from Word documents and pasting into Blogger (any advice, anyone?) In any case, I hope you enjoy it.

I Don’t Want To Live My Life Again:
The Supernatural and the Real in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

What elevates the writing of Stephen King above that of any other popular horror author is not only his ability to conceive of things that are scary, but his understanding of fear as a psychological force. To our jaded contemporary eyes, the fantastic is often not all that frightening when we know it to be fantasy. We may quiver at the cold, stitched-up visage of Frankenstein’s monster, but we are comforted by the knowledge of his off-screen existence as the gentlemanly actor Boris Karloff. What makes a horror story truly frightening and truly great, whether it's in a novel or on the screen, are characters that we connect and relate to. Not only do they interact with the horrific in a way that we feel we ourselves might if faced with such a situation, but their psychological makeup is unraveled as the story unfolds. This makes our fear harder to dismiss, makes it harder to put the book down or turn off the TV, telling ourselves that it’s only a story. King created one horror’s greatest marriages of the real and the unreal with his 1983 novel Pet Sematary.

Shortly after his family moves to rural Maine, the novel's protagonist, university MD Louis Creed strikes up a friendship with his neighbor, a salt-of-the-earth old timer named Jud Crandall. In a friendship-extending gesture, Jud takes the family for a walk and shows them a little graveyard, built and maintained for children as a resting place for their dearly departed pets, many of whom were killed on the nearby road. (The misspelled title of the novel comes from the wooden sign painted by one of the children.) This greatly upsets Louis’s five-year-old daughter Ellie, who comes to the realization that her cat, Winston “Church” Churchill, will eventually die during her lifetime. This sparks an argument between Louis and his wife, Rachel, who believes Ellie is too young to grasp the concept of death.

Then, while Rachel, Ellie and one-and-a-half-year-old Gage are away during Thanksgiving, Church is run down by a car. Jud convinces Louis, rather than planting the cat's body in the backyard, to take him up the path beyond the Pet Sematary to a clearing in the woods that used to be a Micmac Indian burial ground. He then proceeds to explain the supernatural ability of the place to return the animals buried there to life. Sure enough, Church returns the next day, although he displays a noticeable sluggishness, a seeming loss of his agility and alertness, and a newfound enjoyment of leaving slaughtered birds on the front doorstep. However, when Louis’s family return, they assume his behavior is due to his being neutered several weeks before.

Much later, in a tragic coincidence, Gage is killed by a truck on the same stretch of road. The family is plagued with grief, with both Rachel and Ellie cast into near-catatonic states of depression, and Louis practically going mad with the knowledge that he has the power to bring his son back if he chooses to do so. Despite Jud's warnings (in the forties, one of the locals resurrected his boy, who was slain in WWII, and the young man came back as a malicious ghoul), Louis abruptly packs his wife and daughter off to his in-laws’, digs up his child and reburies him in the Micmac burial ground. Gage returns to life as a murderous, demonic imp, and in doing so destroys Louis's family and crushes what lingering sanity he has left, setting him on a downward spiral toward dementia and disaster.

The continued appeal of monsters due to their psychological subtext is a fascinating subject, and a powerful tool for the great storytellers of the horror genre. Dracula is seductive creature who represented a Victorian English fear of erotic, ethnic infiltration of impressionable Victorian women. Frankenstein's monster is one of fiction's great tragic figures, a misshapen orphan who is like the Elephant Man in his doomed quest for acceptance. The werewolf, like Mr. Hyde and the Incredible Hulk, is a manifestation of repressed anger that takes on the shape of a rampaging beast. Martian invaders of 1950’s movies were often thinly veiled examples of communist paranoia, and atom bomb-birthed behemoths like Godzilla spoke to the public’s fear that science could easily spell the end of the world. And yet zombies remain some of the most popular monsters of all, due to their ability to represent a multitude of subtexts. Zombies were once living beings like you and me; zombies are us. The films of George A. Romero were pointed allegories of race relations, consumerism, Vietnam and Watergate-era cynicism in the guise of blood-soaked, survivalist splatter fests. In Pet Sematary, however, the subtext is not social, but personal. Rather than representing the horror of America at war with itself, the reanimated Gage Creed is a personification of the darkness that lurks behind the happy exterior of intimate human relationships.

The notion of a baby zombie, which would ordinarily seem like an exercise in pushing the boundaries of good taste, becomes a serious moral dilemma for Louis Creed. King paints Louis as a loving husband and father, but one who plays his cards close to his chest, and quietly struggles alone. The stress of fatherhood is not something he ever talks about and very rarely even admits to himself, choosing instead to repress his darker emotions. He is also a doctor - therefore a rational man - and many of his inner monologues in the novel involve attempt to explain the abnormal in logical terms. After the specter of Victor Pascow, a student who died in his care, appears to him one night and leads him up to the Pet Sematary bearing a warning of doom, he dismisses the dried mud and twigs on his bare feet the next morning by reasoning that he must have sleepwalked while dreaming. Even after Church returns from the grave, Louis tells himself that he must have buried the cat alive while he was unconscious, not dead.

As someone in the profession of saving lives, he is all the more grieved that he was ineffective at saving the life of his own son. The ability to actually bring someone back from the dead represents a “final frontier” in the field of medicine, but, like Frankenstein's man-made creation, the result bears disastrous consequences. Although Dr. Creed is more multi-faceted and human than Dr. Frankenstein, Pet Sematary still sees fit to punish him, not only because he tampered with dark forces, but because he did not consider his son’s feelings about being resurrected from the dead.

The fact that Louis is a doctor also gives him a somewhat simplified view of his family life, and of people in general. I myself find that doctors often seem to look at their patients the way a mechanic looks at a car, as if a physical ailment is merely a problem that either can or cannot be solved. Though he loves his family, it seems at times that he wants to “cure” them when they go through personal problems. As Terry Heller explains, Louis is a man with conflicting morals (Love and Death). Although I do not necessarily agree with all of the Freudian and Oedipal baggage that Heller attributes to his character, I do agree that Louis is a mixed-up soul. There are times when he grows tired of his fatherly responsibility and misses his more carefree days as a pot-smoking, Ramones-listening med student. This is evidenced in his initial reluctance to get Church neutered, for fear of killing the "go-to-hell look" in the old rascal’s eyes. When Louis has the house to himself, he takes great pleasure in eating artery-clogging breakfast sandwiches, drinking the milk from the carton, and going to bed without brushing his teeth. He also fantasizes numerous times about becoming a medic at Disney World, a place which no doubt represents a kind of Never-Never Land that is free of adult problems and familial obligations. During the drive to Maine at the beginning of the book, he contemplates leaving his family in a restaurant and fleeing to Florida, and when the dream reoccurs later on, Gage rides with him in his Mickey Mouse-eared ambulance, but his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found.

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a favorite bedtime story of Ellie’s, is also alluded to several times. It’s a fantasy that is appealing to Louis because it’s one in which “[a] boy can freely cross impossible borders to the land of monsters, romp with them, and return home to find his supper ready for him” (Heller). The dark power of the Pet Sematary represents not only a forbidden land of monsters, but also a presumed “easy way” for Louis to make things right with his family, as opposed to the “hard way” of sitting down and talking about it. But, much like the Dark Side of the Force in one of our most popular modern-day myths, the quick and easy path rapidly turns a man with good, if misguided intentions into an agent of evil.

Louis’s transformation is gradual, because the “rules” of the supernatural force are not explained outright. The reader slowly begins to understand how the telepathic powers of the Pet Sematary as the characters themselves do. As it happens, the Micmac burial grounds became spiritually contaminated long ago, when victims of cannibalism were buried there. It became the habitat of the Wendigo, a monstrous evil spirit of Native American folklore. But, like the spirits of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, it is not omnipotent; it needs assistance from human beings to wreak havoc on the world. As Jud theorizes, the restlessness of the Wendigo occurs in cycles, like the phases of the moon. In the past, it resurrected various children’s pets that came back not too much worse for wear, but when finds a human with enough recklessness and grief, it latches onto them, causing said person to attempt to become its master, when they are really its slave. When a body is buried there, they return not as themselves, but as a vessel for the Wendigo’s spirit. Louis, Jud, Church, Gage and even Rachel become part of a deadly domino chain, pawns that the creature uses to its will. The actual goal of the creature remains unforetold, even at the conclusion of the book, which ends with one of the most chilling cliffhangers ever written.

Although the supernatural horror is one of dubious power and influence, its marriage with everyday, real-world horrors really makes a true work of genius. Death is such a horror: one of the few things that human beings, with all our knowledge and development, still have no control over. For the Creeds, it starts off innocently enough, with the death of a pet. It’s something that everyone who has owned one can relate to. Even though we know that the feline or canine lifespan is only a fraction of our own, and that they will die someday, it’s still unbearably sad when they do. Reportedly, the demise of Church was inspired by the death of Smucky, King’s daughter Naomi’s cat, and Ellie’s monologue (when Louis explains that God takes all the cats in the world up to Kitty Heaven at some point or another, she tearfully cries “But he’s my cat! Let God have his own cat!”) was transcribed word for word from a tantrum she threw after its burial (AllExperts). Smucky’s name is even referenced on one of the gravestones in the Pet Sematary: “Smucky the Cat. He was obedient.

Then, there is the death of Gage. Even though it happens all over the world, we still regard the death of a child as the worst atrocity that fate can allow. As a rule, fathers are not supposed to bury their sons. In a fair and just world, it should simply never be. For Louis, the violent death of his child, and the subsequent grief that beseeches his family, is a real-world horror greater than any supernatural one that can be brought about by the Pet Sematary. The best-case scenario, Louis reasons, would be that in his resurrected state, Gage would resemble a slightly mentally retarded child, and if so, of course he and his family would still love him. And whatever the worst-case scenario could be, Louis goes to sleep with his syringe on the bedside table, repeatedly telling himself he can handle it.

Another real-world horror is Zelda, Rachel’s older sister, who has been a skeleton in her closet since childhood. Zelda suffered from spinal meningitis, which withered her away to a shrieking, bed-ridden, bony monstrosity. Demanding constant care and attention, Zelda stunk up the bedroom she was confined to with the smell of death and disease, and became a manifestation of all that Rachel feared. “Oz the Gweat and Tewwible” from Frank L. Baum’s book was her favorite literary character, which is what Rachel began to see her as – a fairy tale monster, a real-live boogeyman, who existed in her home. Rachel secretly hoped that Zelda would die, and suffered not only from the guilt of feeling such a thing toward a member of her family, but also a fear that somehow Zelda knew what she was thinking. When their parents visited relatives during Passover, they left the two of them in the house alone, and Zelda finally did die from deliberately choking on her food. The trauma was so great that Rachel found it so hard to deal with death as natural occurrence well into adulthood. It’s why she gets so angry with Louis for allowing Jud Crandall to show Ellie the Pet Sematary, and why the grief over Gage’s death drives her nearly insane. When finally comes face-to-face the reborn Gage, she actually mistakes him at first for Zelda, returned from the grave to take revenge.

The image of young Gage, clad in his dirt-caked burial suit with a surgical scalpel in hand, about to pounce on his mother after killing Jud Crandall, is one of the most frightening in any of King’s books. But the true horror of Pet Sematary lies in the living, loving and caring human mind, and the choices it is doomed to make when faced with the supernatural. It is not a tale of the innocent being menaced by an evil force, it is one in which the hidden guilt, repressed emotions, and conflicting desires are brought into the light by the supernatural. The Wendigo spirit has the power to influence people, cause fatal accidents, and resurrect the slain, but it is Louis Creed who actually does the work that unleashes it from the confines of the Micmac burial ground, allowing it to destroy everything he holds dear. And perhaps the scariest thing about Pet Sematary is, in Louis’s place, don't you think you'd be tempted to do the same?

News and What Have You

2007-10-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

First things first: all-night werewolf movie marathon tomorrow night at the Two Boots Pioneer!, starting at 9:00. Be there, and keep off the moors.

James Lipton is a figure who never ceases to fascinate me. I find his interviews with actors endlessly interesting to watch, and I greatly admire how he gets actors to seriously examine their craft. On the other hand, I find his persona to be one of the skeeviest and most repellent I've ever seen, either broadcast on television or in person. When I'm watching Inside the Actor's Studio, it's as if I'm seeing Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr. or whoever it might be getting molested by the lovechild of Peter Lorre and Baron Harkonnen from Dune, but his doing so somehow makes them incredibly candid about their work ethic, the Hollywood system, and where they draw their inspiration from. Now, to add to the mystery, Lipton has revealed that he once worked as a pimp in Paris in his younger days. The guy just keeps getting stranger and stranger.

Life Imitates Art.... Robert S. McElvaine of the Op-Ed News examines how Bush's presidency eerily mirrors Gabriel Over the White House, an obscure, pro-fascism Walter Huston film from 1933, which was funded by William Randolph Hearst.

Additionally, here's an (old) article from the sometimes pretensious, but most often wonderful Bright Lights Film Journal, about The Bride of Frankenstein. Specifically, it's about how The Bride of Frankenstein is, no joke, one of the greatest pieces of subversive queer cinema ever filmed. I read this article for the first time some years ago, and it gave me a startling amount of insight into the subtextual nature of many genre films.

Halloween is fast approaching. Anyone got any particular favorites they like to pull out and watch this time of the year?

News of the Day

2007-10-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

In further proof that I am turning over a new leaf, I decided to change the name of this blog. When I first started writing here, I picked the name "Dr. Criddle's Homefront Film School" because I ended up taking a year off after I graduated from high school, so I could get a job and save up some money while I searched for an affordable college. Having known pretty much since elementary school that I wanted to study film, I used my year out as an opportunity to get ahold of the works of Ford, Renoir, Kurosawa and Fellini inter-library loan system, scour tag sales and video store going-out-of-business sales for B-movie goodies, and make trips to Williamstown's lovely Images Cinema a weekly habit. Now, I've been at college for almost a year and a half, so I think this title is a little outdated. I decided to change the name to one that speaks to my love of horror cinema, and my interest in the history of cinema which goes back to its roots in the silent era. I also deleted a handful of broken links from the right-hand column and added a whole mess of interesting new ones.

In addition to more regular updates, here's something else that will be a regular feature: Amazing Link of the Moment. The amazing link of this very right now moment is Found Item Clothing, a company which creates reproductions of shirts worn by characters in 80's and 90's movies. They've got The Dude's Japanese baseballer shirt from The Big Lebowski, one with the Elsinore Brewery logo from Strange Brew, and dozens of other designs from Real Genius, Tron, Caddyshack and The Monster Squad. Here's to hoping their next addition to their catalogue will be Jack Burton's samurai tank top from Big Trouble in Little China.

Movies About Trains

2007-10-16T16:01:00.001-07:00

I'm enormously sorry that I've pretty much abandoned this blog for the past few months. I don't really have a good excuse aside from sheer laziness, but I've decided to make updating a regular thing. I'll be reviewing movies, posting more news of cinematic goings-on, and peppering my corner of cyberspace with many more of my nonsensical ramblings to make up for lost time. To kick things off, I'd like to do a little Top Five list in honor of Wes Anderson's excellent most recent feature, The Darjeeling Limited, which in some ways may be the director's most personal film to date. The picture has all the mirth and pathos we've come to expect from Anderson, although the screenplay, which was co-written with real-life cousins Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, shines with an additional level of estranged familial melancholy. This being the first time Anderson has not collaborated with composer Mark Mothersbaugh, and instead "Tarantinoed" sountrack cues from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory (with several Kinks songs also used to wonderful effect), it seems to show that the filmmaker is moving in a new direction whilst remaining true to his roots. And additionally, it proves time and again, that for some reason, trains are goddamned fascinating. Why exactly is that? Perhaps a look back at some of the finest movies to feature these charming and old-fashioned, yet forceful and noble methods of transportation can shed some light on the subject.

The General (1927, Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton)

Keaton's most beloved film features the director as Civil War era engineer Johnnie Grey, who, as the intertitles state, "had two loves, his engine, and Annabelle." When the titular steam locomotive is stolen by Union troops, he sets out to retrieve it, unknowing that he will also end up rescuing the other love of his life too. Keaton's impeccable physical comedy is on full display, as well as his incredible stunt work; jumping on and off moving trains, riding on the cow-catcher, and dodging cannonballs without a stunt double or computer-generated pixel in sight.

The Lady Vanishes (1938, Alfred Hitchcock)

The Master of Suspense's straight-up funniest movie ever, and also, if you ask me, a superior film to the slightly overrated The 39 Steps. The confined setting of the passenger cars on a trans-European train makes for a terrific environment for the story, in which a sweet-natured old lady riding with Margaret Lockwood's character abruptly disappears, and no one onboard seems to have any reccolection of her ever being there. The suspense of the espionage plot is so masterfully balanced with the film's comedy (most notably hilarious are two English men who are preoccupied with getting back London to see a cricket match) that you'll laugh so hard you may well choke on your own fingernail bitings.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone)

The railroad, bringing with it the civilization of the Eastern states, and the end of the romantic time of lone heroes and outlaws, has played a great role in thousands of westerns. Its most memorable appearance in the genre, for my money, would have to be in Sergio Leone's masterpiece. Railroad baron Mr. Morton, a man corrupted both in body and conscience, is the proverbial "man behind the curtain" of Henry Fonda's sinister assasin Frank. Frank is hired by Morton to gun down anyone - be it men, women, or freckly-faced children - all in the name of a mad dream of traveling by rail to the Pacific Ocean. The western genre is filled with deplorable scumbags who'd gladly murder innocent people for a buck, but rarely have they ever been shown as quite so cowardly, nor as unstoppable (even in death, as the railroad will still be built) as Morton.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, Joseph Sargent)

As someone who lives in New York City and is utterly dependent on the subway system to get around every day, I'm often plagued by little, nagging anxieties about something happening when I'm rolling around underground that was worse than being stuck in the tunnel and being late for World Humanities class. This forgotten seventies classic, based on a novel by John Godey, envisioned a hostage situation on the 6 line perpetrated by criminal genius Robert Shaw. The amazing thing is, the novel and the subsequent film actually exposed a flaw in the New York MTA's security system, which was remedied shortly afterward. The hijackers also use colors as code names ("Mr. Blue," "Mr. Brown," etc) which would be employed many years later in another very popular heist film. But even regardless of these interesting factoids, the movie is terrific, with fine performances from Walter Matthau, Martin Balsam and Jerry Stiller, heart-pounding suspense, and crackling, brilliantly politically incorrect dialogue only to be found in a movie from the seventies.

Silver Streak (1976, Arthur Hiller)

One of the cinema's finest examples of pure, unadulterated fun. Misfit heroes Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor - a geeky white guy/wisecracking black guy teamup often imitated, but never equaled - are on a runaway train with bad guy Patrick Macgoohan. It borrows many elements from North By Northwest, such as the comically trivial Macguffin, and the mysterious blonde woman (Jill Clayburgh) who may or may not be who she claims to be, although at the risk of seeking a mob of classic film fanatics at my doorstep carrying rakes and torches, I'd have to admit I think Silver Streak is the superior film. I'm probably repeated myself singing the praises of the glorious seventies, but it seems that the decade was the last time that a sweetly effeminate doofus like Wilder could have been seen an action hero, before the era of Schwartzeneggers and Stallones set in. And although some may cite the likes of Rocky and Forrest Gump as examples of "feel-good" movies, for me they both pale in comparison to the spirit-lifting moment when Pryor puts one over on McGoohan by impersonating a train steward. As train-bound thrillers go (Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train and Xiaogang Feng's A World Without Thieves are other great examples) this is one of the best.

R.I.P. Ingmar Bergman

2007-07-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

A little about myself

2007-07-13T01:08:00.000-07:00

Andrew recently tagged me in the spreading-like-wildfire Eight Simple Things meme, the rules for which are as follows.

1. First, those tagged must explain the rules, as I am currently doing.

2. Secondly, share no more or less than eight facts about yourself.
3. Thirdedly, tag eight of your unsuspecting blogger friends, who are thereby contractually bound by law to do the same. If you do not comply, you will be fed to the crocodiles.

Anyhoo:

1) I share the same birthday (March 27th) as Nathan Fillion, Michael York, and Quentin Tarantino.

2) I made my first movie at the age of seven - a hand-drawn animation for a zoetrope of a man blowing up an enormous bubble gum bubble which popped all over his face. At the time, I had never actually chewed a piece of bubblegum in my life (it's not as easy to come by in England), I had only seen it in cartoons.

3) I met Meryl Streep at the opening to her husband Don Gummer's exhibition at MASS MoCA. She was very sweet and kind, despite probably having talked to the entire population of the Berkshires in a single evening. I, on the other hand, was a completely star-struck, shy doofus. Oh well.

4) There is a shot of Lizzie Straus's character pulling on her rubber gloves in Roads, the short film I made as my high school senior exhibition, which was a deliberate homage to Amelie. There was also a similar scene in my parodic sci-fi film Martian Invaders from Mars where Matthew Diamante's Leslie Neilsen-esque doctor pulls on his gloves before going to work on an alien autopsy. The unfortunate effect of this trend is that everyone who watches my movies now thinks I have some sort of sexual rubber glove fetish. Which, incidentally, I do not.

5) I have an embarrassing and unexplainable fear of aquariums, and more specifically, the big, ugly, scary-looking fish that lurk in them. I even have to tread carefully around the Ocean Creatures display at the New York Museum of Natural History, which is one of the many reasons I thought The Squid and the Whale was such a lovely, poignant little film.

6) As a child, I had a lisp so heavy it resembled a mixture of Hebrew and Klingon.

7) I'm not at all religious, just spiritual, but if there's anyone I think of as a "spiritual hero" it's Johnny Cash; a brilliant artist whose faith was inseparable from his work, but always presented in an unpretentious, honest, and never holier-than-thou manner. In fact, I think if the majority of the world's organized religious leaders "walked the walk," spiritually speaking, the way that Johnny did, the world would be in a helluva lot better shape.

8) Although primarily a filmmaker, I have been known to dabble in other artistic outlets, such as hip hop.

And for the passing of the torch, I tag Jules, Arran, Stacie, Kim, Phelpster, Tom, Paul and Wiley.

Five Films for the 4th

2007-07-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

Forget Will Smith and the great big alien mothership - here are four films which are better suited to grace your DVD player on Independence Day than any other day of the year. What sets a Great Movie About America apart from what are simply Great American Movies its its ability to pick apart our society and the myths and harsh realities associated with it, while simultaneously celebrating its spirit - a national identity which is admittedly like none other in the world.

Nashville (1975, dir. Robert Altman) - the first film which immediately sprang to my head while making this list, and for good reason. Altman presents the glittering Country-Western Captial of the World, over the course of a few hectic days, as a microcosm of America. Following the intersecting stories of some 20-odd protagonists, both superstars and nobodies, the film beautifully captures the chaotic spirit of an America which was doing its best to be cheerful on its bicentennial anniversary, following the assasination of JFK and the Vietnam War. As Henry Gibson's character Haven Hamilton earnestly croons during the opening credits, "we must be doing something right / to last 200 years." But what exactly that is, it's pretty hard to say.

Patton (1970, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner) - scripted by a then-unknown Francis Ford Coppola, this is one of the rare war movies that manages to appeal to the Sands of Iwo Jima fans as well as the Full Metal Jacket crowd. As played by George C. Scott, real-life WWII general George S. Patton Jr. was only marginally less crazy than Dr. Strangelove's Buck Turgedson; a brilliant military strategist for whom the existence of war was the only thing which kept him from being an aimless, Beckettian drifter. Whether you read this film as a right-wing Valentine's card to a historic legend, or an ironic meditation on the nature of war and warlike people, you can't help but be moved when Patton, joined by his dog, walks off towards the windmills at the film's finale - a modern day Don Quixote in a world that no longer needs him.

25th Hour (2002, dir. Spike Lee) - following September 11th, while the rest of the entertainment industry were hard at work editing shots of the Twin Towers out of the opening of "Friends" and ensuring that Escape from New York and Dino DeLaurentiis's King Kong remake were never shown on TV ever again, Spike Lee was making a film which not only acknowledged the absence of the World Trade Center, featuring prominant shots of Ground Zero, but presented the personal tragedy of one man as a microcosm of post-9/11 America. When drug dealer Monty (Edward Norton) is arrested and facing a seven-year jail term, all the great questions surrounding love, family, community and duty come crashing down on his head during his last 24 hours of freedom. Despite Lee's reputation as a "soapbox director," the political subtext of this story is handled with grace and subtlety, while still retaining its heartbreaking power.

Scarface (1983, dir. Brian De Palma) - the tagline of this decadent, bombastic three-hour crime epic sums up the whole thing perfectly: "He loved the American Dream. With a vengeance." Those who pooh-pooh this movie and claim it isn't as good as The Godfather are missing the point - this was never meant to be a film with the meditative, Shakespearean tragedyesque power of Coppola's trilogy - this is a movie of raw, sledgehammer-to-the-face power that bludgeons us over the head with the all-too-American mantra that sometimes, you want what the other guy's got. Pacino's Tony Montana is simply a man who sought to remedy that desire. It's not exactly a noble goal, but one can't help but admire his honesty about getting what he wants. And when it turns out, as it often does, that money doesn't buy him happiness, but results in his downfall, one not only thinks of the scores of Cagney and Bogart gangsters who fell swiftly from their place at "the top of the world," but also of Charles Foster Kane, dying alone in his mansion after alienating everyone he loves. It's about as American a film as one can get.

King Kong (1933, dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack) - as a foreigner to these shores myself, few things are able to tug at my heartstrings more than the stories of immigrants, from The Godfather Part II to Dirty Pretty Things - especially stories about those who just couldn't hack it in their newfound home. Although conceived by its creators as "nothing more than the greatest adventure picture ever made," King Kong is in many ways the ultimate immigrant story. Lured to these shores by the the blonde-haired beauty of Fay Wray, he is met with shock, curiosity, and freakish awe when he arrives in New York - a place which has long been viewed as America's cultural capital by the rest of the world. Brought here against his will, with no way to return to his home, he eventually meets his death on top of th Empire State Building. Like Karloff's portrayal of Frankenstein's creation, Kong is a monster who inspires more sympathy than fright. Like the song goes, "if I can make it there, I'm gonna make it anywhere" - something which is just as true of America as just of the Big Apple - and Kong, the King of Skull Island, sadly could not.

Where's my list? My idiot sheet...

2007-06-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

Much hoopla has been made to the AFI's recent re-polling of the top 100 American films of all time. There were a few brand new selections, a few that lost their place, one or two surprises both pleasing and disappointing - it was nice to see Sullivan's Travels and Toy Story get recognized, and sad to see The Manchurian Candidate and Rebel Without a Cause lose their spots. The most head-scratching entry at #89 was The Sixth Sense - I could name probably a dozen movies from 1999 that are infinately better, with Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut being merely the tip of the iceberg. But for the most part, this list pretty much what you'd expect - boring, bland, and very, very safe. Because really, is anyone going to debate the greatness, or rather, the cultural significance of Citizen Kane and The Godfather? Are there any human beings left on the planet who haven't seen E.T., The Wizard of Oz and It's A Wonderful Life? Even the most cinematically illiterate person has heard of Casablanca and it's reputation as an undisputed classic.

Something that Andrew pointed out, which I wasn't wasn't aware of, was that the films are actually selected from another list of a mere 400 popuar, successful and "classic" films, which is the reason why the list is even blander than both the list of Best Picture Oscar winners since 1928 and even the IMDb's abominable Top 250. Hence, we have a list that is ultimately predictable, as well as characteristically devoid of any foreign films (except for cheating here and there with Lawrence of Arabia and A Clockwork Orange), but more importantly doesn't matter a tick. Are Blade Runner, Nashville and The General any more masterpieces now than they were in 1998? Are Fantasia, Fargo and Stagecoach any less? Of course not. Nuts to the AFI Top 100. Make your own instead.

The Force will be with you. Always.

2007-05-27T22:20:00.001-07:00

The 30th anniversary of George Lucas' beloved space opera is upon us, and it seems like the blogosphere is reeling with thoughts, memories, and reflections on what it is that makes these movies so special. Star Wars has, and will always have, a special place in my heart as the movies that transformed me into a full-blown movie lover, taught me what a film director was, and most importantly, inspired me to make movies myself. Despite all the critical revisionism that the film "killed" the American era of gritty, realistic and self-reflective cinema in the 70's, despite Lucas's transformation into a portly, CGI-obsessed, one-man marketing machine who just can't seem to stop tinkering with his universe, and despite just how damn uncool it might be to be labeled as such - I am, and will always be, an undying Star Wars fan. That's just how it is. I traveled to the galaxy far, far away as a child and never came back.

My first experience with Lucas' space opera was at the age of nine, when the trilogy was re-released in their "Special Edition" forms. My dad told me he would love to take my sister and I to see them, and to tell the truth, I really wasn't that enthusiastic. I had seen reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV here and there, and thought it would be pretty much the same thing - a lot of tedious chitchat from guys in pyjamas on board a spaceship. (That's no disrespect to Star Trek, which I also love - but it's much more of a cereberal, adult-oriented universe.) Of course, my dad set me right. He hauled my ass down to the now long-since-gone North Adams Cinemas, bought me a tub of popcorn, and insisted that I would love what I was about to see. And of course, he was right. From the moment I heard John Williams' blaring score for the first time, I was hooked. The awe-inspiring sight of Princess Leia's Rebel Blockade Runner soaring over my head, followed closely behind my the seemingly neverending Star Destroyer, filled me to the brim with a feeling of "holy shit, we're not in Kansas anymore." And from then on, there was no going back.

I saw both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (which, at the time, was my undisputed favorite) in theaters as well. I was awed at the Battle of Hoth, shocked at Vader's revelation to Luke at Cloud City, creeped out by the Emperor and Jabba the Hutt, and fascinated and moved by the spiritual implications of the Force. I collected the action figures, read the "Expanded Universe" novels, and scoured newstands for magazines related to George Lucas. I was already vaguely aware that it was someone's job to be in charge of making a movie happen, and such people were called "directors".... if memory serves, I first became aware of this when I saw Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in a London theater, preceeded by his short film Vincent.... but when I began to read up on and learn about how George Lucas went back and tweaked his vision, and his philosophy that a work of art could evolve over time, I was truly impressed. Who, it seemed, had it better than him? To a nine-year-old boy, it seemed like he had the greatest job on earth.

I recieved Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, the companion book to the Smithsonian Museum's exhibition of the films' props and costumes, as a Christmas present, and reading it was my first step into understanding the connections between the films and the "Hero's Journey" as it was explained by Joseph Campbell. Luke Skywalker was St. George, Jason of the Argonauts, Oedipus and Odysseus all rolled into one, and the films were the culmination of all human stories told since long before the first written word. Not only, it seemed, was Star Wars "cool" to me personally on a purely entertaining level, but they had meaning. They had weight. They were important. Their appeal, to myself and others, had something to say about us as human beings.

When I was in middle school, I saw The Phantom Menace on opening day with a crowdful of plastic lightsaber wielding dorks, and I will tell you right here and now that I loved it - Gungans and all. Three years later, I saw Attack of the Clones as a high school freshman, and while I found it uneven, the joyousy mad nerd-roar the audience let out when Yoda lit up his saber and let loose on Christopher Lee was completely magic. But even so, as the best-loved things of childhood often do, my adoration for Star Wars started to wane a little bit during adolescence. I became friends and eventually roommates with another film fanatic who introduced me to the work of Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Ingmar Bergman and Francis Ford Coppola - "deep" filmmakers who, as he delighted to phrase it, had "something to say." It seemed that Lucas' galaxy of spaceships, lightsabers, droids, Wookiees, and good and evil was at odds with with these films. I began to regard Star Wars as - dare I say it? - somewhat childish, something I was done with. Like a relationship which had grown cold, I still felt affectionate towards it, but the flames of passion had died. Certainly Lucas' marketing of the films, and his "if you don't like it, screw you" attitude towards tinkering with his universe helped this. After all, the from a marketing perspective, all my treasured experience of seeing the movies for the first time had been was a cleverly-executed marketing scheme to sell the trilogy to a new generation. Much like the hoardes of stuffed Mickey Mouses in the Disney Store can make you forget how powerful Fantasia and Pinocchio are, the Disneyland-like fascade of Lucas's galactic empire began to seem superficial. And it was with this attitude that I went to see Revenge of the Sith, long after most of my friends had seen it, in a dreary theater with only eight or nine people in attendance. I wasn't the enthusiastic kid for whom waiting in line for The Empire Strikes Back's Special Edition was equal to ten birthdays and Christmases. It was a purely obligatory gesture. I went in with the intention of bidding farewell to my childhood.

And yet, while watching that film, I transformed inside. No - transformed is the wrong word - I rediscovered myself. Despite the occasional phony-looking CGI shot and clunky line of dialogue (the film isn't perfect, I still retain that none of the prequels are) I found myself being reminded why I loved Star Wars in the first place. Seeing Anakin Skywalker fall from grace and become Darth Vader, but knowing that he would eventually be redeemed by his son - and being reminded of that fact when Uncle Owen held his infant nephew Luke up to Tattooine's binary sunset - released something within me that made me realize why this universe had won me over to begin with. It isn't a childish appeal, it's a human appeal. At the heart of the entire saga is the story of the war within oneself, the conflict between the dark and the light. It's something we struggle with every day, merely enhanced with laser guns, space dogfights, a pinch of Homer and a smidgen of Shakespearean drama.

Of course, after that screening I gained a better understanding of both the films and myself. Star Wars was not at odds with my roommate's "something to say" auteurs, it complemented their work effortlessly, and vice versa. After pretending like they weren't all that for a number of years, my adoration came full circle and I was right back where I started. I remembered, and continue to remember, how great the films are and how truly importand they are to me. I'm endlessly thankful to George Lucas' imagination and genius, and for his six-part gift to the whole world, which played an undeniable part in making me who I am today.

Happy 30th, and may the Force be with you.

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers

2007-05-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

Check this out. This is awesome.

Happy Mother's Day

2007-05-13T09:47:00.000-07:00