The Tao of Cash

I've been reading Sogyal Rinpoche's THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING and almost had a heart attack when I read Rinpoche's response to a student who said (referring to the idea of impermanence and being in the moment) "All this seems obvious, tell me something new."

Rinpoche replies " Have you actually realized the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment I am dying and that everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence becomes so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the purpose of enlightenment? If you can answer yes to both of these then you have really understood impermanence." (p. 27)

Dude! I totally understood that... once. But what about cinema? Is there a film that brings this urgency to light, strips away our petty samsara blindness and makes us feel and embrace impermanence as opposed to the endless "gimme more bling" parade of gangstas, dorks and superheros who all firmly deny death?

I can only think of one film, and it's rather short. That's right.... the video for Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt."



Even the staunchest republican can feel what Sogyal Rinpoche means by "understanding impermanence" in Cash's wavering voice and in the haunting imagery from director Mike Romaneck. It's the sort of real bravery that reduces phony Hallmark hand wringing to dust in the wind, then follows it.

Depp to Play Mad Hatter in 3-D Alice?

When I learned, via GreenCine Daily, that Johnny Depp might be playing the part of the Mad Hatter in a Tim Burton 3-D version of Alice in Wonderland (financed by the Disney Corp.) my first thought was - Why? Hadn’t Depp already played that part - or a visual simulacrum of it - in Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (above)? On second thought - Why not? If Depp could play Captain Jack in three Pirates films, why not revive his Willy Wonka characterization in the surreal context of a Lewis Carroll adaptation?

In any event, I look forward to seeing Burton express his distinctive sense of visual design in 3-D. I also heard he’s going to cast an 18-year-old Australian actress, Mia Wasikowska, in the part of little Alice - which might sound strange - but not as strange as watching a 25-year-old Kate Beckinsale playing Alice Through the Looking Glass in a 1998 U.K. TV version.

Like Wildroot Cream Oil, it makes your hair stand on end!

Between this heavy stuff floating around about NASA guy Edgar Mitchell and now today, Clark C. McClelland. (No link, because of weird interference, but google his name and take your chances) I've got aliens on the brain! As Bela Lugosi once put it in GLEN OR GLENDA: "Beware... take... care."

Why is this all coming out now? Is today really the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing? Is it all because of the approach of 2012, and the ensuing intra-deimensional rift? Is it just more governmental disinformation with little dabs of truth in for the gradual "accllimation?"

The answer as always lies in CINEMA! We can see it in PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and all the other films that unconsciously illustrate a key concept in human behavior - the "you can't handle the truth" complex.

In my Acidemic article on the Spielberg War of the Worlds remake and "Inherited Immaturity" you can glean my slippery slope of reasoning why the truth is hidden (to those who would not see, etc.:

"in the face of an alien presence they (Dreyfus's Roy and other hysterical witnesses like him) are unable to keep it together, unable to remain calm and act the role of the father. Instead, they act like children and go running around waving their hands and whooping and hollering. In Lacanian terminology, they have abandoned their stake as the absolute signifier; the "keeper of the law," or "He Who Pretends to Know." Though biological fathers, they have not accepted the social castration that must come before one can embody the Father signifier.


"In Close Encounters there still is such a signifier, Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut)... No one in the inner group surrounding Claude Lacombe stammers and yelps and runs bug-eyed around the room at the thought of what they are dealing with. They have no idea what they're doing, but they assume an air of professional resolve and easygoing certainty and authority; they're just folks doing their job like comsumate professionals, lost in the zen-like active contemplation of their individual assignments. "

Watch these films with an open eye and ear. Learn to believe in fiction as possible truth and vice versa; learn to truly believe in things you find unbelievable, no matter what they are. Be a smooth Truffaut rather than a hysterical Dreyfuss. Try to "pretend to know" while maintaining a surface level nonchalance and certainty, and the men in black will come to you and explain everything while you sleep. You will begin not just to read Rinpoche and go, "Sure..Nothing is real" but to feel it and be freed by it... all it will cost is your soul!

It's only when you can move past that outmoded set of opposites - truth or illusion; fact or fiction-- that you can be free enough to begin to wrap your frightened head around the concept of believing "fully" in aliens, or even the baby Jesus! Accept him now! Or better yet, go netflix THE MIST or John Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS! Haha! Don't fight the freedom that your sheepish brethren dismiss as "insanity." Fiction precedes fact. The force was never with you, Luke. you were adopted!

Now it can be told: The mysterious sighting of LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT

If you're at all a horror film fan you need to know about this amazing story: the missing nitrate of LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT has been found. This long lost 1927 film stars Lon Chaney and is directed by Todd Browning. This is to horror and monster fans what the Shroud of Turin is to Christianity.

I'm big on UFO sightings and extra-dimensional perception too, as evinced by recent Acidemic blogs, so I'm taking my belief with a grain of salt as always (I neither believe nor disbelieve anything, Watson!)... but damn, iiregardless of our beliefs and suspicions, we all need to petition and fight the ignorance especially as regards LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT - also known as THE HYPNOTIST. Maybe we should just petition Warner to release THE HYPNOTIST, which is how it's labeled in the vaults according to our friend linked above? Mmmmaybe

Also, the time is upon us for full govt. diisclose the secrets of Operation Blue Book... but just let that simmer in your unconscious reptilian depths for now. For now, concentrate on the cinema. When sending out your crackpost missives, make Free the LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT AKA THE HYPNOTIST NITRATE your top directive!

3 Westerns I Watched This Weekend

GOOD - Western Union (Fritz Lang 1941)

This is one of Lang’s first color films. He shot it in Arizona's Painted Desert with special attention to the natural scenery, and the three-strip Technicolor cinematography is quite beautiful to look at it, even today. It must have bowled over audiences in 1941.

The surprising thing about this film is how comparatively unLangian it is. For the first two-thirds of the picture, we get almost none of Lang’s characteristic Germanic fatalism. Instead, we get an optimistic celebration of America’s westward expansion, in this case, by means of the telegraph line. (With regard to filmic celebrations of westward expansion, Ford’s The Iron Horse would be an obvious predecessor. A later example would be How the West Was Won.) Not that Lang hadn’t trod similar ground before. His Woman in the Moon (1929) is also about the exploration of a New Frontier - but with studio sets instead of Western Union’s location shooting - and both that film and this one feature a romantic triangle. (In Western Union, Randolph Scott and Robert Young compete for the hand of Virginia Gilmour, the boss’s sister.)

Lang, who was always attracted to myths and legends, saw the American West as a kind of noble myth. Finally, after an hour of romance and very unLangian light comedy, things turn darker, visually and thematically. Native Americans attack – seen by Lang as agents of chaos, the ultimate horror in Lang’s world – and someone must make a sacrifice (again, as in Woman in the Moon) for the benefit of *progress.*

BETTER - The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann 1953)

Here is a Western that has nothing to do with community or Western expansionism. It’s basically a five-character drama in the form of a journey. James Stewart plays a dispossessed rancher, desperately in need of money, who hunts and captures grinning outlaw Robert Ryan for the reward. Millard Mitchell plays a grizzled prospector and Ralph Meeker a dishonorably discharged army officer, both of whom join Stewart on his journey intending to claim their share of the bounty. The remarkable Janet Leigh plays the outlaw’s conflicted gal. None of these characters are entirely sympathetic or trustworthy.

The journey, as in many of Mann’s films, is filled with physical and psychological obstacles that are embodied in the landscape. However, The Naked Spur is unique in that it was the only film Mann ever shot in 3-D. Not that you can see it that way. (A complete 3-D print - which would actually be two complete prints, one for the left eye and one for the right eye - may no longer exist.) Regardless, even in two dimensions, we can observe - as in the frame above - how much attention Mann paid to in-depth composition. And there is a landslide early in the film for the benefit of 3-D viewers, with boulders tumbling toward the lens.

BEST - Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur 1946)

Tourneur could be an uninspired journeyman director, but at his best, as in Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Out of the Past – or this film – he could be great.

Canyon Passage is one of the first true community Westerns, a drama in which the ensemble of characters who make up a budding Western community - and the idea of community itself - is as important as, if not more than, any single character. Significantly, the other groundbreaking Western of this type, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, was released the same year. The finest subsequent examples of this fascinating subgenre are Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and HBO’s Deadwood. Ideally, there are no extra players in a project like this – everyone we see has an individual life of his or her own, and the camera could potentially follow any one of them.

A central sequence in both My Darling Clementine and Canyon Passage shows a group ritual in which community is celebrated and affirmed. In My Darling Clementine it is a Sunday dance on the floor of a half-built church. When Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp joins the dance, it is a sign of his assimilation into Clementine’s community. In Canyon Passage, everyone assembles to build a cabin for a pair of young newlyweds. It is during this unusually complex cabin-raising sequence that nominal lead Dana Andrews proposes marriage to the innocent country girl he thinks he loves. Later, he will realize that "city girl" Susan Hayward (above) is more his type. Remarkably, however, the joyous cabin-raising sequence is followed by a scene in which the town nearly lynches a man accused of murder – a sequence that shows community’s darker side – just as in an earlier sequence, the community virtually forces Andrews and the town bully (Ward Bond) into having a public brawl for its own amusement. Native Americans are a threat to the community, but Tourneur’s attitude toward them is nothing like their one-sided portrayal in Western Union. The reason they attack is because Bond’s character has raped and killed one of their women.

Canyon Passage deserves a far more detailed analysis than I will attempt here. It confirms Tourneur as a master of gray areas and the in-between. (Rather like the musician character played by Hoagy Carmichael, below, an ambiguous artist figure, attached to no particular man or woman, but an observer of everyone. If ever there was a character who stood in for Tourneur in one of his films, it is this guy.) Tourneur is among the subtlest of auteurs, a director highly sensitive to individual differences, who views every character and event he sees as a complex mixture of good impulses, bad ones ... and the unexplained.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Western Union and The Naked Spur were screened on TCM last Saturday. Canyon Passage was watched on DVD. Naked Spur image courtesy of DVD Beaver. Canyon Passage images courtesy of Dave Kehr, DVD Talk, and Lost in the Frame.

The Pioneer Charm of Segundo de Chomón

The dance team in Segundo de Chomón's Danses cosmopolites à transformation (1902) are standard figures of so-called Trick films of that epoch. Indelicate to say it like this, but they're essentially mannequins, capable of some mobility, upon whom the filmmaker cast merely the latest optical construct his overheated imagination had wrought. In those lawless pioneer days when screen acting, as such, was unheard of, little else was ever sought from anyone before the camera. The couple in this film go through a routine not unlike any number of Vaudeville performers in America . . . somewhat clumsily, yes, but conveying errant wisps of both continental verve and never-say-die showmanship as they endure the filmmaker's persistence in hurling them from the ornaments of one cosmopolitan culture to another.

Neither eye-popping nor formally complex (relatively speaking, I hasten to add), Danses cosmopolites à transformation nevertheless has a charm that was very often hidden within the visual, hand-tinted tumult of Segundo de Chomón's later and more celebrated achievements. Employed initially by Pathé, Chomón was a filmmaker of extraordinary gift whose name just about always appears in the same paragraphs as Georges Méliès; and for marginally good reason. Both men were pioneers; both had more than a hand in the development of its various techniques of optical hocus-pocus (multiple-exposures, time-lapse gimmicks, dissolves); both gave their filmmaking over to extravagant, impossible visions that made America's rather staid pioneer class look utterly moribund by comparison. But Chomon's determination to embrace the illusory power of what was then a new medium . . . in its known totality . . . often gave his visions an incantatory force that would have rendered them, in retrospect, fairly insufferable were it not for an equivalent spirit of playfulness at their heart (a spirit laid bare in Danses). His wizardry was never dolorous or solemn. It exulted in a joyous sense of potential made positively radiant by the new technology and its vast, still undiscovered galaxies of expression.

In 1964, Jonas Mekas referred to Andy Warhol's films as, in a sense, "a cinema of happiness."

I sometimes think he picked the wrong filmmaker.

On Ecstasy and Anger

It's the dog days of summer and writing brilliant film-related prose is hard going... so I'm linking to some other people's latest stuff, which has fired up my cineastic barbecue, so to speak.

My favorite Blogger, Kim Morgan blazes out a nice shot on Hedy Lamarr's ECSTASY from her Sunset Gun. There's also a fine youtube clip depicting just the famous nude bathing scene--which Kim describes quite eloquently--on her site as well. I urge you to check it out!

The enigmatic Mike of Esotika Erotica Psychotica writes trenchantly about and posts nice screenshots from Kenneth Anger's LUCIFER RISING here.

And if you scroll down further, you can see Mike's weird and strangely wonderful Jess Franco paste-up, PLACER DE GEMIDOS! Highly recommended.

Lastly, for a final cool-down, stroll through the roses that is Stacie Ponder's Summer of 75 poster gallery! I'm glad I'm not the only one who wonders "Whatever happened to the Reincarnation of Peter Proud?"

Still Waiting for the U.S. to Issue Corman Stamps

The U.K. Royal Mail has released stamps celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Carry On films and of Hammer Films’ first Dracula movie. Each stamp features an original cinema poster from one of the Carry On comedy series or a Terence-Fisher-directed Hammer film.

See all six here.

The Rote High School Persecution of Ellen Page

There's something definitely original about the scattershot editing collage techniques of THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (2007), getting a belated US DVD release after a year in Canada and the broken film festival scene. Director Bruce MacDonald delves unashamedly into the trick bags of JULIEN DONKEY BOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, with every little fragment unreservedly depicting sext teen mental illness, teen girl in danger angst, familial breakdown with a father always one step from physical abuse and all that other groovy stuff that's been done before a dozen times... but not this way!

The divine Ellen Page looks here like she's trying to be a mix of Bree from Klute and DeWayne from the documentary, STREETWISE. Mentally ill kids run through fields and we see a lot of Page wrapped in her shower curtain on the bus - talking to the camera in morose cutter girl poetry prose. The whole film has the feeling of a collage and poetry chapbook one's friend might make, the sort where their sick unconscious screams at your from behind the morose drawings and symbolism: "Get thee to a therapist." But one can't ever get these girls to listen to therapists, they're too downy and cuddled up in their madness. And the shrinks are all one-note passive aggressive imbeciles, as is the one here (a passive aggressive old transvestite).

The problem is TRACEY FRAGMENTS can't let go of the "abused child" cliche lexicon long enough to dwell on Tracey's perverse desire for her own illness. A much more brave and fearless breakdown can be seen in JOSHUA, where Vera Farmiga fondly paints red boots on herself with her own blood. You don't see that sick joy in Page's performance because she's too like a young Jane Fonda, too sincere to see the true glory and godliness that lies in insincerity, the layers revealed when you pull back from your own position. Fonda couldn't pull back, but it was okay because she blazed so insanely upon her own position that layers were revealed in the sheer wattage; she made humorlessness sexy in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY, and she made her KLUTE prostitute painfully open, like that friend who uses their brilliance in the service of self-limiting rationalization. Page hasn't quite made the grade; she basks in indie blankness and it works because her face is so flawless and empty.

But the editng is really the star and in its way this film is the anorexic poetess chapbook version of MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. The dialogue and monologues are terirble though - the dreams of academics slumming in the teenage squalor and wrong decisions they never had or made. Tracey's narration (her last name is Berkowitz, like the serial killer!) includes lines like: '"Tracy Berkowitz... Tracy Zeroitz... Tracy Forty Belowitz...", and then there's the cover version of Patti Smith's "Horses," wherein the singer imitates every inflection from Smith's recording to a montage of Tracey running and split screened in with real horses-- and a laughing black man in a bowler hat on the bus to signify alienation and urban hostility, Taxi Driver style.. and a cracked-out dude who hangs on her all skeevy-like named Lance from Toronto. And the colored girls sing "Doo de doo de doo..."

It's one of those films where the chips are stacked so much against the heroine that you suspect the contest is rigged. If we're supposed to see all this social persecution as Tracy's own twisted fantasy, then don't keep rubbing it in our faces like we're supposed to have these insane AND JUSTICE FOR ALL/CUCKOO'S NEST knee-jerks about the man keeping us down. It's unfair to ask for it both ways, and our director and writer and actress can't see the humor in the fantasizing about high school tauntings ("No tits" is the student's cry, which doesn't seem quite realistic). We see her led by a creepy crackhead who promises to find her brother, and when he gets in a barfight instead of fleeing while she has the chance she waves her agape mouth and horrified eyes around like she's waiting for the director's signal and the director's gone to the bathroom. There's some nice shots of a crane machine in the bar though, for all the crane fans out there!

(For the sake of brevity, this rant is continued on my Acidemic Blog.)

Karina Longworth writes a good bit about the release/distribution problems hitting the FRAGMENTS here.

For a genuinely bizarre film about a fucked up chick in Canada, can I steer you towards the underseen PUNCH? (that link is to a review I wrote in 2004).

Read another of my diatribes about Page, this one on HARD CANDY, here.)

The Colbert McCain Challenge

When Republican Presidential nominee John McCain addressed a crowd in Kenner, Louisiana on June 3, he did so in front of a green screen, thereby inspiring Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert to issue the following challenge: MAKE JOHN McCAIN EXCITING.

Whoever accepts the challenge must use that footage (approximately 30 seconds), but there seem to be no restrictions on HOW the footage can be used.

Here are two of my favorite responses:

America is Hard to See(Emile De Antonio; 1970)

Eugene McCarthy's 1968 Presidential campaign started on a premise that would sound downright exotic coming from a member of the United States Senate today. He believed that US military agression in Southeast Asia had to cease. Period. Not for the reasons its establishment critics cited at the time: wholly pragmatic grounds such as the loss of US blood and treasure on an unlikely, if otherwise noble, objective. McCarthy and his initially small handful of supporters felt that, whatever its (dubious) purpose, the US war on Vietnam was essentially a moral issue this country had a duty to address. That was its foundation, and it was up to our threadbare simulacrum of Democracy to rise to the occasion, for once, or fail us miserably. All other considerations came in last place. As I say, were an elected official seeking the White House to speak in such terms nowadays, the basic phonology of it all would sound like half-mumbled esperanto (with a vaguely sinister connotation) to those generations who came of age hearing about such things as Vietnam Syndrome . . . a disease affecting the central nervous system of institutional amorality; theoretically making some in power squeamish about ransacking the globe . . . and the imperatives of a War on Terror that, in fact, was declared during the 1980s. The principal target then was Central America, not the Middle East, but the goals were virtually identical to what we endure now, and every bit as deadly.

While that very real war was gearing up, Emile De Antonio revised America is Hard to See, his 1970 account of Eugene McCarthy and the ultimately failed effort to inject a degree of moral sense into national political life. It is, in all respects, a fondly-writ document; a film of enormous respect (if not awe) toward its subject. Having only seen the revised edition from 1987 . . . shortened by ten minutes and containing several pointless videotape interruptions by De Antonio himself (reading from a volume of Robert Frost; drawing clumsy, rambling parallels between the events of 1968 and those of the Reagan era) . . . it's impossible for me to tell what was revised, or how drastically. What remains is nevertheless an often affecting chronicle of a unique moment that entails interviews with McCarthy campaign veterans (including the candidate himself), newsreels of the long, initially hopeless campaign, as well as extended excerpts of McCarthy speaking on the campaign trail. These speeches and press conference remarks appear to be the main focus of America is Hard to See (at least this edition); and while they make for a charming presentation in an age where Presidential candidates rarely speak words of more than two syllables, they represent the point where both candidate and film falter terribly.

McCarthy may have been a man on a near tactile mission, but in every public utterance during that tragic primary season he exuded what might charitably be described as an implacable reserve; a remoteness of manner that seemed (and indeed was) devoid of passion, particularly when placed alongside the visceral appeal of his eventual rival for the Democratic Party nomination that year, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. He was endlessly risible and professorial, and though he never strayed from his campaign's basic message, opposition to the war as a moral principle, he seemed incapable of rousing in himself one tenth of the insurgent spirit that animated even his most casual supporters (at times he appears to be casting his eyes over the heads of everyone on earth to see if something more amusing is on the horizon).

Sadly, Emile De Antonio takes up McCarthy's eccentric disengagement and just about siphons it wholesale into his film, leaving behind a cinematically limp and uninvolving result. It is, I have to say, not entirely unexpected. De Antonio was a filmmaker whose displeasure at the state of the world . . . a fundamentally aesthetic disdain informed as much by his credentials as a long-time denizen of the New York art scene as by a set of bedrock Leftist principles . . . kick-started his creativity to a higher degree than that of most artists who find inspiration in their own sense of outrage. When events and subjects moved him to anger, he could be a truly, flamboyantly inspired film artist; when he was after something more nuanced (that great and vastly complex found art object, 1963's Point of Order) or something almost celebratory, as in America is Hard to See or his 1973 panorama, Painters Painting, his technique entered a perfunctory state of being. Less stimulated than his preceding work, 1968's In the Year of the Pig, America retains its more or less linear narrative structure, but his style isn't nearly as atomized on this occasion, nor as engrossing (it is also considerably less sardonic). America is Hard to See is a film whose heart and mind is in the right place; but like its subject, that's about all it is.

The land beyond beyond....

I've yet to brave the crowds for Dark Knight, but I'm sufficiently death-obsessed of late to be fascinated by Heath Ledger's "Joker from beyond the grave" and all the weird mimetic magic implied. Actually, what's been obsessing me even more is the semi-double suicide of beautiful brilliant couple Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, and Duncan's blog, "The Wit of the Staircase."

Among the treasures I found on the staircase was a link to an online journal called OBIT, devoted to the concept of "what death can mean to the living, and what living may have meant to the dead." and which has a fascinating compendium of links and quotes relating to Heath's final performance, asking questions of whether the "staring into the void" bravery of his turn as the Joker could have led him to his sad fate.

The looking into the void thing can be a real danger if you are too brilliant for your own good. It's sucked some of our best and brightest right down the rabbit hole from which no man returns. What's freaking me out is just how jealous I am of what Duncan and Blake seemed to have: their fascinating rapport, their friends and artistic successes, their love and "perfection" for each other, and their fearless pursuit of whatever bizarre esoteric niches caught their fancy. Is it also, perhaps, that they died with so much undone, so poetically, the "long swim" and Tylenol PM plus bourbon (mmmmmm bourbon)? Is this the fate of our best and brightest when they get too far ahead of the pack, and realize they have no choice but to speed up into the void, or else go back with the rest and grow old as gracelessly and relentlessly as merciless banal time dictates, watching their beauty and relevance slowly fade under the dictatorial tick tock of the swiping scythe?
Gosh, I don't mean to sound grim, of course there's great artists who've survived the abyss and come back. I just wonder what separates the survivors from the departed? Is it just my Slim Pickens-on-the-bomb style jet black humor that keeps my chin up even as things turn darker than a Tim Burton film? I pray for all these fallen heroes' departed souls, and when I finally brave the crowds to see DARK KNIGHT, I know I'll be thinking "God bless you, Heath. Come back soon."

There Will Be Gumballs

Amid every rash, destructive, feral thing that happens in the mere four minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson's Across the Universe (1998), the overall bearing of Fiona Apple throughout is perhaps the most mysteriously compelling of all. Somehow this woman carries herself . . . within the slow-motion, monochromatic chaos that is its backdrop of epic Soda Shop vandalism . . . with neither authority nor submission; neither blissful ignorance of what's happening around her, nor knowing assent. She seems a world (or two) apart from its ceaseless shower of paper napkins. straws, menus, flying glass shards, ballbats, ice cream scoops, gumballs, crowbars, venetian blinds, chairs and tables hurled in every conceivable direction; yet she nevertheless appears to draw an odd, private strength from it in the same instant. Singing John Lennon's hymn to an exalted state of being as if it were a lament, she shines brightly.

Across the Universe is a music video produced in connection with an immensely obvious and stupid movie of the late-nineties entitled Pleasantville (a film Anderson otherwise had nothing to do with); and if you have to call it something; give it a name . . . something you must always do in film criticism, whether the work under review deserves to be embalmed in words or not . . . you could say that you were seeing the one perfect expression of post-Christian martyrdom our culture has seen fit to cough up.

You could say it; and I'd probably agree with you.

Summer Movie Essential: NIAGARA (1954)

A strangely soothing, a sun-drenched proto-neo-noir, NIAGARA is one of my favorite Marilyn Monroe movies, up there with DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK and THE MISFITS in its ability to capture the sociopathic allure of Monroe (this is the film with her infamous "longest walk"), and Niagara Falls makes the perfect backdrop for her dangerous sexuality; the cascading water forms a cthonic curtain that drapes around Monroe's Venus in a ceaseless embrace.

The dysfunctional death drive underpinning Monroe's allure is what's key here, with Joseph Cotten's shell-shocked sheep rancher George Loomis having ruined his life in pursuit of making Monroe's flirty bar girl, Rose, happy (via gifts and trips to night clubs--never enough). Their trip to the falls is supposed to heal their rift, but Monroe's Rose is actually luring him there to make him jealous and crazy in front of the other guests at the fall-side motel, and thus his murder will look like suicide. Joseph Cotten gets our sympathy, and when you sympathize with someone sleeping in the same cabin as Monroe, you know he must be a good actor. Some claim Cotten is "miscast" in the role. I think miscast is the whole point, as he stands in for every "human" male in the audience who is too old or too plain or too whatever, the types who long for Monroe's quivering form but know--deep down--they would never be able to keep up with her for long even if they got her. She'd leave them broke, broken-down, and broken-hearted, much the worse for having ever gotten involved, since now they could never enjoy "mere life" without her awesome sexuality in their private constellations. And yet, knowing all that, if she cast her eye their way, they'd still jump into that lethal current in a hot minute.

Contrasting this doomed tragicouple are the "protagonists" a clean-cut young couple on their belated honeymoon, played by Casey Adams and Jean Peters. Clearly, producer-writer Charles Brackett identifies more with the Loomis character and shows Adams' grinning all-American boy up for the jackass he is. Remember, this is the same Brackett who collaborated with Billy Wilder on the caustic SUNSET BOULEVARD and so many others, and it's clear that this lampooning of the bogus enthusiasm of the "gray flannel suit" salesmen type (so de rigeur on the conformist 1950s landscape) is intentional: "We're the Cutlers!" Adams announces to the owner from the seat of his convertible when they pull into the cabin grounds, as if he expects a grinning black porter to run and get his bags. This is Mr. Cutler a man for whom American capitalism is designed, he wallows in it, unashamed. For him, Monroe's wiggly walk is alluring ("get out the firehose!" he shouts when she emerges from her cabin in a knockout red dress) but he'd never dream of pursuing her; he's the type who "by the numbers" was invented for.

Peters as the wife is allowed to be much more restrained and human, and her connection with George Loomis in his trashed hotel room (she goes to bandage his hand after he smashes a record) has a moment of genuine connection. You get the feeling that Polly is drawn to George because of what he is not, i.e. full of bluster and meaningless enthusiasm, unlike her husband; he's not patronizing or shallow. While Monroe and Adams provide good mirror images of American cliche "types" (the pneumatic femme fatale and the grinning jackass salesman) the more restrained Polly and George linger in shadow as a gloomy contrast, real characters, with sorrow and quietude in their natures, and as a result just a little lost in the sunny conformity of their era. But opposites attract, and though these muted key types might find some weird bond, nothing can come of it, which is for the best and they both know it; they are chained to their respective "phonies" like life support.

Another plus is how quiet the film is (when George or his boss, played by the Jack Benny Show's Don Wilson aren't bellowing and guffawing). The restraint in use of music is most effective; the score only bursts to life during key moments of danger. Otherwise there is only the ambient, soothing rush of the falls continuous in the background, both comforting and eerie, exactly what a film you watch over and over on DVD in an insomniac haze should be. The quiet emptiness of the town in contrast to the mad rush of the falls creates an almost zen-garden sense of contemplation. You can imagine Siddartha ending up working as a motel manager around here, attuned to the profound mystic frequencies, yet the environment functions also both as a classic "automotive tourist trap" and a perfect backdrop for Monroe's cthonic scheming. The result is a movie as durable as a life preserver, the perfect film to keep you cool during the hot summer city months, glad to have access to the beauty of Monroe and the falls but grateful to be in the relative safety of your own little sanctum.

Is WALL-E a Bad Robot?

Some conservatives apparently see Pixar’s Wall-E, with its images of a future ecologically devastated Earth, as a "carbon-phobic, Al Gore-worshiping, global-warming panic-mongering assault on capitalism, President Bush and U.S. prosperity."

But not Charlotte Allen at the Los Angeles Times - HAL bless her - and she explains why here.

FilmCrit and the Skidoo Epiphany

Over the weekend I read an essay on J.D. Salinger which Janet Malcom published in the New York Review of Books back in that now lost and fabled time, June of 2001. Though I still incline toward the negative conclusions arrived at by his contemporary critics, it was an admirable defense of America's best known, best selling literary recluse (only Thomas Pynchon . . . who once was rumored to actually be Salinger himself . . . approaches his mystique, if not his sales figures). She argues that the immensely long and overconfident non-stories he trotted out in his last decade as a publishing writer represented something approaching the full weight of Salinger's literary musculature; that they were far more inventive and original works than critics of the day could perceive. In essence, she was saying that Alfred Kazin and John Updike and Mary McCarthy (among others) were struck by a sudden contagion of critical blindness. It is, as I say, a position one could easily dispute. Very easily.

In any event, I was reading this essay when I came across the following; from which I quote:

Like the contemporary criticism of Olympia, for example, which jeered at Manet for his crude indecency, or that of War and Peace, which condescended to Tolstoy for the inept "shapelessness" of the novel, it [criticism of Salinger in the early 1960s] now seems magnificently misguided. However—as T.J. Clark and Gary Saul Morson have shown in their respective exemplary studies of Manet and Tolstoy—negative contemporary criticism of a masterpiece can be helpful to later critics, acting as a kind of radar that picks up the ping of the work's originality. The "mistakes" and "excesses" that early critics complain of are often precisely the innovations that have given the work its power.

Maybe. In the realm of film criticism there are no analogs for, say, Alfred Kazin in LitCrit; there have only been shadows, no more. The reasons for this are too varied (and frankly, if you think about it, too obvious) to enumerate in full. Suffice it to say for now that cinema is a medium of such unprecedented volatility that those entrusted with evaluating its piebald and many-hued issue are forced, almost as a mechanism of sheer survival, to fall back on one warhorse gimmick or another from which the reader, poor excluded slob, can then divine what narrowly-cast critical sensibility is ascendent. For a critic it's either that or surrender to the irrational nature of the art itself and acknowledge a baseline cynicism in the critical enterprise. Whether it's mass-market critics tailoring reviews to their own, abysmally low opinion of the audience, or the merry band of Stepford Cinephiles across the globe knocking great viscous balls of reflexive, often identically-worded CriticSpeak back and forth in the most incestuous game of linguistic volley ball imaginable, the imperatives of film criticism, as a craft, will undoubtedly forever reside as far from the true nature of motion pictures as its practitioners can get away with. It literally has to be that way. After all, what film critic on earth . . . good or bad; esteemed or despised . . . wants to voluntarily bring the ballgame to a screeching halt by admitting that words, in the end, will never get the job done?

That said, if FilmCrit is indeed a sweet racket . . . and I don't say that it isn't; at least for those who do it well . . . it does, however, invite certain impulses that can mis-shape the perspective of otherwise unsuspecting readers. I'm speaking, in the main, of the potential for abuse in retrospective analysis; a widely-practiced critical phenomenon (for those of you playing along at home) wherein a work that once suffered foul injustice at the hands of its contemprary jurists is re-heard by a subsequent generation of critics; picked up, dusted off, resurrected; very often reborn into a higher form.

In other words, exactly what Janet Malcom tried to do for poor old J.D. Salinger back in 2001. She's correct that the blinkered estimates of yesteryear can assist a later critic in gauging just how poorly (or not) this work or that work was treated, and for every such rescue mission in literary criticism, I daresay there must be a dozen or more in the arena of cinema. It's a worthy and valuable function, on its face, but the possibility that it could easily get out of hand occurred to me the other night when I had opportunity to revisit Otto Preminger's panavision trainwreck, Skidoo, and reflect on my own critical attitudes (such as they were) when first I bore witness to it.

I saw Skidoo for the first time on television (where else) sometime in the mid 1980s. I'll confess to being somewhat eager beforehand. You see, I was already a confirmed fanatic when it came to its director. More crucially, I was still careening heedlessly through the as-yet-undiscovered (by me) niches and alleyways and hidey-holes of cinema; fully intoxicated by that post-adolescent auteurist fever-dream where something . . . anything . . . could always be found that would redeem even the most maudit of maudit works.

I was familiar with Skidoo's generally foul reputation, of course . . . I doubt if I had ever come across a positive word said in its behalf . . . but I couldn't have cared less. In those days I was trying to make my way as a 'working' film critic (translation: trying to land a paying gig); casting perspective where I could on the medium's discharges, old and new. So I had, you could say, a sense of mission inside of my heart. No, it wasn't morbid curiosity driving me (as it would be today); it wasn't even a basic interest in seeing a heretofore unseen film by a director I admired extravagantly. If anything I was,  in that moment, possessed by an overwhelming desire to redress a critical wrong and ride to the rescue of a work that just . . . had to be . . . far more worthy than everyone said it was. The very fact that critics of its time dismissed the thing with nothing more than a few paragraphs and a shudder only gave this determination to welcome it and clasp it to my critical bosom a greater urgency than I had anticipated.

Turns out that, for whatever reason, I wasn't up to the task. Perhaps it was because I hadn't yet seen other Preminger failures of the late 60s/early 70s and didn't really know what to expect (it must be said that a film like Skidoo comes as a considerable shock when you only know this man's work, as I did then, from relative masterworks such as The Cardinal, Anatomy of a Murder, Daisy Kenyon; Bunny Lake is Missing, even); perhaps the abominable Pan 'n' Scan transfer only served to magnify flaws that would not have been quite so obvious if I was seeing it in its correct aspect ratio; perhaps my capacity for willful self-delusion simply wasn't as vast as the enterprise of film criticism requires; perhaps it was all three. Fact is, I still don't know why my iron-clad determination to admire Skidoo at any cost suddenly vanished midway into the opening sequence. I only know that it did.

I won't say that I was apalled enough to switch it off, or that I could have written it off as just a prosaically bad movie; even as a lesser work in the Preminger canon. The minor films of his that I'd seen by then . . . Saint Joan and (I think) The Moon is Blue . . . had a degree of logic to their failings. They harmonized well with the kind of filmmaker I already believed Otto Preminger to be. But Skidoo, with its mystifying blend of capering farce and counter-cultural lip service, its batallion of Hollywood veterans throwing their dignity onto the ash heap, en masse, was . . . something else, and I watched it unfold in all its garish, mind-breaking wrongness with an undesignated species of fascination. I couldn't begin to tell if it was some kind of failed satire, or a misguided joke on the audience; though I knew one thing almost instantly: Skidoo was a stillborn child inseminated by shrieking miscalculations; the kind that I, card-carrying Teenage Auteurist, was simply not accustomed to attributing to favored directors. It stood tall in the psychedelic saddle as a depraved and unexpected challenge to my fundamental conception of Otto Preminger as an artist, and I didn't like that. I didn't like it at all.

I watched it again two nights ago, after the mighty Turner Classic Movies last January hauled it out of the formless void where it had been dangling on a hook for a couple of decades and slapped it onto their weekly TCM Underground presentation. Still Pan 'n' Scan (I'm told that TCM wouldn't plunk down the coin for a widescreen edition, thereby foregoing what would at least have been a premiere run in that format), but of far better image quality than washed-out bootlegs and my dim recollection. I won't say that my fundamental opinion of it shifted to any degree, but it puzzled and absorbed me nevertheless, far more than it had twenty-odd years ago, and the realization stole upon me as I watched it that I could, if I so desired (and I practically did at that moment), unpack my adjectives and write something positive . . . if not, perhaps, glowing with praise . . . about it in this blog. The unchecked, impulsive half of my brain was aware that Skidoo was still, by any rational measure, absolutely lousy; but the other half, my supposedly rational and sober critical faculty, was once again prepared to dive in like an overeager lifeguard and breathe a good name into the lungs of this godawful movie that it has otherwise never enjoyed. The feeling passed after a few hours, but it was replaced by a disturbing recognition of my own cynicism. Not the cynicism of coming here to more or less deliberately inflate a reaction that was at best highly ambiguous into a misleading form of exuberance (though there was that). I mean the impulse pf my misspent youth that got me itching to rush to this movie's defense before I'd actually seen it.

Oh, you may say I was being idealistic then; indulging a weakness endemic to youth and all that rhythm. But not only do I find it questionable in my case, I have a wisp of suspicion that almost every such resurrection in FilmCrit (planned or executed; wrong or righteous) is accompanied by a like degree of calculation. For anyone in this racket with so much as an ounce of ambition . . . and I plead guilty to harboring more than one ounce . . . will discover that idealism and cynicism are so fatally joined, so inexorably intertwined, that after awhile you can't tell one condition from the other; what's more, you don't even want to. It won't get you anywhere. Latter-day cinephiles and movie reviewers (and I number myself in this concord) should, it can be argued, preserve their morale and remain in perpetual flight from the reality of what they're doing. But when our enthusiasm, our true and everlasting love for cinema becomes so omnivorous, so all-embracing that even crap like Skidoo starts looking good to us, then I sometimes wonder if it might not be time to honor the medium at the center of our souls and find another, slightly less honorable preoccupation.

Don't Miss This Rarely Shown Welles Gem

The name of the film is Black Magic, it was released in 1949, and it stars Orson Welles in one of his most flamboyant performances as Joseph Balsamo, aka Cagliostro, the hypnotist/charlatan whose schemes in pursuit of wealth and power were a factor in bringing about the French Revolution. I am delighted to report that TCM will be screening this rarity on the morning of July 14th (Bastille Day) at 2:30 a.m. Pacific Time, 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

The film is credited to the Russian-born Gregory Ratoff, but I daresay most of it was directed by Welles himself. It is far more obviously Wellesian than some of the other films, e.g., Journey Into Fear or Jane Eyre, which he directed uncredited in some part - most notably in a Magnificent Ambersons-like tracking shot where Welles and his accomplice, played by Akim Tamiroff, make their way through the French court.

A note on Akim Tamiroff — Black Magic is the first of several films where Welles, relishing the contrast in their physical appearances, employed the short, round character actor as a sidekick or nemesis. The others are Mr. Arkadin (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), and The Trial (1962). Welles also cast Tamiroff as the ultimate sidekick, Sancho Panza, in his uncompleted Don Quixote.

The screenplay was written by one of England’s most accomplished scenarists, Charles Bennett, writer of Hitchcock’s Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, etc. and Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon. I once saw Bennett at a Los Angeles County Museum tribute where several scenes from his work were shown. He particularly exulted in a clip from Black Magic where Cagliostro, demonstrating his hypnotic powers, compels a subject to "CRAWL ... CRAWL ..."

The historical events behind Black Magic also provided the basis for 2001's Affair of the Necklace, a Hilary Swank vehicle in which Christopher Walken played Cagliostro. Unfortunately, Cagliostro has far too little screen time in this version which consequently lacks the bite of Welles’ film.

And speaking of late ‘40s French Revolution noir that you cannot miss, TCM will also be screening Anthony Mann’s masterfully shot The Black Book aka Reign of Terror (1949) just a few hours later. Happy Bastille Day, indeed.

On the Web for Over Two Years!

Before we forget. A belated congratulations to - um - us, Bright Lights After Dark, aka BLAD, for having recently celebrated our Second Anniversary. (The very first BLAD post - Robert Keser’s review of Iron Island - was published on June 25, 2006.)

And many thanks to our parent publication, Bright Lights Film Journal, which made its first hard print appearance sometime before Watergate, and to its esteemed editor, Gary Morris, who goes back even further.

Long May They Wave.

[Photo by CJK.]

Some Remarks on Bruce Conner and Report

Entering into negotiations with executives at Time, Inc. over the sale of a film he'd shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder was adamant that his 26.6 seconds of 8mm Kodachrome safety stock be used in the most dignified manner possible. He had visions, awful nightmare visions of seedy people ducking into some armpit of a movie theater in Times Square to watch the now-former President John F. Kennedy get his head blown apart in something more than living color; and the very notion of such a thing made him positively ill. But once he was given the proper assurances, the old man forked over both the film and all publication rights thereto for a final sum of two hundred grand.

Thus did Abraham Zapruder become the first man on earth to make a buck off of the Kennedy assassination.

At the time it would have been hard for American innocents (and they were still legion in '63) to see it in those terms. I mean . . . think about it . . . surely, only the most curdled and irretrievably cynical could dare think that everything, even a filmed record of a political assassination, could become a creature of the marketplace, a mere commodity to be bought or sold. It would not, however, have been a revelation to Bruce Conner. Beginning in the mid 1950s this native of Kansas constructed a large measure of his creative identity through the simple act of gathering together what freedom's land had seen fit to discard; incorporating a mass of found objects, like a Beat generation Duchamp, into a series of assemblages; enigmatic sculptures that, in the aggregate, acted as a critique of American life (among other themes) while investing the individual parts with an aesthetic force not one of them could have had on their own. Furniture pieces, rhinestone necklaces, doll limbs, once-fashionable ladies garments; they'd all been products at one time or another; things, objects, that people paid money to call their own. Now, after their liberation from the trash heap or the thrift shop, they stood transformed and resonant.

When he jumped into the realm of cinema, a move that was only inevitable, Bruce Conner employed a somewhat similar methodology. A Movie (1958), drew its substance from a variety of sources: stock footage, educational films, newsreels. Like the assemblages, there was little of significance in each individual snippet, but when joined together the effect was mordant . . . a term that could be spread evenly across virtually the entire spectrum of American avant-garde filmmaking of that time . . . and more than a little grim (1961's Cosmic Ray utilized roughly the same technique, but to a more frenzied effect). For those who have need of such things, it was a landmark; a status underlined by its inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry . . . the same mortuary of American film where, coincidentally (?), Abraham Zapruder's film now resides.

But while the earlier works could, as I say, be darkly humorous, 1967's Report is simply dark. In its final form (the film endured numerous revisions over the years of its creation) it is a repetition of newsreel footage from that godawful Friday in Dallas . . . the motorcade, the limo, the chaos, the Mannlicher-Carcano held aloft for all to see, on and on . . . punctuated by long blasts of film leader and set to the song of overheated radio reports; eventually joined, in a terrible communion, by an avalanche of other media: TV commercials, industrial films, commercial cinema (ecstatic shots from James Whale's Frankenstein and Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front), sport newsreels, footage of the Kennedys in better times; all of it creating, in its final moments, a bleak, if all-too-recognizable, vortex; as if the great national tragedy that had the world riveted for a time had been pulled down into the fever and ague of the hour and become just as matter of fact, and as marketable, as everything else.

Report is sensory overload with a conscience, but I seriously doubt if Bruce Conner, who passed away on July 7 at the age of 74, could have ever made much money off of it.

Disch by Powers

Books by the late Thomas M. Disch. Covers by Richard M. Powers.

[Tip of the hat to Levar and S. J. Rohde.]

Thomas M. Disch (1940-2008)

Thomas M. Disch, who took leave of this world on July 4th, was one of our finest writers, an American Borges (for lack of a better comparison). What did he have to do with movies? Very little actually. However, he did love film, and he wrote a childrens’ book, The Brave Little Toaster, that inspired one animated feature (above) and two direct-to-video sequels. The genesis of The Brave Little Toaster was - I kid you not - a moment when Disch began to speculate on the inner lives of kitchen appliances.

When I think of Disch, I think of dry wit, keen intelligence, and perfect prose. He tackled several genres, starting with science fiction (The Puppies of Terra, Camp Concentration, 334), passing through the gothic and historical genres, and concluding with a series of contemporary horror novels (The Businessman, The M.D., The Priest, The Sub) after discovering they paid better. He also wrote poetry, criticism, and the libretto of an opera based on Frankenstein. His masterpiece (selected by Harold Bloom as one of the great American novels of the 20th Century) was the 1979 futuristic allegory, On Wings of Song.

Thanks to Bhob Stewart at Potrzebie for letting us know. See also Locus Online here.

Addendum 7/8 - Disch’s last work, The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten (published July 1, 2008), a meta-novel in which Disch imagines himself as God and Philip K. Dick as his spiritual nemesis, is reviewed by John Clute here. The L.A. Times' obituary is here; the U.K. Guardian's here.

DIMINISHED CAPACITY: If the Quirks offend thee...

Put the blame on Mame, or Frank Capra, but I think we're at a saturation point with "quirky" indie family comedies. Hopefully this weekend's release of the tepidly reviewed "never should have escaped the Sundance" LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE-cum-DAN IN REAL LIFE style quirky family comedy "about heart, about growing up, and growing old..." Alan Alda-Matthew Broderick senile old bonding movie, DIMINISHED CAPACITY will mark the water line by which cliches meant to pacify the whole extended family, which have come pouring out of Sundance and IFC like an old lady's tears, will now be done with. Presuming the poor film makes no money.

I don't know, there's a comedy in there somewhere, maybe in a really early draft of Sherwood Kiraly's adaptation of his own novel. I mean, the pitch is great: a senile old man with a zest for zaniness heads to Chicago with assorted family members and a priceless old baseball card he wants to sell. The card is a great mcGuffin, as Broderick has to continually void all the bad deals the demented old man gets hoodwinked into (like entrusting Mister Magoo to shop your original Matisse around the upper east side). Along the misadventure-strewn way just about everything original has been sifted from this idea and discarded...as in, the girl who Broderick used to go out with (Virginia Madsen, quietly searching for someone to play off of) now has a kid (but is divorced) and the kid is a little league space cadet and it all comes down to him catching the card as it almost falls into a janitor's pail of water... you get the idea. Luckily I was seeing this at the Sunshine in downtown NYC and so wasn't the only one groaning as cliche after tired quirky indie cliche was upturned and exposed like so many bugs under rocks all scored to mopey tunes off Sufjan Stevens' ILLINOIS album.

One stand-out is Dylan Baker as a card trader at the convention. Playing a very serious Cubs fan, Baker has a field day, lending a world-weary dignity to a guy who lives and dies by the repeated failures of his beloved ball team. Wisely realizing Baker is really on the ball, first-time director Terry Kinney lets all his scenes play longer than they need to, and for the time he's on screen, it's as if the clouds of stale cliche part and something real and tender and human comes out. You can see the assemblage of quirky actors--Broderick, Alda, Madsen--watching him from the other side of the collector's card table in awe, wishing he'd come in earlier and set the mood. Before him, it's almost like a trading card session between two Sundance workshop veterans: "I'll trade you a quirky gag involving fish writing poetry for your learning to shake off self doubts and reach for that brass ring."

(continued over on Acidemic - check out me trying to tie in ALIEN: RESURRECTION!)

And She Sings and Dances, Too - My Sister Eileen (1955)

Another terrific film by poor neglected Richard Quine (1920-1989). An actor, singer, and dancer before he turned to directing, Quine was particularly adept at showcasing the beauty, personality and talents of his female stars: Audrey Hepburn in Paris When It Sizzles, Nancy Kwan in The World of Suzie Wong, Natalie Wood in Sex and the Single Girl, and - especially - Kim Novak in four films: Pushover, Bell, Book and Candle (Quine’s masterpiece), Strangers When We Meet, and The Notorious Landlady. In the 1955 widescreen film musical My Sister Eileen, Janet Leigh gets the Quine treatment. With delightful results.

The movie was adapted by Quine and Blake Edwards from material that had previously provided the basis for a Broadway play, a 1942 non-musical movie adapted from the play, and yet another musical Wonderful Town (never filmed) with an entirely different score. The durable story is about two sisters, "one witty" (Betty Garrett), "one pretty" (Leigh), who come to New York to make it as, respectively, a writer and an actress.

However, Quine and Leigh are not the only reasons to watch My Sister Eileen. The film was choreographed by a young Bob Fosse - who also plays Leigh’s boyfriend in the film - working here at the top of his game. Most of the film is enjoyable as a diverting light comedy, but during the dance sequences it soars. (Regardless that the Jules Styne score is not particularly memorable.)

The film also features a young Jack Lemmon, a frequent Quine collaborator (6 films), singing and dancing as the romantic interest of Ms. Garrett.

But the film ultimately belongs to the multi-talented Janet Leigh. I knew she could be a great actress (Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate, Touch of Evil) and that she could write (her book on Psycho), but I had no idea she could sing and dance this well. To see her executing precision Fosse choreography alongside Fosse himself is truly something else.

Janet Leigh was born Jeanette Helen Morrison, on July 6, 1927, in Merced, California. She would have been 81 today.

Happy Birthday, Janet, wherever you are.

Metropolis Now!

Big news, folks - via GreenCine Daily - that I’m too excited about not to share. An *original* version of Fritz Lang’s 1926 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis has been discovered in a Buenos Aires film archive, including scenes long considered to be lost forever. The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation will be working with the Buenos Aires archive to restore the rediscovered scenes and make them available to the public. I can’t wait.

David W. Hudson provides the story and updates here.

Happy Birthday Lindsay Ronson!

As a longtime champion of the debauched Lindsay Lohan (who turns 22 today), I'm thrilled to see her in the arms of a good, solid club kid like celebrity DJ Samantha Ronson. While the spin doctors in the Lindsay camp are unwilling to call them a "lesbian couple" (for fear of spooking those album-buying crackers south of the Mason Dixon probably), it's pretty apparent that, if nothing else, they're a beautiful "faux-bian" couple and Ronson is undoubtedly a great influence on Lohan, since Sam's managed to spin records at clubs long enough to get famous, rather than, say, nodding off in the bathroom like so many of her contemporaries. She's an eye in the center of the drug-swilling hurricane, and as long as she stays by Ronson's side, I have a feeling our Lindsay's going to be just fine (and they both seem to know it, too; as inseparable as John and Yoko, and ten times cooler).

The best story so far is Lohan screaming at Ashley Olsen, as per Fox News: "Ashley Olsen said hello to Sam at [the Beatrice Inn in New York City], and Lindsay screamed at her, "Get your 15-year-old 'Full House' ass away from my girlfriend!"

That is so hot, like something Courtney Love might have shouted in the early 90s! At any rate, in a medium where tedium reigns (by which I mean one more baby for Angelina and other tired unconsciously patriarchal heterosexual missionary bullshit) the emotional rescue of Lohan by this funky little baby dyke DJ is about the coolest thing going. And today Lindsay is 22!! Happy birthday, Lindsay, you beacon of "petty morals"-free truth to a bogged-down generation!