A Half-Hour Honey

It's hard to find offline but VCI's DVD set of HONEY WEST is my cold cure of the week. Ann Francis (FORBIDDEN PLANET!) is great and real, with her smoker's voice, full figure with fluctuating weight gain, sass, smarts and Ju Jitsu moves. But the best thing about this black and white prototype for Aaron Spelling's CHARLIE'S ANGELS is that it's only a half an hour. That's right, when the angels used to loll around in forbidden file cabinets or tail the wrong suspect to pad out the running time and you would get all bored? That was because Aaron Spelling crime-and-grind shows are meant to be a slim half-hour.

But even with all that Spelling stigma, there's a lot to love with HONEY WEST. What struck me as most impressive and rare was the sense that West is not very bright, but sometimes is a genius... in short, she's human. She makes mistakes. She's too rash and her partner, platonic male buddy Sam Bolt (John Ericson.) is too cautious. But they think on their feet (no time to think anywhere else) improvise well, and are overall fearless and fresh in their approach. There's lots of suspense and excitement generated from knowing that they do lose fights and forget about things, regret not doing something in the heat of the moment, etc. Things move too fast to sweat the small stuff. No sooner do they have their case, then they are losing the evidence, or getting hit on the back of the head and falling into the bad guy's trap. There's some chasing around and murders and seductions, a big finale and the cute coda, usually with her pet ocelot rolling luxuriantly around on the couch and some banter, and credits. All icing, no cake. The way you like it. The first three episodes are the best of the bunch so far (I'm not even done the first disc!) with nifty touches like Honey's cool kiss with a sleazy suspect (how often are women allowed to be detached about kissing anyone, let alone a bad guy?), putting bands around her ankles to keep her evening dress pinned while she climbs the drainpipe, etc. the little stuff that matters to a Paglia disciple like myself.

Another plus is the great low budget black and white cinematography, recalling the high contrast stuff in early French new wave and Russ Meyer's FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL. Further cementing the KILL KILL comparisons is the great sleazy saxophone jazz score (available on LP), same release year so same cars (West drives a sleek convertible) and the appearance of Lori Williams (she was Billie, the blonde pussycat in the white boots) as a poolside babe in the first episode. Yowza! That's like the 1965 seal of cool.

Last Night's Presidential Debate - Daffy vs. Bugs

One candidate was cool and collected. The other appeared to be seething with unexpressed rage and frustration:




"What my rabbit friend doesn't understand . . ."

Classic Film Smackdown!: MCGINTY vs GODFREY

The Great McGinty, Preston Sturges' directorial debut and one of my personal favorites from his all-too-brief filmography, was on TCM the other night and I caught it from about the middle on. This is one of the great rags to riches to rags stories -- a domestic/political farce with real heart, and great performances, especially from lead Brian Donlevy and "antagonist" Akim Tamiroff (character actors afraid of "overacting" in comedies today, and there may not be any that are, would do well to study Sturges' well-tempered casts). The ending is a real dagger in the chest, too; I don't think Sturges ever maxed out his credit card of the pathetic to that extent again, although he came close in Christmas in July, which -- like McGinty, is soaked in depression-era pain.

I was reminded of another depression-era bum while re-viewing McGinty -- perhaps el rey de depression-era bums, if you will, William Powell in My Man Godfrey, from 4 years earlier. Granted, the two films are very different -- one a dramedy of sorts and the other a screwball exemplar, one a political satire and the other a skewer aimed at the UHBs whose cushy lifestyles were threatened, but not quite demolished, by the soaring unemployment rates and plummeting stock market of the 1930’s. And, the two bums in question -- McGinty and Godfrey -- are practically polar opposites. Godfrey is an entrepreneurial bum who takes command of his own destiny, where McGinty is plucked from the gutter and thrust into greatness. Godfrey's character is static throughout his journey (and the film really is in the end about Carole Lombard's efforts to daffily woo him) whereas McGinty is a social psychology portrait slowly gathering definition as the movie progresses. Godfrey is a linear film, McGinty shows us the ending first and flashes backward (preparing us, mercifully, for the fate that will befall our titular friend).

And yet...is there not, hidden in there somewhere, delicate traces of a mirror image in either film when juxtaposed? Both concern transients who in some way wish to better themselves, and who prove themselves great men. Both fight tooth and nail the possibility of love. It's superficial, but look at even the titles. Both are brief, three-word collections that qualify each bum in some way ("My Man..." is both a reference to Godfrey's vocation and Carol Lombard's "ownership" of the plot's third act; "The Great" is tragic/ironic, even more so when you consider Sturges' original title Down Went McGinty). Both titles even alliterate the same consonant sounds -- M & G -- and end on a long "e" sound.

So how do the two stack up? Personally, I think McGinty would whoop Godfrey's ass in a roughhouse, but we're not talking physical strength here.

Call me crazy, but on closer inspection I think that McGinty emerges from the fray the stronger film. I think part of this is the dated quality of Godfrey. I remarked to my wife the last time that we watched it, "They just don't make bums like that any more" (I should point out that we were living in Berkeley, CA at the time, where homelessness is viewed a disease, like schizophrenia). Granted, Akim Tamiroff's ethnic racketeer is nothing if not an outdated stereotype (though not exaggerated by the actor), but this pales in comparison with characters like Carlo, the Bullock mother's protégé. While I don't doubt that upper-crust families like this still exist, mocking them now would be like hunting lox in a barrel to spread on one's bagel.

Sturges’ films, on the other hand, are steeped in the vernacular and vague bigotry of their time (McGinty even has the obligatory African-American maids and butlers…but then, didn’t the family in Hannah and her Sisters?), yet they always feel curiously modern -- I think simply because of the man's daring. Consider the conjugal configuration in McGinty which has the protagonist marry his secretary as a ploy to win the women's vote, then sleep in a separate room for six months before realizing that he's loved her all along. It’s a plot gimmick, maybe, but this pulling back of the curtains on the dynamics of even quotidian sexual discourse (aberrant or not) – such as what marriage really means to some people, who sleeps where, etc – still seems considerably juicier than it really is (I felt a similar sensation watching My Favorite Wife for the first time). In contrast, when Carole Lombard invades Godfrey’s servant quarters against his wishes, we may feel Hayes grumbling a little bit and Aunt Mabel gasping “Scandal!”, but we don't feel like we've learned anything about how "real people" behave.

And yet…I ADORE Godfrey. I adore Carole Lombard's dippy head-over-heels puppy love and the tender tremors of Eugene Pallette's swollen jowls. The premise would today be a ghastly anachronism (then again, look at the Princess Diaries franchise), but it’s a real testament to the writing and the acting that the film is still hilarious and heartwarming after so much time. But for me McGinty wins the celluloid melee because it refuses to condescend to any of its characters, rich, poor, straight, or crooked (or woman -- Muriel Angelus "concocts" her marriage as either a method of freedom or a method of seduction and sees which one pans out) and because I think that the well-depicted moral trajectory of a single man, satirical or not, may be more rewarding than the tale of the refined businessman who learns to love a nut. And, though it surprises me to say it, I might prefer erudite schmaltz to erudite screwball.

Thoughts on a Frame - I Found Stella Parish (Mervyn LeRoy 1935)

The "return of the repressed" may be a defining motif of the horror film, but it can pop up in any genre - including the woman's film.

I Found Stella Parish is a 1930s woman's film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. It stars Kay Francis as an actress who, after achieving the pinnacle of success on the London stage, drops out of a sight in order to avoid a dark secret from her past. The frame above perfectly illustrates the theme of the film in a single powerful image.

Stella (Francis) has just departed the stage (the public world) and the enthusiastic acclaim of her audience. As she is about to enter her dressing room, someone hands her a bunch of flowers, the visual embodiment of that acclaim. She opens the door, and a direct cut to the frame above places us with Stella inside her dressing room (Stella's private world) visually and spatially dominated by the dark figure in the foreground. Note - the shadowy male foreground figure and what it represents (Stella's repressed past) doesn't enter Stella's private world - it has been there all along. The dressing room is all white - as is Stella in her white dress and white wig, carrying her white flowers - all the better to provide a startling contrast to the darkness of the foreground shape. Whiteness here equals innocence and purity, Stella's public face. The darkness of the foreground figure represents purity's opposite - filth and corruption. (No one has to explain this to the film viewer. We have already been conditioned to understand these codes.)

This is the only time in the entire movie that we actually see or hear this figure from Stella's past. And we never see his face. Thus, we never know him as more than a vaguely defined form (intentionally shot in softer focus than the rest of the frame) and a quasi-disembodied voice - which makes him all the more threatening. Moreover, he does not move. This translates into his being something eternal, a phantom that, though no longer visible, will continue to haunt Stella throughout the remainder of the film.

At the back of the frame are two portals. The door, frame right, is a portal from Stella's dressing room, her private experience of herself - i.e., her ego - to the public world. The mirror, frame left, visually linked to the shadow directly in front of it, seems like a portal from Stella's dressing room/ego to her unconscious - from which such shadows and other monsters may emerge.

Another Scary-But-Sexy Palin (Arche-)Type

While personally I view Sarah Palin as more Barbie-Doll-Puppet than Angela-Lansbury-style Puppetmaster (Puppetmistress?), I enjoyed reading colleague Erich Kuersten’s post on Cinema’s Sexy-Evil Palin-Types, and would like to add one more - albeit from televison.

I’m talking about whatever-happened-to-her Jane Badler who starred as Diana, Alien Overlord of Earth, in the1983-84 sci-fi TV series, V. Diana, aside from being sexy as hell, was a disguised Reptilian whose unhingeable jaw could stretch open wide enough to swallow small mammals whole. How’s that for an archetype of male castration anxiety!

Cinema's Sexy-Evil Palin-types

Watching the original MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE the other day, I got lots of extra frisson from the eerie similarity of vice presidential candidate Sarah Pallin and Jessica Lansbury (above) as the commie puppetmaster wife of a commie-bashing vice presidential candidate Senator John Iselin. In that film, Mrs. Iselin's hysterical red-bashing was just smokescreen defense (she was a Russian agent), that almost makes it okay compared to Mrs. Palin's willful ignorance and globacidal fervor.

Another great Palin-drone can be found in the 2007 film THE MIST, wherein Marcia Gay Harden plays a high strung Christian who uses bible platitudes and fear-mongering to turn the scared refugees at a dino-bug-besieged grocery store into torch-wielding maniacs who stab any straw dog she sees fit to name.

I am sure other more furious political bloggers have pointed these similarities out, though the Manchurian Candidate references I read seemed really off the mark, mistakenly referring to Palin as the "Manchurian Candidate" when all along he's the assassin not the vice presidential nominee. In that film Mrs. Iselin could only be a back of the scene string puller due to the less enlightened times.

Say what you will about Palin though, she's a) pretty hot (though I have always had a thing for evil incarnate) and b)got the courage of her convictions even if they are wrong. Obama really blew it by not having Hillary as his running mate, and McCain was smart enough to counter with Palin. Even if she is evil, even if he barely knows her and did it out of spite, it's still diving in where Obama wallflowered, and the right wing edition of Hillary is even madder and hotter than the original... Hillary Mach 2: The There Will Be Bloodening!

Toast After Reading

(warning, a few tiny spoilers)

I caught the newest Coen over the weekend. I'll save the crux of my critical argument for a more official review, but I mostly liked it; although as a screwball comedy it was a bit lazy. The pace never really climbs to that maniacal pandaemonium we've always wanted from los hermanos Coen -- they keep withdrawing from the scenes of their own crimes, marginalizing clever plot twists by "presenting" rather than "representing" action (oh Syd Field, when will they learn?), allowing characters to spout exposition (and denouement!), etc. But while the madness feels mannered, there's a brilliant post-Cold War farce buried in there that justifies the mechanical, icy tone (think Dr. Strangelove's glacial spirit, especially when mocking sex).

The early-to-mid 90's setting influences far more of the plot than the Coens let on, primarily in the form of a CD-ROM containing the memoirs (and financial documents) of a mid-level clearance CIA man (John Malkovich). The CD falls into the hands of two mid-level brainpower gym employees (the magnificent Frances McDormand and surprisingly boobish Brad Pitt) who decide first to blackmail (in so many words) the CIA man, and then sell the CD to the Russians (and yet the Cold War had already thawed, making this folly hilariously innocent...McDormand and Pitt are the kind of Americans who would have complained that the felling of the Berlin Wall preempted a televised football game). When McDormand presents the disc to an agent at the Russian embassy, he knows the only inquiry worth asking is "PC or Mac?"

Internet critics are heralding this CD-ROM as the Coen's grandest Macguffin, but I think that this misses a key level of their satirical structure. The disc is a kind of uber-Macguffin, if we'll allow some neologism; a plot device that has no bearing on the plot (which in turn has no bearing on ANYTHING) but that in and of itself is highly more relevant than the action it inspires. In other words, it's a Macguffin, yes, but a Macguffin that we'd (or that I'd) rather follow than the storyline itself.

I'm surprised that no reviews of the film that I've read (although I'm sure there's one out there) have made mention of this film's most successful, most probing joke -- the double-edged pun of the title. A typical instruction attached to sensitive documents, this classified triad was turned on its ear in the digital age. It's not often that a word can mean its precise inverse depending on the context, but "burn" managed to achieve this all but unique status. To burn is either to annihilate -- by fire, if you want to get technical, which brings about a very complete destruction -- or to duplicate by way of CD (or now DVD). The characters in this film are both duplicating and destroying simultaneously, ad infinitum -- in the best example the CIA man's wife (Tilda Swinton) "burns" the CD in order to "burn" him (she divorces him and freezes his bank accounts preemptively, using his financial information against him). The other characters mirror this in more oblique ways. In particular, the actions of George Clooney's character (the CIA man's wife's lover...*whew*!) and Frances McDormand's seem to be a meaningless repetition of poor choices -- the way they lead their lives "burns" them and other members of their social web, leaving a mottled trail of corpses behind. But their intense egocentricism suggests that they approach most situations with no more or less interest (or deliberation) than one would while copying a CD in Toast Titanium. Frances McDormand seems to be pining for Brad Pitt's character at one point, when he goes missing...but we discover that her selfish tears are due to the loss of her main go-to boy in the quest for plastic surgery funds (another plot device that truly must be seen in context to be appreciated).

Finally, the film's underbelly forms a slyly nihilist criticism of the futility of information exchange (common Coen fodder). The contents of the CD-ROM are meaningless (the memoirs suck, the CIA "secrets" are garden variety), and yet they are treated as anything but by most characters, and carbon-copied endlessly. One of my favorite lines in the movie occurs when Tilda Swinton's legal secretary realizes she's misplaced the CD-ROM at the gym (the source of this gnarled spiral of dementia) -- I'm paraphrasing, but she basically says "Oh, I'll make another copy with my hard drive backup". We could almost imagine another five or six movies in that one line -- the secretary "burns" more discs, loses them all, and sets into motion several devastating parallel universes of stupidity all over Washington DC as the CD-ROMs are retrieved by the clueless mudbugs of our nation's capital.

That so much is invested in these vacant discs -- these flat, portable orbs of Armageddon -- is very telling. The Coens seem to be whispering in our ears: What's the greater crime? The propagation of vacuous information or the destruction of valid information? Or is there a difference between the two acts? And, ultimately, does the information signify far less than the method of transmission? This, in the end, is the definitive cinematic truth -- that the "experience" of a movie (the method of transmission) is far more precious than the film-maker's thesis (the information being transmitted). And by the way, should the Coens ever tackle the existential undertones of internet use it might be the bleakest (and sharpest) artist's depiction of social interaction ever made.

Classics of Modernist Animation - Flebus (Ernest Pintoff 1957)

In celebration of having just received via mail a copy of Amid Amidi’s marvelously illustrated book, Cartoon Modern, I am posting one of the defining classics of modernist animation, Flebus (1957), directed and scored by Ernest Pintoff for the Terrytoons studio under the supervision of genius animator/designer, Gene Deitch.

The abstract "cartoon modern" style practiced in the 1950s by animators at UPA and Terrytoons, by Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers, and by Ward Kimball and others at the Disney studio, did not just appeal to adults. As a kid, I was absolutely enthralled by this minimalist style. ONE COULD ACTUALLY DRAW THESE CHARACTERS.

Flebus is a simple character, simply drawn, yet extraordinarily expressive. Like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Flebus just wants to be liked. When Flebus meets someone who refuses to like him - no matter how hard Flebus tries - Flebus does what everyone was supposed to do in the 1950s, he consults (gasp) a psychiatrist.

Note the solid color backgrounds in this 6-minute short – even simpler than the character designs. And for more concerning all things animated, check out Amidi’s blog, Cartoon Brew.

the Return of the "Emotional Terrorist"

Getting his typecast as the dunken son in HOLIDAY, Monroe Owsley (pictured with Thelma Todd in a still from CALL HER SAVAGE) will be familiar to any pre-code enthusiast as the "swine" who seduces the easily seduced heroines, impregnating and abandoning, blackmailing and tom-catting, social climbing and dragging innocent girls down with him on his fall, all with a plastered sneer as he leans forward with his weird nose just begging to be punched. He makes Tom Cruise seem humble, makes Richard Gere seem like the Buddha. He's cast to make the other guy's gentle dull decency seem sexy by contrast. He's everything loathsome about confident playas, distilled. He'd do well on match.com! But Owsley died young in a car accident and manipulative jerks like his characters became less popular as time went on. There was no time for cowards when WW2 rolled around, and afterwards, Breen's code made sure girls were protected from tomcat tricks, and by the 1960s there was birth control so no one cared.

What's sad is that 75 years later and this "emotional terrorist" sort of playa dude has made an onscreen comeback in the recent slew of Apatow-aping gross-out romcoms where dull womanizer sees error of his ways and we're supposed to applaud when he finally stops insulting women to their face and/or making fart noises at the dinner table. This weekend sees the release of MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL, where we have comedian Dane Cook as a sort of Monroe Owsley for hire. His buddy Jason Biggs hires him to date and annoy Kate Hudson with the ill-conceived idea that will make her see him (Biggs) as more than just a nerdy friend. Instead of course, the plan backfires, and love.... life's sweetest reward... etc. Dane has to mend his ways, as Hudson calls his macho bluff and viola! There's nothing underneath.

What made the pre-code Oswley films like TEN CENTS A DANCE and CALL HER SAVAGE so exceptional, was that Owsley was a swine but allowed to be somewhat interesting and whole; as his cringing and impinging increased, we saw more of the terrified ego underneath the elan. Even as a whiny "type" he's got more soul and character than the three leads of BEST FRIEND'S GIRL put together (not counting Alec Baldwin who doesn't have enough screen time). That says something about the slow sad slide of masculinity and maturity in this country--and in cinema. While Biggs' nerd frets and whines, like a kid on Xmas who didn't get the toy he wants, the jilted "good guy" in these pre-code films just goes about his business with grace and dignity. He wouldn't dream of hiring an emotional terrorist, any more than Franklin Delano Roosevelt would to spur us into battle against the Nazi menace.

A true parable of its time, MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL gives all the wrong advice to all the young dudes: it tells them to set the bar low to start, so the teacher sees some progress without one actually having to make any, and that hot chicks are as much Esquire-endorsed commodities as gold watches and Italian shoes; if she wont sleep with you, she's basically stealing from you in advance of purchase; and of course, the concepts underlying "emotional terrorism" are eerily similar to our own war in Iraq- just substitute the U.S. for Kate Hudson and the satire writes itself!

MOONTIDE, Morgan & Remorae

It's been lowtide for good classic DVD releases since... since last freakin' spring! Warner Brothers is dumping the dregs out like a fish peddler on a rainy Sunday night - post-code musicals with drab, dry gals hoofin' in their big 1940s bonnets and preaching to the morally correct choir, and westerns... and now, thank God - MOONTIDE. This is a great little piece of California neo-realist "dream poetry" - something John Steinbeck might dream up after a night of opium smoking with his Cannery Row bum buddies. Jean Gabin speaks lovely French accented English, a mix of Bogart toughness and Chevalier suave. He's a wandering laborer with a penchant for black-out drinking, saddled with a blackmailing alcoholic groupie played by Thomas Mitchell. There's a murder he may have committed, and a waif he rescues from drowning, played by Ida Lupino. She and Gabin fall in love under a studio moon as a million Joseph Breen-no nos squrim through the censor nets in the darkness.

The special features documentary reveals just how much luridness they had to scuttle to pass the ratings board (including a Dali-designed drunken blackout sequence) and yet amazingly the film still packs shocks. Part of the reason is the cool intellect of the Eugene O'Neill style old anarchist wharf rat played by Claude Raines, whose way of sliding his words around as if on a greased pole make everything he says inherently... wicked. The code can't touch him because the Joe Breens of the world are conditioned to bow and scrape before Raines' King's English. Mitchell also does a good drunken creep, and Lupino is her usual sizzling self. This movie is a crippled beauty, the code took a leg but one day Ida will walk again.

As for the special features documentary all I can say is - dudes, the code is over, why are you still keeping the lady talking heads hobbled and to the kitchen chained? Maybe it's professional jealousy, but these critics and historians get on my nerves, especially when I see bright cool people (women) on them getting relegated to tiny sound bytes in favor of the dudes. Dudes! What happened to chivalry? There's a speech Claude Raines gives in MOONTIDE about remora eels; they attach themselves to sharks, feeding off the catches of the larger fish. Surely this can't be lost on some of these film professors and historians, who similarly affix themselves to the annals of film history, trying to link their names and faces to movies we'd rather love without them?

The demand for special features on these discs has created a whole new way for film writers to get exposure as "experts." But no one has, apparently, stopped to take into account "who" should represent the guardians of the canon. Who is qualified to judge, even? Not me, obviously. I am merely pointing out what I see as a bit of lopsided sexist injustice in these documentaries, as the girls get relegated to cheerleaders in micro-bytes while the boys get to drone on... and on. We are all remora eels in the eyes of god, but who gets first suck? That's something Joe Breen still decides... the Joe Breen in our minds!

Speaking of giant eels, check out this clip from AT THE MOVIES wherein guest Kim Morgan and Richard Roeper review Korean giant mutant sea monster movie, THE HOST from last year. Roeper's take is that the film is "just plain gross" and "stupid," though entertaining enough to "sit through once." The monster, he notes with a grade school grasp of simile, "feeds on humans as if they're pringles!" When Kim says "I watched it twice," he replies, with a dismissive sally of nervous humor: "We're learning a lot about you, Kim."

I include this clip not to bash Roeper--it's not his fault; he was offered the job for reasons more complex than his cinematic alacrity--but to illustrate the issue of older men in power positions being terrified of the intellect and superior knowledge of an attractive woman with light hair and eye-liner and the desperate, high school clique-style measures they throw up to defend their imperiled sense of entitlement. Morgan is a powerhouse in this clip, she sees more into the film than Roeper does, expresses herself better and says more all in less time, and he reacts... like a guy. Not all the guys act like that of course-Eddie Muller and Robert Osborne seem above reproach, and to be fair, Morgan gets in some good lines on the Moontide documentary, but in general, I would ask you-- what makes an old guy more of an authority on 1940s films than a younger girl? Presuming of course, said old guy didn't actually help make, or have anything to do with, said films? The answer: code brainwashing! Even without Joseph Breen salivating on our shoulder, we're still threatened by a pretty girl, unless of course she agrees to play dumb and let the boys use all the big words.

Kim Morgan continues to work on her own excellent blog, Sunset Gun, and write for MSN and meanwhile gets the barest minimum of screen attention on special features, when she's capable of--and deserves--so much more. And what about the other great bloggers and writers out there who get ignored because they're women? Stacie Ponder seems to be doing all right with a gig at AMC, but she could be doing more! more! more! what about the Self-Styled Siren, Tenebrous Kate or Cinebeats' Kimberly Lindbergh?

Summers of Love and sexual revolutions may come and go, but when the first child arrives and the picnic gets rainy, even the staunchest liberal falls back on his patriarchal notions of family, church, state and reasonable bed times, despite the tough efforts of Barbara Stanwyck in NIGHT NURSE... Well, sorry, grandpa but the Kim Morgans and self-styled sirens of this world aren't gonna be your dumb bitches any more, even if that means you keep them out of your unconsciously coded documentaries in favor of another endless stream of talking... headed.... old dudes. Just know that without these cthonic mermaids nothing you say or do will be worth a misbegotten Moontide's worth of a damn, and the watery grave you draw will be as lonely as the echo of an empty classroom.

Lamest Political Ad Ever?

MEDIA WATCH: A few months ago we posted a bizarre political ad in which former Democratic Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel dropped a rock into a pond. Why? Because we thought it was really interesting in an avant-garde kind of way. And we like long takes. But this latest ad by perennial Third Party Candidate Ralph Nader is just ... pathetic.

So here’s Nader again. But he’s not talking to you and me. He’s not talking to any other human being. He’s talking to a fucking bird. As if the bird would be the only one willing to listen to him. And he explains to the bird that the other candidates are "parroting the corporate line." Which we agree with to some extent. But instead of offering any kind of substantive alternative, he spends the rest of the ad wondering whether he should dress in a panda suit. "To be or not to be ... a panda." Say what?

It’s not so much the content of the ad that evokes pathos but its depressingly low energy level. Far from being provocative, it barely rises to the level of whiney. All we really see is an old guy feeling sorry for himself. As a former admirer of Nader, I’m reminded of that line from The Dark Knight: "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Only in Nader’s case, he hasn’t become a villain. Just tired and irrelevant.

Happy 91st Birthday, Ib Melchior!

If you happened to see Death Race, a $45 million action thriller currently playing at your local multiplex, you might have recognized it as a remake of 1975's Death Race 2000, produced by Roger Corman for the comparatively paltry sum of $300,000, but executed - according to the critical consensus - with considerably greater style and wit.

Ib Melchior, who wrote the original short story on which both Death Race(s) are based, was born in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 17, 1917. Since then he has led a truly remarkable life. His father was the opera singer and film star, Lauritz Melchior. Ib, in turn, has been an actor, a decorated World War II hero, an OSS intelligence agent, a successful writer of novels, historical non-fiction, short stories, plays, and screenplays, and a director of theater, television, and film.

As a writer (in addition to the Death Race films), Ib was responsible for the screenplays of Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Journey to the Seventh Planet, and the English-language version of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. He also created - without receiving credit - the original concept for the TV series, Lost in Space. That series and its film version later became the basis for a precedent-setting copyright infringement lawsuit, Melchior v. New Line Pictures, Inc.

The common thread in all of these projects is Melchior's fertile imagination. I particularly treasure Ib for his writing and direction of The Angry Red Planet (1959), a one-of-a-kind space travel film whose "Martian" scenes were photographed in a proto-psychedelic style (see frames, above) by the great Stanley Cortez, the same cinematographer who photographed Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Laughton's Night of the Hunter, and Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor - masterpieces all. Ib's Martians, unlike your usual extraterrestrials, have no interest in conquering us, or studying us, or making our lives better. Their message to Earth is a simple one - STAY AWAY!

So let us wish a very Happy Birthday to their creator, Ib Melchior, who turns 91 today. His website - including video interviews - is here.

New Issue of Acidemic, Journal of Film & Media

ACIDEMIC - Fall 08: Spotlight on the Spotless Mind
This is a very special edition of Acidemic, as we focus on the themes and implications of Michel Gondry's endlessly fascinating cinema masterpiece, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND: time travel, love, memory, color, desire, adaptation, amnesia, and the blurry twilit crossroads between fiction, belief, and reality. Our French correspondent, Severine Benzimra catches us up on the state of Gallic cinema (which she notes is "not just Gondry"); emerging writer Jonathan Doughty kicks things off with a look at Winslet's changing hair color; abstract artist Audra Graziano contributes the SUNSHINE-inspired piece, "Forget." Noted film historian David Del Valle brings an in-depth look at Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS via the lens of Lovecraft adaptations through the ages.

From me you get an in-depth look at the time travel/amnesiac aspect of Jess Franco's 1967 trash-art classic, SUCCUBUS, and a comparison of SUNSHINE with reincarnation stories from the 1930s, like THE MUMMY, LOST HORIZON and SHE. Also a deep look at the Lacanian implications of the "did she or didn't she" aspects of Elia Kazan's BABY DOLL.

Last but not least I added the full collection of five short "promo" films made for the Josh Furst book, SABOTAGE CAFE, starring Mandy Richichi.

Miss Teen SC vs. George W. Bush vs. Sarah Palin

We here at Bright Lights After Dark take every kind of media seriously – including YouTube, a haven for basement filmmakers and garage auteurs.

The idea of comparing Sarah Palin’s answers to a question about “the Bush doctrine” to the answers of a Beauty Pageant contestant faced with a similar civics question is a brilliant one. Inspired! I say that with confidence because I had a similar idea myself. However, someone else out there actually executed the idea and posted it on YouTube – and you can view the results below.

Classy are the DAMNED

If one could ever be truly drunk on good cinema, then I am so bedrunken. The booze in this case is a little thing called "Kay Francis Month" on TCM. I recorded two beautiful pre-code films last Thursday, saw them, fell in love with William Powell and Kay Francis as the coolest of the pre-war sophisticated couples in Hollywood froth cinema.

JEWEL ROBBERY (1932) is a gem about a dashing jewel thief who catches the eye of bored thrill-seeking diplomat's wife in Vienna. It's the sort of high class rich people doing naughty things sort of European froth that Hitler's war machine would soon blow off the surface of the earth, but here it still sparkles and bubbles and everyone is high, literally, since Powell passes out joints to his robbery victims, a trick to make them too sleepy and silly to call the cops after he's gone. You'll think you're high too when you see longtime sourpuss character actor Clarence Wilson smoke one of these thinking it's an ordinary cigarette, and the hilarity that follows when he starts acitng like Napolean... it's PINEAPPLE-style EXPRESSionistic! And Francis will blow your mind with her weird v-shaped smile and eyes that glaze over with the thought of being kidnapped by the dashing Powell. Her chemistry with Powell is so electrically charged you feel like they're almost kissing each other even when they're on opposite ends of the room.

The chemistry between them was so good they were re-reamed the same year in ONE WAY PASSAGE... almost a sequel to the first film, with Powell a caught criminal sailing home to face execution and meeting Francis and falling in love.. and her character is dying and only has a few weeks to live. It's a testament to humanity's lack of progress in the past 70 or so years that characters this warm, dashing, cool, romantic, witty, sweet and clever-- "whole" people full of confidence, bravery and emotional gravitas, are so rare. Romantic comedies nowadays are full of children in grown up bodies, trying to make mothers out of each other so they can cry in a lap again and not have to grow up and thus, presumably, avoid having to face their own mortality through losing themselves in unconscious consumerism and vehement, self-righteous denial. ONE WAY PASSAGE, by contrast, is laden with grown-ups, and not a drop of stuffy morality taints their beautiful inherent decency as they walk to death like it's just another ocean voyage.

The real source for praise about Kay Francis and these great movies is really SELF-TITLED SIREN, who blogs frequently about Francis and whose passion for these old gems is unrivaled, as is her straight-forward eloquent prose. She calls PASSAGE, "one of the most romantic movies ever made and, no matter what you've heard, bright and snappy, not mushy at all." She also recommends: "Lubitsch's great Trouble in Paradise (1932), Kay's best film and Miriam Hopkins's best as well; and Mandalay, a fast-moving trek through some dens of iniquity and atmospheric rear-projection, directed by Michael Curtiz."

Who doesn't love atmospheric rear projection? I live for it, and can't wait.

The Art of the Snivel

The powers that be have been unusually miserly with their classic film DVD releases in the last five or so months, but this week we at least get some really good, weird film noirs, MOONTIDE and the incomparable ROAD HOUSE. A fine showcase for Ida Lupino (she gets to croak out a bunch of numbers in her frail, smoke ravaged voice, and you understand why she packs the house and everyone stays quiet, almost nervous lest they break the spell of her world-weary reverie), ROAD HOUSE is slam bang quality "rustic noir" - the hybrid of guns and fatalistic romance with the big outdoorsy cabins and lakes that American audiences seemed obsessed with in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The big show stopping performance here isn't from Lupino, though, it's Widmark--who slowly burns his way from lovable swine to full-on homicidal lunatic, sneering and cackling like his KISS OF DEATH killer cranked to 11. Never before has craven sniveling been made so damned sexy.

I'd never seen ROAD HOUSE--not even the Patrick Swayze remake--until last night and I'm fairly blown away. It's rich in atmospheric detail, with the titular house--a bowling alley/tavern deep in the Northern moose country along the Canadian border--brought to detailed, thriving life. Twenty minutes into the film and we feel like we've been working there; we know the playboy boss, Jefty (Richard Widmark), his Rock Hudson-ish fall guy (Cornell Wilde), the bartender, the waitress (Celeste Holm), the newly arrived torch singer (Ida Lupino), their good and bad sides, the way you can only know someone by working with them. The road house itself feels lived in, cozy. The plot runs along the same lines as Douglas Sirk's WRITTEN ON THE WIND, with Wilde's poor but virile right hand man (a very good bowler) falling in love with the torch singer, whom Widmark has imported for himself. Widmark doesn't take well to the news, and begins a rapid descent into giggling homicidal rage, would you really want it any other way?

Adding DVD lustre is a great commentary track from noir czar Eddie Mueller and my favorite, Kim Morgan. Morgan sounds great, keeping the energy raised with her patented quick talking brilliance. More than once I was stunned by her ability to convey elaborate, detailed insights concisely and eloquently--such as the myriad meanings of Widmark's crooked smile--at the speed of normal urban conversation. Mueller is also good; slower to get his points across, as befits, perhaps, his czar status, but a veritable fountain of pertinent information. Together they're an ideal commentary team and one hopes to hear them share more tracks such as this.

The picture quality throughout is very good, though a disclaimer at the beginning assures us humbly it was made "with the best materials available." I didn't notice any flaws, but then again I was too riveted by the intensity of Widmark's performance as Jefty. As I lay in bed trying to sleep I was overcome by Jeftiness, his slimy relish for the hatred he's generating. Widmark here gives us the same lived-in sense of egotistic entitlement and sociopath wit that we find in the best of our complex movie bad men - Brando's Stanley Kowalski for example. He wears the evil of Jefty like a lived-in favorite set of pajamas. Waving a gun around in a drunken display of marksmanship, he's magnetic and believable - you know you should think of an excuse to get away from him before you get hurt, but you just can't; you risk your life just to watch what he does next.

By comparison, we might look at Robert Stack in WRITTEN ON THE WIND. Stack's genius as the rich kid there was in showing us the squirming worm of infant neediness underneath the rock of male bravado; you pitied him but still wanted to step on him, squish him back down to your Freudian root cellar. Widmark's Jefty on the other hand, keeps the bravado rock unlifted. He's a hunter, a dead shot even when dead drunk, and he laughs uproariously at his own absurdity; when he tries to show a needy side it's too foreign, too out of character, even to himself, and he quickly covers it back up. But that's part of why we like him. Instead of showing us the void of his naked soul, he shows us the way out of our own, he makes sadistic glee contagious; we come away not just glad the lovers are united and the sun is coming up, but still infected by Widmark's charismatic violence. He gets under our skin and when the movie's over he's still there, driving the Widmark hook deeper and deeper into our voyeur muscle.

Sarah Palin, and Tall

I expect that quite a few of you - especially the many Alaskan readers of this blog - will recall with fondness the 1991 made-for-TV movie Sarah Palin, and Tall, in which Glenn Close played the feisty frontier housewife, Sarah, and Christopher Walken played her creepy husband, "Tall." Not to mention its two sequels, Skylark (1993) and Sarah Palin, and Tall: Winter’s End (1999). The latter, if I remember correctly, had something to do with global warming.

Wait a minute —

I have just been informed by someone less dyslexic than I that the correct title of that film was Sarah, Plain and Tall, based on a book of the same name.

Never mind!

An Anna Faris Sampler

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post re Anna Faris in Smiley Face and The House Bunny. Note that in the Lost in Translation clip Scarlett Johansson is playing Sofia Coppola, Giovanni Ribisi is playing Spike Jonze (Coppola's ex), and Faris is playing Cameron Diaz whom Jonze directed in Being John Malkovich. In the Scary Movie 3 clip, I think she's imitating Naomi Watts.

The Commodification of Anna Faris

Anna Faris in Smiley Face (above) and The House Bunny (below).

I first noticed Anna Faris in the Scary Movie franchise in which she parodied, among other things, Neve Campbell’s role in Scream. Following that, Faris provided expert comic relief playing supporting roles in two of the most prestigious productions of the last decade, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.

Her breakthrough role - the first indisputable proof that Faris could completely carry a comic film on her own - was as the stoner chick, Jane F, in Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face (2007). Smiley Face is a stoner comedy with integrity. It begins with the already-stoned heroine, an unemployed actress, hungrily consuming a plate of cupcakes baked by her roommate - not realizing that they are marijuana cupcakes - and then follows with the logic of inevitability her wasted path to disaster. In the scene illustrated above (top), Jane delivers a Marxist rant to a group of puzzled workers at a meat-packing plant. We get to see two versions of the scene - the speech as she imagines it herself, a heartfelt diatribe against the alienation of labor - and the speech as it is actually delivered, an incoherent babble.

Wikipedia refers to more than 40 titles in its article on stoner films. Significantly, the protagonists of most of them are pairs of young males. Smiley Face is not only funnier than most of these films* - thanks in large part to Ms. Faris - but in featuring a solo female lead, it puts a few more cracks in that glass ceiling we keep hearing about.

Faris’s next starring vehicle, The House Bunny, which opened this weekend, is in many ways a step back. The most startling thing about it is Faris’s physical transformation - comparable in some ways to Robert De Niro’s physical transformation in Raging Bull, or Charlize Theron’s in Monster. To wit, in order to play a Playboy Bunny evicted from the Mansion, Ms. Faris has injected collagen in her lips, saline in her breasts (either that, or she wears a cleverly designed series of push-up bras), and toned her slender body to fashionable perfection. The subtext is obviously that this is what a woman needs to do in order to succeed in the world. However, it’s not just subtext - it’s the film’s overt message. The House Bunny, written by the same two women who brought you Legally Blonde, charts the title character’s success as a house mother who teaches the girls in her sorority how to win friends and acquire social prestige by basically tarting themselves up.

No one thrust this project on Ms. Faris. She is credited as one of its executive producers and apparently shopped the idea around quite a bit before she found a company willing to produce it (Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions). The result is, as you might expect, pure follow-the-numbers formula unabashedly borrowing from Legally Blonde with dashes of Mean Girls and Animal House thrown in. And yes, Faris’s talents as a comedienne make the whole thing almost worth your while. You, too, can be a shallow-but-successful commodity!

And, if you don’t believe me, I’ve got an Alaskan Governor I can sell you.

* It is not, of course, funnier than The Big Lebowski, which is a masterpiece any way you look at it.