The Halloween Wish List DVD Set: Roger Corman

In this drab time when new classic title DVD releases are almost nonexistent, one has to wonder, are the studio DVD people just asleep at the wheel, or--more likely--do they just know nothing about movies made before 1985 that aren't Singing in the Rain or Casablanca? Well, I'm here to shout into the wind: Release these three long lost Roger Corman classics! Originally put out on Allied Artists (?) a forerunner of AIP, the following three gems may be lost in some copyright limbo (as opposed to their AA brethren BUCKET OF BLOOD and LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, which are in the public domain, so are too available) but wouldn't it be worth it for some intrepid young go-getter to untangle them from the vaults and make some money?

Corman was a fast and cheap director but he was smart enough to get good screenwriters and hip bay area beatnik actors and he kept his films moving with thrills, sex and wit. The following three are classic examples, worth hunting on the gray market if the suits that be insist on letting other people win their dollars (and check out the super sexy posters!):
THE UNDEAD (1957) - A perfect Halloween treat, this has a great old witch with a putty nose and chin (Dorothy Neumann, superb), a super sexy witch (Allison 50 Foot Woman Hayes, super hot) with an imp (Billy Barty, mugging worse than he did in Gold Diggers of 1933)and Pamela Duncan as a streetwalker whose hypnotized into reliving her previous life as a wrongly condemned witch in the Middle Ages! The coolest aspect is how her hypnotist travels back in time to save her and meets the devil! In sum, this movie has everything, including modern jazz ghost dancing chicks from beyond the grave! And most importantly, lots of black fog.

IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956) - Peter (A&E Biography!) Graves finds an alien intelligence living in a cave who possesses his buddy Lee Van Cleef via giant weird looking rubber bats (or is it the other way around?) I haven't seen this in awhile thanks to the "ahem" powers that be; all I remember is, it's awesome. Best scene is when the alien waddles out of its cave to fight the military and when it dies, it falls over like a kicked trash can. Despite the low budget humor, it's great sexy scary fun.

NOT OF THIS EARTH (1956) - I've never seen this, but I hear it's great. It's never even been shown on cable, as far as I know (though the Traci Lords remake is always around, but something like this demands black and white). You can find gray market copies here and there, and since the suits are snoozing, I may do just that!!!!

So there you have it. I don't know if there's a way to start a petition, but if anyone reads this, remember, as the DA once said in SCARFACE (1931): "You! You're the government!" These films would all be great together on a single DVD set: each is little over an hour long and they all use many of the same actors and props (including a nifty rubber devil bat). Man, Halloween, you will never be complete without them!

Synecdoche, Mon Amour

How to describe the films of Charlie Kaufman . . . Ingmar Bergman with laughs? Close, but that makes Kaufman sound too much like Woody Allen, a useful comparison maybe, but one that deemphasizes an essential aspect of Kaufman, his fascination with time and memory. And Kaufman is far more tied to Surrealism/Theater of the Absurd than Woody ever was. I'd prefer to say Kaufman is Woody Allen filtered through Alain Resnais.

Resnais, the French director of such seminal mindfucks as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Providence, is Kaufman's spiritual godfather, a creator of metaphysical puzzles, self-contained worlds in which the protagonists' experiences - or memories of those experiences - bounce off one another in associational rather than chronological order, like echoes of light in a corridor of mirrors. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by Michel Gondry from a Kaufman screenplay) was a virtual remake of Resnais's 1968 classic Je t'aime, Je t'aime. Synecdoche, New York, directed by Kaufman from his own screenplay, recalls Resnais's Providence in that its title stands for both a place (Schenectady, New York; Providence, Rhode Island) and a concept (synecdoche = a part that stands for the whole; providence = fate).*

Alas for the film's commercial prospects, most potential ticket buyers won't know what a synecdoche is, much less how to pronounce it, or that the title is a pun on Schenectady, the town. If Kaufman and his distributors really wanted to market this title, they would print its pronunciation on the poster ("si-nek-duh-kee") like the makers of Ratatouille ("rat-a-too-ee") did.

The story is not exactly commercial either. It's about an avant-garde theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman, right, with Catherine Keener) who, after receiving a MacArthur "genius" grant, attempts to mount a performance piece about EVERYTHING - his own life and, by extension, the lives of everyone else he's connected to. And all the places where they live and work. The vast warehouse where he endlessly rehearses the piece, week after week, year after year, eventually contains the replica of an entire city - or so it seems. He hires actors to play himself and his assistant. They, in turn, hire actors to play their characters in a play-within-the-play. And so on.

All the world's a stage, and the show lasts a lifetime (decades in terms of the characters' real time). Ultimately [SPOILER? not really], when Hoffman's character grows too old to play the demanding role of director/god, he abandons the role to another actor and becomes a creature living inside his own creation. And that only begins to describe this movie.

All of which makes Synecdoche, New York sound like an unusually cerebral film - which I suppose it is - but I also found it to be an extremely moving one. I laughed, I cried, and during a number of sequences I was on the edge of my seat. It's a film that confronts disease and dying (the Bergman connection), uncomfortable subjects for most of us, but there are also moments of great joy (that one "perfect day"). Although the movie is not a flashback per se, events are collapsed together as if in memory. Thus, the house of Hazel (Samantha Morton, below) is always on fire - from the day she moves into it until the day she dies - as though Hoffman's character cannot recall Hazel without seeing the fire he associates with her.

And then there are the women. There are a number of extraordinary actresses in this film - Ms. Morton, Ms. Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Hope Davis, and Dianne Wiest - and Kaufman has written great parts for all of them. Like Fellini's 8½, Synecdoche, New York is a film about a man's creative process, the women who inspire or impede that process, and about how relating to others - lovers, friends, family - might be more important than any of these vanities we call art. It is simply the best new film I have seen so far this year.

* Remarkably, neither Last Year at Marienbad, Je t'aime, Je t'aime or Providence are currently available on U.S. DVD.

Til The End of Time (1946)

Before standardizing the topography of noir with Murder My Sweet, Edward Dmytryk made the nervy little "coming home from the war" film TIL THE END OF TIME. A lower budgeted cousin to William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, Dmytryk's film walks and whispers where Wyler's marches and sings. I love Lives same as anyone else, but if you can find your way around the deceptively soapy title, Til The End of Time is rich in pleasure. Not the least of those pleasures is a charismatic young man in only his second film, Guy Madison, and his chemistry with his older love interest, Dorothy McGuire.

Based on the novel by Niven Bush (The Furies), Til The End of Time follows three vets home to their same small town where they meet up, dance, talk, have flashbacks, fall in love, etc., but don't think Sinatra-style Michener stuff, think Emeric and Pressburger style whisper stuff, even with Robert Mitchum, all funny and tragic and larger than life as a soldier dealing with a plate in his head, but the film's best moments are the quiet ones - Guy Madison's parents, failing to see he's no longer confined by their old world mores and wondering when he's going to stop sleeping in his old bed and get a job and/or obey his old curfew; and Dorothy McGuire, remarkably sexual and free (perhaps since she's a war widow, the censors gave her some breathing room). One of my favorite scenes is a small one: McGuire and Madison comforting a shaky stranger at the bar, in low whispers, like a symphony of supportiveness.

And I say this as a the sort of straight man who generally regards "hunks" with disdain, Guy Madison is GORGEOUS! Good lord... he earns straight guy respect by being nice and sweet while reliable, cool, level-headed and not a self-absorbed preening prick (which the WB mistakes for "sincerity") - but when he lies out in the backyard sun with his shirt off? Notions like gay and straight evaporate as dew on the flowers in mom's garden. And even though like many hunks he can't act, he's got enough natural charm it never seems to bother him. And it's very cool to prefer the older, sexually experienced widow in favor of strapping gal next door Jean Porter (who would later marry Dmytryk). How modern of him! In sum, whatever your religious affiliation, don't miss the misleadingly named TIL THE END OF TIME when it airs on TCM tomorrow at 11:15 AM EST (Weds, Oct. 29)

Jerry Lewis in the News

According to the Los Angeles Times and the The Huffington Post:

“[Comedian] Jerry Lewis made an anti-gay slur on Australian television similar to one he apologized for using on his annual telethon a year ago. Following a news conference in Sydney Friday, Lewis, 82, was asked by a Network Ten national TV reporter for his opinion on the Australian national sport of cricket. ‘Oh, cricket? It's a f*g game. What are you, nuts?’ Lewis replied.”

Yes, I know this is embarrassing and offensive, but Lewis has been embarrassing and offensive all his performing life. It’s part of his schtick, and we ought to be used to it by now. Besides, he’s 82 years old. It’s not as if he’s running for President or anything.

Meanwhile, on a slightly more uplifting note, Cartoon Brew reports The Weinstein Company is about to bless us with a CGI direct-to-video sequel to the Lewis-directed classic, The Nutty Professor – with the character of Julius Kelp (now a grandfather) vocally performed by Lewis himself. I get shivers just thinking about it.

Amazon.com says the title will be released on November 25th. Reserve yours today.

Two Films About the Middle East - Body of Lies/Persepolis

There are three basic types of spy stories: 1) the one about the ultra-skilled professional spy who is almost always successful, e.g., James Bond; 2) the one about the civilian amateur who gets caught up in spy stuff, e.g., Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps; and 3) the one that depicts professional spying as a dirty depressing business, e.g., Hitchcock’s The Secret Agent and Topaze, or anything in the Graham Greene/John le Carré mold. Body of Lies (above), starring Leo DiCaprio as an agent stationed in the Middle East and Russell Crowe as his pudgy Washington controller, belongs to the latter category.

Directed with his usual visual proficiency by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by William (The Departed) Monahan, Body of Lies hits most of the required beats for this type of story, including the usual quota of chases, double-crosses, and explosions, and the part where the hero’s girlfriend or someone else close to him is captured by the bad guys. DiCaprio does well enough. Crowe creates yet another memorable characterization. If Body of Lies were simply a spy thriller, it would rate a solid "OK," worth seeing for viewers who like that sort of thing, but not up to the level of my personal favorite in the spying-is-a-dirty-business genre, The Quiller Memorandum (1966 - scripted by Harold Pinter).

Fortunately, Body of Lies is more than a spy story. It’s also a story about an American (DiCaprio) trying to understand the culture of the Middle East. Although he does a lot of globe-hopping throughout the course of the tale, DiCaprio’s character spends most of his time in Jordan. His interactions with the Jordanian locals, a spy chief (Mark Strong), a nurse (Golshifteh Farahani), and various informants - all exceptionally well-cast - provide the movie with its interest and heart.

Persepolis, an animated film produced in France and based on a graphic novel written and illustrated by Marjane Satrapi takes another approach to the Middle East. (The film was written and directed by Ms. Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.) Instead of viewing Middle Eastern culture through the eyes of a white foreigner, the culture is seen from the inside through the eyes of "Marji," a rebellious adolescent growing up in Iran. The story begins during the reign of the Shah (Marji’s uncle is a Communist jailed by the Shah), takes us through the Islamic Revolution, then a brief side-trip to Vienna school where Marji is the outsider, and concludes back in Iran as Marji prepares to leave the present-day theocracy. Aside from Marji’s distinctive viewpoint - torn between Western values and the traditional values of her family - the most striking aspect of the film is its visual style, stark black and white graphics that owe more to the ‘50s cartoon modern style than they do to Disney-esque "realism." (There is a framing sequence in color.)

The voice-casting is uniformly excellent. Marji and her mother are played by Chiara Mastroianni and her real-life mother, Catherine Deneuve. Marji’s grandmother is voiced by Danielle Darrieux, best known for playing Ophuls’ Madame De .... (On the DVD version, you have the choice of listening to the French soundtrack, or an English-language soundtrack where Mastroianni and Deneuve repeat their roles, and the grandmother is voiced by Gena Rowlands.)

Body of Lies and Persepolis are both compelling looks at Middle Eastern culture, but if you have time to watch only one of them, Persepolis is definitely the way to go.

Enjoy the trailer below.

The Life & Times of Col. Blimp - Metaphor for Presidential Elections

There's a stirring speech made late into Powell & Pressburger's excellent Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) wherein Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), the German friend of General Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesy) tries to explain why antiquated notions of right and wrong in warfare will not succeed against the Nazi menace. Seeing the film the other night, it struck me that the following dialogue made a fine comment about the upcoming election and my (and I'm sure others) general worry that the GOP is going to play dirty (again!)by accidentally misfiling absentee Obama votes in the swing states and other foul play, while the democrats just smile and do nothing to defend themselves, mistakenly believing that these things "just don't happen."


Thanks to imdb.com for supplying the dialogue for me to cut and past here:

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: You commented on Nazi methods--foul fighting, bombing refugees, machine-gunning hospitals, lifeboats, lightships, bailed-out pilots--by saying that you despised them, that you would be ashamed to fight on their side and that you would sooner accept defeat than victory if it could only be won by those methods.

Clive Candy: So I would!

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: Clive! If you let yourself be defeated by them, just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won't be any methods *but* Nazi methods! If you preach the Rules of the Game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you, they will laugh at you! They'll think you're weak, decadent! I thought so myself in 1919!


Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: I don't think you won it. We lost it -but you lost something, too. You forgot to learn the moral. Because victory was yours, you failed to learn your lesson twenty years ago and now you have to pay the school fees again. Some of you will learn quicker than the others, some of you will never learn it - because you've been educated to be a gentleman and a sportsman, in peace and in war. But Clive! [tenderly] Dear old Clive - this is not a gentleman's war. This time you're fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain - Nazism. And if you lose, there won't be a return match next year... perhaps not even for a hundred years.

So here it is, even a hundred years later and we need Kretschmar-Schuldorff to get it into the heads of the people that every swing vote ballot box needs to be closely watched. We're fighting against the second most devilish idea ever created by a human brain - neo-conservatism, and their tactics are no less Nazi-ish and inhuman!

Ebert Hit Eject

Unless you've been living in a film industry bubble the last few days, you're probably aware of Roger Ebert's now (in)famous review of Tru Loved, which he wrote based upon notations taken during the film's first 8 minutes. After this, he paused his screener, and the temptation to forgo the remainder became too great for him to ignore. He typed up his review and sent it to his editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, who had one objection -- she felt Ebert was ethically obligated to disclose outright the fact that he had only seen the movie's first 8 minutes. Ebert disagreed, wanting to save this revelation until the denouement of his review (and dramatically he's right; it's the only way to include such a fact and keep the review at all interesting). Ebert won, the review was printed as it was. The backlash was astounding. Ebert blogged about the issue twice, once to directly solicit comments from readers and a second time to issue what was essentially a mea culpa for having done the indie flick a disservice. I read through several of the comments on both posts; they run the expected gamut from defensive to apathetic to piercingly vituperative.

Being an occasional (though thus far unpaid) film critic and a long-time (though not enthusiastic) reader of Ebert, it puts me in an interesting position to comment on the above events, although I think virtually every possible opinion has already been expressed, ad nauseam. Ebert has always struck me as a curious sort of cultural phenomenon; he might be the purest (and maybe the best) movie "reviewer" out there, and he's not paid to write because he can usefully organize films (ie Andrew Sarris or Richard Corliss) or forcefully burrow into them (ie Manny Farber) or weigh them against some obtuse, arcane, social morality rubric (ie Bosley Crowther). Ebert just describes what he likes and doesn't like about the movies, plain and simple. Why you should see a particular flick and avoid another. Some may dispute the significance of this sort of criticism, but it's made Ebert probably the best known American critic of all time, and allowed him to embody however obliquely what is generally considered the critical zeitgeist -- in the pre-filmcrit blog era, anyway. For example, look at one of my favorite TV shows of all time, The Critic, starring Jon Lovitz as a doughy, cranky, lovable, Pulitzer-winning film critic with a ridiculously reductive review schematic (the "Shermometor," an appropriation of the the "thumbs up/down" system). The cartoon worked because we so strongly identified all those characteristics with film criticism to begin with (although the writing/producing team of Al Jean and Mike Reiss helped a great deal).

But, back to the issue at hand. Some individuals are actually claiming that Ebert cheated them, and I think my observations in the above paragraph have something to do with it. Since Ebert's real claim to fame is simply *reviewing* the movies, mediating likes and dislikes, then how can he be said to have gotten a true "reading" of the film in only eight minutes? You know, I almost feel sorry for Ebert when I hear such arguments, because if this were any other film critic working today the review would have largely been ignored (Consider hearing Jonathon Rosenbaum walk out of a picture. I wouldn't feel compelled to see the film in question, but I wouldn't blame him for writing an essay about why he walked out, either). But, Ebert has become a kind of star power critic, and we hold him to strong ethical standards insofar as is relevant to his "job".

I also find it interesting that so many comments on the blogs noted to Ebert (or scolded him, rather) that reviewing movies is his "job". As though he were financially or contractually obligated to sit through films in their entirety because he is receiving money to do so. Once again, I feel there's something askew in this logic. First of all, I doubt anyone writing those comments actually funds Ebert's work, and second of all, once again I remind that as a critic, Ebert is only getting paid for his opinions (or such is my personal consideration of this profession). The implication in the anti-8 minute sentiments is that the film critic is supposed to be stronger than the average human being, able to view miles upon miles of celluloid shlock and not only survive the experience but wax poetic on the occasional merits of one- and two- star specimens that the typical moviegoer wouldn't touch with a ten foot twizzler and a giant tub of popcorn. I am a bit flattered by this perception, as Ebert should be, but it's simply unfair. The film critic is no stronger than you are, my average moviegoer. He or she simply expresses his/her ideas on paper better (sometimes) and (again sometimes) knows more about film historically and technically than you do.

I was reminded a little here of Cary Grant's character in Arsenic and Old Lace. A real estate writer-turned theater critic, he abhors the daily drudgery of subpar histrionics and at one point elucidates a plan to watch the first act of a play and then "pan the hell out of it". Of course, at that moment he had a family emergency (namely that his aunts were murdering helpless elderly men and burying them in the cellar), so this does not come across as a character flaw whatsoever. But, putting the specifics aside -- the critic is a human being, with a life outside their work, and will occasionally make accommodations. Furthermore, the critic is a human being with a threshold for crap. I think Ebert's trespass was far less dubious than that above; is Cary Grant so much more likable that we forgive him any faux pas (this need not be answered)?

Finally, I can fully comprehend and empathize with those that feel Ebert was insulting to the film, but let's face it -- some films deserve to be insulted (I haven't seen this one so I can't comment further there). I feel strongly that withdrawal -- in film reviewing or in politics -- can be a powerful critical statement. It's more or less the same dichotomy that draft dodgers face: you're either an unpatriotic coward for refusing to serve Uncle Sam or a hero for standing up and proclaiming your opinion despite the potential repercussions. I think the truth falls somewhere in between, depending on the situation. But isn't refusing to see a movie for various reasons just as valid a criticism as sitting through the same movie in its entirety and feeling disgusted? Granted, they're different situations -- in one instance you're responding to the movie itself and in the other you're responding to the aura around the movie, the vibes you glean from descriptions and other reviews and trailers, etc. But they're both responses. And at the end of the day that is all critics should be required to do -- respond. To what, and in what capacity, is their choice.

Socially Conscious Comics - Part 2

A follow-up to this post . . .

Here's an example of a real EC Comics cover - Shock SuspenStories No. 6 - from the company's early '50s heyday, and you can immediately see why some groups wanted to have these comics banned. At a time when any criticism of America was considered *suspect*, EC had the temerity to publish a story that was critical of the (thinly disguised) Ku Klux Klan. What might have riled would-be censors (such as Dr. Fredric Wertham) even more was the inclusion of such lurid elements as an erotically drawn female victim and the suggestion of an incipient whipping. Beyond the adult subject matter of this cover, note the extraordinary draughtsmanship and compositional skills of its artist, Wallace Wood, the hyperrealism of the fabric folds and the metallic gleam of the vintage automobile in the background, the high contrast film noir-like lighting effects using only the moon and the torches of the Klan as light sources.

And here's an example of social consciousness, late '60s-style, from our friends at DC Comics (now a division of Time-Warner) - Lois Lane No. 106 - in which our heroine learns what it's like to live 24 hours as a (more attractively drawn) black woman.

WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER!

This Friday at 2 AM on TCM!

Man, am I glad I finally got cable. If i didn't have it for this, I would have to kill myself, or someone else, who had cable.

I've already written what little I know about this epic in a past entry. This showing will be its "world premiere."

One name should be all you need to go nuts over this: Timothy Carey.

Palin Meets EC

The latest issue of Tales From the Crypt (inspired by the 1950s EC Comic of the same name) features Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin wielding a hockey stick at the Crypt’s storytelling inhabitants.

The publisher assures us that his intentions were completely non-partisan: “[A]ny White House candidate who even entertains a conversation about book banning is a natural enemy to ‘Tales from the Crypt,’ according to Jim Salicrup, editor-in-chief of Papercutz, the publisher that revived the classic title about 16 months ago. ‘This was not a partisan thing. People tend to think of everything as black and white these days -- you are either for or against one of the parties 100%. But for us, this was about the history of EC Comics, the original publisher of 'Tales from the Crypt.' Anyone who knows that history knows that even a whiff of banning books is going to get us angry."

EC Comics and its publisher William M. Gaines were investigated by the United States Congress in the 1950s for purportedly contributing to the delinquency of minors. Congress’s efforts to censor comics eventually led to the creation of the Comics Code and the demise of every EC title except Mad (which survived by becoming a magazine).

In fact, EC nurtured some of the finest and most influential talents who ever emerged in the comic book field – artists like Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wallace Wood, Graham Ingels, Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson, among many others. Though horrific, the comics were also groundbreaking in terms of satire and social criticism and have inspired countless adaptations in other media.

Read the full Los Angeles Times story here.

Service Equals Citizenship!

Why should you sign up immediately with the National Guard (besides so you can sneak around the back door of the recruitment office and into Iraq?), cause you can drive NASCAR! In case you haven't been to the multiplex in awhile, there's this fairly long National Guard recruitment commercial-cum music video that's been kicking off the previews (along with Sidney Poitier standing up for cancer) with Kid Rock singing "I am Warrior!" (where's Laura Branigan when you need her?) as Nascar star Dale Earhart Jr. gets ready for his important day driving around in circles really fast, interspersed with emergency rescue teams braving floods and ordinary citizens saying goodbye to their wives and kids, all ready to "bleed red, white and blue."

One of the moments in the video that always earns astonished chuckles from the blue staters is when a big US armored car is tooling down a narrow Arab nation street and breaks to a stop in front of a rolling soccer ball. The adorable little boys that were playing all freeze in dread, but then one of these American warriors--bedecked in high tech body armor--walks slowly over to the ball, smiles wistfully, and kicks it back to the grateful kids. We see a close up of one of the boys' big, adorable smiles.

In reality of course, rolling soccer balls into the paths of enemy vehicles is the oldest ambush trick in the insurgent book. Hasn't Kid Rock seen IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH? Another head scratcher is the Eisensteinianly montaged implication that service in the National Guard includes driving NASCARs and relaxing after a hard day with the Kid Rock! Is that really true? Or will you just get shot and/or clinically depressed as months drag into years in a repressed, hot and dusty land?

Anyway, besides being an amazing piece of red state propaganda, what's so riveting about "Warrior" is the resemblance the film has to a) ye old Nazi recruitment films like TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and b) Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS. All it would need is a "Service Equals Citizenship - Would you Like to Know More?" tag on the end. (Note: Read an Mark Grimsley's excellent, military-eye view of TROOPERS here). Insidious, devious, misleading and oh so very seductive, this Kid Rock fantasia is a direct reminder that we have become the same enemy we fought in World War Two. We're lured into service by abstract words like "freedom" - a word that has nothing whatever to do with the situation ("democracy" also doesn't "count" if the majority vote is fundamentalist militant and against U.S. policy. That's a "do over"). We "bleed red, white and blue," but the flag in this case stands for corporate oil interests and the war profiteering of Halliburton - not the interests of "the little guy." We don't face invasion from Iraq, Saddam had no WMDs or bin Laden ties, and actually did a much better job of crushing terrorism then we have, etc. etc. If we really want to fight for freedom, the enemy is right there on TV: the guy lying his head off, bankrupting the nation so he can redeem his dad in the eyes of his Saudi overlords.

Yes I am aware that freedom means I can write anti-war tracts like this without fear of incarceration... knock on wood, but what does freedom of speech really mean in this yammering virtual tower of babble called the internet age, when peace demonstrations are viewed as little more than a hassle as we try to drive to the mall for the latest first person shooter game and astronomical education costs help ensure an ever-more monosyllabic voting majority? Freedom of speech means the right to preach to the choir of your choice. After all, no one's ever successfully reasoned with a zealot... or a faceless multi-national corporation.

This Kid Rock short film is a fascinating document I predict will be shown in college classrooms in the decades to come (assuming there are college classrooms and/or decades to come) as an example of a time when "nobody was listening". It's an "ignorance equals bliss" fist in the air, a reminder that driving cars around a track really fast in a time of oil shortages and dwindling ozone was once the ultimate definition of real American heroism. The crazy thing is, I know it's evil, but a part of me still digs it. Deep down under my blue state candy shell, I feel the cold bubble gum lure of fascism, same as anyone. Go 'head, Kid! Let's drop a bomb on this ish!

Harry's Wager

The final presidential debate was about domestic policy, as it should be -- we're in a financial crisis. But, I've been thinking more about foreign policy lately. There are huge differences between the two candidates where domestic affairs are concerned -- especially in regard to taxes and health care -- but both agree for the most part that reform is needed. When it comes to foreign policy, however, the contrasts are far more extreme, and I think what it boils down to is a distinction of approach at a basic social-interaction level.

Let's take two examples that somewhat illustrate what I've been considering. First, the classic scene from Dirty Harry where the titular character aggressively dominates an adversary despite having an empty weapon. He presents what seems like a logical argument, a nearly Pascalian one -- the .44 Magnum will decapitate you if you choose wrong, so why bother even tempting fate? Are you really that lucky? We might call this "Harry's Wager". The more we consider this, however, the more it seems like fascist manipulation -- I'm the law, I'm stronger than you are, it doesn't matter if your weapon's loaded and mine's not. I will always have the upperhand (this is underlined later in the film where another criminal chooses to call Harry's bluff, and of course the Magnum still has a bullet left. "Harry's Wager" ensures that there will ALWAYS be a bullet remaining for those that "feel lucky"). I hesitate to stoop to gender generalization and refer to this as the "masculine" method of intimidation (note that Harry must always proclaim the size and force of his firearm...just look at that photo, above!).

Second, we have essentially the same scene in a very interesting B western -- The Tall Stranger with Joel McCrea. At the end of the film McCrea is battling the primary villain and inevitably finds himself at the wrong end of a shot gun with no weapon. But, McCrea thinks aloud -- "How many shots did you fire? That gun only holds six bullets, so let's see..." and the character actually begins enumerating each round he has heard thus far while slowly advancing on his trembling antagonist. Of course, the villain's shot gun turns out to be empty, and McCrea gains the upper hand.

This scene is practically identical to the one in Dirty Harry with one essential difference -- McCrea is having the empty gun pointed at him rather than pointing the empty gun himself. His wit revolves not around a survivalist wager but a soft sell of self-doubt -- he has nothing to "dominate" with. Harry Callahan peddles self-doubt too, but does this by swelling himself up into a turgidly archetypal image of strength. McCrea works the vulnerable underbelly, playing on the lack of self esteem he senses in his opponent. Also note that both characters present their emotional argument in logical terms -- pathos in logos' clothing -- but one has a male potency, the other a feminine puissance.

Don't get me wrong. Knowing how to bluff when you've got a crap hand is essential, especially in the vast, apocalyptic poker game that is global politics. But we are in an age where "antagonists" do not even need loaded guns themselves for us to point ours at them. Were I at a townhall meeting, I would tease out the differences between the presidential candidates by asking the following question: You're in a gun fight. You're pretty sure your gun is empty, but you're pretty sure your adversary's is as well. Both of you are trapped in a stand-off, the potentially vacant firearms aimed to kill. What do you do?

It Came From the Blogosphere - The Batman Penguin Debate

In which one of America’s most creative character actors, Burgess Meredith, does an uncanny impression of Presidential Candidate John Sidney McCain forty-two years before the fact. Next – someone figures out a way to put Meredith’s McCain/Penguin in the same frame as Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin. HENGH. HENGH.

Via Bartcop.

The Frauds and the Fabulous

This month sees the DVD release of old Night Flight favorite, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS (1981). A young Diane Lane leads the fledgling and titular punk band, which includes a mop-haired Laura Dern on bass. Alas, they can't really play or sing; yet in their "Shagg-y" way they're still more interesting than the Looters, the British punk band led by Ray Winstone who is their co-touring band. I was pretty bored by Ray's rote sneering here until I realized he's the same Ray from SEXY BEAST and NIL BY MOUTH. He's a good actor, but can only do so much with a role that doesn't range beyond three speeds of petulant. Yet his relationship with Lane's Stain (a prefiguring of the Ledger-Stiles relationship in 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU) is given prominence overall. Though sexism and commodification are the big topics, the movie falls prey to them instantly - with Lane's band forced to rip off Winstone's songs and dance moves since they've no time to practice, and then Winstone managing to singlehandedly turn their fans against them with a rip of the famous "Ever feel like you've been cheated" Sex Pistols rant. The idea that girls' success depends on boys to carry their equipment and teach them chords is something the film ostensibly fights, so it's weird when it turns it around and has Ray "teach the girls a lesson" like Clark Gable spanking Claudette Colbert in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.

For everything it gets wrong though, STAINS gets many things right. I really dug the dreary Canadian landscape which passes for the rural wastelands of Pennsylvania, all dripping with mud and fog and depressingly vast parking lots, the dingy but earthy and kind of cozy tour bus run by Jamaican rebel Barry Ford. Having been on dreary low rent rock tours myself, I can vouch for the authenticity of these early moments, the despair at driving all night and then setting up in some empty-looking little hole in the wall still reeking of beer and cigarettes from the night before and having nothing to do except stay relatively sober and try to find some place to disappear until you go onstage in 12 hours...the constant bickering and complaining. Hell, it's a great film just because the busload of kids don't sing "Tiny Dancer" ala the unbearable ALMOST FAMOUS.

But once the Stains start to become popular it gets ridiculous fast. If they'd have gone from no-names to headliners it would be one thing, but within a few minutes the Stains are selling out stadiums to vast seas of girls who all dress identically in reds and blacks with the same "Skunk" style hair while trumpeting their indivuduality.

Barry Ford is an interesting presence as the tour manager, a Rastafarian named Lawnboy. In the early 1980s, reggae music was relatively unknown in the US outside of punk record shops... and punk record shops actually existed! Whoa! While the link between the ever-sneering Looters and reggae music isn't overt, you can bet Paul Simenon of the Clash was hangin' tight with htat. Reggae be a huge influence on the Clash (The Clash is to Bob Marley the way the Stones are to Muddy Waters), the Slits, the Pretenders, etc. Nowadays reggae's been co-opted--at least in the US-- by the khaki set and has thus lost a lot of its political edge, but the STAINS is a good reminder that it was not always so, and that a Bob Marley or Peter Tosh song was once as frightening to the normals as the Dickies, the DKs, or the Damned. The songs in STAINS are mediocre punk, however, even with Clash and Sex Pistols members in the band, and the Looters seem to forget punk's golden rule - make the songs short! By the fifteenth chorus of "The Professionals" you want to pull the plug or throw a beer bottle yourself. If you're into seeing/hearing some "real" punk from the period, check out RUDE BOY and/or REPO MAN.

For all my minor criticisms, it's great to have the film on DVD, and to remember a time when the lines between 1980s new wave, punk, reggae, and Goth were undrawn and MTV hadn't yet streamlined the commercialization of rebellion to such an extent that there wasn't at least a few minutes to notice and fight back. (Though you wouldn't know it from the tacked on Faux-Gos ending), That's nothing new to music or even all art, anyhow: ego and selling out follows on altruism's heels like a snapping, hungry dog! What makes this film so vital is the the riot grrl feminism of the future, screaming in artistic solidarity to the disaffected and sexually harassed, even as it's being crunched into the very thing it's screaming against.

For more STAINS writing, read Gary Morris' excellent historical background of, and personal take on, the film here.

Year of the Comedienne

2008, the year of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, has also been the year of the comic actress in television and film. It’s not that comic actresses haven’t always been around, but I cannot think of another year in which so many comediennes were so prominently leading the comedy pack.

Television has brought us Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, and Wanda Sykes, all of whom have also appeared successfully in films. (The opportunity to parody Palin and Clinton has been a godsend to Mss. Fey and Poehler.) In the past couple years, we have also witnessed the ascendency of prima film comediennes, Anna Faris and Amy Adams, both of whom are now regularly playing leads. Today’s blog post focuses on another rising comic star - Missi Pyle.

Soccer Mom, the direct-to-video release pictured above, is, as far as I know, Missi Pyle’s first title role, and it couldn’t be more timely, what with the aforementioned V.P. Candidate Palin proudly identifying herself as a "pitbull with lipstick" hockey mom. Mirroring Palin, a recurring aspect of Pyle’s comic persona is a certain ruthlessness - in Soccer Mom, Pyle (above left) disguises herself as Italian soccer coach, Lorenzo Vincenzo (above right), in order to instill some confidence into her daughter’s soccer team. Complications and hilarity presumably ensue.

I first noticed this 5'11" Texan (she’s hard to miss) in two films by Tim Burton – she was a small town Southern beauty in Big Fish (2003), and in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), she played one of her defining parts, the stop-at-nothing mother of a champion gymnaste. In Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg, 2008), she played "Raylene," the wife - and sister - of a hip, white trash, trailer park resident.

Pyle has also been active in theater (currently appearing on Broadway in Boeing-Boeing) and television. In the first season of Heroes, she played a Las Vegas showgirl, a villainess with a hidden agenda. Last week, I was enchanted by her performance in the Season Premiere of Pushing Daisies as a (once again) ruthless honey magnate and spokesmodel named "Betty Bee."

I haven’t seen Soccer Mom yet, but I’m hoping it’s as least as entertaining as Faris’s House Bunny. As a true "termite artist" (a term coined by Manny Farber), Pyle in her best roles has an offbeat bitchy edge which I fervently hope is not sacrificed here for the benefit of some putative "warmth."

CALL HER SAVAGE! Set your timer...

If you get FoxMovies (and you might and not even know you do, so it's worth checkin') you should keep a Tivo button open for CALL HER SAVAGE which plays this Thursday at 6 AM eastern standard time. Then you should burn it to a DVD-R and dress it up pretty and wear it out slowly over years of extended play.

I don't have my law books handy but I've a feeling this was one of the films that really burnt Joseph Breen up good and got the code going; next to Mae West there was no one so daringly sexual in cinema, more beguiling, crazy and wild as a hatter, than Clara Bow. If you're not one for silent films (most of Bow's output), CALL HER SAVAGE is your chance to really understand what "it's" all about; it's in sound. Touching on all the "woman's picture" issues as if running around the bases to home plate, the film starts out with Clara's grandfather, a wildcat mountain man who sleeps with a load of lassies as he leads a wagon train west through Indian-covered Texas. Then one of his ill-begotten daughters grows up and gets left behind too often by her traveling rancher husband and gets "comforted" by a stoic Native American with whom she doth beget Clara Bow. The rancher, ever so dour, doesn't realize that's why a daughter presumably from his own boring loins could ever be so wild. And wild? She goes around acting like John Belushi--she can smash a good guitar--in Animal House, but even sexier! Just seeing her wrestle with a big dog is amazing or whip a half-breed, but when she tussles with Thelma Todd? You will want to gouge out your eyes and keep them on the mantle just as they are, that image still burnt in the retina, cuz you know it will never be that good again.

The weird trippy energy of Bow makes her ahead of her time even then -- she moves from emotion to emotion in the same "totally there" way as someone would on psychedelics, but she's like that all the time. She's one of those in-the-moment bad influence trouble girls who you meet for five minutes and throw your small town home life away to follow her penniless and barefoot into the desert, and come weeks back later broke, drug addicted and insane from syphlis and announce: "I regret nothing!" Don't you regret either, pilgrim! SAVAGE isn't out on DVD and never was on VHS. This is your chance. Wait, before you blame me if you don't like it: it's not THAT good. It's not very good at all really, but it's fuckin' great.

Semiology of the Wink, Part III

Another classic enigmatic wink comes in the stalwart late night horror favorite, ANACONDA (1991), starring Ice Cube, Jennifer Lopez and Jon Voight.

Voight has a blast playing a Quint-like snake-stalking maniac who gets eaten up and later spit out by a giant anaconda. Drkpitt at Double Action reports:

Voight's crushed, twisted, partially digested body is regurgitated by the snake right in front of Lopez. As she screams in horror, Voight's suave, debonair character still manages to wink at her with his left eye since he feels that she must find him even more irresistible now.

What more need be said about the symbolic resonance of the wink? The ultimate in conspiratorial inclusiveness, the wink transcends subject and object, releasing both for a split second from the constraints of time and space, revealing all attachment and worry to be folly. Voight's wink in ANACONDA especially seems to invite a special metatextual reading: the actor commenting to the fans on his day spent wrapped in special effects goo: "Hey, it's a living." and simultaneously in the film's diegesis: "Why worry about the big bite, Baby? Come on in, the digestive tract's fine." Also, finally and most deliciously, the wink is a meaningless flourish, an unquantifiable signifier, as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa's smile.

Semiology of the Wink - Part 2

As long as we're discussing the semiology of the wink, here is the ultimate evil wink, the wink of Fritz Lang's 1926 Metropolis fembot, unforgettably mimed by 16-year-old Brigitte Helm, the slow knowing shutting of the metal eyelid that says to flesh-and-blood mankind, "You are so fucked!"

Semiology of the Wink

Confession time. I HATE it when people wink at me. It always feels like an unearned, forced attempt at intimacy – especially when the person is some celebrity whom I have not even met (like Lindsay Lohan or Sarah Palin, above). A wink says, "You and I share a naughty little secret," when, in fact, the person doing the winking has most likely never shared a damn thing with me and just wants to be excused for (get away with) something. No one with whom I have actually been intimate has ever winked at me. They don’t need to.

I find it equally annoying when someone who is not a friend addresses me as "my friend." I don’t think I have to explain why this is bothersome. The inherent hypocrisy is self-evident.

Here’s one exception to my I-hate-winks credo – in the comics drawn by R. Crumb, a character will occasionally look directly at the reader and wink, usually in the last panel, after the character has done something particularly sociopathic. In this context I find the wink excusable - funny even - because the implied request for complicity and forgiveness is grotesquely out of proportion to whatever it is the character has just done (e.g., stabbed someone in the heart with a fork).

Another exception - in the 1932 film, Me and My Gal, starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, and directed by Raoul Walsh, an old character actor (J. Farrell MacDonald) sticks his broad Irish face into the lens and, looking directly at the audience, winks and invites us to "Come on in!" at which point the camera follows him into a room where some kind of neighborhood party is taking place. Sure, the breaking of the fourth wall in Walsh’s movie is startling and grotesque, but it’s also warm and funny, and consistent with the loose, improvisatory feeling of the film. Again, the wink is a request for intimacy, but given the general likeability of Walsh’s characters, we are more than willing to comply with the request.

New film starring VP Candidate Joe Biden?

I usually shy away from film rumors, much preferring the certainty of a finished product to idle speculation, but I came across a very intriguing poster design this morning in my wanderings...


Oh, the questions this raises. Documentary or fiction drama? Will Obama make an appearance as a firm-but-fair boss? And who's making it? The use of the Futura font suggests Wes Anderson may be signed on to direct...now that's a follow-up to The Darjeeling Limited!

Another blogger may or may not have found a still from the upcoming film, you be the judge. Personally, it looks to me like another "Photoshop hoax," as wikipedia calls it (I, of course, had never heard of this computer graphics application before reading the wiki page).

Robin Wood Retires

Everyone who writes about film can name other writers about film who have influenced them. For me, the big three are Andrew Sarris, Raymond Durgnat, and Robin Wood. Wood, author of the seminal Hitchcock’s Films [Revisited] and numerous other works, and whose all-time favorite films include four by Max Ophuls (Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Reckless Moment, Le Plaisir, Madame de...) two by Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby, Rio Bravo) and three by Leo McCarey (Duck Soup, Ruggles of Red Gap, and Make Way for Tomorrow) is now 77 years old, and has retired from teaching at York University in Toronto in order to write his autobiography.

I look forward to reading it.

Via The Manitoban.