Shatner Interprets Palin

Oh, the power of *acting*. To start with apparent nonsense and carry it into the realm of beauty and truth. Take it away, Mr. Shatner.

We Got Announcements

Herewith is a new occasional announcement entry for various and sundry doings by Bright Lights writers and friends that may interest readers.

First, our pal Bob Moricz, future reviewer of the notorious "pink films" and auteur of the wild, Kucharesque indie Palace of Stains (reviewed here, is back with an intriguing new feature called BUMPS. It's premiering as (appropriately enough) a one-night stand on Thursday, July 30, at the legendary Clinton Street Theatre in Portland, Oregon, at 9:00 p.m. Below is the youtube vid and the author's statement.



BUMPS is based on the Gloucester High School teen pregnancy controversy which made national headlines in July of 2008. It is not a direct representation of the events. The headlines were merely a diving board into a pool of cinematic possibilities.

I recruited the actors through a local ad. Once the cast was assembled, the actors received the guidelines and motivations for their characters, list of scenes, and the dramatic arc of the story. No dialogue was scripted. I am a 35 year old man. There is no way I can possibly write for teen girls. That’s just not my world. I figured the actors (ages ranged at the time of shooting from 16-19) would be way better at coming up with their own dialogue.

I wanted real spontaneity. Any script for this story would have been totally phony. I trusted the actors to use their own ideas and experiences, giving them a strong investment in the film. This gives the picture kind of like a documentary feel. It’s very intimate and personal. Almost uncomfortably so. I think they all basically played themselves.

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Next up, Greg Ford, the noted critic and animator whose exegesis of Tex Avery enchanted and enthralled us, is the star of a witty vid riffing on Tom Gammill's "Learn to Draw" series.

Here's the video along with Greg's take, excerpted from his email:



Check out the "LEARN TO DRAW with Tom Gammill" spots on You Tube, specifically the Number Seventeen episode guest-starring yours truly (with Ronnie Scheib in the role of "the great Polish animator"). I was attempting to pull off a self-satirical "Porky’s Preview"-type piece, except that it’s mostly live-action and makes the current rotten state of the economy part of the joke. The running gag of LEARN TO DRAW is that Tom is a sorta self-deluded comic-strip artist (everybody hates his family-friendly strip, which is called "The Doozies"). In episode #17 which I kinda co-wrote and –directed, Tom hires "Greg Ford" to create a feature-length film adaptation of the strip called "The DOOZIES Movie," and hilarity ensues.

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Finally, regular Bright Lights contributor Erich Kuersten has been running a fascinating blog devoted to "acid movies" on his essential "Acidemic" blog. Under the Volcano and The Trip are, respectively, numbers 21 and 20 on this list that we predict won't end soon in our happily drug-addled cutlure. Erich brings his distinctive brand of "grab that zeitgeist!" critique-making to many of the usual suspects — including Psych-Out, one of our favorites from the golden age of such movies — but perhaps you can surprise him by suggesting he tackle an obscure, perhaps subtly "acid" movie that has somehow escaped his compound eye!

A Couple of Bagheads

Saw a couple baghead movies over the weekend and am still sleeping with the lights on. What's so scary about a bag over a head? Who knows, but it works. I should preface by saying I've lived in Manhattan since 1993 for just this reason. Bagheads aren't scary in New York, unless they come to your Halloween party uninvited and you realize you don't know them and they wont take off their mask and are big as houses, which happened to me once. But in general, the city is too noisy to be scary, so whenever I go up the Hudson to stay over somewhere for a woodsy weekend, I try to bring sleeping pills and a white noise machine. Without those, I'm up all night freaking out over every little twig snap in a hundred yard radius of my guest room bed.

This trip, not only did I forget both those proclivities, we rented THE STRANGERS and BAGHEAD for a double bag-headed bill. Max went off to his lavish bedroom around midnight and I was left to fend for myself. I was up until 5 AM, furiously reading Farley Granger's breezy biography "Include Me Out" until the sky grew light and I knew I was safe from bagheads and their enviable good luck when it comes to picking helpless victims.

The first film of the evening and the scariest was THE STRANGERS, starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. I won't spoil the plot but let's just say it's atmospheric thanks to first-time writer-director Bryan Bertino and his ace DP, Peter Sova (DONNIE BRASCO). But as far as writing good screenplays, Bertino has a ways to go: the movie is infuriating (as in you scream "what a pair of idiots!" a lot) and full of cliched coincidences and details that lead nowhere.

For all that, STRANGERS gets a lot of things right - though everything it gets right was stolen out of HALLOWEEN. (Bertino probably assumed none of us had seen that minor little entry in the slasher genre). The score doesn't register the proper note of orchestral panic when a baghead appears in the shadowed corner of the wide-screen frame and other times pounds you into submission on a false alarm. That's the way it oughta be.

It's good to see Tyler with round ears again, and though she is looking a little worse for wear, it suits her character, until she starts cringing and crying and creeping around on all fours because she can't run three feet without tripping and cowering like the whole "final girls got the power" trip rolled right past her back in the slasher 80's (when she was just knee-high to a Jagger-lipped grasshopper). Speedman even manages to get his hands on a shotgun which was stashed away at the cabin by his hunter father, with plenty of shells, but he's nonetheless powerless against a baghead with an axe and two unarmed, zonked-out chicks in cute Halloween masks. If a Claude Chabrol or Michael Haneke was at the helm something bourgeoisie-critique-ish might have come of all this, but instead we just get bags... and masks... on heads and an ominous "this might be true" prologue by the same voiceover guy who did the same thing for TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

There's a great shot in the 1968 original of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, when Barbara suddenly realizes she's unarmed and runs back into the kitchen and grabs the knife like it's a lifeline in a shitstorm shipwreck. The protagonists in STRANGERS could surely have benefited from seeing it. Liv drops the one good knife she finds almost immediately, preferring to cry and cringe and appeal to the mercy of her attackers rather than rummaging around for some fighting spirit (she even picks up and puts down the empty champagne bottle, of which there is almost no better weapon since it's thick glass hence a good club and makes a great jagged edge if broken). It's hard to root for people who refuse to revert to Wes Craven-style savagery to save their own skins and when Speedman tells Liv to "Wait here" with the three attackers surrounding the place while he runs away "to get help," you begin to root for the bad guys because its clearly a kind of Darwinian natural selection; at any rate, it's an out from the tension, until it's time turn off the lights and go to bed.

It's nicely photographed however, much nicer than the next baghead film of the evening, the digital video BAGHEAD, which stars Steve Zissis and Ross Patridge and the talented and beautiful Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller as their easily impressed girlfriend friends.


There really should be more bags going around in this film, especially in the painful light of High Def, in which husky chucklehead Steve Zissis gets many an unflattering close-up. I found myself having to block him with my hand, the way one might block kissing scenes or gore, because I am sensitive. It makes me mad that our screenplay seems to think a hot, thin, addled chick like Greta Gerwig should be peer-pressured into dating a weak body-imaged endormorph just because he's "nice" and "funny." I mean, where are we, Mars? Get these people some bags... stat! And I mean a good bags, like from Prada or Maxinqay, that's how you impress a lady!

These four characters play a tiresome blame game wherein they go to a cabin to write a screenplay but it's really an excuse for Chad (Zissis) to try and score with Michelle (Gerwig), who is really there to try and steal Matt (Ross Partridge) from his girlfriend (Elise Muller). Matt uses Michelle's attraction to him to guilt trip her into feeling like she has to sleep with Chad, all of which, as any hep person knows, means he is really just an insecure ego-tripper using his friend as a grenade. All this is not unnoticed by Matt's "on again-off again" girlfriend (Elise Muller) who questions him about it like she's his mother? Answer me! They all buy into each others guilt trips in a tiresome reality TV kind of way most amoral New Yorker hedonists would scoff at. If that's intentional, it's brilliant, but then we must ask: to what end? These people are hopelessly lost in their navels and, just as in STRANGERS, fold into fetal position at the first sign of a bag on a head (although pictured acting brave with a bat, Matt chickens out when it's time to smash his baghead).

It's billing as a "festival favorite" is understandable for three reasons: 1) there is a legitimately scary Blair Witch-esque middle segment, which works because the acting suddenly gets much better. 2) It has a good message: any bunch of friends with a camcorder and a couple of paper bags can make their own damned movie, so long as they are willing to expose their friends to very real dangers. 3) Greta Gerig is damned cute, and she alone seems to have figured out how to make her dialogue sound natural: act stoned. In fact she'd have been great as one of the masked killers in THE STRANGERS!

While I'm happy to report I survived my night abroad, the only piece of pop culture I can really recommend after my grueling experience is Farley Granger's excellent book. Talk about a perfect hunk of man: gorgeous, talented, bisexual and a lover of good food and musicals: he was friends with a whole slew of amazing show types from Leonard Bernstein to Franco Zeffirelli to Noel Coward. Riding along with Granger down memory lane is as bag-proof a way to spend the wee-wee hours of the night as one could ask for. I'd have been dead without him. The man had the balls to walk away from his dysfunctional parents, his dysfunctional studio head (Sam Goldwyn) and live his dream as a Broadway actor. And he remembers every great meal he ever had. In a slasher-filled world, Granger's book remains proof that one can live happy and baghead free, just stop agonizing over shoddy guilt-trips and bullshit self-esteem issues, be gorgeous and talented...and never be afraid to swing.

Two More for the Movie Bookshelf

Having already submitted a list of ten to Movieman’s Movie Bookshelf meme, a “gathering of all the movie books that influenced, enlightened, and excited me, you, and everyone else,” I was delighted to read his master list of books submitted to him by all the bloggers who participated in the meme - not only delighted, but inspired to add two more books that no else mentioned and which I probably should have included in the first place as “runner-ups.”

The first is a book that had a huge impact on me as a fledgling film buff.
Classics of the Foreign Film, A Pictorial History by Parker Tyler (1967) is a chronological history of the foreign film consisting of 75 seminal titles described by Tyler in nicely photo-illustrated essays of roughly 3 to 6 pages each. As you can see above, the films he selected were now-canonical classics such as – from top to bottom - Rashomon (Kurosawa), La Dolce Vita (Fellini), Potemkin (Eisenstein), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene), Les Enfants du Paradis (Carné), and The Blue Angel (Von Sternberg). He also included several British films. Tyler was not an auteurist as such. He did not subscribe to the “social importance” school of film criticism that was fashionable at the time. Tyler was unique in emphasizing the relationship of film to dream. He was also one of the few critics of his era to champion experimental filmmaking. Thus, he included among his foreign classics a number of avant-garde films such as Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’or, and Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet. For a cinephile just starting out, Tyler provided a great guide to what-needed-to-be-seen.

The second is a recent book, the last work – posthumously published – of Raymond Durgnat.

A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ by Raymond Durgnat (2002) was originally intended to be one of the little volumes in the BFI Film Classics series, but what Durgnat did with the film was much too long and complex to published in that constricted form. A Long Hard Look is an incredibly ambitious book, a shot-by-shot, line-by-line analysis, from beginning to end, of Hitchcock’s Psycho - a film that certainly deserves that kind of close reading. Durgnat also discusses many larger issues that go beyond individual shots and scenes. Offhand, I can’t think of any major film writer who has attempted something that ambitious, except perhaps Durgnat himself, who published a long, almost-as-close reading of Vidor & Selznick’s Duel in the Sun in a 1970s issue of Film Comment. To give you a flavor of the book, here are a few short samples from its first 37 pages:

“By playing the audience, through ‘pure film’, Hitchcock’s great love, Psycho works through suggestion, through atmosphere, not stating ideas, but generating them, in the minds of the audience.”

Re Bernard Herrmann’s score: “its nervous quality owes much to its being all strings, played percussively. But its quiet, reflective moments, its evocation of thought indistinctly ‘stirring’, are just as interesting as its shrill attacks.”

Re the Sam/Marion necking scene: “Visually, it’s dominated not by anatomies, but by hands, his as much as hers, feeling with tender, restless speed the other’s shoulders, neck, face and mouth, while eyes lock on eyes.”

“What’s disquieting is that, as Marion’s lips nibble Sam’s, she murmurs words of dissatisfaction, of edgy negotiation, of despair. (This links with Notorious, where the lovers never stop necking, while also scheming.)”

Countering the idea that Marion’s death is some kind of punishment for sexual misbehavior: “In Psycho, Marion’s death makes no moral sense at all; her fate is in every way ‘absurd’; that’s part of the film’s punch.”

“Sam fondling bed-linen anticipates Norman’s daily linen-changing”

“Pointless, narrative-wise, is a quick shot of the sandwich Marion forgot, amidst a mucky litter of a meal. It’s an ‘atmosphere’ shot; almost, indeed, a metaphor, an emblem, for lunch-hour love as … fast food.”

And so on.

For Hitchcock fans – or Durgnat fans – A Long Hard Look is a must.

LAST MISTRESS ALERT!

Not available on DVD because IFC is sometimes morons, buying the rights of independent films just to make sure no one ever gets to see them, Catherine Breillat's 2007 film, THE LAST MISTRESS, starring Asia Argento is playing on Sundance Channel tomorrow night at 1:30 AM.

There will probably be more showings on that channel (I already missed the first) but if you're an Asia Argento or Breillait fan, this is a tivomatic must. There's still a film missing from the Asia triple play of last year's Cannes, and I'm referring of course to the stripper tales movie made made Abel Ferrara. Keep watching the tivoplex!

Fellini, Michael Jackson, and La Voce della Luna (1990)

In America, the 1960s were the golden age of the foreign film. Film directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais were considered “superstars,” and would-be hipsters young and old (especially young) flocked to their movies. All of that changed in the decades that followed. Many of the later films of Antonioni, Godard, Bergman, Resnais, et al. were never even released in the United States.

So it was with Italian director, Federico Fellini. In the 1960s, he directed some of the foreign film's greatest hits – La Dolce Vita, 8½, Juliet of the Spirits, and Fellini Satyricon – but his final completed film, 1990’s La Voce della Luna (“The Voice of the Moon”), never found an American distributor, notwithstanding that it starred Robert Benigni who had already appeared in some American movies. Even after the huge critical and popular success of Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), La Voce della Luna remained undistributed.

There are reasons for this. Even though La Voce della Luna is superior to many of Fellini’s later movies (e.g., And the Ship Sailed On), it is one of his darkest films. At this point in his artistic life, Fellini appeared to see no way out, not the celebration of earthly pleasure (eroticism) as in Juliet of the Spirits - certainly not religion. This is the closest Fellini ever came to pure nihilism. Benigni gives a restrained (yes, you heard me right, restrained!) performance as a schizophrenic poet wandering through our mad modern world – much as the hero of Fellini Satyricon wandered through the world of Ancient Rome. Occasionally, he is joined by a fellow “madman” (Paolo Villaggio), but neither of the “madmen” are sentimentalized the way Giulieta Massina was sentimentalized in La Strada. They are essentially lonely, tormented souls.

The image of a world gone to hell is crystallized in the film’s most memorable sequence, a frenzied crowd dancing at night to a Michael Jackson song (“The Way You Make Me Feel”) in an open town square. The scene is played for irony. The dancers are so frenetic, they see no difference between the schizophrenic Benigni character and themselves - he blends right in. The disco music can be read as a symbol of the modern consumer capitalism that Fellini loathed.

Yet Fellini’s use of the Michael Jackson song in this sequence lends itself to another kinder reading. As Fellini surely knew, Jackson was also a “mad poet” who, unlike the schizophrenic poet hero of La Voce della Luna, achieved popularity and commercial success, but, like the Benigni character, remained fundamentally isolated. So, in the midst of the scene's chaos, one isolated man-child (Jackson) sings while another (Benigni) dances.

In the end, I don’t think Fellini saw any significant difference between his madmen, himself, and the rest of the world. In La Voce della Luna, he regards us all compassionately as idiots and autists, yearning for an unattainable moon.

Ed Wood Blogathon: Screwy Details in THE NIGHT OF THE GHOULS

It's a shame that Ed Wood's last non-skin film, NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959), had to go unseen all through the prime time of Wade Williams' TV horror package. It was also never released theatrically, so there's no original movie poster, just video cover art. Williams coughed up the lab fee Wood could never afford and resurrected it in time for the age of video and the Image DVD is too clear. The print looks amazing so you can examine every detail of the sound stage electrical wiring and dingy prop and dressing rooms; you can follow along with Criswell's eyes as he looks offscreen right to the cue card, reads it, winces, and then, pulling himself together moment by drunken moment, endeavors to read and address the camera at the same time, uttering in his honeyed tones the story of "The Threshold people" who dwell in "twilight time." You can see the sheer flimsiness of the plywood panel walls that make up every set (aside from the actual sound stage walls), and the bags under the eyes of the vet players.

Once Valda Hansen shows up as "The White Ghost," in a beautiful white gown and long blonde wig, all is well. She's like the collapsing point between Vampira and Dolores Fuller and she's hotter than.... well, Fuller anyway. When she acts in close-up it's like watching a whole dramatic theater group in action -- her eyebrow twitches, eyes bulge, mouth does pirouettes and flashes long beautiful canine teeth. There's even a link to MESA OF THE LOST WOMEN in her awesome fingernail waving action. The top acting honors go to Kenne Duncan--a Republic western heavy--as Dr. Acula, a bunco squad's wet dream of a phony spiritualist employing all the old gags: trumpets on wires, slide-whistles, audio hum, guys dancing in sheets, and a blackfaced member of Devo going "Mongo Mongo Mongo" in a low pitch-shifted voice. Awesome.

Anyone who remembers making haunted houses in the rec room basement and leading cocktail-addled parents through them blindfolded on Friday nights, or going to the Jaycees haunted houses, or trick or treating, or those haunted house rides with the dinky chicken wire covered cubby holes that light up to show a scary mask and emit a loud laugh at local carnivals, anyone in short who knows the giddy thrill of wearing a sheet and waving a skull around going "wwowooooo" will love NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. All others, bevare... take... care.

Where the sun is seen to rise
and the sun is seen to set.

Often called an uofficial sequel to PLAN NINE, NIGHT OF THE GHOULS is really a sequel to BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, with the random exterior of a house (possibly a corner of the sound stage?) standing in for "The Old Willow's place." Paul Marcos as Kelton the cop returns however from PLAN NINE. But the Tor Johnson zombie is from BRIDE, not PLAN NINE. Are you confused? This isn't rocket science, it's motion picture magick! Let us go the resurrection chamber, where the sun is seen to rise. And the sun is seen to set.

GHOULS also contains one of my favorite Wood moments, the infamous iron railing. Anyone whose done acting at cheap old sound stages or theaters knows that railing as leading up to the group dressing room. Criswell breathes down the cautiously investigating Lt. Bradford's neck with his helicopter parent narration:

A staircase he remembered from long ago.
(touches railing)
He remembers the cold, clammy sensation of the railing. Cold, clammy, like the dead!
(holds railing and looks pensive)
Yes, it really was as he remembered it. Perhaps colder, more startling!

The old soundstage where GHOULS occurred had a set "not much bigger than a phonebooth" according to assistant Ronnie Ashcroft, which perhaps explains why the action moves into prop rooms, janitor closets, dressing rooms and dubbing booths. Ever a man for detail, Ed makes sure each room has at least one skull, full skeleton, or in the film's one truly creepy and original scene, a mannequin. Dr. Acula's phony seances--it turns out--revive the actual dead, which he's quite shocked about, since they all resemble used car salesmen.

This is impossible! I hired actors to play my dead. You're not actors!

He was so right. But the bad acting here is uniform and therefore Brechtian/good as well as bad. This is truly the "Twilight Time" picture for Wood and his shaggy crew. His last waltz, awash in poverty row defeat, with 16-year old Valda Hansen providing the only glimmer of hope for Z-Hollywood's future as she screams and waves those magic fingers. The nervous, whiny cop so touchingly played by Paul Marco on the other hand, empties his cowboy revolver at her and another unarmed woman--the black ghost. Two ghosts in one movie--shot at without cause--and that's not even mentioning Lobo, his face scarred from the fire of the last film, not unlike the AMAZING COLOSSAL BEAST! Later, after getting knocked out by Lobo and put in a coffin, Kelton is reborn, his initiation into manhood complete with the symbolic tap out, smoking a cigarette and hanging out backstage all mellow, like a real rock and roller. It's his spiritual rebirth and now he's a cop unafraid of girls in white dresses. A fitting epilogue for the story of a cop called Kelton.

Now I will tell you a tale of the threshold people... so astounding some of you may faint. This is a story of those in the twilight time. Once human, now monsters in the land between the leaving and the dead. Monsters to be pitied! Monsters to be despised!

No, Criswell, not despised. These fleabitten troupers win our hearts the way that scrawny Xmas tree wins Charlie Brown's. The love of cinema is the love of the dark, after all, giving up a sunny afternoon in the park for a cold, dark matinee without a second thought, and these monsters reflect that unhealthy habit. Picked last for teams, pushed into the mud by older kids, rejected from central casting, stripped down to the poverty row bone but all the more beautiful for it. We take comfort in each other and for Wood's part, he delivers the goods: ghostly girls with long nails, deformed Swedish wrestlers, old cowboys in turbans, skeletons, skulls, and the best stock footage the man called Wood can steal.

For my other Ed Wood posts click here
For the Full Ed Wood Blogathon roster at Cinemastyles, click here.

José Mojica Marins Meets the Spirit of Ed Wood in the World of Coffin Joe

Thank you, Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, for giving me an excuse to write about José Mojica Marins, the Brazilian screenwriter, director, and star of films every bit as quirky and original as those of the incomparable Wood.

To be fair, Marins combines Wood with equal parts William Castle and Luis Buñuel, even - in the color clip above - a bit of Mario Bava.

Like Wood in Glen or Glenda, Marins plays his own lead. Just as Maila Nurmi, one of the stars of Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, created a performing alter ego, the goth horror hostess known as Vampira, Marins created a performing avatar, the mad undertaker, Coffin Joe (Zé do Caixão in the original Brazilian Portuguese). Marins’ films, like Wood’s, are steeped in the atmosphere of the American horror movie - everything from the Universal Studios classics to the Monogram cheapies - but with a distinctly Latin American flavor.

However, Marins does not just make horror movies. As Wood combined documentary with wild experimentation in Glen or Glenda, Marins combines documentary with outrageous experimental filmmaking in the LSD-inspired Awakening of the Beast (1970). Marin’s characters often address the camera directly, just as Lugosi did in Glen or Glenda, or Criswell in Plan 9 and Night of the Ghouls. In his role as Coffin Joe, Marins spouts a blasphemous Nietzschean philosophy with so much conviction that it’s hard to tell where Marins leaves off and Coffin Joe begins.

The two clips above are from This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), the second film in what has come to be known as "The Coffin Joe Trilogy." The first clip with its cardboard walls, fake props, and phony-looking makeup, falls squarely into Wood territory - Coffin Joe and his mute assistant are like scientist Lugosi and assistant Tor Johnson in Wood’s Bride of the Monster. To the extent it works, it’s because Marins, like Wood, takes this stuff seriously.

The second clip from the same film - at a point when black and white suddenly bursts into lurid color - is something else entirely. Marins as Coffin Joe is dragged to Hell where the Devil, not surprisingly, is also played by Marins. Joe, the murderous undertaker, wanders in terror until he is confronted by the damned souls of the women he has wronged. There are no subtitles. None are needed. This is eight and half minutes of pure visionary filmmaking.

Hiding the Salami in Plain Sight

A Royal Scandal (1945) is an Ernst Lubitsch production directed through - rather than by - Otto Preminger. It stars Tallulah Bankhead as Empress Catherine of Russia, aka Catherine the Great. It is not, however, a work of history.

It is a sex comedy - one in which sex is never mentioned, much less shown. Lubitsch's trick, known to his contemporaries as "the Lubitsch touch," was to evoke the idea of sex in coy, subtle, and suggestive ways. For example - somewhere in the frame above, the filmmakers have hidden a phallic symbol. Can you find it?

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One can't help wondering whether this bit of censor-defying decor might have inspired similar phallic fun in the Russian sequence of Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975).

PM Gets Box Set From POTUS

According to the U.K. Guardian, President Barack Obama, upon leaving Great Britain, gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a very special present, a box set of 25 classic American films (see above), which the Guardian snarkily describes as "a gift about as exciting as a pair of socks."

Well, maybe to a non-film buff. But to a cinephile like myself this looks like a pretty good selection. Two Fords. A couple Hitchcocks. A little Chaplin. A little Keaton. 2001. The Wizard of Oz. What's not to like?

Now if the situation were reversed - if I were Barack Obama and somebody gave me a box set containing Gone With the Wind - I might conceivably be offended, because I consider that film to be a little, you know ... racist. However, I don't see that the Prime Minister has anything to complain about. Unless he already has all these films.

What did the Prime Minister give the President? An "ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet."

Via Wonkette.

Procedurama!

Public Enemies is the latest in an ongoing parade of "Procedural" bios, a newfangled trend wherein biographies are boiled down to various expensive short scenes blurred together. The movie that results becomes less a narrative than a string of tabloid tableaux: true events that may or may not add up to anything depending on your mood. Recent procedural bios include: Zodiac, American Gangster, The Aviator and the original and best, Goodfellas (actually the real original would probably be "The Naked City"). They edit the thing together in a steady flow of historically accurate violence and hazy sex, and let the characterization arise (they hope) naturally from the events instead of going out on a limb and being true crazy.

Depp, of course, is amazing; effortlessly shape-shifting and disappearing in plain sight, and looking like he's having a good time doing it. Depp's never once lost his wit and penchant for moral ambiguity. Why can't Christian Bale remember he was in American Psycho ? Bale spends the film acting like he's trying not to cry, like the world stole his lunch money. The good part is, he's not talking in that hoarse voice he used in The Dark Knight, though his southern drawl is just as repressive. Bale can be macho fey and morally bankrupt as well as Depp if he wants, but Bale's in that minimalist, sullen pupa stage that so many of these big stars get into, which one day breaks open to reveal a beautiful Jack Nicholson-esque butterfly, ala Tom Cruise, in Tropic Thunder., it they're lucky. If not, they wind up chasing trends in a long tail coat and wispy goatee, ala Leo Di Caprio. Can you see Leo or Bale ever dancing in a fat suit? Maybe one day... for now they're wrapped tight in the choking silken strands through which poutiness glints in their bedeviled eyes and they convince themselves it's gravitas.

Back to the Procedural Syndrome: endlessly interesting to watch if done right (Scorsese, and Fincher, mainly) but just a lot of flashy, riveting nothing if done wrong. Michael Mann lives in it both ways, blowing your mind and leaving you feeling ripped off at the same time. His big problem in my mind is his refusal to get dirty. There's never a moment when Depp's shirt isn't freshly pressed and sharp as the snap of a gray fedora. He loves the shine on the old marble banks of Chicago; he loves them like the woods in Last of the Mohicans, but it's not as palpable here. Mann was working from a solidly crafted novel for Mohicans. Dillinger's life ultimately is not a cohesive narrative, but a gangster myth -- full of sound and fury and ultimately it's hard to care about someone who takes and takes and never gives. We love them if they gloat and live it up like Al Pacino and/or Paul Muni in Scarface, but merely showing up at a posh club and buying fur coats won't convince us you're alive, not the way James Cagney or Lawrence Tierney were alive. Nonetheless, if you like 1930s hats and overcoats for men, you will love Public Enemies.

I watched Manhattan Melodrama recently and its chilling to imagine Dillinger seeing such stunningly-lit electric chair hand-wringing--not knowing he would be dead before the next show. Clark Gable stars in Melodrama as a gambler who winds up facing the electric chair and he's as happy as a clam about it. Mann's clearly enthralled by characters who can look mortality square in the eyes and not flinch; and if you're that way too, you can have a nice paranoid meta moment watching Dillinger watch Gable go to his death. The question is, can Mann look life in the eyes and not feel the need to run out the door until it kindly leaves the room?

For all its swagger and big settings, Public Enemies isn't any more revealing about Dillinger's true character--or even more exciting overall--than the ultra-low budget PRC version, Dillinger, (1945), starring beloved Lawrence Tierney.

Even better them all is The Lady in Red, which tells the real underdog story here, the saga of one of those background whores (ignored in Mann's film) who turns out to be just as gutsy as Dillinger (he teaches her to shoot), played by Pamela Sue Martin! Instead of following true events, Corman's team just made the damn thing up and packed it with machine gun vengeance, screenwriter John Sayles' budding sociopolitical indignation, and good old fashioned sex appeal.

What I longed for after Public Enemies though was the warm humanism of Peckinpah or Nicholas Ray, or Coppola or even William Friedkin, where you could actually feel personal connections between people. In Peckinpah they might be dirty killers but they made big moist eye contact. They shared private jokes and laughed for no reason; they tested and teased, tossed 'em back and horsed around rather than just brooding taciturnly or smirking. People in Public Enemies always seem like they're in a bleak dystopia and after awhile all big-chinned Chicago guys in fedoras look alike. A ridiculously bushy mustache does not the Frank Nitti make, as they say. I longed for someone to ask, "What's the rumpus?" or pull out some rotgut or smoke a cigarette. Anything to lighten the confusing mix of serious gritty editing and blurred-in minor characters.

On the other hand, the movie feels like it's 40 minutes long, and yet its 2 1/2 hours. Right there, Mann must be doing something right. But the image I wanted to leave you with is something that will perhaps illustrate my point above about Peckinpah and soulful eyes. Take a look at Kris Kristofferson's eyes below in the album cover, then think about the eyes of our screen stars today... and then take your hand away from your face / now is the time for your tears.

Space Opera

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Swed takes a long look at some recent film and theater projects that have dealt with classical music - including The Soloist and Francis Coppola's Tetro - and concludes the most interesting of the lot is the Wooster Group's theatrical mash-up La Didone (bottom), which combines a 17th Century opera by Francesco Cavalli with the story and look of Mario Bava's 1965 pop design classic, Planet of the Vampires aka Terrore nello spazio (top):

"Pop culture is not wrong in looking at classical art as outsider art. When the pop people get reverent, they usually get sappy. It’s best to butt heads. Like elementary particles accelerating into each other, the art forms will more often than not blow up in your face. But now and then a brand-new particle emerges. That’s what 'La Didone' is."