THE SHINING RETURNS

The rumors that you may have heard floating around about a wide theatrical release of a restored version of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining were confirmed today by longtime Kubrick associate and the film's associate executive producer, Armen Karshargian, here in Burbank. Apparently buoyed by the box-office success of the special edition of The Exorcist back in September of 2000, studio executives, in conjunction with Karshargian and representatives of the Kubrick estate, revealed today that the film will be rushed into theaters to take advantage of the Halloween season and commemorate the film's 25th anniversary. (The release date was announced as October 24). The restored version will feature no added material, unlike the Exorcist rerelease, but some material has been recut slightly to conform to instructions found in the director's archives, reversing changes that were made in the wake of a less-than-satisfying sneak preview held in Lawrence, Kansas just two weeks before the film was originally released in May, 1980. "Fans of The Shining and Stanley's films may notice that some critical scenes play slightly differently," Karshargian said, adding that most changes could be equated to the difference between a "C" note on a musical scale and a C-sharp. "The scenes are still there and the film is recognizably what it has always been," Karshargian continued, "but the changes we initiated from Stanley's notes will hopefully have the effect he intended-- to expand the appeal of the film to a wider demographic and add a further frisson of terror to a few scenes that he always felt came off a little flatter than expected." Karshargian also noted that if the upcoming re-release of the restored version of The Shining does as well as expected, fans of the director's work can look forward to a similar revisiting of another Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon. "Stanley always imagined Lyndon's battle scenes as a bit more muscular and hallucinatory than what the studio had in mind when the film was originally released in 1975," claims the producer. If the project sees the light of day, Karshargian said, "expect a fully more visceral experience," which may utilize up to 45 more minutes of footage shot by Kubrick that he was forced to excise. Karshargian likens it to the work of another director familiar with the horrors of the battlefield: "I expect it'll end up looking a bit like an Oliver Stone film, but from footage shot 10 years before Stone ever exposed a frame of film as a director." The studio also made the trailer for the restored version of The Shining available today. You can see it here, but you'll need Quick Time.

UPDATE Oct. 1, 2:33pm: The Mysterious Adrian Betamax has directed me to a New York Times story about the creator of this recut Shining mini-phenomenon, Robert Ryang. You may have to register online to read it, however...

LOOKING FOR ALBERT BROOKS

There’s a new Albert Brooks comedy on its way, and a major Hollywood studio—Sony Pictures-- decided to get skittish and refused to release it unless Brooks changed the title. Brooks refused, Sony passed, and Warner Independent Pictures scooped it up for release early next year. The title? Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, about a stand-up comic (Brooks, playing, as he did in Real Life, Albert Brooks) who heads to the Middle East on a quest to discover just what it is that Muslims find funny. Personally, I think anything by Albert Brooks is automatically worth a look, although I admit I still haven’t seen his indifferently reviewed 1999 release The Muse. But Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times has seen the new movie and is perplexed, as is Brooks, by Sony’s sheepishness and the inevitable perception of the movie being a 90-minute knock on an ethnic/religious culture already routinely lampooned and misrepresented in worldwide pop culture. Goldstein chronicles the filmmaker’s attempts to get his movie released and understood during this particularly churned-up moment in history in his Tuesday “Big Picture” column entitled ”Funny Choices.”

THE IMPROPER AMBITIONS OF BRUCE LUNDY

Here’s a tip for any Bay Area-based SLIFR readers looking for a good live theater experience this weekend— Improper Ambitions: Two Women in the Paris Art World, a new production in the Theatre Rhinoceros at the Bella Union Theatre Company in San Francisco, has been getting some terrific reviews and will be closing its short run this weekend. The Bella Union Web site describes the play’s action thusly:

“From the doomed court of Marie-Antoinette to the radical Impressionist circle, two painters confront war, romance, and the French Academy in Paris. This exciting new play is based on the true lives of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the queen's favorite portraitist, and Berthe Morisot, one of the original Impressionists… Written by Bella Union company member Christine U'Ren, and featuring a delightful ensemble cast, this production brings to life such luminaries as Marie-Antoinette, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt.”

I haven’t been able to make it up north to see the play myself, but having seen several productions in the Bay Area over the past ten years or so featuring the work of actor Bruce Lundy* (who plays, among others, Degas, and who will soon, it seems, be adding the credit of producer to his already impressive resume with another upcoming theatrical project), I’d be willing to recommend seeing it based on his talent alone. Lundy has become one of the East Bay’s most respected and sought-after actors since entering the Bay Area theatrical scene over a decade ago; in powerful and inventive productions such as Taking Sides, A Man of No Importance, She Stoops To Conquer and his terrific turn as the Marlowe-esque noir alter ego of a frustrated writer in City of Angels, to name but a few, he has delivered a string of magnetic and thoughtful performances. If I were a betting man (and maybe I am), I’d say the odds are exceptionally good that Lundy, and the other members of the cast of Improper Ambitions, will deliver a engaging, enjoyable evening of theater. Catch it if you can—I wish I could.

* In the interest of full disclosure, I will now not-at-all reluctantly cop to the fact that Bruce Lundy is my best friend and has been for almost 30 years, and I’m thrilled to have some kind of forum to highlight the fine work he does on the Bay Area theater scene. Maybe next time I can deliver some good words before the onset of the closing weekend performances…

(Photo courtesy of the Bella Union Theatre Company)

WHICH FUCKED-UP GENIUS COMPOSER AM I?

I got this one from Rodger over at 8763 Wonderland: "Which Fucked-Up Genius Composer Are You?"

I would have guessed Louis Prima, or maybe Mahler,












but somehow, when it all shook out, I came up thusly...










"Shane MacGowan... unconsciously brilliant. You
can intelligently debate any topic from
theology, history, literature and philosphy...
though only while you're out of your skull on
booze."

Yeah, this is just about on par with the movie that best expresses my personality turning out to be Easy Rider. I can almost hear my friend Paul Reilly laughing his newly svelte Irish ass off. And what's that? I can hear my wife laughing...

But, as it happens, you too can be a Fucked-up Genius Composer! Just click here to find your sick-soulmate-of-song. And of course, report back what you find out. As for me, I have a very strong, sudden desire to go into my bathroom and vigorously floss...

FRIENDS FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE Part 2: PREACHER BEEGE

This is not, in fact, a picture of Preacher Beege-- as far as I know, she is not a pale wooden pew, and if she is, she's the most fun pale wooden pew I've ever posted a picture of. If there is a picture of herself somewhere amongst the many posts on her very personal, entertaining and occasionally moving blog, I am unaware of it. So the pew, from her blogger profile, will have to do...

I cannot remember with certainty how I stumbled across the eponymous blog Preacher Beege-- probably some random search, the blogging equivalent of channel surfing, in a moment of late night exhaustion or boredom. Beege, 30-ish, if I remember correcty, is a Lutheran minister who lived in Kansas when I started reading her blog, and who has since moved with her husband to Minnesota, where she is currently looking for a new church and at the same time enjoying not having one, all the better to dote on her no-longer newborn daughter, Linnea, fast approaching two years old.

After a short time, I began reading her often funny, and just as often cheerfully (and unexpectedly) profane, observations on life, motherhood, God and other obsessions with increasing interest-- this was the first personal diary-oriented blog I'd ever attempted to follow with regularity, and the experience was strangely like getting to know a character in a book or a sharply written screenplay. Only this character was a living, breathing human being. It was a public blog I was reading, but even so I was still peeking into someone's personal thoughts, and after a while it all started to feel, well, a little weird.

Then one day I checked in on Beege and found out she and her husband and daughter had just returned from a vacation in the Pacific Northwest. She even posted pictures from her time there, including a gorgeous shot of Cape Foulweather on the Oregon Coast, which served to make me wish intensely that I could be there and also gave me a good excuse to finally drop a comment and go from lurker to emerging cyber-friend.

It's hard to say how much Beege and I would have in common as friends in the three-dimensional world, but she's a terrific blog-pal-- full of spunk, unexpected perspectives, willingness to participate in the crazy questionnaires and other flotsam and jetsam (including Professor Wagstaff's little quiz) that are so much a part of the blogging universe, and most of all the refreshing enthusiasm of a young wife and mother who can't trumpet the loves of her life loudly enough-- I really like her generally exuberant attitude, as well as her willingness to let her readers in on darker emotions that a young woman, not to mention a young minister, might often try to disguise from public view.

She and I have traded comments on each other's blogs for several months now, but recently she gave me props in a recent post and used the occasion to ruminate on her three favorite films "in the spirit of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule." Well, in my eye, she did pretty well expressing her enthusiasm for three movies that probably aren't on too many cinephiles' top 100 lists, and in the process she honored my blog site and showed that its spirit is indeed a pretty easily accessible one. She had a much easier time, I'm sure, writing in the spirit of my site than I would have writing in the spirit of hers, even though some of my entries are fairly personal in the mode most familiar to her.

Since Beege's blog is better left daily appreciated than emulated, I thought I'd return the compliment in a more routine way-- throwing the spotlight on what she does so engagingly, tipping my hat to her as a way of saying thanks for being a friendly member of the small community of readers on this blog, and swapping top three movie titles with her. It seems to me Beege's choice of titles-- Happy, Texas, Beautiful Girls and Mystery, Alaska-- reveal a tendency to gravitate toward movies featuring depictions of extreme weather and a very specific sense of community. I have seen Beautiful Girls and found it intermittently entertaining, with a terrific performance by a young Natalie Portman, but ultimately a little too tidy and a touch creepy. I have not seen the other two-- I like Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam, so Happy, Texas has a leg up, but I will say I'm fonder of Alaskan weather than the whole Northern Exposure sensibility that radiates from the trailer for Mystery, Alaska, which I have seen.

So, here's my proposal, Beege. I'll rent Happy, Texas and Mystery, Alaska and watch 'em both, if you'll do the same with any or all of the three titles which have made recent surges into my personal top 10 that you haven't already seen. Assuming that you're at least considering the swap, here are the three titles:

1) Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) Sergio Leone's gorgeous, mournful and iconic masterpiece is a thrilling summing-up of an entire genre-- the American Western. In addition to the cast-against-type (and therefore most effectively cast) Henry Fonda as the movie's blue-eyed homicidal villain, Claudia Cardinale (never more beautiful or strong, and an anomaly in Leone's filmography--a central female character) and Charles Bronson as the harmonica-playing man with a secret, the movie boasts one brilliant set piece after another and, arguably, Ennio Morricone's finest work as a film composer. What can't be argued, it seems to me, is the status of the first ten minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West, including the presentation of the main titles, as the greatest opening sequence in a movie ever. When I get around to revisiting my top films of all time list, it seems likely that this movie has a good shot at displacing Nashville, which has been my number-one for about 20 years, at the top of the heap.

2) The Lady Eve (1941) One of those truly great movies that makes you realize that not only do they not make them like this anymore, "they" couldn't make another movie like this one even "they" wanted to. Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck star in Preston Sturges' virtually perfect screwball comedy-- Stanwyck's con artist sets upon bookish snake specialist Fonda as an easy mark and ends up literally falling for him, and he does a few hilarious pratfalls as well in the process of inadvertently upending her preconceptions about the boundaries of sexual attraction. Riotously funny, flawlessly scripted and executed, this is exhibit "A" in the case for Sturges as the premier writer and director of American film comedy.

3) Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) Dennis Price is Duke Louis Mazzini, denied official membership in the family D'Ascoyne when his mother dares to marry outside of their societal circles for love, not money or position. The duke retaliates by deciding to off all eight D'Ascoynes (each man, and woman, played by Sir Alec Guinness) that stand in the way of his ascension to the head of the family. So begins the pinnacle achievement of the British comedies produced by the Ealing Studios, perhaps the pitch-blackest black comedy that has yet been made. By the time you get to the conclusion of this pitilessly hilarious film, you'll have been exposed to the black heart of evil resting, perversely enough, in the chest of the film's protagonist, the character with whose moral outrage and sense of entitlement you'd be intended, in a more conventional film, to empathize, or at the very least understand. This is a movie that has the courage of its convictions as it pulls the carpet out from underneath your sympathies and never takes the easy way out, right up to its bracing, bitter and startling conclusion. And Guinness' distinctly oddball characterizations add up to much more than a casting stunt-- funny and compelling in and of themselves, they also pave the way for Peter Sellers' more celebrated multi-character work in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove...

There you have 'em. I'll go to Netflix right now and pony up for the two titles on your list, if you'll do the same with the three directly above. But movies or no, here's to you, Beege. Whatever it is you're feeding that little girl of yours, keep it up-- looks like she's turning out just fine! And good luck too on the job search, life in Minnesota, and finding out just what God has in store for you. If it's anything like the person I read regularly about on your blog, I suspect it's gonna be pretty good.

ON BEING A DODGER FAN IN THE FALL OF 2005

Once again it's my pleasure to refer you to Jon Weisman and Sunday's edition of Dodger Thoughts, in which he takes the opportunity to eloquently describe what he describes as "the loser's dividend," that is, the possibility of what baseball can be for a fan of a team whose sub-.500 season status is sealed, who have watched the Giants sleep for three-quarters of the schedule, only to wake up and play spoiler to the Padres' prospects for a division title and the already wounded pride of the Dodgers and their fans. It is now, until the end of the season on October 2, purely baseball for Dodger fans. Weisman describes attending two games this past week that were as enjoyable for him as watching them this past week on TV have been for me, regardless of the final result, and separate from all the worry over "will they or won't they?" This article is as close to a cherry on top of a disappointing season as there is likely to be, a season which began so strongly for the Dodgers, a season, as Vin Scully might say, in which the Dodgers rode the elevator from the penthouse to the cellar. Well, not quite the cellar, thanks to our friends in Colorado. But looking at how well the Rockies played the Dodgers this year, and how strong their largely young team looks to be in 2006, one shouldn't be taking any promises of there being that Denver cushion at the bottom of the National League West in 2006 with too much assurance. As Weisman writes in another column, Paul DePodesta's plan was never intended or expected to be a one-season cure-all, and certainly enough went wrong, with injuries, misbehavior and substandard ballplaying, to ensure that 2006 may be just as rough a ride. As the playoffs and the World Series approach, it's a good time to remember, all Fox Sports hype to the contrary, that what's at stake here is not of earth-shaking importance, and what we will be witnessing in October are not contests of gladiatorial pomp and circumstance, nor can they, with any good sense or sensitivity, be compared to war (though somebody with a considerable lack of sense will undoubtedly step up and do just that before the final out of the Series). It is simply, and with all its complexity, playoff implications or not, the wonderful game that Abner Doubleday probably did not invent, and to be able to see it in person on the major league level is a privilege in which many around the country cannot indulge. Los Angeles Dodger fans, join with fans of the Royals, the Devil Rays, the Giants (he said pointedly, even as the distance between them and first place is only three games), the Mets and every other team whose playoff hopes are now or soon will be officially dashed and just enjoy what the game has to offer. The road to 2006 begins in six days.

"WOULD YOU BELIEVE…?” Don Adams 1923-2005

I was five years old when Get Smart debuted on NBC in 1965. It was the first show I can remember loving and the rest of my family having little or no tolerance for—in other words, it was the first show that made me feel like I was hip to something they didn’t get; the first show that made me feel like I was s(S)marter than some of the older people around me; the show that introduced me to the excitement of liking something no one else did (maybe I would have been dismayed to fully understand that, in reality, the show was a huge popular hit from the start and twice won Emmys for best comedy series). It was also the show that introduced me to the name Mel Brooks. And, of course, it made Don Adams, as Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, my very first favorite TV hero, one who I imagined it would be fun to emulate in real life. (Would you believe that later in life, I missed getting my International Super-spy degree from DeVry by thi-i-i-is much, getting booted for not taking things seriously enough, and an inability to effectively employ the various levels of footwear communications technology?)

Don Adams was 82 years of age when he died of a lung infection late Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Adams had broken a hip a year ago and had been ill ever since, according his close friend and former agent Bruce Tufeld. Adams had a long career in TV after the end of Get Smart’s run but was never able to escape the long shadow cast by his brilliantly bumbling comic creation. He was a frequent TV talk show guest and guest star on shows like The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, and in 1980, he reunited with Barbara Feldon (Agent 99) for a Get Smart feature film, entitled The Nude Bomb, which performed up to its titular standard, both in critical circles and at the box office. Nevertheless, he headlined yet another Get Smart TV movie (Get Smart Again!) and a short-lived 1995 attempt to revive the character in another TV show called Get Smart, this time featuring Feldon as Agent 99, and Andy Dick as their equally bumbling son Zach.

Adams may have been occasionally frustrated by being linked so closely to Maxwell Smart, but it’s hard to imagine, from the staccato timing and gusto of his performances—shoe heel or not, he never phoned in an episode of Get Smart-- that he didn’t relish the knowledge that he was part of a genuine TV phenomenon, even before the days when Nick at Nite and TV Land would package nostalgia for the medium’s past and lacquer it with enough rose-colored sheen to make even the smelliest turd from the past look like a jewel. Get Smart never needed the nostalgia-fueled claims for greatness that such irony-laced treatment would eventually make for it and other shows of its time. A look back at it now makes clear that it was a fizzy, silly, witty kaleidoscope of comic insanity right from the start, and despite the pedigree of Brooks, Buck Henry and others who contributed to its success behind the scenes, it was Don Adams who made the show tick. In an age where every lousy TV show is available in boxed set after boxed set on DVD, here is a show, and a brilliantly sustained comic character, worthy of digital enshrinement. As we say good-bye to Don Adams, perhaps one day we’ll be able to say hello to a Get Smart collection that can stand as a testament to the show’s sharp writing as well the actor at its center, and the dazed and confused would-be master of espionage he created.

UPDATE 9/28 9:44 p.m.:

"I may never get to play with the Philharmonic, but on the other hand, is Leonard Bernstein licensed to kill?"
-- Maxwell Smart

In order to assure Blaaagh, and others who may have flushed it from their memories in self-defense, one quick click
here will take you to TV Guide, January 7, 1995, for all you'll ever need to know about Fox's ill-fated attempt to revive Get Smart. Oh, how I wish I could have forgotten about this one myself...

ZIYI ZHANG: CINEMA'S INSOLENT NEW EROTIC ICON

Several weeks ago, long before I'd seen 2046, I became transfixed by the signature image from that film-- Ziyi Zhang posing in a beautiful black cheongsam, arching her back slightly, hand on hip, and looking down just past the camera with a mixture of sexual precociousness and disdain. It ended up as desktop wallpaper on my computer at work (where it still reigns); my wife procured a beautiful glossy still of said image for me on eBay, far more than suitable for framing; and I have posted it twice already, once in conjunction with comments about the film, and once because I just wanted to. (I will not post it again, for fear of being labeled dangerously unbalanced, but I will direct you to it here, just in case scrolling down a few articles to find it is just a little too much physical activity for you at the moment.)

Not long after I put it on my work computer, I mentioned to my wife (who sits right next to me every day, toiling away at the same trade) that I believed the image would one day be seen as a great iconic image of the cinema, right up there with Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grating, skirt making for the heavens, in The Seven Year Itch. Fast forward a few weeks to this past Wednesday, when the Village Voice published an essay by Graham Fuller, Sunday arts editor at the New York Daily News and film columnist for Interview magazine, asserting, in a lovely and perceptive appreciation, that very status for the Ziyi Zhang still (which was, as Fuller informs us, not a still frame from the film, but a photograph shot on set during the filming by Hong Kong photographer and graphic artist Wing Shya).

Fuller goes back even further than Monroe to link the power of the Zhang pose with that of the iconic image of Marlene Dietrich from Josef von Sternberg's seminal classic The Blue Angel:

"There she stands then, in a spangled black cheongsam, a noirish totem of sexual aloofness, in her room, 2046, at Hong Kong's Oriental Hotel. Her upper lip is cast in shadow as it separates provocatively from its neighbor. Her neatly coiffed head is cocked slightly to her left at an angle that would seem quizzical if it didn't seem she knows all the damn answers (in fact, she has none). She has, meanwhile, arrayed herself in insolent contrapposto: Her right hand is spread on her right hip in such a way that it crooks the arm at a 90-degree angle at the elbow; her left hand caresses her abdomen with the scarlet-tipped fingers at 10 o'clock (much too early for bed in mid-'60s Hong Kong). This accentuates not the curve of her back, as the New York Times review headline euphemistically put it, but the prominence of her bust, which must be pressing painfully against her too tight sheath—a clear mark of masochism. The pose echoes Dietrich's akimbo stances in The Blue Angel and especially Sternberg's 1932 Blonde Venus. It's an advertisement, a challenge, and a taunt."

The rest of Fuller's essay is as intriguing and perceptive as that previous paragraph is evocative and profoundly observant. The author is right in suggesting that the image of Ziyi Zhang that has become indelibly associated with 2046, its meanings, its erotic power and its foreboding emotionalism espouses "the kind of tantalizing erotic mystery that movies themselves seldom project these days." That's one reason why it is worth seeking out the few remaining theaters playing 2046 as summer officially turns to fall (it has one more day-- today, Thursday, September 22-- at the Laemmle One Colorado Cinemas in Pasadena, and starting Friday the only place you can see it on the big screen in Southern California is at Laemmle's Monica on 2nd Street in Santa Monica, at 11:00 a.m.!). After the movie disappears from cinemas, Fuller's article itself will stand as a potent, romantic and brilliant reminder of why seeing 2046 in any format-- DVD is next, obviously-- should be on everyone's to-do list in 2005.

FRIENDS FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE Part 1: PETER (PEET) GELDERBLOM AND THE REAL HORROR OF JURASSIC PARK

Earlier this year I was my great pleasure to strike up a cyber-friendship with Peter Gelderblom, founder, editor of, and contributor to, the terrific Web site 24 Lies A Second. Peet (as he is known on the Web) lives and works in Holland; he originally dropped a very nice line or two in the comments column of one of my posts and invited me to rework an old article of mine for publication on the site. I took this as a very great compliment, as I had followed the site for some time previous to his contacting me, and it turned out to be a whole lot of fun to work with Peet and 24 Lies editor Jim Moran to get my big, ungainly, bloated piece of work into something close to fighting shape. Not everybody liked the piece when 24 Lies turned it loose, and I really didn't expect that everyone would-- I got criticism of it when I originally published it on this blog too-- but Jim and Peet were endlessly supportive and have always made me feel welcome to submit new ideas for further articles. In fact, I may have finally tumbled one around in my head long enough to actually start working on getting it ready for them to see.

In the meantime, Peet and I have kept in contact, peering in at each other's Web presences and dropping the occasional e-mail and/or comment on the sites. I got an e-mail from him last week, actually, alerting me to the presence of a new 24 Lies Brian De Palma poll (check this one out, Blaaagh!) and an article freshly minted from the Gelderblom pen (keyboard) called "The Shape of Substance: Brian De Palma and the Function of Form." As I want to give this one more than just the cursory bathroom once-over, I've printed it out and set aside some time this weekend to read it, as I have all of the articles from the contributing writers on 24 Lies. But I was very happy that Peet felt compelled to write to me and solicit my reaction to this one in particular, and I'm relishing the anticipation of consuming it as much as I am the inevitable actual enjoyment of engaging with his ideas in the piece.


From left, Rasmus (the disillusioned dinosaur fan), Luka (my future son-in-law?), and blogpal Peter (Peet) Gelderblom

Attached to his e-mail was a very amusing anecdote than I wanted to pass along, and now that I have secured his permission I shall do so. (This originally appeared as a post on the 24 Lies reader forum, but Peet passed it along to me for reasons that will become obvious):

"A while ago, I also posted a funny story on the forum about my oldest son and me, considering the REAL horrors of Jurassic Park. I guess it's the sort of thing only daddies like you can truly understand...

My son Rasmus has been a dinosaur fan for as long as he can remember, and there's no other movie he yearned to see more desperately than Spielberg's modern classic Jurassic Park. Again and again, Rasmus begged me throughout the years if he would be allowed to see it. Finally, by the time he reached the age of seven I deemed him old enough.

As we sat down before the television together, I wondered what would gruel Rasmus the most: the T-rex scene or the velociraptor chase? Little did I know that it turned out to be something else completely.

You remember the cartoon, about one-third into the movie, that explains how the dinosaurs were recreated from fossil DNA? Since Rasmus doesn't understand English, I was directly translating everything that little string of cartoon DNA said into Dutch, until the bomb dropped and out of my mouth came something along the lines of: 'That's why every dinosaur in Jurassic Park is female.'

Now, for those of you less familiar with the mindset of the average seven-year-old boy, let me assure you there is nothing - I repeat: nothing - more appalling to them than girls...

Rasmus turned to me in utter shock and said, 'What?!? Are all the dinos GIRLS?' Instead of being smart enough to deny it, I confirmed him of his deepest terror. Try to put yourself in his shoes: what he considered to be the coolest creatures on the planet turned out to be what he detested most of all. In a few seconds time, Spielberg had crushed the love of his life and I was partly responsible. It seriously pissed Rasmus off. 'What a stupid movie is this,' he said. 'I will never find it exciting now!'

Luckily, the T-rex scene was able to change his mind. Nevertheless, he may never fully recover from that initial shock. Neither may I."

Thanks, Peet, for the terrific story, and for the fine work you do at 24 Lies A Second. I thoroughly recommend anyone interested in serious, accessible discussion of film to stop by this site right away and make it a regular destination. And the forum topics are always interesting too. I haven't been as active in there as I should have been over the past summer, but some of the topics under discussion now have convinced me to modify my behavior right away. As for that De Palma poll, Blow Out is the current leader (and my choice), with precisely twice the support of the nearest contender, Body Double. Who will cast the first vote for Carrie? Come on, people! And surely Sisters is worthy of a first-place vote from someone. You can even cast a vote for The Bonfire of the Vanities if you want to (I'm talking to you, Mysterious Adrian Betamax), but just follow it up with a good reason or two in the comments section. (Oh, and yes, Peet, we will have to talk about Body Double, which I haven't seen, by the way, in at least 10 years-- it's one of the few De Palma films I have little use for, and I'm very interested in hearing out an opposite point of view, especially yours.)

As Bugs Bunny might have said, ain't the blogosphere grand?

WHEN LOOKING AT THE MOVIE PAGES WAS FUN

If you were a movie-mad kid in the '60s and '70s like I was, ads like these will look very familiar and may send you off into uncontrollable daydreams of leafing through the paper and trying to take in all that there was to see. And if you were a movie-mad kid in the '60s and '70s who, like me, had to get your movie fix largely from imagining the thrills to be had from triple features like Mad Doctor of Blood Island, Blood Demon and Battle Beneath the Earth because you
A typical drive-in movie ad from
the Drive-In Theaters.com Gallery

lived in an isolated town and the paper you looked into every day was from a city 400 miles away (Portland, Oregon), then you'll know that staring at these ads could often, and often had to be, as good as seeing the movies themselves. (In fact, in the case of some of these pictures, your imagination probably far outstripped the actual movie.)

I would see an ad for a drive-in showing something like a triple feature of The Green Slime, Night of the Living Dead and She and know there were better, grander places beyond my hometown just waiting for me to get there, drive up to the boxoffice, lay my money down and settle in for a world of ridiculous and awesome wonders. And what's amazing is, some of these places were showing triple features made up of the likes of The Wild Bunch, The Green Berets and Cool Hand Luke. That's not cut-rate fare-- well, The Green Berets isn't a very good movie, but it was certainly positioned as one by Warner Brothers at the time. It was an epic, an event, not a B-movie horror flick or biker adventure (my own hometown drive-in, in a rare display of enthusiasm and showmanship, trumpeted it on the marquee thusly: "The Big One Is Here!") And if that triple feature in particular was running during the mid-summer months, the show wouldn't start until about 9:00 (if your projectionist was conscientious and didn't fire up the carbon arcs until dark had arrived completely). These three movies together, not factoring in intermission times, clock in at just over seven and a half hou