"SUSPENDED BETWEEN WORLDS": SHINING STAR: THE ANNA MAY WONG STORY

Over the past two years I’ve spent a lot of time immersed in the various avenues of learning to be plumbed in pursuit of a teaching credential and accompanying Master’s degree in cross-cultural education. During that period I have become familiar with a small percentage of the vast multitude of multiculturally oriented children’s literature available to young readers, much of which explores the roots of folkloric tradition for various ethnic groups and how those traditions reflect upon and can be applied to life in the modern world for members of these groups. The relevance for the literature’s primary audience, those in the fourth to sixth grades, couldn’t be more obvious. Much of the intent of introducing children to aspects of their heritage in picture and chapter books devoted to tradition and generational consistency of values is to challenge the idea of America as a melting pot-- that is, a culture created from the globular sum of the dissolution of specific cultural touchstones, beliefs and practices-- in order to replace it with something more like a great salad bar of ethnicity, where each element that demarcates and defines an ethnic or racial culture contributes to the whole new culture, as it is perceived by participants and observers, without losing the unique flavor of each practice or sets of values as they are experienced or understood on their own.

The current trend in education toward leading children to embrace, examine and exult in the intricacies of their cultural heritage is, unlike so many others I can think of which seem to have the weight of educational bureaucracy behind them, a good one. And some of the best children’s books deal pointedly with ethnic mythology and history, pointing the way toward parallels between the subjects of the books and the lives of those reading about them in the classroom. But few have taken advantage of the opportunity to bridge the gap for today’s pop culture savvy young readers between ethnic history, societal reflections of that ethnicity, and how it applies to current values in media culture, to the degree that author Paula Yoo and illustrator Lin Wang seize in their new biography of the first Asian-American movie star, entitled Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story. It is a picture book of exemplary beauty, subtlety and insight that tells the story of an ambitious young girl in pursuit of stardom who deflects the demeaning elements of racial portraiture that were the inescapable reality of life as an actress of identifiable ethnicity in the early days of Hollywood, only to come to realize the importance of immersion in the culture of her origins and bringing to its depiction in films a measure of respect and authenticity where before there was only bigotry and thoughtless stereotyping.


Of course, keeping in mind the age group which composes Yoo and Wang’s target audience—roughly those readers from 9 to 12 years old—one doesn’t come to Shining Star with the expectation of the typical intricacies of biographical presentation. Yoo has taken the bedrock significance of Wong’s life for descendants of first-generation Asian-Americans and artfully distilled from it the main theme that is of concern to her as an author— the tension between Wong’s desire for a career as an actress and the realities of how the Chinese were routinely depicted in the films she wanted to be in, and even the films she would eventually star in. There is a clarity of purpose about Yoo’s approach that makes Wong’s struggle a supremely expressive one for the lessons she wants to impart to her audience, and she does so while telling the story in a lively, page-turning style. The book opens up on a situation and an image—one of many created by Wang in paintings that evoke the dynamism and delicate beauty of the posters that would one day be used to advertise Wong’s movies—that will grab young readers with its audacity and surprise. Young Anna May is seen tied to a railroad track, seemingly in danger of losing her life under the wheels of an oncoming train. She is soon rescued, however, not by a dashing young hero who cuts her loose in the nick of time, but instead by the intrusive reality of her life working in her father’s steam laundry bursting through and overtaking what we soon realize has been a daydream.


Anna spends much of her free time at the movies watching scenarios like the damsel-in-distress scene playing out in serial melodramas. One day, while walking home in downtown Los Angeles, she stumbles upon a movie set and becomes fixated upon the process of moviemaking, a fixation that will give her life focus and direction beyond the walls of her father’s hard-scrabble business. And despite her father’s objections, she continues visiting sets and one day, a tall, teenaged Anna May is hired by the director of The Red Lantern (1919) as an extra, the first paying job of what would become a long professional career.


Yoo allows the reader to share in the excitement of Wong’s breakthrough, but she also craftily sets up a key ethical crisis soon after. Two years of extra work and an increasingly high profile among the Hollywood set leads to her first major part, cast as Lon Chaney’s wife in Bits of Life (1921). Wang’s two-page painting beautifully illustrates the dilemma Yoo introduces in her text—Anna May watching with disdain as Chaney dons his elaborate ”yellowface” makeup design, which includes the taping of his eyelids to better approximate (or exaggerate) almond-shaped Asian eyes and the application of powder, literally yellow powder, to his skin to complete the “transformation.” Yoo also recounts how Wong was not allowed a moment to kiss her “husband” onscreen because of prevailing Hollywood mores forbidding such interracial activity.

As Anna May wins more roles, most of which force her to take on the prevalent stereotypes of the day as defining characteristics of those roles, the image of her watching Chaney from across the dressing room begins to acquire a more painful resonance in the story. Eventually, the actress bristles against playing into such stereotyping and makes her way to Europe to star in British and German films. It is here, during her self-imposed separation from Hollywood, that she finally achieves the full-fledged stardom she once dreamed of working in her father’s laundry, a result of her participation in the British hit drama Piccadilly (1929). Now a movie star and a fashion icon for young girls of the day, the actress would enjoy several years of fame in Europe, including a scene-stealing role in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) in which she all but pulls the rug out from underneath established icon Marlene Dietrich.


Soon Anna May is lured back to Hollywood by the announcement of the impending film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and the hope of landing the lead in what would be the film industry’s most positive depiction to date of the Chinese people and their struggles. However, the male lead having already been cast (Paul Muni, as Chinese farmer Wang Lung), the actress loses the part to Luise Rainer, cast as O-Lan over Wong in part because of those same restrictions against on-screen interracial interaction of an affectionate or sexual nature that have dogged her since the Lon Chaney film. In frustration, she decides that in order to help fight against the stereotyping of Asians in the movies, she must not only refuse to play any further such roles, but she must also reconnect with the values and culture of her father’s native land, and with him she returns to China, where she begins embracing and absorbing Chinese culture, philosophy, fashion, language learning and other aspects of everyday life in the country of her origin. She absorbs stories her father tells her of his struggles to survive and make a life for his family in America, and his hopes for her as a child of both America and China, and emboldened by this newfound connection with her roots and her family Anna May returns to Hollywood to embark on a lifelong career composed of roles and films that actively rejected the virulent stereotyping and bigotry that were a hallmark of the roles she willingly took on as her career began. Now Anna May Wong, the star, would devote her life to positive depiction of Asians, donating her own money to causes such as helping the Chinese people in the wake of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, and paving the way for generations of Asian-American actors and actresses who would suffer their own struggles and indignities to be sure, but who would owe an enormous debt to her pioneering efforts on their behalf.

As befitting a story told to young readers whose very purpose is that same kind of emboldening, enriched engagement with aspects of Chinese culture of which they may not be fully aware, Yoo chooses to end her text on this note of triumph. But unlike some authors of children’s literature who tend to want to put the happiest face on their subject, Yoo leaves the final page for a biographical overview of the years between 1937 and Wong’s death in 1961, years in which Wong was often excoriated by a suddenly more sensitive press (Caucasian as well as Asian) for her role in perpetuating the twin stereotypes of Asian femininity, the passively delicate flower and the dragon lady, even while such stereotyping, despite Wong’s efforts, hadn’t exactly vanished in a smoke puff of political correctness. It will be a bit of a relief for Yoo’s young audience to read that in recent years Anna May Wong’s reputation has begun a long, slow journey toward rehabilitation and she has been more frequently recognized more for what she helped make possible than the indignities in which she was often forced to participate. The author ultimately relates with great empathy her subject’s anguish at being “suspended between worlds” without ever betraying any of her own sense of anger on Wong’s behalf.


Shining Star is a standout for its age-appropriate readers and for a more mature audience as well, not only because it is beautifully mounted and anchored by Wang’s lovely paintings, and expertly paced and accented by Yoo’s considerable gifts as a storyteller—she is exceptionally talented at enveloping her readers with a sense of inclusiveness, a stake in the import of Wong’s life, without ever condescending to them in language or tone. Yoo has also made her source material remarkably accessible, thus facilitating the reader’s potential interest in following up on this biography with more sophisticated takes on Wong’s life and influence. This may be a more frequent occurrence than my limited exposure to children’s literature is able to recognize, but Yoo’s quite extensive and comprehensive bibliography, found in the book’s final pages, seems extraordinary to me. No less than five sources on Anna May Wong, the history of the Chinese in America, and Asians in media culture, all critical and biographical works of intelligence and repute, are cited with full bibliographical notations. I can easily imagine a sixth-grade reader, inspired by the introduction Yoo has afforded here, taking on one or more of these books and beginning a real eye-opening journey. But Yoo also cites the movies she saw to prepare for the writing of Shining Star-- the aforementioned Piccadilly as well as A Study in Scarlet (Edwin L. Marin; 1933) and Lady from Chungking (William Nigh; 1942), as well as acknowledging a panel discussion on Wong held at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre featuring moderator B. Ruby Rich, actresses Jacqueline Kim and Nancy Kwan, and authors Karen Leong and Graham Russell Gao Hodges.

What a wonderful fountain of information to not only ground Yoo’s credibility in her grasp of the facts and the sociopolitical reality of Wong’s career, but also to inspire young readers to make their own connections between Wong’s experience, that of their own favorite Asian actors or filmmakers (or any other ethnicity they might care to investigate), and perhaps their own experiences with racism and bigotry in their daily lives. One can happily imagine many young eyes being opened to the history of the struggles of any number of people in such an ostensibly glamorous profession as the movies through their exposure to the finely drawn biography that Paula Yoo and Lin Wang have fashioned in their frank, intelligent and fascinating book for young readers, Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story.

MATTERS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION:

Here are Paula Yoo’s bibliographical sources:

Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905-1961) by Anthony B. Chan

Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russel Gao Hodges

The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism by Karen J. Leong

Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, STage, Radio and Television Work by Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang

You can also buy Piccadilly here or rent it on Netflix.

Jama Rattigan’s review of Shining Star is loaded with wonderful examples of Lin Wang’s evocative painted illustrations.

Richard Corliss offers an appreciation of Anna May Wong in Time magazine.

And Paula Yoo herself talks about her book and Anna May Wong in this interview:



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RETURN ENGAGEMENT, WITH FUNNY OUTTAKES: MIKE GILBERT ON CINEMA

Today the Los Angeles Times published a straight-faced piece on the box-office bonanza afforded Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen based around the premise that “rarely have critics been more disconnected from what audiences want and love” than over this movie. In the article, written by Times staff writer John Horn, Bay crows, "I think they reviewed the wrong movie. They just don't understand the movie and its audience. It's silly fun." Bay went on to surmise, of the nation’s critics who were almost uniformly dismissive of his baby, "I am convinced that they are born with the anti-fun gene. The reviews are just so vicious. A lot of them are more personal than anything else." Of course it’s not only dumb and illogical to assume, as Bay does, that just because the mass audience is bamboozled into buying your product to the tune of $204 million over the weekend that each and every ticket buyer was satisfied and got exactly what he or she wanted. Even the Times had to concede, on in a blog post later in the day, the shocking news that the director they termed an “audience darling” in the previous piece’s headline, may not be getting the best reviews from even the peanut gallery. Stories about Bay bemoaning the critical reaction to his junk-pile contraptions in the glow of all the filthy lucre pouring in over opening weekend are becoming as predictable as the negative critical reactions themselves. Almost like never before, actually seeing a Michael Bay movie has become a superfluous part of the Michael Bay media experience, and thank God for that.

Now, just when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has, if you believe this poor, mistreated director, captured the imagination of a public eager to be transported away and forget their troubles for two hours (that’s Bay paraphrased from the latest Los Angeles Times ad running before nearly every feature on every screen in the city), what better day then to re-release upon the huddled masses the razor-sharp observations of perhaps Michael Bay’s biggest, and certainly most articulate fan, Mike Gilbert?

The Mysterious Adrian Betamax, via his nifty film blog Cahiers2Cinema, has made his terrifically funny documentary Mike Gilbert On Cinema available once again—just in time, not only for the new Michael Bay, but the new Michael Mann as well!—and this time the MAB has included a brief set of hilarious outtakes that actually are hilarious and provide unique (and scary!) insight into the bubbling cauldron that is Gilbert’s runaway, free-associative mind. So if you can’t get those precious tickets to see TROTF, then just take a breath, press play and let Mike Gilbert spin the magic of a breathless fan experiencing those movies in his head—it’s even better, and maybe even funnier, than allowing a giant mechanical Transformer to pound on your head for 150 minutes.



Behold the one, the only, the dazzling original Mike Gilbert on Cinema!



And now come fly away as Mike flubs his bits and ranks on Jerry Maguire for having been shot in a lame aspect ratio.

Michael Bay, you may be an “audience darling,” but until you can spin a picture as mesmerizing as the ones Mike Gilbert can conjure… well, let’s just say you’re no Mike Gilbert.

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COMING SOON: SOUL POWER

Whenever we sit down to watch or otherwise get unexpectedly sucked into Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, there always occurs a rift in our allegiance that is built in to the movie itself. There is the desire, which the movie shares, to follow the story of the “Rumble in the Jungle” and Muhammad Ali’s connection with/exploitation of the people of Zaire to boost his superhuman ego and build upon his confidence going into the fight while simultaneously undermining that of George Foreman. But there is also the element of the surrounding music festival which the movie uses as a framing device, one that is never allowed to become much more than that, leaving the viewer a tantalizing glimpse at the royal gathering of R&B musical giants assembled to celebrate this coming home of two African-American sports celebrities to their ostensible roots. For whatever reason—entangled publishing rights, unavailable footage, or a simple eye toward the movie’s running time—this jubilant, gyroscopically, sensually spectacular element of the movie, which hits the ground running with the Crusaders’ “Young Rabbits” and cruises straight through to James Brown’s extraordinary “Payback” and BB King’s “I Got Some Help I Don’t Need,” necessarily recedes into sidebar territory once the fight, and its mythologically tinged recounting, takes its final hold. But now those of us who have pined mightily to see the Zaire concert take center stage are going to get our wish. I’d seen it online before, but it wasn’t until I saw the trailer for Soul Power unspool on the big screen, before a showing of Tetro last night, that I began to get really excited for what promises to be one of the summer’s most enticing and electrifying filmed performances. If you get lucky you’ll see it that way too. But in case you don’t, here it is reduced to YouTube size, and still able to stir your heart even at your office desk. The movie hits American screens in limited release next weekend, July 10. As the Godfather once said, hit me!



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MICHAEL JACKSON 1958 - 2009

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1987 my best friend Bruce and I were nosing around the Tower Video store in Sherman Oaks when suddenly, visible over the rise of the shelf cutting through the middle of the room, I saw the familiar visage of Michael Jackson—fedora, sunglasses, white surgical mask covering his nose and mouth—glide through my field of vision. The two of us couldn’t believe it was him—this was in the pre-Bad days, when the allegations of hyperbaric chambers and monkey BFFs and serial plastic surgery had really begun to overwhelm Jackson’s seemingly untouchable pop music legacy, and seeing him in the flesh carried with it its own degree of instant reality twisting, as if suddenly we were in a video store designed by Dr. Caligari. We tried to gawk in that way that would become all too familiar to me as a resident in a city where this kind of thing happens from time to time—that is, gawking while trying to seem not to gawk—but we were surely less subtle about it than we would like to have believed, especially when we turned the corner and realized that he had with him a young girl, probably about 10 years of age, towing along silently behind. And it was apparent that the staff and other customers were keeping their distance in the same way—no one approached or engaged him in any way, as far as I was able to notice. As we headed for the exit to the parking lot in back of the building Bruce and I were buzzing with the excitement of having seen somebody who, freak or no, until that moment literally seemed too big to really occupy a space in the same world in which we lived.

But when we got to our car in the tiny lot, which was only big enough to hold four or five cars, we realized there was a huge Mercedes parked squarely in the middle of the space, blocking in all of the cars that were legally parked there, including ours. I got in my car and honked the horn, but to no avail. One more honk got exactly the same response—none. So I got out and began to head toward the door back into the video store, where I was planning to request that the cashier ask whoever was so thoughtlessly parked to please move their vehicle. I got only a couple of steps from my car when suddenly Jackson, along with his mysterious companion (I’m sure she looked or behaved nothing like this, but I remember her much like the eerie Damian-esque little girl who unnerves Angie Dickinson in the elevator in Dressed to Kill), burst through the door. Without making eye contact he offered several apologies for blocking our way as he fumbled for his keys—and yes, I could now see that he was also wearing a pair of white gloves. Finally the two got in, backed out of the lot and drove away, leaving Bruce and I to stand in the lot briefly, dazed, and contemplate an entourage-less, security-less Michael Jackson trying to remain incognito in a video store, and the two of us calling attention to him in a way he probably least desired. The question that came up later was— Could Michael Jackson have reasonably expected, given this personage and look he had cultivated, to not be noticed? Or was he actually trolling for attention, some way of reconnecting to an everyday world that had no more place for him?


The death of Michael Jackson seemed unreal to many of us who spent Thursday afternoon, in the shadow of breathless reportage of his hospitalization and then confirmation of his death, talking about the various effects he had on our lives simply because, I think, for many of us Jackson, the performer, the pop icon we prefer to remember, had already faded away many years ago. The mind-bogglingly talented 11 year-old who belted out “ABC” and “I Want You Back;” the assured star who, in the face of a staggering fear of being rejected by audiences who missed that precocious miniature tornado of talent, unleashed Off the Wall, his purest and most directly thrilling record; even the moon-walking master of the world whose phenomenal success with Thriller eventually swallowed whole whatever remaining clarity and perspective he had about his place in the creative chain of pop culture—that person had not been in evidence for a good 20 years before the day of his death. Jackson’s public image of natural happiness and exuberant success, which had been his hallmark even in the pre-Off the Wall days when he experienced his first exposure to public indifference and plummeting record sales, had long since acceded to the unrecognizable man in the mirror, a man who turned his face into an ever-shifting landscape of modeling clay, who craved acceptance from the public but created an entangled tabloid-fed universe of bizarre behavior which assured only that he would amplify his isolation from the rest of the world.

The natural inclination in mourning the loss of a superstar of Jackson’s status—and honestly, beside Elvis, Sinatra and John Lennon, who else belongs in this club?—is to downplay the dark stuff and lionize the entertainer for the joy he gave to fans, for the emotion spilling out of some of us who figured we were long past such a reaction. But even if you accept this downplaying as the inevitable way of things (in a media age where even mourning can seem prefab), one could be forgiven if one concluded from the immediate coverage, certainly in Los Angeles, where people choked up traffic and swarmed the UCLA hospital where Jackson was admitted, and where people continue to stand vigil outside his Encino home, that the love affair between Jackson and the public had never ceased. For some, apparently, it didn’t. But for the rest of us (and I speak not entirely inclusively but as someone who assumes there must be a few out there who feel the same way), it seems there must be a way to acknowledge Jackson’s contributions to the shape and sound of pop music without also ignoring the paranoia, megalomania, fear and other disturbing aspects of the man’s personality (insofar as we knew it) that totally subsumed his image in the latter part of his life. It is, it seems to me, a disservice to what he may have meant to any of us to pretend, in the overemotional, sanctimonious terms of TV news, that his impact on us was limited only to his ability to transport us through song and dance, as much a disservice as it is for TMZ and the rest of the tabloid universe to relentlessly shovel his eccentricities at us by the minute as a form of "tribute." Somewhere there must be some middle ground, a way to acknowledge the things that thrilled us as well as the things that we found disturbing about Michael Jackson, to acknowledge the complexity without further stripping away at his corpse or deifying him beyond recognition.


Thoughts of Michael Jackson and what he meant to us have been stirring around over the last couple of days, naturally, and as I entered Dodger Stadium with my father-in-law and daughters last night I wondered if the Dodgers would somehow pay tribute to the star during the game. The tribute came in a surprisingly subtle way that was integrated very well into the atmosphere—Matt Kemp, Dodger center fielder, had replaced his usual at-bat music with a cut from Off the Wall, and various Jackson tunes could be heard pumping over the loudspeakers in between each inning. Finally, in between the end of the game and the procession of the usual Friday night fireworks show, as fans filed onto the field to watch the giant sparklers, the Dodgers put together a nice, simple clip reel featuring performances from the Jackson Five, Off the Wall, Thriller and even Bad. Though interspersed with off-the-cuff thoughts from various celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Alyssa Milano projected as quotes on the DiamondVision screen, the clips were otherwise unadorned, uncommented upon, and a tonic in the wake of such bad, yet seemingly inevitable news. The fireworks themselves were accompanied by more Jackson tunes, and it really was surprising how good it was to hear them again thumping so loud against the night sky. There were reminders enough in the sound and video on display-- in seeing the face that had changed so radically, the voice that sounded so strong and confident resonating with our memories of how timid that voice seemed by comparison in simple speech-- that Jackson’s legacy is one marked by a complicated humanity, one borne of pressures and distortions of perception that we, if we are lucky, will never know. And if the media cannot contain their impulse to sanctify this man who they tended to openly mock a mere week earlier, then the best thing to do is ignore the constant news coverage of the weeping hordes outside the Jackson mansion and seek out intelligent considerations of the fullness of Jackson’s life, his triumphs and his uncomfortable oddities, available from writers like Jim Emerson and Seth Colter Walls, for starters, neither of whom shy away from Jackson’s dark side as they also acknowledge the light, and remembrances like those gathered Friday at The House Next Door and in Salon magazine. These are but a few of the sources for intelligent commentary and reaction to the legacy of Michael Jackson. For a direct line to the sheer pleasure the man was capable of conjuring, turn off your TV, cue up “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” turn it up loud and bid your farewell.

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FARRAH FAWCETT 1947 - 2009

"The latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run
My strongest trials now are past, my triumph is begun
O come Angel Band, come & around me stand
O bear me away on your snowy wings to my immortal home
O bear me away on your snowy wings to my immortal home
I know I'm near the holy ranks of friends & kindred dear
I've brushed the dew on Jordan's banks, the crossing must be near
I've almost gained my Heavenly home, my spirit loudly sings
The Holy ones, behold they come, I hear the noise of wings
O bear my longing heart to Him who bled & died for me
Whose blood now cleanses from all sin & gives me victory"

-- The Stanley Brothers, "Angel Band"

Farrah Fawcett has died after a long battle with cancer. The actress and '70s sex symbol was 62. Her iconic image, seen above, from the heyday of her popularity as one of Charlie's Angels is one that graced the walls of many a boy my age; my original poster still hangs in a corner of my dad's garage to this day, and I hope it stays there a while longer, if only as a reminder to me of pop culture's staying power in the face of life's most insistent realities. Fawcett was never a great actress, but she was a restless and relatively ambitious one, and the critical triumphs over her feather-light image, in films like The Burning Bed and Extremities, and later in Robert Duvall's The Apostle, are reminders to us all that we never have to accept who everyone else says we are. May she enjoy the rest now that eluded her in the last years of her life.

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ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO SQUINT: TRANSFORMERS REVIEWS, OSCAR x 10 and FINCHER'S FACEBOOK

Though I waited to see it on DVD, I have to admit that I enjoyed Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007) for what it was—big, loud, dumb fun, with an unexpected oddball performance by John Turturro thrown in the mix just to prove that not all the pleasures of the film were mechanical. But I also have to admit I have some severe reservations about seeing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the sequel directed by Mr. Bay which opens today in IMAX and on every other multiplex screen in the continental United States. I don’t mind not being the intended demographic for a movie like this—I am far too old for the original toys or cartoons to have meant anything to me, and I find the prospect of sitting through another 2½ hour-long Michael Bay extravaganza, in which the operative concept seems to have boiled down to bigger-louder-MORE!, less and less attractive with each passing hype-filled day. Yes, I know resistance is futile in the movie marketplace, but maybe just this once I’ll give it a try.

However, the read of the morning, perhaps of the rest of the week, is the spectacular collection of opening day reviews for TROTF gathered with the zeal of a good-humored completist and available under one roof-- Transformers: The Binge is Appallin’, courtesy of David Hudson at IFC Daily. Hudson gathers the best of the early reactions to Bay’s destruct-a-thon, and as you might hope, the writers collected here are having a good time dealing with the experience of the movie and what the Bay phenomenon means, but the name of the game is not just two-dimensional slagging of the director and his vision. For instance, there’s Manohla Dargis, who has never shied away from her soft spot for the Bruckheimer/Bay blow-‘em-up aesthetic:

“And make no mistake: [Michael] Bay is an auteur. His signature adorns every image in his movies, as conspicuously as that of Lars von Trier, and every single one is inscribed with a specific worldview and moral sensibility. Mr. Bay's subject - overwhelming violent conquest - is as blatant and consistent as his cluttered mise-en-scène. His images, particularly during the frequent action sequences, can be difficult to visually track, but they are also consistently disjointed. (And proudly self-referential: the only director he overtly cites is himself, with a shot of the poster for his movie Bad Boys II.) The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette once described an auteur as someone who speaks in the first person. Mr. Bay prefers to shout.”

Or what about Stephanie Zacharek’s personal observation:

“’He's here -- I smell him.’ That's a line from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but funnily enough, it's also what I think every time I sit down to watch a Michael Bay movie.”

She goes on to make a point that, as the father of a little girl who recently professed interest in the movie because part of it takes place in Egypt, a country whose history and culture fascinates her, I very much appreciated as a kind of advance warning:

“I don't believe it's the job of movies to safeguard the purity of our youth. At the same time, I'm not sure I see the point of robots using words like ‘bitch’ and ‘pussy’ in a movie inspired by a line of toys. Revenge of the Fallen just comes off as a bratty kid showing how many swear words he knows.”

For those who are inclined to take the whole Transformers phenomenon somewhat seriously, as cinema and as a logical product of the rampant blockbusterism that seems to amplify itself over the course of each successive summer, Drew McWeeny’s take, a very ambivalent one in which he wrestles with his reservations alongside his enthusiasm for the movie as a technical marvel, is a fascinating read:

“In some ways, I think Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen is the movie that fanboys have been slowly but surely placing down payments on for the last 20 years of pop cinema. When I hear people complain that it's overstuffed and indulgent and excessive, I am sort of amazed that they feel the need to point that out. OF COURSE IT IS. That's what Hollywood believes you want. Thanks to the way we've rewarded the lowest common denominator wrapped in the shiniest package, summer after summer after summer, and the way we seem to constantly demand that sequels turn everything up louder, make everything longer, and fill the frame with moremoreMORE, Michael Bay stands astride Hollywood like the perfectly evolved Modern Action Director… What I find remarkable… is how little the plot seems to matter, and that's how this movie feels to me like the final evolutionary step in the blockbuster.”

David Hudson gathers lots more reviews together here, like Roger Ebert’s, which I haven’t had time to check out yet. (Ebert starts off with this paragraph: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.”) But I suspect I will, at some point, and perhaps in lieu of actually seeing the movie which, having seen the previous movie and all of the other Michael Bay movies in existence, I feel like I already have. Thanks, David, for gathering together such a wide-ranging, well-written collection of observations. You may have saved at least one prospective patron the $14 price of admission.

UPDATE 9:21 p.m.: I just had to make room here for David Edelstein's hilarious and astute piece, entitled "Trans Fats," in which the critic comes to terms with his soft spot for Michael Bay, his even softer spot for Megan Fox, and his desire to just tell a good, corny joke. It's been a very good day for those who like to read energetic writing about popular film, and Edelstein's post, from his blog The Projectionist, is the cherry on top. Here's a taste:

"I don’t have much nice to say about Transformers 2, but I’m happy to see my Park Slope neighbor John Turturro get another big paycheck — and he’s very funny given the Drake-and-Josh level of the jokes. There’s a terrific bit with a blonde coed who transforms into a killer-‘bot — but her send-off goes by so fast that the audience doesn’t even have a chance to say, 'Yeah! Kill dat bitch!' There’s also a gorgeous effect in which thirteen transformers hurtle down from space into the desert sand — thump thump thump thump — and the colossi slowly rise from the smoke. But then they start blasting and it’s back to video-game weightlessness. I remember in the eighties watching The Howling, in which a man slowly morphed into a werewolf: His flesh quivered and his snout crunched out of his flesh and the bones in his feet cracked and elongated. Why can’t these transformers transform so that we marvel at their metamorphoses? Can’t 200 million dollars buy that much?"

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In other Hollywood news on this seemingly normal Wednesday, apparently the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has decided that five is just not enough, and that if the Hollywood Foreign Press Association can nominate 10 movies for Best Picture, well, then so can we. Complaints from Oscar party organizers about having to order extra pizzas to cover the extended run time of the 2010 telecast, which industry prognosticators expect to clock in at just under five hours, have already started to roll in, in addition to a vicious protest filed this morning by Barbara Walters to ABC headquarters. “I wefuse to begin my bwoadcast after midnight!” howled the onetime journalist to anyone who would listen.

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And apparently David Fincher is in talks to continue his cinematic experiment, begun with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, to attempt to create a movie in which absolutely nothing happens. Variety reports that the director in talks to direct The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin, all about the formation of Facebook. The paper reports breathlessly that “The film will focus on the evolution of Facebook from its 2004 creation on the Harvard campus by sophomore Mark Zuckerberg to a juggernaut with more than 200 million members.” Juggernaut! Sounds exciting! Maybe a suggestion of how the website BLEW UP beyond anyone’s expectations! Is there really a movie here? We’ll see, I suppose. Or maybe not. After months of preparation, apparently Steven Soderbergh’s film of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, in which a bunch of pocket-protected baseball nerds sort statistics and juggle salaries in order to create the continuing legacy of mediocrity that is the Oakland Athletics, has been put into turnaround.

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ROAD TRIP TO THE SKYLINE DRIVE-IN

(Photo by Sal Gomez)

A series of escalating, multiplying frustrations have led, late on this Tuesday night, to the inexplicabnle disappearance from my Word program of 1,500 or so words I had written and prepared to go along with the photos I took this past weekend on a lovely family trip with the Southern California Drive-in Movie Society to the Skyline Drive-in Theater in Barstow, California. It's near midnight, and my attempt to try and rewrite the piece was greeted by a numb skull and insurmountable (at least for tonight) aggravation over the evaporation of an evening's worth of writing. So rather than lose out on more sleep that I obvious need, I will just post the pictures and hope that they speak clearly enough of the relative sublime experience we all had under the millions of stars visible in the desert sky while Up unspooled in front of us on the Skyline's second screen. I will do my best to reconstruct the piece and attach it to this post tomorrow, when and if I ever stop gritting my teeth.

(Click on the pics for a bigger, better, brighter view.)


The Sklyline Drive-in sits in the middle of nowhere off Old Highway 58 a couple of miles out of town.






As dusk approaches, the cars begin streaming in and the quiet desert hills fill up with the anticipation of a movie under a million stars.


Looking into the sunset, the drive-in ambience becomes magical.



Families and friends settle in for the pre-show fun and relaxation, as important a part of the drive-in experience as the movie itself.


Screen #2 at the Skyline, on an unpaved gravel lot, sits right up next to the desert hills which, when night falls, attain a mysterious beauty that adds immeasurably to the drive-in experience here in Barstow.









The Skyline Drive-in snack bar is an inviting oasis of delicious treats and community camaraderie that has something for everyone, a quaint throwback to great rural drive-in snack bars of the past.



The Lord hits the lights and the show gets underway.


Barstow city lights take on a shimmering beauty as seen flickering behind screen #1. (Photo by Sal Gomez)



And screen #2 provides a pleasing lack of light distraction as the movie casts its spell under the desert darkness.



Southern California Drive-in Movie Society member Warren Myers provides some background on the history of the Skyline Drive-in and a video tour of the theater during the club's July 20 visit.

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HAPPY BIG DADDY'S DAY!

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?” -Burl Ives as Harvey “Big Daddy” Pollitt in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958; Richard Brooks)

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What Big Daddy failed to mention is that I’ve got the gut to live too, but that’s another story…

But it’s because of my daughters, because of what being a dad means to me, that I find the guts to live every day, even when it seems like it’d be easier to just retreat from responsibility under a tree somewhere, or just give up altogether. The specific joys that I get from my lifelong appreciation of the movies are both dwarfed and amplified by the eagerness and the happiness that my daughters bring to the table each and every day and the euphoria that I can often tap into by just watching them go about their business. And of course, whenever we go to the movies together is special, no matter whether I’m introducing them to a classic or heading off to the newest kid-friendly Hollywood fare. We’re headed to the Skyline Drive-in in Barstow tomorrow night to take in Up and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, two we’ve already seen but two we’ve never seen under the desert sky of this quaint little drive-in. And next weekend Michael Torgan is bringing a Michael Powell double bill to the New Beverly, and being a veteran of Black Narcissus already my oldest is very excited for A Matter of Life and Death and, yes, The Red Shoes. (More on that newly restored version of The Red Shoes in a post or two. Thanks, Robert!) The jury is still out, however, on whether or not I have the intestinal fortitude to endure Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer’s new 3-D action movie about secret agent guinea pigs entitled G-Force. There are limits it seems, even to Dad’s joy at the prospect of sitting in the dark with his little monkeys for a movie.

Happy Father’s Day to everyone who either is a dad or has one!

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SPECIAL BONUS FATHER’S DAY PRESENT:

It ain’t a shot of Big Daddy, but this publicity photo from The Spiral Road (1962; Robert Mulligan) is just too juicy to not pass along. What big daddy wouldn’t enjoy a Father’s Day that included a chance to spruce up and primp in a nice, hot bath? (You can keep the stogie, though, thanks.)

(Photo courtesy of Leo Fuchs.)

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IT’S A SHAME ABOUT ME Department:

God bless the Internet for keeping one (that is, me) humble. The fun goes from posts #143-147 and counting. Oh, well! Thanks for the thought anyway, Rowland!

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See y’all next week!

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THREE NEW MOVIES: THE HIT, THE MISS AND THE RUNAWAY TRAIN

The best joke swirling about The Hangover is one you don’t have to have seen the movie to appreciate. It involves a heavily test-marketed comedy designed to appeal (through some pretty prurient and hateful means) to the widest possible demographic, and about which industry types were ”buzzing” for a couple of months before its release, splash-landing on over 3,000 screens to boffo business, and then being hailed as a “surprise” hit by all the the usual suspects. The real surprise about The Hangover turns out not to be its total awesomeness as a moneymaker (Can anyone truly be surprised by this development?), but the degree to which it is continuing to make money. This movie is becoming a calculated hit driven to unheard-of lucre by word-of-mouth and repeat business, yet—and here’s the biggest surprise of all (at least to me)—there’s precious little evidence that it’s actually funny. This high-concept comedy—three exceptional obnoxious guys wake up after an apparently scandalous Vegas bachelor party to discover they have no memory of the night’s debauchery and no idea where the guest of honor might be—gives us the clues about how wild the night was (an empty, trashed hotel suite, plus the mysterious presence of a tiger and a infant, for starters), but skips the party itself in favor of the alleged comic spectacle of these assholes stumbling about Sin City trying to piece together the evening’s events and find the groom. It sounds like a good idea, but the rewards of comedy are in the writing and the execution, and unfortunately The Hangover is undistinguished and unimaginative in both of these departments, not to mention mean-spirited and witless.

The Hangover at first looks like it might be of a piece with the current wave of Apatowian (or Apatow-inspired) examinations of what it is to be a modern American male, of which Superbad and Role Models are probably the most shining examples, with the slighter but still plenty funny Forgetting Sarah Marshall and I Love You, Man filling in the gaps. But whereas those movies invite us to look at the roots of various levels of culturally ascribed and endorsed male behavior and understand them as either satiric jumping-off points or ways into getting at the real particulars of male friendship, the jerk-offs front and center in The Hangover are presented simply as examples of the way things should be between men—we must fight for the right to get laughs by mistreating each other in the name of brotherly love, and we could do so if only those women would stop their harping and let us enjoy ourselves, and if all those strange people of other races would just keep to themselves, especially the ones who want to do vile things to us with their penises. Homophobia taints the movie from the very beginning—schoolteacher Phil (Bradley Cooper), who we’ll see stealing from his students to finance the Vegas trip, is heard on an answering machine instructing his callers to leave a message but don’t text, “because that’s gay.” Phil and the extremely bland groom Doug (Justin Bartha) beckon the horribly henpecked dentist Stu (Ed Helms) from their convertible with cries of “Paging Dr. Faggot!” And the gnome-like Alan (Zach Galifianikis), Doug’s possibly pedophilic brother-in-law, complains while being fitted for his wedding tux, that the “pervert” measuring his inseam is getting way too close to his shaft. If the foundation for some kind of investigation into the underlying homoeroticism that binds these guys was being laid, then at least these comments would have some context. But the movie couldn’t be less interested in this kind of tack. The only thing the comments are there to establish is the characters’ (and the movie’s) brash defiance of accepted restraint when it comes to firing up stereotypes and bashing them at will, without any apparent desire to deepen that defiance with elements of character and storytelling that could force us to look beyond the naughty bits.

As The Hangover chugs along in its rather rhythmless, fitful way, it becomes apparent that the individual elements intended to indicate the bachelor party’s astronomical level of debauchery—the tiger in the suite, the sudden appearance of a motherless infant, Stu’s missing tooth, the insistence of a pair of enormous thugs on doing damage to our heroes and their borrowed Mercedes—are not going to build in intensity toward a lunatic revelation of what really happened. These wild clues lead to nothing but scene after scene of the boys shouting variations on “Oh, shit! We’re fucked! We’re so fucked!” before moving blithely on to the next dumb-ass set piece. The tiger, the baby, the tooth—they’re all eventually dropped from the narrative without ever being exploited for anything more than just wild-and-crazy window dressing used to get us to a useless Mike Tyson cameo and earth-mother/stripper-with-a heart-of-gold Heather Graham, who couldn’t beam with more wholesomeness at the toothless Stu as she breast-feeds her baby (whoops, spoiler, sorry) and telegraphs her righteousness as Stu’s sexy soul mate. (At times Graham seems to glow like Glenn Close in The Natural.) And speaking of that Tyson cameo, it is both interesting and telling that no one seems to have a problem with a convicted rapist appearing in what amounts to a swipe at reconstructing his popular image—an image which includes positioning himself, in the reality of the movie, as a primitive, dangerous beast. The reaction has been far more gushing ”Gee, look! It’s that scary Mike Tyson singing a Phil Collins song!”-- the boys even marvel that he really does seem like a pretty awesome dude—than thoughtful about whether Tyson should even be afforded this kind of opportunity for image-reparation. (To no one’s surprise, his appearance here will eclipse the riveting self-portrayal offered up in James Toback’s brilliant documentary from earlier this year.) But you see, it’s Mike’s tiger, and once he gets it back he’s gone and we’re off to another dumb revelation of some piece in this none-too-fascinating puzzle, all of which culminates in a clichéd montage revolving around the Rainman-esque attempt by Alan to win back enough cash to get the creepy, mincing Chinese gangster (Ken Leong) off our boys’ butts so they can make it back in time for the wedding.

Each and every set piece in The Hangover feels warmed-over, amped for laughs based on sheer outrageousness and lack of feeling (Whoops! The baby bonked its head!) rather than a witty teasing out of that outrageousness with something resembling real, clever, motivated writing. And the hype machine is working in high gear now to convince American moviegoers that they’re part of something special, a phenomenon of high-flying comic altitude rather than just the preordained pop cultural by-product of an intricately engineered marketing campaign. What’s implicit and depressing about all these articles extolling the “surprise hit phenomenon” and the “stupid genius” of The Hangover is that we’re meant to care more about the movie’s status as a box-office stud than its quality as a comedy, as if all those dollars were the ultimate proof that the audience is getting what it wants. The packed house I saw the movie with last Saturday night was appreciative, all right, and definitely on the movie’s side, but there was none of the gasping, aching belly-laughter I remember hearing at Superbad, or Role Models, or many other movies far funnier and more deserving of the kind of attention that is being ladled indiscriminately on this turd. Strangely, the couple sitting next to me uttered not one sound over the course of the entirety of The Hangover, and yet afterward the boyfriend stood up, turned to his girlfriend and another couple they were with and said, “That was fuckin’ hilarious!” I stumbled out of that screening feeling as if I was living on a planet I suddenly didn’t recognize; the reception being afforded this crummy comedy is just as depressing as the movie itself.

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Yet in the same movie marketplace, the exceedingly genial and dopey Will Ferrell science-fiction comedy Land of the Lost is getting killed in review after highfalutin review for being silly, or being gross, or (I love this one) being shaky on just who its audience is. I’m really not sure just how worked up to get over the mass dancing on the grave of this movie—after all, we’re talking about Land of the Lost, not Speed Racer here. But at the risk of flying the freak flag for another big summer movie given the heave-ho by audiences and critics, Land of the Lost won me over through its fearlessness over its own absurdity, by its cleverness (the brainy, sensitive T–Rex is a comic marvel at both the conception and the execution/animation level), and the fairly impressive quality it often displays (despite its huge budget and status as a product of a conservative studio system, however misguided that system may or may not be on a project-by-project basis) of seeming at times improvised on the fly, of being a $200-million shaggy dog. Those who object to the movie seem to believe, because the source material was a hit with young Saturday morning TV viewers in the ‘70s, that the filmmakers are somehow obligated to reproduce the kid-friendly vibe (sans gross-outs or bad language) or at least to deliver a product with a more consistent tone. That's what they get in The Hangover, after all-- a movie that trots out every stereotype on the way to flattening out every juicy plot point for consumption by the widest possible audience, a movie everyone can love. It’s a lot trickier to stay true to a muse which consistently directs one to tickle the funny bone by any means necessary, and in this disregard for safety in numbers Land of the Lost has a lot more in common with movies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (not surprising, given that both star Will Ferrell), or Blazing Saddles, or The Man with Two Brains, all supremely silly movies that both kids of various ages and adults can groove to, than to generic lumps like The Hangover.


In LOTL, there’s plenty of comedy to appeal to the infant in all of us-- a squirmingly hilarious encounter with a prehistoric mosquito takes the bug-centric gross-out comedy of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to new and splattery heights; and Ferrell’s insistence on dousing himself with dinosaur urine as a means of camouflage is a classic bit that builds on the comedy of repetition and increasing returns—its roots can be traced through I Love Lucy to Harpo’s silverware scene in Animal Crackers and all the way back to the vaudeville stage, but we’re supposed to play the sophistication card here and give it the pooh-pooh treatment (pun entirely intended) because the gag involves piss (and gagging on piss). In general, the movie is situated squarely and honorably on the landscape of silly, absurd adventure that is also populated by the likes of the Abbott and Costello films, the Hope/Crosby “Road” pictures, and even comedy hybrids like Don Ameche and the Ritz Brothers’ version of The Three Musketeers-- its anything-goes grab-bag approach to tone and sensibility is one it shares with these movies and the others mentioned above.

The real puzzler brought to the forefront by the rejection of Land of the Lost is in considering exactly when silliness as an end became something to either be ghettoized (in the Scary/Date/Epic Movie subgenre of kitchen-sink parody) or shunned altogether. We’ve already seen what being labeled “silly” or being associated with a comic approach can do to the box office prospects of horror films—the boldly satiric Seed of Chucky was trounced by the far more sober and literal shocks delivered by Saw in 2005, and this summer no amount of rave reviews or positive advance word from the Cannes Film Festival could convince the core horror audience that Drag Me to Hell was a trip worth taking because as much emphasis was put on its laughs as its scares in the reviews and even the advertising. Now it’s apparently a crime for a Will Ferrell movie to be silly, which begs the question: Did anyone who saw the trailer for Land of the Lost, a trailer which accurately indicates its irreverent approach, go into it expecting Jurassic Park IV? And as far as parents worried that the raunch factor might be too much for their kids who might be interested, it is not unreasonable to do what I did—see it for yourself first before deciding whether your offspring are too sensitive for the raucous absurdities that lie within. (My personal verdict: I enjoyed it immensely, took the girls to see it the very next day, and we all laughed like misguided hyenas.)


I was not surprised that a movie which gets great comic mileage out of Dr. Rick Marshall (Ferrell) and his food issues would make me laugh uproariously-- unable to bring himself to test his new time machine/boom box contraption, Marshall goes on a fast-food binge and plunges into a calorie-induced coma, which he then lovingly describes upon regaining consciousness to his adoring assistant, Holly, played with spirit and good sportsmanship by Anna Friel (“I thought an Arby’s value meal might inspire my confidence. But then I hit Del Taco…”) Nor was I surprised to be amused by the way the heavy-lidded Danny McBride, as Will, a redneck tour guide who joins Marshall and Holly on heir “routine expedition” gone wrong, sets the foundation of a hilarious scene in which he, Marshall and primate sidekick Cha-ka (Jorma Taccone) end up psychedelically distracted from the mechanics of the recognizably silly (there’s that word again) plot by the juice of some local plant life, then lay around slurring words of affection for each other and contemplating an interspecies make-out session.


I was, however, surprised by the pop art beauty of some of the artificial landscapes on which these characters frolic-- a vast desert sprinkled with recognizable cultural icons such as the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, a Union 76 ball, the remains of a drive-in movie theater, all half buried in the sand; or the motel whose neon sign sticks out from a dune but whose swimming pool is beautifully preserved and ready for cannonballing; or the bed of glowing pterodactyl eggs all perched on what look like stalagmite tees which begin to crack when the show tunes emanating from Dr. Marshall’s time machine/boom box come to an unexpected stop. None of these designs have much to do with creating a recognizable or believable alternate universe for our heroes to discover; it’s the eerie surrealism of these landscapes, coupled with the fact that they all coexist amongst radically different climates—a geologic mash-up of jungle, desert, volcanic mountain range—that evolves from mere set design into another form of elaborate, rather lovely joke to compliment and balance the crude wackiness of the rest of the show.

Some have concerned themselves about what the mere presence of Land of the Lost means, as if it was some demarcation of how far absurd humor can go before it eats itself. At the risk of being annoying or overly simplistic, this kind of concern seems, at the very least, unnecessary. Those who made the movie and allowed it to be put out into the hostile marketplace and die will undoubtedly pay, to one degree or another, with their reputations or perhaps even their jobs, current and future. But it’s hard to see how the movie itself is an occasion for fretting. It’s a genial, rambling, goofy comedy that colors outside of the lines and belies its blockbuster origins with its ability to at times appear as shambling and care-free as Will, Marshall and Cha-ka tripping poolside. And the confusion of the majority of reviewers over just who composes the movie’s intended audience seems like a pretty easy nut to crack—it’s a movie made not for an age demographic but for anyone who happens to find him/herself on the same wavelength, who happens to find it chock full of laughs, big ones and little ones. Comedies that are created from some sort of inspiration rather than slavish adherence to what they expect will make the most people laugh most of the time are inherently risky propositions, and when they don’t work the sound of crickets chirping can be deafening. But when they do work—and I contend that most of the time Land of the Lost works—they’ll connect you with the giddy kid inside, someone who knows it’s no crime to be silly.

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Tony Scott’s unnecessary remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 isn’t, for its first two-thirds anyway, too bad. The basic premise, taken from John Godey’s novel and Joseph Sargent’s terrific 1974 version, which starred Walter Matthau as a casually racist, beleaguered transit author official locked into a subway hostage drama set in motion by the terse, magnificent intimidating Robert Shaw, has been adapted by Scott and writer Brian Helgeland to reflect an awareness of the manipulation of global economics. But this stab at timely verisimilitude feels like baggage that the stripped–down structure ultimately can’t bear. Shaw’s clipped-cadence ex-military man becomes John Travolta’s over-the-top, incongruously tattooed commodities broker (Would you trust your money to a guy with a Freddie Mercury ‘do and mustache and a garish crucifix creeping up his neck?), whereas Matthau’s legacy is given over to the somewhat more reliable Denzel Washington whose character is meant to reflect, in that hoary action-movie way, a similarity, in terms of moral underpinnings, to the bad guy—he’s a disgraced MTA bigwig accused of taking a bribe; we find out he’s guilty as charged, but he did it for honorable reasons. (Cue a rare slowing of Scott’s spastic stylistic strategies—camera movement, alternating film stocks, high-speed editing, the surveillance satellite as an overriding visual motif—and the requisite swelling of strings on the soundtrack.)


Still, for all the swiveling, gyrating camerawork and general sense of pointless dislocation, the movie does hold a certain level of interest because of that basic premise. What it can’t manage is the build-up of much excitement, even though you know instinctively that such a build-up is at least ostensibly the motivation behind all the camera pyrotechnics. For all of Scott’s visual sturm und drang, the ultimate effect is a weird kind of stasis, an awareness of the technique that constantly throws you out of the enveloping effect of the story. But soon enough the coincidences and absurdities start piling up and what little we have invested in the movie evaporates anyway, just about the time, ironically, that the film abandons its stopped-subway-car scenario for one involving a train and a band of hijackers suddenly on the move. A crucial plot point involving the fate of a runaway train car, which was clear as a bell in the 1974 version, seems to have gone missing. And I couldn’t help wondering, if one takes the trouble to present Denzel Washington, about 40-50 pounds heavier than usual, as a realistically sedentary protagonist, why one would feel the need to press him into service as a standard-issue action hero running full gallop down Manhattan streets in pursuit of the dispersing bad guys, with no acknowledgment of the kind of respiratory crisis anyone in the real world would no doubt be experiencing in a similar situation? Wheeze or no wheeze, Washington’s XL frame hurtles absurdly toward a face-off with Travolta, but by this point the runaway train has already crashed. The climactic scene between the stars features an excess of histrionics but not an ounce of the punch provided by the simple sneeze that punctuates the original.

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Way back in 1927 H.L. Mencken, writing in his Appendix from Moronia, got himself in a lather about the emerging art form of the movies. Mencken was specifically targeting the effect of movies on acting and actors, but, for purposes of amusement as well as evidence of Mencken’s prescience, read this passage in the context of films 82 years removed from the author’s discontent:

”What afflicts the movies is not an unpalatable content so much as an idiotic and irritating technic. The first moving-pictures, as I remember them 30 years ago, presented more of less continuous scenes. They were played like ordinary plays, and so one could follow them lazily and at ease. But the modern movie is no such organic whole; it is simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments. The average scene, if the two shows I attempted were typical, cannot run for more than six or seven seconds. Many are far shorter, and very few are appreciably longer. The result is confusion horribly confounded. How can one work up any rational interest in a fable that changes its locale and its characters 10 times a minute? Worse, this dizzying jumping about is plainly unnecessary; all it shows is the professional incompetence of the gilded pants-pressers, decayed actors and other such half-wits to whom the making of movie seems to be entrusted. Unable to imagine a sequence of coherent scenes, and unprovided with a sufficiency of performers capable of playing them if they were imagined, these preposterous mountebanks are reduced to the childish device of avoiding action altogether. Instead of it they present what is at bottom nothing but a poorly articulated series of meaningless postures and grimaces. One sees a ham cutting a face, and then on sees his lady co-star squeezing a tear—and so on, endlessly. These mummers cannot be whisked off. If, a the first attempt upon a scene, the right attitude is not struck, then all they have to do is keep on trying until they strike it. On those terms a chimpanzee could play Hamlet, or even Juliet... Try to imagine the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in a string of 50 flashes—first Romeo taking his station and spitting on his hands, then Juliet with her head as big as a hay-wagon, then the two locked in a greasy kiss, then the Nurse taking a drink of gin, then Romeo rolling his eyes, and so on. If you can imagine it, then you ought to be in Hollywood, dodging bullets and amassing wealth.”

So we know what the great American journalist and author, this great American satirist, this great American crank, might have to say about Franco Zefferelli and Baz Luhrmann. Just imagine the words that might have been spun had H.L. Mencken ever encountered a Tony Scott film.

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TESSIO THE FISH (NOT SLEEPING WITH)

From Alex Belth at Bronx Banter comes some happy news:

“Took the train uptown, and still with time to burn, got out at 72nd street and decided to casually walk up Broadway. I had the headphones back on as I crossed Broadway and 78th street and saw what looked like Abe Vigoda on the east side of the block. Is Abe Vigoda still alive? I thought. Only one way to find out, so I removed one earphone and yelled out, ‘Hey, Mr. Vigoda.’ And the old man, bent, wearing a beige cardigan, raised his right arm, cane in hand, nodded at me and continued walking down the block.”

Tessio the Fish, looking good at 88 and hard at work on not one, not two, but three new movies. May we all have such productive senior citizenry in our future as Mr. Abe Vigoda.

(Thanks to Jon Weisman for the tip.)

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CONSIDERING FILM GEEK FASHION

Pretentious, sublime, or an equal measure of both? You make the call. The whole director T-shirt line can be seen at the Cinefile Web site. I like the idea behind the Herzog shirt, but the distance between Danzig and the director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God might be too big a conceptual leap for most. I’ve always wanted a De Palma shirt too, but I’m not a fan of the original Def Leppard logo that’s been adapted for the shirt. And as much as the grafting of the two names works, I could never wear a Van Halen-derived Von Trier T-shirt, no matter how hard Lars rocks the cradle. For me, Ozu is the best because I love the man's films, it’s a big, clean image, the phonetic connection linking the filmmaker and the shrunken, fuzzy-headed rock god is as precise and clear as the difference between their outputs is vast and unbridgeable, and it’s probably the one I personally would look the least dopey wearing. (Please, if you see me sporting it someday and it turns out I’m wrong, just leave me to my illusions…) And speaking of nifty T-shirts, there’s a great selection of must-haves for the film-geek in your family to be found here. Remember, Father’s Day is a-comin’! (And I get dibs on the one for R.D. Trucking.)

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GRINDHOUSE REPORT FROM ROW THREE: PLAGUE OF THE SINFUL DWARF

Brian Quinn and Eric Caidin, the dedicated programmers of the twice-monthly New Beverly Grindhouse Film festival, broke format for their Tuesday night series last night with pleasing results. Rather than sticking with the loosely demarcated time frame of mid ‘60s to mid ‘80s, from whence most of the programming for the popular Grindhouse Night comes, they chose to highlight a relatively new film which itself harkens back to the spirit of the grimy, grainy, “realistic” films that made up the aesthetic of the films most typically highlighted. What’s most immediately captivating about Plague Town (2008) is the confidence with which first-time feature filmmaker David Gregory, directing from a script he wrote with John Cregan, take the low-budget independent horror film back to a set of pre-postmodern roots much more entangled with the Wes Craven of The Hills Have Eyes than he of Scream.

Plague Town even pays tribute to The Hills Have Eyes in its basic narrative set-up, though its pay-off, it has to be said, is as eerie and ambiguous as Craven’s post-nuclear nuclear family riff was relentless and crude. An American family, broken by divorce and headed by a father and new stepmother who must preside over the wounds of their angry and dysfunctional brood, take a vacation to Ireland in the hopes of reconnecting with their ancestry and bonding as a new unit. As in the Craven film, Gregory and Cregan don’t really find a way for us to get past this group’s general pettiness. They are, for the most part undistinguished in their antagonisms-- oldest sister Jessica (Erica Rhodes) takes out her anger and aggression on the entire family, but especially on her more introspective (and equally bitter) younger sister Molly (Jossalyn DeCrosta, quite good). Her father (David Lombard) and stepmother Annette (Lindsay Goranson) cannot figure out how to get their family to enjoy the trip and their surroundings, and they are equally annoyed by Robin (James Warke), the arrogant Britisher she’s picked up and invited along on the trip. The family, of course, gets lost in the Irish countryside, setting up their inevitable discovery of and dispatch at the hands of a mysterious band of mutated children, who are quite effective (due to some nice make-up creations and one memorably creepy bit of costume design) as the movie’s objects and purveyors of grisly horror.


Brian Quinn discusses Plague Town with director David Gregory.

Where Plague Town has it all over The Hills Have Eyes is in its canny use of its locale—Connecticut countryside masquerading as Irish countryside—to frame its horrors. Craven’s movie had the naturally forbidding desert as its backdrop, but the director and his cinematographer did little to exploit what they had at their fingertips to create a sense of the landscape closing in on their characters. However, Gregory excels in harvesting tension between the welcoming surroundings and the evils perpetuated in them by the bearers of local and very twisted family values. Gregory also displays, especially for a first-time director, a remarkable patience and assurance with the camera, allowing a rather inconspicuous style to take over the larger visual scheme of the movie. Combine that inconspicuous style with Gregory and Cregan’s resistance to over-explain just what is at the root of the madness overtaking this Irish village of the damned, and you’ve got a movie that feels much closer to the some of the Hammer films directed by Freddie Francis or Terence Fisher, or even Piers Haggard’s bewitched and beautiful Blood on Satan’s Claw, than to the typical 21st-century gross-out shocker. Plague Town is often quite creatively gory, but even so some may miss the crude jolts Gregory avoids that most modern horror directors can’t seem to resist including. For all audiences, the movie’s skin-crawling conclusion may indeed be played and staged with a bit too even a hand—it’s here, in the scenes with the utterly frightening Rosemary, the would-be child bride whose masked face and painted-on eyes covers unspeakable mutation (and provides the movie’s chilling poster images), that the movie could have used more of a playfully perverse De Palma-esque touch. As it is, though, Plague Town, while not exactly breaking new ground in the horror genre, works nicely in a relatively subdued tone, and it speaks well of Gregory and Cregan’s future as genre filmmakers that they would leap out of the box with such an assured first feature.



The official trailer for Plague Town.


As for The Sinful Dwarf, what really can or needs to be said? In my experience at least, exploitation shockers like this are almost never as clever or entertaining as their advertisements. How many times have we seen ads for “the most shocking” this, or “the most erotic” that, only to discover that the actual movie, more often than not crafted (if one can use such a highfalutin word) by stylistic nonentities, exists in a world of muffled sound, inert camerawork and zombified cast members, all of which contribute to the general thick coating of torpor that almost always takes over less than a third of the way through. It is a rare beast indeed that approaches the promise of forbidden (or at least socially deviant) fruit with anything remotely akin to truth in advertising. What we have here is one such beast. Let it be said that The Sinful Dwarf, directed by one Vidal Raski from a screenplay by Harlan Asquith and William Mayo, is one of the most genuinely demented movies I’ve ever seen. Raski, who is credited under this name with no other features according to IMDb (though he may have directed at least one other under a different name), displays a remarkably high ratio of bad to appropriate camera placement—in almost every shot the camera is where it shouldn’t be, and the movie has no claim to a recognizable narrative rhythm-- lurching and crawling and stopping and lurching to life again is the only pattern of its pace. However, The Sinful Dwarf arrives at its gruesome tackiness and perversity sincerely—the movie has virtually no sense of (intentional) humor, yet if it were made even 10 years later you’d have to suspect that there was a desperate camp sensibility behind it all. That said, the movie goes about its business with a lopsided trajectory that generates more honest scuzzy atmosphere, laughable absurdity and creeping dread than almost any movie I’ve ever seen.


Grindhouse Film Festival programmer Brian Quinn poses in front of the one-sheet for Abducted Bride, one of the many titles under which The Sinful Dwarf was repackaged and reissued to a presumably unsuspecting public. This very typical exploitation tactic was a favorite of producer-distributor Harry Novak, repackager extraordinaire, who was certainly not the only low-budget producer to traffic in this kind of deception. (The print we saw of The Sinful Dwarf had the original title clumsily chopped out and the nondescript font "ABDUCTED BRIDE", on a suitably lurid purple backing card, hastily spliced in to take its place.)

The vaguely Euro-Scandinavian otherworldliness of The Sinful Dwarf contributes mightily to the overwhelming sense of unease the viewer slips into almost immediately, but really, that’s only part of the story. The movie takes place almost entirely inside the world’s greasiest, most forbidding, musty and putrid-looking boarding house, where Peter and Mary (Tony Eades and Anne Sparrow-pseudonyms, I hope, for the sake of these actors) take up residence in order to save four pounds a week rent over what one presumes is a more expensive, less obviously hellish residence. The landlady, a rancid ex-cabaret singer named Lila Lash (Clare Keller) runs the place in a drunken stupor—she and a creepy friend (whose dental work we are given much too close a look at) make a daily date out of knocking down bottle after bottle of Beefeater while Lila performs old sub-Dietrich song-and-dance routines for her besotted pal. All this is plenty creepy enough. But it seems Lila has a son, Olaf, the titular slobbering, mouth-breathing perv who lures unsuspecting and nubile hotties to the attic, where he chains them up, hooks them on heroin and sells them as benumbed sex slaves to puffy, acne-scarred neighborhood johns. And when Lila and Olaf get a glimpse of Mary, who pours herself into tight-fitting sweaters (braless, of course) when she isn’t otherwise in full-frontal nude repose, they realize they simply must add her to their collection. A goodly portion of the film’s 92-minute running time is given over to following Olaf as he hobbles up and down the staircase, huffing and puffing and wheezing and cackling, taking advantage of the requisite, conveniently placed peep hole (so he and we can watch Peter and Mary having a near hard-core bang), grotesque choppers bared as if ready to chew down a tree, eyebrows arched insanely, as if they were two furry ski slopes meeting on the bridge of his nose, face twisted into a perpetually drooling leer.


Olaf, who is as obsessed with creepy little wind-up dolls as he is with the dirty pillows on those drugged-out unfortunates in the attic (“Vannnt too zee me ozzer toyisss?” he croaks in a skin-crawling butchery of dubbed English), is played with incredible conviction and absolutely no discernable talent by Torben Bille (he is billed only as Torben in the advertising and in the film’s credits). Torben was at one time a popular children’s TV host—one has to believe/hope his appearance in this shocker ended that career tributary rather swiftly—as well as the go-to actor whenever Swedish filmmakers needed a little person, in kind of the same way that Michael Dunn (best known for his recurring role as Dr. Miguelito Loveless on TV’s The Wild, Wild West) could be spotted everywhere on TV and the movies in the ‘60s and early ‘70s here in America. The difference being, of course, that Dunn was a good actor and Torben—well, Torben is not. (Someone once described Torben as Jack Black after having been put through a trash compactor, and that cackling portrait of him on the Sinful Dwarf poster is, incredibly, no exaggeration.) Never in my memory has the slimy conception of a character jibed so seamlessly with the unpleasant personage of the actor portraying him, which in turn works so claustrophobically in concert with the verite awfulness of that boarding house, the walls which seem to be closing in not only on Mary, as she waits there all day with increasing impatience while Peter goes out looking for work, but on us, the poor, trapped audience, for whom there is no escape from its ghastly oppressiveness. This foul fleapit makes Barton Fink’s Hotel Earle look like the Haunted Mansion.

(Play the Severin Films Sinful Dwarf featurette by clicking to Amazon.com here.)

In its own freakish way The Sinful Dwarf achieves a kind of perfection of its kind—its genuine, lived-in repulsiveness could never be consciously produced or reproduced, and it is compulsively watchable even as we acknowledge it as being utterly bereft of anything resembling the craft and art of film, qualities which produce the pleasures we usually go to the movies to experience. The Sinful Dwarf almost feels like it was produced in an alternate universe, and in a way, I suppose, it was—it’s a Bizarro-world phenomenon where the worse and more grotesque it gets, the more fully it achieves its singular positioning among genuine grindhouse classics, a place where guilelessness and lack of filmmaking acumen, genuine perversion, and balls-out sausage-factory cinema in the name of cooked books and bottom-line profit-making coalesce into a one-of-a-kind production. Seeing The Sinful Dwarf in a beat-up print apparently beamed directly to the New Beverly from Times Square circa 1973 was perhaps as mainline a grindhouse movie experience as is possible to achieve in this age of digital restoration and reverent repackaging of even the sleaziest, most unworthy titles. Just like Brian said I would, as soon as I got home last night I took a shower, and afterward I felt much better. That didn’t stop Torben from invading my dreams, however. He mustn't come visit me tonight. After I finish writing this, it’s off to the showers again. Out, damned dwarf!



Torben et al in the trailer for The Sinful Dwarf.

I should mention here too what Brian and Eric have in store for the rest of the month in the Grindhouse Film Festival. They have added a midnight double feature this coming Saturday, June 13, in memory of the late Marilyn Chambers which will feature Chambers’s first two hard-core Mitchell Brothers films, Resurrection of Eve and Behind the Green Door, and, schedule permitting, there should be some special guests and colleagues appearing to pay tribute to the actress. June has inadvertently become a tribute month across the board. On June 23 the gentlemen have assembled a terrific triple-feature in remembrance of exploitation director extraordinaire Ray Dennis Steckler, who died this past January. In addition to the rare opportunity to see Steckler’s eye-popping monster musical The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies (1964) and The Thrill Killers on the big screen, Eric recently uncovered some missing reels that have allowed for the third feature to be unexpectedly added: Steckler’s weirdo kiddie movie, the rarest of the rare, The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (1965). Brian promises some extra treats for that program as well. And finally, what was to be a celebration of the work of actor-director Don Edmonds, with the director himself in attendance, has turned into what Brian describes will be more like an Irish wake due to Edmonds’ May 30 death. Edmonds directed the infamous Nazisploitation classics Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S. (1975) and Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Shieks (1976). Both of those will screen along with Edmonds’ 1977 thriller Bare Knuckles, an a choice clip reel of Edmonds’ appearances on such shows as Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, The Munsters and many others will also be featured. This Don Edmonds memorial will screen two nights, Friday and Saturday, July 10 and 11.



The trailer for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, in Terrorama AND Eastmancolor!



The trailer for The Thrill Killers a.k.a. The Maniacs are Loose!, in hallucinogenic Hypnovision!


Finally, I'd like to point out that attending the Grindhouse Film Festival on Tuesdays at the New Beverly not only pays off in terms of grime accumulated on the eyes and in the soul, which may or may not be so easily showered away, but also, if you’re lucky, in lovely prizes as well. Last night Brian and Eric gave away some signed Herschell Gordon Lewis posters, some bootlegged copies of God Told Me To (provided by Larry Cohen himself—it’s a long story), and other bits of trashy memorabilia. But when Eric called out my ticket stub number I really lucked out. Brian awarded me two tickets to next Friday night’s Los Angeles Film Festival screening of the newest Coffin Joe shocker, starring writer-director Jose Mojica Marins as the bloodthirsty gravedigger in what is apparently the conclusion of this popular Brazilian movie series. The movie, entitled Embodiment of Evil (Encarnacao do demonio), looks to be suitably grotesque and in keeping with the tone of the previous Coffin Joe chapters, and I’m really excited (if a little apprehensive, after seeing the trailer below) about getting a chance to see this one theatrically, as it’s likely to go the way of straight-to-DVD in America, if at all. My sincere thanks to Brian and Eric for facilitating the corruption of my cinematic soul to the degree that you both have so far this year. I’m glad to be able to make the Grindhouse Film Festival a bit more of a regular destination, and having these two as hosts makes for a very entertaining way to keep the sordid spirit of these pictures alive, not only for the opportunity to trace their influences in more reputable modern motion pictures, but also to rediscover the what these movies are like to see as communal experiences rather than as isolated home-theater diversions. I was grateful for the roughed-up print, as well as the laughter and good-natured groaning and squirming evident all around me in the New Beverly during The Sinful Dwarf. It reminded me, in ways the movie itself did not/could not/refused to, of my shared humanity. Seeing it alone, with no one to turn to or laugh with or share in the shock, might just have been too much for my fragile little mind.



The second trailer for Embodiment of Evil-- beware, it gets pretty grisly, especially for a preview.

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A CHAD OFF THE OLD BLOCK

A bat boy by the name of Chad Scully sits on the bench with Joe Torre during a recent game. Notice any family resemblance? And do you get the feeling he's seeing the game just a little bit differently than the average bat boy? Wow...

This great photo by Jon Soo Hoo courtesy of Sons of Steve Garvey by way of Jon Weisman.

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DOWN TO THE GRINDHOUSE: PLAGUE TOWN AND THE SINFUL DWARF TONIGHT!

It’s Grindhouse Night at the New Beverly tonight, the first of their two can’t-miss programs for the month of June, and keeping true to my threats, I’ll be there tonight to experience a screening of David Gregory’s Plague Town (2008), a reportedly terrifying throwback to the gritty vibe of many ‘70s horror classics which is now also available on DVD and Blu-ray from Dark Sky Films. Plague Town is coupled (if that’s the best term) with the re-emergence of a notorious New Beverly Grindhouse hit originally shown there a couple of years ago. It’s The Sinful Dwarf (1973), and although you can pick up a keen new DVD edition from Severin Films, New Beverly grindhouse guru Brian Quinn explains why your own personal copy, while perhaps providing pride of ownership, can never replace seeing it in a theater:

“Following Plague Town will be the return of a film that even the most hardened and jaded exploitation fans were shocked, amazed and scarred by in its previous Grindhouse screening two years ago. The Sinful Dwarf is a film that lives up to the warning "you'll want to take a shower after this one," and needs to be experienced sitting with an audience in a darkened theater as the well-worn 1970's print unspools before your unbelieving eyes. Who can resist a film with the tagline "A young bride...left alone to the lewd passions of an evil dwarf"? We certainly can't, and neither could the brave folks at Severin Films who recently released the film on an unsuspecting public in a beautiful new DVD edition. If you were at our previous screening of the film you know what to expect, so bring a couple of friends to experience it for the first time... though some of them may reconsider that friendship afterwards!”

Now, there’s a come-on worthy of David F. Friedman! Brian had me at “scarred”! I’ll file a quick update tonight or tomorrow, once the nightmares cease.

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IF IT'S TUESDAY, THESE MUST BE LINKS!

Greetings from the tailpipe end of what turned out to be a weekend loaded with unexpected technological inconvenience (washing machine went tits-up mid-load), hard-fought baseball (Dodgers split the second NLCS rematch of the season with two walk-off wins against the Phillies courtesy of Andre Ethier) and transcendent movie magic (the little ladies and I saw Up), followed by even more technological inconvenience-- computer division-- which resulted in a delay of weekend office work that kept me up until about 3:30 this morning finishing everything off for a 10:00 a.m. deadline. Boo-hoo. All signs point to a righting of the ship, normalcy-wise, though I do have a ballet recital featuring both daughters to look forward to tonight, a season-closing ceremony for my youngest girl’s tee-ball team on Friday, and in between those events two (2) inevitably teary gatherings to honor the departure of a good friend (coincidentally, the kindergarten teacher to both my daughters) from a 44-year teaching career. It’s one of those weeks that will be well worth the tread worn from the bottom of my sneakers, and with Up priming the pump Saturday night I can accurately predict that there will be a certain level of emotional exhaustion on tap by the end of Friday night as well. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the spending the week expressing to those who hopefully already know it how proud and appreciative my family and I are for their talents and generous effort.

Before all that, however, just a few scribble-scrabbles from the notepad, some of which are a bit musty in terms of date of freshness of the subjects at hand. But the topics have been hanging around and have somehow avoided being deleted out of the on-deck circle altogether, so I will try to address them now and try not to look too tired and oh-so-last week (or month, or longer) in the process.

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First off, a couple of housekeeping items. Over the weekend Anne Thompson filed her own report on seeing Drag Me to Hell with us at the Mission Tiki Drive-in last Saturday night. It’s folded into a larger discussion of why it was difficult for many to predict that the Sam Raimi movie would not connect with the mass audience (and why it’s easy to see that Sam Mendes’ Away We Go won’t either). And just in case you aren’t sufficiently enticed yet, there’s a lovely pic of me giving the Anitra Ford-Price is Right treatment to the evening’s signature dessert. Click away!

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Last week Craig D. Lindsey, film critic for the Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer, invited me to participate in a podcast interview on his newspaper’s entertainment blog, Crizzle’s Critical Condition. That conversation is now available for your perusal. Craig warned me that he intended to hold my feet to the fire about Speed Racer and a number of other subjects, but the conversation, which started with some reflections on Don Siegel and Charley Varrick, quickly turned into an early-‘70s love-fest with the introduction of the topic of Freebie and the Bean. We managed to talk a little about Steely Dan and David Carradine before I finally got the hook. I haven’t heard it yet myself, though while I don’t harbor any illusions that anyone will come away changed by the interview it certainly was a lot of fun and, from my perspective anyway, the 35 minutes passed far too rapidly. I’m still ready to talk about Speed Racer if Craig decides a sequel is in order. I’ll just try not to mention either Alan Arkin, James Caan or Alex Rocco next time.

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Okay, it’s the first real box-office bomb of the summer, and though I’m not expecting another Speed Racer, I’ve heard enough from some folks I know who have seen Land of the Lost to make me believe that it still, despite all the retching over it in most of the reviews, might be worth seeing after all. That said, looks like there’s a new trend afoot in idea-starved Hollywood—big-budget adaptations not of old TV series, cartoons or even toys, but board games. Yes, some 23 years after the movie version of the Parker Brothers board game Clue got a raft of withering reviews and made barely a box-office ripple, the movie has developed a modest cult following, and apparently someone in the halls of power has begun to sit up and take notice. Word has it that Tropic Thunder scribe Etan Cohen and Enchanted director Kevin Lima are set to do up a psychedelic version of the popular Candy Land game, and this same package deal with Hasbro may result in upcoming Universal releases based on Ouija, Battleship and—wait for it—Ridley Scott’s Monopoly. (All this is to not even mention the one we’re all waiting for, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a movie version of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. When asked to describe the project, one of the screenwriters said, “Disney had a lot of success with Pirates of the Caribbean, so this is their Pirates movie in space.” Personally, I’ll hold out for the big-budget, rollicking all-star comedy that is just begging to be made, hopefully in a resuscitated Cinerama format, of It’s a Small, Small, Small, Small World.)

But really, why even bother with the annoyance of trying to build a story around a board game? It’s been done, and 24 years ago to boot. Why not just move straight on down the food chain, if you will. If "they" (the Hollywood brain trust) want a pre-sold sea adventure, one with a character attached, a new pre-sold Pirates that could be sequeled well into the next two decades, then what's stopping some genius from developing Cap’n Crunch—The Movie, preferably directed by someone like Kenneth Branagh, or maybe Martin Scorsese, or maybe even Greg Mottola, just so we can throw another indie director into the gaping maw of Hollywood tent-pole hell never to be heard from again? Get Jerry Bruckheimer behind it and not only do you have the breakfast cereal and toy marketing tie-ins sewn up, but you could even shoehorn a cameo from Jack Sparrow in there as well, if things start looking desperate for parts 2 or 3. I need a Bayer. Wait! That’s it! Call Warners! I’ve just got the next big thing—feature-length adaptations of “classic” TV commercials. Mama mia, that’s a spicy meteor-sized meatball on a collision course with Little Italy!

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And now that I’ve brought up meatballs, how about some links:


John McElwee offers a fascinating post about a wrinkle I’d never heard of-- Cinerama at the Drive-in-- at Greenbriar Picture Shows.


Marilyn Ferdinand sets her fine descriptive style loose on the uncut version of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), a consideration which includes thoughts on blasphemy, sexual vs. religious ecstasy, and a vivid recounting of the film’s infamously excised “Rape of Christ” sequence. A must read.


A while back one of the quiz questions was “Best Movie of 1974,” a bountiful year which, upon close examination, is not at all an easy one to boil down in terms of a top five or ten of greatness. Nevertheless, Robert Horton> gives it a shot.


Dave Blakeslee has set himself an even more daunting, and pleasurable, challenge—writing about the entirety of the Criterion catalog, one by one. He’s up to #145.

Greg F., the artist formerly known as Jonathan Lapper, has been thinking about Why Being a Cinephile Matters, and the question, posed in meme form, is one worth thinking about. Greg has some thoughts, as does Marilyn Ferdinand. I have promised to muse upon this one and offered my own, which I hope to have ready for fish wrap sometime this week.

And never one to be outdone, Bill R. passes along the Movie Reading Meme with a tantalizing request for my participation. I accept the challenge, even though one of the biggest sources of frustration of my adult reading life sits squarely atop Bill’s number-one perch: Flicker by Theodore Roszak. I love this book, but I got derailed in my reading of it late last year, during a particularly grueling period of study, and have not picked it back up since. Not for lack of desire to do so, to be sure. But enough time has passed now that I really need to just start over and give myself another chance to luxuriate in this book, which will resonate with anyone who dares call himself a cinephile. In the meantime, I will satisfy myself with as much of Bill’s account as I can greedily consume until the specter of spoilers begins raising its hooded head. My own list is coming, Bill, I promise.


Then there’s Jim Emerson, typically brilliant and thought-provoking on why some -filmmakers have trouble selling themselves and their work, and why some don’t.


Matthew Kiernan, the guy who started the whole Freebie and the Bean revival in my head, checks in with another Movie for Men Who Like Movies, Patrick Swayze in Road House (1988).


After Matthew’s ode to philosophizing bouncers, delve deeply into Noel Vera’s sharp -observations about Richard Fleischer’s equally sharp noir, The Narrow Margin (1952).


And then wash it all down with the tasty brew of love for Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre available from The Self-Styled Siren. Campaspe recently caught up with Don Siegel’s The Verdict, which features the two great character actors, but she doesn’t restrict her musings to that film. Here’s a sample:

“How well these two always managed to flesh out relationships that were somewhat superficial on paper. In The Maltese Falcon their more-than-business association is startlingly plain, but it's all in the playing. When Lorre attacks Greenstreet, yelling `You, you imbecile! You bloated idiot! You stupid fathead!’ we hear not just a criminal sidekick but also a frustrated ex-lover. If it weren't for the year it was made, you would expect Lorre to follow with recriminations about Greenstreet's lack of libido or how he got too flirtatious with last night's waiter. Three Strangers has them playing two characters who, for once, have no history as a couple nor any potential in that way, but the wary way they size each other up suggests all manner of unspoken perceptions. In The Mask of Dimitrios, where Lorre plays a Holly Martins-type writer drawn into Greenstreet's intrigues, Lorre gives hints that his fascination with Greenstreet may have to do with aspects of the big man's lifestyle that aren't being spelled out on screen. `He was my friend!’ Lorre protests at the end of the movie. `Well, he wasn't my friend, but he was a nice man. Compared to you he was...’ It could be the epigraph for their whole eight-movie association.

If you haven’t yet bookmarked Campaspe’s site, for God’s sake, what are you waiting for?

Finally, from the If I Could've Only Said It Half As Well Department, here’s David Edelstein and a beautiful appreciation of David Carradine.

Have a good Tuesday...

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OFF THE CUFF ON SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK, THE MOVIE AND THE DVD

After having missed the movie in theaters least year, I finally got around to the DVD of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, and at the risk of my street cred amongst the blogging community (of which there is admittedly very little to fritter away), I have to admit indifference, at best, to the cold-sweat puzzle-making that this writer-turned-director seems to have fashioned as a singular personal style. I was (and continue to be) in various states of love with the films made from Kaufman’s scripts for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (by George Clooney), Being John Malkovich (by Spike Jonze) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (by Michel Gondry), at the same time as I have to confess a serious amount of aggravation toward Adaptation (also by Spike Jonze) and ignorance of Human Nature (also by Michel Gondry). Synecdoche, New York is Kaufman’s directorial debut, and he is perhaps the only person who could have gotten a handle on the scrambled interior narrative of this most gnarled, deadpan and depressed descendants of 8½. Unfortunately, he is also the one person unable to step back far enough from the self-actualized rubble to at least try to adequately visualize some of the movie’s ideas about artistic crisis and the decay/death/mutation of self, which are startling due to more to the scale of commitment of Kaufman and his actors rather than to any fresh insight or urgency. But despite its ambition, Synecdoche, New York ultimately feels puny to me-- it's a death-obsessed downward shot that nonetheless indulges in a sort of fetishistic romanticizing of its own fatalism. (The movie lacks only a soundtrack scored by the world’s tiniest string section wringing out endless variations on the old Hee Haw ditty, "Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me.")

The movie is nothing if not an honorable try, but it comes nowhere near the kind of audacious high-wire energy necessary to sell these notions of the mysteries of the creative process, perhaps because they all seem to be warmed over from Kaufman’s previously documented navel-gazing, perhaps because this first-time director just isn't up to the challenge he's set for himself. (All the wet-blanket, self-conscious referencing and toying with dopplegangers is enough to make Pirandello throw up his hands.) In Synecdoche the writer-director seems to be mired in a spiraling depression that he is incapable of adequately dramatizing, so he settles for allusions and various clever visual linkage designed to provide emotional ballast and balance for the long dead spots where there’s little for viewers to do but either congratulate themselves for spotting the obtuse references or notice how flat everything else is in the absence of genuine-- as opposed to abstract-- emotional resonance. (The one exception to this observation resides in Samantha’s Morton’s lovely work as longtime lover of our putrefying protagonist, the ultimate Method role for thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman. Horton manages to connect with and embellish upon something resembling the heart and soul of a real person and, as a result, breathe some real life into the hermetically sealed frame. This is a little like admitting that Maureen Stapleton red-clad life-force was the only bearable aspect of Interiors.) I understand that for some this movie is a emotional epiphany, and I respect that; all I can say is, those who respond to it are as welcome to Synecdoche, New York as I am to David Cronenberg’s film of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, an impossible narrative that covers the same ground but does so with Cronenebrg’s visual acumen and filmmaking chops at its disposal, which coalesce and somehow make the damned thing work brilliantly.


I’m sure I must be paraphrasing David Edelstein’s thoughts (or someone’s) when I say that the Kaufman of Synecdoche seems like a very compressed version of the Woody Allen of Stardust Memories, clearly distrustful of the notion that comedy is capable of conveying the ideas he so desperately wants to deal with. (Synecdoche seems like it wants to be funny, but someone just won’t let it.) It's as if making/letting his audience laugh was somehow a concession to an unbearable lightness for Kaufman, or perhaps a corruption of the insistence of his big ideas. Unfortunately, the ideas aren’t so big, and there are many far less pretentious movies that have approached or directly dealt with the ideas present here about the little death and infinite sadness at the core of the act of artistic creativity-- Naked Lunch being but only one-- that don’t come off as punishments. I think Synecdoche is essential viewing for anyone interested in what singular films can and cannot do, and of course for anyone charting the progress (or diversions) of Charlie Kaufman, but that doesn’t make it a masterpiece, or even particularly good. Kaufman’s single-minded pursuit of his interior Escher painting is, I suppose, what will ultimately cement his status as a visionary, but the risk of incessantly charting that interior landscape as your Great Subject, as Fellini did to ever decreasing returns, is in the forbiddingly insular landscape of the films themselves. I wonder what would happen if Charlie Kaufman befuddled everyone and did a job-for-hire as his next project. Whatever the result, it’s a lot more rewarding to contemplate the possibilities of a $100-million Kaufman remake of Fantastic Voyage than it is sitting through Synecdoche, New York.

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From left: Andrew Grant, Karina Longworth and Chris Beaubien

One of the best things on the splashy DVD of Synecdoche, New York is the DVD extra “Infectious Diseases in Cattle: A Blogger’s Roundtable,” in which five reputable and respectable Internet-based film critics, apparently hand-picked by Kaufman himself, chew the fat for a half-hour or so about what they thought about the movie. The writers—Glenn Kenny, Andrew Grant, Karina Longworth, Chris Beaubien and Walter Chaw-- are eloquent in expressing what about the movie got under their skin so, and in detailing some of the points of order that will have escaped those who were worn down by the movie’s narcissistic trajectory. No matter that I disagreed with their conclusions and could not relate to their experience with the film-- I enjoyed seeing these folks getting this forum so much, and that they used it to talk in such captivating ways about the film, that I wish they’d made room for a dissenting view. Now, before anybody writes in and accuses me of jealousy, know that a) this is a New York club (except for Chaw, and congratulations, Walter, if Sony got off the dime for your plane fare) and b), I have almost zero desire to appear on camera talking about anything. This is not my backhanded way of saying I should have been in the room with these folks, though, in other circumstances I’d welcome the opportunity to hoist a beer with any one of them.

I understand that Kaufman and producer Anthony Bregman were looking more for a respectable exegesis of what Kaufman was trying to do as a writer-director, and for fans of the movie and of film criticism I think you’d have to say these five fine filmbrains (sorry, Andrew) succeeded. But I think the scope of the discussion could have been fruitfully expanded, without turning the whole enterprise into a rowdy McLaughlin Report for cinephiles, had someone been invited who could have eloquently expressed the ways in which the movie doesn’t work. David Edelstein or Stephanie Zacharek, for example, are smart folks who didn’t respond rapturously to the movie and could have brought a welcome diversity to the gathering. As it is, this blogger’s roundtable, while not strictly for the already converted, may best be appreciated by the Kaufman choir. But if the idea catches on and more filmmakers promote the notion of gathering writers together for more DVD gab fests like this one, I hope that there will be more room left at the table for the one or two redheaded stepchildren who may be trying to shout above all the praise and call attention instead to the director standing in the corner, holding court in his birthday suit.

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GODDESS OF CARNAGE

Oh, how I love Marcia Gay Harden. I was lucky enough to see her on Broadway in Angels in America: Perestroika, and what wouldn’t give to see her in God of Carnage, which cleaned up at last night’s Tony Awards. Marcia, can you say “roadshow”?



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DAVID CARRADINE 1936 -2009

David Carradine, who died Thursday in Bangkok, Thailand under circumstances that are still under investigation and subject to conflicting reports, will be mourned and eulogized this week with sadness and eloquence, and remembered for his understated work in films like Bound for Glory and Kill Bill Volume 2, and of course for his role as Kwai Chang Caine in the popular early ‘70s TV series Kung Fu. He appeared in Boxcar Bertha, alongside one-time partner Barbara Hershey, for Martin Scorsese, and had a cameo in the director’s signature breakthrough film Mean Streets. And Carradine’s last, most memorable performance may not have even occurred on film (though parts of it undoubtedly exists somewhere as pixels on a digital camcorder or cell phone)—his testy wrangle with cinematographer Haskell Wexler on a panel after a screening of Bound of Glory this past spring at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood was legendary from almost the minute it concluded. (The dust-up was well and entertainingly documented by Chris Willman.)

But for as many of these memorable roles as Carradine could claim (and as many roles in routine or even terrible films that he might have liked to have forgotten, as many of us probably already have), two in particular will always define Carradine the actor in my mind. First, the unmovably cynical Frankenstein in Death Race 2000 (1975), carrying out a covert political revolution while literally playing the establishment game of televised road rage, was a nice twist on the Zen-infused Caine persona and a chance for the actor to play a little looser (all things being relative) with his acting style. But most important for me is Carradine’s contribution to the century-and-a-half-old work-in-progress that is the legend of Jesse James, as Cole Younger in Walter Hill’s elegiac, muscular and lyrical western The Long Riders (1980). Never an uptight actor, Carradine seemed to really enjoy inhabiting the melancholy of Hill’s vision with customary sly humor and straightforward grace. It was a role that allowed him to highlight his lithe physicality— the knife fight with James Remar as Belle Starr’s Indian boyfriend is a spectacular bit of choreographed hand-to-hand violence in which the adversaries are kept within slashing proximity by clamping a belt between their choppers— as well as his extraordinary and enveloping sense of comfort with his fellow cast members. Much was made at the time of the movie’s release about the casting of the real-life Keach, Carradine, Quaid and Guest brothers as the familial pillars of the Jesse James legend, but I think just as memorable are Carradine’s scenes with Belle Starr, played by Pamela Reed with a sense of strong-willed sexual entitlement and a world-weariness to match. The two of them luxuriate in their physical encounters, yet are remarkably frank in assessing and understanding their roles—especially Belle’s—in a post-Civil War social order still largely defined by the masculine prerogative. Their brief scenes together, highlighted below, are one of the many things that makes Hill’s movie remarkable, and Carradine, in Cole Younger’s skin, seemed particularly lived-in. The actor deftly mixed vulnerability, paranoia and even an edge of imperiousness with a surprising grace that perfectly complements the emblematic richness of Hill’s amoral vision just as did the long flowing dusters worn by the James-Younger gang, or even Ry Cooder’s beautiful score, itself haunted by the same ghosts of the Confederacy that pervade the movie. Yes, it is his Cole Younger that I treasure most from David Carradine, and remembering the joy I’ve taken from that performance over the 20 or 25 times I’ve seen the movie since its release in 1980 has been great comfort in the days since his death was revealed.



David Carradine and Pamela Reed in The Long Riders (1980)

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TO DRIVE-IN HELL AND BACK!

UPDATED! 6/2/09 2:54 p.m.


It is my happy duty to report that the first SLIFR Night at the Drive-in, which took place this past Saturday night at the Mission Tiki Drive-in, was, in my humble estimation, a rousing success. Much of that success had to do with the feature entertainment being as perfect for a gathering under the outdoor big screen as was Grindhouse over two years ago—more about Drag Me to Hell in a moment. But I think it had a whole lot more to do with being part of a genial and enthusiastic crowd of people, some friends, some virtual friends and readers of this blog whom I had never occasion to meet before, and many folks who responded to the open invite just because it sounded like it might be fun. And because of each and every one that came out to celebrate the drive-in with us Saturday, that’s exactly what it was.


Members of the Phantom Coaches Hearse Club get a good spot on the lot.

I arrived around 5:45, after discovering an annoying glitch in the directions I had provided to everyone that instructed drivers to turn down not the proper road to approach the theater from the back, but instead down a scary, dead-end alley from where there would seem to be, once you got down there, no safe or sure return. (Drag me to hell, indeed.) Fortunately, the folks who made the journey to Montclair that night were, to a driver, far smart enough to make the adjustment and figure out for themselves what I couldn’t manage to convey. By 6:00 I was setting up tables and chairs next to the evening’s very first arriving guest, the current president of the Phantom Coaches Hearse Club, Kerri and her husband (whose name I cannot recall, to my ultimate discredit), who parked next to my van and, as dusk approached, brought out their vintage Coleman oil-pump lantern (the kind that hisses as the fuel glides through its intricate machinery), which added immensely to the nighttime ambiance already brought to the darkening lot by their awesomely restored Caddy coffin wagon.


Paul Reilly anticipates the general reaction to the evening's second feature. In the ever-resonating words of Marty Feldman, coulda been worse-- coulda been rainin'!

The next guest to arrive was Anne Thompson, who has fast become one of the favorite people I’ve met in the world of film blogging and criticism. She is extremely warm and friendly, as well as an engaging conversationalist, and the two times I’ve met her she has been so welcoming to me that it was a real honor to be able to welcome her in a similar fashion. Anne made it a family affair by attending our little soiree with her daughter Nora and husband David Chute, whose writing I have respected for many years in Film Comment, the Village Voice and countless other publications (many of which also provided my introduction to Anne’s work). David is (not much of a surprise here) a very gregarious and quick-witted fellow and a lot of fun to spend time with at a drive-in. The evening afforded me several opportunities to step back and privately marvel that I was here in this wonderful, casual situation with two people I never thought I’d chance to meet, let alone see a movie with, and their presence added a unique and special element to the evening.


Pictured (from left): Robert Fiore, videographer Ruben, Anne Thompson, Erin Maher and friends, Christian Brackett, Michelle Brien

But then you know what? So did the entire cast of characters. They are, in no particular order, most excellent friend Andy Torres, his son Will and stepson Christian Brackett; an old pal from the early days of closed-captioning, Erin Maher, who brought along her sisters and her writing partner, five in all; SLIFR readers Chris Oliver, along with his lovely wife, and Robert Fiore, neither of whom I had ever met; friend and Internet radio king Paul Reilly, who brought with him one of my favorite people, Michelle Brien (who brought along two friends too!); Mike Goldstein and his son Ben, who heard about the party through L.A. Observed; co-workers and exceptional good sports Kim Braasch and Sean Newcombe (Newk, keep repeating to yourself, it’s only a movie… it’s only a movie…); the lovely and sweet-spirited Sammi Chang and her husband David (a prize-winner, but more about that in a second); SLIFR reader Charlie Dicus, who I managed to miss, dammit, although I did briefly see one of his friends— Nayla, I believe it was?— just before the movie started (Charlie, where‘d y’all go during intermission?); longtime writer pal Bob Westal; my fellow traveler in Dodger fandom, screenwriter Mike Werb, easily one of the nicest, friendliest people I know, and his partner, the exceptionally keen Brian Roskam; my pal Sal’s cousin Ruben, who brought a carload out to join in the fun and served as the official videographer of the event; and several more members of the Phantom Coaches car club, who did VERY well in the prize giveaways— Sophie, Eric, Dee, Bobbie, Judas Trina, Kay Eddie and Diane Fiorelli, Lorin, Terri, Robert. You guys were so much fun and added so much to perfect the atmosphere of the surroundings with your cars. Thanks for coming!

(I also have to acknowledge the four folks who could not be in attendance, the presence of whom would have made an already exceptional night even better: my wife Patty, who made the altogether reasonable decision to shield herself and our daughters from the expected agonies that would befall Alison Lohman this night; old drive-in pal Katie, a.k.a. psaga, who withstood the grisly horrors of Earth Day with me and who would have had the time of her life with us on Saturday night; my fine friend Don Mancini, with whom I’ve already discussed the movie and with whom I can’t wait to dig into it again; and my best friend, Bruce, who I know will thrill to DMTH no matter where he sees it, but who would have loved it even more if he’d been outside with us.)


From left, Michelle Brien, Mike Werb and Robert Fiore anticipate the chills of the movie, as well as the literal chills of a cool not-quite-summer night, in the darkest minutes before being dragged to hell.


David Chute models his exclusive Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule T-shirt, which I don't think I remembered to press him to wear around the UCLA campus-- Exposure! Exposure! (Please forgive the photographer unfamiliar with his new camera-- me-- for the blurry image.)

As we all began to coalesce around the general area near the front of the lot, get our spots laid out, migrate back and forth from there to the snack bar and back, and settle in as dusk and the movie grew nearer, I really began to appreciate the fact that so many people—all in all, nearly 40—came together to share this movie experience, and I was very honored that it happened under my watch. It was a real thrill to look around and see a real party atmosphere taking shape—it really did provide a great lead-in for the high spirited movie we were about to see. Just before show time, we all gathered around the general area where most everyone was parked, with just enough time for me to hold a drawing for some Drag Me to Hell-Sam Raimi-related prizes. Sammi’s husband David picked up a Three Stooges DVD set in a lunchbox container (the Stooges being an obvious influence on the style of slapstick that has been a linchpin of Raimi’s visual style since Evil Dead 2); there were a couple of other cool DVDs—quadruple features from Warner Bros. including a Hammer Dracula foursome that was highly coveted, and one of Raimi’s amusing western pastiche The Quick and the Dead; a couple of very nice Drag Me to Hell one-sheets; and several one-of-a-kind, get ‘em while they’re hot Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule T-shirts! (David Chute is modeling his in the picture above, and I’m very pleased that Anne and Brian took home the others.)


Apparently Satan himself stuck a claw in for a little taste (lower right-hand corner) before the rest of us got a chance! (Photo courtesy of Mike Werb)

And with mere minutes to go before show time, as I was handing out prizes, Brian and Mike were cutting slices of the evening’s customized dessert, a spectacular Drag Me to Hell chocolate cake with strawberry and custard filling that I had specially made for the occasion by the fine folks at Portos Bakery. These ingenious cake artists lasered an edible image of the movie’s one-sheet art, taken from a .jpg, onto the top of the cake, instantly creating a sugary conversation piece that was enjoyed by all, except me—no sugar allowed! I did get some of that orange border frosting on my fingers, however, and I’m here to tell you it puts the stain-making properties of Cheetos to shame. (One of my favorite overheard comments of the evening came as a retort to a suggestion that Universal would be impressed by the unique marketing possibility created with the cake—more likely, said the unknown quipster, they'd be lightning-quick to slap me with a cease and desist order.)

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Once the lights of the sky were properly dimmed, it was time for the feature attraction. Speaking as a big fan of Evil Dead 2, but one who was quite indifferent to Raimi’s other comic book horror movies, including the original Evil Dead and also Darkman and particularly Army of Darkness, I was unable to quell the involuntary impulse to temper my excitement as the rave reviews for Drag Me to Hell began to pile up with my memories of dissatisfaction with Raimi films past. I happen to think (and still do) that his adaptation of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan is the director’s best movie, but nothing that has come since Raimi’s Hollywood arrival has come close to the sheer go-for-broke entertainment value of Evil Dead 2. Until this new movie.

Drag Me To Hell is about as much rollicking, demonically-bent, condemned-by-the-Church fun as could reasonably be expected, and I say that without registering even a smidgen of disappointment. For once the raves were right. The movie takes great black-comic pleasure laying out in delicious detail exactly why it’s not a good idea to deny an extension on a loan to a milky-eyed old lady with a thick Eastern European accent and very bad dentures. The woman (Lorna Raver) who makes her way to the desk of up-and-coming banker Lohman is either pure evil or has an even worse dental plan than she does a relationship with her lending institution. But Lohman takes cues from her boss (David Paymer) that suggest only those who can make the tough decisions will make the short list of promotion candidates, and soon Lohman, with a queasy corporate smile, decides to deny the woman her extension. One humiliating, horrifying display in the bank office leads to an even more horrifying encounter between Lohman and Raver in the bank’s underground parking garage, and we’re off and running. The woman visits a curse on Lohman (“Soon it will be you who will be begging to me!”) that consists of a day or two being toyed with by a demon from hell before being forced to take the titular subterranean trip for all eternity, and the great perverse joy that Raimi’s movie offers is in watching him pull out all the stops as that process of being toyed with escalates. It’s a joy directly connected to being in the hands of someone whose command of the medium is so confident that each blunt shock, each inspired gross-out, comes gilded with an unexpected frisson of style that burns the shocks into your memory and makes you rediscover the exquisite pleasure of a good scream. (The single shot where we slowly become aware of the old woman’s presence in the back seat of Lohman’s car in that parking garage is a small masterpiece of slow-revealing terror that will reconnect you with the childlike sensation of not being able to get your hands up over your face fast enough, while being unable to resist the temptation to peek at the same time.)


For all the praise Raimi has received for his mastery as a director of comic horror, of set pieces that recall his own Three Stooges-influenced style of go-for-broke, kitchen-sink comedy (this is, after all, a movie featuring a séance at one point presided over by a demonic talking goat-- Drag Me to Hell’s most obvious link to the spirit of Evil Dead 2), not much has really been said about his facility as an architect of sustained mood and suggestive imagery. There are sequences midway through this movie that would make Val Lewton, Robert Wise and Jacques Tourneur stand up and salute, so effective is Raimi’s employment of shadowy night creatures and well-timed bumps (and creaks, and groans) in the night. It's not really the director's game to make us worry about whether Lohman will survive her various ordeals at this stage—we know she will, because the supposedly inevitable transport to hell is not scheduled, according to the movie’s legend, until the third day. So Raimi’s movie becomes not a saga of moment-to-moment survival, but instead a showcase for all the ways in which Lamia, the demon coming after this poor, not entirely innocent girl, chooses to fuck with her head and her body, particularly her poor abused mouth, which takes in and spews out an incredible array of disgusting substances over the course of the playing out of the curse.


Raimi’s achievement here as a writer (the movie was produced from a long-shelved script by the director and his brother Ivan) is not so much in the movie’s stake in originality, or its much-ballyhooed connection to the current zeitgeist of economic despair—as one writer has observed, our real-life dire straits were precipitated not by stinginess and rigidity on the part of banks, but instead by giving away too much credit and too many loans—but instead its attendance to storytelling detail. Hints both visual and in the dialogue and character development are dropped throughout as to the thematic significance of money, and those hints come roaring back to the forefront of importance when we least expect it. (If you can fully anticipate how Lohman’s generically underwritten, coin-collecting Boyfriend X, played with charm by Justin Long, will figure into the fate of his girlfriend, whom he supports even though he thinks she’s delusional, then you’re a sharper viewer than I.) And Raimi takes a huge gamble regarding the limits of audience identification with his put-upon heroine when at one point she must decide whether or not to follow an instruction manual given to her by a consulting psychic (Deelip Rao) entitled The Sacrifice of Animals Toward the Appeasing of Deities. (I think he gets away with it and enriches the movie’s tangential theme of having to deal with owning up to the possibly damning ramifications of one’s own decisions in the process.)

The bottom line is, if you have any fondness for the horror genre, you will likely greet Drag Me to Hell as some kind of miracle. The movie is spectacularly good, very clever, very scary, and despite all the wild flights of imagination it never succumbs to becoming the big CGI blowout that most movies of this kind thunder inevitably toward, with little regard to whether the end result is actually in any way frightening. With Drag Me to Hell Raimi honors the best this EC Comics-influenced genre has ever had to offer. The movie is funny-scary right up to the last frame.

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I will say, though, I am beyond surprised that Drag Me to Hell has a PG-13 rating. I don’t think it’s a reactionary, pooh-poohing kind of a thing to observe that the world of what constitutes a PG-13 these days is noticeably different than it was in 1984, when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and its relatively grotesque imagery (everything from ripping a beating heart out of a man’s chest to being gleefully served a bowlful of chilled monkey brains) got concerned citizens like Jack Valenti all steamy under the collar and inspired the MPAA to create the subdivision of the “parental guidance” rating. Even though Drag Me to Hell operates in very much the same adolescent world of cheap thrills and dirty laughs by way of variations on every gross-out in a kid’s imaginary arsenal, the truth is, over the distance of 25 years now Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a cake walk (and a Disneyland ride), graphic images-wise, compared to Raimi’s new movie, a movie I think any sane person, despite the lack of actual bloodletting, would have rated R.

It's my suspicion that the MPAA bowed down to Universal in deference to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man box-office clout and went wa-a-a-a-ay easy on this film, expecting that the PG-13 would induce greater crowds at the box office. What “they” (meaning the MPAA and the marketing suits at Universal) seem to have misunderstood is how a movie marketed as a horror comedy, even one whose humor is as black as it is here, is apparently automatically less appealing to the core horror crowd, who much prefer the type of sadism unmarred by a sense of humor that is usually associated with a hard R. (The movie’s fourth-place showing, behind Up and two other week-old movies-- Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Terminator: Salvation-- seems to bear this theory out.) So the movie comes out, does less well than expected, theoretically because of the resistance of the core horror audience to what they perceive as a watered-down movie due to the rating, and everybody on the studio lot ends up scratching their heads over their misfortune. A friend of mine insists that playing up the horror-comedy angle is death to a movie’s chances with ticket-buyers these days, and it’s hard to disagree—I personally know at least three people who begged off seeing the movie, despite the near-across-the board raves, based entirely on that PG-13 and the idea that if it was funny, then how could it be scary?

If the MPAA had been honest, with themselves, with Raimi, and with the movie, it would have rated the movie appropriately, the movie would have gotten the same raves, and I suspect it would have done better at the box office, as The Strangers did almost a year ago even with a more restrictive rating. Whatever it is rated, Drag Me to Hell is a terrific movie, but I think it's fundamentally dishonest that it has been rated PG-13 by those ever-vigilant keepers of the scrolls of parental guidance. If any other movie not directed by the guy who made Sony over a billion dollars with the Spider-Man series had the kind of creative splatter, projectile vomiting, oral violation and general spirit of demonic manifestation that is the hallmark of this movie, it would have been an automatic R. For crying out loud, Raimi's own Evil Dead 2, Darkman and Army of Darkness were all rated R, back in the day when Sam Raimi was a box-office nobody and no one had anything at stake in what his next movie might be, and not one of those movies was as grim and visually grisly as this one. (Well, maybe Evil Dead 2, but the comic element in that one was even more pronounced than it is here.)

Any parent should be smart enough not to let their impressionable children anywhere near a movie called Drag Me to Hell and to not take a corrupt institution like the MPAA’s word for anything about its content. But I wonder if there might not be grown adults who will barrel into the movie ill-prepared by the relatively innocuously connotations of the PG-13 for the slam-bang horror fest they’ll be subjected to, and stumble out of it dazed and confused by the level of genuine shocks Raimi delivers while the rest of us are chortling and screaming and not daring to look up out of our popcorn bags.

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At 1:00 a.m., the screen #1 projector at the Mission Tiki fires up for the evening's second showing of Drag Me To Hell and bids the hearty folks who stayed for the evening's second feature, Angels and Demons, a fond farewell.

Once again, thanks so much to everybody who made going to Hell this past Saturday night such a blast. To those of you who wrote in wishing you could have been there, I hope this report brings a little of it home to you and will inspire you to somehow join us for the next one. (I’ve got a very good idea, but it all depends on whether or not there’s a drive-in screen nearby that will be showing Black Dynamite.) Most of all, it’s nice to know there are so many genuinely fine people who read this blog and would choose to share their Saturday evening with me for this event. I am honored and so glad that the memory of this fun night will thankfully last much longer than the actual event. (I even had a nightmare Saturday night after I got home, and it was almost as much fun as the movie!) Thanks for reading and coming out, everybody. In the immortal words of Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby, let’s do it again… real soon!

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UPDATE! 6/2/09 2:54 p.m.

Ruben, the videographer for the SLIFR Night at the Drive-in, has turned in his interpretation of the evening’s events, and as a certain beloved late-night vampire TV host might have said, “This one is re-e-e-eally sc-a-a-r-r-r-ry, folks!” Nice production values and maximum fright is squeezed out of this 4½-minute program which documents the early twilight portion of our fun evening under the stars. Why, there’s even footage of Anne snapping a pic of me holding the cake! And lots of frightening hearse footage too-- FNLRIDE, indeed! A good time was scared up by all, and now we’ve got the evidence to prove it… unto all eternity. Many thanks to Ruben and Sal Gomez of the Southern California Drive-in Movie Society for taking on the assignment of this important historical document. Nice job, demons!



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DUCK SOUP-- FUNNIEST MOVIE EVER?

The following is, after a long respite, another in a continuing series of attempts to write about each of the movies included in the SLIFR Top 100.

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One of the challenges of the most recent SLIFR quiz, a quiz to which I have yet to submit myself (and I promise I will—no incompletes allowed here), is to think of a comedic performance worthy of some kind award—Oscar, Golden Globe, whatever—that was rounded ignored by the folks who hand such awards out. Less than a difficult challenge it turned out to be however—the real challenge was trying to keep from submitting more than 20 good and true and worthy suggestions for a less than definitive answer. And after looking over the list of submissions from those who took the quiz, I’ve come to the not unreasonable conclusion, when we’re talking about comedic performances, that anything and everything that makes you laugh is worthy of an award. The eliciting of a belly laugh is one of the most difficult things for a performer to achieve, and its effect on the viewer so exhilarating and therapeutic that it has to be considered on some level criminal the degree to which comedy is devalued by this society, often by the very people who ought to know better.

Another element to factor in when thinking about comedy is the way we watch movies in the home theater age. Everyone knows the logistical, economical and experiential advantages of seeing films at home (the subject of yet another quiz question)—the surroundings are cozier, more relaxing; the cost is minimal—about two bucks a shot at one of those lowest-common-denominator DVD-dispensing robots in your local grocery store, around five clams a rental at the Vaderian Blockbuster empire, maybe a pinch or two less at one of the few surviving mom and pop shops, on up to $18 or so per month for unlimited rentals at the somewhat less Vaderian Netflix empire, where the selection is almost as unlimited as the imagination of the average renter; and one is likely, even sans the toppest-notch home theater viewing system, to have a much more pleasant experience actually watching the movie if one doesn’t have to worry about getting into a shouting match with obnoxious neighbors who can’t keep their mouths shut, their cell phones off or their feet from kicking the back of your seat’s headrest. (Ironically, it’s these very positives that have created, for me, a relatively new problem—the increased likelihood of my falling fast asleep, however compelling the narrative, before even 10 minutes of the movie has passed. This is why I’ve had much better luck with Godard in movie theaters as I’ve gotten older.) All of these factors have allowed for us to achieve that dreamiest of dreams (as least as far as film buffs go), our own private screening rooms.

Yet measuring by the way we as an audience have experienced movies even up through the age of television, until the explosion of the Betamax and VHS in the late ‘70s-early ‘80s, the operative principle has been that collective experience in the dark with, ideally, 300 or 400 hushed and attentive viewers with whom we could share the wonder of a Cary Grant quip/pratfall combo, or the breathtaking intertwining of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or the rush of being immersed in a Robert Altman wide-screen, six-track tapestry, or the mass terror of being on the receiving end of Spielberg’s Jaws. Obviously, in a home theater setting that collective experience is lost, and with the erosion of many of the standards of public conduct, general sensitivity and consideration towards one’s fellow humans a simple fact of the modern multiplex, many have come to feel that the loss of that collective experience is a trade-off worth making. After all, is it not possible to be as wowed by the artistry of Top Hat sitting next to your significant other on your living room couch, or submerged in the audio-visual depth in movies as disparate as Nashville and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy if you have all the highest-rated Best Buy bells and whistles, or even if you don’t? I’d say, perhaps. The sense of scale of the theatrical experience is something that goes missing in any movie, Top Hat, Nashville or The Return of the King, when it gets traded down to a 42-62” TV screen, no matter how flat it is or how close you sit to it. But even sans the occasional theater-wide gasp of terror that comes just after Roy Scheider tosses out that last cup of chum, or the audible swoon of a rapt audience attendant to Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain, those movies can still sweep us away and often still do. My suspicion is that where the home theater experience saps the most from a movie, or more to the point where the collective experience of seeing a movie with an audience is most missed, is in the viewing of comedies.

Wait, you say-- funny is funny. If it’s gonna make me laugh it’s gonna make me laugh, no matter where I see it or who I see it with. Norval Jones courting Trudy Kockenlocker is a ritual no less hilarious just because my best friend couldn’t come over to watch The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek with me, and when Donald O’Connor implores Gene Kelly and company to “Make ‘Em Laugh,” by God we do, even if it’s 2:30 in the morning and we’re staging our own solitary version of that old staple, made irrelevant by VCRs and (1)57 channels with nothing on, the late, late show. And I’d say if you made that argument you’d be absolutely right—even if we weren’t not in constant hysterics over Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains watching it on home video, we can still appreciate on an intellectual level just how funny that movie is, and how inspired he is in it. But taking The Man with Two Brains as an example, this was a movie that did not do ripping business at the box office. Those who saw it theatrically, as I did several times during its brief run during the early days of summer 1983, did so to less-than-packed houses, and we are significantly fewer than the throngs who became intimately familiar with it when it arrived on VHS. On tape TMW2B became the kind of movie that you and your friends rented and gathered together to enjoy over a couple of pizzas and a few beers on a Saturday night. This experience, as you may have noticed, is not the more typical relative isolation of a home theater screening, a reduction of the audience down to you and/or your immediate family, but instead one in which a group experience is often actively sought.

Why? Because regardless of the intellectual appreciation of comedy, the involuntary outward appreciation of it—laughter-- is, at the risk of being obvious, contagious. If someone ends up in stitches over something you also find funny, the bit seems just a smidgen funnier. Someone else’s laughter tends to cue your perceptions and you may find yourself belly laughing at something you might have found only mildly amusing by yourself. The laughter of a big audience at a genuinely hilarious comedy carries with it its own momentum, and if the filmmaker is fortunate enough to have a good sense of rhythm and pacing, so that the dead spots don’t come too frequently or last too long when they do come, that momentum can become an unstoppable force, like a very happy boulder rolling down a hill. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen a classic comedy—if you’re lucky enough to see one in a situation where the audience is naturally, vocally feeding off of the appreciation of the humor and the generosity of the filmmakers and/or on-screen talent free-floating through the auditorium, you’re likely to remember it for a good long while (once you have regained the ability to breathe).

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The last time I saw Duck Soup with a live audience was probably close to 30 years ago, on a double feature with Woody Allen’s Bananas at my beloved old Cinema 7 in Eugene, Oregon. The Cinema 7 was a very small auditorium on the third floor of an upscale downtown mall called the Atrium—there were maybe 100 seats in total—and the screening was, as I recall, nearly full, a good crowd for a program that probably would have easily drawn twice the crowd for a 16mm campus showing in some nondescript lecture hall. The Cinema 7’s métier was Hollywood revival cinema and, given the age during which it operated, the German New Wave, so one could be forgiven for associating the theater and its patrons more with the kitchen-sink gloom of Ali- Fear Eats the Soul than with the merriment of the Marx Brothers. I believe this screening was my first encounter with Duck Soup (I was lucky enough to get my actual introduction via Horse Feathers, on Saturday afternoon TV), and the audience was appreciative and laughed heartily, but I don’t recall them being in hysterics, an appropriate response, it seemed to me, given the state of hysteria in which the movie itself operated with such freewheeling, anarchic abandon. Nevertheless, the movie, over three decades of viewing on various formats—I’ve owned it on Betamax, VHS, laserdisc and now DVD—solidified itself as one of my favorites, one of the unassailable masterpieces of movie comedy.

As is well known to anyone who follows this blog with regularity, one of the prime joys of my life, as my children get older, is enriching their lives with classic movies of all stripes, either at home or, whenever we get the chance, on the big screen. And so when the New Beverly recently announced on its calendar a double feature of Duck Soup and Animal Crackers, I immediately made plans for my oldest daughter and I to attend. Nine years old, and a bit of a maniac herself, I had a strange feeling she would respond well to the antics of Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo. (When I named the four Marx Brothers for her, she cackled wildly at Zeppo’s name, perhaps the biggest laugh this wallflower Marx ever got.) When we pulled up to the theater, the first thing we both noticed was the consistent rather dazed look of happiness on the faces of those spilling out into the evening twilight from the matinee showings. Then she pointed out that there were a lot of kids coming out, and she was right—a lot of parents seemed to have had the same idea I did. So we got our seat and I spent a little time before the lights went down giving her a brief history of the kind of theatrical origins from which the Marx Brothers sprung, and clued her in to imagine Animal Crackers as if it were a play—something she was easily able to do thanks to director Victor Heerman’s tendency to stage the movie as if he were shooting it from the third row. The movie’s relative creakiness and sub-par sound made me nervous—Would she grow impatient if she wasn’t able to follow the rhythm and the verbiage of the wisecracks? But she seemed gratifyingly amused and was, as all kids probably are, fascinated by Harpo’s geniality and rubbery physicality, as well as the vague sensation of watching Chico and Groucho and being witness to something new, a child admitted to a sophisticated club for adults who was enjoying the show nonetheless because she knew something silly and kind of grown-up was going on, even if she didn’t quite “get it.”


And then came the reckoning. Accused of sleepwalking, Groucho’s Captain Spaulding admits that he occasionally found himself up and about during nights on the African plain: “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” That was it—the dam broke, and she went off into peals of laughter so loud that even people sitting nearby, themselves caught up in all manner of guffaw and chuckle, noticed her zeal, and I like to think it made them laugh a little bit harder. I know it worked that way for me. By the time we got the section where Groucho steps forward from the action for the first in a series of mock-lofty asides to the audience (“This would be a better world for children if their parents had to eat the spinach”) my daughter was a thoroughly converted Marxist and I was thrilled just to watch her reaction through the tears of my own laughter. She didn’t even let the lumpy, uneven pacing of the movie and its leaden “plot” bring her down—there was always Chico’s piano solo, Harpo’s harp solo, or any number of unexpected gags, physical bits and arched eyebrows to keep her buoyant. At the climax she howled through Harpo’s triumphantly hilarious exposure as a doe-eyed silverware thief with the wheezing bliss and battle-tested lungs of a true believer.

But as much as she enjoyed Animal Crackers, I could never have prepared her for Duck Soup. By now Groucho’s patented machine-gun delivery was familiar to her, and the sound recording on Duck Soup vastly improved over that of Animal Crackers, so we both settled in for enjoyment right off the top. She loved Groucho’s insults and one-sided jousting with Margaret Dumont even more in this movie—several times since seeing the movie she has tried out lines from the opening sequence (“Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say! You cover a lot of ground yourself. You'd better beat it. I hear they're gonna tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing!”) and is never discouraged that she can never quite get it; it just makes her want to go back and see the movie again. The movie’s streamlined lunacy and relative brevity (68 minutes) made it seem even more perfect after the shortcomings of Animal Crackers. The downside to the movie’s lack of respite within a harp solo or Chico piano number is that the movie is, for its length, perhaps packed with more grade-A gags and bits than anything other movie ever made, and such borderline exhausting. But here’s where that near-exhaustion made the difference for my daughter and me. Throughout the movie’s manic first half we were part of an audience that was far more vocally appreciative than the one I first saw it with 30 years before, and that state of communal bliss, of mass hyperventilation, was one we keyed in on immediately, one which informed the way we thought about and experienced the entire movie.


But the movie’s pacing only escalates in the second half, beginning roughly with the brilliant mirror gag, and created such an infectious, unstoppable force of laughter for us all that my daughter and I were eventually reduced to twitching, coughing wrecks, a sign, I assured her, of the movie’s true hilarity. Every time I looked over at her doubled over and grinning it made me laugh even harder, and then I became aware of the eruption going on all over the auditorium. By the time Rufus T. Firefly holes up in the house with the other three, all under attack from the military forces of neighboring Sylvania, his military uniform nonsensically and anachronistically changing to that of another historical period after each explosion-punctuated cutaway shot, the audience was whipped up into a state I couldn’t believe was possible for a movie with which I was so familiar over so many viewings. And at the point which Firefly calls out for help, and director McCarey cuts to a stock footage montage of everything from fire engines and crew rowers to rampaging elephants and schools of dolphins all rushing to the rescue, my daughter lost her tiny little mind and hit the floor of the theater, unable to process the unrelenting input anymore. Fortunately, for her sanity, my respiratory system and the audience’s general well-being, the movie was soon over and we went spinning out into the night, high on the after-effects of a most generous, absurd and out-of-control film.

In the days that followed I was so happy to have been able to introduce my daughter to the Marx Brothers and to Duck Soup in particular, but I was also exceedingly grateful that her introduction did not have to come via the preserved-in-digital-amber DVD. I am grateful to have the DVD to reference and to revisit with her, and I suspect that my overwhelming desire to show her my other favorite Marx Brothers classic, Horse Feathers, will be too strong to hold off and wait for a theatrical screening, unless the New Beverly manages to come to my rescue sometime this summer. But seeing Duck Soup with a packed house was a revelatory experience, one in which the momentum that the film builds was organically fed by the audience’s response, and I am convinced that my daughter’s experience with either film on the bill that night would have been markedly less pronounced and emphatic had we seen it together late one night on DVD after everyone else was supposed to be asleep. With an audience, the power of the Marx Brothers and Duck Soup is truly revealed, the laughter of the audience providing the all-important connective tissue that leads heightened expectations to the next brilliant sequence and covers up the necessary lulls in the pacing that allow a convulsed crowd to not miss as many of the movie’s absurdly, generously high ratio of good/great gags to groaners. (There is only really one, and its lead-balloon quality has nothing to do with technique and everything to do with racial notions that were depressingly prevalent in 1933). Pound for pound, minute for minute, the experience of seeing this movie with 200 or so gasping, grinning ticket-buyers was a singular thrill. And if you are lucky enough to see it in a similar situation, don't be surprised if you are lead to the same conclusion that I came to last week. Duck Soup? Funniest… movie… ever.

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For the table: What's the funniest movie you ever saw in a theater with a packed house?

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