THREE CHILLS TO BEAT THE SUMMER HEAT: ORPHAN, ROGUE and COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE

You know you’re living in a city where denial of reality and acceptance of the absurd are the main ingredients in the cocktail everyone seems to be sipping when you can, as I did last night, spend 10 minutes watching a crack local TV meteorologist try to convince the audience, herself, and the befuddled anchors nodding at her shtick nearby that the dropping of temperatures from 98 degrees to 92 degrees constitutes a cooling trend that we all oughta be thankful for. Won’t it be great to finally be able to turn off that AC?! We really needed a break after all that heat earlier in the week!

This is, of course, the same tightly-knit, Live Mega Doppler 7000-addicted band of crack TV meteorologists, operating in that same city of absurd denial, that builds whole news hours around the first drop of rain— “Why are you sitting here watching ‘StormWatch 2009’, dear viewer, when you ought to be in your garage stocking survival supplies and building that ark?!”—and attaches animated icicles to numbers on the seven-day forecast when the temps threaten to dip down to 60 degrees.

I wish it weren’t true, but the fact is, there is no real escape from the heat, not when running the AC for three or four hours an evening gets you a several-hundred-dollar monthly electricity bill, and not when you live in a city of sun worshippers presided over by a media for which the myth of an always-temperate and blue-sky-beautiful Southern California is one that must be perpetuated at all costs.

Which is why horror movies are such a good ticket during the summer months—a really good summer screamer, like Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, can give you the kind of deep-seated chills that go way beyond the cooling of the skin provided by central air. And bless your soon-to-be-rotted soul if you can get your claws on one that happens to be set in a wintry environment, thus inviting the visual component to conspire with the narrative to bring your body temperature down to grave-worthy levels. Movies like The Brood (1979), The Dead Zone (1983)-- David Cronenberg does seem to have a way with the desolate chill of winter-- The Thing (versions 1951 and 1982), the climax of Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), one particularly icy moment involving Lew Ayres from Damien: Omen II (1978), Let the Right One In (2008) and last summer’s woefully underappreciated The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) are all excellent examples of how to use a frozen landscape to accentuate and inform a sense of dread and fear.


Some of you may also remember an ABC Movie of the Week entitled A Cold Night’s Death, directed by Jerrold Freeman and starring Robert Culp and Eli Wallach as two scientists air-lifted to a remote Arctic research station who find the facility strangely abandoned, a group of research monkeys in a near-frozen state, and lots of indicators that something has not gone according to plan. This TV-movie occupies a special place in the hearts of many of my generation’s movie genre thrill-seekers, and it’s been famously difficult to find, showing up for the occasional late-night showing when local stations still actually still ran late-show movie programming, but rarely screened since infomercials became the all-nighter’s TV anesthesia of choice. Thankfully, someone has actually posted the entire movie on YouTube, and should you choose to watch this video, you may be in for a viewing that’s even closer to your memory of seeing the movie than you thought possible. I haven’t seen it myself yet, but it looks as though whoever posted this sat in front of an old tube TV screen and shot it with a video camera. The result is an extremely eerie recreation of that staying-up-late-at-night-when-you-were-a-kid frisson of terror that was often part and parcel of catching up with scary movies on TV in the ‘70s. To whoever posted this gem, I thank you profusely, and I forgive in advance anyone who feels they must stop reading this now, shut off all the lights in the room, and make friends with the fuzzy, glowing, intermittently unstable imagery from this posting of A Cold Night’s Death.


But if you decide to continue reading, then feel free to add Jaume Collet-Serra’s spectacularly unnerving Orphan to that short list of superb wintry horror tales. Set in Connecticut during the blustery snowbound months, the movie knows how to exploit that frosty climate—a couple of its more harrowing outdoor set pieces are enhanced by the sense of fear created by the landscape feeling different, less hospitable, less inhabitable, more dangerous. As in those other movies, Orphan cannily externalizes the sense of things not being quite under control by plunging us into this environment so often associated with seasonal joy and familial closeness, where unexpected cracks in the ice can form under our feet, or vehicles can go sailing off slick roads into horrible peril, or toward unaware victims. But the chill in the air surrounding Orphan is only nominally due to its frozen setting. The movie, by means psychological and cinematic, means to put a freeze on your nerves, and that it pretty handily does is a credit to an exceedingly clever script (by David Johnson and Alex Mace) and Collet-Serra’s prodigious talent for throwing the audience’s expectations askew. He does perhaps rely on loud noises and the old "who’s standing behind the refrigerator/medicine cabinet door" trick too much, but so much else about this tale of parental entitlement and fear is so skillfully rendered and low-down effective that I was more than willing to forgive the director these relatively venial sins.


The opening sequence of Orphan will be a very telling indicator of whether you can deal with the shocks the movie has in store. A beatific and pregnant young woman named Kate (Vera Farmiga) is being wheeled into the hospital, her loving husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) by her side, presumably toward the maternity ward where her dreams of becoming a mother are about to come true. The camera hugs the beaming Kate in close-up as a nurse pushes her along, when suddenly we see a look of distress disrupt her glowing face, slowly turning her visage away from joy into a mask of confusion and agony. Kate is obviously in increasingly sharp pain, and yet the nurse never changes the deliberate pace of the wheelchair, never acknowledges the state of her patient except to offer, in a most ghostly, noncommittal tone, “We’re so sorry for your loss, dear.” Loss? Collet-Serra then gives us the first of many sudden shifts in perspective to come, as we see the nurse and patient inching across the wide-screen frame from the point of view of a detached observer from high above, leaving a trail of blood from the abruption occurring inside the woman’s uterine canal along the hospital’s incongruous white shag carpeting. Soon, Kate is strapped to a hospital bed and surrounded with masked surgeons and medical personnel who coolly, callously inform her that she has lost her baby and that an emergency C-section is about to begin. Her screams of denial and horror are met with the happy glance of her husband, himself done up in surgical gown and mask, who continues to aim his video camera at her despite the obviously horrific turn their blissful moment has taken. And he never stops shooting, not even when the nurse pulls a dead, blood-soaked fetus from Kate’s womb and sets it on her chest, a ghastly hello and goodbye rolled into one traumatic moment. At which point Kate screams and wakes up…


Speaking personally, as a father who has witnessed something as horrific, if not as garishly so, as what happens to Kate in her morbidly enhanced nightmare remembrance of profound loss, I had to fight the urge to bolt from the theater during this opening sequence. And had Collet-Serra continued to operate in this weirdly dissociative style of De Palma-tinged surgical theater of horror, who knows how much I could have/would have taken? Fortunately, the director gives us this peek into Kate’s tortured psyche as a way of grounding her psychologically and filling out Farmiga’s choices in playing the character in a way that a simple back story—and everyone here has a back story laced with tragedy—would not do nearly so completely. The movie is not, as one might reasonably expect from the prologue, a grisly freak show a la Takashi Miike, but instead a portrait of how tragedy can unravel even the most perfect-seeming of families and make them vulnerable to outside forces that will personify and exploit the interpersonal instability and mistrust that already exists. During her waking hours Kate, a musician with an alcohol problem who spends her days as a housewife after losing her teaching job at Yale, really is reeling from the stillbirth of a child. She and John, an architect who presumably designed their dazzling postmodern hillside home, channel the reaction to their trauma into a strong desire to adopt. The desperate zeal to patch this hole in their life with an older “sister” to join their two biological children, Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) and Max (a deaf five-year-old played by the remarkable Aryana Engineer), leads them to an orphanage with a none-too-strict policy on background checks. It’s here where they meet Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman, shockingly good), a preternaturally self-possessed nine-year-old Russian girl who dazzles the couple with her artistic ability, her sweet nature, and the pained perspective of the lost child she projects with apparent sincerity, which plays directly into the couple’s savior fantasies of providing for a child in need.

Of course, Esther soon reveals a malevolent side. She orchestrates a playground accident that seriously injures a schoolyard enemy. She puts a bird out of its misery with a rock after Daniel wounds it and cannot bring himself to finish the job. She subtly threatens and emotionally blackmails little Max into assisting her in a series of increasing devilish deeds, at one point pulling a revolver on the guileless child. (“Want to play?” she coolly inquires, removing all but one bullet, spinning the chamber and pointing it at Max’s head. “Perhaps later.”) Something about Esther’s artistic abilities— her mastery of Tchaikovsky on the piano, her increasingly elaborate paintings— also suggests that someone has not provided the whole story on this cinematic descendant of evil little Patty McCormick, and the ones most skillfully holding back on the big picture are the cast and director of Orphan. Truly, if Ms. McCormick was The Bad Seed, there is increasingly little doubt that Esther is the worst.


If it seems I have spent too much time detailing the roots of the horror Collet-Serra and company have concocted, it’s because to reveal much more would be in violation of the pact this movie makes with its audience to peel back ever-escalating levels of disturbing, psychologically believable behavior by means of a surprising level of horror filmmaking craft. (Stay away from any review that wants to talk about the plot in any kind of detail.) Collet-Serra’s previous horror outing, the Dark Castle productions remake of House of Wax, was a decent effort, marred by a slew of obnoxious stock characters who seemed much more pleasant smothered under molten paraffin. As enjoyable as it was for us, it was apparently a waste of time for him, so much more accomplished is his work here. As I said before, Collet-Serra tends to overdo a certain variety of stock horror movie shocks, but he just as often adds an extra touch—an unexpected camera angle, a beat or two longer for us to twist in the wind before the anticipated jolt arrives with not quite the timing we expected—that enriches the sense of our being guided by someone who has a true knack for harvesting gooseflesh.


It also helps that Orphan features probably the best cast, top to bottom, of any horror movie in recent memory, from familiar faces to rosy-cheeked children who we’ve never seen before. Farmiga, an actress who I frequently find annoying, uses her reputation for portraying ineffectual authority figures (see The Departed) to throw us off the trail of what she has charted out for this character. She plumbs the depths of despair, all right, but there’s an unexpected strength, an exhilarating anger that surfaces in Kate which makes her resistance of Esther, and their ultimate conflict, fraught with multiple, creepy levels of resonance. She also expresses fear and horror extremely well, adding strange physical ticks and vocal hiccups to her flailing about that communicate the character’s disorientation and desperation with frightening, if ironic, assurance. Sarsgaard has a more thankless role, the disbelieving spouse who is so eager to give Esther the benefit of the doubt, against all reason it sometimes seems, that he ends up in the Compromised Position of All Compromised Positions. (How’s that for vague, spoiler hounds?) Even so, he retains a measure of sympathy because he seems genuinely conflicted between his duty to believe his wife and his duty as an adopted father. As mentioned earlier, Bennett and particularly Engineer are excellent child actors asked to go well beyond what one might think someone so young could make believable, and they achieve their goals with brilliance. There’s even room for quality character actors like CCH Pounder as an ill-fated orphanage nun and Margo Martindale, for once not being asked to play white trash, as Kate’s far-too-even-keeled therapist.


But the real praise belongs to Isabelle Fuhrmann, who will, whatever else her career holds in store (and her future does indeed look bright), forever be Esther, a child who harbors depths of foulness far deeper than we will, thanks to the clever screenplay and Fuhrmann’s prepossessed facility as an actress, ever be able to accurately guess. Speaking in a light Russian accent that turns from sing-song to deathly hollow in a twitch, Fuhrmann delivers the goods, drawing us in with misplaced sympathy even when we know we’re one step ahead of the hapless family in the story. The movie invites speculation throughout about Esther’s origins, her motivation, but as it becomes clearer and clearer that Collet-Serra and company have something up their sleeves that is far worse than what we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine, Fuhrmann rises to the occasion with a fury and a camp (as well as vamp) haughtiness that places the movie in the vicinity of one of Brian De Palma’s great sick jokes. Late in the game, when her face grows sallow and sunken and she embarks on the final stages of an inevitable course of execution, the audience realizes, with great shock and giddy satisfaction, that we weren’t as ahead of the game as we thought. Fuhrmann, so young and talented, drives home the movie’s final conceit like a stake in the audience’s collective heart, with the pitch-black glee of an instant icon of horror. All the way home from the theater, it seemed every bus kiosk was lit with her terrifying visage from the movie’s advertising campaign. But it wouldn’t have done any good to close my eyes. Esther, and Orphan, is one for nightmares.

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This may come as a surprise (not really-- I just felt like being a smart-ass), but movies set in the sweltering heat can give you chills too. Especially when they’re made with the exceptional craft and sense of fun that Greg Maclean brings to Rogue (2007), a giant crocodile movie set in Australia’s forbidding Northern Territory that fuses the templates of Jaws and Friday the 13th, but ups the ante on the Jason movies by providing us with a cast of potential croc meals that we actually don’t want to see get masticated on screen. Maclean directed the notorious outback slasher pic Wolf Creek (2005), which sports a reputation cruel and gruesome enough to cause me to avoid it thus far. It may be equally well-crafted, but something tells me I can do without another torture wallow at this point. Rogue, however, is vicious, good fun, and it betrays a sly sense of humor right from the start. A cynical travel writer (Michael Vartan) stumbles into an outback bar and grill where the walls are papered with news accounts of grisly croc attacks. He’s waiting for a tour boat to take him up river, and while the friendly clerk behind the counter readies him a cup of tea, he takes a cell phone call from Chicago, which naturally gets peppered with static and drop-outs. “Really bad service here,” Vartan complains to the barely audible colleague on the other end. It’s a complaint the clerk overhears and mistakes for a comment on his demeanor and that of his establishment, which he answers by stirring a dead fly or two into the steaming teacup. This is only the first of many grim jokes the forbidding, bug-infested back country will play on this guy. The movie’s visual strategy is to reveal the beauty of the harsh Northern Country from a distance—the lush cinematography revels in a portrait of lush, untamed, eye-popping wilderness—and contrast it with the brutality of the country seen up close. (Rogue ends on a spectacular shot vaulting up out of the dangerous canyons, a reversal of the movie’s pictorial terms that accentuates the insignificance of its players in such a indifferent environment.)


Vartan eventually finds his boat, populated by an Airport’s-worth of well-drawn character actors, who manage to do much with the meager screen time they’re allotted—among them Caroline Brazier, Stephen Curry and John Jarratt, Wolf Creek’s bloodthirsty killer. They're all piloted by the boat’s tomboyish captain, played by Radha Mitchell with an earthy appeal that has heretofore eluded me in her previous performances, and eventually joined by Mitchell’s roughneck boyfriend, played by up-and-comer Sam Worthington (Terminator: Salvation and James Cameron’s Avatar). The boat is eventually run aground on an island mid-river, and the chilling realization that the river is tidal, meaning that the island will soon be underwater as the hour grows later, puts the characters in a race against time as well as a giant set of choppers which results in excruciating and delicious suspense. Maclean takes a crucial cue from Spielberg in playing coy with the reptile’s big reveal. The movie is nearly two-thirds complete before we ever get a glimpse of the magnitude of this monster and, even though it is a creature born largely of computer-generated imagery, it is no disappointment. The director is also sly enough to throw us off in terms of anticipating who is next on the croc’s menu, and when. Rogue makes clever use of close-ups and our familiarity with the genre’s conventions to keep us both off balance and intimately tied into the fates of its characters. You may surface at this end of this movie—a straight-to-video treat from the Weinstein’s Dimension label that is so much more satisfying than most of the movies that company successfully brought to theaters over the past few years—amazed at this lean, mean thriller’s ability to breathe life into the most rudimentary of premises. Rogue proudly wears its genre cred on its mosquito-bitten sleeves, amped by the singular thrill that only seeing a man swallowed whole by a eight-meter-long croc, bones crunching and snapping all the way down, can offer. For fans of a good monster movie well-told this is spine, and skull, and leg-cracking good news indeed, mate.

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Finally, if it’s still hot here in Los Angeles on August 14, and God knows it most likely will be, you can check out the air-conditioning at the New Beverly Cinema, where an organization by the name of Vampire-Con will be kicking off its festival of All Things Vampire with a mini film festival devoted to cinematic bloodsucking. You’ll be able to see The Lost Boys, Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie in The Hunger, Stephanie Rothman’s exploitation classic The Velvet Vampire, and the one I’m most happy to see back on the big screen, Robert Quarry as Count Yorga, Vampire (1970). American International’s popular foray into vampirism in modern-day Los Angeles, which jumped the gun on Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 by two years, is often crude, and its attempts to exploit its Southern California locations resulted more often in clumsy staging and slack pacing rather than documentary verisimilitude. (And it is a pretty good joke, setting a movie about night-dwelling vampires in the world capital of sun-dappled hedonism.) But the movie, despite its flaws, remains capable of delivering the jolts along with the sly (and not-so-sly) sexuality that was just beginning to be fully exploited by horror films of the time. Count Yorga (Quarry) plays host to a séance conducted in the hopes of contacting the dead mother of a young lady in attendance. Surrounded by her friends (including Michael Murphy in an early role), Yorga hypnotizes the woman ostensibly to reduce her hysterics, but uses the occasion to plan the post-hypnotic suggestion that she become his slave and do as he commands. Of course, Yorga has no good intentions by our heroine, and she soon finds herself, along with a couple of other comely young maidens, part of Yorga’s harem of the undead. When Murphy and a physician friend (played by character actor Roger Perry) discover what’s going on and set their sights on Yorga’s undoing, the movie lurches toward its satisfying finale, which remains somewhat shocking today.


Count Yorga, Vampire was a key movie for me growing up—I saw it when I was about 11 years old, and my taste of horror, while already well-established by the likes of Dark Shadows and the occasional Universal monster movie on Saturday afternoon TV, was just finding its way toward more explicit, bloody fare, as well as more explicitly eroticized takes on vampire lore. (Those scenes featuring Yorga and his slinky minions did a whole lot more than just scare me.) Yorga was an essential stepping stone toward perhaps more vital, solidly imagined tales of terror; it doesn’t have the weight of a real horror classic, but it’s still a lot of fun, even seen through the eyes of someone who has witnessed 38 years worth of horror duds and masterpieces in the interim. Quarry, however, is masterful in a part that I wish could have yielded more than just the one (very good) sequel. He trades sympathy for sheer animalistic force, upping the ante even on the number of fangs necessary to draw satisfying drink from the neck of his victims, and if his portrait lacks subtlety, it does not lack primal, visceral potency. Seeing Count Yorga, Vampire at the New Beverly will undoubtedly provide goose bumps of different varieties—the ones generated by a good horror show, to be sure, but also, for me, ones brought on by the revisiting of a key movie in my development as a true believer in all the famous monsters of filmland, one that hinted at the many possibilities I would soon discover within the telling of stories in this most mutable and flexible of genres. That chill in the air on August 14 might be the New Beverly’s air-conditioning—I hope it will be—but I look forward to allowing myself to imagine that it might also be the damp chill of the catacombs beneath Castle Yorga.

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SEEING AND WRITING (AND SEWING): QUALITY TIME WITH STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

If you’re familiar with the little “On the Marquee” shortcut on the sidebar of this blog, you probably know that throughout the year I only write about 5% of the movies I actually see. Some of that is due to how much time I can actually devote to writing, and some of it is due to sheer laziness. (I usually try to make up for these shortcomings in my year-end posts.) But whether I write about a movie or not, I try to find interesting pieces—reviews, essays, whatnot—about each title to make available at a click, whether or not those pieces represent my own point of view. (The four-star system, a bit of shorthand from which I just don’t seem to be able to fully divorce myself, takes care of that in a pinch when all else fails. Thanks, Mr. Maltin.) And one of the critics I seem to turn to most frequently in “On the Marquee” is Salon magazine’s senior film critic, Stephanie Zacharek, whose work I have admired for years, even on those occasions when we disagree, as representative of the kind of writing about movies that, by design and insistence of deadline, must understand the movie in its moment, but is also cognizant and respectful of the richness of film history, which is frequently accessed and encompassed in the work she does. She’s smart, funny, and she loves The Lady Eve. What else do you need to know? Well, if that question is more than a rhetorical one, you’ve arrived at the right post. Recently Stephanie, who through her warm and friendly demeanor has fast become one of my favorite people, agreed to sit down with me for a webcam conversation via Skype (She’s in Brooklyn, I’m in Glendale) about as many things as we could pack into a hour—growing up with the movies, meeting Pauline Kael, movies she loves to stand up for, film criticism in the age of Internet interactivity, and much, much more. At some point I forgot I was supposed to be conducting an interview and, for me, it became more of a relaxed conversation. I sincerely hope that our time, transcribed here, is as much fun for you to read as it was during the moment for the two of us. She has a standing invitation to return to these pages anytime. We start, as most stories do, at some sort of beginning. (Cue 20th Century Fox theme music.)

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Dennis Cozzalio: When did the movies first become important for you?

Stephanie Zacharek: Well, I was very little. I guess the first movies I really remember watching—I would watch the Creature Feature on Saturday afternoon, stuff like that, and I would watch Monday Night at the Movies on one of the TV networks, whatever was on there. I had an older sister who was really into black-and-white classic movies—Fred Astaire and that kind of thing. And in those days—this was before videos and VCRs, ashamed and embarrassed to say—you had to stay up really late to see anything like this. Luckily, I had very permissive parents who allowed me to stay up, but who really didn’t know what I was doing half the time! (Laughing) So I’d stay up late with my sister, and sometimes by myself, or with my mom, even, and would watch these old movies.


And then when I got a little bit older—PBS used to do these series of foreign films, and when I was about 12 years old that’s when I saw Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Jules and Jim-- And that one really blew my mind—“People actually live like this?!” And for a long time I watched whatever PBS offered up. It’s funny to think that a lot of times people say, “Oh, my kids won’t watch anything with subtitles.” And as a kid myself I don’t even remember making the distinction between a movie with subtitles and one without them. But that was probably the first time I ever became conscious of them as, I don’t want to say “more than entertainment,” but I would look at these movies and realize, Okay, this is a cut above the average made-for-TV movie you’d see on the ABC Movie of the Week. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Thomasina, a Walt Disney movie about a cat with three lives or something like that who ends up using her three lives. Of course I loved it and managed to get them to take me to see it again. But it wasn’t like I came from a big movie-going family or anything like that.

DC: Did you grow up in a small town?

SZ: I grew up in Syracuse, upstate. So, no repertory house, nothing like that. I’m kind of envious of people who grew up in New York or San Francisco or Boston who had access to all this stuff, because that was definitely not the case with me. I was out in the boondocks.

DC: Me too. I suspect my parents looked at movies in much the same way yours did. My parents weren’t overly interested in them either, so it’s always been a source of curiosity for me to try and trace back and figure out where my interest in the movies came from.


SZ: Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it? I know Charlie, my husband (film critic Charles Taylor), his dad was very cool and took him to see The Godfather and things like that when Charlie was far too young to see them on his own, which is great. And I remember I went to see Saturday Night Fever with my mother because she had a crush on John Travolta. But otherwise, I really don’t know where it comes from. You find them on your own, and they stick.

DC: I remember having to work very hard to talk my mother into taking me to see Dirty Harry at a drive-in when I was 11.

(SZ laughs)

DC: But that tactic backfired on me several times. I fooled my parents into taking me to see Deliverance--

SZ: Oh, my God.

DC: “Look, Dad, they’re carrying a canoe. It’s a nature movie! This’ll be fun!” I even knew what was coming, and so I ended up sitting between them as the movie is starting and then I realize, “Oh, no. What have I done?” And they weren’t too happy with me afterward. (Both laugh) Yeah, I saw the movie, but at what price?!

SZ: The other thing that was key for me was, my mother was a secretary for Syracuse University, and they would have The New Yorker in the waiting room of the administration building. I was about 12, and she came home with big stacks of them, and I would go through them and read the cartoons, and I’d look at some of the articles but just end up thinking, this is boring! But then I started flipping to the back and I realized that they had movie reviews that were written by Pauline Kael. I knew her name because my mom used to watch The Dick Cavett Show, and occasionally when I would watch with her Pauline would be a guest, so I knew of her from there. But I started reading these reviews and I immediately loved them because I felt she was obviously this incredible writer and intellectual, I never felt like she was writing above my head. What she was doing seemed very accessible and very vivid to me. And she was writing about movies, most of which I hadn’t seen. Most of them I would not see for 10 or 20 years. But she opened up a world, in a way. Reading her made me feel like I had all this stuff waiting for me. At some point when I was older and autonomous, I could go and see this stuff for myself. That was really important to me. But that was a reading experience, not a film-watching experience, and it kind of reinforced some of these other interests in my life that were simmering.


DC: What did Pauline Kael mean to your development as a writer? Did you ever meet her?

SZ: Yeah, I did meet her, and I would say she was a friend. I knew her for the last 10 years of her life. I met her in 1990 through my husband, Charlie. I remember him talking about her and saying, “Would you like to meet her?” And of course I said, “No!” (Laughs) He kept saying, “You’ll love her, she’ll love you.” So eventually we drove out to Great Barrington to see her one day—we were living in Boston at the time—and the first thing I remember—She was a very tiny woman, and by the time I met her she was quite a bit older, so she’d probably shrunk even a little bit more. So we go to the door, and here’s this very small person peering at us from behind the screen. At the time my hair was very long, halfway down my back, kinda wild, and she said, “Oh, you have Annette O'Toole's hair!” (Laughing). That immediately put me at ease.

DC: The Pauline Kael ice-breaker.

SZ: Yeah! I was nervous, but I wasn’t really intimidated by her in that way that a lot of people talk about. After that we would see her occasionally or talk on the phone. It was a little weird meeting and getting to know this person you had been reading for years and not just respected, but sort of revered. And it was the first time in my life where I had this instance of getting to know someone as a person as well as a writer or an artist. She was very important to me, and in the time that I knew her— (Pauses) I have to say I’ve become very protective of her legacy. There were a lot of people who were friends of hers at one time, and some of them waited until after she died-- and some didn’t-- to start tearing her down. Of course, one thing that people have often said about her is, “She only liked male critics. She didn’t want to have anything to do with women.” Well, there weren’t that many women film critics, so I don’t know if that really holds water. And a lot of men ended up saying things like, “Well, you could never disagree with her. She would never allow it.” So how does that work? You couldn’t stand up to her, or you wouldn’t? It seems to me if you disagree with somebody and you don’t say so or you’re afraid to make your case, or you lose the argument every time, that’s not the other person’s fault. And because she was so incredibly brainy, you would get into conversations with her where you couldn’t argue her down. But that’s not the same as saying she wouldn’t allow you to have your own opinion. Someone not allowing you to think for yourself—

DC: Who would want to spend time with someone like that?

SZ: Exactly. And how would that even work? It’s like the Eleanor Roosevelt thing—nobody can make you a victim without your consent.

DC: The first time I saw Pauline Kael was on The Mike Douglas Show, and I remember even just as a viewer being kind of intimidated by her because she seemed so smart, she took herself seriously, but she had a sense of humor. I wasn’t used to seeing people who were that composed, so sure of themselves. Then, in college I picked up a copy of Reeling because I recognized her name, and that was all it took. I feel like an important, influential moment in my life can definitely be demarcated at the point where I first encountered that book.

SZ: She was so influential, even to those who don’t like her or consider themselves “fans.” At this point I think it’s really ridiculous that you have to be in the Kael camp or the Sarris camp. Andrew Sarris is a sweet guy and a wonderful critic—it’s just a very different approach. Maybe in the days of “Circles and Squares” you really would have to draw a line in the sand, but at this point perpetuating this feudal sensibility is ridiculous. But at the same time, that people go out of their way to tear her down now- I think it’s pointless. There are still people who think that if you were friends with her or if you were influenced by her, you’re somehow still getting your cues from her from beyond the grave.

DC: Speaking of influence, as you mentioned earlier, you’re married to a film critic. I can’t imagine that you don’t have moments when you disagree with Charlie about something.

SZ: (Laughs)

DC: How does that work for you two? I once posed the question on one of my quizzes, Is there a movie, piece of art, whatever , that should the person with whom you were having a relationship expressed great love for something you thought was a piece of crap, would that be the deal-breaker? And I’ve always wondered that about people in relationships who share a profession in which the cultivation of personal ideas about art is front and center. How does that work? Do you get into a lot of arguments about movies?


SZ: Not so much. Charlie and I share a sensibility. We often tend to like the same things, even though we often don’t like them for the same reasons. That’s one thing that has sometimes been kind of difficult during the course of our relationship and our professional lives. You always hear, “Oh, they always like the same things. Their 10-best lists are always identical.” And often I feel it’s a kind of sexist way of reacting, like saying I can’t think for myself, I take my cues from him—that always seems to be the subtext, and don’t even get me started on that. But we do disagree. For example, recently we went to the screening of Public Enemies, and because there were so many people there we couldn’t sit together. I pretty much liked the movie, aside from some misgivings. Afterward I went out to the lobby and I find Charlie, and he’s kind of fuming and he says, “Somebody needs to kick Michael Mann’s ass!” “So you didn’t like it?" And he starts explaining to me why he didn’t like it. “The camera’s all shaky, and I’m so sick of the shaky camera thing--” “I know, I’m sick of it too.” But it’s interesting—if I’m sitting with him, I can tell whether or not he’s with something. So the fact that we were sitting apart was interesting, because I really didn’t know until afterward. But at this point we’ve known each other so long, disagreements on movies are like anything else—you just talk it out: ”I think you’re full of shit,” or whatever. But the deal-breaker question is an interesting one. I do have a friend who had a girlfriend at one point, and we were out for drinks and talking, and he said, “I showed her The Lady Eve and she didn’t like it.” And I just looked at him said, “Are you sure about this girl?” (Laughs)

DC: Okay, I didn’t think I had one, but you might have uncovered one of my deal-breakers with that little anecdote.

SZ: Yeah, I think that would qualify for me too. And by the way, that relationship did not last, and I knew it wouldn’t. I didn’t want to be too harsh, but—

DC: Somewhat related to that, is there a movie you feel you’ve really had to stand up for when everyone else was booing and hissing? Charlie’s piece on Showgirls really turned my head around on that movie—he was writing about it in a way that no one else seemed capable of, seemed willing to. I didn’t see the movie again for about another couple of years after I read that essay, but when I did it was literally as if I’d never seen the picture before. There was something about the way that he chose to understand that movie, how he took it seriously enough to write about the movie on the screen rather than the one everyone had already decided was so irredeemably bad, that was so unusual and gratifying. I’ve since tried to be as persuasive as he was about Showgirls, but I don’t think it’s had very much of the same effect. Is there a movie like that for you?


SZ: There are a couple. I really loved Masked and Anonymous, the Bob Dylan movie that everyone hated. That thing got universally trashed and it’s considered a fiasco, and nobody ever talks about it now. But I loved that movie. And I remember people who really should have known better coming out of it and saying, “What was that?! That didn’t make any sense! I couldn’t put it together! It wasn’t very linear!” And I kept thinking, have you ever actually listened to a Bob Dylan song? Because there’s really a lot going on in that movie, and it is a little crazy, and it does rattle your head, but, really what kind of movie do you want Bob Dylan to make? Well, I really shouldn’t ask that question, because then you get—

SZ, DC: Renaldo and Clara! (Both Laughing)

SZ: But really, what do we expect from this guy? So, Masked and Anonymous is one. Another one that I really love, which is actually not such a tough sell, I have found out, is CQ, the Roman Coppola movie. I adore that movie because it’s so affectionate. It’s one of those movies that could only have been made by the son of someone whose dad has shown them a lot of weird movies—Mario Bava, Danger: Diabolik, and all that stuff. It’s lovely and beautifully made. No one went to see it in theaters, but when it came out on DVD—When Charlie and I find DVDs really cheap, in the discount bins, five dollars or whatever, if we find something we love we’ll buy up chunks of them and give them to deserving people or people we think might like them. We did that with CQ, and I can’t remember giving it to anyone who didn’t like it. People would watch it and say, “Oh, my God, how did I miss this?” And it’s the only movie Roman Coppola has ever made, as far as I know—he’s primarily a second unit director for other people. I really feel protective of movies like that. Sometimes people can be so automatically dismissive of things. You see something on a bad day, you’re in a bad mood—

DC: That was precisely my experience with CQ. I went into it knowing that writers I respected thought pretty highly of it, and I fell asleep midway through. And I put that more on seeing it at home than anything else—the home-viewing environment is, if anything, too comfortable for me at times. I need to take myself out where I know I can’t just flop at will—I automatically feel more aware and receptive in a theater. So when I miss something at home for those reasons, I usually file that movie away and try to get back to it. I don’t want to be dismissive of a movie because it’s usually not the movie’s fault if I can’t keep my eyes open. So I’ll put CQ at the top of that list.

SZ: Maybe you should look at Speed Racer again…

DC: (Laughs) This is the part where I storm out of the interview.

SZ: (Laughs)

DC: I want to talk a little bit about the interactivity with your readers. You’re in a position as a critic where you hear a lot from people who are reading your stuff. I used to look at the comments after one of your reviews, or one of David Edelstein’s, just to gauge the reaction to what you wrote. But it has gotten to the point where I can almost predict the reaction, particularly if you’re talking about a big blockbuster summer release where many people already have so much invested in the anticipation of the movie, because of marketing or advance write-ups or whatever, that, goddamn it, it’s got to be good, and don’t tell me otherwise. "You knew you weren’t going to like it, so why did you review it?" I get the feeling if you said to your editor, “Gee, I don’t think I’m gonna like this one—"

SZ: Yeah, that would go over really well!

DC: And of course, whenever I see this kind of response to something a critic has written, I always think, why are you reading a serious critic in the first place if you’re going to be so thin-skinned
about they write? Is this attitude something you encounter often?

SZ: I encounter it a lot, but the one thing that I have come to terms with is that there’s a difference between readers and commenters. I often suspect, though this is certainly not true across the board, that those whose reactions are most outraged may have only read the deck, or the first paragraph, and no more. Some people try to engage with the ideas I’ve written about, or challenge a particular observation, but sometimes the comments are weirdly personal or along the lines of, “Oh, she never likes any action movies or comedies.” I’ve been reviewing for Salon since 1996—I could point to any number of exceptions to that kind of assertion. I don’t like to have to make that kind of distinction (about readers vs. commenters), but it’s not like the people who come to your blog who are interested in movies, interested in talking about them and having a dialogue where they want to know what you think. You draw a very specific kind of engaged reader. I’m not saying you don’t get crackpots, because there’s always going to be an element of that. But Salon is very easily accessible from Rotten Tomatoes, for one thing. I think that’s how a lot of people found The Dark Knight review. It’s less that those readers come to Salon every Friday to see what I think. It was more like they went on Rotten Tomatoes and looked for the people who didn’t like The Dark Knight, clicked on those names and came on over. I mostly tend not to read those comments, however. Sometimes I’ll read them months after the fact, just out of curiosity.


DC: Well, it’s one thing if someone is there to present an honest argument or challenge you factually, but really, so many of those kinds of comments I see are from people who are there just to pop off and see their names on the Internet.

SZ: One of the great things about writing for Salon, and this has been true since the very beginning, and I absolutely love this about it, is that people do have access to you. I know it might sound like I’m contradicting what I just said, but I realized in the late ‘90s I would write a review and, hey, people could send me an e-mail! I would get letters—some of them very nice, agree or not agree, and sometimes they wouldn’t be so nice—but sometimes they were just normal, engaged, interesting people who only wanted to be able to make their case. I felt like I had this relationship with them. And now you can’t have an online publication without having that interactive arm where people can just post their comments. And what it means is that I actually get less interaction because fewer people write to me directly. I mean, anyone can e-mail me. But I get fewer letters sent to me directly than I used to because I think people may feel posting a comment is the same thing, or maybe it’s more convenient.

DC: I love that close interaction with the readers I have, but something I don’t get much of here is that kind of interaction with people who seem as if they are actively trying not to understand your point of view.

SZ: Yeah, and the other thing is, I do hear from enough people to know that the people who are actually reading the reviews from start to finish-- and agreeing, disagreeing, it doesn’t matter which—aren’t usually the same ones that are commenting. They’re too busy with their lives. I mean one guy actually went through the archives and his criticism was, “Stephanie Zacharek likes the word ‘hangdog’ an awful lot!” And he did a search and found every time I had used the word “hangdog” in a piece going back to 1997. Maybe there were 10 or 12 instances over a period of 12 years! (Laughs). Somebody actually commented about that and said, “You have too much time on your hands,” and he responded, “It only took three minutes!” Well, even three minutes—


DC: A friend and I have been thinking about something lately, and I would like to know what you think. You, as a critic, seem to be more open, I won’t say to every silly comedy that comes around the bend, but you’ve come to the defense of a lot of silly movies that many critics and moviegoers have just tended to dismiss outright as being beneath consideration or, well, silly. I’m thinking of stuff like the Will Ferrell movies-- Anchorman, or even Land of the Lost, which I suspect I liked more than you did. But I heard people getting actively annoyed by that movie, and I’m curious as to what they expected. Do you get a sense that blatant silliness is more likely to be rejected by audiences these days?

SZ: I think you’re right. Comedy is so delicate.

DC: And maybe this is what accounts for the some of the dourness in our superhero/fantasy movies these days. We don’t take our mythologizing as seriously if there’s a detectable sense of humor involved.

SZ: Comedy is difficult to write about too. That’s another thing.

DC: It’s easy for me to just find myself repeating all the jokes and passing that off as a review. And when you try to figure out why it’s funny, that’s a real show killer.

SZ: That’s one of the great pleasures of the movies is just to give yourself over. “This is ridiculous. Why am I laughing?” Isn’t that what you want? One of my favorite people to see a comedy with is David Edelstein, because sometimes the oddest things will get him giggling. We saw The Animal together, the Rob Schneider movie, which is totally stupid and not very good, but he started giggling at some dumb gag, and then I started giggling—Maybe it could skew your critical judgment, this kind of response, but what does that even mean, if something does or doesn’t make you laugh?

DC: You write about movies for a living, and movies are an art form that derive their effects and approaches and pleasures from the combination of all of the other arts, so obviously it takes more than just an knowledge of movies to write well about them. What do you like to read about or think about that is not related to the movies that informs your understanding of them?


SZ: Well, I was a pop music critic before I was a movie critic, and for me music is really, really hard to write about. I did it for four or five years on a freelance basis, and it became so difficult that I think I was really ready to give it up.

DC: I credit you and Charlie with turning me on to Fountains of Wayne, by the way.

SZ: Oh, I love Fountains of Wayne! Did you see That Thing You Do? Adam Schlesinger wrote the title song from that movie. I love that. It’s genius. But really, one of the reasons I loved writing about movies is that you could pull together all of these things—literature, sound, music, to an extent. You’re watching what a director is doing, where he or she is putting the camera, what’s going on with the script, the vibe and the strategy of the cinematography. There’s so much going on in movies that I think a steady diet of only movies is very bad. You have to live a life and pursue other interests, because otherwise you have nothing to hang the movies on. I can see how you could get sucked into it though—you could fill up your life just watching movies.

DC: So many film school graduates are adept with a camera, but they haven’t lived a life that they could tell through the films they make.

SZ: Exactly. And that extends to a lot of young critics, who are just all movies all the time. They’ve seen a lot of stuff—sometimes more stuff than I’ve seen. They’re very movie literate, which is great, but you really do have to make room for other things. So I do listen to music, and I read -- probably not as much as I should, but I try to keep up. You know, I really like to sew. It’s hard to find time to do it, but I make a lot of my own clothes. I don’t think it’s related to movies at all, except that I like seeing the way things go together. Fabric is flat, two-dimensional, and I love sewing it into a shape based on a pattern. There’s a lot of problem-solving, and it’s also completely nonverbal—it’s just visual and tactile.


DC: So, how is 2009 shaping up, movie-wise, in your view?

SZ: Well, I don’t think it’s been a particularly great year so far. Often I find that by May or June I have three, four, maybe five movies that might possibly go on my ten-best list. This year, maybe the Assayas movie, Summer Hours, which I think is lovely. Two Lovers, the James Gray movie which, if you missed it, is out now on DVD. Charlie was just waving it in front of my face, like, “Don’t forget this one!”

DC: What did you think of Tyson?

SZ: I haven’t seen Tyson yet, but I really need to. That movie has gotten a lot of interesting and varied reactions. Oh, and The International!

DC: Yeah! I liked that one too. There’s a good example of a movie that seems to have fallen victim to advance received wisdom about it being bad.


SZ: It opened the Berlin Film Festival, and I was there, and the buzz on it was very weird. A lot of the European critics didn’t like it, and I think the sense of it was that Tom Tykwer was this German director of great promise, and he had sort of let people down by making a movie that was too Hollywood. So the American critics in Berlin kind of followed suit because the Americans don’t want to be seen as unsophisticated. Everyone was saying things like, “Oh, The International wasn’t that good,” and I couldn’t believe they didn’t see how subtle it was and how beautiful it was to look at. I found one Italian critic who felt the same way about it that I did, and we kind of clung together and developed these theories about why- I mean, he said he felt European critics just simply thought it was too American. I love going to festivals, and the Berlin Film Festival is particularly lovely, but you are in this world of critics where these professionals become afraid to render a dissenting opinion. There’s a very strong sense that everybody kind of decides what the good movies are—

DC: And that generalized sense of a movie’s worth does filter down to not only critics and executives at festivals, but it also factors into the way the movie is perceived when it’s finally released in the marketplace.

SZ: It’s true, because those of us who don’t go to the festivals look at the festival coverage and make conscious or subconscious note that, oh, this one didn’t get such great notices at Cannes or wherever. I don’t go to that many festivals myself, but since I have been going I’ve learned to take those initial festival reports and roundups with a grain of salt in most cases, because it’s hard not to be affected by your colleagues. Part of that is because it’s a social atmosphere and you are talking and exchanging ideas, and because you don’t have much time you may say to someone, “Have you seen anything good?” And they’ll tell you, “Oh, see Ten Canoes, or see this little Romanian movie.” So in a way you need to have that interaction with other critics, even though it can be a double-edged sword.

DC: It would seem that a lot of it might also come down to your own confidence in your ability to assess things for yourself rather than get swept up in whatever groupthink might be going on. With my blog, I don’t have time to write about everything or see everything, so the ones I usually gravitate toward writing about are the ones that may be overlooked in the shadow of the latest blockbuster, or maybe I have an alternate point of view from the consensus. I’m not trying to be consciously contrarian, and there are plenty of times when I find myself squarely amongst the pack, but I think it’s a worthy challenge to try to consider why my view might be so different from the majority on a given movie. That’s what’s more interesting to me.

SZ: And also more interesting to read.

DC: I hope so. If it’s well-written, then maybe there’s a reason to read another article about Up, or whatever it might be. Okay, time to start wrapping this up.

SZ: Yes, it’s almost the cocktail hour! (Laughs)

DC: Indeed! Okay, what would be in your movie hall of fame?

SZ: The Lady Eve. The Apu Trilogy. The Rules of the Game. Um, the Godfather movies.

DC: Even Part III?

SZ: No, no, no. When I say the Godfather movies, Part III does not exist. (Laughs). The Wild Bunch. Um… (Pauses and makes hissing sound while considering other titles).

DC: Oh, I thought you were recommending Sssssss!, the snake movie with Strother Martin and Dirk Benedict!


SZ (Laughs) No, not that!

DC: I like that movie!

SZ: Let me see. Also something by Brian De Palma, probably Casualties of War.


DC: Finally, given the events of the past week, do you have any thoughts, as a former music critic or just as an appreciator of pop music, about Michael Jackson? (Jackson died the day before this interview was recorded.)

SZ: Four or five days ago, I just happened to be thinking about “Billie Jean.” I hadn’t heard it in a while, and somehow it got back into my head. My God, what a fabulous, frightening song, you know? And really, I feel like Michael Jackson is somebody we lost long ago. Mourning him at this point is— This is awful to say, but it’s kind of like an afterthought, because I, and so many of us, had to give up on him so long ago. Many times over the years I’d see a film clip of him when he was with the Jackson 5ive, or-- Off the Wall is actually my favorite Michael Jackson period. But when he was little, singing “I Want You Back” or something, I would just look at that face and start to cry. You have this incredible, beautiful kid with an incredible voice and amazing talent as a dancer, even just as a little guy. He was really a born entertainer, but I guess it’s kind of a curse to be a born entertainer in a case like that.

DC: What I find difficult in watching the tributes and people’s attempts to deal with what it is that he meant to them is that so much of it—I mean, to follow the media and the general way the wind has been blowing over the past several years, three or four days ago Michael Jackson was a freak, and now today he’s a saint. There’s an uncomfortable air of sanctimony, especially in the media coverage, after all that’s been written and said. It’s not that I want to wallow in the horrible stuff in this moment. I think I’m just looking for more of an acknowledgment of his complexity.


SZ: You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, right? But I feel like when anyone dies, it’s more respectful to consider the whole of the person. I remember going on the Graceland tour 20 or so years ago, and these glassy-eyed girls would be leading you through the mansion telling you all about Elvis’s life--I’m a big Elvis fan, by the way—and they finally get to the end and they would say, (sing-songy falsetto) “Elvis died of a heart attack.” Well, no, actually he died on the crapper. He was messed up toward the end. He had this very difficult, complicated life. And I think they probably thought it was disrespectful to acknowledge that the guy had any problems or idiosyncrasies… but that’s what makes Elvis Elvis-- a human being and a deity, you know, God and man. (Laughs) That might sound cracked, but we do make these people larger than life.

DC: And the way we deal with that aspect of their legacy is the way we should deal with anything that affects us from an artistic perspective. If you only focus on the warm fuzzies, you’re missing so much more of the total picture of what an artist, or a song, or a film can mean. And when you get to read a good writer, like you, you’re reading someone who’s willing to engage with the uncomfortable stuff too. Maybe that annoys some people when you write about popular cinema, but that’s what gets me on your side, your ability to peel the movie back and really look at it, whether it’s The Dark Knight or Summer Hours or Transporter 3.

SZ: Part of it too is that movies have gotten so strange now—there is, I find, less attention to craftsmanship. A lot of filmmakers are making these big budget movies, and they don’t even know where to put the camera—a lot of hand-held camera shaking all over the place. Put it on a tripod for a while.


DC: That was an interesting point in your review of The Hurt Locker, this resistance to what I’ll call classical filmmaking and letting the camera be an observer, putting it in the right spot to amplify what’s going on. I think Kathryn Bigelow is a brilliant filmmaker, but I wanted a little less of the you-are-there jittery camerawork and more shaping of sequences that were more likely to stay in my head visually.

SZ: I was tough on her, and I did like the movie a lot. I would have been more complimentary, I think, had the movie been made by just a random joe. But because it was her, and she is somebody who knows what she’s doing—I mean, it’s actually a pleasure to write about someone who knows what’s she doing, ‘cause then you can look and find certain things like, “Oh, stealing from Paul Mazursky! No, no, no!” (Laughs). But my thing is, at this point I’m just looking for something that’s alive on the screen. Give me something that has some energy to it—and real energy, not just fast cutting. Or even something as relatively simple as making a woman look beautiful, or lighting someone in a certain way, so much of that seems to have been lost. You just have to grab pleasure wherever you can get it.

DC: When I took my daughter to see The Lady Eve, there was a shot of Barbara Stanwyck early on and she turned to me and said, “Is she real? Does she really look like that?”

SZ (laughing): That’s great!

DC: I got a real kick out of imagining her mentally comparing the way Barbara Stanwyck looked and was photographed in that movie to the way actors are shot in the movies she’s more used to seeing.

SZ: Because cinematographers then would set lighting up very meticulously, and you would have to be on your mark. So the woman would be lit and placed so carefully and if she moved the effect might be lost, but if she sat or stood still she would seem to be the most beautiful, radiant creature. Same with men too. Someone like Cary Grant is beautiful to begin with, but part of it was the skill of DPs and the lighting guys and the director knowing what he wants. I wish more young filmmakers would rediscover and explore more classical filmmaking technique. I don’t want every movie to be like that, but it would be nice to see them screw the camera into a tripod every once in a while. (Both laugh). See what that’s like! Just try it!



*************************************************

A WEEK OF BASEBALL FURIES AND FUZZIES

What a week to be a Dodger fan. Scratch that-- what a week to be a baseball fan. It’s a game that carries with it so much baggage—dramatic, metaphorical, historical, emotional, associative, and a hundred more “ics” and “als” and “ives” that I haven’t mentioned. My wife asked me recently how I can stand to follow the game as closely as I do, investing so much of the way I look at life day to day in the fortunes of my favorite team and the various ups, downs and sideways of the game. I didn’t have a ready answer, because baseball can be so agonizing, so frustrating, so befuddling. And who could put into tidy words why they would voluntarily endure so much gnashing of teeth over the course of several months in spring, summer and fall, especially if, as has been the case with the Dodgers since I began following them seriously in 1994, your team is constantly snake-bit, a monument to mediocrity, or worse? Of course, with the devastating lows, and the steady thrum of the middle ground “meh,” come the occasional highs too—Steve Finley, arms lifted high, as his walk-off grand slam carried the 2004 Dodgers into the division championship; a perfect bunt, or a streaking rocket, hugging the third base line by a millimeter; the balletic beauty of an impossible grab by a shortstop, or the slender threading of the needle to complete a lightning fast double play around the horn; four home runs to even the score in the ninth against one of the best closers in the game, and a walk-off homer in the 10th to win it. The game is indeed like life—if it were all good, or all bad, we’d likely be driven mad with pleasure or frustration. The bumps and curves and changes of course are there to keep us interested, motivated, striving and hoping for better days and the wisdom to appreciate them when they come.


The week began by revisiting one of the most perversely entertaining homages to baseball ever put on film, found sparking off inside Walter Hill’s day-glo (or should that be nite-brite) action picture The Warriors (1979). The packed house at the New Beverly, gathered for the 30th anniversary of the movie, whooped and hollered and listened attentively as James Remar (Ajax), David Harris (Cochise) and Deborah Van Valkenburgh (Merci) held the stage for over an hour reliving precious memories of being on the set and fielding questions from rabid film fans, some of whom dressed like their favorite gangs from the movie. (I thought the house was going to come down on my head when I asked the cast what feelings they had, given their emotional connection, and the audience’s, to the original movie, about Tony Scott’s impending remake.) The movie still holds up very nicely after the passage of 30 years, which have done little to dilute its energy and quite a lot to highlight the fantastical, heightened distance from reality that was always there for the discernment, if one wasn’t otherwise occupied getting all balled up about the hoopla over the responsibility, or lack thereof, of the movie’s violence. And for many, the highlight of this vivid, visceral punch-out of a movie has always been the Warriors, bopping their way across hostile turf and fending off attacks by gangs who mistakenly hold them responsible for the murder of a high-profile criminal organizer, and their run-in with the Baseball Furies. The Furies, inspired by equal parts KISS and Murderer’s Row (they sport Yankees-style pinstripes that clash mightily with grotesquely designed full facial makeup), come out swinging and eventually get their maples and ashes kicked when the Warriors get hold of a few bats of their own. It’s a spectacularly choreographed scene (and it’s probably even topped by a later battle in a subway restroom with that preppie gang on skates), and I would have never guessed that, as electric as that scene is, it would be only the modest starting point of a week of baseball highlights that would just get better and better.

As I indicated earlier on my “On the Marquee” sidebar, the average baseball fan might well see Timothy Marx’s Bluetopia: The L.A. Dodgers Movie (2009) as little more than a puff piece designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a team they probably care less about than one of Major League Baseball’s 29 other franchises, and if they were feeling generous they might find enough to enjoy—including some moments spent with Vin Scully—to justify spending 90 minutes with this movie. And even Dodger fans, those of a inking to examine the darker shades of Dodger Blue, might hanker for a more hard-hitting documentary that gets after some of the issues that haunted the team during at least the first half of its semicentennial year—further tensions between veterans and younger players, the pressure of heightened expectations in the wake of the hiring of ex-Yankee manager Joe Torre, and the team’s perennial albatross, a mediocre offensive line-up. There are undoubtedly plenty of moments, and plenty of storylines, that have been left on the cutting room floor. But Marx’s pruning clears enough of a path toward the movie’s real theme—the team’s relationship with its ethnically and economically diverse fan base—that those who count themselves among the Dodger faithful are likely to be very forgiving toward the movie’s tendency toward sentiment and breathless testimony. Personally, I watched Bluetopia through a constant well of tears, fully cognizant of all the holes along the way that Marx has left to my own abilities as a viewer and a fan to fill in, but swept up in the emotional pull that the team has on me, a pull that the movie replicates with its own passion and its own desire to represent, with respect and accuracy, the experience of a diverse group of Dodger fans over the course of a suddenly thrilling, ultimately heartbreaking season.

The movie interweaves talking heads footage of Scully and other Dodger broadcasters, Frank and Jamie McCourt, Tommy Lasorda and several players with the stories of several devoted Dodger fans: a (fan)atical owner of a tattoo shop that specializes in Dodger ink, who eventually applies his talents to the shoulder of center fielder Matt Kemp; a group of septuagenarian ladies who kvetch from their seats in the left field pavilion and end up at a charity bowling match cooing over the likes of rookie Clayton Kershaw, Brad Penny and James Loney; a man and his son who pride themselves on being the first to arrive in the ball park and who make a habit of snatching up batting practice balls that lay uncollected in the pavilions before the crowd arrives; and a woman stricken with cancer who hopes only to survive long enough to see the Dodgers make the playoffs. It’s admittedly a strategy that plays best to the sentimental streak in any baseball fan, but if you are a Dodger follower that streak will widen considerably while watching this movie. The tears of happiness that were constantly brimming and distorting the picture on my TV spilled over in earnest many times as the movie gave over to the honest emotion and excitement it documents within the confines of Dodger Stadium. One favorite moment—- old Internet friend Jon Weisman’s encounter with Vin Scully in the press box, which he succinctly and aptly summarizes by admitting (and this is probably slightly paraphrased) that “there’s no rational way to express what this moment means to me.” From the Opening Day flyover, to the surprise addition of Manny Ramirez, to the giddy highs of an NLDS sweep of the Chicago Cubs, to the thudding disappointment at the hands of Cole Hamels and the Philadelphia Phillies while knocking on the door of the 2008 World Series, Jon’s comments wisely sum up the heart of a Dodger fan (at least this one), as well as the emotional effect of Bluetopia. It’s enough to make one hope against all hope that Timothy Marx has a camera crew rolling on this season too. The sequel might be even more satisfying.


Not that there’s been much of interest going on in Chavez Ravine this season, right? Wednesday, July 22. I saw the first 45 minutes or so of the game on Fox Sports West, enough to see Andre Ethier’s home run, the one that evened the score, 1-1. It was Manny Ramirez Bobblehead Night, and the game was sold out, fans wanting to get their soon-to-be-valuable souvenir. The bobblehead would be as close as they’d get to the slugger though, because Manny was not in the Wednesday night lineup, taking the night off with a sore hand after getting hit by a pitch the previous night. Joe Torre had said Ramirez would be available for pinch hitting, but who among us wanted to think about the last-ditch scenario, one probably built around a slowly depleting bench, that would require the services of the bruised superstar? Despite my desire to stay tuned, it was a Wednesday night, I was reminded, and so I gave way to my daughters’ one weekly TV addiction (at least until Star Wars: Clone Wars starts its new season) and allowed them to turn on Wipeout, an action-packed game show featuring lots of (mostly overweight) people getting drenched in mud, stumbling, falling and getting back up again as they pinball through an obstacle course designed for maximum difficulty and humiliation. (I was otherwise occupied, but not too successfully-- just try writing in the same room while this show plays to its most squealing and hyperactive demographic.)

The surprises and delights of Wipeout having been revealed and spent at 9:00 p.m., I turned back to the Dodger game just in time to notice the game was now tied a 2-2. With one out in the sixth, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Bronson Arroyo walked James Loney and Matt Kemp, then Russell Martin singled to left to load the bases. Arroyo was sitting tight with Mark Loretta gearing up in the Dodger dugout. But when manager Dusty Baker noticed dreadlocks stirring in the Dodger dugout he had a change of heart. Baker replaced Arroyo with reliever Nick Masset, thinking Arroyo, having just packed the house, might not have enough left to face Ramirez, who was suddenly headed toward the batter’s box, without so much as a single warm-up. I turned to my oldest daughter, who came back into the living room after brushing he teeth, and I said, as I frequently do when Manny comes up, “Watch this. He’s gonna hit a home run.” I didn’t really believe that he would; I was just saying it to pique her interest. But he did. Swinging at the first pitch he saw, he drove a streaking line drive right over left field and into—where else—the field-level section along the Dodger bullpen that was this season dubbed (except for a brief 50-game hiatus) Mannywood. On Manny Ramirez Bobblehead Night. A night on which he was not scheduled to play. This makes all that Roy Hobbs-Robert Redford bullshit look even sillier, but if someone would have scripted the events of last night’s game, none of us could have believed that either. Charlie Steiner went nuts on the Dodger Radio Network, but as is his brilliant ken, Vin Scully called the trail of the ball and then let the deafening crowd, which did not even begin to subside until the second Manny curtain call at the end of the inning, tell the rest of the story.



As he whooped it up in the dugout with his disbelieving teammates (“I was in awe," Kemp said. "He's amazing, man. I can't really explain him. I've never seen somebody who can go up there, no warm-ups or nothing, and just go hit. I need at least a couple of swings."), one camera caught a shot of Kemp walking up to Ramirez, tapping him on the forehead, and stepping back to watch the superstar who plays the game with the personality, for good and ill, like a 12-year-old kid begin to nod his head up and down in imitation of the bobblehead of which he was so obviously proud. To those who expected (demanded) that Dodger fans boo or otherwise ostracize this guy, who accuse Dodger fans of hypocrisy because they will not hold his feet to the fire in the way they did those of Barry Bonds, I offer the simple evidence of this kind of way of relating to his teammates, and to his fans, that marks the difference between Ramirez and the likes of Bonds. Ramirez may not have adequately apologized to fans for his violation of the MLB drug policy and subsequent 50-game suspension, but he has owned up to his culpability—unlike Bonds, hated by fans, reporters and insiders alike, who has arrogantly denied ever using any performance-enhancing substance, all mountain ranges of evidence to the contrary. Unless I’m mistaken, Ramirez did not contest his punishment but instead served it in exactly the fashion prescribed by the commissioner’s office. In societal terms, the man has paid his dues. Will Bonds ever pay his? In my eye, Manny Ramirez apologizes to his fans by energizing the clubhouse, relating to his teammates, and then plating up and batting like a maniac, as if those 50 games were instead a mere 50 seconds over a speed bump. All the Bill Plaschkes on earth (and thank Zeus there is only one) cannot make me feel guilty for thrilling to a moment like the one we witnessed Wednesday night. I wish I could have been at the stadium. But even though I wasn’t, I was there. And I have a feeling this isn’t going to be the last great moment of this Dodger season. Twenty-seven games over .500, three games ahead of the nearest team in the majors (the Yankees) for best record overall. Will Roy Halladay end up here, or in Philadelphia? This is why we love baseball. When even the lows are fascinating just for love of the game, how much more exhilarating then are the highs.


Oh, yeah, and tonight Mark Buehrle pitched a perfect game for Obama’s White Sox.

Here’s the peerless Jon Weisman not just once, not just twice, but three times on what some are calling the most memorable moment at Dodger Stadium since that guy Kirk Gibson hobbled to the plate in ’88. And this was a midseason game!

Here’s what the Grand Slam looked like from out near Mannywood.

Here’s the story on an upcoming commemorative poster in honor of last night’s great moment.

And here’s where you can buy Bluetopia online.

Up next: Richard Linklater's new documentary, Inning by Inning: Portrait of a Coach

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OUTTA SIGHT! IT'S OUT OF SYNC!

Tracking a tracking shot: From left, Rozemarijn Stokkel, director of photography Rogier den Boer, and Peet Gelderblom

Peet Gelderblom, no stranger to these pages, is, apart from his talents as a writer and cartoonist, also a well-known and respected television director in his homeland of The Netherlands. And very soon we’re all going to get a look at Peet’s considerable talent with the camera as he trots out his storytelling chops in his new short film Out of Sync. It sounds like Peet, never one to hide his love for directors like Brian De Palma and David Fincher, is setting some interesting technical and narrative challenges for himself with Out of Sync. The movie, a character driven piece, has what Peet describes as an interesting gimmick. “Only it’s not exactly a gimmick,” Peet says. “It will be the first movie filmed in Anamorphic AuDiVision. For comparison, think split screen, but instead of two or more juxtaposed visual sequences it’s the sound that will be separated from the image, leaving it up to the audience to connect the dots between what you see and hear.” Intrigued? I am, I am! Go to Peet’s post on his Directorama site for some great behind the scenes shots, plus a look at the cast and directions on how you can become a “fan” of Out of Sync on Facebook and get updates as the movie makes its journey through the world of post-production and to a viewing outlet near you sometime this fall. And of course, stay tuned to SLIFR for more updates as well.



Here’s the Out of Sync teaser. Tease no more, Peet. I wanna see the whole thing!

HEINZ EDELMANN 1934-2009

Heinz Edelmann, the artist responsible for creating the graphic design of Yellow Submarine, died Tuesday in Stuttgart, Germany. No cause of death was given. Many assumed that Edelmann drew from personal experience in creating the psychedelia that informed his work on the Beatles film, as well as the many German book covers and other artistic endeavors he produced during his lifetime. But Edelmann always denied the charge. "I had never taken any drugs," the artist said in a 2004 interview with the British magazine Design Week. "I'm a conservative, working-class person who sticks to booze . . . so I just knew about the psychedelic experience. . . . I guessed what it was." Edelmann also served as a professor at the State Academy of Art and Design until 1999.



Related: Heinz Edelmann’s Los Angeles Times obituary.

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PROFESSOR SEVERUS SNAPE’S SORCERER-TASTIC, MUGGALICIOUS MID-SUMMER MOVIE QUIZ

Here were are, midway through the summer, ready to unveil another scholarly exam from the hallowed halls of SLIFR University, and we find that the season of Michael Bay and Pixar has apparently been hijacked by the sixth episode in the allegedly finite Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. In addition to getting some very solid reviews, the movie is reaping untold fortune in the American movie market, making, according to the Variety ticker on my sidebar, a wizard’s whisker short of $22 million last Thursday alone, the second day of its release. If I kept track of things (or knew where to link to someone who does), that’d surely rank as some sort of record. My daughters are now old enough to be official citizens of the Harry Potter brigade as well—my eldest is reading the books while catching up on the movies-- and we’ll unveil Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban tonight, the last HP movie I saw before losing track of the series, in the hopes of being caught up in time to see HP&TH-BP at the glorious Vista Theater next weekend.

In the spirit of this cultural avalanche of all things pubescently supernatural, we’re turning over the midsummer quiz to a staff member of Hogwarts School itself, on sabbatical from that castle of mystical education and hub of Quidditch competition and here with us to administer to you a mental grilling to match the one you get every time you step outdoors or into your car in this unspeakable season we call summer. (I definitely side with the pale Brit actors of the Harry Potters series and their glum, drizzly weather over that of the typical Los Angeleno.) If you will (and he insists), please welcome to the podium Professor Severus Snape, master teacher of Potions and Defence Against the Dark Arts, with us here to offer up his very own Sorcerer-tastic, Muggalicious Midsummer Movie Quiz for your head-scratching delectation. As always, there is no deadline and no limit to the length of your answers—in fact, the more loquacious, the better. And there is only one rule, which Professsor Snapes assures me he will enforce with all the supernatural force he can muster (and if you’ve seen the movies, he’s no slouch in this department). He insists that when you answer each question, please cut and paste the question itself into the comments column along with your answer, so we may more easily see what it is you are answering rather than having to juggle back and forth between “Comments” and “Post.” Professor Snapes vows that if you follow this one simple rule, he will not feel compelled to alter your status as a humanoid via magical transformation by even one atom.

Before I hand it over to our esteemed guest educator, there is one more quiz I need to tell you about, one from Eric Nusbaum, curator of the fine baseball-themed blog Pitchers and Poets. (According to Eric, “The name Pitchers & Poets comes from Robert Frost, who said, ‘Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.’") Eric and his blogging partner Ted have offered SLIFR the sincerest form of tribute, not only in their words, but also by offering a quiz of their own, one decidedly less SL and much more IFR than the ones found here.

Sample question: “Excluding Rollie Fingers, who has the greatest facial hair in the history of the game?”

My own answer will probably be Oscar Gamble, though that is admittedly a choice based more on the whole package—head and face—than just the 'stache alone. (I’m tempted also to choose Ryan Franklin, Cardinal reliever whose previously well-mowed goatee has come to resemble a whisk broom attached with little care to the pitcher’s chin.) Anyway, if you have an inkling for more questions, including a couple on baseball movies, jump on over, buy a box of Cracker Jack and check out Eric’s “Pitchers & Poets Not-Quite-Midseason Quiz.” It’s not nearly as long as Professor Snape’s ordeal, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by a lot of other good reading as a result. Thanks, Eric, for the very kind words and for the great quiz! I will be submitting my answers this weekend!

All right, wizards, put down your wands, pick up your pencils, and let’s begin.

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1) Second-favorite Stanley Kubrick film.

2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil.

3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)?

4) Best Film of 1949.

5) Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)?

6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché?

7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw?

8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)?

9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970).

10) Favorite animal movie star.

11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema.

12) Best Film of 1969.

13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray.

14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film.

15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print?

16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji? (Thanks, Peter!)

17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)?

18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence.

19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date.

20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre.

21) Best Film of 1979.

22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.

23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).

24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film.

25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see.

26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film.

27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.

28) Favorite Alan Smithee film. (Thanks, Peter!)

29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)?

30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film.

31) Best Film of 1999.

32) Favorite movie tag line.

33) Favorite B-movie western.

34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of her or his work.

35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)?

36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie.

37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping?

38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet. (Thanks, Rick!)

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(Thanks to Peter Nellhaus and Rick Olson for inspiring and/or outright lending some questions to this quiz edition.)

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"THIS MOVIE IS TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART": Seitz and Morgan on In a Lonely Place

It doesn’t seem that long ago that some of us were wringing our hands over Matt Zoller Seitz’s decision to leave the world of print criticism and begin a new phase in his life as a filmmaker a little over a year ago. Well, Matt has been busy not only making films but forging a new path for himself in visually oriented film criticism through a series of video essays created for the Museum of the Moving Image’s online magazine Moving Image Source. He’s done excellent exegeses on the films of Wes Anderson, as well as part five of a soon-to-be completed five-part series on Michael Mann. Part four, created in collaboration with Aaron Aradillas, San Antonio film critic and host of the Internet radio show Back by Midnight, digs into the director’s 1985 adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon which Mann retitled Manhunter. According to Matt, the essay is “the most ambitious video essay I've done, in terms of visual analysis and filmmaking technique -- the last half plays out the bloody climax of Manhunter" at full-length, with text annotations.” Matt has also done great pieces on David Fincher and Budd Boetticher, and all of his previous work can be found here. If ever a click were well worth it, it is this one.



But, as Ron Popeil was fond of saying, that’s not all. Matt recently collaborated with another old friend of mine, film critic and film noir specialist Kim Morgan, on a video essay adaptation of one of Kim’s pieces on Nicholas Ray’s haunting and haunted romance of desperation and anger, In a Lonely Place (1950), entitled ”This Movie is Trying to Break Your Heart”. If you haven’t seen Ray’s movie in a while you’ll go to it immediately after you see Kim and Matt’s piece and experience it with fresh eyes, and if you just saw it again recently, the essay will make you feel like the movie is embedded in your soul, so vivid and sharp are the observations and contrapuntal images from this great, perhaps under-appreciated movie, which Matt chooses with such understanding and intuitive strength. It is becoming increasingly fascinating and satisfying to watch Matt gain momentum in this relatively new way of looking at movies, as he carves out a perspective and format that is particularly well suited to becoming a central pylon in the bridge that spans the worlds of print and the emerging dominance of online reading and creating of intelligent, multi-layered and challenging film criticism. And it’s very moving to hear Kim’s voice reading her own heartfelt words on the fearful groping of Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame as they navigate the doomed geography of Ray’s bitter, and bitterly romantic movie. I wrote last week of the world that film blogging has opened up to me, and I am very lucky that both of these writers are people I can count among my short list of personal friends—they have enriched my real worlds as much as they continue to enrich my understanding of the delicacies, terrors, joys and contradictions inherent in the true, deep appreciation of the movies. I’m lucky to know them, and we are all lucky to get to see Nicholas Ray through their eyes.

If you’re in New York, “This Movie is Trying to Break Your Heart” is the perfect lead-in or accompaniment to Film Forum’s upcoming series on the cinema of Nicholas Ray, which commences tomorrow, July 17, and carries over the next two weeks through August 6. The series opens with, of course, In a Lonely Place, which plays for one week, and continues with Bigger than Life (1956) (July 24-25); Johnny Guitar (1954) (July 26-27); Born to Be Bad (July 27); On Dangerous Ground (1952) and A Woman’s Secret (1949) (July 28), They Live by Night (1949) and Knock On Any Door (1949) (July 30); Wind Across the Everglades (1958) (July 30); Rebel Without a Cause (1955) (July 31-Aug. 3); Bitter Victory (1957) and Hot Blood (1956) (Aug. 4); The Lusty Men (1952) and The True Story of Jesse James (1957) (Aug. 5); and Cyd Charisse in Party Girl (1958) (Aug. 6).


Would it be too greedy to hope that this series might hit the road and find its way to a few places west of the Mississippi? All of these are unmissable, but to see Johnny Guitar and Party Girl on the big screen, and of course In A Lonely Place, would be movie manna from heaven. (Bigger than Life will, in fact, open a two-week series of the films of James Mason tomorrow night in Los Angeles at the County Museum’s Bing Theater.)

Again, thanks to Matt and Kim for bringing a little taste of the Film Forum to us with your video essay.

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TWANGIN' AND GRINNIN'

Duane Eddy does the “Cannonball Rag” (1975)

Do guitar geeks and music fans still revere Duane Eddy? Do they even know who he is? The rebel rouser in me certainly hopes so. His IMDb credits reveal he had a career as an actor and a performer on movie soundtracks that was far more extensive than I would have guessed, though it seems he hasn't worked in either capacity for about 12 years. He did, however, get his chrome and hot leather on for Richard Rush in one of the nastier pictures of my youth, The Savage Seven (1968), playing, of all things, a biker named Eddie. Duane, whatever you're doing these days, I hope it's with a twang and a grin to match the ones you put in my heart when I was just a little rocker.


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The Best of Prof. Peabody’s Film Quiz Pt 3: EVEN MORE ICONS, TOO MUCH PAIN, DELIGHTS BELOW THE RADAR AND THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU’RE NOT WATCHING MOVIES

We're in the final stretch, students. A reminder: You can take a look at the original quiz, or catch up with part 1 and part 2 of this Best Of series before marching forward, or, if you're doing a marathon read, then you'll be ready to rumble right now. We open with movies too painful to experience more than once, check out a couple more icons along the way, heed some recommendations for films to see that may not be top of the mind, and then end up, in anticipation of the posting of the next quiz tomorrow, with a consideration of what SLIFR readers like to enrich their lives with when they're not soaking up film images and written thoughts about them. Proceed, Shermans.

24) Name a great (or merely very good) movie that is too painful to watch a second time (Thanks to The Onion A.V. Club)


The only movie that I can think of off the top of my head that I absolutely loved but will forever refuse to watch again is Grave of the Fireflies. It’s much, much too draining. (Schuyler Chapman)

I can't think of any. I revel in movies that make me want to turn away because of the horrors of life or death that they are showing me and try to return to them often. So if it's painful, I WANT to watch it again. Now, there are plenty of comedies that I liked enough to not watch again because I'm afraid they will lose their appeal. (Greg)

No great or good movies come to mind, but two I found excruciating were the last two Terry Gilliams, The Brothers Grimm, which was like having nails driven through my hands, and Tideland, which was like having my skin pulled off. This is a career that's gone completely off the rails. (Robert Fiore)

If I think a movie is truly good, painful or not, I tend to not have much problem going back to it. So I don’t really think I have an answer to this one, but, okay, second viewings of The Piano Teacher or See the Sea would take some gearing up for. (Bill R.)

William Wellman's Island in the Sky is a pretty good film with a performance by John Wayne that is worth noting. However, I almost tore my eyes out at the dorsal view of Andy Devine in swim trunks. At least he wasn't wearing Speedos. (Peter Nellhaus)

Salo: 120 Days of Sodom. (Jim Emerson)


Titicut Follies (1967). (Pretty much a gimme, don’t you think?) (Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.)

Oh, that's easy... Million Dollar Baby. Don't get me wrong, it's simply a great film and I love it. But, it's still laying in a drawer, unopened. I want to see it, but it's such a devastating movie, I can't get it into the DVD player. (le0pard 13)

I've never been able to rewatch Boys Don't Cry. The film's second half is brutal not just for the violence and simulated rape, but because Kimberley Peirce and Hilary Swank do a frighteningly strong job of putting you in Brandon Teena's shoes - I left the movie feeling violated and emotionally drained. I tried watching it once on cable, but when Brandon and Lana kiss for the first time I decided to change the channel and leave the movie on high note. (Bemis)

Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Once was enough for me. If I sat through it again I might just throw myself in front of an oncoming train. (Kimberly Lindbergs)

Grave of the Fireflies. I still find it odd that most people find this film so sad... I found it infuriating. But then, both of those traits make it difficult to watch. It is an exceptional film though, and it's one of those films that you could pull out to traumatize people who think that you can't tell real stories with animation. Incidentally, it's kinda cruel to point to that AV Club article, as it's a pretty comprehensive list... Most of the stuff I considered shows up there. (Mark)

25) Beyonce Knowles or Jennifer Hudson?

I don't have a preference, but my wife just yelled out a vote for Jennifer. (Alonso Moseley FBI)

Tough call, so far Ms. Hudson has shown more chops as an actress, but Ms. Knowles seems to have greater potential, range etc. (Larry Gross)

Jennifer's got a much, much better quality/fluff ratio. (Patrick)

I truly don't have an opinion. Hudson, because who doesn't like to root for an underdog? (Bemis)









26) Favorite Robert Mitchum movie?


His best is probably Out of the Past, but my favorite? The Big Steal - Ramon Novarro chasing William Bendix chasing Robert Mitchum chasing Jane Greer chasing Patrick Knowles through Mexico. (Beveridge D. Spenser)

Hard to choose between Out of the Past and Night of the Hunter (Larry Gross)

The Yakuza. (Peter Nellhaus)

Dead Man (1995). Also should be noted as the only Jim Jarmusch movie that I like. (Walter Biggins)


Until it comes out on DVD and I can verify my memories of how awesome Friends of Eddie Coyle was/is, I’ll go with Thunder Road. I think Mitchum’s performances in Night of the Hunter, Cape Fear and Heaven Knows Mr. Allison are better, but those movies all have scenes that annoy me and I fast-forward through now. Thunder Road isn’t flawless either, but I can plop my ass down and watch it front to back without reaching for the remote (except to rewind that awesome scenes where Mitchum wrecks a rival’s car using his cigarette!). (Ivan)

The Big Steal. (Howard Chaykin)

I’ll specifically avoid Night of the Hunter, because that’s really the only answer that’s possible here, and go with Farewell My Lovely, since it’s nearly as good and probably the best cinematic Marlowe (sorry Bogie). (Schuyler Chapman)


The little known Sydney Pollack film, The Yakuza. (written by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne). He was almost 60 when he made it, and still carried off his role in what was a tribute to the (at that time, little known) Japanese gangster film. Few actors could carry off weary and dangerous with that ease--even fewer, anywhere near that age. (le0pard 13)

"Chilllllll....dren?" (Patrick)

27) Favorite movie featuring a ‘60s musical group that is not either the Beatles or the Monkees


The strangely ambitious Having a Wild Weekend by the strangely ambitious Dave Clark Five. It's practically neo-realist. (Robert Fiore)

What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, featuring the Lovin’ Spoonful. Or maybe that should be featurin’. (Bill R.)

Hold On! with Herman's Hermits. A total hokey Beatles rip-off. (Josh Pincus Is Crying)

Cliff Richard and the Shadows in Thunderbirds are GO. Rent the flick just for their appearance: your mind will explode. (BTW, Thunderbirds are GO is a perfect double-feature with Team America: World Police.) (Ivan)

Petulia, featuring The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company in performance. (Peter Nellhaus)

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Strawberry Alarm Clock -- and, of course, the Carrie Nations). (Jim Emerson)

Criminally underseen The Girls On The Beach with The Beach Boys (though the plot deals with The Beatles). (Aaron)

Have you ever seen The Ghost Goes Gear starring the Spenser Davis Group, with Aker Bilk and a few never-weres? Well I have. It stinks. (Beveridge D. Spenser)

The Kids are Alright, the 1979 documentary on the Who. A high-energy jumble with some incredible performances, and it's a treat to see Keith Moon at his best. (Patrick)

28) Maria Ouspenskaya or Una O’Connor?


Maria Ouspenskaya. She warned Larry Talbot. (Josh Pincus Is Crying)


Una O'Connor – but after all, she worked with Ford, Whale, Lubitsch, and Wilder, whereas Ouspenskaya ... Sam Wood? (Richard T. Jameson)

Ok, I warned you. I'm overriding Dennis' question and replacing it with my own. The funny thing is that I don't really have a good answer. Kane Hodder, I guess. Though Derek Mears has potential. This is one that needs to be revisited after the next few movies come out. (Mark)

29) Favorite Vincent Price movie?


Witchfinder General… no wait, Theatre of Blood… no, The Tingler, uh-uh, Edward Scissorhands…I mean, The Abominable Dr. Phibes… Okay, Witchfinder General. (Dave S.)

Ouch. Wait, no, it’s Witchfinder General. That’s a great movie, and Price is at his best there. The only really tough competition, I think, would be Theater of Blood, in which Price is also outstanding, but there’s quite a bit of dated camp in that one, which knocks it down a peg or two in my book. (Bill R.)

The Pit and the Pendulum. It's the most crazily effective of the Corman films I've seen, and Price just rolls with it. (Krauthammer)

I am woefully deficient in my Vincent Price knowledge. I've only seen a couple. For now, I'll say The Abominable Dr. Phibes because I saw it recently and was struck by how much some recent films seem to take from it (notably Se7en and Saw). I've already placed a number of Vincent Price movies in my Netflix queue, basing some of my choices on the selections of Dennis' readers. (Mark)

Witchfinder-General (aka The Conqueror Worm). However, he never topped the way he said "Truuuuuuue!" in The Pit and the Pendulum. (Let's stipulate that Laura isn't a "Vincent Price movie.") (Richard T. Jameson)

I've never seen a Vincent Price movie from start to finish. (Flosh)

The Masque of the Red Death. (Aaron)

I do love The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but I’ll have to go with Witchfinder General (aka Conqueror Worm, which might be the best movie title ever). (Schuyler Chapman)


Theatre of Blood - Vincent, a far better actor than given credit for, performing as a second rate, ham British stage actor was simply splendid here. Co-star Diana Rigg considered it her best film, too. (le0pard 13)

That's rough but it's probably a toss-up between The Haunted Palace and The Last Man on Earth. (Kimberly Lindbergs)

30) Name a movie currently flying under the radar that is deserving of rabid cult status.


Crap, I don’t know. I don’t want to go with one of my fall-back answers, so I’ll go with a movie that’s truly great and unique, but which may already have a rabid cult following: Saul Bass’s Phase IV. If it doesn’t have a rabid cult following, that’s only because it used to be so hard to find. Not so hard now, because I saw it via Netflix, even though somebody claimed I was mistaken, and that I must have seen something else, which I was confusing with Phase IV. But no, it was Phase IV, all right. Super ants, Michael Murphy, etc. Anyway, amazing film. (Bill R.)

The documentary Capturing the Friedmans got a lot of attention when it came out, but has since disappeared from the popular consciousness. It really shouldn't have--it's one of the most fascinating stories committed to film in years. (Chris Oliver)

“Death Laid an Egg. (Dave S.)

Again, Me and My Gal. Also the Mann-Alton-Menzies-Yordan The Black Book (I hope the new DVD is decently BLACK-and-white). And can we get a release, or even a few TV runs, for Sidney Gilliat's The State Secret? (Richard T. Jameson)

Gigli (more weird then bad). (Anthony)


John Woo's Red Cliff. A huge hit in Asia, but only available as an import DVD stateside. It's the top nominee for the Hong Kong Film Awards for good reason. (Peter Nellhaus)

Deep End, Moonlighting, Winter Kills, Psycho III, Brain Candy, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Housekeeping, The Long Day Closes... (Jim Emerson)

Since Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery came out in 1993, it was immediately lost under the Soon-Yi Previn fallout. As a murder mystery, it’s a little slack, but only because Woody’s interested more in the middle-aged marriage that underpins it than the whodunit factor. (Besides, the whodunit’s not so bad, and the climax is terrific.) As a portrait of a couple in-progress, resolving its troubles, it’s funny and remarkably light on its feet. It’s worth revisiting. In fact, it’s damn near brilliant. (Walter Biggins)

For gross fun - Slither; for crime fiction - Hickey & Boggs (le0pard 13)


Please cut me some slack, but I’m going long: The Love God? (1969) is written and directed by Nat Hiken (a vet of the Sgt. Bilko show and Car 54 Where Are You?). This flick is an unholy mess that’s worth renting for weirdness value alone. The brightly colored mutant love child of Walt Disney and Russ Meyer, The Love God? is Squaresville trying to make sense of the sexual revolution—and becoming schizophrenic for its efforts. Don Knotts and his brand of goofball-loser comedy is The Love God?’s greatest asset and liability. In some scenes, Knott’s comedic acting is transcendent: totally brilliant. But in others, he pulls out the now-stale Barney Fife routine. But The Love God? is hardly a dumb movie: lots of topical issues are satirized, some better than others. Not only does The Love God? poke fun at sex itself, the flick makes fun of student unrest, First Amendment rights advocates and abusers, women’s lib, the ACLU, media manipulation of public opinion, and the corporatization of the mob. (Speaking of the mob, B.S. Pully’s performance as J. Charles Twilight is fantastic! Gee-whiz, rent the movie just to watch him.) (Ivan)

Well, there’s The Edge, which is, you know, David Mamet’s movie about bears. And also Anaconda, which is pretty much the best movie about snakes ever. (Schuyler Chapman)

Said it before, say it again - Get Crazy. All it needs is a DVD release for people to become aware of it. Anyone? Anyone? (Runner-up: Three O'Clock High.) (Patrick)

Fearless. A movie with the kind of moral clarity that gets people crucified. (Robert Fiore)

I don't know that it's officially 'out' yet, but I just saw Jeffrey Goodman's brilliant neo noir The Last Lullaby at the Salem Film Festival. If people get out to see it, it will turn the man into a go-to director for these kinds of thrillers. It's really a brilliant film. (Kevin J. Olson)

Once again, it's sometimes difficult to tell when something is flying under the radar, especially on the internet where there can be a dedicated following to even the most obscure of movies, but I figure my top 10s are a good place to start (incidentally, there's no way to narrow this down to 1 movie). From 2008, we've got Teeth, The Bank Job, Mad Detective, Timecrimes, Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón, The Promotion, and Spiral. A good pick from 2007 that's making the rounds on cable right now is Stardust and a good pick from 2006 would be James Gunn's excellent Slither. There are some movies I've heard of that still haven't been released but that sound awesome, notably Trick 'r Treat. I could probably list off a dozen others from the past few years, but I'll leave it at that. (Mark)

Invasion USA. I think a lot of conservative talk show hosts would find it eerily prescient and latch onto its "message" (that communists are taking over the country and are out to kill us all!). Me, I just find it amazingly silly and awesome. (Troy Olson)

The excellent Belgium horror film Linkeroever. It was released in 2008 and it was easily one of the best films released that year and one of the best horror films I've seen this decade, but I'm the only person who seems to think so. (Kimberly Lindbergs)

Due to rights issues, The Beaver Trilogy is one of the few cult films left that can basically only be seen on seventh-generation bootlegs. And it's well worth the effort - check out this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kULU1Vw93Pw) and other YouTube clips and you'll see what I mean. Sidenote: I've just found out, through the comments on that page, that Groovin Gary died in February. That totally sucks - RIP, Olivia Newton Dawn. (Bemis)

Easy, Stuart Gordon's new to DVD in the last year or so From Beyond. One of the greats for a number of hilarious reasons, please everyone see this film. (Jamie)

31) Irene Ryan or Lucille Benson (or Bea Benaderet)?

Oh, Bea wins this one in a walk if only for her radio work alone. A superb comic actress who worked alongside Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, Lucille Ball (My Favorite Husband), Dennis Day, Jim & Marian Jordan (Fibber McGee & Molly), Mel Blanc, Harold Peary (The Great Gildersleeve), Red Skelton, Ozzie & Harriet Nelson—not to mention dramatic turns in The Mercury Theater on the Air, Grand Central Station, Lights Out, Suspense, The Cavalcade of America, etc. (I’m going to chalk up your inclusion of Benson among these two as temporary insanity, Dennis.) (Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.)

Okay, pops, I’m getting off the lawn… (Ivan)

Granny was also in Bonzo Goes to College. (Jim Emerson)

Irene. I always had a soft spot for the Beverly Hillbillies. (Schuyler Chapman)

*yawns, checks watch* (Patrick)

When you ask us to pick between people I don't know, I die a little inside. Pass. (Krauthammer)

32) Single line from a movie that never fails to make your laugh or otherwise cheer you up. (This may be obvious, but the line does not have to come from a comedy.)


“I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.” – Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (Michael Miller)

Groucho in Horse Feathers: "I'm the plumber, I'm here in case something goes wrong with her pipes. That's the first time I used that joke in 20 years." (Jeremy)

I have several but they're all because of achieving inside joke status between my wife and I. For instance, that horrid line of Gloria Stuart's in Titanic, the one about "he saved me, in every way that a person can be saved." Well, my wife and I laughed at the line instinctively together the first time we heard it and have used it ever since. Bad day at work? "My boss screwed me over, in every way that a person can be screwed over." Sick the night before? "I vomited. In every way that a person can vomit." And so on. Also, you have to say using Stuart's voice. Also the line by Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night where she says "I'll get us a ride and I won't use my thumb." Using her exact inflection my wife and I have gotten extraordinary mileage out of the last part of that line, especially if the reference is off-color. Example: I have to go take a shit, and I won't use my thumb. Oh man, it can be used for anything, again and again and again. (Greg)


In My Darling Clementine, J. Farrell McDonald's response to Henry Fonda's plaintive "Mac, you ever been in love?": "Noooooo, I been a bartender all me life!" (Richard T. Jameson)

“I got this badge, I got this gun, and I got the love of Jesus right here in my pretty green eyes.” --Clint Eastwood, The Gauntlet, 1977 (Ivan)

“So what – you’re gonna jog broke?” (Bob Einstein in Modern Romance). I’m pretty sure I say it daily. (Aaron)

“How’s my hair?” or “Damn! We’re in a tight spot!” or “I don’t want Fop, goddamnit! I’m a Dapper Dan man!” All are said by George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). (Walter Biggins)


Ryan O'Neal at the end of 245 degree pan holding a gun on Rudy Ramos in The Driver, and he says: "Give up." Also Mitchum to Greer in Out of the Past--"Would you mind getting out of here, I have to sleep in this room." Also Bogart responding to Lorre's complaints about his always having a clever answer for every situation: "What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?" And of course Bridges as the Dude, "My thinking about this case has gotten very uptight." and "it's like Lenin said man, who benefits from the crime." (Larry Gross)

"Well, I'm a mushroom-cloud-layin' motherfucker, motherfucker!" - Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction (like you needed me to tell you that). (Patrick)

So, so many...so I'll choose the first one that came to the top of my head -- Nick Cage from Wicker Man, "How'd it get burned, how'd it get burned, HOW'D IT GET BURNED!" Bad acting at its finest. (Troy Olson)

33) Elliot Gould or Donald Sutherland?

Donald Sutherland. "I'm serious. This is my job!" (Quinn)

I think I generally prefer Gould, but Sutherland has two great horror films under his belt -- Don’t Look Now and Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- so my choice has to be him. We horror fans must show our support. (Bill R.)

Elliot Gould has done a lot of good work, but Sutherland has given five or six GREAT performances. He can be terrible too--but Sutherland has been GREAT a lot. To go from the madness of Attila in 1900 to the normality of the dad in Ordinary People indicates creative genius. Gould's real gifts don't go that far. (Larry Gross)

I was going to say: How can you make me choose? But then, thinking more, I realize that as good as Elliot is in The Long Goodbye, I can’t really think of anything else by him that I really like (aside from his cameos in bothNashville and Kicking and Screaming). Donald, on the other hand, has Don’t Look Now, Klute, Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc. So Sutherland by a landslide. (Schuyler Chapman)

I'm sure Gould deserves it more, but Donald Sutherland, for Oddball. "Stop with the negative waves, Moriarty." (Beveridge D. Spenser)


Elliot Gould's performance in The Long Goodbye is one for the ages, but Donald Sutherland is maybe the most underrated '70s-era actor. MASH, Don't Look Now, 1900, Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ordinary People... (Bemis)

Both! I refuse to select Donald over Elliot because my father would rollover in his grave. (Kimberly Lindbergs)

34) Best performance by a director in an acting role

A couple points of clarification: 1) I’m taking Woody Allen out of the betting pool, since he appears in over half of his movies; and 2) I’m interpreting this question as “Best performance by a director (who isn’t known as an actor) in an acting role,” because we otherwise have to consider George Clooney, Helen Hunt, Ida Lupino, Clint Eastwood, and others who started out as actors first and foremost, and gradually made their way to the other side of the camera, even if—as with Hunt, Tom Hanks and Ben Affleck—they’ve only done it once. (Would it be fair, for instance, to put Sean Penn [director of Into the Wild and, um, sort of a big deal as an actor] against Quentin Tarantino’s, um, “performances”?) So, harrumphing aside… My favorite is François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, Truffaut has acted aplenty but mostly in tiny, non-pivotal roles. His gentle warmth in CETK, however, is among the movie’s many gems, a sense of quietude and humaneness amidst the noisy, brilliant spectacle. I miss Truffaut. (Walter Biggins)

Um…honestly, boring anwers, but Scorsese in Taxi Driver. Terrifying and funny. He’s never acted so well since. And I’m not a fan of either Takashi Miike or the film Hostel, or even of Miike’s delivery of his one line in that film, but I do like the line: “You can spend all of your money in there.” Ten times scarier than the rest of the film. (Bill R.)

Francois Truffaut, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Quinn)

Of course all the Welles performances in the films he directed are wonderful, as is true of Chaplin and Keaton, but I will still say, my fave is Renoir as Octave in Rules of the Game. (Larry Gross)

Martin Scorsese in Round Midnight. (Howard Chaykin)


Among those who are primarily directors as opposed to actor/directors the one I enjoy the most as an actor is John Huston. Best performance would be Noah Cross in Chinatown. Roman Polanski does a nice turn in that as well. (Robert Fiore)

David Cronenberg is frighteningly convincing as a killer in To Die For and Nightbreed. It's also fun to see him get killed by Jason Voorhees in Jason X. (Bemis)

Orson Welles in The Third Man, but how about Sydney Pollack in just about everything he did, but maybe especially Eyes Wide Shut. (Bob Westal)

Suzuki Seijun in Sleepless Town. (Peter Nellhaus)

Most recent seen that I liked: Eastwood, Gran Torino, Lucio Fulci, Cat in the Brain. (Ivan)


Sam Fuller in Pierrot le Fou. (Schuyler Chapman)

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo in Frenzy. Really pulls the whole movie together. (Beveridge D. Spenser)

35) Favorite Barbara Stanwyck movie?

Double Indemnity. (Everyone said my mom looked like Barbara Stanwyck.) (Josh Pincus Is Crying)

Changes daily. For today, let's say... um... Ball of Fire. (Greg)

You are cruel. Double Indemnity. (Krauthammer)

So many, so hard to make up one's mind--but my fave is her in Meet John Doe. A great comic performance I should have put in the earlier question on that subject. I think she's neat in Fuller's 40 Guns. (Larry Gross)


The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Kimberly Lindbergs)

My favorite movie that she’s appeared in is Double Indemnity, but my favorite performance from her is in The Lady Eve. (Bill R.)

The Bitter Tea of General Yen. (Richard T. Jameson)

Stanwyck has always been one of those actresses I've never fully gotten why she was so beloved. But the other day, my wife and I caught Remember the Night on TV. There's a scene near the beginning where her lawyer is weaving together a defence in the courtroom completely unknown to her. She sits there and suddenly gives a little smile in response to it. THAT'S when I got it. (Alonso Moseley FBI)

Young Babs: Bitter Tea of General Yen. Never ask a woman her age Babs: Forty Guns. (Peter Nellhaus)


The Lady Eve is currently my second favorite movie of all time. She's had better roles, but this movie has everything: Henry Fonda in a sexual fog, Charles Coburn AND Eugene Palette, Eric Blore, William Demarest. "Definitely, the same dame." (Beveridge D. Spenser)

The Lady Eve, but then Sullivan's Travels is my favorite Veronica Lake movie, Miracle of Morgan's Creek is my favorite Betty Hutton movie, Palm Beach Story is my favorite Carole Lombard (and Mary Astor) movie, Easy Living is my favorite Jean Arthur movie . . . I don't know if there's a writer/director who gave women more good things to do onscreen than Preston Sturges. Maybe Lubitsch. (Robert Fiore)

You know, I realized in looking over her body of work that I’m not that big a fan. (Sharon)

Outside of reading film criticism or other literature about the movies, what subject do you enjoy reading about or studying which you would say best enriches or illuminates your understanding and appreciation of life, a life that includes the movies?

I love history. I read up on it whenever I can and have begun to incorporate it into Cinema Styles. For now, it's History and the Movies posts but it's really just an excuse to write about the past. I find knowledge of the past invaluable. There's nary a phrase in existence that can ruffle my feathers more than "I don't that, it was before my time." The idea of only knowing what is in your time makes me cringe. The past is there and so much of what has happened is already forgotten, lying dormant, waiting for someone to rediscover it and take away the proper lessons. (Greg)

Death. I love reading about death and unusual way people have died. (Josh Pincus Is Crying)

Recently I've really gotten into political theory. I think it's incredibly important to question your basic assumptions about these kinds of things, to actually read and try to understand thinkers who have completely different viewpoints than you. I can't really tell you how much I've rethought about society this year, or how much reading people like Burke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Hobbes, Mill or many others has helped me make sense of society just a little bit more, either by pointing new ideas out to you or by your violent disagreement with them. It's also interesting in that you understand the arguments of your opponent and your own so much better by understanding the underlying assumptions and presuppositions in their and your arguments. It's actually helped me to become less polemical and more understanding of other viewpoints. What this has to do with movies I don't know, but it’s become one of my passions. (Krauthammer)


Literature. They share a lot in common, but are still completely separate and distinct artforms. To be honest, literature probably means a bit more to me than film, but both, in their own ways, have given me an appreciation of the art of saying something, or showing something, in just the right way. Nailing a moment, or a sentence, or a thought, or a turn of the story, or a line of dialogue. The great artists in both mediums know that the smallest touches can be the most important thing, and can connect the work to the audience in a way that no amount of showboating or grandstanding can ever accomplish. (Bill R.)

I don't know that there's a single answer for this one, but history is an obvious choice, even if I don't read that much of it. I do read a lot about technology and the like, which I find interesting and illuminating. And lately, I've been reading a lot about video games, if that counts. (Mark)

Baseball. Baseball is life. Constant failure. Constant need to drag yourself to your feet and try again. Constant need to forget the past and not think about the future, and focus only on the present. (Quinn)

Hate to be obvious but the great theoretical texts about literature like Aristotle's Poetics or Frye's Anatomy of Criticism give still-valid terms for classifying narrative cinema, and give you solid reason to skip Syd Field and those other hucksters giving the watered-down version of Frye's and Aristotle's ideas. (Larry Gross)

It's not quite the answer your question deserves, but at this point I'd have to say politics. Not so much local politics (indeed, hardly at all), but national politics. Especially politics-as-show-business. Ultimately, for better or worse, we're talking about history. (Richard T. Jameson)

I’ve actually read relatively few books about film – until recently I always figured I spent enough time on that in the rest of my life. I’d say world and U.S. history and politics, but I need to get back into eastern philosophy and various esoteric matters. (Bob Westal)

Jazz criticism. (Howard Chaykin)

Art History, Art Theory, for the formal visual working thru of narrative ideas. (Anthony)

Buddhism. (Peter Nellhaus)

Neuroscience. (Jim Emerson)

I love essays, especially deep-think critical essays about the intersections between art and life, so the collected works of Lawrence Weschler rank highly with me. Also, you might have noticed my appreciation of jazz critic Whitney Balliett before now. Jazz criticism is especially illuminating because it necessarily shows off how one can write intelligently and critically about the intangible and ever-changing. (Walter Biggins)

I’m a literature student. I read a lot. It’s what I do. I’m paid to do it. My worldview is so governed by the texts that I’ve read, that I pick a single area would be futile. I can say with some certainty that the way I interact with and understand the world derives in large part from Roland Barthes. Seriously. It sounds a little pretentious, but his willingness to perceive the ideas that lie behind quotidian things (Mythologies) blew my mind when I was 20. And the way in which he examines the erotics of reading (or encountering any text) is also important to me. Barthes is intellectually a guiding light for me and someone I enjoy reading to boot. (Schuyler Chapman)


Good question. I read a lot of philosophy, particularly the existentialists. It's all in the mind, you know. (Bemis)

Hmmm. Hard to think of anything broad, but Foucault's The Order of Things revised the way I examine and analyze any number of subjects, up to and including film. (Daniel L.)



Everything I love the most has a strong element of humor to it. (Robert Fiore)

I have an affinity for postmodern literature...authors like Rushdie, McEwan, Amis, Coetzee, Swift, Winterson, and the like. Since I went to school to study literature I usually find myself reading a lot of literary theory like Lyotard and Baudrillard; Umberto Eco's book On Literature is one of the best ever written on the topics of semiotics and why we interpret things the way we do. I also am intrigued by world cultures and their religions. So I read a lot of stuff that varies from Joseph Campbell to Thomas Merton. All of the above help me better understand myself and life, and allow me to view life through a variety of lenses. (Kevin J. Olson)

Well, I also love reading about sports, TV, and comic books...although the extent to which any of those things significantly help me to appreciate life more is questionable. (Troy Olson)

Psychology - because almost everything boils down to love and sex. (le0pard 13)

Generally speaking my interest in History and music/photography. My appreciation of horror/fantasy film has also greatly benefited from my long time interest in gothic fiction and all things esoteric & fantastique. (Kimberly Lindbergs)

Painting. The book Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant Garde by Branden W. Joseph is required reading, I think. (Jamie)

Robinson Crusoe. As one might say “Such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again.” ;) (Michael Miller)

Reading about the history of American music in the 20th century gives me a great insight into who we are as a people and a country. (Chris Oliver)

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Stay tuned, sharpen your pencils and shake your wrists out-- The new quiz is coming tomorrow!

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The Best of Prof. Peabody’s Hysterical Historical Wayback Quiz Pt 2: MORE ICONS, SINGLE-WORD TITLES, MOVIE PARENTING AND OVERLOOKED COMIC PERFORMANCES

So, where were we? Oh, yes, we were reviewing the best submissions to Professor Peabody's Hysterical Historical Wayback Spring Break Film Quiz and had managed to get as far as the heated debate over the best adaptation of a play into cinematic language. If you want to refresh yourself as to the answers gathered in part 1 of this roundup, have a click right here. Elsewise, let us resume the fun with a side-by-side of Jed Clampett and Uncle Joe. We'll tail off until part 3, the concluding chapter, with another taste test pitting teen flesh (Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron) against slightly less teen-y flesh (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson). Shift the Wayback into "drive" and let's get at it!

13) Buddy Ebsen or Edgar Buchanan?

Edgar Buchanan, who brought a whole world to his every performance. (Richard T. Jameson)

I definitely gotta go by way of Edgar here. The man talked like a frog – how can you not love that? (Bob Westal)

Petticoat Junction wins here. Edgar Buchanan. (Peter Nellhaus)

Edgar Buchanan, please. (Jim Emerson)

Ebsen, in no small part because my favorite Los Lobos instrumental—from 1996’s Colossal Head—is entitled “Buddy Ebsen Loves the Night Time.” (Walter Biggins)

Buddy! I started watching Barnaby Jones because the Beastie Boys referred to it in some song or another, and I was, like, totally down with him. (Schuyler Chapman)

A man called Jed. (Beveridge D. Spenser)

This is kind of a tough call but I’ll go with Buchanan on the strength of both his movie and television work. I know Ebsen had a lengthy film career but outside of Attack! (1956) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) I couldn’t name any additional ones without some help from the IMDb. (Among my favorite Buchanan flicks: The Talk of the Town [1942] and Ride the High Country [1962]. (Ivan G. Shreve)

As far as sheer stupidity in a TV show goes, Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies, neither were my cup of tea. So, I'll pick Edgar Buchanan for "moving kind of slow." (Troy Olson)

14) Favorite Jean Renoir movie?


Rules of the Game might be my favorite movie ever. I think it’s gorgeous and heartbreaking. And that scene with the skeletons? My favorite cinematic moment. Ever. So, although that has to be my choice, I want to give him credit for some other magnificent work: Boudu Saved from Drowning, La Bete Humaine, Les Bas-fonds, and The Southerner. And Grand Illusion isn’t bad either. Nor is French Cancan. Or really anything he did. (Schuyler Chapman)

Le Crime de M. Lange. (Richard T. Jameson)

Another easy one as it was my official “favorite movie” for decades: The Rules of the Game. (Bob Westal)

Rules of the Game is hard to deny, but I was really bowled over by his pre-noir noir La Bete Humaine. (Flosh)


French Cancan. Because I lived with it for weeks when we played a gorgeous restored print at the Market Theater in Seattle. (Jim Emerson)

The River (Aaron)

I’ve only ever seen Rules of the Game and it bored the hell out of me. And I watched it a second time, and it still bored the hell out of me. (Dave S.)


Really surprised by the answers for this question. So many 'Not sure' or 'Not seen enough'. Renoir was once considered one of the three greatest directors ever. His The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion are landmarks, but my favorite is La Bete Humaine. Amazing to think these three films came out in three years 1937-39, what a streak! (Jamie)

15) Favorite one-word movie title, and why


if... because it's ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT! It even has ellipses for the viewer to fill in his or her blank. If what?! If the kids take over? If anarchy reigns? If revolution succeeds? Who knows! What a brilliant title! (Greg)

Unbreakable. It's evocative, thematically coherent with the film. The film itself is outstanding. (Quinn)


The temptation is strong to say M (Lang's, of course). Or Él. But I'll go long and say Stagecoach, because it's the archetypal movie, and the title not only denotes the vehicle and invokes the genre the film helped exalt -- it testifies to and celebrates the glory of movie as journey, journey as movie. (Richard T. Jameson)

Wayne Wang’s Smoke (1995), which unfurls as slowly and thickly as its title. (Walter Biggins)

Trash because it’s anything but. (Schuyler Chapman)


Dick. Just no way you can improve upon the use of this title for a film about Nixon. (Peter Nellhaus)

Zotz! I don't know why. By critical acclamation, this is one of the worst motion pictures ever made, but I was really taken with it when I was a little kid. I think I was just taken by the concept. Haven't tried to watch it again since. (Robert Fiore)

Gummo. The title basically dares you to not watch it. You don't think...oooh Gummo! That sounds like fun. (Kevin J. Olson)


Sssssss. It sums up all you need to know about the movie (Also, it stars Dirk Benedict and Strother Martin -- I need to rewatch this on late night cable once again). (Troy Olson)

Frogs! Compelling, yet a head-scratcher. (Josh Pincus Is Crying)

Hud, because I can hear his father say it as I type it. Also funny to think it was the start of Paul's three one word H films. (Harper and Hombre being the others). Hud also features the boy from Shane as a young adult, another pretty good one-word title movie. (Jamie)


Oh, great question. I'll treat this as a great one-word title, as opposed to a great movie with a one-word title, and say... Patrick. I don't care how bad it is - it's really cool to have a movie with my name. (Patrick)

16) Ernest Thesiger or Basil Rathbone?


Basil Rathbone for being the best nemesis Errol Flynn ever had. (Greg)

Ernest Thesiger for Bride of Frankenstein, and for being an early, obvious and much needed gay presence. (Dave S.)

While the camp in Thesiger's character has been wonderfully explored, I don't think people give him credit on just how scary he could be at the same time. The same line
reading makes me laugh and sends chills down my spine. There's talent. (Krauthammer)

Rathbone (there was never a better villain swordsman... he really knew the moves) (le0pard 13)

Basil Rathbone. Thesiger's wonderfulness was mostly confined to the bent universe of James Whale (not that there's anything wrong with that!), whereas Rathbone – "that young man with two profiles for a face" -- might turn up anywhere, in stellar or character parts. Even looking out of a Xanadu pool-party photo in Citizen Kane. (Richard T. Jameson)


It's an unfair comparison because Rathbone did so much, but Dr. Pretorius is one of the very greatest movie villains ever, so I say Thesiger. (Samuel Wilson)

Rathbone all the way. One of the greatest of character actors and probably the finest swordsmen in all of Los Angeles in his day. (Bob Westal)

Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, icon beats character actor, Rathbone beats Thesinger. (Robert Fiore)

Basil, my dear Cozzalio. (Jim Emerson)

17) Summer movies—your highest and lowest expectations

Meaning this summer? My highest expectation is for Inglourious Basterds, despite being underwhelmed by the trailer. Soul Power! is pretty high on my list, with Raimi's Drag Me To Hell following up. Lowest expectations are kind of incalculable in this environment, but if Wolverine were to prove marginally entertaining, it would exceed my expectations by a huge margin. (Chris Oliver)

I never have expectations one way or the other. I avoid the summer movies in the theatre and catch them on DVD later. So... in about six months I will actually have expectations, but not now. (Greg)

I’m waiting for John Carter of Mars in the summer of 2012. (Howard Chaykin)

Because of my famed gore-phobia, I have some qualms, but I have to go with Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards and just hope that Quentin doesn’t decide it’s time to do the full Fulci on this one. On the other hand, Year One which looks to be some form of spoof of cave man movies starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, David Cross, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, directed by Harold Ramis sounds really, really funny to me, though. As for lowest expectations, I’ve gotta go with the Transformers sequel, as I was unable to sit through the first one. (Bob Westal)


I hope Woody Allen’s return to New York, with Whatever Works, is good. It stars Larry David, which is a good start, and perhaps David’s abrasive and less genteel sensibility (and ease with improvisation) will rub off on Woody. I’m cautiously optimistic. On the flipside, the Star Trek franchise had a good, three-decade run. Let it die without my having to interpret Kirk and Spock through the Generation-Y lens. Please. (Walter Biggins)

The fact that I'm almost entirely ignorant of what's coming out this summer, as opposed to the half dozen or more I was at least half planning to see last year, would indicate that my lowest expectation is for summer movies. Up I see as a late spring movie and Inglourious Basterds (however misspelled) as a Quentin Tarantino movie, but if those are considered summer movies then those are the summer movies I'm looking forward to. There are so few newly released movies I have any expectations for that when one comes out I'm on it like a wolf on a porkchop, and it's down the hatch that quickly. (Robert Fiore)

Highest-New Woody Allen film
Lowest-The fact that my city will not be getting the new Woody Allen film. (Jeremy)

Excited for Julie and Julia and, strangely, for the Transformers sequel. (Veronique)

18) Whether or not you’re a parent, what would be your ideal pick as first movie to see with your own child (or niece/nephew)? Why?

Well, I am a parent and I can't remember what the first was. I honestly think this question will be easier for non-parents because then it will exist purely in the hypothetical. In reality, your kids see dozens of movies before they can understand them and the first several you watch together have no lasting impact on them. By five or so they can start appreciating story lines and characters. By seven and eight it's a lot better. Our youngest is now fully conversant in the language of thirties movies after years of watching them with us. So I wouldn't pick a first movie, but a first period and make sure it's old. In other words, all the new stuff on cable is unavoidable to them anyway so best to get them well-versed in the flow and pacing of older movies at a young age when they can build a lifelong appreciation for them. (Greg)

Man, I don’t know. 10 Rillington Place? Is that good for kids? I’m bad at judging these things. (Bill R.)


If I went by my own biography, it might be a Hopalong Cassidy picture: Class A program-picture making. And I was very dubious about being taken to Ivanhoe, but loved it for the next twenty years. But the first film I always think of, when the idea of showing something good to kids is mentioned, is Gunga Din. Exotic setting (which is really that most inexhaustible of movie-movie locations, Lone Pine, Calif.), exhilarating action comedy (later on you can introduce the kid to the Keaton influences), epic bromance (not that there's anything wrong with that!), genuinely frightening (but parentally manageable) villainy, and as Leo McKern would say, "the value of blood well shed" (anticipate showing the little nipper Help! sometime down the road). (Richard T. Jameson)

I’d want something that I think a small child would love, be completely entertained by, but also a film that I respect philosophically and artistically. So therefore, Baby Dumpling gets to see The Incredibles. (Ivan G. Shreve)

Wall-E because not only is it a highly entertaining movie, with loads of spectacular visuals, fun references to other film classics, and has a dystopian outlook initially, it's a story of optimism and a journey of how one learns to love. It displays how one's soul is more than the physical parts that make us human. I defy anyone who views that one sequence where Eve tries her damnest to bring her Wall-E back from the dead and says they did not feel anything while viewing it. Finally, it will stand multiple viewings, and the test of time. (le0pard 13)


That's a tough one. It'd probably one of the old classic Disney movies, perhaps a Pixar movie or even some Miyazaki (for a young child, I think My Neighbor Totoro would probably work best). If my child is particularly brilliant, perhaps I'll start them on Star Wars. But I just know it will be something like Dora The Explorer: The Movie. (Mark)

I want to see Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. with my kid. When I wrote about it two years ago, Darren Hughes responded with the following: “Walter, four or five years ago, I made my three nephews watch Sherlock, Jr., which is one of my all-time favorites. They were 7, 8, and 10 at the time and had probably never seen a black-and-white film, let alone a silent one. After two or three minutes, they were chuckling, and by the end of the film they were rolling and making me stop and rewind. It's just about the most perfect movie ever made.” I’d like to think that it’ll generate the same reaction in my child. (Walter Biggins)

Hmmm… I think The Wizard of Oz because it’s my favorite “children’s” movie. It means so much to me and always will, that I’d want to share that with my own child. And when they’re 12, I’d make them watch 400 Blows with me because I’m eternally grateful to my father for having done exactly that. (Schuyler Chapman)


The trouble with this question is that you're limited to what a very young child is going to appreciate, but even so there's a good answer, and that's Pinocchio. You have someone whose inner life is about 75% make believe to begin with, and ideally you're going to a surviving movie palace like the El Capitan, so you're taking the kid to a magical place to see a magical thing done in a magical way with transcendent craft. To reframe the question slightly to which movies you would most relish introducing the kid to when the proper time came, what comes to my mind are the Marx Brothers, the Korda/Powell Thief of Baghdad, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, and Alien. The latter I imagine sitting there next to the kid with my hands folded over my chest, invisible halo over my head, knowing what's coming while the kid doesn't . . . I don't have any children, but I have a niece now college age who likes the books I give her at Christmas, which is gratifying. I think I really won her over when I gave her Cat's Cradle when she was a junior in high school. Last year it was South Wind by Norman Douglas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, The Circus of Dr. Lao and Gascoyne by Stanley G. Crawford. (Robert Fiore)

Robocop. But assuming Tricia nixes that, I'll go with Wall-E. (Troy Olson)

Charlie Chaplin in either City Lights, The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus or Modern Times. I always thought Chaplin was the perfect character to show to children. He's childlike himself, he's a comic hero, his humour reaches everyone of all ages. The fact that he's from the silent era also makes him perfect to introduce your child to the film language. (Jeremy)


As a child no movie did more for me than Cronenberg's Scanners, but I'd assume most parents would deem that inappropriate. So I'll say something 'techincolor glorious' like The Red Shoes or Bonjour Tristesse. A child wouldn't know what’s going on, but at that age it's not really the point. Jean Seberg is hypercolor is. (Jamie)

I'm hoping that my daughter will be ready to go to the movies by the time Where the Wild Things Are is released. I think about this subject quite often. When my wife was pregnant with Luna, I read an article in the New York Times (I think) about how kids are becoming increasingly "platform agnostic" - a movie, a TV commercial and a video game on a cell phone all have the same value. So besides wanting to pass on my geekiness, I actually think it's important for parents to encourage an appreciation for movies, books and all stories that inspire curiosity and wonder. (Bemis)

19) L.Q. Jones or Strother Martin


Strother Martin, for the delivery of the line "cozy up to the Finkelstein boy" in Up in Smoke. (Patrick)

Jones, I think. Martin could be a little cartoony for my taste. Plus, Jones is so heartbreaking in A Prairie Home Companion, and he directed A Boy and His Dog. (Bill R.)

Once again, I've never heard of either of these. However, I'll go with L.Q. Jones, not because he was in The Wild Bunch, but because he was in Lone Wolf McQuade and he steals every scene he's in... (Mark)

Unless you can show me the Ken Twitchell L.Q. Jones mural, Strother Martin. Really, this is like Finals 2002 Lakers v. Nets. (Robert Fiore)

20) Movie most recently seen in theaters? On DVD/Blu-ray?


Theaters: Two Lovers (awesome); DVD: The Hole (Tsai Ming-Liang’s—it too was awesome) (Schuyler Chapman)

Sunshine Cleaning, which was quirky and entertaining. On DVD, it was Hoodlum starring a young Lawrence Tierney. And though you wouldn't think it to look at him in Reservoir Dogs, when he was a young man he resembled a bulkier, pissed-off Professor from Gilligan's Island. (Alonso Moseley FBI)

Theater: Adventureland, which hit way closer to home than I thought it would.
DVD: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. I absolutely hate hipster NYC kids, but it's a charming movie. (Flosh)

I saw State of Play and 17 Again last Saturday. And on Dennis’ recommendation, I watched The House Bunny on DVD over the weekend. Really, Dennis, WTF?


My theory is that recommending The House Bunny was an experiment to see how many people would watch The Brown Bunny by mistake. (Robert Fiore)

21) Do you see more movies theatrically or at home? Why?


Most at home. 99 percent of movies I see in the theatre are older films from the silent era through the fifties. I am blessed to have the AFI five minutes away meaning I can see classic Hollywood and Foreign films on the big screen regularly. But we've got four kids, three living at home, so most are seen on DVD. (Greg)

At home. The company's better, and my 56-inch DLP displays a better image than most multiplex screens. Better movies most of the time, too. (Richard T. Jameson)

Home, because I watch more old movies than new, and if I want to see, say, King of Kings or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Hardcore, to name three recent examples, home on DVD is the only option I have. But I see at least one movie, new or old, in a theater each week. (Flosh)

At home. Theatrical standards (projection, facilities, audience behavior) are not what they used to be, and it makes me sad. But also, after years of having my daily dictated by screenings, I treasure being able to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it -- on a good-sized screen, with first-rate sound, and in a decent print. (Jim Emerson)


Theatrically. Despite the talking and chair-kicking people that insist upon sitting next to me, there’s nothing like the immersive experience of sitting in the darkened theater and allowing myself to be engrossed in the world unfolding before me. I’ve yet to truly replicate that elsewhere. (Sharon)

At home, now. For the past five years, I’ve been making a point of educating myself on cinema classics. Since I don’t live in a city with a strong repertory cinema, well, that mostly means DVDs or downloading the obscure movies and watching them on computer. (Walter Biggins)

At home… I’m a grad student, and so movie-watching is usually something I do late in the evening when I’ve put the books to bed. That said, I live within walking distance of two decent theaters now and see more movies theatrically than I have in, say, six years. (Schuyler Chapman)

At home thanks to Netflix/Hulu/living across the street from a performing arts library. (Veronique)

At home, because I keep buying DVDs. It has something to do with the everybody-I-like-is-dead-or-not-feeling-very-well phenomenon, something to do with middle aged energy deficiency, and something to do with not wanting to think I wasted my money on the DVD. However, I do still make a point to see a movie I'm really interested in on the big screen first, which is why I haven't seen Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Kwaidan yet. (Robert Fiore)

Home. Hell is other moviegoers. (Daniel L.)

22) Name an award-worthy comic performance that was completely ignored by Oscar and his pals.


Pretty much anything by Jack Black. He really should have been nominated by now. And honestly, as great as Robert Downey jr was in Tropic Thundder, Black made me laugh more. (Greg)

(Greg, I really like Jack Black too, especially in Shallow Hal and in his shoulda-been-nominated performance as Nacho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o Libre!-- Dennis)

Anna Faris in Smiley Face & Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Silver Streak and Willy Wonka (OK the GGs nominated him for the latter two films…) & Steve Martin in The Jerk, LA Story, The Man with Two Brains and Bowfinger (how the GGs nominated him for Father of the Bride 2 and not any of those other ones is beyond me… At least they gave him one for All of Me. (Schuyler Chapman)


This list is tragically endless: Miriam Hopkins in Design For Living, Thomas Mitchell in Stagecoach, Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner, Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, Joel McCrea in Sullivan's Travels, Eddie Bracken in Hail the Conquering Hero, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot, Bill Murray in Tootsie, Jack Nicholson in The Fortune, Jeff Daniels in Purple Rose of Cairo, Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings in a Funeral, Alan Alda in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, (Larry Gross)

Anna Faris in The House Bunny. (Howard Chaykin)

John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, Twentieth Century; Cary Grant in The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, and supremely His Girl Friday; Rosalind Russell, too, in HGF, as well as a special Oscar ensemble award for the criminal-courts reporters. We could fill this category with performances from Richard Lester movies: Victor Spinetti in the Beatles films, Leo McKern's Clang, Michael Crawford and Donal Donnelly in The Knack, Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (though I have an aversion to awarding actors for roles they created on stage), Michael Hordern in the same movie. Beyond the Lesterverse, Colm Meaney was robbed (by a rules change) for The Snapper. William Demarest in almost any of his Preston Sturges roles. Luis Alberni as Louis Louis of the Hotel Louis in Easy Living, plus why not Jean Arthur? John C. Reilly, especially for Boogie Nights (he did get one of Chicago's few merited nominations). And for a recent supporting gem, Brad Pitt's hanging Chad, Burn After Reading. (Richard T. Jameson)


A: Nicolas Cage, back when he was good in either Raising Arizona or Vampire’s Kiss. He didn’t deserve it for Leaving Las Vegas. (Dave S.)
Can we get a group nomination for the cast of the Ocean's Eleven remake?
(Alonso Moseley FBI)

Where do you start? Nearly all of them, but why don’t we go with James Cagney for One, Two, Three? (Bob Westal)

Oliver Platt in The Ice Harvest. He steals the film. (Flosh)


Eddie Murphy in The Klumps: Nutty Professor II. Not only were there several distinctly different characters, but Murphy reminded me how laugh out loud funny he could be. (Peter Nellhaus)

There are no doubt quite a few between Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality and James Franco in Pineapple Express, but I'll stick with those. (Jim Emerson)

Most of them, frankly. But when heartthrobs and hunks stretch their wings to do comedy, and do it well, the lack of recognition really stings. Which brings me to the sad fact that George Clooney’s finest performance, as pontificating ne’er-do-well Ulysses Everett McGill in the hilarious O Brother, Where Art Thou?, didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar (or a Golden Globe, if I recall correctly). I find that almost as unforgivable as the notion that Cary Grant was nominated for neither His Girl Friday nor Bringing Up Baby, or even The Philadelphia Story. (Walter Biggins)

Easier to name an award-worthy comic performance that wasn't, isn't it? Ignoring comic performances is what the Oscar is about. (Robert Fiore)

Spring Byington in The Devil and Miss Jones (1941). (Ivan G. Shreve)

Too many to name, but I’ll throw out Madeline Kahn in What’s Up, Doc? (Sharon)

Many answers would fit, but Rick Moranis as Lewis Tully in Ghostbusters should have gotten the Best Supporting Actor. (Jamie)

Well, we could go all the way back. Did Groucho or Harpo ever get a nod? Who got awards the year Duck Soup came out? I don't feel like looking it up right now, but I bet the answer is pretty embarrassing. (Chris Oliver)

23) Zac Efron & Vanessa Hudgens or Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart

Best question on this list :P I'll take the High School Musical duo any day by virtue of the fact they are prettier to look at and have a modicum of facial expressions and charisma. And, I don't begrudge them their fame. For some reason, with Pattinson and Stewart, I begrudge. (Troy Olson)

I like Kristen Stewart, but I wish that Pattinson guy would stop with all the eyebrow posing… yeech! Plus he looks like a skinned rabbit. I’ll go with them though, because Stewart’s so good. (Dave S.)

Ask me in five years, all four have yet to make one serious film between them. I'll judge then. I will say I think Hudgens will have the shortest career, Efron the longest. (Jamie)

Goddamn kids and their boom-bang music. (Krauthammer)

Huh? Who? (Bob Westal)

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UP NEXT! The Best of Professor Peabody’s Hysterical Historical Wayback Spring Break Film Quiz Part 3: EVEN MORE ICONS, TOO MUCH PAIN, DELIGHTS BELOW THE RADAR AND THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU’RE NOT WATCHING MOVIES!

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The Best of Professor Peabody’s Hysterical Historical Wayback Spring Break Film Quiz Pt. 1: REAL LIVES, FLUNKED PREDICTIONS, ICONS AND LOONEY TUNES

As part of my ongoing effort to redefine tardiness at every possible turn, I would now like to turn your attention back to April 17 and Professor Peabody's Hysterical Historical Wayback Spring Break Film Quiz. I am so tardy that I have smacked up against the wall without having actually submitted by own answers to the quiz, the ultimate in disrespect to teaching authority. (Although I am taller than Professor Peabody and am counting on the intimidation factor to gain me some ground here.) And as there is another quiz mere hours away, I'd like to do what I should have done a couple of months ago and highlight, as is the custom round these parts, some of the visiting professor's favorite answers from the most recent quiz. You will undoubtedly already be aware of the usual high quality and quantity of answers these quizzes pull in, and even more so than usual this one proved to be a real workout in terms of judicious picking, choosing, cutting and pasting. But I think I've come up with the best, most thought-provoking, cleverest and/or wittiest answers and gathered them together in three digests which should get your juices flowing for the new quiz coming on Thursday. So, without no further hesitation, let us jump right in to part one, in which we deal with icons of cinema, some busted predictions, and our favorite Looney Tunes, among many other items of interest. Whenever I can come up with an answer of my own, I will include it, and that, I'm afraid, is going to have to suffice for my contribution this time around. But be assured, the answers posted here are far more well considered and interesting than what I would have coughed up at this late date. Here, I'll prove it.

1) Favorite Biopic


Lawrence of Arabia – an obviously great film and a rather pedestrian choice given that I really like biopics, sometimes the cheesier and and more ridiculously fabricated the better. Therefore, quasi-demi-honorable mention is alluded this triumvirate of absurdly wrong biopics – The Jolson Story (it’s amazing how much Al Jolson’s life was just like the plot of The Jazz Singer!), They Died With Their Boots On (the love affair between Custer and the Indians your socialist history teacher doesn’t want you to see!) and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (he didn’t just appear in action movies…he lived them!). (Bob Westal)

The Long Day Closes, an entirely different kind of biopic. (Dave S.)

Topsy Turvy. As it happens, I was listening to Bill Condon’s commentary for Kinsey last night, and he said that he believed that the best approach to biopics was to focus on a specific period of the subject’s life (he also said that he was unable to do so with Kinsey, but I wish he’d tried harder). That’s what Mike Leigh does with his film about Gilbert and Sullivan. By narrowing his story to the creation and production of The Mikado, he’s able to bring out a lot more detail, and paint a fuller, richer portrait of the men and their world than he ever could have done had he gone the birth-to-death route. And Topsy Turvy is, of course, immensely entertaining.

Furthermore, the film sort of inspired me to, not write, but think of the idea for my own biopic project, which I will never actually make, but which I’ll also not tell any of you about, because you’d just steal it. (Bill R.)

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Krauthammer)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Most of what happens in the movie...was true... (Quinn)

Young Mr. Lincoln. Partly because it's barely a biopic at all, in the conventional sense. (Richard T. Jameson)

The Scarlet Empress. You know, for its historical accuracy. (Jim Emerson)

Young Mr. Lincoln. Some cows ought to be sacred. (Robert Fiore)

Hmmm… I have generally taken major issue with biopics because, let’s be honest, they mostly suck. That said, there are some notable exceptions. As for my favorite… I’m trying to put off answering that… Let’s go with the Superstar. Todd Haynes has really nailed the biopic form, I think. Both Superstar and I’m Not There understand their subjects with such depth, nuance, and playfulness that they put dreck like Walk the Line or Ray or Kinsey to shame. I have to give honorable mention, though, to The Puppetmaster, Baaaadddddaaaassssss!!, Scarlet Empress, Auto-focus, Young Mr. Lincoln, Secret Honor, Bound for Glory, Ed Wood and Cobb. So, okay, maybe they don’t suck as much as I like to remember. (Schuyler Chapman)

My favorite movie about a real person is Lawrence of Arabia. Biopics tend to be way too formulaic for me, so I generally prefer ones like I'm Not There and Mishima that purposefully break the mold. (Bemis)

Well, I don't especially care for biopics in general, so it's kinda tough to pick a favorite. There are a lot of biopics that I like, but don't love. Goodfellas (if I were forced to pick one, this might be it), Lawrence of Arabia (excellent filmmaking, but the person at the heart of the story remains a bit impenetrable), and Amadeus (which is great because it gets at Mozart through Salieri, an approach I wish more biopics would take) are pretty darn good. (Mark)

Not generally my favorite genre, although I've enjoyed some of the musical ones, like Three Little Words. Lisztomania would qualify, I guess. Then there's the awesome I'm Not There. But I'm going to go non-musical, with Mongol. (Beveridge D. Spenser)

2) Dyan Cannon or Tuesday Weld?


And so we come to the first question where Dennis gives a choice between two people I've never heard of and I pretend to care which one I choose. Well, let's see. Dyan Cannon did some groundbreaking work in Kangaroo Jack, but Tuesday Weld was in Once Upon a Time in America and Thief, so I'll have to go with Tuesday. (Mark)

Tuesday Weld. I mean, come on. Anthony Perkins was gay, and he still killed people for her. (Bill R.)

I'll take the eyes of Tuesday Weld and the breasts of Dyan Cannon. (Piper)

Tuesday Weld, if only for Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which is, perhaps, the most troubling movie I’ve ever seen (it’s at least up there with Cruising and A Clockwork Orange in terms of problematic representations of sexuality). (Schuyler Chapman)

Dyan Cannon for the "special" brownies she prepares for the Laker players and coaches. (Troy Olson)

3) Best example of science fiction futurism rendered silly by the event of time catching up to the prediction


My god, there are so many. It's one of the reasons I love Sci-Fi so much. The all time champ has to be turning the biggest cultural and financial center in the U.S. and possibly the world into a prison in Escape from New York in the way-off future of 1999. But for me, it's social norms that were never taken into consideration. Forbidden Planet takes place far, far into our future but women are condescended to and non-white people don't exist.

Also Strange Days gets a special honor for predicting too much would happen just a couple of years after the movie was released. (Greg)

Robot Monster. (Dave S.)

I don’t know about a specific film, but I do think that filmmakers are asking to be laughed at when they set their futuristic films in a specific year. Blade Runner is great, but what year does that take place in? 2011, or something like that? No one is even working on a flying car, and here it is 2009 already. Just say “The Future”, and leave it at that. (Bill R.)


Le voyage dans la lune. It didn't really happen like that, right? (Josh Pincus Is Crying)

None of them had the Internet. Just thought I would put that out there. (Krauthammer)

Dead End Drive-In (in which) drive-ins become internment camps for the undesireables. (Richard Hollingshead)

Tron. (Quinn)

Pan-Am in Space: 2001:A Space Odyssey. (Samuel Wilson)

Things to Come. (Howard Chaykin)

Logan's Run maybe, because people do not need to be killed when they are 27 anymore--surgery and diet, and the general idea of money has replaced eugenics, plus the aesthetic has been used and abused, so maybe not catching up, but the idea of pleasure and leisure are similar, though those ideas have not changed much since the 70s. (Anthony)

How about me being silly, thinking that the world would end based on George Pal's version of The Time Machine? (Peter Nellhaus)

Any movie with corded phones. (Jim Emerson)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which declares that all cats & dogs were eradicated by disease by 1983. (Aaron)

Aren’t you sorta glad that artificial intelligence hasn’t caught up to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey? (Walter Biggins)

Jaws 15 (or 18 or whatever the hell it was) in Back to the Future II—I guess it seemed like the series would go on forever in 1989 what with the smashing success of Jaws the Revenge two short years earlier. Oh wait… (Schuyler Chapman)

The only answer that springs to mind are all the companies featured in neon in Blade Runner that have since gone bankrupt. (Patrick)


It's a curious bit of perversity that after 150 years of being wrong people were still putting their bets on Thomas Malthus, as we see in Soylent Green. The error here is not in sounding an alarm over environmental decay but in selecting overcrowding as the primary menace. The Malthusian theory is essentially a bourgeois fear, the idea that the value of one's holding is going to be degraded and then eroded by the lumpen masses produced by irresponsible breeding of the lower orders. (Robert Fiore)

2001: A Space Odyssey. We are totally not near Jupiter yet. (Jeremy)
Any of the early-'90s virtual reality-themed thrillers that tried to paint cyberspace as a dangerous alternate reality capable of turning mentally challenged lawnmower men into all-powerful daemons or unleashing a wisecracking Russell Crowe into the world. (Bemis)

In Thunderball, James Bond straps on a jet pack and takes to the air. It has to be the coolest invention that has never been made widely available. I want my jet pack, dammit! When I was a kid I was sure that I'd own one by now. (Kimberly Lindbergs)

I'm watching this old Flash Gordon serial now, and it cracks me up that the Hawk Men's flying city is kept aloft by an anti-gravity beam--that is powered by slaves shoveling radium into an old-fashioned coal furnace! (Chris Oliver)


I doubt I could have improved on any of the answers here, but I did find this great ad for a 1962 Japanese thriller directed by the rubber monster master Ishiro Honda entitled Yosei Gorasu (Gorath) which, just by the newspaper come-on alone, looks like it could virtually define a great answer to this question. The year: 1980! The scene: Outer space! The story: Destruction of Earth! See! The world doomed by an invading wild sun 6,000 times bigger than Earth! See! Scientists move the Earth with hydrogen jet power! See! Astronauts, satellites and spaceships! (Okay, I guess they came pretty close on that one.) (Dennis)


4) Annette Funicello & Frankie Avalon or Troy Donahue & Sandra Dee?

Oh man, I really don't care. By the end of this quiz, I'll probably start replacing these choices with my own. You've been warned. (Mark)

Troy and Sandra, but mostly because of production values (and Delmer Daves). Warners Technicolor beats AIP Pathe Color. (Richard T. Jameson)

Frankie & Annette—because they partied with Eric Von Zipper, Boris Karloff, Buster Keaton, ghosts, Martians, surfers and Don Rickles. And AIP rules. (Ivan)

Annette & Frankie because of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Xmas Special. (Dave S.)

Frankie and Annette hands down. Annette was the shit! (Josh Pincus Is Crying)


Troy and Sandra have Delmer Daves' A Summer Place and Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life on their resumes. Case closed. (Peter Nellhaus)

Where's Troy & Sandra's equivalent of Back to the Beach? (Patrick)

I would drink Annette's bathwater. Honestly, I think I'd rather do her than Sophia Loren, and I have exactly the same desire for Sophia Loren that any decent human being does. Frankie? Well, okay, we'd have to have somebody to go out for pizza. Besides, I like their supporting cast: Harvey Lembeck, Don Rickles, Buster Keaton . . . (Robert Fiore)

Annette Funicello & Frankie Avalon (I have a thing for brunette's...) (leOpard 13)


5) Favorite Raoul Walsh movie?

White Heat. It’s my favorite gangster movie, because it’s perfect. (Bill R.)

I know that it's not a very “Walshy” movie besides a general sense of adventure, but The Thief of Bagdad is really a nearly perfect movie. It's full of adventure, romance and fantasy in the best possible sense. It's the kind of movie that would have been my favorite at the age of ten, and it's able to transport me back to all the best and truest parts of childhood instantly without condescension, without dumbing it down. It's a fantastic movie. (Krauthammer)

Difficult to choose of course, but I have a special feeling for a femme-centered soap called The Man I Love starring the always sublime Ida Lupino playing a tough broad visiting her straight family members and discovering they've got a lot of problems that only she can solve. Great movie. (Larry Gross)

Band of Angels (though White Heat and Captain Horatio Hornblower are a close second & third) (le0pard 13)

Me and My Gal, closely followed by Gentleman Jim. (Richard T. Jameson)

Not really White Heat, and no, definitely not They Died with Their Boots On… The winner is The Roaring Twenties – by far. Just a magnificent entertainment. I need to see that one again some time soon.

Saskatchewan. Shelley Winters, Alan Ladd. Best movie about Mounties perhaps ever. (Anthony)


Only one? The Roaring Twenties. (Peter Nellhaus)

This is where I draw funny little characters on the side of my test sheet. (Piper)

Tough one… I’ll go with They Drive By Night because it’s my favorite movie about truck drivers starring Ida Lupino. Pursued is a close second, though, because it’s my favorite Western supposedly about vengeance but actually about incest. (Schuyler Chapman)

Everyone's going with White Heat, so I wanted to take High Sierra. But no, White Heat. (Beveridge D. Spenser)

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" (Patrick)

The Roaring Twenties, but there are a lot of Honorable Mentions: High Sierra, Gentleman Jim. They Died With Their Boots On. You have to be impressed with somebody who had 50 movies under his belt before directing his first talkie, began his career during the Wilson administration and ended it during the Johnson administration. One of the more strangely interesting bad movies is The Horn Blows at Midnight, with Jack Benny as the angel assigned to blow the final trump. It's one of those plots that's supposed to produce endless hi-jinks but doesn't -- how many gags can you build around stopping a man from blowing a horn, and it displays the usual stilted unease Hollywood applied to philosophical fantasy. But there are tremendous production values brought to bear, including the A-list director. Its complete commercial failure was a running gag on Jack Benny's radio show for years thereafter. (Robert Fiore)


6) Sophomore film which represents greatest improvement over the director’s debut

I’m tempted to go with Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small. It’s not his best film, but I think his first time at bat, Signs of Life is pretty limp and tedious, while Dwarves is a shot of pure Herzogian insanity, and bizarrely riveting. Most of the best Herzog films that followed could be similarly described. (Bill R.)

Targets is a lot better than Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. Trust Me. (Krauthammer)

Kiss Me Deadly (of Aldrich) a world shattering improvement on The Big Leaguer. Bertolucci's Before the Revolution a huge improvement on La Cammere Secca, Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces a big improvement on Head, The Birthday Party (Friedkin) a huge improvement on the Sonny and Cher movie. (Good Times -- Ed.) (Larry Gross)

This is tough, but I guess I’m going to say Polanski’s Repulsion, as it’s brilliant, and Knife in the Water left me feeling merely 90 minutes older after it was done. Though, that was in college and I might have a very different reaction now. (Another possibility is Rushmore – though I loved Bottle Rocket quite a bit, so it’s dicey.) (Bob Westal)

Stranger Than Paradise (a long way from Permanent Vacation) (Jim Emerson)

The Terminator has less flying pirahnas than Piranha II, but is otherwise superior. (Bemis)


I'm probably in the minority, but I think David Lynch showed much improvement between Eraserhead (1977) and his second feature film The Elephant Man (1980). (Kimberly Lindbergs)

7) Ice Cube or Mos Def?

Ice Cube. Straight Out of Compton was the first rap album I ever bought. (Greg)

Mos Def. Ice Cube just postures on-screen, but Mos Def can really act. He’s sliding a little bit towards caricature lately, but look at him in The Woodsman. He’s genuinely good. (Bill R.)

Mos Def. I loved Bamboozled (Josh Pincus Is Crying)

It was an unusual piece of casting, but I have to say Mos Def did just dandy as Ford Prefect in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. (Alonso Moseley FBI).

Mos Def – because he convinced me he was actually English in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Bob Westal)

If we're talking acting, then Mos Def. If we're talking music, then neither, since I don't like the hip hop. (Flosh)

Despite his recent rash of films, I would have to say Ice Cube. (Piper)

Ice Cube, if only because of Mos Def’s vocal choices in 16 Blocks (Aaron)

Mos Definitely, for too many good performances to count: Something the Lord Made, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, his comic timing in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and the unfairly, already forgotten Be Kind Rewind, for starters. Def’s got impressive range as an actor—Cube’s alright but he brings the gangsta scowl to every movie—and he’s a far better rapper, too. (Walter Biggins)

Are we talking acting or rapping? If rapping, give me Cube any day. Mos Def’s good and all, but Ice Cube, when he’s angry (see Straight Outta Compton or Amerikkka’s Most Wanted or The Predator or his verse on PE’s Burn Hollywood Burn!) he’s amazing. Mos might be more conscientious, but Cube’s got a better voice and better flow. If we’re talking acting, I guess I’ll go with Cube too. Why? See question 30. (Schuyler Chapman)

8) Favorite movie about the music industry


This is Spinal Tap. I would say there’s no other acceptable answer, but there is, of course, A Mighty Wind. So everyone has a choice between those two. (Bill R.)

American Hot Wax (Howard Chaykin)

Many, many fun movies in this category, but I guess I’m going to have to with Nashville. (Bob Westal)

Phantom of the Paradise. (Piper)

Nashville, although to reduce it to that is sorta like saying that Moby-Dick is about a whale. (Walter Biggins)

The most obvious choice is This Is Spinal Tap which is certainly deserving of the title. For a less obvious choice, let's go with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, if only for that scene when the band is playing and Robocop stops the music, mid-song, because he hears someone crying in the audience. Brilliant. (Mark)


Velvet Goldmine is one of my favorite movies ever, and it’s ostensibly about the music industry, so I’ll choose that. If I were to choose something that is specifically about the business side of the industry, then I’d choose 24 Hour Party People. (Schuyler Chapman)

Get Crazy, about a night in the life of the (thinly disguised) Fillmore. It is CRIMINAL that this is not available on DVD. (Patrick)

My first thought was Nashville as a default answer, but a quick glance shows that few have mentioned it so far, so perhaps it isn't considered a movie about the industry (it is, but it's about everything). So honorable mentions to Almost Famous and Phantom of the Paradise, respectively the sweetest and most acidic takes on the music industry. (Bemis)

9) Favorite Looney Tunes short


I have never laughed as hard as I did when I first saw Duck Amuck, and I doubt I will again. (Krauthammer)

My all-time favorite is probably Fritz Freling's Three Little Bops. Beyond that, I've gone through some changes in my favorites over the last decade. For Chuck Jones' stuff, my favorite was always What's Opera, Doc?, but now I'd probably say his masterpiece is One Froggy Evening. But then there's Bob Clampett. 10 years ago, I had minimal knowledge of Clampett, but thanks to the Looney Tunes DVD's, and the advocacy of John Kricfalusi (particularly during the night of his favorite cartoons that he presented at The Egyptian one year) and Jerry Beck, Clampett now looms over all the other Warner Bros. directors. And there are a lot of great Campett cartoons in my mind, but I think my favorite is one called The Hep Cat, mostly for the little song the cat sings near the beginning ("The leans and the fats all think I'm the cat's, I must have an awful lot of Oomph!"). As for Tex Avery...well, I really think of him more in association with his MGM stuff, but Porky's Duck Hunt might be my favorite of his Looney Tunes. Or one of his Daffy shorts, anyway. (Chris Oliver)

Robin Hood Daffy (Greg)

“Favorite” might be pushing it a little, but I’ve always been partial to Robin Hood Daffy. (Bill R.)

What's Opera, Doc? (Spear and magic HEL-met!) (Josh Pincus is Crying, Howard Chaykin)

Rabbit's Kin . The one with Pete Puma. (Samuel Wilson)


Baseball Bugs (Quinn)

One Froggy Evening. (Richard T. Jameson)

This is easy. "Duck Dodgers in the 24th½ Century". (Bob Westal)

Bugs & the gremlin: Falling Hare. (Ivan)

Booby Hatched, by Frank Tashlin, about an unhatched egg named Robespierre. (Peter Nellhaus)

Duck Amuck: "Thankth for the thour perthimmonth, couthin!" (Jim Emerson)

I Love to Singa (Tex Avery, 1936) – okay, it’s a Merrie Melodie, but still… (Aaron)

Porky Pig’s Feat (1943), directed by Frank Tashlin—especially for Bugs’ punch line. (Walter Biggins)

Without a doubt Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, though I do quite enjoy all the Road Runner cartoons as well... (Mark)

I was always fond of the one wherein Bugs and Elmer were doing battle but their personalities changed every time they donned a new hat (why there were so many hats around I can’t remember). The internets informs that it’s called Bugs’ Bonnets. (Schuyler Chapman)

There's an eighty-way tie for first, but for you... I'll say Rabbit Seasoning, the middle part of the Bugs-Daffy-Elmer hunting trilogy. (Patrick)

One Froggy Evening. Some cows ought to be sacred. (Robert Fiore)

Rabbit of Seville (1950) (Ivan G. Shreve)

The ending of What's Opera Doc? shocked me when I was a kid. (Bemis)

Only one? Impossible! Too many to link to but here's a few of my favorites: Hair-Raising Hare, Water, Water Every Hare, Hyde and Hare, Ali Baba Bunny and Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (I own a Marvin the Martian cookie jar). I think some of these might be Merrie Melodies instead of Loony Tunes so does that discount them? Is anyone taking notes? (Kimberly Lindbergs)


Again, there's just no arguing with any of the titles cited above. I've been driven to hysterics by almost every one. (Anything with Daffy Duck is above reproach.) But I've always especially loved Bully for Bugs, for every reason you can see in every frame, but perhaps most of all for that hilarious musical cue that accompanies the bull each time he heads back to the grindstone to sharpen up the horns for his next encounter with Bugs. See for yourself:



10) Director most deserving of respect or upwardly mobile critical reassessment


For years – decades -- I would have said Anthony Mann, but he seems to have been taken up at last. Probably it's more a matter, for me, of reclaiming some figures who may have been highly esteemed at some point but have been relegated to the museum cellars -- Borzage, say, or Carol Reed. But wait, I've got one: Jerzy Skolimowski. Mostly, he makes either searing masterpieces or what-the-hell-did-you-think-you-were-doing! disasters. Among the former is the great, great, woefully underknown Deep End (1970). And his marvelous first film in something like fifteen years, Four Nights with Anna, has yet to find a U.S. distributor. (Richard T. Jameson)

Joe Dante. (Dave S.)

Delmer Daves. (Samuel Wilson)

George Roy Hill: Butch and Sundance, Slaughter House 5, The Sting, Slapshot, The World According to Garp. (Quinn)

Edward Yang--it's not that he isn't highly regarded--but due to distribution snafus his gigantic influence on everything good in Asian cinema is insufficiently acknowledged or appreciated. His early death two years ago makes matters worse. Brighter's Summer's Daythe least seen masterpiece of the last 30 years. (Larry Gross)

Michael Curtiz. (Howard Chaykin)

This is a tough one because it's hard to gauge how much respect a given director really has these days, especially on the internet. I'm going to go with Johnny To. When it comes to Hong Kong action movies, directors like John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam get all the praise, but To has been nothing short of fantastic and is definitely the best director working in Hong Kong today (for example, take a look at Triangle, where To completely outclasses Hark and Lam). He got some critical praise recently with his Triad Election films, but for the most part, his movies don't get much of a release in the US. Last year's Mad Detective had its widest release at 1 theater, but it's a fantastic film (it made my top 10 of 2008 once I finally got my hands on a copy). For a modern director, he's quite prolific too. Anyway, for a more conventional pick, I might go with Michael Curtiz. Casablanca is certainly a classic, but Curtiz doesn't seem to have quite the following that you'd expect. (Mark)

He’s already revered in many cinephile quarters, but that’s not good enough! Michael Powell with and without (but mostly with) Emeric Pressburger. Definitely deserves to be viewed at least on the same level as Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Wilder, Capra, etc. and to be seen an enjoyed by as many people. (Bob Westal)

Woody Allen's career since Crimes and Misdemeanors.It’s been 20 years, and he's made a lot of good to great (and yes, a couple truly bad) movies since then. He's been out of fashion for a long time, but the work is still there. (Flosh)

Gordon Douglas is getting better with age. If nothing else, he was a solid craftsman. (Peter Nellhaus)

I'm with RTJ on Skolimowski. And Zanussi needs to be (re-)discovered in America, too. (Jim Emerson)

J. Lee Thompson. (Aaron)

I really love Hal Ashby’s work from the 1970s. I know he’s not exactly critically neglected, but I think he’s due a lot more respect than he gets. The seven films he directed in that decade (from The Landlord to Being There) is an amazing run, and I can’t think of anyone that ever had one quite like it during that same period (maybe Scorsese, who produced fewer films and The Last Waltz, which is a coke-addled stinker). I don’t even know that I can think of another director that put out seven wonderful films in a row (maybe Herzog). Anyway, Hal Ashby needs more people to take notice of his work. He’s awesome. Maybe Matt Zoller Seitz’s article about his influence on Wes Anderson’s oeuvre will get more people to see his films. (Schuyler Chapman)

If Carroll Ballard is mentioned at all in the critical discourse, it’s as the poor man’s Terrence Malick. Maybe it’s because most of his movies are family-friendly, or maybe it’s because they feature children as protagonists. Maybe it’s because he takes his time between projects. But any director who can create such a cinematic glow and such a powerfully mythic vision of humans encountering nature—in The Black Stallion, Duma, Fly Away Home, Never Cry Wolf, and Wind—should be far better loved than he is. (Walter Biggins)

George Roy Hill. He only did 14 films over a quarter centry, but they include Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Slap Shot, The Sting, The World According to Garp, and the ultimate impossible-to-adapt adaptation, Slaughterhouse-Five. Attention MUST be paid. (Patrick)

If as I read in this David Thomson book that Rene Clair's reputation is in eclipse, then Rene Clair. For myself, I've lately been reassessing Bob Clampett, whose work I was mostly lukewarm about, mostly from a fixation on the classic postwar Looney Tune. Now that I have developed more of an interest in pre-war squink I see him as Tex Avery in a minor key, though where Avery mostly rode the road of excess, Clampett was a genuine surrealist. (Robert Fiore)

It’s a tossup between Phil Karlson and Joseph H. Lewis. (Ivan G. Shreve)

Oh, boy, I'll get killed for this one...but I have to say Tony Scott. I think Quentin Tarantino said it best on the commentary track for the True Romance DVD that Scott is a director who makes films where you as the viewer know what you're getting; not only that he has a distinct look that is solely his -- aped by many other directors, but it is uniquely and unquestionably his look (I'm speaking of the rooms drenched in blue and the thickest cloud of smoke you've ever scene). The man can film people smoking like no one else and make it look arty as hell. I remember being the only one in the theater thinking Domino and Man on Fire were any good. The élan of those films are exactly what I mean by films that actually succeed in being entertaining that solely rely on style over substance. Sure, his films aren't groundbreaking or even necessarily memorable, but they are always entertaining and they are always a feast for the senses -- even if sometimes his visuals dizzy you into closing your eyes and rubbing your temples. The man can direct, people! It's time we all gave him his due. (Kevin J. Olson)

The problem with questions like this is that you'll be able to find a lively cult for basically any filmmaker you can think of, and your sense of who is and who isn't respected gets a bit out of whack. One filmmaker who is a cult figure now but who deserves everything that he can get is Anthony Mann, who has even seemed to take the backseat to (the wonderful) Boetticher nowadays. He's my favorite director of westerns, and his world view is far more complex than the “redemptive violence” box that many of his admirers have put him in. Also, Mervyn LeRoy and Robert Aldrich. (Krauthammer)

As odd a choice as this sounds, I'm going to go with William Peter Blatty. I've always thought Exorcist 3 was a good underrated thriller and I just watched The Ninth Configuration last week and found it to be quite good. In both films, the only two he ever directed, Blatty seemed to have a good eye for the camera and a good feel for pacing and tension. (Troy Olson)

There are many, but I'll mention Jack Cardiff today since he just passed away recently and I seem to be one of the only people on earth who liked his directing efforts. (Kimberly Lindbergs)

Gregory LaCava or Jean Negulesco. (Veronique)

Carpenter. Christine is a formal masterpiece. Sort of adding to the question, I think Nicholas Ray's films should get better DVD release in America, same for Godard's 70's films made on video. (Jamie)

I’ve given this answer before, but it seems to me that Ralph Bakshi, for all his faults, is a much more interesting and important filmmaker than he's ever given credit for. (Chris Oliver)


Ted Post (especially for The Baby), James B. Harris, Buzz Kulik (the TV movies he directed—Bad Ronald and Brian’s Song, to name only two—influenced a generation! I mean it!) (Ivan)

I'll fly the flag for a couple of other lesser-known masters of screwball comedy-- Mitchell Leisen and Wesley Ruggles. (Dennis)

11) Ruth Gordon or Margaret Hamilton?

Margaret Hamilton, more of a working actress than a moonlighting scribe.

Hamilton—she played a witch with a castle and an army; Gordon was just a disciple. (Ivan)

This Bud's for you - Margaret Hamilton, based on her appearance in Brewster McCloud. (Peter Nellhaus)

There is only one Minnie Castevet... who also co-wrote Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike with her husband Garson Kanin. (Jim Emerson)\

After Where’s Poppa? (1970) and Harold and Maude (1971), Gordon got typecast as the cutesy old dame that made you really want to just hit upside her head with a shovel (and no jury would convict you). I think Hamilton’s movie appearances (even though she was typecast as the nosy harridan) are far more interesting…not just Oz, but films like My Little Chickadee (1940) and The Red Pony (1949). (Ivan G. Shreve)

I guess Ruth Gordon, because of Harold and Maude and Rosemary's Baby. Of course, those are the only two movies I've seen from either Actress, but at least they're good ones... (Mark)

Ruth Gordon, since I've seen her in several things and don't care about The Wizard of Oz. (Troy Olson)

12) Best filmed adaptation of a play


I know Glengarry is the popular safe pick, but why none of Pinters adaptations? but how about Play it Again, Sam? or Neil Labute's recent under appreciated Shape of Things? Also… Oliver Stones best movie (IMHO), Talk Radio, was a play first. (Jamie)

I’m still mad a film in general for sticking to closely to its theatrical roots: too many movies look like badly filmed plays. But if you must know: Olivier’s Richard III or Grigori Kozintsev’s 1969 Russian language version of King Lear. (Ivan)

Non-musical division, I’m thinking Richard Lester’s version of The Knack and How to Get It though the great score by John Barry almost renders it a jazz musical; actual musical division, probably Sweet Charity. (Several great musicals of the classic era are theoretically based on plays, but most of them took such liberties or were so loosely tied to the originals, that I’m pretty much disqualifying them). Also, a quick shot out here to Polanski’s underrated film of Death and the Maiden. (Bob Westal)

Hamlet (Branagh's uncut version) (le0pard 13)

Night of the Iguana, maybe? I have a nagging feeling that the best answer is some movie we don't even think of as being adapted from a play -- a Lubitsch, maybe. (Richard T. Jameson)

Richard III by Ian McKellen. (Howard Chaykin)

UP NEXT! The Best of Professor Peabody’s Hysterical Historical Wayback Spring Break Film Quiz Part 2: MORE ICONS, SINGLE-WORD TITLES, MOVIE PARENTING AND OVERLOOKED COMIC PERFORMANCES!

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EXPANDING THE SLIFR KNITTING CIRCLE

To be a blogger, particularly a film blogger, is to be an antisocial, adenoidal, basement-dwelling, Cheetos-stained geek who administers blistering opinions on movies, the people who make them and (especially if they don’t agree with us) the poor mushroom-brained tools who flame us and others with their own absurd, overstated opinions in the comments columns of our blogs. At least that’s the perceived stereotype. And while I wouldn’t say across the board that any or all of those elements aren’t completely incorrect for any given sample plucked from the blogger Petri dish, I can speak for myself. Let’s take the stereotype point by point.

1)ANTISOCIAL: I have had to fight the tendency to not be the most social of animals for much of my adult life. Luckily I have usually found myself surrounded by other people who will not accept this from me, so therefore, while social interaction is a skill with which I may not be naturally blessed, my best friends have been good at keeping me in situations where my communication tools have not been allowed to atrophy.

2)ADENOIDAL: I do have sinus problems (not an uncommon occurrence in smog-smothered Los Angeles, by the way), but I would not go so far as to classify myself as a mouth-breather. (Maybe those with a more detached perspective would, though!)

3)BASEMENT DWELLER: My house has neither a basement nor an attic. I most often write and post from my laptop while seated at the dining room table.

4)CHEETOS-STAINED: I will cop to the occasional bout with the delectable day-glo treat from the laboratories of Frito-Lay. But not while I’m typing. Mama didn’t bring up no caveman.

The point of all this (and, yes, it’s a meager one) is that blogging, despite its reputation as being the art form most favored by hostile misanthropes and hopeless (choose your topic) nerds, has actually opened up my world, has reduced my tendency to want to retreat into myself, has afforded me opportunities to meet so many like-minded, smart (and sometimes smart-assed) people without whom the past five years of my life would have been a lot drearier. Many of these people I’ve never even met in the flesh—I’m talking about you, Peet Gelderblom and Jim Emerson—and yet I feel like we’ve been friends for years (and, by gum, I guess we have). The ones I have met are literally too many to even remember off the top of my head, and many of you—you know who you are—have become real friends at a time in my life when I would have expected (not unreasonably, I don’t think) that the frequency of making new acquaintances would necessarily be tracking downward.


Ali and me, seen through the eye of our Barney's Beanery waitress.

And all of this talk just so I can show off a keen pic that really sums up why I’m glad I started blogging, basement or no, almost five years ago. Last month it was my pleasure to meet friend and fellow film blogger Ali Arikan, proprietor of Cerebral Mastication, who was touring the U.S. as part of an exchange and education program for the company with which he works in Istanbul. Ali arrived in town the day the news of Michael Jackson’s death broke, and he ended up getting caught up in the Westside Traffic Nightmare to End All Traffic Nightmares just to get from the airport to his downtown hotel. Welcome to L.A., indeed, Ali. So rather than meet that evening, we shifted gears and met for breakfast at Barney’s Beanery in Burbank, where we slaughtered two hours with great ease over Diet Cokes and Barney’s massive breakfast menu. (I had shrimp eggs Benedict, and it turns out Ali likes his breakfast meats-- largely unavailable in his homeland, he composed a single-platter symphony of sausages, bacon and ham the likes of which this ex-farm boy has rarely seen.) It was a total delight spending the morning with him talking about life and the movies; I could have easily hijacked the street-side booth we had for the entire day. But there were other Burbank sites to show off. On the drive back to his hotel I drove him past NBC (where Conan O’Brien now rules the roost) and Warner Brothers studios. I was very happy when he gasped with recognition upon passing the north gate at Warners, where Harvey Korman and all the cowboy extras spill out into the real world near the climax of Blazing Saddles. As I dropped him off I promised one day I would try to get to Istanbul. How’s that for getting out of the basement?

Ali, it was a real pleasure and honor to meet you!

And all this talk of meeting people coincided with a Facebook post I ran across this afternoon from Rick Olson of Coosa Creek Cinema in which Rick listed five people off the top of his head that he wants to meet. Rick’s list has a touch of the metaphysical in that three of the people he listed are dead. His list? Andrei Tartovsky, Audrey Tautou, Jean Renoir, Bibi Andersson and Robert Altman. I don’t stop wanting to meet someone just because they’ve stopped breathing either, Rick. In thinking about my own list, I would definitely include Robert Altman if I hadn’t already had the pleasure of meeting him once, after a screening of The Long Goodbye on the UCLA campus just before the release of The Player. So I thought, gee, who would make my list? And here are the five I came up with (in alphabetical order):



Claudia Cardinale














Peter Cushing













Howard Hawks













Pauline Kael














Herb Lundy

As for the rest of you, I want to know who would make your list, but hold those thoughts. There’s another quiz coming in a couple of days, and you’ll get your chance!

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THE KINGS OF CINEMATIC SCHLONG

WARNING! This post contains language and imagery centering on a functional part of the human body that much of the population sees every day which has, throughout the history of art, been the subject of much sculpted and painted representation as well as salacious speculation and curiosity. This curiosity seems due more to its implied status as a forbidden object unsuitable for display in such an artistic manner than its inherent status as the focus of licentious sexual evil. But if the subject offendeth thee, get over it or don't read the post. It won't hurt my feelings. But if you do sally forth, just keep it in your pants long enough to read the piece and then, God bless America, do whatever it is that you as a consenting adult, will do.

“I know the reason that it was cut out was that it just wasn’t right. If anything, it’s a beautiful, gentle moment and a f**king large c**k with huge balls, is just f**king jarring.” —Colin Farrell on why his nude scene was cut out of Alexander

“It looks like an egg in a nest. This girl once said to me, ‘Who are you going to satisfy with that little thing?’ I said, ‘Me!’” —Johnny Knoxville


Coming in at #5 on Salon's list of the "Top 10 Moments in Male Frontal Nudity," it's Ewan McGregor, perhaps more single-penis-per-exposed-foot-of-film than any other in cinema history, in Peter (I said Peter) Greenaway's The Pillow Book. This one's for my dear wife...

One finds inspiration where one finds it, by God, and in celebration/commemoration/anticipation of today’s release of Sasha Baron Cohen’s latest satirical sociopolitical firecracker, the thankfully two-syllable entitled Bruno, debate which has been stirring for a couple of months now, ever since the movie was screened at festivals and Cohen began in earnest his unique guerrilla marketing campaign, over whether the movie is a devastating dressing-down of American hypocrisy in which even those sympathetic to its point of view are indicted, or a wrongheaded and depressing reinforcement of the very fears and prejudices it seeks to debunk. Partisans on both sides of the fence seem to agree that the movie is undeniably hilarious—the difference seems to be whether those laughs stick in the throat or whether they can inspire honest introspection in even the choir to which Cohen’s message is being preached. (David Edelstein, in his rave, observed that “Underlying all these gags—the funny, the crude, the funny and crude—is a hard truth: Flagrant gay behavior drives a lot of heteros insane. To be honest, I’m uncomfortable watching two guys with tongues down each other’s throats, too, but at least I know the problem is mine, not theirs.”) It’ll be interesting to see how the movie goes down on those who weren’t bothered by The Hangover’s it-is-what-it-is fag fear.

And by way of celebration of the copious full-frontal male nudity on display in Bruno (unlike the rassling scene in Borat, we can apparently expect a closer-to-NC-17 unpixellated variety this time around), Salon yesterday published a provocative list entitled ”The Dong Show: Top 10 Moments in Male Frontal Nudity,” celebrating, as Salon would have it, Ewan MacGregor, Vincent Gallo and the rest of the upstanding (sorry) men who put the penis in pop culture. Writers Sarah Hepola and Thomas Rogers approach the list with good humor, of course, but their undertaking has a core of seriousness behind it and a question that is worth asking:

“(I)n popular culture, and movies in particular, there's been a rather conspicuous double standard. Sure, boobs and vaginas are great, but where, egalitarians might ask, are all the penises? Male nudity is so verboten in film that even one that centers on its exposure -- The Full Monty -- didn't have the (excuse us) balls to live up to its name. Mr. Skin, an online database of movie nude scenes, doesn't feature male nudity at all. We joke all the time about the mighty John Thomas, but rarely does it get any real screen time. As film scholar Laura Mulvey argued in her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ it probably has something to do with men's discomfort seeing other men's bodies on a movie screen -- a discomfort that Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up to the penis-y Borat aims to exploit. Cohen's floppy member practically gets its own billing.”



Eric Idle asks another important question (okay, two): Isn’t it awfully nice to have a penis?/Isn’t it frightfully good to have a dong?

It’s hard to argue with any of the pole position rankings on Hepola and Rogers’ list, particularly #9, #7, #5, #2 and, of course, #1-- they’re all major signposts of the Phallus in Modern Cinema, all right. And it’s good to see they made room to mention Bart Simpson’s hilarious did-I-just-see-that full-frontal from The Simpsons Movie, a tiny little bit that changed the life of at least one person who saw it (Ralph Wiggum: “I like men now!”). I would nit-pick, and then only slightly, with not so much the inclusion but the significance of screenwriter-star Jason Segel’s self-humiliation in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (#4). Many a review and advance nugget of hype was built around the appearance of Segel’s schlong, and audiences were led to believe they’d be getting a Peter Greenaway-esque unflinching look at the actor’s shortcomings (Thank you, Mr. Niven!) as part of the agonizing break-up scene he does fully nude in that movie. Heaven knows, the unrated DVD may paint a different picture, but as seen in the theater, the glimpses we’re afforded of the Jason Junk are cut helter-skelter in between medium close-ups of Segel’s bare upper body, and consequently we’re given not much more than a second or two to register the shocking visage, as if the editor and director were too sheepish to let us gaze too long—it’s like having somebody’s hands come up over your face to protect you from the near-subliminal flashes of pee-pee they want full credit and notoriety for having given you in the first place. (Was the impish Tyler Durden the film editor on FSM?) Hey, I paid good money to see a Hollywood actor break that double standard at his own expense (knowing that he’d be credited as daring and brave for doing it, of course), and I must say, I felt a little gypped.

Even with Segal at #4, I think you’ll find Salon’s list a lot of fun, inspirational in the way these things usually are in that they get you to thinking about the penises—er, titles that were left off in the zeal to whittle it down to a mere 10 willies. It really is interesting to think that we are so insecure as a society (and as a society of filmmakers and filmgoers) that the only way we can be afforded a look at what makes Richard Gere so attractive to Lauren Hutton and Valerie Kaprisky, in American Gigolo and Jim McBride’s Breathless remake, respectively, is by shadow of Venetian blinds or long shot in a shower. And was it not just slightly disingenuous of Robert Altman to trumpet his balancing of the full-frontal nudity score in Short Cuts by comparing Julianne Moore’s luscious, unself-conscious pubic nudity with, um, Huey Lewis whipping it out and taking a piss off of a fishing boat… into water in which there floats, by the way, the body of a brutally murdered naked woman? (I continue to revere
Altman for every film of his but that one, and this reason is only one of many for my discontent.) It is these opportunities, to fill in the blanks with your own memories and observations, which make lists like this fun and worthwhile, even when their focus is on cinematically verboten body parts. Here’s to directors figuring out that there’s as much an audience for male nudity as for female, and that the double standard so prevalent now has a lot more to do with the hang-ups of the people who finance, make, distribute, and let’s not forget rate, the movies we see than with the supposed fears of an audience whose ranks might be driven to a violent frenzy if occasionally confronted by the image of a member on screen that they see down their shorts every day.

Here’s my alphabetical assignment of six scintillating sin-stances of the schlong in cinema that Salon overlooked:


ANGELS AND INSECTS (1994) Phillip Haas’ deliberate and creepy costume drama, an adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s novel described often as a cross between Merchant Ivory and Tennessee Williams, features one scene in which fair-haired (and one suspects possibly damaged by in-breeding) Edgar Alabaster (played by Douglas Henshall, seen above) is caught in flagrate dilicto with cousin Eugenia (played by Patsy Kensit). When I saw the movie years ago, I was caught up in the drama and tension of the scene, but also by something else—as Henshall flies out from under the covers to stand before the person who has walked in on him and his lover, it’s hard to miss the fact that the actor is sporting a very convincing hard-on. This is the kind of method acting the British are very rarely given credit for, and it makes me think that day’s shooting was not the usual grueling endurance test that actors so often portray when describing shooting scenes like this. “Gives the average flaccid penis scene the old what-for!” - The Sunday Times

EQUUS (1977) Speaking of flaccid penises, I always wondered, since Peter Firth (and Sidney Lumet) were so open in portraying protagonist Alan Strang's fierce and consuming equine sexual passion, what with Firth’s prodigious hose on display like in no other mainstream movie I’d ever seen before (or perhaps since), why they apparently avoided the whole boner issue. Was such possible tumescence the difference between an arty “R” rating and a more forbidding “X” in the eyes of Jack Valenti and the M.P.A.A.? Perhaps. And perhaps another explanation might be that Peter Firth, fine talent that he is, is just not the Method devotee that Douglas Henshall is. Given that Strang ultimately chooses a strapping stallion over Jenny Agutter’s Jill Mason (Agutter being incomparably lovely at this stage of her career), before gouging said stallion's eyes out, of course, I suppose flaccidity was all for the good. Firth also has the distinction of being, until the rise of Ewan MacGregor, the most well-hung mainstream actor to ever expose himself in a major motion picture. (For a better look, click here for Gay Skindex’s post entitled “PETER FIRTH FULL-FRONTAL NUDE IN EQUUS-- LARGE PENIS!”)


THE GROOVE TUBE (1975) Many movie-goers of my certain age got their very first glimpse of the male organ projected onto a 30-foot screen (or bigger, if you saw it, as I did, at a drive-in) during the opening sequence of Ken Shapiro’s intermittently gasp-inducing comedy sketch film, which is presented here uncut:



But the movie ends, as it began, with another groundbreaking presentation of testicular trafficking, one that sneaks up on you in a way much different than a hippie hanging all out in the woods and running into the nightstick-wielding Man. The setting is an ostensible public service announcement for avoiding the pitfalls and agonies of venereal disease, hosted by a strange looking puppet with a two-dimensional cartoon body and a head that looks like a giant peanut turned on its side with two pasted-on eyes added at the last minute. The puppet is seen in medium long shot at the beginning of the spot, which is for the most part earnest in its information. But that information becomes increasingly graphic as the camera pushes in to reveal that our harmless puppet host… is actually a pair of hairy balls stuck through a cardboard backdrop and decorated to distract. Until such distraction becomes impossible, of course, over the giggles induced from the absurdity of being lectured on the subjects of promiscuity and disease by two fuzzy, goose-pimply clackers with fake eyes attached to each nut.


IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976) This one really belongs in the “detached penis” division of our little enterprise, but since this was the very first “pornographic” film I ever saw, it deserves mention. That I eventually emerged from seeing this movie when I was only 17, still having a several-years-long journey toward my own loss of virginity, with relatively little fear of the opposite sex is a fact that still boggles my mind. I was in no way ready (how could I be?) for the level of psychological acuity and despair to which director Nagisa Oshima submits his actors, and of course his audience, with this suffocating, compelling tale of sexual hunger and psychosis. Drew McWeeney’s specific take on the movie will resonate with any male who has undergone a certain medical procedure, but the movie goes far beyond empathy with pain into a kind of character study that might have been impossible to achieve without the director’s and actor’s commitment to the reality of what they were trying to grasp and throttle to some sort of truth. It’s a landmark movie in many ways, and not just for its power to make its climactic castration believable viscerally, but also as a condition of pacifying the extreme dementia of the female character’s sexual desire.


MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979) Graham Chapman, as the titular not-so-much-a-savior Brian, gets to air out all of his concerns as he confronts the DeMille-esque crowd gathered outside his door while he basks in the glow of making love to his terrorist girlfriend. Despite the artfully placed hand here, Chapman in the film was not so modest, though it was apparent he had a long way to go to match fellow thespian Firth’s contribution to the penile pantheon.


LISZTOMANIA (1976) My friend Paul Matwychuk has a terrific take on this lunatic Ken Russell offering, which I offer you in the sincere hope that you will see this certifiable movie one day and enjoy it as much as Paul and I do. The movie is shot through with phallic imagery—no ivory column in this picture is just an ivory column, and often the wall decorations fart a lovely, inebriating mist through lampshades that turn out to be cheeks. But that’s off the subject, innit? Even the one-sheet and subsequent advertising for newspapers featured Liszt redefining what it is to swash one’s buckle by putting front and center an arm holding a rapier what don’t exactly look like an arm holding a rapier. And toward this end, the scene that defined the movie for those of us who were obsessed by it years before actually having seen the film (I bought the record album of Rick Wakeman-ized Wagner and Liszt compositions and absorbed them thoroughly)— does not disappoint. It is the one featuring that gigantic, veiny, seven-foot-long pole which Roger Daltrey sports in the film’s central fantasy sequence—a satanically vaudevillian fantasia built around sexual excess and (here we go again) fear of castration. After being sucked past the XXXXXXL panties of a slightly reptilian courtesan and into her suddenly cavernous vagina, Daltrey sprouts the Big One, whereupon garter-clad dancers high-step on his enormous shaft and lead him toward a guillotine apparently made just for the slicing of a salami as spectacular as his. One imagines, while watching Lisztomania, that Ken Russell was born to make this film, and seeing it again now just makes me miss his indefatigably balls-out (sorry) spirit even more.

EXTRA CREDIT:


FLESH GORDON (1974) The advertising for this porno take-off on the Flash Gordon serials trafficked in some of the same salacious imagery as did Lisztomania, but none of it was particularly outrageous or memorable. The movie, cut down from a hard-core version and turned into a sizeable soft-core hit, doesn’t feature much male nudity, at least that I can recall. It’s phallic highlight instead comes in the special effects design of the spaceship that takes Flesh, Dale Ardor and Dr. Flexi Jerkoff to the planet Porno where they clash with the evil forces of Emperor Wang the Perverted. (Look, I never it was a good movie.) It does also feature slightly phallic Harryhausen-esque set design (again, no mushroom-shaped building is just a mushroom-shaped building) and a monster (“Well, I never! Up yours, Gordon!”) that is easily the highlight of this otherwise limp effort. (For the last time, I'm sorry.)



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All right, what have I forgotten?

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LABOR DAY DRIVE-IN SUPER MONSTERAMA!

Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time will be aware of the great pleasure I take in talking about some of the special programming available to we lucky cinephile citizens of Los Angeles. There’s always something great going on at one of our repertory houses, museum program or university screenings on any given day around the city. We also happen to be one of the areas in the country where the extinction of the drive-in has been avoided. Certainly, where there used to be 80 –some drive-ins in Los Angeles County, there is now only one, with surrounding ozoners in Riverside County, Barstow, 29 Palms, and the San Diego area, so it’s not like there’s a bounty in comparison to the thriving drive-in culture of the past. But we’ve got it pretty good compared to other parts of the country where drive-ins have continued to fall victim not only to the general trend toward the big fade-out, but also to the economic downturn enveloping the nation.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t drive-ins still peppered throughout the country ready and waiting for those who live in the south, northwest, midwest and even the northeast. Some are more remote than others, and some have to be factored in to family vacations rather than just the casual let’s-go-out-to-a-drive-in vibe that we’re probably all familiar with to one degree or another from our childhoods. But they’re there waiting to be discovered. One good way to discover drive-ins in your part of the country is by referencing Drive-ins.com, the self-billed (and rightfully so) definitive resource for drive-in information. Here you can search state by state, to see if the drive-in you remember from years past is still around (odds are probably not too good) or to find one that is open and thriving. Other fun sites include the Drive-in Exchange and Drive-in Theater, as well as our own Southern California Drive-in Movie Society, which can connect you with lots of other great drive-in resources around Southern California and the rest of the nation. Finally, one of the best ways for drive-in enthusiasts from every corner of the globe to stay in touch is through the Drive-ins Discussion Group hosted on Yahoo! Drive-in fans and owners intermingle here and share their enthusiasm, their memories, their frustrations and their fears for the future of the all-American movie-going phenomenon, as well as the latest news on closings and even, occasionally, openings and re-openings of drive-ins long thought gone.


One of the names that frequently pops up in this group is George Reis of the Riverside Drive-in on Route 66 in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania. The Riverside is one of the beauties that does great seasonal business on the East Coast, largely because of the care the management puts into their establishment, but also because every once in a while they step away from the 21st century business model for success at the drive-in (first-run, family-friendly double features) to celebrate the history and atmosphere of movie-going drive-in style. Admittedly, to many drive-in operators and patrons, this usually translates into showing Grease or American Graffiti and inviting a bunch of classic car clubs. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the Riverside gets a little more creative and shows the true colors of its roots by staging an annual Drive-in Super Monsterama… and they don't wait till Halloween to do it. Probably because the weather is pretty dicey in Pennsylvania by the last day of October, the Riverside translates its Monsterama into fun for Labor Day weekend, as a way of bidding farewell to summer and giving loyal customers a memorable treat as a way of saying thank you for a summer’s worth of great drive-in fun. So when George contacted me recently to remind me that not all the drive-in action is happening in Southern California, and when I saw what he had planned for this year’s festival, I just couldn’t resist passing the word.


The festival runs two nights—- Friday, September 11 and Saturday, September 12. Friday night highlights three prime-cut late-‘60s specimens from the American International Pictures vault-- The Witchfinder General (a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm), Scream and Scream Again (both starring Vincent Price) and The Crimson Cult starring Boris Karloff, along with a mid-‘60s Italian gore-fest starring Barbara Steele entitled Terror-Creatures from the Grave. Horror fans of a certain age (mine) won’t have to be instructed to imagine how much fun it would be to see these super-atmospheric pics on the drive-in screen, surrounded as they will be by a slew of vintage trailers and other surprises George hints at having up his sleeve. The same seasoning is given to the Saturday night program, and this side might be even juicier—it’s an all-Hammer vampire bill, featuring The Vampire Lovers, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (a.k.a. The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, Hammer’s martial arts co-production with the Shaw Brothers) and the rarely-seen Vampire Circus. Talk about the drive-in weekend to build a holiday vacation around! If you are not from the immediate area, find yourself suddenly salivating over the idea of attending the Monsterama and would like to find out about hotel accommodations (you can, like the best vampire, always sleep during the day), the Riverside web site has links for local hotels and other establishments to fill all the requirements for your Monsterama-fueled Labor Day.


George, you and the Riverside have succeeded in making this smug Southern Californian, surrounded by more great movie-going than he can possibly process, appreciate or attend, so very jealous and so very disappointed that I cannot be there with you and your lucky customers. I would love it if you’d send along some pictures from the weekend that I could publish here. And even though I can't be there, it makes me happy to think that there's a drive-in operator who continues creative, loving efforts like these to keep the heart of the drive-in beating strongly. The Riverside Drive-in is doing it not just through big ticket Hollywood fare, but also by creating programs like the Drive-in Super Monsterama that bring the inimitable thrills of seeing horror films at a drive-in the ‘60s and ‘70s back with such a goose-bumpy vengeance. George and everyone at the Riverside, for those of us who have only our Vampire Lovers and Scream and Scream Again DVDs to turn to, I salute you.

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(Photos courtesy of George Reis and the Riverside Drive-in.)

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OKAY, NOW I'D SEE THIS...!

UPDATED 7/7/09 4:27 p.m.

From Drew McWeeney comes word (sound and picture too!) of The Greatest (Fake) Trailer Ever Made, for Roland Emmerich's upcoming destruct-a-thon orgasm 2012. (What would the movies do without the near future, guaranteeing us all smug peals of laughter when (if) we watch the movie in, say, the year 2013?)



Whew! Drew thinks the guy who made this trailer may have guaranteed the studio an even bigger opening weekend, and he might be right. One thing I know he's right about, though-- if I felt like this was the movie Emmerich made, without all the ponderous people stuff in between, why, even I'd go see that! The whole thing reminds me of a little Japanese film released here in 1975 and starring Lorne Greene... Yes, how far we've come.

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UPDATE! While we're on the subject of trailers, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir brought this one to our attention this afternoon. The name Diablo Cody is central, so of course the parody here is intentional, but just as long as nobody invokes the "J" word to describe this one (not in the ad copy, but in the reviews, as in "It's J--- meets Let the Right One In!") then I could be convinced to line up for Jennifer's Body... Anyone for the drive-in in early September?



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FAMILIAR FRONTIER: THE DELIGHTS OF AN L.A. SUMMER OF REPERTORY CINEMA

It wasn’t too long ago that I took a look at what was happening at just one theater here in Los Angeles, our beloved New Beverly Cinema, and realized that Hollywood didn’t have as many must-sees on their entire summer slate as the New Beverly did during the months of May and June alone. Of the movies I hoped to see on the big screen in those two months, I flat-out missed Big Man Japan, The Brothers Bloom and The Girlfriend Experience; I hope to still see The Hurt Locker, Public Enemies and Year One; I did see The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and would have been just as happy had I not, but then again I caught Land of the Lost, which provided the biggest return on the chasm between initial excitement and the stink of suspicions raised by bad reviews—I thought it was much more fun than even the kindest reviews seemed to let on. Only Up and Drag Me to Hell have turned out to be every bit as good as their advance notices and worth every ounce of hype, and still audiences roundly rejected Raimi’s marvelously effective fright show as somehow beneath their consideration. (Of the summer movies I have seen that didn’t make my initial list of anticipation, Tetro was a magnificently obsessed epic, Whatever Works was as mummified a movie as I’ve seen all year, and The Hangover was flat-out nasty without the compensation of actual laughs.)


Now, at the midpoint of the summer, with July and August still to go, there are only four movies left on my initial list that actually belong to the summer months (Black Dynamite and Extract will be Labor Day Weekend treats). Those movies are: Bruno, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Inglourious Basterds and The Final Destination, previously known as Final Destination: Death Trip and now distinguishing itself in title only by playing the opposite game of definite articles that made the chronology of Fast and Furious so confused. (Was that number four or the first one you’re talking about?)

Bruno looks like another successful provocation from Sasha Baron Cohen a full week before it’s even officially released; Mandy Lane, which has been finished and playing in festivals since September 2006, has just become the latest dance partner in the Weinstein shuffle, Dimension Pictures having pulled it off the release schedule with no replacement date announced-- Mandy Lane might be headed down the same rabbit hole as Rogue, another superior genre picture buried by the Weinsteins while they fiddle amidst the crackling flames surrounding the marble pylons of the Weinstein Company. At this point, Harvey and Bob might even be desperate enough to keelhaul Inglourious Basterds were it not for the distribution partnership with Universal that, along with its unassailably high profile among not just film geeks but the general public, virtually assures its late August premiere. (That and a tantalizing rave from Scott Foundas which can be read only by purchasing the print edition of Film Comment, a periodical that seems to understand the idea of on-line exclusives as well as the invalidity of giving away all your magazine content for free and then wringing your hands because no one buys the mag anymore.)

So subtract Mandy Lane, add a couple of low-profile nuggets to my big-screen wish list (like The Beaches of Agnes, Moon and Food, Inc.), and what do you know—even if the New Beverly Cinema were the only alternative to Hollywood’s high-tech mind games (and it’s not—more on that later), it would still outnumber the short list of Hollywood must-sees with its July-August schedule by at least double the titles. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, uh, or, uh…. to look away from a gift horse while it opens its mouth wide when I have my back turned, let’s take a look at the treats lined up for the discerning fan/geek/hipster/cinephile on the New Beverly’s screen over the next two months.



Coming up this Wednesday and Thursday (July 8 & 9) is a chance to see a brand-new print of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971) doubled with another underground(ish) provocation, Ralph Bakshi’s much-maligned (but actually pretty terrific) Fritz the Cat (1972). Zappa’s movie is considered a masterpiece of sorts by the converts and somewhat of a muddle by those not particularly attuned to his brand of cacophonous, stylistically promiscuous musical stew, just as Bakshi’s movie is considered by some (R. Crumb included) a bastardization of the free-floating, easy-goin’ nihilism which devotees of the comic feel the director completely missed. This one would be a hard one to program for home video—my 200 Motels laserdisc is in considerably better shape than my Betamax copy of Fritz the Cat-- and I’m not sure how easy it is to lay hands on these titles otherwise. Once again the New Beverly casually, and with very little fanfare, serves up a can’t-miss just to see how appreciative we are. Well, are we?




Friday and Saturday, July 10 & 11, makes for a rare weekend appearance of Grindhouse Night. Curators Brian Quinn and Eric Caidin had originally planned this great double feature-- Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S. (1975) and Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976) as a tribute to festival friend and writer-director of the Ilsa movies, Don Edmonds. Unfortunately, Edmonds passed away earlier this summer, and what was intended as a celebration of the director and his creations, with Edmonds present to soak up the adulation, has turned into what Brian calls “an Irish wake of sorts,” that is, a sad, heartfelt tribute accompanied by a rowdy night of enjoying Edmonds’ penchant for mind-boggling tastelessness and the comedy of politically incorrect shocks. And just for good measure, Brian and Eric have a treat for the faithful—the double feature that magically, at Midnight, becomes a triple, with the addition to the bill of Edmonds’ knockabout 1977 thriller, Bare Knuckles, a hit at Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 New Beverly Grindhouse Festival.


If you’re like me and you’ve never seen Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960)—It’s okay to admit it; you’re among friends here—then we really must avail ourselves of this opportunity to see an archival print of this influential landmark of Italian cinema the way it’s supposed to be seen. The sweet life lasts for three days only—July 12-14.


July 15 and 16, the New Beverly turns its attention to the film career of the late Michael Jackson, which, once Captain EO, the Thriller and Bad videos, and that stilted cameo in Men in Black II have been eliminated, basically boils down to his appearance as the Scarecrow in Sidney Lumet’s ill-fated adaptation of The Wiz (1978). Getting Lumet, king of the New York street movie (‘70s division) to direct Diana Ross as an apparently mentally challenged Dorothy, a 40-ish spinster pretending to be a teenager who’s never been off her city block, sounds like a good idea, right? Somebody thought so, but The Wiz has absolutely no wings beyond Jackson’s elasticity and Mabel King’s sinister comic turn as the zaftig Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the Whatever. For an adaptation of a zesty, if thematically questionable musical, it’s a long, leaden slog, almost worth the glimpse of Jackson’s potential as an actor in musical comedies had that path been one he could have ever chosen for himself.


The real draw on these New Beverly nights is the second feature, after The Wiz. It's a rare chance to see one of the most misunderstood, underappreciated, and yes, best movies of the ‘80s—a movie probably even more reviled by audiences and the film press than The Wiz-- the Disney sequel Return to Oz (1985). Directed by master sound and image editor Walter Murch, the movie was so roundly drubbed as a disaster that it sent Murch scurrying away from a directing career, which, even for all the wonderful work he’s done for others in the interim, particularly Francis Ford Coppola and the late Anthony Minghella, is a damn shame. For Murch captures brilliantly the helter-skelter fearsomeness of Oz with a kind of visual flexibility that more seasoned directors probably envied—the effects are rendered with a catch-all Rube Goldberg playfulness, and the dark undercurrent is far more in tune with L. Frank Baum’s original vision of the dangers within the Emerald City and beyond than the vaudeville-derived sensibility of the beloved 1939 MGM classic that, for generations after the books were published, defined The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Fairuza Balk is a spectacular Dorothy, and Jane March will haunt your nights in a dual role as Dorothy’s evil nurse and the even more frightening Mombi. Don’t let anyone talk you out of it-- Return to Oz is a brilliant piece of work, and it deserves a better reputation, not to mention a cult following all its own.



For those charmed by the wiles and clipped upper-class East Coast cadences of Katharine Hepburn, it’s hard to imagine a better double bill than The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Adam’s Rib (1949)—Okay, it might be possible; Kate starred in one or two good movies in her flash-in-the-pan career. Let’s just say this one is as guaranteed a good time as any, especially if they happen to be your introduction to the grand dame of American screwball comedy. See Kate (and Cary, and Jimmy, and Spencer) at the New Beverly July 17-18.



The next spot on the calendar is reserved for the first “pinch-me-I’m-dreaming, no-don’t-I-don’t-wanna-wake-up” engagement of the New Beverly’s July offerings. If you’re like me, you have extra-fond memories of seeing great early Walter Hill movies when they were in theatrical release. Now that Hill’s classics, as well as his fine modern work (Deadwood, Broken Trail), have been consigned to video, we can be even more thankful to Michael Torgan for bringing a double feature like this to town-- The Warriors (1979) and The Long Riders (1980), two of the most visually arresting action movies ever made. The Warriors looks a little quaint now, and will probably seem even more so in the shadow of Tony Scott’s upcoming remake—but that remake is reason number one to get reacquainted with Hill’s version right now. And no matter how you slice it, it has a freaky, organic vitality that is all its own, and remains undiluted. Since its release The Long Riders has existed, for many cinephiles, in the long shadow of Sam Peckinpah. Though it does seem apt on the surface, I’ve never quite bought that comparison because it usually comes as an attempt to demean Hill as a sycophantic homage artist. Hill, quite independently of Peckinpah's influence, brings strong ties to all his characters and the Missouri landscape, including the women, and renders poetic and lyrical some of the visual edges that Peckinpah preferred to leave rough and jagged. Yet the haunting refrain for an old west of myth, amorality and contained madness seems plainly written on the line that connects this movie with, say, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Don’t miss the double feature for the movies, but stay and enjoy the conversation, because on Sunday night, July 19, members of the cast of The Warriors (guest list to be determined) will be along for the ride and your questions. If the movies are enough, the double bill plays Monday, July 20, as well.



The Long Riders has been well and widely praised for its casting, bringing together for sets of brothers-- Stacy and James Keach, Carradines David, Robert and Keith, Randy and Dennis Quaid, and Nicholas and Christopher Guest—as, respectfully, the James boys, the Youngers, the Millers and those bringers of destiny, Bob and Charlie Ford. And The Long Riders provides an excellent bridge into the next program, after the Grindhouse boys bring ‘80s Hong Kong thrillers Heartbeat 100 (1987) and Angel Enforcer (1989) our way on July 21. Look for the David Carradine tribute to continue in earnest with Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory (1976) on July 22 and 23. Given the actor’s untimely death, as well as the release of the new book on Ashby by Nick Dawson and Carradine’s notorious scuffle with Haskel Wexler at a screening of Glory this past March, the time would certainly seem to be right for revisiting both of these movies, career highlights for the actor, if not for his directors. And once again, time for an admission—I have never taken advantage of the opportunity to see either one of these films, so what better time and place than this summer at the New Beverly?



July 24-28 are dates given over to international cinema at the New Beverly. The recent omnibus features Tokyo! (2009; segments directed by Bong Joon-Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry) and Paris, Je T’aime (2006; Olivier Assayas, Joel and Ethan Coen, Tom Tykwer, Gus van Sant, et al) are a great way to prep for that vicarious vacation you probably can’t afford, and while they are almost by definition uneven, there’s enough inspiration and inquiry into the titular cities, into the surface charms as well as the hidden mysteries, to keep anyone fascinated. And then, on successive nights, July 26, 27 and 28, the New Beverly unravels brand-new 35mm prints of Masaki Koyabashi’s masterwork The Human Condition (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (1959; 1959; 1961). Though recently released on stunning DVD editions, if you can arrange your schedule to make a three-night commitment to this program, you will likely not regret it. I’ve gotten to the point where I cannot bear, if I can at all help it, to have my first exposure of a film classic happen on DVD, no matter how great the transfer, because I feel like I’m not able to give it my full attention at home. Here’s my chance, and yours, to experience the real deal, in a place meant to accentuate all of the movie’s subtlety, agony and scale.



The theme double bills continue as the month winds down. On July 29 and 30 it’s a virtual referendum on the state of Jim Jarmusch, a chance to look at his most recent two features, The Limits of Control (2009) and Broken Flowers (2005) and think about the career path of this most stubbornly independent American filmmaker.



And then, as if by way of antidote, old Hollywood comes roaring back with a jaunty and hilarious coupling of titles from the inimitable, somewhat brittle, undeniably charming Irene Dunne. Her pairing with Cary Grant (and Ralph Bellamy, and Asta) in Leo McCarey’s indefatigably witty The Awful Truth (1937) is one of screwball comedy’s untouchable highlights, and while it doesn’t quite soar as mightily, Richard Boleslawski’s Theodora Goes Wild (1936), in which a small town matron masks her identity as the scribe of a saucy best-seller, is plenty delightful enough. It co-stars Melvyn Douglas and the unbeatable Thomas Mitchell. Sounds like my daughter and I have a date, either July 31 or August 1.



Finally, to wrap up August we must skip ahead two weeks to August 19 & 20, when the New Beverly presents two hard-boiled noirs that are rarely seen on repertory screens. Vince Edwards is a killer whose M.O. is Murder by Contract (1958; Irving Lerner) and who begins to question his trade when his next victim turns out to be a woman. Philip Pine, Herschel Bernardi and Caprice Toriel co-star. Second on the bill is The Sniper (1952; Edward Dymytryk) in which Adolphe Menjou and Gerald Mohr hit the streets in search of a serial killer with a high-powered rifle. Neither of these movies are first on the tongues on noir enthusiasts, but they do have their backers (Martin Scorsese, for one), and it’s fun to get the opportunity to see some films of this period whose reputations do not precede them as strongly as others. However you slice it, a dirty, tough-minded double bill.



The spirit, as well as the words, of Noel Coward take over the New Beverly on August 21 and 22, when the spanking-new version of Easy Virtue (2009; Stephan Elliot) takes the stage, starring Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth, alongside David Lean’s 1945 film of Blithe Spirit starring Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings and Margaret Rutherford.



And finally, time for a new generation, and a bunch of the old generation too, to get their Indiana Jones on, on the big screen. Steven Spielberg’s original Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981; and no, kids, it’s not called Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, no matter what it says on your DVD box) gets to duke it out in our hearts as number-one chronologically (inarguable) and in quality of the series (way arguable), with the movie I think wins hands-down, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which I cannot wait to be overwhelmed by again in full-stretch Panavision and Dolby stereo. I used to think that the “Anything Goes” opening was worth the price of admission but that the rest of the movie fell badly short. Well, I’ve undergone a sort of religious conversion vis-à-vis this movie in the last few years, and now it seems obvious to me that it towers over not only the rest of the movies in the series, but also takes a spot perched high above much of the rest of the director’s filmography, alongside Jaws, Duel, Empire of the Sun, E.T. and, yes, 1941. See these first two chapters on August 23, 24 and 25.


That’s not all, folks. Just look at what Phil Blankenship has in store for the midnight maniacs in July and August:


Perhaps one of the best bad movies of all time, John Frankheimer’s inimitable and, believe it or not, influential eco-horror hokum, Prophecy (1979). Beware the freakisms! (And that shock ending!) (July 18)


The next night, another shocker, and this one is legitimately good-- William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) has a couple of moments where, however much you may have resisted the notion, you become convinced you're in the hands of master filmmaker. (We can debate all night as to whether this is actually true, but it feels like it, dammit, at the time!) (July 19)


Then Phil and the New Bev plumb the slimy depths of the unknown (at least by me) quantity that is Dangerous Men (2005; not on DVD!) We’re gonna have to trust Phil on this one. (July 25)


The following weekend brings a rarity that, if the utterly bizarre trailer is any indication, must be seen at all costs. It’s Stunt Rock (1985), also unknown to me before this year (when Matthew Kiernan sent the trailer to me attached to a VHS copy of Freebie and the Bean), and this one looks unmissable. I refer you to the visual evidence: (July 31)




Then, on Saturday, August 1, those of you with a Charles Band obsession can work out your issues at midnight with The Dungeonmaster (1985).


Finally, at midnight, on August 15, just in time for Rob Zombie’s sequel, Phil invites you to cleanse your palate with the Carpenter-derived mise-en-scene of Rick Rosenthal and the variations on a theme he works with Jamie Lee Curtis as that fateful night continues, in Halloween II (1981). All new!

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One final New Beverly note: You may have noticed a glaring gap in August’s schedule, from August 3 to August 15. Well, it is my pleasure to announce that the slot will be filled by none other than a return appearance by Joe Dante and nearly two weeks more of great programming put together by the maestro himself. Those of you who were able to attend any and/or all of Joe’s New Beverly festival of last year, culminating with the Movie Orgy, don’t have to be reminded just how mind-blowing that festival really was. So far no word on just what the director of Matinee, The ‘burbs, Small Soldiers and Gremlins 2: The New Batch has in store for those lucky/smart enough to attend, but if last year’s program is any indication, there are some minds and eyes that are due to be opened. Joe has promised me some time in between now and then to sit down and talk about what he has planned this year (including, perhaps, another screening of the Movie Orgy?? Please???!!), and I will pass that along as soon as I can. But whatever may be on the schedule, do yourself a favor-- block out August 3-15 right now on your calendar and just be prepared for whatever happens. With Dante at the controls, anything will.

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Time is tight as well as late, but I do want to clue you in, if you are not already sufficiently clued, to the joys of the aptly-named Cinefamily, a repertory collective that has effectively taken over the Silent Movie theater on Fairfax and turned it into, against all odds, yet another film repertory happening during the age of home theater and on-demand delivery that one might have reasonably guessed would have killed such programming once and for all. But not when it’s done with flair, originality and intelligence, as at the New Beverly and here. You are best directed to the Cinefamily’s extensive calendar for a list of every fascinating nook and cranny with which these folks have filled the July and August days. But as confident as I am that you’ll find something to suit you on your own investigation, I just have to highlight a couple of things.

First off, the Cinefamily is highlighting a July-August series of “Silent Sirens” every Wednesday night. On the way is Greta Garbo (Love; July 8), Pola Negri (Sappho; July 15), Marion Davies (Show People; July 22), Colleen Moore (Ella Cinders, Orchids and Ermine; July 29), Mabel Normand (The Extra Girl; August 5), Joan Crawford (Our Dancing Daughters; August 12), Anna May Wong (The Toll of the Sea; August 19) and Gloria Swanson (Male and Female; August 26). Most of these pre-code melodramas are pretty juicy, and the rare opportunity to see this kind of programming ought to be draw enough. But each of these female stars fascinates in her own way, and the Cinefamily’s two-month long essay on their enduring magnetism and allure is just about irresistible.

As is the chance to see, ragin’ full on big-screen-wise, Brother Theodore in the well-regarded documentary of his strange life entitled To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore. It screens August 11 at 8:00 p.m. For those of us who first saw Brother Theodore on David Letterman’s old NBC show, I think it’s safe to say we’ve never known quite what to make of him (and neither did Dave).



Here’s what the liner notes from the Cinefamily calendar has to say:

“He was considered to be one of the most significant links in the history of comedy, admired by such people as Woody Allen, Dick Cavett, and Eric Bogosian. His television appearances have spanned from Steve Allen to Merv Griffin to David Letterman. His long-running Off-Broadway show was hailed as ‘diabolical genius.’ He was Brother Theodore. Formerly a millionaire playboy living in pre-war Germany, Theodore endured the sobering destruction of his entire family, his fortune, and his own identity, as a survivor of Dachau. Later shipped to America and continually haunted by his loss, Theodore re-invented himself by capitalizing on his dark, existential humor, to become one of America’s most respected humorists and monologists. Combining ultra-rare footage of performances and TV appearances along with puppetry and innovative use of voiceover, To My Great Chagrin reconciles the cryptic, oddly comic fury of Brother Theodore’s performing persona with the stranger-than-fiction chronology of his life.”

Finally, your tolerance for ‘80s cheese may be slaked or tested by the Cinefamily’s "Holy Fucking Shit!" series of midnight programs appropriately themed “Summer Camp.” On the schedule is a Pia Zadora tribute-- the Golden Globe Award-winning Butterfly (1981) and the utterly stupefying The Lonely Lady (1984), every bit the equal of the Stephen Boyd-Tony Bennett stunner The Oscar, will be shown, with Zadora in attendance, on July 11; Lambada and The Forbidden Dance (July 26); Magic BMX and Rad (Aug. 1); The Blue Lagoon (August 8); Troll 2 wioth Monster Dog (August 15); Caveman! and Grunt (August 22); and the Summer Camp Grand Finale on August 29. There is no way I could ever do justice to the level of commitment the Cinefamily has to this relentless parade of processed trash—their liner notes for the Holy Fucking Shit series are little gems, each and every one, and far more enjoyable than actually sitting through Rad or Troll 2.


But even those notes won’t replace making it out to the inarguable gem in the Cinefamily HFS “Summer Camp” series—they’re staging a New Year’s Eve party in the middle of July—streamers, noisemakers, giant midnight dropping ball, and a very special movie guest: Allan Arkush’s Get Crazy! (1983), oft cited as one of the best rock movies ever made, as well as one of the most genuinely anarchic and downright goofy, will screen at midnight on July 18. It’s a ton of fun. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the Cinefamily again on their showcase feature:

“(It’s) the absolute ultimate party movie, Get Crazy, the most wild, untamed, unleashed, unbelievable sex-drugs-and-rock-'n-roll movie ever made. Move over, Animal House, there's a new sheriff in Partytown! This devastatingly addictive comedy orgy, set on New Year's Eve, is Rock 'N' Roll High School director Allan Arkush's loving tribute to his bacchanalian days working at NYC's legendary concert venue Fillmore East, and features a nonstop parade of slick rock parody (including Lou Reed as a Dylan-esque mumbling stumbler and Malcolm McDowell as a Jagger clone who ends up having a conversation with his penis), a surprising amount of edgy, dangerous-looking stuntwork, cameo porn galore (Lee Ving! Fabian! Clint Howard!), enough rapid-fire schtick for a dozen Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker flicks, a buffet of salacious souped-up T&A--and a stratospheric level of insane drug use. Every substance in the rainbow is partaken in, joyously and without consequence, almost all provided by the film's mythical El Topo-esque space cowboy, Electric Larry, one of the coolest motherfuckers you've ever set eyes on. Get Crazy is rabid, manic and totally raging, so strap yourself in, tip back that drink--and say goodbye to your brain!”

Can you say, can’t miss? Won’t miss?! July 18. Silent Movie Theater. See you there.

All right, now, is that enough to convince you, dear L.A. filmgoer, that your entertainment dollar (x14) is better spent at one of these creative venues, establishments dedicated to breathing life into the local repertory film scene, than on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (for the third time) or G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (even once)? I hope so. Even if you can’t make it to all of these great screenings (And how could you, you maniac?), you can come out for at least one or two, right? If you’re not in L.A., well, maybe they’ll give you some ideas for home theater double and triple features you can book yourself, transporting you to some of these screenings in spirit if not always in body. Because if going to the New Beverly or the Cinefamily with regularity will convince you of anything, it’s that the spirit of cinema is alive and well in a city where, of all places, it has oft been thought of as moribund, if not flat-out dead. The movies live! And here’s to keeping them alive at the New Beverly and the Cinefamily Silent Movie Theater.

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UPDATE 7/7/09 3:33 p.m. Word is out this afternoon that the Cinefamily and Silent Movie Theater longtime organist Bob Mitchell has passed away at the age of 96. Mitchell, a fixture with the Cinefamily, had a rich history with providing musical accompaniment to silent films, and Mr. Mitchell was also the original organist when Dodger Stadium opened in 1962. A tribute is planned preceding tomorrow night's screening of Love starring Greta Garbo.

Thanks to Jon Weisman and to Art and Culture for passing along the Cinefamily's heartfelt words about Mr. Mitchell and his legacy. A real connection to the history of cinema, he will be sorely missed.

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WHAT DID YOU DO ON THE FOURTH, DADDY?

Well, kids, really, ever since I was introduced to the album way back in 1975, no Fourth of July celebration in my home (or at least in my head) would be complete without Stan Freberg Presents: The United States of America Volume 1: The Early Years, the absurdist ad man/comic genius's ne plus ultra masterpiece. Combine this with the audio recording of Sarah Vowell's uneven but compelling new book The Wordy Shipmates (with great voice work by everyone from Jill Clayburgh to Bill Hader, and a haunting theme written by maestro du jour film composer Michael Giacchino), and you've got an Independence Day celebration worthy of a hot-dog-eating egghead hermit like me. Just make sure to leave me time for the Fox baseball game of the weekend-- Dodgers vs. Padres, 1:00 p.m. PST-- and that's a recipe for a classic day.


To top things off, we'll be heading out to the Mission Tiki Drive-in for some family fun outdoor movie style. I just wish the feature was a little more immediately exciting than Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, but at least we won't have to wear the 3D glasses for this one!

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WARNING! DO NOT HOLD FIRECRACKERS IN HAND OR PUT IN MOUTH!
(Taken from an actual label I once read when I was a kid.)


Just a reminder from Your Friendly Neighborhood Explosives Moralist that in California fireworks are not only illegal but also ridiculously dangerous. I can't imagine having to weigh the thrill of a couple of loud pops in the backyard against burning down 30,000 acres and a few dozen homes as a result, but despite all the pleading and warnings, several thousand jackasses will light 'em off anyway. Let's just pray that their luck (and ours) holds out.



Finally, a treat from the archives: The introductory segment from an all-day ABC broadcast commemorating the American Bicentennial, original air date, July 4, 1976, hosted by Harry Reasoner.

Fallen Arches, Oregon, Harry? I’ve been to Boring, Oregon, but never Fallen Arches. Damned East Coast media bias.

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(Photo courtesy of dinerdog.)

Happy Independence Day, everyone! Who’s barbecuing?

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FOURTH OF JULY B-WESTERN CATTLE DRIVE

Something about the Fourth of July just screams B-movie western to me, and this year I’ve really been in the mood. Here are one-sheets from some that I’ve been lucky enough to ride the trail with recently. Sometimes the posters are better than the movies, sure, but these oaters, each and every one the definition of a programmer, have really filled the bill in satisfying my yearning for hitting the westward trail mid-50s Hollywood style. Check ‘em out some lazy Sunday afternoon and see if I ain’t truthful, pilgrim.






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JON SOOHOO AND THE GAME BASEBALL MOVIES (EVEN THE GOOD ONES) NEVER SEE

(Russell Martin hit by a pitch. Photo by Jon SooHoo by way of Sons of Steve Garvey.)

The best baseball movies-- The Bad News Bears, Bull Durham, Cobb, Eight Men Out-- are the ones that capture as much about the atmosphere surrounding the game, the eccentricities and/or obsessive nature of those who play it, and the importance of the game’s history toward forming the skeleton of what we might term heroism in this country, as least as far as the term applies toward athletes and athleticism, as they do about the game itself. But even these exceptional (and in a couple of cases I would argue, great) movies, and some lesser, but still entertaining ones, like Major League or For Love of the Game, have a hard time capturing what you might naturally think would be an easy call for the movies— the essential physics of a bat on a ball, a figure in motion at the plate on in the field, or a strong sense of what happens on the mound, and in the air, between the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and when it pops in the catcher’s glove. One of the most glaring deficiencies in Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham, a movie often cited for its accuracy in terms of the entirety of the minor league baseball environment, is the performance of Tim Robbins on the mound as the exceptionally wild but occasionally devastating Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, whose pitching eventually lands him in the Show. Robbins’ acting as LaLoosh in general is spot-on and very funny, a naturally gifted athlete who hasn’t the discipline-- until he is adopted as a cause by baseball siren Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon-- to sculpt those natural abilities into athletic, artistic consistency. But one look at him on the mound for the Durham Bulls, whether hurling a wild pitch at his catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or delivering a laser-sharp fastball down the pipe, betrays an actor who isn’t the slightest bit believable from the perspective of pitching form and mechanics. It is surprising to me every time I see this movie that Shelton, himself an ex-minor league player who fashioned the script from his experiences playing the game, wouldn’t have found a pitching coach who could have better schooled the actor rather than let this glaring visual tell stay in the finished film.

Even a movie like Sam Raimi’s For Love of the Game, which lavishes a lot of cinematic attention on the minute processes of pitching (Costner is far more believable as a Detroit Tigers pitcher here than was his Bull Durham cast mate, but then so was Tatum O'Neal), distracts from a certain verisimilitude by suggesting, through its central dramatic conceit, that a washed-up pitcher who finds himself hurling a perfect game would be able to shift his focus enough to reflect on major moments and failures in his life over the course of nine innings. To the extent that such an idea works at all, credit must be given to Costner and Raimi, but I can’t imagine even the most mediocre pitcher in an actual game being able to face a major league line-up without the most thorough concentration he could muster. The minute he starts musing about his love life, the pitches start missing their mark and he gets pulled by an irate manager before the story even has a chance to peak and tug at our heartstrings.

And a movie like The Natural, mystifyingly beloved by many a baseball purist, tries to get at the physical glory of the baseball player by means of every cinematic trick in the book—primarily artfully-applied slo-mo, slick editing, golden-hued cinematography and Randy Newman’s syrupy score, which in modern baseball coverage on TV has become synonymous with the triumphant majesty of the long ball. But all Barry Levinson’s movie does in the end is showcase, apart from the crusty quality of lived-in history brought to the dugout by Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth, a special kind of fabrication, the movie myth brought to bear on the myth of god-like feats of athletic prowess (which was, unless I misunderstand it, the opposite intention of Bernard Malamud’s book, from which the movie was ripped and restitched), all rendered in a showboating key of bombast and glowing nostalgia that exposes everything seen through its lens as phony.


Jon SooHoo

The ascendance of CGI and the Bay-Bruckheimer aesthetic to dominance in commercial American cinema doesn’t exactly raise my hopes that this deceptively simple goal of presenting the particular physics of the game, coupled with the sights, sounds and smells of what it is to really be down on the field, will ever fully be achieved. It is good that Shelton is still in there taking his hacks (his film of the nonfiction book on the BALCO steroids scandal, Game of Shadows is due soon, as well as the intriguingly titled Our Lady of the Ballpark which is currently in preproduction), but I can’t think of another filmmaker I’m already aware of who could or would be interested in taking a stab at really capturing the game from the inside out. To this end, I would submit that the best place to look for this kind of eye toward detail and showcasing fleeting moments