From Alex Belth at Bronx Banter comes some happy news:
“Took the train uptown, and still with time to burn, got out at 72nd street and decided to casually walk up Broadway. I had the headphones back on as I crossed Broadway and 78th street and saw what looked like Abe Vigoda on the east side of the block. Is Abe Vigoda still alive? I thought. Only one way to find out, so I removed one earphone and yelled out, ‘Hey, Mr. Vigoda.’ And the old man, bent, wearing a beige cardigan, raised his right arm, cane in hand, nodded at me and continued walking down the block.”
Tessio the Fish, looking good at 88 and hard at work on not one, not two, but three new movies. May we all have such productive senior citizenry in our future as Mr. Abe Vigoda.
Pretentious, sublime, or an equal measure of both? You make the call. The whole director T-shirt line can be seen at the Cinefile Web site. I like the idea behind the Herzog shirt, but the distance between Danzig and the director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God might be too big a conceptual leap for most. I’ve always wanted a De Palma shirt too, but I’m not a fan of the original Def Leppard logo that’s been adapted for the shirt. And as much as the grafting of the two names works, I could never wear a Van Halen-derived Von Trier T-shirt, no matter how hard Lars rocks the cradle. For me, Ozu is the best because I love the man's films, it’s a big, clean image, the phonetic connection linking the filmmaker and the shrunken, fuzzy-headed rock god is as precise and clear as the difference between their outputs is vast and unbridgeable, and it’s probably the one I personally would look the least dopey wearing. (Please, if you see me sporting it someday and it turns out I’m wrong, just leave me to my illusions…) And speaking of nifty T-shirts, there’s a great selection of must-haves for the film-geek in your family to be found here. Remember, Father’s Day is a-comin’! (And I get dibs on the one for R.D. Trucking.)
Brian Quinn and Eric Caidin, the dedicated programmers of the twice-monthly New Beverly Grindhouse Film festival, broke format for their Tuesday night series last night with pleasing results. Rather than sticking with the loosely demarcated time frame of mid ‘60s to mid ‘80s, from whence most of the programming for the popular Grindhouse Night comes, they chose to highlight a relatively new film which itself harkens back to the spirit of the grimy, grainy, “realistic” films that made up the aesthetic of the films most typically highlighted. What’s most immediately captivating about Plague Town (2008) is the confidence with which first-time feature filmmaker David Gregory, directing from a script he wrote with John Cregan, take the low-budget independent horror film back to a set of pre-postmodern roots much more entangled with the Wes Craven of The Hills Have Eyes than he of Scream.
Plague Town even pays tribute to The Hills Have Eyes in its basic narrative set-up, though its pay-off, it has to be said, is as eerie and ambiguous as Craven’s post-nuclear nuclear family riff was relentless and crude. An American family, broken by divorce and headed by a father and new stepmother who must preside over the wounds of their angry and dysfunctional brood, take a vacation to Ireland in the hopes of reconnecting with their ancestry and bonding as a new unit. As in the Craven film, Gregory and Cregan don’t really find a way for us to get past this group’s general pettiness. They are, for the most part undistinguished in their antagonisms-- oldest sister Jessica (Erica Rhodes) takes out her anger and aggression on the entire family, but especially on her more introspective (and equally bitter) younger sister Molly (Jossalyn DeCrosta, quite good). Her father (David Lombard) and stepmother Annette (Lindsay Goranson) cannot figure out how to get their family to enjoy the trip and their surroundings, and they are equally annoyed by Robin (James Warke), the arrogant Britisher she’s picked up and invited along on the trip. The family, of course, gets lost in the Irish countryside, setting up their inevitable discovery of and dispatch at the hands of a mysterious band of mutated children, who are quite effective (due to some nice make-up creations and one memorably creepy bit of costume design) as the movie’s objects and purveyors of grisly horror.
Brian Quinn discusses Plague Town with director David Gregory.
Where Plague Town has it all over The Hills Have Eyes is in its canny use of its locale—Connecticut countryside masquerading as Irish countryside—to frame its horrors. Craven’s movie had the naturally forbidding desert as its backdrop, but the director and his cinematographer did little to exploit what they had at their fingertips to create a sense of the landscape closing in on their characters. However, Gregory excels in harvesting tension between the welcoming surroundings and the evils perpetuated in them by the bearers of local and very twisted family values. Gregory also displays, especially for a first-time director, a remarkable patience and assurance with the camera, allowing a rather inconspicuous style to take over the larger visual scheme of the movie. Combine that inconspicuous style with Gregory and Cregan’s resistance to over-explain just what is at the root of the madness overtaking this Irish village of the damned, and you’ve got a movie that feels much closer to the some of the Hammer films directed by Freddie Francis or Terence Fisher, or even Piers Haggard’s bewitched and beautiful Blood on Satan’s Claw, than to the typical 21st-century gross-out shocker. Plague Town is often quite creatively gory, but even so some may miss the crude jolts Gregory avoids that most modern horror directors can’t seem to resist including. For all audiences, the movie’s skin-crawling conclusion may indeed be played and staged with a bit too even a hand—it’s here, in the scenes with the utterly frightening Rosemary, the would-be child bride whose masked face and painted-on eyes covers unspeakable mutation (and provides the movie’s chilling poster images), that the movie could have used more of a playfully perverse De Palma-esque touch. As it is, though, Plague Town, while not exactly breaking new ground in the horror genre, works nicely in a relatively subdued tone, and it speaks well of Gregory and Cregan’s future as genre filmmakers that they would leap out of the box with such an assured first feature.
The official trailer for Plague Town.
As for The Sinful Dwarf, what really can or needs to be said? In my experience at least, exploitation shockers like this are almost never as clever or entertaining as their advertisements. How many times have we seen ads for “the most shocking” this, or “the most erotic” that, only to discover that the actual movie, more often than not crafted (if one can use such a highfalutin word) by stylistic nonentities, exists in a world of muffled sound, inert camerawork and zombified cast members, all of which contribute to the general thick coating of torpor that almost always takes over less than a third of the way through. It is a rare beast indeed that approaches the promise of forbidden (or at least socially deviant) fruit with anything remotely akin to truth in advertising. What we have here is one such beast. Let it be said that The Sinful Dwarf, directed by one Vidal Raski from a screenplay by Harlan Asquith and William Mayo, is one of the most genuinely demented movies I’ve ever seen. Raski, who is credited under this name with no other features according to IMDb (though he may have directed at least one other under a different name), displays a remarkably high ratio of bad to appropriate camera placement—in almost every shot the camera is where it shouldn’t be, and the movie has no claim to a recognizable narrative rhythm-- lurching and crawling and stopping and lurching to life again is the only pattern of its pace. However, The Sinful Dwarf arrives at its gruesome tackiness and perversity sincerely—the movie has virtually no sense of (intentional) humor, yet if it were made even 10 years later you’d have to suspect that there was a desperate camp sensibility behind it all. That said, the movie goes about its business with a lopsided trajectory that generates more honest scuzzy atmosphere, laughable absurdity and creeping dread than almost any movie I’ve ever seen.
Grindhouse Film Festival programmer Brian Quinn poses in front of the one-sheet for Abducted Bride, one of the many titles under which The Sinful Dwarf was repackaged and reissued to a presumably unsuspecting public. This very typical exploitation tactic was a favorite of producer-distributor Harry Novak, repackager extraordinaire, who was certainly not the only low-budget producer to traffic in this kind of deception. (The print we saw of The Sinful Dwarf had the original title clumsily chopped out and the nondescript font "ABDUCTED BRIDE", on a suitably lurid purple backing card, hastily spliced in to take its place.)
The vaguely Euro-Scandinavian otherworldliness of The Sinful Dwarf contributes mightily to the overwhelming sense of unease the viewer slips into almost immediately, but really, that’s only part of the story. The movie takes place almost entirely inside the world’s greasiest, most forbidding, musty and putrid-looking boarding house, where Peter and Mary (Tony Eades and Anne Sparrow-pseudonyms, I hope, for the sake of these actors) take up residence in order to save four pounds a week rent over what one presumes is a more expensive, less obviously hellish residence. The landlady, a rancid ex-cabaret singer named Lila Lash (Clare Keller) runs the place in a drunken stupor—she and a creepy friend (whose dental work we are given much too close a look at) make a daily date out of knocking down bottle after bottle of Beefeater while Lila performs old sub-Dietrich song-and-dance routines for her besotted pal. All this is plenty creepy enough. But it seems Lila has a son, Olaf, the titular slobbering, mouth-breathing perv who lures unsuspecting and nubile hotties to the attic, where he chains them up, hooks them on heroin and sells them as benumbed sex slaves to puffy, acne-scarred neighborhood johns. And when Lila and Olaf get a glimpse of Mary, who pours herself into tight-fitting sweaters (braless, of course) when she isn’t otherwise in full-frontal nude repose, they realize they simply must add her to their collection. A goodly portion of the film’s 92-minute running time is given over to following Olaf as he hobbles up and down the staircase, huffing and puffing and wheezing and cackling, taking advantage of the requisite, conveniently placed peep hole (so he and we can watch Peter and Mary having a near hard-core bang), grotesque choppers bared as if ready to chew down a tree, eyebrows arched insanely, as if they were two furry ski slopes meeting on the bridge of his nose, face twisted into a perpetually drooling leer.
Olaf, who is as obsessed with creepy little wind-up dolls as he is with the dirty pillows on those drugged-out unfortunates in the attic (“Vannnt too zee me ozzer toyisss?” he croaks in a skin-crawling butchery of dubbed English), is played with incredible conviction and absolutely no discernable talent by Torben Bille (he is billed only as Torben in the advertising and in the film’s credits). Torben was at one time a popular children’s TV host—one has to believe/hope his appearance in this shocker ended that career tributary rather swiftly—as well as the go-to actor whenever Swedish filmmakers needed a little person, in kind of the same way that Michael Dunn (best known for his recurring role as Dr. Miguelito Loveless on TV’s The Wild, Wild West) could be spotted everywhere on TV and the movies in the ‘60s and early ‘70s here in America. The difference being, of course, that Dunn was a good actor and Torben—well, Torben is not. (Someone once described Torben as Jack Black after having been put through a trash compactor, and that cackling portrait of him on the Sinful Dwarf poster is, incredibly, no exaggeration.) Never in my memory has the slimy conception of a character jibed so seamlessly with the unpleasant personage of the actor portraying him, which in turn works so claustrophobically in concert with the verite awfulness of that boarding house, the walls which seem to be closing in not only on Mary, as she waits there all day with increasing impatience while Peter goes out looking for work, but on us, the poor, trapped audience, for whom there is no escape from its ghastly oppressiveness. This foul fleapit makes Barton Fink’s Hotel Earle look like the Haunted Mansion.
(Play the Severin Films Sinful Dwarf featurette by clicking to Amazon.com here.)
In its own freakish way The Sinful Dwarf achieves a kind of perfection of its kind—its genuine, lived-in repulsiveness could never be consciously produced or reproduced, and it is compulsively watchable even as we acknowledge it as being utterly bereft of anything resembling the craft and art of film, qualities which produce the pleasures we usually go to the movies to experience. The Sinful Dwarf almost feels like it was produced in an alternate universe, and in a way, I suppose, it was—it’s a Bizarro-world phenomenon where the worse and more grotesque it gets, the more fully it achieves its singular positioning among genuine grindhouse classics, a place where guilelessness and lack of filmmaking acumen, genuine perversion, and balls-out sausage-factory cinema in the name of cooked books and bottom-line profit-making coalesce into a one-of-a-kind production. Seeing The Sinful Dwarf in a beat-up print apparently beamed directly to the New Beverly from Times Square circa 1973 was perhaps as mainline a grindhouse movie experience as is possible to achieve in this age of digital restoration and reverent repackaging of even the sleaziest, most unworthy titles. Just like Brian said I would, as soon as I got home last night I took a shower, and afterward I felt much better. That didn’t stop Torben from invading my dreams, however. He mustn't come visit me tonight. After I finish writing this, it’s off to the showers again. Out, damned dwarf!
Torben et al in the trailer for The Sinful Dwarf.
I should mention here too what Brian and Eric have in store for the rest of the month in the Grindhouse Film Festival. They have added a midnight double feature this coming Saturday, June 13, in memory of the late Marilyn Chambers which will feature Chambers’s first two hard-core Mitchell Brothers films, Resurrection of Eve and Behind the Green Door, and, schedule permitting, there should be some special guests and colleagues appearing to pay tribute to the actress. June has inadvertently become a tribute month across the board. On June 23 the gentlemen have assembled a terrific triple-feature in remembrance of exploitation director extraordinaire Ray Dennis Steckler, who died this past January. In addition to the rare opportunity to see Steckler’s eye-popping monster musical The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies (1964) and The Thrill Killers on the big screen, Eric recently uncovered some missing reels that have allowed for the third feature to be unexpectedly added: Steckler’s weirdo kiddie movie, the rarest of the rare, The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (1965). Brian promises some extra treats for that program as well. And finally, what was to be a celebration of the work of actor-director Don Edmonds, with the director himself in attendance, has turned into what Brian describes will be more like an Irish wake due to Edmonds’ May 30 death. Edmonds directed the infamous Nazisploitation classics Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S. (1975) and Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Shieks (1976). Both of those will screen along with Edmonds’ 1977 thriller Bare Knuckles, an a choice clip reel of Edmonds’ appearances on such shows as Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, The Munsters and many others will also be featured. This Don Edmonds memorial will screen two nights, Friday and Saturday, July 10 and 11.
The trailer for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, in Terrorama AND Eastmancolor!
The trailer for The Thrill Killers a.k.a. The Maniacs are Loose!, in hallucinogenic Hypnovision!
Finally, I'd like to point out that attending the Grindhouse Film Festival on Tuesdays at the New Beverly not only pays off in terms of grime accumulated on the eyes and in the soul, which may or may not be so easily showered away, but also, if you’re lucky, in lovely prizes as well. Last night Brian and Eric gave away some signed Herschell Gordon Lewis posters, some bootlegged copies of God Told Me To (provided by Larry Cohen himself—it’s a long story), and other bits of trashy memorabilia. But when Eric called out my ticket stub number I really lucked out. Brian awarded me two tickets to next Friday night’s Los Angeles Film Festival screening of the newest Coffin Joe shocker, starring writer-director Jose Mojica Marins as the bloodthirsty gravedigger in what is apparently the conclusion of this popular Brazilian movie series. The movie, entitled Embodiment of Evil (Encarnacao do demonio), looks to be suitably grotesque and in keeping with the tone of the previous Coffin Joe chapters, and I’m really excited (if a little apprehensive, after seeing the trailer below) about getting a chance to see this one theatrically, as it’s likely to go the way of straight-to-DVD in America, if at all. My sincere thanks to Brian and Eric for facilitating the corruption of my cinematic soul to the degree that you both have so far this year. I’m glad to be able to make the Grindhouse Film Festival a bit more of a regular destination, and having these two as hosts makes for a very entertaining way to keep the sordid spirit of these pictures alive, not only for the opportunity to trace their influences in more reputable modern motion pictures, but also to rediscover the what these movies are like to see as communal experiences rather than as isolated home-theater diversions. I was grateful for the roughed-up print, as well as the laughter and good-natured groaning and squirming evident all around me in the New Beverly during The Sinful Dwarf. It reminded me, in ways the movie itself did not/could not/refused to, of my shared humanity. Seeing it alone, with no one to turn to or laugh with or share in the shock, might just have been too much for my fragile little mind.
The second trailer for Embodiment of Evil-- beware, it gets pretty grisly, especially for a preview.
A bat boy by the name of Chad Scully sits on the bench with Joe Torre during a recent game. Notice any family resemblance? And do you get the feeling he's seeing the game just a little bit differently than the average bat boy? Wow...
It’s Grindhouse Night at the New Beverly tonight, the first of their two can’t-miss programs for the month of June, and keeping true to my threats, I’ll be there tonight to experience a screening of David Gregory’s Plague Town (2008), a reportedly terrifying throwback to the gritty vibe of many ‘70s horror classics which is now also available on DVD and Blu-ray from Dark Sky Films. Plague Town is coupled (if that’s the best term) with the re-emergence of a notorious New Beverly Grindhouse hit originally shown there a couple of years ago. It’s The Sinful Dwarf (1973), and although you can pick up a keen new DVD edition from Severin Films, New Beverly grindhouse guru Brian Quinn explains why your own personal copy, while perhaps providing pride of ownership, can never replace seeing it in a theater:
“Following Plague Town will be the return of a film that even the most hardened and jaded exploitation fans were shocked, amazed and scarred by in its previous Grindhouse screening two years ago. The Sinful Dwarf is a film that lives up to the warning "you'll want to take a shower after this one," and needs to be experienced sitting with an audience in a darkened theater as the well-worn 1970's print unspools before your unbelieving eyes. Who can resist a film with the tagline "A young bride...left alone to the lewd passions of an evil dwarf"? We certainly can't, and neither could the brave folks at Severin Films who recently released the film on an unsuspecting public in a beautiful new DVD edition. If you were at our previous screening of the film you know what to expect, so bring a couple of friends to experience it for the first time... though some of them may reconsider that friendship afterwards!”
Now, there’s a come-on worthy of David F. Friedman! Brian had me at “scarred”! I’ll file a quick update tonight or tomorrow, once the nightmares cease.
Greetings from the tailpipe end of what turned out to be a weekend loaded with unexpected technological inconvenience (washing machine went tits-up mid-load), hard-fought baseball (Dodgers split the second NLCS rematch of the season with two walk-off wins against the Phillies courtesy of Andre Ethier) and transcendent movie magic (the little ladies and I saw Up), followed by even more technological inconvenience-- computer division-- which resulted in a delay of weekend office work that kept me up until about 3:30 this morning finishing everything off for a 10:00 a.m. deadline. Boo-hoo. All signs point to a righting of the ship, normalcy-wise, though I do have a ballet recital featuring both daughters to look forward to tonight, a season-closing ceremony for my youngest girl’s tee-ball team on Friday, and in between those events two (2) inevitably teary gatherings to honor the departure of a good friend (coincidentally, the kindergarten teacher to both my daughters) from a 44-year teaching career. It’s one of those weeks that will be well worth the tread worn from the bottom of my sneakers, and with Up priming the pump Saturday night I can accurately predict that there will be a certain level of emotional exhaustion on tap by the end of Friday night as well. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the spending the week expressing to those who hopefully already know it how proud and appreciative my family and I are for their talents and generous effort.
Before all that, however, just a few scribble-scrabbles from the notepad, some of which are a bit musty in terms of date of freshness of the subjects at hand. But the topics have been hanging around and have somehow avoided being deleted out of the on-deck circle altogether, so I will try to address them now and try not to look too tired and oh-so-last week (or month, or longer) in the process.
First off, a couple of housekeeping items. Over the weekend Anne Thompson filed her own report on seeing Drag Me to Hell with us at the Mission Tiki Drive-in last Saturday night. It’s folded into a larger discussion of why it was difficult for many to predict that the Sam Raimi movie would not connect with the mass audience (and why it’s easy to see that Sam Mendes’ Away We Go won’t either). And just in case you aren’t sufficiently enticed yet, there’s a lovely pic of me giving the Anitra Ford-Price is Right treatment to the evening’s signature dessert. Click away!
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Last week Craig D. Lindsey, film critic for the Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer, invited me to participate in a podcast interview on his newspaper’s entertainment blog, Crizzle’s Critical Condition. That conversation is now available for your perusal. Craig warned me that he intended to hold my feet to the fire about Speed Racer and a number of other subjects, but the conversation, which started with some reflections on Don Siegel and Charley Varrick, quickly turned into an early-‘70s love-fest with the introduction of the topic of Freebie and the Bean. We managed to talk a little about Steely Dan and David Carradine before I finally got the hook. I haven’t heard it yet myself, though while I don’t harbor any illusions that anyone will come away changed by the interview it certainly was a lot of fun and, from my perspective anyway, the 35 minutes passed far too rapidly. I’m still ready to talk about Speed Racer if Craig decides a sequel is in order. I’ll just try not to mention either Alan Arkin, James Caan or Alex Rocco next time.
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Okay, it’s the first real box-office bomb of the summer, and though I’m not expecting another Speed Racer, I’ve heard enough from some folks I know who have seen Land of the Lost to make me believe that it still, despite all the retching over it in most of the reviews, might be worth seeing after all. That said, looks like there’s a new trend afoot in idea-starved Hollywood—big-budget adaptations not of old TV series, cartoons or even toys, but board games. Yes, some 23 years after the movie version of the Parker Brothers board game Clue got a raft of withering reviews and made barely a box-office ripple, the movie has developed a modest cult following, and apparently someone in the halls of power has begun to sit up and take notice. Word has it that Tropic Thunder scribe Etan Cohen and Enchanted director Kevin Lima are set to do up a psychedelic version of the popular Candy Land game, and this same package deal with Hasbro may result in upcoming Universal releases based on Ouija, Battleship and—wait for it—Ridley Scott’s Monopoly. (All this is to not even mention the one we’re all waiting for, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a movie version of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. When asked to describe the project, one of the screenwriters said, “Disney had a lot of success with Pirates of the Caribbean, so this is their Pirates movie in space.” Personally, I’ll hold out for the big-budget, rollicking all-star comedy that is just begging to be made, hopefully in a resuscitated Cinerama format, of It’s a Small, Small, Small, Small World.)
But really, why even bother with the annoyance of trying to build a story around a board game? It’s been done, and 24 years ago to boot. Why not just move straight on down the food chain, if you will. If "they" (the Hollywood brain trust) want a pre-sold sea adventure, one with a character attached, a new pre-sold Pirates that could be sequeled well into the next two decades, then what's stopping some genius from developing Cap’n Crunch—The Movie, preferably directed by someone like Kenneth Branagh, or maybe Martin Scorsese, or maybe even Greg Mottola, just so we can throw another indie director into the gaping maw of Hollywood tent-pole hell never to be heard from again? Get Jerry Bruckheimer behind it and not only do you have the breakfast cereal and toy marketing tie-ins sewn up, but you could even shoehorn a cameo from Jack Sparrow in there as well, if things start looking desperate for parts 2 or 3. I need a Bayer. Wait! That’s it! Call Warners! I’ve just got the next big thing—feature-length adaptations of “classic” TV commercials. Mama mia, that’s a spicy meteor-sized meatball on a collision course with Little Italy!
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And now that I’ve brought up meatballs, how about some links:
Marilyn Ferdinand sets her fine descriptive style loose on the uncut version of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), a consideration which includes thoughts on blasphemy, sexual vs. religious ecstasy, and a vivid recounting of the film’s infamously excised “Rape of Christ” sequence. A must read.
A while back one of the quiz questions was “Best Movie of 1974,” a bountiful year which, upon close examination, is not at all an easy one to boil down in terms of a top five or ten of greatness. Nevertheless, Robert Horton> gives it a shot.
Dave Blakeslee has set himself an even more daunting, and pleasurable, challenge—writing about the entirety of the Criterion catalog, one by one. He’s up to #145.
Greg F., the artist formerly known as Jonathan Lapper, has been thinking about Why Being a Cinephile Matters, and the question, posed in meme form, is one worth thinking about. Greg has some thoughts, as does Marilyn Ferdinand. I have promised to muse upon this one and offered my own, which I hope to have ready for fish wrap sometime this week.
And never one to be outdone, Bill R. passes along the Movie Reading Meme with a tantalizing request for my participation. I accept the challenge, even though one of the biggest sources of frustration of my adult reading life sits squarely atop Bill’s number-one perch: Flicker by Theodore Roszak. I love this book, but I got derailed in my reading of it late last year, during a particularly grueling period of study, and have not picked it back up since. Not for lack of desire to do so, to be sure. But enough time has passed now that I really need to just start over and give myself another chance to luxuriate in this book, which will resonate with anyone who dares call himself a cinephile. In the meantime, I will satisfy myself with as much of Bill’s account as I can greedily consume until the specter of spoilers begins raising its hooded head. My own list is coming, Bill, I promise.
Then there’s Jim Emerson, typically brilliant and thought-provoking on why some -filmmakers have trouble selling themselves and their work, and why some don’t.
Matthew Kiernan, the guy who started the whole Freebie and the Bean revival in my head, checks in with another Movie for Men Who Like Movies, Patrick Swayze in Road House (1988).
After Matthew’s ode to philosophizing bouncers, delve deeply into Noel Vera’s sharp -observations about Richard Fleischer’s equally sharp noir, The Narrow Margin (1952).
And then wash it all down with the tasty brew of love for Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre available from The Self-Styled Siren. Campaspe recently caught up with Don Siegel’s The Verdict, which features the two great character actors, but she doesn’t restrict her musings to that film. Here’s a sample:
“How well these two always managed to flesh out relationships that were somewhat superficial on paper. In The Maltese Falcon their more-than-business association is startlingly plain, but it's all in the playing. When Lorre attacks Greenstreet, yelling `You, you imbecile! You bloated idiot! You stupid fathead!’ we hear not just a criminal sidekick but also a frustrated ex-lover. If it weren't for the year it was made, you would expect Lorre to follow with recriminations about Greenstreet's lack of libido or how he got too flirtatious with last night's waiter. Three Strangers has them playing two characters who, for once, have no history as a couple nor any potential in that way, but the wary way they size each other up suggests all manner of unspoken perceptions. In The Mask of Dimitrios, where Lorre plays a Holly Martins-type writer drawn into Greenstreet's intrigues, Lorre gives hints that his fascination with Greenstreet may have to do with aspects of the big man's lifestyle that aren't being spelled out on screen. `He was my friend!’ Lorre protests at the end of the movie. `Well, he wasn't my friend, but he was a nice man. Compared to you he was...’ It could be the epigraph for their whole eight-movie association.
If you haven’t yet bookmarked Campaspe’s site, for God’s sake, what are you waiting for?
Finally, from the If I Could've Only Said It Half As Well Department, here’s David Edelstein and a beautiful appreciation of David Carradine.
After having missed the movie in theaters least year, I finally got around to the DVD of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, and at the risk of my street cred amongst the blogging community (of which there is admittedly very little to fritter away), I have to admit indifference, at best, to the cold-sweat puzzle-making that this writer-turned-director seems to have fashioned as a singular personal style. I was (and continue to be) in various states of love with the films made from Kaufman’s scripts for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (by George Clooney), Being John Malkovich (by Spike Jonze) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (by Michel Gondry), at the same time as I have to confess a serious amount of aggravation toward Adaptation (also by Spike Jonze) and ignorance of Human Nature (also by Michel Gondry). Synecdoche, New York is Kaufman’s directorial debut, and he is perhaps the only person who could have gotten a handle on the scrambled interior narrative of this most gnarled, deadpan and depressed descendants of 8½. Unfortunately, he is also the one person unable to step back far enough from the self-actualized rubble to at least try to adequately visualize some of the movie’s ideas about artistic crisis and the decay/death/mutation of self, which are startling due to more to the scale of commitment of Kaufman and his actors rather than to any fresh insight or urgency. But despite its ambition, Synecdoche, New York ultimately feels puny to me-- it's a death-obsessed downward shot that nonetheless indulges in a sort of fetishistic romanticizing of its own fatalism. (The movie lacks only a soundtrack scored by the world’s tiniest string section wringing out endless variations on the old Hee Haw ditty, "Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me.")
The movie is nothing if not an honorable try, but it comes nowhere near the kind of audacious high-wire energy necessary to sell these notions of the mysteries of the creative process, perhaps because they all seem to be warmed over from Kaufman’s previously documented navel-gazing, perhaps because this first-time director just isn't up to the challenge he's set for himself. (All the wet-blanket, self-conscious referencing and toying with dopplegangers is enough to make Pirandello throw up his hands.) In Synecdoche the writer-director seems to be mired in a spiraling depression that he is incapable of adequately dramatizing, so he settles for allusions and various clever visual linkage designed to provide emotional ballast and balance for the long dead spots where there’s little for viewers to do but either congratulate themselves for spotting the obtuse references or notice how flat everything else is in the absence of genuine-- as opposed to abstract-- emotional resonance. (The one exception to this observation resides in Samantha’s Morton’s lovely work as longtime lover of our putrefying protagonist, the ultimate Method role for thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman. Horton manages to connect with and embellish upon something resembling the heart and soul of a real person and, as a result, breathe some real life into the hermetically sealed frame. This is a little like admitting that Maureen Stapleton red-clad life-force was the only bearable aspect of Interiors.) I understand that for some this movie is a emotional epiphany, and I respect that; all I can say is, those who respond to it are as welcome to Synecdoche, New York as I am to David Cronenberg’s film of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, an impossible narrative that covers the same ground but does so with Cronenebrg’s visual acumen and filmmaking chops at its disposal, which coalesce and somehow make the damned thing work brilliantly.
I’m sure I must be paraphrasing David Edelstein’s thoughts (or someone’s) when I say that the Kaufman of Synecdoche seems like a very compressed version of the Woody Allen of Stardust Memories, clearly distrustful of the notion that comedy is capable of conveying the ideas he so desperately wants to deal with. (Synecdoche seems like it wants to be funny, but someone just won’t let it.) It's as if making/letting his audience laugh was somehow a concession to an unbearable lightness for Kaufman, or perhaps a corruption of the insistence of his big ideas. Unfortunately, the ideas aren’t so big, and there are many far less pretentious movies that have approached or directly dealt with the ideas present here about the little death and infinite sadness at the core of the act of artistic creativity-- Naked Lunch being but only one-- that don’t come off as punishments. I think Synecdoche is essential viewing for anyone interested in what singular films can and cannot do, and of course for anyone charting the progress (or diversions) of Charlie Kaufman, but that doesn’t make it a masterpiece, or even particularly good. Kaufman’s single-minded pursuit of his interior Escher painting is, I suppose, what will ultimately cement his status as a visionary, but the risk of incessantly charting that interior landscape as your Great Subject, as Fellini did to ever decreasing returns, is in the forbiddingly insular landscape of the films themselves. I wonder what would happen if Charlie Kaufman befuddled everyone and did a job-for-hire as his next project. Whatever the result, it’s a lot more rewarding to contemplate the possibilities of a $100-million Kaufman remake of Fantastic Voyage than it is sitting through Synecdoche, New York.
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From left: Andrew Grant, Karina Longworth and Chris Beaubien
One of the best things on the splashy DVD of Synecdoche, New York is the DVD extra “Infectious Diseases in Cattle: A Blogger’s Roundtable,” in which five reputable and respectable Internet-based film critics, apparently hand-picked by Kaufman himself, chew the fat for a half-hour or so about what they thought about the movie. The writers—Glenn Kenny, Andrew Grant, Karina Longworth, Chris Beaubien and Walter Chaw-- are eloquent in expressing what about the movie got under their skin so, and in detailing some of the points of order that will have escaped those who were worn down by the movie’s narcissistic trajectory. No matter that I disagreed with their conclusions and could not relate to their experience with the film-- I enjoyed seeing these folks getting this forum so much, and that they used it to talk in such captivating ways about the film, that I wish they’d made room for a dissenting view. Now, before anybody writes in and accuses me of jealousy, know that a) this is a New York club (except for Chaw, and congratulations, Walter, if Sony got off the dime for your plane fare) and b), I have almost zero desire to appear on camera talking about anything. This is not my backhanded way of saying I should have been in the room with these folks, though, in other circumstances I’d welcome the opportunity to hoist a beer with any one of them.
I understand that Kaufman and producer Anthony Bregman were looking more for a respectable exegesis of what Kaufman was trying to do as a writer-director, and for fans of the movie and of film criticism I think you’d have to say these five fine filmbrains (sorry, Andrew) succeeded. But I think the scope of the discussion could have been fruitfully expanded, without turning the whole enterprise into a rowdy McLaughlin Report for cinephiles, had someone been invited who could have eloquently expressed the ways in which the movie doesn’t work. David Edelstein or Stephanie Zacharek, for example, are smart folks who didn’t respond rapturously to the movie and could have brought a welcome diversity to the gathering. As it is, this blogger’s roundtable, while not strictly for the already converted, may best be appreciated by the Kaufman choir. But if the idea catches on and more filmmakers promote the notion of gathering writers together for more DVD gab fests like this one, I hope that there will be more room left at the table for the one or two redheaded stepchildren who may be trying to shout above all the praise and call attention instead to the director standing in the corner, holding court in his birthday suit.
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