RAY DENNIS STECKLER 1938-2009

Over at Pop Matters, Bill Gibron remembers and appreciates the life and career of Ray Dennis Steckler, cult filmmaker responsible for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, who died January 7 at the age of 70.

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"PLEASURES WORTHY OF GUILT" REDUX

Updated January 13 9:26 pm

Not counting a couple of nervous-nelly test posts, the inaugural contribution to this blog, which started off with a different name and would eventually come to be known by its current handle, was a long piece I wrote just for the hell of it sometime in 2003 or early 2004 called “Pleasures Worthy of Guilt.” It was typically self-indulgent, an essay initially written without the contribution of an editor’s perspective, and as such it gave prospective readers in on the ground floor a pretty good idea, as it turned out, of what they would be in for were they to decide to come back to this site for more. In fact, it was this article which inspired the very first comment I ever received on this blog, from a reader known only as Frobisher. It is reprinted here in its entirety exactly as it was left here:

“After reading your blog may i be presumptious enough to say you could have done with serious sub-editing. It was long-winded and bloated, sometimes less really is more!"

I never heard from Frobisher again and have always assumed he found more verdant, succinct and tightly maintained pastures elsewhere in his pursuit of good Internet-based film writing. However, less than three months later I did hear out of the blue from one Peet Gelderblom, writer and publisher of a web site I greatly admired, the now-defunct 24 Lies a Second, who asked me if he and his partner, James Moran, could buff the edges of the piece a bit and publish it amongst the other pieces featured there, pieces that featured writing and thinking I felt far outstripped my own. I eagerly agreed, and in addition to embarking on the process of getting the piece in better shape Peet and I began a friendship that has now outlasted 24 Lies itself. In the wake of the site’s shuttering last year, Peet and Keith Uhlich, current editor-in-chief of another esteemed film site, The House Next Door, decided to republish all the essays that were a part of the history of 24 Lies. And now, it seems, we’ve arrived at the moment of the official reissue of “Pleasures Worthy of Guilt.”


When Peet and Keith initially suggested republishing it I had mixed feelings. I was sure I would have issues with my own writing style, which feels different (to me, at least) than what it did back in 2004, thanks largely to the experience of writing this blog, and also thanks to the terrific opportunity I’ve had to work and interact with folks like Peet, Keith, Matt Zoller Seitz and countless others whose paths I’ve crossed in the past four years. But also my attitude toward some of the movies (one in particular), and indeed to the very idea of a guilty pleasure, had changed significantly. After some thought, rather than open a Pandora’s box of tinkering with the body of the piece itself, I decided it was a better idea to allow Keith and The House to republish the piece as it appeared at 24 Lies (which was a significant improvement over what Frobisher and others initially read here). I would, however, attach some thoughts in a postscript as a reward for those stalwart enough to make it through the original roughly-7,600 words and try to deal with some of the changes in my own attitude toward the movies and what I wrote about them.

This is all, then, just my long-winded way of letting you know that Keith has republished “Pleasures Worthy of Guilt” as a feature on today’s edition of The House Next Door. I invite you to check it out if you’ve never read it, refamiliarize yourself with it if you have, and drop a comment either there or here if you’d like. I’d be curious to know if your reactions in any way mirror my own. And Frobisher, if you’re still out there, I’d love to hear from you too.

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UPDATE! My friend Don brings it to you via YouTube, just one of the memorable moments from The Boys from Brazil, this one featuring John Rubenstein calling on one of the Boys (puckered, upper-crust British model), the role essayed as no one else could have by young master Jeremy Black...



A thing of beauty is a joy forever...

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LES NEUF RÉSOLUTIONS DU CINÉMA 2009 (with no apologies to Jean-Luc Godard)

The following is a response to another tag from Bill over at The Kind of Face You Hate; this time Bill instructs us, via Adam Ross of DVD Panache, to come up with nine cinema-related resolutions for the new year, ones that we could conceivably have a chance at keeping. Here, with one to grow on, is the dark cloud of obligation I have concocted for myself.

1) In the interest of broadening my cinematic horizons (and giving less and less attention to whatever new superhero franchises come wiggling down the Hollywood pipe), I will make better progress on paring down that list of unseen foreign films than I did in 2008. There are some movies on the list now that no longer belong there, but those that remain a mystery to me far outnumber the ones with which I have since become familiar. That really must change.

2) In that same spirit, I will see every movie on this list before the ball drops on 2009 a mere 12 months from now. (I have it within my power to scratch three of them this January alone! Hey, Andrew, are we still on for God’s Angry Man?)


3) I will see more movies in revival theaters and repertory cinemas than I do first-run features in multiplexes.

4) I will relearn to be a more disciplined reader. Right now there are probably 20 books on various shelves in my house that have my bookmarks in them—novels, nonfiction, film criticism, collections of dirty jokes, you name it. Ever since my children were born my ability to find time to sit down for an extended period of time with a good book has significantly dissipated. (Yes, girls, I’m blaming it on you so, when you’re 20-ish and I’m even more broken-down and beaten up than I already am, maybe we can have our own phony-baloney Evan Rachel Wood/Mickey Rourke-style moment of reconciliation. But I will not get an Oscar nomination for it.) However, school will be over soon and the distractions from literature will be again minimized, at least for a while. It will again become possible for me to read a book that doesn’t rely on phrases like “California content standards” or “zone of proximal development” to ground its subject matter. And the first thing I’m going to do is resume, or perhaps even restart, Flicker, the best, most entertaining and entrancing novel I’ve ever stopped reading cold..

5) In the spirit of Bill’s Tarr/Syberberg double-header, I will not only seek out Satantango (which will be my first Bela Tarr movie), I will trade Our Hitler for Berlin Alexanderplatz and then, just to prove that I’m no slice of Eastern Eurotrash, I’ll throw in an all-day marathon of the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy too. After all that, nothing over 92 minutes in 2009! (I’m probably kidding about this last part.)

6) Once again, I will see no movie starring Kate Hudson in 2009, especially if she’s costarring with Matthew McConnaughey and/or wearing bridal gear. I reserve the right to change my mind if she should unexpectedly appear in another bayou-set horror opus opposite the likes of John Hurt and Gena Rowlands






7) I don’t care how goddamn hungry I get-- no more movie theater popcorn! I vow that the only kernels to pass my lips during feature films projected in any public auditorium will be the Orville Redenbacher 94% Fate-Free Smart Pop variety smuggled in courtesy of my none-too-conspicuous backpack (unless I’m at the New Beverly, where the popcorn is not only good, but it supports something other than the corporate coffers of Mssrs. AMC, Mann and Pacific). However, I cannot make the same vow as regards the bubbly soda pop. The carbonated allure of a freshly fountain-poured Diet Pepsi is just too much for this weak, thirsty man to resist. (Besides, they get all room-temperaturey when I put ‘em in the backpack.)


8) I will try not to devote every spare moment before April 1st to The MLB Network (but I won’t try very hard…)

9) I will try to remember that writing this blog is a pleasure and a privilege, not a duty, and that the world will not end if I make less than four posts a week. I’ve been getting better about this, but the adrenaline generated by being productive and connecting with a readership, however modest, is addictive and, dismaying as it may be at times, I have to realize that I don’t have as much time as I’d like to devote to SLIFR, I’m likely to have even less in the future, and that I must learn to be okay with that.

10) That said, the next thing I post on this blog will be my somewhat delayed year-end blow-out. (I’ll just have to come to terms with not having yet seen Synedoche, New York, or A Christmas Tale, or…)

Happy New Year, everyone!

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"ONE ON'T CROSSBEAMS GONE OUT ASKEW ON TREADLE!" *

* Translation: Trouble at the SLIFR mill

Updated in bold Tuesday, January 6

Updated ONCE AGAIN in bold Sunday, January 11

It has come to my attention, through the conscientious communiqués of several SLIFR readers since the holidays began, that there have been some problems when it comes to reading this blog. (No, I mean other than the ones involving ability to express opinion, writing style and general agreeability or lack thereof.) It seems that some readers have been, for about two weeks now, seeing the (Alert: Dario Argento reference) deep red of the sidebar take over from the usual pale yellow on which the black type text usually sits. It looks like this…


when it oughta look this.

And it ain’t very readable, that black text on that deep red background.

So, after a polling of those concerned e-mailers, it was quickly determined that what the folks who were having problems had in common (including myself, whenever I access the blog at my office computer) was that we were all using Mozilla Firefox browsers. Apparently there’s something that needs to be tweaked, yanked, jerked or otherwise manhandled in order to keep this from happening to those of you who, in a free society, choose to use Mozilla Firefox to navigate the whitewater of the Internet. Being the technical incompetent that I am, I will be consulting with the many geniuses that surround me in the hopes of making up for my inadequacy with HTML code and getting that puzzlement righted as soon as possible. Of course, if any of you reading this have any suggestions they would most eagerly be accepted. Faithful reader and friend PSaga advises that clicking on individual entries seems to restore the template properly, and it does seem to work for me. But until such time as I can tell you that the problem has been taken care of across the board, if you're a Mozilla Firefox user you might want to trust your online reading experience to Internet Explorer or some other able browser when you read SLIFR over the next few days. This is serious, folks. I’ll accept responsibility for rotting your brain, but your eyes are sacred.

UPDATE Sunday, January 11: Well, it seems like we (and by "we" I mean "not me") may have zeroed in on the problem. A reader going under the moniker California dropped a comment this morning that is well worth reprinting here, for those of you who may still have some curiosity about this situation. It went a little something like this:

"I don't think it's just a matter of 'Firefox is no good, use IE.' The reason that the individual posts look fine but the main page doesn't, is that there's a single post there causing trouble.

When you look at the snowed-in drive-in post on its own (here) you get the red background error. So when that post is bumped off of the main page, the problem will move from the main page to the first 'Older posts' page. Problem not quite solved, but less noticeable.

Which piece of the code is actually causing the trouble I have no idea, but it's probably an easy if you know what it is."

It so happens that I can recall noticing the bleeding red for the first time round about when I first published that apparently troubled drive-in entry, so I will be very interested to see if California's theory turns out to be true. Once a few more posts get added to the SLIFR main page and that drive-in post gets bumped to the "Older Posts" section we may very well see this problem if not exactly go away, then at least move to a less conspicuously annoying position. Thanks, California, for sharing your astute observations!

MASTER DISASTERPIECES

Sir Laurence Olivier and I sharing a prescient moment this past Thanksgiving regarding the Masters of Disaster: The Golden Age of Cataclysmic Cinema series currently on screen at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian theater

Better late than never, I really would be remiss if I managed to start off 2009 by neglecting the first series of the year from the good and true film geeks who operate the American Cinematheque, in the heart of Hollywood, at the Egyptian Theater. As devoted to the art and craft of the movies as they are, these programmers have never been keen to raise their brows too high and can often be found celebrating avenues of cinema that defy accepted standards of taste, featuring movies that have been derided or avoided altogether by the general critical community. That longstanding tradition of celebrating the redheaded stepchildren of popular film continues this weekend with a series that ought to raise the circulatory rate of a certain element of filmgoers, those who came of age during Hollywood’s golden age of disaster epics, roughly 1972-1977. The new series, entitled Masters of Disaster: The Golden Age of Cataclysmic Cinema, stretches over six nights and, while not exactly exhaustive in its representation of the nooks and crannies of the disaster film in all its various incarnations, the Cinematheque promises an excellent overview of the elemental essentials of the genre (water, fire, seismic shock) that, in its second weekend, extends to include disasters of history, nuclear meltdown and terrorism that most definitely qualify, even if they don’t feature the histrionic heroics of George Kennedy.

(The issue of print availability prevented the inclusion of any of the Airport movies, or as I like to think of them the Ascension of Joe Patroni Parts I-IV—Patroni is the airport rep, played by Kennedy in all four airborne opuses, whose presence near one aviation crisis after another ought to have at least raised questions about his status as a bad luck charm, but seems only to have resulted in a promotion, from lowly tarmac supervisor up to Concorde pilot, over the course of one film to the next. As for the absence of movies like The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out… from the Cinematheque schedule, well, I suppose there really can be too much of a good thing.)

What you’ll be able to see on the big screen this weekend and next really is, then, the cream of the crop, for better or worse, from Hollywood’s mid-‘70s obsession with destruction. While I’m not as convinced as folks like Laurent Bouzereau that the blockbuster trend was as much exploration of the social zeitgeist as big-budget exploitation (and anyone who knows me knows I have very few issues with big-budget exploitation), I am happy as a clam to get another chance to see some of these films in the environs that suit them best. Tonight’s feature, which is probably concluding at about the same time as I’m writing this, is Ronald Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the picture that, buoyed by its excellent physical effects and ad campaign built around its Oscar-heavy cast, really kicked off the disaster movie phenomenon. I was 12 years old when the movie came out, and I never saw it until about a year and a half later, on one of its rereleases, but I was no less obsessed with it for that. Of course I was convinced that it could be nothing less, sight unseen, than one of the greatest movies ever made, and my vague awareness that most critics seemed, to one degree or another, to disagree with that assessment just made me take it and the movie even further to heart. The truth is, in terms of the quality of its acting, Neame’s sure, rather classical hand behind the camera, and the vividness with which that claustrophobic upside-down environment of the capsized Poseidon is rendered, The Poseidon Adventure actually turned out to be the high-water mark of the then-nascent disaster genre. This is not to say that some of the movies to follow didn’t also have high points to go along with their many lows, but merely that in The Poseidon Adventure the crudities are kept to a minimum and the memorable moments definitely outnumber those that didn’t then, as they don’t now, play quite as well. (It’s worth mentioning too that the recent remake directed by Wolfgang Petersen was a far better movie than either the reviews or the eventual box-office take suggested.)


The real treat for me personally will come tomorrow night, when Earthquake (1974) rattles the rafters of the Egyptian in the original Sensurround. Techies Brian Long of Meyer Sound Laboratories and Ron Surbuts of Dolby Laboratories have devoted themselves to recreating the original intensity of the audio effect that duplicated the seismic shocks and rumbling of an actual earthquake to accompany the blockbuster epic when it was originally released. Surbuts claims to have an original Sensurround box that has been upgraded to interface with modern surround-sound technologies, with subwoofers precisely like the ones that currently provide the deafening subterranean frequencies on tour with Metallica. “There’s going to be some firepower (at the Egyptian Saturday night),” Surbuts promises in a recent Los Angeles Times piece about the Cinematheque disaster movie series.


It was Earthquake and Irwin Allen’s follow-up to Poseidon, the best picture Oscar-nominated The Towering Inferno (1974), that really upped the ante on not only the spectacle of the special effects on display, but on the gigantic cast of actors recruited to fall victim to crumbling buildings and raging walls of fire. Inferno featured the biggest marquee names (Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire), but I’ve always preferred the cast of Earthquake, not only for its iconic Mount Rushmore of mayhem as personified by Charlton Heston and George Kennedy—one simply cannot think of the disaster movie without thinking of these two—but also because of the sheer perversity of conjuring a single movie which finds room for personalities as disparate and unlikely as Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene (as Gardener’s dad!), Marjoe Gortner, Richard Roundtree, Victoria Principal, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Gabriel Dell, Walter Matthau (as Walter Matuschansky) and even Genevieve Bujold. (Ms. Bujold will be present at tomorrow night’s screening.)


Earthquake is certainly also one of the more disreputable of the disaster hits, in pure movie terms, for what some would term its corn quotient, and what others might term its sheer lunkheadedness (though it can’t put a scratch on the genre’s true barrel-bottom scraper, The Swarm). In fact, in one of the all-time great carny dodges of deceptive advertising, the very fact of the movie’s none-too-stellar reputation is skirted by the folks who assembled the movie's recent home video release. There’s a quote on the back of the Earthquake DVD box from none other than Pauline Kael, who is quoted as saying of Earthquake, “The picture is swell!” Well, a quick look back to Kael’s original review reveals that the actual quote from her review goes a little more like this:

“You go to Earthquake to see L.A. get it, and it really does. The picture is swill (bold and italics mine), but it isn’t a cheat, like Airport 1975, which was cut-rate swill. Earthquake is a marathon of destruction effects, with stock characters spinning through. It isn’t fun, exactly; it’s ejaculatory, shoot-the-works filmmaking carried to the borderline of satire and stopping just short. Universal Pictures, which produced both, is a microcosm of the old Hollywood picture factories, streamlined for TV-age profits and totally cynical. These pieces of contemptuous entertainment might be the symbolic end point of the studio factory system, and there is something peculiarly gratifying about seeing the smoking ruins of the city that movies like this come from.”

I never saw Earthquake in a theater on its original release, a mere three years after the devastating real-life shaker of 1971 gave Los Angeles residents a dose of the real power of nature. The first time for me was at my local drive-in, sans Sensurround of course, and after that on NBC, where my friends and I tried to duplicate the rumbling bass with a couple of jerry-rigged car speakers attached to an FM-radio simulcast of the soundtrack, with unavoidably diminished results. But I always wondered in the back of my mind why audiences in the very city that had so recently experienced Sensurround for real would have been so eager to line up to see it (and hear it, and feel it) at their local movie palaces. Were they as masochistic as Kael's piece seems to suggest? Well, tomorrow night’s screening is going to be a first, one that has been a mere 34 years coming, and being a veteran of a few big shakers myself I may find out about that masochistic tendency firsthand. Ticket already in my possession, the only thing I can think of that would possibly cause me to miss it would be an actual 8.0 just before show time, and even then I might think seriously about sticking around. Somewhere Pauline Kael must be shaking her head in disbelief. (And re-reading reviews like her Earthquake piece makes me miss her even more.)

Sunday night the Egyptian presents Robert Wise’s The Hindenburg (1975), the one actual dalliance with history in the Hollywood disaster genre, and it’s not without its merits. But the movie, whose cinematic helium is essentially the buoyant, haunted score by David Shire, gets mired in a bit of speculative fiction about what actually happened on board the ship courtesy of screenwriters Nelson Gidding, Richard Levinson and William Link, whose script plays the cast-of-thousands game and provides a lively roster of players (including George C. Scott, Anne Bancroft, Roy Thinnes, Gig Young, Burgess Meredith and William Atherton) with precious little to do but bide their time until the gas hits the fan. Despite the sober intentions of the director and writers, the movie leaves a creepy taste in your mouth, something like disrespect (or at the very least disregard) for the real people who lost their lives as the ship descended upon New Jersey—a feeling underlined by the movie’s high-tech usurping of the actual disaster footage for its own fiery climax.


The Towering Inferno (1974), which gets the Egyptian unveiling Friday night, January 9, is a movie that never held up very well for me once I got over my initial infatuation with it. Perhaps another look at it on the big screen might help me remember what I loved about it as a movie-obsessed 14-year-old. But like The Hindenburg, frankly I’m a little queasy about the echoes of real-life horrors that have been imposed upon it in the past nine years that might possibly roar up and over the stereophonic explosions on the soundtrack.


Just thinking of seeing Susan Flannery plummet to her doom (she is on fire too?) lends a slight edge of pornography—deserved or undeserved—to the scenario of The Towering Inferno with which I’m not entirely comfortable. (She meets her fate because she’s screwing a married man—Robert Wagner—but that little smudge of morality, at least, has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden.) Feelings like these might seem like outright hypocrisy, or at the very least turning a blind eye to one group (earthquake victims) and not another (those who have died in cataclysmic skyscraper fires, the World Trade Center included), but the relative verisimilitude of Inferno over the more dated and obvious special effects (good though they may be) of Earthquake makes it harder, for this viewer at least, to take that crucial step away.

Next Saturday and Sunday the Masters of Disasters series culminates with two pictures that might not instantly come to mind when thinking of the disaster movie trend of the ‘70s, but they are pictures that certainly qualify in regard to their facility with presenting worst-case scenarios for human-generated disasters that, to one degree or another, have mirrored actual situations. Saturday January 10 you can relive The China Syndrome (1979) and remember what it felt like to see a movie whose proposed horrors—the very real possibility of nuclear meltdown—was being reflected in the newspapers by the looming Three Mile Island nuclear crisis during the film’s release. As a piece of filmmaking it’s often very clunky and obvious (director James Bridges indulges Jack Lemmon’s proclivity for the sweaty close-up that would be a harbinger for the rest of the actor’s career), but its undeniable power and currency seemed a grimly appropriate capper to a decade-long fascination with movie destruction that was threatening to take over reality.


And finally, Sunday affords a very rare opportunity to see the flawed but essentially powerful (and underrated) Black Sunday (1977), directed by John Frankenheimer from Thomas Harris’ page-turning thriller about an Israeli agent (Robert Shaw) trying to prevent the bombing of the Super Bowl by terrorists led by a deranged Vietnam vet (Bruce Dern). This movie was an essential movie-going experience for me as a young film fan—the sense of spectacle and human drama worked exceptionally well for me, even as I was aware of some of its excesses in performance and conception. I have strong memories of this picture and would be very interested to see if the movie I remember bears any resemblance, especially in this day and age when terror has become an inescapable fact that colors our entire lives, to the one that will play next weekend, 31 years down the line. I also look forward to seeing Marthe Keller in black kitty-kat eye shadow again, as the seductive terrorist who goads Dern into his violent acts—Black Sunday was the epicenter of a major cinema crush on Keller for me, one that started with Marathon Man (1976) but was quickly defused by duds like Bobby Deerfield, Fedora and The Formula. For its pleasures, high and low, and for the resonances with modern life that it eerily prefigures, Black Sunday is, for me, alongside the comparatively silly Earthquake, the can’t-miss selection of this welcome festival.

(Tickets for all performances during the Masters of Disaster: The Golden Age of Hollywood Cataclysm and all other programs at the Egyptian and Aero theaters can be purchased here.)

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PROFESSOR KINGSFIELD'S HAIR-RAISING, BAR-RAISING HOLIDAY MOVIE QUIZ

Well, here it finally is, Christmas Eve, and all through the blog, several pixels are stirring—Ah, forget it. The best thing about this day in particular, when it comes together, as it seems to have this year, is that sense of calm, of everyone and everything being slightly geared down in preparation for time spent together with family and friends. (If you’re a holiday traveler reading this, especially if you’re stuck in an airport waiting for a runway to thaw, please make any attitudinal adjustments with as much good humor as possible.) Right now the office is muted, the skies are properly overcast (this being Los Angeles, that simple fact is cause for celebration), and there’s a feeling that nothing is urgent, no deadlines are being dangled, there is nothing on anyone’s plate that can’t wait until at least Friday. It is with this in mind that I proudly present to you the latest curricular offering from SLIFR University, a brand-new quiz to be lingered over, savored, and, yes, hopefully completed while you sit by the holiday fire tippling a hot chocolate or a hot toddy, whatever your leaning may be. The rather more casual approach to this holiday quiz, suggested by the generosity of the seasonal attitude, is perhaps the best counterbalance to the personality of the professor chosen to present it. Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr., known for his grueling, unforgiving classroom demeanor and harsh, taxing and brutal testing procedures, has been asked to dial down the intensity in the spirit of sensitivity and giving typical of the end of the calendar year, and we think he’s come through fairly well. The length of this new quiz lands somewhere in between the briefest and the most long-winded of those questionnaires past, although Professor Kingsfield assures the rest of the staff that the queries are no less demanding, in their own familiar way, than any you might have previously encountered. The gruff educator has asked us to remind you, however, that when you deposit your answers in the comments section below, please remember to cut and paste the questions and include them along with your answers for easier reading and referencing. Otherwise, unlike the Kingsfield Pressure-Cooker Bar Exam, or the Kingsfield Pop Quiz of Terror, there are no time constraints—complete the quiz at your leisure and return your responses for the entire class to enjoy. So then, if your pencils are sharpened and you’ve no need to get up out of your seat for a bathroom break or grab a tissue or anything else that might distract your neighbors, you may begin at any time. And please remember to have a safe and happy holiday season while you’re at it! Mr. Hart, a question already?...

1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?

2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice?

3) Ida Lupino or Mercedes McCambridge?

4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks

5) It’s been said that, rather than remaking beloved, respected films, Hollywood should concentrate more on righting the wrongs of the past and tinker more with films that didn’t work so well the first time. Pretending for a moment that movies are made in an economic vacuum, name a good candidate for a remake based on this criterion.

6) Favorite Spike Lee joint.

7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady?

8) Are most movies too long?

9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.

10) Create the main event card for the ultimate giant movie monster smackdown.

11) Jean Peters or Sheree North?

12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?

13) Favorite road movie.

14) Favorite Budd Boetticher picture.

15) Who is the one person, living or dead, famous or unknown, who most informed or encouraged your appreciation of movies?

16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.)

17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar?

18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other.

19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie.

20) Tatum O’Neal or Linda Blair?

21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.)

22) Favorite Claude Chabrol film.

23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid.

24) Dennis Christopher or Robby Benson?

25) Favorite movie about journalism.

26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?

27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood.

28) Paul Dooley or Kurtwood Smith?

29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.

30) Your hope for the movies in 2009.

31) What’s your top 10 of 2008? (If you have a blog and have your list posted, please feel free to leave a link to the post.)

BONUS QUESTION (to be answered after December 25):

32) What was your favorite movie-related Christmas gift that you received this year?

Happy holidays to all y'all, and a happy new year too!

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HAPPY HOLIDAYS, EVERYONE!

To you and yours, happy holidays and safe, private driving, everyone!

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