WHO'S AFRAID OF RANDOLPH SCOTT?

Larry David, that's who.

COFFEE, TEA, OR HUBRIS WITH A BLUSH? Dennis Answers Prof. Brainerd's Christmas Vacation Quiz

(NOTE: I really wanted to finish this list of answers and post it on the comments page of "Professor Brainerd's Christmas Vacation Quiz" tonight. But as my list stretched out onto the 10th page, I realized a couple of things: first, I can really run off at the mouth (or keyboard, as it were), and second, in an act of embarrassing hubris, due to the length of my answers, I figured it'd be better to post them as a separate article. I resisted the second decision for some time, until my wife looked at my copy and said, "Of course it should be it's own article, dummy. You'll burst the comments column with all those words. Besides, it's your blog, and you can do what you want to with it." Well, that was reason and validation that I certainly couldn't resist, so, hubris and all, my answers are available below. You'll notice that, as of early Thursday morning, there are none of the links and pictures that would normally accompany a typical SLIFR article, especially one of this size. The reason: As I type this, the clock is striking 1:00 a.m., and to take the time necessary to insert all the links I want to insert here, plus find and size and paste all the pictures I want to use here, would, in all seriousness, have me up until 5:00 a.m. or later, and, frankly, I'm just a little too tired to do that tonight. So please look at this column, as it initially published, as a work in progress. The text is, hopefully, readable, as readable as it ever will be (barring some further typo-scrubbing to come later as well), and in good-enough shape to see the cathode ray light of day. The links and pics I will add later, hopefully in the next 24 hours, before I lose all will to do it (it will be a massive undertaking, similar to, but not nearly as much fun as, the compilation of the answers). For now, enjoy, if you have such a predisposition, my answers to Professor Brainerd's Christmas Vacation quiz-- the piece itself will get spiffier and more user-friendly real soon. And if you're on the fence and wanting to submit your own answers but still haven't yet, don't view this post as the door closing on further submissions-- far from it. I encourage lurkers and familiar friends alike to keep on dropping those lists in the comments column-- I'm probably looking at another two or three weeks before I start the compilation process for the entire group of submissions. And some great submissions there have been so far. I started out thinking that maybe this list of questions wasn't as provocative as quizzes past, but that was before your comments started coming in. The quality of the intelligence and humor of the observations and connections to forgotten material I've seen so far has been exhilarating. To those of you who've checked in, thank you very much-- you keep this whole enterprise vital and exciting for me and for everyone who reads Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. If you haven't yet done so, I hope you'll start thinking about your answers. -- Dennis)

UPDATE 1/8/2006 10:59pm: You may have noticed that I finally got around to posting the pictures! Enjoy!

Describe the moment when you knew you loved the movies

Two separate instances, both coming when I was approximately seven or eight years old, serve to mark the moment for me, and, interestingly, they’re both intertwined with the sensation of fear.

Sometime in October of 1967, when my family lived in Citrus Heights, California, a sleepy bedroom suburb of Sacramento, my mother treated my friends, my sister and I to an afternoon screening of The Jungle Book at the majestic Tower Theater in nearby Roseville. Before the movie began I had to go to the bathroom and somehow I talked my mom into letting me go by myself. I assured her I knew where the restroom was at and would be perfectly fine getting there and back on my own (I was seven years old at the time, and plenty independent.) I remember being mesmerized by the tall staircases that went up either side, and up the middle, of the Tower’s massive auditorium, and it was that fixation that must have provided the distraction. I climbed the stairs all the way to the top, daydreaming that I was on my way to the toilet, when in fact where I ended up was at the door of the projection booth. I opened the door, expecting to see urinals and stalls and sinks and towel racks, and instead I got a glimpse of the giant gray behemoths that would unspool the film I was about to see and splash it onto the Tower’s big screen. The projectionist kindly redirected me down the steep staircase, telling me to turn left when the stairs hit the ramp that bisected the front part of the huge room from the rear balcony section, and there, near the entrance to the snack bar, is where I would find the potty. I followed his directions and made my way safely to where I could make my number one, and then headed back to where my mom, sister and friends were seated.

But as I re-entered the auditorium my heart began to pound as I realized the movie was underway, and that I would have to find my way back to my seat in relative darkness, my path illuminated only by the random, intermittent light thrown onto the floor by the preview which was now unfolding before a throng of excited children, eager to see the newest Disney feature. Unfortunately, for them and for me, that preview turned out to be one for Wait Until Dark, which began, appropriately enough, in total darkness, with the basso profundo announcer intoning something along the lines that for the next 60 seconds you will experience terror like you have never seen before, interspersed with sounds of Audrey Hepburn panting in terror and struggling against some unseen foe. I didn’t have to know the details of the movie to have been scared shitless at that moment—it was that enveloping blackness, and that announcer insisting that my blood would be chilled—he was right—that was freezing me in my tracks. I stood motionless, hoping the attacker that was relishing the terrorizing of the heroine of the movie wouldn’t suddenly appear behind me and start ripping me limb from limb, praying that the preview would end and that I could once again see my way back to my mom. Eventually the preview did end and the familiar Buena Vista Distribution Company logo, which was the standard opening logo for Disney pictures of the period, shone like a beacon of friendliness and reassurance, making it relatively easy to grope my way to my seat, where I settled in next to Mom and took deep, measured breaths all through the opening credits of The Jungle Book. I had never been happier to feel so safe, yet I felt strangely exhilarated too, as if I’d survived some test and discovered an element of the movies that was way beyond the safety that Disney movies were so good at providing.

The Alger Theater as it looks today (photo courtesy of Ranae Hopper, 2005)















The second, came just moments before the lights went down at the Alger Theater one evening around 1968 when my mom and dad took my sister and I to an evening showing of Blackbeard’s Ghost. I remember looking back toward the projection booth, which was at the top of the balcony, and tracing the line where the wall met the ceiling, following the subtle lighting that tracked along the line, barely missing the more ornate lighting fixtures on those walls, from the back of the auditorium all the way to the point where the ceiling was furthest from the ground, right in front of the screen. I imagined dangling from that point, falling, being engulfed by what seemed the huge chasm comprising the center of the auditorium, and then looking up, from a perspective very close to the seat in which I was sitting, as the muted, multicolored lights in their fixtures along the wall began to dim, signifying that the beginning of the movie was at hand.

The auditorium was almost completely dark—the only strong light coming from the circular clock, lit by lavender neon encased in black plastic which gave the translucent advertisement for Lincecum Painting a ghostly glow, hovering over the exit door to the left of the screen. Suddenly, the blue velvet curtains were no longer dark. Instead, that Buena Vista Distribution Company logo shone forth from its wavy, slowly rippling surface—the image was being projected onto it, and the curtains would open at a very deliberate pace, revealing the screen, and the full brightness of the image, beneath their cover. But in my mind, even though I knew where the projected light was coming from, the image was originating from behind the curtains, as if it was struggling, with pomp and fanfare, to let itself out, to unleash itself on the unsuspecting audience. It didn’t matter that I knew the movie we were there to see was an innocuous bit of fluff such as Blackbeard’s Ghost-- the sensation was all about the Power of the Movies, what they promised, what they sometimes delivered, their majesty, their scope, their ability to transport, and their ability to disorient and cause irrational fear and terror in one of the size I was in 1968.

For about a year or so around this period, this ritual of observance and abject cowering, hands covering my eyes, as the curtains erupted in light and then revealed the shimmering silver of the screen, was how I greeted every movie I saw, and on those rare occasions when I see a film projected in a theater with actual curtains in the present day, I secretly hope that the projectionist will have a bit of that curious habit of image first, curtains second, only so I might possibly remember some of the visceral thrill just being in a theater gave me when I was eight years old. The movie theaters of my childhood—big art deco palaces like the Alger, the Tower and the Roseville in Roseville, California, and the Tower and the Esquire in Klamath Falls, Oregon—were genuine cathedrals of mystery to me. They weren’t like any other places on earth, and in my mind the images that played on their screens haunted the empty auditoriums when the lights went up and the crowds dissipated. On those rare occasions when I got to visit the inside of the Alger, for instance, during daytime hours or other times when a movie was not being shown, I still felt overwhelmed just by being in the auditorium, surrounded by all those ghosts of films past, and all the décor and design and the (fairly modest) architecture that still made it seem like the most magical, ethereal place I’d ever been. And one of the most frightening, during those times when I allowed my eyes to wander from the back of the auditorium to the front, experiencing the vicarious agoraphobia that came from imagining myself dangling from the highest point in the theater, and falling… I knew that the movies themselves were what supplied the mystery which emanated and vibrated through the air and the very construct of these old theaters. I knew that if even just being near the places where these wonderful things were being shown could be so transporting to me (on family road trips to unfamiliar parts of the country, my heart would leap at the sight of an theater marquee), and if the moments before a showing could be shot through with such exquisite dread and emotion just from observing the way the building looked and seemed to behave in the moments before the lights went down, then the Movies, no matter what actually showed on that screen, must have at their core something inexpressibly meaningful for me, something that allowed them to cut through the flesh and bone and get right to what it was that made me up as a human being, and perhaps even shape me as a human being as well.

What prop or costume from a film do you most covet?

I think I’d like to cruise through my midlife crisis in one of the Mini Coopers used in the original The Italian Job (1969). Or maybe the miniature Santa Monica pier set, complete with Ferris wheel, from 1941 (1979).

Take a famous role and recast it (for example, Audrey Hepburn instead of Andie McDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral)

Virgil and Brian both latched onto the not-so-hidden subtext of my including this question, but if we’re gonna play this game, then I think Sal has the right idea (and Jen too)—recasting roles with long-dead performers, or performers unlikely to ever be cast in an actual remake, so as to better detach oneself to an important degree from this all-consuming trend of remaking absolutely everything. Just to test the limits of an audience’s empathy, how about a Dr. Strangelove-era Sterling Hayden in the Bill Murray role, and Shelley Duvall, straight out of Brewster McCloud, as Scarlet Johannsen in a remake of Lost in Translation? If nothing else, Duvall could convince you of the woman’s desperation and boredom (and she’d certainly cast that movie’s opening credits in a decidedly different light), and Hayden could sell the hell out of that Suntory whiskey while making the protagonist’s attitude toward his Japanese hosts a hell of a lot more difficult to deal with or rationalize. And while we’re at it, why not go all Tora! Tora! Tora! on this remake and have two versions, one told from the disaffected American point of view—let’s hand the directorial reins over to, say, Daniel Petrie—and for the Japanese version, how about Seijin Suzuki to cast the properly weird, candy-colored light on all those if not exactly Ugly, then certainly at least less conventionally attractive, Americanisms?

Charlton Heston or George Kennedy?

Heston is clearly the better actor, if occasionally given over to gnawing on the hambone (“It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!”), and I’d have to give it to him based on his appearances in Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man and Touch of Evil. But there is something to be said for Kennedy as the cigar-chomping, eternally frustrated, land-bound airport administrator Joe Patroni in all four of the Airport movies. Poor fella always wanted to get in on the action, but was always relegated to the sidelines—until, of course, Airport ’79—The Concorde, when he got to pilot the titular doomed aircraft and bed Bibi Andersson by the glow of a hotel fireplace. Talk about a character arc!

Best performance in an otherwise terrible movie

God knows why these two popped into my head, but how about Rodney Dangerfield in Natural Born Killers, or Marcia Gay Harden in either PS or Welcome to Mooseport?

Worst performance in a famously revered or otherwise great movie

I’ll say Talia Shire in The Godfather (1972), who was all too callow and shrill as the spoiled and abused Connie Corleone. However, she did wonders in a small portion of The Godfather Part II (1974) and would have been a textbook case for redemption, could her dragon lady performance as Connie in The Godfather Part III (1990) or, for that matter, the rest of her career have been artfully avoided.

Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing?

Beege cracked me up by reducing this comparison to Count Dooku vs. the Grand Moff Tarkin. Believe me, I hadn’t even thought of that. I love Lee for his grandiosity in character, and sometimes even for his pomposity out of character. But Cushing gets my vote, for his nuanced Hammer career both as Professor Van Helsing and Dr. Victor Frankenstein, but also his utterly moving performance as the fatally wronged Arthur Grimsdyke, who returns to mete out some “Poetic Justice” in the 1972 horror anthology Tales from the Crypt.

Favorite Walter Hill movie











It’s a razor-thin margin that separates The Long Riders (1980) and Southern Comfort (1981) for me at the top of Hill’s filmography. But I’ll give some props to the early ‘90s one-two-three of Trespass (1992), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) and Wild Bill (1995), two terrific westerns and one that, despite its modern, inner-city setting, was a western to its core.

Favorite musical score from a movie

This is one of those questions that, for me, can’t be approached in any way absolutely, but instead must be based entirely on the moment. My moment right now makes me seem more enthusiastic for the work of John Williams’ than I really am as whole—highlights for me are his work on Jaws, Nixon and The Long Goodbye. But at the top of the heap right now is his brilliantly bombastic and hilarious near-film length score for 1941. (Its equally catchy counterpart would be the wonderful Jerry Goldsmith-Patton parody Elmer Bernstein wrote for Stripes.) That said, hardly a day goes by that a theme or two from Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West doesn’t rack up in my mental jukebox. As for great ones to which I’ve only recently been exposed, I stayed through the end credits just to hear the last note of Williams’ powerful score for Spielberg’s Munich.

Describe the most scared you’ve ever been in a theater, or the scariest moment you recall seeing in a movie

Seeing that Wait Until Dark trailer as a seven-year-old would certainly rank. But that was the fear of childhood inexperience taking hold and molding the moment. A better example is one of a much older kid (I hesitate to say adult, given I was only about 18) and his irrational fear getting the unqualified best of him, despite everything he knows (or thinks he knows) about the real world. Blaaagh and I were (I believe) college sophomores—the year, 1978—and we decided to head out to a midnight movie of Night of the Living Dead. If I’m not mistaken, Blaaagh had seen it at least once in the theater before, but I had only seen it (probably cut) in the 2:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning slot of Sinister Cinema on KATU-TV out of Portland. The movie’s ghastly, inexorable spell settled upon us right on schedule, and it was only about 30 minutes in that there came a banging on the exit door just off the right side of the cracker-box cinema screen. Whatever it was on the other side, hit the door again, and again, relentlessly rattling the handle for a good five minutes. Undoubtedly it was a wino, or perhaps even more likely some smart-ass who knew what was playing on the other side of that outdoor exit door and who decided to make Romero’s landmark, plenty-scary-enough zombie thriller just a little more interactively terrifying. And it worked. I can’t speak for Blaaagh, but I know that a high percentage of me wanted to shit myself in fear during that moment, and for the rest of that screening, over the course of which, thanks largely to the free sound effects provided by our unknown friend, I would come to believe that what was happening on screen just might be—no, it was happening outside the doors of the theater we were in, and that after the credits rolled we would all file out into the lobby, which had probably already fallen to the living dead, only to serve ourselves up as the late-night snack. Holy shit! Who’s that coming through the door at the back of the—Oh. Just another scared kid like me finding his way back to his seat. Okay, so that means the zombies haven’t stormed the snack bar yet. But they might at any minute. Crap, now I have to watch the front and the back of the theater?

Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele?

Barbara Steele, post-iron maiden, from Black Sunday (1960) is about as iconic, and strangely erotic, an image as Famous Monsters of Filmland ever repeatedly printed. But I never saw the movie until quite recently. Ingrid Pitt, however, was the stuff of prepubescent inspiration in such terrifically lurid and bosomy Hammer horror fare as The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Countess Dracula (1972), both of which hold up quite well as eros and as fright cinema some 35 years later. (Pitt was completely nude and quite visible in Countess Dracula too, emerging from a fountain filled with life-restoring virgin blood, and that movie was rated GP!)

Favorite Holiday Movie (doesn’t have to be Christmas oriented)

Well, it’s gotta be either It’s a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day, although Harold Ramis, who directed Groundhog Day, may have just crafted himself another perennial favorite—the besotted and doom-laden Christmas noir The Ice Harvest. And I really do think of Chris Elliot’s Cabin Boy as a holiday movie, as I usually watch it whilst wrapping Christmas presents. Oh, Sally, you just couldn’t be cuter! And do yourself a favor—skip that flank steak bullshit. Try the London broil!

Worst Holiday movie (doesn’t have to be Christmas oriented)

(Sung to the tune of “London Bridge”) "Happy, happy Halloween/Halloween, Halloween/Happy, happy Halloween/Silver Shamrock"... Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Your all-time favorite hammy actor

Rod Steiger. Some years ago a friend of mine and I put together a patchily-edited (on a VCR) montage of some of Steiger’s wildest moments from movies as diverse as Oklahoma!, In the Heat of the Night, The Loved One, No Way to Treat a Lady and many others (including a scene with Kevin Kline from The January Man where the actor goes so far over the top that it seems the only way out is a full-on aneurysm), and it was an absolute delight to see all that bizarre energy pop off like honey-cured firecrackers, one straight after the other. The cherry on top: I was at a screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc at the John Anson Ford Theater here in Los Angeles several years ago, waiting in line to use the men’s room. A guy emerged from the facility and walked passed me, and the guy waiting behind me made a comment to me along the lines of, “Did you see the look on that guy’s face when he came out? I wonder what the hell went on in there?” I chuckled and turned around to acknowledge the stranger’s vaguely scatological good humor. It was Rod Steiger.

Favorite Federico Fellini movie















Right now, Nights of Cabiria, with Amarcord, the usual front-runner, nipping at its heels. Props to PSaga for mentioning another favorite, Roma-- I too love it for exactly the reasons she already stated. I confess not much admiration for 8½, however, even though it does feature Claudia Cardinale, but since I recently came into possession of the Criterion DVD it seems another screening of it is inevitable (and, I hope, revelatory).

Your favorite film critic

Of those currently writing, I most enjoy David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek. But there can be no other absolute answer for me than Pauline Kael, who changed my way of looking at movies when I first cracked the spine of Reeling at the Koobdooga Bookstore in Eugene, Oregon when I was 17 years old.

Jason Lee or Jason Mewes?

Jason Lee has had many fine moments courtesy of Kevin Smith, and he was, after all, the voice of Syndrome in The Incredibles. But it’s Mewes’ characterization of Silent Bob as “Tons of Fun” that puts him over the top for me.






Best use of a natural location setting in a movieI’m obviously not thinking on a very Lean-esque scale here, but I think it’s pretty wonderful what the filmmakers responsible for National Lampoon’s Animal House were able to do to make the campus of the University of Oregon pass for a splendidly atmospheric Eastern college, without changing much at all of the actual functioning campus to their ends, and at the same time capturing the splendor of the school grounds in a kind of moving yearbook. The location adds a priceless richness and authenticity to the movie, just another element that makes Animal House stand apart from its endless imitators.

Worst squandering of a natural location setting in a movie

Conversely, the screenwriter and/or director of The Ring 2 decided to set the movie in one of the most picturesque and haunting locales in the Northwest-- Astoria, Oregon, already very effectively used in movies like The Goonies and even Kindergarten Cop-- and then pissed away any and all opportunity to put that natural beauty to any narrative use to conjure dread or even a strong sense of local geography. The location is relegated to a series of picture postcard establishing shots, each one making obvious the inarguable grandeur and natural beauty of the area. And then whenever anyone in the movie talks about living in the small town, it’s in a derogatory way, implying that it’s some kind of run-of-the-mill boring-ass burg to either be escaped from or imprisoned in. The most frightening thing about The Ring 2 is the film’s blindness to its own setting. For all the good use Astoria is put to in this movie, it could have been shot on green screen and the anywhere-is-bad-enough location could have been added in digitally in postproduction. The best thing about The Ring 2: those establishing shots.

Favorite song from a movie

Original: "Until the End of the World," written Bono and the Edge, from Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1991)

Runner-up (Original): "Baby, It's Cold Outside," written by Frank Loesser, from Edward Buzzell's Neptune's Daughter (1949), performed by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban

Non-original to film: "Move On Up," written by Curtis Mayfield, as heard in Ken Shapiro's The Groove Tube (1973).

Runner-up (Non-original): "Bim Bam Boom," written by Nino Morales, as seen and heard in Richard Elfman's Forbidden Zone (1980)

Madeline Kahn or Teri Garr?

I’ve always had a bit of a crush on Teri Garr based on her flirtatious appearances on the Letterman show, and her sexy turns in Young Frankenstein and Tootsie. She’s always seemed to me the embodiment of Betty Cooper, sometime also-ran, sometime victor in the eternal yin-yang battle with Veronica Lodge for the affections of one Archie Andrews, and it occurs to me now she really reminds me of an older girl—a cheerleader-- I had a big, unrequited crush on in high school. After not seeing her for so long, Garr’s recent appearance on Letterman after a long absence (and a battle with multiple sclerosis) has reignited my affection for her. That said, Madeline Kahn is and always will be Lily Von Shtupp, and that tips the scales for me (“I’m tired/Tired of playing the game/Ain’t it a fwiggin’ shame…”)

Favorite Roger Corman Movie

Three way tie: The Premature Burial (1962; director), The Masque of the Red Death (1964; director), and Hollywood Boulevard (1976; producer; Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, directors)

Your biggest movie-star crush

As susceptible as I have been throughout my movie-going life to the ethereal charms of female movie stars, there have been many leading ladies and supporting players who have caught my eye and left a hook or two in my heart. But two names float to the top largely on their mysterious ability to remain fascinating for me despite the continual discouragement of adulthood regarding such fascinations. They are, and perhaps always will be, Claudia Cardinale and Michelle Yeoh.

Director you’ve always felt deserved more attention than he/she ever got or has gotten up to this point, and a highlight for you from his/her career

I like the M.A.B.'s reasoning, and even his choices (though I remain completely unfamiliar with the work of Theo Angelopolous), but I'm gonna have to gravitate toward the mainstream for my pick. When I look at the list of films directed by Joe Dante, I see a career filled with exceptional work, some of a spectacularly subversive nature, and, to a film, filled with vivid imagination, flexibility, intelligence, raw energy and an assured, open approach to craft that is populated with pop culture references while never seeming enslaved to them or cut off from "the real world." And it's a pretty typical indicator that in a career marked by, at best, mid-level box-office success, his most popular film, Gremlins, created under the aegis of Steven Spielberg, would also be, arguably, his least successful from an artistic standpoint (his sequel, Gremlins 2:The New Batch, was a triumph and, of course, a box-office flop). Run his name up the IMDb flagpole, take a look, then rent Gremlins 2, or other "bombs" like Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Explorers, The 'burbs, The Second Civil War, Small Soldiers, Innerspace, the third episode of the ill-fated Twilight Zone movie, Matinee, or earlier Corman-influenced pictures like Hollywood Boulevard, The Howling and Piranha, and see if you don't see a sliver of what I see: a renegade intelligence running wild and loose under the radar across the landscape of American pop culture, leaving a trail of singed ground, felled trees and exploded cultural assumptions behind.

Michelle Yeoh or Ziyi Zhang?

Ziyi Zhang is undeniably, achingly beautiful, and she'll survive the relative debacle of Memoirs of a Geisha-- Seijin Suzuki's Princess Raccoon (Operetta tanuki goten) is still in the wings for distribution in the U.S., after all. What director won't be clamoring to employ her as her star continues to rise? But there was never a real decision to be made here: from the first time I saw Michelle Yeoh, 15 years ago in Police Story III: Supercop at the Kuo Hwa Theater in San Gabriel, I was transfixed. She had me at that mid-air split-kick, taking out two opponents at once, and continued to enthrall me throughout the entire film. And in 1997 I even got to speak to her, when she appeared at the Los Angeles Comic Book Convention to promote her appearance in Tomorrow Never Dies. For that day, I was a typical fanboy in love, and she was magical. I posed a question to her during the Q&A, and then she signed a photo for me and we exchanged brief words, something along the lines of, "Thanks for coming out and enduring all this," to which she smiled and replied, "Yeah, it's crazy, all right! Thanks, Dennis." Swoon... That autographed picture is still hanging in my youngest daughter's bedroom (it used to be my office). Michelle Yeoh, still beautiful in her 40s and gaining, as great beauties of cinema do, physical character through the inevitability of aging, will survive Geisha too, and she'll always be kicking ass in my memory, and on my DVD player, and looking better than any other movie star while she's doing it too.

If the movies’ were to give you a Christmas gift, or a gift for 2006, what would it be? (I mean “the movies” in the most general sense—the film industry, the actors, a director making a certain film, whatever)

As I look over all the other responses to this question, there's so much to second-- the Mysterious Adrian Betamax wants viewers to, in some way (any way), be able to discover new and exciting directors; Murray hopes for the increased presence of DVD subtitling and closed-captioning and even theatrical captioning decodable through, perhaps, light eyewear; Machine Gun McCain wants to see a new Monte Hellman movie; Nilblogette wishes for lower ticket prices, lower budgets, fewer remakes and less CGI; Beege would like better movies and a free babysitter so she could go see more of them; for Blaaagh, a dream come true would be Peter Jackson's The Hobbit; Brian would love 2006 to bring a traveling retrospective of the work of cartoon director Friz Freleng to commemorate the 100th year since his birth; Sal wants to see the construction of the next great studio lot, modeled on the lost glories of Twentieth Century Fox; Peet would appreciate it if someone could figure out how to resurrect Stanley Kubrick; Robert hopes for a region 1 disc of Pretty Poison and a fully loaded special edition of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (I don't know how fully loaded it'll be, Robert, but I do know BVD will soon be on DVD-- I worked on the subtitles); Thom McGregor would like to see a halt called to overly expository trailers and reporting on box office numbers; and Virgil Hilts would be satisfied if Hollywood could come up with a single original idea in 2006.

Personally, I would love to see directors and editors rein in the incredible versatility and endless shuffling possibilities that editing digitally affords them. Back in the days of the Moviola, when editors actually had to touch film, to physically splice sequences together and make cuts with actual blades, assembling and disassembling a sequence was not only cost-prohibitive, it was time-prohibitive, and it was physically degenerative to the film stock on which the editor was working. This, I think, caused directors and editors to be judicious before the fact and actually plan how best to tell their story, through storyboarding or other means of preparation, rather than just leaving it all up to excessive digital improvisation and using 200 cuts when 20 will do, just because the Avid allows them to do so. My wish for 2006 is that The Movies would somehow rediscover the glories of longer takes, of the use of the camera to do something other than whipsaw back and forth and up and down while genuflecting at the altar of simulated documentary verisimilitude, and for modern film editors to go back and take a look at the work of Robert Wise, Albert Akst, Adrienne Fazan, Agnes Guillemot, Dede Allen, Verna Fields, Anne V. Coates, George Tomasini and so many others from the classical period of American and European cinema (many of whom, as you may have noticed from the above, utterly random list, were women). There's a better way to tell a story, one that doesn't shatter a viewer's perceptions into a thousand incoherent shards with every passing minute, and my hope is that more people who work as film editors in modern cinema, and those who aspire to do so, will look to these masters for inspiration and education in the coming year.

PASADENA AIN'T NO NORTH DALLAS (but it might be Austin, at least for this week)

Well, that was a Rose Bowl classic if I ever saw one. USC and Texas could teach Jerry Bruckheimer, Joel Silver, maybe even Brian De Palma a thing or two about drama and suspense, given their level of performance over the past season and in Pasadena tonight. Congratulations to USC for having such a tremendous run (34 straight victories and knocking right up to the last eight seconds on the door of an unprecedented three-peat), and to Vince Young and Texas for putting on such a spectacular show in winning the national championship game. Final score: Texas 41, USC 38. If only the N.F.L. were this good, I might come close to even feigning interest. Unfortunately, on the eve of Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart getting absorbed into the pro league's worst teams, and Vince Young returning to the Longhorns next year, I'll keep my eye on college ball next year-- the N.F.L. still looks too much like North Dallas Forty and not enough like a league where you can see games like Oregon's agonizing last-minute loss to Oklahoma in the Holiday Bowl, or Penn State's triple-overtime victory over Florida in the Orange Bowl, or the one they just finished up tonight in the Rose Bowl. The real playoffs are over. It's just an excuse to pound down nachos and beer from here on in. (P.S. To my rabid Trojan pal Doug-- sorry it didn't work out for you guys tonight, but, you know, that USC bottle opener still plays the fight song like nobody's business...)

SUPER DELICIOUS NEW YEAR'S EVE HOT LINKS

Well, the final minutes of 2005 have finally arrived. My wife, my daughters and I are relatively safe from overzealous revelers and drunks firing weapons into the air as the hour creeps toward midnight and the first minute of 2006. As tradition goes in Japanese households, in this country and the motherland, New Year’s Day is perhaps the most important holiday of the year, and each dish in the day’s elaborate day-long meal has some significance in indicating, predicting or attempting to influence the fortunes of those who eat it in the coming 12 months.

And New Year’s Eve (at least in my wife’s parents’ house) is no wild party, but instead a festival of relaxation in front of the TV, watching not Dick Clark (or whoever has been dubbed to replace him on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve) but instead a gargantuan, five-hour variety show dedicated to a “competition” between male and female musical performers, who sing in styles ranging from traditional enka to the most modern (often excruciating) pop and rock straight off the Japanese charts. At the end of the program, a panel of judges and the members of the audience present in the huge theater where the special is videotaped vote for who they felt offered the best performances, the men or the women. Then, no matter who emerges the winner, everyone on stage dances and sings and holds hands as the credits roll, presumably into a brighter, happier year than the one just wrapped up. The whole show is, of course, in Japanese, beamed straight from the Japanese television network NHK, but that’s no hindrance to the kitschy fun to be had by non-Japanese-speaking viewers, if you’ve the right sensibility or receptivity to it. I always jump in with enthusiasm, but around hour three a brisk tumbler of tequila is often a great help to maintain that enthusiasm. (I remember one year getting that agave boost a bit too early and exclaiming a bit too enthusiastically when it was revealed that one of the judges was the great Japanese film director Kon Ichikawa.)



So far this year the men seem to be out of the gate early with some fine, more traditional performances, and one by pop star Moriyama Naotoro, who performed his hit ”Kazahana”, that caught my wife’s ear (and eye). My own tastes run toward the enka performed by the women, although there was one woman early on who I thought was mesmerizing, both in physical appearance and performance, who performed her modern pop tune while playing a traditional samisen. (I missed her name, unfortunately, though I mentioned to my wife at the time that she looked very much like a Japanese Jane Seymour.) Still to come: performances by insanely popular superstar popsters SMAP (don’t ask me!), Dreams Come True and male enka vocalist Takao Horiuchi, known around my parents-in-law’s house as the “Thank You! Man” for his unerring signature of ending even the saddest ballad with a triumphant “Thank you!” in English. And that’s not to even mention the slightly loopy female enka singer, and her male counterpart, whose main function in the competition is to perform in the wildest, most gigantic and elaborate costumes imaginable, some of them 40 or 50 feet in height, in a last-ditch attempt to tip the scales of the audience’s sympathies toward their respective genders. I started watching this show with my wife and her family about 15 years ago, and now I can’t imagine a New Year’s Eve without it. I’ve had more fun sitting around in my underwear drinking tequila with my extended family watching this crazy program than I ever did doing the mandatory New Year’s Eve club-hopping when I was younger and desperately trying to impress my soon-to-be-wife. I think she’s more impressed that I seem to be as well-versed in this family TV “tradition” as I am, and now, with my daughters running around the house causing distractions and having their own fun, the Japanese New Year’s competition show is even more fun than ever. Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu!

I’m guessing, however, that you’re not spending your New Year’s Eve wondering whether the men or the women in that NHK studio will reign supreme when all the voting balls are counted. You’re probably not even near a computer. But even so, there’s still New Year’s Day, and perhaps even Monday, an official holiday for most of the working world (don’t get me started…), to poke around the Internet. And so, in the interest of enriching your first surfing experiences in 2006, let me get all GreenCine on you for a moment, if I may. Most of you will already know what that means, and for those of you who don’t, first, shame on you, and second, click the link and start the new year hooked up to the most essential blog I can think of for the dissemination of quality film culture—journalism, blogging, reviews, commentary, online viewing and listening. One look at the great work David Hudson, Craig Phillips and the rest of their staff do on a daily basis—making access to great writing easier than easy for all of us—will make you a daily reader. I’ve been looking in on their site—“joined at the hip” to their terrific Bay Area-based on-line film rental site GreenCine (for people who like to watch—thank you, Ben…)—for about two and a half years now, and I don’t even want to remember what life was like without them. Right now Craig has his top 10 list posted, in addition to all the rest of the great links to lists from film journals, papers and blogs. Enjoy!

And by “getting all GreenCine on you” I mean, the best way I could think of to salute my own humble readership and wish you all the best for 2006 and beyond was to emulate, for one night only, GreenCineDaily’s fantastic resource gathering and offer up a few fun places for you to visit, just in case the prospect of bowl games and parades doesn’t exactly get your engine revving. Some of the links that follow were, in fact, brought to my attention by GreenCineDaily, and for that I will thank them again. Some of the others were culled from my own connections to bloggers and writers with whom I’ve become acquainted over the last year. Some I stumbled on by pure, happy luck. There are even a couple that bear no real, tangible relationship to cinema, yet are so compelling and/or readable and/or moving and/or hilarious that I just had to pass them along. Here, then, are some of the best ways I could think of to start your 2006 reading experience, and mine.

One of my favorite critics, David Edelstein, ended his 10-year relationship with Slate this past Thursday with the conclusion of the Slate Movie Club, an addictive, infuriating, exhilarating enclave of film critics that gather under Edelstein’s aegis annually to assess the year in film, and to attend to whatever pertinent issues—societal, theoretical, personal—informed that year. The 2005 gathering includes the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, the L.A. Weekly’s Scott Foundas and, of course, Edelstein, and is as vital and worth reading as ever. Edelstein takes over senior film critic duties at New York magazine later this month.

Another cinephiliac gathering of sorts is the Village Voice Take Seven film critics poll. This year’s overwhelming winner for best picture is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, but that’s only the tip of the poll’s iceberg. In addition to top ten lists from senior critic J. Hoberman, and Dennis Lim and Michael Atkinson, there is the poll’s annual, and lengthy, column space devoted to the extemporaneous commentary of the various critics involved in the poll who attempt to out-hipster or otherwise one-up either each other or the bad taste of the general viewing public. Given a forum of my own this year, this is bait I cannot resist—I will revisit some of these comments in a post a little later in the week and offer some commentary of my own.

Dave Kehr talks about the year in DVD releases for the New York Times, while the technoelves over at DVD Beaver offer their choice for the Best DVD of 2005 (not really much of a hint: it was in my Christmas stocking this year!)

Anne Thompson of the Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz has her top-ten list available, along with a ton of everyday items good for keeping abreast of what’s going on in the industry and in film journalism. (Why, she even led off her December 27 post with a link to a certain film quiz we’re fond of around here… well, everyone except for the Mysterious Adrian Betamax…)

David Poland picks the best movies you should have seen, but for some reason didn’t.

He was looking to stir things up a bit, and that’s just what he did-- The Reeler goes off on top ten lists and what he perceives as the masturbatory tendencies of critics this time of year, and on Cinemarati Filmbrain takes issue with his ire.

The most surprising observation of the year comes from Grady Hendrix, who discovered through intense exposure to the extensive DVD extras available on Warner’s The Dukes of Hazzard disc, that the big-screen TV show is perhaps the best movie ever made.

Pop on over to 24 Lies a Second for terrific new articles on director Guillermo Del Toro and the ‘70s cinema of Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola, plus juicy and spirited (but refreshingly civil) debates on King Kong, A History of Violence and much, much more. 24 Lies’s Peter Gelderblom promises a new article examining one of his underappreciated favorites, Jonathan Glazer’s Birth.

More fabulous Top ten Lists: Andy Klein of New Times

Aaron Graham trots out his Top Ten, plus a look at the spiffy new DVD edition of Death Race 2000 (and a keen picture of the Real Don Steele from that movie)

Girish sports lists of Top Ten Older Films he’s seen this year, as well as a Top Ten of 2005

Cinephiliac has, easily, the best-designed Top Ten list of the year

Over at DVD Radio you can check out great podcast interviews with George A. Romero, Leonard maltin, Kevin Smith, Miranda July, and even get a report on the Cineschlock-o-Rama Schlockcast of something called The Seduction of Misty Mundae.

Brian, who heads up the essential blog Hell On Frisco Bay, has done more than anything (except the fact that my best friend lives there) to make this die-hard Dodger fan wish he was a citizen of the City by the Bay by offering extensive reports on revival cinema, special screenings and reports on the often tenuous status of the city’s remaining great cinema venues.

Looker offers up some holiday annoyances relating to the audience surrounding him at a recent screening of King Kong, and asks the terribly pressing question, can anything be done to stop New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane?

Flickhead offers the season’s most painful and moving recollection of a night out at the cinema with one parent attempting to hide the effects of a difficult divorce. It’s called ”The Abyss”, and it has nothing to do with James Cameron.

And hey, the drive-ins are still open! Find out what’s playing at the Mission Tiki this weekend, and catch up with your favorite ozoner at the essential site Drive-Ins.Com. For fans of hardtops, check out the endless supply of information and memories linked to every theater, open and closed, in America and elsewhere, at Cinema Treasures.

Finally, cinematically speaking, here’s an article from today’s Los Angeles Times that curdled my urine (thanks to my childhood friend Ron’s dad, Roy Matchett, for coining this particularly vivid phrase that has stuck with me for 30-some years): it’s the story of one Richard Troncone, who has kept a detailed list of every movie he’s seen for the past 40 years, and who is trying to break his own 1972 record of seeing 176 movies in theaters before the ball drops tonight (at this writing, he’s got about an hour and a half—how about that late showing of Hoodwinked, Richard? It’s only 80 minutes long…) The reason my urine got curdled is that I’ve been doing the same thing, but for only 28 years. Damn! One-upped again!

And now, to things non-cinematic:

Do yourself a favor and go get hooked on the writing and societal observations available every day by prolific writer Rodger Jacobs at his fine site 8763 Wonderland.

Or get ready for what just has to be a better 2006 for the Boys in Blue by surfing over to Jon Weisman’s Dodger Thoughts. And while you’re there, be sure to order a copy of Jon’s new book, The Best of Dodger Thoughts. I ordered mine yesterday!

Friend and frequent SLIFR contributor PSaga writes about ”Three People Who Deserve This Blog More Than I Do”, one of whom is our very own the Mysterious Adrian Betamax, and then adds a fourth person, which made me wonder if it was possible to blush in cyberspace…

Blog friend Preacher Beege offers a moving (and at one point scatological—I’m still wondering about this one, Beege) New Year’s Eve tribute to her marriage, which is six years old today.

And finally, speaking of scatology, what better way to launch into the new year than with The Poop Report’s very own Best Of list, which I guarantee is like no other you may have read so far this holiday season. And be sure to check out all the links to some pretty hilarious fecally oriented essays too.

May 2006 keep the turds and the troubles in their proper places and offer to all of you as much pleasure, prosperity, creativity, joy and love as your hearts and souls can accommodate.

ARMAGEDDON IT! New Year's Eve with TCM (or not)

When I was a teenager learning to love movies and soaking up everything I could once or twice a week at the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon, my friends and I, proud subscribers to Famous Monsters of Filmland, The Monster Times and the relatively sophisticated Castle of Frankenstein (“sophisticated” here meaning, every so often they showed stills of bare breasts from an R-rated Hammer film), looked forward to all the major holidays—Halloween, the occasional Friday the 13th, and, of course, New Year’s Eve. On these nights, Mr. Alger, the theater’s dry-humored proprietor, brought to the silver screen in our hometown special programs of current or semi-current horror films culled from the stables of American International Pictures, Hammer Studios, Amicus Films, and sometimes something even further off the exploitation path, but nothing too outré— a werewolf biker movie, or perhaps a crummy thriller from Crown International like Nightmare In Wax, starring Cameron Mitchell. If we were lucky, we’d even get a double feature-- Countess Dracula and Vampire Circus is one that leaps to mind. These horror film holidays were always great nights to gather up your friends and get scared, and the movies, no matter how decrepit or low-rent, always managed to offer a chill or two. And on New Year’s Eve, the program would never go past midnight, but oftentimes it came close enough that the evening’s last thrill involved racing home and making it inside before the new year was ushered in without you seeing the ball drop for yourself—on TV, of course.

Turner Classic Movies taps a little of that horror film holiday spirit December 31 with “The End Is Near!” a series designed to exorcise your worst fears (or at least provide you a good, safe place to wallow in them) before the new year ever dawns. Though the title conjures specifically apocalyptic imagery, most of the films on tap are of a more personal scale, depicting (in a couple of instances, quite literally) the seeds of global apocalypse in their earliest stages of development. Whether or not the end, being so near, actually comes is left up to the wile of the protagonists, the whims of fate, and sheer luckless happenstance.

My old neighborhood, Beachwood Canyon, just below the Hollywood sign, passes for the besieged (and fictitious) Santa Mira, California, in this amazing shot from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The fear fest kicks off at 5:00 pm (PST) with Don Siegel’s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This is a science fiction classic that retains its peerless power to generate existential terror despite being successfully remade by the likes of Philip Kaufman (1978) and Abel Ferrara (1993), and it’s Exhibit “A” in the case for horror and science fiction being among the most adaptable genres when it comes to social critique and metaphorical potency.

Following at 6:30 pm (PST) is director Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment. Known in the United States as The Creeping Unknown, this was Hammer Films’ first international hit, starring Brian Donlevy as British scientist Bernard Quatermass, who leads an expedition to unearth the deadly secrets behind a downed spacecraft, including the reason why the lone survivor of the doomed mission is undergoing a mysterious and life-threatening mutation. Quatermass is relatively restrained in its style and effects, unlike the increasing lurid and gruesome films in which Hammer would come to specialize in the wake of Quatermass’s success, but that restraint is integral to the movie’s mounting sense of dread as it slowly reveals its horrors.

Prime New Year’s Eve Time, 8:00 pm, is reserved for Christian Nyby’s (and Howard Hawks’) The Thing (From Another World), an excellent compliment to the claustrophobic fear generated by the The Quatermass Xperiment. A quick look back at the first three films in Turner’s horror holiday apocalypse-a-thon now reveals a pattern of a much more rarified taste in terror than we were usually exposed to at the Alger Theater when we dared peek between our fingers. But in the case of “The End Is Near!” quality, style and restraint are certainly no barriers to success in terms of frightening New Year’s Eve fare (and if you’re looking for a werewolf biker movie, or even one in which Ingrid Pitt steps naked out of a life-regenerating blood bath, Turner Classic Movies is probably not going to be much help anyway.)

Things get a bit more curdled on the quality scale as we move into our fourth and fifth features, excellent drive-in fare both, but both also definite come-downs from the standard set by the opening three. Showing at 9:30 pm, Director Jack Arnold’s moody, evocative, Theremin-laced It Came from Outer Space isn’t particularly distinctive as a film, but, as Turner’s Jeff Stafford points out, it is a seminal science fiction film that would launch the careers of many key figures in the genre, including Arnold’s (he would go on to direct The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tarantula and the brilliant The Incredible Shrinking Man). It would also be Ray Bradbury’s first work as a screenwriter, and it was Universal’s first foray into 3-D-- though the print being shown on TCM is decidedly flat, instances of the director’s attempts to utilize the format by hurling burning asteroids at the audience are still fun to see.

Even less sound as a piece of narrative, The Blob, screening at 11:00 pm, still rates as worthwhile monster fare based on its archetypal 1950s sci-fi structure, its campy acting, the inventive shoestring special effects, an early appearance by soon-to-be screen star Steve McQueen, and that iconic scene of the Blob oozing its way through a movie theater just like the one you’re sitting in right now! (Don’t let the fact that you’ll be watching it at home bother you—the Blob attacks a house or two as well, if memory serves. And, don’t forget, this is the one with which you’ll be ringing in the new year…)

The TCM fright marathon caps off at half past the first hour of 2006 (12:30 am) with the 1960 shocker Village of the Damned, a chilling classic designed to make all well-meaning parents second-guess the choice to procreate. John Carpenter successfully carved out his own screen classic by remaking The Thing (From Another World) (and hewing closer to the original short story in the process), but he was much less successful in 1995 reimagining this particular bit of fright film history. The original Village of the Damned remains the seminal scary kid movie, one to which The Omen, The Boys from Brazil and scores of other similarly tot-phobic films can trace back the roots of their own toddler terror.

Assuming you’re not either completely freaked out or fast asleep by this point, TCM extends the fear factor for one more hour at 2:00 am with the original documentary, written and directed by Richard Schickel, entitled Watch the Skies, featuring interviews with Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott and others in a consideration of the history of the science-fiction film, in particular the invasion variety. If you’re looking for a hands-off way to ring in 2006 with as much paranoia and clammy skin as possible, Turner Classic Movies promises to be a very welcome guest in your TV room on New Year’s Eve.


But, of course, if you’re like me and you tend toward programming your own fare on such occasions, you may decide that even TCM can’t trump your own fevered imagination when it comes to home theater-style revival house horror. For instance, a one-from-every-column New Year’s night of horror at my house might include a couple from the Universal vaults (say, James Whale’s clever and unsettling The Invisible Man, and from the studio’s excellent selection of ‘50s sci-fi, I’ve always favored the aforementioned The Incredible Shrinking Man or Tarantula), something from the Hammer crypt (Plague of the Zombies is straight out of the studio’s top mausoleum drawer), a dollop of American International (The Masque of the Red Death from the Corman stable, and perhaps Count Yorga Vampire from the company’s vital early ‘70s period), a smidgen of Amicus (can’t go wrong with Tales from the Crypt, but I might also seek out the lesser-seen Asylum), and then perhaps something along the lines of Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine, or perhaps something fairly disreputable, like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2. After a marathon like that, what lies ahead in 2006 would almost have to be sunnier. Right?

CHRISTMAS, CAMBRIA STYLE

A ROOM WITH A VIEW: Santa Claus gets to come here tonight? Will he ever leave? This is what it looks like from our bedroom window...

Merry Christmas to the SLIFR faithful and anyone else who just happens to be lurking or stumbling past this site in a pre-holiday haze of indiscriminate Web surfing!

The missus and I are taking a break (and a well-deserved one, if I do say so myself!) with my parents and her parents, and, of course, our beloved daughters, on the Central California coast in a little town a half hour above San Luis Obispo called Cambria. The past two days have been foggy and thick with Carpenterian atmosphere—there’s even a persistent, lonely lighthouse visible from the deck of our bedroom for that extra frisson of winter ambience, or terror, depending on your perspective, of course. (Rumor has it that Adrienne Barbeau broadcasts illegally from there on Christmas Eve, only to disappear when the sun rises—I’ll be tuning around for that tonight, to be sure!)

But yesterday afternoon the sun cut through the pea soup like a samurai sword, bringing us our first day of clear, blue skies, allowing us to experience to ocean with senses other than our olfactory ones. And it is spectacular up here, don’t doubt it. If my Christmas is going to be of the California variety, much better to experience it seaside in a small town full of charm and friendliness (and, I’m sure, plenty of terrifying skeletons in the closet ready to rear their heads at the first notes of the RKO Radio Pictures orchestral fanfare) than in the dry heat of Los Angeles.

Yet, as happy as my fingers have been to have been away from a keyboard even for just two days now, I miss the blogosphere, and I miss the world of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and I truly look forward to getting back into the groove when we return to the “real” world. I’ve seen, now, that even a 56K connection in a seaside rental house works just fine, though, so now I may not be able to resist logging on and posting a few thoughts a little later on. The missus, my dad and I are just about to get in the car and head to San Luis Obispo for a screening of King Kong at the luxurious old art deco movie palace, the Fremont. I’ll be sure to post a picture or two of that outing, and let you know what I think about the movie too.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t send along all my best wishes to all my friends, contributors, commenters and various other malcontents and ne'er-do-wells who have made the last year of blogging on SLIFR such a rich and exciting experience for me. I hope the holidays find you safe and happy in the arms of loved ones, or even safe and content in the throes of the excitement of a great book or a superb movie, or just curled up in bed, able to rest peacefully while you await the loud thump and pitter-patter of reindeer hooves on your roofs tonight. There are many reasons why I feel I’m an extremely lucky person, and one of the big ones is that I’m able to write on this site, and that there are so many of you who have honored me with your readership and participation.

To all of you, merry Christmas, happy holidays, and best wishes for the coming year.


'TWAS TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, and my father-in-law thinks life looks a whole lot nicer when viewed from the shores of Moonstone beach, Cambria, California

DEAR SANTA CLAUS...

Dear Santa Claus,

I realize that I’m sending my letter rather late this year, but to paraphrase a certain roller-skating Olympian muse, I have to believe you are magic, that somehow this missive will get spirited straight from the blogosphere into your mailbox at the North Pole, and that you will be able to make a quick stop off at Best Buy before arriving at my house. I know, Santa, that you may not have heard of some of these titles, but really, don’t be afraid to ask that friendly associate, the one with the blue shirt and the yellow tag logo who’s loitering on the corner of the “anime” aisle with a bunch of his buddies, to help you out. He won’t know most of them either, but he is officially authorized to amble over to the house computer, take three whacks at typing the title(s) you specify, and then calling over a floor supervisor who may also be ignorant of the title(s) but who may at least be able to show his employee how to press “enter” to send the computer on its search. I’d send you to more of a specialty store like DVD Planet in Huntington Beach, or even the new Virgin Megastore next to Grauman’s Chinese theater, but Huntington Beach is too far out of your way to fly there and then swing all the way back up to Glendale, and believe me, even you don’t wanna spend any more time than is necessary in Hollywood on Christmas Eve. So Best Buy is fine—their selection will undoubtedly cover most of the stuff I’m shamelessly begging for here, and rooftop sleigh parking is absolutely no problem.

So what would like to see spinning in my DVD player in 2006, you ask? Okay, you asked!

Wong Kar Wai’s cluttered, delirious fever dream of love and longing will test any home theater’s capacity for reproducing, in high-definition, the director’s sensitivity toward a disorienting mise-en-scene and impossibly gorgeous brooding. Those who may have been put off by Ziyi Zhang’s struggle with English in Memoirs of a Geisha should look here instead to discover one of the year’s best performances.

The hypnotically static compositions of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet’s formalist masterpiece often give way to unexpected life, not unlike a Magic Eye painting in motion, bursting the boundaries of the frame and drawing the viewer in to experience its tableaus from the inside out.

The first of Warner Bros.’ modern Batman series that I’ve enjoyed as a film, and not just as an “event” or as a garish regurgitation of the director’s perverse obsessions (be they grotesqueries involving penguins, or imposing nipples on the Batsuit). It has real dramatic weight, good humor, enviable action chops, Michael Caine as Alfred, and Cillian Murphy as the Scarecrow.

Three attempts to catch up on Randolph Scott westerns I’ve not yet seen, including the new Warner DVD release of his first collaboration with western maestro Budd Boetticher, the subject of a new Turner Classic Movies biography entitled Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That.

Not to be forgotten, my favorite Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart western has a wagonload of great character moments, surprising dramatic turns and some of the most gorgeous scenery in any western not shot in Monument Valley.

Fritz Lang's literally scalding thriller, in which Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame suffer at the hands of mobsters (his wife is killed in a bomb blast meant for him, she takes a pot of hot coffee in the face from Lee Marvin) and become consumed with the pursuit of revenge. It's here, and in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, that Grahame stakes out her place as an indelible presence in the iconography of film noir.

Howard Hawks’ de facto sequel to Rio Bravo rehashes many of the same situations and characters (but, excepting the Duke, with different actors)—it’s not nearly as good, but it’s still a rousing effort by a director who only had one more left in him, yet another Rio Bravo riff, called Rio Lobo, in which the seams are definitely showing.

What a summer movie should be but is often not, due to bloated budgets and/or directorial hubris—an unpretentious, punchy delight. This is the most purely disarming and unapologetically fun movie I've seen so far in 2005, not at all the train wreck its detractors would have you believe.

The director’s cut of Peter Jackson’s 1996 box-office flop is in the happy tradition of his expansions of the Lord of the Rings movies—for the most part, the added material feels like it should have been there all along. Benefiting most from the new cut is cult actor Jeffrey Combs, never so creepy and hilarious as a special agent sent to investigate the mysterious “frightenings” who turns out to have more than a few skeletons in his own closet (and under his trench coat too).

The Fury, as a device to deliver plot, may be imperfect, but as hellish visual poetry there are sequences here as good as anything De Palma ever directed.

A great, overlooked western by Walter Hill, magisterial and muted. It’s also full of pain regarding the tide of American manifest destiny that is never hampered by Costnerian platitudes or oversimplifications, but instead enriched by the contradictions and contrary impulses found within both the culture of the aggressor and that of the native people. Robert Duvall, as a tracker sympathetic to Geronimo’s cause, has never, with the possible exception of Lonesome Dove, been better.

Three seminal sci-fi entries-- Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Five Million Miles to Earth and It Came From Beneath the Sea-- that cemented Harryhausen’s reputation as an effects master and laid the groundwork for genre classics like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, which were just around the corner. Within this box lie the seeds of a thousand Famous Monsters of Filmland-stoked nightmares, and just as many delights.

Again, catch-up time— Two new Kino Video releases of Fritz Lang classics that I have not yet seen. Depending on the kindness of Santa, that may not be a condition that lasts much longer…













This year’s hopefuls from the Criterion Collection run the gamut pretty much as the label itself does—Akira Kurosawa’s aching drama of a dying man’s attempt at one final, lasting act to leave behind; Mike Leigh’s searing, millennial nightmare; Robert Bresson’s near-documentary staging of a young pickpocket working the streets of Paris; Samuel Fuller’s nowhere-near documentary tale of a pickpocket who unknowingly lifts some hot microfilm and ends up a target of deadly spies; Kurosawa’s spectacular meditation on King Lear; and Kenji Mizoguchi’s ethereal ghost story.









Speaking of ghost stories, they don’t come much more unnerving than Jack Clayton’s unhurried, dread-soaked adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. And if it’s “Boo!” moments you crave, this one has got the Mother of All “Boo!” Moments tucked inside it, and I’ll be damned if I’ll tell you where.

In honor of Peter Jackson’s big monkey movie, Universal trots out a Toho double feature, including the greatest monster match-up ever filmed-- King Kong vs. Godzilla was the first Toho production I ever saw on the big screen, and no amount of common sense is potent enough to dilute the thrill of that moment. Whether a spiffy DVD version will perpetuate the delusion or pop my daydream balloon of hokum is a question yet to be answered.

The only way I’ll ever get to see this (or Histoire(s) du Cinema) is on DVD, and rather than have it clog up my Netflix queue, I’d rather own it and approach it in my own sweet time.

The L.A. Weekly, in a positive review when this movie briefly appeared in theaters in 1987, described it as Animal House meets Nashville. If you’re like me, nothing could have kept me away from the theater after a capsule review like that. And nothing did—I saw it that opening week, and then even endured Whoopi Goldberg in Fatal Beauty in a torrential downpour at a drive-in just to catch O.C. and Stiggs again as the second feature. Now it has very quietly snuck onto DVD, and they thought I’d never notice…


So sue me…










I have a vague memory of seeing either the first or the third Sabata film on TV years ago, and though I remember virtually nothing about it, those titles have always loomed fairly large in the back of my brain, naturally, due to Lee Van Cleef’s presence (Sabata was played by Yul Brynner in the first sequel), but also because they are very rarely talked about in the realm of the spaghetti western cycle. I hold out hope that there might be some unexpected surprises and pleasures—or at the very lest some spectacular Panavision cinematography—within this boxed set.

Don Siegel’s elegiac western, which would end up the capper to John Wayne’s career, has the iconic figure facing down a diagnosis of cancer, as well as villains from his past who rise up one last time to try to cut him down, all while he tries to pass on a little something to the son of a widow whom he has befriended before he dies. Sentimental, powerful work from the Duke is matched by his director’s straight-arrow, unflinching direction to stand as a fitting and final testament to a legend of cinema westerns.

Seasons six and seven are The Simpsons on an unprecedented roll—essential stuff.





And then there’s another icon-- Jet Li, in certainly his best English-language film, taps unexpected streams of emotion while director Louis Letterier and martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo Ping guide him through some of the most explosive and poetically realized fight sequences of his career.





I hope I’ve not been too greedy, Santa, and I certainly will understand if you’re unable to come through with all of these titles on Christmas morning, or any of them for that matter. Cinema is nothing if not a place where we can let our fantasies run free to get all the exercise they need, and if I must continue merely fantasizing about owning these titles, then so be it. Besides, there’s always Netflix and my Ever-Changing Queue. Even so, it’s fun to imagine a DVD library big enough to hold all these delights and 1,001 more. And, truth be told, Santa, I just wanted to see how quick you are on your feet with impossibly last-minute requests! The perpetuation of my childlike innocence and fragile belief system depends on your response.

Oh, and there’s a meat loaf in the fridge with your name on it, if you get hungry and you’re sick of all those treacly cookies the other houses set out for you. Just don’t touch my beer.

Merry Christmas!
Dennis