Lil’ AJ

In my pursuit to see the entire Angelina Jolie oeuvre, I just rented Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), in which a five- or six-year-old edition of my affections plays the wee offspring of characters played by Jon Voight and Ann-Margret. (Angie’s in it for five minutes.) While I had seen the film roughly twenty-five years ago on cable TV, it kinda melted in my mind: I remembered Voight and Burt Young were in it and that it was set in Vegas, but nothing else. This new DVD is apparently an alternate cut put together by director Hal Ashby, who then immediately donated it to UCLA off the cuff, on the QT and very hush-hush. In fact, Voight, who starred, co-wrote and co-produced the picture, never knew about this version until a journalist writing a book about Ashby mentioned it to him three or four years ago. (The one I saw initially was the universally trashed original theatrical version.) I can’t tell you how it differs from the previous cut, though in an interview on the DVD, Voight swears it’s a whole other movie. All I know is that it has Hal Ashby’s trademark claustrophobic interiors which often made me uncomfortable. Cinematography is by Haskell Wexler, but I’m unable to point out his style here in relation to any of his other assignments. I will say that Wexler and Ashby managed to make Ann-Margret look rather drab and ordinary. The screenplay by Voight and Al Schwartz was supposedly based on a true incident involving Schwartz and Kubrick player (and Shining barman) Joe Turkel (!) during one of their escapades in Vegas in 1960. Outside of that, it’s pure 80s (lots of soft-focus browns and bad hair), back when Burt Young could get lead roles and Bert Remsen seemed to be in every other movie ever made. After this, Voight began his gradual descent into quasi-Palookaville. My suggestion: watch this thing at 2am.

Smells like fish . . .

Kelly Brook in Piranha 3D

We were sitting dead center in the theatre for a Sunday matinee of Piranha 3D when three or four post-nukular families shuffled in. Moms and dads with their little flocks, half-pints aching to be cool in their 3D glasses, hands juggling supersize popcorns and outrageously large containers of soda pop.

    Mrs. Flickhead says the youngest munchkin she saw was about five or six. One of the clans parked their sorry carcasses in the row behind us. Tee hee! I thought. This should be good!

    Wife to husband: You know this is rated R.

    Him to her: Yeah, yeah... Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.

    Their frikkin’ kids started bugging out during the trailers — even they were rated R, with tits, blood, torture, the works. FYI, Resident Evil/Milla Jovovich junkie that I am, I can’t wait for the new one in the series due in a few weeks — also in 3D!!

    Ten minutes into Piranha 3D, total carnage. Fifteen minutes in, tits, thongs, hineys firm enough to bounce a quarter on, total Girls Gone Wild shenanigans, resplendent with the sixty-mile-an-hour zinger. Kelly Brook and porn actress Riley Steele engage in an erotic underwater ballet that sent my jaw crashing to the floor. Then, blood, body parts... ‘star’ Richard Dreyfuss — as Matt Hooper, the character he played in Jaws! — buys the farm in the first five minutes! Better duck: a fairly hefty dismembered penis floats at you in 3D!! No fan of contemporary horror, the missus was about to toss her cookies when one girl’s hair got caught up in a boat propeller, sucking the flesh of her face right off the bone of her skull.

    I sat either laughing or stunned for ninety minutes, thinking how far greater it would be on a head full of weed. I give it a thumb’s up — it’s classic exploitation fodder, not far removed from the crap that came out of New World Pictures in the 1970s — only with amped technology, boobage and grue. But I couldn’t imagine sitting through more than ten minutes of it in 2D. And it ain’t for kids. Not unless they’re carving swastikas in their foreheads or drowning kittens. One of the tykes in back of us wanted to leave after forty-five minutes, but dad was way too engulfed in the parade of surgically-enhanced female flesh. Can’t say that I blame him.

On the beach with Ava Gardner

Via Fuck Yeah Ava Garder. Click image to enlarge.

The time you ran was too insane

Colorful and lively if not terribly piercing or introspective, When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors (2009) contrasts the famous rock band with the rise and fall of ‘The Sixties,’ that chaotic epoch which kicked off with John Kennedy’s assassination and drew to a close shortly after Vietnam. The film also reaches into the cult and myth of singer, lyricist and poet Jim Morrison, introduced here in astonishingly crisp, clear footage from HWY: An American Pastoral, an experimental film he made in 1969. That we’re never told where or what this footage is from is the first indication that When You’re Strange is about to shortchange us in a lot of information.
    It played the festival circuit and PBS-TV’s American Masters before debuting on DVD and Blu-ray, which offer supplemental interviews with Morrison’s sister and father. As the documentary avoids the cliché talking head cross talk with those who were there — given their absence in the credits, existing Doors band members Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore may have had no involvement with the production outside of providing memorabilia — the brief home video bonus features shine the brightest. Especially the father, a retired military officer who belatedly accepted Jim Morrison’s art, albeit through clenched teeth. No one bothers asking him for his bead on Morrison’s “The End,” which includes the line, “Father? Yes, son? I want to kill you. Mother? Yes son? I want to fuck you.”
    Johnny Depp narrates, charting The Doors’ meteoric rise from Whiskey A Go Go bar band to chart-topping stardom, but his script, credited to director Tom DiCillo, doesn’t bother to probe their creative process or talent as musicians and songwriters. It feels safe and conventional, tailored to fit a predetermined running time. Which is, in its way, the antithesis of The Doors as both a rock act and, for lack of a better term, performance artists. Morrison’s alcoholism and drug addiction destroyed him, but before his death at the age of twenty-seven, his demons surfaced onstage to bewilder, anger and fascinate all who were present, including the cops working security. Likewise, the intricacies and qualities of his and Krieger’s songwriting are barely addressed at all. (It was Krieger who wrote their biggest hit, “Light My Fire.”)
    Which isn’t to say When You’re Strange is a total loss. Indeed, far from it. There’s a jubilant enthusiasm in the profiling of an era, chockablock with eye-popping footage of a time and place seemingly beyond anything that could ever happen again. The ‘60s youth movement threatened to be this country’s biggest upheaval since the Civil War, cut short by violent police action and rampant drug use. Director DiCillo tries to pack way too much of it into 86 minutes, but what he’s put on the screen makes one wish it were three times longer.

Old Gold

Gold: Before Woodstock. Beyond Reality.
A film by Bob Levis and Bill Desloge. With Del Close, Garry Goodrow, Caroline Parr, Sam Ridge, Orville Schell, Dorothy Schmidt. 89 minutes. Filmed in 1968, released in 1972.

Available on DVD from See Of Sound
Visit the Official Website

DVD review by Albert Schweitzer

As a “film,” Bob Levis’s Gold comes off like a Cheech & Chong movie directed by Pierot le Fou-era Jean-Luc Godard. That is, if Godard had taken acid, stopped thinking and been more interested in hippies than Situationist politics. If that isn’t enough to scare you away, then there actually are some pleasures to be found in Gold, if only in the way it captures the late-60s San Francisco creative scene (despite none of it being shot in San Francisco), as well as appearances by Del Close and Garry Goodrow, both alums of the legendary 1960s improv team The Committee.
    Made in 1968, Gold was mostly forgotten for the better part of forty years, and barely seen at all. It was not released until 1972 and then only in England. Its U.S. “premiere” wasn't until 1996. Now in 2010 it’s available on DVD, the only feature film credited to director Bob Levis.
    Del Close in particular has become something of a legend. Prior to his death in 1999 he had established himself as the chief influence and mentor of Chicago-based improvisational comedy, including most of the original Saturday Night Live cast as well as subsequent members of SNL. Essentially all American improv leads back to Del Close and his name is uttered reverentially by its best known practitioners. Despite his reputation, Close’s filmography is a curiosity. It’s not terribly long and is filled with small, forgettable roles. But the bit parts are in high profile pictures like Lucas’s American Graffiti, Michael Mann’s Thief, Paul Schrader’s Light of Day, De Palma’s The Untouchables, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and several off-beat B movies like Larry Hagman’s Beware! The Blob! He also appeared in Philip Kaufman’s first film, the 1965 Goldstein. It’s a meager filmography with nearly all appearances in films by major directors. Gold is, it seems, the only film in which he has more than a bit part. A lifelong drug and alcohol problem seems to have been the limiting factor in his career, though he spent the early 1980s employed as “acting coach” at Saturday Night Live.
    Goodrow is less known but has been far more visible, with a filmography that runs from the 1960s (The Connection, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) through the ‘70s (Slither, Stay Hungry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), ‘80s (Eating Raoul and tons of TV) and mondo beyondo (he played Adolf von Luftwaffer in Linda Lovelace for President). He was one of the leading lights of the Committee, a counter-culture improv group that appeared on the Smothers Brothers Show, The Dick Cavett Show and other more adventurous TV programs of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
    Taken on its own 1968 terms, Gold is fairly tough sledding because so much of it meanders like someone on acid. But Close and, especially, Goodrow are pros who manage an occasional moment of inspiration. It helps to watch while listening to the bonus track, with Levis and Goodrow reminiscing — though Levis seems intent on claiming all kinds of innovation in the film, from nude hippies immersing themselves in mud (“Mud people!” exclaims Levis, “a year and a half before Woodstock!”) to solarized images (“We did it first!” followed by Goodrow’s wet blanket, “Well, no, Man Ray did it back in the ‘20s.”)
    The film contains relatively graphic nudity and sex for the period (tamer than HBO is today) and Levis mentions that he tried to sell the film to a nudie distributor. He was turned down because he was told it was the “wrong genre.” In fact, the film would fit no genre until Easy Rider popularized the Hippie movie — a genre which lasted only about three years. But it was long enough for Gold’s British co-producer to finally get it a limited release in the UK.
    Much is made of the fact that some of the songs are by the MC5. And Ramblin’ Jack Elliot makes an appearance (as does a silent Dan Hicks as an extra). But the rest of the soundtrack includes mostly forgotten names like David McWilliams, Barry St. John and a group named Beastly Times. The film also shows many attractive young women that the filmmakers say they wish they could find now. With so many forgotten faces and names, the lasting legacy of Gold is that it unintentionally captured a world that seemed eternal at the time but which is now as lost and far away as the world in Flaherty’s Nanook of the North.

All of you scare the shit out of me

If you've got decent speakers, crank it.

Lunch break

Marlon Brando and Mary Murphy take a break from filming The Wild One in 1952. Click to enlarge.