4 5 6 7—all good cretins go to heaven

    The last time I saw the Ramones perform, it was in 1978 at a small Long Island club called My Father’s Place. We were pretty blitzed that night, and I was under the influence of something that impeded my comprehension of the two opening acts. One of my accomplices that evening, however, remembers the scene vividly:

    “We saw two bands before JoeyJohnnyDeedeeMarky came out: The Young Adults, a strange big band doing funk/punk/jazz with a Wallace Shawn lookalike singing and honking the occasional sax. He wore a tigerprint leotard; the bass player wore a gingham dress. They did an excellent horn-soaked original called ‘Men’ that lambasted the male of the species and ended up with the theme from ‘The Magnificent Seven.’
    The other band was Birdland, featuring Joey Ramone’s brother and, more significantly, fronted by the legendary Lester Bangs. As a big Bangs fan I was thrilled. The band wasn’t great, and Lester was a lousy front man, but it was something I'll be able to enthrall my grandchildren with.”

    The Ramones held me spellbound, ripping through about twenty-five songs in a set that clocked in under an hour. They were masters of stripped-down rock, priding themselves on speediness but never sloppy. In my mind, they were wrongly labeled as a punk band, at least a ‘70s punk band, because their repertoire was based on ‘60s garage pop. But they were part of the fray nonetheless, that rough and tumble grassroots movement to reclaim rock (for the common guy who could barely play a guitar) from the manicured clutches of the Emerson, Lake & Palmers, Yeses and King Crimsons who were diluting its raw vitality with stiff Julliard pretension.

    Two recent DVD documentaries profile the band, their popularity and history—one of them as straightforward as possible (at least as far as it goes in the land of glue sniffers and black leather jackets), the other on the Gonzo side, but both equally good and worth a look for fans or students of the decade: Jim Fields and Michael Grindelia’s End of the Century—The Story of the Ramones (2005), and John Cafiero’s Ramones—Raw (2004).

    Loaded with vintage film clips, some 8mm home movies, and newly shot material, End of the Century travels back to the band’s inception in downtown Manhattan fleapits like CBGB’s and the Mudd Club where their doggedly basic style took shape. The 1976 debut album, Ramones exemplified the pared-down sonic assault in songs gleefully bouncing in dysfunction: “Blitzkrieg Bop, “Judy is a Punk,” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” Leave Home and the essential Rocket to Russia were no less relentless, the latter especially so with its glorious non-stop barrage: “Cretin Hop, “Rockaway Beach, “Teenage Lobotomy” (‘DDT did a job on me/now I am a real sickie/guess I’m gonna have to tell ‘em/that I got no cerebellum’), and “We’re a Happy Family” (‘We ain’t got no friends/our troubles never end/no Christmas cards to send/Daddy likes men’).

    “I Wanna be Sedated” (off of the album Road to Ruin) was the closest they ever got to having a hit single. It segued to Hollywood, Roger Corman and a film built around Ramones mystique, Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)—a terrific b picture and the first hard evidence of mainstream aspirations.

    In End of the Century, guitarist Johnny Ramone talks about the hope to break free from cult status for stardom. But despite all their best efforts, including a brief but disastrous association with Phil Spector (Johnny’s comments on him are alone worth the price of admission), the career manifested as a workaday grind, at least in North America. Parts of Europe and South America were inexplicable hotbeds of Ramones mania. A high point in Raw is the chilling scene inside a tour bus maneuvering it’s way through an army of aggressive Brazilian fans flooding the streets, cleverly (and appropriately) juxtaposed with footage of the attacking zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

    Now, nearly thirty years after they began, it seems barely possible that the Ramones once existed. The things they went on about in their songs continue to flourish in Brooklyn, Queens, lower Manhattan…as well as the fevered dreams and unbalanced households of adolescents in Oshkosh. But the music itself is from a distinctly different time and place, and likely beyond the grasp of listeners raised on rap or hip hop. They may not have been the world’s greatest musicians, but the Ramones played hard, fast and tight. When I turn on MTV today, all I see are polished model types babbling about money and attitude, pointing their fingers in all directions without a musical instrument in sight. Could any of them play the three or four chords of “Rockaway Beach”? Could they appreciate its rebellious and nostalgic shadings? (Would they find it—gag!—“corny?”) Or am I still a teenage lobotomy?

Screaming Meme

It’s been creeping and crawling from blog to blog. Is meme pronounced ‘meemee’ or ‘memee’ or what? Here’s my two cents worth:

1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video.

About 200, not counting the ever-growing stack of tapes of movies recorded off of cable that I may get around to, some day…

2. Last film I bought.

Halle Berry as Catwoman. You see, I got this coupon for 20% off, and, well…

3. Last film I watched.

Yasuzo Masumura’s Giants and Toys (1958), a predecessor to Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961), and as half-baked as a vague idea whipped up by Paddy Chayefsky over breakfast.

4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order).

Juliet of the Spirits (Federico Fellini, 1965) How I long to be up in that tree house with Sandra Milo…

The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978) Weekends smuggling beers into the Ziegfeld Theater.

La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995) After centuries, the bourgeoisie finally give birth to their savior(s): a woman ready to ‘go postal’ and a housekeeper they’ve distracted into illiteracy.

The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967) Lola may be Demy’s best, and Umbrellas of Cherbourg his most popular, but give me Rochefort any day.

La Vallée (Barbet Schroeder, 1972) “We’ll always be tourists here,” quips Michael Gothard to Bulle Ogier, part of a group stepping away from capitalism to hedonistic jungle life in New Guinea. To quote Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch, “By God I wish I were one of them.”

5. If you could be any character portrayed in a movie, who would it be?

The artist given years to contemplate her one crowning masterpiece and then the funds to do it, perfectly, but just once: Babette in Babette’s Feast.

Michel Legrand on chess

Above: Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair

The Chess Game mp3

Cats, a Cammell, and some really big bunnies

Warner Home Video has announced an eclectic lineup of titles coming out on DVD this Halloween:

“To direct a picture, a man needs humility. Do you have humility, Mr. Shields?” That was the thinly veiled von Stroheim/von Sternberg character, Von Ellstein (Ivan Triesault), to arrogant movie producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). If we forgive Ellstein’s ascot and riding boots, his point about humility is well taken. What doesn’t register right away is the fact that Shields isn’t as cold and ruthless as his fair-weather friends and associates would have us believe. There’s a dose of humble pie when he’s making a low budget horror movie, realizing that the cat-man costume from the wardrobe department is ridiculous, and that people could be more frightened by shadows in the dark.
    In these scenes, Shields’s character was partially based on the producer Val Lewton (1904-1951) who had a brief but influential career in the 1940’s. Working at RKO, he tapped into the psychological power of shadows, camouflaging threadbare horror productions by making viewers focus on things that weren’t visible to the naked eye. A number of proficient directors worked for him—Mark Robson, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, Compton Bennett, Norman Taurog, Hugo Fregonese—but Lewton is a test case for the producer as auteur.
    Warners is releasing nine of his best known horror films for the first time in a DVD boxed set. For those who are unfamiliar with the work, don’t let the titles fool you: Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man, Ghost Ship, The Seventh Victim (all 1943, his banner year), Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead (both 1945), and Bedlam (1946). Some of them star Boris Karloff, but the rest rely on the spontaneity of their solid ‘b’ casts, generally forgotten actors such as Frances Dee, Tom Conway, Simone Simon and Kent Smith. While all the films are worth checking out, I’ve a special fondness for The Seventh Victim, in which Satanists lurk in the alleys of a backlot Greenwich Village.

While making Demon Seed (1977), director Donald Cammell supposedly quipped to a reporter on the set about his star, Julie Christie: “The film may be shit, but I think her work in it is extraordinary.” A funny, erudite British artist who fell into the trap of Hollywood, Cammell hired himself out for this bizarre exercise in sexual degradation. Prompted by the demand for science fiction late in the decade, MGM wanted a picture about Julie being raped and made pregnant by a computer who has Robert Vaughn’s voice. Cammell was right: it’s shit…but it’s really good shit!

Before he made Night of the Lepus (1972), William Claxton directed a lot of television; after Night of the Lepus, a theatrical release, William Claxton directed a lot more television. Well, work is work. To be perfectly honest, I never knew what a ‘lepus’ was until a couple of years ago—a word stored for years, waiting for the proper moment of revelation. It’s Latin for hare. Rabbit. Bunny. And the book the film was based on—if you can believe that this film was based on a book—was The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon. I’ve never read it, so I can’t rightly say how faithful Claxton’s adaptation is. And it’s been about thirty years since I’ve seen the movie, so I’m not sure how it holds up. The stars are Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley, and an ever-growing population of giant rabbits. If the memory’s correct, they used real rabbits hopping around miniature sets.

A doll’s house

Brad Dourif had his fifteen minutes of fame in March, 1976, when he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Billy Bibbit in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—his screen debut if we opt to dismiss a bit part in the risible W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975). His stammering asylum patient was a sentimental favorite. Viewers dabbed their eyes. But winning a Best Supporting Oscar is tantamount to being cast as a Bond girl. Can you say “One-way ticket to Palookaville?” Can you say “Timothy Hutton?”
    Dourif gave an excellent performance in John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979), a good film shown to empty houses. Then came a succession of smaller roles, smaller films, work in Europe, and a lot of television. Having avoided Heaven’s Gate (1980) upon release, I really didn’t see Brad again until Blue Velvet (1986), in a very minor role as one of Frank Booth’s cronies. When you start playing second fiddle to Jack Nance, it may be time to rethink your career.
    Among all the junk and good intentions, he had limited screen time in Child’s Play (1986), a nasty, darkly comic horror movie that introduced Chucky, a killer doll. Brad did the voice of the doll, which made him something of a celebrity in horror circles, those mysterious places where a guy like Robert Englund is considered an icon.
    Since then there have been sequels, modestly budgeted schlock a cut above the product emanating from both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street camps, making Brad a pivotal member of the Chucky franchise. (Yes, there is a Chucky franchise.) For the fourth in the series, Bride of Chucky (1998), an effective marketing campaign made Chucky temporarily hip. He had sex with a Jennifer Tilly doll. There was rock music on the soundtrack. The jokes got raunchier. And Chucky basked in his fifteen minutes of fame.
    The latest entry is Seed of Chucky (2004), and it’s brand new on DVD. Brad/Chucky (who’s beginning to resemble Pat Sajak) and Jennifer and the Jennifer doll are back, with an androgynous offspring in tow. Introduced in a weird subplot about a deranged ventriloquist recalling Lindsay Shonteff’s Devil Doll (1964), he/she poses a dilemma for the plastic parents, who can’t decide whether to name him/her Glen or Glenda. He/she is played by the voice of Billy Boyd (who chewed some scenery with Dourif in the Lord of the Rings movies), but the face on the figure had me thinking of Rita Tushingham.
    Jennifer’s put on a little weight since her wedding night with the Chuckster six years ago, all of it now packed into slinky sex kitten outfits like nine pounds of shit into a five pound bag. Playing an actress named Jennifer Tilly who desperately wants the role of the Virgin Mary in a Biblical film for director Redman (a real-life rap star), she’s artificially inseminated with a turkey baster full of Chuck-ejaculation in a conception that’s far from immaculate. Meanwhile, using sperm in the promotion was the kind of outré gimmick you’d expect out of Todd Solondz, from the print ads (“Get a load of Chucky!”), the “coming” attractions, and all that white goo oozing over the opening credits.
    Despite a running time of eighty-seven minutes, there are a couple of dry patches that momentarily stall Seed of Chucky, but if you take into account the dire condition of the horror film in general this seems a minor quibble. Why I’ve followed Chucky’s oeuvre may be a concession to the trash fan in me, or perhaps it goes deeper. Could Chucky be my inner child?