Bloggers always mean well…they cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads and suggest, oh, so very delicately…

Moira Redmond buggin’ out in Nightmare

Never mind the clucking tongues and shaking heads of too many blogging cinephiles, I submit as My Favorite Movie of 2008: Wanted, the hyper action movie with curving bullets, talking looms, crafty allusions to Oedipus the King, Morgan Freeman (no one lends quite as much eloquence to the word ‘motherfucker’) and my future second wife, Angelina Jolie as a lean, buff, off-the-hook assassin named Fox. Ridiculous? Fer shur. Idiotic? No doubt. But since I’ve seen it five times (and would gladly watch it again this very minute), it’s got to be My Favorite. True, I’ve seen better this year, but none worth seeing more than once, let alone five times.

    One blogger dismissed it as “the single worst movie of the year,” sending it below Mamma Mia!, The Love Guru — the frikkin’ Love Guru!!! — Fool’s Gold and the migraine-inducing Jumper. Feh! If Jacques Rivette can give a shout out to Showgirls, Starship Troopers and Elizabeth Berkley, I’ll give mad props to this parable about withering under, and standing up to, The Man. As Morgan’s character says, “Insanity is wasting your life as a nothing when you have the blood of a killer flowing in your veins. Insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.” Deep! I am so totally there.
    I admire the film’s divergence from the studied black cynicism of The Dark Knight and its ilk, that murky subgenre that seems to flourish during Republican administrations. Nor is Wanted deliberately safe and mundane — it motions beyond the mainstream banality of Spiderman, Superman and Batman — and I think avoiding conventional heroism turns a lot of people off. Plus, there’s the enigmatic Jolie, who’s vastly more interesting than furniture thespians like Toby Maguire and Christian Bale. When the young man asks her badass in designer shades if she ever wanted to be ‘normal,’ for a second or two Jolie nearly levitates. “No” wafts through those amazing lips with gentle but godlike aplomb.

    I doubt dragging Richard Corliss into the fray will beef up my cred with you nonbelievers out there, but I’m down with his assessment in Time: “The contours of [Jolie’s] face and body are improbable, arresting and unique; she’s simply not designed to play ordinary people. We don’t doubt her skills as a serious actress, but she’s much more seductive and satisfying as a fantasy or cartoon character. Or a saint from some fertility cult: Holy Jolie…Densely tattooed, richly skilled in the automotive and firearm arts, Jolie’s [character] reeks of a take-charge sexiness we might call feminismo. When, to make a point, she kisses Wesley in front of his perfidious girlfriend, you can almost hear the curling of toes of every comic-book guy in the audience; the nerd ecstasy is that palpable.” I couldn't agree more.


Meanwhile, I was still thinkin’…

After the success of Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), a brief wave of similarly themed thrillers came and went. Not to be confused with about a dozen other movies sporting the same title, Nightmare (1964) is Jimmy Sangster and Freddie Francis with the ‘b’ unit at Hammer, and something that’s eluded me all these years until now. It’s a crazy little movie with as many twists and turns as there are in the heads of its two main characters, young Janet (Jennie Lindon) and nurse Grace (Moira Redmond). There’s a father figure/husband milling about in the form of David Knight, an actor who projects a distracting overbite that had me thinking of Austin Powers’ teeth. Nightmare is set in Gaslight territory, with a fleeting kiss between passionate Lindon and apprehensive Knight zipping by without proper explanation. Once you think you’ve got it figured out, Redmond has a psychological meltdown of the Bwa-Ha-Ha! variety that’s well worth the price of admission.

For those who don’t know the case, Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008) comes complete with the details and opinions the rest of us are (all too?) familiar with. Made without Polanski’s participation, it outlines the “alleged” statutory rape, the shafting imposed by a spiteful judge, and the filmmaker’s exile in Europe. One thing I didn’t expect were the lovely home movies of Sharon Tate. Zenovich has better success with them than the clips she uses from his films. Compelled to illustrate Polanski’s declining mental state in his real life, she cuts to him climbing the walls in The Tenant, and the effect is nearly comical.

Tossing cookies on the stars, part one

We’ve seen lists and ‘memes’ naming favorite movies, actors and actresses, as well as the worst of all time and those guilty pleasures that keep us comfy on sleepless nights. But has anyone bothered with movie stars we hate? As I’m presently snowed in and apparently indifferent to other options, I’ve begun looking at the women and men who turn me off. Below is the first part of this reckless endeavor, four who make me want to blow chunks. (We should total ten personalities by the time we’re finished.) If there’s an audience for this nonsense, let me know in the comments and it may inspire me to continue…

Lucille Ball
My concept of Hell could take place in a heavenly environment — a lush island paradise, a beautiful forest, a night with Halle Berry — while my head splits from a repetitious cacophony, a tape loop of Desi Arnaz’s booming, insincere chortle (“ha! Ha! HA!”) alternating with the piercing ‘whaa-whaa’ cry of Lucille Ball… sonic saltpeter to render me impotent before my hot and eager Halle. Yes, I’m well aware that everybody loves Lucy, and that Orson Welles was chief among her early supporters. She was the first performer I ever knew by name, her face unavoidable on TV during my formative years when I was spending way too much time before The Tube. And even then I picked up on the coarseness and phoniness… along with a strain of neurosis. Karl Freund’s camera may conceal some of it in I Love Lucy, but it’s hard to miss in the less-loved Here’s Lucy and The Lucy Show, where jittery unease threatens to transform Lucille McGillicutty into Judy Garland with neon orange hair and a raspy, two-pack-a-day voice. (In her later years, she could’ve been dubbing lines for Eugene Pallette.) Then there’s the disturbing lack of sexuality: to me, Lucy has always been a neutered automaton. That may partly explain her failure to hit as a movie star — one downside of the woman’s career her fans are loath to acknowledge. (Going from film to TV in the 50s and early 60s was tantamount to running off with the circus.) Of course, when she could be herself on talk shows or a Dean Martin Roast, her elegance and intellect shone through. But by that point, for me at least, it was far too little much too late.

Nicholas Cage
There was once great promise, and a welcome balance of the sublime — Rumble Fish (1983), Birdy (1984) — with the ridiculous — Vampire’s Kiss (1988), Guarding Tess (1994) — plus a ‘feel-good’ box office champ — Moonstruck (1987) — and respectable cult movies — Raising Arizona (1987), Wild at Heart (1990). Yes, there’s much to admire about Nicholas Cage, yet all of it seems to evaporate during any given moment of, say, City of Angels (1998) or Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) or Lord of War (2005): is the actor unrehearsed and distracted, is he reading from cue cards? My initial disgust came a few minutes into Leaving Las Vegas (1995) — as an alcoholic, I can tell you that that film is absolute bullshit from beginning to end. However, his precious, moping, horse-faced drunk won accolades and an Oscar, along with my unresolved ire. Since then, the hangdog puss has been perfectly suited to a train wreck of an oeuvre: The Rock (1996), Con Air, the laborious, inept Face/Off (1997), De Palma’s risible Snake Eyes (1998), Scorsese’s misguided Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Recently he’s been looking rather old and haggard, especially when standing alongside Jessica Biel in Next (2007). In Joel Schumacher’s 8MM (1999), Cage never questions why his supposedly hardened detective would wince nearly to tears after watching just a handful of frames from a snuff movie. Perhaps the actor interpreted the situation as symbolic of his own career.

Rosie O’Donnell
Imagine a Hammer film, Peter Cushing tinkering in an Eastmancolor lab, distorting chromosomes to create a race of hermaphroditic Amazons. Off the operating table slinks a buxom biglandular goddess — Victoria Vetri perhaps, or Ingrid Pitt — but downstairs in the dungeon lurks an army of surgical failures, raucous broads with anchor tattoos, beer guts and facial hair, lorded over by… Rosie O’Donnell? Years ago, I nicknamed her ‘Sluggo,’ befitting the bullying arbiter who challenges our conventional definitions of femininity. She was spot on as the wise Palooka in Ted Demme’s lovely Beautiful Girls (1996). Otherwise, the career has been a patchwork of schlock movies and caustic talk shows. In The Flintstones (1994), she transformed the slender and demure cartoon Betty into a beefy, cackling shrew. On TV, she’s been punchy and self-serving, flaunting an obscure code of ethics while hawking the trailer park caviar of Twinkies and Ding Dongs. Overweight and visibly unhealthy (there’s a lot of rage under that flab), she once offered connoisseur evaluations of junk food on her morning show, pushing the “it’s OK to be fat” philosophy on the gullible, obese minions. As it stands, she may be responsible for promoting more gluttony, diabetes and clogged arteries than any other celebrity.

Adam Sandler
The popularity of Adam Sandler, both as comedian and actor, doesn’t baffle me. He’s tailored for the masses, specifically young suburban males wont to ‘high five’ and wear baseball caps backwards. I won’t pretend to know this culture firsthand, for it is foreign, uncouth and intimidating. On their weekends they make box office successes of things like Billy Madison (1995) — easily one of the worst films of all time — and Happy Gilmore (1996), where, with the right kind of eyes, you begin to see the genius of Jerry Lewis. Sandler reminds us of Jerry in jerk mode, but not the technically proficient Jerry — the genius Jerry — of The Bellboy (1960) and The Errand Boy (1961), but rather the lost, dithering Jerry of The Big Mouth (1967) and Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (1967). Sandler’s stabs at pathos are as trying as Jerry’s: Click (2006), where Adam The Everyman reevaluates his humanity, is interminable. He often casts himself with beautiful young women, in the process divulging an oversized ego. If he thinks he’s handsome and desirable, that could be the funniest joke of all, the delusional toad believing he’s a prince. Beady-eyed, slack-jawed and slug-like, his characters tend to shift from idiocy to normalcy, passivity to frenzy without explanation, insinuating a cunning, sinister bipolar neanderthal, one whose life has evolved into a perpetual performance. Sandler may lack the intellect to examine this existential quagmire properly — we’d need an update of Persona with Adam and Jerry as patient and nurse… or vice versa…

More to come, if you want it…

A tale of winter

Varick Frissell

When Paramount Pictures agreed to finance Varick Frissell’s film about seal hunters in Newfoundland, their decision was partly based on two short documentaries he’d made in northern Canada, The Lure of the Labrador (1926) and The Swilin’ Racket (1928). They were also eyeing a growing audience for anthropology and outdoor adventure: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s Chang (1927), and the mountain films of Arnold Fanck were moderately popular. Paramount believed that, by adding scripted drama to the documentary footage, they’d attract an even larger audience — a gimmick later used by Robert Flaherty and F.W. Murnau in Tabu (1931). Neither Flaherty nor Frissell cared much for rehearsed dialogue and staged scenes, hence the need for co-directors. Flaherty had Murnau, but Frissell got studio journeyman George Melford for White Thunder, a title changed to The Viking (the name of the vessel in the film) for its 1931 release.

    In dedication to Frissell, White Thunder is the title of Victoria King’s 2002 documentary tracing his life and work. But she neglects to mention the coincidences between Tabu and The Viking: their combination of documentary and narrative; Flaherty, Murnau and Frissell’s ties with Paramount (they also released Tabu); that both pictures were released the same year; their tumultuous filming conditions; and the deaths of their co-creators. Flaherty and Melford survived, but Murnau died in a car accident shortly before Tabu opened, and Frissell perished with twenty-six others when their ship went down in the worst cinema-related catastrophe of its time.

    Milestone Films have brought together Frissell’s films with King’s documentary for a comprehensive DVD study of an abbreviated and forgotten career. White Thunder is a solid introduction, with King tracing Frissell’s privileged upbringing in Manhattan to his education at Yale, and the wanderlust that sent him far north with a 16mm camera. She touches on Frissell’s momentary association with Flaherty, and attempts to reconstruct a life which never grew or developed. (Frissell was only twenty-eight when he died.) Old photos show a melancholy loner, whose trips to the frosty ends of the Earth remind me of the estranged creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein alienating in his Arctic retreat.

    Interviewing several of his descendants seventy-five years after his death, King turns to Kevin Brownlow for his bead on the films and their historic and artistic significance. He dismisses Melford’s contribution to The Viking — no Murnau, Melford was unable to transcend stagy, static imagery and grandiose gesture and mime. He left behind an oeuvre of no lasting value save for The Sheik (1921), a picture that survives solely for Rudolph Valentino. To be fair, The Viking is further hampered by Frissell’s clumsy romantic scenario. Between the stilted situations, stagnant camerawork and broad performances, it wouldn’t be outrageous to compare the rigged portions of The Viking to an Ed Wood movie.

    However, these ugly passages coexist with spellbinding footage of an arctic sea adventure, a breathtaking panorama of a primal culture on the verge of extinction. It’s essentially an expansion of The Swilin’ Racket, Frissell’s portrait of Newfoundland sealers. They call their prey ‘swils,’ but whether ‘racket’ is slang for their vocation or the cacophonous screams of seals as they’re clubbed is never explained. The Viking and nearly all of The Swilin’ Racket shy away from the slaughter, an indication of Frissell’s unease and distance from his subject’s natural barbarism.

    You can see why Paramount were intrigued: vessels cracking through miles of ice; bergs popping up unexpectedly from below; actual sealers, not actors or stuntmen, bounding from floe to frigid floe, many of them underdressed in raggedy street clothes; and the bizarre rolling effect of the ice, a bobbing, white terrain blanketing the ocean, all of it passionately rendered and beyond Hollywood manufacture.

    A prologue to The Swilin’ Racket provides a list of seal hunting hazards, chief among them the possibility of an explosion. (Dynamite was stored onboard in the event the ship became encased in ice.) Frissell set out on the SS Viking to film additional scenes after principal photography wrapped, but an accidental blast destroyed the ship. Cinematographer Alexander Penrod (who, in a twist of dark irony, filmed Down to the Sea in Ships in 1922) and Frissell were among the missing, and their bodies were never recovered. Thanks to Victoria King’s portrait, Frissell’s fervor to explore and photograph primitive society and the rugged beauty of his imagery, the loss now becomes all the more profound.

Available from Amazon

Santiago de sangre

Santiago de sangre (Vampire Prison, 2009) is a new short film by Francisco Calvelo, who’s currently expanding it to feature length. (For better quality, watch it here.) For more information go to the website.

Be seeing you

Patrick McGoohan, 1928 — 2009

Flickhead nabs the coveted Dardos Award

Silly me: I never even heard of the world famous Dardos Award until now. Imagine my surprise when Mariana at Gatochy’s Blog handed the coveted prize to Flickhead. In case you’re as in the dark as I was:

“The Dardos Awards is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web.”

There are rules, however:
1) Accept the award by posting it on your blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and a link to his/her blog.
2) Pass the award to another five blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgement, remembering to contact each of them to let them know they have been selected for this award.

Therefore, I submit the following on the grounds that they’re excessively kewl:

Self-Styled Siren

Dark Party Review

Frankensteinia

The Sheila Variations

Cinema Styles

Thanks again, Mariana!

Breaking Wind News

They cut down trees for this: Grateful for my patronage, an online retailer has been sending free sample subscriptions to magazines I’d otherwise never buy. One is Wired, a techno journal with tweaking and nitpicking among elitists with Too Much Goddamn Money. By the time I reach the contents page, boredom has reared its ugly head. Another freebie is Us Weekly, often making a direct flight from mailbox to bathroom to trash can in less than twelve hours. Obsessed with celebrity dollbabes and children, it has endless photos of rich women jogging, eating and paparazzi-posing when not gagging their little ones with the silver spoon. A lot of these stars I’ve never heard of, but by the time I’m out of the john and back online I’ve forgotten my momentary urge to Google them. Lately there’s been a feud between Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston splashed across their pages, with Us perched in Jennifer’s corner. I guess it’s because Jennifer appears sweet, non-threatening and as bland as Wonder Bread in contrast to AJ’s lascivious whole wheat vamp. Has Jennifer done anything as amazing as AJ’s Gia? Inquiring minds want to know!

Short notice: Here are some films I’ve seen recently: Michael Clancy’s Eulogy (2004) is like a mainstream Robert Altman movie, meaning it’s coherent and occasionally funny… Towelhead (2007) is unbelievable, the work of an idiot aiming for De Sica-style pathos without the humanity… The Adam Sandler movie Click (2006) was a Christmas gift from someone who found out I like movies; it’s about a suburban schlub fast forwarding through his life, only to croak out the words “family is everything” on his deathbed… From Stephen King, The Mist (2007) works as a Twilight Zone-type of horror-mystery, until the last fifteen minutes sinks it — director Frank Darabont should have his license revoked… Andrew Fleming’s Threesome (1994) came as a surprise, a mature look at adolescent sexuality, sporadically marred by too much forced hilarity and the disquieting oddity of Stephen Baldwin (inset), a man cursed with the face of a chipmunk sucking on lemons…

In Vanity Fair: Bruce Handy offers an excellent article about composer John Barry — click here.

Notes from the Wayback Machine

In a recent email exchange, Flickhead (black type below) and Nelhydrea Paupér (red type) discussed Charles Bronson, Mike Mazurki, prostate exams (warning: scatological anecdotes ahead), The Adventures of the Wilderness Family and Melina Mercouri going down on Alexis Smith:

Comcast’s free movies this month includes a Charles Bronson retrospective. Last night I watched Mr. Majestyk (1974), in high def widescreen no less. I know we saw it at least twice when it came out: ‘the watermelon movie.’ Not for nothing, it’s really not that bad — like a pumped TVmovie directed by Richard Fleischer. Plenty of post-dubbing. And lispy Al Lettieri as the hitman... great 70s muzak score... Bronson’s stoicism at full self-parody...shit, I'll probably watch this again...

I saw some of Mr. Majestyk a few years back. It was kinda fun, I agree. Sadly, I missed the exploding watermelon scene. I'll catch it again if it turns up. I can enjoy some of Bronson's films but the later ones are unwatchable.

I tried watching The White Buffalo (1977), but…

Pretty bad?

Let’s just say, if ‘bad’ was London, then The White Buffalo is Tokyo.

Ouch!

The last Bronson movie I saw in a theatre was Death Hunt (1981) with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. It was directed by Peter Hunt... after Cubby Broccoli kicked him out of the 007 franchise. Hunt directed On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I saw Death Hunt at the Loews in Levittown... smuggled in a barbequed chicken and two six packs of beer... that became a Saturday afternoon ritual to get out of my mother’s apartment... A real black hole in my life.

A barbecued chicken?!? And two six-packs? Yipes, we’re truly in Harpo territory now. Was the chicken from that drive-in place on Hempstead Turnpike near the Levittown Theatre? We used to get rotisserie chickens there sometimes. Yum.

Yeah, Fireside Caterers. The meat fell off the bone — nice and fatty and greasy, you couldn’t stop eating it. I’d sit in the right side of the theatre, near the front, for Saturday matinees. I used to wander into other movies after seeing the one I’d paid for. Oliver Stone’s The Hand, before anyone knew who Ollie was… James Garner and Lauren Bacall in The Fan, Friday the 13th part 2, Used Cars, American Gigolo, S.O.B. — I saw that about four times, Happy Birthday to Me, the golden age of crap... I used to leave the insulated chicken bag with all the bones in it right on the floor next to the empty beer cans... then I'd wander to the local bar, get shooters of Cutty Sark and listen to Rupert Holmes’ “Him” on the jukebox...

The bones, beers, Cutty and Rupert sound like a pretty good night out to me these days…

After watching Mr. Majestyk I kept thinking about that ‘70s Mike Mazurki movie where he played a Yukon hermit… the one where he said, “Take care of the house, cat”… perhaps it’s all this medication I’m on...

How is your prostate these days?

We’ll know in a month. In the meantime, one of the drugs is making my crap slide out magnificently, real award-caliber dumps. And I’m getting feeling back in Mr. Winkie. Just this morning I was teetering on a wet dream where I was banging Kate Winslet in a nun’s habit — Ken Russell country.

Wow… did she look anything like this?:

Whoa dude!… that so totally freaked me out. Ever notice how nuns in movies and TV wear habits that real nuns stopped wearing twenty-five years ago?

Glad to hear your schlong’s Vroom-Vroom-Mikey again. However, you’ve lost me with the Mazurki reference. I have now carefully examined his oeuvre — and what an oeuvre it is — and assume you mean Challenge to Be Free (1975). Did we see this? I remember the title but I don’t recall the film — which was co-directed by Tay (Postman Always Rings Twice) Garnett and Ford (Flash Gordon) Beebe! One of those ‘70s ‘Family Entertainment’ things. Someone should do a documentary on that stuff, The Wilderness Family (1975) and The Late, Great Planet Earth (1979). Those things were kinda weird… there was something abnormal about them.

Challenge to Be Free was the one. They used to advertise it endlessly on TV. The “Take care of the house, cat” line was in every promo… it sounded like he was saying ‘take care of the housecat’… we used to say it as we would toss a ‘weetwah’ into conversation, albeit not as heavily... we never saw the film... Sun Classics? Sun International? ‘Family’ stuff far from Disney... I believe Leonard Maltin gave some of these movies fairly decent reviews.

IMDb has listings for both Sun International and Sunn Classics Are they one and the same? They distributed to ‘select theatres’ for limited runs — no second- or third-run at The Itch and the other dollar theatres, no sir. I think I saw one of them but can’t recall which. The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975), maybe. There was one called Across the Great Divide (1976) — I really wanted to see that because of the Band song.
    But there were also those other things — In Search of Yeti, Chariots of the Gods, The Lincoln Conspiracy — also limited runs. I saw a bunch of them, all perfectly awful. There was one of them about ESP, I can’t remember the title. Did you see it with me?

I don’t think I’ve seen any of them!

It had a scene where a blind man says something about how ‘they’ were out to get him. Someone asks who and he says, “You know, the great ‘They.’ The fates, the destinies. First they say, let him grow up without parents…” It was John Garfield's monologue from Four Daughters (1938) taken word-for-word. I couldn’t believe it. It was almost as shocking as that fucked-up Robert Redford-Demi Moore movie where they stole Bernstein’s famous soliloquy from Citizen Kane (“You’d be surprised what a man can remember…”) I literally hollered when they tried to pull that shit off.
    They tried a similar limited release campaign with The Other Side of the Mountain (which we saw at Cinema Wantagh). Deborah Raffin as a paralyzed girl. I seem to recall a number of extremely tasteless remarks passed between us during that one. God, I miss the ‘70s.

I remember The Other Side of the Mountain, but wasn’t that Marilyn Hassett? Raffin — I had the hots for her. She was in that Sidney Sheldon thing where she’s banging Kirk Douglas, who’s her father figure. Dude, we need a time machine toot sweet — we gotta go back!

Right, Marilyn Hassett. The Deborah Raffin movie was Once is Not Enough (1975) — which featured zero nudity (I’m still pissed). It also had Alexis Smith and ~gag~ Melina Mercouri as lesbian lovers. Carpet munching never looked so unenticing.

Bad Influence: vice, versa and virtue

“Until now… Bad Influence (1990) [has] been a forgotten noir hinged on the back end of the ‘80s, a decade rife with sleepy, sleazy thrillers patiently awaiting our discovery — preferably through groggy eyes at 3am on cable. It’s also a vital part of director Curtis Hanson’s ignored oeuvre, a gaggle of seemingly disparate mainstream pictures most critics wouldn’t own up to admiring. Fortunately, if just for the sake of this brief reflection, I’m not in the same league as ‘most critics.’” Read my review at The Film of the Month Club.

Uniondale Mini Cinema poster c 1975

Click to enlarge

Hat tip: Former Projectionist at Cinema Treasures. Full-size jpeg here. Yours truly is in there... somewhere.