Holy Mudhead, Mackerel: A Saturday Matinee Triple Bill!

Sperm Bank Holdup (7:10)

The Mounties Catch Herpes (7:42)

Revenge of the Non-Smokers (9:58)

All Bozos on that bus.

Recent DVDs: Web reality with a minor in chemistry

cap

A middling thriller with a great premise unhinged by repugnant torture scenes, Untraceable (2008) scores its biggest shock in the casting of Diane Lane. Isn’t this the type of thing actors reserve for career dives? (Lady, what the fuck are you doing here?) She’s an FBI computer watchdog matching wits against a homicidal geek killing people on his website. The more hits it gets, the faster the elaborate executions are carried out. Cat lovers beware: the first fifteen minutes are horrifying — worse, they’re depressing — and I hope no mental defectives try to mimic this nonsense at home. In 2008, Diane also made Nights in Rodanthe, a step up no matter how slight.

Thanks to reality TV and the internet, our documents of the real world have mutated into frenetic, hand-held home videos masquerading as motion pictures masquerading as, well, the real world. Through the wrong kind of eyes, The Kingdom (2007) could be taken as genuine, until we realize Jamie Foxx looks too manicured to be an FBI agent battling terrorists in Saudi Arabia. He’s on assignment with Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman. The latter two were the childless couple in Juno, proof that we need more screen teams. And, given the chance, Bateman could grow comfortably as a lead in comedy rather than settle for thankless second banana parts.

Chemistry is sorely lacking in Eagle Eye (2008), despite the invitation of its Hitchcockian setup. A pair of strangers (the underused Michelle Monaghan and the overexposed Shia LaBeouf) are thrust together in a race against time to stop something terrible from happening. It’s Saboteur and North by Northwest only without a trace of their wit, droll humor, romantic heat, sharp dialog and monumental action. (Director D.J. Caruso and LaBeouf previously mined Rear Window for Disturbia.) It blunders into science fiction with a computer ala 2001’s Hal in a scenario lifted from Colossus: The Forbin Project, but by that point you probably won’t care.

Lapper dance

Prompted by the comments to this post at Jonathan Lapper’s Cinema Styles, I give you Debra Paget’s infamous Hoochie Mama snake dance from Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959). Bow to the Boob Goddess towering overhead — a piece of set design without peer. (The boys must've been smoking a lot of ganja on this one.)

Random linx

I’m not the only one who thought Sunday’s was a phenomenal Oscar presentation. “It was the best Oscar show I've ever seen, and I've seen plenty,” writes Roger Ebert. “The Academy didn’t bring it in under three and a half hours, but maybe they simply couldn’t, given the number of categories. What they did do was make the time seem to pass more quickly, and more entertainingly.” To read Roger’s piece, click here. If you’d rather revel in Flickheadian Oscar discussion, go to the comments at the end of this post.

Very sad news: “With rumors swirling all weekend among industry insiders, New Yorker Films, the venerable film distribution company, confirmed today that it is closing its doors. They made the announcement via a simple statement on their website.” New Yorker was a friend to Flickhead, supplying us with DVD review copies. For more information, click here.

Out of plasma: “The end of the Pioneer Kuro line of TVs represented a true tipping point in the TV industry, one preceded by long-gestating momentum from opposing forces. The recession and LCDs tipped over plasmas for good, and the slope downward will be quite steep, and fast.” Women faint, men weep: click here.

Apropos of nothing: I don’t know why, but after I posted this Slumdog Millionaire banner, I stared into it (click to see it full size) with the song Jai Ho playing over and over (you can listen to it here) and got, well, very nostalgic. I moved to this quiet Pennsylvania farming community five years ago after more than twenty years on Long Island. I used to spend a great deal of time in Manhattan, and the photo of Freida Pinto with that Jai Ho music had me thinking about the wonderful nights I’d walk around the city, the restaurants, the movies… I’m not being facetious, but New York has its own definite odor, its own rhythm. I never thought about it all that much until I stared at Freida with the colors and the lights and the music. Now all I need is Claude Rains tapping me on the shoulder: “I’d like to think you killed a man: it’s the romantic in me.” Jai Ho!

I really do love this guy…

Mickey Rourke accepts the Independent Spirit Award last night for The Wrestler. If you’re a candy ass, beware: it’s unedited… and I pray with all my might that Mickey not only win the Oscar tonight, but that ABC’s delay button be on the fritz.

Adventures with Kenneth Williams #1

Unless I fall to apathy, this hopes to be an ongoing series devoted to one of my favorite comedians, Kenneth Williams. Running slightly over seven minutes, the clip is from the February 17, 1973 edition of Parkinson, a British interview program hosted by Sir Michael Parkinson. Also in attendance are Sir John Betjeman and Dame Maggie Smith. Carry on.

Barry Fenaka? Vincent Palmer? “I told you everything would be gay, gay, gay.”

James Caan as Dick Kanipsia
(click to enlarge)

Throughout February, Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter is hosting MIA on DVD, a blogathon-review of films presently — some would say criminally — unavailable on region-1 DVD. The selections across the internet have been as vast as the gulf separating The African Queen (at Cinema Viewfinder) from Carny (at Obscure One-Sheet). In all, it’s been a good show.

    While I can barely keep up with my Netflix queue (now hovering around three hundred titles), the concept of wanting more seems like shameful gluttony. But there is one movie I’d like to have in my collection, out of nostalgia more than anything else: Slither. No, not the horror film from 2006, but the movie from 1973 that has its own share of monsters and snakes: jittery investors, chain-smoking bingo callers and sweaty, sax-wielding lodge brothers.

    Like so much product of the time, it defies easy classification. Is it a comedy? Road picture? Crime thriller? Well, yes and no on all counts. One thing is certain: Slither thumbs its nose, ostensibly at America itself. Part of that wide canvas included its distributor, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the once-reigning king of the studio system. By the late 1960s they were crumbling under the weight of their own archaic pedigree. Pictures were embracing realism, stars lost their glamour — a black era for a studio known for frilly designer daydreams.

    Commercial American cinema of the pre-Star Wars 1970s generally consisted of road movies or car chase movies, genres connected by asphalt, illustrating radical changes in the zeitgeist. As Albert Brooks would echo years later in Lost in America, people abandoned their comfy homes of Eisenhower and Camelot to ‘find’ themselves on an existential interstate. That they’d end up milking huge corporations into the current Recession should tell you what all that faux Kerouac soul-searching was truly about.

    James Caan made Slither between The Godfather (1972) and Cinderella Liberty (1973): his l’age d’or. He plays an ex-con tipped off about ‘wealth beyond your wildest dreams’ by Richard B. Shull, before the latter blows himself up with TNT over beers and a TV golf match. At which point it may be important to jot down names: Caan is Dick Kanipsia, Shull is Harry Moss. Moss instructs Dick to find Barry Fenaka (Peter Boyle, fresh from Steelyard Blues) and give him the name of Vincent J. Palmer (Allen Garfield of Cry Uncle! infamy), who is holding the loot: $312,000 from an old embezzlement scheme. In the meantime, Barry’s wife Mary (Louise Lasser, three years shy of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) had a crush on Dick in high school. But Dick’s hooked up with Kitty Kopetsky, a wired drifter played by Sally Kellerman in what threatens to be the apex of her fascinating career.

    You got all that?

    Most of the era’s road movies reached some form of epiphany, but not Slither. Dick and Barry and Mary travel the road in Barry’s bloated rig, a block-long Chrysler towing a trailer (where Mary holes up, smoking and doing crossword puzzles) with a mysterious black van in pursuit. There’s a scene in a laundromat where Kitty waxes philosophical on pubic hair, a showdown with bad guys in a trailer park bingo hall, and Moe Green himself, Alex Rocco, licking away at three ice cream cones in unison. Dick shoves a pickle in Palmer’s potato salad. The sex scene — didn’t every 70s movie have to have one? — has Kitty and Dick sitting on a bed with her warning, “You try to rape me, buster, and I’ll empty your circuits.”

    It was labeled a shaggy dog story, which is partially true, and it had some critics wondering what director Howard Zieff would do next. He’d come from TV commercials, as the creator of such chestnuts as “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levi’s” and “Mama Mia, that’s a spicy meatball!” After Slither he made Hearts of the West, a sincere if hollow valentine to 1930s b-movies, followed by House Calls, The Main Event and Private Benjamin, not one remotely similar to Slither. W.D. Richter wrote Slither, and I’m inclined to credit him for its quirky humor and conscious lack of balance. Richter also floundered in mediocrity, but he did write the excellent 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a shaggy pod story.

    MGM released it on VHS in 1994, so at least they’re aware it exists. I’d love Slither on DVD… for Sally’s breakdown in the truck stop diner… to glimpse those six packs of ‘Beer’ brand beer… to hear those ominous bass notes on the soundtrack signaling the black vans, a tune both familiar and distant: “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” a portent of things to come.

Gypsy Lou revisited

Thanks to Bhob for directing me to a couple of recent posts concerning Gypsy Lou Webb and Loujon Press — subjects I wrote about in a book review and a film review. First, there’s Bhob’s entry at Potrzebie, with an eye-popping postcard of Gypsy Lou from the early 1960s, and Edwin at Chicken Fat with another rare image.

DVD Giveaway: Opie Gets Laid

I’m giving away a factory-sealed DVD copy of Opie Gets Laid. If you live within the continental USA, send an email (only one please) before February 20. I’ll pick a random winner from my mailbox on the 21st.

Written, directed by and starring James Ricardo, Opie Gets Laid is a geek sex fantasy about an introverted junk-food junkie, porn addict and all-around loser (Ricardo, resembling a young Jeff Daniels) blossoming into an unlikely stud muffin. Lacking the measured cynicism of Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino, his film resonates with the impromptu and somewhat innocent banter of a campus rathskeller.

    He surrounds himself with several gifted actresses who add dimension to lines and setups shaded by the screenplay’s male perspective. The stream of questions they pose to Opie prompt a supply of hip comebacks and bons mots worth memorizing for your next cocktail party — they’ll go over well, provided your guests have had a few too many.

    Playing a weed-toking bi-sexual neighbor, April Wade elevates Opie’s doldrums as a lively and endearing bed buddy. In an all-too-brief flashback, Gina DeVettori is an exotic dish who should’ve had more screen time. And once Ute Werner enters the fray, there’s every reason to believe Opie Gets Laid will soar. Her erotic black leather fascist enjoys an amusing repartee with Ricardo as her bitch.

    Fond of staring vacantly into space or pontificating on life’s pointlessness, Opie uses plastic dildos to dispense condiments and hand lotion. But the slight gay innuendo is extra weight this feathery picture can’t support. A limited budget and shooting schedule undoubtedly stunted its growth, but there are flavorful and amusing moments… enough to make us wish it were longer, where Ricardo could flesh out his concepts.

Visit the official Opie Gets Laid website.

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

Last night’s David Letterman Show offered the soon-to-be-notorious Joaquin Phoenix ‘interview.’ He’s promoting, if you will, Two Lovers (2009), a film coming out theatrically this Friday even though it’s been available on Comcast cable TV for the last month — a new and innovative approach to distribution that sails beyond my comprehension. Joaquin also mumbled something about a career in hip hop. He projected a faux hipster fog, the kind afforded by wealth and privilege. To these eyes, it was a transparent and smug performance, one I’m sure Joaquin believed wholeheartedly.

Chabrol continues

Above and below, the maestro at work on Bellamy (2009). Click images to enlarge.


With Clovis Cornillac



With Jacques Gamblin



With Gérard Depardieu (oh, to be a fly on the wall…)

Oral report

Click photos to enlarge

Claude Chabrol flexes his dorsum while promoting Bellamy two days ago at the Berlinale Film Festival.

Bookish pros (and cons)

New on DVD and ‘eagerly awaited’ in some circles, I found myself ejecting Michael Powell’s Age of Consent (1969) with a mere twenty minutes left on the clock. I’ve great admiration for his work, but this, his last completed feature, is shrill and miscalculated. Playing an uneasy blend of Gulley Jimson and Father Goose, artist James Mason fends off the broad comedy of Jack MacGowran and Neva Carr-Glyn (did she imagine she was she auditioning for Old Mother Riley?) while painting his muse, 24-year-old Helen Mirren posing as a teenager. Much has been written about her nude scenes and body hair, but this is no La Belle noiseuse and bovine Helen is no Emmanuelle Béart. The beautiful Australian locations occasionally remind us of how instinctively Powell once used environment as a secondary character — The Edge of the World (1937) and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) come to mind — but here they’re spiced in gracelessly, with far less purpose than those earlier milestones.

    As I wrap this portion up with nothing more to add, I scan the comments of a respected blog where the host explains, “film appreciation that pays scant attention to form is, for me, flawed, incomplete, not as deep and substantive as it could be.” And I look over the above, and then at my work — all of it — and wonder if he and others simply wave it all aside and toss it on that vast heap of spent, insignificant, temporary internet prose. My writing may not be all that it could be, but I don’t agree that anyone should invest too much time or thought composing for this electronic medium. It doesn’t pay the bills, and it has no future… except to expedite the death of print.

    Which concerns me because, like a character ripped from Sam Fuller’s Park Row, I have ‘ink in my blood.’ I was born too late, however, and the field didn’t carry me as sufficiently as it could have had I retired twenty or thirty years earlier. That’s when I began in the trade, at a time when you could make an excellent wage with good benefits in a company to stay with decade after decade, all of it capped by a tidy little pension. Desktop publishing, the internet and affordable computers erased that dream forever, and the old companies were sold off to backstabbers and power junkies who thrive in the manufacture of junk mail.



    In some comments on Self-Styled Siren, I’ve dropped recommendations for The Jane Austen Book Club (2007), a neglected movie about reading books — real hardcopy, bound books, the kind they sell in bookstores. (Or are we all shopping on Amazon these days?) The ensemble cast includes Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman and Maggie Grace as Austen devotees who read and discuss her novels as they act out Austen scenarios in real life. The meager box office take was under $4 million, which means we’ll never see an Emily Brontë Book Club or even a Danielle Steel Book Club.



    As it examined a culture consumed by the written word, two other movies in 2007 were made with similar literary spirit, albeit with fluctuating results. Opening with a line from T.S. Eliot — “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers” — Marc Klein’s Suburban Girl uses a middling romantic comedy to soften what could have been a pungent observation of book editing and cronyism within publishing. Also with Maggie Grace, the lead is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who works on her syntax as well as sundry daddy issues via older boyfriend Alec Baldwin. The Jane Austen Book Club may have crashed and burned at theatres, but Suburban Girl went direct to video.



    For the written word itself, Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening has Frank Langella as a retired professor and one-time novelist faced with his expiring mortality and a changed literary world. (The publisher’s once grand and noble search for the Great American Novel drowned in a sea of corporate buyouts.) Pecking away on a Royal manual (do they still make ribbons?), work on his last novel is interrupted by his 40-year-old daughter’s (Lili Taylor) race against her biological clock, and a sycophant university student (Lauren Ambrose) eager to deconstruct the author’s work and life. The latter’s clinical response to his reserved sensitivity shows the best and worst aspects of critical analysis. She illustrates an endeavor which can sour the emotions and limit the breadth of an artist, and, like Langella’s anachronistic character, I began questioning why we would need such things to guide or carry us at all.

Mind wide shut: If just for shits and giggles, here’s a silly bit of business that could turn into an unfortunate trend, a list of movies its author refuses to see… ever. As in: So There — my tongue’s sticking out, my arms are folded. With the exception of Sex and the City, I’ve seen everything on this list and they’re not all that terrible. And it never fails to amaze me how The Sound of Music continues to be slammed Kael-style by the constituency who’ve never seen it. Watch it back to back with the truly repugnant South Pacific, and it’ll play like the Citizen Kane of musicals.

Mad props to Beyoncé

Mrs. Flickhead’s been shaking her head lately as yours truly succumbs to his inner adolescent, but my current obsession with Beyoncé’s video, “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It),” has less to do with lust than exuberance, joy and my admiration for choreography. That last count has been put to the test in recent years, especially when musicals like Moulin Rouge! and Chicago photograph dancers from the waist up (now there’s an interesting concept) and move them around in the editing. In the above vid, Beyoncé and company are not only visible from head to toe, but they’re going full tilt boogie. Yes, there are cuts, but there were also cuts in Astaire and Kelly numbers, so I won’t be too picky. In the meantime, the percussive tune’s been ricocheting between my ears for days. It’s only a matter of time before I start shaking the bony Flick booty here in my crib, where we get “Single Ladies” free on demand in glorious HD. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the speakers flanking the set have been bouncing along with me.