Brown Eyed Girls: Abracadabra

Recommended by Peter Nellhaus; thanx!

Putting his money where his mouth is

Via Technicolor Dreams, three minutes with Quentin Tarantino talking with Craig Ferguson about his purchasing L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema to save it from extinction. Unlike too many people with too much cash, QT understands the bottom line. I don’t live anywhere near the New Beverly, but I hear it’s a place that cares about film and the people who love it. Bravo, QT.

Ursula Thiess wallpaper

Click the above for a kewl, 1024x743 hand-colored shot of Ursula Thiess in William Castle’s The Americano (1955). That’s Caesar Romero on the left!

Popeye

Diabolique via Unexplained Cinema

There ain’t nothin’ inside this ‘Box’

There’s a strong wind outside rustling up the snow, covering roads which are already coated with ice. There’s not enough of a mess for the plows to plow, but plenty to make driving the last thing you want to do… compounded by temperatures and an overall State Of Shit that makes you want to stay inside and hole up until spring arrives, which won’t come a moment too soon. My skin’s pasty white, my hair’s got split ends and the winter weight has me eight or nine pounds heavier than I was three months ago. While not what you’d call an athletic man, I do enjoy being active outdoors and try to run five miles a day, every other day weather permitting — which hasn’t been the case since mid-January. Some scoff at my running, believing it a waste of time and energy, but it keeps the weight down, prevents me from having to upsize my wardrobe, and allows me a life free from blood pressure and cholesterol medication.

    I’m telling you all of that to pad what would be a review of the film The Box (2009), now out on DVD. It stars Cameron Diaz as a schoolteacher who’s missing part of her foot and Frank Langella as a government employee missing part of his face. They’re connected by the titular object, and if Cameron and her husband (James Marsden) push the button inside its small glass dome, they’ll kill someone somewhere on the planet and get $1 million for their meager efforts. Yes, it sounds like a no-brainer (my hand would be down on that thing faster than you can say “yee-haw”), but the whole situation is entwined with a larger conspiracy plot that involves floating masses of water and people with ESP and chronic nosebleeds. It takes place in a contemporary take on 1976, where the teens possess the sullenness of Gen X, right down to their annoying thousand-yard stares.

    It was written and directed by Richard Kelly, who made the cult favorite Donnie Darko (2001). As with that earlier picture, he displays little regard for pacing to where every scene feels leaden and melancholy, and his source material for The Box is Richard Matheson’s “Button, Button”, a short story way too short for Kelly’s bloated two-hour running time. (It was previously adapted for TV’s Twilight Zone, the bogus series that ran in the ‘80s, in a version ultimately disowned by Matheson.) After thirty or forty minutes of The Box, tedium sets in and staying awake becomes more of a concern than that ugly little CGI dent in Frank Langella’s head. What it’s all about is of little concern, because The Box is as hollow as the title implies.

Keep it up, Chuck

Via Pulp International

When Sandra Bullock causes me to write run-on sentences

For the last fifty years here in America, the running gag has been that ‘The French’ like Jerry Lewis. As we’re very big on compartmentalizing, we assume every last one of them adores him, from the peaks of The Bellboy (1960) to the valleys of Which Way to the Front? (1970). Therefore, I’d like to direct them and Jerry lovers the world over to All About Steve (2009). If I were to compare it as I would a ripened wine, let’s say it shares the bouquet of The Big Mouth (1967) with the body of Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (1968), Jerry’s wild, as-yet-unnamed late-60s epoch where he defied so much of what was holy. Age and health issues prevent Mr. Lewis from working as he once did, and you may find it rather bizarre that his long, floppy clown shoes are now being worn by none other than Sandra Bullock.

    Yes, this is a jerk movie; and Sandra, although talented, capable, attractive and desirable, has made a career out of playing ugly, annoying or ill-mannered types who are often punished into submission. Look over her body of work and try to find one film where there wasn’t something mentally or physically off about the people she’s played and the road they take. Forget the temptation to blame agents, writers or directors; she’s got the clout to be her own producer and oversee her films down to the last frame. In the case of All About Steve, she does a burlesque on Anne Baxter’s Eve in All About Eve (1950), transforming her from ruthless ladder-climber into a nervous chatterbox stalker/predator in red plastic boots bent on hooking up with an unsuspecting schlub played by Bradley Cooper, with Thomas Haden Church as yet another clown in an ill-advised side-story, reminding me that Jerry’s co-star in Don’t Raise the Bridge… was Terry-Thomas, who was often funnier than Jerry just as Mr. Church can be in relation to Ms. Bullock. This is a very strange mix and an equally strange movie, and I found myself looking deep and hard at the screen for nearly all of its 99 minutes, bewildered by the directions it took. Just like in the old days with Jerry.

“…or are they spooks?”

Recently posted on Bitterest Cinema, this mondo bizzaro clip from Girl Divers of Spook Mansion (1959) has me vexed, for I really want to see the rest of it. There’s little information online, and in his book Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, Jasper Sharp refers to the title as both “of” and “from” Spook Mansion, while other online sources call it Girl in Monster Mansion, A Woman Diver in a Monster House and Ama No Bakemono Yashiki. Sans English subtitles, these opening minutes are probably taken from one of the videos offered by Santo Street or Shocking Video, who list it under Haunted Mansion of Ama with this description: “Female pearl divers encounter ghosts and gangsters in this bizarre B&W import that’s like a Japanese live action Scooby Doo episode for bathing suit fetishists who also enjoy the occasional seaside catfight. The opening credits to this one are amazingly weird. Original Japanese language print of this watery wonder.” (The ‘ama’ in the title refers to diving girls, later made famous in the Bond movie, You Only Live Twice [1967].) Jeez, I’d buy it if I understood Japanese.

    Directed by Morihei Magatani, Girl Divers of Spook Mansion also received a shout-out from Robert Firsching at All Movie Guide: “[A] traditionally Japanese horror adventure about a girl who, along with her friend and the ghost of her dead sister, tries to protect her family’s treasure from thieves seeking to plunder it for their own. The film contains a good deal of underwater footage featuring pretty Yoko Mihara and Reiko Sato [Marlon Brando’s one-time girlfriend], which was enough to briefly place a butchered version with horrible dubbing in American drive-ins. Masayo Banri and Bunta Sugawara co-star. Magatani went on to direct the notorious Kyuju-kyuhonme no kimusume the same year.” (I wouldn’t mind seeing that one, either.) You can look at some screen grabs at Asia Torrents.

    The music struck me as well. Composed by Sadao Nagase, it sounds like something that could have influenced Pierre Jansen in his score for Les Biches (1968).

    I asked Nelhydrea Paupér if he’d ever seen Girl Divers of Spook Mansion: “No, but this is pretty racy stuff for Japan. I’d happily try the whole thing.

    “Eons ago I saw some fucked up Japanese films from the 60s that never got exported. They were screened at the Collective for Living Cinema (which is no longer living) from the personal collection of John Zorn (yeah, he never did anything for me either). They were all basically torture films — men doing horrible things to women. Sort of H.G. Lewis without the gore and goofiness. Early 60s stuff, I think. They were unwatchable — I was a volunteer so I saw a few scenes here and there but mostly hung out in the lobby. I have never enjoyed seeing women scream in pain. It does not turn me on. (Screaming in excitement from a spanking yes; punched or getting their nipples twisted with alligator clips, no.)

    “There are tons of Japanese films we know nothing about; they had a very healthy film industry. It was around the same time that I discovered Mikio Naruse’s films, which were being screened at Japan Society (and caused enough of a stir in NYC film circles to get another few screenings at MOMA and Film Forum). Few had ever been shown here. I loved them — some of them were like Japanese Sirk, all melodrama with brooding subtext. Others were like the best of the classic Japanese directors. They’re still hard to come by but I’d love to see them again.”

Potent quotables

Ava (click to enlarge)

“When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it any place.”
— Ava Gardner

“Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
— Cary Grant

“You could put all the talent I had into your left eye and still not suffer from impaired vision.”
— Veronica Lake

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”
— Orson Welles on pop idol Donny Osmond

“My notion of a wife at forty is that a man should be able to change her, like a bank note, for two twenties.”
— Warren Beatty

Caterina Boratto

The above is a series of images of the Italian actress Caterina Boratto set to Nino Rota’s theme to Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti as sung by Katyna Ranieri. The homage was assembled by Johnxxx2000 at YouTube.

Caterina in Giulietta degli spiriti (click to enlarge)

Midday rambler

Inglourious Diane Kruger

My interest in Inglourious Basterds at the Oscars may stem from my belief that it’s the best American film since Mulholland Dr., but, more to the point, I’m wondering just how the hosts will introduce it. Yes, it’s set during WWII with Hitler and Goebbels and Göring, but no one with half a brain could possibly label it a ‘WWII movie.’ Its disregard for fact and history, its embellished fantasy (scalp-hunting Jews!), and its unavoidable adherence to movie lore is the byproduct of a deranged fan who’s thankfully found a creative outlet for his dementia backed by a $70 million budget and an exceptional cast and crew willing to drift upriver to confront his inner Kurtz. Or, in his case, his inner Rupert Pupkin, long out of mom’s basement, since properly laid, assembling his speed-freak visions to a state of flowing, loving coherency. You know it’s a Pupkin comedy when a character in a 1944 setting reflects back on his pre-military career as a ‘film critic’ some thirty years before that term was even peripherally acknowledged by the mainstream; and that his commanding officer and Winston Churchill — and I’m sure a vast number of delusional cinephiles in the audience — nod in polite reverence.

    My past dissatisfaction with Tarantino mostly had to do with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, where a myopic persona was distributed over characters possessing identical hair-trigger tempers and too much ‘smart’ dialog (and the word ‘smart’ carries several meanings), mouthing off to an unlikely flock of rapt listeners. Those films felt too precious and self congratulatory, relying heavily on a viewer’s sense of urban paranoia. He found a comfy niche in comic book chop-socky by way of the spaghetti western in Kill Bill, and the best of that epic carries over into Inglourious Basterds, beginning with the strands of the Dimitri Tiomkin opening, a theme from The Alamo delivered in the manner of Ennio Morricone. I’ve yet to read one review of the film, but there are hundreds of blog posts in which passionate fans have pounded out more copy on this than perhaps any other picture in recent memory. Indeed, there is so much to absorb, performances to admire (Christoph Waltz is fucking brilliant), set pieces to marvel at. The background environs of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction lacked that daily tension which held France under Nazi occupation, where everyone, French and German, could easily have hair-trigger tempers while walking on eggshells and landmines. This is a great film, an achievement that I believe will retain its luster long into the future. If it wins Best Picture, however, I may faint.

I just ordered my first DVD-Rs: Angel Baby for Salome Jens, Carny for its sleaze factor (and Robbie Robertson in his druggy matinee idol prime), and Howard Zieff’s Slither for… well, for everything. The purchase was prompted by Mr. Peel’s recent critique of the latter, which I’d lamented here over a year ago for its lack of availability on DVD. Between then and now, the Warner Archive has made it and the others available, initially listing at $29.95 each, but now for $19.95 plus shipping. Ironically, I found them even cheaper at Deep Discount DVD, minus shipping costs. Ironically, because I believed Warners burned these frill-free, barebones DVD-Rs to order. Still, the reduced prices at Deep Discount (starting at $14.95) seem steep for DVD-R, the format of choice among bootleggers. And $29.95, of course, would warrant Blu-ray with all the trimmings.

    I guess I shouldn’t squawk too loud about price, even in these waning (?) days of recession. The last time I did, it was when I chastised The Great and Powerful Oz for their $400 Kurosawa DVD box set, which included several previously released discs with a bunch of films premiering on DVD. This would mean the Kurosawa fan who’d already shelled out $29.95 or more apiece for those ten or so films would now pay for them all over again just to get to see the new stuff. Upon going public with my dismay over what appeared to be a blatant rip-off, I was called on the carpet at the principal’s office, sadly finding little support among my classmates. Of course, it didn’t help that His Nibs works for The Man (and therefore a likely recipient of free DVDs), but the rather forceful tone taken with your humble narrator — and I count myself among the few he’s addressed so harshly — may be attributed to anger issues triggered by a potential drinking problem.


Vincent Cassel in La Haine swiped from gifiction.

Two links

Muddy Waters, Bob Margolin and Paul Butterfield

“Now, whenever The Last Waltz movie is shown on TV, a few people at my gigs tell me, ‘I saw you on TV!’ and how I looked — happy or mad or scared or bored. I think they just project how they would feel. I was simply concentrating on playing, and particularly enjoying Muddy’s powerful shouting, Butterfield’s warbling-tension harp, Levon’s deep groove, and Robbie Robertson’s fiery guitar fills.” Guitarist Bob Margolin recounts Last Waltz Memories we never had before! (Hat tip: N. Pauper.)

“The Overwhelmed Student Blog is penned by a healthcare student who is mid-way through four years of the gauntlet that is a healthcare education in America. This blog is a place to rant and rave about all things related to college life, healthcare, and anything else that is on my mind.” Read a future radiology technician’s bead on the Top 10 Movie Mad Scientists of All Time.

Pen hecked

Here at Flickhead we’ve been graced with press passes, free books and DVDs for review, invitations to affairs of state. Yes, it is a lofty position, leaving one woozy after sailing where the air is crisp. And then there are those days when the mailbox is opened to reveal Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.

    Made in 2006 by the Troma brain trust (Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz), it arrives with much ballyhoo as that company’s first in a projected monthly series of Blu-rays. The new video format has done wonders for some films, but the necessity of Troma on Blu-ray — any Troma movie, and there are plenty — seems like a joke from one of their outtake reels.

    The press release is seasoned with pullquotes from movie reviewers some of you, ahem, trust. Nathan Lee, writing in the once-prestigious New York Times, claims this mishegas “plays like a grind house analogue to the psychosexual provocations of the artist Paul McCarthy and is every bit as liberating… It is just about as perfect a film predicated on the joys of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea can be.” The Times apparently pays its writers by the word.

    The usually unreliable and easily swayed Ain’t It Cool News hails it “a masterpiece,” while Variety dubs it “a veritable Cluckwork Orange.” As the picture ruffled my feathers, I’d love to cry “fowl,” but at this point all the good henhouse references have been taken up. They’re as depleted as the movie itself.

    With great pluck (sorry), Troma’s press release informs us that Mr. Kaufman “has been credited” (by whom we’re not told) for inventing the “slapstick gore” movie via The Toxic Avenger in 1985. It’s a gamy (ouch) subgenre with an audience: Poultrygeist was shot on 35mm, so figure these things turn a profit.

    Despite Mr. Lee’s inebriated ramblings, I doubt he or anyone else could wade through this swill in one sitting. At this point I’m forty minutes into Poultrygeist, and even that had to be parceled over three grueling nights. So far it’s been a wearisome burlesque overstuffed with hiney and doodie jokes, minus the wit of a Charles Busch or the comparative restraint of a John Waters. Writing this, however, liberates me from watching the remaining hour. It also invalidates whatever premature opinions I may have. Just call me chickenshit.

If you would like to have my Blu-ray copy of Poultrygeist along with an unwatched DVD of Troma’s War (the unrated director’s cut), please send your mailing address (continental US only) to flickhead@comcast.net

Available from Amazon

A rare 35mm screening of Kenji Misumi’s Destiny’s Son at NY’s Japan Society

This Friday, February 19, at 7:30pm EST, the Japan Society in New York will be showing Kenji Misumi’s breakthrough film, Destiny’s Son (1962), starring Raizo Ichikawa, as part of their new series, The Double-Edged Sword: The Chambara Films of Shintaro Katsu and Raizo Ichikawa.

    “Two of the most versatile, underrated and comparatively unknown movie performers post-WWII were not from America or Europe, but from Japan. Shintaro Katsu and Raizo Ichikawa defined their generation as surely as actors like Robert Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, James Dean and Clint Eastwood defined theirs. And like Mitchum and Eastwood they were equally at home in rugged action roles as in heavy drama and light comedy. Katsu’s blind swordman Zatoichi and Ichikawa’s misanthropic halfbreed samurai Kyoshiro Nemuri stand out as unforgettable, iconic characters on the panoramic screen of 20th century world cinema.” – Chris D.

    The Japan Society is located at 333 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017. Phone: 212.832.1155; Box office: 212.715.1258.

Donald Cammell's “The Argument”

Part One


Part Two


Part Three

“The next project Cammell managed to get made was a short called The Argument (1971/99) that was shot on location in the Utah desert by Vilmos Zsigmond on the sly. Cammell had obtained the camera on the grounds that Zsigmond was shooting tests for another film. This visually stunning confrontation between a frustrated film director and a goddess (played by Myriam Gibril, Cammell’s lover and Isis to his Osiris in Lucifer Rising) covers many of Cammell’s favorite themes, but does so in an overly obvious way, verbalizing rather than dramatizing the situations with the effect that the comedic dialogue becomes nothing more than an irritating distraction from the images. This is not helped by the inevitable comparisons to the magnificent Lucifer Rising, that arise due to the presence of Gibril as a goddess in a desert. Cammell never completed the film. It was rediscovered and put together by his editor, Frank Mazzola, in 1999.” — Maximilian Le Cain @ Senses of Cinema.

Bobby Beausoleil - Lucifer Rising parts I & II

For more information click here.

Mystery Celeb!

This week's Mystery Celeb was spotted shopping for groceries last month. Do YOU know who it is???

The Film Preservation Blogathon

The following book review is my contribution to The Film Preservation Blogathon co-hosted by Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films. The main purpose of this event is to help raise awareness and donations to fund the efforts of The National Film Preservation Foundation, an independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support. To donate to the Foundation, click here.

This Film is Dangerous:
A Celebration of Nitrate Film

720 pages, illustrated.
More information from The International Federation of Film Archives

Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1989) was a hit in its day, but I doubt if the throngs who went to see it for the romance and nostalgia understood that pivotal moment when the film caught fire in the projectionist’s booth. Tornatore uses it as a metaphor of the passage from youth to maturity, the separation of old world innocence from post-WWII cynicism. And above all, he’s paying his respects to the history of the medium, of the film stock itself and its hidden, volatile dangers. How many of the millions of people who went to the movies week after week prior to the 1950’s realized what they were watching could go up in blazes? And that the light source in the projector sending those beloved images of Chaplin and Bogart and Garbo to the screen was a blinding flame ignited by carbon arcs?

    For the first half of the twentieth century, motion picture film was made from nitrate, highly flammable, prone to deteriorate if not properly stored, and since replaced by triacetate and polyester (which carry their own threats of decomposition). A commemorative tome published by The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), This Film is Dangerous is a thick, oversized anthology weighing nearly six pounds, including papers written for the organization’s symposium, The Last Nitrate Picture Show, held in June 2000. Editors Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec deserve a round of applause for tying this mountain of manuscripts together, a deft balance of scholarly text with engaging anecdotes and personal reflections.

    It answers any conceivable questions about nitrate and its replacements, their differences in image quality and lifespan, a heartfelt and exhaustive study of a part of the past that’s essentially out of reach and gone for good. For those with a discriminating eye, the beauty of nitrate has yet to be equaled. “Nitrate has unique qualities which the modern black-and-white safety stock cannot duplicate,” writes Kevin Brownlow in one the book’s chapters. “I saw a few reels of a rare French silent recently, and was very excited by the quality of the production. Apart from its setting…the film was photographed so beautifully that the film was a pleasure to watch. The nitrate was then copied and I subsequently viewed the black-and-white dupe. I stopped after a couple of hundred feet. It had lost all interest for me. The information was there…but the aesthetic pleasure had gone.”

    This Film is Dangerous is broken down into ten sections pertaining to the various facets of nitrate, and each section is packed with essays written by dozens of people from around the globe. For example, Deac Rossell, a member of the British Film Institute, supplies a scientific history of celluloid itself, tracing experiments with cellulose fibers and nitric acid back to the early nineteenth century. Through him and other authors — curators, critics, archivists, historians, the dedicated few who’ve been anonymously preserving and restoring movies for decades — we witness an evolution, first of film and then the cinema itself.

    These accounts trace nitrate’s chemical makeup and storage requirements, the forgotten art of hand coloring, and reminisce over the sparkle, detail and clarity of silver-based celluloid projecting onto the earliest silver-enhanced screens. And then there are the modern-day discoveries, such as Sam Kula’s story of the batch of five hundred reels of motion pictures found buried in the deep freeze of the Yukon after half a century. The alchemy of motion from still photos is never more appreciable as when this broad party of erudite romantics convey their passions and wisdom.

    Naturally, there’s no shortage of fire stories, and a calendar in the book covers over seventy-five incidents dating back to 1896 and ending in 1993. This is followed by comprehensive accounts of individual tragedies reaching into occasions and places both obscure (such as Sunniva O’Flynn’s evocative “The Drumcollogher Disaster”) and widely known (the connection between nitrate and the Hindenburg disaster).

    In the final analysis, it’s a blessing and a curse. (“Nitrate!” huffs Richard Leacock. “May it rest in peace!”) For the general public, nitrate has no bearing whatsoever, ancient history, a case of ‘out of sight out of mind.’ Among its many noteworthy aspects, This Film is Dangerous touches on the latter disposition. Despite the best efforts of preservationists, restorers and sundry limited reissues and DVD boxed sets, the origins of cinema face a slow, methodical extinction. “The silent era produced many of the cinema’s great masterpieces,” writes Martin Scorsese in the foreword. “But it becomes increasingly difficult to know or prove this point as the last nitrate prints decay or become unprojectable…Informed estimates suggest that the world has lost 80% of all the silent films ever made and up to a quarter of all sound films in major producing countries.”

    Movies that were released just five or ten years ago are commonly called ‘old’ by the mainstream, the word having mutated into a simile for people and things unwelcome and obsolete. Magazine polls of ‘the greatest movies of all time’ overlook the silent era (along with most films made before 1970) as though it were an aberration. With each new generation comes another wave of bunker mentality, a conceit of the-world-began-with-me variety. Concerns for the history and preservation of cinema rarely extend beyond lip service. These are sound reasons to support the efforts of the FIAF, and This Film is Dangerous is an excellent place to start.

Oscar babble, pt 2: No highway in the sky

The inclusion of District 9 among Best Picture nominees has me wondering if I have any concept of quality anymore. For I found it a mediocre b-movie, often ridiculous, riddled with contrivances and dramatically anemic. Too much slamming and banging to keep the ADD crowd involved. Too little consideration given to its science fiction framework; likewise its political ambitions. Even the effects seemed chintzy. The nomination had me thinking that, had there been ten films vying for Best Picture fifty years ago, would the Academy considered pictures of District 9’s aesthetic weight to appease the masses? It was a different world then — a little more rigid and ruthless when it came to placating all tastes. No one gave a shit about being politically correct. (The term had yet to be invented.) Had the premise of District 9 been filmed in 1960, say, it would’ve been constructed within the limited parameters of its era and genre, just as the existing version is. It would’ve played the bottom half of a science fiction double feature; the few critics who’d condescend to review it would refer to it as a ‘kiddie movie’; and today it would be just as forgotten as the existing one will likely be fifty years from now.

Similarly, nominating Up — no relation, not by a long shot, to the Russ Meyer movie bearing the same name — is way too generous a nod to modern Family Viewing. Up isn’t a poor film, just slight, and appears eager to shed its niceness for forced mean spiritedness when the old man, the kid and their sidekick livestock make the acquaintance of the bad guy who resembles Kirk Douglas. Plus its allusion to the couple’s childlessness felt harsh; for a generation so obsessed with shielding its offspring, contemporary parents sure are dumping a lot of heavy realities their way. Why this is necessary in a cartoon is beyond me. If this wins Best Picture, I’ll… I’ll… well, I don’t what I’ll do, but whatever it is, it won’t be pretty.

More Oscar babble to come!

Photograph of Jesus

Photograph of Jesus, a seven-minute film by Laurie Hill. Via Inisfree.

Oscar babble pt 1: Run, fatboy, run

This year’s Oscars are scheduled for Sunday, March 7, my birthday. I’ll be turning fifty-two that day, and the show would’ve been a nice present for the occasion. After decades of dismissing Oscar for what should be obvious reasons, I got swept up four or five years ago. Alone and open for anything that night, I found myself glued to things not seen before: the Barbara Walters special, the Red Carpet intro and the ceremony itself, all the way to the end. After Best Picture is announced and accepted, a pall resembling a hangover takes over — the host is spent, the sets seem threadbare — making those last few minutes as disappointing and fatigued as New Year’s morning.

    The evening’s become a tradition I’ve found myself looking forward to — until now. The Academy has added five nominees for Best Picture to the preexisting five, guaranteed to extend the telecast an unwelcome thirty minutes at least. This, we’re told, necessitates the services of two hosts: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. Rather than explore all the reasons why or how these are mistakes, let me cut to the chase: I don’t like Alec Baldwin.

    Nor do I suspect he’s high on anyone’s list of must-see actors. Have you ever rushed out on opening weekend to a movie because he’s in it? I doubt Alec sells many tickets, whereas people — a lot of people — will plunk down ten bucks to see anything, no matter how dire, with Steve Martin.

    Outside of his tailor-made and shrewdly brief bit in Glengarry Glen Ross (shrewd, because they don’t dare put him in the same frame with Al Pacino; is he Hyde to Pacino’s Jekyll?), Alec has floated in and out of secondary parts, supporting roles, and as The Shadow, something of a super hero done at a time when super heroes were hot… except The Shadow. They say he’s the star of television’s 30 Rock. He could very well be brilliant, but primetime TV isn’t my bag.

    To these eyes, he’s not a good actor. Other than Glengarry, he’s always had the look or given the impression of a man acting. He approaches roles as if maneuvering an obstacle course, of a man pretending, of a thug reaching in vain for sophistication.

    In recent years Alec’s piled on the pounds, appearing ill and bloated. He carries a rehearsed swagger aping Sinatra, if only he possessed an iota of Sinatra’s talent, bravura or standing. Without those things, Alec doesn’t wear Old Blue Eyes’ arrogance so well. An apparent drunk (doesn’t alcoholism gallop through that family?), Mr. Baldwin could be Old Bloodshot Eyes.

    I won’t get into the publicized (promoted?) dark side of Alec’s failed marriage to Kim Basinger and his damaging relationship with his daughter. He wrote a tacky ‘tell-all’ book about proper parenting (!), this after calling daughter Ireland (whose age he isn’t sure of) a “thoughtless little pig” during a self-pitying, screaming rant on her telephone answering machine. I haven’t the credentials or education to remark professionally here, but his public berating of Kim and the attack on Ireland reveals, at the very least, a man with twisted issues spitting on the gift of fatherhood. He displayed no sense of humility throughout his subsequent book tour, opting for the laughable position of ‘victim.’ Alec Baldwin is the kind of man who’d make a normally forgiving father-in-law employ connections well versed in the fitting of cement overshoes and firsthand knowledge of the East River’s deepest recesses. Or, at the very least, a good, hearty beating.

More Oscar babble to come!

Book reviews: Of stage and screen

Screen World Volume 60: 2008
By Barry Monush. John Willis, editor emeritus. 458 pages, illustrated, hardcover 8"x9", ISBN #1423473701. Published by Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, $49.99. Available from Applause Books; also available from Amazon.

Theatre World Volume 65: 2008—2009
By Ben Hodges. John Willis, editor emeritus. 482 pages, illustrated, hardcover 8"x9", ISBN #1423473698. Published by Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, $49.99. Available from Applause Books; also available from Amazon.

There’s something to be said for tradition, and Screen World, now in its sixtieth year, and Theatre World, in its sixty-fifth, bear this out. They’re also a reminder that I spend way too much time on the computer and not nearly enough curled up with a good book.

    They were conceived over half a century ago by John Willis. Born in 1916, an avid theatregoer (according to legend, he would’ve made the Guinness Book had he kept his ticket stubs) most likely faced with a dearth of reference material outside of the copies of Playbill handed out at individual performances, he created a comprehensive annual to chronicle a season’s Broadway, off-Broadway and regional theatre. Profusely illustrated with performance photos, cast and crew listings, play dates and venues, Theatre World debuted in 1945 (coinciding with the inception of the Theatre World Awards) and remains the definitive source for information and the ongoing history of live theatre in America. In 1949, he followed with Screen World, an endeavor to do the same for film.

    Now in his nineties, Mr. Willis stepped down as their official overseer, but left behind a set of guidelines their current editors have wisely resumed without interruption. Taking on the responsibilities of Theatre World, Ben Hodges is co-editor of The Commercial Theatre Institute Guide to Producing Plays and Musicals and editor of The Play That Changed My Life, Forbidden Acts, and Outplays; on Screen World, Barry Manush is the author of The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors and Everybody’s Talkin’: The Top Films of 1965-1969. With the exception of handsome selections of full color photos (perhaps a prohibitive extravagance in the past), the new Theatre World and Screen World are as brimming and thought provoking as ever.

    I believe there’s a small army of cine- and theatre-philes who, like myself, spent countless hours holed up in public libraries pouring over these tight, hardcover volumes. I may have been twelve- or thirteen-years-old when I first discovered them lining a shelf in the reference section. You savored the crisp black-and-white photos, combed through the small print paragraphs (a signature motif still in use), some concerning films I thought I’d never get a chance to see, from plays seemingly out of reach. The books became a bridge to culture, an acknowledgement of art and craft, an academic exercise conducted in the most elementary terms. Simply put, they fired the imagination.

    As they record an evolution, each edition of Screen World shows the crossroads facing the medium while it remodels itself for new generations. “It is doubtful,” Barry Monush writes in his preface, “that, as the years go by, much enduring affection will be held for many of the titles that filled the higher slots on the box office list, as it seems to be the function of too many movies these days to serve as nothing more than cotton candy, providing something colorful to fill you up for an evening, only to leave you wanting more when you come to the realization that substance has its virtues too.”

    DVD and video on-demand have reshaped distribution and exhibition practices, with movie theatres now multi-screen arcades catering not so much to the consumer as to corporate power. It isn’t a case of good films not being made anymore; it’s just that they’ve become harder to see. “There were gems to be had throughout the year,” Mr. Monush writes, “even if you had to go looking for them, which seems to be the norm these days, judging from the modern era’s undependable and haphazard motion picture distribution patterns. You either catch certain titles during their limited runs in the major markets or you don’t catch them on movie screens at all. It makes for a lot of repetition of the same titles on the majority of theatre marquees, leaving only the most avid of movie followers aware of the existence of some worthy product.”

    Despite all of this, the movies continue to weave their spell. (For the record, Mr. Monush has high regard for Gus Van Sant’s Milk, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, the kinds of movies that make most studio heads nervous.) Over the decades I’ve met budding academics who’ve waved the banner of Godard, proclaiming Cinema Is Dead, only to find them years later hunkered down in front of something like a Cameron Diaz comedy with a fixed gleam in their eye. Film is a narcotic, one we’ll never tire of.

    It’s also more accessible than theatre (at least Broadway) for most people, just as its probably been the subject of more books and articles — an anomaly since live performance predates movies by a few millennia. In his introduction to Theatre World, Ben Hodges glances at last season’s riches rising above the omnipresent fiscal crisis: “Broadway seemed strangely immune to the 2008-2009 economic recession which provided its New York backdrop… But the true impact of the worst recession since the Great Depression will not be completely known until perhaps the 2009-2010 season or beyond and in any case well after the printing of this book.”

    As some movies turn into cotton candy, it’s refreshing to see some of their adventurous actors seeking refuge on stage. No longer in traveling distance of Manhattan, having let my weekender subscription to the New York Times lapse, Theatre World tipped me off to what I’d been missing: Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons in Impressionism, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis in God of Carnage, Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush in Exit the King, Angela Lansbury and Rupert Everett in Blithe Spirit, Annette Bening as Margot Channing (!) in All About Eve: enough to make one homesick.

    The season is broken down into separate sections for Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off Broadway and professional regional companies, with additional chapters for awards, the longest running shows, obituaries and an index. There are lengthy roundups provided by Mr. Hodges, Nicole Estvanik Taylor, and Shay Gines, who touches on the unfortunate movement to change the term ‘off-off Broadway’ to ‘indie theatre,’ thanks to the trendy ‘indie film’ and ‘indie music’ labels. Not even the darkest recesses of live performance, it seems, are safe from homogenization.

    Both volumes are beautifully printed on coated stock, with excellent photo reproduction. The design is in keeping with past editions, the ‘crammed’ layout working to full effect. After a few pages of either book, they become living, breathing entities, letting us know our passions are shared and hardly misspent.

Double headers

A Walk on the Moon, 1999 (real people)


An Education, 2009 (Photoshop automatons)

Sporting Wood

Natalie Wood in Penelope via It Is Not Safe Here

Coming soon...

Agnès Varda’s The Beaches Of Agnès (2008) is due on R1 DVD from The Cinema Guild on 3/2/10. To pre-order, click here.