Lunch break

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

I can't go on, I'll go on

Gaelan Connell in Bandslam

It’s brand new on DVD, but I Need That Record!: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store carries a 2008 copyright, and in those two years recession has crushed a lot of retail. The 71-minute film, an obvious labor of love for producer, director, cinematographer and editor Brendon Toller, has its roots in independent rock music, but actually is a bittersweet portrait of small business getting stomped by the corporate giant. Which is nothing new: Noam Chomsky offers Toller his recollection of the ouster of the neighborhood grocer in the 1930s as the first supermarket moved into town. But music isn’t food, at least not in the literal sense, and music-buying has experienced a whirlwind evolution ever since CDs replaced vinyl and mp3s replaced CDs.
    The independent record store of the title is (or was) the downtown hole in the wall operated by someone who channeled their passions and obsessions into a modest business. I remember the first one I ever set foot in, The Etc. Shop in Bellmore, New York, where I heard Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vidda” and saw a poster of Frank Zappa on a toilet (“To Zappa Crappa”) and became an instant fan of Paul Williams’s Crawdaddy magazine when it was still a newspaper. That was back in the late 1960s and early ‘70s when these places were really head shops (hash pipes and bongs in the display cases, patchouli incense in the air), with a decent inventory of unusual record albums and many bootlegs.
    Toller interviews store owners, several in the process of eviction, and musicians such as Thurston Moore and Lenny Kaye who were not only fans of independently produced rock music back when, but also somewhat dependent on these small businesses to sell their albums. One store owner makes a prediction that Walmart, then the nation’s number-one seller of CDs, would scale back its inventory to just a few titles as younger consumers simply download individual tracks online. Time has proven him right: it’s getting difficult to buy any CDs outside of online retailers. The film is certainly worth a look, and the DVD bonus features include extended interviews with musicians, store owners and fans.

I Need That Record! may pooh-pooh commercial pop, but the heart of rock and roll is beating like a big bass drum in Bandslam (2009), in which high schoolers form a rock group (called — without apology to Samuel Beckett — I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On) to compete in the title event, a garage band duel. It was released last August, tanked at the box office and took almost a year to make it to DVD. What a crime! Directed by Todd Graff, who did the amateur-theatre-world film Camp in 2003, Bandslam is funny, energetic and the music infectious as high school geek Will ‘Dewey’ Burton (Gaelan Connell) juggles two potential girlfriends (former Disney stars Vanessa Hudgens and Aly Michalka), emails unanswered letters to David Bowie, and weathers separation anxiety from single mom Lisa Kudrow. Someone asked me if it’s another High School Musical, but I don’t know. I’ve never seen High School Musical. Bandslam is airy and exuberant, with characters that ring idealistic and situations grounded in fuzzy sitcom reality. Perfect summer fare, I got hooked and watched it three times in one week.

The recent and long awaited CD release of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street thrilled fans and undoubtedly puzzled anyone not into the band or too young to remember when the double album came out in 1971. Directed by Stephen Kijak, with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts serving as Executive Producers, the film Stones in Exile (2010) arrives on DVD, presumably to explain a time, place and product unique in Rolling Stones history. I placed an order for it several months in advance, my enthusiasm stoked by an announced running time of 145 minutes. How thorough I thought it would be! When the DVD arrived, the back cover lists its running time at 145 minutes, while in the opposite corner there’s a rundown of bonus features made to appear independent of the main feature. When I played the documentary, however, it clocked in at a minute or two over an hour, and was nothing but a puff piece. “Rip off!!!” says I.

Low sodium

The publicity machine’s been working overtime on Angelina Jolie and her new movie, Salt (2010). The tabloids are recycling her supposed rivalry with Jennifer Aniston, who always struck me as Wonder Bread to Angie’s fresh-baked whole wheat. (But, oh! to be Brad Pitt’s penis.) And Vanity Fair has her on its cover for their fluff piece, the same issue with an article about film stars of the 1950s who used LSD in psychotherapy.
    The film is suitable summer action material with an intriguing premise about Soviet sleeper cells tucked away in the States, Angie a CIA operative who may be among them. There are rough-n-tumble car chases, imposing guys in business suits firing their pistols sideways, and La Jolie kicking some serious ass. I was hesitant about the picture once I heard it was directed by Phillip Noyce, whose blockbuster action movies veer toward the clunky and staid (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Saint), whereas his modest efforts (Dead Calm, Rabbit-Proof Fence) have a modicum of quality. And then there was Sliver, an unfortunate waste of top-drawer trash (and Sharon Stone), Noyce delivering what can accurately be described as the worst film Roman Polanski never made.
    Had Salt starred anyone other than Angie, I doubt it would’ve risen above mediocrity. She remains a formidable presence, lanky and athletic, drop-dead gorgeous with the right couture, but Noyce grants her little room to expand her part. The toughness, humor and clarity of the character she played in last year’s vastly superior (and far more fun) Wanted is gone; save for a few opening scenes where she’s allowed to breathe, Noyce stifles Evelyn Salt as a generic movie cop. And, on a purely personal note, given one of my erotic fetishes, I was alarmed that the scenes of her running barefoot failed to spark my libido. Once she kicked off her pumps, I figured I was in for an arousing treat. But Noyce can be humorless, and childishly innocent of those psychological shenanigans our erogenous zones can play.
    This is the kind of script choice Angie’s frequently made that seems to consciously avoid depth and complication. She’s one of my favorites (there are moments in Gia and Girl Interrupted that stand without peer), but a character with a richer personality and less acumen with assault weapons would’ve been welcome here. Her upcoming movie with Johnny Depp, The Tourist, appears headed in that direction, and advance shots of that film’s wardrobe are to die for.

(Very) Random notes

I tried on three separate occasions to watch Stop Me Before I Kill! (1960), part of the “Hammer Icons of Suspense” DVD set that recently came out. But all three times I fell asleep after ten or fifteen minutes. Odd, considering the plot of a man driven to murderous extremes by a near-fatal accident, along with Diane Cilento’s ludicrous performance, you’d think it’d be an instant trash classic. I can’t say it was boring, but I can testify to a dulling apathy that swept over me like a humid fog. I figure I wasn’t meant to see the whole thing, so I sent it back to Netflix.

My father was an avid Edgar Rice Burroughs fan and took me to see Tarzan movies when I was a kid. I barely remember any of them, but I do recall zoning out a lot. He was into Tarzan and Westerns, I was into monster movies and James Bond. Anyway, in 1966 I was kind of jazzed to see Tarzan and the Valley of Gold because I saw the trailer at a matinee and it looked like it had more action that most of the other Tarzan movies. We went the weekend it opened, at a Saturday matinee, and the old man settled into his chair with his popcorn and soda, and the movie opens with this big husky guy in a suit and tie flying around in a helicopter, dodging bullets and enemy agents, and someone calls this guy ‘Tarzan,’ which got my father really pissed off. They’d turned Tarzan into James Bond! He spoke fluent English and knew judo moves! I thought all of that was pretty cool, and it became my favorite Tarzan movie of all. (I was eight-years-old.)
    Jump ahead forty-four years: Warner Archives releases it on DVD-R, and Deep Discount DVD was selling it for thirteen dollars and change, so in the online shopping cart it went. I hadn’t seen the movie again in all those years. And now, seeing it was, well… I will say this: Tarzan kills a guy with a giant Coke bottle. (You gotta see that.) And he hangs out with Nancy Kovack, who I had the hots for when I was a wee tad. (She knew her days were numbered as a sex kitten screen siren, so she married Zubin Mehta.) And the villain’s bald henchman is played by Don Megowan, fresh from battling Clickers in The Creation of the Humanoids (1962). Was it worth the wait or the money? Yes, yes and no.

Click to englarge

I just smoked weed for the first time in twenty-seven years, only to reach two inevitable conclusions:
    a) I’m no longer in my twenties.
    b) There’s a reason I stopped smoking weed twenty-seven years ago.
(Note to The Authorities: if you’re thinking of busting me, there’s no product in my crib. But if you got a warrant, I guess you’re gonna come in.)

Someone recommended I see Triangle (2009), which intrigued me because the Bermuda Triangle is such a cool setting for a fantasy or science fiction movie. I found the film mildly engaging, though the scenario becomes redundant before long. (I could draw comparisons to its plot gimmick and that used in a couple of other movies, but in doing so I’d be giving away too much, and I think spoilers suck.) One thing that did stand out in Triangle was its star, Melissa George. Not being much of a television watcher, I didn’t know her from the shows she’s been on (Home and Away, Roar, Charmed, Thieves, In Treatment, Grey’s Anatomy), nor did I recognize her for playing Camilla Rhodes in Mulholland Dr. (2001). But in Triangle she was successfully locked in character, and not too shabby on the eyes, either. So I rented The Betrayed (2008), a somewhat suffocating drama where she’s held prisoner and gets abused. It’s not really that good a film, but she’s excellent. And then I saw Turistas (2006), where she’s top-billed with an ensemble cast in what apparently is referred to as a “torture porn” flick. I dunno… I didn’t find it all that disgusting, and, as far as Black Market Body Parts movies go, I’d opt to see it again over a repeat performance of Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Which reminds me that my cable company will be offering Repo Men (2010) On Demand next Tuesday, which may be worth a gander.

Melissa George

Someone close just got leukemia after smoking cigarettes for far too long. It prompted this interesting discussion, between a woman in the family who just turned thirty, and myself, who stopped smoking twenty-two years ago:

    “I’d like to quit smoking,” she said. “But it’s so hard. Every time I want to quit, I end up smoking the next day.”

    “Quitting smoking was the best thing I ever did,” I replied.

    “What made you quit?”

    “A few things,” I said. “There was the health issue. I figured I’d get cancer or something else horrible, or have to carry an oxygen tank around for the rest of my life. And then there was the money. When I quit, Marlboro had gone up to ten bucks for a carton.”

    “They cost a lot more than that now,” she said.

    “But I think the one thing that really made me want to quit smoking is the power cigarettes had over me,” I said. “I don’t like anyone or anything having power or control over me, and cigarettes had complete control over me.”

    “Wow,” she sighed. “I’m glad cigarettes don’t have that kind of power over me.”

    “Well that’s great,” I beamed. “Then quit.”

    She looked at me, said nothing, and resumed texting someone on her Blackberry. One day she may get it.

And still more Jack Davis

All images click to enlarge:

I find Jack Davis’s Jekyll & Hyde portrait of Dick Van Dyke in Some Kind of a Nut (1969) très creepy; it reminds me of artwork by schizophrenics I’ve seen in psychiatric journals. The film was one of Hollywood’s instantly outdated Generation Gap “comedies” from the late ‘60s, and another of the actor’s failed attempts at movie stardom. After heading a talented ensemble cast on television’s The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966), Van Dyke never established a persona strong enough to sell tickets — regardless of the considerable success of both Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and Mary Poppins (1964). His oeuvre is sketchy, as the actor struggled with alcoholism during what should have been his peak years: Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. (1966); the shrill Divorce American Style (1967); Fitzwilly (1967); Never a Dull Moment (1968), directed by Dick Van Dyke Show co-star Jerry Paris; Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), a notorious box office flop no matter what the revisionists try to tell you; The Comic (1969), a heartfelt tribute to silent era comedians (Van Dyke was friends with Stan Laurel, one of his idols); and, the one commercial hit, Norman Lear’s Cold Turkey (1971), in which an entire town tries to quit smoking. Some Kind of a Nut was written and directed by fifty-seven-year-old Garson Kanin, way beyond his heyday (he wrote Tracy & Hepburn’s Pat and Mike and directed My Favorite Wife), when he should have been playing golf and enjoying retirement.

When Inspector Clouseau came out in 1968, it seemed ‘unofficial,’ perhaps even unauthorized, as a sequel to The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964). For starters, it didn’t star Peter Sellers and wasn’t directed by Blake Edwards, who may have been focusing all his attention on making Darling Lili (1970). Nor did it have an audience. As I recall, Inspector Clouseau came and went in a few short weeks. Alan Arkin was an interesting choice as Sellers’s replacement. He’d stirred some positive buzz for his appearances in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) and Wait Until Dark (1967); next he’d do Popi (1969), a sleeper hit that played for months — which I saw in first run, then two or three times again on the bottom half of double features. The supporting cast in Inspector Clouseau includes Frank Finlay (who creeped me out when I was a kid in The Deadly Bees), Barry Foster (best known for moaning “Lovely! Lovely!” in Hitchcock’s Frenzy), Beryl (‘Sister George’) Reid, Michael Ripper (also in The Deadly Bees and a million Hammer films), the would-be international sex goddess Delia Boccardo (uh... who?), and the criminally underrated Patrick Cargill (best known in the States for playing the Scotland Yard Superintendent in Help!). Click on the image below for a sharper look at Jack Davis’s art from the soundtrack album cover:

Previously I posted Davis’s ad art for One More Time (1970), a jaw-droppingly bad comedy that has the distinction of being the one film Jerry Lewis directed that he’s not in. Like a ten-car pile-up you can’t take your eyes off of, it’s a mess of damaged goods and charred ideals demanding your attention. The same cannot be said of Salt & Pepper (1968), the first of that two-film series starring Sammy Davis, Jr. (as Charlie Salt) and Peter Lawford (as Christopher Pepper), two swingin,’ ascot-wearing bourgeois hepcats trolling the nightlife of a middleclass fatcat’s stilted rendering of swingin’ London. One More Time is a catalog of gruelingly embarrassing mishaps; Salt and Pepper is an hour and a half of white noise. It comes as no surprise that it was directed by Richard Donner. In his book, The Biographical Dictionary of Film, the normally verbose David Thomson summed up the director in two succinct and wholly accurate sentences: “Mr. Donner has made several of the most successful and least interesting films of his age. And one doubts it’s over yet.”

You can visit my previous posts about Jack Davis here, here, here and here.

The Last Testicle of Joel Gilbert

Paul McCartney Really Is Dead:
The Last Testament of George Harrison
Directed by Joel Gilbert. 95 minutes. Released in 2010.
Available on DVD from See Of Sound.
Visit the Official Website.

DVD Review by Nelhydrea Paupér

Simultaneously boring, offensive and pointless — a trifecta seldom achieved by any but the most talentless or delusional — Joel Gilbert’s Paul McCartney Really is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison should have been good for a few laughs and some enjoyable nostalgia for those of us decrepit enough to remember the big “Paul is Dead” sensation of 1969. Instead, it’s a waste of time and, should you be foolish enough to buy it, money. As my 11 year old best friend Jimmy used to say in 1969, it bites the hairy kazoo.

    “Paul is Dead” was one of the biggest and fastest spreading urban legends ever. In a nutshell, in September, 1969 some stoned college students in Iowa came up with a joke piece for their college newspaper claiming Paul McCartney had secretly died and the Beatles were leaving clues in their songs and on their album covers. Someone ran with the joke as if it were true and very quickly — within weeks — it became a worldwide rumor, so wide-spread that Beatles records sales started climbing and news outlets began covering the story. In November, 1969 McCartney turned up in a cover story in Life magazine, giving an interview for the sole purpose of announcing he wasn’t even slightly dead. The story was everywhere. I recall watching a nationally syndicated TV show hosted by attorney F. Lee Bailey that addressed the rumor as if it were a courtroom case. The “Paul is Dead” cottage industry vanished quickly but the event itself has been written about in scholarly publications as a phenomenon approaching mass hysteria and a textbook case of how urban legends spread. (It actually predated the coinage of the term “urban legend” by a decade.)

    At the time many young Beatles lovers like myself dismissed the rumor outright yet found the “clues” downright creepy. To this day there are moments in “Revolution no. 9” (on the Beatles’ White Album) that give me a frisson of the willies I felt at the time, harkening back to childhood death fears I first felt during that period. It was a thoroughly strange phenomenon to live through.

    A Dutch documentary, Who Buried Paul McCartney?, was released in 2005. I’ve not seen it, and there may be others, but the subject certainly is worthy of a proper film examination. This Joel Gilbert thing, however — I call it a thing because it’s unclassifiable; it certainly can't be called a documentary — looks like nothing more than an effort to make money and get its maker some attention by resurrecting the question of Paul’s supposed death. While the whole project seems at any moment likely to show its tongue is firmly in its cheek, it drones on humorlessly. Likewise, the marketing of the DVD gives no indication of it being a ‘documentary’ and Gilbert has given interviews that push the DVD’s stated premise as genuine.

    In the film, Gilbert claims that a mysterious package mailed from England arrived at Highway 61 Productions. The one genuinely funny moment of the film is the accompanying shot of a large commercial building with a clearly fake “Highway 61 Productions” sign emblazoned on its facade, as if this fly-by-night company needed more than a post office box to house its requirements. The package allegedly contained two micro cassettes and a micro cassette player. The tapes reveal a voice that claims to be George Harrison lying in a hospital bed after his stabbing by a deranged fan in 1999. “George” speaks with a really bad Liverpudlian accent (“the gooverment”) that bears a striking resemblance to the “accents” used in Al Brodax’s cheesy 1960s Saturday morning Beatles cartoons. He tells the “true” tale of Paul’s death in a car crash, MI5’s intervention to prevent worldwide chaos from blah-blah-blah. What-ever. He goes through the “clues,” the fake Paul, follows up with post-Beatles nonsense and brings in John Lennon’s murder and Harrison’s stabbing to buttress the story (talk about bad taste!).

    Whether I think Gilbert, best known for a series of innocuous but enjoyable DVDs on Bob Dylan, actually believes what he says cannot be addressed without proper legal counsel. What I can say is the voice of “George” sounds like a stoner who has been flattered once too often for his Harrison imitation; that the recording sounds nothing like any voice on any live recording of any person speaking into any tape recorder that I’ve ever heard in my life (there’s not a single “er,” “um,” flub, thoughtful pause or self-correction; indeed, the whole thing sounds like it’s being read for Books for the Blind); that this voice could not be that of a man who had just been stabbed in the chest and suffered a punctured lung (classy way to make money, Gilbert); and it was most clearly NOT recorded on a micro-cassette recorder which, as anyone who has ever used one knows, produces lousy recordings awash in tape hiss, makes words hard to discern, gives every speaker a non-existent lisp and would certainly pick up the room noise in a hospital. On the contrary, this sounds like it was recorded in a soundproof booth on a Shure SM58 microphone with a pop screen, the digital signal bussed through a Joe Meek pre-amp, yeah-yeah-yeah.

    The film’s imagery is mostly comprised of stock footage, the majority of it the already overused public domain material of the Beatles that has been recycled endlessly on cheapo-cheapo DVDs (the same press conferences, the same crowd shots, the same record burnings, etc.) interspersed with stock shots that match the narration (need surgeons in an operating room? no prob) plus newspaper headlines, photos and album covers, all over-edited in that snazzy-moving Looky-what-I-can-do-on-my-Mac style, using a copy of Final Cut Pro whose provenance may be as questionable as the premise of this DVD .

    This endless glop appears to have been inspired by another film about death, cover-ups and conspiracies, Oliver Stone's JFK. That rather dazzling jumble covered all angles — literally — of the Kennedy assassination and the myriad conspiracy theories about it with an undeniable editing mastery. But this isn’t Oliver Stone, this is Ed Wood. Except Gilbert has none of Wood’s naive sincerity. Just the ineptitude. And the stock footage.

    So what harm is there if Gilbert made this as a joke and is simply pulling an Andy Kaufman, creating a conceptual art piece that is both a self-parody and an effort to unsettle? What if the DVD and interviews are all a put-on being done for fun? The problem is: it’s not fun. The DVD is lame and its 95 minutes are truly boring. But using the brutal attacks on Lennon and Harrison for funsies would be despicable under any circumstances. (I can’t imagine what Gilbert’s hero, Bob Dylan, would say to someone exploiting his friend Harrison’s agony — but I’d sure love to be there to hear it.) Top it all off with charging $14.95 for this load and you’ve got the definition of a bad practical joke.

    But what if, on the other hand, Gilbert actually believes any of this? Well, then he’s simply a nut. A perusal of his Highway 61 Entertainment website shows Gilbert is now also making “serious” documentaries about Islam and the Middle East. I haven’t seen them so I won't pass judgment. But if he thinks his Paul is Really Dead conspiracy thing is going to help him gain credibility for his Islamic Conspiracy thing: dude, on behalf of the real George Harrison, try chanting a few Hare Krishnas and get a good night’s sleep.

Jack Davis in the 1970s

All images click to enlarge:

Among its many highlights, Mad magazine’s movie parodies were generally pretty funny — as were their kooky titles: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was spoofed as Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid; On a Clear Day You Can See Forever became On a Clear Day You Can See a Funny Girl Singing ‘Hello Dolly’ Forever; The Poseidon Adventure was The Poopsidedown Adventure; The Great Gatsby became The Great Gasbag, etc. Jack Davis illustrated many of them, stuffing panels with wacky non sequiturs, overlapping dialogue and abrupt shifts in location and action. In a remote way, they were the comic strip equivalent of 1970s Robert Altman movies. United Artists apparently recognized the similarities and commissioned Davis to render one of three posters for Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). Unsure of how to market the picture, UA also sent out this one by an unknown artist; and this poster by Richard Amsel, whose neo-art deco approach was the antithesis of Davis’s work. Me? I prefer Davis’s — it’s an exact replica of a Mad parody — and suggest you click the above image and read the word balloons!

Davis was also an excellent choice to render the frantic aura of pre-Annie Hall Woody Allen — “back when his movies were funny,” as they’d say in Stardust Memories. Bananas (1971) made a boatload of cash, and this caricature of Allen (flanked by Natividad Abascal and former Mrs. Allen/future Mary Hartman Louise Lasser) was something of an icon in its day. Only one other Woody Allen picture in the ‘70s would use portrait illustration in its promotion (Robert McGinnis’s ad for Sleeper), as mounting critical praise (especially for Annie Hall and Manhattan) had distributors using lofty, sedate and ‘respectable’ photographs and silhouettes in their marketing.

Well, you see, I, uh… you know, it was, well… OK! OK! I’ll admit it: I had the hots for Tatum O’Neal. When The Bad News Bears came out in 1976, she was 13-years-old and I was 18. Five years really isn’t that much of a difference when you think about it… at least if it doesn’t involve statutory rape or anything. And far be it for me to fess up to that same horny longing today, where she’s still 13 in the movie while I’m doughy and balding and well into my fifties. I mean, that would be just plain wrong, right? Hmmm. Before I dig myself in deeper: the film was a hit, prompting two less-profitable sequels (The Bad News Bears Breaking Training and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan) and an equally unmemorable (and largely forgotten) 2005 remake whose Ritalin-laced ad art by Phil Roberts lacked all the exuberant punch of Jack Davis’s original. As for Tatum, it’s high time I catch up with Little Darlings (1980), in which my sweet little nubbins vies with 18-year-old Kristy McNichol to see who can lose their virginity first in summer sleepaway camp!

Will future generations give a whit of consideration for George C. Scott? Cults keep the flames burning for Dr. Strangelove and Petulia, and there’s an audience willing to view Patton as an epic of excellence, though, with clear vision, time has eroded much of it to bombast and self parody. That was his signature picture; before and after were blurs of irregularity, bursts of brilliance colliding with mediocrity, the actor apparently willing to do anything to keep busy or pay off debt and alimony. (He was married five times, twice to Colleen Dewhurst.) The first and only time I ever saw Bank Shot (1974), or ‘B.S.,’ a rare directorial outing for former hoofer Gower Champion, was when it came out, an experience I haven’t been moved to repeat ever since. I’d like to think Scott did it to help finance The Savage Is Loose (1974), that disastrously expensive gamble which he produced, directed, starred in and personally marketed and distributed through his short-lived Campbell Devon Films. Making movies is one thing; distributing them is something else entirely. Suffice it to say, Campbell Devon Films went under shortly after, and the movie, a spin on Oedipus, has been swept under the rug — some would say deservedly so. On the other hand, Bank Shot is readily available on DVD. An unofficial sequel to The Hot Rock (“Afghanistan banana stand”) via Donald Westlake, it has gruff Scott in the role essayed earlier by a pre-sun damaged Robert Redford.

You can visit my previous posts about Jack Davis here, here and here.

Vanessa Daou: ‘Sunday Afternoons’

Laying out here on my deck, soaking up the rays, a gentle breeze carrying away the sweaty toxins, an afternoon of pleasure, not thinking I should be somewhere or someone else. Then this song momentarily transports me back several years and several hundred miles away to when I’d roam the streets and parks in and around Manhattan, a lonely young man searching for a connection, preferably with a woman, to share the time and sun and desire to be something more than zero. If there’s one positive thing to come from that forlorn period (oh, how those weekends ached!), it’s the gratitude I now have for no longer being in that mindset and the ability to find comfort in the here and now.

Wikio's film blog rankings for July

Here are this month's Top 50 Film Blogs:

1	Deadline | Hollywood
2	/Film
3	MTV Movies Blog
4	Cinematical
5	FirstShowing.net
6	Twitch
7	Cartoon Brew
8	Film School Rejects
9	Trek Movie Report
10	Some Came Running
11	The IFC Blog
12	Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
13	Michael Sporn Animation - Splog
14	Edward Copeland on Film
15	Upcoming Pixar
16	Ferdy on Films
17	Mayerson on Animation
18	Cinema Styles
19	Film Junk
20	Self-Styled Siren
21	The Evening Class
22	scanners
23	Fin de Cinema
24	Daemon's Movies
25	Only The Cinema
26	Observations on Film Art
27	Indie Ear - IFC.com
28	The Criterion Cast
29	Double O Section
30	Moon in the Gutter
31	Good News Film Reviews
32	goatdogblog
33	Nick's Flick Picks
34	SHADOWPLAY
35	Movie City Indie
36	Movie-Moron
37	Filmmaker Magazine: Blog
38	GreenCine Daily
39	Animated News
40	CinemaTech
41	Bright Lights After Dark
42	Mr. Peel's Sardine Liqueur
43	Cinebeats
44	Premium Hollywood
45	Not Coming to a Theater Near You
46	F L I C K H E A D
47	DaveKehr.com
48	Coffee Coffee and More Coffee
49	2719 Hyperion
50	Big Media Vandalism

Ranking made by Wikio