She-Haw: Catherine undercover

Catherine Deneuve while filming Peau d'âne (Donkey Skin, 1970) via Catherine Deneuve; click to enlarge.

Halloween with Flickhead: “And awaaay we go!”

Gil Astaire via Jumping someone else's tumblr; click to enlarge.

Halloween with Flickhead: This year’s kewlest goth chick

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth in the très, très cool and très, très chic The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; click to enlarge.

Halloween with Flickhead: William Castle meets Roman Polanski

Above, Mia Farrow, Robert Evans and Roman Polanski; below, William Castle, Farrow and Evans during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Bottom, membership card to the National William Castle Fan Club via WilliamCastle.com. Click images to enlarge.

Halloween with Flickhead: The Hot L Whitewood

Click to enlarge

“Whitewood!” The name can still make me shiver. It was the destination of a modest but serious university student named Nan Barlow, who, we later find out, harbors a yen for cheaply erotic, ten-dollar-hooker Frederick’s of Hollywood nighties, right down to the garter belts. Sadly, that jarring moment in Horror Hotel (1960) when she peels off her robe flew over my pointy head; along with the delightfully deranged expression on Christopher Lee’s face as he sacrifices a dove. We’re talking over forty years ago when it played regularly on New York TV, I was under twelve, and never made the connection it had with Psycho (1960), released just three months earlier. Both begin with a doomed heroine who’s killed off mid-way through the picture and replaced by an investigative, chilly sibling. It all takes place in Whitewood, Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Selwyn was burned at the stake for witchcraft three hundred years earlier. She’s played by the criminally underused Patricia Jessel, who died way too young at forty-seven from a heart attack in 1968. The original British title was City of the Dead, which a lot of purists now call the film even though Whitewood wasn’t a city but a village; and the people living there weren’t really dead but damned. So it’s like a village of the damned, but not like that Village of the Damned. Besides, Horror Hotel just sounds cooler than City of the Dead. I probably saw it on WPIX-TV’s Chiller Theatre…



…which later ‘screamlined’ its intro to this…

DVD query

A Flickhead reader asks: I wonder if you can answer a technical query I have about DVDs. In Paris I bought a box set of Jacques Tourneur horror films including I Walked With a Zombie. While watching it this evening, the image began to stop towards the end of the film, then jump, then proceed, then stop again. Finally, I gave up trying to watch it, although successive attempts did find it proceeding as normal in places where it halted before. Do you, or perhaps another Flickhead writer, know what might cause this? I tried wiping the disc with a clean cloth but to little avail.

I know it’s a film about consciousness stopped dead in its tracks, but the irony wore thin this evening!

Any suggestions in the comment box would be appreciated!

Bury my heart at Moulin Rouge

Sonam Kapoor

Will the pretty young maiden ride off into the sunset with the singing, dancing, joyous eunuch who worships the very ground she walks on? Or will she settle for the brooding drifter who’ll guarantee her days of hardship and nights of multiple orgasms? Yes, it’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die. Where the object of affection will inevitably be swayed by the package in his lordship’s pants.

    No expense is spared in Saawariya (2007); it’s a visual feast with a superbly arranged musical score by Monty Sharma, wardrobe to die for and a handful of capably choreographed musical numbers. Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali, however, seems to have overdosed on Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) in an apparent bid to broaden the appeal of Bollywood — working from a short story by Dostoevsky, no less. The results are, as all that implies, eyepoppingly mixed.

    I found Ranbir Kapoor overbearing as the yappity minstrel; a little of his gushing goes a long way. Sonam Kapoor is excellent as the naïve waif blind to his love, but sharp enough to realize what a tediously high maintenance prick he’ll surely become down the road of life. She also supports my theory that India may be giving birth to more beautiful women than any other country on the planet. This is further backed by Rani Mukherjee, who plays the playfully seductive neighborhood hooker. They dance, they sing, they watch Ranbir wear his heart on his sleeve for one-hundred-and-forty-two minutes. When Sonam goes off with Salman Khan’s badboy and the screen fades to black, we realize we’re never going to see the best part of the story.

It looks fantastic on Blu-ray

The music is mostly excellent

Young Frances Farmer

Via Where is my mind?; click to enlarge.

Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide

Every four or five years I’ll pick up a fresh copy of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, that fat paperback perennial that reminds me of how many movies I haven’t seen. Its rows upon rows of occasionally pithy, sometimes clunky capsule movie reviews make perfect bathroom reading, although I once turned to it for the kind of vital information — cast rosters, year of release, running time, a director’s name — now freely available online at a fraction of the speed. Once it arrived in the late 1960’s, I used to buy the book every August (back when it was called TV Movies), and gave it a comfy home next to a decomposing Webster’s held together by rubber bands, on a desk where I’d bang out articles on a Royal manual long into the night.

    I’m not doing much banging these days, but a fractured and strained nostalgia had me buying the new Leonard Maltin’s 2011 Movie Guide (Signet). The cover says its nearly 1700 pages are packed with “more than 17,000 entries, including 300+ new entries, more than 12,000 DVD and 13,000 video listings.” While the quantity of the DVD listings has risen sharply, that latter figure has stagnated since the last edition I picked up four years ago, proof positive that VHS has gone the way of the Edsel, 8-tracks and The Bay City Rollers.

    With the internet and a dodgy future for print media, could the hardcopy version of Maltin’s book be far behind? Some would say the entire enterprise is already obsolete, given the shifts in trends and tastes over the last few years. Could a Gen Xer who “grew up on” the Brendon Fraser The Mummy (awarded “*½” by Maltin’s four-star rating system) find anything of value in Karl Freund’s 1932 The Mummy (“***½”), whose creaky seventy-two minutes threatens to lull even me to sleep? Indeed, would anyone who spent their formative years with Indiana Jones and Star Wars comprehend its comparatively intricate plot or tolerate the absence of modern streamlined effects, loud atonal music and ADHD flash cutting?

    Movie Guide has always been a middle-of-the-road enterprise to placate a wide cross section of readers, where Maltin blurs the lines separating art from entertainment. It’s a book that, evident as far back as the 1970 edition I still own, extols the virtues of Godard and John Ford right alongside The Sound of Music and the gaudy spectacles of Cecil B. DeMille. Now working with ten contributing editors, Maltin’s succinct style has expanded somewhat; new praiseworthy films get more than the three or four glowing sentences they were once granted.

    In a world where ‘tradition’ can sometimes be a fluctuating concept, Movie Guide remains true to a kind of sober clarity that drives some cinephiles nuts. Antonioni’s celebrated Red Desert, for example, earns a scant “**” for being “vague [and] boring,” although Maltin concedes that “it does have its followers.” Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, praised ad nauseam by the online community, also gets “**” for reasons I won’t argue: “A Batman story for the terrorist era, this is doomsday dark and palpably real. It’s also incredibly long.” A junkie like myself could go on and on, flipping through pages long into the night, discovering titles previously unknown while being reminded of those worth seeing again. For the price, it can’t be beat.

Available from Amazon

Ain’t nuthin’ hotter than a Playmate with a gun and a temper…

Playboy’s 1968 Playmate of the Year, Angela Dorian has been arrested for shooting her husband. You can read all the gory details at CNN, The L.A. Times and The Stir, the latter venturing to query, “What pissed the Playmate off?” Cinephiles remember Angela as the girl doing laundry with Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where Mia tells her she resembles Victoria Vetri… which was Angela’s real name, the one she used for her star billing in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970). Three years later Victoria/Angela appeared with Price Is Right model Anitra Ford in the remarkable Invasion of the Bee Girls when her star began to fade. If you click the photo above, you’ll see Angela’s full Playboy centerfold!

The illustrated Marilyn

Via White Black Grey

“Obscure and arty…”

Orson Welles being directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini for the “La Ricotta” segment of Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) via pieto the media ecologist; click to enlarge. The title of this anthology film refers to the four directors who worked on it: Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti.



Peter Bogdanovich: How about Ro.Go.Pa.G.?

Orson Welles: Can’t believe that. I was never in a picture with a name like that.

PB: In one episode directed by Pasolini. You played a movie director.

OW: Oh yes… Censored, in Italy at least, after one single screening in Venice.

PB: I didn’t think it was very good.

OW: No? Why?

PB: It was sort of obscure and arty—

OW [laughs]: “Obscure and arty.” Simply because it didn’t happen on the banks of the Mississippi, it’s obscure and arty… You mustn’t be asked about anything that isn’t, you know, Judge Shit on the Range or something—

PB [laughing]: Well, among other things wrong with it, they dubbed you in Italian.

OW: I played it in Italian! The exhibitors must have thought the Italian public couldn’t stand my accent. They have a terrible snobbism about accents in Italy. So much so that a lot of their leading actors — the girls especially — have never been heard in Italy speaking their own language in their own voices; they’re dubbed by radio actors.

PB: I didn’t know that.

OW: Yes. If your accent is vaguely of the north, let’s say, then everybody in the south hoots with laughter. So of course my own little touch of Kenosha [Wisconsin] would have been fatal. I read a poem in that one, and Pasolini told everybody that he’d never heard an Italian actor read Italian poetry with such simplicity and directness. He tried to get me to play a pig a couple of years ago when I was in Vienna.

PB [laughing]: Really a pig?

OW: A German pig. Something really obscene.

PB: You like Pasolini?

OW: Terribly bright and gifted. Crazy mixed-up kid, maybe — but on a very superior level. I mean Pasolini the poet, spoiled Christian, and Marxist ideologue. There’s nothing mixed up about him on a movie set. Real authority and a wonderfully free way with the machinery.

— from This is Orson Welles.

Sweet Loretta

Loretta Young photographed by Elmer Fryer via Lady Snowblood; click to enlarge.

Jai ho!

The Pussycat Dolls with AR Rahman. What can I say? Indulge me. Play it loud. And often. And loud. Full screen, that's the ticket.

The New Jaglom

Continuing his unfortunate obsession and association with Tanna Frederick.

Halloween with Flickhead: House Par-tay!

I wanted to show the dance number set to Lou Christie’s “Lightening Strikes” from Strange Behavior (1981), and found this YouTube clip. But unless you’ve seen the film, you may want to shut it once the song is over. No use spoiling a cool movie that you should check out. It moves at a pace that’ll have the Ritalin generation upping their meds, but director Michael Laughlin’s best film works as both a remembrance of 1950s lily-white idealism and a component of late-70s/early-80s New Wave. It was originally (and barely) released by the short-lived World Northal Films. I caught it in first run, prompted by enthusiastic notices in The Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice, along with its snazzy poster art (see below). Twenty-eight years later I finally revisited the bugger, on widescreen DVD from Synapse Films, and it hasn’t lost any of its fractured charm. Laughlin co-wrote the screenplay with a young Bill Condon (later of Gods and Monsters fame), resuscitating the mad scientist genre with an actor (Arthur Dignam) who had me thinking of J. Robert Oppenheimer. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of the cast — Dan Shor (from the barely seen Kubrick valentine Strangers Kiss), Dey Young, Louise Fletcher, Michael Murphy, Charles Lane, Scott Brady and an intoxicating Fiona Lewis — are close to excellent. There’s a Halloween party, tacky costumes, a Tor Johnson mask, and this choreographed marvel, all of it unspooling in a quiet Midwestern town… filmed in New Zealand, many years before hobbits and rings. It’s also worth watching with the lively DVD commentary by Condon, Dey and Shor.

Available from Amazon


Original poster art; click to enlarge


Come back later for more tricky Halloween treats!

Halloween with Flickhead: “Ook Batt!”

Two intergalactic hotties with lusciously chunky thighs reanimate the dreaded La Nave de los Monstruos (Ship of Monsters, 1960). The dollbabes are Lorena Velazquez, cult icon south of the border, and beauty queen Ana Bertha Lepe. Dig that crazy talking skull! You can buy this on region-1 DVD, but be forewarned: it’s in Spanish without English subtitles — not that you really need any!



Come back later for more tricky Halloween treats!

Marisa and the Master of Space & Time

Click to enlarge

A barebones romantic fantasy, Happy Accidents (2000) found its way onto my Netflix queue after a string of more recent films — Factotum (2005), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) and The Wrestler (2008) in particular — had me wondering: whatever happened to Marisa Tomei? She’d won an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny (1992), one of the Academy’s more perceptive, albeit unexpected, votes. But then, as fast as you can say, “Timothy Hutton,” she wound up in a series of thankless roles in too many ignored or mediocre movies. Outside of a gag guest spot playing herself on TV’s Seinfeld, other than the four aforementioned movies there’s little in the post-Vinny filmography to demand anyone’s attention. By the time she showed up for a small part in Wild Hogs (2007), her charisma and beauty were never more apparent; at age forty-three she stole what she could of an otherwise appalling John Travolta/Tim Allen midlife crisis comedy.

    There’s a toothless DVD commentary between Happy Accidents editor-writer-director Brad Anderson (Next Stop Wonderland, Transsiberian) and Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays Marisa’s love interest; though neither appears willing to explain or rationalize the film’s rather weird blend of humor and drama with science fiction. A woman pushing forty, burned too often in relationships, a codependent raised in an alcoholic household, Marisa’s Ruby Weaver meets and falls for D’Onofrio’s chatty Sam Deed in the park. Her attraction to this probable stalker and street crazy (he says he’s from the year 2470) is barely scrutinized in the script, but Sam is so blatantly off-putting to make us question Ruby’s sanity just for being with him. I credit D’Onofrio for a brilliant portrayal (few could make unlikeable so captivating), and Tomei occasionally shatters scenes from the gut, her blaring meltdowns over his jabbering eccentricity especially pungent. Props to Anderson for allowing the actors to flex, from the crazy rants about time travel to Tovah Feldshuh as Ruby’s mom, offering a perceptive obituary for the flame that’s died in her character’s marriage.

    Perhaps too ambitious for its own good, Anderson’s script is riddled with holes. Why, for example, is the rough hewn Ruby reading Anaïs Nin — and pronounces her name correctly — when she’d obviously be more at home with a Harlequin romance? How is this woman of modest means able to afford weekly therapy sessions? (Holland Taylor, better known as Charlie and Alan’s mother on Two and a Half Men, plays the therapist.) How does one explain Ruby’s revelatory phone conversation with Sam’s present day father, whose very existence would negate Sam’s ‘birth’ some four hundred years in the future? And how can we overlook the parallels between Sam’s quest to save the woman, with the similar themes in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995)?

    All these things considered, Happy Accidents is difficult to take literally, as a crossover genre piece. Regardless of the two leads’ excellent performances, its comedy, drama, romance and fantasy often fall short. Yet how does the picture manage to wander around in the mind days, if not weeks after viewing? Whether by design or not, Anderson has crafted a singular portrait of people trapped in a struggle to balance their emotions with common sense. He pays homage to the Marker film with freeze-frame zooms accompanied by narration, a subtle and welcome touch. Shooting at magic hour on the streets of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn just months shy of 9-11, DP Terry Stacey (In Her Shoes, Adventureland, TV’s Dexter) fuses the cold realities surrounding Ruby and Sam with the cozy warmth of an older New York, where a fuzzy Sunday afternoon glow so indigenous to that region transforms a ragtag scenario into an Impressionist odyssey. With the right frame of mind, you may even understand why Ruby would believe a man can travel through time.

“Dusty Happy End” by Dusty Trails, from Happy Accidents

The Big Sleep

By Richard Armstrong

Between March and August 2010 I worked as a ‘Maître de langues,’ teaching English at the University of Paris. During this time I saw hardly any films at the cinema or on DVD or video. Perhaps, mired in the newness of Paris, taken in by her looks and scents, overwhelmed by her exoticism, I didn’t feel the need for escape into movie worlds. Depending on the time of year, I taught, marked papers, read novels on balmy spring afternoons, took in art shows at sweltering summer nocturnes. After years of doing nothing but watching movies and writing about them, then researching and writing up a PhD on modernist cinema, I fetched up in an apartment in the 12th south of Bastille and inhabited classrooms and restaurants by day, and galleries, bars or my apartment by night. As my exile wore on, I had a series of bizarre dreams...

    ….I am watching Bonnie and Clyde, except that it isn’t Bonnie and Clyde but another film in which I see a band of evangelists in the Deep South walking down a country road praying, declaiming, and ‘speaking in tongues.’ When they reach the camera, they put somebody in a box; like a coffin. Then I see Clyde in prison on Death Row talking about how he can’t read because the warden won’t turn the lights up. I see a cell door and can just make out the spy hole which then closes. It looks like the eye in Un Chien Andalou. There is then a flashback to the start of Clyde’s career and he is sitting behind the wheel of a car about to rob a bank. It is night and raining....

    ….I am watching The Lost Weekend, but it isn’t The Lost Weekend. It is a film in which three men, including the protagonists of The Lost Weekend, Don and Wick Birnam, become retarded and, so to speak, ‘go native’ in appearance and behavior. I remark to some others that, made during wartime, the film dramatized the crisis of masculinity of that period in US history....

    ….I am watching Ace in the Hole with some others and comment on Kirk Douglas’ great performance. Then as we watch some business with ice cream being placed in a heated bowl on a Japanese person’s head, I begin to doubt that I am watching Ace in the Hole....

    ….I am watching The Age of Innocence and am struck by a particularly vivid scene in which a character at dinner discusses toppling a family’s reputation, thereby ensuring his social rise. This character and this scene do not actually exist in the film....

Above: Ray Milland as Don Birnam

    Clearly, these reveries are the result of deprivation. But what interests me about them is the way in which my movie-starved mind nocturnally fed on ‘scenes from movies,’ while these scenes do not actually appear in either these films or in any I have ever seen. Postulating the name of a film whilst withholding the film itself, the dreams staged deprivation by harping on ‘absent’ films. Whilst the scene of the evangelists walking down the road could feasibly appear in a film set in the American South, arguably the ‘kind’ of film Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) is, the scene does not appear in Bonnie and Clyde. (Given the blur of inexactitude into which these Parisian reveries plunged me, it seems imperative to stipulate their credits when referring to those, actual, films to which they referred so vaguely). Whilst it is conceivable that some left-field experimental take on The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945), might find its ‘weak’ men reverting to some atavistic condition, this does not happen in The Lost Weekend. Whilst The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993), is preoccupied for much of its length with characters jostling for social position, the scene I dreamt does not appear in The Age of Innocence. It is as though I was subconsciously ‘writing’ these scenes and labeling them so that I woke up with the impression that I had been watching a film called ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ‘The Lost Weekend’ or ‘The Age of Innocence,’ whilst in my waking state I know these films don’t go like this. It is like being sung a tune which you are told is Mrs Robinson when it plainly isn’t.

    This kind of impressionistic nocturnal ‘moviegoing’ gives rise to the sensation that what you are watching is some generic film, a mishmash of movies seen with a particular actor or from a particular period. These dreams evince a fascination with Hollywood studio fare from the early to mid-50s, hence the references to Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda and Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951). The rather odd twist to the Ace in the Hole reverie might even suggest a wish to merge that film with another desert-set drama with racism at its core such as Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1954). Far from being about singular films, the finished article copyrighted by the studio and becoming for us documentary testimony to the facts of its making, these dreams emphasize what the finished articles have in common, not what makes them stand out but what makes them blend in. Interestingly, in this later example it occurs to me while I am dreaming that I am not watching Ace in the Hole, yet I do not recall feeling perplexed, confused or cheated by the realization. In the overwhelming majority of these dreams I recall only realizing what I was not watching after I awoke. Arguably, what I yearned for was not a singular example of cinema, but for cinema itself.

    Other episodes embody a strong desire to talk about movies, enthusiastically rehearsing plots to figures who seem disinterested. I am relating the plot of Friendship’s Death (Peter Wollen, 1987) to someone, but they are walking away from me. I am telling someone the plot of Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957). I wonder if the impulse to discuss or rehearse, if satisfied, would have been tantamount in the dream to actually watching the film, given the mainly scopic economy of this dream sequence? Was talking, in other words, another way of seeing? The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956), The Insider (Michael Mann, 2000), They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949), The Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise & Gunther von Fritsch, 1944), Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921), L’Argent (Marcel L'Herbier, 1928), The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968): night after night I experienced the familiar frisson of anticipation as in my sleep I began to see a movie I knew I was going to savor, only to discover that it was not there... (In the case of The Wrong Man, purchased on DVD in Paris in 2007, now gathering dust in a friend’s attic, the absence seemed especially poignant).

    What am I to make of the spyhole in Bonnie and Clyde which becomes the eye of Un Chien Andalou? There is a strange contiguity about these nocturnal séances which bears out the odd associations of early Buñuel, but how appropriate, how historically coincidental, how serendipitous, to have evoked the cinematically hallowed tradition of screen surrealism in one’s dreams! This seems especially pertinent given how I had fetched up in the ‘City of Light,’ arguably the birthplace of cinema, and the site of its fortuitous affair with psychoanalysis. But was I dreaming ‘about’ surrealism in the same way as I dreamt ‘about’ Bonnie and Clyde or Ace in the Hole, merely to compensate for the absence of a singular cultural inventory? Or was I dreaming something new, a burgeoning rhetoric of association and inference producing its own artful juxtapositions after midnight slunk across Paris? Might the ‘film absent,’ itself a bizarre take on the film maudit so beloved of French film culture, give rise to a new canon of ‘film rêver?’

    On my final weekend in Paris I went to the Cinémathèque Française and caught The Shop around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940) and Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) in the season then playing. They were the same films I had seen again and again across the years, each scene where I expected to find it, every flourish and remark just where I had left them. If they were different it was because I was different and they were still new. Despite their similarity to those I had seen in the past, I was not disappointed, and I have never enjoyed a trip to the cinema more, and have never dreamt of a single movie since.


Copyright © 2010 Richard Armstrong

Dynamo hum

Click images to enlarge

Carlos Dynamo’s X — Public Image is another of my favorite photo blogs to call it quits (C. Parker’s Starlet Showcase closed shop on September 8), but before leaving us he offered these images from the making of We Love You (1967): “Intended as a thank you to the fans who’d supported Mick and Keith throughout the Redlands bust and trial, the track was recorded while the band was awaiting appeal hearings, and with Allen Ginsberg, Paul McCartney and John Lennon on uncredited background vocals. The film, directed by Peter Whitehead, interspersed footage from the song’s recording session with Mick, Keith and Marianne [Faithfull]’s re-enactment of the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. Also featured prominently was the infamous fur rug that Marianne had on when Redlands was busted.” Adios, Carlos. You will be missed.

Face off

Now that they’ve given us The Social Network, a box office hit and a very good film that I’d like to see again, the Facebook enterprise has surely jumped the shark, prompting me to deactivate my account lest I be associated with yet another tacky mainstream addiction that now feels as Cutting Edge as an AOL chatroom. Of course, one could say the same for Blogger, but I’m fatigued from keeping up with all these new outlets bent on nurturing ADHD. As my website has stalled out of apathy, this blog is where I’ll hang my hat… for the meantime, at any rate. And if my FB “friends” are truly just that, they’ll have no problem visiting me here.

    In order to better detox you from the FB experience, allow me to provide a few of that site’s typical posts which you may, through the link below, comment on. It is unfortunate that Blogger does not offer the thumb’s up “like” icon, a viable alternative in those times when one feels like a drooling, slack-jawed moron, someone akin to Jeff Goldblum’s hooligan in Death Wish (where he wore a Jughead-style felt crown and moaned “I’m gonna do a thiiing” while spray painting graffiti). So flex your mind around these witty, FB-style entries with a few Twitter Tweets thrown in for good measure, and become one with the networking universe:

Flickhead is feeling anxious.

…has his doubts.

…feels writer’s block coming on. Can you relate?

…just had the plumber in. There goes another $100.

Awful depressed after Social Network.

…watched the new David Lynch, and is baffled.

Sees how things could turn out.

Doesn’t like what he’s seeing.

“What poetry,” as Stanley Kowalski once ruminated.

The ups and downs of obsession

Via Acidemic, screen shots from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, reminding me of when a master filmmaker could quietly turn each individual scene of his (and Saul Bass’s) work into an iconographic image. Click to enlarge.

Italian dressing

Michelangelo Antonioni, Marisa Mell and Federico Fellini in 1971, via Farbror Sid. Click to enlarge.

Mystery siren

The eyes... they're putting the whammy on me! Anyone know who this is? (Click to enlarge.)

Hollywood cuties & French pips

I can still recall this Manhattan, long since gone and replaced by something wholly unattractive to me. (Click to enlarge.)

Ste. Raquel the Divoone

Click to enlarge