You Will Go to the Moon

Some instant nostalgia for children of the space age, courtesy of the Dreams of Space site which chronicles and exhibits some of the cool space art found in children's books from 1883-1974. A majority of the stuff dates from the 60s, when the fantasy of space flight was becoming reality, and the possibilities appeared limitless. The illustrations from the early 60s are interesting in that the artists weren't yet constrained by NASA's own project blueprints and were able to let imagination take over. In the late 60s and early 70s, the art was based on actual NASA plans, although still heavily optimistic.

via Boing Boing

Movie Flip Books

Yet another instance of pre-video movie collecting, as referenced in this post about 8mm versions, and early video traders. 5 cents gets you a stick of gum that slightly resembles sweetened pink sheetrock and a set of cards. On each card are two frame blowups from scenes from your favorite Universal horror film. Split the cards in half and you have two seperate cards that you need to compile with others in order to form a flip book. Buy enough gum and you too can have a piece of pocket cinema. Back in 1963, Topps' Monster Flip Movies gave you thrilling vignettes such as Frankenstein Cries Out ("Frankenstein suspects that someone has been in his secret hideout. Angered that he may have been discovered, the brute roars furiously"), Anger of the Wolfman, The Mummy's Wrath, or Frankenstein on Alert.

Flip books have been around for a while, of course, and so have flip books based on movies. Disney printed a bunch. There was a Bruce Lee Flip Book that came out in the early 1970s in Asia. There were even flip books of NY underground films by Jack Smith and Andy Warhol (although, perversely, the flip book of Warhol's Kiss appears to consist of a static image).

Videodrome and Beta Fetishism

One of the upcoming DVD releases I'm most looking forward to is the director approved 2 disc set of David Cronenberg's Videodrome being released by Criterion the end of this month. Of course, it has all the features you've come to expect from Criterion: an excellent and impeccable anamorphic transfer, commentaries galore, documentaries, and so many extras you can't possibly imagine what they could have neglected (including unedited footage of the pirate "Videodrome" transmissions). And dig the packaging! The discs come in a case that resembles a video cassette. And for all those early 80s video tape fetishists out there, it resembles a classic L-750 Beta cassette (I should know -- my family's first VCR bought way back in '81 was a top-loading Sears Beta)!
Speaking of the glory and bittersweet obsolescence of the Beta format, here's a page devoted to the earliest publication geared to the home video enthusiast, a mimeographed typewritten newsletter called the The Videophile's Newsletter that began back in September 1976, when Sony Betamax's were brand new and cost $1500 a pop (and blank tapes that only lasted one hour were $16.95 each, if you could find them). As pre-recorded tapes were still in the future, The Videophile's Newsletter was the only forum that allowed these early video collectors to discuss recording tips and trades in order to build their nascent movie libraries. One subscriber writes:

"... interested in 'bizzare (sic) films' and is particularly looking for: Alphaville, Zardoz, Creation of the Humanoids, Run Home Slow, Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead, Homicidal, Nosferatu, Yellow Submarine, Rock All Night, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Suddenly Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies (!). These must be complete and without commercials.... would like to see though not keep many others including: any movie with Eddie Constantine, any Starman or Prince of Space movie, Station 6 Sahara, Invaders from Mars, H-Man, Murder Party and others..."

Hopefully, this early collector is still around to enjoy the fruits of progress. Most of these films are definitely available, although I can't vouch for the availability of such obscurities like Murder Party (although Station 6 Sahara appears to be available).
It's interesting to note that these early tapers also wrestled with the same copyright issues that P2P traders do today, and they defend themselves in much the same way. Some things never change, I suppose. It's also remarkable that some of these pioneers felt they were performing a duty by recording, collecting, and archiving a lot of stuff that most people would think of as dross. As the newsletter's publisher Jim Lowe wrote:

I'd like to say a word in defense of commercials. Naturally you don't want them in the middle of Gone with the Wind. But with respect to current network shows, I feel that they have a certain historical value, and as we all know (pack rats that we are) it is the throw away culture of today that is so highly sought after tommorrow.

Indeed, a lot of the local TV programming from the 1970s that exists today exists only because some early taper, either intentionally or not, kept it around (the originating TV stations, in most cases, certainly didn't). Will DVR hard drives provide the same in the year 2034, or even later?

Hitchcock/Truffaut

Courtesy of Radio France, a series (Real Audio) devoted to the famous interview between François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in 1962 that ultimately formed one of the most famous books on film, Hitchcock-Truffaut (which I monkishly re-read and studied throughout my teen years). After all these years, it's interesting to finally hear the audio that formed the book. In today's installment, Truffaut and Hitchcock discuss The Wrong Man and Vertigo. Hear Hitchcock describing James Stewart's character in Vertigo, as he waits for Kim Novak to emerge from the bathroom, having "...an erection like this!" One can imagine Hitch raising his fist in a triumphant salute of masculine potency.

The series is beautifully bilingual, as Truffaut did not speak English, nor Hitchcock French; but both are ably assisted by the seamless translation skills of Helen Scott, who worked for the French Film Office in New York at the time. The entire series is archived here.

Hooray for Nollywood

Rambunctious low-budget genre movie-making is alive and well in Nigeria. Shot on video on ridiculously meager budgets ($8000 to $10,000 on average), they are sold on street corners throughout Nigeria and surrounding countries, usually as $3 VCDs. These films are also becoming popular among African immigrant communities here in the states, where people want a little taste of back home. If you want a taste of what this new Nigerian cinema is all about, you can check out the downloadable trailers from this site. If you're overly acclimated to Hollywood production standards, these movies may seem shoddy and amateurish; but these action-adventures, family dramas, and witchcraft pictures seem to have a home grown, fly by the seat quality that American films can't touch. You can also buy them at africamovies.com.

The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made

More canon fodder, courtesy of the New York Times. The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made! As these sort of lists go, it's a fairly inoffensive and safe one, covering all bases with popular and critical favorites, domestic and foreign classics, but like the AFI top 100 American list from some years back, it gives the silent era the cold shoulder. Films not included: Keaton's The General (although Boorman's is), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, The Gold Rush, Metropolis, Man with a Movie Camera and The Birth of a Nation (which people usually shy away from including in lists like this for its incendiary racism, but you can usually replace that with Intolerance so at least Griffith's influence can be acknowledged). I'm not exactly a silent movie maven, but anyone with a cursory knowledge of film history and its evolution knows of the importance of these films. Have silent films fallen so out of favor with critics and the popular consciousness that they are no longer acknowledged, much less considered part of the canon? In a half-hearted defense of the list, these films were probably never reviewed in the pages of the Times as, in those early days, "the paper of record" considered movies an amusement and not as an artform worthy of serious discussion (that is, if I'm assuming correctly that a review in the Times is a prerequisite for inclusion).

It's also interesting to note that George Romero's gut-chomping classic Dawn of the Dead was included in the hot 1000, as its original review in the Times by Janet Maslin is (in)famous for its snide and dismissive tone and the fact that Maslin, sickened by the film's brutality, walked out of the movie after only 15 minutes. It's also interesting that this original review is not directly linked from the best 1000 list, only this laudatory appraisal by Cavett Binion from the All Movie Guide.

Dementia / Daughter of Horror

Where do avant cinema and exploitation meet? Somewhere on the crusty margins of '50s Hollywood, perhaps. Consider the case of Dementia, written and directed by John Parker, shot in 1953 in poverty row studios in Hollywood, finally released in 1955 in a small art-house in New York after two years of censorship battles. Completely without dialogue, with only the eerie music of firebrand composer George Antheil and a sparse use of sound effects to accompany the images, a woman's descent into madness and dark isolation meanders with the dream logic and visual archness one usually finds in the "poetic cinema" of the period, although harsher and crueller than what you would find in Maya Deren.

Transparently Freudian in a way that belies its 1950s vintage, the film follows the "gamine" (as the young lady is called in the credits) as she saunters through the expressionistic skid row of Venice, California (with the long shadows and locations Orson Welles would appropriate with greater success in Touch of Evil). She accepts a ride from a cigar chomping fatcat, then retreats to a memory of an apparent patricide which takes place in a misty graveyard lorded over by a man with a black stocking mask. Then back to the here and now where our heroine watches in disgust as the fatcat noisily slurps and chomps on a chicken dinner. The gamine produces a switchblade and (in a really nice shot) the fatcat falls to his death several stories below. She finds her victim's body on the street surrounded by passersby, all wearing black stocking masks. The victim clutches her huge olympic sized pendant. She attempts to remove it but the death hand won't relinquish its grip. In a scene that upset the New York state censors, the man's lifeless head rocks back and forth while she saws his hand off with the switchblade. We follow her to a hepcat cellar where she unwinds to bebop provided by Shorty Rogers and his combo. Things get frenetic when her handless victim appears at the club's streetlevel window. She retreats to her dank noir apartment, where all is well, except for the man's hand writhing in a bureau drawer.

While the storyline seems grimly adolescent, one must remember that Dementia was shot in 1953 and that it was intended as an arty but earnest exploration of abnormal psychology. It's also not hard to see in its influences several antecedents from earlier avant garde films: the disembodied hand seems straight out of Luis Buñuel and Un Chien Andalou, the long shadows and harsh lighting from German Expressionism. Also, Dementia's composer George Antheil also provided the music for painter Fernand Leger's 1924 experimental smash Ballet Mécanique. Alas, this sort of pedigree does not usually spell boffo biz on Main Street America, or even on the piss scented streets of midtown Manhattan where it had a short-lived engagement (along with a co-feature documentary on Picasso) in 1955 at the 55th St. Playhouse After that, despite a glowing testimony from Preston Sturges (!)(who called the film "a work of art... It stirred my blood and purged my libido..."), the film known as Dementia simply disappeared, never to be seen again for decades.

Enter Daughter of Horror. Its history is pretty hazy, but, apparently, an outfit called Exploitation Productions Incorporated thought Dementia was just good enough to add some voice-over narration (courtesy of an announcer from Philadelphia named Ed McMahon), rename the effort Daughter of Horror, grind out a few prints and push them through the drive-in circuit. Once the prints have been too tattered and fried from way too many spook shows, Daughter of Horror would have been lucky to be shown on late night television.

Interestingly, it was its inclusion as the feature shown in the movie theater attacked by the blob in The Blob that may have saved Dementia/Daughter of Horror from complete ignonimity. Many fans thought the title on the marquee ("MIDNIGHT SPOOK SHOW - DAUGHTER OF HORROR also BELA LUGOSI") was some imaginary generic horror movie title dreamt by The Blob's makers, and discussions raged in the pages of early 60s horror movie magazines as to the film's existence.

It was probably an essay by Jim Morton in Re/Search's seminal Incredibly Strange Films book from 1986 that created a resurgence of interest in this little off-beat piece of marginal cinema. Until recently the film (as Daughter of Horror) was only availible as the crappiest of VHS dupes. Many thought that the original source of Dementia had been destroyed in the manufacture of Daughter of Horror. Fortunately, that was not the case. Indeed, the pristine original negative of Dementia had been unearthed and brought out by Kino in a very nice DVD package double-billed with a nice looking version of Daughter of Horror. Watched back to back (which is only recommended to the heartiest of souls), one finds that, except for the inclusion of McMahon's boogie-man narration and very short appearance in the beginning of the movie, the two films are essentially the same. It's interesting to ponder that the same film exhibited at a small Manhattan art house also played at drive-ins in the South and Midwest. Such is the strange democracy of cinema.

For more info on this film(s), Flickhead has a good piece, as does DVD Savant.

Adios Jingo!

Adios, Jingo! -- Happy Independence Day, everyone, both here in the states, and abroad as well. In honor of this patriotic holiday, I offer this humble list of 10 American films that best exemplify certain qualities that seem to me uniquely and terrifically American. Some of these may cast a critical and jaundiced eye on the various excesses of the American scene, and some may excorciate us for sins and transgressions, both past and present. But some also celebrate those things like tolerance and sacrifice that make the ongoing American experiment worth pursuing, and the "more perfect union" worth achieving. In this crucial political year, it's more important than ever to realize that patriotism is not the sole province of the lazy few who blindly follow leaders and swallow their empty platitudes. It's not a bad thing to be proud of your country, but it's also not a bad thing to question and criticize the direction and policies of your country. This list of movies is not a best-of list by any means, but these are movies that make me proud to be an American.

In no particular order:

Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz) -- I've always loved this movie. Early WW2 patriotism at its most transparent, yet at its most sincere. Cagney sings and dances, and still plays the lovable tough guy. FDR is shown in silhouette as he presents George M. Cohan a medal. Favorite scene: the older Cohan tapdancing down the stairs in the White House after receiving said medal.

The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola) -- The promise of America is expressed when the new immigrants pour to the side of the ship to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty when the boat pulls into New York Harbor. The curse of American largesse is coldly seen in the last shot of the movie: Michael Corleone alone in his compound in Nevada, his power and wealth consolidated, yet his family and soul destroyed.

Blue Collar (Paul Schrader) -- Very few American films deal with the working class. Schrader's directorial debut is one of the few that do. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphett Kotto play work buddies who try to screw over the system. Ultimately, the system screws them over, playing the race card to divide them. It would be hard to see a movie like his be made nowadays, not unless it deals with Wal-Mart employees. Another plus: great American artist Captain Beefheart sings over the titles.

Nixon (Oliver Stone) -- A lot of people can't stand Oliver Stone. I find him one of our more interesting writer/directors, although he's in bit of a slump lately. His ham-fisted style is at its best and most garrulous in 1995's Nixon. Richard Nixon, as brilliantly portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, is ultimately a tragic figure, a man with a chip on his shoulder who attempts to control events but soon finds himself the victim of them. Not as overbearing and outrageous as J.F.K. or Natural Born Killers, but it still has that that visually excessive style that exemplified his filmmaking at the time. It's forever playing on cable. Give it a chance if you haven't already.

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero) -- The film's first shot is an small American flag fluttering in the foreground of a western Pennsylvania graveyard. The terrible strife of 1968 as horror film. Americans eat their own. Children kill and consume their parents. A crisis of leadership leads to the most pessimistic ending in any American film from the '60s. The monsters are us.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford) -- I'm not a big John Ford fan, but I really like this stark black & white western. Image and myth transcend truth and nuance. Its message seems more relevant today than it did in 1962. Too many legends becoming fact.

Nashville (Robert Altman) -- America as widescreen canvas. But instead of the grandeur of American landscapes, Altman concentrates on funhouse faces, dialogue bumping into dialogue, the carnival of politics, singers drowned out by the roar of automobiles, the sting and danger of celebrity. It's a long, meandering mess, heartbreakingly beautiful in places, uch like the country it both mocks and celebrates in equal measure.

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock) -- On the faces of great men scurry the small and insignificant, the merest of pawns in the grandest of geopolitical matches. "War is hell, Mr. Thornhill," cants the professor, played by Leo G. Carroll. "Even when it's a cold one." Cary Grant answers: "If you fellas can't lick the Vandamms of this world, without asking girls like her to bed down with him and fly away with him and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars!" Simple decency butts against the imperatives of outfoxing your opponent, even when one's ideals form an obstacle. Hitchcock fought to retain these lines in the picture against the desires of the MGM brass. Heavy for a Hollywood movie in 1959.

Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner) -- Right wing poem on the thrill and glory of military victory and achievement, or ironic post-Vietnam rumination on the anachronism and utter absurdity of warrior-wise men in the age of automated war? Either way, it's simple but powerful cinema. At the film's end, Patton walks among windmills, too tired and resigned to tilt at them any longer as he may have in the past, aknowledging his day is done. The pastoral impulse need not be peaceful or gentle.

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone) -- Not American created, but this great western touches on all the great American themes of reinvention, the retention of perhaps outdated ideals, the usurping of the wild and unspoiled by creeping civilization. This movie is enriched by a great American cast (Fonda, Robards, and, yes, Bronson), and by Leone's first opportunity to shoot in Monument Valley and other locations in the USA. The great American film genre was never the same after Leone borrowed enough to create something bright and new.

R.I.P. Marlon Brando

R.I.P., Marlon Brando --

PLAYBOY: And you didn't feel that acting was worth while or fulfilling enough?

BRANDO: There's a big bugaboo about acting; it doesn't make sense to me. Everybody is an actor; you spend your whole day acting. Everybody has suffered through moments where you're thinking one thing and feeling one thing and not showing it. That's acting. Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage. . . . It's very difficult for people to have an extended confrontation with themselves. You're hiding what you're thinking, what you're feeling, you don't want to upset somebody or you do want to upset somebody; you don't want to show that you hate them; your pride would be injured if they knew you'd been affected by what they said about you. Or you hide a picayune aspect of yourself, the prideful or envious or vulnerable, and you pretend that everything's all right. 'Hi, how are you?' People look at your face and it's presentable: 'And I shall prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet.'

So we all act. The only difference between an actor professionally and an actor in life is the professional knows a little bit more about it--some of them, anyway--and he gets paid for it. But actually, people in real life get paid for acting, too. You have a secretary who has a lot of sex appeal and a great deal of charm and she knows it, she's going to get paid for that, whether she delivers sexual favors or not. A very personable, attractive young man, who reflects what the boss says, is smart enough to know what the boss feels and likes and wants and he knows how to curry favor . . . he's acting. He goes in in the morning and he gives him a lot of chatter, tells the right kind of jokes and it makes the boss feel good. One day the boss says, "Listen, Jim, why don't you go to Duluth and take over the department there? I think you'd do a bang-up job." And then Jim digs his toe under the rug and says, "Oh, gosh, I never thought, J. B. . . . Gee, I don't know what to say. . . . Sure, I'll go. When?" And he jumps into the plane and checks off what he's been trying to do for four years--get J. B. to give him the Duluth office. Well, that guy's acting for a living, singing for his supper, and he's getting paid for it.

From Brando's Playboy Interview, 1979.

FanTasia Festival 2004

Montreal's FanTasia Festival advertises itself as "North-America's premier genre film festival", and who can doubt it looking at the festival's hefty line-up showcasing the latest and best and wildest of Thai, Korean, Japanese genre cinema, and also adding some homegrown Quebecois efforts into the mix. Also spotlighted with special retrospectives are Spanish horror movie icon Paul Naschy and Hong Kong kung fu moguls the Shaw Brothers. The FanTasia Festival is credited with introducing international audiences to the imaginative excesses of Takeshi Miike and having the international premiere of Ringu, which sparked interest in the current cycle of Japanese horror. It seems like quite a show, and worth a trip if you're near by (I, unfortunately, am not... maybe next year).

Il Thrilling Italiano

More giallo stuff-- By far, this is the best English language introduction and overview to the perverse thrills of Italian giallo films I've found yet on the web. From The Uppers Organization, "Your Guide to the Pleasures of Modern Living". Also check out their overviews of 60s Italian fumetti.

Carlo Jacono

While some may know that the incredibly violent and sexy Italian murder mysteries filmed in the 60s and 70s known as giallos inherited its name from a series of mystery novels published by the publisher Mondadori which were easily recognizable by their bright yellow covers and garish illustrations, very few know of the contributions of the cover artists of these cheaply produced paperbacks. One such artist is Carlo Jacono, whose work has a simple pulp grace and pop craftsmanship that sets it apart from other pulp artists in Italy, or elsewhere for that matter. Jacono also did some interesting work for the Italian Urania science fiction series.

Some Films by Finns

Here's an interesting collection of Finnish movie posters from the 50s through the 70s. Most of the films are not from Finland, but some are.

Leone on Ford

Sergio Leone on John Ford:

"'As Romans, we have a strong sense of the fragility of empires. It is enough to look around us. I admire very much that great optimist, John Ford. His naivete permitted him to make Cinderella - I mean, The Quiet Man. But, as Italians, we see things differently. That is what I have tried to show in my films. The great plains - they are very beautiful, but, when the storm comes, should people bury their heads in the sand of the desert? I believe that people like to be treated as adults from time to time. Because a man is wearing sombrero and because he rides a horse, does not necessarily mean that he is imbecile...

Ford, because of his European origins - as a good Irishman - has always seen the problem from a Christian point of view ... his characters and protagonists always looks forward to a rosy, fruitful future. Whereas I see the history of the West as really the reign of violence by violence'"

From Fistful of Leone.

Nick Ray on Metafilter

Extraordinary Metafilter uber-post on Nicholas Ray with 42 (yes, 42!) Ray-related links. Way to go, matteo! Might as well take a day off!

Kubrick Meets Escher

Another 2001 conundrum -- It's one of the most impressive shots from a movie that's loaded with impressive shots: the Pan Am space hostess walks up a circular walkway until we see her upside down and she delivers meals to the craft's cockpit. While 2001 has been rightfully lauded for its scientific accuracy and plausibility, Agostino Ambrosio has explicated from the evidence offered from the film how the physical geography of the Aries 1-B spacecraft is completely illogical, and how it more resembles an Escher illustration than a scientifically sound ship.

Popcorn For Your Head

Popcorn for your head -- For your perusal, a list of films divided and catagorized by philosophical theme. Film buffs may find the list lacking as it seems to only include recent Hollywood efforts (although in defense of the list's creator, it appears to be a list made primarily for beginning students), and most of those are science fiction or fantastic in nature. SF, as a literary genre, has always been one to put ideas and hypotheticals to the forefront, and it would seem to follow that SF films should do likewise. However, instead of constructing taut trampolines intended for philosophical leaps, films such as The Matrix, Minority Report, and Vanilla Sky tend to use these ideas (usually the problems of identity, perception, and deception) as a plot twist to take us to the next shock and awe action sequence. It seems like so much window dressing. Even a great movie like 2001 (probably my all-time favorite) has this problem. While one can wrap their mind around the meanings of the monolith and the star-child (which after 36 years of media promulgation seems almost kitschy), it only gets in the way of enjoying some of the most beautiful cinema and sly satire ever accomplished. For a more satisfying philosophical climax in a science fiction film, look no further than the defiantly existential ending of Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man. Maybe it's dime store metaphysics, but it's quite unique, especially for a Hollywood film from the '50s. "To God, there is no zero. I still exist!"

Joyce and The Volta Cinematograph

As we celebrate the Bloomsday Centenary, we also mustn't forget that James Joyce was also an early champion of the nascent art form of the cinema. After some time abroad, Joyce and his family returned to Dublin in 1909. It was at this time that Joyce opened and ran Ireland's first cinema, The Volga Cinematograph. According to film historian Luke McKernan, Joyce's programming at the Volga was eclectic and diverse. He exhibitions ran the gamut from exotic travelogues to Louis Feuillade. These films are now being compiled as The Volta Programme by McKernan, an attempt to replicate an evening of Joyce programmed films and to maybe show the influence the very young medium had on his work.

The Volga did not succeed, and Joyce headed to Trieste and to bigger and better things. But he never lost his enthusiasm for cinema. After Ulysses was published, he asked Eisenstein to consider a cinematic adaptation of the novel. Joyce even preferred actor George Arliss to play Bloom.

More on I, Robot

More on I, Robot -- Director Alex Proyas wasn't too crazy about the trailer Fox put together for his sci-fi opus so he edited his own version and posted it on his Mystery Clock website. Frankly, I'm still not impressed. Via The Movie Blog.

I, Not Amused

I have to admit it's been 20+ years since I've read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, but when I recently viewed the trailer for the new film version (you can watch it here, if you so desire) I found myself a bit perplexed. I saw nothing of Asimov's collection of robot stories within the standard Will Smith sci-fi actioner except the inclusion of the classic 3 Laws of Robotics, which every SF fan knows by heart. And even then, the 3 laws are thrown out the window when the robots start killing people.

Apparently, the title of the movie is I, Robot not because it was an adaptation of Asimov's book, but because the director, Alex Proyas, probably thought it was a kick-ass title for a summer blockbuster. Jayme Lynn Blaschke of RevolutionSF has a fairly comprehensive wrap-up of what seems to be another classic case of Hollywood bending over backwards to do anything but the right thing.

The Older Wilder

He was Billy Wilder's brother, older by one year. His name was Willie Wilder and he made a good living selling women's handbags in New York. An apt example of the American dream (hardworking immigrant version), and wanting to share his new world success, in 1935 he asked his younger brother Billy to come to America. With his movie career at a standstill and the Nazis in power, Billy jumped at the opportunity. Just as plucky and interprising as his brother Willie was in accumulating his fortune, Billy went west to California, roomed with Peter Lorre, learned English from listening to baseball games on the radio, teamed with Charles Brackett, and started writing and then directing some great movies. Soon, Billy's success and wealth surpassed his older brother's. Apparently, this didn't sit well with Willie.

Evidently thinking that if his brother could, he could too, Willie sold his business and moved his family to Hollywood in 1945. He had enough connections (and, no doubt, enough liquid cash) to start producing and directing films. These films were produced in the depths of Poverty Row, with emaciated budgets, skeletal sets, and schedules that hardly lasted a week. When he first started directing, he used the name William Wilder in the credits. He then changed it to W. Lee Wilder, in order not to confuse his film credits with his much more famous (and Oscar winning) brother. He needn't have bothered. The older Wilder's most famous film is probably Killers From Space, which is probably best known for the ludicrous appearance of its aliens. Other highlights from his filmography include Phantom From Space, The Snow Creature, and The Man Without a Body.

Despite living in the same town, and sharing the same profession, the two brothers rarely spoke. Billy saw one of his brother's films, didn't like it, and never saw another one. Billy rarely discussed his brother, but when he did, he was usually dismissive. "He was a fool," he once said. "He lived in America many years before I even came here. I came here, really kind of pushed by Hitler. He was in the leather-goods business—he manufactured handbags. And then one day he said, ‘Well, if my brother can do it, I can do it too.’ He sold his business, he bought a house here, and started making pictures, one worse than the other, and then he died." Billy also referred to his brother as a "dull son of a bitch".

Sibling rivalry? It's quite apparent some odd fraternal dynamic existed between the two Wilders. One can see resentment, embarassment, envy, snobbery and arrogance. There's no doubt more to the story, but the secrets probably died with the principals. For a lot more info, here's an interesting piece by Allen Frost on the films of W. Lee Wilder, and considers what moviemaking lessons he may have learned from his more illustrious brother. Very little, it appears, but was it because the older Wilder was too arrogant to listen, or was Billy too disdainful to even offer advice?

Joe Stalin, Cinema Fiend

Joe Stalin, Cinema Fiend -- Stalin loved movies. He loved Tarzan pictures. He also liked American Westerns, digging on the lone hero archetypes and the harsh and arbritary nature of frontier justice. He also wanted to kill John Wayne. He also told Sergei Eisenstein how to make films. While Eisenstein was making Ivan the Terrible, Stalin offered this insight: "Ivan was very cruel. You can show he was cruel. But you must show why he needed to be cruel." He was also a prude. He hated outward signs of affection in movies, and once, outraged and apparently apoplectic after witnessing one long, slow, soulful kiss on the big screen, he forbade any kissing in any Soviet picture.

Boca do Lixo

Boca do Lixo - it means "Mouth of Garbage" in Portuguese, and it's one of the sleazier and most crime-ridden parts of Sao Paulo (the name is a play on a much swankier and wealthier part of town, Boca do Luxo, "Mouth of Luxury"). It's also the neighborhood where some of Brazil's sleazier cinematic offerings were shot. Consider these films to be the moist and grimier flipside to Brazil's Cinema Novo, a homegrown movement that borrowed from neo-realism and ethnographic films to address the country's political and social ills. Boca do Lixo films instead took their cues from the avant-garde and popular culture. Among the favorites of the Cinema Marginal crowd (as they were known) was Jose Mojica Marins, who starred and directed a series of lurid and primitive horror films in the early '60s as the grimly Nietzchean Ze do Caixao (Coffin Joe).

The signature film of this underground movement was Rogerio Sganzerla's O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (The Red Light Bandit), which seems to be an amalgam of underground and popular tendancies. Its subject matter makes the movie seem like classic gindhouse and drive-in fare: a man breaks into women's houses, illuminates their faces with a red flashlight, talks to them, and then rapes and kills them. Beyond this exploitative aspect, the film also addresses issues of cultural identity, and parodies Brazilian popular culture (this is all based on descriptions of the film -- sadly, this film is not available in the States).

While Sganzerla had aspirations to art and used the "aesthetics of garbage" to make commentaries on the state of Brazil, other films made in the Boca do Lixo had no such pretensions. Taking advantage of the loosening of moral strictures (and in spite of the military dictatorship), these filmmakers started churning out sleazy sex pictures like pornochanchadas, an indigenous form of sex comedy (which borrowed the name chanchada from another uniquely Brazilian cinematic genre, the samba-musical). These movies were cheap and easy to make, and they were big hits at the box office. Some of the higher-end of these vehicles even crossed over to the US like Lady on the Bus and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (the latter of which is not a pornochanchada per se, but an adaptation of a literary novel by Jorge Amado that neverthless carries many of the sexy and ribald trappings of the pornochanchadas). These two films, featuring the talents of the statuesque and often nude Sonia Braga, were often shown on late-night Cinemax in the '80s.

But Boca do Lixo films generally did not make it beyond the Brazilian borders. They were homegrown entertainments from the heady days before globalized cinema (i.e., Hollywood dominated). The graphics used to market these pictures would put your garden variety American pornographer to shame (particularly the one advertising Ou Da... Ou Desce).

You can also listen to some of the music of these kinds of films, via streaming audio (Windows Media) courtesy of Phono 70, an excellent online radio show that specializes in Brazilian rarities.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

An appreciative shout-out to Filmbrain for including Bitter Cinema in his overview of film related blogs. Very happy to be among such distinguished company.

And giving credit where credit is due, thanks to Filmbrain's enthusiastic and thoughtful reviews, I have recently been bitten by the Korean Film bug. Saw a scratchy DVD-R of Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance over the weekend. What an exquisitely odd and brilliant film! I was half expecting the fist in your face cinematics that Miike is (in)famous for, but little did I realize that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance would be such a somber poem on the human costs of vengeance (and I use the term poem advisedly: the film's elliptical structure and visual strokes do not explicate the narrative, nor push it along in a Hollywood fashion, but instead builds layers of emotional and intellectual responses that transcend the narrative --much like a good poem). It plays like a dream, or rather like a nightmare. Imagine yourself in the middle of a darkened highway, totally naked, less one kidney (shoddily removed by a junkie surgeon), deaf and dumb, trying to hitch a ride back home as autos whip by, unconcerned. Our tragic hero Ryu finds himself in such a situation. While the scene can be considered comic, Park's close-ups of Ryu whimpering in the dark has the pathos hitting you like a 2X4. The movie's filled with many scenes like this (another one is when Ryu is holding his girlfriend's hand in the elevator --if you've seen it, you would know how wonderfully touching and tragic it is), and it's the humanity that sets Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance above a lot of know-it-all post-modern slash-and-dash neo-pulp (heads up, Messrs. Miike and Tarantino). It's good to mix a little Truffaut in with your Godard once in a while.

1219 Sample Sources

A list of 1219 sample sources in various recordings, of which almost all are from movies. Number one? That distinction belongs to Blade Runner, which seems obvious enough, considering that film's place and importance within cyber and techno undergrounds. Other popular sources include Star Trek (actually a cheat, as it encompasses all the movies, and the TV shows), Apocalypse Now, Aliens, and, surprisingly, Exorcist III. It's interesting to note how the genres break down. There's science fiction (which are sampled by mainly techno and electronic acts), horror (metal and industrial), and gangster films (hip hop). Even Godard is included, with Alphaville coming in at 263, although it misses Cobra Verde's rip of Alpha 60's voice in their album Viva la Muerte.

Non EC Pre-Code Horror

Speaking of non-EC pre-code horror comics, here's an informative article about just that. Contrary to common knowledge, E.C. did not invent the horror comic, nor were they the first to realize the first successful horror comic series. They were the best, but they weren't the only ones who provided quality chills.

Enter These Weird Worlds

Enter These Weird Worlds -- A nice collection of '50s horror and crime comic book covers. A lot of non-EC titles I've never seen before.

Gojira vs Godzilla

A very interesting comparison between Gojira, the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla that is currently in theatrical re-release in the US and its American counterpart (the one with Raymond Burr) by Kathryn Joyce in The Revealer. The contrasts go beyond culture. Indeed, the religious and spiritual implications of both are incredibly different. One deals with repentance and sacrifice, the other believes that might is right. Guess which is which.

Mr. Monster

Some Koreans nicknamed him Mr. Monster, an affectionate tribute to an eccentric moviemaker and to his equally eccentric and dark films. His real name was Kim Ki-young, and his creations could be the most deliriously and deliciously bizarre films you've ever heard of, much less ever seen. A director who worked within the Korean film industry from the 50s until the 80s, Kim eschewed the sentimental and treacly trappings of the popular and traditional Shinpa dramas (which were actually Japanese in origin) and started his career making films that were influenced by the Italian neo-realists. As his career progressed, Kim began to shed the neo-realism, and his movies started to take a decidedly darker and more gothic turn.

One of Kim's signature films is The Housemaid, a lurid melodrama of lust and domestic chaos. Here's a brief synopsis, courtesy of Chuck Stephens:

The husband, a feckless music teacher, gives piano lessons to the young, rural-born women who staff a local factory; his wife, in addition to raising their bratty son and crippled daughter, takes in sewing to supplement the family income. When hubby asks one of his students to recommend a suitable domestic from among the factory girls, the trouble begins. The student, it seems, has developed a powerful crush on the teacher, and when her advances are spurned, she spitefully recommends a chain-smoking farm girl, Myong-ja, to the family's employ. A panic-eyed succubus, Myong-ja makes her first appearance emerging from the student's closet -- as if directly from the rejected woman's vengeful unconscious -- and immediately begins to sow the seeds of the family's destruction.

Nice! The Housemaid and other important Kim films such as The Insect Woman, Woman on Fire, Killer Butterfly, and his last film Carnivore (great titles!) are not available on video through normal means here in the states, although I suppose they may be available in stores that cater to Asian immigrants. Kim has had some recognition in the west with retrospectives in San Francisco and in Berlin in 1998. Unfortunately, 1998 was also the year he died. As Kim and his wife were preparing for a trip to Berlin to personally attend the retrospective, the house the Kims had recently bought and moved into and which was apparently haunted and ill-omened (doubt appealing to Kim's whimsical sense of the macabre) caught fire due to an electrical short circuit. Kim and his wife both died in the blaze.

With the recent ascension of Korean films in the west, culminating with Park Chan-wook's Old Boy winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, perhaps some enterprising company will attempt to release a Region 0 DVD of Kim's work to an unsuspecting Western audience. Hell, maybe even seeing Park's films at the local video store wouldn't be beyond the pale.

For a ton of info on Kim Ki-Young, point your browser to this site run by a Cinema Studies class at the Korean National University of Arts. The site's in English, and it has bios, filmographies, interviews, reviews, and academic papers galore. Simple, but very well done.

Frankenstein Ad Art

A very nice collection of international advertising art, production stills, and pressbooks from Frankenstein films from 1910 to 1950 can be found on the exemplary B-Movie site from Germany (which has plenty of cool stuff to lose yourself in for at least a couple of hours). Even this Frankenstein fan was astounded to see stuff he's never seen before, like this, and this. Great stuff!

via filmtagebuch, a fine German film blog

"Subject for Further Research"

Just to show that Blood Feast can be a "subject for further research", and inspire odd metanarratives, here's Chris Fujiwara's take on a correspondence between Mr. Fuad Ramses, Egyptian Caterer, and a potential client.

Save Blood Feast!

There's an online petition afloat to protest the court ruling in Germany banning the sale of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast. The 40 year old gore film was declared by a court in Karlsruhe as Gewaltverherrlichung, "promoting violence". The court's seizure edict (Google Translation) details the scenes that contributed to its subsequent banning. Here's one: (23 min.) The murderer suffocates a woman. After (she) is dead...He tears...out the tongue with bare hands. The pulled out tongue as well as the blood-smeared woman...are in close-up...

The scene sounds a lot worse than it plays on film. I remember reading about Lewis' films way before I ever saw them and expecting them to be the most horrid things I could ever imagine. Sure, I saw some stills, and of course I knew his films scraped the bottom of bottom barrel production values and were shot in the wilds of South Florida, but that knowledge just reinforced in me that these movies (especially Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs) were the culmination of some Southern culture of blood, an instance of trailer-park sadism and in-bred hillbilly carnage and killing for kicks (I went through my adolescence in Texas, if that explains anything). Then I found an oversized video box of Blood Feast (Wizard Video) at a local mom and pop video emporium. Shrinkwrapped and garish, the box was shelved next to copies of Faces of Death, Dr. Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, and Zombie Lake. I dared myself to pick it up, and then I dared myself to rent it. Two hours later I slid the tape into the VCR. And just 15 minutes later, as I sat on that beat-up couch, beer in hand, I asked myself, is that all there is about Blood Feast?

Is that all there is? Clearly my fears were not justified. While the movie was not without certain primitive charms and had a kind of 1963 motel room aesthetic (the bright colors, the sets), there was nothing horrible about it but its execution. Sure, there was blood and gore, lots of it, but the violence and mayhem was so profoundly unrealistic and so incompetently shot, that horror was the least and the last of the emotions this movie delivered. Simple disgust, maybe, or a risible kind of disdain. In spite of all that (or, most probably, because of it), through the years Blood Feast has garnered a worldwide following (one can safely call it a "cult", although I feel the term has been bandied about and way overused by film critics and pundits in referring to "off-beat" films in that it has become a genre unto itself; moviemakers are writing and lensing films that they consider "cult" without taking into consideration that it's the appreciative and somewhat obsessive audience that makes the "cult" and not their "wacky" skills --The Dark Backward, anyone?). While some may admire the corny and creaky mechanics of the narrative, the Playboy Playmates ("Introducing Connie Mason... you've read about her in Playboy"), or the phony Egyptology, I'm sure the reason for most of Blood Feast's renown and appreciation is simply a matter of history. In 1963, even if it only played in Southern drive-ins, there was nothing in the world like it. The clinical and pornographic way the film portrayed bloodletting and violence shattered movie paradigms and we haven't been the same since. While 1960's Psycho pushed the envelope of film shock and violence, Blood Feast took the envelope, tore it into shreds, formed the pulp into a ball the size of a large Bartlett Pear, and stuck it up your ass. Which does not make Blood Feast a better movie (it's hardly close, on so many levels), but it certainly is important as a historical and cultural document, a precursor, for better or worse, to a new kind of violent film, splatter cinema if you like. While we may think of splatter as cheap and ugly genre films, it's influenced more films than you think, from Saving Private Ryan to The Passion of the Christ.

Which leads us back to the German ban of Blood Feast, which I find unconscionable and, yes, obscene. To deny Germans the right to view this thin historical slice of American schlock is simply wrong, not unlike the British ban on "video nasties". I genuinely hope that the ruling is overturned, or at least reexamined.

For more on the Blood Feast ban, here's a Mobius thread on the story.

International Indian Film Awards

A major film awards ceremony was held yesterday. No, I'm not talking about Cannes (although I've been heartened to find this year's festival having a higher profile here in the US than previous years --no doubt due to the notoriety surrounding Micheal Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and it's moving and unprecedented reception at the festival, and, of course, Quentin Tarantino's provocative presence as the jury president-- or perhaps I've been reading too many blogs). I'm referring to the International Indian Film Awards, which were presented in Singapore yesterday. The ceremony's big winner was Kal Ho Naa Ho, a love triangle drama shot in New York, which garnered the best film award. One of its stars, Preity Zinta (who also writes a column for the BBC South Asia page) came away with the Best Actress honors.

I readily admit that I have a severe blindspot when it comes to Indian popular film (although I must admit a fascination with what little snippets I've seen of Indian horror movies and their outlandish set pieces shot with shoe-string abandon), but who's to say that Kal Ho Naa Ho couldn't be a moderate hit in the art-house circuit? The movie is about Indian immigrants in New York and the conflict between old world ties and new world demands, which is, of course, one of the great themes in American art. Of course, this time, Americans didn't make it, but Indians. In spite of Kal Ho Naa Ho's soap opera trappings, the film could lend us a different persective on the immigrant experience, amidst all the hoopla and song and dance numbers.

No Such Animal

There's no such animal, despite what the movie poster on the left may indicate, but Abbott and Costello did meet the Creature from the Black Lagoon, if not in a rip-roaring side-splitting laff-fest meant for the big screen, but on NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour in 1954. Here's the low-down on that momentous meeting.

Le Theatre du Grand Guignol

A very interesting and informative site on Le Theatre du Grand Guignol, the desecrated chapel turned intimate shoebox of a theater in Paris that specialized in horrific playlets brimming with gore and sadism. Here's a description of one such play:

The innocent Louise is unjustly locked in an asylum with several insane women. A nurse assigned to protect her blithely leaves for a staff party as soon as Louise falls asleep. The insane women decide that a cuckoo bird is imprisoned in Louise's head and and one gouges out her eye with a knitting needle. The other crazy women are freaked and burn the gouger's face off on a hot plate.

Once a major Parisian tourist attraction, it closed in 1962 when more graphic horror films and the grue of real-life rendered the Grand Guignol's little shows and presentations quaint and campy. However, the idea of presenting theatrical beheadings, disembowelings and the like still continue with troupes like the Thrillpeddlers in San Francisco, who translate and adapt original plays from the Grand Guignol's repetroire, and present original pieces of ghastliness as well.

Zombi

Hailing from Pittsburgh, PA, city of steel mills, Carnegie, and, it goes without saying, George Romero, the musical duo Zombi pay tribute to the prog but eeriely minimal soundtracks of 70s and 80s horror films. The horror connection is obvious, as they named themselves after the Italian title for Romero's Dawn of the Dead (music by Goblin, one of their acknowledged influences), and they've even scored a horror film themselves (Home Sick,which is due out this fall and seems a pretty nasty throwback to 70s style grindhouse stomach churners). The music is sort of a throwback to the throbbing and anxious sounds of Argento, Fulci, Carpenter, and, yes, Romero, and yet it stands on its own as it combines retro synths with avant-metal. The fact that Relapse Records is putting out their next album is a definite plus. Downloadable mp3s available on their site.

LLLS 4 Agent of Doom

The Late-Late-Late Show Project, yet another vain attempt to extrapolate meaning, correlations, and unsure and precarious connections from the trailers of painfully obscure European genre films from the 50s and 60s as collected in Something Weird's Late-Late-Late Show VHS compilation, as referenced here. (1) (2) (3)

No.4 Agent of Doom, original French title Un Soir... par Hasard, which roughly translates as One Evening... by Chance. One Belgian site sketches a very brief synopsis, here translated (via Google): At the time of an accident of motor bike, the young atomic scientist André Ségonne is helped by a motorist. He awakes in an unknown house. A series of unexplainable phenomena soon will transform its life into hell... Science fiction and love story.

Aside from French online merchants like alapage, there's not much to go on concerning this curious film. From what I can gather from the trailer, Florence (played by the ravishing Annette Stroyberg, who also happened to be married to Roger Vadim at the time --and indeed, she is best known nowadays as Vadim's woman between his trysts with Bardot and Deneuve) is either a woman who enjoys eternal youth, or some sort of automaton. She's surrounded by two creepy old men (played by French film stalwarts Jean Servais and Pierre Brasseur), who may be her servants, or former lovers who suffer being her servants merely to be in the glow of her incredible youth and beauty. The young scientist (Michel Le Royer), convalescing in her mansion after a motorcycle accident (a colleague warns him before his excursion: "A motorcycle is a dangerous toy", to which our hero replies, "I'm not about to get killed. I like life too much."), finds himself falling in love with the mysterious Florence. He also finds that he may enjoy eternal youth as well. As arch harpsichord music plays, she tells him: "We'll never grow old, Andre. We'll never be apart." Then we see a jetliner's engine blow and toss young Andre across a runway like an autumn leaf. And the trailer ends.

If this description of the trailer seems remarkably vague, it is because the trailer to Agent of Doom is remarkably vague. Is it a romance, a fantasy story, a spy tale, or some sort of melange of all of them put together? One suspects that the American marketers who put together this trailer were unsure themselves. I imagine their prime directive was to show as much of Annette Stroyberg's bare back as possible.

One interesting sidebar to this film is the story of the man who wrote the novel on which this film is based, L'Aventure Commence ce Soir, or The Adventure Begins This Evening. His name was Robert Collard, but he is best known by his pseudonym R. Lortac, one of France's first animators. Inspired by Winsor McCay's films while on a trip to the United States, he began making animated films in the late teens. Some of these were distributed as 9.5mm films meant for the home market in the early '20s (by Pathé Baby, the first manufacturers of home movie equipment, and who also sold ready to view movies for their system such as Lortac's films, and also Chaplin shorts and different chapters of Abel Gance's Napoleon), and it's in this small format that what's left of Lortac's early work survives. He also started making advertising cartoons in the early '20s, which could be considered the first commercials. In 1922, he began his "Canard en cine" series, which were satirical cartoons shown along with newsreels.

With the coming of the Depression in the 1930s and the advent of World War II, Lortac sold his animation studio and turned to a less taxing way to make a living, writing comic books and popular genre fiction. One of his comic book creations was Bibi Fricotin, a sort of Tintin in space. Another was a series published in Meteor Magazine, Les Conquérants de l'Espace (The Conquerers of Space), featuring the adventures of the space pilot Spade and his smart-talking mechanic Texas. He also started writing novels as Robert Collard, such as Les Bagnards du Ciel (Convicts of the Heavens), and the aforementioned L'Aventure Commence ce Soir. Little did people realize that this genre journeyman was also one of the pioneers of the animated film.

Yet more marginalia. The director of Un Soir... par Hasard, Yvan Govar, has been credited (accused?) by some genre fans as the director of the lost (never completed, or perhaps never even made) Paul Naschy werewolf feature Las Noches del Hombre Lobo (The Nights of the Wolfman). The story surrounding this non-film is fairly interesting, but best left for another time.

Glenn Branca

Streaming video hits you in the solar plexus! Here's a collection of performance videos from Glenn Branca and his electric guitar ensembles. Atonal and cool, and still going at it apparently.

Here's Inga!!

Mp3 Friday! Back with a vengeance! This week we present the rocking Middle of Nowhere by The Good Grief, the title tune of the 1968 Swedish skin flick Inga. (Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling) 1.8M

"The most acclaimed masterpiece of erotic cinema ever created!" claims the blurb on the cover of the "Collector's Edition" DVD of Joe Sarno's Inga, or, as it was known in Sweden, where it was produced, Jag - en oskuld (I, a Virgin). Surely another case of an adman's hyperbole, as the film, a taciturn soap opera with some nudity, clearly does not live up to its billing (what film could, really?). The blurb itself seems quaint, from a time (not that long ago) when the promise of art could be used to push sex, at least making it high-minded enough to make the sex seem respectable. Pick up a copy of any Playboy from the 60s, and in between the gatefold and "The Girls of Rio" pictorial, you would find Nabokov, Bertrand Russell, and Marshall McLuhan. Sex became the thinking man's sport. In the arts, loosening the bounds of decency statutes became the province of poets and prurient hucksters alike.

The sex films of the period exemplified this odd dichotomy. Filmmakers like Sarno and Radley Metzger had pretensions to art, but still had enough T&A to appeal to the raincoat crowd. Inga is not an exception. With its crisp b&w photography, Swedish locations, and Scandinavian quietude, some have made the comparison to Bergman. This is a stretch. While a lot of it is artfully done, it shows nothing that compares to Bergman's moral weight. It's essentially a story of a woman who attempts to pimp out her teenage niece to a wealthy publisher "who likes young girls" in order to have the money to keep her much younger boyfriend. The niece ends up sleeping with the boyfriend, and the aunt finds herself with nothing in the end. Not necessarily a bad story, but it would have been better without the arthouse pretensions. Better as a Sirk, not a Bergman.

The main title for Inga is the song "Middle of Nowhere", written by Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling, and performed by The Good Grief. A very fuzzy guitar lead snakes around a classic mid-60s "shake" beat. The lyrics (in English) offer a critique of the nihilism and angst of youth: "Everybody's playing, but nobody's really winning...It's a paradox, they don't know if it's joy or pain...Believing that their friends are in hell (spooky sound from the organ)...And where does it take you to, if you refuse to care...The middle of nowhere!" I'm assuming The Good Grief are Swedish. The heavy fuzz gives it away, along with the singer's accent. I found nothing about the band on the web. The imdb has The Bamboos listed (they're listed as The Good Grief in the credits). While I couldn't find anything about The Bamboos, there is a Swedish band called Bamboo, whose claim to fame is that it launched singer Mikael Rickfors' career, first as a member of the 70s version of The Hollies, then as a solo artist. So, are The Good Grief The Bamboos in disguise? Does anyone care? One of the song's writers is Clay Pitts. The only other credit I could find for him is the soundtrack for another sex film (from 1970) Female Animal. There's an interesting discussion about the Inga soundtrack on the Mobius Euro Cult Board (scroll down to Scoring with INGA), alas with no resolution.

Your Littlest Gauge

Long before the advent of DVD, and way before the days of VHS and Beta, the very idea of collecting feature films for home viewing was impractical, cumbersome and horribly expensive. Sure, some worthy and enterprising souls collected 35mm and 16mm prints of their favorite movies, but normally these collectors were theater owners or had access to the hardware needed to project these reels. For those of lesser means who still wished to keep at least a small taste of a memorable film experience, alternatives might include recording an audio cassette off the late, late show, commercials carefully edited out (as I had done, many years ago, when local TV used to broadcast movies instead of infomercials in the wee hours), or, for the more adventurous, film favorite scenes directly off the television with a Super 8 camera (which I also tried, although with not much success). Or you can do what most reasonable people did: buy edited highlights of their favorite feature in a 100 to 400 ft Super 8 reel. These would usually run from 7 to 25 minutes, and would sort of synopsize the movie's story in that allotted time. Some were sound, but most were silent. Sketchy intertitles would not only function to show dialogue, but also to completely do away with exposition and provide the merest wisp of context with the previous scene. Thus, the 30 minutes of plot, gags and happenings between two scenes in, say, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein can be reduced to a simple title: "After escaping Dracula, the boys find themselves in Frankenstein's lair".

These were highlight reels of your favorite movies, pure and simple. Cinema ESPN, if you like. An interesting question to pose, though: who were the editors of these expurgated editions? They were usually the employees of companies such as Castle Films (here's a nice history of Castle Films here), who bought a movie's rights from a studio, chopped them down to size, and then printed them in 8mm or Super 8 reels, often packaged in garishly designed boxes (here's a nice collection of images of these boxes). But these editors, how did they work? Did they study the full feature backwards and forwards in order to find the perfect abridgment? Or did they put in the exciting stuff, with no care at all to any semblance of narrative order? Did they follow a certain aesthetic?

Possibly the closest analogue to these truncated films are trailers, if only in the way a film can be distilled into an impossibly short length. Other than that, these little editions are quite unique, and, aside of a few collectors, pretty much forgotten. If one were so inclined, one could do an interesting study.

Yet Another Post about KB

Yet another post about Kill Bill --Screencaps from the Japanese Region 2 disc. See the showdown at The House of Blue Leaves in all its colorful and gory glory.

New KB Edit?

Rumors are afloat that Tarantino intends to re-edit and fuse together both volumes of his Kill Bill opus for a year-end release for video and quite possibly for a limited release in theaters. Speculation on the DVD Times Forum is that a total re-edit of the structure is in the works and that one shouldn't expect a simple and expedient tacking on of the second volume to the end of the first.

I see troubles for film scholars ahead, not to mention for the well-being of film fans and collectors. I suppose this sort of reordering and refashioning of an ostensibly completed work began in earnest back in 1977 when Francis Ford Coppola re-edited parts I and II of The Godfather into a sprawling miniseries for NBC. What was notable for that endeavor, entitled The Godfather Saga, or The Godfather 1902-1959: The Complete Epic was not just the inclusion of outtakes of both movies but the chronological reordering of the events of Part II. While this may make some sort of narrative sense and assuage some of the confusion and insecurity some viewers may have felt trying to piece things together, it also undermined the complex thematic poignancy of the juxtaposition of the scenes of Little Italy and those in mid-century Tahoe. It was this juxtaposition that made The Godfather Part II a greater film, I feel, than its predecessor. Aesthetic considerations won out in the end, though, and both films (along with its sickly Fredo-like Part III) are available in a handsome boxed set, along with the outtakes that were included in the TV Saga. Of course, the remanufacturing of our filmic past didn't stop there. Again, Coppola put out Apocalypse Now Redux, which added about an hour's worth of material to his original (I still prefer the original). Thanks to the introduction of the DVD format, there are more director's cuts than you can shake a stick at, which begs the question: which will be the proper and accepted text for future scholarship and archiving, and who will decide this. Will Peter Jackson's take on The Return of the King be studied as it theatrical version or some mega five hour version available on some 3 disc special edition? Did Han Solo shoot first, or did Greedo?

Then again, it's Hollywood isn't it? It's a matter of merchandising, not artistic credibility. If Tarantino edits both volumes of Kill Bill into one big sloppy and lovable mess, will both original volumes still be available? Probably, because it will be something for the fanboys to buy in order to keep their collections complete. Which will be the versions dissected and analyzed in the future, say a hundred years from now? If one assumes there will be an academic pursuit such as Tarantino Studies in the year 2104 (which may sound absurd to some, but people study 19th century Penny Dreadfuls), then one can imagine future scholars sifting through the variety of versions available, editing compendia, comparing exegeses not unlike dusty monks studying the apocrypha in the middle ages.

KB Game

Bored? Here's a time waster, courtesy of Kill Bill's official Czech site. You can be Uma for a day, or at least for a couple of minutes, and slice and dice and de-limb an enslaught of the Crazy 88 as Al Hirt's Green Hornet plays in the background. Mindlessly fun. via Boing Boing

I Saw Kill Bill Vol. 2

I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 yesterday, and, while I enjoyed it, I felt the movie was neither "the personal reverie that generates a dramatic power of its own" as Variety's Todd McCarthy rhapsodized (the first review a lot of us read on the film, but now only accessible to Variety subscribers, so I apologize for the sketchy link), nor the "shapeless mess" as opined by The New Yorker's David Denby, or evidence of our incipient "cultural retardation" as pointed out by the pugnacious Armond White of The New York Press.

This is Tarantino: the man clearly loves cinema. He lives it and breathes it. This is a good thing. This cannot be more evident than running through the trailers leading up to Kill Bill, where one can practically smell the stink of cynical merchandising and Hollywood manipulation behind the bullshit of Van Helsing and I, Robot. Tarantino makes movies because he loves movies. Unfortunately, I fear that may be the only thing he loves (apart from the pop ephemera of growing up in the 70s). The man is 40 years old. He should be hitting his artistic and intellectual stride. Instead I find in his films, as fun and as visceral as they are, the work of a very smart, very talented, very precocious 16 year old. Which is not to say they are strictly immature, but there is a shallowness of emotion and experience that comes from a life ensconced in dark sticky theaters and in front of TV sets with smouldering bong in hand. I'm perhaps being harsh, but that's only because I think Tarantino has it in him to be a truly great filmmaker. Playing "spot the reference" is great fun for movie lovers, but its nothing more than a parlor game. It may sound trite, and it's been said a thousand times, but it's the universality of the human condition and experience that makes art truly great and transcend whatever perimeters we may place on it. Sometimes movies need to be more than to be about movies.

Shiseido TV Commercials

An interesting collection of Japanese television advertising from 1960 to the present from Shiseido, a cosmetics company that has been around since 1872. I especially like the b&w 1960 doowop guys with the checkered jackets and portable grooming kits.

Mexi-Horror!!

A good survey of Mexican horror and fantasy cinema from 1933 to 1970. Mexico was establishing it's own horror tradition in the 30s, the same time Universal was doing the same in the states. In Spanish. Here's a translation from Google.

Soledad Miranda Sings!

Cult horror queen Soledad Miranda, while toiling away in westerns and costume dramas in the Spanish film industry in the mid-sixties, also tried her hand as a pop singer. It's pretty pedestrian, really, but you can find cover scans of her records and mp3 samples here.

Italo-Horror Frame Grabs

Very nice frame grab comparison between the recently released DVD of Mill of the Stone Women and several Mario Bava 60s gothics, showing many stylistic similarities. Compliled by Henrik Hemlin, who also helps run the Mario Bava Web Page. From the Mobius Home Video Forum.

Fu Manchu For Mayor

Ah, the days when Occidentals played Asians....Not so long ago actually. Peter Sellers played Fu Manchu in 1980 (The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu, his last film, I think, not including the outtakes that were flung into that lame Pink Panther thing released 2 years after his death), and Spanish horror star Paul Naschy played Fu Manchu in 1990 (La Hija de Fu-Manchu). These are just two tidbits of arcane info found at The Movies of Fu Manchu, a repository of graphics, posters, promo pieces and other neat stuff. Part of a larger Fu Manchu site.

The Bloody Pit of Swank!!

Mp3 Tuesday!-- some minor internet problems and other distractions precluded me from uploading this on Friday. I hope it's just as enjoyable -- the swanky, swinging, and sadean Theme from The Bloody Pit of Horror (Il Boia Scarlatto) (Gino Peguri) 3.6M

At a certain moment of excess, I conjectured that if Michelangelo Antonioni was a third-rate hack who toiled in relative anonymity in the papier-mache depths of Cinecitta, where Monica Vitti wouldn't even give him the time of day as she rushed by him on her way to the set of her comedy with Alberto Sordi, he could have possibly made Il Boia Scarlatto, aka The Bloody Pit of Horror. The notion, on the face of it, is of course quite absurd, ridiculous even. But through sleepy late-night slits for eyes, though the imagination may be cloudier, I thought I saw the stamp of Antonioni.

Syrupy and sinister languor marks each minute like a stain. Like Antonioni's upper-class creations, the artists and models of Il Boia Scarlatto who meander through the long hallways and corridors of Travis Anderson's (Mickey Hargitay) odd castle find little joy or emotion in their lives. Ennui rules their day. So does cynicism. Even the act of love provides little solace or even anything resembling human interaction (indeed a woman's empty stare as her lover busses her neck mirrors the expressions of Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau in similar situations in Antonioni's early 60s films).

Ironically, it is only when confronted with physical torture and horrible deaths do our characters exhibit any pathos. Indeed, it often plumbs the depths of utter despair: "Why is this happening?" a woman cries out as boiling oil is poured over her bare back. "I can't stand this anymore!" "Please don't! I don't want to die like this!" the impresario screams as he's roasted alive. "Mercy!"

Then again, the existential distress our characters exhibit may not be intentional on the filmmakers' part (in this case director Massimo Pupillo, and writers Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale), but merely the byproduct of a weak and silly script and even weaker and sillier actors. The film has garnered a certain reputation as a "cult classic" (a term I tend to dislike, but I'll use anyway), if only because of Mickey Hargitay's maniacal performance. It's also interesting that it refers to Hargitay's own history as a "muscleman in costume films" in the character he plays. In fact, one can see Il Boia Scarlatto as an outgrowth of the peplum genre, or Italian sword and sandal films, or an attempt to hybrid this genre (on its last legs in the mid-60s) with the gothic horror that was popular in Italy at the time. In any case, most people call it camp nowadays, but there's also a fringe following that focuses on the cheesecake and torture chamber aspect, which seems harmless on the surface, but gets pretty ugly when you dig a little deeper.

The music was by Gino Peguri, who has about 16 films to his credit, usually westerns in the 60s and softcore porn in the 70s. His first soundtrack was for a mondo documentary called Italia Proibita in 1963. Il Boia Scarlatto was his second score for a film, and one can hear the mondo influence. Scenes of depravity are set against soft swingy lounge tunes. Peguri's only bow to horror music convention is the skeletal sound of a discordant guitar, which sort of sounds like early 80s NYC downtown no wave. After the main credits, we hear some sweet cocktail music as our characters make their way to the castle where most of them will meet their horrible fates. Nothing like a sense of foreboding.

Psycho Flash Edit Thing

More Psycho stuff. Neat little Flash page where you can re-edit the shower scene yourself. I attempted a minimalist version with just shots of Janet Leigh's gaping mouth. I can delude myself by thinking that it works. It's in the gallery section listed as "minimalist psycho".

Was Gus Psycho?

I always thought Gus Van Sant's Psycho was one grossly misunderstood movie. I always thought it quite audacious to attempt a shot by shot remake of one of the most studied films in the history of the art, a film that had been analyzed shot by shot obsessively, compulsively, fetishistically. The frothing reaction by movie-buffs to the news of its production and its eventual release was something approaching pitchforks and torches. It was as if Van Sant had shat on the Master's grave. The common complaint among critics was "Why?" Another one was "Pointless." Of course, the point these critics missed was not that Van Sant intended his version to be a replacement or a a version upgrade (in software parlance) to the venerable original (despite Van Sant's claims to the press about updating it in color to cater to younger filmgoers' tastes, which in retrospect seems nothing more than playing to the reporters, which of course Hitchcock used to do). Instead, I feel, it was Van Sant's intent to create a companion piece to the original, a variation to a theme, formally something a little more complex than mere homage. Things like this are common in other artforms like music, painting, sculpture, even poetry. Despite claims of cinema's closest analogues being music, dance, or even the plastic arts, what a lot of people expect and want out of movies hasn't changed since the days of Griffith, that is, essentially, the aesthetic trappings of the Victorian novel: a well paced plot arc, three dimensional characters, a climax and denouement. People feel cheated if they don't get them.

Mark Carpenter suggests in an interesting piece in Off Screen that Van Sant is engaging in "appropriation art", art that utilizes and exploits elements of the original, and comments on it the same time. Carpenter comments Van Sant "...provides us is a near-mirror image which leaves us with the peculiar sensation of watching ourselves watching images retained from our viewing past".

Indeed. Van Sant's Psycho is best appreciated by those who love and know the original like the back of their hand, like I do, and so many other people. These are the people who, in their pale and awkward adolescence, recorded the soundtrack off the late-late show on C-90 cassette and who played it back, flipping through Richard Anobile's shot by shot book (which may have inspired young Gus, too). People who had it on Beta, then VHS. Surely, these fans would understand Van Sant's motive, his meta-commentary on Psycho, and also the movie industry itself (it's a wonder it got financed at all; it's like Hollywood's first art school film). Maybe they would dig on the familiarity, and then the not so familiar. Then these could be acolytes who would rage and rail against the heresy of the thing.