The Magnificent Ambersons

Here's a fantastic resource for images and info on Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. The site includes the requisite posters and lobbycards, but also included are magazine ads and scanned articles from fan magazines, including one entitled "Is Orson Welles a Menace?" There's also a trailer that gives us just a taste of the footage that was ultimately edited out (the final scene where Joseph Cotten visits Agnes Moorehead in a cheap boarding house --a scene that Welles thought was the best in the film and possibly the best he ever directed).

Cinema Diabolico

Very cool collection of Mexican horror and wrestling movie posters and lobby cards, part of Pulp Morgue, a repository of pulp art and ephemera. One of many wonderful finds divined from Bibi's Box.

Death at Disneyland

The Happiest Place on Earth? A detailed and sad history of fatal accidents at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim by John Marr, publisher of the zine Murder Can Be Fun.

Weekend Poster Feast 6

Weekend Poster Feast 6. Not a movie poster, per se, but what looks like a crazily hyperbolic newspaper ad for a double feature of Keep Talking, Baby (Cause toujours, mon lapin) (1961), and Ladies' Man (Lemmy pour les dames (1961), both starring the great Eddie Constatine. Constatine is best known as tough guy Lemmy Caution in Godard's Alphaville, the craggy faced throw-back alpha-male pitted against the cruelly efficient Alpha 60 supercomputer, the Tarzan against IBM, as it were. Constantine made his name in Europe as a cabaret singer and then moved on to play hardboiled American heroes like Lemmy Caution and Nick Carter in French films in the '50s. Constantine's new bride said, in an interview in 1977 (when Eddie was 62, mind you): "I've had five husbands, and Eddie is the best lover of them all." Who needs James Bond or Our Man Flint? Yes indeed!

Online Viewing Tips

Some online viewing tips. A series of five minute cartoons from Cartoon Network Mexico featuring masked wrestling superhero El Santo. Pretty nicely done, in a sleek Batman and Teen Titans sort of way. Santo battles mummies and clones in Mexico, D.F. In Spanish (as if that would stop you).

Via WFMU's blog, a preview of The Found Footage Festival, a compendium of stupid home videos, foul mouthed outtakes and tantrums, and incredibly violent training tapes. Entertaining and enlightening.

And lastly, one definitely not for the kiddies. Via Warren Ellis, a cheaply and crudely animated version of a Tijuana Bible, featuring a third-rate Bugs Bunny rip-off, cartoon animals as sailors and pirates, naked cartoon women, moronic racial sterotypes, and a whole bunch of squishy sex. Who the hell made this cartoon? It looks like it was made in the '60s or '70s, probably made for stag parties or smokers. Despite its crude look and sub-Hanna-Barbara animation, it looks somewhat professional -perhaps a lark produced by easily amused (or bored) animators in between jobs. An interesting cultural artifact, I suppose. Probably not worksafe.

Up the Academy!

Henceforth, let it be known (at least by me) that the Oscar known as the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Direction has no grounding in even the most objective criteria of what can be considered "good direction". This so-called "award" shall not be considered in any way a yardstick of cinematic quality or artistic vision, but instead something akin to a Hollywood Chamber of Commerce "Good Citizenship" award. Considering the background of many of the recipients in the past 20 years, perhaps it should change its name to the "Actor Does Good" Award.

Let it also be known that for a filmmaker to be shunned or snubbed by the so-called "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" is not a detriment, but, instead, a credit to an artist's worth. Let it also be understood that the collective work of those not worthy enough to be so "honored", by any qualitative measurement, is far, far superior to the collective work of those who have won (and in this case -if it's close at all- it's because of the heavy lifting of a few: like Ford, Wilder, Huston, maybe Coppola, Bertolucci, and Polanski, and maybe Spielberg on a good day).

While all this may painfully obvious to many of you, this bite-sized piece of rancor was mainly created to assuage those (like myself) who had hoped against hope that perhaps this was the year the Academy would bend to finally honor America's Greatest Living Filmmaker. That Martin Scorsese, despite his outsider status, used every culinary trick and ingredient in his filmic kitchen to appeal to Academy tastes in his last two outings (historical feasts: grand, epic, sweeping, with big stars, and even bigger budgets), still he fell short of garnering the prize. Maybe it was a cynical attempt by Scorcese to rig the game, knowing that a movie like The Aviator had Oscar written all over it, and that this was his best shot. All the undeniably great films he made that had never won were much too raw, violent, and strange for the Academy, so he may have tried to smooth this wrinkles out in The Aviator. It could have worked, but, the problem remained: he's still Martin Scorsese. The Aviator, grand mess that it is, still had as its core, a morally ambivalent and somewhat unsympathetic main character. Howard Hughes is a classic Scorsese hero in much the same vein as Johnny Boy and Charlie, Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, Rupert Pupkin, or even Jesus Christ. And the Academy doesn't like weird characters... give them a gruff old boxing trainer with a heart of gold anytime.

Like the scorpion in Welles' Mr. Arkadin, it's in Scorsese's nature to have such uncompromising aspects in even such a compromising effort. And it's also in the nature of the Academy (the Hollywood elite, if you like... dull and conservative to a fault) to shun such irregularities, to turn their heads away from the weird and the colorful. If you're going to have to have a kink in the proceedings (such as euthunasia), at least let it be stately. One thing Scorsese is not, is stately.

So, once again, the asthmatic kid from Little Italy is uninvited to the big party. Well, Marty, if they don't let them play in their yard, fuck 'em. There's nicer fields all around.

Deutsche Kinostars

More film ephemera... Photos and info on Postwar German movie stars(in German). I've always been fascinated by this kind of international pop cinema that flies under the North American radar (our cultural NORAD?), and ends up in the sad margins of recollection, barely on the tip of the tongue of dumb memory. Most of the films featured on the site appear to be melodramas or comedies, movies that would not have easily translated to American tastes (unlike the fantastical Krimis, which at least showed up as second features at drive-ins or downtown fleapits or on late night television). The stars themselves were attractive enough, although they didn't seem to make much of a splash outside West Germany (or German speaking environs), unlike, say, Curt Jurgens, Hardy Kruger, Gert Frobe, or Karin Dor (although a lot of these aforementioned actors made their transatlantic bones on Bond films, oddly enough). Another chapter in the secret history of cinema.

Batman The TV Show

KAPOW! occurs 50 times, which makes it the most often used sound effect graphic used in the old 1960s Batman TV series. Coming in second on this wonderfully compiled list is that old standby POW! with a respectable 49 times. Not far behind is ZAP! with a 42 count. There's also a list of cameo celebrity appearances, plus a whole bunch of bat-details and minutiae for your surfing pleasure. A bunch of batvideos can be seen here, including Burt Ward's screen test with Adam West in a Batman Year One style insignia on his chest.

Weekend Poster Feast 5

Weekend Poster Feast 5. Have Negligee...will travel...! Meet Mari Lou... the blonde on fire! Meet Mari-Lou...Once she starts she can't stop... Mari-Lou...Hiway Pick-Up...She Couldn't Resist Men...Any Man! Kathy Marlowe...That Girl on Fire Who Starts In Where Mansfield and Monroe Leave Off!

Just some of the taglines for the wonderfully titled Girl with an Itch (1958), a tawdry potboiler of a b-movie taken from a paperback from the bottom of a squeaky book rack. I really don't know anything about this movie, except that it features Robert Armstrong, who played Carl Denham in King Kongand Robert Clarke, whose been in tons of cheap horror flicks from The Astounding She Monster, The Hideous Sun Demon, and Frankenstein Island. And I really haven't any information on the aforementioned Kathy Marlowe, except that she apparently came out in Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story, which I remember as a pretty good gritty film about a totally corrupt city in Alabama. The poster has a certain old school prurience that seems innocent nowadays, almost sweet. You can get a fridge magnet with the poster's image. If you're really interested, Something Weird is selling the film in VHS.

Click on the image for a larger version. 326K.

Chess In The Cinema

What do the films The Seventh Seal, 2001, An American Werewolf in London, Monkey Business, and The Abominable Dr. Phibes have in common? They all feature scenes with chess playing. These films, and many, many more, are featured in the Chess In The Cinema site, which exhaustively tries to list every movie with a scene featuring either chess playing, or even a chessboard. They have a count of 604 so far, and I'll be damned if I could find one that they've missed.

R.I.P. Simone Simon

Another loss in the film world. French actress Simone Simon died today in Paris at the age of 93. She is best known for her role as the enigmatic and troubled Irena Dubrovna in Val Lewton's 1942 production of Jacques Tourneur's Cat People. It's an intriguing film, cast in pools of light and shadow, thick with mystery, and handling the subtexts of female frigidity and sexual awakening with a deftness that films of that time just didn't approach (unless it was a low-budget horror movie). Simon's performance was a key part of the movie's success. Her Irena is soft, vulnerable, perhaps ingenuously earnest; but behind her pretty and exotic eyes, as she melts into the shadows, we can sense her rigidly held surface melting as well, failing to keep the beast in check.

Hollywood was just a small part of her career. Simon starred in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine in 1938, and in Max Olphuls' La Ronde and Le Plaisir in 1950 and 1952 respectively. She retired from the movie industry in 1956 and, for nearly 50 years, presumably never looked back.

The Quatermass Restoration

A very interesting (and technical) piece on the restoration and eminent DVD release of the classic BBC productions of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass teleplays. A lot of care has been given to the these old '50s kinescopes, and it looks like it'll be a nice presentation. Hopefully, a Region 1 release is in the works.

R.I.P. Dan O'Herlihy

Lost among the obituaries of the past week was the passing of 85 year old Irish actor Dan O'Herlihy. O' Herlihy built quite a list of credits. He made his film debut in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, and made his splash in Hollywood playing Macduff in Orson Welles' Macbeth. He may be more familiar to some as the "Old Man" in the RoboCop films, and as a reptilian extraterranean in The Last Starfighter. He was also in John Huston's swan song The Dead.

O' Herlihy is probably best known for his title role in Luis Buñuel's Las Adventuras de Robinson Crusoe, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1954 (although the film was shot in 1952). The movie was a first of a many things for Buñuel: his first color film, his first all-English language film, and his first to receive an Academy Award nomination; and Robinson Crusoe may seem, on the surface, atypical for Buñuel, but it contains many touches that are exclusively Buñuel: the erotic charge when Robinson sees the fluttering wind tossed garments on the scarecrow, and also when Friday puts on those same garments (and Robinson quickly tells him to remove them); the theological discussion between Robinson and Friday in which Robinson fails to convince the pagan Friday of the moral superiority of Christianity. What also makes the film is O'Herlihy's performance, and the transformation his character takes from being a callous slave trader to a man overwhelmed by loneliness, from a man who sees Friday as a servant, and then as a comrade, then as a friend. It's a remarkable performance, especially when there are many scenes where it is just O'Herlihy, the beach, the jungle, and the camera.

My favorite O'Herlihy role may be that as General Warren Black in Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (usually dismissed as the overly serious flipside to Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, but is just as good, in my book, and may even be better after Strangelove's time worn jokiness wears off). O'Herlihy pays a dovish general who is ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice at the film's chilling climax. "There's nothing more to be said," he says coldly, muffled by a black oxygen mask in the cockpit of the B-52. He then recites his last orders and performs his last act, horrible and unimaginable, as the rest of the crew watch, frozen in terror. We hear just the whine of the bomber's jets, heavy breathing, and these words: "The matador...the matador...."

Stars Pushing Lux

A small but nifty gallery of French magazine ads from 1930 to 1984 featuring some very big stars pushing Lux soap, from Hollywood beauties such as Susan Hayward and Marilyn Monroe to international film figures such as Ursula Andress, Marina Vlady, to a very lovely and feminine Simone Signoret (a revelation after only seeing her in Les Diaboliques and Curtis Harrington's Games).

Weekend Poster Feast 4

Weekend Poster Feast 4. A stark and elegant design distinguishes this Japanese poster of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema. John Waters called Teorema his favorite "art" film, which ought to give an indication of its transgressive power. Click on the image on the left for a larger version of the image. 460K

Xtreme Loonacy

There's been much hubbub and hand wringing consternation among interweb wags about the "re-imagining" (new Hollywood speak for "remaking" or "insipid recycling") of Bugs and the rest of the Warner Brothers cartoon gang as the Loonatics. The story, if you don't know it by now, concerns a crackerjack group of superheroes doing battle with evildoers and other assorted nogoodniks in the far off year of 2772. These heroes are updated versions of the classic Warner Brothers' characters we've all grown up watching, but now drawn with sharper angles, meaner faces with bad-ass glares, and clad in black and flourescent colors. To wit, these characters are:

Buzz (Bugs Bunny): Team leader with laser and martial arts expertise
Duck (Daffy Duck): Weapons expert with built-in sonar
Roadster (Road Runner): Super speed
Spaz (Tasmanian Devil): Team muscle with jaws of steel
Lexi (Lola Bunny): Disguise expert with super hearing
Slick (Wile E. Coyote): Vehicles and surveillance; regeneration abilities

Disregarding whether or not Lola Bunny is a part of the Warners' canon, Loonatics doesn't seem especially egregious compared to other Warners' attempts to exploit and recycle their famous cartoon characters. Doesn't anyone remember Tiny Toons, Space Jam, Baby Looney Tunes or any of the crappy repackaging of old shorts linked by newly (and horribly) animated footage that came out in the early '80s? Certainly, Loonatics is an outrageous and cynical update, and yet another sign of a dearth of imagination in the major studios; but, really, is that anything new? True cartoonheads aren't probably going to watch the series, or if they're especially curious, give it a cursory look, and the series will probably fade without consequence into the fuzzy background of our consciousness. The victims of this bastardization are not so much the legacies of Chuck, Tex, Friz, and Bob, but as Amid from Cartoon Brew aptly put it, "...[the] countless modern creators out there who have ideas...who have something to say...and it's a slap in the face of every talented artist working in this business whenever a major animation studio chickens out like this. Shoving a tired rabbit down America's throat for the umpteenth time will never reap WB the rewards of giving America a great new cartoon star, an honestly-created cartoon that speaks to our time and place..."

Well said. If you're curious on how Loonatics is going to look, here's a Quicktime preview.

Mp3 Heads Up - Italian Style

A movie mp3 heads up --The Stypod, Stylus Magazine's mp3 blog has three mp3s from slassic '70s Italian horror films (well, actually two horror films, and one giallo if one wants to be pedantic), Goblin's theme from Argento's Suspiria, Fabio Frizzi's main theme from Fulci's Zombie, and, best of all, Ennio Morricone's little heard theme from Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Good cuts all, and an excellent way to introduce yourself to the wonderful and weird world of Italian genre film soundtrack music ('70s style).

Tons of Titles

"What is it? A unique catalog of movies on video...specifically, screen captures of movie title screens!" Over 3130 titles are available on Steven Hill's Movie Title Screens Page, an incredible collection and undertaking. It's not only a snapshot history of film, but also a history of popular typefaces and graphic design, from Caligari to Alien Vs. Predator.

Posters From Egypt

Here's a nice collection of Egyptian movie posters from the 1950s to the present day. The older ones are the best, as the more recent ones try to ape modern Western styles ( has movie poster art ever been worse than it is right now?)

Weekend Poster Feast 3

Weekend Poster Feast 3. It's easy to lose oneself in the gaze of Barbara Steele. This brittle beauty found a home in the gothic opera of Italian horror films after floundering for a couple of years in the British and American film industry. Where Anglo-Saxon minds faltered in succesfully framing her unorthodox countenance, it took an Italian like Mario Bava to see in her saucer eyes and the cruel cut of her face an expression of centuries of betrayal, treachery, and perdition. One can perhaps see her as Lucrezia Borgia (the greatest role she never played), or perhaps Elizabeth Bathory. In any case, Steele was extraordinary in the dual role in La Machera del Demonio (Black Sunday), and she would never be as great again. Click on the image on the left for a much larger picture. (540K)

Jewish Movies

Here's a nice site on Jewish themed and influenced films. It's mainly a review site, but the reviews are very well thought out and well written (and there's a ton of them). On Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights: "But while this film shows in bittersweet detail what looking beyond one's culture is good for, it never questions why both boys don't fall for Jewish girls. If virtually every -coming-of-age Jewish movie didn't feature the hero always falling for a "Shiksa", I wouldn't question it either, but Jewish girls in these films are either nonexistent, or they are featured as overly aggressive (in this film, they are just nonexistent)." On the 1959 Ben Hur: "...these noble, Hollywoodized characterizations create a wider gap between the races (and the truth) when one is confronted with the way Semites really looked, and I personally think that faith is something that deserves an honest representation. I'm not trying to be "PC". If people want to believe that this Semite Jew named Ben Hur really looked like Peer Gynt on steroids, that's fine. Faith is also illusion, and this is after all just a story of one person's experience of being touched by Christ. It's metaphorical. But in my mind, as a movie, this is just a case of bad acting (Hawkins is good) and bad direction. But the Academy gave it 11 awards. What do I know?"

The site also has a nice collection of Goldwynisms. My favorite: "If I look confused it's because I'm thinking."

Don Martin Dept.

Don Martin Dept. The Nearsighted Voodoo Priest, an impossibly cruel, incredibly tasteless, and no doubt anthopologically incorrect comic strip from the great Don Martin. I picked this off of usenet, laughed out loud, and suddenly remembered how much loved Mad Magazine and especially Don Martin (and Sergio Aragones and his "marginalia" and Antonio Prohias and his fantastic "Spy Vs. Spy") when I was an impressionable tyke. More Martin stuff: The Don Martin Shrine. Don Martin Collector's Page.

George W. Bush and Hollywood

George W. Bush, Filmmaker? Certainly a stretch, but Psychotronic Video Guide's Michael J. Weldon points out an extended piece that from 1983 to 1992 Bush was on the board of Silver Screen Management, a firm that produced films for Tri Star and then Disney. Bush, of course, was never credited on any of the movies Silver Screen Management produced (he seems to a well-connected moneyman, if anything), but Weldon speculates on Bush's involvement in the process of moviemaking: " I'd love to know if GWB did anything besides lend his famous name and share in the profits of these movies. Did he help secure locations, read or approve scripts or make casting suggestions? Did he attend premieres and party with the stars?"

The films themselves? Silver Screen Management produced 74 major release features while Bush was on the board, and most of them are hardly memorable --the sort of instantly forgettable Hollywood product that used to gather dust on Blockbuster shelves in the late '80s and show up on pay channels to fill up the hole in their schedules: The Black Cauldron, My Science Project, Tough Guys (with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas), Adventures in Babysitting, Can't Buy Me Love, Ernest Goes to Camp, the shitty remake of D.O.A., V.I. Warshawski. Bush scored some hits, too: Three Men and a Baby, Cocktail, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Little Mermaid. The common thread for all these films was that these were the one of the first manifestations of creeping corporatism that now seems to run Hollywood: the high concept package deal, heavy duty marketing and focus group surveys, the gleaming perfect surface of glitz, spectacle, and sentiment. Entertainment was always a commodity in Hollywood, but in the '80s it became a science. Weldon writes: "Note how well Silver Screen Management practiced product placements, recycling (remaking French films) and outsourcing (filming in other countries)." Indeed, one can make analogies to Bush's style of politics: the spectacle, the control and marketing of image and message, product placement (Hallibuton, any one?), the manufactured edginess of Bush's maverick image, the thumbs-up platitudes. It's like some forgotten '80s movie, only it's not relegated to a 2 AM showing on The Movie Channel. It's live.

Weekend Poster Feast 2

Weekend Poster Feast 2. The Astounding She Monster, classic 1950s drive-in exploitation... well, at the least the poster and marketing. The actual movie itself? See here for a review and screenshots and make up your own mind to search it out. Click on the image on the left for a much larger image (350K).

Ultra-violent comix from Hong Kong

Brutally insane collection of ultra-violent hyper-gory comic book covers from Hong Kong from the late '60s to the present, from what I can surmise. The early ones are the best, if you dig the primitively surreal. Even Bruce Lee gets into the act. I don't know much about these comix, but apparently they're very popular. Found via the German blog The Crime in Your Coffee, who found it via another German blog, Scheinriese, who found it through a Chinese blog MegaroGolith2004 (with a sketchy but helpful translation from Google here). Whew!

Scans of the '60s German magazine "Film"

Very nice gallery of scans (covers and sample pages) of the 1960s German magazine Film. From The Cartoonist, a very fine weblog.

More SF from Italy

More SF from Italy. An excellent collection of cover scans of science fiction magazines and paperbacks published under the Arnoldo Mondadori imprint can be found at Mondo Urania (Mondadori was also responsible for giallo fiction). If you're interested in some of the more far out illustrations, click on the Urania link on the page, and you would find scans of 1500 covers of I romanzi di Urania, alongside a synopsis (in Italian, of course) of that month's novel (usually by an American or British author).

Antonio Margheriti

Even among genre fans, Italian director Antonio Margheriti's name and reputation provokes little, if any, recognition. A simple and quick glance at his prolific filmography reveals a panoply of popular film genres, from Westerns to gothic horror, from muscle-man pictures to spy spoofs, and from giallos to sex romps. Margheriti, who often signed his films with the Anglo-Saxon sobriquet "Anthony Dawson" in order to sound more American (a common ruse in the Italian film industry), had his hand in so many genres, some may consider him a journeyman, a technician, a director-for-hire, or, less charitably, a hack. While Margheriti does have his defenders, particularly in his horror efforts such as Castle of Blood (Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas called him "The Third Man of Italian Fantasy", after gold and silver medalists Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda respectively), I feel his reputation will rest mainly on his gloriously frenetic and bizarre pop-art science fiction movies from the 1960s, a genre which had no antecedent in the Italian cinema before Margheriti pretty much built it from the ground up.

Before 1968, when Kubrick's 2001 made its grand splash and established new criteria for the portrayal of space travel on the screen, the SF space film was a hearty runt of a genre, although one whose history stretched back to Georges Melies and his Trip to the Moon. Since Melies' initial trip, other notable space movies graced the theaters like the 1924 Soviet allegory Aelita, Queen of Mars, Fritz Lang's follow-up to Metropolis, 1929's Woman on the Moon, and that fantastic mixture of hard SF and American ingenuity and optimism Destination Moon. By the early 1960s, the dawn of the space age, movies dealing with space travel had become common. The Soviets brought an element of socialist utopianism into the mix with films like Planeta Burg (Planet of Storms, which exhibited excellent special effects and design, but which also carried itself with the stodginess of a Politburo overcoat (but not too stodgy for it to be re-edited by Curtis Harrington and Peter Bogdanovich, under the aegis of Roger Corman, as Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women). Other films from the Eastern Bloc which also followed the utopian lead include East Germany's Der Schweigende Stern (known in the US as First Spaceship on Venus, and based on a Stanislaus Lem novel), and the remarkable Ikarie XB 1 (Voyage to the End of the Universe) from Czechoslovakia (which deserves it's own post!). While the SF space films from the Warsaw Pact were heavy and serious, space movies from Hollywood tended towards the juvenile with efforts like The Angry Red Planet, 12 to the Moon (which featured the photographic skills of the great John Alton), although there were good films like Robinson Crusoe on Mars which treated the subject matter with a modicum of respect, if not scientific verisimilitude.

Which leads us to Antonio Margheriti. While there has always been an element of the fantastic in Italian cinema, it usually stemmed from stories from antiquity and mythology (such as the peplum films which featured muscle-bound heroes like Hercules and Maciste and their laborious exploits against evil tyrants, treacherous queens, remarkable monsters), or borrowing from the previous century with the supernatural gothic horrors helmed by the likes of Bava and Freda, never did the Italians look to the future for their fantasy. Which is not to say Italians didn't have a taste for SF. After the war, science fiction stories and novels printed in periodicals such as Cosmo and, more importantly, Urania became extraordinarily popular. Mainly, these were translations of American and British SF by authors such as Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon. As there was little appetite for home grown SF in Italy in the '50s and early '60s, so when Margheriti decided to direct his first space picture Space-Men (Assignment: Outer Space) in 1961, he took the name of "Anthony Daisies" (a strict transliteration of "Antonio Margheriti") in order to hide his nationality (a common ruse among Italian filmmakers in the '50s and '60s -- even Sergio Leone signed his films as "Bob Robertson" once upon a time). As the first Italian space film, Space-Men set an important precedent. As Phil Hardy writes in his Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction:

"One of the strengths of even the worst of Italian Science Fiction is the visual sense of its designers and set decorators.... the space stations, moons and asteroids of Italian Science Fiction have an imaginative vibrancy about them about them that connects as much with fantasy as with the sober, however pulp inspired, Anglo-American predictions of the look of the future. When, in addition, such films are directed by the likes of babe... or, as here, Margheriti, a director with an equally keen visual style, the results can be superb."

The film was made on a shoestring -- 49 million lire, which translates to $30,000, which in 1960/61 was an extraordinarily paltry sum, especially for a movie which deals with space travel and requires plenty special visual effects. Nowadays, hipsters raised on MST3K and Ed Wood's pie tins snicker derisively when Margheriti's spacemen float by on visible piano wire and the spaceship's exhaust flares like an out of control Zippo, but one should overlook these handicaps and instead focus on the manic imagination and visual flair of Margheriti's space films. Especially with the weird I criminali delle galassia (best known by it's English title The Wild, Wild Planet). Candy colored pop-art spaceship interiors, dancers dressed like butterflies, disembodied organs tremble to life, kidnap victims shrunk to the size of dolls to fit into attache cases, automatons in wraparound shades and black leather, and an explosion of red at the end.... Not great art, but pulp art at least, with the kind of unfettered imagination that is hard to find in today's overly expensive and overly marketed sci-fi extravaganzas. What could Lucas do with $30,000 (or adjusted for inflation. $300,000? Maybe he could get off his ass and make a real movie instead of a toy tie-in.

Academia gives Margheriti his props with an overly serious entry in Senses of Cinema's Great Directors database. There's also a treasure trove of images and video at the official Antonio Margheriti tribute site run by Margheriti's son Edoardo. The best things on the site are the collection of trailers of many of Margheriti's movies, plus a really cool behind the scenes look at Wild, Wild Planet shot for Italian TV.

Then there's the question of authorship of Flesh for Frankenstein (aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. There are proponents for both sides: Margheriti's and Paul Morrissey's. There's one thing that's certain: the breathing disembodied pair of lungs in Frankenstein are the same found in Wild, Wild Planet, designed by the great Carlo Rambaldi.

We Jam Econo

For your viewing pleasure -- a trailer for the upcoming Minutemen doc We Jam Econo. Besides the promise of seeing some smoking Minutemen footage, you can also see how gracefully your favorite '80s punk rocker has aged in some present day interview clips. Ian MacKaye looks the embodiment of straight edge health; J. Mascis looks like someone's hippie mom; ed fROMOHIO doesn't look so hot; George Hurley looks like a cross between a robust and healthy Zuma Beach lifeguard and Freddie Blassie; and, yeah, Thurston, we know you have a badass record collection.

Weekend Poster Feast

Weekend Poster Feast. Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy, done up Japanese pop art style. Here's a nice Barbarella site, which professes not to "honor Jane Fonda or her political views". Oh well. Click on the image on the left for a larger version.

Godard on Monster Movies

Godard on Monster Movies (from a series of lectures presented at the Conservatoire d'Art Cinématographique de Montréal in 1980). Portions of the lectures are included in these film film notes from the Pacific Film Archive (as gif image files). Some excerpts:

"The true monster film is Grease, or Saturday Night Fever... Because one has no fear.....

"I believe that there were few movies in the genre of Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein where [the monster] was not totally invented; frightening, but separate from reality.... A movie was never made about a worker's strike using Dracula, which would be useful; or films about the mafia. Suck the blood or take the money - there's no real difference....

"One could imagine Germany, Year Zero being made in another manner; it would not be disorienting to see, all of a sudden, Bela Lugosi cross the screen....

"There are few films that attempt the two together. When Frankenstein was made, one could have put him into a monstrous social situation... the Depression.... It appears at moments, but the film doesn't treat it, it treats it separately.... I would rather try to treat the two together.....

"Dracula is somebody from another world in today's world. One says Dracula doesn't exist, but through 3/4 of the film you have only to see how the people are dressed.... Still today on all the boards of directors, in all of high society, people are dressed like this. So, where are the monsters? Who are the monsters? Dracula's house is absolutely the house of Dupont de Nemours.... Do you think they would have had the idea of shooting in another kind of house? Your ideas come from the world you come from... you get ideas only from seeing things. If I had seen only Dracula, I never would have had this idea. But as I see Germany, Year Zero just before or after, I find... cosmic links between these films.... Berlin is the tomb of Dracula. It's effectively Hitler's genius.... If you had put a little mustache on Dracula...."

Ingrid Bergman - Swedish Magazines

Nice collection of scans of Swedish magazine covers featuring Ingrid Bergman, including some that predate her Hollywood career.

Pepsi Vs. Coke

The trailer for Rialto's re-release of Godard's 1965 paeon to youth and pop Masculine Feminine is up, a snazzy little montage of clips from the movie set to a hip little number by one of the film's stars, Chantal Goya ("Tu m'as trop menti", to be exact). Curiously, the trailer's tagline is "Paris, Sex, and the Pepsi Generation", while Godard always claimed it was about "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola". Surely, Marx may have fallen out of favor with the young, but Coca-Cola? Cola wars aside, it's still a cause for celebration, and no doubt a Criterion DVD edition is around the corner.

Video Nasties in the UK

In Britain they were called "Video Nasties", European and American horror films with explicit sex and violence that could never be passed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for theatrical exhibition, but because of the nascent home video explosion in the early '80s, were found on the shelves of video shops without any sort of restrictions. Vying for the attention of the discriminating video consumer, many of these videos were packaged in the biggest and most explicitly garish boxes possible. The yellower segments of the British press get wind of all this and raise holy hell, and the government, of course, follows suit. Some distributors are prosecuted, and some "Nasties" seized. By 1984, the Video Recordings Act is passed by Parliament, and the brief flame of the "Nasties" era comes to an ignominious end. A very good history can be found here, and a brand new database of pre-certification "Nasties", built in conjunction with an upcoming book from Fab Press, can be found here, complete with over 7000 video cover scans.

Sexploitation Film Mags

We're not talking about Positif, Cahiers du Cinema, Sight and Sound, or Film Culture here. When these colorful slicks emblazoned their covers with the words "Art Films", don't expect any pontifications on Bergman or Brakhage, but instead expect a "Full Color Center Spread" and a special pre-release preview of the film Hot Miami. Titles like Cinema Close-Up, Barred, Bizarre Films, and Cinema Keyhole seemed to proliferate under the radar of the Look and Life mainstream in the '60s until the early '70s when hardcore reared its ugly, gnarled head, and rendered these magazines quaint, and perhaps not so daring.

From a very interesting site called Bad Mags, which details the sleazier aspects of magazine publishing in the '60s and the '70s, and which will be the subject of a volume coming out of Headpress, a publisher of fine books. And, yes, some of these links may not be work safe.

El Vampiro Sangriento

A meticulous labor of love: more than a hundred frame grabs from The Bloody Vampire, K. Gordon Murray's English language version of the Mexican horror film El Vampiro Sangriento. Alas, there's no text to explicate the images, so unless you've seen the movie (I haven't), you may be at a loss to know the significance of each image and how they relate to each other, except to possibly discover the odd, dusty poetry of some of them: the skeletal coach driver; the sloping arches; this mixture of eros and science; the vampire's tome; the frightened maiden and the jiggling ornate doorknob; a dinner table borrowed from Citizen Kane, and this outtake from L'Age d'Or; and a whole lot more. It looks exceptionally well shot in any case. Piece together the images and form your own narrative. Or check out the movie. It's probably not bad.

From the K. Gordon Murray website.

Welles' Quixote

Scroll down a bit and find an audio report (from PRI's Studio 360) on the long and strange history of Orson Welles' film production of Don Quixote. Self financed and languorously shot over a period of twenty odd years, it was the film masterpiece that never was, and most probably never will ever be completed to anyone's satisfaction. Not that some haven't tried to piece together Welles' footage that sits in various libraries, cinematheques, and personal collections throughout the world, most notably Eurotrash icon Jesus Franco. Franco, who served as second unit director on Welles' Chimes at Midnight, assembled what material was available (mainly in Spanish collections) and produced Don Quixote de Orson Welles in 1992. It was almost universally reviled on release, although some suggest it was Franco's participation (and his reputation as a cheapo porn director) that engendered the disdain (critic Jonathan Rosembaum called Franco "biggest hack in all of Spanish cinema!"). At any rate, this was the first time I've heard anything about Jess Franco on an American public radio program, and it contains some audio clips from Succubus and Venus in Furs! More importantly, there are clips from the Quixote soundtrack itself, with Welles voicing both Quixote and Sancho Panza. A very interesting listen. You can also find some screen captures of some European DVD editions of Don Quixote de Orson Welles here, courtesy of the great DVD Beaver.

Playing the Audience like an Organ

One can usually find interesting sources from the online syllabi of college film instructors. From a cinema history course taught by David Clearwater from the University of Lethbridge in Canada we find several audience reaction shots from a screening of Psycho during its original release in 1960. Read their faces from 45 years back in time. Their tension is palpable. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. "It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. "

Slouching out of oblivion

Slouching out of oblivion. No, Bitter Cinema is not on permanent hiatus. Yes, I've been slacking. And yes, I've been watching and thinking about movies, and I've found a fresh new impetus to write about them again. And no, I didn't see the Golden Globes.

Speaking of fresh, courtesy of Bedazzled!, a cool and nifty audio and video blog I stumbled upon the past couple of days, a hoary little Scopitone of a strange 1968 French number by De Giafferi entitled Sado-Maso. Monsieur De Giafferi appears and sounds like a poor man's Gainsbourg, also recalling the cruel insouciance of Christopher Lee, particularly in late '60s international Harry Alan Towers productions. And speaking of Lee and Towers, doesn't the clip's frenzied and psychedelicized mise en scene resemble Jesus Franco's S&M Eurotrash chic of the same period? Had Franco a hand in this little endeavor?

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.