Some Came Running

Image of the day, 8/16/11

Robert Ryan, Woman on the Beach, Jean Renoir, 1947

In the absence of much original blog content (busy, busy week, filled with outside concerns), I thought I'd commend you to the excellent piece my friend Kent Jones has contributed to MUBI's Daily Notebook, tied in to New York's Film Forum's superb Ryan retrospective. In the piece, Kent notes a couple of regrettable omissions, including the above-glimpsed Renoir maudit; I myself kind of wish for the inclusion of Flying Leathernecks, not a particularly great film, I know, but fascinating for the contrast of performing styles—Ryan goes up against John Wayne in that one, and not to push any false dichotomy themes here, there is a real friction at work. In any event, there are rarities that more than make up for the omissions, including a Boetticher double feature that I'm gonna miss if I spend too much more time on this post. 

The current cinema, 3D house of boobs edition

"[T]hey look good in 3D," Heather Morris, acting in character as "Britney," says of her "boobs" in a backstage segment of Glee the 3D Concert Movie, which I awarded five out of five stars, a move I explain to what I hope will be your satisfaction in my review of the "film" for MSN Movies. She does not lie. I see that over at Movieline, Jen Yamato is Concerned that sequences such as the one pictured above are not presented in a proper context, which brings to my mind the immortal words of John McEnroe, e.g., "You CANNOT be serious." 

Anyway, also at MSN Movies, my review of 30 Minutes Or Less, which I must admit I was highly amused by, despite the moral/ethical quandaries its ripped-from-the-headlines-that-none-of-the-cast-members-ever-caught-wind-of-if-studio-publicists-are-to-be-believed (and they're not) premise. The Wired account of the incredibly fucked-up true life story is as much a, um, cautionary tale as an out and out tragedy, and the modifications the 30 Minutes screenwriters applied to that scenario certainly...well, place the stresses on comic potential, as they will. In any event, I laughed, and you may, too. 

"The Kid With The Replaceable Head," Richard Hell & The Voidoids (w/Robert Quine)

"He used to beat himself up 'til he was sick and confused/and tired and frothin' and crazy and bruised/'Til he'd be too worn out to keep being himself/now he can pick 'em at will from the heads on the shelf."

Gimme Gimme "Shock Value" Treatment

This week, in the latest edition of Nomad Editions' Wide Screen, I review Jason Zinoman's Shock Value. Here is an excerpt, which largely concerns portions of the book that met with my disapprobation:

One of the several unfortunate byproducts of the success of Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which chronicled the glories and excesses of a group of filmmakers in the “New Hollywood” of the early ‘70s, is that it created a template for any would-be popular film histories that followed. And “template” becomes just another word for “trap” in Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, in which the author, who’s clearly an enthusiast of the genre, tries to shoehorn stories of the likes of John Carpenter, George A. Romero, Brian DePalma (who also figures prominently in the Biskind book), Wes Craven, and European émigré Roman Polanski among others, into an Easy Riders-style narrative.

The book begins with an imagined / reconstructed editing room meeting between Craven and his early-‘70s partner, producer Sean Cunningham, and the two poring over graphic footage from Craven’s early-‘70s groundbreaker The Last House on the Left. Cognoscenti may find considerable comic value in the idea of Cunningham being brought to stand in for some kind of idea of artistic conscience, but this book isn’t for cognoscenti. In any event, the passage does indicate that Zinoman’s not entirely uncomfortable with the trap he’s walking into.

While Biskind’s book threaded a kill-the-father narrative throughout (starting it off with a bang with Dennis Hopper’s “We will bury you,” directed at poor little old George Cukor) Zinoman dispenses with his right off the bat, and makes a hash of it with a chapter on Hitchcock and Psycho that is so rife with perversity and misinterpretation that it may well have ardent Hitchcock scholars throwing Shock Value into the nearest roaring fireplace. 

Zinoman cites the great book Hitchcock/Truffaut, the epic-length interview between the suspense master and critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut, over and over again, and then writes, with a straight face, “At best, [Hitchcock] was a competitive type who had no interest in revealing his secrets.” Well, Hitchcock/Truffaut is a book in which Hitchcock, um, reveals his secrets — at some length. Zinoman goes on and on about how the Simon-Oakland-played psychiatrist in Psycho “ruins” the film by explaining away Norman’s madness, referring to this sequence as the film’s “last scene,” and of course it is not; Psycho’s last scene is of Norman/Mother in custody, and it’s unsettling and hardly represents a “comfortable point of view,” as Zinoman insists Psycho finally does. And it goes on: “Hitchcock also had a teasing style that handled murder and crime with a dry sense of humor.” True that, but Psycho is one of his least jokey films, so to bring up this quality in connection with that film is stacking the deck. Zinoman never misses an opportunity to quote a “modern horror” master saying something deprecating about Hitchcock, and it doesn’t take long before it seems like beside-the-point piling on. He cites Herschell Gordon Lewis protesting that he thought Psycho “cheated.” Now Lewis is a delightful fellow and a great showman and all that, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna put aside the salt lick when contemplating film criticism from the director of Monster a-Go Go, which I have actually seen and hope Zinoman has too. We learn that a teenaged George Romero was put off by Hitchcock’s “chilly demeanor” on the set of North by Northwest, and hell, even if we’ve read The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, we’re like, “Enough already, we get it.”

And just as Biskind’s book had its misunderstood-genius-who-was-screwed-over-by-the-system-not-to-mention-his-so-called-friends in director Hal Ashby, so Shock Value has Dan O’Bannon, a film-school-and-beyond collaborator with John Carpenter who, after getting thrown off the boat by the focused and, we are to believe, ruthless future Halloween director, had a strong hand in the creation of arguably the best horror/sci-fi hybrid, Alien, before getting thrown off the picture, and went on to a rather more desultory career before his death in 2009, at age 63, of complications from Crohn’s disease. Not to speak ill of the dead, but O’Bannon’s filmography doesn’t testify as compellingly as Ashby’s did, and Zinoman does O’Bannon and said filmo a disservice by omitting from discussion one of his most beloved-among-horror-hardcore-types works, the script he co-wrote with Ronald Shusset for Gary Sherman’s still-awesome 1981 Dead & Buried.

The entirety of the notice can be read by subscribing (it's cheap!) to the e-publication in question, which I also edit. Go here to learn more. 

Image of the day, 8/10/11

The hand of Françoise Dorleac, the vinyl of Thelonious Monk (music not featured), Cul-de-sac, Roman Polanski, 1966.

"Corpse" love

Almost immediately (in historical time) after Robert Benayoun's citation of "authentic sadistic cinema" (in his 1960 essay "Zaroff; or, the prosperities of vice") and a good two decades before Nick Zedd's rather less eloquent "Cinema of Transgression" manifesto, the Brazilian writer-actor-director José Mojica Marins grew his fingernails long and whipped out the character Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) for a few galvanic films in which his actors, plucked from the slums of Sao Paolo, were compelled to enact the tortures of the damned in circumstances that didn't involve green screens or squibs. "Authentic" indeed. I've ruminated on Coffin Joe in these parts before, so I won't reiterate my theses here but merely point out that one of the most galvanic of Marins' '60s films, This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (Este Noite Encarnerei No Teu Cadáver) will be screening this Thursday, August 14, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater at 9:30 p.m., with a live guitar score provided by my pal Gary Lucas, who recently worked sonic wonders with the Spanish-language version of Universal's Dracula. More info on the event here. The film's visit-to-hell sequence, the only color scene in this black-and-white film, is a particularly squirm-inducing highlight, an oozy bit of body-horror faux-psychedelia that expelled the entire aesthetic of such outfits as The Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black, from its pulsing brow. I imagine Gary's found some genuine inspiration in these images and I very much look forward to seeing and hearing. 

UPDATE: Because the film has an often prominent and pretty "far out" score of its own, composed by Herminio Gimenéz, Gary's accompaniment was even more of a high-wire act than usual, but the extra slathering of psych-rock and baroque motifs and carefully-carefree-with-that-axe sound effects the guitarist laid on over the film made it even more of a fantastic faux-nihilist trip on a pitch-black midnight ship. As usual, there was no shortage of wit to Lucas' musical commentary, but more often than not his music was a deliciously decadent directive not to beware of darkness but to surrender to it, at least for just a little while. Awesome. 

The current cinema: "Help" me somebody edition

The Help, starring, from left, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, and Viola Davis, is pretty much as problematic as you would expect, in all the ways that you would expect, but also in some ways that you wouldn't necessarily expect, either, e.g., it has almost as many "poop" "jokes" as The Change-Up. I discuss its issues, and ours, in my review for MSN Movies.

Neat idea

For longer than I'd like to disclose, I've had a very distinct idea of myself as John-Lennon-type house husband, raising a rugrat whilst the wife goes off and adds to the investment portfolio or what have you. The child in question would not be made aware of color television until he or she was at least ten; in the meantime, he or she would be schooled in the classics. "Today," I imagine myself saying to the toddler, "we'll check out Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, adapted from the novel by Georges Bernanos." I believe that my articulation of this fantasy is one of the several reasons that...well, never mind. I'm not a dad myself, surprise, but if I was one, I'd check out TCM's summer series "Essentials, Jr.," which has been airing all summer at eight on Sunday nights, unbenownst to me until now.Tonight, ambitiously enough, they're showing the 1939 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara. And one doesn't have to be a dad to appreciate the fact that funny fellow Bill Hader, a friend of this blog and a genuine cinephile, is the series host, a cool and apt gig for the multi-talented man, so I'll be tuning in to check him out, at least. The web page for the series is here; a splendid series of Sunday nights seems guaranteed for all. 

Image of the day, 8/7/11

Jane Asher in Deep End, Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970

Apes-ma

I'll admit that I got Planet of the Apes much more than I got 2001: A Space Odyssey in the year I first saw both films, which was in fact the year of their releases, that is, 1968. I have no problem admitting this because I was eight years old going on nine at the time, and of course it totally follows that what Planet of the Apes was selling was a lot easier to "get" for an eight-year-old. That said, I will tell you that I can still remember, without googling, the name of the then-15-year-old prodigy who wrote an exegesis on the Kubrick film that inspired Stanley himself to rave: "What a first-rate intelligence," that name being Margaret Stackhouse. I read about her, and her writings on the film, in that sui generis mass-market paperback The Making of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and have been nursing a major inferiority complex ever since.

Anyway, back to Apes. Yeah (SPOILER ALERT), the Statue of Liberty. That really messed our minds up but good. But even more nightmare fuel came with Beneath The Planet of the Apes,the bleakest, creepiest, most outright sad and nihilistic of the series. I'll never shake the mental picture that forms my recollection of Chuck Heston pressing down on the button that will bring nuclear ruin to our planet YET AGAIN, his actul heart seeming to beat its last as he holds it in his actual hand (the one that's not pressing on the big button) even as he does so. Fucked up, man. Weirder still is that this truly inspired and Dante-esque vision occurs in what is for all intents and purposes a completely tossed-off sequel directed by Ted Post, a guy I identified as a hack of hacks when trying to discern just what it was that distinguished Magnum Force from Dirty Harry. Just goes to prove what the surrealists said about how you never really can tell about these things. 

So of course I was hooked on the Apes saga, such as it was, but it isn't as if I didn't notice when the series shifted from a Heston/James Franciscus focus to a Roddy McDowell one. Nothing against Roddy, of course. But still. It was interesting to see how the subsequent films found themselves inadvertently balancing overt cheese with very confused ruminations on present-day "Black Power" activity. We continued to want to believe, but I dunno, Ricardo Montalban as a kindly circus chimp handler wasn't really making it for me. By the time Battle came out, this then-13-year-old just couldn't take it seriously. Wouldn't it be amusing, I thought, if the Apes films were made into an opera cycle, like that Ring thing? "This is the battle for the battle for the battle for the battle for the planet of the apes!" I sang, to the tune of the overture of Bizet's Carmen. "With Caesar as our leader/we know we cannot fail/For with Caesar as our leader/we found the Holy Grail!" I further extemporized. Why not? Since this was to be an operatic work in the Wagnerian tradition, it made sense to link it back to certain themes in that composer's work. As you can imagine, I raised a bit of an eyebrow when I saw that Simpsons episode with the Planet of the Apes musical in it. I am reasonably sure that nobody I went to Dumont High School with went on to write for The Simpsons.

Anyway...I'm not a religious man, but I always thought that a remake of the first Planet of the Apes film was kind of a lousy idea for the simple reason that it represented an irreproducible result. It's like at the end of the 1957 Looney Tune Show Biz Bugs where Daffy finally elicits applause from the vaudeville house audience by, as the saying goes, suiciding right on the stage; as his soul ascends to heaven (surely that can't be correct?) he laments to Bugs that the problem with this trick is that you can only do it once. Hence the essential uselessness of the Burton version, even though everyone is clearly putting something resembling their best foot forward. As for Beneath, I don't know that Hollywood would have the balls to even try, recollecting that the motivating factor behind the original was less balls than profit taking. But the subsequent Apes films strike me on principle as recombinant fair game. Still, I wasn't expecting much of anything from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which is one reason it's one of the most pleasant surprises of the summer. Another reason is because it's kind of awesome. I wasn't able to discuss it in these terms in my review of the film for MSN Movies, but as you are know doubt aware, I've seen a fair amount of films, and one side effect of that is I don't get a whole lot of "holy shit!" moments in a theater anymore. And by "'holy shit!' moments" I mean parts where I'm watching the film and something happens and I go back in my seat and I say, "Holy shit!" Hopefully not too loud because I don't like to disturb my fellow moviegoers. Anyway, I recall counting at least four "Holy shit!" moments watching this. That's one for every $2.50 or so of your moviegoing dollars. Not bad.