Some Came Running

Failla on Film

I was looking through my electronic correspondence with my friend Joseph Failla (see below) and wanted to share some of it here. The first entry is a response to a request; I asked him, after the death of horror maven Forrest J. Ackerman, to contribute something for this blog's own tribute to the man. The last piece of correspondence is following the death of Christopher Lee, and is, like all the other bits of writing, self-explanatory. 

December 7, 2008

G,

There's never been any question that fantasy and horror films were the birth of my movie obsessions. But Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine was the lightning rod that brought it all home for me in a way that was attractive (colorful cover artwork), informative (how great to discover who Lon Chaney Sr. was!) and addictive (every issue packed with plenty of b&w photos, both from the films and behind the scenes). It was definitely aimed at kids but that was its genius and lasting gift. I'm still amazed I knew who Todd Browning was before I learned about Orson Welles. For a kid to long to see the lost silent LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, at a time when all he had access to was afternoon television is pretty unheard of.  

I saw my first still from a Fritz Lang film in the pages of FM, it was a shot of the dragon from SIEGFRIED and it looked as realistic as I could imagine, I immediately tried to figure out how they made it work. And I can't tell you how I felt seeing the surviving remnants of KING KONG's spider pit sequence, or the only recognizable pics of James Arness in full THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD regalia, let alone all those Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen original art sketches before I understood the animation process. I vividly remember the concept drawings for an unmade O'Brien project KING KONG VS. PROMETHEUS, which I still regret never saw the light of day in the form presented. 

One of my favorite articles was a piece on the 50 worst horror movies ever made called "Dante's Inferno", written by a teenage Joe Dante. This is where I first read about PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, I don't remember it's ranking but he said Tor Johnson rising from the grave was the best thing about it. Not a bad job of reporting, because when I caught up with PLAN 9 so many years later, this bit of early film criticism ran through my mind during that very scene. 

Although I never made it to LA to tour the famed Ackermansion, I did get to meet the great man himself at a local collector's convention. As this would be my one opportunity to explain how important his magazine and devotion to fantastic films had been to me, I felt a little inhibited. Once we began talking however, I could tell any apprehension I had wasn't necessary, he was gracious and every bit the old friend FM lead me to believe. At the time, I was contributing to a mystery and nostalgia film magazine which FJA was also associated with. I pointed out how proud I was that both our names appeared regularly under the same letterhead. It certainly was something I never thought possible while I was reading FM during those days when we first learned about the films, stars and legends that would occupy so much of our time and influence us throughout our lives. 

For a good look at FJA's legacy, I recommend Criterion's EQUINOX special edition DVD, a low budget special effects wonder, with a video introduction by Forry. THE SCI-FI BOYS, an affectionate reflection on classic sci-fi with much input from FJA, Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, Roger Corman, John Landis, Rick Baker, Dennis Muren, Peter Jackson and others. RAY HARRYHAUSEN: THE EARLY YEARS COLLECTION shows exclusive footage of FJA with friends Harryhausen and Bradbury reminiscing fondly over their lives spent pursuing their dreams through a common love of all things sci-fi and fantastic.

Joe

April 6, 2009

G,

I'm actually glad to hear ADVENTURELAND is not your usual coming of age comedy and offers quite a bit more. John Hughes by way of Truffaut? Not an easy match but I'll take a look. I'm writing you about this because the ADVENTURELAND trailer I saw looked like anything else except what you describe in your review. It appeared to be just one more in an endless line of goofy teen comedies which I long ago outgrew (or was I ever into goofy teen comedies?). Even the theater goers sitting near me seemed to be put off by remarking how glad they'll be to skip this one.

But that was a mistake I made with DAZED AND CONFUSED when the trailer I saw perfectly sold it as an unfunny stoner comedy. I didn't catch up with DAZED until years later and realized how misled I could be. Sure, as a teen this was not my group of friends and I didn't grow up in Texas, but in a way I felt I knew many of the characters depicted in that film regardless. As a result, DAZED is now a favorite trip back in time for me and I still regret not catching it when I first could. I just find it fascinating that a trailer can sometimes work in reverse and hide the special film it is by taking the hard sell approach. 

Btw, speaking of comedies, I watched RACHEL GETTING MARRIED this weekend and while some of it was very funny, the performances were natural and the atmosphere inviting, I found Demme's insistence to manufacture an "independent" film to be very distracting. Hasn't that fly on the wall approach become tiring to anyone else but me at this point? I would have much preferred a less "observant" point of view than the one chosen as traditional techniques would have tended to call less attention to themselves. Still the film has its moments but I wish it were more of the return to Demme's roots in the '70s and '80s that I heard it was. Why doesn’t someone just release HANDLE WITH CARE so I can complete my early Demme collection? 

Joe

February 4, 2010

G.
Friedkin's TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. was almost completely ignored at the time of its release, but as you'll remember, I couldn't stop talking about it and saw it several times theatrically. What most people hated, was not it's cold blooded-ness per se (there never has been any shortage of tough cop flicks), but the combination of excessive brutality and cynicism was simply too unappetizing for mass audiences to embrace.

Advertised as a big screen MIAMI VICE action pic, L.A. manages to shake that false impression fairly quickly. Not long after the film begins, anyone expecting trendy television fare, will find themselves extremely shaken. If anything the psychotic counterfeiter (Dafoe) has more scruples than the clearly unbalanced agent (Petersen) on his tail. But it's the unexpected twist the story takes at the end that really separates L.A. from anything found on television or at the cineplex. Most folks I encountered felt confused, even cheated, but having seen CRUISING a few years prior, I was well prepared for L.A.'s transfer of personality finale.

Although coming smack in the middle of the '80s, L.A. seems to simultaneously harken back to the gritty '70s cop film Friedkin helped define years before ("The director of THE FRENCH CONNECTION is on the streets again!" was its tag line), while prophetically introducing us to the notion of Middle East suicide bombers, even before the film officially begins.

Is it true Scorsese was so captivated by Dafoe's performance portraying pure evil, that he felt compelled to cast him as a complicated Christ in LAST TEMPTATION?

Quick, what is the connection between TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. and TOUCH OF EVIL? Why it's Val De Vargas of course, the creepy judge who Petersen threatens, is the same actor who plays Pancho, the Mexican street hood in leather jacket, who menaces Janet Leigh in EVIL. I didn't realize it for years, but I always knew there was something eerily familiar about the judge's voice. Maybe because it's post synched, it stood out all the more.

The most amazing thing about the film on disc, is the extra offered as the deleted ending. It's pretty incredible that such a thing was conceived, let alone actually shot. It's a great glimpse into what compromises sometimes have to be taken to satisfy everyone who has a say. You can plainly see how it's inclusion would have voided everything that came before.

Joe

June 29, 2010

G,

I don't know if this helps or hurts your stand on Reed but did you ever see FLAP (1970), his next to last film? Most folks probably never heard of it (and I've only watched it once many years ago), but this unfunny, totally unenjoyable tragicomedy about the plight of modern day, Native Americans was Reed's curious follow-up to his Oscar winning OLIVER!

Although FLAP did receive a good review in the NY Times, saying star Anthony Quinn was once again given a role worthy of his talents, all I can recall is Quinn spending most of the film ranting in a drunken stupor (see some of the pics). Much of his antics are played for laughs, but the finale (in true '70s fashion) was as depressing as they come.

Whatever your feelings for OLIVER!, it's still quite an achievement turning the despairing, Dickensian material into such a lively musical without embarrassing itself. The Bill Sykes caper and chase in the second half is reminiscent of Reed's hunted man thrillers and is at least as exciting. So how does this explain the dreariness of FLAP? I don't know the circumstances that lead Reed to want to make it but having just won an Oscar (over Kubrick for 2001), he certainly would have his choice of projects and must have found something compelling here. 

Joe

January 26, 2011

G,
I'm actually glad to hear you enjoyed THE MECHANIC remake because the original was just the type of violent action pic that I used to enjoy Sat afternoons during the early days of our '70s movie going education. I got a big kick out of the Bronson/Winner version precisely because it was so amoral and straight forward in presenting its hero as a cultured cold blooded type who took his unusual line of work extremely seriously. The film's first murder I remember as being particularly ingenious and "executed" in a very pragmatic style. The payoff to which (a fiery inferno sparked by the killer's well aimed, high power rifle shot) was a terrific conclusion to one of Winner's few truly suspenseful sequences.

But in order for this kind of thing to really work, it's all in the casting and I wonder how Statham with his nonstop energy will compare to Bronson's steely, silent, unbreakable menace. A good part of the film's appeal for me came from seeing the normally unvarnished Bronson, strutting about in expensive bathrobes, tailored suits and luxury living quarters. I seem to remember Bronson also being a well-read professional that stood in direct comparison with the many blue collar tough guys he was usually cast as. Now say what you want about Winner's blunt directorial approach to the material, but there was something about the way '72 MECHANIC slowly lumbers from one murderous set piece to the next that coincided with Bronson's own brand of minimalist emoting which works completely in its favor.

I'm also assuming (or shouldn't I?) that the original's potent twist ending will be conveniently avoided in order to provide a possible follow up if necessary? It was the first film's final chilling closing moments that perfectly punctuated all the unconscionable mayhem that proceeded it, and in a sense made the character's lethal cunningness, easier to accept in its abrupt sense of justice.

Let's see if they have the nerve to remake THE STONE KILLER next? Just kidding.

Joe

January 3, 2012

G,

It took a while but when I caught up with DON'T MAKE WAVES, I wasn't disappointed in the least. While I have a liking for some of the sillier beach movies, WAVES as directed by Mackendrick seemed to have more on its mind, basically skewering many American values of excess. This would make a good double feature with the incredibly acidic THE LOVED ONE, also helmed by an English director taking an even angrier aim at the same subject (in fact both films feature a sequence with valuable beach front property precariously teetering on the edge of destruction). 

I realize to call DON'T MAKE WAVES, the LA DOLCE VITA of beach films is a stretch, although these pics from both movies are interesting to look at side by side. I may not have picked up on the white suits, but I find Tony Curtis makes for a decent Marcello Mastroianni, American style (just think of press agent, Sidney Falco in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS as a more smarmy counterpart to Mastroianni’s famous paparazzi, Marcello Rubini from VITA). While the inclusion of Claudia Cardinale reminds me of the presence of a European's eye view of the sweet life in '60s southern California. You may not feel both films should be mentioned in the same conversation but is there not a similar glint in Curtis' eye for Cardinale that Mastroianni has for Ekberg?

Btw, could WAVES have been where Curtis first met up with Roman Polanski thru co-star Sharon Tate and later be cast for a voice cameo in ROSEMARY'S BABY?

Joe

March 1, 2012

G,

By now I'm sure you know of the passing of Davy Jones but were you also aware Lina Romay succumbed last week to cancer at the far too young age of 57? A very odd week of celebrity passings indeed, having read about Erland Josephson on your blog last Sunday, I looked at CRIES AND WHISPERS to do a little reflecting. But who knew I'd have to do the same this weekend with HEAD for Jones and FEMALE VAMPIRE for Romay?

In fact the untimely passing of Davy Jones comes when I was getting acquainted with the Monkees television show all over again. What surprised me about revisiting the series was not how consistently funny the first season is but how drastically experimental (which ultimately doomed the show) the second season really was. Probably due to the boys insisting on more input themselves, the second season episodes are alternately daring, free form and even a bit irritating at times. But they are an eyeful and certainly point the way to HEAD, which seemed to have found the perfect mixture of Monkee humor while commenting on the times and their own prepackaged image. I don't know how well the show has aged with you but I can't recall you disagreeing with me it was anything but fun in the day. 

Joe

 

August 22, 2012

G,

For a better idea of how Tashlin might have tackled SEVEN YEAR ITCH, why not take another look at SUSAN SLEPT HERE? Made a year before ITCH, SUSAN also incorporates the idea of an older man (Dick Powell) sharing his apartment with (in this case) a sexy teen (Debbie Reynolds), causing him endless frustration and turning his life upside down during her overnight stay. Although he's not married, he does have a sultry Anne Francis as his interfering girlfriend, adding even more pressure to his plight, rather than a non-present wife away on summer vacation as in Wilder's movie. 

I'm not unhappy with the way Wilder handled ITCH, although it may be a film that's better remembered than how it actually plays and the censors would have come down hard on anyone trying to make a film version of the original show. What I do like about it is how it clearly details what was really on most folk's minds regarding sex in the oppressive 50's. Everything seems to simmer in the summer heat, from the fans in motion, to the underwear placed in open ice boxes, until it spills over with Marilyn's more than suggestive bubble bath scene and the ever famous shot of her white dress billowing over the subway grating. 

Incidentally, I did manage to see Walter Matthau’s screen test for ITCH years ago on a television program promoting the film. As I remember, he was much more lively than Ewell, not sad or downhearted at all, if anything, he's overly giddy and self-satisfied. Running up and down a staircase while managing a fair balancing act with a tray of items he's bringing to the girl waiting for him upstairs. He also worked that crick in his neck bit quite a lot, never missing a chance to bring attention to it. That said, this is one of those rare instances where Matthau can actually appear youthful in comparison to Ewell's droopy, wannabe rebel. 

 

September 30, 2012

G,

This might amuse you, upon reading of Herbert Lom's passing the other day, I immediately had this flashback to the two of us at the Oritani theater in Hackensack 1972. While waiting for a double feature of TALES FROM THE CRYPT and THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD to begin, the trailer for the next week's attraction, MARK OF THE DEVIL turned up. As I recall it was a fairly no holds barred advertisement (this was widely publicized as rated V for Violence) complete with uncensored shots of sadism and bloodletting which the theater management apparently had no problem running for an afternoon audience of kids. Amid the mayhem of torture by rack, branding, stabbing, a beheading and burnings, a familiar face appeared on screen, that of Herbert Lom in full Witchfinder General mode. 

At which point I exclaimed to you, "That's the guy!" 

You responded, "What guy?"

Me: "The guy from the Pink Panther!"

You: "That's not Peter Sellers!"

Me: "Not THAT guy! The OTHER Pink Panther guy!"

Talk about "Who's On First?"

Seriously, as popular as his Inspector Dreyfus was, my favorite Lom character was Kristo the London racketeer in NIGHT AND THE CITY, who ruthlessly ran the wrestling promotions that Richard Widmark's small timer Harry Fabian tried to muscle in on. Lom is thoroughly sinister here (even more so than usual), you just know Widmark will suffer dearly for his ambitions. When Lom says after the death of his father whom Harry was inadvertently responsible for, "Bring me Fabian!" he can still raise the same harrowing chill within me (despite so many viewings) till this day. 

I also remember him fondly as the psychiatrist who tries to help Ann Todd in THE SEVENTH VEIL, the most dangerous member of THE LADYKILLERS, the pirate who betrays SPARTACUS,  the villainous Moor from EL CID, Captain Nemo in MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, a very sympathetic PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the Clouseau -hating Dreyfus (from A SHOT IN THE DARK in particular), a Van Helsing for Jess Franco in his version of COUNT DRACULA, a clever and suave Russian spy in HOPSCOTCH, the kindly doctor who tells Christopher Walken how he'd deal with Hitler in THE DEAD ZONE and even a buffoonish German officer in the '80's KING SOLOMON'S MINES remake. But can either of us ever forget the deadly, tiny mechanical dolls made in his likeness for ASYLUM?

By chance TCM was running one of Lom's earliest films, THE DARK TOWER last week when I heard that unmistakable voice of his. As I turned my attention to the movie, there he was looking as young as I've ever seen him, he was thin, trim and quite dapper but already a commanding presence at the start of a very long career. 

Joe

Joe's companion at the Tales from the Crypt/House That Dripped Blood double feature at Hackensack's Oritani Theater in 1972. 

April 3, 2014

G,

With all the distractions you have with assignments and deadlines, you may have missed that today is the 45th anniversary of the opening of the roadshow engagement of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY at the now long gone Capitol Theatre in New York City. Beginning on April 3rd, 1968 (although the film had its world premiere the evening before in Washington D.C.) 2001 ran for a total of 24 weeks in Cinerama with reserved seating arrangements. 

It may interest you to know the theatre was located at 1645 Broadway, which should sound familiar, as it's been replaced by the Paramount Plaza, the local home of Premiere Magazine (not to mention the offices of Jerry Langford in THE KING OF COMEDY). 

I've included a few photos which should help us appreciate what the experience might have been like seeing 2001 in that wonderful setting. Note in the newspaper clipping, while 2001 was enjoying its run at the Capitol, BELLE DE JOUR could have been seen at the Little Carnegie theatre just several blocks away. 

Joe

July 22, 2014

G,

Back in its day, this James Garner western double feature laserdisc provided me a lot of welcome entertainment, both DUEL AT DIABLO and HOUR OF THE GUN are solid, adult themed genre examples that deserve to be better known than they are. However neither showcase the usually genial Garner we're most familiar with, but a much more somber and angry fellow which broadens my appreciation for the actor who too infrequently got these kinds of opportunities. Make no mistake, we're not in SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF territory here, as directed by Ralph Nelson and John Sturges respectively, these films introduce us to a Garner more in line with James Stewart's conflicted, complicated, Anthony Mann heroes. 

In DUEL AT DIABLO (1966), Garner is out to avenge the murder of his wife by tracking those responsible and signs on to escort cavalry soldiers through hostile Indian territory in his quest. The action is violent and realistic, Dennis Weaver is particularly intolerant and twitchy, while Garner convinces as a man caught in the grip of vengeance. In that sense this does prefigure Nelson's much more brutal SOLDIER BLUE, which was still several years off, but was not as successful as he is here thematically. DIABLO is also a progressive film for its time in presenting a very dapper Sidney Poitier (complete with designer vest) navigating a racially charged western landscape, and casts Bibi Anderson as a woman held captive by Apaches, now an object of scorn by local townsfolk and her own husband (whoever thought we'd see Bibi opposite Garner in a western no less?). 

Revenge is taken to obsessive lengths in HOUR OF THE GUN (1967), with Garner as a doggedly determined Wyatt Earp hunting down the surviving Clantons in the aftermath of the O.K Corral gunfight. HOUR serves as more of an update than a sequel to Sturges own GUNFIGHT AT O.K. CORRAL from a decade earlier as attitudes during the '60s towards violence and retribution in films reached new heights. Along with Jason Robards as a very cynical Doc Holiday, he and Garner make for the screen's most underrated pairing of the two western legends, Garner distinctly impresses with a cruel edge not fully explored before. He brings to justice those he feels have wronged him by systematically eliminating them in a series of showdowns staged with such cold blooded bitterness, he chances alienating himself from the audience. So much so, I can somewhat understand the plight the ornery Clantons find themselves in, I mean did you ever think you'd sympathize with a villainous Robert Ryan? 

Building on these, Garner made a number of films which continued to present him in a light far less appealing than you'd suspect, MARLOWE (1969) a late '60s telling of the Philip Marlowe story "The Little Sister" with Garner, an oddly, folksy choice as the famous private eye. It's not totally on target, but the L.A. depicted is bright, sunny, sweltering and seedy, it's a setting Garner navigates with an unexpected naturalism (the bit with Bruce Lee is a gem) and the finale is a tense one. SKIN GAME (1971) is a western comedy of sorts in which Garner sells a slave (Lou Gossett) to various owners only to con them and meet up again afterwards to split the money. This set up immediately recalls the dubious bond between Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. It begins humorously enough as we know Garner and Gossett are working together but before long, things turn much more serious. Why this film wasn't discussed in the wake of DJANGO UNCHAINED still surprises me. In THEY ONLY KILL THEIR MASTERS (1972), Garner is the police chief of a small costal California town trying to solve a recent murder with the main suspect being a dangerous Doberman pinscher. At the time this was an exceptionally well-reviewed film which has seemed to drop off most everyone's radar but it plays today as a decent mystery, low key thriller and character piece with Garner acquitting himself nicely in a moderately irritating role that makes him less likable than those he's investigating. 

The flip side of all this for me was 2000's SPACE COWBOYS, a film I continue to enjoy despite its more farfetched and silly moments, mainly because it teamed Garner with Eastwood and the results couldn't have been more pleasing. The scene where they meet after years apart and Eastwood discovers Garner has become a preacher is a delight as we notice Clint suppress his surprise and smile in response, giving the sense of the two old friends they really were. In a way this was my own reaction to seeing Garner in a theatrical film after far too long, my only regret is they hadn't costarred before in a more traditional cowboy film (their MAVERICK episode not withstanding). But it was a thoughtful reminder of just how much I admired Garner and was grateful for the chance to have him on screen once again.  

June 13. 2015

G,

Believe it or not, it was my mother who first introduced me to the world of Christopher Lee when she bought me the Famous Films issue #2, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN / HORROR OF DRACULA magazine, which featured both Hammer classics in pictorial form. Except for the cover art, all the pics used were in black and white, it did however get across the unique tone of the films, already having a background in Karloff and Lugosi, I knew (so to speak), I wasn't in Kansas anymore. It thrilled me to read a film in comic book form, in a sense becoming my first keepsake of an actual movie, if only my mom could imagine the door she was opening for me!

But more to the point, she brought me into the orbit of Christopher Lee who would have such a presence outside the confines of horror and fantasy so that when the time came for me to widen my view to other genres, Lee was still there in full force. Although, I was never quite able to separate him from the humble Hammer productions where I first learned of him, he remained a recognizable, charismatic and enduring connection to my own youth as my movie appreciation and understanding continued to grow.

To explain the longevity of my relationship with Lee and his films, the first time I saw Lee onscreen in a theatre was in DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS in 1964. The first time I saw HORROR OF DRACULA, it was on Super 8 black and white film, projected on a sheet in a friend's garage, even though it was only snippets of the film's highlights, it was extremely exciting to experience in any form regardless. It would be another 30 years before I could see a 35mm print with slightly faded color, projected properly in a legitimate theater.

While HORROR OF DRACULA cannot be beat for shocks, tautness and the teaming of Lee with Peter Cushing, I may actually prefer DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE as my favorite Lee Dracula film since it's the most religious of the series, making the struggle between good and evil even more profound.

Lee was the best of all possible Fu Manchus in some of the oddest films made about the character. 

He was a great Bond villain in one of the weakest Bond films, said Lee about playing a Bond villain, his only regret was "you can only do it once". 

A favorite Lee performance was in a rare turn as the hero battling sin and depravity in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, making it a wonderful flip side double feature with HORROR HOTEL, with Lee as his own devil worshipping "opposite number”.

His expert swordsmanship was on full display in Lester's THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS. It was here he seemed to inherit the same fate of Basil Rathbone, who also could slice up any of his fellow performers but was not allowed to win any of his screen sword scuffles as we could not ask for a more effective villain.

One of the great strengths of Jackson's Rings Trilogy of films is the casting, even down to the smallest of roles. But no actor was made better use of in this series than Lee himself. He was a most believable practitioner of the black arts, having demonstrated an affinity for such mischief in a host of prior films setting the foundation for an evil film persona in stone.

Perhaps now his involvement in the STAR WARS prequels will garner a little more respect for the much disliked recent series of chapters. I for one couldn't have been happier to see Lee join the ranks of STAR WARS in any capacity but his Count Dooku, while recalling his gothic villainy, complete with cape and castle bring more of a sense of symmetry and coming full circle with the original trilogy than any other element I could imagine. Although belated, Lee would now join his former screen partner Peter Cushing once again as a participating co-star, at least in spirit. 

So yes, this one really hurts.

Joe

I Remember Joseph Failla

In 1973. 

[I learned yesterday that Joseph Failla, who I’ve mentioned on this blog and who contributed to Premiere’s Home Guide when I was running it in the 1990s and 2000s, died in hospital after experiencing shortness of breath. Like me, he was 62.)

I remember in seeing Night of the Living Dead with Joseph Failla on the night before Halloween, known in our town of Dumont as “Cabbage Night.” I remember Joseph’s father picking us up and driving us back home. I remember some moron kid actually trying to apply shaving cream to one of the car’s windows while it was actually moving. I remember that Joseph’s father, who was not by any yardstick a “devil may care” person, being very irritated at having to come and chauffeur us home from the movie, which had upset us into witless silence. I remember him saying “nonsense.” I remember this being maybe 1969.

I remember seeing Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Cowboys, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, several Godzilla movies, and a million more pictures, at the Palace Theater in Bergenfield with Joseph.

I remember Joseph drawing and writing a "Peanuts" parody called "Charlie Blech." 

I remember walking with Joseph and with Mark and Aaron L. all the way from Dumont to the Stanley Warner Theater in Paramus, over roads with no sidewalks, risking death, just so we could see Dirty Harry in the spring of 1972.

I remember Joseph and I discussing our highly unrealized film projects. The anti-Vietnam film  eroM oN (read it backwards), told from the POV of a dead soldier, in reverse. Johnny Angel, based on the Shelley Fabares song, the story of the loves of a girl biker. The Ballad of somebody or other, a Peckinpah-inspired Western.

I remember getting off the phone with Joseph after we had a long and rambling conversation during which Joseph insisted that Fellini was preparing an adaptation of the comic strip Beetle Bailey. I remember after I cradled the handset my puzzled mother asked “Don’t you two ever talk about anything real?”

I remember Joseph and I creating a book together, called Canadian Alligators and Otter Things. It was a group of illustrated comical stories about a quarter of alligators who were members of the Royal Canadian Mounties. I remember many years later an uncle of mine asking why we had never done anything with the book, because we had apparently created what could have been the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of its day. I remember saying to my uncle, “Well, we were ten.”  

I remember in eighth grade, during gym class, sitting on a bench with Joseph, as we invariably did, because after a long period of being picked last for baseball or dodgeball or what have you teams, the gym teacher decided to leave well enough alone and just exclude us from play. I remember telling Joseph that I had been invited to a party that evening (a rather extraordinary occurrence) but that I wanted to get home in time to catch Psycho on the 11 p.m. movie on some local station. I remember our gym teacher, Coach M., whose life claim to fame had been being on the 1964 Mets frm team, overhearing me and smirkingly saying, “What is it, Kenny, an all-boy party?” I remember Joseph and I then clamming up.

(I remember many years later Joseph telling me that Coach M. had died of a heart attack. “Oh well,” I said.)

I remember taking a bus home from a movie in Paramus with Joseph and telling him about a small piece I’d read in Time magazine stating that in California, a TV ad for condoms was run during a late-night slot. I remember we concocted a storyboard for a condom commercial then and there, and that later on Joseph, who was getting more and more uncomfortable writing expository prose, then making a comic strip out of the fake ad for health class. I remember many years later the both of us being flummoxed by actual condom commercials featuring “Trojan Man.”

I remember that Joseph somehow got to see Mean Streets before I did. I remember him calling me and describing its opening scene, the “home movies” and the Ronettes song “Be My Baby.” I remember him saying, “This is for me.” I remember we both had to have been 14.

I remember in his senior year in high school Joseph writing and drawing, for a class project, an elaborate comic based on Dante’s Inferno, with the nine circles of hell represented by eight class periods and then the prom. I remember that he drew me as the Virgil character.

I remember Joseph telling me about one of his instructors at the School of Visual Arts, Art Spiegelman, and of his initially appalled reaction to Spiegelman’s comic about his mother’s suicide, “Prisoner on Hell Planet.”

I remember standing on line with Joseph and with My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ at Cinema Village for a double feature of The Shining and The Killing. I remember a couple of fellows standing behind us going on about Clint Eastwood’s directorial career, talking about how with Play Misty for Me Eastwood hadn’t yet found his “water level.” I remember Joseph squinting at me and saying, in an Eastwood rasp, “What do you know about my work, punk?”

I remember being mildly irritated with Joseph for not having submitted any work for an SVA comic magazine that published student art, and which contained a ton of work by his fellow student Drew Friedman.

I remember Joseph admiring Friedman’s talent but being very disapproving of Drew’s classroom behavior, especially with respect to the instructor Harvey Kurtzman.

I remember an animated character Joseph concocted while at SVA, “The Slug,” which was, indeed, an anthropomorphic slug who smoked a cigar and made wisecracks.

I remember Joe’s graphic novella, “Ed Victory,” about a paunchy, washed-up former superhero living in a North Bergen tenement.

I remember when Joseph was a co-manager of the Stanley Theater in Jersey City, and how he once proposed to put up on the marquee: COMING FOR XMAS: TAXI ZUM KLO.

I remember Joseph working at a video store in Teaneck where one of his regular customers was the jazz guitarist George Benson, who once made a special order for Raymond Chow’s Lady Kung Fu.

I remember Joseph telling a group of friends at lunch that another customer came in requesting Henry V: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

I remember when Joseph became the manager of the laser disc section at Route 17’s Tower Video, where he quickly acquired the nickname “Laser Joe.” I remember his clientele included Ernest Dickerson and Gordon Willis, and that he became friendly with them both. He also had a couple of New York Yankees as customers.

I remember having Joseph over at the very messy studio apartment of a Manhattan girlfriend for some reason, and of him saying upon entering, “It looks like Catherine Deneuve’s place in Repulsion.”

I remember also having an intimacy mishap with that girlfriend, in which I bonked her nose with my forehead, which caused her considerable pain and swelling. I remember her being very angry with me over the course of several days and at one point saying “I’d like to grind your bones into dust.” I remember relating all this to Joseph, in great earnest. I remember Joseph then paraphrasing a Raging Bull line: “She ain’t pretty no more.”

I remember the funeral for my cousin Mark, who died of lymphoma in 2002. I remember my father showing up for the wake, which I had not expected, as he had been self-estranged from this side of the family since the early 1980s. I remember he spoke to me with a seriousness that was unfamiliar to me and that he said, “I can’t imagine anything worse than for a parent to lose a child.” I remember my father perking up when Joseph appeared. I remember my father asking him “So do you still get to spend time with Herman here,” using a nickname for me that he concocted after I had a sudden growth spurt at age twelve, a nickname my dad knew that Joseph would be the only person in the room to get. I remember Joe giving my dad an affectionate half-smirk and saying “We manage.”

I remember several years after the Route 17 Tower Video closed, its building was repurposed to be the gym in Burn After Reading. I remember Joseph telling me of seeing hand-painted signs with an arrow and the word “BAR” painted on them, on the north side of the highway.

I remember in one of our last phone conversations telling Joseph that I must be getting soft in my old age, because I didn’t think No Time To Die was so bad. “For me the Bond franchise ended with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” he said, and I could hear the shrug. I remember responding, “Man, you are hardcore.”

I remember learning recently that my cousin, Tommy Gentile, who had been so helpful with my mother’s funeral and who helped Joseph a great deal when his own mother died about a year after mine, had himself died in May of 2021, and that for whatever reason our side of the family had been kept out of the information loop on this one. I remember that I had intended to call Joseph and to say to him, “So if any of you are thinking of DYING, you should know that there’s a small change of management at Gentile Funeral Home.”

In 2020. 

Readings of 2021

The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson (Recommended by a friend. Enjoyed it quite a bit, as Churchill worship goes; I think Larson's writing here is a substantial improvement on The Devil in the White City, which I found clunky in parts.)

The Nolan Variations, Tom Shone (A good way to look at Nolan, I think. I'm in it, too.)

A Fairly Honorable Defeat, Iris Murdoch (There's a lot of Murdoch to be read and last year I read a bunch. This is a pretty nifty vinegary allegory of sorts.)

Mike Nichols: A Life, Mark Harris (Aside from its inherent value, which is more than substantial, it gives writers like myself something to aim for.) 

The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright (I knew a lot of this already but this is a better than decent aggregation so to speak.)

True Believer, Abraham Reisman (See above; also Abe's enthusiasm for the Golden Age of Marvel relative to his disappointment in Lee makes for engaging reading.) 

Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley (Oh those wandering modernists. Great.) 

The Recognitions, William Gaddis (Finally did it! And dug it!)

Last Call, Elon Green (A true crime account with a real purpose.)

Beeswing, Richard Thompson (Fascinating, spectacular)

The Quiet Americans, Scott Thompson (The origins of the CIA in four ironical portraits; recommended to Charles McCarry fans for sure.) 

Dark Passage, David Goodis (Goodis, as you like him.) 

V., Thomas Pynchon (A second reading; the first was when I was about 13. Definitely got a touch of the magic I felt then. "Keep cool but care" is a stressed-out character's observation, not the book's, or Pynchon's, life motto. Jesus.) 

Moscow to the End of the Line, Venedikt Erofeev (Drunken Soviet monologue, exhausting for such a short book.) 

The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy (I could never get into Hardy's prose when I was a collegiate reader, but loved his poetry. [Still do.] This hit me hard, so I'll be getting to his other novels.)

Letting Go, Philip Roth (A sweeping, curious, genuinely tortured book.)

Castle in the Air, Donald E. Westlake (Mid Westlake, which is still pretty damn good.)

Rhythm is our Business: Jimmy Lunceford and the Harlem Express, Eddy Determeyer (An informative but dry account of the amazing bandleader.)

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, Edward White (A wholly admirable and readable attempt to come to grips with Hitchcock's character defects while insisting on the pertinence and ultimate humanity of his art)

My Life As A Man, Roth (Whatever you think of the guy, you have to admit he got put through the wringer. I mean, maybe you don't, but I do.)

Enter the Aardvark, Jessica Anthony (A very entertaining and purposefully eccentric political fable.) 

The Conjure Man Dies, Rudolph Fisher (It's terrible that Fisher died in 1934, only two years after publishing his first detective novel. Had he lived to keep at it, I think he'd have written mysteries that improved on this fascinating but not entirely satisfactory Harlem mystery.)  

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (Believe the hype.) 

Ending Up, Kingsley Amis (Old people quarreling and falling about. Figured I'd read it now, before it got too on the nose.) 

The Black Prince, Murdoch (Good loony philosophical fun.) 

Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, edited by Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton (A dizzying compendium of Smith unpacking, packed with promo artwork and scribblings)

Later, Stephen King (The Hard Case Stephen King has kinda become a genre unto itself. I dig it.)

Nuns and Soldiers, Murdoch (Possibly the most solidly constructed of the Murdochs I read this year.) 

No Beethoven, Peter Erskine (Wow, this dude is the father of one of the co-creators of Pen15! Anyway. Protean drummer tells cool anecdotes.) 

Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky (My first go-round with this. Hot stuff.) 

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino (Good loony not particularly philosophical fun. And a revealing peek into the psychopathology of its author to be sure.)

The Wall, Mary Roberts Rinehart (A bit creaky but enjoyable. A mystery, in case you don't recognize the name of the author.) 

Inside Out, Walter Bernstein (Believe the hype.)

Frankly We Did Win This Election, Michael Bender (Aiiiieeeee)

Letters, John Barth (I'd wanted to read this for forever but hadn't completed all the prior Barth works which provide this opus with its dramatis personae...until I did. This was fun, and instructive, mainly in demonstrating that the author can kind of do anything he damn well pleases after all. It is not entirely an exercise in dickering trivial postmodernism, either. )

The Hook, Westlake (A masterpiece, chilly as hell. ) 

The Plague Court Murders, John Dickson Carr (As expected)

Always Crashing in the Same Car, Matthew Specktor (This one slammed me with the force of discovery. Two discoveries, really: that of a kindred spirit, L.A. division [although Specktor's a way better writer than myself I think] and of a truly new form derived from two well-worn ones, the cultural history and the memoir. Cowley's book falls into that dual category too, but Specktor does something with it that's...well just read it.)

The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch (A couple of philosophical essays. Heartening, sort of.)

Get Real, Westlake (More, Mid Westlake, fun times)  

I’d Rather Be The Devil, Stephen Calt (Or, How Getting To Know Skip James Messed My Mind Up. Eye-opening, disheartening, and while Calt certainly turns over a genuine rock, so to speak, he's also priggish and snobbish in a really jolting way.) 

Dune, Frank Herbert (Research.) 

Seven Types of Atheism, John Gray (A cogent and actually entertaining survey of disbelief.) 

Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment, James R. Gaines (Gaines' decision to tell their lives in parallel, while great for marketing I guess, resulted in some brow-furrowing for this reader. Otherwise aces.)

Flaubert and Madame Bovary, Francis Steegmuller (A little dry and a probably more than a little unfair to Louise Colet but still something.) 

The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch ( I wished so passionately to defenestrate its narrator that the whole thing temporarily stalled my Murdoch journey.)

Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen (A true pleasure to read and not nearly so Updike-like as its synopses might lead you to believe.) 

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (Finally, and fine.)

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Nation, Jeff Chang (Again, a lot of stuff I've already learned, put together with passion and purpose.) 

The American Gun Mystery, Ellery Queen (A little too far-fetched.) 

State of Terror, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny (Aiiieeeee.)

Fog of Doubt, Christianna Brand (Surprisingly racy London mystery.)

Your Turn Mr Moto, John P. Marquand (Gak.)

In The Woods, Tana French (Highly satisfactory.)

Spirits of the Dead, Tim Lucas (Great stuff.) 

Bugsy Siegel: The Dark Side of the American Dream, Michael Shnayerson (A good primer on the man who hated being called Bugsy.) 

Sound Man, Glyn Johns (Breezy, fun, slightly wonky [and I like that] chronicle of a mixing man. Nothing about his '60s clothes sense though.) 

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner (Whew. Exhausting, agonizing, all that good stuff. Also kind of an object lesson in how a little Faulkner can go a long way.)

The Case of the Borrowed Brunette, Erle Stanley Gardner (A little more transparently pro forma than a lot of the Masons I've read but okay.) 

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman (Great fun.) 

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor (Aging and [spoiler alert] dying in somnambulant Olde London, just the way you wanna ring out the year.) 

Notable film releases of 2021

Stalin wasn't stallin': Loznitsa's State Funeral

2021 wasn't an entirely heartening year for cinema. It wasn't an entirely heartening year for anything, really. So this year's notable films list is shorter than in the past. It's not ranked; the list goes in roughly the order I watched them, or in some cases the order in which I came to like them. The titles with links have reviews attached so you can follow my argumentation. The ones without you have to take my word on. There are a lot of films you'll see on other best-of lists that aren't here, and in many cases that could be because I just haven't seen a lot of them, and I am aware that a number of them might be right up my alley, and I suppose I look forward to catching up when I can. But for now, in the words of John Wayne in Rio Bravo, this is WHAT I've got. 

The Salt of Tears (Garrel) 

Supernova (Macqueen)

Atlantis (Vasyanovych)

The Human Voice (Almodóvar)

This is not a Burial, it's a Resurrection (Mosese)

State Funeral (Loznitsa)

Undine (Petzold)

No Sudden Move (Soderbergh)

Summer of Soul (Questlove)

Annette (Carax)

Days (Tsai)

The Card Counter (Schrader)

Parallel Mothers (Almodóvar)

Last Night In Soho (Wright)

Wife of a Spy (Kurosawa)

Fire Music (Surgal)

The Village Detective (Morrison)

The Velvet Underground (Haynes) 

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Coen)

France (Dumont)

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time (Peete, Yapkowitz)

Memoria (Weerasethakul)

Cry Macho (Eastwood)

The French Dispatch (Anderson) I was just speaking last night with a friend who was, among other things, enraged by this picture's re-imagining of James Baldwin. I allowed that Anderson could be accused of being willfully callow. But I found value, and pleasure, in the smart-alec bouyancy of this. 

Bergman Island (Hansen-Love) I only completely got this after watching Hansen-Love's debut feature, which got its first U.S. release this year. See below.

All Is Forgiven (Hansen-Love)

The Souvenir Part 2 (Hogg)

Drive My Car (Hamaguchi)

Licorice Pizza (Anderson) My parents bought a waterbed in 1973, ask me anything.

West Side Story (Spielberg)

Nightmare Alley (del Toro) Although I wish it contained More About Alcoholism.

HONORABLE FILMS

Land (Wright)

About Endlessness (Andersson)

Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (Beth B)

The French (Klein)

Wrath of Man (Ritchie)

Eyimofe (Esiri and Esiri)

Can You Bring It (Hurwitz and LeBlanc Loo)

The Sparks Brothers (Wright)

Pig (Sarnoski)

Dune (Villeneuve) 

The Power of the Dog (Campion)

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (Lindström and Petri)

Titane (Ducournau)

Golden Voices (Ruman)

What Do We See When We Look At The Sky (Koberidze)

Benedetta (Verhoeven)

Blu-ray and 4K Consumer Guide, WInter 2021

So I’m still maintaining this blog, but obviously haven’t posted on it too much. Like Dick Cheney vis a vis Vietnam, I have other priorities. There’s also the fact (not that I pay too much heed to it) that blogs really aren’t a thing anymore; they feel almost archaic. Yet here we are.

Some of the aforementioned priorities have diminished recently. I’m not going to get into detail but some of my readers at other publications may have noticed my contributions becoming lesser in number. This eventuality sees with it a diminishment in personal revenue, which led me to consider starting a newsletter, a subscription one even. So, I started gathering materials for such an undertaking, including notes for the Consumer Guide I’m publishing below. I made notes for other things, too, most hilariously an essay about a recent Van Der Graaf Generator box set, which would surely have rocketed my subscription base past Andrew Sullivan’s and Bari Weiss’s combined. All the while, a feeling gnawed at me. That feeling being: I don’t want to do this. Obviously conducting a newsletter hustle requires the hustler to go into it absolutely wholeheartedly and (in some respects, not necessarily the most obvious ones) cheerfully. Resentful hesitancy signals half-heartedness, and half-heartedness is no way to run a Substack or whatever it would have been.

And again, without going into detail, my anxieties concerning revenue are not what they were a few months ago. So there’s not going to be a Substack, not yet. And there’s probably not going to be an essay about the Van Der Graaf Generator box set either. (Sorry!) But there is, here, a Consumer Guide, now with some 4K UHD titles. And it is dedicated, for reasons he’ll understand, to the great Tim Lucas. Thanks for reading, as ever.

EQUIPMENT
My prediction in the last Guide, which was, “between now and next March I’ll get a goddamn PlayStation 5 and will try and knock out a 4K Ultra Disc Consumer Guide for variety and perversity’s sake,” proved highly laughable in the PS 5 department. Have you gotten yours yet? I just recently got a notice from B&H saying, “WE WILL NEVER HAVE THIS.” But anyway. At a certain point, specifically upon remembering that I hadn’t used my PS 4 for game playing in eleven years, I packed the thing up, sent it to a nephew who has four young boys, and got a Sony UBp-X800 multi-region 4K player and it’s pretty snazzy. Then there’s the Sony KD50X690E display and Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver. Which doesn’t have Dolby Atmos. For now, I’ll live.

The Damned (Criterion)

I recollect this picture being quite a scandal on its initial U.S. release — the distinguished maestro Luchino Visconti done gone and made an “X” rated movie. About Nazis! A couple of years later it would turn up at two in the morning on Channel 7 and I never bothered to stay up and watch because I figured it’d been cut to ribbons. When I finally got around to seeing it the first time what I was most struck by wasn’t the content but by how crazy Visconti decided to go with the zoom lens. Makes Jess Franco look like Carl Dreyer. Okay, not quite. But thank the creator that he curbed this tendency when he made Death In Venice soon after. Then again, the style here is suited to the movie’s almost hysterical account of Third Reich decadence/degradation/depravity and such. Maurice Jarre’s opening music inspires similar “what’s got into you?” thoughts. Bearing down hard on the anti-Communism of its Nazi characters in its first thirty minutes or so, it then sets in motion a relatively nuance-free account of fascist interpersonal dynamics. It’s kinda like Succession, but with actual Nazis! And with zero, or hardly any, likable characters. In many instances of laying it on with a trowel, it offers the sight of a naked Ingrid Thulin languishing in a bed rhapsodizing about power. The movie is possibly best considered as crazier cousin to Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero in its unrelenting depiction of not just Nazi, but German nihilism. In the end, Helmut Berger’s Martin wins out not because he’s wiliest in the batch, but because he’s the most depraved. The transfer of the sometimes handsome, sometimes Tinto-Brass-level-lurid imagery is terrific. — A

 

Dead and Buried (Blue Underground)

This 1981 oddity has a premise that would be acceptable in a fantastic black comedy, which apparently this was originally intended to be. But its New Direction, suggested in part by the excellent effects work by Stan Winston, casts it as a mostly intense, gritted-teeth grindhouse horror. In which the premise is pretty laughable. But never mind. The movie’s midsection is a series of compulsively watchable scare scenes set in the dark and fog and distinguished by go-for-broke sensational brutality. As it happened, Winston left the movie after the New Direction was determined, and wasn’t around for the shooting of one late-scenario death, and the crummy effects therein show. (You’ll definitely know it when you see it.) The 4K rendering has a subdued pallet, plenty of grain, and packs quite a punch, and Joe Renzetti’s score will give your subwoofer/woofers a bit of a workout. The voluminous extras feature four separate audio commentaries, to which I can only say “thanks, but come on.” Your mileage may vary of course.  —A-

Deep Blues (Film Movement)

Dave Stewart, or to be more precise, David A. Stewart, commissioned, co-produced, and appears in this 1991 documentary shot largely in North Mississippi, about blues music as a still-vital and everyday practice in those parts. And yes, it’s that Stewart, the Eurythmics fellow, who’s first seen in black t-shirt and wire-rimmed dark glasses looking at a couple of busking blues men in a Beale Street park on a hot sunny day. But don’t balk — further inspection reveals Stewart’s got both head and heart in the right place, and in the supplemental outtakes he jams pretty credibly with R.L. Burnside on “Big Boss Man.” On Beale, Stewart is soon joined by Robert Palmer — the music critic, not the “Addicted to Love” fellow — who acts as docent. Palmer was from the south and relocated there after doing time in New York City as, among other things, a music critic for the New York Times. He also made some pretty fantastic music, in part with the great boho band The Insect Trust. A little less than a decade older than Stewart, the friendly, scholarly Palmer here looks older than that still — he would die of liver disease in 1997. A bad loss in a lot of ways. The movie is simple: Palmer, sometimes with Stewart, sometimes without, travels to the homes of musicians whose roots go all the way back to Robert Johnson — among these figures Johnson is a lot less of a mystery than he is in the larger culture — and lets them talk. And play. And director Robert Mugge keeps his camera unobtrusive. Shot on 35 in a rough and ready style, the Blu-ray looks fantastic in its way, and the plain old stereo soundtrack is vivid and crisp. Along the way you’ll learn who or what “Johnny Cockaroo” is. You’ll also spend a lot of time with Big Jack Johnson, a helluva guitar player, whose nickname “The Oil Man” derives from the fact that he made his main living driving an oil delivery truck. An interesting oddity: the white rhythm section guys in these Black-led bands all look like George Costanza, or some variant thereof. Mugge’s commentary is a dry but informative production account, in which he relates, among other things, why the pre-cult-stardom Burnside is seen here playing a cherry Telecaster. Inspirational dialogue: “The musician, he’s usually down on his luck.” Inspirational commentary line: “One of the traditions when filming or recording rural blues artists is to bring along a fifth of whiskey as a show of respect, but in our experience many southern blues artists preferred Crown Royal.”  —A+

Deep Red 4K (Arrow)

The friend who introduced me to Argento way back in 1978 at a screening of Suspiria at the legendary Paterson Plaza Theater — where the projectionist omitted an entire reel of the picture, and it made no difference to the narrative coherence —long ago abjured the director’s work, repelled by its trucking in what he called “the pornography of violence.” Watching this 1975 landmark, wherein Argento shucked most of his Hitchcock influence in favor of something relatively new and entirely garish, I felt my pal’s point in a more pronounced way than I have in a long while. The bathtub-scalding murder, and the camera’s lingering on the victim’s awful burns, really squinched me out. The images seemed completely unnecessary, like that shot of the knife plunging into a beating organ in Suspiria. (On the commentary track from Troy Haworth and Nathaniel Thompson, one of them notes that in the aftermath of the breakup between Argento and Daria Nicolodi, the female lead here, Nicolodi actually accused Argento of being a notorious, at-large serial killer.)  By the same token, going too far is one of the perquisites of guignol, arguably. And while Argento’s image-making instincts take him, and you, places where no one ought to tread, it also inspires some truly fantastic, elegantly disturbing picture. The quick cut to Macha Meril’s mouth as she takes a drink of water and can’t keep it in is oddly beautiful, practically Magritte-worthy. This too is the sort of thing that wouldn’t occur to most filmmakers and shows why Argento was special in the first place. In any event: this magnificent 4K rendering doesn’t present anything like a subdued color pallet, nosirree Bob. The mono soundtrack acceptable, but man, the 5.1 is a kick in the head with the incredible Goblin score and such. Story still doesn’t make any damn sense though, and who cares. —A+

Dune 4K (Arrow)

Having sat through the Villeneuve Dune not once but twice (crazy, right? Second time was mainly a cousin date though, honest), and having long held a complicated admiration for this vexed Lynch effort, I approached a re-review of this movie in any format with some trepidation. What if it felt more cheesy than Lynchian? This splendid presentation assured me the unrealized vision here was more 60/40, or even 70/30 in favor of Lynch. A trifle overlit in the way of ‘80s Hollywood pictures at the time, it’s still packed with sinister weirdnesses (Robin Wood, a stalwart Lynch hater, came down hard on the homophobia of that Harkonnen scene, and I can’t say he didn’t have a point). The dialogue between Jose Ferrer and that “Navigator” is almost Eraserhead-worthy in its way, as is the sight of Alicia Witt with that dagger. As far as that pesky narrative is concerned, hell, this lays out the whole plot in the first ten minutes! Pas de problem! But as we get further in, the awkward condensation of scenes (dissolves and such, which are very Lynchian, but not entirely well-judged) becomes highly noticeable. The wonky Star Wars touches are a little blush worthy — “activate a fighter,” you betcha. In other news, Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul has an iPad, and in this version, they actually DO say “jihad.” So there. The disc is beautiful, and the only way you should ever watch this at home.  —A-

The Emperor Waltz (Kino Lorber)

Moderately fascinating Wilder. Released the same year (1948) as A Foreign Affair, this would have been a valentine to Old Europe, countering Affair’s poison-pen letter to post WW II Germany. The director envisioned a Lubitsch homage but felt he didn’t pull it off. Producer and co-writer Charles Brackett pronounced it “in no way outstanding” in his journal.  Still there’s Technicolor, which is reproduced handsomely here save for the odd out-of-register-looking shot. And there’s Bing Crosby. Where McCarey used Crosby’s insouciant, irreverent persona to buttress piety, here Wilder has him swing into Old Vienna like Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea rocked the academic hermitage in Ball of Fire. Here Crosby’s character extols the virtues of the newly-invented phonograph and its accompanying devil music.  Joseph McBride’s exemplary commentary touches on Wilder’s affinity for jazz, first articulated back when Wilder was a German journalist. It also explores Wilder’s reasons for enlisting Der Bingle, and the conflicts between leading lady Joan Fontaine and her costar. — B+

The Guns of Navarone 4K (Paramount)

At its best, this UHD disc makes you feel like you’re looking at a miniaturized version of seeing Real CinemaScope, and for the first time. Those Greek columns and varied geologic formations have a genuine tactile quality. When Quinn’s sniping at the white-clad Germans from the mountaintop, I was like, “Wow! Look at that ROCK!”  Nevertheless Robert Harris, in his post at Home Theater Forum, is right (well of course he is) about the weaknesses sporadically inherent in the image overall. The sometimes dupey look is built into the original camera negative. These are most glaringly noticeable almost right away, with the optical effects of newsreel insets over the static shot of the title guns.  My ultimate takeaway was: when it’s great, it’s great and when it’s not it makes you appreciate the great parts. As for the movie’s content, I was slightly surprised all over again by some of it. You gotta hand it to screenwriter/producer Carl Foreman for keeping the narrative in the mire of it’s-a-helluva-thing-to-kill-a-man pessimism, countering the standard Hollywood heroics. Not that those aren’t there, of course, and “fan service” is certainly evident in the final death tally of the characters. For all that, when Peck says “You’re up to your neck,” it really does register. And the movie most credibly demonstrates a venerable World War II picture truism: When you’ve got a really tough job, leave it to the partisans. — A

 Halloween 4K (Shout Factory)

Inspirational commentary line: “John Carpenter was so committed to realism, we actually killed that dog.” — A+

The Incredible Shrinking Man (Criterion)

Once you’ve sat through this 1957 classic in its entirety, you’ll have one question, that being “So just where did Scott Carey record the narration?” Possibly the same place where Toby Dammit recorded his, I reckon. Anyway. A Universal picture, directed by Jack Arnold and produced by Albert Zugsmith, it of course features William Schallert in a key supporting role, that of a doctor. The one who has to ponder the statement: “People don’t get shorter…they just don’t get shorter.” And yet Scott Carey does, and at each stage of his shrinkage deals with it in different ways, like almost having an affair with a carnival employee. Eventually he gets into a doll house and there has his first face off with the cat. As housecats go, it’s pretty mangy looking. And a real biter too. Lead actor Grant Williams looks a tad like Aaron Sorkin, really. The transfer shows off the movie’s admirable effects ingenuity. But also underscores the optical effects that tend to look dupey. It’s kind of staggering this hasn’t been remade — not that I’m recommending it — given what effects supervisors could do with LCD backdrops and such. In any event, the overall presentation of this Existential Nightmare Redeemed (remember, as Scott notes in his recorded-God-knows-where narration, his reduction to near-atom size is in fact the Beginning Of A Great Adventure, maybe) is exemplary Criterion — respectful and thorough. In supplements, Richard Matheson’s son talks Eisenhower era anxiety; there’s a pleasing, coherent effects breakdown; and comedian Dana Gould and cinematic maestro Joe Dante discuss the movie in amiable, diverting, often amusing style. — A

 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 4K (Paramount)

Good news! My post-teen misogyny seems to have substantially waned, because I did not bristle with loathing over Kate Capshaw’s performance the way I did when I first saw the picture at the not-all-that tender age of 24. For whatever reason her characterization of a character who’s supposed to be mostly endearingly exasperating in a screwball comedy way made me just plain exasperated. Watching the movie now I was more inclined to notice that the Willie Scott role is actually anti-screwball in its conception: while the exasperating females in Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth and what have you are almost uniformly smarter and more resourceful than their male counterparts/foils, the nightclub singer along for the ride with Indy and Short Round is just an imposition and burden, albeit a physically attractive one. Now, as to Short Round…oh never mind. This is one of four films included in Paramount’s 4K UHD set of Jones movies, and it’s the only one I’ve watched so far and I was very taken by its look and sound. And I was largely taken by the movie itself, in spite of all its very manifest flaws and objectionable bits (not mutually exclusive, these) because the action set pieces are such a kick. I lay blame for the faults (all of them) on screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Not to gang up on the team behind Howard the Duck — and hey, I think Messiah of Evil is a too-unheralded chef d’oeuvre of sorts — but the binding material they concoct is complete plaster compared to the story structure that held Raiders together. Of course it’s ultimately Spielberg’s mistake in accepting this flimsy contrivance but I surmise he was too excited about putting together the set pieces to really notice or care. Maybe. Anyway, the set pieces: great.— A

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 4K (Kino Lorber)

It’s kind of weird, and certainly against all odds, that (up until Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers, at least) this story has been made into a moving picture three times and all three of the moving pictures are in their way exceptional. (At the time I first posted this, I had forgotten that the 2007 The Invasion had broken the streak...and why wouldn't I forget that?) This one, directed by Phillip Kaufman in 1978 from a script by the too-undervalued W.D. Richter, is oft lauded for its satirical bent (the pods come to San Francisco, then the mecca of self-help and self-realization cult-like processes, get it?) and that factors into its effectiveness to be sure — Chicago-born Kaufman had been a Frisco resident since 1960, gets the environment with an offhanded mastery. But the movie is also steeped in an atmospheric unease that goes far beyond satire. It’s a film of genuinely eccentric, unnerving choices. From the opening in which the pods leave an alien planet and journey to earth with truly overbearing music (Denny Zeitlin) accompanying the action onward. Brooke Adams and Art Hindle are introduced by a voyeuristic camera, moving implacably down corridors to home in on the reflections of their characters rather than the characters themselves. The scenario makes an already unhappy marriage the fulcrum on which the discovery is first hinged. Cinematographer Michael Chapman, only a couple of pictures ahead of Taxi Driver, almost repeats the famed lateral dolly from the excruciating Bickle-on-the-pay-phone scene in a shot in which Adams and Donald Sutherland clinch by an elevator, about 24 minutes in. Dig, too, the distorted reflection of Jeff Goldblum in the bookstore mirror, and the fact that Sutherland never repairs the shattered windshield he suffers at the beginning of the movie. The 4K image on this edition is fabulous added value to the overall cinematic richness. —  A+

Jet Pilot (Kino Lorber)

Howard Hughes wanted a movie about aviation and hotness. Josef Von Sternberg wanted…work. The hijinks began in 1949, pairing a 22-year-old (but looking 18) Janet Leigh with a 42-year-old (but looking 55) John Wayne. The cast also features J.C. Flippen at his most suave. No really, he’s very polished here, as befits his ARMY BRASS role. The result, not unleashed on a drooling public until 1957) was one of the most exhilarating movies about nothing, or maybe about star charisma, ever made. Leigh, as a not-quite-defecting Soviet flyer (oh those egalitarian commies), doesn’t even try an accent, and I’d bet that Sternberg didn’t even ask her to. A typical Hughes touch is the obnoxious leering jet sound effects as Leigh removes each individual piece of her flight suit after landing. The Kino disc does not advertise as a new scan, but it looks plenty sharp and we’re offered a choice between 1.37 and 1.85 aspect ratios — given when its principal photography began, you know which one to watch. The movie’s depictions of American Plenty are properly vulgar, what with the half-foot-thick steaks, which actually trigger Leigh’s ultimate abandonment of the USSR. Where there are zero steaks and the barracks are in such a poor area they can’t even afford real scenery — the backdrops are remarkably obvious paintings. Its utter, blissful triviality is so scrupulously hewed to that it becomes transcendent, and hence Essential Cinema. There’s no commentary. Make up your own.  Andrew Sarris: “an ecstatic flight of speed, grace and color.” Jean-Luc Godard: “Chaplin said […] tragedy is life in close-up, and comedy, life in long shot. I said to myself, I’m going to make a comedy in close-up: the film will be tragi-comic. Sternberg’s Jet Pilot is also a close-up comedy. That’s why it didn’t go down well.” Inspirational dialogue, as Wayne shows Leigh some U.S.-made lingerie: “That’s one thing we have in common with the Soviets.” “What’s that?” “We both believe in uplifting the masses.” And from Leigh, solo: “The water is so hot.” — A

 John Carpenter’s The Thing 4K (Universal)

After watching this in 4K for the first time, I looked up the contemporary reviews of the movie and came to the conclusion that film critics, as a class, were then almost as dumb as film actors. Maybe dumber. And the situation is, revisionism on this particular movie notwithstanding, even worse today. I will not be taking any questions at this time. Anyhow. Image wise, I found this superb; what audiophiles call reference quality. The actual audio has elicited some dissatisfaction in certain corners but to my ears the lossless DTX soundtrack gets the job done. Carpenter’s mastery of film language is strongly present throughout, and it’s instructive to keep track of when he and cinematographer Dean Cundey keep their anamorphic frame in full focus and when and how they go shallow. In the latter instances they keep the backgrounds distinct but not too distinct. A nice kind of head-fake in the “don’t look behind you” suspense column. — A+

 The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster (Kino)

So this is neither a Blu-ray or a 4K release — indeed, with 4K especially you might say super-high-resolution would, given the nature of the material, “defeat its own purpose” — and it’s not brand spanking new and the filmmaker is an old friend which is a crucial reason I’ve not covered this disc. The friend is Michael Schlesinger, a venerable and passionate film scholar and enthusiast who did a lot of hard time managing rep for a mega-corporation that often didn’t know its assets from its elbow. You’ve likely heard his commentaries on fare such as It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Producers and other not-dissimilar titles, in which case you know the kind of madcap stuff he likes. The fictional comedy team of Biffle and Shooster is a concept that could only have sprung from his mind, and I do mean that as a compliment. The five picture collected here are made-in-the-21^st-century fake comedy shorts from the ‘30s, featuring the above-named and titular fictional comedy team. Played of course by real actors, Nick Santa Maria and Will Ryan, who shared Mike’s vision to the extent that they’re credited as co-creators of their characters.  Santa Maria’s Biffle is the goofy super-nervous one and Ryan is the dyspeptic and relatively straight-mannish Shooster. On this collection they Stooge and Niagara Falls their way through five “missions of mayhem” including a private-eye spoof guest-starring Robert Forster and an unapologetically Borscht-Belt Bride of Frankenstein send up. Much of the humor is as apt to elicit groans as laughs. I don’t think that’s accidental — the nudging is the point. I was sad to learn last month of the death of Will Ryan, half of the duo of amiable zanies. It reminded me that one thing about the Biffle and Shooster shorts that was wholly unmitigated was its absolute movie love. And that makes this object worth buying, and cherishing. —A

New York Ninja (Vinegar Syndrome)

Vinegar Syndrome’s devotion to the Grindhouse Dream in all its manifestations is 100 percent admirable even if not every title upon which it expends such exemplary care gives me the buzz I’m seeking. (Volume one of its Forgotten Giallo box had me muttering “there are reasons these were forgotten” more than once.)  I was at least mildly skeptical about this special project for the company, an unfinished 1984 picture with a self-explanatory title. Abandoned by director/star John Liu before any editing process began, with no dialogue or music nor any script to consult, it was assembled into a whole by Kurtis Spieler, who provides an informative commentary. A company of classic exploitation movie actors — Leon Isaac Kennedy, Linnea Quigley, Michael Berryman, Cynthia Rothrock, and Ginger Lynn Allen — dubbed in newly-written dialogue, some of it apparently extrapolated via lip-reading. I know what you might be thinking and I thought it too: “Uh-huh.” It was only after a recommendation from my buddy the writer and artist Bob Fingerman that I sought took the plunge, and I’m rather glad I did. Ninja really does approximate the True Grindhouse Experience in the Comfort Of Your Own Home (which is a big plus when you get to be my age). The likely wholly unlicensed NYC lensing is big on period interest (although a little on the narrow side — Liu never wastes a chance to get the Twin Towers in his lens), the plotline (initially concerned with a personal revenge story set in a milieu in which “drugged out scum” are roaming wild in the city doing horrible crimes) dips into some weird sci-fi shit about a half-hour in, the fake newspaper headlines are so bad they’re almost poignant (“Another Lady Vanishes Abductions Continue”) and so on. The music and dubbing are so apropos you’d swear this thing is a fully realized 1984 film. And the image quality is shockingly good, like straight-from-the-lab good. A unique entertainment. Inspirational dialogue: “Looks like we got ourselves a hero!” — A

 A Night at the Opera (Warner Archive)

As a Marxist sourpuss, I used to hew to the party line that Irving Thalberg ruined the brothers for film by imposing tighter structures and such on their anarchic antics. My memories of Allan Jones in this were particularly cringe. I don’t know if it’s age or Scott Walker who softened me up to the guy, but now I find him entirely tolerable and hell, if Zeppo wanted to retire why not. And I also very much enjoy the movie itself, and not just because Harpo doesn’t get to chase any gamines around. It’s a focused light comedy that goes down easy and has a lot of marvelous highlights. The musical interlude shipboard is awfully sweet too — Harpo and Chico Among The Children, acting like they should. Also: “Boogity boogity boogity.” The image here has a wonderful brisk clarity. Yes, the picture was/is at the top of a long downward slope for the fellas but nothing in the actual film necessarily indicates this. Give it a shot, you may be pleasantly surprised. — A

Operation Burma/Santa Fe Trail (Warner Archive)

I remember reading, way back in the day, in some Andrew Sarris volume or other, Sarris averring that the Raoul Walsh/Errol Flynn pictures were better than the Michael Curtiz/Errol Flynn pictures, so when these came from the Warner Archives at roughly the same time I figured it might be fun to use them to put the idea to the test. Burma is one of the made-during-World-War-II movies (first screened January 1945) in which the Japanese forces are referred to in the racist terms they were likely referred to as by actual Allied soldiers in that was and is additionally one of the “Give America all the credit” WW II movies. This is the Walsh movie, with a Franz Waxman score, and both craftpersons are pulling out all the stops here. This transfer is from original materials so there’s no “Sorry, Great Britain for snubbing you” disclaimer in the opening — this was put on prints after Great Britain raised holy hell about it. Way after Great Britain raised holy hell about it — 1952. Despite all the fictionalization this is a very wonky picture that’s consistently confident in putting across the illusion that it’s giving you the real story fair and square. That of “Merrill’s Marauders,” such as they are, slicing through a “Jap-infested jungle,” yeow. Looks clean as a whistle, with lots of what you could call “good” grain. Contains many lingering shots of reconnaissance plane equipment and such. Featuring Samuel Beckett lookalike Erville Alderson and the future Doberman.  Now. As for Santa Fe Trail. Curtiz in 1940, on a pretty good run as you may recall. You know you’re in for some “fun” when an explanatory opening text speaks of West Point’s “brilliant commandant” Robert E. Lee. But it gets worse. This phantasmagorical slop bucket of racist rationalization and Confederate-coddling is objectionable from start to finish but you almost have to hand it to the ideologically blinkered Curtiz — he would have made a great used car salesman. Curtiz’s fluid, impassioned camera never misses a trick, the staging is masterful, Sol Polito cinematography has that good Expressionist redolence. The movie also, one has to say, underscores Curtiz’s weaknesses as a director — his people are a lot shallower than those of Hawks and Ford. But the leads are great eye candy — Flynn grows and keeps a mustache, Olivia de Havilland is absolutely charming. Reagan is Reagan, and he’s playing George Custer, so you can happily imagine his ultimate fate. Raymond Massey’s John Brown is introduced about 25 minutes in. The actor displays utter conviction playing an utter nutjob but he refuses to project villainy, a salutary choice. Must have chapped Ward Bond’s ass to play an abolitionist, you think? Anti-inspirational dialogue, from Flynn’s J.E.B. Stuart: “It isn’t our job to decide who’s right and who’s wrong about slavery. Any more than it is John Brown’s.” Oh get stuffed. — A- to both.

The Outsiders: The Complete Novel 4K (Warner)

S.E. Hinton’s novel was foisted upon me when I was in my early teens as something I “ought to” read (as opposed to A Clockwork Orange or Funeral Rites, both of which I’d perhaps too-enthusiastically consumed by this time) and it did nothing for me. Not just because its terse, plain prose style didn’t appeal to me at all, but because as a Jersey suburbanite I couldn’t get with these relentlessly sentimental post-greaser mid-Western kids. And despite my devotion to Coppola, my 23-year-old self couldn’t relate to them onscreen, either. (Rumble Fish is a wholly other story, for reasons I explored here.) Watching this new rendition of the film it still speaks to me loudest as a curio of high visual interest, especially with respect to the stuff homaging Gone With The Wind. I also dig those GIANT closeups of Ponyboy as he goes into his reverie. Helluva cast, too: Tom Waits! William Smith! Melanie Meyrink! Coppola’s new, and rather moving, ten-minute intro to the film reminds you that he is the only director in recorded history who made a film at the request of middle school student petition.  — A+

The Servant 4K (Canal)

Some movies reveal themselves to you more and more on repeated viewings, and why wouldn’t they. The uncanny thing about The Servant is that it just gets more naggingly mysterious and disturbing. This spotless presentation conveys the film’s frostiness almost too well. You can choose between watching in 1.66 and 1.77 aspect ratios. Given that the compositions are such you’d swear that the movie emerged from Zeus’s (Losey’s, that is) brow in 1.66, I can’t imagine why you’d watch in 1.77. Because you can, I guess. — A+  

 Sex World 4K (Vinegar Syndrome)

Certainly some of you out there must be wondering: what does porn look like in 4K? Specifically, what does vintage porn, which for a brief span of time was actually shot on 35mm film, look like in 4K? Well. Let me tell you. The colors in this 1978 quasi-futuristic yarn of the troubled souls looking for satisfaction/catharsis at the title resort are often remarkable vivid. So, too, are the pimples and ingrown hairs on the intimate body parts of several performers. While directed by Anthony Spinelli, the movie suffers from Gerard Damiano Disease, that is, a compulsion to get almost sick-makingly self-serious about the dysfunctions its motley characters suffer from. Also it really skimps on the Annette Haven content. I absolutely credit Vinegar Syndrome for being format pioneers here, while wishing they’d have given the 4K treatment to something more funsy, like Mary Mary. I’m sure they have their reasons.. — B

 Some Came Running (Warner Archive)

What can I say? I named this damn blog after the movie, which I went into some detail on here.  And a few years later, for Decider, I wrote on it some more. So hell yes, I have been wishing and hoping that this would make it to Blu-ray for some time. Now it has, and It looks remarkably fine, crisp and clear with excellent color values. Director Vincente Minnelli’s mise-en-scene is as on point as ever and his camera ever so slightly more noticeably mobile than usual. The proscenium is less prominent than in such other landmark melodramas as 1955’s The Cobweb or 1960’s Home From The Hill. The final shot, a graceful funeral scene that closes with the very significant gesture of Dean Martin’s Alabama taking his hat off to a character he had previously rather grossly disparaged, is an all time. And watching it, I was hit with the nauseating realization that the Russo brothers were likely paying their own form of homage to it in the ghastly closing shot of Endgame. Anyway, this shot is way better than the one in Endgame. — A+

Tavernier and the fraught story of "In The Electric Mist"

John Goodman and Tommy Lee Jones, In The Electric Mist, Tavernier, 2009.

Bertrand Tavernier, who died today at age 79 ("So young," gasped this 61-year-old) had a long, distinguished, and honorable career, one difficult to sum up quickly, in no small part because a good deal of his substantial filmography is unjustly obscure in the States. I met and interviewed him in 2011, when he was in New York promoting his exceptional, vivid historical film The Princess of Montpensier. By now you've probably read this before, but he was a great interview, warm, erudite, good-humored, always eager to talk cinema. 

Aside from Montpensier, we discussed his prior picture, one of his infrequent English-language pictures, In the Electric Mist. When word got out in 2007 or so that Tavernier was making it, cinephiles and fans of hard-boiled literature were pretty excited, as I mention below. The U.S. release of the movie befuddled more than a few viewers. So, for feature package the interview yielded — this was for a e-magazine startup named Nomad (you remember startups) for which I was the editor of the movie organ, called "Wide Screen," I wrote a piece comparing the U.S. cut with Tavernier's own version of the movie, which he put together in France surreptitiously, and which was put out on French DVD.

In Bertrand's memory, I reproduce the piece below. And after that, as he is no longer with us and no longer bound by whatever egregious contractual enjoinment prevented him from talking about the film on the record, I include a section of the transcript of our conversation, lightly edited. 

When it was announced a few years back that the French director Bertrand Tavernier would be returning to English-language filmmaking with an adaptation of James Lee Burke’s crime novel In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead, several different breeds of enthusiasts started drooling. Fans of the crime writer Burke had to be stoked that one of his works was about to be tackled by Tavernier had to have been excited that their man was getting a film treatment from a director who clearly appreciated genre material—Tavernier’s terrific Coup de Torchon was an excellent transposition of a novel by Jim Thompson, one of Burke’s acknowledged antecedents. Fans of Tavernier were tickled by the notion of the director working in the U.S. for the first time since his very well regarded Round Midnight. Fans of actor Tommy Lee Jones were excited that the actor was going to be embodying Burke’s recovering-alcoholic-lawman Dave Robicheaux. (The character was last portrayed on film by Alec Baldwin, in the not-entirely successful Burke adaptation Heaven’s Prisoners, directed by Phil Joanou.) Especially coming after Jones’ superb portrayal of Texas lawman Ed Tom Bell in the Coen brothers’ 2007 No Country For Old Men. In the Electric Mist, as the title was shortened to, looked like it had a shot at being a very worthy quasi-successor to that excellent film.

But the picture didn’t even wind up having a theatrical release in the United States, coming out straight to DVD in spring of 2009. Hardly an event picture, as it happens. What happened? As Chris Mosey explains in an interview with Tavernier that was a web exclusive for Cineaste magazine in the 2010,  “Tavernier and both his American producer, Michael Fitzgerald, and editor, Roberto Silvi [had a conflict] concerning the cutting of the movie. When their disagreements proved impossible to resolve, the only solution was to release two versions of the same film, one for either side of the Atlantic. Fitzgerald, head of Ithaca Pictures, supervised Silvi on the cutting of the shorter, faster-paced film for the U.S. market. Tavernier, with the help of editor Thierry Derocles, completed his own cut." If you are lucky enough to own a multi-region DVD player (foreign-manufactured DVDs are often embedded with a “region code” that makes them impossible to play on domestic machines), it’s possible to make a comparison between the two versions.

The initial difference is pretty stark and immediately discernible just by looking at the information on the respective box covers. My Image Entertainment domestic DVD lists a running time of 102 minutes; the French-issued TFI  Video Blu-ray disc shows “1h57,” or 117 minutes. So we’re talking about an American issue that is a full fifteen minutes shorter than the American one.

The differences start at the very beginning. In Tavernier’s version, there are atmospheric slow-lateral-dollying shots of the titular mist sitting in a gray swamp. Tommy Lee Jones’ unmistakable voice comes on the soundtrack: “In the ancient world, people placed heavy stones on the graves of their dead, so their souls would not wander…” The American opening is a little more “on the nose,” as it were: a shot of Jones sitting at a bar, a bartender pouring him a shot of whiskey, and Jones getting up and walking away without taking the shot. The voiceover here: “My name’s Dave Robicheaux. I’m an alcoholic. Sometimes I’m tempted to have a drink. But I never do.”

This kind of encapsulates the essential difference between the two versions: the American cut is rather more direct and literal minded, while Tavernier’s cut has more emphasis on atmosphere, mood, and so on. It might therefore follow that the American version is brisker, more story-driven, more conventionally entertaining. It actually isn’t. It’s just more literal-minded, is all. As it happens, Tavernier’s version, after its atmospheric beginning, kicks off with Robicheaux’s investigation of the grisly murder of a part-time prostitute, the uneasiness of the shady characters he’s interrogating creating an absorbing tension that seeps into the film as a whole. The restructuring imposed by Fitzgerald and American editor Silvi introduces the movie-actor characters played by Peter Sarsgaard and Kelly MacDonald earlier on, for no real reason except to maybe bring more recognizable faces into the picture sooner than later. One excised scene, of Robicheaux attending an AA meeting, doesn’t advance the story all that much, but does do a better and subtler job of enhancing the characterization of Robicheaux than the above-cited opening shots and narration achieve. Another excised scene showing the malevolent local big-shot played by John Goodman deliberately beaning Robicheaux with a baseball represents an even dumber cut, as it’s a great showcase for both Goodman and Jones and it gives Goodman’s character more of the sinister “he’s-not-bluffing” sense that makes the viewer eventually feel more empathy for the fix Robicheaux finds himself in at the film’s climax.

Some of the footage from that excised scene does find its way into the ending of the American version, in a way the most egregious of the many egregious changes. A shot of Goodman swatting a baseball is included in a “where are they now” montage, narrated by Jones, detailing the fates of all the characters in the scenario. Needless to say Tavernier’s ending is both far more evocative and emotionally/narratively satisfying, I won’t give it away here. But I will say that while Tavernier’s cut of the film DOES represent a worthy quasi-successor to No Country For Old Men, the American cut plays like a better-than-average thing you might have caught in the wee hours on Court TV back in the day. A no doubt very frustrating state of affairs, not just for Tavernier (who I believe is contractually enjoined from discussing the matter in any detail), but for American film lovers as well.

 

And here's a portion of that interview. 

 

WIDE SCREEN:  I want to talk a little bit about In the Electric Mist.

TAVERNIER:  Yeah.

WIDE SCREEN:  Because of working in America after you worked intermittently throughout your career with American actors and American themes, American writers.  And I wasn't able to read the journal you kept of the film, but there was an interesting thing in an article about it about working with an editor who always wanted to do transitions through close-ups.  And it seems interesting when you're looking at your written work and looking at the films that inspired you and getting to the point where American or Hollywood film grammar has gotten to the point where it's almost split off into something different than what inspired you.

TAVERNIER:  And from the grammar in Hollywood and some of the directors I admire.

WIDE SCREEN:  Yeah.

TAVERNIER:  I mean because when I was told that I was doing too-long takes and not enough coverage I was thinking of Otto Preminger and many, many brilliant directors.  On the whole I find the contribution of Tommy Lee Jones invaluable.  I found him brilliant, very, very respectful of the other actors.  Very.  I've never seen an actor so polite, so respectful of his colleagues.  I mean he could be...he could come on the set and not say good morning to anybody.  And some people on the crew hated him.  But I mean with Levon Helm or with Ned Beatty, with John Goodman, or with Mary Steenburgen, everybody, he was always trying to help.  With Kelly Macdonald he was--he says, Kelly, I want to help you so we can see you better.  We'll turn you there.  So I've never seen somebody so refined, so attentive, so full of admiration for the others.  I never see.  And for me the real Tommy Lee Jones is there, is not the guy who can be a bit rocky and sometimes a bit difficult, is somebody  who  — a person who contributed in the writing, to some of the best lines of the movie.  And the best scene, the fishing scene, is a scene which he himself wrote during the shooting.  I thought I was missing a scene between him and Bootsie [Steenburgen], and he said to me, 'Bertrand, what the scene should be about?'  And I said, 'About understanding.'  And two days after, he came with that scene.  On the salamander, does she know she's a salamander.  And does she understand--I mean beautiful scene.  Lovely scene. 

But the problem I had, I lost...I had a total moment of despair and I could not — I was not getting along with the editor, to a point that I didn't want to provide any ideas.  I was dry.  I became dead.  I just wanted to leave the editing room to see my friends.  There was no pleasure.  That was the first time that happened in my whole life.  And then when I went to Paris and I could have an agreement with the producer, Michael Fitzgerald, and I could start the editing of the version that is called the French version, then suddenly in four weeks — I mean it took very little time — and suddenly I found enthusiasm.  I was working with a crew which was enthusiastic, who loved what they saw.  And all the ideas which I kept every time I was trying a few of them in New Orleans and I was facing a crisis and I was...I decided to fight.  I recorded all the voiceover I'd been writing. I was listening on the phone to Tommy Lee recording it.  And Tommy Lee was like that first stage.  I've never seen somebody so good with voiceover.  The control he has of his voice, of the music of his voice.  And that was so important, the voice, because Burke's book are told in the first person and they have a rhythmic melody. 

What I found difficult in America, I found the crew are very big, I found some of the rules are so strange that it's becoming embarrassing.  I found that you have a hierarchy where people do not talk to each other, so sometimes you have a conflict because two different or two different kind of people are working on the same thing and they are not communicating.

But speaking of talent, I had some of the best people I've ever worked with. I had the best person on sound, Paul Ledford, who is a genius of sound, has been working with Stephen Soderbergh on many films. Paul is a genius.  And a lovely man. When they learned I was editing the film in Paris they sent me hours of wild sounds for me, to help me.  And when I wanted to pay them, they said 'No, Bertrand, because we had so much love working with you, so much fun, we are giving it to you' so I had wonderful people.  Wonderful.  And I gave Paul a credit, a main credit, as sound mixer. and that's a typical kind of thing when suddenly becomes something with the union. 

I mean for instance I wanted to to start my version with the credit 'This film is dedicated to Philip Noiret who loved so much the novels of James Lee Burke.'  So the WGA calls me and says, 'Bertrand, we cannot put that there; you named somebody from the WGA before your own credit.'  And all those calls, I was in Paris, were taking place between 2 and 4 in the morning.  And after 15 days I said, let's forget about that.  And that's what I found rigid.  That system, very rigid.  

Walter Bernstein, 1919-2021

Zero Mostel in The Front (Bernstein and Ritt, 1976) 

I never met Walter Bernstein, the legendary screenwriter who died last night at the age of 101 —and while his passing is of course an occasion for mourning, good for him to reaching that age — but at times, with mutual friends, I could sense his presence. Those people I knew who did know Bernstein, and brought him up in conversation, carried his wisdom and humor with them, it seemed. It made me glad he was still around.

He was credited on a lot of films and not credited on a lot of films, and putting them all together you see a lot of classics, some reliable genre pictures, and some wild cards. That’s almost invariably how it is, or how it was, for a gigging screenwriter in Hollywood, particularly in the post-World-War-II days. It’s probably no coincidence, though, that some of his best-known films were made with two directors with whom he had definite affinities of background and upbringing. There’s Fail-Safe, adapted from Eugene Burdick’s novel, directed by Sidney Lumet, another New Yorker, Jewish, tough-minded, craftsman, left-leaning, on the boisterous side at times. Fail-Safe was one of his — their — most po-faced films, but if you were alive in the time it was made you may remember it had reason to be. Sometimes as a kid I’d catch the last half-hour on television — Henry Fonda’s monologue, the description of the shriek of the melting phone, the freeze-frames of New York City that end the film — and I’d have nightmares the whole rest of the week. Bernstein had worked with Lumet several years before, on 1959’s That Kind of Woman, which had a provocative sub-theme of the kept woman, and seems to have been a Paramount attempt to beef up leading man Tab Hunter’s dramatic cred. It didn’t quite work, but it’s, as they say, interesting.

The other director was Martin Ritt, with whom Bernstein worked on three pictures, all of them worth revisiting. 1961’s Paris Blues, from Harold Flender’s novel, about American expat jazz musicians in the title burg, was meant to have the protagonists each engage in interracial romance with American tourists. As costar Sidney Poitier recounted, United Artists “chickened out” and so Paul Newman woos Joanne Woodward and Poitier gets involved with Diahann Caroll. For all that, and the fact that the movie is still sometimes dismissed as a trifle, Paris Blues has some meat on its bones. Particularly in the scenes in which Poitier’s character explains to Carroll’s why he doesn’t ever want to go back to America. (I should note here that Bernstein is one of four credited writers on the picture; the others are Irene Kamp, Jack Sher, and Lulia Rosenfeld.) One is reminded of Miles Davis’ subsequent autobiography, in which he speaks of his joy (it’s one of the few purely joyous parts of the book) of being able to walk with and hold hands and kiss Juliette Greco out in the open while living in the City of Lights. Paris Blues also gets the music, which few Hollywood pictures of the time did. Newman’s character, and his musical ambition, likely informed Scorsese and De Niro’s conception of Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York.

The Molly Maguires, from 1970, is one of the most uncompromised politically-themed pictures to come out of Hollywood, and proof that you can (could) make an undiluted statement within that context. Bernstein, a crackerjack researcher, based his story around late 19^th century labor agitation in the mines of Pennsylvania — most of whose workers were Irish immigrants. The opening scene is one of the great fake-outs in movies; what you take to be mine work is actually mine sabotage. A full 27 years before There Will Be Blood, it’s fifteen minutes before the first word of dialogue is spoken. The relationship between Sean Connery’s ringleader and Richard Harris’s undercover investigator is a lot more full-blooded, realistic, and galvanizing than the capital-labor cartoons Bertolucci would sketch with De Niro and Depardieu in 1900 seven years later.

Then there’s 1976’s The Front, a beautifully distilled piece of dramatic writing filmed with resolute dispatch and passion by Ritt. It’s the story of Bernstein’s life, or a significant portion of it, as told through someone else’s life. Woody Allen, using his nebbish persona in a more heimishe fashion than he had before or has since, plays Howard Prince, a regular guy who just happens to know a television writer who’s out of work because what we still call “the blacklist.” He finds money, a bit of fame, and ultimately, his conscience and his voice, working as a “front” for his friend, and then other writers. It’s a parable that’s also a bit of history, and its humor draws on a razor-sharp irony without being wholly dependent on it — it’s also a terribly tender movie. And Zero Mostel, a blacklist victim in real life, is heartbreaking as a doubly-washed-up performer who befriends Howard.

I imagine Bernstein must have been gratified, at the end of his script, to have Howard say to a HUAC panel something Bernstein himself was not able to say: “Go fuck yourselves.” I leave this for last because I wanted to lead off with something other than “blacklisted screenwriter,” because Bernstein was a whole lot more than that. But he was also that, and his 1996 book about that period, Inside Out, A Memoir of the Blacklist, proved that he was not only a great writer of drama but a terrific prose scribe. The two aren’t always mutually exclusive. The book is an immediate grabber. Not even twenty pages in, and Bernstein’s given you fascinating thumbnail sketches of Ben Hecht, Robert Rossen, Robert Parrish and James Dean, and fuller portraits of Ritt and Elia Kazan. Here’s a paragraph from the early part of the book: “The cold war was starting, and with it the blacklist, but it was not affecting me and, secure in wish fulfillment, I did not really believe it would. Winston Churchill had made his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. The Hollywood Ten were summoned before the House committee, but the committee members seemed only stupid; I understood their bigotry but not their power. Who, really, could be on their side? I also knew the Communist Party was no menace. After all, I belonged to it. The charge that we wanted to overthrow the government by force and violence was ludicrous. Nothing I had ever done or intended or even thought was designed for that. No one I knew in the Party even dreamed of it. Our meetings might have been less boring if they had. I took for granted that I could be both.” And the rest is just as good.

My friends who are also friends of Walter are Jay Cocks and Howard Rodman, Jr., two screenwriters who belong, with Bernstein, in the club of wonderful prose writers. (Check out Howard’s visionary novel The Great Eastern, and Jay’s moving and evocative tribute to Huey “Piano” Smith in the Greil Marcus anthology Stranded.) Whenever either man spoke of Walter in my presence, their eyes lit up in a particular way. I also had the honor, in 2019, of sharing a meal — at Harry’s Bar in Venice, yet — with Walter’s son Jake, an investigative journalist whose passion for social justice and socially pertinent writing were no doubt inspired by his father’s example. His book Secrecy World, about the Panama Papers and the various tendrils emanating from it, inspired Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat. I extend my condolences to them all, and to all who were touched by Walter and his work. And I wish I’d have met him; I’d have asked him about the movies I cite above, and also about Semi-Tough, the hilarious football picture he wrote for Michael Ritchie. And, had I gotten comfortable enough, I might have queried: “So. The Betsy. What was up with that?”

I've Got A 4K Player And I'm Gonna Use It: A Probably One-Time-Only Consumer Guide

“Real talk:” Like so many of you, I had looked forward to the PlayStation 5 for several months prior to its late fall release, and upon its late fall release, I followed a Twitter account that kept track of the stores that had it in stock (where it would stay in stock for nanosecond), I kept open tabs at Target, Best Buy, B&H, and the Sony store, and then made it a point not to “drive myself mad” by refreshing those pages constantly. Concurrent to these efforts, I began looking into 4K Ultra Blu-rays, excited (well, mildly excited) about experiencing this not-entirely-new high-definition format.

Another thing that happened in late fall is that our household took delivery of a credenza to hold our television display and electronics playback equipment. A really beautiful piece of furniture; all credit goes to My Lovely Wife Claire who commissioned it. Migrating some electronics from the mediocre-man-cave-ready vertical unit that had been mine since before getting married, it occurred to me that my setup was moderately absurd. Of course I had my beloved OPPO machine, ostensibly an all-region player that was locked on Region B for reasons I needn’t go into here. This was , alas, starting to turn obsolescent because certain labels were making Blu-rays whose bitrate went beyond what the OPPO could actually handle. This concern could be handled with a firmware update — were OPPO still a going concern that provided firmware updates for its hardware, which it’s not. In 2019 I got a super-cheap LG all-region player that was so small as to be practically portable. I think for the purpose of bringing it to this house upstate that we and some friends were renting for the Thanksgiving holiday. So that played the high-bitrate Region Bs (the first was the Eureka/Masters of Cinema Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, a handsome item indeed; and more often than not the discs from Powerhouse/Indicator have that maxed-out bitrate, even the Fu Manchu titles you’d think wouldn’t’ have enough inherent information to support such a thing, ar ar ar). And it functioned as a proper region-free player all around. So why keep the OPPO? Sentimental value, perhaps (God I’m an idiot) but also it functioned as a Super Audio CD Player, which neither the LG nor the PS4 did. Nor, I understood, would the PS5. Yes, it would play 4K Ultra discs but the CD option was one and it was plain.

Now as we know, during the 2020 holiday season, and indeed this holds of today, a PS5 was almost impossible to get. So as I refreshed my Walmart and Target and Sony tabs, and looked at the beautiful new credenza and thought that despite its capaciousness its look could benefit if every nook and cranny wasn’t supporting equipment, and I faced the fact that I had not actually attached a VIDEO GAME CONTROLLER to the PS4 in eleven years. So why was I buying a PS5, or rather, not buying a PS5 but driving myself semi-nuts waiting to buy a PS5?  

So I went to B&H (the website, dummy), did a little research, and lo and behold, found a Sony UBP-X800E 4K player, modified for all-region playback. As America’s favorite club kid Stefon would say, this player has everything. Up-to-date all-region playback at the push of a button. 4K Ultra of course. A variety of media server options. Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube access built in. AND it plays back Super Audio CDs. God is good. I packed up the PS4, controller, and the dozen games I had and shipped them to a favorite nephew (not so much for his entertainment as for that of his four kids [Jesus!]), put away the LG for Future Use While Traveling Maybe, and brought the OPPO to the electronics graveyard. And began to gorge on 4K physical media. The below capsules chronicle my earliest explorations. Future physical media Consumer Guides, if they happen at all (I mean, I assume they will, but their frequency is particularly open to question these days) will incorporate 4K discs and of course identify themselves. 4Ks are region-free by definition, by the way. Fun. For the purposes of this exercise I’ve given separate grades for movies and image.

EQUIPMENT: Sony UBP-X800E 4K Ultra BR player,  Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver, bitchin’ speakers, a really nice credenza.

The Beastmaster (Vinegar Syndrome)

Some of this looks incredibly close to what you might have seen in a theater, had you been lucky enough to see this in a theater back in 1982. Remember, despite this being “schlock,” it was lit and shot by John Alcott. He’s good. 10 minutes in and the action shots are incredible in texture and dimensionality of image. The whole thing is lots of fun. Side note: Amazing that talents like Don Coscarelli, who have a genuine feel for pulp (and ability to transpose it to film) have to make their movies guerilla style while Marvel/Disney hands franchise after franchise to fake humanist comedians with near-zero visual sense looking for a big payday. What a world.  Movie: A Image: A+

 

Beverly Hills Cop (Paramount)

Coming to America (Paramount)

Up until now I’ve never seen either of these ostensible classics in full. Not because I boycotted — I think Eddie Murphy is funny, and I like John Landis movies more than a person of my moral caliber really ought — but just because I never got around to them. As Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” played under the opening credits of Beverly Hills Cop, though, I got a bit of an idea why. Miss me with this Glenn Frey shit, dude. Especially with his white bread stylings playing over a montage of poor persons of color, as we prepare to meet the legendary Axel Foley. The movie is relatively smooth sailing after that, though. Based on multiple glimpses of individual scenes on cable, I expected Cop to be an over-lit day mare. Instead it looks like a picture shot by Bruce Surtees, which it is. Yay! Not a bad movie, but it’s no 48 Hrs. “The super cop story…was working” bit, with Murphy in his underrated quiet mode, is particularly hilarious. As for Coming to America: Hey! The production designer Richard MacDonald did all those Losey movies too. Whoa. As for the rest of the movie, it generally toggles between Comic Genius Operating On All Cylinders and Look Ma, No Story Editor! The image quality is really great. It’s almost palpable how badly the Waldorf needs a thorough sandblasting in 1998.

Beverly Hills Cop: Movie: B- Image: A+

Coming to America: Movie: B Picture: A+

The Big Lebowski (Universal)

I always considered the Blu-ray better than watchable. It’s only when doing an A/B comparison of BR and 4K that you can understand why it’s relatively poor representation of the movie. On its own, the BR looks bright, clean, smooth, somewhat digitized but not too creamy. The 4K is like the windshield has been squeegeed — better detail, less digital brightness in the interiors, a more  subtly varied color palette, revealing the BR as WAY TOO creamy. 4K is definitely the way to go here.

Movie and Image:  A+

 Blade (Warner)

Here’s another one I’ve never seen before. I like the image. One thing 4K brings to the table is really great blacks, and you can sure bet on them here. Ar ar ar. Back in the day, one video nightmare was deep reds on a black field, but check out the opening titles here, they really work. Unfortunately the movie is kind of goofy, I found. Snipes manages to ham it up while maintaining a stone face, and all the martial arts moves are corny. I’ll see what Del Toro got up to with Blade II, but I’m not encouraged. Also this movie dispenses with Traci Lords too quickly. Phooey.

Movie: B-  Image: A

Collateral (Paramount)

Pretty remarkable looking. The L.A.-by-night-in-high-def look, a postmodern noir idea for sure, is a gas. I didn’t really like it the first time I saw it, and I had to sit through a whole bunch of SHITTY SHOT-ON-DIGITAL MOVIES to really appreciate it. (Don’t ask me to list them. I saw a lot of them at Sundance I think.) The bleary semi-softness is the key —  it’s like the colors are still wet, and if you wiped your hand over the screen they’d come off on your palm. Mann and cinematographers Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron use this quality for some startling effects, including the silvery near-monochrome of the Metro Rail finale. More digital Mann on 4K, please. The movie’s solid, filled with bravura sequences and little funny touches that only happen in Mann World, like when Barry Shabaka Henry’s character saying “You ain’t shit when you’re playin’ next to Miles Davis” when just minutes before he was miming playing to the ACTUAL RECORDING of Davis’s “Spanish Key.” And Cruise is great, and more likable here as a sociopathic assassin than he is in a movie considered below.

Movie A- Image: A+

Crash (Arrow)

This is also a U.S. Criterion Blu-ray, with a superb picture and some excellent extras, including a perceptive Jessica Kiang essay and a Cronenberg commentary from the first DVD release a long time ago. The rather more elaborate Arrow release is the same Peter Suschitzky-supervised and Cronenberg approved transfer. Only in 4K, its native resolution. So what’s the difference? Well the Arrow audio is a little louder as the default. It’s a visually fascinating film, from the very beginning: the travelling shot into the airplane hangar where Deborah Kara Unger’s character is having her assignation looks like it’s in black-and-white until the camera rises and there’s a red-striped plane in the frame. Watching the Criterion version, you will certainly not feel deprived. But a 4K transfer in actual 4K is its own reward, and this edition has that. It also has a 1971 short film by J.G. Ballard himself, two excellent latter-day shorts from Cronenberg, and a whole book of essays and interviews. It’s a lot and the movie warrants it. So much so that if you can swing it, you ought to own both versions. But if you have a 4K player, this one should be a priority. And I understand the dearth of art films on 4K is for a reason — most investors in the hardware tend to be mavens of blockbuster and/or genre stuff, which is certainly reflected in the nature of most of the titles considered here.

Movie and Image: A+

Daughters of Darkness (Blue Underground)

Speaking of genre stuff, this moody, slinky 1971 film from the very (delightfully) odd Harry Kümel is art-film adjacent (the lead is a fabulously swanning Delphine Seyrig) is an erotic horror jewel for the whole family. The BR was good, but this has a definite boost in clarity — scenes bathed in a particular color (the lavender in the opening train lovemaking sequence for instance) — are not overwhelmed by that color. Makes me drool at the prospect of 4K Bava, frankly. And again, what a faboo movie. How can you not love a picture whose script features the phrase “sinister deserted caravanserai?”  

Movie and image: A+

Dawn of the Dead (Second Sight)

A supreme masterpiece gets a supreme home video treatment. Three discs with three cuts of the 1978 Romero film, and CDs of the various soundtracks too, and a book of essays and interviews.  The cuts are Romero’s U.S. theatrical, the “extended cut” (not a director’s cut but a longer version that played at Cannes and was trimmed by the director for release),and co-producer Dario Argento’s European cut (called Zombi, which is why Lucio Fulci’s film was in some markets called Zombi 2, or II, or what have you), which is shorter than the U.S. theatrical. My preferred cut is Argento’s, largely because it has the most Goblin music. But also because it’s fleet and grisly without losing any of the points Romero was making. The extended cut feels more like a “sequel” to Night of the Living Dead, because it’s score is completely library music, like the score of Night was. It’s the power of suggestive association so to speak. It’s also filled with bits, some of which don’t work all that well (for instance, the attempted hijacking of the chopper at the beginning). The theatrical cut mixes library and Goblin music and is the one you and I grew up with (I was still under 20 when it came out, totally counts). I watched all three over the course of a couple of weeks and didn’t feel at all put out or dutiful, that must say something. The new restoration is gorgeous, really puts across the thoughtfulness Romero put into this color film. Scorsese tells a story of trying to rent a print of Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann way back in the day and finding out it was in Romero’s temporary possession. You can see that movie’s influence in the opening TV studio scenes if you look carefully enough. Anyway. Essential.

Movie and image: A+

Flash Gordon (Arrow)

This mops up the floor with the Universal BR in terms of color value and detail. And the BR could not be called bad by any means. But it’s over 8 years old. Going back to the movie, which I sometimes had a rather dismissive attitude towards, I was delighted to see how much loving Méliès tribute it contains, among other things. And that, for all the Camp and faux-Camp elements it contains, director Mike Hedges keeps a pretty straight, if you’ll pardon the expression, face while staging and shooting some of the suspense set pieces, like Barin and Flash facing off in the hollow-stump ritual thingie. As other reviewers have mentioned, the magnificent detail shows off some visible matte lines, but visible matte lines ain’t no crime. Movie A- image A+ 

Gremlins (Warner)

A real improvement from the Blu-ray, right off the bat. On the earlier edition, in the opening scenes, the flushness in Hoyt Axton’s face, for instance, had something of a dupey look. The 4K smooths things out, gives the image a real boost in the “film look” department. Less of a “telecine” quality, let’s say. It’s lower key but still vivid and color, with skin tones more realistic. Movie: A Image: A+

It’s A Wonderful Life (Paramount)

I was half expecting a cream-colored digital nightmare. This is not that…but it’s not ideal either. Not by a long shot. The ice sledding scene has this shine to it that’s a weird contrast to the very subdued sepia-adjacent look of the pharmacy scene that follows.  Most will find this acceptable. And that’s kind of exactly what it is — acceptable. A perfectly pleasant image for people. The way the picture will freeze when a shot holds on a sign, for the Bailey Savings and Loan for instance, is annoying for me, because why do you need to use that kind of compression for a 4K rendering anyway? But perhaps not annoying for thee, family gathered around the home theater boisterously having popcorn or what have you. The DVD that comes with the 4K disc is a colorized version, which is low key tasteful and completely inapposite.  

Movie: A Image: B-

The New York Ripper (Blue Underground)

Zombi (Blue Underground)

House by the Cemetery (Blue Underground)

Lucio Fulci concocted some of the ugliest movies ever made — aesthetically, spiritually, epistemically, you name the category, Fulci is ugly in that category. And it’s true that one can hit these marks while not meeting Benayoun’s bar for “authentic sadistic cinema.” But Fulci’s work does also meet that bar, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Fulci’s oeuvre is authentic sadistic cinema, and hence cinema sadists must reckon with it. So here we are. The meticulous folk of Blue Underground has 4K-ed three Fulci films so far and I thought I’d watch them in reverse order of repellence. Yep, I started with 1982’s The New York  Ripper. Misogynist, quasi-pornographic, anti-sex, racist farrago of gore and grotesqueries, brimming with authentic Manhattan locations of the sleazy and not sleazy kind. I first watched it on a VHS tape, panned and scanned and with an image quality that seemed like it had been telecined from a print that had spent several months submerged in the East River itself. It was appalling. The 2019 restoration, on the highest res home format ever…is stunning, and even yields some beautiful imagery, in the same way that space can be negative. It is actually impressive how much “ick” this movie packs into nearly every second.  Not a single character save for the slob coroner is allowed a shred of dignity. 1979’s Zombi, by contrast and despite its extreme gore, is slightly less “objectionable” because it plays like what it is, a can-you-top-this genre exercise.

1981’s House by the Cemetery is pretty brisk and sometimes genuinely  atmospheric but also revels in “cheepnis” (both the budgetary and aesthetic varieties; they’re not always mutually exclusive). “It begins with a big gross out but it more restrained moving forward,” I wrote in my early note, but actually, no. It’s hella gross. And damn that is one creepy looking child actor (Giovanni Frezza), or “Italian Terror Moppet” as per Armando Munoz. More than the other two in noticeability, the House restoration has that TEAL color temperature that makes some mavens crazy. In this case it’s entirely appropriate to the content, I’d say. So okay, Blue Underground. Bring on City of the Living Dead.  

The New York Ripper: Movie: D- Image: A+

Zombi: Movie: B Image A+

The House by the Cemetery: Movie: B Image A+ 

Prince of Darkness (Shout Factory)

They Live (Shout Factory)

Two Carpenters from the late 80s, both winners in their way, and both different. Written by Carpenter under the pen name Martin Quatermass, Prince of Darkness definitely bows to the adventures of Nigel Keane’s cranky prof — unknown evil slime in a church, whatta concept. This gives you higher detail and blacker blacks than the BR. And because 4K gives you blacker blacks, this might throw of viewers into thinking certain whites are less white, as in the white on black opening credits here. BUT check out the nun’s habit  in an early scene in the actual movie and you’ll see the true whites are indeed excellent. The lighting feels subtler, and creepier. 1988’s subtle-as-a-flying-mallet societal parable They Live is always a kick. The overall  look is very B movie but a lot of the cinematic grammar is art film. The cityscapes are in very patient shots, logically constructed, with a nearly Antonioniesque detachment. And yes, the Piper/Keith fight scene lasts well beyond five minutes. Cool double bill and excellent 4K values.

Prince of Darkness: Movie and image: A

They Live: Movie: A+ Image: A 

Rad (Vinegar Syndrome)

Hal Needham completists got one step closer to heaven with this spectacular presentation of his 1986 BMX biking epic. The storyline’s corny, albeit in a nice Rocky way, the actor playing the teen hero tries to split the difference between Scott Baio and Ralph Macchio and often threatens to fall into the Baio abyss. But Lori Laughlin’s in it too! The biking stuff is great though — what we ‘philes like to call “pure cinema.” The 4K picture is remarkably crisp and vivid, particularly in the outdoor stunt scenes, which I guess kind of figures. But the improved detail doesn’t flatter the florid skin tones of veterans Ray Walston and Jack Weston, Hollywood vets in unsympathetic support roles. Ye Olde Talia Shire support role, however, is sympathetic, and she looks fine.

Movie: B+ Image: A+

Shutter Island (Warner)

4K here offers a conventional but gratifying boost. The image is a little darker, more noir; in some scenes it actually looks like the color grading itself has been slightly tweaked. Works like a charm or, given the movie’s grim bearing, a curse.

Movie and image: A+

Spider Man Into The Multiverse Spiderverse (Sony)

Like the female date in the Ultra Downy TV ad, this looks amazing. A feast of color and shade.  Also it actually feels like some kind of fucking comic book, which no live action comic book movie has come within swinging distance of since Raimi was doing the Spider Man movies.

Movie and image: A+

Suspiria (Synapse)

Looking at the Synapse BR from 2017 it’s hard to imagine it looking any more vivid from the first two minutes on. But yeah, there we go. The colors are just as insanely vivid, but there’s an added stability and solidity that make them more seductive. I remember the very first days of DVD when I wrote about them for Premiere and talked about all the compression anomalies that could come up. Like in The Exorcist, one of the very early releases on DVD: the approaching lights of the subway train were less than convincing, kind of pixelated. And here, 25 years and two format upgrades later and every taxi headlight in that rainy airport waiting area is perfect.  Early into the format the anomalies were all but unavoidable, but as the tech advanced when you saw this sort of thing it more often than not was a sign of sloppiness or cutting corners. The current technology is clearly fabulous but I’m sure there are ways of screwing it up. The people who made this disc absolutely didn’t screw it up; they applied it to its limits and made an amazing disc.  

Movie and image: A+

Tenet (Warner)

Pretty good picture! It’s not THAT hard to follow, you just have to pay attention. And I got the dialogue just fine, except for the parts I wasn’t meant to. A little po-faced, but to those who bitched that it lacks the joie de vivre of a Bond movie, have you seen a Bond movie recently? Least John David Washington isn’t playing a guilt-ridden self-torturing alcoholic. I thought the Branagh character was miscast (just because my familiarity with Branagh doing good acting with accents has been leaning toward mild contempt) and not terrifically written but overall? A romp! And beautifully shot. And the disc looks (and sounds) remarkable.

Movie: A- Image: A+

Top Gun (Paramount)

I don’t want to sound like a weepy old bolshy but this war mongering advertisement for the military-industrial complex is still a horrible movie about horrible people doing horrible things, and it rubs your face in that fact every minute. The critic Esther Zuckerman called The Wolf of Wall Street “a Douchebag’s Handbook;” well, this was the 1985 Young Republican’s Handbook and it’s still in play, and it’s responsible for a lot more material damage.  Sure, it is fast-moving and “exhilaratingly” outlandish in its action. And Tom Cruise’s performance is superb; you really just want to strangle him in the first ten minutes. (Poor Kelly McGillis, playing a character who actually wants to sleep with this sociopath.). Anyway, the 4K is a mild but noticeably boost on the BR. And looks amazing.

Movie: Too gross to grade. Image: A+

Total Recall (Lionsgate)

As Robert Harris has pointed out this is a pretty janky-looking movie to begin with. Possibly by design, given the prerogatives of the frequently perverse director. I mean, consider the idea of Mars in this movie being the supposed real world, but looking like a papier mâché futuristic Coney Island of the mind. It’s funny. And honestly I kind of love how it looks, it’s total B-movie shit. Also: “Get your ass to Mars” is one of my favorite lines of movie dialogue ever, the movie delights in fantastic gratuitous touches like THE DEATH OF JONNY CAB, the bar-cum-sex club The Last Resort is the R-rated Mos Eisely Cantina, etc., etc. I dunno, I think it’s just all kind of irresistible.  

Movie and Image: A

The Wizard of Oz (Warner)

The boost is slight but real. Watching the 4K version I really started noticing how technically wonky it is, if you care about that sort of thing. This movie has more “bad cuts” than Goodfellas! Look at what happens when she leaves the house and steps into Munchkinland, her arm positioning is all over the place! But it’s The Wizard of Oz. So.

Movie and Image: A+

Newly Released Audio recordings I enjoyed in 2020

In more or less the order I heard them. 

Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Orchestra: Ancestral Echoes: The Covina Sessions 1976 (Dark Tree)

Tapscott was an inspired pianist and a staggering composer and bandleader. It's both amazing and not at all amazing that he's not better known, but if you yearn for 100-proof spiritual jazz this will be your bag. 

Brandon Seabrook with  Gerard Cleaver and Cooper-Moore: Exultations (Astral Spirits)

Guitarist Seabrook's prior outing was called Convulsionaries and the change of backing players suggests a change of mood/mode (Cooper-Moore is an often ebullient player). Still pretty galvanic.

Bill Laswell: Against Empire (Method of Defiance)

This falls on the more anodyne end of the Laswell spectrum but it still sticks to the ribs. Members of its all-star cast include Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, and Jerry Marotta, but given Laswell's enthusiasm for aural montage I don't believe they all convened together in an approximation of a Rudy Van Gelder session. 

Henry Kaiser: Problems Are Only Opportunities In Dress Clothes (Fractal)

Some typically bracing HK soloing on a record that his label offered as a free add-on to shoppers at varied forward-looking retailers, as a way to spur business. 

Tisziji Muñoz: Drop Dead (MRI)

The healer (and Paul Schaffer's favorite free musician) gets a little brutal. 

Not Two…but twenty (Not Two)

The excellent European label chronicles the products of a live fest celebrating its 20th anniversary

Milford Graves and Don Pullen: The Complete Yale Concert, 1966 (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

As cosmic as its artist teaming suggests.

Ivar Grydeland and Henry Kaiser: In the Arctic Dreamtime (Rune Gramofon)

Chilled genius.

Sam Rivers Trio: Ricochet (No Business)

Fronting a trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul supporting, Rivers plays a variety of instruments over the course of one long improvised set. This is a musician who resets your expectations every time you hear him.

Threadbare: Silver Dollar (No Business)

An energetic trio juggling practices from the trad, the free and the fusion. 

Ikue Mori, Phew, YoshimiO: I.P.Y. (Tzadik)

You know their names. Their concept of space music is exhilarating.

Terje Rypdal: Conspiracy (ECM)

A surprisingly ripping quartet date from the always stimulating guitar god.

Code Girl: Artlessly Falling (Firehouse 12)

Mary Halvorson stretches electric guitar language with a tone both crystal-clear and elastic. With the band Code Girl she stretches the art song. On this perfect album she brings on Robert Wyatt to sing a few of the tunes. Moving and magnificent.

Harvey Gold: It’s Messy Vol. 1 (Smog Veil)

An Electric Love Supreme  (Cuneiform)

Henry Kaiser and Vinny Golia are the lead voices for the most part; Wayne Peet brings some Larry Young to the concept; drummer John Hanrahan shakes some action; and Watt from Pedro on bass is both in the pocket and around the world. 

The Underflow (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

Horn and electronics men Mats Gustafson and Rob Mazurek meet David Grubbs for something they all clearly found exhilarating: while the voices are recognizable, the pieces are rather different from what I'm accustomed to hearing from them.

Thumbscrew: The Anthony Braxton Project (Cuneiform)

The trio of Mary Halvorson, Mark Furmanek and Tomas Fujiwara pay tribute to a teacher, mentor, and collaborator and provide an iteration of his music both tidy and labyrinthine.

Schnellertollermeier: 5 (Cuneiform)

Imagine Polyrock without the keyboards and vocals, then think more austere. That's KIND of what this is like, but not quite. But if that description made you curious, you ought to check this out

Ray Russell: Fluid Architecture (Cuneiform)

On the fusion end of the Russell spectrum, and pretty great. 

Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley: Being Astral and All Registers/Power of Two (Discus)

There have been a couple of Taylor/Oxley recordings issued recently, and this is my favorite. But all of them are worth having. 

What keeps authors awake at night

Writing a book and having it published by a prominent house is a generally pleasant experience, to put it mildly. Having your book get a warm reception from reviewers and readers, which my book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas mostly has, is also nice. Selling well is…well I don’t want to repeat myself. My first Author’s Statement comes in January and since my editor has already told me that the book “exceeded expectations” I’m looking forward to good news, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The downside of this multi-level experience is knowing where you screwed up and temporarily having limited means to do anything about it. A few errors made it into the first printings of Made Men; they all ought to be fixed by now, as we go into (I think) a third printing. But having made them  in the first place stings, especially when I think of the people involved in the movie, who’ll be reading, and who’ll spot them, and whose confidence in me as a chronicler of their work will be at least slightly undermined. (And yes, I do appreciate how they let down the lay reader as well.)

How do these things happen? Actually, it’s too easy. Mostly through a combination of simple human  error coupled with over-confidence. And what you come up with after you’ve read something over and over again, and are kind of semi-automatically going back to the text for what you think is a thorough tidying up, when in fact what you’re actually doing is a robotic (as in mechanical, not as in laser-focused) pantomime of proof-reading. Your eyes see, but you don’t think through what you’re seeing. An error that’s been in place for some time starts to register as “right’ just because you’ve scanned it so many times and come to accept it as a reality.

One of the Made Men reviewers on Amazon slammed me for two errors that they found early in the book: my misidentifying The King of Comedy as a 1984 film when in fact it was released in 1982, and my placing “Smooth Criminal” on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album as opposed to his Bad album, on which it actually appears, and whose title track was made into a video by Martin Scorsese from a Richard Price story and script. This was a bit of a “gotcha” moment for me, in the privacy of my imagination at least, because it tipped me off that the reviewer was basing his slam on the bound uncorrected galley proofs, which are announced in a circle on the front cover as uncorrected galley proofs for a reason — they’re not corrected. So this guy had definitely not made an “Authorized Amazon Purchase,” phooey [author mimes spitting at the floor]. Because for the final version, the release year of King of Comedy was changed to the correct one. Except, uh-oh, the Thriller error remained intact.

Later on in the book, writing about movies with pop song soundtracks, I compare Mean Streets and American Graffiti and glibly state “While both acknowledged as classics today, neither Mean Streets nor American Graffiti were box-office blockbusters.” While Graffiti was a little slow out of the gate — it became what used to be called a “sleeper hit,” something that the subsequent mutations of the film exhibition industry made a practical near-impossibility — it of course was a box-office blockbuster, the third highest-grossing film of the year. You like to think that you check every factual assertion you make, but you don’t. That’s why fact-checkers were invented. But fact-checkers are thin on the ground these days. I’m not making excuses. The point is, the “facts” you don’t check, because you think you know, will bite you on the ass every time. 

People like to bat around that F. Scott Fitzgerald observation (did he even really say this? I’m not so certain anymore, and who can really state with certainty that he did?) that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” As it happens, then, maybe having a “first-rate intelligence” has more in common with being an idiot than was heretofore believed. Because, you know, here I am, writing about Scorsese’s video for “Bad,” writing about Joe Pesci’s appearance in the Michael Jackson film Moonwalker, which is largely tied in with Bad, and I’m nevertheless identifying “Smooth Criminal” as having appeared on Thriller. And later on, there I am talking about how American Graffiti was sufficiently popular to inspire the sitcom Happy Days, and then I state it wasn’t a box-office blockbuster.

These goofs have been fixed, but it’s embarrassing to have them in a first edition, and those are not the only ones. At one point I cite the girl-group The Ronettes when I mean the girl-group The Crystals. I misspell “Bufalino” as “Buffalino.” For a little while after the book went into hardcover all I could see were the errors, and I started to hate the book. I had to pull myself back to something I told myself after I submitted the manuscript, which was that absolute perfection was an unlikely outcome. I still would have liked to come a lot closer to that than I did with the first printing.

Oh, and there’s another side to this: what did not make it in. I recently got an e-mail from a reader who was rather perturbed that I did not cite the obvious antecedent to Goodfellas’ “meet the gang” Steadicam shot, that is, a similar characters-address-the-camera bit in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni. The thing is, I had. In my manuscript of the book’s fourth chapter, a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie (a favorite with some readers, a source of “I already know what happens in the movie” complaint for some others), I wrote this:

Liotta’s voiceover accompanies an elaborate tracking shot.  The inspiration here is the opening (post credits) shot of Federico Fellini’s 1953 I Vitelloni, which moves across a boardwalk restaurant and introduces three of its main characters, in less than a minute. But Scorsese goes bigger than Fellini, giving us 10 characters in less time,  in a Steadicam shot that goes on for a little more than 60 seconds.

In the finished book, the passage goes “Liotta’s voice accompanies an involved Steadicam shot. There’s an overtly theatrical feel somehow…” etc. That sentence about the theatrical feel kicks off a new paragraph in the manuscript featuring the citation of the Fellini film. I’ve gone over the notes and drafts and PDFs of various versions and I still can’t suss out how the passage got dropped. It should be restored some time in the future.

What have we learned here? As I embark on a new book, I’ve made some new rules for myself that I’m not going to mention here because that sort of revelations tends to solicit reactions such as “you mean you DIDN’T do [X]?” and or solicit suggestions as to what I ought to do, which I think should be confined to my immediate circle of project collaborators, no offense. Mainly I have a new appreciation of something I thought I already knew, which has to do with how you can never be too careful, and what you owe to the reader. I have been told many times over by readers how much they enjoyed the book and how much they got out of it, so I know to some extent in the larger scheme of things they haven’t been let down. But I also know that I can’t snicker at another author writing that Max von Sydow played the role of Death in The Seventh Seal as vigorously as I once might have.