Less Hat, Moorhead

BROOM AT THE TOP

2012-03-05T15:18:00.001-08:00

Sunday The Kid got to go visit a pal while The Wife & I & two friends had the chance to see the national tour of Wicked at Gammage Auditorium in Tempe. I had never seen the show, the story of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West & her long, complicated, love-hate-betrayal-&-bonding relationship with Glenda the Good, adapted, loosely, from Gregory Maguire’s densely imagined novel.

Simply as slick theatrical spectacle, it’s among the best I’ve ever seen—from the opening seconds, where we see the Winged Monkeys capering acrobatically around the clockwork set, presided over by a huge stylized dragon, it’s like watching a Melies movie come to life. I was surprised, however, by how much I liked the show not just as theatre, but as music & drama. The score is of the contemporary rousing-belt sort, & the lyrics are often very clever, while the story cheekily debunks simplistic, fairy-tale ideas of good & evil.

Subtextually, it’s really about the price that modern women pay, & the empowerment they can receive, by embracing the choice not to be conventionally “nice”—a more accurate title for the show might be Bitchy. But in light of the current debates on the Right even in this country, it should be said that such choices for women clearly are still regarded as wicked.

Anyway, great show; go see it if you get the chance. The Gammage run continues through March 11; click here for more info.

COP TO BOTTOM

2012-03-03T02:08:00.001-08:00

The movie isn’t much fun, but Woody Harrelson is brilliant in Rampart. He plays Dave Brown, an unraveling Los Angeles cop in 1999, the height of the notorious Rampart Scandal. From the outside, Dave looks like a cocksure archetype of the LAPD at its formidable worst: Crooked, vicious, racist, arrogant, obsessively macho, reflexively self-justifying.

But Harrelson also lets us see how Dave sees himself—as a roguish, vigilante hero—& how his intensity & sexual confidence suck others, women especially, into sharing & enabling this delusion, at least temporarily. His smile is both boyish & predatory, & he speaks with a deliberate, jaunty verbosity, provided in part by James Ellroy, who wrote the script with director Oren Moverman. The movie is a bit like a west coast version of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, with a more specific psychology & social context & minus the Catholic guilt & mysticism. For better & worse, it’s Bad Lieutenant done a la Robert Altman.

Dave Brown feels that his name is too prosaic for a person as remarkable as he thinks he is, but he has a more distinctive nickname: In the department he’s called “Date-Rape,” because he coyly declines to confirm or deny having killed a man known to be a serial date rapist. Early on, we see him bully a (female) rookie & beat up a suspect, then do a full-on Rodney King to a guy who collides with his car & then flees. Later, we’re clearly shown his capacity for murder, not to mention robbery.

He justifies all this brutality with claim that he never hurts any good people. He also uses the familiar line, beloved of racists everywhere, that because he hates everybody he somehow can’t be a racist; he cites his willingness to sleep with black women as further evidence of this.

Some of the most successful scenes in Rampart, however, are concerned not with Dave’s work but with his eyebrow-raising home life. He’s been married, consecutively, to sisters (Cynthia Nixon & Anne Heche), & has one daughter with each, & they all live together, though the exes want him gone so they can get on with their lives. Despite frequent absences for sex with other women, including Robin Wright as a self-loathing lawyer, Dave refuses to move out—his role as paterfamilias is essential to his heroic self-image.

The cast of Rampart is stellar—in addition to the aforementioned, it includes Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, Ice Cube, Ben Foster & Audra McDonald—& they give fine performances, but they have the feel of cameos in a vehicle for Harrelson.

For about half the film’s length, his magnetism keeps it morbidly riveting. But Ellroy & Moverman haven’t shaped the material for a climactic payoff. We’re just expected to stare at the last few loops of this guy’s downward spiral, & it grows very tedious. Even though I felt a certain repulsed pity for Dave, I also began to strenuously wish that someone would put him out of our misery, & his own.

GREEN GEM

2012-03-02T01:02:00.000-08:00

For those unfamiliar with The Lorax, the 1971 children’s book on which the new film Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax is based: It’s an environmentalist parable told by a mysterious character called The Once-ler. Once an industrialist, The Once-ler is now a recluse living in a wasteland of his own making. He & his family chopped down the entire forest of truffula trees, the tufts of which he used to make “thneeds,” a multi-use consumer product vaguely like a Snuggie.

Throughout the story, the Once-ler repeatedly ignores the warnings of The Lorax, a gnomic forest being who looks like a mustachioed orange throw-pillow & irritably advocates on behalf of the trees & the ecosystems they support, which include such cuties as Brown Bar-ba-loots & Swomee Swans. In the new, computer-animated film, he’s voiced by Danny DeVito, while Ed Helms speaks for the Once-ler.

Dr. Seuss, aka Ted Geisel, might be my pick for the finest narrative poet of the 20th Century, at least in English. His power comes not only from his exuberant, often nonsensical rhymes, but also from his rhythms—the lift & sweep & beauty of his cadences, & the thrilling declarative punch they give to his assertions: “‘Mister,’ he said with a sawdusty sneeze/‘I am The Lorax. I speak for the trees/I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues/And I’m asking you sir, at the top of my lungs…’”

Dr. Seuss was wise to make The Lorax a cantankerous, curmudgeonly sort; he knew that railing against consumerism is typically a loser’s game, & that those who speak for the trees tend to grow strident & tiresome, even though they may remain lovable. Conservative commentators have complained that The Lorax is environmentalist propaganda, which it certainly is, but it isn’t simpleminded propaganda.

The book may have depth, but what a movie needs is breadth. Like Dr. Seuss’ other books, The Lorax, very much by design, doesn't have it. So it fell to screenwriters Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (Despicable Me) & directors Chris Renaud & Kyle Balda to stretch & embellish—to pad, in other words—the material to feature length.

Thus we get songs—pretty good ones—& an elaborate backstory set in Thneedville, an airtight plastic paradise in which all the trees & grass are artificial & in which fresh air is purchased from a villain named O’Hare (Rob Riggle). A boy named Ted (Zach Efron) wants to find a real tree to give to a girl he likes, Audrey (Taylor Swift); on the advice of his spirited Grandmother (Betty White) Ted becomes The Once-ler’s auditor.

Whether or not what I’ve just described can truly be called Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, the movie is lively for kids & witty for adults. The trouble, of course, is that far more than the book, it’s an unabashed product of the very cultural mindset that it criticizes.

Toward the end, Ted, Audrey & the Grandmother race to plant the last truffula tree in the center of town, where everybody can see it, while the sinister O’Hare & his goons try to stop them. But in our world, there’s no shortage of public acknowledgments of the need for saner environmental policy, & in the movie, as in our world, there’s little sense of what the citizens of Thneedville (Thneedvillians?) would have to give up to make things better.

Obviously a fable for children can’t, & shouldn’t, attempt to account for all of these real-world complexities. But it shouldn’t be disingenuous about them, either. The screening I saw of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax was held at a futuristic-looking multiplex at an enormous, brightly-colored outdoor shopping center that doesn’t look very different at all from Thneedville. Before it was a mall, it was a landfill site that had spent 20 years on the EPA’s Superfund list. Somewhere back there, before all us Once-lers arrived, it must have been pristine desert.

GOOD & BRAD

2012-03-01T01:08:00.014-08:00

RIP to Davy Jones of The Monkees—& arguably The Wife’s first love—passed on too young at 66.

One more quick Oscar note: Sunday evening’s show featured talking heads of famous people discussing their earliest movie memories. Brad Pitt recalled being taken to see a movie featuring “a good Gargantua and a bad Gargantua,” & that the good Gargantua had to sacrifice himself at the end. He’s thinking, of course, of the 1966 Japanese kaiju film War of the Gargantuas (Furankenshutain no Kaiju: Sanda tai Gaira; released in the US in 1970), a vague sequel to 1965’s Frankenstein Conquers the World.

So, for inspiring Mr. Pitt with his selflessness…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the honor to Sanda…

…the brownish, mountain-dwelling “Good Gargantua,” who does battle for humanity's sake with his greenish, sea-dwelling, people-gobbling brother Gaira…

…in that movie. I was taken to it by my long-suffering Mom, for all I know on the same day as Pitt (he’s only about a year younger than I am, which is probably why I’m often mistaken for him), & I remember it spooked me slightly more than the Japanese monster pictures usually did. Accidental byproducts of Frankenstein-ian experiments in the earlier film, these shaggy anthropoids with their ugly ogre-ish faces & their Cain & Abel dynamic, plus the goriness of Gaira’s eating habits, combined to make this one grimmer & nastier than the typical Godzilla fare.

Also, there’s the matter of this horrible song, which has been occupying space in my cranium for four decades…

OSCARS, THE GROUCHES

2012-02-27T19:48:00.001-08:00

A couple of Oscar notes: The verdict online appears to be that last night’s show sucked, sucked, sucked, or at best that it was boring. This is the usual verdict any more, & I don’t think it has much to do with the quality of the show (except for last year’s, which got particularly venomous notices).

Over the last twenty years, the hosting duties have been given to a variety of comedic geniuses—Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin—most of whom have been declared failures. I liked them all (I thought Martin was especially funny). All of them have been found wanting by comparison to Billy Crystal, who hosted the show for the 9th time last night. But when he’s hosted, he too has usually been found wanting by plenty of viewers.

I think that the petulant response that so many contemporary fans have to most Oscar telecasts in recent years has more to do with the show failing to give them the sense of giddy excitement that it did when they were kids. Last night’s show did kind of suck, & it was kind of boring, but my suspicion is that Oscar shows always have been—they’ve always represented the lamest of a species of self-consciously old-fashioned variety show, & that’s what we want. We want to hate the Oscars, & we’d hate them even more if they were somehow made “modern.” We’d probably hate them most of all in the unlikely event that they ever were a couple of tightly-paced hours of really first-rate entertainment.

I thought that Crystal, maybe the last of the comedians who sees doing a song-&-dance number as a routine part of his job rather than something for which he should get extra credit, managed his duties last night excellently, more relaxed & confident than he’s been in some past years. The Cirque de Soleil number was impressive, & I also loved this short sketch with Bob Balaban, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Christopher Guest & Jennifer Coolidge about a focus group for The Wizard of Oz, although I understand that it was poorly received...

When Crystal said “Weren’t they hilarious?” afterwards, many (likely similar) people online were quick to reply “No.”

The only remotely surprising win of the night, I thought, was Meryl Streep’s for The Iron Lady. It was a pleasant surprise—the movie was thin & weak apart from her, but that performance was sensational.

My gripe this year, as so often, was with the necrology. It was cool that George Kuchar was included, but here’s a list, compiled with the help of some friends, of those omitted: Harry Morgan, Charles Napier, Jeff Conaway, Sid Melton, Yvette Vickers, Tura Satana, Zina Bethune & Zalman King, among others.

You could quibble about some of these, maybe, but…no Harry Morgan? Really?

GOOD MOON ON THE RISE

2012-02-24T22:56:00.002-08:00

Happy Oscar weekend everybody!

As an aesthetic or meritocratic measure, the Oscars are a travesty of course, & always have been. Probably all contests based on subjective judgment of artistic work are travesties. Probably back at the City Dionysia in 442 BC, somebody was muttering “Look, Antigone was good, I just don’t think it was the play of the year. I think they just figure they owe Sophocles after he got hosed on Oedipus Rex.”

Travesty or not, the Oscars are usually good for a laugh or two, & they do often honor good movies. Last week a friend of mine mentioned on facebook that she & her husband were watching one of their favorite movies: “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”

Ah, Moonstruck.

The Wife & I count this movie, which turns 25 this year, as one of our favorites as well. Oscar liked it, too: It won for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, & Best Screenplay.

In Moonstruck’s main plot, woman falls in love with her fiancé’s estranged brother. In the subplot, an aging, successful businessman cheats on his wife. To someone who’d never seen the film, that description might sound more like the basis for a sordid, Arhur Miller-ish melodrama with a violent, tragic ending than a warm, eccentric romantic comedy.

Part of Moonstruck’s achievement is that it manages to be both romantic & fiercely honest about love. The fickleness, the brevity, the irrationality, & the wide streak of selfishness that characterize even the grandest amores are fully acknowledged, & cheerfully mocked, & yet somehow the movie convinces us of love’s transcendence. Plus, it’s one of the funniest films of the ‘80s.

The story centers on a Loretta Castorini (Cher), an Italian-American widow pushing 40. An accountant, she lives in a palatial house in Brooklyn, exquisitely shot by cinematographer David Watkin, with her gloomy father Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), an affluent plumber, & her gloomier mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis). Gloomiest of all is her grandfather (Feodor Chalaipin), who moves around in a wake of small dogs—the only time joy registers on his face is when he gets them to howl at the moon.

Loretta agrees to marry her dull, pleasant boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello), who by her own admission she likes but doesn’t love, before he leaves for Italy & the deathbed of his vociferous, energetic mother. While he’s away, Loretta goes to invite his brother Ronnie (Nicolas Cage) to the wedding, & the two fall immediately in love. Meanwhile, Rose struggles with the awareness that Cosmo is cheating on her.

That’s the plot, but it does no justice to the richness of the movie, which works on a surprisingly broad canvas, with minor characters ranging from Loretta’s customers to Cosmo’s, Ronnie’s coworkers, the waiters at the restaurants, or random passersby like the vitriolic old crone with whom Loretta has an odd exchange at the airport. In formal terms, the resolution of the plot is a bit of an anticlimax, really, but while you’re watching the movie it’s comedic bliss, & utterly satisfying.

Indeed, this is one of those rare & precious movies where everything somehow went improbably right. Cher did her best work as an actress in Moonstruck, & Cage probably had his finest hour here, too. But the supporting actors & bit players are sublime without exception—in particular Louis Guss & Julie Bovasso as Loretta’s Aunt & Uncle, & John Mahoney as a coed-loving college professor who happens into dinner with Rose & wistfully discovers the pleasure of a mature woman’s company.

The director, Norman Jewison, did fine work before & after this film, but nowhere else showed this flawless a touch. John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the Oscar-winning, highly quotable script, has never topped it—most of his subsequent work has been brilliant in flashes but badly uneven. But Moonstruck’s dialogue, for all its idiosyncratic poetry, still sounds blunt & natural in the mouths of these actors. The happy irony is that this celebration of love’s glorious imperfection is, in itself, pretty much a perfect movie.

JUMPIN' DRAC FLASH

2012-02-23T00:27:00.000-08:00

If for no other reason than that it’s celebrating its 40th anniversary…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the title character in Dracula A.D. 1972, released by the UK’s Hammer Films in the title year.

This was Hammer’s attempt to give a “mod” spin to their Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula series. It opens in 1872 (long before the 1897 date of the Stoker novel) with Van Helsing (Cushing) & Dracula (Lee) fighting it out again on an out-of-control carriage. It ends badly for both of them—the Count meets the business end of a broken wheel spoke.

But a century later, after the opening credits, a Drac disciple with the rock-star-like name of Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame, looking insufferably pouty & Byronic) leads a group of thrill-seeking Chelsea hippies in an unholy ceremony in the ruin of a church, & succeeds in re-integrating the vampire prince, who is particularly ungrateful & entitled about it: When his young benefactor says “I summoned you,” he snaps “It was my will.” Typical freakin’ aristocrat.

I watched this for the first time in decades this past weekend, & was struck by how very little Lee was given to do in the film—with the title, one might hope for psychedelic party scenes of the Count mingling with the Mods, but except for the fight in the prologue, Lee, who’s top-billed, spends all of his brief footage in the wrecked church—to which Johnny A. dutifully delivers him such delectable snacks as Caroline Munro, Marsha Hunt & Stephanie Beacham, in return for an equal lack of gratitude—& speaks only a handful of lines. Cushing, as a modern Van Helsing, does the expository heavy lifting.

All that being said, the film is fun early-‘70s artifact, & it features an appearance by the American rock ensemble Stoneground. They perform, in an hilarious scene early on, at an upper-crust party that’s been crashed by decadent hippies, to the elaborate scandalized horror of the guests.

SMALL WORLD

2012-02-17T01:19:00.000-08:00

Even if, like me, you’re not an especially big fan of the Japanese anime style, don’t miss The Secret World of Arrietty. We’re only in February, but I would have to have an outstanding year at the movies indeed for this 2-D animated feature from Japan’s Studio Ghibli not to be somewhere on my 2012 top ten list.

The film is a loose adaptation, & perhaps a deepening, of Mary Norton’s 1952 British children’s book The Borrowers, by Hayao Miyazaki, the genius behind the 2001 masterpiece Spirited Away & other extraordinary Studio Ghibli works. On Arrietty, Miyazaki is credited as screenwriter & “planner”; the director, making his feature debut, is Hiromasa Yonebayashi.

The Borrowers of the original title are a race of insect-sized people who reside inside the walls or under the floorboards of human houses & survive by making sorties into the house proper to “borrow” tiny, unnoticeable amounts of whatever they need—a sugar cube, maybe, or a pin—from their human hosts, to whom they refer as “beans.” Our adolescent heroine Arrietty lives in bourgeois comfort with her taciturn father Pod & her hysteria-prone mother Homily beneath a closet in a lovely home in the Tokyo suburbs.

Arrietty (voiced, in the U.S. version, by Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler) has a taste for adventure that outstrips her caution with regard to a cardinal rule of the Borrower lifestyle: Never being seen by humans. Shawn (David Henrie, another Disney Channel favorite), a sensitive human boy who’s been sent to stay with relatives in the house while he waits to have heart surgery, becomes aware almost at once of Arrietty’s existence, & thus of her family’s. The ensuing tale hinges on the guarded bond that develops between them.

The Secret World of Arrietty doesn’t have the epic, preternatural grandeur of Spirited Away or some of the other Ghibli stunners, but I think that for this very reason it may please Western audiences even more, in some ways, than those films. The scale of the story makes Arrietty less ambitious & more delicate, but also more direct & focused, & perhaps more conventionally charming (& also, for younger kids, less scary).

Still, Miyazaki & Yonebayashi fill the movie with dazzling touches—the enormity of the teardrops that form in Borrower eyes, or the tea drops that fill their miniscule cups, the insects that routinely cross Arrietty’s path or the pillbug that rolls up when she idly picks it up, the way the sound of a rustling shirt is used to give a sense of Shawn’s colossal size—that leave us wide-eyed. Arrietty is richly imagined, funny, high-spirited, exciting, suspenseful & touching, yet also blessedly quiet. It’s pure fantasy, yet intensely in tune with the natural world. It’s deeply refreshing.

RIP to dancer & actress Zina Bethune, killed at 66 in a horrifying traffic accident in Los Angeles (possibly a hit-&-run; the initial police reports are uncertain), & to Mets & Expos great Gary Carter, departed at just 57.

Cancel your Saturday night plans—Your Humble Narrator is slated to be a guest at 7 p.m. tomorrow on 9.23 KTAR's The Jay Lawrence Show, along with my pal & Phoenix Film Critics Society colleague David Ramsey, to talk movies with the redoubtable Jay.

FEAR OF THE CAT

2012-02-16T01:07:00.000-08:00

“Monster” is often a relative term—a perfectly ordinary creature can become a monster depending on your perspective. The inches-high heroine of The Secret World of Arietty, the animated Japanese film opening in the U.S. tomorrow, is confronted by a normal-sized cat who, to her, is a terrifying gargantuan (though her ultimate relationship to the animal is more complex).

Similarly…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the titular protagonist of Jack Arnold’s superb 1957 sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man sees his pet turn from an ordinary housecat into, well, this week’s honoree…

You can watch our hero’s encounter with the titanic tabby, here.

CUPIDITY

2012-02-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

VALENTINE TWELVE

A dozen Februarys come and gone
Beneath a bright September-mocking sun,
A dozen times the smirking archer's drawn,
And in those dozen shots, he's missed on none.
No other piercing of my hapless heart,
No dark and jealous pet, no sultry toy,
No cauterizing wealth, no salve of art,
Can bleed from it my surging, stinging joy.
This earth, by definition, is mundane,
And doles out wonders sip by stingy sip,
And from this liquor, sobers us with pain—
But I live in my wonder's constant grip.
These February wounds I yearly feel
Apparently take thirteen months to heal.

SOMETIMES BARD IS BAD

2012-02-12T21:46:00.000-08:00

Your Humble Narrator missed the screening of Anonymous last October, & didn’t catch up with the film during its brief theatrical run. I wrote a column summarizing my thoughts about the premise it dramatizes—that the works attributed to Shakespeare were secretly written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, with Shakespeare as a front, & that this was covered up for various political & personal reasons.

Ludicrous as I think this idea to be, I was nonetheless very curious to see if Anonymous might be a fun movie on its own terms. Last week it came out on DVD & PPV, & I got my chance to find out.

The film, directed by Roland Emmerich from a script by John Orloff, is a really crazy Renaissance fever-dream. Though the class & academic snobberies from which I believe the Oxfordian “theory” arises are the tale’s unmistakable subtext, it’s hard for me to imagine even a staunch Oxfordian thinking much of the case it makes, since Emmerich & Orloff ignore history at every turn.

Rather than offering even a partial list of its nonsense, suffice to say that, even aside from any speculation about Shakespeare’s authorship, the film shows no more interest in historical accuracy about the Tudor period than, say, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds showed toward the history of WWII. Taking such liberties is, of course, a perfectly acceptable convention in period drama—for the most obvious example, it was Shakespeare’s own method in his history plays. But it seems an odd approach for a movie that claims setting the historical record straight as its mission.

Aside from any issue of accuracy, the plot, built on the idea that Oxford & Elizabeth I were longtime lovers, is overlong & overcomplicated. But for all that, I quite enjoyed Anonymous. This shouldn’t be mistaken for a recommendation, except to other fanatical (& thick-skinned) Shakespeare geeks for whom even a curio like this has its appeal. It’s a pretty bad movie, I suppose, but it’s a well-made movie, with an absurdly distinguished cast.

Rhys Ifans, with his handsome high forehead & his troubled eyes, is effective as Oxford, wisely not trying to make him likable—the Earl is an imperious & bitter sort, but with a quick, observant mind. Vanessa Redgrave & Joely Richardson are both beguiling as different vintages of Elizabeth, Sebastian Armesto makes an improbably self-effacing Ben Jonson, & Mark Rylance actually gets to do a bit of classical stage acting as Henry Condell.

But these are only a few examples of the fine work done by the huge cast. The actors skulk around the loving recreation of late-Elizabethan London in doublets & tights, murmuring exposition at each other, & if you’re a sucker for this sort of thing, as I am, there’s a decent chance you’ll be amused. Also, laborious as the plot may be, its final twist, though silly & unsavory, is at least a juicy humdinger.

What I most enjoyed about Anonymous, however, was, oddly, its depiction of the “real” Shakespeare. Played rather likably by Rafe Spall, this version of ol’ Will is a Dickensian knave, not just a fraud but a drunken, whoring lout, a vain buffoon, a blackmailer, & even a thuggish cutthroat—it’s implied he murders Christopher Marlowe for threatening to reveal his secret (some six years after poor Marlowe had already died in a barfight).

I couldn’t help but find something perversely endearing in this very posthumous & ineffectual attempt at character assassination. I think it reveals the psychological heart of the Authorship Controversy: The envious resentment that we mediocrities may feel when confronted by an unassailably superior talent—especially a talent who had the nerve not to go to college.

The urge to paint Shakespeare as this movie does isn’t very different, perhaps, than the urge of an underachieving student to doodle obscenely on the face of the valedictorian in the yearbook. It’s outrageous, of course, but—especially at this historical distance—it’s too human to be truly offensive. Shakespeare can take it.

FILING A BRIEF

2012-02-11T22:44:00.000-08:00

My pal Barry Graham has started a new Tumblr, Desert Noir, featuring very very short noir stories. I’m proud to be his first guest contributor, you can read my story “Haircut,” all three sentences of it, here.

RIP to Peter Breck of The Big Valley, among many other credits, departed at 82, & to Whitney Houston, passed on way too young at 48. I was no particular fan, but thinking of the radiantly lovely young woman with the air-raid siren voice that she was in her heyday in the ‘80s, & then of the sick old lady she turned into before she was fifty, makes me bitterly sad.

CLEANUP ON ISLE 2

2012-02-10T02:17:00.000-08:00

The sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D is titled Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. The pun built into the title is the whole of the movie’s verbal cleverness—it’s been a while since you’ve seen a movie, even a kids’ movie, with dialogue this corny & insipid. Fortunately, there are visual pleasures to make up for it.

Big, beefy Brendan Fraser being unavailable this time, the big beefy duties went to Dwayne Johnson, here the stepfather of the sullen kid (Josh Hutcherson), from the first film. The two of them end up stranded, along with a comic-relief helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman) & his cute daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), on an island of wonders somewhere near Palau, hidden behind a permanent waterspout. The boy’s adventurous grandfather is already there, played by Michael Caine—or, to put it more accurately, Michael Caine was paid to smile good-naturedly & speak the role’s lines.

The island was an inspiration, we are told, not only for Verne’s The Mysterious Island but also for Stevenson’s Treasure Island & apparently both Lilliput & Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels—its residents include elephants the size of terriers & bees the size of ponies. Dumb as all this is, Journey 2 is perfectly watchable.

The CGI effects have a garish appeal, the 3D flourishes better than usual, the action all but nonstop. About the only time things slow down is for Johnson to sing “What a Wonderful World,” pleasantly enough, accompanying himself on the ukulele. There’s also a dreamy slow-motion shot of Hudgens falling through the air toward the jungle that verges on real, as opposed to kitschy, beauty.

So sure, take your kids, but also do them a favor: Before or after, show them (& yourself) the 1961 movie adaptation of Mysterious Island, with added Ray Harryhausen monsters. Beside it, this new film is punier than a Lilliputian elephant.

In theaters, by the way, Journey 2 is preceded by a Warner cartoon, Daffy’s Rhapsody, in which the manic-depressive waterfowl sings to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, all while dodging Elmer Fudd’s bloodlust. Classical music has been good to the Looney Tunes—three of the best Bugs Bunny shorts, The Rabbit of Seville (1949), What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) & Long-Haired Hare (1948), are operatic send-ups—& this new film is probably the best of Warner’s post-Mel Blanc efforts, in no small part because…Blanc actually provides Daffy’s voice! The animation is a setting of a ‘50s-era children’s record by the peerless voice actor, & it’s quite wonderful to hear his irreplaceable tones filling the multiplexes.

WHAT A CRAB

2012-02-09T09:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was Jules Verne’s birthday, & tomorrow is opening day of Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to this cranky crustacean...

...from the splendid 1961 version of Mysterious Island—a real crab shell, articulated & animated by the great Ray Harryhausen, to a wonderful, halting musical accompaniment by the at least equally great Bernard Herrmann. Melt some butter!

STALL TALE

2012-02-06T23:27:00.000-08:00

A friend recently mentioned to me that the writing on the walls of the lavatory stalls at his workplace had grown disappointingly barren, both in volume & in its invention & wit. A possible explanation struck me at once: competition. After all, isn’t the bathroom stall the original—& less censorious—Facebook?

RIP to Bill Hinzman, the zombie shuffling through the cemetery at the very beginning of the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead, passed on at 75—he was Zombie Zero in the movies. He was also on the camera crew of that film, & he went on to appear in and/or work on several other George A. Romero productions & eventually became a low-budget horror auteur himself. But his true cinematic legacy is as the face—the lean, hungry, haunted face—of a new franchise, & a new genre.

RIP also to the commanding Ben Gazzara, departed at 81, & to Zalman King, at 70. King’s career was fascinating: After a period as an offbeat leading man—he starred in the TV series The Young Lawyers, played Jesus in the film version of Hugh Schonfield’s The Passover Plot, & was the hero of the strange 1978 thriller Blue Sunshine—King found his real niche writing, producing & directing glossy erotica. He wore one or more of those hats for such familiar lonely-guy late-night premium-cable favorites as Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid, 9 ½ Weeks & The Red Shoe Diaries.

THE GOSPEL OF FLUKE

2012-02-03T02:10:00.000-08:00

Last week, in The Grey, humans lost in the Alaskan wilderness were turned into wolf chow. This week, in Big Miracle, humans struggle to save three whales trapped under the Alaskan ice. If you got all your information from the movies, you might conclude that humans were the put-upon species in the Alaskan ecosystem.

Veterans of the late ‘80s may recall that Big Miracle is based on a true story, at least in its broad outlines. In October of 1988, news media began to fret about a trio of California gray whales at Point Barrow, Alaska, one a juvenile, who had waited too long to begin migrating south & were separated from open water by several miles of ice; they had only a small hole through which they could surface to breathe.

Various groups pooled their resources to cut a path to safety for the enormous mammals, & the heightened media coverage broadened & intensified the effort. It was a highly improbable coalition—Reagan administration officials, oil company officials, the Alaska National Guard, the Soviet Navy, local Eskimos, and Greenpeace, among others. It’s almost unthinkable that equivalent groups would set aside their differences in today’s climate, for anything, let alone a mission this quixotic.

Directed by Ken Kwapis from a script by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler, Big Miracle shapes the material something in the manner of, say, a broad-canvas Preston Sturges comedy, with lots of eccentric types bouncing off each other. The central character is an Anchorage-based TV reporter (John Krasinski) who longs to make the big time but is stuck sending human-interest dispatches from Barrow. His ex-girlfriend (Drew Barrymore) is the frazzled Greenpeace operative, & Kristen Bell is the cute reporter from LA who shows up to distract him.

The cast is high-powered—it includes Ted Danson as the oil company honcho, Dermot Mulroney as the National Guard pilot, Vinessa Shaw as the White House rep, Tim Blake Nelson as a cetologist, & Rob Riggle & James LeGros as stereotypical Minnesotans who ride to the rescue. Kathy Baker, Stephen Root & John Michael Higgins also contribute amusing bits.

I liked Big Miracle a good deal more than I expected to. It’s unabashedly a sentimental family film, with warmhearted performances, but it isn’t dumb, & it neither soft-soaps the sad side of the material nor milks it for pathos. In short, it doesn’t pander. Kwapis & the screenwriters fully embrace the whale-sized irony at the heart of the story: That everybody was there for the free PR.

This was obvious in the case of the Reagan & oil industry folks, who were trying to soften appalling environmental records, but it was just as true of Greenpeace, who acknowledged that the plight of the whales, though heartbreaking, was natural; humans weren’t to blame. Even the Eskimos, who were sanctioned whale-hunters, were hoping to improve their image to outsiders.

The movie is by no stretch a satire, however. What keeps it from cynicism is the suggestion that whatever their motives, when these people looked down the long-jawed faces of the whales, with their sweet, somehow pessimistic frowns, all that mattered was setting them free.

This leads, however, to another irony of human psychology upon which the film touches only briefly—Barrymore’s character summarizes it in a TV interview. Of course humans are more likely to feel compassion for animals that we find cute or beautiful, but I think that large animals fall into this category as well.

I was once walking with my then-boss along a wide tract of desert in North Phoenix—long since paved over—& he spotted the nest of a large bird, a hawk or other raptor, at the top of a tall tree. The area was due to be cleared for construction, & my boss seemed really upset at the probable fate of the nest’s residents. He anxiously asked me if I thought that the birds would be moved.

I felt so bad for him that I almost made up some fake agency in charge of relocating large birds, but instead I pointed out that most trees have small birds’ nests, & no trouble is taken about moving them. This didn’t seem to bother him especially.

This incident came back to me after I saw Big Miracle, which from its title on suggests that when it comes to interspecies empathy, size does matter.

RIP to Angelo Dundee, passed on at 90, & to Soul Train producer/host Don Cornelius, passed on at 75, alas apparently by his own hand. Obviously & inevitably, as always in parting we wish him love, peace & soul…

HOG DAY

2012-02-02T01:17:00.000-08:00

Happy Groundhog Day!

At this writing Punxsutawney Phil’s prophecy remains unrecorded, so I’ll simply note, again, what my beloved departed mother always said about the day. Mom was from Mississippi, & she always observed that only having to put up with six more weeks of a Northwestern Pennsylvania winter was cause enough for celebration.

In Arizona, of course, we greet a short winter more glumly.

Anyway, I’m not aware of any monster groundhogs, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: ...in Phil’s honor I thought we could, at least, give the nod to a fellow rodent, such as…

…any of the giant rats in the 1982 Canadian horror picture Deadly Eyes.

It’s a terrible movie—even the presence of the great Scatman Crothers does little to help it—but there is a detail of the production that fills me with envy toward those who got to work on it: The monster rats infesting the Toronto subway were played by dachshunds. That’s right, when Crothers & the other actors were frantically fleeing the horrifying giant vermin, they were actually being pursued by wiener dogs!

What a great gig.

LEADER OF THE PACK

2012-01-27T01:09:00.000-08:00

A few environmental activists have called for a boycott of The Grey, because it depicts wolves stalking & killing humans. Such attacks, though certainly not unknown in human history, are very rare, & given the much higher degree to which wolf populations have suffered at the hands of humans, it may seem gratuitous to use them as movie menaces.

But it’s probably a losing argument. The wolf of traditional stock villainy, as opposed to zoology, can be traced from Aesop, The Three Little Pigs & Red Riding Hood to the modern werewolf movies.

The Grey is a dark & rather unsavory thriller concerning a bunch of oil workers whose plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. The most capable of the survivors, Ottway (Liam Neeson), who hunts wolves for the company, soon realizes that they’ve crashed on the turf of a wolf pack, & he takes charge, trying to lead the group to safety. As the wolves, among other perils, cull their numbers, personality clashes intensify within the party.

The script, by director Joe Carnahan & Ian MacKenzie Jeffers, based on a story by Jeffers, offers some man-against-the-elements philosophizing in between a lot of macho head-butting, in between gory wolf attacks—it’s something like jacked-up Jack London with a dash of slasher movie. The animals look heavily computer-generated in many of the scare scenes, however, which weakens their impact.

I can’t say I found this movie likable, but it has a saving grace, & its name is Liam Neeson. One of the few authentic slabs of beef left in current movies, Neeson’s imposing masculinity, his no-nonsense maturity & the lupine sadness on his face give this overbearing melodrama a touch of Bergmanesque tragedy.

There are other creditable performances—notably by Frank Grillo as the most obnoxious of the party & Dermot Mulroney as the least obnoxious—but no other contemporary actor I can think of could give the role of Ottway the plausibility that Neeson does. Indeed, he brings the film the wild animal presence that the wolf effects fail to capture.

RIP to Robert Hegyes, best known as the “Sweathog” Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter, passed on at 60.

DRAGON IT OUT

2012-01-26T01:26:00.000-08:00

A bunch of departures over the last few days: RIP, first of all, to the great Nicol Williamson, passed on at 75. I like his Hamlet, in Tony Richardson’s stark 1969 film; get a taste here.

RIP also to James Farentino, at 73, to Dick Tufeld, the “Danger, Will Robinson” voice of the fretful Robot on Lost in Space, at 85, & to difficult but intriguing Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, accidently killed at 76.

Here’s one more entry in our January dragon fest…

Monster-of-the-Week: …another splendid stop-motion specimen, animated by Jim Danforth for 1962’s The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm…

This enjoyable film remains frustratingly unreleased on DVD, but you get the briefest glimpse of the dragon in action toward the end of this trailer.

BESTIES

2012-01-24T11:18:00.000-08:00

The 2012 Oscar nomination were announced this morning. I was particularly delighted by the nomination of “Man or Muppet” from The Muppets for best song.

RIP to Joe Paterno, passed on at 85. It’s hard not to see something classically tragic in his fall—shortly after being celebrated as the most successful NCAA Division 1 coach ever, he was disgraced & fired in about a week, & dead two months later. This doesn’t strike me as a fate worse than, say, having no one seem to give a shit when you get raped by an old man at the age of ten. But it’s still a shocking twist.

RIP also to powerhouse Etta James, passed on at 73.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

2012-01-20T01:09:00.000-08:00

Despite the title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a mostly quiet movie, & for quite a while it keeps its emotional distance, too. The central character, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the son of a Manhattan jeweler (Tom Hanks), speaks in a direct, declarative manner, even when, a couple of times, he raises his tone in anger.

He has plenty to be angry about. Oskar’s very smart & imaginative but obsessive, phobic, possibly Aspergers-afflicted. None of this gets any better after 9/11, on the morning of which his father is at a business meeting more than a hundred flights up in the World Trade Center. This, presumably, is the reference of the title—how New Yorkers perceived the attacks. The loss leaves Oskar even more confused & secretive, & opens a gulf between him & his gentle, shattered mother (Sandra Bullock).

Oskar’s Dad would send him on fanciful “reconnaissance missions” in Central Park, designed in part to force him to interact with other people, in search of artifacts of a mythical “Sixth Borough” of New York City. About a year after what Oskar refers to as “The Worst Day,” the boy is snooping in his Dad’s closet, & he finds a key in a small envelope with the word “Black” written on it.

Taking this as a posthumous reconnaissance mission, this strange, wounded kid ventures out into his strange, wounded city. He starts spending his Saturdays pestering people named Black throughout the Five Boroughs, sure that if he can find the lock that this key fits, it will reveal a message from his father. Really, of course, he just wants to keep his connection to his beloved departed parent alive.

I must admit that it took a while for me to respond to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The film is directed with precision by Steven Daldry & beautifully shot by Chris Menges, & it features another lovely, urgent score by Alexander Desplat. There’s no shortage of fine acting, either. But for almost the first half, the script, by Eric Roth from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, seems precious & self-consciously whimsical.

It’s also a particularly single-minded exercise in that relentlessly pursued theme in the American narrative tradition, the Search for the Father. For all the excellence of young Horn’s performance, when the supposedly sweet-natured & sensitive Oskar ignores, even exacerbates his mother’s sufferings, it becomes hard to like him, fairly or not.

But about midpoint, a character enters the story known only as The Renter, who lives with Oskar’s grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) & can’t or won’t speak. He & Oskar take to each other, & he starts to accompany him on his Saturday quests, conversing only through cryptic scribbles in his notebook, or through the words “Yes” & “No” written in the palms of his hands.

The Renter is played by the great Max Von Sydow, & the odd, somber rapport that he & Horn find in their scenes together makes the movie start to click. It might be too much to say that Von Sydow, with his alert, wary face, saves the movie single-handedly. But he’s a big part of its salvation, & he does it without ever speaking a word.

By its final stretch, when the mystery of the key was finally solved, & Oskar’s own terrible secret was cathartically revealed, I was fully drawn into the movie. Oskar’s flailing reaction to the tragedy becomes a proxy for his city’s, & his country’s, & if what he learns about himself & his neighbors is extremely heartbreaking, it’s also incredibly uplifting.

CLICK & DRAGON

2012-01-19T01:08:00.000-08:00

Happy Chinese New Year next Monday!

You may have noticed that all the Monsters-of-the-Week so far this month have been dragons, so to continue our welcome to the Year of the Dragon...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod to one of my favorite movie dragons, this beauty...

...animated by Ray Harryhausen from one of my favorite movies, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. This beast, who guards the lair of the wizard Sokura, always struck me as having a sweetly canine manner; check the climactic scene here (spoilers!) & see if you agree.

SEX CHANGE FOR C.B.?

2012-01-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

From Variety online, spotted by my pal Dewey:

BARENAKED LADY

2012-01-13T02:11:00.000-08:00

An elderly hand takes a container of milk from a convenience-store refrigerator. That’s how The Iron Lady begins. The hand belongs to the long-retired Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep), who buys the milk and scurries home, unrecognized & unnoticed, one more old ratbag in an ugly winter coat.

In terms of narrative, it may be the cleverest touch in the movie—not just beginning an epic about a long & nasty era in British history with a poignant, small-scale episode, but also beginning the film in a grocery store. The Iron Lady makes the point, early & often, that Lady Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter to the depths of her soul.

Hardly anything else that ensues is of much interest cinematically, but then, it doesn’t seem meant to be. The film is built as a showcase for Streep’s performance, & the result is effectively a one-woman show.

As usual, she makes it an entertaining one. After her hilarious & endearing turn as an expansive, ecstatic, flirtatious Julia Child in Julie & Julia, she’s inevitably not as much fun as this small-souled woman, with her cross perplexity at everyone else’s failure to perceive how right she is. In the end, though, Streep uses these very limitations to generate pathos, & she gives Thatcher witty little flashes of weariness with her own company.

The movie’s achievement, as opposed to Streep’s, is harder to pinpoint. Much as I resent the director, Phyllida Lloyd, for the minutes of my life I gave to her previous film Mamma Mia!, I’ll grant that her work here is mostly efficient. The script, by Abi Morgan, presents a fairly perfunctory chronicle history of the PM’s life—her youth (in which she’s played, capably, by Welsh actress Alexandra Roach) as the worshipful daughter of a Grantham grocer father & an emotionally aloof mother, her early political ambitions & her marriage to Denis Thatcher, her rise within the Tories, her ascension to Prime Minister. Then come the mining strikes, the IRA, the Falkland War, the assassination attempt.

This stuff is all strung, in flashback, along much fuller scenes of Thatcher as an old lady, infirm, condescended-to by her children & heckled by the ghost of the departed Denis (Jim Broadbent). This seems to be the principal concern of the movie: depicting the Iron Lady as aged, sick, bereaved, helpless. A hardhearted viewer might note that these were all categories of humanity for which the Lady showed minimal concern during her career, but Streep, subtle & slyly funny as ever, has it in her power to soften some pretty hard hearts.

She’s got her work cut out for her. Even some of us who have never set foot in the UK may feel our jaws clench at the very mention of the name “Margaret Thatcher.” Along with Ronald Reagan & John Paul II, she’s part of the current neocon Holy Trinity (that none of them could now pass a Tea Party litmus test is both ironic & a testament to their own self-devouring reactionary influence). Thatcher’s importance in 20th-Century history is undeniable, & so is the sad leveling power of age & illness & personal loss. But only by combining these two truths can a Thatcher biopic become palatable for many of us.

CHANGE OF HOBBIT

2012-01-12T00:44:00.000-08:00

Last week’s honoree was a dragon, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s do another dragon, namely…

…"Slag the Terrible” (that’s right, Slag, not Smaug) from this version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, a little-known, twelve-minute cartoon adaptation of the tale from 1966. It was designed by graphic artist Adolf Born & directed by Terrytoons veteran Gene Deitch—creator of the Tom Terrific shorts for Captain Kangaroo—who explains in this fascinating section of his website that it was made as a ploy so that producer William Snyder, then the holder of the film rights to the book, could extend them & thus sell them back to Tolkien’s reps for big bucks in the wake of the ‘60s-era craze for Tolkien’s work.

The film can be watched in its entirety here; the animation is limited & no doubt the major liberties taken with the story would qualify the filmmakers for burning at the stake as far as Tolkien freaks are concerned. But I really like the cool retro look of it; part Jay Ward, part William Steig.

COMING OF AGE?

2012-01-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

A couple of months back I wrote, here, about the return of Beavis & Butt-Head to MTV, & that for me, they hadn’t aged a day since the ‘90s, either chronologically or in terms of the quality of the shows.

Well, I’ve watched a few more episodes since, & there is a difference. Now, in addition to ragging on music videos, the boys also comment on clips, sometimes lengthy, from MTV “Reality” series like Jersey Shore & 16 and Pregnant. The thing is: They come across as less imbecilic, more clear-headed & sensibile, than the pathetic douchebags on these shows. Much more, sometimes. Again & again, our heroes seem to be on the verge of saying “These kids today, I tell ya…”

I refuse to insult Mike Judge’s post-modern Tom & Huck with the suggestion that they might be maturing, so I must conclude that real-life society’s sensibility has actually sunk below their mental, emotional & moral level. I suppose there are critics who would suggest that the original Beavis & Butt-Head itself played its part in this de-volution, but I think, now as then, that this is killing the messenger: Check out reality TV, especially the youth-oriented stuff, & Judge seems pretty freaking prescient.

As in 2010, this past year I kept a list of the books I read in the order I read them, not including magazine & newspaper articles, reviews, essays, poems, blogs, short stories, comic books, etc:

Democracy: An American Novel by Henry Brooks Adams

The Giaconda Smile by Aldous Huxley

Discoveries: Early Letters 1938-1975 by Robertson Davies, ed. Judith Skelton Grant

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Murder in Canton by Robert van Gulik

Judge Dee at Work by Robert van Gulik

Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

Scumbo: A Novella and Stories by Barry Graham

The Willow Pattern by Robert van Gulik

Small Town by Lawrence Block

The Champion’s New Clothes by Barry Graham

There is a Serpent in Eden by Robert Bloch

The Red Pavillion by Robert van Gulik

The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Origin of Evil by Ellery Queen

And On the Eighth Day by Ellery Queen

The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

BARD NEWS & BAD NEWS

2012-01-06T00:46:00.000-08:00

Looking for a wild Saturday night? Well, what could be much more glamorous than listening to one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays on the radio? Tune in to Sun Sounds of Arizona (sunsounds.org) this Saturday, January 7, at 8 p.m. (Phoenix time) to hear an hour-long version of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, adapted & directed by none other than Your Humble Narrator, & performed by a pack of talented Valley-area classical actors (& Your Humble Narrator). Details here.

On a much sadder radio note: RIP to Valley talk-radio favorite Bill Heywood & his wife Susan, both passed on, apparently by their own hands. I had the privilege to do movie reviews a couple of times in 2001 on the morning show Bill co-hosted with Heidi Foglesong on KFYI, & found him a gracious, seamless host, on the air & off.

DRAGON MY ASS

2012-01-05T02:19:00.000-08:00

Among the loot brought to The Kid by Santa Claus this year is a Disney edition of the card game Uno. Your Humble Narrator suffered several ignominious defeats this past weekend.

Here’s the problem: Most of the cards feature one or another of the various Disney Princesses—Snow White, Belle, Jasmine—but occasionally one’s opponent plays…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a Dragon Card, depicting this week’s honoree, the dragon from 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Confronted with this beast, one must discard, or draw from the deck until one finds, a card depicting a Princess in the clinch with her designated Prince, such cards being called “Dragonslayers.”

Now, this strikes me as suggesting to the young players that you need a man around for whatever dragon shows up in your life, that you’re powerless to pick up a sword & slay the freakin' dragon yourself. Doesn’t it? Or am I just being excruciatingly politically correct?

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

2012-01-04T03:28:00.000-08:00

Every now & then a movie comes along that delights audiences so much, & so transcends all the agendas that tend to cloud our enjoyment, that even the most curmudgeonly critics & buffs are disarmed, & just say “go see it.” The Artist is one of these movies. There are detractors out there somewhere, no doubt, but I haven’t heard from them yet, & I’m not one of them. Go see it.

Written & directed by the Frenchman Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist is a black-&-white & (mostly) silent romantic comedy-drama. The title character is a silent-movie star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a dashing, romantic hero in the vein of Douglas Fairbanks or John Gilbert. As the film begins it’s 1927 & he’s in his glory, seeming to radiate glamour & bonhomie, onscreen & off, from his blazing smile. He basks in the love of his fans & coworkers—the occasional outraged leading lady excepted. The stern face of his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) at the breakfast table, however, is like a dark cloud on George’s horizon.

The storm, of course, hits two years later, in the form of the talkies. George’s studio boss (John Goodman) plans to get current with the new technology, but George is sure sound is a fad that will blow over, & he sinks his fortune into producing a silent vehicle for himself. It’s a flop, & George, attended by his faithful chauffeur (James Cromwell) & his resourceful little dog (Uggie), is on his way to the gutter.

Parallel to George’s decline is the rise of Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo, Hazanavicius' partner), a delectable young actress whose career gets a lift from George when she’s a dancing extra in one of his films, & who rides it all the way to stardom. She’d love to help revive George’s career, & his romantic life, but he’s too proud.

The Artist is not the first movie to use the birth of the talkies as a backdrop—the peerless Singin’ in the Rain is the best-known of the others. Nor is it the first latter-day film to employ the faux-silent-movie conceit; others include Silent Movie, the enjoyable Mel Brooks effort of 1976, Charles Lane’s neglected 1989 slapstick opus Sidewalk Stories, & Guy Maddin’s intoxicating 2002 ballet film Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary. But despite the lightweight story & the lovingly recreated look, The Artist somehow seems more like a reclamation of the silent cinema’s strengths than like a nostalgic gimmick. It even employs sound at a couple of points, briefly but brilliantly. It’s vital & gutsy, & we respond to it as a contemporary movie.

In no small part, this is due to the actors. For all the skill that Hazanavicius displays in his direction, for all the beauty & authenticity of Guillaume Schiffmann’s cinematography or the sly score by Ludovic Bource, the real punch in The Artist comes from the performances. Hazanavicius was shrewd, maybe, to have made George such a maddening, exasperatingly prideful person—this offsets the almost comical likability of Dujardin, with his ebullient smile.

Bejo captures silent insouciance perfectly, & she has a sweet moment, interacting with George’s jacket, that’s as sexy as anything I’ve seen in movies in a while. Cromwell is spot-on, & the supporting cast is full of name players from English-speaking movies in minor roles, but Uggie, as George’s long-suffering canine costar & pet, is the only presence in the film more irresistible than Dujardin.

THE LIST I CAN DO

2012-01-02T23:37:00.000-08:00

For the multitudes trembling in anticipation, here are my Top Ten movies for 2011:

1. The Tree of Life: Terrence Malick’s film isn’t ambitious or anything; it just takes on the Creation of the Universe and the Meaning of Existence. Also, it contains Brad Pitt’s best performance, beautiful music by Alexander Desplat, & a plesiosaurus.

2. The Skin I Live In: Pedro Almodovar’s entry in the venerable European “mad skin doctor” genre is convincing, ingeniously-structured & potent. Antonio Banderas & Elena Anaya are superb as the Doctor & his patient/victim, respectively.

3. Moneyball: Brad Pitt & Jonah Hill play statistical weird science on the Oakland A’s to make them win without marquee players. Sly, restrained direction by Bennett Miller & another gem of a performance by Pitt combine to make this inside-baseball tale fascinating & improbably touching.

4. The Artist: This black-and-white, mostly silent romantic comedy somehow manages to be a movie of substance rather than a stunt. Jean Dujardin is sensational as the title character, an ultra-debonair Hollywood leading man whose career hits the wall when the talkies arrive; the beguiling Berenice Bejo is the spirited up-and-coming star who adores him from afar & would salvage his career if only he wasn’t so proud. The film is studded with charming supporting performances, but the hero’s little dog steals scenes like they were Snausages.

5. Meek’s Cutoff: Kelly Reichardt’s subtextually political Western, loosely based on historical events, is about a bunch of lost covered-wagon settlers looking for a drink of water in the eastern-Oregon desert. It’s an ordeal, but a dramatically valid one, & it maddeningly offers no answers. Michelle Williams is quietly excellent as a clear-headed frontier wife, & Bruce Greenwood gives the performance of his career as the reactionary guide Meek.

6. Martha Marcy May Marlene: Elizabeth Olsen is spectacular in the title role, a young woman who flees a rural New York cult, & John Hawkes is chilling as the cult leader. Sean Durkin’s simple, low-key direction generates moody atmosphere & a subtle, fretful suspense.

7. Attack the Block: Teenage South London street punks jump on their bikes & save the world from aliens on Bonfire Night. Joe Cornish wrote and directed this funny, tense sci-fi tale, with a fine ensemble cast & spooky, amusingly simple invaders.

8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes: More top-notch sci-fi, this is the best iteration of the Apes franchise since the 1968 original, cleverly dramatizing how the Ape-pocalypse begins. Behind the CGI, Andy Serkis provides the superb facial expressions of the chimpanzee revolutionary Caesar.

9. Texas Killing Fields: This police procedural from director Ami Canaan Mann , about the murder of young women in a small, grungy Texas town, is a grim & difficult work, but it has an intense, enveloping atmosphere of tragedy.

10. The Adventures of Tintin: Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Belgian comic books is pure fun, & dazzlingly skillful cinema. As with The Artist, however, Spielberg lets the dog steal the show.

Also worth checking out: Contagion, Women on the 6th Floor, My Week With Marilyn, Hop, We Bought a Zoo, Footprints, Rio, The Smurfs, J. Edgar, Arthur Christmas, Happy Feet Two, Thor, Rubber, Super8, Trollhunter, Margin Call, Winnie the Pooh, Rango, Henry’s Crime and The Muppets (& the excellent Toy Story short before The Muppets).

A couple of major stinkeroos: Zookeeper, The Green Hornet, Creature & Atlas Shrugged: Part One.

CHEETING DEATH

2011-12-29T01:19:00.000-08:00

RIP to—& apparently this isn’t a joke—Cheetah the Chimp, believed to be Johnny Weismuller’s costar in the Tarzan movies of the ‘30s, passed on at—again, this is supposedly true—80 years old.

[Update: The more one reads about this, the more suspicious the claims about this chimp seem. Obviously I’m no primatologist, but I believe that a chimp reaching the age of 80 would be equivalent to a human living well over 100, & apparently this isn’t even the first time that this claim has been made about an aged chimp in a sanctuary.]

In memory of actor & accent coach Robert Easton, also passed on last week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod goes to the largest and most formidable of the title invaders in The Giant Spider Invasion, Bill Rebane’s Wisconsin-made (& thus, perhaps not coincidentally, very cheesy) drive-in fave of 1975.

This arachnid, who devours Easton as a lecherous farmer, was played by a Volkswagen in a spider suit, driven backwards—the taillights served as its red glowing eyes.

WINNER WONDERLAND

2011-12-27T22:44:00.000-08:00

The Phoenix Film Critics Society has announced our 2011 Award winners; you can check them out here. As with the nominees, several of these reflect my voting, others don’t, but there are lots of worthwhile movies represented here.

My own Top Ten List will be posted shortly after the New Year.

HOLIDAY WRAP

2011-12-24T02:26:00.000-08:00

It’s an unusually crowded Christmas week for movie releases; here, very briefly, are two that I caught up with:

The Adventures of Tintin—Steven Spielberg directed this animation of the Belgian comic books by Hergé. The title character, voiced by Jamie Bell, is a Poil de Carotte boy reporter who gets caught up in an intrigue involving a ship in a bottle, car & motorcycle chases, hidden treasure, pirates, pickpockets, mirages, a glass-cracking opera singer, etc. etc. Working from a script by Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, Spielberg is in masterly form here, even if the most vivid character in the film—by far, really—is Tintin’s dog Snowy ("Milou"), always way ahead of the action & saving the day.

We Bought a Zoo—The title is the answer to a question: What did you do because of your grief over your wife’s untimely death? Desperate to reconnect with his kids, Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) buys a rundown rural California animal park that comes handily equipped with Scarlett Johansson as head keeper. The script, very loosely adapted from Mee’s memoir by Aline Brosh McKenna & director Cameron Crowe, freely mixes broad comedy & teen romance with pretty somber bereavement drama. The result isn’t quite the lightweight entertainment that it's being marketed as, & it’s a little overlong, but on the whole it’s an agreeable picture, well-acted & beautifully shot, & though Crowe doesn’t allow them to upstage the humans, the animals are lovely.

RIP to Robert Easton, passed on at 81. A veteran character actor whose credits ranged from The Red Badge of Courage to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea to The Giant Spider Invasion, he’s most famous as one of Hollywood’s busiest dialect & accent coaches.

Finally, a wistful note: My pal the Midnite Movie Mamacita has announced that her venue The Royale in downtown Mesa will be closing permanently at the end of business Christmas Eve, after just six lively & memorable months. This comes two months after the closing of Farrelli’s on Scottsdale Road; Barry Graham suspects here that FilmBar downtown could be the next to go.

Best of luck to the Mamacita on whatever her next venture may be. The Royale’s final selection is, appropriately, both seasonal & deeply f**ked-up: Black Christmas, a Canadian horror picture of 1974 (the French-Canadian version was known as Un Noel Tragique). Employing techniques that John Carpenter would popularize four years later in Halloween, this influential film offers us the POV of a panting, slavering maniac stalking a sorority house just before Christmas break, ogling such residents as Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Andrea Martin. John Saxon plays the cop, and Keir Dullea is on hand as a creepy pianist.

Though it's no more realistic than any other slasher movie, this one has a pervasive luridness that makes it a really queasy, unsettling piece of work, and somehow the queasiness is magnified by the fact that it shares a director, the late Bob Clark, with that warmest, funniest, most beloved of Christmas movies, 1983's A Christmas Story. It might be called The Anti-Christmas Story.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays to all, & to all of us, a lifetime of Christmases infinitely merrier than the one depicted in that film.

IN MEMORY OF A MONSTER...A MONSTER

2011-12-22T00:18:00.000-08:00

In acknowledgment of the passing this week of Kim Jong Il…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to Pulgasari, the title character of a 1985 North Korean—that’s right, North Korean—giant-monster movie, a sort of gigantic, scaly, bipedal, fanged ox that eats metal…

Pulgie is the creation of a poor blacksmith in 14th Century Korea. Imprisoned by an evil warlord for refusing to make weapons, the man gives his daughter a tiny horned figure shaped from rice. Soon after, the girl pricks her finger while sewing & accidently drips some blood on this figurine, which comes to life & starts eating—first the needle, then the door latch, then bigger & bigger items, including the weapons of the warlord’s forces.

The more he eats, the larger he grows. Before long the Pulgster is Godzilla-sized, & a Golem-like champion of the peasants against the oppressive warlord.

It’s really a rather charming fantasy—with obvious communist allegorical subtext—but the movie is less famous for its story than for its bizarre backstory: The producer-director, Shin Sang-ok, was a South Korean cinema bigwig who claimed he had been kidnapped in Hong Kong in 1978 by agents of Kim—like many dictators, a fanatical movie buff—& held in North Korea to build up the North Korean movie industry.

After making several films including Pulgasari for Kim, Shin managed to escape, along with his actress wife, to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna while on a business trip in 1986. He ended up in Hollywood, where he directed and/or produced stuff like 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up under the name Simon Sheen, before returning in 1994 to South Korea, where he died in 2006.

Years ago I went to some trouble & expense to obtain a bootleg copy of Pulgasari, but you, if you wish, may watch the movie in its entirety on Youtube, starting here.

DEAR LEADER & "DEAR LEADER"

2011-12-20T00:07:00.000-08:00

RIP to the great Vaclav Havel, dissident playwright &, in one of the coolest twists in 20^th century international politics, President of the Czech Republic, passed on at 75. I had the honor to appear in the U.S. premiere (so we were told, anyway) of Havel’s play Mistake at the Scena Theatre in Washington, D.C. in the mid-‘80s. My favorite of his works, however, is his wonderful, self-deprecating comedy Audience (1975), maybe the most generous-hearted political play of the 20^th Century.

On the other end of the political spectrum, RIP also—since my ultimate hope for all beings is eternal peace—to the mad & murderous Kim Jong Il of North Korea, departed at 69.

Finally, RIP to former child actress Susan Gordon of the Twilight Zone episode “The Fugitive” & other TV & films, passed on at 62.

NO 'MUNK IS AN ISLAND

2011-12-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

To the list that includes The Tempest & Robinson Crusoe & Swiss Family Robinson & Lord of the Flies & The Blue Lagoon & Castaway & all the other tales of maroonings on desert islands we may now add a new title: Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. There’s a twist this time, though. The others are about mankind struggling to survive against the primal forces of nature, while Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked is about chipmunks struggling to survive against the primal forces of nature.

The title cheats a little for the sake of a pun: There’s no shipwreck. Carnival Cruise Lines, aboard whose opulent vessel the singing rodent trio are vacationing, would likely have been less forthcoming with the product-placement dough if there was. Instead, Alvin, Simon & Theodore are swept overboard due to Alvin’s hijinx, along with their distaff counterparts the Chipettes, Brittany, Jeanette & Eleanor.

Their manager/adoptive father Dave Seville gives chase, along with comic villain Ian Hawke (David Cross), & all of them end up marooned on a tropical island. There they encounter a wacky young castaway woman (Jenny Slate), a spider whose bite radically changes Simon’s personality, a treasure, a volcano, & many of the other standard tropes of the genre.

For the unitiated: The Chipmunks were created in 1958 by a struggling songwriter named Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. Bagdasarian’s earlier claim to fame was co-writing (with William Saroyan!) the Rosemary Clooney hit “Come On-a My House.” In ’58 he concocted “The Witch Doctor,” which employed his own voice, sped up to give it a high-pitched, cartoony sound. The same year, Bagdasarian used the same technique on “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late),” providing the voices for all three rodents—wiseguy Alvin, cerebral Simon & sweet Theodore—as well as that of Dave. The record’s wild success led to dozens more albums, as well as TV shows & animated movies.

The elder Bagdasarian died in 1972, after which his son Ross Jr. took over the family business, including the singing duties for all four characters. He was replaced in the 2007 feature & its 2009 “Squeakquel,” however, by the voices of Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler & Jesse McCartney as Alvin, Simon & Theodore, respectively, & by Jason Lee (of My Name is Earl) as Dave.

The first two films were big box-office, so this third outing was probably inevitable. How is it? Well, you know, it’s a Chipmunk movie. They sing, they dance, they do wacky stuff. There are throwaway gag references to everything from Lord of the Rings to Sarah Palin, & they made me chuckle here and there, but what’s important is that my nine-year-old sat stock-still & watched the whole thing & seemed well satisfied by the investment of her time & attention. So I guess it’s a good movie.

RIP to Christopher Hitchens, departed at 62, & also to two comic-book giants: Jerry Robinson, creator of Robin the Boy Wonder & probably of the Joker as well, at 89, & Joe Simon, creator of Captain America, at 98.

HYDE & GO SING

2011-12-15T00:55:00.000-08:00

That great movie star Kirk Douglas celebrated his 95th birthday this month. So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …in his honor this week let’s give the nod to one of his less celebrated outings, as both title roles in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—a musical TV version from 1972 (no relation to Frank Wildhorn’s cult-favorite 1997 musical Jekyll & Hyde).

I vividly remember watching this curio as a kid & finding it embarrassing even then. But it has a terrific cast; in addition to Douglas, there’s Donald Pleasance, Susan George, Susan Hampshire, Stanley Holloway and Sir Michael freakin’ Redgrave. If you have an hour and eighteen minutes to kill, you can judge for yourself; it’s viewable in its entirety here.

NAMING NOMS

2011-12-13T23:44:00.000-08:00

Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which Your Humble Narrator is a proud founding member, has announced its 2011 Award Nominees; you can check them out here.

Some of them reflect my nominations, some don’t, but there are a lot of movies & performances on this list worth seeing. The winners will be announced December 27.

THE SUBJECT WAS ROCZ

2011-12-12T15:00:00.000-08:00

The Wife happened upon this nice blog post about my late pal, KPHO-TV film critic & host Bill Rocz. The post links, at the end, to this article I wrote for New Times about Bill just after his passing.

PLUCK THEM

2011-12-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

RIP to Henry “Harry” Morgan, departed at 96. Famous for Dragnet & the later seasons of M*A*S*H—though his best work on M*A*S*H was a hilarious guest-shot, as an unhinged & racist general, in the earlier seasons—Morgan was one of those actors that are so familiar that it’s easy not to notice how genuinely good & skillful & quietly real they were. This shows up at times even in the many mostly dreary late-vintage M*A*S*H episodes, but abundantly among his many film roles—notably, as Henry Fonda’s partner in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). A friend also pointed out to me that he & Jack Webb were the bad guys in the 1951 noir Appointment With Danger.

RIP also to actor Bill McKinney, who despite a long & varied career is best remembered by far as one of the rapists...

...in Deliverance (1972)—a terrifying performance which immortalized the phrase “squeal like a pig”—departed at 80, to disco (& also porn) veteran Andrea True, departed at 68, & to Dobie Gray of “Drift Away” fame, who has drifted away at 71.

RIP, also, to my love affair with Chick-fil-A. I’m not proud of this, but I really, really loved those freakin’ sandwiches. They’re probably my all-time favorite fast food. Until this changes, however, they’ve sold me my last bird, & in the meantime they can kiss my ass.

So, in recognition of Chick-fil-A’s rottenness…

Monster-of-the-Week: …how about this Brobdingnagian broiler, this ponderous piece of poultry, from the cover of a 1961 Classics Illustrated adaptation of Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells:

MAID MAN

2011-12-03T02:33:00.000-08:00

Playing through Thursday at the Harkins Shea 14 in Scottsdale is The Women on the 6th Floor (Les Femmes du 6eme Etage), Philippe le Guay’s mild social comedy about a persnickety stockbroker (Fabrice Luchini) who bonds with his ravishing, unflappable new maid (Natalia Verbeke), & through her with the other Spanish domestics in the servants quarters in his building in early ‘60s Paris.

It’s a sweet, sly spin on class relations, well worth seeing for the deeply funny performances of every member of the cast. Along with Luchini & the breathtaking Verbeke, I especially liked Lola Duenas as the Communist maid, smiling with unoffended incredulity at everyone’s naïvete. Lord knows what this character would have to say, however, about this sentimental tale, which seems to hinge on the same “enormous platitude” that Orwell ascribes to Dickens: “If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”

My brother made me aware of this story, about the chapel in the cemetery near Evans City, Pennsylvania that appears at the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, & of a fundraising attempt to save it. You can donate here, & here is a New Times story I wrote about a peculiar experience I had at that cemetery.

RIP to the truly hilarious Alan Sues of Laugh-In, passed on at 85, & to the truly hilarious Patrice O’Neal, passed on at just 41.

SNAKE CHARMER

2011-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

In memory of Ken Russell, departed this week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the honor goes to Lady Sylvia Marsh, the seductive but lethal snake-woman played by Amanda Donohoe in Lair of the White Worm, Russell’s 1988 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s fevered final novel of 1911 (based, in turn, on the legend of the Lambton Worm):

This lightweight but genuinely witty little film is maybe my favorite of Russell’s works, formidable though The Devils (1971) is. White Worm’s imagery is sexy in a marvelously adolescent way, Donohoe is unforgettable, & there’s a charming early performance by Hugh Grant, posh & self-deprecating as ever, as one of the young heroes.

By far the best thing in the movie, however, is this song.

COP ART

2011-11-29T00:10:00.000-08:00

Much as I admire Sid and Nancy, & love Repo Man, my favorite movie from nervy Brit director Alex Cox—it topped my Top Ten list in Phoenix New Times the year it played here in Phoenix, as I recall—is his little-known Highway Patrolman, or El Patrullero. I think it’s one of the most neglected movies of the ‘90s, & one of the simplest & best of all cop movies.

A Mexican police drama almost entirely in Spanish, directed by a Brit, & written & produced by a Peruvian-Irish-American, Lorenzo O’Brien, is not the sort of thing you see every day. But what’s really unusual about Highway Patrolman, paradoxically, is how straightforward it is. Cox eschews the surreal flights & outré eccentricities of his other films in favor of a standard action-thriller structure, & lets the change of scenery drain off its banality.

The title character, played by Roberto Sosa, is named Pedro Rojas, but he might as well be named Pedro Verde—when we first meet him, fresh from the academy, he’s comically green. Even though his instructors make it clear that he’s a cog in a kleptocracy—they tell him flatly, in the opening scene, of anyone he chooses to pull over, that “they’ve always broken the law,” & it’s up to him only to figure out how—he initially tries, as he prowls the desolate Durango roads to which he’s been assigned, to behave honorably.

We soon see that not only does the system make it impossible for Pedro to stay pure, but that the mere attempt makes him ridiculous (though likably so). The episodes which follow dramatize the erosion of this idealism, as Pedro gets married, has a kid, gets wounded in a shooting, drinks too much, begins an affair with a soulful prostitute. Eventually, his insistence upon clinging to a few shreds of decency endangers his life.

Police forces in America tend, even when they aren’t overtly corrupt or brutal, to favor the interests of economic or racial elites. Even when we understand this, American audiences accept cops as movie & TV heroes, yet we have no problem seeing cops in other countries, especially someplace like Mexico, depicted as uniformed gangsters. Without suggesting that foreign police are paragons, Highway Patrolman, through its guileless title character, can gently push us to reconsider the stereotypes of our fiction, & how they shape our view of the real world.

Don’t misunderstand, it’s a perfectly enjoyable picture—tightly scripted, evenly-paced, funny, exciting—all on the surface, with no subtextual cultural analysis. Yet by being entirely conventional in an unconventional context, Highway Patrolman manages to seem brilliantly original.

Kudos to Microcinema International for making this small gem available on DVD, for the first time in North America. The disc includes commentary by Cox & O’Brien, a couple of documentaries, & Cox’s early short Edge City, aka Sleep is for Sissies.

By the way, Microcinema International is running a holiday sale through the end of the year—you can get Highway Patrolman or any of the other interesting releases in their catalog at 40 to 50% off, details here.

RIP to another self-consciously provocative Brit filmmaker, Ken Russell, passed on Sunday at 84.

ARTHURIAN LEGEND

2011-11-24T02:26:00.000-08:00

Literalism is the joke behind the new computer-animated feature Arthur Christmas. It’s right there in the poster: “Ever wonder how 2 Billion presents get delivered in 1 night?”

2 billion kids have wondered the same thing, & also how reindeer can fly, & how Santa gets down the chimney, etc. According to Arthur Christmas, nowadays it’s accomplished via a massive, technologically sophisticated process involving a city-sized, rocket-powered sleigh, & countless elves operating like commandos, rappelling down the sides of buildings & through windows SWAT-team-style to plant gifts & leave traces that simulate Santa’s visit.

The real Santa (voiced by Jim Broadbent) is at the center of it all, as an ineffectual figurehead, hustled here & there by the elves. The real brains of the outfit, & his itching presumptive heir, is his son Steve (Hugh Laurie), who runs the show from a palatial mission control back at the North Pole & resents his father’s refusal to retire & pass him the reins. The retired senior Santa (Bill Nighy) watches & scoffs at the newfangled spectacle from his rooms.

The title character is Santa’s recessive younger son, who works answering letters, & truly cares about the kids. When Arthur (James McAvoy) learns of a glitch in Steve’s system—a little girl in a small town in Cornwall hasn’t been given her bicycle—he’s appalled that his father & Steve are prepared to just blow it off, as within the margin for error. With just a few hours left before sunrise in England, Arthur & his grandfather set out to make the delivery old-school, using a sled, reindeer, a gift-wrap-obsessed elf & a bit of magic dust. All does not go smoothly.

It does go hilariously, however. This blend of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” with Apollo 13 is one of the more inventive Christmas movies I’ve seen in a long time.

A product of Aardman Studios—the folks that brought us the Wallace and Grommit films—it’s dizzyingly imaginative on a visual level, & despite the sentimentality inherent in the storyline, it isn’t mawkish, probably because it’s so bracingly honest about creeping institutional impersonality. I also liked the shades of gray in the characters—Arthur is lovable but clueless; without his less warmhearted, more competent relations he’d be helpless. The crotchety Santa emeritus, also lovable, has his own selfish reasons for wanting to make the run, & Steve & father aren’t presented as soulless.

In reality, of course, the charming tradition of giving Christmas gifts has degenerated over the decades into an angst-ridden consumerist nightmare driven by a technological juggernaut far more pitiless than that depicted in the film, with Santa Claus, that fascinating composite of diverse cultural traditions, reduced to its mascot. Arthur Christmas carries, & is deepened by, a rueful awareness of this corruption under its merry, bright surface.

Happy Thanxgiving everybody, by the way. The holiday weekend box office will likely be dominated by Muppets, & that’s fine, but it would be a pity if, because of that, Arthur Christmas was overlooked by audiences.

Speaking of the Muppets…

Monster-of-the-Week: …in honor of their new movie, here’s a Halloween greeting I received, depicting the iconic Miss Piggy as another icon…

SOCKO BOX OFFICE

2011-11-23T01:11:00.000-08:00

“The characterizations were amusing, but they always reminded me of bad carpeting.” Thus did a curmudgeonly friend of mine recently explain why he never liked the Muppets.

It is, to put it mildly, a minority opinion. The Muppets are one of those rare acts that operates squarely in the mainstream of wholesome, family-approved entertainment, yet has just the right edge of pure, irresistible silliness to make them hip—& maybe the faintest hint of kinkiness as well, as in Gonzo’s masochism & his seemingly polygamist interest in chickens. Almost everybody, Your Humble Narrator included, loves the Muppets. Indeed, their low-tech, old-school showbiz tactility is one of the keys to their charm—many of us love them because they remind us of bad carpeting.

For the newest film version, however, the Muppets have been recast as underdogs, has-beens. The premise of The Muppets is that Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, Animal et al are forgotten relics of the ‘80s. When Kermit, lonely behind the gates of his faded Bel-Air mansion, learns that a rotten one-percenter named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) wants to tear down the old Muppet Studios to drill for oil, he gets together the old gang to put on a telethon to save them.

This formula Let’s-Put-On-Show plot is really secondary, however, to the story of Walter, a fanatical Muppets fan who is, manifestly, also a Muppet himself (voiced by Peter Linz). This is doubly odd because Walter’s brother Gary (Jason Segel, who also co-scripted, with Nicholas Stoller), is human, as is Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), as is everyone else we see in their smalltown home. So when the three of them travel to L.A. & get caught up in the Muppet’s adventures, Walter feels truly at home for the first time.

At one point Walter gushes to the Muppets that they give people the greatest gift, laughter, & the Muppets protest, pointing out at least two greater gifts. But the third-greatest gift is nothing to be sneezed at, & The Muppets delivers a generous dose of it. The screening audience with whom I saw the film received it rapturously; I enjoyed it greatly but I think it’s the third-greatest Muppet movie, after the sublime Muppet Christmas Carol of 1992 & the original 1979 effort, The Muppet Movie.

The script is laced with in-jokes & period references & parodies of dramatic clichés, genuinely witty but aimed more, perhaps, at nostalgic adults than at the kids in the audience, as are the many, many celebrity cameos. Also, the movie seems—and this isn’t a criticism I find myself handing down very often—a little talky.

Don’t get me wrong—the upsides of The Muppets far outweigh these minor reservations. They include: Cooper, who’s pretty droll in the obligatory bad guy part, & who delivers a sensational rap; the new songs, by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, working in the style, if not quite on the level, of Paul Williams, & the old songs, including “The Rainbow Connection” & Piero Umiliani’s unshakeable “Mahna Mahna.” This movie even found, at last, a redemptive good use for that horribly catchy ‘80s embarrassment “We Built This City.”

Finally, there’s Kermit, pained & sheepishly idealistic as ever. Steve Whitmire still reproduces Jim Henson’s voice characterization flawlessly, & whoever actually operates Kermit gets extraordinarily fine shades of feeling on his face. Many a highly-paid non-amphibian star doesn’t have nearly as expressive a pan.

HEROIC FEET

2011-11-18T04:09:00.000-08:00

2006’s Happy Feet was a truly crazy movie, a blend of Pixar-style animation, Bollywood musical & a streak of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Set in a world in which penguins sing to connect with their soul-mates, the film focused on the unfortunate young Mumble, unable to carry a tune but endowed with a natural talent for tap-dancing.

It starts off, in short, as a fable about nonconformity & finding your own individual path—a good joke right off the bat, in the black-&-white uniformity of the penguin rookery (in The Far Side, Gary Larson once depicted a single penguin amongst the multitudes belting out “I’ve Gotta Be Me”). But by the end, director George Miller had spun the film from a sweet, if deeply eccentric, underdog tale into a grandiose environmentalist vision for which the word epic is hardly sufficient—“cosmic” would be more like it.

I’d be tempted to say it’s a one-of-a-kind movie, but as of this weekend, it’s not. A major box-office hit & an Oscar-winner besides, Happy Feet could hardly fail to spawn a sequel, & here it is, some five years later. In Happy Feet Two, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) has the penguins mixing some fancy footwork in with their stirring oratorios—the tiny feet often splashing in ominous melt-water—but alas his own son Erik, ironically enough, isn’t much of a dancer. Poor Erik runs away from the shame of this, accompanied by two loyal pals, & Mumble heads off to find them.

While they’re gone, a huge chunk of Antarctic ice collides with the rookery, sealing thousands of penguins, including Erik’s Mom Gloria (voiced by Alecia Moore, aka Pink, replacing the late Brittany Murphy), off from the ocean. So it’s up to Mumble, Erik & his friends to try to find a way to save them—from hunger, from marauding skuas, & from general despair. Their allies this time include the Latin-accented Adelie penguin Ramon (Robin Williams) & his colony, elephant seals, electric-guitar-playing human researchers &, albeit unwittingly, two nearly-microscopic krill (Brad Pitt & Matt Damon) who have broken away from their enormous swarm to strike out on their own existential search for identity.

There’s also, of all birds, a puffin—named Sven, & voiced complete with Nordic accent by Hank Azaria—who has somehow found his way to the other end of the world. He’s been mistaken for a penguin who can fly, which gives him the status of a sort of self-improvement spiritual leader.

In other words, like the first film, Happy Feet Two is another big helping of off-the-wall weirdness. But also like the first film, it’s funny & good-hearted, & the musical numbers—which, a la Bollywood, freely mix snatches of the Rawhide theme, grand opera & Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”—are thrilling, both in their relentless rhythms & in Miller’s dazzling, undulating visual perspectives.

Miller’s apparent purpose, this time, is to stave off the sense of despair that many of us feel over the seeming futility of individual action in the environmental struggle. The moral which the movie asserts—it’s also on the poster—is “Every Step Counts.” To this I can only say: I hope so.

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS HERMAN

2011-11-17T02:44:00.000-08:00

Recently my sister mentioned that her favorite monster was…

Monster-of-the-Week: …Herman Munster, devoted head & principal breadwinner of the Munster family residing at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the TV sitcom which ran from 1964-1966, & became a major hit in afterschool reruns. So in light of the news that a new, "darker" version of The Munsters is in the works, Herman’s our honoree this week…

Played by the late Fred Gwynne, in the role for which, despite much other fine work, he is most remembered, Herman is possibly the sweetest & most guileless of all monsters. His only real faults are an overenthusiastic streak & a penchant for brief (though earth-shaking) temper-tantrums.

Also, his wife is seriously hot.

Here’s an eyebrow-raising excerpt from the Munsters episode where Herman tries out for the Dodgers. Check out Leo Durocher comparing the family to “wetbacks in the Petrified Forest” & wondering, after Herman’s devastating at-bat, “…whether to sign him with the Dodgers or send him to Vietnam.”

Speaking of baseball, Diamondbacks skipper Kirk Gibson has, rightly, been named National League Manager of the Year. Yay!

TYPO NEGATIVE

2011-11-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

Out on DVD this month is Atlas Shrugged: Part One. This filming of part of Ayn Rand’s doorstopper for douchebags was numbingly amateurish, almost unwatchable—you can read my review here—but the stories surrounding its production & marketing have been highly entertaining. This may be the funniest of them, however: The packaging for the DVD mistakenly used the word “self-sacrifice,” in place of “self-interest.” Appalled at the very idea that they might be promoting self-sacrifice, the producers are offering a replacement.

RIP to sad-eyed Cynthia Myers of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, one of the most glorious of the Russ Meyer stars, passed on at 61.

G-MAN

2011-11-11T01:38:00.000-08:00

One of the more alarming things I notice, as my half-century mark approaches, is how many people I’ve watched not only grow up from childhood, but turn the corner & begin the march toward middle-age themselves. There aren’t many more striking examples of this than Leonardo DiCaprio.

I remember when he was the little kid on Growing Pains, & the period when he appeared in movies like The Quick and the Dead & Total Eclipse & his voice had that grating, screechy sound to it, & then his relatively dignified tenure as a teen idol in the wake of Titanic. I never thought I’d be able to take him seriously as anyone older than twenty-three, but within a few years there he was, fine as Howard Hughes in Scorcese’s The Aviator, & over The Departed & Shutter Island & Inception & others he gradually stopped being an overgrown ingénue & became an intelligent, substantive leading man.

Now, at 37, DiCaprio plays the title character in J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s episodic biopic of the FBI dark lord. In much of his footage he clumps around his office, dictating his memoirs to a string of subordinates, his boyish, full-cheeked features buried under jowly, chalky-skinned old-age makeup. Hard as it is to believe, Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t seem ridiculous playing a man in his seventies.

He’s just as believable playing Hoover in his twenties, scooting around D.C. in 1919 on a bicycle, stalking communists for the Department of Justice, or struggling, against a ham-fisted tradition, to get some semblance of scientific method into American criminal investigations, or gingerly negotiating with his steely mother (Judi Dench) for her approval. By this account, Edgar doesn’t seem to have had much of a father figure; his old man, played in a very brief but memorable turn by Jack Donner, seems to have wandered in from a Gothic horror movie.

We see the middle-vintage Hoover, gradually amassing power with the help of his platonic Lady Macbeth, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), or bonding with his inseparable deputy Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), & eventually learning how to politely blackmail Attorneys General & Presidents. In a quiet way, DiCaprio gives Hoover a complex character—he truly believes in & aspires to his own wholesome-gangbuster vision, but he also knows very well that he’s faking it, & it terrifies him.

Aside from the performances of DiCaprio & his costars, J. Edgar is less successful—it’s a hurried, harried, cluttered chronicle history, fast-paced without any particular dramatic urgency. Eastwood is skillful enough, & Hoover’s story is astounding enough, that the film can’t fail to be interesting & watchable. But the script, by Dustin Lance Black, is a lesser piece of work than his screenplay for Milk. Black & Eastwood hustle us, with little context, past some of the more colorful Hoover highlights—Emma Goldman, Bruno Hauptmann, Alvin Karpis. But the movie’s real interest is Hoover’s personal life, particularly as regards his longtime companion Tolson.

Though the depictions of Hoover & Tolson’s intimate life are necessarily speculative, Black & Eastwood remain mum as to whether their relationship was ever consummated. Still, the movie’s best scenes are built on what seems reasonably evident, even from their public life: that they were a married couple. The relevance of this, from Black & Eastwood’s point of view, is presumably that Hoover’s style as Director of the FBI—his bullying, secretive paranoia, his intense image-consciousness—arose inevitably from his psychology as a closeted man. This is the hypothesis which occurs to many of us armchair shrinks from reading even a superficial account of Hoover’s career, so I don’t know that it qualifies as any great insight by itself.

It does link to a great & terribly relevant subject, though: that part of the American national psyche that allowed Hoover to thrive for so long. This, I’m afraid, is just what the movie misses, & it’s why J. Edgar, though well-made & rich in period detail, never really becomes an epic. The movie is never deliberately campy—there is a crossdressing scene, but strikingly it comes at a solemn, tragic moment—and I appreciated that Eastwood & Black don’t mock Hoover for the pain & misery that, perhaps, helped to produce his outrages. But I don’t know that their movie ever fully acknowledges the pain & misery that he inflicted on others.

ANT, HILL

2011-11-10T00:41:00.000-08:00

Driving south on Galvin Parkway Wednesday evening around sunset, Your Humble Narrator saw giant ants crawling down a hillside. No kidding:

Even though I had heard about this exhibit at Desert Botanical Gardens, I was still startled for a split second. Because…

…Monster-of-the-Week: …a few weeks ago, The Kid & I watched the peerless 1954 giant ant movie Them! So the nod this week goes, for the second time, to any individual he or she or it belonging to the aggregate them! from that film…

(By the way, herewith is a policy change for Monster-of-the-Week: I have decided that I may sometimes reuse a monster, or even recycle some or all of what I wrote about him/her/it.)

RIP Heavy D, departed at 44. Hooray for the unseating of Russell Pearce. Finally, for the record, Joe Paterno & his PSU colleagues are a disgrace, & sadly it appears this would be true even in the unlikely event that the charges against Sandusky were proven false.

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SECTS

2011-11-07T22:56:00.000-08:00

After the screening of Martha Marcy May Marlene, I had the opportunity to participate in a brief roundtable interview with the director, Sean Durkin. You can read my very short Q&A piece here, on JabCat on Movies.

The star, Elizabeth Olsen, was also there; she told me her influences included “Sinatra musicals,” & that her acting idols were Annette Bening, Diane Keaton, Kate Winslet & Michelle Pfeiffer.

By the way, Beavis and Butt-head are back on MTV, with new adventures—like the Peanuts gang, or Bart Simpson, they’ve done an admirable job of staying young since we last saw them, in 1997. My friends know I’m a great fan of the lads & their creator, the estimable Mike Judge, but even so I was willing to glumly admit it if it seemed to me that the world had moved on & the new shows just weren’t the same.

Well, I’ve watched several episodes now, & apparently imbecility is always in style, at least for me. The new shows convulsed me just like the old ones did. For all the excellence & subtlety of King of the Hill & Office Space & Idiocracy, I think that B&B is Judge’s true masterpiece.

RIP to commentator Andy Rooney, departed at 92, screenwriter Hal Kanter, departed at 92, & heavyweight great Joe Frazier, departed at 67.

IN CULT BLOOD

2011-11-05T03:18:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of Martha Marcy May Marlene, the title character—all those names are hers—flees a cult in rural upstate New York. In desperation, she calls her older sister Lucy, who’s had no idea of her whereabouts for the past couple of years. Lucy comes & picks her up, & takes her to the upscale Connecticut lake house she’s summering at with her Brit husband Ted.

Played by Elizabeth Olsen, Martha—her original name—is affectless, so cowed she’s barely articulate. She’ll only tell her puzzled relations (Sarah Paulson & Hugh Dancy) that she left a bad boyfriend, but she offers no details. We, however, get to see what happened to her, in a series of flashbacks. We see how, rudderless after her mother’s death, Martha is drawn into the cult, & gradually, skillfully has her identity stripped away, even to the point of getting the new name “Marcy May” (“Marlene” comes later).

The group in question doesn’t seem to be religious in nature, though we aren’t given much of a sense of its ideology, or even if it has a very clear one. It’s more in the secular self-help line, with a streak of hippie-commune hedonism. Above all, it’s a cult of personality, & the personality in question is Patrick, played by John Hawkes of Winter’s Bone.

Patrick has a casual, friendly, yet faintly wounded manner, like somebody who’s sad that you don’t want to stay longer at his party, but before long we can see that this covers a bottomless emotional & sexual tyranny. Under the precise, patient, un-sensationalistic eye of writer/director Sean Durkin, we see Patrick lead his flock, with disturbing plausibility, into more & more sinister realms.

By the time Martha is in her sister’s care, she’s so accustomed to the cult’s mores that her behavior is shockingly inappropriate at times. She’ll strip naked for a swim, turn weirdly aggressive at the dinner table, even come & sit on the edge of Lucy’s bed while she & Ted are noisily making love.

Here, perhaps, is a small glitch in the film’s believability—Lucy & Ted understandably suspect that Martha is mentally ill, or maybe just intolerably obtuse. But it’s maddeningly apparent that if she once just said the word “cult,” or “group” or “compound,” everybody would slap themselves on the forehead & say “Oh, that explains it.” Since Martha had the clarity to see that she should run away & the courage to do so, that she would then decline to explain herself seems more like a dramatic strategy for maintaining suspense than a psychological trait.

Maybe, maybe not; in any case it’s a minor quibble. MMMM is a remarkable film, controlled, spooky & poignant. It has one of those frustratingly abrupt, literary-fiction-type endings that one gets in indies sometimes, but this is less irritating here than it was in, for instance, Meek’s Cutoff earlier this year.

Most notably, MMMM showcases some fine performances, by the chilling Hawkes, by Paulson, Dancy & several others, but above all by Olsen, the hugely promising younger sister of Mary-Kate & Ashley. Olsen brings to vivid, moving life Martha’s struggle, both pathetic & heroic, to stay connected to her original name.

SKIN & REDEMPTION

2011-11-04T02:26:00.000-07:00

In Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), Antonio Banderas plays Dr. Ledgard, a brilliant reconstructive surgeon whose wife died after being burned in a car accident. Ledgard is developing an artificial skin, resistant to burns & insect bites. In his beautiful Toledo home, he has his own laboratory & operating room. He also has a prisoner.

Held in a comfortable upstairs suite, doing yoga in a bodysuit the color & texture of an ace bandage & receiving her meals & supplies via dumbwaiter, is Vera (Elena Anaya), a beautiful young woman. She’s the doc’s unwilling long-term patient & guinea pig, from whence isn’t clear at first. But she seems, under the bodysuit, to be wearing the Doc’s synthetic skin—exquisitely.

Horror-movie geeks like me will recognize in the synopsis above a tissue of motifs from innumerable earlier European shockers dealing with the attempt to restore old or damaged skin, & make the restoration permanent, ranging from The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) to Atom Age Vampire (1963) to Countess Dracula (1971) to the hilarious Corruption (1968), but above all to Georges Franju’s unforgettable French classic Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960). Almodovar himself has called it a horror movie, though without overt shocks.

While this description is accurate enough, I hope it doesn’t ghettoize The Skin I Live In for those with a distaste for the genre. The director plays this potent, violent, sexually graphic melodrama straight, or at least with no more than the tip of his tongue in cheek. Banderas, in what can only be described as a mad scientist role, underplays superbly & makes the Doc convincing; it’s a commanding star turn, maybe the best of his career. The stunning Anaya makes the mysterious Vera’s plight touching, & Marisa Paredes makes Ledgard’s faithful servant—a role reminiscent of Alida Valli’s in Eyes Without a Face—unnerving without camp.

I’ve always enjoyed & admired Almodovar for his wit, his imagination, & his eye on glorious women. But his movies have often seemed to me to suffer from a streak of whimsy for whimsy’s sake that limits their impact. Volver, his spellbinding non-supernatural ghost story of 2006, was an impressive step away from this, & so is Skin—I think it may be my favorite of the many Almodovar films I’ve seen over the years.

For about the first half of the movie, though I was carried along by scene after tense scene—& also by the excellent score by Alberto Iglesias, driving & suspenseful but never clichéd—part of me also feared that Almodovar was slumming, using the horror trappings as a gimmick. But again & again, what looks like a self-consciously colorful Almodovar flourish—a man showing up at the door in a tiger costume, for instance—turns out to make perfect sense in the story.

Eventually you realize that the script, which Almodovar & his brother Augustin loosely adapted from a French novel by Thierry Jonquet, is going to pull all its strange flashbacks & subplots together into a coherent & jolting whole. It’s one of the best movies of the year.

RIPs: To producer/director Gilbert Cates, noted for his many Oscar shows, departed at 77, & also to actor Leonard Stone, 87, veteran of films like Soylent Green & Mame & plentiful TV, but most remembered as Sam Beauregard in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

BAD BAD BAD DOG

2011-11-03T00:08:00.000-07:00

Let’s turn to mythology…

Monster-of-the-Week: …for this week’s honoree: Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades. Here's the multi-pooch, as depicted by William Blake…

But the real reason I wanted to give him the nod is that my sister recently sent me some photos of dog Halloween costumes, & this one…

…was easily my favorite.

HAUL-OWEEN

2011-11-01T23:44:00.000-07:00

Here’s an inventory of The Kid’s Halloween take:

5 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

7 Kit Kat bars

4 Starburst Fruit Chews

2 Twizzlers

2 Nerds

6 bags of M&Ms

3 boxes of Milk Duds

3 Laffy Taffy

3 Butterfinger

4 Skittles

2 Smarties

2 Dots

12 Tootsie Rolls

2 Baby Ruth

1 Twix

1 3 Musketeers

1 Milky Way

2 Lemonheads

1 Heath Bar

1 $100,000 Bar

3 Snickers

4 Whoppers

2 Jolly Ranchers

1 bag of Candy Corn

2 Sour Patch Kids

1 Swedish Fish

2 Gummy Candies

1 Hershey Chocolate Bar

1 bag of Doritos (Cool Ranch)

5 Nestle Crunch Bars

2 Pixie Stix

8 lollipops

ALL THE WAY HOMUNCULUS

2011-10-30T00:51:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween Eve!

Your Humble Narrator got to spend a jolly hour-&-a-half Saturday evening talking scary movies on KTAR's Jay Lawrence Show, along with Phoenix Film Critics Society President David Ramsey. Among the callers, The Exorcist won the poll as scariest movie ever by about a half-dozen votes.

In honor of the day, let's do a bonus monster: The time has come, I think, to officially acknowledge one of the very greatest of all time...

Halloween Bonus Monster-of-the-Week: ...Boris Karloff’s incarnation of The Frankenstein Monster…

Karloff played the role just three times, in Universal’s original 1931 version, which The Kid & I watched the other day, & in the first two sequels, The Bride of Frankenstein—the only one in which he speaks as the character—& Son of Frankenstein (decades later he donned the makeup again, for an episode of the TV series Route 66). But his poignant, entirely sympathetic performances set a standard for acting in horror movies that has rarely been equaled, & probably never surpassed.

Not that Karloff's was the only worthy interpretation of the character. At 11:45 a.m. (MST) tomorrow is another fine Frankie: Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein. Lee’s makeup...

...more closely resembles the description of the character in Shelley’s novel, although, like Karloff, he doesn’t speak at all, much less spout high Miltonic rhetoric, like the book’s Monster.

Here, by the way, is a superb portrait of Lee's Monster, drawn as a teenager by Ed Naha, the veteran writer of & on horror:

WILL HE AM

2011-10-28T00:10:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare is my favorite writer. I’m a Shakespeare buff. My experience of his work is, in a small way, as an actor & a director, & in a bigger way as a reader & an audience member. I’m not a Shakespearean scholar, in any literary or historical sense. The difference between me & most of those who question Shakespeare “The Stratford Man” as the true author of the plays attributed to him is that I know it.

Opening today is Anonymous, Roland Emmerich’s film dramatizing the notion, around since at least the 1920s, that Shakespeare was a front, & that his plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. I wasn’t able to get to the screening earlier this week, & anyway I wouldn’t want to clutter up a movie review with a pedantic & partisan rant on this premise. So I thought I’d put the rant here, & review the movie fairly, as a movie, whenever I can get to it.

Though he seems to have been the “candidate” most in vogue for the last few years, Oxford seems like a particularly improbable alternative, even if you somehow doubt that Shakespeare could truly have written those plays. For one thing, Oxford was actually mentioned in contemporary writings, like the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, that also mention Shakespeare as a different person. No matter, say the “Oxfordians.” Oxford must have written Shakespeare’s works since he was, after all, an aristocrat, & good-looking & troubled, & because details of his own dramatic life can be made to line up with characters & situations in Shakespeare’s plays.

The idea is that Oxford must have had to hide the fact that he was a playwright because this would somehow have been an improper occupation for an aristocrat. This despite the fact that he was known to be a playwright—his own comedies, now lost, were reportedly good—& that this doesn’t seem to have been a secret, let alone a scandal. This despite the fact that Oxford died in 1604, roughly a decade before new Shakespeare plays stopped appearing. The Oxfordians have explanations for all this & for the rest of the comparative mountain of other evidence that associates the “Stratford” Shakespeare with the plays attributed to him.

I’ve spent a lot of time (way too much, actually) over the last few years reading articles & websites pro & con about this silly controversy, & I genuinely think it’s bullshit. & even though it doesn’t really matter—whoever wrote those plays, they’re magnificent—it still annoys me, because I think it arises, in part, from a peculiar self-loathing class snobbery.

It also partly stems from a misunderstanding of the history of the period, which leads people to believe that Shakespeare couldn’t have picked up enough knowledge to write about court matters, foreign countries, etc., the way he did. This is not unlike thinking that somebody else must have written Stephen King’s books, because after all a bumpkin from rural Maine could never have picked up a vocabulary like that, & could never have understood enough about, say, virology to have written The Stand.

Many still think of the Renaissance as a period in Merrie Olde England full of Lords & Ladies & Wenches & Squires & Peasants, & nothing very much in between. In truth, even a perfunctory reading of social history about the period shows that this whole system (never as quaint as it’s depicted anyway) was already long in decline. The really dynamic social force in Renaissance Europe was the Middle Class—and therein, I think, lies the heart of the matter.

Maybe the core of the whole authorship controversy, in all its forms, is something I’ve never seen anyone write about: a desire not to let the middle class have Shakespeare. Many people love & admire Shakespeare’s work, but just can’t bring themselves to like Shakespeare. The man who emerges from the existing record is too dull, too disappointingly conservative in his social and political beliefs, too interested in money, too litigious, & just generally too...well, middle class to be responsible for such glories.

If Shakespeare had been born to poverty but worked his way up to reknown, like Bunyan or Dickens, I don’t think it would bug people as much as the idea of a middle class guy from a small town whose Dad was a glovemaker & local politician turning into the greatest writer in English. So you get stuff about how scanty the information about Shakespeare is, but nobody points out how it’s still far less scanty than that of any other playwrights of the time except Ben Jonson & Oxford himself.

You get the line about how there’s no evidence that Shakespeare attended the Grammar School in Stratford, but they don’t point out that no records at all survive for any students there during that time, but that the children of public officials could attend for free, & Shakespeare’s father served as both an alderman & “bailiff” (mayor) in Stratford-on-Avon. Also, the grammar school in Stratford offered a Latin education that would probably have exceeded in rigor that of the average Classical Studies Major at a contemporary American college, & was steeped in the sort of Latin writers (Plutarch, Plautus, Seneca, etc.) that are the clearest influences on Shakespeare’s earlier work.

You get the nonsense about how Shakespeare couldn’t have learned French & Italian when, apart from the fact that knowledge of Latin makes both of those languages less daunting, the same publisher who printed the first editions of Shakespeare’s long poems Venus and Adonis & The Rape of Lucrece, a guy named Richard Field, specialized in publishing language manuals, especially for French & Italian (knowledge of these languages in Shakespeare’s time was as commercially valuable for a Brit as knowledge of Japanese is for a modern American). Field was also a Stratford guy of about Shakespeare’s age, & lived a few houses from him in Stratford-on-Avon as a kid; records show their fathers knew each other, & it’s believed that he & Shakespeare were friends. In other words, there are all sorts of connections between Shakespeare the Stratford “bumpkin” & Shakespeare the writer.

But above all, “anti-Stradtfordians” are never able to give a satisfactory answer to one simple question: why only Shakespeare? If you insist that detailed evidence about Shakespeare’s life is lacking, you may be right, but if that leads you to conclude that he therefore probably didn’t write the stuff that’s attributed to him, then why not apply the same standard to all the other playwrights, Christopher Marlowe very much included, about whom even less (often much less) is known. The obvious answer—and indeed, on some of the websites they flatly admit this—is that the other playwrights aren’t so dull and provinicial.

It’s true, too—Shakespeare’s politics are ass-kissingly in favor of the aristocracy & the status quo. Playwrights at the time, including some of Shakespeare’s pals, tended to be brawlers & radicals & horndogs—Marlowe died in a barfight, Thomas Kyd was jailed & tortured for “atheism and immorality” (&, ignominiously, informed on Marlowe to get out), Jonson & John Marston both got busted for their play Isle of Dogs, Jonson killed two men in duels in his life.

Shakespeare isn’t known to have done any of that sort of thing, though his wife was about three months pregnant when he married her, & there are a few gossipy stories about his womanizing. He was a careful businessman & very willing to participate in lawsuits, & he also was always careful not to piss off the powerful, all of which has made him utterly unsuitable for glamorous literary status now.

Absurdity certainly doesn't mean, of course, that Anonymous might not be a highly enjoyable movie, as was the willfully ridiculous trifle Shakespeare In Love a few years ago. That film also hinged on the gag that The Bard must have turned from his own torrid affairs, picked up his pen, & scribbled them into Romeo & Juliet & Twelfth Night. The difference is that Shakespeare In Love treated this idea as a goofy, borderline-campy romantic fiction, while Anonymous, at least in its marketing, treats the idea as an Oliver Stone-style expose.

Shakespeare’s works are so astoundingly good that it’s understandable, in a sense, that one might find it improbable & mysterious that anyone could have written them. But trying to turn the author from a social-climbing Stratfordian into a financially frustrated blueblood does nothing to solve that mystery.

SWOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

2011-10-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

Your Humble Narrator had the honor to be a classmate, back at dear old Harbor Creek High, of a pleasant fellow named Robin Swope. Though he was an unusual & interesting guy even back then, nothing would have prepared me for the course his life took: he became a Christian minister & missionary, & also a paranormal investigator.

Robin writes a blog called The Paranormal Pastor, contributes to publications like Fate magazine, & is the author of such works as An Exorcist’s Field Guide. He recently sent me an early Halloween gift: a copy of his latest tome, Eerie Erie: Tales of the Unexplained from Northwest Pennsylvania (The History Press, $14.99), a fun review of uncanny folklore from my beloved gloomy hometown of Erie & its gloomy environs.

The book covers subjects ranging from UFOs over Presque Isle to “Phantom Panthers” in Summit Township & Edinboro to Bigfoot sightings in Wintergreen Gorge, from Gudgeonville Bridge & Axe Murder Hollow to sightings of the ghosts of Perry’s sailors from Misery Bay, to…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, the Lake Erie Storm Hag…

…our own Great Lakes version of a perennial sailors legend, sometimes known as Jennie Greenteeth. Fetchingly equipped with green skin, green fangs & cat-like yellow eyes, the Storm Hag is fond of preying upon sailors when their vessels are caught in bad weather. According to Swope, she’s also a gifted singer who, just before she attacks, likes to serenade her victims thusly:

Come into the water, love,

Dance beneath the waves,

Where dwell the bones of sailor lads

Inside my saffron caves.

CREEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS

2011-10-21T00:46:00.000-07:00

In the middle of Texas Killing Fields, two detectives are examining the body of a murdered young woman, lying half-submerged in the water of the title marshland. Detective Heigh (Jeffery Dean Morgan) observes a fingerprint on her neck, & at the same moment it starts to rain. In a panic, he & his friend Detective Stall (Jessica Chastain) struggle to preserve this crucial clue while pulling the wet, unwieldy corpse onto the bank.

It’s a harrowing, heartbreaking scene, maybe the best in this grim & atmospheric police drama, loosely based on true events & directed by Ami Canaan Mann. It reflects the overall experience of Texas Killing Fields: You get a glimpse of the forces behind the horror, & then the hostile, unpredictable environment shifts, & you’re lost again.

It’s rare for an American crime movie to treat a dead body as something other than a prop, a font of exposition, but the bodies of young women that keep turning up in this small, grungy Gulf Coast Texas city, or dumped in the marshlands adjacent, have a physicality, a wretched weight. The investigators aren’t depicted, in the manner of so many movies of this sort, as casual & business-as-usual around the victims; they’re anxious &, though they speak softly, palpably angry.

The angriest is Detective Souder (Sam Worthington), Heigh’s partner & Stall’s ex-husband. His anger leads him to stupid, counterproductive outbursts of violence, but it also paralyzes him. Heigh wants to explore the link between their victim & a string of others that have been found in the “Killing Fields” nearby, while Souder wants nothing to do with cases outside his jurisdiction, especially on his ex-wife’s turf.

He’s pretty sure that his & Heigh’s case is linked to a sordid prostitution ring in town anyway. Heigh, a haunted ex-NYC cop & a devout Catholic—he murmurs the Hail Mary over a victim—suspects that there’s a bigger picture. Both of them are terrified for Little Anne (Chloe Moretz), daughter of a miserable local hooker (a shockingly haggard-looking Sheryl Lee, of Twin Peaks). Poor Anne seems appallingly tailor-made to join the gallery of victims.

Director Mann (the daughter, as she is probably weary of reviewers noting, of Michael Mann) nails the settings—the town is a muggy, dirty shithole that’s no place to live, let alone die, while the marsh, with its twisted, leafless trees, would have an unearthly beauty if it weren’t so charged with threat. She shows a strong touch with the actors here, too. Worthington, Chastain & especially Morgan are so low-key that it’s almost disorienting at first; they aren’t working from the standard cop-show-acting playbook, even when Donald F. Ferrarone’s dialogue seems to call for it. But their controlled intensity accumulates force.

Mann & Ferrarone are less successful with the police-procedural side of the material; at times I found myself confused, & not in the good way. But there’s an emotional maturity to Mann’s work here which even some of her father’s films can’t claim—an awareness of the reality of human suffering that can without too much pushing be called authentically tragic.

It comes out, especially, in her handling of Moretz, as Little Anne. She strikes me as one of the least smarmily sexualized adolescent girls I can think of in many a movie. Through the other characters, & through her alert, sympathetic, unleering camera, Mann treats Little Anne not as a white trash Lolita but as an imperiled & precious child.

VARIOUS THINGS

2011-10-20T00:24:00.000-07:00

RIP to a hero of Your Humble Narrator’s, the great radio dramatist & triumphalist liberal patriot Norman Corwin, passed on way too young at 101.

Though I’ve loved old-school radio drama ever since I heard War of the Worlds as a kid, it was seeing a live performance of Corwin’s classic airwave comedy My Client Curley, starring my dear late pal Tim Reader, that really got me jazzed about trying my hand at the medium. A few years later, my pal Julie, who directed that show & later worked on several of my Sun Sounds productions, kindly gave me a copy of Norman Corwin’s Letters. I was both humbled & exhilarated at the craft & polish that Corwin put into the prose of his private correspondence.

Corwin’s best-known work may be On a Note of Triumph, his word-concerto broadcast on V-E Day in 1945. Here’s a passage from the Prayer section which I wish we’d all make a daily devotion (it was later included, by the way, in a standard prayerbook for American Reform Judiasm):

Lord God of test-tube and blueprint
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of the little peoples through expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.

Can I get an Amen for Brother Norman?

Check out this terrific review of Pat Buchanan’s latest jaw-droppers…

I wasn’t able to get to it before it opened last weekend, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s acknowledge the title character of the new version of The Thing, now in theatres.

My review:

All it means, really, is “object,” yet somewhere along the line in American pop culture the word “thing” came to mean something scary, a monster, a freak. Maybe it says something about humans that it’s what’s undefined, not consigned to a pigeonhole, which raises our collective gooseflesh.

Despite short stories like Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” & Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” & despite the disturbing ‘40s-era radio play “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” the usage was probably truly popularized by the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World, with James Arness, who passed on this June, in the title role. Based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 pulp tale Who Goes There?, the film was remade by director John Carpenter, simply as The Thing, in 1983.

The Thing in question in the 1951 version is a vampiric humanoid vegetable from outer space, discovered frozen in the ice near a U.S. military/scientific outpost in the Arctic. Accidentally thawed out, he wreaks deadly havoc until he’s outdone by American ingenuity & cooperation.

Carpenter’s remake sticks closer to Campbell’s novella. Discovered in Antarctica this time, The Thing is the ultimate chameleon, an amorphous mass that can assume the shape of a human host. But whenever its cover is blown, it suddenly unravels into a squealing, twisted, tentacled horror out of Hieronymus Bosch, & starts tearing everybody in the vicinity apart.

The film, with Kurt Russell leading a pack of top-notch character actors, is also pretty gripping. If there’s one, you know, thing that the movie world didn’t especially need right this minute, it was probably one more version of The Thing.

But we’ve got one, directed by the impressively-named Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. Despite the identical title, it’s not actually a remake, but rather a “prequel” to Carpenter’s film, set in Antarctica in 1982, among the Norwegian researchers who make the initial discovery, & soon aren’t sure who’s human & who’s a Thing. The cast is full of manly types, but the resourceful heroine is a young American paleontologist, well-played by the incredibly adorable Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

This Thing takes an ill-advised excursion away from the outpost near the end which strains its convincing feel a bit, but up until then it’s a fairly tense, austere little thriller, with a soundtrack full of the unnerving pulses & thrums that used to make up Carpenter’s minimalist electronic scores. Some pretty shocking special effects are deployed, too, but van Heijningen derives most of the film’s atmosphere from his teasing out of the suspense & paranoia. He rather deftly keeps you wondering who the monsters are.

But while this Thing is a passable piece of work, I can’t find any pressing reason why needs to exist. The original is a fascinating study in Hawksian attitudes toward American collective strength against a generic common enemy. Carpenter’s The Thing has a more cynical, individualistic, spaghetti-western ethos, & a correspondingly thicker sense of paranoia.

The new film, conceived as a direct prologue to Carpenter’s, adds no new dimension, &—I hate to sound like a Luddite broken record on this topic, but—it loses some punch thanks to the CGI’s lack of solidity. There was a surreal poetry, a gravity, almost a horrific beauty, to Rob Bottin’s “practical” (mechanical & prosthetic) effects in the ’83 film that the computer-generated shocks in the new film, above-average though they are, can’t match.

The effects in Carpenter’s Thing could make you doubt the person sitting next to you. The effects in the new film make you doubt what you see on the screen. Rightly.

FAREWELLI'S

2011-10-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

RIP to Farrelli’s Cinema and Supper Club on Scottsdale Road, which has closed after a decade of providing dinner & a movie in a plush yet comfortable setting. I first went there shortly after it opened (shortly before 9/11), to see The Tailor of Panama & write an article about the place for the Tribune.

In the ensuing years, I racked up many good memories there. The Wife & I went dozens of times, including several Thanksgivings & New Years; we took my mother-in-law there during the last year of her life, when she could no longer see but could still thoroughly enjoy The Queen & Breach in all their talky glory. My pals Dave & Dewey & I saw For Your Consideration there; Barry Graham & I went for the Midnite Movie Mamacita’s presentation of the deranged Hausu, & I went for the Mamacita’s late show of Terror of Mechagodzilla. This past Easter, The Wife, The Kid & I saw Rango there, over a delicious brunch.

I liked Farrelli’s from the start, but I honestly didn’t think the place stood a chance. I was slightly surprised it lasted ten months. To survive ten years—these particular ten years, especially—is a real achievement.

RIP also to actress Patricia Breslin, from William Castle’s Homicidal & I Saw What You Did, passed on at 80.

MY TWO CENT(IPEDE)S

2011-10-14T02:04:00.000-07:00

Moviemakers who deal in extreme or sadistic violence have been known to defensively pooh-pooh the notion that their work might inspire real-life imitators. But Tom Six, Dutch writer-director of last year’s disgusting-but-compelling The Human Centipede (First Sequence), is afflicted with no such modesty. The main character of his “meta” follow-up, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), is an obsessed fan of the original who seeks not only to reproduce the atrocity depicted therein, but to expand upon it.

For the (perhaps fortunate) unitiated: The Human Centipede (First Sequence) was about a German surgeon (the unforgettable Dieter Laser) who for no particular reason other than to see if it could be accomplished, created a human “Siamese triplet,” with a gastric tract running mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus, out of two young American women & a Japanese man he'd taken captive. The Doc met a bloody fate at the end, & it appeared that the three members of his pathetic creation were also doomed, so it was hard to grasp how a sequel would work.

Here’s how: The protagonist of The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), opening today at The Royale in Mesa, is Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a gnome-like attendant in a featureless & very poorly supervised London “car park” (parking garage). Martin lives in a shabby little flat with his horrible ratbag of a mother (Vivien Bridson), who blames her son for the imprisonment of his sexually abusive father. His other roommate is a large centipede in a terrarium, which his loathsome psychologist (Bill Hutchens) suggests may be a phallic symbol representing his rage over his father’s abuse.

Martin obsessively watches Human Centipede the first on his computer screen at work, & keeps a scrapbook devoted to the film. He even takes seriously the movie’s tongue-in-cheek hype line: “100% Medically Accurate.”

Indeed, Martin seems determined to put this claim to the test. He keeps abducting people, & secreting them, bound & gagged, on the floor of a rented warehouse. His victims include customers who are rude to him at the car park, among others—he even lures Ashlynn Yennie, one of the actresses from the first film, to London with the offer of an audition for Quentin Tarantino.

Martin’s plan is to construct his own, highly ambitious human centipede, this one consisting of twelve subjects. The second half of the film is excruciatingly devoted to his efforts to complete this gruesome task—without, of course, any surgical skills or training & with workshop tools instead of surgical instruments.

So, how to review this thing? It’s both so revolting—it’s much, much more graphically gory than the first film—& so ridiculous that I found much of it almost unwatchable, & might have shut it off if I wasn’t reviewing it. I can’t say I found it particularly enriching, or that I think the world would be a notably poorer place if it didn’t exist.

Having said that, I must admit that this is by no means an artless piece of moviemaking. In some ways, it’s perhaps a more unified, less obviously padded-out piece of work than the original. Six achieves a despairing, Dante-esque horror at times, in the images of Martin’s writhing victims.

Harvey, too, is a potent presence as Martin. Unless I missed it, he never speaks a word in the film, but he has the unsettling stillness of a Beckett clown, & his face can erupt with homicidal rage or grief or glee. He’s one creepy little nudnik.

I wouldn’t blame any critic who didn’t care to split the hair that separates The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) from blackhearted torture-porn trash. But I will; I can’t quite dismiss the movie as that. I can acknowledge, at some level even admire, Six’s talent, & the transgressive vision that gave rise to this ghastly worm-that-turns fantasy.

But that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed it, or that, to anyone other than a hardcore-horror completist, I’d recommend it. Six got what he wanted out of me with this movie—he won. As with A Serbian Film a few months ago, at some point I gave up on these victims & just wanted the movie over. I just barely was able to, you know, leg this one out.

SPINAL ZAP

2011-10-13T00:19:00.000-07:00

On my honor, I don’t watch Dancing With the Stars. But a friend of mine who does told me about Ricki Lake & her partner dancing the tango to Bernard Herrmann’s great Psycho theme, & said that it was excellent. I watched it here, & he’s right, it is.

As we roll toward Halloween, yet again we turn to Turner Classic Movies to provide us with…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our weekly nightmare: This time it’s the title creepy-crawly of 1959’s The Tingler, a sort of big centipede-ish critter which, scientist Vincent Price discovers, attaches itself to the human backbone during moments of terror, on which emotion it feeds. Hence the tingling.

Directed by William Castle from a script by Robb White, the movie is perhaps best remembered for Castle’s notorious gimmick “Percepto”—theater seats electrically wired to produce a mild, tingler-like jolt in audience members. Unless you have a Taser & are masochistic, this effect is difficult to reproduce while watching the film now—it plays, by the way, at 9 p.m. (MST) on Monday, October 17. But even without it, The Tingler, though obviously preposterous, is bizarre & imaginative, probably my favorite of Castle’s films as director.

By the way, I recently became Facebook friends with Castle. Considering that he died in 1977, it’s enough to give you a you-know-what down your spine…

LOVELY RITA'S

2011-10-11T01:03:00.000-07:00

One of my great pleasures in visiting my beloved hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania—in the warmer months, that is—has to be partaking of the delicious Italian ice at Rita’s on Gore Road. So you can imagine my delight in learning that there are now two Rita’s locations here in the Valley, where we really need them: at 4730 E. Indian School in Phoenix, & at 83rd Avenue & Union Hills in Glendale.

RIP to the beautiful Diane Cilento, of Tom Jones, The Agony and the Ecstasy & The Wicker Man, among other films, departed at 78, & to the fine character actress Doris Belack, best known as the keen-minded, intrigued soap opera producer in Tootsie & as a tough judge on many episodes of Law & Order, passed on at 85.

RIP also, by the way, to the 2011 season of the Arizona Diamondbacks, regrettably ended last Friday after Game Five of a superb National League Division Series with the Milwaukee Brewers. Looking forward to next season, boys. For a change.

HEADIN' OUT TO EDEN...

2011-10-07T00:32:00.000-07:00

RIP to the reliable, high-testosterone character actor Charles Napier, departed at 75. The Platonic ideal of the term “lantern-jawed,” Napier appeared in Russ Meyer flicks & as scowling heavies on TV & in films like The Blues Brothers & Rambo, but got to show his versatility as a fixture in many Jonathan Demme movies, including Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Philadelphia & perhaps most memorably as the Tennessee Corrections Officer that Hannibal Lecter gets the better of in Silence of the Lambs.

But I’ll always have a soft spot for Napier's guest shot on Star Trek, as Adam, the cheeriest of the space hippies in the notorious third-season episode “The Way to Eden”:

Listen to him singing “Yea Brother” (rather well) here.

BUSHY CHANEY

2011-10-06T00:06:00.000-07:00

Once again, the October schedule for Turner Classic Movies provides us with…

Monster-of-the-Week: …another classic selection: Lon Chaney, Jr. in his signature role of the hapless Larry Talbot…

…in 1941’s The Wolf Man, a man who is pure in heart & says his prayers by night, but still turns into a half-lupine maniac when the moon is full. There isn’t much good one can say about last year’s remake The Wolfman, with Benicio del Toro, but it did at least show, by comparison, the excellence of the original, which plays on Monday, October 10, at 6 p.m. (MST).

HEALARIOUS

2011-10-02T02:05:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago today, the TV series Scrubs debuted on NBC. I’m not suggesting that there should be some National Day of Remembrance for this august anniversary, but I do want to take a moment to appreciate Scrubs. Its ubiquity in reruns may make it easy to take for granted, but it’s a great sitcom.

Indeed, I think there’s a solid case that Scrubs, which ran for nine seasons over two networks & so heavily in syndication that it seems almost unavoidable when channel-surfing, can take its place with the best sitcoms of all time. For all its obvious success, I’m not sure the show has ever quite gotten its due. It very deservedly won a Peabody Award, but it had only a handful of Emmy nominations, & only a couple of technical-category wins—the excellence of the show’s writing &, especially, its acting were largely ignored.

For the uninitiated: Scrubs, created by Bill Lawrence, followed the career & personal life of Dr. John “J.D.” Dorian (Zach Braff), a young intern at Sacred Heart Hospital, in an unnamed city. A gushy, overenthusiastic innocent, J.D. shares his struggles with his inseparable best friend & roommate Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), a surgical intern, with Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke), a sweet but brittle fellow intern who becomes J.D.’s on-again/off-again romantic interest, & with veteran nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes), who in the course of the series marries Turk.

J.D., who narrates the episodes, is obsessively driven to achieve a father-son bond with his boss & role model, Dr. Perry Cox (the magnificent John C. McGinley). This sneering misanthrope has a penchant for spewing complex arias of sarcastic abuse on everyone, but especially on his adoring, & undaunted, young disciple, to whom he refers either by various female names, or simply as “Newbie.”

Among the show’s many secondary characters are the curmudgeonly Chief of Medicine Dr. Kelso (Ken Jenkins), the depressive hospital counsel Ted Buckland (Sam Lloyd), Cox’s mocking ex-wife Jordan (Christa Miller), & the hospital’s janitor, known simply as Janitor (Neil Flynn). He's given to bizarre non-sequitur verbal flights, & also makes it his mission to torment J.D.

It occurs to me that to someone who has never watched the show, the description above would likely make Scrubs sound like ordinary sitcom fare, a bit more ambitious than usual in terms of number of characters but otherwise almost boilerplate. The show’s originality isn’t in its format. The laughs arise from the depiction of J.D.’s fantasy life—again & again, he casts his eyes upward at an angle & we see one of his preposterous, often surreal daydreams, inventively staged. This was perhaps the first live-action series to attempt the speedy inserted-gag vignettes developed by animated shows like The Simpsons & The Family Guy.

But the program’s real distinction is its honesty about the inner life of the American male, particularly the movie-&-TV-fed all-American white boy embodied by J.D., & played so fearlessly by Braff. Speaking as a specimen of the same, I wish I could report that the narcissism & infantilism of J.D.’s megalomaniacal-yet-mawkish hero fantasies is exaggerated, but I can’t.

I’ve often wondered if this embarrassing candor isn’t the secret both of the show’s staying power with audiences & of its lack of critical acclaim. What Scrubs says to the audience is: you’re not cool. You may be a nice person, you may be a competent person, you may even cure the sick & comfort the afflicted. But for all that you walk around every day fantasizing about being cool, you aren’t. You’ll never be like your hero Dr. Cox—indeed, over the course of the seasons we gradually come to see that Cox himself is a self-loathing emotional wreck & a poseur.

Like many shows that feature single protagonists, Scrubs bogged down a little when it focused on J.D.’s love life—his interminable dithering over whether he really loved Elliot or whichever gorgeous guest star it was became tiresome at times. Other than that occasional minor annoyance, Scrubs was a near-perfect half-hour, year in and year out, delivering silly laughs & rich characterization, expertly balanced. Even its “Jump the Shark” ninth season, which moved the action to a medical school & introduced a new set of characters, was pretty good—it featured, among other merits, riotous & utterly overlooked work by Dave Franco (too-little-known brother of James).

Finally, while Scrubs was never pretentious, it also was quite capable—unlike, say, the equally brilliant & funny but somehow emotionally aloof 30 Rock—of startling moments of seriousness. Maybe because of the mortality inherent in the medical setting, it had a dramatic gravity underpinning the broad shtick.

MOUTHS OF BABES

2011-09-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Saturday evening at The Royale in Mesa, The Midnite Movie Mamacita revives the sick-ass, unforgettable Tom Six film The Human Centipede (First Sequence), in preparation for the meta-sequel, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), out later this month. You can read my review of the first film here, & if you’re not squeamish, see the trailer for the new film here.

A pal directed me these remarkable clips of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, before the voice of Mercedes McCambridge was overdubbed. The finished clips are presented afterwards, for a compare & contrast. What do you think? For me, it truly shows how much McCambridge added to that film.

GREEN BLUES

2011-09-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

Since we’re on a baseball roll…

Monster-of-the-Week: …as a consolation prize to the Boston Red Sox, whose epic fail this week has shut them out of the postseason, let’s give the nod to The Green Monster, Fenway Park’s legendary left field bulwark…

Better luck next year, boys…

NODBALL

2011-09-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

Speaking of baseball, as Your Humble Narrator just was—the Diamondbacks clinched the NL West Championship last Friday! The following evening, The Kid & I betook ourselves to Chase Field to watch the reptiles add insult to the Giants’ injury, routing them 15-2. It was Hispanic Heritage Night, & the lads were decked out in their “Los Dbacks” gear, & before the game we were transfixed by Ballet Folklorico & Capoeira performances. Then we watched the Dbacks drive the Giants’ starter, poor Eric Surkamp, out of the game in the first inning, after he had recorded just two outs.

It was a very long, peculiar game—there was even a power outage during the 7th Inning—& we left, thoroughly satisfied, long before it ended. The highlight of the evening, as far as The Kid was concerned, was getting her Ryan “Tatman” Roberts bobblehead...

Tatted-up arms, neck & all, Ryan now stands atop her bookcase, ready to nod in vigorous agreement with whatever she says: Just what every girl wants from a guy.

IT'S NOT THAT EASY BEING BEANE

2011-09-24T00:18:00.000-07:00

“It’s so hard not to be romantic about baseball,” says Billy Beane near the end of Moneyball. He’s right, it is. Indeed, it’s so hard not to be romantic about baseball that the makers of Moneyball just went right ahead & romanticized it. The result is that a sports movie set mostly in the front office & concerned with a purely quantitative approach to success turned out, improbably, as one of the more engrossing big-studio films of the year.

Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, had a mostly forgettable career as a player in the Major Leagues—stints with the Mets, Twins, Tigers & Athletics. He found his niche in management: he’s been the GM in Oakland for more than a decade. During this time he is credited with making the franchise as cost-efficiently successful as any team in the Majors, through his application of analytical principles of the sort pioneered by the maniacal baseball writer & statistician Bill James, of Baseball Abstract fame.

Beane’s story was told in the 2003 Michael Lewis book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Steven Soderbergh was at one time slated to direct the film adaptation, but his approach was reportedly too unconventional, & he was replaced by Capote’s Bennett Miller. The script was also reworked—the finished product is credited to Steve Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin.

Interesting though it might have been to see Soderbergh’s take on this material, it’s hard to argue with the quiet tension & wit of Miller’s elegant, leisurely-paced work here, or with the lively, idiosyncratic dialogue. Miller is somehow able to use just the sort of romantic & sentimental notions that run counter to Beane’s management style—superstition, jinxes, crazy longshots—without violating the cool, dryly humorous tone he’s established. There’s even a tingly sports-movie climax, though the film ambles on for quite a while afterwards.

It’s hard to argue with the performances, either. Fresh from intense work in The Tree of Life, & looking almost laughably beautiful, Pitt turns in another gem here. His Beane is laconic yet tightly-wound, in the vein of his scary, overlooked performance as Jesse James in that Jesse James movie with the cumbersome title—the same bullying aggression under the bonhomie, the same sense that he’s nagged by melancholia.

Wide-eyed under the weight of Beane’s imposing presence is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a fictionalized version of A’s assistant GM Paul DePodesta. An Ivy-Leaguer with a degree in Economics, Brand schools Beane in anxious, intimidated blurts, & their relationship is the movie’s core. There are other fine performances—by Steven Bishop, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Arliss Howard, & especially by Chris Pratt as catcher-turned-first-baseman Scott Hatteberg & Kerris Dorsey as Beane’s daughter—but they’re basically glorified cameos; the godlike Pitt, & Hill as his nebbishy Sancho Panza, carry the movie.

To the degree that I understand it—never a profound degree, where statistics are concerned—Bill James-style baseball analysis is intended to replace conventional wisdom with empiricism. It challenges, most famously, the reliability of batting average as an indicator of a player’s value to a team, especially by comparison to on-base percentage. In other words, it’s an attempt to apply hard rationalism to an activity that makes a great show of valuing the traditional, the intangible, the ineffable.

Somehow, though, even those of us for whom baseball has almost the quality of an orthodox religion—a set of grandly absurd ceremonial flourishes that seem, against reason, to add up to metaphysical significance—may not find this approach offensively reductive, maybe because the mad-scientist number-crunching of James & his disciples is so clearly born of a love of the game. Or maybe it’s because it points to a democratizing effect—it means that the rich teams won’t always win.

In any case, in professional baseball, what owners & managers actually value is money, & what paying fans generally value is winning. It was likely that any formula that promised to deliver the latter for a minimum expenditure of the former would sooner or later be given a try.

The question, of course, is—why should we care if it succeeded? Even if we love baseball, why should we care? At one low point Beane reassures his sweet, worried daughter that “I’ve got uptown problems, which aren’t really problems at all.” Again, he’s right (more coarsely, these are sometimes called “white people problems”). In human terms, Beane’s career fortunes matter even less than, say, the King’s stutter in The King’s Speech, & since the movie is about taking mushy-brained poetic thinking out of baseball, we really shouldn’t even grant this story metaphorical importance.

Skillful filmmaking can get you to care about almost anything, but when you think over the wistful tone of Moneyball’s final act, you may laugh out loud that you sat still for it: In a season in which he set a landmark record & revolutionized sports management, Beane is saddened because he didn’t win the World Series. He still hasn’t, & problems don’t come much more uptown than that.

REPORPOISING

2011-09-23T00:37:00.000-07:00

“From the studio and producers of The Blind Side.” That’s how Dolphin Tale is being marketed. This may strike you as a tenuous aesthetic connection, but it’s savvy advertising—Dolphin Tale, loosely based on true events, is another story of a wounded foundling becoming a star.

The young dolphin in question is injured when she runs afoul of a crab trap. She’s rescued & taken in by Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida, & her damaged tail is amputated soon after. Given the name Winter, the creature learns to swim by moving her rear stump left-right instead of up-down, & it turns out that this technique endangers her life by improperly building up the muscles around her spine.

How Winter got her groove back is, in a highly fictionalized form, the subject of Dolphin Tale. In the movie’s account, a lonely fatherless boy, Sawyer (Nathan Gamble), ditches summer school to hang out at the Aquarium with Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff), daughter of the widowed Dr. Haskell (Harry Connick, Jr.) the vet in charge of Winter’s case. When Sawyer’s Mom (Ashley Judd) finds out about the ditching, she’s furious at first, but the charm of the aquarium & her son’s passion for his newfound interest breaks her down.

There’s talk of putting both Winter & the cash-strapped aquarium to sleep. But while visiting his war-wounded cousin at a Vet’s hospital, Sawyer meets Dr. McCarthy (Morgan Freeman), a designer of prosthetic limbs, & somehow talks him into attempting to craft a new stern for Winter. Getting the mammal (who Dr. McCarthy persists in referring to as a “fish”) to accept the uncomfortable appliance is a struggle.

Directed by character actor Charles Martin Smith, Dolphin Tale is a brightly-colored, slick piece of moviemaking, with corny humor & carefully engineered moments of uplift. The cast is big-name & talented—along with Judd, Freeman & Connick are Kris Kristofferson, Frances Sternhagen, Ray McKinnon & even Richard Libertini in a bit—but overall, the actors seem to be on autopilot. Freeman has a line or two that seems meant to suggest that the Doc is an eccentric curmudgeon, but you’d never know it from the performance. He just smiles amiably & cruises on through. He’s always pleasant company, but this isn’t a rich character.

It’s a shame that the filmmakers didn’t try to dramatize, beyond the most general terms, the technical challenges of the tail-making project—Apollo 13 showed that such details can be absorbing. But the thing is, Dolphin Tale is about the attempt to build an amputee dolphin a working tail. If you can’t emotionally invest a little in a quixotic effort like that, regardless of the movie’s gravitas or even, really, of its implications, you’re tougher than I.

EQUAL TIME

2011-09-22T01:27:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the Autumnal Equinox, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree is this guy…

…one of several excellent monsters from Equinox, a low-budget oddity which began as a 1967 student short directed by future multi-Oscar-winning special effects master Dennis Muren, & was later expanded with new footage & released commercially in 1970. Frank Bonner, beloved as Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati, had one of his earliest roles in the film, & his sideburn length changes dramatically between the old & the new footage.

I have the ridiculously lavish Criterion Collection boxed set of Equinox, with both versions & endless behind-the-scenes explications; it’s a fascinating dissection of a trivial but amusing film. A few years ago The Wife & a friend betook themselves to San Francisco for a weekend of fun, leaving me to batch it on my own. What did I do?

I called up my pal James, who drove down from Prescott, & we sat up & watched the Criterion Equinox DVDs until about 5 a.m. A blast, but it made me feel both adolescent & old at the same time.

ALLIGATIONS OF WRONGDOING

2011-09-16T01:09:00.000-07:00

The creature in Creature is Grimley, a human-alligator hybrid revered by a clan of inbred Louisiana swamp rats. Six extremely attractive, extremely idiotic young road trippers decide to camp out in Grimley’s traditional stomping grounds & soon find out that he’s more than just legendary.

Creature is a jaw-droppingly wretched movie—the director, Fred M. Andrews, doesn’t seem to have the first clue how build an authentic scare, or even an effective jolt—but for about half its length, it’s sort of amusingly tawdry in its badness. Much of the fun is provided by the sly-eyed, smirking redhead Lauren Schneider, who can claim the impressive distinction of having the most unintelligible diction in the cast, but who’s so energetically trashy & cute that it doesn’t matter.

About halfway in, though, as the gang falls into the clutches of Grimley &/or the rednecks, Creature stopped being fun. The tropes that have become de rigueur in the horror genre begin to assert themselves—young women in tank tops or camisoles, mewling for their lives as they’re tied down to chairs or otherwise menaced & abused. This crap, the artless legacy of Tobe Hooper’s harsh but superbly made Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is disgusting & tedious, but it’s not, for me, harrowing, in the aesthetically valid sense.

The antipathy to female sexuality to which these movies cater is clear, but I’m not sure it’s ever occurred to me what a broad streak of bourgeois class hatred—fear & loathing of the rural poor—that they also carry. There are some terrific actors, such as Sid Haig & Pruitt Taylor Vince, among the grinning, gibbering, incestuous hayseeds in Creature, & they’re entertaining as usual. But this stereotype could also be put on the shelf for a good long while, all the same.

One final note: The soundtrack of Creature includes—with what the filmmakers no doubt regard as withering irony—some fine roots music, including, over the end titles, “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life” & “That Old Time Religion” by New Jersey folk-rock duo Chasing June. Though I can’t say that Chasing June made Creature worth sitting through, I’m still grateful to this dreadful flick for showcasing them. Check them out here.

POLEMIC

2011-09-15T01:08:00.000-07:00

The sun sets in the North Pole next week—a cheerful sign for those of us who dwell in the desert—so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the honor this week goes to the Ice Giant…

...from the brief 1912 epic Conquest of the Pole, by pioneering film fantasist Georges Melies, about a race to the Arctic by airships. The winners encounter the pipe-smoking titan, who has a taste for French food...

You can watch the film here.

CLIFF NOTE

2011-09-14T00:37:00.000-07:00

RIP to Cliff Robertson, departed at 88, acclaimed for his Oscar-winning turn in the title role in Charly, as JFK in PT-109, & as a variety of characters, often unlikable or even villainous, in many other notable films including The Best Man, Picnic, 3 Days of the Condor, Obsession, Brainstorm, Star 80 & Wind. All the same, he’s probably now best known as Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man movies.

Turner Classic Movies, by the way, will change their schedule to devote next Monday, September 19, to Robertson’s work.

RIP also to producer & studio head John Calley, passed on at 81.

One more RIP, alas: to the Scottsdale 6 Drive-In, one of only two remaining drive-in theater complexes in the Valley. It has reportedly closed down, though the management holds out some hope for a resurrection.

ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY...

2011-09-11T01:18:00.000-07:00

…of a really bad day, here’s an essay I wrote about five weeks after the attacks. It original appeared in the Tribune:

Surreal.

Most of us have probably heard that word more frequently in the last month and a half than we have in the rest of our lives. Once the term for a school of aesthetics, it’s now the word that people keep using to describe the sight of airplanes flying into buildings and New Yorkers fleeing as clouds of dust and rubble flood the streets behind them. We call such images surreal not because we haven’t seen them before but because we have, faked in countless movies—we call them surreal because, this time, they’re real.

But there’s another kind of surreal. There’s the kind in which medievel kinghts ride invisible horses to the clacking of coconuts, or get frisked by 20th-Century police. There’s the kind that fills a working class British diner with Vikings singing the praises of canned meat, or pits an extraterrestrial pudding against a Scotsman at Wimbledon.

As has been repeatedly noted, where we were and what we were doing when word of the terrorist attacks reached us is something we’ll always remember. I’ve got a story that I doubt anyone else can claim: When I heard, I was watching the opening credits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And after I heard, I sat there and kept watching...and once again, Monty Python came to my rescue. People have been psychologically coping with the current crisis in many different ways. My way has been to watch Monty Python.

Let me explain. There was a critic’s screening of the recent theatrical release of the special edition of Holy Grail scheduled for the morning of September 11 (the DVD of this version came out on October 23 from Columbia Tristar). My wife gets to sleep in on Tuesdays, so when I got up to go to the screening that morning, I showered and dressed quietly, and didn’t turn on radio or TV. Driving to Harkins Centerpoint, with a CD playing instead of the radio, I vaguely noticed that the streets seemed quiet for a weekday morning, but even when I saw the electric sign on the Squaw Peak Parkway—“AIRPORT OPEN; NO FLIGHTS; ESSENTIAL TRAFFIC ONLY”—it somehow still didn’t register that something big had happened. Nor did I observe, until I thought about it later, how stricken and scared the kids working at the theatre looked as they let me in.

Only one other person was in the theatre, a friend of mine. As I sat down, he asked me “Have you heard any updates?” He quickly saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, and as the lights went down, he told me: The World Trade Center was gone, the Pentagon had been attacked as well, thousands were almost certainly dead.

I sat there stunned, staring at the movie’s opening scene, as Graham Chapman’s long-suffering King Arthur endures the sentry’s endless speculation on whether African or European swallows could carry coconuts to England. I briefly thought that it was inappropriate that I stay and watch one of my favorite movies—a wacky comedy no less—at a time like this. But something made me stay in my seat.

It was no longer the same movie, of course. The scene of Eric Idle dragging a cartload of corpses and calling “Bring out your dead!” wasn’t the same anymore. Watching knights on mission from God lop off the limbs of their enemies or employ the Holy Hand Grenade to destroy a lethal white bunny—none of it felt the same. But it didn’t feel trivial or cheaply cynical. It felt unsentimental, but warm and profound.

That weekend I bought my first DVD box set—the entire run of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on the BBC. I’ve been watching the half-hour shows obsessively ever since. Seen in its entirety, the series really seems like an amazing, almost Chaucerian achievement, among the finest things ever made for TV.

The violent, often gory slapstick doesn’t seem so blithe anymore, nor does the fierce awareness of the capacity of human beings to commit atrocities. Pythonesque organizations like the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Royal Society for Putting Things On Top Of Other Things now carry the echo of psychotic Taliban agencies like the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. And it’s jolting, now, to hear a candy in the “Crunchy Frog” sketch referred to as “Anthrax Ripple.”

As I’ve watched, though, it’s come to me: They’re showing us they world as it is. The violent, chaotic comic vision of the Pythons isn’t insanity, it’s clear-eyed sanity. It’s the real world that’s crazy; all the Pythons do is enable us to see it, and to see that it’s possible, maybe even necessary, to laugh at it. This, perhaps, is the true function of surrealism. And its true blessing.

On the other hand, here’s a quote from somebody not known to have been a Pollyana:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending his spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”—Howard Zinn

A 'SHROOM OF ONE'S OWN

2011-09-08T00:18:00.000-07:00

This weekend we enjoyed excellent pizza at Mellow Mushroom at Norterra, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's grant the honor to the title character of 1963's Matango, one of the strangest & best of the Toho shockers...

Matango is a variety of fungus found by a shipwrecked party on a remote island. It's temptingly tasty, but it has some distressing long-term side effects if you eat too much...

Long known on American late-night TV as Attack of the Mushroom People, the film has a more unsettling atmosphere than one might expect, & it even struggles a bit with the question of how much difference there is between a modern city dweller & a mushroom person.

It's based, by the way, on the 1907 story "A Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson. You can & should read it here; it's creepy.

STALKED PLAYER

2011-09-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

RIP to theatre critic, novelist & occasional actor Leonard Harris, best known as the handsome Senator Palantine in Scorcese's Taxi Driver, passed on at 81.

GRUE MOON & BLOCK PARTY

2011-09-02T23:43:00.000-07:00

As Barry Graham points out, this month marks the 109^th anniversary of the premiere of A Trip to the Moon, the pioneering sci-fi film from the great Georges Melies (Turner Classic Movies shows a collection of Melies shorts Monday at 7:45 am Phoenix time). September also marks the release of Apollo 18, a less charming lunar excursion.

Apollo 18, like Cloverfield & Trollhunter, uses the Blair Witch conceit: The premise is that we’re seeing classified footage of an Apollo mission, supposedly scrubbed for budgetary reasons but actually conducted in secret under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The stolid astronauts who land at the lunar south pole soon discover that—gulp—they aren’t alone…

Apollo 18’s opening was rescheduled several times, & Dimension didn’t screen the film for critics (in Phoenix, anyway), so I confess I wasn’t expecting much. The studio’s caution was understandable. I’d be surprised if it became a hit with a wide audience—even at less than an hour and a half, it’s too claustrophobic, oppressive & one-note. But on its own narrow terms, it works, for me at least. The two lead actors (Lloyd Owen & Warren Christie) even though they’re Welsh & Irish, respectively, flawlessly capture the aw-shucks machismo of American astronaut cadences, & the look of ‘70s-era film & video footage is lovingly recreated.

There’s nothing remotely new about the film in terms of sci-fi content, but the director, Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, generates a strong atmosphere of desolation & dread, & there are some pretty well-timed jolts. There’s even a whisper of political disillusionment worked in.

On the other hand, maybe you’d prefer an earthbound alien invasion…

“Pardon my French,” says the nice middle-aged lady, “but they’re fucking monsters.” She’s speaking of her neighbors, the teenage street punks who haunt the title block in Attack the Block. “Fucking monsters,” echoes the young nurse (Jodie Whittaker) who’s just been mugged by the misunderstood lads in question.

The judgment may seem fair enough, but when literal monsters—shaggy, ferocious quadrupeds from outer space, with blue luminescent fangs—unwisely choose this same block of council flats in South London to drop onto out of the sky, the street kids turn out to be the planet’s first & possibly most effective line of defense. That’s the joke of this headlong, highly exciting sci-fi/horror comedy, written & directed by Joe Cornish.

The alien landing takes place in the middle of Bonfire Night, & goes unnoticed among the fireworks, except by the kids, who arm themselves with ninja swords & bottle rockets & the like, & take to their bikes. The nurse is eventually drawn into a truce with her muggers to fight the common enemy.

Whittaker gives a fine performance, as do Nick Frost as a weed dealer & Nick Treadaway as an upper-crust stoner, but the movie really belongs to the young ne’er-do-wells. Once their faces are out of their hoodies, they’re an engaging, even endearing rabble, & the most glowery of them, Moses (John Boyega), is a born leader. The actors are terrific, but Cornish doesn’t sentimentalize the little sods too much; he even lets them indulge in maudlin sociological self-pity when the nurse challenges them on their criminality. Their fast chatter—unsubtitled & sometimes unintelligible but comprehensible by context—& their swiftly-formed alliances give Attack the Block some of the quality of The Thing From Another World.

The creature effects, though extensive, have a minimalist quality that’s spookily effective—you haven’t seen these aliens before—& the musical score, by Steven Price, Felix Buxton & Simon Ratcliffe, is wonderfully old-school. With Attack the Block, Brit cinema does for the alien movie what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie movie: Take an American form back to basics &, in a lighthearted but by no means unemotional way, reinvent it.

SWOOP THERE IT IS

2011-09-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

From Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, comes…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, a pterodactyl…

…which swooped down last month upon the Cardiff Kook, a bronze statue of a surfer that is reportedly much-loathed by the surfing community & often the target of pranks. As pranks go, this one is pretty spectacular—the prankster even provided a prehistoric backdrop.

SANGSTER THE MEMORIES

2011-08-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

A fond RIP to British screenwriter & occasional director Jimmy Sangster, departed at 83.

Though he reportedly had no special enthusiasm for the genre himself, Sangster was one of the principal architects of the horror revolution at Hammer Studios in the ‘50s & ‘60s, writing The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) & Horror of Dracula (1958), the original Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing incarnations of those respective icons. His handful of directorial credits includes Lust for a Vampire (1971) & the underrated, amusingly nasty Horror of Frankenstein (1970).

But…

Monster-of-the-Week: …instead of any of these, let's give this week’s nod to his lesser-known terror the Rakshasa, a ghoul borrowed from Hindu lore, in “Horror in the Heights,” a Sangster-penned installment of the ‘70s TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (quite probably that silly but fun show’s best episode). Seen here in his true form…

…the Rakshasa appeared to his victims in the shape of a person they trusted—to monster-hunter Carl Kolchak, it was as the sweet little old lady who worked in his office…

WARRIN' JEFFS

2011-08-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

Per this story forwarded to me by my pal Dewey (who also suggested the superb headline), there are three, count 'em three, Jeff Buckely movies in the works. My Buckley-fanatic pal Dave might regard this as too few...

RIP to filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti, famous/notorious for 1962's Mondo Cane & similar now-quaint shock-documentaries—& also the popularizer of the term "mondo" (for, vaguely, "extreme," or "exotic") in English—passed on in Rome at 91.

COVERT OPERAS

2011-08-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

Your Humble Narrator is an opera enthusiast, but also a realist: I recognize that live opera is a difficult enthusiasm to indulge for the financially &/or geographically challenged. UltraStar Cinemas in Scottsdale & Surprise, however, are offering a pretty fair next best thing: Four productions from Opera Australia, some of them from the Sydney Opera House itself, shown “in high definition & surround sound on the big screen.”

The Wife & I saw a production of Sondheim’s Company in this way at UltraStar a couple of months back & greatly enjoyed.

The scheduled operas start at 5 p.m. tomorrow (Sunday, 8/21), with Rigoletto, with additional shows at 10 a.m. Tuesday, 8/23, & at 7 p.m. Thursday, 8/25. This pattern is repeated with the subsequent operas: The Mikado (9/18, 9/20, 9/22); Der Rosenkavalier (10/16, 10/18, 10/20) & La Boheme (11/13, 11/15, 11/17).

Tickets are $20, which is about as cheap as opera comes unless you check it out of the library. Or sing it yourself.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE THING CALLED WRONG?

2011-08-19T00:25:00.000-07:00

Disclosure up front: Barry Graham & I have been close friends for many years, since we both worked at the Phoenix New Times in the late ‘90s. We’ve collaborated on a couple of projects, edited each other’s freelance pieces for different newspapers, gone to scores if not hundreds of movies together, & talked on the phone with the stamina of teenage girls, if not always with an equal level of maturity.

Still, with as much objectivity as I can muster—& much as it pains me to feed the mad Scottish bastard’s ego—I must grant that Graham is probably the best writer of prose I’ve ever known well, & that some of the very best of said prose can be found in his novel The Wrong Thing, newly out from Switchblade.

Barry recites from & signs the tome Saturday at The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, starting at 5 p.m.

Graham’s idea with The Wrong Thing was to put a human face on an archetypical figure, in this case the classic southwestern boogeyman: a murderous Mexican-American drug dealer known simply as The Kid. The Kid’s career is traced from his neglected childhood in a New Mexico barrio, through a string of gruesome murders & other crimes.

On the surface The Kid is likable & unassuming, even sweet—he loves his girlfriend & his cat, & reading & cooking. But whenever he’s confronted with any petty authority or crossed in the slightest way, he lapses into brutality with an almost slapstick haplessness, stumbling into homicide the way Jerry Lewis might stumble into a tray of desserts.

I don’t mean by this to suggest, by the way, that The Wrong Thing is black comedy. It’s horrific & sad, & Graham’s earnest tone insists that we take in the momentousness, both physical & moral, of every gory outrage. What keeps it from being depressing is the speed & exhilaration & straightforward beauty of the writing. Graham’s style—precise without fussiness, simple & conversational without forced chattiness—turns this tale from a case study into a tight, compact tragedy.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

2011-08-18T00:24:00.000-07:00

Out this week on DVD is...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...The Colossus of New York, a 1958 yarn in which the brain of genius Ross Martin is salvaged after his accidental death & placed in this hulking yet deco-elegant robot giant...

...which has been thoughtfully equipped with death rays that he can shoot from his eyes. I've always had some affection for this cornball black-&-white robodrama, with its piano score by Van Cleave. Check out the trailer here.

ROYALE WATCHING

2011-08-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

Sunday afternoon Your Humble Narrator & The Kid betook ourselves to The Royale, the Midnite Movie Mamacita’s nouveau-grindhouse in downtown Mesa, for a screening of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory benefitting Kids Need to Read. Not for the first time, I was struck by how really messed-up, on many different levels, that movie is, in spite (& at times because of) Gene Wilder’s classic turn as Wonka.

But it was a lot of fun anyway, & I swelled with pride to see my two contributions to The Royale’s décor. First, this poster for the 1955 Republic serial Panther Girl of the Kongo, starring sexy Phyllis Coates:

Seeing this so prominently displayed in the lobby delighted me, because it was a legacy from my dear late pal & mentor Bill Rocz, who passed on in 1996. Valley folk will remember Bill as the movie critic at Channel 5 & host of that station’s Family Classics & Hollywood Greats. I had enjoyed the Panther Girl in my home office for years, but there was no place she fit in our current house, & she had been in storage for more than five years. I can think of few places that Bill would more wish to see her than her new home.

The Royale has also offered shelter to The Great Shuggahoo, a big wooden Tiki that hung over my desk for years, but who was also out of place—according to The Wife—in the current Moorhead Hacienda. Shuggahoo (named after an alien ruler in some head comic I read decades ago) has an important gig at The Royale—guarding the commode:

He looks pretty sullen about the detail, wouldn’t you say?

OF GLEE THEY SING

2011-08-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

All I know first-hand about Glee! the TV series, other than that it’s wildly popular, is what I’ve gleaned from the parts I’ve seen of two or three episodes. I liked what I saw, more or less—the eclecticism of the musical choices & the goofy overproduction of the numbers, the sweet exuberance of the young performers, the good values didactically delivered, and the even-toned comic villainy of Jane Lynch as a bracing counterbalance to the show’s self-conscious virtuousness.

But I’m sure that there’s plenty I didn’t “get” about Glee! The 3D Concert Movie, opening today. Directed by Kevin Tancharoen, this documentary chronicles a New Jersey stop on last summer’s concert tour by the show’s cast, remaining nominally in character while they perform dorky-but-rousing versions of pop favorites, scavenged from sources ranging from Britney Spears to the Beatles to Streisand, and performed in idiosyncratic arrangements.

Most of the performers seem like they’re trying a little too hard, in the Star Search/Up With People mode, but that has its own charm, within limits; it’s as if they’re auditioning for the right to go on living. One of them, Lea Michele, takes this to another level: She’s such a merciless crowd-pleaser that you may feel like somebody’s picked her up by the ankles and is swinging her at you like a club.

That said, I enjoyed a lot of these numbers. My favorite, I think, was Pink’s “Raise Your Glass,” bellowed by a group of young pretty-boys in traditional glee-club jackets. The incongruity between the costumes & the lyrics was strong showmanship.

Between songs, Tancharoen cuts to talking-head interviews with giddy Glee! fans outside the venue, naming their favorite character, or asserting what an unstoppable universal force for good the show is. There are also a few extended documentary sequences about fans struggling with “being different,” like a midget cheerleader in Yuba City, California, a girl with Asperger Syndrome, a gay teenage boy who was outed to the classmate on whom he had a crush. This stuff is interesting, at times harrowing—any of these strands could probably make a full-length documentary by itself.

Like most concert movies—Jonathan Demme’s great Stop Making Sense is one of the very few exceptions—Glee! The 3D Concert Movie seemed a little too long to me, & it’s a bit self-congratulatory, too. But I can’t deny that a good chunk of it made me smile & tap my foot. The 3D, by the way, is a gratuitous drag as usual—the only really amusing effects are some computer-animated fruit smoothies spilling at us during the closing credits, to the tune of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”

TEEN WOLF ONE

2011-08-11T01:39:00.000-07:00

The school year is cranking back up, so everybody steer clear of…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this guy, who sprouts hair & fangs when the school bell rings—the “I” in 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf:

It should be said that, while this drive-in fave is hokey in the extreme, young Michael Landon’s performance is genuinely poignant at times.

You can watch the MST3K version here.