A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE REACTION

Check out Your Humble Narrator's short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about the upcoming TCM/Fathom Events revival of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan at select AMC Theatres on Sunday, September 4, Monday September 5 and Thursday September 8...

...and also of the showing of Nosferatu at the Orpheum Theatre here in Phoenix next Tuesday.

It's bad enough that Nosferatu is marking its centennial this year, but it's really irksome that Wrath of Khan is being shown in observance of its fortieth anniversary. Wrath of Khan is forty freakin' years old.

I have a bit of personal history with this film. My review of Wrath of Khan was the first movie review of mine ever to appear in a daily newspaper, the Erie Times-News. I was twenty years old, and had been submitting my work to the editors there for a while without success. My break came because the regular reviewer disliked sci-fi, and horror, and action pictures, and pretty much any kind of movie in which, as he liked to put it, "the dialogue appears in word balloons over the characters' heads."

Needless to say, I was more than happy to relieve him of this beat, and Wrath of Khan was my first opportunity to do so. I dragged my then-girlfriend to it at the Strand on 10th Street in Erie. I think she was a little taken aback at how much I responded to it. She knew I was a nerd; she didn't know I was that much of a nerd.

Forty years later, it's still a favorite of mine. All these years, however, I've had a complaint about the movie, and I doubt there will be a better occasion than now to air it. But it involves a moment in the very climatic scene of the film, so if you've never seen it, and want to discover it for yourself, consider this a MAJOR SPOILER warning.

Okay, for those still reading: Near the end of Wrath of Khan, Kirk's titular nemesis, grandly played by Ricardo Montalban, is dying aboard the starship Reliant, scarred by radiation burns, but still lashing out at Kirk by trying to detonate the Genesis Device, spewing Ahab's invective toward Moby-Dick all the while. Meanwhile, aboard the Enterprise, Kirk and his crew are frantically trying to regain warp speed so that they can escape the blast zone. The director, Nicholas Meyer, cuts between the two vessels, with Khan's crazed, disfigured face gleefully watching the Enterprise on his viewscreen.

At the last second, of course, warp speed is attained, and the Enterprise zips away to safety as the Reliant explodes behind her. Yay, the good guys win; all is well, except...Meyer doesn't cut to a reaction shot so that we can see Khan register, in that final second, that Kirk has defeated him once and for all.

I've never understood this omission. Everything about the way the scene is shot and edited up to that point seems to set up such a reaction shot, maybe even a final "NOOOOO!" from Montalban. It would have been the perfect payoff to Kirk's much-parodied roar of "KHAAAAAN!" earlier in the film.

I'm well aware that the reason for the dissatisfaction I feel at the lack of this shot has to do with my persistent, spiteful feelings about revenge in melodramas. Khan himself, in this movie, quotes a "Klingon proverb" that "revenge is a dish best served cold," but the innumerable action pictures that end with the bad guy simply being killed leave me cold; they're entirely unsatisfying. Far better that they should live long to wallow in their defeat; at a minimum, they should die knowing that they've lost. There are a few movies that have grasped this: the original Cape Fear, also The Princess Bride among them. But few movies have ever left me hanging in this regard as badly as Wrath of Khan, wonderful as it is.

Was such a shot planned, but never filmed? Was it filmed, but cut for some deliberate reason, or just for time? Did Montalban have to leave early that day? Or was it truly never considered? If I ever get the chance to interview Meyer (no matter what the subject of the interview is supposed to be), these are likely to be the first questions I ask him. Or, by some chance, does the shot exist after all, and is it at last included in the "Director's Cut" being shown at the TCM/Fathom Events revival?

In the meantime, I'll ask you: Am I the only one that ever noticed this or felt this way?

EIGHT WATCHERS

Despite the depressingly--though appropriately--audience-less venues, I thoroughly enjoyed the Tokyo Summer Games, which wrapped up this evening. Thanks to the greatest TV channel of all time, Turner Classic Movies, I also got to observe the Olympiad by watching a film that's been on my list since I read about it back in the '70s...

Visions of Eight--Produced by Stan Margulies and David L. Wolper and scored by Henry Mancini, this is a 1973 anthology of documentary shorts, each on a different aspect of the 1972 Munich Summer Games, by eight important directors of the time. All are interesting; a couple of them are real gems...

The Beginning--Soviet director Yuri Ozerov helmed this brief, briskly edited segment on the Opening Ceremonies. A standard travelogue in style, but a good time capsule of images and people.

The Strongest--Mai Zetterling choose weightlifting for her subject, she says, because she knew nothing about it, but was fascinated by the solitary, obsessive nature of the training. "I am not interested in sports, but I am interested in obsessions." She captured some remarkable physical feats, and some poignant psychology.

The Highest--As pure cinema, Arthur Penn's visual poem on pole vaulting is probably the best of these shorts. Nearly wordless--indeed, nearly soundless; just some dim crowd noise and chatter faded in and out--it's elliptical and almost hypnotically beautiful.

The Women--Though women had been participants in the Olympics since 1900, they were still enough of a novelty in '72 to be patronized in this short by Michael Pfleghar; he got some fine footage, however, including scenes of German long jumper Heide Rosendahl.

The Fastest--Kon Ichikawa had already directed one of the great sports documentaries, Tokyo Olympiad (1965), about the '64 Summer Games; it featured throat-catchingly wonderful footage of Ethiopian marathon great Abebe Bikila. His quick, highly concentrated, almost forensic look at the Men's 100 meter dash at different speeds is another high point of this collection.

The Decathlon--Milos Forman intercuts the event with both traditional and classical German music, at times facetiously. We see some of then-Bruce Jenner's first Olympic appearance.

The Losers--Claude Lelouch's painful and compassionate look at some of the losing athletes is another of the best segments.

The Longest--Except for a vague mention in the opening, this short by John Schlesinger is the only one to include any content about the Munich Massacre; its main subject, however, is British marathoner Ron Hill (who just died in May of this year, at 82). Somehow Schlesinger's style seems, with the possible exception of Ozerov's, the most dated and heavy-handed, but it's still a compelling chronicle.

What I liked about all of these films is how little any of them rely on talk; there are interviews or a scrap or two of narration here and there, but on the whole this is visual storytelling.

Anyway, in the unlikely event that you're not quite ready for a break from the Olympics, Visions of Eight is available to stream at TCM.com through August 18; Blu-ray and DVD editions are available from The Criterion Collection.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY MATTER

Just because it's playing this Saturday afternoon on Turner Classic Movies...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week let's honor the title malevolent cerebrum in the 1953 classic Donovan's Brain...

 
...based on Curt Siodmak's novel of the same title, or, as it's known in Portuguese, O Cerebro de Donovan...

TOP RAT

Saturday evening (11:30 p.m. Phoenix time) Turner Classic Movies hosts the TCM premiere of the 1983 Canadian horror picture Of Unknown Origin, directed by George Pan Cosmatos of Rambo fame, about the battle of wills between a young urbanite (Peter Weller) and a rodent of unusual size who's trying to drive him away. I remember seeing it back in the '80s, and finding it intriguing.

So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...our honoree is the vermin from that film, here salaciously depicted on the VHS cover art...

WINGING IT

RIP to Dick Gautier, who played Conrad Birdie on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie, and Hymie the robot on Get Smart, passed on at 85. Last night I watched him in an episode of the short-lived sitcom When Things Were Rotten, in which he played Robin Hood, facing off against The Black Knight, played by the recently late and much-lamented Ron Glass.

A Canadian entomologist has named a newly-discovered species of moth Neopalpa donaldtrumpi after our incoming President, on the basis of a similarity in coiffure.

The difference is, it works on the moth. Most becoming.

You can read about it in the Washington Post, although presumably that makes it fake news. Anyway, in the creature's honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...we can hardly do other than to acknowledge Mothra...

...star of the 1961 classic and many subsequent Toho favorites. We'll be lucky indeed if The Moth's Eponym in the White House wreaks no more havoc than Toho's larger but far less repulsive bug.

It was also pointed out to me that Turner Classic Movies is showing the Budd Schulberg-Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd on Inauguration Day.

Great movie, great gesture, but I don't think I can watch it, anymore than I can watch the spectacle itself. That movie came true, and what's heartbreaking is that the tape exposing the character of the real Lonesome Rhodes (far more reprehensible than Andy Griffith's character in the film) surfaced, right on cue, and the public failed to give a shit. As cynical as they always seemed, it turns out that Schulberg and Kazan overestimated us.

DRAWN OF THE DEAD

Just because The Fearless Vampire Killers is on Turner Classic Movies Saturday night… 

 Monster-of-the-Week: …our honoree is the cackling green-skinned vampire who tangles with the title characters in the animated prologue of that 1967 classic...

TOME SWEET TOME

Opening today:

The Book of Life—Produced by the great Guillermo del Toro and directed and co-written by Jorge Gutierrez, this computer-animated feature is a tapestry of motifs from Mexican folklore, both pre- and post-Colombian, especially that culture’s version of Halloween, the defiantly festive Day of the Dead. It starts out in a town in the center of Mexico—which is identified at the beginning of the movie as the “Center of the Universe”—and involves a love triangle.

Said triangle’s points are the spirited, big-hearted town beauty, Maria (voiced as an adult by Zoe Saldana) and two local boys, Joaquin (Channing Tatum), a military hero whose fearlessness secretly stems from the talisman of invulnerability he wears, and Manolo (Diego Luna), who descends from a long line of matadors. Manolo has the chops for that profession except that he can’t bring himself to kill a bull.

The outcome of the affair becomes the object of a wager between two gods of the hereafter, and thus The Book of Life turns into a crazy cosmic epic, with characters turned into elegant skeletal versions of themselves as they journey into the underworld. Gutierrez manages the feat of making his story feel plausibly traditional while at the same time making it hinge on modern values like feminism and the abolition of animal cruelty. Also, the movie is full of lovely music, one visual splendor after another, and a really endearing little pig. It’s magnificent.

The Best of Me—Amanda, a sassy rich girl in a small Louisiana town in the early ‘90s, falls in love with Dawson, a hunk from the wrong side of the tracks. Dawson is no bad boy, however—even though he was raised by a violently abusive drug-dealing father (and apparently no mother) he’s somehow grown up into a gallant, studious, flawlessly well-behaved paragon.

But these two aren’t just star-crossed, they’re star-double-crossed. Separated by a tragedy as good-looking teenagers, played by Liana Liberato and Luke Bracey, they’re reunited about twenty years later, having grown into dissimilar but even better-looking adults—Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden, to be specific—only to see circumstances building up to a second tragedy.

This adaptation—seemingly rather loose—of a Nicholas Sparks weeper was directed by the always-interesting Michael Hoffman, of such underrated efforts as Soapdish, the 1999 Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Last Station. His work here shows him no less skillful. He modulates the performances and maintains a swift, dry tone that keeps the banal dialogue and contrived plot carpentry from spiraling into pure camp. Whether that’s to the benefit of the movie’s entertainment value is another question, but it’s impressive.

Marsden can sometimes use his great looks to comic effect; he doesn’t quite get to that here, but he’s still good company, and so is Monaghan. Sean Bridges and Gerald McRaney contribute solid work as Dawson’s scumbag father and curmudgeonly surrogate father, respectively. But the general sobriety and professionalism of their work can’t disguise what The Best of Me is—polished hokum. At best.

RIP to the beautiful, soulful, sexy, funny Elizabeth Pena, passed on way too young at 55, “after a brief illness.” She was at her sexiest and funniest in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and at her most lovable in the terrific John Sayles yarn Lone Star, in which she gets to speak the wonderfully commonsensical final line.

TV note: We’re in the thick of October, so TCM is serving more than its average quotient of monster flicks. This Saturday morning, for instance—check the schedule for local airtimes—we get 1967’s Hammer shocker The Mummy’s Shroud…
 

HE SO HORNY

At the suggestion of a reader…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree is the winged fire demon…

…conjured up periodically in Jacques Tourneur’s superb 1957 Night of the Demon, or, as it’s known in its abridged American form, Curse of the Demon, showing Friday evening at 9:30 p.m. (Phoenix time) on that all-time greatest TV channel, Turner Classic Movies...

It’s said that director Tourneur, screenwriter Charles Bennett and star Dana Andrews all thought the demon in this adaptation of the M.R. James short story “Casting the Runes” should be suggested rather than seen, but they were overruled by producer Hal Chester. Tourneur et al were probably aesthetically more tasteful, but the demon, with his loutish, jowly face, is cool enough that it’s hard to regret its inclusion.

UNTRUE BLOOD

Happy Halloween next Wednesday! That evening, Turner Classic Movies will be showing their ingenious 45-minute still-photo reconstruction, by restorer Rick Schmidlin, of Tod Browning’s 1927 lost silent London After Midnight, featuring…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, “The Man in the Beaver Hat,” with buggy eyes and a grin of nasty big pointy teeth...

This iconic vampire visage was created and played by the famed Lon Chaney, Sr., and [spoiler alert!]…

…it turns out that he’s fictitious even within the context of the movie: a policeman in bloodsucker disguise, part of an elaborate charade to get a murderer to crack and confess. It’s somehow more implausible than the idea that vampires are real.

Browning remade the film, entertainingly but with the same hard-to-swallow twist, as Mark of the Vampire in 1935, with Lionel Barrymore, Bela Lugosi and Jean Hersholt.

MY SCARE LADY

Since Turner Classic Movies is featuring a Hammer horror line-up this Saturday…  

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to a creature from one of the evening’s features: The woman (Susan Denberg) revived by Frankenstein, but infused with a vengeful male soul, in 1967’s Frankenstein Created Woman…

Martin Scorcese admires this movie (try to hear the following in his rat-a-tat voice): “I like all Hammer films. If I singled this one out, it’s not because I like it the best—it’s a sadistic film, very difficult to watch—but because, here, they actually isolate the soul: a bright blue shining translucent ball. The implied metaphysic is close to something sublime.”

WAR ON CATERPILLARS

Friday evening the single greatest TV channel of all time, Turner Classic Movies, presents a tribute to director Ishiro Honda. It starts at 5 p.m. (Phoenix time) with Gojira (1954), followed at 6:45 p.m. by Rodan (1957) and then at 8:15 p.m. with...

Monster-of-the-Week: …Mothra (Mosura, 1962), the title character of which is this week’s honoree (note that she’s “ravishing a universe for love”; I might have thought that she was “ravaging” it). She’s a gigantic insect god who in the course of the story goes from egg to caterpillar to cocoon to full-grown moth, all while single-mindedly working to rescue two diminutive captive maidens (played by singing twins Emi and Yumi Ito, aka The Peanuts) who are being exploited by a greedy businessman.

This one’s worth catching, if you’ve never seen it. It’s one of the most beguiling of the Japanese monster flicks.

INK AGAIN

Thursday afternoon at 1:30 p.m. (Phoenix time) the greatest TV channel ever, Turner Classic Movies, shows a weird one: 1969’s The Illustrated Man. It’s from the 1951 short-story collection by the great Ray Bradbury, framed by the device of a hobo covered from the neck down with body art, supposedly by an old woman from the future, that comes to life and tells stories if you stare at it.

As an adaptation of this famous anthology, the movie, directed by Jack Smight, is a travesty, but it’s a bizarre, occasionally disturbing travesty. Only three of the stories are presented, each starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. They all kind of suck, although the middle one, “The Long Rain,” about space-wrecked astronauts struggling through the perpetual torrential downpour on the planet Venus, is a little bit cool. The real focus is on the frame story, featuring Bloom as the tattoo artist, Steiger, at his hammiest—which is saying something—as her human canvas, and Robert Drivas as the poor schmuck who meets him on the road. There’s also a very cute, but very strange, little Pomeranian as Steiger’s familiar.

What’s really striking about this film, however, is how restrained the ink on Steiger looks by today’s standards. The designs, by Western artist James E. Reynolds, are terrific, but the idea that they make Steiger “a freak,” as he says, is now hilarious—if only by virtue of his head and neck being un-inked, you wouldn’t look twice at this guy nowadays if he was your tax attorney.

RIP to the excellent, eccentric character actor Luke Askew, passed on at 80, whose career ranged, rather apolitically, from The Green Berets to Easy Rider, and with whom, I note from his obit, I have the honor to share a birthday.

ALL THE WAY HOMUNCULUS

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:

SPINAL ZAP

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…

BUSHY CHANEY

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).

CLIFF NOTE

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.

GRUE MOON & BLOCK PARTY

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.