ROADSIDE SCHOLAR

The Wife, The Kid and I spent the weekend before last in beautiful Palm Springs, so that Your Humble Narrator...

...could check out and review a couple of fascinating obscurities at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival at the Camelot Theatre on Baristo.

On the way, we stopped in Quartzsite, Arizona, at Reader's Oasis Books...

...where I had stopped in May of 2019 in hopes of interviewing the celebrated "Naked Bookseller" Paul Winer, only to find the place closed and learn, upon calling his wife Joanne, that Winer had died in a hospice in Yuma just a couple of days earlier (here's the Phoenix Magazine story I wrote about him at the time). This time, I found the store open, and Joanne sitting disconsolately in the doorway, but alas, the place was without electrical power, and the books seemed dusty and dry. Heartbreaking. Nonetheless, I left with several volumes, including a Western paperback called The Man From Padera, by cowboy star Rory Calhoun.

Then we stopped for gas at Chiriaco Summit, California, and paid a quick visit to "William the Conqueror" (Patton's dog) at the Patton Museum there...

In Palm Springs, we had several fine meals, including lox and eggs at Sherman's...

On Saturday, after dropping the ladies off to shop at the outlet malls just west of Palm Springs, I headed back to the incredibly windy exit at Cabazon to visit my beloved roadside dinosaurs (famously featured in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) to find they had been painted in Flintstones style...

Oh the indignity. "Dinny" looks rather irritable about it...

I went into the gift shop inside Dinny's belly to see if I could establish if the dinos are still under occupation by the anti-evolutionist crowd, and rather to my surprise, could find no evidence of it. There were no books, brochures, tracts or signage to that effect that I spotted, just standard toys, shirts, etc. It made me wonder if, maybe, the owners found their anti-evolutionist views bad for business and decided to self-suppress them, at least in the gift shop. 

In any case, sculptor Claude Bell's bas-relief depictions of earlier humans, which suggest a belief in evolution, may still be seen in the interior walls...

Outside, there's also this snake sculpture...

...and the huge, dinosaur-adorned sign of the Wheel Inn Restaurant...

It's now closed, alas, but I would have eaten there if it wasn't.

On the ride home we stopped in Quartzsite again for gas, and saw still more fauna I would like to have adopted...

BOOKSTORES, PYRAMIDS AND FILMS NOIR

This past weekend, May 9 through 12, marked the 20^th annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs, California. So The Wife, The Kid and I headed west, me to check out the movies; the ladies to check out the shopping, and all of us to check out some fine dining.

On the way I planned to stop by and visit, and maybe interview, legendary “Naked Bookstore” owner Paul Winer at Quartzsite’s Reader’s Oasis Books…

 

It turned out, alas, I was two days too late; you can read my story about it here.

But since we were in Quartzsite, we took a minute to visit the grave of the famed camel driver Hi Jolly; here’s me and The Kid at that distinctive monument…

As for the Noir Festival, it offered rare showings of a couple of obscure gems, both in beautiful new 35-millimeter prints (hopefully they’ll both show up soon on TCM). 1956’s The Scarlet Hour…

 …starred sultry Carol Ohmart, cheating on her abusive husband James Gregory with sap Tom Tryon; it also featured early scene-stealing by the young Elaine Stritch. And there was the wonderful moment when Gregory, renting a car for some shady business, asked rental guy for “the most inconspicuous car you’ve got." And if all that wasn’t enough, Nat “King” Cole appears in it, and sings. 

Richard Fleischer’s Trapped (1949), which begins like a docu-drama with a stentorian narrator, turns into a good lurid melodrama with just-as-sultry Barbara Payton, in the clinch with Lloyd Bridges as an escaped counterfeiter. Bridges is a brute here, but fabulously dapper; when we first see him he’s brought into the warden’s office at the federal penitentiary, but he looks like he’s dressed for lunch at the Brown Derby. He keeps getting into fights throughout the film, and I wanted him to knock it off, because I hated to see his outfits get messed up.

Caught up with this one belatedly:

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu—Almost twenty years ago it fell to me to review, for New Times, one of the animated Pokemon movies. It was an alienating experience, sitting there, watching the incomprehensible action up on the screen, all the while aware that it was perfectly comprehensible to the kids around me in the theatre. Now I’ve seen the franchise’s first live-action feature film, and I’m only slightly less perplexed.

For the uninitiated, a Pokemon—the term derives from “Pocket Monster”—is any of a large selection of strange creatures, variously fuzzy or downy or scaly, featured in Japanese video games and trading cards and toys and TV cartoons and so on. Some of them fly, some swim, others are quadrupedal, with what look like giant cloves of garlic growing out of their backs.

Certainly the most famous is Pikachu, a furry yellow sort-of-cat with red cheeks and a tail that resembles a bolt of electricity. He’s the star of this new film, a mystery set in an alternate reality in which humans and Pokemon co-exist.

The story starts with Tim (Justice Smith), a human kid, traveling to “Ryme City” after hearing of the death of his estranged police detective father. He soon meets his father’s companion Pikachu, here rendered in CGI and voiced by Ryan Reynolds. In a grand film noir tradition, Pikachu’s an amnesiac. The two of them team up with obligatory plucky young reporter Kathryn Newton to probe a convoluted intrigue involving the escape of a powerful dragon/kangaroo/dinosaur-like Pokemon called “Mewtwo” from a research facility.

That’s about as coherently as I can summarize the plot. Besides, if you’re a Pokemon buff you don’t need me to summarize it for you, and if you’re not, you need it even less. All I can say is that it’s an impeccably well-made movie in the modern style, briskly edited and scored, with the CGI seamlessly intermingled with the live-action cast and settings. The nattering of Reynolds is amusing at times, the human leads are likable, and such veteran character actors as Bill Nighy and Ken Watanabe turn up in supporting parts. And any movie that gets Bill Nighy a paycheck can’t be all bad.