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.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
GREEN BLUES
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…
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…
Monday, September 26, 2011
NODBALL
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 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.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
IT'S NOT THAT EASY BEING BEANE
“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.
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.
Friday, September 23, 2011
REPORPOISING
“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.
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.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
EQUAL TIME
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.
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.
Friday, September 16, 2011
ALLIGATIONS OF WRONGDOING
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.
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.
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