Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL

Just ring a doorbell and say "Pizza" — Newsweek magazine's 2012 Oscar roundtable

2012-01-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

I love listening to professional actors talk about their working experiences, the training and processes they develop to do their job, the work and structure behind their performances.

Newsweek magazine's 2012 Oscar roundtable delivers a gathering of actors whose heads I want to crawl inside of.

Via The Daily Beast:

Newsweek's annual Oscar roundtable always feels like a cozy A-list dinner party. Since 1998, we've hosted the actors who gave some of the best performances of the year for a raw discussion about their craft. And this year, the conversation was at its best: fast, funny—and sexually charged. We should have known that it would be, given our lineup of George Clooney (The Descendants), Viola Davis (The Help), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michael Fassbender (Shame), Charlize Theron (Young Adult) and Christopher Plummer (Beginners). (See our essay about the day in this week’s Newsweek).

David Ansen's feature write-up on the roundtable is here.

I should have known that the talk would quickly turn to sex. Although my fellow moderator, Ramin Setoodeh, and I had decided we’d open the discussion with a generic question—“Was there a movie or performance you’d seen as a child that inspired you to be an actor?”—Swinton is quick to remind me that she and I had just been discussing our first erotic memories in the cinema. She’d recently shown her 14-year-old twins Vertigo, the most sexually obsessive of Hitchcock movies. So our opening question is revised, by popular demand, to everyone’s first cinematic sexual revelation.

Ten clips from the roundtable are here. Points of interest include:

George Clooney recalling his "worst job," which involved rubbing powder on the corns of women's feet (some of which had a toe removed).
Tilda Swinton on why she gave away her 2008 Oscar.
Viola Davis on Hollywood's condescension regarding race. Allison Samuels has some words on Theron's well-intentioned but "thoroughly misguided" contribution to that discussion. Andrew Sullivan provides some reader push-back toward Viola Davis.
Michael Fassbender on onscreen pissing.
Clooney: "I was in Batman 4." Theron: “What up, Nipples!"
the whole bunch on What Actors' Production Trailers Mean to Me.
Charlize Theron on wanting to be Kristen Wiig.
Christopher Plummer on his exasperation with Terence Malick.
Clooney on "selling out" — "You know what, fuck you."
Davis and Fassbender on their process as actors to find their characters, even a character such as Magneto in X-Men.

Midnight in the Tree of Life with Hugo the Artist and His Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Descendants. Get the Help, We're Being Moneyballed!

2012-01-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

And the Academy Award nominations are now out.

Not a lot of refined commentary from me about them as my opinions regarding the influences behind, and thus the merits of, the Academy Awards has declined sharply over the past decade or so. (The year Crash took "Best Picture" I didn't just throw in the towel, I set it afire and salted the ashes with uranium isotopes.)

However, albeit unasked for, some random thoughts as I look at that page:

Overall, what a tepid bunch of Best Picture choices. With the exception of The Tree of Life — the obligatory bone tossed for public "it's art!" cred — there's not a truly interesting pick there. Not a surprise, really, but I'm ever hoping for more actual surprises to zazz up the annual lassitude. It's the final confirmation that 2011 won't be a year that looms large in my movie memory.

PREDICTION #1: The most entertaining thing about Oscar night will be Patton Oswalt's Twitter feed.

Speaking of interesting: Melancholia ... ?... Paging Melancholia ... I'm not certain that it's a "great" film, or even a good one in some godlike objective sense, but I am certain that it was one of the few films in 2011 that left me with some lasting impressions. It's not in any category at all but Extremely Loud made it to the Big 10? What the? Kirsten Dunst? Lars Von Trier? Not even just to class up the joint a bit more? To see if Von Trier will joke about Nazis again? No? Harrumph.

Probably just as well. Nooses would have to drop from the Kodak Theatre's chandeliers after Melancholia's interpretive dance number.

And Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close squeaked onto the expanded "Best" 10 list but Drive could not? Yes, I know: a "heartwarming" "issue" movie vs. a summer genre action entry. But as summer genre action numbers go, Drive rose above old stale formulas while Extremely Loud used them like Velveeta on mac & cheese.

No Tilda Swinton? Michael Fassbender? Shailene Woodley? Ryan Gosling? Albert Brooks? Vera Farmiga (for as either director or actor in Higher Ground)? Charlize Theron and/or Patton Oswalt for Young Adult? When was the last time an Oscar ceremony was better defined by who and what didn't get nominated? (Okay, easy answer: most of them for the past 20 years.)

Oh, I'd love to witness Albert Brooks' acceptance speech that magically manages to say "Thank you" and "Fuck you" without using any of those words.

Of course The Artist is there, given the confetti-cannon reception it has received and especially given Hollywood's penchant for both nostalgia-fantasy and licking its own nipples. I still remain lukewarm on it. Likewise Midnight in Paris. I found both enjoyable and charming enough when in the moment, but neither is a movie that we'll be talking much about in ten years. Or five. Two?

And really, The Artist is also up for "Music (Original Score)"? Shame.

PREDICTION #2: The entire ceremony will be scored to Bernard Herrmann's "Scene D'Amour" from Vertigo. Kim Novak will strangle Billy Crystal with a rape whistle.

Speaking of Shame, I'm not upset that that movie is nowhere in sight, although one of my drinking game cues will be whenever a camera zooms in on Carey Mulligan.

I assumed Midnight in Paris would get a nom for Cinematography. Wait — it did for Art Direction. Okay, that's what I meant.

The Tree of Life gave me the most surprising and sincere positive emotional moments I experienced in a theater this last year. I think it's a remarkable piece of work, one that demonstrates film's equivalent of abstract expressionism, and the closest I'll ever get to being in an audience in 1968 that's alternately enthralled and perplexed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. It moved me in some subliminal ways that left me quietly observing, "Whoa. Where did that feeling come from?" And I love when a movie does that to me.

But I'm still not settled on what I think of it as a whole, especially Sean Penn's part of it. I will see it again, and I'm just pleased that we had a film that bears rewatching through different lenses. Right now I agree with Christopher Plummer, who worked with Terence Malick on The New World — Malick could use the hands-on objective wisdom of a first-rate collaborator, a fully tuned-in screenwriter other than just himself. Someone whispering into his ear now and then. That opinion might change after subsequent viewings.

The Tree of Life is also there for Cinematography and Directing. I'd like to see it take at least one of those, followed by studios banking more on Malick so he makes more movies more often. But it's not up for Editing? Huh.

I wish mightily that Jessica Chastain had been nominated for that one rather than The Help. Pleased that she had such a good year, though.

Elizabeth and I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Gary Oldman in attendance. He gave a warm Q&A afterward. I remember more about the Q&A than I do about his performance. That pretty much means he nailed George Smiley, doesn't it?

I smile and nod to see both Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo there for The Artist, though it was Bejo who made the bigger impression on me. Whether or not either wins, this probably means we'll see a lot more of both of them in the future and that's okay by me. I still think they (with Uggie the Dog) should take over the leads in the talked-out remake of The Thin Man.

Christopher Plummer vs. Max von Sydow: Glad to see the 20th century representin'. I love that it's 2012 and we have Rudyard Kipling from The Man Who Would be King up against the chess-playing medieval knight from The Seventh Seal. And neither has won Old Goldie before. It's Plummer's in a walk and hooray for that.

And yet, if that statue goes the other way, would the great von Sydow really want to cap his long, august career by finally winning an Oscar for a movie as aggressively ordinary as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and as hackneyed as his role in it? It would be like finally giving one to Peter O'Toole for Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage.

Pleased and relieved that Bridesmaids didn't make it to the final list, but pleased indeed that Melissa McCarthy did for Best Supporting Actress. (By the way, it'll be a good year when the Oscars finally do away with the increasingly pointless Actor/Actress fenceline and have them all compete as the Actors they are.) My fondness for funny women is an eternal life-giving flame within me, so I loved Bridesmaids' cast — as I do in their individual work too — particularly McCarthy and Kristen Wiig. (Oh, if only Kristen Schaal were there with them!)

But that screenplay really put me off with its achingly trite romance-paperback throughline between Wiig's character and Chris O'Dowd's banal stock love interest. It felt so false, so jackhammered in by some studio committee barely visible behind their tired old assumptions. It tainted all the better stuff around it like a pencil-thin line of dog shit across the center of a fine spice cake. As far as I'm concerned, if O'Dowd's character, and any romance subplot at all, had been entirely removed after the first draft, the whole final movie would have been stronger, more memorable, and more in keeping with the "see, women can be raunch-funny too!" plaudits Bridemaids has received. But as it is, that part wrecks the "Girl Power!" vibe Bridesmaids' PR seeks to generate. I acknowledge that I'm an outlier on this one.

Oh, look. Bridesmaids is also up for Writing (Original Screenplay). Well, it is nonetheless heartening to see Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig on the list.

You don't have to see War Horse (I haven't) to know that it's the sort of emotive contrivance precision engineered like the President of Switzerland's watch to appear on this list. It'll be forgotten within 24 hours of the ceremony.

Ditto The Help, this year's The Blind Side.

I was dead certain that Contagion would place a contender in the Best Performance by a Virulent Mutant Bat-Pig Pathogen category. And the guy who said that single line after sticking his fingers in Gwyneth Paltrow's brain, where is he?

You already know my love for Hugo. Whether it's "the best" or not is beside the point.

Iran's The Separation made it to the Foreign Language Film category. That may be my favorite inclusion of the whole bunch. Israel is in the same category for Footnote. I'm just naively romantic enough to fantasize about neocon wetdreams being dashed by the directors' handshake backstage.

Loved Rango both times I saw it. Need to see A Cat in Paris and Chico & Rita ASAP.

Puss in Boots? Only if strapped to a chair like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

After what I've read about it, I'm unexpectedly interested in seeing Pina.

And all those shorts. Thank you, Scarecrow Video and all the new streaming movie sources that I added to my big-screen TV in 2011.

PREDICTION #3: Throughout the ceremony, for the third straight year the sexiest couple will be George Clooney and his tuxedo. Although Kristen Wiig with Melissa McCarthy after a few drinks at the after-party might just take the glory.

For your consideration — "So much for that 'Intermission' " edition

2012-01-23T16:23:00.000-08:00

Addenda to my December 21 collection of "the Year's Best Movies" lists:

The 40 Best Films of 2011, according to the Pop Matters staff. X-Men: First Class ahead of A Separation?
New York Magazine: Vulture Critics' Poll: The Complete 'Worst Movie of 2011' Ballots — A comprehensive gathering, with some thoughtful and conversation-starting (or teeth-gnashing) choices, occasionally with a little added commentary. Jack and Jill appears to set the bar, to no one's surprise.

Also not surprisingly, you'll find some titles shared across both of those lists.

Meanwhile, Julie at Misfortune Cookie offers the Best overlooked and underappreciated performances of 2011 and Roger Ebert declares They wuz robbed.

IndieWire/Press Play: The winners of the Vertigoed contest — In response to the foofaraw (given a wobbly rocket boost by Kim Novak) over that pivotal scene in The Artist scored to a distinctive Bernard Herrmann cue from Hitchock's Vertigo, the Press Play staff launched a contest among their readers. Rule #1:

Take the same Herrmann cue -- "Scene D'Amour," used in this memorable moment from Vertigo -- and match it with a clip from any film.... Is there any clip, no matter how silly, nonsensical, goofy or foul, that the score to Vertigo can't ennoble? Let's find out!

And so they did. The results are in. Click here for the full scoop on the contest, its criteria, and the judges, followed by the Grand Prizewinner — STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, by Jake Isgar — the four finalists, and some special awards (e.g., Citation for Homoerotic Grandeur: TOP GUN by De Maltese Valk).

My glowering assessment of that Vertigo cue in The Artist is here.

NPR: Movie Titles That Might Have Been — From Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under 10 Million Dollars, That Your Reader Will Love But the Executive Will Hate to American Pie

How many movies will we watch over a lifetime? AD Jameson is keeping track of his own number — 1,925 so far:

That doesn’t sound like too many, not after fifteen years of avid cinephilia. But to put it in some perspective, that’s roughly 128 feature films/year, or about one every three days. ... We found last week that there have been at least 268,246 features made. (Since then, the IMDb’s count has grown to 268,601.) So I’ve seen little more than .7% of them—and remember, I think that IMDb count far too low.

Why he has given so many poor ratings to contemporary movies:

The more you watch from the present day, the more garbage you’re bound to see—but your conclusions will be your own. Conversely, the further back you go, the more you’ll be guided by the opinions of others. (If nothing else, what’s available will be largely determined by what’s remained popular.)

"What if..." Movies reimagined for another time & place — Artist Peter Stults asks "...what if movies we were all familiar with were made in a different slice of time? Who would be in it? Who would direct it?"

Star Wars Uncut: The Director's Cut — May the video editing software suite be with you

2012-01-23T09:04:00.000-08:00

Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

In 2009, Casey Pugh asked thousands of internet users to remake Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. Contributors were allowed to recreate scenes from that film however they wanted. Within just a few months, Star Wars Uncut grew into a wild success. In 2010 its creators won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media.

This crowd-sourced project is finally online for your streaming pleasure (or kneejerk disgruntlement). The "Director's Cut" is a feature-length film that contains hand-picked scenes from the entire collection.

This cut is over two hours long, far more than I'm able to stick with it in one go. However, take 15 minutes to jump-click through various scenes. Star Wars itself of course needs no introduction or synopsis, though this time we get it performed by an amateur cast of hundreds, stitched together with Gorilla Glue and paper clips, shot in environments real and animated, presented and reconceived with a low-tech, zero-budget aesthetic. Many of the sequences are filmed in crudely comical fashion, daisy-chaining, for instance, live action college pals wearing paper hats, stop-motion animation using colored paper or Lego Star Wars figurines, Toy Story action figures, kitchen items, cartoon work recalling various nostalgia touchstones, parodies of pop culture subgenres such as anime and grindhouse, the family dog, and so on.

Love it or hate it (or some of both at various points), it's possibly the funniest, most charmingly obsessive-compulsive tribute vid ever slapped online.

Two by two

2012-01-21T17:35:00.000-08:00

The big snow didn't last long. Right now, as I look out the living room window from this big comfy sofa, I can see that the ice is pretty much gone, the snow now just random patches. Elizabeth and I took Kai for a bayside walk and I swear he pined for the cold around his paws and the vistas that spoke straight to his Alaskan blood.

But it's nice to have it all back to Seattle Normal.

Still, I felt bad for the pair of yeti who rang our doorbell and asked if I’d be interested in their “literature.” They were so well mannered. I said no thank you, but sent them on their way with a shank of raw yak meat.

An Alaskan Malamute in Seattle (part 2)

2012-01-21T17:14:00.000-08:00

Soon after his atavistic explorations of the Iditarod-worthy front yard, Kai checked out the back to see how it compared.

Yep. About the same.

And yet, there's always a downside:

Definitely not ham.

"Wimpy furless primates. You want to go back indoors already?"

Oh, one last thing: When dog-walking out in this kind of cold, DO NOT accept a "double-dog dare" to put your tongue on your pooch's nose. Trust me on this one.

An Alaskan Malamute in Seattle (part 1)

2012-01-21T17:02:00.000-08:00

Of course there are inconveniences that arrive with any massive dump of snow so large that the nearby Starbucks corporate HQ officially approves two new seasonal coffee beverages: the Shackleton (a low-low-fat white mocha that never makes it back to your home) and the Donner Party Half-Calf (tastes like chicken). But there was one member of our household who loved the whole experience down to his DNA: our dog Kai.

In his cool equanimity, he proved that this was no "Snowpocalypse," no "Snowmaggedon." In fact, I hope that both examples of lingua hysterica will now be banished from the Tiresome Media Freakout lexicon.

After all...

... it's just snow.

Still pretty damn cold, though.

On the other hand...

... the neighborhood kids are out playing.

And that short beefy child looks a lot like Jack London.

Unsinkable

2012-01-21T16:31:00.000-08:00

Credit: Aaron Brackney

Just because I'm still officially on "Intermission" doesn't mean I won't pop in here now and then to stoke the fire a bit. Still TBD is whether this portends an expansion of this blog from "mostly movies" to "more or less movies mostly, yeah, but also more of the other stuff too depending on my own caprice and whims."

If you've kept up with the U.S. news this week, you know two things: (1) Newt Gingrich is still to "values" what a ten-gallon sack of live tapeworms is to a recipe for Lobster Thermidor, and (2) Seattle got socked with more snow in two days than we usually get in a year.

Although Elizabeth and I were effectively immobilized here atop the crest of our West Seattle ridge surrounded by hills worthy of a Jamaican bobsled team, we were well provisioned and experienced no significant difficulties.

Well, there was that one thing:

Wednesday’s fine blanketing of new-fallen snow had by Thursday become, after hours of light freezing rain, that afternoon's solid encasement in ice. So I spent some quality muscle-time chipping and shoveling a mountain of ice off our front steps.

Just as I was wearily leaning the shovel near the front door, an enormous passenger liner hove into view, moving at top speed. It struck my mountain of shoveled ice, capsized, and broke in two. The scream of wrenched metal! The shrieks and lamentations of tumbling bodies! Down, down it slid with eerie grace into the snow near where Kai peed on a bush just a few hours earlier. And yet the band played on. A pitiful few lifeboats, some only half full of wailing women and children, managed to break away and row down 41st Ave. toward the more traveled depths of Andover Street and possible rescue. The last thing I saw was Leonardo DiCaprio sinking into the lawn. I would have offered him a rope or the shovel handle or something, but just then, from the kitchen, I heard the kettle for the hot chocolate. I feel kind of bad about that, but, after all, needs must.

Now, although I didn't have the expected difficulty of getting my car started, I still gotta hire somebody to clean up the lawn by hauling away all those deck chairs.

Intermission

2012-01-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

I'm putting Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL into an intermission for a while. I'm pounding on some other, bigger writing projects, which makes trimming back assorted peripheral distractions ("Squirrel!") a necessity. I still respond to activity notifications, so feel welcome to browse and comment or contact me via my main site. And those blog rolls on the right are still my main avenues to bloggish favorites. So don't think of me as lost through the Stargate so much as just hiding on the other side of the monolith for a while. Thanks.

Happy New Year ... and that's a wrap

2011-12-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

Bud sinks down happily on the couch, and Fran holds out the
deck to him.

                         FRAN
            Cut.

Bud cuts a card, but doesn't look at it.

                         BUD
            I love you, Miss Kubelik.

                         FRAN
                   (cutting a card)
            Seven --
                   (looking at Bud's card)
            -- queen.

She hands the deck to Bud.

                         BUD
            Did you hear what I said, Miss
            Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.

                         FRAN
                   (smiling)
            Shut up and deal!

Bud begins to deal, never taking his eyes off her. Fran
removes her coat, starts picking up her cards and arranging
them. Bud, a look of pure joy on his face, deals -- and
deals -- and keeps dealing.

And that's about it. Story-wise.

                                            FADE OUT.

 

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) — Going somewhere on hot air and fantasy

2011-12-30T12:19:00.000-08:00

"Films are like flares fired from a lifeboat to see if anyone else is out there." — Terry Gilliam

The span between Christmas and New Year's Day, as the days begin crawling slowly out of the dark, has always been a nearly ceremonial week for me to indulge in guilt-free, pajama-clad viewing of favorite movies, particularly those of a science fiction/fantasy bent. And it became pretty much assured that soon after my Christmas post of Terry Gilliam's 1968 animated gonzo holiday card, at some point during the week I'd be reaching to the shelves for a Gilliam flick. Holy Grail? The Life of Brian? Twelve Monkeys? The Fisher King? Or perhaps finally catching The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus via some streaming medium? What I chose was one of my favorites, a film I dip into once every couple of years.

"I think what was funny about this thing: the making of it was very much like the story itself. This disaster, this nightmare situation, and here's this old lunatic trying to drag everybody through. I think I was getting blamed for being the old lunatic, even though I was quite young then."

That's the former expatriate Python trouper — and one of moviedom's more notorious "visionary" directors — early in the audio commentary on the DVD/Blu ray disc of one of his more notorious visionary films. Even before the last frame was shot, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen had already left its stamp as a cautionary tale of budget overruns and production fiascoes. Although it's only a coincidence that Columbia Pictures was financially and executively crashing at the time, a regime change put in place new studio heads who failed to support this enormous, outside-the-box whirligig.

So the studio further ill-treated this 1989 film by giving it an anemic U.S. theatrical release, guaranteeing its initial box office failure. The whole affair hammered a nail into the foot of Gilliam's directing career, and despite subsequent successes such as The Fisher King (1991) and Twelve Monkeys (1995), the over-publicized Munchausen experience was so traumatizing that it bronzed Gilliam's reputation for being "difficult." It's a small miracle that none of the behind-the-scenes upheaval and disruption ended up marring what appeared on the screen. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is as unruffled a movie as you'll find this side of Oz.

So it's been up to home video audiences to give this ornate, epic-scale, comedic fantasy spectacle — probably the purest expression of Gilliam's metaphysical, Rococo imagination — the reappraisal it deserves, particularly now given our society's current antiauthoritarian mood. And in this year of Scorsese's Hugo, here's a film that feels even more intimately connected to the work and spirit of Georges Méliès, who in fact made his own Munchausen film in 1911 (YouTube). While you might also fairly describe it as a grandiloquent paroxysm of a film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is one of the few "cult favorites" that, despite its flaws, positively earns the status on its own merits.

Its story is based on the tall (think Mt. Everest) tales of the historical blowhard Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Münchausen, a German nobleman who in the 18th century fought with the Russian military against the Turks, and who became renowned for embellishing his exploits with florid details such as joy-riding cannonballs, journeying to the moon on a whirlwind, visiting the god Vulcan inside volcanic Mount Etna, and having his ship stuck in the belly of a monster fish.

Ripe material for Gilliam, as literate and phantasmagorical a director as we're likely to see working outside of animation. Munchausen concludes a trilogy with Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981) and Brazil (1985), their thematic axis being the power of imagination and storytelling in childhood, adulthood, and old age.

As personified by John Neville (who died last month), the Baron is an elderly, world-weary raconteur no longer at home in a world shifting into the Age of Reason's hardheaded rationalism, which spares little room for lyrical flights of fancy. Feeling displaced in this cold new world order, he wishes that death (given form as a hideous skeletal angel dogging his heels) would just bloody well get on with it.

Baron Munchausen: "Go away! I’m trying to die!"
Sally: "Why?"
Munchausen: "Because I’m tired of the world and the world is evidently tired of me."
Sally: "But why? Why?"
Munchausen: "Why, why, why! Because it’s all logic and reason now. Science, progress, laws of hydraulics, laws of social dynamics, laws of this, that, and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me."

Right there we witness the Baron embodying Gilliam's overarching theme here, what he has called his "message in a bottle" — "the clash between the baroque and the Newtonian view of the world." (Now, I don't believe such a clash exists any more than the "war on Christmas," but I understand what Gilliam's saying here.)

Munchausen gets his groove back when an invasion by the Turks sends him on an epic quest to gather his former team of super-friends (the strongest man in the world, a runner faster than a speeding bullet, a dwarf with super-breath, and an eagle-eyed sharpshooter) and save a European city under siege. As in Time Bandits, we follow the resulting colorful episodes through the eyes of a persistent child. Here that's Sally, played by expressive Sarah Polley, now a filmmaker and Very Interesting Adult, all of nine years old at the time.

Their adventures send them to the moon, where the Moon King's giant disembodied head (Robin Williams in fine riffing mode) is both insane and jealous of the Baron's amour with the Queen (Valentina Cortese). From there it's imprisonment in a cage (a Gilliam signature) and a long drop to the volcano palace of the brutish god Vulcan (Oliver Reed), who's inventing the "intercontinental, radar-sneaky, multi-warheaded nuclear missile." Vulcan's wife, the goddess Venus (Uma Thurman, age 17 and not yet with a high school diploma), rises nude from her clamshell. Soon she's pressing her lovely décolletage against the romantic Baron as they waltz while floating high above a ballroom floor.

After escaping the gullet of a leviathan, our heroes ultimately return to the city to confront the army of the Grand Turk (Peter Jeffrey, familiar around here from the Vincent Price Dr. Phibes films).

However, the Baron falls afoul of a calculating bureaucrat, the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce, always terrific), eager to bury everything the Baron represents — the "folly of fantasists who do not live in the real world" — beneath the romance-free logic and cynicism of a new age "fit for science and reason." As the Baron ascends in a hot-air balloon sewn from women's undergarments, Pryce's officious villain sneers, "He won't get far on hot air and fantasy." Since Munchausen's production turmoil, it's a safe bet that for Gilliam "officious villain" is a redundancy applicable to Hollywood execs.

Gilliam's fellow ex-Python Eric Idle puts in welcome screen time as Berthold, whose powerful running legs must be anchored with irons or else he might jog himself into orbit.

Not one to embrace a silver lining when a dark cloud better fits his purpose, Gilliam keeps Munchausen out of merely "kids film" territory by grounding it with somber meditations on the theatrical follies of life, war, age, death, change, and political fear-mongering. There's more going on under the film's skin than a simple quest fantasy, and Gilliam at times seems like a director with his fingers more in a Norton anthology than in Variety magazine.

At first blush, Munchausen's strengths would appear to be unfettered Gilliam, abetted by a squad of European collaborators, namely cinematographer Giuseppi Rotunno, production designer Dante Ferretti (Hugo, Shutter Island, Sweeney Todd), and special effects chief Richard Conway (most recently the special effects senior technician on Attack the Block). The scenic design fills the screen with grittily realized city and battles scenes, and his witty special-effects spectacles — the Baron's beknickered balloon, the universe as a gyring geometric celestial sphere, the King of the Moon's surreal lunar court, the island that becomes the sea monster — give us photorealistic extensions of Gilliam's distinctive cartoons that punctuated the Monty Python troupe's TV and feature-film work. While the production remains notorious as a budget fiasco, you never doubt where the money went.

But blushes can be deceiving. Gilliam was very much fettered indeed, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as it exists is a compromised vision. Unscrupulous producers, unreliable contract labor, and Gilliam's "naive" understanding of unregulated production financing while shooting in Rome all diminished his original concept.

For instance, he had planned the moon sequence as a gargantuan banquet hall filled with tiers upon tiers of giant feasting heads, rather than just Robin Williams and Valentina Cortese in a minimalist landscape. But as Gilliam and his co-writer Charles McKeown (who plays the sharpshooter Adolphus) acknowledge in the commentary, the surreal 2-D moving backdrops and re-focused strength of the final version probably worked out for the best anyway. Drew McIntosh, in his movie blog The Blue Vial, has an extensive quote from Gilliam about that experience:

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was different from my other films in that, for the first time, I was working with a producer who claimed he would provide everything I ever wanted. The fact that he couldn't and didn't created a living hell. I was, and still am, very literal about taking people at their word and holding them to their promises. However, when, as is inevitable in these situations, the shit hit the fan, we were forced to close down while Charles McKeown and I attempted to trim the script. The pain was quite unbearable at the time but, when you are forced to destroy your work in an attempt to save it, certain creative magic occurs.

Originally, the moon sequence involved thousands of giant characters all with detachable heads. It was conceived as a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza with great crowds, much singing and dancing and feasting - all during an eclipse of the moon. The yearly eclipse provided a chance for everyone to forget everything and start again with a clean mental slate. Unfortunately, the celebration resulted in a lot of heads becoming separated from their bodies and then being unable to remember where they belonged. The sequence ended in a grandiose, outrageously spectacular slapstick chase with the Baron and friends riding and attempting to control a giant palace guard's headless body as the eclipse and the King pursue them.

Attempting to keep the film alive, we cut the moon's population down to two, King and Queen. In doing so, it concentrated our attention on the detachable head phenomenon and resulted in a very bizarrely literal interpretation of the problems of Cartesian mind/body duality. What was originally a lot of ideas jumbled together in a slightly rambling, but spectacular, sequence became one very clear and much funnier idea that was exactly to the point, and far more original.

While so much of what the final film visualizes is wonderful, the pacing is sometimes draggy. Its self-contained fantasias are often beautiful bordering on the magnificent, but taken as a whole they possess all the urgent momentum of an art gallery tour. Sometimes there's little feeling that we're heading anywhere special, even though the scenery along the way is stupendous. The script, credited to Gilliam and McKeown, doesn't make the going easier by sliding us between its various definitions of reality: Are the Baron's tales real, or merely the ramblings of a lunatic old duffer on a theater stage? Do he and his men actually defeat the Turks, or was the defeat achieved offscreen and then suppressed by Jonathan Pryce's character for his own "enemy at the gate," Fox Newspeak fearmongering ends? Is Uma Venus or is Uma the peasant girl Rose?

Gilliam being Gilliam, the ambiguities are deliberate, with our mulling them over afterward part of his plan.

It may be hot air and fantasy, but The Adventures of Baron Munchausen takes us further than most effects-heavy fables manage to do even with three prequels.

Finally, here's a movie that makes the ideal narrative and thematic double-feature with Tarsem Singh's similarly screen-filling fantastical The Fall, also about the life-shaping power of storytelling.

If you're inclined to seek out The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, I suggest Sony's 2008 "20th Anniversary Edition" in either its two-disc DVD and single-disc Blu-ray format. It delivers a lovely transfer of a nearly flawless print. Color, definition, and detail are brilliant and vivid. The newly remixed Dolby 5.1 surround audio does a splendid job with its clarity and surround effects.

On the Munchausen disc, the special features are a cut above the typical promo fluff and filler you usually find on "anniversary" editions. Besides the illuminating commentary track — now I know where to spot Gilliam's friend Sting in a quick cameo — we get one of the best "making of" extras I've seen in ages, a three-part 72-minute documentary fittingly titled The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen.

Gilliam and McKeown host this occasionally painful retrospective that doesn't just take us behind the scenes — it kicks open the door into the ugly business and personal risks that are movie-making. The director and writer, along with actors Jonathan Pryce, Eric Idle, John Neville, Sarah Polley, Bill Paterson, and Robin Williams, plus production associates who have since recovered from the experience, speak about their loyalty to the project even when the director was "insane" and every possible aspect of the shoot was going wrong. Yet they are candid when it comes to the downside of the clashing personalities and the seemingly endless months spent on sets that might never actually get built and the money-mandated revisions at every turn. Recorded separately, producer Thomas Schuhly — who wasn't as connected and experienced in the biz as he had presented himself to Gilliam — is defensive and caustic, but accepts some of the blame for the pain and suffering. It's clear that there remains little love lost between Gilliam and Schuhly.

We also get Gilliam's storyboard sequences — "The Baron Saves Sally," "A Voyage to the Moon," and "The Baron & Bucephalus Charge the Turkish Gates." Gilliam and McKeown perform the sequences through vocal narration and commentary while Gilliam's drawings let us "see" scenes that never made it in front of a camera, never mind the final cut. "Moon" in particular is fascinating for the sheer ambition it represented in the pre-CGI era.

We also get four deleted scenes totaling a bit over three minutes: "The Rules of Warfare" (0:47), "Extended Fish Sequence" (0:50), "Mutiny on the Stage" (0:52), and an "Alternate Opening" (1:04) that revels in the film's extravagance further than the theatrical cut does.

Music: Arctic Monkeys
Near at hand: A new Dalek

Post-Krismas Kai

2011-12-26T20:02:00.000-08:00

"Hey, everyone's home! Let's go out, chase things, run on the beach! I'm a dog on the go! There's my ball!"

"What? You're gonna watch movies? Damn primates. That's okay, I'll wait for you."

"No, really, you go on and do your monkey things. I'm ready when you are."

"Actually, this is a comfortable spot."

"Screw it. Wake me when there's ham."

Terry Gilliam's Pythonesque animated holiday card, 1968

2011-12-24T12:04:00.000-08:00

In this short animation for the pre-Monty Python TV series Do Not Adjust Your Set, Terry Gilliam cut up treacly Christmas cards and transformed them into deranged scenes of yuletide chaos. Here's Terry's method for creating these animations, in case you were wondering.

(Via io9.)

Watching "The Artist", feeling the "Vertigo"

2011-12-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

Last night Elizabeth and I caught a SIFF Cinema screening of The Artist, which is already appearing on a number of 2011 Top 10 lists, occasionally in the #1 slot.

I found it attractively shot, charming, and enjoyable most of the time, though it didn't Wow me as much as I anticipated given the Oscar-buzzy hype and the lustrous trailer (see below). The story is too slight and too reliant on trite melodrama conventions (and big lifts from Singin' in the Rain), which fit the time period but don't, in my opinion, fully provide sufficient substance. The screenplay is curiously thin even given the faux-"silent film" format — partly, I think, due to a number of missed opportunities, especially in the second half. (And Penelope Ann Miller needs some stern words with her agent.)

On the other hand, the three leads — Jean Dujardin as a Douglas Fairbanks-like silent screen star washed up with the advent of the "talkies," Bérénice Bejo as the bit player who achieves Hollywood stardom, and Uggie the dog as the loyal pooch who saves the day — are marvelous and must be signed for a remake of The Thin Man, pronto. Elizabeth and I had already come to love Dujardin from the two French "OSS 117" spy-film spoofs (also directed by Michel Hazanavicius and featuring his wife Bejo), and now we learn the guy can dance Gene Kelly-style too. Yet it's Bejo who's the breakout star for me. She held her own as the co-lead with Dujardin, while doing it, as they say, backwards and in high heels. Together they have an easy chemistry, and I hope the success of The Artist means we'll be seeing more of both of them, singly and together, for years. And seriously, Uggie gives one of the best canine performances in decades.

As a pastiche of the black-and-white "silent" cinema of yore, The Artist is appealing and good-looking (though hardly accurate-looking), with some clever touches. However, the conceit wears thin without further narrative oomph starting around the half-way mark.

Trumping much of the good stuff on display, though, is one peculiar element that sore-thumbed a key scene for me: Late in the story, when Dujardin's George Valentin has hit rock bottom, having lost his career and his chance at true love, he wanders Hollywood like the Ghost of Movies Past. What jarred me during it is the choice for its musical scoring — Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" from Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece Vertigo (YouTubed here).

Now, I may be just a big ol' film geek, but it's not as if Vertigo is some obscure forgotten film, or that Herrmann's work isn't one of Hollywood's more famous and distinctive movie scores. I love Herrmann's music in Vertigo and others, but it threw me right out of The Artist as I was sitting there asking, almost out loud, "What the hell is music from Vertigo doing here?" Instead of joining George Valentin in his cinelicious despondency, I had visions of Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak dancing through my head.

By my lights, that particular motif doesn't wed itself naturally to the scene in The Artist. It's hardly an ideal bit of scoring for the moment. For one thing, using it is the very definition of uninspired, even in our pop culture of mashups and creative appropriation (which I agree can be artful and inspired).

Secondly, the piece is distracting as it brings to mind a real (and better) movie made nearly 30 years after the story's setting.

Thirdly and most damningly, it's almost mawkish as it tries hard to make us feel something, thus kneecapping any earned feeling the scene may elicit. To me, it felt as though someone was trying to tap my emotional memory of Vertigo and hijack it for the scene in The Artist, rather than crafting the scene so that it generated the emotional layering on its own.

During those minutes of being kicked out of the movie's narrative, my mind wandered. I was curious whether Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" landed there initially as some temporary scratch track filler that Hazanavicius decided he liked well enough, or else using Herrmann's music was less expensive than rescoring the scene with an original piece.

So when I got home I did what people do when disconcerted in the 21st century: I googled. Here's what I found:

A.O. Scott's New York Times review notes the Vertigo lift as one of The Artist's built-in cineaste references.

According to the film's English press kit (PDF), Hazanavicius played mood music from vintage movies on the set:

The shoot being silent, did you give your actors much direction during the takes?

What I did was play music on the set and it literally carried them. So much so that at the end, they couldn’t do without it! I played mostly Hollywood music of the '40s and '50s: Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Frank Waxman, but also George Gershwin, Cole Porter... I used SUNSET BOULEVARD a lot but I also played THE WAY WE WERE and even Philippe Sarde's music for THE THINGS OF LIFE. It's a beautiful melody and I knew Jean has a particular relationship with that theme. I didn't warn him the first time I played it and I knew that by playing it on set I'd trigger something during the take. That’s exactly what happened. I did the same with Bérénice when she arrives in hospital; I played the theme from LAURA, which she loves.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Laura Emerick's 'The Artist' is director's love letter to early Hollywood includes this unhelpful quote from Hazanavicius:

"The 'Vertigo' music is here to help shape the emotional structure of the climax.... But it's also heard in the finale [of 'Vertigo'], and the theme worked perfectly here. It helps to create a sense of resolution."

Finally, an A.V. Club interview with Hazanavicius addresses the lift directly:

AVC: Like your OSS comedies, The Artist has a Hitchcock influence—you use Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score for a pivotal moment in the movie. Was that intentional?

MH: For The Artist, the music from Vertigo came in post. I guess all the directors in France are influenced by Hitchcock, because he’s the perfect visual director, in my eyes. So I guess, yes, certainly he was an influence, but it wasn’t a reference. I mean, I wasn’t watching Hitchcock movies, I was watching silent movies. But when I was writing the script, I was listening to a lot of classical composers, and there was a lot of music from movies in that, and the music from Vertigo was one of them. So when we were editing, I went back to the script and told the composer, "There are nine narrative blocks where we need nine big scores." So I gave him all the points of what kind of emotion the music should have. And for that particular scene you're speaking of, I wanted something special. I wanted it to be the final movement. I wanted a slow love theme, and the music from Vertigo just fit perfectly. And it's not Herrmann's score, in fact, but the score re-orchestrated by Elmer Bernstein [from 1992].

After seeing that sequence cut together, our composer [Ludovic Bource] used that style as an influence for the rest of the music he created for other parts of the movie. I'll admit it's strange to have the music from another movie in your movie, but finally I chose to accept it.

Okay. So there's the answer. Not a very satisfying answer, but at least he addressed the question. I too love Herrmann's music and if I were writing a darkly moody love scene I'd have it in the background too. But it is indeed "strange" and it did toss me out of a key moment in The Artist. I recovered, of course, even if it did niggle at me until I got home and sought answers to my burning question online.

So file this post under Curiosity, qualified satisfaction of.

'Tis the season for Sherlock

2011-12-21T18:32:00.000-08:00

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has just opened wide. This second outing with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in Guy Ritchie's revisionist, Gaslightpunk backspin on the Holmes and Watson mythos will be Christmas Day viewing for me and Elizabeth, as we both enjoyed the previous computer-game-redolent adventure despite being longtime aficionados of traditional Holmesiana. (In fact, I've been known to get paid for indulging in fantastical Sherlocking myself, and I scripted the "cases" and dialogue to a successful Sherlock Holmes computer game.) We all have our Holmes and Robert Downey Jr. isn't mine. That would be Jeremy Brett by a mile.

But ever since Chaplin and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I'll see Downey Jr. in anything, and I have to admit that he and Law are thoroughly enjoyable in their Holmes/Watson relationship, all anachronistic dudeness aside. Besides, I'll prep myself for this new movie the way I did for the first, by chanting my incantation while standing in the ticket line: "I'm not going to see a Sherlock Holmes movie, I'm going to see a Guy Ritchie movie." Holmes himself would agree that the right frame of mind is crucial.

Also, starting in January we're getting the second series of the BBC's Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. If it's anywhere near as good as the first series, it'll go a long way toward clinching the prize as my all-time favorite alt-Sherlock interpretation.

Like Peter Jackson's film versions of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, cinematic adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon are vulnerable to an extra lens of critical analysis. The legions of fans, aficionados, devotees, and armchair scholars of a book-to-film's original source material must, like skeptical clerics studying the Shroud of Turin, hold up every foot and frame of the filmmaker's work to the light of the hallowed author's words and pages. And we all know what the first four letters of the word analysis are. Is the film version faithful to its revered source? Does "faithful" mean dogmatic word-for-word translation from one medium to another, or are creative and practical allowances excusable?

Like Tolkien's fantasy epic, Doyle's beloved Victorian detective stories evoke an idealized time and place that never existed except between our ears, so any attempt to visualize them onscreen is inevitably judged through filters found, as Holmes authority Vincent Starrett put it, "in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."

In any case, here are a few that I'm pleased to have on my DVD shelves:

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the most-filmed tale of Doyle's famous Great Detective. Doyle's original text for The Hound of the Baskervilles concluded its serialization in The Strand Magazine in 1902, and that same year saw the complete novel published for the first time, making 2012 its 110th anniversary year.

For hardcore Sherlockians (not to mention less temperamentally scrutinizing film-lovers) the 20th Century Fox 1939 version remains a favorite screen treatment of Holmes' encounter with the supernatural hellhound. This film, which inaugurated Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in their career-defining roles as steely Holmes and trusty Watson, ranks up there as a glossy, respectful interpretation that bends and condenses the sacred text yet remains authentic to its atmosphere and spirit.

When Sir Charles Baskerville dies mysteriously outside Baskerville Hall, his friend Dr. Mortimer (Lionel Atwill) finds evidence that the centuries-old family curse, a death-dealing spectral hound, has struck once again. Before Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene) arrives in London to claim his inheritance, Mortimer enlists the aid of Sherlock Holmes (Rathbone) lest yet another Baskerville succumb to the horror stalking the desolate ancestral moors. Mortimer brings Sir Henry to 221b Baker Street and expresses his fear for the young heir's life.

Baskerville learns that along with the grand family mansion comes the too-real legend of a phantom killer canine, a secretive butler (John Carradine, one year before his Casy in The Grapes of Wrath), and colorful neighbors such as the boyishly affable Dr. Stapleton (Morton Lowry), who collects ancient skulls from the Neolithic ruins nearby; Mrs. Mortimer (Beryl Mercer), whose séances conjure up ghostly howls; and Stapleton's lovely stepsister (Wendy Barrie, goddaughter of J.M. "Peter Pan" Barrie), who is quite fetching indeed in her riding togs fit for a baroness.

Holmes, pressed with "other business," sends Dr. Watson (Bruce) to accompany Sir Henry to the dreary estate and keep a watchful eye for the mysterious goings-on Holmes anticipates. Of course, with danger afoot, Sherlock Holmes may not be so far from the scene as he lets on.

Doyle's short novel has always been difficult to bring to the screen. Not only must Holmes' brilliant yet talky intellectual detective work be combined with gothic horror trappings, but Holmes himself is absent for the entire middle third of the story. This most famous version streamlines Doyle's plot and removes some of its twists and complications, then adds more red herrings than you can shake a deerstalker at.

Director Sidney Lanfield cut his teeth on musicals and light entertainments, so he wasn't entirely up to the challenges The Hound of the Baskervilles presented. Nonetheless, he served the material well, and his sets and photography positively overflow with fogbound atmospherics. Even while avoiding the visual difficulties of Doyle's phosphorous-coated beast, Lanfield's climactic Hound attack has yet to be bested.

Nowadays the movie comes off stagy and theatrical, as much a product of the thirties as the dry-ice blowers. Yet this Hound ably shows that the miasmic Devonshire moors should be shot only in spooky black-and-white with plenty of deep shadows and craggy rocks. Purists can fault the screenplay for downplaying Holmes' clockwork scientific deductions for action-thriller plot-padding, and they'd be right. Other embellishments are an effective séance scene and a rewrite of Wendy Barrie's role from a knowing accomplice to an innocent romantic interest.

Creative license aside, this film triumphs because it belongs enduringly to Basil Rathbone. Already an established star (he was the villain in the previous year's The Adventures of Robin Hood), his perfect Holmes profile and snappy characterization stamped him irrevocably into the public's image of Doyle's detective.

Here Bruce's Watson is not quite yet the blithering comic-relief idiot he became later in the series, an image that subsequent Watsons have tried hard to yank back to Doyle's reliable ex-army surgeon and narrator. The chemistry between Rathbone and Bruce energizes one of the great Hollywood team-ups. So sure-footed is this Hound's casting, another high-profile version wasn't attempted until England's Hammer Films gave it a garishly entertaining turn twenty years later, and Rathbone's only serious competition for the definitive screen Sherlock wouldn't arrive for almost fifty years with Jeremy Brett.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

In a year chock-full of good movies, 1939 saw the first two — and the two best — movies that teamed up Rathbone and Bruce as Holmes and Watson. Hot on the heels of The Hound of the Baskervilles came an even more stylish yarn, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, pitting the Great Detective against his arch-nemesis, Prof. Moriarty (George Zucco).

Moriarty's double-bladed scheme is not merely to filch the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. He aims to distract Holmes with murderous red herrings* and thereby publicly humiliate the Crown's famous defender, thus ending the two opposing geniuses' rivalry. Involved in the convolutions is exquisite ingénue Ida Lupino, who comes to 221b Baker Street when her brother, and then she herself, is threatened by the same mysterious messages that presaged the murder of her father exactly ten years ago.

Loosely based on William Gillette's stage play from 1899, Adventures doesn't break a sweat trying to make sense of its unwieldy and pulpy plot, but gets away with it in entertaining fashion thanks to pithy dialogue ("You've a magnificent brain, Moriarty; I admire it; I'd like to present it pickled in alcohol to the London Medical Society") and the strengths of everyone in front of and behind the cameras.

Rathbone is again pitch-perfect as Holmes, his wiry energy and avian features guaranteeing that the actor would find the role unshakable for the rest of his career. Bruce excels as the bovine Dr. Watson even as the series forces him to settle into the silly-ass buffoon that purists have come to either loathe or hate. The script hits a sour off-note early on when, in a dickish moment, Holmes dismisses Watson's help with a supercilious insult followed by a paternal pat on the shoulder, as if he's calming a blubbing child. Note, however, that it's Watson who keeps trying to steer Holmes to the business of the endangered Crown Jewels, a task Baker Street's most renowned resident pooh-poohs until it's nigh too late.

Zucco's Moriarty may be the screen's finest so far. This coolly evil Napoleon of Crime proactively manipulates the London underworld like, as Doyle put it, a spider in the center of his web. The relationship between Holmes and Moriarty is smartly crafted, like two ruthlessly competing CEOs who respect each other's acumen yet who are nonetheless determined to see each other ruined.

In terms of directing and photography, Adventures is even better than its predecessor. Director Alfred L. Werker shows off a flair for the material, and we get scenes that appear composed, lit, and shot expressly for the most evocative publicity stills. The noirish ambiance of Victorian London is beautifully rendered, with hansoms clattering down cobblestone streets in a city built from roiling fog and inky shadows.

(* Edited to add: This plot device — Moriarty distracting Holmes with red herrings so that the Professor's more dastardly plot can proceed elsewhere — gets amplified in the new Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, as does the Zucco Moriarty's affinity for horticulture, which provides a big clue to Downey Jr.'s Holmes against Jared Harris's Moriarty.)

Regrettably, after only two films 20th Century Fox discontinued the series. After Adventures, Universal snapped up the rights (and the cast) and "re-imagined" the Holmes tales in twelve enjoyably trashy B-movies such as...

Terror By Night (1946)

Alongside series high points Pearl of Death and The Spider Woman (both 1944), here's a favorite title from Universal's Sherlock Holmes series, the World War II-era thrillers that starred Basil Rathbone.

By now Rathbone had so thoroughly imprinted himself on Holmes (or was it the other way around?) that he was eager to decouple himself from Arthur Conan Doyle's unkillable mastermind. Perhaps because his servitude was nearing an end, here Rathbone gives one of his more dynamic Holmes performances. These production-line pulp yarns — Hollywood's own Bazooka Bubble Gum — couldn't have given the terrific Rathbone any sense of challenge or growth as an actor. Nor do they ask much of the viewer, but they can be undemandingly entertaining period bric-a-brac.

The Great Detective and faithful Watson (Nigel Bruce at the height of his character's nauseating boobery) attempt to guard a priceless diamond, the Star of Rhodesia. The stone is cursed ("all those who possessed it came to sudden and violent death"), placing its owners — haughty Lady Margaret Carstairs (Mary Forbes) and her fretting son, Roland (Geoffrey Steele) — in mortal peril.

Before you can say "elementary," Roland is murdered with a poisoned blowdart and the diamond stolen. With the action set on a speeding train between London and Edinburgh, Terror by Night shares a point of interest with Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. No passenger is above suspicion, and they are indeed a fishy bunch. The story doesn't rise above the expected paperback whodunit formula, and chances are you'll peg the perp long before Holmes does.

But the whole movie's only an hour long so the twists involving a trick coffin, secret disguises, a switcheroo with the gem, more murderous poison darts, and a fearsome adversary from Holmes' past aren't spread too thinly. Dennis Hoey returns for his final turn as ineffectual Inspector Lestrade. And American actress Renee Godfrey, as a young lovely caught up in events, is in the running for Hollywood's worst British accent until Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Better-than-usual pacing by series director Roy William Neill serves a by-the-numbers screenplay by pulp novelist Frank Gruber. Inconsistent stock footage suggests that the train changes engines during the journey, and the series itself is quite obviously running low on coal, though you can't fault the enduring Rathbone-Bruce chemistry or the unflagging charm of Rathbone's portrayal. After a life-or-death struggle on the train's exterior, literature's most famous sleuth returns to his compartment, slicks back his hair, and reports to Watson that he's just been "observing the landscape from the end of the corridor." Watson protests that he hadn't seen his friend there. "I was on the outside," Holmes quips, "you must try it sometime." Now we know where James Bond got it.

By the series' next and final installment, 1946's Dressed to Kill (a.k.a. Prelude to Murder), Universal's Sherlock Holmes films had degenerated to modest B-movie pulp potboilers with contemporary stock villains such as Nazis and The Scarlet Claw. After all that plus more than 200 half-hour Sherlock Holmes radio adventures with Nigel Bruce, it's understandable that Rathbone wanted to leave Holmes and Hollywood behind. Rathbone delivered a magnetic performance to the bitter end, though, and for two generations of viewers he still holds a place as the screen's all-time favorite Holmes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

No literary characters have appeared on screen more often than Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula. So in one of life's happy little synchronicities, one of the best screen Holmes teamed up with one of the best screen Draculas in 1959, and did so in an adaptation of the most-filmed Holmes story produced by the studio that revivified Dracula for the movies. Britain's Hammer Films had already made a name for itself as a maker of lurid yet appealing adaptations of horror and suspense classics, so its colorful The Hound of the Baskervilles was a welcome inevitability.

Here's the seventh cinematic version of Doyle's novel and the 121st Holmes film. (In 1945 a copy of a German version of Hound was found in Hitler's private film library at Berchtesgaden.) This was also the first Holmes movie shot in color.

Director Terence Fisher had already teamed stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in two films that jolted Hammer to the domination of the British horror film scene: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror of Dracula (1958). Cushing was evangelical in his quest to do right by Doyle, and his Holmes is one of the greats even if it's not quite up there with the inestimable Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett for screen portrayals. Not to mention that it's peculiar to see Holmes this time surrounded by significantly taller actors.

Doyle's story has been predictably Hammerfied, but most of his plot's floorboards and furnishings are intact. Back in the 1600s, an abandoned abbey on the property of Baskerville Hall near the misty Devonshire moors was the site where evil Sir Hugo Baskerville murdered a girl who refused his favors, and in turn he immediately perished between the fangs of a gigantic spectral hound. Ever since, so the legend goes, the Baskerville family has been cursed with the monstrous beast. Holmes (Cushing) and Watson (André Morell) are brought up to date on the tale by Dr. Mortimer (Francis DeWolff), the friend and physician of Sir Charles Baskerville. Sir Charles was the most recent resident of the hall, until he was found dead of fright at the remains of the abbey — and a horrific howling has been heard in the surrounding moors.

Newly arrived from South Africa to take his place in the ancestral estate is Sir Henry Baskerville (Lee). Holmes, of course, is not convinced by ghost stories, but he senses evil afoot. Immediately after he warns Sir Henry against venturing to Baskerville Hall alone, his lordship is almost bitten by a tarantula deliberately placed to attack the new head of the manor.

Holmes sends Watson to Devonshire with Sir Henry. From there Watson, Sir Henry, and later Holmes encounter an escaped convict, the scatterbrained local bishop (Miles Malleson, glorious as always) whose tarantula is missing, and Baskerville's neighbors: Stapleton (Ewen Solon) and his seductive daughter, Cecile (Marla Landi).

Will Holmes solve the mystery and discover who or what is behind the murders? Well, of course, but not before someone else perishes at the hound's jaws, the blood-stained dagger used by Sir Hugo is back in action, and Sir Henry discovers that a local girl beneath his station has plenty to offer his lordship.

This version of the tale works better as a "Hammer film" than as a Baskervilles adaptation. And I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing. Holmes purists and pedants may gnash their teeth over add-ons that augment the Hammer house style — that menacing tarantula, an unexplained sacrificial rite, Sir Henry's sudden love interest (although we must say that the movie is unique in letting Christopher Lee, of all people, kiss the girl), among other divergences and alterations. Baskervilles has always been a little over-populated with red herring characters, and this version makes no effort to be an exception. The pacing could use a boost at times and — let's shoot straight here — the "hound of hell" itself is something of a letdown.

Nonetheless, Peter Cushing nails the energy, arrogance, and mannerisms of the literary Holmes, and bears a pleasing likeness to the original Strand illustrations even without possessing the elevated physicality of Doyle's character. Cushing's incarnation achieves distinction even as he plays up the stereotyped image of Holmes that had crystallized in the zeitgeist long before '59. With a Meershaum pipe in his teeth, he sports the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape that are as associated with their owner as Superman's red cape and "S" logo. Twice the film all but winks at the audience when Cushing exclaims "Elementary, my dear Watson," a line never uttered in Doyle's stories yet which has — thanks to William Gillette's stage play mentioned above — barnacled itself onto the popular image of the Great Detective. No matter. Cushing delivers a sterling performance, and a Holmes film made strictly for Holmes purists certainly wouldn't be a Hammer production.

André Morell's no-guff, dependable Dr. Watson isn't given enough to do, yet he's miles more authentic than the wuffling comic sidekick Nigel Bruce's version imprinted on the popular imagination. He steadfastly strides forth alone into the moonlit moors, risking death by quicksand or convict or canine terror, to ably assist his companion.

Being a Hammer production, the cinematography is stylish and just gaudy enough, with that distinctive Hammer gothic plumage on display — plenty of antique tones, dark wood sets, and shadow-strewn exteriors — and the set designer obviously did fastidious research into the canonical details of 221b Baker Street.

Alterations aside, the Hammer Hound rates well on lists of favorite Doyle adaptations, though it's usually ranked below the 1939 version and the BBC's 1968 version that again featured Cushing as the Master. In 1984 Cushing played Holmes yet again, in the TV movie The Masks of Death, and wrote about Holmes for a number of books.

Christopher Lee also had his turn playing Holmes in 1962's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, a German-French-Italian production co-directed by Fisher, then twice more on TV, in 1991's Incident at Victoria Falls and 1992's Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady. Lee speaks about these at length in a feature interview on the DVD of our next title....

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Among my favorite Holmes pastiches is director Billy Wilder's (Some Like It Hot) most personal and ambitious serio-comedy. A box office failure of delicate grace and wit and thinly veiled melancholy, it's his most under-appreciated work. Never mind that the theatrical release print we can watch now on DVD or via digital streaming is only a portion of the entire movie that was planned and filmed by Wilder. Even so, the truncated edit that remains is among the most pleasurable of Holmes films and stands tall among the better movies of its era.

Wilder and his longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond conceived The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a 220-page screenplay ("a symphony in four movements," Wilder called it) that resulted in a 165-minute epic slated for a "roadshow" format: it would include an intermission and tour the country screening exclusively at the best movie palaces in each city it played in, charging higher admission prices and offering moviegoers souvenir programs and reserved seating. By 1970 it was a format already from a bygone era, the 1950s and '60s, that included such roadshow spectacles as West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, and My Fair Lady.

Alas, Hollywood was suddenly skittish after a number of recent expensive roadshow pictures flopped before the public. So United Artists altered the release strategy, and therefore the film, after Wilder had completed his big production. Of Private Life's original four adventures (three short ones and one lengthier one), two were cut along with a flashback sequence and a more elaborate framing-story prologue that added Watson's contemporary grandson.

Contrary to popular notions of the events, the studio heads didn't "butcher" Private Life behind Billy Wilder's back or without his participation and official approval, however reluctant he may have felt about it. He possessed the right of final cut and didn't push back against UA's request for a radical trimming of the total run time. Accounts of his involvement and any later regrets vary depending on which biography or interview you read. But it seems clear that he left the actual cutting duty to his editor, Ernest Walter, and afterward wasn't happy that his Platonically ideal three-hour version wasn't up there on the screen.

Nonetheless, in my opinion The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes flows briskly and seamlessly with no ragged traces of the 40 minutes of footage that was removed. It's quite the finely cut jewel.

(While the cut material was not preserved intact, the "Deleted Sequences" feature on MGM's DVD assembles vault elements such as script excerpts, videoless audio, and stills for partial reconstructions of the cut scenes, including "The Curious Case of the Upside Down Room," "The Curious Case of the Dumbfounded Detective," and "The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners.")

This time out it's theatrical actors Robert Stephens (Maggie Smith's husband at the time) and Colin Blakely as an effete, adenoidal Holmes and a more than usually agitated Watson. Together they deliver Wilder and Diamond's traditional acerbic dry wit in a plot that takes an arch and irreverent approach to the source material (Holmes bitches about Watson's Strand magazine stories saddling him "with this improbable outfit which the public now expects me to wear") while remaining respectful to Doyle's invented world and its innate High Victorian adventure spirit.

The movie kicks off with an episode involving a Russian diva ballerina who plans to bear Holmes' child, thereby forcing Holmes to suggest that he and the infuriated ladies' man Watson are more than just friends ("Tchaikovsky is not an isolated case"). It's a slight bit of insubordinate whimsy, but the question of Holmes' sexuality glides the plot smoothly toward its more sinister components — the alluring amnesiac Madame Valladon (Genevieve Page) warming Holmes' chilly heart, bleached canaries, a vanished troupe of circus midgets, the code word "Jonah," mysterious monks, the Loch Ness Monster — to concoct a scheme that could forever change the course of the Empire. The rather anticlimactic culmination brings Holmes and Watson together with Holmes' brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee again!), who's overseeing the construction of a top-secret weapon of mass destruction, and Queen Victoria, who gets the last word in.

It's all sumptuously mounted with splendid period trappings and flavor. A key component is the haunting orchestral score by Miklòs Ròzsa. For years I searched to no avail for this film's soundtrack album just to own the theme music. My quest finally found satisfaction when I learned that Ròzsa had adapted it from his Violin Concerto, Op. 24, which he composed in the 1950s for violinist Jascha Heifetz. As Wilder and Diamond worked on the screenplay, Wilder played the concerto in the background as inspirational mood music. He decided that he wanted the piece in the film and hired Ròzsa to compose the score around the concerto. Ròzsa has a cameo in Private Life as the ballet conductor. (A soundtrack album has finally been released, apparently.) Ròzsa's music alone justifies for me the existence of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and I'm listening to it now as I type. It's exquisite frosting on one of my favorite cakes.

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975)

Let's follow one Wilder with another.

In his first feature as writer/director/star, Gene Wilder walks softly but carries a big shtick. I'm not recommending this one for hardcore Holmes fans, or even as a particularly good movie. But this broad comedy capitalized on Wilder's easy appeal, a cuddly likeability he'd earned in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and especially in three enduring classics directed by Mel Brooks: The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

Because he was a longtime fan of Universal's vintage Frankenstein films, his script for and performance in Young Frankenstein radiated his affection for the source material. This time Wilder the Sherlock Holmes fan — in this DVD's audio commentary he says he reads Conan Doyle's entire Holmes canon every couple of years — tries to again capture lightning in a bottle with a costume comedy ably abetted by Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman.

However, Wilder the director gives us less polished zaniness in a film that's pleasant but too inconsequential to make much of an impression. It's melbrooksian, alright, but without Brooks' boldness or his early talent for shaping and timing a gag or a scene.

Wilder plays low-rent sleuth Sigerson Holmes, the younger brother of the renowned Sherlock (or "Sheer Luck," as Sigerson spitefully puts it). Although "hopelessly twisted" in his famous brother's shadow, he receives a blackmail case from Sherlock, who has urgent business elsewhere. The victim is loopy music hall singer Kahn, as always supremely sexy and multitalented, who succinctly informs Holmes that she's "simultaneously funny and sad." The maguffin is a stolen government document in the hands of a villainous Caruso type (Dom DeLuise).

In real life Wilder was a fencing champion and instructor, and finally we get to see this surprising swordmaster clashing blades with none other than evil Prof. Moriarty (Leo McKern).

As the Watson figure, walleyed Feldman is in good comic form as Sigerson's associate, Sgt. Orville Sacker of Scotland Yard. (Devotees of Doyle get the in-joke: Sigerson and Sacker were the author's original first-draft names for Sherlock and Watson.)

Fans of TV Britcom will recognize Nicholas Smith from "Are You Being Served?" in a recurring walk-on. And catch Mel Brooks' unseen one-line cameo in an otherwise predictable "the lady or the tiger" gag.

From start to finish The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother looks like a first film from a skilled comic actor trying his luck as an inexperienced director. The script is flabby, Wilder doesn't display a noticeably gifted eye behind the camera, the editing needed a more surgical hand, and too many participants (especially Kern) would rather pull gurning-contest faces than act.

Fortunately, Wilder insisted that Kahn and Feldman co-star with him, and together their three-way chemistry is a many-splendored thing. The stepped-down Mel Brooks influence is obvious. The sex scene with Kahn must have a been a kick to shoot, and no other film exalts in Wilder's and Feldman's bare asses at a tuxedo ball, courtesy of a death-dealing buzzsaw. Enough of the funny stuff works so that we sit through the movie aching that the whole thing isn't better than it is. Some of the silliness feels inserted at random (Wilder's commentary says that Fox chief Alan Ladd Jr. requested the reprised "Kangaroo Hop" dance to goose up the ending), and the daisy-chain of prop gags, slide-whistle humor, and blackout sketches merge uneasily with the romantic and mystery-thriller components.

What glues it together, mostly, is the talented cast in fine form. (Who else but Madeline Kahn could make the word "winkle" sufficiently funny?) It's occasionally charming, but — as the real Great Detective might put it — it's elementary, and so slight that the next day you may not remember that you watched it at all. Wilder's follow-up, The World's Greatest Lover, makes even less of an impact.

On the DVD, the big extra is Wilder's commentary track. Anyone writing a biography of Wilder or a production history of the film won't get many data points from the track — it's mostly "I remember this scene" reminiscences — but those of us who want to take him home and thank him with a cup of cocoa can enjoy his first-person annotations. He's soft-spoken and sometimes too self-critical, often sounding an inch away from melancholy, an avuncular comic in his 70s wistfully observing his younger self and his friends who've passed away. His praise for his castmates and his crew (notably production designer Terry Marsh, who went above and beyond) is touching rather than merely obligatory.

Murder By Decree (1979)

In the dark and fog of London, 1888, a brutal killer the papers call Jack the Ripper is slaughtering the "wretched women" of the Whitechapel slums. Although the grisly murders have created a public stir, Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) observes that the official investigators are actively hostile when he offers to take up the case. When a citizens committee of Whitechapel shopkeepers appeal to him for help — Saucy Jack is proving bad for business — Holmes and stalwart Dr. Watson (James Mason) have no choice but to pursue the mystery.

Through a Victorian London that's realized with rich, claustrophobic atmosphere, the pair follow the clues to a psychic (Donald Sutherland) who claims to "see" the murderer, an Inspector (David Hemmings) with a vital secret, the aristocratic Metropolitan Police commissioner (Anthony Quayle) who commands Holmes to steer clear of the case, and a prostitute (Susan Clark) who knows too much and thus is doomed by the nightmarish black horse-drawn coach haunting the dark streets. Genevieve Bujold makes a fine impression as a traumatized young woman whose tragic story is at the heart of matters — a heart with arteries connecting to the highest levels of English society.

1979's Murder by Decree wasn't the first Holmes-Ripper movie. A Study in Terror did it in 1965. But it is the one distinguished by lavish "A" production values and by placing Holmes within the most sensational of the "Who was the Ripper?" theories — a conspiracy involving Freemasons and the Royal family that also inspired 2001's screen adaptation of Alan Moore's From Hell. From that starting point director Bob Clark and screenwriter John Hopkins fashioned an intelligent, slow-burn drama that's one of the screen's most somberly grounded Holmes stories.

As Holmes, Plummer cuts a striking figure. His controlled, subdued performance makes the stereotyped deerstalker cap and Meerschaum pipe appear natural and unaffected. As we watch Holmes "grappling with the dark intention" behind the murders, we also witness the brittle, aesthete Great Detective overwhelmed and transformed by the sheer humanity of what he uncovers. So much so that Murder by Decree is ultimately less about the Ripper than it is about Holmes being shaken to the core by the revealed truth and by the awareness that things might have gone better if he had not gotten involved.

The climactic reveal/confrontation fails to thrill because at no point beforehand does the screenplay offer us any direct involvement with the killer, so the whole "Whodunit?" factor feels merely incidental. Nonetheless, Holmes' impassioned speech of righteous outrage before the Prime Minister (Sir John Gielgud) strikes such a stirring populist condemnation of political elitism and class-warfare culpability that it could serve today as a manifesto for an Occupy Downing Street movement.

This British-Canadian co-production shot in London takes what could have been just a routine suspense thriller and elevates it into something else. Whether that "else" is something suitably Sherlockian depends on the expectations of the viewer. Some fans (such as yours truly) rank Murder by Decree among the very finest Holmes movies, embracing its play-it-straight, non-ostentatious approach to the Master. Others balk at Plummer's understated, emotional interpretation, which doesn't play up the literary figure's dispassionate deductive fireworks. James Mason took the role of Watson on the proviso that Clark allow him to counter the "silly ass" Nigel Bruce approach to the character. So Mason gives us a welcome no-bullshit Watson who is the empathetic counterpoint Holmes needs, although a purist can reasonably argue whether the staunch army physician would be so sensitive about his peas.

In any case, Plummer and Mason together make one of cinema's most warmly felt Holmes-Watson teams. Ripperologists will be pleased by how true the script is to historical incidents and persons involved. Frank Finlay appears as customary Holmes foil Lestrade, although the typical Lestrade involvement is mostly taken up, for plot reasons, by Hemmings' new Inspector Foxborough. And Donald Sutherland's character, despite his screen time in scenes played as if they're of supernatural importance, ultimately has little to do with the story.

Director/producer Bob Clark's career shows quirky variety, from Black Christmas to Porky's to A Christmas Story. On Anchor Bay's DVD edition, his commentary track shows him to be one of the more listenable and informative "how we did it" speakers. In his low-key manner, he covers production and directorial details, some Ripperology, and reminiscences of his stellar cast. Among the revelations: if Peter O'Toole and Sir Lawrence Olivier had had less of a "fuck you too" relationship, they would have taken the Holmes and Watson roles.

The year in rearview

2011-12-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

It's that listy time of year. Naughty vs. nice, art vs. commerce, Tree of Life vs. Twilight, etc. Movie critics, film pundits, and cine-bloggers are compiling their summations of what happened, or didn't, onscreen in 2011.

Here are some I find most useful and meaningful. Between now and January I'll be adding to this list as more appear.

The Atlantic: Richard Lawson's The Best Movies of 2011

A.V. Club: 15 Best Films of 2011

Roger Ebert's Journal: The Best Films of 2011 and The Best Documentaries of 2011

GreenCine Daily: Best of 2011: Supporting Performances

The Guardian: The best films of 2011: Peter Bradshaw's choice

IndieWire: Annual Critics Survey 2011 and overview article

io9: Best and Worst Science Fiction/Fantasy Movies of 2011

L.A. Times: Year in Review: Kenneth Turan's best film picks of 2011

Movie Line (Stephanie Zacharek): The Artist, Tinker, Midnight in Paris: Stephanie's Top 10 Movies of 2011

Movie Morlocks (TCM): The Top Twelve Genre Films of 2011

MSN:

Top 10 Movies of 2011
Contributors' Individual Top 10 Lists (Sean Axmaker, Jim Emerson, Don Kaye, Glenn Kenny, Richard T. Jameson, Dave McCoy, Kim Morgan)
MSN Movies Bloggers' Top 10 Lists
Users' Top 10 Poll

The New Yorker (Richard Brody): The 26 Best Films of 2011

The New Yorker (David Denby): The Best Films of 2011

The New York Times: Riding Off Into Civilization's Sunset — Stephen Holden's Top 10 movies of 2011

NPR: 2011 In Film: Bob Mondello's Top 10 (Plus 10)

Online Film Critics Society: 15th Annual OFCS Awards Nominations

The Oregonian: Top Movies of 2011 — Shawn Levy — Mark Mohan — Mike Russell (pleased to see 13 Assassins here)

Salon: Andrew O'Hehir's The 10 best movies of 2011: Brilliant movies for a bleak year

Scanners (Jim Emerson): My First 2011 "Ten Best" List

Slant: Top 25 Films of 2011

Sunset Gun (Kim Morgan): Magnificent Melancholia: 11 Best of 2011

Time: Richard Corliss' Top 10 (one of those annoying click-through formats, but glad to see Rango there). And the Top 10 Worst.

Time Out London: Time Out's film team nominate their favourite movies of 2011

Village Voice: 2011 Film Poll, including J. Hoberman's Personal Best. The Critics List is here. Click the names to see individual votes.

Also looking back at the year in movies:

Ferdy on Films: My Year at the Movies, 2011 and Confessions of a Film Freak, 2011

Glenn Erickson: DVD Savant picks the Most Impressive Discs of 2011

Huffington Post: Best Films Of 2011: 11 Great Films You May Have Missed

IndieWire: The 30 Top-Grossing Indies of 2011, Led By Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris'

IndieWire: A Complete Guide To 2011-12 Awards Season / Summary of Winners

IndieWire: Indiewire's Greatest Hits: The Top 10 Reviews From 2011

io9: Lessons that 2011 Has Taught the Entertainment Industry

New York Times: Old-Fashioned Glories in a Netflix Age by A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis

New York Times: A Year of Disappointment at the Movie Box Office

The New Yorker: Anthony Lane's The Year in Movies: Gladness, Despondency, Madness

Slate:

Happy...

2011-12-20T06:59:00.000-08:00

"Cranberry salad is a dish that is best served cold."

TCM Remembers

2011-12-17T18:26:00.000-08:00

Esteemed correspondent Glenn Erickson, at his DVD Savant site, points us to the 2011 edition of TCM Remembers, Turner Classics' salute to movie professionals who passed away during the year. Says Glenn, "It's a beauty that concentrates on the many 'lesser' but personally memorable stars and personalities. Plenty of heart-tugs here, in an emotional and respectful presentation."

The music is "Before You Go" by OK Sweetheart.

Classic movie posters reimagined

2011-12-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

Artist David O'Daniel silk-screens by hand new movie posters for San Francisco's Castro Theatre. Every film gets a unique treatment with metallic and iridescent inks in a style that hits my eyes as some elaborate Deco-Mucha-metallo-snakeskin-retropunk fusion that I find irresistible.

And you know what's really cool? You can buy limited-edition prints of them at his website (at least those that haven't already sold out).

At last! The solution to all the distractions from writing!

2011-12-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

Click to engage pixelation overthruster.

From Hugo Gernsback's Science and Invention, July, 1925.

(Via A Great Disorder and If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats)

Happy birthday, "Papa Georges"

2011-12-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

The release of Hugo is likely just a coincidence. Nonetheless, happy 150th birthday, Georges Méliès!

Mythical Monkey offers a bit of historical context here. Kristin at davidbordwell.net also provides some marvelous appreciation and perspective, plus plentiful links to more.

Just sayin'

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

"We may take pride in observing that there is not a single film showing in London today which deals with any of the burning questions of the day."

— Lord Tyrell, President, British Board of Film Censors, 1937, BBFC Annual Report, p. 4

The rise of the Empire, the fall of Vader, and the victory of the Rebellion, as told by Charlie Chaplin

2011-12-06T12:07:00.000-08:00

I love it when someone reminds us that movies exist not just as discrete, isolated things, but as elements of a single big continuum stretching back more than a century. Here we have footage from The Return of the Jedi and The Clone Wars, music from Inception, and audio from the big moment of Chaplin's 1940 The Great Dictator (I write about that one here).

At first I was skeptical about this, but as it went along I became surprisingly moved by it. It struck me that Chaplin's speech could also be used as the cri de coeur for a mashup of conscientiously chosen OWS footage. I posted such a remix, about the Arab Spring, last March.

(Via Big Shiny Robot)

Here's quoting at you, kid

2011-12-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

Clay Risen considers the possibility that's it's time to mark and celebrate the death of the movie catchphrase:

Take the American Film Institute's list of the 100 most memorable film quotes, compiled in 2005, ranging from what was arguably the first film that could be quoted, 1927’s The Jazz Singer—whose signature quote, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin’ yet!" was so perfectly self-reflexive, the archetypal movie quote—to 2002's "My precious," from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. What I'll call the two-decade Golden Era of the Movie Quote, 1967-1986, accounts for 36 citations, by far the densest 20-year stretch.

One could argue that classic movie quotes proliferated during this time because movies were so imminently quotable. It was the era of the heroic screenwriter, the time when men (and a few women) took dialogue seriously; memorable lines were a way of grounding a scene, the ironic counterpoint to a moment of high seriousness that kept the whole thing stuck in your mind—Roy Scheider's "you're gonna need a bigger boat" in Jaws, for instance.

Needless to say, that line and others, like "bad hat, Harry," also served to brand Jaws as more than your average slasher fare. Over time, though, that branding got out of hand. From the subtle use of catchphrases in a film like Jaws, scriptwriters eventually moved to a baroque phase in which catchphrases were an end in themselves. By the mid-1980s, a summer blockbuster risked failure without a memorable line. Otherwise-middling actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis found they could make up for their lack of skills by learning to dish out well-placed lines like "Hasta la vista, baby" and "Yippee kay-ay, motherfucker." Is it any wonder that we eventually took a break from the whole thing?

'Aliens on Ice' — Staying frosty

2011-12-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

Austin's Old Murder House Theater has mounted a rendition of James Cameron's Aliens — on ice! Jacob S. Hall at movies.com follows up his preview post about the troupe (which has also staged their own versions of Home Alone, Die Hard, Back to the Future, and RoboCop), with a feature review of their theatrical epic:

Anyone who has seen Aliens can follow what transpires over the next 70 minutes or so. It's James Cameron's film on fastforward…and caffeine…and possibly cocaine. The show captures the little details and turns of phrases that fans will know by heart and cast makes creative use of the ice, never standing still when they have to. Ripley's confrontation with the board that accuses her of destroying the ship from the first film is transformed into humorously blunt exchange, with every party involved skating around each other in menacing circles. The colonial marines searching the seemingly abandoned colony of LV421 becomes a showcase for humorously clumsy figure skating. The subtle relationship between Ripley and Hicks becomes gloriously unsubtle when the two share a brief little spin together on the ice.

These guys may not be professional skaters, but they're not bad. Not bad at all. They're certainly not afraid of the ice and they're not afraid of taking risks. When they do stumble, they play it off beautifully and keep moving. They make the "on ice" part of the show look effortless until they make a mistake and then it becomes a newly improvised joke. Using expert skaters as the aliens is a truly inspired choice and seeing the aliens literally skate circles around the clumsy humans is a genuinely thrilling experience.

'Aliens on Ice': The Review (With Video!)

If that leaves you yearning for more, there's also Empire on Ice.

Kickstopper: Because the world never asked for the remake of 'Arthur'

2011-12-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

Here's an idea whose time has come. The Dork Tower webcomic's modest proposal: a crowdfunding site called "Kickstopper" that raises funds to persuade Hollywood studios to halt production on tired sequels, franchises, and adaptations.

Dork Tower Thursday (via Boing Boing and The Mary Sue)

'Hugo' — Dear Martin Scorsese: Thank you for making a movie just for me

2011-12-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

At Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, I make a practice of not "reviewing" major studio movies currently in wide theatrical release, and I'm not about to start now. After all, the internet is so replete with film reviews and commentary that aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic will probably soon achieve their own Borg-like hive-mind sentience and enslave us all to rewrite our lives as three-act rom-com screenplays. No doubt you've already selected the professional, amateur, or webby pro-am hybrid critics/reviewers/pundits who speak to your personal cinematic sensibilities (I sure have). And — bottom line — no one's currently paying me to do so.

But I will say this much: Great Chaplin's ghost! Hugo sure in a damn fine movie.

It's the mighty Scorsese's charming, gorgeous, beating-hearts-on-sleeves love letter to "the magic of the movies" and the fun of storytelling (in all forms), and especially to the vintage cinema he has championed throughout his career. Regular readers here already know that Scorsese's and Hugo's unconcealed treasuring of silent-era greats such as Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, Fairbanks, and especially the pioneer at the center of the film's story, Georges Méliès, speaks right to my cinephilic lub-dubber.

Is this the Martin Scorsese we know from Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, and Shutter Island? Arguably, no, although the sheer experienced filmcraft on display throughout Hugo is never short of masterly.

Instead, the Scorsese we get this time is the zealous collector and encyclopedic fanboy-turned-pro who for years I've found giving passionate cineaste testimonials on DVDs such as Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Public Enemy (wherein he appraises Cagney's performance as where "modern screen acting begins"), Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach and The River (Hugo's Monsieur Frick, as played by Richard Griffiths, looks a lot like Renoir, the scenes with the steam train engineer and his fireman quote outright Renoir's 1938 film La bête humaine, and Renoir's name appears in the closing credits list of Acknowledgements), and a dozen or more other films. And that's not including the full-length commentaries to his own movies.

Throughout Hugo, we see the love light in Scorsese's eyes, and it's flickering at 24 frames per second.

Here's an "easter egg" I'm looking forward to when I get the movie on Blu-ray — name-checking all the period movie posters that festoon several of Hugo's scenes. I caught Fantômas and Judex (two pulp hero adventure serials directed by Louis Feuillade), Charley Chase's Why Men Work (as "Pourquoi les hommes travaillent"), a poster of Chaplin without a film title (rights issues?), a colorful illustration of Chaplin forebear Max Linder, and others panning by too quickly to capture in my memory.

Even Méliès had his predecessors in the Lumière brothers, and they receive a significant nod as Méliès recounts how he got started in filmmaking during a carnival screening of their "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station." Later, in a montage sequence, we glimpse just enough of several later films to identify them, such as the The Great Train Robbery, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Intolerance, The Thief of Bagdad, Tumbleweeds (William S. Hart's last movie), Keaton's The General, Chaplin's The Kid, and Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box.

I'd love the eventual disc to add a track that annotates Hugo's filmic homages, for they are abundant and pointing them out would create added value illumination. (Hey, if anybody on the production end wants a hand with that, just contact me here, 'kay?)

Plus, Hugo speaks between the frames about the creative process, both explicitly in the film's narrative and implicitly in the way it was made. I can't shake the notion that we're glimpsing Scorsese celebrating the tortuous, thrilling, clockpunky act of movie-making itself, like Chaplin using The Circus as a vehicle to comment about the often precarious art and craft of being funny.

The film aims itself right at my limbic system even in its incidentals. For instance, the whole thing is set in my own mind's-eye image of romanticized Paris at the turn of the 20th, with Django Reinhardt playing his gypsy jazz in a café where James Joyce shares a table with Salvador Dalí. We get those mammoth steam locomotives barreling through Paris' Gare Montparnasse station, so evocative since I was a kid. And suffusing the setting and storytelling — all that brass clockwork, gears within gears; visit my house and you'll see that I have a thing for old clocks.

Hugo is being marketed as a "kids film," and I guess technically it is that. Its screenplay is conventionally structured enough to attract parents looking for nonthreatening mainstream "holiday family film" fare. Sacha Baron Cohen's Inspector Gustav comes within his mustache's width of tipping over into Disney cartoon villain mode before being given some redeeming dimension when it counts.

But it's not only a "kids film." There's plenty on tap for those of us in the higher age brackets, especially those of us whose love of movies encompasses far more than the latest 'splodey summer blockbusters.

And yet I'm so glad it is a "kids film."

For one thing, here's a movie in which the plot, and therefore our two child leads, drives forward with an appreciation not only of movies — but also of books: of reading, of discovering the world and engaging your authentic self via leather-bound covers and the Narnia-like expanses of bookshops and libraries.

Precocious Isabelle (Chloë Moretz) finds joy in trying out new words as she leads Hugo (Asa Butterfield) from his clockwork warren within the Paris train station walls through the looking-glass/wardrobe/pirate ship/TARDIS that is Christopher Lee's (!) bookshop, a storefront cathedral so piled high with shelves and stacked-up volumes that he might be living in an Escher drawing. To Isabelle the shop is "Neverland and Oz and Treasure Island all wrapped into one." The fact that she can also recite Christina Rossetti gets them out of a sticky predicament with Inspector Gustav early on. Give her another 15, 20 years and there's my dream girl. (In fact, she's Elizabeth, so big win there.)

As the plot's gears start turning faster, Hugo repays her in kind by leading her into a story of their own beyond the written page. "This might be an adventure," she observes, "and I've never had one before, outside of books at least."

While I'd say that Lee's bibliophile shopkeeper could have used a moment or two of his own for some development, he earns his keep in the film by giving Hugo the talisman he needs right when he needs it most: an edition of Robin Hood that, the man says, is innately meant to be Hugo's. It's a moment that sets in motion Hugo's act of reigniting the storyteller's spark within morose old Méliès.

When they discover the missing clues they need to solve the mystery of the heartbreak embittering Isabelle's "Papa Georges," it happens within a library. There, the adult guide they encounter to get them into Act III isn't a wizard or a talking lion or a pirate. He's a movie buff and, most crucially, an author.

And the "reading is fundamental" angle is not conveyed with a heavy hand. It's naturally integral to the narrative and not slathered on like a dose of "good for you" broccoli on a dish of ice cream.

During the showing, I observed the kids packing our audience — ages 6-13, I'd say. I was pleased to see them so engrossed and entertained. They squealed as if opening birthday presents during the recreations of the authentic "old timey" Méliès films. I was happily surprised when they fully engaged with the scene where the two leads sneak into a showing of Harold Lloyd's famous Safety Last, the kids in our audience responding to Lloyd dangling from the clockface as much as Hugo and Isabelle did. They laughed at a quick gag from Keaton's The General. (What they'd think of Louise Brooks and the entirety of Pandora's Box should probably be run by their parents first.)

And when it was all over, they applauded.

So now I'm wondering: Given Hugo's critical and commercial success, and given its likely "long tail" staying power as a Scorsese film, is it possible that we'll now see a generation of kids grow up with more familiarity of silent-era cinema, from Méliès forward, and with a fuller understanding of where the movies they enjoy come from — than any generation since ... well, since ever, even their great- or great-great grandparents who were those first movie audiences?

I'm going to click Publish Post hoping so.

Thanks, Mr. S.

Music: Django Reinhardt
Near at hand: Gifts from London for Judy and Dan

For your consideration — "If there were no Internet, Hedy Lamarr would have to invent it" edition

2011-11-30T15:51:00.000-08:00

Photo by Art Streiber

Fast Company: The Vision Thing — How Marty Scorsese risked it all and lived to risk again in Hollywood.

Slate: The Return of Silent Cinema — The Artist isn't the only movie harkening back to the time before talkies.

Slate: The Real Movies Behind the Magical Hugo

The Film Stage: 10 Classic Films You Must Watch Before Seeing Martin Scorsese's 'Hugo'

The Daily Beast: Good Actors, Bad Movies, and the Oscars — In this year's unpredictable Academy Awards race, one trend has emerged: excellent performances in so-so films. Richard Rushfield has had enough:

Ultimately, great performances are not about acting as a self-involved exercise unto itself, but about creating great, rich, unforgettable characters. And if a film has a great, rich, unforgettable character at its heart, audiences will forgive it a galaxy of sins. But if the film is forgettable, how unforgettable can the performance be? In recent years, Oscar has bestowed its favors for various reasons—some political, some artistic—on performances in a collection of films that were almost erased from the public imagination while they were still on the screen: The Reader, La Vie en Rose, Walk the Line, Crazy Heart, and Capote, to name a few. Despite the alleged brilliance at their hearts, the films have managed to be forgotten. Perhaps that is a judgment Oscar should consider the next time it rewards good work in a failed project.

Indiewire: The 10 Biggest Surprises of the Spirit Award Nominations

Indiewire: Images From Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' Comic-Con Footage Leak — Hints that Scott's hush-hush project, set for a June 2012 release, will look sensational whether or not it really is an Alien prequel. Update: /Film — High-Res Images From Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus'

NPR: 'Most Beautiful Woman' By Day, Inventor By Night — A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes sets out to rewrite America's memory of Lamarr. Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, chronicles her life and the inventive side that is not often mentioned.

Also:

io9: Hedy Lamarr, the gorgeous geek genius who helped invent the cell phone
Slate: The Inventor in Hollywood — Richard Rhodes explores Hedy Lamarr's other career. Also the video, Hedy Lamarr: The Other Side of the Screen Siren.
Inventor.org: Female Inventors: Hedy Lamarr — Includes images of drawings from Lamarr's co-authored patent.
The Mary Sue: That Time Hedy Lamarr Invented Wifi

PBS.org: I enjoyed the new two-part PBS American Masters entry, Robert Weide's Woody Allen: A Documentary. I disagree with calling it "definitive" — it has conspicuous gaps and the depth of penetration of a drink coaster — but it's still a well-made introduction to a course in Woody Allen 101 and I was pleased to see Allen onscreen as our docent. It's available for free viewing online. (It may be rights-restricted to in the United States.)

The Guardian: Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood — Fans were shocked when Batman writer Frank Miller furiously attacked the Occupy movement. They shouldn't have been, says Rick Moody – he was just voicing Hollywood's unspoken values.

In a related piece, here's David Brin's Roll over, Frank Miller: or why the Occupy Wall Street kids are better than #$%! Spartans

Slate: The Longform.org Guide to the Making of Movies — Five notable magazine stories about the film industry, from loony directors to phenomenal flops.

TPM: Right-Wing Freak-Out: Children's Movies Pushing Liberal Agenda — It's simple, really. Happy Feet has the word "happy" right there in the title, and there are few things right-wingers find more threatening than others' happiness.

How to be a Retronaut: New York, 1940s, by Stanley Kubrick — "Kubrick's striking black and white images of 1940s New York City — which were often shot on the sly, his camera concealed in a paper bag with a hole in it — hint at the dark beauty and psychological drama of his later creative output."

The Daily Beast: Confronting The Apocalypse — Andrew Sullivan rounds up some thoughtful responses to Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, which I too think of as half of a double-feature with Malick's Tree of Life. "...It’s what Malick was getting at in Life: Every human—like every dinosaur millions of years ago—is here for a brief time and then gone, terminated by a rogue asteroid, a wartime bullet, a freak accident or a wayward planet called Melancholia."

The Atlantic: The Johnny Depp 'Thin Man' Reboot Is on Its Third Writer. For a little background, here's a "green light" announcement from The Guardian last May. My question: Who could possibly play Nora without leaving us pining for Myrna Loy? Don't screw this up or I'll personally shoot you five times in tabloids.

Well, the new John Carter trailer sure looks sensational. The screenplay is by Andrew Stanton, who also wrote Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Wall-E, and Toy Story 3. I'm not crazy about what I see here of the character of John Carter. He seems too much the Hollywood-standard bronze brute, which isn't at all like Edgar Rice Burroughs' original Southern gentleman. However, Stanton says he is a big fan of the novel and that the movie "feels like the book." Here's hoping.

Making a movie? Need medical and scientific antique props and set decor? Who ya gonna call? These guys.

'Manos' in HD: Why I’m Saving 'Manos: The Hands of Fate' — Earlier this year Ben Solovey found the original 16mm workprint of Manos: The Hands of Fate, one of the most famous culty bad horror movies this side of Plan 9 from Outer Space. This site documents his quest to rescue and preserve the film from the bottomless dumpster of obscurity. Why? I'm not certain. But I salute his diligence.

Tor: Your New Baby Needs This Star Trek Book — If you're wondering the best way to reinforce the concept of opposites to the toddler in your life, the Star Trek Book of Opposites is here to help.

The Onion: Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director's Youth

Bouncing off my recent teeth-gnashing at Anonymous: Who wrote Shakespeare? As usual, Monty Python's Eric Idle has the last word.

Added without comment (via Huffington Post):

Stephen Colbert interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson

2011-11-29T10:53:00.000-08:00

The Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey hosted a fascinating, one-hour chat between Neil DeGrasse Tyson — Hayden Planetarium director, TV science host, and all-round good guy — with Stephen Colbert in a rare, out-of-character appearance.

The dream factory

2011-11-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

Today after we woke up, I brought Elizabeth her cup of coffee in bed as I do every morning. Lying there between sips, we shared the dreams we'd been having the moment the alarm clock went off.

For Elizabeth, we were having dinner with Johnny Depp in New Orleans.

As for me, we were dining in a restaurant/bar here in Seattle. Miranda July was sitting by herself at a table across the room. I approached her, said hello, and she invited us to join her. After some chat about each other's work, she invited me to join her on her next production, both as an actor and behind the scenes. (In the dream I told her that her recent film The Future didn't entirely work for me, but apparently this was no obstacle. She was pleasant throughout.)

What fed our respective dreams were two things, I think:

Seeing and utterly adoring Martin Scorsese's Hugo this weekend. (I'll post about that later.) During the closing credits we noticed that the movie was produced by Johnny Depp, and during the film Elizabeth noticed that the actor playing Django Reinhardt (Emil Lager) looked a lot like young Johnny Depp, which she thought was okay indeed.
Before switching off the light, Elizabeth had been reading Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House. I saw Miranda July's name on the cover for her new story "Oranges." I like her short stories.

Now I'm wondering what dreams we'll wake up to tomorrow. Maybe I can talk her into going out to dinner tonight (obviously dining well must be involved), followed by a showing of My Week with Marilyn....

Screw CGI, no. 8: Ice finger of death

2011-11-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

BBC Nature answers the obvious question: "What the...?"

The temperature of this sinking brine, which was well below 0C, caused the water to freeze in an icy sheath around it. Where the so-called "brinicle" met the sea bed, a web of ice formed that froze everything it touched, including sea urchins and starfish.

"Game over, man"

2011-11-26T22:45:00.000-08:00

Via Sharksplode

"I'm looking at the gun ... Here's the great moment of the sweat running down ... His eyes are popping ..."

2011-11-25T17:09:00.000-08:00

Arnold Schwarzenegger illuminates the nuances of Total Recall in a DVD commentary that synopsizes the obvious:

Gabe at Videogum snarks:

How is Arnold Schwarzenegger not recording DVD commentary for all of the movies? Now that we know what a DVD commentary track can actually BE, who on Earth wants to hear what Wes Anderson has to say?

I am sympatico with Brent Rose when he adds:

I've gotta say, this is something I really miss about DVDs. I'd say about 90% of the movies I watch at home these days are streamed. Streaming movies are fantastically convenient, but we lose something that was one of the first big advantages DVDs had over VHS tapes: extras. I love extras. In a streaming-only world, the commentary you hear in the video above would never exist, and that, my friends, would be a tragedy.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Reddit, and The Daily What

My blushes, Watson! (no. 2)

2011-11-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

Recently I mentioned that soon you may find me doing some vintage Sherlock Holmes movie blogging here in coordination with the release of the newest Robert Downey Jr. film. Beating me to the punch, Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman (och aye) gave another nice press nod to my own Sherlock Holmes story, "The Case of the Detective's Smile," in his article The Immortal Sherlock Holmes. He slightly misremembered the story's title, apparently, but hey. I'll take PR wherever I can get it.

Although I've sold other fiction that I wish would garner as much attention as that one, I'd be a cad to complain about "Detective's Smile" being far and away my most popular fiction byline thus far.

Pic pick: "It comes in pints?"

2011-11-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

Just an ordinary little pub we wandered into while visiting London and Oxford this past September:

And now I'm off to San Francisco again for several days. Probably no posts until I get back. Cheers!

For your consideration — "Not written by the Earl of Oxford" edition

2011-11-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

Critic David Bordwell on Dante's cheerful purgatorio — Occasioned by a New York retrospective of director Joe Dante's films, including a marathon screening of his pop-culty mashup The Movie Orgy, Bordwell elegantly reflects on Dante's body of work. "Dante, impresario of the comic grotesque, finds his inspiration in popular culture, the more wacko and inept the better. The comedy may come from childhood silliness, the grotesque from childhood fears. They say we baby boomers will always be just big kids, and Dante accepts this with a grin and a darkly cheerful eye."

laurel-and-hardy.com: Film Preservation - Another fine mess — A thorough four-part look at a difficult but necessary curatorial artistry. "How could movies like these, so widely seen for so long, be at risk of disappearing forever in first-class quality copies? Because they were too popular. Too many prints and negatives wore out, is the simple answer."

As a somewhat more than armchair Shakespeare buff with teeth-gnashingly strong opinions about the moronic, counterfactual "authorship controversy" recently given the thud of a movie it deserves in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, I have considered blogging about it at Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL. But I fear such a post would devolve into a spittle-flecked Hulk-smash rant (on the Internet?! No way!) on the "Oxfordians'" logical fallacies and their absurd Creation Science/Birther/Moon Hoax-style pseudo-intellectualism. So instead I heartily recommend more clear-headed authorities such as Holger Syme (start here), Paul Edmonson, Ron Rosenbaum, and Bardfilm's KJ.

indiewire: Director & Actress Rie Rasmussen Says Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained' Will "Revolutionize" Hollywood

Slate: William Monahan picks his Top 5 British Crime and Suspense Films from the ’60s and ’70s. David Haglund on When Pauline Kael Was Wrong.

Filmicability: Here's a charming and expansive retrospective on Charles Schulz at the movies.

Having seen and been equivocatingly enthralled by Von Trier's bleak yet beautiful newest, Melancholia, I've been curious to read a review of the film from someone with first-hand experience with depression. Dean Treadway at Filmicability rewards my quest here.

Ferdy on Films: Marilyn Ferdinand, one of the more thoughtful and interesting movie bloggers going, also helps me see Melancholia more clearly.

indiewire: Lars Von Trier Confronts Depression Head On In The Grim 'Melancholia'

io9: Planetary Collisions and Other Disasters: Lars von Trier’s Crackpocalyptic Melancholia — "But Melancholia doesn't give us disaster porn — instead, it gives us disaster erotica."

NYT: A.O. Scott on Melancholia. Pat Ryan on The Prince, The Showgirl, And the Stray Strap, a bit of historical context ahead of My Week With Marilyn, which is high on my See It list.

The Guardian writers' My Favourite Film series, plus readers' comments.

Thirteen movie poster trends that are here to stay and what they say about their movies

Mythical Monkey — Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett And Film. Waiting for Godot with a flat hat on. Also Happy Birthday, Louise Brooks. (Also see my own Alternate universe movies: "The Public Enemy" with Louise Brooks instead of Jean Harlow.)

io9: First Early Reviews of Looper, the Time Travel Movie That Could Be One of 2012’s Best Films and Why is Buckaroo Banzai such an enduring classic? (Because wherever it goes, there we are.)

Variety and, within hours, all over the geekiverse: "Harry Potter" director David Yates is teaming up with the BBC to turn its iconic sci-fi TV series "Doctor Who" into a bigscreen franchise. As a fan of Doctor Who, old and new, from way back, I remain dubious until I hear more directly from the Beeb. Still, io9's Charlie Jane Anders, whose opinions I've learned to respect on such things, is optimistic.

The Mary Sue: Toy Short Story Shows Us The Island of Abandoned Happy Meal Toys

The Girl With the White Parasol: Citizen Kane Takes the Stand - "The reason I watch films is so that I can find those moments of beauty, whether they come from a Technicolor image or from the throb in an actor's voice or from a string chorus. That's why I named my blog, 'The Girl with the White Parasol.' That's why I love film. And that's why I love Citizen Kane."

Music: Oscar Peterson
Near at hand: Yellow Submarine figures

Screw CGI, no. 7: Stunning Space Station time-lapse

2011-11-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Earth at night, as seen by astronauts on board the International Space Station. The video is amazing, eerie, humbling, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Watch it full-screen.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

More info here.

How Kai understands "The Hound of the Baskervilles"

2011-11-12T14:23:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week Elizabeth got a yen to watch the 1959 Hammer production of The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Peter Cushing (as Sherlock Holmes), André Morell, and Christopher Lee. Thinking that I might do some Sherlockian blogging here ahead of the release of the new Robert Downey Jr. movie, I acceded with pleasure.

As usual, our dog Kai, a 90-pound Mostly Malamute, joined us in the movie room for the showing.

Afterward, Elizabeth mused about how Kai might interpret the story's famous climax through his own perspective and nature. She suggested it might go something like this:

Baskerville: "Help! It's a terrible great evil hell-hound come to kill me!"

Hound: "It's a human! I can get petted!"

Baskerville (running): "I must escape from this giant, evil creature!"

Hound (jumping up and knocking him over): "Stop! Rub my tummy!"

Baskerville: "Help! Arrgh! My heart!"

Hound: "Finally, I can lick your face. Oh human, I adore you. Here, I'll lie on your chest to get closer. I love you, human!"

Baskerville: "Hellllllp!"

Suddenly the villain Holmes, knowing nothing about dogs, appears and shoots the good boy instead of giving him a reasonable command such as "Off" or "Down" or "Greet." He doesn't even offer an ever-present pocket treat.

To Kai, it's one of the great cinematic canine tragedies.

Pic pick: Hitch's "Rear Window" cameo

2011-11-08T21:10:00.000-08:00

"Sci-Fi Savant" — Now beaming to a nightstand near you

2011-11-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

I've been a fan and regular reader of Glenn Erickson's DVD Savant column for going on ten years now. The habit started when I was a new staffer at DVD Journal and my editor there recommended Glenn's articles and commentary as an example of good new work by someone who knows what he's talking about and how to talk about it.

So I visited the site and knew right away that here was someone I wanted to be like. I wanted to be that smart when it comes to movies — new movies and (especially) those from earlier decades and social eras; famous classics as well as rarities as obscure as Grant Williams at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man. And I wanted to write like him, with that authoritative yet personable style, that relaxed and unforced sense of humor, and that way of making you think about — not just react to — movies and move-making in new ways.

I discovered that he's also an astute film historian and a contributor for Turner Classic Movies and is a go-to expert on Film Noir. His day job as a film and video editor has earned him an Emmy nomination. Glenn produced the restoration of the original "lost" ending to the Cold War sci-fi noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. Early in his career he worked behind the scenes on two Spielberg films, 1941 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His coolness quotient just kept going up.

The Gulliver-like head of Glenn Erickson, summer 1977.

That stretch of road some months later.

Were I to rummage through my own pieces of film journalism from those early days, I know I'd spot myself aping Glenn's tone and style and cine-smarts, or at least trying to. But it worked. His was a bar to reach for and reading his stuff made me do mine better.

Plus, it turned out that he's just a hell of a nice guy. An erudite film buff who can write and a gentleman to boot.

Somewhere during all that, Glenn and I became friends. Well, in that Internet way at least. For years we've been emailing each other links and jokes and pictures and mutual appreciation of each other's work. When I was a producer-writer for Film.com, my first "get" was Glenn as a weekly contributor there. Our correspondence has continued to the point where I feel comfortable calling him a "friend" even though we haven't yet actually met in person. Next time I get down to L.A. or he makes it north to Seattle, we'll finally clink glasses in 3D space.

And twice a week his DVD Savant column remains a never-miss destination for me.

All that throat-clearing is by way of full disclosure. For this post isn't just a personal reminiscence. I'm here to beat the drum for Glenn's new book, Sci-Fi Savant (Wildside Press) and I acknowledge that I'm not exactly an unbiased critic when I say you should click over to Amazon right now and buy a copy before you leave Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL.

This "classic sci-fi review reader" collects his thoughts on 116 science fiction movies. It presents an entertaining thumbnail history of the genre in chronological order, from Fritz Lang's seminal Metropolis (up to date with the most recent restoration) through to Pixar's Wall-E and James Cameron's Avatar (where Glenn recognizes its cinema precursors as broader and deeper than just the obvious Dances With Wolves).

In between he covers decades of science fiction milestones (e.g., Things to Come, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey), not to mention some worthy millstones (rubber-monster and exploitation fare such as Gorgo, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Brain from Planet Arous, and Teenage Caveman). He treats grade-A major studio releases and B- to Z-grade giant-muto-slime-bug flicks as illustrative segments of the same continuum, as cultural snapshots that reveal as much about us in the audience as about whoever it was behind the camera.

He gives fresh perspectives to big-deal classics that have been written about to death over the years. For instance, his pieces on Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and Cameron's Avatar have refocused the way I view those films and those filmmakers.

Meanwhile he waves the flag for under-appreciated masterworks such as Val Guest's Enemy From Space, a.k.a. Quatermass 2, from Hammer Films in 1957.

Cosmic Journey, USSR, 1936

His scope ranges beyond Hollywood and British titles to also provide perhaps our first exposure to films such as Abel Gance's "delirious misfire" of 1930, the apocalyptic epic La fin du monde (The End of the World); the startlingly sophisticated and almost wholly undocumented early Soviet moon adventure Kosmitcheskiy reys (Cosmic Journey); the East German/Polish Der Schweigende Stern (First Spaceship on Venus); and the extraordinary Czech space odyssey Ikarie XB 1.

"Catching up with Ikarie and and other Eastern Bloc films made during the Cold War," Glenn says in his thoughtful Introduction, "is like discovering a new wing in a favorite museum."

Red Planet Mars

Glenn also pokes around under a film's hood to see what sociological and ideological contexts, what themes and anxieties might be humming under the surface: anti-Communism, anti-Capitalism, religious revivalism, xenophobia, social paranoia.... Not surprisingly, the often boldly message-making films of the Atomic Age/Cold War 1950s receive hefty attention. Harry Horner (father of composer James Horner) raised that bar to opium-dream heights in 1952 with his debut, Red Planet Mars, "a pro-Christian anti-Communist melodrama, a politically radical film that advocates conversion of the United States to a Christian theocracy." In 1962, The Creation of the Humanoids may have been too talky and exposition-laden for anyone's good, but what it had to say about the humanity of its humanoid robot "Clickers" anticipated the deeper themes that later ran through Blade Runner.

He also reminds us that more modern films aren't immune to their own unspoken assumptions that, like the arrow in the FedEx logo, become unmissable once they're pointed out by someone paying attention. His pages on RoboCop and Starship Troopers, films I have dismissed with a disparaging wave of my hand, inspire me to give them a close rewatch for possible reappraisal.

This book is a casual sample platter, not an end-all or definitive final word on the subject. A conversational, non-academic read such as this should only be so thick, so editorial adjudication led to some omissions I'd love to see here just to get Glenn's take on them — e.g., Slaughterhouse Five, Sleeper, Brazil, Alien, 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Primer, and Moon. Of course, I can get all those and hundreds more at Glenn's site, plus enough farther-reaching articles and essays to fill a couple dozen books this size.

Besides, any arguable gaps are more than offset by the new material written exclusively for Sci-Fi Savant, and especially the chapters that have introduced me to films I'd previously never known about (and I'm no neophyte in this territory). I'm talking about the BBC's documentary-like post-nuke extrapolation The War Game from 1965; the Czech doomsday drama Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon (The End of August at the Hotel Ozone); Gorath, Ishiro Honda's Japanese angle on the apocalyptic "worlds in collision" scenario; and the Film Board of Canada's 1990 short animated To Be ("a gem of a film, a philosphic wonder in miniature").

That said, the "anti-2001" German agitprop film Der große Verhau (The Big Mess) from 1970 sounds so unwatchable I wonder if it's really worth the page space.

The President's Analyst

And I was pleased to find some familiar but less obvious choices, titles that aren't usually tagged with the label "science fiction" even though that's exactly what they are. Of these, regular readers here already know two of my favorites, The Man in the White Suit with Alec Guinness and The President’s Analyst with James Coburn, a couple of excellent films that fans of science fiction may not ordinarily consider but should.

Glenn deploys his sense of humor with a light touch. Good thing, too, because as he states in his Introduction, as with any genre "the overall appeal of sci-fi can't be judged by its finest works alone." So he takes several dips into some of the, let us say, less artistically sophisticated movies that represent the field. Even here, though, Glenn refreshingly doesn't resort to easy snark and insult humor. He is no fan of Mystery Science Theater spitball-shooting, so even when his opinion of a given movie is less than laudatory, his professional regard for the artisans and working stiffs behind the scenes never stoops to petty mockery. That's not to say he isn't averse to a nip from the sarcasm bottle now and then. Re Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea:

"Director Allen shows his opinion of [Barbara] Eden's acting talent by saving his only non-eye level, non-boring interior shot for a CinemaScope close-up of Eden's derrière gyrating to goldbrick Frankie Avalon's trumpet music. Eden's off-screen husband Michael Ansara wanders about cradling a puppy and mumbling deranged prophecies about the end of the world. The annoying radio announcer with the Jersey accent is none other than our producer Irwin, saving a buck."

My favorite, though, is an isolated pullquote spoofing the colorful terminology we hear exclaimed in David Lynch's Dune: "For surely he IS the Cuisinart Hat Rack!"

Other points of interest include extended essays on 1953's Invaders from Mars ("a personal fascination since childhood") and the three-hour original European cut of Wim Wenders' 1991 Until the End of the World. His write-up on George Pal's The Time Machine takes a side-step into an aspect of the source novel that has nothing to do with the film, but it's an interesting digression nonetheless, one that has made me rethink and appreciate anew H.G. Wells' cleverness in his original story. I like that Glenn opened the fence wide enough to include Walt Disney in Space and Beyond, a three-hour collection of Tomorrowland-themed television "infotainment" programs that from 1955-59 sold America on the vision of space travel as a new Manifest Destiny.

For readers watching at home (which means pretty much all of us) entries also add information about their respective DVD or Blu-ray viewing options. As "DVD Savant" since the 1990s, Glenn has been championing movies' presentation on home video, so here he provides info on transfer quality, commentary tracks, featured extras, and so on as relevant. It's a handy addendum when it comes to avoiding inferior bargain-bin public domain DVD editions, or as a reference source for buffing up your own home cinema library.

While I'm placing Sci-Fi Savant on the shelf as a worthy companion to Bill Warren's essential Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties and Phil Hardy's The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, Glenn's less formalized approach to the subject appeals to the casual movie-watcher as well as the already-bitten aficionado. Plus it has the advantage of being significantly cheaper than those coffee-table-crunchers and quite a bit easier to read in bed.

My only plaint is that the overall text could have used one more pass under an editor's eye to clear out the occasional typos and other infelicitous line-level mechanics. I'm a stickler for that sort of thing. (Insert Annie Hall quote: "...because I'm anal." Annie: "That's a polite word for what you are.")

Now, what was it I recommended way up there? Oh, yes — click over to Amazon right now and buy a copy.

Music: Philip Glass
Near at hand: Kai sleeping by my office door

I approve of your taste in 1960s movies, Senator

2011-11-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

According to my Sitemeter stats, about an hour ago as I type this, someone landed on my feature post about the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers movie The Party by Googling up claudine longet ted kennedy.

Who's taking time during an undoubtedly busy work day to blogsurf the movie's waifish songstress and her connection with the late Senator Kennedy?* Sitemeter tells me it was someone from domain name senate.gov (U.S. Government) / ISP: U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms.

Better yet, whoever it was (the actual current Senate Sergeant at Arms?) clicked through to my Fantastic Voyage post and then out-clicked on this image of Raquel Welch.

And apparently D.C. federal employees use Microsoft WinNT with Internet Explorer 8.0.

* Actually, there was a marginal but historically interesting connection between them.

Screw CGI, no. 6: Chilean volcano ash cloud lightning

2011-11-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

From National Geographic's Pictures We Love: Best of October:

Photograph by Ricardo Mohr, My Shot

Remember the scene from the Radiers of the Lost Ark when the ark is opened? Or an apocalyptic vision out of Hellboy or some "End Times" thriller? This isn't that, but I'd believe it if it was. Instead, it's something far cooler...

A cloud of lightning-topped ash rises toward a starry sky during the June eruption of southern Chile's Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano complex in a picture submitted to My Shot in October. The summer eruption grounded flights in Chile and neighboring Argentina.

This month officials began evacuating people from the immediate vicinity of the Hudson Volcano, 470 miles (756 kilometers) south of Puyehue-Cordón Caulle, according to the Associated Press. Recent releases of steam and ash from the volcano have had authorities in Chile and Argentina on high alert, AP reports.

According to National Geographic, these little-understood "dirty thunderstorms" may get sparked up when "rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in the plume collide to produce static charges — just as ice particles collide to create charge in regular thunderstorms."

Utterly wowed by this image and what it depicts, I plugged the keywords Chile ash cloud lightning volcano into Google Images and got my mind wow-ified a bunch more:

National Geographic

NASA / Astronomy Picture of the Day

National Geographic

The News Tribune

Hat tip: Boing Boing

Tim Burton montage

2011-11-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

I tend to run hot-and-cold when it comes to Tim Burton, though I confess to a certain affinity for his sense of fantastical "vision," or whatever that je ne sais something quoi is he displays when he's at the top of his game.

This supercut by 17-year-old (!) Kees van Dijkhuisen — who has put together nine other supercuts for filmmakers such as Michel Gondry, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Ridley Scott, and Pixar — is a two-minute celebration of Burton as one of Hollywood's more distinctively expressive filmmakers, one whose personal stamp is unmistakable. I would have liked more Ed Wood and a bit less of the emo rush, though it's a fine piece of work from young Kees.

[the films of] Tim Burton from Kees van Dijkhuizen jr. on Vimeo.

Also, recently on these pages: Tim Burton's "Vincent"

I see dead people - lots and lots of dead people

2011-10-31T18:18:00.000-07:00

During our trip to London last month, Elizabeth and I strolled through Highgate Cemetery, the Halloweeniest of them all.

A movie reference!

Naturally I left a pen at Douglas Adams' site.

Flickr photo set here.

Octoberfilms: "The Tomb of Ligeia" & "An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe" (1964, '70)

2011-10-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

And so, on Halloween day, we close the tin reel can lid with the final post of this year's Octoberfilms and a respectable conclusion to Roger Corman's AIP Poe series from the 1960s. And here's also a final happy 100th birthday shout-out to Corman's Poe-pourri star attraction, Vincent Price.

After seven cinematic interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe tales for American International Pictures — from House of Usher to the comic romp of The Raven to the vivid color dreamscape of The Masque of the Red Death — producer/director Roger Corman had grown tired of the repetitive series. Eager for some travel, he shot Masque (1964) and his eighth and final Poe film, The Tomb of Ligeia, in England. Not coincidentally, those are the two most lauded as the masterstrokes that concluded his Poe cycle at its gorgeous, broody apex.

Of all the Corman-Poe-Price films, The Tomb of Ligeia is the least celebrated. This one tends to get lost down the memory hole, yet it competes admirably with Masque as one of Corman's most lavishly executed mood pieces, with the highest production values of his faux-Poe titles.

The Tomb of Ligeia's richly portrayed and meticulous screenplay expands Poe's narratively flimsy early short story "Ligeia." It was written by no less than Robert Towne (The Last Detail, Chinatown, the first two Mission Impossible films). It's a pleasure to say that he's still active here in the final third of 2011. Earlier this month GK Films announced that Towne is set to write Battle of Britain, and he's currently writing "Compadre," an original television pilot, for FX. Internet rumors have attached him as writer-director on a remake of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, though if true that project seems to be stalled in development hell. Still, that's a pretty good way to spend the past fifty years, I'd say.

The Tomb of Ligeia gives us Price as melancholic widower Verden Fell, who lives with only his servants in an enormous ancient abbey.

We first see him burying his wife Ligeia (Elizabeth Shepherd), her face visible through a glass window in the coffin lid. At the screech of a black cat who has slinked in from another Poe story, Ligeia's eyes snap open. (Fear of premature burial also haunts House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Premature Burial.) Attributing the phenomenon to a mere physical post-mortem response, Fell closes the grave — but it's not long before we must wonder whether Ligeia, a blasphemous woman determined to beat death by the sheer force of her indomitable will, actually achieved her goal.

Spooky manifestations continue after Fell meets vibrant and lovely Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd again, now wholesome blonde), thrown from her horse at Ligeia's grave site. Rowena is attracted to the doomladen, light-sensitive Fell. Although he shuns sunlight and society, and is reluctant to give up mourning his beloved Ligeia, Fell and Rowena soon fall in love.

They marry, and that's when Rowena is driven to the brink of madness by mysterious goings-on, which aren't improved by her husband's strange nocturnal behavior. In their "ill-omened marriage" they share neither bedroom nor bed, and he disappears throughout the night to places unknown.

Before long, Fell realizes that he has two beloved and strong-willed women in his life, one on each side of the Great Divide. Trouble is, the headstrong ex on the far side is working hard to step back through to this one. In a particularly creepy scene, Fell demonstrates the new technique known as hypnotism to their dinner guests. Using Rowena as a willing subject, he's as surprised as anyone when his mesmerized wife speaks in Ligeia's voice: "I will always be your wife ... your only wife."

More ghostly occurrences, several returns of that tormenting black cat, another of Corman's trademark gorgeous nightmare sequences, and a revealing exhumation pass before Rowena discovers the secret behind Fell's nighttime occupations. When she finds him catatonic within a secret room of the abbey, then pulls back the sable drapes of a four-poster bed and sees Ligeia's corpse locked in a recently vacated rigor mortis embrace — then falls into those stiff, open arms — it's the most macabre moment in all the Poe series. The appealingly overwrought climax that follows is an operatic feast of possession and conflagration.

The Tomb of Ligeia lacks Masque of the Red Death's fever-dream energy and surrealism, although the sheer look of Ligeia is stunning in its own right. This is the only Poe film that Corman shot largely outdoors, and no British horror movie had ever displayed such sensational location shooting. Ligeia is visually sumptuous as the fetid ambience of English ruins such as Stonehenge and a 900-year-old abbey (Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk) fills every widescreen inch. Lush photography by Hammer cinematographer Arthur Grant and elaborate dark interiors relish every gothic morsel we love about this series.

Price delivers his innate dignity and intensity with nuanced twists, playing a romantic lead who's also a tragically tortured antihero prone to necrophiliac madness. And aristocratic Shepherd is the best leading lady in the AIPoe canon. It's a shame we didn't get more of her.

Towne's screenplay brings something of a Hitchcockian touch (you can spot points of connection with Vertigo), although it is overly talky and the pacing is sometimes too contemplative, resulting in tedious stretches. But when it all clicks The Tomb of Ligeia is one of Corman's most eyeball-grabbing, admirable achievements.

Nonetheless, the bell was tolling for his Poe films. According to John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows...

The Poe series was a major profit center for AIP as long as the vogue lasted, and Roger Corman was in for the first eight of them. House Of Usher garnered $1.4 million in domestic rentals, a near-record AIP number exceeded only by that year's Goliath and The Barbarians (!), which did $1.8. Pit and The Pendulum was slightly better, and captured a whopping 13,627 bookings, more than a lot of major studio features were getting. American-International really knew how to push its product back then, and they worked hard at good exhibitor relations. Tales Of Terror was the first one to fall below a million, but Corman's comedy approach with The Raven got good word-of-mouth among the kids, and the rentals spiked to $1.2. After that, it was a slippery slope. The Haunted Palace was down to $797,000 --- Masque Of The Red Death tumbled further to $535,000 --- and Roger's last, Tomb Of Ligeia bottomed out at $348,000. Bookings for Ligeia were less than half in number to those of Pit and The Pendulum. It was a great series, but as Sam Arkoff often pointed out, when a thing has run the course, bring down the curtain.

And thus, as the man said, nevermore.

Well, mostly.

After Corman hung up his Poe hat, American International Pictures tried to continue feeding off their success with The Oblong Box ('69) and other films. But the heyday was over, audiences wanted more visceral thrills, and without Corman and his crew the results were at best troubled and tiresome. The world had moved on.

So had Corman's star, Vincent Price. But Price's association with Poe continued, and this popular screen actor reminded us that he was also a respected Broadway veteran by appearing solo in an hour-long TV special, a four-part stage performance called An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe. That appears on MGM's "Midnite Movies" DVD with The Tomb of Ligeia.

An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe is a 53-minute television item videotaped in 1970. Price is all on his own in four dramatic monologues enacting Poe's "The Tell-Tale heart," "The Sphinx," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Pit and the Pendulum." In each, Price appears in a period costume on a small, well-appointed stage like a "black box" theater piece. His interpretations are dynamic and frequently riveting, by turns maniacally intense or slyly humorous or quietly somber. This is simple two-camera TV fare (only "Pendulum" is tricked-out with post-production video flourishes), so Price carries the evening with a strong one-man show that lets him trod the boards again with material that fits him the way Mark Twain fits Hal Holbrook.

On the DVD, Ligeia arrives with two commentary tracks. The better of the two is the newer one with Roger Corman. As in his lucid, revealing commentaries for House of Usher and Pendulum, Corman points out his particular approaches to framing, camera movement, and whatever director's techniques were required to give his films the look and feel of productions with three times his budget. He's especially keen to note the scenes of "pure cinema" where he indulged his love of no-holds-barred filmmaking.

The other commentary is a relic from the old Laserdisc edition. It's a poorly recorded interview between Elizabeth Shepherd and film scholar David Del Valle. It sounds as though it were taped on a cheap cassette recorder in Shepherd's den with the movie playing on a small TV in the background. What she has to say is not completely without interest, but listening to it is such an irksome experience that it seems hardly worth the effort.

Happy Halloween from Myrna Loy and me

2011-10-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Ghost of the Cepheus Flare

2011-10-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

Hat tip: Astronomy Picture of the Day

The Toys of Frankenstein

2011-10-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Karloff...

McNugget Buddy Frankenstein (yes, I wish I were kidding)

Papercraft by Bob Canada

Medicom Toy Mickey Mouse Frankenstein Version

Todd McFarlane's Frankenstein

Tim Burton's "Vincent"

2011-10-30T19:54:00.000-07:00

Vincent is a 1982 stop-motion short film written, designed, and directed by Tim Burton and Rick Heinrichs. It's narrated by actor Vincent Price, a lifelong idol and inspiration for Burton. From this relationship, Price would go on to appear in Burton's Edward Scissorhands. Price later said that the film was "the most gratifying thing that ever happened. It was immortality—better than a star on Hollywood Boulevard." (Wikipedia)

Damn, it feels good to be a monsta

2011-10-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

Chillin' between takes with Boris Karloff, the gentleman actor who starred in my favorite of the various Universal classic monster series.

On the set of Son of Frankenstein.

Below: November 23, 1938: Karloff is treated to a birthday surprise on the set of Son of Frankenstein. Before the day was over, there would be another reason to celebrate as Boris’ daughter, Sara, was born.

Octoberfilms: "The Masque of the Red Death" & "The Premature Burial" (1964, '62)

2011-10-29T18:32:00.000-07:00

I'm closing up this year's Octoberfilms posts with the final Corman-Price-Poe titles, capping the series with this post and the next one, The Tomb of Ligeia.

A brief recap: In 1960, Roger Corman inaugurated a new class of low-cost/high-value gothy horror films with the first titles in his "Poe cycle" for American International Pictures, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum. Along with The Premature Burial (which I'll get too later in this post), those modest yet stylish and entertaining little chillers were such a critical (not to mention economic) success that additions to the series were inevitable. After The Raven and The Comedy of Terrors downshifted the series to a broadly comedic gear, 1964's The Masque of the Red Death upshifted in several striking ways. Particularly noteworthy here are the film's richly varicolored artistic design and a luridly bleak story highlighted by Price's performance (his seventh for Corman) as evil Prince Prospero, probably his most blithely nasty character.

The Masque of the Red Death is, by my lights, the series' pinnacle. Thanks to a larger budget, his first principal shooting in England with an English cast (upping his bang/buck ratio in both departments), and more production time (five weeks across November-December '63 instead of his previous three), this is Corman's most opulent and visually impressive Poe picture, and the one that offers the most to dip your absinthe cup into. It's a tour de force of perverse gothic weirdness, and easily one of Price's most distinctive roles.

And yet, while aficionados tend to regard it as a high-water mark in horror cinema — and I'm not arguing the point — this one hits me on a different level: not so much as just a "horror movie" (there's nothing actually "scary" about it) but more of a big-screenification of the horror genre comics and magazines of the '60s and '70s. I'm thinking (however vaguely at this remove) of Marvel's Strange Tales and Warren Publishing's Creepy and Eerie lines. The Poe elements naturally lend a Classics Illustrated vibe. Contributing to the overall effect are the stage-bound storybook medieval setting, shots that would look at home in an Alan Moore graphic novel, and the vivid choice of putting the whole thing on the screen in jewel-tone and Crayola colors.

Indeed, while poking around looking for new background information on this movie, I discovered that Dell Comics issued its own adaptation of it in 1964. Here's a case in which the bridge from one medium to the next could hardly be straighter.

Instead of Corman's previous cinematographer, Floyd Crosby, this time out it's none other than Nicolas Roeg (Petulia) applying the Pathécolor and CinemaScope with creative camerawork on sets left over from the Burton/O'Toole/Gielgud Becket. The sequence of monochromatic rooms — yellow, purple, white, and finally the forbidden velvety black chamber — is one of those elements that gets mentioned when you strike up a chat with someone who has seen Masque. You can really see Roeg's work, and that of Corman's meisterbuilder Daniel Haller, on the MGM "Midnite Movies" DVD, where Masque of the Red Death's transfer is exquisite. The print is so clean and beautiful it's startling, with richly saturated colors from across the spectrum popping out crisp and solid. Most of the time we could be watching a virgin source master.

Charles Beaumont, who already had five years of Twilight Zone episodes and three other Corman films on his résumé, co-wrote (with R. Wright Campbell) the screenplay. The ambitious Corman is at a career best as Masque breaks the by-now routine formalism of the series' previous films, confidently coupling an unusually meditative and layered script with relatively high production values brought to opium-dream life by Roeg.

Smoothly blending two of Poe's stories, "Masque of the Red Death" and "Hop-frog, or the Eight Chained Orang-outangs," Masque showcases Price as tyrannical, blasphemous, Satan-worshipping Prince Prospero, who maintains a sadistic grip on his plague-stricken territory. At his castle are his debauched noblemen guests, a contemptuous pack of ass-kissing elites who submit gleefully to his degrading games in the mistaken belief that Prospero's midnight masked ball will shelter them from the pestilential Red Death stalking the land outside the towering walls.

"The Red Death? I beg you, Prospero, sanctuary!" "This is no church" Thwip!

After ordering the burning of a village that has been infected by the Red Death plague, Prospero abducts Francesca, a virginal peasant girl (17-year-old Jane Asher), as a passing fancy to corrupt and convert to his satanic ways. To staunch any rebellious impulses, he holds her fiancé (David Weston) and her father (Nigel Green, the same year he appeared in Zulu) as amusements in his dungeon. Even so, she makes no bones about leaning on her Christian faith for strength, a faith that Prospero sneers at.

Prospero: "Somewhere in the human mind, my dear Francesca, lies the key to our existence. My ancestors tried to find it. And to open the door that separates us from our Creator."

Francesca: "But you need no doors to find God. If you believe..."

Prospero: "Believe? If you believe you are gullible. Can you look around this world and believe in the goodness of a god who rules it? Famine, Pestilence, War, Disease, and Death. They rule this world."

Francesca: "There is also love and life and hope."

Prospero: "Very little hope I assure you. No. If a god of love and life ever did exist, he is long since dead. Someone, something rules in his place."

It's in such moments that The Masque of the Red Death leans toward one of genre filmdom's more existential disquisitions, sort of a comic-book Camus in costume dress.

At first Prospero's mistress Juliana (Hazel Court) is jealous of the new girl, but soon determines that life would go back to normal with Francesca gone, and so aids her attempt to free her men and flee the castle. There's a fine moment when Juliana, seeing that she has been demoted to second place, challenges Francesca, who gives as good as she gets with steely determination:

Juliana: "You may think that you have impressed the Prince Prospero, but you can count on little help from me."
Francesca: "You will do as he told you!"
Juliana: "Yes as we all must do."
Francesca: [rising] "I will do what I must to save my men, but if they are killed I will die and so will Prince Prospero."

What makes the scene stand out is that Francesca is in what had been Juliana's gold bathtub, vulnerable in every way when the Prince and his mistress barge in, taunting and imperious. But soon after Prospero leaves, as the peasant girl rises to accept the towel held by the attending servants, her resolve to not merely survive but prevail supports her. She's no passive lamb to be slaughtered. It's a moment that gets more interesting in retrospect once we see how utterly that resolve crumbles under the theater of cruelty that Prospero has yet to reveal to her.

That, right there, that crumbling — that's the nub of what makes Francesca, for me, the most interesting character in Corman's Poe cycle. Granted, the films are by and large peopled with "types" more than characters, actors playing parts drawn with single pencil strokes, not 3D software. But Francesca is, by my reckoning, the only one whose pencil stroke bends in a surprising way. In so doing, she bends Prospero's a little too.

Going spoilery here:

Prospero's grim tutelage exposes Francesca to horrors that challenge her Christian goodness to the breaking point:

At a feast, Prospero's entertainment for his giggling, gluttonous guests includes forcing Francesca's sweetheart Gino and her father to strike each other with five daggers, one of which has a poisoned blade. With the final, poisoned, blade, her father lunges at Prospero, who runs him through on the spot before Francesca's eyes and to the amusement of the guests. Gino, to prevent him from choosing martyrdom, is cast out of the castle into the disease-ravaged landscape.

Juliana, hoping to graduate to Prospero's spiritual level as his equal, offers herself body and soul (mostly body) to Satan in a freaky dream-like phallo-Freudian-gang-bang blood rite in which she is demonically stabbed/penetrated again and again.

Afterward, she's killed by Prospero's trained hawk which, apparently, claws her face to pieces with poisoned talons. Looking over his former lover's body, the Prince expresses to Francesca merely a blasé smile and a verbal shrug: "I beg you do not mourn for Juliana. We should celebrate. She's just married a friend of mine."

Then there's the scene with Patrick Magee, who has been relishing his role as pervy, grotesque Alfredo, the boo-hiss noble who more than earns the vengeance meted out by the dwarf jester Hop Toad (Skip Martin). Avenging the mistreatment of his beloved, the child-like dwarf Esmerelda, Hop Toad tricks Alfredo into an ape suit for the masque, with himself Dom/Sub role-playing the ape's whip-bearing master for Alfredo's kinky amusement. Before the other guests, Hop Toad trusses the "ape" to the chandelier, douses Alfredo with brandy and with a candle sets the bastard afire. Alfredo burns to death in front of an audience that includes Prospero and Francesca.

That breaking sound? That's the girl's faith snapping like a scorched bone.

Prospero: [to Francesca, who is emotionlessly watching Alfredo burn to death] "I see you no longer turn away from the cruelties of life."
Francesca: "I no longer care. My life is done. What's left I give to you tonight."

Whoa. Having been force-fed from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, her eyes are opened to the everyday banality of casual evil and there's only one step left before her innocence is forever crushed out of her. She is no longer the doe-eyed peasant girl who entered Prospero's castle. Who wouldn't be changed by all that she has witnessed?

Fortunately there's not enough time to follow through on that "What's left I give to you tonight," because the party's about to start and the remnants of her "perfect faith" apparently impress the mysterious spectral figure cloaked all in red who crashes the shindig and has sharp words with its host.

About that orgiastic masque: The scene is a stagey wingding of wickedness that fails to fulfill its screen potential, partly because suddenly the dance choreography goes all "interpretive" in a way that deflates any tension that the scene might have built up. But it still provides a kick of '60s kitsch before the entrance of the Man in Red (the one color Prospero has forbidden at his knees-up), and the danse macabre that follows for this gathering of degenerate party animals.

At first Prospero mistakes the Man in Red for an emissary from Satan and is delighted at his presence. Soon enough, though, Prospero realizes that his ultimate BFF, Lucifer, is just a bit player among the world's supernatural movers and shakers, and the Man in Red is the personification of the pestilence that observes no borders or tower walls and who has come to strike down the partygoers.

Here we get the movie's second interesting character bend. Evidently Francesca's strength of devotion has moved something within vile Prospero. She has changed him perhaps as much as he has reshaped her.

Prospero: "Your Excellency, this girl [he indicates Francesca]. In all my life, I've never met one whose faith rivaled mine. Spare her to me."
Man in Red: "A charitable request. A rare thing with you, Prospero."

Prospero gets his wish. Before leaving to escape with her fiancé Gino (who has already had his own, more benign, encounter with Red in the forest), Francesca reaches up to kiss Prospero's cheek. In thanks? Absolution? Acknowledgement? Sympathy? In any case that kiss, and Prospero's look of moved surprise, is a powerful moment, one that for me is among the film's great take-aways.

Nonetheless, Prospero's entreaty on her behalf is too little too late for him.

Prospero: "But Satan rules the universe! I made a pact with him!"
Man in Red: "He does not rule alone, and your pact with him will not save you."
Prospero: "There is no other God! Satan killed him!"
Man in Red: "Each man creates his own God for himself, his own Heaven, his own Hell."
Prospero: "Let me see your face!" [He unmasks the Man in Red to reveal Prospero's own bloodstained face]
Man in Red: "Your Hell, Prince Prospero, and the moment of your death."

And so we come to Corman's screen interp of the final passage of Poe's story:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. — Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death"

After the entire narrative's worth of build-up, when Prospero's demise comes it's a thudding anti-climax, too stylized and theatrical for its own good, as hair-raising as a pillow fight. In his 1990 autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Corman acknowledges the scene's problems and at least one big source of them:

"I still regret my decision not to pay extra mandated union fees for going over a day at Christmastime. I still feel that would have made the large-scale ball sequence — with dozens of extras, plenty of fire and lots of action — a true tour de force instead of a merely good sequence."

What should have been a horrific climactic moment is an opportunity missed. But Corman doesn't end his movie there.

What follows is an epilogue that tips a hat to Ingmar Bergman by way of EC Comics. In the forest, as the Red Death enjoys a game of Tarot with a little girl from the village we saw destroyed at the top of the film, he is joined by his fellow pestilences — the Black Death, the Yellow, the White, and so on. They discuss their melancholy work like call-center staffers around the coffee pot, and the Red Death sums up his evening's ledger:

"I called many. Peasant and prince, the worthy and the dishonored. Six only are left: a young man and woman, a dwarf and a tiny dancer, this child [he rests his hand on the little girl's head] and an old man still in the village. Sic transit gloria mundi."

Then he joins their procession and the various Deaths move on like somber cosmic crayons to their next destination.

After the closing credits, as I slip the disc out of the player, my thoughts rewind back to Francesca, who's now offscreen embarking on her new life with Gino. Her boyfriend is little more than a cipher, although we see his traits of bravery and Christian piety in action as the plot unfolds. He's the good guy, but she's the Hero of the tale. They've both suffered, yet that big bend in her arc we've seen — "I no longer care. My life is done. What's left I give to you tonight" — points to a transformation that we can assume leaves her far more than just the spunky peasant girl that Prospero found. She is scarred, hardened, and by my read probably even "enlightened" in some grim but valuable ways. Bent but not altogether broken. Her Christian faith may be re-affirmed, but she is now also more worldly and stripped of her naïveté. She's a new woman, and I just hope that, wherever they end up, Gino can keep up with her.

Even with Masque of the Red Death's extraordinary color palette and atypically faceted screenplay, the key element on the screen is, of course, Price. He proves (as if anyone still doubts) that he was more than just a swooping-cape, maple-glazed ham actor. He took his professionalism quite seriously here, and it shows. It's a chilling performance and he's so obviously having a grand good time with Prospero's outrageous wickedness that, with Sadean debauchery and supernatural comeuppance never looking so good, we do too.

Pairing him up with young Jane Asher was an inspired choice. We catch her in an early ramp-up to the posh appeal she gained later in Alfie ('66) and other film, TV, and stage performances.

On the DVD, in "Roger Corman: Behind the Masque", a 2002 on-camera interview with Corman on the conception, writing, and production of the film, the genial director tells an anecdote about the day he had lunch on the set with Asher's then-boyfriend, a member of a music group from Liverpool on its way to London for a big-city gig. The 21-year-old lad was Paul McCartney, who for a while stayed with Asher and her family in their Wimpole Street, London home during the rare down-times when The Beatles weren't touring. McCartney and John Lennon wrote their hit "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in the basement of Asher's parents' house. The song saw its UK single release on November 29, 1963, while Masque was in production.

Asher had only recently begun her five-year relationship with McCartney, and they were engaged three years later. According to Hazel Court, Asher passed the time between takes by knitting caps for Paul and his young bandmates because the Beatles wore them when they went out in public.

MGM's two-sided double-feature DVD spotlights the AIPoe that — alongside The Tomb of Ligeia — many enthusiasts consider the series' best. On the other hand, the disc bills it with The Premature Burial (1962), Corman's third Poe installment and the entry that's generally ranked as the most forgettable of Corman's Edgar Allan adaptations.

Both films are lauded among fan circles for their production values, Daniel Haller's set designs, and the yummy presence of scream queen Hazel Court, "in whose bosom," Time magazine noted, "you could sink the entire works of Edgar Allan Poe and a bottle of his favorite booze at the same time." And as you'd expect from a Corman costume gothic, the moodiness of The Premature Burial's foggy Victorian atmospherics is effective.

Still, The Premature Burial suffers from Price's absence. Instead, it's Ray Milland who emotes, by turns, hand-wringing gloominess or manic eyeball-spinning through Charles Beaumont's script, which bears too many similarities to its predecessors, Usher and Pendulum.

Where was Price in '62? Well, for starters he was in Corman's faux-Poe anthology film, Tales of Terror, with Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. Its three short sequences are based on the Poe tales "Morella," "The Black Cat" (merged with "The Cask of Amontillado"), and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." Price introduced each sequence and appeared in all three narratives.

He also starred that year in a Corman non-Poe picture, Tower of London, a remake of a 1939 film of the same name and that starred Price, Basil Rathbone, and Boris Karloff. Like its predecessor, the '62 version is a vengeful-ghost story take on Richard III. This one sees Price mugging the tapestries off the walls as hunchbacked Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who begins murdering his way to the throne of England within the first five minutes. It's a cheesy bargain-basement affair, with Price slicing the ham in thick portions, best forgotten. Its one interesting factoid is that its dialogue director was 25-year-old UCLA grad Francis Ford Coppola, who the next year was Corman's sound man on The Young Racers.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Ray Milland in The Premature Burial.

Tormented Guy Carrell, doomed by an obsessive fear of being entombed live, is a role crying out for the theatrics Price displayed in the other Poe pictures. Milland, however, just can't lock his character's pieces into a solid whole, nor is he given much help from a screenplay stricken with multiple-personality disorder.

Because his father was buried alive after a bout of catalepsy, newlywed Carrell is convinced that the same fate awaits him. So he constructs numerous elaborate mechanisms to prevent such a terror, but a horrific event shocks Carrell into his own death-like catatonia.

He is (you guessed it) buried alive until graverobbers and a complicated deception engineered by his bride (Court at her loveliest) push Carrell and the movie off the deep end.

Corman's taut directing keeps a firm grip on the reins, but The Premature Burial galumphs instead of canters. It can't shake out the rocks in its shoes, and Milland doesn't deliver the focused sureness of Price (although he did so the following year in Corman's X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes).

As with Masque, the DVD serves up a chat with Corman about the production of Premature Burial. As extensions of his tracks on the Usher and Pendulum discs, these two mini-documentaries continue our professional education in (as the title of his autobiography puts it) how to make a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lose a dime.

Music: interesting new stuff via kexp.org
Near at hand: Two passports that need to be filed away until next time.

Once upon a Portland

2011-10-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

Hollywood has a hard time shooting a movie worth a damn in Portland, Oregon*, my and Elizabeth's previous home town. However, some fine new TV is being set and shot there with enough frequency that we have friends who get in quality time as extras during shooting. "Portlandia" and "Leverage" are two of the more obvious examples.

Last night Elizabeth and I caught the pilot of NBC's new series "Grimm" (think "Buffy" meets "CSI"). We enjoyed it quite a lot, and it may just have real legs. One fun moment came when our heroes went into "Berkeley Park," identifying it by name and showing a glimpse of the actual Berkeley Park sign. "Hey, they're near our old house!" we exclaimed, the park being three blocks from our former address. Then our intrepid monster-finders entered the park and the scene cuts to deep, dark fairy-tale woods stretching for miles.

"My, the city has really let the place go," we observed of the erstwhile ball field.

* Thank you, Gus Van Sant, for raising the bar.