I stumbled outside at 6 AM this morning, and already it was incredibly warm and humid. When the cool part of the day is this bad, you know it's only going to get worse. So I'm thinking this is going to be a weekend to stay inside, soak up the air conditioning and enjoy some movies. The idea of doing anything else--well, it's too darn hot.
Too Darn Hot is also a song from one of the movies I'll be watching this weekend, the 1953 adaptation of Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate. (By the way, shouldn't there be a comma in there? It's always bothered me...) Overlooked and underappreciated for years, this wonderful movie is finally starting to get the reputation it deserves.
The reason it was ignored for so long, apparently, is because it was an MGM musical that wasn't produced by Arthur Freed. For the tastemakers who wrote the official histories of screen musicals, the product cranked out by the Freed Unit in the forties and fifties equaled Real Class.
And a lot of good things happened under Freed's supervision. He gave Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen the go-ahead to direct On The Town (though the decision to gut Leonard Bernstein's score was also Freed's), which would lead to even greater things with Singin' In The Rain and It's Always Fair Weather. He brought Vincente Minnelli to Hollywood and produced virtually all of his musicals, an amazing list that includes Meet Me In St. Louis, two obscure personal favorites, The Pirate and Yolanda And the Thief (Am I the only one who thinks Lucille Bremer was hot?), The Band Wagon...It's a good list. Unfortunately, Freed was also responsible for an endless stream of Mickey-and-Judy snoozers, gaudy biopics of Great Songwriters and the occasional overproduced adaptation of Broadway shows.
So the fact that Freed didn't shepherd Kiss Me Kate to the big screen indicates MGM must not have had much faith in it, which might explain why it gets away with so much. There's a great number early on where Ann Miller performs Too Darn Hot, basically a song about how, before air conditioning was commonly available, sometimes it's just too hot to have sex. The content of the song apparently didn't ruffle the feathers of any studio bosses, but, in a concession to Good Taste, a reference in the lyrics to the Kinsey Report was changed to "the latest report!"
This amuses me, because they let stand the lyrics to Always True To You In My Fashion, which includes the line "Mister Fritz is full of Schlitz," both a scatological pun AND a reference to anal sex (ah, the Cole Porter wit!), and let pass the Tom, Dick And Harry number, which features Miller and three guys in tights unleashing a sexually charged dance while singing, "Dick-a dick, dick-a dick, dick-a dick!" As dick jokes go, this is about as unsubtle as they come (sorry), but no one at MGM caught it.
Those three guys in tights, by the way, would be Tommy Rall, Bobby Van and Bob Fosse, and one big reason why Kiss Me Kate has attained a sizeable following in recent years is because it features Fosse's first choreography for the screen. Hermes Pan, who staged the dances here (and who did an ace job), let Fosse stage his own brief duet with Carol Haney. The results are sensational, and were directly responsible for Fosse getting the job as choreographer on Broadway's The Pajama Game, which is to say, this is dance history in the making.
But everything is great in this movie. Leads Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson slogged through a lot of middlebrow crap in the fifties, but Grayson is surpisingly good here, and Keel is magnificent--this is actually one of the best comedic performances I've ever seen. And of course, boy, can they sing. (It's a guarantee: their duet of So In Love will break your heart.) Kurt Kasznar, James Whitmore and Keenan Wynn are quite funny in supporting parts, the story moves along, the Technicolor on Warner Home Video's DVD pops out of the screen. A real treat.
Oh yeah, and the songs. That Porter guy knew what he was doing.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Friday, July 14, 2006
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
Is there anything more depressing than a movie like You, Me And Dupree?
Well, yeah, the Bush presidency and Israel's two-pronged asssault on despised neighbors come to mind. I acknowledge that these depress me, and now move on.
So okay, for people who love movies, is there anything more depressing than You, Me And Dupree? Not that the movie is in and of itself any worse than any other piece of Hollywood product, but why is Owen Wilson doing this to himself?
Wilson is written about in the press as a member of a sort of Guy's Guy collective of comedic performers, whose frat brothers include the likes of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, Will Ferrell and Wilson's brother, Luke. Can you think of a movie most of these guys have made recently that was worthwhile? Yeah, me neither.
What's sad is, all these guys are massively talented. Despite several hits, Stiller has yet to show on the big screen a fraction of the genius he brought to his late, lamented TV program, The Ben Stiller Show, which was regularly fall-on-the-floor funny. Vaughn was a memorably creepy Norman Bates in the otherwise misguided remake of Psycho. Black was lucky in that his only substantial hit, School Of Rock, was a pretty good movie, but he's already showing signs of falling into easy, lazy habits. As for the Wilson boys, Luke was absolutely heartbreaking in The Royal Tenenbaums, a movie co-written by Owen. In fact, Owen co-wrote three films with director Wes Anderson, including the wonderful Rushmore. Honestly, if you're capable of something like that, why would you waste your time doing shit like You, Me And Dupree?
Most of the good work these actors have done seems to be receding into the past. Of this bunch, only Ferrell seems to even be trying these days. True, his co-starring roles in The Producers and Woody Allen's underrated Melinda And Melinda didn't get a lot of attention, but they showed a willingness to diversify, to not just appear in lazy comedies made by your friends. (Of course, his upcoming Talladega Nights looks to be just that sort of movie, but if it's anything like Ferrell's Anchorman, it will have one advantage over most current comedies: it will actually be funny.)
What I don't understand is, why this is happening. In earlier eras, the level of success these guys have had would propel actors to take a few risks, to try new things and work with challenging material and strong collaborators. Instead, they tend to work with the usual suspects, supporting actors like Paul Rudd or Seth Rogan or Jason Bateman (all of whom are usually funnier than the leads) and maladroit directors like Jay Roach or David Dobkin, who can be counted on to supply absolutely no style or anything resembling a point of view.
That's the problem. These actors are so successful, they oversee every aspect of the movies they appear in, and they choose to appear in crap. There are brilliant comedic filmmakers working these days, like Joel and Ethan Coen, Alexander Payne and Noah Baumbach, but they make movies their own ways. If Vince Vaughn wanted play one of Alexander Payne's sad-sack protagonists, he'd have to resist his crowd-pleasing mannerisms and be willing to be a character...but he could do it. Ben Stiller could easily play a neurotic urbanite for Noah Baumbach, as long as he was willing to step outside his comfort zone.
It probably won't happen, though. Which is frustrating, because all of these guys are capable of doing great things. If only they'd break out of their little fraternity, which is starting to resemble a circle jerk, and take a look at how shitty their recent work really is, maybe they'd learn. Here's a hint, guys: If your agent sends you a script like You, Me And Dupree, first fire the agent. Then destroy all copies of the script, so it can't happen to anyone else.
Well, yeah, the Bush presidency and Israel's two-pronged asssault on despised neighbors come to mind. I acknowledge that these depress me, and now move on.
So okay, for people who love movies, is there anything more depressing than You, Me And Dupree? Not that the movie is in and of itself any worse than any other piece of Hollywood product, but why is Owen Wilson doing this to himself?
Wilson is written about in the press as a member of a sort of Guy's Guy collective of comedic performers, whose frat brothers include the likes of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, Will Ferrell and Wilson's brother, Luke. Can you think of a movie most of these guys have made recently that was worthwhile? Yeah, me neither.
What's sad is, all these guys are massively talented. Despite several hits, Stiller has yet to show on the big screen a fraction of the genius he brought to his late, lamented TV program, The Ben Stiller Show, which was regularly fall-on-the-floor funny. Vaughn was a memorably creepy Norman Bates in the otherwise misguided remake of Psycho. Black was lucky in that his only substantial hit, School Of Rock, was a pretty good movie, but he's already showing signs of falling into easy, lazy habits. As for the Wilson boys, Luke was absolutely heartbreaking in The Royal Tenenbaums, a movie co-written by Owen. In fact, Owen co-wrote three films with director Wes Anderson, including the wonderful Rushmore. Honestly, if you're capable of something like that, why would you waste your time doing shit like You, Me And Dupree?
Most of the good work these actors have done seems to be receding into the past. Of this bunch, only Ferrell seems to even be trying these days. True, his co-starring roles in The Producers and Woody Allen's underrated Melinda And Melinda didn't get a lot of attention, but they showed a willingness to diversify, to not just appear in lazy comedies made by your friends. (Of course, his upcoming Talladega Nights looks to be just that sort of movie, but if it's anything like Ferrell's Anchorman, it will have one advantage over most current comedies: it will actually be funny.)
What I don't understand is, why this is happening. In earlier eras, the level of success these guys have had would propel actors to take a few risks, to try new things and work with challenging material and strong collaborators. Instead, they tend to work with the usual suspects, supporting actors like Paul Rudd or Seth Rogan or Jason Bateman (all of whom are usually funnier than the leads) and maladroit directors like Jay Roach or David Dobkin, who can be counted on to supply absolutely no style or anything resembling a point of view.
That's the problem. These actors are so successful, they oversee every aspect of the movies they appear in, and they choose to appear in crap. There are brilliant comedic filmmakers working these days, like Joel and Ethan Coen, Alexander Payne and Noah Baumbach, but they make movies their own ways. If Vince Vaughn wanted play one of Alexander Payne's sad-sack protagonists, he'd have to resist his crowd-pleasing mannerisms and be willing to be a character...but he could do it. Ben Stiller could easily play a neurotic urbanite for Noah Baumbach, as long as he was willing to step outside his comfort zone.
It probably won't happen, though. Which is frustrating, because all of these guys are capable of doing great things. If only they'd break out of their little fraternity, which is starting to resemble a circle jerk, and take a look at how shitty their recent work really is, maybe they'd learn. Here's a hint, guys: If your agent sends you a script like You, Me And Dupree, first fire the agent. Then destroy all copies of the script, so it can't happen to anyone else.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK AND I HOPE THAT YOU APPROVE
Ah good--the CHECK ENGINE light blinks on the dashboard.
It's probably nothing. It's done this before, guys with greater knowledge than me have pointed out that it's not worth it to run the diagnostic, that light's basically just there to remind you of some recommended service. If there was really something wrong with the engine, I'd already know it.
I know this. Yet it's making me anxious, a gnawing, festering anxiety. The last time the light came on, I ignored it and it went away. My car was fine. No problem. But that was several thousand miles and what feels like another lifetime ago.
Crappy things seem to be happening to me at regular intervals these days. Big things, little things, they add up, slowly draining the joy from my life. Yeah, for now, I've still got my sense of humor, and I feel like as long as that's in place, I can survive anything.
I can't help wondering, though, how firmly in place that is. Am I one catastrophic financial or emotional blow away from losing it?
Or to put it another way: Do I finally spring for them to hook my car up to the computer? It's only seventy bucks, and while a couple of months ago, seventy bucks would have been nothing, money's a little tighter now. Yeah, I can afford it, but what if they find something seriously wrong? Can I afford that?
Or do I do nothing and continue to drive a ten-year-old car that has already developed a significant oil leak? And if the car goes kablooey, I'm well and royally fucked, since I need it for my job, and considering what my monthly bills look like, I'd be hard-pressed to afford a new (used) car.
I'm forty-one, and if, when I was younger, I ever imagined my life at this age, the vision was probably nothing like this reality. Probably I never actually imagined living this long, so in that sense I'm ahead of the game. But a tiny apartment, a crappy job, two cats, no girlfriend, no change to any of this in the forseeable future--no, that's not a future I would have imagined for myself, even in my grimmest moments.
It's the life I made for myself, though. College, feh, that was for elitists, I figured, or people who wanted to spend their lives as puppets of The Man. No way, I'd make my own life and march to my own music, even if I wound up marching straight off a cliff.
Still...I've never really gone off the cliff. Some wrong turns, unavoidable detours and unmarked cul-de-sacs aside, my life's journey has been largely satisfying. Right now I'm just cruising, I've been to the old familiar places and I missed the exit I meant to take, but it's okay, there will be other exits, and maybe they'll lead to places more interesting than wherever it was I wanted to go in the first place.
Still, I'd better pull off soon, before my life-as-highway metaphor springs a leak.
It's probably nothing. It's done this before, guys with greater knowledge than me have pointed out that it's not worth it to run the diagnostic, that light's basically just there to remind you of some recommended service. If there was really something wrong with the engine, I'd already know it.
I know this. Yet it's making me anxious, a gnawing, festering anxiety. The last time the light came on, I ignored it and it went away. My car was fine. No problem. But that was several thousand miles and what feels like another lifetime ago.
Crappy things seem to be happening to me at regular intervals these days. Big things, little things, they add up, slowly draining the joy from my life. Yeah, for now, I've still got my sense of humor, and I feel like as long as that's in place, I can survive anything.
I can't help wondering, though, how firmly in place that is. Am I one catastrophic financial or emotional blow away from losing it?
Or to put it another way: Do I finally spring for them to hook my car up to the computer? It's only seventy bucks, and while a couple of months ago, seventy bucks would have been nothing, money's a little tighter now. Yeah, I can afford it, but what if they find something seriously wrong? Can I afford that?
Or do I do nothing and continue to drive a ten-year-old car that has already developed a significant oil leak? And if the car goes kablooey, I'm well and royally fucked, since I need it for my job, and considering what my monthly bills look like, I'd be hard-pressed to afford a new (used) car.
I'm forty-one, and if, when I was younger, I ever imagined my life at this age, the vision was probably nothing like this reality. Probably I never actually imagined living this long, so in that sense I'm ahead of the game. But a tiny apartment, a crappy job, two cats, no girlfriend, no change to any of this in the forseeable future--no, that's not a future I would have imagined for myself, even in my grimmest moments.
It's the life I made for myself, though. College, feh, that was for elitists, I figured, or people who wanted to spend their lives as puppets of The Man. No way, I'd make my own life and march to my own music, even if I wound up marching straight off a cliff.
Still...I've never really gone off the cliff. Some wrong turns, unavoidable detours and unmarked cul-de-sacs aside, my life's journey has been largely satisfying. Right now I'm just cruising, I've been to the old familiar places and I missed the exit I meant to take, but it's okay, there will be other exits, and maybe they'll lead to places more interesting than wherever it was I wanted to go in the first place.
Still, I'd better pull off soon, before my life-as-highway metaphor springs a leak.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
FREE ASSOCIATION: CAPRICIOUS FUN OR HELLISH TIME-KILLER?
1. Free Association? Hey, didn't they do Cherish?
2. My cat Monika is fuzzy and gray. Solid gray. When I had a house of my own, I literally painted the walls of the living room a solid gray, just to match Monika. Anyway, she's suddenly developing stripes. Very faint stripes, like the Shroud of Turin, but still, stripes. Where the hell did these come from? Twelve years of one solid color, now this?
3. It occurs to me that if I was fond enough of Monika to paint my walls in tribute to her, the fact that I left her in my Mom's care when I ran off to be with my then-girlfriend, later-wife, now-ex, probably makes me seem like a heartless bastard. I was looking for an apartment in Washington, Iowa, and the first one I found didn't allow pets. Why didn't I just keep looking?
4. On the other hand, after a few months in my own apartment, I just moved in with Sue Ellen anyway. She already had a cat, beloved Scotchie, and technically, she wasn't supposed to have pets, either. If I'd had Monika with me, we'd have really been pushing our luck. Plus, if Monika's been with me through the marriage, she'd have moved out to Maryland with us, and would probably still be out there. Anyway, I like Monika, and I'm glad, whatever the circumstances, that she's here with me again. Still--stripes?
5. When referring to my ex, I call her Sue Ellen, which is, after all, her name. Yet she's taken to calling herself Sudie, which sounds to me like a character from Where The Lillies Bloom. I remember her mentioning to me once that I could call her that, but I didn't take it seriously. (Heartless bastard, remember?) I told her she could call me Spats, but that didn't go anywhere, either.
6. The name Spats would be a reference to Spats Baxter, one of the characters played by George C. Scott in the very funny, now almost completely forgotten film Movie, Movie. It's a spoof of a 1930's double feature, half of it a gangster melodrams, half a musical extravaganza. It was written by Larry Gelbart and directed by Stanley Donen, two of the best at what they do. Man, I'd love to see it again, but it's almost impossible to find, and has never been on DVD. A crime, I tells ya, a crime!
7. I'm sorry...Did I really reference Where The Lillies Bloom?
2. My cat Monika is fuzzy and gray. Solid gray. When I had a house of my own, I literally painted the walls of the living room a solid gray, just to match Monika. Anyway, she's suddenly developing stripes. Very faint stripes, like the Shroud of Turin, but still, stripes. Where the hell did these come from? Twelve years of one solid color, now this?
3. It occurs to me that if I was fond enough of Monika to paint my walls in tribute to her, the fact that I left her in my Mom's care when I ran off to be with my then-girlfriend, later-wife, now-ex, probably makes me seem like a heartless bastard. I was looking for an apartment in Washington, Iowa, and the first one I found didn't allow pets. Why didn't I just keep looking?
4. On the other hand, after a few months in my own apartment, I just moved in with Sue Ellen anyway. She already had a cat, beloved Scotchie, and technically, she wasn't supposed to have pets, either. If I'd had Monika with me, we'd have really been pushing our luck. Plus, if Monika's been with me through the marriage, she'd have moved out to Maryland with us, and would probably still be out there. Anyway, I like Monika, and I'm glad, whatever the circumstances, that she's here with me again. Still--stripes?
5. When referring to my ex, I call her Sue Ellen, which is, after all, her name. Yet she's taken to calling herself Sudie, which sounds to me like a character from Where The Lillies Bloom. I remember her mentioning to me once that I could call her that, but I didn't take it seriously. (Heartless bastard, remember?) I told her she could call me Spats, but that didn't go anywhere, either.
6. The name Spats would be a reference to Spats Baxter, one of the characters played by George C. Scott in the very funny, now almost completely forgotten film Movie, Movie. It's a spoof of a 1930's double feature, half of it a gangster melodrams, half a musical extravaganza. It was written by Larry Gelbart and directed by Stanley Donen, two of the best at what they do. Man, I'd love to see it again, but it's almost impossible to find, and has never been on DVD. A crime, I tells ya, a crime!
7. I'm sorry...Did I really reference Where The Lillies Bloom?
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
I'LL GET BACK TO YOU
Two new DVD releases of note today. First up, Joe Dante's contribution to Showtime's Master Of Horror series, Homecoming. Masters Of Horror was a good idea that mostly didn't really lead anywhere, an opportunity for terrific filmmakers like John Carpenter and John Landis--guys who once created big boxoffice hits but who seem to find themselves out of work these days--a chance to strut their stuff, albeit in abbreviated, one-hour form, and under the restrictions of TV budgets and shooting schedules.
Mostly the results have been disappointing, but Homecoming redeems the whole series, though tagging it as "horror" is a bit misleading. The premise: It's 2004, the presidential election is coming up and the slimy (though unnamed) Republican president will do anything to win. The unpopular war he's waging in an (also unnamed) foreign country may come back to haunt him as all the soldiers in flag-draped coffins suddenly rise up, determined to do their patriotic duty and vote.
Typically for Dante, Homecoming is very funny, but there's a bracing anger here that's new to his work, and very welcome. Though made for TV, it should be considered one of the best films of 2005, and after with George Romero's Land Of The Dead, was the second zombie picture of the year to use the undead to explore life in Bush's America. Sadly, these were among the very few non-documentary films to show any interest in contemporary life.
Also new to DVD is the second season of one of my favorite TV shows, The Rockford Files. Starring James Garner as reluctant private eye Jim Rockford, this is one of the most underappreciated programs ever, regarded by even its fans as nothing more than a vehicle for the smooth charm of Garner.
Well, it is that, of course, but so much more. For one thing, Rockford is a surprisingly complex character, a literal working class hero living in a trailer and hustling for jobs. Despite his easygoing manner, he's capable of real anger as he goes up against the machinations of corrupt businessmen or, in one memorable episode included in this set, the military. He's funny, he's tender, he won't even hold a grudge if you beat him up--just don't piss him off, or you will be sorry.
The other thing about The Rockford Files is that it never slipped into formula. Yeah, most episodes would feature a chase scene--it was actually in Garner's contract that he'd get to drive his Trans-Am as much as possible!--but you could never guess, in the first five minutes, where the story was headed. It might be a light hearted caper, a complex, Ross MacDonald-style mystery involving buried secrets, or a character study. Wherever any episode sought to take you, the trip was almost always worthwhile.
The Rockford Files really started to gel in its second season, and would only get better. Other than an interview with series creator Stephen J. Cannell, the DVD comes with no extras, and Universal Home Video continues to issue their TV library in crappy-looking prints, but at least the shows themselves are uncut, unlike the versions in syndication, so this is the best way to see them. And who needs bells and whistles when the show itself is this good?
Mostly the results have been disappointing, but Homecoming redeems the whole series, though tagging it as "horror" is a bit misleading. The premise: It's 2004, the presidential election is coming up and the slimy (though unnamed) Republican president will do anything to win. The unpopular war he's waging in an (also unnamed) foreign country may come back to haunt him as all the soldiers in flag-draped coffins suddenly rise up, determined to do their patriotic duty and vote.
Typically for Dante, Homecoming is very funny, but there's a bracing anger here that's new to his work, and very welcome. Though made for TV, it should be considered one of the best films of 2005, and after with George Romero's Land Of The Dead, was the second zombie picture of the year to use the undead to explore life in Bush's America. Sadly, these were among the very few non-documentary films to show any interest in contemporary life.
Also new to DVD is the second season of one of my favorite TV shows, The Rockford Files. Starring James Garner as reluctant private eye Jim Rockford, this is one of the most underappreciated programs ever, regarded by even its fans as nothing more than a vehicle for the smooth charm of Garner.
Well, it is that, of course, but so much more. For one thing, Rockford is a surprisingly complex character, a literal working class hero living in a trailer and hustling for jobs. Despite his easygoing manner, he's capable of real anger as he goes up against the machinations of corrupt businessmen or, in one memorable episode included in this set, the military. He's funny, he's tender, he won't even hold a grudge if you beat him up--just don't piss him off, or you will be sorry.
The other thing about The Rockford Files is that it never slipped into formula. Yeah, most episodes would feature a chase scene--it was actually in Garner's contract that he'd get to drive his Trans-Am as much as possible!--but you could never guess, in the first five minutes, where the story was headed. It might be a light hearted caper, a complex, Ross MacDonald-style mystery involving buried secrets, or a character study. Wherever any episode sought to take you, the trip was almost always worthwhile.
The Rockford Files really started to gel in its second season, and would only get better. Other than an interview with series creator Stephen J. Cannell, the DVD comes with no extras, and Universal Home Video continues to issue their TV library in crappy-looking prints, but at least the shows themselves are uncut, unlike the versions in syndication, so this is the best way to see them. And who needs bells and whistles when the show itself is this good?
Sunday, July 09, 2006
REPLACEMENT POST
Well, here's the deal: I was most of the way through a lengthy post on the new Will Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby when I somehow deleted the whole thing. D'oh!
Well, I'm not rewriting the whole thing. (The point was, it's funny movie, you should see it.) So here's my fallback move, posting lyrics to favorite songs. In this case, here are the lyrics to Richard Thompson's "She Cut Off Her Long Silken Hair" from his magnificent 1996 album you?me?us?:
Midnight in her room
Music, incense and mirrors all 'round
By the light of the moon
Her silver dress slipped to the ground
Then she knelt like Saint Joan
And invisible armies attended her there
And her knife brightly shone
As she cut off her long silken hair
Trapped, I suppose
Lied, for my sake
Crushed like the rose
Picked by mistake...
O I knew it would come
I knew she would leave me
For some better start
O I knew it would come
She was too well-rehearsed in her part
And I measured my life
And my heart fairly broke with the sorrow and care
When she took down the knife
When she cut off her long silken hair
There are some who believe
O some who believe there are reasons to lie
And there's some who deceive
When the truth is right there in the eye
But I don't see why
In all of my life I've seen nothing so fair
And I don't see why
She cut off her long silken hair...
Well, I'm not rewriting the whole thing. (The point was, it's funny movie, you should see it.) So here's my fallback move, posting lyrics to favorite songs. In this case, here are the lyrics to Richard Thompson's "She Cut Off Her Long Silken Hair" from his magnificent 1996 album you?me?us?:
Midnight in her room
Music, incense and mirrors all 'round
By the light of the moon
Her silver dress slipped to the ground
Then she knelt like Saint Joan
And invisible armies attended her there
And her knife brightly shone
As she cut off her long silken hair
Trapped, I suppose
Lied, for my sake
Crushed like the rose
Picked by mistake...
O I knew it would come
I knew she would leave me
For some better start
O I knew it would come
She was too well-rehearsed in her part
And I measured my life
And my heart fairly broke with the sorrow and care
When she took down the knife
When she cut off her long silken hair
There are some who believe
O some who believe there are reasons to lie
And there's some who deceive
When the truth is right there in the eye
But I don't see why
In all of my life I've seen nothing so fair
And I don't see why
She cut off her long silken hair...
NOW I FIND I'VE CHANGED MY MIND
How awful is Superman Returns? Bad enough to make me nostalgic for Superman III.
Almost. Nobody could make any claims of quality for Superman III. In fact, it's just awful. But it's awful in a different, more interesting way than Superman Returns, and it's hard to imagine an oddball project like this even getting a greenlight these days.
Everything that seemed dreadful back in 1983 remains the same: Richard Pryor is shoehorned into this simply because he was a major boxoffice star of the time, and his tic-filled performance as a nervous computer genius manipulated by the bad guy drifts dangerously close to Stepin Fetchit territory. That bad guy, an ultra-rich industrialist played blandly by Robert Vaughn, has no personality whatsoever, and his scheme to control the world's economy...hell, I just watched the thing and I can't tell you what he was trying to do. There's no sense of menace, or urgency, no reason for Superman to be involved. Which is good, since Supes--or more accurately, Clark Kent--spends much of the movie back home in Smallville, rekindling an old flame, which makes us wonder why he's being unfaithful to Lois (and why Margot Kidder is barely in this).
The most annoying thing about Superman III is the obvious contempt director Richard Lester has for his material, and yet, that's the thing that today makes it most interesting. Once an exremely influential filmmaker, Lester's career had obviously gone into freefall by the early eighties. He had made such terrific pictures as A Hard Day's Night, Help!, and Petulia, but by the late seventies a series of flops had led him into for-hire work. He was worked on the first two Superman installments in various capacities, and was credited as director on Superman II, although only about half of the picture was his own work.
Lester was on board Superman III from the get-go, though why he bothered is anyone's guess. He'd had good luck deconstructing familiar genres in the past, such as the anti-musical A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and the anarchic swashbucklers The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, but in those cases he seemed to have real love for his source material, even as he refashioned it to his own ends. Here, he seems totally at sea. Lester's touch is evident in some elaborately constructed slapstick and deadpan sight gags, as well as eccentric casting choices. (British comic Pamela Stephenson and jazz singer Annie Ross are always welcome presences, but what they're doing here is beyond me.) Some of his work here is elegantly staged, some is appallingly sloppy, but nothing he does seems to serve the material; viewers who plop down their money to see a Superman movie have a certain set of expectations, and Lester had no interest in fullfilling any of them.
On the other hand, Bryan Singer is so respectful of the material in Superman Returns that his movie is utterly lifeless, with no sense of fun whatsoever. It's like one of those all-too-respectable adaptations of Great Literature MGM ground out in the thirties and forties, but this isn't great literature, it's Superman. He wears tights and can fly. It's one thing to take a premise seriously--as opposed to taking a campy approach, as Lester did--and another thing to regard it with wildly misplaced solemnity, making The Passion Of The Christ look like a Mel Brooks film.
Comic book adaptations seem to be the new regular thing in Hollywood these days, and though most of them flat-out blow (The Fantastic Four, anyone?), they're not train-wreck bad like Superman III. These days, it's hard to imagine an eccentric like Richard Lester getting hired by a major studio to direct a big-budget franchise picture.
It's also hard to imagine an eccentric like Lester getting hired by a major studio to direct, period, and we're all poorer for that.
Almost. Nobody could make any claims of quality for Superman III. In fact, it's just awful. But it's awful in a different, more interesting way than Superman Returns, and it's hard to imagine an oddball project like this even getting a greenlight these days.
Everything that seemed dreadful back in 1983 remains the same: Richard Pryor is shoehorned into this simply because he was a major boxoffice star of the time, and his tic-filled performance as a nervous computer genius manipulated by the bad guy drifts dangerously close to Stepin Fetchit territory. That bad guy, an ultra-rich industrialist played blandly by Robert Vaughn, has no personality whatsoever, and his scheme to control the world's economy...hell, I just watched the thing and I can't tell you what he was trying to do. There's no sense of menace, or urgency, no reason for Superman to be involved. Which is good, since Supes--or more accurately, Clark Kent--spends much of the movie back home in Smallville, rekindling an old flame, which makes us wonder why he's being unfaithful to Lois (and why Margot Kidder is barely in this).
The most annoying thing about Superman III is the obvious contempt director Richard Lester has for his material, and yet, that's the thing that today makes it most interesting. Once an exremely influential filmmaker, Lester's career had obviously gone into freefall by the early eighties. He had made such terrific pictures as A Hard Day's Night, Help!, and Petulia, but by the late seventies a series of flops had led him into for-hire work. He was worked on the first two Superman installments in various capacities, and was credited as director on Superman II, although only about half of the picture was his own work.
Lester was on board Superman III from the get-go, though why he bothered is anyone's guess. He'd had good luck deconstructing familiar genres in the past, such as the anti-musical A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and the anarchic swashbucklers The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, but in those cases he seemed to have real love for his source material, even as he refashioned it to his own ends. Here, he seems totally at sea. Lester's touch is evident in some elaborately constructed slapstick and deadpan sight gags, as well as eccentric casting choices. (British comic Pamela Stephenson and jazz singer Annie Ross are always welcome presences, but what they're doing here is beyond me.) Some of his work here is elegantly staged, some is appallingly sloppy, but nothing he does seems to serve the material; viewers who plop down their money to see a Superman movie have a certain set of expectations, and Lester had no interest in fullfilling any of them.
On the other hand, Bryan Singer is so respectful of the material in Superman Returns that his movie is utterly lifeless, with no sense of fun whatsoever. It's like one of those all-too-respectable adaptations of Great Literature MGM ground out in the thirties and forties, but this isn't great literature, it's Superman. He wears tights and can fly. It's one thing to take a premise seriously--as opposed to taking a campy approach, as Lester did--and another thing to regard it with wildly misplaced solemnity, making The Passion Of The Christ look like a Mel Brooks film.
Comic book adaptations seem to be the new regular thing in Hollywood these days, and though most of them flat-out blow (The Fantastic Four, anyone?), they're not train-wreck bad like Superman III. These days, it's hard to imagine an eccentric like Richard Lester getting hired by a major studio to direct a big-budget franchise picture.
It's also hard to imagine an eccentric like Lester getting hired by a major studio to direct, period, and we're all poorer for that.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
WELL, WHAT IS THIS THAT I CAN'T SEE?
The usual plans for Friday night: Not a damn thing. But an evening of sloth was interrupted by an email from my online dating service. Someone has emailed me. Her communique read, in part, that she believes in doing things spontaneously, she'd read my profile and I seemed "cool." And she left her phone number.
I called, we talked. "Allow me to be bold," she said. "Maybe we should meet tonight." Um, okay. "What's your favorite spot that you haven't been to for awhile?"
Well, if I haven't been there for awhile, it's probably not a favorite spot.
"Then what's your favorite regular haunt?"
I like hanging out at book stores. How about we meet at a book store?
So the plans were made. We'd meet at a local chain book store at 7:30. Her manner over the phone seemed a bit self-consciously high-flown--does anybody use terms like "regular haunt" in a non-ironic way?--and I knew that by asking me for a favorite spot, she was testing me to see if I'd name an official "in" place. But I figure there's a coffee shop at the book store, plus literature, music and DVDs. If we can't bond over these things, there's no point. Besides, it's just a meeting place. We can go elsewhere later, if we're so inclined.
I told her I'd be hanging out in the magazine section, and she approached me there. She told me she was 43, with a few extra pounds, and was 5' 7". Well, the first may have been true, the second definitely, but I'm 5'6", and I had a slight edge on her height-wise. Not a big deal, but something I noticed.
We start to wander through the store. There was a prominent display of recordings from Tony-nominated musicals. (Note to Borders: The Tonys have come and gone. Update your display items.) "Oh," she said, examining a CD, "what's this? The Drowsy Chaperone? I've never heard of it."
Yeah, I said, probably the least lame nominated show this year. It didn't win. I don't know why I know this stuff. Just a theater geek, I guess.
"Well, not much of a theater geek, since you don't recognize me."
And I would know you from--?
She rattled off a couple of credits, and I realized I wasn't being properly awed to be in the presence of an icon of community theater, and I thought, oh no, if there's one thing I know, it's stay the hell away from theater people.
We continued walking through the store, to no apparent purpose, and arrived at the music section. She would mention something, I'd start to respond and she'd talk over my response, already on to another subject. She picked up a copy of the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack and started to rhapsodize about it in a particularly patronizing manner.
Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies, I said. In fact, I love it so much I named my cat Delmar.
She studied the back of the album. "Who's Delmar?"
Ah, one of those. She has the album because it was trendy for awhile there, psuedo-sophisticated NPR types decided that Ralph Stanley was worth their time, at least for a moment. The movie, feh, she'd probably never bothered.
We wandered back through the store. Maybe she'd just made a bad first impression on me, and I certainly had nothing better to do, so I started to suggest making our way over to the cafe and sharing a nice, overpriced drink. But literally as I opened my mouth to suggest this, she said, "Well, thanks for sharing some time with me," and marched straight out the door.
I stood, slightly perplexed, somewhat relieved. Am I that much of a loser? She spends maybe five minutes, tops, with me, then kicks me to the curb? Really? Do I deserve that? Really?
The best I can figure is...hell, I don't know. Maybe if I had recognized her from her extensive body of work (in community fucking theater--that's it, I'm never going to a locally produced play ever again; it only encourages these people), been properly dferential, I'd have gotten somewhere. No place I wanted to go, but somewhere.
The amusing postscript is, I come home, sit down in front of the computer and start to write a post, this very post, about what happened. The phone rings, it's a girl I briefly went out with over a year ago. We'd talked a few times since then, but nothing much. I asked her if she wanted to go have a few drinks, she said yes, and we went out and had a great time, the type of evening I could never have had with Theater Queen.
But then again, it's a scientifically proven fact that you can't have fun amongst theater people. Unless you're one of them, but I prefer to keep my soul.
I called, we talked. "Allow me to be bold," she said. "Maybe we should meet tonight." Um, okay. "What's your favorite spot that you haven't been to for awhile?"
Well, if I haven't been there for awhile, it's probably not a favorite spot.
"Then what's your favorite regular haunt?"
I like hanging out at book stores. How about we meet at a book store?
So the plans were made. We'd meet at a local chain book store at 7:30. Her manner over the phone seemed a bit self-consciously high-flown--does anybody use terms like "regular haunt" in a non-ironic way?--and I knew that by asking me for a favorite spot, she was testing me to see if I'd name an official "in" place. But I figure there's a coffee shop at the book store, plus literature, music and DVDs. If we can't bond over these things, there's no point. Besides, it's just a meeting place. We can go elsewhere later, if we're so inclined.
I told her I'd be hanging out in the magazine section, and she approached me there. She told me she was 43, with a few extra pounds, and was 5' 7". Well, the first may have been true, the second definitely, but I'm 5'6", and I had a slight edge on her height-wise. Not a big deal, but something I noticed.
We start to wander through the store. There was a prominent display of recordings from Tony-nominated musicals. (Note to Borders: The Tonys have come and gone. Update your display items.) "Oh," she said, examining a CD, "what's this? The Drowsy Chaperone? I've never heard of it."
Yeah, I said, probably the least lame nominated show this year. It didn't win. I don't know why I know this stuff. Just a theater geek, I guess.
"Well, not much of a theater geek, since you don't recognize me."
And I would know you from--?
She rattled off a couple of credits, and I realized I wasn't being properly awed to be in the presence of an icon of community theater, and I thought, oh no, if there's one thing I know, it's stay the hell away from theater people.
We continued walking through the store, to no apparent purpose, and arrived at the music section. She would mention something, I'd start to respond and she'd talk over my response, already on to another subject. She picked up a copy of the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack and started to rhapsodize about it in a particularly patronizing manner.
Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies, I said. In fact, I love it so much I named my cat Delmar.
She studied the back of the album. "Who's Delmar?"
Ah, one of those. She has the album because it was trendy for awhile there, psuedo-sophisticated NPR types decided that Ralph Stanley was worth their time, at least for a moment. The movie, feh, she'd probably never bothered.
We wandered back through the store. Maybe she'd just made a bad first impression on me, and I certainly had nothing better to do, so I started to suggest making our way over to the cafe and sharing a nice, overpriced drink. But literally as I opened my mouth to suggest this, she said, "Well, thanks for sharing some time with me," and marched straight out the door.
I stood, slightly perplexed, somewhat relieved. Am I that much of a loser? She spends maybe five minutes, tops, with me, then kicks me to the curb? Really? Do I deserve that? Really?
The best I can figure is...hell, I don't know. Maybe if I had recognized her from her extensive body of work (in community fucking theater--that's it, I'm never going to a locally produced play ever again; it only encourages these people), been properly dferential, I'd have gotten somewhere. No place I wanted to go, but somewhere.
The amusing postscript is, I come home, sit down in front of the computer and start to write a post, this very post, about what happened. The phone rings, it's a girl I briefly went out with over a year ago. We'd talked a few times since then, but nothing much. I asked her if she wanted to go have a few drinks, she said yes, and we went out and had a great time, the type of evening I could never have had with Theater Queen.
But then again, it's a scientifically proven fact that you can't have fun amongst theater people. Unless you're one of them, but I prefer to keep my soul.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
WHERE HOME USED TO BE
I'm feeling kind of down this morning, and don't feel much like writing. So I'll just post these lyrics by Marshall Crenshaw to the song Where Home Used To Be, from his 2003 album What's In The Bag? This describes how I'm feeling right now better than anything I could write:
I had to see for myself
I had to show it to you
Among my sweetest of memories
I see this place in more than a few
Familiar shadows remain
They are all that's unchanged
Because this whole street seems haunted now
And the atmosphere is still and strange
We didn't worry 'bout much
We never had a spare dime
This is where home used to be
In a different time
I know it's hard to believe
So much has turned to dust
But this is where home used to be
And it was good to us
More than good to us...
This was our place in the world
When life was new and untried
When every wild dream seemed possible
It felt good to be here
It was warm inside
I have to say I'm amazed
Even though I learned long ago
Sometimes good things get thrown away
How I wish right now that it wasn't so
Those days are good and gone
Around here it's plain enough
This is where home used to be
Where we lived and loved
We were only here for awhile
Then we got drawn away
This is where home used to be
And I pray
That it'll see a better day...
I had to see for myself
I had to show it to you
Among my sweetest of memories
I see this place in more than a few
Familiar shadows remain
They are all that's unchanged
Because this whole street seems haunted now
And the atmosphere is still and strange
We didn't worry 'bout much
We never had a spare dime
This is where home used to be
In a different time
I know it's hard to believe
So much has turned to dust
But this is where home used to be
And it was good to us
More than good to us...
This was our place in the world
When life was new and untried
When every wild dream seemed possible
It felt good to be here
It was warm inside
I have to say I'm amazed
Even though I learned long ago
Sometimes good things get thrown away
How I wish right now that it wasn't so
Those days are good and gone
Around here it's plain enough
This is where home used to be
Where we lived and loved
We were only here for awhile
Then we got drawn away
This is where home used to be
And I pray
That it'll see a better day...
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
WAIT A MINUTE, LOOK AROUND
Yes, I see we're moving on
Maybe trouble's all we'll find
But compared to what's behind
This is easy...
--Marshall Crenshaw
My sister Ann and I got together for lunch yesterday. It didn't take long for the conversation to turn to memories of Mom.
Specifically, how Mom dealt with the deaths of people around her. When dad died, he'd been so ill for so long, it was most likely a relief. She told me once she'd accepted that she had long before accepted that her husband no longer existed, she had become a caretaker, not a wife. So when he passed, there was sadness, yes, but it was easy to move on.
But when my brother Keith was killed in 2002, it was different. It was sudden, out of nowhere. Keith was her first born child, and they were as close as that suggests. Yet Mom seemed to accept it, seemed almost to expect it. "When you reach a certain time in life, nothing surprises you anymore," she said. "It's not that it isn't sad, you just know thngs like that are going to happen sooner or later."
Is that what I'm going through? Have I reached "a certain time in life?" Because this whole thing is a lot easier for me than it should be. I'm more likely to go on a crying jag thinking of my late, lamented cats Pinback or Scotchie than from thinking of Mom. And it's not that I don't think of her.
Ann mentioned a weird moment when her phone rang the other day at the same time of evening when Mom would always call, and how, for just a moment, she thought it was Mom calling. Well, I had experiences like that, too, but only in the immediate wake of her death, for maybe a week or two. After that, no, she was gone and I knew it. And, stranger still, accepted it.
Or is it just that I've accepted that, as she put it, things like this happen? It might be freeing to think so. It would be hard to imagine a personal loss more devastating, but it's happened and I'm still here. If a person like me, prone to depression and occasional bursts of suicidal behavior, can get through this, the rest of my life should be easy.
Maybe trouble's all we'll find
But compared to what's behind
This is easy...
--Marshall Crenshaw
My sister Ann and I got together for lunch yesterday. It didn't take long for the conversation to turn to memories of Mom.
Specifically, how Mom dealt with the deaths of people around her. When dad died, he'd been so ill for so long, it was most likely a relief. She told me once she'd accepted that she had long before accepted that her husband no longer existed, she had become a caretaker, not a wife. So when he passed, there was sadness, yes, but it was easy to move on.
But when my brother Keith was killed in 2002, it was different. It was sudden, out of nowhere. Keith was her first born child, and they were as close as that suggests. Yet Mom seemed to accept it, seemed almost to expect it. "When you reach a certain time in life, nothing surprises you anymore," she said. "It's not that it isn't sad, you just know thngs like that are going to happen sooner or later."
Is that what I'm going through? Have I reached "a certain time in life?" Because this whole thing is a lot easier for me than it should be. I'm more likely to go on a crying jag thinking of my late, lamented cats Pinback or Scotchie than from thinking of Mom. And it's not that I don't think of her.
Ann mentioned a weird moment when her phone rang the other day at the same time of evening when Mom would always call, and how, for just a moment, she thought it was Mom calling. Well, I had experiences like that, too, but only in the immediate wake of her death, for maybe a week or two. After that, no, she was gone and I knew it. And, stranger still, accepted it.
Or is it just that I've accepted that, as she put it, things like this happen? It might be freeing to think so. It would be hard to imagine a personal loss more devastating, but it's happened and I'm still here. If a person like me, prone to depression and occasional bursts of suicidal behavior, can get through this, the rest of my life should be easy.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
SEE MY FRIENDS
Today's DVD recomendation is 1000 Years Of poular Music, a concert film of singer-songwriter Richard Thompson's peculiar theatrical conceit: In 1999, a magazine asked a variety of musicians for their picks fot the best songs of the millenium. Figuring they probably meant the last 1oo, not 1ooo, years, Thompson took the assignment literally, naming popular songs stretching back to the 1200s.
The magazine declined to run his list, but it got Thompson thinking. Why not perform these songs in concert, trying to find the common thread that links medieval ballads to American country music, or British music hall to jazz? And filtered through Thompson's voice and astonishing guitar, the similarities are easy to spot: They all sound like Richard Thompson songs!
The emphasis here is on the songs, but Thompson, with the invaluable assistance of percussionist Debra Dobkin (formerly with one of my favorite bands, Was (Not Was) and vocalist Judith Owen (apparently a graduate of the Patti Lupone School Of Annoying Mannerisms, but she has a great voice and is married to Harry Shearer, so she gets a pass), makes it clear that all ths music profoundly influenced his own songwriting. The Buck Owens honky-tonker A-11 (which features a brief but jaw-dropping solo during which you'll swear Thompson is somehow playing lead and rhythm guitar and bass all at once) clearly is a spiritual forefather to Thompson's numerous love gone bad songs, just as Shenandoah clearly inspired his heartbreaking ballads. (He could easily have dropped some of his own songs, such as Beeswing, in here, and they'd have not been out of place.)
He brings it all to the new millenium with a cover of Ooops!...I Did It Again, Britney's teen-pop fave, and though he's performing it more or less as a joke, he characteristically finds the icy dark heart inside it ("I'm lost watching the day..."). All in all, a grand event, and if this sounds more like homework, well, Thompson is the coolest professor you'll find.
If you're a Thompson neophyte, by the way, I highly suggest starting with the splendid concert DVD Live In Austin, part of a series of releases from New West Records of uncut performances from the Austin City Limits TV program. The producers of this show clearly understand music, and the camera is always in the right place at the right time. Others in this series include individual discs devoted to performances by Sun Volt, Johnny Cash (who also has a new CD in stores today--buy it!), Merle Haggard and a great one featuring Steve Earle in his mid-eighties New Springsteen period.
And crikey, as long as I'm in a music groove here, let me also suggest you pick up the brand new The Kinks: The Live Broadcasts, a swell opportunity to appreciate this still criminally undervalued band, and Marvin Gaye: The Real Thing, which proves, beyond all doubt, that Gaye was in fact the greatest singer who ever lived. (No, there's no room for argument. Check out the performance of What's Going On included here...it's one of the most transcendent things I've ever heard.)
Why are you still reading this? Start listening!
The magazine declined to run his list, but it got Thompson thinking. Why not perform these songs in concert, trying to find the common thread that links medieval ballads to American country music, or British music hall to jazz? And filtered through Thompson's voice and astonishing guitar, the similarities are easy to spot: They all sound like Richard Thompson songs!
The emphasis here is on the songs, but Thompson, with the invaluable assistance of percussionist Debra Dobkin (formerly with one of my favorite bands, Was (Not Was) and vocalist Judith Owen (apparently a graduate of the Patti Lupone School Of Annoying Mannerisms, but she has a great voice and is married to Harry Shearer, so she gets a pass), makes it clear that all ths music profoundly influenced his own songwriting. The Buck Owens honky-tonker A-11 (which features a brief but jaw-dropping solo during which you'll swear Thompson is somehow playing lead and rhythm guitar and bass all at once) clearly is a spiritual forefather to Thompson's numerous love gone bad songs, just as Shenandoah clearly inspired his heartbreaking ballads. (He could easily have dropped some of his own songs, such as Beeswing, in here, and they'd have not been out of place.)
He brings it all to the new millenium with a cover of Ooops!...I Did It Again, Britney's teen-pop fave, and though he's performing it more or less as a joke, he characteristically finds the icy dark heart inside it ("I'm lost watching the day..."). All in all, a grand event, and if this sounds more like homework, well, Thompson is the coolest professor you'll find.
If you're a Thompson neophyte, by the way, I highly suggest starting with the splendid concert DVD Live In Austin, part of a series of releases from New West Records of uncut performances from the Austin City Limits TV program. The producers of this show clearly understand music, and the camera is always in the right place at the right time. Others in this series include individual discs devoted to performances by Sun Volt, Johnny Cash (who also has a new CD in stores today--buy it!), Merle Haggard and a great one featuring Steve Earle in his mid-eighties New Springsteen period.
And crikey, as long as I'm in a music groove here, let me also suggest you pick up the brand new The Kinks: The Live Broadcasts, a swell opportunity to appreciate this still criminally undervalued band, and Marvin Gaye: The Real Thing, which proves, beyond all doubt, that Gaye was in fact the greatest singer who ever lived. (No, there's no room for argument. Check out the performance of What's Going On included here...it's one of the most transcendent things I've ever heard.)
Why are you still reading this? Start listening!
Monday, July 03, 2006
THIS IS WHAT TWO HUNDRED MILLION BUYS?
I'll say this for Superman Returns: at least it looked like they tried to make a good movie.
They failed, but when it's summer blockbuster time, and you're dealing with the likes of Poseidon or The DaVinci Code or--shudder--Click, good intentions actually count for something.
But director Bryan Singer made quite a few fundamental mistakes when he set out here. One is his obvious devotion to the 1978 Superman, which Singer feels--correctly--is still the best cinematic adaptation of a comic book. In essence, Superman Returns is a belated sequel to that picture.
And it just doesn't hold a candle to it. Singer is certainly a better director than Richard Donner, who helmed the '78 film, but Donner got lucky. He had a script by writers like Robert Benton and David Newman and Tom Mankiewicz, who'd written for magazines and newspapers as well as movies, and who could write dialogue as well as action. He had cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, who shot 2001 and Cabaret, and designer John Barry, who'd created the settings for A Clockwork Orange and Star Wars. In other words, Donner was riding herd on world-class talent, and he had the sense to let them do their best.
But mostly what Donner had were perfect leads, Christopher Reeve, achingly sincere as Superman, goofily funny as Clark Kent, and Margot Kidder, quirky, adorable, cynical and slightly melancholy as Lois Lane. They had chemistry you couldn't manufacture, and it wasn't just between the actors but between their characters; you could understand why a straight-arrow like Superman/Clark would be drawn to an oddball like Lois.
Singer's movie has plenty wrong with it, but it would have gotten by with the right leads, and this is where Superman Returns fails most spectacularly. The whole premise is, Superman has been away from earth for five years (on a rather flimsy premise) and when he returns, he discovers that not only has the world survived without him, but worse, Lois has, too. She's engaged, she's got a kid--she doesn't need him anymore, and the poor sap's heartbroken. Basically, it's Superman as Paul Giamatti in Sideways. (Or, um, me.)
Fine. Not what most people want to see in superhero movies, but okay. For it to work, though, you have to believe that these characters have a past. And if Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth seem to have shared any kind of past, it must have been in junior high.
It's not just that they're too young for the parts (Though they are; seriously, if you're going to make it a plot point that they've been apart for five years, it pretty much follows that you should cast actors who would have been adults five years ago.), it's that there is nothing even remotely interesting about them. Routh--probably not his fault--simply does an impression of Christopher Reeve, and while he's not bad, he's clearly just a copy of the original. Bosworth is much worse. Beyond being physically attractive (though in a rather generic way), there is nothing in her presence or performance that justifies Routh's character carrying a torch for her. He's Superman, and this is the best he could do?
With this failure at its core, Superman Returns is left to live or die by its spectacle, but here, too, it comes up short. A sequence involving an airplane and space shuttle is fairly riveting, (though the cartoonish CGI looks phonier than the cheesy miniature work in the '78 film), and Kevin Spacey froths entertainingly as villain Lex Luthor (though again, he fails to erase memories of Gene Hackman's superb comic performance in Donner's original). But really, that's about it.
So what we have here is a summer blockbuster that tries to work on a slightly higher level than these things usually do, but fails on even the most elemental level. There's a lesson there somewhere, but no one in Hollywood will ever understand it.
They failed, but when it's summer blockbuster time, and you're dealing with the likes of Poseidon or The DaVinci Code or--shudder--Click, good intentions actually count for something.
But director Bryan Singer made quite a few fundamental mistakes when he set out here. One is his obvious devotion to the 1978 Superman, which Singer feels--correctly--is still the best cinematic adaptation of a comic book. In essence, Superman Returns is a belated sequel to that picture.
And it just doesn't hold a candle to it. Singer is certainly a better director than Richard Donner, who helmed the '78 film, but Donner got lucky. He had a script by writers like Robert Benton and David Newman and Tom Mankiewicz, who'd written for magazines and newspapers as well as movies, and who could write dialogue as well as action. He had cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, who shot 2001 and Cabaret, and designer John Barry, who'd created the settings for A Clockwork Orange and Star Wars. In other words, Donner was riding herd on world-class talent, and he had the sense to let them do their best.
But mostly what Donner had were perfect leads, Christopher Reeve, achingly sincere as Superman, goofily funny as Clark Kent, and Margot Kidder, quirky, adorable, cynical and slightly melancholy as Lois Lane. They had chemistry you couldn't manufacture, and it wasn't just between the actors but between their characters; you could understand why a straight-arrow like Superman/Clark would be drawn to an oddball like Lois.
Singer's movie has plenty wrong with it, but it would have gotten by with the right leads, and this is where Superman Returns fails most spectacularly. The whole premise is, Superman has been away from earth for five years (on a rather flimsy premise) and when he returns, he discovers that not only has the world survived without him, but worse, Lois has, too. She's engaged, she's got a kid--she doesn't need him anymore, and the poor sap's heartbroken. Basically, it's Superman as Paul Giamatti in Sideways. (Or, um, me.)
Fine. Not what most people want to see in superhero movies, but okay. For it to work, though, you have to believe that these characters have a past. And if Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth seem to have shared any kind of past, it must have been in junior high.
It's not just that they're too young for the parts (Though they are; seriously, if you're going to make it a plot point that they've been apart for five years, it pretty much follows that you should cast actors who would have been adults five years ago.), it's that there is nothing even remotely interesting about them. Routh--probably not his fault--simply does an impression of Christopher Reeve, and while he's not bad, he's clearly just a copy of the original. Bosworth is much worse. Beyond being physically attractive (though in a rather generic way), there is nothing in her presence or performance that justifies Routh's character carrying a torch for her. He's Superman, and this is the best he could do?
With this failure at its core, Superman Returns is left to live or die by its spectacle, but here, too, it comes up short. A sequence involving an airplane and space shuttle is fairly riveting, (though the cartoonish CGI looks phonier than the cheesy miniature work in the '78 film), and Kevin Spacey froths entertainingly as villain Lex Luthor (though again, he fails to erase memories of Gene Hackman's superb comic performance in Donner's original). But really, that's about it.
So what we have here is a summer blockbuster that tries to work on a slightly higher level than these things usually do, but fails on even the most elemental level. There's a lesson there somewhere, but no one in Hollywood will ever understand it.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
WHATEVER WAY THE WIND BLOWS
With my marriage only a vague memory, what is left? What fills my nights? How do I stave off boredom and loneliness?
Well, I could take up knitting. Instead, I date.
God help me.
I don't even know why I do this. I pretend that I'm looking for a relationship, but I'm not sure if that's true. Relationships are a lot of work, requiring massive energy to build and even more trouble to maintain. I thought I found the love of my life in my thirties, and that didn't work out. I'm forty-one now. Is it getting a bit late for this sort of thing?
Seriously, is it? Because if it is, I might as well just admit that what I'm looking for is just a pure physical relationship--the old rumpty-pumpty, as Roger Ebert would put it. (Sorry, I've just been listening to Ebert's commentary on the Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls DVD.) And if that's the case, well, I guess it makes more sense.
Because for that, at least, I need another person. Sure, I can go trolling for all the naked web-cam action a fella can stand (not--koffkoff--that I'd ever, you know, do that, heh heh...), but at some point, you need contact.
Emotional contact, though, that's a whole different thing. Society conditions us to pair off, to find emotional fullfillment with another person. But is it really necessary? Most of the time, when I desire someone's company for non-sexual reasons, it's usually just to save myself the embarrassment of going out someplace by myself. And often, I wind up going out anyway, by myself, and having a perfectly good time. Solitude is underrated--often, you can more fully enjoy yourself if you're not worrying about the response of the person you're with.
When I'm home, I'm probably better off being alone, anyway. Since I'm the type of person who can suddenly decide that an Ingmar Bergman double feature is a perfect evening's entertainment, Swedish angst is probably best experienced in private. (And if I actually knew a woman who was into Bergman, it would be pretty clear that she had issues of her own. Which, of course, is the type of woman I date, and is usually the reason it doesn't work. Lord, this is getting depressing...)
As you might have guessed from the tone of this thing, the only reason I'm sitting here writing is because I'm not doing what I thought I'd be doing this evening, which is to say, going out with someone. She was very apologetic when she cancelled, and given what I know about her (which is probably way too much for only two dates), the reason she gave seems plausible. I don't really think she's just blowing me off, but who knows? The worst part of dating is never knowing the other person's intentions. How can I know what to feel when I don't know what they feel?
And is it possible to write about this sort of thing without sounding like a country song?
Well, I could take up knitting. Instead, I date.
God help me.
I don't even know why I do this. I pretend that I'm looking for a relationship, but I'm not sure if that's true. Relationships are a lot of work, requiring massive energy to build and even more trouble to maintain. I thought I found the love of my life in my thirties, and that didn't work out. I'm forty-one now. Is it getting a bit late for this sort of thing?
Seriously, is it? Because if it is, I might as well just admit that what I'm looking for is just a pure physical relationship--the old rumpty-pumpty, as Roger Ebert would put it. (Sorry, I've just been listening to Ebert's commentary on the Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls DVD.) And if that's the case, well, I guess it makes more sense.
Because for that, at least, I need another person. Sure, I can go trolling for all the naked web-cam action a fella can stand (not--koffkoff--that I'd ever, you know, do that, heh heh...), but at some point, you need contact.
Emotional contact, though, that's a whole different thing. Society conditions us to pair off, to find emotional fullfillment with another person. But is it really necessary? Most of the time, when I desire someone's company for non-sexual reasons, it's usually just to save myself the embarrassment of going out someplace by myself. And often, I wind up going out anyway, by myself, and having a perfectly good time. Solitude is underrated--often, you can more fully enjoy yourself if you're not worrying about the response of the person you're with.
When I'm home, I'm probably better off being alone, anyway. Since I'm the type of person who can suddenly decide that an Ingmar Bergman double feature is a perfect evening's entertainment, Swedish angst is probably best experienced in private. (And if I actually knew a woman who was into Bergman, it would be pretty clear that she had issues of her own. Which, of course, is the type of woman I date, and is usually the reason it doesn't work. Lord, this is getting depressing...)
As you might have guessed from the tone of this thing, the only reason I'm sitting here writing is because I'm not doing what I thought I'd be doing this evening, which is to say, going out with someone. She was very apologetic when she cancelled, and given what I know about her (which is probably way too much for only two dates), the reason she gave seems plausible. I don't really think she's just blowing me off, but who knows? The worst part of dating is never knowing the other person's intentions. How can I know what to feel when I don't know what they feel?
And is it possible to write about this sort of thing without sounding like a country song?
Saturday, July 01, 2006
I REMEMBER DAYS...OR AT LEAST, I TRY
Photos of us in a variety of settings, dressed up, dressed down, her hair changing. Tapes and demos she recorded, and presents she bought for me. Inexplicably, her wedding dress was left at my mom's house, and came into my possession when Mom passed away. Oh, and a divorce decree.
These things are the only tangible proof I have that i was married.
Memories, too, of course, growing fainter as the time we spent together recedes farther into the past. Not so much memories anymore as anecdotes, the bad things I did, the bad things she did, spun over and over to women I date, so they'll understand, or told to friends, to explain a mood. The tales are told by rote now, there's no longer any pain, no new revelations, the details never vary. Sometimes I wonder, as I recite the stories yet again, did it really happen this way?
My marriage doesn't feel like something that actually happened to me anymore. It doesn't feel, period. Would I remember as much as I do if I didn't talk about it? Do I have actual memories of us as a couple, or memories of talking about us? We did things, went to nice restaurants, saw a lot of movies, went for walks. We made love, we fought. That we did these things I know, but the little details that can make this shared past come alive, those are gone. The whole time we spent together is blurring into vague feelings, contentment or resentment, happiness or pain, joy and sorrow--yes, I remember all those things from my marriage, but I can't recall the context. I considered myself happy with her, but I don't know why.
It's good to let it go, and necessary, but troubling, too. When all the wounds were fresh, I could hear a song or read something or see something that would make me think of her, and I would burst into tears. I don't do that now. Is it the pain that has diminished, or the clarity of the memory?
I'm calmer now, less angry, better able to keep my temper in check. Depression is still an aquaintance i know all too well, but I function. I wasn't like this when we were together, but I know this because she reminds me, not because I can recall my foul moods. Does the person who was married even still exist? Or is he just a shadow, whispering in my ear vague warnings that the past could repeat itself, preventing me from enjoying my life in the present? Would I be better off now if I had never known her? Or worse?
We talk still, two or three times a week, because we still enjoy each other's company. Her voice on the phone is abstract, I can't even visualize the person who goes with it. The vibe is that of talking to an old buddy you haven't seen in years, not someone I once loved with all my heart and soul. And I did love her. That part, at least, I remember.
These things are the only tangible proof I have that i was married.
Memories, too, of course, growing fainter as the time we spent together recedes farther into the past. Not so much memories anymore as anecdotes, the bad things I did, the bad things she did, spun over and over to women I date, so they'll understand, or told to friends, to explain a mood. The tales are told by rote now, there's no longer any pain, no new revelations, the details never vary. Sometimes I wonder, as I recite the stories yet again, did it really happen this way?
My marriage doesn't feel like something that actually happened to me anymore. It doesn't feel, period. Would I remember as much as I do if I didn't talk about it? Do I have actual memories of us as a couple, or memories of talking about us? We did things, went to nice restaurants, saw a lot of movies, went for walks. We made love, we fought. That we did these things I know, but the little details that can make this shared past come alive, those are gone. The whole time we spent together is blurring into vague feelings, contentment or resentment, happiness or pain, joy and sorrow--yes, I remember all those things from my marriage, but I can't recall the context. I considered myself happy with her, but I don't know why.
It's good to let it go, and necessary, but troubling, too. When all the wounds were fresh, I could hear a song or read something or see something that would make me think of her, and I would burst into tears. I don't do that now. Is it the pain that has diminished, or the clarity of the memory?
I'm calmer now, less angry, better able to keep my temper in check. Depression is still an aquaintance i know all too well, but I function. I wasn't like this when we were together, but I know this because she reminds me, not because I can recall my foul moods. Does the person who was married even still exist? Or is he just a shadow, whispering in my ear vague warnings that the past could repeat itself, preventing me from enjoying my life in the present? Would I be better off now if I had never known her? Or worse?
We talk still, two or three times a week, because we still enjoy each other's company. Her voice on the phone is abstract, I can't even visualize the person who goes with it. The vibe is that of talking to an old buddy you haven't seen in years, not someone I once loved with all my heart and soul. And I did love her. That part, at least, I remember.
Friday, June 30, 2006
A DREAM IS A WISH THE HEART MAKES
I wish I believed this actually meant something.
The Supreme Court Thursday ruled that Bush's plan to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions was illegal, that the commissions weren't authorized by federal law and, additionally, violated international law.
There are two parts of this ruling that help make it a total smackdown of the decider's policies. One is that it makes clear that the administration is obliged to follow the Geneva conventions even if they deem them "quaint." The other is its finding that Bush improperly acted on this plan without congressional authorization, a clear rebuke of this administration's attempt to consolidate all power in the executive branch.
All well and good, and the decision was handed down by a solid majority--Chief Justice John Roberts sat this one out, as he'd already ruled (in Bush's favor) on this case as an appeals court judge, but even if Roberts had ruled, the outcome would have been the same--which is gratifying. But does it matter?
It's not just that the usual ass-kissers and cocksuckers in the senate are already lining up to give Bush the authorization to go ahead with his military tribunals plan for the detainees. (Aside to Bill Frist: Does Bush have mighty tasty semen? Because you seem to be willing to swallow an awful lot of it. Metaphorically speaking, of course. And, metaphorically, do you deep throat or--never mind...)
With or without congressional authority or judicial approval, Bush will do whatever he wants. Given his propensity for "signing statements"--signing something into law, then declaring that he is not beholden to that law--why should we expect him to be beholden to laws enacted by lesser mortals? The Supreme Court's ruling might be a setback, at least for the moment, but if the Bushinistas have proven anything, it's that they don't care what anyone says.
So expect business as usual.
The Supreme Court Thursday ruled that Bush's plan to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions was illegal, that the commissions weren't authorized by federal law and, additionally, violated international law.
There are two parts of this ruling that help make it a total smackdown of the decider's policies. One is that it makes clear that the administration is obliged to follow the Geneva conventions even if they deem them "quaint." The other is its finding that Bush improperly acted on this plan without congressional authorization, a clear rebuke of this administration's attempt to consolidate all power in the executive branch.
All well and good, and the decision was handed down by a solid majority--Chief Justice John Roberts sat this one out, as he'd already ruled (in Bush's favor) on this case as an appeals court judge, but even if Roberts had ruled, the outcome would have been the same--which is gratifying. But does it matter?
It's not just that the usual ass-kissers and cocksuckers in the senate are already lining up to give Bush the authorization to go ahead with his military tribunals plan for the detainees. (Aside to Bill Frist: Does Bush have mighty tasty semen? Because you seem to be willing to swallow an awful lot of it. Metaphorically speaking, of course. And, metaphorically, do you deep throat or--never mind...)
With or without congressional authority or judicial approval, Bush will do whatever he wants. Given his propensity for "signing statements"--signing something into law, then declaring that he is not beholden to that law--why should we expect him to be beholden to laws enacted by lesser mortals? The Supreme Court's ruling might be a setback, at least for the moment, but if the Bushinistas have proven anything, it's that they don't care what anyone says.
So expect business as usual.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
A QUOTE FROM CHAIRMAN MEL
It's his eightieth birthday, he's one of my heroes and I couldn't let the day pass without a favorite inspirational verse:
Hope for the best
Expect the worst
Life is a play, and
We're unrehearsed.
--Mel Brooks
Hope for the best
Expect the worst
Life is a play, and
We're unrehearsed.
--Mel Brooks
IT ISN'T FAIR, IT ISN'T NICE
My sister Ann had a colonoscopy yesterday, and she's doing fine, thanks. Since she's had hers, she asked me when I would schedule one of my own. Obviously, I should do this--both of my parents had colon cancer. And it would be dangerously irresponsible for me both to avoid this procedure and to suggest that it won't do any good, anyway.
And I'm not suggesting that. However, I'm becoming more and more convinced that early detection of cancer is no more likely to save your life than waiting until the last minute. You'll either die or you won't.
Okay, my evidence for this theory is strictly anecdotal. But it's a pretty telling anecdote.
My dad was just short of seventy when it was determined he had colon cancer. It was a pretty easy determination to make, since dad, never a guy to admit physical pain or see a doctor, had waited until his left side swelled to cartoonish proportions, looking like a bladder effect from an early David Cronenberg film. By the time he decided that yeah, maybe he needed to go to the emergency room, he was in such pain he couldn't even move, and needed to be transported by ambulance.
So having waited until literally the last possible minute before even being examined, much less diagnosed, Dad had surgery. And you know what? He was fine. Yeah, he had to wear a colostomy bag, but the cancer was completely removed.
So, summing up: A guy nearly seventy, smoked and drank for most of his life, abused his body through a lifetime of tough physical labor, never saw a doctor. He gets cancer, lets it balloon and...no problem.
True, after awhile dad had the first of a series of strokes that would ultimately incapacitate him, and he died of heart failure, and both of these were almost certainly related to the lifetime of abuse he'd dealt out to his body. But they were in no way related to the cancer...and wouldn't you have thought there would have been some complications from that? There are poor schlubs who eat healthy, exercise, do everything right...but when cancer appears, it spreads quickly and they're dead in no time.
My point is, life is a crap shoot. (And as my sister points out, when you're prepping for a colonoscopy, it's literally a crap shoot.) The comedian Bill Hicks (dead from cancer at thirty-two, unfortunately) liked to justify his hard-living ways by contrasting runner and health nut Jim Fix, who died of a sudden heart attack, with Keith Richards, who has abused his body in every imaginable way and is still going strong. And he's absolutely right. (Of course, Hicks was right about pretty much everything.)
Luck is with you, or not. You fall in love, or you don't. You get the job, or you don't. Good things happen, or bad things happen. You live. Or you die. Though I'm agnostic, I do believe there is a sort of guiding force to things, but I don't think anything but pure happenstance guides individual fates. We live our lives to the patterns of chance.
Still, I should probably schedule that colonoscopy, just to be safe.
And I'm not suggesting that. However, I'm becoming more and more convinced that early detection of cancer is no more likely to save your life than waiting until the last minute. You'll either die or you won't.
Okay, my evidence for this theory is strictly anecdotal. But it's a pretty telling anecdote.
My dad was just short of seventy when it was determined he had colon cancer. It was a pretty easy determination to make, since dad, never a guy to admit physical pain or see a doctor, had waited until his left side swelled to cartoonish proportions, looking like a bladder effect from an early David Cronenberg film. By the time he decided that yeah, maybe he needed to go to the emergency room, he was in such pain he couldn't even move, and needed to be transported by ambulance.
So having waited until literally the last possible minute before even being examined, much less diagnosed, Dad had surgery. And you know what? He was fine. Yeah, he had to wear a colostomy bag, but the cancer was completely removed.
So, summing up: A guy nearly seventy, smoked and drank for most of his life, abused his body through a lifetime of tough physical labor, never saw a doctor. He gets cancer, lets it balloon and...no problem.
True, after awhile dad had the first of a series of strokes that would ultimately incapacitate him, and he died of heart failure, and both of these were almost certainly related to the lifetime of abuse he'd dealt out to his body. But they were in no way related to the cancer...and wouldn't you have thought there would have been some complications from that? There are poor schlubs who eat healthy, exercise, do everything right...but when cancer appears, it spreads quickly and they're dead in no time.
My point is, life is a crap shoot. (And as my sister points out, when you're prepping for a colonoscopy, it's literally a crap shoot.) The comedian Bill Hicks (dead from cancer at thirty-two, unfortunately) liked to justify his hard-living ways by contrasting runner and health nut Jim Fix, who died of a sudden heart attack, with Keith Richards, who has abused his body in every imaginable way and is still going strong. And he's absolutely right. (Of course, Hicks was right about pretty much everything.)
Luck is with you, or not. You fall in love, or you don't. You get the job, or you don't. Good things happen, or bad things happen. You live. Or you die. Though I'm agnostic, I do believe there is a sort of guiding force to things, but I don't think anything but pure happenstance guides individual fates. We live our lives to the patterns of chance.
Still, I should probably schedule that colonoscopy, just to be safe.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
WHEN EVERY WILD DREAM SEEMED POSSIBLE
First, a prelude:
In the summer of 1975, at the age of ten, I saw three movies which would literally change my life. The first was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which demanded active participation on the part of its audience, not passive viewing, and its enigmatic final sequence haunted me, daring me to make sense of it. Later I saw Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, which champions oddballs and outsiders over faceless conformity, and which introduced me to the world of schtick. It also made me laugh harder than anything I'd ever seen in my life, so hard I literally couldn't breathe for long stretches of its running time.
The third movie was the most important of all. Like any ten year old boy, I liked monsters, and the ads for the movie The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad certainly promised plenty of those. I badgered my mom until she agreed to take me, and on a Monday night at the Perry drive-in, with lightning flashes in the distance, my life changed forever.
I didn't know then that the movie was nearly twenty years old, and I wasn't familiar at that time with the name Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion animator responsible for Sinbad's monsters. But in the movie's first five minutes, as Harryhausen's cyclops came bounding across the screen, I knew this was nothing I'd seen before. The cyclops was blatantly unreal, and yet it lived--it shifted its massive weight as though it was awkward to stand still too long, its animated movement--curved back, bent wrists, splayed fingers--had the grace of Fred Astaire. But Astaire was real--what was this?
In some embryonic form, my whole worldview was born that night. In Harryhausen's work, I recognized an element of truth, and it would be my belief that truth is the essential component of all human endeavors--art, politics, relationships--that would come to define me, to accept or reject things according to this belief.
All of this is a long way to go just to say that new on DVD today--and from the good folks at Criterion, the most high-toned of specialty video companies--is Equinox, an amateur horror movie from the late sixties that was later revised and released theatrically by drive-in specialist Jack Harris in 1971. Both versions are included on Criterion's disc, and while neither one of them could really be described as a good (or even watchable) movie, this is still a fascinating release.
In its original form, Equinox was directed by Dennis Muren, a would-be effects guy who was using this partly as a test reel to show what he could do. Within a few years, Muren would be an effects supervisor for Star Wars and one of the founders of Industrial Light and Magic, so it's probably safe to say it worked.
But to what end? The goofy storyline in Equinox is clearly only there to support a few crude but exuberant special effects sequences, most of them clearly riffing on characters from Harryhausen's work. The DVD is hosted, appropriately, by Forrest J. Ackerman, erstwhile editor of Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine, and the man largely responsible for fostering the Monster Kid culture of the fifties and sixties.
Dennis Muren was clearly part of that culture, and he and his compadres spend a lot of time remarking on how much it meant to them, and how significant Ackerman's magazine and Harryhausen's monsters were to their lives. Yet Muren has made a lot of money (and won a shitload of Oscars) working on movies full of visuals that were big, splashy, but utterly empty. He says on this disc that he loves hand-made effects and doesn't care for CGI, yet he was the effects supervisor on Jurassic Park, the movie that pretty much brought old-school effects work to an end. Yeah, the effects in that movie look real, but so what? The spark of originality, of love, of truth, that is present, however primitive the form, in Equinox has largely vanished from the screen.
Criterion's DVD is absolutely essential, if not for the movie itself then for its heartbreaking shadow, the story of kids who could make their dreams come true, but who lost their souls along the way.
In the summer of 1975, at the age of ten, I saw three movies which would literally change my life. The first was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which demanded active participation on the part of its audience, not passive viewing, and its enigmatic final sequence haunted me, daring me to make sense of it. Later I saw Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, which champions oddballs and outsiders over faceless conformity, and which introduced me to the world of schtick. It also made me laugh harder than anything I'd ever seen in my life, so hard I literally couldn't breathe for long stretches of its running time.
The third movie was the most important of all. Like any ten year old boy, I liked monsters, and the ads for the movie The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad certainly promised plenty of those. I badgered my mom until she agreed to take me, and on a Monday night at the Perry drive-in, with lightning flashes in the distance, my life changed forever.
I didn't know then that the movie was nearly twenty years old, and I wasn't familiar at that time with the name Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion animator responsible for Sinbad's monsters. But in the movie's first five minutes, as Harryhausen's cyclops came bounding across the screen, I knew this was nothing I'd seen before. The cyclops was blatantly unreal, and yet it lived--it shifted its massive weight as though it was awkward to stand still too long, its animated movement--curved back, bent wrists, splayed fingers--had the grace of Fred Astaire. But Astaire was real--what was this?
In some embryonic form, my whole worldview was born that night. In Harryhausen's work, I recognized an element of truth, and it would be my belief that truth is the essential component of all human endeavors--art, politics, relationships--that would come to define me, to accept or reject things according to this belief.
All of this is a long way to go just to say that new on DVD today--and from the good folks at Criterion, the most high-toned of specialty video companies--is Equinox, an amateur horror movie from the late sixties that was later revised and released theatrically by drive-in specialist Jack Harris in 1971. Both versions are included on Criterion's disc, and while neither one of them could really be described as a good (or even watchable) movie, this is still a fascinating release.
In its original form, Equinox was directed by Dennis Muren, a would-be effects guy who was using this partly as a test reel to show what he could do. Within a few years, Muren would be an effects supervisor for Star Wars and one of the founders of Industrial Light and Magic, so it's probably safe to say it worked.
But to what end? The goofy storyline in Equinox is clearly only there to support a few crude but exuberant special effects sequences, most of them clearly riffing on characters from Harryhausen's work. The DVD is hosted, appropriately, by Forrest J. Ackerman, erstwhile editor of Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine, and the man largely responsible for fostering the Monster Kid culture of the fifties and sixties.
Dennis Muren was clearly part of that culture, and he and his compadres spend a lot of time remarking on how much it meant to them, and how significant Ackerman's magazine and Harryhausen's monsters were to their lives. Yet Muren has made a lot of money (and won a shitload of Oscars) working on movies full of visuals that were big, splashy, but utterly empty. He says on this disc that he loves hand-made effects and doesn't care for CGI, yet he was the effects supervisor on Jurassic Park, the movie that pretty much brought old-school effects work to an end. Yeah, the effects in that movie look real, but so what? The spark of originality, of love, of truth, that is present, however primitive the form, in Equinox has largely vanished from the screen.
Criterion's DVD is absolutely essential, if not for the movie itself then for its heartbreaking shadow, the story of kids who could make their dreams come true, but who lost their souls along the way.
Monday, June 26, 2006
I THINK IT'S GOING TO RAIN TODAY
Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York, has called for an investigation, and possible prosecution, of the New York Times. "What they've done here is absolutely disgraceful," he said.
The crime? Daring to report on the Bush administration's searches through bank records of U.S. citizens. In other words, when Republicans are caught performing activities that are almost certainly illegal, fellow Republicans respond by accusing the accusers.
Except the Times isn't really accusing the administration of anything. It's just reporting something that is already there. Ah, but by exposing the administration's tactics to the light, the Times is somehow revealing state secrets, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Does anybody really believe that? Could anybody really be comforted by the fact that shadowy right-wing operatives are going through their bank records and tapping their phones? And do we really believe this has anything to do with the alleged war on terror?
Because if these illegal tools are supposed to be helping us find terrorists, our intelligence people are even more incompetent than previously thought. Zarqawi releases a video of himself wandering around identifiable locations, and it still takes us awhile to track him down. When we do, we don't take him out G. Gordon Liddy-style, with a shoelace or a sharpened pencil. Nah, we drop a big-ass bomb, which--hey, here's a big surprise--also takes out a bunch of civilians, including a little girl.
Or what about the justice department's breathless announcement last week that they'd foiled a terrorist threat to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago. Except that the "terrorists" in question turned out to be a bunch of hapless schmucks who knew a guy who said he knew a guy who could connect them to another guy. The Honeycomb Bunch was as big a threat to national security.
If the administration's war on terror is this incompetently waged, may we assume the phone taps are in fact being used for other purposes? Maybe we'll find out soon, since Senator Arlen Specter has proposed oversights on Bush's wiretap program. But since Specter is a Good Republican, I think when he says oversights for Bush, what he really means are free blowjobs. (Metaphorically speaking, of course. These are good, solid citizens. No homo stuff here.)
While all this is going on, where have the Democrats been? Busy trying to figure out how to have no position about Iraq. Sigh.
Let me just say it again: We're hosed.
The crime? Daring to report on the Bush administration's searches through bank records of U.S. citizens. In other words, when Republicans are caught performing activities that are almost certainly illegal, fellow Republicans respond by accusing the accusers.
Except the Times isn't really accusing the administration of anything. It's just reporting something that is already there. Ah, but by exposing the administration's tactics to the light, the Times is somehow revealing state secrets, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Does anybody really believe that? Could anybody really be comforted by the fact that shadowy right-wing operatives are going through their bank records and tapping their phones? And do we really believe this has anything to do with the alleged war on terror?
Because if these illegal tools are supposed to be helping us find terrorists, our intelligence people are even more incompetent than previously thought. Zarqawi releases a video of himself wandering around identifiable locations, and it still takes us awhile to track him down. When we do, we don't take him out G. Gordon Liddy-style, with a shoelace or a sharpened pencil. Nah, we drop a big-ass bomb, which--hey, here's a big surprise--also takes out a bunch of civilians, including a little girl.
Or what about the justice department's breathless announcement last week that they'd foiled a terrorist threat to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago. Except that the "terrorists" in question turned out to be a bunch of hapless schmucks who knew a guy who said he knew a guy who could connect them to another guy. The Honeycomb Bunch was as big a threat to national security.
If the administration's war on terror is this incompetently waged, may we assume the phone taps are in fact being used for other purposes? Maybe we'll find out soon, since Senator Arlen Specter has proposed oversights on Bush's wiretap program. But since Specter is a Good Republican, I think when he says oversights for Bush, what he really means are free blowjobs. (Metaphorically speaking, of course. These are good, solid citizens. No homo stuff here.)
While all this is going on, where have the Democrats been? Busy trying to figure out how to have no position about Iraq. Sigh.
Let me just say it again: We're hosed.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
THE SEVENTIES ARE OFFICIALLY DEAD
The glory days had certainly passed producer Aaron Spelling by when he died Friday at 83. True, he had producing credits on such current or recent shows as Seventh Heaven and Charmed, both of which helped give The WB its identity, just as he had helped establish Fox with Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.
But however popular those shows were, they were just shows. But back in the seventies, Spelling pretty much owned TV, or at least ABC, which was the network most watched by those of us growing up in that era. Virtually all the shows I think of when I think of the seventies were Spelling's handiwork: The Rookies and Starsky And Hutch, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels and The Mod Squad.
In addition, Spelling's liver-spotted hands were all over some of the most delightfully lurid TV movies of the period, including Little Ladies Of The Night, One Of My Wives Is Missing, Death Cruise, The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped, and Satan's School For Girls. The nea plus ultra of seventies cheese, The Boy In The Plastic Bubble--yup, that was Spelling.
Keep in mind, none of these things were any good. In fact, you didn't even need to watch them--their contents just sort of took up residence in your system, providing you with glossy images of feathered hair and wide lapels, plus more than your recommended weekly dose of Karen Valentine or Laurette Spang. Spelling was some sort of genius, seemingly able to tailor a show to any conceivable audience segment.
As the decade shifted, he was right there, offering Big Eighties Hair and padded shoulders aplenty with Dynasty, a show which seemed to run forever, spinning ever screwier storylines, and a massive phenom of its time--and yet the magic was fading, cannier producers were using some of Spelling's formulas with greater elan, and his name no longer guaranteed a big hit, or even a decent time slot.
Additionally, Dynasty, like 90210 later, was all too aware of its own camp charm. The joy of prime Spelling, Charlie's Angels or any of his TV movies, was a total lack of irony. They were stupid, yes, but entertaining in a brain-dead way, and they aspired to nothing higher. There was a consistency to his work, a craftsmanship, and we'll not see his like again. He gave us seventies kids some wonderful memories.
For just Satan's School For Girls alone, thanks, Mr. Spelling.
But however popular those shows were, they were just shows. But back in the seventies, Spelling pretty much owned TV, or at least ABC, which was the network most watched by those of us growing up in that era. Virtually all the shows I think of when I think of the seventies were Spelling's handiwork: The Rookies and Starsky And Hutch, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels and The Mod Squad.
In addition, Spelling's liver-spotted hands were all over some of the most delightfully lurid TV movies of the period, including Little Ladies Of The Night, One Of My Wives Is Missing, Death Cruise, The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped, and Satan's School For Girls. The nea plus ultra of seventies cheese, The Boy In The Plastic Bubble--yup, that was Spelling.
Keep in mind, none of these things were any good. In fact, you didn't even need to watch them--their contents just sort of took up residence in your system, providing you with glossy images of feathered hair and wide lapels, plus more than your recommended weekly dose of Karen Valentine or Laurette Spang. Spelling was some sort of genius, seemingly able to tailor a show to any conceivable audience segment.
As the decade shifted, he was right there, offering Big Eighties Hair and padded shoulders aplenty with Dynasty, a show which seemed to run forever, spinning ever screwier storylines, and a massive phenom of its time--and yet the magic was fading, cannier producers were using some of Spelling's formulas with greater elan, and his name no longer guaranteed a big hit, or even a decent time slot.
Additionally, Dynasty, like 90210 later, was all too aware of its own camp charm. The joy of prime Spelling, Charlie's Angels or any of his TV movies, was a total lack of irony. They were stupid, yes, but entertaining in a brain-dead way, and they aspired to nothing higher. There was a consistency to his work, a craftsmanship, and we'll not see his like again. He gave us seventies kids some wonderful memories.
For just Satan's School For Girls alone, thanks, Mr. Spelling.
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