IT'S JUST A SHOW

Things had deteriorated, obviously.  With her cancer, Mom's doctor had already given her less than six months to live.  Plus, there'd been a mix-up on her meds which had caused to to hallucinate wildly, she'd fallen a couple days before and...well, time was running out.

But I didn't want to believe that.  So when I got home from work that day and discovered several messages from my sister telling me Mom was in the hospital, I refused to believe it was anything but a bump along the way.  After all, she still had a few months left; a doctor said so.

When I got to the hospital, I was shocked by how small she looked, how fragile and lost.  The bump on her head from her fall had gotten worse, now resembling some Cronenberg mutation.  And there was her voice, faint and far away but oddly cheerful: "Hi, Honey.  Did you have to work late?"

Yeah, I said.  Sorry, I didn't know until now.

"That's OK.  Have you eaten?"

No, I explained, I came over here as soon as I got the message.

"Oh.  Well, you should eat.  I'll be OK.  It's almost time for Lost, and after that, I'll get some sleep.  What are you going to do tonight?"

I don't know.  I'm kind of worried...

"I'll be OK.  Really.  Go have some pizza and watch MST.  That always makes you feel better."

So I did.  Mom was right--Mystery Science Theater 3000 always made me feel better, could always be counted on to give me a laugh when I needed one.  So I picked an episode at random, Joel and the Bots going to town on the Roger Corman Western Gunslinger.

An odd choice, as it happened.  The movie itself is oddly obsessed with death, and that carries over to the rest of the show, which features this sketch:

Kind of weird, but nothing creepy about it.  Sure, Mom was in the hospital, but she'd be alright.  Wouldn't she?  Wouldn't she?

You can guess what happened next: An early morning phone call, a long, agonizing vigil, bad hospital food, then...well, then she died.

And the bottom dropped out of my world.  Mom was always there, the one person above all others that I could always count on to be there for me, to point me in the right direction, to tell me what I needed to hear.  Without her, how could I go on?

Something else was there for me, though.  In the blur of days following, the visitation and funeral and dread of returning to work and everything else, I wondered if I could ever regain what had been lost.  In the depths of sorrow, could I ever be happy again?  There was one sure way to find out:

Another random episode: I Accuse My Parents.  The intro made me happy, and the episode made me laugh.  A lot.  And when it was over, I knew Mom was right: It would be OK.

I'm writing all this right now because Mystery Science Theater 3000 premiered twenty-five years ago today.  It was hugely influential to the comedy landscape of the late twentieth century, and its lasting impact continues to be felt well into this century.

And more than that, it's the show that kind of saved my life.

A TREMOR IN THE FORCE

Again, I have been accused--just yesterday--of being a Star Wars geek.  Again, I plead not guilty.

The main evidence seems to be that I know Admiral Ackbar's home planet (Mon Calamari--yes, I do know this), a fact which isn't revealed in Return Of The Jedi, and thus something I could only have learned through reading of spin-off novels, comic books or, at the very least, repeated trips to Wookiepedia.

But I've done none of these things!  (Okay, I visited Wookiepedia one time--just once, I swear!--and oddly enough it was to look up the proper spelling of "wookie" because there was some dispute about that in the very early days of Star Wars fandom and look, never mind how I know about that.)  But Star Wars is Star Wars, a vast cultural thing that everybody knows something about, even if they've never seen the damned thing.

Let me put it this way: I've never watched porn.  (Unless Caligula counts, which technically, it probably does.  Oh, and that one Laura Gemser Emanuelle movie where the girl jerks off the horse and there are a few penetration shots, but they were obviously just inserted (tee-hee, inserted) after the movie was shot, so that really shouldn't count.)  More specifically, I've never seen Behind The Green Door, but I've read two different books on its directors, Jim and Artie Mitchell.  (They invented the lap dance!)  I've also read Sinema and The Other Hollywood and could tell you more about The Opening Of Misty Beethoven than you could ever want to know.

On the other hand, I've never seen any of the awful live-action movies Disney cranked out in the seventies, but if you shouted out their titles, I could probably tell you who directed them without even looking it up.  (No Deposit, No Return? Norman Tokar!  The Shaggy D.A.?  Robert Stevenson!)  Hey, as a bonus, I can tell you that Frank Phillips was the cinematographer and Cotton Warburton edited most of those things, because Disney used pretty much the exact same crew in all their movies back then and WHY DO I KNOW THIS?

But does all this make me a porn and/or Disney geek?  I can tell you who produced both The Genius Of Ray Charles and Pink's Raise Your Glass, even though I don't imagine many people who revere the former have even heard of the latter.  I can quote whole passages of James Joyce's The Dead verbatim.  I couldn't tell you my sibling's birthdays, but if you ever want to know who shot Ilsa, Harem-Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks, I'm your guy.  I can't remember the precise layout of the house where I grew up, but I can remember exactly the details of the mighty River Hills/Riviera theater, where I first saw 2001, Fantasia and, okay, Star Wars, which, granted, yes, I saw five times in the summer of '77, but hey, so did everyone else.  It played theatrically for almost a year.

And it's not like everyone who saw it became a geek.  We liked it, then we moved on with our lives.  If, by "moved on" you mean "continued to fill our heads with ever-widening but essentially useless pop culture knowledge that unfortunately we used as a prism through which to view real life, and found reality wanting".  And if by "we" you mean "me". 

SO GLAD YOU MADE IT

It's OK.  I'm still here, theoretical reader who probably doesn't even exist anymore.  Well, not here, at this site, actually writing things.  But I'm still, you know, here in the world.  Things get in the way, life goes on, what have you.

But hey!  Here's a little something we haven't done in awhile: Lynda Carter singing!  It's from a 1984 variety special, and if you had told me people were still turning out this kind of crap as late as '84, I'd have said you were nuts.  But here's the eye-gouging, ear-punishing evidence.  Enjoy, or whatever.

FROM THE LAND BEYOND BEYOND

I can tell you every single detail of that Monday night: the trip form the farm into Perry in Mom's Ford Galaxie, the stop at Fareway for supplies for the evening's entertainment (Shasta cola and an industrial-sized bag of M&Ms), the whir of cicadas sounding from the shrubs on west side of the drive-in, the pink and purple clouds as the soon slowly descended, part of the endless wait for the movie to begin; the flashes of lightning far off to the north, somewhere far away, as the movie finally began.

The movie was The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad.  It had been heavily advertised on local TV, the commercials promising monsters and visual wonders aplenty.  I didn't know then that the movie was nearly twenty years old; I didn't know the name of Ray Harryhausen, though I noted his name in the credits as "Creator Of Visual Effects", and I knew what it meant: He was the man who made the mosters.

Mostly, I didn't--couldn't--know the profound effect those monsters would have on me.  How Harryhausen's cloven-hooved cyclops, with his splayed legs and delicately-curving back, formed an interest in the mechanics of the human body, an appreciation for choreography and dance, or how the slow, painful death of a dragon would haunt my dreams, its stumbling final movements echoed in the sad exits of my own beloved pets.

By the time a skeleton dropped down from the ceiling, grabbing a shield and sword and engaging our hero in a duel to the death (or redeath), my mind was completely blown.  I had never seen anything like this before.  My mom was an adult, she knew things, so I asked her how this sequence was done.  "I have no idea," she answered.

Which convinced me more than anything of the reality my eyes told me: It was real!  There was magic in the world!

And there was, once.  But no more.  Ray Harryhausen, creator of more wondrous sights than any other human ever imagined, died today at the fine age of 92.  The world is a sad place for his passing, but an infinitely better place because he lived.

SHE'S A NUN! SHE FLIES! WHAT DO YOU NEED, A ROADMAP?

Wow!  It's been--months?  Actual months since I've posted anything here?  Things happen, momentous things, in my life and in the wider world, and this space has remained silent.  But there are still things worth discussing, like, um, this.



The increasing numbers of entertainment providers desperately needing any type of content--whether online services like Hulu and Netflix or specialty cable channels like MeTV and Antenna--has spurred the rights holders of scores of vintage television shows to haul their products out of the mothballs.  Suddenly shows unseen for years are back, and the results are...interesting.

TV has always existed primarily as a way to kill time.  In the pre-internet days, the vast majority of programming was the equivalent of Chuck Norris memes and cat videos on YouTube, a way to spend a half hour here and there when you really had nothing else to do.  If you were watching The Love Boat and the phone rang halfway through it, you'd go ahead and answer, confident that you weren't really going to miss anything.

And it's still that way.  For the last decade or so, many believe TV has entered a golden age of creativity, and the best of what's out there gives that argument some weight.  Sure, dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and comedies like Louie and Community, but even animated kids shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and cop shows like Justified are astonishing--fully cinematic, but with a novelistic approach to plotting and detail.

But these are exceptions, and there have always been exceptions:  Sgt. Bilko, The Twilight Zone, Route 66, The Rifleman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbo, The Rockford Files.  The cream always floated to the top, but then as now, there's a lot of time to fill.  TV as a whole is as crappy as it's ever been--have you ever tried sitting through an episode of Rules Of Engagement?--but it's a whole lot slicker.  Writing rooms are full of Harvard grads eager to show off their education, which is why even a lowly Disney Channel sitcom will have an occasional reference to Proust.  The directors who set the visual style of the likes of Chicago Fire have been to film school and want to show off their skills for composition and editing, in case it might land them a feature film gig.

Which brings us back to The Flying Nun.  It's safe to say we'll never see its like again.  Sure, we'll see other shows with astonishingly stupid premises--Dog With A Blog is a thing that exists--but there will never again be something this innocent and naive, and by "innocent and naive" I mean utterly incompetent.

Let's look at that intro again.



The opening of a show is meant to get you to watch.  It can lay out the premise or establish the characters or simply bombard you with snazzy images and a catchy theme song.

Or, in the case of The Flying Nun, it can be a clumsily edited assortment of available footage.  There's no flow between the images, no rhythm, no sense.  Ed Wood couldn't have done a worse job.  She's a nun, she's flying, OK.  Other cast members appear, obviously filmed in a studio.  Are they supposed to be watching her?  Their eye movement suggests yes, but the clips we've seen show her at a much greater height, and then--wait.  Now she's walking across a plank?  And suddenly becomes airborne?  But we've already seen her fly!  Shouldn't this have started the sequence?  (I especially love the slide whistle deployed for this bit; that was a hacky comedy device even in Vaudeville.)  And now she's...got a dog?  And the cable holding her up is incredibly obvious...seriously, they didn't have a better take to use in the title sequence?  Another random shot of Alejandro Rey, apparently not realizing the camera was running, then she's crashing through a stained glass window, an image that seems more appropriate for a mid-seventies Italian Exorcist knockoff.  Suddenly she's flying again, exec producer credit, and we're out.

The show itself is a pretty typical relic of its era--flat lighting, ABC-simple plotting, uninteresting characters--but that opening sequence has a maladroit charm.  It's the type of thing that's hard to believe even exists, but like the dinosaur, its time has gone.  TV now is so damned professional.

MESSRS. K AND H ASSURE THE PUBLIC THEIR PRODUCTION WILL BE SECOND TO NONE

Sadly, I didn't get a chance to see David Chase's Not Fade Away during its run here in Des Moines.  I wanted to, of course--who wouldn't want to see the first theatrical film from the creator of The Sopranos?--but it only played here for a week, the victim of a studio that had no faith in it, destined to be just another obscure red Box rental.

Based on even the most sympathetic reviews, Not Fade Away may not have been a total triumph, but Chase's track record--again: The Sopranos--certainly suggests it would be worth seeing.  A personal film that doesn't quite work is almost always more worthwhile than an easy success.

Sadly, easy successes are pretty much the very best we can hope for when it comes to major studio releases: Toothless PG-13 horror movies, raucous comedies, big dumb action movies and endless retreads and sequels.  That they mostly can't even do these things well is beside the point.  Hollywood's blockbuster-or-nothing mentality is like a diet of nothing but frozen pizza and cheap beer.

To this day, plenty of well-informed people lay the blame for all this at the feet of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.  The massive success of Jaws and Star Wars ushered in the era of the blockbuster, and we've been going downhill ever since.

This is nonsense, obviously.  Yeah, many producers great and small tried to chase the success of those films, much as they tried to rip-off earlier blockbusters like The Poseidon Adventure, The Godfather and The Exorcist.  You can't blame them, after all.  It's a business.  They wanted to make hits.

But that wasn't all they wanted.  The studios were perfectly content to produce and release mid-level, mid-budget movies that weren't designed to be blockbusters.  Since there wasn't much at stake, they could afford to take chances.  Consider something like The Elephant Man: On one hand, as Oscar-bait inspiring story about overcoming physical deformity.  On the other hand, Paramount Pictures entrusted this story to David Lynch--whose only feature at that point was Eraserhead, for God's sake--and was perfectly okay with his decision to shoot it in black-and-white, to make it as weird as he wanted.  And it paid off: Not a runaway smash, but a solid hit.

 Of course, that was when Paramount was an actual studio, as opposed to being merely one vertically-integrated content provider for the Viacom organization.  Throughout the eighties and nineties, studios increasingly became slaves to their corporate masters, and the people making creative decisions came from the world of business, not art.  This explains a lot of the problems with movies today, but not all of them.

I think the real turning point was the TV debut of Entertainment Tonight in 1981, followed quickly by the print debut of USA Today the following year.  This marked the first time weekly rankings of the top-grossing movies became available to the general public.  Suddenly there was a horse race quality to judging the week's new releases.  Will Movie X succeed?  Will Movie Y recoup its massive production costs?  Nobody but Hollywood insiders cared about this previously, but now it was a thing.  Whereas once something like Howard The Duck would have failed and disappeared, now we could read just how much it cost and how much it lost.

The studios, now aware that people were watching, decided they damn well weren't going to take chances anymore.  They commissioned increasing amounts of polling data, and soon organizations like Cinemascore were asking viewers for snap judgements on movies they'd just seen, a practice that didn't exactly encourage nuanced opinion.  (The Sorrow And The Pity--thumbs up or down?)

All this, plus the rise of drooling fanboy websites like Ain'tItCoolNews and review aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes, has changed the very way movies are perceived.  Consider the recent case of Killing Them Softly.  While it has flaws--director Andrew Dominik occasionally strains too hard for significance, and some of his musical choices are thuddingly ironic--it's mostly a very faithful adaptation of a terrific George V. Higgins novel, impeccably made and showcasing an ace cast.  And yet upon its release, the only stories written about it stressed its low grosses and Cinemascore rating of F.  As if this movie was made to be a blockbuster!

A similar story played out in the press over the "disappointing" audience reaction to This Is 40.  Whatever artistic ambition the film may have had is beside the point.  It's not making money, and that's all you need to know about it.  In that sense, Not Fade Away was lucky--it was so low profile, there weren't even any stories proclaiming it a flop.

It used to be an insult when a movie was described as feeling like a TV show.  But I hope the next thing David Chase does is for television.  The movies don't deserve him.

PREHISTORY

The 1974 Saturday morning series Korg: 70,000 BC is newly available on DVD.  I was eight when this premiered as a mid-season replacement, and even though it had a comic book spinoff and everything, I never watched it.

The only reason I remember it at all--heck, the only reason why I'm mentioning it now--is because eight-year-old me thought it would be awesome if it had been called Coug: 70,000 BC, and had been about my beloved cat Cougar, who somehow traveled through time to a prehistoric era.  Episodes would follow her as she...well, as she slept, devoured mice and occasionally fought with other cats, which is pretty much what Cougar did.  Sure, that doesn't sound very interesting, but come on, we're talking seventies kiddie shows.  A half hour of a cat sleeping on a rock couldn't be any less entertaining than an episode of Ark II.  At least my show wouldn't feature any guest appearances from Jonathan Harris.

And...this is my last post for 2012: Cats and long-forgotten TV shows.  Seems about right, doesn't it?

SHINES AROUND ME LIKE A MILLION SUNS

He curls up beside me, his head on the pillow.  His powerful hind legs, kick gently against my chest, his front paws wrap around my wrist on lazily fall on the side of my face.  His purr is so loud his whole body trembles, and I feel the vibrations through him.

He seems almost possessive.  There's a dog now, and another cat I sometimes seem to favor, and he's maybe unsure of his place in the world.  But this is our time now, and he relaxes, some comfort finally available to his troubled soul.

Still, this is Delmar, so as gentle as he tries to be, his claws are perpetually bared, piercing my skin as his paws slide across my arm or my face.  I'll wake up with fresh scratches, with dried blood.  I'm used to this by now.

After all, he's been in my life for ten years.  Sometimes he can be a pain, quite literally, but hey, to live is to feel pain.  And joy, which he also provides.  Delmar is awesome and terrifying and sweet.  His love is ferocious and absolute, and I can't imagine my world without him.

I SHOULD REALLY GO TAKE A NAP

Whenever possible, you're usually better off buying name brands, at least when it comes to, say, things you actually put in your body.  Other times. it's okay to go with the dollar store special.  Dish soap, for instance.  Does it foam up in water?  Yes?  Fine, I'll take it.

So I had less than a third of my Dollar Tree dish soap left before I even bothered looking at its label, and more to the point, its randomly-chosen brand name: First Force.  Huh, I thought.  Sounds less like a brand of soap than a cheapo eighties action movie.

Fair enough, but I can't just let it go.  I start to imagine a First Force movie in my head.  David Carradine would star--that seems obvious enough--but who else?  Steve James as Generic Black Guy, whose main job is to get kidnapped by the bad guys at some point so he can be rescued by our hero, because they were buddies in 'Nam.  Don "The Dragon" Wilson would be Martial Arts Guy, who does the action stuff Carradine's stunt double doesn't.  And the group's lone female?  My first thought was Cynthia Rothrock, but since we already have two actors associated with martial arts movies, maybe it should be a onetime mainstream actress who everyone thought would be a second-tier star, or at least have a healthy career.  Lisa Blount or Lisa Eichhorn, whichever one would be most likely to do a topless scene, since that's the only reason she's even along.  Then there's the Gary Busey question: Does he play a member of the titular Force--The Guy Who Gets Killed Early To Drum Up Sympathy--or is he Generic Bad Guy?  Probably Generic Bad Guy, because he could be someone else Carradine knew in 'Nam, but who went bad.

About the time I start speculating about who would've directed such a movie (Joseph Zito, no question), it suddenly occurs to me that I'm spending way too much time thinking about a bottle of dish detergent.  Maybe I should just stop shopping at Dollar Tree.

I WILL CHASE THE BOY IN YOU AWAY

As much time as I sometimes spend here prattling on about all things Muppet related, you might expect me to have something to say about the sort-of-or-maybe-not sex scandal involving Elmo Muppeteer Kevin Clash.

The thing is, it's really too depressing to consider, especially since we don't know what actually happened, and probably never will.  Clash was initially accused of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a minor, although the minor in question was 16, not, say, 10, and the unnamed accuser even admitted the relationship was consensual.  As a result, Clash lost his regular gig on Sesame Street, but only one day after the story broke, the accuser recanted his story, claiming he was of legal age when the whole thing started, but he'd apparently accepted a financial settlement from Clash, and neither side is talking, so who knows?

Still, it seems likely Clash's Muppet days are over, since an accusation is all that is needed to taint a reputation.  If online chatter is any indication, most people are creeped out not so much because Clash might have been getting it on with a minor as the age difference in general.  Even assuming the accuser was eighteen when the relationship started, Clash was in his mid-forties.

But as to that age difference, I say what about Bobby Goldsboro's touching relationship with an older woman, as explored in his profoundly not-good song Summer (The First Time)?  Society was okay with this sort of thing back in the early seventies, or so I must assume, because the song was a hit, and it sure as hell can't be because people thought it was any good.



If you find yourself wondering whether starting this post by referencing the whole Kevin Clash thing was basically just an excuse for me to post this song, hey, you may be right.  But seriously--what a horrible song.  "I told Billy Ray/In his red Chevrolet" may be the worst lyric of all time, or at least until Billy Joel came up with "Talking to Davy/Who's still in the Navy" a couple years later.

But aside from its basic awfulness (did I mention rhyming "julep" with "two lips"?), the worst thing about this song is that it forces me to imagine Bobby Goldsboro having sex.  We'll never know for sure what Kevin Clash actually did.  But the very notion of Bobby Goldsboro banging hot older chicks?  That is a crime.

LUKE'S JUST NOT A FARMER, OWEN

I not only watched Space:1999, I proudly carried the luchbox to school every day, subscribed to the comic book, had both the Eagle 1 model kit and the much larger and more awesome Eagle playset.  My devotion to all things Planet Of The Apes-related led me to own numerous posters, action figures, comic books, the novelization of Beneath The Planet of The Apes (the first quote-unquote adult novel I ever read), a board game and so much more.

Upon starting fifth grade, I was thrilled to discover the middle school library was well-stocked with juvenile-skewing science fiction novels by the likes of Andre Norton and E.E. "Doc" Smith.  More importantly, book-wise, late in 1976 I bought a copy of Jeff Rovin's A Pictorial History Of Science Fiction Films, which was, as its title suggests, full of glorious images from classics like Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth, as well as glimpses of obscurities like the Soviet-made Ikarie XB and forgotten cheapies like Monster from Green Hell.  All these movies had one thing in common: I'd never seen any of them, and aside from the occasional lucky TV broadcast, I never would, not in that pre-cable, pre-VCR world.  I could imagine, but I could never experience.

So I was primed.  Before just happening to spot a full-page ad in the Sunday paper, I'd never even heard of Star Wars.  But that ad, running two weeks before the movie even opened, became the only thing that mattered in my world.  It was kind of hard to make out in the crappy newsprint, but it showed robots, and a girl in a gown holding a weapon, and a guy with some kind of crazy laser sword, or something.  I had to see this!

After relentless pestering of pretty much everyone in my family--I literally couldn't talk about anything else--my sister became the one to drive me all the way to Des Moines, to the cavernous River Hills auditorium, the only theater in the whole state--one of the few in the entire midwest--playing the movie.  The place was packed even two hours before showtime.  The lights went down, the curtains parted, the 20th Century Fox fanfare sounded, there was a written prologue, and then...well, once the Imperial cruiser glided implacably from the top of the screen, I felt a rush such as I'd never known.

This was it!  This was the movie--the experience!--I'd waited for my entire life.  Whatever I'd imagined, hoped, dreamed this movie would be, it was better, so much better than...well, better than anything ever.  There was nothing wrong with it, no boring parts, nothing where you had to pretend it was better than it was.  I bounced up and down in my seat the entire time, fully alive.  Surely this was the defining moment of my life.

Maybe it was.  But, you know, I had just turned twelve.  My life had very little definition to begin with.  Living on a farm in the middle of nowhere--just like Luke Skywalker!--I hated school, had very few friends and just generally felt lost.  These aren't exactly unusual circumstances, and my love of science fiction clearly indicated a desire to be taken away, to leave this farm and this life and this world, to be swept up into a galactic uprising, to destroy the Death Star and learn the ways of The Force.  Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Given all this, I was surprised to discover how indifferent I was to the announcement that George Lucas sold his company to Disney, which promptly announced plans for a new Star Wars movie.  Fandom seems divided between those who dread the Disneyfication of their beloved galaxy far far away and those who hate the prequels so much they are eager to see what Star Wars is like without the direct involvement of Lucas' increasingly heavy hand.

There's no way to minimize what Star Wars meant to me, but it was just one part of my life.  I remember a lot of things about that summer: I moved into a new room in the house, and it had an AM radio so I started listening to the local Top 40 station.  I finally read Fahrenheit 451.  Also, for whatever reason, I suddenly became obsessed with the idea of mortality, and spent a terrifying amount of time obsessing over the inevitable death of everyone I knew and loved.

I remember these things, all the profound feelings of joy and despair, but what I can't quite conjure is the person who actually experienced these emotions.  Twelve year old me is gone forever.  Sure, I'll always love Star Wars, but mostly for what it was, not what it still is.  It's just a movie, and honestly, it's not even all that good.  It's no longer vital, it doesn't matter, not in the life I lead now.  If someone wants to make a new one, good, bad, mediocre, I don't really care.

But maybe there'll be some kid out there, lost and lonely and unsure of his place in the world, and he'll see it, and it will be the most important thing in the world.

THE MOMENT'S GONE

I had a thing in mind I wanted to write about today--it was about the summer and fall of 1977, the year I first started listening to the radio, and how the seemingly bland and innocuous Top 40 ballads We're All Alone and Dust In The Wind both featured amazingly fatalistic lyrics, and whether constant exposure to aural wallpaper that reminded me of my mortality somehow contributed to the crippling depression and suicidal thoughts that would manifest themselves a few years later.  (Short answer: Probably not, but it certainly didn't help.)

Obviously, I haven't actually written that piece.  Or the one where I explain why I'm not really obsessed with Star Wars, or the one where I wrestle yet again with my inability to make a relationship last, or the one where...you get the idea.  I can crank out stuff about the dog and cats by the yard, but after so many times, how interesting is that?  Then again, how interesting is anything?  And what's the point, since we're all gonna die anyway?  Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky, man.  Dust in the wind...

Sorry.  Got kind of distracted there.  The point is...um...something.  Something about how regular posting might resume here in the near future?  Or not?  Yes, something like that...

I should probably provide some actual entertainment here, shouldn't I?  This is all I've got.  It's more than enough, though, isn't it?

AND THE BLUEST INK ISN'T REALLY SKY

1)  I'll start, as I do with alarming frequency lately, with the obligatory "Hey-it's-been-awhile" comment.  Last month I posted seven pieces in this space.  Nothing like when I used to write here every day, but more than one a week.  We're halfway through this month, and I'm just now getting around to putting up some new content.  And not even interesting content--just a time-killing Random Thoughts post.

Has inspiration dried up?  Have I run out of things to say?  Have I had more interesting things to do?  Possibly, possibly and dear God, no.

2)  But of course, I was pulled back to writing in order to comment on the momentous news that Russell Crowe and his wife are separating.  I think I speak for everyone when I say, "What?  Seriously?  Did we start caring about Russell Crowe again?"

The Associated Press story on this treats it as a tragedy on the level of the Kennedy assassination, but what can you expect from a news-gathering organization that continues to give us updates on Pete Wentz's doings, continuing to tease us with the possibility (or, more accurately, threat) of a Fall-Out Boy reunion? 

3)  So I'm driving down the Interstate the other day, and I'm passed by a vehicle with vanity plates that read LIVNWEL.  Seeing something like that, I immediately think of KENWINS from Breaking Bad.  But at least Ken was driving a BMW.  LIVNWEL had a Chevy Equinox.

Granted, it's certainly newer than my car, and perhaps fully paid for, so in that sense this clown could be said to be LIVN better than me.  But again, he's driving a fucking Chevy--a relatively high-end model, sure, but I'm not sure that constitutes LIVN all that WEL.  Certainly not WEL enough to brag about.

After all, if you were truly LIVNWEL, you wouldn't need to brag about it--your status would be obvious.  Driving an Equinox is strictly a middle-management guy's idea of the good life.  In that sense, this poor guy's pathetic boast kind of made me feel better.  My job sucks, but at least it doesn't give me delusions of importance.

4)  I saw Argo over the weekend, and I enjoyed it, but I feel the need to point out that it concludes with a "Where Are They Now?" crawl which unfolds over a series of shots of Star Wars action figures.  This does tie in, rather obliquely, with the true-life story Argo has to tell, but let's face it, what it really tells us is that director Ben Affleck is a child of the seventies.

If you were, I dunno, fifteen or under (I was twelve) in the summer of '77, your life can be neatly divided into before or after you saw Star Wars.  It was the center of your universe, at least for awhile, and even though you moved on, it still meant something, in the same way that baby boomers were influenced by the annual TV broadcasts of The Wizard Of Oz.  Doesn't mean you think it's the greatest movie ever, but it was important to you, it's cultural impact ran deep, and if you make a "These are not the droids you're looking for" reference, you can reasonably expect that whoever you're talking to will get it.

All this is to say, no matter what most people who know me seem to think, I'm not obsessed with Star Wars.

5)  Two mornings in a row, I woke up with fresh, deep scratches on my arm.  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a world without a terrifying psychotic cat.  But then I'd live in a world without Delmar, and I'd never want that.

YOU MAY SEE THE MEANING OF WITHIN

There's not much I can say about Paul Thomas Anderson's new film The Master.  Not to sound dismissive; in fact, I think it may be a genuinely great, profound work.  Still, it's so deeply personal--for Anderson, and for the viewer--that to try to think of something to say, to cast it into words...well, it feels inadequate and somehow disrespectful.

Others, of course, may disagree.  :Aren't you proud of me?" the middle-aged lady in the back row asked her companion literally the second the credits began to roll, her voice so loud the whole auditorium couldn't help but hear.  "I actually managed to stay awake through that stupid thing."  After a moment of silence, and apparently in case her opinion hadn't been made properly known, she continued: "What the hell was that even about?"

The two of them had arrived about ten minutes into the movie, but considering the parade of trailers ahead of time, close to a half hour after the posted start time.  More accurately, the quieter of the two arrived ten minutes in.  His loud-mouthed companion showed up a few minutes after that, large drink and popcorn in hand, which she proceeded to slurp and munch for some time afterward.

I realize my description of the distaff member of the duo might be a bit cruel, and might make me seem somewhat snobbish.  But honestly, her behavior invited ridicule.  As they worked their way down the aisle after the show, she continued her tirade, asking a complete stranger, "Do you even know what that was about?"

An odd question to ask, since The Master has more on its mind than almost any American film this year.  But an odd question, too, because even a rough description of the plot--what it's "about"--already reveals that it's not going to be a popcorn-munchin' movie.  Google's plot description reads thusly: "A psychologically troubled drifter returns from the war and meets the charismatic leader of a new religion."

Just from that, and from the trailers, which do a fairly good job of representing its elliptical style, I can't help but wonder why this person even showed up for this particular movie.  It wasn't for her, which is fine, but even a cursory amount of research would have told her that ahead of time.  I'm not saying she's an idiot because she didn't like it.

I'm saying she's an idiot for going to a movie she clearly knew nothing about, then expecting everyone else to agree with her snap judgement.

AND I LOVE ALL OF YOUR VOICES MORE THAN MY OWN

Happened to be flipping channels this morning and caught the opening of the 1969 Oscar-bait extravaganza Anne Of The Thousand Days, with Richard Burton in full-out Master Thespian mode, and immediately thought of this great SCTV bit.



A few notes:

1) Dave Thomas' Richard Harris impression is one of the greatest things in the history of the world.

2) If anything, John Candy's plummy Richard Burton doesn't go far enough.  Was Burton ever a particularly good actor?  On stage, maybe, but we have no record of that.  As far as his work on film goes, I'll give you The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?...and that's about it.  Everything else I've ever seen is unbearably hammy, projecting to the balcony without realizing there is no balcony on a film set.  Hey Dick, you've got a close-up--tone it down.

3) On the other hand, Joe Flaherty's Peter O'Toole, while technically accurate, is a little unfair.  Unlike Harris and Burton, O'Toole seemed to master film acting right from the start.  Even while giving overwrought performances in overproduced stage adaptations (as in The Lion In Winter, one of the obvious inspirations for this sketch), he at least made some attempt to portray the character beneath the high-flown speechifying.

4) Obviously, I found this clip on YouTube.  A commenter at that site smugly dismissed this entire sketch.  Why?  It was so overacted!

I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but this person is unbelievably stupid.

GHOSTS AND EMPTY SOCKETS

Earlier this week I wrote about the closing of my hometown movie theater.  One could romanticize such things and say the decline and eventual disappearance of small town cinemas is in itself the story of how movies went from being a shared, communal dream to just another time killer, how we went from palaces to multiplexes.  That would, however, completely overlook another step in the process, the type of auditorium mostly gone and never mourned: The mall theater.

Movie theaters had been built into shopping centers since the mid-sixties, but the trend didn't begin en masse until the seventies, when mall construction was ramped up under the delusion that these graceless bunkers could be "lifestyle emporiums", offering everything we could ever want--shopping, sure, but also food and entertainment.

Thus, with the same resemblance the offerings at Orange Julius or One Potato Two have to food, mall theaters had almost nothing in common with the grand cinemas that could still be found in most major cities: Two, three, maybe four crackerbox auditoriums, all with small screens, most with poor sightlines; small staffs, made up almost entirely of bored, surly teenagers with little idea how to run and maintain the projection equipment; and worst of all, a dark, dreary ambiance.

Here in Des Moines, showcase theaters still existed throughout the seventies and even into the early eighties.  The mighty River Hills and Riviera were reserved for the biggest of blockbusters--Earthquake, Star Wars, Superman and the like.  The Capri was for prestige offerings and Oscar bait, as was the Sierra.

The mall theaters were the Valley 3, the Southridge 3 and the Forum 4--or, to honor its neo-Roman logo, the Forvm IV.  They mostly showed the types of things people went to see--action, comedy, romance, Burt Reynolds pictures or Chevy Chase vehicles.  People may have enjoyed themselves, but the vibe was different.  They were no longer going out to the movies--they were going to the mall, and seeing a movie was something they did while they were there, in between swinging by The Gap and stopping at the food court.

Since most of the retail space in malls were targeted to young people, so too were most of the movies.  By the mid-eighties, the biggest blockbusters no longer played exclusively in the larger venues.  Sure, you could drive all the way downtown to see Top Gun at the River Hills, but why bother, since the Valley was closer, and you could shop at Foot Locker afterwards.  The more screens a movie played on, the easier it was to see it--no more lines, no more people being turned away.  Consequently, a hit wouldn't play all summer long, like Jaws or Grease.  It would have one, maybe two killer weekends, then head for video.

With the rise of disposable hits, theaters expanded, from six and seven screens to the googleplexes we have today.  The modern suburban multiplexes dealt a death blow to the mall theaters of old: more screens, bigger auditoriums, stadium seating, digital sound and projection.  Those out-of-focus, slightly misframed viewings of Pale Rider at the Valley 3 would officially be consigned to the past.

Miserable as they were, though, these theaters are still where I spent most of my movie-going life.  Maybe they didn't produce fond memories of the venues themselves, but they allowed me to see everything from Monty Python And The Holy Grail and Animal House to The Warriors and The Howling.  In that sense, they mattered.

I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND

It's like watching a loved one waste away from some terrible disease.  Bit by bit, the person you used to know disappears, and when they are finally gone, you have no tears.  Your grief has already been spent.

So it is with the announcement that dire financial circumstances forced the oddly-named Big Time Theaters to shutter three of its Iowa properties, including the 3-screen auditorium in my former hometown of Perry.  I'm completely indifferent.  I shouldn't be.

Much of my life has been lived in movie theaters.  I have regarded them with nearly sacred awe, within their walls I found the first stirrings of lust, have had my consciousness expanded, have been challenged and delighted, have been made to believe that magic is a real and tangible thing.  And it all started in Perry.

I was five, and the movie was the heavily-advertised nature documentary Cougar Country.  (Even then, I loved cats!)  I'd never been in a theater, and I remember all the details--the cheap yellow-with-red letters marquee, the glass-encased posters for Coming Attractions (including a reissue of The Wizard Of Oz), the almost overwhelming smell of popcorn in the small lobby, the cranky old guy tearing the tickets, the pop machine outside the auditorium (which struck me even then as odd, since they obviously sold pop at the concession stand), the hand-cranked paper towel dispensers in the men's room.  And the auditorium itself.

Oh, the auditorium.  The walls resplendent with huge WPA-era murals depicting the glories of rural life, as enacted by mostly faceless, godlike figures rendered in the style of Soviet poster art.  Beige curtains down in front, a small stage (never used) before the screen.  It was almost overwhelming to me, so elegant and unlike anything I had ever experienced, and when the movie started--Such a huge screen!  And filled with big cats!--I knew something in my life had changed.  Cougar Country itself faded from my memory almost as soon as it ended, but this experience lingered.  I wanted more.

Obviously, this theater holds a special place in my heart.  But this theater hadn't existed for years.  In the early eighties, it was gutted into a remarkably nondescript two-screener, the stage and the murals gone forever.  Later still, ambitious owner Robert Fridley overhauled it completely, two tiny screens and one would-be showcase auditorium, with curtains and busts of famous composers ringing the screen and stars on the ceiling.  Then it closed for awhile, reopened, changed hands.  And now it's closed again, most likely permanently.

Through all the renovations, it devolved from a shrine to cinema to just another place to see the latest blockbuster.  (The last thing I saw there was The Matrix Reloaded, a deeply unnecessary follow-up to a very well-regarded original, and something that could probably be teased into a metaphor for the moviegoing experience if I tried hard enough.)  Film-going habits have changed over the years, and the small town movie theater is no longer a vital part of the community.  From what I've heard, it hadn't been kept in very good shape, and with the changeover to digital projection, its days were numbered.

No need to mourn, then.  It had a good run, and that's more than enough.

ANYTHING YOU SAY, "SMOKIN'"

Non-acclaimed director Joe Carnahan--or, as he insisted on calling himself a few years ago, "Smokin' Joe" Carnahan--the auteur behind such fine films as Smokin' Aces and, uh, Smokin' Aces 2, is planning to make a new movie about a relatively mild-mannered sort who takes to the streets as a vigilante after his wife is brutally murdered.  The title of this project?  Death Wish.

"Oh," you're quite sensibly thinking.  "A remake of the old Charles Bronson movie."

But you're wrong, according to Smokin' Joe, who is actually throwing a kind of hissy fit over the fact that you would even think such a thing.  To clarify, he recently Tweeted this easily-mocked message:

Guys, for the record and so I don't have to answer this question a billion goddamn times.  'DEATH WISH' is NOT a remake.  At all, in ANY way.

Well, that certainly clarifies that.  Except...it's based on the same novel as the Bronson movie, it has the same basic premise and, oh yeah, IT'S CALLED DEATH WISH!

Carnahan's defensiveness is understandable.  Hollywood has gotten a lot of flack lately for increasingly unimaginative production slates, which seem to be filled with nothing but rehashes, reboots and remakes.  And most of these are incredibly pointless: How did a redo of Total Recall seem like a good idea to anybody?

Thing is, though, remakes in and of themselves aren't a bad thing.  Plenty of movies have intriguing premises poorly executed, and despite its somewhat iconic status, Death Wish is a very bad movie.  It's well-cast, and features great footage of New York City in its mid-seventies hell-on-earth prime, but the famously maladroit touch of director Michael Winner renders the whole thing pretty much unwatchable.  His pacing and staging are downright inept, and though Bronson is quite good, other fine actors like Vincent Gardenia and Stuart Margolin stumble through in confusion.

All that, plus a source novel that is much better and more morally complex, make Death Wish a perfectly good candidate for a remake.  And it's okay to admit it, Smokin' Joe--it is a remake.  And however it turns out, it won't be the worst thing you've ever done.  After all, you directed The A-Team.  Of course, that wasn't a remake, either, was it, Smokin' Joe?  I believe the term you used back then was "reimagining"...

I'M NOT THE OTHER ANYTHING

I first expressed this opinion when they were new, but now that I have a dog as well as cats, it's more obvious than ever: Aside from being two of the greatest animated films ever made, Up and Coraline are remarkably species-centric, and your opinion of cats or dogs is likely to color your opinion of either movie.

Consider Up.  It's...I was going to say "sentimental", but that's not quite true.  But certainly, it wears its outsized emotions on its sleeve, and encourages the audience to respond.  Most people cite the opening ten minutes, which quickly illuminate protagonist Carl Fredericksen's wonderful, heartbreaking life, as an emotional highlight, but to me, it's this scene, these lines, that caused me to blubber uncontrollably right there in the theater.

I should mention that this scene is carefully set up, with Carl's discovery that his late wife wanted him to continue to live his life in her absence, so his sudden acceptance of Dug, who'd been begging for his love for the entire movie, is absolutely cathartic.

More than that, though, it's just a dog thing--"I hid under your porch because I love you!"  Who wouldn't want to hug that dog?  And what dog isn't that devoted to its master?  It's why people love dogs.  They're awesome.

As are cats, but in wildly different ways.  There's something about them that is mysterious, unknowable.  Maybe even creepy, as perfectly illustrated by this scene from Coraline.  The terrifying final shot in this sequence is something I've wakened to pretty much every day of my life.

Unlike Dug, who simply wants his master's love, the cat--unnamed, because, as he explains, he knows who he is--is waking Coraline for a specific purpose.  He needs her, and in that sense respects her, but actual affection?  That doesn't really enter into it.

As a movie, Coraline seems to take its cue from the cat.  It's breathtakingly beautiful to behold, and is infinitely wise, but emotionally, it's a little remote.  It's so confident in its sense of purpose that it doesn't seem to care whether the audience follows it or not.  As a piece of filmmaking, it seems to me unquestionably better than Up.  But I don't enjoy it as much.

Whatever other entertainment they provide, the most important lessons we learn from these movies is that dogs are sweet and loveable (even bad dogs can be rehabilitated) and that cats are genuinely otherworldly and do indeed know everything.  That seems about right.

ANYWAY, WE DELIVERED THE BOMB

Every movie is a product of its time, and yet somehow the best films transcend whatever reputation they may have had during their initial release.  Any reasonably intelligent viewer would value the work itself, not whatever trends it may or may not have inspired.

Yet when Jaws--by pretty much any standard, one of the greatest suspense films ever made--made its long-awaited Blu-Ray debut earlier this month, literally every single review I read of it, even by esteemed critics like Dave Kehr of The New York Times, took time out to lament the fact that this one film essentially gave birth to the modern blockbuster age, and somehow single-handedly (or perhaps in collusion with Star Wars, depending on which theory you buy into) brought the glorious director-dominated era of the seventies to a close.

This has been repeated so often it is now accepted as common knowledge, even by people who weren't even born when Jaws was released.  And it's just not true.

Let's consider some of the fallacies contained in this theory.

1) Jaws was the first big-time blockbuster, and its TV-dominated ad campaign and saturation release set the model for the future.

Yes, Jaws famously made a ton of money, and was at the time considered the most financially successful movie of all time.  But even that statistic is debatable--it made its fortune in the mid-seventies, when ticket prices had risen up to three times what they were in the previous decade.  If you count the number of actual tickets sold, it was far less successful than, say, The Sound Of Music or Thunderball.

(And if you want to talk about a widely-released blockbuster that was sold heavily on TV, hell, Thunderball is a great place to start.  There were toys, there were clothes, there were records, and there were tons and tons of crappy movies trying desperately to replicate its success.  The James Bond phenom of the sixties was a huge deal, and had a tremendous influence on mainstream cinema, yet even the most passionate Bond haters would never grant it the mythical power to ruin everything so routinely ascribed to Jaws.)

It's important to remember that Jaws was released by Universal, one of the canniest studios of the era in terms of maximizing profits.  Very few of the more artistic films of the seventies came from Universal; they cranked out schlock like Earthquake and the Airport series.  They invented Sensurround, for God's sake, a creation that by itself should destroy the notion that the pre-Jaws era was some sort of filmmaker's paradise.

To the suits at Universal, every movie was product.  Sometimes, when the product was actually good (The Sting, for instance), the audience responded with actual enthusiasm, and ticket sales were higher than had even been calculated.  They expected Jaws to be a hit before it even went into production--they even considered casting reliable disaster movie icon Charlton Heston at one point--but once they saw it, they realized it had breakout potential, and the ad campaign they whipped up ("Rated PG...But may be too intense for younger children", a COME-ON that would do Sam Arkoff proud) worked like a charm.  But really, the selling of it was just business as usual for Universal.  It's what they did.

2) Jaws brought the New Hollywood era of the seventies to an end.

Universal was a division of MCA, a company with major investments in TV and music, and it had been since the fifties.  Other major studios may have been bought by other companies--Paramount by Gulf + Western, United Artists by TransAmerica--or they may have still been independent entities, like Twenthieth Century-Fox and Columbia.  But they were all still all in touch with their glorious histories.  Lew Wasserman was at Universal, Daryl Zanuck still ran Fox at the beginning of the decade.  Jack Warner himself was still at Warner Bros. at the start of the New Hollywood age, and oversaw the production of Bonnie And Clyde, the movie that really started the era.

Even better, the studio heads who weren't left over from the forties and fifties knew what they were doing.  Paramount's Robert Evans may have been a terrible, terrible human being, but he oversaw the production of Rosemary's Baby and The Godfather and Chinatown.  John Calley at Warner Bros., Alan Ladd at Fox--these guys loved movies.  And as long as the budgets were kept relatively low, they were happy to sign unknown, promising talent.

And boy, did some great movies result.  Harold And Maude and The Last Detail, McCabe And Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye and Nashville, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, and so on and so forth.

But the thing is, none of these movies set the box office on fire.  The popular movies of the era were disaster movies or schlock like Love Story or action movies with the likes of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.  (Amusingly, the fact that Eastwood himself was one of the best directors of the era was completely overlooked by critics at the time.)  In other words, studios then as now made movies they thought would be big hits.  Jaws may have made more money in a shorter amount of time than, say, The Godfather or The Exorcist, but it was part of a blockbuster trend those films had started.  (The fact that all three were also extraordinary films might have contributed to their success as well.)

The New Hollywood filmmakers who flamed out didn't do so because of the success of Jaws.  They did it to themselves.  The poster boy for this would have to be Francis Coppola, who followed up Apocalypse Now by pouring ridiculous sums of money into One From The Heart, a movie that had absolutely no chance of recouping its budget, and which, more to the point, is completely tone-deaf.  It's not a bad movie so much as a completely misbegotten one, and it's failure put Coppola in hock for over a decade, working as a director for hire on crap like The Cotton Club and--shudder--Jack. 

Finally, on this topic, how did Jaws exactly end the era of the filmmaker, anyway?  Martin Scorsese's immediate post-seventies movies included Raging Bull, The King Of Comedy and The Last Temptation Of Christ.  Two years after Jaws, Robert Altman dropped 3 Women, one of his best, and followed with A Wedding and A Perfect Couple, two of his least commercial movies ever.  But he got them made, and released.  How did Jaws destroy his ability to do that?

3) In the Lucas/Spielberg era, sensation is prized above everthing else.

When George Lucas made Star Wars, or more importantly, when Twentieth Century-Fox agreed to put up the money for it, expectations couldn't have been too high.  Lucas himself famously said he thought it would be "Disney successful"--popular with kids, maybe turn a profit, not much more.  Fox was probably expecting a somewhat higher-end version of Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad movies, which were wildly popular in the seventies.

But of course, it was huge--bigger than Jaws.  Honestly, though, it wasn't really designed to be a blockbuster.  The ad campaign was relatively modest, and it didn't have a saturation release--here in Iowa, it only played in one theater in the entire state during its initial release.

Movies in those days didn't open in 4000 theaters, or even 400.  If you wanted to see a movie right away, you had to make it an event.  If you liked it, and wanted to see it again, it wasn't going to be on TV for well over a year, much less on video.  You had to see it in the theater.  A studio could open a movie, but they couldn't make it a smash.  Only the audience could do that.

Audiences loved Jaws and Star Wars.  They made them hits.  Meanwhile, elsewhere in Hollywood, sinister forces were at work.  Michael Eisner was brought in from Paramount's TV division to run the movie studio.  Alan Ladd was forced out of Fox, which would ultimately become a mere cog in Rupert Murdoch's scary empire.  Coca-Cola bought Columbia, then sold it to Sony.

Almost overnight, studios were no longer being run by people who loved, or even understood movies, but by corporate types who cared only about the bottom line.  They wanted blockbusters because they wanted to make money, and nothing else.  This is what killed the movies, and it would have happened regardless of the success of Jaws or Star Wars.  Production costs rose so high that literally every big movie made these days is a co-production, which is why we have to sit through endless corporate logos at the start of every movie we see now.

And yes, it is true, some of the worst movies of the modern era were made under the aegis of Spielberg or Lucas.  (I say this as someone who saw both The Money Pit and Howard The Duck.)  So what?  That doesn't automatically render what they had made earlier as crap.  That just means they learned how to play the corporate game, to fit in and survive in an era that doesn't care about quality, a reality that was bound to happen with or without their earlier successes.

Some of the best filmmakers of the seventies may have crashed and burned, and some may have lost their souls, but many of them are still around.  (Brian DePalma has a new movie coming this fall, and I can't wait.)  The eighties and nineties saw the emergence of many great new directors--Joel and Ethan Coen, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Jane Campion, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne and so many more.  And for God's sake, has any decade been kinder to a director than the eighties were to Woody Allen?  Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Hannah And Her Sisters, Radio Days--That's an astonishing run, made in the multiplex era, when the director-driven movie was supposedly no longer being made.

If Jaws killed a glorious era, why are there still so many good movies being made?