Orange. Maybe closer to brown. Somewhere in between. Burnt umber, according to the Crayola Corporation.
All the walls are like this here. Lime green, if the lime is overripe. Sky blue, and oppressively cloudless. A combination of bright and neutral. Soothing by design. Don't want to have anything that might disturb the nutjobs.
But here, in my room, orange. Two toned orange. The color of puke from someone who's eaten too many fruit-flavored Pop Tarts. Not soothing. Disturbing.
Or maybe it's just me. I'm the disturbed one, right? I've got the scars on my wrist to prove it. Colors that are interesting might somehow angry up my blood, make me want to harm myself. Not that it would be easy to do that around here. They won't even let me have a plastic fork unless I'm supervised. Can't even have a can of instant pudding because it has sharp edges.
But hey, I can have books. No sharpened pencils for me, but they didn't have a problem with my mom bringing in a copy of Naked Lunch, which, let's face it, seem like the most cliched book a suicidal young man could be reading. Maybe I should read one of the books they have in the day room, old Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins potboilers, or one of the eighty million Harlequin Romances. It might be nice to know what normal people like. If there are such things as normal people.
******************************************************************************
The windows in the day room face east. The blinds are up, and morning light floods the room. Then again, even with the blinds down, the lemon-yellow walls are clearly meant to induce some kind of fake cheer. But it doesn't work like that. When you're depressed, a perfect sunny day is just something to be endured. The few people who are out sit in chairs as far from the windows as possible.
I seem to be one of the younger people here. No sign of that cute girl I saw last night, the one I almost certainly won't talk to, because that would mean talking to someone, and I don't do that. But that guy who looks kinda like Sean Penn in Bad Boys, he's here, still strutting around like he's waiting for his closeup. Most of the people are in their thirties and forties, lost in themselves, making occasional small talk with the attendants but never interacting with each other.
The TV is tuned to Good Morning, America. I'd turn it over to cartoons, but that's probably discouraged. If we saw Jerry whack Tom with a pool cue, it might give us bad ideas. My first morning here, and I feel like I've been here for years.
*******************************************************************************
Mom called last night, and asked if I'd watched the first episode of some new Earl Hamner-created TV series about young kids volunteering in a senior citizen home. No, I hadn't seen it.
"Well, if you're still there next week, all of you should watch. It's so nauseatingly sweet, it'll make you all mad. You can form discussion groups and talk about how much you hate it."
So, summing up: My mother phones her son in the psych ward for no better reason than to complain about a horrible TV show she watched.
Yeah, we're definitely related.
********************************************************************************
I made a reference to Zelig during my counseling session this morning, and my therapist actually knew what I was talking about. She even seemed to appreciate it, and I was encouraged, so I told her I wanted to make other semi-brainy references so she'd like me more, and I'd fit in, and I wanted be the depressed loser I am. Then she asked me if I'd always felt like that around other people.
No, I said. It was a joke. Another Zelig reference. Ugh. Jokes never work when you have to explain them.
*******************************************************************************
There's a dry-erase board in the dayroom and every day a new stupid homily/affirmation/line of bullshit is written on it. Today's bit of wisdom is this: "A comfort zone is relaxing, but nothing ever grows there."
What the hell? OK, first of all, that's just stupid on the face of it. So we shouldn't do what we're comfortable with, what we're good at? Joe Namath's entire post-football career is a strong argument against that. And did anybody ever watch a Marx Brothers movie and think, yeah, these guys need to do some heavy drama?
But more importantly...what the hell does that have to do with me, or anybody in this ward? Comfort zone? I cut my fucking wrists a few days ago. I don't feel comfortable anywhere. I would kill just for the chance to have a comfort zone. I don't know what it's like. Maybe I will someday, but I doubt that I'll get there if the best you can offer me by way of a cure is meaningless catch phrases and bright colors.
I go back to my room, to the burnt umber walls and scribbled notepads, and I stare out the window. There are trees and grass and sunshine, and it all looks like some alien world to me.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Thursday, April 10, 2014
I SUPPOSE I SHOULD JUST--GOD HELP ME--LET IT GO
So the Frozen soundtrack is once again atop the charts, the Blu-ray and DVD release is poised to sell a bajillion copies, even as the movie itself is still in theaters, and still racking up record ticket sales.
And that's fine, really. It's a good movie. Honest. It's easily one of the best animated movies of the last few years, which, okay, granted, isn't exactly wild praise. (It's better than Turbo and Rio combined!) It tells a good story, it tells it well, the characterizations are vivid, it's funny and even occasionally moving.
I just don't know why it's animated.
This is the problem I have with at least 90% of recent CGI movies: They're so busy trying to recreate reality, with meticulously rendered hair and fabrics, that they beg the question of why they weren't shot in live action anyway.
Consider this, the big moment from Frozen, the most character-defining moment. In particular note the action starting at about 2:56.
Yes, she's literally letting her hair down, but the moment is a total throwaway, because absolutely nothing is done to emphasize it. There is literally nothing in this entire sequence that gains from being animated. Or, more accurately, there's nothing here that takes advantage of what animation can do. The settings and movements are depicted with thudding literalism.
This is the recurring problem with computer animated features. All the software is written to depict a sort of reality. The settings are meticulously rendered, and furnished with equally realistic lighting. The Dreamworks feature How To Train Your Dragon went so far as to hire the great cinematographer Roger Deakins as a visual consultant. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that maybe, for an animated movie, they should employ painters or graphic artists instead. That's the advantage settings in an animated film have over live action: They can turn abstract, or deploy colors purely for visual emotional effect. Here's a sequence from Pocahontas, a lesser film in the Disney canon, one of their last big successes in cel animation before Pixar started the CGI revolution with Toy Story.
Even before the visuals turn vaguely abstract, the colors are varied, the shades of blue alone turn according to the emotion of the scene. Quite a contrast with Frozen, where the color and lighting remains the same from shot to shot.
But the movement is even more mundane that the setting. Again, consider the shot of her letting down her hair. She just kind of reaches up, removes the tiara and her hair...just falls. The moment isn't emphasized, or, more to the point, the movement isn't emphasized. Animation is all about exaggeration, a caricature of reality, but that isn't what happens here. It's what you'd see if this was being performed on a stage, but shouldn't the power of animation be used to emphasize the significance of the moment? She's becoming a whole new person, but this is depicted almost entirely through the song and through Idina Menzel's powerhouse vocals. True, she's making a palace over in her own new image, but even that is depicted rather prosaically--that is, the character is literally doing this, and we see it, but it doesn't have the impact it would have with more vivid staging.
I admit, I prefer hand-drawn animation to CGI, but every form of art has its strengths and limitations. Brad Bird made fine use of stylized movement and realistic settings in The Incredibles, Pete Docter beatifully gave cartoonishly-designed characters a sense of reality in Up and, though the movie itself isn't much, Genndy Tartakovsky proved computer animated characters could stretch and squash with the best of old school cartoons in Hotel Transylvania. My problem isn't really with computer animation, it's with how it's deployed. And with the massive success of Frozen, it seems less likely than ever that anyone will try to do anything new.
And that's fine, really. It's a good movie. Honest. It's easily one of the best animated movies of the last few years, which, okay, granted, isn't exactly wild praise. (It's better than Turbo and Rio combined!) It tells a good story, it tells it well, the characterizations are vivid, it's funny and even occasionally moving.
I just don't know why it's animated.
This is the problem I have with at least 90% of recent CGI movies: They're so busy trying to recreate reality, with meticulously rendered hair and fabrics, that they beg the question of why they weren't shot in live action anyway.
Consider this, the big moment from Frozen, the most character-defining moment. In particular note the action starting at about 2:56.
Yes, she's literally letting her hair down, but the moment is a total throwaway, because absolutely nothing is done to emphasize it. There is literally nothing in this entire sequence that gains from being animated. Or, more accurately, there's nothing here that takes advantage of what animation can do. The settings and movements are depicted with thudding literalism.
This is the recurring problem with computer animated features. All the software is written to depict a sort of reality. The settings are meticulously rendered, and furnished with equally realistic lighting. The Dreamworks feature How To Train Your Dragon went so far as to hire the great cinematographer Roger Deakins as a visual consultant. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that maybe, for an animated movie, they should employ painters or graphic artists instead. That's the advantage settings in an animated film have over live action: They can turn abstract, or deploy colors purely for visual emotional effect. Here's a sequence from Pocahontas, a lesser film in the Disney canon, one of their last big successes in cel animation before Pixar started the CGI revolution with Toy Story.
Even before the visuals turn vaguely abstract, the colors are varied, the shades of blue alone turn according to the emotion of the scene. Quite a contrast with Frozen, where the color and lighting remains the same from shot to shot.
But the movement is even more mundane that the setting. Again, consider the shot of her letting down her hair. She just kind of reaches up, removes the tiara and her hair...just falls. The moment isn't emphasized, or, more to the point, the movement isn't emphasized. Animation is all about exaggeration, a caricature of reality, but that isn't what happens here. It's what you'd see if this was being performed on a stage, but shouldn't the power of animation be used to emphasize the significance of the moment? She's becoming a whole new person, but this is depicted almost entirely through the song and through Idina Menzel's powerhouse vocals. True, she's making a palace over in her own new image, but even that is depicted rather prosaically--that is, the character is literally doing this, and we see it, but it doesn't have the impact it would have with more vivid staging.
I admit, I prefer hand-drawn animation to CGI, but every form of art has its strengths and limitations. Brad Bird made fine use of stylized movement and realistic settings in The Incredibles, Pete Docter beatifully gave cartoonishly-designed characters a sense of reality in Up and, though the movie itself isn't much, Genndy Tartakovsky proved computer animated characters could stretch and squash with the best of old school cartoons in Hotel Transylvania. My problem isn't really with computer animation, it's with how it's deployed. And with the massive success of Frozen, it seems less likely than ever that anyone will try to do anything new.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
I HEAR YOU ARE SINGING A SONG OF THE PAST
There's an old issue of Weird War Tales about a soldier who receives a talisman from some wizened gypsy that reveals the moth and year of his death. It's the middle of World War II, but this talisman says he won't die until sometime in the seventies. Which means...well, as far as this war goes, he's bullet-proof. He begins taking crazy chances, because he knows he won't die. Except the talisman only promises he'll still be alive by that date. It doesn't say his body will be in one piece...
Cheap irony, with a big twist you can see coming from a mile away, but it made a huge impression on eight-year-old me, and I find myself thinking about it a lot lately because...Well, partly because my brain pan is crowded and random memories float to the surface and refuse to leave. But mostly because reading that story provided the first time I'd ever considered mortality. There's no magic talisman, and you can't know the precise date and time, but there will come a day when you will die.
It's OK, really. I'm fine. As far as I know. That's the thing, though: As far as I know. But I turn forty-nine in a couple of months. My mom and dad both had colon cancer. Family history being what it is, I have a preview of what's going to happen. Sure, a safe could fall on me or my heart could explode, but barring that, I will get cancer and die. It's a certainty, an inevitability, like Charlie Sheen getting fired from another TV show.
(Incidentally, and because I love pointless parenthetical asides, I would observe here that almost twenty years ago--Lordy, I'm old--when I used to write for a kinda-sorta-alt weekly in Des Moines, I was known to use Charlie Sheen as a metaphor for terrible things happening so often that one of the editors rejected a column with a hand-written note: "Charlie Sheen AGAIN?")
Obviously, like most people, I'll ignore the warning signs, signs that will be in flashing neon because, again, I know they're coming, and soon it will be too late and...Why yes, funny you should ask, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. And I wish I could say I've been using all that time in a valuable way, taking stock of my life, making plans for the great inevitable, or maybe for crying out loud actually getting around to doing some work on that one idea I had for a novel that one time that really, swear to God, would have been great, I had a killer opening paragraph and everything but man it just kind of sat there and I was so terrified by the notion that it wouldn't be interesting for more than twenty, thirty pages max that I just kind of let it die.
But, uh, I've done none of those things. Things get in the way. Good things, mostly, and bad ones, too. I mean, my life is good, relatively speaking. I try to live in the here-and-now, but the reality of now changes as you go through life. You acquire knowledge along the way, and you can rage against it, or try to ignore it, or even accept it, but that knowledge rules your existence.
So sometimes I escape into the past: I'm sprawled out on the couch in the living room, all excited because when Mom came home from town today, she brought me the latest issue of Weird War Tales, always one of my favorites. I open the cover with anticipation, not knowing that will be the last moment of my life untouched by a feeling of creeping dread.
Cheap irony, with a big twist you can see coming from a mile away, but it made a huge impression on eight-year-old me, and I find myself thinking about it a lot lately because...Well, partly because my brain pan is crowded and random memories float to the surface and refuse to leave. But mostly because reading that story provided the first time I'd ever considered mortality. There's no magic talisman, and you can't know the precise date and time, but there will come a day when you will die.
It's OK, really. I'm fine. As far as I know. That's the thing, though: As far as I know. But I turn forty-nine in a couple of months. My mom and dad both had colon cancer. Family history being what it is, I have a preview of what's going to happen. Sure, a safe could fall on me or my heart could explode, but barring that, I will get cancer and die. It's a certainty, an inevitability, like Charlie Sheen getting fired from another TV show.
(Incidentally, and because I love pointless parenthetical asides, I would observe here that almost twenty years ago--Lordy, I'm old--when I used to write for a kinda-sorta-alt weekly in Des Moines, I was known to use Charlie Sheen as a metaphor for terrible things happening so often that one of the editors rejected a column with a hand-written note: "Charlie Sheen AGAIN?")
Obviously, like most people, I'll ignore the warning signs, signs that will be in flashing neon because, again, I know they're coming, and soon it will be too late and...Why yes, funny you should ask, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. And I wish I could say I've been using all that time in a valuable way, taking stock of my life, making plans for the great inevitable, or maybe for crying out loud actually getting around to doing some work on that one idea I had for a novel that one time that really, swear to God, would have been great, I had a killer opening paragraph and everything but man it just kind of sat there and I was so terrified by the notion that it wouldn't be interesting for more than twenty, thirty pages max that I just kind of let it die.
But, uh, I've done none of those things. Things get in the way. Good things, mostly, and bad ones, too. I mean, my life is good, relatively speaking. I try to live in the here-and-now, but the reality of now changes as you go through life. You acquire knowledge along the way, and you can rage against it, or try to ignore it, or even accept it, but that knowledge rules your existence.
So sometimes I escape into the past: I'm sprawled out on the couch in the living room, all excited because when Mom came home from town today, she brought me the latest issue of Weird War Tales, always one of my favorites. I open the cover with anticipation, not knowing that will be the last moment of my life untouched by a feeling of creeping dread.
Monday, December 16, 2013
DAMN YOUR PACIFISM!
It's unpleasant, to say nothing of unseemly, to turn this space into an ongoing obit section for my cultural heroes. I don't write much anymore, and when I do, it seems like it's yet another memorial piece. And it's sad and depressing, and honestly, I don't enjoy doing it, which is why there hasn't been anything here remembering Nelson Mandela or Doris Lessing or, most recently, Peter O'Toole.
Then Billy Jack dies, and dammit, that shit's personal.
If you were the right age in the 1970s, the half-breed ex-Green Beret ass-kicking pacifist Billy Jack was as big a deal as Bigfoot or Evel Knievel. The creation of writer/director/producer/star/messiah Tom Laughlin, our Billy first appeared in 1967's The Born Losers, a routine biker picture (albeit one with an unconscionable 113 minute running time, because Laughlin's ego was already in place), but it was 1971's Billy Jack that briefly made the character and the actor household names.
A weird mix of standard drive-in fodder with typical early 70s hippy-dippy mysticism, Billy Jack is less noted as a movie as for how it was sold: A flop in its initial release, Laughlin famously sued Warner Bros. and reacquired the rights to the picture and sold it his own way, renting out neighborhood theaters one at a time and keeping all the profits himself. Both the four-walling of theaters and the accompanying heavy duty TV ad campaign were highly influential--the notoriously awful indie outfit Sunn Classic Pictures used Laughlin's technique to sell their fake documentaries like The Mysterious Monsters and In Search of Noah's Ark.
It worked--Billy Jack became a smash hit, and Warner Bros. rereleased it again using a variation of Laughlin's technique ("See it again...for the first time!"), and it was a smash one more time. It was basically a liberal-populist version of the conservative-populist Walking Tall, and it played small towns and drive-ins forever.
At the box office, if not artistically, Laughlin had even grander visions. The 1974 sequel, The Trial Of Billy Jack, was again produced in conjunction with Warner Bros., but Laughlin mapped out the ad campaign himself. It was the first movie to open really wide--over a thousand theaters at once, quite a feat in those pre-multiplex days--accompanied by a massive advertising blitz. (I remember the full-page color ad in the comics section of The Des Moines Sunday Register!) It worked--the movie made a then-astonishing $11,000,000 in one weekend. Those numbers are amazing--that's at the level of Jaws or Star Wars.
Except the movie sucked, and after the first weekend, it tanked.
And thus ended Laughlin's career, basically. He made a horrible semi-mystical Western, The Master Gunfighter ("A Billy Jack Enterprises Production") and the barely released Billy Jack Goes To Washington...and then he just kind of went away.
Laughlin had been a journeyman actor for over a decade before his big success, with guest shots on TV and bit parts in the likes of Tea And Sympathy and South Pacific. But Billy Jack--the character and the movie--seemed to change him. The Trial Of Billy Jack is a terrible, terrible movie, and sitting through it is like spending three hours with your nutjob conspiracy-theory cousin, the kind of guy you assume is a hardcore lefty until you notice his Ron Paul For President bumper sticker, and even if you agree with its politics, you'll cringe at the presentation.
But Laughlin clearly believed. He meant every half-baked they're-all-out-to-get-us assertion, and to him it wasn't a movie, it was a manifesto. Going back to mere acting wasn't in the cards for Laughlin, so his celluloid legacy pretty much begins and ends with the original Billy Jack, the only halfway decent movie he ever made.
And that's the strange part. A big deal at the time, it's kind of sad how little impact it ultimately made. Laughlin was a marketing genius, and it's easy to imagine he could have had a nice career as an action star, a philosophically aware Clint Eastwood, but that's not what he wanted. He had to tell the truth, man.
As the seventies ended, Laughlin tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at politics, and wrote vanity-press books on psychology and alternative medicine. And he kept making plans for more Billy Jack movies, including one with the wonderful title Billy Jack's Crusade To End The War In Iraq And Restore America To Its Moral Purpose, which suggests that his ego certainly never diminished.
Laughlin died this month at the age of 82, having failed to bring an end to racism or war or poverty or any of the things his character stood for. But you know what? In 1975, my brother Keith dragged ten-year-old me to a re-release of Billy Jack pretty much for the sole purpose of making fun of it. We counted the number of times the boom mike was visible, we yelled out our own responses to some of the dumber dialogue, we laughed at the action scenes. But we had a great time watching it, and I've seen it countless times since then, and enjoyed it every time.
So no, Billy Jack didn't change the world. But he taught me how to watch movies critically, and I'll always love him for that.
Then Billy Jack dies, and dammit, that shit's personal.
If you were the right age in the 1970s, the half-breed ex-Green Beret ass-kicking pacifist Billy Jack was as big a deal as Bigfoot or Evel Knievel. The creation of writer/director/producer/star/messiah Tom Laughlin, our Billy first appeared in 1967's The Born Losers, a routine biker picture (albeit one with an unconscionable 113 minute running time, because Laughlin's ego was already in place), but it was 1971's Billy Jack that briefly made the character and the actor household names.
A weird mix of standard drive-in fodder with typical early 70s hippy-dippy mysticism, Billy Jack is less noted as a movie as for how it was sold: A flop in its initial release, Laughlin famously sued Warner Bros. and reacquired the rights to the picture and sold it his own way, renting out neighborhood theaters one at a time and keeping all the profits himself. Both the four-walling of theaters and the accompanying heavy duty TV ad campaign were highly influential--the notoriously awful indie outfit Sunn Classic Pictures used Laughlin's technique to sell their fake documentaries like The Mysterious Monsters and In Search of Noah's Ark.
It worked--Billy Jack became a smash hit, and Warner Bros. rereleased it again using a variation of Laughlin's technique ("See it again...for the first time!"), and it was a smash one more time. It was basically a liberal-populist version of the conservative-populist Walking Tall, and it played small towns and drive-ins forever.
At the box office, if not artistically, Laughlin had even grander visions. The 1974 sequel, The Trial Of Billy Jack, was again produced in conjunction with Warner Bros., but Laughlin mapped out the ad campaign himself. It was the first movie to open really wide--over a thousand theaters at once, quite a feat in those pre-multiplex days--accompanied by a massive advertising blitz. (I remember the full-page color ad in the comics section of The Des Moines Sunday Register!) It worked--the movie made a then-astonishing $11,000,000 in one weekend. Those numbers are amazing--that's at the level of Jaws or Star Wars.
Except the movie sucked, and after the first weekend, it tanked.
And thus ended Laughlin's career, basically. He made a horrible semi-mystical Western, The Master Gunfighter ("A Billy Jack Enterprises Production") and the barely released Billy Jack Goes To Washington...and then he just kind of went away.
Laughlin had been a journeyman actor for over a decade before his big success, with guest shots on TV and bit parts in the likes of Tea And Sympathy and South Pacific. But Billy Jack--the character and the movie--seemed to change him. The Trial Of Billy Jack is a terrible, terrible movie, and sitting through it is like spending three hours with your nutjob conspiracy-theory cousin, the kind of guy you assume is a hardcore lefty until you notice his Ron Paul For President bumper sticker, and even if you agree with its politics, you'll cringe at the presentation.
But Laughlin clearly believed. He meant every half-baked they're-all-out-to-get-us assertion, and to him it wasn't a movie, it was a manifesto. Going back to mere acting wasn't in the cards for Laughlin, so his celluloid legacy pretty much begins and ends with the original Billy Jack, the only halfway decent movie he ever made.
And that's the strange part. A big deal at the time, it's kind of sad how little impact it ultimately made. Laughlin was a marketing genius, and it's easy to imagine he could have had a nice career as an action star, a philosophically aware Clint Eastwood, but that's not what he wanted. He had to tell the truth, man.
As the seventies ended, Laughlin tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at politics, and wrote vanity-press books on psychology and alternative medicine. And he kept making plans for more Billy Jack movies, including one with the wonderful title Billy Jack's Crusade To End The War In Iraq And Restore America To Its Moral Purpose, which suggests that his ego certainly never diminished.
Laughlin died this month at the age of 82, having failed to bring an end to racism or war or poverty or any of the things his character stood for. But you know what? In 1975, my brother Keith dragged ten-year-old me to a re-release of Billy Jack pretty much for the sole purpose of making fun of it. We counted the number of times the boom mike was visible, we yelled out our own responses to some of the dumber dialogue, we laughed at the action scenes. But we had a great time watching it, and I've seen it countless times since then, and enjoyed it every time.
So no, Billy Jack didn't change the world. But he taught me how to watch movies critically, and I'll always love him for that.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, September 01, 2013
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".
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".
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, December 31, 2012
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?
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?
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, November 02, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
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?
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?
Monday, October 15, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, September 28, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, September 24, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, September 21, 2012
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.
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.
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