Oscar Mayer in a Blanket... or a nutshell...

Scorcese finally won.
Pan's Labyrinth took 3 out of 6.
Alan Arkin stole one and Sunshine took screenplay.
Monster House did not win, but Al Gore did (again).

I am cool with all of this.

Recently Rated Movies #40: Failing to Catch Up to the Oscars

Another Oscar ceremony, and I've somehow, barely, seen anything nominated.

This post has been awhile in the making, but only because I was trying to get in as many Oscar-nominated films in before the ceremony tonight as I could. Unfortunately, Jen has been in rehearsals for a show at Disney over the past few weeks, so our time to see movies together has been drastically decreased. Add to that my exhaustion in getting preparations together for my company's convention and putting out our publications, and you might well see why I just stay home once I get home, instead of having to trek out to the theatres, which takes a bit more for me than someone who actually drives. In Alaska, I lived about a mile away from many of our theatres, but here, it is not so. As such, the nominated films I did see on the list below were all when Jen and I could go together, and all within the over-three-weeks-ago or longer range, and some at the beginning of January.

The result is that I really have no interest in picking who will win at the Oscars this year. So many people believe that most of the major acting awards are foregone conclusions anyway, and since I have not seen most of the performances, I don't feel that I have any right to say what I think in this area. I can tell you whom I would like to see win, but that always seems to muddy the pond, so to speak. People generally don't want to know what you would like to win or what should have been nominated, but what you think will win. I could rail on and on about how Pan's Labyrinth should be up for Best Picture instead of just Best Foreign Language Film, and it would generally fall on deaf ears, like I hadn't said it all, and then my "listeners" would ask of me, "Yes, but which one will win?"

Of course, I am ever the one to throw that shit back in their face and reinforce my belief that the Academy is wrong-headed as always. Pan's Labyrinth is the best film that I saw in a theatre this year, and my favorite film overall was Brick, even though it was made in 2004, released only to film festivals in 2005 and got a limited theatrical run midway through 2006. For me, it is a 2006 film, even if I only saw it on DVD. And to reiterate what I have shouted before: Over the Hedge is the Best Animated Film of the year, even if it did not get nominated in a category that has one poor choice and two OK ones. (I'm rooting for Pixar's Cars, though I liked Happy Feet a tad more, in the only category where I have seen all of the nominees... just 'cause...)

Of the nominated films, I have seen four of them, as our attempts to reach Letters from Iwo Jima over the past fortnight were quashed by time and illness. I liked The Departed and Babel, thought The Queen was a bit of alright (quite good, actually), and outright loved the exceedingly quirky and small Little Miss Sunshine. I am rooting for Sunshine, though all of the films I have seen are worthy winners. My main problem is in Pan's Labyrinth and the Foreign Language thing. The last time I checked, Babel was not only mainly not in English, but in about six languages, including sign, overall. And both directors are not only from the same country (Mexico), but also best friends. Oh, yeah... and Pan's was more successfully artistically, too. I say, "Switch 'em"...

I am pulling for Scorcese as Best Director, but would not mind if any of the others won, since Marty should have already won about three of these suckers, and all for better films than The Departed. (For those keeping track, that would be Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas.) I have only seen one of the Best Actor nominees (Whitaker), so I will not call that race, but I will say that Mr. Whitaker was awesome, though I really, really would love to see O'Toole walk to the podium. Best Actress, I have only seen Mirren and Streep, so again, I won't call it, but Mirren was perfection. I have seen only two of the Supporting Actor nods (Arkin and Wahlberg), and I would be lying if I said I was pulling for Arkin in the O'Toole mold. For Supporting Actress, I always root for naked Japanese teenagers (even those played by a woman in her mid-'20s), so I'm pulling for Ms. Kikuchi.

"But who will win?", you ask annoyingly. Just look at the predictions. I have a feeling that this year, the odds-on favorites are just that. I would add "sadly", but I can't. I just haven't seen enough of the nominated performances to have an opinion on these categories.

So, good luck in whatever pool in which you have entered. To the gang: I miss you guys, and we'll get together for this again sometime in the future. And as always, I've got movies to watch.

The List:
Babel (2006) - 7; Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia [Curse of the Golden Flower] (2006) - 5; The Queen (2006) - 8; El Laberinto del Fauno [Pan's Labyrinth] (2006) - 8; Merry Andrew (TCM, 1958) - 6; B. Monkey (1998, DVD) - 6; Bruiser (2001, DVD) - 4; Transamerica (2005, DVD) - 7; The Last King of Scotland (2006) - 7; Be Cool (2005, The Movie Channel) - 5; The Island (2005, DVD) - 5; The Hills Have Eyes (2006, DVD) - 5.

Recently Rated Movies #39: Psychotronic Ketchup "Catch-Up" Part A

Variety -- it is both a blessing and a curse. I don't mean the Hollywood business rag (though I suppose I could for those who have actually read it); no, I mean merely the wide range of choice available to one who pursues a DVD-watching project such as the one that I have undertaken. By crawling through the debris left in the wake of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (i.e. watching all of the movies contained within its pages that I have not seen previously, or have only seen partially, or saw so long ago that I have decided, with some reticence, to view them again), I have found myself surrounded by a vast selection of genres. Even if it seems to the casual observer that, because I am gathering films from what seems to be a rather select guide on wigged out movies, I am merely watching a lot of junk films in a row, I am actually finding that the guide itself has far more depth than one might imagine.

This is the blessing. In the pages of this book are pure and true schlock -- in fact, entry after entry of the stuff -- but then one stumbles over a 40's Agatha Christie classic that turns out to be just that: a bona fide classic of the French-pronounced sort. (This would be And Then There Were None; if you like mysteries, it is a must, and I am stunned that I have never run into it before.) One must battle intense weariness over bad English sub-horror flicks (The Beast in the Cellar) before crashing into a solid underrated English one (And Soon the Darkness, wherein Dr. Phibes director Robert Fuest and Avengers creator Brian Clemens prefigure much of the slasher genre to come later in the 70s). One switches quickly from Italian muscle-man flicks to Bert I. Gordon size-fests to Corman-produced disaster disasters to genuinely intense documentaries like The Atomic Cafe, which I had never seen in its entirety and have now made sure to add to my collection post-haste.

Herein lies the curse, for then there are the gore epics, many of which I really did not have access back in the day, or neglected to pick up the edited American releases in the 80s. Today, for some mysterious reason, DVD allows these films to arrive uncensored (for the most part) on our sets, where they tended to be hacked to pieces on VHS in the past. So, I end up finally watching Autopsy, a film that got some measure of publicity in the grindhouse '70s for its supposed "real" autopsy footage. The thing is, the first ten minutes of this film -- with corpses coming to life and starting to get down to "bidness" with each other, and a half-dozen rapid succession suicides -- had me thinking that this would be a fascinating, albeit disgusting, lost Italian classic. But after the shocking beginning, it cuddles up with ennui and turns out to be nothing more than a sub-standard giallo effort. One gore-fest to which I did have access to in the past, but neglected to watch, was Joel Reed's famous and controversial Blood Sucking Freaks, which many had told me was the most disturbing thing they had ever seen. I would point out Yentl, and those same people, even the Streisand-apologists, would mostly agree that I had a point. My verdict after finally watching it? Eh... while if you watch the gore in context with the film, one might consider its snuff-theatre and white slavery storyline and endless scenes of nude women being tortured and murdered shocking, for me it was all tempered by the fact that most of the torture scenes are too clumsily staged to seem real (the ballerina-feet sawing and the human dartboard being particularly comic in approach) and much of the gore is so amateurish as to make amateur gorehounds blush. And, to be honest, though I do not turn away from well-done gore in any film, my moment for films of this ilk has truly passed.

But some people swear by this flick, and that's fine. Some would find this to be a remark of great concern considering its subject matter, but after seeing the film, I know that the only way someone could take this film seriously is as one of those "so bad, its good" things. To this end, the most joyous discoveries on this journey thus far, apart from the genuinely well-made films I have encountered, were the Mexican "Wrestling Women" flicks and the Japanese "Starman" epics. The wrestling films are so dopey and inept as to be utterly fascinating, and I would be lying if I said that I didn't find them strangely compelling, even though the wrestling scenes left me wondering if I had taken the garbage out yet. (I hate wrestling.) The films have the feel of old '30s serials, even if they were made several decades later than the serial heyday, and this might explain my affection for them. Likewise, "Starman" hit my head in the way that Ultraman TV shows do, and this is a good thing. Pure fun as Starman wades through dozens of opponents in scene after scene of absolute chaos. I have heard this was Japan's answer to Superman back in the '50s, but Starman does something that ol' Supes would never do: when Starman gets hold of an enemy weapon, he will absolutely use it on the next dozen guys that cross his path. The truth is that these Superman knockoffs are actually better produced (some incredibly intricate, if cheesy sets, are used in both of the films that I saw) than their inspiration, and the action quotient is much higher.

So, as I wander further down the Psychotronic path, fighting my way through the many disparate styles of film, both good and bad, when I eventually meet up with Las Luchadoras and Starman again, they will now be considered my avid allies in this battle. Which is good, since there will be someone to headlock Fred Olen Ray, Andy Milligan and Jess Franco when I start running into their zillion bad flicks. Or, at least, Starman can shoot them...

The List:
And Then There Were None (1945, DVD) - 8; And Soon the Darkness (1970, DVD) - 6; The Beast in the Cellar (1970, DVD) - 3; The Astounding She-Monster (1957, DVD) - 4; The Atomic Cafe (1982, DVD) - 8; Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi [Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops] (1961, DVD) - 5; The Ape Man (1943, DVD) - 3; Attack of the Puppet People (1958, DVD) - 4; Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957, DVD) - 5; Avalanche (1978, DVD) - 3; Atomic Rulers (of the World) (1965, DVD) - 4; Attack From Space (1965, DVD) - 4, Autopsy [Macchie Solari (Sun Spots)] (1975, DVD) - 4; Las Luchadoras contra la Momia [The Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy] (1964, DVD) - 3; Las Luchadoras contra el Médico Asesino [Doctor of Doom] (1963, DVD) - 3; Back Door to Hell (1964, DVD) - 5; El Secreto del Dr. Orloff [Dr. Orloff's Monster] (1964, DVD) - 4; Blood Sucking Freaks [The Incredible Torture Show] (1976, DVD) - 3; Because They're Young (1960, TCM) - 5.

Psychotronic Ketchup: The Alien Dead (1980)

Is success in the motion picture industry truly only to be measured in dollars earned at the box office or in awards gathered in one's arms? Or should success also include the ability to hang about the fringes of the movie industry for over 30 years, and getting the chance to direct almost a hundred features in that time, even if the quality of those features ranges variably from OK time-wasters to the truly inept?

In a world where a film is generally considered to be a "bomb" if it hasn't earned a $100 million at the box office, people like to heap abuse on those like Edward D. Wood, Jr., filmmakers who pour their souls and every ort of art within them, no matter how lacking in actual talent, to make their movies their way. Wood gave us Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda, and all he has gotten for the past fifty years is some rather savage mockery. He has also pretty much been declared, by much of the western world it seems, as the "The Worst Filmmaker of All Time". Yes, his films are quite clearly "bad", if that term must be used; every single element in every single frame oozes with manic dopiness, and each line of his screenplay is stilted, and then delivered awkwardly by actors who should have never left their jobs picking up the garbage at Central Casting, not walking through the door of it. And yet, in even his worst moments, there is a certain art to Wood's artlessness, and this stems from the feeling upon watching his oeuvre (even before the Ed Wood revival) that he was making the movies that he simply had to make. While one likes to lump them in with other "bad" 50's sci-fi pictures, there really are no other pictures like Wood's movies, and they definitely portrayed his inner longings and obsessions on their shabby exteriors. (Cringe you cinephiles, if you will, but to a certain extent, Wood might be the truest example of the auteur theory...)

I don't know if Fred Olen Ray is truly making the films that he simply has to make anymore (his output is far too high and seemingly random to give him the air of a man deeply troubled over getting his message "out there"), but at one point, he must have been hungry and desperate enough for success to be such a director. Certainly, watching his second film (and the first released into theatres), The Alien Dead, there is a "can-do" spirit alive in the frames of his strangely huggable Z-effort. There is the feeling of a small-town guy gathering every person within a two-mile radius and putting them to work on his little home movie about a meteor that turns rednecks into zombies that hide underwater and eat alligators, and then start attacking the populace of the nearby town. Somehow, to play the sheriff of this town, he manages to land an aged Buster Crabbe, the ex-swimming champion and world-famous portrayer of the amazing Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in the serials, who apparently had a hard time remembering his lines and improvised many of them. You can't make this stuff up, and the details of the making of this film would make a terrific self-referential comedy, if only Ray would get around to directing it himself. The scenario would be like Babes in Arms or Summer Stock with the Living Dead: "Hey, kids! Let's put on a show in the swamp!" And then chaos ensues on their way to making a mediocre (at best) picture.

The film itself is barely over an hour long, but even with the actuality that the film is kind of huggable in that "so pathetic I love it" sort of way, if you are watching it by yourself and not in a party setting, it is a bit of a chore getting through it. The film itself is rather dull until the last twenty minutes or so. Yeah, there are breasts, but belonging to no one that you wouldn't throw a rock at, and there are some laughable effects scenes that keep the interest up, but the film plods along like a lame duck President in his last two years in office towards its inane climax. My thought through most of it is that there must be some great behind-the-scenes stories about this film, and they at least had to be far more interesting than actually watching it. (Listening to Ray's commentary on my second trip through the film proved this to be true, and this track provided the "party" setting that one needs to steamroll and laugh your way through the flick.)

So, we have a "bad" film, and one could probably take a look at the titles in his resume and surmise that Ray might be one of the modern front-runners for Wood's title of "Worst Filmmaker of All Time". But wouldn't the "worst filmmaker" actually be someone who couldn't get his movies made? Wood may be universally derided, but he did get a surprising amount of his films on the screen, both by his hand or in screenplay form. Roger Corman is often, quite wrongly, ripped for his contributions to the "bad movie" field, but as Corman has stated many times, he never made a film that lost money. And if that isn't the purest form of financial success, then what is? (Artistically, he also proved himself with many of his Poe series and some of his quickie comedies.) And here is Ray, who, like his cronies David DeCoteau and Jim Wynorksi, might make a lot of bad movies, but at least he gets to make them. Clearly, he has an audience "out there", or he would never get the chance to direct again. At least, not at a studio. but, 26 years after The Alien Dead, Ray has numerous movies on the horizon, and even if they aren't the movies he simply has to make (they may be, for all I know), he is making them.

Even if he never gets the top box office spot for the weekend or a nomination for Best Director, I would call that success. At least, color me envious: he's making pictures. I'm not...

Rixflix A to Z: Badlands (1973)

Badlands (Warner Bros., 1973)
Dir./Wr./Prod.: Terrence Malick
Crew Notables: Jack Fisk (Art Direction); Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner and Brian Probyn (cinematography)
Cast Notables: Martin Sheen (Kit), Sissy Spacek (Holly), Warren Oates, Gary Littlejohn, Alan Vint, Ramon Bieri, John Carter, Terrence Malick (cameo)
TC4P Rating: 9/9


"I saw her standin' on her front lawn just a-twirlin' her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died

From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through to the Badlands of Wyoming, I killed everything in my path

I can't say that I am sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun"
To say that Charles Starkweather's murderous rampage through the Midwest in the winter of 1957-58 caught the nation's attention would be a severe understatement. Not only did his desperate flight from Nebraska to Wyoming with his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, five years his junior and only 14 years old, become a phenomenon in the headlines and have half the country searching for them, but their flight is still impacting popular culture to this day, fifty years after it happened.

I really did not pick up on the term "Badlands" until I got my copy of Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town shortly after its release in 1978. It was my first Springsteen album (though I already knew Born to Run and Thunder Road by heart from a zillion listens on the radio), but it wasn't until I was flipping to our only cable channel a couple of years later that I ran into the movie Badlands. It was only the second half of the film, with a James Dean-like Martin Sheen shooting it out with the cops and working the media like it was his bitch. Even though he is doomed for the electric chair for a string of murders, and is probably a nervous wreck inside, he maintains a cool exterior and has the cops practically eating out of his hands. 

And the film itself was unlike anything that I had seen to that point: slow, methodical, and poetic in its juxtaposition of the eerie calm and emptiness of the landscape with the sudden savagery that sprung from its teenage protagonist's hands. And though I found their acts despicable and hard to fathom, I was then blossoming into the lovable misanthrope that I am today, and so the snotty anti-social behavior of the couple held a strange appeal to me as I devoured the film a few times more during the course of the next couple of months.

It didn't hurt that the two lead actors are terrific in the film. I was already a fan of Sheen from his appearances on television in The Execution of Private Slovick, where he played the lead, and in the Cuban missile crisis docudrama The Missiles of October, where he portrayed Bobby Kennedy. It was because I saw him on the screen immediately when I flipped on the cable that I stayed around to watch Badlands. 

I had also not seen Carrie yet, so this film was my introduction to Sissy Spacek, and her blank expression through most of this chaos also struck me as weirdly compelling. But I had no idea that they were playing cinematic versions of real people; to me, the film was just a lovers-on-the-run flick. Later, in the library, I looked up Badlands and found out the true story behind the film, and also ran into one of my first run-ins with the Law of "Based on a True Story": that filmmakers, no matter how talented or true in their intentions, have to change details. They don't have to; they just do. Call it "creative license".

I found out that the murders in real life were even more terrible than the ones committed in the film, and that Starkweather and Fugate killed 11 people in all, and that where Sheen's Kit shoots his girlfriend Holly's father, Starkweather also killed Fugate's mother and then strangled her two-year-old sister while she made lunch in the kitchen. Or so Charles claimed. He went to the chair claiming that Caril Ann was involved in most of the murders; she went to prison stubbornly insisting that she was a hostage the entire time. In the movie, Holly gets off scot-free. And characters that Kit lets live, like the rich man and his maid, met their doom at Starkweather and Fugate's hands. I've always wondered why Malick toned down their spree; my guess is that it would make his couple seem a little more sympathetic, even when Sheen is blasting someone with a shotgun. I know myself that if the film played by the real-life rules, that I would probably not have watched the film the same way -- or over again. The violence would have appealed to my teenage self, but I most likely would have truly despised the characters.

I find myself thinking about two other amazing films that played the same way to me at that age: Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Dillinger (the one with Warren Oates and Richard Dreyfuss). I was fascinated with the blood and machine guns, and found the Robin Hood antics of the bank-robbing desperadoes to be dangerously "right up my alley", even if I came away from both films, like this one, with the definite notion that crime not only doesn't pay, but that nihilism is a relentlessly stupid pursuit. I may have my problems with our society and government, but I still believe that things can always be changed for the better, and it is far more noble to take a positive stance than to think that life will never get better and that one should strike out violently at the world. For all the negativity that Hollywood withstands over the subject of violence in movies, and while I simply can't turn away from a good gangster flick, consider me one person who prefers the path of non-violence because I am watching films like Badlands.

The film world certainly didn't stop at Badlands in its screen portrayal of Starkweather and Fugate: it found its earliest form in the low-budget schlock thriller The Sadist (with the caveman-faced Arch Hall, Jr., in perhaps his only decent performance), and later inspired numerous other films and TV movies, including the overly famous Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone and written by Quentin Tarantino. I must say that I was shocked at first to see that Peter Jackson included Starkweather and Fugate references in his ghostly Michael J. Fox fantasy The Frighteners, but their name-dropping does add an effectively edgy dose of darkness to an otherwise fun film.

But, it all came around to Springsteen again in 1982 on his solo acoustic album Nebraska. When I dropped the needle on the disc (yes, it was in those days), and I heard the title track begin the record, the images from the film came rushing back into my head, even though at first I had no idea that the song was inspired by the film directly. I will let the remainder of the Boss' lyrics to that song close the show, because after I read them, I feel the same way I did after I heard them that first time, and the way that I feel when I watch Malick's movie: like there is a vengeful chill in the air. Like I am standing in the Badlands, with the cold wind of Justice bearing down on my neck, and with Love and Life ready to betray me for the crimes I have committed. I understand Kit's rage. And then I understand Starkweather's. I don't want to, but I do.

"Now, the jury brought in a guilty verdict, and the judge he sentenced me to death
Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest

Sheriff, when the man pulls that switch, sir, and snaps my poor head back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin' right there on my lap

They declared me unfit to live, said into that great void my soul'd be hurled
They want to know why I did what I did? Sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world"

Lyrics Copyright © 1982 Bruce Springsteen

Rixflix A to Z: Baby Snakes (1979)

Director: Frank Zappa (also Writer, Producer, Music, Co-Editor) // Intercontinental Absurdities; 2:46; color
Crew Notables: Richard Pearce & Phil Parmet (cinematography), Bruce Bickford (clay animation)
Cast Notables: Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew, Dale Bozzio, Terry Bozzio, Vinnie Colaiuta, Warren Cuccurullo, Roy Estrada, Jennifer James, Phil Kaufman, Ed Mann, Tommy Mars, Patrick O'Hearn, John Smothers, Peter Wolf, Ron Delsener, Johnny Psychotic, Donna U. Wanna, Diva Zappa
Cinema 4 Rating: 8

Look, you are either going to get Zappa, or you are not. I am proud to be counted amongst his legion of admirers. These people have many reasons for loving the man: as a virtuoso guitar god; a master satirist who spit our social mores and popular culture back out at us with a sly grin; or as a groundbreaking composer of avant-garde music. Many, far too many, see him simply as a guy who wrote some outrageously funny, dirty and shocking novelty songs. I tend to go with the second and third reasons, but there is great merit in all of them, and I won't deny anyone the pleasures inherent in delving into his catalogue, if they are so inclined.

I do get a kick out of the stoners I know who love his music, because he abstained from drug use (and alcohol) and did not allow his band members to partake, and even once said ""A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole." If anything, Zappa hated assholes, which reminds me of the many "bikers" I have met over the years who have waved Zappa's Titties & Beer like their own anti-freak flag, which is unbelievably ironic since Zappa is ripping them a new one with it. Likewise, the dirty hippies (not necessarily exclusive from the druggies, and certainly not from the assholes) I have met, who totally seem to have missed the fact that Zappa despised their stance, and spent a lot of early album time mocking them and their inevitable commercialization by the establishment.

There are also those who decry Zappa for being a misogynist, pointing out his rude digs at women in his songs, or as being a racist, as shown in the controversy whipped up over "Jewish Princess". What these reactionaries miss out on is that no one -- men, women, animals, children, his fellow band members, even himself -- is spared in his ruthless assault on our social mores and our casual acceptance of mediocrity, especially in music. If the women come off as vacuous sluts and whores, well, the men who surround them often come off as nothing more than base animals who only think with their dicks. If they aren't thinking with those particular organs, then they are likely corrupt politicians, idiot record company execs or greedy preachers all trying to grind us out of our precious dollars and ruining the overall potential of mankind. Zappa cast a wide net, and no one was allowed to wriggle out -- not even if they could proficiently knock out The Black Page #2 on the drum kit. (Poor little Terry Bozzio...)

Me? I decry Zappa for just not being around anymore. I would love to get his take on the current state of affairs in our government, especially if he had indeed successfully run for office, as it is rumored he was considering to do. Yes, he is still around in some form I suppose: he has around 70 albums in his catalogue, and all of them still in print, and I only have about half of them, so I could easily buy a new Zappa CD each year for the next two decades and still not be near completion of my collection. And in 2003, Baby Snakes, a movie I had never gotten the opportunity to see, made its debut on DVD. My brother Mark had it first, and my premiere viewing was on his computer screen -- by the next weekend, I had my own copy in hand, and devoured its goofy content several times over through the next couple months.

Should you decide to make the journey, be warned: Baby Snakes is a concert film, but it is wholly unconcerned with giving you the full on-stage concert experience, as one might expect when Zappa himself directs the proceedings. Large sections are devoted to backstage foolishness between songs, and sometimes, in the middle of songs. There is also a terrific concentration on Zappa's collaboration with the award-winning animator Bruce Bickford, whose unique and often pornographic claymation sculptures spring to life over Zappa's music and sound collages. We see Bickford not just filming some of this animation, but also discussing his wacked-out philosophies on art and life (of which, I must admit, a little goes a long way).

Zappa's band, as is expected, is extraordinarily tight, but it is the pre-concert moments where you see that Zappa didn't just have a band -- he was truly its conductor. He demanded precision on the part of his players, as any maestro expects of his orchestra, and this pays off in the middle of the show when he actually does conduct the band in a percussive free-for-all which includes his gestural tormenting of erstwhile Zappa companion Roy Estrada, who lends his odd vocalizations to his portrayal of a man who is tormented by his attraction to a sexually aroused gas mask.

Estrada is a freak of the first order, not in the hippie sense, but in the fact that he seems to have stepped out of a circus sideshow. In fact, much of Zappa's entourage seems to have done so -- the film is subtitled: A Movie About People Who Do Stuff That Is Not Normal -- but don't be fooled. These were immensely talented musicians, and Zappa gets everything he can out of them in the course of this film. And, on the way, Zappa brings many of the devoted from out of the audience to do ridiculous things on stage. These engagements are rarely frivolous, even if the stunts are, because Zappa uses these moments to help illustrate whatever point he has to make, even if the connection between statement and action are fairly tenuous at best. It's also interesting to see the genuine affection he has for some of his flock, while he dismisses those who interrupt him with quick flips of the bird and an annoyed "Fuck you, too, buddy!" It seems Zappa doesn't just conduct his band, but feels the need to conduct his followers, as well.

But, if its a power play, its because he wants you to hear what he has to say, and he has much to say indeed, even if much of it is only about "Poodle Play". And in a film that runs two hours and 44 minutes, Zappa will say it, whether you feel like hearing it or not. Myself, I prefer uninterrupted musical performances, but that would be like saying "Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar!" Zappa must be taken "warts 'n all"; he has many facets, and one must see all of them to even begin to understand his art. He doesn't just play guitar; he doesn't just write dirty songs; he doesn't just lead a band. And one of the best places to learn this is in Baby Snakes.

But be further warned: if you are a rubber doll, stay away from Roy Estrada. The boy had some issues...

Rixflix A to Z: Babe: Pig In the City (1998)

Director/Co-Writer: George Miller // Kennedy-Miller & Universal; 1:37; color
Crew Notables: Dick King-Smith (characters); Paddy Moloney (song); Randy Newman (song, AAN) & Peter Gabriel (vocals)
Cast Notables: James Cromwell, Magda Szubanski, Mickey Rooney; Voices: Elizabeth Daily, Glenne Headly, Steven Wright, Adam Goldberg, Miriam Margolyes, Hugo Weaving, Roscoe Lee Browne (narrator), Naomi Watts, Jim Cummings
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

I'm not sure, but this might be the first G-rated film that mentions the phrase "serial killer" in it. It's a reference that Ferdinand the duck makes regarding the rather plump Mrs. Hoggett and her smooth way of doing away with any number of his relatives for dinner, but it's probably more indicative of the maturation of the Babe franchise itself. The pig indeed goes to the Big City, and he finds out quickly that he has to grow up just a little bit, and so its no surprise that the film gets a slightly harder edge to it. The city, while a wonderful-looking conglomeration of just about every famous building or type of structure in the world, is not the friendliest of jungles, and Babe (along with a flustered Mrs. Hoggett) learns this lesson fast and hard.

Unfortunately, this maturation process doesn't quite jibe with the fairytale-like presentation that leaps over from the first go-around, even if the film itself is a gorgeous construct to behold. The special effects work combining puppetry, live-action animals and animation is nearly seamless (except for when the baby chimp twins arrive), but the film is definitely lacking in the story area. Babe is presented as a "pig-on-a-mission" to save the Hoggett farm after Mr. Hoggett is seriously injured in an Babe-caused accident, and when the purpose of his trip to the city (to collect a large appearance fee for showing his skills as a "sheep-pig" at a huge fair) goes south due to their being delayed, this "mission" seems to get lost in a cavalcade of characters, most of whom serve little purpose except to confuse the issue. Yes, Babe becomes the lord of the city's animal population and his sheer good nature and dumb luck with lead to the inevitable saving of the farm (c'mon, is there any doubt that he will?), but the sharp little guy seems to get lost, along with some of his initial charm, in action sequences that really seem out of place with the original film.

Part of this might be due to the fact that the co-screenwriter/producer from the first film steps in to direct this one, and his pedigree might hold a clue to this change, for he is none other than George Miller, the maestro of the Mad Max series. While I admire his work on at least the first two of those films (and some of the third), his sure eye for frantic, nervy action seems misplaced with the gentle Babe. It does have one benefit, I suppose: in several places, so edgy is the unnecessary action, that I feel any one of the animals could get hit with a Mack truck at any given moment. And there aren't even Mack Trucks in those sequences. Just over the rise and --- BAM!! Just like in Max Max II. And those three main action sequences -- the bull terrier-chase, the roundup of the hotel animals, and the ballroom bounce finale -- go on far beyond my interest in any of them, and the film could have easily been cut down by ten minutes through the use of some freewheeling editing of these scenes. The bounce sequence itself is merely an updated version of the Thunderdome battle that Miller failed to thrill me with over a decade earlier. So, why bring it back to bore us again?

Through all of this insanity, outside of his heroic saving of the bull terrier, Babe turns from a pig trying desperately to think of a way to save his beloved farm and humans, to basically being a pig who is in the right place at the right time. Whereas in the original film, Babe learned he had a skill and used it to become famous, here he just has to hang out with his newly acquired friends, and through some extremely convoluted circumstances, good fortune will come his way. It's the lazy pig's road to success, and for me it proves that Babe never really had to be the self-starter that he was when he began his career as man's best pig friend.

He just had to sit around, blowing his cash on Lotto tickets, and hoping for that one big break. Now that I think about it, I suppose this won't do the general public any harm. They are already there, though I doubt Babe would lie about stuffing his mouth with pork rinds...

1999 Academy Awards: Nominee, Best Song

Rixflix A to Z: Babe (1995)

Director/Co-Screenplay: Chris Noonan (AAN) // Kennedy-Miller & Universal; 1:29; color
Crew Notables: George Miller (co-screenplay, AAN); Dick King-Smith (book); Jim Henson's Creature Shop
Cast Notables: James Cromwell (AAN - Best Supporting Actor), Magda Szubanski; Voices: Christine Cavanaugh, Miriam Margolyes, Danny Mann, Hugo Weaving, Miriam Flynn, Russi Taylor, Roscoe Lee Browne (narrator)

Subtitled: How I Destroyed My Fake Vegetarianism
(Only to Linger In Self-Doubt Forever More...)

I have said more than once before that films cannot change your life. I say this because when a person declares such a ridiculous thing like "That book changed my life", or a film or whatever, what they are doing is what most of our society mistakenly does: places the credit (or the blame) on an outside force rather on the only people who can make that change (or bungle it): themselves.

I saw Babe and that deeply hidden animal rights activist deep within me said "How the hell are you gonna eat bacon now that you've fallen in love with a pig?" (It was a different, deeply hidden activist that said a much similar thing to me right after my wedding.) Again, I am passing the blame off on an imaginary being rather than myself, by creating the brain-activist, and so I will admit that I told myself that very thing instead. And I quit eating all pork products for four -- count them -- four solid years. And somewhere in that second year, going through a divorce, and already losing weight due to stress, I decided to go cold turkey -- as in, no more turkey. Or chicken. Or hamburgers. For two years, I cut out meat altogether.

At home, because at the time I really did not know how to cook, I relied on frozen and raw veggies, fruits and a heck of a lot of pasta, which really does not count as cooking. At least, not the way I do it. Because I had gotten a taste for veggie burgers, I was able to trick myself for a while that nothing had changed in my beloved burger department. But it had. It wasn't the same, and every time that I passed the greatest burger place in existence, the Arctic Roadrunner, my stomach turned flips on me.

But I held strong, and to combat the fact that I run with a pack that is almost 97% full-on balls-to-the-wall carnivorous, when it came time for carousing in eating establishments, I indulged myself in halibut. I can't stand fish, but I love halibut, and for the two years that I stuck to this mainly low-key hush-hush vegetarianism, that was what I got for dinner when I was out with my friends. There were also a lot of "I'm not so hungry tonight -- I'll just get French fries" nights out.

My downfall from the diet? As always -- reindeer sausage. A Sunday morning breakfast at Gwennie's, a former-cathouse-turned-greasy-but-excellent eating establishment, with some pals, and I needed comfort food. (I won't go into why...) It became one of those "Aw, what the hell --!" things, and soon I had a mountain of reindeer sausage piled up in front of me. (This is the main reason why Gwennie's is excellent: the portion sizes.) While it wasn't the moment when I announced that I was going to eat so much of it that my shit would come out in casings, it was pretty damn close. It was the end of my nascent vegetarianism, and though I really didn't pay attention to it, the end of my anti-pork campaign, even though I hung onto that ideal for another year. The reason? I had forgotten that most reindeer sausage is loaded with pork, and it took me that long to read a label and realize that I had ruined my campaign several months back.

The funny part is, this is all before I started dating Jen, a vegetarian since she was a child. And even though we have now been together for over 6-1/2 years now, I have yet to come close to turning vegetarian again. Sure, I mention the fact constantly at work that I want to quit eating meat again, and every time I find a piece of gristle in a burger, or a vein in a chicken breast, I gag and throw the rest of the meal away. Except for occasional deli cuts for sandwiches, I don't bring meat home, and there are sometimes weeks at home where I don't get near the devouring of the flesh of animals. My main problem, really, is that I am now living in the Land of Fast Food Joints -- Anaheim, CA -- and right across the street from my office is a Jack-in-the-Crack. And now, perhaps due to a certain extent to this extreme change in habitat, my bad cholesterol is dangerously high and the good cholesterol is way too low.

The truth of the matter, I've been wanting to go cold turkey (and everything else) for quite some time now. I could lie and say that watching Babe again, which is a nearly perfectly rendered modern fairy tale on film, would get me back on the track (I have the DVD, but I actually have not seen the film since I bought it), but I should admit it: the only thing that will get me to stop eating meat, and losing weight, and reversing my cholesterol trend, is me. Not a movie, not a book, not a TV show. Me. I have to take the steps to making myself healthier and better.

To begin this, I will announce right now that my home is currently 100% free of all meat products. This is only because, right before I wrote this entry, I finished eating the Trader Joe's Barbecue Chicken Pizza I had been saving all week.

Hopefully, nobody will deliver a pepperoni and sausage pizza to my door tomorrow night, or I will never get started on this thing.

1996 Academy Awards: 1 Win (Visual Effects), 6 Nominations (Picture, Director, Screenplay Adaptation, Editing, Art Direction-Set Decoration, Supporting Actor)

The Man Who Had to Sing About "The Man Who Had to Sing"

When I first got the "series of tubes" (Ted Stevens, bless your technological acumen!) hooked up in April of 2005, just after I moved to Anaheim, before I even thought of starting up a blog, or even multiple blogs, I had a mission. Inspired by a small, obscure animated short that I had not seen for over a quarter century, but whose presence in my brain had stuck with me that entire time, I made my way to IMDB to start researching the film's whereabouts. Not only did the film appear to not have been released on DVD or VHS, at least in the English-speaking world as presented on the "BUY" section of the website, but the entry for this film didn't even have the minimum number of votes required (a mere 5) to qualify to have a rating on the site (it still doesn't, which seems to speak to its current obscurity). And because this lonely little film titled The Man Who Had to Sing, which seemed to me still like the scraggly, unloved Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown special, didn't have any user comments either, I felt compelled to leave this brief note regarding my past involvement with the film:
"I remember seeing this film back in the late 70's on PBS when I was a teenager, and just beginning to turn into an animation nut. The show was "The International Festival of Animation", hosted by Jean Marsh, and while there were a great many wonderful cartoons presented on the series, this is the one that stuck with my brother and I. The lead character's endlessly repeated singsong refrain of "Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah!" super-glued itself to my brain, and I still sing it all the time over 25 years later, though I have not seen hide nor hair of the film since that show went off the air. Unfortunately, I did not own a VCR until 1980, and never thought to tape it when I did get one. Hopefully, Spike and Mike or some similar group will collect some of these wonderful old films and let them find a new audience. Perhaps it wouldn't hold up in a fresher viewing, but it was a very sad, quirky but poignantly beautiful gem, at least, as I recall it.."

That was it. I titled the comment, "Sometimes You Just Have to Let It Out...", but to this day, I am unsure of whether I was merely referring to the character in the film or to myself, too. I also left a couple of other comments following this one for other likewise obscure and fondly remembered trifles of my youth, but my real hope with this particular one was to locate others who not only shared my love for this film, but to also track down a copy, by any means necessary.

Time passed, and I never received a reply. And more time passed... nothing. It seemed, apart from my brothers, that I was alone in my "Yeah-yeah-yeahing". And then, Wednesday night, I received an email from someone who was conducting a Google search for The Man Who Had to Sing. Nearly two years later, they ended up on my comment at IMDB, and they were then nice enough to contact me. The email as follows...

Hello - I went googling for this Yugoslavian Animation short tonight and found your comment on IMDB. I had such a similar experience that I had to write. I also saw it with my brother who was a good deal older than me (now deceased). He used to watch the same PBS show late at night and I would get home from a night out and find him sitting there with a smile on his face watching this show. I had never seen stuff like this before and I found it really interesting, especially the Slavic stuff. And one night I saw "The Man Who Had To Sing" and we laughed ourselves silly... I also could not get that song out of my head and now years later at 53 I still remember the whacky, oblivious way that the guy went through life singing that same refrain over and over. Like you said, "... glued to my brain". I wonder... did you ever get to see it again? Well, thanks for listening. Just had to write. "Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah!"

I was elated that there was someone besides my brother and myself that had not just seen this in their youth, but had also become inflicted with the "yeah-yeah" madness. But it also served to remind me that my quest was far from over, and that I needed to start anew my search for this film. Unfortunately, Google offers little in the way of an immediate solution, but it did list a few potential bright spots:

• A website for the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon lists the film in its rentable video library thusly:
  
  THE MAN WHO HAD TO SING V224001
  Media Type: Audio (Cassette(s))
  Audience Level: JHA
  A little guy (Charlie Brown type) goes through life with a song to sing ("Ya , ya, ya-ya") that nobody wants to hear. As a child he gets deserted by his parents, beaten up by other children, kicked out of school, and tagged
  Subjects: Growth & Development; Faith Enrichment; Self-Esteem; Life
  Running Time:10
  Mass Media Ministries
  
• A website for the Ruth Dudley Resource Center, which also seems to be a religious library, offers this description:
  
  The Man Who Had to Sing
  A hilarious portrayal of the life of a luckless Charlie Brown-type, a real loser who had only one thing to offer -- a song for which the world had no need. 10 minutes. 1989. JH - A.
  
• And best of all, the San Bernardino Valley College website offers up a list of their library films (which consists of the usual mix of public domain titles, industrial films and obscure art flicks). It gives more of the real deal on the film:
  
  The Man Who Had to Sing

  Year: 1971	Type: Films	Colorization: color	Length: 10 min.
  This film is an animated cradle to grave fable - funny, quirky, and sad. A little guy goes through life with a song to sing that nobody wants to hear. As a child he gets deserted by his parents, beaten up by other children, kicked out of school. As a man he has a hard time with the army, with religion, with a wife who soon takes her leave of him, with psychiatrists who declare him hopeless, and with society in general. But he hangs in there, until an outraged public silences him in his grave. Or, is he silenced? The caricature becomes a clue to many problems of human interrelations and individual integrity.

I find it amusing that the Archdiocese's subject description notes "faith enhancement", when I believe that "The Man" finds just as little comfort in church as he does in the rest of his life, and is summarily dismissed from the environs when he takes up his Tourette's-like burst of inappropriately loud and off-key singing. Whatever people take from the film (and it has been so long since I have seen it, so that practically anything could be within the film and I would have forgotten much of it), I am glad that it is around in some form.

I can't rent from the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon because they limit their rentals to the borders of the state, unless you give them a good reason which they will study "case by case". I don't know whether my lack of religion will either hurt or help my case. This same problem might apply with the Ruth Dudley catalog. And I am pretty sure that one must be a student of the San Bernardino Valley College to rent from it, and even if I could, it would be hard to convince Jen that we need to make the trip to S.B. just to rent a 10-minute long obscure Yugoslavian cartoon with a guy who just blurts out nonsense lyrics at every given opportunity. She would say that she already has someone like that around for real. Why would she need a cartoon for that?

Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah...

The Man Who Had to Sing [Covjek koji je morao pjevati] (1970)
Directed by Milan Blazekovic
Cinema 4 Rating (Distantly Remembering How Much I Loved It): 8

Rixflix A to Z: Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997)

Director: Jay Roach // New Line; 1:34; color
Crew Notables: Demi Moore (producer)
Cast Notables: Mike Myers (Austin Powers/Dr. Evil; screenplay, producer), Elizabeth Hurley (Vanessa Kensington), Michael York (Basil Exposition), Mimi Rogers (Mrs. Kensington), Robert Wagner (Number Two), Seth Green (Scott Evil), Fabiana Udenio (Alotta Fagina), Mindy Sterling (Frau Farbissina), Paul Dillon (Patty O'Brien), Charles Napier (Commander Gilmour), Will Ferrell (Mustafa), Clint Howard (Johnson Ritter), Cindy Margolis (Fembot), Burt Bacharach (himself) // cameos: Tom Arnold, Lois Chiles, Carrie Fisher, Susanna Hoffs, Rob Lowe, Mike Judge, Michael McDonald, Cheri Oteri, Christian Slater, Matthew Sweet, Patricia Tallman
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

I don't have a need to balance my movies out like my girlfriend does. When we left Babel the other night, and I posed an option for the following night of seeing The Last King of Scotland and, perhaps, Letters from Iwo Jima, she professed a desire that one of the movies we go to be, at least purposefully, a comedy. This left me with the vision of going into a theatre late the next night to go see Epic Movie, which left me with a tiny bit of dread, since the trailer is mostly atrocious in execution. As it turned out, we went out to spend the day in Palm Springs instead, but the point was made.

I have an enhanced ability to absorb negativity and sadness when watching a multitude of films in a row. When I see a movie, I try to remain open to whatever emotions might fly at me in the course of a story, and if three movies in a row turn out to heavy-going tearjerkers, then so be it. Where others might need to uplift their mood a bit in between installments of Chan Wook-Park's Revenge Trilogy, I merely dove into the next installment wholly unconcerned for its possible affect on my attitude. I can easily watch one type of film for a whole month, whether unceasing mindless gore, soul-crushing drama or doofy slapstick comedy -- for me, each film is to be approached with a, no matter what the subject matter, and repeated doses of the same type of film don't carry over emotionally for me from film to film. Because I wipe the slate clean before I start the next movie, I am able to approach each one with a blank attitude. Whether I go to see Epic Movie or Letters from Iwo Jima, I try to enter the theatre with an open, receptive mind.

But this doesn't mean that I don't let the outside world affect me. It does -- tremendously. The mutant gene that allows me to hop carefree from film to film doesn't work for me in the real world. Because I don't let the films that I view in my refuge color my mood, I am perhaps overly sensitive to my feelings in my actual day to day wanderings. A misplaced laugh across a room I immediately interpret as a personal attack; a small, relatively inconsequential error on my part will inevitably get blown to gargantuan proportions in my mind and cause the downfall of my mood for the afternoon. This is where film rescues me. By setting my mood to neutral as I enter the theatre, I not only set myself up as a blank slate on which to received the offerings on the screen before me, but I also cleanse my mind, if only for a couple hours, of whatever has brought about an inferno of rage in my true nature. When I say that the theatre is my refuge, my temple of well-being, and my church (for a person for whom a church, as recognized by organized religion, is merely another building)... I mean it.

Which finally brings me to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, a purely silly comedy if ever there was one. Because it came to me in a time when my emotional reserve was perhaps at one of its lowest points, I have great affection for these movie. I am not a big Mike Myers fan; apart from Middle-Aged Man and Dieter from Sprockets, I have never truly loved any of his characters, thinking that they mainly fell into the usual over-exposure deathcamp that has cursed most of the latter-day Saturday Night Live characters. I liked many of his characters well enough, especially Wayne from Wayne's World, but even he ended up being drawn from the well once too often, as the second movie serves as ample evidence. Myers started to become more interesting to me once he started to develop original characters for the movies, though while many of my friends loved So I Married An Axe Murderer, I felt it was a bit slapdash in its construction, and meandered all over the place structurally, even if it was sweetly funny in many places.

And then, on a night when I could have easily tossed myself off the theatre balcony, had there been one off of which one could hurl oneself (and if I were of weaker composure), I went to see Austin Powers. It was a night where I hadn't yet learned how to wipe that emotional slate clean, and I was unsure of whether I really wanted to go see a movie that night, preferring instead to wallow in misery on my own for about, oh, six months. My friends were insistent that I join them, and of course, I had no choice.

I knew it was supposed to be a spoof of James Bond movies, but what delighted me was that it wasn't. Sure, it had the Bond villainy in place, but Austin Powers is no James Bond. What he really turns out to be is a spoof of the spoofers: he's a goof on characters like James Coburn's Flint and all of the other Bond imposters and knockoffs who marauded the silver screen (and television) in the Swingin' 60's. Austin Powers is the Casino Royale of Casino Royale, vintage 1968: a hip-shaking spoof of a hip-shaking spoof of the real thing. He might be saving the world, but he's doing it with a wink while also doing the Boog-a-loo Shinga-ling, and all before getting shagged but good.

And, as it turned out, it wasn't the world, but me that this ridiculous creation of Mike Myers saved. For that one night, at least. The movie was the exact thing that I needed on that night, and even if repeated viewings have pointed as many jokes that don't work as those that do, it doesn't matter. People love far worse movies for far stupider reasons than this; hell, I can think of dozens of stupid movies that I love simply because they trigger a fond memory of a location, or a particular point in time. But, hardly any of those moments involved a time like the dark one I was immersed in the night that I hit the cineplex with a dozen of my nearest and dearest. I laughed along with my compadres, and outwardly, I seemed one of the group, but inside, the laughter did what laughter is supposed to do in that manner that has brought about that whole medicinal cliché.

There is a reason that I have run to the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd my entire life. Often, my reasons for dowsing myself in their art are for this very same purpose: those moments when I need that certain pick-me-up. The moment in Brazil where Kim Greist, in the middle of an insanely preposterous and grim, though satirical, Orwellian future can only find her smile by watching an old Marx Brothers comedy speaks volumes to me, as it did surely to Terry Gilliam, Brazil's director. And here, though the remainder of his output has left me sort of shrugging (including the Powers sequels), Myers was able to pull me out this self-sickened state and help me, via his ridiculous giant-toothed grin, on my way. What he did was surely groovy.

Baby.