The Shark Film Office: My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)

My Super Ex-Girlfriend
Director: Ivan Reitman // 2006 [DVD]
Cinema 4 Rating: 5
Shark: Great White Shark
Appearance: CGI, dialogue

Sleeping with Anna Faris should be heavenly, and -- despite my deep and abiding appreciation for toothy marine creatures -- uninterrupted by the sight of a great white shark flying towards one’s head as one sits up in bed after awakening from what was probably the most emotionally and physically fulfilling night of one’s life. Setting my own personal fixation on Ms. Faris aside, this is exactly what happens to Luke Wilson just over an hour deep into the middling special effects comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

Wilson sleeps with Faris, his longtime crush, after breaking up with the voluptuous, but clearly “off her rocker,” superheroine G-Girl, played almost like a mannequin for the most part by Uma Thurman, who really should remain in the employ of a director like Tarantino who clearly worships her and understands her strengths as well as her weaknesses as an actress. (While she is physically perfect for the role, straight comedy is not her forte.) G-Girl, who lives her day-to-day existence in the guise of Jenny Johnson (a name on which, for personal reasons, I shall refrain from further comment), takes this emotional rejection in the manner one expects in a romantic comedy: badly, and with thoughts of revenge on her now “evil” ex-suitor. Only here, since G-Girl is essentially gifted with the powers of Superman (or Supergirl, for that matter), the revenge on a normal human being can get, ahem, potentially deadly for the party receiving the vengeful abuse.
Hence, the dream-shattering shark-tossing.

Waking up at last with his true love, Wilson hears the taunting words, “Oooh, honey!” outside of the bedroom window. Such a confrontation would be difficult in a normal romantic comedy, since the apartment is several stories up, but when he looks out the window, there is G-Girl, floating casually in mid-air, holding a thrashing, teeth-gnashing great white by the tail. With a modicum of effort, she tosses the shark through the bedroom window, where it lands full force onto Wilson’s side of the bed, snapping its deadly jaws at Wilson as he tucks in his feet. Luke bolts through the apartment, with the shark making several leaps in his direction, including one that ends with the shark closing its jaws mere inches from Wilson’s crotch, finding the couch cushion with its teeth instead. Wilson runs to the other bedroom window, and the shark makes one last leap at the terrified everyman, crashing through the glass and falling to the street below. We hear the screech of tires, a woman’s astonished scream, and several crashing noises, but that is the last we will see of the shark in the film. I assume the lovable predator meets its sad demise at the end of that fall, but Ivan Reitman, who has already directed the pinnacle of special-effects comedy, Ghostbusters, over 20 years ago, never lets us consider the bloody mess remaining, unless one is speaking of this film itself.

Faris closes the scene by asking, “Why would G-Girl throw a shark at us?” Wilson answers, “I don’t know,” but the real answer regarding the film is, “Why didn’t Ivan Reitman decide to throw more sharks at them?” In the middle of a big city, several stories up in an apartment building, the last thing anyone expects to see is a giant shark flying through their window. Despite the small show of G-Girl’s incredible powers up to this point, which establishes to a lessened degree that we are living within the fantasy of this film’s world, the shark scene is still such a strong visual non-sequitur, and so absurdly incongruous to the more mundane occurrences to which we have borne witness in the film, that the concept actually seems to work. It is quick, and it is sudden, and it is over before one can really consider its ramifications.

It may seem unfair to throw a director’s past classic work in his face, but we simply cannot ignore such an obvious regressive trend in Reitman’s work, and thus we must make comparisons to Ghostbusters here. In that film, the similar point where the audience has to make a wacky leap of visual faith is in the acceptance of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man as a monstrous Godzilla-like screaming terror that will crush the entire city into rubble beneath his Michelin Man-like puffy feet. Reitman tried to play the same gag again in Ghostbusters II, but the Statue of Liberty was far too, eh, ordinary (and expected) -- to play out as wonderfully silly/scary as the Marshmallow Man scenario. Stay-Puft was a perfect choice, both in bringing horror – even the merely comedic variety – out of cuteness, and also for the fact that it, to this day, still plays as a great “What the fuck?” moment. But where the Reitman, Aykroyd and Ramis had it right in that film was in writing the scene so that it wasn’t purely this odd thing that came out of nowhere, but was actually the next bizarre link in a chain of increasing goofiness throughout the film. The Ghostbusters had, up to that moment, seen numerous things that one did not see everyday, each one larger and more threatening than the next, but when Stay-Puft arrives, Bill Murray still has enough bemused shock left in his character to say, indeed, “There’s something you don’t see everyday.”

The problem in Girlfriend is that the characters, even the normal citizenry, regularly have incredible things happening around them, all because they exist in a world where G-Girl is in constant battle with Professor Bedlam (downplayed well by Eddie Izzard, even if it is a waste of his talents), her spurned teen sweetheart who has grown up into a “don’t call me a super-villain” super-villain. True, there is a difference in the reality of the news reports and what really occurs (example: Wilson’s casual media-fed reaction to Izzard’s infamy), but this is an angle that is barely explored by Reitman, concentrating instead on the romantic angle. Everyone expects G-Girl to save the day, but when she does display her talents, even the filmmakers seem almost bored with the results. There is no real sense of wonder to her world-saving or to the display of her powers, either in the faces of the characters, or in the way they are displayed onscreen. It’s almost as if the superheroics were tacked onto a standard sitting romantic comedy script at the last minute, and little consideration was given to how this would play off the rest of the script. In the end, G-Girl is merely just a celebrity, and Wilson's character might as well be banging Paris Hilton to get basically the same reaction from his friends.

Before the shark scene occurs, there is nothing that can approach it in its inspired wackiness. And after? Nothing but the rote machinations of that “standard sitting romantic comedy script.” When I saw the trailer in the theatre, the only item that even made me halfway wish to see the film was the tossing of the shark, and now, seeing it on DVD, I find that I saved myself some decent coin by not following that slight impulse.

Late in the film, Wilson is asked why he has teamed up with the Professor to strip away G-Girl's powers, and the laid-back Wilson thinks for half a second, and replies, "She threw a shark at me!" Though the line is slightly amusing, it mainly serves to point up the flaw in the character's, and thus the writer's, logic. The reason for his revenge should be because the shark-tossing broke up his reverie in bed with the delightful Ms. Faris. Now that's a form of coitus interruptus that could make me kick Superman's ass. I wouldn't even need the Kryptonite...

Psychotronic Ketchup: Misterios de Ultratumba [The Black Pit of Dr. M] (1959)

Misterios de Ultratumba [The Black Pit of Dr. M]
Director: Fernando Méndez // Mexican, 1959 [DVD]
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

Old Mexican horror movies get a bad rap. If you say to your friend, “Hey, I watched this old Mexican horror movie last night,” most likely that friend will first groan, and then expel a small chuckle and reply, “That must have been pretty damn crappy,” or some such declaration of the movie’s inherent badness. Part of this is most likely due to the fact that the bulk of Mexican horror movies seen in America, like Japanese kaiju, were seen dubbed with ridiculous accents by American actors, and were also largely cut up and reedited upon release. It also probably has something to do with the fact that most of them were, inarguably, pretty damn crappy. Possibly fun, but pretty damn crappy.

The problem with assumptions like this that pass into the “common knowledge” spectrum of popular thought is that their acceptance pretty much extends outward to encapsulate all examples of the genre, good or bad. To tread back to the Mexican horror genre, even a halfway decent film will get sucked into the vortex with all the other Paul Naschy, Santo and Aztec Mummy films, immediately thought of by the bulk of the population aware of them as "bad," circling about in this downcast oblivion. And even I, who recognizes openly that even out of such belittled areas great things can grow, spent a small amount of time gnashing the pearlies over the thought of spending time sinking into The Black Pit of Dr. M, also known as Misterios de Ultratumba, and initially released in 1959. Truthfully, I knew little – actually, nothing – about the film before slipping it from its case and inserting it into my player.

And this is what I found: a lost minor foreign classic of mood and design. It’s no great shakes story-wise: some basic horror folderol about Dr. Mazali (the “M” of the title) seeking to discover the secrets of the afterlife, and determined, via the ministrations of his already deceased partner in science, to come back from the dead upon his own demise. Mazali is, essentially, an atheist who nonetheless hungers for a peek into the afterworld. Of course, his plans get slightly altered when the daughter of his dead partner is mysteriously summoned by her father’s ghost (whom she had never met in her life, and thus, did not recognize) to collect her inheritance. What she does not know is her interference in the doctor’s life is just one small dizzying step in her father’s elaborately spiraled and possibly malignant plan to fulfill Dr. M’s odd request. Where this all leads I will allow you to discover, but I will briefly touch on the look and mood of the film itself.

Yes, this is one of those “everything in the stewpot” type of films. Naturally, because Dr. M is a man of science, we are allowed to step into his laboratory throughout the picture, but we also are given glimpses of the attached insane asylum, and numerous ominous trips into the cemetery to attend funerals of various characters. There are ghosts, séances, mysterious amulets, a disfigured man who slowly evolves into a monstrous killer, hypnotism, knife murders and, eventually, a visit from the living dead. One would think all this busywork would be enough to fill an audience’s interest, but the filmmakers chose to render all this action in relatively grand style, an incredible feat given the obvious low budget of the film. I have noted previously, when watching the popular Mexican “Wrestling Women” films of the ‘60s that it seemed as if the filmmakers had stopped watching horror movies with the demise of the Universal line of horror classics. There were obvious nods there to the great Gothic Universals, and here, in Dr. M’s world, such influence is brought to a mount as seriously close to art as these films are going to get.

Things might be a little too clean, though; that the camera wishes to pan through nearly every gorgeously rendered set in delirious reverence subtly reveals the damning fact that hardly any of these perfect worlds are actually lived in by the characters. There is a certain aspect to a cluttered existence that might seem unromantic, but which can reveal a little bit more soul in the person that lives there, rather than appear as a fussbudget trapped in a completely antiseptic womb. But this is only a momentary distraction, and as the camera does take to its traveling through the lab set and so on, one can only show appreciation for the attention to detail. Even the cobwebs sparkle with perfection.

And dare I say that eventually this leads to an amazing graveyard sequence, where what would have been just a moribund corpse revival had this film actually been the sort of below-average Mexican horror fare that undoubtedly many inexperienced viewers have proclaimed it as, is turned somehow artful to a cunning degree, and also serves as an almost accidental tribute to those great gothic Universals of years past. I will admit that even up to this point, I was still a doubter poking about within this film, enjoying the sights but skeptical of the outcome. And then, with the mere lightning flash-aided crawl to the grave’s surface of the doctor in the guise of the living dead, I was struck by the thought that, at least for this film, the slow, inexorable plot crawl paid off in spades. In fact, it pays off several times in the film’s second half, but none so more thrilling than this moment. (And if you feel that I have given away anything in the way of spoilers, I cringe for your skills as a film detective, because surely by this point in the film, you know where it is going. That’s not why one attends such a film as this.)

Of course, certain people will never be able to see past all of the ghosts and zombies and mad scientists, and will always think “That’s a pretty damn crappy movie.” These are people who divide their movies into immediate sensations, and they are the most susceptible to the impulse to proclaim the cliché, “So bad, it’s good.” And more often than not, nearly all horror and science-fiction films of any sort of vintage fall into this category for them, and they never care one whit that even within the most downgraded of genres, or in much impoverished genre-country of origin combinations, there might be some sort of art to be achieved. Much to the consternation of these type of people, The Black Pit of Dr. M climbs away from its own name and achieves this very level.

That Familiar UV Buzz: No Next Star on the Food Network

Having dinner with Jen and Frank, our ol' buddy from Alaska, at Storyteller's Cafe last night brought me at last to a realization over which I have lost zero sleep through the last few years: I am a reality show snob. Frank posed the question, "Do you watch Top Chef?," to which my basic reply was, "Uh, no... yeah, I, uh -- I don't know why I haven't watched it, because I watch tons of Food Network, so you think it would be a relatively easy thing to switch over to -- uh, I've heard good things about it -- it's on Bravo, right?" Nothing like getting to the point, Rik. The conversation veered away from -- and then eventually stumbled back into -- Top Chef, and I really couldn't pinpoint in my head exactly why I don't watch it, except for the fact that viewing it on any sort of regular basis would force me to memorize Bravo's channel number, and I really just don't have the room for a 113th number in my skull. But the real reason I don't watch it is because, due to certain operational aspects of the show, I consider it to be a reality show (which it is), and as everyone with whom I work knows full well from my frequent tirades over American Non-Idol, I... don't... like... reality... shows!

Which means I am the biggest hypocrite in the world, because I actually do watch one particular example of the fetid genre: The Next Food Network Star. I didn't even see the first season, and couldn't even tell you for sure who won it that year, but I can tell you this: I got hooked on it... and fast. So much so, that when the time came for the third season to begin, I was amazed that I was anticipating it so highly. And what did I get for this anticipation? An affirmation as to why I can't stand reality shows in the first place: chiefly, the mind-fugging the producers of these shows are engaging in with their inexplicably loyal audiences. I will not go so far as to accuse the higher-ups behind Next Food with scripting what is supposed to be a real competition, but they are certainly involved with tampering at a high level. Coming down to the penultimate episode last week, it was revealed that Jag, one of the two finalists, was caught fudging the facts of his past, and thus he was forced into "resigning" from the competition. Frankly, I can't see what not actually serving in Afghanistan has to do with being able to prepare a soufflé, but I guess lying about graduation from cooking school does. (Even if some of the best cooks I know never got near such a place.)

Outside of the fact that Jag was the only one on this season who created even halfway delicious-looking dishes, I guess Food Network just doesn't like liars. But that is precisely what they did on nearly every promo and sneak peek of every episode of this season: lie. Lie about outcomes, and mislead through taking quotes out of context to make it seem as if something else was being referenced. And, ultimately, lie by acting shocked at the revelation of Jag's mistruths onscreen, and by surprising the audience with it at the last moment, when this actually happened several months ago. To know this, and then take an audience along for a ride for several weeks in which certain contestants build up followings, and then to pull the rug out from under that audience. If the intent is to make the audience feel the same queasiness of broken trust that the producers are maintaining they went through, they have failed, because all I felt was that surely, at some point in preparing the show, Jag's credentials were probably checked out, and long before they actually put cameras on him. If not, then this show is run by rubes of the most common sort. Because, if they didn't bother to check him out before filming, then why would it matter later? Surely, these people knew this was going to come up at some point, and just had the cameras ready to record the fall.

This whole concluding nightmare is only one thing that is wrong with the show. Most of the food looked inedible, most of the contestants were nightmares of personality, most of them barely seemed aware they were doing this to be on the friggin' camera, and worst of all, the show got incredibly gimmicky with the challenges. Too gimmicky. I preferred the second season where there seemed to be more of a concentration on skills needed for actually filming shows, and where there also seemed to be more focus on the actual food. Perhaps the reason none of this season's dishes really impressed me was because I didn't really get to know the food they were creating, and just got an endless cavalcade of bad facial tics and evil glances from contestant to contestant (though most of them actually were directed at the slyly evil Colombe, with whom I naturally fell into instant love, mainly because she is exactly the sort of Zen-artiste blond chickie with whom I have mistakenly fallen for time and again, always to my regret. This was no different.) In the second season, there were at least four contestants who created dishes that made my mouth water constantly; here, I don't think any of them could have actually graduated from culinary school, let alone Jag.

And do you want tampering? How about bringing the person back whom everyone despised, Colombe, as one of the assistants in a later challenge, clearly giving the advantage to the other contestant by letting them choose the other assistant first. Because why would anyone dare choose Colombe first, even if she is actually fairly competent in the kitchen? (She did win the initial challenge.) Who won the challenge is not important here; it's just the fact that the other person they brought back was probably the most beloved contestant. Don't tell me the producers didn't know in advance what the outcome of pairings would be. And by bringing Amy back, the in-denial-about-her-snobbiness French-married mom, to replace Jag, it immediately explained exactly why there was such concentration on her feelings early in that episode. But she and Rory, the other finalist, are both unremarkable in both presentation and personality, and if I hear one more thing about backyard bistros or gourmets next door (their boring "identities", both much fretted over in the run), this budding home cook is going to puke his next six meals up before even making them.

I'm not sure I will even watch tonight's finale, because 1) I am not interested at this point, and 2) I doubt that I would watch any show these two were on again. (Besides, I accidentally ran into the final result earlier completely by accident, so what's the point?) Then again, they are going to have Colombe on for a cast reunion. Just to watch this immensely tedious bunch of bores have to twist themselves into knots to put on a smile for her just might be the highlight of the show so far.

And for me, for good. This soufflé has burst... I'm going to check out Top Chef...

And now... A Torrent of Unabashed Love for Spout.com

You should know the score by now, O' Loyal Readers of the Pylon. First I try something out, then I bitch about it for a score of days or so, and then I make nice with the former target of my distress. Like if I am looking for a screwdriver in the tool drawer, but I can't find it, and so I punch the kitchen cabinets in testosterone-fueled stupidity, and then maybe throw a cup across the room. Invariably, just as I let loose with a burst of sinful profanity, I will spy the screwdriver peeking out from behind a towel on the counter. And then, as John Prine once sang, "Everything's OK, everything is cool."

So it went with Spout.com. It intrigued me for a while, and I finally checked it out. When I did, it ran far too slow, even on the pair of relatively speedy computers with which I am affiliated, and it took me forever to add movies to my profile. I wasn't happy with the cover for King Kong that popped up, and I groused about that in the previous post a couple of days ago. I snagged the shiny widget that claimed to show my favorite movies, but after a cameo appearance as a featured page element on the Pylon for a handful of days, I took it down out of a weariness with its limited range. And I bitched about the site some more.

But, then I fell in love with it. Honestly, it was completely by accident, this revitalization of my interest in Spout. I was actually going to close shop, but when I tried to log in over the weekend, I found that I couldn't. The Spouters claimed they were making positive changes to the site, and so I stayed away for a couple of hours. When I came back, the site seemed a bit speedier, though not much. But, I had cooled down considerably in the meantime, and I started to poke around a bit to see some of the features in a more in-depth way. I accepted invitations to a couple of groups, neither of which really enthralls me all that much, but it did allow me the opportunity to see how the place was run. I checked out numerous profiles, and discovered some very interesting people, along with a couple of rather scary ones. (This was mainly due to their abhorrent spelling and grammar. It's one thing to get on a teenybopper board and use "w00t" and "WTF" and all that other slang; but, if you are going to join a specialized site built around criticism and film writing, take some time and brush up your language. At the very least, use some goddamn punctuation from time to time...)

Next, and to my great joy, I discovered a procedure for rating movies in a relatively swift manner. I won't go into the details, but the main obstacle in proceeding with the plan, apart from site speed, was in my finding some sort of peace with Spout's five-star rating system. From five to one, the choices are: "I loved it"; "I liked it"; "I am neutral about it"; "I lost interest"; and "I disliked it." The struggle for me was to stop thinking of a five-star movie as a top-shelf classic film and instead merely proclaim my outright love for certain films, despite a possible lack of quality. I was able to do this for the most part, but even though I have seen Plan 9 a zillion times, I still could not affix a fistful of stars to the sweet, sweet damnable thing. The nearest I could get was four stars, but this is a shame, since it means I only "liked" it. This is a clear-cut case of utter personal deceit, as I probably adore the film far more than others to which I am blatantly unashamed to marry my kiss of overly earnest approval.

Soon enough, though, I found the peace for which I was searching. I not only rated Plan 9 those mere four stars for likability, but just under 5200 films found themselves with ratings over the next four days. I started numerous fun lists on my profile page -- some of which I shall go into with some detail in a future post -- and then I sought to contain the final looming section on Spout which posed as my chief interest in the site initially: the FilmBlog section. If you are on Spout reading this particular post right now, then I have configured it correctly. The plans for now are to post selected past articles of my choosing, as I reset them on Pylon to link over to Spout. As opposed to merely catering to the smattering of friends and family, devoted as they are, who read it currently, the goal now is to get my writing closer to an audience which might be interested in perusing it.

Hopefully, this includes you who are reading it right now. Welcome to The Cinema 4 Pylon...

Q: WHERE DID THE WIDGET GO?

A: It displeased me greatly. That, as my pal The Working Dead described it, "shiny" little box at the top left that portrayed the DVD covers of some films that were particular favorites of mine? Gone.

Why? Mainly aesthetic reasons. Chiefly, I could never get the sizing of the covers right to match the vision within my discerning eye, and also, the widget has a limit of 30 covers. So, despite there being around far more films in that file on my page at Spout, it would only show 30 of them, and only the most recent additions to the list at that. The worst part? It would not allow me to choose my list of "favorite films" from off of Spout, instead automatically setting itself to my "highest rated" films. These two lists, while only slightly exclusive of each other, are still not the same thing at all.

The worst is that the widget started to bother me after a while. I liked having something glowing and movable on my site, but the more I fretted over what films were and weren't on there, and the more I grew angry at the lack of choices within the program, the more the thing took on the odious and malignant air of Poe's black cat to me. I wanted to murder the increasingly horrid-seeming thing every time I checked in on my blog, and each glance at it brought the spectre of death ever close to the seemingly harmless (and free, I must add) "shiny" little widget.

And now, it is gone. Not for good; I will look into it again in the near future, maybe after I bitch for a bit about the program, and do some research to find out if there are indeed avenues to getting what I want in that same box. As long as it is free, of course...

Purely Prurient Reasons Why I Watched This Stuff As A Teenager #1: Star Trek

In Which Our Hero Fires Randomly at Anything Flixster Has to Offer Him...

Boy, was I ever livid... in the beginning...

Jumping onto Flixster that first day, looking at a list of people who had left recent reviews for Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas, and skipping past the girl who is so cool that she has to hate the movie just because "everyone else likes it", I ran across the profile of a soul who felt the movie was "completely over-rated". Naturally, I clicked on his Flixster profile, which revealed a lad who purported to be 16, which threw me because, in my Flixster infancy, I noticed he had 7,216 ratings in his profile.

7,216 ratings? Movie ratings? Need I mention that when one reaches their 16th birthday, one has only been alive for 5,840 days, give or take a leap year here and there? If you started watching 3 movies a day from the age of 10, you are still going to fall far short of having seen 7,000 movies at that youthful age. Unless this kid was an invalid (I would not leave out that possibility, but then the picture of him with his skateboard served to preclude that angle), I would highly doubt he has gotten anywhere near seeing that many films by the age of 16. I have been immersing myself in movies since the age of 13 or so, and it took me quite some time to get near that total number of films seen.

And there's the rub: he hasn't seen that many films. I don't need to know this for a fact; it is merely a sense. But, at first, I merely accepted that this sk8ter boi was just zipping through the QuickRate section of Flixster and dismissing offhand any film he might not have an interest in -- chick flicks, kiddie films, probably any movie that didn't have spurting blood or a fart joke in it (I am only judging from the films on the first page of his profile, but this was the pattern) -- and I was correct to the degree that I was able to discern from the limited range of that page. A couple of days later, I logged into Flixster proper -- directly onto the site -- and encountered Ardiaz23, a 21 year old who has -- wait for it -- 25,373 films rated on his profile.

I am 42 years old, almost 43. When I left Alaska two years ago, after I started collecting videotapes at the age of 17 or so, and began taping films off of cable slightly before that, I had amassed a collection of somewhere in the vicinity of 5,000 films. I have had two years in my life where I purposely watched over 1,000 films in one year (1991 and 1997, 1 married year and 1 divorced). Currently, thanks to the differing work schedules of both Jen and I, and despite the fact that I spend much of my free time writing, I still probably average around 10 films a week (remember, I watch a lot of older films, and many of them are rather brief in length). And while I am fairly certain that I have seen over 10,000 films in my lifetime, I am not so certain about having seen 25,373 of them. It would take a highly motivated/unmotivated person to pull that off. I doubt even most certified film critics have gotten near that number of films, unless they have reached the age of Roger Ebert and have been on the job for over 40 years. And there, if he sees an average of 500 films a year, it would just put him over 20,000 total.

Going back to Ardiaz23, the 21-year old with a giant capacity for film ratings, and digging into his movie rating list further, I discovered how these people were pulling this off. It was rather evident, really, but I had just assumed the program only listed films on which one had actually put a starred rating. What was vexing me, and what was making these film counts attain such high levels for these mere babies, was the ability to select either "Not Interested" or "Want to See It." If you just said you wanted to see a film, it would get added to your film count.

Then, I became even more freakin' livid! If there is anything that could possibly hack me off even more than thinking some 16 year old was just tossing around movie ratings all willy-nilly without even seeing them, it would be finding out that I was completely misguided in my premature assumption about such a thing.

Goddamn it, Flixster! Not to go all David Lo-Pan on you, but now this really pisses me off to no end! Couldn't you just leave me to stew happily in my self-righteous critical funk? How come every time I find something I dislike with you -- you inoffensive little Facebook application you, sweetly designed to give nothing but idle pleasure to lonely souls on their laptops -- you -- YOU!! -- have to ruin my sadistic reverie and make with the kissy-face...

Goddamn it, Flixster. Looks like I'm just going to go slap a rating on Lethal Weapon 2...

A Quick One While You've Been Away...

Ach! Look to your left! What do you see?

That's right -- nothin'... Now, in the words of Joe Jackson, "Eyes right!" What do you see there?

Oh, just my latest fishie widget, landed when I opened up my account on Spout.com, which is a very specific online community for movie lovers. I had been hearing about the site for a while now, really ever since I started listening to the Filmspotting podcast from Chicago Public Radio. Never thought to check it out before, until I listened to the latest 'cast today and heard Spout mentioned once more. As I happened to be on my lunch and was bored from casting about aimlessly on the tubes of the Internets, I said, "What the heck!"

As I have documented quite fully thus far -- and which will be documented just a tad further in a couple days -- I am still not exactly enthused about my experience on Flixster, the application which I added to my fledgling Facebook page. Checking out Spout.com, I found a variety of cool services that Flixster cannot approach, but Spout.com's downfall for me is its rather slow-loading interface. It took me about 12 minutes to rate and add about 8 movies to my list of favorite films, when Flixster allowed me to add roughly 50 or so. Ultimately, there may be more one can do with their movie lists on Spout.com, but I will withhold judgment on this until I have put in more than a mere 0.48 days on the site (at least, that is what my "Stats" page tells me I have done thus far).

The chief pisser for me is that when you look up a title, a DVD cover comes up which does not necessarily correspond to the one in my collection. As an example, I dialed up the 1933 version of King Kong and got a DVD cover on my page that I am fairly certain I have never seen before in my life. This hacked me off because I was attempting to use the swell new widget I discovered on Spout, and the very one that you see on the top right of this very blog. If you run your cursor over the image, the titles will move fast or slow depending on how you move it, and you can also see the title name and my incorrectly starred rating for the film. I say "incorrectly" because these ratings in no way correspond with the 9-star ratings system that I have installed on all of my posts on my various blogs. Spout.com also does not allow you 1/2 votes -- just five boring stars, so that is another plus in Flixster's favor. At least with Flixster, I can ignore the full fifth star and still have my 9-star system.

And if you do scan the image at the right, you will see that loathed cover of the big ape movie, which when you look up all 118 titles that come up when you put the title through Amazon's DVD section, doesn't even show up on any of the five pages. So, now this makes me rather suspect of Spout.com's online store (which is a big push on the site), and something which I probably won't choose over Amazon's general swiftness and ease of use. After all, I don't want it to take half an hour to purchase three titles, as slow as the pages load on Spout.

So, if I am bitching so much about Spout already after only a half day as a member (it is a free service), then why have I put their widget on my blog? Well, because it's different and new for me... and so sue me already if I can't try something to punch things up a bit. Of course, I realize it actually serves as a free ad for their site, so once I have determined that I really can't deal with the site, it will go away. My rule since the beginning is I would only allow an ad on my pages if it were something I believed in deeply. For now, they get a pass because there are numerous features which interest me.

Chief amongst these would be its connection to Filmspotting, a show I enjoy greatly, and also allows you to add the show's two critics to reside on your page as "experts." While their savaging of Bringing Up Baby a couple of months ago makes me doubt the veracity of this statement, I do respect their opinions to the larger degree. Because the charge of the site is its clear focus on movie criticism and nothing outside of that, it also, right now, seems remarkably free of the usual teenie random clickers, who as a rule generally give little thought to their opinions on a larger scale, something that quite obviously plagues Flixster, as if it were a gathering place for people who have only seen films with Jennifer Garner.

For now, the widget stays, incorrect covers and all. Perhaps I will discover some hidden method on Spout where I can choose the cover I wish to include (Flixster doesn't allow this either); perhaps I won't. But let me have my fun for now. I'm sure I will discover something else in a week or so that make me rethink the entire process all over again.

Psychotronic Ketchup: Zero Hour! (1957)

Zero Hour!
Director: Hall Bartlett // Paramount, 1957 [DVD]
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

It wasn't until halfway through this film that I started to think of the title in more than just the traditional way, where the term serves to denote the beginning of a military operation or as announcement that the moment for action has arrived. Watching the sweat drip off the furrowed brow of the flustered but always determined Dana Andrews as he attempts to land a plane full of ptomaine-poisoned passengers, including the actual flight crew, I wondered if the studio or the author (Arthur Hailey, who would go on to tremendous fame as the creator of the Airport series of disaster books/films -- think of this one as a test flight, which Hailey actually based on his own teleplay of the year before) actually intended the title to take on the double meaning that it does. After all, they do cast their hero, Ted Stryker, a down-on-his-luck ex-fighter captain tormented by the death of most of his squadron in WWII, as a complete nebbish who can't keep a job for more than a few months, who is about to lose his wife and kid, and who cannot accept any responsibility whatsoever. Then, when the circumstances are right and all the planets are aligned perfectly against him, he gets another moment to shine, and he has to come through or else all will be lost (..."And this includes your son Joey, too!," he is reminded, more than once.) It truly becomes the "hour" for this "zero"...

This quandary surrounding the title is much like the uneasy certainty over whether the makers of this film are actually aware of just how campy this film plays to the audience. Acting styles from past eras always seem this way to modern eyes, though I am sure the actors were aware of the cheesy nature of the dialogue and storyline. But there is something else here at work, that is bigger than the filmmakers could ever have imagined when this film was produced. If the name of uneasy Capt. Ted Stryker gives you a nudge, or perhaps if I place the images of a boy named Joey palling about creepily with the pilots in the cockpit, or even the aforementioned plane full of near-death food poisoned passengers, maybe you will pick up on this circumstance of which I am hinting. If not, how about I mention an edgy, nicotine-addicted captain who alternately fights and talks Stryker down to the ground, but says "It looks like I picked the wrong week to give up cigarettes!" as he lights up another one? Bring anything to mind?

That's right. Zero Hour! is the chief and extremely camp source for the classic comedy Airplane!, and it is nearly all here: the face-slapping of the hysterical female passenger by the stewardess; the deadpan doctor who tries to keep everything in the back of the plane on an even keel; and even Johnny the office boy, who is asked "How about some coffee?" (though in this case, he actually does get the coffee, unlike the late Stephen Stucker, who merely blasts back "No, thank you!") OK, so there is no singing nun or dying girl from whom she can rip out the IV with her wayward guitar, or even a jive-translating Mrs. Cleaver, but Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ) had to add some elements for originality. And they certainly switched some characters about, giving Stryker a past with a comely stewardess, taking away his wife, and making Joey just some kid on the plane. But, watching Zero Hour!, there are at least a couple dozen points where the dialogue causes the corresponding punchlines in Airplane!, or at least the immediate variants to that dialogue, to go rushing joyously through one's brain. If one is aware of the connection between the two films, though, then it blows past the walls of impartiality and makes it impossible to judge or enjoy the source film strictly on its decent B-movie merits.

ZAZ were brutal in their dissection of the older film (which they bought the rights to for the purpose of making their own film), but I didn't realize just how intricate their spoofing was until I picked up on the name of Hall of Fame footballer Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch in Zero Hour's credits. Seeing this, I immediately thought, "I hope he is playing part of the crew." Why? Because this would explain to me why ZAZ got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a rather stiff actor, to play co-pilot Roger Murdock. The result is that the co-pilot role in each film is filled by a world-famous athlete. Maybe it is mentioned on the commentary track somewhere on the Airplane! DVD -- I don't know; I rarely listen to commentaries, finding they can often destroy the mystique behind certain films, though I am sure this one would be fun -- but I am certain this is completely on purpose.

And quite the opposite of what Arthur Hailey and his compatriots probably expected or could ever imagine when they made this golden age disaster flick. Of course, what they made was just as funny, just in a different way...

Recently Rated Movies #52: Ryan's Hope

Desperate Hunger + Jack in the Box on Thursday Noon + Ciabatta Grilled Chicken Sandwich = Goddamned Food Poisoning. Felt like crap the last couple of days. Back in the saddle tonight...

The Proud Ones
Dir.: Robert D. Webb // 1956 [Fox Movie Channel]
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

I know what film convinced me that Robert Ryan was a crappy actor: Captain Nemo and the Underwater City. I saw it several times as a youth, and was always flustered with Ryan's portrayal of the title character, especially since I had fallen in love with the character in both book and film. For me, James Mason was Nemo, even if he is not as described in Verne's novel, and I also developed an appreciation for Herbert Lom and José Ferrer in the same part. But I felt Ryan's performance was lazy and, perhaps, uninterested, as if he felt the role was ridiculous and beneath him. The role is not, of course, but the film definitely was beneath him, and most likely behind him already in his mind as he made it, which probably resulted in what I perceived as a bad job of acting.

This is wholly erroneous, because Ryan was a terrific and complex actor, which I discovered as I grew up and saw many of his most famous films: The Wild Bunch, Crossfire, Billy Budd, The Dirty Dozen. (I prefer The Naked Spur out of his entire filmography, but I am a solid Anthony Mann nut.) In the past year or so, I have caught a lot of his earlier Westerns, and have definitely found myself happily caught in the middle of a personal Ryan revival. The opportunity to catch The Proud Ones on Sunday morning left me thinking about how one's opinion of an actor can hinge on such incidents: a youthful collision with a bad moment in the person's career, such as Ryan's late-career filling of the Nemo part.

Because, while Ryan's performance as Nemo may have actually been lazy and possibly bad, his job as Marshall Cass Silver in The Proud Ones shows his true dimensions to a sharpened degree. What could have been an apparent knockoff of Gary Cooper's High Noon role in the hands of a lesser craftsman becomes a showcase for Ryan to imbue his stoic lawman with craftiness and intelligence, arguably exceeding Cooper's Oscar-winning portrayal. This is no knock on Cooper; this is a different character in a roughly similar situation -- at least, each lawman is stuck in a scenario where he seems to be a doomed figure when the rest of their respective townsfolk refuse to get involved -- but Cooper's sheriff seems to rely more on sheer guts, desperation and the fortunate saving grace of some doubly timely intervention by his wife. Ryan's Marshall Silver also doesn't have to initially face his killer gang alone: faced with a worsening eye condition that could leave him blind and with a citizenry unwilling to back him up politically and physically, he uses his wits to slowly convert a youthful wildcat (Jeffrey Hunter) into his fold, even when the kid is more than willing to kill the Marshall, believing throughout most of the film that Marshall Silver shot down his gunslinging father in cold blood. At numerous other points in the film, Ryan's Silver relies unswervingly on his wits, using what he knows about the town, its surroundings and its citizens, to aid him in his battle against his tormenters.

And this was the biggest pleasure in The Proud Ones. One can go through several seasons of numerous western series and not get the same sense of their towns being as lived in as the town of Flat Rock, Kansas. Every character seems absolutely possessed by this feeling of belonging in exactly that place at that point in time. It's a tough trick to achieve, making the viewer believe that even the incidental characters are real people that exist even outside the frame of the story, and the screenwriters succeed in that, while also giving a plausible historic mood to the events leading to the film's actions. The film itself, though, is no High Noon. But what film, outside of High Noon itself, is? The Proud Ones proves in the end to be merely good, and while no lost classic, but it contains numerous treasures within, not least of which is Robert Ryan's steadily crafty performance.

There is a reason one must revisit the impressions of one's youth and judge them by the critical standards of an adult intellect. In the case of judging Mr. Ryan when I was ten years old, I was sorely incorrect and unlearned. I still don't like him as Captain Nemo (I saw it again last year), but through the keening intelligence I have seen him display in about two dozen other performances, I have now surfaced from my trip in the Nautilus of Premature Judgment...

The Ravaging of Influence? - A Holiday Diversion

The question regarding these two pictures is not "Who's more Booty-licious?"

The questions are "Do you really think that Beyonce has ever gotten close to actually watching Fritz Lang's Metropolis? Could she even tell you what is was, or did her designer just say "Here's your robot costume, honey!"

And is she aware that the original robot, the False Maria, was designed to seduce the masses for evil purposes?

It's all about subtext, Baby Girl. The best comment I have seen on the internet about Mizz Thang's BET Awards costume was from someone who said "Great! Now the outside matches the insides!" Cannot top that one. Been intimating it for years regarding certain popular entertainers.

People are making a lot about the fact she may have stolen this robot-rising-and-stripping stage act from Kylie Minogue a few years back, and others point out she is dressed like C-3PO. Regardless of what she stole and from where the media rubes think she got it, everything goes back to Maria. And 1927's Metropolis. Watch it, Bouncy...

Psychotronic Ketchup: Wolfman (1979)

Masochism only plays a small part in my watching of some of these films in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. Certainly, I enter into many of these films with a large amount of dread as to their expected quality. This can pay off in spades, however, if the film turns out, on the rare occasion, to be far better than could ever hope them to be.

If only I could tell you that North Carolina's would-be lycanthropy & Satanism epic from 1979, Wolfman, were one of these opportunities. If I could tell you, here's how I would do it: I would slowly roll up to your stately home in a surrey with some fringe on top, carefully bring the single horse pulling the carriage to a stop, puffingly crawl down from the driver's seat and amble achingly up your front steps to impart the news to you. And then, because I don't feel like coming up with another way to approach you, I will return twenty minutes later to tell you this news again in the exact same excruciatingly sluggish way. (Perhaps, after a breather, I will decide to remind you of the news about this film once more, and if I do, I will deliver it for the third time in the same manner. Until that time, you are just going to have to wait.)

Earl Owensby never met a scene he couldn't reuse multiple times in the same 90-minute movie, such as the one described above, with himself as the driver of the Slow Surrey to Boredom. He doesn't just drive that buggy, though. Owensby, a self-made man who walked off with a zillion in the tool industry and went into film production, is the producer and star of Wolfman, and it would be far too apparent a joke to elaborate on the reasons why he got the lead in this film. Here's what I know about Owensby: zilch, apart from what I can glean from his website and from the Weldon book (Wikipedia has literally nothing on him, just on his studio), he made about three dozen films at his studio beginning in the mid-'70s and through the '80s, and is at the very least a footnote in the making of a handful of Oscar-nominated/winning films. His studio, during the filming of Cameron's The Abyss, sported the world's largest underwater soundstage, built at the site of an unfinished nuclear power plant. But Owensby made his real mark in B-movies, churning out ultra low-budget flicks one after the other, including numerous 3-D productions, often starring himself in the lead. His films usually made money, playing only in the South, and gaining extra revenue from being sold to cable outlets. He gained enough notoriety that he was featured in a segment nationally on 60 Minutes the year that this film was released.

And I had never seen any of his movies until Saturday, when Wolfman arrived almost surreptitiously in my mailbox, somehow caught in the newspaper-like junk inserts that usually fly straight into the garbage can below the box. Perfect timing, as it turned out, and not actually planned at all, as I was intent on checking out Universal's The Wolf Man on a new local monster movie show that same night. Thus, a natural double feature was born in an instant.

Look, for all I know, Mr. Owensby might be a terrific guy. He probably has a lot of hard-won friends, and is a pillar of his community, and definitely has an incredible business sense. For all I know, his impulse to delve into movie-making sprang forth naturally from a personal love of movies, and I am all for feeding that impulse. I will always support independent filmmaking, and I personally would love to be involved in any production, even ones as low-budget as the ones Owensby cranked out in his heyday. If I had stayed in Alaska, signs were good that I would be helping my pal Aaron out with his zombie opus, and I had another friend who is active in making his own films as well. If it is what you love, then by all means, do what you feel you have to do.

But, let's get this fact straight from here on: judging from Wolfman, Earl Owensby, for all his presumed sincerity in making these films, was a shitty filmmaker. Yes, he is not the writer/director -- that dubious distinction belongs Worth Keeter, who was seemingly the house director for Owensby Productions, and who has since gone on to a career as a director of numerous episodes of shows like Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and Beetleborgs. (This direction seems appropriate given his start...) But, Owensby was the man in charge -- the money man -- and once you make yourself the lead over and over again, it's quite apparent who actually ran the show with this film and on the others. And if the films are shitty, then that makes you a shitty filmmaker.

Why don't we focus on the good points in Wolfman, most of which stem from an obvious love for this type of film? Most people don't make a distinction between werewolves and wolfmen, but Owensby does, and I must give him credit for that. His Colin Glasgow is a man who is cursed to assume the hair, claws and ferocity of a wolf, but still retains his humanity as far as form and mobility go. He is not a man who turns into a wolf. This puts the film's title squarely in the right subset of lycanthropy films, and points to Owensby and pals knowing, at least to this degree, what they were messing with here. I am also fine with the idea that the curse is set upon Glasgow by a cult of Satanists rather than the mere bite of a wolf (though that does happen, too); the film is already ridiculous at the outset, and it does add another small element to the plot that was actually surprising at the start, since I assumed it would just be a generic Wolfman effort as described by the history of these things.

There is some pretty good opening atmosphere over the credits, and some of the camera shots are not too bad given what I assume was a rather limited set of choices, not to mention money, time and equipment. And bonus points must be given to these brave souls for at least attempting to set their film in a bygone era, even if it really doesn't come off that way in the finished product. (All the preproduction planning in the world can't mask the sense that some of your townie extras had barely set down their Super Big Gulp from the local 7-11 before picking up their torches and shotguns.) It sometimes seems like they bought every item at a flea market that was older than 1930, and then jam-packed each set with the items, with little regard for their appropriateness. The attempt is appreciated, however. I also had that sense of the child within me, who would have loved this film at the age of ten. It is simple, it has a Wolfman, it has blood, it has a number of people getting killed. I grew up loving two werewolf movies unflinchingly, even while being scared to walk home at night: 1956's The Werewolf and 1973's The Boy Who Cried Werewolf. Quality didn't matter; the werewolves and wolfmen did. These films were the "hairy" ones that I had seen at that point, but if Owensby's film had been around just a few years earlier, it surely would have seemed like wolfie heaven to me.

And that's it for the good. The film's largest demerit comes from the editing, or rather, the lack of it. I don't know if Owensby had a contract with the theatres to deliver a solid 100-minute long feature, but if he did, then he succeeded. On that count alone, the film succeeds. Wolfman feels so much longer though -- the first twenty minutes dripped by in what seemed like a hundred themselves -- and the blame has to rest on Owensby and Keeter's need to repeat themselves endlessly. They can't just show Glasgow running up the steps to the doctor's townhouse; they feel the need to show the entire scene I described above in the second paragraph -- with the surrey and the fringe and the horse and all -- and then when Glasgow returns for another discussion with the good Doc, they show the entire thing again. No shortcuts, no trimming of the scene to quicken the pace. They show it again. And this happens in a couple other scenes as well.

Because of these delays, Owensby doesn't even get in his Wolfman makeup until a full hour into this opus, and if you thought it was all meant to add anticipation to the moment, you have another thing coming. For a film so obsessed with sticking around in scene after scene, when it comes to the big transformation moment, it is over and done in about five seconds. Owensby grimaces, he grips the door jamb, his hand gets hairy, and he runs off into the night. I am fine with the Wolfman look -- he is more Cousin Itt than Chaney, Jr., with practically every bit of skin covered by long brushed-down hair -- I just don't understand why they give us hardly anything in the initial change when they linger so long on it later when he switches back. (And, of course, more than once.) There are several moments that one definitely feels the on-the-fly mode of the making of the film when it seems action sequences don't quite go as planned, such as in the final fight scene or in the big chase scene with the villagers.

It all comes down to Owensby, though. Again, he might be a nice guy, but he is no actor. It came as no surprise to find out later he was supposedly a buddy of Elvis Presley's, because the sense I got from watching Earl's first few scenes here was one of Elvis, all paunchy and addled from pills, giving up music and going back to films again. In fact, a conspiracy theory popped into my skull at that moment, almost a Bubba-Ho-Tep scenario, with one E. switching with the other E. and hiding out in North Carolina, making crappy flicks. Owensby only bears a superficial resemblance to the King, however he did play a Presley-like entertainer in a later film, and he named his real-life son after the King, too; the true match comes in his mumble-mouthed attempts at dialogue, with his soft, sweet-natured sounding accent tripping over line after line, almost to the point where you feel sorry for the guy for just trying. He loses this empathy once he is shown without his shirt, with more natural body hair than even his Wolfman character should even rightly bear. And Keeter seems determined to stay the course with his editing choices, giving us no less than three terrifying glimpses of Owensby's shaggy, dumpy physique. Upon this third horrendous attack on our vision and sanity, one screams out, "Surely, he has to be the producer to have gotten this part!"

Then again, it was the '70s. If Joe Don Baker could be considered leading man material at that time, then so apparently could Earl Owensby, even if only in his own movies. Somehow, mysteriously, he made lots of cash on this point.

Of course, that Baker guy could actually act...

Shock Show Update: Monster Movies on KDOC-TV (Channel 6, Irvine, CA)

Until now, I had only thought of KDOC-TV, a local Anaheim-Irvine station that proclaims itself to be the home of "Endless Classics" and sports a Woody as its logo (don't get excited, pervs -- I meant the style of vehicle, sitting in front of a sunset, replete with surfboard on its roof), as merely a place where I could watch repeats of old Johnny Carson skits right at bedtime. Then, Carson was removed from the schedule, and suddenly, I didn't think of KDOC-TV at all. Sure, they play several series of which I am enamored (The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Cheers, Wild Wild West, The Honeymooners, Hawaii Five-O), but they also play a lot of crappy shows, too, and in this age of the DVD, I would rather just get the series I like on disc or on Netflix, and watch them completely uncut... and also not have to put up with a load of commercials to boot. Classics KDOC-TV may play, but I'd rather watch them my way.

However, this doesn't mean that I pass up the occasional episode of the Zone before I hit the sack. The other night I tuned in, and I received a most pleasant surprise. A commercial came on alerting me to the fact that KDOC was going to be playing "Monster Movies, Every Saturday night!" I figured immediately that I would be hit with the usual lump of public domain titles or more ancient prints of old dubbed Godzilla flicks (something I wouldn't pass up regardless), but then came the second surprise. Lon Chaney, Jr. leaped into the TV frame, resplendently ferocious in his old Wolf Man guise! The hope sprang up in my heart that perhaps these guys had gone the extra mile and secured themselves a Universal package. Even though I own all of the classic Universal flicks (at least, the ones out on DVD currently), I still thrilled at the thought of a regular run of these films on television again.

Tuning in Saturday night, here is what met me: an introduction filled with most of the classic Universal Monster crew, all in glorious black and white! Simple, direct, and to the point: "Welcome to KDOC-TV's Monster Movies!" The gate to a castle opens up and there they are: The Creature, The Invisible Man, Frankenstein's Monster, Ardath Bey, The Wolf Man, The Mummy... all rushing at the viewing so fast one can't help but feel compelled to watch the show. Plus, in the mix, four wonderful images of Boris Karloff -- but strangely, no Lugosi, no Dracula. The intro continues: "This week, the all-time great monster movie, The Wolf Man, starring the great Lon Chaney, Jr.!" Here's the deal: whether this is a designed package from Universal itself, or if KDOC did more than just slap their logo and announcer over the designed package, the effect of both the ads and the intro is immensely appealing, and kudos should go out to whomever is responsible.

Even though I own the DVD for Wolfie's epic, I watched regardless of this fact. The only things I dreaded were the interruption of commercials, and the disappointment I would feel if my eyesight were saddled with a sorry-looking print. But the commercial breaks were swift, and spaced around 12 minutes apart, leaving one time to really sink their fangs into the flick before being jolted away. Best of all, despite a two-hour time slot on the guide, the film ended at 10:31 p.m., meaning that even with ads, the seventy minute film only took just over ninety minutes. (They filled the time with an unannounced Zone.)

Late in the show, they ran a promo for next week's film, The Mummy, and it was especially pleasing to hear them pay the proper obeisance to Karloff, referring to him as "The One and Only Boris Karloff." This is a very important point, because I am not thinking of myself when I feel joy over the airing of this series of films; I am thinking of the next generation of movie nuts and horror fiends. My own personal introduction to the Universal Monsters and many, many others came via an after-school matinee show on KTVA-TV Channel 11 in Anchorage, Alaska, though that particular time-slot filler didn't have any attempt at surrounding the watcher with monster knowledge or imagery; they simply showed the films and didn't comment on them otherwise. But I happily blundered into watching them, in much the same way that I hope younger viewers of today might discover these films for themselves. And part of this process is falling in love with Karloff and Chaney and Lugosi and Rains, and it helps that this show goes the extra step in putting their names quite clearly before their audience.

Looking at the channel's website, I checked out the page where they list the upcoming films through September 1st, and I do indeed have all of the films listed. The last Saturday of August, though, brings us William Castle's I Saw What You Did (which I have never seen) and then September 1st has The Deadly Mantis, an OK film with a pretty sweet monster that is nonetheless nowhere to be found on DVD yet (and that I first saw on that long gone KTVA Channel 11 matinee show in the '70s). 

So, I will definitely be taking the opportunity to sit down to watch these two films, and will certainly have the show on in the background on the other Saturdays, should I fail to have anything else to do outside the home on those nights. Mainly, it will be for the atmosphere (if I really want to watch The Mummy's Curse, I will simply watch it flat out on disc), and to give myself the warm feeling that, somewhere out there, new fans are hopefully being created by some of the oldest denizens of the scare game. They've got to do it; today's fiends simply aren't up to the task.

Make A Note of This: Who Do Ya Trust?

Despite the fact that true critics are supposed to work from a balanced center when they enter a screening or a show or a restaurant, they don't. They can't. I, myself, try to do such a thing when I sit down for a film. Whether the film is Wallace and Gromit or Hostel, I try to approach the film with a blank notepad in my head. Most critics contend that this is how they do it. But, it cannot be done. No matter how much they might protest, there is not a critic in the world who can totally divorce themselves wholly from their experience, their prejudice, and the influence of the surrounding atmosphere. That blank notepad? It's only in their hands.

And I am sorry, but if you are taking notes during a movie, then you are not watching the whole film. It's one thing to take notes during a lecture or a speech, but film is mainly a visual experience, and relies on a connection between the viewer and the screen to impart the bulk of its message. To properly see a film -- at least, the first time; I don't care if you take notes on a second or later screening -- one must totally immerse oneself in the experience. No chatting with pals or neighbors; no giggling or goofing with dates; no specially cut popcorn buckets. I doubt there is a reviewer out there who would wear iPod earbuds while reviewing a film, or talk on their cell phone in the middle of one. I've seen ordinary citizens do both; but a reviewer? Nah...

A film reviewer for the Anchorage Daily News would often show up in the theatre when I was attending numerous films through the '80s; on two occasions, once at Re-Animator and once at The Evil Dead, I sat behind her and caught a full glimpse of her working habits. With Re-Animator, she had her head down taking copious notes through the first half of the film, and then got up halfway through and left. I assume she used the bathroom, because she was gone for some time, and when she came back nearly twelve to fifteen minutes later, she had a spanking new soda cup in her grip. Due to this detour from actually reviewing the film, she missed much of the already controversial "head" sequence. At The Evil Dead, she brought a girlfriend (uh... yeah... you know...) and while she also kept notes on her reporter's notebook (I was sitting on the aisle in the postage stamp screen that made up the third theatre in the late, lamented Polar Theatre, and I saw her note-taking peripherally down the open aisle), she somehow decided to maintain a full and quite noticeable conversation with her gal-pal. As there were about twelve people in the room, it turned out I was the only one who really cared, but my decision to relocate across the aisle in a huff was apparently all that was required to get them to stifle it. For the most part. Either way, I found it implausible that she could pay any attention to either film in the circumstances, and still feel qualified to construct a balanced review on the event. Somehow, she actually ended up giving slightly positive reviews to the pair of films (of the "great cheesy fun" type -- blah blah blah...), a turn which I attribute either to magical pixies or to someone paying heed to the critical trends and then following suit. (I recall that her Re-Animator piece quoted lines and details that she missed during her lengthy sojourn to the potty and snackbar.)

I have said before, and let me reiterate slowly -- because this is the launching point -- we are each of us the sum total of our experiences. A person beaten by their father as a child is going to approach any film with violence far different than a person who has ridden a bicycle down the sunny path of life their entire existence. My brother Mark and I, who are very similar in our musical and cinematic tastes, both reacted to The Squid and the Whale positively, but with markedly different perspectives as children of divorce four years separated. My angle on our parents' slow dissolve from coupled happiness is far different from Mark's, though it affected each of us in many of the same ways. He found the film far more amusing than I did; all I saw were moments than made me recall my own freefall into the anguish that led to some very frustrated and angry teenage years. For this same reason (and for some that stem from my own ill-fated turn with divorce), I will tend to skip on many films that are heavy on personal or household drama, simply because I cannot handle them on my own emotional plane. Example: I have yet to see the Oscar-nominated, wildly acclaimed In the Bedroom due to this reticence on my part. As relatively untroubled as my past made be, it still comes back to haunt me, even (and especially, perhaps) when I am sitting in the dark of a movie theatre, where I am supposedly watching a film with a calm and measured eye, just like I pretend to do with any other film. In my brain, I believe that I am cool and collected and balanced at the center as I enter the theatre, but my subconscious will never allow me to go unaffected by everything in my past.

So, would my friends trust my opinion on The Squid and the Whale? Much of my inner circle know, as I do of theirs, of my past experiences, perhaps not every detail but fully but enough to know that I might have a particular knowledge of the subject of divorce and the children devastated in its wake. I like to think that most of my close friends value my opinion on films, but I am looking at this from the angle of a person who cherishes writing about them.

Most people, when weighing in on their views about movies to a close pal or sister or brother, don't consider this angle. They are merely ordinary people talking in an everyday fashion to other people. "Hey, we went to Ocean's Thirteen last night." "Oh, was it any good?" "Eh, it was alright. Not as good as the first, but way better than the second one." The person receiving this information will likely pass on "I heard it's OK" to the next person who happens to bring up the name of that film, and so on. If this initial inquirer read a review in their local paper or in a magazine that raved about the film, they would then have to judge that A+ opinion against their friend's "alright" rating. Which do they value more? The reviewer? Or their close friend? It really depends on what they know about their friend, and how much they value the opinion, based on past reviews, of the critic. What it really comes down to is, "Who do ya trust?"

(To be continued...)