A Temporary Setback...

As concerned as I am about crossing every "t" and dotting every "i" where my actual work output is concerned, I am absolutely a nightmare when it comes to the matter of handling the minutiae and behind the scenes details of my personal business.

I refuse to go into the "who" as this is nobody's fault but my own, but my inability to follow through with the proper paperwork (all of it remarkably simple) when politely requested has forced me to learn a hard lesson today in keeping someone's trust (in a business sense). And, thus, also lose the position I was to have with them for at least the next couple of months.

This is going to slow the personal roll that I had been on for a good six weeks (plus) by this point. While I have caused no actual harm to anyone but myself, it is going to be hard to smile for a few days.

He Built It, and We Came Around...

Since the majority of my friends are of the theatre world, I imagine many will post on Facebook and other social media sites today about the death of Edward Albee, especially since so many of them have had the chance to meet him over the years (as did I). Since I am less theatrically bound (and not to put the man's monumental talent and staggering work down at all), Albee didn't mean quite as much to me as did author W.P. Kinsella, who also died on Friday.

A nice chunk of space on my bookshelves is still devoted to Kinsella's works, which of course include his novel Shoeless Joe, from which the film Field of Dreams was adapted. While I do have a couple of volumes of his short stories based around Native American reservation settings (such as Dance Me Outside, itself turned into a film in the '90s, and The Fencepost Chronicles, each excellent in their own right), most of my Kinsella collection is comprised of his numerous books about baseball.

Naturally, this was the key component to my attraction to Kinsella, that there wasn't just a major fiction writer whose voice actually appealed to me in an immediate sense back then, but that he was as obsessed with the game as I was at the time.

My personal favorite remains Shoeless Joe. While I went nutso over the movie version when it was released (mainly because I had already read the novel), I still recommend the book over the film simply because the writer that the Ray Kinsella character engages in his mission in the book is actually J.D. Salinger, and not the fictionalized knockoff (for legal reasons) played by James Earl Jones in the film. It adds an extra level to the story that the whitewashing for the film negates.

But a close second for me is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, which is even more deeply immersed in a state of magic realism than Shoeless Joe and manages to work in the 1908 Chicago Cubs, a mythical minor league system, a 2000-inning baseball game, and Leonardo da Vinci at the same time. It's a pretty remarkable book in its own right. And you also can't lose with his short story collection, The Thrill of the Grass.

Never got to meet you, W.P., but I am going to miss you.

[Postscript 9/22/16: As it turned out, very few of my friends posted about Mr. Albee.]

Either an Exceedingly Happy Accident and/or The Quickening...

Chalk this one up to "Exceedingly Happy Accidents". Yesterday morning (Thursday), it suddenly struck me that I had forgotten to post a link to my review of Patton Oswalt’s stand-up show that Jen and I attended on Monday night at the Irvine Improv. I had written the review for Facebook originally, but had, once the piece moved beyond a couple of brief paragraphs, also decided to publish it on The Cinema 4 Pylon as well. I totally put aside any promotion of the piece, which is quite out of character for me, but the reason I put it aside is because I was concentrating on actual work. Actual work, as any other member of this household will tell you, is quite out of character for me now as well.

I usually start out promoting on Twitter and then move forward through Google Plus, etc. and finally end up on Facebook. On Twitter, I did up a brief 140-character or so line, included @pattonoswalt within the text in the absolutely vain hope that perhaps he might see it, though I doubted he ever would, and pressed the Tweet button.

It didn’t take very long at all and it was not what I ever could have expected. Minutes later, I received a tweet from Patton Oswalt. He had gone to my review and read it, and sent me a message (partly in response to issues that I bring up in the review) that read: “Thanks for being there. This will be ongoing, but I’m finding a gear.”

I lost my shit.

I am such a fanboy, at least as far as certain celebrities are concerned and Patton is one of those celebs. I have had brief conversations with directors Rian Johnson and Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son) on Twitter, and those were pretty cool. Years ago when I still lived in Anchorage, Roger Ebert once replied to an email I sent him, and that kept me going for a good while.

But this was different. Patton had read something I had written about him and replied. AND he didn’t rake me over the coals for it. Not that I said anything negative about him in any way, but I was touching on the sensitive subject of his wife’s passing and his handling of comedic material regarding said passing onstage.

Patton did something else that blew my mind. In addition to his response to me, he retweeted the link to my website on his own Twitter page. You know, the one that has 2.83 million followers to my meager 2,750.

I lost my shit again. Within a couple of hours, I had 500 visitors to my website. By noon, over a thousand. It’s not even 24 hours yet right now, and over 2,000 people have visited my website since yesterday morning.

Now, on the average, I am happy to get 50 visitors to any one of my websites per day. The Pylon gets about a thousand visitors a month on average, usually a bit more, depending on how frequently I post. My animation blog, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, usually gets twice as much, and sometimes even more. I am not surprised by this, as it has always been more popular, especially since I revived it last year. The Shark Film Office is really just taking off, but when I post it has been getting comparable numbers to the Cel Bloc.

But to match what has happened in a single day? I’ve had posts that have gotten a couple of thousand hits over the years… OVER THE YEARS. Most of them have taken many years to accumulate those totals.

So, I know my levels, and as much as I would like to love to have an ego about even the tiniest boost, I know that I am a very small fry in an exceedingly large and uncaring pond. I promote like crazy, and though I have been having more success in the past few months, the rewards have been very fleeting. It’s hard enough to get one’s own friends and family on Facebook not to ignore it when you post a new article, imagine trying to get total strangers in the vastness of Twitter to pay attention for even a split second and give you a chance.

For Patton to do this was nice beyond words. I don’t even know if he thought about it, like “Hey, I’ll throw this guy some table scraps.” If he did think about it, I doubt that he would think in that manner. I think it was more like, “Oh, this was very nice that this guy wrote this about me. I should acknowledge it.”

I wasn’t trying to get his attention, it just happened this way, which is why I am chalking this up to “Exceedingly Happy Accidents”. Now I have had over 2,000 people who normally didn’t know I existed stop by my website in the past not-quite-a-day and read my words. And for that I have to thank Patton Oswalt.

P.S. Someone just left a comment on the Pylon and it turned out to be Carl Gottlieb, the co-screenwriter of Jaws. I just lost my shit for a third time.

Refilling the Flagon of Chuckles (or at Least an Extra Tall Improv Glass)...

One of these days, my wife Jen and I will see Patton Oswalt live at the end of a tour, when he has buffed his latest material to a crystalline sheen and stropped each and every punchline to its ultimate razor sharpness. He will be recording (or close to recording) his latest cable special or album, in a hall specially selected for its visual and audial excellence, and it will be a truly memorable night of comedy for us.

But until then, I love watching Patton Oswalt in workshop mode. Last night was our fourth time seeing him onstage in any setting, and our second seeing him onstage at the Irvine Improv (in the old theatre and now in the brand new design, which is much improved, though Patton did riff on how dwarfed he was in the larger, deeper stage layout. [The other two times we saw him live were at the Tenacious D and Friends – Stand with Haiti Benefit at the Wiltern in 2010, where he did a short set amongst many other acts, and at the inaugural Festival Supreme in 2013, where we missed his Stage 3 set (and others) because we could barely get back to that area comfortably without being crushed by the crowds, but he did get on the main stage to make a couple of introductions, and appeared onstage during Tenacious D's closing set, though hidden inside a costume.] 

The last time we saw Patton onstage at the Improv, he came out in sweats, just after having fed his then-infant daughter, and worked haphazardly but hilariously through brand new material off a legal pad. We had seen Eddie Izzard in the early part of a tour a few years back, but he was way beyond where Patton was that night in regards to polish. I found it fascinating to watch Patton throwing out lines and quite literally rewriting on the pad on the stage as he discovered what worked with the crowd and what didn't.

Skipping ahead to last night, Jen and I got to bear witness to Patton's first long stand-up set since his wife died suddenly four and half months ago. He was nervous (or at least seemed that way, and it would be understandable) and if he wasn't totally in control of his emotions, he did have the audience behind him the entire way. Most of the crowd seemed to have an awareness of what they were witnessing, and made allowances for it, although Patton addressed that issue directly on a couple of occasions, calling himself out when he felt that he had gained cheap applause through stage trickery.

Working sporadically off a legal pad once again, the hour-long set was a mix of brand new material, a couple of the best bits from his last tour (the "clown from the edge of the forest" story, for example), his fluent nerd-speak, and some crowd work with the first couple rows of tables (his refrain of "Tractors!" being a favorite for me) when he needed to clear his head a little. But hiding behind everything was that hill that needed climbing, which he tackled somewhat tentatively and more than a bit roughly. With less agile comedians, should they start a bit with "So, my wife died four and a half months ago...," the air would definitely find its way as quickly as possible out of the room. It was different here, because there was so much hanging on it. To a degree, we in the audience were all guilty of being rubberneckers, and perhaps Patton was as well. His act has long relied on being open about his life experiences in a rather sincere way, even more so in the last few years since he got married and had a child. To just ignore that in his act now would seem a betrayal, and he finally tackled it head on with a certain degree of success. Comedy is a fine-tuning process, and with material soaked in this much darkness, he has a lot of tuning to do before it is ready for mass consumption.

Patton had one sure thing in his pocket, and he was able to rely on the makeup of his audience when he needed a jolt of energy in the show: his high-profile Twitter feuds with various Trump acolytes, and his anger at the political circus in which we are enmeshed currently. In fact, so fired up was he on this point that he interrupted his new opening material to launch into some Trump material. "OK, I'm sorry, but this can't wait..." Everyone knew exactly what was coming. It was grand.

On a personal note: I found it interesting that when Patton mentioned that most of his audience were probably of like mind with him politically and then the resultant applause started, my eyes immediately drifted across the audience to see who wasn't clapping. (Mind you, Irvine is a city in Orange County, traditionally the most Republican-voting county in left-dominant Southern California.) The people on either side of us weren't clapping at that cue, but then they laughed as hard at everything, including every other anti-Trump rip that followed, as we were, so that response applause was clearly no indicator. I just found it interesting that my knee-jerk reaction was to suss out the enemy within. That is where our country has gone with this, and I am as guilty as anyone of being unaccepting of the opinions of others. We all need to step this back a notch or two.

[I wish that I had pictures but the Improv, much like a movie theatre, has a "no cell phone policy" once the show is underway. I don't like my movies interrupted, and I am certainly not going to ruin a stand-up show either. Unless Dane Cook is on the stage...]

The Tower of Film: My Top 25 of 1964

For those who might think it is in poor taste for me to use the word "tower" so blithely in an article title on September 11, my answer to anything negative you might have to say about it is a deeply cold "Fuck you, it's my goddamned birthday."

Also, this tower is still standing. (And please don't cue the Elton song...) This tower stands as long as I do (or at least as long as I can breathe, if in fact standing ever becomes a true difficulty, then I shall watch sitting down). The Tower of Film is my term for the figurative monstrosity that has arisen out of the 12,000-plus feature films that I have watched in my now fifty-two years on this spheroid, with the very cream of the crop occupying the higher, more exalted positions on that tower.

The Tower of Film started out a few years ago as a different project which slowly evolved into its current state, once I realized the enormous breadth of the project and just how much I had underestimated its original potential. That first intent was merely to make sure that I watched the most important films that had been released within each year of my lifespan, but then went far beyond that I started accumulating an enormous database of films, which ultimately spanned over 6,000 films before I stopped pulling it together about three years back. (I have yet to update it to account for those last three years.)

Early on in the project, I decided to start going through the list and concentrated on the very first year within it, that naturally being 1964, the year of my birth. Using the website Flickchart to rank all of my films (to date, I have ranked 12,040 feature films – that I have views from start to finish, a prime criteria for candidacy on my part – on that site), I've discovered that I have watched 164 films from 1964. (Not every film that I have seen is on Flickchart yet, so there are some titles left out each year.)

After several years of ranking my films one against the other on Flickchart (I highly recommend it for movie buffs if you are at all interested in determining your favorite films of all time), I present now on this celebration of my 52nd year my Top 25 films of 1964:

[# | title | director | my ranking overall on Flickchart out of 12,040 films as of 9/11/2016]

#25 | The Pawnbroker | Sidney Lumet | Flickchart: 1,447
#24 | Nothing but a Man | Michael Roemer | Flickchart: 1,340
#23 | Fail-Safe | Dir.: Sidney Lumet | Flickchart: 1,336
#22 | World without Sun | Jacques-Yves Cousteau | Flickchart: 1,306
#21 | The Gospel According to St. Matthew | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Flickchart: 1,300

#20 | Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster | Ishirô Honda | Flickchart: 1,299
Some of you might be surprised that I am able to have a big, stupid, Japanese monster film appear on the list slightly higher than a far more sober and intellectually demanding Pasolini film (as well as a trio of steady, sharp dramas). I have two answers to that: 1) I am an atheist, and if I do have a god, it is only Godzilla, not the Jesus (though he seemed like such a nice boy...); and 2) Welcome to the world as occupied by my brothers and I, the world of Silly and Serious, where equal weight is given to items in both camps at the same time. I am deathly serious about my silliness, and can be most silly when it comes to matters of great seriousness. For me, Pasolini sits alongside Toho quite easily, and I can jump from one to the other in seconds. And my love for the Ghidrah film (though I prefer it to be spelled Ghidorah) is high enough where I could have placed this even further up on the list given my druthers. However, no one has given me any druthers in a good while, so the film sits in the list where it is for the moment.

#19 | Seance on a Wet Afternoon | Bryan Forbes | Flickchart: 1,162
#18 | The Masque of the Red Death | Roger Corman | Flickchart: 1,033

#17 | The Train | John Frankenheimer | Flickchart: 1,032
If I had been exposed to this Burt Lancaster film a few years earlier than I actually was it would probably rank even higher on this list than it does. I have always been a sucker for Lancaster, and this would have made me crazy had I seen it at twelve or thirteen.

#16 | Une femme mariée | Jean-Luc Godard | Flickchart: 1,004
#15 | Seven Faces of Dr. Lao | George Pal | Flickchart: 1,003
#14 | Gate of Flesh | Seijun Suzuki | Flickchart: 961

#13 | The Umbrellas of Cherbourg | Jacques Demy | Flickchart: 927
This might as well be called The Umbrellas of Charm-bourg, because once I saw it a few years ago, I knew that it was just so perfect. Where had it been all my life? (Though it is likely I would have hated it as a child...) This film has the greatest chance of moving straight up the charts for me on subsequent showings. It already has a tad.

#12 | Topkapi | Dir.: Jules Dassin | Flickchart: 883

#11 | Goldfinger | Dir.: Guy Hamilton | Flickchart: 645
I am going to admit here and now that as they age and as I do too, some of the older Bond films are slipping for me. Maybe it is because I am becoming ever more progressive in my attitudes with each passing year, but attitudes that I once either accepted, shrugged off, or embraced are harder for me to simply let pass. Still, I love the early Bond thug as portrayed by Connery (and still the best Bond for my money) and it is hard to ignore the famous set pieces, villains, punchlines, and hardware that have been ingrained in my head since youth. It has come down my list a bit in recent years, but it is still hanging in there. I do not expect Mr. Bond to die.

#10 | Zulu | Cy Endfield | Flickchart: 618
#9 | Becket | Peter Glenville | Flickchart: 542

#8 | Band of Outsiders aka Bande à part | Jean-Luc Godard | Flickchart: 370 
Only the second director to land on the 1964 list twice (the other being Lumet), I expect this Godard classic will bring the most debate from my fellow film buffs for being this far down in my Top 10. My defense is simple: I did not see it until after the age of thirty, I like other Godard films of that era better (Contempt, Week-End), and my Top 3, maybe 5 are almost impossible to surpass in my mind on a nostalgic level, being a child of 1964 (though, of course, I did not see any of them until I was a good bit older than a mere baby).

#7 | Woman in the Dunes | Hiroshi Teshigahara | Flickchart: 338
I bought the Criterion triple-movie box set of Teshigahara's films sight unseen just because Woman in the Dunes came highly recommended to me from about four thousand different corners, and the substandard print I found on YouTube was too fuzzy to understand. A most stunning film, though I liked his film The Face of Another even more. Just discovering Teshigahara for myself made the entire effort of spending months creating my database entirely worth it. If all of this had only brought me to discover his films, I would have been content. But I have found so much more.

#6 | Kwaidan | Masaki Kobayashi | Flickchart: 311
#5 | Mary Poppins | Robert Stevenson | Flickchart: 261
#4 | A Fistful of Dollars | Sergio Leone | Flickchart: 195

#3 | A Shot in the Dark | Blake Edwards | Flickchart: 136
While my love for Blake Edwards comes down to The Great Race from 1965, my esteem for Peter Sellers is built initially from my early exposure to this quite silly Inspector Clouseau film, the best of The Pink Panther series. It is only in the #3 spot for 1964 because two greater comedies were released in the same exact year...

#2 | A Hard Day's Night | Richard Lester | Flickchart: 15
I will never get this film out of my system, no matter what I do. Richard Lester is absolutely underestimated as a director and needs a serious career reevaluation. Entirely too influential, sometimes in ways that people who have never even seen this film will never know. Plus, the Beatles were great natural actors, and hilarious as well. That it is all wrapped about live (though staged) footage of the boys in their prime makes it even better, giving us a real time capsule glimpse of history in the making, while also making us laugh with pre-MTV video antics and trademark Lester wackiness.

And for me, though it is sometimes a close swap with the #2 in the list, there really is only one film that could possibly top my Top Films of 1964 list:

#1 | Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | Stanley Kubrick | Flickchart: 8
The film that I watch on my birthday more than any other (probably about twenty times or so, though I am skipping it this time). In my all-time Top Ten, my favorite Kubrick film, and my favorite Sellers film. Eminently quotable, endlessly ridiculous, and ultimately vital in the times in which we find ourselves. Quite simply the sharpest, wittiest, most dead on satire ever created.

---

Well, that's it. I am sure many of you will have disputes about favorite films left off MY list. See, that the gist of it... this is MY list. These are films that have either influenced me quite young, as many of the movies higher up on the list did, or that have come into my life later of which I have grown an abiding fondness. However they got there, they are my treasures, and on this birthday, it is likely that I will choose at least one or two of them to revisit to make my day brighter. I hope you do the same, especially if there are films that you haven't seen yet on here. You could do far worse (and probably will at some point, just as I do...)

Hell, I started the day watching The Crawling Eye...

The Psychotronic Video Guide: Straight to Video but a Long Time to Letterboxd

[This post has been published simultaneously here and on my new film book website – V for Voluminous, C for Cinema. To read this post on that site instead, go to https://vforvoluminous.wordpress.com/.]

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

by Michael Weldon
St. Martin's Press/Griffin | 1996
Trade paperback | 646 Pages

1st U.S. edition

My love for Michael Weldon's 1983 book, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, is well-known to my friends and longtime readers of my websites. Much of the early drive of my original blog, The Cinema 4 Pylon, was dedicated to playing catch up (in a series of posts that went by the title "Psychotronic Ketchup") in trying to see all of the films within that book, a volume which contained roughly 3,000 film titles of the not exactly middle of the road variety.

If there is a book within my library that I consider to be a "bible," though not in a truly religious sense of course, it is Weldon's Encyclopedia. As rough hewn and lowbrow as it is, for a fan of so-called "trash" cinema, it is indispensable. Before that book, which was published by Ballantine Books at roughly the same time I started working for a book chain in Anchorage, Alaska, Weldon put out a fanzine (that I never saw back in the day) called Psychotronic TV. After the Encyclopedia came out, he transformed his fanzine into a more widely distributed publication (though still pretty much tied to its fanzine roots in its sporadic publishing schedule and DIY aesthetic) titled Psychotronic Video. I grabbed a copy any chance that I got, and sure enough, just like with the book, I was always certain to read about films that made my head spin. I couldn't fathom that some of the titles could even be considered, let alone actually filmed and put into theatres or on video.

The magazine ran until 2006, when Michael Weldon finally closed the doors on the psychotronic world for good, but before that he put out a sequel to his first book. In 1996, Weldon published The Psychotronic Video Guide, an even larger book than the Encyclopedia in dimensional size, but it has a couple of hundred less pages and the rough movie count comes out around the same (at least according to Weldon's foreword) to somewhere around 3,000 films.

Since the Encyclopedia was published, the home video market really blew up throughout the eighties and into nineties, and straight-to-video titles became a really big seller, especially in the genres in which Weldon specialized: science-fiction, horror, martial arts, and action... tons and tons of action films. The Video Guide came out just before DVD hit the United States and started to slowly take over as the primary video format within the next few years. Like the first volume, which concentrated heavily on the '50s through the '70s – the prime years of exploitation and drive-in classics – the Video Guide does a fairly thorough job of snapshotting the bulk of the '80s output up through the mid-'90s. A big difference this time, though, is the inclusion of actual video compilations in the mix (many of them by Johnny Legend and Rhino Video, for example), once video started to become a home for original content and not just a second-run arena for former theatrical titles. Hardcore porn titles – well, a good handful or two of them, when they have content that goes beyond just bedroom antics – are represented as well.

Weldon also took the time to class things up just a little bit with the inclusion of certain directors who were renowned for their flirtations with genre form, even when they were considered general masters of film itself, e.g., Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. Weldon did a similar trick in the first volume by including nearly every film starring Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre, whether or not the films were genre flicks or not. The assumption was that the very inclusion of these actors within any cast placed that film automatically within the psychotronic category.

Something I have noticed that is a slight difference between this book and the first is that Weldon seemed more intent on actually reviewing many of the titles on the second go around. In the Encyclopedia, he seems mostly content with saying "This film is loaded with zombies. And Nazis. And tons of gore and blood. And Christopher Lee is in it!" and leaving it at that. (That is a completely made up example, but it strikes the tone of many an entry.) Very rare is the paragraph that really rips into a film, though there are a handful of entries where either his disdain or his high regard for a film is pretty clear. In the Video Guide, he seems more comfortable with telling his opinion on whether not a film stinks, and really lets go on many films. It is an attitude that I really wish the first book had, and perhaps he was less comfortable with striking such an attitude when he was younger and more freshly excited about the "B" genre.

Now, because my life turned to one of married discord for many years in the late '80s and early '90s, when the second book came out, I was freshly divorced in my early thirties, and suddenly not worrying so much about watching 37 movies a day. As a result, even though I really enjoyed going through the Psychotronic Video Guide when I first bought it, I have never really used the second book as much as the original volume. It is odd for me to say this, but movies, for a brief period, went to the back-burner as I readjusted myself to single life, and so the Weldon books went by the wayside for a good while. And unlike the first book, where the enjoyment I experienced as an 18-year old was in playing catch up with psychotronic history up to that point in time, the bulk of the films in the Video Guide are titles that came out after I had just reached my (presumed) adulthood. So, when this guide was released, by my own misguided accounting, I had pretty much seen the ones listed in it that I really wanted to see (with a few glaring exceptions), and so never really pressed myself to play catch up (at the time) like I did The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

Then Letterboxd came into the picture...

When Letterboxd started up online a few years ago, after my initial flirtation with Flickchart (another movie site that I love), I created an account and started using Letterboxd to maintain my regular film diary, something I was already doing (and still do) via spreadsheet (there are still many titles, mostly shorts and cartoons, that I watch that do not show up in Letterboxd.) The site allows you great flexibility in creating lists of any size, and after they have been published, it shows you the percentage of films that you have seen and fades the title images as well, so you can focus on what remains to be watched. Pretty groovy function and the site looks nice as well. 

One of my first goals was to transfer the titles from The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film to Letterboxd so that I could not only easily figure out what I still needed to see, but so that others that might happen upon the list could use it for their own guidance through the "B" movie world. It took me a while to build those lists and when I was done, I sat back and thought, "There is no way that I could do this again." And then I started up on The Psychotronic Video Guide. I got a quick early start on the first couple of letters... and then let it sit for a year or two. Maybe even three. 

I kept getting remarks from users who liked the other Psychotronic lists begging me to create the rest of them. Finally, I decided to start using the last hour or so before bedtime to knock in a few more pages each night, and then took the giant book with me on my Alaska trip, knowing that I would have several hours each morning before my friends were up and ready to do things where I could make a pretty severe dent in the book. And now, two months after returning from that trip, I just put the finishing touches on the final letter, "W", and the entire book, save for a handful of titles not yet on Letterboxd under each letter (which are recounted in my notes), is now live on the site.

My Lists for The Psychotronic Video Guide on Letterboxd.com:

• Films Beginning with "A"
• Films Beginning with "B" 
• Films Beginning with "C"
• Films Beginning with "D"
• Films Beginning with "E"
• Films Beginning with "F"
• Films Beginning with "G"
• Films Beginning with "H"
• Films Beginning with "I"
• Films Beginning with "J"
• Films Beginning with "K"
• Films Beginning with "L"
• Films Beginning with "M"
• Films Beginning with "N"
• Films Beginning with "O"
• Films Beginning with "P"
• Films Beginning with "Q"
• Films Beginning with "R"
• Films Beginning with "S"
• Films Beginning with "T"
• Films Beginning with "U"
• Films Beginning with "V"
• Films Beginning with "W"
• Films Beginning with "X,Y, and Z"

And if you enjoy using these lists, feel free to leave a comment on Letterboxd or follow my page there if you decide to join yourself. It's a really wonderful website.

What It Is, My Man, and What It Will Be...

If you are the sort of person who is nice and polite and checks back regularly with websites you enjoy and wonders sometimes why a website for which you retain a particular admiration doesn't update more frequently, then this post is for you.

Of course, I would not dare to presume that my humble website might be counted amongst those sites for which you hold particular admiration, but on the off-chance that it is to be counted within that group, then please let your eyes drift downward.

I have not posted on The Cinema 4 Pylon since July 10, and that post was Part 1 of what was meant to be a multi-part excursion into the world of straight-to-video action thrillers, a genre which I have largely avoided in recent years. The post was triggered by an impromptu and cheap DVD purchase in a Wal-Mart in my then just-completed holiday trip up to my home state of Alaska, and there was never meant to be a two-month gap between the first part and even the merest mention of the second part.

The last thing I posted before that was on the day after I returned from my trip to Alaska on July 7. It too was Part 1 of what was meant to be a multi-part excursion into something completely different, this time into a personal history of Disneyland and how my sense of the place was completely warped by a seemingly innocent children's book in my youth. The Part 2 and the Part 3 to that Part 1 were already written by that point – in fact, were written even before I left for my Alaska trip at the end of June – but I started to rethink the piece after I posted Part 1, and so has now been sitting in limbo until I have time to revisit it again. But it is the same story as with the first Part 1 I mentioned... it was never meant to get to this place.

So, why have I not been posting on here?

Well, a myriad of reasons. I can give those reasons in a list, but such lists turn into excuses, and then it just becomes a case of lying to myself. Basically, what I am saying in the end is that the Pylon became less important to me than everything else in my life. 

That isn't true, of course: the Cinema 4 Pylon is meant to be a representation of my mind, and my mind is all that I have going for me when all is said and done. What has happened is that I split that mind into too many fragments in recent months, and some of those fragments have taken on a life of their own unexpectedly.

THE SHARK FILM OFFICE

Most important to me of late has been the success I have been having in getting The Shark Film Office to finally take off its water wings. The Shark Film Office has been around since 2006, but I just never committed to it back then, and kind of wrote it off altogether, especially when I went through my darkest period a few years ago and almost completely stopped writing. When I turned the engines back on the Pylon last September, however, I then followed suit on my animation blog, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc. Once the Cel Bloc was up and running again to my satisfaction, I started to think seriously about The Shark Film Office and whether to revive it or not. There was a moment or two where my cursor hovered over the "Delete Blog" button (I, of course, had saved out all of my text elsewhere), but doing so seemed to trigger something in my head. I started thinking more and more about how I would do the site if really, truly committed to the shark site.

Knowing that Syfy had a full week of shark movies coming up at the end of July with six brand new premiere films was the kicker, and just before that was the latest edition of Discovery's Channel's Shark Week, which allowed me to expand to documentary reviews as well. But something happened on Google+ for me that allowed me to rethink my whole plan. I was getting a ridiculous amount of views on my Google+ page, far more than any of my friends on there were getting, and it was all happening since I started up the Pylon again last year. I don't know what triggered it, but now my Google+ posts were showing up high in search results for any subject on which I posted, most often in the Top 10 results. Sure, I would rather that the actual articles would show up in the search results instead – but, hey, a link is a link, and these results were translating into Rik-diculous numbers of views and in turn getting people to visit my websites.

THE DYNAMIC DUO

In this mix are a couple of other projects that my writing partner and erstwhile pal, Aaron Lowe, and I have been bashing out over the past few months that have also proven to be a lot of fun and get us a little notice lately: Visiting and Revisiting with Rik and Aaron and We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King in Print and on Film.

I have written about both of these projects on this website already, and you can find out more on both by visiting the links to them above or going into my bio page. Of course, we have run into some difficulties in not just maintaining both of our own original sites (his is Working Dead Productions) when we spread ourselves out a tad thin with not just extra blogs, but also in maintaining a working life and a family life. In my case, I had been out of work for well over a year, which has allowed me a lot of free writing time and given me an opportunity to revive the blogs and get my shit together in that regard. Additionally, I have a wife who works, but our only charge is a small cat. In Aaron's case, he has a regular job and a wife and daughter, though they expanded recently with the addition of a second newborn daughter. So, now his writing is often done with baby in one hand.

We have really enjoyed the first response to our first few attempts on both sites (the first several articles for each, you might recall, were split between our respective pages before we decided to build new sites for each title), and have big plans moving forward. Aaron and I are always throwing around ideas for a podcast, either audio or video, though I seem to be the one really holding us back in that regard.

COUNTDOWN TO HALLOWEEN

Coming up first though, is the annual Countdown to Halloween in October, something in which both Aaron and I have taken part in recent years, and plan to continue this year. Countdown to Halloween is a handy site which allows people who run Halloween-oriented blogs, or blogs related to horror, toys, candy, masks, costumes, etc., to gather in one place and have people who are into any of those topics easily find websites of interest. Taking part in the Countdown gives bloggers access to badges they can display on their site and allows them to expand their audience.

I don't know what Aaron has planned for his own site, but here is what I can tell you about two of mine and We Who Watch as well:

The Cinema 4 Pylon – Semi-regular posts throughout October on various monster toys in my collection, more about monster trading cards, Halloween music posts, and a couple more editions in my relatively new The Monster's on the Loose! series, where I discuss the horror-related films, shows and cartoons that were most instrumental in developing my interest in the genre when I was but a wee lad.

Cinema 4: Cel Bloc – I have articles on several cartoons planned for October, all with spooky themes (naturally), with a concentration on Walt Disney cartoons this time. Scheduled shorts to include Lonesome Ghosts (1937), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949), Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! (1966), Spooks (1930), and Trick or Treat (1952).

We Who Watch Behind the Rows – Aaron and I are spending part of September reading Stephen King's first officially published novel Carrie (1974) and then watching the four film projects derived from it: Brian De Palma's seminal version (1976), the rather belated and unnecessary sequel The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) with Emily Bergl, the unnecessary TV remake (2002) with Angela Bettis (who makes it watchable, of course), and the still unnecessary theatrical remake (2013) with Chloe Grace Moretz. Then we will post about all of them throughout the month of October. Sorry to tip my hand on the films, but I haven't rewatched them yet; those are just my opinions going into this process, having seen all of them before. [There is also a Filipino version of Carrie, though I doubt we will find a copy in time for this series.]

We have not discussed plans for a Halloween film or two on Visiting and Revisiting, but that may be because it is hard to find horror films that neither one of us hasn't seen already. The next film we plan to cover there is Miracle Mile, which we will hopefully get to in the next week or two.

BACK 2 THE BASE

The robustness of our combined plans, of course, are always going to be hampered and/or enhanced by what we do personally. Speaking for myself – and really, I probably shouldn't even be that bold – I have told you all of this without relating to you the good fortune of recent weeks: that I have started to pick up freelancing work. Yes, this means money, which is alway a good thing to have, but it has also meant a reduction in the amount of free time that I have at hand lately. It started out small, as a mere handful of hours that has blossomed into a great many more than I was anticipating, and it has been nice to be able to work completely from home and at my own pace. And now a second project has landed in my lap at the same time, so I am now having to learn how to balance this along with everything else. But I feel productive in a societal and monetary sense again, and this will helpfully keep the wolves at bay for a short period.

In the end, I will be posting here on the Pylon again regularly, I just need my schedule to align with my goals a little more. For now, blog-wise, I remain focused on the shark site online, but there is another contender for my time of which I have yet to speak except to a small handful of individuals. Even with this utterance, I hope that they shall remain mum as to its details in the public venue, especially in response to this posting.

I have committed myself to a personal writing project offline that will hopefully turn into a completed book over the next year's time. Knowing that I am a few months into the project will also give you another idea as to why The Cinema 4 Pylon has suddenly been relegated to second class citizen status within the universe of its own creation. More details will be released in coming months. Or not at all, if the entire thing goes kablooey on me. In which case, forget you ever read this...

RTJ