Wake Me Up When September Begins...

Did you blink on January 1st?

If you did, you might be wondering where the last eight months have gone. The last time that I posted here on The Cinema 4 Pylon, on that very same inaugural day of the new year, I had been giving anyone that still cared some pre-climb instructions before I launched into a massive blog series chronicling my assault to the summit of my self-constructed Tower of Film.

But there was trouble almost from the start. I discovered that the department store which occupied the first two floors of the Tower was having a fire sale on various and sundry thingies, but it was almost impossible to deal with the salesmen. Some insisted on pushing only the wares of the previous decade, mired in their plaid-heavy, staid comfort and nuclear winter certainty, while others were more intent on showing me the brilliant, shining promise of a new tomorrow, with its eventual shag carpeting and orange furniture.  However, the sale wasn't a total loss. Since Jen and I were in dire need of kitchenware replenishment, I went hog-wild in the spatula section. (Not so strangely, it turns out none of the lot I purchased were ever actually used on food of any recognizable form).

On the third floor, I was caught in the massive crossfire brought about from the activities of roughly forty spies, most of them working for the same governmental system, but  all completely at odds in methods and tactics. No sooner had I formed a grudging allegiance with the two agents most apt to have spare go-go girls at the ready, the scene abruptly shifted, and the seemingly certain notion that my doom would be spelled out via ballistic penmanship left my mind. Suddenly, a drink was in my hand instead, and the original melee had slipped into a non-stop martini party. The drinks were fine, but far too much smoke and Aquanet and not nearly enough oxygen left me reeling. It threatened to get even worse when the scene slowly shifted once more, and the well-dressed evening crowd with whom I had been lounging was gradually replaced by odious hippies smiling far too broadly, who insisted on a shared experience of their own particular madness. As hippies have always served as a room-clearer for me, that was the definitive sign that it was time to renew my efforts up the tower.

Eventually, I fought and clawed my way up to 1970, and I thought it would be a smooth glide straight through the decade to follow, but as I was approaching an area where I had far more expertise, things went truly wonky. Sure, I had no trouble at all accepting that there was a swingin' cheerleader party on that seventh floor -- assisted by additional cadres of swingin' stewardesses and swingin' nurses -- but then the roving biker gangs showed up to ruin the fun. Raping and pillaging ensued, as things are wont to do where roving movie biker gangs are concerned. The problem was chiefly aesthetic on my part. While I could partially identify with their naive form of "freedom," I couldn't come to grips with their need to sporadically reinforce Nazi imagery. Also, their raping ways had to go. Luckily, roving, raping movie biker gangs are also wont to die off in droves, so my path was cleared in time for...

Now.

In the preceding eight months, I have been around, and I have been writing. I just have not been posting. On my laptop, there is a file folder with exactly 137 text files featuring the lost posts of the last year or so, let alone the past eight months. Some of them are complete; most are not. I could go back and complete them and retro-post them, but my intent behind writing the bulk of them is long vanished from my mind, and where I do recall the intent, I most likely cannot dredge up the same urgency that brought me to create them initially. Better to move forward...

Which is why we are now at this exact point. When reviewing the goals I set for myself early last year when I first conceived the Tower of Film project, and then comparing them to my actual achievements in that time, it is certainly clear that I have dug myself into a massive hole. But, when compared to the goals I set when I first moved here almost 5-1/2 years ago, it is even clearer that said hole has likely reached the earth's core.

Have I gotten over whatever was keeping me all but completely silent for these past months? Probably not, but believe me, I have never been shy about sharing the details. Simply filling in the hole and calling it a fresh start is not an option -- as I said, I've dug myself into it. I spent all my climbing energy on the damn Tower, and right now, I am taking a rest from it. For my own creative sanity (and for other reasons that will become plain as I gradually roll out what I have been up to in this time), the only answer is to start digging my way out the other side.

Welcome back, me. Here's the shovel. Oh, don't forget your scuba gear. The other side of the world comes out in the Indian Ocean...

Before We Take Off...

When I woke up this morning at 4 a.m., after ignoring the usual rowdy and largely misplaced New Year’s celebrating of my neighbors the night before, I had the first half-dozen hours of the day mapped out already. Thanks to my steady adherence to my film-watching mission of the last six months – The 46x60 or So Project – I found myself due for early hour meetings with a blustery Rod Steiger carrying his version of Napoleon toward his fate, Alan Arkin essaying the role of the most caring but devastatingly lonely deaf-mute in film history, and a venomous transsexual with Rex Reed’s mind inside Raquel Welch’s body, bent on not only sadistically trashing thousands of years of male-female archetypes, but taking modern Hollywood out with him/her as well.

I didn’t plan on watching Waterloo (1970), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968) or the infamous flop Myra Breckinridge (also 1970) this morning. It just happened that they were the next ones on my Netflix queue, and so… here we are. I have now seen a Sergei Bondarchuk epic without having seen War and Peace. It has now been revealed to me that there might have been a point in time where Sondra Locke might have shown some acting ability. And I am now filled with delight in discovering that, yes, while Myra Breckinridge is every bit as shitty as every single critic in the world has already relayed to us (mainly for the Mae West scenes and the old film clips), I still rather dug just how fucked up the whole thing was and rather enjoyed that it pushes the buttons that it does. And that is not a reference to the strap-on sodomy scene… but take it how you will. (Or exactly how you want it, you bad boy.)

This has been the overall fun of following the list I created through the last half of 2009: never knowing what I am going to get into or where I am going. Some nights it is a pile of documentaries on civil rights and door-to-door salesmen; on other nights, underdeveloped dramas or mistimed comedies; another night, true cinematic masterpieces of which I have largely missed out. Most nights, I am hit with a mixture of various elements and genres, and so mind has to bounce from one to the next without a pause. As a result, more than ever, I have learned to take my usual pre-film maxim of “clearing my mind, checking any attitude at the door, and erasing all preconceptions going in” to another sharper and faster level.

Since September 30, when I began keeping a regular journal on the films I am watching throughout this experiment (which I should have done from the start, I now recognize belatedly), I have watched 220 films over 94 days, including today. This means I am averaging just over 2.34 films a day, though I doubt that I can keep this pace up now that the holiday season has passed, and as I get deeper and deeper into upcoming work-related projects that will consume some of my outside time. So, how have I kept this pace up? Easy. I often watch a film, or most of a film, before I go to work in the morning, and then it is a simple matter of finding 1-1/2 to 2 hours in the evening to watch another one. How much is Jen involved in this madness? Hardly at all, it turns out… our schedules are so remarkably different, that I still have a massive amount of time on my hands. It is never a problem to find the time to watch another film, or even two or three extra films, in the evening if I feel like it. I also tend to save longer, more epic films for the weekend when I can really sprawl out with them, and watch the shorter films within the work week.

Most people watch a tremendous amount of TV or videos (or spend hours on video games) without ever realizing just how much time they are using. Making it a routine means not noticing this. It becomes habit. I just happen to maximize the amount of time that I can watch films, and I use spare moments when I find them. I just don’t hesitate. I see a moment, I grab it the chance to zip through 15 minutes of a film in the way most guys grab any spare opportunity to knock one out on the side.

Granted, this time will decrease now that I plan to begin writing full-time again, but by focusing so hard over the last 94 days, I have gained a wonderful jump-start on this project. I only have one available film left for 1964, and two each left to see for 1965 and 1966. 1967 is down to 12 films left to see, while 1968, after today, is down to 25, after starting at 58 films to watch total (89 overall, 31 not on DVD). Already, I have taken care of the bulk of films in the 1960s on my list, and I have barely started.

I have also barely started to write about the Project, detailing the climb to the top of my Tower of Film. I have already seen so many films about which I was previously unlearned or unaware, and I have been very surprised at my reactions to some of them, and shocked to learn how overhyped some others have been over the years. This is the way of opinion, and the way of film discovery. If you are truly honest with yourself and the way you approach your emotions, then everything should be used as a chance of discovery and knowledge. There are equal amounts of marvels and horrors in every corner, but do you have the guts to seek them out and reveal them?

Combined with the revelation I made not long ago that, in many ways, I was practically a poser when it came to film fandom, this is what drives me. I now feel it is my mission to see all of these films. Earlier this week, I revealed to Jen the lamentable fact that I had to watch The Cannonball Run II that evening because it was on my list. She replied, “You don’t have to watch it. You choose to watch it.” My reply? “No, I have to watch it. It’s on THE LIST.” And then she closes with “Uh huh…” in disbelief. We have run through this dialogue many times over the past couple of months, but I am starting to believe that my helplessness in the shadow of The 46x60 or So Project has finally broken through to her.

Yesterday, I revealed to her the even more lamentable fact that I had to watch Look Who’s Talking Too that evening, thanks to a pair of Golden Raspberry nominations for Gilbert Gottfried's acting and Roseanne Barr’s voice, which landed the film onto the Project list. This time she replied, “Ooooohhhhh…” Not even a sardonic “…poor you…” attached to it. I believe that she truly felt my pain. Not enough to bear the burden with me, but there was some empathy on her part. And then I did indeed watch it, and felt like drilling a hole through my temple every step of the way. But I had to do it.

It is the way of things at the beginning of this "happy" new year. And certain films I encounter along the way will make it seem not so "happy." But, I have no choice. It is now the way of things…

RTJ

The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 3: Things Start to Get a Little Wonky...

With my Tower of Film already swaying haphazardly in the skies above me, I was beginning to consider whether it was simply time to concentrate on watching the movies and writing about the experience of doing so.

But, there were still three crucial elements missing...

First, there were my DVDs. The thrust for the notion of adding my own collection from 1964 forward to the list was that, while a certain portion of films already entered into the 46x60 or So Project were also sitting on my shelves, there were a great many discs that I had purchased over the last couple of years of which I had yet to pause for a viewing. Since watching every available film in the project would allow me little time (or much in the way of interest) for watching films outside of it, the solution was to add every single film in my personal catalogue. Not only did this increase each year, on the average, by eight to twelve more films, cushioning the Project a tad more, but it would essentially force me to finally catch up on watching everything I owned.

It also led to the addition of the second crucial, missing element -- horror and science-fiction films -- to the list. Since I tend to purchase most of the films which I adore (or at least halfway like) in those genres, and since horror and science-fiction is largely ignored by the Academy except in the makeup and effects categories, this allowed me to "slum up" the list a little bit. I have to admit, it was looking awfully prestigious in there. I know the original point was to actually watch all of these films of presumed prestige which I had ignored much of my life. But, after the first couple of months of plowing through endless dramas from 1964 through 1966, one after the other, with very few comedies to break up the bluster and whining, adding my own personal faves, no matter the genre, threw a bit of a fun factor into the mix.

And this led to the purpose of the third crucial, missing element: slumming it up even more. Any overview of a cinematic yearbook is not complete without also seeing the nadir of cinematic "achievement" throughout those twelve months. Sure, the Academy is pretty good at allowing some truly egregious films get nominated, but not really as much as you would think (or snarkily wish). That's where the Golden Turkey Awards, and its one-time competitor and now leader in the field of film insult, the Golden Raspberries come into the picture. As much as I despise Michael Medved's politics and cultural whining, and as much as I don't agree with the purposes behind why he and his brother Harry included certain films within the pages of their series of books in the late '70s and early '80s about epically bad movies, I will admit that I return to them time and again to catch up on the wacky antics of directors gone loco. And overall, since they saw fit to have their readers also vote on the worst films in history, this provided a pretty solid base of rottenness on which to build.

Pretty much where the Golden Turkeys and the Medveds left off (they do overlap a few years) is where the Golden Raspberries began embracing movie horridness and took it to an even more thorough finger-pointing level, handing out their annual awards to major time- and brain-wasters to this day. (Myself, I am about one month away from joining their society myself, so I too can vote on the awards, something the Oscars don't allow. Their loss. Oh yeah, and I could attend the ceremony, as well.)

Thus, I took to the task of adding all of the nominated films for both awful movie award programs to my Tower of Film. (Granted, most of the films will be kept in the basement of the Tower, but this is pending further review. After all, I can't criticize a film without seeing it first.) It only took a couple of nights to add every single allegedly terrible movie to my list (after all, I have not seen all of them, just many of them). When completed, unloading a couple barrels of genuine trash balanced out the 46x60 or So Project so nicely, that I was finally ready to allow the contractors building the Tower of Film to go home and see their families after a long four months of construction.

And since I am actually each and every one of those "contractors," it's sad I didn't work out a decent overtime plan.

[To be concluded in Pt. 4 tomorrow...]

The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 2: It's a Tower Built to the Heavens. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The foundation was built, and it seemed like a decent enough place already to just skip building the new couple of floors, planting an aerial, and calling it a home. The list had already taken me about a month to create, and in my excitement, I had already started watching films in earnest. The first film I watched under the sway of this fresh delirium was 1965's Sean Connery army prison flick, The Hill, directed in truly brutal fashion by Sidney Lumet. If I had started going through the multitude of films on my list by encountering a true dud (and not one where I went in expecting vileness), I may have given up the entire project then and there. But The Hill so captured my attention that I knew straight off I had made the right choice.

But, the list itself did not seem robust enough to me. There were still films that I loved missing from the list, and films I had always wanted to see which were not appearing yet. I began to think about what was influential in the mid-60s. in the dawning of my youth, and it didn't take me long to figure out where to find a major dose of relief: the Cannes Film Festival. Yeah, yeah, ugly Americans, hate the French all you want. Myself, I don't hate them, not even for easy comedic stereotyping. I love watching their films (equally as much as I love watching films from all over the world), and I love how purely they (as a nation) used to commit themselves to cinema. And yes, there are other major film festivals out there from which I could have chosen to cull more choices for my Tower of Film, but how many are as famous or as influential for such a long time as Cannes? Unlike most other festivals, except perhaps Sundance, Cannes still makes the news every single year, perhaps more now for the antics that take place there more and more than for actual film presentation. But, Cannes still looms large in the international cultural atmosphere. And, speaking solely of a certain period in time, how can one such as I deny its mix of foreign releases from nearly every corner of the world?

It was a natural for me, and so I started adding Cannes years to the list. This took far longer than I had anticipated, considering that I tend to format as I go along and I wanted things to be as perfect as possible. (Again, that possible OCD kicking in...) Cannes added a huge amount to each year, sometimes 30-40 more films, sometimes even more. I didn't take just "in competition" films, but outside award winners, "out of competition" films, and all of the films in the multitude of Cannes' special categories of which they seem to be so fond. The list truly began to bulge to elephantine proportions, and I actually did start to worry about whether I would be able to see even half of these films in my lifetime. (More on that later...)

While I was zipping through each year of Cannes, I started another side project: queuing all of the available films up on Netflix, or marking whether I owned the films or had already seen them. Because I wanted the list to remain fresh, I had to decide on a cut-off date for where I would consider my current critical decree valid to the purposes of the list. I decided to choose the moment of my arrival from Alaska into California, which was when I started writing, reconsidering my film philosophy, and critiquing full-time: April 2005.

Any film that I had seen since that date and of which I still had decent recall could be marked as "SEEN" on the list, unless I truly wished to watch it again even in the midst of thousands of other films. (Surprisingly, in many cases, I chose to go this route, if only because it would probably be a while until I encountered them as I went through the list.) This enabled me to check off many of the films I had seen in the past four years, even in the last six months. (I chose to make the current year more of a checklist of everything I had seen within 2009, to keep it fresh and because we won't know the Oscar nominees for a couple of months yet.)

However, as I went through Netflix, looking up every single film, I ran into far more films turning out to be unavailable than I thought. Some of the missing films weren't just relative obscurities either, but Oscar nominees, and occasionally, an actual Oscar winner. And by adding the Cannes lists, largely composed of films of foreign extract (most, but not all, more popular Hollywood films tend to get shown out of competition, if they showed up at all), the problem got even worse, with each year's list (now grown to around 60-75 films per year) ending up with a range between 20-25 films per year unavailable. Not just unavailable on Netflix (which is actually surprisingly robust in its catalogue), but not even for purchase on Amazon. With so many of the foreign films not even available in their home countries, I realized that I needed to rethink my goals in this endeavor, as it was becoming very clear that a solid quarter of my ultimate list would be unattainable towards the completion of my new project.

[To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 3: Things Start to Get a Little Wonky...]

The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 1: Building a Tower of Film...

I wanted focus, but the question was, "Focus on what?" I began to try and work out exactly where to begin reeducating myself in the film history of my lifetime. Do I start with a certain director and watch all of his available films straight through? It sounded good, but then I was likely to lapse into a state of cinematic paralyzation if I restricted myself to just one style without interruption, and how would I determine the best place to force an interruption if needed? How would I fit those moments into the plan? The same went for choosing one genre outside of my normal path and focusing on the landmark films within that genre. Except who was to establish what I should see within that genre? I considered focusing on stars, cinematographers with whom I have grown enamored and wished to see more of their work, even something as goofy as choosing a random key grip and then watching any film in which they were involved.

But, then it struck me... Considering my concerns regarding The Last Detail and its until-thus-far unseen ilk, it dawned on me that most of the films of which I claimed knowledge (when in fact I didn't beyond what I had read fleetingly) were released within the span of years in which I have been alive, from 1964 to the present. (Yes, I have established my age, but then that has never been a problem with me, as I always feel as if I am 22. Only an increasingly creakier 22...) What if I were to focus on watching the major films, foreign and domestic, that have been released within my lifetime? 

The reasons are three-fold. One, most of the films on which people would confront me would be of more recent vintage, so this would be a great way to capture that knowledge and be ahead of the game, or point me towards films to include in my "to-see" list when I ran into someone who mentioned something I hadn't watched. Two, it would allow me to flit about through most of the major directors and styles throughout my lifetime, without allowing myself to fall into a state of that dreaded boredom, for too long at least. Thirdly, and I was hoping most interestingly, it would allow to actually gain a large dose of cultural and political knowledge by watching films through the '60s, '70s and '80s, and perhaps increase my understanding of the shifting tides of both the American and world consciousness through these decades. (There was also a fourth, smaller reason, that didn't strike me until much later. This was seeing the evolution of the movies themselves through five decades of development, turmoil, and changing technology.)

So, I knew why, but now: what? How to determine which films to watch. The first step was easy: the Oscars. I do not believe that there is ever actually a "Best Picture" in any given year. Styles are so diverse, as are intents, and who is to ever say that a supposedly moving drama about love and loss during wartime is any more meaningful than a mere comedy that seeks to bring nothing but laughter and smiles to people's faces? That's right: simple escape is just as important. I often deride it, or at least those who only go that route, but the use of the movies as mere escape is actually quite important. It is a release for emotions and pent-up frustrations that can prove very necessary to society. Thus, I needed to build a list that gave me a fairly accurate picture of each movie year. The Academy Awards are critiqued by the masses as being not populist enough, and on the other hand, by much of the film community, as being too populist. The Oscars really cannot win in the long run. They just have to endure, and prove themselves enough of a mark of excellence to thrive.

I may not agree most of the time with the Oscar choices, but I do know that it would prove enough of a mix of the high and low to begin building my list using all of the nominees and winners for all categories from films released in 1964 forward. I created an Excel database and begin to construct my Tower of Film. At first, each year ended up working out to about 25-35 films or so, which is what I began calling the project, added a 44 at the front, representing the number of full years of my lifetime to that point. (I changed it to 46 for now, for while I have just turned the corner on 45, I am actually in my 46th year of existence. The title will remain so for a good while though. I am reluctant to change it past this point of establishment, if only out of exhaustion.)

Completing the Oscar list left me delighted with the structure of the thing -- each year neatly blocked off, films alphabetized within each year, and columns for each category, the winners in yellow -- but desperately seeking major films which I had known to have come out in a particular year, but were not to be found within their block. What to do? How to add films without making this list more personally oriented, and not neutrally enriching?

The trick was to turn it personally towards someone else: Danny Peary. Mr. Peary had written a volume in the early '90s (on which I have written before) called Alternate Oscars, which is basically his version of how each Best Picture, Actor and Actress award should have been handled from the beginning of the awards in 1927 through the year of the book's devising, 1992. Peary makes numerous interesting and brave choices, such as the great Karloff getting a Best Actor achievement for his astounding role in Val Lewton's production of The Body Snatcher in 1945. (It is a favorite of mine as well, and I agree, Karloff is exceptional in the film.) Like the Oscars, no one will ever agree with all of Peary's choices (even I don't), and many of them are based on whether he had already rewarded a certain party with an award either farther up and down the line, so it plays heavily on second and even third sight. Alternate Oscars is armchair critiquing at its top-notch best.

And so I went through his book beginning in 1964 and adding in any films not touched or dismissed by the Academy the first time around. This began to flesh out the list a tad more, but it really only added, at most, three or four films per year, if any at all. Scanning my own collection, I began to realize that what the Oscar (and Peary's list) was missing was a foreign influence. Apart from the Best Foreign Film category and the odd stray nomination elsewhere, foreign films were barely represented, with many prominent directors of my lifetime missing wholesale from the list. Since it was a few Criterion Collection discs that caused me to muse on this aspect, I decided to grab the entire Criterion list of releases, queue it up by year, and then add all of those releases from 1964 on up. This made the list bulge out a bit more, sometimes as many as seven, eight or ten films per year, though there was naturally a major drop-off from the mid-'80s to now, seeing as the company really concentrates on older films, with only a few more modern releases in the mix. I was also aware of the European version of Criterion, Masters of Cinema, and though some films were matched on both lists, it did a handful more films of great interest to me, some not released on Region 1 discs at all. (I would eventually purchase a couple of Masters of Cinema discs at Scarecrow Video in Seattle in late July. Region 2, yes, but they will play on my laptop.)

So, I now had a good fifty or so movies per year on my list, and it was looking like it might top out at around 2000 films. But it wasn't enough for me...

(To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 2: It's a Tower Built to the Heavens. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?)

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 4: The Facts, Ma'am... (Maybe the Facts)

On the Internet Movie Database, which most of us simply refer to as IMDb (small "b", thank you) and which has largely taken on a generally accepted position as the main online resource for instant movie information, I have (to this date) rated around 5,000 movies.

Let's get this straight from this point on: I know that I am not a complete poser. Despite what happened with The Last Detail and those other films, I am very certain of my love for the movies. It's like asking if I wish to continue breathing. And I have actually seen all of the films that I have rated on IMDb. I may not have seen some of those films for over twenty years or more, but I have seen them. The difference, though, is that I actually care and consider what I am rating on the site. 

Fully aware that the way I felt about certain films in my teens, twenties and even early thirties may not be the way I feel about those films now (and even considering the fact that I might have nothing left of the memory of the seeing of a certain film except for my love, hate or boredom with it at the time), I have taken great pains in recent months to amend these ratings to fit my current state, but only by freshly viewing the films in question. While it is not of any importance to any other person but myself, it is the way that I have to tackle things to keep my sense of critical opinion as pure as I can, given the fact that I am as deficient and as prone to posturing and wrongheadedness as anybody else.

The one constant in my life of misspent youth, careless education, menial employment, and suffocated relationships has been my love of movies. The movie theatre has always proven to be the only acceptable form of a "church" to me. I don't require religion in my life, but it doesn't mean that I didn't spend a certain portion of my teens trying to figure out where I fit into the system in which everyone else was so willing to switch to lock-step every Sunday to enter. Combine my youthful wandering with my early love for movies, and is it any wonder that the only times that any socially accepted church really reached me in any way was when I took in various viewings of The Cross and the Switchblade and The Greatest Story Ever Told inside churches? (OK, it was also to make out with girls in the church pews. Hardly watched the films in two instances...)

And so it has gone. It doesn't really matter where the experience takes place, though I prefer a legitimate theatre. The flicker of the movie image, the darkness of the room, the comfort (or charming discomfort) of the seats, the smell of popcorn, the shared community... all of the standard cliches of why one loves going to movies also apply to me -- call it my one true moment of conformity -- and there is nothing for me to trade for the experience. I long to see movies everywhere, in any setting. Anywhere Sam-I-Am would not eat green eggs and ham is where I would watch a movie. Even on a vacation that has been solely designed for me to partake of an area's distinct pleasures, my first thought is of seeing a movie at some point while I am there. The movie theatre is where I always long to be, and for this statement, there can be no pose. It is where I meditate. It is where I can truly think through problems. It is where I need to be. It is where I am truly me.

Perhaps you see my movie adoration as too romantic. Well, if I must prove romantic in some small measure, then this is it. Personally, I view this stance as more theological, maybe even personally political. Regardless, what I know is that I am a movie fan. Of that, I can be certain, and my motto of "Any film, any time" is also a true statement, at least to the degree that I can follow through on it by financial means and via my ability to reach the location in question at the proposed time.

But, if I know who I am, why did I get all flustered over my reaction to not having seen The Last Detail (and those other films)? If I just kept to my occasional pose in those situations, aren't I the only one to know of my infrequent deception?

That is precisely the problem: for most of my life, I have simply been deceiving myself. Maybe even all the time.

Worse, to a large degree, I have drowned myself in sewage, and never really taken advantage of the full breadth that the cinematic world can offer me. I have resigned myself to the film ghettoes for so long, that I have forgotten how wide-ranging and interesting the total film experience can be. See only wide-release films, and you will only have a wide-release history and knowledge of movies. Keep to watching only slasher movies, and your ability to dissect films of deeper intent with the same casual ease of a killer's butcher knife through a victim's flesh will be met only with struggle and the eventual rending of true understanding. It's the equivalent of only keeping to beach reading, but never approaching the literary canon. While I have made exposed myself to and studied films throughout my life, it has only been through the keeping of company with very particular directors: Hitchcock, Lang, Kurosawa, Powell and Pressburger, Welles... But there are so many more worthy of deeper study and appreciation, beyond seeing one of their films and calling myself done. There is a broader, film education waiting out there for me, of which I thus far largely chosen to neglect myself. The first step is to watch the films. The second is to understand them.

I have friends who only go to the movies to do what they term as "escape," an overused term, to be sure, but it is the way I have heard it phrased. Get off work, "need to not think for a while," go to any stupid film that weekend... that is the relationship that the bulk of people have with the movies. It is a night out with friends, a wife, a date, a lover... nothing more. Dinner, a movie, and then... come what may... return again next weekend unblinkingly and machine-like to the next wide-release movie...

I, too, have walked the path of shared ritual as regards the movie experience. I love going to new movies, too, but I never call it escape. Never. I cannot shut off the brain, even when watching Friday the 13th, Part Eleventy-Thousand: Jason Gets A Hysterectomy. (Believe me, they will find a way...) My need to not simply watch, but to ascertain and critique, extends to my home movie ritual, where the DVD player almost never seems to stop whirring. And lately, whirring non-stop without any true focus.

And it this inability to simply watch a bunch of dopey After Dark horror films (in the same manner that I just fervently watched thirteen dopey horror films over the Halloween weekend) and discovering nothing but ennui over the idea of continuing through the series, combined with my anger over the collected lies of my reactions to simple conversational movie repartee, which led me to moment a few months ago for which metaphors concerning holes and digging were created. This point in time saw me finally get a grip on all of these issues, and brought about the establishment of "The 46x60 or So" project, involving the creation of a massive (and ever-growing) list, and a new sense of purpose guiding me through the movie landscape.

[To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 1: Building a Tower of Film...]

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 3: Oh yeah, that's a really good one...

I was lost in a cinematic un-wilderness of my own creation, so I threw myself into senseless social networking in order to run away from the painful notion that I was not really a horror fan anymore.

And then someone brought about the added notion that perhaps I wasn't even a movie fan at all.

It wasn't intentional on the other person's part. It was merely a simple question that led me to this state: "Surely, you've seen The Last Detail?"

For those out there who have never seen The Last Detail, it is an Oscar-nominated 1973 film directed by Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid, in which two MPs show a naval prisoner one last good time before they escort him to prison for what they consider to be an unfair sentence.

And no, I have never actually seen it. Never more than twenty minutes or so of it, and actually, what I had seen was the ending of the film when I ran into on cable by mistake. "What's this? Oh, it's Jack Nicholson with a properly folded Gilligan hat. Must be The Last Detail." I knew of the film. I just had not seen it all the way through.

But what I said to this person was, "Oh, yeah, that's a really good one. Nicholson... Quaid... Great film!"

What I was not prepared for was their followup, which began, "Well, you know that scene where they...," at which point I blanked out, because I knew then I had committed myself to a series of nods, grunts, more mutterings of "oh yeah," and the eventual admittance that "it had really been a long time since I had seen it, so I really don't remember the details of The Last Detail that well." I then sell the wimpy pun on the title with a self-amused chuckle, and then we start to riff on further puns on the word "detail" or of a naval variety, and the moment gets lost in the haze of mid-afternoon buffoonery. I crawled out of the wreckage of poor conversation once more, but this time, there was scarring. Luckily, though, there was also a form of resolution at hand.

We have all performed this little act -- pretending to have seen something we haven't -- whether you wish to admit it or not. Ofttimes it is used to keep the conversation moving, such as when one does not wish to keep talking to that person any longer than one has to, or especially in party situations when someone has just been introduced to you, and you'd much rather move on to the cute girl over there rather than keep speaking to the boring movie ponce directly in front of you. (And, ofttimes, I am that boring movie ponce... but we all reside on both sides of this fence.) And many times, it is just used to keep the peace: "Sure, I've seen that!" Assimilation, conformity, or just getting through another spirit-crushing workday... call if what you will. But we all have done it at some time or another. No harm, no foul. Little white lies to keep the small talk small.

And experience in this area should have better prepared me for the follow-up that seems to arrive about six times out of ten, that bit with the scene in question. Despite knowing this query will arrive at some point more often than not, you think I could have a better answer in reserve than, "Oh, yeah, well, er, um, yeah... isn't that the bit where they... (throw in whatever scene you might happen to know is in the film)?"

The actual bit with The Last Detail wouldn't have bothered me so much if it hadn't come so quickly on the heels of three other inquiries (from at least two other sources in addition to the fellow above) as to whether I had seen a particular film or not. Save the Tiger, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and A Guide for the Married Man had all whacked me full in the face in the months previous to this question, and I was already smarting pretty badly. I've never gotten near seeing Save the Tiger, despite the fact that I love Jack Lemmon and it is one of his pair of Oscar-winning performances. For years, I saw a copy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz sitting on the shelf at Video City, and just couldn't get past what I perceived to be an annoyingly pretentious title. I just passed by the cover time and again, thinking about renting it because back then Richard Dreyfuss was still interesting to watch, and then choosing something more along the lines of Hell Night or Graduation Day instead, solely because they were horror movies and there might be a good chance that I could see tits in one of those.

And A Guide for the Married Man? I ran into it on cable all the time, and I had considered watching it because of Walter Matthau, but seeing just a couple of minutes triggers my "Sixties Defense": an automatically triggered, impenetrable shield that drops down about me anytime I am confronted by what appears to be cheesiness from the '60s and early '70s. Beehive hairdos, too much fringe, gorillas on motorcycles, a preponderance of non-ironic hippie behavior, extended go-go or cocktail party sequences, pornstar-style mustaches, shag carpeting, lapels that are far too wide, Ali McGraw... these are all triggers for my Sixties Defense, though there are many more items that can do it. (I suppose it needs a better name, since that same mood -- and Ali McGraw -- also spills over the '70s.)

It's odd that this arose in me, especially given that I was born in 1964, and the last time I checked, I lived through both of those decades. Clearly, this defense mode developed out of a need to blind myself to the times in which I was raised. Perhaps it was also a side effect extending from my parents' divorce and my general unhappiness. And such a defense mode really doesn't make sense when you consider that there are so many films from those decades that I love very much. But, when you examine the films, it becomes obvious. Most of the ones I do love from that time don't take place in those times. Westerns, science fiction, historical epics; if any details from the times in which they were created slipped in, I seem to have been able to chalk it up to casual sloppiness. Hardly any films from that era outside of the aforementioned genres, though, that took place at the time of their making, show up on my "love" list, except maybe Dog Day Afternoon and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

There are always exceptions to any self-imposed rule. We are all hypocrites on some level here and there. Horror movies, though, were different. I loved so many of the '70s horror films, and yes, they tended to be more modern, but the beauty was that the defense was built right into them. It didn't matter what people wore or how they did their hair or how their apartments were decorated or how many hippies showed up... they would all most likely die within the framework of the film. Perfect. Even though my love for horror began with Hammer, Universal and AIP, once I began to grow up a bit and was able to watch them, the '70s suddenly became a more interesting decade to me, but only through the horror lens.

Then again, personal evolution has always been what I am about, and it has been my major theme since I moved to California. It had been dawning on me for a while that perhaps it was time to put away some of the pastimes of childhood -- the monsters, the aliens, the gore -- for a little while, at least, and evolve just a tad more in the cinema department. And the negative obsessions as well. It was time to put away the "Sixties Defense" and finally confront all of the films from my youth that I have spent most of my life avoiding, which has only resulted in creating ego-shattering moments like the one involving The Last Detail.

My life has been filled with small attempts at expanding my horizons. Why not make a major one, and finally research all of these filmmakers from the '60s and '70s, people within the framework of my lifetime, that I have largely dismissed? Sure, I have never shied away from a Truffaut, Godard or Kurosawa film -- I have always quite liked foreign films of any type, just to make myself believe even for a moment that I was more cultured than I actually am. It's for the same reason you occasionally hit a museum and stare at paintings that you have no hope of ever understanding, at least not without a little research and practice. Despite being fully aware of your intellectual limitations, you still convince yourself of your artistic sensitivity.

As an example, I own and have read an entire biography on Rainier Werner Fassbinder, the German director who fiercely burned through the '70s like no other (or so I read), and yet I have only seen one of his films. Why have I not followed up on this? If I found his life interesting enough to read about for a whole week, why would I not seek out his films, even though they are all so readily available for rental? Why have I always had this block on pursuing avenues where I could actually learn something about quality filmmaking, and instead crawl back into my comfortable hole full of familiar demons, killers and monsters? As I said, I make small attempts at breaking out and expanding my view. Why can't I make the transition stick?

People tend to think of me as a bona fide movie nut, but sometimes, I am more sure of the nutty part and not so much on the supposed realm of my expertise. So, am I a poser?

It is a daunting question, and a hard one for people to actually ask of themselves. Who wants to expose themselves to ridicule purposefully? Isn't life hard enough to get through? Isn't dealing with other people, even your friends, family and neighbors, already enough of a mindfuck than to openly invite everyone to see that you might not be what you have served yourself up to be all along?

And isn't this what we all do on the internet now anyway?

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 4...)

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2: When 8 Films Turn Out to Actually Make You Die of Boredom

Earlier this year, while already consumed with crawling along on the paths of numerous subsets of film obsession -- such as watching every movie in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (still ongoing throughout my life) -- I took it upon myself to start watching all of the films released in the annual 8 Films to Die For festival, three years worth up to then and all of them easily obtainable on DVD. I had lined up all 24 DVDs in my Netflix queue, and the future held the promise of a few solid, blood-bedecked weeks of what seemed at first glance like good, gory bloodletting. 

Somewhere about seven films into the list, I realized that there was little here for which "to die," unless it was out of sheer ennui. You see, I entered into this latest round of compulsion still believing that I was a horror fan.

Let me qualify that statement. While my motto throughout my life has been "any film, any time," the twin poles of my movie obsession have been horror and science-fiction, even better when the twain did meet, as in The Thing (either version). Sure, I liked films in all genres, but it didn't take much more than the swiftest glance at my personal collection and the preponderance of horror and sci-fi titles within it to know where my heart truly lies. I will not use the past tense here, as the proposal is still largely true: my heart still lies with those monsters and aliens and the glory of nature gone amok, and I freely admit that I always, without exception, root against mankind (the center of all actual villainy) in all films of this stripe. These feelings have held unswervingly true throughout my life.

I will lay to rest here the recent revisiting of the rumors (from a pair of those old "acquaintances" I mentioned in Part 1) that I was anyway involved in the creation of the notorious "gore" tapes that flitted about our high school in the early 1980s, causing people to dash the eyes from out of their faces, sending innocent children to the sanitarium for the remainder of their youth, and bringing peace without honor. I would love to admit that I was involved in compiling those crudely transferred collections of graphic horror movie scenes (and I wish I still had a copy), but our family didn't even own a second VCR (ask your parents) until deep into my senior year of school. The closest I got was hanging out with the real culprits from time to time, once even popping by when they were finishing a tape. It was certainly true that I had seen all of the same films from which they had culled their teenaged notoriety, but, it wasn't me acting in that particular capacity as a horror propagandist, though I wish I could take credit for upsetting the (meager) masses in said manner.

However, I was around for this, and it is not for nothing that my friends bestowed upon me the nickname of "The Boogieman." I was, then as now, an obsessive sort, and I was clearly possessed of something which caused me to forge an alliance with films of a more disturbed nature. Truthfully, though, I always leaned towards the more surreal and political of these films, and less towards the merely violent, and once I discovered Lynch and Cronenberg (who are actually filmmakers working at cross measures much of the time, but somehow occupying enough similar territory to make me pair them in my mind)... well, once I met them, my interest in the more generic realm of undying serial killers and their pathetic ilk pretty much waned forever.

And this is how I have spent the last 25 years of horror fandom. I buy the toys, put up the posters, and consider myself a devotee, but the pickings have been truly slim, if not almost entirely devoid of quality of late, despite the fact that there are more horror films available now than ever before. With the flood of releases comes even more dross washing up on a shore already shockingly polluted with the corpses of unimpressive, would-be franchises. I have always considered myself happy if I find at least three or four films per year that I even halfway like, and the fact that I have stuck around this long into the "aughts" still maintaining this posture proves my resistance to change (though massive change is exactly what I have attempted to enact in my personal life since I left my home four-plus years ago).

For me, a form of the proof lies in my fairly vast DVD collection, numbering just over 1500 titles at the present moment. I can't wait to leap at films that I even slightly liked in some measure and add them to my library. So, if you want proof of my wearying of the recent history of the horror genre, what doesn't make it onto my shelves at home is a fairly good measure of my displeasure. Look for horror films in this decade alone, and you will find relatively few: The Descent, Let the Right One In, High Tension, Cabin Fever, Ginger Snaps, about a half dozen J-horror titles... and that's it. (And the pickings are actually even worse for the '90s in my collection.) This might point to a resurgence in quality in the last few years, but that is a debate for another time and place.

In fact, this really does not prove anything about the quality available in any decade, since it really comes down to personal taste and opinion. What it actually does prove is that, when compared with the large amounts of horror films I have considered worthwhile and accumulated from the 1920s forward in my collection, it is clear that my interest in the genre has truly waned by this point. Even a series that was considered as groundbreaking as Saw (a ridiculous notion at this point in the already worn-out series) left me cold from the start. I began to appreciate the effort more on a second viewing, and I have always understood the mechanism behind it, but my lack of a need to see people tortured mercilessly (or at least without a real fighting chance) left that new sub-genre in the dust for me from point one. It is not surprising to me that our country is so willing to entertain at least the discussion of what actually constitutes torture, when we are so willing to accept it as entertainment at a level even farther below the normal gladiatorial means by which many in our society mentally masturbate.

So, clearly, given the current choices and atmosphere, I have become largely immune to the current "charms" of a genre which I once purported to love. Bringing us back to the recent past of just about six months ago, where I was musing on whether to continue renting the films in the 8 Films to Die For series. I had bolted through about a half dozen in a week, during which I only discovered one, Mulberry St., which proved even halfway interesting to me. Worst of all was receiving a major dose of the generic quality that has overtaken supposedly "edgy" filmmaking. When everything takes on the pose of being "edgy" or "extreme," without any discernible variation from product to product, then it merely begins to look like everything else. It loses its edge, and becomes the mainstream. And so it can go with any movie genre in which one immerses oneself: there is the chance that repeated overexposure dulls ones reactions to it. Much like porn, where some practitioners have to seek ever more bizarre or socially unacceptable avenues to maintain that "edge."

I yelled out, "Why do I keep renting these boring pieces of shit?!" This frightened my dogs far more than even a split second of any six of these films had, and out of a knee-jerk reaction, I deleted about fifty horror and science-fiction films of recent vintage I had lined up on my Netflix queue. I knew I was bound to add them back in eventually, but it seemed like a strong stance at the moment. I was caped in anger and proud of myself for finally shaking off this compulsion, even as I was wrestling with every atom of my being out of a sense of betrayal to my lifelong standards.

And then I ended up not watching a single film for about two weeks, exactly the point in time when I began to immerse myself in Twitter and Facebook again.

And then my mood got even worse...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 3...)

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 1: I've Been Here, I've Been Working on Something, and There Is No Problem

The title above holds the answers to the questions most often asked of me over the past couple of months, during which time it seems I have taken some form of hiatus, purposeful or otherwise, from the Cinema 4 Pylon: "Where have you been?" "What the hell are you up to? You haven't been writing lately." "What's the problem now? Are you in another one of your funks?" Emails, phone calls, up close and personal... this is what I have heard, and not just from the usual suspects.

It's funny how you can write and write and write your ass off, and only a couple of committed, caring friends (and the odd stranger or two) will comment here and there, and you will begin to feel as if you were just another voice lost in the uncaring wilderness of the internet.

But, take an uncharacteristic amount of time away from something that people have locked you into their minds as being the sum of your being, and they begin to notice. Lately, I have received batches of concerned emails relating to this topic, along with a few comments on old posts to which I didn't bother to respond, and even Twitter messages from people with whom I am only lightly acquainted who have at least wondered where all the movie review tweets have gone.

This is all very nice, and I appreciate that some people have noticed my disappearance from the online world. But, here's what I thought was the truth: as of early September, I had grown sick of the internet.

After a few short months of testing, I came to believe that Twitter was essentially useless as a real communication tool, and rather just the latest and possibly worst form of networking pollution -- chiefly mindless blather trying to out-shriek the rest of the chiefly mindless blather, much of it scrubbed of context and therefore lacking any real impact. Facebook had become unmanageable to me once I reconnected with dozens of people from the past that I never really knew anyway. A precious few are grand old friends with whom I am glad to refresh our acquaintance, but then they throw their friends from the old days at you, and they don't realize (and often get hurt when they find out) that you really have no wish to know those other "old friends" anymore. Largely, this is because you never liked them in the first place (and most likely, they never liked you either). Worst of all, for weeks I dreaded opening my email accounts for fear of actually having to communicate with anyone. And when I did answer, I found, because I had not been paying very close attention to the run of things on the internet, that it would most likely would have been better had I not ever replied to anything at all. I had taken myself out of the loop, and even considering playing the slightest bit of catch-up had become both loathsome and monumentally difficult for me.

And so, for the most part, I disappeared online. A couple of email replies here and there kept the dread going; a mere handful of tweets throughout September and October showed that I was fighting whatever this creeping malaise happened to be. There were even brief moments where I tried to push back at it, and announced boldly m return to online life. (Well, if you can call saying anything in the cavernous depths of either Twitter or Facebook saying being truly bold -- which neither action is.) And while it is fun to think that perhaps this mood is merely just another syndrome amongst the thousands either identified or created to help us inch our way through the modern world -- let's throw a charming acronym or a smartly dressed abbreviation at it! -- the fact is that my attention has been diverted, and interacting online with the electronic world of faceless others has simply not been shown to be important enough to wash away the impression that I have disappeared.

But I have been around, and I have been busy, quite busy. Indeed, I have been quite deeply engaged for two to three months now. While I have been writing to some small degree, that activity has not been on anything to which this website directly relates, and it has not been the center of my attention. Writing is still the most important thing to me, and will prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of what I have been up to over the last two months. In fact, you could call my efforts "research" to the largest degree, or rather, a preparatory indulgence. What I have been doing will likely seem idiotic to some and markedly obsessive to all, but those who have similar addictions to the world of the cinema, those who feel lost within their own personal realms, and even anyone even the tiniest bit OCD will fully understand. (Yea, modern syndromes!)

To fully impart the madness into which I locked myself through the lateness of summer, though, I should divulge what led me to this point...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2...)