More Cinema 4 Pylon Goodness on the Rupert Pupkin Speaks Blog!

Just a heads up to any of my regular followers about an article that I have put together for another website...

My friend Brian has a blog called Rupert Pupkin Speaks (and if you don't know who Mr. Pupkin is, boo on you). Apart from telling the world about new blu-ray and DVD releases, Brian has a regular group of fellow movie obsessives submit articles based around various topics that he sends out to us.

After a couple of years of promising him that I would take part but not getting back in the game of writing regularly, everything is a go. Today, he posted my piece on "Underrated Films of 1945". 

If you are interested in reading my selections for that year -- or even if you love me, or mildly like me -- follow this link:

http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2015/12/underrated-rik-tod-johnson.html

That is all,

RTJ

Recently Rated Movies: Michael Gough and the Ice Cream for Crow

Find the Blackmailer (1943)
Dir.: D. Ross Lederman
TC4P Rating: 6/9

"Why, the nerve o' that tuh-mat-uh!"

Sure, watching "classic" classic film is often pretty great, though you sometimes find a dud among the films generally considered the greatest of all time. But "B" pictures are where the fun of classic film is really at, but you sometimes have to squirm your way through a lot of dross to find the real... well, "gems" may not be the word, but when you find a good one, they sparkle like any bonafide diamond. Of course, when you are hanging around such low-class digs, that gem may just be made of out paste instead.

As brisk (just 55 minutes long) as it is fun, Find the Blackmailer is a speedy little detective yarn featuring Jerome Cowan as D.L. Trees (his secretary is named Pandora Pines, so you get the gist of what is going on here), a private eye so far below public scrutiny that he gets the job in this picture just because nobody knows he is a detective. When a mayoral candidate (Gene Lockhart) gets involved deep with some gangsters, it is up to Trees to figure out the exceedingly convoluted mystery (involving the search for a talking crow) and save the day.

Find the Blackmailer is just a simple potboiler, but the performances are all engaging (I especially like Lockhart, but I like him in almost everything). The film is a wonderful showcase for Cowan, who played a lot of second bananas in his four-decade film career, including his supporting role in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, two years before this picture, where he played the tragic part of Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, who gets bumped off by Brigid O'Shaughnessy. But Cowan is the man here, an unlikely tough guy who is able to think his way out of rough spots, and is able to smart talk his way into uneasy alliances when he needs to do so.

And of course, some of that smart talk is what slowly endeared this movie to me, with lines like ""Beat it, before I throw a moth in your muffler!" Yeah, that kind of stuff gets me right here, as does all the silliness with the talking crow, which itself might be a not so subtle ribbing of The Maltese Falcon. There are worse films that have been nominated for Best Picture awards, so why not skip all of that high-falutin' garbage and just settle for a fun "B" pic? 

[Find the Blackmailer is available in the Warner Archive set, Warner Bros. Horror/Mystery Double Features, along with 5 other films. If you like "B" pictures, this is a must have set, especially for Sh! The Octopus.]


Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972)
Dir.: R. Winer / Barry Mahon "Thumbelina" portion
TC4P Rating: 2/9

This one is currently frightening audiences -- and generating big laughs -- by being shown in trailers all over the country as part of a Rifftrax program being promoted in theatres right now. Unfortunately for me, seeing a truly bad movie as part of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or its offshoot riffing shows does not count as my having seen the actual film. And so I had to knock off a major blank spot on my film-watching resume by sitting down to watch a full version of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.

I said "watch a full version" rather than "watch the full version," because there are actually two different takes of this film. The Santa portion of the film is actually nothing but a wraparound segment that introduces a film within the film, a separately filmed fairy tale that could either be the story of Thumbelina or Jack and the Beanstalk (both filmed by exploitation director Barry Mahon), depending on which release you were unlucky enough to have caught. The films within the film are both longer than the combined before and after Santa segments, thereby rendering the title characters to also-ran status in their own movie.

As for the quality of the film, that varies between segments. The Santa portion looks like it was filmed outside someone's Florida beach house. After first hearing some completely talentless kids dressed at elves attempt to sing (and fail) about why Santa Claus hasn't returned to the North Pole, we see Santa use his mind control powers to enlist several local kids (some of the same ones playing the elves) to help him get his sleigh out from the beach sand holding it down. The kids get various animals to try and pull the sleigh free -- a gorilla, a warty pig, a sheep, and a cow -- but all to no avail. Why Santa doesn't get his fat ass out of the sleigh when the gorilla is pulling it will tell you all that you need to know. For some strange reason, we are shown shots of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fiddling about on a raft in the water (with Ol' Man River on the soundtrack). As the kids give up hope, Santa tells them the story of Thumbelina.

The Thumbelina film not only has a different director, but is far better filmed than the Santa part. However, this is not praise, just a notice that the Santa scenes are some of the worst filmmaking that has ever been released theatrically, while the Thumbelina story is just a generic attempt at low-budget children's filmmaking. (It does raise my rating of the overall film just a tad since it so much better than the Santa wraparound.) We watch a pretty girl walk around the defunct Pirates World theme park in Dania, Florida, and she happens upon a series of diorama telling the story of Han Christian Andersen's Thumbelina. She imagines herself into the story, and then we get over an hour of slow-moving drama involving the birth of Thumbelina and her impending marriage to Mr. Mole. The songs are better than the ones in the Santa part of the film (and clearly a better songwriter too) though still not all that good. For the animals in the story, they have chosen to go with full head masks rather than makeup on the actors, and so all of the voices seem disembodied. It's dull but its better than what came before, and what will come at the end.

Returning to Santa, after the story, the kids depart for reasons unknown to the profusely sweating old elf, and thankfully he waits until they are gone to strip from his coat and belt down to his red t-shirt. When they return, all two dozen of them are hanging onto a red jalopy being driven by a poor guy trapped inside the silliest white rabbit costume that has every existed. It is the Ice Cream Bunny to the rescue, in a scene that only goes for the last ten minutes of the film, but seems to amble on for about three hours. And then these horrid urchins sing again... they... sing... again. (I'm sorry, but this film made me look up the definition of singing in the dictionary, because surely, this can't be what is meant.)

The whole affair really makes you start to hate the commercialization of Christmas even more, because without an audience out there willing to watch anything to do with the holiday, this movie doesn't get made. Maybe what we should have been teaching our children first all along was good taste. Manners, letters, numbers, potty training... that can all come later.

Oh, and singing. We should teach them to sing well too. That's something my ears learned from Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.


Black Zoo (1963)
Dir.: Herman Cohen
TC4P Rating: 5/9

Michael Gough. If there is one name that must be placed amongst the pantheon of the World's Hammiest Actors, Michale Gough must surely have a plaque there. You might know him best as Alfred the Butler in the four Burton/Schumacher Batman films, but Gough had acted for a very long time before that. For the purposes of this quickie, let's concentrate on a very small period in that career. In the late '50s and early '60s, he tore the horror world up in a trio of films for producer (and sometimes director) Herman Cohen, and where he really made the raised eyebrow and out-of-place tone of voice an art form.

My favorite of the three films has always been Horrors of the Black Museum, the first and best of the set, a Grand Guignol piece that I first saw as an older teenager and have never been able to get out of my system. (And it is one of the films to which I was tipped off by Stephen King's seminal non-fiction work, Danse Macabre.) The least of the trio is Cohen's giant gorilla epic, Konga, which while being highly derivative of better (and some worse) films, pushes the crazy factor just enough to make it interesting. Through both pictures, Gough controls your gaze for every second, his indignant face ready to burst (sometimes inappropriately) in every scene at the slightest provocation or perceived slight. And when things really start to not go his way, watch out!

But until this week, I had not seen the last film in the three Cohen/Gough team-ups, Black Zoo from 1963. After a beautiful girl is killed by a loose tiger on the street, we meet Michael Conrad (Gough), a British expat who runs a private zoo in Los Angeles called Conrad's Animal Kingdom. Even with Gough running about, all seems on the up and up at Animal Kingdom. Conrad leads tour groups to meet his lions, tigers, apes, and bears, and his wife runs a chimpanzee act that thrills audiences. Conrad himself seems to have an odd rapport with his predatory creatures, and he is seen to play his organ for his big cats while they fall asleep loose in his own home.

Jerome Cowan, whom you might remember from the first review regarding Find the Blackmailer above, shows up as someone attempting to swindle Conrad out of his immense property, and you can imagine how that works out. Anyone who crosses Conrad starts to disappear, and the police become increasingly suspicious, especially when the evidence at the crime scenes seems to point to animals as the killers. 

Once again, the result is a very derivative film, but what sets it apart from others of its ilk is its lead role featuring the nearly always sinister Gough. It is hard to watch this film in this age when all one can think about is the working conditions for the animals (except for the gorilla, which is not only a guy in a suit, but possibly the same suit from Konga). Even with some cool names showing up in the cast -- Elisha Cook Jr., Jeanne Cooper, Marianna Hill (yum!), Virginia Grey, and Edward Platt -- Gough is the whole show here. Like the other Cohen films, the main reason to watch is to see him puff and pout and plot his way out of and into situations. And he does it in the grandest way possible.

Yes, his hamminess is the big draw, but he was also an actor with a broad range -- appearing in Ealing comedies, Hammer and Amicus horror, Disney historical epics, and even winning a Tony Award for Best Actor in 1979. Gough, in any role, is always worthwhile, even when you really hate where they went with Alfred in the last two Batman films. Then again, I really hate where they went with every character in the last two Batman films, so I suppose that I should cut him some slack. He was just doing his job like any other working stiff actor.

Not Quite Hammer, Not Quite Wry

Victor Frankenstein (2015)
Dir.: Paul McGuigan
TC4P Rating: 5/9

I could start off by listing everything that does not work in Victor Frankenstein, Paul McGuigan's somewhat revisionist take on Mary Shelley's timeless, Promethean, proto-science fiction tale. I could list them all, but it would take up three thousand words and this entire piece would be composed of nothing but "should have beens" and "could have beens". But here's a few:

How does a self-educated and abused hunchback gain enough medical knowledge while basically being trapped in the squalor of a low-rent circus to rival the highly educated and obviously brilliant but maniacal Victor Frankenstein? Why does Daniel Radcliffe's limp disappear and reappear at will, often within the same scene? Why is The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss, who plays Mycroft Holmes on Sherlock (sometimes directed by McGuigan and sometimes written by Gatiss), not given anything to do but stand around and silently push buttons in the movie's hugely over-the-top finale, when his Sherlock co-star Andrew Scott, who plays über-villain James Moriarty, is given (ironically) the much juicier role of Scotland Yard's top detective?

There is hardly a scene that goes by in Victor Frankenstein where you don't wonder why they did this and didn't do that. When a film pushes the bounds of incredulity from time to time, you either have to suspend your disbelief and just try to enjoy the film, or you have to write the exercise off altogether and pretend you never submitted yourself to it in the first place. But when a movie asks the viewer to make that choice in every single scene, and still somehow remains oddly watchable all the way through, then you've got something special. 

Despite vowing to hit every horror and science fiction feature that reached my local cinema from the moment I became trapped in this new home in an eerily new town, I was somewhat resistant towards making a visit to see Victor Frankenstein. The trailer did not give me much hope -- in fact, nearly quashed my intent entirely -- nor did the dishwater dull movie posters (two big heads or two characters standing side by side with no real artistic vision in sight: both types of popular poster were released for this film). When the release date came, I fought off the urge for a week or so, but as time ticked by and I became aware that the film would likely leave our cinema by last Friday -- much quicker than I expected or Twentieth Century Fox wished -- I rushed up to catch the only afternoon showing left. What sort of Frankenstein fan would I be if I didn't see the latest iteration of the classic story mauled to death on the big screen?

The answer, surprisingly to me, is: a sadder one. No, I was not tricked by the film at all. Victor Frankenstein is not a good film by any stretch of an imagination greater than the people who created this film (which would be legion). It is over-produced, under-written, over-acted wildly (except for a couple of roles where a little more hamminess would have helped), and stuffed to the gills with every artifice and horror cliche known to resurrected man. They have disregarded the source material except for the names of a couple of characters and the basic regeneration concept, mixed in characters that only surfaced in later cinematic versions of the story (such as a hunchback named Igor), all while steampunking everything in a style that many millennials probably now believe was the actual look of the Victorian era. 

My friend Aaron expressed concern that the film would be filled with post-Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes-style "modern quippery and explosions," and that was a concern of mine as well. While McGuigan does resort to current Ritchie-like devices such as the superimposed anatomical cutaways of human and animal bodies, surprisingly there is little in the way of the dreaded quippery. While McAvoy's Victor is a non-stop shouter and rambler (often drunken) of whatever nonsense runs through his mind, Radcliffe's Igor is rather more quiet and introspective, and not up to that style of verbal linguistics, and so we don't really get the pair zinging one-liners off each other like they were in a buddy cop picture instead.

Were the hammy acting scale built into a high-rise building, much of the cast (Including Andrew Scott) would be seen about three to four stories above the ground floor, while James McAvoy, clearly relishing the cheese factor built into his role, would have already settled into the penthouse dozens of floors above and sat around wondering when everyone else in the cast was going to join him for an aperitif. This leaves the thankless job of anchoring the film to Daniel Radcliffe, which is an odd choice since his character (actually a co-lead as Igor) is one of the more bizarrely drawn in the film. But Radcliffe underplays most of the time, and rather disappears as a character in the presence of the far more brazen McAvoy. But apart from the lovely but very wooden Jessica Brown Findlay as the heroine, Lorelei, everyone else in the cast seems to have gotten the note that everyone should step into the ham elevator and push the "up" button.

The true sense I got from Victor Frankenstein was that it was as if someone was told several competing versions of the Frankenstein story while they were growing up, and having only heard each tale once when they were a kid, tried to recall the bits of each story years later through their faulty memory, and then reassemble those bits into one cohesive tale. Thus, like Frankenstein's creature itself, Victor Frankenstein absolutely feels like a patchwork creation.

Shelley's novel is pretty much shrugged aside from the very beginning as McGuigan and his team flat out decide to go their own way. From the second Radcliffe's Igor is introduced in clown makeup, we are in new territory (not that Frankenstein tales haven't taken place partially in circuses before; for example, 1985's The Bride). He is not even named Igor; in fact, doesn't even have a name, but he will acquire the monicker Igor from Victor for reasons I will not go into here. The film has Victor in medical school, and it is clear he has not created his first monster yet, and is in fact, working on raising the deceased chimpanzee first. Here too, we have already perverted the original storyline even more, and switching its main setting to London -- the book two most notable settings are Germany and the North Pole, but also takes time in London, Scotland, and Ireland as well -- also means a general change of atmosphere, and spending less time with the superstitious ways of simple villagers and more time with the manners and personalities to be found in a big city.

The film delights in its gruesomeness. In this age of PG-13 horrors, I have come to be shocked again and again by what can and can't be shown at that rating. While Victor Frankenstein is not loaded with gore per se, it does have enough blood included with its violence to remind you that it is indeed a horror picture. Mostly you get body parts being sewn into new bodies (you don't really see a lot of how they do it, but mostly the end products), and a fairly detailed, reanimated chimpanzee monster that provides some fun at the medical college. Some disembodied eyes that return their function is another sick thrill.

But one of the grosser moments in recent cinematic history is in this film, when Victor siphons the massive abscess that it is the cause of the hunchback's pain. He sucks the pus out through a rubber tube using his mouth, spits out a mouthful of the vile excretion, and then the remainder of the lightly yellowish pus spatters out of the tube onto the floor of the laboratory. (The pus that lands in the bucket which was meant to catch most of it is thrown by Victor off his balcony, and we hear the screams of some people below.) It's nasty and created a pretty good, intentional laugh from me when it happened. (Sadly, I was the only one in the audience, so I didn't get to hear the squirming of others at the scene.) Additionally, I was reminded of Michael Palin's Miles Cowperthwaite segments on the original Saturday Night Live (with the sawing off of a sailor's limbs just because his legs got wet and the spilling of copious amounts of drool from a bucket held about an elderly man's neck) and that is always a good thing for me.

The pus siphoning scene (I love the disgusting sound of that phrase) is still fairly early in the picture, when Victor and Igor (not his actual name, as it turns out, but one purloined for him by Victor) are still establishing their relationship. But it was the moment when I first caught on to what was happening within me in regards to my reaction to the film. While recognizing that the film was all of the negative things I have already mentioned earlier, I realized that I was still having a pretty good time with Victor Frankenstein. As I continued to watch, a small part of my mind was dispatched to do some detective work on its own and begin analyzing exactly why this was. 

My theory is tied up with the late night television adventuring of my twelve-year-old self, who had just discovered there were such thing as Hammer horror films if you stayed up later than your parents suspected. You can read the how and why elsewhere on my blog, so I won't elaborate here, but at that age, my first experience with really bloody films were from the Frankenstein and Dracula titles starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. My favorite of the lot was a Cushing starrer called Frankenstein Created Woman (actually the first Hammer film I ever saw). Frankenstein Created Woman crammed crazy plot element on top of crazy plot element in a way that my twelve-year-old self truly couldn't handle or really appreciate until I was much older (it has a pretty kinky twist to it that went over my head back then), but I loved it immensely even when it didn't make a lick of sense.

While watching Victor Frankenstein, I realized that for the first time in a very long time, I had regained that same feeling that I used to get from watching those Hammer films early in my youth. Hammer rarely held true to the original material themselves except for in a minor way in their introductory films to their Dracula and Frankenstein series, and later films in each series were all marked by some of the most wild divergences possible from what Stoker or Shelley had intended. And as I stated earlier, here too is where I seemed to be catching the vibe (yes, I watch The Flash religiously) that Victor Frankenstein was bringing up some of that residual Hammer Studios feeling in my system, long dormant from misappropriation and unfulfilled horror cinema promise.

As Victor Frankenstein grew increasingly manic but remained purposeful in its relentless path to the ultimate fates of its characters, the more I got caught up in it, with a wide grin plastered on my face in the darkness of the theatre. Luckily, since I despise smiling, no one was there to see me. (There wasn't even a sporadic visit from an usher to check on things, and they usually come through an average of three times a screening.) I wouldn't feel compelled to offer up a meek explanation of why I was enjoying myself at a movie that no one seemed to want to attend. Not that anyone would have questioned me; they would have probably just assumed that I had horrible movie taste, and they would be partially right.

And unless you too were raised on Hammer horror films, and knew the outrageous (and sometimes unsuccessful) lengths they would go to in their monster epics, you might not get why I was so overjoyed as the canvas of Victor Frankenstein got bigger and crazier and built itself toward a ridiculously grandiose finale, in a remote castle in Scotland, in a wild thunderstorm, and with practically every major character in the film in motion somewhere in that finale.

I have said little about the monster in this film, but I will say that when he is finally brought to his feet by Frankenstein's machinery (this gives away nothing, because of course he will; this is a Frankenstein movie after all), he is a remarkable creation. I was a little saddened that he wasn't brought to this world in a much better Frankenstein movie, but then I remembered that I had been smiling like a madman throughout the buildup to his creation. I had to check to see if perhaps the film was a co-production with the revived Hammer Studios, and I was more than a little saddened to find out that it is not. Regardless of that, I still felt like I did when I was a kid watching Peter Cushing build creature after creature in those Frankenstein films of yore. Bad new film or not, for me that is truly mad science at its best.

Love and Mercy, That's What We Need Tonight...

Love & Mercy (2014)
Dir.: Bill Pohlad
TC4P Rating: 8/9

"I was lying in my room
and the news came on TV
A lotta people out there hurtin'
and it really scares me
Love and mercy, that's what you need tonight
Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight"
- Brian Wilson, Love and Mercy

The television news has been filled for the past two days with the details of the massacre in San Bernardino, California. Terrorism or random violence? No one knows at this point, speculation is rampant, and you can just sense both sides of the gun debate ramping up their defenses for the next good while.

We live about 25 miles away from where the massacre took place. Just a quick drive and we could be there. I have only been to San Bernardino a couple of times, and I doubt that I have ever even seen the building where the killing took place. But I can feel the very nearness of the horrors that we are taking in complacently on our televisions and digital devices. Watching what happens in New York, Paris, or London, it all seems so far away. Even if your heart goes out to the victims and you are disgusted with the actions of the attackers, you are still able to say, "That is not here. That is half a world away. That sort of stuff doesn't happen here." And then it happens here. And then you realize, it can happen anywhere.

It seems a bit unfair to put all of this burden on the shoulders of a biographical film about the creation of some of the greatest pop music ever written and the subsequent healing and resurgence of its creator, but I can't help it. 

On Wednesday morning, not less than fifteen minutes after I finished watching Love & Mercy and found myself swept in the most sublime reverie after the film's conclusion, that mood was shattered -- quaked, really -- by the news from San Bernardino. Connecting the two in my mind was pure happenstance, but I have done it all the same. The simple lyrics I posted above -- from Wilson's 1988 song that give the film its title -- were still in my mind as I hummed along to the melody long after I had pulled the disc out of the player. Switching the mode to return to broadcast television and seeing what was taking place live in my general vicinity... well, if it doesn't bother you that something like this has happened, then you probably don't have a heart.

Except, that is sometimes exactly how I feel much of the time. I often find difficulty reacting in a warm way during moments like this. While I do have a moral sense (despite what some of my friends might think), I am not necessarily composed of the social cues that one requires when dealing with other human beings in moments of crisis or disaster. If you are not someone that is already a friend or family member of mine, I can be cold and withholding in empathy, or at least sympathy. I feel somewhat out of body as the news is reeled off, as if I were floating above everything and none of it affects me at all.

My reticence to show warmth extends to the knee-jerk reactions that seem to comfort the rest of the world on social media and in human circles. I think the phrase "thoughts and prayers" is a wholly meaningless expression that has about as much import as a total stranger answering "Fine" after you have asked "How's it goin'?" before you pass by them and never seem them again. And, of course, I have long been known as someone who does not believe in the term "too soon" in regards to tragedy. Were I famous and stupidly tweeted some of the dopey jokes I have thrown unthinkingly at friends in the past following random deaths and other tragedies, I would get in as much trouble as Gilbert Gottfried did. Good thing I don't give voice to a duck.

My warm fuzzies are seriously misplaced, and they tend to only come out when I am involved with popular art. Not that overly friendly guy Art down the street (he is kind of creepy), but with manifestations of human artistic talent. Books, comics, TV shows... but especially music and movies. I get misty not just holding your hand, but when I see a well-turned scene in a film, or when someone pulls off a good practical effect instead of resorting to CGI. I get all choked up not in moments of obvious, forced sadness in something, where everyone is meant to have a good cry, but instead at odd moments when I sense that the maker or makers of something (and it can be pure commercial product with no pretensions at all) have melded all the various pieces together perfectly and delivered on their objective. Tears may well up and my throat will catch over silliness that most others fail to perceive.

But music is the place where I get the most ridiculously emotional. It pains me when people don't love a song or an album as much as I do, to the point where I want to throw the nearest whatever at them. I get overwrought just listening to a simple but perfect pop song, and I take all lyrics by my favorite bands, no matter how juvenile or unfathomable, as the gospel. (It is very important to get each word exactly right... yes, very OCD of me.)

And if there is a surefire way to make this supposedly adult male get all weepy or if you'd like to administer a knockout drug that will make me starry-eyed and wistful for about three hours at a go, all you need to do is play the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds around me. There is no album of any genre of music that I find as beautiful, hopeful, but downright melancholic as Brian Wilson's inarguable masterpiece from 1966.

Growing up, I knew the basic Beach Boys song list; they were everywhere in the '70s, even if they were past their true heyday. I did not know very much about them except that three of them were brothers, my immediate favorite was drummer Dennis, and that the whiny guy who sang some of the lead vocals wasn't as good a singer as the others. But we did not own any of their records when I was a kid, so I only heard them sporadically on the radio. But I liked what I heard.

My real fascination with Brian Wilson sprang to the fore with his appearance in 1976 on Saturday Night Live, when he appeared as a musical guest not long after falling under the influence of Dr. Eugene Landy, a psychoanalyst who would largely control Wilson's life and finances off and on for over a decade. (Landy, in fact, forced Wilson to perform on the show as part of his therapy.) I barely remember him performing in a lackluster and nervous fashion; what stuck in my mind to this day was the sketch filmed at his home where John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, dressed as policemen, force Wilson to get out of the bed and finally learn to surf (under the "Catch a Wave Act"). The sketch is uncomfortable and strange -- and the overweight and confused Wilson does not look happy rolling around out in the water -- and the situation immediately made me wonder was wrong with Wilson.

It colored my opinion of him throughout the next couple of decades even as I reached adulthood and tackled Wilson's entire oeuvre, falling deeply in love with his songwriting and production artistry. My next televised run-in with Brian was in an HBO special that was filmed live in Washington, D.C. on the Fourth of July in 1980. I watched the special several dozen times over the next few years (I recorded it onto tape when the regular HBO airing were just not enough), and came to appreciate the full group as a live band (even if they were never really known for their musicianship apart from their vocals and Brian). But Brian was always so odd in it. He still seems distant and not really a part of the proceedings, and when he sings "I wanna go home" on Sloop John B, he seems like he really means it. (I had heard rumors over the years that his piano was not actually miked during this show and many others during that tour, but have never seen anything to back this up.) Of course, all of this only served to make me even more interested in what was going on in his mind. Is this the guy who wrote all of those melodies? The near genius who masterminded Pet Sounds?

Love & Mercy, subtitled The Life, Love and Genius of Brian Wilson does not take a conventional approach to musical biography, showing us the artist as a young child and then progressing through his career until he reaches either a significant career highlight or an untimely death or a dramatic comeback in his later years. Instead, it concentrates on two distinct periods of Brian's life: the time building up to and just after the creation of the Pet Sounds LP and into the Smile sessions where he would famously begin his downward spiral into supposed madness, and the later years of his abuse at the hands of Dr. Landy when his eventual wife of the past 24 years, Melinda Ledbetter, enters his life. The film cuts between these two periods in unexpected ways, and we are never allowed to sink comfortably into the film as a result. If anything, it is almost as if we are there inside of Brian's brain as these events are recalled, even though the film doesn't actually imply that is what we are doing. Director Bill Pohlad has too deft a hand to allow us that easy route into the film.

Part of his unconventional route of Love & Mercy is to have Wilson portrayed in each period by a distinctly different actor. I suppose a similar case could be made for Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, where Bob Dylan was portrayed by six actors, each one reflecting a different side of Dylan's personality, but that was less biographical than fantasia (excellent as it was). The younger, '60s genius with the mind bursting with endless musical exploration and eventual mental breakdown is played by Paul Dano, an actor of whom I have made many disparaging remarks in the past. (I still think he was out of his element in There Will Be Blood.) But I have liked him in lighter fare such as Little Miss Sunshine, though nothing prepared me for how fully he would embody Brian Wilson, both in looks and personality, in this film. There is not a false note in his performance, and I will be disappointed should he not register at least an Oscar nomination from this. He is a wonder here.

And then there is the role of the late '80s Brian Wilson, fulfilled with equal interest by one of the most criminally underused and underrated actors of the past three decades, John Cusack. Yeah, I know there are a lot of people who still want him to be that young smart-ass from all of those '80s comedies, but Cusack has chops, and we have seen them from time to time over the years. But he rarely gets roles like this, and he knows it (but doesn't make us aware he knows it). He digs in deep in the sand outside of Wilson's beach home. His Wilson is not the fast-talking sharpie we tend to equate with a Cusack role. He is lost and trapped and nervous. He longs for... hell, love and mercy, neither of which he is getting at the hands of Landy, played with predictable desperation mixed with cunning by Paul Giamatti (who seems to be the go-to guy for these sort of roles). Cusack may not register as someone who looks particularly like Wilson, unlike Dano (though Pohlad says he got the idea of casting Cusack after seeing pictures of the '80s Wilson). However, once you see how Cusack inhabits the soul of Brian Wilson, such considerations go to the wayside.

A prime component of selling this film to the viewer is the excellent soundtrack work of Atticus Ross, who has combined snippets of studio conversations, studio session tracks, outtakes, foley effects, and his own scoring to create a musical collage that carries the viewer from scene to scene (there is a bit of a Lynchian feel to the music, though never in a lush way as when he worked with Badalamenti). Never fully reliant on simply playing Beach Boys hit after Beach Boys hit in a traditional biopic, Ross' score instead allows Wilson himself get under our skin, sometimes pleasingly, sometimes to where we feel as traumatized as the man himself. Another pleasing element is the use of Dano's own singing in certain key musical scenes and mixing it in with Wilson's at times to create a fluid effect that allows the actor his instrument but also keeps Brian's voice in our minds.

The film rides waves of abuse, that experienced by Wilson at the hands of his domineering father and one-time manager, Murry (cruelly stamped by Bill Camp), and then the paranoid, overly drugged existence of his years under Landy and his goonish "bodyguards". But the film is grounded in its title. Love and mercy will come; all you have to know is Wilson's current flourishing state of creativity and continuing marriage to Ledbetter to see he has done well for himself. Smile has finally been completed, and while it may not be precisely what he would have done had he actually completed it as his younger self in the late '60s, it is informed by his experiences through the rest of his life, and it is a wonderful tribute to his talents and the resiliency of his music.

And near the end of the Landy era, on an album on which Landy himself took co-production and co-songwriting credits (since rescinded), Wilson wrote the song Love and Mercy. The lyrics are nearly childlike, but speak to Wilson's outlook on the world at large from his isolation:

"I was sittin' in a crummy movie
with my hands on my chin
All the violence that occurs
seems like we never win
Love and mercy, that's what you need tonight
So love and mercy to you and your friends tonight"

As I finish this, it has been almost 48 hours since the first reports of gunfire in San Bernardino. Everyone is yelling back and forth about gun control; the same old arguments both pro and con by the same old elements. No one can agree on anything except that everyone is afraid (except maybe the ones that have too many guns and ammo). There is still a debate about whether this constitutes an act of terrorism, though increasingly, the signs are pointing to "yes". And if so, it has touched down basically in my backyard. 

How long am I going to be able to lose myself in music? How long am I going to be able to try and ignore most of the world and deny that I am a part of the human race? This species that should only seek for beauty and peace and scientific truth but instead nearly always turns to war and rape and murder and torture and destruction? How long can I hold out?

As long as I fucking can... [Cues up Pet Sounds once again...]

It's A Very Special Cel Bloc Xmas!

I am just a little bit lost this Christmas season. Not feeling particularly festive, and even less so than last year, which really sucked. This is even after we spent the day after Thanksgiving decorating our new home for the first time.

Why? The reasons are varied, but I have decided to combat it the only way I know how: writing about Christmas cartoons. I have selected 9 cartoons about which I have never written before, all with holiday themes, and will be posting them throughout December.

The first of the batch, Warner Bros.' The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (1933) is online now at the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc at http://bit.ly/1PwLI5S. I have also embedded the video into the article in case you have never watched the cartoon.

I'll see you over there!

Recently Rated Movies: Classical Beach Boys, Star Wars for Girls, and a Tragic Son

Death in Venice (1971)
Dir.: Luchino Visconti
TC4P Rating: 6/9

I am woefully unarmed in any discussion involving Thomas Mann's writing. Despite everything I have read in my life, he is a blind spot. I am able to reel off the names of his three or four most well-known books, and know just enough about him to help me in crossword puzzles, but that is all. I am willing to admit that I have not read the man, or Mann, as it were. Therefore, I was absolutely unprepared for watching Italian director Luchino Visconti's film version of Mann's 1912 novella, Death in Venice.

As part of my Tower of Film project, which I wrote about in great detail a few years ago and which is the now the chief guiding force behind what movies I choose to view (though not the only criteria), Death in Venice came up as a selection for the year 1971 based on its nomination at the 1972 Oscars for Best Costume Design, as well as its nomination for the Palme d'Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. Part of the problem in watching films from far behind, long after they have come out, and yet still trying to approach them with a blank state of mind, is going in without being affected by the acclaim and recognition (or conversely, derision and hatred) the film received before you got to see it. Such knowledge can influence your opinion positively or negatively. You can blindly accept that all of the 4-star reviews and nominations are automatically correct. You can also enter the film cynically and believe that "nothing could be that good," and leave the film with the notion that they must have been a right bunch of fuckwits to think this movie was anything worthwhile. In both cases, it can prevent you from thinking through the film for yourself. The biggest part of watching a film is actually watching the film.

Because of my then-lack of knowledge regarding Mann's story, I did not know what I was in for with Death in Venice. I did read up on a synopsis of the novella before I sat down to watch it the other day, and it jibes pretty closely with that of the film (with one minor change I will mention in a moment). A middle-aged writer named Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Vienna on vacation and becomes enamored, from a distance, by the singular beauty of a teenage Polish boy named Tadzio. As time passes, Gustav runs across the boy time and again in public settings and comes to be obsessed with the teenager. So far, so creepy. He never speaks to or touches Tadzio, but he does begin to follow him about the city, and his family becomes increasingly aware of this intrusion. Meanwhile, a cholera plague is developing in the city, and Gustav not only begins to notice the city falling apart, but captures the virus himself. The more his obsession with Tadzio grows, the more Gustav worries about his own looks, and takes to having his hair darkened and wearing makeup in public. Eventually, Gustav sits on a beach chair and watches Tadzio get beaten up by another boy on the beach. Tadzio wades into the water, stares back at Gustav, but as Gustav attempts to rise and meet the boy, Gustav slumps sideways on his chair in death.

Director Visconti changed Gustav's profession from writer to composer, and then loaded his version with the music of another Gustav -- Mahler, that is, after whom Mann, an acquaintance of Mahler, supposedly based his character's physical description and first name. The composer's music dominates the entire film to the point that even if I were the most ardent Mahler fan, I might be sick of it by the end. Assuredly, it fills one's ears with glorious sound equal to and even beyond the measure of the cinematography, settings, and costumes that dance before your eyes (the Oscar nom is well deserved). Sadly, for me, despite the excellence of those separate elements, Death in Venice went on far too slowly and too long, and I grew restless for its conclusion. And take it from me; I find L'Avventura to be pleasantly paced.

This is where I part ways with the popular, cultural acceptance of Death in Venice. I don't find the story interesting in the least. I understand the metaphor at play here (Gustav, an artist, is driven to distraction, while his world crumbles around him, more with the ideal of true beauty and not necessarily with a mere child), but I did not enjoy spending two-plus hours with what would appear to modern society as a budding pedophile creeping about a historic city to steal another surreptitious glimpse as a boy a quarter of his age. While I am used to be complicit in other acts of voyeurism as seen through the eyes of the protagonist/antagonist in many, many other films (Hitchcock, De Palma, and many noir films as prime examples), in this case, I had a sense of great unease in the process.

And yet, I do find much to commend in the film. Apart from elements that I already lauded earlier in this review, Dirk Bogarde, an actor who has grown on me immensely over the past decade as I finally got a chance to see his body of work, is a fine choice for Gustav, even if he is largely silent for much of the film. Physically, the role suits him to a T. As for Visconti, I had only seen three of his fourteen films before watching Death in Venice: his first film, Ossessione (1943), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), and his Italian political epic, The Leopard (1963) I ranked all three of these films as "8" (out of 9 on my scale), having enjoyed all of them greatly (and all for very different reasons, as they exist in quite different genre). Death in Venice, unfortunately, didn't catch me the same way, but its influence is already so widespread (operas and other homages in literature and film), that it doesn't need me to help it along. It will be just fine without me paying a revisit.

Strange Magic (2015)
Dir.: Gary Rydstrom
TC4P Rating: 5/9

In a interview made in tangent with the release of Strange Magic, producer George Lucas noted that he had already made Star Wars for 12-year-old boys. He wanted Strange Magic to be for 12-year-old girls. This is odd, because most of the 12-year-old girls that I knew when Star Wars came out (I was 12 myself at the time, you sickos) loved Star Wars as much as the boys. Not that I have done a scientific study, but based on what I saw around me back then and moving forward through Jedi, nearly every kid in 1977, no matter the gender, was crazy about that film. And has been ever since.

My immediate question back to Mr. Lucas would be, "Why didn't you just give Leia her own lightsaber in Star Wars, and then Strange Magic wouldn't have to have been made at all?" Seriously, why make this?

This one was arduous. I mean, really tough to get through. Supposedly inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (in that there are fairies, elves, and sprites in a dark forest and much talk about love potions in it), Strange Magic is stuffed to its spiracles with all manner of classic magical beings, bugs, reptiles, squirrels, and whatever other small woodland creatures they could imagine in an extremely lush forest setting. It looks marvelous -- apart from the more human faces on the fairies, which show so little emotional range I was instantly reminded of The Polar Express -- and their world is very inviting at first, which is part of why sitting through nearly 100 minutes of cliched dialogue and trite situations is so very draining. I guess they thought that Pixar gets away with longer running times in animated films all the time, so why can't we. The difference is that Pixar (apart from the Cars films) has interesting stories and characters with real life and personalities built into them.

Then there is the music. Characters break into song at every possible moment, and often with just the first couple lines of a song, or the first verse and chorus, or just the chorus of something. There are songs I love here and songs that I hate as well, but it doesn't matter; they seem to be from the George Lucas playlist. I have a hard time believing that 12-year-old girls in 2015 are going to be familiar with many of the music snippets from the '50s, '60s and '70s. There are current songs in the mix as well, such as Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and Beyoncé and Jay-Z's Crazy in Love, but they are definitely in the minority here. The net they cast musically is so wide and scatterbrained that none of it makes a lick of sense when jammed together. I guess that if a kid watching this gets to learn a little about older music and decides to do the research into discovering more, then all the better, but within the film, the stew of music really doesn't flow very well and just makes me visualize someone just randomly flipping through an iPod while the soundtrack was being created.

And yet, every once in a while, Strange Magic's magic would work strangely on me. I chuckled at a line here or there that was delivered by a couple of the side characters, even if their type has been better represented in nearly every other animated film ever made that had a main villain with toadies at his beck and call. Design-wise, my favorite character was the white, mouse-ish imp that plagues the heroes even though it is clearly meant to be lovable. As I usually do, I enjoyed Alan Cummings' voice as the Bog King, but I preferred when he was singing rather than hearing him spit out such stiff lines of dialogue. There are snippets of the musical sequences where I can see what they were going for, such as when they finally fully use the title song by ELO during the big romantic awakening between the lead characters. The film breaks its ADHD tension and settles down for a couple of minutes. The characters and the song actually seem to work together, the scenery is lovely and moonlit, and the romance of the scene is pretty effective. And then the film jumps back to its lyrics-dropping, manic self.  

While I am all for everybody being in love in whatever combination they so please in real life, I can see the more morally uptight twitching their noses at the combinations proposed throughout Strange Magic as more proof that Hollywood is trying to indoctrinate their kids into some form of bestial nuptials administered by Satan himself. Not that I believe any of that b.s., but it is easy sometimes to see where the Huckabees, Santorums, and Bachmans of the world get their dim-witted, knee-jerk fire. You know, all it takes is just one film with a frog making out with a mushroom, and we are all doomed for the pits of Hades.


Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)
Dir.: Brett Morgen
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Goddamnit, at this point I don't care if it was a suicide or a covered-up death by misadventure or murder. There seem to be scores of documentaries or docudramas out there now about Kurt Cobain leaving this void, and I am sure many more will be heading our way in the future. The Cobain doc machine has become a cottage industry of its own, almost to the point where I start to wonder if Nirvana and Courtney Love are almost encouraging the continued controversy around the supposed mystery.

Of course, I don't really believe that. (Or do I?) To do so would add me to that particular group of trolls that respond to every article in which it is mentioned that Cobain definitely committed suicide with accusations that the writer must be getting paid by Love (or with some far more graphic form of compensation) to say things that point away from conspiracy theories regarding her involvement or outright direct responsibility for his death.

The obstacle with any film about Cobain is that his death will eventually override it. You can delve into his past all you want, but the ultimate tragedy of his life fairly stains everything. After all, these films would likely not be made about his life without what happened at the end of it, and all that he created in his lifetime are likewise soaked in it. Things that even might have appeared loving or innocent get suffused with the shadow of that ending.

Cobain: Montage of Heck is not going to block out the cries of those who feel he was either murdered by Love or that she was at least involved in covering up his murder. In fact, it may turn up the volume on those cries. This is because Montage of Heck has the full cooperation of Cobain's family, including his daughter Frances Bean, and Love herself. Nothing sets off a Love-hater more than Love herself showing up, flapping her gums, and continuing her assumed inconsistency. (Myself, I am no fan of Love's, except to say that I thought she was exceptional in The People vs. Larry Flynt, a film that I adore.)

Kurt's death is barely mentioned just before the credits, but as I said, his suicide (yes, I said it) hangs over every second of the film. Taking its title from a sound collage Cobain created in 1988, Montage of Heck is composed of interviews with family and friends, animated recreations of moments in his life, unreleased live footage including behind the scenes footage from the acclaimed MTV Unplugged performance, and a steady parade of Cobain's diary clippings, notes, drawings, and song lyrics. To director Bret Morgen's credit, we get to see all sides of Cobain's personality, the beautiful and the ugly, the truly inspired and the merely profane, and as a father both loving and ambivalent. We get to understand exactly why he turned to heroin, but like any story involving the narcotic, it is never portrayed as glamorous in the least, especially when we see how idiotic and downright filthy Cobain and Love are under its influence. (I can't even imagine the smell that must have permeated that home.)


For me, I am still mad that I got cheated out of more new Cobain music after In Utero, which I still feel is one of the best albums ever released, and which showed dramatic progression from what Nirvana put out on its first two already excellent discs. Cobain's Beatle-esque sense of melody was ever-growing, and it actively disgusted me at first that we were not going to ever know what lay ahead musically. Sure, Cobain may have crashed and burned eventually in some other way. Maybe he would have become a shell of his former self, like an updated version of Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett. Or he could have cleaned up his life, found inner peace, and his muse may have departed at the same time.

Back to reality: he is gone from this world all the same. The question is, do I want to accept he is gone forever and then use films like Montage of Heck as tribute and testament to a lost artist of great promise and talent? Or do I want to, twenty years after his passing, remain enraged to the point of boiling over because of an assumed cover-up of murder or at least rather loose investigation into a mysterious death? At the risk of upsetting all the drama-thrivers in the world (goddamnit, they are legion these days), I think that I will choose the more peaceful path...

Zappa Still Alive in "Roxy the Movie"

Roxy the Movie (2015)
Dir.: Frank Zappa
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Except for my brother Otis, I often feel quite alone in my regard for Frank Zappa, especially in 2015. Some of my friends have Zappa in their collections, but nobody that I am aware of listens to him on a regular basis like I do. And except for when I am with my brother, I have no one else in my life with whom to discuss Zappa and his work.

While I was aware of Zappa when I was a bit younger (I remember being fascinated by him when he hosted one of the more notorious episodes of Saturday Night Live), I did not own one of his albums until 1980. After hearing the song Dancing Fool on Dr. Demento's show, I purchased my first copy of Sheik Yerbouti on double LP (with that iconic cover photo of Frank in Arab garb), and I never looked back. Within a year, I owned seven more of his albums. I kept buying even more albums, anything that I could find in our local record stores. I followed every move Zappa made in the press, including his political misadventures, and it just made me feel even more connected to this music from what truly had to be another universe, though he was (tragically) human as anyone else, just prodigiously, ridiculously more talented and outspoken. At a garage sale in the mid-'80s, I picked up the very first Mothers of Invention LP, Freak Out, and after that, it was just a not so simple matter of filling in the gaps, owing to how crazily prolific he was, both in his lifetime and posthumously. Tupac has nothing on Frank.

It is now some thirty years later, and I have nearly every Zappa album -- official and otherwise -- around ninety albums in some form or another, LP, disc, or digital. I have read numerous biographies on the man and even his own autobiography, books of analysis and criticism of Zappa's music output, and magazines devoted to his legacy. The Zappa Wiki Jawaka is a regular online destination for research for me, and I also regularly listen to The Zappa Podcast, released sporadically throughout the year, which is the true apotheosis of Zappa nerdom. Zappa, like Lincoln, is never far from my mind.

And like many Zappa fanatics, it is the hope of discovering missing artifacts and long dormant music that spurs us through the years. For some, one of these artifacts being dangled on the end of a forty year old stick is Roxy the Movie, a concert documentary built from a quartet of performances in L.A.'s Roxy Theatre in December of 1973. The shows featuring the music of one of Zappa's justly renowned and finest ensembles were available on a double LP called Roxy and Elsewhere in 1974, along with selected tracks in the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series. (And even more from two of the shows on a 2014 release called Roxy by Proxy.) But what had happened to the movie that was being filmed during that set of shows?

Sound problems, man. Really, synchronization problems. Something got messed up, the timing on the sound in relation to the image went out of whack, and it took forty years (with shifting focus on Zappa's part until his death in 1993) to figure the mess out and release a finished film out of it. Editor John Albarian was brought in to sort through the wreckage. As he puts it in the liner notes, " Four shows multiplied by four cameras multiplied by 80 minutes equates to about 21 hours of picture and sound that needed to be sunk together but couldn't due to their difference in speed." It took him over eight weeks to figure out what needed to be done to get the film and sound to play together nicely. Then he had to cut the film together.

And what we have is what we didn't have before. Criticism is fairly useless, because you can't go back and have Frank do it all over again. We were missing this, and now we get to see it in all of its ragged glory. If you are not already a convert to the cult of Zappa, I am not sure if maybe Baby Snakes is the better entry point film-wise, but Roxy the Movie does show off one incredible band on some of Zappa's most complex (and therefore, difficult to play) pieces.

The Band:

• Napoleon Murphy Brock (flute, tenor saxophone, vocals)
• George Duke (keyboards, synthesizer, vocals)
• Bruce Fowler (trombone)
• Tom Fowler (bass guitar)
• Ralph Humphrey (drums)
• Chester Thompson (drums)
• Ruth Underwood (percussion)
• Frank Zappa (lead guitar, percussion, vocals)

Zappa, after discussing sound problems with the audience (certainly presciently), launches into a discussion of marital aids that leads into Penguin in Bondage. Next is the percussion-heavy T'Mershi Duween, followed by a medley jamming together The Dog Breath Variations and a section of Uncle Meat. Excellent renditions of RDNZL and Inca Roads give the entire band a workout before leading into one of my favorite numbers from the film, Echidna's Arf (of You), with its manic start-and-stop rhythms. 

Most impressive for me in the film was getting to see Ruth Underwood attempt some insanely intricate vibraphone, marimba, and xylophone parts in several songs. This is especially true in the next number, Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?, where Frank even calls attention to her at one point when it is her turn to shine (though she has already been going crazy on percussion the entire time). She is clearly very caught up in the concert and has a definite rapport with Zappa onstage. 

Next up is Cheepnis, a number clearly close to Zappa's monster-movie loving heart (and mine). He introduces the number with a lengthy discussion of the Roger Corman film, It Conquered the World (that I just watched again right before Halloween), including a description of its absolutely silly monster. As Frank describes it, "The monster looks sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone with teeth around the bottom. It looks like a... like a teepee or... sort of a rounded off pup-tent affair, and, uh, it's got fangs on the base of it. I don't know why but it's a very threatening sight. And then he's got a frown and, you know, ugly mouth and everything..." Napoleon Brock Murphy's lead vocals tell us the tale, but the middle section with the squeaky vocals describing the giant poodle attack (my favorite part of the song) is completely missing from this version, though the full song does appear on Roxy and Elsewhere. [Note: The poster art (and blu-ray cover art) for Roxy the Movie is itself a takeoff on the original poster for It Conquered the World.]

The show closes with a quite lengthy (17 minutes) version of Be-Bop Tango (Of the Old Jazzmen's Church). Zappa stresses that he wants to make sure they get this take right, and tells the audience, "This is a hard one to play," and then adds with a smile (even though he does play guitar during it), "That's why I don't play it." Clearly meant to stretch the limits of his orchestra, the entire band is up to the task, but in this number, it was the twin drum playing of Thompson and Humphrey that stood out for most for me, as well as jazz giant George Duke on keyboards. The song itself devolves into a weirdo dance contest with members of the audience (and one ringer stripper, who is really not that good) trying to keep up with whatever wild cacophony the band can play. It's truly stupid but also fun in its way, even if it goes on too long. Still, as a record of a Zappa concert in 1973, it is pretty accurate, even if there is an element of "you just had to be there" to get it.

If there is a criticism on the film from me, it is one how Zappa's guitar playing is not showcased as well as I thought it would be. He is rather jammed into a corner of the stage, and oftentimes the camera appears behind his guitar so we don't really get to see him play from that position. He looks cool, sure, but if you are trying to study the man and his style, he is often not afforded the most opportune of angles. Still, Zappa himself is his charismatic best onstage in Roxy the Movie, and fully in control of both the band and his audience in that neo-game show host voice that he perfected.

Extras on the disc include three additional song selections, totally around 20 more minutes, not included in the film. One song has another dance segment, this time involving groupie supreme, Miss Pamela Miller (one day Mrs. Des Barres), who is given the highly misogynistic task of sexually titillating the band members (even taking a crack at Ms. Underwood) to distract them from their playing. One could be taken aback at this behavior in 2015, but again it falls into the category of accepted behavior for 1973 (and well afterward) and comes off less dirty and more innocent silliness than it would seem. And besides, in a time capsule aspect, it is easy to see what was so appealing about Miss Pamela. She was a lovely girl.

And now I have another addition to my extensive Zappa catalogue, not just by having Roxy the Movie, but also because the Blu-ray comes with a second disc with the soundtrack to the film. Will the onslaught of Zappa releases ever end? I certainly hope not, and I am fairly certain that his recorded legacy will not only outlast the impending 25th anniversary of his death in 2018, but also probably my own demise. Hopefully someone will invent a way, besides identity theft, for me to purchase new Zappa albums when I am dead and buried. Just pipe the music into my coffin...