A Funny Meme Happened on the Way to the Blogorium...

 Okay, so when I mentioned a handful of directors that didn't make the cut in Thursday's post about the director meme? Where I also mentioned that someone would be providing me with more directors? Yeah, funny how that worked out...

 I believe that I mentioned Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman didn't make the initial run, along with a host of others I gave to other people. For reasons known only to me, I decided to pass on John Huston, David Lynch, Ridley Scott, and Terrence Malick. Silly Cap'n... The results came in for my next challenge, and here's the text verbatim:

Alright here we go. Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, Ridley Scott, John Huston, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roman Polanski, Jacques Tati. Some are personal favorites, some...not so much. All pique my interest, however.

Well, looks like I'm doing them anyway, so here comes the part where I admit that some of them I left out because there aren't really any movies I "hate" by several of these directors, which makes this tricky. But oh well, let's give it a shot anyway...

 Ingmar Bergman
 A Movie I Like: Hour of the Wolf.
 A Movie I Love: The Virgin Spring.
 A Movie I Hate: I guess The Magic Flute? I don't really love or like it... The Serpent's Egg isn't one of my favorites, either.

 Terrence Malick
 A Movie I Like: The New World.
 A Movie I Love: Days of Heaven.
 A Movie I Hate: See, here's the problem. I guess maybe it was assumed I'd put The Thin Red Line or The New World here, but I don't hate either of them. In fact, I really like both of them. And I love Badlands almost as much as Days of Heaven. I haven't seen The Tree of Life yet so I can't really say anything in that regard, and that's it. That's all there is.


  Ridley Scott
 I'm giving myself the caveat that I'm not allowed to use Alien, Blade Runner, or Thelma & Louise.
 A Movie I Like: The Duellists, or Matchstick Men.
 A Movie I Love: Believe it or not, I love the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven.
 A Movie I Hate: Hannibal. Yeah, Legend would be an easy choice, but it's at least an interesting failure. Hannibal is just terrible, and I didn't see Robin Hood or A Good Year.

  John Huston
 A Movie I Like: The African Queen, or Wise Blood. You know what? Wise Blood.
 A Movie I Love: The Man Who Would Be King.
 A Movie I Hate: This is a cop out, especially since I don't really love The Asphalt Jungle, but since Huston directed parts of Casino Royale, and since I HATE Casino Royale, there's your winner.

 Jean-Luc Godard
 A Movie I Like: Pierrot le Fou.
 A Movie I Love: Vivre Sa Vie.
 A Movie I Hate: I don't really enjoy Made in U.S.A., if only because I am a fan of the Richard Stark "Parker" novels and their adaptations (Point Blank, The Outfit, Payback), and since this one is kinda based on The Jugger but is also making fun of it, I'm not such a huge fan.

 David Lynch
 A Movie I Like: The Elephant Man. Or Lost Highway.
 A Movie I Love: Wild at Heart.
 A Movie I Hate: The easy answer would be Dune, I guess, which is kind of a mess, but in all honesty I have a hard time sitting through all of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me when I put it on. It's not a bad movie, but thoroughly unpleasant, unseemly in a way that makes Blue Velvet seem family friendly.


 Charlie Kaufman
 He only directed one movie, so this is kinda tricky. If we're expanding it to films he wrote, then that's a different story, but not by much.
 A Movie I Like: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
 A Movie I Love: Synechdoce, New York.
 A Movie I Hate: I don't hate any of them, by either measure (writer or director). If we're just going "weakest link," then it's Human Nature by process of elimination. Nothing personal, Human Nature; I like you all right.


 Bernardo Bertolucci
 A Movie I Like: 1900. Or The Dreamers.
 A Movie I Love: The Last Emperor.
 A Movie I Hate: Is Little Buddha too obvious? Because if it is, I'm not really a Last Tango in Paris fan either.

 Roman Polanski 
 Like Ridley Scott, I am purposefully removing the best known, i.e. Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Repulsion, and The Tenant.
 A Movie I Like: I am alone on this island, but The Fearless Vampire Killers.
 A Movie I Love: Knife in the Water, since I left out all of my other favorites.
 A Movie I Hate: I have more "meh's" than "hate's" here - I'm not a huge fan of Frantic, Pirates, or Bitter Moon. I have a love / hate relationship with The Ninth Gate, because it's such a great movie as it builds and builds and then just kind of peters out. There's not so much an ending as an "okay, we're done here; movie's over," which ruins the film every time I watch it.

 Jacques Tati
 A Movie I Like: Trafic.
 A Movie I Love: Play Time.
 A Movie I Hate: Again, I don't really hate any of the Monsieur Hulot films, which is the bulk of Tati's filmography. I guess of them, Mon Oncle is my least favorite, but that shouldn't reflect poorly on the film. It's like asking me which Buster Keaton film I like the least.

 Okay, so Monday we'll get back to reviews. I did see a movie about some super powered kids that wasn't "second class," per se, but could have been better than everybody seems to think it is. Not that I didn't like it, but I mean it wasn't all that, even with a cameo from the star of Baz Luhrmann's Australia (aw, who am I kidding, nobody saw that movie. I mean Australian Broadway's Oklahoma!). But I don't know if I'm going to review that yet. Nah, I don't feel like piling on the "January Jones is a terrible actress" critiques just yet. That can wait for some other time. Hrm... that means I have to find something else to review.... damn.

Unrelated (as much as possible)

I've been racking my brains trying to find something to write about other than the bizarre trifecta of celebrity deaths - Ingrid Pitt, Leslie Nielsen, and Irvin Kershner - because I just don't have enough anecdotes beyond repeating "The Empire Strikes Back was the first movie I saw" or "The Naked Gun was a movie we watched during the first sleep over birthday party I remember" or "Ah, Ingrid Pitt. Where Eagles Dare and The Wicker Man, and oh yeah, Doctor Who*." That's really what I've got.

Other being enthused at the combination of James Franco and Anne Hathaway (who are consistently excellent hosts on Saturday Night Live) hosting the Academy Awards, I don't have much to add to that. Awards Season has been more of a Neil thing over the last few years, and I often find myself missing out on the shameless Oscar bait high profile end of year films. Yes, it's true: I'm more focused on Tron Legacy and True Grit than... well, that should give you some idea of how out of it I am. I'll be lucky to catch Get Low before the Oscar ceremonies, and I really want to see Get Low.

While toying around with ways to approach the forthcoming "Retro Reviews" column - which replaces "From the Vaults" in January - I found myself torn between reviewing films from my perspective now, or when I first saw them. During high school and early years in college, I saw perhaps more films than any other period save for 2007-2010. Many of the films I watched then I've never seen since (Lost in Space, Godzilla, The In Crowd), but some, like The Fifth Element, were revisited, and when I think about what I thought of Luc Besson's film the first time I saw it compared to the second, a review from that first experience might be as entertaining as a critical synopsis from today.

If I can make time in the next few weeks, I really hope to have reviews up for Harry Brown, I'm Still Here, the complete Metropolis, The Magician, Head, and possibly a revisiting of The Expendables outside of the sphere of that other movie opening the same day. And yes, I might look into Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. That being said, I'm torn between Metropolis, I'm Still Here, and Harry Brown, which are sitting on the table with Ratatouille, Grindhouse, 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, The Wizard of Oz, and Best Worst Movie.

That being said, I have a sudden, pressing urge to watch The Wicker Man, Forbidden Planet, and The Empire Strikes Back...




* The Warriors of the Deep, if you were wondering.

Short Attention Span Blogging

Before we start, I have a public service announcement for Major Tom:

The Estate of Ingmar Bergman is up for sale.

Verily, it can be yours, sir, if the price is right.

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If I could keep from passing out between finishing class and writing these here blogs, I would review Observe and Report, the new joint from Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way, Eastbound and Down). I understand it to be a remake of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which makes it like the fastest turnaround from original to remake I can think of, but feel free to correct the Cap'n on that. I'm pretty sure I heard that somewhere. Or made it up. Same difference.

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This weekend, your choices are a) see Teenage Mother here with the Cap'n, or b) See Fame with nobody else at your local multiplex. You have no other options, so if you aren't here tomorrow night, I'm just going to assume you wanted to see the remake of a movie you didn't want to see on home video for almost thirty years.

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Speaking of "see on home video", if you can think of any more VHS horror movies that want to join Terrorvision at Horror Fest, just drop the Cap'n a line.

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Finally, I'm not going to say anything about Stan Helsing. The trailer speaks loudly for itself, and what it says isn't very promising:

True to my word...

I was not kidding. Here are (at least) 100 movies I expected to see remastered in High Definition before Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions*.

note: this is not a "better than" or "movies that should be", it merely reflects movies I expected to see announced for Blu Ray or showing in High Definition somewhere before they got around to Lord of Illusions.


Touch of Evil
Fantasia
Citizen Kane
The African Queen
Dracula
Vertigo
Seven Samurai
Frankenstein
Psycho
The Bride of Frankenstein
The Ten Commandments
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Metropolis
La Strada
Rashomon
The Virgin Spring
The Empire Strikes Back
High Noon
Taxi Driver
Point Blank
O Brother Where Art Thou
Sullivan's Travels
The Gold Rush
Duck Soup
The City of Lost Children
The Virgin Spring
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Lolita
The Thing from Another World
Apocalypse Now
On the Waterfront
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Sunset Boulevard
Alice in Wonderland
Eraserhead
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Lawrence of Arabia
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
Soylent Green
Back to the Future
Ed Wood
Bringing Up Baby
Trainspotting
Jaws
Dead Man
A Hard Days Night
The Trial
Network
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Pulp Fiction
Blue Velvet
Insomnia
Toy Story
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Star Wars
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Some Like It Hot
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Tron
Rear Window
The Apartment
Spartacus
Modern Times
The Incredibles
A Fistful of Dollars
The Sound of Music
Escape from New York
The Maltese Falcon
Annie Hall
Ben-Hur
La Dolce Vita
Yojimbo
THX 1138
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Mary Poppins
Paths of Glory
M
Days of Heaven
Jules and Jim
The Night of the Hunter
Night of the Living Dead
Amelie
The Man Who Wasn't There
City Lights
8 1/2
Ran
Double Indemnity
Nosferatu
Schindler's List
Leon: The Professional
To Kill a Mockingbird
All About Eve
Singin' in the Rain
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Scarface
The Hustler
In Bruges
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Philadelphia Story
The Conversation

and for good measure, three I wasn't really expecting but would have surprised me less than Lord of Illusions:

The Toxic Avenger
Freaks
Plan 9 from Outer Space


* Nothing personal, Lord of Illusions.

So.... did you ever wonder how it is the Cap'n finds such random movies when he's reviewing? How on earth I make the jump from Phantasm II to Surveillance, or even Tyson (review coming soon-ish)?

Well, I usually do one of two things when I hear about a movie that sounds interesting: I bookmark it and file it under the "Stuff to Buy/Rent" subfolder, or I add it to my Netflix queue in order to find it much later when I've forgotten such a film existed.

To demonstrate:

the "Stuff to Buy/Rent" page, which is normally reserved for things I'd like to have with little reservations.

Most other films end up in the Netflix queue, and to give you some idea how random it can get because of that, I'm including some screencaps. As with any picture in the blogorium, click on it for a larger, more legible version.

Okay, I'll admit it's a bit random. I've got Del Tenney's Curse of the Living Corpse (and some other movie) alongside Jacque Tati's Playtime, Slaughter High, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle occupies the same space as Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. But come on now, I have Outlander (the Vikings vs Aliens movie) Alien Tresspass (a Lost Skeleton of Cadavra-like film from last year), and Doctor Who at home right now. It's just how the Cap'n operates.

I really like this segment, because it really jumps haphazardly between high and low art. I challenge you to find me someone else who has Preston Sturges between Return of the Living Dead 3 and April Fool's Day. Or American Movie and The Bad and the Beautiful side by side.

And here I exercise my indie / art house tendencies, only to switch it up at the very end with I Drink Your Blood. Classy.

I have no particular comment here. Just thought it was a pretty odd mix of movies.

Schlock, followed by some class. It's a cinematic blender when you leave the queue-ing to me.

Kagemusha. Kickboxer. Hot Rod. Need I say more?

So yeah... maybe that helps you understand my scatterbrained approach to what I watch and when. Throw in the considerable amount of disc and tape-age here art the ATDB, and it's hard to say where I'm going next. Hopefully you now understand that it's not only horror I dig into; that's just the easiest to write about quickly.

Greatest Stage Name Ever?

No... not Kim Cattrall... the other guy. Dack "Ma-Fuckin" Rambo, that's who!

A name so stupendously rockin' that it distracted me from filing for the rest of the night. The best part is that based on the placement of the names to images, I'm really not sure if that wooden-devil-dude is supposed to be Mr. Rambo or a placeholder in order to prevent your socks from being knocked off!

The movie, as best as the spotty copy on the back indicated, is about an exorcist who goes head to head with a rival exorcist and his gang of Satan-worshippers in an epic battle of, well, good against evil. Netflix and IMDB and pretty much everywhere else tell it differently, but who am I to doubt a bargain bin dvd cover and the one-two punch of Kim Cattrall and Dack "Mah-Fuckin" Rambo? Surely this movie must kick ten kinds of ass.

In all seriousness, I did some poking around online and discovered his real name is Norman and that he did a lot of tv work (of which Good Against Evil qualifies as), and Dallas fans are already laughing at me for not knowing the guy who played "Jack Ewing" on a long running show I've never seen. Whatever. I can appreciate the name without the backstory. Better still, if refuse to look up images of Dack Rambo, I can pretend that he looks like Devil Dude on the dvd cover. Clearly Mr. Rambo is summoned at some point in the film to lay the smack down on some dueling exorcists.


The power of Dack compels you!!!

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In other news, the Cap'n now possesses his very own copy of Theremin! For those of you who don't watch science fiction films of the 1950s, somehow forgot everything about Ed Wood, or just aren't hip to the lingo, the theremin is the worlds "first electronic musical instrument"* and is played by "non-contact", involving the motion of your hand through an electric field... or something. Look, the theremin is the jam, gang, so watch this video:



See? Wouldn't you want that all the time? Of course you would, shut your mouths, the theremin is incredible! At any rate, I haven't seen a copy of it since Adam and I gave one to Cranpire, so it's super swank to have my own.

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I don't know anything about Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor, but the blurbs on the front and back make it impossible not to check out. To wit:

"Strange... funny.... brilliant... twisted."

"The most ingenious film comedy since Being John Malkovich."

"Short Cuts meets Night of the Living Dead."

and, my favorite:

"The film is like an Ingmar Bergman movie as realized by Monty Python."


So yeah, there's that too. My head hurts.

* according to the back of the dvd. I'm sure Major Tom can confirm or deny this.

Maybe we both changed...

"Movies, like any other works of art - or presumptive art - don't change. DVD "director's cuts" aside (and there are, I think, legitimate debates to be had about them), most movies are destined to live their lives in the form in which they were first released. But the people who watch movies do change. They grow up - or at least older - and their perceptions of a particular movie change. Movies we loved as young people sometimes seem less lovable when we revisit them years later. The opposite is also true; sometimes we need more experience to appreciate fully the subtlety of movies we saw for the first time in the distant past."

- Martin Scorsese, from the foreword to Scorsese by Roger Ebert

I brought this quote to the blogorium for two reasons:

1) It addresses directly the question of "are movies malleable?", at least from Martin Scorsese's perspective. For Scorsese, the answer is no; George Lucas (among others) believe that films are "never finished, they merely escape".

2) The second point, which I circle around periodically when writing: that just as important as the idea of a film "changing" is the way our relationship to a film changes with time.

There are movies that I will admit I did not "get" the first time I saw them. I liked Touch of Evil when I saw it in high school, but I did not "get" it, even in its truncated VHS version, I did not appreciate Evil or many of Welles' other films until I was older. I enjoyed Blade Runner when I saw it for the first time, but I didn't understand it. It took me years to fully appreciate what Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch did in the opening of Apocalypse Now. Taxi Driver - to bring in Scorsese - was something I thought was cool when I was 17, but it meant so much more when I was 28.

What interesting is that the two movies I mentioned first were films that did "change", one to a restoration that approximated a director's vision and another that went through a few passes before seeing a "Final" version. Admittedly, the first time I "got" Blade Runner was during the era of the so-called "Director's Cut"*, and the "Final Version" released two years ago was further proof of what I saw the second (or third) time through.

I think this can represent a hybrid opinion of the possibility that films can "change" and the certainty with which our opinion about movies can (and will) change with time. Not knowing Scorsese's exact position on "Director's Cuts", I will not engage that part of the quote directly. On the other hand, we can turn this notion of a changing position on the viewer's part back towards our earlier discussions.

Perhaps the attachment to the ratty, ragged prints of films has something to do with the way I (or many of us) first encountered them. I can't speak for the rest of you, but I never saw Eraserhead on the big screen. Or Night of the Living Dead, or the long rumoured "extended" cut of 2001 that Kubrick gutted after a preview screening. Most of these and other films I love were introduced on home video, particularly VHS. In those I came to understand film in a "square" format; movies were "panned-and-scanned" to fit the 4X3 screen, and for a long time I had no idea that movies should look any different. Even going to see them in theatres, I never made the connection about aspect ratios.

Laserdiscs changed the way I understood movies. It was with the laserdisc (and the player we rented from Video Bar) that I learned what "letterboxed" meant, and that films were shot in a rectangular manner. For the first time, I could see the whole picture in movies like Aliens and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a small shift that came to mean much more as I engrossed myself in cinema.

(I realize this is primarily related to the idea of film in a technical sense. For personal anecdotes about specific films, I will include older entries and update section with links soon)

Another key shift happened with Laserdiscs: I discovered that I could not like a film presented in a "director's cut". After spending four or five years with the theatrical cut of Aliens, the experience of watching Cameron's "preferred" cut was at first intriguing but ultimately underwhelming. I felt that the longer version over-explained plot points, rendering parts of the movie redundant or robbing them of their impact. For example, not knowing what the colony looks like before the Marines arrive increases the suspense for audiences. If, on the other hand, we get a full "ride through" of the colony and meet Newt's family, we know where the Marines are geographically and any sense of discovery is nullified.

That wasn't the last time my opinion on a movie would change, but it's the first one I remember clearly. The "Special Editions" of the Star Wars trilogy had similar effects, positively and negatively. To this day I wrestle with how I feel about some of the changes to the film and whether they reflect the films themselves or how I've changed over time.

Someday I will do more than just "appreciate" Wild Strawberries. I imagine as I get older, the film is going to resonate in different ways, just as something as seemingly trivial as Dazed and Confused grew more endearing. Dazed moved from what I wanted high school to be like to a film that reminds me of the ways that time of my life echoed parts of the movie, just not in the nostalgic way you'd expect. The boredom, the sense of "something more" that permeates the film resonates with me more than the hijinks or the potheads throwing a party. As I got older, a film like Dazed and Confused captures a period in my life where I was very much like those characters, in a way that Ghost World continues to echo my early twenties.

Maybe films don't change. Perhaps we do. I think there's room to say that a movie is slightly more flexible than Scorsese claims, but I understand his point. If movies are focal points around which fans of cinema can orient themselves, then it might be more important to look at how we change in relation to films than how they "change" to entice us or surprise us.

At any rate, this topic is far from put to rest. Feel free to chime in with your own anecdotes.




* I say that because the 1992 Director's Cut represents Warner Brothers staff working with Ridley Scott's notes to recut Blade Runner. Scott was off filming Thelma and Louise during much of the process, which took place between 1990 and 1991.