Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Lady Detective Holiday - WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT
While the Patient Slept (1935) - It's a dark and stormy night in the mansion and the family vultures are gathering to watch the old man die. Everybody is half hysterical by nature, everybody has got some kind of angle, and they all have their claws into each other. There is something to do with a missing twin brother and a green figurine of an elephant. Nurse Sarah Keate, played by Aline MacMahon, has been called in to supervise the coma. Aline MacMahon and her eyebrows. Her archingly elevated eyebrows. She is a fine figure of a woman, but those eyebrows are her best feature. Just look at them.
When the most hated relative is gunned down in the middle of the night on the main stairway, it's time to call in the law, in the form of blustering Detective Lance O'Leary (Guy Kibbee) and his ridiculous sidekick (Allen Jenkins).
From then on it's a lot of nocturnal rambling, shouted questions, the whole mob gathered in the living room, lightning flashing, a mysterious silhouette, a groping hand. Look out, Nurse Sarah, look out for that groping hand!
This is the first of five movies based on the Nurse Sarah Keate novels of Mignon G. Eberhart. It is based on the second of those novels and the first of them wasn't made into a movie until later. The weird thing is that as soon as Keate and O'Leary meet, they act like they have worked on many a crime before, and the sidekick blurts out, "Every time there's a murder SHE pops up," which makes you think, what the hell, did I miss some other Nurse Sarah Keate movie that came before this? But no you did not. It's a ploy. Five different movies made by two different studios, played by four different actresses and given three different names, that is the score for the literary Nurse Keate. You can look it up if you want to know the whole deal. This one is a well-produced B movie, good as these things go. Naturally she is the one who finds the most clues and gets into the most peril from the mysterious figure with the groping hand, but you have to ignore the usual number of inexplicable instances of people covering for each other and not telling what they know and saying something happened when it didn't or didn't happen when it did, and finding out the butler has a criminal record but what does that have to do with anything. Don't they always have a criminal record just to throw things off? It's a mild way to fill the bill - did they put these before the main feature so you would have to sit through them, or after so you could bail out? I don't know.
Monday, December 24, 2012
Lady Detective Holiday - ADVENTURES OF KITTY O'DAY
Adventures of Kitty O'Day (1944) stars the mildly attractive, yet strangely forgettable, Jean Parker as the hotel switchboard operator who reads detective magazines and listens in on people's calls, so she naturally overhears a murder. She is not so much a detective as a nosy meddler, and this is not so much a mystery as it is a farce of the vanishing corpse variety. The story is so unimportant to the film that it is left to a brief unintelligible explanatory monologue at the end, but nobody in it or watching it gives a damn who did what to who and why. Directed by world champion hack William Beaudine, this is a formulaic stand-in for a detective story, just as the characters are formulaic stand-ins for real people. They are types - the nosy meddler, her frustrated boyfriend, the vamp, the overdressed older woman, the angry police detective and his absurd sidekick. The types are played by actors who fit the role and who can get the job done as quickly as possible. I knew when I saw Parker that I had seen her before a bunch of times but couldn't remember where or when. I am still having trouble remembering her name. Here she is with ever-present Byron Foulger, doing his bit as desk clerk.
Parker had a career of over 30 years with numerous starring roles, almost entirely in B movies. She was in a few notable films, such as Little Women (1933) and Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces (1939), but mostly appeared in anything that needed someone to be The Girl opposite a handsome action man; adequately entertaining minor productions like No Hands on the Clock (1941) and Wrecking Crew (1942) with Chester Morris and Alaska Highway (1943) with Richard Arlen.
The only contact this movie has with the outside world is a couple of references to the "manpower shortage," which pops up a lot in movies from this period of the war. Even its brief "outdoor" scenes consist of one tiny set with two park benches and some shrubbery. A cultural note of minor interest is one of the few film appearances of Shelton Brooks, seen here as Jeff the Custodian along with what's his name who did something or other in the movie. Brooks was an old time minstrel and vaudevillean, who composed the standard Dark Town Strutters' Ball, and Sophie Tucker's signature tune Some of These Days.
I think I have made it pretty clear that there is not much to this - the second half devolves into a lot of chasing around and everyone eventually goes down the laundry chute, but in the part that relies on dialogue between a few people standing in an unnatural arc roughly facing the camera, it has some laughs. It is mostly inoffensive, and that is sometimes enough.
The only contact this movie has with the outside world is a couple of references to the "manpower shortage," which pops up a lot in movies from this period of the war. Even its brief "outdoor" scenes consist of one tiny set with two park benches and some shrubbery. A cultural note of minor interest is one of the few film appearances of Shelton Brooks, seen here as Jeff the Custodian along with what's his name who did something or other in the movie. Brooks was an old time minstrel and vaudevillean, who composed the standard Dark Town Strutters' Ball, and Sophie Tucker's signature tune Some of These Days.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Lady Detective Holiday - MURDER ON A HONEYMOON
Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) is the third and last of Edna May Oliver's appearances as spinster detective Hildegarde Withers and it couldn't be more different from the feeble effort which followed it. Capably directed by Lloyd Corrigan (a unique instance of a director who dropped the megaphone and went into screenwriting and an extended career as a character actor) and co-written by Robert Benchley so you know at least there are going to be some good lines in it, it looks like they tried. All pretense at the schoolteacher setting is dropped as Hildegarde is on vacation in California. On a short seaplane hop to Catalina Island, in itself a great way to start a picture, the most irritating passenger sickens and dies. It appears that he was a witness against the mob, and that it was murder, and that Inspector Oscar Piper must hop out from New York to take charge of the investigation. That business out of the way, we may settle down to a fairly pleasant entertainment that keeps one's interest and even has a few mild surprises before it satisfactorily ends.
While the story is adequate it is the sharp dialogue and interaction of Oliver and Gleason that provides the interest here. The RKO studio had a good thing going with these two and it was only because she signed with MGM, probably for more money and less work in classier pictures, that this series didn't peter out at the usual pace for such things. Since I have just viewed the dismal production which followed this, comparisons are inevitable, but the main thing is that in Murder on a Bridle Path it seems like they didn't even bother to try. Here they spent some money on it, with much of the action filmed on location on Catalina Island. Oliver maintains the frumpy sardonic schoolmarm nature of the character as compared to the aging socialite portrayed by Helen Broderick. You can imagine having cocktails in Broderick's apartment but with Oliver a handshake at the door and sincere thanks for a pleasant evening will suffice.
A secondary character in the plot is played by Lola Lane who has a lot of charisma, which makes up to some degree for her lack of subtlety as an actress. It seems as if there were more to her part than appears now, as it's a bit disjointed and meaningless - it never really contributes anything of value to the story. I enjoyed her in Port of Lost Dreams (1934), Death from a Distance (1935) and the serial Burn 'em up Barnes (1935). I bring her up because here is something that maybe you didn't know. In 1938 she appeared as the girl reporter Torchy Blane (usually played by Glenda Farrell) in Torchy Blane in Panama, inspiring the name and character of girl reporter Lois Lane in Superman comics the following year. So that is where that came from.
It's not the greatest thing you have ever seen by any means, but it is well made, doesn't put you to sleep, and gets a little bit exciting before it ends, and that's all anyone can reasonably expect from this sort of thing. You come away from it saying that wasn't bad at all. Except maybe for the fact that Willie Best was still being billed as Sleep 'n' Eat. That's bad.
It's not the greatest thing you have ever seen by any means, but it is well made, doesn't put you to sleep, and gets a little bit exciting before it ends, and that's all anyone can reasonably expect from this sort of thing. You come away from it saying that wasn't bad at all. Except maybe for the fact that Willie Best was still being billed as Sleep 'n' Eat. That's bad.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
A Lady Detective Holiday: MURDER ON A BRIDLE PATH
Lady Detectives seem to be standard fare in these enlightened times, but they were few and amateur back in olden days. Single girls or spinsters, schoolmarms or nurses, they found themselves fortuitously on the scene of a murder presided over by their old acquaintance, the blustering boob of a cop. Spotting with their female eye for detail the vital clue, they consistently save the ass of their grudgingly grateful foil and step back into obscurity when the flashbulbs start popping, as a lady ought to do.
Murder on a Bridle Path (1936) is the middle "gem" in the diadem of films featuring Stuart Palmer's accidental sleuth Miss Hildegarde Withers. Played here by acerbic Helen Broderick, it bodes ill from the start with two directors named in the credits. With a ten day cheapie like this, that probably means somebody quit or got bumped to another project and the other guy finished up. Neither of them, and they shall be nameless here, had much to show for themselves as directors and they spent most of their time as assistant directors and editors. It shows. I have seen the first two Withers movies in which she is well-represented by the immaculately spinsterish Edna May Oliver, and while they are never more than standard fare, the chemistry between Oliver and her foil, Police Inspector Oscar Piper played by irascible James Gleason, provides most of the viewing value. Here, not so much.
When an unpleasant young socialite is struck down in Central Park, clearly an accident, up pops Hildegarde to complicate matters by pointing out the evidence that is right in front of them all. Then a bunch of stuff happens and they go places and talk to people, Willie Best does his chagrin-inducing schtick, Dewey Robinson pops in with his giant eyebrows for one scene, and suddenly you find out who did it and it is over. I don't often say this, but this movie stinks. I like Helen Broderick, but all she does is pop off shots at Gleason and pick up scraps of paper that turn out to be valuable clues. Most of these cheapies try to build mystery by having everybody talk about everything, but in this one nobody talks about anything and it is all suddenly pulled out of a hat and the killer suddenly goes through a railing at the top of the stairwell and you're done. I lured the wife into watching this and she nodded off after ten minutes, finally bailing out one minute before the killer was revealed and she didn't even care who it was. I didn't even care who it was.
Broderick meanders through her undemanding role without contributing much to it, although in the right circumstances she can be a real asset to a film. Not here. After this tiresome thing, Withers was played in two more movies by ZaSu Pitts who I fear may be even less appropriate for the role than Broderick. The character vanished from the screen, to appear once more in a 1970s TV movie played by Eve Arden whose years as Our Miss Brooks must have prepared her adequately for the spinster schoolmarm duties. All I know right now is that of the three I have seen, this one is the worst. If it ever comes on TV, get some cleaning done instead.
Murder on a Bridle Path (1936) is the middle "gem" in the diadem of films featuring Stuart Palmer's accidental sleuth Miss Hildegarde Withers. Played here by acerbic Helen Broderick, it bodes ill from the start with two directors named in the credits. With a ten day cheapie like this, that probably means somebody quit or got bumped to another project and the other guy finished up. Neither of them, and they shall be nameless here, had much to show for themselves as directors and they spent most of their time as assistant directors and editors. It shows. I have seen the first two Withers movies in which she is well-represented by the immaculately spinsterish Edna May Oliver, and while they are never more than standard fare, the chemistry between Oliver and her foil, Police Inspector Oscar Piper played by irascible James Gleason, provides most of the viewing value. Here, not so much.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
WORKS OF ETGAR KERET
One day I found upon the comics shelves of the otherwise pretty lousy Holgate Branch Library, a short walk from my home, a volume called How To Love, containing works by the Actus comics collective. Seriously, the Holgate Branch Library is the lousiest library I have ever encountered. It used to be pretty okay for a little neighborhood branch library but it seemed that once every few years they would undertake an assessment which concluded that they should reduce the number of actual books, and see that the ones they kept were mostly thin illustrated books with shiny covers with the word dummy or idiot in the title. If you just want to browse it is worse than useless - it is insulting. A real tragedy considering how great almost every other library in the city is.
I was pleased by the quality of the works in How To Love, and surprised to find that there were people in Israel who just want to live normal daily lives. I was ashamed to be surprised. For you see, Actus is an Israeli comics collective. Realizing one's ignorance is the first step toward removing it and I had soon read the few other available volumes of Israeli cartoonists - two by Rutu Modan (Jamilti and Exit Wounds) whose clear-line style and nostalgic/surreal stories are fascinating, and Jetlag, a collection of works drawn by various artists, based on the stories of Etgar Keret. I had never heard of Keret but instantly saw in him something I had never seen before and didn't even know what it was.
Keret's books are not the kind you want to read right through. They would be good to have around where you could pick one up and spend a few minutes reading a story and go about your day digesting them. His stories are very very short and each one is unique. Each one is strange in a new way, a boiled down Twilight Zone compressed into two or three pages and inserted into the real world. However unimaginable the situations and events, they seem Normal with a capital N.
Keret has also had his works transformed into movies, with varying results. The most mainstream of them is Wristcutters, A Love Story (2006), based on a single story of the crummy half-assed afterlife to which suicides are doomed. Meduzot [Jellyfish] (2007) is written and directed by Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, and is made up of a group of stories which intersect but don't overlap. An inept and alienated young woman finds some of life's meaning in a beautiful child who appears from the sea, a Filipina works as companion to a harsh elderly woman who doesn't seem to appreciate her daughter's life as a stage actress, and a young couple are having a rather unhappy honeymoon when they encounter a mysterious writer staying in the same hotel. $9.99 (2008) is an Australian/Israeli stop motion animated film comprising a group of Keret's stories which, as in Meduzot, intersect without overlapping. It suffers, in my opinion, from that type of physical ugliness unique to stop motion animated characters, and bears a touch of that unsettling Australian psychology which makes me apprehensive every time I have to decide whether or not to watch an Aussie movie. There is a beggar who commits suicide and returns with wings - still the same mooching bum but with wings. There is a woman who wants her men to be smooth and clean - really smooth and clean. There is a young man who looks to a mail order book for his answers to life's problems and the book costs $9.99. Of the three, Meduzot is the one that best conveys the spirit of Keret's work and I recommend it. It has another value which I think is very important, in showing life in Israel without religion and politics. It is not a commentary on anything other than living as a human being.
If you have a few moments to spare, and would like to try out an Etgar Keret story there are a few you can read on his website here. You can also learn about some of his other activities, like the four foot wide house.
So why was I surprised to learn that there were regular people in Israel? Try not to freak out when I tell you this. That place has got more baggage than any other country on earth. You never hear anything but politics, religion, conflict from that place. Sometimes I want to smack that country and say just be Human first, then be religious or nationalist or whatever you want to be, because all that stuff isn't as fascinating to me as it seems to be to you. We all brush our teeth the same way. Keret doesn't write Israeli stories, or Jewish stories, political or religious stories. He writes stories that can fit into any brain without having to be an example of something or teach a lesson about something, and they make you see things a little bit differently.
I was pleased by the quality of the works in How To Love, and surprised to find that there were people in Israel who just want to live normal daily lives. I was ashamed to be surprised. For you see, Actus is an Israeli comics collective. Realizing one's ignorance is the first step toward removing it and I had soon read the few other available volumes of Israeli cartoonists - two by Rutu Modan (Jamilti and Exit Wounds) whose clear-line style and nostalgic/surreal stories are fascinating, and Jetlag, a collection of works drawn by various artists, based on the stories of Etgar Keret. I had never heard of Keret but instantly saw in him something I had never seen before and didn't even know what it was.
Keret's books are not the kind you want to read right through. They would be good to have around where you could pick one up and spend a few minutes reading a story and go about your day digesting them. His stories are very very short and each one is unique. Each one is strange in a new way, a boiled down Twilight Zone compressed into two or three pages and inserted into the real world. However unimaginable the situations and events, they seem Normal with a capital N.
Keret has also had his works transformed into movies, with varying results. The most mainstream of them is Wristcutters, A Love Story (2006), based on a single story of the crummy half-assed afterlife to which suicides are doomed. Meduzot [Jellyfish] (2007) is written and directed by Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, and is made up of a group of stories which intersect but don't overlap. An inept and alienated young woman finds some of life's meaning in a beautiful child who appears from the sea, a Filipina works as companion to a harsh elderly woman who doesn't seem to appreciate her daughter's life as a stage actress, and a young couple are having a rather unhappy honeymoon when they encounter a mysterious writer staying in the same hotel. $9.99 (2008) is an Australian/Israeli stop motion animated film comprising a group of Keret's stories which, as in Meduzot, intersect without overlapping. It suffers, in my opinion, from that type of physical ugliness unique to stop motion animated characters, and bears a touch of that unsettling Australian psychology which makes me apprehensive every time I have to decide whether or not to watch an Aussie movie. There is a beggar who commits suicide and returns with wings - still the same mooching bum but with wings. There is a woman who wants her men to be smooth and clean - really smooth and clean. There is a young man who looks to a mail order book for his answers to life's problems and the book costs $9.99. Of the three, Meduzot is the one that best conveys the spirit of Keret's work and I recommend it. It has another value which I think is very important, in showing life in Israel without religion and politics. It is not a commentary on anything other than living as a human being.
If you have a few moments to spare, and would like to try out an Etgar Keret story there are a few you can read on his website here. You can also learn about some of his other activities, like the four foot wide house.
So why was I surprised to learn that there were regular people in Israel? Try not to freak out when I tell you this. That place has got more baggage than any other country on earth. You never hear anything but politics, religion, conflict from that place. Sometimes I want to smack that country and say just be Human first, then be religious or nationalist or whatever you want to be, because all that stuff isn't as fascinating to me as it seems to be to you. We all brush our teeth the same way. Keret doesn't write Israeli stories, or Jewish stories, political or religious stories. He writes stories that can fit into any brain without having to be an example of something or teach a lesson about something, and they make you see things a little bit differently.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
ALINE BROSH MCKENNA AND THE FEMALE ACTION MOVIE
After I binged out on Mexican horror movies for Halloween I needed a break. Not a break from watching movies, that would be the smart thing to do. I needed to see something nice. A chick flick. After a couple of false starts I settled on Morning Glory (2010). I remembered that it got fairly good reviews when it came out, then promptly vanished forever. That's just what I needed, something fluffy that would drift away on a breath, that would show a glossy snapshot of a pleasant world. Morning Glory is about the Clumsy-cute Spunky Girl Who Won't Give Up. She finds herself thrust into place as director of the worst rated morning talk show on television and she has to get those ratings up or they will cancel the show. The only way to do it is with a plan that is so crazy it just might work - drag in a surly highly respected journalist and try to force him to banter. It's a Shirley Temple movie, with Harrison Ford as the old grump who must be won over by cute little Rachel McAdams' cheerful never-say-die attitude. But of course what it really takes is for her to finally snap and bitch him out for being a hateful old jerk. It was cute. It washed my brain clean.
When I looked it up I found that it was written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada (2006), which I kind of hated. One thing I didn't hate about it though was the writing. As I said, I eventually started to like it. That's what happened with Morning Glory - I never really hated it but I finally liked it for what it was. So I figured what the hell let's check out something else by Aline Brosh McKenna and see what happens.
I looked up 27 Dresses (2008) and it seemed like the sort of thing that was the least like anything I would ever want to experience, so I knew I ought to see it. The way I am different from a lot of people is instead of just learning about things I know I will like I try to learn about things I might not like, but I try to find something good in them. Some stuff I know about, like zombies. I saw Lucio Fulci movies in the '70s at drive ins and dollar movies so zombies are OLD OLD hat to me. You can keep your zombies. Unless they include Milla Jovovich all strapped up in black leather. But being a bridesmaid, that is something I don't know about. I have been to a couple of weddings and what an incredible waste. Weddings are anathema to me, so the idea of there being a person who is a wedding junkie, or women who dream all their lives about the perfect wedding, that is just INSANE. The titular dresses are a closet full of bridesmaid dresses, and this whole movie probably got kickstarted by the brief online Horrible Bridesmaid Dresses craze. The hero of the movie is the person who always does everything for everyone else and never for herself, a wedding junkie with a closet full of horrible dresses, one from each wedding she has been in. She is played by Katherine Heigl, who seems to be popular for her non-threatening everywoman appeal. She is hopelessly in love with her handsome boss and when her younger prettier sister comes along and snatches him up something has to snap. You could send this movie back to 1938 and put Claudette Colbert in it and it would work just the same - changing dresses in the back of a taxicab (driven by Allen Jenkins) as she rushes from one wedding to the next. It was after seeing this that I understood that these are Female Action Movies.
An action movie has a hero seeking a fabulous object in exotic locations with an inferior sidekick, facing obstacles and adversaries which become progressively more difficult until at last the good guy wins. Except in these movies it isn't vengeance or a million dollars in gold, it's the fulfillment of a lifelong dream or true love. There are no explosions except emotional ones, no leaping through windows shooting two machine pistols as a ball of flame explodes behind you, except with your heart. The sidekicks are not ever-present, sometimes they are quite intermittent but they are there, to act as a sounding board or to give advice - not cute and spunky like the hero but helpful and convenient. The adversaries are not evil, just unsympathetic, selfish, oblivious to the feelings of others, and they are not defeated, just brought around to the side of righteousness.
Armed with that knowledge I tried out I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), though not without some trepidation. I almost chickened out. Sarah Jessica Parker is the urban mother of two who does something important in investment banking that nobody understands which causes her to always be going somewhere and breaking promises to her daughter. Maybe she just waited to start a family but at some points Parker is looking a little haggard, and maybe too old for these cheerful chatter roles, but what else has she got going for her? She's going to have to be playing crazy grandmas someday. Through much of the movie I found myself exclaiming "I HATE THIS," and yet the overall effect was that I actually liked it. One very important adventure aspect of the Female Action Movie is public embarrassment. In each of these movies there are moments of supreme public embarrassment which, contrary to her expectations, the hero survives with few repercussions. Falling down, hitching up your underwear where everybody can see you, getting lice from your kid. It happens, it's over, nobody dies - like crossing that jungle rope bridge over the piranha river chased by cannibals, it seems like it is going to be terrible but then it is over and you cut the ropes and keep running.
I had some momentum going so it was either We Bought A Zoo (2011) or Laws of Attraction (2004). I don't know about the zoo thing, and kids and animals so I will pass on that one. Laws of Attraction stars Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan as two high-powered divorce lawyers who instantly hate each other so obviously they must fall into bed as soon as possible and eventually wake up from a drunken spree - married. This wasn't quite as specialized as a Female Action movie as McKenna's later work and it would be a good married date movie because naturally any divorce movie ultimately affirms marriage.
Finally I tried to finish it off with Three To Tango (1999) but McKenna was merely co-writer on it and frankly it stank so bad I happily quit after 15 minutes of heavy-handed yoks and gay jokes. So there you go. That was my foray into Aline Brosh McKenna territory and what I learned from it was that your sidekick will always be there for you when you do something stupid and humiliating. If you just keep trying and never give up you will finally find true love, have your dream wedding, and balance a happy home with a career in high finance. Sometimes you just have to snap, and smack somebody down, and think about yourself for once, and show them you are a human being too, but it will all work out okay in the end. That's how it is in the movies anyway.
When I looked it up I found that it was written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada (2006), which I kind of hated. One thing I didn't hate about it though was the writing. As I said, I eventually started to like it. That's what happened with Morning Glory - I never really hated it but I finally liked it for what it was. So I figured what the hell let's check out something else by Aline Brosh McKenna and see what happens.
I looked up 27 Dresses (2008) and it seemed like the sort of thing that was the least like anything I would ever want to experience, so I knew I ought to see it. The way I am different from a lot of people is instead of just learning about things I know I will like I try to learn about things I might not like, but I try to find something good in them. Some stuff I know about, like zombies. I saw Lucio Fulci movies in the '70s at drive ins and dollar movies so zombies are OLD OLD hat to me. You can keep your zombies. Unless they include Milla Jovovich all strapped up in black leather. But being a bridesmaid, that is something I don't know about. I have been to a couple of weddings and what an incredible waste. Weddings are anathema to me, so the idea of there being a person who is a wedding junkie, or women who dream all their lives about the perfect wedding, that is just INSANE. The titular dresses are a closet full of bridesmaid dresses, and this whole movie probably got kickstarted by the brief online Horrible Bridesmaid Dresses craze. The hero of the movie is the person who always does everything for everyone else and never for herself, a wedding junkie with a closet full of horrible dresses, one from each wedding she has been in. She is played by Katherine Heigl, who seems to be popular for her non-threatening everywoman appeal. She is hopelessly in love with her handsome boss and when her younger prettier sister comes along and snatches him up something has to snap. You could send this movie back to 1938 and put Claudette Colbert in it and it would work just the same - changing dresses in the back of a taxicab (driven by Allen Jenkins) as she rushes from one wedding to the next. It was after seeing this that I understood that these are Female Action Movies.
An action movie has a hero seeking a fabulous object in exotic locations with an inferior sidekick, facing obstacles and adversaries which become progressively more difficult until at last the good guy wins. Except in these movies it isn't vengeance or a million dollars in gold, it's the fulfillment of a lifelong dream or true love. There are no explosions except emotional ones, no leaping through windows shooting two machine pistols as a ball of flame explodes behind you, except with your heart. The sidekicks are not ever-present, sometimes they are quite intermittent but they are there, to act as a sounding board or to give advice - not cute and spunky like the hero but helpful and convenient. The adversaries are not evil, just unsympathetic, selfish, oblivious to the feelings of others, and they are not defeated, just brought around to the side of righteousness.
Armed with that knowledge I tried out I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), though not without some trepidation. I almost chickened out. Sarah Jessica Parker is the urban mother of two who does something important in investment banking that nobody understands which causes her to always be going somewhere and breaking promises to her daughter. Maybe she just waited to start a family but at some points Parker is looking a little haggard, and maybe too old for these cheerful chatter roles, but what else has she got going for her? She's going to have to be playing crazy grandmas someday. Through much of the movie I found myself exclaiming "I HATE THIS," and yet the overall effect was that I actually liked it. One very important adventure aspect of the Female Action Movie is public embarrassment. In each of these movies there are moments of supreme public embarrassment which, contrary to her expectations, the hero survives with few repercussions. Falling down, hitching up your underwear where everybody can see you, getting lice from your kid. It happens, it's over, nobody dies - like crossing that jungle rope bridge over the piranha river chased by cannibals, it seems like it is going to be terrible but then it is over and you cut the ropes and keep running.
I had some momentum going so it was either We Bought A Zoo (2011) or Laws of Attraction (2004). I don't know about the zoo thing, and kids and animals so I will pass on that one. Laws of Attraction stars Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan as two high-powered divorce lawyers who instantly hate each other so obviously they must fall into bed as soon as possible and eventually wake up from a drunken spree - married. This wasn't quite as specialized as a Female Action movie as McKenna's later work and it would be a good married date movie because naturally any divorce movie ultimately affirms marriage.
Finally I tried to finish it off with Three To Tango (1999) but McKenna was merely co-writer on it and frankly it stank so bad I happily quit after 15 minutes of heavy-handed yoks and gay jokes. So there you go. That was my foray into Aline Brosh McKenna territory and what I learned from it was that your sidekick will always be there for you when you do something stupid and humiliating. If you just keep trying and never give up you will finally find true love, have your dream wedding, and balance a happy home with a career in high finance. Sometimes you just have to snap, and smack somebody down, and think about yourself for once, and show them you are a human being too, but it will all work out okay in the end. That's how it is in the movies anyway.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
BOOKS, GO TO HELL!!!
I have kept quiet about this for a long time. When there first started to be ebooks lots of people had a lot to say about how wonderful "real" books are, how they look, how they smell, how they feel and how tragic it is that because there are now ebooks apparently all that will vanish forever. Which it actually won't. Well let me tell you I have read books. I have read far more books than the average literate person. I may not have read more than you, dear reader, because I am fortunate in knowing some pretty damn literate people, but I know for sure I have read books you have never even heard of. I know I can get on any city bus or walk into any supermarket and I have read more books than every person there combined will read in their entire lives. My sister and I spontaneously began reading at age 4, and starting at about 14 I read books every day for over 30 years. So I have had some experience with real books. I have had so much experience that I actually began to run out of resources. I had read everything I wanted to read that was readily available. I got to the point that I was sending off by interlibrary loan to a university library in Montana or West Virginia just to read Life In London by Pierce Egan, in which the character names Tom and Jerry originate; or Philip Dru, Administrator by Col. E. M. House (said to have been President Wilson's eminence grise) - a future fantasy in which the concepts of the League of Nations and the U.N. allegedly first saw the light; even an obscure novel by John Lymington, maybe the eighth version of the same story he wrote over and over again; all just because I needed to see those things for myself. Finally I ran out of steam and for the past three or four years I read fewer than half a dozen books a year.
Then I had some experience with ebooks. My sister-in-law sent me her old Palm pda, an already outdated piece of hardware that looks vaguely like a big clunky smartphone of some sort. I let it sit around for a while and didn't really do what I had wanted to do with it, put ebooks on it to read. Finally I started by loading a few things from Project Gutenberg onto it. It took over a year for me to really use it but in the past few months I have read more books than I did in the preceding year. Just obscure bits of popular culture, nineteenth century stories of Scientific Crime Detection or French Master Criminals that I had seen mentioned off and on for years. I got caught up on Sherlock Holmes. I read Sophocles and Aeschylus and a couple of their contemporaries I can't even remember the names of. I read a novel about a young go-getter who saved the mayor's daughter from runaway horses and became the youngest ever advance man for a traveling theatre company.
I have also seen a hell of a lot more movies than most people and one thing for certain is that when things finally start to seem okay, look out. The guy driving the dynamite truck looks over at his pal and says, "You know, this ain't such a bad job. I've just got this feeling that everything is going to work out fine." Then the tire hits a rock and over the cliff they go. Just when I was really enjoying ebooks and reading them every day, the machine died. Right in the middle of When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells, Oscar Micheaux's autobiography, and The Case of the 16 Beans by Harry Stephen Keeler.
I know what books look, smell and feel like, and from the very beginning of the ebook thing, reading those essays lyrically acclaiming the effect of inhaling the dust of oxidized cellulose and fondling grubby old bindings I thought, "Here we go again. The same thing they went through when card catalogs were replaced and when CDs started outselling vinyl." Sorry, but I have got no time for nostalgia because I have lived in the past and I am alive now and now is better.
We have got ten thousand books in this house, and that is not using ten thousand as just a big number, but literally and factually we really do have ten thousand books in this house, or more. We have books in every room of this house except the bathrooms and the breakfast nook - hundreds of them per room. I don't want to read any of them. The ones I have already read I don't want to read again and the ones I haven't read I never shall read. For some reason even though I don't have the slightest bit of use for them as books I am stuck as their guardian for the rest of my life just because somebody sometime might want to read them. When I got done with an ebook I deleted the file, not because I needed the space - I could have put hundreds of them on the little memory card the size of a two-cent stamp (that's another thing nobody wastes their time rhapsodizing over any more by the way) - but because I was done with them and wanted them gone.
Books. They come into the house every week, by the boxful. They sit on the "dining room" table in stacks eternally. They come up to my studio in stacks to be repaired and go back down to sit on the table some more. They go into my wife's office to be listed for sale, and they go down into the basement to wait until someone buys them, and they come back up again to be packaged and sit on the table until they are taken to the post office. More come in than go out, and half of the ones already here aren't even for sale and will stay here. I am chained to them for the rest of my life and I have already planned exactly how I would burn this place down, if I did, which I won't ever do. I promise.
I don't think any of the people who wrote maudlin essays about the tragic loss of the dear old library card catalog even remember they did that. I think right now they are browsing their local library online and putting stuff on hold to go pick up later this week. I don't think anybody wishes their mp3 player came with five thousand twelve-inch-square pieces of mold-splotched basementy smelling cardboard, or that they could enjoy taking their mp3 out of the cardboard sleeve and then out of the paper sleeve and then carefully wipe the surface of it with an mp3 cleaner and blow the fluff off the mp3 needle just to hear one song, and then do it again for the next song they want to hear. If you do, you are an idiot and get off my planet.
I have read books, and I have read ebooks. I have searched for books in card catalogs and waited for them to be brought up from the stacks, ordered them by interlibrary loan and waited two weeks for them to get to the library so I could go there and get them. I can get the same books online right now in five seconds, read them, and be rid of them. Did you notice I put links up there to a couple of them? I'm not sure the Egan book is the same one because he wrote a bunch of them, but still you can read them if you are as crazy as me which you are not but even if you did you would not have those books cluttering up your place for the rest of your life. You can't get everything you want as an ebook, but you can't always get it as a book either.
I have read books and I have read ebooks, and ebooks are better. BOOKS, GO TO HELL.
Then I had some experience with ebooks. My sister-in-law sent me her old Palm pda, an already outdated piece of hardware that looks vaguely like a big clunky smartphone of some sort. I let it sit around for a while and didn't really do what I had wanted to do with it, put ebooks on it to read. Finally I started by loading a few things from Project Gutenberg onto it. It took over a year for me to really use it but in the past few months I have read more books than I did in the preceding year. Just obscure bits of popular culture, nineteenth century stories of Scientific Crime Detection or French Master Criminals that I had seen mentioned off and on for years. I got caught up on Sherlock Holmes. I read Sophocles and Aeschylus and a couple of their contemporaries I can't even remember the names of. I read a novel about a young go-getter who saved the mayor's daughter from runaway horses and became the youngest ever advance man for a traveling theatre company.
I have also seen a hell of a lot more movies than most people and one thing for certain is that when things finally start to seem okay, look out. The guy driving the dynamite truck looks over at his pal and says, "You know, this ain't such a bad job. I've just got this feeling that everything is going to work out fine." Then the tire hits a rock and over the cliff they go. Just when I was really enjoying ebooks and reading them every day, the machine died. Right in the middle of When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells, Oscar Micheaux's autobiography, and The Case of the 16 Beans by Harry Stephen Keeler.
I know what books look, smell and feel like, and from the very beginning of the ebook thing, reading those essays lyrically acclaiming the effect of inhaling the dust of oxidized cellulose and fondling grubby old bindings I thought, "Here we go again. The same thing they went through when card catalogs were replaced and when CDs started outselling vinyl." Sorry, but I have got no time for nostalgia because I have lived in the past and I am alive now and now is better.
We have got ten thousand books in this house, and that is not using ten thousand as just a big number, but literally and factually we really do have ten thousand books in this house, or more. We have books in every room of this house except the bathrooms and the breakfast nook - hundreds of them per room. I don't want to read any of them. The ones I have already read I don't want to read again and the ones I haven't read I never shall read. For some reason even though I don't have the slightest bit of use for them as books I am stuck as their guardian for the rest of my life just because somebody sometime might want to read them. When I got done with an ebook I deleted the file, not because I needed the space - I could have put hundreds of them on the little memory card the size of a two-cent stamp (that's another thing nobody wastes their time rhapsodizing over any more by the way) - but because I was done with them and wanted them gone.
Books. They come into the house every week, by the boxful. They sit on the "dining room" table in stacks eternally. They come up to my studio in stacks to be repaired and go back down to sit on the table some more. They go into my wife's office to be listed for sale, and they go down into the basement to wait until someone buys them, and they come back up again to be packaged and sit on the table until they are taken to the post office. More come in than go out, and half of the ones already here aren't even for sale and will stay here. I am chained to them for the rest of my life and I have already planned exactly how I would burn this place down, if I did, which I won't ever do. I promise.
I don't think any of the people who wrote maudlin essays about the tragic loss of the dear old library card catalog even remember they did that. I think right now they are browsing their local library online and putting stuff on hold to go pick up later this week. I don't think anybody wishes their mp3 player came with five thousand twelve-inch-square pieces of mold-splotched basementy smelling cardboard, or that they could enjoy taking their mp3 out of the cardboard sleeve and then out of the paper sleeve and then carefully wipe the surface of it with an mp3 cleaner and blow the fluff off the mp3 needle just to hear one song, and then do it again for the next song they want to hear. If you do, you are an idiot and get off my planet.
I have read books, and I have read ebooks. I have searched for books in card catalogs and waited for them to be brought up from the stacks, ordered them by interlibrary loan and waited two weeks for them to get to the library so I could go there and get them. I can get the same books online right now in five seconds, read them, and be rid of them. Did you notice I put links up there to a couple of them? I'm not sure the Egan book is the same one because he wrote a bunch of them, but still you can read them if you are as crazy as me which you are not but even if you did you would not have those books cluttering up your place for the rest of your life. You can't get everything you want as an ebook, but you can't always get it as a book either.
I have read books and I have read ebooks, and ebooks are better. BOOKS, GO TO HELL.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 7
For the seventh day of this week of thrills and excitement we have two more fine films from the Churubusco-Azteca studios especially for the ladies:
Espiritismo (1962) is a domestic melodrama with a devilish twist. Mom and Dad are just celebrating their big anniversary and are extra happy because the mortgage on the house is finally paid off, and they feel they can ignore the dire warnings they got at that Ouija board party they went to the week before. Along comes junior who needs eight grand to start a crop dusting business and if they loved him they would mortgage the house again. Things don't seem to be working out after that and they are going to lose the house unless drastic actions are taken, so it seems like the natural thing to do is join a spiritualist cult and call upon the dark forces for aid. This takes the form of an emissary from the devil bringing Pandora's Box which, as you recall, contains a Crawling Hand that grants you your desires. Mom runs the show here, always puffing on a cig and ranting, and poor Dad can only tag along and watch the world fall apart. How it all turns out isn't too surprising. This is kind of slow and talky and is intended to appeal primarily to the housewife of those days, but it keeps a steady pace of mysterious events leading up to the inescapable conclusion that she shouldn'ta done that thing.
That's Pandora's box on the table between them but the cool thing is the shadow of the lamp on the wall behind her. I have this thing about seeing the shadow of something that should actually be emitting light. It's crazy, I know. I'm just nuts about lighting. Look how they hit that chair in the background to establish that the space goes all the way back there.
I found it interesting from a sociological standpoint; the attitudes expressed by the characters regarding their social standing and economic security, with The House being the big thing in their lives which keeping or losing meant their happiness and survival. Which may not be the way you want your horror movie to come across. This was a K. Gordon Murray release, dubbed in Florida by Floridians for the edification of the English speaking world, and it is the first time I have ever heard the narrator of a movie or anyone else use the word "quelch." Apparently the aim of this movie is to quelch our desire to get involved with Ouija boards and summoning the spirits of the dead. WELL IT DIDN'T WORK.
El maldicion de la Llorona (1963) a.k.a. Curse of the Crying Woman, is a real rip-snorter. You never know what is going to happen next. It's a multigenerational family curse story, the curse of an ancestor who made a deal with the devil to gain youth and power, with the catch being that to keep her youth and power she had to keep committing the most terrible crimes she could. This didn't go down well with the community. Most families don't keep the spear-transfixed skeleton of their most evil ancestor in the basement awaiting the day the youngest member of the clan turns 25 and pulls out the spear to bring her back to life, but this one does. And guess what. Home comes the young niece of the family who is exactly 24 and 364/365ths years old. All kinds of crazy stuff happens then. The aunt comes flying into the basement like a hideous skeleton and gets these empty eye sockets sometimes, and she's got no reflection and the niece loses her reflection the closer it gets to the fatal hour and the uncle they said was dead is actually a half human beast chained up in the bell tower but he GETS OUT when the club-footed scar-faced lackey goes up there to give him a GOOD BEATING, the dogs are let out to KILL POLICEMEN, and MIDNIGHT IS FAST APPROACHING. It's one nutty thing after another, and it all takes place in one night of terror.
You can see they light the hell out of everything and it all looks really great and spooky. They don't spare the horrors and rats and cobwebs and groping hands and sudden shocks. What's funny is that when they do the flashback explanation of the origin of the family curse they show it all in negative and a bunch of the scenes they use are a nonsensical jumble of shots from El mundo de los vampiros. I thought it was funny anyway. Oh yeah, the niece has a husband too but the great thing is he spends most of the movie in peril and really only gets useful when it comes to the climactic scenes when someone is needed to brawl with the club-footed scar-faced lackey. It's all about the ladies here and it's great. Rita Macedo as Aunt Selma is creepy as hell, always seeming weirdly elated over her evil power and not hesitating to do whatever she needs to do to achieve her wicked goals.
This concludes our week of holiday cheer and I wish you and yours all the joys of this wonderful Halloween season. Just be careful who wears the pants in the family, that's all.
Espiritismo (1962) is a domestic melodrama with a devilish twist. Mom and Dad are just celebrating their big anniversary and are extra happy because the mortgage on the house is finally paid off, and they feel they can ignore the dire warnings they got at that Ouija board party they went to the week before. Along comes junior who needs eight grand to start a crop dusting business and if they loved him they would mortgage the house again. Things don't seem to be working out after that and they are going to lose the house unless drastic actions are taken, so it seems like the natural thing to do is join a spiritualist cult and call upon the dark forces for aid. This takes the form of an emissary from the devil bringing Pandora's Box which, as you recall, contains a Crawling Hand that grants you your desires. Mom runs the show here, always puffing on a cig and ranting, and poor Dad can only tag along and watch the world fall apart. How it all turns out isn't too surprising. This is kind of slow and talky and is intended to appeal primarily to the housewife of those days, but it keeps a steady pace of mysterious events leading up to the inescapable conclusion that she shouldn'ta done that thing.
El maldicion de la Llorona (1963) a.k.a. Curse of the Crying Woman, is a real rip-snorter. You never know what is going to happen next. It's a multigenerational family curse story, the curse of an ancestor who made a deal with the devil to gain youth and power, with the catch being that to keep her youth and power she had to keep committing the most terrible crimes she could. This didn't go down well with the community. Most families don't keep the spear-transfixed skeleton of their most evil ancestor in the basement awaiting the day the youngest member of the clan turns 25 and pulls out the spear to bring her back to life, but this one does. And guess what. Home comes the young niece of the family who is exactly 24 and 364/365ths years old. All kinds of crazy stuff happens then. The aunt comes flying into the basement like a hideous skeleton and gets these empty eye sockets sometimes, and she's got no reflection and the niece loses her reflection the closer it gets to the fatal hour and the uncle they said was dead is actually a half human beast chained up in the bell tower but he GETS OUT when the club-footed scar-faced lackey goes up there to give him a GOOD BEATING, the dogs are let out to KILL POLICEMEN, and MIDNIGHT IS FAST APPROACHING. It's one nutty thing after another, and it all takes place in one night of terror.
This concludes our week of holiday cheer and I wish you and yours all the joys of this wonderful Halloween season. Just be careful who wears the pants in the family, that's all.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 6
Suffering sometimes brings rewards, and two nights of crap make a good night that much more pleasant.
El mundo de los vampiros (1961) was written by Alfredo Salazar, and directed by Alfonso Corona Blake who went on to bless the world with Santo Versus the Vampire Women and Santo in the Wax Museum. In the case of Sr. Blake I can assert that this movie right here was the greatest thing he ever did, probably. I have seen more vampire movies than I can count and I have never seen one quite like this. Filmed on the startlingly large and elaborate well-lit sets of Churubusco Azteca, it has a great look from the very first shot of a hand groping out of a slowly opening coffin. Multigenerational family curses seem to be a feature of Mexican horror stories, and this one is the three hundred year vengeance curse of Count Sergio Subotai, Vampire, against the descendants of the Colman family, and if he doesn't get his vengeance venged right now he will have to wait another hundred years. Another feature of these stories is hairy-handedness - when you get vampire bit the first sign of impending vampirism is you get hair on your hands. That is the universal sign of something going wrong in your life, when you get hair on your hands, because the next thing you know you are going to get claws and probably a big hairy pig nose and soon you will be running around in a cape and top hat going RAAAAAR! That doesn't happen in this though, I am just talking. You can forget about the plot and just watch the crazy things happening - the Bone Organ, the Pit of Impalement, the mob of stupid looking masked sub-vampires and spooky looking she-vamps, the fortuitous appearance of an expert on the psychological effects of music. And this:
El mundo de los vampiros (1961) was written by Alfredo Salazar, and directed by Alfonso Corona Blake who went on to bless the world with Santo Versus the Vampire Women and Santo in the Wax Museum. In the case of Sr. Blake I can assert that this movie right here was the greatest thing he ever did, probably. I have seen more vampire movies than I can count and I have never seen one quite like this. Filmed on the startlingly large and elaborate well-lit sets of Churubusco Azteca, it has a great look from the very first shot of a hand groping out of a slowly opening coffin. Multigenerational family curses seem to be a feature of Mexican horror stories, and this one is the three hundred year vengeance curse of Count Sergio Subotai, Vampire, against the descendants of the Colman family, and if he doesn't get his vengeance venged right now he will have to wait another hundred years. Another feature of these stories is hairy-handedness - when you get vampire bit the first sign of impending vampirism is you get hair on your hands. That is the universal sign of something going wrong in your life, when you get hair on your hands, because the next thing you know you are going to get claws and probably a big hairy pig nose and soon you will be running around in a cape and top hat going RAAAAAR! That doesn't happen in this though, I am just talking. You can forget about the plot and just watch the crazy things happening - the Bone Organ, the Pit of Impalement, the mob of stupid looking masked sub-vampires and spooky looking she-vamps, the fortuitous appearance of an expert on the psychological effects of music. And this:
I like to fell over when I saw this insanely wonderful human-headed bat. I have never seen that before ever. I have also never seen the main vampire suddenly in the middle of the big fight inexplicably grow big furry bat ears. To help him fight. Every minute of this movie is full of great stuff to see, even if it is just the imaginative way the big fancy set is lit - it's as gorgeously filmed as any great Hollywood b-movie of the 1940s. This is going on my list of all time favorite horror movies, second only to El espejo de la bruja (The Witch's Mirror). I have used up all my raving and will just fill this out with absolute proof of my assertions in the form of these images:
The lovely Erna Bauman, who went on to grace El vampiro sangriento
and La invasion de los vampiros with her solemn beauty.
Go and do likewise.
Monday, October 29, 2012
MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 5
Mexico - in the late '60s it was where old monsters went to die.
Fear Chamber (1969) was one of a batch of bargain basement movies Boris Karloff was lured south of the border to make for the sake of a paycheck - legend has it that paycheck was found uncashed among his effects after his death. I am sure the circumstances of the making of those films and their posthumous release has been well documented, if you care. I have seen one of the others, Snake People, and was surprised that this was not quite as dreadful as I had anticipated but still it is a disgrace in many ways. Karloff's character takes to a sick-bed part way through the movie and doesn't appear again until the very end to clean things up, but a good bit of his dialog throughout is delivered into a telephone while others carry on the action of the story - if you can call it a story. It seems he had discovered a type of subterreanean mineral intelligence by aiming some kind of atomic telescope at the earth's core, which fact is revealed near the end of the movie, in a dream sequence. That shows just how broken up and inept the plot, script and overall execution of this thing is. They don't seem to be able to shoot a scene in a way that you can tell what is happening, or in many cases so you can even tell what it is you are looking at. Perhaps they realized that the rock monster was so stupid looking they should not give it one clearly visible shot but instead shoot only blurry closeups of some lumpy thing twitching around with smoke and colored lights. Did I mention that to stay alive it needs a substance which is only formed in a human body in a state of terror? A female human body? That explains why they have to lure women into a spook house dungeon and torment them for a while before sucking out their blood for the monster rock. Luckily it grows an elephant trunk after a while which it can grab them with and suck their blood out, making the spook house and its associated henchmen unnecessary. I will give them one thing, the lab set looks pretty good.
See how hairy that hand is? It will soon be strangling. And see how crummy looking that set is? And see how lousy the print is? I had to tweak these images in a graphics program just to make them decipherable to you, which shows what a great guy I am. What you can't see here is the most horrible thing about the movie - the soundtrack. The opening credits are backed with a horrendous continuous random piano noodling and organ pounding and I thought, "My god, what am I going to have to endure?" The more exciting things were supposed to be the more random and horrific the background noise became. Worst of all were the laboratory scenes - even though there were no electronics of any kind the lab scenes were overlaid with a continuous wooping and bleeping noise meant to indicate apparatus I suppose. Four seconds worth. The same stupid and absolutely inappropriate noises repeating every four seconds the whole time anyone was in the laboratory.
I tell you, these two were pretty rough to make it through and I am going try to watch better things for the rest of this exercise because fun is fun but this ain't it.
Fear Chamber (1969) was one of a batch of bargain basement movies Boris Karloff was lured south of the border to make for the sake of a paycheck - legend has it that paycheck was found uncashed among his effects after his death. I am sure the circumstances of the making of those films and their posthumous release has been well documented, if you care. I have seen one of the others, Snake People, and was surprised that this was not quite as dreadful as I had anticipated but still it is a disgrace in many ways. Karloff's character takes to a sick-bed part way through the movie and doesn't appear again until the very end to clean things up, but a good bit of his dialog throughout is delivered into a telephone while others carry on the action of the story - if you can call it a story. It seems he had discovered a type of subterreanean mineral intelligence by aiming some kind of atomic telescope at the earth's core, which fact is revealed near the end of the movie, in a dream sequence. That shows just how broken up and inept the plot, script and overall execution of this thing is. They don't seem to be able to shoot a scene in a way that you can tell what is happening, or in many cases so you can even tell what it is you are looking at. Perhaps they realized that the rock monster was so stupid looking they should not give it one clearly visible shot but instead shoot only blurry closeups of some lumpy thing twitching around with smoke and colored lights. Did I mention that to stay alive it needs a substance which is only formed in a human body in a state of terror? A female human body? That explains why they have to lure women into a spook house dungeon and torment them for a while before sucking out their blood for the monster rock. Luckily it grows an elephant trunk after a while which it can grab them with and suck their blood out, making the spook house and its associated henchmen unnecessary. I will give them one thing, the lab set looks pretty good.
That blurry thing there is a representative shot of the monster. The print I acquired also included a scene of gratuitous nudity deleted from the general release, and believe me even a little gratuitous nudity can really pep up something this badly made.
Pacto diabolico (1969) is an unconvincing costume effort inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There isn't all that much you can do with that story. You know eventually there is going to be a hairy-handed strangler involved, no matter what else happens. John Carradine plays a former colleague of Jekyll who hopes to alter the transformation technique to create an elixir of youth and it does transform him into a younger Mexican actor, relieving him of some responsibility for how this turns out. The essential ingredient of this elixir is just what you would expect - the eyes cut out of women's heads. Their eyes. Once again the magic of transformation baffles me, as Carradine's facial hair disappears with his wrinkles and reappears when the serum wears off. At least it doesn't transform his clothes. I watched him very carefully, and it appears Carradine delivered his lines in Spanish, but apparently it wasn't good enough so he was dubbed. Maybe there is an English print, I don't really care, but he does have one deranged line that I would enjoy hearing in his own lushly stentorian tones. This movie is meant as a period piece of a vaguely nineteenth century nature, and filmed mostly on cheap little sets that look just like cheap little sets and nothing more. They are brightly lit from above whether people are carrying a candelabra around or not. Fortunately there was a brief moment of gratuitous nudity, enough to give me hope that there might be another, which gave me the strength to endure the chasing and brawling that results when a hairy handed strangler goes after a young woman with a fiancee. For some reason the primary young woman in the movie is the daughter of Dr. Jekyll. That made me hope it might end up being a Daughter of Dr. Jekyll thing and that she might transform too, but no.
I tell you, these two were pretty rough to make it through and I am going try to watch better things for the rest of this exercise because fun is fun but this ain't it.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 4
I figured I had better do some double features if I want to get all these things watched by Halloween so here we go with a Cowboys vs. Monsters double feature:
El charro de las Calaveras (1965) a.k.a. The Rider of the Skulls looks like it was meant as a pilot and two episodes of a kids' TV show, but judging by the online evidence of posters and lobby cards it was released as a movie. The Charro was orphaned when his parents were killed by bandits and he dedicated his life to Justice, remaining anonymous and masked because Justice is faceless. I'd like to point out though that recent history has shown that being masked or anonymous does not make you automatically Just. Sometimes it only makes you one of the monsters. Social commentary aside, in the first episode the Charro confronts a werewolf which has a transformation style I have never seen before - the guy falls in a faint and his fully clothed body fades into a naked skeleton, then back into a fully clothed werewolf. I have never understood the supernatural influence on attire and the way clothing tends to transform with the body. In defeating the lobo humano the Charro acquires a cowardly and foolish sidekick, and an orphan boy. In the second episode the Charro's costume undergoes significant changes, and the boy is replaced by a different boy but the cowardly foolish sidekick remains the same. They go on to encounter two more episodes, a vampire and a headless horseman, both of whom are among the lousiest looking monsters I have yet seen. I hate to stigmatize an entire people but in general Mexican movie monster makeup and masks are terrible.
I don't know if it is just the fading of the Eastmancolor print or they couldn't afford to light the sets or what, but even the courtyard of the rancho is wrapped in gloom at the triumphant finale with Crazy Coyote yawning on his horse:
El charro de las Calaveras (1965) a.k.a. The Rider of the Skulls looks like it was meant as a pilot and two episodes of a kids' TV show, but judging by the online evidence of posters and lobby cards it was released as a movie. The Charro was orphaned when his parents were killed by bandits and he dedicated his life to Justice, remaining anonymous and masked because Justice is faceless. I'd like to point out though that recent history has shown that being masked or anonymous does not make you automatically Just. Sometimes it only makes you one of the monsters. Social commentary aside, in the first episode the Charro confronts a werewolf which has a transformation style I have never seen before - the guy falls in a faint and his fully clothed body fades into a naked skeleton, then back into a fully clothed werewolf. I have never understood the supernatural influence on attire and the way clothing tends to transform with the body. In defeating the lobo humano the Charro acquires a cowardly and foolish sidekick, and an orphan boy. In the second episode the Charro's costume undergoes significant changes, and the boy is replaced by a different boy but the cowardly foolish sidekick remains the same. They go on to encounter two more episodes, a vampire and a headless horseman, both of whom are among the lousiest looking monsters I have yet seen. I hate to stigmatize an entire people but in general Mexican movie monster makeup and masks are terrible.
Charro Mk. 1 meets the Old Witch in the abandoned cemetery:
Skull and crossbone logos on arms and back, cloth face mask.
Crummy looking vampire.
Charro Mk 2 - logos on chest and plain skull on back, full head mask
Idiotic looking headless horseman head in box.
The monsters are intentionally not very scary because this is standard kids' show stuff - chase around, fight the monster, happy ending. What interested me was the rural settings and decaying brick farm architecture of the locations where all the chasing and brawling was filmed. Scholars of the Cinema should note that it was directed by El maestro de los Monstruos, Alfredo Salazar, who as writer created the most outrageous monsters of the Mexican cinema. Name a famous Mexican monster or masked wrestler movie and chances are, Salazar wrote it. As director, maybe not so good.
El grito de la muerte (1959) was renamed The Living Coffin for its U.S. release, but there are more screams of death than there are living coffins in it. There are strange doings on the old rancho, with a murderous Crying Ghost weeping over the deaths of her children in the quicksand swamp and clawing up the faces of her victims, and it has something to do with a fortune in gold. Luckily along comes Gaston Santos, Cowboy Detective, and his stupid lazy sidekick Crazy Coyote - the same sidekick known as Squirrel Eyes in Swamp of the Lost Monsters, but wearing a coonskin cap this time. The dancing horse doesn't do any dancing in this one but it does pull Gaston out of the quicksand and show him where the secret panel is that the ghost comes out of. Swamp of the Lost Monsters was mostly filmed in rural locations, but except when Gaston is riding around the countryside or falling in the quicksand this is filmed in the gloomy arched sets of Churubusco Azteca. In fact the street scene set looks like a rusticated and expanded version of the one in The Monstrous Doctor Crime:
When Gaston Santos takes a hand in things you know there aren't really any monsters, just criminals in monster suits, and everything will turn out okay after a lot of chasing around and brawling. So, nothing really exciting here but I got these out of the way at least.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 3
I have mostly recovered from my physical suffering, leaving me only my usual mental suffering to cope with, so it is appropriate that I should enjoy a movie about lunatics on a rampage.
THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1973) is an hallucinogenic-expressionist rendition of Poe's story The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, which explores the simple premise of lunatics taking over the asylum. Though made in Mexico it more closely resembles many European gothics which begin with a coach rumbling through misty woods toward an eerie castle. In this case the castle is acknowledged from the beginning to be a lunatic asylum, instead of you having to figure out along the way that everybody is nuts. There is not much to Poe's story besides the situation. His writings never seemed fully comprehensible to me, being more mood than meaning and more poetry than plot, and this film does a good job of carrying that through. At that point in history when this was made, the civilized world had been on drugs for years, wallowing in sexual and social libertinism, and it was just at that time that many filmmakers got the idea they could do any damn thing they wanted. Movies like The Holy Mountain, Sweet Movie, and O Lucky Man! not only got made but watched, and there was a market for exercises in excess. This particular mansion of madness was created in some remarkable scenes of industrial decay and creates an effective mood of derangement suitable to its origin in Poe's brief but intense story of lunacy liberated.
Addendum: Scholars of the Cinema will find it worth noting that the director, J.L. Moctezuma, was producer of Jodorowsky's Fando and Lis and El Topo.
Thanks also to reader Lou Minatto for noticing that Artistic Supervision was credited to noted Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. That explains a lot about how this movie looks.
THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1973) is an hallucinogenic-expressionist rendition of Poe's story The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, which explores the simple premise of lunatics taking over the asylum. Though made in Mexico it more closely resembles many European gothics which begin with a coach rumbling through misty woods toward an eerie castle. In this case the castle is acknowledged from the beginning to be a lunatic asylum, instead of you having to figure out along the way that everybody is nuts. There is not much to Poe's story besides the situation. His writings never seemed fully comprehensible to me, being more mood than meaning and more poetry than plot, and this film does a good job of carrying that through. At that point in history when this was made, the civilized world had been on drugs for years, wallowing in sexual and social libertinism, and it was just at that time that many filmmakers got the idea they could do any damn thing they wanted. Movies like The Holy Mountain, Sweet Movie, and O Lucky Man! not only got made but watched, and there was a market for exercises in excess. This particular mansion of madness was created in some remarkable scenes of industrial decay and creates an effective mood of derangement suitable to its origin in Poe's brief but intense story of lunacy liberated.
Even if you don't have any drugs to take this is still a freaked out headtrip, but it maintains an attitude of culture and sophistication throughout, never seeming to indulge for the sake of mere shock value. The film appears to have High Art intentions and was made early enough in that period of accelerating decadence that it can be judged as a success in that regard.
Addendum: Scholars of the Cinema will find it worth noting that the director, J.L. Moctezuma, was producer of Jodorowsky's Fando and Lis and El Topo.
Thanks also to reader Lou Minatto for noticing that Artistic Supervision was credited to noted Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. That explains a lot about how this movie looks.
Friday, October 26, 2012
MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 2
My reward for surviving the Attack of the Deadly Migraine Pill seems to be a perpetual low grade headache but in spite of that and other inevitable miseries of life here is more of the distracting triviality of Mexican Halloween 2012.
Swamp of the Lost Monsters (1957) a.k.a. El pantano de las ánimas, is one of the films brought to the U.S. by producer K. Gordon Murray and dubbed for the matinee market. When a body vanishes from its coffin after being boated through the Haunted Swamp and a murderous fish-man begins dragging hapless campesinos to a watery doom, it's time to call in Gaston Santos, Cowboy Detective on his dancing horse, and his voluble comedic sidekick Squirrel Eyes. There are mysterious doings on the old rancho, with plotters scheming via secret telegraphy, and it has something to do with a million dollars in life insurance. There really isn't much movie in this movie, with lots of riding around, miscellaneous brawling, and some irrelevant fiesta footage filling it out. It's aimless, meaningless, not in the least compelling and the only thing worth seeing unless you love the sight of a guy making a horse prance backward is the crazy fish man suit. Though the waters of the haunted swamp are uniformly cocoa colored from above, once you are under water they are as crystal clear as a studio tank, as you can see,
The one unique experience this film provides is the opportunity to see a man in a fish man costume operating a telegraph key. I actually took a couple of breaks to go watch baseball with my wife - that is how unthrilling Swamp of the Lost Monsters is. It creates an eerie mood for about two minutes and from then on it's just stuff happening but not interesting stuff, just stuff. So pray for me, that this headache will go away in a week or so.
Swamp of the Lost Monsters (1957) a.k.a. El pantano de las ánimas, is one of the films brought to the U.S. by producer K. Gordon Murray and dubbed for the matinee market. When a body vanishes from its coffin after being boated through the Haunted Swamp and a murderous fish-man begins dragging hapless campesinos to a watery doom, it's time to call in Gaston Santos, Cowboy Detective on his dancing horse, and his voluble comedic sidekick Squirrel Eyes. There are mysterious doings on the old rancho, with plotters scheming via secret telegraphy, and it has something to do with a million dollars in life insurance. There really isn't much movie in this movie, with lots of riding around, miscellaneous brawling, and some irrelevant fiesta footage filling it out. It's aimless, meaningless, not in the least compelling and the only thing worth seeing unless you love the sight of a guy making a horse prance backward is the crazy fish man suit. Though the waters of the haunted swamp are uniformly cocoa colored from above, once you are under water they are as crystal clear as a studio tank, as you can see,
Thursday, October 25, 2012
MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART ONE
Having determined to regale my small but sporadic readership with my experiences in enjoying a week of thrills from South of the Border, I promptly disabled myself in the middle of the first movie with a medical error. I took a migraine pill the wrong way at the wrong time and put myself down for about five hours after the damnedest physical reaction I have ever had. However I pulled through and here I am to do my duty.
Il mostruoso dottor Crimen (1952) a.k.a The Revived Monster, is said to be Mexico's first Mad Doctor movie. [Addendum: the correct Spanish title is El monstruo resuscitado - I was watching an Italian print of the film with dual Italian/Spanish audio and English subtitles.] A jaded journalist answers an enigmatic advertisement which leads her into the bizarre domain of a masked doctor in his gloomy mansion between the cemetery and the sea. His hideous countenance and social rejection drove him to become a renowned plastic surgeon and amateur sculptor of waxen beauties, but naturally his inner conflicts and isolation from humanity have deranged him.
She
becomes the first person ever to show him kindness or encouragement,
inducing him to unmask, but when he learns that her true motivation is
to get a great story he contrives a convoluted revenge. This involves
the inexplicable revivification of a handsome corpse by somehow
transferring into it the life force of the beast-man he keeps caged in
the basement, the resulting revenant being operated by the remote power
of his insane mind. This is really a gothic melodrama with plenty of
appeal for the ladies - a strong independent female falling into a
relationship with a pitiable but creative soul who ultimately becomes
too crazy to endure. How many times has that happened to you? It
happens here every day.
This was filmed at the Churubusco Azteca studios, the RKO of Mexico, on a couple of very nice elaborate interior sets and some strange little exterior ones the size of a garage with a rear projection screen at the end showing the sea or the city. It is a realm of endless night and one thing I love about these Mexican horror movies is their dark beauty. The scenes are often staged with a truly artistic eye for lighting and the striking forms of arches and silhouettes, as these images reveal:
Despite its thrifty and slightly primitive origin it achieves a powerful mood and its melodramatic and sentimental nature becomes quite affecting. Its formulas and cliches are not of the Mad Doctor variety, but more of the Doomed Romance style of older horror films, the pathetic situation of a gifted man who is too ugly and crazy to live, and an endangered woman whose error was in showing kindness to someone too poorly socialized to understand it.
YES, it's the hideous story of my OWN TERRIBLE LIFE!!!!
Il mostruoso dottor Crimen (1952) a.k.a The Revived Monster, is said to be Mexico's first Mad Doctor movie. [Addendum: the correct Spanish title is El monstruo resuscitado - I was watching an Italian print of the film with dual Italian/Spanish audio and English subtitles.] A jaded journalist answers an enigmatic advertisement which leads her into the bizarre domain of a masked doctor in his gloomy mansion between the cemetery and the sea. His hideous countenance and social rejection drove him to become a renowned plastic surgeon and amateur sculptor of waxen beauties, but naturally his inner conflicts and isolation from humanity have deranged him.
This was filmed at the Churubusco Azteca studios, the RKO of Mexico, on a couple of very nice elaborate interior sets and some strange little exterior ones the size of a garage with a rear projection screen at the end showing the sea or the city. It is a realm of endless night and one thing I love about these Mexican horror movies is their dark beauty. The scenes are often staged with a truly artistic eye for lighting and the striking forms of arches and silhouettes, as these images reveal:
YES, it's the hideous story of my OWN TERRIBLE LIFE!!!!
Friday, October 19, 2012
IT DIDN'T START IN NIGERIA
IN demonstration of the fact that the email scams of today are of long ignoble lineage, and that the wiseass response thereto is of nearly equal age, I present this excerpt from
P. H. WOODWARD
Adventures in the Secret Service of the Post-Office Department
Entitled:
AN OLD GAME REVIVED
On the 18th of September, 1875, a fellow was arrested in West Virginia who sent the victims whom he proposed to bleed letters whereof the following is a copy:--
"A lady who boarded with me died on last Saturday of apoplexy. She left a trunk containing the following property: One very fine ladies' gold watch and chain, one ladies' gold necklace, six ladies' finger rings, earrings, and a great deal of ladies' clothing. Among other things was a letter addressed to you. I suppose you to be a relative of the deceased, and want to send you the trunk. When Miss Thompson died she left a board bill unpaid amounting to $20.50. You will please send this amount by return mail, and the trunk will be forwarded to you immediately."
Instead of remitting the money as modestly requested, the recipient of one of these choice douceurs, a lady residing in the interior of Pennsylvania, sent the letter to the mayor of the town where it was dated and postmarked, who in turn handed it over to special agent T. P. Shallcross; and he in the course of a day or two succeeded in capturing the miscreant.
This particular form of the confidence game is very old; yet in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-five a swindler by means of it succeeds not only in maintaining himself in dashing style, but also in sporting a flashy traveling companion of the female persuasion!
Where the letters are addressed to men, the articles reported to be found in the imaginary trunk are changed to correspond to masculine habits and wants. The operators receive many singular and some entertaining replies. The following, dated long ago from a small town at the South, may serve as a sample, the orthography of the original being preserved:--
"COL. SNOWDEN,
"Dear Sir,--Yours received, and you say John is dead. Poor fellow! I always expected it. Death runs in the family. Dyed suddenly of appleplexy--eat too many apples. Well, I always thought John would hurt himself eating apples. I s'pose you had him buried. You said nothing about funeral expenses. He had a trunk--gold watch in it, &c. Well, well, what an unexpected legacy! but strange things happen sometimes. Never thought I should get a gold watch so. And he had the watch in his trunk, did he? Poor fellow! was always so particular 'bout his watch and fixings. Had two revolvers. What is them? I never heard John say anything about them. Well, you have been so kind as to write to me; just keep all the balance of the things, you can have them; but the gold watch, send that to me by express. Send immediately if not sooner."
"Very truly,
"GEO. STREAM.
"P. S. My mother in law says, if you come this way, call. She likes to know all such good, kind folks."
It is safe to conclude that "Col. Snowden" never accepted the invitation to call from the hospitable mother-in-law.
P. H. WOODWARD
Adventures in the Secret Service of the Post-Office Department
Entitled:
AN OLD GAME REVIVED
On the 18th of September, 1875, a fellow was arrested in West Virginia who sent the victims whom he proposed to bleed letters whereof the following is a copy:--
"A lady who boarded with me died on last Saturday of apoplexy. She left a trunk containing the following property: One very fine ladies' gold watch and chain, one ladies' gold necklace, six ladies' finger rings, earrings, and a great deal of ladies' clothing. Among other things was a letter addressed to you. I suppose you to be a relative of the deceased, and want to send you the trunk. When Miss Thompson died she left a board bill unpaid amounting to $20.50. You will please send this amount by return mail, and the trunk will be forwarded to you immediately."
Instead of remitting the money as modestly requested, the recipient of one of these choice douceurs, a lady residing in the interior of Pennsylvania, sent the letter to the mayor of the town where it was dated and postmarked, who in turn handed it over to special agent T. P. Shallcross; and he in the course of a day or two succeeded in capturing the miscreant.
This particular form of the confidence game is very old; yet in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-five a swindler by means of it succeeds not only in maintaining himself in dashing style, but also in sporting a flashy traveling companion of the female persuasion!
Where the letters are addressed to men, the articles reported to be found in the imaginary trunk are changed to correspond to masculine habits and wants. The operators receive many singular and some entertaining replies. The following, dated long ago from a small town at the South, may serve as a sample, the orthography of the original being preserved:--
"COL. SNOWDEN,
"Dear Sir,--Yours received, and you say John is dead. Poor fellow! I always expected it. Death runs in the family. Dyed suddenly of appleplexy--eat too many apples. Well, I always thought John would hurt himself eating apples. I s'pose you had him buried. You said nothing about funeral expenses. He had a trunk--gold watch in it, &c. Well, well, what an unexpected legacy! but strange things happen sometimes. Never thought I should get a gold watch so. And he had the watch in his trunk, did he? Poor fellow! was always so particular 'bout his watch and fixings. Had two revolvers. What is them? I never heard John say anything about them. Well, you have been so kind as to write to me; just keep all the balance of the things, you can have them; but the gold watch, send that to me by express. Send immediately if not sooner."
"Very truly,
"GEO. STREAM.
"P. S. My mother in law says, if you come this way, call. She likes to know all such good, kind folks."
It is safe to conclude that "Col. Snowden" never accepted the invitation to call from the hospitable mother-in-law.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
The Two Mona Lisas
This morning I spent some time looking at the website of The Mona Lisa Foundation,
proponents of the "Earlier Mona Lisa" theory. I have never thought much
of the Mona Lisa as a painting, but there are features to this thing
that I found interesting enough to think a little about and to have an
uneducated opinion about. Here are the two Mona Lisas:
These are just details of the face - there is a lot more to each picture that bears looking into. The assertion of The Mona Lisa Foundation is that the picture on the left was painted by Leonardo eleven years earlier than the picture on the right, and that he painted both pictures. They seem to have a lot of evidence which they say supports this; far more than I care to dig through. That is why my opinion must remain uneducated. However I live in the Kooks Museum and our shelves are full of books by people with something to prove and the one thing they all have in common is that whatever it is they have to prove, whether it is perfectly sensible or completely crazy, they all prove it, at least to their own satisfaction. I am also a painter and I have found that people who set out to prove things with lots of supporting evidence usually think in a very different way from the way a painter thinks, as I have pointed out in the past.
Here is what my opinion is. It is my opinion that this is not necessarily a person painted by same artist eleven years apart. One painting is copied from the other painting. I am an artist and I am going to paint the same person eleven years after I first painted her. I have painted a really good portrait of a cute little gal and eleven years later I say I want to paint you again as a kind of stodgy matron only everything else will be EXACTLY the same except for the background. I will even give you the same hands and not paint the hands you have now which are eleven years older. And she and her husband are going to say okay that sounds good. What gets me is the line of her hair on the left side. I might be
able to cajole a woman into wearing the same costume and same hairstyle
and into striking the same pose eleven years later - which itself does not
make much sense except in a 'conceptual art' context which I don't think
even existed then - but her hair is not going to do the exact same
thing as it did eleven years before. It isn't even going to be the same
hair. Her hands are not going to be in exactly the same position, the folds in the sleeves are not going to be exactly the same. Or maybe I would just have a couple of assistants copy the previous painting and I will just step in and do the face and make her look kind of flabby and grumpy compared to the peppy little doll in the old painting. Then I have to make sure they don't see the first painting so they don't go what the hell you made her look like her own mom, that's not what we are paying you for.
One of those pictures is copied from the other one, so side by side comparisons of the proportions of the two paintings don't prove anything because all you need to do is use any one of three simple mechanical devices to copy the forms and proportions exactly, which any apprentice could do. They both seem to be painted with a great degree of skill and they both look pretty old. As I said I have never been able to grasp the romantic ideal of the Mona Lisa so I don't really get what a great painting it is, but it seems to be well executed. Both of them. I am not qualified to make any statements on how much of Leonardo's paintings were done by assistants, how often he used what kind of pigment on what kind of board or canvas, etc. but I will tell you this as an artist - I am not the only person on earth who has looked at that painting and said, "That would be a pretty good picture if you fixed up her face a little, because frankly she is not that great looking a gal." I think that is what we have got here. But what do I know.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Brief and Anonymous
Film careers for a woman of color in the mid-20th century were often brief and anonymous. For a pretty young woman like Anita Turner, it may be that her film career ended when she entered what was then considered a woman's "real" career - marriage. In any case, she was only in three movies, and we see her here as Esther in the Technicolor logging melodrama, River Woman (1948).
In the late 1940s and into the '50s a sassy maid was rare, but like many maids Esther is slightly subversive, an encourager of forbidden romance, and sometimes bearer of startling news.
The name of the tall, slim young woman who played Ellen, the maid in The Moth (1934), is unknown. The protagonist Diane, played by Sally O'Neil, is rebellious and unconventional, and she treats Ellen more as a friend and confidante than a servant, and even gives her money to help Ellen's needy family members.
It should be noted that, while white people sometimes touch a maid in a friendly or affectionate manner, a maid rarely, if ever, forgets her station. She touches white persons only when dressing or assisting them.
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