Notes from the Trenches

Working on this very piece tonight, I hear a racket from the backyard, open the door to find my dog a bloody mess. Got tangled up with something or another nasty back there and now, three hours later and five hundred dollars poorer, my pooch has something like forty sutures in her and enough morphine to kill a horse and I’m looking at not making the mortgage payment this morning. Hard not to feel sorry for myself today, turned 33, wife too pregnant to do much celebrating, and now I’m crawling into bed covered in dog blood and looking into taking out another loan in the morning so we’re not on the street come summer.

Yesterday, though, spent the morning at Vail for a critics’ panel discussing film criticism (among other things) and how it’s been changed in the digital age. For all that, I was the only Internet critic on a panel that included Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman and the Independent Weekly’s Godfrey Cheshire. Felt good to be there. Felt a little like a validation – particularly when I was referred to as possibly the best "non-analog" critic in the country.

I think I’ve made a friend of Cheshire, at least, who’s as affable and well-spoken in person as he is in print. Gleiberman seems a nice chap as well though I did disagree with him over a few things: his worst crime might be that his position as one of the most-read analog critics in the land insulates him from a lot of the indignities and outrages that I try to articulate once in a while here. When he and Cheshire talked about private screenings in lushly-appointed screening rooms in New York, I think back to the other day at a local mall’s multiplex amongst the abandoned popcorn bags and the stench of old nacho cheese, watching Basic Instinct 2 with my colleagues while overhearing one of them talk about how much he hated Citizen Kane because it was, among other things, “boring.”

Believe me when I say that this guy’s not a rebel: he’s just an ill-considered, low-brow boob that doesn’t have an argument beyond “I just think. . .” Hard to keep it level.

Gift bag from Vail included some very nice, expensive male toiletries, a lovely glass, an energy bar, and a magazine with Dennis Quaid on the cover.

Last week also saw me at the Denver Public Library discussing Nimrod Antal’s Kontroll – a film that I was enthralled by upon initial viewing over a year ago, but had cooled on to the extent that it didn’t even crack my top 30 to end last year. Revisiting the film with an audience, however, especially the impassioned comments of one woman I knew from the Argus Film Festival, has renewed my interest in this film as a fairly sophisticated Susan Faludi-influenced look at the destructive component of masculine competition. Coincidentally, as I waited for Raimi to get stitched back together again tonight, read an old Sports Illustrated article about a small town in Maine that had three of their high school football players kill themselves within a short period of time. Fact I learned from the piece that sticks is that while athletes are less likely to try, when they try, they’re more likely to either succeed, or gravely injure themselves in the attempt.

Also last week, presided over the second installment of the DPL’s Cinema Club where we talk about a group of movies that folks have had a month to view. This session included a talk and shot-by-major-shot dissection of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Incredible Shrinking Man, and Village of the Damned. The Cold War was the starting point, but the discussion soon went into a fruitful chat about our current situation in Iraq, about the intense sexual disorder and fear of noir and ‘50s sci-fi, and ultimately the cogent humanity of the WMD solution of Village of the Damned. Most surprising revelation to me was provided by a late arrival who, out of nowhere, suggested that it seemed to him that all the films were about secrets. Simple/complicated.

Anyone catch in Siegel’s Body Snatchers, by the way, the three prints decorating the pool room of the writer-friend? Pretty interesting stuff.

The spider mouth/vagina dentata imagery of The Incredible Shrinking Man, by the way, is a fascinating illustration of that film’s gender-displacement anxiety – among other things, of course. Especially when our tiny hero pinions said vagina with his mighty (pin) prick.

Audience this month twice that of last month. If that trend continues, in about a year, I should have a million people packed into that little conference room. I just hope that we get enough participation that the DPL doesn’t pull the plug for their summer session as they were threatening to do this week (pre-show) when it looked like no one would show.

Last thing: saw Slither late, but in time for a possible Wednesday pub-date on the review. It did awfully in its first week so you might not have much time, but go see it. It kicks ass.

Raises the question of favorite genre actor now that Nathan Fillion is climbing the list for me: gaining ground on the great Jeffrey Combs.

Here’s the capture:

(Hot off the presses - April 5) -

Bill completes (?) his trail-blazing work on "Dawson's Creek" with a review of its final season and finds time, too, to administer the DVD post-mortem on the moribund Fun with Dick & Jane remake. Travis, meanwhile, tackles a little giallo action with his humane treatment of How to Kill a Judge - and proves himself a workhorse with reviews of Chariots of Fire and Adam & Steve. I, on the other hand, only managed to squeeze out a review of Slither - a film I'm going to try to see again before it vanishes ignominiously from the theaters.