When Jack Met Wendy

I realize it's all over the blog circuit by now, but what does everybody think of this clever parody of contemporary trailers, which markets The Shining as a family comedy by decontextualizing, with a little help from Peter Gabriel, some of the scariest parts of the movie? Personally, I think the most brilliant thing about it is the fact that they dropped "the" from The Shining--it instantly, ineffably transforms Kubrick into Rob Reiner.

Half-assed Contest

Here's the deal:

At the end of my weekly beat reports from here until I decide not to do it anymore or am shot in mid-flight, find a screen capture from a mystery movie. The comment section will be the place where you log your guesses - I'll cut it off after the first correct answer - and I'll keep a tally of correct answers over the course of, let's say, seven weeks at a pop? If you're the cinephile who has the most correct answers after seven weeks, I'm going to send you some piece of swag from the ever-moldering pile of swag sitting here, creating friction in my marriage and providing a home for what I believe are sightless moles. There are T-shirts, novels, screen adaptations, a pumpkin carving kit from the new Wallace & Gromit flick (I'd send the pumpkin, too, but what am I, made of money? - besides, my daughter's using it as a chair), little tin cars, something truly weird from the War of the Worlds campaign - but no baseball caps because on the rare occasion they send me a baseball cap, I wear it. I'm just that poor and heterosexual.

Let's see, there's something in a sealed silver baggie that I don't remember what it is, something that I think I broke but might send someone anyway as an ironic prize with which they might impress someone with as stunted a sense of humor as me, and a few posters. Some of it probably eBay-valuable - my best advice is that if you win some random gewgaw, I'd bronze it for that day you compete at your regionals for that ridiculous IFC movie trivia show. As further proof of the symbolic nature of the prizes, I will include a signed certificate stating that you've won "FFC Blog Contest #1", dated and ready for framing. Just like a diploma from the University of Freak.

By the way - please don't request something in particular because my life, while not complicated, is far too complicated for me already. It's going to be all I can do to drag it to the post office and, in the event one of our loyal foreign readers wins, fill out that little green customs slip and try to explain why I'm mailing a xXx coaster to Australia. Consider that I'm not of my right mind and am cooking this up because I'm blocked on a review this evening and, should you run a wet finger along my arm, might hum like fine crystal.

Okay - so as an addendum to this week's Trenches, a tough one (they won't all be) so have at it:

(I will, of course, periodically, give out hints.)

Notes from the Trenches

Did a speaking engagement tonight at the Denver Public Library after finding out that they might be losing funding to continue doing films in their basement what with the new budget and all meaning the fifth (or so) straight period of budget slashing at a major metropolis’ cultural center. I wonder what people are thinking about when they vote down taxes for public works – you eviscerate government, right, and government sure enough gets eviscerated. Doesn’t take a genius, but it does preclude retards. More’s the tragedy as the librarians that I’ve met at the DPL are, to a one, bright, funny, and most important, devoted to their jobs as archivists and curators – just putting together a series of road trip films that includes The Gold Rush, Sullivan’s Travels, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and North by Northwest takes imagination and follow-through. Their reward? Their lives getting fucked with on a regular basis – benefits cut, retirement cut, hours cut, and programs like this cut. Public outreach is superfluous – the reason that the outer extremities are the first to contract gangrene, I suppose – but the outer extremities are the ones that keep us connected to the ground and reaching for the stars. Not to quote Kasey Kasem but, there you have it.

Anyway, talked before and after Treasure of the Sierra Madre tonight: to paraphrase Chris, one of the dying breed at the DPL, Bogie, you was never uglier. It’s a brilliant film, a brilliant transfer, a fine evening and one of the last for a while (after next week’s North by Northwest) here in downtown. We like to brag that Denver is turning a corner from cow-town to Metropol, but shit like this is just really shaming. It’s not like different leadership and leadership philosophies can’t resuscitate this institution – but it will do so at the expense of all the folks that this current leadership is using as grist for their great social experiment. I realize that the bootstraps, govern thyself philosophy means that with my $100.00 rebate check, I can purchase three books and get a head-start on my own little library at home but it, somehow, just isn’t quite the same thing. Rumor is that there’s not even any money for our library to buy new books.

Caught a screening on Monday of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s endlessly disappointing Mirrormask - if you’re a fan (and I am) of these guys, there are hints here and there of their brilliance – but mostly, it’s just the most puerile, obvious elements of their stuff distilled into a CGI fireworks display that is, actually, just ugly. A lightshow of a different kind, watched Into the Blue this morning after learning that a screening of the Keira Knightly Pride & Prejudice set for Wednesday afternoon had been pushed back. Looking forward to that one, even though it’s longer than most movies ought to be. Mirrormask and Into the Blue both industry, press-only screenings though the former had been filled with a cinematography class from a local arts school. Kids were well-behaved though and, judging from the murmur afterwards, uniformly impressed – at least by the software. Chances are good that they would have been just as impressed by Into the Blue’s “software” as I declare I’ve just spent (another) 110 minutes with my face pressed up against Jessica Alba’s ass. Into the Blue, by the way, is sort of a remake of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - take that as you will.

You can kind of see why they made Mirrormask for all its adolescent earnestness, but it’s hard to put a finger on why something like Into the Blue exists. It raises the daunting question of whether art has to serve a purpose – for my money, art – good art – should at least strive towards touching the face of god. The sublime as the ideal, that tingle you get when you get something that you know you can’t explain and, if you’re surrounded by the right folks, know that you won’t need to. The first time I heard Ian McShane utter “cocksucker” – I got it. The first time I saw Johnny Depp step into the town of Machine in Dead Man, I got it – hell, the first time Michael J. Fox’s DeLorean gets struck by lightning, I got it. Not to say that Into the Blue doesn’t instantly go into my memory banks as one of the most galling pictures to wiggle down the pike, just to say that I wish at those moments that I was actually in a public screening with my seat turned towards the audience.

It’s better, after all, to keep people like that in front of you.

On a side note, finished a 4000 word-plus piece on the first season of “Lost” tonight – don’t know where it fits on the publication schedule, but at least I’m done with it barring major (and likely) rewrites. One of those episode-by-episode things you might recall if you’re a total bleeding masochist from such gems as my “Xena” and “Dark Angel” pieces (speaking of Ms. Alba). What irks me the most about Alba, I think, isn’t that she’s a bimbo, but that she has these pretensions. She refuses to strip (though, watching Into the Blue after Sin City - what’s the difference anymore?) and proclaims to the heavens that she’s cast in her insipid roles because of her non-boob-and-flat-tummy-related talents. Latest thing is her wanting to start a line of non-violent video games so that filmmakers can see what kind of action movies she’d like to make in the future – films with, I guess, more of the extreme jet skiing and less of the ugly violence of Into the Blue. Talking? Meet “out of both sides of your cute little bow of a robotic little mouth.” I hope they had professional advice before deciding to put Alba and Paul Walker in the same room together – what’s that stuff about anti-matter colliding with anti-matter that I slept through in college?

Pictured here, of course, is the lovely Evangeline Lilly from "Lost" demonstrating one of her two expressions. This one, which I call "expression 1" is meant to convey fatigue, concern, curiosity, chagrin, shame, resolve, uncertainty, ardor, confusion, mild irritation, major irritation, mild fear, physical discomfort, quiet bemusement, condescension, concentration, meaningful flirtation and, if held for three seconds or more, to indicate the onset of a flashback to her uninteresting backstory. That, plus a hardbody and the same Alba-like resolve not to get naked on network television but to dress in wet t-shirts and teeny-bikinis, equals fanboy pin-up infamy. Now, let's talk about why the rest of "Lost" - with maybe three exceptions - just flat stinks or, more sensibly, just wait until the review goes live and we'll use that as a springboard. Did I say "4,000-plus?" I meant "4,100-plus".

Flight planning

So after missing the industry screening of Flightplan due to a scheduling conflict last week, I attended a regular screening on the studio’s gracious dime this afternoon with a semi-packed, rapt-until-the-end (at which time I heard more than a few angry mumbles) crowd at the local Cineplex. It’s going to do better than I expected this weekend, I think, because of a lack of real competition (Corpse Bride probably attracts exactly the opposite demographic) and because the flick touches on a few of our exposed nerves in such a way as to attract folks looking for answers or, failing that, at least the succor of a popular entertainment that all but guarantees a happy ending. There’s the bogey of airline travel, sure, but losing a kid, being thought insane, suspecting a conspiracy against you, wondering if your leadership is competent, wondering if the Arab guy in row 11 has a bomb in his shoe, and so on. As a film, independent of its time, I’d say that Flightplan is a sub-mediocre Mildred Pierce lioness/cubs melodrama – but just like last year’s The Forgotten (a film that’s almost as interesting and almost as failed), the fear of “losing” a child in a metaphysical and literal sense is just piggybacking on last year’s spate of memory-manipulation films – and now this year’s semi-spate of airplane soapers (including TV’s “Lost” in that) that result in character studies of scary ethnicities and homegrown terrorists.

The audience was the best that I’ve had the good fortune to experience since the last time I saw a “civilian” show (A Sound of Thunder a couple of weeks ago) – giving credence to my idea that some people turn into jackholes when they’re given something for free – this audience all the more remarkable for its comparative size (about 200 people at 2:00pm in the afternoon). Not even a text-mailer, making me wonder if this film doesn’t skew “older” in respect to Foster’s audience and the subject matter. The ending though is going to be a problem for the flick’s longevity: I can’t see it lasting longer than four or five weeks of steadily-diminishing returns.

At home: in addition to the queue (“X-Files,” “Lost,” and a couple of Bruce Campbell flicks from Anchor Bay), watched four Robert Wise films on TCM including a fairly amazing Mitchum western called Blood on the Moon. In other news, Gilpin County’s great public library has hired me to do an October series. The theme? Ghost stories: The Innocents, Wise’s The Haunting, and The Sixth Sense, The Others, and A Tale of Two Sisters. If you’re in the area, they’re on Saturday afternoons: stay tuned.

In the pre-frontals: fascinated by Walter Salles’ Dark Water from this last summer, a film that I saw late and thus probably won’t review until/if we get a DVD to cover. Because I’m essentially an idiot – I mean “optimist” – I’m thinking that the fall season this year will be good enough to knock it off: but as of right this moment, Salles’ film is a dark horse for the end of year Top Ten list. I think it fits in here somewhere in discussions of this new cinema of the maternal that Quentin Tarantino started, maybe defined, with his Kill Bill pictures.

Do you suppose that it has something to do somehow (and how does it?) with our experiencing an attack on a civilian population? After all, the Japanese have been making films like this for almost six decades.

I May Be Blind and Dead, But I Got Your Attention

Speaking of conspicuous DVD packaging (see the previous blog entry's talkback), the little gewgaw on your left arrived at FFC HQ today from Blue Underground. It's a casket-shaped box set housing all the films that constitute Amando de Ossorio's "Blind Dead" series, a bonus disc dedicated to the late Ossorio's exploits, and the 2005 edition of Nigel J. Burrell's monograph Knights of Terror: The Blind Dead Films of Amando de Ossorio (which looks like a fabulous read). After the brouhaha over the "Homer head", I wouldn't be surprised to see fewer and fewer of these impractical objets d'art put into production--but might I suggest that for those seminal works not necessarily on the zeitgeist's radar, the nonconformist approach to packaging is a necessary evil? They need the beacon; if I had a nickel for every time I unwittingly flipped past some cultish find while cruising the record store for same, I'd be Harry Myers, "An Eccentric Millionaire."

On a side note, the DVD I have most coveted in the history of the format is finally coming out on November 22nd. Can you guess what it is?

Notes from the Trenches

Conducted a discussion after a screening of Sullivan’s Travels at the Denver Public Library last night – a good show, a good chat – with over fifty people which is, actually, not a bad turnout considering we were up against the inexplicably revered The 39 Steps across town as part of my friend Tom’s Denver Art Museum series at the Starz Filmcenter. An unabashed fan of Hitchcock – I think he reached his pinnacle in Britain with The Lady Vanishes (fond, too, of Young and Innocent and The Lodger), and feel like The 39 Steps is something of a piddle. Big fan of Hitch’s first U.S. film, Rebecca - Fontaine, Sanders, Olivier, and, of course Judith Anderson’s iconic turn as Mrs. Danvers – use of subjective point-of-view for an eternally-unseen heroine a precursor in a lot of ways to Preminger’s Laura and a nigh-pioneering work of queer cinema. Hitch made a few of them – just not The 39 Steps.

A fairly light week for screenings and so: a chance to dive into the DVD queue. Coolest new title? The new Book of the Dead edition for The Evil Dead II. Knocked off several others in the last few days, too, but because I wrote something like 10,000 words in about 20 increasingly-weary hours, I’m guessing Bill’s got some fairly grisly, fucked-up prose to edit. Watching the X-Files: Black Oil set now – been watching it on and off for about a month-and-a-half. Shit’s awful – and it’s got lots of special features.

I didn’t get the studio schedule for Monday until today and so missed a screening for that disco/rolloer-skating flick Roll Bounce (thank god) – I’ll catch it in the second run. Also missed the only screening of Flightplan because of my obligation at the library. I’ll see the Jodie Foster on Friday afternoon and intend to catch Everything is Illuminated tonight. With a Sunday Feature interview to write-up tonight, though, I’m not sure I’ll get a review for the Elijah Wood flick logged before deadline. Which brings us to: what’s happened to the Sunday Feature? Was a while there, we were going great guns with oven-fresh interviews if not every week, then at least every other.

Here’s the scoop.

Bill and I decided that we were tired of doing interviews.

90% of the people that you talk to in this business (99% of actors), don’t really have anything to say and some (say 10%?) are obnoxious when they say it. There’s the director who demanded a hair stylist and complained to her studio when I gave her a bad review even though I was nice to her during the interview (she accused me of telling her that I liked her film so I just turned over a copy of the tape – controversy ended) – and the guy who did the same because we shared a couple of tears over recently-lost parents (didn’t make me like the movie any better). It’s hard on me though, the people who can’t separate what it is that I do with what they do – there’s a good, solid reason that we have a standing policy of logging the review of the film before interviewing the subject.

On the other side of it, there are the interviews that I’ve conducted that I later find that I can’t use. I had a long heart-to-heart with Lili Taylor a couple of years ago, only to find that I couldn’t bear to listen to it again afterwards: too personal – just a conversation between two strangers that, for about an hour, talked to one another about things that wouldn’t be interesting to anyone else. Truth is that it’s probably just me being a coward, but there you have it. And a chat with author/historian/filmmaker Paul Cronin that turned out to be a two-hour bitch session about the state of modern film, film historians, and the death of the cinematheque tradition. A Londoner, he was appalled that our central library is closed one day a week (something our mayor recently addressed by shortening all the hours and cutting staff – if we eviscerate government by not paying taxes, you see, we lose all of our public works) – and even more appalled when I told him that for a while there, the DPL was recognized as one of the best central libraries in the country. It is, at the moment, a siege where the focus of every right-wing, racist wacko (Colorado’s own Senator Tom Tancredo is about a half-step away from wearing a hood and hanging the help off the Cyprus trees in his front yard – do a Google search on him, you’ll love it) wants to squat and make a point about how the government wastes money: all this while we’re blowing a few billion a week in the most unpopular war since 'nam.

Hey, where’d this soapbox come from? See? Two hours of that.

A good story as sidelight: when I interviewed John Boorman, I had a terrible cold and while transcribing, realized I’d been mouth-breathing, semi-heavily, into the receiver so that Boorman most likely thought I was jerking off while I was talking to him. Suddenly the question about who the good guys were in Deliverance probably made a lot of sense.

The worst thing about interviews, though, is this presumption that because we’re primarily Internet-based, that we’ll take anything and, on the other hand, that we need to constantly justify ourselves to anyone who might consent to sit with us. If you write for a major daily, Quentin Tarantino will spend fifteen minutes giving you the party line no matter what how you write and what you have to say – if you write for Film Freak Central, a publication that reaches roughly seven-times as many readers on any given Friday (and all of them tuning in to read some fairly specific material) than almost every major daily in the country, you need to convince Paul freakin’ Reiser’s people why it is you’re worthy to sit in the same room with him. So, thanks, and no thanks all the same. I skipped two screenings of Reiser’s film on Monday and declined an invitation to talk with him on Tuesday once the credentials were checked and we were graciously given the greenlight. I look back on the people we’ve devoted pages and pages of space to and wonder how it is that it doesn’t buy us a little grace with 9/10ths of the major studios and boutiques.

The answer’s a pretty simple one so far as I can see it: Sony Pictures Classics and their local representative respect the work that we do and, despite the write-ups I did on Dan Harris and the Maria Full of Grace people, continue to desire the publicity that an actual dialogue can provide for their pictures instead of a dedicated pimping of the party line. I can’t prove it, but I’m deeply suspicious that the write-up I did for the junket trip I took for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind put us on some shitlists but deep. It makes me wish I could go back and actually name specific names. The result is a lot of fighting and scratching for a lot of missed connections and lamented opportunities. Bernardo Bertolucci – one of the great champions of the Cahiers du Cinema and guerilla criticism, declining in his decline to do any non-major-daily press is one thing – but never getting a call-back for the vast majority of our requests feels different. Even a “no, thank you” is preferable to a flat, cold snub: that chill, cosmic “no thanks, but how about Paul Reiser? um. . . Peter Riegert?

Then there’s the story of Gregg Araki who had someone at his tiny distribution company, unbeknownst to us, audit the questions I might ask him ahead of time. Sorry, Gregg. Cronenberg and Morgan Freeman and John Sayles, Errol Morris and Steve James and Paul Schrader didn’t ask for question approval – I don’t think we’re addled enough yet to bestow upon you that dubious honor.

So the short of it after the long of it is that Bill and I decided to take a break from the Sunday Feature in the hopes that one or both of us would feel like rejoining the fight. Frankly, I still don’t remember the prize yet well enough to care.

ADDENDUM

Everything is Illuminated = The Wizard of Oz + The Holocaust - this is the poppy field
there, now you've seen it

Went to the screening of Everything is Illuminated tonight at one of Denver's older Landmark theaters - small seats, narrow theater, small screen, reek of butter and popcorn. Gotta love it. No cell phones went off, only one person checked their messages, but - and this is a big but - a young woman sitting behind me and to the right would not shut up. You know the type - giggly, garrulous. She would repeat the last thing that people said in the film and laugh, she would coo whenever she saw a dog, she gasped in dismay when the main character discretely and in character, kills a grasshopper, she commented upon a character's suspected zodiac sign ("Oh, that is so Sagitarius!") - and when asked to be quiet, she huffed and declared "But I'm not bothering anybody!". Then she started again. I spent the last half hour of the film standing, leaning against the back wall of the theater, having left my seat to cool in the spit-flecked parabola of my own self-appointed Greek chorus.

Oh, and the movie's not all that great.

Steven Spielberg Memorabilia

So we go into Deseret Industries (an LDS owned chain of thrift stores for those of you living elsewhere on the planet, this is where Napoleon Dynamite found his tape) looking at furniture when I find a novelization of Close Encounters of the Third Kind authored by the director/screenwriter Steven Spielberg! Hardcover first edition. Two dollars. Then in the games section there is the E.T. board game! One dollar.

I like Spielberg a bit more than my peers I think. I don't think that he's gone rotten, his work is just particularly uneven. Sometimes great and sometimes just blah. War of the Worlds is still going to make my end of the year top ten. But I have to say, he used to be really cool. I thumbed through the novelization and while I can't say that it looks like particularly great literature it's sort of surprising how much of Spielberg's aesthetic seeps through. There is something delicate and loving, something empathetic about his description of Barry's (the little boy) room. This was a valuable find.

The E.T. board game was missing most of the pieces. It was supposed to have a plastic E.T. and a spaceship and a deck of cards. There were no directions, but from the looks of it, it seems to be a rip-off of Parchesi. For a film that treated it's audience with so much respect (my wife, seeing it for the first time, expressed gratitude that it never sugarcoated anything for it's target audience) this board game seems to be in line with E.T. merchandise such as the infamous Atari cartridge that seek to cynically rip-off their fans.

Above is what it is suppose to look like. Whoever owned it last also added a box of crayons to the set. Deseret Industries, the reputable business that they are, sold this to me "as is" without specifying what, if anything, was missing. I'm sort of reminded of how thrift store owner Edith Massey sold bags of bottle caps for fifty cents as "grab bags".

I stole that photo from E-bay where the starting bid is also one dollar, but shipping and handling is eight though. Despite being suckered twice over, one dollar seems to be a small price to pay for the indignity.