Category Archives: Movies

Woodstock

Posted on by

Watched Woodstock last night on TCM. Hadn’t realized it’d been so long since I’d last seen it…I hadn’t even seen this Director’s cut yet. All those crazy 18 years old running through the mud are 65 now. Anyway, forgot how beautifully shot that flick was, amazed they pulled it off. You wonder what became of all the interviewees. And if everyone hawking their wares in the drug super market scene wound up in prison. If the Porto-San man’s kid got back from the DMZ ok. Or who wound up with Pete Townshend’s guitar. Just what that glop was the Hog Farm was feeding everybody? And whatever happened to those intricately beautiful hash pipes all the serious freaks seemed to have back then. It’s a long flick, endless, and you have time to wonder about these things. And about how everyone got home. And the psychedelics no one talks about anymore, like DMT, and how mesc was short for mescaline. And how fit everyone was back then. Trim and beautiful. I can’t imagine camera crews spending so much time on skinny dippers at a festival today. There’s a lot of beautifully shot scenes in the flick. There’s one night time scene and someone is on stage, a folkie, alone–maybe Joan Baez–and the shadows through behind on the stage are gorgeous and one of the camera men, no doubt stoned, focused on it for a luxurious several seconds, and it still fills my mind’s eye 24 hours later.

Amazing how different the mood is from Gimme Shelter–another extraordinary concert film–which was only four or five months later. Or from the Isle of Wight flick, less than a year later. Or from Monterey Pop, a mere two years before. Or from the contemporaneous Wattstax, which seemed a world away. And how vastly different it was from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, shot eleven years earlier, or The Decline of Western Civilization, ten years away. That’s a twenty year span, packed full of cultural revolution. Things seemed to move so fast then. They seem so slow now. If not slow, perhaps it’s just that the old never really goes away anymore. It always hangs around. Digitalization makes the dead seem completely alive. Long dead movie stars seem to walk and talk still. People love the Beatles like they never went away, or Miles Davis like he walks among us. Old releases are repackaged and released as if brand new. The long dead comment on new events–I just saw Kurt Cobain predicting Donald Trump; a lie, but that seemed not to matter–and we seem to live our lives shifting between eras as if we were there for all of them. But we weren’t. We only are where we are, and once were where we once were. And I can’t figure out it it’s good or bad that we can conceptually shift between eras like that–imagine how the tripping freaks at Woodstock would have loved the idea–but I do think the long dead should remain dead, the long broken up remain broken up, and we should live in the now, but that’s just me. I mean I love Hendrix and Coltrane and Monk and the Jefferson Airplane, but not they are still here. Meanwhile I’m watching hippies cavort half a century ago, and Jimi Hendrix frozen forever at 27 and the YouTube I’ve been listening to in the background flits through the jazz decades as if time itself was completely irrelevant. Time free like whatever that Albert Ayler thing just was, before this ancient Louis Armstrong thing or the brand new Ben Wendel thing I heard before. A hundred years of music randomly thrown together. Each video sets a mood, each brings out a feeling. Each make me feel like I am elsewhere, and this computer is a pad a paper and these letters my cramped, impenetrable scrawl that no one will ever see.

Sound of Soylents

Posted on by

Hello green thing, my old friend. I’ve come to munch on you again.

For a dystopian planet overwhelmed with maybe fifty billion people, the world of Soylent Green is remarkably free of children. There are nearly none. Like the people had stopped fucking a decade or so before and now it was all adults. Which would take care of that population problem soon enough. Maybe soylent had been made out of babies. It’s left unresolved, abandoned somewhere behind Charlton Heston’s acting and Edward G. Robinson’s brilliant last performance. I think he was gone before the movie opened. Soylent green was Edward G.  Mother of Mercy, is this the taste of Rico?

Stoneground A.D. 1972

Posted on by

Stoneground opening up Dracula A.D. 1972 (the sixth and last of Christopher Lee’s Dracula run for Hammer Films, with Peter Cushing back as Van Helsing’s grandson) with Alligator Man. That’s Sal Valentino (of the Beau Brummels) on lead vocal. It’s an old cajun tune by Jimmy Newman, and their arrangement is groovy shuffling stuff, with solid ensemble playing (and back up vocals) in that San Fransciso style, always more about the band than about any specific player, and Sal’s rock’n’roll vocalizing was pretty unique, as were his dazed LSD expressions. Laugh, Laugh it ain’t. More like Magic Hollow on Exile on Main Street. I always liked this band, and love this song, and it’s a shame Stoneground never really took off, though Bay Area hippies that they were, I don’t know if they worried about it much. They recorded a couple albums, and Family Album, their second, is their best, one of those vast double LPs, like Sons of Champlain’s Loosen Up Naturally or the second Moby Grape album–that came out of San Francisco (or thereabouts) and went  nowhere. Who knows why.

Alas, this opening party scene with Stoneground is much more fun than most of the rest of the flick, late period Hammer not being what it had been. But hell, it’s Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the 20th century. Hippies and mini-skirts abound. Peter Cushing’s (i.e., Van Helsing’s) way hot granddaughter just told him she is neither dropping acid nor shooting up nor balling anybody. He looks at her, bemused, like why the fuck not? But he says nothing and smiles. I’m an alligator man. Or he was, in another movie. Or was that George Macready?

Exorcist 2: The Heretic

Posted on by

Which reminds me, I recently watched Exorcist 2: The Heretic. Well, it was on as I was writing. My wife abandoned it for better fare, but I somehow could not get myself to turn it off. I mean, it’s the greatest movie ever. I assume Sir Richard Burton was smashed the entire time, raging in his trailer, quoting Shakespeare till he was blue in the face. Then back out to utter more humiliating profundities on camera. Egad. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf come to life. Who must one have coitus with to escape this production? Sir Richard beseeched the gods. They answered not. Then back to the trailer. Ya gotta love catastrophic sequels. Godfather III with ectoplasm. How do these things happen?

crochet-exorcist

Alas, I have no idea whose this is, but my pal Lynn Kelley found it on the Gallery of the Absurd Facebook page, thus validating the entire concept of the internet.

Fluidmaster

Posted on by

So I replaced the 242 seal in the Fluidmaster 400A and it works fine except that it started whistling then squealing and finally shrieking a high pitched shriek like the monolith on the moon in 2001. Weird. Maybe that’s where Kubrick got the idea. Or was it Arthur C. Clarke. Or maybe HAL, though I can’t imagine a HAL9000 ever using a Fluidmaster. In fact, I don’t even know if they had Fluidmaster in the 1960’s. It’s all very Space Age. They put a man on the moon and a Fluidmaster in the bathroom.

And while the toilet shrieks impressively, it never gets into the Ligeti. That would be too much to ask for.

Shadow of the Vampire

Posted on by

Shadow of the Vampire. John Malkovich has to have the worst fake German accent of all time, worse even than Marlon Brando in the Young Lions. You think they could have cut back on Malkovich’s specialty catering needs and brought in a dialog coach, or at least combined them. Or maybe they did, and it didn’t work. This is Münchner Weißwurst, Herr Malkovich. Munchy Wice wirst? Willem Dafoe, however, is one of my fave vampires ever. You think that someone would make a NetFlix mini-series based around that dirty old decrepit vampire. AARP could sponsor. Dracula Is Trying to Rise From the Grave. Dracula Has Fallen and He Can’t Get up. Unbeing John Malkovich. Which makes no sense, I know, but it’s been a punchline in search of a set up for years.

Cisco Pike

Posted on by

Cisco Pike on TCM. The last time I saw this I was in a crowd full of hippies at the Wilshire Theatre in Fullerton, California. Weed smoke was in the air and Jerry Ford was in the White House. Kris Kristofferson is Cisco Pike. I believe Doug Sahm comes up somewhere, high as a kite. But then who wasn’t? He’s a poet, he’s a picker, Kris sings about Cisco, he’s a prophet and he’s a something, though what I can’t remember. That refrain has been going though my head since 1975, though that last something disappeared somewhere in the punk rock eighties. Three quarters of two couplets, hanging unresolved. Odd that it never bothered me enough to seek out that last he’s a. But it didn’t. As Kris sang it again on Turner Classic Movies I heard that final he’s a and thought a ha! Now I got it. But I didn’t. Within days it was he’s a something again. The three fourths quatrain has etched itself into my brain permanently. Let’s leave it. Kris has stopped singing now, instead is trying to sell a whole mess of marijuana. He’s not doing so well. He’s doing better that Harry Dean Stanton in the bath tub, though, who’s not looking so hot. And there’s Karen Black, Cisco’s old lady, who was in everything back then. Gene Hackman–it’s Gene Hackman Day on TCM, with this stuck between The Conversation and French Connection–is a cop gone bad, and he’s creepy and inexplicable and irritating all movie long.  Gene probably doesn’t watch this one a lot. There is a plot, one of those early seventies sort of plots full of hippies and rock’n’roll and jaded stoner wisdom, but far be it from me to give away the twists and turns. A cult picture, they call this. The hippies in the Wilshire Theatre snickered even then. I remember being thoroughly confused by the story. Let’s see if I still am.

Yup, I was.

Preston Sturges

Posted on by

A smart ass writer’s heaven tonight on TCM–The Lady Eve (Barbara Stanwyk is vamping Henry Fonda as we speak), Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, Hail the Conquering Hero and an earlier gem, the Great McGinty. All that’s missing are that other early gem, Christmas In July, and his penultimate classic (that’s the fourth time I’ve written penultimate this week, and this is the next to the last time) Miracle on Morgan’s Creek. Preston Sturges wrote and directed these two near perfect and five flat out classic screwball comedies beginning in December 1939 and ending in September 1943. Seven flicks in less than four years, and not one of them less than great, and most of them as near to perfect as any comedy on film has ever been. Then it dried up just like that and he released a string of OK comedies that only worked in places (such as 1947’s The Sins of Harold Diddlebock, with Harold Lloyd, the final flick in this Sturges marathon), as if he were the less talented younger brother of Preston Sturges, say, or the son who could never compare to his old man. But it was him, sadly, mysteriously, and he faded away, not forgotten, but certainly wondered about. He died in 1959. You can’t blame the studios, as with Buster Keaton, and you can’t blame psychotherapy, as with Woody Allen. Sometimes you are incredibly funny and suddenly you’re not so funny anymore. Creativity is a strange thing, you never know when it will dry up and wither away. But I forget all about that and lose myself in these flawless scripts and perfect direction and jokes for days. They call me the Weenie King, the old man says.

(September 1, 2016)

Preston Sturges

 

Spartacus

Posted on by

Hadn’t seen Spartacus in maybe 25 years. No idea why it had been so long. Then Laurence Olivier, as Crassus, is looking over a bunch of newly delivered slaves. One is Tony Curtis. What is your name, Crassus demands of Tony. Bernius Swartus I blurted out loud. And I suddenly remembered why I had not seen Spartacus in twenty-five years, because my wife had blurted out Bernius Swartus at that very point the last time I saw it, and we both dissolved into giggles, hours of endless giggles. The movie never seems to end. It goes on and on and on. Dalton Trumbo was being paid by the word, obviously. No wonder he was blacklisted. At one point the plot crawled to the pace of the really slow parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but with Bernius Swartus instead of Halius Computerus. Just who do you have to fuck to get out of this picture Jean Simmons asked. That is the legend. Sweet Jean Simmons saying fuck. But she didn’t, really, it was Bernius Swartus who asked that. Jean laughed, getting remarkably naked for a movie in 1960. Tempting, but one more Kirk Douglas speech and I would explode. He’s starting to sound like Joe Flaherty. I switch to Bridge on the River Kwai for a bit, a vastly better flick, but when an old lady starts talking about catheters I switch back again. I am Spartacus, says Bernius. I am Spartacus, says John Ireland. We are Spartacus, yell various extras. Everybody is Spartacus? asks Laurence Olivier. Yup, everybody is Spartacus, I say, throw out the whole balcony. But instead Crassus crucifies everybody. I remember being bewildered by the unintended Christian imagery of all that when I was a child. Then again, Crassus will get his soon enough, in the waterless deserts of Mesopotamia, his legions annihilated, his mouth filled with molten gold. Later, says Plutarch, the head of Crassus was used as a prop in an off, off Broadway production of Euripedes. I switch back to Bridge on the River Kwai. Madness, says James Donald. Madness. Then some idiots start whistling.

Jean Simmons--Spartacus

Jean Simmons in Spartacus. Made you look.

My Favorite Year of

Posted on by

(Another lost essay…apparently I didn’t care for My Favorite Year…)

I saw My Favorite Year once all the way though. I started watching it again sometime later and gave up after a few minutes. Tonight I tried harder and got about a third of the way though it before I wanted to shout what the hell is Peter O’Toole doing in this loser movie? I mean it stinks. Everything about it stinks except Peter O’Toole. All the other characters stink…I don’t care about any of them, except the ones I actively dislike. All of the infuriating subplots stink…I don’t give a damn about these people’s storylines, their lives, their romances…all I care about is the Peter O’Toole character.

And who the hell told the writer he was funny? He’s not. He’s not a funny guy. He thinks he’s funny, He took a course on how to be a funny. He studied comedy in college. He’s analyzed jokes. But he’s not funny. You wanna know how not funny he is?  Let the writer explain it himself:

K.C.: Do you think there are funny people and not-funny people?

Benjy Stone: Yes. Definitely. On the funny side there are the Marx Brothers, except Zeppo; the Ritz Brothers, no exceptions; both Laurel *and* Hardy; and Woody Woodpecker. On the unfunny side there’s anyone who has ever played the accordion professionally.

The Ritz Brothers? He thinks the Ritz Brothers are funny? And I don’t mean kinda funny, but quintessentially funny, funny as the Marx Brothers are funny.  After sitting through that moronic and utterly predictable Storke Club scene I hear him say Ritz Brothers and bells go off and oh man, yes, that was the Ritz Brothers. I’m watching a movie written by a guy who thought that the Ritz Brothers were, without exceptions, as funny as funny can be.

Good lord.

And then there’s the setting. He is one of the writers for a guy who is obviously Sid Caesar. Which means, in 1954, that he would be writing for the Show of Shows. So he’s set himself up as a writer in maybe the greatest television comedy writing room of all time. Those people in that room were incredibly funny. Crazily funny. Savagely funny. The competition was deadly, the timing perfect. The jokes this fool lays out so predictably here would never have survived that room. Would never have survived Sid Caesar. Sid was not the buffoon portrayed here. Sid Caesar was probably the funniest man in America in the 1950’s.  This kid would never have even got in the door. Not with this material. They would have eaten him alive. Humiliated him. It would scar him till the day he died. So what’s he do? He brings that room down to his level and then makes himself the funniest guy in that room. The egomania is overwhelming.

Ya know, if you’re gonna be funny you better be really fucking funny. There’s no room for mediocrity. What a gem of an idea this movie was. And how perfect Peter O’Toole was for the role. It’s too bad that such a sad script, low brow humor, piss poor casting and hamfisted direction turned out something not much funnier than your average inane sitcom. None of you would watch more than a minute or two if it weren’t for Peter O’Toole. Without him it’s just crap. With him, it’s a treasure since O’Toole made so few film appearances.

Yeah, people will always love My Favorite Year because Peter O’Toole is so funny in it. The movie itself is lousy, but Peter O’Toole sparkles, he really does, he’s wonderful in this. So people will be watching this film for generations long after far, far better comedies are long forgotten.

It ain’t fair, it just is.

My Favorite Year

My Favorite Year