O Captor My Captor! DVD Review: Sweet Hostage

Article first published as DVD Review: Sweet Hostage on Blogcritics.

In this age of the 24-hour news cycle, we take it for granted that producers of reality television and made-for-cable movies will respond quickly to this morning’s headlines. Such was the case even in 1975, when the fondly remembered Sweet Hostage was featured as ABC’s Friday Night Movie. Today’s audiences may appreciate it for melodrama and even a little camp factor, but they may not be aware of the timeliness of the plot.

Martin Sheen plays Leonard Hatch , a mental patient who as the film opens is reciting Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, right before he escapes from a Boston asylum through a laundry chute. Linda Blair is seventeen-year old Doris Mae Winters, a farmer’s daughter who is wielding a gun when we first see her: she’s just shot a 6-foot rattlesnake and hopes to keep it as a trophy when her hysterical mother (a staple of the 1970s teenage movie - cf The Loneliest Runner) comes along and axes it to pieces. These efficient opening scenes are an overture to the movie’s themes: the ennobling nature of literature; escape from the confines of societal expectations; man vs. nature; sexual hysteria. The characters' names are ripe with meaning as well - Hatch opens up an escape route not simply for himself; Winters is clearly discontent in her life on the farm. It is also obvious that she can fend for herself. However, the only trophy she manages to salvage from her kill is the snake's rattle, which various characters treat as a talisman throughout the film.

This is a pair fated to meet, and when Sheen, on his third or fourth hot car, ends up in New Mexico, he chances upon Blair examining her broken pick-up truck. Their fate is sealed and Sheen takes her hostage in a remote cabin.

Stocklholm Syndrome  is the phenomenon where a hostage develops sympathy for their captor. Classified in 1973, its most famous example was the 1974 case of Patty Hearst and her abduction by and later affinity with the Symbionese Liberation Army. When Sweet Hostage was first broadcast, the notion of a hostage falling for their captor was very much in the news. Today it would seem sick if not entirely surprising that a major network would respond to the headlines with what is essentially a romance.

Sheen and Blair have an easy chemistry, so much so that despite her protestations, you never quite fear for her life. Sheen’s star-making turn in Badlands in 1973 also prepared us for a sympathetic depiction of his outlaw urges; and Blair's battle with the devil established her own strength.

Despite the captor's aggression, his intentions seem chaste, even professorial. The literary conceits that Sheen wields are hammier than we have come to expect from him, and we can probably blame a lot of erudite-insane characters on this performance (hello The A Team?). Hatch/Sheen takes to calling his hostage Christabel, after another Coleridge poem. Winters resists her captor’s didactic approaches at first but this becomes part of an enriching teacher-pupil dynamic.

The sympathy between captor and hsotage may be unusual and even distasteful but the actors play it well, especially when the script reins in the literary references that often lean this in the direction of camp. The script by Edward Hume (who went on to script the apocalyptic tv-movie The Day After) can be overheated and the symbolism heavy, with a serpent and an apple signifying Eden. Scenes in the cabin become a haven away from the townspeople, who seem to belong to a different tribe. The cabin itself is like a stage, Sheen and Blair players in a chamber piece reluctantly pulled away from to get provisions - and this is where the Fall begins. They don’t make them like this anymore, and that may be a good thing, but those who like their backwoods romances uncomfortable will love Sweet Hostage.


Like other Warner Archives made-to-order DVDs, the disc does not include any bonus features. You can pre-order it from Amazon, but it's cheaper if you order directy from Warner Archives, where it is available now.

movie review: black zoo

I've been sick lately and may have been too hard on this. It's not a good movie but if it's sounds like fun to you, you'll probably like it. Just keep a finger on the fast-forward button. Article first published as DVD Review: Black Zoo on Blogcritics.

Who is the most dangerous animal? Lion? Tiger? Robert Gordon’s 1963 thriller Black Zoo suggests the answer is man. The complicated relationship between man and beast is the stuff of philosophy as well as the B-movie, and Black Zoo, which also goes by the clarifying title Horrors of the Black Zoo, addresses this time-honored theme with murderous beasts indeed. But simply adding “horrors” to the marquee does not alchemically create an effective cinematic scream fest. Vivid cinematography and elegant composition can’t save producer Herman Cohen’s lousy script. But the film is not without its moments.

Cohen is known for B-movies that don’t quite live up to their premise, like the early Michael Landon picture I Was Teenage Werewolf and the late-career Joan Crawford vehicle Trog. The burden of this dark menagerie is carried by Michael Gough, who starred in two other Cohen productions, Horrors of the Black Museum and Konga. For Black Zoo he takes on the role of organ-playing zoo keeper Michael Conrad, who lords over the animals of his Los Angeles zoo. James Dean wannabe Rod Lauren plays the mute Carl, the zoo keeper's charge, and veteran character actor Elisha Cook plays to his signature bug-eyed strength as he teases a tiger with raw meat. Add to this a memorable gorilla attack that prefigures Chinatown, and the synopsis alone may lure the unsuspecting viewer to pounce.

Sadly,  a few strong elements do not a well-balanced meal make. The script is stiff, heavy on exposition and light on propulsion, so the handful of startling scenes just lay floating in a pool of mediocre muck. Which is too bad - for a B-movie, the production values are good, the set design and cinematography suitably atmospheric.

Like other Warner Archives made-to-order DVDs, the disc does not include any bonus features, but it’s a new and crisp transfer from a good print. As a document of early sixties fashions and mores, the student of anthropology will find something to chew on in Black Zoo.
But horror aficionados will have to look elsewhere in the Warner Archives catalog for a more fulfilling meal.

Available only from Warner Archives.

photodvd review: Bill Cunningham New York

Article first published as DVD Review: Bill Cunningham New York on Blogcritics.

Bill Cunningham New York, the impressive feature debut from director Richard Press, may well be the best documentary ever made about a  photographer. That the photographer documents New York, for the New York Times Style section and other outlets, makes this  one of the great films about New York, all the more important as it captures a dying world. Cunningham was one of the last holdouts in the artists’ apartments above Carnegie Hall, whose legendary tenants over the years included Marlon Brando and Leonard Bernstein. This scene was further documented in the documentary Lost Bohemia, but BCNY gives the viewer a wistful glance at the corporate carnage at work all over the city: the wide open sapce that was once dance studio of Agnes DeMille (choreographer of Oklahoma and other milestones of American Musical Theater) has been recently broken up into telemarketer’s cubicles.

“If you can’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.” This is Cunningham’s response to the greedy metropolis, and though he collects a paycheck from The Old Grey Lady, his early work capturing the Downtown 80s scene for Details magazine was largely gratis - and frequently earned him 100-page special issues solely of his work.  The octagenarian photographer has documented New York fashion trends for decades - from haute couture runways to the New York gala scene. But it’s not money that draws his voracious lens (“I eat with my eyes,” he tells a waiter who offers him a plate at a gala). The artist finds what people are wearing on the street just as important, even more so. 

A photographer who seeks out fashion trends might seem to be judge and jury, but while Cunningham makes aesthetic decisions, he has a fondness for all his subjects. Socialite Annette de la Renta admiringly notes, “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a cruel picture done by Bill.” Cunningham in fact had a falling out with Women’s Wear Daily when they changed his copy to make fun of the subjects.

As a study of a dedicated professional, BCNY is also about obsession . The documentary is populated by some of Cunningham’s  favorite subjects: the dandy Patrick McDonald, who never leaves home without his eyebrows and beauty mark in place;  Vogue editor Anna Wintour (who declares that if he doesn’t take your picture, “you’re dead!”); Shail Upadhya, the outrageously dressed Nepalese Diplomat (“This used to be my old sofa; the jacket and pants, my ottoman”). This dense film constantly  entertains with such colorful personalities. But,  as Cunningham explains that he visits Paris regularly “to re-educate the eye,” the film also gently educates the viewer: what makes a dynamic photo, how to put together a comeplling layout, how to organize your obsessions and recognize trends, from fanny packs to chains, from baggy pants to leopard prints, from improvised rain gear to dazzling snow-wear.

Cunningham can find the visual grace in people from all walks of life, and his public face is always smiling. But when that smile breaks, so do you. Despite a certain amount of professional freedom, there is a chilling sense of entrapment to Cunningham’s life. His tiny studio apartment above Carnegie Hall was filled to the short ceiling with magazines and file cabinets of every negative he’s ever made (he is the only New York Times staffer still using film). In a quietly heartbreaking scene near the end of the film, the artist is asked about his personal life; he’s never really had one. His Catholic uprbringing made his sexuality something not to be spoken of. Has his flurry of work been at the expense of his own happiness? Bill Cunningham New York is an unforgettable portrait of a man and a city. It is filled with great joy, but not without the bittersweet.

the motion picture show: or, how I learned to stop worrying about not thinking of "informercial vanilla" before I filed last week's column

I've been busy pushing out blog posts (like giving birth for length) before a much-needed vacation and have neglected both my photobook reviews and every camera I own posts - I'm hoping I can at least get one of the latter done before I go. Which is soon! My recent posts for that blog on the internet have been fairly evenly divided between art reviews and my weekly movie column. I've been thinking lately that, although I feel I have more knowledge gaps in the former than the latter, I write better when I write about art. Much as I love the movies it is usually a more passive exercise. But with art, especially the site-specific work I've been writing about more and more, I have to really engage with the work to get something out of it at all.  This is very much the case with Untitled (Me Too), a recent installation by Patrick McDonough and Matias, he first art review I've written that comes with a spoiler alert (though spoiler warnings may have been useful for my review of  Lindsay Rowinski's Trying to be There a few weeks ago). 

From last week's column Popcorn & Candy: Life is the Only Thing Worth Living For Edition, here one of my few really unfavorable movie reviews. After I filed it, the phrase "infomercial vanilla" occurred to me, but that would have been running up the score. You can read this week's column, Popcorn & Candy: Lives that are probably harder than yours, here.


How to Live Forever

What it is: The meaning of life and the ways we deal with death.
Why you want to see it: The trailer for Mark Wexler's documentary suggests a celebratory look at those who live life to the fullest. That's not all it is. But one wishes it were a little bit more. The film takes promising detours about the way we package death. Early in the film, Wexler visits a funeral convention, where dealers of oversized caskets compete with pirate-themed vendors for your mortal coin. And a visit to a cryonics lab later in the film sounds juicy enough. But then there's the Ms. Senior pageant, where contestants spout the kind of platitudes you hear in any beauty pageant: "Life is a journey, and I'm just enjoying the trip." Sure it's a celebration of the gracefully aging, but can we stop treating life like a horse race already? Isn't life about more than a Chamber of Commerce slogan?

Wexler is the son of great cinematographer Haskell Wexler (he shot One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is Monday night's Screen on the Green feature), and his previous documentary look at life under the shadow of an accomplished father. But Wexler fils doesn't push the boundaries of non-fiction filmmaking as his father did in Medium Cool, and his work to date seems stuck in a navel-gazing loop of identity crises.

Which is too bad, because his material has potential, and asks serious questions. If, as one scientists predicts, the era of the ageless society is upon us, how will we deal with our new found vampirism? Where does Suzanne Sommers find the energy? Wexler knows something about a camera, but his setups are frequently banal; do we really need an establishing shot of him walking to Alcor, the cryogenics company? The film finally gets interesting in the final reel, when Wexler visits Japan, the site of a retiree who puts the sex in sexagenarian starring in "elder porn" films; and a nursing home where an animatronic baby seal is introduced to simulate the feeling of holding an infant.

Documentary filmmakers introduce themselves more and more into their films, but Wexler comes across as more Tim Allen than Werner Herzog.  How to Live Forever ends with the suggestion that art is the answer to immortality, and that Wexler's film is part of the legacy he'll leave to posterity. It would have been more memorable if it had stuck to the lives of others. Which reminds me, among the interviews with the famous and not-so-famous who drink life to the lees - couldn't he have spoken to Iggy Pop? Kids, start smearing peanut butter on your chest now, while there's still time.

View the trailer.

the bloggy, bloggy movie review: tabloid edition

Joyce McKinney

From Popcorn & Candy: Manacled Mormons and Androgynous Aliens Edition, July 14, 2011. See this week's movie roundup here. Also on (ironic definite article alert) The DCist, read my thoughts on Lindsay Rowisnki's Transformer Gallery installation Trying to be There (ironic awkward pronoun juxtaposition alert) here.


Tabloid

What it is: Erroll Morris' latest portrait of an obsessive looks at the strange case of Joyce McKinney, beauty queen -- and kidnapper?

Why you want to see it: Miss Wyoming 1971, Joyce McKinney could have had her pick of men. What made her not only choose bumbling Mormon missionary Kirk Anderson, but fly across the pond with a hand-picked team of accomplices to abduct him at fake-gunpoint? Morris told theNew York Times that McKinney was one of his most fascinating interviewees -- "if there was an Academy Award for best performance in a documentary, she'd win."

But Morris' new film is more than just a lurid story, although sensationalism is part and parcel of a tale in which a former Miss Wyoming ties a Mormon missionary spread-eagled to a bed and reportedly rapes him over the course of three days of, in McKinney's words, "fun, food, and sex." This Rashomon for the supermarket aisle is about how we tell stories -- not just the tabloids, but all of us. McKinney tells Morris that her training as an actress came in handy during her 1977 trial, and she performs for the camera today as surely and expertly as she performed for the jury thirty years ago. But we get no less a performance from Daily Express gossip columnist Peter Tory, one of the tabloid journalists who originally covered the story.

In the 1970s, rival British tabloids sold conflicting versions of McKinney as small town sweetheart and S&M call girl -- neither of which exactly lines up with her own version of the truth. For that reason, she has waged a campaign against the film. But is there such thing as a reliable narrator? Morris uses the visual language of tabloids in the form of contemporary newspaper clippings and of titles and fonts designed to mimic vintage tabloid graphics. Film footage is framed as if on a television screen against vintage wallpaper out of Diane Arbus. In other words, we all frame the truth through our own particular lens, and we are all performers -- even Morris. But some of us tell better stories than others. McKinney turned up in the news again a few years ago, but if you don't recognize the name, I won't spoil it for you. It just goes to show you that the best storytellers never stop telling stories. Like Joyce McKinney, and Errol Morris.

View the trailer.

the bloggy, bloggy movie review

More highlights from my weekly movie column for the DCist. Visit the DCist for this week's column, See this week's column, Popcorn & Candy: Manacled Mormons and Androgynous Aliens Edition, in which I review Tabloid, the new Errol Morris film. I also reviewed three offerings from the Capital Fringe Festival this week, my favorite being the Pointless Theatre Company's Super Spectacular Dada Adventures of Hugo Ball.

From Popcorn & Candy: Technology is a Blessing and a Curse Edition, June 30, 2011

Larry Crowne

What it is: The second feature from writer/director/auteur Tom Hanks, whose portrayal of the lowly worker is a stark rejoinder to the oppressive hegemony of the Roumanian New Wave.
Why you want to see it: The titular Crowne (everyman a King, yo) is called to the front office at the big-box store where he works, boasting to his cow-orker that he's won Employee of the Month designation an Ed Rooney-esque NINE TIMES. [Ed. note: I had (and still kind of have) no idea who Ed Rooney was when I wrote this, but my editor inserted the additional qualifier.] But this time Crowne is a different statistic: he's laid off, allegedly because he lacks a college degree. And thus, multi-millionaire Tom Hanks (who I'm sure is a nice guy) takes an imaginary bullet for The People. Oh the catharsis! Hanks wrote and directed -- his first such project since 1996's That Thing You Do, which painted a picture of stardom in a more innocent time. But is this the right time for innocence? Is Forrest Gump II going to make America sleep better through this economic crisis? No, but Hanks' studied naivete magically transforms this picture into a live-action Spongebob Squarepants, in which the forbidden sexual tension between Spongebob and Squidward (Julia Roberts) is finally, subversively fulfilled. Co-written by Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame; exercise extreme caution.

View the trailer NINE TIMES.
Opens tomorrow at a pineapple under the sea near you.

Rear Window

What it is: The AFI's Hitchhock retrospective continues with one of his greatest films.
Why you want to see it: Photo-journalist L. B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) is holed up in his Greenwich Village loft after breaking his leg shooting an auto race. (Be careful out there, kids!) Bored and restless, he watches the comings and goings of his neighbors across the way. Rear Window is one of the classic thrillers. But it is also a case study in the power of photography, and of seeing. The film's main action takes place entirely in the space of one character's apartment, and what he sees from his window: the courtyard, a distant street, fragments of his neighbor's apartments, framed by their own rear windows. Does this presage the internet? People-watching has long been a favored past-time, and with a lens trained on nearly everybody it's hard to know where to look. Can what we see hurt us? This masterpiece from fabled voyeur Alfred Hitchcock examines the dangerous nature of photography while celebrating it with finely-crafted suspense and one of the great screen beauties, Grace Kelly. A Bernard Hermann score [I only realized after I wrote this that Hermann would not begin to collaborate with Hitchcock until The Trouble with Harry] might have made this a perfect movie, but Franz Waxman's treacly music serves as a fluffy counterpoint to the brooding danger within. Trivia note: the score is performed on screen by a young Ross Bagdasarian, creator of The Chipmunks.

View the trailer.

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From Popcorn & Candy: Young and Misunderstood Edition, July 7, 2011

Psycho

What it is: The birth of the shower scene.
Why you want to see it: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is an office drone entrusted with enough money to blow Phoenix for greener pastures. Too bad she has a change of heart -- at the Bates Motel. Hitchcock's beloved avian imagery -- both predator and prey -- explodes a few years later in The Birds, but here it plays a more subtly sinister role: flight is arrested and animal urges are kept in check by man's own cages. What is the shower but a birdbath, the carving knife our hunger for fresh KFC? Psycho is the ur-slasher movie, the iconic shower scene the first in a long line of brutal punishments that are visited upon any sexually active bodies with the misfortune to find themselves in a horror film. Its influence goes far beyond the theater, to music ("Psycho Killer"), art (Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho), and even the collector's doll market (the shower scene became a liimited edition Madame Alexander doll). And thus, the film itself is like a phoenix: out of the horrific crimes of Ed Gein (who inspired Robert Bloch's source novel) rose something like poetry. Or is it kitsch? For all its strengths, the movie is flawed, the psychological exegesis ridiculous, the plot twists so much a part of the collective consciousness that it is impossible to watch it with the intended suspense. Then again, seeing the film with an audience helped Hitchcock realize the movie was, in fact, a black comedy. It may not be as funny as, say, Eraserhead, but rather a stark look at the arid morality of the American desert, an Oedipal western with Perkins as a troubled outlaw. And mother? She's the sheriff.

View the trailer.

the motion picture show: highlights from my weekly movie column

Dick Dyszel as Mayor Wicker in The Alien Factor.

I've started writing the weekly Popcorn & Candy column, a roundup of the coming week's movies, for DCist. It's at once my most visible gig (who doesn't check movie listings?) and my most ephemeral (who's going to look up what I wrote about a video screening of Night Patrol?). For some reason this column stresses me out more than anything else I write, and perhaps I end up overwriting now and then to compensate.  I'll occasionally highlight some of my P&C blurbs here.


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From my first column, Popcorn & Candy: Criss-cross Edition May 26, 2011. You can see from the url that I originally planned to use the subtitle "Why is My Body Changing? Edition," but I shelved that for the following week.

The Hangover Part II
What it is: The start of summer movie season.
Why you want to see it: Drunken blackouts are a primitive form of teleportation. One minute you're tossing back a wine cooler and then BLAM: you wake up in a strange room with a chicken from an advanced civilization that visits hotels in search for human blood. The first Hangover took this bacchanal as a jumping off point for fraternal hilarity and even something that approached human feelings. Director Todd Phillips' sequel ups (or downs, considering on your perspective) the ante with a scenario in which our favorite drinking buddies are teleported to Bangkok.
What to expect: Culturally insensitive hijinks.
What not to expect: A cameo by Mel Gibson, which was scrapped after his very public breakdown last fall. Maybe he should have pulled out The Beaver?


Opens tomorrow within projectile vomiting distance.


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White Irish Drinkers. As a commenter pointed out,
this is supposed to be 1970s Brooklyn?

From Popcorn & Candy: Why is My Body Changing Edition, June 2, 2011.

White Irish Drinkers
What is it: A tale of working-class Brooklyn circa 1975.
Why you want to see it: The words, "from the creator of The Ghost Whisperer" send this movie columnist into a cold sweat, but as long as Jennifer Love Hewitt doesn't show up cooing to her carrier-pigeons with a fake brogue, I will try to reserve judgement. Writer-director John Gray cut his teeth making 8mm films in his Brooklyn neighborhood, to which he pays homage with this story of coming of age among alcoholics, mobsters, and The Rolling Stones. Does this melodramatic return to the borough of his birth mean a return to low-budget roots? Or has he never really recovered from that Jennifer Love Hewitt dream sequence with a white tiger?
What to expect: Highly coached Brooklyn accents.
What not to expect: Vajazzle.


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Euro-Asia Shorts 2011
What it is: A festival of short films from around the globe.
Why you want to see it: Young couples, cantankerous elders, a planet where women are macho and men weak, and a clown that can't make people laugh are just some of the subjects on tap in this sprawling survey. "Five nights. Nine countries. One Theme" -- the last being Men and Women -- is the focus here. How that relates to Cuore di Clown (Clown Heart), (Tuesday, June 7th at the Japan Center on 18th Street) is anyone's guess, but it will only take 14 minutes of your time to find out.
What to expect: Where clown hearts beat, clown tears surely fall.
What not to expect: God willing, Jennifer Love Hewitt.

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From Popcorn & Candy: You Are Tearing Me Apart Live Edition, June 9, 2011.


The Room Live
What it is: Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero appear in a live adaptation of what some call The Worst Movie Ever Made.
Why you want to see it: Cult hit The Room is not by any measure a Good Movie. But it's a Great Bad Movie. Tomorrow night, the AFI Silver presents auteur Tommy Wiseau in a challenging new medium: live theater. The Room Live promises your favorite scenes as well as new scenes from everyone's favorite possibly Louisianan filmmaker. Will it be a train wreck or a revelation? I'm hoping for the latter, and here's why. What sets The Room apart from your typical midnight cult classic is Wiseau's complete lack of irony. Tommy -- as his fans intimately call him -- never winks at the viewer as if he's letting them in on a joke. He's completely earnest, and completely, heroically himself, despite a nation recoiling in horror at The Room's love scenes. And as strange and silly as his vision may be, he's true to his own star. Tommy's first new work since The Room was last year's short The House That Drips Blood on Alex, and he was the best thing about it. Sadly, he didn't write the self-conscious, knowing script -- you could practically hear the air quotes around any dialogue not spoken by its star. More successful is the recent short video series Tommy Explains it All (assaying, so far, Citizen Kane and Love) which makes the right decision to just let Tommy talk and let the magic happen. And if you go early enough, you can make a double bill of unparallelled aesthetic contrast with our next featured pick. [Diary of a Country Priest, which I saw right before The Room Live with no measurable aesthetic damage to either.]
What to expect: God to forgive you.
What not to expect: To be torn apart.

Read my full review of The Room Live here.

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From Popcorn & Candy: Music and Martians Edition, June 16, 2011.


The Stuff
What it is: Schlockmeister Larry Cohen's prescient satire of consumerism.
Why you want to see it: "Pre-swhu-huh?" you may ask. Cohen made his mark with the mutant homicidal baby series It's Alive. Horror movies are often manifestations of deep societal anxieties -- sexual hysteria in vampire movies, mindless consumerism in zombie pictures, growing pains in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, clothing manufacturer's inconsistent sizing practices in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Thus the intelligent B-movie is no oxymoron, and The Stuff is enjoyable, thoughful and just well-acted enough to put the lie to the notion that Psychotronic necessarily equals "bad." A natural fount of bubbling sweet white stuff is found in Alaska and marketed as a dessert. But is the stuff...alive? Michael Moriarty (whose aw-shucks with a hint of menace would have made him perfect for The Killer Inside Me) investigates the titular material's mysterious contents for a rival company, only to find himself face-first in it. Could this satirical story of the killer inside us have foretold 21st century cupcake mania? You will eat a cupcake. You will eat a cupcake.
What to expect: Better acting than you'd think.
What not to expect: To leave The Passenger not yearning for a cupcake.

photo book review: Carmen Soth, The Brighton Bunny Boy

Photo courtesy of Little Brown Mushroom.

Here is this week's literally eleventh-hour (twenty-third hour if you keep military time) photo book review, brought to you by the pile of photo books I bought last month.

Last year Magnum photographer Alec Soth was commissioned to work for the Brighton Photo Biennial. But due to a last minute snaggle he was unable to get a work visa in time. At a loss to deliver what was asked of him, on the fly he enlisted his then seven-year old daughter Carmen to photograph what she saw in Brighton. This young woman has now produced two books based on that experience under the auspices of her father, and although in some ways less ambitious than Brighton Picture Hunt,  The Brighton Bunny Boy (Little Brown Mushroom), a collaboration among Carmen, Alec, and Gus Soth,  remarkably conveys both the innocence and anxiety of childhood.

Soth pere recently explained to the New York Times, for whom he occasionally blogs,  that there are wall photographers and there are book photographers, and he considered himself squarely in the company of the latter. I wouldn’t tell anybody not to see a Soth gallery show, but I would tell you to run and find one of his excellent books, from his landmark debut Sleeping by the Mississippi (of which I am fortunate to own the much-sought after first edition - and signed at that!) to the tabloid style newsprint edition The Last Days of W.

He has passed on his gift for the photography book to his daughter, who supplies the kind of openness and imagination that most of us unfortunately grow out of. The Brighton Bunny Boy incorporates Carmen Soth’s text and illustrations with her father's photos of an elusive boy (played by brother Gus) who mysteriously hides in a bunny costume. Such alienation is often seen in her father’s work but I all too well remember that childhood alienation, different from that of adulthood but no less acute, and Soth adresses one of the painful dilemmas of growing up: how to find and assert your identity in the greater society. In the span of eighteen zine-sized pages, a brief but not at all minor drama plays out with character development and resolution. The book is cute and unsettling, a winning combination. May the Soth family continue their monographic winning streak for generations to come.

Also recently reviewed: the new Criterion DVD editions of Sweet Smell of Success and Luchino Visconti's rarely seen Senso for Blogcritics. This post was brought to you by the letter S.

Update: The Seattle Post Intelligencer syndicates Blogcritics content, and Alec Soth just linked to the review from the Little Brown Mushroom blog with the clarification that Carmen took all the photos as well. Yay Carmen!

Timothy Carey's 57 Varieties

I went up to Philly last weekend for a four-hour program of films featuring Timothy Carey, the late great character actor who hammed his way through dozens of bit-roles. I've written about him previously. Some of his movies you've seen and love - notably his significant supporting roles for Stanley Kubrick in The Killing and Paths of Glory (his famous scene in the latter involces a cockroach); some you haven't seen and wouldn't love if you had (Chesty Morgan, anyone?) A contrary fellow if there ever was one, he turned down roles in all three Godfather pictures, because, he claimed, he didn't want to be one of those actors who was in it for the money. Chesty Morgan, anyone? I tease, but in my search for the Timothy Carey mysqtique I've watched a lot of bad movies, and the only one I couldn't get through was the so-called sex comedy Chesty Morgan. Which is too bad, because the director let Carey go on at length during a dinner scene where you can clearly see his fellow actors becoming uncomfortable with Carey's riffing.

Carey was also a director, most famously of The World's Greatest Sinner, a film whose reputation was such that Elvis Presley asked to see it (Carey has an uncredited role in the Presley/Mary Tyler Moore vehicle Change of Habit, as a hulking, massive grocery store clerk.) Carey's son Romeo presented a documentary about the making of TWGS (Mike White, who administers the Timothy Carey page on Facebook, writes about the documentary, and the other films shown that evening, here.) and answered questions at the screening. One of his remarks hit on why I'm so drawn to Carey - the guy simply didn't care what people thought of him. If this can be seen in his supporting roles in other people's movies, it goes in spades for his work as a director.

TWGS was rarely seen until it ran on TCM Underground last year. Carey plays Clarence Hilliard, an insurance salesman who up and quits his job to follow his own strange path - as a God. He enters politics as God Hilliard, and also tries his hand out as a rock star. One of the talking heads in the making of documentary notes that Carey has no proficiency on the guitar before making the movie, but claims that he got by on charisma alone, and could have opened for Elvis. That may be overstating things:



The film is a mess, but has a few remarkable scenes. As hard as Carey is for other directors to rein in, he's even less inhibited here, which isn't always a good thing. His performance relies too often on shouting - from streetcorners, from stage. The most memorable scenes are softer, or at least, not as loud: a seduction scene with an elderly former insurance client; and the final revelation.

TWGS has been difficult, but not impossible to see, until recently. Much rarer is Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena, a collection of footage, shot between 1969 and 1974, that was slated for a tv pilot in the 70s. This train wreck makes TWGS look like Citizen Kane; my first reaction was that it was unwatchable, but as it went on and I laughed hard at one and then another ridiculous scene, I couldn't look away, always wondering what the hell he might do next. Carey stars as the roller-skating, bib-overall wearing Tweet Twig, caretaker of a menagerie of animals including goats, chickens, ducks, dogs and kittens (all of which belonged to the Carey family). Who talk. Yes, Timothy Carey made a talking animal picture, and naturally, the German Shepherd has a German accent.



After the four hours of films were over, Romeo Carey, who expressed surprised that more people didn't walk out on Tweet's (several in the audience did) took questions from the audience. I asked if he knew about this newspaper item:

New York Times, May 8, 1957
Missing US Actor is Found

MUNICH, Germany, May 7 (Reuters)--Timothy Carey, 31-year old Hollywood actor who disappeared from his hotel here sunday night, was found gagged and handcuffed on a lonely road outside Munich this morning, the police said here today. They said the actor had hitched a ride in a car driven by two English-speaking men, who held him at gunpoin, robbed him of $40 and finally dumped him by the roadside.

Romeo Carey did know about it. After shooting for Paths of Glory had wrapped, Timothy Carey had been frustrated with the publicity around Kirk Douglas and his other co-stars. So he faked his own kidnapping. In another incident around that time, the crew had gone to a burlesque show one evening in which one performer ended her act in a buble bath on stage. Timothy Carey walked right up to the stage and got into the bubble bath with her.

Carey's son painted a picture of life with father that was funny and uncomfortable. Romeo admitted that he used to be tremendously embarassed by the Tweet's footage. Toward the end of his life Carey became obsessed with the artistic possibilities of the fart. His last, unfinished project was a play called The Insect Trainer, about a man convicted of murder by farting. Carey liked to fart in church, just before reaching out to greet his neighbor in a sign of peace.

The screenings were held at the International House of Philadelphia (amiably known as IHOP) in conjunction with the show "Dead Flowers" at Vox Populi (link NSFW), where it will run through the end of the month before moving to New York's Participant Inc. Gallery in May. The curator was inspired by the work of Timothy Carey and his refusal to compromise his artistic vision. The show assembles a group of transgressive artists who work with the body: Genesis P-Orridge, Kembra Phfaler, Cynthia Plaster Caster, among others, and a selection of ephemera from Carey's career - film stills and other promotional materials, and, pictured above, a fart chastity belt. The other artists' connections with Carey seemed tenuous to me, other than their shared fixation with their own bodies, but it was a treat to see the Carey ephemera at hand.

a brief note on gods and godesses

This review first appeared on blogcritics.org.

One of my favorite movies of 2009 was Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot), a documentary that assembled footage from the French director's doomed 1964 production. Marvelously edited and with a spanking new but era-appropriate soundtrack, the most spectacular sequences were simply lighting tests of Romy Schneider:

I don't know about you, but I could watch that all day. So I thought, if Romy Schneider's test shots made for a five-star movie, I could watch her in anything, right?

Swimming Pool (La piscine), part of the five-film Alain Delon Collection, answers that question: positivement non! A 1969 vehicle for Schneider and Delon, who together were the Brangelina of their time, the picture is ostensibly a thriller but is one of the most boring movies I've seen in recent memory — and this is coming from someone who thinks Last Year at Marienbad is funny. Alainomy play Jean and Marianne (aka Jearianne), a young couple vacationing near St. Tropez. If you are still awake, I'm surprised. Because despite the magnificent specimens of gender that are Alainomy, there's only so much visual and dramatic interest you can squeeze from scenes of screen gods lounging tanned and glistening at poolside. Did I mention there's spanking? Oh, it is playful, as Delon strips a low-hanging branch from a nearby tree and lovingly slaps his topless Schneider on the back; first gently, then with gusto! You would rip off his shirt too, no?

This wouldn't be French without the promise of a menage-a-trois or even a-quatre. Column B is provided, if you can call it that, by the couple's old chum Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his teenage daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin, hot off her iconic duet with Serge Gainsbourg, "Je t'aime ... moi non plus"). This May-September couple make for romantic rivals — and, in the case of Mlle Birkin, someone to count walnuts onscreen.

Not to toot my own horn as a writer, but if you've read this far, you've likely experienced amounts of heat and tension comparable to that I felt during the entire two-hour length of Swimming Pool. There's a murder, but by the time it happened I didn't care who lived or died. Swimming Pool is sad proof that the beautiful people of any era made for a lot of baaad pictures.

J'accuse!

the three burials of timothy carey

Timothy Carey is my favorite character actor. His 6' 4" frame and menacing looks got him plenty of work as a noir heavy, and an often uncredited one at that; it's not for nothing that he's listed in the cast for Shock Treatment as "Hulking patient." His scene-chewing walk-ons would be enough to land him in the darker annals of Hollywood legend, a kind of demonic Edward Everett Horton. Imagine for a moment that Carey was born a generation or two sooner and had a recurring role in the Fred and Ginger movies; perhaps Hermes Pan would have recognized a kind of grace in seventy-six inches of mean lank and, on the merits or at knifepoint, given the man a dancing role?




But Carey wasn't your ordinary character actor, and his was not an ordinary career. To crib from the notes I wrote for a brief Timothy Carey film series I curated for a now defunct repertory program in Washington, D.C., : [Carey] was known to go to unusual lengths to get a role. Hoping for a part in Prince Valiant, he donned medieval robes and climbed a fence to brandish a knife at Henry Hathaway. At a casting call for The Godfather, he shot blanks at Francis Ford Coppola, who returned fire with glee. Carey didn’t get either of those parts, though Coppola kept trying to hire him anyway. Not satisfied with chewing somebody else’s scenery, Carey directed himself in the notorious underground film The World’s Greatest Sinner, and upon his death was working on a stage production of a play he called "The Insect Trainer," a salute to the irrepressible creative energy of flatulence.

I recently looked up Timothy Carey in a database of historical newspapers and found a number of intriguing items:

New York Times, May 8, 1957
Missing US Actor is Found

MUNICH, Germany, May 7 (Reuters)--Timothy Carey, 31-year old Hollywood actor who disappeared from his hotel here sunday night, was found gagged and handcuffed on a lonely road outside Munich this morning, the police said here today. They said the actor had hitched a ride in a car driven by two English-speaking men, who held him at gunpoin, robbed him of $40 and finally dumped him by the roadside

One's natural first response is, "What kind of thug holds up Timothy Carey?" My dear fellow American suggests an intimidation level of three Klaus Kinksi's, but I'm not sure that even an unholy trinity of Communist Kinksi's could strike that much reckless fear into the eyes of this fallen American Carey.

But what further intrigued me, upon scrolling reel after reel of virtual microfilm, was that the name Timothy Carey was associated with an uncanny violence in at least two previous iterations.

New York Times, July 5, 1887
SUICIDE OF A VIOLENT WOMAN
Ellen Carey, the wife of a cripple, Timothy Carey, living at Tenth Avenue and One-hundred and Fortieth Street, commited suicide yesterday by taking a dose of rat poison. She had been quarelling all night with her husband, and about 7 o'clock in the morning resorted to force, striking him a severe blow with a stick of wood. She then drank the contents of a teacup, afterward found to have contained poison, and died almost immediately.

The deceased had been known as a woman of violent temper, approaching at times to insanity. During Mr. Cleveland's Administration as Governor she was pardoned from state prison after serving two years of a life sentence for arson. She had been convicted of setting fire to a house belonging to her sister.

Finally, this item, which despite the chronological proximity to the previous tragedy, is, owing to the manner of injury, unlikely to be a document of the widower Carey.

New York Times, September 28, 1897
BICYCLIST FOUND UNCONSCIOUS
Timothy Carey Picked Up Near Vineland, N.J., with a crushed head.
VINELAND, N. J:, Sept. 27.--Timothy Carey, a bicyclist, was found lying unconscious in the middle of the road near this place to-night. His head was badly crushed, and it is probable he will die. His bicycle, a light racing machine, was lying beside him totally wrecked. It is not know how he was hurt.

Good night, sweet three Timothy Careys, and may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

That's no Dialectical Materialism, That's My Wife!

Dušan Makavejev's most famous avant-garde film was inspired by a book called Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis. If that doesn't sound like a fun night out, you've never seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Criterion scored a hit with their release last year of Makaveyev's two best and most notorious films, WR and Sweet Movie. Now they've done us all a service by releasing his first three films in Eclipse Series 18:Dušan Makavejev, Free Radical.

Fellow iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard similarly pushed the celluloid envelope, but while Godard's narrative-busting seemed like so much calculated exercise, Makaveyev's approach was genuinely omnivorous, hungry for ideas and excited about the possibilities of going beyond narrative. "But don't you see how this is connected too?" you can imagine him waving his arms and throwing his shot glass down, drunk on filmmaking.

Dr. Zivojin Aleksic as Criminologist in LOVE AFFAIR, OR THE CASE OF THE MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.
Makaveyev's films came out of and celebrated the sexual revolution with an equal accent on both words of the phrase. Within the first five minutes of Man is Not a Bird (1965) Makaveyev has set up his two major themes: Marxism and sex. After a credit sequence typeset in stark Gill Sans, "Opening remarks on negative aspects of love" offers a Marxist hypnotist itemizing and railing against the local superstitions. This leads into a sequence with a burlesque singer entertaining a rowdy bunch of factory workers. The film is one of his more straightforward but is peppered with striking imagery, as in a car wash that sounds like a roaring tiger.

Love Affair or: the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) is based on a true story, though again Makaveyev's technique is leagues beyond that of Unsolved Mysteries. Part procedural, part collage, this is one of Makaveyev's more conventional works, though where this director is concerned that's a relative statement.

With Innocence Unprotected (1968), Makaveyev lights the fuse that would explode with WR. It is here that he hits his stride with his unclassifiable collage form - not quite fiction, not quite documentary. He wasn't the only one breaking free of narrative structures - Godard, Chris Marker - but nobody did it with this much fun (pace the preciousness of the Czech New Wave) - and this much sex. Here, he takes as his starting point copious amounts of footage from the first Yugoslavian talking picture, the 1942 film Innocence Unprotected. With just stock footage and a series of interviews, Makaveyev made something remarkable — and he was just getting started. He selectively tints and hand-colors sequences of a stiffly photographed, over-acted melodrama and frames it with interviews of surviving cast and crew members, and intercuts these with scenes of bombed-out occupied Belgrade. The effect is something like juxtaposing a Fred and Ginger movie with shots of bread lines. A work of brilliance and passion, sex and politics - and it's hilarious.

The original Innocence was made under German occupation in 1942. It was written, direct by, and stars Aleksic Dragoljub, a stunt man and love interest. Contemporary footage of the grey-haired acrobat show him still unafraid to test the limits of physical endurance. At one point he takes a steel bar and bends it using his teeth as a fulcrum. He spits out the tooth or two that succumb to the show of strength. Cameraman and sound recordist Stevan Miskovic boasts "Our modern cinema today came out of my belly button." Makavejev's most famous films are joyously sexual; Innocence may be less so, though it is no less a celebration of the human body.

the circle theatre

the circle theatre, originally uploaded by a nameless yeast.

A program ca. 1984 from the late, lamented Circle Theatre, now the site of an office building, not a parking garage as the link says. In the '80's, the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that housed The Circle also had a bar (the 21st Amendment, being near 21st Street NW), a science-fiction bookstore and a liquor store. That entire block is gone. View large.

this year in Marienbad

DVD Review: Last Year at Marienbad - Video - Blogcritics
by Pat Padua

Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad is one of the most infamous works of avant-garde cinema. It polarized audiences in its day, when audiences still cared enough to be polarized about an art film. Pauline Kael lamented the "creeping marienbadism" of modern cinema, and given subsequent art-film indulgences you can't really blame her. But is the movie any good? Mariendbad has been unavailable on DVD for years, but thanks to a stunning new transfer from Criterion, a new generation can make up their minds about what did or did not happen last year.

The plot, such as it is, may be little more than high-class melodrama: X (Albertazzi), meets A (Seyrig), at a party and insists he's met her before. The dialogue appears vague and impenetrable: the opening narration is nothing more than a catalogue of a decadent hotel's super-baroque details. But pure cinema takes you through it, literally, as the camera dollies along baroque corridors and follows a shot that may consist of nothing more than two nattily dressed Frenchmen spouting some kind of avant-garde boilerplate ("it was '28 ... or '29"). This subverts conventional narrative, of course, but it's also a celebration of cinema — Resnais and his crew demonstrate that you (if you are a genius surrounded by beautiful people and impeccable craftsmen) Resnais and his crew demonstrate that you can take any old dialogue - say, Alain Robbe-Grillet's - dress and light it and come up with something compelling. Like The Sound and the Fury, you may not know what's happening, but the confident style carries you along - and you will follow that aesthetic anywhere. What is often lost in the controversy about Marienbad and what it means or doesn't mean is that this is simply one of the most beautiful examples of filmmaking ever struck to celluloid. Sacha Vierney's lush black-and-white photography; the handsome pair of Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi; even the man who can't be beat at matchsticks, Sacha Pitoeff, has an otherworldly creepiness that's beautiful; he's no less than the French Timothy Carey. If the film can be taken as an scathing indictment of haut-bourgeoisie values, then it certainly does not eschew beauty, but revels and dreams in it.

Resnais previous and subsequent films were often directly engaged in politics: the Night and Fog of concentration camps, a love affair tinged with politics in Hiroshima mon Amour. But in Marienbad, Resnais puts the real world aside to build something that only seldom is achieved in art: a perfectly imagined, self-contained world. It's a world that's best experienced in full immersion, in a dark theater on a huge screen; but in the absence of that, Criterion's release is essential viewing.

The bonus disc includes two early Resnais documentaries, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), whose tracking shots through vast libraries prefigure Marienbad's camera gymnastics; and Le chant du styrène (1958). Also on board is a half-hour documentary featuring interviews with surviving members of the production team. They were Young Turks working on this production, Resnais included, but their dedication to the project - even though the script mystified many of the participants - were crucial to this masterpiece. In fact, it is through the meticulous craftsmanship that the film is actually less convoluted than it's making. To take one example, a scene where X and A are followed down a long corridor turns out to be assembled from shots of three different corridors. The script girl (Sylvette Baudrot, who still works with Resnais today) helped bring scenes shot months apart into a seamless flow, taking a gesture that Delphine Seyrig makes to turn away in one shot, continue into the second shot, filmed a month later.

how to learn Dutch from movie titles - part 2

More from the book Filmtitels maken by A. Ph. Sterken (Focus, 1950).

the revolution is still boring

DVD Review: A Grin Without a Cat and Inquiring Nuns
by Pat Padua

Director Chris Marker is best known for his masterpiece La Jetee, a 22-minute film consisting almost entirely of still images. This meditation on time and memory, which inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, is one of the very few fiction films in Marker's vast oeuvre. (Less known is the music video he directed for Electronic's "Getting Away With It," which pays homage to La Jetee in its brooding remembrance of things past).

Marker's primary work has been in the documentary genre - but not the documentary as practiced by Ken Burns or even Errol Morris. Rather, Marker is a film essayist. Where La Jetee masterfully edited and juxtaposed the elements of still photographs to fashion a chilling science fiction, his documentary work, at its best, works such magic on the historical and cultural detritus of celluloid. His Sans Soleil (available on an essential Criterion DVD with La Jetee) is the pinnacle of this form, with layers of image and narrative that transcend the ordinary documentary to create a multi-faceted dreamscape of fact.

There may not be a more thorough document of the international student uprisings of 1968 than Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (aka Le Fond de L'air est Rouge). The director/essayist weaves a celluloid tapestry juxtaposing footage of explosives instruction with a television ad where an elderly couple boasts, "Now we're a TWO-set family." Copious tinted stock footage of army training films, pilot's-eye footage of a napalm attack on a village in Vietnam, and of course Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin battle for semiotic significance. But the talking heads (which include the likes of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, natch) and onslaught of revolutionaries fail to incite the fervor of this non-student of the revolution. For the large part (Grin originally ran at what Marker himself admits was a megalomaniacal four hours) the released print is merely three hours) the film lacks the cross-disciplinary layering that makes Sans Soleil so fascinating. While essential classroom viewing, A Grin Without A Cat probably won't interest many outside the academy. But for those who were there in 1968, there's probably plenty of fodder for both sides of the political spectrum.

Inquiring Nuns sounds like a good concept for a half-hour television special: set two young nuns loose on the streets of Chicago asking passersby, "Are you happy?" The problem is that despite the seeming cross-section of the 1968 Chicago zeitgeist - both the hippies and the straight-laced, the religious and the non-believers - there's something about two young nuns asking "Are you happy" that prevents the interviewee from saying anything truly interesting. The respondents who the sisters speak to outside church - fresh after Sunday mass, even - are particularly polite and predictable. Which is too bad, because most of the people they speak to look interesting—you wonder what did the blue-collar worker, the businessman, the African-American grandmother, really think about what was going on in 1968? Many responded that they would be happier if America pulled out of Vietnam but that is all they have to say on the matter.

An occasional score by Philip Glass lends some minor chords to the proceedings but that's the extent of the tension onscreen. More interesting is the bonus material. Interviews with the nuns today reveal that both of them left the order, inspired by the times and each other to question authority (but not their faith) and pave a path that certainly contained more drama than the two television episodes on this DVD.

How to learn Dutch from movie titles

The first in a series of posts taken from the book Filmtitels maken by A. Ph. Sterken (Focus, 1950).



"Hein will be washing."




"Please, we have plenty in the freezer."




"I can see your house from here."

A rat done bit my sister Nell and Space Buddies on the moon!

Slave dogs take on the traits of their owners. A Cosmonaut is doomed to cossack-dance alone in orbit with his Budweiser mascot. The security of American space stations is in terrible disarray. Haunted by the deaths of five puppies during the making of the previous Buds installment, Space Buddies, the latest entry in Disney’s storied talking-dog franchise, offers a cruel vision of contemporary dystopia.

The history of canine space travel begins with the tragedy of Laika, who survied a mere hours into launch. Standing on her long lamed shoulders is Spudnick (the voice of Jason Earles), who begins our tale with a melancollie monologue: "I used to dream of being the first dogmonaut to walk on the moon; and now I dream of going home to my boy Sacha." Russian anomie is quickly dispersed by the gathering of American buds, who leave their owners to unite in a quest to go where no pup has gone before.



A note on methodology. The viewer may observe, Well, dogs can't talk - not in America! The evolution of cinema has fostered increasingly efficient means of anthropomorphism. In this instance, to render the mouths and eyes of children agape in awe and wonder, mouth-shapes were superimposed with a computer on previously non-verbal snouts, and Actors were hired to voice words written by a dues-paying member of the Screenwriter's Guild of America. It is a collaborative effort not unlike that which the pups undertake in their adventure - or folly, as one would have it.

The nearly indistinguishable voice talent (remember, the puppies are not really talking! Otherwise they would be scientific wunderpups and even more exploitable) requires visual and verbal clues to bolster canine individuality. Thus, Buddah (Pushing Daisies' Field Cate) spouts quasi-wisdom along the lines of "You never know how deep a puddle is until you jump in it". Rosebud (Liliana Mumy) is one of them "bitches" you hear about in song and is decked in pink ribbon. She doesn't want to go out in the rain and who could blame her? Budderball (Josh Flitter)'s master is a rich kid who has passed his insatiable appetite down to his furry familiar, whose urges lead him to an accident with a space-food vending machine. B-Dawg (Skyler Gisondo), whose homie is a hip-hop moon-walking white kid, cold lamps the spaceride and he goes, yo, "I would have blinged it out a little." Cultural appropriation gives way to painful introspection as B-Dawg muses during liftoff: "Dad always said I should be a little more down to earth. Why didn't I listen?" Mudbud's (Henry Hodges) owner naturally owns a lily-white couch upon which to splatter his namesake, which may be taken as a metaphor for the onset of menstruation despite the fact that Mudbud's owner is a boy.

These are ingredients for a recipe of delight - or are they? Serve your six-year old niece a single serving of this jimmied cupcake and she will be transfixed and entertained for the duration. But unlike recent examples of class-conscious canine cinema like Wendy and Lucy and Hotel for Dogs, this picture fails to address the current economic crisis. Sure, laugh at how the dog's personalities mirror our own human frailties! Go ahead, sigh a little when the kids come home to find their puppies all gone to the moon! By all means cry when B-Dawg greets Spudnick with a culture-crossing, "fo' shizzle!" Remember that blood bought you those tears, you chief executive bastards.

you're just a sensuous bigfoot

With ol' sasquatch back in the news, it behooves me to give the info-hungry community a brief run-down of my recent cryptozoological-themed viewing.

BIGFOOT TERROR collects four count-em four motion picture features on Sasquatchian themes on a single two-sided DVD. At least half of it is worth the time of the connossieur of bad film.

The title THE CAPTURE OF BIGFOOT (dir. Bill Rebane, 1979) is a bit of a misnomer, since the arctic-furred protagonist seen here is more often known as a Yeti or Abominable Snowman. Sex-craze skiiers and fuzzy-browed bounty hunters are caught in a blanket of snowy acting and writhing with a beast - or two! - on the loose. CAPTURE's is the best-dressed beast on the marquee, but really, what makes this picture worth saving for me can be summed up right here:


In SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED (dir. Michael Findlay, 1974), a pair of fey professors lures a team of coeds to the woods for a weekend of expanded consciousness and exposed cartilage. This motion picture unleashed Hot Butter's smash disco hit "Popcorn" on the world, except that the company that released this DVD couldn't get the rights for it so they subsituted some other generic electronic disco of the time for the unforgettable party before the storm. Redeeming qualities? Probably not, but it made for compelling bad cinema for reasons which I don't recall at the moment.



Lacking both redeeming and compelling qualities is THE SEARCH FOR THE BEAST (dir. R. G. Arledge, 1997) a straight-to-VHS mediocrity unworthy to wash the big feet of even the mediocrities that accompany it. Of some note are a Bigfoot sex scene and what is perhaps the least sexy shower scene ever photographed. Bad Bigfoot!


Last but not least is THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (dir. Harry Winer, 1976) ... which I admit I didn't finish after being warned of a tremendously manipulative and off-topic love story concerning two squirrels. 300 minutes is a lot of Bigfoot, and I had some Bresson next in queue. Still: two mangy thumbs up for the A-side of this quadruple bill; you can send it back with the other side unwatched.


Tangentially related - and alas, the extent of its tangentiality was unknown to me until the program's teleevangelegraphed ending: THE LEGEND OF DESERT BIGFOOT (Dir. Robert Vernon, 1995) an episode of LAST CHANCE DETECTIVES, a series which follows the adventures of pre-teen Christian seekers of truth. High production and family values aside, this was not about Bigfoot at all, but about doing the right thing.

i'm burt lancaster and i approve this makeup

how to purchase and apply makeup, originally uploaded by a nameless yeast.

from the filmstrip "the professional studio girl makeup," produced by a Hollywood company that I think sold cosmetics. I don't have the audio for these filmstrips so I don't know what Burt Lancaster had to say about the product line but I'm sure they're a fine American company peddling the best in American-made consumer goods.