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Dispatches from Occupied Hollywood, No. 3, Portland Edition (Monday, 1 March, 2004) 1 Don't take calls from Courtney Love. 2 Remember (as if I need reminding!!!) cast no one over 18! 3 The most important thing about the '80s rock scene was the drugs and the fact that everyone liked Gus Van Sant movies!!! 4 Don't take calls from Todd Haynes (he made that awful, awful awful Velvet Goldmine!!! Good thing I didn't see it). 5 It would be great if, like, everything in the movie happened all at once, with like long tracking shots that sorta connect everyone all up and stuff, so that everyone can see that the whole grunge rock scene thing was, like, sorta all connected and stuff. 6 Don't take calls from Rozz Rezabek!!! 7 Don't lose that scrapbook again!!! 8 Remember, the very best grunge band of the '80s was Destroy All Blondes!!! Dispatches from Occupied Hollywood, No. 2 (Monday, 9 February, 2004) This past Wednesday marked the one-month anniversary of my relocation from Oregon to Orange County. So, in the tradition of yearbooks, slambooks, and clip shows, I thought I'd run down a list of the highs and lows of the past month. From great trips to the beach to the horrors of apartment hunting, here are the best and worst things about my first thirty-four days in Orange County. WORST: 10. The overly-perky kickboxing instructor who shouted so loudly it actually made my ears ring for hours afterward. 9. Listening to a pair of radio DJ's gripe about how their Hummer H2's are too tall to fit into most parking garages AND their abominable suggestion that current garages should be retrofitted to accommodate those ugly, hideous, earth-killers. 8. Finding out that $1200-a-month apartments in California don't necessarily come equipped with a refrigerator. 7. No more free car washes when it rains. 6. Lack of restaurants catering to vegetarians/ no one understands my "Hail Seitan!" T-shirt. 5. The additional $30/ month "pet rent" demanded by the $1, 200/ month apartment community. (Looks like Heidi is going to have to learn how to flip burgers…) 4. IT'S CALLED TURNING INTO THE NEAREST LEGAL DRIVING LANE, YOU HUMMER-DRIVING SHITHEAD! 3. Getting your strip malls confused and ending up at the gym instead of the Target. 2. Styrofoam. 1. Missing everyone back home. BEST: 10. Frozen bananas dipped in chocolate and covered in nuts. 9. My governor can beat up your governor. 8. You can drive a minimum of 45 mph on any street. 7. The Thai restaurant in Irvine Spectrum with wasabi mashed potatoes. 6. The "severe weather warning" broadcast using the actual Emergency Broadcast System, which alerted Orange County residents that (gasp) it might rain. 5. Zipping down the rainy streets past all the freaked out California drivers in my Oregon car. 4. Hearing "Girlfriend in a Coma," "Such Great Heights," "Debaser" (and other great songs) played on a commercial radio station. 3. Learning Californian: "You should totally go to Trader's to get some snacks for your trip back to Lumberjack Country." "Are you sleepy? You can flake out on that cot if you want." "Are your friends crunchy granola, too?" 2. Sunny, 70 degree February days where you can ride your bike down Huntington Beach and watch the surfers. 1. Scoring a job with the a company as awesome as PADI and meeting all of the very friendly and down-to-earth people who work there. Pucked Over (Monday, 25 January, 2004) Dispatches from Occupied Hollywood, No. 1 (Wednesday, 21 January, 2004) It's Oscar time. And amidst all the hubbub of the various awards, it's easy to overlook some of the fantastic fare that is being released right now in theaters across the country. A case in point is Delroy Linder's latest thriller, The Devil May Care, a masterful example of what may soon be known as "cinema pastiche". It is the kind of edge-of-your-seat, pull-out-all-the-stops, go-for-broke, cutting-edge epic that the Hollywood studios just don't make anymore. They don't have the huevos. There are huevos aplenty here as the film opens on a close-up of a Mexican breakfast. We soon learn that we are in the high-rise apartment of a rising opera star (loosely based on '40's diva Rise Stevens) who is surprised to find that she cannot get a rise out of her husband, tequila sunrise in hand but laying prone across the breakfast table face down in the guacamole. Our heroine calls out several times for her faithful Japanese butler Toshi, before remembering that she had discharged him a few days before. It seems that there was an unfortunate ethno/linguistic misunderstanding. In a lengthy flashback we learn that Toshi had claimed that his employer had lice in her hair. Pointing and proclaiming repeatedly "lice, lice", he so offended the lady that he was shown the door and asked never to return. A short time later, full of guilt and regret, she realized that she had just returned from her sister's wedding. Fearing that her husband was the victim of foul play, and craving a tuna sandwich, she runs outside where she is struck and killed by the No. 4 bus to Yonkers. The plot thickens when it is discovered that she lives in Chicago. The scene moves to Cairo where things really heat up. The Irish Mafia is planning their last big score so they can all retire to Lake Havesu. The Lechowski brothers have other ideas. They steal the heroin in hopes of financing another Matrix movie. The younger Lechowski (played by heart-throb recording artist Billy Babenco) keeps threatening to sing, much to the chagrin of the rest of the hardboiled cast who eventually stick a broom handle up his ass. A tight shot of Babenco's crack reveals the missing crack, but unfortunately no one sees it but the audience. It is another 30 minutes before it is discovered and then all hell breaks loose. Bullets fly, as bodies fall and blood flows like the Euphrates. Violence is never gratuitous in Linder's films but rather fortuitous, as it usually serves to eliminate characters about whom we have just ceased to care. Such is the case here as the scene shifts to a modest home in suburban Minneapolis. There is a knock at the front door and it is opened by the little-seen actress Molly Penfold who is 4'9". Suddenly there is a bright flash of light, and then we are plunged into total darkness in a scene reminiscent of Wait Until Dark, only without Audrey Hepburn. The suspense is unbearable until it is discovered that the film had actually broken and the projector shut down. It is a testament to the power of this film that no one left the theater during this interruption. The fact that I was the only one in the theater at the time only added to the eerie ambience. One thing leads to another and there you have it. The raison d'etre for the modus operandi of Linder's mise-en-scene is revealed in the denouement. To say any more would be to let the cat out of the bag. I could say that Linder has taken the bull by the horns with his doggedly determined independent style thus hastening the swan song for the studio system, but that would be beating a dead horse. Cork Hubbert (Tuesday, 30 September, 2003) When so many great people are dying all around us in 2003 (in recent weeks, Edward Said, Elia Kazan, George Plimpton, Robert Palmer, Donald O'Connor, Gordon Jump, John Ritter), which is quickly coming to seem like some kind of biblical crossroads of death, it's important to remember those who have struggled to make a statement, even if it wasn't "heard" as much as the front page Times obits. Cork was an actor, a comedian, a stand up comic with a political bent, and an unwavering skeptic of the Warren Report. He was a "little person," but also an actor, and he was an actor more than he was a little person. He was a man who worked on his craft. He was in The Ballad of the Sad Café as Cousin Lymon, and he was in the short lived sit-com Not for Publication, which is where I first saw him on the screen; he was movingly cast as Rollo Sweet in Under the Rainbow and starred with Ringo Starr in Caveman, Tom Cruise in Legend, and Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam, all of whom became show biz friends of his. But his first movie was Property, filmed in Portland, Oregon, by director and memoirist Penny Allen with poet Walt Curtis and others, in which Hubbert had a nude scene, and in which his robust sexual dimensions could not be attributed solely to context. Though I only really knew him through friends, I saw him on various occasions when he would return to Portland. I would see him at Berbati, a Greek restaurant and one of the best rock clubs in town, arriving like a king, indifferent to all who gazed upon him wonderingly. He was an actor who lived up to his roles, not down to them, be they public or on the screen, or perhaps even in private. Lives always end with strands untended. It is the survivors who pick up the pieces. But it is also the survivors who fan the flames of memory. Though Cork was a "minor" Hollywood "star," he was also a man, with dreams, desires, doubts, now all dead. Let those who knew him resolve to keep his memory, at least, alive. Profoundly Briggs (Friday, 13 June, 2003)
Yet little noticed at the time was that this intro comprised an adept, detailed history of the drive in theater as a commercial institution. Now, after a detour of a few decades, in which Briggs (real name, John Bloom) left Texas for Manhattan, wrote several more books, became a TV personality and a movie star (in Casino), he returns to his roots as an historian in his new book, Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History! (Universe, 256 pages, $24.95, ISBN 0 7893 0844 4). He does a fantastic job.
Briggs drops the Joe Bob voice for the duration of the book and just provides the facts in a breezy yet still detailed manner. There's not one mention of buzz saw fu. Or any of the fus. The mission of the project is to chronicle the production history and impact of 15 significant films (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Mom and Dad, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, And God Created Woman, The Curse of Frankenstein, Blood Feast, The Wild Bunch, Shaft, Deep Throat, The Exorcist, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Drunken Master, Reservoir Dogs, Crash), the sorts of pictures the French like to call film maudit, and which the late Raymond Durgnat specialized in as a way to needle stuffy Sight and Sound scholars. Briggs laces his detailed histories with numerous surprising facts: Roger Vadim invented the term "discotheque." Gary Sinise's father edited Blood Feast. Not all the essays are a success. I felt that there was something skimpy or unenthusiastic about his essay on Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein. Perhaps he didn't make that great a case to me for the film's influence. Also, each chapter ends with an invitation "for further disturbance," a bibliography and filmography of related films. Unfortunately, this material often just rehashes things he already said in the body of the chapter.
But these are minor complaints. One of the best essays is on Blood Feast. Briggs really captures the feel of that film, but also the feel of how people responded to it, people such as Bill Landis, a Times Square habitué who started a magazine to celebrate Blood Feast and its coevals. Briggs is also very good on Deep Throat, managing to summarize that film's mostly secret history with just the right blend of anecdote and scorn (it seems to be commonly accepted now that Deep Throat was a Mafia production). As it happens I worked in an adult movie theater in the mid-'70s that played Deep Throat almost continuously. Adult theaters were one of the few kinds of movie theaters that were open during the day, and employees were also eligible for "courtesy" admissions to regular theaters, a perfect combination for young film buffs. I believe the theater operator actually owned a print of the film by that time (when he died, they also found prints of films such as 8 1/2 hidden in the theater's "attic"). During the entire time I worked there I never actually watched Deep Throat (still haven't), but I heard parts of its musical score four or five times a day, and its dreadful music (unattached to any specific images) still haunts me. One lyric went something like, "Deep Throat. Deeper than Deep Throat's throat." Ghastly stuff. Briggs's latest book reminds me that I haven't seen a review by him in a long time, and that I miss his wit, world view, and artificial little cosmos of trailer parks and truck stops. All of Joe Bob's reviews must be gathered together in a massive variorum edition with chronology and footnotes, and soon. Dominatrix Reloaded (Friday, 29 May, 2003) We thought that Freres Wachowski were making the liveliest, most advanced science fiction films of their times when in fact they thought they were making the Rocky Horror Picture Show Reloaded. The level of gossip about Larry Wachowski puts to shame the stories about Michael Cimino that circulated a few years ago before finally surfacing in a Vanity Fair article. Polland offers a plea that no one mock Wachowski for his no doubt difficult decision to allegedly change his sex. What's interesting to me, though, is how this revelation about his private life contributes to an understanding of the Matrix series (of which, as a reviewer, I've seen only the first one, thanks to Warner publicists and studio policy, but that's another blog). It's not just the emphasis on Trinity's sexy fetish garb. Wachowski's presumed desire to switch sexes provides an insight into the fluctuating identities of the Matrix world. The morphing and shape shifting that lies at the heart of MatrixWorld now appears born of an agonized discomfort with one's own identity, a turmoil that finds solace in a fantasy world of easy transmutation. That this is also a hazardous world in which being transformed has its hidden dangers and horrible hang-ups suggests that Wachowski has also been reading that dissident on transsexualism Dr. Robert Stoller, whose books on the subject reveal the tense Freudian family dynamic that "causes" transsexualism. Stoller's findings, for what they are worth, are that the actual act of sex change does not "solve" the internal feeling of incorrect gender assignment (but then, Stoller was himself a disciple of the now bankrupt religion of Freud; he also annoyed pro dommes such as Stephanie Locke, whom he wrote about in disguised form in one of his last books, Pain and Passion). But enough digression. The story continues to unfold, and we await the definitive Vanity Fair article, which is no doubt in the works. Elephant Ears (Monday, 26 May, 2003) Van Sant is viewed as a visual stylist, but in truth the real knock against him is that he isn't very patient with craft, and that's the one thing you've got to have patience for in moviemaking. One argument supporting his lack of interest in the visual aspect of films is that Van Sant's movies lack a consistent visual style across a series of cinematographers, unlike the films of Hitchcock, whose Psycho Van Sant recreated and "gay-ified" on rather flimsy grounds. Mr. Van Sant has always seemed to be more interested in a Warholian traveling circus of aspiring models and actors who can hang out in a familiar studio space and be accessible to his projects. Not only that, but historically speaking moviemaking, like live theater, does serve the purpose of expanding one's social life, and the photos of Van Sant in Cannes surrounded by a quartet of young blond actors probably spoke more loudly than the film itself (which I haven't seen yet) about just what he finds so appealing about the movie making process. Even the rather appalled Variety review of Elephant noted that the high school students in the film seemed impossibly model-like. The other running joke against Van Sant in Portland circles is the wish that he would be banned from seeing movies at the Northwest Film Study Center. Every time he goes there for a screening, cinematic disaster ensues. His viewing of Welles's Chimes at Midnight led to his rethinking a then current project, My Own Private Idaho, with disastrous results, i.e., the inclusion of Shakespeare dialogue and a borrowing of the Henry cycle story arc. A few years ago, he once again made a visitation upon the NWFSC where he saw some films by Bela Tarr, which led to the soporific Gerry.One imagines that the attraction that Tarr's "style" holds for Van Sant is that he can avoid style and craft, and claim the "simplicity" of Warhol, but with the cachet of Eastern European art house cinema instead of the patina of the lazy and exploitative world of Warhol, even though the two styles are virtually the same. Curiously, even though the real story on which Gerry is based has a gay component, Van Sant masks it in obscurity, or in the meandering improvisations of the two stars. In Elephant the gay interpretation of the Columbine massacre — that the boys were driven to an interest in Hitler and murder by their exclusion from the fabric of the high school's social life — appears to be unusually overt for him. Again I haven't seen the film, but it sounds like Van Sant is expressing something akin to sympathy for Nazi-loving kid killers. There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the psychology of evil; the Variety review, however, made the film sound like its deadpan style masked a sympathy with them beyond the level of creative empathy. Is there evidence that Columbine duo Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were tortured gay-inclined kids? I thought that particular rumor had been squelched. I would be curious to know why gay directors like Greg Araki or Tom Kalin (Swoon) can get away with celebrations of violent and amoral men while straight helmers like Peckinpah are castigated for their perceived love of violence. They can also get away with child love movies despite a national climate of hysterical fear and loathing of the pedophiles supposedly lurking in every bush. Larry Clark can make films that lovingly celebrate the opportunistic selfishness and succulent bodies of young boys and girls and is praised as an artist. Meanwhile, in the real world, people across America, from Manhattan Beach to upstate New York are railroaded into prison on the flimsy memories of "abused" children. William Friedkin and Paul Verhoeven were castigated and protested for including gay killers in their films. Will a similar protest arise against a film that shows two gay teens massacring scores of their schoolmates? Van Sant's film is only the latest movie to get an inexplicable pass for its weird approval of social violence against youths. But then, the French film festival was probably in no mood to look kindly on a mainstream American film such as Eastwood's Mystic River (though it, too, deals with child abuse) when there was an appealing anti-American film in the running, one that "exposed" the psychic corruption at the heart of the American experience. Once again, Van Sant's remarkable luck saw him to one of cinema's highest accolades in the face of all reason. Hard-working Scribes (Sunday, 25 May, 2003) Yes, I have files like that. I find it most helpful to have with arm's reach all the material I need to make me sound smart. In any case, I pulled out the folder and found Sarris's review, which was published on December 6th, 1973, in the Village Voice. I remembered reading it at the time. In fact, I remember things from 1973 much better than I do events from last week. Sarris's review is amazing. He first offers up a survey of sports films and cites a few recent examples, such as Fat City, all as a prelude to a discussion of the film itself, which he digresses from to discuss the source novel, and make a side journey into his dislike of Catcher in the Rye, whether Gary Cooper "worked" as Lou Gehrig, and the pornography of sentimentality. In the course of about 1000 words Sarris makes reference to Jean Cocteau, Teresa Wright, Jack Twyman, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Sarris wasn't the only one. Most of the reviewers of the day could pack their short reviews with details, knowledge, and wit. Man, the reviewers back then worked hard! And they knew a lot to begin with (they didn't have to do "research" as I do). But all of Sarris's weekly columns were similarly packed. Most of Sarris's reviews for both the Voice and the Observer have not been reprinted (while Kael's merest sentences were rushed into book form). Someone would be doing a great service to we "researchers" by gathering Sarris's complete reviews into one solid book. Film at Eleven friends in focus (Sunday, 2 March, 2003) Biographical dictionaries (Friday, 17 January, 2003) The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf, 963 pages, $35, ISBN 0 375 41128 3) is Thomson's magnum opus, now revised for the fourth time, and it offers the pleasures and the perplexities of its earlier incarnations. The first version appeared in 1975, then with revisions and additions in 1980 and 1994. The 2002 edition features some 1,300 brief essays and considerations of directors, stars, producers, and even a few critics. Sadly, there is no one definitive one-volume film reference for readers, and never will be, because personal expression is defeated by the obligation to amass a fortune of statistics. Indeed, there may be no need for such a volume at all, given the abundance of reference materials on the Internet, if all you want to do is figure out if Bogart's The Harder They Fall came out before or after Sirocco. Instead, Thomson's book is meant to be read in bed or bath, or under the reading lamp in the still of night, where you can engage in a dialogue with his cranky opinions and dismissals. Though about as old as his '70s brethren, Thomson sounds much older—disgruntle, disappointed—and you get the impression that Thomson doesn't really like movies much anymore. He certainly doesn't like what John Ford, for example, "did" to the movies, and in the introduction he even comes right out and says that books are better than movies. What, then, compelled Thomson to update this book? He has a tendency to over-praise friends (James Toback, Edward R. Pressman) and to spoil endings (he never fails to mention that so-and-so played "the murderer" in this or that thriller). For so felicitous a writer, sometimes his images don't make any sense (Michelle Pfeiffer's face "seemed to know the effect of humidity"), while in other passages he is incisive (Al Pacino, in one of the book's longer essays, has "learned to be seductive [but] cannot rid himself of that faint edge of the sinister"). What Thomson is good at the thumbnail sketch, the one sentence appraisal, on everyone from Jean Harlow ("Her neglect of underwear seemed aggressive just because her breasts and the oceanic roll of her hips were so mature") to Madonna ("She is disappointed about something, and hugely driven by resentment"). He can surprise you with his dislikes, such as Billy Wilder ("He could be ordinary to dull far too often") or Akira Kurosawa ("As to the contemporary Japanese experience, Kurosawa now trails behind a new generation"). Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film is maddening, enthralling, and addictive—but also grossly disappointing. Few old essays are updated, merely appended. And he seems to have little patience for new filmmakers. The most famous item in this book is his one sentence dismissal of Wes Anderson ("Watch this space..."—as if there is really is going to be another edition of this book), but there is an equally short citation for Richard Donner. Surely they aren't equivalent? The best assessement—the most thorough, the most sympathetic, the most disappointed—appears in the new Film Comment, for January-February, 2003. Written by Kent Jones, the essay is born of close study of the book and heightened familiarity with all its previous iterations. Though reading the self-regarding Film Comment continues to be a madly frustrating experience, with its layout in which you cannot tell where an article begins, its impenetrable contents page, and its host of Kaelesque prose stylists who all sound exactly the same, occasionally the publication rises to the occasion and this is one of them. I took have been a fan of Thomson back since the days when he reviewed for the Boston Real Paper and have been disappointed in recent years by his dyspepsia and the resultant compromises in his views brought on by tangential associations with the movie industry. It's a pleasure to read a fully informed critique of such a massive book (though Jones is one of those FC writers who sounds like all the others, either through careful screening or heavy editing). I've read Jones's article twice already and he make so many provocative statements not directly chained to his Thomson thesis ("the demise of plush movie houses and the increasing importance of tape and DVD…have done so much to democratize movie culture and force us to see movies as objects rather than as experiences") that the essay itself deserves. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Tuesday, 14 January, 2003) Critic, heal thyself (Monday, 13 January, 2003) Lights, action, cameraman (Friday, 10 January, 2003) Film at Eleven In Focus (Wednesday, 1 January, 2003) Stranger on a screen (Friday, 27 December, 2002) A look into Jane Sloan's massive and normally complete bibliography unearthed nothing (it may have been there, I just didn't see it). But a visit to IMDB revealed that in fact there are alternate versions of the film, and what TMC had been showing was the British version, which does end before the minister sequence. There are two other distinguishing characteristics. The first, which I missed, is a longer first encounter between Bruno and Guy on the train, and features more gay flirtation. The second shows a shot of Guy opening a drawer to get the map Bruno sketched before he sneaks out of his apartment, which, upon reflection, I noted and didn't think anything about at the time, even though I have seen the film at least 10 times one way or another and never seen that scene before. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 16 December, 2002) Fire the theater (Thursday, 12 December, 2002) In any case, the advance screening of Two Weeks Notice for critics was chaos. First, as usual these days, the screening wasn't just for the critics but also for selected members of the public, who got in via a radio tie in giveaway. But when the radio people cleared out, they left behind their shiny signs taped to the screen, and I had to spend the first five minutes of the movie trying to find someone to get the reflective material removed. Next, a drunk in a train engineer's hat and an untucked flannel shirt over a white T-shirt decided to start talking. When people tried to shush him he cursed at them and said he had a right to talk. The next seven minutes of the film were spent finding a theater manager to deal with this (they did; the guy was thrown out, but not before threatening the lives of the theater staff). Finally, the old and overweight, possibly retarded freeloaders in the row behind me decided that they were in their living room and felt they could chat with each other accordingly. When I finally told them to be quiet, people behind them told me to shut up and turn around. There is no justice in the world. For some reasons publicists continually book advance screenings at this theater, which is called the Tigard Cinemas. All the publicists who service my town actually live in Seattle and so perhaps they don't know that telling the critics to go to Tigard to see a film is like telling them to go to California to see it—the theater is about 20 minutes or more away from almost all the reviewers I know. Worse, this is a poorly run theater in the so-called Regal chain, and I've never attended a screening there when something didn't go wrong, either on the screen or in the audience. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 9 December, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 2 December, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 25 November, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 18 November, 2002) Location, location, location (Sunday, 10 November, 2002) Santa Monica Press is at it again with the latest entry in the genre, Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco (286 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1 891661 27 2), by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal. A blend of frame enlargements, studio photos, and contemporary snapshots of SF street scenes, the book is a delicious dip for film fans and Hitchcock freaks. About the 50th book on Hitchcock to be published since 1997, it focuses on Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, The Birds, with side forays toward Psycho, Marnie, Topaz and a few other films that have bits shot in Northern California. There are photographs in this book that even the most diligent Hitchcock student has never seen. Also, given the shear logistical nightmare of location shooting, it's a grim reminder of just how hard it is to make movies. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 21 October, 2002) Heat (Monday, 14 October, 2002) One of the good things about the BFI series is that the format allows the writers to speak personally about their relationship with the film under discussion, defying modern critical theory that seems to suggest that, because there is no author, they is also no reader, or reader response, either. "It's treatment of work, destiny, and male identity—themes rehearsed with fierce solemnity by its two stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino—moves me to a stronger degree than anything in most of the art-house films of the 1990s," James notes, and then goes on to walk the reader through the film, making numerous close-reading connections, and with side trips into such topics as the real life bank robbery case that followed in the wake of the film, and the TV movie (L.A. Takedown) that preceded Heat. American readers of James's book should be aware that Mann's Thief is based on a book called The Home Invaders here in America. It's funny, because the book is about guys who rob houses, while in the movie Caan's character goes out of his way to assert that he does not do "home invasions." In a film that is basically a Shakespearean tragedy, for me the worst moment comes when Waingro disappears amid the trucks at the diner, because I know that from that point on it is all downhill for most of the characters. By the way, the script to Heat is easily available in PDF form, most easily via www.JoBlo.com. Curiously, just as I finished the book I stumbled upon Mann's re-entry into series television, Robbery Homicide Division starring Tom Sizemore, and broadcast on NBC Friday nights. The show seems to be an outgrowth or a return to the concerns of Heat. Sizemore, who was also in the film, seems to be doing a Pacino impression, such as leaning in to whisper in a suspect's ear. But Sizemore is good: very intense and much like the film's Vincent Hanna, but without the private life (yet). The show seems to be filmed on video to create a sense of urgency, or a Cops feel. There was one nice moment in an early episode when Sizemore and Co. burst into the bad guy's apartment and instead of the room being a pig sty as would usually be the case in a cop show, it was unusually neat and orderly, as if the man were still in prison (you'd have to see the show to get the full meaning). The opening few minutes of an early episode was a bravura montage sequence with no dialogue which managed to both introduce all the characters and initiate the action of the show. Unfortunately, RHD is yet another American TV cop show that, for the most part, essentially takes the side of cops and reassures the viewer that they are doing the best they can in trying, thankless circumstances. This is much different from Heat's examination of the dire impact that the life of crime has on the private lives of both crooks and cops. There seem to be about 20 of these shows on TV this season, among them Boomtown, a clever show by Graham Yost of Seed fame that takes a Tarantino-esque (or The Killing-esque) approach to its stories. But all these shows seem to be rife with sentimentality about the private lives of the cops, who suffer so that we can live safely. This sentimental crap is derived from the soap opera sentimentality of Hill Street Blues. Another recent cop show, however, called The Shield, takes a harder look at the subject, as its central character is a corrupt cop. It's an interesting show, but it is yet another program that relies on the counterpoint subplot that comments (or distracts) from the main story line, so that in effect you get two divergent half hour shows shuffled together; one episode with a parallel story about the investigation of a psychic ended up buying into the fraud after spending the whole hour ridiculing the psychic's scam. Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Sunday, 13 October, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Sunday, 29 September, 2002) Film at Eleven on line (Thursday, 26 September, 2002) Squint (Tuesday, 3 September, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 30 August, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 23 August, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 17 August, 2002) Reign of Fuego (Thursday, 15 August, 2002) Let us chant: "Thermodynamics are not optional." "Thermodynamics are not optional." "Thermodynamics are not optional." The "choking on bad science" portion of Reign of Fire is that they eat ash. Ash is the result of combustion, so every last chemical bond has been broken and rearranged into it's simplest form, releasing all the heat stored in those bonds. This means there is no energy to be had from ash. Because there is no energy there, no creature lives on combustion products. Large creatures eat very complex organic matter (plants and animals) and turn it into extremely homogenized organic matter (crap). We get all our energy from this break down of complex to simple—we basically eat entropy. Although the dream of a kind-bud sprouting from the ash of a long unused pipe is comforting it simply will not happen. And dragons do not feed on ash in this universe. Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 2 August, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 26 July, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 22 July, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 19 July, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 15 July, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 12 July, 2002) Another minority report (Monday, 8 July, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 5 July, 2002) Cinemonkey at DVDTalk (Friday, 28 June, 2002) Cinemonkey in the DVDJ (Monday, 24 June, 2002) Cinemonkey in DVDTalk (Friday, 21 June, 2002) Cinemonkey in DVDTalk (Friday, 14 June, 2002) Cinemonkey in DVDTalk (Friday, 7 June, 2002) June musings (Saturday, 1 June, 2002) So, once again, I am noting how an overbooked dance card prevents me from the daily meditations in this diary that I so enjoy. I look at my desk, for example, and there are no less than four new books and one semi-new book on Hitchcock, one on film noir, two on Kubrick, one on Lynch, and numerous other on other aspects of cinema that I want to dig into. Unfortunately, until this book is done, I must live my intellectual life at a snail's pace. [Those interested in the January through May musings may click here diary, or visit the Nocturnal Admissions page.] Welcome to the Cinemonkey home page Cinemonkey is dedicated to film, literature, and the media ... but then, what else is there? This web site is a continuation of Cinemonkey : A Serious Film Journal, the short lived magazine that burned brightly if briefly in the late '70s. Edited by D K Holm and Carl Bennett, and designed by Bennett, Cinemonkeywas auteurist in orientation and muckraking in tone. So is this web site. We invite you to peruse the opinions of our reviewers, and respond to them in our film chat forum, where you can discuss auxiliary elements such as Sid Falco's media reviews, and our "Directors Project," which will expand with time to include a critical ranking of filmmakers who have made their debut since 1971. |
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inemonkey.com recently came upon director Gus Van Sant's memo to himself about his latest project, to be filmed in Portland, Oregon, about grunge rock in the 1980s, or variously, the Kurt Cobain story. On Sunday, 29 February, 2004, Van Sant's team staged an open casting call in Portland to round up some fresh faces for the project. The memo reads: 
ur friend and fellow film buff Megan Denny moved to Los Angeles recently, and sends in this top ten list first report about her life down there:
hen I interviewed screenwriter Mike Rich for Creative Screenwriting several years ago, he was on top of the world. He'd just written Finding Forrester and then went on to do The Rookie and more recently Radio (which I didn't like too much; see 
e preferred to be called Cork, though his name was Corky Hubbert. He didn't want that diminutive "Corky," which would cast him in an already small light. He was an actor, living in Hollywood, who died sometime on Sunday, presumably quietly in his sleep from complications due to diabetes, though everyone who knew him knew that he was not "quiet" in his sleep.
've loved Joe Bob Briggs since page two of the introduction to Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In. That's where Briggs makes a series of Wizard-stepping-from-behind-the-curtain jokes that had me laughing out loud. He's a fine prose stylist and a hilarious writer (I associate him in my mind with another funny film oriented writer, Joe Queenan), and that first collection of movie reviews is a great stand alone anthology.
few weeks ago I had occasion to write a review of the DVD release of Bang the Drum Slowly for MoviePoopShoot.com. As is often the case, I decided to do a little research on the film, which I hadn't seen since it came out almost 30 years ago. So I pulled out the file folder of Andrew Sarris reviews for 1973.
riend of Film at Eleven Eric Edwards, cinematographer for many prominent films, is the subject of a 
ust when you think the field is tapped out, there's a new genre in film studies. I guess you'd call it Location Studies. Basically the subject matter is the real city in the background of artificial stories shot on location. The first one I saw was James Sanders superb, almost epical book Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (Knopf, 498 pages, $45, ISBN 0 394 57062 6), which came out not too long before the events of 9/11, and should be out in paperback soon. The next one I saw was the earlier book, John Bengtson's Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood in the Films of Buster Keaton (Santa Monica Press, 232 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1 891661 06 X), which tackles the monumental task of comparing and contrasting scenes from Keaton's films and collating them with the actual settings today. I've only been to Los Angeles a few times, but the book makes me feel nostalgic. The author is even able to find specific rock formations that have little changed in almost 100 years.
he latest batch of BFI Film Classics and Modern Classics has arrived from the University of California Press, and among them is Nick James's monograph on Michael Mann's star-studded and influential Heat, one of my favorite movies, and his. James is the editor of Sight and Sound, and in that capacity perhaps has a Droit du Seigneur that other writers might not have to compose a book on an unlikely addition to the series of Modern Classics. Which is our good luck, because James makes a stirring case for the film.
e sure to read Cinemonkey.com contributor Ian McCullough's thoughtful analysis of the science in