in search of moebius…

The legendary comics illustrator Jean “Moebius” Giraud died this weekend.  His influence on the world of pop culture can’t be overstated.  Even if you’ve never seen any of his artwork in Métal Hurlant magazine (Heavy Metal in the States) or anywhere else, you’ve probably seen his graphic design work in such as films as Alien (the spacesuits worn by the crew of the Nostromo), Tron (concept artist), The Abyss (concept artist), and The Fifth Element (designer).  Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (my favorite science fiction film) is heavily indebted to Moebius as well: the crazily busy cityscape was inspired by the one from the classic story “The Long Tomorrow,” a collaboration between Moebius and American screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (who would later write Alien).

There’s a great little documentary about Moebius from a few years back, Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures aka In Search of Moebius, that aired on the BBC and that I’ve included below.  Great stuff for anyone with even a passing interest in this stuff.

natural born losers: bust, slide, and the max

Musicians regularly get together and jam.  It’s not always serious.  Sometimes it’s just jazzing about, goofing off, making shit up while still searching for a note, a thread, a pathway to something viable.  Actors do the same thing through improvisation.  Comedians too.

Writers, however, are rarely thought of as improvisers in the same way.  The obvious difference is that writing is a solitary vocation and they’re usually not open to input from family, friends, and colleagues until well into revision stage.  To put it bluntly, most writers simply don’t play well with others.

Collaboration still occurs between writers though.  I’ve always wondered how those things work when two hot-shot novelists get together.  Do they sit in the same cramped room together bashing the keys?  Does one type while the other dictates, then they switch roles at the end of every chapter?

I figure what ever way crime writers Ken Bruen and Jason Starr managed the practicality of writing their Max & Angela trilogy, they sure as hell had a great time doing it.  All three Hard Case Crime mass market paperbacks–Bust, published in 2006; Slide, published in 2007; The Max, published in 2008–feel like two writers having a laugh.  It feels like a lark and I haven’t giggled so hard reading in a long time.  The humor, though, is dark.  This is caustic stuff, but always hilarious.

“Max was barely listening to the rabbi’s eulogy, but when he realized that everyone was breaking down in tears, he knew he had to show some reaction.”

Bust is the most traditionally noir of the three.  It introduces our two anti-heroes–schlubby middle-aged businessman Max Fisher and his busty unqualified assistant and mistress Angela Petrakos–and digs a hole deep for the both of them.  Neither one of them is smart, to put it nicely, and part of the diabolical fun of the novel is watching these two overconfident idiots get themselves into terrible situations and… get into worse situations.

Max wants to knock off his wife.  He hires a sketchy Irishman with mangled lips (they were cut with a broken bottle) named Popeye to do the deed.  Popeye claims to be a professional killer, that’s why Angela brought him to Max in the first place.  It should go off without a hitch, but hardly anything goes right and when Max’s wife is horribly murdered it sets off a chain of misfortune that would make the Coen brothers’ heads spin.

Novels like Bust, including the rest of the series, are essentially perverse reads.  The comedy arises from events that are truly terrible–beatings, murder, kidnapping, and a whole lot of other nasty business.  The worse it gets and the farther Max and Angela descend into the pit, the funnier it is.  Max is the worst offender of the two.  He’s arrogant, delusional, and sociopathic.  He’s one loathsome character, but he’s also funny because he’s completely clueless about how bad he really is.  And as we move through the subsequent books, Max gives into those negative characteristics even more.  Angela, a half-Irish-half-Greek American bombshell, is horrible in a whole different way.  She’s certainly amoral, dumb, and gold-digging.  But I think her worst trait is her horrible taste in men.  When it comes to hooking-up, the woman would bed a rock if she thought she could squeeze some gold out of it.

“Max’s big problem was, despite all he’d been through over the past few months, his ego was all there.  He might’ve looked like a cesspool on the outside, but inside, he was still the same happening, suave, debonair, hip Max Fisher he’d always been.”

Slide picks up a year after the events in Bust.  Max aka The M.A.X. is now a “big time” coke dealer living in a Manhattan penthouse apartment with his new mistress Felicia (a stripper Max pays to be with him) and his in-house sushi chef.  He’s living the American Dream, or so he believes.  Maybe he’s just watched Scarface too many times.  Angela has fled to Ireland, her ancestral homeland, in hopes of riding the Celtic Tiger to wealth and fame.  But the economic boom has flat-lined and she gets mixed up with an American culture-loving Irish serial killer named Slide, who originally intended to kidnap and murder Angela when she accosted him on a Dublin street.  He quickly feels that she’s a kindred spirit and Angela, as per her usual routine with bad men, gets stuck with another loser… albeit a very scary, fucked up one.

I missed not having Max and Angela interact like they did in the first novel, but I thoroughly appreciate that Bruen and Starr don’t repeat themselves.  No fun in that.  And while Bust was undoubtedly a comedic book, it still very much adhered to noir tropes in a straightforward manner.  Slide‘s plot is looser.  It feels like a free-for-all at times… not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It feels like two writers jamming.

I don’t know how Bruen and Starr actually divided the work load, but you get the feeling that each one tried to set up the other one with improbable (and hilarious) plot complications and then said, “Now, try to get out of that one!”  It feels improvisatory to some degree.  If you go in looking for a ruthlessly plotted suspense tale, you may throw down the book in frustration.  It is suspenseful and quite the page-turner, but this is even more of a lark, and an outrageous one at that.  The transformation of Max into The M.A.X. is indeed a sight to behold.

“You got The M.A.X., you don’t need nothin’ else, dig?”

If The Max was a song, it would be turned to 11.  This is one hysterically over-the-top book and slightly better than the second one because it amps everything up to an even more ridiculous level.  This kind of far-fetched plotting is understandably not for everyone.  And The Max is really out there: The M.A.X. is now in prison, Attica, and reality is crashing down on him hard.  Angela is now in Greece, her other ancestral homeland (Ireland didn’t work out too well), and trying to live the high life with no money.  She gets involved with a suave grifting Englishman, Sebastian, who comes from money but doesn’t have any, and the two set off a domino effect of mayhem that will travel halfway ’round the world and end up intersecting with Max at Attica.  Toss in a desperate midlist crime writer who wants to write a biography of Max, plenty of crime genre/writing biz in-jokes, loads of politically incorrect humor, and you’ve got yourself another Hard Case winner.

All noir fiction straddles a line between humor and horror, tragedy and comedy.  If the existential odds are stacked up too high against our poor sap protagonist, a writer runs the risk of alienating their reader, pushing them too far.  There’s only so much trouble a character (and a reader) can take.  Maybe the size of one’s ego determines how far you can shove them closer to the void.  Max–who is oblivious in the first book but turns into a monstrous caricature by the second one and insanely destructive by the third–is unlike any fictional character I’ve ever run across.  At times he comes across like a sociopathic Elmer Fudd… a cartoon character with malicious intent who thinks he’s Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, or Al Pacino in DePalma’s Scarface remake.  The latter comes up a lot in Slide, since Max watches it all the time and tries to pattern his gangsta-lite persona on Pacino to become the de facto King of New York.

Or so he imagines.

If there’s one major theme running through these novels, it’s self-delusion… of characters not being able to see themselves clearly, of being unable to deal with reality truthfully.  For all of the gratuitous violence and extreme situations Bruen and Starr wallow in, they are completely insightful about this negative trait in us.  Everyone is capable of self-delusion.  I couldn’t help, however, seeing this as an exaggerated (because everything in these books is cranked up really high) examination of a specific strain of American self-delusion.  If the last ten years has taught us anything (you did learn this lesson, right?), it’s that American exceptionalism is a fantasy.  You can believe all you want that Americans are inherently different from everyone else in the world.  But that kind of destructive thinking only works so long and only within the borders of fortress America.  Go out into the world–and I’m not even talking the “exotic” Third World–and try acting like a know-it-all exceptional American.  Try it.  See how far it gets you on your crusade to win friends and influence people.

Max and Angela are American self-delusion personified.  Max adopts personas (badly) throughout the books–loving husband, good boss, ladies’ man, murderer, drug kingpin, gangsta, convict, genius.  He is incapable of being authentic, incapable of being what he truly is.  The frighteningly funny depth of his psychosis is brilliantly shown in how he reacts in the aftermath of his wife’s murder.  He eventually convinces himself that he didn’t hire Popeye and that he was the real victim of the whole affair, not his dead wife.  Max was the one suffering.

Angela’s delusions are more normal… for what it’s worth.  She’s dumb as hell, but she’s aggressive about living the good life.  Unfortunately, she’s not very good at attaining what she wants.  But damn if she doesn’t keep trying.  That’s what you call a real American can-do spirit!  Which is not a bad thing, mind you.  She’s a survivor, no doubt about it.

These are not sympathetic characters.  They don’t need to be.  The only thing that matters in fiction is that the characters are engaging.  Noir has always traded on that… not catering to good taste or offering up vanilla protagonists for fear of alienating readers/viewers.  The only moral or decent characters in this book–less than a handful–end up either dead or ineffectual… as it should be when we’re talking noir.

worse things waiting: hard rain falling

Maybe it’s just me, but I think with each passing year it becomes more and more difficult to discover a new favorite book (it goes for movies as well).  You know, the kind of book that immediately gets under your skin and seeps into your DNA.  It happens, but not like it did when I was younger when my taste was still being shaped.  My taste is still changing, I guess, but not like it did when I was in my formative years.  I’m more confident in what I like now and certain in what I hate.  I know what I like and try to stay away from things I don’t in other words.  Life is short and there’s no time to waste exploring the movies of Larry the Cable Guy or the novels of Chuck Palahniuk.

But this blog post isn’t about what I hate.  It’s about what I love.  I’ve fallen in love with the late Don Carpenter.  Well, that’s not exactly right.  I’ve fallen in love with Carpenter’s first novel, Hard Rain Falling, originally published in 1966.  The book isn’t long (it runs only 308 pages), but it feels epic in its modest way.  It feels like a personal epic, charting the life of a petty criminal named Jack Levitt as he roams the pool halls of Portland, Oregon (my hometown) in the late 1940s to his time in San Francisco and prison in the 1950s to his post-prison years in Frisco where he marries a wealthy woman and tries to go straight.  That’s its basic plot.  The novel’s misfit characters, its seedy setting, and the cleanness of Carpenter’s otherwise muscular prose would make for the prime ingredients of a crime novel.  But as writer George Pelecanos points out in his fine introduction to the New York Review Books edition, this isn’t a crime novel although it partly deals with criminals and their milieu.

The real dramatic weight of the book, however, is about male bonding and the struggle of standing tall when the weight of the world aims to crush you.  It’s about existing at the bottom of it all.  It’s about realizing you’re fucked but that you still have to get on with it every goddamn day.  So you try to have a good time while the seconds tick down.  Because whether you’re a rich man or a poor man, a law-abiding citizen or a thief, a God-fearing man or a non-believer—you’re going to die.  Everything you once believed in, everything you ever accomplished, everything you ever dreamed of doing, won’t matter in the end.  That’s so obvious it’s simplistic and stupid of me to even focus on it, but every day most of us live our lives in denial of that simple fact.  It’s understandable why most of us don’t fixate on it every day.  We have jobs, families, loved ones, and obligations to focus on.  To contemplate too much on the impermanence of our lives would be morbid and selfish and unhealthy.

Carpenter paints a harsh world for his characters.  Hard Rain Falling deals with the same thematic elements that noir writers like Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, and James M. Cain regularly dealt with.  Carpenter, though, isn’t interested in tying the narrative to melodrama, which was something noir writers routinely did.  I rather enjoy melodrama and there’s nothing wrong with a writer going for outsized emotion if it’s handled with commitment.  But that’s not this book.  This is a page-turner in its way, though it’s a character-driven one and plot is always incidental to the emotional momentum built up from what happens to Jack throughout the book.  At the heart of this story is, surprisingly enough, a love story between Jack and a black pool hustler named Billy Lancing.  The two first meet in Portland at a pool hall and there’s plenty of racial tension in those scenes.  They are not fast friends.  Years go by and both men go through their own significant struggles in life.  They both wind up at San Quentin Prison, become cell mates, and eventually lovers.  It’s powerful stuff… and emotional.  Their relationship, which peaks roughly halfway through the book, nevertheless underlies everything Jack does afterward when he’s back on the outside trying to keep his shit together in San Francisco.  The final act of the book almost feels far-fetched… melodramatic.  Jack the pauper and ex-con falls into the realm of the fast-living moneyed, and he scrambles to hang on when he becomes romantically involved with a quick-witted beautiful rich woman.  What started as a naturalistic post-World War II novel thoroughly in the hard-boiled tradition segues into a picaresque tale with a subtle absurdest edge as it cruises into the 1960s.

There’s no sentimentality here, no melodrama to distance us from the pain.  There’s nothing false to comfort us along the way.  There’s no bullshit. Carpenter isn’t Woolrich or Goodis or any of the other noir writers that when at their best turned being on the skids into dark poetry.  Carpenter eschews any pretense toward doomed romanticism, instead writing about his losers and bums and criminals with clear-eyed realism.  There’s a real tenderness running through the novel, however, particularly in the second half.  Underneath the book’s hard exterior, underneath the toughness of its prose, underneath its snarl, is an insight and sensitivity that haunted me long after I finished it.

It’s wise about the world.  It’s wise about people like us.  And I can already tell this one won’t be too far from my grasp no matter where I end up in the world.

That’s a damn good feeling to have.  Let’s hope that the NYRB will republish more of Carpenter’s work.  It’s too vital and honest to be forgotten.

random moments in film criticism #3

I finally got my copy of When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, the first collection of Dave Kehr’s writing from his years as the head film critic at the Chicago Reader.  I couldn’t be happier, although I’m sure if someone told me that an intact print of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons had been discovered in a steamer trunk in Peru or that the latest Dario Argento movie was actually pretty good, that would make my day as well.  But there’s something about reading great criticism that’s… well, it opens the pores and scrubs out the cobwebs of the mind.  It sharpens you up to see and think in new ways, to engage with not only movies (or books or whatever) with a fresh insight, but to deal with the world outside of the frame in a renewed manner.  It’s not simply about finding out if the critic liked or disliked a movie.  It’s about understanding how the critic engaged with it and if you as a reader and watcher can engage with the work on your own terms.  A great critic doesn’t shut down the argument; they keep it evolving and widen participation.

I know how we physically engage with movies is drastically changing, as is the very definition of what a movie is nowadays, or at least it seems to be.  Film criticism has significantly changed with it.  Note that I don’t think it’s getting worse or better necessarily.  It’s just changed and evolved into something different.  As print movie journalism has dwarfed in recent years, quite alarmingly so, movie blogs catering to all persuasions have flourished as well, like weeds sprouting in the concrete fissures of an abandoned parking lot.  I think that aspects of the change, for instance the proliferation of well-informed and well-written blogs by amateurs and pros alike, is great.  What’s not so fantastic is the disintegration of intelligent movie criticism that is aimed at a large audience that was regularly found in magazines and newspapers in the 1970s or even in the 1980s, the decade when I first started reading film criticism.  It’s all niche-driven now, like most things.  As Kehr points out in his introduction, there is academic writing on one side and mainstream writing on the other and the two rarely if ever meet in the middle.  That’s a shame.  I’m not even going to touch upon the overflow of so-called fanboy blogs, which seem from afar to be nothing more than extensions of studio marketing divisions.  But plenty of movie reviewers on mainstream sites and in print publications also seem to be uncritical minions for p.r. departments.  The ability to talk to a wide audience about complex ideas intelligently though without obfuscating meaning with distracting jargon seems like a rare talent.

Which is why Kehr’s book is worth picking up and should make anyone happy who still cares about the cinematic medium and good writing.  Reading his 1978 review for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, a film I know well, made me want to put down the book and immediately pop the Blu-ray on.  Almost, I say, because then that would have required me to stop reading… no way was I going to do that.  Kehr’s examination of how the film utilizes Old Testament myths for its own narrative purposes is far more enlightening, but the following passage nevertheless evokes clear, resonant images in my mind.

“Days of Heaven is a uniquely palpable film: the breath of the wind, the texture of the grain, light snow melting on a woman’s hair—we see, we hear, but somehow, we touch, too.  Nester Almendros’s prickly-sharp cinematography (the film was made in 70mm, but, unfortunately, is playing Chicago in only 35mm) finds its match in the crispness and subtlety of the Dolby sound.  Crickets sing, a windmill hums, and the image is opened up.  One of the most moving moments in the film occurs as the farmer (Sam Shepard) rolls a blade of wheat between his fingers, testing its ripeness.  The chaff crinkles off, and the farmer blows it away with a light, delicate breath.  In that second, the screen dissolves: not simply sound and image, the film becomes touch, taste, and smell.”

I guess I know what I’m re-watching later this evening.  After I finish the book, of course.

random moments in film criticism #2

“The pure horror movie would be that in which the forces of evil succeeded in taking over, the one they would themselves direct: pure, and therefore unrealizable.  Carmilla, the gorgeous undead girl (invented by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu) who infiltrated bourgeois households in Blood and Roses and The Vampire Lovers, was the advance agent for a New Order, but you would never get to see what sort of a world that would be.  There would never be The Last Man on Earth II, detailing what happened on virus-ridden Earth in the aftermath of Sidney Salkow’s unforgettably downbeat 1964 production, after there was no one left except vampires.  The inheritors, in such a scenario, would propose a ravenous alternative dispensation, in which the lords of chaos in their unrestrained domesticity could give themselves over to a voracity without end.”

The evocative passage above was by the writer/critic/editor Geoffrey O’Brien and taken from his superb, impressionistic analysis of movies and memory, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century, originally published in 1993.  It’s not a traditional critical examination at all, but it’s brilliantly written and contains many insights that keep me going back to it all these years later.  Reading the above paragraph immediately reminded me of the movie below.

The video clip is taken from the experimental movie Begotten, directed by E. Elias Merhige, from 1991.  It’s not really a horror movie, although it contains plenty of macabre imagery and feels unwholesome in that way only the best horror movies can exude.  It looks and feels as if it had been unearthed from ancient soil and screened as a sacrament to unnameable gods.  It feels like something they would screen for themselves for a night of entertainment, when their bellies were too bloated to continue their ritualistic sacrifices.

random moments in film criticism #1

“The Getaway is an utter bore.  A failure as drama, as film, as entertainment.  It is morally corrupt, artistically arid, conceptually outdated and in sum as thoroughly unredeemable a piece of shit as has been released this year, and the horror and wonder of it, is that it came from such massive talents.”

The above quote is from the always outspoken Harlan Ellison, writing in the January 19, 1973 edition of The Staff about Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 crime movie The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw.  The review is collected in the book Harlan Ellison’s Watching.  As good a quote as any to inaugurate this new blog feature.

Below is a scene from the movie, giving you a little taste of what Bloody Sam did best.  If you haven’t seen it before and plan to, you may want to back off.  Plot lines are resolved and not everyone makes it out alive.  Good scene.

ADDITION:

I think you could argue that Ellison is the godfather of the kind of belligerent, smartypants writing that blankets the internet nowadays.  The sort of hostile over-the-top typing that is frequently mistaken for having an opinion.  The big difference is that Ellison could write and he was informed about his opinions.  He harangued the reader, but it came loaded with just as much brains as brawn.  Most of the time.    

the phantom empire #1

Photo © Scott Seymour. All rights reserved.

It’s the dream of every cinephile, I think, to own a cinema.  If not to own their own cinema then, at least, they wish to be employed at a liberal-minded establishment that would allow them to program whatever they wished to screen.  It’s an idea I’ve often fantasized about.  It would be a single screen joint (a huge one, of course, because bigger really is better in this case), project real film (of course), and have excellent sound.  Beer and wine would be available, as well as coffee, tea, and a few soda pops.  Fresh buttered popcorn, black and red licorice, and a couple of chocolate bars would also be offered.  Vintage movie posters, lobby cards, and stills would decorate the walls of the foyer, and the place would definitely have an old fashioned neon marquee out front above the glass ticket booth.  The place would seat about 425 people.  Old trailers would be shown before every movie, a cartoon also (Looney Tunes, the Fleischer brothers’ Popeye the Sailor cartoons from the 1930s, and Tom and Jerry), and appropriate soundtrack music would play before each feature as people found their seats.  A different double-feature would appear every couple nights.  Friday and Saturday nights would have midnight movies.  Late mornings and afternoons on the weekends would show kid-friendly fare.  There would also be theme weeks periodically or showcases for a particular actor or director.  No genre would be excluded and discussion/arguments would be encouraged.  I wouldn’t care about profits.  Each double-feature would be $0.99 just like the old Broadway theater in Portland.  The old one.  The rundown one back in the 1980s where I once took a girlfriend on a first date to see Day of the Dead and where I witnessed, with another girlfriend, the subversive horrors of Lynch’s Blue Velvet while I was frying on multiple hits of acid.  Oh, the stamina of youth!

It would be what I imagine the afterlife to be like.

But the challenging thing about the place would be what to show.  I mean, it’s easy to come up with titles.  It’s the order of things I would be concerned about.  A good programmer would serve much like a dj or someone who makes mix discs.  It’s all about the perfect combo, the correct flow of things, and making sure it’s always entertaining.  Unless… you’re trying to fry their little brains or something.

So what would my first double-feature be?

I could go with my favorite films, but I’ll wait to do that later.  I could go with some childhood favorites, but I’ll pass for now.  I’m figuring that the premiere screenings would be in the evening… so no kid movies then.  How about something simple?  Yes, I’ll stick with two easy but pivotal and life-altering choices.  These were two of the earliest films I remember seeing and they, I believe, set me on a path of image intoxication.  I was forever doomed.  And though the love affair with movies has hit snags from time to time, careened down detours leading to nowhere, and occasionally offered only heartbreak (mostly in my teen years, I should emphasize)… it’s been a love affair well worth indulging in.  It’s not like I really have a choice in the matter.  I am forever doomed after all.

The first film screened would be the 1931 Universal horror film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning.  The second feature would be James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, also from Universal.  Like I said, nothing radically adventurous, but they each made significant impressions on me as a child.  In many ways they shaped my future love of the medium and set me on a path of loving horror movies in particular.  I first watched both films with my father when I was around four years old.  Back in the 1970s there used to be a Creature Features-type horror movie program on KATU in Portland, Oregon after the news ended on Saturday nights called Sinister Cinema, hosted by Victor Ives.

What could I possibly say about these films that haven’t been said before?  Well, nothing really.  They both contain two iconic monster movie performances, they’re both well-crafted and contain moments of exceptional poetry and beauty (as do many of the early Universal horror productions), but they’re not exactly created equally.  Dracula betrays its stage origins a bit too much for my taste, especially after the initial brilliant cinematic scenes with Renfield (Dwight Frye) journeying to Count Dracula’s Transylvania castle.  Even as a child it slightly bored me.  It doesn’t now, although I’m always a little disappointed at how talky much of the film is.  I guess in the end, I like the later Hammer version better.  However, it never seduced me like Browning’s creation did.  Dracula may not be perfect, but it ensnared me darkly with its images.  Anyway, like so many horror movies, it’s not about the entirety… it’s those individual moments of aesthetic beauty, poetry, and/or genuine terror that reward the patient viewer.

Unlike now, I wasn’t exactly a night owl at the age of four.  But I tried to keep up.  I only made it through the opening few scenes of Dracula… the best part actually.  I nodded off quickly after.  But the image that burned itself into my brain is the moment when I snapped awake to see Renfield laughing maniacally when the authorities discover him inside the hull of the ship carrying Count Dracula to the shores of England.  I think I passed out afterward from the fright.

Frankenstein is even better, although I don’t recall one specific moment that sent me over the edge.  The whole film cast a spell on me–the sets, lighting, music, the monster himself–and the first three Frankenstein films have been favorites of mine ever since.  Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the sequel, is even more effective in its fusion of dark humor, melodrama, visual poetry, and melancholy.  But I didn’t see that film until much later.  This is the one that left its mark on my imagination… and for that I’m thankful.

Back in 1991 or so when I was in my early 20s, Dracula and Frankenstein were both screened at a small theater in NE Portland.  I lived on the other side of the city, didn’t drive, though I made sure I got to the screening.  It was great to finally see both films on the big screen with an appreciative audience of youngsters and older people.  And though I’d seen each of them numerous times over the years via videocassette, each unruly monster seemed to flourish unleashed in the flickering dark before a packed house of eager viewers.  Lugosi and Karloff were reborn.  Resurrected for a whole new generation of monster kids… a reminder to older ones that these cinematic creations still mattered.

By the time I watched these films in the theater, I was already a veteran horror film watcher–from silent classics to Hammer horrors to cannibal holocausts to necromantik evil dead maniac butchers… I had the psychic eyeball scars to prove my cred.  And though these Universal horror films would never be able to compete with their modern day unholy brethren in terms of graphicness or intensity, they did excel when it came to lyricism, imagery, pathos, and wit.  So for nostalgic and artistic reasons, Lugosi and Karloff would open the show… hopefully luring a whole new generation into the phantom empire.*

Stay tuned for further screenings….

 

 

* The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century is a book by critic Geoffrey O’Brien.  It’s sort of an impressionistic, subjective, secret history of the medium–obsessive, fetishistic, and cosmic.  It’s a brilliant piece of writing and one of my favorite non-traditional books about cinema.  I would name my theater in its honor.

 

appearing at the decatur book festival september 5

I’ll be appearing at the AJC Decatur Book Festival this weekend, Sunday at 1:30 in the afternoon on the Emerging Authors stage.  This book festival is the largest independent book fest in the country, so you’re bound to find an author to your taste, a panel worth taking in, or maybe even “discover” a new writer you’ve previously never heard of.  I’m certainly looking forward to it.  Will talk a bit about my first book Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers and do a short signing afterward.

pt anderson blogathon @ moon in the gutter

My film blogging comrade over at Moon in the Gutter, Jeremy Richey, is hosting a P.T. Anderson blogathon September 13-19 and it will no doubt be an entertaining, exciting event.  I’m contributing an essay–not sure which film I’ll be focusing on yet–and I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with.  I wrote a short piece about Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love in my first book, a film that is (I feel) one of the best of the last decade and a rather damn fine romantic comedy at that, so there’s always the temptation to revisit it… maybe do some screengrabs or something.  But I’ve been dying to write about There Will Be Blood since I saw it in January 2008 the day before I left for Europe and then watched again in the Leitrim Cinemobile when I was living in Ireland.  Seriously, some enterprising cinephiles in the States need to bring cinema to the masses with trucks like these.  They’re great.  And they’re warm too, which was surprising since it’s always so damn cold in Ireland year round!  Also, the cool thing about the Leitrim Cinemobile was that it would screen international films and smaller indie fare from the States… not blockbusters.  This was out in the boondocks, mind you.  We didn’t live in the city.  And these were real 35mm prints, not DVDs or digital projections.  Real films, real patrons in seats, and loads of arguments afterward as you scurried down the pub for a few pints.  Make sure to check out the video below that gives you a glimpse of how cool the Leitrim Cinemobile is.  But I digress.

P.T. Anderson.  Blogathon.  Moon in the Gutter.  That has Awesome all over it.

directory of world cinema: american independent and sinescope

It’s been pretty busy around these parts and as the summer crawls forward… it’s only going to get busier as the Terry Gilliam book gets finished and a new book project gets started.  I’m not going to say anything publicly about the latter thingy… but it’s exciting and in time I can be more open about it.

First off, I noticed this evening that my comrade from across the pond, UK film academic/editor/writer John Berra, has been interviewed by Jeremy Richey over at his fabulous site Moon in the Gutter.  I was fortunate to have been able to contribute a number of reviews (and an essay on Yakuza cinema) to both of the books that Berra edited (when not teaching film studies at Sheffield Hellam University), Directory of World Cinema: Japan and Directory of World Cinema: American Independent (both published by Intellect).

The book on Japanese films is now available in the UK and will soon be available in the US.  The American Independent book can now be pre-ordered here.

I also want to mention a project that I’m very happy about.  I’m now a contributing editor and resident film critic at the online arts journal Sinescope.  The site just went up Sunday evening and… well, it’s just getting started.  Plenty of wonderful essays already up over there–including my own piece on Quentin Tarantino’s war epic Inglourious Basterds–and I also have a film-oriented blog (He Watched by Night) there too which will include DVD/Blu-ray, theatrical, and movie biz items.  And if you head over there you can read my reviews of the recent superb Criterion Collection releases Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy and Steve McQueen’s remarkable feature-film debut Hunger.

Whew!  Sorry for the self-promotion, but I really wanted to mention those nifty things.  We now return to regular programming…