Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Boris Ingster.

Striking little B clearly influenced by German expressionist film. Wonderful combination of a typically American tight studio plot combined with beautiful European cinematography (by Nicholas Musuraca, who is also associated with five Val Lewton movies). The fact that the film stars Peter Lorre just underscores its connection with films such as M.

When a naive young journalist's testimony helps to convict a man for murder, his mind begins to unravel as he considers the possibility that the man is in fact innocent and he may be solely responsible for the man's execution. At the centre of the film is an extended dream montage in which the young man finds himself wrongfully accused of murder. In this vivid nightmare, he finds himself at the mercy of an indifferent judicial system and is celebrated in the very newspaper he writes for, which thrives on sensational stories. During this sequence, his innocent outlook is exchanged for an examination of man's sinister nature and he questions the the agents that promised to propel him to fame and fortune.

The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Henry Hathaway.

Let's bow our heads and speak to this rocking chair like she's still here.

Katie Elder has a few things in common with Mrs Bates of Psycho. Physical evidence of her abounds although we never meet her. We see Mrs Bates' shadow in the window and that old Victorian mattress imprinted with the shape of her resting body. In this flick, though, we are told up front that the mother has died -- doesn't make it less creepy.

Another shrug from me for a Wayne film. Not a shambles, but stilted and slow moving. We don't see a saloon until 58 minutes in; even though we are told John Wayne is a bad-ass, he mainly hangs his head in remorse. I'm starting to think that the general trend for westerns in the 60s was bloated laziness. Another case where I prefer the remake (Four Brothers). I firmly believe Hollywood should remake crappy old flicks and leave the good ones alone.

Yes, that is your dead mother's dress judging you as you practice card tricks.

Inglourious Basterds (2009), Quentin Tarantino.

In this post: here be spoilers!

The New Yorker's David Denby calls Inglourious Basterds "ridiculous," and the AV Club's Keith Phipps says the movie is "designed to inspire mere minutes of reflection." (Yeah- that's basically all the movie criticism I read unless I drag my ass to the local Mags 'n' Fags and pick up Film Comment, which I haven't done recently). WHAT!? I'll admit, the pacing was off -- not enough scalpin' and lots of yabber. But, I loved this flick.

As Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will let you know, urban Jews were the creators of the comic book superhero and in Inglourious Basterds, they ARE the superheroes! This movie's thesis is that film is so powerful a medium it can change our perception of history - maybe even history itself - and through film, Jewish storytelling has won out over Nazi myth-making. At least, that is what I am going to maintain. In what other WWII movie is the British Lieutenant assigned to assassinate Goebbels a film critic in civilian life? Churchill asks Lt Hicox whether Goebbel's mission as Minister of Propaganda is to beat the Jews "at their own game," and asks if Goebbels sees himself as the Aryan Louis B Mayer. Churchill is told no, Goebbels is more of a David O Selznik. So it's David O. VS Goebbels, and guess who is going down!

The film's Jewish heroine is the proprietor of a Parisian cinema, inside which the staggering denouement takes place: every senior Nazi official (including Hitler) is barricaded inside the theatre watching propagandist claptrap. While a pile of cellulose nitrate ignites, setting the screen on fire, her homemade film spliced into the main feature disrupts the Nazi narrative. Her face takes up the entire screen and she announces: "I'm interrupting your Nazi propaganda horse shit, to inform you despicable German swine that you are all going to die. And I want you to look deep in the face of the Jew who's going to do it." Did you know nitrate creates its own oxygen while burning, therefore fueling its own conflagration? Yes, in addition to baseball bats, machine guns and knives, one of the murder weapons is 35mm film!

How is this movie ridiculous when every movie that has featured Nazis as its antagonist has been ridiculous? The most accessible, one-dimensional, condemnable enemy for American cinema has been Nazis. Remember Tom Cruise's anachronistic desire as a kid to Kill Hitler? Well, here's your opportunity - the Inglourious Basterds rat-a-tat-tat Hitler to de-yeath - and burn the rest to kingdom come! (I'm going to mostly skip over the truly ludicrous production that was Valkyrie... but can't help mentioning that instead of surrounding one implausible actor with Brits with stage cred, IB gives us Mike Myers in a British general's uniform putting on an accent that is just a slightly thinner slice of ham than usual!)

So sure, this deviates a bit from the official historical record that says faced with his own defeat, Hitler offed himself in a bunker. And what is WWII good for except for being perhaps one of the best documented events (colour film appears, the Nazis make blueprints of gas chambers and keep a very tidy paper trail of all their activities). Not even attempting to live in the this-is-exactly-as-it-was-past, this flick is saying sure, we know the Allies won. It's also saying, our story won and your story failed. Is this Tarantino's masterpiece? I don't know, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Extract (2009), Mike Judge.

So, I attended my first evah movie premiere: Extract at the Paramount Theatre in Austin on the 18th of August. It was a completely oddball but thrilling experience for a reticent person like myself who normally watches flicks either alone or with other ordinary schmucks in the local multiplex. So having no idea I was supposed to bring a camera and get a shot with Jason Bateman or Mike Judge, who were in attendance, I just sat in my seat waiting for the film to start. And what was with the copious drinking and why is the film not starting right at eight? As soon as the movie started rolling and the actors began speaking their lines, the audience was crippled with giant laffs. I looked around in surprise, thinking - Jaysus, that was funny but not HILARIOUS, was it? I know, I am a total rube.

I like Mike Judge products because they are simply one man's view of the world and obviously not committee written. He's one of a few American directors that prefers to use movies to examine everyday life rather than escape from it. The settings are identifiable, tangible. During Q&A Judge acknowledged that some of the scenes were filmed in Austin, including the scene at the Best Western - must be something particular about that completely homogeneous motel chain...! The film's title refers to an actual extract plant that had at one point existed in town, and Judge pointed out that Mr and Mrs Extract were actually right here with us in the audience. Kewl! Just as an aside, at a party in university, a guy studying biochem once passionately explained to me that synthetic food flavourings - vanilla extract was his example - are chemically exactly the same thing as the real deal, so weren't people morons for paying so much more money for the "real thing" when there was no difference at the molecular level between the two? This came to mind when the film played. Dude, whoever you were and wherever you are: here is a film for YOU!

The original Adams Extract plant in Austin.

Jason Bateman is the central character and plays a moderately successful business owner whose dissatisfaction with life drives him into strange experiments that include taking a monster drag off a ten foot bong. Actually, the plot of Extract reminded me of all my favourite Coen bros flicks, which seem to have a couple of wild card characters wreaking havoc on ordinary folks. Mila Kunis plays a gorgeous young grifter who throws everything into chaos. It's well paced and enjoyable, and probably one of Judge's more accessible creations - more Office Space than Idiocracy.

I'd like to apologize to Mike Judge for laughing out loud when he said he would go & wash dishes when he had writer's block during Beavis & Butthead. All I could picture was the episode where they threw burgers into an overhead fan for seven minutes and wondered how anyone could get writer's block for that, but I am sure Judge meant while writing the movie, not the series!

McLintock! (1963), Andrew V McLagen.

Dear God, someone, please poke my eyes out.  There's apparently one other film left in the McLagen oeuvre that uses an exclamation point in the title but I don't think I am going to make it.

Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (1995), Edmund G Bansak.

This is an engaging history of how Val Lewton climbed from pulp writer to David O Selznik's right hand man to B-movie maestro. Not the aggressively ambitious type of guy, talented Lewton appears to have been quite satisfied as a B-producer and his films, claims Bansak, are an interesting bridge between "horror" and noir. Who doesn't like a guy who puts on a mauve, paisley "dog puke" tie just to insult people in pretentious company meetings? "Anyone who looks at this tie and doesn't realize I am insulting him is a fool anyway" Lewton confided to a colleague. Interesting barometer.

If you prefer to know how the studio system functioned and could care less about salacious personal details, then this is your biography. Bansak beautifully circles down from the big picture (how Orson Welles nearly bankrupted RKO and necessitated someone like Lewton who could cook up cheaper, but popular films) to a walk-through and analysis of each movie associated with Lewton. I was surprised to learn that Lewton's B's were relatively generously financed (compared to "poverty row" B's from Producers Releasing Corp and others). Bansak provides the context behind the creation of each movie, and explains how Lewton fits in with other contemporaries. When I first watched Lewton's flicks, I never associated them with others in the "horror" genre (like the Dracula franchise) but would have called them "historical thrillers"; in any case they are gorgeous and worth study.

This is a great read for film nerds who scour for titles like I do. Get out your notebook & start jotting.