Gotta get here!

About 1300 kms away from Chateau Peresblancs, Northwestern University's B-fest 2012 is ongoing http://www.b-fest.com.  I must eventually get there! And as long as Mitch O'Connell shows up, I won't be the oldest person in the room!  Thanks, Mitch!

Just one example of B-fest fare this year.

Shark! / Caine (1969), Samuel Fuller.

The DVD I watched was distributed by the guys from Troma. This is the most awesome fake skyline ever, I LOVE it!

A young Burt Reynolds and sharks in a movie directed by Samuel Fuller!  Hoo boy, did I get all excited for nothing.  In his autobiography A Third Face, Samuel Fuller describes sitting through a private screening  of the final film with Peter Bogdanovich.  "What a horrible shock I had!" he writes, "They'd completely recut my movie, retitling it Man-Eater, refashioning almost every scene to suit their tastes, which were lousy... Over and over, the producers butchered scenes, destroying all trace of timing and subtlety. I was flabbergasted with their reediting."  Shark! is one of a string of B-movies Fuller directed towards the end of his career where the arrangements with his producers turned out badly (Fuller eventually petitioned to have his name removed from the credits to the film).  I can't believe Fuller actually sat through the entire film. 

Sudan?  So this is the Red Sea, I guess?

Shark! is supposedly set in Sudan but was filmed in Mexico.  In it, Burt Reynolds is an American adventurer and arms dealer who agrees to cooperate with another couple in their attempts to recover treasure from a sunken ship in shark-infested waters.  The copy I watched was in terrible shape.  I'm no technical whiz, but it looked like it was cut into pan-and-scan -- is this part of the butchering Fuller described?  The reediting was not the first bump in the road - Fuller's account of the film's shoot is one of problematic local arrangements and a script that did not inspire him.  He praises Burt Reynolds for keeping his chin up and making the best of a bad situation.  Trying to visualize what could have been was an impossible task for me with Shark!  

Won't you at least look at me when I'm talking to you? Burt Reynolds and the back of Silvia Pinal's head.

What kind of over the shoulder shot is this!?

Kay Francis, 1934.

Publicity photo of Kay Francis, from Meet the Film Stars 1934-35.

Cicely Courtneidge, 1934.

Publicity photo of British actress Cicely Courtneidge, playing Maise Marvello in Soldiers of the King (1934).  From Meet the Film Stars 1934-35.

Ac-ting! Will Hay, 1934.

Will Hay, Those Were the Days (1934).  From Meet the Film Stars, 1934-35.

Canadian Theatre Snacks, 1952.

Nothing too surprising here.  Hey, wow - Lloyd Percival, author of the Hockey Handbook!  From the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Yearbook (1952-3).

An Improvised Life (2011), Alan Arkin.

Alan Arkin, in Catch-22.  Hey, what? I get to choose the photos around here.

Having to drive to work alone over these dark winter mornings I decided to keep myself company with the audiobook version of Alan Arkin's 2011 autobiography, An Improvised Life.  How can anyone stay glum listening to Alan Arkin's voice?  Not me.  Driving over bumpy ice patches I listened to him speak about his life, focusing on how he has developed as an actor, and how acting came to also shape him.  I'm sorry to say that I haven't even seen many of the films that brought Arkin professional recognition such as The Russians are Coming The Russians Are Coming (1966), Catch-22 (1970) or Little Murders (1971). You can put me in the category a generation of people that only came to know his name through more recent works like Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006).  Basically I only knew him as someone's onscreen dad which is fitting, because he says that fatherhood has been one of the real-life roles he has found most fulfilling.

An Improvised Life doesn't let us get too close to Arkin.  There's not a lot of personal details here which seems fitting for a guy who says he's still mystified by the "love"his fans have for him ("Love is a precious thing, and I'd rather discussions of it for people I've at least met," he writes).  But he's unreserved in describing his psychic journey through life starting with analysis and moving through Eastern thought and meditation, all of which informed his approach towards both acting and just simply being himself.  His worldview, which I think I glimpsed in the following passage, is one I can appreciate.  It's about the transcendence we achieve through art, which is so magic it seems to tap into some kind of universal love.  Describing his experience at a Carnegie Hall performance of Beethoven, he writes:

And then by the third movement even Beethoven's agenda was gone, and we were swept up by what he had been swept up by, what lived through him, and all of Carnegie Hall became one living organism, one thing with a couple thousand moving parts.  We had let go, and we lived inside that majestic vision of brotherhood and unity and heroism written over two hundred years ago.  We had become the music.  

Arkin joined Chicago's Second City when it was just newly invented.  At the time, he was convinced that moving to Chicago would be a career killer.  Instead, Second City exploded.  It was somehow perfectly timed to meet the public's needs for irreverence with a touch of intellectualism and politics.

An Improvised Life drifts from autobiography to actor's manual in the final pages, as Arkin described workshop techniques and the joys of teaching improv.  Again, instead of telling anecdotes about himself and the people he knows, he keeps it all very businesslike. As a cubicle creature, I am envious that Arkin's profession (as he sees it) demands continuous self-development and offers the opportunity to continually explore human nature.  For those of us not in the arts, it seems we are often forced to do these necessary things on our own time, outside of company hours.  He makes very amusing observations about the overlap of acting and life, of the acting that even non-actors do in everyday situations.  So hope you don't mind me saying, Mr Arkin, but I love your work and I'm glad you were so happy making The In-Laws. 

Dracula (1931), Tod Browning.

Ladies, you are each worth 33% of my value and your stock is falling.

I haven't looked at Bram Stoker's novel Dracula since I was in high school, but a vivid passage has always stuck in my mind:

"With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast.  When blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck  and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the...Oh, my God!  My God!  What have I done?"  ... Then she began to rub her lips as though to cleanse them from pollution. -Chapter 21.

I pictured his finger nail as jagged, running across the white unliving skin -- the whole passage left me nauseated.  By contrast, the biggest threat Bela Lugosi's Dracula poses is that he's on the prowl for your woman!  The first we hear of Dracula, we are told he has wives, plural, and is up to no good.  Why does Dracula want to lease Carfax Abbey in England anyway?  Is it because it is conveniently located next to the Seward Sanitarium, run by a physician who just happens to have a fetching daughter?   And that this daughter Mina has little Jazz Age slumber parties with her pretty pal Lucy?

"I dunno, the accent - it's so dreamy!"  "Oh, Lucy, you have the weirdest crushes!"  

Dracula delegates almost all unpleasantness offscreen, which has a bit of a disjointed effect:  Lucy died?  When did that happen?  You never see him actually walk out of his coffin (how undignified); the camera politely averts its gaze and only returns once he is standing.  I am told Lugosi's moans during his staking have been restored to the 75th anniversary edition version I watched but were never originally heard in theatres.  It's interesting to observe that this landmark vampire film doesn't contain all the elements we consider to be part of the "canon."  Most troublingly, Dracula seems never to need an invitation.  In fact, the film's climax has the entire household attempt to keep Lucy in her own bedroom and Dracula out.  Oh, this heart-breaker Dracula -- someone get the shotgun!

As they are in the Swedish "coming-of-age" vampire film Let the Right One In (2008), the more disturbing themes found in the source material are downplayed. The freakish, the revolting are smoothed over.  In Let the Right One In, the vampire is a friend and secret weapon to a bullied boy more than a predator looking for her next human servant.

I told [Harker] exactly what had happened and he listened with seeming impassiveness, but his nostrils twitched and his eyes blazed as I told how the ruthless hands of the Count had held his wife in that terrible and horrid position. -Chapter 21.

Jonathan Harker's response to the description of his wife's forced interaction with Dracula is that of one whose wife has been, well -- the blood drinking ceremony is basically a Victorian metaphor for rape, right?  Mina's horror at having been made impure becomes a regrettable wayward crush onscreen.  Lugosi is elegant - hypnotic -- something all young wives and fiancees might be forgiven for falling for.  He's like a Carnegie Hall Mormon - who wants to be #4, girls?

No, Eliza Doolittle - NoooOOOOoooo!

Sharktopus (2010), Declan O'Brien.

One idea and a .99 cent set.  As well as borrowing heavily from Jaws (now a 36-year old movie), it's surprising how many tropes from classic studio-era B's Sharktopus uses:  the monster, the wacky scientist father with a beautiful young daughter, the plucky girl reporter.  Too bad the whole production reeks of boredom, boredom with movies and boredom with storytelling.

Mad-scientist Eric Roberts is the creator of the S-11, a shark-octopus hybrid killing maching designed for the US Navy.  Roberts seemingly accidentally ambles onto the set, in jeans he's been wearing for the last 72 days.  Where's the villainous entrance with fanfare, organ playing and an allusion to an old grievance that has warped his moral sensibilities?  There is none!  He just walks onto this cheap set with the glowing green lights that symbolize high-tech computer savvy activities, or something, I guess.

Oh hi, I'm here.  Roberts carries on the noble tradition of being the disgraced actor with name-recognition who can sell a B. 

Local sea salt captain-for-hire.  You sir, are NO Robert Shaw.

So basically, our crappy-CGI Sharktopus shakes off his controlling helmet and makes his way down to Puerto Vallarta, picking off tourists as he goes.  Eric Robert's beautiful daughter and a guy with plasticized abs are forced to hunt the creature down.  Meanwhile some bozo reporter smells the story of a lifetime and her cameraman (Hector Jimenez, from Nacho Libre) trails behind.  There's a lot of ladies in bikinis frolicking in an all-inclusive.  Robert Corman has a cameo staring at a lady's bum.

The main purpose of watching Sharktopus is to watch Sharktopus eat people.  Sharktopus is pretty awful, almost as though there was a competition to design the most ridiculous, artificial-looking thing imaginable.  It was created by a company called Dilated Pixels.  The scale of Sharktopus varies immensely from scene to scene and its tentacles, often brightly lit, don't match the type of ambient light in the scene.  I'm mystified by its tentacles - it seems to walk on them, stab people with them, hug people to death.  Maybe it has boa constrictor or squid genes spliced into it as well?  Maybe it should have been Sharkstrictor?

Sharktopus somehow makes it ashore.  Couldn't they have at least taught the poor thing some manners?

Bwa ha ha.  Well, at least I got one laugh.

Later this month the Alamo Drafthouse is featuring an event called "CGI on Trial," where they explore "the biggest digital atrocities perpetuated upon cinema."  The trailer below shows a few samples.  The presenters, Tommy Swenson and Bryan Connolly, contend that over-reliance on CGI effects have robbed cinema of its magic.  "Big budget movies used to be packed with daredevil stunts, ambitious effects work and ingenuity," their site claims.  "Now we're treated to an aromatic buffet of Jar Jars, Shreks and even darker offenses.  No thrills, no chills... just the 64-bit machinations of overpaid, Dorito-addicted studio schlubturds."  Back in the day the playground of the cheap effect - the puppet, the model, the guy in the Godzilla suit, the Tingler - was the B-movie.   Is the Drafthouse right in expecting more from "big budget" films?  Is Sharktopus suited only to the cheap production? Should CGI stay out of better quality flicks?  Julie and Roger Corman have produced a bunch of other Shartopus (that was an typo, but it works, I'm leaving it in)-type movies:  Supergator, Dinoshark.  Are they right in recognizing CGI effects as a cheesy novelty most appropriate for cheapies?   When will Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011) make it to my town?  

Two Weeks to Live (1943), Malcolm St Clair.

Abner Peabody slips down a flight of soapy stairs.

I can't believe anyone ever paid money to see this lame crap!  It's as if that busker guy hanging out next to Aldo Shoes in silver paint somehow made a movie.  Weighted down by an overly convoluted plot and predictable gags (Lum and Abner go to New York to earn back money the swindled out of their Arkansas townfolks.  Lum and Abner are predictably baffled by big city customs) the film's 70-odd minutes seem to never end.  Not even a guy in a monkey suit can change my opinion.  I'm just cranky because I watched Truck Turner which was effin' brilliant - but I can't write about it because I rented it on Apple TVand have no effin' brilliant screen shots to show anyone.  The location work!  The jiggly boobs on the Sondra Locke-alike!  The beautiful Abyssinian kitten!  Uhura with no bra!  Grrrrrrrrr.

Grrrr!

Leonard Maltin's Stars-Askew Guide to the Movies

Confession:  I read Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide.  Like it's a real book. I have been doing this since I was a kid.  Because it's not fiction, with characters and a plot and big words, I feel guilty when caught reading it: "oh, I'm just looking something up here, I'll put it down in a minute."  What can I say, it's just an inexhaustible pile of delicious, insane tidbits (all in a Tinkerbell-sized summary)!   Damn, that's succinct writing!  The family Maltin was a legendary (the vintage was 1992, I think).  Duct-taped along the spine, it sat on the coffee table for probably fifteen years before it was replaced.

Last year, I bought myself my own family heirloom:  the 2010 edition.  At least that what I had thought I'd done.  Turns out he's eliminated a lot of 30s and 40s films and put them into a separate book!  Whaaa?  OK, I realize there's a limit to how fat a paperback can get, but I find this a sad compromise.   Maltin's earlier books included lengthy lists of B-serials like the Bowery Boys and Blondie.  Having suffered through a number of Bowery Boys vehicles, I've come to realize that the Maltin star rating system is about as unreliable as a 2002 Ford Explorer transmission.  To test this, I chose a couple gut-wrenchingly awful films I have seen in the last ten to fifteen years or so, to see what the Maltin team came up with.  Keep in mind the maximum number of stars awarded is four.  

Category:  Unnecessary Sequel

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Maltin Rating:  ***
"DIE HARD is effectively re-invented for a post 9/11 world" (!).

Editorial comment:  This is the Die Hard with the "I'm a mac" guy, people!  Now, if it had co-starred John Hodgman....!

Category:  Down and Out Former Oscar Winner

Men of Honor (2000)

Maltin Rating:  ***

Really?

Category:  In Retrospect, The Original Review Could Use a Rethink

Star Wars Episode II: The Phantom Menace (1999)
Maltin Rating:  ***
"The beginning of Lucas' epic saga resembles his first STAR WARS film in both story and tone, with quantum leaps forward in special effects - including computer-generated characters (like comic-relief character Jar Jar Binks) who seem astonishingly real." Dude, what?

Of course knowing that you don't use the Maltin star ratings as the basis for making movie-watching decisions means knowing how to use your Maltin.  You don't also use it as a comprehensive reference! Maltin himself even complains in the Introduction to the 2010 edition that shall-not-be named internet websites can be - gasp - erroneous (oh, IMDB, we are looking at you and your industry-contributed information).  Maltin is proud to say that the fact-checking that went into his guides are far superior, and he's most likely correct.  I also appreciate details such as format availability, length and the Widescreen Glossary.  But the always-included Maltin Guide appendix of certain folks (Halle Berry?) and their film credits feels superfluous these days.  When I am trying to remember where I saw that guy before, it's not usually Clint Eastwood.  Oh, the colliding worlds of analogue and digital when it comes to searching for information.   There's probably a Library Science paper in there somewhere.

On a final note, I'd like to thank (?) Sarah Silverman for forever associating Leonard Maltin with certain talents in her thank-you speech from the Night of Too Many Stars Autism fundraiser (NWSF).

Night of Too Many Stars: Sarah Silverman Wins an Autism Award from Sarah Silverman

More B's!

After a strict-ish diet of classic-era Poverty Row flicks for 2 years, I am proud to announce I will be actively expanding my viewing to include more recent low-budget fare.  I won't completely abandon all oldie B's (pre-1945) but have to admit that too many crummy, blurred prints of morally upright B's clog up my palate - like eating cardboard!  Bring on the shark+octopus flicks! 

The Best B-Rated Movie Trailers Ever!

Here's a good link from Roger Ebert's blog at the Sun Times.  Although I'm disappointed The Tingler isn't here, I have to say I fully appreciate the multiple shark entries!

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/the-best-b-rated-movie-trailer.html