Webb pages

“It’s a sober, compelling acknowledgement of creative systems that flourished, no matter how briefly, independent from corporate influence with love and enrichment as both a means and an end.” A review of Jeff Weddle’s new book about Jon and Louise Webb, Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press—now on Flickhead.

Cheap thrills, cheap date

“So where did the monster come from?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “Well, what happened to the monster at the end?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “What’s Cloverfield? Why’s that the title of the movie?”

    I had just taken Mrs. Flickhead to see Cloverfield, my decision based on the amount of hoopla it’s gotten on the internet. “A wishing well of crocodile cheers,” to borrow from Terence Trent D'Arby, gushed by extremists who’ve been contemplating the affair in almost Biblical terms. The missus, ensconced in the mundane concerns of family and vocation, had never heard of Cloverfield, didn’t give a hoot in hell about Cloverfield, didn’t know it was a monster movie. I thought it would be interesting to bring her to the theater cold without tipping her off in advance, to quietly monitor her reaction. To assuage her pre-screening curiosity, I told her it was about young people in Manhattan.

    It sure wasn’t dull. But, like any narcotic (Cloverfield hoodwinks the intellect by stimulating base sensations), it had the profundity of a roller coaster ride and was very talky…a lot of chitchat among a cast of gorgeous twenty-somethings who look as if they’d just auditioned for All My Children. The guy holding the camcorder never stopped yapping away…yet what was coming out of everyone’s mouth need never have been recorded. If its monster is a metaphor of conservative Republican totalitarianism, the characters are emblematic of the New Dumb.

    “It’s huge on the internet. Everyone’s writing about it. Comparisons to Blair Witch Project, an illustration of Armageddon and all.”

    “If it’s so huge,” she said, “then why were there only six people in the audience?” She had a point. It was only in its second week. “And Blair Witch Project was scary. Those kids couldn’t get out of the woods. You felt the witch hanging around. In this thing, it’s just a big monster and giant sand spiders running around.”

    (Meanwhile, I’d almost forgotten about Open Water, a vastly superior shaky-cam, pseudo-doc horror picture that scared the hell out of me and ended on a truly sad note…I dwelled on it for days, while I’m sure Cloverfield will evaporate from my mind sooner than later.)

    “What about the parallels to 911?” Personally, I thought when the first building came down and all the dust and debris took over the street, it was pretty cool.

    “Oh, please,” she groaned. What can I tell you? She sits around reading Jane Austen and Dostoevsky most of the time.

    “I’ll give it this,” she volunteered. “I wasn’t bored. Maybe it would’ve been better if you bought me popcorn.”

    Hey, what can I say? I’m cheap.

Breakfast in America

“Terrible news about Heath Ledger…just a week after that other guy OD’d.” Jacques was concerned alright, but it seemed the little black dot floating around in his tea was more relevant than some distant movie star he’d never known in person.

    “To tell you the truth,” I said while handing him a spoon, “I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen him in anything. My niece lent me Brokeback Mountain, but there was nothing about it that I was compelled to see. That DVD must’ve sat on our shelf for six months until she took it back. Plus, I’m not even sure if I know what the guy looked like.”

    “Ah, the curse of the post-1970s movie star,” sighed Jacques. “Yes, things have gone entirely generic, haven’t they? No one looks like Edward G. Robinson or Ernest Borgnine anymore. The new stars just look kind of soft and hazy.”

    I nodded. “If Edward G. Robinson were alive today, they’d keep him locked in the attic and send his food up in a dumbwaiter.”

    Jacques narrowed his eyes as if to focus on the truth. “Hmm, dumbwaiter. I dunno…that seems politically incorrect in so many ways. Dumb meaning mute, we’d have to make it audibly-impaired. Waiter, well that’s now waitperson…audibly-impaired waitperson…”

    “For a box you hoist up in the wall? Forget it. Besides, I hate PC. I’m still trying to figure out ‘Asian.’ Most people use it for what they used to call ‘Oriental,’ Chinese and Japanese and Korean…but doesn’t Russia take up, like, half of Asia? Why aren’t Russians called Asians? And why lump all the, uh, Orientals in one category? That’s like saying Japanese culture is equal to Chinese culture…shit, if anything’s racist, it’s that!”

    “No way am I getting roped into that discussion,” he laughed. “Not with all the blank-eyed, stone-faced cyber cynics who read blogs like yours…they love the whole Asian thing…almost as much as they love those little narrow rectangular eyeglasses they’re all wearing.”

    “Yeah, when did those things become a trend?”

    “Around the time everyone started carrying cell phones. Anyway, about the movie star thing…I just saw Zodiac and the guy who was kind of the lead I thought was Tobey Maguire, but it turns out it was Jake Gyllenhaal. They’re almost interchangeable…that sleepy pedophile look.”

    “Who was the other guy that OD’d last week?”

    “I forget his name. He played a cashier in Ghost World.”

    “Oh, that guy,” I said after fixing a mental picture. “Wow, they’re dropping like flies. Hey, if you owned a movie studio and had someone named Jake Gyllenhaal under contract, would you change his name?”

    “Fifty years ago he’d change his own name before he even applied for a job. Is he related to Maggie Gyllenhaal? Her name kinda sounds like a Nordic Jello dessert. Hey, how do you pronounce Gyllenhaal, anyway?”

    “Beats the shit out of me.”

Suzanne Pleshette: 1937—2008

Suzanne in Nevada Smith (1966)

As a boy I harbored an unspoken attraction to all-American girl-next-door types, and easily fell for Suzanne Pleshette at a time when buxom Europeans like Sophia Loren and Anita Ekberg were all the rage. I probably first saw her in The Birds (1963) and favored her earthy, brunette and sexually aware schoolteacher over ‘Tippi’ Hedren’s icy, urbane blonde. It was nothing against ‘Tippi’ — my eyes simply gravitated toward the film’s true g-spot.

    “I don’t sit around and wait for great parts,” she’s quoted as saying at the IMDb. “I’m an actress, and I love being one, and I’ll probably be doing it till I’m 72, standing around the back lot doing Gunsmoke.” That never came to pass, unfortunately, as she’s left us at 70 from respiratory failure. (Ms. Pleshette developed lung cancer two years ago.) But her long list of credits on stage, screen and television reveal a talent less interested in exploiting her good looks than someone in love with her craft.

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969)

    Nonetheless, in the late ‘60s at the age of 12, I found myself falling hard for her face, her style, her eyes, and her throaty voice in If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. It’s probably not that good a film, but I remember going to see it three or four times just for her. The scene above brings back a flood of memories…what she did for that shirt! Yes, she’s part of my history and life…may she rest in peace.

AP news story

Below, Suzanne in The Birds (click images to enlarge):

With ‘the distance’ in her eyes, it’s a flawless portrayal of tragic longing and suppressed desire through understated lust, a sensitive individual scarred by unfulfilled needs.

Face Dances

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Steve Fiorilla at the Memorabilia Shoppe

Yet another Stateside interpretation of an Asian techno-shocker, One Missed Call (2008) — a remake of Takashi Miike’s Chakushin Ari (2003) — is ballyhooed with this deliciously deceptive poster art. Fifteen feet away in the theatre lobby, it initially looked like a little old lady peering at me through opera glasses…“What new Joan Plowright film is this?,” I mused…but a closer look revealed that those peepers were not bespectacled…nor were they the deep, dark pools of a Whitley Strieber visitor…no, they’re screaming human pie-holes of unbridled terror!

    This eye candy had me reflecting back on the mass of writhing, tortured souls within the face of Vincent Price on the poster for Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (1964)…along with other past instances when art directors smuggled imagery within heads and faces and bodies. Oh! The possibilities!…

Click images to enlarge:

Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Dorian Gray (1970)

Visiting Hours (1982)

Silence of the Lambs (1991)

A Brighter Summer Day (1991)

Can you think of any others?

DVD Giveaway: He Was A Quiet Man

Thanks to our generous friends at Anchor Bay Entertainment, we have four DVD copies of He Was A Quiet Man to give away. Written and directed by Frank Cappello, it stars Christian Slater, Elisha Cuthbert and William H. Macy. TimeOut says, “Visually arresting, structurally inventive and entirely unpredictable, the film plays like the bastard child of Fight Club, Brazil, and Amelie, and has the potential to be a genuine cult hit.”

    To enter to win a copy, e-mail us with your name and address (continental U.S. only) before January 22, 2008. We’d really appreciate it if you send just one e-mail. Winners will be selected at random on January 23. Good luck!

The Val Lewton Blogathon

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Michael Guillen’s Val Lewton Blogathon is underway, celebrating the respected producer in conjunction with Turner Classic Movies’ broadcast premiere of Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows. Although written and directed by Kent Jones, everyone seems to be crediting the documentary to Martin Scorsese, who co-produced (with Margaret Bodde) and narrates.

    Along with David O. Selznick (his boss in the 1930s), Lewton is one of the few Hollywood producers to be discussed as an auteur, most of his films sharing themes and elements seldom repeated by their writers or directors. Granted modest budgets at RKO, he used low key lighting as a gimmick ostensibly to enhance the mystery of horror stories, but actually to camouflage cheap sets and fabricated backdrops. This part of Lewton inspired the producer ‘Jonathan Shields’ in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), who is observed concocting a picture similar to Lewton’s Cat People (1942).

    His story will undoubtedly be making the rounds on the internet this week, along with the expected hosannas from the intelligentsia. It would be foolish of me to take these defenders to task, as my argument—that Lewton’s films are often plodding, dull and consciously morose—stems from a deep rooted childhood dissatisfaction. I loved horror movies as a kid and, conditioned by the crude and boisterous monsters of Universal Pictures, the stuff of Lewton always possessed for me the stodgy lifelessness of a codeine fix. Isle of the Dead (1945), for example, could lull any reasonable person into a coma after twenty minutes.

    Repeated exposure to Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) over the decades has made me appreciate their beauty. Lewton’s scripts (he apparently rewrote or embellished the finished drafts of his screenwriters) are densely poetic and play heavy with dramatic license. Indeed, the Cornell Woolrich novel Black Alibi is virtually undetectable in Lewton’s adaptation, The Leopard Man (1943). Depending on where one stands with Woolrich or the art of staying faithful to source material, this could be seen as an improvement. Personally, I think the book knocks the snot out of the movie.

    His stable of first-time or sophomore directors for the horror-mystery pictures—Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson and Robert Wise—were equally flexible when it came to modifying whatever vision they may have had to suit the producer’s needs. Lewton’s piousness wafts through every scenario, from Boris Karloff’s pontifications about military duty in Isle of the Dead to Anna Lee’s knee-jerk socialism in Bedlam (1946).

    Those two pictures came at the end of the war, and questioned the rights of the individual under the thumb of autocratic rule; while the earlier Cat People and The Seventh Victim (1943) retreat to alternate worlds where archaic legends gasp their last breath in the 20th century. In Curse of the Cat People (1944)—arguably Lewton’s best film—reality is abandoned for a fanciful existence instigated by loneliness and isolation. Its characters are running from the noise of an insufferably cruel world…or could be reflections of a manic-depressive producer stuck with churning out product he thinks is beneath him.

The Val Lewton Horror Collection including Martin Scorsese’s Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows available from Amazon

DVD Giveaway: White Noise 2

Thanks to our generous friends at Universal Home Entertainment, we have six DVD copies of White Noise 2 to give away. “A terrifying, supernatural thriller that explores the disturbing real-life phenomenon of Near Death Experience.”

To enter to win a copy, e-mail us with your name and address (continental U.S. only) before January 15, 2008. We’d really appreciate it if you send just one e-mail. Winners will be selected at random on January 16. Good luck!

Living between panels and frames

Steve Fiorilla at the Comix Shoppe

Comic book illustrator Mike Ploog (Marvel’s Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider, Man Thing) is back between staples with pencil and inking chores on Thicker Than Blood, a Brothers Grimm-inspired three-part graphic story of lycanthropy via Full Circle Publications. Up until now, Ploog has been in demand as a storyboard artist for animated and live action feature films—his credits include The Unbearable Likeness of Being, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, Memphis Belle, Titan A.E., The Witches, Valiant, Return to Oz, The Black Cauldron, Caveman, Heavy Metal, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Takashi’s Metamorphosis, Dreamchild, Young Sherlock Holmes and Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings.

    Thicker Than Blood is written by Simon Reed and richly colored by fellow comic book illustrator Simon Bisley (Judge Dredd, Slaine, Lobo). Bisley too has dabbled in film design: Galaxy Quest and John Carpenter’s god awful Ghosts of Mars. Thicker Than Blood book one is available now, with book two due in February. With any success, its future may lie in a film adaptation of its own — much like last year’s moody movie version of the vampire graphic novel, 30 Days of Night.

    Meanwhile, fellow comic book legend Berni Wrightson (Marvel’s Illustrated Frankenstein, Freak Show) has rendered the design of the enormous Lovecraftian creature glimpsed near the end of Frank Darabont’s The Mist.

—Steve Fiorilla

Pump up the paisley

David Thomson wrote, “Of all the Hollywood veterans, none lost his way as completely as Preminger.” Well, here’s a chance to test that theory out: late, late Friday night or early, early Saturday morning, depending on how your strawberry alarm clock ticks, Turner Classic Movies promises a 2am showing of Otto Preminger’s notorious Skidoo (1968), with Jackie Gleason on acid and Groucho Marx as God. For full lobotomy, stay tuned afterward for The Love-Ins (1967) at 3:45am.

Update: Going Otto my head

The recent broadcast of Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) on Turner Classic Movies was something of a milestone. Never issued on VHS or DVD, screenings have been rare, presumably due to the drubbing it took from critics and public alike—a stigma perhaps accounting for its absence from the January 2008 Preminger retrospective at Manhattan’s Film Forum. But it sported a new Paramount logo on TCM (which ran a severely hemmed-in pan-and-scan version with terrible sound), and we can only hope that a new, widescreen DVD is forthcoming.

    As noted above, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson wrote, “Of all the Hollywood veterans, none lost his way as completely as Preminger.” After a fruitful tenure of glossy noir and “women’s pictures” at Fox (including Laura, Fallen Angel, Forever Amber and Where the Sidewalk Ends), high-minded concepts and lowbrow ‘realism’ crept in once he flourished as his own producer: sexuality (The Moon is Blue, Bonjour Tristesse), drug addiction (The Man With the Golden Arm), black American culture (Carmen Jones, Porgy and Bess), law, religion and politics (Anatomy of a Murder, The Cardinal, Saint Joan, Advise and Consent). In many cases these appear less concerned with drama than in simply jarring the viewer, and employed A-list actors to disguise the fact that a lot it was tawdry exploitation at heart.

    The detour Thomson refers to became evident in 1965 with Bunny Lake is Missing, a middling thriller which jettisons substance for hollow posturing. After Hurry Sundown and Skidoo, the 1970s were years of sharp decline: Such Good Friends, Rosebud and The Human Factor, proof positive that the studio system and all its rigid guidelines had evaporated.

    Filmed at the height of psychedelia by a “suspected communist” whose interracial dalliances unhinged conservative moralists, Skidoo’s wafer-thin plot follows a hit man smuggled into prison to kill a stoolpigeon convict. But after accidentally tripping on LSD, he has an epiphany and scrubs the mission. That’s essentially the whole nut, but Preminger and screenwriter Doran William Cannon (Brewster McCloud) pad it with gimmicky characters, outrageous situations and one of the most bizarre casts ever assembled, headlined by Jackie Gleason, Groucho Marx, Frankie Avalon, Carol Channing (who, uh, sings), and the forgotten mod model Luna.

    The centerpiece is its LSD trip, which takes up about a third of the movie. It’s been thirty years since I last dropped acid, but my recollections are fairly intact; and the commercial mainstream, Hollywood especially, always failed in their square attempts to render the psychedelic experience. (For the record, the most accurate cinematic recreations I’ve seen are the opening animated sequence of The Grateful Dead Movie and the bit with the pyramids in Altered States.) Skidoo is no exception, even if Otto and Groucho experimented with the drug for personal research.

    At this point, the film has been written about extensively throughout the internet by scholars, hacks and buffs, so no need for me to repeat what’s already been said.

Download the Skidoo soundtrack by Harry Nilsson