Mondo Rondo, or: Creeper dude

Get Your Ding Dong On!

Anita & Mick

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Burning of the Midnight Lamp

Jimi Hendrix in 16mm from 1968

Stayin’ Alive with Rita Hayworth

Melville! Delon! Gabin! Morricone!

Just added!

Auteur! Auteur!

Coming Attractions!

Coming this week!

Starts Sunday!

This Fri and Sat at the Imaginary Theatre

This week at Ciné Flickhead

Science gone awry!

Opening in a sleepy black and white town, some noirish backwater out of a Tom Waits song where the local pub’s jukebox plays selections from Brando’s The Wild One to an assortment of farmers, truckers, village drunks and sassy barflies, The Werewolf (1956) reinvents lycanthropy as a byproduct of atom-age experimentation. Presently offered by FEARnet in HD, it stars Steven Ritch as whiny, hapless Duncan Marsh (that’s right: Duncan Marsh) who’s taken in after a car accident by a pair of overzealous scientists determined to toughen-up the human race for post-holocaust survival by transforming them into wild beasts. Before you can say ‘Larry Talbot,’ he’s bounding in the woods ripping apart unsuspecting hayseeds, with sheriff Don (Creation of the Humanoids) Megowan, nurse Joyce (Terror from the Year 5000) Holden, and a frantic torch-wielding posse in pursuit. What separates the film from its cheesy b-formula is an uneasy but effective alliance of soapbox preaching with moody chiaroscuro, and sporadic fits of existential hogwash as characters dwell on their impotence against global annihilation and the threat of extinction hanging over the family unit. Heady stuff for director Fred F. Sears, better known for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and best forgotten for The Giant Claw. Whew!

Ciné Botox

With the release of the first two That’s Entertainment films back in the mid-1970s, I remember hearing grumblings, mostly from teens, over how ‘fake’ the color looked in those MGM clips from the 1940s and 50s. The dissenters were accustomed to the more ‘natural’ tones that came around the time of Bonnie and Clyde, and found the blistering hues of Singin’ in the Rain somewhat akin to what you’d find in a child’s storybook.
    There was ample time to mull this over during This Means War (2012), an anemic ‘meet-cute’ padded out over two numbing hours, a film void of cosmetic reality as all the actors, locations and sets appear (in Blu-ray, at least) like something concocted in a faulty Photoshop program lacking varying degrees of reds and blues. It stars Reese Witherspoon, an actress approaching forty but floundering in a character nearly half that age, whose golden, flawless, airbrushed-centerfold skin is as artificial as the dimwit dalliances she gets into with the overripe boytoy suitors played by Chris Pine and Tom Hardy. Furthermore, her infamous, ever-growing golf ball chin has been magically deflated.
    While the film pushes its action with hyperactive gusto but little purpose — the ‘director’ is McG, late of the Charlie’s Angels movies, generic fodder for indiscriminating night owls — one gets the impression that the script’s been collecting dust in a file cabinet for ages. Indeed, somewhere in the droning scenario of one woman’s plight to weed out her true love in a variety of incredibly unfunny situations, is a scene from the Wayback Machine, shot long after Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11: set in a huge movie rental outlet (imagine the midtown Manhattan Virgin Megastore, circa 1999) where hot young women in miniskirts and stiletto heels spend dateless Saturday nights discussing the aesthetic merits of Hitchcock.
    True, that could be the film’s one saving grace, but screenwriters Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg (two people wrote this?!?) invest no time in such elevated issues or intelligent parody. Kinberg, in fact, bravely signed his name to the vacancies known as Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey as action figure), the migraine-inducing Jumper and the very guilty pleasure (?) of Brangelina’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith. At the very least, This Means War is a worthy addition to that deadening pantheon, and as memorable as any of them.