Miscellaneous: Surfacing

Coming up for air to weigh in on a few things ...

Spiderweb/Shooting Star, by Robert Bloch (1954/1958). Hard Case Crime revives the double! Two Bloch novels in one, both set in a Hollywood where the tinsel is not so bright. Shooting Star, about a one-eyed literary agent turned gumshoe investigating a cowboy star’s suspicious death, is creaky but fun. Spiderweb is an unmitigated blast. A showbiz wannabe is groomed into a phony psychic so he can work his way to the top of the movie colony. And you know how I feel about phony psychics.

Redbelt. David Mamet has described his latest as both a fight movie and a modern Samurai tale. It’s really about the code of the warrior. Mamet strikes an idiosyncratic tone here, blending a knotty, intellectual plot with Rocky-style uplift. A good chunk of the audience I saw the movie with didn’t get it, which I understand. I, however, was on its wavelength from frame one. I heartily endorse its philosophy, it’s got some great Mamet dialogue (“Everything in life, the money’s in the rematch”) and my favorite scene of the year so far, where Chiwetel don’t-call-him-Chewie Ejiofor trains Emily Mortimer.

Iron Man. Haven’t seen it yet. Yeah, I can’t believe it, either. But I could only squeeze in one movie in the last week, and Redbelt had better start times. Soon, though. In the meantime, Jeff Bridges was kind enough to post his photographs from the shoot on his dandy website.

World Cocktail Week. It runs through Tuesday. Get out there and do your part. I had the boys at the Zig Zag Café fix me a “lost” classic cocktail featured on their website, a Firpo’s Balloon. Ask for it by name and give your bartender fits.

Labels: Books, Miscellaneous, Movies

TV: Today’s Mitchell And Webb Moment

If you’re not watching this show, you’re missing out. I have been known to talk about the Mets this way, and will start doing the same with movies.



Miscellaneous: Links, All-Brawl Edition

As a David Mamet fan, I can’t wait to see Redbelt. In an article he wrote for the New York Times, Mamet calls it a “fight film” and discusses a few cinematic battles and battlers that left memorable impressions.

Then, in the Daily News, Mamet calls Redbelt his tribute to classic film noir and mentions a few favorites.

Interestingly, both pieces cite the original Night and the City. Which also earns a place on this list of the 20 greatest movie fight scenes. Hat tip to Bill Crider and, by extension, Walter Satterthwait.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Movies, Noir, TV

Book: Matala, by Craig Holden (2007)

Craig Holden’s Four Corners of Night is a big, bruising heartbreaker of a novel. His latest, Matala, is short enough to be read in a single sitting and sharp enough to wound. It’s dark, sexy, twisted. Kinky in every sense, which I intend as a high compliment.

Darcy is a spoiled American girl fresh out of high school, sent on a European tour by her wealthy parents. Naturally, she gets bored at once. In Rome she falls in with Will, another American who’s grifting his way across the continent. Will, in turn, is in thrall to the older Justine, a veteran con artist who looks at Darcy and sees nothing but opportunity. The three of them agree to smuggle a package to Greece, and before the trip is over all manner of masks will slip.

Here’s the best way I can plug Matala. A meme currently making the rounds ask you to open the closest book. Turn to page 123. Find the fifth sentence. Post the next three sentences. (Yeah, I don’t get it, either.) No one has tagged me – what, you think you’re better than me? – but Matala was the closest book when I first came across it. I give you the result:

They had each other to keep them amused and happy and satiated. And she certainly felt all three of those things. Will had proved to a robust and durable lover, and Darcy did not feel disappointed in him except at the furthest edges of her desires.

Tell me you don’t want to read more.

Miscellaneous: Links

The AV Club’s exhaustive primer on my musical hero, Elvis Costello. King of America is a personal favorite.

Roger Ebert on Joe Vs. The Volcano. Via Bill Crider, a charter member of the JvTV fan club along with yours truly.

Labels: Books, Movies

Book: Sleeping Dogs, by Ed Gorman (2008)

With the last major primary out of the way and the Democratic party’s electoral future clear – sweet Jesus, this campaign is gonna go on forever – this seems like an ideal time to recommend Sleeping Dogs, the latest from friend-of-the-site Ed Gorman. Ed, an immensely talented writer who’s done some time in politics, knows the territory and covers it well.

Political operative Dev Conrad steps into an Illinois Senate race in the closing stages. The incumbent, a good-enough pol with only a minor history of bimbo eruptions, finds himself in a pitched battle with a downstate “nut job ... (who’d) gone to sanity school recently.” Dev has to deal with campaign sabotage and the suicide of the man he’s replacing, not to mention his own doubts about the candidate he’s working to reelect. The action, as always with Ed, goes down smooth, and is punctuated by his bittersweet observations about life and culture.

Don’t just take my word for it. Bill Crider, Lee Goldberg and James Reasoner like the book, too. I might steer you wrong, but those guys? Never.

Movies: More Blast of Silence

Found: a few panels from Sean Phillips’s graphic novel adaptation of the movie that has altered the way I communicate. Thanks to GreenCine Daily.

Labels: Books, Movies, Noir

DVD: Blast of Silence (1961)

Remembering ...

You’d heard of this movie before, in whispered tones. Church voices. Blast of Silence. A gritty, low-down noir shot guerilla-style on the streets of New York. Back in the early days of scrounging together bucks to make films on the cheap. You’d never seen it. Figured you never would. But you catch a break when lips slip that it’s getting the Criterion treatment. Five star all the way.

You jump on it as soon as you have the chance. Grass don’t grow under your feet.

You watch it, this movie written and directed by Allen Baron. He even stars in it, playing Frankie Bono, a Cleveland hit man who trains in to New York over Christmas to take care of a guy. But Frankie runs into some people from his past, a girl. He starts thinking about his life. You don’t want to do that. Not with that life.

You know the movie’s not perfect. The plot gets a little convenient, and if he can’t see the ending coming you figure Baby Boy Frankie Bono may not be the sharpest cannon in the shed.

But you’re not watching this one for the story. No. You’re watching it for the mood. The feeling. The energy that Baron finds on the streets of your hometown and channels into every frame. In Harlem. In Greenwich Village, beatniks pounding their drums and their libidos ‘til everything’s raw.

Remembering ...

You read Lawrence Block’s A Diet of Treacle not too long ago, from the same time and set on those same streets. The movie takes you right there. In style, in attitude, you’re watching one of those old Gold Medal paperbacks come to life. Or as close as you’re gonna get.

Most of all, you’re grooving on that voiceover. Written by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt under a phony name. Delivered by blacklisted actor Lionel Stander under no name at all. Putting you in Frankie Bono’s head. Making you feel Frankie’s palms sweat. Or not sweat. You know the meteorology of Frankie’s hands is important. You can’t get enough of that voiceover, think that Dave Kehr had it dead to rights when he called it “second person accusative.” You start doing that voiceover all the time. You can’t stop. You understand why friends of yours lapse into it on the streets of Philadelphia after a showing at NoirCon. You wish you were there to do it, too.

You even dig the extra features on the DVD. Baron’s still around, still kicking, still feisty. You like the guy, Martin Scorsese crossed with George C. Scott from The Hustler. He had a nice career for himself in TV. He takes you back to the locations, thirty, then almost fifty years later. Shows you the ways the neighborhoods change. And the ways they don’t.

You don’t see the best extra, though. A short graphic novel adaptation of the movie by Sean Phillips, one of the genius bad-asses behind Criminal with Ed Brubaker. That’s because you punked out, rented the DVD when you knew you should have bought it. You’ll pony up now, though. You want to come back to it.

Remembering ...

You watched Murder by Contract a few months back, another hit man movie. Picked by another genius bad-ass, James Ellroy. Vince Edwards wandering L.A., starting to feel bad about killing. You remember Ellroy talking up Contract as the first movie to give you the assassin as existential hero. Yeah, maybe. But you think Silence is the first one to get it right.

Labels: DVD, Movies, Noir

Sort Of Related: Hollywood Station, by Joseph Wambaugh (2006)/Confessions of a Superhero (2007)

LAPD veteran Wambaugh is perhaps the master of cop fiction. He turns his attention back to his old department for the first time in 20 years – at fellow author James Ellroy’s urging – and it’s obvious the man hasn’t missed a beat.

Station has a plot of sorts, involving a pair of tweakers and some Eastern European thieves whose fates are destined to collide. But the bulk of the novel is devoted to the day-to-day of the police officers who work the still-mean streets of Hollywood. And quite the motley bunch they are: surfers and wannabe actors, single moms and wily veterans. Wambaugh makes no bones about his dislike for the federal consent decree that the LAPD has been operating under in the wake of the Ramparts scandal, but aside from a single chapter it never overwhelms the narrative. It’s rich, compassionate, funny and heartbreaking stuff. A TV series based on the book is in the works, but there’s no sense in waiting for that. I’ll be jumping on the just-published sequel Hollywood Crows ASAP.

Wambaugh’s cops aren’t superheroes. As it turns out, his superheroes aren’t superheroes either. Some of the novel’s action takes place around the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, where people in costume pose for photographs with tourists outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Wambaugh spells out exactly how low-rent this spectacle is. According to him, many of the “performers” are meth addicts, and the police ID three similarly clad figures as Fat Elvis, Thin Elvis, and Smelvis.

Matthew Ogens’s offbeat documentary Confessions of a Superhero profiles four people who don capes to stay afloat in Tinseltown. The movie’s Superman, who identifies with his alter ego to an alarming degree, is a recovering addict who’s also the son of Academy Award winner Sandy Dennis – unless he’s not. Wonder Woman’s tale is all too common: the belle of her high school, she heads west to learn that she’s too “voluptuous” to book TV commercials. And wait ‘til you see what happens to Batman. Sometimes “only in L.A.” is the appropriate response.

Labels: Books, Movies

Movies: Show Biz Sundays

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Sunday evenings stink. That double whammy of disappointment, feeling you didn’t drain the weekend cup dry while dreading Monday’s return to the grindstone. I’ve always held that if aliens were going to invade, they should do so on a Sunday. Humanity would welcome the distraction.

The Chez K prescription for the Sunday blahs: show business melodramas. Plenty of color and movement to distract the eye – and no messy plots! Herewith, a rundown of an almost-month of Sundays.

Torch Song (1953). In the days before Mommie Dearest, when people made fun of Joan Crawford this is the movie they had in mind. Joan plays the Broadway legend who can’t stop giving her all no matter how much we beg her to hold back. In Joan’s first Technicolor feature, she dyes her hair crimson and lemons around in outfits so garish they permanently damaged my TV screen. With Michael Wilding as the world’s most insufferable blind man.

Enjoy the trailer, featuring some choice dialogue and a snippet of Joan’s big number in blackface (and blacklegs).



Alas, the trailer does not include the moment when Joan, still in blackface, yanks off her wig in a titian tizzy. Scarier than Pinhead, Jigsaw and Donald Trump rolled into one.

My Wild Irish Rose (1947). A St. Patrick’s Day perennial on TCM. Dennis Morgan stars as Chauncey Olcott, the tenor who invented stage Irishness. This movie is what is known in the old country as malarkey.

It’s A Great Feeling (1949). Morgan and Jack Carson came to my attention in The Hard Way, a backstage meller with a heart so black that it screened at this year’s Noir City. But to the extent that they’re remembered at all, it’s as Warner Brothers’ answer to Hope and Crosby. Here, Dennis and Jack try to get unknown Doris Day cast in their next project. It’s not a movie so much as a collection of skits with Warners stars like Gary Cooper and Edward G. Robinson. The best of the bunch is Joan Crawford’s scene. She erupts in fury, slapping both Morgan and Carson. When Carson asks why, she says, “I do that in all my pictures” and strides off.

When I say these movies have no plots, I’m not kidding. Absolutely nothing happens in them. Every problem is readily surmountable, with solutions coming in about the time it takes to warble a few bars. Which makes them the perfect way to ease into the long week ahead.

Labels: Movies

Movie: The Laughing Policeman (1974)

Flipping channels the other day, I stumbled onto the middle of The Laughing Policeman. After three minutes I thought, “It’s been too long since I’ve seen this. Time to watch it again from the beginning.”

Policeman is one of the great underrated procedurals, a movie with an unerring eye and ear for detail. Screenwriter Tom Rickman skillfully transfers the action of the award-winning Sjöwall/Wahlöö novel from Sweden to San Francisco. Walter Matthau leads the investigation into a massacre on a public bus, a task complicated by the fact that his own partner is one of the victims. Bruce Dern is the callous detective new to the detail who slowly breaks through Matthau’s shell.

Three random observations:

1. It was filmed in a San Francisco still in the shadow of the Zodiac killings. Tremendous location work. Every aspect of the city’s life at the time – hippies, political revolutionaries, Mitchell Brothers-style sleaze – is on display. For crime drama, nothing beats the city by the bay.

2. In 1973 and ’74, Matthau consecutively appeared in Charley Varrick, Policeman, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which as some of you know is the Official Vince Keenan.com Greatest Movie Ever Made™. That’s a stupendous streak of winners. Especially since Matthau’s acting wasn’t stylized. No matter what side of the law his characters were on, Matthau played guys who worked for a living.

3. I think the title was meant ironically.

Labels: Movies

Movie: Daisy Kenyon (1947)

It’s one of the latest releases from the Fox Film Noir Collection. It’s directed by Otto Preminger, who made Laura. It’s got shadowy photography and a plot that’s twisted in every sense.

But trust me on this. Daisy Kenyon is not noir, no matter what the box says. Daisy Kenyon is melodrama. Pure melodrama. Uncut melodrama. Schedule I grade melodrama.

And as such, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Joan Crawford – who else? – plays Daisy, a Manhattan graphic artist who insists on paying her own way even though she’s also the mistress of high-powered attorney Dana Andrews. She’s on the verge of ending their relationship when she meets a veteran (Henry Fonda) shattered by the death of his wife and his experiences in Europe. Daisy awakens something in him, and soon she’s forced to choose between her two suitors.

Sound straightforward? Take my word for it, it ain’t. Nothing is straightforward with Otto Preminger. There’s always a welter of perversions and neuroses beneath the polished sheen of his movies.

Dana Andrews, a Preminger favorite, is at his best here playing a blithe charmer whom Rosemarie described as “Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer combined.” Competition for Daisy’s affections and a pro bono lawsuit he takes only to demonstrate what a swell guy he is reveal the hollowness of his life to him. They also expose the deep fissures in his marriage; his high-strung wife (Ruth Warrick) is taking out her frustrations with her husband on their younger daughter, in a subplot that still startles.

Fonda gives an atypical performance as a man whose demons have stripped away his internal censor. His unflinching honesty in word and emotion teeters between charming and unsettling, with the balance tipping toward the latter once Andrews comes back into the picture.

If Fonda is stretching here, Joan Crawford is playing Joan Crawford. Again, I have no problem with that. 42 at the time of Daisy Kenyon’s release, Joan is at least 12 years too old for the role; the noir cinematography by Leon Shamroy isn’t used to establish mood, but to hide the leading lady’s age. Watching Joan at this stage in her career isn’t about seeing her disappear into a character. It’s about bearing witness to a woman trying to stop the hands of time with every weapon in her arsenal. Always a mesmerizing spectacle.

For every aspect of Daisy Kenyon that’s dated, like the divorce proceedings that take up much of the third act, there’s another that remains bracingly fresh and adult. Throw in some well-produced extras that feature several members of the Film Noir Foundation and you can’t go wrong. Noir or not, Daisy Kenyon is a movie that gets under your skin.

Labels: DVD, Movies, Noir

Jules Dassin, R.I.P.

It was just last week that we lost actor Richard Widmark. Now comes word that Jules Dassin, who directed Widmark’s best film Night and the City, has died at age 96.

Dassin led an extraordinary life. He started as an actor in New York’s Yiddish theater – his name may have sounded French, but he was Julie Dassin from Connecticut – then moved to the other side of the camera. In the wake of the blacklist he went to Europe and managed to maintain, even reinvent his career. His greatest success was probably 1960’s Never On Sunday. Dassin would end up marrying the movie’s star Melina Mercouri, and both would be nominated for Academy Awards. Mercouri would go on to become Greece’s Minister of Culture.

But it’s Dassin’s impressive body of crime dramas that will earn him a place in cinema history. Name a subgenre and Dassin not only contributed to it, he helped define it. The prison film (Brute Force). The policier (The Naked City). Two landmark noirs, Thieves’ Highway and Night and the City. During his European sojourn, he would direct a pair of essential heist movies, Rififi and Topkapi. An amazing string of films.

Ed Gorman and I talked about Night and the City in the wake of Widmark’s death here. And here’s a vintage Dassin interview. Via GreenCine.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Passings

Movie: Jar City (U.S. 2008)

IFC Festival Direct showcases foreign and independent films that will see limited theatrical release in the United States. For less than the price of a ticket, you can watch first run fare on demand. In other words Jar City, one of the best movies I’ve seen in months, may already be on your cable box waiting for you to press play.

An intense Reykjavik detective (Ingvar Sigurdson, whose superficial resemblance to Eliot Spitzer give things an additional contemporary charge) investigates what looks like “a typical Icelandic murder, messy and pointless.” But the crime is the gateway to a larger mystery dating back decades and touching on police corruption and scientific research, with a solution unique to the country where it’s set.

Baltasar Kormákur’s script, based on an acclaimed novel by Arnaldur Indridason, is a marvel of engineering, deftly weaving in a subplot about the detective’s pregnant junkie daughter and deploying an intricate structure that sneaks up on you. There are extraordinary shots of the Icelandic landscape and a haunting soundtrack of male choral music. Watching this movie is a reminder that there are countless American mystery novels crying out to be adapted in such a bracingly effective way. Act fast: Jar City is available on demand through the end of March.

Labels: Movies

Movie: Married Life (2008)

The theater where I saw Married Life didn’t even have a poster for it to hang outside. So I’m putting one up here, because I want to get the word out about this movie. It’s worth tracking down.

It’s based on the 1953 novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham, the former MI5 operative who served as the inspiration for John Le Carré’s George Smiley. (Sarah Weinman reviews Bingham’s literary career here.) The adaptation by Oren Moverman and director Ira Sachs sets the action in 1949 New York and Connecticut.

Chris Cooper’s longtime married man finds himself falling for a fetching war widow (Rachel McAdams). He’s certain his sweet, trusting wife (Patricia Clarkson) would be destroyed by divorce, so he decides that the only humane solution is to poison her. The whole sordid story is told by Pierce Brosnan, playing a lothario friend of Cooper’s with his own designs on McAdams. Brosnan looks rakish as all get out in period duds and narrates with silken menace. If ever a man was meant to do voiceover, it’s him. He should provide it for movies he’s not even in.

There are some taut Hitchcockian suspense sequences, including a dandy involving a bathtub. Noir strings are plucked, but softly. Sachs is more interested in dark comedy and shrewd observations about the deceptions that go into marriage, happy and unhappy alike. It’s said that 90% of a film’s success is dictated by the casting, and that’s certainly true here; all four leads are terrific. Make an effort to see this one.

Labels: Movies, Noir

Book: Pictures At A Revolution, by Mark Harris (2008)

Harris’s book is an essential read for any serious film fan. Which surprises me, because I had doubts about its premise. Subtitled Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, it follows the quintet of titles nominated for Best Picture of 1967, from development to awards glory. As if the Oscars are any indication of quality.

But Harris, an Entertainment Weekly contributor, knows his show biz and merely uses the awards as a framework for a larger story. 1967 was a transformative year in the movie industry. The old guard was still in power, but a new cinematic culture driven by European filmmakers was beginning to take hold. The five movies that ended up in the Oscar derby reflect that tension, and Harris meticulously researches their histories. The nominees are:

Bonnie & Clyde. Easily the contender that has held up the best. My favorite tidbit: 16 year old Texan Patsy McClenny served as Bonnie’s double because Faye Dunaway couldn’t drive a stick. A few years later, Patsy went to Hollywood and became Morgan Fairchild.

Doctor Doolittle. The only one of the five I haven’t seen. A critical and commercial flop, it’s widely seen as having bought its nomination. Harris recounts the campaign in detail.

The Graduate. I saw this week I graduated from college and didn’t get it. Perhaps it captured a moment so perfectly it was lost on those of us who weren’t there. Or maybe it was me. Director Mike Nichols tells a great, sad tale about meeting Ava Gardner – at Ms. Gardner’s insistence – for the role of Mrs. Robinson.

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. Harris won me over with his treatment of this Stanley Kramer movie. Yes, it was square at the time, a middlebrow take on race relations that stacked the deck completely. But, Harris asks, why shouldn’t films that speak to middlebrow audiences get a little love? Sadly, Kramer felt he was being overshadowed by the young turks. The section in which he embarks on an ill-fated college tour to talk to “the young people” is one of the best in the book.

In the Heat of the Night. Spoiler alert: it takes home the prize. Truman Capote, fuming that the adaptation of his book In Cold Blood wasn’t in the running although many expected it to be, called Heat “a good bad picture.” It’s also the one I’ve seen the most. It was a fairly important movie for me growing up, because it was the first time I became aware that the crime genre could be used to address other issues. I still like it. I plan on watching it again. Harris has me ready to watch them all – except for Doolittle. Nothing’s getting me anywhere near that train wreck.

I can think of five other 1967 movies I would rather see nominated for Best Picture. Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Two by Stanley Donen, the comedy Bedazzled and the romantic drama Two For The Road. And a pair with Lee Marvin, The Dirty Dozen and my personal choice, Point Blank. Your picks?

And now I present, in its entirety, my favorite story from Harris’s book. Mike Nichols is in pre-production on The Graduate.

With nobody yet cast, Nichols returned to Broadway and spent the fall of 1966 at the Shubert Theatre, directing Alan Alda, Barbara Harris, and Larry Blyden in THE APPLE TREE. Nichols brought in Herbert Ross to help stage the numbers and could at least take comfort in the fact that somebody else’s movie was in bigger trouble than his own: After six months, Ross was still working on DOCTOR DOOLITTLE for Arthur Jacobs and was increasingly grim about the ordeal. “He was dividing his time,” says Nichols. “He’d come to New York and he’d work, say, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and half of Monday, and then he’d go back to Los Angeles and the movie. One week he flew off, and we were rehearsing the next day, and suddenly he comes strolling back across the stage. I said, ‘Herbert, what happened?’ And he said, ‘We’re postponed for three days. The giraffe stepped on his cock.’”

G’night, everybody!

Labels: Books, Movies

Movie: The Great Flamarion (1945)

I’ve had this movie parked on the DVR for almost two years. During that time, I consistently referred to it as “The Great Flame Iron.” (For the record, the name is pronounced Fla-marion.) Catching a pair of Anthony Mann films at Noir City finally got me to fire it up.

It doesn’t start out so good. I take that back; the opening shot is a gem. A long, unbroken take ushers us into a third-rate Mexico City nightclub, showing us latecomers filing in, the acts on stage changing.

But the story is too familiar. Older man, younger woman, her permanently soused husband. You see where this is going. There’s some novelty in the older man being a professional trick shot artist and the couple serving as his nightly targets – but of course, when hubby’s number is up you already know how he’s going to meet his fate. The film begins with the older man recounting the entire tale in flashback after he’s been shot. The other famous example of that device is Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, made the previous year. As it happens, Flamarion was produced by William Wilder, Billy’s brother. (Were they both called Billy?) Bet that family reunion was a pip. At least in Double Indemnity Fred MacMurray doesn’t wave off an offer to call the police by saying “I’ll be dead before they get here,” and then proceed to talk for seventy minutes.

Erich von Stroheim plays the title role. He’s better known now for his work in front of the camera instead of behind it, most famously as Norma Desmond’s enabling butler in Sunset Blvd. (Hey, Billy Wilder again! No, not him, the other one.) But von Stroheim isn’t much of an actor. The first half of the movie is like watching a stone gargoyle get the Blue Angel treatment.

And yet ... damned if the ol’ Teutonic blowhard didn’t grow on me. A rock may not be able to tell you much, but you can still read changes in the weather by looking at its surface. Same effect here. Plus it turns out von Stroheim is surprisingly nimble for a gargoyle.

Other casting helps. Mary Beth Hughes, a staple of the Mike Shayne movies, initially seems too wholesome to play a femme fatale, but that quality ends up working in her favor.

It’s Dan Duryea who walks off with Flamarion as the one-time dancer reduced to dodging bullets to buy his bourbon. No one plays weak like Duryea; he actually gives petulance a kind of charm. To quote Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, “He was a serviceable good guy, but a delectable bastard.” I’ll watch any movie he’s in.

This in spite of the fact that, to me, anyway, Duryea bears an uncommon resemblance to ... Stephen Colbert.

These photos aren’t the best, but work with me here. Just look at the eyes and face. Blond Colbert up and he’s Duryea’s dead ringer. Not that I’m comparing the two. I’m a fan of both. Besides, one is famous for playing the pushy, overbearing type, always certain he’s right but still capable of being weaselly. The other is Dan Duryea.

Labels: Movies, Noir

Movies: Paprika (U.S. 2007)/The Bank Job (2008)

These movies have nothing in common aside from my seeing them over the same weekend and liking them both. I met multiple deadlines this past week, so perhaps the rosy glow of accomplishment is influencing my opinion. But I doubt it.

All due respect to Brad Bird and the Brothers Coen, but I’d call Paprika a genuine contender for both Best Animated Film and Best Picture of 2007. Throw in Best Adapted Screenplay, too, because it amazes me how well the movie hangs together.

An experimental therapeutic device that allows the wearer to interact with other people’s dreams is stolen. It’s up to a repressed scientist and her lively alter ego to prevent the boundaries between reality and fantasy from breaking down completely.

Paprika looks extraordinary. The dream imagery has a potent logic to it; the recurring “Parade of All Things Under the Sun,” as writer/director Satoshi Kon calls it, still haunts me. But the movie isn’t just about arresting visuals. It’s a dense story that takes on duality, the subconscious, and filmmaking. The last scene is note-perfect. When it ended, I felt – there’s no other word for it – uplifted. And that doesn’t happen often.

Here’s what’s known about the 1971 robbery that inspired The Bank Job. Thieves tunneled into a London branch of Lloyd’s and raided the safe deposit boxes. They coordinated their efforts using walkie-talkies, and those conversations were picked up by a ham radio enthusiast. Breathless coverage of the caper ended abruptly after several days, leading to speculation that the British government had issued a gag order – and that those boxes must have contained something special indeed.

From those facts and a mix of other historical tidbits, writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais cook up an entertaining stew. The ingredients include salacious royals, dubious “activists,” bent cops, a porn baron, and MI5. Or is it 6? It’s an old-school heist movie. Nothing slick here, just hard work and a lot of luck. Jason Statham, a Chez K favorite – news that there will be a Transporter 3 was greeted with song and feasting – has his best role to date. Well worth seeing.

And now, more deadlines. It never ends.

Labels: DVD, Movies

Movie: Born To Kill (1947)

Noir withdrawal. It’s no laughing matter.

After seeing two movies a day for a week, I needed a booster shot. Might as well go with the concentrated form. Born To Kill, directed by Robert Wise, scripted by Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay from James Gunn’s novel Deadlier Than The Male, delivers everything you could want from a film noir, pitched at delirium levels.

Femme fatale? Check, in the form of personal fave Claire Trevor decked out in a procession of impressive hats.

Doomed passion? Double check, because Claire hooks up with trouble personified: certified bad-ass Lawrence Tierney. He’s a post-crackup quick-tempered killer who insinuates his way into Claire’s clan by romancing her wealthy kid sister. But Tierney and Trevor are the ones made for each other, because they’re both schemers, dreamers, and batshit crazy to boot. Murder is their lovemaking!, as the poster should have said. Lousy Hays Office.

Plot twists? Fire it up and hang on.

Juicy character roles are another staple of noir, and again Born To Kill comes up aces. Walter Slezak as a genially corrupt private eye. Elisha Cook, Jr. as Tierney’s pal, always concerned about what’s “feasible.” Esther Howard as the bibulous old woman who can’t leave well enough alone.

Great scenes abound from the opening, a sharply observed look at the culture of soon-to-be divorcees’ rooming houses in Reno. A dazzling POV shot when Tierney’s first victim is discovered shows how much Wise drew from his experience with horror legend Val Lewton. And a confrontation between Cook and Howard in the blasted hellscape of sand dunes outside San Francisco is not to be missed.

Wise’s reputation has suffered over the years. Plenty of critics will never forgive him for his role as the perceived hatchet man on Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Others just hate The Sound of Music. I say to hell with them. Wise knew how to tell stories, and he told them like an editor.

Born To Kill is mainly Tierney’s show. It was his one chance at a (sort of) conventional leading man role. Eddie Muller, in a terrific commentary track, provides the full sweep of the man’s career. He recounts the first time they met, at a screening of this movie, a saga involving profanity, headbutts, and unauthorized uses of promotional merchandise. It seems that Tierney – why don’t I let Eddie tell it?

Labels: DVD, Movies, Noir

Miscellaneous: Grab Bag

Busy, busy, busy, so here’s a bunch of stuff at once.

A Diet of Treacle, by Lawrence Block (1961/2008). Hard Case Crime has reprinted some extraordinary early novels by Lawrence Block. But Treacle, originally published as Pads Are For Passion by Sheldon Lord, is the first that seems like a paycheck gig. It’s a sordid trip through the Greenwich Village beatnik world. Block paints the scene as peopled largely by posers and venal layabouts, a characterization I have no problem with. As always in a Block book, there’s fluid prose and vivid New York atmosphere to spare. But nothing much happens until the last forty pages or so. To be fair, those forty pages are pretty damn good, but Treacle is more a curio than anything else.

And then there’s that title. I dig that it’s a riff on Lewis Carroll, who always seemed like he Got It. But as a title, man, it’s strictly from Squaresville.

Stardust (2007). Why wasn’t this a big hit? High adventure with a noble hero, a fallen star, evil princes, wicked witches, and a swishbuckling sky pirate (not a typo), all of it served up tongue-in-cheek. Loads of fun.

Let’s All Kill Constance, by Ray Bradbury (2003). In 1960 Hollywood, an unnamed writer (c’mon, it’s Ray himself) is asked by a legendary star of the silent screen to figure out who left two “Books of the Dead” for her. If James Joyce wrote a pulp detective novel after mainlining Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, Constance would be the result. I don’t know if I completely got it, but I did enjoy it.

Larry King Live. Last night, Larry was responsible for the single dumbest hour of television I’ve ever seen. I was on a treadmill at the gym, but as fast as I ran I couldn’t escape it. Larry had tag teams of celebrities talking up their picks in the 2008 presidential election. The dictionary may not agree with me here, but I’m making a new rule I expect Larry to follow. Newspaper editorial boards, political organizations, and elected officials can “endorse” a candidate. Samwise Gamgee and Kumar can only support the individual of their choice. I have spoken.

Labels: Books, Miscellaneous, Movies, TV

Upcoming: GreenCine Oscars Live Blog

I’ve linked many times to GreenCine Daily, perhaps the best movie site on the web. This year, they’re hosting their first-ever live blog of the Academy Awards. They’ve invited a stellar gaggle of film bloggers to participate, including yours truly. Currently I’m receiving “special guest appearance” billing. Very Quinn Martin. I feel like Robert Lansing. Or John Saxon.

That’s just an example of the kind of razor-sharp wit and timely references to expect on Sunday night. Open up a box of wine and join us, won’t you?

The party is here.

To put you in the right frame of mind, here’s a reprint of Oscar Night in Hollywood, a 1948 essay from The Atlantic by, wait for it, Raymond Chandler. A sample:

Making a fine motion picture is like painting ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ in Macy’s basement, with a floorwalker to mix your colors for you.

Ouch. Sunday night, kids. Fun and games to be had.

Labels: Movies, On The Web

Noir City Northwest: Conflict (1945)/The Suspect (1944)

The love triangle gone wrong. It’s a noir stalwart. So it makes sense to close out this year’s Seattle edition of Noir City with a pair of murderous husbands that doubles as a salute to filmmaker Robert Siodmak.

Siodmak has a story credit on Conflict, and a nicely twisted story it is. Humphrey Bogart kills his wife because he’s fallen in love with her younger sister. It’s a perfect crime that has both the cops and psychology expert Sidney Greenstreet fooled. Until Bogie begins receiving hints that maybe the missus isn’t dead ...

Conflict is smartly manipulative fun, with a strong Bogart performance; he goes crazy very well. I’d say it’s surprising that the film isn’t better known, but our host and programmer Eddie Muller explained why. Legal issues held up the movie’s release for two years. That meant it came out after the seminal noirs of 1944, like Double Indemnity and Laura. Conflict was dismissed as a copycat even though technically it blazed its dark trail first, and ever since it’s been treated as a footnote in Bogart’s career. Undeservedly so.

The Suspect is another test of the flexibility of noir’s definition. It’s the classic story – guy falls for another woman, bumps off his wife, and tries to outwit the cops – but set in 1902 London. Siodmak directs what Eddie called “the best Hitchcock movie not made by Hitchcock,” inspired by the infamous Dr. Crippen case. Ella Raines, star of Siodmak’s Phantom Lady and a local girl, plays the other woman. But it’s Charles Laughton’s performance that makes the movie memorable. His character is a profoundly decent man, a killer who is not a killer at heart, and by the film’s end we’re rooting for him to get away with murder. If that’s not noir, I don’t know what is.

And so we bring down the curtain. Fourteen films plus one short in seven remarkable days. My thanks to SIFF Cinema and especially to Eddie Muller. Film noir could not have a better champion.

It’s 2:17 AM as I write this, but I made a pact with myself that I’d post about these movies every night, as if I were on deadline. I’ve realized that in a sense I am. To me, these films – about need and desire, desperation and hope – are still news. And they always will be.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Noir City Northwest: Night and the City (1950)/Road House (1948)

A pair of movies starring Richard Widmark screening just before the Oscars serves as a reminder that the actor is still with us at age 93, and still deserving of a lifetime achievement award. Need proof? Watch Kiss of Death, Panic in the Streets, Pickup on South Street, Madigan. Or either film featured on Noir City day six.

Night and the City received the full Criterion DVD treatment two years ago. I revisited the movie back then, but was still eager to see it again. So was Rosemarie, even though “it’s so hard to watch.” That’s because Jules Dassin’s film distills noir to its essence: failure. People struggle to make a name for themselves, to stake a claim to some small part of the world, only to be foiled by forces larger than they are, or by the indifference of others, or by their own weakness. It’s as bleak as movies get, and strangely beautiful.

Much of that beauty comes courtesy of Widmark’s performance as Harry Fabian, whose only wish in life is “to be somebody.” He’s a hustler down to his bones, always looking for an angle. But years of disappointment have made him desperate. There are few moments as heartbreaking as when girlfriend Gene Tierney tells him he “could have been anything. You had brains, ambition. You worked harder than any ten men. But at the wrong things. Always the wrong things.” Gets me every time. And Widmark’s response ... extraordinary.

A U.K. print was screened on Wednesday night. It’s not Dassin’s preferred cut; it’s several minutes longer and felt like it. But Harry Fabian registers in any version.

An audience needs to be talked off a ledge after Night and the City, and Road House is the movie to do it. It’s a confection of pure Hollywood hokum. Ida Lupino, the not-so-secret star of this festival, is a chantoosie brought to the title establishment by rich boy owner Widmark. He’s got his sights set on more than a six-week engagement, but Ida goes off and falls for his best friend Cornel Wilde. Road House has everything you want in an overheated noir romance. It’s a swillin’, smokin’, singin’ ‘stravaganza. The singin’ is the only problem, as Ida does her own and has a somewhat limited range. To quote Rosemarie again, “It’s like she’s both Kiki and Herb.”

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Noir City Northwest: Reign of Terror (1949)/Border Incident (1949)

Director Anthony Mann concentrated on noir for only a few years in the 1940s, but over that stretch he created some of the genre’s signature films. Railroaded!, T-Men, Raw Deal. On the last two, he collaborated with John Alton, the rare cinematographer who wasn’t afraid of the dark. It’s only fitting that Noir City day five spotlighted lesser known works from these masters of shadow.

It’s official: Reign of Terror is the strangest movie screened in the festival so far. It’s the French Revolution as crime drama. The surprise is how easily history falls into the noir dynamic. You’ve got Robespierre (Richard Basehart), “fanatic of powdered wig and twisted mind,” as your kingpin making a power grab. The outside muscle (Bob Cummings) who’s not what he appears to be. Arlene Dahl as a femme fatale, and the cops all on the take. A few corners are cut with the story, but it’s refreshing to see a historical drama that doesn’t put the emphasis on spectacle and instead keeps close to the action.

What I’d like to know is why the filmmakers gave France’s past the noir treatment. What’s wrong with American history? Feature it: Robert Ryan as Benedict Arnold, a twitching wreck eaten away by guilt. Or Dan Duryea playing Aaron Burr, always with the chip on his shoulder. “Al Hamilton says he’s a self-made man. Think it’s time somebody maybe unmade him.” Hell, I’d see it. Although that should come as a surprise to exactly no one.

Border Incident is a lot less fanciful. It’s a taut, tough suspense film about a joint U.S./Mexican investigation into the murder of illegal immigrants. George Murphy and Ricardo Montalban play the lead detectives, and noir reliables Charles McGraw and Howard Da Silva turn up as the heavies. It’s sad to realize what’s changed in the span of fifty-plus years in terms of this issue: basically nothing.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Noir City Northwest: Jeopardy (1953)/Woman In Hiding (1950)

A: The theme of Noir City day four.

Q: What is dames in distress?

That’s a joke. Look at the first title. Come on, people, cut me some slack. All this noir is making me loopy.

Jeopardy begins with a voiceover by Barbara Stanwyck that could come from the American Highway Council. Only her spiel turns strangely lush and poetic. Then there’s a kicker you don’t see coming. It’s a great set up for an entertaining odd duck of a film.

Running a mere 69 minutes, Jeopardy still takes its time putting all the pieces on the board. Stanwyck, her husband (Barry Sullivan) and their son took a slow drive down Baja for a fishing trip. Just as they set up camp, Sullivan gets pinned underneath a collapsed pier – and the tide is coming in. Stanwyck seeks help, and the first person she finds is an escaped American convict (Ralph Meeker) who wants considerations before he’ll go Good Samaritan.

Meeker is never over the top in his menace. His hoodlum is simply cagey and ruthless, perfectly willing to let Sullivan die if it’ll save his own life. Sullivan is saddled with a thankless part, but he does get one fantastic scene as the water is rising and he tries to impart some advice to his young son. Plus there are excellent physics lessons to be picked up.

It’s hard to believe that Ida Lupino could ever be in distress, but Woman In Hiding does its damnedest. It’s directed by Michael Gordon, whose grandson Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a contemporary noir icon with the films Brick and The Lookout.

Ida’s new husband Stephen McNally only married her because he has designs on the family business. When she discovers the truth, he tries to kill her – only Ida escapes and goes on the run, determined to dig up evidence before McNally locates her. Her only ally is an aimless war veteran played by Howard Duff, who would soon marry Lupino in real life. The movie is a minor effort but a fun one thanks in large part to plot twists provided by Roy Huggins, a man this website has declared a stealth giant of pop culture. It also follows Chekhov’s dictum that if a hydroelectric turbine is mentioned in Act One, it must be turned on in Act Two.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Noir City Northwest: Moonrise (1948)/Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948)

Day three’s films had two common threads, according to our host and programmer Eddie Muller: actress Gail Russell and a sense of otherworldliness. There’s also a third link, namely curses real and imagined.

Moonrise is the work of one of the least likely filmmakers ever to venture into the genre, Frank Borzage. The winner of the first-ever Best Director Oscar (for 1927’s Seventh Heaven), Borzage was an optimist and a desperate romantic. On the face of it, not a promising match for noir. Yet that spirit and a visual style honed in the silent era work wonders.

Dane Clark believes that “bad blood” courses through his veins because the father he never knew was executed for murder. When he accidentally kills his lifelong tormentor, he’s certain this family curse is about to claim another victim.

The movie announces itself as something special with the opening sequence, which captures a childhood’s worth of torture in stark images that feel more like panels from a graphic novel. There’s also a bravura scene of Clark suffering a panic attack on a Ferris wheel that’s worthy of Hitchcock. (No surprise that Moonrise’s cinematographer John L. Russell would later shoot Psycho and many episodes of Hitch’s TV series.) The redemptive ending flies in the face of what some fans may expect from noir. It also completely works. Moonrise deserves to be better known.

I’ve wanted to see Night Has A Thousand Eyes for a thousand reasons. OK, three. Fantastic title, for starters. It boasts a great premise: bogus psychic develops genuine paranormal powers. And you can’t beat those writing credits, with Jonathan Latimer co-adapting a Cornell Woolrich novel. The plot is as rattletrap as can be, but Edward G. Robinson grounds the action as the ex-grifter now exiled from his fellow man.

As for Gail Russell, the object of affection in both movies, well, perhaps she was cursed worst of all.

On top of that, we were treated to a bonus. Eddie screened a print of his new short film The Grand Inquisitor, based on his story in the Busted Flush anthology A Hell of a Woman. Marsha Hunt, the 90-year-old star of noir classics like Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal, plays a woman who finds a young girl (Leah Dashe) on her doorstep bearing a box of books and a disturbing theory about San Francisco’s greatest mystery. It’s a terrific piece of work, lean, suspenseful and beautifully acted. Look for it on the festival circuit soon.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Noir City Northwest: High Sierra (1941)/The Hard Way (1942)

Funny thing about noir. It even works in the daytime. Saturday afternoon’s films were a double-double shot, honoring both the lovely Joan Leslie and Ida Lupino, who in many respects is the first lady of the genre. (Check out that career.) I’d seen both movies before, but watching them in tandem brought new aspects to light.

High Sierra holds up on DVD, but it seemed shockingly vital on the big screen. Humphrey Bogart’s recently paroled but not reformed thief yearns for the straight life but can only take crooked roads to get there. His performance is all twisted desperation and thwarted desire. The script, by W.R. Burnett and John Huston from Burnett’s novel, sets up a stark contrast with our leading ladies: Joan as a naïf willing to take advantage of her benefactor, Ida as the hard-bitten moll who recognizes a good man when she sees one. Raoul Walsh stages a climax that still packs a wallop.

Ida comes into her own in The Hard Way, taking on the kind of role that buttered Joan Crawford’s bread. Little sister Joan (Leslie, not Crawford) aspires to a career in the theater, and Ida moves heaven and earth to make those dreams come true. The movie is terrifically well-cast, making excellent use of the comic Jack Carson in a dramatic role and singer Dennis Morgan as a slickster curdled by show business.

Our host Eddie Muller said the movie’s inclusion was sort of a test case; we had to decide if The Hard Way were truly a film noir or just a melodrama with a particularly nasty script by Peter Viertel and Daniel Fuchs. I know what my answer is. When I caught this gem on TCM a few years ago, I thought it was about as noir as it gets. Nice to know I’m not alone in that opinion.

While watching Ida today I was reminded of someone. Then, in a scene in The Hard Way where she appeared without make-up revealing a spray of delectable freckles across her face, it hit me. Lindsay Lohan. Call me crazy.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Noir City Northwest: The Prowler (1951)/Gun Crazy (1949)

Night one of Noir City was a tribute to a man not credited on either movie on the bill, the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

The Prowler is a film rich with secret history, not only because of Trumbo’s involvement and that of John Huston as a shadow producer, but because it essentially disappeared for decades. Only a single print remained in limited circulation. Die-hard noir enthusiasts, among them James Ellroy, would speak of it in hushed tones. I’d given up hope of seeing it myself, until a second copy of the original elements turned up in France and Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation stepped in.

Van Heflin plays a disgruntled Los Angeles beat cop, a one-time athlete seemingly fated for bigger things until “lousy breaks” brought him low. He investigates a call at the home of Evelyn Keyes, a woman who knew him when back in Indiana. She had dreams of making it as an actress. Now she’s settled for a dreary marriage with a wee-hours disc jockey (dulcet tones provided, in an in-joke, by Trumbo). Heflin thinks the two of them together could turn their bad fortune around. The only thing standing in the way is that voice in the night.

The first half of the film charts a course through James M. Cain territory. Heflin and Keyes give it their all, but the psychology of their characters never rang completely true to me. The second half of the film takes some borderline-surreal plot twists that would be hard to swallow even if you did accept what leads up to them.

For me, The Prowler is a fascinating movie that doesn’t work. In his comments on the film Eddie Muller praised not only the subversive elements of Trumbo’s script – he’s right to say that many of the story choices were bold for 1951 – but its sheer unpredictability. “You don’t know where this movie is going to go,” he said. I only wish I could have gone with it.

As for Gun Crazy, what is there to say? It’s a landmark film that sixty years on hasn’t lost any of its vitality or its edge of danger. Every movie about young outlaws on the run and in love dwells in its shadow. Even the lousy dialogue shoehorned in by the Production Code can’t diminish its impact. I’ve seen it many times, but never before on the big screen. It was worth the wait.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Miscellaneous: About As Good As It Gets

Here’s how Rosemarie and I went about constructing a damn near perfect day yesterday.

1. Get up and out a reasonable hour. The Lord loves a working man, even on Saturdays.

2. Stop in at Zanadu Comics to introduce myself to the world of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal.

3. Go to the Seattle Mystery Bookshop so I could get a copy of Money Shot signed by the divine Christa Faust, as well as meet Marcus Sakey, author of the fine novel The Blade Itself, and the lovely and lively Sue Ann Jaffarian. Tell me the sample chapter of Money Shot doesn’t make you want to read the whole thing.

4. Lunch at The Honeyhole, offering the finest sandwiches within Seattle city limits. The Chachi’s Favorite is particularly good.

5. See In Bruges, the feature film debut by brilliant playwright Martin McDonagh. A pair of hit men (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) hide out in Belgium, getting on each other’s nerves while awaiting instructions from their hair-trigger boss (Ralph Fiennes). A dark, moving comedy with a richly mordant Irish sensibility. Tell me that unrated trailer doesn’t make you want to see the whole thing.

6. Meet up with Christa, Marcus, Sue Ann and Kim of Seattle Mystery Books at my home away from home, the Zig Zag Café. I’m not sure I’m old enough for the conversation that followed, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. A marvelous night in the company of good people. Don’t take my word for it: here’s Christa’s report. (UPDATE 2/11/08: And here’s Sue Ann’s.)

All that, plus the Washington State caucuses got along just fine without me. And it looks like the WGA strike is over, meaning I can get back to work.

I tell you, kids, sometimes it’s good to be me.

Labels: Books, Cocktails, Life, Miscellaneous, Movies

Miscellaneous: More King of Kong

The AV Club is on a roll this week. Today they have a lengthy interview with Billy Mitchell, the putative villain of The King of Kong. I love how it came about: AV Club staffers ordered up a mess of Rickey’s Barbecue Sauce, probably as part of this article on B-list celebrity food products, and Mitchell himself called to confirm the address. Whatever Billy’s faults, the man knows service. A must-read if you’ve seen the movie.

Miscellaneous: Political Art and Science

The Washington State caucuses are on Saturday, and for once they matter. Within a span of 24 hours Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain were all in Seattle. It’s nice to be wanted. For several hours this morning I couldn’t think with the sound of news helicopters circling the Obama rally.

But I won’t be at the big shindig tomorrow, for three reasons.

1. I have a prior engagement. All those Saturdays when I have nothing to do, and now this happens. Great.

2. I still have nightmares about my experience at the 2004 caucus.

3. I don’t feel so strongly about my choice that I want to stand around a high school gym discussing it with strangers.

Still, it was nice to discover I’m not the only person who is intrigued by Obama but vaguely embarrassed by the frenzy surrounding his campaign.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Movies, Politics

Miscellaneous: Thrills, Agonies, Defeats

The Super Bowl: I should have known something was up when a die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fan told me he wanted the Giants to derail the Patriots’ perfect season. When an Iggles fan roots for the team’s most hated divisional rival – in the Super Bowl – then truly unholy forces have been unleashed upon the world. I’m surprised that a cloud of locusts did not enshroud all of Glendale, Arizona, that crows didn’t peck Tom Brady’s eyes out (maybe that’s why they closed the roof), that the earth did not open up and swallow Wes Welker whole. I woke up on Sunday and sensed a great shadow on the land. New England never had a chance.

The Half-Time Show: Missed it. I watched an episode of The Venture Brothers instead. I couldn’t risk a Tom Petty wardrobe malfunction.

The Commercials: Lousy crop this year. My favorite was the hot-air balloons.

How to follow up such brutal competition? With even more! The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary about the battle to set the world record for the highest score in Donkey Kong, is hands down one of the best movies of 2007. It’s got everything: high drama, memorable characters, head fakes, last-second twists, even a training montage. And the DVD is packed with dandy extras. Rent it now.

When the movie ended, Rosemarie said, “That was more intense than the game!” Coming from a Big Blue fan on the greatest day in the team’s history, that’s high praise indeed.

Labels: Movies, Sports

Sort-Of Related: Park Row (1952)/The Wire, Season Five

Park Row, Samuel Fuller’s two-fisted tribute to the glory days of the newspaper industry, has long been one of my personal white whales. It’s unable on video and seldom turns up on television, owing in part to its history as one of the first independent films. I was thrilled to see it surface on Turner Classic Movies during John Sayles’ recent stint as guest programmer – and could have kicked myself for almost forgetting to set the DVR.

Why do I love Sam Fuller? Because he has no problem opening the film with a list of more than 1700 daily newspapers, followed by the 120-point declaration DEDICATED TO AMERICAN JOURNALISM. Because when he offers adoring close ups of the statues of Horace Greeley and Benjamin Franklin that adorn the New York street of the title, you know someone will later get his ass kicked in front of them. Because he’ll wear his heart on his sleeve and give you the shirt off his back.

Sayles wasn’t kidding when he introduced the film by saying that it packs twenty years of journalism history into two months. Gene Evans, a Fuller regular who once played John D. MacDonald’s Meyer to Sam Elliott’s Travis McGee, stars as the crusading editor who gets a chance to start his own paper in 1886 Manhattan. He then singlehandedly develops banner headlines, newsstands, and linotype, all while romancing his chief competitor. It’s one damn thing after another, served up with Fuller’s customary brio and feet-firmly-planted honesty. Alas, the print quality was noticeably poor; someone needs to restore this corker sharpish.

It was strange to watch Fuller’s film in the midst of the fifth season of HBO’s The Wire, focused as it is on the inexorable demise of the daily newspaper. Series creator David Simon had a storied career with the Baltimore Sun, and he’s openly admitted that he has axes to grind. Personally I think the man responsible for the finest show in television history is entitled do what he likes, even if he is nostalgic for an era that may have been an aberration.

That said, the newsroom scenes have yet to grip me. Maybe Simon’s proximity to this world weakens the material. But the truth is the drama is simply too pallid compared to the rest of what The Wire has to offer. Cops, drug dealers and politicians are being challenged by technology and cold economics. They’re not being fundamentally altered by them, the way newspapers are. End of story. As Sam Fuller would say, thirty.

Labels: Movies, TV

Miscellaneous: Grab Bag

Oscar nominations. They’re out, and here’s all I have to say: if “Falling Slowly” from Once doesn’t win Best Original Song, somebody’s getting a letter.

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates (1961). A modern classic I am only now coming to. It deserves its reputation; I was well and truly staggered. Yates’s story of stultifying suburban life and how the lies we tell ourselves can poison others blazed a trail that novelists have been following for decades.

The Colbert Report. Tuesday night’s show, with “Stephen Colbert” dipping into Stephen Colbert’s family history and a closing Gospel number, is a must-see. Colbert has always walked a high wire, but the WGA strike has removed his net. He has yet to stumble.

Miracle (2004). I don’t know how I missed this movie about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. I’m a sucker for inspirational sports films, it acknowledges my alma mater as a college hockey powerhouse, and I revere Kurt Russell as the acme of American manhood. A recent mention from Kung Fu Monkey corrected my oversight.

Art in the Blood, by Craig McDonald (2006). Not too long after I raved about McDonald’s debut novel Head Games it was nominated for an Edgar, due presumably to my endorsement. I can also recommend this collection of interviews with some of the leading lights of contemporary crime fiction. McDonald knows how to ask questions, and includes a wide range of writers. Lots of insight to be gained here.

Labels: Books, Miscellaneous, Movies, TV

Movie: More 52 Pick-Up

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s watched the sleazetastic Elmore Leonard adaptation 52 Pick-Up lately. So did Filmbrain and Premiere’s Glenn Kenny, who notes that the movie includes a veritable who-did-who of late ‘80s porn. I missed that aspect of the movie entirely. Yours truly, a good Irish Catholic boy, doesn’t take an interest in such prurient matters.

Book: Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique, by Kelly DiNardo (2007)

On the other hand I did read a biography of a stripper, so maybe I’m lying.

Lili St. Cyr is primarily remembered now as a reference in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But she was America’s greatest ecdysiast. (I’ve always wanted to use that word.) One glimpse of Lili plying her trade in Irving Klaw’s burlesque films Varietese and Teaserama and you can see why. She had a cool elegance and a sense of the theatrical that elevated her performances above the mere bump and grind ... although she had va-va-voom to spare. (Check out the NSFW Varietease trailer for a sample.)

But a life rich with incident – six husbands, multiple suicide attempts, and a sad end as an elderly heroin addict – doesn’t necessarily equal a compelling story. Lili never fully registers as a person in these scrupulously researched, rather academic pages. DiNardo wants to use Lili to make broader comments on evolving attitudes toward sex and the role of women in society, but the dancer born Marie van Schaak doesn’t provide enough of a foundation.

Still, there are plenty of great tidbits. A nicely fleshed-out portrait of Montreal as the Sin City of ‘40s North America. Sally Marr, Lenny Bruce’s mother, taught at the Pink Pussycat College of Striptease in Los Angeles, including a course called ‘Dynamic Mammary, Navel and Pelvis Rotation.’ Lili’s numbers in the film adaptation of The Naked and the Dead were so arousing that they allegedly made director Raoul Walsh’s glass eye pop out.

I didn’t need to know that Lili possessed a “high-pitched, Minnie Mouse-like voice,” though. Shades of Lina Lamont.

Kelly DiNardo is interviewed by Rick Klaw, grandson of Irving, here. DiNardo’s blog The Candy Pitch covers the contemporary burlesque scene and is worth a look. Or several.

Labels: Books, Movies

Movie: Skidoo (1968)

I watched it. All of it. From the truncated cartoon opening to the closing credits, which are sung. Yet another item I can cross off life’s to-do list.

The history of Otto Preminger’s unwieldy combination of head movie and counterculture farce, laid out nicely in this TCM piece, is more interesting than its plot. And that’s saying something. Jackie Gleason is a reformed mobster coerced by the country’s top kingpin “God,” (played by Groucho Marx in his final performance) to go into prison and whack his onetime best friend. He’s thrown into a cell with a draft dodger (Austin Pendleton, easily the best thing in the movie) who accidentally turns him onto LSD. Meanwhile, Gleason’s daughter and wife fall in with a band of hippies. Here, watch the trailer.

Some select highlights from the Chez K running commentary:

Me: I don’t know which thought is more disturbing, Carol Channing sleeping with Frankie Avalon or Frankie Avalon sleeping with Carol Channing.

Rosemarie: Please don’t talk to me.

And when the movie was over:

Rosemarie: Honestly? Twenty minutes in I was hoping the wind would knock the cable out so I wouldn’t have to watch the rest of it.

Me: You could have just walked away.

Rosemarie: No. I couldn’t. But I can still root for an act of God.

As bad as Skidoo is – and is it bad; I’ve seen episodes of The Monkees that make more sense and do a better job of explaining the ‘60s – it at least represents an honest attempt to come to terms with the times. Which is more than I can say for 1967’s The Love-Ins, which followed Skidoo on TCM. It stars James MacArthur as the least believable hippie in film history – he still has his Dan-o hair, for Christ’s sake – and Susan Oliver, the first actress to become famous for going green. At one point Oliver takes a massive dose of LSD – again with the acid! – and does a striptease during a protracted trip based on Alice in Wonderland.

Rosemarie: They spent too much money on this. The freakouts in Skidoo were better because they looked cheaper.

Let that be a lesson to prospective filmmakers out there.

Strike Stuff: The Golden Globes

The WGA makes it difficult for the awards show to go on. Note to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association: maybe the writers don’t want to help you out because you treat them so shabbily. Only one screenplay category, for adapted and original, with a mere five slots? No recognition of TV writing at all? And yet you split the lead acting categories into comedy and drama so you can pack the hall with A-listers, and nominate seven movies for best drama just ‘cause you feel like it? You’re lucky the Guild doesn’t picket you when there isn’t a strike.

TV: The Wire

The fifth and final season starts tonight on HBO. Slate digs up a suppressed closing scene. I think they should air it.

Miscellaneous: Links

The New York Times on free web-based videogames. This is how I’ve been killing time while riding out a cold. I particularly like 5 Differences, which works as a soothing art piece as well as a game.

It took two years, but my friend Tony Kay finally finishes the tale of his autograph hound trip to Los Angeles, complete with photo gallery.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Movies, TV, WGA Strike

TV: Late Night Report

Second day back for the network shows and things have already returned to normal, in that I didn’t watch any of them. And if I’ve got the TV on tonight, I know what I’ll be watching: Skidoo. Otto Preminger’s counterculture film – Jackie Gleason as a mobster on acid, Groucho Marx playing a gangster named God, and hippies, hippies, hippies – gets a rare television screening on Turner Classic Movies at 2AM Eastern/11PM Pacific. Mark Evanier has done a sterling job of getting the word out. Don’t miss it.

Book: Luck Be A Lady, Don’t Die by Robert J. Randisi (2007)

Back in March I raved about the first of Randisi’s Rat Pack mysteries. The second entry in the series keeps the good times rolling. The Pack is back in Las Vegas for the premiere of Ocean’s 11, and once again they reach out to Eddie G, pit boss extraordinaire at the Sands casino, for help. Frank Sinatra, pining for Ava Gardner even as he cavorts with Juliet Prowse, has arranged for yet another young lovely to meet him in town. After checking into her hotel she disappears, and Mr. S wants Eddie to find her. Before he’s done Eddie will cross paths with a battery of luminaries, including Sam “MoMo” Giancana. With slick plotting and a peerless recreation of 1960 Las Vegas, the book goes down like good bourbon.

It also reminded me of another recent appreciation of Las Vegas in its mobbed-up heyday, from Bob Newhart in the HBO documentary Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project. As Newhart put it, say what you will about “the boys,” they knew how to run a gambling establishment.

Labels: Books, Movies, TV

Movie: 52 Pick-Up (1986)

Say what you will about the 1980s, but it was the last decade that knew how to deliver quality sleaze.

Novelist George Pelecanos, in a 2005 Sight & Sound article about Elmore Leonard adaptations, describes 52 Pick-Up as:

“the first film that truly captures the beneath-the-gutter atmosphere and acne-scarred, unwashed villains of the middle period, ‘hard’ Leonard crime novels ... This one is sure to be offensive to some, but if the dark end of the alley is your meat, by all means, walk right in.”

The dark end of the alley was not my meat in 1986. At the time I was into stuff like SpaceCamp, which, coincidentally, starred 52 Pick-Up’s Kelly Preston.

Leonard co-wrote the script – to 52 Pick-Up, not SpaceCamp, although maybe he did some uncredited work – and the movie was directed by John Frankenheimer. But the surest sign you’re going to get the vulgar goods comes right at the beginning with the Cannon Films logo.

Roy Scheider is Leonard’s steely protagonist, an ex-military man who has built a successful engineering firm. He’s happily married to Ann-Margret, but is seeing Preston on the side. Little does he know that her interest in him has been orchestrated by a trio of seedy types bent on blackmail. Scheider convinces them he can only come up with a little more than fifty grand, then methodically pits the three of them against each other.

There’s some breathtakingly sordid stuff in Pick-Up, filmed in great lurid L.A. locations. Gotta love Scheider’s interrogation of Vanity in a “modeling studio.”

The movie’s best feature is its bad guys, rightfully described by Pelecanos as “unhinged.” John Glover portrays the ringleader, shooting porn films anywhere and everywhere; in that he’s ahead of his time, kind of a proto Joe Francis. His scene with Ann-Margret’s character late in the action is the very height of lowdown. Glover never lets up. He is magnetically loathsome, or loathsomely magnetic, in every frame. (Glover is an acclaimed stage actor who won a Tony award for his performance as twins in Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, which he then recreated on film. But what do I remember him for? Playing a deranged billionaire, equal parts Ted Turner and Donald Trump, in the underrated Gremlins 2: The New Batch. And now this. It almost makes me feel bad.)

Pick-Up is not exactly a good movie. It’s an enjoyably unpretentious one. It’s mean and it plays dirty. It’s trashy and it knows it. And sometimes that’s exactly what you’re in the mood for.

Labels: DVD, Movies

The Year In Review: In Which The Year Is Not Reviewed

The first installment of my 2007 recap was here earlier today, but I took it down when I realized I was never going to write the other installments. I have neither the time nor the inclination. I am officially retiring from the “best of” business. Which is too bad, because my year-end movie list might well have been the only one to have included Shoot ‘Em Up.

In other news, go see Sweeney Todd.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Movies