Cinematical

When the 1932 Olympics hit LA, it began a long history of synergy between the games and the movie business. That synergy led to Zhang Yimou, China's answer to William Wyler, who gave the recent opening ceremony all due pageantry. Over the years, the Olympics contributed to the movies, foaling movie stars by the ton. The games were a casting call whenever one needed someone as chunky as a wrestler or as slender as a swimmer, or Tarzan, who I guess is a combo of swimmer and wrestler. My favorite will always be Harold "Oddjob" Sakata, silver medalist in the light-heavyweight weight-lifting competition at the 1948 Olympiad. Defamer.com has the more tragic roster of Olympians who pursued cinematic careers like those of Mitch Gaylord and Bruce Jenner. The games have foaled classic documentaries, too, the most well known example is Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 Olympia. Yet there have been these lesser known pictures about this world-wide fest:

On a cloudless January day in 1966, Los Angeles was such a dull small town that children could be alerted to something as small a skywriter at work. My parents must have been watching the Rose Bowl, as they did every New Year's Day. In those days we lived five miles or so away from the arena, on the heights over the Arroyo Seco. They saw the plane on TV buzzing the big game and urged me to go outside and have a look. Up in the sky, the small plane, low enough that you could hear the drone of the engine, spelled out the words in smoke B-A-T-M-A-N I-S C-O-M-I-N-G.

My friends, I just don't know. Falling in love with a real atrocity is a mystery for me. It's not all about pathetically proving my self-worth by laughing at someone else's failed effort: "better to have never made a feature film at all than to make a monstrosity like this! Haw haw! Oh, I'm so very superior." I know I ought to be saving my limited spare time for masterpieces instead of outlandish dreck. But I still have one particular friend who knows where to find this stuff, and we sit side by side on a couch and laugh ourselves into hypoxia. Companionship is part of the experience. But so is the out of body experience ... it's like my brain is trying to reject the very message the eyeballs are trying to convey to it.

It's official: more actors need to die. Debra Winger figuratively kicking the bucket in Terms of Endearment, or Jimmy Durante literally kicking the bucket in It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World ... Harold Sakata reaching for his unfortunately uninsulated derby in Goldfinger, Bugs Bunny grabbing for Oscar gold after being mortally wounded by Elmer Fudd in Tex Avery's short "The Wild Hare" ("It's gettin' dark, Doc ... gasp, choke"). One of my favorites: James Mason making it until daybreak during an entire movie-long death scene in Odd Man Out, or the death by, eh, inspiration in Hot Fuzz.

The list goes on at Gawker.com, where a poll got a lot of people talking. Male posters aired out plenty of excuses for crying in movie theaters like whipped little girls. One correspondent has a likely explanation for shedding his unmanly tears at the end of Armageddon: "a piece of meteorite got in my eye." I know how he felt. Ambient radiation made my eyes run when Spock got broiled at the end of The Wrath of Khan. And all that Middle Earth pollen played hell with my sinuses right when Boromir keeled over, begging apology with his last breath. What's your own favorite demise? Cinematical's Monika Bartyzel lists her 7 best here, from an '07 column, mentioning one time Steven Seagal didn't pull through. Incidentally an outfit called movie deaths.com insists on that the one 100 percent rating is the demise of the pugnacious black knight (above) in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Get out the kleenex and weigh in ...

Bad news from European Variety: Hamish McAlpine's 26-year-old Tartan Films is folding. Today, it was announced that Tartan is laying off of its entire 22-member staff, part of "going into administration" as the Hollywood Reporter notes, using the British phrase that more or less means bankruptcy under the administration of auditors.

The London-based distributor might be best known for the scads of J-horror and K-horror it distributed through the Tartan Asia Extreme and Tartan Terror, aka Tartan Grindhouse. The label had a strong fan base, but apparently not enough of a base to survive. The news may not be a surprise, since the closure of Tartan USA had been announced at this year's Cannes Festival, with the sale of domestically-distributed films to Palisades Media.

Tartan films had included such prestige fare as 12:08 East of Bucharest, 2005's best film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (above) and Johnnie To's Triad Election; the Asia Extreme label got grittier with for Oldboy, the original Ringu and its sequel, and the excellent Korean chiller A Tale of Two Sisters. Here's a list of some of the releases; as eclectic a roster as there is in the current cinema, bearing as it does names from Michael Powell to Park Chan-Wook.

As a long time fan of the original TV show, and as a grown up version of the kid who used to memorize William Johnston's paperbacks ... as a former elementary school student who went in for as many tedious "Would you believe?" jokes as the legions of film critics writing about this week's box office success ... as all of these things, I'm not expecting anything more heart-breaking this summer than Get Smart. From the under-performing villain (the usually savory Terence Stamp) to the dull direction by Peter Segal, the film was a complete tick-off.

Richard Schickel spelled out his own disappointment in the opening paragraph of his review in Time Magazine:

"A schlemiel may be, must be, grievously acted upon by the always malevolent world. But he can never be permitted to act effectively against that world. At the end of his adventures he must, somehow, triumph over the forces of darkness that surround him - but only accidentally so...In that spirit of genial fantasy, we permit out surrogate that utter self-confidence, that sublime sangfroid, with which with he cheerfully motors his way around and through disaster."

Quick, what do H. B. Halicki and Louis B. Mayer have in common? They both went "from junk cars to movie stars" as the poster for The Junkman put it; both were scrap merchants who got into the film business. Wrecking shop owner turned auteur Halicki's homebrewed hit Gone in 60 Seconds led the 1999 remake by Dominic Sena, who reputedly worked on the original The Junkman as a camera man. The Junkman, the follow-up to the original 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds, is an even more extravagant car-cruncher. It's a film that makes Tarantino's great car chase in Death Proof look like an also-ran. (QT refers to this original by having Kurt Russell's character keep a row of sunglasses on his dashboard, just like Halicki did.) The Junkman is an all-out demolition derby with Hoyt Axton providing the vocals, a co-starring role by a pet pig named Farah and a finale with the Goodyear Blimp buzzing the Cinerama Dome. As the price of a gallon of gas reaches the inevitable $5 mark, let us return to this uniquely decadent actioner.

Can't get a ticket to The Hulk? Try The Brute. Movies give all kinds of different pleasures to all different kinds of people. But there's no substitute for the special dirty pleasure of class-card playing melodramas; this is a pleasure we usually deny ourselves. Our critical establishment, from wattle-shaking newspaper dinos down to acne-pocked bloggers, are very careful to detect a film's inhumanity to fictional evil landlords, conniving bosses and cruel millionaires.

Being a cartoon character, The Simpson's C. Montgomery Burns gets a pass. Burns is reputedly based on a real-life Hollywood type, but he has some other real-life predecessors. (Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller is one; he put a lot of people out of business, lived to be enormously old, and ... this is so Burns ... survived in his last years off the breast-milk of a hired wet nurse.)

Uh-oh.

Submitted for your approval: a berk named Merk in bed with his bird. The fuzzy photo cannot really sum up what's going on here. The still I would have preferred is this film's money-shot: a red-cloaked Milton Berle conducting a Satanic mass in convincing Latin. Somehow this is not available on the Internet. Here, instead: a relatively chaste shot of quintuple threat Anthony Newley (actor/director/co-writer/singer/composer) grappling his real-life wife (the beeyoutiful and talented Joan Collins).

The still is a relic of what I've sometimes thought was the worst film ever made by a human being in world history.

Whether it's the critic leaving the screening room, flabbergasted at another mess ... the producer baffled at how much time and treasure and good intentions got squandered into an immense dog's egg ... or the actor who had some sort of a hunch that a film could be work, only to find out that there wasn't enough of him to fight the dozens working against him ... all can console themselves with screenwriter William Goldman's rule: 'Nobody knows anything." This is the consolation when sure fire things go wrong. If nobody knows anything, there's still 7 things you ought to know if you're making movies ...