Cinematical

After Images: Batman (1966), (1989), (2008)

Richard von Busack — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:02:00 EST

Filed under: Fandom, Comic/Superhero/Geek, After Image, Columns

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.

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After Images: The Apple (1980)

Richard von Busack — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:02:00 EST

Filed under: Music & Musicals, After Image

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.

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After Images: The Junkman (1982)

Richard von Busack — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:02:00 EST

Filed under: Action, Quentin Tarantino, After Image

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.

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After Images: El Bruto (1953)

Richard von Busack — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:03:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, Foreign Language, After Image

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.)

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RvB's After Images: Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe...(1969)

Richard von Busack — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:32:00 EST

Filed under: Music & Musicals, After Image

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.

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RvB's After Images: True Grit (1969)

Richard von Busack — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:02:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, After Image, Western

Before it opened, there was much public mulling over whether Harrison Ford had the stamina at age 65 to play Indiana Jones one more time. Apparently the box office grosses answered that question. It was an irrelevant question, anyway. In those Indiana Jones movies, the machinery is what mattered. Ford was there for the ride, just like the audience. I think what was missing in ...Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the elegiac qualities of a late period performance ... for example, the aging heroism in John Wayne's last great movie.

True Grit isn't just the sword outwearing the sheath, and the soul outwearing the breast, as Byron put it. It's also about remaining power in an old carcass. Wayne's rallying of that power in the film's memorable duel: blinking his one good eye at the shock of being called a fat old man, he takes his horse's reins in his teeth and rides down four gunmen. The film is often a comedy, with lines worthy of Mark Twain in it; so much so that the emotional content blindsides you. Every film class in the world quite justly talks about the end of The Searchers, John Ford's image of Wayne framed by a doorway, never at home or really at ease. True Grit has a scene to equal it: a gentle if tersely written scene at a snow-covered grave yard in the high country, with approximately the emotional fire power of the finale of James Joyce's The Dead.

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RvB's After Images: Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

Richard von Busack — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:02:00 EST

Filed under: Comic/Superhero/Geek, After Image

NASA's Phoenix lander has its rendezvous with Mars, and that, as well as the upcoming Puerto Rican primary, gives a torn-from-today's-weblogs quality to this purported horror film, aka'd both as Mars Attacks Puerto Rico and Mars Invades Puerto Rico. But Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster is a film for all seasons anyway. Lou Cutell's alienating Doctor Nadir (above) in bald wig, goblin ears, and loads of clown white makeup, isn't even the most uncanny part of this particularly inexpensive sci-fi epic, which pits a disfigured robot Frankenstein against the gorilla-suited, skull-headed Mull: a sort of an alien attack dog.

Made by Robert Gaffney, a long-time second-unit director for Kubrick (this piece from dvdtalk.com considers Gaffney's career), FMTSM is a good-looking li'l crapburger. It's remembered fondly for Mull, and the hoity-toity aliens who keep him on a leash. Recently at the Super-Con in San Jose, I saw two separate TV horror hosts on a panel endorsing FMTSM as their favorite bad film. Could it give Plan Nine From Outer Space a run for its money? Hard to say, but it shares four essential qualities of Plan Nine; four things that may be completely necessary to the making of a memorable turkey. You've heard it said that it's as hard to make a bad movie as it is to make a good one. Fair enough: there are plenty of filmmakers out there who want to work hard making a bad movie.

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RvB's After Images: Artists and Models (1955)

Richard von Busack — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:02:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, Comedy, Comic/Superhero/Geek, After Image

Times may have changed, but for years conversationalists who knew nothing about France except that french fries came from there always had a great fall back position: "You know, they worship Jerry Lewis movies." Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope analyzes the urban legend, while passing on some of his own notions regarding "highbrow critics (the only kind France has)".

When I was Paris once, I can remember reading the newspaper Le Figaro's review of "Allo Maman, C'est Moi Encore" (Hi Mom, It's Me Again better known as Look Who's Talking Too). The review began, as I recall, "What's more droll than a talking baby? Two of them!" Sheesh, that's more highbrow than Richard Roeper even! The Lewis libel is what is the novelist Gustave Flaubert called "a received idea," a bit of folk wisdom passed down uncritically from one ignoramus to another.

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RvB's After Images: Crimewave (1986)

Richard von Busack — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:32:00 EST

Filed under: Comedy, After Image

As Jack Handey put it, "It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man." Crimewave is about that big kind of man, and his partner: two electrocutioners on a rampage. They prowl the streets in a truck with a hog-sized stuffed rat on top, with red light bulb eyes. The driver is Faron Crush, who looks like Paul Sorvino playing the Incredible Hulk. HIs sniggering partner Arthur (Brion "I'll tell you about my mother" James) wears a jumpsuit, fingerless leather gloves, and a flat leather cap the shape and color of a cow-chip. If you ever had a nightmare about Gallagher, that's what Arthur looks like. The two maniacs carry with them "a shocker," a killing-machine that has three settings: "Rat," "Man" and "Hero". And they have no motivation beside malice and sheer professionalism.

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RvB's After Images: Chimes at Midnight (1967)

Richard von Busack — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:02:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, After Image

Here stands a rebuke to the idea that in the digitized world everything is available. Well, if you strain a bit you can get this notoriously out of print movie. The Brazilian version of the semi-legal Chimes at Midnight aka Falstaff aka Campanadas a Medianoche can be bought for a cool $40, and all you do is turn off the Portuguese subtitles. However, thanks to the poor sound of this masterpiece, English subtitles might be necessary. The entire film was post-synced: "not a word in direct sound," said the co-star Keith Baxter, who played Prince Hal. Led by the obtuse Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, critics of 1967 put their finger on this very obvious button. Few of them considered how few viewers come out of a movie saying, "Boy, the picture, the script and the acting sucked, but wasn't the sound great?"

Last Sunday, the local film archive showed Chimes at Midnight; me and 100 other people turned our back on a sunny afternoon, and treated ourselves to a rare 16mm screening of one of the most imaginative, stirring and beautifully composed Shakespeare films ever made. I mentioned it to Cinematical's Jeffrey Anderson and he pronounced Chimes at Midnight a better film than Citizen Kane. I don't have that kind of enthusiasm (Citizen Kane changes lives, and Chimes is a rougher sell). And still, everyone will tell you about Citizen Kane, whereas Chimes is not just a gem but a half-buried one.

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RvB's After Images: Herman, Katnip and Other Gloomy Tunes

Richard von Busack — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:02:00 EST

Filed under: Animation, Classics, After Image

Recently down for a week to pick up some kultcha in the "hateful megalopolis," as R. Crumb described Los Angeles, I caught a recurring cabaret night of bad cartoons titled Cartoon Dump! hosted by Jerry Beck, an internationally known authority on animation. Frank Conniff, best known as TV's Frank from Mystery Science Theater 3000, was on hand in costume as "Moodsy," a clinically depressed owl. The slim comedienne Erica Doering played Compost Brite! the cute, lisping dumpster-diving elf who had retrieved from the garbage a bunch of stinky cartoons that the world might be well without. Beck and Company dug up some real lulus. Hard to top was the opening from the 1950s, Paddy the Pelican.

You knew you were in for it right from the cackling theme song, seemingly a version of "The Irish Washerwoman" performed by a demented Canadian goose in duet with an electric organ. The graphics and apparently improvised dialog was like something a brain damaged-child might have come up with if you handed him a microphone and a crayon. You owe it to yourself to leave a few bars of that "Paddy" soundtrack on a friend's cellphone. They'll be looking over their shoulders for months afterwards to see if there's someone stalking them.

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RvB's After Images: URGH! A Music War (1981)

Richard von Busack — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:32:00 EST

Filed under: Music & Musicals, After Image

This will no doubt be an illegal movie forever. After seeing it at the UC Theater in the summer of '82, I recently found a copy on a bootleg VHS for $1 at a Friends of the Library sale, still burned with the Sundance Channel bug. In today's cinema, much is made of the nostalgia value of the 1980s soundtrack: a famous example being Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" during Donnie Darko's opening. You can have your MTV, though, since URGH! A Music War was the soundtrack to my 1980s. Hey, what a surprise, no Duran Duran, no INXS, no Soft Cell covering a Gloria Jones soul classic and convincing a history-impaired generation that they wrote it. And yet it's clear why this film failed.

As a business scheme URGH seems, in 2008 hindsight, a uniquely quick way to burn a fortune. The film documents second-wave punk and New Wave bands playing from LA to London, editing them together without any particular zeitgeisty event like a music festival. So: play it a little under a real kiss-of-death title, and then wait to be deafened by the wails of bands, managers and lawyers zooming in to fight over the non-existant money. The Police were the headliners, opening and closing the film. They wrap up the film, too; you can see drummer Miles Copeland wearing an URGH! T-shirt. Is this perhaps all he was paid for this film? There are mostly cinematic performances here, and we see how much was lost by the fact that the Industry couldn't figure out a way to use their talents in the movies. Here's a key to the best of the show, omitting slurs of forgotten bands who perished long years ago.

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RvB's After Images: Caveman (1981)

Richard von Busack — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:02:00 EST

Filed under: Animation, Comedy, After Image

I hardly have to explain why I'd go fetch this one from the vaults, since it's the only known anecdote for 10,000 BC. Roland Emmerich certainly hasn't lost his delicate touch, has he? I feel the pain of people who had ten year old sons and thus were dragged into it. You get force marched through the tundra for what seems like hours only to arrive at the Pyramid of the Fancy Boys. And the only real diversion besides 3 minutes of saber-toothed tiger, are those devil-ostriches. After I got out, I couldn't wait to have a look at director/writer Carl Gottlieb's satire of the all-purpose caveman movie. Unfortunately, I never saw Caveman back in the day, despite the high-spirited tagline on the posters: "Back When You Had to Beat It Before You Could Eat It!" I think the reason I skipped it was because of all the genial oafs I knew who kept quoting the dinosaur poop joke in the film. They are there, alright, but happily it's only a tiny part of the comedic inanity set in "One Zillion Years BC...October 9."

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RvB's After Images: Raising Cain (1992)

Richard von Busack — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:02:00 EST

Filed under: Comedy, Thrillers, After Image

The double-role has been a favorite for movie audiences for a long time. Actors as different as Lon Chaney and Ronald Colman have indulged in the two-actors-for-the-price-of-one roles. In The Dark Knight, Aaron Eckhart will get to do a two-fer, playing a character who didn't get nearly enough to do in that Joel Schumacher fiasco. (Though I did very much enjoy the bifurcated Tommy Lee Jones' use of the pluralis majestatis, the royal "we.") Few double-roles, however, are as roundly a good time as Brian De Palma's Raising Cain, a reviled but rich melodrama derived in equal parts from Psycho and the equally scandalous Peeping Tom. Preposterous, invigoratingly silly, and done to a technical turn by Hitchcock's most devoted fan, this forgotten thriller gives John Lithgow -- kindly actor and easy-going TV star of Third Rock from the Sun --a chance to show his hulking, evil side.

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RvB's After Images: Skidoo (1968)

Richard von Busack — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:02:00 EST

Filed under: Comedy, Music & Musicals, After Image

Let's imagine Tony Soprano in one of his 3 am near-comas. Rich food and stress is keeping him awake, as the rest of his family sleeps soundly in their Jersey mini-mansion. Having just loaded an extra-extra large hot fudge sundae into his gut, he's half-awake on the sofa, watching television. This is a scene that happened repeatedly during The Sopranos, when Tony would sometimes see an old movie that would cut him to the quick, or else plant a seed of doubt in him, tipping him off to some unsuspected treachery in his world. Tonight's screening is a weird, weird film from 1968...so damned weird that the next day, Tony wouldn't be sure if he didn't doze off during it, adding plot details from his own dream-life.

Skidoo by Otto Preminger--a resounding, loathed failure in its time--has a cult, like almost all failures do. It includes the first appearance by the reliable character actor and acting teacher Austin Pendleton. Also making her debut was the famed pioneer African-American model and Warhol star Donyale Luna ~~(memorable from this photograph you've seen in every beauty salon, in which Luna's leanness and sinew is visually contrasted with a line of elephants).~~ (here's a famous photo of her) Unique casting compliments a really one-of-a-kind musical/satire that shows how beyond "good" and "bad" some films are.

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RvBs's After Images: You're Telling Me! (1934)

Richard von Busack — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:02:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, Comedy, After Image

Considered one of the least of W.C. Fields' films, this little more than an hour long morality tale directed by Erle C. Kenton (Island of Lost Souls)--an almost Rohmerish parable about snobbery--was a pleasant surprise discovery on the W. C. Fields Comedy Collection Vol. 2. This movie balances The Great Man with a sort of fairy godmother, an unhappy princess on the American tour. It could lure in female fans in who might be repelled by a real Fields day like The Bank Dick or Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. The Booze Movie blog, run by a 100-proof fan of Fields, mentions this film slightingly, pointing out that it was based on a short story published in the woman's magazine Redbook, and has Redbook's own lack of edge. (Incidentally, it's a nigh-shot for shot remake of an earlier silent version, the Gregory La Cava movie So's Your Old Man.)

The movie was out of circulation for some time; William K. Everson wrote that it was "a major disaster" that the public couldn't see it, in his 1972 book The Art of W.C. Fields. True, You're Telling Me! lacks in the written-by-pink-elephants whimsy of Fields at his most extreme. And yet there's an emotional center here that won't repel the harder-core fan of Fields, who was certainly the grandfather of Homer Simpson. Fields plays a gauche but intrepid drunkard named Sam Bisbee, in search of that million dollar payoff that'll bring him well-deserved leisure for life. It's his passing friendship with a female stranger on a train that makes it happen.

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RvB's After Images: Hellzapoppin' (1941)

Richard von Busack — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:02:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, Comedy, After Image

I'm hardly describing Meet the Spartans as something to celebrate, at least on the grounds of the trailers -- leave Brittany alone, indeed. However, this week's unpreviewed satire represents the latest version of a film that's a gag, followed by a subsequent gag, followed by yet another gag, without any connective tissue. Now that they're so codified by sequels, it's hard to remember this kind of comedy as something that once seemed berserk and new. What did something like the Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin' look like on its first go-round in 1941? Though it was a flop, It was influential, and for years it was synonymous for a certain kind of entertainment. As a kid I always heard my favorite show, TV's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In described as a new Hellzapoppin'. Watching R and M's shtick today proves it as mirthless as any of these Stupid Movie-style franchisees of today, though I sure hope to do an After Images column on The Maltese Bippy some time. For that matter, which came first, W. C. Field's 70 minute long dazzler Never Give A Sucker an Even Break or Hellzapoppin'? It's the same thing either way: performers in vain search of a plot decide to make the movie anyway.

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RvB's After Images: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Richard von Busack — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:02:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, Mystery & Suspense, After Image

Otto Preminger is in the midst of reappraisal. Foster Hirsch just published a new bio about the bald and fulminating showman (here's my review), the New Yorker's David Denby recently discussed the director/producer on the occasion of Hirsch's book and Chris Fujiwara's more analytical book The World and its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger, and there was also a retrospective of Preminger at NYC's Film Forum. There are times when it seems like there's very few big rediscoveries to make in Hollywood cinema. The longing that maybe there's someone out there who has been overlooked strengthens the idea that Preminger needs new viewers and new understanding. Skidoo, for instance, which I'll be writing about shortly, is an astonishingly strange film, strange in that mind-roasting way that makes it really distinguished. Preminger's less-seen films deserve a revival, but his best work hardly needs a defense. The 1959 Anatomy of a Murder is a juicy, involving court-room drama with a splendid Duke Ellington soundtrack. It's about the wolf-like ardor for the law, a legal duel over a pair of wasted lives, held in a small town that sits right on the line between "picturesque" and "squalid."

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RvB's After Images: The World's Greatest Sinner (1962)

Richard von Busack — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 12:02:00 EST

Filed under: Comedy, After Image, Religious

You want some blasphemy? Don't bother with that certain fantasy movie with that skinny lacquered redhead in it. Despite all the public outcry over that particular blockbuster's pro-Reformation message (isn't it risky for our cinema to endorse the policies of the heretic Martin Luther?), the Compass movie really doesn't give God much trouble for your entertainment buck. By contrast, The World's Greatest Sinner, a backyard-shot indie has a real beef with the Almighty. (Don't worry, kids, the Rock of Ages is tough enough to handle it!) As director, writer, producer, chief cook and bottle washer, eccentric character actor Timothy Carey shows the instincts of a French decadent. His Clarence Hilliard is a Southland Baudelaire who rails against the existence of God, and sets himself up as a false messiah. The hand-rubbed Letraset titles in the graphic above indicate the budget level of this berserk film. Much of it takes place in an early 1960s San Gabriel Valley a.k.a "The Inland Empire," so innocent and blue-horizoned that David Lynch would have refused to believe it.

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RvB's After Images: Remember The Night (1940)

Richard von Busack — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 17:02:00 EST

Filed under: Classics, Comedy, Romance, Paramount, After Image

Jette's very good column the other day called Remember the Night one of the seven Christmas movies you haven't ever seen. Jette caught it on TV once and hadn't watched it since. This 1940 romantic comedy is another one of those films that reminds you why you'd better not ditch your VHS player yet. If you want to see this (and, oh, you will want to see this, if you're a Preston Sturges fan), you have three options: one is to buy a grey-market DVD, something anyone with a search engine and a credit card can do. Another is to get one of the few VHS copies available off Amazon for $50 (excuse me, $49.99). The last, and cheapest, is to live in an urban area with a good specialty video store--such as Silver Screen in the Berkeley area suburb of El Cerrito.

If the last is the case, it's worth checking today to see if someone hasn't rented it out yet. Remember the Night is an unknown classic of the holiday, stressing romance, comedy and -- most important on Christmas -- hope and rebirth. The American cinema's most versatile actress, Barbara Stanwyck plays a character study for screenwriter Sturges' later The Lady Eve. Here she's a larcenous woman who turns out to be essentially no worse than the people around her.

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