The Unofficial John Westmoreland Memorial Tribute Webring

The 2025th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:59:00 +0000

The 2024th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:59:00 +0000

Lost Films and forgotten reference

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:21:00 +0000

[I started writing this a little more than a year ago; I parked it after Ackerman's death -- I take one of his more fanboyishly enthusiastic quotes and kick it in the nuts a few times as a springboard to write about movies I only sort-of like at best. Even I have some respect for the dead, even dead nerds. Anyway, I saved what I wrote then and just discovered it yesterday.]

This dates from my Lon Cheny Sr.-mania, which was some time around 1999-2000. It's a quote from Forrest J. Ackerman: "There are perhaps a baker's dozen of lost films of the fantastic that imagi-movie fans thirst to see: LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, MYSTERY OF LIFE, NIGHT OF THE GODS, THE YOUNG DIANA and ... INCUBUS."

It's obviously an old quote -- how old, I have no idea and Google was not helpful -- but it's interesting that most of these lost films have been found.

LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT [1927]
The more historians and film archivists investigate this Chaney vehicle, the more the film sounds like a middling potboiler that was puffed up by Carl Laemmle's histrionic PR department upon its release and that puffery has been expanded into legend by the no-research generational game of Telephone that passed/passed for fandom history. I'm still a huge Chaney & Tod Browning fan, but the stills-only recreation of the film on the Chaney TCM set does nothing to change my mind that LONDON's loss is their reputations' gain.

MYSTERY OF LIFE [1931]
Controversial in its time -- more for supposed dirtiness than Clarence Darrow making a convincing case for Darwinism; these days, I would imagine the proportion of outrage would be reversed -- a complete-ish nitrate of the film was reportedly discovered in a private collection and is being prepared for a public release soon.

THE NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS [1935]
I think Ackerman meant this film, a jaunty little movie about a man who invents a magic wand that turns people to stone. He then gets really hammered, hooks up with a leprechaun and they go to a museum and turn the statues of Greek Gods into people and then the movie gets really weird. The movie is more whimsical than funny, but it's the sort of plot I almost wouldn't mind being remade with, I don't know, Hugh Laurie and James Franco -- which one plays the CGI-Hobbitified leprechaun, I don't care -- as the leads. The idea sounds almost impossible to fuck up.

THE YOUNG DIANA [1922]
This Marion Davies vehicle is apparently lost, which is odd; you would think that there would be a print of it somewhere in her old boyfriend's vaults. It's reportedly a romantic fantasy about a fountain of youth, the kind of melodramatic showcase that William Randolph Hearst insisted she make. Davies was a great comedian, and the few "serious" films of hers that I've seen don't make me mourn the loss of this one too much.

INCUBUS [1965]
Sometimes, I wonder how massive and yet haphazardly organized the Cinémathèque Française's permanent collection of films must be; it seems that two out of three times a print of a long-believed-to-be-lost film is found, it's found there. Shortly after its release, INCUBUS' negative and first generation of prints were accidentally destroyed, the lone surviving print was found a few years ago at the C.F. Despite its gimmick -- the first [and I think still only] film made entirely in Esperanto -- it's an effective, spooky programmer, and a another rock-solid pre-STAR TREK effort from William Shatner.

The Shat had a pretty hot streak up to TREK: even as he was busy playing dozens of bit parts in scads of random television series, he made an impression in JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG [1961], should have made a bigger splash from his work in Roger Corman's THE INTRUDER [1962, way too soon for this sort of story], reunited with writer/producer Rod Serling for the TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" the following year, then held his own opposite Edward G. Robinson and Howard Da Silva in THE OUTRAGE [Martin Ritt & Michael Kanin's remake of Kurosawa's RASHOMON] just prior to starring in this film. It's tiring just to write it down. After years of low-paying bit parts in full-budget projects and a few leading roles in some no-budget ones, it must have been nice to be comparatively well-paid and The Man on a full-color network-television show. And, like him or loathe him, when TREK ended Shatner went back to hustling up whatever acting jobs were offered to him like a good trouper.

It's odd to start a post kinda shitting on Forrey Ackerman and Lon Chaney Sr. and end it by praising Marion Davies and William Shatner, but I can only follow the path that my failing eyesight and intellect can perceive. Unless you have written proof, I never promised you a rose garden.

The 2023rd step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:59:00 +0000

Weekly DVD Alert Seven: January 4-11, 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:47:00 +0000

Check your local listings; also a lot of these films are shown throughout the month -- some are in a semi-permanent rotation -- so you may want to look at previous DVD alerts for December and January.

Monday, January 4

Midnight-1:30AM, TCM: THE FRESHMAN, 76m.
TCM's Silent Sunday film this week is a fine go-getter Harold Lloyd football movie, co-starring Jobyna Ralston and Brooks Benedict.

12:30AM-2:45AM, Sun: CHE "Part 1: The Argentine," 134m.
The first half of director Steven Soderbergh and writer Peter Buchman's epic about revolutionary/fashion icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara, focusing on the Cuban Revolution. It was a great idea to cut the Che legend down into a series of low-key human-sized vignettes and chronologically shuffling them just enough to tell the stories of the Revolutions in Cuba and Bolivia that's both epic and accessible.

1:30AM-2:45AM, TCM: COLLEGE, 65m.
It's Buster Keaton's turn to be the nerd gone football hero. Anne Cornwall and Harold Goodwin co-star.

2:45AM-5AM, Sun: CHE "Part 2: Guerrilla," 135m.
The concluding half of the story is not nearly as easy to take in as the Cuban film -- I joked that the first two & a half hours rip by in half that time and the last two hours make up for it -- but that might been intentional; unlike Cuba, Che's campaign in Bolivia was a frustrating non-starter, [SPOILER] even if he hadn't been executed at the end of it. [END SPOILER] It's also ingenious that director/cinematographer Soderbergh changed aspect ratios from the epic 2.35 of the Cuba film to a much smaller 1.85 for Bolivia, which does amplify the conclusion's claustrophobic feel along with the much more washed-out coloring.

2:30PM-3:54PM, TCM: TOP BANANA, 84m.
What an oddball movie; producer Albert Zugsmith [and maybe director Alfred E. Green] optioned the rights to Phil Silvers' Broadway musical-comedy with the plan to film it as a stage show but in 3-D to simulate seeing it live, "from the best seat in the house!" But then the 3D boom goes bust and rather than stick to their guns, they push the movie out as a regular 2-D film with rather odd coloring. Rose Marie and Jack Albertson co-starred.

3:55PM-4:04PM, TCM Short: PETE SMITH SPECIALTY "A Wife's Life," 8m.
This sounds like "Just Suppose," but Dave O'Brien's wife plays his wife this time.

6PM-8PM, TCM: A THOUSAND CLOWNS, 118m.
Still a gold standard for eccentric-uncle-assisted coming-of-age movies. Jason Robards Jr., Martin Balsam, William Daniels and Barbara Harris star.

8PM-9:32 pm, FMC: THE ADVENTURE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER, 91m.
If you squint, this movie could look like a lost mid-'70s Mel Brooks film; Gene Wilder wrote the screenplay and stars with Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman and Dom Deluise in this specifically sub-genre specific spoof, complete the inspired Brooksian stunt-casting of Leo McKern as Professor Moriarty. But Wilder also directed the film, and showed that he is no borscht-belt fartypants like his one-time mentor; I remember this being a far more adult piece of silliness than YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN or HIGH ANXIETY.

Tuesday, January 5

8AM-2PM, H: LIFE AFTER PEOPLE
The History Channel is apparently having a "HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE IN A CATACLYSM [some scientists and maniacs suggest]" Week, ringing in the new year with lots and lots of programs about how the Earth is living on borrowed time, maybe. I find most of these documentaries cheesy and dishonest, but the original LIFE AFTER PEOPLE two-hour doc serves up the Apocalypse with generous amounts of real-sounding science; what happens to all the stuff we've made after humanity is suddenly eliminated? This six-hour marathon leads off with the "pilot" and then four episodes of the later series, and reairs in the afternoon and evening, then two more episodes air at 10PM and 11PM.

8:15AM-9:55 AM, Sun: JUMP TOMORROW, 97m.
I'm a sucker for multi-national, indie romantic comedies set in upstate New York, especially when they are occasionally funny and have a leading lady like Natalia Verbeke with support from character actors like Hippolyte Girardot and the old man who plays the deaf grandfather. [Reairs at 4PM.]

3:45PM-5:45PM, TCM: GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, 108m.
The first few layers of this movie haven't aged well, which is understandable; it's a movie made at a time when interracial dating was literally dangerous and interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 or 17 States, and it takes a stand on racial politics, which isn't something Hollywood A-pictures did. Its stand is hedged somewhat -- Sidney Poitier plays another saint in a suit and the only physical intimacy his character shows his would-be bride is a kiss that couldn't be any shorter or more obscured and still register, even subliminally, to the viewer. The sociopolitical status quo of the country was so volatile at the time that several lines of dialogue that referenced politics and law were inaccurate even before the film was released. I mention all this because I'm afraid I'd feel like an asshole if I didn't. What remains after you strip out the torn-from-the-headlines hot topics, and the unexamined but undeniably condescending view of young women pre-Women's Liberation, is a beautifully acted, somewhat stagey, comedic drama of manners about the parents and their children struggling to navigate the gray area where the children aren't children and the parents don't know what to do if not parenting, but they haven't reached the next state, where the adult children become the parents/guardians of their parents. I could watch the scene where Poitier yells at his dad for hours; for me that's the best speech of the film, Spencer Tracy's summation in the last reel be damned.

5:45PM-8PM, TCM: UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE, 124m.
I know nothing about this movie except that it was made the same year as DINNER [1967], it's another spin on the new-teacher-in-ghetto-school-overcomes-delinquents-and-the-system plot and it stars a young Sandy Dennis. Two-plus hours seems very long for this sort of movie, though.

10:15PM-12:45AM, Sun: BLACK BOOK, 146m.
Paul Verhoeven is the man. It's not just that he's the only cerebral filmmaker of his generation to develop and retain a sense of humor, he's somehow the most honest of his peers, even if it's a emotional or metaphorical honesty that often gets him in trouble. This film is his big Holland homecoming, a WWII spy thriller that gives you The Full Verhoeven: slyly funny characters tossed through a twisting plot told largely in amazing images and juxtapositions. Also, tits.

Wednesday, January 6

6AM-6:30AM, Sun: HUMAN REMAINS, 29m.
I like this engaging little documentary, which presents those charming madmen Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse Tung in their own words.

6:45AM-8PM, TCM: LAUGH, CLOWN, LAUGH, 74m.
TCM kicks off an all-day tribute to Loretta Young with this 1928 silent movie. It's a vehicle for Lon Chaney Sr., who plays a circus clown in love with a young woman who loves another man. If you've ever seen a Lon Chaney movie before, you already know where this tale goes and where it ends.

10:30AM- 11:45AM, HBO: TED WILLIAMS, 75m.
A solid documentary about the baseball-hitting genius and eternal cryogenically frozen footnote/punchline. Armchair-directing it, I would have shoehorned in more funny/odd Ted anecdotes and gotten the bizarre postscript of the Boston Red Sox legend laying in suspended animation at a lab somewhere over and done as quickly as possible.

Noon-1:15PM, TCM: SHE HAD TO SAY YES, 66m.
Another Loretta Young film, this time she stars in a surprisingly progressive-sounding Great Depression-made [Busby Berkeley co-directed] melodrama about secretaries being pressured into dating prospective customers for their company. Lyle Talbot and Hugh Herbert co-star.

1:15PM-3PM, TCM: THE STRANGER, 95m.
Orson Welles insisted on expurgating this movie, made largely to show that he could be a commercially viable studio director after his campaigns to be a successful radio comedian and a political activist/commentator began to fail, from his official filmography. Despite its obvious producer-ordered scene deletions and less-than-artistic origins, it's scarcely worse than THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI [which suffered more from studio-made edits] and more successful as a whole than most versions of MR. ARKADIN/CONFIDENTIAL REPORT I've seen. In his book HELLO AMERICANS, Simon Callow's recreation of STRANGER's missing scenes, which explain much of what's really going on in the last half of the movie, are exceptionally vivid even in a biography that's packed with lively writing and analysis. It's a shame that Welles didn't get his first choice for the lead investigator, Agnes Moorehead, and had Edward G. Robinson instead [it's that kind of movie].

3PM-4:30PM, TCM: RACHEL AND THE STRANGER, 79m.
This sounds like another post-war women's picture -- mail-order bride falls for a handsome, mysterious drifter, starring Young, William Holden and Robert Mitchum -- but Norman Foster is one of a handful of directors who jam my critical senses; was he a really good craftsman who had to make a hash of an occasionally interrupted stream of lousy scripts and bad casting choices, or was he a hack who got lucky a few times and worked with the perfect set of collaborators? [See: Robert Wise.]

6:15PM-8PM, IFC: THE FLORENTINE, 104m.
I'm oddly nostalgic for this kind of '90s B+ list cast indie movies, but loathe the entire subgenre of indie gangster movies. This one subverts the formula just enough to make me want to watch all of it -- yes, it features Luke Perry, Jim Belushi, Burt Young and the late Chris Penn in support roles, but what I've seen of the movie was more about accepting that you've grown up [Tom Sizemore's character returns to town to find out his ex-girlfriend Virginia Madsen is getting married] than any gangster shit. Also, how often do we get a chance to realize that the character actor in Hollywood is not entirely dead? [Reairs tomorrow at 7:30AM and 12:35PM]

10:05 PM-Midnight, IFC: BLOW OUT, 107m.
I still don't quite know what to make of John Travolta being cast as the lead in this remake/homage/theft of Michelangelo Antonioni's BLOW-UP -- one of the most rewarding aspects of Brian De Palma's movies is that he casts the right star for a part, even when it sounds like a terrible idea. [Michael J. Fox is perfectly cast in CASUALTIES OF WAR precisely because he's such an acting lightweight, just as his character is so outclassed by the other soldiers.] Anyway, I guess I don't know enough about where Travolta was at that time in his life & career that casting him as an ex-police tech turned slasher-flick soundman who unwittingly records an assassination makes meta-sense for the film. It can't just be that a Sweathog was working out of his depth and gets poor Nancy Allen killed, is it? Oop, SPOILERS!

Thursday, January 7

6AM-8AM, FMC: THE LIEUTENANT WORE SKIRTS, 99m.
Frank Tashlin and Tom Ewell's first collaboration -- they made THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT later the same year -- this is a about the pressure to re-enlist felt by the only male "civilian wife" on an Air Force base. This better be in widescreen or I'm gonna tell it to the Marines. Sheree North and Rita Moreno co-star.

6:45PM-8PM, TCM: INDISCRETION OF AN AMERICAN WIFE, 63m.
One amazingly short 1954 melodrama from Vittorio De Sica, starring Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift and Richard Beymer. [Reairs at 2:15AM]

10:30PM-12:15AM, TCM: BEAT THE DEVIL, 90m.
Released the same year as the above De Sica, this John Huston comedy really does play like they threw out the serious script about a group of con artists jockeying for ownership of a bogus uranium mine and ad-libbed themselves a comedy. Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre co-star.

Friday, January 8

Elvis turns 75 today, and TCM celebrates …. by, um, showing his movies all day. I dunno, if I was Elvis I'd probably would appreciate them airing movies I liked rather than my comparative stinkers.

8AM-10AM, FMC: HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON, 108m.
Those irascible drunks John Huston and Robert Mitchum are back with a WWII yarn about a Marine and a Roman Catholic nun [Deborah Kerr] being marooned on an island in the South Pacific. John Boorman later remade this elliptical romance as HELL IN THE PACIFIC with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune.

1:30PM-3:05PM, IFC: TAPEHEADS, 93m.
I've done no research to confirm this, but: Everyone who was cool in 1988 is in this movie.

10PM-Midnight, ESPN12: FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS "Roman Karmazin vs. Dionisio Miranda"
The warhorse boxing series returns, boasting fights with boxers whose names sound sorta familiar if you're a fight fan. I still haven't decided if I'm really going to resume watching FNF; if I do it's probably only because Teddy Atlas can always be counted on to take a big, heaping shit on obvious mismatches before, during and after the promoter-arranged execution is completed.

10PM-11:35PM, IFC: THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE, 90m.
So odd that the primary engine of both I SHOT ANDY WARHOL and AMERICAN PSYCHO could take the pin-up icon's fascinating life and work, a decent-sized budget and a well-selected cast [Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Lili Taylor, David Strathairn, Jared Harris, Sarah Paulson] and then make a movie that plays about as well as any made-for-HBO movie. [Reairs the next day at 3:45AM]

11:35PM-1:45AM, IFC: THE PLAYER, 123m.
That Robert Altman, what a card.

Saturday, January 9

2AM-3:45AM, TCM: THE BIG CUBE, 98m.
For no explicable reason, I love LSD movies -- this one sounds a little too square to give Corman's THE TRIP any competition for Best LSD Movie in my personal awards, but the prospect of seeing Lana Turner on acid may beat out Jackie Gleason's acid trip in SKIDOO. George Chakiris and Richard Egan co-star.

3:45AM-5:30AM, TCM: I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS, 94m.
It's certainly not the best-made Peter Sellers movie, it's not even Sellers' best performance, but TOKLAS is my favorite Sellers movie. I think it's that he gets so many types to play off of -- his oversexed business partner [Herb Edelman]; his batshit mother [Jo Van Fleet, who has the only laugh that makes me laugh]; his brittle, baffled fiance [Joyce Van Patten]; his hippie-injun brother [David Arkin]; the very pretty, very blank canvas of Leigh Taylor-Young; and nearly every bit player in the film from Louis Gottlieb's guru [In my memory, he's doing a fine John Huston imitation but that can't be correct] to the screenplay authors/hippie hitchhikers Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker. Also, I like the Lincoln Continental he drives. [I never promised that I had good reasons to recommend these movies.]

6AM-8AM, TCM: THE SEVENTH CROSS, 112m.
Fred Zinnemann: Another studio auteur who may have been a great filmmaker who was saddled with many bad projects or a hack who got lucky more than once? I can't decide. This is an oddly cast WWII Holocaustic potboiler: Spencer Tracy leads a group of six other men in an escape from a German concentration camp. The men who are caught and returned to the camp are crucified on crosses. You can probably guess who is slated to receive the title object. Signe Hasso, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Agnes Moorehead co-star.

10AM-Noon, TCM: MAN HUNT, 102m.
It's somewhat-loony WWII movie morning at TCM: This is an immaculately made but somewhat narratively clumsy Fritz Lang thriller about an English hunter sneaking into Germany to kill Hitler but engaging in a battle of wills and skills with a Nazi who fancies himself the real big-game hunter. [And the most dangerous game is ….. Whatever or Whoever Stands Against The Aryan!, etc.] Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett and George Sanders star.

8PM-10PM, TCM: NOTORIOUS, 101m.
I think this was my first Cary Grant movie; I remember thinking he was a real dick and not understanding why we were supposed to root for him and that drunken party girl Ingrid Bergman. You never hear about how star-casting fails if the viewer's never seen the star before, do you. Obviously, I get it and take Grant the right way now, but I still feel the most for poor little Claude Rains.

8PM-9PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "Jose Luis Castillo vs. Diego Corrales II"
The less pyrotechnical but much shorter rematch between the two lightweight legends.

9PM-10PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "Bobby Pacquiao vs. Carlos Hernandez"
Manny's brother fights at lightweight in 2005. I often think about boxing brothers -- Juan Manuel and Rafael Marquez, Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, José and Miguel Cotto, Leon and Michael Spinks, Roger and Floyd Sr. [and Jeff?] Mayweather, Jerry and Mike Quarry, the Roach brothers and my favorite, Rahman and Muhammad Ali. It's a topic that doesn't get much play.

10PM-10:30PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "Carlos Quintana vs. Miguel Cotto"
Cotto made his debut at welterweight with this title bout to fill the vacant WBA title.

Sunday, January 10

10-11AM, ESPNC: CLASSIC POOL "1999 BCA championship finals"
11AM-Noon, ESPNC: CLASSIC POOL "2008 semifinals: Women's 9-ball championships"
It would be nice if they showed all of a tournament in one block of time, but spending Sunday mornings watching ladies play pool is OK by me.

5:15PM-7PM, Sun: BOB LE FLAMBEUR, 102m.
Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 thriller essentially wrote the book for all heist movies that followed. Roger Duchesne and several tons of coolness star.

10PM-Midnight, TCM: THE HOSPITAL, 103m.
Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky's bleak, black office comedy stars George C. Scott, Diana Rigg, Barnard Hughes and Richard Dysart.

Monday, January 11

Midnight-1:30AM, TCM: BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT, 90m.
This Sunday Silent movie is a 1926 swashbuckling-ish romance from director King Vidor and writer Dorothy Farnum. John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman star, with bit parts for waiter-character-actor extraordinaire Gino Corrado and a 19-year-old John Wayne, in his second film appearance.

1:30AM-2:15AM, TCM Short: REDISCOVERING JOHN GILBERT, 32m.
Profile of the long eclipsed silent leading man.

2:15AM-4AM, TCM: BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, 85m.
I've never been able to get into this Jean Renoir comedy nearly as much as any of his other movies; I blame it on the pain of the '80s Hollywood remake DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS being so annoyingly ubiquitous when I was a kid.

10:15AM-1135AM, Sun: THE CRUISE, 76m.
Monday is "Doc Day" on Sundance, showing a handful of documentaries all day. This is Bennett Miller's oddly moving portrait of Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a deeply eccentric NYC tour-bus guide with the kind of POV on living in the big city that is admirable as it is untenable for anyone else. It's inaccurate to call this guy an outsider; as I recall his monologues, they present a view so thorough that you can help but feel like you're the one on the outside. Of course, I haven't seen this movie in ten-plus years. [Reairs at 4:30PM and tomorrow at 6:25AM.]

3:30PM-5:30PM, TCM: THE GLASS BOTTOM BOAT, 110m.
I'm starting to think Frank Tashlin was an alchemist disguised as a comedy director; either that, or the stars have aligned just so that I can enjoy movie vehicles for Jayne Mansfield, Debbie Reynolds and maybe, just maybe …. Doris Day playing an important scientist's biographer who has been mistaken for a spy? The mighty Tash could pull it off, although doing it in 1966 seems like a stretch, even for him. Rod Taylor and Arthur Godfrey co-star.

5:55PM-6PM, Sun: JEU, 4m.
The scherzo of Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto + M.C. Escher-esque animation x being too short to be tedious = awesome. [Reairs tomorrow at 7:25PM and 11:25PM]

11:35AM-12:55PM, Sun: A WALK INTO THE SEA: DANNY WILLIAMS AND THE WARHOL FACTORY, 77m.
Whatever happened to Danny Williams? Well, first: Who is Danny Williams? He was a key member of the filmmaking section of Andy Warhol's factory, who reportedly "edited some of Warhol's films and created the revolutionary lighting design for a notable stage show. Additionally, Williams was also Warhol's sometime lover." Williams' niece Esther B. Robinson made this documentary to investigate her uncle's life, work and 1966 disappearance. [Reairs at 6PM and tomorrow at 4AM.]

9:20PM-9:40PM, Sun: MADAME TUTLI PUTLI, 17m.
The still in this short's information page looks nice, and I find the combination of phrases "a night train" and "a timid woman in red" irresistible.

And there's another week.

Sunday Morning Fight Post-Finishing

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:04:00 +0000

So, the 2/3rds world middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik successfully beat an Opponent in 5 rounds two weeks ago, bringing his record for "fighting the very best" [a recurring claim from the Ghost's people] since rising to the level of prominence where a fighter actually can get fights with the very best if wants them, to dead even between The Very Best and Not The Very Best.

Pavlik made a splash with his TKO win over Edison Miranda, an achievement even King Arthur Abraham couldn't pull off nine months earlier. Pavlik's fight was a title eliminator, earning him a shot at the champion, Jermain Taylor. Pavlik TKO'ed Taylor in the seventh round, and won a unanimous decision in an ill-considered immediate rematch that Taylor demanded a few months later. As I recall, Pavlik's people presented, or allowed his fight with Gary Lockett to be presented, as the following: 1] A much-earned break from the high-tension matches of the previous year, 2] A keep-busy fight while Top Rank makes a deal to unify the middleweight titles with Abraham, or 3] another seriously dangerous fight that Kelly and his team were taking very very seriously, depending on what level of media was reporting the story. Lockett was out in the third, via TKO.

Then Pavlik fought Bernard Hopkins and the wheels fell off his wagon. How anyone could have thought a smaller, come-straight-forward brawler with three punches in his repertoire could do anything more but be an unwitting assistant in Hopkins' boxing clinic "How To Make Your Opponent Look Like A Chump For 12 Rounds" is still beyond me. Maybe it's the matchmaker fanboy in me talking, but I still retain most of my blind faith in Top Rank's matchmaking genius Bruce Trampler; I assume that he nixed the idea of Pavlik facing B-Hop but was ignored. In one of the more pathetic acts of machismo common to boxing -- not admitting to injuries until after a fight, always doing so if you lost -- Pavlik claimed to have had bronchitis just prior to the fight, but wanted it to go on anyway.

Since getting thoroughly hosed in that fight, Pavlik has gone the hometown-lion-in-winter route, pummeling the clearly outclassed Marco Antonio Rubio and Miguel Angel Espino before still-adoring Youngstown crowds, broadcast on pay-per-view after attracting no serious interest from any of the cable networks. HBO was still actively promoting the Pavlik-Paul Williams fight even after Pavlik pulled out for the third time, claiming serious hand troubles. Again, it's interesting how there was no talk of this hand injury/staph infection/life-endangering case of MRSA/life-extra-endangeringly allergic-reaction-to-medication until months afterward, with a vague chronology of events. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it's stories like these that remind me that there really aren't any rock-solid journals of record nor full-time investigative reporters in boxing journalism. [This ongoing clusterfuck with Mayweather-Pacquiao is a fine example; I've never been a big boxing-messboard reader -- I mostly skim them looking at the pictures posted -- but I've had to leave them alone for the last two or so weeks because it's so upsetting how no one agrees on the basic facts of the blood-test dispute. It's probably in both promoters' best interest to keep the bewildered herd's understanding of this news vague -- not just legally but the more fans can argue the more word-of-mouth can be generated and the bigger the PPV sales theoretically might be, even when the conversations generated are confusing and embarrassing -- but selling a boxing promotion shouldn't be boxing-journalism's job.]

Anyway, after three postponements and with HBO's blessing, Williams and his people moved on and made a fight with the second-most-avoided light-middleweight in the world, Sergio Martinez. Miraculously, shortly after Williams-Martinez was finalized, Pavlik recovered and fought Espino two weeks after their fight. Apparently, Pavlik called out Williams in his post-fight ring interview, claiming that Williams is not the most ducked fighter out there, hype hype hype blah blah blah. Technically, that probably is true now; if I was a middleweight as limited as Pavlik, I would much rather take a bigger-money, higher-profile fight with Williams [a welterweight lost in a middleweight's frame] and lose on the cards but physically unhurt than have Martinez zing my ass to the canvas for less money. Williams didn't look nearly as dominating and unearthly against Martinez as he did against his opponents prior to signing to fight Pavlik.

That all said, Paul "The Punisher" has shown a remarkable knack for coming back stronger from setbacks; I seriously underestimated how ferociously motivated he is, re: his one loss to Quintana. This is a man who has fought more widely ducked A-list fighters in a row -- not counting Williams' middleweight-tryout fight with Andy Kolle -- than Pavlik has faced, period: Antonio Margarito, Carlos Quintana [twice], Verno Phillips, Ronald "Winky" Wright and now Sergio Gabriel Martinez. It's hard to not see Pavlik having the nerve to call Williams out now as him going after the far easier fight, an impulse he may regret. Even if Williams doesn't throw with the speed, accuracy and power of "Maravilla," he can still easily swamp out a "jab-jab-overhand-right" plodder with his old hundred-punches-a-round workrate and footwork.

[I was going to compare Pavlik's history with a contemporary who seems to be charting a similar career trajectory, albeit one that doesn't have hand like Trampler's guiding it: Juan "Baby Bull" Diaz, but: One, it's unfair to Diaz, who has genuinely been fighting the best in his division for the bulk of his prime time as a unified Lightweight champion and a Showtime/HBO fighter; Two, I distracted the fuck out of myself when I realized that Diaz is another in what seems to be [no research done, but my gut says it's pretty accurate] a long line of Don King-promoted titleholders who ended their association with him and then lost their last fight under his banner, as well as their titles, to other Don King fighter [in this case, Nate Campbell, who promptly lost the titles on the scales in what was to be his first defense].

The 2022nd step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:59:00 +0000

Fine Art Fridays [belated]

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:31:00 +0000

Click for larger.

Vibrant and sensual are ideal terms to describe Marc Schimsky's paintings. I like that he has a camera's eye and a Fauve's hands, and I'm always impressed that he rarely lets his work veer into illustrator-ishness when it's easy to imagine the style going there naturally and/or commercially. Someone please buy me a Schimsky of a pretty girl. Thanks in advance.

Quote of the week

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:16:00 +0000

"Bobby Wise, for example, couldn't find his way out of a field without a choreographer. Bobby even times a kiss with a stopwatch. He marks out the floor at seven o'clock in the morning, before anybody gets there. Lays it all out with a tape measure. True. It's very difficult to work that way. I worked with him and Shirley MacLaine and Shirley said, 'Why doesn't he go home? He's just in the way.'" -- Robert Mitchum on Robert Wise, who made a handful of good movies despite himself

The 2021st step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:59:00 +0000

The 2020th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:59:00 +0000

"Happy New Year"

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 05:07:00 +0000

You know, we exist in a boundless, immeasurable time continuum, which makes New Year's Eve/Day an entirely arbitrary piece of sociopolitical bullshit. Speaking of bullshit, I call it on this so-called blue moon we supposedly have tonight. There's an ultraviolet moon in the sky, liarpants! So, I took a picture of the snowman head I have impaled on a pole outfront to scare off any snowmen hobos/gypsies who travel on the nearby trainline.

Last dinner/salad of 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:39:00 +0000

Going all out, mostly because I'm afraid that most of it will spoil soon.

Last quote for 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:37:00 +0000

"I really prefer you as an enemy, Bob" - Chuck Jones to Bob Clampett

The 2019th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

Happy New Year Comics Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:10:00 +0000

From an early issue of EERIE magazine, Steve Ditko busts out his peerless B&W graywash skills to illustrate a story about the changes that affect a middle-aged ~~virgin when he finally reaches puberty~~ man cursed by a werewolf, or something. At this point in my gray Ditko reading, I had been so beaten down by the stupidity of the stories that I treated text like footnotes in a general-interest article and just enjoyed the pretty pictures.

Click for larger.

Yeah, ha ha ha, but it's stunning how good he could be at this style.

Click for larger.

Click for the full panel, and possibly shit your pants.

The 2018th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

The 2017th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

The 2016th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

Weekly DVD Alert Six: December 28, 2009-January 4, 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:06:00 +0000

Check your local listings; also a lot of these films are shown throughout the month, so you may want to look at previous DVD alerts for December.

Monday, December 28

Midnight-1:32AM, TCM: SHERLOCK HOLMES, 86m.
TCM's Silent Sunday movie this week is the 1922 feature starring John Barrymore as Holmes, Roland Young as Dr. Watson and Gustav von Seyffertitz as Moriarty. Was this film fully restored? I always heard that this movie is missing its entire last reel. Well, I guess we'll find out.

2AM-3:45AM, TCM: THE BICYCLE THIEF, 89m.
Vittorio De Sica's classic; I thought we had all agreed to call it the more accurate THE BICYCLE THIEVES?

3:45AM-5:30AM, TCM: THE LAST DETAIL, 104m.
Hal Ashby's rambling shaggy dog of a gritty Navy MP story. Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid star.

11:45AM-1:15PM, Sun: ALICE NEEL, 83m.
Andrew Neel assembled a fascinating, appropriately frustrating portrait of his grandmother, the late great portrait painter Alice Neel. [Replays at 5:05PM.]

2PM-4PM, TCM: ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON, 115m.
I loathe Ginger Rogers, that red-baiting overrated meathead, but the combination of Cary Grant, Walter Slezak, the still-unsung director Leo McCarey and the sublimely goofy plot [A radio correspondent tries to rescue a burlesque queen from her marriage to a Nazi official] is enough for me to pretend that Rogers is someone else and enjoy the movie.

8PM-9PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "Jose Luis Castillo vs. Diego Corrales"
ESPN's working concept of "classic" can be questionable at times, but this 2005 ten-round war between lightweight titlists "El Temible" [WBC champ] and "Chico" [WBO champ] serves as the modern ideal for a classic boxing match. People ask me why I put up with all the many annoyances that come with being a boxing fan; it's because of fights like this. Sometimes the stars align so that we see two men really and truly give the fight everything they have and nearly everything else falls away to this one elemental drama. I say "nearly everything" because referee Tony Weeks could have given Castillo an extra second or two before calling the fight off.

9PM-10:20PM, Sun: BROKEN NOSES, 78m.
One of photographer Bruce Weber's lesser-known documentaries/portraits, this one trails former Golden Gloves champion Andy Minsker as he mentors Portland, OR teens at a boxing club. Weber photographs Minsker's face with almost as much love as Minnelli filmed Garland.

Tuesday, December 29

6:43-ishAM-7AM, TCM Short: MOVIES ON SUNDAYS, 8m.
In 1935 Pennsylvania, movies were not shown on Sundays. This film was made to help make a case to the state's citizens to treat the flickers like any other enjoyable time-waster.

7AM-8:30AM, TCM: HIGH NOON, 85m.
Everyone knows why this movie is a classic, right? A textbook case of synergy, with a journeyman director Fred Zinnemann, screenwriter Carl Foreman and a
cast of Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Otto Kruger, Lon Chaney Jr. and Harry Morgan somehow making a Western so transcendently relevant that even demagogues and wingnuts who find its message loathsome still have to embrace the movie.

8:30AM-8:45AM, TCM Short: MANHATTA, 12m.
A 1921 silent documentary about "the beauty and majesty of the New York harbor."

9AM-10:35AM, IFC: DARSHAN, THE EMBRACE, 93m.
Another Jan Kounen documentary about spirituality and approaches to living, this one follows humanitarian Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi ["Amma, the Hugging Saint] who has helped heal the world and roughly 23 million people on it by hugging them. That's a lot of hugs; perhaps some of them got seconds. [Reairs at 3:45PM]

10:30AM-11:47AM, TCM: THE CAMERAMAN, 76m.
It's difficult to lose yourself completely in any of Buster Keaton's films -- except for maybe THE GENERAL, which is too visually stunning to plagiarize -- because of how widely and shamelessly generation after generation of lesser comedians and filmmakers have borrowed and outright stole from them. This proto-meta movie is a little jaunt about a newsreel photographer's struggles to woo a big-time movie starlet; even for a movie about movies, this one has been copied so often I bet you could stitch together a nearly complete "cover" version of it from all of the homages and copies of its set pieces. Marceline Day and Harry Gribbon co-star.

11:47AM-Noon, TCM Short: THE CAMERA SPEAKS, 11m.
We'll have room on the disk; A short 1934 film about an elderly cameraman and his camera reminiscing about silent movies and newsreels.

Noon-1:40PM, THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK, 99m.
Of Preston Sturges' WWII homefront comedies, I think this one is the most successful; for a change, he didn't hinge the entire movie on the audience never taking a moment to ask itself any questions about the plot they're following. Eddie Bracken, Betty Hutton and William Demarest star.

1:39PM-2PM, TCM Short: GIVE US THE EARTH, 21m.
Apparently, this is 20 minutes of a white man teaching some Mexicans how to farm the Earth and be nice to their neighbors. Holy fucking shit, dude.

2PM-3:35PM, TCM: SALT OF THE EARTH, 92m.
Just to keep us all a little confused and paying attention, TCM's programmers will be chasing the previous offensive short with this beautiful feature, about the struggle in a small Mexican-American community to unionize the local mines. Made by Hollywood Ten writer-director Herbert J. Biberman and fellow blacklisted writer Michael Wilson and writer-producer Paul Jarrico [who literally risked their lives to make it], the movie has the distinction of being the only movie to be blacklisted during the McCarthy Communist witch-hunts of the mid-'50s. It's one of the most fundamentally American movies I've ever seen; that so many people even now would consider it anti-American illustrates how thoroughly the American school system has failed us. The United States is a very big country and a lot of different kinds of people comprise its citizenry, but so many of those people refuse to see that America extends beyond their lives and front yards.

2PM-4:30PM, FMC: THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX, 142m.
The original movie, not the remake -- although I am interested to see the 2005 version, mostly to see Giovanni Ribisi and Hugh Laurie as well as see how big a shit the writer/director/producers take on Robert Aldrich & Lukas Heller's original song to group effort and rationality in the face of all-consuming hostility. I'm guessing the remakers missed that point and focussed more on shit blowing up but good. James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy and Hardy Krueger star.

3:45PM-5:30PM, TCM: HAROLD AND MAUDE, 91m.
I was only briefly in the H&M cult and always knew Hal Ashby was a credit-hog, but it's still such a great movie. A romantic comedy starring Philo Beddoe's mom, Boone from M*A*S*H, the Fire Captain from Truffout's FAHRENHEIT 451 and an actress whose name really was "Vivian Pickles."

5:30PM-5:41PM, TCM Short: JAMMIN' THE BLUES, 10m.
Tenor-sax master Lester Young leads an all-star group [George "Red" Callender and John Simmons on bass, Harry Edison on trumpet, Marlowe Morris on piano, Sidney Catlett and Jo Jones on drums, Marie Bryant on vocals, Illinois Jacquet on tenor saxophone and a young Barney Kessel on guitar] through the sort of visually composed and stylish jam session one would expect from the one and only motion picture ever made by LIFE magazine photographer Gjon Mili. As bracing, fun and liberating as the film is, it's still anchored by some unfortunate racial real-politick: as happened a number of times in his career, producers got gunshy about Barney Kessel being the lone caucasian in a group and literally darkened him to appear black. In this film's case, he's filmed in near-silhouette in full-shot and his hands are stained darker in close-ups for his solos. Still, this is one of those shorts that make me greatly grateful to TCM for citing them in their schedules.

10PM-Midnight, TCM: FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF, 103m.
It's understandable, considering John Hughes' early death, that a lot of well-meaning people are going to wrap their assessments of his oeuvre in the kind of generic sentimentality that he really railed against in the prime of his career, and all that off-the-rack praise will retard the natural process of honest reappraisal that most filmmakers receive, especially in comedy, later in their careers. Hughes' death also moved the hands forward at least ten minutes closer to midnight on the Cinematic Doomsday clock, the end point when Hollywood really will pull itself into its own asshole, Ouroboros-style. Even a Kevin Smith fan should shudder at the thought of him remaking, say, THE BREAKFAST CLUB or SHE'S HAVING A BABY, but we all know it's inevitable. Let's all hold hands and pray that they just leave BUELLER alone, at least until Michael Cera is definitely too old to play him. Without doing any research, my gut says that nobody wrote more perfectly realized tertiary characters than Hughes did at his peak. Perhaps it's just having seen his movies a million times, but I can't think of another writer-director whose support characters can be recalled from just a line or two of dialogue: "Well with your bad knee Ed, you shouldn't throw anybody. It's true!" "Uh, what country do you think this is?" "I weep for the future."

10PM-Midnight, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING: "Rafael Marquez vs. Israel Vazquez Trilogy"
All three of their classic super-bantamweight fights from 2005 and 2007. They're scheduled to meet for a fourth fight in May; as thrilling as these fights were -- again, real classics -- I don't think I need or even want to see them tear into each other again, especially as Marquez only won one of the fights, after Vazquez's breathing was drastically impaired by a broken nose. All a fourth fight does is put more money in everyone's pockets and bigger medical bills in the fighters' mailboxes.

Wednesday, December 30

12:15AM-1:45AM, Sun: GARAGE, 82m.
This recent West Ireland comedy sounds promising; lots of pretty scenery and a few jokes in a movie about a slowly dying community. [Sounds awfully familiar; I hope it doesn't play like a home movie if I made any.] Leonard Abrahamson directs, Pat Shortt and Conor Ryan star with Anne-Marie Duff.

2:07AM, TCM Short: THE MAN WHO MAKES THE DIFFERENCE, 7m.
Behind-the-scenes short featurette about the John M. Stevens, the undersung second unit & stunt photographer behind the more amazing shots in GRAND PRIX and ….

2:15AM-5AM, TCM: ICE STATION ZEBRA, 152m.
I can see why this was Howard Hughes' favorite movie, even beating out his own movies. Still, sometimes you just have to stare slack-jawed and think "Patrick McGoohan dropped THE PRISONER for a few months to go make this??? And MGM pulled 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY from theaters early to make room for its release????" John Sturges directs Douglas Heyes' script [based on Harry Julian Fink's story adapted from Alistair MacLean's novel, all with an uncredited punch-up from W.R. Burnett], co-starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown.

9:15AM-11AM, TCM: IN A LONELY PLACE, 93m.
Nicholas Ray! Humphrey Bogart! Gloria Grahame! Romance! Hollywood Murder!

1:15PM-255PM, IFC: SHATTERED GLASS, 94m.
I guess Hayden Christensen has officially been typecast as the go-to guy for whiney, ineffectual protagonists now. I'm a soft touch for journalist movies, and it's sort of fun to watch Anakin Skywalker struggle to not be outacted by the far-stronger ensemble of actors around him, especially understatement-maker supreme Peter Sarsgaard and Steve Zahn's irrepressible scene bandit.

4:30PM-6:30PM, THE HARDER THEY FALL, 109m.
Mark Robson does a beautiful job directing -- in the visuals, Robson and cinematographer Burnett Guffey were more faithful to Budd Schulberg's savagely honest novel about the shit-crusted underbelly of boxing than screenwriter Philip Yordan was in his script adaptation -- with a cast starring Bogart [his final movie], Rod Steiger, Jan Sterling and a number of notable boxers [Jersey Joe Walcott, Max Baer, etc.]

11:30PM-1:01AM, TCM: BEAT THE DEVIL, 90m.
This John Huston movie has always sounded a little too wacky -- "A group of con artists stake their claim on a bogus uranium mine. Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones." -- but I'm giving it a shot as part of my watch-every-Huston reeducation.

Thursday, December 31

1:04AM-1:30AM, TCM Short: A GUN IN HIS HAND, 19m.
A two-reeler, directed by Joseph Losey, presenting a semi-documentary "Crime Does Not Pay"-style demonstration of detective work.

6AM-6:33AM, TCM Short: AVENTURE MALGACHE, 31m.
Wartime propaganda from Alfred Hitchcock, whose heart was clearly not into it. Still interesting from a novelty/comparison view, of course.

6:34AM-6:53AM, TCM Short: CALGARY STAMPEDE, 18m.
I think I saw this on an Errol Flynn DVD's supplements -- very pretty Technicolor documentary about, um, Calgary. Very pretty, though.

9AM-10:35AM, IFC: ANNIE HALL, 93m.
You often hear this Woody Allen movie hailed as the most truthful romantic comedy every made; I don't think that's true, it just has a set of lies far different and much more interesting than the usual Hollywood romcom fare. Allen starred and directed a script by himself and Marshall Brickman, co-starring Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts and Carol Kane.

10:35AM-12:45PM, IFC: THE NAMESAKE, 122m.
I like Kal Penn and I love immigrant stories, but Mira Nair being this film's director might be a dealbreaker; the strongest dramatic pull in most of her films comes from knowing that, some time in the second half of the movie, the thrust of the plot is going to splinter off into a bunch of stuff happening and then something else happens and uh, who gives a shit -- hey, the end credits.

11:30AM-1:30PM, TCM: SHADOW OF A DOUBT, 108m.
My favorite B&W Hitchcock -- so much texture and great moments, you can steal from it endlessly and still find new bits the next time you have writer's block. Thornton Wilder and Sally Benson wrote the screenplay, Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright starred.

12:45PM-2:30PM, IFC: MANHATTAN, 96m.
I know it's not Woody Allen's fault that two generations of filmmakers think that if they set their movie in New York City, it has to be both one of the main characters in the story and a source for musical montages that do nothing but remind the audience HEY WE'RE IN NYC ISN'T IT GREAT THIS MUSIC WAS PROBABLY RECORDED HERE TOO. Anyway, I can believe Allen's claim that he pleaded with United Artists to not release this film, even offering to make a movie for free if they would shelve MANHATTAN; I'm going to watch it again to see if it's as much of a misfire as I remember. Allen again directs, co-stars and co-writes with Brickman; Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway and Meryl Streep costarred.

3:30PM-5:40PM, TCM: VERTIGO, 130m.
One of my favorite color Hitchcocks. So often in his movies, he seemed so into the technology of moviemaking rather its effect -- a good example is how Hitch often crowed about the feat of making a movie-set's skyline gradually change from day to sunset to night throughout ROPE, but never acknowledged that it still looked like a movie-set skyline, fiberglass clouds and all. Anyway, the bulk of the money shots in VERTIGO threaten to disappear right up Hitchcock's asshole at any moment, but that we feel about as blasted and spiritually exhausted as Jimmy Stewart's character is by the end credits is still testament to how great Hitch could be when he cast himself well. [Some, including Hitchcock himself, blame VERTIGO's commercial failure on Stewart being 49 at the time it was made; that would be accurate if it was a conventional romance, but VERTIGO is as much an extended metaphor about being a film director as the other major Stewart-Hitchcock collaboration REAR WINDOW is. Perhaps Hitch and screenwriter Samuel A. Taylor woulda-coulda-shoulda focused on that a bit more.] Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes co-starred.

5:41PM-6PM, TCM Short: CAVALCADE OF SAN FRANCISCO, 9m.
You'll have room for it on your DVDR.

8PM-9:45PM, TCM: THE THIN MAN, 91m.
9:45PM-11:45, TCM: AFTER THE THIN MAN, 112m.
11:45PM-1:31AM, TCM: ANOTHER THIN MAN, 103m.
1:45 AM-3:30AM, SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN, 97m.
3:30AM-4:15AM, TCM: THE THIN MAN GOES HOME, 101m.
TCM closes out 2009 with a mini-marathon of movie adaptations of Dashiell Hammett's crime-solving couple, Nick and Nora Charles. W.S. Van Dyke II directed and William Powell & Myrna Loy starred in the series, which starts out brilliantly but slowly dies a dog's death as the producers all seemed to forget why people loved the first movie, as the couple [especially Nick Charles], is altered from an pair of insouciant inebriates to your trying-hardest-to-be-hip aunt & uncle. Thankfully, TCM is sparing us the pain of seeing the final film in the series, 1947's THE THIN MAN MOVES BACK INTO HIS PARENTS' BASEMENT THE SONG OF THE THIN MAN, where even some of the support characters are openly insulting the unhip couple. But these first two sequels do a solid job of follows the original; the pain starts with the next films, which suffer from the departure of the series' husband & wife screenwriting team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett after the third film and the death of director Van Dyke after the fourth. A young James Stewart co-stars in the second film and a young Donna Reed in the fourth, by the way.

Friday, January 1

1:32AM-1:42AM, TCM Short: HOW TO BE A DETECTIVE, 9m.
Robert Benchley teach us how to be a detective, then two more THIN MAN movies. Happy New Year.

1:15PM-3PM, TCM: THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, 102m.
Don't mess with Jimmy Stewart in a Western, man. He will fuck your shit up all to be damned. Arthur Kennedy co-starred, Anthony Mann directed a script by Philip Yordan & Frank Burt.

3PM-5:15, TCM: THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, 123m.
Like I said, don't mess with Stewart -- I know he wrote bad poetry and sounded like a wimp, but this is a man who DROPPED REAL FIRE ON REAL NAZIS [… and several thousand German civilians] in WWII. The guy kept flying bombing missions even after Black Thursday, which is like Dieppe for Canadians, which is like Market Garden for paratroopers, which is like, um, look it was really fucking bad and Stewart could've asked to be transferred anywhere else but he didn't, which is why the dude had real guts. Anyway, John Wayne and Lee Marvin co-star, John Ford directs.

Saturday, January 2

4:15AM-6:30AM, TCM: DIE! DIE! MY DARLING!, 96m.
I think this was the first Hammer movie I saw; you can imagine my disappointment when none of the rest were also batshit-crazy women's pictures. Silvio Narizzano directed Richard Matheson's script, adapted from Anne Blaisdell's novel: the clearly-soon-to-be-late Tallulah Bankhead plays a religious fanatic who kidnaps her dead son's fiance, played by Stefanie Powers. A young Donald Sutherland plays a retard. It's that kind of a movie. It gets compared to another British birdnapping movie that was released the same year, William Wyler's THE COLLECTOR. Wyler's movie is far better made -- he had a budget, for one thing -- but DARLING is ultimately more affecting, having the pulpy creepiness that only clumsiness can provide.

10:30AM-Noon, TCM: REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT, 85m.
This is the shorter edit of the feature-film version of Rod Serling's teleplay; I hope that Criterion/Eclipse eventually packages a collection of Serling's work, with proper restorations of his key works. I've seen at least three versions of the film REQUIEM and each of them had scenes the others didn't, which is just silly. I think I prefer Jack Palance & Keenan Wynn as Mountain McClintock and his manager Maish Rennick to the film's Anthony Quinn & Jackie Gleason, although Mickey Rooney was a better Army [the trainer] than Ed Wynn. I don't remember who was the more appropriate Grace Miller, PLAYHOUSE 90's Kim Hunter or the film's Julie Harris. Still, even in a truncated form, REQUIEM is still a pretty devastating little movie; Rod Serling had a knack for writing characters who were both primal archetypes and recognizable human beings.

12:45PM-2:30PM, FMC: DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK, 76m.
A snappy, noirish programmer starring a young Richard Widmark, a young Marilyn Monroe and a very young Anne Bancroft in her feature-film debut. Daniel Taradash wrote the screenplay for director Roy Ward Baker. It's not Billy Wilder's, but the dialogue fairly crackles throughout. "I'm not angry; I'm just furious."

5PM-6:30PM, TCM: VALLEY OF THE KINGS, 86m.
I wonder if George Lucas has been dreading the day for decades when recording media becomes so cheap to produce and distribute that every obscure movie he's lifted stuff from will be easily available. Stop me if this sounds familiar: Daredevil archaeologist clashes with graverobbers during a frantic search for a priceless Egyptian artifact. That's right, Lucas totally stole the plot from this movie to make THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

8PM-10:45PM, TCM: LOLITA, 153m.
As far as LOLITA goes, it's not that Peter Sellers was born to play Clare Quilty; it's that Vladimir Nabokov was born to write the character for Sellers to play. Nabokov adapted his novel for the screen with director Stanley Kubrick; James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyons co-starred.

10:45PM-1:15AM, TCM: HUSBANDS, 138m.
John Cassavetes' best men's picture -- an overlong, shambling mess that randomly lurches between hilarious, cockeyed-profound and outright boring; just like a good night out with your boys. Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Cassavetes co-star.

10PM-Midnight, Sun: STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING, 111m.
This May-December romance edges close to the MANHATTAN syndrome I described earlier, but its heart is too melancholy and its characters too vividly aware of how much they've compromised and lost for any Gershwin or jaunty pop music to play over montages of NYC streets. Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose and Lili Taylor star in producer Fred Parnes and director Andrew Wagner's adaptation of Brian Morton's novel.

Sunday, January 3

3:15AM-5:15AM, TCM: TWO FOR THE SEESAW, 119m.
They should show this movie on Thanksgiving -- not just because it's a turkey, but to illustrate how thankful Robert Wise should have been every day of his professional life to ever have been allowed to direct any movie not directly aimed at drive-in cinemas. There's nothing wrong with the original 1958 Broadway play, written by [not the] William Gibson [you're thinking of] and starring the perfectly cast Anne Bancroft and Henry Fonda as a young, poor but carefree Jewish girl from Greenwich Village and an uptight, unhappily married and aging lawyer from Nebraska, respectively. Four years later, Hollywood decided to cast a SEESAW movie with …. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Thankfully, both escaped to go make better movies, leaving Wise and/or the producers to then cast … Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine. Good thing Mitchum was always at his best when playing uncool chatterboxes. How could this movie have failed?

7:48AM-8AM, TCM Short: THE SEESAW AND THE SHOES, 11m.
Between this and the Mexican combination a few days ago, I'm starting to wonder if TCM has a TIVO making the minor programming decisions for them. This episode in the PASSING PARADE series of documentaries dramatizes Rene Laennec's invention of the stethoscope and Charles Goodyear's development of the vulcanization of rubber.

8AM-9:37AM, TCM: FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK, 96m.
A rare Errol Flynn comedy, this one about an aspiring mystery novelist stumbling onto a real murder. Brenda Marshall, Ralph Bellamy and Alan Hale co-star.

9:38AM-9:48, TCM Short: PETE SMITH SPECIALTY "Just Suppose"
Another in the long series of SPECIALTY comedies, this one presents a fantasy where Dave O'Brien is the wife in the family, having to shop, clean and have the babies. Madness! Castration Anxiety! Sore Nipples!

9:54AM-10AM, TCM Short: ACTION ON THE BEACH, 6m.
I like TCM's practice of running their short, behind-the-scenes films about a given feature film either just before or immediately after the feature. If they could start doing the same thing for a film's trailer, that would be very nice.

10AM-Noon, TCM: THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, 115m.
Paddy Chayefsky! James Garner! Julie Andrews! Melvyn Douglas! Arthur Hiller!
Love! Passion! WWII! A Cast of Thousands, In Aggregate! More Cynicism On The Silver Screen Than There Are Asteroids In Space!

10AM-Noon, ESPNC: CLASSIC POOL
I'm still waiting for my personal ESPN channel, which will air nothing but boxing, Australian Rules Football and ladies playing pool 24/7. Maybe marathons of classic spelling bees on the weekends. This is a rebroadcast of the 1998 Women's Tournament of Champions.

11AM-12:15PM, Sun: OFF THE GRID: LIFE ON THE MESA, 68m.
I think we all want to lift the rock and see what kinds of people actually try to make a go at living "off the grid" of our civilization. Apparently, many of them are a little crazy.

Noon-2PM, TCM: THE REIVERS,111m.
Steve McQueen's entry in my second- or third-favorite film sub-genre, the my-nonconformist-uncle section of coming-of-age movies. Based on William Faulkner's final novel -- the plot sounds like it was taken from Faulkner fanfic, the writing "lighter" than his usual tone; so curious how often dying artists try to put on a happy face so close to death [see also: Bill Hicks' Cosby sweaters the last few months of his life] -- written by another husband & wife writing team, Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch and directed by Mark Rydell.

2PM-4PM, TCM: THE EGG AND I, 108m.
A little on the late side [1947] to cash in on any wave of the semi-regular fad for chicken-farming -- it's interesting that both Carl Barks and the Marx Brothers tried to be chicken farmers before giving up and going into the easier rackets of movies and comics -- but who's to complain about having the pleasure of Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray's company?

1:30PM-3:30PM, FMC: THE PROUD ONES, 90 or 94m.
This seems to be the week that underlines what comparative candyasses John Wayne's characters were; this film often gets compared to RIO BRAVO [although HIGH NOON might be a better fit], but Marshall Robert Ryan has to deal with a revenge-addled Jeffrey Hunter, a socially powerful Robert Middleton and a downright disrespectful populace and there's no calvary coming to bail his ass out in the last reel, so far as I can recall. In BRAVO, Wayne and Howard Hawks act like being able to hold off one gang until help arrives is just on this side of impossible. I always thought it was funny that the plot of Wayne & Hawks' right-wing, Real American response to HIGH NOON hinged on the Duke coercing a drunk and a codger to collectively fight for the good of the community. If John Garfield and Dalton Trumbo had made that movie, you know they would have been executed as Commie traitors on the sidewalk in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Anyway, THE PROUD ONES isn't nearly as heralded as a classic as either of those films, but it has gorgeous Cinemascope cinematography and a great performance from Ryan.

8PM-9:45PM, Sun: EASY, 99m.
I'm going in expecting a clunky, somewhat lazy independent romantic comedy that's not particularly romantic nor funny -- I asked the eccentric-old-lady character actor from the next-door apartment as well as the Magic 8-Ball that I keep on my desk at my totally hip day job that still couldn't possibly make me enough money to afford the cool apartment I have, and they agree that this will be a movie that gets its empowering kicks from having a female protagonist who can fuck anyone she wants, as written in a screenplay that undoubtedly used the word "kooky" as a character trait more than once -- but a few friends insist that I should see the movie as a Marguerite Moreau showcase, an actress I reportedly need to know. I figure if I made it through BEHEADING JESSICA STEIN without cutting my own head off, I can survive anything.

8PM-9:15PM, TCM: IT'S A GIFT, 68m.
Turner's little marathon of W.C. Fields comedies starts with this sound remake of his silent feature IT'S THE OLD ARMY GAME. As vastly superior as the filmmaking and Fields' own performance are in GIFT, Diana Lewis is no Louise Brooks.

9:15PM-10:30, TCM: NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK, 71m.
In general, I like the downtrodden-husband Fields to the slick-operator Fields -- it's so curious how often a niece/daughter type features in his movies; that he wrote so many of them in his scripts and shows them so much disarming tenderness as a writer and actor is touching, even though there's nothing in his recorded biography that can explain why it was so important to him. This film is, I think, my favorite of Fields' slickster movies, playing "himself" in one gleefully, willfully weird Hollywood lark.

10:30PM-Midnight, TCM: IF I HAD A MILLION, 84m.
The marathon ends with one of Fields appearances in an early anthology film: Richard Bennett plays a dying tycoon who picks eight names at random out of a phone book to bequeath a million dollars. Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, George Raft, Jack Oakie, Charlie Ruggles, et al. co-starred; Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Z. McLeod, Stephen Roberts, William A. Seiter, Norman Taurog, et al. directed; reportedly, there is a longer edit that includes segments that were cut from the movie after audience previews.

11:35PM-1:15PM, IFC: KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, 97m.
William Shatner fights thousands of hungry spiders. I've seen the movie twice, and I still can't tell you who won. I assume IFC and indie douchebags finally embraced drive-in movies as part of the independent-film scene/history after that Tarantino and Rodriguez's pretentious faux-grindhouse double feature movie came out a few years back?

Monday, January 4

Midnight-1:30AM, TCM: THE FRESHMAN, 76m.
TCM's Silent Sunday film this week is a fine go-getter Harold Lloyd football movie, co-starring Jobyna Ralston and Brooks Benedict.

12:30AM-2:45AM, Sun: CHE "Part 1: The Argentine," 134m.
The first half of director Steven Soderbergh and writer Peter Buchman's epic about revolutionary/fashion icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara, focusing on the Cuban Revolution. It was a great idea to cut the Che legend down into a serious of low-key human-sized vignettes and chronologically shuffling them just enough to tell the stories of the Revolutions in Cuba and Bolivia that's both epic and accessible.

1:30AM-2:45AM, TCM: COLLEGE, 65m.
It's Buster Keaton's turn to be the nerd gone football hero. Anne Cornwall and Harold Goodwin co-star.

2:45AM-5AM, Sun: CHE "Part 2: Guerilla," 135m.
The concluding half of the story is not nearly as easy to take in as the Cuban film -- I joked that the first two & a half hours rip by in half that time and the last two hours make up for it -- but that might been intentional; unlike Cuba, Che's campaign in Bolivia was a frustrating non-starter, [SPOILER] even if he hadn't been executed at the end of it. [END SPOILER]

2:30PM-3:54PM, TCM: TOP BANANA, 84m.
What an oddball movie; producer Albert Zugsmith [and maybe director Alfred E. Green] optioned the rights to Phil Silvers' Broadway musical-comedy with the plan to film it as a stage show but in 3-D to simulate seeing it live, "from the best seat in the house!" But then the 3D boom goes bust and rather than stick to their guns, they push the movie out as a regular 2-D film with rather odd coloring. Rose Marie and Jack Albertson co-starred.

3:55PM-4:04PM, TCM Short: PETE SMITH SPECIALTY "A Wife's Life," 8m.
This sounds like "Just Suppose," but Dave O'Brien's wife plays his wife this time.

6PM-8PM, TCM: A THOUSAND CLOWNS, 118m.
Still a gold standard for eccentric-uncle-assisted coming-of-age movies. Jason Robards Jr., Martin Balsam, William Daniels and Barbara Harris star.

8PM-9:32 pm, FMC: THE ADVENTURE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER, 91m.
If you squint, this movie could look like a lost mid-'70s Mel Brooks film; Gene Wilder wrote the screenplay and stars with Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman and Dom Deluise in this specifically sub-genre specific spoof, complete the inspired Brooksian stunt-casting of Leo McKern as Professor Moriarty. But Wilder also directed the film, and showed that he is no borscht-belt fartypants like his one-time mentor; I remember this being a far more adult piece of silliness than YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN or HIGH ANXIETY.

And there's another week.

The 2015th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

The 2014th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

Felix Navigawd

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 21:32:00 +0000

Click for larger, if you must.

So nice to know that even the Pope has to contend with assholes on Christmas. Or is that how Christmas officially starts, with his holiness being knocked to the floor like he was Glass Joe? [Visualizing the Pope turning and zig-zaggingly wobbling to the ground is officially the first time I've laughed today. I think it's imagining the back of a Pope's robe in 8-Bit animation]

The 2013th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000

The 2012th step on the last road home.

noreply@blogger.com (Milo George) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:59:00 +0000