Monday, May 21, 2007

For Those About to Rock

The Beastmaster (1982)
directed by Don Coscarelli
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

What Death Proof is to stuntmen, "The Beastmaster" is to animal trainers. An adorable black panther,* a devious pair of ferrets, even a mighty golden eagle team up to help our hero con a kiss from his sun-bathing future star of That '70s Show, Tanya Roberts. The Beastmaster acts like the cornball, romantically-inclined, weight-lifting older brother in The Goonies, but for what it's worth, everyone's childhood should contain at least one afternoon movie like this one.

I can only imagine how much Coscarelli resented Rip Torn's hammy, self-conscious Maax; even amid so much goofiness, the Don still makes woods and far lines of hills more than a little ominous.



* actually a regular striped tiger dyed black!

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Amends Ere Long

El Topo (1970)
directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Why this cult movie and not another sparked such press upon its re-release last year feels like a bout of novelty run amok. Jodorowsky's mystical self-promotion is most endearingly actualized in the movie's imagery - legless midgets on the shoulders of armless midgets, or a man buried in honeycomb and milk in the desert sand - but just beyond the clever iconography is a beginner's palette of indelicate moviemaking and half-baked intellectual soap-boxing (thank you, John Lennon). Novel locations are one thing, but it takes a Buñuel to show just how good you have to be to get God right.

Canyon Passage (1946)
directed by Jacques Tourneur
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Dave Kehr was right in praising Universal's publication of this "great unsung achievement" of American filmmaking. For me the question now is why Tourneur can't escape his fate as Great Director (with Reservations). When the Val Lewton set was released two years ago, Tourneur's efforts were subverted by producer Lewton's overriding vision of horror. Out of the Past, too, is always talked about as great noir with far less mention of the man calling the shots (as if great movies just make themselves!). When you've mastered westerns, noir, and horror within the studio systems that invented the genres, you deserve to be great unconditionally.

One last hosanna: Hoagy Carmichael, more than just a "lunar figure," is, in "Canyon Passage," as close to the spirit of midsummer's trickster as movies ever imagined a Puck to be.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Limelight Highlight

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)
directed by John Hough
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Ribbons of highway across open western landscapes remind me of the last scene in My Darling Clementine, when Wyatt Earp says goodbye and starts off on that thin civilizing road through Monument Valley, hat and bridle aimed squarely at the future. Seems like just a short jump from Henry Fonda's boot on the railings to an early-seventies hodge-podge of racing stripes, helicopters, trains, and speed.

Maybe it's not great, but reading something like this makes "Dirty Mary" seem like everything worth loving about movies.

Monday, May 14, 2007

A Pair of Corpses

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)
directed by Bob Clark
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

If I'm a little late on the Bob Clark obit, it's because A Christmas Story isn't a movie I even remember all that well. But if every director made his name on low-budget horror as goofy, enthusiastic, and effective as "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" (what a title!), I'd be inclined to be kind at their passing, forgetting an unbelievably swishy pair of homosexual stereotypes to remember an even gayer, entertainingly devious ringleader at a nicely localized (an old island off city-lights Miami) theatrical resurrection of ghouls.

Blissfully Yours (2002)
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Mysterious Object at Noon works because enjoying it doesn't necessarily depend on the director's intentions (and I know I didn't like it until I heard the director's intentions, but another day, another opinion). "Blissfully Yours" doesn't, because as much as I appreciate how Weerasethakul vocalizes his thought processes, the end result in this case simply doesn't stand on its own. I don't think it's an issue of patience with oblique character revelations, because normally I'd approach a movie that makes sunlight and the sense of touch so tactile like a cup of hot coffee meets pie. Maybe a too obstinate strangeness parading as emotional revelation, maybe me just bored.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Humid Train Track Parlour Games

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The part of me that feels exhausted in art museums after twenty minutes wants to confess that I didn't know where this one was going until I read Weerasethakul's reference to the surrealists' Exquisite Corpse experiments online. Which might mean that people have to tell me what it is I like, in which case I'm happy to be told to like the gentle, deeply invested Mysterious Object at Noon.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Nut-Kraken

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Script (2006)
directed by Gore Verbinski
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at JL's

There's a lonesome little story here about a man whose heart was broken, so he cut it out of his chest and roamed the cold sea forever. One sentence, and Dead Man's Chest is two and a half hours long.

Here's a picture of Davy Jones lending some youngsters a hand at the groundbreaking for Southwark's new Unicorn Theatre for Children:

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Spring Training

Phantasm (1979)
directed by Don Coscarelli
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from As Seen On TV

Is it horror movies' willingness to look ridiculous that makes them this carefree? Is that why a kid running out of a mausoleum at night reminds me most of Les Mistons (seriously)?



In Phantasm, there's even grace in the actors' names. The Tall Man, played by Angus Scrimm? Just incredible.

I Was A Male War Bride (1949)
directed by Howard Hawks
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from As Seen On TV

The big joke here is that Cary Grant plays a French officer but might as well have just walked in from the editor's desk in His Girl Friday. Much funnier is two acts worth of right-on-the-surface rebuttals to those dogging claims that the bachelor pad Cary shared with Randolph Scott between marriages made them "just friends."



Elf (2003)
directed by Jon Favreau
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from As Seen On TV

The part of me that laughs at Zooey Deschanel in the shower again got lost for the size of James Caan's Christmas ham heart. That "goodbye" from Mr. Narwhal is one heavy-lidded kid away from someone with a soft voice reading Goodnight Moon, and that's a memory I'd almost forgotten.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
directed by Tay Garnett
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from As Seen On TV

More than some sad small-time California power plays, The Postman Always Rings Twice makes the most of weather: hot winds, fog, warm evening swims. The structure is built less on coincidence than a paranoid's fear of law enforcement, and everyone's so unhappy. It's like driving through a hurricane to reach the center calm; a white blouse, a white swimsuit, white paint on a rotten beam.

Thunder Road (1958)
directed by Arthur Ripley
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Romanticize Thunder Road too much and you and the movie get ahead of yourselves. The world you want isn't poverty and desperation - just a drive-in and a summer night and maybe the chance, one time, to give a pretty girl change for the jukebox and not be there when she picks a song and turns around. In Memphis, no less.

Pulp (1972)
directed by Mike Hodges
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at JL's

After thirty years, sarcasm and condescension age into bleached bones in the Malta sun. Is it the strain of royal succession that makes British sex such a chore?