Can a movie be so bad that it's IMMORAL?

There's something intensely gratifying about listening to a reviewer who becomes so incensed at how abysmally rotten a movie is that he literally begins screaming. This review had all the beauty and sincerity that the movie (apparently - I didn't see it, and won't) lacked. The thing is, everyone constantly says "don't  be negative!" and "find the good in things!" But if a movie is an absolute insult to the buying public, if it's so poorly, slap-dashedly made, if the actors are so ill-motivated that they aren't even phoning it in, and - worst of all - if CATS are being exploited (even if they're artificially-generated, not-real cats), then a critic ought to let rip with every bit of vocal protest he can muster.

This guy, I can tell, knows cats, "has" cats (meaning he is possessed by them), gets them, and thus finds it utterly offensive that this moviemaker has allowed them to be portrayed in such a horrendously disrespectful fashion. Of course Christopher Walken is in this movie playing the Magic Cat Man, or whatever he is, and tons of people praised his performance even if he seemed somewhat "cat"-a-tonic in it (I have a theory his brain battery is slowly running down, perhaps from too much smoking). I am learning there are those who praise EVERYTHING Christopher Walken does, and it confuses me. He seems to inspire a die-hard loyalty that has nothing to do with the quality of his performances.

Meantime, this critic, this wonderful man, absolutely lets go with great shouts of protest over this badly-made and nonsensical thing. The premise of it - hard-nosed businessman magically changes bodies with a house cat in order to learn an Important Life Lesson - sounds like something out of the '90s, if not the mid '80s. And it's Kevin Spacey, people - by all that is rotten, it's Kevin Spacey.

Now that we know a little bit more about Kevin Spacey (you know, the guy who was accused of molesting an adolescent boy and tweeted in response, "Gee, too bad about that, if it happened I mean, but I was too drunk to remember", then went on and on about his wonderful new gay lifestyle, as if anyone was surprised), which no one did back in 2016, it only lends the production ever more abysmal depths of wretchedness. It sinks to the level of immorality, which for a lighthearted family comedy is perhaps a first.

I don't know why this is, but Kevin Spacey reminds me of a pair of navy blue polyester pants from 1970 that someone has worn every day for the past six years without washing them. Ever. His personality stinks in just that rancid, unavoidable, inexcusable, unforgiveably embarrassing way. He is contesting the assault charges and smirking around and happily finding his weaselly, rancid way back into the public's good graces. No doubt he'll win, but as far as I am concerned, the damage has been done. He will always be stinking pants to me.

And Walken. I'm not sure. I've been sort of dissecting him as a subject lately, just because that's what I do on this blog, I sort of get stuck on one subject until I go on to the next one. It's interesting to go on YouTube and see ten-minute chunks of his movies from the past forty (!) years, because he seems to leap from age to age, until he is somehow every age at once. He's not. He's an old man now and mighty saggy, and his  brain seems to be in a fog. 

When he played Captain Hook, he put no energy into the part at all. His singing was even more wobbly and unmusical than usual. I watched just a snippet of Cyril Ritchard, the original Broadway Hook, and could not fail to notice the roistering, heel-clicking glee of his performance, the ripping good time he was having up there, and the spooky old-school ability to touch his audience, visible even on an old TV kinescope from 1953. Ritchard founded the subversive notion of pirate as King of Camp, glamourous eyes, long curly wig, beauty mark and all - an image endlessly replicated in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean. Walken merely looks as if he has been given a temporary face-lift, rendering his face tight, immobile, and queerly Asian (and with the worst painted-on eyebrows in stage history).

So what's my point? It's late, I don't have one, I'm rambling. It's all about cats, bad movies, Walken, pirates, and people who have run out of  steam. But not this guy! I've watched his rant several times, and it's a good antidote to apathy and frustration. Just blows it out of the ball park. I think I will watch it again.

Harold Lloyd: the lost tapes

I swear, I never thought I would get to see three seconds of the lost Harold Lloyd film, Professor Beware (1938). It was a movie that was shown maybe once on American TV, and then, for reasons unknown, buried.

Harold plays an Egyptologist who gets into all sorts of wacky situations, and the word is that he didn't like the movie very much and felt the gags were overly silly. Harold had a lot of pull with Howard Hughes in those days, not to mention William Randolph Hearst, the man who buried Citizen Kane, so if he wanted the movie pulled, it would be pulled.

That means that, in spite of a lot of promotional hoop-la, it was probably barely seen.

I have no idea where this snippet of video came from, and it seems to be part of a tribute to Sterling Holloway rather than Harold. It's a minute long, and doesn't tell me very much.

I've heard through the Rich Correll grapevine that Paramount owns Professor Beware now, but keeps it in a vault. Or maybe they destroyed it. I doubt I will ever get to see it, but then, a couple of years ago I came up completely dry, and now I have one minute of it!

The stills are magnificent, however. They are all I have.

(Nobody does dismay better than Harold Lloyd, and I notice in the stills that he's often slapping himself on the forehead, gasping and ducking his head. God, how I'd love to see this!)

The Sneeze Animations

OK, so this might just look like a whole lot of jerky animations of a guy sneezing. And it is. But if you look at each of them, they're not the same: the frames are combined and recombined in slightly different ways. 

It started off as something like this - a contact sheet, with five frames per row endlessly repeating.

These are still frames from a very short (like, three seconds) film that Edison made in 1894. It's sometimes called Fred Ott's Sneeze, maybe because it depicts Fred Ott sneezing. Stuck a feather up his nose, or huffed that sneezing powder the fetishists use on YouTube. 

When I see something like this, I have a mad desire to make it move again, to resuscitate the guy who's been dead for a hundred years, and turn his frame-frozen sneeze back into motion. To do that, I had to cut the frames in the contact sheet into little squares, re-assemble them into some semblance of film, then run them through my gif program.

As you can see, it worked fairly well. Blown up like this, Fred looks eerily realistic, even though I was working with only five frames:

Meanwhile, I found a Library of Congress video of the original, three-seconds-long masterpiece of cinema. Frankly, I think my animations look better.

Girl gang

As is usually the case, the trailer is much better than the movie. I especially love those captions: Today's Major Problem: Girl Gangs That Flout the Law! Most Daring Film of the Year! And note at 2:50 - the "doctor" seems to be implying that he needs money to perform an abortion. But maybe it's just an ingrown toenail.

DRAGSTRIP GIRL - Film Trailer

                       

A*P*E (1976) Trailer

Why Toto is the star of The Wizard of Oz

A tribute to Gene Wilder: Young Frankenstein gifs!

We lost Gene Wilder today, and I am pretty much inconsolable. This is all I can think of to do.

These are just a few of my hundred or so fave moments from Young Frankenstein. Everything about this movie worked, and as funny as it is, it's also more romantic than Casablanca ("Taffeta, darling"). But the main reason it worked was its leading man.

Best spit-take in history. 

Masculine in mascara.

"Give my creation. . . LIFE!"

"Three syllables. . . sounds like. . . "

"SED-A-GIVE??"

"No matter what happens. . . don't open that door!"

"Abby somebody.  Abby. . .  Normal."

"I love him"

"Put. . . the candle. . . back."

"IT!. . . COULD! . . . WORK!!"

A coverup of a coverup

Things I almost remember to forget.

But not quite.

And can't quite remember, would have paid more attention at the time, except that I didn't know it would DISAPPEAR and I would be left with an awful, aching, conspiracy-theory-type feeling.

I used to go to a lot of movies. This was before all the smaller, older theatres in downtown Vancouver closed. Believe me when I say, there are none of them left now. These weren't the height of elegance, they had old red carpets and smallish screens and smelled kind of musty, but they charged less than the garish Cineplexes that were already beginning to take over, and there was something kind of cosy about them. There was the Granville, the Capitol 6, the Fifth Avenue, and (one of my faves) the Caprice, which I used to think looked like Elvis' bathroom, all done up in flocked maroon wallpaper, cherry velvet seats, and a silver lame curtain that swung gracefully open as the show began.

But this isn't about that, or the massive bag of hot buttered popcorn (always leaking greasily out the bottom and ruining my jeans) that seemed to be my main reason for being there. It was about something. Something strange. Something that disappeared.

It was a preview for something, and I wasn't paying much attention to it because my face was down in my big, warm, butter-laden bag of popcorn and I was probably going, "Mmmmmmmmmmmm." But the preview - we'd call it a trailer now - it was sort of along the lines of All the President's Men, an action/thriller sort of thing about - what was it? Some sort of expose. Of the pharmaceutical industry.

We didn't say "Big Pharma" back then because this was (I think) still in the 1990s, and the expression hadn't been coined yet. But that's what it was about. I remember that much. And these reporters were talking urgently to each other - well, it was a bit like The China Syndrome, too, that sense of a disaster coming, of needing to stop something, some juggernaut. Or else the need to expose corruption of some kind, in some huge impersonal omnipotent/omnipresent corporation.

If only I remembered one of two things: the title; and the people in it, the actors. None of that will come to me. I am not even sure of the date, except it was WAY back in my movie-going history, the time of Elvis' bathroom and slightly pee-smelling theatres that always had one screen showing an arty film way the hell up at the top of the building, which meant you had to take an extra set of stairs to get there.

Yes, and there were stairs such as you'd see in the 1940s, big broad Loretta Young-style staircases, then a really really long flight of stairs that led to another side of the theatre altogether, but at least you could still get popcorn. That was the Granville, I think, a place which used to be quite grand. The grandeur in these places was as threadbare and faded as some disappointed spinster in a Tennessee Williams play.

And this went on and on for so many years, I can't even tell you how many. I did this once a week, I saw a movie in Vancouver, by myself. People thought I was a freak, but I absolutely loved it. No matter how bad the movie, it was like sinking into a warm bath.

Then it was all torn apart and ripped down. All of them were gone. It was over, and now all you get is huge Cineplex-type places. We're supposed to think these are Much Better because the screens are huge, there are no bad seats, the washrooms are usually clean (though just try to find the entrance without stumbling into the wrong one) and they have DEAFENING sound that leaves your ears ringing for a week. 

So. Back in 19-whatever, which now seems like the 1940s it was so long ago, there was this preview. After that, I did see ONE poster, a coming-attractions sort of thing, about the same movie. I know it was. And then -

And then, nothing.

Nothing.

All traces of this film simply disappeared.

It got stashed at the back of that messy closet of memories everyone has, or at least I assume everyone has, and every so often, but not often at all, the memory would stir or wink or something, a neuron devoted to that memory would get up and walk around, then lie down again, and I wondered - I'm not big on conspiracy theories, but this sudden and total disappearance of what looked like a mainstream feature film screamed "coverup".

Ironic, because the movie itself was about coverup, corruption, in the pharmaceutical industry. It's as if I can hear the dialogue echoing through my brain, but - you know when you can hear voices, but not what they're saying? When you can tell if it's a man or a woman, and if they're yelling or not? It's like that.

I've tried, oh how I've tried since the internet improved and search terms didn't need to be so exact. Back then, there was no internet. There was "something", but I didn't know much about it and certainly did not use it. I do remember a movie that had a sort of layabout deadbeat poet in it (I think he was Scottish - ?), and though he had never gotten anywhere with being published, suddenly he became world-famous "on the Internet". Probably they called it the World Wide Web. Nothing was explained about this, WHERE on the internet, or how. People were in awe enough, and just ignorant enough, that you didn't even need to explain it.

Did that movie actually exist, is it in a vault somewhere, has the negative been destroyed by Big Pharma, has some studio executive eaten it, will I some day find reference to it on one of those Top Ten YouTube videos that now proliferate so madly? I've seen videos about movies that were never released. All sorts of stuff has been covered up by mega-corporations. We can guess why. But we don't know about it because. . . it's been covered up.

I have this fantasy that some day I will find maybe just a title, and bang, the neurons will start firing and I'll remember more about that trailer and be able to look it up. But it was eerie, a weird unsettling feeling. The poster for Coming Attractions was up there, I saw it, I read it, and it was definitely about this movie. But the next time I walked by the place, all that was left there on the wall was a hole. 

TOTAL LOSS OF A FOLLOW-UP: I found these two movie posters. One is for a comedy (2005), which still seems too recent. The other one came out 3 years ago.

So it's not this, and it's not this. But what is it??

Cover your eyes: it's Equus

I made the mistake of watching Equus last night, the whole thing this time. I’ve bailed on it at least once, and I should have bailed on it again: it's heavy, dark, oppressive, and totally sickening at the end. In essence, it's one long monologue by Dr. Martin Dysart (played by a pockmarked, dead-eyed Richard Burton), a disaffected child psychiatrist who treats an adolescent boy (Alan Strang) who has blinded six horses for no reason anyone can determine.

The original Broadway play does NOT “show” the horses being blinded, but dramatizes and narrates it, which would be much more effective. Even Roger Ebert in his review from 1977 said he could not watch that part, and I even had to mute the sound. I didn’t like the boy at all – didn’t even care about him, dull, snotty-nosed kid without a single thought in his head. I soon became bored with all his self-created travails. 

And what was it about – how horrifying sex is? How religion destroys sex, how religion is sublimates sex – WHAT? Some say it was about, gasp, horrors, homosexuality, which might still have had some punch as a forbidden topic back in 1973 when it was first staged. Analysts to the stars like Mildred Newman (How to Be Your Own Best Friend, a bestselling masterwork of psychobabble) were still trying to "cure" it :"We've heard all kinds of success stories", she claimed, probably referring to Tony Perkins who later died of AIDS. But such sexual "deviancy", as it was known then, has no punch left in it now.

In the film version, Richard Burton is impossible to engage with. The many extreme closeups of his face are like a lunar landing, deeply pitted and utterly cold. On Broadway, the part was originated by Anthony Hopkins (who would have handled it better, though he’s still pretty stony), followed by Anthony Perkins, Leonard Nimoy, and maybe one other underappreciated Hollywood has-been.  Along with that snotty-nosed git of a boy,  I found it similarly hard to care about Burton’s character. In a rut? DO something about it, for God’s sake – have an affair with a girl or a boy or a PATIENT even. Get arrested! It would at least be a change of scene, wouldn’t it? No kaopectate needed. That reference gave me a good laugh, but it was the only time I actually felt something.

Maybe it’s a period piece, I don’t know – after all, this is Peter Shaffer, who wrote Amadeus, and that was a very long time ago. But the lines are just too flowery for normal speech – nobody talks that way or even thinks that way. (And we all know that going on and on about Greek mythology means you're actually a flaming poof.) It was self-consciously “beautiful”, verbal fireworks, real oooh and ahhh stuff, which I despise. Oh my God, how moving! Oh my God, how powerful! Makes me sick. How I hate writing that calls attention to itself.

It's a cheap trick. 

Anyway, I was going to bail at several points, and should have. Or keep it for another day, which means never - I would have deleted it. Then I kept looking at the time left and looked up the length in my movie book (TCM leaves 20 minutes or so between movies for endless fawning over 95-year-old legends of the screen). I had half an hour left and trudged through it, literally covering my eyes when the blinding scene came, and muting it. I refused to watch or listen. Now I still feel a little bit sick and have a hangover or aftertaste which is pretty awful. Is that “art”? Art is supposed to unsettle as well as entertain, but I'm not sure it's supposed to unsettle your stomach to this degree.

A little backnote. I remember, ages ago, reading (or reading parts of - it was essentially unreadable) an attack on Hollywood by former producer Julia Phillips, who managed to devastate/alienate everyone in her path. It was called You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, a good description of her own self-created fate.

I only mention it here because it talked about her relationship with Tony and Berry Perkins. She attended a performance of Equus on Broadway with the couple, starring I'm-not-sure-who (but I think it was Hopkins, the originator of the part), and said that when Tony embraced her he "felt her up": "highschoolhighschoolhighschool," she commented, later pronouncing Equus "a crock of faggot shit".

BTW, "Lunch" (as it became known) was considered career suicide for a woman who often inspired the urge for homicide amongst her cohorts. This is an excerpt from a surprisingly long Wikipedia entry:

On its release most critics agreed that the book was both scandalous and career-ending. (Even with a quarter of the 1,000-page original manuscript excised, it took lawyers at Random House fourteen months to approve it for publication. Lewis Cole, in The Nation, described it as being "[not] written but spat out, a breakneck, formless performance piece...propelled by spite and vanity".Newsweek's review called it a "573-page primal scream", while one Hollywood producer said it was "the longest suicide note in history".In the 2003 documentary version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, based on Peter Biskind's 1998 anecdotal history of New Hollywood, Richard Dreyfuss recalled his initial fury at Phillips' revelations, before more circumspectly listening to "a little voice inside my head [saying] 'Richard, Richard, the truth was so much worse'." Despite Phillips' criticisms of Steven Spielberg in the book, Spielberg nevertheless invited her to a 1997 screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a way of "keeping his friends close and his enemies closer."

The "career-ending" thing is a little ambiguous. Do they mean HER career, or the careers of those people she so savagely, publicly eviscerated? Why did she hate everybody so much? If the book was so suicidal, why is 85% of the Wiki entry dedicated to it? Why is she remembered far more for the memoir than for anything else? I also have a sneaking suspicion that people would be far more upset if they were left out of the book. Nothing is more devastating than being ignored by Julia Phillips.

Her feud with Erica Jong was legendary, and there are quite long passages in Lunch where she trashes her. Erica gets her revenge in more than one of her books, depicting her as a ball-crushing, narcissistic bitch in one of her novels (the one after Fear of Flying, whatever it's called) and having another go at her in one of her memoirs, insisting the two of them kissed and made up while Phillips was in the death-throes of cancer. In this scenario, Phillips apologized to her profusely - but we'll never know what really happened. Let's not forget that Jong primarily writes fiction.

With such a histrionic cast, it's all pretty good theatre, I'd say. Much better than the psychological clinker that is Equus. It's a bummer, folks. If you do watch it, fast-forward over the horse-blinding part. Or just put your hands over your eyes.

Post-thoughts. This is a tiny clip of Daniel Radcliffe's go at Alan Strang. I wish it were longer. I do like the idea of stylized, abstract human/horse figures, as it both takes away from the horror of watching actual horses have their eyes gouged out, and brings the horse/boy relationship uncomfortably close. These creatures are like centaurs in reverse. Not half-horse and half-human, but mostly human with a horse's head and impulse-driven brain.  Sublimely beautiful, yet grotesque. Just the way the actor shakes the horse's head is eerily natural. I guess Equus was just one of those stage plays that got lost in translation.

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