Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Got my Mojo Working
Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
I wanna love you so bad till I don't know what to do
Going down to Louisiana, gonna get me a mojo hand... oh yeah...
Gonna go Louisiana, gonna get me... get me a mojo hand
Then right here... gonna have em at my command.... yeah...
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
.... yeah yeah...
(lead)
Got a gypsy fella that's givin' me advice
Got a gypsy fella givin' me givin' me advice
I gotta whole lot of tricks for keepin' you here (?) on ice.... yeah...
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Monster chiller horror haunted house!
Shannon's spooky haunted house story on CTV News includes a couple of little kids I think I've seen before!
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1032822&binId=1.1184694&playlistPageNum=1
Just in time for Halloween. . . creepy, icky gifs!
The rotten skulls and hanging strips of flesh make this mini-version of Murnau's Faust especially icky. In a previous post I compared this snippet with a similar bit from Disney's Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia. The ghostly horsemen images are practically identical. Disney only stole from the best.
From Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Everything is more-or-less OK until she opens her eyes.
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Here you have to ask yourself: why? Why would a giant bottle of castor oil chase two characters (cats?) around and around the moon, until the cats jump off?
You know I hate clowns. I even wrote a poem about it once. I was going to include that master of the macabre, Milky, but somehow this tiny clip of Enrico Caruso performing Pagliacci was creepier. I have it on reverse here to make it extra creepy. What's really weird is that he's singing it silently.
I want you to pay close attention to this one. It's the "reveal" from the Lon Chaney silent version of Phantom of the Opera. It reverses, so that in a couple of seconds he's "unrevealed", which is the important part. Just before she puts the mask back on, for a nanosecond you see that Chaney's face looks completely normal. This means that almost none of the macabre effect is done with makeup. It's all done from the inside.
I don't understand this - any of it - and it's so bizarre and grotesque as to be almost unbelievable. It's a pig dance, but the pig looks carnivorous, or perhaps rabid. Where did this come from? The devil knows.
I wasn't going to post two from the same source, but you have GOT to see this.
It's Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met! This is an unfortunate mistake Disney made in the 1940s. Willie has his mouth where his belly button should be (if whales have such a thing - hey, they're mammals, so maybe they do). This means he has a giant head that careens around like one of those bulky 1940s cars going out of control. Bambi he ain't. Nor Pluto. He looks like a foam rubber toaster. Here he combines TWO of my creepy fetishes - make that three, I don't like foam rubber toasters much either - clowns (especially sperm whale clowns) and Pagliaccio. The outfit is a bit femme, too, don't you think? Maybe he's Pagliaccio's girlfriend Gnocchi or something.
Monday, October 28, 2013
The ultimate horror film (or, why we love Baby Jane)
This is one of those movies that, when it comes on TV, you tell yourself: no way, I’m not watching this again, or if I do, I’ll bail after a few minutes.
And you come reeling out the other side, just as gobsmacked as you were the first time around – or maybe more, because you always notice new things every time you see it.
Turner Classics is responsible for most of this, because certain movies are always shown in rotation. Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce and Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon seem to come around monthly, along with a lot of those noir-ish (and spell-check, STOP changing this to “nourish” NOW) ‘40s films from Warner Brothers, complete with lavish and somewhat overblown scores by Max Steiner.
In this case, well, yes, it was Bette Davis all right, but not the same Bette Davis who experienced such a melancholy metamorphosis in Now, Voyager (complete with Paul Henreid’s famous dual cigarettes). This one was – oh God, NO – What Ever Happened to Baby Jane!
I first saw this film while sleeping in the den on a pull-out bed when I was a kid. I wasn’t allowed to do this very often, so it was a treat. It meant I could stay up as long as I liked and watch TV, and maybe my older brother Arthur would come in at some point, a little drunk from a piss-up with his high school buddies, and provide a running commentary. I saw great films this way, the original Frankenstein and Dracula, the incomparable On the Waterfront (which I still believe is, Citizen Kane aside, the greatest movie ever made), and – even more macabre than any James Whale creepfest – the Baby Jane movie, which from the first frame provides more howls and shudders than anything else Davis ever did.
I say Davis, because in spite of the fact that Joan Crawford plays Blanche, the “sympathetic” sister in the wheelchair, crippled decades ago when Baby Jane rammed her with her car, Davis just walks off with it. With her ashen face layered with old face powder that has never been washed off, her hideous rotting child-star clothes, her foot-dragging shuffle, slovenly drunkenness and foul temper, it’s Davis we can’t take our eyes off of, can't get enough of. And why? Reactions. Flickers of reactions like swiftly-moving storm fronts that seem to pass (for some reason) left to right, as if sweeping through her flesh and bones – this is HATE, folks, out-and-out hate for the sister who upstaged her pathetic little career as the mincing, shrieking vaudeville performer Baby Jane. Her role as resentful, foul-mouthed nursemaid is forced on her after the "accident", the event that snapped Blanche’s spinal cord at the same time that it ended her career.
The point I’m trying to make here is: though we know we should, NOBODY likes Blanche. She is denigrated, harassed, even tortured (especially with her sister's unique luncheon plan of dead budgie and stiffened rat), ruthlessly kicked in a scene of real horror that might just reflect Davis’ true feelings about her, but still and all, we either hate Blanche or are just plain bored with her.
Nobody wants to be Blanche. Nobody wants to be the victim, no matter how virtuous she is (in fact, the more virtuous she is, the more bored we are). I suspect that this picture was proof, once and for all, that Davis’ acting chops so far outstripped Crawford’s that she lived in a separate universe. When someone does something seemingly simple and you think, with a slightly creepy feeling, “how in hell did they do that?”, then you know you are in the realm of genius.
But it’s more than that. She must be snagging something deep inside us somewhere, gleefully yanking it out and celebrating it, throwing it up in the air. This law of identification, if that’s what it is, doesn’t stop with this movie. Not by a long shot. Let me ask you: you’ve seen Gone with the Wind, haven’t you? Well, what’s the matter with you? (Go see it now.) Anyway, how many of us love and admire and identify with Melanie Wilkes, the sweet, brave, unselfish wife who patiently waits while her husband returns from fighting them damn Yankees in the Civil War? How many of us think to ourselves, oh dear, she’s having a baby in a wagon, how will she ever survive?
Piffle! All we care about is Scarlett, trying to manage a fractious horse while wearing a dirty dress and a corset, her alabaster brow furrowed as she faces the first of many mortal challenges in her bitchy, spoiled, overindulged life.
Yes, everyone loves Scarlett, and it’s not just because she’s so supernaturally beautiful, her eyes glittering with the first signs of the bipolar disorder that will eventually derail her life. Everyone loves her because she is duplicitous, greedy, conniving, and just plain bad. Melanie never seems to make a single mistake in her life (oh God, she even forgives that whore!) but is so poisonously good that we just don’t want to bother with her. When I first saw this movie at age thirteen, I was sort of hoping she would die in childbirth so Scarlett could get her claws on Ashley.
So what’s going on here besides superior acting skills and a much meatier part? We like bad people because deep inside ourselves, no matter how far down we push it, we are afraid we are bad: that someone will some day see our awful, unforgiveable secret.
But even worse, we WANT to be bad, bad enough to wield the kind of power these half-mad, scary women do. These harpies, these broom-riding supernatural scream-queens raining down a firestorm of gleeful destruction on all that lies around them.
There’s something a tad sociopathic about them – wait a minute, a tad? That budgie-killing, rat-serving, head-kicking, haranguing Jane (“But you AAAAAARE in the wheelchair, Blanche! You AAAARE!”) rivals Norman Bates in the realm of antisocial personality disorder. Though we fear them and are supposed to disapprove of them, we like sociopathic characters because they pull all the bad out of us and act out all the things we’re not supposed to do.
Though this was the sixth or seventh time I had seen it, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? creeped me out more this time than ever before. I had a new appreciation of Davis’ subtlety. Yes, subtlety – you can read her devious, duplicitous thoughts, her careful plotting and planning of the kind of medieval torture specifically designed to drive her sister to the brink of insanity. The crazed child’s laugh behind the door when Blanche lifts the dome on her ratatouille lunch – the ruthless yanking out of the phone cord – forging her signature, imitating her voice, withholding her fan mail and her food – all these devices are tailor-made for Blanche, ever-escalating until that scene on the beach where she lies so flat and lifeless she resembles a dessicated corpse.
Then, of course, we have the final turnabout confession: Blanche confesses that SHE ran Jane down and somehow snapped her own spine, and yet had the strength to crawl to the gate and – oh, never mind. We accept this absurdity because by then we don’t have much choice. We are held as captive as poor Blanche, manacled to the ceiling with electrical tape over her mouth.
Then comes one of the most incredible lines in film history, delivered in the dulcet tones of a Jane who has rocketed back in time to the charming brat who wowed them all on the vaudeville stage: “You mean. . . all this time we could have been friends!”
It’s only then we realize that not only are we enthralled by Jane – we actually feel compassion for her. We’re somehow on her side. Freaking Jesus, how the hell did THAT happen?
It’s a mystery, as all superb crafting is. Is it just the fact that these are better parts, and that better actresses land them? What if someone else had played Jane: say, Olivia de Havilland? What if Crawford had played her, as was originally planned? Wasn’t she pretty good at Mommy Dearest-style torture herself? But no. It had to be Hurricane Bette or no one. It’s the same dynamic as in the Wizard of Oz, when Margaret Hamilton chews up the scenery and fills the room with brimstone and green smoke as the Wicked Witch, but Billie Burke makes you half sick to your stomach as the quavering, sparkly-gowned Good Witch of Whatever. We must either want the bejeezus scared out of us (which I still don’t understand, because in “normal life” most of us try very hard to avoid anxiety and danger), or we want to be every bad thing, every shameful thing, every heartless hideous inhumanly insane thing we know we shouldn’t be.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
MELTDOWN!!
When I don't have much to say, when I am embroiled in editing my next novel (The Glass Character!) and feeling like I'm in the trenches, there are always gifs.
GIFS (or gifs, or giffys or whatever-they-are) are easy to make, but tricky. Tricky in that you must literally isolate hundreds of a second to get the effect you want without extraneous material. There are other restrictions: on the program I like, you have to use YouTube videos that are shorter than 10 minutes, and not all of them work.
But the rest is done for you, so I don't really have to do anything very technical. My favorite site is Y2GIF, though GIFninja ain't bad for using your own videos or making montages of stills.
I am totally freaked out by this cartoon, as animation in the '30s was completely bizarre. Most of it was ripped off of Disney, and this one is no exception. There is this Oswald the Rabbit, and I can't find him because he looks like a mouse with long ears (IF that's him), a dead ringer for Mickey.
This cartoon even uses similar effects to the skeleton dance I made gifs out of a couple of posts ago, but very crudely: the skeleton leaping forward into the frame so that the camera passes right through his hollow body and out the other side. Stylin'.
Walter Lantz was the animator for this one, and it ain't much for imagination. He went on to Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda and a few others I don't remember now.
But it sure made a few great gifs.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Two little words that nobody says
Two little words. There are two little words, NOT three (the ones written on those cheap heart-shaped boxes of candy from the drug store) or four (the ultimate, shining, tinsel-coated four that cause men to get down on one knee at hockey arenas with the Jumbotron on them). I never hear these two little words any more, and in fact I can’t even remember the last time I heard them.
If someone is offensive to you, if someone says something rotten, if someone hurts your feelings with the nastiest thing they can possibly say, what generally happens? What does the offender say, if they bother to say anything at all?
“Oh, I didn’t know you were so sensitive.” (or, alternately, “Jeez, stop being so sensitive!”)
“You obviously don’t know how to receive feedback (or, alternately, “You need to work on your ability to receive feedback”).
“I was only trying to help you” (with your bad breath, terrible cooking, lousy taste in clothes, etc.)
“I just don’t see how you can be so ungrateful” (for all this help!).
“How dare you accuse me of saying something so mean!”
“What’s the matter with you? Why are you so neurotic?”
“It was a joke! (your taste in music, movies, art, people). Don’t you have a sense of humor?”
“Oh, no, you misunderstood me. I would never say anything like that” (you’re fat, you’re boring, you’re lousy in bed).
“Well, I’d never react that way. I always receive criticism as a compliment to my ability to change in a healthy, positive direction.”
"I know I'm right, but if you really need me to say it. . . "
"Well, what do you want me to say?"
"I didn't say that."
"You made it up."
“You’re just playing the victim.”
“You made me do it.”
“You owe me an apology.”
“Oh, but this is karma.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“Criticism is just God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
“Here, read this book.”
“Here, read this book.”
“Here, read this book.”
For some reason, every nation in the world has turned to Teflon. NO ONE takes responsibility any more, for anything. To do so is so rare that it is seen as almost freakish.
Just when do people learn these baroque twists and turns, these arabesques which slip and slide them out of any necessity for owning up to saying something personally hurtful? We all know the advantages in this system. It means people can spew out the meanest, most venomous comments and then turn the blame around and aim it at the victim. Yes, victim. If someone has a poison dart thrown at them, they are a victim, though the word now has such negative connotations that it's seen as an insult in itself.
A victim of someone else's verbal cruelty does not deserve to have their own protests shoved back down their throat. Nevertheless, it happens all the time, along with all the other popular flip-flops practiced by the heartless. No one “makes” anyone do anything abusive, but this is something you hear over and over again from the thugs that make everyone else's life so utterly wretched.
I have seen people behave abominably because they hurt me. You see, I am not allowed to say anything. Ever. If I do say something, THEY flip out, act as if they have been horribly abused. "How could you do this to me?" Then the shivering little rabbit, limping after being so badly kicked, crawls under the bed.
I have a remedy for all this twisted shit, and it is very simple, though not (apparently, or people would do it once in a while) easy. It’s only two words, and once they’re out, you can run and go gargle with mouthwash and then go home.
"I’m sorry."
Not, “Even though I know I was right, I guess I’m. . . “
Not, “Even though I know you’re way too sensitive, I guess I’m. ..”
Two little words.
And that’s all.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Editing your novel can be hazardous to your health
Encountering a T-Rex in some steaming Amazonian jungle is NOTHING compared to the embattled state of editing your novel. You will come to see it as a nightmare beyond your wildest dreams.
But just maybe, if you keep at it, you and the monster can learn the cha-cha-cha.
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