WHAT'S READIN' - Lots O' Lots

Check this out....

* This dude Gerry Canavan was writing about "the motivations for apocalyptic fantasy..." 

when he was...  “Struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the 'net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor”

He has compiled an amazing collection of doomed Statue Of Liberty pics and scenes from movies, books, comic etc. It's great, a lotta fun.

* Screen Grab has a cute little piece, about the freak, one time superstar director: Vanishing Act: Michael Cimino  It's slight and they don't even mention the great Vanity Fair article on Cimino from March 2002. 

I searched on line, but I couldn’t find a copy of it.

However Vanity Fair is currently posting on line for all to read, Peter Biskind's awesome piece...

Thunder on the Left: The Making of Reds  On the box-office coattails of 1978's Heaven Can Wait, Warren Beatty seized his chance to defy Hollywood wisdom by making Reds, a big-budget docudrama sympathetic to the Russian Revolution. The star-director-producer's creative obsession, from the volatile scriptwriting wars to the relentless retakes that reduced Jack Nicholson nearly to tears and helped send Beatty's romance with Diane Keaton into meltdown, resulted in a stunning epic about American Communists.

* My friends, now here is a great website... 

Observations on film art and Film Art by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell

They always are loaded fascinating, epic articles on film.

This recent piece about Cloverfield is good one.

A behemoth from the Dead Zone  “I enjoyed Cloverfield. It starts with a sharp premise, but as ever, execution is everything. I see it as a nifty digital update of some classic Hollywood conventions”

* Yuck. In a gushy Wall Street Journal article about the hit-or-miss director, this  geeky critic Joe Morgenstern asks about Sydney Pollack:

“how did he come, most recently, to do one of the best documentaries ever made about an artist, ‘Sketches of Frank Gehry,’ when he is not essentially -- and was not previously -- a documentary director? The answers flow from the essence of the man”.

I thought "what the hell is he talking about ‘best documentaries ever made’? 

Hey man, of the documentaries of just that year 2005, it wasn’t even one of the ten best.  Off the top of my head, I like these much more.... The Boys of Baraka (Ewing, Grady),  Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Gibney),  Home of the Brave (di Florio),  Inside Deep Throat (Bailey, Barbato),  March of the Penguins (Jacquet),  Murderball (Rubin, Shapiro),  No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Scorsese),  The Staircase (de Lestrade),  Tarnation (Caouett),  Unforgivable Blackness (Burns) and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Irving).

And I’m not even a Grizzly Man (Herzog) fan. 

* A really good site Hollywood Bitchslap. Keeps track of lame film critics, weekly publishing pieces making fun of them.

Here's their year end  Criticwatch 2007 - The Whores of the Year

It's very funny and very insightful.

* Another E Mag with lots of rich film articles is Bright Lights Film Journal

Their DVD section always introduces me to new titles. 

The latest issue has some nice pieces including... 

Jason Mark Scott's The Lady from Shanghai: Welles bids farewell to Hayworth and Hollywood

David L. Pike writes a lengthy piece A Boy and His Dog:  On Will Smith, Apocalypse, and I Am Legend

Even though I was deeply disappointed with Grindhouse and especially Tarantino's overlong, full of it’s self Death Proof, I still cant’ get enough reading about it.  Revisiting it, Erich Kuersten writes The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier.

He convinced me to give it another look, some time

* Also, though not on the internet, the great film nerd mag Video Watchdog’s current newsstand issue has it’s own round table discussion on the whole Grindhouse experience.   Some of their past round tables discussions are however available to read on line. The 1970s HORROR REVIVAL chat is a blast

* Hey, Video Watchdog is all over this years  RONDO HATTON CLASSIC HORROR  AWARDS

Lots of good stuff listed on that.

Gee whiz maybe next year Rocket Blog will be getting lots a trophies (can you imagine all the chicks a dude writing for an award winning web site could get? Oh boy, it's gonna be a good year!)

-sweeneyrules

IN DEFENSE OF ‘THE CHUCK’

EL CID (Anthony Mann 1961)

Where has this flick been my whole life? 

Well it just came out on DVD and like many of the forgotten epics of the pre-Lawrence Of Arabia era, I just never got around to it.

But, golly, I'm glad I finally caught up with it,  

I mention Lean’s desert epic because in my mind,  the depiction of  of Lawrence's character is so much more complex then the depiction of other epic heroes (and yet even he in real life was more complex then the film revealed). And since, even though many comic-books have been disguised in epic clothing, yet because they have hundreds of extras and massive battles, some mistake these films for being important  (Braveheart) and with no cartoony looking CGI  effects (Kingdom Of Heaven). What a relief it was seeing a dude lead his troops into battle without first giving some rousing bullshit rah-rah speech. 

I won’t try to explain the plot. I admit to not going in with much knowledge of the Era ('twas a time long ago when so-called Christians were massacring and conquering Moslems and other terrorists, er, what the? I mean protecting them from themselves). So it wasn’t always clear the who and when, to what could be a  who’s-who of famous names to any Campeador Era buff. 

Director Anthony Mann, who after a string of respectable B-crime flicks and near-noirs gained a filmafile following with his James Stewart ‘modern-hero’ westerns with '50s (The Far Country (1954), The Naked Spur (1953), Winchester '73 (1950) etc.). El Cid was his chance to out-epic Spartacus (1960) which he had just been fired from (replaced by the wonderkid Stanley Kubrick). 

Even though I have a lot of admiration for Ben Hur and even more for the much maligned Cleopatra with gossip page darling (and wonderfully talented) Liz Taylor. There’s something about those Hollywood pre- Lawrence historical epics that reeks of phoniness.

Okay some smarty-pants types might question Charlton Heston being cast as an 11th century Spaniard (just years after being grossly miscast as a Mexican in Orson Welle’s otherwise brilliant Touch Of Evil). For me, he's perfect for the the part. Like TE Lawrence there’s an arrogance and self importance in these kinda heroic figures, and no one plays self-importance better then Chuck Heston did. 

The Chuck gets a lot of shit from folks, because in recent years he’s gone insane and affectionately names his guns & all that crazy right-wing nutso crap he embraces. I wish Michael Moore (in his otherwise, right-on, Bowling For Columbine (2002)) when interviewing the demented ex-actor, had pointed out that The Chuck wasn’t always a-would-be-fascist. Did you know that The Chuck historically is credited with being the first Hollywood Honky to put his Southern box-office credibility on the line and march with MLK (it was considered risky, both socially and financially), he did this before more celebrated liberals Paul Newman & Marlon Brando jumped on board.

While actors of the era just before  The Chuck who carried that stage voiced gravitis  like Welles or Lawrence Olivier quickly aged into character actors, no other actor of his era (1950-) had that Shakespearian voiced, matinee idol looks, bigger then life persona to carry off  being the savior of the human race (more then once) (okay maybe i’m exaggerating Richard Burton could of had Heston’s career but he was preoccupied) . In El Cid, he’s powerful, but his acting is not out of control. He’s flawed and sometimes weak. His Rodrigo’s nobility is grounded in a realism that the film overall evokes. 

What really sets El Cid apart from the epics before it (Quo Vadis (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), The Robe (1953) etc.) is a sort of Euro-realism. The locations do not look like sets built in Southern California. The cinematography, shot by the great Robert Krasker (The Third Man (1949), Trapeze (1956) etc.) is not that CINERAMA  bullshit, often seen in that period. The score by Miklos Rozsa (Double Indemnity (1944), Spellbound (1945), Lust For Life (1956) etc) is grand and epic, but there's something ‘off’ about it, as if to suggest  yes, HEROIC... but flawed.

Did I mention Sophia? Though, The Chuck ages into some kinda wild haired Unibomber, as his long suffering wife, Sophia Loren, luckily is sparred the wrinkle make-up, Her Jimena never ages over, I guess, decades. And frankly, that’s a good thing. If I may be shallow, Sophia Loren in 1961 is at her apex of beauty, this is a year after her Oscar winning, monumental performance in Vittorio De Sica‘s Two Women (have you seen it? A must. A masterpiece. Loren’s performance an one all time great). And though Jimena starts off as possibly complicated she becomes a one dimensional mourner, but the role aside, I will now declare... Sophia Loren in 1961 is THE BEST LOOKING ACTRESS OF ALL TIME. 

And back to The Chuck if I may.... When I was a little kid, he was my favorite (along with Roddy McDowall) based on The Planet Of The Apes (Schaffner 1968). Though by the 1980s his career as a leading man was over, his string of 70s flicks certainly  appealed to a five-year-old movie-nerd, Flicks like like The Omega Man (Sagal 1971), Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973), Earthquake (Robson 1974), Airport 1975 (Smight 1974) and The Two-Minute Warning (Peerce 1976). 

In the 60s besides the enormous hit El Cid, he went to bat and made / saved Peckinpah’s career with Major Dundee (1965). This less than ten-years after he fought the studios to let Welles direct Touch Of Evil. 

So on screen or off, whether fighting for his guns or for his directors, Chuck Heston was bigger then life. El Cid is one of the key films that was big enough to contain the epic size of the guy.

UPDATE: Just watched all the making of supplements on the EL CID DVD. Worth watching.

Most disappointingly I learned The Chuck hated Sopia Loren because she made more then her (what a dork). He was a total dick to her. Man, I woulda been like “hey lets go run lines in my room” etc,. etc ...

-sweeneyrules

PRETTY FUNNY

at least funnier then Stuck on You (2003)

-sweeneyrules