Friday, October 20, 2006
Review: American Hardcore
Most accounts of the history of punk rock go something like this: punk was originated in the late 60's by The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, continued in the early 70's by The New York Dolls, and finally took root in a lower Manhattan dive bar called CBGB, where bands like The Ramones, Patti Smith and Television established the aesthetic of the punk scene. From there it spread to England, where an explosion of bands like The Sex Pistols and The Clash played a more aggressive, politically-fueled brand of punk. Then the Sex Pistols broke up, Sid Vicious died, and nothing else of any importance happened until 1991, when Nirvana finally unleashed punk on the American masses with Nevermind. If your awareness of that period between 1978 and 1991 is based on the music that could be heard on the radio, seen on MTV or read about in Rolling Stone, you could be forgiven for buying into this incomplete history. And the makers of American Hardcore want to set you straight.
The title American Hardcore, currently expanding its run through independent theaters across America, does not refer to porn, although the confusion is probably helping them sell a few more tickets. It refers to the music of bands like Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys and Bad Brains, a harsh distillation of the earlier punk sound that could best be described as sounding like the earliest Ramones or Clash records played at 45 rpm. Hardcore was faster, more aggressive, and more directly political than earlier punk, an angry response to the conservatism of the Reagan era and the oppressive dullness of suburban life. This doc attempts to capture the exhilaration of hardcore, and in its first minutes, scored to Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum" and Black Flag's "Rise Above," it's electrical enough to make you want to get out of your seat and start a mosh pit in the theater. That energy doesn't really last, largely because few hardcore tunes are as exhilarating as those two. I find it doubtful that many new fans will be won over to MDC or Gangrene by the live clips on display here. Just as it's impossible to imagine how people could listen to techno unless you've experienced it at a rave, or to understand the appeal of The Grateful Dead without having been in a stadium full of tripping hippies, most hardcore is music that makes the most sense in a tightly-packed club while rushing on adolescent adrenalin.
Possibly what is most important about this movement has nothing to do with the music itself, but with the DIY ethic that propelled it. Whereas most of the 70's bands were signed to major labels, hardcore was completely ignored by the record industry and the media, so the bands had to take a grassroots approach to promoting their music. They started their own labels and magazines, distributed their records through direct mail order, and played gigs at any space available: American Legion Halls, school auditoriums, houses of kids whose parents were on vacation. In doing so, they blazed a trail across America, producing a network that independent bands would continue to build throughout the decade, until, by the early 90's, even the record industry would have to take notice.This is the stuff that makes for the best part of the film. Minor Threat's Ian McKaye describing how they personally cut and folded 10,000 record covers by hand over the years, Bad Brains singer H.R. describing gigs that took place in basements and art schools, others describing touring as sleeping on the floor of a series of other bands' houses. There's a great visual device of a map of America showing the spread of hardcore across the country "like a spilled beer," starting in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, then sprouting up in D.C. and Boston, then to major urban centers across the Midwest, until every city and college town, and eventually every small town and suburb across the country had their own local scene and original bands playing this music. As several musicians point out, it was music so simple that anybody could figure out how to play it about as well as the major, national bands. It was sort of like folk music, except it didn't suck.
If nothing else, I have to give this document credit for being honest about the scene, and the violence and stupidity that overran it. It is suggested that, more than anything, it was the mosh pit that killed the scene, attracting a violent, lunkheaded crowd who eventually overran the scene until the intelligent people just wanted out. While that's certainly part of it, I would suggest that the real reason hardcore died was because it was just so musically limited (and so narrowly defined by its fans). Several musicians mention that the scene was active and vital from 1980 to 1984, then died almost overnight by 1985. That's one interpretation, although I have another. 1984 seems to me like a year of transition, as bands like The Butthole Surfers, Husker Du and The Minutemen were releasing albums that were taking the punk sound into new directions, clearing the way for a new wave of indie rock bands like Sonic Youth, The Pixies and Fugazi, bands that would be as exhilarating to the mind and heart as the hardcore bands were to the body. And this is where I think American Hardcore fails. It fails to make any connection to earlier or later bands, as if this music (or any music) happened in a vacuum. It didn't. Art never does. It's always part of a larger continuum, and anyone that would set out to document a movement has to examine how it fits into that continuum.
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In Related News...
Betcha bite a link!
The rumor we all want so very much to be true - a musical version of DC Comics’ The Creeper - has all of Hollywood abuzz. Well, it has all of the internet abuzz. Okay, it only has all of us here at TFL abuzz. Most of us, anyway. Look, let’s just say Brad Millette has a thing for red boas and keep it at that. Still, we can all agree if there is any kind of loving god ruling our universe, this will become a reality. In the meantime, the second greatest musical adaptation ever produced is coming to the Great White Way. Fangoria reported this week that Evil Dead: The Musical hits NYC’s New World Stages next month! Not only that, but Bruce Campbell himself is scheduled to appear for a few shows. Click it, baby, for the details! And if you go, be sure to bring a raincoat. In the grand theatrical tradition of Gallagher, GWAR, and Seussical, the first few rows get drenched in blood.
The super wicked cool poster of The Host (press here for super wicked cool poster) is nothing compared to the super wicked cool website for The Host (press here for super wicked cool website). It’s chock full of Korean people saying Korean stuff and I don’t understand a word of it, but sometimes super wicked coolness transcends the language barrier.
Who loves Battlestar Galactica? Anthrax does. And so does every sci-fi nerd in the kingdom. The show actually even seems to be slowly making it’s way into the cultural mainstream like some lonely high school geek quietly inching his seat closer to the cool kids’ lunch table. I guess it’s time for me to drop my Richard Hatch loyalty and get on board this bandwagon. While I’m busy watching the first season DVDs, you guys take a look at this interesting Slate article analyzing the show’s political themes.
Jerry Robinson isn’t the only old man trying to get his finger in Batman’s pie. Michael Caine, reprising his role as Alfred, The Sassy Homosexual Butler for Nolan’s upcoming The Dark Knight, would also like to contribute to the script. It’s kind of cute in it's own awful way:"…Batman was trying to get bad guys, and he wanted to use the butler dressed as Batman as a ruse, and then go back around behind him. So I said to Christopher—and I don't know whether he's going to use it, because he won't tell you anything about the script—but I mentioned this to him, because I thought that this was a great idea. I think that if he dresses me as Batman, it could be one of the funniest sequences in the history of movies. Can you imagine what I would make out of that? Trying to get into the Batman suit and then running around the woods [while] he's going around the [other] way to try and get the bad guys? See, you're already laughing, and those films are very serious."
Mr. Caine then proceeded to laugh so hard his top bridge fell out of his mouth, splashing lentil soup all over his pajamas. He then cursed his soup and muttered something about how the squirrels were stealing his clothes again. Read it all here.
If there is anything better in this world than a Creeper musical, surely it must be a Mexican wrestler slasher movie. El Mascarado Massacre premieres today at The Hollywood Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Festival at the Arclight in Los Angeles! It's about a legendary masked mexican wrestler rising from his tomb to kill people. And if that's not enough to hook you, it features Irwin Keyes. You know, this guy. If any of our seven readers happens to see this flick, drop me a line. The rest of us can get our Santo on with the trailer here.
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128 Million For A Man And His Guns
So, Universal and Fox pulled their funding for the Halo film.
I think that it's important to remember at times like this, that the main character has two guns when shooting aliens. You can't make character depth like that up.
Variety is reporting that Universal and Fox, who were going to co-finance the $135 million video game translation, pulled out for a combination of rumors and filmmaker manhandling. This is not unlike that time two of your friends refused to chip in for pizza because the Russian mafia said they would shoot their kids, and you were forced to pay for it all yourself. However, since you weren't Peter Jackson, a man who made a $200 million dollar film about a giant monkey, you were actually kind of pissed off about it.
Intially, the rumor mill churned out a thick, gooey lie that suggested Halo was getting bloated and hitting the $200 million mark. As we have learned in the past this sort of price mark can near destroy studios (Superman Returns) or shine them in the glorious green light made of sin and richness (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). Even when paying half the bill between the two studios, it's still a sizable risk if it bombs. So, in that case it wouldn't be too much of a surprise that the two distributors backed out.
Here's what their rep Ken Kamis had to say about that:
"The only budget the filmmakers every spoke about was $145 million less the 12.5% rebate that you get from shooting in New Zealand, which would put it at about $128 million," Kamins said. "That was the only number that was ever discussed."
The truth seems to be that Universal and Fox were going to take some dollar signs off of PJ and crew's paycheck, and pull some money away from Microsoft. That is a lot like saying you're going to tear the sun from the very skies itself. As a result of this suggestion by the studios, PJ and the rest of the producers declined the studios help. Now they are looking for new people to give them tons and tons of money. At this point I really don't care enough about Halo to be worried. As interesting as the director sounds and as interesting it is that Peter Jackson is involved, I find myself apathetic to a big blockbuster where a guy in really awesome armor drives around and blows up alien invaders.It's also very scary that when I see the film will cost 128 million dollars, I see that as being cheap.
The Halo flick is supposed to come out in the summer of 2008, but considering this little problem we'll see if it'll take longer. I have a feeling Peter Jackson will launch into his space shuttle dubbed the U.S.S. Venture, and he will split open the space Kraken's belly with his cosmic harpoon. All this so he can get to where he hid his magnificent movie fortune. While he does that, you can watch the upcoming King Kong Deluxe Extended Edition. Yes, I said extended.
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DVD Invasion - Week Of 10/17/06
I reported the release of The Break-Up in the September 26th edition of DVD Invasion, but apparently it is actually being released this week. I'm pretty sure this error can be blamed on the world's largest bookstore, but I'll take responsibility anyway. It's not like I was dying to announce it. If you wasted time and fuel a few weeks ago in an attempt to buy this movie, let me apologize. You have bad taste, and for that I am deeply sorry. Heh. Sorry again. I'll put a link to the DVD down the page for those of you who still trust me. Let's move on to things I'm not wrong about...
The Omen (2006)Kids were creepier in the 70's. I'm not talking about Japanese kids, who honestly have always been very scary. When I think about a movie like this remake, I picture the little boy who portrays Damien running back to his trailer every couple of hours during the shoot to play a game on his XBox or text message his grade school chums. Children thirty years ago didn't have fancy toys like that to play with. They had dead animals to stomp on and screwdrivers to loosen the screws on their grandmothers' walkers. They had secret things to bury in the backyard. That's scary stuff. This movie is nothing. Watch the original and imagine just sitting in the same room with the demon child from that movie. He'd probably try to poison your beverage when you weren't looking, the little bastard.
SATAN DIED LAUGHING features include a commentary track by Director John Moore, Producer Glenn Williamson and Editor Dan Zimmerman, a "Revelation 666" featurette, unrated extended sequences, an unrated alternate ending, "Omenisms" (crap like this is why this movie cannot surpass the original), "Abby Road Sessions", and the trailers.
Over the HedgeIt may seem like a nitpick, but I'm tired of celebrity-driven animated films. I don't necessarily want to hear recognizable voices coming from cartoon characters, and you can be sure that kids don't care about it. Bruce Willis is never going to win any awards for his voicework, so he may as well stop. That said, Over the Hedge looks like a fun movie. The story of various furry woodland creatures venturing into the world of the humans is getting overused these days, but I'm sure there is plenty of slapsticky humor to keep the events lively. I really don't have much more to say about this film, except that I'm glad I can watch it in the comfort of my living room, where very few children are allowed to be.
SORRY, WE'RE NOT PIXAR features include a commentary track by Directors Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick and Producer Bonnie Arnold, the all-new animated short "Hammy's Boomerang Adventure" with optional commentary by director Will Finn, the "Verm-Tech Institute Infomercial" with Dwayne LaFontant, a "Behind The Hedge" featurette, a "Meet The Cast" featurette with the voice cast, "The Tech of Over The Hedge" featurette, "DreamWorks Kids (DWK): This Way To Play" virtual playground, DVD-ROM activities and still galleries.
FeastI never saw the point of Project Greenlight. Anything to do with Ben Affleck is like a snake bite to the eyeball, as far as I'm concerned. I was slightly intrigued when the winning story of the third season was a horror movie, however. It made me wish that the premise of the show was focused solely on horror films. I can guarantee I would have tried very hard to be faithful to a show called Project Darklight, Affleck or no Affleck. The horror film in question, directed by John Gulager (son of veteran actor Clu Gulager, who you may know as the cranky warehouse owner in Return of the Living Dead), is a straight-up survival picture. It has a few elements in its favor, including the bar setting, inventive monsters, plenty of gore and Krista Allen. Ben Affleck sucks.
CLU GULAGER IS LORD features include a commentary by the filmmakers, a "Horror Under the Spotlight: Making Feast" featurette, "The Blood and Guts of Gary Tunnicliffe" featurette, deleted scenes and outtakes.
Clean Shaven - Criterion CollectionI can't tell you how many times I passed up this movie on the rental shelf when it came out in 1997. The indie bug was scraping emphatically at my flesh at that time but hadn't broken the skin yet, and character studies about schizophrenic loners seeking out their long-lost daughters did not appeal to me based on the work I was doing at the time with real schizophrenic loners. Nevertheless, the film is back on DVD, and this time it has received the Criterion treatment, including a newly restored high-def transfer. There will be no passing of the up kind this time around.
Criterion strikes hard and deep with these engaging features: a commentary track featuring Steven Soderbergh interviewing Director Lodge Kerrigan, "A Subjective Assault: Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven" - a new video essay, written and narrated by critic Michael Atkinson, the film's soundtrack and selections from the film's final sound design (MP3 downloads)the theatrical trailer and a booklet with a new essay by Dennis Lim.
Rest Stop - Unrated EditionI was going to start this blurb by saying I don't know why I decided to feature Rest Stop this week, but that's not true. I do know why. I am a sucker for these "stranger in a strange land" kind of horror-thrillers. There is something about getting stuck/attacked in an unfamiliar setting on some rarely travelled stretch of highway that gets me every time. Last year's Wolf Creek was an example of how this kind of film should be done. In this one, a young couple are on their way to Hollywood when they stop at an isolated rest area. The boyfriend disappears, and his female companion must deal with the maniac who disappeared him. With all of the urban legends surrounding rest stops in this country, I'm surprised the damned things even exist anymore. It's a wonder new cars don't come with their own portable toilets. Nobody wants to pull over to use the bathroom after seeing these kinds of movies.
HANG IT OUT THE WINDOW features include three alternate endings, a "Scotty's Home Movies" featurette, an "On The Bus" featurette and a trailer.
If Not Better, More:
Look at that cover for Starsky and Hutch. Notice anything homoerotic about it? Like the sheen of sweat on David Soul's forehead, or how it looks like Paul Michael Glaser is sitting on Soul's lap? Makes you wonder where Huggy Bear is, doesn't it? I could say more about that, but I don't want to.
See, I told you I'd have The Break-Up waiting for you. Please enjoy the shit out of it. Grotesqueries is my sleeper pick for this week. Check it out, it could be some spooky, nostalgic fun.
What I Missed Last Week:
I feel like a real vegetarian for not being around to push the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 special edition last week. The movie is not without its flaws, but the only way it would have been able to approach the quality of the original is if it was a musical. Imagine Leatherface and Jesse James Dupree of Jackyl playing "Dueling Banjos" on their chainsaws. Go ahead, imagine it. The other highlights from last week offer a little something for everyone, including Sandler fans (who really should cut it out).
Next week: Nacho Libre, An American Haunting, Slither, Monster House, a nifty collector's edition of Reservoir Dogs and more.
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Trailer: Dreamgirls
Lovely ladies, Motown rhythms, and high-haired Eddie Murphy: All lookin' very good in the new full trailer for Bill Condon's Dreamgirls.
Dreamgirls is the film adaptation of the hit 1980s Broadway musical of the same name which was loosely based on the rise of Diana Ross and The Supremes. The film is the latest from writer/director Bill Condon, whom you might know as the man responsible for the wonderful Kinsey and Gods and Monsters. Also, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh. So basically he's pretty awesome. Dreamgirls marks the filmmaker's first musical feature, though he's no stranger to the stage or its showy lights; He also adapted the screenplay for 2002's Chicago.
I had the opportunity to visit the set of this film here in Los Angeles earlier this year. Everything I saw was pretty great (including a stunning Beyonce Knowles and an extremely affable Jamie Foxx). And apparently, the early word on the film's first cuts have been extremely positive. That includes performances from all-comers, even Eddie Murphy, who's playing James "Thunder" Early, modeled after the Godfather of Soul, James Brown.
Please realize that after learning that Murphy will continue to embrace his Pluto Nashian roots, the possibilty (and very probable one) exists that he may receive an Oscar nod this season. Movie Universe, you can sure be an odd little minx.
Dreamgirls sings and dances into theaters on
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Halloween@TFL: The A-Z Of Horror - M
M is for Monsters!
Icky!
Toothy!
Funny!
Fucking weird!
Sexy!
Me on the pull!
MonkeyCat!
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Thursday, October 19, 2006
Which Was Worse? - Part 3
In a mighty battle, Van Helsing overcame Godzilla to go through to our semi-final, proving that TFLers prefer dull shit to batshit insane shit. I did state before that Van Helsing would go on to battle Superman IV but, in a desperate bid to build tension, I'm going to put the four first-round winners in a hat to pick the semi-final match-ups, so keeping you in something like suspense for a little longer. So - two more first round match ups, two semis and a final then that will be enough crappy geek films for a while, I think. Next up are two titans of geek hate: Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones and The Matrix: Revolutions!
The Phantom Menace invented the Internet back in 1999 when it turned out it really sucked. Fans really did hate this film, and they should know as they watched it a dozen times in theatres. 2002 brought Attack of the Clones, which showed that George Lucas had been listening to the fans and was trying to appease them. Now we had more lightsaber action, more epic battles, more Yoda and less Jar Jar Binks. Initial reaction was positive. It was better than The Phantom Menace it seemed and finally we got our Clone War, even if it was only for twenty minutes at the end.
But time, and far too many viewings on DVD, gives a strange perspective on things. The Phantom Menace, while dull and childish, has a certain charm and consistency of vision to it. Attack of the Clones, it turns out, is almost unwatchable.
You should all, hopefully, be aware with George Lucas' obsession with digital technology by now. It's even been covered several times on this blog, born well after the after the final prequel was released. He shot the film entirely on digital and he shot everything on green-screen, to the point where the actors even had to mime eating food. It was state of the art technology, but even George admits the film was a testbed for a technology that was still finding its feet. A DVD transfer that emphasised the clarity of the shots only emhasised how fake and flat everything looks. But having a good looking film wasn't the point. The point was to show how much clarity you could get with digital technology.
While watching the final battle I wondered why the clone-troopers looked a little stiff - it was because they were, every one of them, CGI, even when having a simple conversation with Obi Wan Kenobi. The only reason George seems to give on the commentary is that, well, they could. It may have been state of the art, but it still looks crappy.
The space-cow scene.
It's all horribly cynical. Lucas pretty much admits that Star Wars now is his means of keeping his empire going. It is his main revenue stream so he has to keep refreshing it with new product, like movies for example, every few years. The prequels were his way of testing out the new technology on a property he knew everyone was going to lap up anyway.
But he did try and heed the cries of the fans. The fans loved Boba Fett, so Boba and his dad, Jango, are in this film. The kids loved the droids, so the droids are shoe-horned in too. Everyone hates Jar Jar, so he's hardly in it at all. Yoda's cool right? Let's have him fight!
The problem is that it is all done so very, very badly. Jango is not only the one behind the assassination attempt, but he's also the genetic model for the clone army that becomes the Empire's stormtroopers which also helps explain away why everyone called it the 'clone' wars in the original trilogy. It's all very conveinient and needlessly busy writing, that makes the universe small by having everyone know each other and it creates an horrendously complicated continuity. Lucas admits the first film worked precisely because we didn't know all that back story. The lack of nerdily obsessive continuity added to the mythicality of the story. Oh well.
Should I mention C3P0's one-liners? Or the attempts to make R2-D2 the 'cool' droid with 'where the fuck did that come from?' flying ability (it came from thinking up that factory action scene right at the last minute and having to fudge the details) who saves the day and is a bit of an action hero? Or how about the entirely lame fan-pandering of Yoda fighting like a rabid frog? No I shouldn't, you've seen them and you hate them.
The two strands of the entire trilogy were Anakin Skywalker turning into Darth Vader and the birth of the Empire. The two strands of this story do mirror that but, two hours into the film and over halfway through an entire trilogy, and they have both barely begun.
As The Empire Strikes Back took the original trilogy to richer and genuinely emotional places (relatively of course, but don't be a grump), you look for the deepening of the prequel trilogy's story. But it isn't there. There's just more dry exposition scenes about the minutiae of the Jedi Library. The spark of the love story never ignites, nor do the teeth of the political storyline ever really bite so, when things start to wrap up on Geonosis and the monsters come out to play you realise that all you have been watching is a glorified monster movie.
You may actually feel slightly relieved at this. You realise the adult in you doesn't have to take this silly space movie seriously and so you can sit back to enjoy watching a glorified monster movie. Yay! But then you realise that the flat acting and fakey-effects means the actors never look like they are being attacked anything by anything more than a middle aged bearded billionaire. They don't even look like they're really running because, back in the real world, they're worried abot running into that green screen wall five yards in front of them. The ability to digitally enhance scale means that while they can have dozens of lightsabers on screen at once, none of them have any impact. Anakin riding on that space rhino thing still looks awful. And the digital ability to tweak entire shots in post means that Lucas has spent the film's engorged post-produciton period tweaking everything he could until everything feels chopped up and bitty.
Next time you watch the film (yes you will), pay attention to the music in the Geonosis battle. It goes all over the place, changing every few seconds. This is because Lucas chopped and changed the footage after the score had been recorded, meaning it had to be cut and pasted as best it could be to fit the new flow of the film. It doesn't, of course.
Everything is there in the film, sure, but it feels just like a check list Lucas is ticking off. There's some big battle stuff, OK now put in some Anakin being angsty, OK now some C3-PO comedy for the kids, OK now a bit of the Force Theme, OK now lightsabers, OK now back to that faux hand-held zooming CGI shot we just created. A checklist does not make a film. Nothing holds together. Lacking that steady throughflow, the film descends into the bitty, awkward, laundry-list reading, tech-demo-feeling pile of crap it is.
And the tragedy is that, when the music does get to play - when Anakin is speeder-biking off to kill some sandpeople, or in the final sequence of star destroyers taking off - the old lump-in-the-throat Star Warsy feelings come back. Beyond all the yoda-hopping, continuity-mongering and cgi-abusing, it is the editing that kills the film.
We are, all of us, total marks for Star Wars and it doesn't take much to set us off. That creeping feeling that The Phantom Menace is not actually so bad is a testament to this. That Attack of the Clones fails to achieve even this is a testament to how really, really awful it is. If you can't even enjoy it is a cheesy monster movie, what exactly is there left?
Now, there are always some wankers who will try and convince you that The Matrix sequels are, actually, awesome. I'm one of them. They're awesome, seriously. While I will defend Reloaded and actually kind of mean it, the final film of the trilogy, Revolutions, is really not very good at all. As a fan I will give it a pass but, as a fan, my opinion should not be given any weight. At all.
It commits all of the faults of a bloated blockbuster and all of the faults of trilogy capper as well as finding some new faults of its own to rub in our faces.
It makes no attempt to be a film in its own right, leaping straight into a lot of expository scenes that make no sense unless taken in context of the previous films. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest also has these faults, with large chunks of it purely being set-up for the final part. But Dead Man's Chest knows how to have fun, and how to treat its more lumpen parts with humour and lightness. Revolutions is too unbearably portentious, self-serious and in love with its grand statements to pander to anything as shallow as entertaining the audience.
In the first film you get the sense that characters are actually enjoying themselves. Neo's arc of discovering his powers means that, when they attack the agent's building in the now famous lobby scene, you get the sense that he's having a great time, even if he is killing loads of innocent humans. In Revolutions, saving the world means never smiling at all.
This isn't helped by the emo-goth vibe all of the characters give off. They are all carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, pondering heavy thoughts and just generally being very angsty. They are all being teenage goths, who are quite possibly the worst people in the world. Unless they are hot women or have a sense of humour, that is. Unfortuantely both of these things are rather rare in a goth. It is no surprise that it is only Agent Smith, who is against our world-saving, mopey heroes, who displays any life in the film. His scenes are great fun, and almost reclaim the energy of the first film.
The cool thing about The Matrix, as the Wachowski Brothers state in their introduction to the films in the box set (which, yes, I own), is that it is a kick-ass sci-fi kung-fu film that also manages to have thematic and philosophical heft. It is cool-as-fuck entertainment that also has something on its mind. The greatness of the first film is that it manages that trick without any real compromises on either side. In Revolutions, the cool-as-fuckness as been entirely removed in favour of stodgy cogitation.
Characters are now entirely symbolic cyphers representing themes such as the conflict between mind, body and spirit. The plot is now a means to set up conflict and resolution between fate and freedom, reason and emotion, purpose and choice. As such the film is chock full of subtext, which I can argue mostly hangs together if you like, but simply has no text anymore. The characters are one dimensional, and the narrative has no internal cohesion at all.
As is a problem with many maximum scale films, when the film-makers are givn a free hand and blank cheque, every tiny bit of this film is blown up to massive scale. tertiary characters are given loads of screen time. Battles are obscenely distended. There is always 'more' with never any consideration of 'better'.
We have the character of 'The Kid', Link's girlfriend, her dykey friend (the one blatantly based on Vasquez from Aliens) and the commander of the Zion forces. We would have cared about them exactly as much if we had just been introduced to them in a single shot just before the battle, instead of having scene after scene of them nattering glumly and uninsightfully away - possibly even more, as we could project our own feelings on to their faces if we had been told nothing about them.
Also, as with any sequence of films that tell one over-all story, there is always the sense that they could have just told the good bits in one really awesome film. In Revolutions the only important plot thread is Neo's journey to the machine city to make peace between the warring factions. Everything in Zion is, basically, unnecessary and yet it takes up half the film. I wrote an article about Action Crap which complains about the modern blockbuster's habit of filling up time with narratively and dramatically empty spectacle. The Battle of Zion is a full half hour of unbroken Action Crap and, while being at times staggering to look it, is utterly pointless noise.
And noise is a major problem with Revolutions. They had the money and they had the technology so they spent it filling the screen with as much stuff as possible. There's probably a solid hour of this film that consists of thousands of things rushing at the screen and exploding. It was supposed to be intense, it was supposed to feel like a real and terrifying war was happening but mostly it feels being assaulted. Rather than exhilirating or immersive, it feels like being beaten up.
I do like the final fight between Neo and Agent Smith, I do think the film is really awesome to look at and I do think its thematic arc is resolved in a satisfying and beautiful way (shut it, you heathen dungeddit scum), but fuck me is it a slog getting to it.
So here we have two bloated sci-fi fx fests that utterly failed to recapture what made their originals so popular, replacing it with flat, lifeless, techno-masturbatorial noise and static. Visit any geek movie website and you will still find arguments about the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix sequels, as I believe they represent the two most loved modern movie myths (yes I can justify this. Try me), and the two most horribly sullied by their most recent tellings. But which was worse? You decide!
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News Round-Up: 10/19/06
The Prime Line, Crazy Conservative Scribe, and Animated Ari Gold!
For some truly bizarre reason Paramount decided to let fans come up with a line for Peter Cullen to speak as Optimus Prime in the upcoming movie. Well all the entries are in and now it's up to you to vote. Go here and view the ones they felt were non-lame enough to be options. They range from the pseudo-metaphysical, "Greatness is measured not by wealth, power, or strength but by service, honor, and sacrifice." to the ridiculous "Are you a Decepticon or a Deceptican't?" Voting ends on the 23rd. I'll be over here gently weeping.Source: Paramount
John Milius (Apocalypse Now) is writing the script for a movie based on "Task Force Faith" which is itself based on events during the Chosin Reservoir Battle. Not familiar with it? During the Korean War (you know the one with Hawkeye and Hot Lips) an American Army task force of three thousand men was ambushed while trying to defend a Marine division's flank. Over four days they fought their way back to the American lines only to have to turn around and fight their way back out with the Marines. All of this happened in snow and ice with temperatures getting to thirty below. The survivors were called the Frozen Chosen and after some controversy eight were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the army's second highest award. The movie will be called The Chosen Few and will no doubt be brutal.Source: Variety
On the animation front, Jermey Piven (Cars) and Molly Shannon (Talladega Nights) will be joining some other outstanding talent in the CG comedy Igor. He will play Dr. Schadenfreude, Igor's nemesis and she will give her voice to Igor's monster Eva. Christian Slater as Igor, Steve Buscemi as Scamper, and John Cleese as Dr. Glickenstein are enough to make me want to see this in spite of the fact that the plot sounds a little lame. Igor wants to win the annual Evil Science Fair. Hmmm. But they're going for the funny and as long as it stays well out of Shrek territory they've certainly picked the right folks. Unfortunately the director, Anthony Leondis, is responsible for Home on the Range so I won't get my hopes up.Source: Hollywood ReporterDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading News Round-Up: 10/19/06
The Creeper Feels Pretty! Oh So Pretty!
Today's "Rumor So Weird I Pray To God It's True" is one of the best, most sheerly insane ideas I've heard in a long time. The Creeper, one of Steve "I Created Spider-Man, Now Leave Me Alone, Dammit!" Ditko's greatest creations for DC Comics, may be coming to the big screen. What's so weird about that, you ask? Well, when he shows up there, he may be singing, dancing and creeping about in a full-on musical extravaganza.
Comic Book Resources got an anonymous scoop from someone claiming to be close to the writer of the Don Murphy produced We3 (An excellent comic, by the way, and one I can only hope survives the rigors of adaptation.), who had this extremely awesome tidbit of possible information to share as well:
"Apparently Don is also trying to develop a comic book character called 'The Creeper,' with the guy who directed the Cirque du Soleil Beatles' show as the director. It's a 'Rocky Horror Show' meets 'West Side Story' type of musical, with amazing dance/fight routines ..."
Mr. Murphy, Don, can I call you Don? I know I may have said some mean things to you in the past, but please, I beg of you, make this happen. If ever there was a superhero that befitted, nay, demanded a full-force musical, it's the Creeper. Pull out all the stops. Get a chorus line of "Creepettes". Make this the all-singing, all-dancing, all-punching smorgasbord of pure comic book nonsense that we all never knew we were waiting our whole lives to see.
Oh GOD how I hope this is true.
Source: Comic Book ResourcesDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading The Creeper Feels Pretty! Oh So Pretty!
Korean Tentacle Sighting!
Dude, what the fuck?
Why is France getting every cool movie poster these days? First they got the super wicked cool Sam Jackson Taser Zombie poster for Snakes on a Plane. Now they have this super wicked cool poster for the new Korean born creature feature The Host. Just look at that beautiful piece of pro-tentacle propaganda. That's how you put asses in the seats. French asses, anyway. The American poster is some kind of generic dogshit. And I mean an actual picture of dogshit with the word "The host" scribbled underneath. And like the blood infused Saw 3 poster, it's printed with actual dogshit. And when you lean in to sniff it (because you're wondering what smells like dogshit) you see a little message that reads "In your face, insolent American cur! Love, Kim Jong Il"
More info on The Host from the creepy cool cats at DreadCentral.com.
Source: IMP Awards, Dread CentralDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Korean Tentacle Sighting!
Interview With Jerry Robinson
Sorry, I can't think up a clever title for this one. I've got too much respect for the guy recognized as the co-creator of one of the greatest villains of all time: The Joker.
Newsarama has a wonderful interview with Jerry Robinson up, where he discusses his involvement with the Jewish Museum and their current exhibition, Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics. It's a great read, and a very enlightening (though brief) account of the creation of the Joker.
More interestingly, Robinson goes on to speak about his potential involvement in the upcoming Bat-film, The Dark Knight:
NRAMA: What do you think of the Batman movies?
JR: I was more impressed with the last one [Batman Begins] than the others. I didn’t care for most of the others, mostly the writing and not necessarily the acting. I hope the next one [The Dark Knight] will be good. I might be acting as a consultant on that.
NRAMA: Oh really?
JR: Possibly. That’s being discussed. So if that’s true, then I hope it’ll be the best one.
Considering that Nolan has already gone on record as saying he wants to go back to the Joker's origins for his inspiration in the film, this makes a lot of sense. You can't get more original than the character's creator.
The rest of the interview is a great read, and really compelling for any fan of comics history. Go check it out.
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Halloween@TFL: The A-Z of Horror - J To L
Yes, I do know what the entry for Q is.
J for J-Horror!
So the quesiton is - is J-Horror (horror films from Japan or, more accurately, Asia) dead? During the 90's Hollywood horror went jokey and meta with the Scream films deconstructing horror cliches even as they increasingly relied on them. The glut of 'metoo' films starting killing the genre once again (perhaps it is the perfect genre for zombie status) and left a gap in the market for serious horror films which the Asian film industries, by luck or judgement, happily filled.
Films like Ringu and Ju-on were serious, dark and deadly effective at scaring the crap out of people. I didn't sleep properly for a month after seeing Ringu for the first time.
The hallmarks of these films were a mostly quiet atmosphere, a deliberate, observational pace and repeated motifs of water and young dead girls with long black hair down over their faces. They were mostly very fatalistic, where the malevolent force would focus on you for some simple or arbitrary reason and there would be no way to escape its wrath.
Whether these films genuinely tapped into a new set of fears in western audiences or were simply something different from the clever-clever tone or clumsy brutishness of Hollywood fare is up for grabs, but they became so popular that, of course, Hollywood starting remaking them (The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water).
Asia is not above riding a trend either - the director of Ju-on has essentially remade the film around seven times now, including the American version (The Grudge).Later entries in the J-Horror wave were more or less effective, as western distributors started picking up the second tier stuff after the gems had already been released. The Tale of Two Sisters is beautiful, atmospheric, very dark and makes absolutely no fucking sense. Kairo (remade as Pulse) is dull and silly but gets marks for being technically superb and uncompromisingly bleak.
It is certainly good to get some cross fertilisation of our filmic cultures, and the alien-ness of much of Asian culture (not to mention their obsession with alienation) certainly plays in to the horror genre. Unfortunately, even the low rent Scary Movie franchise has picked up on the 'long dark haired girl' trick for parody so its days could well be numbered.
K is for Kill!
You'd think this was an obvious one, but why does there have to be so much killing in horror movies? The build up is what is scary, and pain is far more unpleasant than a quick death.
The Exorcist has 3 deaths (I think) and they all happen mostly off screen. Halloween has only 3 on screen deaths. Cronenberg's The Fly only has one, unless you count the baboon.
These films, however, deal in characterisation and lethally accurate thrill-building, which most horror films can not be bothered with. For most horror films the build up is jus a cost effective way to pad the running time and the star of the film is the make-up guy getting the 'knife-through-the-throat' appliance ready in the back room.
The slasher film evolved into nothing more than a sequence of kills, with the good ones having as little in between them as possible and most recent entries having a 'jump to a kill' option on their DVD menus.
But fuck quality, kills are great, even if we have just been trained to love them by decades of crappy movies. Tom Savini, who learnt his gore trade by actually being in war zones and did the never-bettered kills in Romero's second two Dead films, is not worshipped as a god for nothing, despite being a weird plastic-faced whore these days. See also Braindead, aka Dead Alive.
The fetishisation of the kill is pretty low, but it's not like it's new (See Gladiator) and when a film gets it right, like Final Destination 2, which really isn't much more than highly elaborate kill sequences, it's a six pack of fun.
L is for Lovecraft!
H.P. Lovecraft was a horror and fantasy author writing around the beginning of the 20th Century. While some of his ideas were very modern, dealing with psychology and the subconscious, he mixed them with very ancient ideas such as fatalism, millennarian fears of the collapse of civilisation, and pagan cosmologies.
His work is most memorable for not dwelling on the specific objects of the characters' fears, but their reactions to them. As he stated:
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
The monsters and terrible events in his stories are usually only ever seen in glimpses, usually of a giant tentacle, there are lots of descriptions of terrible smells, or of foreboding atmospheres, or of characters becoming suddenly overcome with inexplicable fears. This works really well with the written word but, by its nature, it is not very visual.
As such, his works have been fairly under-represented in film - mostly consisting of awesome but not particularly faithful adaptations like Re-Animator and From Beyond. However, his most famous creation - the Cthulhu Mythos - has influenced countless strands of fantasy and horror over the century. The mythos dealt with ancient and evil beings living in alternate universes that, when they impinge upon our world, are worshipped as gods. In this mythos, humanity is small and powerless, and our young civilisations are fragile and fleeting when they come into contact with the Cthulhu.
Japanese anime and, infamously, Hentai, is full of giant tentacles doing terrible things, often to young females.
John Carpenter's last half-decent film, In The Mouth Of Madness, was full of Lovecraftian imagery such as half glimpsed monsters, portals to evil dimensions and lots of gooey tentacles.
Even comedies like Ghostbusters have plots revolving around ancient gods resurfacing in the modern world and threatening the thin patina of civilisation we so hubristically believe is powerful and stable.
While Lovecraft possibly didn't invent evil interdimensional beings with giant tentacles, it is his gooey terrors that so much of modern horror is referencing when they break out the eldritch atmosphere.
Guillermo Del Toro directed Hellboy, an adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic books that revel in gothic myths and horror legends. In the film, giant tentacled interdimensional beings threaten the modern world. Again. He also keeps promising to make In The Mountains of Madness, one of Lovercraft's best books, telling the tale of an expedition to Antartica where a huge and ancient city is found in which live, you guessed it, huge tentacled ancient evil beings that we only see in glimpses.
While the easy parts of Lovecraft's work (tentacles) have seeped into almost every aspect of fantasy and horror, the best parts are still largely missing. The sense of fatalism and of humanity being small, powerless and irrelevant are much harder to put across, especially as the horror genre is still mostly about delivering cheap thrills to young audiences. His stories very rarely have happy endings. It is not that the evil wins, it is that there was never any fight to begin with - the main character mainly just uncovers a vast and ancient secret that all his reason, knowledge and civilisation is powerless to resist. That inability to escape, as well the total emasculation of our conscious selves at the hands of our subconscious fears, is still too dark for most films and, as such, still gives Lovecraft's work a power even today.
Let's hope that Del Toro, who has just made the extraordinary Pan's Labyrinth, will stop playing around with the fun but shallow Hellboy and get down to perhaps our best chance of seeing some real Lovecraft on our screens with In The Mountains of Madness.
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Halloween@TFL: The A-Z of Horror - G To I
Continuing to teach children basic literacy, one death at a time.
G is for Gore!
Horror films are supposed to scare you, to disturb you or challenge your beliefs and values. They are supposed to affect you psychologically and images of violence can do this. However most horror films suck too much to get a genuine emotional reaction out of us. Most, fortunately, know how much they suck and just pile on the fake blood and pig guts for our amusement.
Cheering for the killer isn't what we are supposed to be doing, and neither should we be looking forwards to the violence, but we are all evil and film-makers know that, making the kills as gruesome and bloody as possible. Thank fucking Christ.
Modern horror is currently split between the PG-13 films, aimed at girls and definitely don't like the gore (See The Fog, The Grudge, The Covenant and The Etc), and torture porn flicks (like Hostel, The Devil's Rejects and The Hills Have Eyes) which focus on the pain and suffering of the victims, rather than the complex gooey prosthetics. Personally I like the early 80's style (The Thing, Day of the Dead, almost anything by Cronenberg) which raised gore to almost psychedelic levels of explicitness, all done practically and all bathed in rivers of sticky fake blood.
It may not be big or clever, but gore is awesome and should be in every film ever.
H is for Hell!
God bless Christianity for filling our cultural memories with images of fire, torture and eternal suffering.
What's interesting about hell is that the threat of it is usually more effective than actual depictions.
The Exorcist, despite its head-spinning, pea-soup spewing, crucifix-loving effects, derives most of its power from the idea that innocent Regan is trapped somewhere invisible and unreachable being tormented by demons. Even worse is the idea that that place is just underneath the poor girl's skin.
Hellraiser depicts hell as an S&M fantasy land of dungeons, chains, and bloody chunks of ex-humans, writhing in orgiastic pain. The sequel portrayed it as an Escher painting. It's all very impressive (especially on the budget they had), but the real creep-out in those films were that part of our nature might actually enjoy an eternity of pain.
Event Horizon has a ship that opens a portal to hell and, if you are the sort of person who goes frame-by-frame through the violent bits, contains a great deal of very nasty 'sharp things in people' imagery indeed. It still sucks though, so proving that all the brutality in the world isn't effective at giving you the creeps if that's all you have.
Doom, the computer game that Event Horizon nicked its 'portal to hell' idea from, went one worse when it was made into a film in which the monsters turned out to be genetic mutants rather than demons, which is a really pussy way to avoid any religious controversy and one of the few times it can be said that Event Horizon is better than another movie.
The problem with Hell is that it still plays into the idea of an afterlife and that, if you can be doomed, you can also be saved and go to heaven. I won't go into the possible truth of that, but I will say that, in terms of horror films, it's a cop-out. If death isn't the end then, really, what's so scary about death?
A real cinematic hell is anywhere you can not escape. Terry Gilliam's Brazil does this amazingly well, where Bureaucracy closes in on the hero in all its relentless and impersonal horror.
From Katanga's 'Holiday 05' Album
I'll leave the last word on this to Bill S Preston Esq:
'Woah, dude, my heavy metal album covers totally lied to me'.
I is for Itching!
What's so scary about itching? It's the cinematic shorthand for the first stages of a terrible disease, that's what, not to mention that it's a symptom of beng a total psychopath, who are alwasy good value.
The nerdy researcher in Poltergeist gets freaked out by some exploding meat, goes into the bathroom but the light starts to irritate his skin. He starts itching, then itches some more, then blood starts dripping into the sink, then hunks of skin, then half his face! He itches off so much of himself that he turns into a puppet, which is awesome.
In Hellraiser 2 an Evil Psychologist is caring for a disturbed man who thinks there are bugs under his skin. He itches so much he would scratch his skin off if he wasn't in a straight jacket. Evil Psychologist takes the patient's straightjacket off...and gives him a straight razor to scratch with. The director's cut of the scene then shows the poor man cutting himself to ribbons for a good minute or so. When the skinless demon-whore rises up from hell and sucks his blood out, it almost seems like a relief. A great scene.
What's wonderful about itching is that everyone does it, so horror movies can play in to the universal fear of 'OMG do I have a disease? Do I have the plague? Do I have an incurable and virulent flesh eating bug that will kill me and my entire family in 24hours? Did that gypsy I ran over just give me the ZOMBIE DEATH CURSE? OH NOES!!!!'. We've all thought that from time to time.
IMDB tells me there are currently no horror feature films called The Itch or The Itching. I spot a gap in the market.
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News Round-Up: 10/18/06
Demon barbers, comedians selling their soul and hellish investigators. All in the Halloween spirit in this news blast!
This will probably come as no surprise to anyone who has seen more than one Tim Burton film, but Helena Bonham Carter will be playing in his latest outing Sweeney Todd. She will play the cannibalistic baker Mrs. Lovett. Filling the shoes of Angela Lansbury could well be a challenge for her. It's also interesting that most of the actresses that have played the part on stage have been a good ten years older than Carter. Whether they age her or not she is a welcome addition to the Burton/Depp partnership as is Sacha Baron Cohen. You might remember that we mentioned the rumor of his joining the cast last week.I understand Shane's misgivings about both Burton and Depp's involvement. I've never seen the Broadway (or any) version of this musical, but hopefully as strong as Sondheim's music is in general it will shine through the Burton's patina. Of course given his history of doing some really odd (and not entirely popular) things with source material (POTA, Chocolate Factory) I could be wrong. Either way I hope it means more musicals coming down the pike.
Source: Variety
It's a real shame that kids today probably don't remember a time when Eddie Murphy was funny and edgy. I remember watching Delirious as a wee lad and being blown away. I remember 48 Hours and Trading Places. I'm even old enough to remember his stint on SNL without straining. Growing up now you'd think he was a no talent hack, doing it for a paycheck. And if his latest movie is any indication, you'd probably be right. Starship Dave has him playing the captain of an intergalactic starship and get this, he also plays the ship. Devin over at CHUD pretty much nails this to a wall, but I'll reiterate. Eddie, if you can't play one character in a movie well, don't try playing more than one.Source: Variety, CHUD
Consensus around here seems to be that at least one of the best Batman feature is Mask of the Phantasm, so it can be argued that sometimes the best version of a franchise is the animated one. On October 28th we'll get to see if the same is true of Hellboy. That's when Hellboy: Sword of Storms premiers in Cartoon Network's Toonami.When a university professor opens a forbidden scroll, he is possessed by the twin demons of thunder and lightning who seek to return to the world to wake their brothers, the dragons. Hellboy, along with a folklore expert and a psychic, travels to Japan to investigate. There, Hellboy finds the sword of storms, the only weapon that can defeat the demons, and he is transported to a world where he encounters several creatures of Japanese folklore. He learns the sword is the only weapon that can defeat the demons, but it also holds the magic that will return them to Earth.
Perlman, Blair, and Jones lend their voice talents and Mike Mignola co-wrote it and served as creative producer with Guillermo del Toro. Director Tad Stones, has been keeping a production diary on the process and according to that Mignola seemed happy with what he saw when laying down the commentary track.
Source: Cartoon Network, SuperHeroHypeDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading News Round-Up: 10/18/06
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
The Silver Surfer Is Actually Kind Of Green
A short time ago, rumors circulated that the Silver Surfer, appearing in the upcoming Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, would be portrayed in the rather low-tech fashion of dressing some guy up and slathering him in silver bodypaint. The internet collectively unclenched when these rumors were quashed, and it was announced that the award-winning Weta effects team would be taking on the daunting task of making us believe a man can fly.
Through space.
On a surfboard.
And now we have proof!
A scoop over at Silver Bullet Comics finally provides us the first photographic evidence of Norin Radd, Herald of Galactus. Sure, it's just some shots of Doug Jones in a motion capture suit, but that contraption they've got him hooked up to does potentially bode well for the Surfer's depiction on screen. It looks like they're really pushing the "surfing" aspect of the character, with some kind of swivelly, turny, Spanish-Inquisitiony machine designed to emulate the movement of a surfboard over the, uh, cosmic waves.
Okay, look, I know the character sounds really dumb, but let's just roll with it. Besides, doesn't this look like a hell of a lot of fun?
Also included in the story are a few semi-spoilery shots of Jessica Alba in a wedding dress, presumably from the wedding scene between Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman. She's accompanied in the photos by Johnny "The Human Torch" Storm, the role being reprised by Chris Evans. Presumably, he's a groomsman, unless they're totally going crazy and having Sue marry her own brother in what's bound to be the sexiest incestual relationship in film history.
Source: Silver Bullet ComicsDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading The Silver Surfer Is Actually Kind Of Green
The Big Screen: 10/17/06
Russian sci-fi in L.A.! Scandanavian sex in Cleveland! Crazy actor in Frisco! See what's playing in YOUR neighborhood!
Los Angeles:
The Egyptian Theater hosts a series of Russian Fantastic Cinema. Besides Tarkovsky's scifi classics Solaris and Stalker, there are plenty of scifi, fantasy and horror gems from the 20's through to the modern day. From one of the earliest adaptations of Poe's Masque of the Red Death (entitled A Spectre Haunts Europe) to the popular The Amphibian Man ("a cross between The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Little Mermaid") and beyond.
At the New Beverly Cinema, learn how coporate America is sealing our doom with a double feature of An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed The Electric Car?, then get your languid on over the weekend with Antonioni's The Passenger and Blowup. Saturday at mindnight, it's the Festival of Scary Trailers 4, which promises to be a fun time for all. And Sunday and Monday, The Godfather I & II, which I guess I don't really have to say anything witty about.At The Silent Movie Theater, FW Murnau's 1926 version of Faust is paired with a Harold Lloyd comedy, Number, Please?.
LACMA continues it's tribute to silent screen beauty Louise Brooks with A Girl in Every Port, Diary of a Lost Girl and Prix de Beaux. Man, look how hot she is!
Friday's midnight show at The Nuart is Kubrick's The Shining, which I just watched last week, and is even better (and scarier) than I had remembered. Saturday at the Rialto, it's Poltergeist. Monday at the Wadsworth, an advance screening of Inaritu's Babel courtesy of Reel Talk with Stephen Farber.New York City:
At Film Forum, Altman's California Split is still playing, to be replaced on Friday by Herzong's classic Aguirre: Wrath of God. And the new film Old Joy continues to play there--I hadn't mentioned it before, but it's getting very good reviews.
MoMA is showing a program of videos by the world's weirdest rock band, The Residents. If you've never seen Third Reich and Roll or One Minute Movies, now's a great chance. And if you've never seen Jackie Gleason take acid or Groucho Marx smoke pot, you should check out Otto Preminger's Skidoo! this Friday!
The Museum of the Moving Image continues it's program of classic Japanese films. Plenty of Ozu and Kurosawa, as well as the amazing Woman in the Dunes. They're also showing classic serials in the Tut's Fever Movie Palace. Right now, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe is playing!
Here's a fun one at BAM: Teslamania! A bunch of short films featuring Tesla coils. Mmmm, geeky!
San Francisco:
The Castro continues it's 3-D festival. Screenings of Robot Monster, Cat Woman on the Moon, Kiss Me Kate, Gorilla at Large, and more! Plus, the Three Stooges shorts Pardon My Backfire and Spooks. That's right, 3 Stooges in 3-D!!! This weekend, Crispin Glover will be at The Castro to present his labor of love, the appropriately-titled What Is It? And all weekend long, starting at midnight, a Crispin Glover film festival!!! See Crispin act weird in Friday the 13th part IV, Willard, The Rivers Edge (great film!), and more, including the rarely-screened The Orkly Kid and Plays With Rubin and Ed.
Cleveland:
The Cleveland Institut