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Saturday, December 06, 2008 ( 12/06/2008 09:52:00 AM ) Bill S.  FORRY: Reading of the recent death of Forrest J Ackerman couldn't help but bring back memories of my boyhood. I was just the right age to key into his Famous Monsters of Filmland back when it began ('58), and I was an avid reader of the mag for through most of my elementary school years.The magazine provided decent basic schooling for this budding monster movie fan: I particularly remember a piece by horror writer Robert Bloch talking about monumental moments in old-fashioned horror flicks (the unveiling of Lon Chaney's Phantom, the legless/armless man crawling through the mud in Freaks, etc.) that had me eager to seek these flicks out. (Only one that took a long time to get to was Freaks, which wouldn't really find audience in America until the Midnight Movie phenom broke.) Many of the articles in FM were fluff – pun-packed p.r. pieces for genial drive-in hacks like Bert ("Mister B.I.G.") I. Gordon – but Ackerman's exhaustive collection of stills and classic posters were plenty evocative in a day when classic horror flicks were largely relegated to Friday night post-primetime airings. At some point in my 'tween years, I graduated from Ackerman's mag to its more critical and serious competitor, Castle of Frankenstein (home to writers like William K. Everson, Bob Stewart and a young Joe Dante). I began to look down upon the more gee-whiz fan-stylings of Ackerman the writer/editor. I stopped reading FM and its spin-offs, though I remember occasionally coming across his writing in the introductions to paperback sci-fi collections. Now that I've outgrown my adolescent snobbishness*, I can appreciate Ackerman for all that he revealed to this horror film junkie. R.I.P., Ackermonster! UPDATE: Johnny Bacardi has a similar reaction on learning of Forry's passing. *A process that took over forty years to complete. # | Friday, December 05, 2008 ( 12/05/2008 06:33:00 AM ) Bill S. BUNNY TIME: Hey, it's been a while since we've checked out Angry Alien Productions' "30-Second Bunny Theatre." So here's a link to the bunnies' succinct version of Grindhouse. # | Thursday, December 04, 2008 ( 12/04/2008 07:14:00 AM ) Bill S. A BASIC RULE OF LIFE: So I go to the dentist's for the first time since I've arrived in Arizona (have two fillings that have popped off that I'm finally getting around to have fixed), and I'm waiting for the man to arrive by writing the first paragraphs of my Zenobia posting on a legal pad. When he comes in and sits down, he asks what I've been working on, and I tell him a review of a comedy starring half of the Laurel & Hardy team. "I love Laurel & Hardy," he says after hearing my brief description of the flick and settling down to start probing my teeth with a pick. "I used to watch 'em all the time with my kids." They'd pull the movies out at Halloween, he elaborates, and view the VHS tapes then. "Laurel & Hardy Meets Frankenstein. Laurel & Hardy Meets Dracula." At which point, of course, I realize that the good dentist isn't talking about Laurel & Hardy at all - but rather Abbott & Costello. I don't correct him, though. You should never correct a man with a sharp pointy object in his hand . . . # | ( 12/04/2008 06:27:00 AM ) Bill S. "THERE ARE LOTS OF NICE PEOPLE AT THE PARTY – BUT NOT MANY." Caught an old movie curiosity, the Oliver Hardy vehicle Zenobia (1939), off the DVR recently. It's one of the few films he did solo after teaming up with Stan Laurel - in which he plays a character different from "Ollie." Hardy is Dr. Henry Tibbit, a country doctor in the small town of Casterville, Mississippi, circa 1870. Married to Billie Burke at her most blithering, Dr. T. is a kindly soul who's turned away from treating the hypochondriac dowagers in his community in favor of the less well-to-do who really need his services. This decision has led to a downturn in the family fortunes, though when the movie opens, we see he and his family reside in a nice house and still manage to maintain two servants (Hatty McDaniel and mush-mouthed Stepin Fetchit). The movie centers on the problems created after Doc Tibbit is called to to treat an ailing circus elephant named Zenobia. After "curing" her, he's pursued through town by the pachyderm, who seems to have become smitten by the rotund physician. Zenobia's owner (Harry Langdon) winds up suing the doctor for alienation of affection, and our hero is forced to defend himself in court. Intertwined in the midst of all this is a not-very-interesting thwarted romance between the doctor's daughter and the son of the aforementioned hypochondriac moneybags - who sees the doctor's family as being beneath her son. Zenobia was filmed during a period when Stan Laurel was in a contract dispute with Hal Roach Studios and was trumpeted initially as an attempt to team Oliver Hardy with a fresh partner, the baby-faced Langdon. As a team-up movie, the film doesn't really devote a lot of time to establishing Hardy/Langdon as a comic couple. It has only one decent sequence featuring the comedians really working with each other - an amusing slapstick scene where the doctor attempts to examine to examine Zenobia - while more of the film is devoted to domestic and class-based comedy featuring the doctor and his wife Bessie. We're also provided two sequences where the benevolent M.D. teaches a cute black kid (Philip Hurlic) about the Declaration of Independence. It's a fascinating reflection of the era's idea of benevolent segregation: all men are created equal, even if they can't really mingle with each other too much. ("You don't go to white folks parties," Tibbit explains to the lad. "I don't go to colored folks' parties.") Depending on your tolerance for this kind of dated material, these scenes come across as essentially good-hearted or condescending. I went for the first response, myself, though perhaps if the movie had given me too many scenes with Fetchit going through his stereotypical shtick, I wouldn't have. The film's conflicts are all resolved after the young boy Zeke recites the entire Declaration in front of everybody at the courthouse: milquetoast son stands up to his controlling mother to declare his love for the doctor's daughter; controlling mother gets Langdon's character to drop his lawsuit; happy negroes learn their son is a whiz at memorizin' stuff. All that's left to learn the real reason the lady Zenobia has been following Dr. T. all around town. You can probably guess it, though how Langdon's elephant owner would miss it is beyond me. I'm told that elephants have a long gestation period, though. It's a decent little movie artifact, though nowhere near as funny as the best Stan and Ollie shorts or features (Sons of the Desert, say). Hardy shows clear range as a comic actor (still does a couple of his patented frustrated looks into the camera, though), playing a less cartoonish, more recognizably grown-up character. The man had the capacity to be a strong comic character actor on his own, though, happily, he was soon back in front of the cameras with Stanley. Labels: obscuro comedies # |Sunday, November 30, 2008 ( 11/30/2008 03:56:00 PM ) Bill S. "YOU'VE GOT TO GET THESE DISASTER FANTASIES OUT OF YOUR HEAD!" Soon as I heard the music playing in the opener to the series finale of The Shield, I knew that creator Shawn Ryan was gonna strike all the right moves. With its nattering refrain to "get out" of its title city, X's "Los Angeles" was a strongly apt soundtrack choice: both a reminder of what a shock to the system this series has been and an evocation of the urban decay that's long been one of the show's big subjects. What followed this opening remained wholly satisfying throughout – as we got to finally watch the series' anti-hero Vic Mackey get revealed to everybody for who he really is. For all its talk about "good cop/bad cop/different kind of cop," at heart The Shield was primarily about the ways self-deception can lead men and women into the worst possible acts. The Shield of the title was as much the elaborate system of lies and rationalizations Mackey and his men held onto to push them deeper into the murk as it was a police badge – and as the final season approached its end, each of the surviving Strike Force's self-deceptions grew harder and harder for them to maintain. Watching this process occur brought out some exemplary performances: especially from lead Michael Chiklis and Walton Goggins as doomed team betrayer Shane Vendrell. If anything, Goggins edged out Chiklis when it came to fearless acting this season. When, in the final episode, Shane futilely tries to convince his pregnant wife Mara that everything will somehow turn out all right, we know at this point that even he doesn't swallow the lie. Even Mara's young son knows something's "wrong." In their belief that their essential rightness justifies any act, no matter how appalling (remember the face on the stove?), Mackey and the rest of his crew were definitely creatures of their time. And as satisfying as it's been to watch them fall, I'm gonna miss 'em . . . Labels: teleseries # |( 11/30/2008 03:56:00 PM ) Bill S. "YOU CRASH UPON A STAR." If ever there was a rock artiste who deserved to have his songs done in cartoon videos, it's Robyn Hitchcock. Here's one for "Adventure Rocketship," done with the Venus 3. # | ( 11/30/2008 03:56:00 PM ) Bill S. IS IT STILL SUNDAY? Put up a small posting this Tuesday a.m. before I left for work and was surprised to see it labeled by Blogger as a Sunday posting. I feel like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. # | ( 11/30/2008 03:56:00 PM ) Bill S. MOVIN' ON UP: As a current Arizonan, I've been largely dreading the news that our governor Janet Napolitano will be stepping into the position of Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama cabinet. Because AZ has no Lieutenant Governor position, the liberal Democrat will be replaced by Secretary of State Jan Brewer, a conservative Republican with a lousy track record in the area of social services and child welfare. Napolitano, who has served as a reasonable check on many of the state Republican-controlled House and Senate excesses, will be handing over the reins to a woman who won't be showing the same restraint. While there's no doubt that Napolitano, an early Obama supporter from a state that shares a border with Mexico, is a reasonable choice for the position, her departure doesn't bode well for those of us in the state with a strong interest in social services. So what looks like an okay move on the national level, also looks like it'll be bad news for my new home state . . . # | |
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