Click here to check if anything new just came in.
February 08 2010
Hazel Brooks, 1940s film noir actress, clearly takes the Girl Scout motto seriously & knows to always “Be Prepared”.
(via)
Still via The Lost World (1925, dir. Harry O. Hoyt, adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s book), the silent fantasy epic that inspired King Kong, and ultimately Jurassic Park.
In the film, Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) & his research team go on an expedition to authenticate his claims that a “lost world” of dinosaurs exists in the Brazilian jungle. Chaos, of the rampaging dinosaur variety, inevitably ensues.
The team members manage to escape the island, but like many science-fiction movie characters to come, they have the brilliant idea of bringing a member of the dangerous species they’ve discovered back home with them as some kind of ill-tempered, homicidal souvenir. Luckily, too, as this opens the door for the terrific sequence in which the brontosaurus escapes and runs amuck through the streets of London.
The film, the first live-action dinosaur adventure, is also notable for its groundbreaking special effects, courtesy of Willis O’Brien, the pioneering FX artist. Mark Bourne, in his very good overview of the film, writes:
Painstakingly bringing detailed models to life, O’Brien showed 1925 audiences such wonders as an allosaur attacking the expedition, a tyrannosaur battling a stegosaur, a pterodactyl being snatched out of the air and devoured, and a tyrannosaur battling a brontosaur off a cliff. True to the style seen most potently in King Kong, O’Brien’s dinosaurs aren’t just clumsy static mannequins — they display nuances of individuality that add to their illusion of life-like reality. They stop to scratch their faces. They react realistically to noises. A mother stegosaur endearingly protects her young from the allosaur. The bellows-like chest of a brontosaur breathes convincingly. They snarl and sneer at their opponents, blink their eyes, and bleed when wounded or dying.
The original trailer for the film can be seen here, the entire film is online at Internet Archive here.
Lifestyles of Animation Executives
I’ve often heard people complain that there’s no money to be made in the animation business. That’s not exactly true. It’s just that the money usually doesn’t filter down to the people who actually create the art. Case in point, the NY Post reported that the Manhattan apartment of criminal douchebag Bernie Madoff was recently purchased by Al Kahn of 4Kids Entertainment, which is the licensee of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!:
The millionaire “marketing genius” behind the Pokemon and the Cabbage Patch Kids toy crazes inked a deal to buy Ponzi King Bernie Madoff’s posh penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, sources said. Al Kahn, CEO of 4Kids Entertainment, signed a contract to buy the 4,000-square-foot home, which was put up for sale by the feds to help recoup cash for the victims of Madoff’s $65 billion scam. The apartment, at Lexington Avenue and East 64th Street, was recently listed at $8.9 million, $1 million less than the original asking price. While the actual sale price is not known, sources said the pad — a three-bedroom, four-bath duplex with a wrap-around terrace — went for just under the asking price in the deal brokered by the Corcoran Group.
That’s nothing though compared to DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, a more admirably creative exec, who plunked down $35 mil for new digs according to The Wall Street Journal:
Media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg has paid $35 million for a house in Beverly Hills, CA. . . The six-acre property, which was never on the market, sits just above the Greystone Mansion, a Beverly Hills landmark. A long private drive leads to a house on a promontory. Mr. Katzenberg had been shopping for a large property with a view for several years. The home belonged to aerospace pioneer Simon “Si” Ramo, who was instrumental in the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile and co-founded TRW, which was acquired by Northrop Grumman. Mr. Katzenberg, who bought the property under the name of a trust, declined to comment.
February 07 2010
The Killer / Dip huet seung hung (John Woo, HK 1989)
Bad Girls of Film Noir
Both “bad girl” and “film noir” are terms to be understood loosely in this two-volume, eight-film collection from Sony, but I’m more than willing to put up with a little hype if it means bringing some fresh material to market. To say the least, this isn’t a director-oriented collection; the strongest personality here is the redoubtable Hugo Haas, represented by “One Girl’s Confession,” one of his least pathological productions (this time, Cleo Moore is the masochist).
There are two anonymous efforts by Lewis Seiler (“Women’s Prison,” 1955; “Over-Exposed,” 1956); two somewhat more flavorful films from Henry Levin (“Night Editor,” 1946; “Two of a Kind,” 1951) that suggest Levin had a little more kink in him than his bland Fox comedies would suggest; and a half-hearted medical melodrama from Irving Rapper (“Bad for Each Other,” 1953) which manages to make Charlton Heston look like a much worse actor than he actually was. More intriguing are the two on-location thrillers, “The Killer That Stalked New York” by Earl McAvoy and “The Glass Wall” by Maxwell Shane, both of which show the very strong influence that neorealism was bringing to bear on Hollywood practices, even on this marginal level of production. The latter film goes so far as to import Vittorio Gassman, in his first English language role, to play a Hungarian displaced person on the run in New York City; his attempts to find refuge in Times Square were filmed, according to the trailer, with “hidden cameras” — probably 16-millimeter rigs loaded with high speed newsreel stock.
The performers, of course, are the center of attraction here, and if the set offers a little too much of the fleshy Cleo Moore (in three films, including the all-star “Women’s Prison”), it does showcase Lizabeth Scott (in two films), Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter, Gertrude Michael, Juanita Moore and Mae Clarke (all in “Women’s Prison”), Evelyn Keyes (“The Killer That Stalked New York”) and the underrated Janis Carter — whose enthusiastic interpretation of a decadent socialite who gets turned on by the prospect of examining a battered corpse in “Night Editor” makes her the baddest girl of this bunch. That’s her above, with William Gargan. My New York Times review is here.
Stills via Lord of the Flies (1963, dir. Peter Brook, adapted from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies) (click to enlarge)
Excerpted from Peter Brook’s The Shifting Point:
“The book is a beautiful fable—so beautiful that it can be refuted as a trick of compelling poetic style. In the film no one can attribute the looks and gestures to tricks of direction. The violent gestures, the look of greed, and the faces of experience are all real.
People always ask whether the children understood, and what effect it had on them. Many of their offscreen relationships completely paralleled the story.
Even the wise and calm [Hugh Edwards, who portrayed Piggy] came to me one day close to tears. “They’re going to drop a stone on you,” the other boys had been telling him. “That scene on the schedule, Piggy’s death. It’s for real. They don’t need you anymore.”
My experience showed me that the only falsification in Golding’s fable is the length of time the descent to savagery takes. His action takes about three months. I believe that if the cork of continued adult presence were removed from the bottle, complete catastrophe could occur within one long weekend.”
transmediale.10
Nikolaus Perneczky ist für CARGO auf der transmediale.10 unterwegs - seinen Bericht u.a. über Arbeiten von Giradet/Müller, Rania Stephan sowie Jürgen Reble und Thomas Köner finden Sie hier.
Fables of the Reconstruction: The 4-Hour GREED
Rotterdam 2010: Tsai Ming-liang & Lee Kang-sheng Shorts
Surprises big and small have peppered Rotterdam as they will any film festival, but who could have guessed that Madame Butterfly, the new 30 minute short work by Tsai Ming-liang (whose feature Face is also in the festival), would be made up of 3 shots, 2 very long takes, all shot handheld on a digital camera by the filmmaker himself?
The first sequence follows actress Pearlly Chua around a Kuala Lumpur bus depot as she tries to leave the city after a trip to visit her lover, getting more sick and more frustrated as she both fails to leave and he fails to come through for her. Named after Puccini, this is actually an unlikely homage (perhaps) to that great antsy scene in Jackie Brown where Pam Grier wanders aimlessly through an L.A. mall. Madame Butterfly also explores its banal public space, following Chua up and down 3 floors with its grubby little camera to watch her try to buy tickets with not enough money, call her unresponsive lover, quaff lots of water and cough quite a bit (guaranteeing, despite outward appearance, this is a Tsai movie afterall), and, in the insert short that breaks up the verité long take, she phantasmagorically finds a hair of her lover in a steamed bun.
Sunday Funnies (2/7/10)
Eek! By Scott Nickel (2/3/10), Boffo by Joe Martin (2/3/10), and Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard (2/6/10).
(Thanks, Jim Lahue, John Hall and Uncle Wayne)
Auf Wüstenboden
Kalifornien, 1964
Below the Surface. So heißt ein Tiefseetaucherfilm von Irvin V. Willat (1890 - 1976), an underrated director whose hard-punching films, difficult to see, deserve further study (Jay Weissberg*).
Die New York Times* schrieb (im Januar 1920), sein Kriegsfilm Behind the Door sei einer der erbarmungslosesten und grausamsten und gleichzeitig einer der entschieden besten Filme seit Beginn des Krieges . Sein Technicolor-Western Wanderer of the Wasteland (1924) gilt als verschollen (Wikipedia zitiert vermutlich einen Text von Robert S. Birchard*): “A 35mm cemented bi-pack Technicolor print survived until the 1960s in the hands of Irvin Willat, who had directed the picture. Irvin Willat reported in 1971 that his print had decomposed and turned into jelly. After Willat’s death, his daughter mentioned that she remembered the day when he had first discovered that Wanderer of the Wasteland had decomposed. She said he went upstairs to his bedroom, closed the door and cried for three hours. His former wife Billie Dove had starred in the picture, and he never really came to terms with their separation.”
Billie Dove had a huge legion of male fans, one of her most persistent being Howard Hughes.
(…)
She was also a pilot, poet, and painter. *
Kalifornien, 1969
Vom Meeresboden: Das große Experiment 1898-1918. Unter dieser Überschrift verheißen die Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen “die bislang größte Schau früher Filme”. Unbekanntes! Das kling gut. Und ausnahmsweise wird nicht damit geworben, die Filme seien “aufwendig rekonstruiert”. Ich warte immer noch darauf, dass endlich mal jemand von einer “unaufwendigen Rekonstruktion” schwärmt und damit wirbt, die Filme seien “garantiert nicht neu orchestiert”. Schön ist das Versprechen: die neue Rekonstruktion von Metropolis sei endgültig die letzte! Mein Großonkel fuhr mit der damals größten Schau dressierter Störche über die Dörfer. Hat das vielleicht jemand gefilmt?
Kalifornien, 1974, Klapperschlange
In Zane Greys Roman “Der Wanderer in der Wüste / Wanderer of the Wasteland” beschreibt ein alter, erfolgreicher Goldsucher in kurzen Worten seine Europareise: Der Biss einer Klapperschlange hat mich nie halb so elend gemacht wie dieses schmutzige, stürmische Meer! Die Überfahrt war ein Alptraum. Dann kam London. Eine öde Stadt, so groß wie die Mohavewüste und voller kurioser, fischäugiger Leute, die ich nicht verstehen konnte. Dann Paris: eine schöne, glitzernde Stadt, aber weiß der Teufel, was ich dort zu suchen hatte. Von Paris fuhr ich nach Rom, und dort geriet ich in eine kuriosen Zustand. Ich konnte die Tempel und die alten Ruinen anschauen, ohne sie richtig zu sehen – meine Gedanken waren entwischt in die alte Heimat. Diese ganze Idee, reisen und lernen und betriebsam sein, war mir plötzlich unendlich zuwider. Ich ließ Ägypten aus, und an Indien und Japan kann ich mich nicht mehr recht erinnern. Aber als ich dann das Schiff bestieg, das mich nach Frisco fuhr, da sah ich freilich auch nichts mehr, aber aus einem anderen Grunde – weil ich die Augen voller Tränen hatte!
Utah, 1985
Fotos von Gus Hormay
Shin zatô Ichi: Yabure! Tôjin-ken (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, Japan 1971)
Der blinde Masseur mit dem schnellen Samuraischwert ist eine japanische Institution. In diesem Teil der Reihe trifft Shintaro Katsu auf den chinesischen Superstar Wang Yu, der hier den ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN gibt und aufgrund von Mißverständnissen und offensichtlicher Sprachbarriere zum Feind mutiert. Im Todeskampf gleichwohl, wer hätte es gedacht,... erfolgt die Einsicht, doch nun ist es: wie immer zu spät.
Dass der Film überhaupt zu einem Ende findet ist so mancher Unlogik geschuldet, jedoch es soll mir reichlich egal sein. Immer wieder liest man Kommentare derart, es gäbe keinen einzigen schlechten Zatoichi-Film. Nun, das mag sein. Doch dieser hier ist äußerst mittelmäßig und nur mit goodwill zu ertragen. Ich kann mich dem Hype jedenfalls nicht anschließen.
Kihachi Okamotos ZATOICHI VS YOJIMBO, in dem Katsu auf den großen Toshiro Mifune trifft, ist nicht nur eleganter inszeniert, von feinerem Humor, sondern unterläuft auch die Zuschauererwartungen mehrfach, was diesen zum deutlich besseren Film macht. Der Einarmige ist sicherlich schnell vergessen, und das ist nicht das Schlechteste. "Wir raten ab."
Sound and Vision (Films by Marguerite Duras)
Poliziotto sprint / Highway Racer
For just about everything in it is geared towards showcasing car stunts and chases, to the extent that the contributions of director Stelvio Massi and leading man Maurizio Merli almost feel peripheral at times compared to Remy Julienne and his team: Who staged this scene? Who was behind the wheel of Merli's car, when everything is in long shot and the windows are tinted?
Merli plays Marco Palma, a Rome cop determined to prove he's the best driver out there. This is an opinion not shared by his boss Tagliaferri, due to Palma's tendency to write off one car after another and show little regard for the safety of others, and because in his day Tagliaferri was himself a hot-shot driver.
When Tagliaferri's old nemesis il Nazzardo shows up in Rome to lead a series of audacious robberies, Palma finally gets his chance as he is charged with infiltrating the gang. This necessitates his being shown all of Tagliaferri's old tricks – and showing his teacher some of his own, as far as gunplay is concerned – and given that symbol of Italian machismo, the Ferrari. (Since Lambourghini started off making farm machinery such as tractors, they don't count.)
There's a nationalistic aspect to the cars used by the two sides more generally, with the Italian cops driving the usual boxy Alfa-Romeos – albeit with a blue and white livery rather than the more usually seen green and white squadra volante design – and the French-led robbers preferring the elegant lines of the Citroen DS series.
Where the film fails is away from its action sequence. As written, Merli's character is pretty unsympathetic, with the death of his partner, the result of his reckless driving in their first encounter with il Nazzardo, warranting no soul searching, desire for revenge or even comment. He also plays the role without his trademark moustache. While this helps in Marco seem more youthful it also creates something of an alienation effect, causing you to do a double take that this is in fact Merli.
While Marco has a girlfriend, played by Lilli Carati, she's included more for the possibility of threatening to reveal his real identity when he is undercover than anything else and, as such, also jars a bit given the single-mindedness he shows in other regards. Still, she does work for a car dealers...
Stelvio Cipriani provides the score, a collection of characteristically ostenato-driven funky / percussive tension-builders.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
