Blockbuster 101

The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom), 2008. Directed by Ji-Woon Kim, written by Kim and Min-suk Kim. Starring Kang-ho Song (the Weird), Byung-hun Lee (the Bad), Woo-sung Jung (the Good), Ryu Seung-su, Song Yeong-chang, Son Byeong-ho, and many, many more.

Oh, you want a blockbuster do you? Lots of noise, explosions, some crazy plot that takes you through the air and to the most remote and exciting parts of the globe? How about a decent plot, character development, a touch of humor now and then? Yes, I know, I know you don’t always need that–any number of sequels, not to mention the whole Mission: Impossible franchise speaks to that. This summer’s not even really begun and the probably woeful Iron Man 2 had pulled in nearly $200 million. Next there’s Braveheart 2: Robin Hood, followed by yet another Shrek (I’ve lost count how many of those awful movies have been made), and the list goes on and on.

I know, I know: you’ll see most of those. Most likely I will, too. But if you want action, adventure, flying, explosions, noise, humor, violence, and incredible characters, well, there’s a sort-of micro-Blockbuster opening tomorrow: Ji-Woon Kim’s The Good, the Bad, and The Weird. Imagine the child of Sergio Leone and Steven Spielberg, only it was adopted and its biological dad is Mad Max. Despite that summation it’s purely original. And it’s my favorite movie of the summer.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on May 13, 2010
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This Week’s Birthday: Orson Welles, International Man of Mystery

How do you narrow down the mystery that is Orson Welles? Like trying to make a disc of the greatest sounds of the planet earth,  really, it’s fairly impossible to do, yet fun to try. We can bask in the warm glow of Citizen Kane and marvel that it was made; gnash our collective teeth at the wonton destruction of The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, Lady from Shanghai, or shake our heads at the brilliant lunacy of F for Fake. Oh, yes, and in-between, there’s Shakespeare films, and somewhere, floating between here and the Shah of Iran is his last movie, the Other Side of the Wind.

Orson revolutionized theater. Radio. Movies. The few bits he had on TV suggest that would have been his catnip as well. F for Fake predates and out-maneuvers documentarians like Errol Morris. But try to write a biography of the man, and, well, you get conflicting stories. Like Mr. Arkadin based on the novel Confidential Report, written by Orson Welles.

Only he didn’t. Write it, that is. Who did. Who knows? That’s one of the many mysteries of Orson Welles. Exaggeration. Hyperbole. Duplicity. Fraud. Aggrandizement. Trickery. Legerdemain. Magic. Yes. That’s it–magic.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on May 5, 2010
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Conversations Real & Imagined: Mad Men (and Women)

All That Heaven Allows, 1955. Directed by Douglas Sirk, written by Peg Fenwick. Starring Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorhead, Conrad Nagel, Gloria Talbott, William Reynolds, and Hayden Rorke.

From the files of street critic Guy” Fresno. 

All notes found scribbled on both sides of seventeen pages of RC Cola stationary, and included with a packet of photographs of the first meeting of the “New Underground Detroit Cinema Society That Tells Mike Ilitch to Go Fuck Himself and His Expensive (and Discrimanatory [sic] Against Homeless) Fox Theater”.

These are blurry shots of a Douglas Sirk film festival that Guy curated in the basement of the abandoned Michigan Central Railroad Station. Also included was a bill, for $52, payable for a copy of the lost Barbara Loden script about Ida Lupino. All of which came packed in a greasy Dunkin’ Doughnuts box that had been wrapped, like a cocoon, in cheap packing tape.

Pay attention, now, because it must be known about Douglas Sirk. You wouldn’t think an old bike-riding and half homeless man such as myself would dig a man like Douglas Sirk. Douglas Goddam Sirk, who was one of the fucking best, the best, a director who knew what emotion was, and more, he knew how to be a zombie and how not to be a zombie. Like All That Heaven Allows. That’s a zombie movie, and it’s more terrifying than any of that blue-faced, vein-chomping crap that Romero shits out every few years.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on April 28, 2010
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HOW DID WE MISS THIS ONE?

Flash Gordon, 1980. Directed by Mike Hodges, written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and Michael Allin. Starring the perfectly coiffed Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Max von Sydow, Topol, Ornella Muti, Timothy Dalton, and one of the great bellowers of all time, Brian Blessed.

I remember a moment back in 1980, standing in my Grandma’s kitchen, when Dad and Pam came back from the movies (Grandma was watching us.) They were ecstatic, or at least he was. “Flash Gordon!” he said. “Well, that was fun!”

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on April 26, 2010
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This Week’s Birthday: Michel Simon

“When people see Boudu Saved From Drowning or L’Atalante for the first time, they sometimes ask ‘Was Michel Simon really like that?’ –David Thomson

The answer, as Thomson points out, is somewhere between yes and no. Michel Simon is one of my favorite actors, a strange beast of a man, stomping through his movies like some satyr intent on disrupting the proceedings and yet, magically, somehow deferring to others so that his movies remain balanced. When I describe L’Atalante as the story of a man, a sailor, who lives on a riverboat, who marries a woman from the city, and mention that his shipmate is Simon’s Jules, a towering man often wandering about without a shirt, exposing his tattoos, living in the hold with a million strange items (including a pair of human hands in a jar), you’d think he’d steal the picture. But Simon clearly loved his work, and his ego seemed, at times, to be the smallest thing about him. And that, I think, makes him a perfect actor.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on April 6, 2010
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SMOKE AND MIRRORS

How do they do it? The good people who bring us alternative cinema, who plead and entreat their fellow citizens to give up a good day to attend something as magical as The James River Film Festival?

Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors, that’s how.

For isn’t that’s cinema in a nutshell? Smoke reflecting off a screen, dazzling us and making us forget about life for awhile. A film festival is the same thing, writ large–good people conjuring up amazements with no money, feats of energy on few calories and less sleep, to bring the locals into places they’d never otherwise visit. And the movies! Small, perfect pictures like Jem Cohen’s Benjamin Smoke ten years in the making, or Celia Maysles’ Wild Blue Yonder, or, for that matter, Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, which seemed like a good idea at the time, was a disaster, and has since righted itself like a toy ship in a bathtub.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on March 24, 2010
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PEDDLING THE GOOD WORD

Salesman, 1968. Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin. With Paul “The Badger” Brennan, Charles “The Gipper” McDevitt, James “The Rabbit” Baker, Raymond “The Bull” Martos, Dr. Melbourn I. Feltman, Kennie Turner, and scores of potential customers.

The cruelest merchandise is a talent for which there is no demand. –A.J. Liebling, “People in Trouble”

Salesman, the Maysles Brothers’ and Charlotte Zwerin’s profound documentary about roving Bible sellers, opens with a failure. We see Paul Brennan, a slight man, his suit tight in spots and loose in others, lacking a chin and with hands gnarled from arthritis, desperately trying to make a sale. He’s showing off the beauty of his product: a Catholic Press Leather-Bound and Illustrated edition of the Good Book. “Do you think this would be a benefit to you in your home?” he asks. The woman of the home, in curlers, her child hanging all over her, mumbles a “yes”, knowing damn well that any “yes” exposes her limited finances to plunder. But she resists, says she can’t afford the thing, and finally invokes her husband, who is not home to make the decision.

Paul is defeated, and bites his lip. The camera freezes on him as his name appears onscreen: Paul Brennan–”The Badger.” But we can see, very clearly, that The Badger’s claws and teeth are worn , his fight is nearly gone, and his time in this field is limited.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on February 6, 2010
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A PERSONAL APPEAL TO FILM CRITIC ROGER EBERT

“This is my happening and it freaks me out.”–Roger Ebert, in a line from his movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

 There he was on television again after all this time: Roger Ebert, the movie critic, on the Oprah Winfrey show. By now, movie lovers have seen and heard of Ebert’s troubles. The battles with thyroid cancer, the loss of his jaw, the inability to eat, and the crushing loss of speech. Now he’s left with a dangling lump of flesh and a permanent smile.

But he soldiers on–in fact, the man is happy: married, working, living. Oprah spoke lovingly of his wife, Chaz, who has given up her career as a trial lawyer to run his affairs and to take care of him. It was a truly touching moment. Chaz Ebert described her husband as”A man who respects women,” and Winfrey, her audience, and Ebert, agreed. His eyes are bright and communicative, and his gesticulations remain expressive, if not more so than before he lost his ability to speak. In this way, he was able to tell us all how much he loved and admired her.

Despite my admiration, or perhaps because of it, I had to chuckle. What a crazy, wonderful life. Roger Ebert: Movie Critic. Writer. Historian. Television Personality. Pundit. Cancer survivor. And writer of Russ Meyer’s <em>Beyond The Valley of the Dolls</em>, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, and Up!–definitely not to be confused with the latest Pixar classic.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on February 2, 2010
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WERE THE WORLD A FAIRY TALE… OR THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, 2009. Directed by Lee Daniels, written by Geoffrey Fletcher. Starring Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, and Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey, for Christ’s sake.

Precious is the story of a young woman, all of sixteen, who has been raped twice by her father and given birth to a pair of children from him. The eponymous girl, played with steely determination by Gabourey Sidibe, is beaten by her mother. She is overweight. Because of her pregnancy, she must drop out of school and attend an alternative high school in one of the upper floors of a run down New York hotel, which is often surrounded by crack heads. Poor Precious hates how she looks, wishes she were white, wishes she had a light-skinned boyfriend, wishes she was on a Black Entertainment Television music video. She is good at math, but she cannot read. At last, she is HIV-positive.

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by Peter Schilling Jr. Posted on November 19, 2009
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