How To End A Horror Movie

In the past couple of days I've seen a couple of horror movies that both end with a "big reveal" of a monster.  Together they show there are good ways and bad ways to do this.

The bad one is The Maze, a 1953 3-D horror film directed by the great designer William Cameron Menzies.  It's standard "spooky castle" stuff with a titled Englishman shutting himself off from the world in a creepy old family castle and his fiancee and her friends trying to find out the secret that is making him do this.  The movie is atmospheric and all the shots of people walking through long corridors must have looked really powerful in 3-D. Then they come to the reason why the hero has become a recluse. I won't give it away but it involves an unseen relative and it is so jawdroppingly ridiculous it pushes this movie close to Robot Monster - Plan 9 From Outer Space territory.  Let's just say this movie could have been an inspiration to Jim Henson. It's hard to say what's worse, the monster itself or the explanation given for his existence.

The Spanish horror film [REC] from 2007 makes far more sense at its conclusion.  This is a Blair Witch Project-style effort supposedly filmed by a TV documentary crew that spends a night in a firehouse and follows two of the firefighters as they respond to a call about a sick woman in an apartment house.  The woman isn't merely sick. She is infected with something that makes her start taking bites out of people's necks and soon enough, in time honored George Romero tradition, policemen, firemen, the other apartment tenants and the TV people are fighting a losing battle against each other to keep from turning into cannibalistic zombies.

This film was actually remade in an American version recently called Quarantine.  That movie told basically the same story as this one but changed a couple of details seemingly to play to the "conspiracy theory" crowd, such as suggesting the authorities are telling the world everyone has been removed from the house and is safe while they have really been left inside to die.  The biggest change is in the final explanation for it all. There is no explicit "this is how it started" scene but at the end of both versions, the TV reporter and her cameraman, the last two survivors, ascend to the locked penthouse of the complex and discover a hidden laboratory.  In the American version there are newspaper clippings on the wall about a doomsday cult and just vague hints about what has been happening.  In the Spanish original, the clippings are about the demonic possession of a little girl and there is enough evidence mentioned from journals and tape recordings to enable the viewer to piece together the story and also make understand who the two monsters are that appear at the end.  Like Let The Right One In and seemingly, its American remake, Let Me In, this shows that foreign horror films make a lot more sense these days than many of their American counterparts.

Golden

It's one thing to hear musicians on a recording but sometimes when you experience them live, you gain an entirely new appreciation for their work. I've heard CDs by Wadada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer, John Lindberg and Pheroan AkLaff in all sorts of settings but just hearing them live as Smith's Golden Quartet was a revelation. This band has a dazzling, explosive power to it from AkLaff's savage yet melodic drumming to Smith's steely, demonstrative power on trumpet.

     I'd always thought of Smith as a player who dealt in small notes and silences but here his playing was forceful and fiery. In a pre-concert talk he said his music was influenced by the blues and Miles Davis. You could hear both. There was a mournful blue touch in everything he played and Miles was there especially in his muted work and the way he shot out streams of notes over the occasional spate of electric rhythms from Iyer's electric piano and Lindberg's bass effects pedal.  The other major surprise to me was AkLaff who regularly worked his drumming into a nuclear frenzy but was always controlled and maintained the sense of the compositions.

The size of the audience was also heartening. This concert was held at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress.  It was an auditorium that held a few hundred people and the place was packed. Every seat was taken and there were a bunch of overflow patrons around. Okay, so the concert was free but we are not talking about household names here. Jazz, especially this forward looking sort, is considered to be a marginal music yet this show drew a stunning number of people. It makes you think there's some hope yet.

Tooning In

Wandering around the internet yesterday, I caught mention of a new cable channel starting on January 1 called Antenna TV. This looks to be something along the lines of the Retro TV channel showing a variety of old shows other channels don't show anymore. Whereas Retro TV gets its stuff mostly from the Universal Studio vaults, this new channel will use all kinds of shows from the Sony archives like All In The Family, Father Knows Best, The Monkees, The Partridge Family and Gidget.  What got my attention on their schedule, though, was what they are showing on Saturday mornings, Totally Tuned In.  If that's what I think it is, that's a real find.

Totally Tuned In was a series put together by Columbia in 1999 to showcase their large library of cartoons. According to Cartoon Research, the website of animation historian Jerry Beck who worked on the show, it was syndicated in foreign countries but never shown in America. This may be the show's American debut.

The importance of all this is that most of the Columbia cartoons have been rarely seen for a long time. When I was growing up in the late 50's and 60's I saw cartoons from all the other major movie studios, the Warners mob, the Paramount stuff from the Fleischer Brothers and later Famous Studios, Universal's Walter Lantz work and even Terrytoons cartoons from Fox.  As for Columbia, they put all their live comedy shorts on television, featuring of course The Three Stooges, but none of their theatrical cartoons.  Back then I didn't even know Columbia ever released any cartoons. They did have one enduring star, Mr. Magoo, but, as I know now, the Magoo cartoons I saw back in the day were new ones made for television.

     Since then I've read some about the various Columbia series and seen some of them through VHS tapes and YouTube but this series looks to be a bonanza of little seen work. There's a list of what's on all the Tooned In episodes here and looking through it made my eyes pop. Besides the Magoo cartoons there is work from directors Ub Iwerks and Frank Tashlin, some of Columbia's other most successful series, The Fox And The Crow and a lot of work from the legendary "modern" studio of the 40's, UPA, which Columbia distributed. Now I just hope this channel makes its way to my cable system here in Northern Virginia

Tate

In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the western genre dominated television to an extent that no other genre has since. In the 1958-1959 season there were 31 western series on the air, which is really amazing when you remember there were only three networks back then. Some of those shows like Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Cheyenne and Maverick are well remembered today. Others have fallen through the cracks of history. That brings me to one old show I've just been watching that I had never even heard of until recently, Tate.

     Tate wasn't around for long. It was a summer replacement series that ran on NBC for 13 weeks in 1960. Its creator was writer Harry Julian Fink who, among other things, wrote several excellent episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel.  Tate, the show's hero, comes off as a less courtly and crafty version of Paladin. He is a gunman who lost the use of his arm during a Civil War battle and now roams the West as a bounty hunter.     Just going by the five episodes I've seen, the show had a severe and brutal view of the Old West without even the humor or warmth of other adult Westerns like Gunsmoke and Have Gun. Tate seemed to be invariably on the trail of someone who had committed some kind of brutal crime, usually involving the killing of women and children but that plot was always secondary to other trouble he would face like the killer's family trying to break him out of jail or entire towns refusing to give the bad guy up.  In one episode Tate runs into another bounty hunter who mistakes him for a killer and is nonchalant about bringing him in alive or dead even after he gets word that Tate is innocent.

     The most powerful episode I saw, "Stopover", was even more hard-bitten. In that one Tate finds his quarry, a legendary old fast gun, in a small town and shoots him in a gunfight in the first five minutes. His problem then is, while waiting to get his reward money wired to him, a younger gunfighter keeps hanging threateningly around him. It turns out he had been trailing the old man to face him in a fight and prove he was a faster draw, but now that's he dead, he wants the man who killed him...Tate. 

And that's still not all. There is one more main character in this episode, a young "saloon girl" who charges five dollars just for conversation. She makes friends with Tate and when he asks her why she doesn't go back home, she tells him home was a shack where she was one of fifteen children and she suffered some kind of unspecified abuse.  She's much happier in her current life where people are at least nice to her. That's pretty heavy territory for a 1960 TV show and I'm amazed the saloon girl stuff got past the censors, even as ambiguous as it was.

     As on just about any show from this era there are several actors in these episodes in the early stages of their career who would go on greater success, like Robert Culp, Robert Redford, Louise Fletcher and James Coburn as well as former child star Peggy Ann Garner as the saloon girl and Royal Dano as a sheriff caught in a Rio Bravo-like standoff against the family of a man about to hang for murder.  Tate himself was played by an actor named David McLean who was a new name to me. According to IMDB, though, he did gain later fame as one of the actors who played the Marlboro Man, the rugged cigarette smoking cowboy in the famous Marlboro TV commercials. He was also one of several actors in those commercials who eventually died of lung cancer.

    In its short thirteen week life Tate doesn't seem to have developed the breadth of the more successful adult Westerns, but it was an uniquely tough-minded show closer in tone to the original radio version of Gunsmoke than any of its TV contemporaries that I've seen so far.

Clare Dolan

A Irish woman works as a high-priced prostitute in New York City in order to pay off a debt to a man who is acting as her pimp. When her mother dies the woman runs away to Newark, gets a job as a beautician and starts a romance with a taxi driver. One day her pimp finds her...

You think you know how this story would play out from that description but the film Clare Dolan is nothing like you'd expect. The characters here act out the story in a very austere and controlled way.  Except for two momentary scenes, neither of which involve the title character, there is no violence. Even when the pimp finds Clare he doesn't raise a hand to her. He simply tells her to get back to work and drives her to Manhattan.
     Little is outright explained in the movie. There are no clunky exposition monologues explaining everyone's backstories or motivations. They talk tersely to each other like people who already know watch other well would and the audience is just left to speculate. How long has Clare done this? Did she do it before she had to pay this debt? Why is she so cold and mechanical to all men, even her boyfriend? None of those questions are answered, but you do eventually see that a child is the one thing that means something to her. She carries an unsmiling expression on her face for most of the film and the only time she smiles in the entire picture is at the end when she watches a sonogram of her unborn child.
   It's an eerie, mesmerizing film played out mostly in a landscape of straight angled offices and hotel rooms often viewed through mirrors or windows. Katrin Cartlidge is powerful in the title role doing a combination of serene  blankness and vulnerability. It's sobering to realize she would die four years after this film came out. Colm Meany cuts a calm and businesslike but subtly menacing figure as the pimp and Vincent D'Onofrio is fine as the taxi driver who futilely tries to understand his lover. What's most stunning to me is that the director, Lodge Kerrigan, has only made two other films since this was done in 1998. How does someone this talented get so few chances to work in this day and age?

A Real "Jazz Festival"

A lot of times these days events advertised as jazz festivals have only a nodding acquaintance with the concept. For example a local "jazz festival" in Silver Spring, MD last Saturday was headlined by Aaron Neville, a great singer without doubt but hardly a jazz guy.  There was another jazz festival closer to me in Rosslyn, VA the same day that really fitknew what it was about featuring acts like Jason Moran and Tierney Sutton.

The show was held in a lovely outdoor park at the foot of Key Bridge which is literally a walk away from the Georgetown section of Washington, DC. There were the sort of distractions that can come at these outdoor events like planes flying overhead, traffic noise and conversations from people obilvious to the music but that didn't really hurt my enjoyment of things. The opening act, the Afro Bop Alliance, didn't do much for me as all Latin jazz groups tend to sound alike to me at this point. Then came one of the people I came out to see, pianist Jason Moran and his trio, the Bandwagon.

Moran has been acclaimed for some time as one of the most important younger pianists out there, someone who takes influences from all styles of music as well as art and other disciplines and, with the other members of his trio, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, works them into a thrilling stew that constantly shifts mood and time, working in piano styles from stride to swing to free with amazing fluidity. His chopping and rolling was well supported by his long time rhythm mates, especially Waits who in his solo spots, established himself as one of the killer modern drummers. Moran used some taped music to introduce a couple of pieces, one a Billie Holiday song, the other, a 1905 Bert Williams recording of "Nobody". His allegiance to the Jaki Byards and Thelonious Monks of the world is well known but here was Moran going back over a hundred years to give respect to one of the first great African-American performers. That kind of embrace of history is what made his performance so dazzling.

Moran's trio was followed by another highly touted piano trio, The Bad Plus, known for their rockish rhythms and their covers of the likes of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Iron Man".  I appreciate what they do and their pianist Ethan Iverson shows he knows his music in his blog writing but at this concert I couldn't warm to them. With drummer Dave King often taking the lead role and Iverson content to vamp repeatedly in the background, this sounded more to me like prog rock without the syntthesizers and guitar solos, a music that pushed mechanically instead of cutting loose with the organic rolling flow of Moran's work. Still there was a lot of loud applause at their set and a lot of the younger people at the show got up to leave after they finished. I almost did but I was glad I stayed.

I had seen Tierney Sutton's name around before but not paid too much attention to her. Saturday I thought  "Just another swoony saloon singer doing standards. I'll listen to her first song, then leave." Thirty seconds after she started performing I knew I was staying for her entire set.

Tierney Sutton is one of those singers who takes the Great American Songbook and puts it through a Cuisinart. Fronting the trio she has worked with for 17 years, she sings in a waling incantory style like Sheila Jordan turning her familiar material inside out. Fast songs are done slow, slow songs are speeded up, and she stretches "Get Happy" out into a doomy monotone that sounds cut from a Nirvana album. On this day she and her excellent band pushed and pulled their way through songs like "Blue Skies", "Fever", "Summertime", Something Cool" and "My Man's Gone Now" in imaginative and sometimes ballsy arrangements. I found a new singer to go crazy over Saturday.

Here are a couple of clips of Moran and Tierney from recent years. First Moran and the Bandwagon doing their slippery eel stride thing in Brazil in 2003. Watch Nasheet Waits kick butt and take names.



Then Tierney Sutton and her band running the changes on "Route 66" and doing their "chimes of doom" version of "Get Happy" in San Diego in 2007.  Sutton was wearing different clothes Saturday of course but there was the same set up of her sitting on a stool in front the band. Pianist Christian Jacob gets a very cool solo here.

The Vile Vivienne Vyle

You can have Tina Fey. When it comes to funny women on TV I'll take British writer and performer Jennifer Saunders. Her show Absolutely Fabulous was a fearless slapstick classic about two middle aged women boozing and drugging their way through the fashion industry like the Swinging Sixties never ended. Her 2007 show, The Life And Times Of Vivienne Vyle, is even darker, going way beyond what a show like 30 Rock would even dare. 

Saunders (above) stars on this show as Vivienne Vyle, a daytime TV host who runs a show where she parades the dregs of humanity before the cameras and tells them how disgusting they are under the pretense of helping them. There have been any number of these hosts in America,of course, from Jerry Springer to Maury Povich to Sally Jesse Raphael and beyond, but this character is supposed to based on a specific British TV star named Jeremy Kyle. If this concept had been attempted here by Fey or anyone else,  the host would be probably be humanized with some kind of inner conflict about what they are doing. Not Saunders, she makes Vyle a self-centered, unrepentant monster who will exploit anyone for her own gain, even her own husband.

There is still a lot of physical comedy on this show as on AbFab with Saunders still not above the occasional pratfall or bizarre sight gag. There are also a couple of characters that echo the earlier show's craziness. The talk show's producer, Helena, played by Miranda Richardson, is the same sort of scatterbrained, drugged-out mess as Saunders' Edwina and Vivienne also has a gay husband the same way that Edwina had a gay ex.

The overall tone of this show is much grimmer though. Vivienne is a more controlled person and she is so cold-blooded you can't identify with her in any way. There is a more sympathetic character in a therapist hired as a consultant on the show who is the closest thing to normal here and stands somewhat apart from the mad swirl of Vivienne's circle but he is really secondary. (Incidentally this show was created by Saunders and a clinical psychologist, Dr. Tanya Block. I haven't read anything where the doctor worked on a talk show but you have to wonder.) There is an evil genius in the way Vivienne twists a possible scandal involving her husband  to her advantage on live TV with a made up story of childhood abuse in the last episode but that's not something I could really laugh at. This is a fascinating show in its way, just not one of the laugh riots Saunders has done in the past.

Abeey Lincoln 1930-2010

I was going to write something about the film Fillmore: The Last Days but I happened to see that Abbey Lincoln passed away today.

We seem to lose a plethora of giant jazz figures every year. In the last few months alone, Hank Jones, Fred Anderson, Bill Dixon, Harry Beckett and Willem Breuker have passed on. Now it's Abbey Lincoln. She wasn't as overall prolific as other great jazz singers but the work she did was impressive, singing powerful and passionate songs in a strident carrying voice that demanded your attention. She had two great periods as a vocalist, in the Sixties when she worked with her then-husband Max Roach for a few years. The highlight of that time being their monumental protest album, We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite. Then there was little music from her until she turned up on Verve Records in the 1980s doing a series of very personal and uncompromising records in the company of people like Stan Getz and Hank Jones. She wasn't a "pretty" singer but she got her message across.

This is a video of her on the old NBC "Night Music" show in the 80s doing Charlie Haden's "First Song".  Not only is she in great voice but she obviously lit a fire under host David Sanborn.