Weekend Movie Wrapup

I do most of my movie watching on the weekends and between Netflix, Classic Flix, cable and even an occasional trip to an honest-to-God movie theatre, I can see a very eclectic bunch of stuff over any given weekend. This is what I just saw over the past three days:

Shutter Island - Coming from Martin Scorsese, the man who gave us Taxi Driver, The King Of Comedy, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, this is relatively small potatoes but it's a serviceably creepy thriller and when the big twist comes along, you see that this was Scorsese's way of paying homage to one of the most seminal horror films of all time.  I'd had trouble buying into spindly Leonardo DiCaprio as a serious leading man in the past but here I can see him finally maturing into a convincing noirish tough guy.

A Matter Of Life And Death - By coincidence, Scorsese does a short commentary on the DVD of this classic Michael Powell film about a  British World War II pilot who is supposed to die when his plane is shot down but doesn't thanks to a Heavenly mishap and instead falls in love with an American WAC leading to a massive trial in Heaven to determine whether he shall die now or go on living.
    On a first watching, I'm not as overwhelmed by it as other Powell films like Black Narcissus, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp and Peeping Tom but it's still an audacious and very well made romantic fantasy with fine acting from David Niven, Roger Livesy and Kim Hunter.  I was slightly confused, though, when the trial sequence detoured into several minutes of debate on the merits of America vs. Britain.

The Wrestler - The weekend of the 2011 Oscars, I finally saw Darren Aronofsky's previous film about a fatally obsessed performer. I've followed professional wrestling off and on since the 60's and by now, I've heard plenty of the stories of broken families, ruined bodies and early deaths that the business has led to.  This movie captures the feel of that world so authentically it's chilling. I know I'm very late to the party in saying this but Mickey Rourke does give the performance of his life as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a man who only seems to feel alive when he's crashing and bleeding in front of an audience, someone who has let every real relationship in his life slip right through his fingers, someone far too reminiscent of Hulk Hogan, Terry Funk, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, Curt Hennig, Brian Pillman, and other real living and dead wrestlers for comfort. When he gives a speech to the audience near the end about how he loves to perform for them, I immediately thought of speeches I've heard by Ric Flair more than once and The Rock on Monday Night RAW a couple of weeks ago.  Marisa Tomei, who has become a scary good actress in the last few years, was equally as affecting as an aging stripper.
     I noticed that the very end was eerily like Aranofsky's Black Swan with both main characters leaping to their deaths, but where you know Natalie Portman's Nina is bleeding to death at the fade of Swan,  The Wrestler goes black as Randy The Ram leaps off the top rope. All the signs are that his heart is about to give out on him but you never actually see that. I thought that was a really classy way to send him out.

George Shearing / David F. Friedman

There are a lot of things I could write about right now like Esperanza Spaulding beating out Justin Bieber at the Grammys last night (Yay!) but whatever I was thinking got overruled by the news that two figures from wildly different parts of the cultural world died today, George Shearing and David F. Friedman.

George Shearing is one of those musical names I heard a lot when I was a kid, since jazz was very much in TV's common language back in those days. As I got more into the music, I often heard Shearing blown off as a lightweight, "cocktail jazz" sort of pianist but, like Dave Brubeck and Ahmad Jamal, what he did looked simple but had a lot of substance to it, especially in his early days when he played with amazing dexterity as in this clip of Denzil Best's "Move.



Besides which the man wrote "Lullaby Of Birdland". That made him forever cool in itself.

Then there were the laughing, lusty lures of Mr. David F. Friedman, one of the all-time great exploitation movie producers.  He specialized in making soft-core nudie films in the 60's and 70's full of boobs, blood and complete insanity including the likes of Trader Hornee, Scum Of The Earth, Nature's Playmates and Herschel Gordon Lewis's notorious "blood trilogy" including Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs.  I discovered him, as I think many did, in the home video era when some of his wild movies started turning up on videocassette and magazines like Psychotronic Video reviewed them. Then he made contact with Something Weird video which put far more of his pictures out and even released compilations of the trailers.

Friedman's movies weren't art but they were wild over-the-top fun with sexy women and crazed plots. I'm not crazy about the ones I've seen where the violence is a bit too gruesome but I've enjoyed the innocent-seeming peekaboo smut gags of Lewis's pre-gore The Adventures Of Lucky Pierre and the wild sex romping of A Smell Of Honey, A Swallow Of Brine where the uninhibited heroine memorably tells her lesbian roommate, "Paula, I may be a bitch but I'll never be a butch."  They don't write dialogue like that anymore.

I actually saw Friedman once at some movie collectors' convention at a table with Something Weird's owner, Mike Vraney, regaling young peole with stories of his days in the exploitation business. I also read his autobiography, A Youth In Babylon, which talked about his time working in carnivals as well as his movie days. A second volume was promised at the end of that book but it never materialized. From the interviews I saw of him Friedman revelled in his rediscovery and never lost his taste for the carny come-on and the razzle dazzle.  He was a showman who made something memorable out of the sleaziest of raw materials.

Thriller - Progress Report #1

I've finally started going through my box set of the vintage Thriller TV series.  According to most of the things I've read on the show, the common thinking is that it was a conventional suspense anthology show in its early episodes and only really got good when it turned to the horror themes it's most remembered for.

In actuality these early shows are nothing to sneeze ateither . I've seen just the first nine episodes so far and they've involved gangsters, spies, murder mysteries, haunted houses and serial killers. The first episode, "The Twisted Image" starrted Leslie Nielsen as a businessman hounded by two stalkers with competing agendas and things have stayed interesting from that point on.

The most famous other TV anthology it resembles is Alfred Hitchcock Presents but there's been a darker edge here so far than Hitchcock's black comic whimsy.  The people who made this show did not go for laughs and knew how to get you hooked into the stories of a delusional young boy loose in the woods with a loaded rifle or a mob lawyer trying to go straight in only 50 minutes.

Two of these episodes, "The Purple Room" and "The Watcher" have been more in line with the show's creepy reputation, giving off outright scary vibes.  They were produced by one William Frye whereas Fletcher Markle produced the other shows and you can tell the different approaches from the way Boris Karloff does his introductions. In Markle's shows he appears wearing glasses and talks very chipper and eruditely about the story. In Frye's programs so far, he doesn't wear glasses, talks a bit more dramatically and the lighting gives him a more sinister look befitting one of his movie roles.
    
As for the shows themselves, "Purple Room" was about a man, played by Rip Torn, who has to spend the night in a haunted house (impersonated by the Bates house from Psycho) in order to get an inheritance. Someone tries to scare him out and needless to say things don't end well. "The Watcher" was directed by John Brahm , who made among things, the great Hangover Square. It was about a high school teacher who closely watches one of his hunky former male students, played by Richard Chamberlain, and murders the young women he thinks are "corrupting" him. There was one scene where the teacher tried to "comfort" the kid where his intent was much more obvious than you would have imagined being shown in 1960. 

All this and people like Mary Astor and Everett Sloane showing up in other shows as well. Thriller, so far is holding up its reputation. It'll be interesting to watch future episodes especially when the horror stuff really kicks in.

Going...going...

A few days ago I got some unpleasant news that I knew was coming but was still dreading. Cadence, the jazz and improvised music magazine I've been writing for almost 20 years, has announced it will cease publication at the end of this year.

The reasons why are obvious. The last few years have been a tough time for all printed publications with increasing hordes of people deserting them to read things online. A small, independent magazine about an increasingly marginalized music genre would find it tougher going than most. The fact that one of their major newsstand venues, Tower Records, went out of business didn't help matters either.  In 2008 the magazine tried to save itself by changing format from a fat little monthly to a quarterly publication the size of an oversized paperback book. I talked to Bob Rusch, the magazine's publisher, at a concert a few months ago and he reiterated what he had been saying in his editorialsfor a while, that times were tough and he didn't know how long they could continue. Now the closing date has been set.

I'm really bummed about this. Cadence is a unique publication, low on trendy graphics but full of information. Its long interviews with various musicians are more like oral histories with the subjects discussing their careers, experiences and philosophies in unexpurgated fashion. As for reviews they covers a vast sweep of music, from blues and trad jazz to the farthest out there improv. I know I got to review a great variety of work, a lot of it by people I had never heard of before.  The reviewers could be insightful or argumentative but usually they had interesting opinions. I don't know of another magazine around that covers the territory they do, the closest probably being Signal To Noise, but Cadence's demise is going to leave a hole in the musical conversation even if most people don't realize it.

I'm still trying to figure out what this means for me personally. Writing reviews for Cadence has come to take up much of my spare time over the years. It's really what I structure my evenings and weekends around. I guess I'll look around for another magazine or website to write for but I don't know how many options there are that way.  I should have more time to devote to this blog and do other things like go out to concerts and performances but we'll see if that happens.  I don't know how many more CDs I'll be sent for review past what I'm now working on, if any. After that I'm going to have a bunch of extra time on my hands.  I'm just grateful right now I still have a regular day job to keep a roof over my head.

General Spanky

Tuesday I watched part of the last night of TCM's Hal Roach tribute. First up  was Laurel and Hardy's Sons Of The Desert with Stan's and Ollie's teamwork at its zenith. I would now put up that one upthere with Duck Soup as my favorite comedy of all time. Then I saw a real curio for the first time, General Spanky.

On TCM, host Robert Osborne referred to this as the only feature-length "Our Gang" movie but as this poster shows it wasn't intended to be seen that way.  Only Spanky McFarland himself is listed. Going by this you wouldn't even know any of the other Our Gang kids were even in the film.  This picture comes off more as Roach's failed attempt to make Spanky into a big time child star after the fashion of Shirley Temple or Our Gang veteran Jackie Cooper.  Part of the problem is that someone at the studio got the bright idea to dump the modern-day setting of the shorts and stick Spanky in a Civil War movie, probably because that had worked so well for Temple. This is just one of the things that goes wrong with the movie.

The film actually starts out focusing on Buckwheat (Yes, some of the other kids are in this movie, if way down in the cast list.) He's a slave on a riverboat who gets separated from his master and hooks up with Spanky who here is an orphan shoe shine boy. They make friends with a young plantation owner who goes off to fight for the Confederacy when war breaks out and with some other kids, including Alfalfa, organizes a homemade "defense force" to protect the women and children while the men are fighting.

How many things are wrong here? First of all, instead of the kids being the center of attention as they always were in the shorts, a lot of time is spent on the various adults in the story with Spanky and the rest being just around the periphery. Also when adults figured into their best comedies, they were often fine comic actors like Billy Gilbert or Edgar Kennedy.  Here you get the bland likes of Phillips Holmes, Ralph Morgan and Irving Pichel playing it completely and boringly straight.  Pichel, in particular, seems really out of place. He plays the villain, a crooked gambler turned incompetent Union officer, with no hint of emotion.

Spanky is expsoed as not really having the acting range to carry the kind of comedy-drama this wants to be and outside of a couple of bits, like Alfalfa's one song, most of the kids' antics aren't that funny. Then there is the whole tenor of this being a sentimental view of the Civil War South. The great majority of these old movies that show contented black slaves laughing and grinning on the plantation don't bother me but this one is a little disturbing in that they are actually called "slaves" several times, a word I don't usually notice in these pictures. That word especially sounds nasty when used to refer to little Buckwheat. It's a bit grim at one point when, separated from his owner, he walks around asking other white men if they will be his Master.  He, Farina, Stymie and the other black Our Gang members may have been equal to their white pals in the shorts but this time things were clearly different.

It's no wonder this movie didn't do weel at the box office. There was far too little of everything that made Our Gang successful and nothing but dull Southern soap opera replacing it.

Roach Rarities

Turner Classics Movie has been commanding more of my attention than usual this month because of their Hal Roach tribute, 24 hours of comedy shorts and other material from the Roach studio every Tuesday. I've yet to do the intelligent thing a movie buff should and buy a DVR or Tivo so I've been limited to watching just what I can when I'm not sleeping or at work. Nevertheless I've been able to see a lot of good comedies, some I'd seen before and some I hadn't.

    On the 4th it was 24 hours of Our Gang shorts, including a bunch of silent ones I'd never seen before. The earliest one shown was "Fire Fighters" from 1922 which oddly began with what seemed to be a clip from Roach's bizarre Dippy Doo Dads series, a couple of minutes of animals dressed up as humans, before switching to Our Gang, at that point just Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison and a bunch of guys named Fred, pretending to be firemen. I also noticed that several of the sound shorts were really remakes of the silent ones and that "Love Business", where Jackie Cooper and Chubby Chaney are rivals for the affection of their teacher, the beloved Miss Crabtree, still holds up as a very funny movie.

The 11th had a full day and night of my heroes, Laurel and Hardy. I'd already seen all of the ones I was around for but not for many years. The genteel brilliance of their style of slapstick was as funny as ever.

Last night started off a period of odds and ends. I saw another Our Gang classic, "The First Seven Years" with some footage that had always been missing from the TV prints I'd seen in the past. I also saw two early Charlie Chase talkies, "Whispering Whoopee" and "Fifty Million Husbands" that demonstrated how loosely put together the Roach shorts of that period were. All they seemed to do was come up with a premise and have the cast riff on it.  Thinking about it, this is true of the Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang comedies but I was so familiar with those I hadn't noticed it there. It really shows up though in "Whoopee". The "plot" is Chase hiring three ladies to party with some small town elders he wants to sell land to. From that scrap of idea they work all sorts of slapstick gags culminating in everyone spraying each other with seltzer bottles for two or three minutes.

The real rarities of the month came last night when ten episodes of a 1955-56 Roach TV show, Screen Director's Playhouse, were shown. This was a video version of an old radio show where A-list movie directors would film a program with a story and cast of their choosing, usually with some big stars involved.  The five episodes I saw were a mixed bag.  The most hyped show was "Rookie Of The Year" directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. This was made around the time they did The Searchers together and featured Wayne as a sports reporter who stumbles across a potential big story that could ruin the career of a promising young baseball player. The story is well told enough and has good actors like Ward Bond, Vera Miles and James Gleason in it but it was very hard for me to buy the slow-talking Wayne as a slick, ambitious reporter.

"Lincoln's Doctor's Dog" which featured Robert Ryan as Abraham Lincoln didn't do much for me either. The other three were better. "Tom And Jerry" starred Peter Lawford and Nancy Gates as a married couple who decide to get a divorce on Christmas Eve. It could have been sappy but director Leo McCarey put some slapstick and an air of sophistication in the mix that hearkened back to his days directing Charlie Chase and Laurel and Hardy and also his screwball classic, The Awful Truth. It also had good supporting people like Marie Windsor and Arthur Q. Bryan AKA The Voice Of Elmer Fudd, as a sarcastic judge.

"The Silent Partner", which I'd seen before at Slapsticon, starred the sublime Buster Keaton (right) as a forgotten silent comic. It had plenty of time for Keaton for time to do his still hilarious physical comedy stunts and also featured Zasu Pitts, Joe E. Brown and Bob Hope.

Then there was "Number Five Checked Out" a crime drama directed by no less than Ida Lupino. It was much in the tenor of other noirish work she did, a story about two bank robbers who hide out in a deserted resort tended only by a deaf woman. There is a nice, dark fatalism to this story and good interplay between Teresa Wright as the deaf woman and William Talman, who had starred in Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker two years earlier, but the show is really stolen by the guy playing the other robber, Peter Lorre.

      Lorre is at his creepy best here, nonchalantly pouting and purring in his silken voice. When his partner yells at him about shooting someone needlessly during the robbery, he just shrugs and says "There was a change of plans." He doesn't really upset the balance of the story just makes it a little off center.

Next week this tribute finally ends with a day of Roach features. I don't know I'll see many but they are starintg with Laural and Hardy's masterpiece, Sons Of The Desert, and the one and only Our Gang feature, General Spanky, which is really just Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat, dropped into the middle of a Civil War story. Those two I know I'll see.

New Buys

 These are the three latest additions to my CD pile.  I bought all three the first time I actually saw them in a store which is unusual for me. Junko Onishi is a Japanese pianist who I remember liking when she recorded for Blue Note back in the 90's. She reportedly took a sabbatical for several years and suddenly without any fanfare or notice here she is with a new CD on Verve.
   Dave Liebman seems to have suddenly released a bevy of new work in the last couple of months and this Ornette Coleman tribute is the one that has been winding up on a bunch of "Best of 2010" lists.
   The Imani Winds record which I just read about a few days ago on the blog of Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson is a set of classical woodwind pieces written by composers best known for jazz: Wayne Shorter, Jason Moran and Paquito D'Rivera. Iverson really raved about Shorter's piece which is evidently the first classical writing he's ever done. Given that and the high profile Moran has had this past year I'm kind of surprised this work didn't get more attention.

Finally Tooned In

As I hoped for back in October here, Antenna TV came to my cable system this month, even though it didn't seem to fully start until around the 8th instead of January 1 like it was supposed to. With it, came their series of  Columbia theatrical cartoons, Totally Tooned In, which is being shown in a three-hour block from 7 to 10 AM on Saturday mornings. I sat down and watched all three hours today and even though nothing really blew me away, it was still fun watching a shifting melange of over a decade of changing Hollywood animation styles through cartoons I'd never seen before.

The star attraction, of course was Mister Magoo, the studio's one enduring cartoon legend. There was one of his shorts in each half-hour show, which all sported the unique modernist look of UPA Productions.  There was also another UPA-era short by John Hubley, "Family Circus", about a little girl who goes berserk when her new baby brother hogs all of her father's attention. This one had a section of animated crayon drawings that looked pretty unique among all the traditional cartoon antics that surrounded it.

    The earlier work shown seemed to indicate that Columbia's cartoons weren't very different from all the competition before UPA came along. There were shorts from the 30's produced by Charles Mintz that were mostly psuedo-Disney cuteness full of round faced little kids, puppies and other small animals and birds with one dark exception I'll mention later. Cartoons shown from the 40's, particularly with the studio's other stars, The Fox and The Crow, (seen on the left in their comic book forms) were far more full of the aggressive slapstick that was then ruling the roost at places like Warners and Universal. I'm sure that wasn't an accident since I recognized a few names in the credits from other animation studios, one of them no less than Max Fleischer who produced the two Fox and Crow shorts but also composer Darrell Calker who did a lot of the music for Walter Lantz cartoons.

While there were no really outstanding moments in any of these cartoons on first viewing, a few had interesting touches.  In the Fox and Crow short, "Slay It With Flowers" the two get into a nasty fight over Crow eating the seeds out of Fox's garden but stop abruptly when Crow finds out Fox is planting a Victory Garden. (This cartoon was made during World War II.) "Mountain Ears" is a Tex Avery travelogue-style short about hillbillys featuring a narrator with a Jack Benny-style voice who continually argues with a bratty kid on screen. At one point the narrator's supposed hands come on screen and try to catch the kid.

The most impressive cartoon of this particular bunch was "The Little Match Girl", a 1937 Mintz era rendition of the Hans Christian Andersen story.  It was gorgeous to look at, particularly the scenes where the little girl dreams of angels and Heaven and it was no surprise to learn that this short was nominated for an Academy Award. One thing though, the televised print of this went right up to the tragic ending of the story, the little girl freezing to death in the snow but stopped short of showing that. According to Wikipedia, that ending was part of the original cartoon which means sadly that some editing has taken place on a few of these TV versions. I'm not complaining though. I'm just happy that I'm finally getting to see this stuff at all.