Wet Hot American Summer
seen @ Movies With a View @ Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn, NY
8.2.12
And now, a few do's and dont's on seeing outdoor movies:
DO get to the venue as early as you can. Free outdoor movies are always popular and tend to be packed most of the time, so you're gonna want to arrive well ahead of showtime. Last year, I arrived to Brooklyn Bridge Park only an hour in advance and I ended up in a spot far off to the side, towards the back. Last Thursday night, I arrived two hours early and got a spot in the middle close to the front. Score!
DON'T arrive a half hour after showtime and go picking your way through the throng trying to find your friends. You'll only block the view and step on someone's sandals or accidentally kick their bag of Cheetos off their blanket. Wait till after the movie to hook up with your crew.
DO bring a blanket to mark your territory. This is especially important at a venue that doesn't offer seating. Some do, like when I saw Persepolis last month, but if not, then take it from me: if you go without a blanket or tarp to lay down on, space will get eaten up around you and you'll have very limited room to stretch out - and you'll want that room as more people arrive!
DON'T encroach on someone else's blanket unless you're sure they're cool about it. Those without one - such as latecomers - will inevitably find themselves twisting and turning to make themselves fit and they may end up with a leg or an arm in your space. That happened with me on Thursday, but it didn't bother me because they weren't in my way and eventually they moved. If you find yourself about to enter someone else's territory, be careful!
DO bring your own food. Not only because you never know what kind of ripoff prices you may get from any concession stands at the venue, but if your spot is in the middle or the front, you don't wanna get up and step around a hundred people lying all around unless you absolutely have to.
DON'T eat all your food before the film starts. I mean, duh!
DO bring a book to read. You're gonna want one as an option when you get tired of playing Uno with your BFFs, and if you're going stag, it's an absolute necessity.
DON'T bring a heavy (as in really deep thoughts) book. On Thursday, I grabbed my used copy of Gulliver's Travels off my shelf because I hadn't started it yet. I didn't even get ten pages into it. It's not the kind of book one should read surrounded by 20-something hipsters and listening to loud 80s music.
DO enjoy the movie!
DON'T enjoy it too much. There's a tendency to think the rules of moviegoing ettiquette get relaxed to a certain degree just because you're watching the movie outdoors instead of indoors. They don't.
I can't complain about the crowd I saw Wet Hot American Summer with on Thursday. Someone about 15-20 feet in front of me was smoking for a little bit (smoking is now banned in NYC parks), but not long enough for me to have to say something, and I didn't get the brunt of it besides.
The movie was okay. It tried to capture the spirit of older R-rated teen-sex comedies like Porky's, but the humor came and went intermittently for me. For a summer camp movie, it certainly was no Meatballs, but it had Janeane Garofalo, and that was enough for me.
We were all treated, however, to quite a big surprise: WHAS director David Wain, co-writer/co-star Michael Showalter, and several cast members, including Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd, happened to be in the area filming a new movie, and dropped in to introduce this one! The crowd, which consisted of many fans of the film, went bananas, as you can imagine. Almost made me wish I had seen the film before!
The Dark Knight Rises
seen @ Jackson Heights Cinemas, Jackson Heights, Queens, NY
7.31.12
Many of us will never know what it feels like to kill another human being, even if only in self-defense. If we were to be honest with ourselves, though, the truth is that we crave that feeling from time to time. That guy on the freeway who cut you off. The supervisor who you just know has it in for you. The teenager on the subway playing his iPod too damn loud.
Most of us, however, find alternatives to acting on these impulses. Going to the movies is one. Maybe we can't take a knife to the throat of the woman next door who plays her TV at high volume at two AM, but there's a certain catharsis we get from seeing Jason Bourne or Iron Man or James Bond enact violence for us. It can be an adrenaline rush, and it can be immensely satisfying.
But sometimes make-believe violence isn't satisfying enough.
I finally saw The Dark Knight Rises; my post on it will go up later today. I find I'm actually kinda glad I waited. For one thing, I got a better idea of its quality, not that I read a lot of reviews on it. Also - and with all due respect to my fellow film bloggers - when it comes to movies like this, we're like lemmings. We not only have to see it opening weekend, if not opening day, but we have to get our reviews on it up as soon as possible, never mind the fact that hundreds of other writers are writing about the exact same movie at more or less the same time. I am absolutely no different; I succumb to this mentality just as much as the next blogger. But sometimes a more measured approach is called for.
I've made a guest appearance on a blog called Eternity of Dream as part of a collective group post called "New York in Genres." It's all about New York-based movies set in different genres.
Everyone really liked me putting Jean Seberg in my re-casted version of Pulp Fiction, so here's a review from Courtney of an actual Seberg movie, Breathless.
Jacqueline talks about the old Joan Crawford film Mildred Pierce with an emphasis on the cinematography.
Speaking of the Caped Crusader, Leonard Maltin takes a look back at the old Batman serials.
And here's an interesting think piece on blacks in sci-fi films.
Pandora's Box
seen online via YouTube
7.29.12
I have a comic book which re-interprets the Pandora myth: basically, the "real" Pandora was a prostitute who gets hired by a wealthy Greek landowner in a revenge scheme against his male ex-lover. At the landowner's urging, she marries the ex-lover but cheats on him with his brother (though she doesn't have sex with either of them), sowing dissension between the two and setting them at war with each other as a result. The box element comes in later, through one of Pandora's clients, the poet Hesiod. She tells him the story of the landowner and the brothers while they're in bed. They get caught by his wife and he blames Pandora for tempting him. When he eventually writes her story (re-interpreted into a tale of the gods), he vilifies her, creating the concept of the box containing all the world's evils. The whole thing's actually played up for laughs and it's quite funny.
The underlying message here, as in the original myth, remains the same: women are man's scapegoats for everything bad in the world - which is why I found this a somewhat odd metaphor to use for the silent German film Pandora's Box, since so many men in the story are eager to do just about anything for Louise Brooks' character. She kills her insanely jealous, much older husband, though it could be argued that it was self-defense, given the unusual circumstances, but at her trial she escapes sentencing thanks to a diversion provided by her pals. Talk about devotion! She spends the second half of the film on the run with them, including her husband's son from a previous marriage, who, of course, is in love with her.
This one was melodramatic, but strangely compelling. Brooks keeps the whole thing watchable. She's not what I would call my type - too skinny, for one thing - but she has a certain glamor, a certain presence, accentuated by the clothes she wears and, of course, that Vulcan hairdo of hers. It's easy to see why she became so memorable.
When Norma Desmond says "We didn't need dialogue, we had faces!" in Sunset Boulevard, I didn't fully grasp the depth of her meaning when I first saw it, but now I believe I do. Silent movie stars had to convey their emotions, their character, with their faces - sometimes it was overwrought, but other times, like in Pandora, it's more subtle, and as a result, more magnetic. Many great actors say all the acting is done in the eyes, anyway. Combined with the right camerawork, a certain look can be iconic in a way that you rarely see in "talkies," and certainly less so in modern Hollywood movies, which pummel you into submission with frenetic imagery. No subtlety at all.
The Great Recasting Blogathon is an event in which post-1965 films are re-cast with pre-1965 actors, hosted by In the Mood and Frankly, My Dear. For a complete listing of participating blogs, visit the links at both sites.
In the spring of 1960, Samuel Fuller was stuck. For a little over a year, he had been working on a screenplay about a middle-aged boxer who agrees to take a dive for a gangster for money, only to double-cross him. Fuller was interested in exploring the world of boxing, but he wasn't satisfied with what he had to that point, and for several months had put the unfinished screenplay on the shelf, returning instead to the script for what would eventually become Underworld USA.
Then Fuller received an invitation to the Cannes Film Festival from his friend, writer Romain Gary. Fuller was reluctant to go at first; he was still bitter about the French reaction to his 1957 war film China Gate. However, Gary, the French Consul-General in Los Angeles at the time, claimed to be able to smooth things out with the right people if need be, and ultimately, Fuller agreed, choosing to keep a low profile while in Cannes.
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| Samuel Fuller |
This was the year Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless debuted to a rapturous Cannes audience, and as Fuller watched it, he was amazed to see his influence in this young French director's work - for example, there was a clear visual homage to his Barbara Stanwyck Western Forty Guns. Fuller had heard inklings here and there about a recent resurgence in French cinema, but it wasn't until seeing Godard's film, with its use of hand-held cameras and of course, jump cuts, that he began to feel as if these techniques could be applied in his own work.
A meeting was arranged between the two filmmakers. Godard couldn't have been more excited to meet Fuller, one of his idols, and the two talked for hours. Eventually, Fuller mentioned his boxing screenplay and Godard offered a few suggestions, including the addition of a young female lead. Suddenly re-energized, Fuller brought in Gary to help him with the rewrite, spending an extra week in Cannes holed up in their hotel. Fuller returned to America while Gary remained in Europe.
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| Rod Steiger |
Fuller envisioned Rod Steiger as Butch, his boxer character, ever since seeing him in the title role in Al Capone (1959), and approached him with the current draft of his screenplay. Steiger had been alternating between television and film for much of his career, and was eager for another showcase role on the big screen such as this. With both a leading man and a script - now retitled Pulp Fiction in an homage to his younger years as a pulp novelist - Fuller went to Columbia Pictures to set up a deal to produce and direct.
Fuller set up a screen test for Godard's Breathless star Jean Seberg with an eye towards getting her to play Mia, the moll character Fuller added after his initial conversations with the French filmmaker. Fuller had met her briefly at Cannes and was quite taken by her. Seberg was greatly trepidatious about returning to Hollywood, having struck out in her film debut, Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957) and not faring much better in her subsequent films, hence the move to France. Fuller informed her, however, that the part of Mia was written with her in mind. With Godard's encouragement, Seberg agreed to fly out to LA.
Gary, back in LA by now, also attended the screen test, which Seberg passed with flying colors. She even offered a couple of suggestions for the character which Fuller and Gary readily took to. Gary and Seberg began spending more time together during the production of Pulp, and a relationship formed between the two of them.
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| Jean Seberg |
In Pulp, Mia is the kept girl of Marsellus Wallace, the small-time gangster who gets Butch to take a dive. She has a sub-plot all her own, in which she's watched over by a pair of Wallace's henchmen while Wallace is out of town, but gets excessively drunk at a nightclub and nearly dies. Fuller brought in journeyman actor John Dall, whom he admired from his turn in Gun Crazy, and Brock Peters, who had small but memorable parts in the black musicals Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, as the henchmen Vincent and Jules.
For the part of Wallace, Fuller had in mind someone tall and imposing. Gary happened to remember the Gregory Peck war film Pork Chop Hill (1959) and seeing the 6'4" Woody Strode in a small part. Fuller liked the suggestion and brought the actor into the cast as well.
Post-production took longer than usual for a Fuller film, mostly due to the editing process, and as a result, he was not able to bring it to Cannes like he had hoped. Godard flew in to look at a rough cut and make a few suggestions here and there. Eventually, Pulp was released in the
fall of 1961 to middling reviews. As much as Fuller tried to bring the
French New Wave sensibility to his film, the American audiences of the
day were less than receptive. The French received it more warmly, though, especially Seberg's performance. It would take another six years before that style would be successfully wedded with American cinema, in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde.
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| Jean-Luc Godard |
Fuller's relationship with Godard and the French New Wave would continue, however. Years later he would make cameo appearances in Godard's Pierrot le Fou and Brigitte et Brigitte, directed by another Fuller acolyte, Luc Moullet. Further in life, Fuller would move to France. Gary and Seberg, meanwhile, would get married in 1962 and have a son. He took up directing and made a pair of movies with Seberg, but their relationship grew sour and they divorced in 1970.
Quentin Tarantino's remake in
1994, ironically, did make it to Cannes and won the Palme D'Or as a
result. His version is particularly notable, not only for the increased
level of violence, but for the addition of the non-linear storytelling
format, which has been compared to Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
(1956). Indeed, it is more of a re-imagining than a straight remake (the henchmen Jules and Vincent are expanded upon, for instance), one
which Fuller has said is truer to his original vision than his actual
product turned out to be, hampered as he was by his attempts to make a
French New Wave film.
Mallrats
from my VHS collection
Maybe if I had grown up in the suburbs, I would've hung out at malls more. As it is, they never meant anything more to me than a place for one-stop shopping. The Queens Center Mall is no different from most indoor malls, and I can probably count the number of things I've bought there on one hand, not counting food. I once worked at a Tower Records which was part of a strip mall out on Long Island - not quite the same thing as an indoor mall. It was across the street from a more traditional indoor mall. I'd go there for lunch.
The thing about most suburban, big-box, indoor malls that's truly insidious is the way they're usually set up: great big parking lot in front to encourage lots and lots of car traffic and little in the way of a safe place to walk for pedestrians. I remember reading somewhere once that all that parking space is meant to accommodate Christmas shoppers. If true, well, that's some ass-backward thinking.
The mall near where I live is a textbook example. First off, it's right next to a constantly-busy eight-lane highway that you have to be fleet-footed to cross (yes, there is a traffic light; I don't have to play Frogger with the traffic). Because the cars go by so fast on the highway, walking on the sidewalk can be a little unnerving, and indeed, there are always very few pedestrians on the sidewalks. The parking lot is huge. In recent years, they put up a stop sign in this one spot next to a Best Buy to let pedestrians cross the road leading to the main mall entrance, but it hardly provides one with much of a sense of security. And the sidewalk surrounding the mall proper is so small it's ridiculous, especially given the vast swaths of territory allotted to cars. There are buses that go to the mall, but none of them stop close to the main entrance, so when you get off the bus, you're forced to schlep for another five-to-ten minutes all the way to the nearest entrance. Tough noogies if you're carrying shopping bags.
In Columbus, the rise of suburban malls, a symptom of city-killing urban sprawl, led to the decline of the mall in the downtown area, one that was fairly popular for a long time. Recently they tore it down and put up a park. (Here's a City Mouse strip I did about it.) I remember walking around in it once before they took it down. It was eerie. There were empty storefronts almost everywhere, and it had a kind of haunted feel - there should have been people there, but there weren't.
And as for those suburban malls... Once I took a bus to the northern part of town, almost near the county border, just to see this one mall I was curious about. I was let out next to a wide street with cars everywhere and started walking in the direction of the mall, and as I walked, I remember thinking how peculiar it was that I was the only pedestrian around, even though it was the middle of the day. There was no shortage of cars on the street, though. This was when I first began to fully understand the consequences of sprawl. The mall itself was nothing special. I never went back there.
There's also a mall to the east of Columbus which, I have to admit, is really nice. There's the traditional big-box building to one side, but there are also areas that are done up like villages or small towns. The buildings are smaller, there are benches and fountains, the walking space is beautiful, comfortable and pleasing to the eye - and most importantly, it's separate from the parking space. At Christmas time, it's even better. This mall has a movie theater, so I took the bus there often, but I usually found other excuses to go there, such as actual shopping - I bought a jacket there once.
I don't believe malls are inherently bad; it's just the application of them that's the problem, especially when they're a contributing factor in sprawl. When sprawl happens, the population of a city is decentralized and gets spread out further, usually requiring more car travel, which leads to greater dependence on oil, which leads to less self-sustainability. That's a problem we gotta fix.
I passed on seeing Mallrats the first time it came out because I believed all the negative reviews about it. Eventually I bought it on VHS and to my surprise, discovered that I liked it a lot more than I expected, but by that time, I was already sold on Kevin Smith as a filmmaker. (There's your lesson for the day, kids: reviewers can be a guide to evaluating movies, but ultimately, you have to decide for yourself if a given movie's worth seeing or not.) The comic book-related humor helped, of course - strange that a character like Jason Lee's Brodie, presented as a typical geek outsider, can now be considered mainstream. Yes, it's unfortunate that Stan Lee failed to mention Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko when talking about his comics, but I suspect he knows better now. And as for those stupid optical-illusion images, I could never see a sailboat or anything else in them either! I think they were just a scam!
Life goes on. I had wondered for awhile whether or not I had overreacted to refunding my Dark Knight Rises ticket, since the Aurora massacre obviously wasn't stopping other people from seeing it. That in itself didn't surprise me. I was on vacation from my video store job when 9-11 happened, and when I came back, my co-workers told me the video store for the two or three days immediately afterward was packed. Movies are still a means to escape for many people, in spite of everything, and I think it's generally understood that the odds of another shooting happening so soon after the first one are very slim. Not that I believe it'll happen, of course, but I'd still rather wait. In the meantime...
I was gonna see the Singin' in the Rain re-release, but my plans changed, but that's okay - I'd rather read about first-timers Alan and Sarah describing it.
When Ryan did this shtick on Twitter, I thought he was just being funny (and he was). Now I know why he did it. (For the record, I agree with him. Too much nitpicking can be a pain after awhile.)
This was funnier before DKR came out, perhaps, but it's still worth reading. (NOT Aurora-related.)
Page applies her special brand of snark to a rare recent movie, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer.
She calls herself Caftan Woman. Why? Cuz she wears a caftan, duh. Here she writes about silent short films.
Notable film critic Glenn Kenny on fanboy culture in general and comic book culture in specific.
Proof that the younger generation still cares about classic movies.
This guy does some sweet woodcuts of classic movie stars.
DO bring a blanket to mark your territory. This is especially important at a venue that doesn't offer seating. Some do, like when I saw Persepolis last month, but if not, then take it from me: if you go without a blanket or tarp to lay down on, space will get eaten up around you and you'll have very limited room to stretch out - and you'll want that room as more people arrive!
