Sunday, September 21, 2014

Channel Zero Returns!!

Friday October 3rd at 8p (sharp) in the cozy screening room of the Somerville Theatre 55 Davis Square Somerville with a screening of.... "THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND" (!929) Lionel Barrymore stars in this silent steampunk classic as Captain Nemo whose super submarine The Nautilus is hijacked by a Balkan Dictator and taken to the sunken City of Atlantis. Based on the classic novel by Jules Verne with a few sea monsters, sentient amphibians and even a girl thrown in for Good Measure! Admission: $7.50 (cheap!) Three Years in the making and unseen in Boston for Eighty Five Years!!

Monday, September 15, 2014

Death of an Ape Man...

The Jungle Girl came hanging around my window last night she lives in a vast unexplored tropical rain forest that straddles the border between Arlington and Belmont Massachusetts. Since she "Stands the Watch over the Lost Land of Spirits" she offered me a choice of obituaries...Denny Miller or Joan Rivers. Ever the scion of Republican Simplicity, I chose the late Tarzan Actor...after all, Joan Rivers had Howard Stern...but the Late Denny Miller has but me. The Jungle Girl smiled nodded and rode the vines back to her Fabled Lost City, for now, her mission was complete. *** Cuz I got a line on the guy not mentioned in any of the obits... Because let the record show that Channel Zero gathered what was likely the lastpaying audience to watch one of the Late Denny Miller's performances back in July when we screened an ep of "Mona McCluskey" as part of our "Riot Girls of the Great Society" program. And it's just ironic to note, that Miller left the basketball court at UCLA to become a screen Tarzan (in MGM's awful 1959 remake "Tarzan the Ape Man") and then spent the rest of his career goofing his own heroic image...meanwhile the original film itself languishes in complete obscurity no one seems to have it. Ah but Denny was proof positive you didn't have to be in a good Tarzan movie to Make Good, look at Lex Barker...he ended up working with Fellini. Fate was not quite so kind to Denny he had to make do with stooging it up with Peter Sellers in "The Party" (1969) among some two hundred TV appearances and stint as the "Gorton's Fisherman"...On the Other Hand, Denny never descended to the dregs of doing "The Celebrity Apprentice"...cuz frankly Trump would've been lucky to have him.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Atlas Shrugged Part III "Who is John Galt" (2014)

Who is John Galt? He is an actor named Kristoffer Polaha whose chin has the contours suggestive of Mount Washington on a clear summer's day and eyes that exude the sincerity that make or break hemorrhoid cream adverts. And that...is the Libertarian Man on Horseback. I'll probably go to my grave wondering if anyone volunteered their services and talents gratis for this the third and final chapter in the misbegotten film adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel & notorious libertarian screed. Because it would be ironic that charity that virtue derided by all true Randians was the vital component to bring Ayn Rand's Magnum Opus to the screen and so very ineptly as well. Because the god-damned thing was nothing but a fan film... a bad one at that. Rob "Northern Exposure" Morrow is allegedly in this film, as a still photo (guess the Objectivist Power Elite couldn't afford his price to walk around on camera)...and he is the most recognizable name on the roster! Which is an excellent precis of the film's problems, a no name cast fit for a freeze dried coffee commercial and a budget of some five million dollars a paltry sum ill spent. Objectivists are obsessed with a personifying a self selected self celebrating intellectual elite, the libertarian herrenvolk...but give them five million large and sure enough they made a hash of their Guru's Personal Gospel. They have no one to blame but themselves. Now,don't blame the budget, blame the resentful envious mediocrities behind this project, you give five million to Orson Welles you'll get "King Lear"...and one for the ages...but these guys attract no talent on the scale of the late "Citizen Kane" director. Hell you give five million and this very meshugginah script to Roger Corman and he'll deliver something worthwhile, that boyo knows how to make a nickel squeak and get it all up on the screen. Hell, Mussolini's Blackshirts adapted Rand's novel "We The Living" and managed to generate a prototype neorealist document...but these jobbers? Phhfft! But this sovereign irony is at the core of Objectivism, a cult of rugged individualist genius that invariably attracts tepid insecure cubicle crawlers.