Elegy for a Phoenix...

It seems crazy, but The Boston Phoenix has abruptly shut down and scattered it's staff to the winds sans severance. Sad. And a serious blow to arts, culture and investigative journalism here in the Boston are, perhaps, dare I say it? a mortal blow. By way of full disclosure let me add that my first published by-line in Boston was a co-written article on vampire movies for The Boston Phoenix in 1991. My long suffering collaborator and I snarked it up for 650 words divided a small sum between us and were off on an improbable adventure as local freelance film writers...we had a good run in part because The Phoenix gave us a good solid shove in the right direction. It is a publication that was vitally necessary and exactly what if anything will replace it cannot be predicted with confidence. In the past twenty years or so, I've had a rueful front row seat on the decline and fall of paper-driven news media in Boston. Hell I started this obscure little blog in 2004 specifically as an outlet for my own admittedly marginal arts writing as a response to the obliteration of the local freelance market. It has been a process that has worked from the "outside in", relentlessly snuffing marginal paper-publications (exp "The Boston Comic News") until at least the inner ring has been penetrated and The Phoenix has gone for the terminal dirt nap. Of course the internet made all this happen, but then the internet is a thing that is viewed, it is not really read at least not in depth...and it is the act of reading that is enduring strength of all the dailies and weeklies out there, even the blustery old Boston Herald. Moreover a host of able reporters and reviewers have all been put out on the streets at a time when their skills have never ever been more needed but the cash value of those skills has never been lower. I'm gonna miss the Phoenix, it was always a good harbinger when Channel Zero could rate a positive mention in those paper pages. Boston's arts scene comes in for too little coverage as it is, the Phoenix always tried to dig down a little deeper than say The Globe (whose idea of cutting edge seems to stop at the "goings on" at the A.R.T.). This is bad news all around for anyone trying to do anything new and different in da Hub. Moreover trimmers and porch-climbers on Beacon Hill and elsewhere sleep a little sounder tonight without The Phoenix looking over their shoulders. That mah frenz is "change", and at the moment it is a Bad Thing at least until we can collectively harness it and set it to work in service of a better agenda.

Pick of the Week...

Hands down the King Hu retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive. Haven't seen the like since the MFA was screening serious Hong Kong Action cinema back in the late 1990's. Hu is one of those rare directors with the innate gift for revitalizing tumbledown genres, he did for Chinese Medieval Swordfighting movies what John Ford did for the American Western. In other words made it something dramatic, some adult driven without sacrificing the visceral pleasures raw physical conflict. Some of his work is a bit of slog, but keep in mind this is the filmography that single handedly educated Tsui Hark, John Woo and many many other Chinese Film-makers desperate to upgrade the national cinema. So this is a rare opportunity, don't miss it, hell if it proves successful maybe the HFA will revisit Hong Kong down the line and start educating some American Film-makers.

The Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester Ma

(allegedly the only museum in North America dedicated solely to armor and weaponry) is closing as of December 2013. The Worcester Art Museum is taking over the Higgins' Collection...Although it has been alleged by certain parties that the WAM is taking title to only 250 pieces out of a total inventory of two thousand. The balance of the Higgins' Collection is allegedly going to be auctioned off by Sotheby's, certain high dollar value items have supposedly turned up in catalogues and the closure of the Museum was only formally announced as of Friday 3/8/2013. Who profits from this almighty sell off of museum quality weaponry and armor? What of the Higgins Museum's Endowment? Where is that going? By the way, the Higgins' Endowment is allegedly larger than the available endowment of the Worcester Art Museum.... Maybe I'm all stupid like, I am certainly not any species of "citizen journalist" but an allegedly insolvent specialty museum in Worcester is sudddenly gonna become a veritable cataract of cash, I'd like to know where that money is going thats all. Someone please, prove my suspicions wrong, feel free to patronize me, I'm all ears.

"Ideology is Destiny"

Never moreso than in a "scientifically socialist" Marxist-Leninist State. The purpose of ideology in such nations is threefold, depict to the masses the coming communist eschaton of peace & plenty, explain in Marxist Leninist terms just why said ideology does not "rule the world" and act as a cost effective means of controlling the masses (see Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda" for more on that aspect). autarchy, the promulgation of a completely internally self sufficient economy exerts a powerful fascination for Totalitarian Nation States of all ideological brands. At various times dictators as diverse as Juan Peron, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler Mao ZeDong and Fidel Castro have all made autarchy the central focus of their respective regimes. Autarchy is potentially inflationary and can be ruinously wasteful of public/private resources, tyrants tend to opt for it for strategic military reasons & out of the naive' belief that they can bend the economy to their will they way they have dominated the world of ideas and gotten a stranglehold on mass opinion. Joseph Stalin invented all this virtually single handedly, after a long ruinous civil war in Russia, the death of Lenin, another long ideological civil war with Leon Trotsky and slow realization that the USSR was internationally isolated to a dangerous degree....Stalin proclaimed "Socialism in One Country". Ironically, he stole the idea from his hated rival Leon Trotsky. "Socialism in One Country" literally meant that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was now hell bent to create overnight the very industrial working in whose name the party allegedly ruled! "Socialism in One Country" was bumptious, wasteful and based entirely on the genocidal expropriation of peasantry. But as pure ideology it was a slam-dunk, it lavishly illustrated the coming socialist utopia, neatly explained while "the international balance of forces" did not yet favor said utopia and kept the helots in line...And what the hell, Stalin died in bed while most of the above listed tyrants and dictators swung by their heels in end. This was a fact not lost on the Kim Clan, the Ruling Family in Marxist Leninist North Korea, whose proclaimed doctrine of "Juche" (literally "self reliance") mixes Confucianism and Stalinism in a heady brew that asserts a motivated Marxist North Korean can do anything! In short it is autarchy designed to keep the usual suspects safely in control of the nation, no more no less. Lash the masses on to dig marginally uneconomic iron mines under appalling conditions, because that is North Korea asserting control over it's own Marxist Leninist Destiny! Like I said, heady stuff. So it is will some mirth that Channel Zeroscreen Jim Finn's 2010 mockumentary "The Juche Idea" this Friday Night at 8pm in the micro cinema of the Somerville Theater. Mixing together eye-popping archival footage with deadpan re-enactments, Finn has created a complex docu-fiction that is equally thought-provoking & entertaining. In "The Juche Idea", a sympathetic South Korean filmmaker visits a North Korean artists' colony to bring Juche ideas into the 21st century. She ends up producing hilariously stilted shorts, including a nonsensical sci-fi story and the enigmatic "Dentures of Imperialism." "The Juche Idea" is both sardonic satire and historical excavation, an exuberant collage that reveals the absurdity at the heart of Kim-Jong-il's regime. Friday March 8th at 8pm (Sharp!) The Somerville Theatre, Micro-Cinema 55 Davis Square Somerville Ma 617 625 5700 In Korea and Bulgarian, Subtitled in English Admission $7.50 "Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art, Mr. Finn's meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe..." —Dennis Lim, THE NEW YORK TIMES Tell yer friends, we are at it again!

Good Lord but Seth MacFarlane is a hack in extremis

punching ineffectually waaa-ay above his weight on the Oscars Telecast last night. I'd a paid Sally Field $10,000.00 of my hard earned money to beat on Seth's no talent ass with a baseball bat like a pinata during a "Flying Nun" sketch early in the broadcast. Ah but nothing quite saves the Oscars from irrelevancy and derision quite like a Nazi Gag derived from "The Sound of Music", a Broadway Musical that is fifty years old....sheer comic genius at work. For that fact I'd a paid Bruce Vilanch $15,000 to waddle out on stage and quietly hand MacFarlane a pink slip and a cab voacher.

Hope everyone got a good night's rest last night....

Because after last night's Waterloo-esque debacle on the Oscar's telecast, now today begins the long twilight struggle to repair William Shatner's Reputation. I suggest an evening of readings from Shakespeare at the A.R.T. with some suitable patter to bridge the varied soliloquys. I'd pay a hundred bucks to hear William Shatner read "Now is the winter of our discontent" at the A.R.T. Proposed titles "Bill & Will, A Love Story"? "Shat-n-Shake"? The mind reels with the possibilities!

Congrats to Hometown Hero Ben Affleck

his latest picture "Argo" won the Oscar last night. That boyo has completed his resurrection from the ashes of "Gigli", "Daredevil", "Pearl Harbor" etc etc. Now he is gonna hafata work 24-7 to mess it all up again and crash back onto skid row...I suggest he start with some parenting advise from Alicia Silverstone or a lecture on exobiology from John Travolta.

Seth "The Family Guy" MacFarlane...is Hosting the Oscars tomorrow night?

My Ghod but Hollywood is desperate for attention isn't it? And doubling down on that whole "we need younger hipper viewers" meme that lead tinseltown to it's Waterloo in 2011 with James "The Sedated Zombie" Franco and Anne "The Zombie's Waitress" Hathaway as the event's co-hosts. Well these "tentpole television events", the Oscars, the Miss America Contest, The MD Labor Day Telethon, institutions that might've predated broadcast television but certainly reached "operational maturity" under the aegis of TV...all have aging audiences, the networks themselves rapidly becoming antiques. A process like that is historic in scope getting some mediocre cartoonist to host The Oscars can't stop it in any manner shape or form. Yup and when Hollywood is Desperate for Attention (over and above the norm) they make all sorts of bizarre entertaining mistakes...

Channel Zero Returns, Friday March 8th at 8pm Sharp!

With a screening of.... Jim Finn's "The Juche Idea" (2008)  an uproarious and provocative mockumentary deconstruction of North Korean propaganda and philosophy. Mixing together eye-popping archival footage with deadpan re-enactments, Finn has created a complex docu-fiction that is equally thought-provoking and entertaining. Translated as self-reliance, Juche (CHOO-chay) is a hybrid of Confucian and Stalinist thought that Kim Jong-il applied to the entire culture. In "The Juche Idea", a sympathetic South Korean filmmaker visits a North Korean artists' colony to bring Juche ideas into the 21st century. She ends up producing hilariously stilted shorts, including a nonsensical sci-fi story and the enigmatic "Dentures of Imperialism." "The Juche Idea" is both sardonic satire and historical excavation, an exuberant collage that reveals the absurdity at the heart of Kim-Jong-il's regime. Friday March 8th at 8pm (Sharp!) The Somerville Theatre, Micro-Cinema 55 Davis Square Somerville Ma 617 625 5700 Admission $7.50 In Korean and Bulgarian Subtitled in English

Channel Zero Now in our Seventeenth Year of Genteel Cinematic Transcendence!

The Bird Watcher Takes Flight....

Let the record show that one weekends, when he could get away from his family, my honorable father would tip toe into his room and using a pair of binoculars (this a man who'd be half blind from the age of twenty three) would bird watch for hours on end. He knew nothing about ornithology, he simply found the birds that loafed in our back yard droll and interesting. There may have been something of the "consider the lillies" variety going on, who can say, The Old Boy declined to discuss his hobby with the family. When you are Francis L. Galligan Sr, you have endured much and must therefore find grace wherever it may be found. Because if there was a man in this life who suffered, it was my father. He survived being orphaned, The Battle of the Bulge (St. Vith, the 168th Combat Engineers, his first Purple Heart), the Crossing of the Rhine (second Purple Heart wherein he stopped a shell with his head and lived). He endured forty separate plastic surgical procedure six years of hospitalization, a shoulder separation, partial loss of eyesight & hearing, a round of sepsis and a ruptured ulcer that damn near killed him right before my eyes in 1966. In later years there was anemia, vertigo, skin cancer, a prostate problem, eyesight issues, a god-awful stomach hernia, pesky digestive issues, UTIs dementia (induced by "blunt force impact trauma") and a fractured hip. And at long last, eight days ago, at the age of ninety one, the flu and pneumonia fetched Him off to that final muster, the one place I may no longer stand the honorable watch over him. He finally died for his country, it just took him sixty plus years, ah but that was my Old Man, he always took his time with the Big Challenges. And never once in all that time and in all that pain and suffering did I ever hear him express so much as an iota of self pity, he treated his problems with amused contempt and soon enough his problems learned to fear him. That is the secret of being an old disabled veteran, laugh and make witticisms, it scares Inscrutable Fate shitless. And oh how my father liked to laugh and crack jokes, a mere month ago up at the VA Hospital that was tasked with his care these last three years my mother asked my wheelchair bound father if he needed to use the bathroom in an unctuous syrupy tone. My Father templed his fingers with academic hauteur and muttered "That is an awful personal question dear don't you think..?" The man could have taught timing and dry wit to "Bert and I". Along the way he collected some titles: "All Highest, Son of Destiny, Supreme Leader, Boss of Bosses and King of Heroes", only about half of them were in fact tinged with irony. My boisterous uncles all dummied up when he sat down at the holiday feast, at Robbins Farm in Arlington dogs would cease barking & seek him out for vigorous petting and he could use the word "nomenclature" in a sentence correctly and despite the eye patch he taught me how to drive (wanna learn to drive the Right Way? Get a one-eyed man to teach you). The whole cult of "The Greatest Generation" left him cold "everyone has challenges" Father once muttered in response to it all. He was mild, gentle, peaceful, people looked out for him instinctively, he was patient and kind with one and all. What an Honor to be his son. But alas it is required of old men, that they die, it is a miracle he lived so long, truly if ever a man overthrew destiny, it was Francis Leo Galligan Senior, Last of the Stoics my departed Father. Take Care Boss, you are making a sentimental wreck of me at age fifty.

My Top Ten Movies of 2012

(Frankly I am still shocked that I saw enough movies in 2013 to fill up a Top Ten List...Way to go complicated private life!) 1.) Coriolanus Directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes. Ralph will always get props from me for adapting a Shakespeare play for the screen that the late Orson Welles insisted was "Shakespeare's worst play for film treatment". And moreover, he got Gerard Butler out of the action movie ghetto and into a serious part, what more can we ask of any Shakespeare movie? 2.) The Avengers. Stan Lee is a credit stealing hack who loves money the way a hog loves slop. Just needed to establish that...because Joss Whedon did indeed take Stan Lee's superhero franchise and did something seemingly impossible, he pulled off a great multiple super hero team up. That and he got Mark Ruffalo off the rom com circuit...hell Ruffalo is best Incredible Hulk since....Bill Bixby. For better or worse this is will be the Gold Standard Superhero movie they will all be riffing off of for the next twenty years. Remember this when it comes time for Superman and Batman to team up in the movies. 3.) The Dictator Normally I can't stand Sacha Ben Cohen's act, mostly because it is predicated on persecuting the unsuspecting in comical ways...but give him a script and a character to play lo Cohen can really step up. Kudos to his sentimentally unsentimental ending as well. 4.) Moonrise Kingdom Best movie I saw all year hands down, Wes Anderson is a genius, Harvey Keitel in a Boy Scout Uniform and a walrus moustache is worth the price of admission alone. 5.) Hit and Run There are some old genres I will always linger over, we thought the car-chase movie had gone the way of Burt Reynolds' hairline...but no thank Ghod Dax Sheperd and Kristen Bell and co-director David Palmer believed enough in this project loopy gearheadeness and all to invest their own money!. And anyway, one willing to drag Tom Arnold out of obscurity and dress him up as a gay US Marshal is ace's high in my books! 6.) Bachelorette Y'know, Kirsten Dunst is funny because she realizes when she has to throw her beauty and poise onto the comic bonfire. The rest of the cast, Isla Fisher, Rebel Wilson, Lizzy Caplan have to squeak thru by being merely excellent in every way. Besides we are long past due for a purely distaff response to the berserker antics of Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill...and these ladies threw down with aplomb. 7.) Seven Psychopaths Another scene stealing triumph from Woody Harrelson who shines here in every way when he isn't being upstaged of course by Christopher Walken. Yeah I know Colin Farrell is in this thing somewheres as well. 8.) The Queen of Versailles Cautionary tale on what happens when David Siegel a real estate mogul and GOP fundraiser builds a bloated super mansion to dwarf Hearst's own ode to Gigantism, San Simeon, only to have the economy crash as the tile is being laid...How will his willfully optimistic trophy wife Jacqueline ever adapt? I could be a Chevy Chase comedy or a bad sitcom starring Mark Harmon, but no...did I mention this is a documentary? 9.) Flight Denzel Washington has been in some bad movies, but he rarely if every turns in a bad performance. So it's all the more pleasurable when he gets a script worthy of his talents. 10.) Lincoln I was skeptical of Daniel Day Lewis as the Great Emancipator, but this guy IS LINCOLN...the midwestern drawl, the clumsy grace the weird charisma of the man and even the tendency towards prolonged anecdote it is all there in once package. This is another film that'll be the measure of future Lincoln based projects going forward.

Children of a Lesser Tarzan...

As prior mentioned, 2012 marks the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Creation of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. As far as his film career goes, Tarzan's topmost avatar has always been Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic Swimming Champ who took the Ape Man to Glory and Big Box Office back in the 1930's and 40's. Thus Weissmuller is in a rare cinematic category along with Sean Connery as 007 and Chris Reeve as Kal El, consistently everyone's favorite version of their respective characters. Johnny's appeal was simple, he was first Tarzan explicitly marketed to women on the basis of his good looks and simpleminded relationship with Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane. Whatever problems purists may have with the scripts and Tarzan's pidgin english or progeny "Boy"...The approach stands the test of time as the iconic Tarzan interpretation. So far as Tarzan is concerned literally the race is to come in second behind Weissmuller. For me three actors come into contention:

Jock Mahoney The great problem of Mahoney's brief two film reign as Tarzan back in the early 1960's is that he came to the part a decade too late, being almost forty two when he was cast in what is my favorite color Tarzan movie "Tarzan goes to India" (1963). Forty two or not, Mahoney is a lean, quick, slightly feral Tarzan who is trying to save a herd of Indian elephants from a dam project that threatens to flood their home. Its a simple movie and Mahoney plays it with a lot of heart as a very human sort of a Jungle Lord. This is also the first Tarzan film to push Lord Greystoke into the role of "International Adventurer" all in color and shot on location as well.

Ya gotta love Mike Henry last of the original All-Up Color Movie Tarzans, a pro football player turned actor, he reputedly refuses to this day to sell his autograph to fans at nostalgia shows despite the fact that his association with the Tarzan franchise could net him a nice annuity. Nope Mike has wonky sort of integrity and he is in the weirdest of the 1960's adaptations of the character "Tarzan and the City of Gold" (1966) which takes Lord Greystoke from International Adventurer to outright Secret Agent as the Jungle Lord must thwart a coup plot in Mexico! 007 needs a souped up Astin Martin & a Walther PPK, Tarzan gets by with a Bowie knife and some arrows. And anyway, look at Mike Henry's physique...the man is literally a Renaissance statuary come to life! His muscles had muscles! Mike is no scenery chewer, none of the post Weismuller Jungle Lords ever were, but when he goes prowling thru the underbrush, he looks at home like he is the Apex Predator of legend.

Gordon Scott, who must have been a yard across at the shoulders in his prime, can credibly claim to be the Man Who Saved the Tarzan Franchise. Initially cast as the successor to Lex Barker Scott limped thru a few cheerless black and white jungle features complete with pidgin English until Producers Sy Weintraub & Sol Lesser got their hooks into the series shot them in color made lavish use of location work and set Gordon Scott free to speak in proper syntax. The result was a box office bonanza, the films started doing huge business overseas with Scott as the most massive, seemingly unstoppable Tarzan of all...Hell in "Tarzan's Greatest Adventure" he throws down with 007 Sean Connery(in a rare villainous role) and wins... All the above mentioned films are available for purchase thru the Warner Brothers Archives, either on Blue Ray or DVD.

FAB R.I.P.

Late word comes to us of the death of British TV Producer, Gerry Anderson creative spirit behind such classic kidvid series as "Stingray", "The Thunderbirds" and that SF-noir for the Elementary School crowd, "Captain Scarlet". I will remember him primary as a technical innovator of the first rank, if the public wanted puppet shows from him then he made sure that the puppets he was using were technological marvels of the first rank. Anderson was smart, maybe not the best writer in the world (this became apparent when he made the leap to human actors in the 1970's) but he reinvested in his own product and tried to do better with each succeeding series. Like The Beatles, he figured out early on that $uccess depended on penetrating the American market, to this end he made sure to leaven his British produced product with some American voices (chiefly US actors Shane Rimmer and Ed Bishop) as his shows became less comical, more adventuresome and violent.

Like William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, Anderson's various characters, the stolid Thunderbirds crew or the pre-liberated Lady Penelope, or the semi suicidal Captain Scarlet, all form veritable pillars in a pre-Star Wars science fiction driven childhood. In point of fact, the whole of the special effects industry in Great Britain has its origin with Gerry Anderson's many supermarionation series, dozens of creatives who worked with Gerry and his talented then-wife Sylvia all went on to work on almost all the major SF films of the 1970s. Truly there is no Star Wars without "Joe 90". Alas though, supermarionation eventually maxed out (ten years of research and still Anderson could make his puppets walk realistically) and Anderson tried his hand at producing an all up live action "Star Trek" style franchise "Space 1999" there some of his creative limitations revealed themselves... But to the end of his life he remained invested in the latest technology, a decade ago he was executive producing a remake of "Captain Scarlet" using CGI animation and at last the immortal Captain could walk right! Anderson must have been relieved....

Happy Birthday Lord Greystoke....

Its been a bittersweet year for the protean fantasy worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, "John Carter" (Warlord of Mars) tanked at the box office compelling a managerial shake up at Disney and consigning ERB's science fiction to bookshelves for the foreseeable future. A certain amount of stock taking is in order, but at the very least lets take a moment to celebrate the Century Anniversary of Burrough's greatest creation, Tarzan of the Apes! Ah but Tarzan was a marvelous creation, an English Aristocrats sense of duty married to an animal's ferocity and lust for freedom. Indeed how could the Ape Man miss? Unlike most of Edgar Rice Burroughs' other creations, Tarzan though a titled English Baronet AND "Lord of the Jungle" is not a conqueror per se. Once Tarzan emerges from the jungle to claim his hereditary birthright he settles down to ranch live in some fabled rainforest with his chosen mate Jane Porter. Tarzan "is" he does not "rule" any more than any other prowling predator rules over abd above the dictates of their animal instinct. That to me is what has given Tarzan his unique appeal down thru the years, he is Free and has the Strength and Character to maintain his freedom without recourse to brutality or mendacity. He speaks several languages (including the gutteral tongue of the Great Apes) and yet he holds all civilization as a very paltry thing indeed. Conquerors & tyrants are almost always Tarzan's mortal enemies...running some lost City founded by a lost Roman Legion on the up and up is NEVER on the Ape Man's agenda. Tarzan is in short, the ultimate escape fantasy...he is also very much rooted in the contemporary world even if his version of Africa may as well be another planet given the inconstant nature of Edgar Rice Burroughs' zoology. Still it's a milieu that needs little explanation and is accessible to everyone from Tarzan's mate Jane Porter to the usual motley collection of communists, film crews and absent minded scientists. Proof of the Ape Man's power lies in the fact that even as jungles and rainforests shrink...his power over the imagination crashes thru the tree tops unabated...And with the Broadway musical and the Disney ice show, the Ape Man has demonstrated unmatched popularity in almost ALL media outside the printed page. Let me close then with one of Edgar Rice Burrough's greatest descriptive quotes from the original "Tarzan of the Apes" "Mother Was a Lovely Beast..."

Red Dawn (2012)

Y'know it probably isn't a good idea to remake a bumptious xenophobic anti-communist "classic" with a cast seeded with all too pretty Australians. I mean you haven't heard sheer irony in a flat mid pacific accent until your hear Chris "Thor" Hemsworth inspire his scrappy band of American guerillas with a cataract of Patriotic sentiments. I mean sheee-it can't the commies invade and occupy Canberra for once? Then maybe some American actors can stumble into some work... *** The problem with "Red Dawn" (2012) is plain and simple it is a famously anti-appeasement plotline, alas the people who made this misbegotten mess chickened out completely and went the Munich route digitally reconfiguring the film in post production to excise the original Chinese invaders and replacing them with...North Koreans. Oh and the big McGuffin in this script, Chris Hemsworth's scrappy rebels have to steal North Korea's unhackable walkie-talkie system. *** It seems The People's Republic of China is a biii-ig export market for US Films so everyone had nice Neville Chamberlainish second thoughts about offending the Middle Kingdom to say nothing of awakening their terrible wrath. You can't denounce appeasement by...appeasing, that sort of cognitive dissonance is strictly Mitt Romney in form and content. *** The current version suffers from the angst of Modern Conservatism, sans communism to denounce & exploit today's wingnuttery are reduced to pumping hot air into the ruptured envelope of Muslim Extremism, North Korean Irredentism etc, all pale shadows of the original Red Threat. Hell the original anticommunist films of the 1940's & 50's are counter cultural classics compared to this bilge..."The Red Threat" (1948), "My Son John" (1952) or the utterly demented "Red Planet Mars" well worth screening in revival. Not so "Red Dawn", cowardice fairly leaks off the screen, what would R. Emmett Tyrell & Bill Safire say about such truckling before Peking?? Anyway NORTH KOREA??? Give me a break the Minuteman Council of the Boy Scouts of America could take them down in a week who are these mooks kidding???

May the Mouse be With You...

Lucasfilm has sold out completely to Disney, netting George Lucas a four billion dollar windfall. My first impressions of the acquisition were entirely venal and sarcastic "George Lucas loves Money like a Hog Loves Slop" to paraphrase the late lamented Earl K. Long. Of course I resent the "corporatization of fantasy", but I then again I truly wonder what a Star Wars movie with worthwhile dialogue would entail.... Shee-it if The Mouse has any brains they will coproduce the new franchise with Pixar...that might be a Star Wars worth anticipating at long last.

"The Man with the Iron Fists" (2012)

Y'know, I wanna believe that RZA can produce, direct and star in a successful revival of the classic formula chop-socky epics of the 1970s...Honestly I am pulling for him to be the next Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan....even the next Alexander Lo Rei. And the film has it's merits, good pacing, akin to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" sans all that lovey-dovey stuff. And his CAST! Ricky Yune, David Bautista (who has future in the movies IMHO),Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe at his most dissolute and cameos from Gordon Liu &Pam Grier as well! And it isn't like RZA doesn't have the best sort of an education to be a martial arts movie star, like me he clearly watched a lot of "Ocean Shores Video LTD" titles on VHS back in the day.

Alas though, the man just doesn't have the acting skills or the physical props to carry an all up Wu Shu movie, I admire his moxie, I hope he perseveres in his efforts to revive the genre but this film was a bit of a glorious well intentioned misfire. I think RZA needs to direct and write and find someone to act as his on camera muse...exactly who that person would be I cannot say, but Gina Carana is surely at loose ends she might do some business goin' forward.

Y'know...

THIS is a good book! Why? Edgar Rice Burroughs just communed with his audience, it wasn't enough to send Tarzan to a land of prehistoric monsters and cave people, oh no he had to throw in reptile men, man-apes, a Zeppelin, a sexy cave princess and of course, 17th Century Pirates! The man practically invented "Fan Service"....

Atlas Shrugged Part Two (2012) or "Fear and Loathing in Galtsylvania"

Let the record show that I had to pay $10.50 at the Woburn Ma multiplex to finally hear Raymond Joseph Teller (of "Penn & Teller" fame) actually say something in a motion picture. Too bad that motion picture is "Atlas Shrugged Part II" a cheaply made, crudely acted mishaugas that doggedly cashes in on the classic objectivist novel and it's cult appeal. Teller must have wanted to speak up in defense of his well know libertarian principles in the worst possible way....and so he did. There is just something grimly ironic about a group of artistic nonentities creating a two hour long piece of utter hackwork whose core mission it is to denounce and deplore the mediocrities that persecute the producing class. *** It is important to locate Ayn Rand within a larger continuum of 20th century political thougt, that is the ongoing quest for a rigorous Counter-Marxist system of thought. For a while there, Counter Marxism was Big Medicine within and without political science with a diverse range of players everyone from Dr. Fred C. Schwarz to Billy Graham, William F. Buckley, William Simon (that founder of numberless conservative think tanks in Washington DC) along with heavy hitting intellectuals like Eric Voegelin and Friedrich Hayek and numerous others along for the ride. There were some serious charlatans mixed in there as well, Counter-Marxism could be a lucrative intellectual discipline if you played your cards right. And right there at the center of the maelstrom was Russian refugee, novelist, screenwriter & philopher Ayn Rand who saw no validity to anyone else's system of thought but her own, even her fellow Counter-Marxists. It is ironic to note that in some ways, Rand was a better Bolshevik than she herself realized, utterly humorless, zealous to the point of fanatism and a militant atheistic to her dying day....and indeed its her Godlessness that put her at lifelong odds with the more conventionally spiritual US Anti-communists, the William F. Buckleys and Billy Grahams. No, Rand believed in elites, good old fashioned Pre-Marxist Nietzchean elites, success was the indispensible indicator of superiority, as long as wealth favored cunning then the elites were secure and the masses can go hang. This is a ideology of particular appeal to US Sophomores, everyone wants to belong to an elite, especially in college, unself conscious mediocrities on the other hand always crave a caste of helots and thralls to patronize and deplore. It was all so simple simple enough to ensnare two generations of college sophomores. What unites Rand with Buckley and Schwarz and all the rest is the unstated notion that the confrontation with Marxism-Leninism is somehow a crisis of faith, and that what gives communism its power over the masses is the fervor and density of the belief system. The response therefore is simple anti-communists must generate and then simultaneously proclaim a powerful Counter-Marxist Creed and transform the whole confrontation into a cosmic war for intellectual, spirit and physical supremacy. There is something ironic about so famous an atheist as Ayn Rand birthing an entire system of theology for others to moon over and worship, but then again there was always a dead void where Counter Marxism's sense of humor should have been. To which I stand athwart the whole process and cry HALT!! A clash of faiths, especially synthetic ones derived from political philosophy is a conflict uniquely freighted with fantasy distortion and cognitive dissonance. Moreover you read history, economics, sociology and mere factuality right out of the argument. Faith is easy, the facts are always hard to find and tougher to proclaim. *** Ah but the movie is was awful, the SyFy does it better with it's Saturday Afternoons devoted to "Mega Octo-Squid versus the Atomic TornadoQuake" they certainly take the time to collect and rehearse better actors. I think SyFy stalwart Debbie Gibson would definitely make a better Dagny Taggart than Samantha Mathis...Gibson would pout less and wouldn't perhaps bark her orders with so much uncertainty. Ah but these are true believers we are talking about, all they need is a threadbare $20 million dollar production to sell to the true believers for the next generation or more. Certainly a mere two years ago word on the street was the two planned sequels to "Atlas Shrugged" were cancelled on grounds of poor box office, clearly DVD sales made up for this or a new collection of suckers were dug up to back the franchise. It is also notable that nearly the entire franchise was recaast from part one to part two with no appreciable improvement in the delivery of Rand's leaden self satisfied dialogue. And indeed we must recall when we see films as bad as "Atlas Shrugged Part II" that to the end of his life Ed Wood Jr. insisted that "Plan Nine from Outer Space" was a very serious anti-nuclear movie.

Channel Zero Returns This Friday Night!

With a screening of "Journey Into Fear" (1942) (Allegedly) Directed by Norman Foster Joseph Cotten stars in this classic WW II spy movie as a befuddled American engineer who must flee wartime Turkey with Nazi Assassin's in pursuit! Starring Joseph Cotten, Ruth Warwick, Jack Moss, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorhead & Delores Del Rio. See this movie & recall one of the great mysteries of Hollywood's Golden Age, "Did Orson Welles Really Direct Journey into Fear"? This Friday October 12th 8pm The Somerville Theatre (micro cinema) 55 Davis Square Somerville MA Admission $5 (CHEAP!) 617 625 5700 Good Luck Finding Us on Facebook!! *** Y'know,let the record show that every time, Orson Welles tried to reintroduce himself to Hollywood it was usually with some sort of a thriller movie. This is sort of ironic given his reputation as an iconic auteur of heavy dramas. Stop and think though, "The Stranger"(1946) was spy drama designed to repair Welles' reputation for profligacy and "Artiness" after the whole It's All True/Magnificent Ambersons mishaugas. "The Lady from Shanghai"? A doomed bid to land himself a production deal at Columbia using the unique leverage of Welles own wife Rita Hayworth over Studio Boss Harry Cohn. The result was a quirky noir that is one of Rita Hayworth's best films...even if she plays a thoroughly disreputable character. In 1958 Welles made yet another attempt to re-enter the Hollywood ranks with the very last of the noir thrillers "Touch of Evil". Hell the very first property the Mercury Theater optioned was a spy story called "The Smiler with a Knife". Taken all together one gets the distinct impression that Welles was constantly trying to create a default position for himself in Hollywood as a sort of domestic brand of Alfred Hitchcock. Who was perhaps the Wellesian ideal, a superb artist with a robust record of success at the box office. As for "Journey into Fear" the script is a bit of a mess (little of the source novel's risque atmosphere makes it into the screenplay) but the whole thing is enlivened by an excellent Mercury Theater cast and a sock-o ending worthy of Hitchcock at his best. Supposedly Norman Foster directed the film, but we here at Channel Zero have our doubts...maybe Orson Welles did direct this film after all- It sure looks like an Orson Welles movie if shot on the fly a bit...

Come and see for yourself!

Late word comes to us

that WMFP-TV Channel 62 in Lawrence Ma has changed hands from the eminently watchable "ME-TV" with the re-runs of "The Rifleman:,"Lost in Space" and "Batman" to something called "Plum-TV" defined as "Lifestyle Television" ergo infomercials, 24-7. Appalling! WMFP-TV was quite literally the last place on basic cable where one could see Van Williams and Bruce Lee in "The Green Hornet"on the small screen the Way Ghod Intended! Oh well I guess it is back to watching Texas'unfolding "Feral Pig Crisis" on A&E. More and more I suspect that if we do not want to live in a television world dominated by the thrilling antics of pawn shop clerks, we may have to make a Last Stand on Local Cable Access.

Marie Antoinette at the A.R.T.

Y'know I liked this play, but I did not love it. But that is a huge concession from me given the A.R.T.'s record of artistic bungling nigh these past five years or so. Oh it is a flashy witty production to be sure, anchored by a bravura performance from Brooke Bloom as the doomed Queen of France she goes easily from a sort of Lucille Ball clown to a trembling haughty Hepburn facing that final blade. Ms. Bloom seems bound for bigger places based on this performance. If I have a complaint its that the scenario is nigh hilarious in the first act and then as the Royal Family faces deposition and execution it darkens and darkens to pitch black. But then again that tracks pretty much with the broad flow of French History before and during the revolution, first farce then the massacre. Kudos to dramatist David Adjmi for catching that aspect of the story. As for the A.R.T.I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest their current fascination with all things transgressive, flashy and contemporary strongly suggests they ought to abandon all classical revivals and confine themselves to new plays a'la The Gate Theatre in Dublin. There is nothing worse than watching the A.R.T. work a disco glitter ball into something like Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. They are doing "Pippin" in december, that seems like a good start.

Pick of the Week...

is undoubtedly Carmine Gallone's 1926 silent Italian epic "The Last Days of Pompeii" screening at 4pm Sunday September 23rd at the Harvard Film Archive (for free no less!).

Carmine Gallone was a reliable hack who directed any number of forgettable fare under the aegis of Benito Mussolini back when the Blackshirts ruled the roost. His high point was directing "Scipio Africanus" (1937) a bloated lumbering epic given to celebrating the joys of Roman colonization in North Africa. After the war his career staggered on directing costume epics until the early 1960's....the man was nothing if not consistent. Well, we should know, Channel Zero first screened "Scipio Africanus" over ten years ago at the Coolidge Corner Theater. I just wanna say that this appears to be the third time in a year that the HFA has screened films dating from the Italian Fascist era, a film making epoch which, up until now, has been pretty much been the province of Channel Zero. Oh well, this is the HFA we are talkin' about they at least understand the worth of the film. But I reiterate, anyone out there who can get me a line on North Korean propaganda films....drop me a little note. Either that or wartime Japanese fare...I'm starting to get desperate...

Channel Zero Returns Next Month!!

With a screening of "Journey Into Fear" (1942)

(Allegedly) Directed by Norman Foster

Joseph Cotten stars in this classic WW II spy movie as a befuddled American engineer who must flee wartime Turkey with Nazi Assassin's in pursuit!
Starring Joseph Cotten, Ruth Warwick, Jack Moss, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorhead & Delores Del Rio.
See this movie & recall one of the great mysteries of Hollywood's Golden Age,

"Did Orson Welles Really Direct Journey into Fear"?

Friday October 12th 8pm
The Somerville Theatre (micro cinema)
55 Davis Square
Somerville MA
Admission $5 (CHEAP!)
617 625 5700
Good Luck Finding Us on Facebook!!
Channel Zero, now in our sixteenth year of genteel video transcendence…

Late word comes out of Somerville

of the unexpected death of Courtney Wayshak last week.
Long ago, in the life before The Internet made grubby pamphleteers of us all, Courtney was our editor and friend at the now defunct Boston Comic News. He was charming, full of anecdote and encouragement for the writers and artists in his charge....Courtney made an unpaid writing gig at an obscure publication into an adventure, a duel with giants, a ribald comedy and an epic of youth.

He will be missed, Peace to His Ashes, Succor to his Loved Ones.

Meanwhile back in the Granite State

Photographer Evelyn Lamprey has her first gallery show ever at The Studio in Laconia New Hampshire.

Yeah I KNOW it is a schlep but this is a new artist in the making, yuh wanna get in on the ground floor of something good doncha?

***
Ah Laconia, had a lot of fun there back when I was a wee summer camp counselor...Did a lot of good laundry, got spurned righteously by the local girls....

The Final trumpet Sounds on the Red Line....

This evening on the Red Line a gorgeous young blonde haired woman sat down opposite to me wearing a pair of unlaced boots and a diaphanous white sun dress. No purse, no book bag, no IPod, I could not figure out how she paid her fare. She was utterly unencumbered.
She had a placid untroubled countenance, imagine a benign version of Paris Hilton. By the time we reached Downtown Crossing I noticed she was cradling a tiny brown kitten in her lap...and by the time we reached Park Street I was convinced she was the very Angel of Death come to ring down my final reckoning.
Truly the only other thing she had on her ghostly person was a tiny pair of safety scissors, a very surreal scene to be sure.

She had to be an angel, she sure as shit wasn't leaping over the turnstyle in that teensy little dress. She got off at Alewife, my very stop just to make it all very very Gothic indeed...I searched the platform the shades of my Honorable Ancestors were nowhere to be seen.
The Angel meanwhile disappeared up the stair still petting her tiny little kitten....no doubt to return from the Divine Altitudes from whence she came.

Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Batusi...

"Some Days, You Just Can't Get Rid Of A Bomb!"

Such was the dilemma for Adam West in 1966 and such was the climax of "The Dark Knight Rises" in 2012, Bruce Wayne escapes a glacially slow moving "inescapable death trap" in Anarchystan only to spent the last ten minutes of the film careening around Gotham CIty trying to defuse a "Four Megaton Nuclear Device" with an inane five month fuse.

Spoiler Alert (Weapons Research & Development Division), You can't fly a four megaton H-Bomb out to sea via Bat Helicopter and hope to spare Gotham City, blast fire radiological effects and very likely a "nuclear tsunami"as well.

My point is, that director Christopher Nolan wanted to end his Bat-Trilogy on a Wagnerian note in the worst possible way, and he succeeded beyond Warner Brother's wildest dreams. What they got was a huge box office, what we got was a hopeless game of connect the dots, from yawning plot hole to plot hole.
I mean Bane can punch holes in marble columns, but Batman smacks the bad guy in the fetish-mask a few times and the Gramsci quoting lout virtually falls to his knees in a swoon.
And DON"T get me started about Talia, the dumbest passive aggressive bimbo on Batman's A-List of super villainy, seriously her big plan to steal the Wayne Family's personal nuke and vaporize Gotham CIty???
Whaddya callit..."Operation Thunderball"??!!
The Caped Crusader has a few too many unoriginal lackwits in his very crowded rogue's gallery, he can afford a cut a few out without damaging his bottom line...
***
For all that the movie was was magnificently acted, Christian Bale is officially in Chris Reeves orbit in terms of character identification, he let nothing slip thru out the entire cycle, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Tom Hardy....superlative work down the line redeeming a hash of a script.
Oh and Ann Hathaway as Catwoman, freaking amazing...I initially disparaged the choice when I heard it, I'd like to take a moment to publicly apologize, like Bale, she let nothing slip past her for two hours and forty five minutes, her intensity and focus helped save a film with an out of control script.
No doubt even as I write this she is being bombarded with ideas for a solo Catwoman film "RESIST ANN RESIST!" I cry "Remember Halle Berry!"

In short great cast, hopeless script mired in excess....Nolan has done better work elsewhere.

Pick of the Week!

Is undoubtedly The Harvard Film Archive's revival of "The Island of Lost Souls" (1934) starring Charles Laughton as Dr. Moreau, HG Wells' infamous maker of animal-human hybrids.
For years this bad baby did no circulate on the revival circuit as Paramount was uneasy with the unsubtle hints of rape, bestiality and homosexuality....1934 was clearly a tad too early to explore John Waters' territory! I must have requested it a dozen times for the olde Orson Welles Sci Fi Marathon..Well here it is at last screening on Quincy Street in the teeming heart of Harvard Square and it even includes a stellar cameo appearance by Bela Lugosi as the beastmen's nominal lawgiver.
The balloon goes up at 9:30pm Sharp be there, this is a once in a lifetime big screen screening....

HRH Elizabeth Regina, of England Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland....

Now reduced to co-starring with Daniel Craig like she was Keira Knightley or some damn thing.

Proposed Caption; "The Things That I Do For England, God Almighty but I Miss the Luftwaffe!!"

Pick of the Week!

The HFA is screening Marlon Brando's only directorial effort "The One Eyed Jacks" (1961) tonight at 7pm.

Go figure, it's a western from a famously pro-American Indian activist...

Well whatever, it has to worth seeing, if only because it hales from an era when Brando still took his craft seriously and had artist goals (however vague and unobtainable they may have been).
I could write about the man all day long, his excesses and mistakes were only matched every step of the way by his supreme ability.

Pick of the Week!

This Friday, July 20th, celebrate the sixty eighth anniversary of "Operation Valkyrie Day" with a rare screening of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis in "Artists and Models" at the Harvard Film Archive.
9pm, sharp...and yes Shirley MacLaine does get all tarted up as Dean & Jerry's own comic book creation "Bat Lady".
I mean, take THAT Caped Crusader!

Pick of the Week

Run don't walk to the Harvard Film Archive for tonight's 7pm screening of "Wedding March" (1928) directed by and starring da king of da Teutons, Erich von Stroheim and featuring Fay Wray with the ever suffering much put upon,Zasu Pitts.
This film does not normally circulate either in repertory screenings or on DVD owing to the extreme rarity of the film, the HFA had to secure a print from the Library of Congress no less, making tonight's screening an authentic rarity.
Its a silent movie, but that doesn't mean you can talk or check your phone messages or anything...

Robert Blake may be

guilty of murder, but the fact that he called the repellent and corrupt Piers Morgan "Charlie Potatoes" to the CNN's host's hateful little face, is just too precious and lovely for words.

Happy Belated Birthday

Richard Starkey, late of The Dingle in Liverpool and better know to the universe as Ringo Starr.

Y'know I've finally decided that Ringo wasn't the most talented or creative member of The Beatles, but he did have was charisma, loads of it.
Consider that he replaced Pete Best after what amounted to coup within the band itself thus making the drummer's sinecure inherently perilous as far as The Beatles were concerned.
And EMI was pushing back on the band with respect to Ringo's musicality...and the fan reaction in England to his inclusion was awful to say the least.
But Ghod love him, Starr turned it all around, wove a spell over the audience, got his band mates behind him and somehow convinced EMI that he was a valued member of the team.
And it was charisma that carried him through it all, when Peter Best clearly demonstrated his hold on The Beatle's fanbase, John, Paul and George did naught but ceaselessly plot his downfall.
When Ringo demonstrated and even greater appeal, John Paul & George shrugged and repaired to the green room to write songs for Ringo to sing.

Like I said, charisma....

Question for the Day....

How badly does Bill Murray want to win an Academy Award?

Consider the record..."The Razor's Edge" (1984), Murray 2003 Best Actor nomination for "Lost in Translation" and his ongoing association with Wes Anderson (a director who could well end up winning Best Picture by accident one of these days).
Now comes word of a historic impersonation, FDR no less in the yet to be released "Hyde Park on the Hudson".
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just luvs historic impersonations...just sayin'.
The question is, why does Bill Murray want to win an Oscar?
He might be the least ego driven actor in Hollywood (which ain't sayin' much I know)...Lots of actors want the Oscar for reasons of unquiet neuroses (Jim Carrey) or else sheer vanity (Robin Williams) but Bill Murray's motivation (if I'm guessing right here) remains utterly inscrutable.
Or else maybe Bill just thinks its a hoot for an actor with no management and no staff and no production company who makes all his commitments in person or over the phone...to win an Oscar.
A subtle way to flip off tinseltown if'n ya think about it.

Well whatever, the acceptance speech will be one for the ages...if I'm guessing right.

Feel free to discuss....

Moonrise KIngdom (2012) Directed by Wes Anderson

THIS is a film for everyone out there who has longed to see Harvey "The Bad Lieutenant" Keitel play a uniformed Boy Scout Leader beneath a flowing walrus moustache.
Otherwise this is the best movie I've seen this summer and illustrates perfectly the notion that everything I know about the opposite sex I learned in the Boy Scouts of America.
I know, the thought chills the blood....

Games I like to play:

"Fakes", generating spurious and entirely non-existent film titles and casts with the stipulation that the cast itself must be reasonably accurate to the era. So the "year" tends to be the important variable along with the captione genre:
Examples:
"The Loves of Rasputin" (1940) starring Bela Lugosi, Maria Montez, Grady Sutton, Jon Hall, Sabu & Shemp Howard

"Fascist Beach Partei" (1964) starring Deborah Whalley, Tommy Kirk, Yvonne Craig, Bobby Watson, Joe Devlin, Harvey Lembeck, with music from Peter & Gordon, The Supremes and Gary Lewis and the Playboys.

"Zorro and Calamity Jane Against the World" (1964) starring Gordon Scott and Joi Lansing

"I Orbited The Moon with an All Girl Crew" (1968) starring Dean Martin, Mary Ann Mobley, Yvonne Craig, Stella Stevens and Wally Cox"

"Django Against Sputnik" (1966) starring Franco Nero, Lee Van Clief and Chelo Alonso

But whether my intent is parody or simply close mimicry, I could never come up with a title as patently ridiculous or a film as inane as "Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter".
As Harrison Ford once told George Lucas on a sound stage far far away "George you can write this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it!"

I sometimes like to imagine

that it might be possible to revive the classic action serials of the 1940's. They say the attention span is ever shortening, well the better serials, from Republic Studios at least, featured chapters no longer than fifteen minutes.
This is as good a place as any to start sez Zolok.
That roughly tracks with the space limitations on a site like Youtube, you could compensate a bit by running serials of say twenty chapters or so. This might be perfect for adventure characters were once popular but are now on the skids, Doc Savage, The Spider, The Phantom....Hell imagine what could be done with a little irony and public domain stalwart like "Calamity Jane".
Of course you'd a studio's backing, money and visionary leadership, all in short supply these days I'm afraid.
Besides the cliffhanger format has changed, evolved and interbred with so many durable genres that it can hardly reconstitute it's original style.
Still it is fun to think about...
I guess in matters both political and cultural, I am a Jacksonian, for the people and against the interests and elite driven top-down institutions. If feature films are being made in the backyards of America no matter how problematic the results then something good is indeed happening.
Meanwhile Channel Zero is gonna offer kowtow to the olde time serials tomorrow night with a rare screening of "Captain Celluloid versus the Film Pirates" (1965) a loving contemporary homage to classic chapterplays.

The Nefarious League of Film Pirates wants to corner the world’s supply of Classic Cinema! Only one man stands in his way, that Masked Marvel of the movies, Captain Celluloid!
Take a contemporary silent movie, a great love for the old Republic Serials a genuine feel for action cinema, and this is what you get, the weirdest Superhero Movie ever made!!
All in Super Monochromoscope!

Plus a surprise or two in the ineffable Channel Zero Style!!

Friday June 29th 8pm Sharp!
The Somerville Theatre Screening room
Admission 5 bucks cheap!
55 Davis Square
Somerville Ma 617 625 5700
Channel Zero Boston’s Cheapest Entertainment Franchise now in our sixteenth year of Genteel Cinematic Transcendence!

Good Luck finding us on Facebook!!

I think that I must've waited

all my life for the advent of home video.

And why?

Because I am a lifelong serial fan and until I was in my twenties classic chapterplays did not really circulate in cinemas or on TV.
Oh Channel 56 once screened all the "Flash Gordon" serials at 11pm on weeknights, a welcome byproduct of the "Star Wars" craze to be sure.
But if you wanted to see "The Purple Monster Strikes" (1945) you had to wait and hope that the feature film ("D-Day on Mars" I LOVE THAT TITLE!) edited out of serial somehow got screened on an obscure UHF station.
Mostly until stuff started showing up on VHS, the serials I wanted to see had to be read about, Glut and Harmon's "The Great Movie Serials" being the then definitive work on the subject.
I can safely say that my ardor for serials is such that the two Kirk Alyn "Superman" serials are both good examples of movies long anticipated with high expectations that in turn lived up to the hype in every way.
Top that "Avatar"!
The genre is dead and gone now and I think that is a helluva shame...silent serials pioneered female action heroes (The Perils of Pauline, the Hazards of Helen, all of which featured brave self reliant heroines in a pre World War One milieu), sound serials help creat modern stunt work and fight choreography and formed the first venues for comic book characters like Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel.
Though almost no one trifles with the genre anymore, serial DNA lives on from every "Dr. Who" cliffhanger to the endless storylines of daytime soap operas.
To say nothing of "Indiana Jones" a last lavish love letter to a bygone genre of film-making.
So it is with some affection that Channel Zero screens "Captain Celluloid versus the Film Pirates" this friday night...a relatively concise silent homage to the old Republic Serials produced under independent circumstances in 1965 by true serial lovers and sadly forgotten since then.
Channel Zero can't screen "The New Adventures of Tarzan" as all 12 chapters would run for four hours of screening time...So Captain Celluloid at 45 or so minutes will do as a good substitute.
And we will have some surprises to screen that night as well to round things out to "feature length".
Anyhow...tell your friends!
"Captain Celluloid versus the Film Pirates" (1965)
Friday June 29th 8pm Sharp!
The Somerville Theatre Screening room
Admission 5 bucks cheap!
55 Davis Square
Somerville Ma 617 625 5700
Good Luck finding us on Facebook!!
Forget Batman, Forsake The Avengers, Captain Celluloid is All The Hero
the Summer of 2012 Needs!!

Star Trek Update...

Per the producer of the new (old) Franchise, there will be No Borg, No "Gary Mitchell", No "Yeoman Rand" (SACRILEGE!) and no Ruk the Android in the upcoming sequel.
Which leaves the door wide open to another gay romp with the Klingons, Tribbles, a return bout with "Gary Seven" or perhaps, just perhaps Harry Mudd's Hour has at Long Last Struck!
This being Star Trek, the Blockbuster Franchise, Mudd will be played be Seth Rogen, and if they can't get him then Jack Black or Jonah Hill (if he can fit the movie in)...with Mudd's Infamous Fembots played by Wanda Sykes, Katherine Heigl and Michelle Rodriguez (assuming Janeane Garofalo has thrown in the towel on movie work)...

All snarkage aside, I like the new Star Trek, but I have a feeling they wanna be a blockbuster franchise and not a science fiction built around "Seeking Out New Life, New Civilizations"....

"Diskovery" on Washington Street in Brighton

is going out of business. It was the last of the great filthy flea bitten used book and records stores in Boston, the ones with all the great buys and a owner willing to negotiate.
With this, and the closure of Movieland on Beacon Street the great age of Bohemian Independent Shopping experience in Boston draws to a very sad close, at least insofar as books and sundry entertainment goes.
Brookline and Allston Brighton once bastions of offbeat independent retailers, is gonna get less interesting and a lot more standardized, but don't worry Panera Bread and StarBucks will no doubt make sure neither storefront is idle for long.
Meanwhile I threw down $15 for some used paperbacks, Diskovery is still stuffed with bargains for anyone willing to make a last book & music run.
And yes, they've got vinyl!

The Venerable Harvard Square Cinema

is closing next month.

That causes a bit of a pang, back when they were an independent in the pre-Home Video days the "Daily Double Feature" was a veritable film school unto itself.
I saw there...
"Night of the Living Dead"
"Dawn of the Dead"
"Fritz the Cat"
The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat"
"Clockwork Orange"
"Pink Flamingoes"
"Female Trouble"
"Desperate Living"
"Dr. Strangelove" (of course)
All the Marx Brothers Canon...
"Flesh Gordon"
"Broadway Danny Rose"
"The Creature from the Black Lagoon" (in 3D)
"Enter the Dragon"
"The Man who Fell to Earth"
"Woodstock"
The List Goeth On...
Back in High School it was a very easy going venue if you were a kid when a definite yen to see R-Rated Movies.
Geez if I owned this venue, I'd probably try and get a wine and beer license a'la the Somerville Theatre, I'd repurpose the main theater as an occasional live venue (What is left of Harvard Square once vibrant live music scene??), try and get some traction in the community (in the fashion of the Coolidge Corner) and aim a lot of my content at the best walk-in crowd in the city, college students.

The Parking in Harvard Square is crappy to say the least, but the venue is on the Red Line with thousands of 18 to 24 year old's forcibly domiciled nearby, there has to be something that can be done with a mix like that.
Oh and I'd also repurpose one of the theaters as a micro cinema for rent to local film fans etc.

Y'know for all those other Channel Zero's out there...
:D

Pick of the Week...

"Khrustalyov, My Car!", being a sort of film memoir of Joseph Stalin's final days screening at the Harvard Film Archive Saturday Night @ 7pm.

Hell All Channel Zero did was screen Stalin's bloated "Funeral Film", and now the HFA comes along, grabs our idea and comes up with a title three times as good as what we had!
It's like when Salieri wrote a fanfare for Mozart, only to watch the young genius take his labored march and turn it into something exquisite.
Anyway...this one sounds very interesting and we never begrudge one of the majors when they work our side of the street, the Big Guys have the reach after all to extract maximum value from a screening.

Our Current Flyer....

Apologies for the crude JPG format which does not do justice to the punchy character of the flyer. The Franchise Marshal did an outstanding job this time, the whole thing just pops off the page!
My only complaint, the great age of bulletin boards has entered it's twilight, we are compelled to hunt just a bit for appropriate spaces wherein to tack this bad baby up for all to see or just drop a stack of flyers for folks to pick up.
Damned internet...
This is an interesting irony as our anecdotal "audience research" at our recent screenings indicates fully half the paying audience is hooked in by these flyers!

There is nothing quite like a weekend

given over to a screening of "Prometheus" (junk) and then John Carpenter's 1998 remake of "The Children of the Damned" (sad junk) to put one off the genre of horror-sci fi movies entirely.
***
Sometimes I think that the whole film making process must needs be democratized, the most interesting genre films these days are being made in backyards under amateur circumstances.
I mean, look at these guys, they've decided to revive the chapterplay era lock stock and barrel.
Someone ought to make a real horror film up in New Hampshire, lots of scary places and scenes up there to work with...Ever been to Hampton Beach in October?? An indescribable Poe-like atmosphere permeates the resort town, that and a slate grey mist that roles off the ocean and has to conceal monsters on the other side.
For that fact, someone ought to make an old fashioned horse opera western here in Massachusetts. I can think of a number of rural areas that would make an appropriate backdrop. Be straightforward about it and try to avoid the cliches that have all but taken over that genre.
I mean think about it, a Spaghetti Western shot entirely on location in the Berkshires amidst the Commonwealth's own ghost towns the ruined factories and mills of our bygone industrial past.
Think on it anyways...My main point is, that as certain skills and trades become obsolete, some of them inevitably fall into the hands of artists. Printmaking, calligraphy, the production of comic books, all superceded by technological developments and all thriving in the art schools of America. Maybe feature film-making is about to descend to that very happy level...

Winston Churchill was born in Saint Louis Missouri

was a progressive and a 19th century "goo goo", wrote nine novels, moved to Cornish New Hampshire, sat in the Granite State's legislature (twice) and in 1906 came within an ace of the GOP nomination for Governor.
Churchill was the intimate of two US Presidents, notably Woodrow Wilson made the mansion in Cornish NH his summer White House on at least one occasion.

What you don't believe me??
The facts are all there in Black and White on Wikipedia....but tis' strange not a mention of the Battle of Britain or the Yalta Conference.

:D

We got some good ink from

The Boston Sunday Globe today....

Our plan is to let "The Avengers", "The Dark Knight Rises" etc etc "punch themselves out" then deliver a haymaker courtesy "Captain Celluloid"...
So again for the record Channel Zero is screening "Captain Celluloid versus the Film Pirates" Friday, June 29th at eight pm in the Micro Cinema of the Somerville Theatre (55 Davis Sq Somerville Ma), for a mere five bucks.
Anyone with a pronounced taste for the bizarre and outre' is strongly encouraged to attend...And if that don't work we have a few surprises in store that night as well.
***
Meanwhile....For the Love of Ghod Almighty in Heaven Above, avoid "Prometheus" at all costs. It is two tedious hours you will never ever recover, good cast witless script, your time is better served anointing your head with a ball-peen hammer.
It is the worst sort of Hollywood excess, the entirely unnecessary origin story.
Destiny has quit on Ridley Scott, lets be up front about that....

If the Globe is to be believed

2012 allegedly marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Boston Strangler's reign of terror.

So I'm just gonna suggest quietly and disinterestedly, that maybe the Harvard Film Archive (or some comparable entity) might wanna revive the 1968 Tony Curtis adaptation of the whole sorry tale.
"The Boston Strangler" is one of those select films I refuse to watch on DVD owing to the complex split screen cinematography which was really designed to be seen on a forty foot high screen...And only on a forty foot high screen.

Channel Zero can't really traffic in a film like this owing to the modesty of our designated venue, it requires a Big Screen and preferably a fresh print on celluloid.
Well if yer gonna dream, dream big sez I.

RIP Ray Bradbury

Let the record show, that as far as I am concerned, Ray Bradbury's best medium outside the printed page was radio, not movies or TV.
Dimension X's audio adaptation of "Zero Hour" lives on my memory much more vividly than any scene from the "Illustrated Man" starring Rod Steiger.
Why exactly this is, I do not know, maybe it's because of the sheer Hemingway-esque sparseness of Ray's dialogue and descriptive sense.
It all translated but poorly to the visual medium...
Whenever Bradbury needed to send his character's outside the solar system he was content to describe their transport as "a rocket" and leave it at that.
You can't get away with that in Hollywood, no that rocket has to be tarted up like the Battlestar Galactica.
Ray didn't traffic with FTL drives and elaborately appointed doomsday machines, if he needed technology he just got a few old gimmicks out of the prop room no need for CGI or Industrial Light and Magic.
This is what gave his writing such power & focus, and it all stands in stark contrast to say his fellow SF writer E.E. "Doc" Smith with his planet sized alien superbrains and inane dialogue eructated by department store mannikins.
Ray had characters, those were all the SPFX he ever needed.
Like his hero Edgar Rice Burroughs, Bradbury is one of those select authors who follow people right out of childhood and may be read re-read and enjoyed right up to the point of senescence and for a goodly while thereafter.
Now at the age of 91, after a lifetime of inspired other writers and being the very bridge out of the sci fi ghetto and into the mainstream, Ray has passed on.
And if there is a merciful and ironic Ghod in Heaven Above, then yes, Ray awoke at the instant of his death on the red sands of Mars, Dejah Thoris on one side of him and a few of his brownish golden eyes martians giving him the puppy dog eyes on the other...

Apropos of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee...

Isn't it funny how the whole House of Windsor can get tarted up in elaborate military drag, and yet you get no whiff of fascism off of them?

Normally they all look like a bunch of Argentine Colonels that just seized power in a coup, but the Windsors all treat it like it is mere appropriate costumery and nothing at all untoward.
That to me, is a key part of their mystique...

Broadgay Highlights...

Had a chance to disengage for a few days last week and head off to New York City to take in some legit the-aterrr.
And this is what I saw:

"The Best Man", a revival of Gore Vidal's 1960 drama about the backstage politics at a presidential nomination convention that features extended supporting turns by James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury.
Who knew that in their eighth decade such an accomplished pair of actors would shamelessly caper, cavort, mug & upstage the leads out a pure thirst for thunderous applause?
I sh*t you not about that applause, Jones and Lansbury's every entrance and exit is greeted by prolonged adulatory clapping.
Alas Candice Bergen, comes in very little of this, she has to get by with being merely excellent in every way.
As I said, it is all very shameless and at times overshadows the contest between the lead characters (John "Night Court" Larroquette and Eric "Will & Grace" McCormack)as a Former US Secretary of State and a US Senator who traffic in accusations of homosexuality and mental illness on their way to an un-named party's presidential nomination circa 1960 or so.
Nonetheless, it is fine revival in every way, we often forget Gore Vidal's talent for witty dialogue and prophetic political set-ups.
Now, to hear Vidal tell it, the play was a sort of meditation on the emerging 1960 presidential contest between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. I myself have always suspect that the whole thing was really about the internal GOP rivalry between then Vice President Nixon and New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller both of whom clashed in the GOP presidential primaries that year.
Nonetheless it was well worth it, how many more times can you see Angela Lanbury shamelessly upstage five other actors in one go or see James Earl Jones play a blusterly ex-president and come off a little bit like Teddy Roosevelt in the process?
See it, it is strong in the hind legs and well worth your time.

The Columnist: I had to take the Acela to Manhattan to find out that the late Joseph Alsop was gay.
I have no defense either I have a master's degree in political science...You'd a thought it would have come up during all those discussions about the Viet Nam War??!
Anyhow this is another winner, John Lithgow is freakin' amazin' as the erudite, witty painfully uptight Alsop who is tormented by the fact that he had to reveal his homosexuality to the FBI in order to forestall an attempt to blackmail him by the KGB.
So tormented is he, that the columnist works himself into a anti-communist frenzy banging the pots for war in Viet Nam even as the elite Washington strata he inhabits cracks crumbles and disintegrates.
Alsop was a bastard, and Lithogw plays him as such but a human even humane bastard, a man whose sexuality prevents him from embracing the past and whose politics prevent him from facing the future with any poise.
As bad as Alsop was, I almost miss him, who stands in his place?
That shameless shill George Will? Rush "Oxycontin" Limbaugh...Laura "Hollow Leg" Ingraham...a gruesome unwholesome lot to be sure. If Alsop was alive he'd never invite any of them to one of his elite dinner parties no matter how much they might agree with him.
So basically I spent forty eight hours on Broadway immersed in the politics of homosexuality circa 1960...

Pick of the Week

2012 marks the fiftieth Anniversary of Orson Welles' adaptation of "The Trial".

Kafka is of course, nigh unfilmable, but Orson gave it the old college try anyway with remarkable results..


The Brattle Theatre is reviving it today at 1:30pm and then again at 7pm, see how far one man can go with no money and an unlimited fund of genius.

Gym Notes:

#1) Comedy Central broadcasts the original "Revenge of the Nerds" (1984) with all the rude gestures, Anglo Saxon expletives & sundry explicitness lovingly blocked, obscured and or bleeped out.

AND THEN runs commercials extolling a "name brand" condom that features a frantic young woman careening thru a pharmacy searching for prophylactic latex with real pleasure inducing properties.


#2) (Duly noted after watching the first twenty minutes of "The Love Guru") Say what you like, but Mike Myers is a talented "Voice Man" cut from the same clothe as his idol, the Late Peter Sellers.
Without execrement jokes though, Mike Myers would starve or else have to back to digging ditches on Thunder Bay.

July is Wide Open...

no update on the Harvard Film Archive's Calendar as yet. So why not some suggestions? Well let me mark out hard once again for a proper Charlton Heston retrospective, That Axiom of American Cinema is long overdue for a critical re-evaluation...Especially if some of Heston's early TV work could somehow get dredged up! And while we are at it, I wanna strongly suggest a Don Siegel retrospective, mostly cued because I saw his one collaboration with Mickey Rooney "Baby Face Nelson" and thought that anyone who went from Mickey Rooney to Clint Eastwood was ready for their moment in the sun.

Moreover how about Sam Fuller, nobody has a good review of his career leastways in Boston. How about it? C'mon everyone wants to see "The Steel Helmet" on the big screen!!!