The Summer of 2013, An Autopsy...

Took me a while to gather my thoughts, but I suspect, just suspect that the Summer of 2013 will go down in the Annals as the very moment when Hollywood went over the hump, never to return. The litany of catastrophe and humiliation is a long and appalling one, an Iron Man sequel that pit a worthy like Robert Downey Jr against genetically engineered lava-men, a Lone Ranger movie that Will Live In Infamy and "The Man of Steel", a film that compares unfavorably with self induced blunt force impact trauma with a ball peen hammer. The list goes on seemingly endless and indistinguishable Pixar animated epics, a collection of horror films seemingly shot on a smartphone in the same clothes closet and of course, a Brad Pitt zombie movie...as if that is brand enhancement. The collapse has been in truth, a long time a-comin', the rise of committee rule extending it's top down iron clad rule to even the most trivial film projects, a foolish bid to ingratiate with overseas audiences and a editing zeitgeist that favors running the film stock thru a lawn mower. To say nothing of the millions being wasted time after time...more and more spent to achieve less and less. Tinseltown's answer to this season's debacle, Ben Affleck as Batman in the upcoming "Batman versus Superman" epic. Unlike everyone else on the internet, I'm fine with Affleck at Batman, he might even be good at it, he certainly won't do the role any disservice. No my issue is with Zack Snyder et all, they'll make a the same gruesome ruin of "The World's Finest Heroes" that they made of "Man of Steel". I'm convinced Affleck did it to secure financing for some directorial project to be named later... No the best action film I saw this summer was the much reviled "KickAss 2"...mostly because the filmmakers managed to match up the semi inept KickAss (Aaron Taylor Johnson) with weedy Wall Cox-esque Christopher Mintz-Plasse whilst Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz)finally gets a fight worthy of her homicidal skill set, a one eyed female Russian bodybuilder. Subtle just won't do in the KickAssverse. Sheee-it I got myself invested in a line up like that... Critics hate the KickAss "franchise" mostly because they prefer their foulmouthed killer vigilantes be Hugh Jackman and not a teenaged Chloe Grace Moretz...me I love the girl, she is pure screen violence done right. Nope the last bastion of creativity in Hollywood is among the comedies, "The Heat", "The World's End" and "The Way Way Back" all had a strong auteur feel to them, the writing was universally tight in each case...but lets face facts, It's the Twilight of the Gods Out There in Beverly Hills...and hearty laughter always attends on the End Times.

The Battle of Armageddon....(Part One)

This has been God Help Us, an Awful summer for movies, when Hollywood can't even get The frickin' Lone Ranger right something seriously has gone wrong with the American Entertainment Zeitgeist. Hell the only superhero movie that did anything at all for me in 2013 was Chloe Grace Moretz in "Kick Ass 2".... But even as the shades of summer depart, The Mendon Twin Drive In has hurled it's defiance at the Whole World by scheduling A Full Month of Repertory Screenings All thru September...Starting this Friday and Saturday, its a Double Feature of "Jaws" (1975) and "Back to the Future" (1985)!!! To my knowledge this is a First in Local Drive In History, normally these venues tend towards family friendly first run double features, these revival screenings are literally breaking new ground! Anyhow click on the link to the right for all the details, this is quite literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, to see any of these films in the outdoor setting is naught but a miracle!! All I can say is, tell your friends, In Mendon, At the Drive In, It Is ON!!!

The Canine Moment in Arlington Ma....

My next door neighbors, own a "cotton poodle", that barks at me whenever I walk past their house in a tone that seems to say "Okaaaa-ay I'm gonna bark at you now....don't get scared, I'm the dog here, I'm obligated to bark thats all". Inevitably, I bark back at the cotton poodle...with as friendly a "woof" as a man can muster. Eventually my neighbors children asked me why I barked at their dog...and so I told them that I had conspicuously failed to teach the dog to speak english, I was forced to try to learn the secret language of suburban canines. And my next door neighbor's kids are good sports, they haven't turned me in to Bridgewater State Hospital...

"The World's End" (2013)

Simon Pegg claims that "Nostalgia is the Enemy" in his new comedy "The World's End". And indeed he is onto something as aging lad Gary King a man child layabout leads the remnants of his now middle aged high school posse on a last tour of twelve pubs in the grotty suburb of their misspent youth only to find benevolent but bossy aliens underfoot. The evils of nostalgia and "past worship" might've come off a little stronger if writer & star Simon Pegg along with director Edgar Wright didn't serve up a comical homage to Jack Finney's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" right down to the nominal climax Ah but I quibble this film is the closest thing to a gem this summer, ant film that can take portly pasty and very middle aged Nick Frost and turn him into a veritable Sammo Hung, is aces high in my books. I think Simon Pegg is sort of weedy English Genius with just enough geek cred to prosper in Hollywood, I think it helps that he has come along as Tinseltown has lurched into self parody and gigantism...his ideas all seem to properly scaled and sane by comparison to the outlandish expectations of his alleged competition. Unlike Seth Rogen or Jonah Hill (both of whom I do like), I don't expect Pegg to fly off a cliff anytime soon pursuing a billion dollar box office pay off. The Greats didn't worry about their next project or their projected returns, they stayed focused on Being Funny Now...That seems to be Pegg's Agenda pure and simple. More power to him sez I.

Did I mention....

We are on Facebook with a Fan Page? Feel free to join....

On the Other Hand or "The Day the Clown Decried" (Part II)

On the Other Hand ("The Day The Clown Decried" Part II) I honestly wonder if Jerry Lewis isn't trying to use reverse psychology on us? He knows "The Day the Clown Cried" is appallingly controversial, he allegedly lacks the rights to release it and supposedly doesn't wanna release it...but suddenly we are getting rivulets of info about the long uncompleted project. He himself asserts here (in so many words) that it is at once unwatchable and yet still an unreleased masterpiece. If I didn't know better I'd think he was trying to create a groundswell out in the aud to complete and release the film. Then again, given the fact that Jerry Lewis' ego long ago outstripped that dried husk once known as his dignity, it probably simply gratifies Le Roi d' Crazy to enroll himself into that elite Hollywood Fraternity of Auteurs with Great Unfinished Film Masterpieces. Its a very heavy duty room there, Orson Welles, Joseph von Sternberg, Sergei Eisenstein, Bruce Lee, Jean-Luc Godard and even Alfred Hitchcock...shit now that I mention it, who wouldn't want in on that action?? Labels: Jerry Lewis - J

Garen Daly is Doing The Lord's Own Work...

the local film impresario is trying to Crowdsource to life, a feature documentary on the sadly departed Orson Welles Cinema in Harvard Square. This is a project well worth the money and long past due as well, I can recall with the simplest nostalgia literally dozens of motion pictures that I saw in that invaluable theater, "Altered States", "Dark Star", "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls", "1984", "Ran", "Liquid Sky", "Hail Mary", "ReAnimator" and on and on. This is on top of DOZENS of good and awful science fiction movies screened at the Annual 24 "It Came from the Orson Welles" marathon every February. My own obsession with the late Sifu, Orson Welles was kindled therein, I met Welles' biographer Barbara Leaming there after a screening of "The Chimes at Midnight", the whole cinema was a film schooling unto itself. On the the day the Orson Welles Cinema burned, the local film scene took a body blow from which it has yet to recover even today nigh a quarter century later. But let us not live in the past, let us learn from it, and if Garen Daly's documentary comes off, then just maybe we'll have a starting point for a real film renaissance here in Boston. Maybe I'm naive' but I think that would be a great thing to strive for...

"The Day the Clown Decried"

A seven minute "making of" clip of Jerry Lewis infamous unfinished & unreleased Magnum Opus, "The Day the Clown Cried" has turned up on Youtube. From what I can see, "The Day the Clown Cried" is what you get when you devote a full decade of your life to dancing in attendance upon Dame Demerol. I've always had a very ambivalent attitude to Jerry Lewis, he can be staggeringly funny, I freely admit it, but then he blows it by trying too hard for too long to top himself. The man's ambition is nigh perfectly balanced by his thin skin and egomania...All of which is sadly encapsulated by the above clip. Rumor was that back in the day, Jerry used to intimate to his nearest and dearest that "The Day the Clown Cried" was his secret incomplete masterpiece nowadays "Le Roi D'Crazy" confesses the whole thing was a disaster that'll never be released. So I guess...even Jerry Lewis can learn...Now if he'd only apologize to Betsy Sherman I could alibi for him with a light and tripping heart.

Late Word Comes to Us

of the sudden death at the age of seventy of the former publisher of Editorial Humor/The Boston Comic News, R. Dean Wallace. Dean gave me and my co-writer Jon Haber our first steady columnist gig and largely stood aside and allowed us to jabber on and on about anything under the sun...sans renumeration of course. What HE got was a column with a pronounced affinity for the Masterworks of Steve Reeves, the scientific mischances of Percival Lowell, The Fall and Rise of Elmer McCurdy or the subtle genius of Earl K. Long. What WE got was a priceless opportunity to perfect our craft, all the writing I have to date was the consequence of lessons I learned for better or worse under Dean Wallace's aegis. Dean was a visionary, only a visionary could have stubbornly hung on in the face of a market less and less friendly to small periodicals for nine long years. He was also supremely eccentric, difficult to negotiate with and prone to flights of fancy as the Victorians would say. But quite literally, he presided over the last Great Newspaper Adventure in the Boston Metropolitan Area, he was never a breaker of proverbs and he will give the Devil His Due. Peace to his Ashes...He will be missed.

Back to the Batcave....

Putting "Batman" dead center in the proposed "Man of Steel" sequel is pretty much confession of failure on the part of the Powers That Be @ Warner Brothers. These dingbats are completely obsessed with making a "billion dollar movie" just like The Avengers, alas the Warner Brothers/DC gang are "Too Dumb to Pour Piss Out a Boot" to quote the late Lyndon Johnson. By their works shall you know them.... But in a larger sense other than Batman which one of DC's many properties is properly launched as a live action franchise? Answer NONE of them! Every time DC has infallibly chosen the wrong script, the wrong actors the wrong director Every Gawd Damned Time. Does anyone here really think if Warner Brothers were truly satisfied with "The Man of Steel" they'd be retreating to the Batcave for the second movie? I hope Brandon Routh is laughing his ass off right now...they don't dare recast the role a third time THAT would be an admission of failure...and DC never ever fails does it?? It signals a lack of faith in the Superman mythos though doesn't it? One final thought, the dominant DC motif is these days is, whenever Kal El and Bruce "team up" it's means Superman is about to be jobbed out to Batman...That is pretty much a sad acknowledgement of Batman's almighty cross platform strength and Superman's continuing creative paralysis since Chris Reeve gave up the role.

The Lone Ranger (2013) Directed by Gore Verbinski

Last sunday night I sat thru the latest and likely last adaptation of the legendary Lone Ranger character for the big screen. It took two hundred and fifty million dollars and a two and a half hour running time to drive home the tragic point that film-wise we have reached the prophesied end times. A worse film cannot be imagined. Stilted, arch, full of strange alleged jokes from Johnny Depp's "Tonto" (who STILL lapses into pidgin english at odd moments), a vapid performance from nominal star Armie Hammer and a berserker climax that looks like it was edited by running the celluloid thru a lawn mower. And all of this to penetrate the overseas market, a final burnt offering of an American Pop Culture Icon...rock bottom, end times, doomsday baby doomsday. I'm calling it folks, the Hollywood is finished, it has hit the auto-destruct button, they aren't dumbing down the product with endless sequels to satiate the allegedly teachable US Aud, no they are producing this dreck to entice overseas ticket buyers. Johnny Depp did well in "Pirates of the Caribbean" therefore he is literally the only actor who can credibly play Tonto in Hunan Province, Bangalore and Brasilia. And in turn this malign ethos is what destroyed The Green Hornet, John Carter of Mars, Superman The Man of Steel and now The Lone Ranger. Hollywood is no longer able to execute competent films with respect to classic adventure properties because the automatic expectation that they must be Global Tentpole Properties. Its worth remembering that back when The Lone Ranger was a low budget TV show back in the racist, sexist 1950's the Producers still somehow found a full blooded Mohawk Indian to play Tonto. Hell that "Legend of the Lone Ranger" bomb back in 1981 had a Amerind Actor playing Tonto....Now today forget about it, its either Johnny Depp or Jack Black. I hear tell, that a New Doc Savage movie is in the offing, this is quite literally a thought to chill the blood, please Ghod Hollywood don't wreck my happy nostalgic memories Ron Ely in the cheap ass misbegotten 1975 film. So keep this in mind: The tendency among high name recognition superhero movie franchises is a failure rate of about 50% (for every "Avengers" there is a "Green Lantern"). Therefore half the time the various franchises must be rebooted in any given situation and the origin "retold & reinterpreted"...at a fifty percent failure rate though this means whole iterations of specific characters in the movies over a generation can be nothing but a succession of origin stories. If I ran Warner Brothers etc, my first dictum would be "Nobody gives a rat's @ss about The Flash's origin"....but I don't run Warner Brothers and that organization is bound and determined NOT to learn from any of it's mistakes. Its worth recalling that Mark Hamill turned "The Trickster" into a game changer on ye olde Flash teevee show and no one thought to load the character up with a lot of origin nonsense. Ditto any number of the villains fro ye olde Batman TV show (his own origin was disposed of in exactly two sentences as I recall)... I could not begin to tell you "The Black Canary's Origin", I am sure I couldn't care less. I do care that the character gets respectful treatment...that is my investment. Well what of it, these people are hell bent for annihilation. Maybe we can still save broadcast television, too bad I watch so very little of that.

Looking forward to all the

Trayvon Martin pistol range targets at the next NRA convention... Look for em'...If they are willing to do Obama, why would mere good taste and deference to the grief of parents stand in anyone's way?

Whatever Happened to George Arliss?

Well what didn't happen to George Arliss? I mean in 1929 at the dawn of the talking picture era, he was the very first British actor to win an Academy Award and for a historic impersonation as well, Benjamin Disraeli. And what the hell he gave Bette Davis her first serious screen role in that oldest and most dependable of Forgotten Hollywood Chestnuts, The Man Who Played God in 1932. Word is, Arliss had to fight the studio to cast Davis, she was ever after grateful to the British Actor. The man had his own Hollywood repertory company,specialized in historical biopics and shaped and controlled his own films years before Orson Welles...and he is largely and unforgivably forgotten today. It might have been his age, he was past sixty when sound came it and his opportunity hit, and then again I am convinced that the DemiGods of the Early Sound Era did not always have staying power as the Golden Age Unfolded. In the 1929-1934 period the box office was dominated by names like Will Rogers, Marion Davies, Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd were still bankable if not necessarily profitable. None of whole would still be at the top of their game by the end of the decade least of all Arliss who for a while there was playing a behind the scenes auteur's game. Still and all that, Arliss managed to produce and star in a number of high end A-List biographical films as the aforementioned Disraeli, Alexander Hamilton, Cardinal Richelieu, the Duke of Wellington and a founder of a Certain International Banking House....the man virtually invented the modern BioPic all by himself! So of course, this guy was just Made for a Channel Zero Screening! And what better film that "The House of Rothschild" (1934)...in which Arliss stars as Nathan Rothschild stalwart Son of Abraham, international banker and sworn foe of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington's prized paymaster. Back during the depression one suspects the only way you could make a Banker the Hero in a movie was make him the underdog, in a word, a Jew...that and make Boris Karloff his Jew-Baiting Nemesis...I mean Rothschild is up against religious prejudice and Frankenstein's Monster in one go, talk about long odds! But then as now, the Jewish Actors all play Gentiles and the Gentile Actors all play Jews...so you see it's a tradition going back decades. So by all means come see the show! "The House of Rothschild" (1934) Starring George Arliss, Boris Karloff, Robert Young and Loretta Young Friday July 12th @ 8pm (sharp!) The Somerville Theatre (Micro Cinema) 55 Davis Square Somerville Ma, 617 625 5700 Admission $ 5 (cheap!) And just try and find us on Facebook, we dare yuh! Channel Zero: Now in our 18th year of genteel cinematic transcendence! Oh we are on Facebook...somewhere....

Tippling on Independence Day Part Two...

Y'know I like "Knockabout Gin" (distilled by Ryan & Wood in Gloucester Ma), it has some bite to it. Sometimes gin per se can be a little too damn subtle it's an American Spin on a classic London Dry Gin. It mixes very well with diet tonic water and the necessary increment of ice. On the other hand, Bully Boy Vodka (certified organic distillers in Boston Ma) get along well with almost all conceivable mixers, from Pineapple Juice to Glaceau Sparking Fruitwater (zero calories)...I suspect Bully Boy Vodka might just be able to insinuate itself with Milk with an aplomb once reserved for the cadres of the Viet Cong.

Tippling on Independence Day...(Part One)

I sampled some of the Nashoba Valley Winery's "Vidal Grappa" last night, it appears to be the only brandy as yet distilled entirely within the confines of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, As such it is a surprisingly light potation with a slight fruitish taste...It mixes well with tonic water and ice to form a proper hot weather libation. "Grappa" is an Italian folk-brandy made from grape leavings of the winemaking process and can be somewhat overpowering, Nashoba Valley Spirits seems to have found a happy medium in their version of the famed potation. It is expensive stuff but well worth the drive to Bolton Mass to invest in locally produce spirits.

Jim Kelly R.I.P.

Let the record show, when Channel Zero screened "Black Belt Jones" (1974) back in 2002 at the Coolidge Corner Theater we sold some seventeen tickets for this seminal martial-arts-blaxsploitation fusion. Ah but our rule of thumb has always been that the "moral imperative to screen certain films is in no way conditioned by said film's potential box office". Suffice to say, we live up to this dictum every time we do a screening. Ah but Jim Kelly was Zen, he had Muhammad Ali's insolent bravado and the martial arts skills to back it all up. Of all the Bruce-Lee Successor-Wannabees (a eclectic assortment that starts with George Lazenby and ends next to Bruce Li) Kelly was probably the most credible. But after a mere five films he gave up on Hollywood took up professional tennis and wrapped himself in such comforting obscurity that rumors of homelessness dogged him for years. Its like he found out that "being Bruce Lee" was a fruitless ambition, my Ghod Robert Clouse must have wept. Bruce Lee though, (who was Zen like yuh read about) would have understood. In fact I myself I had to buttonhole Kelly's former costar Gloria Hendry at a con in East Rutherford New Jersey who assured me Jim was alive and well, reading scripts and turning everything down with a merry smile. Maybe word got back in him, a few years later, there was Jim Kelly at Chiller Theatre in New Jersey cheerily signing autographs. After all being Zen doesn't me you have tolerate rumors of mendicancy. Alas now too young (a mere sixty seven) Jim Kelly is dead....if there is an afterlife organized on principles of Justice then Jim Kelly and Bruce Lee are bowing to one another in the Squared Circle.

My only take away from the Whitey Bulger Trial

is that you cannot become an A-List gangster without mastering the subtle art of snitchwork. Even if you are good at it, sooner or later you run up against a situation wherein access to savage violence and huge stacks of US currency aren't gonna cut it...and at the moment of truth, you'd better know how to sing. So far the Bulger trial is like an audition call back for the Boston Straight Men's Chorus....everyone on key and singing a heartfelt ballad of former friends and business partners. These guys not only have no sense of honor they aren't even good to go with their own much hyped Code of Silence.

It comes as a final irony....

That Richard Matheson up and died the very week that his old "world of the living dead"(as posited in his novel "I Am Legend" 1954) motif reached it's logical conclusion in "World War Z", what started out as a project for the likes of Vincent Price ends up a Tentpole concept fit for Brad Pitt. Ah but that is Matheson unto the last, endlessly "homaged" in other words, the man broke ground early and often. His short stories are masterpieces of economy they ought to be in the core curriculum of any "writing speculative fiction" course on or off line. Moreover, he was one of the few all up A-List postwar fantasists with the capacity to adapt his own work with success, he proved this over and over again on "The Twilight Zone" and then all over the TV schedule during the 1960's. It is a great shame that his taut adaptation of his own book "I Am Legend" was not used by AIP in 1959 in favor of some hackwork written and shot in Rome in the weary wicked end. That original script deserves publication I'd love to get a look at it. Y'know, I have a theory, will never be a faithful adaptation of "I Am Legend" until some decides on a Fan Film version. I mean think on it, there are maybe five speaking parts, all you need is a secluded house as the prime setting, some zombie extras and plenty of brio. And at the age of eighty seven, he lived to have dozens of his ideas homaged and or just plain stolen...as galling as it sounds, that can be a life well lead...

Channel Zero Returns to the Somerville Theatre, Friday July 12th at 8pm!

In a summer abjectly surrendered to Zombies, Superheroes and Seth Rogen, Channel Zero attempts counterintuitive programming with an epic screening of: “The House of Rothschild” (1934) Starring George Arliss, Boris Karloff Robert Young, Alan Mowbray & Loretta Young EUROPE: 1815 – Is it just possible that the only person who stands between Napoleon Bonaparte and World Domination is a Little Jewish Financier from London named Nathan Rothschild? Golden Age Hollywood’s first great character actor George Arliss stars in this rare Historic Biopic as the real life banker who battled both Tyranny and Anti-Semitism! Friday July 12th @ 8pm (sharp!) The Somerville Theatre (Micro Cinema) 55 Davis Square Somerville Ma, 617 625 5700 Admission $ 5 (cheap!) And just try and find us on Facebook, we dare yuh! Channel Zero: Now in our 18th year of genteel cinematic transcendence!

Mensch and Ubermensch...

When Will Smith's superhuman "Hancock" tore up the town in a quest for Justice...indictments were handed down, mandatory sentencing was imposed! In contrast Henry Cavill's Superman wrecked two US municipalities trying to bring down "General Zod"....and with all that damage and casualties, no one thought to call the Justice Department. It's GOOD to be the White Superhero! OKAY! I'm kidding!! Kidding! I love...to kid!

The Man of Steel (2013) Directed by Zack Snyder

Somewhere in the Warner Brothers entertainment complex, perfect superhero scripts are written with the right blend of action, adventure, wonderment and escapism. These scripts are then sent down deep underground to a secure bunker where a trained chimp armed with a 12 gauge shotgun blasts away indiscriminately at the text until it is literally in tatters and riddled with plot holes. That script is then reverently handed over to the captioned director with the admonition he may not deviate one jot from what is therein written. How else to account for "The Man of Steel" a film whose half baked conceit is to turn Siegel and Shuster's creation into a sort of second rate "Wolverine" Wannabee...Warner Brothers is apparently desperate to take Kal El into a new direction In the Very Worst Way and by Ghod they have done it! This is a terrible film, long at times tedious, two thirds of it is utterly incoherent, the last quarter is a bewildering "square up reel" in which Superman's arch nemesis "General Zod" the superhuman Kryptonian General reduce both Smallville and Metropolis in an epic brawl. It looks great but after a while the mind wanders and you start mentally tallying up the hypothetical casualties until some very sobering thoughts are entertained indeed. I'm not even gonna justify it on grounds that it's a good cast undone by a uneven ill conceived script, I'll cut to the chase and simply note that Henry Cavill is fine as Superman but he brings nothing to the role that Brandon Routh didn't offer back in 2006, Michael Shannon's Zod although armed with a better motivation than is usually the case is not gonna make anyone forget Terrence Stamp. This seems to be the summer for second rate early eighties supervillainy tedium and unorginality all in one short season...marvelous. Amy Adams was a bit of fresh air as Lois Lane but she is only that, given the sheer carnage indulged and Superman and Zod really have to wonder what the hell she sees in the guy after seventy five years. This is the sort of mishaugas you get when you are desperate to break with past practice but have no real ideas about where you wanna go coupled with highly unrealistic expectations...And still this Sumbitch made two hundred million this weekend, given the sheer morose shellacking Superman's character took in this one, it'll be interesting to see if those numbers go up. Frankly thoughthe rumors are Chris Nolan and Director Zack Snyder are being groomed as the creatives to bring DC's Justice League of America to the big screen at long last...and if this is so and "The Man of Steel" is any indication, THIS is a thought to chill the blood!

Across Cambridge: A Brief Unused Itinerary for an Out of Towner on the Fly....

1.) The Maritime Museum at M.I.T. A small but well organized collection of professionally ship models. It is otherwise a good showcase of an art form that if it hasn't been abolished by digital imaging it soon will be. The scale model of the "USS President" alone is worth the trip. 2.) Either Central Square or Inman Square...a decision that would have to be made on the fly. In Central there is "Rodney's Bookstore" one of the last independent publisher overstock/used bookstores left on Mass Ave (an empire that once stretched from the Back Bay out to Route 128). For shits and grins we can stop in at the Pandemonium Bookstore, which shells fantasy and SF exclusively, these days it is a front for marathon RPGs. Not sure just how they make their money quite frankly. My parents grew up in and around Central Square, it has been trying to "class up" since 1936 with little luck, it'll fruitlessly continue this process right up until perdition. 3.) If Not Central, Then Inman: Home of the "Lorum Ipsum Bookstore" a gathering place for the last of the amateur "zine writers" of Metro Boston. Small but good collection of vintage pulp paperbacks. Also home of the "S&S Deli", lunch here is still considered a corporal work of mercy in the Dioceses of Boston. Targets of opportunity "The Zeitgeist Station" and "The Lily Pad", they might be open and they might have interesting art therein displayed who knows? 4.) Harvard Square: Across Cambridge Common on Foot perhaps a look see into the remnants of the Coop, definitely a stop in at the "Million Year Picnic" (if only to paw thru their collection of pulp fiction). A stroll thru Harvard Yard, the Steps of the Widener Library by which to briefly gawk at the progeny of the overclass, Memorial Hall and the cheesy-ass student center under it. There is no point in seeing The Harvard Film Archive unless somehow something worthwhile is being screened, the building is unremarkable and given over to modern art exhibitions for the most part. Oh and of course "The Harvard Bookstore" best used book outlet left in Cambridge, I buy a lot of stuff here, it's ability to beguile should not be underestimated. Oh and the Grolier Poetry Bookshop round the corner, if only because they still believe. Targets of opportunity, The Porcellian, well hidden Harvard Frat composed well heeled layabouts. In Your Ear Records, an actual for real used record store! The Harvard Lampoon which is off limits to helotry but nice to look all the same. And then there is the Mount Auburn Cemetery, last resting place of the Brahmin Elite of Boston, a class of cold unyielding people given over to austere theology and self denial...when they died after a lifetime of eschewing all immodesty they'd be buried under a two ton replica of the Sphinx or perhaps if of a retiring disposition the Temple of Athena. See it all soon, a lot of it is bound to vanish over the short term.

Good Frickin' Riddance...

To the CBS national telecast of the 4th of July Pops Concert. They always pushed the fireworks off til after ten O'Clock and turned the evening into an endurance test for television viewers and attendees alike. And worse the CBS contract brought in just enough money to warrant scheduling a marquee headliner, INEVITABLY it was some unctuous country western shitkicker singer whose sole reason for doing the Esplanade Concert was to reassure viewers in Houston Texas and Marion Ohio that a gol-durned Patriot was a singin' ta the heathenish liberals in Boston. Condescending and transparent to say the least. Boston, You Are Stronger Without em!

Grace Note on a Sunday Afternoon

"I don't think God wants to be worshipped. I think the only pure worship of God is by loving one another, and I think all other forms of worship become a substitute for the love we should show one another." Charles M. Schulz

Dr. Who News...

Per this link Matt Smith is calling it quits as the BBC's long running Time Lord. If they can't get Chow Yun Fat (think of it, Chow Yun Fat IS "Dr. Wu") then I say go whole hog with Alexei Sayle.

Pick of the Week

Hands Down it belongs to Sean Connery as James Bond 007 in "From Russia with Love" screening at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square tonight at 7pm. Somewhere on my bucket list (next to a driving trip to Marion OH to see Warren Harding's federalist style tomb) is a heartfelt desire to see ALL the Connery Bonds on a the big screen as God Almighty Intended. When I was a wee Justin, I had to make do with the "ABC Sunday Night Movie" don'cha know. AND IF You are of a Bohemian disposition with rarified tastes, then you may then wanna ease your way over to the Harvard Film Archive where at 12:15 am EDT they are actually screening Jack Benny in "The Horn Blows at Midnight", wherein Jack plays the angel seconded by the Almighty to blow the Horn heralding Armageddon...this is actually a comedy, who sez the Golden Age of Hollywood admitted no surrealism??

A Brief Thought Experiment for Trekkies and Trekkers....

Can anyone out there recall ANY quotable dialogue from Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonian Singh (AKA The World's Whitest Sikh) in the new Star Trek Movie? Now cast your mind back to "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan", be it bombastic or campy or whatever almost every one of Ricardo Montalban's scenes as Khan are infused with memorable lines. He tasks me! He tasks me, and I shall have him! I'll chase him round the Moons of Nibia, and round the Antares Maelstrom, and round Perdition's flames before I give him up! Prepare to alter course!

A Moment of Silence on Memorial Day

For all Absent Friends, the Fallen Soldiers of the United States and in particular PFC Francis Leo Galligan Sr of the 168th Combat Engineers Battalion. *** And just a quick shout out to the Young Marines and Boy Scout Troop #114 of Bedford Ma, they helped out tremendously at the Bedford VA Hospital's annual Memorial Service.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Y'know, ever noticed how Leonardo DiCaprio tends to play these tragic type strivers in the movies? So why wouldn't he play Jay Gatsby...modern lit's quintessential Jazz Age social climber, I mean it's typecasting at this point after J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes and whatziname on the Titanic? As a matter of fact I'm not I'd cast anyone else as Gatsby at this point he has that weird lack of affect that easily matches Fitzgerald's somewhat furtive protagonist. So the real question is, what is to be made of Baz Luhrmann's lurid glitzy party scenes with their liberal doses of rap music and sundry decadence. Me? I'm fine with it, look "The Great Gatsby" is a novel about a striver's failed attempt to penetrate the overclass and carry off a rather hapless inbred bimbo, period end of story. Sans some morbid decadence and a little flash it can fall into endless talk punctuated by drinking and then wrapped up with a fatal car accident & a shooting. If you don't believe me check out the 1949 adaptation starring Alan Ladd wherein someone at Twentieth Century Fox decided F. Scott Fitzgerald's almighty classic was a sort of high end gangster story with a sniffy attitude towards adultery. I liked the performances all around blank affectless Carey Mulligan was j'es fine as Daisy the same goes for Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton and nigh unrecognizable Isla Fisher as the hapless floozie Myrtle Wilson. My main takeaway from the film and book (finally read the book BTW about a month ago) is that the Overclass is decadent depraved and damn near invincible. Jay Gatsby the aspiring bootlegger the feckless lover of the dissolute Daisy is defeated in all things brought down by desperate love and a sense of honor utterly foreign to his rivals in the Gentry. Ah guess dats what make's em' classics I guess. Y'know, there are two classics out there that are just beggin' for adaptation to the films, Melville's Moby Dick and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, I can see Baz Luhrmann doing well by either work.

Newport Revisited....

Let the record show that Newport RI is no kind of town in which to occasion a flat tire. From bitter experience I can tell you all a flat tire on my part occasioned the intervention of the local police to stay one step ahead of a mob of outraged gallery owners and incensed boulevardiers. Ah but the wealthy are different than you and I, they have more money as the old saw goes. And the very smell of money, like old fermented cherry blossoms virtually permeates the whole town despite every attempt by balmy sea breezes to chase it away even temporarily. Its a town proud of it's Yacht Races ergo NASCAR for Trust Fund Set. And yet I don't think a single one of the vast robber baron estates (ironically called "cottages" by their Gilded Age Owners) was built by any species we'd regard as an Honest Man. It is a town that is prideful and utterly unconcerned with it's own hypocrisy. Here is pictured The Marble House built by William Vanderbilt at the behest of his wife Alva, an outspoken turn of the century suffragette. Alva was a pistol, spent lavishly on the cause of women's rights back when the notion of enfranchisement was a joke...none of this prevented Alva from all but forcing her daughter Consuela to marry the cash strapped Duke of Marlborough in blatant display of 19th century Familial Force Majeure. Or take it another way, Alva the women's rights crusader happily denied her own daughter one of her few inalienable rights all to take sheer social climbing to a New Level. Newport Rhode Island abounds in stories like these...For truly the rich are as rampant in their whims as the poor, that is truly what unites them. Ah but the Cliff Walk is still a tonic for the soul, you can stride along and admire the profane works of prideful man and still worship the pulsing ocean like a proper cro-magnon. It is a beautiful town, but it has a terrible "object lesson" to it's beauty. But if you get a chance, do check out the Naval Warfare College Museum, it virtually starts with Themistocles and ends up with age of remote piloted drones and the Nuclear Navy. Hell thats worth a drive down to Rhode Island any old day.

So far...

Iron Man Three was a bust and Star Trek Into Darkness a complete bust, I sure do hope that I can see a movie this summer that I can enjoy and champion on line....starting to get worried.

Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

It may be that the final downfall of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek can be neatly symbolized by the sudden appearance of peaked military caps on Starfleet uniforms giving Kirk, Spock & McCoy an uncanny resemblance to Amtrak Conductors. Gene Roddenberry's Starfleet, was dedicated to peace, justice, freedom and exploring the universe...and NO HATS! Visored military chapeaus and a sadly superlative cast, seem to be director J.J. Abrams sole contribution to the Star Trek mythos as the rest of this much hyped film consists of "greatest hits" pay off scenes extracted shamelessly from the prior ten Star Trek Features. Loud, frantic and ultimately cautious sums up this film. Having broken with all past practice and successfully recast one of the most iconic sci fi crews in history, given license to do anything with the franchise, director J.J. Abrams retreats into the past trots out the whitest least Sikh like Khan Noonian Singh in history (pasty faced Benedict Cumberbatch) and makes with the CGI chases and firefights. I'm calling it folks, if you want Star Trek to still be Star Trek we are gonna haveta let go of J.J. Abrams, he is making blockbuster movies for the world market, not reviving a real science fiction property. The sad thing is, I love this cast, Chris Pines was born to play Captain Kirk every bit as much as William Shatner, Zachary Quinto has literally found an even finer line dividing logic from emotion than even Leonard Nimoy and Karl Urban IS Doctor McCoy (even if he is largely unforgivably sidelined in this film)...the rest of the actors are amazing in every way and they struggle with this mishaugas with the utmost grace, but the script simply lets them down...They may was well be doing "Radar Men from the Moon". There is something I need to make clear here, we all laugh at the earnestness of Gene Roddenberry's liberal technocratic utopian with it's naive brushes with The Big Issues of the Times, but we live in the shadow of it nonetheless...however much one may mock it, it is still the least worrisome sci fi utopia on public record. But without those Brushes with the Big Issues, however rightly or wrongly or foolishly they may be rendered, Star Trek becomes Space Patrol, it was a Space Patrol movie I saw last night at the Mendon Drive In, not Star Trek as it ought to be.

"Iron Man III" (2013) duly reviewed....

Given a choice between sitting thru "Iron Man III", and sitting quietly at home hitting myself over the head repeatedly with a bungstarter, I shoulda gone rooting around my cellar for the fabled cudgel of my Late Father's Youth. And to think, I could have seen "The Great Gatsby" at the Drive In instead, a decision I fear will haunt me all the rest of my days. I liked the Iron Man III cast well enough, Downey is superlative as always whilst Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce have to limp along at mere excellence but all and sundry are done in by an incoherent script and joyless direction...oh and Tony Stark's inward motivation PTSD...his outward motivation, genetically engineered lava-men. I mean geez this is what we got to work with, Lava-Men cribbed from the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea playbook? I don't really know where Marvel goes from here, clearly utter mediocrity is no barrier to big box office...dreck like this only encourages them to do even less next time. Oh and supposedly director Shane Black has been tapped to direct a Doc Savage adaptation, lets hope he was saving his A-Game for that project thats all I can say.

Death of a Sorcerer....

Let the record show that the only artist with a more interesting list of unrealized projects than the late Ray Harryhausen was the late Orson Welles. War of the Worlds? Sinbad on Mars? Wrath of the Titans? Ya had me from the Git Go. Ah but Ray was famously irascible, I think the sheer wearisome burden of pitching upwards to two perfectly good ideas for every one that got approved just got him down after a while. And sadly he lived just long enough to see his chosen venue of artistic-technical expression become a veritable museum piece. Surpassed by a vast allocation of computer programmability all great looking but about as spontaneous and surprising as a granite block. That by the way, is Harryhausen's lasting achievement in stop motion animation he made everyone from Mighty Joe Young to the reptilian Ymir to Gwangi the Allosaurus, mechanical models all, into actors creature seemingly capable of spontaneity. If you don't believe me screen "Twenty Million Miles to Earth" someday on a double bill with "Jurassic Park". Spielberg's dinosaurs are lovingly, realistically rendered and are utterly affectless and charmless in every way. Harryhausen's brutish Ymir from Venus fairly breathes pathos, he is like Stanley Kowalski on a last drunken tear thru the streets. And that, making mere rubber and metal armatures into performers with subtle traits, remains Harryhausen's lasting achievement. So I'd like to reiterate once again a humble plea to the Harvard Film Archive to dedicate some screening time this summer to this great artist's work.

THE DRIVE INS ARE OPEN!

THE DRIVE INS ARE OPEN!!! Oh Thank Ghod I thought this winter would never end!!! Check the links on the right for details and lets cue up the Official Drive In Theme Music...

Massachusetts Uber Alles

Oh Massachusetts, how I love you. When the klaxons go off and shit is going down you never ever flinch. The Earth may open beneath our feet, a river of fire may rise to consume us all, furies will scream down from the Heavens Above, but you will abide by your duty unto The Last. From The Bronx to The Pacific, they heap scorn on us, but you don't give a rat's ass what anyone thinks of the Commonwealth, not in Good Times Nor in Catastrophe. Not once in this last endless testing week did anyone self recriminate or second guess or chicken out and when the bombs went off the citizenry of this Commonwealth literally rode to the Sound of the Guns En Masse. You are Proud and Vain Massachusetts, but you will go down fighting long long after everyone else has quit. Massachusetts, you are indomitable. The Other Forty Nine have "lifestyles" and "Attitudes", But Massachusetts has Principles,oft mocked for them, now for a little while will deserved credit be reaped. Inscrutable Providence has tested us and we were not found lacking....I know that reads awfully bombastic but that is how I feel. When it is my turn, bury me anywhere, from the Berkshires to Provincetown, bury me beneath a toxic waste site in Brockton if it comes to that, but Bury Me in the Commonwealth...The Home of the Brave.

Happy Anniversary Superman...

Seventy Five Years Ago Today (or so) Action Comics #1 starring Superman was published at once establishing a whole new publishing industry the American Comics and putting super heroes on the metaphoric map in one swell foop. I freely admit I've always been a "Superman Person", he is the promised of swift incorruptible retribution for wrongdoing, his origin is simple which makes him the perfect adventure character, infinitely malleable and yet somehow "mystically the same" to borrow a phrase from Orwell. Ah but in the midst of triumph there is always the savage thread of catastrophe, Superman's creator's Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster got cheated out of their copyright and pretty much ended up penniless while their character went on rack up a quarter of a billion dollars in profits over a generation or so. Defrauding Siegel and Shuster pretty much set a ruthless exploitive benchmark for the comic book industry that persists and overshadows all and sundry to this day. Ah but Kal El, he is a game changer he took four or five disparate tropes and fused them all into something new and different, would to God I had even one creative notion half so bold and pure. Happy Seventy Fifth Big Guy!

I don't know Paula Soto from a cord of wood

But I wish her lawsuit against the City of Cambridge all the best. Soto runs a film series even smaller and more obscure than Channel Zero (IF that is possible) and she seeks to overturn a dubious city statute seeking to prevent the leafleting of automobiles. As a co-curator of Channel Zero with eighteen years of leafleting behind me, I can well attest to the endless difficulties when it comes to "getting the word out" about a small screening in a town with a chilly snobbish attitude towards fringe artistic events. The main and most heartbreaking battle is always about putting meat in the seats, any tiny advantage however ludicrous is not to be overlooked. And please spare me the windy diatribes about "protecting private property"...where the hell is all this love for the sanctity of My Car when it gets festooned with home cleaner adverts and gym leaflets at the Alewife Station MBTA Garage every week??

Pick of the Week:

I make fun of the Brattle Theater, but any local movie house that is willing to project The Giant Claw (1957) on the biii-ig screen deserves respect. And it's on a double bill with Ray Harryhausen's "Earth Versus The Flying Saucers" (which was remade in 1996 as "The Truth About Cats and Dogs") all justified because the director of both films, Fred Sears was a local boy.

Channel Zero in 1996....

What does the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square and Channel Zero both have in common? A thing for amazon crimefighters apparently. This weekend, in a bid for "psychotronic street cred" The Brattle Theatre actually screening "Wonder Woman" the nigh forgotten super heroine TV pilot from 1974 starring Cathy Lee Crosby as the DC comics super hero. Details may be seen hyar. Let the record show that back when our feckless little film & video series was an irreverent adolescent hanging around the Liberty Cafe in Central Square in the era of VHS, we screened some "Wonder Woman" material as well...of course Channel Zero dug down deep and came up with the infamous 1967 Ellie Wood Walker Wonder Woman TV pilot (in reality a seven minute promo reel)that quite literally has to be seen to be believed. So the Brattle is only now catching up to ideas we had seventeen years ago deploying content we ourselves likely turned down in our quest to reach the absolute pinnacle of worthwhile obscurity. Ah but that is snarkage, I actually hope the Brattle does well with this one, maybe it'll spark a trend towards reviving some other TV-movie titles from the era "The Love War", "The Pueblo Incident" or maybe even infamous "Iron Man" ripoff "Exoman". :D Or you could just wait for Channel Zero to get around to them... :D KIDDING KIDDING KIDDING, I KID BECAUSE I LOVE! Anyway I never begrudge when one of the major venues starts working our side of the street, after all they've got the marketing muscle to make a bigger splash with an obscure title...I just like to tease em' a little thass all.

R.I.P. Roger Ebert....

Roger Ebert is dead. I'll miss him. What I always liked about him was he was a sort of "passionate analyst" of the movies, he could generate credible reasons to champion the directing career of everyone from John Waters to John Ford. He could stand his ground and rarely if ever changed his mind about his own opinions today's punditariat scrounging their last meager pittance from the dino-media, could learn a thing or two from Ebert. His was an important voice, he deserved that Pulitzer believe me. What I won't miss is the self serving wails of self pity arising from his surviving film critic brethren all of whom will insist that film criticism is dead, because the paying opportunities therein have vanished along with Newsweek Magazine, The Boston Phoenix and the Saturday Evening Post. This is akin to a gaggle of philosophers insisting that "philosophy is dead" because no one is willing to pay philosophers for their big thoughts. People need to get a grip quite frankly. Ah but Roger Ebert as a young man he did inspire me, anyone with a high opinion of "Inframan", "Massacre at Central High" and the capacity to write a screenplay as demented as "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is an official Demigod of the Channel Zero Pantheon.

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..."