Channel Zero Returns!

Channel Zero returns to the Somerville Theatre on Friday July 22nd @ 8pm with a screening of "The Devil with Hitler" (1943).

Satan in a bind, his demons want to fire him and place Adolf Hitler in charge of hell!

The devil (Alan Mowbray) can retain his old job only by tricking the Fuehrer into committing One Good Deed. MEanwhile back on Earth, Mussolini (Joe Devlin) and General Tojo (George E. Stone) plot the Fuhrer's assassination as part of an insurance scam!

A comedy very much in the spirit of the Three Stooges and starring Bobby Watson, the greatest Hitler Impersonator of Hollywood's Golden Age (discounting his faint Brooklyn accent).

The phun begins at 8pm and includes a few relevant short subjects on the program, admission $5. Bring your friends we will have plenty of room on this one!!

The best time to go down to Cape Cod for a few days

may in the week before Memorial Day.
Granted the Cape is still fitfully stirring from it's annual Odinsleep, your favorite restaurants may be entirely seasonal and thus it's impossible to get a good meal after 9pm.
Moreover a fitful Nor'easter may be battering the peninsula as well, drizzle and wind at night and whole of Nantucket Sound churned up like Captain Ahab's worst nightmares during the day. The sun usually batters its way out by noon, but at four pm the mists come loping back across Provincetown Harbor with studied insolence.
But you shoot right over the Sagamore Bridge, there is little traffic on Route Six and no lines for anything at all. You can cruise the Cape Cod Rail Trail from Eastham to Wellfleet in a Charlton Hestonish Omega Man solitude.
You can explore the last of Primeval Cape Cod on the Fort Hill Trail with it's Red Maple Swamp, on a grey drizzly day you could actually believe just for a moment that these were the wild moors around Culloden and Bonny Prince Charlie's Highlanders are about to make their last stand for Scottish Liberty.
Of course you never quite escape the sound traffic on Route Six, but if you close your eyes and imagine real hard....
I saw a surfer on Nantucket Sound at the Cape Cod National Sea Shore braving the obvious rip tides, as he sped along a seal black and curious surfaced to the height of the animals shoulders about a hundred feet away. The beast gave the surfer a disdainful looking over and seemed to think to itself "AMATEUR! Needs a board to float...."
By the way, seals have made a comeback on the outer Cape, How Cool Is THAT???
I walked from the Coast Guard Station to Nauset Light and thanked God that President Kennedy had the foresight to sign off on the Cape Cod National Sea Shore, otherwise it would all be the ruins of Howard Johnsons by now.
Provincetown has lost none of it's charm or it's Boho street cred. The streets were just filling up when I got there. Those dunes over Route Six loom over the Cape like the Alps.
I also bought a bottle of wine from a local vineyard in Truro of all places, will advise when the bottle is appropriately sampled.
For the record, the daily wine tasting therein was packed.
And I even got an opportunity to see "Pirates of the Caribbean IV, On Stranger Tides" and "Thor" at the Wellfleet Drive In. If all else had gone to smash, that alone would have made the trip worthwhile. For the record, the Wellfleet plays the National Anthem before each Double Feature, I heartily endorse this practice.

If you are in a mood for some old timey Samurai Action

You could do a lot worse than to see "13 Assassins" currently playing at the Kendall Landmark Cinema.

True is is almost completely derivative of "Seven Samurai", right down to the savage village based swordfighting showdown...but what the hell, if you are gonna steal, steal from the best sez I.
Besides there is a tactical deployment of enraged bulls that is the most original movie combat gimmick I've seen since Tsui Hark's missing masterpiece "The Raid".

Smallville: An Autopsy

Tom Welling has cast a spell of sheer enchantment over me.

He makes me nostalgic for Dean Cain.

Granted he did not accomplish this overnight, no, it took Tom Welling ten years of boring scripts and mechanical acting to get me to reconsider completely "Lois and Clark, the New Adventures of Superman", but in the end he prevailed.
It seems hard to remember that ten years ago, Smallville was nothing more than a rip off of "Buffy the Vampire the Slayer" with a buffed up male protagonist, a built in audience and a completely cowardly core concept...I.E. Young Clark Kent no tights no flights no nothing really.
And what the hell the damn thing was a success and a malign precedent as well.
D'ye know what you get when you do Clark Kent without the costume?
Without the mythos?
Sans cape?
You get Hugo Danner, the pitiful superhuman "hero" of Philip Wylie's 1931 novel Gladiator, except this poor schnook feeling sorry for himself because he couldn't think of single practical application for being faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive.
And that is what was wrong with Smallville (regardless of Tom Welling's suspended animation performance style), it was whiny self pitying nonsense...directless for lack of a unifying concept.
Year after year Smallville piled up ever more inane excuses to keep Clark out of the cape, other characters from DC comics were introduced seemingly at random (What the hell has the Green Arrow have to do with Superman, other than the show's producers couldn't get the rights to Batman) all to cloud and obscure and obstruct any progress towards the debut of Superman.
Whenever they got two steps forward Clark would lose his powers or his confidence or wanna snuggle with Lana Lang (Played by Kristen Kreuk possibly the worst actress on this breathing Earth), and this went on for years!
Smallville did the impossible at the end of a decade I was entirely in sympathy with Lex Luthor maybe Clark was an alien interloper after all...Maybe Clark Kent is the threat. And even if he isn't when is that Big Mary gonna snap out of it??
And the audience kept coming back for more despite yearly rip-offs that stagger the creative imagination.
Until last week the producers could bail out the Titanic no longer and in the last fifteen minutes of the two hour season finale they CGI'd Welling into the costume and had a cheap computer animated Superman at last save the day.
A more blatantly disrespectful conclusion cannot be imagined.
My Ghod Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster AND Kirk Alyn are spinning in their graves.
What is wrong with Smallville and what will live on long after it's finale is the bad precedent that it sets. That it's okay to run far away from the character's core concept and that you can fake out the comic book audience for decades sans reproach.




I fear the next time the Man of Steel hits TV, the wrong lessons will have been learned from Smallville and even worse indignities will be meted out to Kal El and his mythos.


But thank Rao it's all over, and unless he has made some formidable investments we can expect to buy Tom Welling's autograph for $20 a pop at the Framingham Super Mega Fest sooner or later.

Jerry Lewis Deposed

as the host of the Annual MDA Labor Day Telethon.
This comes as no surprise to me, the word on the street is, that the Muscular Dystrophy Association has long been looking for a decent honorable way to ease Jerry out the door. Contributions are down, the telethon itself hardly even functions as "So bad it's good: kitsch and Jerry spent most of last year's screen time trading risque quips with a sixty five year old Charo.
Time for a change.
Alas though, I'll miss Jerry and his annual orgy of ego-mania, at it's height the weird mix of oddity acts (Czech blob-dancers and or Sandra Bernhard), the last die hard remnants of the Las Vegas Olde Guard and the Osmond Brothers...it was a heady heady brew.
And on good nights when Jerry's manic phase (or simply his meds) would kick in, the man would literally self inflate like a demented Zeppelin, his voice would go up an octave as he berated a stagehand for some trivial offense and for a moment, Jerry Lewis would look like the explosive bolts that held his head together were finally about to detonate.
It seems no accident to me that Jerry's abdication comes on the heels of the news that the Rat Pack's own Fortress of Solitude, the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas is shutting down for good.
Twilight of the Gods indeed.
But if this is IT for Jerry Lewis, who is literally The Last Man Out of Vaudeville (well him and Mickey Rooney)...Trust me you won't wanna miss the last hour of this year's telethon. It'll be like they they legalized above ground nuclear testing for one night only in Beverly Hills...The man's famous volatility will go super critical at long last, after all there will no encore after Labor Day 2011.

And if the MDA needs a new host I say they go with Mickey Rooney assuming Andy Dick isn't available...

I say must that DC Comics

picked a really bad week to have Superman renounce his US Citizenship.

Maybe Cousin Supergirl seize power at last & get Superman relieved of his Iconic Superhero Status under Article 184 of the Justice League of America code of conduct...

Only if Herman Wouk wrote Action Comics...

Seriously though, I get the birther symbolism of it all, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that comic book super heroes are no necessarily the best and more efficacious mirror to hold up to society. The personnel therein just don't have enough points of conduct with the real world to long keep up the pretense of relevance.

OBL DOA...

The best comment I've heard so far today on Bin Laden's overdue demise was from a co-worker from South Africa (all places)....What she said was "This gives me hope that they can get Whitey Bulger after all".

Cosplayground...Or Robur the Conqueror in the Back Bay

If power in the classic democratic sense is being redistributed from the producers to the masses via games, cosplay and social media, then the age old question must needs be asked "What are the people gonna doooo-oo with The Power?"

Dress up as Batman apparently.

But then there is nothing more disheartening than to see a perfectly turned out Batman costume at a convention, the cowl, the cape, the utility belt all of it exactingly rendered and the whole rig is worn by a guy whose body type exemplifies a "Chinless medicine ball".
We've all seen this, in fact it's become a sturdy cliche at comicons and sci fi conventions all over the nation, a very very true cliche at that.
The problem with your perfect home made Batman or Wonder Woman costume is that unless you put double the amount of time into hitting the treadmill yer gonna undercut the costume's effect when you debut it at the BiMonthly Sci Fi Con (or wherever).
The problem with this type of cosplay is that it tends to favor a limited range of body types...Unless of course you are one of those feckless souls who are Out and Proud about your muffin top.
And then there are the Star Wars cosplayers and the inevitable Klingons, there I've seen some pretty amazing costumery and it's a little more figure flattering for the portly or the undersized owing to the heavy traffic in robes and platform boots.
The problem with the Jedis, Stormtroopers and Klingon warriors is that the best they can aspire to is perfect reproduction of the designs developed and designed by Industrial Light and Magic. These are the more inclusive cosplay groups and also the least imaginative.
For my money the most inclusive and imaginative of the rising cosplayers are the Steampunks. They aren't reproducing someone else's trademarked costume nor to they need Tarzan's physique to wear their own neo-Victorian Jules Vernian sci fi rigs.
The possibilites here are limitless, you can go with James Mason's "Royal Navy" style of uniform for your Captain Nemo costume, or you can get tarted up in a princely turban and scimitar for a Captain Nemo closer to the Indian exile favored by Jules Verne.
And the possibilities presented by H.G. Wells from the invisible man to Doctor Moreau are nigh infinite.
Sherlock Holmes meets the Time Traveller?
DONE!
And that is only the beginning...yes its a "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" universe, but it lets everyone play to the absolute limits of their imagination.
Besides any fanbase that favors clockwork top hats, welders googles with Edwardian cricketer costumes is aces high in my books.

Y'know its funny...

I was at Comicon today at the Hynes Center, (good time even if no one was selling interesting DVDs) and the joint was crawling with persons in elaborate costumes. This has been a fairly recent phenom in Boston, as recently as two years ago, you never saw anyone done up in Superhero costumes or whatnot at a con.
Now down in Jersey, at the Infamous Chiller Theatre show, you'd see all kinds of cosplay going on, up here, bupkiss though.
Not any more.
This goes hand in hand with an even odder phenom I've noticed, the aging comic book buyer (Newbury Comics is crawling with persons thirty and over on Wednesdays getting their books) and the perpetually youthful comic book convention goer.
So IF, these kids aren't buying floppies on a monthly basis how are they getting aligned so to speak with all these characters?
They could be buying graphic novels straight up at Barnes & Noble, I think that is part of it, but I also suspect that they interact more with these characters in on line RPGs, video games, movies TV etc.
However it happens they are then inspired to don extremely elaborate costumery and go a' paradin' at the Comic Book Convention. The kids in the above pic had good costumes all around but you should have seen the incredibly detailed rigs favored by the Star Wars fanbase.
I'm starting to think that all these characters are being systematically "claimed" by their respective fan bases regardless of what the copyright holders may have planned for the property.
There is something quintessentially American and democratic about that...
***
Other than that I ran across "The Horror Haven" table, who are some peeps doin' th' lord's work in ensuring that Late Nite TeeVee Horror Film Hosts Shall Not Perish From This Earth.

Atlas Shrugged Parts II & III have been canceled???

Noooo!!!!
The most gut-bustling preposterous parts of the book had yet to be filmed!!!

Well, all I can say is, live by the free market die by the free market, produce a cheap humorless film adaptation of a cult leader's holy book and all the exploitation film tricks in the world will not stop you from going bust.
I mean so much for playing entirely to your base, I guess even hard core objectivists require a little more bang for their buck at the box office.

Really though, was it something I said????

***
The ironic part of all this mishaugas is, that to date, Ayn Rand has had a pretty good filmography, "We the Living" an epic 1942 adaptation of her anti-bolshevik novel executed under the aegis of the Fascists in Italy, and later on "The Fountainhead" starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.
Ah but really, it takes close intellectual cooperation between free market fundamentalists, hard core objectivists and reactionary cultists of all types to produce a film as bad as "Atlas Shrugged Part One". It took fifty years and ghod knows how much money and effort but they finally managed to do their beloved Prophetess' legacy lasting damage.
These are people with "believing minds" (to quote H.L. Mencken) and as he famously observed they are never more destructive of their ideals when they try to put them into practice.

"First Man" James Hansen's authorized biography

of Astronaut Neil Armstrong, must be a very engrossing book. I sat down with it on the Red Line at Alewife, and somewhere between there and South Station the burly African American fella who sat next to me changed into a skinny caucasian college student without your humble narrator ever noticing.

"Ayn Rand and the Forty Thieves" Or "Who is Kroger Babb?"

Once upon a time in post war America , risque titillating movies circulating furtively thru the land under the aegis of "The Forty Thieves", hard core road showmen who arrive in town, rent a theater, paper the place with flyers, ruthlessly target a sensation hunger audience and all on behalf of ragged moralizing tripe like "Reefer Madness".
The uncrowned king of the Forty Thieves was one Kroger Babb, who for some twenty years toured America with a film called "Mom and Dad" a half titillating, half educational melodrama depicting the dangers of unwed teenage motherhood. The movie's key selling point was it's much ballyhoo'd "Birth of a baby" scene which was in reality some old Army training film footage ineptly spliced into the storyline.
Babb did all this mishaugas up big and included the use of carnival barkers done up as "Elliot Forbes the eminent hygiene commentator" who job it was to hawk war surplus bith control pamphlets during intermission.
According to Babb's apprentice, the late David Friedman, Babb made about eleven million dollars off of "Mom and Dad" when all was said and done.
Trust me, I've seen "Mom and Dad" it is cheap moralizing trash sold to the unwary as a social problem film with some sex education footage thrown in for good measure.
Of interest only to franchises like "Channel Zero".
As Babb himself so frequently observed "You sell the sizzle, not the steak".

Which brings me to "Atlas Shrugged" Part One (2011) now screening at the Landmark Kendall Square the Framingham Fourteen and elsewhere.
A lot of different people have tried to get this novel adapted as film, I can recall as a teen serious rumors that NBC wanted to option it as a TV miniseries more recently Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were supposedly interested in the property as a starring vehicle. Rand herself once opined that her sprawling 900 page semi-science fictional denunciation of "big government" labor unions and uppity intellectuals was inherently unfilmable.
So it is ironic that here we have a low budget film with a cast of wooden unknowns, a labored script and a marketing plan that depends on word of mouth, lots of flyers and the activation of a particular subset of the moviegoing audience.
Truly, Kroger Babb lives.
Indeed given the divisive nature of the Ayn Rand novel on which the film is based, the only smart thing for the producers to do is cut costs remorselessly and sell this turkey exclusively to hard core libertarian objectivists.
I saw this bad baby in Framingham last night, and I half expected Elliot Forbes himself to stroll up the aisle selling copies of Ayn Rand's "The New Left: The Anti Industrial Revolution".
The film itself is cheap looking, ill-lit in certain scenes and features actors who artistic range compare unfavorably with the monoliths on Easter Island.
And this is only Part One!
Ultimately though, the films problems start with the source novel, a long boring work of libertarian utopianism churned out by Ayn Rand in 1957 in desperate attempt to generate a capitalist free market ideology that would have the same pseudo-religious appeal of Marxism Leninism.
That much worked, "Atlas Shrugged" is a book nigh venerated by conservative mediocrities toiling away in cubicles all over the USA convinced that the EPA, "community activists" and Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms Bureau are all that is keeping you from inventing an aircraft powered by the limitless power of your own resentment.
The book itself is trash, female railroad tycoon Dagny Taggart is desperately trying to hold her empire together even as all the other smart rich people in the nation disappear literally "going on strike" to protest a government given over to wicked wicked leveling and egalitarianism. The book's machine worship & veneration of wealth is perfectly comical, Dagny Taggart all but copulates with a locomotive as the Dollar $ign finally triumphs and new age of financial super heroes is proclaimed.
If you are a libertarian with a grievance, then Ayn Rand wrote this book for you, it is a massacre of straw men, have at it sez I.

God imagine how much more beautiful and exquisite New York City would be if Donald Trump took John Galt's advice and went on strike against "big government"?
Imagine how many people would still have their live savings if Bernie Madoff & Lehman Brothers had run off to "Galtsylvania" in a huff prior to the 2008 market crash?
Wealth=heroism in Ayn Rand's cosmology, remember that the next time one of British Petroleum's cheap ass oil platforms blow up.

Its a world built for impersonal Orwellian cubicles

That is where most of us make our money however much or little that may be.
So it's imperative to personalize and individualize that space as much as possible.
The whole "You Big Mary" movement is nothing but an attempt celebrate individuality in impersonal workspace, so check their site out out, they've got needlepoint, tee shirts and lots of other snarky tchotchkes in thepipeline.

In hard times when the boss is breathing down your neck like Captain Queeg gone mad on crystal meth, needlepoint proclaiming "Suck It Up, You Big Mary" is a vital necessity in everyone's cubicle.

THE DRIVE INS ARE OPEN THE DRIVE INS ARE OPEN!!!

Praise the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!!!

Well...The redoubtable Mendon Drive In is open at least, thats a start.

Seriously tempted to go see "Limitless" there...Now if only Suckerpunch would git on th' schedule...

When the Drive In opens, winter ends officially for me, not a moment too soon this was a bad one from start to finish.

The People's Republic of China...

has officially outlawed the use of Time Travel as a storyline in movies and TV.

My Gjod what next...mass burning of "Dr. Who" DVDs???

Totalitarian societies can survive a lot, but they teeter when they look foolish and Beijing looks pretty damn stupid with this one.

Must be all those movies where enterprising Chinese go back and time and successfully convince Chiang Kai Shek to go over onto the defensive on the Yangtse River, wear down Mao's communist troops and wait for Stalin to get sick of bankrolling stalemate in China.
:D
What would Herbert George Wells do? (As played by Malcolm McDowall in "Time after Time")?

He'd go back in time and PREVENT China from outlawing "The Time Tunnel" - THAT is what he'd do!!!

My heroes have always been Englishmen ...

First Welsh born Christian Bale becomes "Batman", now word comes that one Henry Cavill, born in the Channel Islands, is on track to play Superman in the upcoming 2012 film.
What is going on here? Who the hell WON at Yorktown anyway?? How'd all these limey's get into the Justice League of America????
Granted Toledo Ohio native Adrianne Palicki is currently playing Wonder Woman in a David Kelley pilot, but likely thats because Sporty Spice wasn't available.
Besides, she is running around in stretch pants for ghod's sake, it's like putting Tarzan in a track suit and Nike running shoes.
***
Honestly I am starting to miss Dean Cain and Val Kilmer...
***
Nope for true down home old fashioned hard R-Rated superheroic action, I strongly recommend you seek out James Gunn's "Super" over at the Landmark theater in Waltham and elsewhere. Because amidst all the purely terrifying grue and gore is a pair of scintillating performances from Rainn Wilson as "The Crimson Bolt" a down on his luck masked avenger who wields a lug wrench like it's the Hammer of Thor and Ellen Page as his utterly psychotic sidekick "Boltie".
What I liked about "Super" was simple and yet profound, I had the good fortune to sit with an aud that was utterly shocked at the film's gleeful excesses, I was truly the only one laughing as Rainn Wilson's Crimson Bolt tries to abort a purse snatching only to severely injure both perp and victim.
What can I say...sometimes the violently transgressive is hilarious or at least for once it worked in this case.
BTW all bluster aside it is a standout performance from Ellen Page who goes a long way towards stealing the show from Rainn Wilson, which believe me, is no small feat.

Many thanks to the Big Sell Out Aud

we had at Friday Night's screening of "Wesley Willis's Joy Rides". What a pleasure to see so many new faces at Channel Zero. Our humblest apologies to anyone who was turned away at the door...it is a thirty one seat venue what can we say?
If it is any consolation there will be plenty of room at our next screening (Hopefully in July), as we are planning on screening something incredibly obscure and fun.

At Last Validation...

The Boston Phoenix's on-line edition devotes some critical digital space to our screening of"Wesley Willis's Joy Rides" tomorrow.
You kin read it Hyar:

Meanwhile the curtain goes up on this mutha in just 24 hours...

“Wesley Willis: Joyrides” is a unique documentary experience about one man’s journey out of homelessness and schizophrenia to Rock-n-Roll Redemption.

Friday April 8th at 8pm (sharp!)
Admission 6.50 (Cheap!)
The Somerville Theatre, Screening Room
55 Davis Square.
Somerville Ma 617-625-5700

Why Wesley Willis?

April has always been "National Poetry Month", despite Channel Zero's manful attempts to turn it into "National Bad Poetry Month" thru the good offices of our annual reading of the world's worst verse "The Bad Poets Society".

For years now, Wesley Willis' lyrics have fairly anchored the Bad Poets Society.
Audiences from Central Square to Somerville have rocked with laughter when read the lyrics to such songs as "I Whupped the Mighty Thor's Ass".
For a franchise that heavily trafficked in oddball 19th century substandard poets, Wesley was a rare contemporary lyricist with a strong transgressive quality (exp "Casper the Friendly Homosexual Ghost" possibly THE MOST cringe worthy song lyrics ever recited at the Bad Poets Society).
So when We found out he had a career as a singer/songwriter going on in Chicago and had not one but TWO feature length documentaries dedicated to his amazing story, We knew Channel Zero had to do a screening.
My thinking is, at long last we are allowing one of the Bad Poets Society's stalwarts a chance to "talk back" and give us his side of the story.

When someone produces a GOOD documentary on the life of Francis E. Dec (He of the Cannibal Frankenstein CIA Monster God fame) or Julia Moore "The Sweet Singer of Michigan" (Otherwise know as America's answer to William McGonigall), trust me, Channel Zero will conspire to screen it.
Meanwhile on Friday April 8th at 8pm (At the Somerville Theatre) the spotlight shines down on the late Wesley Willis, singer songwriter and inadvertent star of the Bad Poets Society.
Be there, admission is $6.50 (cheap!)

Elizabeth Taylor is Dead...

If there is any justice in the Heavenly Firmament, she was met at the Pearly Gates by Sir Richard Burton who had a vodka bottle in one hand and two common water glasses in the other...

***
Otherwise, Liz was the recipient of one of the greatest put downs in the history of modern journalism. At the height of the whole Eddie Fisher - Debbie Reynolds - Elizabeth Taylor - Richard Burton quadrilateral, the Vatican accused Taylor of "erotic vagrancy".
And thus commenced Liz Taylor's superstardom...
John Waters and his cross dressing muse Divine (AKA Harris Glen Milstead)would have KILLED for snark like that when they were up and coming.