"So Long, and Thanks for All The Tharks!"

Richard Ross, has been ousted as CEO of Disney as a direct result of whole "John Carter" fiasco this winter. Helluva shame really. I can see some malign consequences of of this, Director Andrew Stanton may well be at a career dead end once the dust settles. This is a great pity as he has done some great things at Pixar and could well do great things again. Well Andrew, Channel Zero needs a good director we've got all kinds of ideas for short films, drop us a ting-a-ling baby, we can get this thing turned around.

The other malign consequence is that a dumbass Hollywood fatwah will likely be pronounced against all of Edgar Rice Burroughs' non Tarzan works. Since Disney allegedly has the options on his entire bibliography, this likely means we will never see adaptations of "Carson of Venus", the "Pellucidar" series to say nothing of any more excursions to Barsoom. This is a shame because Burroughs created extraterrestrial politics, bizarre interplanetary evolutionary excesses and the whole modern space opera idiom quite frankly. But because his speculative fiction has been off market in terms of media adaptations, what was groundbreaking in 1912 now appears utterly derivative in 2012. And on that petard the whole mishaugas has been hoisted. Sad. It seems pretty clear that Disney is gonna put all it's emphasis on tentpole movies based on their Marvel Comics Properties...As far as I'm concerned, Dejah Thoris could kick Iron-Man's white ass from here to City of Helium.

Channel Zero Returns in June!!!

"Captain Celluloid and the Film Pirates"
(1966)

Hollywood is under attack, a nefarious Film Pirate bids on cornering the world market in Classic Cinema! Only one man stands in his way, that masked man of the movies, Captain Celluloid!
Take a contemporary silent movie, a great love for the old republic serials a genuine feel for action cinema, and this is what you get, the weirdest Superhero Movie ever made!!

Plus a surprise or two in the ineffable Channel Zero Style!!
Forget the Avengers, come see a Real Superhero Take Charge!!

Friday June 29th 8pm Sharp!
The Somerville Theatre Screening room
Admission 5 bucks cheap!
55 Davis Square
Somerville Ma 617 625 5700
Channel Zero Boston’s Cheapest Entertainment Franchise now in our sixteenth year of Genteel Cinematic Transcendence!
www.channel0.blogspot.com
Good Luck finding us on Facebook!!

I for one cannot wait for Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows" remake

The only creative question in play is just how will Johnny Depp's vampire character Barnabas Collins learn life's most important lesson which is.... "Be Yourself".

If Tim Burton directed an adaptation of Dante's Inferno, that would be the great moral learned by Satan in the bottom-most pit of hell.

Hail Kenya!

First three runners in today's Boston Marathon were once again, Kenyans.

This is getting ridiculous these people are smoking us like cheap cigars at every marathon...I think just to keep it interesting next year the Kenyans should be compelled to run the Marathon backwards or on their hands.
Who am I kidding?
They'd still win if they were manacled to cinderblocks.

Well all kidding aside, this is their "highlight reel" for the Kenyan Olympic Committee a nice speedy performance here is a potential gold medal elsewhere.
Which is enough to swell my civic pride by gosh.

Pick of the week!

The Brattle Theatre (in the teaming heart of Harvard Square), is running "King Kong versus Godzilla" on a double bill with "Godzilla on Monster Island" tomorrow at 1pm.
Tis all a part of their annual "Schlock Around the Clock" marathon...and if this alone isn't a reason to drop all obligations and debtor and make a beeline for this blessed venue,they are also running "Death Race 2000" on Sunday at 5:30pm.

I've always liked the Brattle Theatre, for one thing, its one of the few remaining venues in Metro Boston that has yet to throw Channel Zero out it's ear.

I hate it when....

The Harvard Film Archive takes one of Channel Zero's ideas and refashion's it into something sublime.
Its like watching Mozart go to work rewriting one of Salieri's lugubrious fanfares.
Case in point a month or so ago, Channel Zero explored the twilight of the Stalinist Era by screening "The Great Farewell" the official Soviet propaganda documentary detailing Joe Stalin's funeral.
In June the HFA blows our asses out of the water with a retrospective of Soviet director Aleksei Guerman's films, a man with a great ongoing interest in the Stalinist era. We direct your attention in particular to the June 23rd screening of "Khrustalyov, My Car! " (1998) a film centered around the last weekend in Stalin's miserable life.
Oh and they are also screening a full retrospective of Sergei Eisenstein's works including "Ivan the Terrible" parts One and Two.
YIKES!
How the hell do we keep up with that??

Honestly, anyone out there got a line on contemporary North Korean Cinema??

Drop us a line for the Love of God!

Oh well we never really hold it against the HFA they have the money and the venue and the content, after sixteen years of obscurity Channel Zero is not above tipping it's chapeau at the Machers, they are there for a reason after all.

A Boyhood atop Collapsible D or The Revenge of the Titanic

I first encountered Walter Lord's marvelous book "A Night to Remember" when I found an abandoned paperback copy of it atop a coat rack at the Old Brackett School in (Romantic) Arlington when I was in the Fourth Grade or so.
Despite a boyhood that was rapidly spiraling downward into defeat and obscurity, I remained a precocious reader, so the Titanic's story of epic futile catastrophe really resonated with me.
Shit I was a bound over on the same trip, I could grasp that right away...
Now when it came time for some pre-cyberspace cultural synergy, I had to wait around until Channel 56 re-ran the 1958 film adaptation (in glorious black and white which registered so sharply on the old portable black and white TV set in my parent's bedroom)...For once a good movie and good book got together in holy matrimony and there I was, bearing the ring on a little red cushion.
There are certain incidents from history that we revisit time and again, because of their natural tragic drama, because of the lessons we affect to extract from them or because we like to feel humbled by "Big Events".
The whole Titanic phenom has all of that in spades, it is Man and his Machines versus Melville's Inscrutable Malevolent Nature, and of course, Nature clears the boards.
Walter Lord would have us think that the RMS Titanic was the breaking point between the old and new order, Captain John Smith taking her straight to the bottom, Herbert Lightoller going down with the ship and living to the tale, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his spouse floating off to safety in what amounted to their own private lifeboat.
Aiyee, there are a lot of old and new tropes to that story...a vertiable cozy lace trimmed Steampunk Apocalypse (Think about it, a 35,000 ton luxury liner depending on two sets of eyes and no binoculars to navigate an icefield at night...Jules Verne couldn't have done better!)
So this is powerful stuff, even if all the current hype seems like....well...annoying hype.
Shee-it, The Titanic spawned the first "Instant Movie" "Saved from the Titanic" (1912) starring Dorothy Gibson a real life survivor of the disaster who happened to be an actress mercenary enough to be the first extract boffo box office from the tragedy.
The Nazis saw fit to create a big budget propaganda epic out of the story, "Titanic" (1943) which gets in the usual cracks at "British Plutocrats" and features an entirely fictional virtuous German Officer to the storyline. The film only played in markets outside Germany though, Dr, Goebbels abruptly decided that a downbeat movie about ship sinking was too stark a reminder of the Nazi regime's long term prospects.
Of course after World War II the Titanic finally rose from the depths and came into here own, Walter Lord's book was published, Fox released "Titanic" (1953) in which the great liner goes under soap suds while Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb torment each other with brio & Robert Wagner sings "The Navaho Rag".
Of the lot, including James Cameron's super epic, I still like "A Night to Remember" (1958) best, it packs a great emotional punch, doesn't back off the class element and features a fine performance by Kenneth More as Fifth Office Lightoller...I liked it as a kid and I like it now.
Most people forget though that the book was first adapted as live television play in 1956 on the "Kraft Television Theater" and a veryu good adaptation it was as well featuring narration from Claude Rains no less.
Channel Zero always wanted to screen the kinescope but was hamstrung by the unavailability of a good copy and the sure knowledge that a third of the aud would show up expecting Kenneth More and Honor Blackman.

Well, that is our inbound iceberg isn't it?

The Market Report

Vampires have peaked as investment opportunities thanks to Twilight and all the multivarious vampire based TV series. Pitches are going on all over town for new YA series featuring the Last Vampire on Earth beseiged in a mansion by an army of vampire slayers, the only vampire at an exclusive girl's school or some AV HS nerds who go in for vampirism to improve their social position. Saavy Investors are looking at a plateau situations with more creatives piling in, less dividends paid out.

Zombies are approaching a plateau situation, critical market stressors include the Walking Dead TV series, a plethora of graphic novels and a continuing output of new tentpole movies featuring Romero-template zombies. Flesh eating ghouls are still a short term Blue Chip Bet with Saavy Investors running the numbers in their heads furtively darting their eyes at the lifeboats.

Everyone on the street is still talking up Frankenstein's monster on the basis of strong pre-war and post war performance, but Big Frank hasn't been heard from since the Branagh-De Niro merger back in 1994, Saavy Investors are waiting for a Steve Jobs to innovate Frankenstein back to market dominance.

The Wolf Man? The dirty secret here is the old howler is a niche market performer, a penny stock despite strong brand penetration. A long time favorite of Lady's Garden Club investment roundtables who have happy memories of Lon Chaney Jr nonetheless Saavy Investors politely give lycanthropy a pass.

The Mummy: A dependable investment with the same creative blockage as Frankenstein's monster, hamstrung unfairly as a kidvid dependable due to the association with Brendan Fraser. Saavy Investors though are enamored with the Mummy's vast install base derived from the ongoing popularity of Ancient Egypt exhbibitions.



The Field:
Imps, Leprechauns, The Master Works of Edgar Allen Poe, Japanese Product, public domain fairy tales...and of Sarah Michelle Gellar. All worthwhile ground floor opportunities, just steer clear of the Disney Channel.

Season of the One Season Wonder...

Success is great and all, it has its lessons to impart, but failure is no slouch in the race to be "educator of the year".

I make no secret that failed television series utterly fascinate me, "one season wonders" I calls em', back in Channel Zero's Outlaw Days we used to screen them with perverse impunity.
That was back in olden analog times, these days all sorts of obscure televisual catastrophes get tossed out onto DVD, in many cases it's a last attempt to cash in on a series that lacks a sufficient episode count to be profitable in syndication.

Two upcoming titles of note:

The Invisible Man (1975) This was a hugely hyped NBC series circa 1975 starring David McCallum as an invisible scientist who undertook secret agent stuff for the government. As I recall this was NBC's response to the whole "Six Million Dollar Man" phenom. To be honest, David McCallum with his huge blonde cranium, is nigh perfect at this sort of role he has a certain sly wit and never takes the outlandish set up too seriously.
Too bad the scripts were all mid seventies spy stuff, mediocre and uninspired. The Show went for the terminal dirt nap after seventeen weeks, as I recall NBC execs blamed the failure on the fact that McCallum's character was happily married and thus limiting plot possibilities!

So of course, Harv Bennett (showrunner on "The Six Million Dollar Man) was hired to create a sort of successor series called "The Gemini Man" which was an unmarried rakehell invisible secret agent played by the weirdly uncharismatic Ben Murphy. Damn thing went off a cliff in seventeen week, David McCallum no doubt laughed. If the Gemini Man ever turns up on DVD I'll discuss it in more detail to be sure.`


Logan's Run (1977) Ahhhhh 1977, a storied year when Science Fiction went from a nerdy cult to An Industry, overnight thanks to Star Wars/Close Encounters.
All the TV networks wanted in, unfortunately, CBS got the bright notion that the cheap and witless film version of "Logan's Run" was a good bet for an ongoing television series. In the patois of the time it was "a natural" with it's simpleminded futuristic hash of "The Fugitive" the sort of set up readily understandable to television executives.
The show had problems, chiefly it's lead, Gregory Harrison a preposterously handsome actor who could underplay a test pattern, he was duly buttressed by actor-writer Donald Moffat as Rem the Android a sort of acerbic Mister Spock knock off and Heather Menzies a decorous actress whose character thought a minidress and ballet slippers acceptable post apocalyptic attire.
For all that, the show had some serious science fiction chops behind the cameras, Star Trek alum DC Fontana was the story editor and she was able to hook in no less than Harlan Ellison and David Gerrold to contribute scripts before the ax fell.
Maybe it was the concept, these Fugitive knock offs fall into crippling formula pretty quickly if you don't watch out, or maybe it was the cheap cardboard sets...still Heather Menzies was easy on the eye and Donald Moffat was pretty funny all told...As for Gregory Harrison, I hear he was always good to his mother.


BTW The Four "Man from Atlantis" TV movies have been released on DVD, regardless of Patrick Duffy's lingering appeal, the main reason to pick up something like this is to see the Late Victor Buono as the evil "MIster Shubert".
MyGhod but that man was born to play villains, from his days on "Batman" and "The Wild Wild West" Buono stole every single scene he was ever in with aplomb! If you want to watch a classically trained Shakespearean effortlessly redeem mediocre material then by all means track these sonsabitches down.

Well there you have it, ghod almighty we really LIVED in the mid 1970's....

The Red Line...

Is "One Hundred Years Young" as of today.

The rat infested sumbitch makes me late for dinner on a regular basis.

It is filthy...

The PA systems literally vary in functionality from car to car.

You get me home in about the same amount of time it took my father to commute from Government Center in 1966, this you regard as a sort of triumph over adversity.

The damn thing desperately needs a maintenance upgrade, both the rolling stock and the tunnels themselves as well as the switching system.

One does not exit the parking garage at Alewife Station, one competes one's sentence and is tardily sent out into the world.

It has compelled me to walk from South Station to Central Square on one memorable occasion and lesser strolls at various times.

It keeps the cab companies very much in the black.

Ghod help the Red Line commuter on the day after a blizzard, a medieval oxcart would be a surer mode of transport.

But what the hell, without it, I'd be digging ditches on Mount Gilboa in Arlington, and all those delays have proved a heaven sent change to get caught up on my reading.

So Happy Birthday Red Line...yer a dirty swine but you are all I have to get to and fro my phony baloney job.
I may not love you, but I'll still be there for you long after everyone else has taken to hang-gliding to work or flipped over to some sort of sail powered skatboard hybrid.

From left to right...

there seems to be a nigh universal skittishness among The Parents of America about letting their elementary school offspring see "The Hunger Games" (Which opens Friday I guess).
These are the "Wife Swap" type parents, overbearing Xians, Alternastyle Hippies, Helicopter parents off all stripes...concerned that upsetting images will take root in their issue's soft little noggins.
Yet these are the same people that would be rotten glad if their kids read and appreciated the carnage and bloodshed in The Book of Judges...or Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (highest bodycount of all Shakespeare's works BTW).
Ah, but that is the point, different emotions and parts of the brain are activated by reading as opposed to viewing.
Put it another way, no kid is ever wracked with nightmare from merely reading about the feeding habits of H.G. Welles' martians from the War of the Worlds.
But just see that sh*t on the big screen and it's Katey-Bar-The-Door.
Well I can afford to be specious, I have no children no hostages to horrific fortune so to speak.
I saw plenty of horror films whence but a youth, a few of them very scary indeed, but nothing of that pursued me to adulthood.
But lets face it, reality is plenty scary for grown ups, that is what keeps me up at night.

Pick of the Week!

"My Living Doll" infamous one-season wonder from 1964 is at last available on DVD.
Julie Newmar stars as "Rhoda the Robot", an Air Force AI project seconded to a psychiatrist played by the insufferablly smarmy Bob Cummings who is tasked to turn the shapely automaton into the "the perfect woman".
Supposedly Cummings walked off the show after twenty one episodes due to conflicts with the methody Julie Newmar, that and the fact that he wanted to ditch the blame for the inevitable cancellation...vaguely rodentish Jack Mullaney filled in until the show went for the terminal dirt nap in whatever cemetery is reserved for patriarchy driven comedy.

This is a sitcom concept designed to give even Marabel Morgan the screaming bedspins...so of course I have to have it.
For historic purposes of course!
Years ago Channel Zero once had a scheme to screen some old female driven mind sixties teevee shows, appalling obscurities like "Occasional Wife","The Governor and J.J." and the lead off was most definitely gonna be "My Living Doll".
We were gonna call "Riot Grrls of the Great Society"...

"Regrets, I've had a few..."

I just watch "The Celebrity Apprentice" for the movie trailers...

And this week they were pimping out hard for the Farrelly Brothers' "Three Stooges" revival.
To be blunt it looks awful in extremis.
You can't impersonate what was "Lightning in a Bottle" by way of post war TV re-runs you just can't.
Mind you, "Animal Crackers" the play gets revived now and again with Marx Brothers Impersonators, but that was a work specifically written for the brothers as characters.
To revive it, you have to impersonate Groucho, Chico, Harpo & Zeppo....The Farrellys are creating a ersatz original work featuring Moe Larry & Curly's likenesses. There is an important distinction between revival and joyless simulacrum.
Why not wait on the technology to digitally recreate The Stooges...Hire Andy Serkis to mime Moe Howard?
Me I'm waiting for a lavish Shemp Howard biopic starring Sean Penn as the embattled Horowitz Brother.
Hell what I really want is Shemp Howard's old solo Columbia Two Reelers to get released on DVD, it is my firm conviction that Shemp did his best work alone.

John Carter (Of Mars) (2012)

Before I swing into my usual palaver, I want to say firmly and unequivocally that I liked this film, it has perhaps the best man versus four-armed albino ape fight ever committed to whatever the hell has finally replaced celluloid.
Oh they made changes to be sure, the villainous straw that stirs the drink has been beefed up from Book to Movie, "The Holy Therns" once a decadent theocracy have now become parasitic immortal shapeshifting super villains but do not worry, much of Burroughs theme and intent seems intact.
And Taylor Kitsch (Our Leading Man) is a man to watch, if in nothing more than Steve Reeves was once a man to watch when the curtain rose on his hour in the spotlight.
For that fact, Lynn Collins is most definitely a woman to watch in the best Frank Frazetta Cover sense of the term.

True though, my expectations were controlled and low as I eased into my seat at the Reading Imax Theater, I recalled sitting thru "The Land That Time Forgot" in 1974 in Fresh Pond with expectations as high as Hindenburg.
As I've said before, we are in a third age of peplum movies, buff supernormal actors cavorting semi naked thru some mythological realm tarted up with as much CGI as common decency allows.
In that respect, Director Andrew Stanton succeeded, he spent an amount of money comparable to Mitt Romney's entire fortune and every damn penny is up there on the screen for all to see.
Alas it may well be a case of "Too Much Too Late".
Just for a moment though, I'd like to digress, as co-curator of the Channel Zero Film & Video Series (now in our sixteenth year of genteel obscurity) I can speak as an expert in the attempted revival of departed genres. From Peplum Movies (Hercules Unchained and Hercules in the Haunted World) to the Ritz Brothers ("The Gorilla"), Channel Zero has manfully attempted to spark new audiences to forgotten artists and their films.
And if it is one thing we've learned down through the years, there are some dead horses that are strangely resistant even a thorough beating.
It doesn't stop us from trying (Jungle Girl pictures anyone? Believe me we are working on it!), and Ghod Bless Andrew Stanton he was certainly in there pitching, but I fear it was all for naught.
What is Old is Not Always New, sometimes it can be The Original and yet still Derivative.
In the case of Edgar Rice Burroughs' sumptuous Mars Series, the man literally invented the entire genre of extraterrestrial geo-politics, braced it with a heavy load of exo-zoology and armored it with the Modern Myth of the Messiah From Another Planet.
And that is just the first book, written in 1912, in an eleven book series!
Tevis' The Man Who Fell to Earth, Siegel & Shuster's Kal El, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Cameron's Avatar and dozens of others all shamelessly derive from Burroughs' protean imagination.
But because Edgar Rice Burrough's epic science fiction has been largely off market in terms of film or television adaptations nigh these one hundred years the general audience has no idea that ERB's "Barsoom" is the robust original and not some preposterous "Dune" knock off.
And that is the shoal on which the film founders, it comes to market fifty years too late. If for example a string of low budget "John Carter Warlord of Mars" peplum movies got churned out in the 1960's, shot in Spain and starring Gordon Scott and Maria Canale (directed by Mario Bava natch) there might have been enough of cultural hook on which to hang the current incarnation.
But there isn't ERB's science fiction has languished so long it has become too strong a purely literary cult with no links out to the mass audience.
Tarzan, John Carter's almighty cousin in African has no such problem, he has never vanished off the cultural radar screen since he slaughtered his first lion and proposed to howl about it.
But still, it was a well attended show last night, in front of me sat a little blonde nine year old girl, who watched with Saucer Eyes the whole myth unfold.
She was peppering her poor befuddled father after the show with questions about "The Other Mars Books" as they departed, I am sure Wikipedia got consulted via Iphone in the car on the way home.
I suspect this film won't make enough money to warrant a sequel, but maybe just maybe it'll plant a seed for the next generation.
Meanwhile, I do love it when my favorite books become good movies or even passable ones, but there is something to treasure about Edgar Rice Burroughs and his science fiction that is so very impregnable to successful film adaptation.

Trout Fishing on Barsoom or E.R.B. Appreciated...

Over and above the "assigned classics" (Twain, Dickens or Poe), a few select authors will follow one's boyhood to an adult's estate.
For me, one of that elite few, is Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan, Discoverer of Barsoom, Amtor, Pellucidar plus a host of other places and just possibily the real father of Modern Science Fiction.
I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs about 1974, a most auspicious year at the tender age of twelve my mind was at last opening up to all the possibilities fantasy literature had to offer.
Dyslexia was behind me, Mars, Venus, Captain Kirk and the Galaxy beckoned.
That and those god-damned Frank Frazetta covers to Edgar Rice Burrough's then omnipresent reprints, a boy of twelve will never ever forget the like.
As a writer, Burroughs knew what his audience liked, two fisted gentleman heroes, adventurers who must first survive some bizarre undiscovered location, second they must scoop up a veritable dream princess for a mate and thirdly they must conquer and rule justly.
This was John Carter Warlord of Mars, Carson Napier of Venus, Tarzan of the Apes, David Innes in Pellucidar and on and on and on.
Burroughs made that formula sing arias in over eighty novels.
Gore Vidal once wrote a cheeky ode to Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs back at the dawn of the Age of Camp in the 1960's. He noted Burrough's misspellings, his spotty sense of African zoology and then swung into a long praiseful discourse on the superiority of Burroughs' "fight scenes".
According to Vidal, no one wrote better fistfights which was no small achievement, apparently writing brawls is a hard business, too often they are written as boring or laughable affairs.
And in truth, Burroughs' fight scene do pop off the page pretty consistently, be it Tarzan tackling a gorilla or John Carter skewering an assassin.
Burroughs heroes are expert & upright users of violence.
If Burroughs had a flaw as a fantasy writer, it is that his heroes inevitable comquered all and ran up into a meta contextual wall, they've won, now what?
After all who wants to read about the adventures of a beloved all powerful Emperor?
Burroughs got around this by wrapping series up and moving on to other planets and realm or else putting heretofore lower ranking members of the supporting cast in the spotlight.
If need be he'd restart the whole mishaugas by throwing the original hero's Son into the mix.
With Tarzan Burroughs' staved off boredom by deploying a vast array of Lost Civilizations, almost a dozen of them in over twenty books. At one point, the need for a challenge to Lord Greystoke sent the Ape Man to the Center of the Earth and a few rounds with the dinosaurs of Pellucidar.
And that is another thing, Burroughs' invented the "continuity crossover", without it the comic book industry would languish today.
For what it is worth, irregardless of his nonsensical science, Burroughs may be the real founder of Modern Science Fiction, simply because he looked out into the universe and assumed Anything Could Happen and that made for sterling adventure.
Stuff like "Avatar" and a lot of the modern canonical SF owes so much to Burroughs it isn't funny.
The Superman? Check, John Carter was leaping the Minarets of Mars in a single bound long before Clark Kent hitch hiked to Metropolis.
The Stranger in a Strange Land? Check, David Innes of Pellucidar is Valentine Michael Smith's messianic Daddy.
The Man of two species? Check Tarzan, Both Ape and Man, in both worlds and of neither att he same time.
Hell "Tarzan and the Lion Man" features talking super intelligent apes a good twenty years before Pierre Boulle's "Planet of the Apes".
And Burroughs was an early exponent of the sturdy notion that the inclusion of dinosaurs improve all drama by an order of magnitude.
***
Alas, For all his props, other than Tarzan, Burroughs has never cast a giant shadow in the movies, (I mean have you seen "At the Earth's Core"??), his fantasies are almost too robust even for today's Hollywood.
As I write this, the word on the street is the latest attempt Disney's "John Carter" laid an egg at the Box Office.
That should upset me, it does not. It does however reinforces the sheer scope and power of ERB's imagination.
Godspeed Mister Burroughs 2012 marks the onset of your second century as American Fantasist of the First Rank....

Pick of the Week!

The Lady from Shanghai (1947), running Sunday and Monday at the Brattle Theatre on a double bill with "The Postman only Rings Twice".

Who else but Orson Welles could sell Harry Cohn at Columbia on adapting an obscure potboiler as a film starring his ex wive Rita Hayworth and still somehow churning out a Noir Masterpiece?

The Third Age of Peplum is upon Us...

thanks to Friday's premiere of "John Carter" (Warlord of Mars) starring the appropriately named Taylor Kitsch as Edgar Rice Burrough's mesomorphic interplanetary swashbuckler.
But of course, this has all happened before, and it will happen again, especially in Hollywood.
The first age of Peplum started in Italy in 1957, it was built around Steve Reeves, Champion American Bodybuilder who starred in the hugely profitable "Hercules".
Well, the movies abhor a vacuum and soon almost any US Bodybuilder with any sort of title to his name was jetting off to Rome to star as Maciste, Ursus, Goliath or Samson as well as dozens of variants on Hercules. At it's height, obscurities like Ed Fury (chiefly known for being a sort of musclebound chorus boy in Mae West's Las Vegas revue) was starring in motion pictures up and down the Mediterranean Littoral.
All these movies made money, do not forget this, muscles = money.
The whole thing lasted almost eight years before the creative winds deserted peplum's sails and everyone moved on to Spaghetti Westerns, Horror Flicks or in the case of Steve Reeves a comfortable retirement breeding horses in California.

Then in the 1980's the whole damn thing flared up again, thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger;s short lived "Conan the Barbarian Franchise. This time in Hollywood and driven by Arnold and by "Rocky" star Sylvester Stallone whose physique became increasing cartoonish in the Jack Kirby sense of the term. Other than the two "Conan" movies, the second peplum wave eschewed the purely mythological type of script. This time around it was less Hercules and more soldiers of fortune, androids, crusading cops and the like...But believe me this was peplum sans the dubbing and the classical setting.
However, at the height of this second wave, TV's Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno made a counterintuitive return to Italy where he discovered that the whole Hercules filmography was short by at least two films starring himself as the Lovechild of Zeus.
Eventually that wave receded, leaving in the tidal pools everyone from Dolph Lundgren to Mister T. (both of whom got their starts jobbing to Sylvester Stallone in the "Rocky" franchise).

I think Billy Crystal did the second wave in...that is just a theory though.

Now a third Peplum Wave is upon us, and it is driven much like the first by fantasy and or mythological narratives, commencing with "300" starring Gerard Butler and running straight thru Brad Pitt's turn as Achilles in "Troy".
Now it is the turn of "John Carter, Warlord of Mars", Edgar Rice Burrough's first action hero (circa 1912).
I dunno if this film is gonna be a hit, the blunt truth is, Edgar Rice Burrough's non-Tarzan film adaptations have run the gamut from mediocre ("At The Earth's Core" starring Doug McClure) to...mediocre ("The People that Time Forgot" starring someone). I'm giving this film despite it's Mitt Romney-esque price tag, long odds.
I'd like it to be a success, some the finest reading pleasure I had a as a boy was spent reading Edgar Rice Burrough's science fiction.
But I am not hopeful.
Remember I saw "The Land that Time Forget" in Fresh Pond back in 1974...I got time invested in this mishaugas.

Well if it doesn't work, Taylor Kitsch and his pecs can probably revitalize the Tarzan Franchise, I hear Disney still owns that option.

"Act of Valor" (2012)

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. Any film that cites all the Navy SEALS who died on active duty since 9/11/2001, can't go entirely wrong.
But the storyline is pretty under-dramatized, Navy SEALS in hot pursuit of a Russian Smuggler and his Jihadist buddy who are armed with scary detection proof suicide bomber vests...the acting is underwhelming.
And besides, at one point Our Heroes penetrate a Mexican shantytown harboring terrorists and never once is a civilian ever accidentally shot...I mean Welcome to Hollywood guys.

In short script wise, it was pure Stallone sans the glitzy pyrotechnics.
On the other hand, I liked the naturalistic settings, the judicious use of real SEAL veterans, the authentic hardware (anything the Pentagon clears for use in a movie has to be obsolete compared to what is used on deployment right now)and the relative realism of the climax.
I think though, that maybe they might have done better with a sort of neorealism experiment like the Italians tried during WWII (See "Men Under the Sea" (1940) currently out on DVD under the title "SOS Submarine" for proof. The film has NO professional actors in it!) or else some sort of "Mondo Special Forces" exploitation flick.
Hell imagine what Orson Welles in full "F For Fake" mode could have done with some serious Navy SEALs found footage?
Now some might dismiss "Act of Valor" as a naval recruitment film. That is pretty much what it is, but then again, these are all volunteer forces we have and no one compels anyone to Join the SEALs.
Now if we could only "force" someone to make a new and different movie about Navy SEALs....

The Death and Afterlife of Joseph Stalin

Let the record show that one of the last things that Joe Stalin did when he retained the ability to talk, walk & slay is screen at late night movie with select members of his politbureau.
Then came the sumptuous buffet and the vodka wine and then more vodka. Stalin was a terrific insomniac and stroke/heart attack survivor but according to Nikita Khrushchev he could party like a fratboy well into his seventies...hell he routinely courted cardiovascular disaster by taking steambathes, no one could tell the Boss what to do, not if they wanted to live any longer.
That last party was a success by the standards of the politbureau circa 1953, Stalin was in a good mood, no one got arrested.
When the guests dispersed, The Leader retired to his private house in the Kuntsevo suburb of Moscow at 4:30am 2-28-1953 leaving strict orders he was not to be disturbed, til he called in the morning.
Normally Stalin rang for his morning tea at 11:30am or so, but come the next day he did not call, the security detail at the Dach were frantic, calls when back and forth to the Minister of State Security (Sergei Ignatiev, a protege of Nikita Khrushchev...the guards were told to leave the Leader alone.
Finally at 6:30pm eighteen hours after Stalin retired, a light went on in the Leader's dining room (where he normally slept on a coach)...the detail breathed a sigh of relief...but the phone never rang.
Such was the sheer terror Stalin's underlings had for him that literally did not dare enter his Imperial Presence unless biden to do so, like a Chinese Emperor quite literally.
By now the guards are in a state of panic, complicating things was the arrival of the daily sealed mail poach from the CPSU Central Committee, which had to be handed over to Stalin without delay.
Finally these poor mooks drew lots and the loser went into the house with the pouch.
There at 10:30pm that night he found The Leader sprawled on the floor in a semi conscious incoherent state, having urinated himself.
All attempts to rouse the Dear Comrad Leader failed thus doctors were summoned, at 7am the next morning.
By now, the politbureau is in attendance, so there are plenty of witnesses when the diagnosis came down that Stalin had suffered a massive stroke and would shortly die.
The great irony of Stalin's death is, that due to the "Doctor's Plot", a blantantly anti semitic campaign to purge the medical profession in the USSR of "rootless cosmopolitans" and "British Agents", the best cardio-vascular MDs in Russia were all in KGB's Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.
All these poor unfortunates were summarily rousted and interrogated by hulking secret police types who painfully described the Leader's condition to their prisoners using no names, the verdict from the Lubyanka, the case was terminal.
Beria, Stalin's brutal child molesting chief of the Secret Police alternately kissed the leader's hand and cursed him in loud tones, Khrushchev wept, almost all the men who stood the deathwatch had been themselves threat of arrest & execution at one time or another.
But they saw their opportunity and took it.
I mean is it any wonder then why medical attention never reached Stalin until twelve to eighteen hours after the onset of symptoms?
Still and all that, it took Stalin almost four days to die, just long enough for his "colleagues" to fix up the succession, abort the coming purge and start plotting the arrest and death of Beria.
Stalin's millions of victims living and dead, could wait.
Stalin himself, ended up a preserved mummy, a sort of high end Elmer McCurdy placed on eternal venerated display in Lenin's tomb until 1961 when Khrushcheve decided to bury Stalinism by burying the late leader's corpse once and for all.
And all of this is merely where Channel Zero's next screening begins....
That would be "History's Greatest Loss" (1953) the official Soviet Propaganda Documentary detailing the funeral rites for Comrade Stalin.
Communist societies know how to bury their leader's with true necor-worship, look at the rites accorded Conrade Kim Jong Il in North Korea, buried in a blizzard thousands forced to weep at the mere sight of his hearse.
Anyhow..."History's Greatest Loss, the Great Farewell to Joseph Stalin" screens Friday March 2nd at 8pm in the Microcinema of the Somerville Theater 55 Davis Square Somerville Ma, Admission $7 (cheap!), in Russian, Subtitled in English.
This would be the last great spasm of Stalinist Propaganda...unseen in Boston in fifty nine years!

But all that aside, I'd love to know the title of the last movie Stalin ever saw...Y'know over and above the Soviet Propaganda Product, Nikita Khrushchev claimed to te end of his life Joe Stalin loved John Wayne movies.

Coriolanus (2012)

One thing is for sure, Shakespeare knew his soliders, both as heroes but also as fatally flawed men several steps short of glory.
From Othello with his superstition and credulity to Julius Caesar with his fatal ambition...the Bard told the truth on them all.
Now at long last, Ralph Fiennes has dig waaa-ay down in the canon to come up with "Coriolanus" Shakespeare's arrogant childish mother dominated Roman General who is banished by jealous rivals only to return at the head of an army composed of Rome's hated enemies.
Simply put, I loved this movie Fiennes put across just enough Wellesian touches (modern dress, iambic pentameter news broadcasts) without taking focus off the weird triangle between Coriolanus, his Norman Batesish Mother (played with razor sharp nastiness by Vanessa Redgrave) and Aufidius (Gerard Butler), Coriolanus's former foe, sudden ally and maybe sorta BF.
Like I said, Shakespeare knew his soldiers.
Well all sexual politics aside, Coriolanus is likely Shakespeare's most reactionary protagonist, he loses out on the consulship of Rome simply because he can't bring himself to cajole the restive masses for five lousy minutes. He bungles his opportunity, blames everyone but himself and then betrays his country literally in a childish temper tantrum.
Very instructive in an Election Year to be sure.
I sometimes am given to think that Shakespeare had it in for the Romans, they keep reaching for Glory in all his Histories and all fall short with tragic consequences...by contrast his English Kings occasionally land on a Happy Ending...even if it's by accident.
Anyhow this one won't last long in the theaters, its an relatively obscure Shakespeare adaptation by US standards well worth tracking down to the Waltham Embassy.