Frankenweenie (1984)

I keep seeing trailers for the new Frankenweenie film from Tim Burton. I'm not sure if I'm going to see it in theaters after being so disappointed by Tim's recent work, but it got me thinking about how much I love the original short film.

The premise is simple. Boy loves his dog, dog dies, boy resurrects dog. Barret Oliver (what ever happened to him?) plays Victor Frankenstein with such sweetness, and Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern play his parents. What makes the film so special is the humble homemade quality of it. It's wacky and a little dark but it has heart and features the misunderstood outsider, qualities which would later come to define Tim Burton's feature films. Frankenweenie was a memorable look at things to come.

If you are interested in watching this short film on Netflix, you have to get the bonus disc of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Or just watch it on YouTube!

October starts Monday, are you ready? Go watch something scary this weekend to kick-start the spook-fest!

He Said/She Said: The Master

If We Ran The Zoo...

Since early August, the 65-year-old Bay Theatre in Seal Beach has stood mysteriously vacant. According to an article in the local paper, this is due to a sudden mass exodus of employees who were not pleased with the current management. There is no indication as to when the historic movie house will re-open. To lose a place like this would be a catastrophe. We at This Cinematic Life have decided to take this opportunity to ponder how we would run such an institution. Though some of the following suggestions might be a little pie in the sky, struggling theaters might be wise to take a few of these ideas to heart...

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Policy
First and foremost, simply walking into the theatre should instill a sense of awe and wonder. Patrons have made the decision to leave their house and plunk down hard earned money, so make it worth the effort. Comfortable seating and beautiful decor will go a long way towards making them feel as though they made a wise choice with how to spend their evening. Hopefully this will also help to remind audience members that they are not at home and to be respectful of everyone else's viewing experience. But if that is not the case...

When Movies Invade Your Dreams...

There's no denying it: cinema is all around us. It's in our references, inside jokes, and sometimes it gets buried in our subconscious and shows up in our dreams. It could be that time you dreamed you were fighting Sub-Zero in a Mortal Kombat style arena, or that dream where you decided not to get on the plane and stay with Rick in Casablanca.

Or, if you're nerdy and boring like me, you'll spend a good chunk of your evening dreaming about trying to convince your coworkers how good Amadeus is, and getting mad when the IMDB-in-your-dream has the wrong year listed ("Amadeus was NOT made in 1967! The Internet is WRONG!") No lie, that was my dream last night. Is that the best you can do, brain?  Another recurring dream of mine is that I'm one of the bank-robbing cheerleaders from Sugar & Spice. I'm a little bothered by how much space that movie is apparently taking up in my brain.

I want to hear from you! What is your most awesome, bizarre, or just plain memorable movie-themed dream?

Mulholland Dr. (2001)

A young woman (Naomi Watts) who has just arrived in Hollywood with dreams of stardom meets a mysterious woman with amnesia (Laura Elena Harring). All of this is somehow connected to a film director (Justin Theroux) who is being strong-armed and of course the eponymous street - Mulholland Drive.

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In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditaion, Consciousness, and Creativity, director David Lynch attempts to describe his creative process:

It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta Stone. It's the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It's a hopeful puzzle piece...You fall in love with the first idea, that little tiny piece. And once you've got it, the rest will come.

Though I cannot say for certain what that "first fragment" was for Mulholland Dr., I think it might have been simply the desire to depict Los Angeles as he sees it:

I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you're there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather.

While L.A. Confidential is easily my favorite Los Angeles film, I think Lynch was successful in making  Mulholland Dr. the definitive cinematic depiction of this city of angels. Watching the film feels like taking a drive around the city. It's all there: The beauty, the ugliness, the diners, the nightclubs, the palm trees, the light, the darkness, the hills, the bungalows, the wealthy, the poor, stars on the rise, stars on the decline, the present, the past, movie magic, etc. It all exists simultaneously in one large sprawling, living mass.

Double-Bill: Double/Double

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair and Grindhouse

How To Be Melanie Daniels

I went to a screening of The Birds on Wednesday night, and was once again entertained by the somewhat icy and amusingly unlikeable daddy's girl Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren. She has her redeeming moments, of course, but mostly I just enjoy sniggering at her antics. So you want to be just like her, right ladies? Here's how!

Step One: You've got to dress the part. Chic green suit, fur coat, flawless updo. I'm kinda crazy about this green/gold version, and here's a pretty fabulous fur coat to top it off! Add some shiny peach nailpolish on those talons of yours and you're good to go!

Step Two: Pretend you work someplace you don't. In this case, a bird shop. Who cares if it's obvious to anyone with a brain that you have NO idea what you're talking about? And while you're at it...

Step Three: Lie about everything. Who you know, why you're in town, everything. Don't worry, your guy will think it's adorable when you finally come clean.

Step Four: Stalk men you just barely met. Copy their license plate number, find out their name, address,  members of their family, and drive all the way over to their family home just to drop off some lovebirds. In fact, go ahead and let yourself into his house. He won't find it weird at ALL.

Step Five: Try to make better choices. Have birds been attacking? Do you hear the rustling of feathers in an upstairs room? Do you need to go investigate by yourself? No. No you do not. But if you REALLY want to be Melanie Daniels, be my guest. Just make sure you remember how to exit a room you just entered...just in case.

Step Six: Try to avoid birds altogether. There's absolutely NO REASON for you to stick around in case birds start swooping at your face trying to kill you.  Go back to San Francisco, you crazy dame!

The Unknown (1927)

Alonzo (Lon Chaney) is a knife-thrower in a traveling circus. The gimmick? He has no arms and throws the knives with his feet. He's in love with the circus owner's daughter Nanon (Joan Crawford) and is always there to lend a sympathetic ear or a shoulder to cry on. But there is something sinister about Alonzo, and his seemingly pleasant face hides a criminal past and a darkness in his character.

The Unknown was the first silent movie I ever saw (thank you TCM Silent Sunday Nights!) so I'm probably a little biased when I say that this is the perfect first silent movie for anyone interested in the genre. It's just about an hour long, the plot is interesting, and it's a great introduction to Lon Chaney, the "Man of a Thousand Faces". I'm a big fan of his and this film sparked a minor obsession with his work when I was a teen...from The Phantom of the Opera to The Unholy Three to Laugh, Clown, Laugh, I loved it all. I even sat through an attempted reconstruction of his famous lost film London After Midnight, made entirely from production stills. He's a very intriguing actor and works great with the young and not-yet-scary Joan Crawford.

If you're looking for something different to mix up your almost-October movie list, I recommend this one. It's bizarre and quirky in a way that silent movies almost always are, but a great watch nonetheless.

Document This! - Part I

I’m gonna be completely honest with you, gentle reader, I’m not the biggest fan of making lists. But then again also not a fan of picking just one favorite movie, album, or song.  Any time someone asks me to name my all-time favorite film or book or album, I begin to sweat, panic and rattle off a laundry list of my top favorites.  I never have and never will have a single favorite movie, but I can tell you (roughly) what my favorite films are.  Since my lists are constantly evolving, changing and shifting to add new and revise the old, I will never have a complete or comprehensive list. Always a work in progress.

Now then, I would be remiss if I didn’t introduce you, to one such ever ‘evolving’ list of mine. This list is of documentaries I’ve seen over the years and would implore you to seek out and watch.  This list is by no means complete and it will continue to be added to as I continue to seek out and enjoy as many offbeat and amazing documentaries as humanly possible.  As it stands, this list will be broken up into as many parts as I can muster, more parts to follow if this initial outing goes well.

Roll Credits!

Back in the day, movies had all of their credits up front. In order to keep audiences engaged and to prepare them for them for the film that would follow, studios employed keen minds like Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro to design title sequences that were like small films unto themselves. Though today most directors take the easy way out and lay text over their opening scene, some filmmakers still choose to invest the time, money and effort necessary for a nice title sequence. Here is  a small sampling of my favorites both past and present. 

The Blob (1958)

The Apartment (1960)

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has found the perfect way to succeed in business without really trying - he lets his bosses use his apartment as a place to canoodle with their mistresses. Things get a little complicated when he ends up falling for one such mistress, the adorable and trouble elevator operator Ms. Kublelik (Shirley MacLaine).

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The Apartment was Billy Wilder's last great film. Though flashes of genius can be found in his later work, none of them ever approached the greatness his first 16 years. What a streak! Beginning with 1944's Noir classic Double Indemnity, he was able to effortlessly bounce back and forth between pitch-black films like Ace in the Hole and lighter fare a la Some Like It Hot. And with its delicate swings from hilarity to pathos, The Apartment serves as the perfect integration of Wilder's two worlds. The perfect mixture of sweet and sour. It's almost as if this film is what he was building up to his entire career. Few films can get away with having a character as broad as Mr. Dobisch exist alongside one as coldly apathetic as Mr. Sheldrake, but this film can. So what if he was never able to hit such a high point again? Nobody's perfect! The man directed at least seven masterpieces (Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17, Sabrina, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment) AND wrote Ninotchka. Now shut up and deal!

Double-Bill: Strangers In A Strange Land

Bunny Lake Is Missing and Don't Look Now

That's What He Said: The Expendables 2

Shame-In: Prologue

For nearly two years I've been gathering notes for a monograph on film in the late 2000s focusing mostly on No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood and how they reflected America under George W. Bush. As clear as this idea is in my head, I've been continually putting off starting the damn thing.

Cut-To: Earlier Tonight. 

I was listening to an interview with writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach in which he discussed a writing group he is part of. They call the group a "Shame-In" since everyone in the group essentially shames the others into working with their mere presence.

Seeing as my work schedule is all over the place, I don't think I could really get together a group of people to do this on a regular basis. But then I thought of you guys, our faithful readers...

What follows is the prologue to my piece which I just wrote in the past couple hours. Hopefully by putting this out there in the ether I will be shamed into continuing to move forward with it. Encouragement is welcome. In the likely event that you think this is crap, please don't tell me, I already agree with you...

Prologue

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" - Bob Dylan

Sunday, February 25th, 2007
The Kodak Theatre was alive with energy as Martin Scorsese left the stage clutching his long overdue Oscar for directing. The glamourous audience had been through a lot and after nearly four hours, the end was in sight, only one award remained. But as Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton made their way to the stage, there was a great amount of uncertainty as to whom would be taking home that last little golden boy.

Normally the film with the most nominations is the shoe-in for Best Picture, yet for the first time in Academy history, the top nominated film wasn’t even in the running. Despite its impressive eight nominations, the long gestating adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Dreamgirls had failed to secure the most important one. Though Babel had the second most nominations with seven, victory seemed unlikely as it had failed to win a single award all night. It was truly anyone’s race. Who would come out on top?

Would it be Clint Eastwood’s year again with his Japanese language WWII film Letters From Iwo Jima? What about The Queen? The Academy does love Brits. Or maybe the feel-good Little Miss Sunshine would follow in the tradition of Marty and Rocky to become the little film that could?

In spite of the three awards it had racked up over the course of the evening (editing, adapted screenplay and director) few saw The Departed as a real contender. It was a genre picture, it was violent and it was cynical. This was the same Academy that had only one year prior singled out the maudlinly hopeful Crash for Oscar glory. Surely they wouldn’t give their highest honor to a film that the director himself later described thusly:

"It has to do with the nature of betrayal. The nature of a morality which, after 2001, has become suspect to me. I'm concerned about the nature of how we live, how we're living in this country and what our values are. This new kind of war is going to continue. Our children are going to inherit it. It's not going to be over with by the time we're dead. It's like a whole worldwide civil war. How does one behave in that context? What's right and what's wrong in that war? On the street level of The Departed, no one can trust one another. Everyone's lying to each other. It fueled me in a way. It got me angry, it got me going."

Going purely off the applause as Diane Keaton read the nominees, it seemed as though Babel might end up walking away the victor. But then again this is the Academy Awards, not Opportunity Knocks. Jack Nicholson didn’t even wait for The Queen's applause to die down before tearing into the envelope. Once it was open, everyone fell silent. Keaton seemed giddy with anticipation. Who would it be? After a moment to examine the contents (and with an oh-so-subtle grin) Nicholson proudly announced the winner - The Departed. And like that, the delusional optimism of Crash was obliterated. The chickens had come home to roost and the rage of The Departed reigned. This was sure to make for a very interesting election season...

The Grey (2012)

When a plane of oil drillers goes down in the arctic, a small band of survivors must band together to survive both the elements and the pack of wolves stalking them.

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As many DVD collectors are well aware, when you buy a box-set, you usually get one legendary film accompanied by a whole bunch of  fluff. When I first saw the trailer for The Grey, I immediately dismissed it as one of the fluff films in the continually expanding, "Liam Neeson Kicks Ass" box-set. Having now seen the film, I can assuredly say that it is and will in fact be the centerpiece. While I'm not usually one for man v. nature survival stories (with their empty platitudes about man's savage nature and intense survival instinct) this one really grabbed me. Joe Carnahan's direct, subjective camera and Neeson's heartbreakingly nuanced performance are things of wonder. Together they make a masterpiece. I really can't see a world where this doesn't make my end of the year top-5. It's that good. Please check it out.

Double-Bill: Hero Worship

The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

John Williams at the Hollywood Bowl

Last Saturday I was fortunate enough to see "The Maestro of the Movies" John Williams perform at the Hollywood Bowl! And yeah, it was awesome.

Confession time: I lost my program! So I'm going off my memory here. Bear with me!

Top 5: Take 2

A quick look into the mind of a lazy blogger: I couldn't come up with anything substantive to write for the blog today so... I pulled Rob Gordon and compiled a quick Top-5 list of my favorite director's cuts! Hopefully this doesn't become too regular of a thing.  If you start seeing a lot of these, please yell at me to be more ambitious. Thanks.

That's What He Said: The Bourne Legacy

Leave Her To Heaven (1945)

Socialite Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) meets and falls in love with writer Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde). They marry, and appear to be an ideal pair. But, as luck would have it, she turns out to be obsessive, jealous, and capable of evil things nobody thought possible.

I'm so happy this film is in Technicolor. Gene Tierney's face is a work of art. And she's SO good in this. It seems I've been watching a lot of crazy-women-movies lately (Fatal Attraction, Play Misty For Me, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Misery) and I was happy to revisit this one. It's pretty campy at parts (The film has Vincent Price in a supporting role...I think he drags camp behind him wherever he goes) but it's also very dark. The bad girls of 40s cinema don't get much more twisted than this! Add Jeanne Crain as her saintly (and equally stunning) sister, the beautiful scenery (although the matte painting in the background are at times laughably obvious) and the insane story, and you've got yourself a good way to spend a couple hours.

Enjoy, and don't let Gene Tierney take you swimming!

What's Up, Doc? (1972)

Several people staying in a San Francisco hotel all have the same style bag... As you might expect, hilarity ensues!

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Though Hollywood spent the entire 1960s trying to make old-time genres work again, most of them resultant films were strained, dated, and willfully blind to the changing times. But then in 1972 this little movie came along and proved that in the right hands, old genres can still work that old magic. All it takes is a brilliant cast, a clever script and a director who learned at the knee of the greatest filmmakers ever. Simple right? Sure it doesn't work all the time (see: Steven Spielberg's so-so 1941) but when it does - WOW!  It's a shame that Peter Bogdanovich has become so marginalized in recent years. Targets, The Last Picture Show, What's  Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, They All Laughed; the man sure knows how to make a picture,  just give him a chance to do it!

Double-Bill: Epic De Niro

1900 and Once Upon A Time In America