emma blackwood

Have a very scary solstice!

2010-12-21T22:37:00.001-08:00

Goldfinch
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

I'm a little late (and have been reprehensibly quiet recently; more frequent posts will return in 2011 as I re-embrace the joy of watching movies for their own sake) but wanted to wish everyone a very happy winter holiday. We can't do much for this goldfinch here, but the outlook for the rest of us is, I hope, a great deal brighter for the coming year. Stay warm on these dark nights, and pray for daylight....

Downtown gothiness

2010-08-17T18:24:00.001-07:00

Million Dollar Theater
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Neither a man-eating plant nor a scary movie. I am just happy with this photo! The carvings are outside the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway, a beautiful place to visit. I am fond of the Million Dollar Pharmacy on the corner of Broadway and Third. Across the street is the Bradbury Building, which was the only sight in LA I really wanted to see on my first visit. When it turned out to be three blocks from the office that was interviewing me, I was pretty thrilled.

"Left Bank" (2008): Yes! Belgian horror!

2010-08-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

I cannot highly enough recommend "Left Bank," which came to my attention via the always-reliable Arbogast. He was comparing it favorably to "House of the Devil," and while I would agree that it is far superior to Ti West's snoozefest I'm not sure I'd compare the two. Both involve creepy buildings and a lone girl in peril, but "Left Bank" is unquestionably modern. Which is weird, because it ends up involving some crazy medieval hoorah, but still.

Heroine Marie (Elina Kuppens) is a scrappy, independent-minded young woman living with her divorced mom and spending most of her spare time running: she's training for an international event in Portugal, and her proud coach thinks she has it in the bag. When she gets sick and Portugal becomes out of the question, she's devastated. With a sudden amount of unwanted free time on her hands, she takes up with cute archer Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts), and after a night of hot sex, she pulls away from her mom and coach and decides to go recuperate at Bobby's. He's got a sweet apartment on Antwerp's Left Bank, apparently a hip transitional neighborhood, in a huge old building run by his grandmother.

But almost immediately things start to get weird for Marie. Instead of getting better, she suffers headaches, nausea and insomnia; when she tries to go running, she hurts her knee, and it spends the rest of the movie getting darker and purplier and grosser. Her flaky mom comes to visit and starts fussing about weird vibrations and dangerous ley lines. A neighbor tells Marie that the previous tenant of Bobby's apartment was a woman who vanished. Then a package comes for the missing woman; when Marie opens it, she starts learning more about the building than she ever wanted to know.

There are definitely shades of "Rosemary's Baby" here, but unlike fragile Rosemary, Marie stays totally independent and together. I adored her character. She clashes with her parents and coach, but she keeps her head on straight; she asks direct questions, she never starts at shadows, and when things start getting berserk she does the sensible thing and moves the heck back out. She doesn't go creeping timorously down hallways, and you never want to yell "Don't go in there!" You're right along with her the whole way. She's fab.

Marie is also a very physical character -- she's young, her body's always been her ally, she loves running and she enjoys sex -- and I love how this is really key to the ensuing awfulness. Her problems begin when her body turns against her: she's been pushing herself so hard that she's quit menstruating, among other problems. You really feel how much it kills her not to be able to rely on herself anymore. She wants so much to get better, and she can't. And as her hurt knee gets darker and weirder -- eventually sprouting hideous stiff hairs that she tries, sobbing, to yank out -- it all starts to feel like a metaphor for puberty or old age. Transformation turns out to be key to what's happening. I won't give it away, but: brr. See this film!

Casting a shadow

2010-07-27T17:22:00.001-07:00

Spider & Sarracenia
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

I do love this spider. Every day when I go out to visit my plants, it's hanging around on the pitchers, usually on top of a Sarracenia rubra. Sometimes it crawls, picks itself up a bug and crawls back out. The sunlight caught it just right the other day for this photo.

Final Girl Film Club: 'House of the Devil'

2010-07-25T21:02:00.001-07:00

Writing about this movie is going to be difficult because I kept falling asleep. Each time it happened I would jolt awake a few minutes later, see unfamiliar stuff happening onscreen, sigh with irritation and rewind the movie to the last thing I remembered. This was a tedious exercise but, I imagine, not quite as bad as watching "House of the Devil" straight through without interruption. I'm grateful not to have seen it in a theater, where I would have had to sit upright. This movie is a snooze and I'm afraid director Ti West is a frightful bore.

This is the first film I have watched for the Final Girl Film Club that I have energetically disliked. It will be very interesting to see what the other Film Club Coolies have to say! My friend Jason adored it. I read a bajillion favorable reviews when it came out. But -- I have nothing good to say about "House of the Devil." It is without redeeming qualities.

Everyone's favorite thing about this movie seems to be that it's set in the 1980s and made in the style of the era's brilliant horror movies. And how could you not love that idea? A babysitter, a synthesizer score, a friend with a crazy flip hairdo -- these are great accessories for a horror movie. But they're accessories. You need something real at the core. The movie needs a scary idea, and "House of the Devil" hasn't got one.

Heroine Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) lives in a college dorm and really wants to rent an off-campus apartment from landlady Dee Wallace (tribute! tribute!). To help pay her first month's rent, she accepts a babysitting job from weirdo Tom Noonan ("Manhunter," "Monster Squad") and his weirdo wife, Mary Woronov (the friendly scientist from "Night of the Comet" -- and OK, I did get excited about that). But the house is dark and it's creepy! It might even be the house of the devil! Whatever will Samantha do?

Well, she plays some pool. She listens to her Walkman. She orders a pizza. She watches some TV. She walks around the house. I woke up and skipped the DVD back and she obligingly did it all again.

The problem with this movie is not so much that it's slow -- it's really not that slow -- but it gives your brain absolutely nothing to latch on to. The characters are impossible to understand. How come Samantha needs this apartment SO badly? So she gets sexiled by her roommate. Who hasn't been through that? How come the couple is so weird about pretending they have a kid, and then pretending instead they have an elderly mother who needs looking after? How come they don't even show her the upstairs of the house before leaving her alone? How come she puts her Walkman on? What if the "elderly mother" called out for her? Who's after whom? What's going on? I just sat there getting irritated, and after a while I just quit caring and let my eyes close.

Unfortunately, West's "The Roost" had exactly the same effect on me, which is really a shame because I love farm horror and I love bats and I love zombies. But "The Roost" never quite coheres -- it creates an atmosphere, but it isn't intelligent enough to create a mood. "House of the Devil" is the same. A scene doesn't automatically become interesting because the heroine is using a rotary phone instead of a cell phone. The fact that this is all West has got -- I find it kind of insulting. Come back when you have something to say, dude.

But Mary Woronov! That's pretty sweet. God, do I love "Night of the Comet."

Ladybug opens

2010-07-17T15:45:00.001-07:00

Ladybug opens
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

My Sarracenia hybrid "Ladybug" unfurls a sinister new pitcher! It will turn deep red in the (as you can see) bright rooftop sun. The pale spots are translucent windows that disorient insects and lead them to their doom. I have really come to love this hybrid and the hooded-cultist look of the pitchers.

I took some better photos of this pitcher but sort of like the washed-out, raw quality of this one. Sometimes death is more frightening in broad daylight.

I do so love "Cabin Fever"

2010-07-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

And I don't think enough other people do. The debut feature from Eli Roth has so much going for it. Just a few reasons, off the top of my head...

The music. Nathan Barr does a fabulous nails-on-a-chalkboard score, starting with the gorgeous opening credits. Angelo Badalamenti contributes a jazzy, "Twin Peaks"-esque number for the surreal Deputy Winston, as well as the haunting "Red Love," for Paul's doomed attempt to manually satisfy Karen. A bunch of songs are borrowed from "Last House on the Left," providing both a shout-out to Roth's beloved 1970s horror, and setting a nicely creepy we're-alone-in-the-woods kind of mood.

I even love the closing bluegrass band, pepping up the end credits with "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." (Apparently they were a local band and Roth invited them to come play in his movie; I just love that.)

The characters. They're all likable enough that you root for them, yet ultimately they're just rotten enough that you don't feel awful when they die. I've never seen a slasher movie that walks this line quite so well. They're selfish but not loathsome. Everyone gets annoyed with Burt when he shoplifts, and when Jeff talks down to the locals ("If such an incident were to result in a 'lawsuit,' you could be held liable"), his girlfriend Marcy tells him to shut up. A sick man asks for their help, and they light him on fire -- but they feel really bad about it! You wouldn't want to be on vacation with these kids, but you don't hate them like you hate the people in the "Friday the 13th" remake either.

The disease. Flesh-eating virus! I love nothing more than fake blood and zombie skin effects. I also love how a killer disease preys upon these beautiful, hygiene-hyperconscious kids -- "I don't want him touching me" is a recurring line. But the best part: Everyone gets sick by the end, but not one of the main characters actually dies of the disease.

Dennis:

The writing. "Paul, that guy asked for our help. We lit him on fire." (I also like when Jeff says "The rain probably put him out.")

The girl stuff. I might get in trouble for this but I think this movie is particularly fun for women. It can be hard to find good female characters in your modern horror movies; at a glance Marcy and Karen just fall into the usual slut/girl-next-door pigeonholes, but they turn out to be a lot more complicated. Marcy turns out to be very nurturing, fixing chili for everyone and stroking Karen's hair. Karen strings Paul along and then drops him as soon as a semi-cute stranger shows up with a bag of weed ("You can sit here!").

And I think women viewers just are going to get a more personal frisson out of Marcy's notorious leg-shaving sequence, or Paul's even more notorious misfire as he attempts to manually satisfy Karen. (Male viewers might relate to the misfire in their own way, of course.) Even just little moments ring true, like Karen talking about her parents' shower massage and saying "You can imagine my disappointment the first time I had sex." Marcy rolls her eyes: "Tell me about it," and all the boys look confused. ♥!

The group dynamics. People are awful, and they're even worse in groups. "Cabin Fever" is a fascinating showcase of groups behaving badly! First, the teenagers light the aforementioned sick man on fire. They don't mean to; they think he's attacking them, and maybe he is; but still, it's not nice. Later, when one of their group gets sick, they react in terror: screaming, running, slamming doors, and finally putting the sick girl outside in a shed, alone. I love the scene where they line up to carry her mattress out and then help her down the stairs, silent for the moment, their group decision made: they look like a tribunal, there on the back porch.

Then various group members go for help, running afoul of locals in various ways, then lying to each other about what happened: the group is coming apart. They meet their match in a tightly-knit, shotgun-toting family of rednecks. And that's before several law-enforcement agencies hold an emergency parley in a hospital room to discuss the best way to handle this strange new disease. It all seems chillingly plausible. I mean, we cover things up and scrub the surfaces clean and make sure our hair is as shiny as can be, but -- underneath it all, people are just nasty.

God, I love this movie.

New camera, new spider

2010-07-10T16:30:00.001-07:00

Spider friend!
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

At last I have replaced the camera that I dropped on the ground and can photograph the beautiful green spiders who have been hanging out on my pitcher plants. Sometimes they are just inside the pitchers and sometimes outside. I spotted this one on my lovely "Dixie Lace" hybrid, casting a dramatic shadow over the intensely veined pitcher top. Still figuring out the camera settings -- and the sun was way too bright -- but this will do for now!

One more thing

2010-06-28T22:37:00.001-07:00

"Spike," about which I posted some wild-eyed ravings here, is now slated for an early August release on DVD... you can however find it now on Netflix and add it to your queue, where hopefully it will not languish as long as, say, all the other saved movies in my queue. (Come on, Netflix, I wanna see "Cronos" and "Cry of the Banshee." And how come "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" is still sitting there? Wah! Although they finally did release "Rabid." That was exciting.)

Anyway. "Spike"'s actual website is here. Horrornews.net liked it too.

Not enough plants

2010-06-28T22:07:00.001-07:00

First open pitcher of the year
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

I have not had enough photos of my carnivorous plants up lately, in large part because I dropped my camera a few weeks ago and it no longer works. But I need to get a new one and document the full summer glory of my beautiful Sarraceniae. They are magnificent plants and they really love the new rooftop home they've got this summer! In the meantime, here's a newly opened Sarracenia pitcher from spring. So lovely. Check out those veins.

Final Girl Film Club: 'It's Alive' (1974)

2010-06-28T01:43:00.000-07:00

There is a nightmare, fairly common to those who have the care of an infant: that if they close their eyes for a second they will hear it walking about. It makes the blood run cold.

- Alice Thomas Ellis,
"Fairy Tale"

My husband asked politely, "May I help you with breakfast?"
"No indeed," I said. I stopped to catch my breath and smiled reassuringly. "I feel so well," I said.
"Would you be offended," he asked, still very politely, "if I took this egg out of my glass?"
"Certainly not," I said. "I'm sorry; I can't think how it got there."
"It's nothing at all," my husband said. "I was just thirsty."
They were all staring at me oddly, and I kept giving them my reassuring smile.

***

"I'm not yelling," I said. "I don't like this any more. I've changed my mind, I don't want any baby, I want to go home and forget the whole thing."
"I know just how you feel," he said.
My only answer was a word which certainly I knew that I knew, although I had never honestly expected to hear it spoken in my own ladylike voice.
"Stop yelling," my husband said urgently. "Please stop saying that."

-- Shirley Jackson, "Raising Demons"

This month for the Final Girl Film Club, a movie I'd never seen and never had any particular interest in seeing. I don't really want to see a monster-baby movie any more than I want to see, say, a monster-kitten movie (although -- please, God, somebody make one). Scary children are one thing, but scary babies just seems sort of un-cricket. Like Pussy Galore, I have maternal instincts. Still, I did love "The Brood," and the whole Pill-era fear of reproduction is sort of interesting. So I gave it a shot.

The first half-hour of this movie is just about perfect. It opens with the very pregnant Lenore (Sharon Farrell) waking up in the night feeling certain pangs and rousing her husband, Frank (John Ryan): "It's time!" I love the late-night eeriness of this intro, how this domestic scene already feels a little like a horror show -- it's just weird to wake up in the night and have to go to the hospital. The couple is excited but a little scared. Lenore & Frank's son, Chris, is a little freaked out too.

The scenes in the hospital are also pitch-perfect, as Lenore tries to talk to her patronizing doctor (who reminded me of Shirley Jackson's reminiscences about labor, quoted above) and Frank hangs out with other nervous dads in the waiting room. I love the tension of this segment: this is stuff that happens to thousands of people, every day, and yet the sense of certain doom is just inescapable.

And then Lenore's baby is born, and kills everyone in the delivery room. See, you were right to be scared!

From here the movie gets pretty bizarre, as Lenore and Frank's monster baby rampages through West L.A., mostly unseen until it leaps on someone's throat with its fangs out. It seems to be pretty much your basic baby, except with claws and fangs and massive jumping/climbing abilities: it's bald and it crawls, and although it kills people, it doesn't seem to eat them or anything. Its motives are unclear. Rick Baker did the makeup effects, but they're hard to see.

Lenore and Frank, meanwhile, argue about their new baby and its place in their home, in a bunch of sequences that I guess are supposed to indicate anxieties about modern medicine and the modern family. It's implied that the monster was caused by fertility drugs -- or maybe Lenore's oral contraceptives -- or maybe just all the smog in the air. Lenore and Frank turn out to have been considering abortion at one point, just to add one more social-issue layer to things. I appreciate the allegory here, but after a while all this gets boring.

But the killer-baby scenes aren't all that satisfying either. I mean, come on, it's got fangs, but it's just a baby! There's a high-camp sequence where it goes after a milk-truck driver (did they really still have milk trucks in 1974?), in a scene that reminded me of the truck scene in "Night of the Lepus." It ends with milk and blood pouring down the street. I guess it's funny? Sort of?

Another bit, used more than once, involves a character standing in a dark room full of baby toys. Everything looks so sinister! Wait -- did that plastic car just move? Is something else here? You get the sense that director Larry Cohen is immensely pleased with these scenes. At one point, multiple characters enter a dark nursery in turn, alone, just so Cohen can push that button again.

And they do resonate, unpleasantly; it's true that there's something otherworldly and alien about babies, sure, and you never really know what's going on inside their heads, and we project all kinds of anxieties onto them, both about our private lives and about society.

But still -- it's just a dang baby! I don't know about it, people. I'm going to hold out for the killer-kitten movie.

In which I very unexpectedly fall in love

2010-06-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

I had no hopes whatsoever for "Th e Legend of Hell House." I knew nothing about it; I forgot why I put it on my Netflix queue; it just meandered up to the top and landed in the mailbox one day, and later that week I was in the mood for horror and noticed with pleasure that it was only about 90 minutes long. And then I fell in love.

The premise is your basic haunted-house setup: A disparate group of people is asked by an eccentric wealthy person to spend several nights in a house full of nasty spirits. In this case, a millionaire who wants to know for sure if there's life after death has hired a physicist and a pair of psychic mediums to investigate the Belasco house, also known as Hell House. The house is notorious for its nasty spirits: Other people have tried similar investigations and have been killed. Yoicks!

The script is based on "Hell House," a book by the ubiquitous Richard Matheson (the night before I had happened to watch "Somewhere in Time," which is also based on something of his; he is of course responsible for "I Am Legend" and that damn "Trilogy of Terror" story with the Zuni doll). Apparently after Shirley Jackson had a hit with her lyrical "Haunting of Hill House," he got inspired. But unlike Jackson, Matheson does not like things to be quiet and understated. I am usually more of Jackson's way of thinking, but the gonzo baroque fun of this movie proved irresistible. Someone has sex with a ghost, people! What more could you want?

Plus, just look at these frames. Every scene in this movie is just lushly gorgeous. Even when the story is in Maximum Ridiculousness mode, "Hell House" is a beauty.

Our group consists of physicist Barrett and his wife, who is just tagging along; a young medium named Florence Tanner; and another medium named Ben Fischer, (Roddy McDowall!) who is the only survivor of a previous Hell House expedition. Barrett gets right down to business, taking measurements and readings. Florence immediately senses a powerful presence in the house. Ben pretty much keeps to himself; he wants to get through the experience, get his money and go home. The house, though, has other plans for the group.

What I love about this movie is the interpersonal conflict between the investigators as the paranormal situation gets more and more out of hand. Unlike Jackson's much classier story, in which each individual sort of retreats into himself, this movie is all about the fights the characters have. It's almost too glib to say it's like a paranormal "Survivor" but it does focus on the effects of an extreme (and extremely peculiar) situation on a group's dynamics. Barrett (sort of the hero) dismisses Florence as silly, Ben as unhelpful and his own wife as irrelevant; Florence is frustrated because no one's listening to her; and Ben has a lot of tension and fear simmering beneath his calm, sexless exterior.

As for the house -- it's not so much a character as a puppet master, provoking everyone individually into a group conflict. The prevailing spirit appears to be former resident Emeric Belasco, who used the house as a staging ground for appalling orgies: as Fischer describes them, his practices included "drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies." (If I were into ringtones, I would love an audio sample of McDowall dryly reciting this sequence -- the final clause just kills me.)

Anyway, all this degenerate behavior seems to have made the house evil, or at least extremely restless. Florence thinks she's got its number: it's haunted by Daniel, an illegitimate son of Emeric's. Is she right, or is the truth something darker? Lonely Ann Barrett finds her way to a very provocative bookshelf indeed and soon starts hurling herself at poor Fischer. Daniel's spirit (if there is one) shows a very, shall we say, personal interest in Florence. Things get more and more bizarre, with a final showdown in a crypt involving a blood-soaked corpse, the hurling of insults and heavy objects alike, a lead-lined room, and a surprising discovery of false limbs. It's a great ride from start to finish.

Plus, just look at this bookshelf. How many movies have prop books like this? "Obsessive Acts And Religious Practices" indeed! "The Worship of Priapus." "The Anatomy of Abuses." I love it. I love "Hell House." Let's go!

Midnight Warrior Attack: What is guaranteed to make you happy?

2010-06-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

Dear horror movie bloggers: I love you for updating and giving me reading material and suggesting cool movies for me to watch. But I especially love you for holding participatory events that spur me to quit staring at your sites for long enough to update my own! This is my first Midnight Warriors post for the wonderful The Mike over at From Midnight, With Love. What The Mike does is, he presents a topic, and then we either email him our thoughts or, as in this case, post our own and send him a link.

The current topic is: What's guaranteed to make you happy when it comes to horror, genre or cult cinema? This was a fun topic to kick around. The Mike's list is here; although he kindly insists we do not need to also come up with top 10 lists, I came up with 10 anyway, albeit in no particular order.

1. The woods. Always, anything set in the woods. I grew up on a farm in Tennessee, and at night I would lie awake and think about all the dark forest surrounding the house. What was going on there right now? What creatures were prowling, leaves rustling, unseen things moving through the dark trees? I sleep with the light on when I visit my parents, always. And my favorite horror movies confirm what I always suspected, deep down: There are awful things in the woods and they are going to get you. My beloved "Evil Dead" captures the mysterious feel of the woods late at night so perfectly; "Cabin Fever" does a nice job too, I think, and even M. Night Shyamalan's maligned "The Village" turns that primal dread into a nifty, creepy fable.

2. A dreamy mood. I love a movie that clings to your imagination like cobwebs afterward, trailing gorgeous sticky shreds of mood. I love being haunted by a movie. "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" comes to mind; after watching it, I just put it on again and let it play while I wandered happily around the house, enjoying the music and the creepy water scenes. "Spike" is another one (with another nice eerie score), and so's "Carnival of Souls." I love watching "Evil Dead" at night because it sends me to sleep feeling that way: like I've already been dreaming. Mm.

3. Comedy, but not too much. Such a tricky one. I love the humor in "Evil Dead" but "Evil Dead 2" is almost too much, and "Army of Darkness" makes my head ache. I just like things to be subtle. "Cabin Fever" though is pretty gonzo and it cracks me right up. I also love the vicious black humor of "Hostel," and the loopy insanity of "Spider Baby." Even "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" has some of the most hilarious moments in horror ever -- I love Pam sitting up in the freezer. And then there are the "Friday the 13th" movies, which aren't quite comedies but are impossible to watch straight-faced. Hm. It's hard to get the balance right, but when it's there, oh baby. "Bubba Ho-Tep, "Re-Animator," honeys, I'm looking at you.

4. Gin and microwave popcorn. I don't keep microwave popcorn in the house anymore, but back in my 20s when I was less worried about my girlish figure, my favorite thing after a tough night at work was to fix a giant gin martini, sit down with a bag of popcorn and watch something scary. These days it's usually a baked potato, but still, it's all about the gin and butter. Happy AE.

5. Children. Scary scary children. The floating vampire kid in "'Salem's Lot." Tomas in "The Orphanage." The entire cast of "The Devil's Backbone" (except for that fab teacher with the wooden leg). Is it some kind of psychological anxiety? Is it just that they're small and could creep unseen around your bed at night? Whatever the reason, nothing's as creepy as children.

6. Being surprised. There are jump scares, there's twist endings, and then there's a genuine surprise. Maybe it's taking a chance on an old BBC movie and having it be so scary I actually spit out my drink in terror at one point ("The Woman in Black"). Maybe it's a twist that's more than a gimmick and actually makes you think ("High Tension" -- I realize not everyone will agree with me here). Maybe it's a movie you expected to hate and ended up loving ("The Wicker Man"). When a movie surprises you it becomes yours in a whole different way.

7. H.P. Lovecraft. Darling, elegant, mannered, racist, disturbing Howard. Just trot out his name and I'm happy. It doesn't matter if it's a faithful adaptation like "The Call of Cthulhu," or something that takes more liberties, like the CoC team's upcoming adaptation of "The Whisperer in Darkness." Or something that is completely insane, like "Re-Animator" or "Dagon." Or even something that just requires the adjective "Lovecraftian." I am just happy about the man from Providence.

8. Houses. Anything set in the woods has me. Movies set in houses are much trickier. Done well, they bring your worst nightmares to life: something evil invading the place where you should be safe, making you fight for your life in the exact places you have your cozy daily routines. The best ones make you look around, as you sit drinking tea in your living room, and think : "where are the exits? What could I use as a weapon here?" They force you to think about really nasty logistics. "The Birds," of course, is the classic, as is "Night of the Living Dead." I am also a pretty big fan of "Signs," although it doesn't really turn into a house movie until the very end. Done badly, though, the logistics fall apart and everything becomes confusing: this happens in "Ils" and "Dog Soldiers."

9. This.

10. Fear. That's all. Waking up in the night knowing -- just knowing -- that the old dead woman from "Black Sabbath" is in your doorway. Driving down your street and wondering if, like Mary in "Carnival of Souls," you shouldn't be here. The best horror movies get under your skin, expand your perception, stretch your imagination. Sometimes it hurts, but it's good for you.

Wow, this is long. So much happiness. Also, I clearly need to just dedicate a post to "Evil Dead" already. Thanks, The Mike!

I write about old movies

2010-06-11T18:28:00.000-07:00

Just another plug for my other blogging project -- over at the LA Times' Daily Mirror site I write a Friday column called From the Vaults, about movies from 1920, 1940, 1960 and 1980. The site is a history blog and most of the posts focus on those specific years, so I figured, why not see how many movies worth watching I can round up? 1920 and 1940 have proven to be particularly entertaining. (I almost wrote another review of "City of the Living Dead" (1960!) but I want to keep this blog a dirty little secret from that blog -- also, I just did not want to think about the intestine scene anymore.)

Anyway, this week it's the Cecil B. DeMille picture "Why Change Your Wife?" which I just cannot recommend highly enough. The dresses! The shoes! Gloria Swanson! The completely awesome title cards! Even the typefaces are beautiful. Even if you don't bother reading my review, do yourself a favor and watch the movie. It's a blast.

In other news, my "Spike" post is now listed on Maverick Entertainment's site for the film, where my site is described as "Review Blog." Yes! Am famous!

Final Girl Film Club: 'City of the Living Dead'

2010-05-23T19:18:00.000-07:00

(Best thing ever, btw: the backwards E's on this DVD cover. Silly zombies, they can't write good!)

My first Fulci! One hears about the ruthlessly baroque gore of Italian maestro Lucio Fulci -- his work even makes a cameo in "Juno" -- but nothing can really prepare one. "City of the Living Dead" (or, as fancy-pants IMDb has it, "Paura nella città dei morti viventi"*) should really be watched with a crowd, so everyone can bob heads to the catchy organ music and scream "Oh my God" during the gore sequences, and most particularly so everyone can say "What in the name of God just happened?" after the head-scratching ending. The Final Girl Film Club is the next best thing.

Plot's not really the point here, but briefly and with spoilers: During a seance, a comely psychic (Catriona MacColl) has a vision of a priest hanging himself in a cemetery and thereby opening the gates of hell. Paralyzed by fright, the psychic is buried alive and rescued by a cigar-chomping reporter (Christopher George, of "Pieces"! (Or as IMDb has it, "Mil gritos tiene la noche." What is with you, IMDb?)). The two of them set off together to find the cemetery and close the gates before all hell breaks loose. While they're getting their act together, lots of craziness starts going on in Dunwich, the town with the cemetery in question. (Nice Lovecraft reference there, Fulci babe.) This movie doesn't make much sense and it's not really good, per se, but it is a blast to watch.

First, the live burial: This entire sequence is just fantastic, starting with the eerie shots of Catriona lying in her coffin. I wasn't expecting this to go the live-burial direction; I figured she'd just be a zombie or something; and when her eyes flew open and she started gasping for breath and clawing at the coffin lid, oh my, the effect was very chilling. The big lesson here is that if you are going to get buried alive, make sure ANYONE rescues you besides Christopher George. He waits about an hour to respond to her shrieks and then nearly puts a pickaxe through her skull. It's worth it for you, the viewer, because the payoff is the fantastic image below.

Meanwhile, particularly unpleasant things are happening in the town of Dunwich. The gates of hell are being unleashed in the form of a zombie plague; I expected the zombies to advance upon the townspeople in a straightforward manner, but since these are the devil's zombies, their ways are more roundabout. They like to appear and disappear, often covered in earthworms (not a lot of gardeners in Dunwich, apparently, since no one is happy to see the worms). Other strange things happen: a mirror cracks and the shards begin to bleed; a cat freaks out; the streets are filled with creepy sounds, like howler monkeys and crying babies.

But mainly it's a plague of zombies, who bring about some very baroque deaths! The most vivid of these is the famous intestine-vomiting scene -- oh, I am so grateful not to have seen this as an impressionable tyke, because I would have been scared of throwing up to this day. (I mean, I still don't like it, but damn.) A girl sees the priest zombie standing outside her car, a nice scare in itself, and within seconds she's bleeding out the eyes. Then stuff starts coming out of her mouth. I actually put down my tea and started repeating "Oh my God. Oh my GOD." If watching the buried-alive sequence is like sipping a fine chilled martini, this is like slamming a shot of tequila. I mean, damn.

Also famous is the drill through the head sequence, which is just what it sounds like! My favorite thing about this is how early you see the drill. By this point, even the Fulci virgin knows he's not going to power up a drill and let it just sit there without poking a hole in somebody. You (and the victim) get to watch it coming, and watch, and watch, and watch. It's a little like the steamroller sequence from "Austin Powers." Again, this is where it would be fun to have a room full of people screaming "Here it comes!"

And then there's the ending. I found a couple Web reviews that referred to the "much-discussed" ending, but I didn't find much discussion. What, ah, what happened there? Johann, Peewee, Final Girl, help!

Also, I loved how game the cast is. They had goofy dialogue and inexplicable plotlines to deal with but they all just seem really committed. I particularly adore the actresses, who nearly all have to bleed out of their eyes at some point, and most of whom have to do something worse; even the heroine is willing to foam at the mouth. Plus all the main cast members get covered in writhing maggots in one memorable scene. (It's nothing like Argento plunging Jennifer Connelly into a maggoty pit in "Phenomena," but I am not getting into the Argento-Fulci discussion right now.) The point is, these people are troupers! Fulci must have been quite persuasive. "You weel wear maggots on your face! Eet ees perfect."

*I guess this means "Terror from the city of the living dead," in case it wants clarifying that the living dead are scary.

So my friend made a movie and it's gorgeous, or, You shouldn't have come here.

2010-05-19T02:28:00.000-07:00

There are a handful of movies that authentically replicate the feel of a dream: "Evil Dead"; "Don't Look Now"; "Carnival of Souls"; "Picnic at Hanging Rock"; parts of "Edward Scissorhands" and the 1992 "Last of the Mohicans"; even fragments of the vigorously campy "Night of the Comet." And then there's Robert Beaucage's Spike, which is part nightmare and part love story and part fairy tale, and all dream. I just finished watching it for the third time and I'm anxious to just go to sleep, all swathed in the mood of it (I did that one night last week, and ladies, it was lovely), but tonight I just want to write about it. Around middle school I used to stay up past midnight writing in my diary (my version of rebellion) and this movie puts me back into that exact mood. It's deeply, deeply unsettling. I mean, how does this movie reach that place? How does it know? Even I had forgotten.

I have been dithering with how to write about this movie here, because I wouldn't have seen it if I didn't know the director -- it's not out on DVD yet and I missed its showing at Shriekfest earlier this year. This isn't a situation I've really come across in LA yet, and I've had the little Homer Simpson angel and devil on my shoulders saying "You just like it because it's your friend's movie" and "Shut up, you!" and "Yes sir *poof*" and frankly it's very tiring for a middle child like me. Dammit, I'm not a professional blogger, I'm just a person, and if I didn't like his movie I would just tell him "Well, that was very interesting" (that's what we say back home for "God almighty, get me out of here") and not worry about it here in Emma-land. But all I can speak for is myself, and this movie just gets to me. It's unsettling as hell.

The plot is pretty simple, really. Two couples are driving at night through the woods in a relentlessly quaint vehicle (what is that thing, a Suburban?) and crash, and they find themselves at the mercy of sinister and primal forces. Or you think that's the plot, until it becomes clear there's really only one sinister and primal force, and he's got a major, primal crush on one of the occupants of the Suburban. (If it is a Suburban. I don't know. I try not to get bogged down in this stuff.)

The dynamics change abruptly and decisively: The one guy in the car is severely injured by this hostile force in the forest. His girlfriend goes after him and promptly, in manner of helpless damsel, gets herself bitten by a rattlesnake; perhaps the hostile force in the forest can save her. The other two people in the car, a lesbian couple, get bogged down in a hopelessly fatalistic argument about what to do next. You could get snarky, and part of you kind of wants to -- but the movie is so sincere and so earnest, it defeats your attempts at snark. (Though the dialogue shows flashes of wry self-awareness: "That is the cheesiest line ever." "Marry me!" "Um, what's for dinner?")

What it turns into is a big meditation on relationships. This hostile spiky thing in the forest, it turns out, knows the straight girlfriend -- they grew up together. A bizarre past is hinted at involving her dad, his Harley, and his fear that his daughter might be harmed by her strange little friend. A lullaby is sung: "Your dad sang it, so I sang it to you." It's dark. The damsel's not as helpless as she seemed. Things get confusing.

I've always had a thing about movies shot in the woods, and this film was shot entirely in Angeles National Forest. (I drove up there winter before last, homesick for snow; I got to some snow and walked on it, blissfully, then turned around and went home. That spring the Station Fire happened. It burned up all the locations used in this film.) When the characters go stumbling into the thornbushes, cliffs, undergrowth -- you know where they are. No matter who you are, it's a place you have to recognize. You've been there. They're in the Forest of Arden, Prospero's island (Spike helps you by quoting "The Tempest"), the bramble forest of Sleeping Beauty. It's not just that there are monsters there: this is the primal setting where you find out what you're made of, whether you're Red Riding Hood or just a Star Trek red shirt. As Alan Moore put it in his "Swamp Thing" series: This is the place. This is the story. And you shouldn't have come here.

Yeah, it turns into being about relationships. But is there anything else more enduring or haunting? Before I had ever heard of this movie, I had nightmares about turning into a monster for someone I loved; you know someone's deepest, darkest secrets, and when you leave them it's as if suddenly you had become a daisy-cutter bomb for them, suddenly turning from their sweetest friend into a weapon that can level sharp weapons at their most vulnerable places. It's something only someone in a relationship can do.

And the cruel truth this movie has for you is the worst one imaginable: You can never, in a thousand years, run from it though you may, escape from hurting the person you love. Just by loving them you do them unimaginable harm. But you have as little choice in it as any creature of the forest. This is the story. And you shouldn't have come here. But you can never help it. You'll be back.

Sweet dreams.

Top: Anna-Marie Wayne faces a nightmare; below, Edward Gusts adorns a poster.

The world as we know it

2010-05-14T02:28:00.000-07:00

So I finally got around to reading "The Stand." I love Stephen King, I really do. I have never read anything by him that I haven't enjoyed -- "Carrie," "The Shining," "Misery," "'Salem's Lot." I wanted so much to like "The Stand" and I hated it.

This bothered me a lot, not least because it dawned on me something like 300 pages in and I knew I had a long way to go, because it was the uncut version. Maybe I should have started in with the shorter one instead. My first complaint about the book was that it was bloated beyond belief. I can tell from the introduction that he's incredibly proud of the descriptive passages involving heroine Frannie and her nasty mom, who embodies the sort of oppressive suburban strictures that King is excited about taking out with his superflu plague. I appreciate what King's trying to do here, especially as a fellow Shirley Jackson fan -- yeah, these social strictures are unpleasant, aren't they? But oh my God, he goes on and on and ON. Some editor needs to stand on his head and say "Steve, enough!" But people love the uncut version of this book, so what do I know. Just every sequence is like that -- it goes on and on and ON -- and you think there's going to be some major payoff by the end, but no. I was so crushed by this. I don't know what I was expecting (maybe something related to the iconic cover art, above), but it just, ugh.

Has anyone besides me not read "The Stand"? Quick summary: Army-developed superflu takes out civilization. A few individuals are left. They gradually find each other, and find that they are all having dreams of an old black woman in Nebraska; they make their way to her, and find she's real and she's amassing a force to resist the other figure in their dreams, a violent white man. Good people line up against bad people. Except not really, but kind of, at the very end, and then not.

I don't know. If I had never heard of this book and someone had handed me a short version, I might well have loved it. I loved the superflu taking people out (misanthropes love plague) and I enjoyed the awkward social interactions between the survivors, who comes from all different backgrounds. But the eventual society that the survivors form is so weird and crazy and mad sexist, it read to me like a 1960s-era husband's daydream. "What if everyone died and we had to PROTECT THE WOMEN?" This of course led me to thinking about my favorite Ray Milland film, "Panic in Year Zero":

Which pretty much reads like a daydream some henpecked husband has on a fishing trip. "What if we couldn't go back to the city and I had to lead us? What if I had to find us rifles and food supplies and care for the WOMEN?" Well, bleah, is what I say to that.

The best thing about "The Stand" was the idea that you would never, never get away with writing a book like that today. We now live in a world that's rich with apocalypse fiction -- and we owe "The Stand" a great debt, I am sure -- but it is not all about Fertility and Saving The Women anymore. The women will be right up front firing automatic weapons at the rapists and zombies, not huddling in the back all pregnant and scared, thank you.

Oh, and the theology involved with this gave me the utter willies. Maybe it's just, again, a sign of the times: the godlike-old-black-woman trope was tired when "The Matrix" busted it out a decade ago. Does it serve anyone to divide communities into absolute good and absolute evil? The people who don't laugh at your hero's jokes are automatically going to decamp for the evil site? The creeps and the outsiders and the ones who just never fit in, they line up with the dark man? Jeepers. I appreciate that it's just a potboiler, but -- leave me out of it, please.

Happy Mother's Day!

2010-05-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

Moms = royalty. Hope all of you have a beautiful day!

Spider baby II

2010-04-27T15:39:00.001-07:00

Climbing
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Finally got some distilled water today and took it out to use on my gasping pitcher plants -- it has been quite warm and dry in LA, and I keep forgetting that they are coming out of dormancy and require moisture! By accident I startled this sweet furry dime-sized creature, who was all snuggled down in the dry sticks of last year's pitchers. She scuttled safely up some old stalks, but my watering had trapped her like a moat. I took her picture and then apologized and moved her to the lemon tree.

Open pitchers

2010-04-13T17:43:00.001-07:00

Laaaaaa!
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Now that their beautiful flowers are fading, the Sarracenia pitchers are starting to open up. They like bugs almost as much as spiders do!

Final Girl Film Club: 'Spider Baby' (1968)

2010-04-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

You have to love a movie that was originally titled "Cannibal Orgy." I was first made aware of "Spider Baby" by my marvelously creepy Cousin Merricat,* who had a post about a screening in L.A. a few months ago. Although I couldn't make the screening, the movie sounded great. And then Stacie picked it for this month's Final Girl Film Club, and I learned it can be viewed in many places on the Internet, and "Spider Baby" and I were together at last!

And I do not think we will ever again be parted. What a marvelous film, and enjoyable on so many levels: creepy, funny, beautiful, oddly touching. It even has an excellent theme song, performed by star Lon Chaney Jr.

The plot concerns the three Merrye children -- Elizabeth, Virginia and Ralph -- the last descendants of a wealthy family. They live alone in a crumbling mansion, guarded by their faithful chauffeur Bruno (Chaney), who protects them from the world. But he can't keep them hidden from distant relatives Peter and Emily, who show up one day determined to claim guardianship of the children, and thus a share of the family wealth. But Peter and Emily do not know about the degenerative ailment that has left the children in a state of total savagery. They also do not know about the spiders in the furniture, or the skeleton in the bedroom, or the cannibalistic relatives locked in the basement...

True to their name, the three Merrye children just have a grand old time, and it's a blast to just kick back and watch them running around. Sure, they're killing delivery men and cutting off their ears, but it's just so much fun. Virginia in particular gets a tremendous kick out of throwing a rope web over people and pretending to be a spider; when she brandishes a pair of butcher knives like mandibles and runs at her prey, she suddenly goes from ludicrous to terrifying, and it's a fantastic frisson. And Ralph (Sid Haig -- aha, this is who he is) galumphs contentedly about like a great bald Irish setter. They have a totally sweet relationship with Bruno: he looks after them (is he protecting them from the world or the world from them?) and they trust and adore him.

They're a little old to be children; Merrye syndrome, we're told, sets in at puberty and regresses the sufferer to a "prenatal state" of savagery and cannibalism. So much for the Rousseauian ideal. Besides killing delivery men, they catch and eat cats, kiss their father's rotting skeleton every night, and attempt to saw the feet off a fetching secretary (Mary Mitchel of "Panic In Year Zero"). And when Ralph catches Emily (Carol Ohmart of "The House on Haunted Hill") in her lingerie....

Besides the madcap "Addams Family"-type escapades, though, there's a wonderfully dreamy atmosphere. Elizabeth and Virginia wander in their white nightgowns up and down dark stairs; Ralph navigates the house via a large dumbwaiter; tarantulas spill out of a rolltop desk. The house just feels familiar, like something you read about (the theme of two witchy sisters barricaded against the world is very Shirley Jackson) or dreamed about a long time ago. "Spider Baby" opens the gates to you ... but be careful ...

*not an actual relation, alas

Oh, HA HA.

2010-04-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

Happy April Fool's Day, everyone! Last October I finally got around to seeing this 1986 classic (it was one of Cinefamily's wonderful slasher marathons, screening after "My Bloody Valentine" on a holiday-themed night). It's unique, all right. Every slasher movie is essentially a game, with bit players knocked out one by one, routes of escape systematically shut off, until the killer and final survivors meet for a final match. But this is one of the only slashers to make that theme overt: unbeknownst to the main characters, and to the audience (sorry, spoilers, but it came out in 1986 for heaven's sake), it really IS a game.

College student Muffy St. John (Deborah Foreman, marvelously creepy) invites a bunch of her friends to spend spring break on her island vacation home. It's April Fool's Day, and Muffy happens to love practical jokes, so the house is rigged with goofy paraphernalia like joke drinking glasses, joke doorknobs, joke light switches -- stuff that's dumb at first, but eventually Muffy's guests are going to NEED those doorknobs in working order, because it seems there's a killer on the island. Maybe even in the house! Creepy reminders of the guests' dark secrets show up in their rooms. People start to disappear. Muffy starts acting completely spacey and weird. Eventually, clever coed Kit (Amy Steel) and her boyfriend work out the mystery: Muffy has an evil twin sister called Buffy who's been locked away in an institution, but has escaped. Look out!

I can't tell you how weird it is, even knowing the ending ahead of time, to see Kit burst through a door and see Muffy standing there with all her "victims" alive and well. Audiences reacted really badly to this movie, and I can see why (I felt similarly after watching "The Village," although I still love it). Nobody likes being made a fool of, and poor Amy Steel still looks grouchy as it all ends.

There's some interesting tension in this movie between Muffy and another girl named Nan (Leah Pinsent). Nan seems to be particularly hurt by Muffy's weird behavior, and she comes in for some particularly vicious personal pranks involving a rumor about an abortion she may or may not have had. In a bizarre little coda, Nan gets Muffy back in kind for all the April Fool's behavior -- is something going on with these two? Or am I just thinking of lesbians because Amy Steel is here and she's so durn cute? I don't know. Either way it's a fun movie to see with a lively audience. Hooray!

Three dead men ride north

2010-03-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

Finally hitched up my skirts, poured a nice tall glass of wine and sat down with "The Last House on the Left" this week. I have been avoiding this movie for many years, on the grounds that it just sounded Very Unpleasant. (The NYT's film critic walked out in 1972!) Sure, it's a horror classic, but why put oneself through it?, was my thinking.

Over the past couple years I've gradually worked up to the idea. First I watched "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," which I had avoided on similar grounds, and adored it. Then I saw Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," the basis for "Last House," and was fascinated by the themes of revenge, redemption and female purity; it's black and white and it's Bergman and it's arty, but it's still fairly brutal. Beloved medieval daughter Karin is raped and murdered by a trio of men who then, unknowingly, seek shelter with her parents; when the parents find out, they take revenge. What interested me the most was the contrast between adored town flirt Karin and her resentful foster sister, Ingeri, who is pregnant out of wedlock and is in thorough disgrace with the household. The dynamic between them is the real driving force of "Virgin Spring," I think.

And "Last House" hews closer to those themes than I expected. Beloved daughter Mari is everybody's sweetheart. Her parents adore her, only making a halfhearted attempt to stop her from gadding around braless and going to concerts by bands with names like Bloodlust. They do not at all approve of her relatively new friend Phyllis, who comes from a bad neighborhood and is taking her to the latest Bloodlust concert, but they let her go anyway. Unlike in "Virgin Spring," Mari & Phyllis are friends, but they exhibit a milder version of the Karin & Ingeri contrast: Mari takes this innocent, exultant joy in the world around her, pointing out the beautiful fall leaves and then her own new 17-year-old bod. The worldlier Phyllis watches her with something like bemusement at times, but Mari's joy is infectious: the girls frolic in the woods, go for ice cream, and then decide to score some grass before the concert, approaching a total stranger to ask him about it as if asking directions from a friendly neighborhood cop. This is where they go wrong. The girls are different, but unlike in "VS," they end up in the same boat.

From here the movie becomes a protracted, sadistic exercise in dread. I just tucked up my feet and poured some more wine and bit my nails and waited and waited. It seems to take forever for Mari and Phyllis to meet their hideous end, and the film cuts mercilessly between their torment and Mari's parents, first fixing her a birthday cake, then sitting up anxiously waiting for her to come home. It's the dread rather than the actual violence that made this so agonizing for me, although when the brutality arrives, Craven films it in a straight-on, almost documentary style that somehow enhances the cruelty. The grainy film stock makes it look like a snuff film. Over on Final Girl, Stacie has a great line in her review of "The Evil Dead": it "just feels wrong." And that's how this feels. It's like something you shouldn't even be *allowed* to watch.

Making it extra horrible is how hard the girls fight and how close they come. One of the last things Mari sees is her own mailbox; Phyllis dies within sight of traffic whizzing by on the road. Both of them make perfectly laudable attempts at getting away. Phyllis (who delivers a haunting "oh, shit!" as the thugs slam the door shut behind them) does a really good job of keeping Mari from completely freaking out, and then picks a great chance to make a run for it. Mari uses smart psychology to get one of them to help her. They almost make it; they should make it; they die for no reason at all beyond their killers' sheer viciousness.

At the same time, it's beautiful. The colors in this movie are amazing: the fall leaves, the bright red blood on Sadie's white face, the magnificent mustard-yellow shirt worn by Mari's dad in the climactic scene of chainsaw revenge. I'm such a sucker for anything horror that's shot in the woods... I love the contrast between nasty goings-on and the bucolic setting. Fairy tales are right: Scary things do hide behind trees (no matter how beautiful the leaves are); there is something waiting under the surface of that still lake. We all know this, deep down.

Also, when Mari's parents start rigging their house for revenge, you just want to hug them; not only is it cathartic, but they are so satisfyingly competent! How I admire movie characters who have a clear plan. I wanted to match this couple up against the mewling, puking pair from Ils.... Dr. and Mrs. Collingwood would've had those hooded home invaders up against the wall in no time, bellowing "And tuck your shirts in, you damn kids!"

And then there's the bizarrely incongruous folk soundtrack -- I counted four tracks that were borrowed by Eli Roth for my beloved "Cabin Fever" -- and the deranged slapstick antics from the incompetent local law enforcement, who seem to have wandered in from another movie. It all adds up to a big bizarre gorgeous raw mess of a movie. When it was over I had one more glass of wine just to celebrate. Then I watched it again.

Edited to add: Arbogast has an interesting essay arguing that the movie is an unintentional blood libel. After watching the movie I'm not sure I buy it, but it's still a good read. Happy Passover!

Pitcher plant flower

2010-03-28T21:36:00.001-07:00

Sarracenia leucophylla bloom
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

While I try to marshal my thoughts on "Last House on the Left," here is a photo of my beautiful Sarracenia leucophylla hybrid in bloom. I have had S. leucophyllas bloom with sort of a cherry Kool-Aid smell, and other Sarraceniae flowers have a powerful cat-pee odor, but this one smells like nothing: She is just about line and color. Ah, the color.

Under the thorns

2010-03-05T19:29:00.001-08:00

Thorns
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

I loved standing under this silk floss tree watching rain clouds approach this week -- the silvery bark and gold-colored new growth stood out sharply against the darkening sky. Plus silk floss trees continue to just amaze me. I've been here four years and still can't get over the city being full of thorny giants that make lavish pink flowers and fluffy alien seed pods. The LA Arboretum also has a white one and a red one, both extremely beautiful.

New gig

2010-02-26T17:45:00.000-08:00

I'm going somewhat legit... I will be writing every Friday for the Times' Daily Mirror blog, a site that looks at historical Los Angeles, about old movies. Most of the posts are about 1920 and 1960, so I will be writing about movies from those years. And my first one is up now, about "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring stone cold fox John Barrymore.

I tied myself into a little stress knot over writing the first couple of posts. It's one thing to put up my own thoughts here, semi-anonymously (even though most of you know who I am, not that I am anyone in particular). But the DM stuff has my name on it. People might read it. Gaak.

So far so good, though. I loved watching the movie. I loved watching the 1960 movie that's going to be next week's topic. I'm trying to branch out a little from writing about horror but -- dammit, that's what I love. Anyway, I'll still be here and still be writing, and I am very excited about the next Final Girl Film Club... but I'll also be over there. Yeep.

"Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem" - Not sure who won, but we lost

2010-02-20T16:31:00.000-08:00

A copy of the "Aliens Vs. Predator" sequel wandered into my sphere last night, and like an idiot I succumbed to the temptation to watch it. Now I have a pretty high tolerance for Alien-related silliness. I have found something to enjoy in all the previous movies, even the ghastly "Resurrection" (come on, Brad Dourif was in it!) and the mostly forgettable "Aliens Vs. Predator" (Lance Henriksen!). I cherish my "Aliens Vs. Predator" comic books. I even love the goofy "Batman Vs. Aliens" comic -- it has some really beautiful drawings. Just give me some acid blood and a big skeletal tail and I'm happy. But even I couldn't enjoy this movie. There's just nothing there. This morning I woke up and couldn't remember a single thing about it. Aliens and a Predator chase each other around. There are dull human characters (one named, with vicious cruelty, Dallas -- I hope Tom Skerritt kicked someone's ass for that). It's really dark and you can't see what's happening. I may have slept through part of it.

It's all just so depressing. "Alien" fans had been waiting for so many years for a movie set on Earth. The one really great thing about "Resurrection" was that its ending set that up to happen, with superclone Ripley coming home at last. The first "Aliens Vs. Predator" does take place in Antarctica, but all the action happens in a giant subterranean pyramid -- it's so claustrophobic it might as well be a spaceship. But in "Requiem" the aliens crash-land outside a small Colorado town. You could have aliens jumping out from behind Dumpsters, lurking under your bed, chasing you through your own neighborhood. Yikes! And here it finally happens, but it's so chaotic and dark, and the characters are so boring, that there's nothing remotely scary about it. I miss the big drippy aliens who used to give me nightmares. As Mark Twain once wrote, "I have no heart to write more. I never felt so about anything before."

You are a furred leaf, I think

2010-02-15T13:29:00.001-08:00

Butterwort
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

A good example of deadly soft fur is the beautiful Pinguicula, or butterwort. The leaves look like African violet leaves, with the tiniest sheen of fuzz; but if you are an insect and land on them, you cannot get off again. The tiny furry stems are covered with sticky material that holds you in place while the plant's digestive enzymes slowly dissolve you. How awful! This plant mostly eats gnats, but mine has trapped larger flying insects from time to time.

In "Little Shop of Horrors," the man-eating plant Audrey II is said to be a cross between a butterwort and a Venus flytrap, as Peter D'Amato points out in his wonderful book "The Savage Garden."

Seed pod

2010-02-10T15:33:00.001-08:00

Seed pod
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

No really, sometimes a seed pod is just a seed pod. From a Queensland lace-bark tree at the LA County Arboretum.

"Ils (Them)": Come play with us

2010-02-09T18:28:00.000-08:00

Ah, ze French. They can ratchet up the tension from the get-go like nobody's business, and it is so elegant! "Ils" (2006) has one of the best opening sequences I've ever seen. A mom and daughter are driving at night and have car trouble: directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud take that simple premise and spin it into several minutes of increasingly exquisite agony. By the time the movie proper got under way, I was about to chew off my own arm. The main story, sadly, eventually loses the elegant simplicity manifested in the opener. But still it has some nice moments.

I knew almost nothing about "Ils" going in, only that it was supposed to be similar to the 2008 American movie "The Strangers" except a) without Liv Tyler, b) shorter and c) French. I haven't seen "The Strangers" due to my violent Liv Tyler allergy, but it sounded good. The premise of both involves a couple being terrorized at home by, well, strangers, for unknown reasons. (It's probably best to go into "Ils" not knowing more than that, so if you haven't seen it, beware spoilers ahead.)

Home-invasion stories are the scariest to me. You can haunt the school or the old department store or the mall all you want to, but come scratching around my bedroom window, where I'm most vulnerable, and brrr. The home-invasion premise also appeals to my sense of practicality: Do you know which windows of your house you can open? Where's your flashlight? What can you use as a weapon? Where are the entrances and exits?

Well, Clem and Lucas (Olivia Bonamy and Michael Cohen), a French couple living in a lonely fixer-upper in Romania, do not pass this test at all. They know where their front door is, and that's about it. The movie's a beautiful exercise in sustained tension, but the imbecility of these two -- particularly Lucas -- had me pretty turned off by about midway through. Creepy people steal Clem's car in the middle of the night; then the power and phones go out; then someone waves a flashlight through the window. What do Clem and Lucas do? Race upstairs and barricade themselves in their room, then decide Lucas should go down and "check" to see if anyone's inside. This just violates all common sense to me. Don't they want to just try and find out who these people are? Maybe they just want to take the TV and jewelry and leave? What happened to Clem's cellphone anyway? And how come these people seem to know the house better than Clem and Lucas do? They switch the power off, they beat Clem to the attic... Maybe it's all supposed to be a metaphor for how Clem and Lucas feel as expatriates, but I was too exasperated with them to analyze.

(And why not go on the attack? Even if you don't have a gun, it's *your* house: you know where everything is. Grab a bottle of spray bathroom cleaner, jump out from behind a doorway and aim for the eyes! But no, these two decide to ditch the house -- and their poor dog, whose fate is unclear but probably unpleasant -- and run, Lucas' severe leg injury notwithstanding.)

Once the action moves outside, things devolve in terms of making sense. Everyone goes into the sewers for some reason, and there's a lot of mazelike running around.

Still, there are some spiffy effects along the way. Sound is used beautifully, with the attackers making a mysterious scrapey sound at the most unexpected moments. The house and sewers turn into a series of set pieces -- it reminds me a little of watching "Alien: Resurrection," which I remember as being just a bunch of baroque fight scenes in different cool settings -- but they're nice-looking set pieces. And I enjoyed some classic-film references: a massive old door bends under the pounding from an unseen force, a la "The Haunting"; a pursuit through the sewers ends at an unyielding grid, a la "The Third Man."

The final twist is fine, but not particularly shocking for the healthy misanthrope. People are pretty much the same at any age, if you ask me. Still, it's something an American-made movie would probably steer clear of. Viva la France!

Movies by heart

2010-02-08T18:38:00.000-08:00

A conversation over the weekend got me thinking about this: There really are quite a few movies I could recite from start to finish. (And will, if you ask nicely!) Most are accidental; they happen to be the videotapes we had growing up, including somewhat random movies taped off TV, which has the amusing side effect that I only know the TV-censored versions of some of these. Others are among my favorite movies ever. It's an odd mix. Here are the ones I can think of, off the top of my head:

Gone with the Wind
Romancing the Stone
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (censored version! "I feel like total crud, Ferris.")
Sixteen Candles
La Bamba (it's been a while, but I think I could still pull this one out. "Bob! Mi hijo!")
The Sound of Music
Mary Poppins
The Princess Bride
Flashdance (censored version, although I bought the DVD and couldn't find much difference)
Roxanne
Mystery Men
Starship Troopers
Cabin Fever
Sense and Sensibility (the Ang Lee version; within a few years I should have the six-hour BBC Pride and Prejudice down, but am not there yet)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales... it was the only one we owned, for some reason)
Star Wars, Empire & Jedi (of course)
The Last of the Mohicans
Little Shop of Horrors (the one with Rick Moranis and the magnificent Ellen Greene)
M*A*S*H (within reason: I don't think I could do every bit of the overlapping dialogue. But most of it, yes)

Looking this over, it is clear that I have not obsessively watched enough movies from the last decade; I need to pick some favorites and learn them. Project!

Sleeping beauty

2010-02-07T15:12:00.001-08:00

Venus flytrap, at rest
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Tiny tiny Venus flytrap -- occasionally addressed as "Mrs. Chompy" -- is on the verge of emerging from her winder dormancy. Look at that beautiful spring green! In the next couple weeks she should start putting up little vertical shoots that will open into lively new traps. She lives next to the compost bin, so a bountiful harvest of flies will be hers whenever she's ready!

Her consort, a Red Dragon cultivar (usually addressed as "Please don't die"), is in a considerably less picturesque dormancy: brown and crunchy. He might be dead, although he looked bad this time last year and he came back. I hope he pulls through, for Mrs. Chompy's sake.

Teeth

2010-02-05T14:38:00.001-08:00

Puya venusta
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

I never saw "Teeth," the 2007 teen horror film about a girl equipped with a vagina dentata, but every time I tangle with the Puya venusta bromeliad, I feel I should.

My supervisor in the desert garden thinks it's called "Venusta" because of the leaves' silvery/whiteish shade. I think this is about as likely as the Venus flytrap getting its name from its pretty white flowers. (The wonderful Barry Rice debunks that idea in this wonderful entry over at the Carnivorous Plant FAQ, in which you can also learn the history of the made-up naughty botanical term "tipitiwitchet"!)

Final Girl Film Club: Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath"

2010-01-25T20:18:00.001-08:00

For this month's Final Girl Film Club, I sat through my first-ever horror anthology! (I have seen most of "Creepshow," but that doesn't count, because it was New Year's Eve and I started in the middle and passed out before the end from too many AEtinis.) This was also my first-ever Mario Bava movie and I just fell in love with him. I want to explore his oeuvre. But first, "Black Sabbath."

This is a spiffy new release which apparently restores a fair amount of footage from the 1963 film, particularly from the first segment. Everyone's dubbed in Italian, even Boris Karloff, who is visibly speaking English in his "welcome to our horrorshow" introduction to the series. The anthology includes three stories, apparently set in three different time periods and places, none of them related at all. Somehow though a similar mood pervades them all -- the same sense of creeping dread. And because they're essentially short stories (although I seriously doubt they're actually adapted from Chekhov, Tolstoy and De Maupassant, as the credits claim), the action moves pretty fast. There's no time for long dream sequences or whatnot as in many of your other vintage horror films. These stories get down to business!

In segment #1, "Il Telefono," a gorgeous woman alone in her plush apartment receives a series of violent and sexual threats via her spiffy red-and-black telephone. She calls a friend for help, and it quickly becomes apparent that the two are... more than friends. Apparently the lesbian-implication footage was largely removed when the film was first released. The segment is campy but sexy, and creepy in a very giallo way -- you get the sense that these women are in peril because they're so gorgeous. While you're still sorting out how to feel about that, matters reach an inevitably grisly conclusion, and we're on to #2!

"Il Wurdalak" (Italian for "The Wurdalak") is the longest and I guess the best-known chapter, starring Boris Karloff as a patriarch who returns to his family after doing some vampire-hunting ("wurdalak" apparently is Olde Country for "vampire"). Perhaps he is a vampire himself! I wanted to like this chapter, just as I want to like all vampire stories, but I am finally confronting an uncomfortable truth: Vampire stories just put me to sleep. I don't know if it's the dreamy mood, or the key role of sleep & hypnosis, or just all the standing around. (Why is there so much standing around in vampire movies?) Last fall I rented Tod Browning's "Dracula" and it took me three nights to get through it; I kept waking up on the couch to the DVD menu. Same for the Spanish-language version, same for "Dracula's Daughter." Maybe I just require vampire tales to be enlivened by campy elements, as in the Coppola version of "Dracula" or "'Salem's Lot." Anyway, although things here are kept moving along pretty briskly, with horseback riding and guns and severed heads, I just about fell asleep. Two things kept me awake: 1) Creepy child vampire!! Crying in a high-pitched voice! Absolutely fantastic. He did not get near enough screen time. 2) The voluptuous heroine is named "Sdenka," which is very Olde Country, and which also sounds like "Stinka." This amused me.

Chapter 3, "A Drop of Water," woke me up quite thoroughly. A hard-drinking, tough-talking single nurse, who appears to live in the 1930s and seems to have a pretty fun little apartment, gets called out in a storm to dress the body of a recently deceased countess. The countess' maid is wigging and doesn't want to do it. So the nurse briskly does her job, listening to the maid go on about vengeful ghosts and how the countess died during a seance. Before heading home, the nurse pockets a ring from the body. Shouldn't have done that!... This sequence is short but fantastically effective. When the countess (played by a ghastly dummy, above) makes her first reappearance -- well, I knew it was going to happen, but I just felt my spine turn to ice. (I would have screamed if Karloff hadn't made me so sleepy.) Water drips from a faucet, a fly lands on a table, a hand reaches around a corner: the tools of a movie ghost story are so basic, but Bava deploys each one so expertly. The man is a master craftsman. I left the lights and radio on all night.

What impresses me is how different these stories are, yet how consistent the mood is. They're a contemporary (well, for 1963) thriller, a vampire tale, and a ghost story. But somehow they all go together. At the end, Karloff appears again in his Wurdalak costume, and the camera pulls back to show you his horse is a fake and so are the trees he's riding through. It's all just a show, a three-ring circus if you will -- you're invited to buy a ticket and have fun. Whee! I'm in. Thanks Stacie. Looking forward to the next one. In the meantime, I want more Bava!

Last Halloween

2010-01-23T22:14:00.001-08:00

Unholy laughter
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Very belatedly -- and for no particular reason, other than that I am already looking forward to next Halloween -- I am sharing my Halloween costume with you gentle readers. I was Linda from "The Evil Dead."

This costume was thrown together in the car in great haste after work, and considering that I think it turned out rather well. The blue splotches are a little too bright, but I don't think you can do authentic '80s zombie makeup without having some blue in there. For a white bathrobe I had to resort to buying a white graduation robe at Goodwill and cutting it into a more shapely form. You just cannot buy a slinky white bathrobe these days. I was extremely pleased with the authentic necklace, which was purchased for a song on eBay. I wear it all the time now!

The costume was worn to an event where I knew almost nobody, so in hindsight it feels kind of wasted. One person, when I identified myself, did know who Linda was and said "OH YOU HAVE THE NECKLACE," which thrilled me beyond belief. My favorite reaction came from a blood-covered young woman who struck up a friendly conversation. "I'm Linda from The Evil Dead," I said. "Oh!" she said. "I'm Allison, from, I guess, Allisonland! Ha! Nice to meet you. What's Evil Dead? Is that a club?" So yeah. I need to meet some geekier people.

Final Girl Film Club: Welcome, fool

2009-12-14T21:58:00.000-08:00

I recently introduced a good friend to "The Wicker Man" (1973), starring Christopher Lee (above) and the late Ed Woodward. "You'll love it," I promised. "It's creepy, it's witty, it's got a gorgeous setting, and it has songs!" Well, she hated it. "It wasn't scary," she complained, "and it was just weird."

But the "weirdness" is the point. This is like no other horror movie. Sure, the mood throughout is maybe more unsettling or peculiar than scary (I still think "creepy" applies). But even if you know the ending -- and unfortunately pretty much everyone does --the fun of this movie is in the getting there. What other movie gives you a sweet-faced matron popping a frog into her tiny daughter's mouth? ("He's got your horrid sore throat now!") Or Christopher Lee singing a bawdy duet with Sean Connery's ex-wife? Or malevolent villagers in fish masks?

The soundtrack for this movie just rocks my face off. I vigorously recommend downloading yourself a copy. "Willow's Song" (covered elsewhere as "How Do") is really quite pretty, and it's lots of fun to roll down your car windows and sing along with "The Tinker of Rye." ("For patching and plugging is his delight! His work goes forward day and night!") I'm also fond of the opening music, based on Robert Burns' "The Highland Widow's Lament." There's a very informative page about the music here.

I refused to watch this movie for many years because of the ending. It still really gets to me; when Woodward sees the "man" and screams "Oh God, oh Jesus Christ!" something way deep in my reptile brain just goes ice cold. Maybe having an evangelical-Christian background makes the idea of a martyr's death particularly chilling (much like having a Catholic background does for stuff like "The Exorcist"). There's something about Christopher Lee just standing there letting it happen, and he knows it's just for show, and Woodward knows he knows that: he's about to die in agony for no reason at all, and all the Psalms in the world can't bring him any comfort. Brr! Turning on all the lights won't help. But "Summer Is Icumen In" is a damn catchy bonfire song.

This post is for the Final Girl Film Club, where Stacie has created an excellent cartoon review of the film. Don't miss it!

Hooded cultists

2009-12-14T17:42:00.001-08:00

Hooded cultists
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

A Sarracenia (North American pitcher plant) cultivar, called Ladybug. See the little translucent windows in the back of the pitcher hoods? The light disorients insects and keeps them from being able to fly right back out of the trap. Eventually they fall into the pitcher to their deaths. Clever girl!

Separated at birth?

2009-10-13T17:30:00.001-07:00

This utterly fabulous, terrifyingly blank-faced jack-o'-lantern, carved by one of my neighbors.....

..... and Baghead Jason from Friday the 13th Part II!

God do I love October.

Light housecleaning

2009-09-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

Just tidying up a tiny bit in here. Like a lot of bloggers I'm now on Facebook a lot (unlike a lot of bloggers, I am not really involved with Twitter) and so the old website has been fairly neglected. I do want to keep posting about scary movies, though -- damn it, I like them, and I like reading what other people have to say about them! So the blog will be staying alive.

At right is now a full archive of all my movie posts over the years! Not all of them are scary, but most of them are. My goodness I have seen a lot of movies. (This feeling is a nice contrast to the way I usually feel looking at, say, my Netflix queue: "my God, I haven't seen ANYTHING. Will 'Whispering Corridors' never get here?") I have also consolidated my "Friday the 13th" liveblog, a gimmick cooked up in honor of a Final Girl blogathon, into a single post for anyone who might be interested in that sort of thing.

I'm working on the blogroll... there's a slew of gorgeous horror blogs that I regularly read and want to add, but being me I'm dithering about whether they should get their own section, or just go under "People" or is that too many people, or what. Also, it feels strangely quaint to even be thinking about a blogroll.... very 2002. Dither dither. I might update the layout too, although I'm hoping the ancient Blogger layout will just come around the other side and be all cool and vintage. No?

Anyway, that's what's going on. Also, "Whispering Corridors" just arrived, so stay tuned if you're into that.

A farewell to arms

2009-09-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

(Normally I would ask someone to smack me for that subject heading, but it's OK because of "Evil Dead 2.")

There's a pile of classic horror in my Netflix queue, and last night I kicked it off with Tod Browning's "The Unknown" from 1927, starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford. (In the Chaneyesque spirit of transformation, Crawford in this movie pretty much looks like every other 1920s actress, with her sleek bob and narrow lips. I would never have recognized her.) I first read about this movie in David J. Skal's wonderful "Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween"; Skal is fascinated by Browning, who of course also directed the carnival classic "Freaks" as well as a little something called "Dracula." In "The Unknown," Chaney plays Alonzo the Armless, a Madrid circus performer adept at throwing knives and lighting cigarettes with his toes, and smitten with Crawford's sexy Nanon. But Alonzo has a secret -- two secrets! Not only is he not really armless, but he's hiding in the circus because he's a notorious criminal, and the armless act is the perfect way to conceal his distinctive double thumb -- which leaves a notable mark on all his strangulation victims. The armless act is also useful because Nanon has a particular horror of grabby men, and she finds Alonzo appealing because, as she shyly tells him, "You're the only man I can turn to without fear." Circus strongman Malabar (played by Norman Kerry, Raoul from "The Phantom of the Opera") scampers around after Nanon with his arms out, but she will have none of him.

Like every movie monster, Alonzo is brought down by his affection for the beautiful woman, in a series of utterly unbelievable and awesome plot twists. A secret midnight surgery is performed! A dramatic change of heart takes place! The climax involves a pair of rampaging horses on treadmills! This movie just has to be seen to be believed.

I don't suppose it's necessary to say that Lon Chaney is amazing, but you just can't take your eyes off him, whether he's making eyes at Nanon or grouchily kicking his feet up to light himself a cigarette. When he realizes his evil (and insanely elaborate) scheme has backfired on him, the camera never leaves his face as he passes through heartrending shock, grief and rage, finally ending in deranged, mocking laughter. "Look!" says the oblivious Nanon: "Alonzo is laughing at the way things have happened!" You're laughing in disbelief too, but Chaney makes you feel for the man. My dashing Spanish hat is off to him. Netflix this, people.

In which most of the cast melts

2009-09-05T21:13:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia's article about "The Devil's Rain" (1975) has an arresting opener: "The film is remembered primarily for its over-long and drawnout ending, in which most of the cast melts." Yes, yes, but check out the cast: William Shatner. Ernest Borgnine (as a Satanic priest who occasionally morphs into the Beast himself!). Ida Lupino, whoever that is. Tom Skerritt. Eddie Albert. John Travolta, even! It was a lovely choice for the Final Girl Film Club and I am so happy to have resurrected the blog in time to join in.

The plot concerns a family -- brothers Shatner & Skerritt and their parents, who do not survive the movie for long -- and the Secret Book it is concealing from Satanic preacher Borgnine. As Borgnine tries to get the book back, he seizes the souls of various family members and replaces them with waxen-faced, empty-eyed cultists. Yipes! The souls themselves evidently go into a little sort of aquarium, in which it is always raining. I had not envisioned hell as being particularly rainy, but whatever. Eventually there is a Confrontation and the promised melting takes place -- there goes the wax, I suppose.

Director Robert Fuest (who ended his feature-film career with this movie) also made "The Abominable Dr. Phibes," which I watched a couple months ago and quite enjoyed. The films have a few things in common: a glacial pace, hammy leading performances and an epic sense of composition. Set largely in a ghost town with a creepy New England-style chapel ("This doesn't belong here"!), this movie has some gorgeous vistas of sunlit mountains and wind-blasted trees. The scenery doesn't help the movie much, but it's nice to look at while you're waiting for something to happen.

My favorite thing about this movie is the crackling chemistry between Shatner and Borgnine as they face each other down on that ghost town's main street, each vying for dominance of the screen. Every look says, "No, I can overact more!" and these men are serious. They purr, hiss, snarl, arch their backs, strut, and eventually just launch themselves at each other. These two need to be in every movie. They could power a town glaring at each other.

Actually, that's just my second favorite thing. My real favorite thing -- spoiler-- comes after Shatner tumbles before Borgnine's maniacal, goat-horned splendor and becomes a cultist himself. Shatner's face becomes waxen. His eyes are blacked out. His expression is vacant. Three years after "The Devil's Rain," this face will become famous...

And then, of course, at the end, everyone melts. And melts. And melts. It's actually pretty creepy looking; I could sort of sympathize with Fuest, thinking "no, THIS one is the most horrible; I have to get THIS in too." I also thought about the "Chubby Rain" scenes from "Bowfinger"; surely they were inspired by this film.

While the faces are melting, you can contemplate the film's remarkable tagline: "Heaven help us all when The Devil's Rain." What is this even supposed to mean? How could one edit it into coherence? I occasionally get sentences like this from reporters, and I just take them out, but I guess the poster would look silly with no words on it at all. What can you expect from a movie in which Borgnine, in an exciting Puritan-era flashback, addresses a crowd of underground satanists as "thee"? That's a singular pronoun, silly! (Spoiler note: This flashback ends with Borgnine's character being burned at the stake, except instead of being tied to it, he sort of lounges next to it as if it were a hitching post. What a badass!)

There is much fun to be had here on many levels. Make yourself a nice big pitcher of martinis (two pitchers if a friend is over), kick back and enjoy the face-melting fun. Heaven help us all when The Final Girl Film Club!

'Halloween is a powerful trigger point for you'

2009-09-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

*opens windows, blows dust off blog... coughs violently, having briefly forgotten powerful allergy to dust*

um. Hello! Is anyone still here? Lord, this place looks as bad as the old Myers house.

Well, it has been a lovely summer break, but here in LA the days are growing shorter, the shadows are beginning to lengthen and the fragrance of wood smoke is in the air -- ok, that would be due to the immense and horrible fire continuing to burn above the city. Still, summer is clearly drawing to a close, meaning horror-movie season is about to return. Of course, around here it never really stops.

Rob Zombie's "Halloween" remake was so ballyhooed -- I had mixed feelings about it but thought it was an interesting exercise, if nothing else -- that I felt bad for this one, sneaking into theaters without any advance reviews or any love. And then I heard Margot Kidder was in it. So the ever-patient Art Boy and I gave it a shot, and WOW. It's a hoot and a half, people. It's bizarre, sure, and it's hampered by awkward Rob Zombie dialogue, and a lot of it doesn't make any sense, but it is *never* boring. And it looks great. It's got the same gorgeously worn, lived-in patina as all Zombie's movies, making it feel beautifully raw, almost "Texas Chain Saw Massacre"-style. I had to run out for a minute when a dog got killed (I had to pee anyway, so it worked out) but otherwise I was just glued to the screen.

What helps a lot is that Zombie's not remaking a classic this time. The action starts, like the first "Halloween II" did, later the same night, with Michael reappearing to wreak some hospital havoc. But things move forward fairly quickly, and from then on, it's an entirely new movie. It's a huge relief to bid the specter of Jamie Lee Curtis farewell and just enjoy the performances on their own terms. Yeah, performances -- I kinda dug Scout Taylor-Compton as Laurie this time around. The girl is a great screamer! And Brad Dourif is quite subdued and heartbreaking as the long-suffering Sheriff Brackett, to whose little town Death is about to return. All he wants is to protect Laurie and his daughter, but we all know how well that's going to go. (The girl who plays Annie, inexplicably allowed to survive the last film, is fine, but it's hard not to think about Nancy Loomis and how great the first sequel would've been with her.) And of course Malcolm McDowell is back as Dr. Loomis, chewing the scenery even more maniacally than before.

Most of the action takes place a year later. Laurie is living with Annie & Sheriff Brackett, who are both incredibly protective of her and feed her healthy breakfasts even after she keeps them up nights screaming in her sleep. Her therapist (Margot Kidder!) helps her work through her grief over her parents and cautions her that she'll have a lot to deal with, emotionally, as Halloween rolls around, bringing the first anniversary of Michael's massacre. Laurie still doesn't know she's Michael's biological sister... but Dr. Loomis, who has once again morphed into a self-obsessed celebrity author, is about to come out with a tell-all book that might destroy Laurie's peace of mind forever! Oh noes!

Well, the movie doesn't build up much tension about that. And you're not really afraid of Michael, either -- he'll show up and stab someone every few minutes, but that's just what he does. Yet somehow this movie just never stops being entertaining. Rob Zombie's slices of domestic life are, once again, a hoot; as Laurie sulks around the Brackett house in her black T-shirt and eyeliner, with her Alice Cooper posters, you imagine Zombie thinking wistfully "Here's the daughter I never had." Malcolm McDowell is, of all things, the comic relief -- snarling at interviewers and reluctantly sharing talk-show space with Weird Al Yankovic (whom he addresses as "Mr. Weird"). Yes, there's Weird Al. There's also Sheri Moon Zombie as a ghost, leading a white horse. What is up with that? This movie makes no sense. And yet it is never boring, right up to the "Psycho"-inspired finale. It's the perfect summer slasher film. I can't believe I'm saying this, but don't miss it.

Another reluctant admirer is over at BloodyDisgusting.

Vacation tally

2009-06-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

Sunburns: 0 (yes!)

Victorious light-saber battles with nephew: 2

Non-victorious: approximately 79

Weddings attended: 1

Age of primary dancing partner at reception for said wedding: 18 months

Fried oysters consumed: 3 dozen

Crab species spotted: 6 (fiddler, hermit, ghost, sand, spider, blue)

Number of times fire extinguisher deployed: 1

Number of adult books spilled out of hiding place by kittens in absence and reshelved by cat sitter: 3

It is good to be home.

Final Girl Film Club - Amityville II: The Possession

2009-05-10T21:59:00.000-07:00

I've got a bad feeling about this ...

Normally I'm kind of a completist -- I don't watch sequels or remakes without having seen the originals, and I never start a book series in the middle. I just like to know what's going on. (I also sleep with the lights on, but that's another story. Or is it?) So watching "Amityville II: The Possession" was an unusual experience for me, since it's a sequel to a movie I've never seen, based on a book I haven't read, and part of a horror franchise that I have no experience with at all. But I hadn't really heard good things about the other movies, or really about any of the books... still, this was for the Final Girl Film Club, which has not yet failed to introduce me to something new and interesting ("Phenomenon," for example). And anyway, "Amityville II" is actually a prequel, so there you go.

As I understand it, in the first movie Margot Kidder and her family move into a house where Something Awful Once Happened, and at the end they leave. The sequel/prequel covers the Something Awful that Happened, which apparently really did happen: Ronald DeFeo Jr., 23, shot and killed his parents and siblings in their home one night in 1974. "Amityville II" cheerfully changes the family's name to Monelli, then gussies up the story with extra gizmos, including demonic possession, Indian burial ground and incest.

Despite the ludicrous trappings, the first two-thirds of the movie are pretty straightforward: The Monelli family moves into a new house. They fight. The eldest son goes increasingly berserk and eventually out comes the shotgun. Knowing what's going to happen, it's just sickening to watch the tension build. Is it the house turning them on each other, or just amplifying their familial dysfunction? Although the movie's trappings are supernatural, the performances are good enough that all the characters seem organic. The father (Burt Young, who is indeed repellent) is a brute; his wife treats him coldly; the youngest children are scared. And poor Diane Franklin is terrifyingly vulnerable as the older sister. (I didn't even recognize her as the brilliant, mostly-silent comedienne from "Better Off Dead.") This is a family with real problems; the Indian burial ground in the basement is just decoration.

The family slaughter scene pretty well caps the movie; afterward there's some business about exorcism involving The Worst Priest in the World (who dashes out the door at the first sign of unpleasantness, then responds to Diane Franklin's pitiful pleas for aid by leaving on a camping trip). But the money scene is Sonny stalking through the dark house with his shotgun, hunting his family down one at a time. His surviving siblings huddle at the bottom of the stairs, unable to escape (you can't escape from family, after all), watching helplessly as his shadowy figure approaches and raises the weapon. They can't even scream. It's your very worst childhood nightmares come to life, and no amount of satanic trappings can keep that from being scary.

So thanks for the nightmares, Final Girl! I vote for something with maggots next time!

Pictures

2009-04-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry, gentle readers, I got nothin' lately. And I'm off to Nashvegas in the morning so the situation is unlikely to be remedied. I've been outside a lot lately -- here are some photos of my friendly neighborhood Griffith Park, here's the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, and here is the unsettling Arthur Ripley Desert Woodland State Park. Many pictures of poppies and Joshua trees and strangely contorted desert flora!

When I get back, there will be posts about horror movies in which women are insane -- or are they? ("Cat People," "Let's Scare Jessica to Death," "Repulsion"); about the tomatoes growing on my garage roof and the carnivorous pitcher plants sprouting around my compost bin; and probably about the ongoing adorableness of my niece and nephew. I also aim to get back in gear and write a post for the next Final Girl Film Club, which will mean viewing the sequel to "The Amityville Horror," a film I have no previous experience with whatsoever but Final Girl has steered me well thus far. (By which I mean she shares my love of "Pieces."

I am going to try to avoid writing about the kittens, but below is their most adorable picture. There are more here.

Carnivorous plants in the Onion

2009-03-27T15:40:00.000-07:00

Yay.

In photo: a lovely Sarracenia flower from a couple years ago. Multiple Sarraceniae are getting ready to flower again under my stairs. Perhaps you lucky readers will get to see pictures!!

I leave it entirely in your hands

2009-03-12T23:33:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, I don't; I'm going to make you all sit here and listen to me blather on about the "Watchmen" movie. Hah! Lord, what a suspenseful few years waiting for this thing to get made, wondering if it was going to be any good, actually watching bits of "300" when it came on TV to try and get an idea of what director Zack Snyder might do with it. In the last few months, as the hype started to really build, I just stopped worrying. A bad "Watchmen" movie could no more affect the book than a bad novelization of "Citizen Kane" would affect that movie. It just doesn't need to be a movie. The movie doesn't matter.

So going into it with that outlook, the movie was pretty damn good. Thanks to Zack Snyder and his obsessive fanboy devotion to the source material, every scene has the right look. The cast does a nice job -- I particularly loved Patrick Wilson as Dan and Malin Akerman as Laurie, both of whom mixed vulnerability with their butt-kicking superherodom. They get the most emotional moments, which isn't saying much. It's a very cold movie. Still, they manage.

A bunch of scenes translate really well. The prison riot rocks, beginning with Jackie Earle Haley snarling, "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me." Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian in Vietnam are just fantastic. Archie looked great. The opening credits have been justly praised -- they give you a perfect sense of scale. (I missed the gay subplot between Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice, but hey, hot Silhouette action.)

What was the deal of having Laurie be a nonsmoker, though? That seemed like an oddly priggish change. I always like the bit where she mistakes the flame-thrower for a cigarette lighter. I guess designing her little smokes-of-the-future was too much of a challenge.

My big beef is with Ozymandias. Playing him as a sneering, effete fop is just not quite right. He needs to be smart but he cannot be unlikeable, at least not before the very end. I guess a bunch of his scenes got cut out, hopefully including poor Bubastis, who shows up just long enough for you to be able to check her off your faithful-to-the-source-material checklist. But the actor plays him as an obnoxious little weenie. It ain't right.

I'm also not crazy about the non-giant-squid resolution. It's not so much the squid -- I willingly concede that it would have looked silly -- but the squid was meant to be an extraterrestrial attack that would cut the Gordian knot of international conflict. Having the resolution be not only terrestrial-based but ALLIED with the U.S. is just not the same. Having the disaster be an international one doesn't help it make sense. And then you only see one world leader declaring peace at the end (that distractingly awful Nixon). It's not as satisfying.

But, you know, whatever. It's not the book. In line to buy popcorn I mentioned to Art Boy (I can't remember how this came up, but he was appalled) that in the novelization of "The Empire Strikes Back," Han doesn't tell Leia "I know." Apparently the author was bugged by that line so he wrote something more boring, like "He gave her a crooked grin and said 'Just remember that, because I'll be back.'" But really, who cares? Getting outraged about "Watchmen" is sort of like getting outraged about that. Watch "Empire." Read "Watchmen." AE out.

Ki-ki-ki-ki Ma-ma-ma-ma!

2009-02-18T00:50:00.000-08:00

Just in from the Friday the 13th remake. Hmm. It wasn't so much bad as it was sort of pointless. I had never seen any of these until a couple years ago, when Art Boy introduced me to the first one and we went on kind of a binge (here's the month with those posts if anyone is curious -- you have to scroll down) (yeah, I could be using these rainy days to tag my archives). I loved #1 and heartily enjoyed #2 and belly-laughed my way through #3. It's not a long history with these movies, but I did enjoy them.

So the remake? Meh. It was about a third as much fun as the "My Bloody Valentine" remake, and about one-twelfth as interesting as the "Halloween" remake (which was not itself very good). Jason scholars should get a kick out of some references: Jason jumping through a window, Jason briefly thinking the final girl is his mom. And slasher scholars can contemplate the changes in mores over the years. I think it's very interesting that smoking pot can now get you killed just as dead as fornicating can. What does this mean? The characters aren't very interesting, and none of it makes any sense, but that wasn't a problem for me in the first three movies. Really the worst thing about this movie is the total lack of atmosphere. It feels incredibly cold and clinical, from the perfectly waxed & buffed bodies to the unlived-in locations. Maybe in 20 years it will look better... but I doubt it. Still, if you're bored and feel like a movie, you could probably do worse.

I am actually pretty excited about the "Last House on the Left" remake. I haven't seen the Wes Craven movie but did see the Bergman movie it was based on, "The Virgin Spring." They share a plot: daughter gets murdered, parents get revenge. So judging from the previews of this remake, the daughter *doesn't* get murdered... she's apparently brutalized but survives. Does she get to partake in the revenge then? Is it more gritty or less gritty? (My money is on less gritty.) I am curious.

Children hate you!

2009-01-31T23:38:00.000-08:00

In honor of the octuplets lady, here are some thoughts on David Cronenberg's "The Brood"!

Gosh, I just loved this movie. I didn't expect to. Years and years ago I saw "The Fly" and thought it was fine, but more gross than scary, and I assumed that would be the case here. And there's some grossness (see photo) but it's the tension and the bizarreness that really make this movie wonderful. It's a good while before you see the evil children, so the sense of dread really builds up. I love the first kill scene, which begins when the victim-to-be hears a muffled thump in the other room, and creeps toward the swinging kitchen door... This is totally the kind of movie that makes you scream "Don't go in there!" And once you actually see the children -- who are of course not children but physical manifestations of a divorcee's repressed rage -- the balance kicks over into the deeply surreal. The evil shorties in their little bright hoods are a great shout-out to "Don't Look Now," too...

It's fascinating. And somehow even empowering. I thought this movie would be all misogynistic and women-are-evil, but divorcee Nola develops this Carrie-like power. Somehow by having her dwarf creations beat the living daylights out of everyone who's ever gotten on her nerves, she achieves peace of a kind her miserable ex-husband will never know. She's certainly not a hero and things go no better for her than they did for Carrie White, but the movie still treats her powers with tremendous respect. Don't mess with a breeding woman, I guess.

Por fin

2009-01-25T19:38:00.001-08:00

Por fin, I can be happy with Guillermo Del Toro again. Finally steeled up the nerve to watch "The Devil's Backbone" last night. I was all braced to loathe it, what with having hated "Pan's Labyrinth" and having viewed enough Spanish Civil War movies in college to kill a horse. But this 2001 film hits all the right notes. It's a good ghost story. It's a good war movie. It's scary. It's sad. It has beautiful colors. It has dead children and a teacher with a wooden leg. It has everything!

The setting is symbolically loaded: an orphanage for leftist kids during the last days of the Spanish Civil War. The director & teachers have watched, devastated, as their side has lost; their food supplies are dwindling, their options are running out, and they have all these kids with nowhere to go. The last boy to arrive is wee Carlos, who learns the orphanage has a resident ghost: that of a boy named Santi, who died violently on the premises. His ghost flickers through the bedroom and hallways at night but spends most of its time near a basement cistern. What does it want?

Unlike "Pan's Labyrinth," where you just get so exasperated with everyone you want to kick them in the shins, this movie gives you a great array of flawed, complex, identifiable characters. Even the villain has a tragic past -- he's the total opposite of the scenery-chewing fascist from "PL." All the action is all too believable. Del Toro does a great job of delineating the scorching sunlight of the external world -- where adults are, where the war is -- and the dark interior corridors of the orphanage, where Santi tries to communicate with the boys. But the two worlds inexorably overlap. The ending, in which a group of wounded boys limps haltingly out into the blinding sunlight, is both a perfect war-movie visual and a perfect ghost-story visual. He mixes the tropes just flawlessly.

And the ghost stuff is nice and scary. Santi is no Tomas, thank God, but he's plenty creepy. He's a little CGI-intensive but that's OK. All the ghost tricks you might expect, like footprints from an invisible source, the shadow of a hand that isn't there, an eye suddenly on the far side of a keyhole, are deployed so expertly. It's a pleasure to see Del Toro exercise his craft. It almost makes up for Hellboy 2.

Movie "pick" of the week! (Ha ha!)

2009-01-19T20:26:00.000-08:00

By all means, go and see "My Bloody Valentine 3D." It is indeed a barrel of laughs!

And amazingly, it really honors the spirit of the original film. I missed the everyday camaraderie of the miners, and the denizens of the small town -- these characters spend most of their time standing around in shock or running for their lives -- but still, they're clearly working-class folks rather than your typical slasher victims. The killer chases two employees through a darkened grocery store and goes after a hotel desk clerk, a truck driver and a very unfortunate nanny.

But this movie is definitely less about the characters and more about the 3D. Here comes a pickaxe! Here comes a tree limb! Here comes an eyeball! Here comes a jaw! Oh man, the 3D is used to maximum effect and it just could not be more fun. It's cheesy but competent, intelligent but not snarky, and just on the whole a great ride.

There are some nice references to scenes from the original, too: something horrible in a dryer, the scene with all the empty mining suits (yes!), body parts in candy boxes (really, would a heart fit in one of those?). Sure, there are a couple bits that don't work -- the mine setting isn't used as intelligently as in the first film, and the scene where the killer walks along smashing light bulbs would be a lot scarier if it actually got DARK when he did that -- but these are quibbles.

You have to love a movie that, in its first ten minutes, gives you Tom Atkins walking into a carnage-filled hospital, surveying a bloody body's empty chest cavity, and snarling, "Happy f***king Valentine's Day."

As for Jensen Ackles, ACE... he is perfectly serviceable, if not really my type. Still, just for you, here is a gratuitous photo!

Time to lose your heart!

2009-01-12T22:03:00.000-08:00

Sat down with Art Boy the other week and tucked into "My Bloody Valentine," the classic Canadian slasher being remade in 3-D. What a fascinating little movie! I thoroughly enjoyed it, start to finish -- even though Art Boy pointed out afterward that a) it does not hold up under any degree of analysis and b) it has no genuine scares at all. Still, it's so unique that it's just a real charmer.

First of all, it's set in a sleepy mining town, and our heroes are all working-class men and women -- not high school students, campers or babysitters. It all begins with a horrible mining accident, in which sole survivor Harry Warden is trapped underground for six weeks and has to subsist on the bodies of his friends, all because his colleagues on the surface blew off work in order to get to the town's annual Valentine's Day dance. A year later, Harry escapes from an institution and kills said colleagues, threatening to do the same every year that a Valentine's dance is held. Twenty years later, the town finally decides to have a dance, and guess what happens!

I am so in love with that premise. It's like nothing else you've ever seen. The workers and their gals care so much about this dance! They really hate to think about canceling it even after people start dying! They ignore the dire warnings of their bartender! The whole thing even closes out with a Gordon Lightfoot-style folk ballad, recapping the story in vague fashion ("The horror, from 'long time agooooo"). I can't talk about it without gushing. But it's not just that it's cheesy. The movie, oddly enough, makes this quirky little world believable, at least for a couple hours. The miners' banter, the run-down laundry room, the creaking mine machinery, the lived-in neighborhood bar... somehow it all works. You end up really rather concerned for these people.

It's stylish, too. There aren't any great scares, but the atmosphere down in the mine is fantastically creepy, and the movie intelligently teases you for a while until it actually gets you down there. My favorite though is the scene in the room with all the hanging uniforms -- it almost resembles Harry Dean Stanton's death scene in "Alien." (The death by pot of boiling hot-dog water is pretty imaginative too.) The final shot is fantastic, a perfect blend of gruesome (the severed arm) and stylish, with an eerie sound effect to cap everything. It's like listening to a predictable but still well-told ghost story. This movie's a real pleasure.

Apparently at the time it was a box-office flop. I watched an interesting documentary this week, "Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Flick," in which the movie's failure is blamed on its R rating. This was back when kids could get into pretty much any movie (lucky damn kids) and an R rating was seen as kind of a punishment, in this case because the makers were seen as Canadian carpetbaggers trying to capitalize on the new American slasher-movie cash-cow formula. Anyway, it's interesting that the remake is also rated R, and that will probably do nothing but help it at the box office, since no teenager is going to bother with a lame-o PG-13 movie. (Teenagers still say "lame-o," right? Oh, where are my bifocals?)

Side note: The remake is driving me up the wall with its tagline, "He's coming to break your heart." With a pick? He's going to *break* my heart or just drive a pick into it? (I don't think it's the same thing.) And he's not going to extract it and hide it in candy boxes for people to find? Drag.

Happy holidays!

2008-12-22T23:19:00.001-08:00

Maybe Santa will bring me a new camera, because a couple weeks ago mine started taking pictures like this. I have no idea how it happened, but I love it. In the meantime, I give you readers this fascinating photo of a ranger station at Henninger Flats in the San Gabriels, taken a couple weeks ago when the sun was so bright I didn't realize how the photos were coming out until I got back to the car.

Have a wonderful holiday, everyone.

Kiss me good night, Miss Giddens!

2008-12-22T23:07:00.000-08:00

And finally, to ring in the holiday season, I finally got around to watching "The Innocents" with Deborah Kerr. It's been on my list for years, since I read "The Turn of the Screw" in college. All I remember about that class (whichever class it was) was having to read five different essays that analyzed the story from five different points of view -- one saying the governess is a basket case, one saying the ghosts she sees are real, one talking about the children and their Freudian projections, and I don't remember what-all else. They were all pretty convincing and I came away with a mild headache and a deep-seated confusion about the story.

So it was really impressive to me that the movie upholds the same ambiguity. You're seeing it all in front of you, but you really can't tell what's going on. Miss Giddens (Kerr) is a fetching young governess who lands her first job ever after a flirty conversation with her cute employer. He explains, though, that she'll never see him -- he lives in London, and she'll be looking after his two young wards at his country estate. Still, she claims to love children, and she really seems to enjoy her work. But there's something weird about the children....

There is of course nothing creepier than creepy children, and the most awesome thing about these kids is that you never know if they're malevolent or not, but they're still utterly creepy. Young Flora prances around singing "O Willow Waly" (which turns out to be a song about mourning a dead lover) and slightly older Miles is just a little... precocious. Are they possessed? Are they just misguided? Is Miss Giddens really seeing ghosts through the windows? Even the ending leaves you wondering. But no matter what you think is going on, you have to enjoy the ride as Miss Giddens slowly loses it. When the ghost brushes past her in the schoolroom, oh my God, the hairs on my neck stood up.

I was also excited about this movie because it inspired Kate Bush's classic song "The Infant Kiss," which itself is pretty ambiguous: "There's a man behind those eyes... Oh, how he frightens me." Is it a love song or a song of terror? The movie walks the same line.

Brr. Let's take our niece and nephew's Christmas presents back to the store!

Secret stigma, reaping wheel

2008-12-15T20:42:00.000-08:00

Next up in my festive holiday trifecta: the 1962 classic "Carnival of Souls." Wow! I don't think I've ever identified with a horror heroine quite so much. After a serious car accident, Mary (Candace Hilligoss, who only made one other movie, but it was called "Curse of the Living Corpse"!) packs up and moves to Utah for a new job as church organist. But she's haunted by creepy apparitions and horrific nightmares. She has episodes where she seems to become invisible to people around her - a saleslady looks right through her, sound seems to come from under water. And everywhere she goes, she sees the same smiling white-faced man, staring back at her out of mirrors, reflected in her car window, nearly bumping into her nose at the water fountain.

This all makes Mary a bit jumpy, and it doesn't help that she's already kind of an oddball for 1962. A healthy, intelligent young woman who doesn't want friends, isn't interested in the advances of the loutish tenant across the hall in her boarding house, plays professionally on a church organ but lacks religious conviction... she doesn't seem to fit in anywhere. Her landlady, her boss at the church and her doctor are all slightly baffled by her. You've already got the plot twist figured out, ten minutes into the movie, but it's fascinating to watch: on so many levels, Mary doesn't belong here. She belongs somewhere else.

It's creepy as hell to watch Mary's destiny close in on her. Gorgeous, too. Why aren't more horror movies set in Utah? The black and white cinematography makes the most of the sweeping, open landscape, especially around the vacant lakeside pavilion that irresistibly draws Mary: white skies against dark water. This would be great to see on a big screen. The soundtrack, almost entirely organ music, is gorgeous too.

As a fairly spacey person myself, with an often-tenuous grip on reality ("Where are my glasses? What's her name again? Wait, what year is this?"), I could powerfully identify with Mary's terror as her world starts to blur and something else starts to come in. It's a universal fear, this fear of losing one's grip altogether. James Thurber puts it this way in his introduction to "My Life and Hard Times":

It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life can not lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies. As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.

Brr. Let's turn on some more lights and have some eggnog!

RIP, Bettie

2008-12-11T21:23:00.001-08:00

She took such obvious joy in her body, it still sparkles across all of the years that have passed. Her life was quite troubled for many years. I hope she's found some peace. Good night, Bettie.

LAT obit
NYT obit (for "Ms. Page," don't you love it?)

There's a nice quote in the LAT's obit from artist Olivia de Berardinis:

It took me years to understand what I was looking at in the old photographs of her. Now I get it. There was a passion play unfolding in her mind. What some see as a bad girl image was in fact a certain sensual freedom and play-acting -- it was part of the fun of being a woman.

And that's exactly the key to her charm. You never get the sense, in her photos, that anyone but her is in charge -- she never comes across as exploited, but as someone who's playing a game, wielding her sexuality because it's making her some money and heck, it's kind of fun. She grew bangs to cover what she thought was a weird-looking forehead, but other than that, she never concealed anything. Bettie herself is quoted as saying, in 2006: "I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

As the NYT correctly reports, Bettie was born in Jackson, Tenn. (not Nashville -- Jackson's down toward Memphis). Her pinup years were nicely immortalized in Mary Harron's movie "The Notorious Bettie Page," in which Gretchen Mol captures some of her vivacity (although that girl is awful skinny). She went through a religious conversion, a few unhappy marriages, and a decade in a mental institution, and ended up living out here in L.A. I always sort of hoped I'd run into her somewhere and we'd fall into a discussion about Tennessee, although she probably wouldn't have wanted to talk about Tennessee. Besides, it had been many years since she allowed someone to photograph her face; she wanted to be remembered as she was in her golden era. Which is kind of cool. She could have been any 85-year-old walking around out here.

There's a holiday angle to her story, as the NYT notes: "Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January 1955, when she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas tree." But I'll still be thinking of her this summer when I put on my Bettie swimsuit.

It's Christmas. Let's have a ghost story!

2008-12-11T16:53:00.000-08:00

I'm coming off a trio of excellent ghost stories, my little pippins. I'll post about the other two later but will start off with my favorite: "The Woman in Black," by Susan Hill. This book has been on my to-read list for years but it's surprisingly hard to find. None of my last few libraries has had it and it's never in stores... I finally caved and included it in a big Amazon order last month. I read it on a visit home over two nights, sitting by the fire while my parents watched football. The racket of the TV kept me from getting too creeped out while the fire added nice atmosphere: it was a perfect setting for this classic ghost story.

The narrator is celebrating Christmas with his second wife and her grown children; he's enjoying the merriment and the good times when the family starts clamoring for a ghost story, and his mood darkens. He goes for a walk and remembers what happened to him many years ago, when he was a young, happily betrothed solicitor. His firm sends him from London to a northern town, to settle affairs for a client who's just died. No one in the town wants to talk about the client and her creepy old house, and no one comes to the funeral... but a mysterious woman in black appears in the back row during the service. When he mentions her, the reaction is shock and horror. She's a ghost!

This book has everything: a big creepy house on the marsh; ghostly sightings; ghostly sounds; a haunted nursery (yes!); a cute dog; and, most heartbreakingly, a very relate-able narrator who really does his best to pull himself together and do his job. You just deeply feel for the guy as events unfold. What would you do differently? Probably nothing. The pieces of the story fall inexorably into place around him, and there's no way he can escape.

At one point I was reading and gave a tremendous gasp. Mom looked up from the third down (or whatever football has) and I said, "He's alone in the house at night and the lights just went out!"
She said "How can you read those things?"

In 1989 the book was adapted for British TV, and I managed to track down a copy at the excellent Cinefile (and then kept it for an extra week -- sorry, guys). I had been working up this post in my head when I sat down to watch the movie, but afterward, I didn't want to even think about "The Woman in Black." It's taken me about a month to get it together enough to write this. The movie is absolutely terrifying. It nails all the best elements from the book, adds some good twists and some beautiful images, and gives you one scene that made me scream out loud here in the living room. Not a start; not a yelp; nothing that could be followed by embarrassed laughter, but a genuine scream of terror. (I had just taken a mouthful of hot toddy, which was extra tragic.) Oh my God. I've never seen anything like it. Final Girl has, as usual, an excellent review.

I understand the stage play is excellent as well, but haven't talked to anyone who's seen it. Apparently it makes explicit the terrifying subtext -- the reader/audience is as helplessly involved in things as the protagonist, so are we cursed too? Brr! Let's turn on all the lights!

Stealth in action

2008-12-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

Apparently I saw a Stealth bomber yesterday, although at the time I thought it was a kite. It was moving very slowly and looked sort of aimless. Glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, drifting over the hilltops against a cloudy sky, it looked sort of like a distant Dementor. A few minutes later I was driving under it on the eastbound 110 and noticed it looked like a Stealth fighter. "Huh," I said, and watched it meander off into the distance, and then forgot entirely about it it until I saw Wil Wheaton's post about it just now. I was on my way to Art Boy's and he would probably have been pretty interested... oh well. We did see a guy on a Segway, which was exciting for us.

Anyway, I keep forgetting I live in a place where the thing that looks like a Stealth fighter might actually be one, and the nerdy scruffy old guy at the restaurant who looks like Dustin Hoffman might actually be Dustin Hoffman. It's not really ***OMG L.A.*** anymore, it's just where I live. Which is pretty nice.

Hang on, Bettie!

2008-12-05T17:08:00.000-08:00

Fellow Tennessee native and retired pinup goddess Bettie Page is in the hospital this evening after having a heart attack. She's said to be critically ill. Send her your good thoughts, please. I don't think I can handle losing Bettie on top of everything else.

If the world is round, why is a frozen pond flat?

2008-11-16T16:01:00.000-08:00

Wow, "Don't Look Now" was -- not at all what I expected. I'd heard of it as a super-scary horror classic and guess I was expecting something on the order of "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Innocents" in Venice. But wow, WOW. It's just like nothing else.

Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, of course, play a married couple whose daughter drowns in a pond on their property. Grieving and racked by guilt, they try to move on with a working vacation in Venice, where Donald restores old churches. There they run into a psychic who claims she can communicate with their daughter, and from there things get weird.

But things were pretty weird from the get-go. The opening sequence introduces the film's fragmented editing, full of quick cuts across space and time: from indoors to out, from the immediate past to the future. "Nothing is as it seems," murmurs Donald as he looks over some slides of churches. (It's so cute to see slides. And it's so funny that it's cute to see slides. While on the subject of cuteness, Donald and Julie have these great identical wavy perms that are almost hypnotic.) I watched the opening and then *immediately* skipped back to watch it again. It's gorgeous how the tension builds, and how you get a sense of Donald and Julie's closeness right off the bat; and how their daughter already looks like an otherworldly harbinger of doom.

What surprised me the most thought is just how unbearably sad this movie was. Not sad because a little girl dies; but because it shows you in the most visceral way that everything you love and believe in is just hopelessly fragile and transient. This movie's sex scene is famous for being graphic, but also for the way it flashes forward throughout to shots of Donald and Julie dressing afterward for dinner. The gimmick's been read as a joke or as an illustration of Donald's second sight, but I took it to mean that everything ends, even the most blissful feeling of connection. One minute one is rolling around in shared ecstasy, the next minute one is sitting on the same bed dressed in an uncomfortable suit, pouring some scotch and staring off into space. In the context of the end of the movie, the contrast becomes absolutely, unutterably heartbreaking.

As for the end -- the big reveal -- what's crazy about it is that you can't possibly prepare for it (I screamed out loud), but somehow, on some level, you *know* what he's going to see. You want to stop him and you can't. You're as helpless as Julie behind the iron gate. One day your story will end too, and your own finale will turn around and look you in the eye; and that's scary as hell.

Final Girl has a fab review, which I was excited to finally read after watching the movie! I also went and looked up the NYT's review and read Pauline Kael's review in one of my books; neither of those two enjoyed it much. (Pauline really hates it when she thinks filmmakers are just trying to be arty.)

Sigh

2008-11-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

This week I joined Facebook and started watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on DVD. In other news, I am 13.

The vampire is angry now!

2008-11-08T02:23:00.000-08:00

For years I was warned off the old TV movie version of "Salem's Lot" by Betsy: "The vampire is made out of, like, blue Play-Doh, and his mask is so stiff that he can't actually talk, so the other characters have to supply his emotions by saying things like 'The vampire is angry now!'" Still, about eight years after I borrowed the book from her and was rendered sleepless for a week, it was time to check the movie out for myself. And she's right, it is pretty goofy (although to my disappointment, "The vampire is angry now" is not an actual line of dialogue) and the monster really is blue. You know he's coming, in fact, every time you see the color blue. This spells trouble for our hero Ben Mears, who likes to wear lots of denim, most troublingly a close-fitting short-sleeved denim blouse. On the whole, though... it's really not that bad.

OK, it's not great. The pace is slow and it crawls and crawls... you could argue that this is building up a sense of dread, but come on, when you immediately introduce a black-suit-clad weirdo living in a haunted house and driving a big black car, there's really no dread to build. I spent a lot of time thinking about horror movie tropes and wondering how anyone would not immediately suspect the black-suit-clad weirdo when bad things start happening. It's like in the Harry Potter books where they're like "The Death Eaters are back! It's probably Harry Potter's fault! It's certainly not Draco Malfoy's!" and you can't figure out if JKR is being sarcastic.

But then the vampire noshes on a little kid, and things just pick up from there. The movie becomes a series of really fantastic vampire set pieces. The wise old professor reading books labeled "Vampire Lore" in his library, and then hearing a noise upstairs.... the vigil over a sheeted figure at the morgue ... the movie fog outside the window parting to reveal a genuinely creepy floating child. And Barlow's first appearance, in extreme closeup (above), gave me the supreme willies.

It doesn't really go anywhere, and it's nowhere near as scary as the book. Scenes in the book that turned my hair white -- the boys walking alone in the woods, not knowing they're being stalked until it's too late; and everything involving the priest -- are pretty much ignored here.

Still, it's a hell of a lot scarier than the more recent TV movie starring poor Rob Lowe as Ben. My favorite scene in that had poor Samantha Mathis, starring as the vampire-turned Susan, appearing in Rob's window and delivering a crucial bit of exposition, talking like Susan even though she's supposed to be a vampire. "I could love you, Ben Mears," she concludes. Rob replies, reasonably: "Susan, you're a vampire."

Anyway, it was interesting to see Tobe Hooper's other good movie, having become besotted with him last year. I don't guess I will be checking out "Eaten Alive" or any of his other opi. This one doesn't have the sort of gorgeous and uniform look of TCSM.... the lighting is this sort of milky wintry light, and isn't really noticeable anyway since most of the scenes are indoors. Ah well.

Well, heck

2008-11-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

It appears to be a bittersweet morning in California, with a rather mean-spirited little constitutional amendment appearing poised to pass. Here's hoping for a last-minute counting miracle. In the meantime:

The world is quiet here

2008-10-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

I'm not dead, I promise. I'm doing that thing where I feel helplessly glued to the computer all day and don't want to sit in front of it when I come home. But everything's fine -- working, walking, reading, gardening, watching fall settle over Los Angeles. And watching horror movies, most recently the delightful "Jaws" parody "Trees," about a small forest town being terrorized by a great white pine: "This was no lawn mower accident. This was -- a tree." Fantastic.

My daily routine has been through a series of changes and should settle into a new normal in a couple of weeks. I should be a bit less helplessly glued at work and more able to blog. Until then, enjoy Art Boy's pictures, Big Country's home-cured bacon, Eileen's musical notes, the adventures of Mark Trail & Mary Worth (not, sadly, together) and the various other delights available via my blogroll at right.

Avast

2008-09-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

So a few weeks ago my friend Tricia and I took a whale watching cruise out of Long Beach Harbor. She had seen on the LA Times website that multiple blue whales were being sighted in the area daily due to an unusually high concentration of krill, and indeed, we saw four. It was hard to make out more than is visible in the photo above, but no photo can convey how impressive it is to be within sight of something so huge. They would roll across the water, their bodies just going on and on and on, then dive, then resurface with a spout. Just as our boat was getting to them they'd take a long dive (they were either playing with us or annoyed by us), and the boat would drift over the massive imprint each had left on the water's surface.

We didn't go far out to sea at all; we were right off Palos Verdes the whole time. On the way back the boat was mobbed by a pod of common dolphins. Quite exhilarating.

The real surprise for me was how much fun it was just to be on the water, especially once we left the harbor and hit the open sea with some real waves. I like having my feet on the ground: I don't even like riding a bike, and I definitely do not like flying, and I'm not even all that crazy about driving; I like to walk. So I wasn't sure how the boat would be, but it was fantastic. Tricia said it felt like we were riding on Santa's sleigh, and she was absolutely right. Another boat ride, please.

I have not also died

2008-09-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

OK, it's time to quit sitting shiva for Estelle Getty. But I have to go to bed so just a quick hello.

All's well here. Upcoming posts will include photos from whale watching and my trip to Denver. Work has decided to turn my schedule upside down for a couple of months. It's testing my fortitude. I'm working for a very cheerful gentleman and am snarling at him a lot.

I did however just restore the tissues with my annual viewing of "Last of the Mohicans." I now think the original theatrical release is better. It's not about the Clannad or lack thereof -- it's really the edited-out wisecracks that bug me on the U.S. DVD. When Duncan roars "I'll have you beaten from this fort!" it really doesn't make sense for Nathaniel to just stand there and gaze at him. Still, the sound/image quality are magnificent, and Chingachgook (pronounced "Chicago")'s bonus monologue leaves me completely verklempt every time. "Once we were here." I may watch it again tomorrow. I still can't fucking find Colm Meaney. I'm upping the reward to a beer and a shot of whisky.

On top of everything else...

2008-07-22T11:16:00.001-07:00

Buy the T-shirt at the lovely Bust Boobtique

Estelle Getty goes and dies on us. She was 84 and had been ill for some time.

The kinds of nostalgic family associations that most people have for old TV shows -- I pretty much only have that for "The Golden Girls." I don't watch much TV but I will always watch that if it's on. And all the actresses have done such noble work elsewhere -- Betty White in "Lake Placid," Rue McClanahan in "Starship Troopers," and of course, Bea Arthur in the Star Wars Holiday Special. As for Ms. Getty, you will of course remember her as the owner of the crucial department store in "Mannequin."

I didn't want to wear your tacky green dress anyhow, stingy!

2008-07-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

Will Benteen is a widower: Actress Evelyn Keyes, who did many interesting things but was best known for playing Scarlett O'Hara's bitchy sister Suellen in "Gone with the Wind," has died at 91. I think this leaves us with Cammie King and Olivia de Havilland as surviving cast members. Keyes was otherwise notable for having been married to Artie Shaw and John Huston; she acted and starred in many films -- including, apparently, a lot of noir B pictures -- but left Hollywood in 1955. She wrote a column for several years for the Los Angeles Times, which, I note with slightly clenched teeth, has yet to post her obituary.

RIP, dear.

Happy Fourth of July, Daddy!

2008-07-04T23:05:00.000-07:00

That would be then-child star Mae Whitman's big closing line from Independence Day.

Art Boy and I didn't recognize her while re-watching the film tonight, but I saw her name in the closing credits and blurted "It's Mayonnegg! It's Egg!"

Art Boy said, "Her?"

I tell you, I find something new to love about that movie every July 4.

This had better not be about your cat, Ralph

2008-07-03T10:09:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know. But they are naperrific this morning. Check them out:

Anastasia guards the window in my room

Isis is watching for stray cats so she can growl at them through the screen door

The boy's job is to lie around looking pretty

She's back, and with a warning

2008-06-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

We know how they feel

I return from my long silence to just make sure and warn off any of you who might have been thinking of seeing The Happening. Yeah, I know; the only two people who saw Lady in the Water should really know better. I thought it might at least be an interesting genre exercise, but unfortunately it's just too heavyhanded to be enjoyable. It's not even tense; the "shocking" moments fail to shock. If you go, bring a book. (Or, as Art Boy learned from the Guardian this morning, we could just be screaming racists.)

I can, however, vigorously recommend Scott Smith's The Ruins if anyone is looking for a summer thriller. Outstanding character-based horror. I didn't see the movie, but critics uniformly recommended the book (as did Stephen King), and by gum they were right.

Update: Had a lovely email from Jamie this evening to say she's been drinking the Blogger Kool-Aid. Check out her lovely new site, Spare Candy. Jamie's a fab writer so I'm very glad to have her out from behind the MySpace curtain. Not that there's anything wrong with MySpace... please, kids, don't all come and beat me up. I'm old and tired.

Orange

2008-04-23T23:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Democrats (who need to just quit arguing and kiss already), I had one day off this week, so I spent it at Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. It's peak bloom season! Check it out!

Here's how it looks from far away:

Here is how it looks closer up:

And here is how it looks very close up:

Yes, kiss me, you foolish poppies!!!

Such a gorgeous and needed getaway. The colors were amazing. I should have a decent Flickr set up in the next day or two (Flickr's being bitchy right now).

Another reason to love Rex Morgan, M.D.

2008-04-16T20:27:00.001-07:00

(Besides that he has the prescription for the daily blues): He pops up in the most delightfully unexpected places. Such as the bunch of lilac I got at the farmers market today. See?

Sure gives me pause as I inhale the lovely fragrance of my lilac. Could I have staph bacteria growing in my nose? Thanks, Rex!

Kitten?

2008-03-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

I just emailed Art Boy and asked if we can get a kitten. (The actual threat level of this is low; some colleagues rescued a litter of kittens from an abandoned car in the garage at work, and they're cute enough I imagine they will all get homes.) This is mainly an experiment to see what he says. I'll let you guys know.

UPDATE, ART BOY RESPONSE, 5:15 p.m.:

"Oh, lordy."

(I think someone wants a kitten!!!)

UPDATE 2:

I admitted to Art Boy that there were probably plenty of potential homes for these particular kittens. He replied:

"if they get no takers then we should step in. If they have plenty of admirers we can pass and save that spot for a kitty that needs our help. Like the boy! (please God not like the boy!)"

He so so so wants a kitten.

At the zoo

2008-03-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

Art Boy and I went to the LA Zoo on Tuesday. It was a hot afternoon and most of the animals were napping:

The sea lions, however, seemed comfortable:

By the time we got to the tigers, it was practically evening and they were feeling mildly frisky:

In the meerkat exhibit, only one deigned to come out of the nap pile in the shade; it just sat with its back to everyone. Meerkat divas.

I went through frowning at inappropriate signage. Couldn't they have tailored a "Do not feed" sign for the reptile area? Sigh. Copy editors belong in zoos.

Art Boy has more photos.

Variety is the staff of -- ouch! no hitting!

2008-03-07T02:02:00.000-08:00

Well, tonight I decided it had been altogether too long since my last dance outing -- that was Feb. 14, which was an utterly delightful night to spend at Perversion at the Ruby -- so I layered my dancing shoes and dress under my work clothes and set out after hours to Hollywood. Traffic along Hollywood Blvd was just zany tonight. The weather's really warmed up in the last month, so lots of scenesters were out walking around and lining up outside clubs. Apparently the hot new thing to wear is a flimsy little dress that's sort of like a cross between a baby-doll dress and a bubble dress -- it essentially resembles a slip, but the hem is tucked under so it balloons out very slightly. It doesn't look like much of anything, but everyone was wearing one of those with platform shoes. Outside the El Capitan, there appeared to have been some kind of opening for the film "College Road Trip" -- lots of signs and lights were set up, and some platinum-blond fellow was having his picture taken by professionals with a young platinum-blonde lady on each arm. Perhaps they were the Hiltons. I don't know. I made it through all the kerfuffle and got a very nice parking spot directly across from the Ruby. But when I got to the door, the bouncer, who knows me, paused and said "You're here for Perversion, right? It's moved. It's at Boardners now." He very kindly gave me directions ("three blocks") and shortly thereafter I was off on foot, heading back toward the center of Hollywood and into all the traffic. Damn. I hate that it's moved, although it's been at the Ruby for at least a year now and that's a good long while as these things go. Still, I will miss the bartender who resembled Gaius Baltar, and who poured me the most sublimely ridiculous gin and tonics with, like, a teaspoon of tonic apiece. And I will miss Consuela the housekeeper, who always walked through collecting used cups with her stoically set face indicating that her mind was safely elsewhere. And the bouncers were friendly. Farewell, The Ruby.

Anyway, I walked to Boardners on foot, which took about ten minutes, which was ten minutes along a street I did not want to have to walk alone in a couple of hours; so after making sure of the club's location I walked back. It was pretty fun to walk along Hollywood Blvd. alone late at night, watching the skateboarders and the crowds and the dissipating El Capitan paparazzi (the Hiltons having left). I walked back along the north end and happened to glance down just as I was stepping across Ritchie Valens' star. Hee hee. It felt like a little benediction, a feeling that stuck with me as I retrieved the car and circled the block a couple of times until a street spot opened up around the corner. Unlike the Ruby, this place is very in the middle of things, which in Hollywood can be a little ridiculous. I was very lucky to find a spot. That's unlikely to happen every Thursday; Boardners is the longtime home of Bar Sinister, a Saturday goth night that I've been avoiding on the grounds that it looks way too crowded. It felt pretty damn crowded tonight, and I realize it was nowhere near full.

The club itself is lovely, though. It's a two-story complex, semi-outdoors: you walk in through this sort of alley and the first dance room is in a covered courtyard, with a fountain at the center. There was a bar at one end and a raised dance floor at the other, but the only dancers were writhing on the flagstones next to the fountain; the floor itself was empty. I realized with tremendous regret that this was my usual room at the Ruby, the 80s room. Inside is a longer, narrow space with a bar along one side, running parallel to a very narrow dance floor; this space was full of people dancing. I approached the bar and got a gin and tonic from a female bartender. I hate to perpetuate stereotypes, but the pour was terrible. Grumpily sipping my glass of tonic, I wandered up a flight of stairs and was mildly startled to find myself in an S&M play area. There was a bar up here too, specializing in absinthe drinks, with its own menu (most drinks are $20 apiece, a fact they're kind enough to note on the menu for you). I watched a ringmaster type in striped trousers flog a blonde lady against a wheel-type setup, and watched a couple of bosomy brunettes go at each other with paddles. The vibe in the upstairs room was hard to get a handle on. Some people were blase, some people were total frat boys ("Woo! Turn her around!"), and some people were very participatory and into it; one frat-boy type in camouflage shorts was smiling as a girl in platform shoes bound his wrists with pink tape. I watched for a bit, hoping to see someone cross some sort of line and be asked to leave, but it was difficult to determine where the line was.

Back downstairs, I returned to the 80s area and got a second drink from a male bartender, who poured me an outlandishly generous gin and tonic. I was so pathetically grateful I left him a ridiculous tip. The DJ played Kathy's Song, Destroy Everything You Touch, Wreath of Barbs and (randomly) Carolyn's Fingers, all in a lovely long set. I danced on the stage with a delightful young man who resembled Jesse Eisenberg, then took one more long, slow walk through the club before heading out to my car. Short visit, and I don't know that I'll be back. A nice place to go once, but not really large enough for me to feel really comfortable, and a lot of bubble-dressed tourists wandering in from other clubs. It might be time to find a new place to dance.

I make a very dry martini....

2008-03-05T00:16:00.000-08:00

I make a very wet souffle
Don't be so mean, you mean old meanie....
(Come, my dear!)

In honor of National Grammar Day (albeit a few minutes into National Grammar Boxing Day), I am hoisting a nice dry Grammartini, as intelligently suggested by You Don't Say. After tonight's election tedium, it is hitting the spot. I miss drinking with my fellow ink-stained wretches, although martinis taste equally good in front of the computer, I am pleased to note.

Anyway, to grammar! And to our lovely messy always-evolving language -- in my case, the founder of the feast. And, just for the hell of it, to Miss Hannigan.

Desert trip

2008-03-04T21:40:00.000-08:00

Art Boy and I took advantage of a rare overlapping day off to drive into the desert together. (More accurately, Art Boy drove, which proved to be an adventure in itself due to the high wind advisory in effect over much of our drive.) We headed to the town of Mojave, looked at the map, and decided to make for Red Rock Canyon State Park a few miles north. Oh my, it was lovely. Very dry and very windy, but dramatically beautiful.

We stopped at a visitors center and chatted with a friendly ranger, who said she drives to Ventura to surf and reminisced about the days of her youth, when it was safe to sleep on the beach. "Now you can't even afford to live anywhere near the water," she said. "It's sad, it really is. But I've got the desert." She directed us to nearby Nightmare Gulch, where "The Mummy" was filmed, and to a nearby spot where, she said happily, "Waterhole 3" was filmed. "You know, James Coburn," she said. We nodded; we knew James Coburn. We were unable to find the exact "Waterhole 3" site but walked around near there, and also near the entrance to Nightmare Gulch, before the howling, chilly wind drove us back to the car.

I was disappointed, upon our return, to find that the film is actually called "Waterhole #3" and is not the third in a sequence of "Waterhole" films. It does, however, apparently feature a joke in which rape is described as "assault with a friendly weapon." Yes, it was an educational day.

Anyway, you can see Art Boy's pictures here. He was gentlemanly enough not to include the photo he took of me in the high wind, in which I appear to have spent three weeks in the desert smoking peyote (or eating it or whatever one does with peyote... we'll learn that on the next trip I guess).

Jane, Jane, Jane

2008-02-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

Art Boy is out of town, leaving me all alone (come and get me, brigands!), so last night I kicked back with an enormous [vice redacted] and watched "Northanger Abbey" on Masterpiece Theatre -- or "Masterpiece," as it is now apparently called. Once Gillian Anderson's unbearably awkward introduction was out of the way, I rather enjoyed it. It's short (2 hours) and so necessarily a bit broad in its insights, but that's appropriate for Jane Austen's most melodramatic book. And I found it charmingly modern -- lots of sexual overtones and gothic-fantasy sequences.

This morning I dropped by the applicable Republic of Pemberley discussion board to see what people thought and found largely positive responses, although there are some detours to discuss grammatical issues raised by the dialogue and share a link to the somewhat inevitable Very Secret Diary of Henry Tilney. I am torn between being annoyed at the ongoing trendiness of Jane Austen, and charmed at the ongoing geekiness of the Internet.

Sebastian has interrupted me with a series of hideous sounds before I am able to bring this post to any kind of conclusion. Sorry, gang.

Circle of life

2008-02-19T16:45:00.000-08:00

To complete the circle of life, I took myself to see "Juno" this afternoon. Once more, expectations were low -- it's been compared to "Little Miss Sunshine," which Art Boy and I roundly loathed, and Slate is already doing articles about the Juno backlash. But the cast is just so fab, and Art Boy recently learned that Ellen Page was in the first season of "Trailer Park Boys," and Kelly loved it. So I took advantage of a cloudy day off and went, figuring now was the time in case that backlash thing gets any worse.

Well, it is quite nice. Pretty much all I can say about it is to compare it favorably to LMS: the characters are developed, not overly precious, and the story gives everyone the space to change and be complicated. It's always the characters in charge of the story, not the other way around, so it really works. I don't know that it is the Best Picture of the Year, but really, more people should be making movies like this. And I am in favor of anything that involves a dump truck full of money pulling up to Michael Cera's door. (Imagine him answering the doorbell and being all bashful. Aww!)

Yeah, there is Rainn Wilson at the beginning saying things like "homeskillet," and the hamburger phone gave me a moment of terror that this was going to be Napoleon Dynamite. (Although I remain fond of Napoleon Dynamite.) But it gets better. Kelly is correct that the worst moment is a character saying "Honest to blog?" but it's gotten out of the way quickly. I was reminded of Molly Ringwald getting on the bus in "Sixteen Candles" and going "I loathe the bus": it's just a new generation of largely invented teenspeak. I was going to focus this post on that, but discovered that screenwriter Diablo Cody's phrasings have already been examined and analyzed. It's nice to see the teen movie successfully moving forward. In your face, YouTube!

Dear "Diary of the Dead"....

2008-02-19T00:49:00.000-08:00

[I should now apostrophize the movie, but cannot bring myself to.]

I can't believe it but I really didn't mind "Diary of the Dead" one bit. After reading a slew of poor-to-middling reviews, I was prepared to hate it. (Final Girl loathed it; there's a surprisingly charitable review on Slate.) It certainly isn't scary, and most of the characters are insufferable, and it hammers its point home to the point of ridiculousness -- but it's never quite boring. A group of film students are making a low-budget mummy movie in the woods, pausing for some "Scream"-esque commentary about horror movie tropes: "How come the girl being chased always falls down?" and "The monster needs to shamble, not run." They hear news broadcasts about the dead returning to life to attack the living, and decide to go check on their friends and families. Eventually, most of them are piled in a Winnebago, heading for the home of heroine Debra, who is apparently the only one interested in making sure her parents are all right.

Along the way they have many zombie-related adventures, all of which are filmed by Debra's boyfriend Jason (or possibly Josh -- I forget), because he's very insistent that everything needs to be captured for posterity: He says some Cloverfieldesque things like "People need to know what's going on." His stubbornness leads to some pretty goofy scenes: Jason won't stop filming to help his friends when they're attacked by zombies, he never expresses a whole lot of surprise at the sight of one, and at one point he risks great physical danger by refusing to move away from the wall plug where his camera is charging. Ostensibly because they're film students, the footage never looks very raw, and that combines with the ridiculousness of Jason's behavior to really, really strain the premise of this film. And it takes some doing to strain the premise of a zombie film. You never quite buy that all this is going on, which is very unfortunate.

Still... there are some good zombie set pieces. I would sit through the whole thing again just for the marvelous Amish sequence. And the zombies look fantastic: we're a long way from Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" with the blue Play-Doh makeup. (We're also a long way from the ridiculously elaborate special effects of "Land of the Dead," with the carefully exposed teeth and the spinal-column removal and all that. These are just good, plain zombies.) I'm on the fence about the zombie-clown sequence, and a fragment toward the end involving an elderly couple is just pointlessly vicious.

Romero breaks up what little action and narrative he has with social commentary, and it's exhausting. I like his point, though: Unlike in "Cloverfield," he refuses to let the cameraman off the hook; if there's a villain in his story, it's Jason (or Josh). He's saying, I think, that the privileged youth of today are so used to absorbing information secondhand that when confronted with something challenging, they can only cope with it secondhand. They're incapable of getting off their asses and dealing with it. The kids in this movie are more doomed than the families in "Night of the Living Dead" or the cops & news crew in "Dawn of the Dead," because at least those people were capable of boarding up windows or flying a helicopter. All these kids can do is film, look for a place with an Internet connection, and upload to YouTube. When the zombies come, please, give me FlyBoy and his helicopter any day.

Art Boy on Gojira

2008-02-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

Art Boy and I watched Gojira the other week, largely thanks to Cloverfield. It's pretty good! Of course, we decided to turn it into an Event and watch it over gyoza and sake bombs, and because we've gotten old and gentle, the sake bombs pretty much had us sacked out on the couch before we'd even seen an hour of the movie. (Art Boy: "If this were Cloverfield, we'd have passed out during the party scene.") Anyway, the next night we watched the whole thing and it was pretty damn cool. I've been trying to formulate something intelligent to say about it but Art Boy beat me to it. So go read his thoughts. He's smart and funny.

Vote, lambkins

2008-02-05T09:47:00.000-08:00

If you live in California or another Super Tuesday state, remember to stop by your polling place today. (In CA, you can call (800) 345-VOTE or go here to find out where.) Whether you fancy Obama or the lady, or one of the Republicans, this is a big day and every vote counts. Now scoot!

Doggies

2008-02-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

The NYT has a nice story on the pit bulls rescued from Michael Vick's dogfighting kennels, the majority of whom ended up at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah. Art Boy sponsors a kitty there named Ruby and we have been getting their magazine for about a year. They seem to do really good work. It's just a giant sanctuary with space for lots of animals, many of whom are unadoptable -- Ruby has feline leukemia and can only live with other cats if they have it too. Their website has a section on the Michael Vick dogs, including video, here. It's not too sad, in case you're a softie like me and doesn't want to see animals being sad. They are in pretty good hands now. From the NYT story:

Here, they live in a 3,700-acre sanctuary that is covered by juniper trees and sagebrush, and surrounded by canyons and red-rock formations. They have food called Canine Caviar, squeaky toys, fluffy beds and four full-time caregivers. The caregiver on the night shift curls up with the dogs for naps.

...

Because the dogs are still adjusting to their surroundings, it is difficult to predict how many of them will become adoptable. They arrived Jan. 2 from Richmond, Va., on a chartered airplane, stressed after eight months in shelters. In initial evaluations last September, many lay flat and looked frightened. Now, many respond to caregivers by wagging their tails and giving sloppy kisses.

So see, this blog isn't all death and stuff. Fluffy animals saved! Hooray!

Did someone say blood?

2008-01-22T18:35:00.001-08:00

OK, wow. That was marvelous. Watching "There Will Be Blood" is sort of like sending your brain to camp -- it might not be fun*, or the sort of thing your brain would do of its own accord, but it will have some new experiences and come back enriched. Damn, I am pleased to have seen this movie.

I saw it for two reasons: I haven't seen Daniel Day-Lewis on the big screen in forever, and I feel bad about that, as I fancy him. We all kept hearing how great he was in "Gangs of New York," and that really underwhelmed me when I finally rented it, so I felt like I should give him a shot to impress me on the big screen. Second, I loved "Magnolia." I also loved "Punch Drunk Love," but that was a very lovable movie. This I was able to go into armed with "Magnolia" experience: It's going to be three hours long, it's going to be very slow, there's going to be no discernible point, and you should just kick back and see what happens. So I guess I must also love Paul Thomas Anderson. (Why am I such a sucker for people with three names? Me, Emma Blackwood? Odd.)

Anyway. I feel I should warn you that if you go see this, it's very long, and very sad, and not very much happens. If you're not at least mildly interested by the first 20 minutes, it might be good to just go ahead and leave. There's a sketchy storyline -- something about an oilman buying up some property and clashing with the locals, becoming rich and destroying himself in the process; your basic American Dream-dystopia outline -- but what's important is the character study of Daniel Plainview, the angry greedy arrogant bastard oilman at the center of the movie. What he does is drill for oil, taking occasional breaks to charm people into investing in him, and he's very good at both. He's incredibly driven -- he wants to be successful and wealthy -- but he's not working toward anything external. A classic misanthrope, he's most comfortable being entirely alone in his own mind, and the rugged Western landscapes he works in are the external counterpoint to his gorgeous internal solitude. When he starts to find success, he surrounds himself with more people, and that's where his trouble begins.

He rarely speaks, and almost never his own thoughts -- his first spoken words, quite a few minutes into the movie, are "Ladies and gentlemen" as he addresses a group about the oil he's found -- but late in the film he gives a remarkable monologue (there's someone answering him back, but he's not really listening):

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people....There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone....I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I want to rule and never, ever explain myself. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these-- people.

It's remarkable. I've about talked myself out of misanthropy but this speech gave me such a thrill of recognition and empathy. The only person he really loves is his adopted son, who doesn't talk back and quietly adores him, and allows him to both experience unconditional love and love a projection of his own self-image. (Another child he meets seems to arouse similar feelings.) But mainly he loves his work on the oil wells. He feels about oil the way Flaubert did about fiction, or Florence King does about the South: misanthropes do great work.

But he's not a true misanthrope, of course; misanthropes don't bother with the competitive streak he alludes to, and this is why his character is so fascinating. Oh, I just adored this movie. Also, his mustache is fantastic: it sort of turns him into the anti-Vondo, for those readers who may be familiar with Vondo.

*There will be no fun, ever.

"It's a terrible thing!"

2008-01-20T19:39:00.000-08:00

Saw "Cloverfield" Saturday night. I don't know, lambkins. Art Boy absolutely loved it but it left me feeling pretty let down. The premise is fantastic, and I love a monster movie as much as the next girl, but once the monster attack is under way the movie started to go thin for me.

I wasn't particularly thrilled by any of the running/escape sequences. My thinking is that a large monster is probably very easy to escape from if you can stay out of its way. (The best scares come from the parasites that drop off it, but after their initial attack, they mostly stop being an issue. Why?) The scariest part of a monster attack on Manhattan, I would think, would be the crowds and the sense of mass panic. But somehow everyone escapes the island very quickly, leaving our protagonists alone in the city. And they aren't all that fleshed out. I didn't care about them or their little romances or whatever. People who run from monsters for hours in high-heeled shoes are not real people. I wanted this movie to be either really smart or to be a great thrill ride, but it never quite made it to either one.

But the premise: wow. It never stops being great. I love the gimmick and I love the cinema-verite effect. I love entire shots carefully framed around being entirely accidental. I love the shots of crowds holding up their cellphones to take pictures of the Statue of Liberty's head. Basically, I love the trailer for this movie. The movie didn't stand a chance of living up to it.

Oddly, it got me super-excited for Romero's "Diary of the Dead," which is exactly the same premise but with zombies. Is anything not vastly improved by tacking on "with zombies"? No.

*I'm also irked by the tagline for this movie. It's not somehow more horrifying to say "Some thing" than "Something"; either way, it's a "thing," right? Art Boy disagrees, but then he really liked the movie. Also, it's a misleading tagline as it implies more of a mystery than is featured in the movie -- we don't know if it found us or if we woke it up with a foghorn or created it with a atomic tests or what. Anyway, Art Boy won't talk to me about this movie anymore.

Pity the child

2008-01-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

I was a bit startled to find Bobby Fischer's obit on the NYT's main page this morning. They did a nice job; it's very poignant. Poor little thing. I will have to bust out "Chess" today; Bobby would probably not appreciate that, but he would probably not approve of most things that most people do anyway.

(By the way, Vampira finally got an obit.)

In other news, I am completely undecided about this Teeth film. I love horror movies and I am always interested in the subtexts about women's sexuality so this should really be my kind of thing. I'm just not sure I can handle it. Just reading the reviews makes me feel rather faint. Also, it doesn't sound like it's got a whole lot to say; it sounds like the horror version of, say, Enough. Then again, how often do you get to hear a bunch of movie critics talking about the vagina dentata myth? I feel a certain obligation to support this. Hmm. Hmm.

Maggots! Strange irises! Bat attack! Razor wire!

2008-01-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

And yet, Art Boy and I did not have quite as much fun as we had hoped watching Dario Argento's "Suspiria" for the Final Girl Film Club. That's OK. It's still a gorgeous movie.

Our story, such as it is, begins when heroine Suzy steps out of an airport, disoriented from her overseas flight to Germany. The doors click behind her and she's plunged straight into a maelstrom: it's pouring rain and no cabs will stop, and the driver who finally pulls over can't understand her. Things only get worse for Suzy from there. She's come all this way to enroll in a prestigious ballet academy, but on the night of her arrival, one of its students is horrifically murdered. Strange goings-on ensue. The three women in charge at the school act creepy. Suzy faints during her first dance and has to spend the rest of the movie in her nightgown. There's lots of crazy lighting, running through corridors and absolutely balletic bloodshed.

It's beautiful, but it's all hung on such a flimsy plot, and nobody acts the way a reasonable person might act. None of the school's boarding students explore outside their rooms at night. (Professor McGonagall would be delighted with this gang.) Suzy is completely at home one minute and completely confused by everything the next. I get that it's deliberately dreamlike and hallucinatory, but it's hard to follow a movie where nobody acts like a human being.

That said... damn is this movie beautiful. The Goblin soundtrack (featuring director Argento) is outstanding, even lovelier than the Iron Maiden soundtrack for Phenomenon the other night. The lighting is crazy gorgeous, starting with Suzy's taxi ride, where red lights flash across the rain and make it look like she's bleeding. There's a terrifying night scene where a blind character stands alone in the middle of a huge white plaza, sensing danger but unable to tell from which direction -- and then a shadow flits by. And the violence is beautiful in a completely different way, very harsh and over the top. I screamed and covered my eyes when Suzy's hapless classmate tumbles through a window into a room full of razor wire. (Why does a ballet school have a room full of razor wire? Do not ask. It is dreamlike!)

I really wanted to love this movie. It's entirely about women, their power and their weaknesses, and I love women in horror movies. And best of all, the climax involves hidden passageways and rooms in the school's mazelike building; I have a running dream about a house with hidden passageways and rooms. And yet "Suspiria" evades analysis. Its dreamlike qualities make the viewer feel like a participant rather than an observer; it's difficult to pin down what's actually happening. This made it feel very unlike a horror movie to me: a horror movie depends very much on what is chasing whom, and where the parties are in relation to one another. (Is it inside the house? Will she be safe in the closet?) After a while it gets tiring not to be able to find your feet. Still, it's a gorgeous place to get lost.

Art Boy found an audio commentary the next day that he says is pretty good. I haven't listened to it yet, but it's here.

Meanwhile

2008-01-11T22:04:00.000-08:00

Not a whole lot going on right now. I finally watched Alfonso Cuaron's lovely 1998 adaptation of "Great Expectations" the other night. It's a shame not to have seen it on the big screen. I've adored Cuaron since seeing "A Little Princess" forever ago, and I thought "Children of Men" was a masterpiece. His "GE" is certainly flawed, but my beefs were mostly with the script: it focuses more on the love story than on the Pip character's coming of age, which is really what the story is about. It has some lovely performances from Chris Cooper as the Joe character (actually, he gets to keep the name Joe) and Anne Bancroft as the Miss Havisham character. Bancroft is so radiantly lovely, she puts gawky little Gwyneth Paltrow to shame. I actually missed the big money-shot effect of little Pip and Estella transforming into adult Ethan Hawke & Gwyneth as they dance, because my eyes were just glued to Bancroft swaying at the edge of the frame. She's a vision. From her crumbling mansion to the Florida marshes to the garrets of New York, this is a gorgeous movie.

Just finished reading Bill Bryson's memoir, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid." I had a vague memory of reading bad reviews of this, so I didn't seek it out although I have enjoyed all his other books (particularly the useful "Guide to Troublesome Words"). My parents gave it to me for Christmas, though, and it turns out to be just ducky. His anecdotes about growing up in Iowa in the 1950s are told with the perfect blend of affection and dry detachment; every word is note-perfect. It's very enjoyable.

Art Boy and I might watch "Ratatouille" tonight, so the buckets of blood will have to wait a bit. Sorry.

Wish you were here

2008-01-11T21:37:00.000-08:00

Maila Nurmi, best known as Vampira, died in her sleep yesterday. She was 86. Thanks to LAist for letting me know, as I have seen nothing about this whatsoever in the mainstream media, which strikes me as inexcusable. If there is any kind of public to-do, I am totally skipping work and going.

Vampira, of course, was Elvira's predecessor as a TV hostess of horror movies; she famously sued Cassandra Peterson, who plays Elvira, for stealing her concept but was unable to pay legal expenses, and the case was dismissed. Vampira can also, of course, be seen in "Plan 9 from Outer Space." Back in her heyday, she was a Hollywood fixture, driving up Sunset in a convertible with a parasol to shade her pallid complexion. She and James Dean somehow got to be good friends and hung out a lot in the early 1950s. While he was in Texas filming "Giant," she had a set of glossy photos taken of herself sitting in an open grave; she sent one to James inscribed "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here." His handlers confiscated it, not knowing they were friends and assuming it was a threat, so he never saw it. A few days later, he was dead.

RIP, Ms. Nurmi. Have a wonderful time.

Live free or die!

2008-01-09T14:25:00.001-08:00

Bill Bryson once wrote that New Hampshire's state motto struck him as a little extreme; as a resident himself, he was not entirely comfortable with signing up for an implied life-or-death struggle. Anyway. Wasn't last night exciting? I'm trying to keep politics out of this blog for the most part but I am just having a ball with this campaign. It's all going to end after Feb. 5 so we should enjoy it while we can. I love that Hillary's win is being treated as a "comeback" when she's had the state in the bag for so long. What's real news is that Obama gave her such a close call there. It's slightly enraging too that both Iowa and New Hampshire have been treated as all-or-nothing wins and losses. You're not dealing with a single electorate that's changing its mind, after all. Art Boy pointed out that the campaign is being treated like a giant sports tournament, hence the wins/losses emphasis. I guess people are just excited, which is nice.

I'm not normally a fan of hers, but I just loved the Maureen Dowd column. Both Clintons are absolutely shameless. They'll do whatever it takes. People don't dislike Hillary because she's a woman; they dislike her because Americans want their leaders to become successful on their own terms, not because of who they're married to. (Sure, Bush was elected because of whose son he was, but I think that's part of why even Republicans are so contemptuous of the guy now.)

Anyway. Art Boy just wrote to say Netflix is sending us "Night of the Comet" and Dario Argento's "Inferno," so I'll be back to posting about zombies and fake blood shortly.

The new computer

2008-01-04T11:54:00.001-08:00

So the below post was the first to be composed on the new computer... I have not given it a name yet, but it seems to run pretty smoothly. And it is so nice to be able to write in, say, Blogger or the upgraded Gmail without having to sit and wait for every letter I type to appear on the screen. And I can watch video without hiccups. That's pretty dang nice.

The only real downside is that the computer is very, very quiet. My old one, as visitors to my home will fondly recall, sounded something like an old refrigerator. In recent weeks, it had begun to do a sort of faint high-pitched scream (like Betsy's old screaming TV). This thing just purrs silently away. It's eerie. Eerie, I say.

No one cares for you a smidge

2008-01-03T09:34:00.000-08:00

We went to see "The Orphanage" last night, and you'll forgive me if my review is a trifle disjointed; I slept very badly last night. My reaction to this film is probably best summed up, though, by Art Boy, who walked out of the theater rubbing his hand and said indignantly "You bit me!" I don't remember biting him, but I probably did. For most of the movie I wore a sweater over my face and chewed on the tag in the back. Brr. Brrrr.

I don't want to say too much about this movie. The plot concerns a woman, Laura, who moves back to the now-empty orphanage where she was raised, bringing along her husband and young son; they plan to reopen it as a home for disabled children. But there are strange noises at night, and a mysterious old woman prowling the grounds. Their son, who's always had imaginary friends, starts talking about a creepy-sounding new group of them. Then he disappears.

My instinct was to compare this movie to "The Others," but it's oddly more similar in spirit to the 1963 "The Haunting." The house itself has a secret, a mystery that needs solving before it will leave the inhabitants alone. My favorite element, though, was a subtext about telling children the truth, vs. the white lies we tell to reassure them. (Pulling the burlap over their eyes, as it were.) What happens when those stories go sour? "Is Father Christmas a lie too?" demands a child at one point, reminding me of Art Boy's holiday rant. Seriously, though, if you're a parent, you might find this movie too unsettling. It's pretty grim.

It is also adorably European. I love watching genre movies from other countries for how they violate the U.S. tropes. Bad things happen to kids. Months go by without action. In the climax, Laura swings into full-on ghost-chaser action-heroine mode, stripping down to her tank top and St. Anthony medal like a Spanish Ellen Ripley. Her husband is your classic Spanish male character, sitting back and grunting while his wife runs around solving problems. I just loved all that.

The L.A. Times has a nice review. The NYT has a clip here but I'm alone in the house and absolutely refuse to look at it, so if it's no good, sorry...

Golly jeepers

2008-01-01T16:17:00.001-08:00

Art Boy and I ended up spending a good chunk of New Year's Eve watching "Creepshow." First we had to watch the ball drop, three hours later, since there is no West Coast equivalent of the ball dropping that we have been able to find. Then I got the remote back and flipped through channels.

"Doesn't that look like Stephen King?" I said.
"That is Stephen King," said Art Boy.

And so I was introduced to "Creepshow," the classic horror anthology film, the only collaboration so far between King and George A. Romero, and the perfect thing to watch after midnight with vodka-champagne martinis. This thing is just a blast. We tuned in for the second segment, a "Colour Out of Space"-inspired tale of a rural New England farmer (King) who finds a creepy meteor. The third involves Leslie Nielson burying Ted Danson up to his neck in sand, which somehow manages to be genuinely horrifying.

Art Boy thought the actress who plays Nielson's unfaithful wife might be Veronica Cartwright, which I thought would be the coolest thing ever until I looked it up and found who it really is. "MIKE," I screamed, swilling more champagne. "IT'S GAYLEN ROSS." The "Dawn of the Dead" star was in four movies and this is one of them. I thought that was pretty fabulous until we got to the fourth segment and it turned out to star Adrienne Barbeau.

Sometime before segment 5, which stars E.G. Marshall and features a Tom Savini cameo, I gently passed out on the couch, but Art Boy assures me it is very cool.

Over coffee and aspirin the next morning, Art Boy explained the frame story to me: a mean father (an uncredited Tom Atkins) takes a horror comic away from his son (played by a child who grew up to be horror novelist Joe Hill*). At the end the boy receives the voodoo doll he had ordered from an ad in the comic and uses it on Atkins. Ha!

Art Boy's breakfast conversation included a couple of vague anti-child remarks, and after the second one he said "I don't know what's gotten into me today." I told him he was being haunted by the movie because, being a secret Republican in his heart of hearts, he identifies with the dad. "You think children shouldn't have horror comics," I taunted. "You think they should be all repressed and stuff." He put down his newspaper and said "It's true. Look. One day, little Cindy Lou Who is going to be looking at Japanese tentacle porn, and you'll agree with me." I suppose he's right.

Anyway, the movie was super cool; if you like horror at all, it's heaps of fun. And champagne is great in vodka martinis. Just drink some water before bed.

*Also Stephen King's son.

Happy new year, lambs

2007-12-31T21:00:00.000-08:00

I wish all of you a joyous 2008. May your final hours of 2007 be merry.

Be well.

Raise our hats to the strange 'Phenomena'

2007-12-31T20:05:00.000-08:00

I love titling posts with obscure Kate Bush quotes. Anyway, last night it got into Art Boy and me to watch the 1985 Jennifer Connelly movie "Phenomena," directed by Dario Argento. From the opening credits this film was a revelation. On the soundtrack: Iron Maiden. Costumes: Giorgio Armani. Costarring: Donald Pleasence. By the time the action started, I had turned to Art Boy and said "Why does everyone not know about this movie?"

One reason might be that it was originally titled "Creepers" in the U.S., and preceded Jennifer Connelly's big break in "Labyrinth" by about a year. It was shot in English but features a largely Italian cast, many of whom re-dubbed their own English dialogue, so all the conversations sound incredibly stilted. For example:

Lady: This is a strange area. It's called the Transylvania of Switzerland.
Jennifer: Why is that?
Lady: I don't know. It just is.

You're left thinking "..." But fortunately, Dario Argento is in charge and the dreamlike horror sequences soon take over. Jennifer plays an American movie star's daughter sent to a Swiss boarding school, where everyone has been unnerved by a young girl's recent murder in the woods nearby. Fortunately, Jennifer can communicate telepathically with bugs -- a fact that impresses local entomologist Donald Pleasence -- and is able to find clues no one else can, such as a glove crawling with maggots. Which is good, because the killer appears to be striking again...

At first I thought the story would end up being secondary to the fabulous dream sequences, in which Jennifer sleepwalks down long hallways in her billowy Armani dresses while Iron Maiden plays. But then toward the end it becomes a pretty good mystery. Jennifer is preternaturally calm whether insects are crawling on her arms or whether she's sticking her finger down her own throat to make herself vomit. I adored this movie. Art Boy would probably appreciate my adding, however, that you'll want to finish eating beforehand.

I'm pretty stoked to watch Suspiria for the Final Girl Film Club. A copy is laid in and at the ready. We may however take a break and get a little more festive tonight... maybe some Arrested Development reruns or something crazy like that.

She's dead

2007-12-29T21:44:00.001-08:00

That would be my PC Clarissa, who expired last night with a tremendous snap and smell of smoke. Some guy at Best Buy decided the power supply had exploded. My data should be salvageable, and hopefully in the next week I'll have a new computer that actually runs Blogger without complaining and I can update more regularly. Won't you all love that? So it is a blessing in disguise. Still, I mourn Clarissa, my first really-all-mine-and-not-just-borrowed computer. She was ramshackle but lovable.

RIP.

The annual smackdown

2007-12-23T15:09:00.000-08:00

I came home the other night and Art Boy had put "It's a Wonderful Life" on. Yes, gentle readers, it was time once again for our recurring argument: Bedford Falls vs. Pottersville. It runs along these lines (and can be blamed in large part on Salon's marvelous article on this topic, which I read a couple of years ago and which completely horrified Art Boy):

Me: Pottersville rocks! Look at those great bars. Bedford Falls is full of nosy old biddies who are all up in your face all the time.

Art Boy: Pottersville is a city of the damned. Bedford Falls is great!

Me: I don't want to live in a city where I have to share a bartender with a doddering old guy who orders flaming rum punch. Look, wouldn't it be fun to go to one of those jitterbug places?

Art Boy: Bedford Falls is friendly. Pottersville is scary.

This year I got particularly worked up by the swimming-pool scene. "Bedford Falls," I ranted to Art Boy, "is the kind of city where the floor opens up underneath you and NOBODY SAYS ANYTHING. You just dance right toward the edge and everyone goes 'Oooh!' and nobody warns you." Art Boy ignored me and did his patented imitation of the school principal diving into the pool. I don't know, gentle readers. I might just not get this movie.

But I'm pretty sure Annie Korzen does. Merry Christmas, Annie! Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter! And Merry Christmas, gentle readers. Check out the gorgeous moon tonight, wherever you are, and don't miss Mars shining nearby. I hope you will all be safe, happy and well.

Separated at birth?

2007-12-16T18:51:00.001-08:00

I don't know much about "Sweeney Todd." I'm sure it's lovely. But the posters just remind me of Count Olaf. I would be more excited about this movie, I think, if it weren't for "Sleepy Hollow" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and the fact that Depp/Burton is just not a sure thing the way it was back in "Edward Scissorhands" days. Yeah, it's got Helena Bonham Carter, but so did Kenneth Branagh's "Frankenstein," you know? Sigh.

Oh, I'm probably just grouchy on account of Dan Fogelberg dying today. To find out if the encounter described in "Same Old Lang Syne" really happened*, go here.

*IT DID! Can you believe it! He had an awkward conversation with his high school girlfriend just like a regular person!! Except, as he reminds us in the song, he's famous. OMG.

One of those days

2007-12-10T15:46:00.000-08:00

It's a very bright, clear day after several days of scattered clouds (and occasional, gasp, showers). A dry wind has picked up, playing havoc with my sinuses and filling the air with this electric energy. I feel very sort of nervous and lively; made lots of unwise lane changes on the drive to work, ran yellow lights, that sort of thing. Also, apparently this morning I was laughing in my sleep, multiple and prolonged times; I woke myself up doing it. I've never, ever done that. There's just something buzzing in the air today.

I thought maybe it was just me, but Veronique de Turenne at Here in Malibu waxes poetic about today's insanely bright light.