Which David Lynch movie are you?



you are the rarest: Industrial Symphony No. 1:


The Dream of the Broken Hearted



Which David Lynch movie are you?
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Sounds of "Silence"

Back from Ebertfest in IL... plenty of doin's that went on. More about that later.

Do you like musicals?

Do you like "Silence of the Lambs"?

Well, this gives you the best of both worlds!

On the road...

I'll be up at Champaign-Urbana, IL for the next couple of days for two reasons - the first being to help out at this screening, co-sponsored by the magazine that I write for; the second to spend at least one day at Ebertfest. Time contraints prevent me from staying the length of the festival, but it should be very interesting.

More about it when I return.

Life's little horrors

Before I go on, you need to go here first.

I picked up the WENDIGO dvd over a month ago, having heard good things about it for awhile and having missed it's festival run when it got to Kansas City... I managed to find, after several weeks of looking, a copy of HABIT. Now I'm looking for the first feature, NO TELLING.

The filmmaker in question is one Larry Fessenden. And he's the Real Deal amongst a wave of indie-poseurs and Hollywood wanna-be's.

Check out the site - then see the work.

History shows again and again how Nature points up the folly of Men...

Picked a new book off of the shelves of my local library - THE BUZZING, by Jim Knipfel (Vintage Books) - had never heard of the man before, although the jacket copy pegs him as a columnist for a NYC paper, and the cover features a blurb by Thomas Pynchon.

The Pynchon blurb was not a draw (since I spent a good week during my college days repeatedly throwing my copy of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW across the room in fits of frustration), but even so, I cracked it open, and was suitibly rewarded with a decent yarn about a NY newspaperman, not quite burnt out, but getting pretty near, covering "kook" stories, who stumbles into something even too wierd for him. I won't spoil it for anyone here, but suffice it to say that the saying, "Life is not a movie" is missing an important qualifier -- "Life is not an American movie".

Knipfel has a pretty extensive knowledge of pop culture - if you're a fan, you get shivers of delight finding references to "Kolchak: The Night Stalker", Japanese 'B' films like THE GREEN SLIME, and lots of others. Being a journalist himself, he also manages to immerse one thoroughly in the workings of the trade. Beyond all of that, the serious point of the book (and yes, there is one, sorta) is about the paranoia that abounds in American culture.

This Knipfel is quite a character - check out his website about his other writings and to find out about his previous non-fiction books.
Besides, anyone who knows the theme from THE GREEN SLIME is OK by me.

Monkeys With A Concept

Everybody under 25 is a dumbass.

At least that's the impression I'm getting watching SCARE TACTICS, the Sci-Fi Channel's take on 'hidden video' programming with Shannon Doherty. The basic set-up is pretty much the same as Candid Camera, Spy TV and the endless follow-ups/rip-offs -- the gimmick this time around is that most of the situations are inspired by science-fiction & horror movies.

This has the probability of being somewhat greasy fun... the first segment kicked off with an "alien abduction" prank, which then decended into cheesiness with the appearance of the rubber-suit 'alien' pulling the door off of the car and dragging out the driver. Subsequent segments go through a catalog of urban legend bane - Bigfoot, homicidal maniacs in the woods, murderous clones in warehouses - and some take their cues from films such as "Flatliners", "I Know What You Did Last Summer", and more.

While it is fun watching clueless youth work themselves into frightful fits, the overall impression one is left with is that the Youth of America are bone-stick stupid, gullible naifs who'll fall for anything. While this does explain the success of shows such as Elimidate, Survivor and others in the "reality/hidden-camera" genre, and our current War In Iraq, it doesn't make one sleep well at night to realize that at some point these same gullible naifs will be running the country some day.

As for Shannon Doherty, who left her previous show CHARMED because it was "stupid" -- someone must have some juicy video footage of her doing something heinous to make a such a lateral career move.. That, or she must be related to one of the creators.

Wrong Is Right

It was a time when Outer Space was filled with incredible machines whose telescopic eyes & ears witnessed our most sensitive secrets. Information that could, and did, change the face of nations.

It was a time when no one on Earth could hide from Technology. No people. No continent.
No one was safe from spy satellites.

It all could have happened in the recent past. Or the present. Or even in the near-future.

But it didn't.

It did happen in that elusive time between now & later. That time when Dark is Light.

When Down is Up;

When Foul is Fair;

When...

well, see the top to finish out that little introduction.

It was pure happenstance that I happen to find my copy of this movie roughly three weeks ago, as our War Against Iraq started. Others may find that what was once thought to be mindless entertainment suddenly became a bit more pointed (I imagine STARSHIP TROOPERS found a little more respect recently). Even this week's episodes of "Angel" and even "Enterprise" seemed to be right on schedule with concurrent events.

Wrong Is Right is a "moldy oldie" from the early 1980's (1982, to be exact), a dark comedy starring Sean Connery and one of the last projects from Richard Brooks (whose resume includes films such as ELMER GANTRY, THE PROFESSIONALS, IN COLD BLOOD, LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, and for the cultists out there, co-scripter of the cheese-classic COBRA WOMAN... if you haven't heard of the man before, go out and search out some of these films.) A satire on television media's effect on the world and on political events, it flopped horribly at the time it was released -- I doubt most of anybody reading this who is a fan of Connery has even heard of this picture -- and probably with reason, since political satire was not an audience crowd pleaser at that time, despite comparisons being made with DR. STRANGELOVE at the time.

Brooks wrote the movie, (based on a novel, The Better Angels, by Charles McCarry), which features Connery as superstar newsman Patrick Hale, the shining star of World Television Network, who inadvertantly ends up smack-dab center in a chain of events in the Mideast (well, actually North Africa, but go with it) involving two suitcase atom bombs and various factions (The President and his Cabinet, the CIA, a terrorist leader, and a prospective candidate for the Presidency) all trying to get the bombs first.

From that quick and dirty synopsis, it may appear to be a parody of the James Bond films that starred Connery... not in the slightest. Connery is actually more of a combination of a Dan Rather/Ted Koeppel type, a media superstar who actually gets out and covers the news. The unfolding of the plot is what is of interest here... what was easily dismissed as satire over 20 years ago seems to be indistinguishable from recent events over the past several months/years -- suicide bombings (but only in front of the television cameras), anti-American sentiment in the Mid-East (at the time this was released, the main bad guy was Kadafi (sic)), and a concerted effort for 'regime change' by whatever means necessary.

The plot and tone almost seems to be an advance taste of BUCKEROO BANZAI, although without the overt comic book influences - it was shot by the same person, Fred Koenkamp (who also deserves honor as the DP on BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS) and features Rosalind Cash (as the Vice-President of the U.S.) who was also in BB - I suspect that someone at the Banzai Institute may have tipped the filmmakers to take a look at it before work began on BB. There's some nice montage work by George Grenville, that moves things along at a brisk pace (maybe not brisk enough for those who wallow in today's seizure-inducing editing); and a good cast: Katherine Ross, Hardy Kruger, George Grizzard, Robert Conrad, Dean Stockwell, Leslie Nielson (before he totally switched over to 'funny' roles) and a very young Jennifer Jason Leigh who appears in the first 5 minutes.

Unlike contemporary 'black-comedies', which seem to define the term as having lots of "attitude" and cursing and little that's actually funny, WRONG IS RIGHT aims for skewering the (then) pervasive influence of television turning everything into entertainment and in the hypocrisy of the U.S. Government and its foreign policy in the Mid-East. The joke on us, is, that we've gone even further than even political satire could posit.

It's worth hunting for in your local video stores - as things develop over the next year, it could come in handy...