Pop Culture Petri Dish

30 Day Song Challenge, Day 30: Your Favorite Song at This Time, Last Year

2011-04-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

If you want to get technical, this is Day 35 of the 30-Day Song Challenge: I fudged and neglected posting on a couple of days. And no, I don't want to go out on Toto (see previous entry).

Close to this time last year, I was first discovering the joys of Cobirds Unite, the most recent solo CD by Seattle's best singer/songwriter, Rusty Willoughby. The title track, my favorite song on the album, sounds (to me, at least) like the Beatles and Neko Case waltzing through a dense forest together, under a bright but foreboding full moon. Or something like that. Gorgeous, eerie stuff; sung sublimely by Willoughby and Visqueen's Rachel Flotard.

Day 29: A Song from Your Childhood

2011-04-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

Some of my first favorite bands as a kid were incubated in the slick waters of AM radio. Before I discovered punk and new wave at age 15 I drank as deep from the well of arena-schlock as any child of the 1970's.

One of those AM-ready bands was Toto, whose big hits of the 1970's and '80's made for some reasonably tasty empty calories. One of the first LP's (vinyl, kids) that I purchased was Hydra, the band's sophomore release in 1979. The title track's combination of pompous prog rock keyboards, unicorn-piss fantasy lyrics, arena-metal guitars, and radio-ready gloss stroked my pre-adolescent pleasure nodes. I hadn't heard this song in ages, and it did take me straight back to being 11 years old. No, it's no damned good, but it entertained the hell outta me back in the day.

Toto actually made a 'video album' for Hydra, many excerpts of which can be found on YouTube. The 'Hydra' video is really damned entertaining pre-MTV cheeserificness (but sadly, not embeddable). This live version, however, is. Enjoy with a pack of Ritz crackers, as you would any pasteurized processed cheese food.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 28: A Song that Makes You Feel Guilty

2011-04-02T00:43:00.000-07:00

Still behind. Sorry. Took a day off yesterday from everything, including participating in this Facebook-rooted time-suck.

So what to make of today's Song Challenge? Are we back in Guilty Pleasure territory? Or are we talking about a song that triggers associations with acts of guilt and sin? Or are we talking about a song that really addresses issues of guilt in an eloquent fashion? This silly challenge yields as many nuances of interpretation as Shakespeare, I tell ya.

Well, I've already covered the so-called Guilty Pleasure turf (viva, Spice Girls!); and as an ex-catholic whose every breath and move induced guilt in his halcyon years (and sometimes today, for that matter), every third song I hear could probably trigger some guilt-induced association. And that's not particularly fun (though it is sort of funny).

So I go for Door #3: A great song that happens to address guilt. And as a bonus, I'll throw in two great ones.

The Arctic Monkeys are probably my favorite British band right now; four young pups who can rock like the Buzzcocks on a meth cocktail, craft pop hooks easily the equal of any UK band of the last thirty years, and top the whole combination off with some of the best song lyrics out there right now. Their last disc, 2009's Humbug, saw their songcraft collide with patches of sexual surrealism and a druggily-pulsating production by the Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme. It's a wonderfully odd-duck record that stretches creatively without losing sight of the band's considerable strengths.

Chief among those strengths is Alex Turner, the band's lead singer, guitarist, and lyricist. This Humbug highlight, "Dance Little Liar", showcases his sharp lyrical pen; and I love the way the song simmers, then explodes, then fades back into that pounding pulse. Call it Brit-Pop Noir.

If "Dance Little Liar" examines guilt with a sense of foreboding, Billy Paul's 1972 soul classic "Me and Mrs. Jones" unabashedly romanticizes it. The track captures the smouldering slow dance between infidelity-induced guilt and undeniable desire better than any other song ever recorded. Over a lushly-upholstered bed of velour strings and horns, Paul describes the clandestine affair between himself and the titular woman with such a vivid ear, you can picture the entire story in your head as it plays. An entire universe is conveyed in the hints and implications of the lyrics; and in Paul's show-stopping vocal delivery. A stone classic.

30-Day Song Challenge, Days 26 and 27: A Song You can Play, and One You Wish You Could...

2011-03-30T03:13:00.000-07:00

So I got a little behind. When you're up 'til 3 in the am writing trivia questions, this'll happen. Fortunately, both of these categories are easy for me.

Like every third person in the Northwest, I play (a little; very little) guitar. For awhile in my halcyon days of youth, like every third person in the Northwest, I even kicked around the idea of, you know, doing it for reals. Played two live solo gigs at a Chinese restaurant in Ballard, even.

During this period, I practiced guitar pretty diligently and got to the proficiency of a pretty skilled twelve-year old. One of the things you learn when you first pick up the guitar is that some of (OK, MOST of) the greatest rock and pop songs on the planet are pretty damned simple to play. So it's kind of a rush to discover a great song, a song that you love, that you can play. One of my first such discoveries was this one. There's a terrific guitar tab for it that's right in my vocal key, and with some practice...I sound like a pretty skilled twelve-year old playing David Bowie's "Heroes". So one of the songs I can play is "Heroes." But give me a week to practice/re-learn it first.

On the flipside, one of the other things you learn when you first start dinking around on a guitar is that, sometimes, its not as easy as you think. Whether it's the windmill power-chord goofball wizardry of Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, or the acoustic picking of Nick Drake, I do appreciate really good guitar playing.

I don't put a lot of cop into wankerly guitar virtuosity (songs, not wheedling solos, are my bag most of the time), but David Bowie has always aligned himself with amazing guitar players. Ironically, while "Heroes" is incredibly easy to play, "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" sports squalls of incredibly precise yet crazed guitar soloing by Robert Fripp. I will never be able to play like this. But I'm glad that Fripp does.

30 Day Song Challenge, Day 25 - a song that makes you laugh

2011-03-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of songs that induce intentional laughter in this world. Hell, the entire catalog of Flight of the Conchords would fill the bill nicely. But picking between all of the Conchords songs would be like the Octomom picking her favorite octuplet, so I'll go with someone else entirely, namely garage rockers Electric Six.

Don't know about you, but any band that mixes fuzztone guitar with handclaps, cowbells, and Abe Lincoln in tight leather shorts makes me mighty happy.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 24 - A Song that you Want to Play at your Funeral

2011-03-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

I hope that the necessity for this soundtrack doesn't come for a good many years, but when it does I'd rather have people having fun than moping about my recently-departed duff. Party up, all.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 23 - A Song in a Foreign Language

2011-03-26T03:20:00.000-07:00

The initiator of this here list suggested a change to Day 23, and that suits me just fine, especially in light of the artist who comes immediately to mind.

Serge Gainsbourg's probably best known today as the dad of chanteuse Charlotte Gainsbourg. But for over twenty years, he was an honest-to-God superstar in France, cutting records that combined his sense of lackadaisical Gallic cool with a wide variety of musical influences--jazz, afro-cuban, disco, and rock. My favorite Gainsbourg track is "Bonnie and Clyde," directly inspired by the 1967 Arthur Penn flick and sung in duet with the exotic Brigitte Bardot. Some of Gainsbourg's work took a left turn into kitsch (not a bad thing); "Bonnie and Clyde," with its surging acoustic guitar, strange looped (or at least they sound looped) cymbals, and insistent strings, just sounds gothic and haunting and wonderful. And really damned cool.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 22 - A Song that you Listen to When you’re Sad

2011-03-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

I've tried to avert the climes of sadness a lot lately. The surging and chaotic tumult of life brings scary alien bouts of change; and those surges of unrest alternately hurt, terrify, and exhilarate. But plumbing deep into sadness--looking squarely into it--is a whole lot harder.

That's why when you hear music that truly taps into it, it can almost be too much to listen to.

For some reason, a cloak of sadness has been hanging over me pretty persistently today. Part of the credit's due to some exotic strain of something that's been hanging on far, far too long. And when your body doesn't feel well, the mind makes that same stretch easily. So when I got home from a co-worker's farewell party, I threw on Nick Drake's Pink Moon.

Nick Drake, in case you didn't know, was an English folk singer whose haunting, airy voice and sophisticated acoustic guitar playing wrought a massive influence on a lot of musicians. If you're a fan of the emotionally-naked songwriting of Elliott Smith, you're hearing the doomed spiritual progeny of Nick Drake.

Drake fit the portrait of a doomed spirit himself, passing away at the painfully young age of 26 in 1974. Before dying, he committed three full-length albums to posterity, all of which walk some very dark pathways.

The most harrowing of them, 1972's Pink Moon, is less than thirty minutes long. It presents Drake at his most stripped-down and chilling-to-the-marrow sad. All eleven tracks are deceptively tranquil--just Drake's spectral croon and his densely-plucked guitar--but beneath that lull of a voice is a melancholy of incalculable depth.

The title track was (stupidly) used by Volkswagen for a commercial a few years ago. It's understandable, I suppose. The soothing sonics probably seemed perfect for a bunch of hippie kids parked sentimentally under the stars. Volkswagen (wisely) omitted the full brunt of Drake's lyrics; a tale of the world ending, delivered with narcotic inevitability. If that ain't sad, I don't know what is.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 21: A Song that you Listen to When you’re Happy

2011-03-23T19:35:00.000-07:00

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. And listen to James Brown's "Sex Machine."

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 20 - A Song that you Listen to when you’re Angry

2011-03-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

So what do I listen to when I'm angry? Well, why am I angry? And what am I hoping to accomplish in listening to music?
Well, I'll tackle a couple of these possibilities. What the hell, it's only sleep.

Maybe I'm just flat-out pissed at someone or something and need something loud and cathartic. If that's the catalyst, then I pick "Jake Leg," a track by Baroness, an amazing metal band that flat out blew the top of my head off at Bumbershoot 2010. It's loud enough to satisfy the head-banging, but brimming with hooks--like Zeppelin and Dick Dale in a caravan, on amphetamines, with a pack of marauding cossacks hot at their heels. Bonus points to the guy who put this video together with clips from War of the Gargantuas and Frankenstein meets the Space Monster.

Am I looking at submerging into something immersive and escapist that's gonna whisk me away from anger-inducing/mundane reality? Then I'd program in the first three tracks from The Dandy Warhols' 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia (one of which is this, "Godless"). Guaranteed to whisk me off to someplace exotic, dangerous and sexy; even if I'm commuting or scrubbing a toilet. Seriously.

Now, if I want to remove myself from the angry with something happy there's plenty of places to go, happily. Right this instant, if I was fuming and wanted something that'd get my tootsies to a' tapping and the fun to start a' kicking in, I'd throw on this song in a New York minute. And I'd stop being angry, right quick.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 19 - a song from your favorite album

2011-03-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

I already put my favorite song by Love on Day 1; and that band's Forever Changes is (pretty much) my favorite album ever. So I'm gonna fudge and put down a song from one of my (other) favorite albums ever. On certain days, it is my favorite album ever.

The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle came out in 1968; and in one of those glorious ironies of fate, it became a sizeable hit over a year after the band broke up. It is, I think, a perfect album--full of faultlessly-realized songwriting, a production that's as layered as it is crystalline, and exquisite singing by Colin Blunstone, a man gifted with the most hauntingly-beautiful set of pipes ever granted to a pop singer. The big hit from the record was the dusky "Time of the Season." It's still one of the most headily sensual rock songs ever recorded, and it's lost none of its power despite over forty years and use in umpteen commercials. But the rest of the album glitters like a chest of jewels exposed to sunlight.

Odessey's two key songwriters, keyboardist Rod Argent and bassist Chris White, drew from a massive bag of wonders--classical music, jazz, traditional English folk, gothic cabaret--and created something magical. This gorgeous madrigal, "Changes," is as good a representation of that magic as anything, and it takes my breath away every time I hear it.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 18 - A Song that you Wish you heard on the Radio

2011-03-21T00:13:00.000-07:00

As was addressed before, I'm not much for traditional radio. But if I did listen to it, I'd love to hear this song by Texas psychedelic shamans The Black Angels on it.

I'm pretty much in love with the Angel's third platter, Phosphene Dream. It's a sublime trip record, and this song, "Telephone", sounds like some great lost track by The Zombies. Enjoy.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 17 - A Song that you Hear Often on the Radio

2011-03-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

A song I hear often on the radio. The radio? Does anyone listen to The Radio anymore? With the myriad listening options feeding the earbuds of the world nowadays, radio in its traditional form seems like a quaint, wheezing memory.

That said, every now and then a modern song becomes such a part of the pop-culture firmament that you can't escape it. And I'd hazard a guess that that means it also got played a lot on the radio. So here goes. If Your Obscurity-Huffing Geezer Truly has heard it, then that means it's REALLY become pervasive.

Hey, I kinda like it, too. That Euro-trash barebones synth is in the pocket, methinks. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it, hipsters.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 16 - a song that you used to love but now hate

2011-03-19T14:07:00.000-07:00

Wow, this shoulda gone up last night; but a date with The Residents kept me up til the wee hours. And a guy's gotta sleep sometime, y'know.

Music-wise, I'm not one to discard beloved songs like used Kleenex. But every now and then, a song can get overplayed to death (by you as well as the whole of the media universe). And it can wear out its welcome.

I used to be a pretty big Police fan in my halcyon days of youth, but the massive oversaturation of their last proper album (Synchronicity) and its first hit single ("Every Breath You Take"), coupled with Sting's precipitous descent over the years into tiresome old-gasbagginess, eroded a lot of that fondness. For about six months after it first came out, I thought "Every Breath You Take" was the greatest pop song ever.

'Hate' would be too strong a word for how I feel about the tune today, but listening to it again left me pretty cold, and had me scratching my head as to why I adored it so, back in the day. Honestly, I could go the rest of my life without hearing it again.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 15 - A Song that Describes You

2011-03-18T03:12:00.000-07:00

On a really, really, really good day, I do, in fact, move like a cat, talk like a rat, and sting like a bee, babe... Just saying.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 14: A Song that No One would Expect you to Love

2011-03-16T23:26:00.000-07:00

Well, now that I've admitted my fondness for the Spice Girls, there really isn't much of anything that'll surprise folks who stray across this blog. Considering my propensity for music that's outside the mainstream much of the time, though, my fondness for this song might be a surprise.

A lot of folks worship Tom Petty pretty slavishly, and I've never been one of them. He's written a few great songs, but those efforts have often (for me, at least) been superceded by that mewling Dylan whine and (I'm sorry, but it's true) those teeth that appear too massive for that horse-face of his.

But, again, he's written some great songs, and this one--"Here Comes My Girl"--is probably my favorite. With all the tension in those coiled guitar chords and the spoken-word interludes, it sounds like Lou Reed with a libido. I'm still waiting for someone who can, you know, really sing, to cover this.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 13: A Song that is a Guilty Pleasure

2011-03-16T00:27:00.000-07:00

So any music geek willing to stick to his or her six-guns would preface this category with the exhortation that, "There should be no such things as guilty pleasures." I'd agree with that, pretty much. Unless you're a Celine Dion fan.

Kidding. Sort of.

So I guess my definition of this category would be music so utterly bereft of any traditional muso-snob 'redeeming values' as to raise eyebrows from most stuffy rock critics and indie snobs. If that's the litmus test, then I've got one that'll turn the PH strip into a frickin' kaleidoscope.

I love--no, scratch that, ADORE--the first two Spice Girls CDs. They're perfect, sunny uber-pop albums that hit every fizzy note you could ask for, and then some. And I'd argue that--with their hopscotching of genres, insidiously catchy tunes, and larger-than-life personae--Ginger, Sporty, Posh, Baby, and Scary were the ABBA of the 1990's. They're one pleasure that I'll readily cop to and defend to my dying breath, the way I defend my deep love of SweetTarts and Scooby Doo.

This song has been played to death, reincarnation, and death again since it was released some fifteen years ago, but God help me, I still love it. And with enough belts in me I can lay down a mean version of it on a karaoke night (be ready to help out on the chorus, though). So here's the story from A to Z; you wanna get with me, you gotta listen carefully...

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 12 - A Song from a Band you Hate, and a Bonus

2011-03-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

I've had a curve ball thrown at me by a fellow music nerd (OK, maybe the only person reading these posts besides me). Instead of just linking a song from a band I hate, how about also linking a song that I really like from a band I (normally) hate?

Quick and easy, on both counts.

Not even gonna waste too much copy yabbering about how much I detest Huey Lewis and the News. Sanitized, ultra-slick gruel that I've hated, literally since the day I first heard "Do You Believe in Love?" on the radio nearly thirty years ago. Ick, ick, ick, ick.

Rather than dignify these blandoids with a link or an embed of a straight-up video, I'm attaching a link to a YouTube clip of a sequence in American Psycho, in which Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman character sings the praises of the band's most grating hit single, "Hip to be Square". And if you put a tableful of Huey Lewis CDs in front of me, you can bet I'd treat said tableaux in the same way that Bale treats Jared Leto in the clip.

Here's the link (embed is, sadly, disabled). It's funny, it's gruesome, and it's definitely NSFW.

Meantime, as a bonus, here's a link to a song that I love, by a band I hate. This appeared on the Petri Dish a couple of years ago in a post on songs I'd bought as MP3's, and my sentiments about it still hold true.

Chicago, "Wishing You Were Here": God, admitting to this one almost hurts. My virulent hatred for Chicago's brand of mellow pop knows no bounds. It's Steely Dan slathered with cheesy horns, a bowl of mud with a spoonful of Cool Whip on top. Good thing downloading gives you the ultimate opportunity to indulge in those anomalous freak tracks by bands that you normally loathe. "Wishing You Were Here" is brilliant, a haunting song of longing with some of the most ethereal harmonies I've heard in a seventies ballad. Sole credit goes to the Beach Boys, who guest on the song and anchor Peter Cetera's treacly songwriting (that cheesy-ass Cetera-sung bridge has gotta go) with their luminous intertwining voices.

30-Day Music Challenge, Day 11: A Song from your Favorite Band

2011-03-14T01:21:00.000-07:00

Let's amend this to A Song from One of your Favorite Bands, why don't we? This selection comes from my personal short list of all-time faves.

For my money, Cheap Trick were the greatest rock band of the 1970's. They crashed the pompous Rock Artiste Jackass Party of that decade with an almost punk-rock irreverance, and to this day their meld of bright pop hooks, snotty humor, and monster power chords holds up like Gibraltar in a hurricane.

Somewhere nestled in the bowels of this blog is the beginning draft of a nerdily-exhaustive cap of their career, but for now, here's one of my favorite songs off of Cheap Trick's most recent album, The Latest. Listen--and rock--as four old guys blow out eardrums with more force than bands a third of their age.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 10: A Song that Makes You Fall Asleep

2011-03-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

Some of the categories on this Facebook Time Vacuum could be open to several interpretations. Take today's, for example. A song that makes you fall asleep: Do you go with a song so numbingly dull that it instantly induces somnabulism in the stoutest of night owls? Or do you go with a song that captures that wonderful twilight time, when you're relaxed and contemplative and ready to drift happily into the wonderful universe of Dreamtime?

God knows there are more than enough songs out there that encourage the former torpor. Hell, the vast majority of the mellow ballads that somehow prospered in the 1970's could handily fill the bill; the collected works of Barry Manilow ("Copacabana" and "Could This Be the Magic" notwithstanding), Bread, Air Supply...Just writing their names is forcing me to stifle a major yawn as my fingers touch the keyboard.

But the nocturnal romantic in me vastly prefers contemplating songs that capture the twilight and ease you into the evening's indigo folds.

Circulatory System was a side project largely spearheaded by William Cullen Hart, lead singer of Olivia Tremor Control (one of the great, underrated psychedelic bands of the late 1990's/early 2000's). OTC put out a couple of great records, and sounded (to me, at least) like what the Flaming Lips have wanted to sound like for most of the last decade, only bolstered by much better singing. Circulatory System's lone disc swirls and mesmerizes with equal beauty.

The album's finest song, "The Pillow", makes for perfect nighttime music. Hart's hushed, spectral vocals layer atop themselves at the opening, gliding along a bed of gently-insistent kettle drums and eastern-tinged guitars. And on at least one night I've had occasion to lie in the darkness, staring at moonlight streaming through gaps between curtains, with this song on constant repeat as sleep enveloped me.

Listen, close your eyes, and drift there.

30 Day Music Challenge, Day 9: A Song You can Dance To

2011-03-12T01:46:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the recesses of my work-and-chaos-informed existance, I'd intended to post this on Valentine's Day, but that February pseudo-holiday came and went. Fortunately, this song fulfills the booty-shaking quotient required for Day 9 of the 30-Day Music Challenge, and then some, no matter what time of the year.

Outkast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below was one of my favorite listens of the last decade (for reals--see here), in no small part because Andre 3000's portion of that big-selling hip-hop double-disc marked the best platter Prince never released. Sure, it was packed with sonic imagination and hooks to burn, but moreover, you could dance to the mutha.

"Happy Valentine's Day" sports the kind of potent old-school groove that packs dance floors, and it's funny as hell (the venom at the tip of Cupid's arrow, it seems is as rife with giggle juice as it is with the poison of unplanned passion). When the horny imp intones, "Keep on runnin', player...'Cause I got my good shoes on, and I got 'em tied up tight..." it's as hysterical as it is inevitable. Permission to shake your ass is officially granted.

30-Day Music Challenge, Day 8: A Song that You Know All the Words To

2011-03-11T02:50:00.000-08:00

INXS were my favorite band for a lotta years; and they possessed one of the greatest rock vocalists ever in Michael Hutchence. When I made attempts at singing myself, I'll admit openly that Hutchence's dusky, evocative pipes were a massive influence.

The band's two best records were (I thought) 1982's Shabooh Shoobah and 1984's The Swing. They sounded more mature, more sensual, and richer than damn near anything else the era produced. I could blather on interminably about the many ways in which they rocked my world, but it's late, and I'm trying to stay on task.

After a lot of years, I still know all the words to every single song on both of these records, but the one that resonates with me the most on this cool, rainless Seattle night is "Johnson's Aeroplane," from The Swing. It's incredibly atmospheric, melding a funk pulse with stately strings and lyrics that have their hands placed firmly and empathetically into the Australian soil. It would've been interesting to hear George Martin put his orchestral touch on this track, but it's pretty perfect on its own, thanks.

I sang along with it tonight, some part of me hoping Hutchence would come slinking back from the afterworld to set my ass straight and sing it right.

30-Day Music Challenge, Day 7: A song that Reminds you of a Certain Event

2011-03-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

This'll be even quicker than last night.

The night of my graduation, I partied as heartily as any energy-filled kid at that crossroads; and the album from which this song came provided the soundtrack, thundering over the speakers in Frank Takahashi's Dodge Ram Truck like a choir of horny troublemaking satyrs. Damn, but I loves me some Diamond-Dave-era Van Halen.

30-Day Music Challenge: A Song that Reminds You of Somewhere

2011-03-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

This will go fast. It's late, and I'm tired. But I love this song, and it's a location spike of total precision and clarity for me.

I spent a couple of weeks in England four or five years ago, and found myself enchanted by the noir grayness that enveloped much of it. There was also the deep sense of history that rose from it and clung to you like so much humidity.

Being a hard-core Anglophile I could summon up a lot of songs that make me think of certain aspects of Merry Olde. But sometimes one band captures the spirit of a place better than anyone or anything else can. Want to feel and taste what Compton's like? Throw on some NWA. Want to experience the almost freakishly sunny pocket universe of California's coast? The Beach Boys'll do the trick.

For me, no band captures the forboding, swoonsome, and spectral atmosphere that imbues much of England better than The Clientele--a limey quartet whose gently-psychedelic music seems deliciously, inexorably a part of their place of origin.

"Since K Got Over Me" is one of my favorite Clientele songs, a bittersweet and all-'round gorgeous rumination on the disorientation singer Alistair MacLean feels as he contemplates a world in which an ex-lover no longer reciprocates emotions he's still kicking around. Like England itself, it feels melancholy, austere, and swoonily magickal--in equal turns.

30 Day Music Challenge, Day 5: A Song that Reminds you of Someone

2011-03-08T02:43:00.000-08:00

Circa 1975, it was, I think. I was seven years old, on an Arkansas-bound Trailways bus with my mom and little brother. My mom sat next to John, and I sat across the aisle from the two of them, stretched out between two seats and looking out at the deep indigo sky as the silhouetted landscape zipped by.

At some point the bus stopped to pick up more passengers at a brightly-lit terminal somewhere around what I think was Idaho, and my stretched-out reverie was broken when a woman stepped on to take the second seat on my side. I politely shifted to the window seat while she took the aisle.

She made me nervous at first; just because I was a shy kid, too young to understand females in general. Strange, floral-scented aliens, they were, I thought. But after a few minutes of silence she noticed the book in my lap--Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea--and asked me how I liked it. I started talking to her about how full of strange and wonderful things it was; how different it was from the Walt Disney movie I'd seen a few weeks previous, and yet how similar it was. And she responded in kind by talking about that book and other science fiction books she'd read. She was going to college, she said, and loved sci-fi.

After awhile my shyness began to thaw some, and I looked up at her. She was slender; with long, straight blonde hair and alert-but-kind green eyes. She wore a pink T-shirt and faded bell-bottoms, and laughed a lot. She was older than me, but younger than my mom and most of the other adults I knew. In the course of a few minutes time she was talking to me like an equal, engaging me in conversation and addressing me in a way that no adult before ever had.

She began telling me stories about the highway down which we sped. At one point, an illuminated cross pierced the night horizon, glowing about a mile away from the road; and she told me how it had been erected to commemorate the passing of a sports star who'd perished in a plane crash. She told me a lot of other stories, too; about places she'd seen, books she'd read, people she'd known. She looked young, yet seemed to know so much about the world.

Every now and then, she'd lean over me to point out some building or unusual tree. My eyes would follow her finger as it pointed against the window, and occasionally I'd find myself looking at her as she described the world beyond that glass. Little kid enthusiasm would play against her features, and that exhuberance was infectious. It was the first time I'd met a (pretty much) grown-up who possessed that kind of energy. After what was probably a good couple of hours I began to get drowsy. I stifled a yawn, and she smiled. "If you're tired, you should go to sleep," she said serenely. Truth be told, I wanted to talk with her some more; but exhaustion overtook me and I drifted off.

The next morning I woke with a start. In the place of the blonde girl who'd kind of enchanted me was a heavy-set Mediterranean-looking man with a jet-black cookie-duster of a moustache. The blonde girl was gone.

My mom gently needled me at breakfast about chatting up the girl the night previous, a concept that made my seven-year-old face flush slightly. That flush turned to full-blown tomato redness when a middle-aged African-American woman who'd befriended my mom on the bus said, "Tony found himself a girlfriend!" with a restaurant-filling chuckle. Of course I was embarassed: I was crushing hard on a girl--a woman--for the first time, and it was pretty uncomfortable being outed.

Days went by. My mom reconnected with close family, and my brother and I experienced a humid, fulsomely green land of adventure. We stayed at my great-grandparents' house, a two-story white structure that looked big as a southern plantation to my child's eye. Katydids chirped deafening choruses amongst the trees at night; John and I walked along the sidewalk shaded by oak trees as the sky drenched us with warm rain; my great-grandma fed me beefsteak tomatoes the size of my head; and my brother and I sat in a paddle boat with our Uncle Dane one hot spring night, watching a creek bed that teemed with masses of tadpoles and watergrasses that seemed to descend to infinity.

Then one morning my Aunt Brooke packed my brother and I into her giant station wagon, and she drove us to a burger place for lunch. On the way, a song came on the radio. And for some reason, that tune instantly took me back to being on that bus several nights previous. In about two-and-a-half minutes I found myself reminiscing on the conversation, on the world that stretched beyond that bus window, and on the pretty college girl who'd opened my eyes to that world for a couple of hours.

The song that played on Aunt Brooke's AM radio was "To Sir With Love" by Lulu. And long story short, it still makes me think of that girl on the bus every time I hear it.

30-Day Music Challenge, Day 4: A Song that Makes you Sad

2011-03-06T19:48:00.000-08:00

If you're talking about songs that induce you to drink from the fount of romantic and spiritual melancholy like a bittersweet and toxic liquor, well, I got a million of 'em. But as far as songs that just flat-out make you sad, there's always been one that's done it for me sure as the sun sets at the end of every day.

Like any thinking human who professes any sort of love for popular music in any form, I love the Beatles. And they could do romantic melancholy as well as anyone (cue "Julia" and "Yesterday"). But the band's last single, "The Long and Winding Road," pulls from a well of sadness so deep that I must confess that I have a hard time listening to it. It's the sound of the last fragments of the band crumbling away; and in that fragmentation you can hear a pretty rich metaphor for the dissolution and fragmentation of anything--a human life, a relationship, your childhood, whatever. The strings and the gospel chorus interjections are supposed to suffuse it with some sense of grandeur and hope, I reckon, but it's like gilding and fancy decoration on a corpse. Which, for the Beatles, it was at the time.

This YouTube video includes lyrics, which are about as diametrically opposed to a pick-me-up as you can get. Here you go, if you can handle it.

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 3 - a song that makes you happy

2011-03-05T17:59:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last five hours traversing downtown Seattle and Capitol Hill, aglow in that rarest of Emerald City joys--a sunny, mild(-ish), beautiful March day. And as clouds drag across the clarion blue sky, I've been listening to one song on repeat all afternoon.

Seattle band Curtains for You are making a bit of a splash lately, most recently in a City Arts magazine poll that picked them as one of the region's Best New Bands (plug alert: Yours Truly was asked to contribute a sentence or two extolling the band's considerable virtues). Curtains craft un-jaded, unapologetically heart-on-sleeve pop blessedly free of indie-poseur airs; packed with gorgeous harmonies and songwriting that carries on the tradition of pop classicists like Harry Nilsson and Village Green-era Kinks. It's music tailor-made for a day like today.

"Licorice Skies" closes out the band's (great) 2009 CD What a Lovely Surprise to Wake Up Here. It's a loping, joyous account of an extra-memorable Fourth of July, delivered with vivid lyrical imagery and the kind of exhuberance that only youth and happiness can produce. Music nerd that I am, I could produce a phone-book-sized list of songs that provide potent pick-me-ups. But in this moment, this burst of sunny pop makes me happy to be alive.

I'm far too much of a Luddite to be able to upload an MP3 of "Licorice Skies" to this humble blog, but if you go to the band's MySpace page, you can hear it in its entirety. Do so, and c'mon, get happy.

Music Challenge: Day 2: Least Favorite Song

2011-03-04T18:49:00.000-08:00

If you've ever been to a wedding or a family reunion, you've likely endured the nightmarish Lovecraftian Vortex of Treacly Hell that is Kool and the Gang's "Celebration".

Kool and the Gang earned their funk cred points in the 1970's with a lot of great throw-down tracks like the classic, "Jungle Boogie". But their biggest hit has been beaten to death as THE soundtrack for any gathering populated by rhythm-(and taste-) impaired white people. It's R & B flavored with Nutri-Sweet. No wonder your grandpa can dance to it.

I hate the song so much that I won't even dignify it with a link to a video or MP3 of the actual original song. So I thought I'd link the most memorable version of (a portion of) the song I know.

SCTV was the Canadian equivalent of Saturday Night Live in the late '70's/early '80's. The sketch show spawned some of the previous generation's greatest comic sensibilities, some of whom created this (I think) hysterical parody. Those of you too young to realize the amusement in the Old Guard's most lame entertainer (Perry Como) doing a 'funk' song are just flat-out missing out. So, here for your edification is the Perry Como spoof featuring a funny excerpt of "Celebration." Honestly, it isn't that much blander than the original.

30 Day Song Challenge, Day One: Your Favorite Song

2011-03-03T16:46:00.000-08:00

I pride myself in averting most Facebook Time Vacuums like the plague. Farmville? Bah! Mafia Wars? Meh. But send me somethin' music-related and I'm like a horse addict given the opportunity to rave on about his favorite grades of China White.

My friend and Musical Yoda Dean Saling sent me the following challenge, and I'm in thrall to its siren song. I was looking for an excuse/vehicle to force myself into keyboard diarhhea, just for the love of it, on an extended basis, anyway. So here goes.

The challenge is thus: Every day for 30 days, post a song title, mp3, video or link to your Facebook profile, in this order:

day 01 - your favorite song
day 02 - your least favorite song
day 03 - a song that makes you happy
day 04 - a song that makes you sad
day 05 - a song that reminds you of someone
day 06 - a song that reminds you of somewhere
day 07 - a song that reminds you of a certain event
day 08 - a song that you know all the words to
day 09 - a song that you can dance to
day 10 - a song that makes you fall asleep
day 11 - a song from your favorite band
day 12 - a song from a band you hate
day 13 - a song that is a guilty pleasure
day 14 - a song that no one would expect you to love
day 15 - a song that describes you
day 16 - a song that you used to love but now hate
day 17 - a song that you hear often on the radio
day 18 - a song that you wish you heard on the radio
day 19 - a song from your favorite album
day 20 - a song that you listen to when you’re angry
day 21 - a song that you listen to when you’re happy
day 22 - a song that you listen to when you’re sad
day 23 - a song that you want to play at your wedding
day 24 - a song that you want to play at your funeral
day 25 - a song that makes you laugh
day 26 - a song that you can play on an instrument
day 27 - a song that you wish you could play
day 28 - a song that makes you feel guilty
day 29 - a song from your childhood
day 30 - your favorite song at this time last year

Yeah, I'm more than up to the challenge.

Rather than just post stuff to Facebook, I figured I'd post a link to this here Blog on Facebook each day. So today, day 1, marks Favorite Song of All Time.

Anyone who's wandered into this corner of the Blogosphere (or anyone who's been corralled into music nerd-speak with me at all) will not be surprised at the choice here. I've adored Love--the LA psychedelic cult outfit fronted by troubled genius Arthur Lee--since I was 17 years old, and if pressed I could (but don't worry, I won't) populate nearly every positive category on this list with a song by the band. You can go here for a personal account about this metaphoric and literal Love affair, if'n you're so inclined).

The band's finest moment, ironically enough, was penned not by Lee but by Love's only other contributing songwriter, the underrated and gifted-in-his-own right Bryan MacLean. "Alone Again Or" opens Love's 1967 masterpiece Forever Changes with a rush of urgent, propulsively gorgeous incandescence. Lyrically, it's conflicted as hell--the sound of an awestruck romantic celebrating the beauty of the people and the world around him ("I could be in love with almost anyone/I think that people are the greatest fun") even as he wrestles with loneliness (the next line? "...And I will be alone again tonight, my dear").

The song's so sonically breathtaking, though, that it utterly skirts self-absorbed navel-gazing. When the strings surge and the horns soar, "Alone Again Or" conveys (to these Love-struck ears, at least) the whole tapestry of life; every heady, sad, joyous, magickal moment. And that's why I will never stop adoring it, for as long as I breathe.

Passings: Tura Satana--Actress, Icon, Tigress

2011-02-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

The Conqueror, a gloriously bad 1956 sword-and-sandal flick featuring John Wayne as Genghis Khan (no, I'm not smoking crack...), brims with ridiculous dialogue, but one line in particular has always stuck with me. It's uttered by Khan/Wayne in classic western-drawl style, and he uses it to describe the object of his desire, the fiery Tartar princess Bourtai (played by the not-very-Tartar-but-admittedly-very-hot Susan Hayward):

"She is woman...MUCH woman."

Tura Satana was one of maybe six women who walked the earth worthy of that bit of minimalist adulation. Satana, who passed away yesterday at the age of 72, was a Japanese-internment-camp survivor, an exotic dancer, paramour to Elvis Presley, and--most importantly--an energizing and world-changing (no lie) presence in some of the most entertaining cult movies of the 1960's and '70's. And she was much woman.

I put Tura under the Petri Dish microscope a couple of years ago, ironically enthusing how nice it was to write about a cult movie heroine who hadn't shuffled off this mortal coil. In the interim, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! blew the top of my head off several times. Screw all the jaded post-post-revisionist balderdash: The movie still roars like Varla's jet-propelled hot rod, and in the lead Satana embodies a full-strength, undiluted physical and sexual power that kick-started the notion of Woman Power years before the feminist movement took hold on a mass level.

That feminine strength got overlooked by the mainstream media back in the day, but Tura's animal charisma, strength, iconic look (jet-black hair in bangs, clad head-to-toe in black, mouthwatering figure poured into black jeans and blouse), and real-woman curves formed the roots of nearly every Tough Chick who followed her celluloid lead. I'll argue to my dying breath that, but for Varla and Tura Satana, there'd be no Marian Ravenwood; no Ellen Ripley; no Bride from Kill Bill; no Xena, Warrior Princess. Anytime a woman onscreen dishes it out as well as taking it, she's following Tura's lead.

Shortly after I wrote my last entry on Tura Satana, I had the great fortune of catching Faster, Pussycat! at Seattle's Egyptian Theater, with Satana in attendance. She was in great spirits, still dressed in black, and pretty much delighted with the local display of adoration. In a pinch, I could (and have) let go of a lot of the collectibles I've accumulated in my life, but my personally-autographed memento of my meeting with Tura Satana (a Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! lunch pail)? Hell, no.

So long, Varla: I'll eat your dust anytime.

Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit: Not Exactly a Home Run

2011-01-24T01:15:00.000-08:00

Man, but it's been a long time since I've visited this corner of the Blogosphere. My apologies.

Truth be told, I've been far from idle. Between massive changes and upheavals, and a heap of outside projects, the ol' Petri Dish has been laying cold and neglected. More on all of that later...Maybe.

Meantime, I've given myself an hour (gotta sleep, y'know) to wax cinematic in these electronic pages for the first time in too damned long. And where better to start than in a movie theater?

I went into True Grit--the Coen Brothers' remake/reimagining of the 1969 John Wayne western--over Christmas, readily equipped with high hopes. Like most movie nerds worth the butter on their popcorn, I've been a pretty huge fan of Joel and Ethan Coen's brand of rejiggered genre cinema for a long time, and figured that this latest effort would maintain those lofty standards. Bottom line: True Grit does, and it doesn't.

For those unfamiliar with the original movie (or the Charles Portis novel on which it's based), True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, an adolescent girl who hires Rooster Cogburn, an alcoholic wastrel of a US Marshall, to apprehend the killer of her father. Along the way, she and Cogburn join forces with Texas Ranger LaBoeuf to track down the culprit--hired hand Tom Chaney--and square off against Chaney and the outlaws with which he's aligned himself.

Looking back at it now, the original True Grit, entertaining as it is, is no masterpiece. It's an old-fashioned western, relatively untouched by the aesthetic influence of contemporaries like the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Epics or by the socio-political upheavals that left their fingerprints all over so much of the era's films. But it's a pretty entertaining formula picture that showcased John Wayne's craggy appeal to good enough effect to garner The Duke his first (and only) acting Oscar.

It's to the Coens' credit that they really do try to give their version its own distinctive flavor and life, ratcheting up the (pardon the pun) grit and sprinkling their distinctive brand of gallows humor into the mix. Carter Burwell's score bypasses the Old-West bravado of the original's Elmer Bernstein soundtrack in favor of something richer and more steeped in the time period, and cinematographer Roger Deakins (the Coens' DP du jour for a long time now) once again delivers some amazing work for the Brothers.

Key members of the current movie's acting ensemble register strongly as well. Young Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie with a solid sense of purpose that feels totally genuine, and Matt Damon disappears (literally: it took me several minutes to recognize him) into the role of LaBoeuf. The Coens also improve on the relationship between LaBoeuf and Cogburn, rendering it more plausibly adversarial than in the original. Oh, and Barry Pepper's pretty damned entertaining in the role of lead heavy Lucky Ned Pepper.

So why didn't this new True Grit deliver for me? I'm still working that out. Part of it may be because the Coens have made a career out of subverting genre to their own ends; and here, they try to do so with a storyline that fairly cries out for a more conventional approach. The Coens' untethered imaginations thrive in self-generated projects, and this adaptation of a familiar property just feels like too limiting a structure for them.

But the biggest fault (to these eyes, at least) lies squarely at the center of the film, within Jeff Bridges' characterization of Rooster Cogburn. Yeah, John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn was John Wayne Playing John Wayne, but he telegraphed the character's core of tarnished-but-indisputable backbone clearly. The Coens have let Bridges run bull-in-China-shop-style through the remake: For much of the movie he's a jumble of Actors' Studio affectations and tics; and his indulgent lapses into method-actor mumbling sound uncomfortably like Pa Bear from the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Hillbilly Bears.

Just when Deakins' cinematography--or Steinfeld's quiet determination, or Damon's unaffected work as straight-arrow LaBoeuf--would draw me in, Bridge's uncured ham act would completely pull me out of this often carefully-crafted world (the fistsful of huzzahs being thrown at his performance have me utterly stymied). It reminded me, all too frequently, that I was viewing A Show-Off Performance in A Remake of A Movie; not following an adventure. Only in the last twenty minutes of True Grit does Bridges set aside the affectations and begin to inhabit the character, and by then it's too little, too late. Silly as it sounds, Bridges' previous work as The Dude in the Coens' stoner-noir The Big Lebowski was more subtle, more consistent, and--dare I say it--several shades more believable. Swear to God.

Song of the Day: "Percussion Gun," White Rabbits

2010-12-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

This song by this Columbia, Ohio-born, New York based band came out last year, but I've only recently discovered it through the magic of iTunes (and this pretty straightforward YouTube performance video).

If you're a fan of Spoon, you'll note that the track's got that band's footprints all over it, and that's no accident: Spoon's mainman Britt Daniels produced the record.

I could prattle on, music-nerd-style, about all the elements that sound so cool: The Adam-Ant-gone-indie dual drums pounding away; the cool way that Stephen Patterson's energized and searching vocals are often just accompanied by that percussion, or by a few stark guitar or piano notes; how the handclaps drive along the instrumental bridges; the great, jagged-crystal sheen of the production; yada, yada, yada.

But if you're in a stage of restless transition (and God knows I am right now), all of those pieces are just couriers. That relentless percussive drive, the backing vocals that sigh away like spirits that refuse to let Patterson (or the listener) let go, and the insistent gothic-barrelhouse piano capture a state of tensely-gorgeous psychic chaos better than a hundred pummelling power chords or a stadium-ful of mannered rock screamers ever could. It's all of the confusion and barely-contained tension you've ever felt (or feel in this particular Now); rolled into one arresting package. And it's beautiful.

Passings: Ingrid Pitt, Actress and Author

2010-11-24T00:36:00.000-08:00

Hammer Films--Britain's legendary horror film factory throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies--pushed the genre into the modern age with swatches of rich color (emphasis on the crimson, of course) and a willingness to push the envelope of content. Suddenly, all of the latent sensuality and shocking violence insinuated in the Golden-Age Universal thrillers of the '30's and '40's was spelled out. One of the key figures in that massive shift, actress and author Ingrid Pitt, died yesterday at the age of 73.

Born in Poland in 1937, Pitt's real life was filled with enough drama to rival any of the movies enriched by her presence. She survived internment in a concentration camp as a child, then was forced to flee communist Berlin as a young woman--on the night of her planned stage debut (the British officer who rescued her eventually became her first husband). A few years later she was discovered by producers watching a bullfight, and her career as an actress began.

Pitt's first high-profile film role came in the 1968 war epic Where Eagles Dare, opposite Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton, but she made her biggest mark (and, I'd argue, did her best work) as the lead in horror movies.

Hammer cast her as the lead in The Vampire Lovers, a 1970 adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu's short story Carmilla. Even from a studio renowned for frank content, the movie turned heads. Its charged and explicit sexuality changed the landscape of genre films irrevocably, and turned the subgenre of lesbian vampire tales into a cinematic staple.Viewed today, The Vampire Lovers looks downright quaint, but with hindsight it reads more and more like one of Hammer's last really good gothic chillers; solidly directed by Roy Ward Baker (who, sadly, passed away recently himself), and played to the hilt by Pitt.

Her work as the rapacious Carmilla endures. Sure, she's sexy as hell (clothed or no), but the moment in the movie that haunts most profoundly is its most subtle. During a funeral, Carmilla watches sadly, knowing that all around her will die even as she lives on: It's the kind of reflective moment that you don't often get in horror films, and Pitt taps into a deep vein (no pun intended) of empathy to bring it to life.

I'm also in thrall with her great work in the title role of Countess Dracula, a retelling of the Elizabeth Bathory saga in which she manages to make the notorious blood-drinking countess alternately terrifying and sympathetic, and her small but indelible turn as a vampirized actress in the entertaining horror anthology The House That Dripped Blood.

Pitt cannily created a mini-industry around herself for the last two decades of her life, appearing at horror conventions, writing multiple books (fiction and non-), and even organizing a goth dating service (Carmilla the Vampire as Matchmaker? Pretty sublime). All of the late-in-life huzzahs proved richly-deserved: she was an uninhibited and lively writer, and she managed to become one of the few women to carve out a real, multi-layered persona in horror cinema. Brava, Ms. Pitt.

More Rock Photos: Mark Pickerel, Lindsay Fuller, Rusty Willoughby at the Tractor Tavern

2010-07-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Tractor Tavern played host to a pretty nifty show on Friday July 2, and once again I was on hand with a camera. A detailed review and slideshow can be seen at the Seattle Concerts Examiner, but I had to (again) crop the pictures and omit a few that I really liked.

Rusty Willoughby:

Lindsay Fuller and the Cheap Dates:

Mark Pickerel and his Praying Hands:

Columbia City Theater Grand Re-Opening: Kelli Schaefer, Drew Grow, Grand Hallway

2010-06-29T23:08:00.000-07:00

The Columbia City Theater in South Seattle celebrated its Grand (Re-) Opening with two free shows June 25 and 26, and it was a pip by all accounts.

Duties with Bizarro Movie Night kept me from seeing the June 25 show (a Hip-Hop extravaganza featuring Mash Hall, Cloud Nice, and DJ Suspence), but I was in attendance, camera in hand, for the Saturday performance by Kelli Schaefer, Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives, and Grand Hallway.

Details (and a slideshow) can be accessed at the Seattle Concerts Examiner by going here. I had an embarassment of riches, photos-wise: Chock it up to great good luck, and great subjects. Only a small portion were used for the Examiner slideshow, and I had to severely truncate the photos that did make the cut, so enclosed please find some of my favorite snapshots of the evening, in all their un-shrunk, un-cropped beauty. Click on each to see a larger version if you like.

Kelli Schaefer:

Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives:

Grand Hallway:

Thanks to the Columbia City Theater, and especially to all three acts for giving such great face--and for a really wonderful show.

My Springtime with SIFF

2010-06-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

If'n you read the last entry, you know I've been a movie-watchin' mole lo, these last three weeks, and it's been quite the adventure. In addition to seeing more movies in theaters in that span than I did in the preceding six months, I was able to freeload my way into the Seattle International Film Festival Opening and Closing Night Galas, where neon-colored cocktails and much shared movie geekery amongst fellow nerds/journalists flowed freely. And I met some talented and fascinating filmmakers, to boot.

I saw 28 feature films during the run of SIFF. Almost all of them were good-to-great; only a couple were straight-up disappointments. Enclosed please find my evaluations of everything I saw, along with accompanying ratings.

The Extra Man: **1/2
The Fest opening film was a quirky comedy featuring Kevin Kline as a struggling playwright who escorts elderly rich women and takes recently-unemployed Ivy League professor Paul Dano under his wing. Kline's a hoot, as always (he's maturing with the rascally grace of a David Niven), but as for the movie? If there was a such thing as Indie Comedy Generator software, and you programmed in every Indie Comedy cliche (Oddball Father Figure, Quiet Protagonist with Fetish, Funny-Voiced Ancillary Character, etc.), this movie would spit out.

Senior Prom: ***1/2
This comedy about several Mountlake Terrace High Schoolers stumbling towards their senior prom feels rough around the edges and descends into sentiment a little too much at the end. But Nick Terry's directorial debut sports quite a few great belly laughs, and it rings with a front-line immediacy that could only come from someone living through high school themselves (yes, the director's only 17, and yes, I'll pimp my SunBreak interview with him right about now).

How Sex Sold Hollywood: ***
Seattle U professor James Forsher's How Sex Sold Hollywood presentation was pretty skin deep (pardon the pun), but not without some seriously warped highlights. High (low?) points: a silent-era sapphic fever dream of a short called "Dormitory Secrets," and some frankly pornographic cartoons from distaff Max Fleischer studio animators.

The Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould: ***
Classical piano's James Dean gets the doc treatment here. The archival performance footage--Gould throwing himself into playing, tousled hair partly shadowing his face like a high-brow Jerry Lee Lewis--is riveting, and there's no denying his brilliance as a player (or his pronounced eccentricities). Alas, you finish the movie feeling like you don't know anymore about Gould than when you started.

K-20: The Fiend with 20 Faces: ***
K-20 re-imagines Japan sans WWII, as a totalitarian nigh-communist regime. Amidst this world, the ultimate master thief steals priceless artifacts, and frames a circus acrobat for the crimes. Said acrobat then becomes a reluctant hero. Terrific art direction and atmosphere (think Metropolis meets The Dark Knight) and exhilarating action sequences are only slightly marred by a few too many dips into the Cuteness Well (I officially propose a permanent moratorium on all adorable imperiled orphans in Asian action movies).

George Romero's Survival of the Dead: **
I'll go to my deathbed defending George Romero's first four Living Dead movies (haven't seen the fifth yet), but his newest one, George Romero's Survival of the Dead, just doesn't cut the mustard. The Irish-born patriarchs of two rival families on a East Coast island lock horns because--get this--one thinks zombies should be exterminated, and one thinks the undead can be rehabilitated and taught to eat non-human meat. The writing's clunky as hell, and (SPOILER ALERT!) Romero de-fangs his revenants by turning them into eaters of horsemeat at the climax; a not-very-scary denouement, unless you're My Little Pony.

Ahead of Time: ****
This concise, solid documentary focuses on the achievements of Ruth Gruber--arctic explorer, World War II Correspondent, and chronicler of the 1947 Exodus. At age 94, Gruber's more articulate and sharp than 99.9 percent of people a third her age; and her restless streak, eloquence, and charm make her an enchanting documentary subject.

Visionaries: Jonas Mekas and the (Mostly) American Avant-Garde Cinema: *****
Ace documentarian Chuck Workman serves up a great primer on Underground Cinema, with Anthology Archives curator and filmmaker Jonas Mekas functioning as a charming epicenter. A compelling window into a seldom-explored subgenre of cinema, with generous samples of works by Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and many others.

Wheedle's Groove: ****
You'd never know it from most Northwest music history references, but Seattle had a seriously jumping soul and funk scene in the 1960's and '70's. The terrific Jennifer Maas documentary Wheedle's Groove corrects this massive oversight, covering the scene and its participants in loose-limbed and engaging style. For a music doc that features (sadly) very little actual archival footage of these bands cutting loose, it's incredibly exciting and moving to watch. More details in my Seattle Concerts Examiner piece on the movie's SIFF premiere.

RoboGeisha: *****
Sibling rivalry between mechanically-augmented Geisha Girls; enough arterial spray to put the Icelandic volcano to shame; Japanese robo-chicks with circular saws popping from their mouths; swordfights by the score; and acid-spurting mammaries? If that summary of RoboGeisha and the accompanying trailer don't spell MUST-SEE in bold letters, you've stumbled into the wrong blog by mistake, Bucky.

Brownstones to Red Dirt: ***
There's no denying the total charm and inspiration in the subjects of this doc (grade-schoolers in the New York projects and far-off Sierra Leone exchange letters and bond in mutual friendship); too bad the movie's shot and slurpily-scored, like one of those 'The More You Know' spots on NBC.

Rejoice and Shout: ****
Once you get past the first fifteen over-preachy minutes (yes, I know, it IS about gospel music, but still...), Rejoice and Shout is as absorbing as any music doc that I've ever seen. It traces gospel's evolution throughout the decades, from its origins on the plantations of the south to the present day. Interestingly, the genre was (and still is) as succeptible to trends as any other musical style: The Swan Silvertones brought unearthly doo-wop harmonies to worship music in the 1950's, the Staple Singers proffered Stax soul sizzle (and social awareness) during the '60's, and even 1970's velour soul was represented by smoother-than-smooth Andrae Crouch. At its best, the music's so good the lyrical subject matter's irrelevant (that's a compliment from this agnostic).

Marwencol: *****
My favorite documentary of the Fest was this study of Mark Hogancamp, victim of a memory-wiping, near-fatal beating. For rehabilitation, Mark constructs an intricate pulp universe in his backyard, entirely from GI Joes and Barbies. If it sounds like a gawk-fest, it's not. Director Jeff Malmberg obviously loves his subject, and tells his story with unvarnished honesty as well as affection. More details, and my interview with Malmberg, here.

Reykjavik-Rotterdam: *****
Thrillers don't get more well-engineered and satisfying than this Icelandic gem, in which a parolled former smuggler risks life, limb, and family for the financial promise of That One Last Job. Fast and harrowing-yet-funny as hell, it figures that it's being twisted into a vehicle for Mark Wahlberg.

Garbo: The Spy: *****
The amazing story of Juan Pujer Garcia, a Spanish counter-agent who basically duped the German army into their crushing defeat in Normandy on D-Day (and by extension, helped the allies to win WWII), is so surreal and hilarious you'll swear someone made the shit up.

Disco and Atomic War: ****

This Estonian doc about how clandestine signals from an extra-tall Finnish TV tower titillated and liberated citizens of communist-ruled Estonia kinda charmed the hell out of me. It's also one of those rare documentaries where the re-enactment scenes actually entertained in their own right.

Imani: ****

Caroline Kamya's feature film debut was one of the most subtly rewarding movies I saw all Fest. More details--and an interview with Kamya--here.

Double Take: **

One of my few outright disappointments of the Festival. It's an odd experimental pastiche in which Alfred Hitchcock (starring via archival clips and a little bit of CGI trickery) faces his doppelganger amidst the Cold War. It started out as a short film, and the seams of that origin show: the Hitchcock and Cold War elements just don't gel.

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields: ****

Gail O'Hara's and Kerthy Fix's documentary doesn't exactly lay its drily humorous genius subject (yes, I am a fan) bare, but it's a smart and engaging glimpse into Merritt's career, and the love/symbiosis between the songwriter and his bandmate/de facto manager/den mother Claudia Gonson is fascinating. An interview with O'Hara and Fix should be up at the SunBreak soon...

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: ****

Film purists probably balked at its irreverence, but I enjoyed this SIFF archival presentation with musical accompaniment. Stephin Merritt composed the score, and his playful music included some hummable melodies (I found the bits of atmospheric texture scattered throughout to be pretty immersive, too). As for the film itself, it's a dated but fascinating artifact--really the Avatar of its day (1916) what with its underwater cinematography and lavish production values. For a very early silent, it also sports an impressively ambitious structure containing three intersecting stories and flashbacks from multiple sources--pretty heady stuff for a movie that's older than your great-grandparents.

Protektor: ***

Protektor is a WWII love story that follows a Czech radio correspondent and his glamorous, flirty Jewish movie-star wife as they navigate the emerging influence of Nazi Germany on their homeland. The movie sports a great art-deco look and it's edited/shot with arresting style, but the relationship at the core never quite engaged me like I wanted it to. ***

Amer: *****

Probably my favorite fiction/narrative feature of the Fest. This utterly immersive, technically brilliant art-film-in-giallo's-clothing captivated me, and interviewing the directors was a major Festival highlight (jump here for the interview).

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within: ****

I have eternally been enthralled by Burroughs' raggedly brilliant and powerful words, and by his gravel-tinkling-over-sheet-metal voice, so this new documentary on his life and work was an enrapturing view for me. Well-researched and packed with heartfelt reminiscences and testimony.

The Wildest Dream: ***1/2

In the IMAX epic The Wildest Dream, modern-day mountaineer Conrad Anker climbs Mt. Everest, retracing the route of and replicating the conditions endured by British adventurer George Mallory in 1924. The movie touches on deeper emotional and philosophical questions than your average IMAX flick, drawing interesting parallels between Mallory's relationship to his wife and that of Anker's with his own spouse. And if the movie lets that psychological complexity take a back seat to the grandeur sometimes, well, IMAX is first and foremost spectacle-porn...

Dream Home: **

This Hong Kong shocker wants to have its bloody cake and eat it too by simultaneously throwing spurting blood and social commentary at its audience. In her obsessive quest to obtain a mortgage on a high-end Hong Kong flat, a young woman takes to brutally murdering several of the building's occupants (what better way to drive bidding rates down?). The premise is rife with possibilities, but the tone is wildly uneven: One minute you're watching a dippy party guy's disembowelment played for gallows giggles, the next our murderous protagonist is dealing with the failing health of her mesothelioma-wracked former abuser of a father. Gore fans, though, will have a field day.

Howl: ****

I really enjoyed this Allen Ginsberg biopic directed by Times of Harvey Milk directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. James Franco makes an effective Ginsberg (anyone who's played James Dean and Ginsberg in the space of just a few years deserves mad props), and the movie eschews standard beginning/middle/end bio-pic structure by zeroing in on the obscenity trial surrounding Ginsberg's poetic masterpiece, Howl. The only liability: Ginsberg's words are sometimes accompanied by CGI animation that puts a pretty glaring pull date on the movie.

Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives: ***1/2
You gotta love the directness of a movie title like Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives, but it's easy to go into it thinking it's gonna be a Troma-style rib-nudging camp-fest. Thankfully, it's got sharper teeth than that. Director Israel Luna's made an honest-to-God gut-level grindhouse action opus here--think Death Wish with a more fabulous wardrobe--without neglecting the humor. It captures the patina of a grindhouse flick amazingly well, and there's a sense of righteous outrage underneath the surface that makes it much more cathartic and empowering than the GLAAD protesting blue-noses out there would have you believe. SunBreak interview with Luna and Trannies star Willam Belli coming soon!

Vengeance: *****
This new Johnnie To gangster epic finished out my SIFF odyssey in stylish and riveting fashion. In it, a French restaurateur (Johnny Hallyday) enlists a trio of hitmen (led by HK action mainstay Anthony Wong) to avenge the massacre of his daughter and her family. It's a purely formulaic set-up--think the Magnificent Seven minus three, combined with (again) Death Wish--but it's beguilingly shot, darkly witty in places, and peppered with twists and wrinkles worth their weight in gold. Hallyday--with his lived-in face, watery blue eyes,and Mephistopheles goatee--is a revelation as a worn-down protagonist with much more of a history of violence than he initially lets on.

Quick Update from SIFF-land

2010-06-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

Damn, I love this poster. Just saying. And it does have a bearing on this overdue Petri Dish missive.

The last two to three weeks of my life have been spent split between my day job and the glorious rigor that has been covering the Seattle International Film Festival for the SunBreak.com.

I've seen a ton of great movies, and better yet, I've been able to interview some of the makers of those films in detail. It's been the most inspiring couple of weeks I've had, writing-and-movie-lust-wise, in awhile; though the writing part's been hard to squeeze in 'twixt dashing madly between theaters, home (sleeping and eating can be quite the nuisance sometimes), and the W Hotel (site of most of the interviews I've conducted).

I'm enjoying an actual vacation (or, more likely and aptly, a stay-cation) for the next couple of weeks and plan to use that time to get a lot of creative/writing things up to speed. I'll, of course, be getting the ol' Petri Dish caught up on all that I've imbibed in, pop-culture-wise, for the last month or two--including, I hope, a detailed recap of the 28 movies I saw as part of the SIFF experience. Also, I've still got three or four more interviews to transcribe and post for the SunBreak. And we're working on scheduling another Bizarro Movie Night at the end of this month as well.

In the meantime, feel free to jump over to the SIFF-related posts at the SunBreak. All partisan bias aside, our little upstart site's done a pretty great job of covering the Fest. You can take in the picks, pans, and recommendations from the entire eminent staff at the SunBreak, gnash your teeth in envy at the movies you missed, and sigh with relief at the crap you avoided.

Enclosed please find links to the SIFF interviews I've posted at the SunBreak so far...

Senior Prom director Nicholas Terry (a nice kid who gladly put up with me making him pose for all sorts of goofy pictures, including this artsy-fartsy shot I took of him)

Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet, directors of the mesmerizing giallo-cum-art-film Amer

Jeff Malmberg, director of SIFF Best Documentary Feature Award winner Marwencol.

Three more interviews should go up onto the SunBreak within the next week or so, and they should be pips. Stay tuned...

Life Doesn't Slow Down: A Petri Dish Update

2010-04-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

Pardon me for not posting anything new here in a spell. I haven't been idle, by any measure.

Much of my non-day-job time's been parced out between a couple of enterprises. One of them is Bizarro Movie Nights at the Aster Coffee Lounge in scenic Ballard, Washington, in which I put my Doctorate of Schlockology to the test by presenting strange cinema of various stripes on the grandeur of a big(gish) projection screen. Yours Truly delivers patter so snappy you can scat sing to it (when I'm not ceding hosting duties to the eminent El Serpiente de Oro); audiences laugh and stare goggle-eyed at pinheaded giants, cackling Indonesian witches, and Satan-fighting holiday icons; and everyone can partake of fine coffees, teas, beers and wines in one of Ballard's coziest locales! Go to the Bizarro Blog for details. Next one's on May 1, and we're featuring a night of vice and sin, Depression-era style--Don't miss it!

I've also been pouring a lot of spare time into writing for the Seattle Concerts Examiner and The SunBreak.com. I haven't exactly been getting wealthy on either, but people are reading them, and if I may say so, the quality's been pretty damn good..

You can visit my Concerts Examiner page here (and I get paid by hits, so come back, read, and re-read often!). As for the SunBreak, the whole kit and caboodle can be accessed here. You'll find interviews with everyone from Hollywood legends to rock stars to film noir experts to reviews of B-movie schlock, but here are a couple of my personal faves.

Interview with Exene Cervenka of X: I took a bunch of pictures, and will try to post them here soon, along with the unedited version of the interview.

Interview with Trouble in Mind director Alan Rudolph (linked on Movie City News, thanks Vince Keenan!)

Interview with Indie Film Icon/Blaxploitation Pioneer Melvin Van Peebles

Interview with Film Noir God Eddie Muller

Preview of Frank Henenlotter's Bad Behavior (hey! Thats yours truly hobnobbing with the Basket Case director! And he even gave Bizarro Movie Night a ringing endorsement!).

Swear to Pete, I'll be a'scribblin' here again soon. Thanks for dropping by: Sorry to be such a stranger.

Jerry Cantrell Gets an Emergency Steak Knife Tracheotomy: Final Chapter, Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan

2010-03-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

I went to high school with Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell (he graduated one year ahead of me). We sang in choir together, and spent a lot of time talking music: He was one of the few headbangers during that halcyon time (ahem, the early eighties) that didn't grimace when you mentioned The Clash or The Sex Pistols.

We even partied together some: One of the most surreal things I ever saw after an all-night party was Jerry in the front yard of Kevin Yeagher's parents' house as the sun rose, sitting hunched over like some zen gargoyle. Beads of morning dew peppered his serenely sleeping-sitting-up form like spiders' eggs as steam rose from the grass. It was a strange and humorous vision that always stuck with me, and we had a good laugh about it the following week in choir class.

The last time we bumped into one another was at the taping of MTV's New Years' Show somewhere around 1993. Cypress Hill, The Breeders, and Nirvana headlined; Jerry was a VIP guest, natch; and I was a Production Assistant. We hadn't seen each other in about seven years, and I was sporting regulation shoulder-length grunge hair and thirty additional post-collegiate pounds. But he recognized me and called me over to introduce me to (I think) Alice bandmate Mike Inez and chat for a few minutes. Even in the flush of fame (this was right after Dirt had made the guy a star, for Chrissake) he was still the same laid-back, unpretentious, friendly guy he was in high school. Word has it that he's still that way, too.

All of this is apropos of nothing, except as a segue into this silly cartoon. Click images to enlarge.

Incidentally, thanks to the Internets (and my own dumb luck and detective work), I'm now reconnected with Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan Grunge-era Greek Chorus Dan Troy after eleven years. He's living happily in Davis, CA with a wife and two scrappy grade-school-age sons. This strip--and a bottle of Snapple--are lovingly dedicated to you, mi amigo.

Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan #3: A Blow to the Happy Sacks Sparks the Seattle Scene

2010-03-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

The third installment of The Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan (see parts one and two to catch up) showcases Lanegan's um, lateral, contribution to the Northwest Music Scene via a misapplied Ninja kick. Click on image to enlarge.

In case the joke's not immediately apparent, one of the songs on Nirvana's multi-megaton smash Nevermind was a track called "Stay Away," hence the speculative fiction on its genesis. (The actual origin of the song is a bit less, um, impactful).

OK, after eighteen years the below panel still makes me snicker. Go figure.

Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan, Part 2: Lanegan Rescues Calvin Johnson from a Bear

2010-03-04T23:32:00.000-08:00

In the second volume of Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan (circa 1993), the Singing Tree saves the head of K Records (Beat Happening/Dub Narcotic Sound System Singer/songwriter Calvin Johnson) from the clutches of a pissed-off bear. Johnson was/is a great songwriter and important figure in Indie Rock (Beck released an early album on K Records, and the whole Olympia music scene that Johnson helped create influenced the DIY and Riot Grrl scenes immensely). Johnson was also the vocal equivalent of Eeyore on some of those Beat Happening records.

One of the highlights of my early music geekdom was attending a K Records Barbecue with my buddy Brad circa 1988, and getting into a humorous drunken discourse with Calvin Johnson on whether or not Isaac Hayes ever recorded a version of the theme from Shaft on which Hayes sang the F word instead of implying it with, "He's a Bad Mother--Shut your mouth." (Calvin insisted that Black Moses did sing the unexpurgated word on a recorded version of the Shaft theme at least once; I vigorously dissented). Johnson also had a singing voice that sorta sounded like a cooler version of Eeyore's deadpan monotone, a detail that merited lampooning.

Again, click the image for a detailed zoom.

A Trip Down Memory Lane: Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan Part 1

2010-03-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

I spent one night not too long ago, scanning various print articles from my chequered past in that eternal, Quixotic quest to drum up some paid scribbling gigs. There, buried amongst features about everything from operatic sopranos to Mexican masked wrestlers, resided an entertainingly silly piece of my misspent youth. And this being a blog, I thought I'd share. This is a bit of a long set-up, but it's kinda in order.

I was 24 years old, toiling away at a couple of telemarketing jobs circa 1992. One of these gigs was for an 'Employment Services' group known as Progressive Media. They specialized in selling Employment Guidebooks for everything from working on fishing boats in Alaska to teaching English as a Second Language in Japan. We received only inbound calls, so frequently I and my fellow bored twenty-somethings--music geeks all--wasted time doing strange things. Like (if you were me, at least) drawing cartoons of famous grunge singers.

The Screaming Trees were one of the finest bands to come out of the era; more a loud, heavy psychedelic band than strict grunge. Their lead singer Mark Lanegan's smoky rasp of a voice gave their brand of rock a sunburnt garage tinge. Lanegan also had a reputation as a guy who wasn't averse to a drink, or two...Or more.

My best buddy at the time was a New York ex-pat named Dan Troy. Dan, like me, was a hardcore music nerd, and he was good buddies with the head of an indie record label. Said label head knew much dirt and many silly stories about a lot of the era's rock luminaries, and he related a pretty funny story about Lanegan to Dan.

The Screaming Trees singer was in a bar, imbibing and watching a Portland Trail Blazers game. He waxed enthusiastic about the playing of Blazers' star Danny Ainge, and a fellow barfly good-naturedly chimed in with a genial reply of, "Yep, Danny Ainge: He's my boy." An inebriated Lanegan reputedly took the innocent remark wrong--VERY wrong--and the rest, as they say, is history. Or at least the stuff of goofy grunge-era comic strips.

Dan Troy's dry sense of humor and lanky, amiable mien made him the perfect Greek chorus for my tangents, so he became my surrogate Crypt Keeper. And I turned Mark Lanegan, serious musician and artist, into a mountain-climbing, emergency-surgery-performing, happy-sack kicking comic figure. I was just being silly, but the few people who saw these got a chortle or two out of them. The first Sub-Pop retail store (not the online one, sadly) allegedly had this first Tale of Brave Mark Lanegan proudly tacked to their wall, and Dan told me at one point that Portland band Pond liked 'em so much that they wanted me to illustrate a T-shirt for them.

(hey, Pond guys, I'm still around and I work cheap).

Looking at these with a jaundiced grown-up's eye, they're incredibly innocent and naive. It was before Kurt Cobain took his own life--and before drugs, bickering, and rock-star excess caused the Seattle Scene to become just another bit of rock history. I saw some great bands, collected some silly stories of my own, and learned a little about the music industry (and myself), too.

This first strip (The Danny Ainge Story) is based on ostensible fact (or at least semi-reliable hearsay). The other three that I'm gonna post are pure fiction. Hope you get a kick out of them. Click the image to see the complexities and subtleties of my finely-honed illustrative skills.

Best Albums of the Decade (from My Cramped Vantage Point)

2010-01-01T17:22:00.000-08:00

The first decade of the new-ish millenium's wound down, and--as is the case with a lot of Bloggers out there, I'm sure--I've done some looking back on the pop culture pantheon of the last ten years.

I could go all blathery about the massive sea change in entertainment--on all spheres--thanks to the Internet and the massive technological advances that've impacted all of the arts and popular culture. But I don't feel like it. Instead, I just thought I'd devote the first Petri Dish entry of the new decade (it's just fun to write that out) to some of the albums that I fell most strongly in love with over the last ten years.

This isn't meant to be some massive critical dissection of the new millenium's musical trends or aesthetic significance. It's just a list of the albums released in the 2000's (the 'Oughts) that've taken up the greatest amount of space in my ears (and my head). As such, it's filled with obvious biases and my own flagrant subjectivity, and I'm gonna indulge in twenty picks as opposed to the traditional top-ten list.

My Favorites of the Decade, in Chronological-ish Order:

The Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (2000): Portland's Dandy Warhols always took heat from rock critics for wearing their influences on their sleeves, and for actually having fun being rock stars. Screw all that snobbery. This big, gorgeously-produced Pop-record-with-a-capital-P delivers catchy and hilarious dance tracks ("Solid"), sloppy nods to country ("Country Leaver"), sad narcotic gorgeousness ("Sleep"), beautiful harmonies (the Beach-Boys-worthy "The Gospel"), and more hooks than a whole shopful of fishing tackle. The opening three tracks of Urban Bohemia comprise the most alluring and atmospheric psychedelia proffered by anyone all decade; a triptych of music that got me through more lousy commutes than I could count. [Plug alert: yours truly interviewed Dandy Warhols keyboardist Zia McCabe at the SunBreak.com: If you're interested, you can see parts one and two here and here.]

The Dirtbombs, Ultraglide in Black (2000): Detroit's Dirtbombs released a gaggle of great original records this decade (2008's We Have You Surrounded is an impassioned call to arms that rocks like Hell). This (almost-) all-covers disc does for old-school soul what David Bowie's classic Pin-Ups did for the British Invasion; meaning, it celebrates the original songs while still staking out its own personality. If there's a more impassioned, sweaty, and joyous ode to R and B's Golden Age out there, damned if I've heard it.

The New Pornographers, Mass Romantic (2000) and A.C. Newman, Get Guilty (2008): Everything these Cannuck power-popsters touch is aces by me, but the Pornographers' debut still shines a little brighter than all the others. Each individual song on Mass Romantic contains enough hooks for any three lesser pop songs. Meantime, a more detailed fawning-over of Pornographers lead singer/songwriter's divine solo record, Get Guilty, lives here.

P.J. Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000): An album composed in the flush of heated romance, with all dimensions covered--prowl-and-growl lust ("This is Love"), exploding-heart happiness ("Good Fortune"), leap-of-faith urgency ("One Line"), and my pick for the most swoonsomely haunting love song of the 'Oughts, "Beautiful Feeling."

The Strokes, Is This It (2001): The Strokes arrived on the music scene with so much hoopla that it almost marginalized the spiky, urgent, simple, but perfect old-wave pop songs they delivered so well. Like walking the streets of New York with your coolest pal on earth.

David Bowie, Heathen (2002): One of the most arresting ruminations on mortality a rock legend has ever committed to posterity. And the cover of the Pixies' "Cactus" is pure Man-who-Fell-to-Earth awesomeness.

The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow (2002): James Mercer's pop mini-symphonies reached their apex with the band's sophomore release. I'll warrant each of these perfect songs'll still sound every bit as lustrous two decades from now.

Supergrass, Life on Other Planets (2002): At their best, this British band has always played like a wonderful melange of every great Brit-pop style of the last forty years. Life on Other Planets is their most colorful and fun rock-and-roll highlight reel, with Buzzcocks-style fizzy punk, T. Rex glammy stomp, and loping Beatles flourishes in delicious abundance.

Guitar Wolf, UFO Romantics (2003): Every Guitar Wolf record is the same, like every Ramones record is the same; magnificently, wonderfully the same. 4/4-time, blisteringly loud and raw punk rock that makes me happy to be alive. I've already crowed on about their greatness once or twice in these electronic pages, and will continue to do so forever.

Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003): Step One to selling your hip-hop record to a Doofy White Guy Like Me: Make the first disc of your two-CD set good, sturdily-danceable jams. Step Two: Make the second disc the Greatest Whacked-Out Soul Record Prince Never Recorded. "Prototype" damn near out-Barry-Whites Barry White, and "Hey Ya" remains one of the decade's greatest singles--an incisive commentary on relationships that you can also shake your booty to (like a Polaroid picture)...

Richard Hawley, Coles Corner (2005): Go here for much more on this, the most consistent, lushly romantic set of songs by anyone all decade.

Louis XIV, The Best Little Secrets are Kept (2005): The best, most absurdly smutty glam-rock record that T. Rex and the Sweet never put out. The over-the-top potty-mouthed lyrics likely doomed it to cult status; a damn shame. The glittering, radio-ready production on this album was made to be played, full-blast, from Camaros all over the galaxy.

TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain (2006): Again, go here for a bit more detail. This Brooklyn-based outfit sounds like no one else--new wave meets mutated falsetto soul meets African polyrhythms, all combined in a dense and heady swirl of noise that's as affecting as it is creative.

Amy Winehouse, Back to Black (2006): Yeah, she's a frickin' wreck personally, but Christ dipped in batter and deep-fried, is her second disc perfect. The incredible songs navigate the minefield of romance and relationships with Elvis Costello-esque wit and a succulent girl-group vibe (courtesy of producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson). Not a wasted note, not a false moment appears on it, and its utter flawlessness brings up the inevitable question: Will she ever be able to follow it up?

The Hives, The Black and White Album (2008): The new-ish millenium's most fun meat-and-potatoes rock band, the Oughts' other great equivalent to the Ramones besides Guitar Wolf. If "Try It Again" doesn't get your ass moving and your blood pumping, get thee to a defibrilator, stat.

Tom Jones, 24 Hours (2008): In case you didn't know, Tom Jones IS God. Just saying (in greater length, natch, here. And here. And here.).

Flight of the Conchords, Flight of the Conchords (2008): Calling 'em novelty rock or a comedy act almost seems insulting. What they really are is a top-flight pop combo that just happens to also bust out the most pants-soilingly funny lyrics on the planet (cue detailed blarney here). All 'novelty acts' should sport this kind of replayability.

Arctic Monkeys, Humbug (2009): Conventional rock-crit wisdom practically dictates that the Monkeys' 2005 debut disc, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, should be on this list: It's the brash debut that broke them internationally, and like Nirvana's Nevermind, Whatever made its impact not by reinventing the wheel but by gilding said tire with distinctive personal touches. And yes, it's great. Funny, then, that Humbug, Arctic Monkeys' beautiful, sensual, heavy mess of a third record, refused to leave my car stereo for weeks last summer. More blathering on this tangent here...

Cheap Trick, The Latest (2009): Power pop's restless founding fathers (and the greatest American rock band of the 1970's, IMO) put the youngsters to shame with their, um, latest. "Sick Man of Europe" rocks hard enough to peel wallpaper (this from a buncha fifty-something geezers!), and Oasis are likely pouting big-time over not having composed a psychedelic ballad as luminescent and healing as "Closer (The Ballad of Burt and Linda)".

Happiest of New Years, all, and Rock On!

Catch Some Cool Art at Forgotten Works this week!

2009-11-30T19:53:00.000-08:00

My talented wife, Rita Bellanca, is one of fifty honored participants in the Forgotten Works Art Challenge, exhibiting at the Tashiro Kaplan Building in Pioneer Square, 315 Prefontaine Place South!

Thirty of her paintings will be on display, along with a lot of other great work from local artists, and the schedule is as follows:

Wednesday, December 2: Preview (no works for sale), 5 to 8pm
Thursday, December 3: The sale begins and runs from 5 to 9pm. This is a popular annual event, plus it's First Thursday in Pioneer Square, so make sure to arrive early: It will be busy!
Saturday, December 5, the gallery will also be open from noon to 5pm.

Rita's done a lot of great, great work (check out her Zazzle page and her Blog, Atomic War Bride, and prepare to be, well, Zazzled), so this is an outstanding opportunity for her work to be exhibited (and sold!).

Hope to see you there!

Bizarro Movie Night at the Aster Coffee Lounge!

2009-11-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

I've got mucho irons in the fire, friends, so the 'Dish may be a bit under-stocked in the coming couple of weeks.

HOWEVER! I will be hosting a Movie Night at the Aster Coffee Lounge in scenic Ballard, Washington and have created a Blog to summarily clarify/plug/pimp the blessed event. Feel free to stop by said Weblog at your leisure and say hello. And try to come out for the shindig!

I could be persuaded to pull my T-shirt halfway over my head, then bust out a baaad imitation of Vincent Price in The Pit and The Pendulum. Maybe. But one thing's for sure: I promise to deliver some seriously wiggy stuff...Stay tuned!

Have a Scary Story, and a Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

As you read this, I'll be relaxing on the Oregon Coast with wife and dog. But Horrorpalooza must go on; hence, the inclusion of this for your Halloween.

Rather than break out another review, I thought I'd actually present a scary story. Five years ago, Rita and I vacationed in Romania, and one of the most eerily-inspiring places we visited was Snagov Monastery, an isolated house of worship reputedly housing the actual remains of Vlad the Impaler--the real Dracula.

The entire week we visited, the weather was in the mid-seventies and sunny (at the tail end of October, no less)...Except for the day we visited Snagov. Fog enshrouded everything, and a palpable chill cut through the air as we sat in a rowboat and traversed the lake route to the Monastery's location. It was sublimely, fabulously spooky.

I've been keeping the fiction writing muscles limber-ish via writing exercises in a Yahoo chat group. The conceit: A sentence is posted, and you have 15 minutes to write a story around it. Below is the result. Poe won't likely rise from his grave shouting hosanna's, but I thought this was sufficiently creepy to present as a Halloween gift to all twelve of you (and there ARE at least twelve of you, my Sitemeter told me so!) who've stuck it out with me lo these last couple of weeks. It's been fun.

Thanks, all, for reading. And Happy Halloween!

The Island was Surrounded by Fog

The whole rest of Sam's sojourn to Romania had been amidst mild, sunny skies and 70-some degree temperatures; except for Friday. The ghosts came out on Friday, and he went to Snagov Monastery to see them.

He'd been personally invited by Janos Czerny, one of the Monastery's acolytes, to explore the grounds on his last day. Czerny had been in correspondence with Sam extensively for the last four months, knew Sam's background in Eastern European Folklore. And Czerny knew that Sam wouldn't scare or sway easily. That was important.

They met at the bank of the lake, in front of an unspectacular row of newly-constructed houses that looked to Sam exactly like any bland suburban neighborhood in America, until he glanced down one cul-de-sac and observed two old women swathed in peasant dresses and dull blue scarves, carrying large bundles of sticks--kindling--on their stooped shoulders. He noticed one of them staring at him with brown eyes that were as cold as gravesite soil, but thought nothing of it.

"I've hired someone to take us there," Czerny said as he led Sam to a small rowboat moored at a small dock just off the main drag. An olive-skinned local--just a boy of fourteen, Sam figured--smiled and held his hand out. Czerny quickly handed the boy a handful of Romanian lei, and the metal-coated plastic coins clattered emptily. They could see no more than twenty feet beyond the boat. Snagov Island lay hidden evocatively beyond a dense layer of morning mist: The Island was surrounded by fog.

Sam's eyes shot alertly all 'round the boat as the boy rowed deliberately. Czerny sat at the front of the rowboat, holding a bible in his hand and sedately chanting in Romanian as his black eyes regarded Sam with respectful scrutiny. Sam stared back at him for a few seconds, then turned to look back at the dock as the off-white mouth of vapor lapped up at and swallowed the last vestige of the homogenized neighborhood they'd left.

It was like being snow-blind in a way, being in a boat on a fog-enshrouded body of water with nary a sound of bird, fish, vehicle, or human to stir the placid splashing of the oars against the lake's surface. After what seemed like one long, languid now, the turrets of Snagov pierced the white mist, and the boat crunched into the rocky shoreline of The Island.

Only one other American had been led by Czerny to this side of Snagov Island, a Princeton grad student named Theo Marstedt who shared Sam's fascination with (and major in) Eastern European Folklore. They'd had coffee just nine weeks ago, and Theo's shock of red hair was standing on end as he raved about an exclusive in to the only area of Snagov unsullied by tourist traffic. He told Sam about underground catacombs carved 'neath the Monastery by Vlad the Impaler himself to hide the Romanian ruler from the Turks who thirsted for his throne and life. "I'm gonna be the first American to see it," Theo told Sam in a conspiratory whisper as though the disinterested students glutting the coffee shop gave a damn.

Sam hadn't heard from Theo since the latter would've returned from this strange land where Porsches gave right-of-way to oxcarts likely passed from generation to generation for a century or more. And now Sam stood up shakily in the rowboat, setting foot on the softly-muddy earth of Snagov Island.

Czerny had strode ahead, gesturing for Sam to follow. The monk looked like a spectre as he pierced the mist that danced around him. Autumnal trees poked out of the pale green earth like gnarled, arthritic hands. Sam shuddered a little as he complied.

The Monastery loomed large and dark against the white fog, still undistinguished in its details because of the fog's thickness. Sam had never, in all his studies of the Monastery, ever seen a photograph or sketch of the building from this angle. The chill of the unknown insinuated itself against the back of his neck.

Just ahead of them was a small farmhouse, a simple structure of weathered and weary boards threaded up top by a branch-and-pitch roof. Outside, tethered to a fencepost by thick ropes, were three dogs--Two sulky hunting hounds, and what looked like some sort of Irish setter mix. The setter regarded Sam with interest, then began barking loudly.

Czerny, who'd moved silent and graceful ahead of Sam up until this point, stopped mid-stride awkwardly and turned towards the dog. The monk raised one bony hand and gestured at the dog with a few nuanced motions. Its loud caterwauling segued into a soft whimper. Something about the dog stuck with Sam, and he stared long at the canine. The dog looked back at him with a strange sense of familiarity, still whimpering what almost sounded like a warning.

It took just a few seconds for Sam to see what lay in the setter's eyes, peering worried and warning from beneath a shock of red hair. Surprise--and then dumb fear--rose in him.

"Theo..." Sam muttered as he felt Czerny's cold hand against the back of his neck.

The monk caressed the spot for several seconds, and Sam felt himself relax involuntarily. "Easy, boy...You'll be fine here," Czerny purred in broken English.

Sam barked softly in muted, futile protest.

Freakshow at the Cafe Racer, 10/29/09

2009-10-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

It's fun being a fly on the wall at a freakshow.

Last night, I visited the Cafe Racer in Seattle's University District. On display were several great pieces of art--all inspired by old-school freakshow banners and posters--and a tassel of convivial and scary folks. 'Twas one hell of a great way to spend Halloween Eve Eve.

Cemetery Man: A Beautiful Nightmare Mess

2009-10-30T03:32:00.000-07:00

I've always been a night owl.

It takes next to nothing for me to stay up longer and later than most normal mortals, and on weekends or days off I'll routinely stay awake until 2 or 3 in the a.m.

Writing during that time can be, in a strange way, fun. Sometimes, being up that late just turns you into a tired and punchy oaf the next day. But other times, drifting in that twilit state between consciousness and narcotic slumber stimulates great things. It's as if, when you're on that fine line, it opens up a door to untold wonders, beauties, nightmares, and imaginings.

That twilit time means so much to me that when I see a movie that truly, deeply captures it--that drowsily-heady point where dreams and wakefulness dance so closely that you can't tell them apart--I fall for it like a frilly-shirted poet gazing at some alabaster-skinned Edwardian muse. Cemetery Man is one of those movies.

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) works as a caretaker at Buffalora Cemetery, a far-from-routine job made even less so by its interred's irksome tendency to return from the grave to devour the living. Aided by his mute sidekick Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro), Dellamorte guns, stabs, shovels, and beats the undead back to death with deadpan workaday efficiency. Then one day, a voluptuous and sensual widow (Anna Falchi) strolls into Buffalora to bury her husband. Francesco's jaded exterior begins cracking; and he tumbles into an ill-fated romance, self-examination, nightmares, and madness--maybe--as a result.

I fell hard for this dark fairy tale, and for all of its rich and dense layers. Director Michele Soavi strikes the perfect tone between black humor, visceral horror, and strange romance. And his movie looks unlike any zombie movie you've ever seen, drawing from a palate that's equal parts Fellini, Romero, and Tim Burton.

Structurally, it works on myriad levels, brilliantly. It's funny as hell (the opening scene, with its deadpan humor offsetting the violence, is just drop-dead cool--and dig the cycle crash victim who's buried, fused to his hog), as strangely romantic as anything you'll see in a so-called chick flick, brimming with symbolism if you care to look for it (Francesco's musing on Gnaghi's love of dead leaves, Falchi's recurring reappearances as different women/different aspects of woman), possessive of a surprising vein of sweetness in places (as demented as it is, Gnaghi's guilelessly adorable romance with a disembodied head wouldn't be out of place in a warped John Hughes flick), and yet it still delivers on the chills, thrills, and gore front.

Soavi cut his teeth assistant-directing for the great Dario Argento, and it shows in the best way. His cinematographer Mauro Marchetti swoops, pans, and glides his camera across Buffalora with feline fluidity, and he captures some eerily-enchanting images, punctuating them with Argento-esque bursts of primary color and violence. Special effects wizard Sergio Stivaletti's zombies--plants, weeds, and trees sprouting from the ones that've resided in their graves for awhile--are unlike anything you've seen in a horror movie, too. All of this serves a literate script by Gianni Romoli that combines black humor, gothic romance, and sledgehammer horror shocks masterfully. This may be the first Italian horror movie I've ever seen where you actually savor the dialogue (it helps that much of it's delivered by Everett with low-key honesty). And Romoli sketches out some fascinating characters: The deadpan-philosophical Dellamorte and his sweet-natured mute of a sidekick Gnaghi make an odd but very funny pair, and the latter experiences Cemetery Man's happiest romance: Never mind that it's with a disembodied head (talk about shades of Tim Burton).

As Cemetery Man progresses, it gets more surreal, strange, and discomfiting, and the Grimm's gothic romance gives way to a bird's-eye view of Dellamorte's descent into insanity. In the last twenty minutes or so Soavi starts bending and manipulating the pocket universe he's created with the same disregard for linearity that David Cronenberg displayed in the closing reel of Videodrome. The utter insanity of the final reel initially bugged me, until I watched it again at twilight. At that hour, it all made sense: The visual and verbal cues, the final denouement, and Dellamorte's erratic and homicidal behavior all follow their own dream-logic. I haven't been led on a journey this strange, funny, and disturbing in a long time; and I want to go again...Just before I drift off to sleep.

Dog Soldiers and The Descent: Neil Marshall, New Genre Hero

2009-10-29T02:56:00.000-07:00

British filmmaker Neil Marshall's only directed three movies so far, but on the strength of the two I've seen, I'm willing to go out on a limb and proclaim him one of the most promising guys working in the horror genre today. His inaugural features, 2002's Dog Soldiers and 2005's The Descent, do their jobs so well that they transcend the genre.

Marshall's concise, lean style involves setting up a pretty basic fits-in-one-sentence synopsis, then turbo-charging it with clever, compact writing and solid characterizations. Seems simple enough, until you consider how few modern horror filmmakers actually get past the 'fits-in-one-sentence' part.

Dog Soldiers' conceit? A squad of British soldiers on a routine training mission in the Scottish wilds are besieged by a pack of lycanthropes, then they barricade themselves in a deserted cottage. So, yeah, it's basically a classic World War II action opus with werewolves and a dash of Night of the Living Dead stirred in.

The budget's punishingly low (admittedly, there are more convincing screen werewolves in the canon), but Dog Soldiers still nailed me to my seat, in part because of the script. The half-dozen soldiers at the movie's epicenter talk, act, and think like real hard-scrapple guys, and Marshall (who also wrote the screenplay) gives them all great, humorous tough-guy dialogue. The principals--Sean Pertwee as the commanding officer, Kevin McKidd of Rome fame as his no-bull second-in-charge, and Liam Cunningham as the resident not-so-nice special ops guy--all deliver, too.

Marshall also knows--big-time--how to jack up the tension. He sets up innumerable perils for his grunts, and engineers them with plausibility and merciless efficiency. By the time the movie's reached its fiery conflagration, the director's got his hooks in you but good.

He followed Dog Soldiers with The Descent in 2005. Again, the central concept could fit on the head of a pin. And again, Marshall makes it into something tense, taut, scary, and genre-transcending.

Fate levels an awful blow to young wife and mother Sarah (Shauna McDonald), and a year after her devastating loss she's on a camping trip with five of her best friends. The six women party and bond, then head into the Appalacian woods to go spelunking in an off-the-beaten-path cave, and the trouble--some of it rooted in their own foibles, some of it decidedly monstrous in nature--begins.

Even more than Dog Soldiers, The Descent transcends its pulpy concept. Marshall fleshes his characters out well in the movie's opening scenes, subtly laying out the individual personality traits that prefigure their fates later in the film. And he deserves commendation as much for what he doesn't do as for what he does: He never makes a big deal about his leads all being female; despite the Deliverance elements that surface, he never exploits them; and he avoids CGI, letting shadow, ambient sound, and good old-fashioned prosthetics (that's as close to a spoiler as you're gonna get, kids) aid and abet the story.

The claustrophobic cave setting's utilized brilliantly by Marshall: He turns the cavern labyrinth into a character in its own right. I love the way he uses only light from the women's own stash of flashlights, glowsticks, and lighters to illuminate the surroundings; and how the dark underlit corners of the frame seethe with potential peril. The Descent's principals, all unknown here in the states, do terrific ensemble work, and their relative anonymity as performers helps bolster that great unwritten commandment of a good horror movie: Anyone can die at any time.

Much has been made about The Descent's two endings--the more ostensibly optimistic US edit, and the darker original UK finale. Try to make sure you see the movie with the latter: It's as effective a coda as you'll see in a modern horror flick; elegant, sad, spooky, and ethereal, all at once.

Marshall's third feature, a post-apocalyptic thriller called Doomsday is high on my Netflix cue. If it's one-twentieth as good as Dog Soldiers or The Descent, it'll be another one to savor.

Scary Song o' the Day: Peter Gabriel, "Intruder"

2009-10-28T02:19:00.000-07:00

Everyone associates Peter Gabriel with the jaunty pop of "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time." But right after he left prog-rockers Genesis, he put out three musically-innovative records that incorporated pop melodies with tribal percussion and atmospheric scariness.

"Intruder," from Gabriel's self-titled 1980 release, always chilled the living pants offa me. With it's pounding drums, tribal chants, atonal shards of guitar, and spastic xylophone break, the song always sounded like it belonged in a horror movie. This brief entry for today is a cop-out of sorts--sorry, all--but revisiting this horrific piece of music was almost as good as watching a horror movie. Almost.

Stay tuned for more scary in the next couple of days...

Exor-Sistah is Doin' it for Herself: Abby

2009-10-27T03:54:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed The Exorcism of Emily Rose--a classy, tasteful treatment of possible demonic possession populated with A-list Oscar nominees and shot with polish and care. Respectful and respectable as it was, it kinda left me a little cold.

Tonight I viewed Abby, a cheap Exorcist rip-off from 1974. It's lustily potty-mouthed, silly as hell, moves like a chicken with its ass on fire, and doesn't give a hang as to how respectable it is.

Guess which one I liked better.

Abby's backstory reflects almost as much drama and silliness as the movie itself...Almost. When The Exorcist became a massive box office hit back in 1973, it unleashed a slew of filmic imitations both here and abroad. It seemed like damn near everywhere you turned, local theaters and drive-ins were overflowing with heretofore innocent women vomitting pea soup thanks to the influence of some pesky demon-of-the-week.

This proliferation of demonic-possession movies did not go unnoticed by The Exorcist's benefactor, Warner Brothers. The big studio soon brought the legal hammer down hard, threatening to sue the producers of every one of these Exorcist knock-offs for plagarism. Before the legal system called bull on Warners, Abby was yanked from theaters, the most significant victim of this litigious carpet-bombing.

Abby went nigh-unseen for decades, last playing theaters in the seventies and never receiving a legal release on VHS or laserdisc. Finally, in 2003 Cinefear Releasing put it out on DVD. And thank God (or someone significantly less wholesome) that they did, because Abby is, to quote the eminent Snoop Dogg, the shizzle.

William Marshall plays Bishop Williams, a man of the cloth whose archaeological digging in Africa releases a Nigerian sex demon (yep, you read right). In addition to horniness, said demon nurses one big-assed mean streak, so it wreaks vengeance by demonically possessing Bishop Williams' daughter-in-law, Abby (Carol Speed). One minute, the young woman's singing in the choir and serving as a marriage counselor at her church; the next she's kicking her husband Emmet (original Battlestar Galactica star Terry Carter) in the hacky-sacks, spitting up white bile, slapping old ladies around, and cussing like a gangsta rapper in a Barry-White-gargles-Drano scary voice.

William Girdler's mind-broiling The Manitou received some Petri Dish adoration during Horrorpalooza 2007, and he also directs here. If anything, Abby actually tops that movie's over-the-top loopiness. I suppose you could read below the surface and see this little low-budget chiller as an extreme meditation on the release of a repressed young woman's libido by the Sexual Revolution. Then again, you can just take the movie's tassel of goofy dialogue ("Whatever possessed you to do a thing like that?!") and wild-assed moments (Abby causes one of Emmet's friends to literally go up in smoke when she jumps his bones in the back of a car) at delicious face value.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose reaches its climax in a musty old courtroom with earnest moral debates about theology's influence on the mentally-fragile; Abby ends with a hellzapoppin' encounter in a stone-soul nightclub packed to the rafters with badazz stylin' mofos in flares, floppy hats, and platforms. Emily Rose's exorcist is a gentle priest who may be completely nuts; Abby's savior Bishop Williams is a towering, decisive asskicker who disgorges multilingual exorcism chants with Shakespearean richness. The priest in Emily Rose fights off the devil by reading bible passages and accidentally killing the possessed woman in his charge; Bishop Williams defeats the Nigerian Sex Demon by dissing the hell out of its candied ass until it runs away whimpering, and Abby walks away from the whole experience alive and well. And you ponder why Abby made me happy to be alive while The Exorcism of Emily Rose merely made me nod respectfully?

If you do get your hands on the Cinefear DVD of Abby (and you're a blithering ninny if you don't at least try to), be prepared for your eyes to hurt. The print looks like it was marinating for the last three decades in a vat of cooking oil, and the audio's nearly as bad. But it's worth it to catch one of the most fun 'lost films' of the 1970's at long last. Don't believe me? Get a load of the enclosed clip courtesy of YouTube, and be ready to have the top of yer head blown off. To quote Abby herself, my soul is a witness.

Random Bits of Fright and F@$kery, 2009 Edition

2009-10-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

I've got some real goodies in the offing if I may say so, kids, but none are close enough to completion to finish rapidly. Included are retrospectives on everything from a stately Universal classic to one of the best overlooked zombie flicks of the last twenty years. But they're gonna have to wait.

The relentlessness of this weekend (Relaxation...Wuzzat?) prohibits me from being able to pour much time into this here entry, so I will openly cop out and give you a visual tour of some horror highlights, courtesy of YouTube...

Not totally sold on the charms of The Incredible Melting Man after the rave in this here corner of the Blogosphere? Mayhaps this trailer will convince you...

...And if you're looking to replicate my Parkland Theater experience in microcosm, you should thrill to this trailer for the very entertaining Without Warning, Melting Man's partner in double-feature crime.

Enjoy this trailer for The Pit and the Pendulum, a Roger Corman Poe classic..."Nicholas...NICholas..."

One in-depth Petri Dish piece in the works involves the Knights Templar zombie movies from Amando De Ossorio. They made their way to US drive-ins in the seventies, and Blue Underground's lovingly assembled a beautiful box set in their homage. Here's a trailer from one of the best, Return of the Evil Dead...

Don't know who Paul Naschy is? Get thee to this Horrorpalooza archival link for some schoolin', and then enjoy this trailer for The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (aka Werewolf Shadow)...

Gotta run. A live rock show waits to be reviewed. But tomorrow, the monsters will return!!

Four Flies on Grey Velvet: Dry Run for Horror's Most Gifted Savant

2009-10-25T02:54:00.000-07:00

The arrival of Dario Argento's 1972 giallo Four Flies on Grey Velvet on domestic DVD is kind of a horror-nerd big deal. Legal loopholes had kept it away from legit US issue for a lot of years, and it's one of the few films from his ouevre that I hadn't seen.

So how is it? Bottom Line, it's nothing to write home about, but it does offer an intriguing view into the evolution of one of horror's great visual stylists.

Rock drummer Roberto (Michael Brandon) is followed for days on end by a gaunt, suspicious-looking bald man. Freaked out and ultimately fed up with the man's presence, Roberto confronts him, and in a struggle the musician accidentally kills the stranger. For some reason, a weird voyeur happens to be on hand taking pictures of Roberto having just committed the crime, and soon incriminating photos and harrassing phone calls commence. Then, people around Roberto begin dying violently.

Four Flies opens with a beautifully-shot and creatively-framed scene set against one of Rob's recording sessions. It courses with so much energy and imagination that it builds up anticipation for something amazing. Sadly, that's not quite the case.

Argento's protagonists--male or female--are often innocent or passive souls to whom myriad strange shocks and adventures happen, but the very bland Brandon takes this to the extreme. His utter absence of charisma, and his frequently impassive presence make him truly dull, even by Argento's not-exactly-character-driven film standards. And the director was still getting his sea legs at this point: While Argento's gift for masterful gruesome setpieces was already in full-flower, his pacing wasn't, here: Four Flies just sorta drags in places.

As a devoted fan of the Italian director (see here and here if you don't believe me), though, I was fascinated throughout. Four Flies really does feel like a dry run for Argento's stone-classic 1975 giallo, Deep Red: Both films share frame compositions that draw from Edward Hopper paintings, both borrow from Hitchcock's wrong-man setups with vigor, and both are peopled with all sorts of truly strange characters. And the big reveal of the culprit may not be much of a surprise, but how Roberto accidentally discovers said perp's ID at the end shows customary imagination. It's not executed to Argento's usual furiously-paced and terrifying standards, but there are worse ways to spend ninety-odd minutes.

I Heart Uwe Boll. Frickin' Sue Me.

2009-10-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

I'll say it loud and proud: Uwe Boll, contrary to what every mainstream critic in the country (no, the world...no, the SOLAR SYSTEM) might say, is NOT the worst director in the world...At least not by my criteria.

Hollywood routinely excretes movies much worse than Boll's; generic, faceless, focus-grouped-to-death pieces of product slicker than the proverbial duck's ass but utterly bereft of personality. I'll assert that workmanlike hacks like Michael Bay and Brett Ratner deserve way more derision than the notorious German director ever will.

This supposition is based on a simple litmus test: Uwe Boll's movies entertain the hell out of me. Are they polished? Nope. Subtle? Uh-uh. Are they fun? Hells, yes.

Boll stands out amongst the Bays and Ratners of today not because he makes films for less money, but because he belongs in another era, alongside B-movie directors like Al Adamson and Ed Wood. Like those two filmmakers, the Teutonic titan makes lowbrow movies from his own gut, movies that--absurd and cheap as they sometimes are--possess a distinctive personality and a loopy energy all their own. I've fallen asleep during Bay and Ratner epics, but never during an Uwe Boll movie.

Boll's aesthetic never aspires to great art. He's a goofy, hyperactive kid intent on piling everything that'll satisfy the ids, bloodlusts, and libidos of other goofy hyperactive kids into his movies (hell, most of Boll's movies are adaptations of video games, themselves hotbeds of adolescent gratification). They're written with the florid literalism of really simple comic books. Judge 'em on any level beyond that, and of course they'll fall short. But my informal double-feature of two Uwe Boll epics--Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne--gave me way more pleasure than higher-profile big-budger stuff like X-Men 3 or the fourth Indiana Jones movie.

In Alone in the Dark Christian Slater plays Edward Carnby, a paranormal investigator trying to figure out why there's a big blank spot in his memories as a child in an orphanage. So what's up? The central threat revolves around about how he and his fellow orphans were infected by monstrous parasites that turn everybody into testy super-strong zombies two decades later; and Native American magic; and computer-generated, quadrupedal faux-Alien monsters that've been unleashed by that Native American mojo, I guess.

Truth be told, the plot's immaterial: Boll pragmatically uses the convoluted storyline as a coat rack upon which he drapes a few of his favorite things. Inside of ten minutes, there's a random car crash and a big fight between Carnby and a chrome-domed parasite infectee (the latter ends up impaled on a stray piece of metal jutting from a fish cart). Soon, a CGI alien-rhino thing eats a security guard in a museum. Then a squadron of secret government soldiers burst into the meal site (a museum) and the monster makes short work of them, too.

Boll totally trims all of the fat, gouging pieces of plot and continuity meat away in the process: The soldiers are part of a covert paranormal agency that used to employ Carnby, a plot element summarized in one concise sentence. We never see Carnby actually investigate anything aside from his own past; and the fact that he lives in a spiffy gothic-tinged loft and wears a wardrobe adapted by a lot of the movie's target nerd demographic (Matrix leather coat and wife-beater) does nothing to illuminate his character: Again, it's all about the cool things. I, for one, got a kick out of Boll's refreshingly direct approach: After all, why putz around with characterization and plot advancement when there are skulls to be split, mass firearms to be discharged, and enough monsters to make your head explode?

Like a good lunkheaded hard-rock band, Boll steals from the best--a pinch of X-Files here, a dash of Aliens there, one cup of The Relic, four heaping tablespoons of The Matrix stirred in--with a childlike enthusiasm that's easy to get caught up in, if you just go with it.

Speaking of going with it, some major, major, MAJOR suspension of disbelief is required to swallow American Pie chippie Tara Reid as an archaeologist, and it's something to see how Boll works around Reid's mouth-breathing performance. Half of her dialogue is delivered while the camera's on another character (all the better for post-production during the starlet's fleeting moments of sobriety), and the two sentences of exposition about the ancient Native American tribe she's supposedly studying get delivered by the same security guard who ends up being CGI alien-food a few minutes later.

Fun as Alone in the Dark is, though, it's got nothin' on Bloodrayne, a period costumer/horror movie that takes Uwe Boll's more-is-more aesthetic to its zenith. Kristanna Loken of Terminator 3 fame plays the title character, a titian-haired half-human half-vampire (excuse me, Dhampir) who joins up with a band of vampire hunters known as the Brimstone gang, to avenge her mother's death by the hand of evil vampire lord Kagan (Oscar winner Sir Ben Kingsley).

More pilfering/synthesis goes on here, with Bloodrayne playing like a blood-soaked low-budget Lord of the Rings filtered through Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. It replicates key scenes/levels from its videogame source, but branches off in all manner of oddball directions, and Boll again uses the screenplay as the springboard to uber-gratification of his inner little boy. Characters in Bloodrayne don't just get stabbed or bitten; they're sliced open in a volcanic arterial spray if they're not energetically parted from their heads and limbs amidst Vesuvius-style gushers of plasma; and gratuitous boobage abounds. It all gallops at a rapid pace, literally: Whenever things threaten to slow down Boll throws one of his characters onto a rapidly-sprinting horse for a long tracking shot.

The cast adds to the loopiness, oscillating between hyper-enthusiastic intensity (Loken treats this like her star-making role, she's so intense), campy scenery-chewing (you have NOT lived a full life until you witness arena-rock god Meat Loaf emoting in a white poodle wig as a foppish vampire pimp), and obvious discomfort (Petri Dish fave tough guy Michael Madsen amusingly derided the movie and his role when Rita and I met him at a Hollywood Collectors' Show three years ago). And talk about strange bedfellows (again): In addition to Madsen, Loaf, and Loken, Michelle Rodriguez turns up as a vampire fighter alongside Madsen and company; Michael Pare (Eddie in Eddie and the Cruisers) sells weapons; Geraldine Chaplin tells fortunes; Udo Kier gnaws at scenery in a monk's robe; and Titanic's resident rat-bastard Billy Zane camps it up in a wig almost as ridiculous as Meat Loaf's. Oh, and did I mention that Mahatma Gandhi plays a vampire king?

No, neither of these movies is even close to being what conventional wags'd call good. But they entertained the hell outta me. And you could argue a stronger case for the auteur theory with Boll than with Michael Bay or Brett Ratner. Both Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne incorporate buried childhood memories as key plot elements, and Boll's enthusiasm for bloodletting provides a colorful aesthetic thread through these two films. His coda at Bloodrayne's end is a highlights reel of all of the meatiest, bloodiest, spurtiest death scenes from the preceding ninety minutes. Thank God the man's got his priorities straight.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue: One Scary Trip to the Country

2009-10-23T00:59:00.000-07:00

Any horror movie that turns placid natural surroundings into a garden of fetid, horrific menace earns major props from this corner. The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue manages that rare hat trick, and much more.

It first surfaced in theaters in 1974 under about a dozen different alternate titles--Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Don't Open the Window, Breakfast at Manchester Morgue, and a few others. Such chronic retitling usually signals a stinker, but The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue couldn't be further from it.

In this Spanish-Italian co-production, antiques dealer George (Ray Lovelock) hops on his motorcycle and departs the tumult of bustling London for some relaxation in the country. En route, his bike's totalled by Edna (Christine Galbo), a young woman likewise heading to the remote countryside to visit her sister. George insinuates his way into her car and insists on her taking him to his new house in the tiny English hamlet of Windemere. They stop near a small cemetery, and when George leaves the car to ask for directions, a creepy old derelict attempts to attack Edna. Said vagrant turns out to be a presumed-dead suicide, and soon it's clear (to the heroes, at least) that corpses are rising from the grave and devouring the living.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue's producers just wanted a horror movie patterned after George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but like Romero, Spaniard Jorge Grau (Morgue's director) managed to sneak in a ton of subtext and nuance with the chills.

Morgue superficially follows the Romero template--the vagrant's out-of-nowhere attack on Edna echoes Barbara's victimization in Night, and both movies share decidedly un-cheery endings--but Grau forges his own sensibility early on. Morgue is largely shot in the relaxing verdant green of the English countryside, and the film moves at a languid, dreamlike stride that's distinctive from Romero's staccato EC comic of a chiller (Morgue's minimalist soundtrack, with its ambient synths and malevolently-whispering wind gusts, adds to the fever-dream feel). The topicality implied in NOTLD gets explicitly spelled out here: experimental radiation causes these flesheaters to rise from the English earth; and dividing lines are sharply etched between the young, liberal George and Edna and bitter local cop Arthur Kennedy, an Irish redneck who derides their dress and hairstyles and accuses them of being drug-addled hippies.

Don't let all this subtext scare you into thinking that The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is just a post-Flower-Power-era polemic, though. Grau doesn't skimp on the gutmunching. And the final reel, in which George winds up falsely accused of murder and on the run from the law amidst a zombie infestation, is every bit as nerve-rattling as anything in Romero's zombie classics.

Blue Underground's US DVD release of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue packs a ton of extras onto its second disc, including interviews with leading man Lovelock (who reveals that character actor Kennedy was likely channeling some real-life anger into his role), Grau, and special effects man Giannetto De Rossi. There's also a fascinating featurette called "Back to the Morgue", in which the director gives viewers a guided tour of the movie's rural English locations. Just more evidence that a great director can make anyplace--no matter how restful or peaceful--scary as hell.

Jonny Quest: It'll Scare you Spitless

2009-10-22T00:21:00.000-07:00

I loved Scooby-Doo as a kid, but it always gave a little horror-loving moppet like me (prepare for crudity, folks...) the prepubescent equivalent of blue-balls.

Yeah, the comic interplay between Scooby and Shaggy (the Cheech and Chong of Saturday Morning Kiddie Kartoons) still holds up, and I sorta had dual crushes on Velma and Daphne. But in the end, every monster in the Scooby Rogue's Gallery turned out to be some greedy hoaxster schmuck in a costume, faking monster-dom in an attempt to get at a pile of treasure or to close down some old motel. Even as a tyke, I felt a little gypped. But Jonny Quest never let me down.

Jonny Quest was a vigorously-syndicated 1964 cartoon show also produced by the brains behind Scooby-Doo, William Hanna and Joe Barbera. In decided contrast to Scooby's slapshticky shenanigans, Jonny Quest ran in a world of excitement, danger,...and scary stuff that frequently turned out to be chillingly real. It only lasted one season, but it grew legs in syndication and ended up inspiring a whole generation of animators, including Pixar's Brad Bird and Christopher McCulloch (AKA Jackson Publick, creator of the hilarious Quest spoof The Venture Brothers).

The title character was a precocious blond kid whose dad, geniuser-than-genius scientist Benton Quest, built everything from supersonic jets to massive laser cannons. The Quests investigated all manner of strange wonders and skullduggery with the help of Jonny's snake-charming Hindu prince buddy Hadji and the Quests' personal assistant/jet pilot/asskicker Roger 'Race' Bannon. Oh, and Jonny had a spunky, pugnacious little dog, Bandit.

The series took lumps from bluenoses because of its violence (killjoy parents...Grrr...) and some of the racial stereotypes (never mind that the show actually shows an Indian boy being treated with respect by his fellow adventurers). But it still stands as one of the coolest animated shows on TV, with a distinctive pulp-comic look courtesy of creator Doug Wildey, an indisputably great horn-punctuated Hoyt Curtin theme song, and a merciless edge decades ahead of its time: The good guys threw punches and kicked ass when necessity dictated, bad guys frequently displayed complex political motivations, and people actually died...Sometimes very violently.

Most of the time Jonny Quest traversed James Bond-style pathways, and many of Jonny's and Hadji's provided a lighter touch, but a few episodes veered squarely into nightmare territory. In "The Curse of Anubis," an Egyptian professor steals a sacred relic from one of the ancient Pyramids in an effort to unite his people against foreign interests (pretty heady stuff for a kid's cartoon). He ends up re-animating a massive, very frightening mummy who crushes the Egyptian prof to death in a cave-in. Elsewhere, a giant robotic spider, single red eye glowering, tears up a military base in "The Robot Spy".

There were spooky voodoo inferences ("The Dreadful Doll," which sports a scarily-wide-eyed mesmerised little zombified girl), carnivorous giant reptiles barely contained by a bald, bug-eyed villain ("Dragons of Ashida"), and a people-disintegrating energy beast straight out of Forbidden Planet ("The Invisible Monster").

But the most terrifying episode of Jonny Quest, and one of the creepiest animated half-hours you'll ever see, is "The Sea Haunt." Jonny and company land their super-plane on a deserted freighter, only to discover that the crew's either been picked off by (or fled from) a giant aquatic dinosaur-man. Dr. Quest reads passages from the captain's log, describing the monster's vicious path of mayhem in gruesome detail. Then the monster smashes the jet, marooning Jonny, Dr. Quest, Race, and Hadji (along with an admittedly un-PC Chinese cook) in the middle of the Java Sea. The giant monster's scary as hell, and Curtin's score really rattles the nerves in places. If Aliens director James Cameron denies having ever seen this as a kid, he's a bloody liar as well as an egotistical twinkie.

Still Not Out on DVD: The Incredible Melting Man

2009-10-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

Every dyed-in-the-wool film buff has their personal cinematic Lost Ark: That indelible movie classic that's haunted them for years, yet somehow evaded release on DVD.

For some film obsessives, it's John Huston's The African Queen. Others may bemoan the absence of Nicholas Ray's noir western Johnny Guitar from the domestic digital front (Criterion, incidentally, is supposedly remedying this, soon).

Me, I would readily don the fedora and brave Indiana Jones-style perils for the love of...The Incredible Melting Man.

In an era when even the most obscure vintage horror schlock makes it to the Digital Age (and when something like, oh, Dracula 3000 can be purchased at any frickin' video store), the absence of this mean-spirited little curio from the DVD pantheon sorta surprises me. It's gruesome, gloriously silly, and features makeup effects by a young Rick Baker--all prime reason for digital immortality. I lamented this gem's absence of a domestic DVD incarnation three years ago, and its elusiveness still taunts me.

We share a strange friendship, the Melting Man and I. He first reared his drippy head in 1977 and I was there at the outset, a dorky ten-year-old dragging my ever-patient mom to the local military theater on a school night. Deep down, I knew we weren't gonna exactly be watching Annie Hall (go here for a detailed assessment of the military theater's place in the Drive-In Era Hierarchy of Crap). But The Incredible Melting Man stuck with me like gooey liquified flesh affixed to a doorknob.

Six years later, I saw it again on a double-bill at the late, great Parkland Theater with another yet-to-surface-on-DVD B-chiller, Greydon Clark's Without Warning. During this encore viewing I laughed so loud that the manager asked me to pipe down or face eviction (this, just before a giggling party boy in the back rolled an empty beer bottle down the aisle).

These fond memories induced me to unearth my beat-up VHS copy of The Incredible Melting Man for a peek. And Dear God in Silk Jammies, it still serves up the grotty low-budget goods.

The Incredible Melting Man belongs to that unheralded but beloved sub-genre of science-fiction; the Returning-Astronaut-Turns-Monstrous film, represented in fine fashion by the classic British sci-fi epic The Creeping Unknown, and the underrated 1958 US thriller First Man into Space. Here, space explorer Steve West (Alex Rebar) flies a mission to explore the rings of Saturn, and he brings back a radioactive virus that sets him to melting like an extra-grotesque candle.

Of course, had it just stopped there, IMM would just be another disease-of-the-week movie--An ickier version of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, maybe. But this being a horror flick, there are complications. Steve's extreme case of eczema rots his brain, infuses him with super-strength, and turns him into a ravenous cannibal who ravages the town even as he disintegrates like Margaret Hamilton under a bucket of water.

Dr. Ted Nelson (Burr DeBenning), an old pal of West's from his pre-gory-puddle days, runs around waving a geiger counter and making astute remarks like, "Oh, God...It's his ear!" His only backup for much of the movie, General Perry (Myron Healy), mocks Nelson for putting up with a nagging wife and freeloads leftovers from the doctor's fridge.

Viewed with grown-up eyes, The Incredible Melting Man plays less like a straight horror flick and more like a crude spoof of one (thereby rendering the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment it received years ago thuddingly redundant). Director William Sachs dispenses with even the slightest backstory, and reels off each of the Grilled Cheese Astronaut's attacks with zero subtlety and nary a whit of suspense: Blood, guts, and glop fly freely, but rather than offend or nauseate, the movie's over-the-top nasty streak induces (maybe not entirely unintentional) giggles; like a grade Z sci-fi flick directed by South Park's Eric Cartman.

The movie's seventies vintage surfaces hysterically, in all sorts of odd corners. Sensitive Dr. Nelson simpers about the cramp a melting super-strong cannibal's gonna put on his wife's pregnancy; the General picks on the poor schmuck for putting up with his spouse's nagging, then Mother-Hens him into keeping the whole gloppy mess covered up Watergate-style; and the everybody-dies finale plays like the downbeat conclusion of every downbeat horror movie of the decade, only written on a Lite-Brite. The actors play it all uber-straight--DeBenning appears to have walked off of the set of an earnest family drama by mistake, and Healey made a mini-career out of impersonating stout-voiced, barrel-chested military men in movies like this and Varan the Unbelievable.

If you like some gore with your cheese, IMM also delivers. Mr. Melty chews an obese nurse's face off, rips a poor fisherman's head from his body and tosses the forceably-liberated noggin down a waterfall (it splits nicely on some rocks at the bottom), eats Nelson's mother-in-law, gets his arm hacked off with a meatcleaver, and fries the local sheriff on some extra-sparky electrical wiring (among other misdeeds of varying severity).

Since we've already talked about bad-horror-movie-strange-bedfellows this week, it bears mentioning that director Jonathan Demme spends a minute or two in front of the camera as a possible Melting Man Happy Meal. And if the thought of the director of Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia sporting a porn-star moustache and getting devoured by a melting cannibal doesn't fill you with unbridled and unrestrained joy, you've wandered into the wrong blog by mistake, Bucky.

Dracula 3000: Top Your Crappy Horror with A Dollop of Coolio Whip

2009-10-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

I've spent a good five minutes working on a zingy introduction to this exploration of yet another crappy direct-to-video horror schlocker; but then I realized that Dracula 3000 ain't even worth that much effort. This from a guy who's spent a lot of time contemplating really lousy horror movies.

What we've got here, friends and neighbors, is an incredibly cheap and impossibly incompetent weld of cheesy vampire flick and one of those Sci-Fi Channel thrillers in which several B-grade actors run around in a darkly-lit factory or airplane hanger that's shoddily standing in for the interior of a spaceship. I guess that makes it a cross-genre effort by crappy home-video standards.

Set in (you guessed it) the year 3000, Dracula 3000 follows the crew of an intergalactic salvage ship as it stumbles across the Demeter, a deserted transport ship packed lots of coffins. Greedy crew members, searching for possible drugs in the coffins, smash some of the caskets open. One reckless crewman cuts his hand, and his blood oozes onto one coffin's contents--a pile of sand. The sand then turns into a guy with fangs, a cape, and a silly white turtleneck, and the fun (relatively speaking, at least) begins.

The only demographic remotely served by Dracula 3000 would be a masochist like me, the kind of mook who'd endure nearly ninety minutes of numbing, unfun incompetence for the rococco charms of a strange-bedfellows cast that includes strong-jawed home-video hero Casper Van Dien, ex-Baywatch babe Erika Eleniak, beloved Teutonic scenery-chewer Udo Kier, veteran big lug 'Tiny' Lister...and Coolio.

Yes, that Coolio--The one-hit wonder with the bitchin' medusa braids. And he's the undisputed highlight of Dracula 3000...Not that that's saying much.

The rapper normally gives the kind of woozy "Thanks for the Weed Money Paycheck" performance pioneered by Ice Cube. But here, the man behind 'Gangsta's Paradise' goes thoroughly gonzo, intermittently charging this dull throbbing toothache of a movie with a hearty dose of cartoonish glee.

Here he plays 187, the reckless crew member who accidentally unleashes the vampire threat, and once he's infected with the vampire virus, he becomes the movie's surrogate Renfield. 187 rolls his red-contact-lensed eyes and gnashes his fanged choppers with gusto as he throws the rest of the hapless crew through glass shelves and delivers a profane monologue about co-star Eleniak's pneumatically-enhanced figure. If Tex Avery's Big Bad Wolf took a salty cue from 2 Live Crew's Luke Skywalker, he'd act and sound like this.

Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, you can spare yourself the unparalleled agony of sitting through all 86 minutes of Dracula 3000 and enjoy (or at least gaze in slack-jawed WTF wonder at) this bold thespian's effort by going here. Be warned that the dialogue ain't the remotest bit work-appropriate, and that it's crude, infantile and sexist as hell. But the sheer shamelessness of it elevated this little cooked-carrot fart to crazy rotten-egg status for a few brief moments. Just don't think too hard about the fact that Dracula 3000 was written and directed by Darrell Roodt, who helmed the moving and acclaimed Cry The Beloved Country eighteen years previous. Otherwise you might get depressed.

Adolescence Sucks, Literally: Let the Right One In

2009-10-19T00:57:00.000-07:00

I've said it a million times, but only because it still holds true: Really good horror movies--the ones that live in your memory and dreams/nightmares long after you're finished watching them--are essentially dark fairy tales; veiled allegories for universal truths and subconscious fears that connect with viewers on a level deeper than just a jump and a spontaneous scream. That element makes Let the Right One In not just the best new horror film I've seen this year--It makes it one of the best I've ever seen, period.

Withdrawn kid Oskar leads a solitary and monochromatic life in a Swedish suburb. He occupies himself by collecting morbid newspaper clippings, and faces a coldly-manipulative bully every day at school. Then a girl his age, Eli, moves in next door. She's a weird kid who walks barefoot through the snowy Swedish countryside every night. Her father's blocked all of their apartment windows from the sun's rays, and she has this habit of appearing out of nowhere. It's quickly obvious that Eli's a vampire, but Oskar finds a kindred spirit in this square peg, and a close friendship blooms between the two of them.

Let the Right One In proceeds at a leisurely pace, taking its languid cue from the alabaster peacefulness of the snowy Swedish countyside, but it's far from dull. The dream-state it creates is punctuated by swatches of gallows humor, and by some incredibly imaginative and terrifying setpieces that'll haunt you long after the film's ended. It works on myriad levels--It tells an affecting coming-of-age story for young Oskar, packs a significant symbolic punch with the character of Eli (she's Oskar's pent-up violence let loose as well as a potent metaphor for budding female maturity), and captures a child's-eye view by deliberately de-emphasizing most of the adult characters physically as well as aesthetically.

If you know your vampires you'll also love how director Tomas Alfredson and his screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist point up genre cliches. Let the Right One In pays all due respect to the conventions of vampire lore, but isn't afraid to goose things up with doses of reality, common sense, and humor: I don't think I've ever seen a movie in which someone attempting to harvest blood for a vampire almost gets caught...by a poodle. Yet it still delivers shocks by the bucket (the less revealed about them, the better).

The relationship between Oskar and Elli, however, forms the movie's soul, and the two young actors portraying these characters are stunning. Kare Hedebrandt's Oskar looks, feels and acts like a real kid: He's awkward and insular, but begins to blossom under Elli's attentions. And Lina Leandersson makes an incredibly charismatic and otherworldly dark angel, trapped in the unassuming body of a very normal-looking girl. Her incredibly expressive eyes mirror (quite appropriately, of course) much more experience, wisdom, and destructive violence than her regular-girl features initially let on.

Hollywood's reputedly optioned an Americanized version of Let the Right One In. I'm sure it'll completely torpedo everything unique and wonderful about the original, so it's extra-important to catch Tomas Alfredson's masterful contribution to the genre before Hollywood turns his gorgeous Bach concerto of a horror movie into the cinematic equivalent of a Hannah Montana music video.

Blacula Dynamite: Hasty Scrawls from the Precipice of Too Busy

2009-10-18T02:57:00.000-07:00

I'm jam-packed with work and a music show to review for the SunBreak tonight, then more work tomorrow, so today's missive will be brief, meandering, and nuts.

First, a plug for a non-horror flick hitting theaters this weekend.

I caught Black Dynamite at the Seattle International Film Festival a few months back, and I haven't laughed so gut-constrictingly hard since Borat. It's a blaxploitation parody so funny that you don't have to be a Black Action Cinema aficionado to appreciate it; yet it reproduces that era so spot-perfectly that it coulda fit right in on a double bill with Coffy or Dolemite back in the day. BD belongs in that great pantheon of movies-spoofing-movies inhabited by Airplane and Young Frankenstein. Go see it before you throw your bucks at the sure-to-be-good Where the Wild Things Are; BD needs the money much more, and you won't regret it. Believe it , Bruthas and Sistas.

About the only afro-centric 70's flick that doesn't get Dynamited in BD is Blacula, the 1970's redux of the classic bloodsucker that's available on the Soul Cinema imprint (how's that for a segue?). Entertainment Weekly, in its (justified) praise of Wesley Snipes' badassed Blade, took a decidedly unjustified swipe at Blacula as 'minstrelsy'. Oh, well, it's not the first time EW's hit the crack pipe too hard.

William Marshall plays the title character, an African prince vampirized by the original Drac and sealed in a coffin for 100 years. He's set loose upon modern LA, and this being the Bell-Bottom Era it's one awesome ride. Booty-shaking songs by The Hues Corporation, some real shocks (the scene in the morgue with character great Elisha Cook Jr. getting attacked still sets me to a'shudderin'), primo fashions...and Marshall gives a world-shakingly great performance as Blacula. Proud, menacing yet elegant, his rich baritone giving even the pulpiest lines rock-of-Gibraltar gravitas (he was a world-class Shakespearean thespian earlier in his career), he's one of the cinema's greatest vampires; brainless EW revisionism be damned.

Cuisine Review: Franken Berry, Count Chocula, Boo Berry

2009-10-17T02:11:00.000-07:00

I actually take pride in eating pretty damned healthy most of the time--easy on the processed sugars, lots of veggies, and water as my usual beverage of choice. But a massive rush of childhood nostalgia hit me in Target the other day, and I could not resist its demon call.

There, snuggled cozily between Target's overstock of The Notebook DVD's and a shelf of Wheat Thins sat three icons of my childhood: The General Mills Monster Cereals, Franken Berry, Count Chocula, and Boo Berry. And at $1.99 a box, the missus and I just had to take some home.

I'd been oblivious to their current status--forsaking these cereals' Creature-ific existence in favor of the grown-up cereals like Total and Smart Start--but General Mills redoubled distribution of these three cereals especially for Halloween. I vowed I would eat Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry again for the first time since the age of ten--nutritive correctness be damned.

A bit of background may be in order. The early 1970's marked a turning point in pop-culture perceptions of the traditional movie monsters. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Werewolf, and the Mummy saw their positions as scare generators gradually erode throughout the 1960's, but by the time the seventies rolled around, the Vietnam War and mass socio-cultural upheaval had effectively de-fanged the Classic Monsters and turned them into warm-and-fuzzy pals. And into breakfast cereals.

The General Mills Monster Cereals all followed the same pattern visually. A cute cartoon version of a classic monster adorned the mostly-white box. The cereal itself consisted of puffed corn flour pieces and those flavored marshmallows that possess the texture of squeaky styrofoam when dry. Of course the patently artificial colors varied from pink (Franken Berry) to Blue (Boo Berry) to Brown (Count Chocula), and the flavors (as I'd remembered them, at least) were as gloriously artificial as the colors that seduced undiscerning sugar-craving monster-happy kids.

In lieu of busting out this fine dining in front of a TV screen during Saturday morning cartoons (are there such things anymore?), I decided to stay up 'til an ungodly hour this Friday night/Saturday morning to give you, dear reader, the unvarnished scoop on what these damned things taste like today. So while I dug into a viewing of The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, I also dug into a bowl or two (or three, to be exact) of breakfast cereal. The agonies I go through for my readership...

The purist in me misses the original white boxes (the new ones look too slick and glossy for me), but the actual cereal itself skewed reassuringly consistent with the old memories.

I came out of my informal taste test liking Count Chocula the least. Chocolate-flavored cereals always seemed a bit much for me, even when my garbage-gut sensibilities reigned supreme over my prepubescent appetite. But Count Chocula, ironically enough, didn't assault my tastebuds or my gag reflex enough. It possesses a blander flavor than I remembered; so indistinct that I'm tempted to brand it the Cooked Carrot Fart (the Whiteout?) of the General Mills Monster Cereal line.

Things looked up with my second bowl of cereal, Boo Berry. I'd always derided Boo Berry (the actual character on the box, not the cereal) as the lamest of the General Mills Cereal monsters--a wispy and wimpy, sleepy-eyed, bad-hat-wearing puff of ectoplasm. He did earn bonus points in the 1970's commercials for being voiced by veteran voice performer Paul Frees in an over-the-top Peter Lorre accent, though. And the cereal beats the Count's to the punch by having a bit more flavor--the blue marshmallows added a faint bit of tang, and the artificially-fruity bouquet of the milk-moistened cereal sat on my nose much more favorably than Count Chocula's chocolate-plastic-hose smell.

But the winner of the breakfast-at-midnight trifecta for me was Franken Berry, an observation that's held constant for me since I was five years old. It smells like one of those great cheap strawberry car fresheners,and cold milk releases this cereal's powerful chemical-strawberry taste. It's the most distinctively flavorful of any of the three cereals, and it comes closer to tasting like real fruit than Boo Berry (of course, this is like saying cow poop smells less than donkey poop, but still...). A ready thumbs-up, if you can cope with (or get a yen for) something synthetic-yet-curiously-yummy.

My one regret of this trip down Monster Memory Lane? General Mills has yet to reissue Fruit Brute, a cereal discontinued in 1983 and represented by a werewolf in striped overalls (think Larry Talbot dressed by a really bad mime). Fruit Brute was supposedly multi-fruit flavored, and don't think I ever got to try a bowl.

Fruity Yummy Mummy, conversely, existed between 1987 and 1993: It may have been a redux of Fruit Brute, but it rose from the Cereal Grave long after I'd stopped eating sugar-coated cereals. I for one would welcome the opportunity to sample these arcane breakfast delicacies. Get with the program, General Mills.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my stomach to file a formal protest over the sugar, corn starch, and Red Dye 5 I've stuffed it with. The Petri Dish, it seems, isn't the only harsh mistress in my life.

Favorite Scream Queens: Yvette Vickers

2009-10-16T01:34:00.000-07:00

Some B girls, like the wonderful Beverly Garland, you take home to mom.Yvette Vickers, conversely, is the girl you hop into the hot rod with--the sultry, thrill-seeking, wild-for-kicks vixen who's too much trouble to handle but too smoking-hot to resist.

Vickers appeared in several movies and TV shows in the 1950's and '60's, usually in bit roles (she's got a great cameo in Sunset Boulevard as a giggling blonde on a phone at a party); she posed for Playboy in the late fifties; and she worked the lounge circuit as a pop singer, too. But she amassed a rabid cult following from her work in two low-budget sci-fi classics.

Even horror non-initiates know Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, the immortal 1958 schlock epic in which despondent and put-upon heiress Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) grows to giant-size after falling afoul of a UFO. Attack's tawdry melodramatic shell conceals heaps of (probably unintentional) subtext: Nancy's imprisoned in a loveless marriage to Harry (William Hudson), a mythically rotten parasite of a guy who looks like Bill Holden's skeevy brother. He's just one of a pack of males who conspire to hold her back--local law enforcement is either in Harry's grubby pocket or ignores her pleas for help; and after Nancy gains Amazonian size and strength the doctors studying her dismiss her mental duress as high-strung female-ness ("When women reach the age of maturity, Mother Nature sometimes overworks their frustrations to the point of irrationalism!" proclaims one). Small wonder Nancy's gigantism feels less like a freakish curse and more like liberation.

Hayes was a great scream queen in her own right, and if I'd had a chance to re-watch more of her movies recently she'd be getting some Petri Dish love in her own right (with her heavy-lidded eyes, bee-stung lips and air of world-weary vulnerability, she coulda been a great noir heroine). Vickers flat-out steals the movie, though, as gold-digging Honey Parker, Harry Archer's hussy on the side. Whether she's kittenishly planting one on Harry even as she goads him into attempting murder, or steaming the windows at Tony's Bar and Cafe in a sexy spitfire dance with the yokel deputy, Honey represents the flip-side of Nancy: She may be the reviled Other Woman, but she knows damn well what she wants.

Vickers' other moment in the B-movie sun came in 1959 with Attack of the Giant Leeches. In it, the aforementioned bloodsuckers rise from an underwater cave (Why? Who the hell cares? GO WITH IT) to liberate hapless locals from their plasma in the Florida Everglades. Vickers plays one of those locals--Liz, the bored and trampy bride of dyspeptic Dave (Bruno VeSota), the local general store owner. Again, Vickers is sex on a stick, traipsing scantily-clad around the swamp environs and enthusiastically jumping into the arms and affections of local stud Cal (Michael Emmet). Of course, the affair ends badly, with Liz and Cal forced to choose between the barrel of Dave's shotgun and a dip in the swamp with something just as lethal and a lot slimier.

It's another blast of a grade B monster-fest, replete with awesomely ridiculous monsters (the giant leeches look like Glad trash bags with octopus suckers plastered all over them), but the best part of Leeches is its richly-pulpy dialogue. Vickers lends slatternly sensuality to her lines, alternately caressing and spitting them out like she's making rough love to them. How apropos, then, that in its most sublime moments Attack of the Giant Leeches resembles nothing more than a sci-fi flick filtered through the senses and sensibilities of Tennessee Williams.

Sands of Oblivion: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

2009-10-15T00:37:00.000-07:00

Some crappy made-for-cable horror movies are born with crappiness, some achieve their crappiness, and some have their crappiness thrust upon them.

Despite the fact that it premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel (or as it's now known, SyFy--please explain, someone) in 2007, I'd argue that Sands of Oblivion was not born crappy. It's got the kernel of an interesting idea, some likeable actors, and a monster--three fine starting points for a night of Horrorpalooza entertainment.

Sands of Oblivion's neural crappiness pathway runs twofold. On one hand the script works hard to achieve a pretty consistent level of crappy; on the other mitt, this little thriller's sphincter-cinchingly low budget thrusts the crappy onto it as well. As anyone who's visited these hallowed electronic halls knows, however, crappy in the convergent conventional sense often portends at least a few yocks with your schlock.

I'm a sucker for speculative fiction that uses real-life events as a springboard for wiggy stuff, and therein lies the interesting conceit here. It's 1923, and Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments is shooting in the California desert. Historic accounts indicate that DeMille had the movie's lavish sets abruptly demolished immediately after filming (an act of indulgence almost unheard of in 1920's Hollywood), but nothing exists to explain why.

Jeff Coatney and Kevin van Hook, screenwriters of Sands, theorize that a real, cursed Egyptian artifact somehow made its way onto the set amongst the Tinseltown fakes. That relic caused the deaths of a couple of crew members, and a freaked-out DeMille--unsure which prop was the cursed culprit--razed the whole kit and caboodle to save the world from evil.

The movie proper begins in modern times, with a team of archaeologists unearthing the Commandments set while an old man (George Kennedy), who was just a small boy when the 1923 epic was filming, looks on. Right on cue, curse-y things start happening. Members of the dig team die via mysterious (and on occasion, ridiculous) coincidences, and it gets really sandy and windy and spooky at night and stuff. The soon-to-be-divorced heads of the team (Firefly's Morena Baccarin and Adam Baldwin) bicker away as they attempt to solve the mystery.

At first, Sands of Oblivion moves like a single Nubian slave pushing a two-ton pyramid block uphill...solo. Once you slog through the exposition, though, some low-rent jollies emerge. Old coot Kennedy uncovers the cursed amulet, and all heck breaks loose. Anubis, demon god of the ancient pharaohs, starts picking off the hapless archaeologists with curses and frontal attacks, and Baldwin gets possessed by the evil Egyptian mojo. There's some jibber-jabber about a portal to Egyptian demon-y goodness too.

Is it scary? Um, no. Is it fun? Well, yeah, pretty much. Anubis, a really grouchy mummy with a dog head, represents one of the more creative monsters I've seen in a rinky-dink Sci-Fi Channel presentation. Baldwin actually has some fun with his irresponsible-genius role. The plagues of locusts and snakes visited on the set look patently ridiculous, and therefore very entertaining (ah, bad CGI: the zipper-backed monster of the new millenium...).

You gotta love the strange-bedfellows nature of the casting. DeMille is played in flashbacks by none other than the voice of Homer Simpson himself, Dan Castellaneta, with the overarching broadness of a cartoon (of course). John Aniston (Jennifer's dad) busts out an English accent and dodders. Baccarin and Baldwin are likeable (though the former gives a really stiff performance here), and I'd watch Oscar-winner Kennedy--one of Hollywood's great robust character actors--in pretty much anything.

The star of Cool Hand Luke and the Airport movies just about earns a second statuette for keeping a straight face while hanging upside down getting terrorized by a stuntman in a cobwebbed dog mask. Oh, and I almost forgot the nifty icky supposedly-accidental decapitation straight outta The Omen or one of those Final Destination movies. Thank God (or Anubis) for the little things in life.

Drag Me to Hell: Horror Movie Heaven

2009-10-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

What was the first project director Sam Raimi undertook after he finished the third mammoth Spider Man movie? Well, if yours truly's scribbling about it in October, you can bet it wasn't a quaint comedy of manners set in rural Edwardian England.

No, Raimi's labor of love--the movie he chose to make for pure fun after the rigors of an umpeen-hundred-million dollar superhero flick--was a horror film. And thank God for it.

Drag Me to Hell hit theaters last spring, and today it arrived in all its pus-projecting, roof-rattling glory on DVD and Blu-Ray. Those of little faith who'd assumed the mastermind behind the Evil Dead movies (which, incidentally, are playing locally at a revival theater near me--plug, plug) had forgotten his roots need look no further for rebuttal than this most joyous of spook shows.

Alison Lohman plays Christine, a loan officer struggling to hold her own against her co-workers at a cutthroat local bank. Desperate to show her boss that she's got the cajones to make tough decisions (and get promoted), she ignores her impulse to compassion, and denies a mortgage extension to Mrs. Ganush, a sickly and financially-strapped old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver). Bad move.

Christine turns away Mrs. Ganush, and unintentionally humiliates the old woman as she's begging for mercy to boot. Mrs. Ganush responds in a fashion apropos to any vengeful gypsy: She lays one bad mutha of a curse on poor Christine, and if it isn't lifted, well...see the title for a little hint.

That threadbare plot synopsis probably doesn't sound like much, but Raimi gives this little EC Comics-style opus his absolute all. Raimi and his co-scripting brother Ivan approach Drag Me to Hell like the best short-story or comic-book writers, enthusiastically sketching out a spooky backstory with minimal screen time and packing as much vomit, pus, and demonic insanity into it as they can (note to budding horror filmmakers: Want to push the envelope and still get a PG-13 rating? Try substituting blood and guts for mass quantities of vomit and human excretions).

This is no exploration of psychological complexity or ambiguity: It's an old-fashioned Scary Movie with a capital S, and every frame of it exudes Raimi's complete adoration for the genre. The movie's best setpieces demonstrate the director's untouchable mastery at referencing past horror flicks (including his own) while setting the genre's old standards on their collective ear. A seance scene's pretty much a given in a movie like this, but Raimi turns his into a giddy and terrifying funhouse ride, replete with dizzying camerawork and a talking goat. And although the ending's not a big surprise in retrospect, Raimi does such a great job of building to it (and diverting the audience's vantage up to that point) that it still packs a delicious wallop.

I suspect that Raimi's latest was only a modest profit-maker for Universal because it didn't pander to teen audiences by slathering on the blood and breasts (oh, and all of the protagonists are grown-ups: Imagine that). Their loss. Drag Me to Hell packs as many jumps in its 99 minutes as any ten lackluster slasher-film remakes, and it's made with something almost unheard of in this jaded age: Real, unbridled love.

Fright Night's Jerry Dandridge: A Sucker to be Reckoned With

2009-10-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

As an afterthought/tie-in to their coverage of HBO's True Blood series, Entertainment Weekly published its list of the 20 Greatest Vampires of All Time in late July.

The list skewed towards the requisite flavors-of-the-month (True Blood, Twilight's Edward Cullen, etc.), with a few detours into the inspired (Goth goddess Barbara Steele's vampiress Asa in Black Sunday!) and at least one WTF ranking (that'd be putting Bela Lugosi's immortal Count Dracula at number three--hel-LO??). But one of the most disheartening omissions was that of Jerry Dandridge, the principal bloodsucker in 1985's Fright Night.

On the face of it, I reckon I understand. Fright Night's almost 25 years old, and hasn't yet acquired the revisionist cache of Kathleen Bigelow's once-underrated-but-now-cultishly-adored Near Dark (whose Caleb and Mae did make the EW list). Too bad, because Chris Sarandon's portrayal of Dandridge is a stone-classic.

Fright Night details the misadventures of Charlie (William Ragsdale), a high-school kid who sees what he thinks is a murder next door. The crime's perpetrated by his new neighbor Jerry Dandridge, a drily witty, icily handsome bachelor who turns out to be (yep) a vampire. Charlie gets nowhere with the disbelieving local cops, so he's forced to take on this undead villain with the help of his squeaky-voiced pal Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) and a faded horror movie star (Roddy McDowall).

I'd accrued such fond memories of Fright Night that I put it on my Horror Movie All-Time Top 50 List during Horrorpalooza '07, despite not having seen it in several years (Heck, I was even in accord with those candy-asses at Rotten Tomatoes on that front). A recent re-viewing of it really opened my eyes.

It's a real relic of its era, in ways both fun (dig the puffy pastel wardrobes and clumsily-dancing white people in the club scene) and not-so-much (most of the clattery faux-nu-wave pop songs on the soundtrack just plain hurt, they're so lousy). And as entertaining as it is, Fright Night suffers from possessing a trove of great ideas--cowardly horror movie actor as reluctant hero, vampirism alternately representing escape and belonging to the film's resident misfit--that seldom see full fruition.

Good thing this little chiller sports one of the coolest vampires ever. With his serpentine good looks and droll delivery Jerry Dandridge is Cary Grant on a liquid diet, turning Charlie's mom (Dorothy Fielding) and his girlfriend Amy (future Married with Children co-star Amanda Bearse) into swooning puddles of goo with each offhanded bon mot. He also possesses enough cruel animal charisma to scare you spitless, even before he metamorphoses into a full-blown vampiric demon. I love the way Sarandon casually drags his long fingernail over the stair railing--taking ribbons of finish off of the wood--and how he turns something as benign as biting an apple into a wolfishly-amusing act of predation.

Most of the vampires delivered to us by current pop culture are mopey Heathcliffs, broody youngsters who put their wrists to their foreheads and bemoan the loneliness of being immortal and drop-dead gorgeous. Screw that. Jerry Dandridge represents that most welcome of bloodsuckers: A vampire who actually enjoys being a vampire. He's a guy unafraid of (un)living the good (un)life to the hilt, and we could all take a page from that book.

Mystics in Bali: One Potent Indonesian Cocktail

2009-10-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

At first, Mystics in Bali tastes just like any other tacky tropical cocktail you'd get in a plastic coconut-shaped cup at any crappy little dive bar.

You know the kind of poison to which I refer. It's tinted an ungodly neon color from some cheap fruit-flavored drink mixer. A maraschino cherry and a pineapple chunk marinate in the fluid unceremoniously, impaled by the obligatory plastic spear. And the whole odd-tasting concoction's adorned with an obnoxious paper umbrella.

So imagine quaffing one of these, only to realize someone's spiked it with the most mind-jiggeringly disorienting exotic hallucinogen a human can ingest; and that there ain't no turnin' back from the wild and hairy trip. That's Mystics in Bali, in a (coco)nutshell.

American anthropologist Cathy (Ilona Agathe Bastian) travels to Indonesia, where she watches traditional dances and becomes romantically involved with Mahendra (Yos Santo), a Brillo-haired townie whose wardrobe leans towards jeans hiked up to his ribcage and 'I'm a Perfect 10' T-shirts. But Cathy's arrived in this exotic land to do more than just take in the regional color and canoodle with a ridiculously-dressed local: She's a student of black magic and is chomping at the bit to research the Leák, Indonesia's powerful indigenous strain of the dark arts.

One night, Mahendra arranges for a meeting with the local Leák queen, a crusty-faced and ever-cackling old hag who accepts offerings of blood in milk bottles and tattoos the American girl's inner thigh with a magic spell. Then for the next several evenings Cathy visits the witch alone, excelling in her Leák 101 studies (maniacal cackling, dancing, shape-shifting into pigs and snakes). Her tuition for this unusual curriculum? The Leák queen demands that the girl sprout fangs and turn into a vampiric demon who disconnects her head from her body. Cathy's disembodied head (replete with chunky bits of viscera and lungs hanging from it) then flies around the Balinese countryside knocking people through walls and sucking fetuses from understandably reluctant expectant moms (Yes, you read right, and no, I'm not making this up). Mahendra aptly deduces that things aren't going well, and enlists his Buddhist priest uncle for a fire-and-laserbeam-shooting-fingertip-filled final battle.

If you like your unintended guffaws with your low-budget horror flicks, Mystics in Bali does deliver on that shallow barometer. Cathy's transformations into pig-and-snakehood include some of the most laughable prosthetics committed to celluloid, and most of the decidedly low-tech special effects follow suit. The performances are reliably moribund, with Bastian (a German tourist literally recruited off-the-street to star in the film) and Santo playing their love scenes with the easy grace of a couple of twelve-year-olds dry-reading Shakespeare. And good luck trying to keep a straight face when anyone speaks. You're dwelling in the kind of territory where the hero reacts to his girlfriend vomiting up live mice and pea soup by hypothesizing that "Perhaps it was the food last night that has made you so sick now" in badly-dubbed English.

But the movie's also an utterly fascinating snapshot of the land and customs of Indonesia. Like low-budget American cinema, Mystics' producers were forced to shoot the movie in local areas that give way more welcome (and unintended) flavor than an antiseptic soundstage. Gorgeous, detailed religious statuary and architecture sit overgrown and foreboding in a few instances, and--absurd to jaded US sensibilities as it is--the movie's storyline faithfully dramatizes local folklore and mythology. Between that and the exotic masks and costumes that pepper the opening credits, Mystics offers a revealing glimpse into its people's figures of worship as well as their cultural phobias. There's something cooler than cool about the casual, everyday way Mahendra's uncle and his fellow Buddhist priests sit around, smoking and discussing extermination of the local demon witch like a bunch of pipefitters kibbitzing about the last Steelers game. And sometimes the primitive visuals--frequently shot in fog-enshrouded local woods--elicit shudders as well as snickers.

Mystics in Bali marked my first dive into the strange waters of Indonesian genre cinema (the mighty The Devil's Sword, previously covered in these here electronic pages, was the second). I'd initially seen this unique 1981 horror flick several years ago on a dupe-y, cropped DVD-R, and its blend of low-budget cheapness and exotic regional colors stuck in my head like a fuzzy but impossible-to-forget fever dream. As with The Devil's Sword, though, Mondo Macabro has put out Mystics in a sterling DVD issue. It's a little extras-stingy by Mondo's usual standards, but the presentation of the movie itself more than makes up for it: The letterboxed print looks better than most mainstream Hollywood blockbuster digital transfers.

And now, to quote my favorite crusty-faced Leák witch-queen, I will have to borrow your head for a short time. Why in the hell you'd need any more incentive to RUN to your local video store (or your Netflix queue) for a look at Mystics in Bali is beyond me. But if you're on the edge, this trailer--a modest sip from this heady cocktail--should clinch it.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose:You'll Respect it in the Morning, But...

2009-10-11T02:19:00.000-07:00

When a horror director strives to craft a chiller that's a bit classier and more thought-provoking than your typical fright flick (as Scott Derrickson does with The Exorcism of Emily Rose), you can't help but root for him. And when he stumbles on an interesting genre weld that hasn't really been explored to its fullest extent before, you want to like the end result...No, you want to LOVE it.

So it stings a little that The Exorcism of Emily Rose doesn't quite cut the mustard; this despite a top-drawer cast, a carefully-crafted visual sense, and an admirable willingness to objectively explore its interesting moral Gordian Knot.

Tom Wilkinson plays Father Richard Moore, a Catholic priest accused of negligent homicide when college student Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) dies under his care. Moore, it seems, is convinced that Emily was possessed by the Devil, and his attempt to exorcise the demonic forces from her may have contributed to her death. His powerful diocese enlists genius attorney Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) to defend him, and the prosecution's headed up--ironically enough--by Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), a devoutly-religious Methodist who nonetheless harbors considerable skepticism for the supposedly well-intentioned priest.

Based on a true story, Emily Rose wins major novelty points for being the first cross between courtroom drama and horror flick that I can think of. The cast's uniformly good: Linney effectively captures the spiritual conflict that seeps into this savvy and cynical defense lawyer, and Wilkinson is, I think, genetically incapable of giving anything less than an excellent performance. Scott nets the top acting honors for making the ostensible heavy of the movie into a decent, moral, utterly genuine guy. Derrickson and his fellow screenwriter Paul Harris Boardman also go to great lengths to paint a scrupulously objective vantage point throughout.

And maybe that's one of the problems. The movie concerns itself so doggedly with giving both sides of the case full credibility and equal screen time that it never commits fully to a specific viewpoint. Just when it starts to get under-the-skin scary, you're boxed back into almost docu-drama pragmatism, then jerked back again. It's one of those rare modern movies that would've actually benefitted from more running time: an increased fleshing-out of the characters--and more details regarding Emily's descent into madness/possible demonic possession--might've made the relentless objectivity less frustrating. It's respectful and respectable, but it never engages (or, more importantly for my horror-hungry ass, scares) like it should.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose tries really hard to be something more substantial than your average horror flick. In the end, though, it feels less like a living, breathing, artful feature film and more like a slightly spooky episode of Law and Order.

Hey. Hostel's, um, er, Pretty Damn Good Some of the Time...

2009-10-09T23:55:00.000-07:00

The Crotchety Contrarian in me usually avoids movies that generate a lot of hubbub and brouhaha until said hubbub dies down. So when Hostel burst into theaters in early 2006 replete with a thumbs-up from Quentin Tarantino and enough controversy to give thirteen states full of bluenoses massive coronaries, I stayed away for awhile.

Time passed. The movie made a mint. Its champions trumpeted it as a horror masterpiece, and its detractors channelled their inner knock-kneed-old-ladies and clucked on about the movie's amorality and violence. In the three years between its original theatrical release and my viewing of it on late-night cable, the so-called 'Torture Horror' sub-genre it helped birth came into and out of vogue, as fads often do. Some great movies (The Devil's Rejects) and some lousy ones (almost all of the rest) surfaced from the trend.

So what does this boundary-breaking, notorious socio-cultural zeitgeist of a movie look like today with hindsight? Honestly, better than I thought it would.

In case you've been living under a pop-culture rock, Hostel covers the story of Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson), two American college boys backpacking across Europe with their horny oaf of an Icelandic buddy Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson). After a wild night in Amsterdam the trio gets a tip from a local about a hostel in Slovakia packed stem to stern with gorgeous single women. They hop a train to the area and find the bacchanalian stories to be gloriously true...But with one helluva catch.

A sex-filled first night at the Hostel ends up with Oli disappearing mysteriously. Paxton and Josh try to piece together their pal's fate, but get politely stonewalled by the Hostel's females. Both guys are drugged, and Josh ends up chained to a chair in a dank concrete room, torture implements staring back at him menacingly...

Of course (SPOILER ALERT!) the Hostel's a ruse, designed to lure naive tourists into becoming human game for wealthy sadists. And no quarter's given, to the characters or the viewer.

Make no mistake, there is some major, jaw-droppingly brutal violence on display at times, and director Eli Roth torments the audience with sadistic glee (even hard-core gorehounds will have a hard time watching some of it without crying 'Uncle'). But for almost half of its run-time, Hostel is...good. Really good.

Roth sets the whole thing up masterfully, getting us well-acquainted with the two Americans and creating a brief-but-memorable scene-stealer in the carefree Oli. Pax and Josh come off as the most numbingly routine of stereotypes (jock and nerd, respectively) at first, but Roth's screenplay builds layers of complexity on these guys: Paxton may be an agressive prick, but it all comes from some seriously damaged familial stuff (confessed to Josh in one of the movie's best--and few gore-free--scenes), and when his homophobic distrust of a predatory Dutch traveller surfaces early on, it's as revealing as it is ugly. Best of all, the writer/director takes his time mounting the unease: His grey and foreboding Slovakia (Prague actually stands in) is a truly spooky alien world, peopled by folks whose Everyperson exteriors barely conceal contempt, distrust, and worse for the clueless Americans in their wake. It's Bush-era xenophobia taken to a richly chilling zenith and it's so sharply-realized that it'd arguably work just as well without a drop of the gore.

Sadly, Roth decides to broaden the scope of absurdity in Hostel's last third, and it becomes a rather dumb, over-the-top action movie in the end. It's still briskly-paced and executed with polish, but the atmosphere Roth so carefully crafts--mysterious and unpredictable--deflates under the weight of the horror movie director's worst enemy: Telling and showing the audience too damned much about the threat. That descent into the obvious hits the movie's kneecaps harder than any of the torture instruments on display ever could.

Petri Dish 101: The Haunted Worlds of Roger Corman

2009-10-09T01:01:00.000-07:00

After several decades of entertaining and influential work behind the camera, director/producer/exploitation legend Roger Corman will finally get some respect in the form of an Honorary Oscar next year. It's a long-overdue acknowledgement considering the man's indelible impact on film.

Corman produced and directed low-budget B-flicks for decades, following trends and social mores with a canny eye for what audiences wanted. but he's probably best known today as mentor to some of the greatest and most successful filmmakers of all time. The roster of talent that Corman mentored during his years as a director and producer pretty much built modern cinema--Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro got some of their earliest acting gigs in Corman's employ, and the rogues' gallery of directorial talent shepherded by this exploitation king includes Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, John Sayles, and James Cameron (yes, the man who directed the most financially lucrative motion picture in history learned his craft in the trial-by-fire B-movie trenches of Roger Corman).

With all of this talent springing forth from Corman's metaphoric loins, his own work as a director often gets dismissed. Part of the blame goes to the man himself, who's repeatedly confessed to being too frugal and impatient to create lavish cinema masterworks: He's always been all about telling stories as directly as possible (and making a profit, natch). But within budgetary and time constraints that'd kill a dozen lesser men, Roger Corman turned out some of the most fun and satisfying genre films of the twentieth century.

This being Horrorpalooza, I'll resist the temptation to wax rhapsodic on most of the genres that Corman invented or perfected (biker flicks, juvenile delinquency movies, and women-in-prison pictures among them), and concentrate on his forays into the macabre and fantastic. His style may not have been as showy as some of his contemporaries, but Roger Corman always gave even the most absurd genre flicks his all.

From this cramped perspective, the below horror and sci-fi films stand as his most essential:

Attack of the Crab Monsters (Available from Allied Artists DVD, originally released in 1957): A team of Navy scientists investigates a remote, freshly-irradiated (thank you, H-Bomb) South Pacific island; and soon they're marooned and picked off--one by one--by an initially-unseen menace with a yen for decapitations (the title might be just a bit of a spoiler). Yeah, it's saddled with one of the most deliciously absurd monikers in cinema history, the titular critters look like a grade-schooler's attempt at a papier-mache Peter Lorre mask, and you'll surely lose it when one of the giant crabs busts out a French accent (long story best discovered for yourself). But Corman does a terrific job of unpretentiously building up suspense--keeping his monsters in the shadows proves a wise decision aesthetically as well as economically--and screenwriter Charles Griffith (one of Corman's best creative foils) constructs a taut narrative that sports smarts uncharacteristic for a fifties science fiction thriller.

A Bucket of Blood (MGM/UA DVD, 1959): After helming a few dozen straight exploitation flicks, Corman grew bored with standard horror tropes and decided to goose the genre with a hearty snifter of black humor. The apex of this approach came a year later (more on that a few clicks down), but A Bucket of Blood stands honorably as a pretty awesome horror comedy on its own. Corman stalwart Dick Miller plays Walter Paisley, a pathetic busboy working at a hipper-than-hip coffeehouse/art gallery. Paisley accidentally kills his landlady's cat, coats the iced feline with clay, and is instantly hailed as a burgeoning artistic talent by the self-absorbed snobs who populate the hipster hangout. Of course, Walter's gotta follow up his masterwork with something bigger...Like a human sculpture or two. Miller's flat-out hysterical in one of the few leads of his career, and Charles Griffith hits the nail on the head with this screenplay: Substitute spiky-haired indie-rock kids and rock clubs for the beatniks and coffeehouses on display, and you've got a spoof that still stings today.

The Wasp Woman (public domain, available from various companies on DVD, 1959): You have my permission, officially, to laugh at the title. Go ahead. And when you get a load of the actual Wasp Woman--with its helmet-wig, pipe-cleaner antennae, glitter-covered ping-pong-ball eyes, and dime-store fangs--you'll likely lose it, too. Just promise me that you'll pay attention to the melancholy and resonant performance of Susan Cabot as an aging cosmetics CEO so desperate to stem the tide of advancing years that she literally turns herself into a monster. And in a world more fixated than ever on eradicating the signs of age with potions, creams and injections of God-knows-what, The Wasp Woman looks less like silly sci-fi schlock and more like prophecy with each passing day.

Little Shop of Horrors (public domain DVD, 1960): This mini-budgeted horror comedy about a nebbish and his carnivorous plant inspired the Ashman/Mencken musical that took Broadway by storm and made mordant humor palatable to the Great White Way. Much as I love Frank Oz's film adaptation of the musical, Corman's original still takes the cake with its gleefully nasty streak, uncompromising ending, and utterly hysterical comic bit by Jack Nicholson as the squeaky-voiced masochist Wilbur Force. And Roger Corman shot this little gem--one of the greatest horror comedies ever--in two-and-a-half days.

X-The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (MGM/UA DVD, 1963): Oscar-winner Ray Milland plays James Xavier, a scientist experimenting with a chemical that can expand the capabilities of the human eye. When he recklessly tests the substance on himself, he opens up a veritable Pandora's Box of perception. One of Corman's most cerebral efforts, with a literate Robert Dillon/Ray Russell script, great performances by Oscar-winner Ray Milland and (seriously) insult comic Don Rickles, and an ending that packs quite the existentially-horrific wallop.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), all on MGM/UA DVD: The most artistically-accomplished horror movies of Roger Corman's career started off as a nervy gamble. Producer Samuel Arkoff initially balked when Corman suggested they film Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, and the director fought for obscene luxuries. He eventually won double his usual shooting schedule, a bigger budget, full-color Cinemascope, and the thespian talent of silken-voiced character actor Vincent Price.

The gambit paid off big-time: Corman's stylish, spooky version of Usher made a certifiable horror star out of Price, and became such a huge hit that six more Corman-Poe adaptations made it to the screen in the next five years. Good as all of them are, three of the adaptations shine just a bit brighter than the rest.

In Pit and the Pendulum, Spanish nobleman Nicholas Medina (Price) is driven to the brink of insanity by the ghost of his late--or is she?--wife (Barbara Steele). Screenwriter Richard Matheson does a terrific job of taking what was essentially one horrific Poe vignette and expanding it to a real story replete with whodunnit elements and a whole closetful of hideous family secrets. Steele's echoey, spectral voice purring "NIC-holas...NIC-holas," and the terrifying final shot still chill to the ever-lovin' core.

The Raven, meantime, sees Corman returning to the fertile fields of horror comedy, satirizing the sub-genre he helped create. Good magician Price faces evil sorceror Boris Karloff in an effort to save his colleague Dr. Bedlo (Peter Lorre) from imprisonment in the form of a raven, and his daughter from certain doom. It's little short of horror heaven to see Price, Karloff, and Lorre sharing the screen, and Lorre's an improvisational hoot as the boorish, crabby, eternally-soused comic scene-stealer.

Finally, Corman pulled out all the stops with his adaptation of Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. Its plotline and visuals superficially reflect the influence of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, but it quickly becomes its own rich, darkly-colorful fairy tale. Several nobles take refuge from their plague-ravaged countryside in the castle of the most corrupt noble of the bunch, Prince Prospero (Price again). As it turns out, even the corrosively evil Prospero proves no match for the Grim Reaper himself. Masque glows with succulent primary colors (shot by Nicholas Roeg, soon to be a successful director himself with efforts like Don't Look Now and Walkabout). It also showcases two incredible performances from Price (seldom more subtly, icily sinister than here), and the luscious Hazel Court as a hedonist nowhere near as strong and cynical as she thinks she is. Consider that honorary Oscar a belated reward for this, Roger Corman's masterpiece.

Horrorpalooza 2009 Begins in Zombieland and Journeys to Yesterday

2009-10-07T23:49:00.000-07:00

Holy cow, the year's zipped by faster than a plague-infected 28 Days Later refugee. It's already time for yours truly to deliver the demonic; to shovel up the scares; to heap on the horror...Yes, ladies and gentlemen, back by popular demand (again, popular demand in the Land of the Petri Dish=three or more inquiries)...It's Horrorpalooza time.

For those who've never visited the Petri Dish for the fear-stivities, it's a long-standing tradition in this electronic neck of the woods to devote a sizeable chunk of October to my most cherished cinematic mistress, Horror, in all of her myriad mutations. I arrange a deal with the devil during this time, and complete a Blog every day of the fright fest, if it kills me. And no, we're not talking a couple of glib sentences, either: You get an All-You-Can-Eat Smorgasbourd of Scary here.

Horror movies have remained a mainstay in my life for literally as long as I can remember. My first childhood memory was of sitting on a couch next to my mom, watching Boris Karloff's elegant 1932 version of The Mummy as we fed ice cubes to our family dog Suzie. Early on, horror films captured my imagination and added a tincture of danger, excitement, and the forbidden to my decidedly typical suburban childhood. They were the springboard to my appreciation of all genres of film, and they arguably helped make me a more creative, happier person than I'd have been without them.

The genre's always been one of the most durable in cinema, for one basic reason: Getting scared never goes out of style. Other film categories experience ups and downs; some damn near die out (how many westerns have stormed the box office in the last ten years?). But horror always keeps its gaunt and menacing head above water. Like the flu, it mutates to suit its environment; and also like the flu it'll knock the wind outta all but the heartiest souls. Watching a good fright flick can alternately provide the most electric of vicarious thrills, force you to confront the darkest and most ugly aspects of yourself and the world around you, and tap deeply into the romance and dread that dwells impatiently in the dark. I'll never stop adoring them.

Sturdy as the horror film is, it's also as subject to trends as the most fickle Rodeo Drive bonus baby. So when Zombieland disembowelled the box office competition last weekend, it pointed up how thoroughly in-vogue the good old-fashioned zombie flick had become.

It also pointed up the surprising elasticity of living dead cinema. Once the province of grindhouse denizens and bleary-eyed geeks, zombie movies have shambled their way implacably into the mainstream. Small wonder that Zombieland really feels like 28 Days Later by way of Judd Apatow: It is, in a very real sense, the world's first feel-good zombie movie.

Zombieland follows Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a neurotic (and yes, nigh-Apatowian) Texas-based college kid who manages to survive the zombie apocalypse by keeping to himself and adhering to a rigid set of Survival Rules (amusingly illustrated and superimposed onscreen as the movie progresses). Surrounded by naught but walking corpses, loneliness gets to him and he hits the road to search of his parents. On his way to their homestate of Ohio, he bumps into Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a short-fused cracker with a God-granted gift for (re-)snuffing the walking dead. Their meeting signals a shift into buddy-movie gear, and when this odd couple crosses paths with two con-artist sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), things get downright surrogate-family-values.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Zombieland's director Ruben Fleischer (a feature-film first-timer) juggles the suspense and humor ably, but his most distinctive stroke is injecting a good-natured, almost John Hughes sweetness into the post-apocalyptic zombie stew. In light of the genre's pessimistic conventions, the simple gesture of (SPOILER ALERT!!) allowing all four of his main characters to enjoy a happy ending takes on an air of subversion.

Much as Zombieland engaged me, though, the best living-dead flick I saw in the last two weeks was a micro-budgeted indie that's just now making the rounds on the film festival circuit.

Seattle's Revenant Film Festival presented a consistently high-quality batch of independently-produced features and shorts a couple of weeks ago (go here for a detailed rundown--plug alert), but the highlight from this corner was the first movie screened, Yesterday. Shot in 2006 in Canada, it covers yet another living-dead-induced doomsday and the efforts of a handful of squabbling survivors to keep their heads together (and their bowels inside their bodies).

Yeah, it's a completely formulaic set-up, but the basic premise isn't the thing here: Director Rob Grant's excellent script is. Every one of the almost two-dozen disparate characters he lays out in the film's opening minutes feels real and fully-formed, so it's impossible for the audience to rely on the comfortable assurance that anyone's gonna make it all the way through alive (I'm hard-pressed to think of another recent horror movie that's manipulated audience expectations and sympathies so masterfully through plain old-fashioned character-driven scriptwriting). Grant's also well-served by a surprisingly good amateur cast. My personal favorite: Justin Sproule's contemptable yet curiously sympathetic heavy, Rob.

Any movie made on 25,000 (Canadian) dollars is bound to show some seams. The film's 16mm pallate looks washed-out and ragged (not always a liability), and some of the early scenes feel a little awkward. But as Yesterday progresses the tension--and surprises--ratchet up amazingly. Real shocks (impessively-orchestrated considering the low budget) surface, and none of Grant's characters do Dumb Movie Character things.

By Yesterday's nihilistic end I was completely, utterly hooked. If this little wonder doesn't garner its young writer/director some major attention, there ain't no justice.

Whiteout: A Cooked Carrot Fart of a Movie

2009-09-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

Allow me to get scatological for a moment to make a point.

When my brother and I were in junior high school, we thought farts were the funniest thing in the world. They fascinated us so boundlessly that we even developed a Fart Taxonomy, as it were. We'd hypothesised that every form of gastointestinal expulsion known to man arose from one of three distinctive categories: The Rotten Egg Fart, The Potato Salad Fart, and the Cooked Carrot Fart.

The Rotten Egg Fart wore its self-explanatory name on its shoulder. It packed a sharp, attention-getting, nostril-stinging, sulphuric stench that usually erupted wetly, killed small birds at ten paces, and never failed to elicit maximum snickers. Rotten Egg's slightly less-potent cousin, the Potato Salad Fart, shared a bit of the nostril sting, only leavened by a foody, potatoey undertone.

But the most unspectacular, dreary fart--the one that extracted naught but resigned groans and dull disdain--was the Cooked Carrot Fart. Cooked Carrot usually trumpeted its arrival with low, growling notes, like a tuba being played underwater slowly or a naugahyde chair being punched. It was a thick, heavy, ugly--and worst of all, crushingly unhumorous--smell. It was the smell of the most uninteresting substances consumed by man, converting to an uninteresting gaseous state. It was the Boring and Unremarkable Wallflower Fart.

I'd readily concede to flaws in our classification at the time (we were a few years away from eating Taco Bell, which surely created its own sub-strata of stench), but I thought of John's and my Flatulence Classification System frequently as I watched Whiteout.

Bad movies, it could be argued, skew pretty close to the Tony and John FCS. The most entertainingly outlandish ones sting at the senses and elicit laughter or other extremes of attention-getting emotion, Rotten Egg-style. Others flirt with Potato-Salad-esque moments of potency, leavened by mitigating factors like budgetary limitations or a trickle of originality; less bold but still worth a chuckle or two.

Whiteout, put straight-up, is a Cooked Carrot Fart of a Movie.

Based on an acclaimed Oni Press graphic novel, Whiteout serves up a pretty standard-issue whodunnit. A scientist gets gruesomely murdered on the frozen tundra of Antarctica, and it's up to spunky US Marshall Kate Beckinsale to solve the mystery before too many more bodies pile up amidst the subzero temperatures. Through circumstances far too convoluted to mention Beckinsale, mysterious FBI guy Gabriel Macht, crusty-but-loveable on-site doctor Tom Skerritt, and nice-guy pilot Columbus Short wind up isolated at their arctic base to face a shadowy killer who may or may not be one of them.

The actors are appealing enough, I suppose, and Beckinsale does emote during one scene in her underwear (not a liability by any measure from this corner). But the piss-lousy script trots out cliches by the bucket. The Big Twist Ending gets telegraphed within the first ten minutes; numbingly literal flashbacks to Beckinsale's past as a Florida cop pepper the proceedings; and you can bet that when a character stumbles across a dead body with a bullet in its skull, he or she will state, "It's a dead body. And it's got a bullet in its skull." Such hackery would be forgiveable--hell, welcome, even--if director Dominic Sena actually shoved things along with something resembling verve and brio. But don't let Whiteout's abyssmally low Rotten Tomatoes approval score (6%, ladies and gents!) fool you into thinking it'll be any damn fun: the movie unspools as slowly as molasses flowing up an arctic hill. It makes you appreciate the enthusiastic Rotten-Egg energy that you get from, say, an Uwe Boll film. Seriously.

Here Comes de Judge: The First Annual Great Ballard Chili Cook-Off

2009-09-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

Cooking chili is a lot like playing the bass guitar: It's easy to get by on, but deceptively difficult to really do well. I've cultivated a profound love for this beany Mexican-born dish over the years, and it got me through a lot of lean years in high school and college. A good chili possesses a protein-and-fiber-rich heartiness that sticks to the ribs, and sports enough spiciness to give the taste buds at least a little bit of a spank. It also initiated my abiding lifelong fondness for spicy foods in general.

So it was a massive honor--and an undeniable pleasure--to be chosen as a celebrity judge for the first annual Ballard Great Chili Cook-Off. The Cook-Off drew a large, enthusiastic crowd of at least four-dozen happy eaters, and Re-Bar raconteur/Get Loweded mastermind Chas Roberts hosted.

Four phenomenal cooks created four vastly different variations on the venerable staple food, and The Clash of the Con Carnes took place at the Sunset Hill Community Center; a great time, and full bellies, were had by all.

Chili 1 waltzed the furthest 'outside the box' in its construction. The only veggie offering of the day, it sported butternut squash, corn, and a nice peppery/sweet undertone. Good stuff, almost more of a soup than a chili.

Chili 2 skewed closer to the traditional chili model with pork, red beans, and jalapeno and poblano peppers rearing their zesty heads. The peppers added a piquant heat that did, indeed, spank my tastebuds just enough to titillate.

If Chili 3 were a human being, it'd be the brawniest, most muscular stud on the beach. The thickness of this pot of goodness damn near bent my spoon, and the ingredients--chicken, genuine smoked pork, stout beans--combined to a near paste, barbecue-sweet, smoky, and flavorful.

Last but certainly not least came Chili 4, another more traditional-leaning bowl of magnificence. Andouille sausage, chicken, red beans, and a zesty tomato base made for yet more yum.

No, the decision was NOT easy.

In addition to myself (the Cultureophile, farthest left), I was joined at the judges' table by (continuing left to right) Moms Sue and Mary, Ketchup and Soup Food Blogger Sarah, and Genuine Texan Sean. All of us agonized over the final choice, and I for one had to go back for, um, seconds. All in the interest of accuracy, you understand.

Musical entertainment was provided by Youth Rescue Mission, a fine trio co-fronted by Friday Mile's Hannah Williams. Their tight harmonies and exuberance made for great dining ambience.

Two prizes--the Judges' Award and the Audience Favorite--were handed out. Santos' excellent Chili #2 (a family recipe) won the Judges' prize.

The Audience Fave (and my personal favorite by a narrow margin) went to the #3 Uber-Chili created by event coordinator Kevin.

I've not had a better--nor more filling--late summer afternoon in quite some time. And I got to keep the spiffy apron.

Thanks all. Looking forward to next year.

Interview with Melvin Van Peebles at TheSunBreak.com

2009-09-13T23:51:00.001-07:00

What the Hell? I've plugged it everywhere else; I'll plug it here.

I had a lengthy and extremely stimulating chat with one of the architects of modern independent cinema, Melvin Van Peebles. The director of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song was easily one of the most inspiring and fascinating people I've ever spoken to, and the interview (all partisan bias aside) turned out pretty all-right.

Check out TheSunBreak.com, a fine new Seattle-centric website. My review of Van Peebles' newest movie lives here, and the interview lives here.

Song of the Day: "Got Nuffin," Spoon

2009-09-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

It's 1:40 in the am and I'm driving home alone.

The sky's clear and dark. I ruminate on the night, life, the future. Random images and thoughts begin seeping along my consciousness like silty mud running from a swollen river into an open field--fuzzy, unfocused, intermittently negative.

But then the drums start, a mid-tempo throb of purpose. The silt runs in reverse, receding back into the waterline. Clarity--the first of several hot moments of it--rides the rhythm. The near-black sky etches the highway in front of me into sharp graphic-novel relief. Laser focus. I roll down the windows and crank up the volume.

Spikes of guitar jab into the top of the backbeat; then the bass starts its sturdy surge of rhythm. The pulse of the car against the uneven asphalt punctuates the low thrum. As though by uncontrollable gravitational pull, my foot presses down on the gas...65 mph...70mph...

A scarred and sensual voice rasps out the lyrics with barely-coiled, all-or-nothing urgency. Wounded romance, or maybe a projection of it, runs through some of the words. Some of them don't make literal sense. But I understand them all, I feel them all as the car accelerates.

"When that blood goes rattling through my veins, my ears start to ring; I notice what matters."

Rays of bright light stream through the lyrics--not the hokey positivity of some granola-huffing passive-aggressive hippie, but the hard-won vitality of a thinking badass. And that's what I am right now, thanks to the dark and sweet fix provided by the steady rhythm, the rabbit-punch melody, and the wind circulating relentlessly around me. My foot gravitates closer to the floor...75...80mph...

"I've got nuffin' to lose but darkness and shadows...Got nuffin' to lose but bitterness and patterns..."

All those reams of pages of words about being one-with-the-road make total clarion sense right now. The few night-owl souls sharing the asphalt with me dissolve, their red tail-light eyes staring blankly as I soar past them. I weave along the ribbon of cement like a serpent in high gear. 85mph...90mph...

It's driving with the top down; not giving a damn, yet feeling utterly focused and connected to the world around you. It's the all-or-nothing dizzying lure of the road; the explosion of energy that renders birth and sex and death all impulses springing forth from the same well. It's the terrifying and exhilarating jolt of change from within and without. For the three minutes and fifty-six seconds that the song throbs through the car speakers, all of the above swirls inside me--in crystal-clear six-channel stereo, painted across the dark blue late-night/early morning sky in glorious pin-prick starlight brush strokes. I feel cucumber-cool, dangerous, beautiful, happy, and charged, like the entire promise of the world's in my hot little hand.

I exit the freeway and wind down the car. But the feeling's still there, hopping around inside me.

Then my finger hits Replay.

The object of the game of course, is to spike that vein, to mine that feeling even when the music's not insinuating itself into my ears or my brain. I'm working on it. Meanwhile, Spoon's "Got Nuffin," the best driving-song-that's-not-really-about-driving that I've heard all year, is a damned good jump-start. I have no idea whether or not it'll hit you the way it did me, but for what it's worth here it is, courtesy of Youtube. Have a good weekend, all.

Inglourious Basterds: Tarantino's World War II Fever Dream

2009-08-26T20:38:00.000-07:00

Quentin Tarantino always manages to deliver astonishing setpieces in his films, and Inglourious Basterds opens with one of his most masterful--an excruciating cat-and-mouse game between a French farmer and the movie's principal heavy, SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).

The wonder of the sequence lies not in its Swiss-watch precision (we've come to expect as much from the motor-mouthed auteur), but in its subtle artistry. It begins in the most pastoral of south-of-France countrysides, and escalates with ambling leisure: Neither man raises his voice above the most gently-civil of conversational tones, and Tarantino avoids manipulation with music cues until the scene's climactic payoff. It is, in short, twelve minutes of pure, undiluted genius.

That opening promises a work of unparalleled maturity that, put bluntly, Tarantino doesn't quite follow up on. But if this World War II opus is just a typical Quentin Tarantino joint, that still renders it more ambitious, distinctive, and electrifying than 99.9% of the faceless product clogging multiplexes in these devalued times. And that's more than good enough for me.

Tarantino's detractors will surely find grist for their mill here. The director still hurtles ultraviolence at the screen with the childish enthusiasm of a grade-schooler jamming baby carrots up his nose in the lunchroom for laughs; and incorporating this approach into the very real horrors of Naziism and World War II Jewish persecution feels a little irresponsible.

The guy also takes a Molotov cocktail to historic accuracy. In the interest of making this a spoiler-free zone, let's just say that Quentin Tarantino may be the only director alive with the hubris to make up his own end to World War II (get ready for some ridiculous answers on the next World War II History quiz you give, high school teachers of America).

But it's hard to give a rat's ass about those nitpicky points. Tarantino crafts rare cinematic birds--his movies sport a distinctive and idiosynchratic sensibility that still connects with large audiences. In non-nerd-speak, that means he makes exactly the kinds of movies he wants to make, while still managing to get lots of butts into theater seats. Nice trick.

Damn, there's a lot to love here. Visually, it's far and away the most sumptuous thing Tarantino's committed to film, all period lushness filtered through vivid pop-art colors. And the soundtrack (largely borrowed Ennio Morricone pieces, peppered with anachronistic detours by David Bowie and others) puts the director's great taste in tunes front and center once again.

The director's trademark layering of disparate subplots, all tying together in the closing reel, continues to flourish. So in addition to the Jewish-American Nazi killers of the title, Tarantino throws in an engaging almost-romance, a plot to assassinate several key Third Reich players, one of the most entertaining (and brutal) Mexican Standoffs in movie history, a vendetta-fueled conflagration, and a smorgasbord of cinematic references. His scripted dialogue still sings, too (no one but no one today writes characters' voices with such a perfect combination of pulp showiness, humor, and emotional honesty).

Tarantino directs with such stylistic verve that it's easy to forget his Midas touch with his actors. Brad Pitt actually mines some comic gold as the cracker leader of the Basterds (talk about crafting a silk purse out of a thespian sow's ear), and I love Melanie Laurent's vulnerable avenging angel of a French jew. But the breakout character of the movie (Basterds' Jules Winnfield, if you will) has gotta be Waltz's alternately cultured and menacing Colonel Landa. He's the kind of quotable, charming, and deeply scary villain most mainstream movies (and more than a few Oscar voters) would kill for.

Basterds' pockets are so overstuffed that it's almost too much sometimes. Tarantino creates incidental characters so interesting and fun that it damn near stings when they disappear or die after just a few minutes of screen time (might I suggest a whole movie built around Til Schweiger's badassed Hugo Stiglitz, pretty please?). And the director's so enraptured in letting his characters talk (and talk...and talk...) that the verbal theatrics occasionally take their toll on the pacing.

That's where seeing it again pays off. And yes, I saw it twice in as many days.

Knowing exactly when the movie's going to slow down for character-based chitchat allows you to savor the music of Tarantino's dialogue. The brutality's a bit easier to swallow (or at least to turn away from) with hindsight. The uneven tone (It's over-the-top comic/bloody action junk food! No, wait...It's the moving story of a Jewish girl on the run...No, wait...) doesn't jerk you out of the moment. And dyed-in-the-wool nerds can relish the references more thoroughly. Just like any overstuffed banquet table, you get the most out of Inglourious Basterds by going back for seconds.

Dirty Not-Quite Dozen: The Inglorious Bastards (1978 edition)

2009-08-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'm such a Quentin Tarantino loyalist that I fully intend to plunk down my sawbucks for opening weekend of Inglourious Basterds--this despite the presence of one of the least skilled A-list actors in history, and a deliberate misspelling that just drives me nuts (I'm far from anal about grammatical flouting, except when it comes to cuss words. Cuss words should never be writ with anything but the most pinpoint precision).

But Tarantino's mega-budget event flick'll have to go a long way to be as entertaining as the first movie (sort of) bearing the title.

The original Inglorious Bastards (now THAT'S how you spell 'bastards'!) hit international screens in 1978 with little fanfare. At its modest core lives a classic Dirty Dozen set-up: A group of condemned military miscreants--deserters, thieves, murderers--are accidentally sprung free when their convoy gets massacred by German fighter planes in France; then they spend the rest of the movie on the run from German and Allied Forces until a twist of fate offers them redemption.

No, the wheel ain't reinvented here. But does it really need to be? Director Enzo Castellari delivers vivid pulp characters and thrills aplenty on a shoestring budget, the action scenes fly fast and furious, and two of the most entertaining tough guys of the 1970's--Bo Svenson and Fred 'The Hammer' Williamson--stand at the forefront of this cinematic pissing contest. It's the kind of movie that my curmudgeony ex-army sergeant dad would've eaten up back when he still went to the movies: No-bull characterizations; lotsa stuff blowing up; no kung fu or fussy pretentions to art; and ten skinny-dipping machine-gun-packing Nazi women. The enclosed trailer summarizes things nicely:

Tarantino's revisionist opus, incidentally, has nothing to do with the original, but the auteur's influence encouraged Severin Films to put out an impressive '3-Disc Explosive Edition' of The Inglorious Bastards. Included: a pretty terrific transfer of the movie; an amusing conversation between Castellari and Tarantino in which the latter allots the former maybe six sentences edgewise; A making-of documentary almost as long as the movie itself; A CD of the original soundtrack; and most importantly, a tour with Castellari of the movie's scenic European locations...Just in case you were wondering what the river with all those skinny-dipping machine-gun-packing Nazi women looks like today.

Oko Yono, Treetarantula, Arbitron, and AFCGT: The Joy of Bleeding Eardrums at the Comet Tavern

2009-08-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

I heart Capitol Hill.

It's one of the few parts of Seattle that's largely resisted homogenization and maintained its off-kilter and funky vibe. A surging mass of hipsters, summer-vacationing college kids, and vagrants pepper its streets and alleyways this time of year: Neighborhood streets practically hop with all the energy, and the Comet Tavern couldn't be plopped into a more ideal area.

Graffiti-encrusted and beer-spattered, the Comet's the antithesis of the blandly-fancy-pants watering holes that inundate most Emerald City neighborhoods. It also merits Northwest institution status, having hosted dozens of bands at its current location for over twenty years. It's a great, sweaty, wonderfully distinctive place to see bands you've never heard of, playing their guts out. Which is what I did on Thursday, August 6.

Oko Yono, Treetarantula, Arbitron, and AFCGT played the Comet that night, none of whom I'd heard of prior to stumbling into the dilapidated tavern and all of whom made me really damned happy. All four bands were cut from the same general sonic cloth, pounding out some ungodly, largely instrumental guitar/bass/drum-anchored noise that referenced Northwest instrumental combos like Earth and Kinski, thickly layered with avant-garde noise along the lines of Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth in their less-accessible moments. It’s a defiantly uncommercial sound born from a serious love of Loud; Not the kind of assault I’d plug into every day of the year, but as immensely satisfying as a slug of homebrewed moonshine if you’re in the right mood.

Oko Yono served up early Sabbath as part of their sludge soup; Treetarantula worked a more psychedelic side of the street; Arbitron kicked up an industrial punk-tinged variation; and AFCGT ladled elements of prog-rock and thick funk in. But for every outfit maximum volume, caveman drum pounding, and guitars yowling like packs of grizzlies presided.
Seeing these guys do exactly what they wanted to do—despite its current un-hipness, to a small-but-totally stoked crowd on a proverbial school day—inspired this jaded old warhorse beyond measure. The joy of being there rubbed off on some of the other patronage, too: In one wonderfully surreal moment, a pool-playing customer threw down a rambling stream-of-consciousness rap during AFCGT's set, straight out of nowhere and much to the band's amusement.

My earplugs did bupkis to shield my ears from the din, and despite my best efforts a lot of the photos I shot looked, well, nuts; as though the heavy volume and thundering energy had my camera crying uncle, too. Somehow, it all fit. Thanks for making my Thursday, gents.

Passings: John Hughes, director

2009-08-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

John Hughes would've laughed off the notion, but in his own populist and unpretentious way he was the voice of a generation.

You'll likely hear variations of that statement echoed ad nauseum in the coming days and weeks, largely because like me so many writers, bloggers, and sitemasters grew up as part of that generation. But the endless repetition of that sentiment doesn't make it any less true.

I was gonna go all academic and analyze Hughes's work with typical Petri Dish microscope scrutiny, but such fussing almost seems to diminish it. The most moving tribute I've read thusfar, and the one that taps into the director's soul most deeply, comes from Alison Byrne Fields' excellent blog detailing her very personal connection with the director (Go read it now. But please come back, pretty please? Thanks. And thank you, Dean Saling). John Hughes largely made movies for kids, and none of them were what film cognoscenti would call masterpieces. But he captured the layers of adolescence--the unrequited crushes, the alternate rebellion against and obsession with fitting in, the inherent absurdist comedy that is high school life--like no filmmaker before or since.

Whether he was amusingly chronicling the days preceding winsome Molly Ringwald's sweet sixteen in Sixteen Candles, locking five high-school archetypes in detention 'til they bared their souls in The Breakfast Club, or injecting teen wish fulfillment with a hefty dose of surreal Marx Brothers hilarity in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Hughes always found a core of relatable truth in even the most broadly-drawn teenage stereotypes. And his sure-handed use of music in his soundtracks merits an essay in its own right (provided nicely by the LA Times' Todd Martens here. And thank you, Bob Suh).

Hughes's movies brim with memorable setpieces, but for me the most sublime of them lives at the end of Sixteen Candles. Molly Ringwald's crestfallen Samantha Baker looks up from the steps of her sister's wedding chapel to see her dream boy Jake (Michael Schoeffling) waiting for her; moments later there's a fade-in to the two of them bathed in lambent yellow light, talking above her birthday cake before they slowly kiss to the haunting strains of The Thompson Twins' "If You Were Here." If you're lucky you've been on one or both sides of that cake at least once in your life. And no one knew that better--or felt it more deeply--than John Hughes.

Passings: Walter Cronkite, Journalist

2009-07-17T22:43:00.000-07:00

Rita and I spent this Friday night watching All the President's Men, the excellent 1976 drama detailing the efforts of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to uncover the Watergate scandal.

Woodward and Bernstein were bottom-rung reporters at the Washington Post who started out covering a simple burglary at a Washington D.C. hotel, and ended up unpeeling layer upon layer of a conspiracy that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon.

The movie's a riveting view--crackling Hollywood filmmaking seamlessly working hand-in-hand with a profound sense of social conscience--and, ironically enough, exactly what I was watching when news came through the wire that respected news anchor Walter Cronkite passed away at age 92.

Cronkite exhibited the purity of journalism exhibited by Woodward and Bernstein, but on a much more sustained level. He started out as a World War II correspondent, vaulting into the middle of action in the North Atlantic. By the time he retired from the CBS News anchor chair in the early 1980's, he bore witness to several of the key events of the twentieth century--the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King; every agonizing moment of the Vietnam War; the moon landing of 1969; Richard Nixon's ignoble bow out of politics; and the Iran Hostage Crisis, among many others. All along, Americans always felt like they could trust him.

We live in an era where television journalists are treated (often deservedly) like telegenic dunderheads. Cronkite was one of the last TV anchors who did what they did out of a genuine sense of pride, duty, and conscience. He shed real tears when reading the sobering announcement that President Kennedy was slain by an assassin's bullet, and stared viewers squarely in the face with his unflinching 1968 assessment that the Vietnam War was locked in perpetual stalemate. Despite the many horrors and tragedies he saw in his career, he remained by all accounts one of the most idealistic and ferociously compassionate human beings who ever walked the earth.

Our world is that much less rich, has lost some depth, with his passing. And that's the way it is.

Passings: Farrah Fawcett, actress, and Michael Jackson, pop singer

2009-06-25T22:18:00.000-07:00

How strange and ironic that two of the pop culture firmament's most massive figures should pass away within 24 hours of one another.

Farrah Fawcett (who died at age 62 after a long battle with cancer) wasn't just a TV star: She became one of the most enduring physical archetypes of the 20th Century, her decade's equivalent of Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, or Madonna; someone whose distinctive look continues to have ripple effects on fashion and beauty perception well into the new-ish millenium. I don't think it'd be difficult to convey the impact she's had to a kid of this generation: Hell, just open up any magazine or turn on a TV set. Some variation of Farrah will surely emerge from the page/screen--that California-girl smile, that trim and tan figure, and most importantly that exquisite mass of feathered blonde hair have all found replication amongst too many of today's actresses and models.

When I was nine years old and just beginning to recognize the strange wonder that was the female of the species, Farrah Fawcett represented a stopgap between wholesome Mickey Mouse-style crushes and the earthy realities of real, grown-up desire. My triggers of feminine beauty may have changed over the years, but for me and many of the men of my generation Farrah Fawcett was Ground Zero for our sexual awakening.

She was also a better actress--and a savvier human being--than most gave her credit for. Hers was such a formidable presence that it's easy to forget she only spent one season playing private eye Jill Munroe on Charlie's Angels, and that beneath the tight sweaters and short shorts was a pretty sharp cookie. Farrah displayed range to reckon with in the Emmy-nominated telefilm The Burning Bed, and even in the failed movie projects she undertook after leaving Charlie's Angels (Somebody Killed Her Husband, anyone?), she possessed a self-aware comic touch that portended the makings of a real career. Too bad that her looks, meteoric fame and extended time in the gossip pages overshadowed her talent.

With a legacy as formidable as Farrah Fawcett's, it'd take the passing of a demi-god to overshadow her death, and in the case of Michael Jackson, that's pretty much what happened. Jackson died suddenly of apparent cardiac arrest at the age of 50, but with all the pressures of his fame and the neuroses that surely wracked him up to the end, it'd be more appropos to say that Michael Jackson died of being Michael Jackson.

Even if you weren't a rabid fan of Jackson, it's impossible to deny his massive impact on pop culture. Only Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Frank Sinatra could boast equal significance as musicians and as (hate to use the word, but it fits) icons. And in this age of file-sharing and fragmented listening audiences, Jackson will likely be the last musician in history to be able to boast selling hundreds of millions of units.

In the coming weeks, we're sure to see the inevitable cavalcade of parasites and muckrakers surface: Indeed, Jackson's personal idiosyncracies had almost completely dwarfed his musical and artistic achievements in recent years. But I'm old enough (and sufficiently immunized to the gossip press) to put Michael Jackson's musical legacy front-and-center.

I'd never considered myself a Jackson fan, but his creative impact still inspires awe. Kids today likely can't comprehend that Jackson's videos helped erase the color lines on MTV in the network's embryonic days; and that the King of Pop prefigured the rap-rock fusion of Run DMC (and, by proxy, much of modern-day hip-hop) when he hired Eddie Van Halen to contribute guitar to 'Beat It.'

In the end, the music and the performances--the stuff divorced from the wagging tongues, from the ancillary hype, from the business and career savvy or lack thereof--deserve to endure. Jackson's gravity-defying appearance on the Motown 25th Anniversary celebration 26 years ago merits inclusion with Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special and the Beatles' inaugural bow on the Ed Sullivan Show as one of the most important musical moments ever televised.

And seeing a prepubescent Jackson on American Bandstand, singing and dancing with the uninhibited expressiveness and skill of someone three times his age while his brothers backed him up, just hammers home what a fireball of a presence he was, right from the get-go.

Despite the intense laser-focus trained on Michael Jackson's personal life, he always seemed to be an enigma, a mythically-unhappy figure not quite of this earth. It's fitting that his performances seem to offer more of a window into his soul--and ours--than all the tabloid-fodder antics and innuendo rolled together. Rest in Peace, King of Pop: You've earned it.