Pop Culture Petri Dish

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, ...

In the great opening credits sequence of the John Cusack music-nerd vehicle High Fidelity , we see a good old-fashioned LP player, its needle dropped purposefully on a record. Underneath the homey crackle and pop of the ancient vinyl, the garage rock classic "You're Gonna Miss Me," by the 13th Floor Elevators, begins. Three guitar chords pound through. Then, on cue, the drums and a bizarre alien hum (actually an electrified jug) kick in. After a few bars comes the vocal, a snarling, soaring, utterly out-of-control wail that suggests a bobcat on mescaline fighting for its life. The antiquity of that sputtering vinyl only intensifies the feeling that the voice you're hearing emanates from somewhere gloriously, chillingly not of this earth. It's the kind of tooth-rattling rock and roll howl from which cult worship is born, and the possessor of that magnificent instrument, Roky Erickson, is playing Seattle's Bumbershoot arts festival on Labor Day. Such an announ...

Some of the most flawless, seamless so-called cinema masterpieces evaporate from the mind the instant you finish watching 'em. But there are certain filmmakers who can nail you to the edge of your seat during even their lesser efforts. Dario Argento , for me at least, is one of those directors. I've always thought of Argento as a bit of an artistic savant--goofy script tangents and cardboard characterizations pepper nearly all of his films. If you don't take a glass-half-full stance with a lot of his work, you could get irritated. If you don't have a tolerance for extremely strong onscreen violence, you could get nauseated. So why bother watching any of his movies? Because--warts and all--he's one of modern horror cinema's greatest visual stylists. No, scratch that: He's one of modern cinemas greatest visual stylists, period. Warts, absurdities, and all. At their best, the Italian director's movies bypass rational explanation and imbed themselves directl...

This entry is dedicated to my lovely wife Rita, who turns one year older today. Consider this an electronic birthday card, My Sweet. At an age and era when most girls were carrying crushes on Leif Garrett and Donny Osmond, Rita harbored a grade-school crush on Bela Lugosi's Dracula. As it states on the intro to this Blog, Rita's pretty cool for a girl. No, let's amend that: She's really cool for a girl. Put bluntly, there would be no Dracula without Bela Lugosi . The Hungarian horror icon's indelible performance as that most famous of cinema bloodsuckers created the template for the character. And his formidable shadow looms large over every single actor who's portrayed the Count since. Born in Lugos, Hungary in 1882, Bela Blasko rechristened himself Lugosi in homage to his town of birth when he first began steadily acting onstage with the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts at the turn of the twentieth century. A passionate political activist, he organized an ...

The films of Ingmar Bergman radically changed cinema by turning the director’s point of view inward. The Swedish master's quiet, personal films emphasized inner conflict, eschewing action for psychological substance… Just kidding. Some people experience waves of childhood nostalgia from The Wizard of Oz , or from a comfy childhood quilt. Some are propelled into the reverie of remembrance by a favorite old song. Me, I get warm nostalgic fuzzies from Italian zombie movies. Blame the Parkland Theater, which screened 'em with reassuring regularity. The Italian zombie film, like a lot of other exploitation genres, first took root in the good old U S of A. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead was a huge international hit upon its release in 1978, and its combination of flesheating zombies, action, and graphic violence registered strongly with audiences all over the world. Since there was no NC-17 rating back then, Dawn was released by Romero without an MPAA rating, to avoid t...

All actors parlay artifice for a living, so on some level all film actors are full of crap. Good film actors make you forget that they're full of crap, at least for an hour or two. At no point in his career has Tom Cruise convinced me that he's not full of crap. This is not to say that Cruise is incompetent; far from it. He hits his marks, delivers his lines with a modicum of professionalism most of the time, and has impersonated a feeling entity efficiently enough that he's hoodwinked a staggering amount of people that I respect (filmmakers, critics, and fans alike). He's never given a performance as hilariously inept as Brad Pitt in, well, 85% of Brad Pitt movies. The void in Tom Cruise's work goes deeper; bluntly put, the guy's got no soul. Picking on Tom Cruise at the moment is as fashionable as a trip to Sak's 5th Avenue and as easy as Lindsay Lohan after three beers. But I've been riding the Tom Cruise Un-fan Wagon for a lot of years, kids, so I...

It's Tom Jones's birthday today, and what better way to celebrate than by giving my faithful readership (both of you are the greatest!) a Petri Dish 101 crash course on the man's work? You need to take out a mortgage to buy tickets to your average arena/big-deal venue show, and it cost me a king's ransom ($80+, each! Ay yi yi...) to score Tom Jones tickets recently. Normally I balk and rail against such obscene admission rates. But Jones (who struts into Seattle's Paramount Theatre on June 18) is one of the few artists who's a bargain at twice that price. Tom Jones is a unique pop culture alloy; old-school crooner, soul shouter, furry-chested lounge lizard/kitsch icon, and all-around sex god, all rolled up into one iron-lunged, larger-than-life package. He's old enough to qualify for Social Security benefits, but can still tear the roof off the sucka at age 65. Born in Ponty Prith, Wales on June 7, 1940, Jones came of age musically in the mid '60's. ...

This is for my east coast pal Jasper, who's looking for some background and recommendations on Hammer Films. Simply put, there would be no British horror cinema without Hammer Studios. This small independent movie company was formed in the early '30's, initially financing and producing budget B pictures in various genres for almost two decades before strategy and fate intersected to make Hammer a buzzword for chills, and a formative influence on the modern horror film. In 1955 the company released The Creeping Unknown , a solid science-fiction thriller based upon the popular BBC radio and TV character, Professor Quatermass . In the movie, Quatermass (played by US character actor Brian Donlevy) observes a young astronaut (Richard Wordsworth) who's returned from a space mission and is gradually mutating into, well, something creeping and unknown. This inexpensive but very effective genre exercise made considerable jack for the young studio, and an equally successful Quate...