Pop Culture Petri Dish

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 ...

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...

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 t...

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 ...

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 s...

Damn, was the party weak. The swinger's pad sported beige walls and even more beige sounds. Everyone lolled around the bland rooms, sucking on fancy drinks and huffing cocaine like Hoover vacuums, and the soundtrack to the party was buffed to a tiresome, glossy sheen. Rock and roll had feathered its hair, bought itself some quaint matching furniture, and had moved way uptown. The Conceited Jackass Party that comprised the first half of the seventies was like that. Suddenly the roar of a loud, unmuffler'ed car engine impeded on--then entirely drowned out--the genteel tinkle of expensive cocktail glasses and the inane whirr of Me-Generation small talk. A rusted-up ghost ship of a Cadillac--all fins, oxidation, exhaust plumes filling the air like brimstone byproduct, and deafening growls--ground its way from the street into the immaculately coiffed lawn outside the pad. The front doors of the ride popped open, and two figures emerged amidst the off-white smoke. Some kind of Va-Voo...

You were completely and totally into me, and I into you. I know that now. And that thought, that fleeting instant of magical chemistry, consoles me as I think of your voice being silenced forever. We met a decade ago, but the night reverberates in me with the heady urgency of the last breath that just escaped my lips. I waited for you jadedly, with no more expectation than mere entertainment--just the amiable passage of an hour or two passively listening to you. But you elegantly strode out and bewitched me and everyone else in that dimly-lit little class-A joint. Cheekbones so haughtily elegant and defined that they could cut diamonds; gams too perfect to have any right gracing the body of a 35-year old, never mind that of a septuagenarian; hourglass figure poured into a gold lamé dress by God in one of his most continental moods...That utterly unique and enchanting package alone was enough to have the whole lot of us eating out of your hand that night. Then you opened your mouth and ...

For anyone of a certain age, or anyone far-sighted enough to appreciate film or pop culture of an era other than this one, the last couple of weeks have been especially heart-breaking. Bettie Page , who died at age 85 on Thursday, left an indelible impact on the country's--nay, the world's--collective sexuality that can't be overstated. Oh, and any man who does not harbor a hemisphere-sized crush on her is a fool. In a world so celebrity and pop-culture saturated that the word 'icon' gets tossed around like used Kleenex, Page was the real deal. Like most pioneers, she received little recognition (even outright derision) during her pin-up model prime, but her striking signature look--jet-black hair and bangs, crystalline eyes eternally generating playful sensuality in those Irving Klaw photos--generated a major aesthetic and erotic ripple effect. And now that she's gone, it's awfully easy to see Bettie Page as a martyr for the Sexual Revolution. Aside from he...

As I write this, DVDs of many of my favorite horror and sci-fi films sit on a shelf next to me--a library of fear at my fingertips. Exhaustive information about even the most obscure little genre films is just a mouse click away, and horror and sci-fi geekdom is a megalithic, multi-billion dollar industry. Thing is, literally none of it would exist without Dr. Ackula, Forrest J. Ackerman . Ackerman, who died on December 4 at the age of 92 , wasn't a household name to most folks, but he left a massive thumbprint on the horror and science fiction genres. He essentially created fandom, purchasing his first science fiction pulp magazine ( Amazing Stories ) in 1926, creating the first Science Fiction Fan Club in 1930, and popularizing the term 'sci-fi.' He spread the gospel of the fantastic to the world as a literary agent, editor, sometime author, and was a close friend to everyone from author Ray Bradbury to horror movie icons like Boris Karloff and Vincent Price. But to me an...

Chef died. That's probably what all too many people thought when presented with the news that Isaac Hayes passed away at the age of 65 . But remembering Hayes for South Park alone is a little like remembering Orson Welles strictly for doing the voice of Unicron in that 1986 Transformers movie . Long before he good-naturedly winked at his iconic persona in the guise of Chef, Isaac Hayes left a seismic impression on popular music. I can't remember a time when some aspect of Isaac Hayes wasn't tincturing my life, whether it was hearing the immortal theme from Shaft at age five on the tinny car radio buried in my parents' old Chevy, watching the man menace the president of the USA in Escape from New York on my 14th birthday, combing used record racks for vinyl copies of the Truck Turner soundtrack and Isaac Hayes at the Sahara Tahoe in college, or watching him bring a crowd of apathetic Seattleites to a booty-shaking frenzy at Bumbershoot a few years back. Enclosed ple...

It's been a few weeks since the sad passing of director/actor Sydney Pollack , but appreciation for his life and work will never get old as far as I'm concerned. The man helmed some truly great films throughout an era much ballyhooed as the last Golden Age of American Cinema--the Seventies. In contrast to Altman's loose-knit improvisation, Coppola's sense of bruised epic romanticism, and Scorsese's mean-street virtuosity, Pollack--like his aesthetic and generational peer Sidney Lumet --kept it direct. That unerring knack for setting aside visual or thematic showiness to tell the damn story imprinted itself all over Pollack's best directorial efforts, and nowhere is it more prominent than in 1975's Three Days of the Condor . It's out in bare-bones form on DVD, and (all high-fallutin' verbal foppery aside) it completely and utterly rules. Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, a low-level CIA researcher who comes back from lunch one afternoon to find his ent...

Hearing of the death of movie legend Charlton Heston at 84 , from this corner at least, is tantamount to seeing one of the tallest, most majestic trees in the cinema forest felled. The hell with his oft-paradoxical political views : Heston was loved and highly-regarded by co-workers, and he leaves behind a formidable legacy of film work. His unconventional but striking looks, his intensity and the rich cadence of that voice indelibly etched itself on the collective consciousness. I've literally known the man's work as long as I've known life, and his passing feels like the loss of a member of the family. Charlton Heston represented one of the last sustained links between the glamour of the traditional Hollywood Studio System and the modern dream factory we know today. Unlike many of his peers, Heston sustained his relevance through some of American Cinema's most radical upheavals. Yeah, he could gnaw scenery with the relentlessness of a swarm of locusts, but his longevi...

On an elemental level, I'm pretty ill-equipped to comment on the life of Heath Ledger, the highly-regarded Australian actor found dead on January 22 at at the tragically-young age of 28. Up until a week before he died, I'd never even seen one of his movies. Being a good pop culture/media sponge, though, I'd followed the man's career from afar for quite a few years. I'd avoided his early breakout movies Ten Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale due to my utter lack of fondness for the genres they represented (synthetic nineties teen comedy and willfully anachronistic MTV-ized period piece respectively). Never got around to seeing any of his other movies, either (though five of 'em, ironically, have been on my Netflix cue for a long time, periodically supplanted by my spur-of-the-moment fetishes for blaxploitation flicks, old-school Japanese horror movies, etc). All along, though, I'd continue to read interviews with Ledger or see him on some froth...

For decades, Robert Goulet was Mr. Perfect. With his old-showbiz helmet of pompadored black hair, bright blue eyes, chiseled jawline, and bell-clear baritone speaking/singing voice, Goulet (who died on October 30 at age 73 ) was less a traditional leading man than a larger-than-life cartoon of that leading man, and to his eternal credit he always seemed as keenly aware of it as anybody. He rose to prominence as the stage's first (and I'd argue, definitive) Sir Lancelot in Lerner and Lowe's monster hit musical Camelot in 1959. That voice and those features--both strong and distinctive enough to clearly communicate to the back rows of the most packed houses on Broadway--ensured him frequent employ on the musical stage, most recently in 2005 for a revival of La Cage aux Folles . But Robert Goulet became celebrity comfort food of the most welcome variety for me (and many of my generation) on TV in the seventies and eighties, logging in scores of talk-show appearances and gues...

Deborah Kerr , one of the greatest movie actresses of the last century, died earlier this week , and with a storied career that spanned five decades and key roles in scores of classic films, I could write a book about her. This being Horrorpalooza, of course, I'd like to pay tribute to her contribution to one of the greatest horror movies of the sixties. The Innocents got some serious face time during last year's Horrorpalooza , but revisiting this masterpiece just puts this legendary thespian's brilliance--and her willingness to take risks--into even sharper focus. All genre-related bias aside, The Innocents was one of Deborah Kerr's most important projects. It's widely acknowledged that Kerr's against-type portrayal of the tumultuous, adulterous Karen Holmes in From Here to Eternity turbo-charged her career and made her bankable in Hollywood again, but after that triumph she was back to playing strong, decent women who were the unquestionable moral compasse...

Character actor Nicholas Worth passed away back in May of this year, but there's nothing like Horrorpalooza to provide a nice excuse to tip a glass to the man's overlooked contributions to the genre. Worth paid his dues for a good thirty years in showbiz, lending his stocky, imposing frame and cut-square-through-you gaze to villain roles of varying size and significance. For me, his presence was always welcome, whether he was menacing Starsky and Hutch , getting roughed up by John Saxon in The Glove , running nasty errands for Larry Drake in Darkman , or aiding and abetting the dapper Louis Jourdan's elegant villainy in a sublimely moronic turn in Wes Craven's fun Swamp Thing . Ironically, though, Worth's finest onscreen hour--and one of his few genuine leads--comes in one of his most hard-to-watch movies, making for an awkward but sincere recommendation from this neck of the woods. In 1980's Don't Answer the Phone , he plays Kirk Smith, a violent Vietnam v...

From this corner, The passing of Kurt Vonnegut doesn't just feel like a literary loss of epic proportions. More than any other author, Vonnegut felt like a friend to me, or more accurately, like my favorite uncle: The one with the crotchety-but-compassionate voice of wry, offhanded wit that managed to expand your mind massively even while you laughed your ass off. Like his role model in letters Samuel Clemens , Vonnegut was a master at calling bullsh%t on the greedheads, warriors, paper-pushers, and hypocrites who all-too-frequently run this world. He did so without ever letting his own--or his readers'--foibles and frailties skate by, and he wasn't above interspersing intense insights with the occasional fart joke or flight of science fiction fancy. Kurt Vonnegut's work forever changed the way I look at the world. His writing provided a big source of bonding between my girlfriend (now wife) and me back in the day. In high school I'd read--and like any rational hum...