Totally, Tenderly, Tragically

Lovely beyond belief. In fact, don't analyze anything you see. Instead, a feeling: a hermit receiving his first hug in he-can't-recall.

A Groundbreaking Development

When in Dubai, land of a thousand and one dreaming billionaires, do as the local developers do: overdo Everything. Home of architectural indulgences like the world’s largest indoor snow park (coolly situated on the sun-drenched main boulevard), the city’s soon-to-be-completed Skyscraper of skyscrapers, the half-mile high Burj Dubai, is the first of six 100+ story buildings to decorate the desert sky. For a shock-and-awe perspective, one only has to look to Chicago, with only two such towers and a third on the horizon. Additionally, the Sears Tower, at its tippy-toes top, is still 900-odd feet shorter than the Burj’s projected height. Let’s hope that the moneyed man at the top of the Burj is comfortable with not seeing the earthlings below.

Dubai’s most recent announcement, however, reduces the rest of its upward expansion to mere background. On Tuesday, plans were unveiled for an eighty-story, shape-shifting skyscraper--the “world’s first building in motion.” Each floor of the aptly named Dynamic Tower will be able to rotate independently (via wind turbine power) and each takes only a week to assemble because they are composed of prefabricated units. The efficient, environment-friendly process, in turn, requires far less manpower and, in some small way, mediates Dubai’s notoriously exploitive labor practices. A possible red flag, though, could be the fact that lead architect David Fisher doesn’t have an accredited architectural degree.

Yet, if finished, the future of architecture will come at a steep price (say $4-$40 million for an apartment). Similar towers are also being discussed for Moscow and the original monolithic city, New York.

Check out the oasis-like computer rendering here.

I Do Declare (Futurism)

In 1909, Futurism founder and Italian ideologue Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the manifesto outlining the tenets of his new, slap-to-status-quo-art movement. Here are those violent, Make-It-New points:

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

William Holden: A Different Kind of Hero

My published Flavorpill post:
When William Holden burst upon the screen as a violinist-turned-boxer, the Golden Boy exhibited an alchemical quality that was nine-tenths bonhomie and one-tenth brooding cynicism. As the years passed, Holden adjusted the ratio to give each of his roles—from carefree playboy to kill-anything-that-moves desperado—an effortless believability. And with a voice ideally suited for voiceover work (as heard in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard), Holden made an impact even after his lady-killing looks faded. For two weeks, Lincoln Center surveys his rich career, screening classics like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Network, and The Wild Bunch, as well as lesser-known fare such as Fedora, Wilder’s other love-hate ode to Hollywood.

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Woogie Boogie Weegee

I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side

Beaux-Arts

New York, circa 1931

PSA on a Friday

Dear Reader,

The previous, oh, 200+ posts are Flavorpill listings I have decided to put on my blog for posterity's sake. If you see a "tonight" or a date-specific phrase, you'll understand why.

Experimental Night: Zbigniew Rybczynski

My published Flavorpill post:
Music-video director Zbigniew Rybczynski (pronounced “Rib-chin-ski”) is a preposterously talented, tech-savvy maverick. Simultaneously breaking and making the rules of established filmmaking, Rybczynski earned his Hollywood rep in the early Eighties, creating mind-bending videos for John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Grandmaster Flash. Rybczynski’s techniques-- pixilation or motion control photography-- set the tone for MTV’s early heyday and inspired decades of subsequent music-video artistes (Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze are amongst his disciples). Tonight, the Cinefamily and Rybczynski himself present a retrospective of the director’s groundbreaking shorts.

Young Mr. Lincoln & Prisoner of Shark Island

My published Flavorpill post:
Perhaps America’s most screen-adapted president, Abraham Lincoln is the mythic epicenter of this John Ford double feature. The first collaboration between Ford and Henry Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln molds the director’s Whitmanesque ardor for the assassinated into an enthralling, but decidedly fictionalized early history. The cornpone script, which follows Lincoln from a general- store clerkship to his adept defense of two wrongfully accused brothers, is at times anxiously earnest, but Ford’s reflection on his Lincoln’s maturation retains a poignancy nonetheless. Prisoner of Shark Island, meanwhile, attempts to exonerate the historical Dr. Samuel Mudd, the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Samaritan who unwittingly treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg.

Young Frankenstein

My published Flavorpill post:
Writer-director Mel Brooks’ revisionist shtick peaks in his send-up of monster movies, Young Frankenstein. Brooks ambushes the genre ith his trademark mix of raunchiness, madcap musical tangents (particularly “Puttin’ On the Ritz”), and over-the-top parody, including a gut-busting bit involving a girl and Gene Hackman as a blind hermit. Shot in lustrous black and white, Young Frankenstein is chock-full of inspired performances. From co-writer Gene Wilder as the nefarious Frankenstein’s (Fronckensteen!) grandson, to Peter Boyle as the monster with an abnormal brain and “enormous schwanzstucker,” to Cloris Leachman as keeper of grandfather Frankenstein’s copy of “How I Did It,” the cast is more than game for Brooks’ hilarious butchering of old Hollywood.

Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

My published Flavorpill post:
The New York School of poets is renowned for its canonized males (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, etc), but its leading women have been largely overlooked. Like morning light slivering through history's forested branches, Maggie Nelson's Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, offers a poetic, feminist analysis of women's integral role. Tonight, Nelson and a panel of her peers — including subject Eileen Myles, critic Bruce Hainley, poets Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, and artist-musician Tara Jane O'Neil — creatively and critically respond to the shifted spotlight.

Winter Sky Highlights

My published Flavorpill post:
Before your grand plans this Friday, experience the grandeur of a twinkling firmament at one of the west side’s most unheralded resources, the Santa Monice College Planetarium. With the moon’s delayed ascent, tonight’s breathtaking telescopic viewing includes the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula, and a head-spinning array of constellations from the legendary to the obscure. What with the view, the science tidbits, and the cocktail-party wisdom, you'll finally get a night of LA stargazing that won't have you asking for a refund on your tour-bus ticket money.

The Wicker Man

My published Flavorpill post:

Robin Hardy’s cult classic, The Wicker Man, was the prototype for Neil LaBute’s horribly disappointing remake. Fortunately, the CineFamily celebrates the original’s disquieting pagan pageantry on the big screen tonight. The suspenseful plot begins with mainland Sergeant Howie’s investigation of a missing girl on a remote Scottish isle. As the Christian officer investigates the island’s arcane society and its immoral rituals, the community of svengalis suspiciously begins to rope-a-dope him, led by pseudo-diplomat Lord Summerisle (career villain Christopher Lee). Organized religion is broadsided here, of course, but the slow-cooked shocker is deliriously provocative and sinuously disturbing to the last lingering shot.

Wholphin #5

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
If the crème de la crème acronym C.R.E.A.M (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) speaks to you, fear not as those loving purveyors of esotericism at McSweeney’s also distribute Wholphin, a divine, independent DVD magazine of rare shorts. The quarterly pub’s infancy is indexed with Spike Jonze’s lost 2000 Al Gore election documentary, Daily Show writers rewriting the Japanese Bewitched, and Steven Soderbergh’s Godard-gushing, sci-fi homage, amongst others. Selections from Wholphin’s fifth eclectic issue are screened tonight, with rumors of a crying competition, a Consumer Service Announcement to Identify Clone-free Products, and never-before-seen footage from Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog and P.T. Anderson.

A Cinefamily Valentine’s: Wendy Clarke’s Love Tapes & Casablanca

My published Flavorpill post:
Valentine’s Day is about L-O-V-E, and tonight, the Cinefamily offers up a romantic doubleheader to stoke that tender feeling. First up are Wendy Clarke’s favorite Love Tapes: compiled by the artist since 1979, these heartfelt, three-minute videos feature people musing on love over handpicked background music and are vicariously cathartic. Next up: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as erstwhile lovers in the for-all-time wartime romance, Casablanca. When a luminous Bergman asks Sam to play it again, and weary Bogie hears it, the flashback intrigue sustains us until the bittersweet, breathtaking finish.

Victor Victoria

My published Flavorpill post:
Though more traditional than, say, Hedwig and the Angry Itch, Blake Edwards’ musical Victor Victoria still displays a similar teardown mentality about genders preferences and performances. Like Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Edwards’ gender gambit entails wholesome Julie Andrews masquerading as a male soprano whose “Victor/Victoria” cabaret act involves “his” impersonation of a woman. Soon, 1930s Paris is swooning, a drastic turnaround brought about by the encouragement of a gay entertainer (Robert Preston). Among Andrews’ admirers is a very confused, very straight Chicago gangster (James Garner), whose main squeeze and main muscle provide some slapstick silliness. A heartfelt romp with plenty of Henry Mancini tunes, it’s nostalgia playfully wedded to progressive ideas.

Underworld

My published Flavorpill post:
In 1927, Viennese director Josef von Sternberg-- later famous for his Marlene Dietrich-inspired masterworks-- set a new standard for silent film, exploring the dark world of the American gangster. Underworld’s chiaroscuro narrative revolves around a capricious Capone-like character, Bull Weed, documenting his dubious activities at a suspenseful pace. The detail-heavy plot thickens to a vengeful boil that threatens to consume Rolls Royce (Weed’s erudite right hand), Feathers (his heavily made-up moll), and Buck Mulligan (his bitter rival). While it’s seeping with possibly dated sentimentality, the effect of the film’s general tough-guy tone, shoot-first-ask-later action, and enthused names lasts to this day.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

My published Flavorpill post:
Director Jacques Demy described The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as “a film in song”-- every line is sung to Michel Legrand’s sublime score, which conforms to conversation’s naturally singsong cadence. When star-crossed lovers-- Nino Castelnuovo, a make-ends-meet mechanic, and Catherine Deneuve, daughter of the titular boutique’s widowed owner-- are separated by the Algerian War, the pair’s bliss culminates in one romantic (read: pregnancy-producing) night. Deneuve is then torn between fidelity or financial security with a diamond dealer. The film toasts and spoofs the movie musicals of Demy’s era, while striking a balance between fantastical and realist styles with a brilliant, hypersaturated color scheme.

Ulrike Ottinger: Prater

My published Flavorpill post:
Ulrike Ottinger settles her restless aperture on Vienna’s Prater amusement park in this odd, engaging film. With a curious cast that includes the descendants of the “man without a torso,” an illusion-machine repairman, and current and past guests, Ottinger traverses time and space to explore the attraction’s cultural importance. She brackets her reminiscences with rare archival footage and a reworking of Alice in Wonderland as a hopscotch adventure; it’s as jubilant and jarring as the Prater’s own carnival amusements.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her

My published Flavorpill post:
In Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard curbs his usual bang-bang bravado to muse on his title’s double entendre-- Her refers to both his beloved (but rapidly changing) Paris and the housewife/prostitute Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady in Brechtian self-awareness). A free-associative approach gives the omnivorous director a chance to weigh in on politics, consumerism, Barthes, and that Nouvelle Vague fixation: cinema and the liberated woman. Yet the film is remarkable not for its au courant cynicism, but its pop art beauty. Raoul Coutard’s CinemaScope camera accentuates Lichtenstein-like colors, and gracefully captures a city--and a woman-- adjusting to the modern age.

Tropical Malady

My published Flavorpill post:
Based on Thai folklore, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s hypnotically sensual film Tropical Malady explores a hesitant romance between a soldier and a shape-shifting country boy. Divided into dialectic halves--the first rooted in an urban reality, the second in a magical forest-- the film is an intoxicating reverie with a twisting narrative. As Weerasethakul considers the nature of desire, the film shifts midway through, pitting the soldier against a man-eating tiger that could be his beloved. Silently bonding in the dark rain forest, the lovers share both a tentativeness and primeval attraction. The dynamic is the most enchanting element of the film, and its persistent resonance is utterly ravishing.

Trail of the Screaming Forehead

My published Flavorpill post:
“Who can sleep with the brows on the prowl?” taglines Larry Blamire’s Trail of the Screaming Forehead, a heady tribute to 50s sci-fi B-movies with all the trimmings: brilliant color (Craniascope here), catchpenny costuming, delightfully droll exchanges, and a nonsensical storyline. In small-town Longhead Bay, a sexy scientist, with an inexact, high-brow Brit accent speculates that “thinking-up stuff ability” stems from the forehead, not the brain, and convinces her clueless colleague to inject cranium-enlarging Foreheadazine. (He believes each dosage swells his brilliance.) Scientific Method or skulduggery? We find out during a full-out attempt by outer-space foreheads to attach themselves to the city’s dim denizens.

Touch of Evil

My published Flavorpill post:
When Orson Welles left his last American masterpiece, Touch of Evil, to the edit-happy heads of Universal, his position was similar to that of a translated writer: his reputation hinged entirely on someone else's intelligence. Of course, the dough-minded bigwigs misunderstood Welles' unusual film noir and their clear-cut version played for the next forty years. In 1998, however, the director's 58-page, edit-by-edit memo helped restore the film to its original, more ambiguous vision. Opening with the famously virtuosic crane shot, the good cop-bad cop tug-of-war (Charlton Heston’s by-the-book Mexican against a larger-than-life Welles) and Henry Mancini’s jarring jazz score anchor the eccentric character study, which ends, fittingly, in an uneasy compromise.

Tim Bavington: There We Were, Now Here We Are

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
Sin City artist Tim Bavington reinvents the once-obsolete “stripe painting” with some hometown verve. Besides the vibrant Vegas Baroque, Bavington incorporates sound into many of his dense compositions, assigning a musical note to each color and naming the spray-painted acrylics after a recognizable rock song--as in the duo of Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue) and My, My (Into the Black). The piano-key-like swaths of color lend warmth and familiarity to the works’ impersonal uniformity; like Rothko’s multiforms, Bavington’s cascading colors almost melt into the gallery space, with each piece’s horizontal blur evoking a landscape rushing by, reduced to transitory shades that recur and disappear with optic allure.

Thrift Store Movie Xmas

My published Flavorpill post:
For its final festive happening of the year, the Echo Park Film Center offers a smorgasbord of seasonal oddities they’ve dubbed the Thrift Store Movie Xmas. The nonsense includes the “lost” Star Wars Holiday special, cable access-style musical acts, and the made-in-Mexico Santa Claus-- a gloriously redubbed, Santa-vs-Satan experiment. Local glam evangelist Miss Velma makes a special appearance, while on-screen participants include the Mirthworms, HeMan and SheRa, and Garfield.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil

My published Flavorpill post:
The 1959 doomsday film, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, is an important time capsule with an uncomfortable hypothesis; it posits a post-apocalyptic world where only a black man, a white woman, and a racist remain. As coal miner Harry Belafonte wanders vacant New York streets and imagines intimation with mannequins (copied in current box-office bonanza I Am Legend), he unexpectedly discovers two other survivors. Each person struggles with how to salvage a human future in the face of society’s now-obsolete racial divisions. Writer-director Ranald MacDougall’s blend of mid-century American themes-- Cold War concerns, sci-fi savvy, and racial politics-- still remains forceful almost a half-century later.

The Wild One

My published Flavorpill post:
The Wild One may not be a great film, but it is an enormously influential one. Bob Dylan rode-- and crashed-- a Triumph, the same make that Marlon Brando sat confidently astride of in the film. The Beatles got their name from one of the film’s motorcycle gangs. Most notoriously, Brando’s nasal, nonconformist retort of “Whaddya got?” to an innocent inquiry of “What are you rebelling against?” summarized the country’s panic over juvenile delinquency in one sentence. As for the movie itself, the taut narrative arc follows the method actor’s band of scary pranksters, the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, and a rival gang as they battle for supremacy in a small California town. It’s worth seeing for Brando’s biker regalia alone.

The Whole Shootin’ Match

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
The film that supposedly inspired Robert Redford to start Sundance, Eagle Pennell’s 1979 paragon of regional filmmaking, The Whole Shootin’ Match, observes the Sargasso Sea existence of two backwoods dreamers (Lou Perry and Sonny Carl Davis) with a languorous cinematic eye. Shot on a shoestring budget in black-and-white, Pennell’s film dotes on the Texan’s indolent, alcoholic days and shifty enterprises (like raising chinchillas). Apart from their half-baked schemes, the two underachievers spend their time with family, out hunting, or at honky-tonks. But while Pennell’s story is colored by an unspoken melancholy, it’s redeemed by the film’s many rough charms.

The Virgin Suicides

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
Cinematographer Ed Lachman doesn't have the behind-the-camera cachet of Christopher Doyle or Vittorio Storaro, but his Swiss Army-knife work cuts an impressive figure nonetheless. Lachman's strength is his versatility: he’s captured Fellini's in-your-face aesthetic (in I'm Not There) and a yuppie's empty excess (Less Than Zero) with equal polish. The BAMcinématek series on the cameraman continues with Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, in which Lachman adjusts his aperture for Coppola's dollhouse treatment of the Lisbon sisters' demise. The subject may be Poe-and-Plath morbid, but Lachman's Polaroid-perfect shots of teenage idyll and soleil—along with Air's plaintive score—evoke a faded romanticism.

The Violin

My published Flavorpill post:
With a tender musical motif that recalls Kon Ichikawa’s anti-war tract The Burmese Harp, Francisco Vargas’ astute debut, The Violin, tracks a violinist’s escapades during the peasants-against-military free-for-all of ‘70s Mexico. While eking out an existence as on-the-move musicians, Don Plutarco (Ángel Tavira in a custom-cut role) and his sons surreptitiously amass ammunition for the campesina peasant movement. But when a vital guerilla vein is unexpectedly captured, the apparently docile violinist orchestrates a precarious ruse on the occupying captain. Adding earthy beauty to this harsh reality are stark silhouettes caught in Vargas’ expressive black-and-white shutters, consciously reminiscent of early Russian propaganda pieces.

The Thin Man & Christmas in Connecticut

My published Flavorpill post:
With its mythic milieu of Prohibition-era Manhattan and its charming gumshoes, William Powell and Myrna Loy, The Thin Man established early criterion for conjugal sophistication and affectionate sarcasm. It follows detective-cum-debonair retiree Nick Charles as he and wealthy wife Nora drink at parties and delight in repartee. That is, until they are approached to find a missing inventor, whereupon their genuine chemistry and ingenuity truly shine. Also playing is Christmas in Connecticut, starring Barbara Stanwyck, who poses as a famous food columnist living in New England, when she is actually a single New Yorker, clueless in the culinary arts. Irresistible intrigue stirs up when her none-the-wiser publisher and a war hero come by for dinner.

The Stone Rider

An unpublished post:
Fritz Wendhausen’s little-seen classic The Stone Rider is an atmospheric beauty-tames-the-beast yarn with a German expressionist twist; it could be a distant ancestor of Edward Scissorhands. Scorned and secluded, Rudolf Klein-Rogge's misunderstood Master terrorizes a Teutonic village until the sister of a woman he accidentally kills answers his cries for love. Master's unearned reputation as an evil influence, though, make the unlikely couple's romance a fairy-tale respite until the unhappy finish.

The Shining

My published Flavorpill post:
The Shining opens with cinematographer John Alcott's eerie, beautiful aerial shots of Colorado's empty byways — it's a gorgeous, unsettling scene-setter for Stanley Kubrick's classic adaptation of Stephen King's novel. Struggling writer Jack Torrance (a scenery-chewing Jack Nicholson) volunteers his family to be winter caretakers at the mountain-locked Overlook Hotel. In between big-wheel rides through the Overlook's cavernous halls, Jack's son Danny begins witnessing supernatural phenomena (most famously, a pair of twin wraiths) while his dad grins and grimaces his way into homicidal mania. Although it's been parodied into overfamiliarity, Kubrick's singular vision of psychosis still unsettles, with its slow-roast suspense punctuated by bursts of neck-snapping aggression.

The Savages

An unpublished post:
In The Savages, dementia and domesticity become Savage subjects when John and Wendy’s not-so-dear dad becomes afflicted with the former. Impeccably played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, the socially shut-in siblings must overcome their own dilapidated relationship while dealing with their distant father’s deteriorating memory. The domestic détente with dad allows the brainy brother and sister to rehash and reshape their past and present while moving toward mutual understanding. Tamara Jenkin’s first feature in nearly a decade is a dramedy of inclement charm, addressing the trauma of set-aside childhoods while managing loss, memory, and family with humor and sweet subtlety.

The Reflecting Pool

An unpublished post:
Jarek Kupsc’s The Reflecting Pool invents an investigation of 9/11 with conspiratorial implications. Our right-wing regime bears the brunt of the accusatory assumptions in this better-now-than-never film about two men’s pursuit of the truth about that historic autumn day. The answer-seeking journalist-researcher duo-- one with a daughter who died in the attacks-- bound between New York and D.C to dissect top-secret information, digest eyewitness testimonies, and assume an about face on our wholly blameworthy government’s role in the holy attacks plus aftermath. Whether if it is revelatory or rehash, the film’s human foundation lends leverage to its remonstrative, piece-by-piece discoveries.

The Producers & The Twelve Chairs

My published Flavorpill post:
Overflowing with merriment, Mel Brooks’ first film The Producers tells the now-familiar tale of a once-toasted theatre producer and his accountant. Their fantastical money-making scheme involves staging a monumental flop-- Springtime for Hitler. From Dick Shawn’s LSD-addled as the leading man to its taboo hysterics, Brooks’ self-conscious rendering of a Broadway disaster is a burlesque classic. Also screening tonight is Brooks’ fantastical film, The Twelve Chairs, which tracks a former aristocrat, a beggar, and a priest as they search for a fortune-filled chair.

The Omen

My published Flavorpill post:
When your cute child is actually the Antichrist, as Gregory Peck and Lee Remick discover in The Omen, it’s understandably hard to accept. As parents to the hellacious Damien, they uneasily unearth the grounding truth about their lovely lad, while the death count is creatively, and cruelly, realized. Unlike contemporary child-horror stories, Richard Donner’s unsettling nocturne, replete with cautionary clergy and crossed statuary, impresses with its innovative craft. Jerry Goldsmith’s moody score of alternating Latin litanies and comforting lyricism, and Technicolor cinematography by Star Wars Gilbert Taylor are pitch-and picture-perfect for this resplendent rejoinder to The Exorcist. So before All Saints Day, Ave Satani!

The Moon is Blue & The Man With the Golden Arm

My published Flavorpill post:
Otto Preminger’s tried to destroy Hollywood’s obsolete Production Code in the ‘50s by inserting drug use and “deviant” sexuality into his films. Without the Code’s seal of approval, he released The Moon is Blue and The Man With the Golden Arm to resounding success. The mild-by-today former details a chaste actress courted by two methinks-the-lady-doth-protest-too-much men (William Holden and David Niven). The latter features Frank Sinatra’s harrowing performance as a determined-to-be-clean heroin addict and card dealer whose spuriously crippled spouse forces him back into the dissolute fray. Kim Novak is the alluring alternative in a film famous for Saul Bass’ paper cut-out opening and its coolly inventive jazz score.

The Marines Who Never Returned Home & Wildflowers on the Battlefield

My published Flavorpill post:
Lee Man-hee brings tender humanism to the war-movie genre with The Marines Who Never Returned Home and Wildflowers on the Battlefield. In these fascinating chat-before-combat dramas about the Korean War, he parcels out insights about the tragedies of an embattled nation. However, as warfare often unceremoniously confirms, for each touching moment comes the sobering shock of violence.

The Manchurian Candidate

My published Flavorpill post:
Some forty-odd years since its release, John Frankenheimer’s supremely suspenseful The Manchurian Candidate remains on point-- even prescient-- about closed-door politics. McCarthyism and Communism stuff the contextual crevices of this puzzle of a film, in which former Korean War POW Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) experiences chronic nightmares that hint at something deeper than battle-triggered hysteria. Soon, he realizes that his platoon was brainwashed Peking-style, with his decorated superior Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) programmed for political assassination. Shaw, in turn, becomes the instrument for his self-serving mother (Angela Lansbury) and her anti-communist, presidential-hopeful husband. Awash in Red Scare fear, the film bandies between satire and thriller for an unforgettable finale.

The Little Fugitive

My published Flavorpill post:
The Little Fugitive captures the step-right-up rush of a trip to Coney Island in 1952. Influencing the likes of Truffaut and Cassavettes, the film follows seven-year-old Joey during a weekend escape to the erstwhile wonderland after he “kills” his older brother (don’t worry: in Shakespearean spirit, ‘tis but a prank). Morris Engel’s handheld camera documents Joey’s seriocomic excursion with a documentarian’s reverence for the candid, but poetic image. Throughout, Coney Island and its crowded glamour embody any kid’s conception of Eden: a land overrun with sugary temptation, amusement, and the scary new notion of free will.

The Leopard

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
Neorealist filmmaker Luchino Visconti adapted Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard with an elegant, epic eye. While Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon lend their gorgeous faces, Burt Lancaster’s patriarchal Prince Don Fabrizio is the film’s focus. Documenting the rise of the Sicilian bourgeoisie and the final throes of its aristocracy, Leopard is best known for its ravishing, hour-long ballroom denouement. The grandiose film also drums up sweeping wartime scenery, quicksand politics, and tradition’s age-old reaction to social revolution. Visconti’s grace is seen in the painstaking period detail and amped-up color of this unqualified masterpiece.

The Last Laugh

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh hinges on a dolorous, rise-an-fall performance by Emil Jannings, who play a proud porter unfortunately demoted to washroom attendant. The expressionist classic is best-known for its avant-garde characteristics such as murky lenses, slow-moving and sumptuous tracking shots, and the audacious absence of title cards-- except for one mocking, coda-inducing instance.

The Last Dragon

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
The Last Dragon is a flypaper film, in which the over-the-top 80s idiom is caught to be flaunted. Produced by Motown founder Berry Gordy, the cult classic is stuffed with the electric sights and sounds particular to the Reagan era: risible costuming and choreography, one-named stars “acting,” and dialogue that makes “written by” appear irrelevant. The story follows a square Bruce Lee devotee Leroy Green (martial artist Taimak) in his path to become the One. Jiving Chinese fortune-cookie makers, a combative warlord named Sho’Nuff, and a veejay love interest (Prince girl Vanity) add some crowd-pleasing funk and soul to his solo journey.

Shampoo & The Landlord

My published Flavorpill post:
Pauline Kael considered Hal Ashby’s Shampoo one of the finest films of the ‘70s-- no small compliment considering Hollywood’s impressive output that decade. The crisscrossing comedy follows a narcissistic hairstylist (Warren Beatty) who juggles current loves (Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant, Carrie Fisher), an old beloved (Julie Christie), and the financial challenges of funding his dream salong. With Election Day, 1968, as its backdrop, Shampoo skewers the politics of sex at the height of the free-love era. Also screening is Ashby’s heart-of-gold first effort, The Landlord, which tracks a grown-up Richie Rich who learns tough interracial truths after he purchases a inner-city tenement.

The Kite Runner

An unpublished post:
As per Khaled Hosseini’s stunning source novel, Marc Forster (Finding Neverland) mines recent Afghan annals and the historical American immigrant experience for a moving exposition on friendship and its integers—betrayal and redemption. The film maps the well-to-do Amir from his kite-flying childhood in Kabul to his high-flying novelist adulthood in San Francisco, while a seed of guilt grows. When he discovers that Hassan—the have-not childhood friend he betrayed—has been murdered and that the Taliban has captured Hassan’s son, he heads homeward for deliverance. Forster negotiates the decades and continents, Dari and English dialogue, and native actors to capture the human weight of history.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
Fabulously filthy, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie faithfully remembers those repulsive, nausea-tinged trading cards from the late ‘80s. Forgotten favorites include Valerie Vomit, Foul Phil, and Messy Tessy, with each ugly youngster yucked up in one-note, off-putting personalities. The live-action film transfer of the how-the-hell fad begins when an antique collector discovers the alien garbage can that houses the mischief-makers. Of course, his airhead assistant frees them, leaving the two to save the unknowing world from the gross moppets. With the manners of a mannequin, this film’s original run was protested so fervently that it was removed from theatres.

A Century Ago: The Films of 1907

My published Flavorpill post:
At the 20th century’s turn, the still-new art of moving pictures by many as a fly-by-night fad. Come 1907, though, the populist demand for more refined offerings at nickelodeons foretold the arrival of something big. Tonight, the Academy celebrates that expansive year with an archive-driven screening of the then-infant industry’s finest films. Accompanied by Michael Mortilla’s live musical score, the slate of escapist entertainment features a primitive attempt at Ben-Hur, documentary footage of Los Angeles’ Shriners’ Conclave, Melies’ stop-motion classic The Eclipse, and other early box-office hits The Dancing Pig and The Little Girl Who Did Not Believe in Santa Claus.

The Earrings of Madame de… & Letter From an Unknown Woman

My published Flavorpill post.
My mishmash:
Like many mid-century directors from the Continent, Max Ophüls’ legacy is scattered on both sides of the Atlantic. Ophüls’ ironic French masterpiece, The Earrings of Madame de..., fills its four corners with ornate decoration and oneiric camerawork in recounting aristocratic adultery through the fortunes of a pair of earrings. Ophüls’ American effort, Letter from an Unknown Woman, is remarkable for its fluid, florid tracking shots. The flashback-style storytelling shows how love cruelly eludes Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. Warm up the tear ducts!

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

My published Flavorpill post:
Chic and charismatic, Jean-Dominique Bauby was ELLE France magazine’s elegant editor-in-chief until, in 1995, a massive stroke stripped him of his speech and all other motor faculties except the ability to blink his left eyelid. Despite his particular paralysis (called locked-in syndrome), Bauby systematically parlayed the imprisonment of his nimble mind into memoir, titled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. American artist Julian Schnabel, whose own paintings breathe brutality and bare emotion, harvests Bauby’s inspirational tale to craft a story that shades both tragedy and triumph. Loyal to the original French lyricism, the film assumes an empathetic and enlivening first-person perspective, including periods of blackness that powerfully convey Bauby’s reliance on blinking.