GWEN WELLES'S SAFE PLACE

The world of Henry Jaglom has never been a safe place for me, but it certainly seems to have been that for many actors over the course of his almost 40-year career as a writer and director of what could generously be termed ensemble films that have consistently succeeded or erred (depending on your point of view) on the side of creative indulgence, for his actors certainly but also Jaglom himself. Jaglom disdained the “rules” of conventional storytelling from the start, opting instead to create free-form cinematic tableaux in which “real life” could be credibly represented by his actors’ long, shapeless improvisations. But I wouldn’t blame everything on the actors—Jaglom’s own fingerprints are just as sticky. He edits sound and picture with no concern over rhythm, pacing or even respect for one person finishing a sentence before a jagged cut-- ones which often, I swear, it seems you can see the visible marks of splicing tape roll by-- hitches the frame and delivers the viewer to her or his next destination, which is usually almost indistinguishable from the last. It is arguable whether Jaglom’s rejection of classic form and filmmaking fundamentals is purposeful or whether it is borne of simple disregard and, maybe, incompetence. What seems less arguable is that, looking back over his career, he has managed to balance his fumbling, look-Ma-no-training style with an almost licentious weakness for the raw voluptuousness of actors in their most vulnerable and self-indulgent moments.

I recently caught up with Jaglom’s first feature film, A Safe Place (1971), and the thing that astounded me right out of the box, and confirmed some of my own suspicions about the director, is how fully recognizable his rambling, “searching” style seemed right from the beginning. In a mid-period film like Someone to Love (1987), in which the director gathers a bunch of friends in a soon-to-be-demolished Santa Monica theater to reminisce and indulge heir memories, all of which becomes a dissolute, upper-class white Hollywood meditation on the pain and folly of the creative process, Jaglom’s camera cuts back and forth between his actors with careless abandon. It prods and burrows into and just as surely evades the director’s subjects with a kind of phony interest that always seems to be most interested in reflecting the actor’s concerns back onto Jaglom himself. He casts himself here, as he almost always does when he casts himself, as the supreme yet conflicted listener, the one who will be there for them when everyone else throws up their hands and calls them on their bullshit, even as he recognizes—in that very sensitive yet condescending male way of his—that he’s probably full of shit too. Over his career he often cast Orson Welles, in a kind of balancing act of directorial iconography, as a kind of detached overseer, a magician, a muse, and in Somebody he cast himself as the off-screen interviewer who presumably sat at Welles’ feet and lapped up his every wry, bitterly wise observation. Yes, Jaglom is there for his actors, but like his camera’s phony observational status, Jaglom lets his subjects have the floor to his detriment and theirs—he rarely demands that they use the raw material of their experience and shape it into something that speaks to the entirety of a vision. It’s a constant wonder to me that someone who worshipped a control freak like Welles could find his way to a whole new martinet-like relationship with his actors, and with the craft of film, by so roundly rejecting the mastery of the film medium Welles represented. You can see him in a bit part in Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said (1971), as a self-indulgent, manipulative theater teacher who manipulates a group of students into a series of guerrilla theater tactics that, for one student in particular go violently awry, and he seems already the fully formed Svengali of “whatever, man” performance neurosis that he seems in films from 20 years later in which he would cast himself as the blunt-talking, whiny romantic lead of reason and constantly prodding psychobabble, a Woody Allen for nebbishes who, unlike Allen, are more or less convinced they have their shit together and are endless fascinated by the poor bastards (seemingly everyone else) who don’t.

In A Safe Place, Orson Welles is The Magician, who is seen only in what are most likely flashbacks (with Jaglom, from the beginning, one can never exactly tell), in which he relates with somnolent authority to a beautiful woman named Susan (Tuesday Weld). Susan is a dream vision of self reflected on by a woman named Noah (also played by Tuesday Weld), who thinks back on her more ethereal identity while she tries to make her way through a romantic life swinging between the attentions of bookish, well-meaning Fred (Firesign Theater’s Phil Proctor) and the dynamic, appetite-driven, vaguely sinister Mitch (Jack Nicholson, encouraged to improvise and already refining the “Jack” persona). Her time with the Magician, in which he entertains her with magical levitating balls and other devices, is Noah’s retreat from herself into “a safe place” where she dresses as she did when she was a child and relates to the Magician as a father figure, where she isn’t bound by the responsibilities and natural impulses of an adult. In her older roles Tuesday Weld always projected a bit of reluctance to move into the adult realm, and she’s perfectly charming here in a movie in which that reluctance is the ostensible subject. And it’s a bit of a relief that when Jaglom’s camera sputters and stumbles to its next scene, it’s usually one in which Weld can at least offer her natural luminescence, a quality Jaglom seems, at least at this stage of his career, ill-equipped to muffle. ( Jaglom may be one of our most appropriately named directors, for the jaggedness of his editing and the way his lumber (lomber?) around in their given space.)

But Jaglom, even as a rookie, can’t resist the urge to meander away from his simple premise, and so we get a couple of scenes shot in the apartment where Noah lives—she works in some sort of salon which is apparently attached to the living quarters, so there’s always someone milling about who may or may not be part of the living arrangements, you know, in that late ‘60s, early ‘70s California-dreamin’ kind of way. She can be seen frittering about the edges of the frame in a couple of earlier scenes, but no introduction is given to the character played by Gwen Welles, whose very first film this was, when we are suddenly yanked away from the Noah/Fred/Magician triangle and into a scene in which Welles embarks on a monologue built around a peculiarly paranoid sexual fantasy. It’s one of those moments which are usually meant to embellish character, only here Jaglom, perversely, gives us the back story sans the actual character. It’s all rendered flat and affectless by Jaglom’s aloof observational approach and his insistent perforation of the scene with cuts to Weld in a state of romantic bliss or, worse, Nicholson, leering at the camera (her/us) and cackling while trying to think up something amusing to say.


Gwen Welles in Hellé (1972), directed by Roger Vadim

Welles was a pretty, natural actress who seemed incapable of a phony impulse—some I think mistook this rawness for lack of talent, and the kind of roles she is best known for (Sueleen Gay in Nashville being the best example) probably reinforce this notion to an uncomfortable degree. But she was smart, quick, and she used that nasal, disaffected voice to disarm those who hoped to catch her “acting” in pictures like Altman’s delightfully baked Southern California dreamscape California Split (1974) or Joan Micklin Silver’s comedy set backstage at an independent weekly newspaper, Between the Lines (1977), or even in Roger Vadim's period drama Hellé (1972), in which she plays a deaf-mute girl who befriends a French veteran who returns home during the earliest days of the Vietnam War. Welles had a captivating strawberry beauty about her and a slightly stoned fizz endemic to her personality that was sweetly seductive, and you can see in that monologue in A Safe Place that Jaglom had, quite differently that what he had in Weld, a camera subject that could do more to invite the viewer inside than he might have been capable of handling at that point (if ever). Welles relates a situation in which she’s walking down some New York City street and suddenly becomes painfully aware of her vulnerability, and Jaglom surrounds her with actors hanging out, rolling joints, paying half-attention to what she’s saying and being condescending and inappropriately jokey when the do pay attention. After being scolded by a store owner for leaving herself open to attack by unsavory types on the street, Welles relates how she began, on her unaccompanied walk home, to let her paranoia about being attacked take over, eventually imagining herself as a lonely, bruised, ugly 45-year-old whore who can’t be sure if she even cared if she were to be raped or not. She goes on, her companions on the bed still only half listening, to describe becoming enamored of the entire experience of feeling so degraded—“I loved that whole feeling; I was a turn-on, very sexy.”

Suddenly the guys lying around her smoking, relaxing, become more sympathetic to her story, and Jaglom’s camera settles into its customary stare. Welles’ vulnerability increases as she admits that imagining herself as a beaten-up whore freed her from her everyday sense of isolation, of being apart from the dinner guests and normal contacts of everyday life, freed her from the sense of isolation, cueing her into the oneness to be found amongst those whose very lifestyle is built around despair. This is Welles’ moment in the movie, a point at which the young actress was given to command the camera, a chance any young actress would relish. But Jaglom undermines it by his hunger for “truth,” for the unadorned relating of experience. It is, of course, a lesson Jaglom has yet to learn, for all of his devotion to actors and their craft-- the stripping away of actorly effects in pursuit of some nugget of realistic insight usually results in less fascination, less revelation, because an actor’s art is built on artifice, the acclimation of experience, borrowed or lived, on moments made from the construction of an interior world which the actor then makes exterior. As Jaglom’s own movies have soften proven, the more convinced an actor may be that he or she is diving down deep and exposing something real, the more likely it is that the audience is painfully aware of that actor putting on a show, perhaps one more “raw” than a heavily rehearsed stage or film performance, but a performance nonetheless. Jaglom, his self-satisfied smirk evident even when he’s not on camera, leaves Welles, in her first film, to twist in the wind of this kind of ultimately embarrassing self-revelation, ostensibly because he’s fascinated by the actor in the moment, but I think more likely because he hasn’t a clue what to do to help Welles shape the moment into something truly affecting. The camera zooms in when Welles confesses about her strange affinity with these possibility violent street people: “If this is where one is happy, I don’t know where one goes from there. I felt completely apart from anything that didn’t resemble being completely miserable.” Dr. Jaglom nods patiently, and the scene cuts away, presumably for good, to Tuesday and Jack gamboling in the park, with Welles (the rotund, bearded one) always hovering nearby and bursting into inexplicable laughter.

Yet after 10 minutes or so, suddenly we’re back on that bed with Gwen Welles and he sympathetically stoned friends. “And they said I’d taken all these sleeping pills, and I couldn’t remember doing it.” The movie, as is Jaglom’s wont, roughly tosses us back into the realm of Welles’ psychic confession with nothing even resembling nuance. At this point it’s clear that Jaglom has let the camera run for a god-awful duration, and Welles sits mid-frame, skewered by her director’s patient anticipation of that therapeutic breakthrough that is surely on its way. “I took three pills just because I could stand the pain,” Welles now pleads directly into the camera. “Do you think people get to a point of pain where they just can’t stand it?” Long, uncomfortable pause. There are lots of tears now. “I took three pills to sleep and I almost died. You can imagine when I woke up I really wished I was dead.” Long pause. “I constantly beat myself on the head for being so unhappy, and I just get more unhappy and I ask when it’s gonna stop, and it never stops.” Long pause. The tears are flowing for real now. A hand reaches out from right of frame and cresses Welles’ face. (Could it be Jaglom’s?) There is another jagged cut to a boardwalk scene, a woman smoking in the foreground, and the shot is so clumsily composed you could be forgiven for missing the fact that Welles is in the background of the shot, dressed in a child’s black dress and holding a doll, staring forlornly. I imagine it’s the novice director’s intent to equate on some level Welles’ pain with Weld’s more free-wheeling attempt to deal with her past and her present romantic dilemma, but it’s a weak connection. There is no Welles thee beyond this monologue, and Jaglom wouldn’t, by evidence of his superficial visual treatment of Weld, be much capable of digging into a real character anyway, let alone a doubling relationship like the one he blithely infers here.


But then we get the pay off. We cut back to Gwen Welles, inexplicably smiling through her tears, still pained but with light in her eyes. “Gee, I feel all better,” she proclaims, in the manner of a patient getting up off a psychiatrist’s couch after a particularly productive emotional spew. “All of the sudden I don’t feel so sorry for myself!” It’s an emotional Band-aid moment, but it turns out to be what Jaglom, with his peering, relentless camera, is after, and it’s hard to imagine we’re supposed to take it for anything but a triumph of sorts, the magical exorcism that occurs when people just “talk about it” and “let it all hang out.” Welles, beaming, ends her stay in the movie with this proclamation: “I don’t think I’ll try to kill myself anymore because I like walking down the street with all the bums.” Presumably without the indulgence of the paranoid fantasy that came along with that walk just a few moments earlier. Well, who wouldn’t feel better about all that? It’s a testimony to her luminescence as an actress to know that her talent would out and she would go on to contribute superb work to two or three of her generation’s best movies despite being essentially betrayed by the director of her first feature. (That feeling of betrayal I sensed from the film was likely not one shared by Welles herself. She may have well felt that indeed Jaglom took her to a safe place where she could do good work-- she did act for Jaglom two more times, in 1989’s New Year’s Day and in Eating, released in 1990.)

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I had a film professor who once said that there was no such thing as a bad or misused moment in a film, because if your mind started to wander into other areas of your life and thoughts occurred to you that were of some importance during that wander, then the film could be said to have performed some important function for you. This is a premise that seems necessarily separate from whether a film works as art—sitting and watching a ticking alarm clock, to grab a random image, could function in precisely the same way, yet would we shout at the top of our lungs, “Henry Jaglom’s alarm clock is a masterpiece!”? Probably not. Yet my mental meandering during A Safe Place, especially where Gwen Welles was concerned, did set me to wondering about the actress and the circumstances that led to her death in 1993. As I reflected on the content of Welles’ monologue, I realized that I had no memory of how she died. And considering that I found Jaglom’s use of the actress to be borderline exploitation, I really hoped that Gwen Welles did not give in to the kind of demons she wrestled with “in character” in A Safe Place and kill herself. Suicide would already be an irreconcilable tragedy, but to have an on-screen moment that so prefigured this destructive act would be, as Welles herself put it, too much to bear. So I set about Googling Gwen Welles, an actress whose life was too short, as was her résumé, in the hopes of finding out something more about her life and what ultimately happened to her.


A good part of my summer was spent with several of the documentary films of Allan King, who will be the subject of a Criterion Eclipse box coming in September. King’s films deal with aspects of life we generally, as a society, turn either a polite or a defiant eye away from or work desperately to ignore altogether. His 1967 film Warrendale documented five weeks in a home for mentally disturbed children, and the nonjudgmental, patient way in which King observes and constructs the “stories” of his subjects would set a standard for excellence in nonfiction film making that could coolly stand beside the more emotionally exhaustive approach of someone like Frederick Wiseman. But it is King’s films dealing with aging and the inexorable finality of life’s final processes, which result in Alzheimer’s-related derangement, isolation and, of course, death, that so absorbed me over the past summer. I will have much more to say about the films themselves when the set becomes publicly available. But I will say that I have never seen a more quietly wrenching film than King’s two hour-plus document of life in a Toronto cancer ward entitled Dying at Grace (2003), a work of profound intimacy about the insistent approach to the most intimate moment imaginable, that in which a person’s life force passes out of the body, turning a person into a shell, a deteriorated physical memento of remembrance. King exquisitely frames the stories of several patients, some of which are more coherent and ambulatory at the outset than are others, but with their consent he has endeavored to portray the dignity hidden within the indignity of being at the mercy of a ravaging disease. We are privy to moments that chronicle the despair of loved ones, their anguished acceptance, and the struggle of the patient him or herself, shrunken and comatose, to simply draw another wet, ragged breath. And yet King’s approach is completely without exploitation.

This is not to say King’s films, particularly Dying at Grace, are without moments where the individual viewer might question the appropriateness of being privy to such moments of intimate agony. King’s ultimate statement is to leave those kinds of decisions to the viewer. In attempting to chronicle what is a legitimate, inevitable stage of life and to look on it with honest inquisition, searching for the grace which, despite the individual circumstances, can be located if one can simply bear to cast a gaze, King demystifies one of our greatest, most profound fears. King himself died of brain cancer a mere five years after finishing this film, and watching it one wonders if he knew of his own condition when he conceived the film. Even if not, the finished film remains an unparalleled act of empathic therapy, for him but just as surely for us.

I bring up King’s films here because, among the many things they do, they bring us close to the lives and deaths of “real” individuals (I hate the way reality TV has bastardized the use of a word like “real”) with whom we have never occasioned to meet before, and by doing so make us feel, within the span of two hours, the price exacted by the privilege of seeing someone, anyone, given up to death. How much more devastating, then, would it be to document, or see documented, the death of someone one knows, even in the most superficial sense?

It wasn’t difficult to locate an account of what happened to this wonderful actress. I Googled “Gwen Welles death” and was immediately directed to her brief obituary which was published in the New York Times on October 16, 1993. In addition to the fact that she was married to actor Harris Yulin, which I did not know, the obituary said only that Welles had died of cancer, and then went on to briefly list some her of most well-known films. (It was cold comfort to me to find out that, unlike her character in A Safe Place, Welles had not flirted openly with suicide or had ultimately taken her own life.) But the search also unveiled the Web site of director Donna Deitch, on which is posted a brief clip from a documentary Deitch filmed about Welles as the actress struggled with a particularly devastating form of colon cancer. The film, Angel On My Shoulder, which I have not seen, seems to aspire to something akin to what King achieved in his films, an unflinching portrayal of one’s person painful trauma that could never be mistaken for exploitation. Deitch was Welles’ best friend, and Welles, in a severely emaciated and weakened state, directly addresses Deitch (and us) to relate a most intimate agony. It’s that combination of our personal experience with Welles, the actress, and Deitch’s long history with her as a close friend that combines to make Welles’ pain so acute. The film also details Welles’ decision to reject the typical cancer treatment therapies, which helps us to understand the contradictory, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exasperating personality that Welles possessed. (Deitch is interviewed at length on her site about the film and her friendship with Welles.) Yet even in the clip provided on Deitch’s site, Welles’ often displays an unlikely humor regarding acceptance of her situation, the elusiveness of peace of mind, the possibility for growth even as her body shrinks and turns away from her. “There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t learn something,” she says with a clarity that may not be so easily accessible during those extended periods of pain that demarcate her journey toward death. What’s most moving about the Welles we see in the clip is the reticence born of experiencing pain and then having that pain momentarily recede—when she’s riddled with pain death seems attractive, but in her moments of lucidity and (drug-induced) peace she is fully aware of everything she stands to lose, which for Welles may be a different kind of pain, but equally devastating.



I have provided the clip from Angel On My Shoulder not for shock value, but because I think it’s valuable, in the way that King’s films are valuable, for the way it portrays the awful reality of approaching death and the state of grace that lies within acceptance, both the intellectual kind and the kind forced upon someone when their body begins to fail. The difference between Gwen Welles and King’s subjects is that, with one notable exception I can think of, mostly inarticulate about their situation, sometimes frustratingly so (for them and for us). And the filmmaker stays with them like a loyal friend, long past their own physical and mental cognizance, offering every hitched breath and rattled moan as evidence of the dignity one would have thought evaporated. It’s the kind of picture of physical devastation, as it relates to aging or to debilitating disease visited upon younger people, which deserves to be considered by a society as fearful of death as we are. Deitch’s portrait of her friend Gwen Welles is served well by her subject’s training in expression, self or otherwise, one which naturally became more acute the more acting she did. At one point she makes a comment that forced me back into the world of A Safe Place, a memory of how even when she was relating her emotional isolation and devastation she was smiling through her tears, her eyes lit up from a mysterious source. Incredibly, as she lies hooked up to machinery in a hospital bed, that light is still present and just as mysterious. She looks to Deitch, who is behind the camera, and says, “I look sweet when I cry, don’t I? Everybody says that I break their hearts when I cry. My face doesn’t get ugly when I cry.”

Anyone who has valued Gwen Welles’ contributions to movies like Nashville and California Split and Between the Lines and Star 80 and Desert Hearts, and even Jaglom’s films, should be glad that this document exists. I hope one day to be able to see the entire film, which was an acclaimed documentary award winner at the Chicago Film Festival in 1998. I am entirely sure it will be worth the pain.

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THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT: RAMONA AND BEEZUS

This past weekend, all about what passes these days for kid-oriented entertainment, was one not well spent for this adult movie viewer. Take a brain-dead movie like Bob Clark’s Baby Geniuses (1999). Please. When I realize this blurry, indifferent nightmare of semi-animated babies doing alarming things, eardrum-grating wisecracks (all overdubbed for infants and, apparently, the adult leads), and the presence of slumming Kathleen Turner in full Cruella DeVil, I’ll-Eat-Any-Actor-That-Moves! mode wasn’t the worst movie I’d see all weekend (not to mention the worst talking baby movie I’d see all weekend), well, so much for thoughtful, well-mannered reflection.

I also ended up in front of the thin but enjoyable The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland (1999), Henson Productions’ feature-length vanity vehicle for their furry red star which, with help from Mandy Patinkin in full Snidely Whiplash I’ll-Eat-Any-Actor-Than-Moves! mode, is good, solid, interactive fun for the under-six set. (Elmo talks to the audience, which is presumably packed with kids, and encourages them to shout back responses, a tactic that doesn’t translate to home video with 100% success, even when boosted by a canned audience track.)

I slept through what might have been the best movie of the weekend, the Farrelly Brothers’ gleefully gross live action-animation mix Osmosis Jones (2001)-- we cranked it up off of Netflix Instant Play at 9:30 Saturday night, after my oldest daughter and I had spent the first two-thirds of the day hiking and swimming, and if ever there were a sure-fire recipe for Snoring Old Man in a Blanket it is a scenario such as this. But the dregs were saved for last—Amy Heckerling’s pointless and dreadfully conceived sequel to her late-80s hit, this one cleverly titled Look Who’s Talking Too! (1990). The entire "justification" for this warmed-over comedy is the addition of two new baby voices to keep little Mikey (Bruce Willis) company— cute little sister Julie (Rosanne Barr) and best buddy Eddie (Damon Wayans)—and if the mere description of this stunt casting doesn’t tickle your tummy with bubbly giggles, then you’re probably in for as much grimacing and eye-rolling as I went through over the deliberately infantile humor, which Heckerling has focused on here to the absolute exclusion of a narrative reason for it to exist in the first place. John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Olympia Dukakis and Elias Koteas-- Whaaaa??!!-- are left entirely without a single interesting thing to do, but Mel Brooks does make a cameo voice appearance as a talking toilet, a Freudian vaudeville nightmare which Mikey imagines wanting to eat more than his poo-poo. But beyond that, LWT2 is strictly a used diaper.

But one movie made up for all the mediocrity. Ramona and Beezus (2010) is not based on the Beverly Cleary book of the same name, because there is no Beverly Clearly book of the same name. There is one, however, called Beezus and Ramona and it, like seven or eight other of Cleary’s beloved books, serves as the source for this new movie’s episodic structure, built as it has been out of incidents and settings faithfully derived from Cleary’s series of stories revolving around precocious Ramona Quimby (played here by Joey King) and her older, oft-impatient sister (Radio Disney superstar Selena Gomez). I always loved Cleary’s books, which began with Henry Huggins (1950) in which Beezus’ newspaper-slinging boyfriend took center stage, because they were sharply written, funny, unerringly sympathetic to the juvenile point of view without having to make adults looks like dummies in the process, and packed with neighborhood atmosphere—Cleary painted a vivid picture of life on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon, for Henry and his dog Ribsy, and it was a thrill for me as a child growing up in Southeastern Oregon to read books that were derived, at least tangentially, from a world I knew. (Henry pedaled a paper route for the Oregon Journal, an afternoon daily and rival to The Oregonian, which passed into history in 1982.) But I gobbled up the Beezus and Ramona books too, which came five years later in 1955, and just as eagerly, perhaps more eagerly. They never seemed like girls’ books to me, largely because Cleary’s humor, while rooted securely in the nuclear family model of the ‘50s, made way for a sharp sense of underdog irreverence in the Ramona character which was immensely entertaining and easily identifiable whether you were in a skirt or suspenders. I knew I loved this little girl, who was rambunctious, good-hearted, terribly impatient and a magnet for every conceivable shade of trouble, when I read of her confusion upon singing the national anthem on the first day of school. Cleary spends the better part of a chapter allowing Ramona to express her confusion over what exactly the “dawnzer lee light” might be, as well as her emerging fascination with this new phrase, and it was then that I knew these books had captured the rhythm of life for kids in a suburban neighborhood as well as the way they could struggle to wrap their heads around concepts and feelings they often weren’t ready to understand.

The new movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen (Aquamarine), from a cleverly distilled script by Laurie Craig and Nick Pustay, is blessedly nonfrantic and unpretentious as it communicates those pleasant nuances present in Cleary’s writing with surety and ease. The filmmakers have trusted that Ramona’s adventures did not need an infusion of Cats and Dogs-style action movie energy; they have allowed the movie to be energized instead by everyday, often uncomfortable, emotionally confusing episodes which Ramona navigates with the occasional blast of imagination, blasts which have a delightful D.I.Y. design that is true to Ramona's inner consciousness as well as a gentle raspberry launched in the direction of slicker kids’ movie fantasies. When contractors remodeling the Quimby house take out a wall, Ramona and her pal Howie joyously leap through the hole in the wall from the house to the ground, a short drop which Ramona, attached to a bed sheet parachute, turns into a triumphant plunge into the blue dotted with messy tufts of cotton clouds—the neighborhood onto which she descends is made entirely of models and play toys.)

Ramona and Beezus also has a nice, patient rhythm which carries our freckled heroine from one misadventure to the other—classroom run-ins with her stern teacher Mrs. Meacham (Sandra Oh), a disastrous attempt to reunite her beloved Aunt Bea (Gennifer Goodwin) with her hunky ex (Josh Duhamel), and the emotional fallout from a family in disarray when her Dad (John Corbett) loses his job and her Mom (Bridget Moynahan) begins to feel the stress of suddenly being the sole provider. King and Gomez communicate the gap in experience between Ramona and Beezus (also named Beatrice, but nicknamed after Ramona’s charmed mispronunciation), a realistic friction between siblings separated by seven or eight years, which is leavened by the moments in which these two let their guard down and try to help each other understand the seriousness of their situation. The performances have weight, which is in part, I’m sure, due to the openness with which the director and writers have approached the material—there isn’t an ounce of the kind of cynicism typically on display in the average lazy production aimed at this demographic in Ramona and Beezus. Yet the movie isn’t a dour affair either. It’s rather remarkable, in fact, how cast and crew have managed to maintain a balance between delights and difficulties and come up with an entertainment that is satisfying and reconcilable to the way young girls and boys see the world without excluding their parents from a degree of that same emotional satisfaction.

The cast is uniformly good—King has spunk without the attendant obnoxiousness that mars so many young performers, and Gomez, the more seasoned Hollywood actress, is perfectly fine, letting the appropriate amount of sunshine out at just the right moments to counter her slightly sour teenaged disposition. Oh is deadpan delightful as Mrs. Meacham, who turns out to be far more understanding (and much less tightly wrapped) than Ramona would have ever suspected, and young Hutch Dano is almost eerily how I imagined Henry, brought up to 2010 standards, of course. And though I would have appreciated more colorful actors as Mr. and Mrs. Quimby, Corbett has a strong connection with King that serves them both well, as does Moynahan, who I must say looks alarmingly, distracting thin here. (Perhaps she shows her stress too well.) It may be a temptation, in the face of so much overblown entertainment in American movies pitched at kids and adults these days, to overrate the ease and humor and gentle (but in no way precious) sensibility with which Beverly Cleary’s stories have finally been brought to the screen in Ramona and Beezus (with the author’s famously reticent blessing). But kid movies that avoid trading wisecracks and crude emotional button-pushing for genuine character shading are as rare as any authentic movie surprises these days. Ramona and Beezus honors its origins, as well as the bond between parents and their kids, both the ones on screen and the ones in the theater being absorbed by the story.

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MIXED-UP HORROR DADS MIXING IT UP-- PT 2!

“I’m also more sensitive to the reactions of parents in movies now. Not just if they’re experiencing grief but in empathizing with their protective instincts. The remake of The Fog (2005) was shit but it came out the fall after my son was born and I remember liking that Selma Blair’s Stevie Wayne actually left the lighthouse to go after her kid. That seemed right to me. I must have seen the original The Fog (1980) about thirty times and never thought twice about the fact that Adrienne Barbeau stayed on the air but when I watched it again after having my son, I couldn’t help but think that it was a movie clearly made by people who didn’t have kids at the time. I still love The Fog but the idea that Barbeau’s Stevie Wayne would stay on the air no matter what rather than get the fuck back home when the only thing standing between her son and all the shit in the fog is the decrepit Mrs. Kobritz is insane. The hell with staying on the air - get your ass home and protect your kid! For that matter, the old lady could use your help, too!”


That’s horror dad Jeff Allard, one of six panelists (including the Old Codger Speaking Now) sounding off on mixing horror films with the perspective of parenthood, as Richard Harland Smith continues his terrific feature The Incredibly Strange Film Fiends Who Had Kids and Became Mixed-Up Horror Dads Part 2 today over at TCM’s Movie Morlocks.

It was a real honor to have been asked to participate in what I naturally believe to be a pretty fertile subject. How great it is, then, that the feature itself has turned out to be deliciously readable, I think, for non-parental horror fans as well as those of us who have had to evaluate and re-evaluate our passion for the fantastic and the terrifying as the arrival of our little ones changed and continue to change the way we go about life.

So please visit our discussion, which is far more suitable for the Overlook than the Algonquin (but no less fun for that!) and join in with your own thoughts. Part three comes your way next Friday. The Incredibly Strange Film Fiends Who Had Kids and Became Mixed-Up Horror Dads Part 2-- fear not the grue, for it beckons to you… !

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SHOW PEOPLE AND THE REAL MARION DAVIES

"Marion Davies makes up for the rest of Hollywood."
– Tennessee Williams

If only as many people knew about Show People as know about Citizen Kane…

Like most folks who are aware of the ABCs of their film history, a couple of months ago I could have told you that in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ brilliant but not-so-disguised portrait of a media tycoon based with obvious relish on rich and powerful newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the character of Susan Alexander, the talentless vixen whom Hearst promotes into a career of fake stardom, was meant to represent Marion Davies. But unlike Susan Alexander, Davies, who in real life fell in love with the already-married Hearst, was by measure of viewers, critics and historians a sharp-eyed, quick-witted comedienne, the polar opposite of the rather nasty picture painted by Welles and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and I’d never seen her on screen to judge her talents for myself.

Davies started in show business early. By 1917, at age 20, she was already a familiar face on Broadway, having landed a featured spot in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1916, which is where Hearst first became aware of her. Her first film, which she wrote, was called Runaway Romany (1917), but it was Cecilia and the Pink Roses (1918) that was her first film backed by Hearst, and with that film their strange professional relationship began in earnest. Davies was certainly ambitious and hard-working, and Hearst wanted the whole world to know about her. He brought the full force of his media empire to bear on her relentless promotion, but unfortunately Hearst had little instinct for where Davies’ true talents lay. Over the course of her career, until she retired from pictures in 1937, Marion Davies made close to 50 movies all under the watchful eye of Hearst, all of them expensive, almost all of them financial flops. According to Pauline Kael, who wrote extensively about Davies in her famous essay “Raising Kane,” Davies, by all accounts an unpretentious and down-to-earth personality, felt smothered by Hearst’s notions of what roles were best for her. Kael wrote:

“Marion Davies was a mimic and a parodist and a very original sort of comedienne, but though Hearst liked her to make him laugh at home, he wanted her to be a romantic maiden in the movies, and—what was irreconcilable with her talent—dignified. Like Susan, she was tutored, and he spent incredible sums on movies that would be the perfect setting for her. He appears to have been sincerely infatuated with her in old-fashioned, sentimental, ladylike roles; he loved to see hr in ruffles on garden swings. But actresses didn’t become public favorites in roles like those, and even if they could get by with them sometimes, they needed startling changes of pace to stay in public favor, and Hearst wouldn’t let Marion Davies do anything ‘sordid.’”



Like take a pie in the face. (More on that later.) In the late ‘20s Davies managed to wrest free of the dull costume pictures which had become her trademark under Hearst and she made a series of freewheeling comedies, including The Red Mill (1927, costarring Fatty Arbuckle), The Fair Coed (1927), Tillie the Toiler (1927), Quality Street (1927), The Five O’Clock Girl (1928) and The Patsy (1928). However, outside of the occasional screening on Turner Classic Movies, movies starring Marion Davies have typically been difficult to come by. The recent made-to-order Warner Archives program has rectified this situation somewhat, with The Red Mill, The Patsy and other titles like The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929), Operator 13 (1934) and Cain and Mabel (1936) all now available to purchase . (Click here to find out more.) Also, new to the top of my Netflix queue is the DVD of a 2001 documentary entitled Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies, produced in association with Hugh Hefner and TCM. That DVD, in addition to the documentary (which is purported to be quite good), also includes the previously mentioned Davies comedy Quality Street, which costars Conrad Nagel and Helen Jerome Eddy and which was remade in 1937 by George Stevens with Katharine Hepburn and Franchot Tone.

Unfortunately, the reemergence, such as it is, of Marion Davies on DVD does not yet include perhaps her most beloved movie, a 1928 silent comedy called Show People, directed by King Vidor. The movie is still available on a VHS issued by MGM/UA in 1998, and though I am unaware if MGM (or now Fox) still holds the rights to the film or has any plans to reissue it on DVD it certainly would seem to be a good time to do so. Show People is one of the first, if not the first, and certainly one of the best of all Hollywood comedies, that is, comedies that shine a light on the moviemaking process and the glittery allure of the movie business.

Davies is Peggy Pepper, fresh from the boondocks and escorted to Hollywood to give a career in pictures a try by her pompous father, the Colonel (Dell Henderson), who uses his military status to affect the easily impressed who might be standing in Peggy’s way. The picture opens on the two of them riding down Hollywood Boulevard, fresh into town and wide-eyed as any modern-day tourist, and viewers in 2010 will be just as dumbstruck and fascinated as Peggy and the Colonel by all the lost monuments of Hollywood at the end of the silent era on view as they pass on the street. Soon Peggy makes friends with another young up-and-comer, Billy Boone (William Haines), who joins her on a parallel pursuit of Hollywood stardom. Peggy lands a series of jobs which put her on a distinctly Gloria Swanson-esque career track, while Billy remains mired in the land of Mack Sennett-type bit players. Of course this disparity in experience is grist for the movie’s ripe sense of parody, but it’s also a terrific showcase for Davies and her comic talents (arguments over which should abruptly end after seeing this movie) as well as a glimpse inside MGM during a period when the movies themselves were about to change forever.


It’s up for grabs just how talented Peggy and Billy really are, but in Peggy’s case her wild-eyed energy is enough to get her noticed, and enough to position Davies to let loose the gifts of mimicry and snap comic timing that were the stuff of legend within the walls of San Simeon. (A scene where she is commanded to cry on cue and finds the act near impossible is a gut-busting classic.) Davies and Haines knew the Hollywood world inside out, of course, and both had star images that were sharply at odds with their own personal lifestyles-- Davies was nothing like the Hearst-groomed waxwork candidate on display in most of her movies, and Haines was gay and living a relatively uncloseted life—so you can feel the relish and joy with which they rip into this genial parody of the Hollywood styles and fashionable entertainers of the day. Peggy rises from lowly farm girl to the hoity-toity toast of the movie business on the strength of a roster of highfalutin pictures that closely resemble Davies' own filmography, but also those of Gloria Swanson. (Swanson also comes in for some good-natured nudging by way of many of Peggy’s facial mannerisms and her body language when the actress “upgrades” her name to Patricia Pepoire.) The telling of this story certainly gives Show People ample opportunity in which to cast a wonderfully observant eye on the world of making movies in the days when talkies were but a year or so from really taking hold. Peggy dines at the MGM commissary, and in a single scene, sharp-eyed observers of the silent film firmament will spot William S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Norma Talmadge, John Gilbert, Mae Murray and seemingly dozens more relaxing over their lunches. As her star begins to rise, she is approached for an autograph by a dapper but diminutive admirer, and poor Peggy is still such a rube she doesn’t realize the fella she’s haughtily putting off is Charlie Chaplin. And in one unforgettable bit of “meta” business, Peggy and Billy are making their way through the lot when they encounter Marion Davies herself, all dressed-down, comfortable and laughing as she passes by. Naturally, Peggy cannot help but observe that the young star Davies is nothing like what she expected.

Show People’s most famous entry into Hollywood lore relates to Hearst’s hawk-like supervision of every element of Davies’ performance. He refused to allow her to participate in a scripted pie fight, and despite director Vidor’s pleas to Louis B. Mayer, who was apparently sympathetic to Vidor and his star’s desire to indulge in the spirit of the scene, Hearst insisted that his Marion not be demeaned by having to take a face full of custard. He seemed to feel that a high-pressure blast of seltzer water directly in the kisser was the more dignified route, and so it stands in the final film. Davies' wild over-emoting in her audition scene is a highlight in a movie filled with highlights (I wondered if Naomi Watts saw this performance before jumping into Mulholland Drive), and Show People stands, some 80 years after its release, as one of the funniest movies to ever come out of Hollywood. And thanks to having seen it recently on the big screen (thank you, American Cinematheque!), I’ve got the biggest crush on Marion Davies, one which I hope never goes away.

The movie deserves its stellar reputation, and I just wish that it would somehow be rediscovered so that more people who, like me, only knew Marion Davies from what we were told by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz could discover for themselves what an effervescent, charming actress she was. Kael reminded us that by the time Citizen Kane was released Davies had been retired for four years, and the publicity machine, which had tried so desperately to sell her image in such a way that even the public began to see through it and reject her, continued to grind on during that time. She suggests that audiences and readers were so worn down by Hearst’s efforts on behalf of Davies that they probably no longer even trusted their own memories of the charming comedienne they had loved in those late ‘20s comedies, like Show People:

“Mankiewicz, catering to the public, gave it the empty, stupid, no-talent blonde it wanted—the “confidential” backstairs view of the great, gracious lady featured in the Hearst press. It was, though perhaps partly inadvertently, a much worse betrayal than if he’d made Susan more like Davies, because movie audiences assumed that Davies was a pathetic whiner like Susan Alexander, and Marion Davies was nailed to the cross of harmless stupidity and nothingness, which in high places is the worst joke of all.”

Welles himself, in the recent PBS documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane, admitted: ““We had somebody very different in the place of Marion Davies. And it seemed to me to be something of a dirty trick, and does still strike me as being something of a dirty trick, what we did to her.” I haven’t had an opportunity to read it myself, but Welles did write the foreword to Davies’ own book The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst, and in it I hope the mercurial director displayed a similar tone of contrition. Personally, I hope Welles is still apologizing to Davies, wherever they both might be.

More on Marion Davies:

The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies

A brief biography of Marion Davies written by Robert Board

Notes on Show People, particularly the life of William Haines, by Jack Hagopian

Fred Lawrence Guiles’ published biography (1972)

The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw (2001).

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Many thanks are due to my friend Charley Taylor, who first made me aware of the American Cinematheque screening of Show People and insisted I take my daughter Emma to see it with me. I did, and with that single act he has well earned, with all due respect to William Demarest (whom Emma also loves), the familial moniker Uncle Charley.

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MOVIE OF THE MOMENT: INCEPTION

Inception is nothing if not the most ambitious Hollywood movie of the year. The hype machine has been telling us so for months, and the actual film, whatever its ultimate successes and failures, bears this out. Its director, Christopher Nolan, has built a career on an obsession with tricky narratives that are, by their very nature, difficult to navigate, from the low-budget Following and Memento through to his emergence as a major Hollywood player with the box-office shredding Batman films. These narratives can feel like personal obsessions-- Memento’s backward-tracking film noir hero was driven by the need to make sense of the narrative of his own life and forced to depend, thanks to crippling short-term memory loss, on the kindness of lovers and strangers to tell him the truth about his past. (Nolan upped the ante, clever boy, by telling the story backwards.) But the very trickiness of Nolan’s notions can also feel imposed from without—the multiple-narrative storytelling strategy that pointed The Dark Knight to its potentially orgasmic finish backfired, and the movie collapsed into an incoherent, pretentious heap. However, even narrative devices that are employed to serve the story thematically aren’t necessarily a measure of success. Nolan kept the audience suitably and satisfyingly disoriented in Insomnia in a way that conveyed the distress of the sleepless lead detective (Al Pacino) investigating the film’s central mystery, but in The Prestige the cinematic sleight-of-hand with which he constructed the movie was involving, but it couldn’t hide the obviousness of the movie’s big twists.

I can remember growing up and being swept up in the breathless rush of information gushing forth from movies as disparate as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Network and even a thriller like The Andromeda Strain, movies that attacked their subjects with seriousness but with wildly different tones—cosmic mystery, anger fueled by satirical corporate-speak, poker-faced medical and military panic-- and made me feel as though I were somehow inside the events and being carried along. It didn’t matter that I may not have understood all the ins and outs of what was being referenced or inferred or even explicitly laid out (some of which was due to the age at which I saw them, surely)—the movies themselves carried the electric charge of engagement with their audience that helped at least this viewer to connect with what was going on. The very act of watching them, plugging into them, made me feel smart, alive, ready for more.

This kind of tidal wave of visceral connection is clearly what Nolan is going for in Inception, and the breathless pace at which the movie hurtles into his opening set piece, all the way through its tangle of exposition, made me eager to anticipate the moment when, like in those other films, I would find a way to just give myself over to the experience of tumbling through the different levels of consciousness on which the movie plays out its mind games. Leonardo Di Caprio, with that familiar haunted glumness that is fast (after Shutter Island and The Departed) becoming his signature, is Dom Cobb, a corporate spy whose stock in trade is the extraction of company secrets by means of invading, along with a team of specialists, the mindscapes of his targets and navigating their unique psychological terrain. After a test-run designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of Cobb’s talents, he’s hired by a smooth bigwig (Ken Watanabe) not to steal secrets but instead implant an idea into the brain of a rival businessman (Cillian Murphy)—an idea to dissemble the monopolistic company he has inherited even as his own father (Pete Postelthwaite) lays dying, thus opening up the marketplace for the competition, an idea which he must perceive as organic, his own.


So far, so good. As it has been pointed out, this is essentially a Rififi-esque caper movie blown up to gargantuan Hollywood blockbuster proportions, and as such Inception remains aware and unashamed of its genre roots at this point, as Cobb and his business-like assistant (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) embark on assembling the team that will be required to perform this daring reversal of their usual methods, a job which some of them believe can’t even be done. We’re introduced to the chemist (Dileep Rao) who will concoct a sedative powerful enough to allow Cobb and company access to several different levels of consciousness, all the while keeping their inner ears “alive” to physical influence from the outside world so that they might be jolted out of the dream state at the crucial moment. Then there’s Tom Hardy (magnetic, and near unrecognizable from his thrilling turn in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson of last year) as the team muscle who can capably assume the identity of various important acquaintances of the target. And lastly, Ariadne (note literary/psychological reference, please), the student recruited by Cobb to create the fantastic interior dreamscapes on which the intrigue will play out. She’s played by Ellen Page with the actress’s patented perky insouciance and native intelligence, but thankfully minus the Juno-influenced snark, and she seems alive to the possibilities of creating mazes of the mind designed to be deliberately perplexing, especially to Cobb, who needs to be kept most unfamiliar with the mental terrain she creates in order to keep the projection of his very unhappy dead wife (Marion Cottiard), which tends to pop up at inopportune times, at bay. All these actors are sharp and fun to watch, and if their characters are written a bit on the thin side, it may be a side-effect of existing in a movie crammed to this degree with stuff. (I saw Inception with my friend Don, and I like his suggestion that a good way to look at these characters, one which could justify that thinness, is as separate aspects—the scientist, the businessman, the macho swagger, the long-buried creative idealist—of Cobb’s personality.) And they all get their introductions amidst a sea of exposition, which is annoying and overwritten, but also part of the territory—I didn’t resent it so much as accept it as part of what I wanted to see these terrific actors navigate successfully. And frankly, the effort it took to keep up with it was strangely more compelling than I expected—I wanted it to gel and make sense.

Inception hints that the worlds Ariadne will have to create will materialize the awe-inspiring, disorienting center of Nolan’s concept. The imagery most familiar to audiences subjected to the movie’s unstoppable advertising campaign are the images of Cobb and Ariadne sitting at a sidewalk café, expressionless as a Parisian street crumbles and explodes around them. Cobb illustrates to the woman the possibilities of dreamscape design by folding the city over and onto itself, and it is an undeniably exhilarating effect. Later, Gordon-Levitt further demonstrates the power of creative dream technology by taking the young designer on a walk up a staircase that leads nowhere, a reference to Escher that portends the visual feats of disorienting space and surreal unreliability of the dream environment that the movie surely holds in store.

But when Nolan gets us into the meat of the action, in which the fates of this team of mental raiders, along with Watanabe and Murphy, play out amidst Ariadne’s constructs, the movie is often thrilling, but just as often it is overwhelming and suffocating. Inception settles into a extensive pattern of cross-cutting as various intrigues—a dizzying car chase, anti-gravity hand-to-hand combat (the physical disorientation of which is caused by the jarring movement of that car chase up on Consciousness Level #1), a James Bondian ski slope shootout, a frightening confrontation with the deepest fears and emotions of two major characters—work themselves out simultaneously, each affecting the other. In other words, the last half of the movie is assembled in a frenzy of simultaneous action in the manner of The Dark Knight, and though the action hangs together much better than it did in that movie, Inception simply becomes too busy for its own good (or at least for mine). My mind was working overtime just to keep the action straight in my head, but I never found a way to give myself over to it, to surrender. It’s not a dreamer’s movie, it’s a clockmaker’s movie, and as such it demands that a viewer’s facilities be poured almost exclusively into following the machination of those various narrative cogs. For me, following them came at the expense of the treacherous emotional tones Nolan reaches for in the final act. There was no room in my tightened lungs and overstuffed skull for the expanse of feeling those scenes clearly intended.


More problematic, and more damningly on its own terms, is that the movie feels like a disappointment in terms of its visual imagination. After the priming of that Parisian street folding and the trip up that Escher staircase, it’s not unreasonable, I don’t think, for an audience to expect (especially for a big expensive movie like this) that Ariadne, inspired, might construct some playfully maddening cages inside which her prey and her colleagues might bounce. And it doesn’t seem unreasonable either for a movie that takes place almost entirely within the realm of the unreliable, the unpredictably mutable and ethereal, to have some of that feeling about it itself. Inception’s conception of those various levels of consciousness are pedestrian at worst (a hotel corridor, a ski slope) and half-baked at best—a skyline of cut-out skyscrapers and a cliffside beach setting that seems to be missing only a half-buried Lady Liberty. But they’re not differentiated enough in terms of the movie’s visual style to make keeping them straight any fun—the whole movie is Action 101, no variations of tone or texture, and those familiar street-folding, landscape-crumbling images from the movie’s trailers are just about it in terms of arresting special effects. Inception is a work made by a man who wants to give himself a technical workout—Nolan wants to see if he can pull off the challenges he sets for himself as a storyteller. The movie is, for all its big-ass sensibility, relatively light on pretense, which is the last thing that could be said of The Dark Knight, and I find it difficult to take points away from a filmmaker for his ambitions, for trying something not necessarily so much new as it is, oxymoronically, simply complicated. (In this pursuit Nolan seems to be spiritually kin to a director like Nicolas Roeg, who loved fracturing rather simple, and sometimes simplistic, ideas and reassembling them in ways that made them seem more... complex.)

But ambitions have to be realized, and I think Nolan only gets halfway there with Inception. I’m not suggesting that Nolan should have made a spy movie version of Mulholland Drive or The Exterminating Angel, but it would have been nice to at least sense some of the shivering instability or devilish humor of those movies, or other films which have successfully suggested dream imagery and thought and logic. A better movie for Nolan to have at least partially emulated would have been Joseph Ruben’s Dreamscape, which is a lot more fun than Inception while plumbing much of the same territory. As it is, Nolan’s is ultimately too square and literal for a film about the mysteries of the mind. (Did the team have to ride an elevator from one level of consciousness to the next?) And It’s simply too much; I would have appreciated some room to breathe, a break from the movie’s insistent intensity (which is too often represented by its volume level). Had I been able to breathe, I might have been more receptive to the pain at the center of the story, that which surrounds not only Cobb and his doomed wife, but Murphy and his distant, disapproving father as well. The movie doesn’t reject Freud or Jung so much as misplace them; the two are nowhere to be found in the supposedly psychologically charged action set pieces, which is the aspect of the story Nolan really cares about. At times Inception had me right where it wanted me—it has a protracted vehicle crash off a bridge into a river that is extended so long that I’m sure somewhere Brian De Palma is cursing in envy-- and even after that feeling of disappointment has taken hold, the movie flips right over and serves up the most exhilarating cut to end credits I’ve seen since Drag Me To Hell. (It involves the image of that spinning top seen above, a recurring motif in the film.) But most often I just wanted to wake up.

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THE MOVIE MORLOCKS HORROR DADS EXPLAIN IT ALL FOR YOU... PART 1!

“My posse has changed over the past few years. Now that I’m a father of two kids under 5 years old, I don’t get out to many rep screenings or conventions and I turn down most invitations to sneak peeks and movie premieres. As such, I don’t hang with the black tee shirt crowd anymore and find I’m commiserating with other parents online … and a (perhaps not) surprising number of these are horror lifers who either carry the creep torch blog-wise or actually make horror movies. I decided to corral some of these horror dads for a roundtable discussion of the challenges involved in raising children when one’s tastes run to the grotesque and arabesque (to put it diplomatically).”

So begins Richard Harland Smith’s nifty a three-part horror movie roundtable over at TCM’s Movie Morlocks entitled The Incredibly Strange Film Fiends Who Had Kids and Became Mixed-Up Horror-Dads: Part 1, the first installment of which debuted on the site today. The panel represents a good mix of writers and filmmakers who are unrepentant horror dads- old friend Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles, along with new friends Jeff Allard, creator of the horror blog Dinner with Max Jenke (Jeff also writes for Shock Till You Drop and Cinefantasique); Paul Gaita, a terrific writer who has penned for everything from The Los Angeles Times to the legendary genre publications Famous Monsters of Filmland and Sleazoid Express; writer-director Nicholas McCarthy, whose daughter grew up in the shadow of a vintage Night of the Living Dead poster; Richard, of course, and Yours Truly (that’s my little contribution to the new generation of horror fandom baring her fangs above).


The discussion is brisk, wide-ranging and fun—at least we thought so—and if nothing else really underlines the common themes that seem to occur in growing up a horror fan—the encouragement, the disbelief, the feelings of loneliness, of being an outsider, and the flipside of that loneliness—the joy of loving something you know nobody else quite gets or, better yet, which totally grosses everybody else out.

The roundtable went on long enough— this is what happens when you get a bunch of grown-up, verbiage-oriented horror geeks and turn them loose to talk about their passions— that Richard will have at least one more segment coming next week, perhaps two. Bookmark Movie Morlocks to keep up with the gab and all the other good stuff that goes on there daily from their excellent staff of writers.

P.S. I finally saw Inception last night, and I promise to write it up, along with about four or five other long-gestating projects this weekend. No hints. Okay, just one… it turns out to have something to do with dreams…

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SLIFR AND FRIENDS HONORED IN FILM COMMENT'S LIST OF TOP FILM CRITICISM SITES!

Hey, kids, SLIFR and I are on top of the moon this week!

It’s been a very busy, very heady week for me and for Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. I finally got to see Despicable Me-- I loved it (review forthcoming). It has the punch and wit of the best politically incorrect Warner Brothers cartoons, a great eye for exploiting 3D (stick around for the end credits) and toying with an audience's expectations for it, and a hilarious script that never pushes for effects or jokes too hard.

Secondly, the imbroglio over Inception and David Edelstein’s much-maligned negative review brought much attention to these parts, not least of which from Roger Ebert, who tweeted the message “FWIW, I think it’s perfectly permissible for David Edelstein to dislike Inception.” (How reasonable! Kids, this is a good example of how to approach an opposing opinion—Ebert gave the movie four stars.) What’s more, Ebert attached a link to my piece on Patrick Goldstein’s weird rant to his own comment, and I found out in very quick order just how many people follow Ebert’s every tweet. My traffic on Wednesday went through the roof—an all-time high—and though it dropped precipitously the next day, it’s still running above average through the end of this week. (And no, all you hotheads, I did not write the piece to attract attention from the likes of Roger Ebert for the express purpose of driving up my traffic. On very rare occasions it just happens that way.)

But there was a much nicer surprise in store on Wednesday that had nothing to do with Roger Ebert, Christopher Nolan or Patrick Goldstein. Internet friend Ted Haycraft left me a message on Facebook (“Have you seen this yet?”) along with a mysterious link which led to the web site for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, specifically the on-line edition of Film Comment and an article by Paul Brunick entitled “IT’S ALIVE!: The Top Film Criticism Sites: An Annotated Blog Roll”. The article, part one of an extensive two-part piece on Internet film criticism, is far more open-minded than mentions on this digital-age phenomenon have been in the magazine in the past, and there’s a lot of good information to be had and debated within it. But the really cheery part of the article came in Brunick’s long sidebar, into which he leads with the following:

“The projects included here span a wide range of genres: digital film journals, multi-writer theme sites, side projects of film studies academics, digital outreach by professional print reviewers, and, above all, the personal blogs of unpaid enthusiasts. Our only criteria for inclusion were that (a) posts must be written primarily in the English language and (b) the content must be specifically produced for online consumption. The selections are unranked and in randomly generated order (our highly sophisticated algorithm is modeled loosely on the perennial schoolyard favorite MASH).

For years now, Internet film critics have been relentlessly dumped on by many (but by no means all) in the legacy media. Though they’ve gotten little in the way of social recognition or financial compensation, cinephile bloggers have filled in the gaps of mainstream review coverage, corralled hard-to-find source materials, enriched cinema’s theoretical vocabularies and historical narratives, and shared their personal obsessions in often fascinating, hilarious, and deeply affecting ways. I feel personally privileged and just really fucking happy to shine a light on their work—all of them life-affirming examples of democratic participation and humanizing cultural exchange.”

Wow. That’s enough to put a smile on this Internet writer’s face already. And “unranked and in randomly generated order” or not, it was exceedingly thrilling to see my good friend Farran Nehme Smith and The Self Styled Siren right at the top of the heap. The list would be littered, as it turned out, with good friends and Internet acquaintances, including Acquarello’s Strictly Film School, Rumsey Taylor’s Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Glenn Kenny’s Some Came Running, Dennis Lim’s Moving Image Source, Tim Lucas’s Video Watchblog, the eponymous blogs of Girish Shambu, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Dave Kehr, Greg Ferrara’s Unexplained Cinema, Jim Emerson’s Scanners and such essential sites as The House Next Door, Senses of Cinema, DVD Beaver and even Ain’t It Cool News.

And smack dab in the middle of that list was an entry for Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule!

As I said to the list of folks whom I e-mailed immediately with this giddy-making news, this honor has to be counted as one of the highlights of my writing life, if not my life in general. I started this thing off with zero expectations for an audience or even my own ability to sustain it past a couple of months or so. Instead, SLIFR is going on six years, has brought me many new friends and has allowed me to keep the company and be mentioned in the company of the kinds of people who do such good work on all those sites mentioned. I am honored beyond even my own capacity to articulate and understand at this point. Wednesday was a pretty good day, and this news has sustained by spirit and renewed my drive to live up to the enthusiasm of the likes of Paul Brunick and Violet Lucca (who wrote my entry on the sidebar). Thanks to each and every person who has helped me get this blog into the seventh month of 2010. Hopefully you know who you are. Many of you can be found on that list too.

The list is located on the site for The Film Society of Lincoln Center and also at The House Next Door, which cross-published it with Film Comment and Slant magazine. The full article, with a brief tag directing readers to the list, will also be available in the hard copy of the latest issue of Film Comment, available on newsstands now. (It’s the one with the picture of Leo on it.) Mine just came in the mail!

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