KPBS Film Club of the Air - June 27, 2007

June 30th, 2007 by Scott Marks

Appearing monthly on These Days, the Film Club of the Air features local film critics Beth Accomando and Scott Marks discussing films in San Diego theaters.

Michael Moore’s Sicko, A Mighty Heart, Broken English, Killer of Sheep
June 27 2007
Beth and Scott review three new movies and one re-release of a now classic movie from the 1970s. During our show today, we’ll look at A Mighty Heart, Broken English, which was directed by the daughter of John Casevettes. And Beth and Scott talk about the 1977 movie Killer of Sheep. But first, Sicko, by Michael Moore.

Tags: Film Club of the Air, KPBS, Radio, Scott Marks

Filed Under KPBS Radio Shows

The Road to “Hell” is Paved With Unintentional Laffs!

June 26th, 2007 by Scott Marks

Hot Rods to Hell / John Brahm (1967)

The date had been circled on my calendar for months. June 25th couldn’t come soon enough.

Hell hath no fury stronger than a home video release.

Sometime around my Bar Mitzvah, a friend called and told me about a film he’d seen in which some guy and his family is terrorized by teen punks. We watched it together that night via telephone taking particular delight in drunken Dana Andrews wrenching his bruised back after catching a football.

Subsequently, I never missed a WGN screening, but that wasn’t enough. I had to experience Hell, all eight circles, on the screen. A bunch of us pitched in and rented the faded 16mm Films, Inc. copy and went on a weekend bender, screening it at least a half dozen times.

Tom Phillips (Dana) drives his family through the dessert en route to the motel (in the middle of nowhere) of their dreams. Plagued by a trio of clean-cut, beer can throwing hooligans, the Phillips’ journey yields more laughs than 99% of intentional comedies. From the slurred line readings, well-intentioned morality pleas, sun-drenched day-for-night cinematography, thudding reminders of Tom’s chronic back pain and the Mickey Rooney, Jr. Trio, this is the textbook example of a film that’s so bad it’s educational. Originally intended for TV, M-G-M’s lion shat this into theaters. The TCM “restored” print contained on the DVD includes more dialogue and different music cues than the version we grew up on.

It just keeps getting better. If anything, the restored copy looks too good. It needs more green scratches. Even without the washed out color Dana retains his funeral parlor blush and fire-engine red lipstick. Nothing short of The Day the Clown Cried or the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons could thrill me as much as being able to hold a pristine copy of Hot Rods to Hell in my hands. It even has the trailer!

For those of you who may be uninitiated, buy it sight unseen. You won’t regret it.

I’ll see you all in Hell!

Tags: Dana Andrews, HOT RODS TO HELL

Filed Under DVD, Reviews

Vintage Movie Ads

June 24th, 2007 by Scott Marks

Aside from bronzed bums and terrible food, the one thing this Chicago transplant can’t get his head around is the fact that movie reviews appear in the Thursday entertainment section of the San Diego newspaper as opposed to Friday.

Between the time my I received my first driver’s license and the year revival houses were replaced by home video, every Thursday found me stopping at ‘Blind’ Jimmy Arnold’s corner newsstand for the late edition of the Sun-Times to see what films opened the next day.

You never knew what was going to pop up at neighborhood theaters in the pre-VHS/megaplex era of independent exhibitors. What was going through the mind of the Devon Theater booker when he paired Marcel Ophuls’ 4 hour holocaust documentary The Sorrow and the Pity with Carl Reiner’s pitch-black comedy Where’s Poppa?

I perused the Friday movie section with the same fervor a race track tout scanned his Green Sheet. The splashy box ads frequently acted as my first introduction to a vast array of features. I miss the lost art of ballyhoo. Forget about colorful marquees and lavish lobby displays. Nowadays, most multiplexes don’t even bother to hang a corresponding one-sheet at the entrance to the shoe box.

In the months to come, I’ll be dropping hundreds of vintage newspaper ads in the Image Vault.

Link:
Vintage Newspaper Movie Ads

Tags: Advertisements, Chicago transplant, Image Vault, Movie Ads, Movie Section, Newspaper Ads, newspaper movie ads, Vintage, Vintage Ads, Vintage Movie Ads

Filed Under Image Blog, Rants

KILLER OF SHEEP / Charles Burnett (1977)

June 24th, 2007 by Scott Marks

KILLER OF SHEEP (1977)

Killer of Sheep (1977)

Written & Directed by: Charles Burnett

Cast: Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy & Jack Drummond

Aspect Ratio: 1.33 : 1

Genres: Drama

Running Time: 80 min.

Rating:

Hollywood wasn’t accessible to black independent filmmakers, or films by people of color, unless they were black exploitation films. You never expected anything from Hollywood. Filmmaking was for you making personal and political statements. – Charles Burnett

Shot over the course of 52 weekends with non-professional actors and at a cost of $10,000, Killer of Sheep was unlike anything movie audiences had seen at the time of its release.

That is, providing they had a chance to see it.

Killer of Sheep opened just as the hard-R rated blaxploitation craze had all but run its course. Most of these revenge-filled potboilers were produced and directed by The Man and their formulas were simple: whitey oppresses for 3 reels, followed by 2 reels of non-stop violent reprisal at the hands of brothers Truck Turner and Drum or sisters Coffy and Cleopatra Jones.

Fred Williamson, Pam Grier and Jim Brown were out and role models Mohamed Ali (The Greatest), Richard Pryor (Greased Lightning) and just about every unemployed black comic (A Piece of the Action) were in. While no more cinematically competent than their action predecessors, at least the latter two pictures were directed by African Americans.

Continue reading KILLER OF SHEEP / Charles Burnett (1977)

Tags: KILLER OF SHEEP

Filed Under Reviews, Theatrical

1408 / Mikael Håfström (2007)

June 21st, 2007 by Scott Marks

John Cusack

1408 (2007)

Directed by: Mikael Håfström

Written by: Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski

Cast: John Cusack, Mary McCormick, Samuel L. Jackson & Len Cariou,

Jasmine Jessica Anthony, Tony Shaloub, Paul Birchard, Margot Leicester, Walter Lewis, Eric Meyers, David Nicholson, Alexandra Silber, Johann Urb, Andrew Lee Potts, Emily Harvey, William Armstrong, Kim Thomson, Drew Powell, Noah Lee Margetts

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Genres: Horror, Thriller

Rating:

Once again Stephen King entombs an author in a hotel of horrors, this time to less than shining results.

SoCal scribe Mike Enslin (John Cusack) specializes in tour guides to ghostly hotels. Book sales must be up (he was commissioned to pen a fourth book), but you’d be hard pressed to notice given the abysmal turnout for his most recent in-store appearance.

Siphoning through the junk mail and bills, Mike spots a postcard from New York’s Dolphin Hotel with a chilling challenge scrawled across the reverse: “Don’t Enter 1408!” So long Hermosa Beach, Hello Big Bloodcurdling Apple!

One can’t accuse Dolphin manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) of deceptive advertising when he admits up front, “It’s an evil fucking room.” With a record of 56 kills, Olin is delighted to keep the room in a permanent state of “No Vacancy.” With a little coaxing from Mike’s attorney, by law if a room sits unoccupied the hotelier is bound to rent it, Olin grants the author a one-night stay in the soured suite.

Instead of spooks, an initial scan of the room with an ultra-violet lightsaber uncovers little more than a cluster of horrifying bed stains. Mike wonders whether the reason most occupants don’t last more than sixty-minutes is because they succumb from boredom.

At the stroke of 8, the clock radio transforms into an LCD stopwatch and begins counting down Mike’s final hour. Even that doesn’t seem to fluster him. Nor do numerous floating apparitions (including a specter wearing a Steven Wright mask), a return appearance from dear dead dad (Len Cariou) or most unnerving of all, the incessant sound of a closed-circuit broadcast of The Carpenter’s We’ve Only Just Begun on the radio.

Long before we even begin to reach an explanation, director Mikael Håfström has already hammered us with cheap techniques, most noticeably placing his camera where it doesn’t belong (i.e., inside Mike’s P.O. Box or behind a microfiche viewer). The paranormal highjinx and cinematic trickery can only carry so much of the story and movies like this are generally made or broken in the last half hour.

The shocks are rapidly replaced by cheap sentimentality. Instead of maintaining a state of heightened psychological surrealism, schlockmeister Stephen King resorts to mushy melodrama. It’s another family in hell with guilt-ridden Mike, his estranged wife (Mary McCormick) and the ghost of their dead daughter Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony). One nice touch has dad receiving little Katie’s dress via fax machine.

Cusack and Jackson are always a pleasure to watch. Too bad the script called for just one scene between them. If you missed Vacancy and Bug and find yourself in dire need of a horror fix, this will do for the moment.

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Tags: 1408, John Cusack, Len Cariou, Mary McCormick, Mikael Håfström, Movie reviews, Samuel L. Jackson, Scott Marks

Filed Under Reviews, Theatrical