November 4, 2007 - November 10, 2007

Great moments in movie history

Four years ago when I wrote about Johnny Cash's movie debut, Door to Door Maniac (aka Five Minutes to Live), embedded video didn't exist, so all I could offer was a sound clip. Now, thanks to Youtube and a user named gatorrock786, I can actually show you the trailer of what has to be one of the most bizarre career choices any star ever made. While it wasn't uncommon in the late '50s-early '60s for American rock and pop singers to carry guns and even shoot them in their first movie, it was uncommon to see them play serial-killing rapists. What effect Johnny and his manager thought this role would have on his popularity at the Grand Old Opry is anybody's guess. (And don't miss the identity of the child actor at the end of the trailer-- this still may be the best movie he's ever made.)

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 9, 2007 11:08 PM

My movie year (so far)

Some more weird stuff I've managed to watch all the way through-- whether I should have, you decide.

Sheitan, aka Satan (2006 - France), directed by Kim Chapiron. That's not Borat's brother, it's an unrecognizable Vincent Cassel (Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen) in his first closeup as the demonic goat-herder Joseph-- and that's the best he looks for the entire film! What starts out looking like a French version of a typical teen gore movie (Cabin Fever, Wolf Creek) is blown literally to Hell as soon as Cassel walks into the picture, and from then on it's a completely original, insane horror-comedy. Joseph isn't Sheitan, he just made a deal with Him so he could commit incest one night. (But Joseph isn't selfish-- he asks one of the young male visitors to his farm if he'd like to have sex with Joseph's own favorite farmgirl, then adds, "She's my niece.") As the craziness escalates-- Joseph's backwoods family includes a wife he hides in the closet as she swells with their Satanic miracle-- you realize that it's actually a Christmas movie. Recommended, especially as an antidote for overdoses of It's a Wonderful Life.

Zoo (2007), directed by Robinson Devor, and The Real Animal Farm (2006 - UK). You may have heard of Zoo, since it's not every day a documentary about beastiality plays Sundance and is reviewed in the New York Times. And you've probably heard about the news story at its center-- a middle-aged man was basically screwed to death by an Arabian stallion. What you may not know is that the film manages to be repellent and boring at the same time. (Eric Henderson at Slant said it "looks like a feature-length commercial for Ambien.") Since almost no one involved with the actual case wanted to even be recorded on the phone, let alone filmed, it's mostly dull and hokey reenactments (although not of the actual "murder," thank goodness!). The fact that, for the most part, the participants are only identified by their online handles is perhaps the only interesting revelation of the film: if not for the Internet, these guys would never have met and the whole thing would never have happened.

That isn't true about the films at the center of a much more disturbing BBC documentary (sent to me by a "friend"-- who needs enemies indeed?) called "The Real Animal Farm," an episode of a series called The Dark Side of Porn. It's the story of a Danish woman, Bodil Joensen, who was not only known in Europe during the '70s for her "Animal Farm" films, but may have actually invented the whole beastly genre-- in 1969, she approached one of the brand new Danish porn companies (all censorship ended there in the '60s) and suggested various "plots" for films with her and her menagerie. It's hard to believe the BBC would even bother with a subject like this (PBS might, but only to flog the video during fundraisers), but it's undeniably fascinating, mostly because of the strange person who made the original films. While it doesn't need to be said that she had a bad life (homecoming queens don't usually do beast porn), the documentary shows there was more to "the boar girl" than tragedy, and it's the alien-- animal-- quality of hers that makes the show so haunting.

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 8, 2007 1:00 PM

Superboy sez: Don't give fire a place to start!

A CP public service message. And remember, kids-- don't smoke in bed!

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 7, 2007 2:10 AM

The Monday Movie Quiz #148

Stars, stars, stars! In those three picture clues, we have an Oscar winner, a groundbreaking director-- nay, auteur!-- and American icon (even though he isn't). And even the unknowns went on to be known-- what a movie! So if you know what it is, send me an email by late Sunday night, and if you're right, expect to see your name in next week's loser's, er, winner's circle (sorry, I was still thinking of the cast).

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 5, 2007 3:02 AM

Last week's Movie Quiz winners

You'd hardly know from the above poster that Joel McCrea was the real star of last week's quiz movie, Sullivan's Travels, or that it was written and directed by the great Preston Sturges. The poster is exactly what film director John L. Sullivan (McCrea) is talking about at the beginning of the film: "I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity! With a little sex in it." That movie, O Brother Where Art Thou? (sound familiar?) would have been lousy, but the picture that Sturges made not only has everything in that description, it's in a class by itself: slapstick tragedy.

(A picture that's an old movie trivia test all by itself, one that includes stalwart character actors William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, and Byron Foulger. Your task: find them.)

Decades before the auteur theory, Sturges made a pretentious director his protagonist, and that's only the first of many surprisingly modern touches in this morality play with pratfalls about the value of comedy. McCrea, at the height of his good-guy stardom, is perfect as the big-hearted but shallow director John L. Sullivan, who wants to learn how to literally suffer to better his art, only to learn his lesson from Mickey Mouse. Besides a plot that revolved around a question of artistic integrity, Sturges' comparisons of Sullivan's opulent celebrity life and his time in the flophouse and on the chaingang must have pushed '40s Hollywood's limits for showing poverty (in a major film) about as far as they'd let it go.

Even though it's a movie about the movies-- new Hollywood's favorite subject-- there's no worry of Sullivan's Travels ever being remade: besides being far too pointed a look at pampered, psuedo-liberal Hollywood, the dialogue is so fast and nuanced I doubt there are enough A-list stars who could deliver it. And of course, if a remake didn't have those things-- as well as a hilarious go-cart chase scene, a seamless transition from comedy to drama, and a reach-for-the-moon final moment that actually works-- it wouldn't be Sullivan's Travels.

Again, an unexpected (and heartwarming) bounty of winners who recognize a great movie when they see some stills from it, so congratulations and a ride in a cockeyed caravan to the following: Wayne Palmer, Song-Un Lee, Bob Aulert, E. Yarber, Donald Greene, Michael Kelly, Mark Gisleson, Dennis Lynch, Bob Redwing, mick, Jeffrey Rapp, Peter Schilling, Michael Mattson, Bill Hearne, Thomas Miller, Nancy Louise Rutherford, and Kevin Musolino.

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 5, 2007 12:46 AM

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