Film – Page 4 – Ash Clifton, Writer

R.I.P. David Lynch

It has been a week since David Lynch passed away, and many great tributes have already been written about him. I’m tempted to say that I needed a week to process his passing and figure out what I wanted to say about him, but the truth is I was just too damned busy to write anything. In fact, I knew instantly what I wanted to say—simply, that Lynch was a very important person in my life, and in the lives of many of my friends.

I was a college English major in 1986 when Blue Velvet came out, and it hit me and my circle of arty friends like an atomic blast. I already knew of Lynch’s work (I was one of the few kids to see The Elephant Man, and in an actual movie theater, no less), and I knew that he was a director of enormous visual and thematic power. But even I was unprepared for Blue Velvet. On the one hand, it’s a murder mystery, an homage to the noir films of the 1950s in which an unsuspecting suburban kid discovers a hidden world of violence, evil, and, (of course) depraved sexuality. On the other hand, it’s a surrealist vision of the inner world of a modern young man (and, probably, many young women). I was roughly the same age as the main character, Jeffrey Beaumont, in 1986, and so the film had special resonance. I felt like the landscape of my own imagination was a strange blend of the beautiful and the grotesque—often in the same image. And that’s exactly what the film captures, somehow.

Getting Stabbed Doesn’t Hurt

(…or, Everything That’s Wrong with Deadpool & Wolverine)

Well, I finally got around to watching Marvel’s latest blockbuster, Deadpool & Wolverine. This was the first Marvel movie I’d watched in a while, and now I remember why. Holy smoke, what a crappy film! As I watched it—doggedly, hoping it would get better, resisting the urge to switch it off—I began to realize that this film is not only bad, it is profoundly bad. That is, bad in a way that’s worth talking about.

Normally, being a nominal “artist” myself, I don’t lay into other people’s work just because I don’t like it. Why bother? But this movie triggered me in such a way that I have to rant about it for a while. Specifically, it pissed me off because it breaks the single most important rule of genre fiction (which applies equally to genre film): Keep it Real.

Wait a moment, you say. Realistic genre fiction? Realistic fantasy fiction? Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Actually, no. For while every Marvel movie, like every James Bond movie and every action movie and every horror movie and even every science fiction movie, is, in a sense a fantasy, the good ones display a kind of realism that’s critical, and vastly more important than any sense of day-to-day realism in the story itself. This is psychological realism. And psychological realism has its root in physiological realism—the realism of the human body.

Perfect Films: “Thief”

Author’s Note: Michael Mann’s first feature film, Thief, is on-sale for dirt-cheap on Prime Video at the moment. So, I thought I’d re-post a short essay I wrote about it on my old blog some years ago. Enjoy!

When my son and I went to New York City over the summer, we stayed in Queens, just a few blocks from the Museum of the Moving Image. We spent most of our time in Manhattan, doing the tourist thing, and I never got around to the seeing the Museum. I regret this, and not only because it’s supposed to be a really cool place.

As fate would have it, I later found out that the film being screened at the Museum that week was Michael Mann’s first feature, Thief. It’s a fabulously entertaining crime thriller starring James Caan (a Bronx native) in one of the best performances of his long career. Caan plays Frank (we never learn his last name), a Chicago businessman by day and a high-end burglar by night. Like many heroes in Mann’s films, Frank is guy with a score to settle; he spent much of his youth in jail on trumped-up charges, and now stealing is his way of making for lost time.

Ten Things I Love About “It’s a Wonderful Life”

1.) Alternate Realities One of the great things about living in a university town is that you get to hear some great lectures by famous people—for free. Back in the 80s, I attended a lecture on the subject of evolution by the late, great Stephen Jay Gould. He talked about how incredibly subtle mutations in the gene pool can, over time, create titanic changes in the history of earth. He called this the Phenomenon of Contingency. To illustrate his point, he mentioned two movies that deal primarily with the subject of an individual’s impact on the course of history—the way small choices can resonate through the future. The movies he sited were It’s a Wonderful Life and Back To The Future. He might have mentioned a dozen or so works of modern science fiction, or the Hindu concept of the Net of Jewels. Or all of Buddhism, for that matter. But he was right on the money with It’s a Wonderful Life. The movie is about keeping your eye on the Cosmic View, rather on selfish or ego-centric desires. George has forgotten how much good he had done in Bedford Falls because the effects of his actions have been blurred by time. Clarence the Angel reveals (or re-reveals) it to him.

What I’m Reading: “I am Spartacus”

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.) I don’t want to jinx the man, but the fact that Kirk Douglas still lives is an unmitigated source of joy for me. If you believe, as I do, that movie stars become movie stars because of some internal life-force, whose aura is palpable even when projected onto a silver screen, then Kirk Douglas seems like the best proof of this theory.

At 101, Douglas is a living bridge to Hollywood’s second Golden Age—the 1940s to late 1950s. A bone fide movie start by 1949, Douglas was, along with other mavericks like Burt Lancaster, one of the first major actors to become a power-player in his own right. In an era when the Hollywood studio system traded actors like cattle, he formed his own studio and made his own films. He fostered young writers and directors—most notably, a brilliant, aloof young filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick.

R.I.P. Earl Holliman

Last month, I reran an old post about how much I love the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet. Then, just over a week later in a striking and somewhat sad example of synchroncity, the last suriving cast member of that film, Earl Holliman, passed away at the age of 94.

Holliman’s brief performance as the boozing, womanizing cook in Forbidden Planet was a highlight of the movie. This is not surprising; Holliman was one of the best character actors of his generation, performing in countless movies and TV shows. These ran the gamut from Westerns, cop dramas, thrillers, and (of course) science fiction.

Physically, Holliman had the kind of rugged, Southern-style good looks that were a requirement for tough-guy roles back in the day. Actually, he looked a bit like another great TV actor, James Garner (not to mention my dad). The picture above shows him in all his 1970s-era glory.

Forbes Magazine has a nice tribute article about him here.

Ten Things I Love About “Forbidden Planet”

Author’s Note: A few days ago I saw that a remake of the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet is in the works. So, I thought I’d repost a short essay I wrote about it some years back on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes. Enjoy!

The first DVD I bought was Blade Runner. The second was Forbidden Planet. This latter film is a science fiction classic from Hollywood’s second golden age, 1956 (the same year that John Ford’s landmark film The Searchers was released). Perhaps the definitive pulp sci-fi movie, it’s got everything you might expect: stalwart heroes, spaceships, lasers, aliens, a teen-aged hottie, a mad scientist, and even a talking robot.

And monsters, of course. Monsters from the Id.

Ever since I first saw Forbidden Planet on TV when I was kid, I’ve loved it. Here are ten reasons why…

1.) Altair IV

Forbidden Planet is, to my knowledge, the first Hollywood movie to depict human beings landing a spaceship on a planet of another star. This was a fairly landmark achievement in the history of science fiction cinema, made even better by the film’s two art directors, Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan. In their vision, Altair becomes a green- and blue-tinged desert, not unlike that of John Ford’s American Southwest. Considering this was done with matte paintings and other pre-CGI effects, it’s amazing how good the landscapes are, so desolate and full of foreboding. It’s a prefiguration of all the wild worlds of Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on, yet to come.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Turn to Stone”

If you were to ask a music lover to name the most iconic pop band of the 1970s, their answer would probably be The Bee Gees. And they’d be right–mostly. For about three years, The Bee Gees bestrode the world like a collosus, leading the musical and cultural era that was disco.

But, for my money, it was the Electric Light Orchestra that most defined 70s pop. The creation of musical genius Jeff Lynne, E.L.O. was hit machine that cranked out gold records with regularity. Their songs were all over the radio here Gainesville, and their records were coveted.

And expensive. I remember looking at Out of Blue in the record store and was shocked to see that it was priced at $14.99. (This was back when ten bucks would get you a decent dinner in a real restaurant.)

My favorite E.L.O. song is, of course, “Turn to Stone”, which is the perfect fusion of pop and rock. Cinemaphiles will note that it was this song that P.T. Anderson ended his great film Boogie Nights with.

Rock-on…

R.I.P. Teri Garr

There is a great tradition in American comedy of very smart women playing very dumb women (usually, dumb blonds). It goes back to at least the 1930s with the duo of George Burns and Gracie Allen, and probably much further than that.

So, it’s not terribly surprising that the brilliant actress Teri Garr was best known for playing a stereotypical “dumb blond”. Specifically, she played Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s (that’s FRAH-ken-steen‘s) lab assistant in Mel Brooks’s classic Young Frankenstein. The film is one of the funniest ever made, and Garr’s performance is one of the funniest things in it. It’s a masterpiece of physical humor, timing, and delivery, not to mention a great, fake German accent.

The doc falls in love with her by the end of the film, and the same can be said for many of the viewers. It’s safe to say that the film wouldn’t have been half as good without her.

Godspeed, Ms. Garr…!!!

Random Dose of Optimism: Real-Life “Tasty Wheat”

Remember that scene from The Matrix in which the crew of the rebel hovercraft the Nebuchadnezzar sits down to a meal of some artificial, lab-concocted glop? Apoc describes it as being “like a bowl of snot,” while Mouse say it actually reminds him of one of his favorite foods as a child, the fictional Tasty Wheat.

Dozer explains that the glop is said to be created by a single-celled organism and has all the nutrients required to support human life. In real life—and especially on our rapidly warming planet, where droughts are becoming more common and every inch of arable land will soon be needed to grow basic crops—such glop would actually be a very cool thing. It might, in fact, be the difference millions of people suffering famine and those same millions having decent, long lives. Never mind the taste, this glop would be a Godsend.

Well, this week some nerds at the University of Tübingen in Germany announced that they have essentially created some version of the magical glop. The single-celled organism turns out to be a bacterium called Thermoanaerobacter kivui, and the glop created contains both B9 and more protein per volume than beef. And all it needs to grow is C02 (the primary offender in the climate crisis), hydrogen, and some heat. Pretty cool!

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of creating artificial food. This is probably because I’ve read too many science fiction novels, where such technology is often presented as dystopian (I’m looking at you, Soylent Green) as well as utopian (see the replicators on Star Trek). Being a natural, rational optimist, I tend to believe that artificial food will be a great boon to society. In particular, artificial protein would be a wonderful thing because it would free up so much land that is currently used by livestock (the most inefficient form of food production, not to mention the cruelest in its most common form).

Don’t get me wrong—I like meat. I cook with meat. And I think free-range livestock raised with traditional, holistic practices might actually be a crucial element in the fight against climate change. But if there were a good, renewable alternative to real meat that sucks up C02 in the process, I’m all in. It could, in fact, save the world as we know it.

Hopefully, they will figure out the taste problem.