A MOVIE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST was the Big One. I've told this story before, but I went to my local theater one Saturday when I was 12 to see the latest Elvis Presley movie, CHARRO!
. OUATITW was the co-feature. I must have got there late or something, so I decided to come back the next day (Sunday) to enjoy it from the beginning.
When I got there, I discovered that the theater had reversed the showtimes, so I had to see OUATITW anyway; an idea that didn't exactly thrill me because I didn't care for Westerns. To make a long and already told story short, I became enthralled by the movie to the extent that I felt branded by it. It put hair on my chest.
And when the movie ended, I could suddenly see how ephemeral the Presley co-feature couldn't help but be, and I made what I count as the first adult decision of my life: I got up and went home. To this day, I have never seen CHARRO!.
A MOVIE I'VE SEEN MORE THAN ONCE: Tons of them, including many I don't particularly care for. Much moreso than the maxim "reading is re-reading," I find that watching movies is re-watching movies. Among the movies I believe I've seen more often than any others: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, WOODSTOCK, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, WOMEN IN LOVE, TOMMY, WITCHFINDER GENERAL, THE ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER, THAT THING YOU DO!
(which I feel is a nearly perfect movie), the Bava films of course, and a goodly number of the classic Universal horror films. We're talking as many as 20 times in some cases. Looking over that list in printed form, I have to say that -- with a few exceptions I can still understand -- I could have picked better movies to obsess over!
Very often when a movie affects me deeply, I deliberately keep my distance from it, prefering to cherish the memory rather than wear it out. Four of the titles I chose for my in 2002 I have seen only once.
A MOVIE I WOULD TAKE WITH ME IF I WERE STUCK ON A DESERT ISLAND: I think Charlton Heston in THE OMEGA MAN had the right idea with WOODSTOCK.
It's got drama, humor, idealism, a huge cross-section of humanity, and great music. It's not just a movie; it's company.
A MOVIE THAT MADE ME LAUGH: I have a perverse sense of humor and things like W.
C. Fields' THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER and the "Black Cat" episode of Roger Corman's TALES OF TERROR resonate especially well with my funny bobne. Feature-wise, however, three stand out: Preston Sturges' UNFAITHFULLY YOURS, Bruce Robinson's WITHNAIL I, and Richard Kwietniowski's LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND.
All three have an aggressively literary bent in their dialogue, so that all three would have been just as funny on the printed page; none of them is particularly cinematic, but all three feature great performances.
Fritz Lang discusses the day's rushes with producer Jack Palance in CONTEMPT.
A MOVIE THAT MADE ME CRY: Strangely enough, Jean-Luc Godard's CONTEMPT.
There is an exterior moment after the episode in the screening room, in which Fritz Lang walks pensively across the wide screen as Georges Delerue's tragic theme music swells; the combination kills me every time. That's how much I love movies.
A MOVIE I WISH HAD NEVER BEEN MADE: I agree with whomever had the insight that great art is a lie (an invention) that tells the truth.
Ergo, any film that tells lies to propogate falsehoods and to take cynical advantage of public ignorance I find, by definition, repugnant. So my answer is THE PATH TO 9/11.
A MOVIE I'VE BEEN MEANING TO SEE: Movies I've been meaning to see are the bane of my existence.
At the moment I have about ten bankers boxes, containing 50 DVDs each, stacked high in a corner of my dining room. Discs I've bought, discs sent to me by friendly correspondents, and, of course, review screeners. Every one of them is screaming "Watch me!
" at the top of their imaginary lungs, and some are (ouch) box sets.
A MOVIE I RECENTLY SAW: The 1929 version of SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE, starring Richard Dix (who reminds me a great deal of George Reeves). It ran on Turner Classic Movies yesterday morning and it ran about 10 minutes longer than my Dish TV menu screen said it would, so my recording cut out before the movie was over.
Irène Jacob models for a bubble gum ad campaign in RED.
A MOVIE I WISH I'D MADE: Krzysztof Kieslowski's THREE COLORS trilogy, particularly RED.
I felt immediately at home in this movie, and somehow saw most of its levels at once, but this didn't do anything to exhaust my fascination with it. A perfect mesh of the commercial and the metaphysical, it captures the daunting magic of meeting someone who gives your life unsuspected depths of meaning -- a recurring theme in my own work. Jean-Louis Trintignant probably ties with Oliver Reed as my favorite actor (they star in more of my favorite films than anyone else), and I'm very smitten with Irène Jacob; I love the way their characters seem to represent real people while at the same time boldly occupying a more symbolic plane, and the bolero theme written by Zbigniew Preisner gives the whole a vaguely apocalyptic tense that is highly dramatic and would sadly be fulfilled by the retirement and quick death of Kieslowski.
As a Gemini with a deep interest in music, I am in some ways even more drawn to THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE...
but my senses tell me that RED is the more complex and satisfying achievement.
In closing..
. apropos of some of the finest films it has ever been my pleasure to see -- one of which (L'ECLISSE) is certain to make my next SIGHT SOUND Top 10 list -- a very Happy 94th Birthday to . Buon' compleanno, Maestro.
To date, George Mendeluk's (1980) -- starring Richard Crenna and Paul Williams -- has only reached home video here in America as a standard, pan scanned VHS release from Media Home Entertainment.
With this in mind, some of you may be interested to learn that it aired on The Movie Channel last night in a brand new, letterboxed transfer. It is still a notable turn of events, sad to say, when a pay cable station shows a film in its correct aspect ratio, especially a picture on the level of this Canadian thriller.
Crenna stars as a recently separated police sergeant investigating a series of prostitute murders in an unnamed city that he describes as dirty and scummy while driving past a storefront that reads "Disney.
" (It was shot in Toronto, then credited as being a North American city so clean you could practically eat off its sidewalks, with lots of recognizable Yonge Street landmarks like Sam's record shop.) The hookers are being shot with a customized rifle attached to a 35mm still camera, allowing the limping assassin to develop quasi-cinematic serial photos of each killing in progress; the red-tinted developing room shots, showing black leather-gloved hands hanging the wet prints on a wire, lends the proceedings an occasional Argento-like flavor. Another Argentovian touch can be found in the delineation of Crenna's character, an eccentric who has rigged a special unlisted telephone number to feed his pet fish whenever it rings ("I don't get home much," he explains).
An unusually pudgy Paul Williams plays Kurtz, a shag-haired crime boss/pimp -- and the Movie Channel print was so sharp that the red impression of a discarded wedding band is sometimes distractingly visible on the third finger of Williams' left hand. (It's not in this sleazy character's profile to have been married.) Williams, who has a big dialogue scene outside the "Paradise Cinema," is miscast as a crimelord who strikes terror into people's hearts, but Crenna brings a world-weary gravitas to his character that works, and Belinda J.
Montgomery has one of her best showings as a daring female officer who goes too far undercover to solve the case; she also gets a rare opportunity to sing, and is in good voice. Christopher Walken lookalike Frank Moore (from Cronenberg's RABID and THE ITALIAN MACHINE) is on hand as a strip-club habitué red herring, and Michael Ironside, buried way down the cast list, appears just long enough to get shot during a stakeout.
I had never seen STONE COLD DEAD before, but I remember seeing TV spots during its initial release to local drive-ins that made it look ugly and sordid and cheap.
With that in mind, it was a nice surprise to find it so competent, watchable, and evocative of my own happy memories of Toronto -- and it held my attention even at an hour when common sense dictated I should have long been in bed. It's sleazy too, but a sweet kind of sleazy. It's probably nothing I would bother to record, but sometimes it's pleasure enough to find good people injecting a little soul into a project where such dimension wasn't really necessary or expected.
I've checked The Movie Channel's schedule for the next week and can't find any future playdates for STONE COLD DEAD, so it may be played out there, but -- for those interested -- it's bound to resurface sooner or later on one of the other TMC or Showtime family channels.
Link added by Donna Copyright by Tim Lucas.
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