I went to go see "Under the Big Black Sun", the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibit of modern art from 1974-1981 on Saturday. It was a free day for most of Los Angeles' museums, so I figured I would make the most of it with a journey downtown, via train, through the barren wastelands of Downtown LA on the weekend, to Little Tokyo.
Now, with an exhibition named after an album by LA punk band X, and scheduled events involving Henry Rollins and another one involving X performing with the Dead Kennedys and the Avengers, you'd think this would be a very punk-centric exhibit.
Well, actually, if you know much about punk, the fact that MOCA is honoring the LA arts scene in the punk era with performances by two SAN FRANCISCAN punk bands would probably be a warning that we're going to get a very selective and self-serving exhibit.
And that's exactly what we get. The main portion of the exhibit is devoted to the expected modern art conceptual pieces, recordings of performance art and video pieces, strange abstract stuff, and borderline tongue-in-cheek anthropological photography.
And then, shoved into two rooms in the very back of the building, hidden behind an unrelated exhibition on Theaster Gates and Civil Rights, are the majority of the punk pieces.
Which amount to two Gary Panter pieces, some random collective propaganda art (for benefits or protests, etc.) and a wall of Raymond Pettibon art.
So MOCA has basically segregated the punk rock culture items from the rest of the modern art. And I don't totally blame them.
Because while one or two pieces of the main exhibit are "creative" or "interesting", most of it disappeared from my mind the instant I walked away. But the Gary Panter art and the Raymond Pettibon art stuck. Pettibon's pop-art/Chick-tract/comic book-damaged art especially is a million times more shocking, scary and witty than anything in the rest of the exhibit. If you put any Raymond Pettibon flyer next to a series of matches placed on top of quarters representing the Soviet armored cavalry (no, I'm not joking), I doubt you'd really care about the latter.
And, strangely enough, MOCA must realize what the real draw is, because in addition to a marketing campaign trying to springboard off of punk, 9/10ths of the gift shop is given over to punk memorabilia. You don't see any coffee table books about left-wing post-modernists who white out newspaper headlines or take blurry stills from inaugural videos. You see copies of Black Flag's discography and oral histories of punk.
I don't think there's any question that punk is an art form, not a revolution, at this point. But it's hilarious that, even as co-opted and compromised as it is, it still has more lifeblood than your average piece of contemporary art.
Showing posts with label camp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label camp. Show all posts
Monday, January 30, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
The past is a foreign country...
I recently watched the two hour pilot of Showtime's The Borgias (I know, welcome to 2010, Mr. K) and the first two episodes of Roberto Rossellini's Age of The Medicis, which was produced as a three part miniseries on Italian television in the 1970s.
Both shows dealing with politics in the Italian Renaissance, both helmed by talented directors (Neil Jordan serving as the show-runner for the Borgias, as well as director for the pilot), and the two could not be more dissimilar.
The Borgias wavers somewhere between crime drama and sumptuous, sexy costume melodrama. It certainly has its moments (Irons is a little uneven, but he plays Pope Alexander as a charismatic, corrupt man who is utterly sincere about his belief in the power of the Church and God), but, as my Lovely Girlfriend put it, "well, at least during the boring parts, there's something pretty on screen to look at."
Which definitely sums up the aesthetic of The Borgias. Lots of beautiful naked bodies, lots of beautiful clothing, artwork and architecture, plus lots of sex and blood (which is usually deployed in beautiful ways). But also frequently boring.
And while it's never easy to figure out how accurately a pilot represents the rest of a series, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that The Borgias is going to totally do away with the Bloody Sexy History. What's most disappointing about the approach is the way that it just sort of flattens the lechery, venery and blood-lust, when it's all sex and violence, all the time.
In contrast, Rossellini's Age of the Medicis is a much more austere and glacially paced production. Rossellini's favorite device is to stage scenes like tableaus out of Renaissance artwork, with the actors merely an element of mise en scene. Unlike The Borgias, where everyone is usually manipulating or murdering or making love, but rarely working, the majority of the action in Age of the Medicis takes place while people are going about their daily work.
Even as Cosimo de Medici is making his triumphant return into Florence, for example, someone still has to go down to the local pawn shop and redeem his supporters' goods from the pawnbrokers. At one point, the Weaver's Guild commissions an assassin to do away with someone in a nearby town who is infringing on their patents. But that only happens after a scene where they analyze what production technique is being used, who had patented it, examining the recordbooks to see who could have passed along the information, etc.
The Age of the Medicis often feels closer in kinship to one of Peter Watkins "You Are There"-style faux-documentaries, where he approaches hypothetical or historical situations with the austerity and impartiality of a modern-day documentary film-maker.
That's not to say The Age of the Medicis doesn't have beauty. Rossellini's Florence is less ornate than Jordan's Rome, but Rossellini has a better eye for detail in the positioning of groups of actors, the atmosphere of their settings, and he is more adventuresome with his camera, sending it roving through a workshop, or panning across the various factions attending a funeral.
Perhaps the one aspect in which The Age of the Medicis suffers compares to The Borgias is, oddly enough, in its treatment of the female characters. The Borgias' female characters are not given as much to do or as much depth as the male characters, and too much of their characterization depends on their sexual desires. But women are really only extras or bit players in The Age of the Medicis. My guess is that, given that Rossellini's script seems heavily based on primary sources and focused on day-to-day business, it's bias towards the masculine sphere is understandable. At the same time, given the effort put into portraying not only the power-brokers but also the common men and bourgeois, it is disappointing.
Both shows dealing with politics in the Italian Renaissance, both helmed by talented directors (Neil Jordan serving as the show-runner for the Borgias, as well as director for the pilot), and the two could not be more dissimilar.
The Borgias wavers somewhere between crime drama and sumptuous, sexy costume melodrama. It certainly has its moments (Irons is a little uneven, but he plays Pope Alexander as a charismatic, corrupt man who is utterly sincere about his belief in the power of the Church and God), but, as my Lovely Girlfriend put it, "well, at least during the boring parts, there's something pretty on screen to look at."
Which definitely sums up the aesthetic of The Borgias. Lots of beautiful naked bodies, lots of beautiful clothing, artwork and architecture, plus lots of sex and blood (which is usually deployed in beautiful ways). But also frequently boring.
And while it's never easy to figure out how accurately a pilot represents the rest of a series, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that The Borgias is going to totally do away with the Bloody Sexy History. What's most disappointing about the approach is the way that it just sort of flattens the lechery, venery and blood-lust, when it's all sex and violence, all the time.
In contrast, Rossellini's Age of the Medicis is a much more austere and glacially paced production. Rossellini's favorite device is to stage scenes like tableaus out of Renaissance artwork, with the actors merely an element of mise en scene. Unlike The Borgias, where everyone is usually manipulating or murdering or making love, but rarely working, the majority of the action in Age of the Medicis takes place while people are going about their daily work.
Even as Cosimo de Medici is making his triumphant return into Florence, for example, someone still has to go down to the local pawn shop and redeem his supporters' goods from the pawnbrokers. At one point, the Weaver's Guild commissions an assassin to do away with someone in a nearby town who is infringing on their patents. But that only happens after a scene where they analyze what production technique is being used, who had patented it, examining the recordbooks to see who could have passed along the information, etc.
The Age of the Medicis often feels closer in kinship to one of Peter Watkins "You Are There"-style faux-documentaries, where he approaches hypothetical or historical situations with the austerity and impartiality of a modern-day documentary film-maker.
That's not to say The Age of the Medicis doesn't have beauty. Rossellini's Florence is less ornate than Jordan's Rome, but Rossellini has a better eye for detail in the positioning of groups of actors, the atmosphere of their settings, and he is more adventuresome with his camera, sending it roving through a workshop, or panning across the various factions attending a funeral.
Perhaps the one aspect in which The Age of the Medicis suffers compares to The Borgias is, oddly enough, in its treatment of the female characters. The Borgias' female characters are not given as much to do or as much depth as the male characters, and too much of their characterization depends on their sexual desires. But women are really only extras or bit players in The Age of the Medicis. My guess is that, given that Rossellini's script seems heavily based on primary sources and focused on day-to-day business, it's bias towards the masculine sphere is understandable. At the same time, given the effort put into portraying not only the power-brokers but also the common men and bourgeois, it is disappointing.
Friday, May 20, 2011
The best crime film to involve Beethoven's birthplace...
DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET (1973)
d. Samuel Fuller
Starring Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang Fuller, Anton Diffring, Eric P Caspar & Stephane Audran
I had a chance to check this out thanks to a friend in UCLA's film archives graduate program who had it screened with Christa Fuller (the star and Fuller's wife) talking about it afterwards. This hard-to-find Fuller film was actually shot for German television in the 70s as a TV movie version of a German policier TV show. The effect is rather like finding out that von Trier directed an episode of Law and Order, with all the attendant weirdness.
Furthermore, Fuller, who had little familiarity with 70s West Germany, decided to that he'd throw the street-level "realism" of the TV series out the window and just have some fun.
To be fair, the people involved with this lark of a movie had great pedigrees. Jerzy Lipman, a Polish cinematographer who'd worked with Polanski on Knife in the Water, was Fuller's cinematographer, and art-rock band Can did the score.
The plot, about a call girl (Christa Lang Fuller) and a gang of extortionists taking incriminating photos of politicians and the American private eye (Glenn Corbett) who decides to take them down when they kill his partner, is fairly standard stuff. But Fuller displays a great deal of wit in the execution.
There's a fair number of meta-film jokes that liven up the film, like a brief detour where Corbett's character follows Lang into a movie theatre showing a German-dubbed version of Rio Bravo, so we can luxuriate both in the awesomeness of that film and the strangeness of a German-speaking Dean Martin imitator. For that matter, Claude Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran pops up in a small role as a former extortionist named Dr. Bogdanovich. Lang's own appearance in Godard's Alphaville is even excerpted as evidence of her character's failed film career!
Beyond the in-jokes, Fuller plays around with the conventions of movies and the policier/noir genre. A shootout takes place in the nursery of a hospital's maternity ward, images of the gunfight intercut with images of sleeping babies, mocking any pretensions of realism the viewer might approach the film with. As one blackmail victim examines his photo, the expected ominous sound cue appears, but the next shot reveals that the sound cue is coming from a band in the same room as the character.
In some moments, the absurdity of Fuller's approach to the story circles around and becomes ominously threatening. As the streets of Cologne fill with Carnival celebrations in the film, the events of the film become seriocomic like an Elizabethan mystery play. Eric P Caspar, as a clown-suited henchman, runs through the streets, confetti covering his lips, muttering drugged-out nonsense as he closes in on Corbett and Lang, and everything resolves into eerie surrealism. Much like in Losey's Modesty Blaise, where Amsterdam's Carnival offers a site where the funny becomes dangerous, Fuller's film develops an unresolved tension from the impossibility of predicting which mode (comedy or thriller) it will end in. As a result, the ending, which brings us back to the beginning and the title, has the gut punch of a particularly well-told sick joke.
d. Samuel Fuller
Starring Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang Fuller, Anton Diffring, Eric P Caspar & Stephane Audran
I had a chance to check this out thanks to a friend in UCLA's film archives graduate program who had it screened with Christa Fuller (the star and Fuller's wife) talking about it afterwards. This hard-to-find Fuller film was actually shot for German television in the 70s as a TV movie version of a German policier TV show. The effect is rather like finding out that von Trier directed an episode of Law and Order, with all the attendant weirdness.
Furthermore, Fuller, who had little familiarity with 70s West Germany, decided to that he'd throw the street-level "realism" of the TV series out the window and just have some fun.
To be fair, the people involved with this lark of a movie had great pedigrees. Jerzy Lipman, a Polish cinematographer who'd worked with Polanski on Knife in the Water, was Fuller's cinematographer, and art-rock band Can did the score.
The plot, about a call girl (Christa Lang Fuller) and a gang of extortionists taking incriminating photos of politicians and the American private eye (Glenn Corbett) who decides to take them down when they kill his partner, is fairly standard stuff. But Fuller displays a great deal of wit in the execution.
There's a fair number of meta-film jokes that liven up the film, like a brief detour where Corbett's character follows Lang into a movie theatre showing a German-dubbed version of Rio Bravo, so we can luxuriate both in the awesomeness of that film and the strangeness of a German-speaking Dean Martin imitator. For that matter, Claude Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran pops up in a small role as a former extortionist named Dr. Bogdanovich. Lang's own appearance in Godard's Alphaville is even excerpted as evidence of her character's failed film career!
Beyond the in-jokes, Fuller plays around with the conventions of movies and the policier/noir genre. A shootout takes place in the nursery of a hospital's maternity ward, images of the gunfight intercut with images of sleeping babies, mocking any pretensions of realism the viewer might approach the film with. As one blackmail victim examines his photo, the expected ominous sound cue appears, but the next shot reveals that the sound cue is coming from a band in the same room as the character.
In some moments, the absurdity of Fuller's approach to the story circles around and becomes ominously threatening. As the streets of Cologne fill with Carnival celebrations in the film, the events of the film become seriocomic like an Elizabethan mystery play. Eric P Caspar, as a clown-suited henchman, runs through the streets, confetti covering his lips, muttering drugged-out nonsense as he closes in on Corbett and Lang, and everything resolves into eerie surrealism. Much like in Losey's Modesty Blaise, where Amsterdam's Carnival offers a site where the funny becomes dangerous, Fuller's film develops an unresolved tension from the impossibility of predicting which mode (comedy or thriller) it will end in. As a result, the ending, which brings us back to the beginning and the title, has the gut punch of a particularly well-told sick joke.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
The tightest 2 hours & 20 minutes in movie history...
The Honey Pot, d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1967
Starring Rex Harrison, Susan Hayward, Cliff Robertson, and Maggie Smith
"If not for Signor Perry Mason, each week in America, an innocent person would be convicted," says a police detective as he leaves for work, midway through The Honey Pot. That should give you an idea of how much respect Mankiewicz (who directed & wrote All About Eve, among other great films) feels toward the mystery genre. In this twisty tale, he seems to delight in yanking away the rug each time you start to figure things out. He does the same thing to the amateur detectives that always show up in these things, which is playing fair in a strange way, I guess.
Still, this is a two hour and twenty minute mystery/comedy, two genres where most people (myself included) value efficiency. Heck, I'm pretty sure that's a longer run time than Ben Jonson's Volpone, the classical comedy the movie is based on (and also commenting on). When Rex Harrison, Maggie Smith or Cliff Robertson are on screen together, you don't feel the length. But when one of Rex Harrison's character's three loves is on screen, you might feel the urge to check your watch. I certainly feel as if Mankiewicz is showing his age in this one, All About Eve being 17 years old at the point when this movie was made.
So the synopsis... Cecil Fox (Harrison) is an eccentric millionaire, the type who buys out an entire theatre's seats so he can watch a play by himself & then leaves at the end of the fourth act because he doesn't like how the play ends. He's decided to re-enact Volpone (whose title character's name means "Fox", after all) and his eccentricity extends to hiring an "administrative assistant" cum stage manager because the guy's last name is McFly (just as Volpone's servant is Mosca or "fly"). McFly (Cliff Robertson) and Fox lead Fox's three greatest loves, Princess Dominique (Capucine), Hollywood star Merle McGill (Edie Adams); and Texas tycoon Lonestar Crockett (Susan Hayward) to believe that Fox is dying and trying to decide which of the three should be his heir. However, when Lonestar O.D.s on sleeping pills that her nurse Sara Watkins (Maggie Smith) knows should have been placebos, it seems that someone is taking Fox's prank more seriously than was intended. You can probably start to see why this will take two plus hours.
As far as plotting goes, the double-crosses and twists are well-handled, so that even as you find yourself formulating theories, you wonder if it could really be that simple. And while this isn't quite a mystery that you can solve on your own, when everything is revealed, there's no sneaking suspicion that characters weren't acting (relatively) rationally.
On the acting side, Rex Harrison is a wonderful fit as an eccentric millionaire whose eccentricities might not be so harmless. He's affable and witty one moment, flip and cynical the next. On top of that, Mankiewicz gets the best bit of physical comedy from Harrison's character's ambition to dance ballet. Harrison is amazingly agile, but he certainly lacks a dancer's body, though the comedy comes from the dignity and self-assurance he projects, as if his pirouetting were the most natural thing the world.
Cliff Robertson also does a nice turn as a clever and cynical drifter, capable of brilliance but afraid to pursue anything in life for fear he might fail at it. And Maggie Smith pulls off the difficult job of playing a rigid, repressed woman while hinting at her capability for deception and amorality.
When these three are sparring or flirting or quipping among the brilliant Venetian scenery, the movie is like dark chocolate, bitter with a tang of sweetness, tasty without becoming cloying.
Unfortunately, Harrison's former lovers/prospective heiresses are vague caricatures, all outline, with no substance. I'm not quite sure what drew his character to them in the first place, even though he has good enough reasons for going after them now. Lonestar, the one we hear the most about, whose lust for life nearly killed Harrison, fails to come off as a voluptuary clinging to life and instead seems vaguely tired. Though only a fourth of the movie is spent with them, each moment focused on them feels twice as long.
If I haven't spent much time on the visual aspect of the film, it's because there's very little to talk about. The set design is quite lovely and deliciously spooky when it needs to be, and there is one very good shot of one character reacting unexpectedly to another character's attempt to unravel the mystery that could have come straight out of a giallo. But except for the opening scene at the theatre, there's nothing particularly original or daring or exhilarating in the mise en scene.
Still, I don't want to be too harsh to a movie which ends with a main character recoiling in horror (via voiceover) from the expected "happy ending" tableau, as our two romantic leads bicker and quip across the Venetian cityscape. Hardly a lost classic, but as enjoyable as a big piece of candy.
Grade: B-
P.S. There's a weird way that it serves as a companion piece to The Last of Sheila, given they're both about eccentric millionaires whose games are hijacked by someone else's scheme. The Honey Pot is more flippantly cynical, yet has a happy ending. The Last of Sheila is more focused on the mystery, only to end on a viciously dark note. I don't know quite what to make of that.
"If not for Signor Perry Mason, each week in America, an innocent person would be convicted," says a police detective as he leaves for work, midway through The Honey Pot. That should give you an idea of how much respect Mankiewicz (who directed & wrote All About Eve, among other great films) feels toward the mystery genre. In this twisty tale, he seems to delight in yanking away the rug each time you start to figure things out. He does the same thing to the amateur detectives that always show up in these things, which is playing fair in a strange way, I guess.
Still, this is a two hour and twenty minute mystery/comedy, two genres where most people (myself included) value efficiency. Heck, I'm pretty sure that's a longer run time than Ben Jonson's Volpone, the classical comedy the movie is based on (and also commenting on). When Rex Harrison, Maggie Smith or Cliff Robertson are on screen together, you don't feel the length. But when one of Rex Harrison's character's three loves is on screen, you might feel the urge to check your watch. I certainly feel as if Mankiewicz is showing his age in this one, All About Eve being 17 years old at the point when this movie was made.
So the synopsis... Cecil Fox (Harrison) is an eccentric millionaire, the type who buys out an entire theatre's seats so he can watch a play by himself & then leaves at the end of the fourth act because he doesn't like how the play ends. He's decided to re-enact Volpone (whose title character's name means "Fox", after all) and his eccentricity extends to hiring an "administrative assistant" cum stage manager because the guy's last name is McFly (just as Volpone's servant is Mosca or "fly"). McFly (Cliff Robertson) and Fox lead Fox's three greatest loves, Princess Dominique (Capucine), Hollywood star Merle McGill (Edie Adams); and Texas tycoon Lonestar Crockett (Susan Hayward) to believe that Fox is dying and trying to decide which of the three should be his heir. However, when Lonestar O.D.s on sleeping pills that her nurse Sara Watkins (Maggie Smith) knows should have been placebos, it seems that someone is taking Fox's prank more seriously than was intended. You can probably start to see why this will take two plus hours.
As far as plotting goes, the double-crosses and twists are well-handled, so that even as you find yourself formulating theories, you wonder if it could really be that simple. And while this isn't quite a mystery that you can solve on your own, when everything is revealed, there's no sneaking suspicion that characters weren't acting (relatively) rationally.
On the acting side, Rex Harrison is a wonderful fit as an eccentric millionaire whose eccentricities might not be so harmless. He's affable and witty one moment, flip and cynical the next. On top of that, Mankiewicz gets the best bit of physical comedy from Harrison's character's ambition to dance ballet. Harrison is amazingly agile, but he certainly lacks a dancer's body, though the comedy comes from the dignity and self-assurance he projects, as if his pirouetting were the most natural thing the world.
Cliff Robertson also does a nice turn as a clever and cynical drifter, capable of brilliance but afraid to pursue anything in life for fear he might fail at it. And Maggie Smith pulls off the difficult job of playing a rigid, repressed woman while hinting at her capability for deception and amorality.
When these three are sparring or flirting or quipping among the brilliant Venetian scenery, the movie is like dark chocolate, bitter with a tang of sweetness, tasty without becoming cloying.
Unfortunately, Harrison's former lovers/prospective heiresses are vague caricatures, all outline, with no substance. I'm not quite sure what drew his character to them in the first place, even though he has good enough reasons for going after them now. Lonestar, the one we hear the most about, whose lust for life nearly killed Harrison, fails to come off as a voluptuary clinging to life and instead seems vaguely tired. Though only a fourth of the movie is spent with them, each moment focused on them feels twice as long.
If I haven't spent much time on the visual aspect of the film, it's because there's very little to talk about. The set design is quite lovely and deliciously spooky when it needs to be, and there is one very good shot of one character reacting unexpectedly to another character's attempt to unravel the mystery that could have come straight out of a giallo. But except for the opening scene at the theatre, there's nothing particularly original or daring or exhilarating in the mise en scene.
Still, I don't want to be too harsh to a movie which ends with a main character recoiling in horror (via voiceover) from the expected "happy ending" tableau, as our two romantic leads bicker and quip across the Venetian cityscape. Hardly a lost classic, but as enjoyable as a big piece of candy.
Grade: B-
P.S. There's a weird way that it serves as a companion piece to The Last of Sheila, given they're both about eccentric millionaires whose games are hijacked by someone else's scheme. The Honey Pot is more flippantly cynical, yet has a happy ending. The Last of Sheila is more focused on the mystery, only to end on a viciously dark note. I don't know quite what to make of that.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Dept. of Loathsome Movies...
So, are there actually people who think Falling Down is a good movie? I think Glenn Beck must have seen this movie, and thought it was a documentary....
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
The Creature With a Thousand Films
I'm kind of conflicted by what I'm about to write. For I am a geek and I love the horror and sci-fi genres. And if you love horror and sci-fi films, then the man you owe the most thanks to is Roger Corman.
Roger Corman was/is not the best director or producer to work in those genres. He obviously wasn't the first. He was never the most ground-breaking one, even at his heyday. But he was probably the most prolific one*. And as Stalin once said, "quantity has a quality all its own."
Even if you think AiP/New World Pictures put out mostly cheap cash-in crap (which is true), Corman's desire to corner areas of the market that the "serious" studios like MGM or Warner wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole often produced interesting or daring work. Corman made a movie attacking the KKK in 1962 (!), when such a film could be personal and commercial risk (The Intruder). His Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors helped to perfect the dark comedy. And X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes, really needs no defense or explanation, beyond the fact that it is a well-made and effective horror film that mines the seamy side of our desires to great effect.
And if, for whatever reason, those films just don't speak to you, then remember that Corman helped raise an entire generation of film-makers, giving them a place to learn their craft and perfect their voice. Directors like Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, John Sayles, Jack Hill, James Cameron, Monte Hellman and Paul Bartel all learned at his feet or the feet of people working for him. Corman's films gave actors like Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, William Shatner, and Peter Fonda some of their first major acting gigs.
But he made a lot of crap. Sometimes personal crap, sometimes exhilarating crap, but in the end, enough to keep MST3K running for years on his directorial & production work alone. And the older he got, the more of a cash-in artist he became. The Vampirella movie. The 1990s Fantastic Four movie. The endless Syfy/Sci-Fi channel re-makes and originals.
And while you could never claim he alone dumbed down the industry, he specialized in cheap, stupid movies aimed at teenagers, filled with blood and sex and rock 'n' roll (or his best approximations of them). He churned out endlessly padded films with no plot, bad science, attractive but lightweight actors, and ridiculous costumes. He practically invented the car chase movie. Corman was no Val Lewton, taking a trashy genre and finding the beauty in it. He was a dumpster diver, who could recognize when someone threw out something perfectly good, but more likely to take a pile of junk to the scrapyard.
When you watch a summer tent-pole film that's clearly cobbled together around action sequences and catch phrases, market-tested to the 18-25 demographic, you're watching the inheritors of the Roger Corman tradition. The difference is that they are more scientific about it.
So it's easy to complain the loss of intelligent movies these days, the bad actors, ham-fisted direction & awful scripts. But that's the commercial model, dreamed up by a man who knew how to compete with TV without having to work on TV's model.
So don't complain about the culture wars. Roger Corman's Hollywood is on one side, really; the side of the consumer.
Let's give Roger Corman an Invisible Hand, everyone!
But he made a lot of crap. Sometimes personal crap, sometimes exhilarating crap, but in the end, enough to keep MST3K running for years on his directorial & production work alone. And the older he got, the more of a cash-in artist he became. The Vampirella movie. The 1990s Fantastic Four movie. The endless Syfy/Sci-Fi channel re-makes and originals.
And while you could never claim he alone dumbed down the industry, he specialized in cheap, stupid movies aimed at teenagers, filled with blood and sex and rock 'n' roll (or his best approximations of them). He churned out endlessly padded films with no plot, bad science, attractive but lightweight actors, and ridiculous costumes. He practically invented the car chase movie. Corman was no Val Lewton, taking a trashy genre and finding the beauty in it. He was a dumpster diver, who could recognize when someone threw out something perfectly good, but more likely to take a pile of junk to the scrapyard.
When you watch a summer tent-pole film that's clearly cobbled together around action sequences and catch phrases, market-tested to the 18-25 demographic, you're watching the inheritors of the Roger Corman tradition. The difference is that they are more scientific about it.
So it's easy to complain the loss of intelligent movies these days, the bad actors, ham-fisted direction & awful scripts. But that's the commercial model, dreamed up by a man who knew how to compete with TV without having to work on TV's model.
So don't complain about the culture wars. Roger Corman's Hollywood is on one side, really; the side of the consumer.
Let's give Roger Corman an Invisible Hand, everyone!
*I'm excluding people like William "one-shot" Beaudine, who were so prolific because everything they churned out was unadulterated crap. Corman certainly put out crap, but almost all his crap is at least trying to do something.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sick as a dog... what's your story?
ugh...
bad bad blogger.
no content now.
promise to blog soon.
If you are in need of commentary, I will say, Die, Mommie, Die is disappointingly uncampy (at least compared to the source material it parodies). Maybe it works better on stage?
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