Sloganeering

If this were only the original trailer...

Question Me An Answer

Though it's probably a bad, bad movie, I'm dying to get my chance to see the 1973 remake of Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, a prime example of the disconnect between the Hollywood Studios and the movie audience of the seventies. And I don't want to see it so much because of the moviemaking but rather to see how the songs are deployed in context of the film, as this is the only original motion picture musical written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David; in fact its colossal failure was the beginning of the end of their partnership. I bought the soundtrack on a whim a few years ago, partly because the movie was so famous for being bad and partly because of its garish gatefold cover of the steps of Shangri-La. I didn't actually listen to the record until I went on a huge Bacharach bender and tried to sample everything he did. (Another fantastic discovery along these lines was Bacharach and David's score for Promises, Promises on Broadway, another remake, this time of The Apartment, with Jerry Orbach. The clip below is a mindblowing number from the 1968 Tony Awards of the most uncharacteristic song from the show.)


This is a clip from a Bacharach TV special made around the time of Lost Horizon and Burt seems pretty enthusiastic about the project and working with a children's choir (was there ever a man who seemed more comfortable in his own skin?) but in a more recent interview he painted the experience as a nightmare - perhaps the reception it received got under his skin over the years.


But it's a terrific score, anyway, considering Sally Kellerman sings a few of the songs. I would have been classified as a "heavy user" of this soundtrack a couple of years ago - I played it a few times a week, not my usual practise. Of course there is no DVD of the film, even as a cash-in on Bacharach's cult status. How happy I am to be able to present this appreciation of one of the highlights of Lost Horizon courtesy of two hilarious Dutchmen.

Senior Moment

The first thought I had when I saw the final one-sheet for this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Meth was: hasn't anything happened to me in the last eighteen years? It looks exactly like the other posters in the series, in the sense that it looks like it came off a template of eighties action movie poster design. I will repeat my grousing of last year. Harrison Ford is now older than Sean Connery was when he played his father in the last one. But Connery was supposed to be a senior in that film...I highly doubt Ford's role is to be that of the grumpy old man in this one. Please let there not be a shirtless scene.

This seems to be a bit of a step back for Spielberg. I think it's a bit old-fashioned to continue to knock him for being Mr. Blockbuster, a non-risk-taking director who, to quote from an anti-Spielberg essay written by Crispin Glover (sic), “wafted his putrid stench upon our culture, a culture he helped homogenize and propagandize” (this from the guy who signed up for Like Mike and Charlie's Angels). I myself probably skip as many of his new releases as I see but I cannot take cheap shots at his body of work or his skills as a filmmaker. Minority Report was top-notch and his last film, Munich, even with the WTF sequence towards the end, is a masterpiece that time will be very kind to; maybe someday people will wish it had won Best Picture instead of fucking Crash. I know he pops between these lofty heights and The Terminal, but the career work is worthy of a Cinematheque series as much as that of Lynch or Scorsese... let the comments flamewar begin.

Crackhouse Multiplex

Another great moment from the history of Cannon Films - from the British release of their late eighties thriller Crack House, here is star Richard Roundtree introducing the film with a public service announcement about not doing crack, while settling back in a teensy, empty little multiplex theatre with springy seats.

Eastern Provinces

My friend Gordon informed me that Juno has just opened in South Korea, and is the first Canadian film that he can remember playing there since The Red Violin (didn't you guys get A History of Violence or The Barbarian Invasions? What about Les Boys?)

The Genies, the Canadian Oscars, are on next week, and Juno, despite being shot in Vancouver with a Canadian director, star and crew, is ineligible for any awards as the financing was American, whereas Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, with American and Australian leads, a London backdrop and an British crew, was partly financed by Canadians and therefore enjoys 12 nominations.

This nationalistic dilemma could have been addressed by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences if they had deigned to nominate the soundtrack to Juno for a Juno award this spring...could this be a job for a write-in ballot campaign?

I took the photo to your upper right outside a video store in Buenos Aires - it was prominently displayed on the racks in most of the rental shops I checked out...

Walking With Lee

Let's take a walk down Valhallavägen...

M.I.A.

Star-filter-saturated musical number from 1982's Disco Dancer - the sample may ring your bell.

Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye...

Well, Mitt Romney is out. He said he's leaving the presidential race for the good of the nation, because if he was in any way responsible for the GOP losing the election that would be tantamount to giving the terrorists the upper hand. This is all psuedo-bad news for all the right-wing talk radio blowhards who have been backing his fading candidacy, saying they would vote for Hillary Clinton if McCain was their party's standard-bearer, purportedly because she's more conservative than he is, even though they must know that raging against the ruling Clintons is actually their bread-and-butter.

Well, David Letterman should be good tonight - his nightly skewering of Romney has been a spectacular run of scorched-earth hilarity - and further proof that Mitt's a rich man, as all these wicked burns have been at his expense.

Don't worry about Mitt, if this presidential thing doesn't work out he can always go back to playing Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless. Mitt Romney doesn't look like a president, he looks like a ringmaster. Mitt looks like a guy wearing a golf shirt in an Eddie Bauer catalogue. He looks like the desk clerk at a Peninsula Hotel who tells you your room's not ready. Mitt looks like the guy at a party who gives you his card. He looks like a tennis pro at a restricted country club. He looks like a Jet Blue pilot who comes out to greet the passengers during the delay. Mitt Romney looks like the guy who says to the contestant, 'We're out of time, can you come back tomorrow?'

The Florida retirees didn't go for that Mitt Romney, either. He reminded them of a guy who tries to get a hold of their nest egg. He reminded them of a guy who sells subdivisions in the Everglades. He reminded them of the guy who pitches overpriced cemetery plots. He reminded them of the pharmacist who doesn't accept their prescription plan.

How about that Mitt Romney, am I right about this guy? I mean, he looks like the guy on TV selling life insurance, doesn't he? He looks like that guy on a Father's Day ad for Norelco. He looks like a guy on cable urging you to tap your home equity. He looks like an American President in a Canadian movie. He looks like the medical expert in a Victoria Principal infomercial. He looks like the spokesman for senior lending networks. He looks like the guy who promises accident victims he'll get the money they deserve. He looks like the guy on the 'Just For Men' bottle. I mean, this guy looks like he'd be selling fruit dehydrators on cable. He looks like the guy who tells you how to buy real estate with no money down. He looks like a cosmetic surgeon who gets ambushed on 60 Minutes. He looks like the photo that comes with the frame... By the way, if Mitt Romney is elected, he'll be the first president ever sworn in on a copy of GQ.

What about that Mitt Romney? He looks like a guy who would run a seminar on condo flipping. He looks like the neighbor who spends way too much time on his lawn. Mitt Romney looks like he is the closer at a Cadillac dealership. Mitt Romney looks like that guy on the golf course in the Levitra commercial.

We're all very proud of Mitt. He's the only presidential candidate to come from the Channel 2 news team. Let's throw it over to Mitt and see what's going on in the weather. He looks like the guy that would approve your check at a supermarket. He looks like the piano player at an upscale department store. He looks like a guy who winks when he shakes your hand. He looks like a guy who is married to an over the hill actress. He looks like a guy who would brag about his cholesterol. He looks like the owner of the steakhouse who keeps interrupting dinner to find out how things are going...

He looks like a lawyer who advertises on the back of a bus. This guy, he looks like an American actor who's popular in Germany. He looks like a contractor you'd have to sue, this Mitt Romney. He looks like the neighbor with the neat garage, that Mitt Romney. You remember Mitt Romney from the '80s? He was Mr. Goodwrench.

Mitt looks like a guy modeling briefs on a package of underwear. Mitt looks like a guy who said he met Marge on eHarmony. Mitt looks like a guy who goes to the restroom when the check comes. Mitt looks like a guy who tries to sign you up for Herbalife. He looks like a golf commentator fired for an off-the-cuff remark...

Air Scopitone

You Are Now Free To Move About The Cabin

Baby, It's Cold Outside

What better way to hot things up on an icy-cold winter's night with some lurid imagery from the fevered imagination of Harold Robbins?


Trailer for The Carpetbaggers (1964).



Fashion show from The Adventurers (1970).

Soviet Oscars!

One thing that has been interesting about the writers' strike in the States is how management's refusal to get back to the bargaining table has wound up imposing a quasi-Soviet gloom on the entertainment industry. Sunday night's televised Golden Globes ceremony was kind of like a 1988 Cold War awards show with a Hollywood touch, with no jokes and glammed-up TASS reporters as the presenters. (Come on, weren't there any right-wing movie stars with enough cojones to stride through a picket line and rip open some envelopes?) It's amazing that the industry is choosing to go forward with awards season in the midst of the strike, pretending that this dourness is the best possible way to do things instead of just sending out a press release like in wartime. The old adage must be true: The Show Must Go On.

Here is clip from Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Televised Conference / Awards Ceremony - category is Best Original Musical Song From Feature-Length Movie Film For Theatres. Loving usage of oppressive roomtone.



Will the Academy Awards be this amazing? Will they fly in Gorbachev to give out the Best Picture award? Will they finally give Sergei Eisenstein his special lifetime achievement Oscar?

This Is Not Your Mother's CBC

Says the latest full-page ad touting the launch of the Mothercorp's Winter Prime-Time Schedule, and they are not kidding. I guess the bad news is CBC 2.0 won't be bringing us anything along the lines of SCTV, The Kids In The Hall or Donald Brittain-calibre documentaries, then.

CBC has recently seemed to me to be about three or four years behind most TV trends. Their biggest ratings hit of late, Little Mosque on the Prairie, bears more than a passing resemblance to Corner Gas, a successful CBC-esque show airing on the private broadcaster for three or four years now.

This season, CBC has:

- their own 24 (The Border, with lots of Kiefer-meets-David Caruso squinting through Raybans, jittery shots of computer monitors, gunmetal grey interrogation rooms, dialogue revolving around the phrases "intel" and "satellite uplink" and gunfights in parking lots with shutter-strobe photography.)

- their own Footballers' Wives (MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives): bare bums in the locker room and flashes of boobies after 9 PM! Here's a telling quote from one of the actresses on the show (italics mine): “I remember my jaw dropping when the script for the pilot had a sex scene that involved double-teaming. It never shows that happening, but I remember going, ‘What? For the CBC, a threesome is pretty risqué!'”

- a Reality Bites-esque Gen-Y comedy called J-Pod billed wincingly as "a full terabyte of dysfunctional" but which at least has Alan Thicke as a sleazy dad. That still won't be enough, though.

- their own wacky one-woman Sex In The City called Sophie (itself a remake of a Quebec sitcom) which seems to have incorporated every Cosmo cliché imaginable without irony: the gay best friend, the domineering mother, etc. The tagline for the show is "And the craziness hasn't even begun!", which I imagine they can use for the entire run of the series.

Well, at least it's writers strike reruns in the States and that will allow these shows a rare chance to be seen. And whether or not it all works out, I guess this means maybe in 2010 the CBC will have an ersatz Desperate Housewives or Entourage to push, perhaps while mocking the kind of shows they are running now.

Hey, and what's wrong with the old CBC anyway? It was awesome! I think the braintrust ignores this at their peril.

Write What You Know, Brisseau

The ever-shrinking world of French filmmaker Jean-Claude Brisseau has just shrunk a bit further... in 2002 Brisseau made the deeply cynical male-gaze extravaganza Secret Things, an erotic thriller about two women using their sexuality to move up the corporate ladder. Upon the film's release, Brisseau was charged by two actresses who auditioned for the film with sexual assault (he had asked them to masturbate before his camera as part of the audition, you see). He was found guilty and received a suspended sentence.

His follow-up film, 2006's The Exterminating Angels, is an even sleazier film about a film director who makes a film about female eroticism, hiring young actresses to audition by masturbating in front of his camera who then turn around and accuse him of sexual assault. And lo and behold, last month Brisseau was accused by two more actresses who said he sexually assaulted them during the auditions for this newest film.



Brisseau, who in real life looks like the Paramount Pictures mountain if it wore a leather jacket, denies these latest charges. This is just a guess, but I think Brisseau's next film will be about a filmmaker making a film about a filmmaker making a film about female eroticism who hires women to masturbate in front of the camera who will then accuse him of sexual assault, only to be charged himself with sexual assault.



(Thanks, Andréa, for the update - I'm now obsessed.)

Buenos Aires In Trailer Form