End of the Month Round-Up

So, here are a couple of fun experiences I had this past (couple of months).

First of all, I actually got to meet somebody who has my dream job. I got to meet Andrea Kalas for thirty minutes at Paramount. She was very cordial and had a lot of helpful, encouraging advice. After all, one of her first major projects. I'm forever indebted to Tom, who spurred the Bessie Love post from last month, for putting me in touch with her.

Secondly, I've had a few production gigs, some of which actually paid, but all of them were good experiences. I've had some shitty, shitty PA jobs before, so I ought to know. There are some in the future, unpaid for the most part, but it makes school bearable.

Right now, I am on Spring Break, and last night I went to see Ran at the Stanford Theater with my dad and my brother. Now, I'm one of those people who needs to see a Kurosawa movie in the theater, and not only because that's the only way to see them. I'm have a bad case of that very modern disease, the ADD, and it makes watching anything on DVD a bit difficult. With nobody to watch you (and judge you), you find yourself folding laundry, checking your email or rushing back and forth from the kitchen to microwave a burrito while the movie plays. If the movie has subtitled, its even more of a problem; half the plot goes missing, characters become indistinguishable, you get the drift. So I always welcome to opportunity to see anything in the theater that I know isn't going to completely captivate me.

(That's not to say that Ran isn't a captivating, powerful film. It is. It's a strong story (you know, King Lear) and beautifully told. The lush greens and brilliant reds really make you appreciate the look of projected film. I'd never seen Ran before, and I'm glad that this was my introduction to it.)

The Stanford Theater and me go way back. I saw my first silent movie, Safety Last, there when I was seven (that's a story for another day). I saw many of my favorites there for the first time: Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, the silent Ben Hur, These Three, The Man Who Laughs. In high school I went all the time, sometimes with a friend but usually alone; I liked to do things by myself at the time anyway.

Flash forward five or six years to now, and I am very much a changed man. I strongly dislike going to movies alone. I haven't gone to see a conventional movie on my own since 2007 (Aranofsky's The Fountain - which I liked). This past month, however, I've had a bit of regression to my past life as a chubby, virginal, be-acned seventeen-year-old in the form of screenings at the Silent Theater down on Santa Monica and Melrose in Hollywood. I was most excited to find out that they were screening a Tod Browning silent from 1926, The Mystic with Aileen Pringle, because, as it just so happens, me and The Mystic go way back.

Flashback to 1996. I'm 11, I'm in sixth grade, and I'm going through a phase where I want to be a fashion designer. After haunting every fashion section of the local library for at least a week, I come away with an awareness of the artist Erte, and his amazing body of work that spanned over fifty years. I was enthralled by his extravagance, his use of detail, his willingness to show bare breasts and, most notably, his time spent in the mid-1920's as a couturier-in-residence at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He designed sets and costumes for the likes of Marion Davies, Carmel Myers (his favorite), Norma Shearer and the exquisite above-mentioned Miss Pringle. Among the illustrations in the two books of his that the Palo Alto Library System holds are both costume sketches and tantalizing set stills from The Mystic. I remember staring at those photos and wondering if I would ever actually see the movie itself. It seems so long ago and so far away.

Well, I got my chance. I want to actually write a review, but that can be done another time. The issue at hand is regressing back to high school. I say this only because I went alone and wished that I hadn't. I made a sheepish attempt to invite a couple of people at the last minute. I didn't expect any sort of big crowd to show up, but when I got there, there was a line out the door. I was worried that I wouldn't get in. Nobody resembled the crowd I expected. Almost everyone in attendance was young, slim, clearly well adjusted and not at all crotchety. They all had dates.

At first I felt encroached-upon. All I wanted to do was slink into a quiet screening of some obscure movie, have my box of candy all to myself, and then slink back out. It was exactly the kind of experience I could have at the Stanford way back then, with the cavernous auditorium barely an eighth full. For some inexplicable reason I felt angry at everyone there. Then I caught myself; I was being stupid. I should have rejoyced, as I do now, that so many people had an interest in this movie. I should have been happy for The Mystic that I almost had to fight my in to see it.

Then there was the fact that I was alone. I felt so weird and naked there, being one of the few people with no date, no entourage. I look back on the situation and I realize that, generally, I don't often expect my friends to have any interest in these events. This is silly, of course. Case in point, I met up with some friends right after (a last minute thing) and they said "Oh, that sounds like so much fun. You should have told us." I don't doubt that I have cool friends, but I forget that we have as much in common as we do.

My resolution for April: Do a better job of inviting people to stuff.

Good Ideas: Ozsploitation

I've gotten really interested, lately, in vintage foreign action movie genres, namely the Nikkatsu yakuza thrillers of the 1960's, and the Roger Corman-produced, Pam Grier-starring quazi-Blaxploitation women-in-prison action movies from the 1970's, movies like The Big Doll House and Black Mama, White Mama (they count as foreign because they were shot in the Philippines). I have to admit I'm even curious about those awful Golan & Globus action movies that were shot in Israel or Apartheid-era South Africa in the late 1980's. Maybe this was a phase I should have gone through when I was younger, but right now I'm rethinking my old attitudes about "guy" movies, movies that are gritty and cheep and know it.

I can now add another sub-genre to that list, thanks to today's episode of The Business on KCRW (I listen to the podcast version every week). Ozsploitation is the subject of a documentary called Not Quite Hollywood, which documents the rash of sleezy, ultraviolent and bra-ripping early days of 1970's Australian filmmaking. According to the director, Australia had developed a very strong film industry in the 1940's and 1950's, but the foreign powers bought up all the cinemas in the 1960's and pushed the homegrown industry out. The country's return to domestic film output co-incided with the dismantling of censorship laws, and as a result, the outback cinema became one of blood and boobs, and more than a handful of near-death car stunts. Among the best known of the genre were Mad Max and The Cars That Ate Paris, but there were dozens of other films that were far dirtier, far more explicitly violent and sexual, far more shocking. The genre also gave start to a lot of careers, including Barry Humphries/Dame Edna Everage, who you'll remember from another blog entry.

I had no idea there was a piece of history like this lurking in the shadows, but it does fit with what information I did already have about Aussie films. If I had to name any Austrailian movie older than Mad Max, I couldn't get much farther than The Story of the Kelly Gang. and that's only because it's been acknowleged as the first feature film ever made that wasn't a boxing documentary. It's really qite a sad story, that of Australia's film industry, that it produced the worlds feature film (in the tender year of 1906) and had a thriving industry that was so destroyed by America in about fifteen years time that these films are the output of an industry that was starting over from scratch.

That's not to diminish the value of the movies that are profiled in Not Quite Hollywood. They look fun and exciting. Given the context in which they were made, I feel like now is the best time for me to see them. The really ironic thing is that the only other movies being made in Australia at the time were languid hits and misses like Walkabout (hit) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (not a hit).

Somehow I bet Night of Fear or Alvin Purple Rides Again are a lot more watchable that the beautifully shot but not very rewarding Careful, He Might Hear You, which I just sent back to Netflix yesterday.)We'll see how I feel once I've seen a few Ozsploitation movies all the way through, but first, Seijin Suzuki's Youth of the Beast.

Now I Wanna Be Your Dog

Every now that then you see something that makes you angry, not because it offends you, but because you wish you came up with it. Back in February I saw Diablo Cody speak at Cinequest in San Jose and she said that The Wrestler had made her angry for that very reason.

Well, here's the item for this week that I wish I had come up with: A beautifully designed and smashingly edited rendition of the classic Stooges song. Why couldn't I have come up with this? It's not like I've been busy updating my blog or anything.



Oh well. I'm sure I'll be feeling the same thing tonight; I'm going to see the long-awaited (500) Days of Summer.

Good Ideas: WPA Murals, Hawaii

There are a few things bothering me lately, but only slightly since I haven't been keeping up on politics a whole lot in the past few weeks. From what I can tell, crazy white people are still having affairs and snubbing government money that would help their states' schools, and then spreading rumors that Barack Obama might not have been born in the US, and about how brown women are racist. Oh yeah, and they're still practically going out of their way to mispronouce non-WASP surnames. I guess I haven't been missing very much.

President Obama is a native of Hawaii, that beautiful state where white people can go and get treated like massa's. Hawaii was inducted into the union in March 1959, a year and five months before his was born, so the question of birth on American soil isn't an issue. However I was talking with a friend the other day and the hypothetical "What if he had been born before 1959" came up. It's a reasonable scenario. Fortunately, Albert is smart and knew right away that, since 1900, Hawaii had been a US territory, which qualities it as American soil, and therefore Obama wouldn't have had any trouble. Can you imagine what Mrs Ann Coulter would have done with that, though? I'm going to write Albert in on the ballot for 2012.

The only things that are really bugging me about Obama are already things we knew before we voted for him: He's a little more moderate than I would like, and he doesn't support marriage equality. I've said that before, not on here, and I'll say it again, on here. And, yes, it's the perfect time to take down Don't Ask, Don't Tell. These Human Rights Campaign spam emails really to stop. People are also totally freaked out about the free communist healthcare, big surprise. I just want to know if American can expect free WPA Murals with their healthcare. That's a change I could believe in.


By the way, this is the WPA mural from the late, great Essex Mountain Sanatorium in Verona, New Jersey. Check out the link below to see more fabulous pictures.

http://www.mountainsanatorium.net/