October forever

I became a fan of Ray Bradbury at the age of 9, first through his short stories, then via the wonderful novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Aside from The Great Gatsby, this is the novel I've re-read the most over the years. As a young reader, the last half of the book fell down a bit with its speculations on aging and fatherhood, but the first half never lets me down, particularly the first 30 or 40 pages which introduce the main characters. This is a picture of my original copy from 1967. I also own two other paperback editions and a hardcover, but this copy, still holding together, is the one I go back to.

Every year when October rolls around again, and leaves start swirling in the twilight wind, I think of this book. I consider that feeling and those images gifts from Ray Bradbury.

Lena Horne

No, I'm not old enough to have seen Stormy Weather when it came out in 1943. But I did see Lena Horne in person when she took her one-woman Broadway hit Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music on the road in the mid-80s. In her sixties, she had more energy than I had in my thirties when I saw her. It was a fabulous show. She never got the movie career she deserved, but she shines in this movie, just released on Blu-Ray in a lovely print. There's not much plot--this is one of those big studio revues that is essentially a string of production numbers with just enough narrative to keep them all together. But with Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway, and the amazing Nicholas Brothers, you don't really need a plot.

I Want to Bite Your Hand

As an 8-year-old in 1964, I was caught up in Beatlemania thanks to my babysitter, a high school student named Susan. It was because of her that I watched the Beatles debut on Ed Sullivan and asked for Beatles records for my birthday (which to my parents' credit, I got). I was also at the beginning of my obsession with monster movies. So my mom got me this album full of parody rock songs with a monster-movie twist. I loved it and listened to it almost as much as I listened to Meet the Beatles.

The man who created the album, Gene Moss, mostly worked in children's television, including spending a few years producing segments for Sesame Street. This album actually made the Billboard charts for a few weeks. I don't remember all the songs, but I can still hear Moss in his best Dracula voice singing "I Want to Bite Your Hand," and I know "The King Kong Stomp" ("The jungle swings with a mighty sound/When King Kong starts to monkey around.") Mom knew what I'd like.

New year, new purpose

I will try to revive my moribund blog by focusing on mementos and artifacts (ads and photos) of movies, books, songs and albums that have been important to me, with a few brief words on why. I have been posting movie ads from newspapers in a Facebook group, which gave me the idea for doing the same here, with added personal commentary. Most of the ads will be from papers in Tucson AZ or Columbus OH, where I spent by formative years, though I will also posts ads and other artifacts from other sources. Some are from microfilm, so pardon the iffy quality.

I begin with Walt Disney's BABES IN TOYLAND (1961), the first movie I remember seeing in a theater. This ad is for its original run (Dec. '61) in a downtown theater in Columbus, Ohio, though I remember my dad taking me to see it at a drive-in, so it probably would have been a 2nd or 3rd run sometime in spring or summer of '62 when I would have been 5 years old. I have fond memories of it, but when I rewatched it a few years ago, it felt pretty bland. I think I had a little crush on Annette, whom I would have known from the Mickey Mouse Club, and I knew Ray Bolger was the Scarecrow from Oz. Had I seen this as an adolescent, I probably would have been more taken with Tommy Sands...

Self-published movies 4: The Room

So it was apparently four months ago that I was posting about bad movies and I never got around to my final example, The Room. This one, though delightfully bad, is harder to write about because it seems like a very personal film, and because, thanks to the book and movie The Disaster Artist, we know much more about the film’s auteur, Tommy Wiseau, so the bashing of the movie feels more personal, though ultimately, any bashing of anyone's artistic expression inevitably has a personal element to it. Another way in which this film is a little different is its genre. Most movies with a "bad movie" rep belong to a clearly defined genre, like science-fiction, horror, mystery, or religion. This one doesn't fit any of those categories. It's a psychological melodrama—its badness doesn't come from cheap special effects or bad costumes, but from an amateur auteur vibe that invites both ridicule and sympathy.

A guy named Johnny lives in a San Francisco apartment with his girlfriend Lisa. They have sex, hang out with friends, and have an odd relationship with a teenage boy named Denny—they start making out in front of him, then when Denny tries to make it a threesome, they boot him out. Out of the blue, Lisa confides to her mother that she's no longer in love with Johnny and she starts an affair with Johnny's best friend Mark. Lisa starts telling people that Johnny hits her, though we know that's not true. Johnny suspects that Lisa is cheating on him so he plants a tape recorder near the phone and soon has evidence. Johnny goes to Peter, a psychologist friend, for advice. There's a party, some horseplay with a football, a visit to a flower shop, and finally a confrontation which ends tragically.

The badness here is pretty much in all categories: script, acting, and execution. Wiseau wrote, directed and played Johnny, and does all three things like an amateur. Characters aren't consistent and most don't act in recognizably human ways: we don’t know why Lisa is unhappy with Johnny—to be fair, Wiseau does play Johnny like a half-asleep manchild with a heavy unidentifiable accent, but we assume he's always been like that, so we never know what changed to make her tired of him. Lisa's mother announces that she "definitely" has breast cancer, but nothing happens to that plotline. As far as Denny and Mark, well, who knows what the hell their motivations are. For the most part, the actors are not at fault. Most of them aren't pros, but you can see they're trying; they're just not getting anything from the script or the director. There's enough potential here, however, that you can see that this might have worked except for Wiseau's extraordinarily weird performance in the lead role. He goes from barely acting (his constant asides of "Oh, hi…”"to everyone who enters the scene) to going over the top (his delivery of "You’re tearing me apart!" in homage to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause).

What makes this movie particularly interesting is how much we now know about its production. Greg Sestro, who plays Mark, wrote a book called The Disaster Artist about the film and his relationship with Wiseau, who comes off alternately as a mentor, a buddy, and a jealous would-be lover. After reading the book and watching the film made of it by James Franco, I wound up having sympathy for Wiseau, although for all the exposure he gets, he remains a man of mystery. This movie was obviously a labor of love for him—as were, I assume, the other self-published movies I've covered previously—and trashing it becomes a little harder to do. Well, not harder (I could fill another blog post relating all the things in the movie that make me laugh or stare in stupefaction), but maybe a little less fun. What looking at these four movies has done is made me realize that some bad movies represent the long, hard work of many people who are trying to express themselves through art. I'm inclined to be a little more forgiving while watching these small-scale films. A poorly-produced film is still a bad movie and may well deserve to be trashed by MST3K or in the privacy of a viewer's living room, but maybe they don't deserve the acid commentary they often get. A.I., Signs, Showgirls, and other awful works from Hollywood big shots still deserve it, but maybe we should be a little kinder to The Room. But I'll still go about chuckling as I recite lines like "You're my favorite customer" or "Me underwears" (The Room) or "…solar panels…" or "…such as seals" (Birdemic) or the all-purpose, "Oh, hi Mark!" And I should add that the Rifftrax guys who riffed on both The Room and Birdemic actually made watching these films fun and interesting; had I popped those movies into my DVD player cold without the riffing, I might not have finished them. (Pictured above is Mike "Me underwears" Holmes.)

Self-published movies 3: Birdemic: Shock and Terror

This so-bad-it's-good movie sounds more or less OK in summary (like the other self-published movies I've written about, there is potential in the story) but the production is inept. However, in this day and age, badly made movies can look good and glossy on the surface. The film's director, James Nguyen, makes this look way better than its 50s and 60s counterparts (PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES). So if you watch this, don’t let its professional look in the beginning fool you; you will soon be giggling in mirth at the bad-movieness on display.

Rod (Alan Bagh) is a software salesman; Nathalie (Whitney Moore) is an aspiring model. Rod catches sight of Nathalie while he's at a diner, and at first, it looks like he's stalking her, but it turns out they went to high school together, and after some strained chit-chat, they make a date at a Vietnamese restaurant (which must have paid Nguyen to include some long sweeping takes of the restaurant's interior), and so begins their romance, which takes up the first half of the movie. Rod, who pays attention to the dismal news about the environment that is playing on TVs around him all the time, becomes a Silicon Valley millionaire and starts an ecology-friendly company; Nathalie gets a gig as a model for Victoria's Secret. They wind up spending the weekend in Half Moon Bay at a pumpkin festival, and the morning after they consummate their relationship, bird attacks begin, not just against Rod and Nathalie, but all over the place. The birds, mostly eagles and vultures, flutter and hover and occasionally expel some liquid that causes fires and explosions. The last half of the film follows the couple as they join up with another couple and hit the road to escape from and do battle with the birds, and encounter others, including a tree-hugger who lives in the woods and two orphan children they take under their wings.

[Spoilers ahead] There are obvious parallels to Hitchcock's THE BIRDS in that two Californians awkwardly couple up, sexual tension seems to trigger the attacking flock of birds, children wind up in harm's way, there's a fiery scene at a gas station (see below), the hero's name is the same as the lead actor in The Birds (Rod Taylor) and the attacks mysteriously stop for no apparent reason. Unfortunately, for a movie selling itself with the words "shock and terror," the bird effects are just laughable. It looks like primitive video game graphics were laid them over the film, so you end up having people swatting the air or swinging clothes hangers in the air as these ridiculous bird images hover in front of them. There is never a moment of shock or terror in the whole film because no one ever seems in danger, even though people do die, with at least one death copied directly from THE BIRDS. For me, the effects are the one thing for which I can't excuse the director.

It's the rest of the stuff that makes this a truly good bad-movie experience. In the acting realm, Alan Bagh as Rod has taken the brunt of the criticism, and he does often seem like a wooden sleepwalker in the first half (the way the poor guy walks down the street makes you wonder if he just learned how to walk). But he grew on me, becoming a major contributor to the dreamlike, almost surreal tone that the film takes on, and he does become more realistically energetic in the second half. Whitney Moore gives arguably a worse performance; her facial expressions are more natural, but she has trouble expressing emotions—during the opening scenes, I couldn't tell whether she was happy, upset or non-committal about Bagh's pestering, and that emotional flatness mostly continues throughout. As for getting the cover of Victoria's Secret—that's never gonna happen for her (not because of her looks but because of her drab affect). I feel bad about criticizing the supporting actors—let’s just call them amateurs and move on.

To touch on just a few of the high/low points, some brought to my attention by the Rifftrax guys, who made the difference in my appreciation of the film: lots of driving and parking footage; a news anchor who discusses the dying off of arctic animals "due to the difficulty of finding enough food, such as seals"; Alan Bagh slurring the words "solar panels"; the complete lack of erotic chemistry between Our Couple during their tame lovemaking scene; Damien Carter's performance of a song called "Hangin’ Out with My Family" while Our Couple gamely hops around on a dance floor—sample lyric: "Then Thelma starts to dancin' and Grandma starts to prancin' / To make sure that the fellas don’t try any glancin'"; one woman is fatally attacked by a bird while she is squatting in the desert having a bowel movement; at Rod's office, an announcement is made that the company has been sold for a billion dollars, making them all rich, and we are treated to an endless scene of a dozen or so people applauding, and then applauding some more; Rod's basketball buddy pumping his arms up and down, exclaiming, "A day without sex is a day wasted" (I was sort of hoping that he and Rod might get a little handsy after the game); any scene with Nathalie's mom.


I can't quite put my finger on why this awful movie is so fun to watch. Part of it is undoubtedly the "I could make a better movie than this" aspect. Part of it is the sincerity of both the writing (Nguyen thinks he's making an important point about climate change and the environment) and the acting, in particular Bagh and Adam Sessa as his buddy. Criticizing them feels like yelling at a puppy trying its best to climb the stairs. As noted earlier, the Rifftrax crew do a splendid job providing comic commentary to this film and I highly recommend watching their version first. Thanks to them, mumbling "solar panels" has become a tick with me. The sequel, by the way, is just as bad but not as much fun.

Self-published movies 2: Mister Scrooge To See You

On Christmas Eve, 1844, a year after the cranky miser Ebenezer Scrooge (David Ruprecht, above) was visited by three ghosts and became a generous Christmas-loving man, Jacob Marley's ghost sends him, with no explanation, to the small town of New Britain, Wisconsin in the year 2013 to work some redeeming magic on Timothy Cratchit VI. The head of the Scrooge and Cratchit financial company, Tim (Matt Koester) has become a cold-hearted moneyman just like Scrooge was. When Tim and his associate Ron (David Koester) visit the Dinner Belle for a cup of coffee, they run into the diner's owner, Belle (Shannon Moore), who remembers Tim from high school. Their reunion is not a happy one. Tim's company is in the middle of a neighborhood renewal project and she is behind on her mortgage payments; he is there to let her know that he will boot her out if she can't pay up by the end of the year. Scrooge, out of his element, stumbles into the diner and Belle takes pity on him, giving him coffee and helping him to get current with customs and lingo (ordering elaborate drinks at the coffeehouse and saying things like, "I'm stoked!"). When he produces a partnership document from 1844, he takes it to Tim's office and claims half-interest in the company. Scrooge immediately begins making friends with the employees and changing the mood in the office from unpleasant to fun, much to the chagrin of Tim (though Ron actually warms to Scrooge and his influence). As it gets closer to Christmas, will Scrooge eventually figure out why Tim is so cold and thaw him out by Christmas Eve?  

Like JOURNEY TO PARADISE, this is another problematic production from the sincere but overly ambitious Christian entertainment company Salty Earth Productions and director Steven F. Zambo. There are so many things wrong with this film that pointing them all out could easily take three more paragraphs. The low-budget sets look terrible (which the sets in PARADISE did not); the acting is generally poor—again, as in the previous movie, the Koester brothers (pictured above; I assume they're related) excepted; the story is filled with so many plot holes that you pretty much just sigh and accept it as an almost hallucinatory avant-garde narrative: Why does Marley send Scrooge to 2013 without explaining what he's supposed to do? How has Belle stayed in business at all when she seems to be a terrible manager? There's a plotline involving a pastor and his homeless buddies who Belle feeds for free that really has no payoff and serves little purpose except to show that Belle's heart is in the right place. The biggest problem is a spoiler that involves the ending which I'll save for my last paragraph. The score is bland and the featured song by Michael Schroeder is awful (as it was in PARADISE). And once again, the Christian elements, mostly absent from the Dickens' original, feel uncomfortably added to the mix. In only one scene does Scrooge spout religion, and the actor's voice bizarrely drops to an artificially serious tone, which made me laugh out loud.  

This second example of a self-published "Bad Movie" does have some saving graces, and not just camp-level enjoyment at its misfires: 1) the plot does have promise; updatings of A Christmas Carol are always fun; 2) Matt Koester (above) is a better actor than his material calls for; 3) the humor as Scrooge adjusts himself to the 2ist century is cute, though Ruprecht, a professional actor, never feels comfortable in his role; 4) I appreciate their attempt at multiculturalism by including a Latina character as Belle's friend and employee. As a fan of Christmas movies, I find this (and PARADISE) interesting for going against the current grain of vanilla romance stories, which leads me to the SPOILER: Belle and Tim were friends in high school but Belle keeps insisting that she didn't feel romantic about him. The reason, which comes out of absolutely nowhere in the last few minutes, is that Tim is Belle's brother! Better than that, they're twins! He grew up as an adopted orphan, but we are given no reason for why he would have been given up and Belle kept. In this case, a Hallmark romance ending would have been preferable. I hope if Salty Earth does any more Christmas movies, they give the screenplay a more thorough going-over for plausibility and coherence. The company has produced two more films in recent years, though I'm not sure I'm game for finding out in anything's gotten better.