The book front.

Have a lot of books to read, many of which I don't finish. Right now I'm reading Roger Ebert's biography, LIFE ITSELF. I enjoy the stories of his life as a young newspaperman, hanging out in bars, and then being drafted into film criticism. I'm envious in a lot of ways. I think Ebert would like that, that despite all of his recent difficulties, that a reader of his memoir would ultimately envy his life. I work now, and wish I had more time to read. I only work part-time, but it still takes up half a day, every day. Still, I guess it's a good way to ease back into the world of work after being out of it for years. Still looking for something full-time, and something more stable. I'm also re-reading Larry McMurtry's LITERARY LIFE, in hopes that it will cause me to write again, something I haven't done in months.

Bud Spencer & Terence Hill - Crime Busters

Crime Busters

Some movies are just made for lazy afternoons. They usually don't require too much attention and can be enjoyed even while you're doing something else, be it chores or messing around on your laptop. Crime Busters, like many Italian films, is one of those type of movies. There's something reassuring about the combination of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer [love his jacket in this that has "JUMBO" written across the back in cheap looking lettering.] Doesn't matter if they are in the Wild West or on the mean streets of Miami, you know that Terence Hill will make a fool out of the bad guys, Bud Spenser will be a combination of irresistible force and immovable object, logic will probably take a holiday, and fun will be had. That sentence went a little long. So does CRIME BUSTERS. Hill and Spencer meet on the docks. Both are out of work and get on the wrong side of some kind of vague organized crime group that controls the union jobs. Both Hill and Spenser manage to get the better of their foes, but are still out of work so Terence [whom I always want to call Trinity no matter what movie he's in] has the idea of robbing a grocery store. But it turns out the grocery store is actually a police station, so to cover themselves our heroes decide to sign up for the force. A whole lot happens over the next 100 minutes or so and the mind can wander at times [the weird showdown between the good guys and some kind of weird Indian wannabe biker gang at the Orange Bowl really bogs stuff down] but it all works out in the end. Think I may try to re-visit some of the Trinity films next...

Noir noir noir....

I have tried to be on a "steampunk" kick lately but got sidetracked by an article about modern noir authors and have been trying to read all of the books mentioned since then. THE MOTEL LIFE is the first one and I blazed through it in a couple of days. It's about a pair of unlucky brothers who live in seedy Reno motels and try to hammer out an existence for themselves. Both have creative talents that they only use to pass the time and get through life, and there's a sense throughout of "what might have been." At first this seems like a typical Bukowski style pastiche of the boozing lifestyle, but this wouldn't be a noir if that's all it was. It's been a while since I read something that I kept wanting to get back to, and where I was disappointed to know it was over and that was all. Listening to black metal a lot, things I was into in my late 20s. Wondering if my mid-life crisis is coming up.

Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976)

Not sure how to embred, but here goes...I

Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man

Okay, I'm back. Saw several things since I last posted, not going to try to recount them. Let's just continue with the Italian crime theme. This one was nowhere near as good as Caliber 9, but was worth a watch. It almost seems like the Ambiguously Gay Duo at times, despite their attempts to molest/pick up nearly every female character in the movie [other than one of the old ladies.] Maybe they have something to prove. Lots of chases, busting of heads, gals taking their tops off, but oddly, the heroes never seem to be in that much jeopardy, as if the whole thing is a massive goof to them. It is unique in that these cops generally don't give a rats ass about hurting people or getting rough, the opening chase scene ends with one of them snapping the neck of a critically injured suspect, and it is not viewed as anything remarkable. I have a cousin who was stationed in Italy and he said the police there don't mess around, so maybe this is true to life...it also has some of the more ineffectual villains I've seen in a crime film. Directed by Ruggerio Deodato, which may explain the casual attitude toward mayhem.

Fernando Di Leo's, Caliber (Milano Caliber 9)

Watched this today on Netflix, I'd heard about it for years but had never gotten around to seeing it.

Lots of groovy music, double and triple crosses, people dropping off and exchanging mysterious packages that sometimes explode, and general mayhem.  I really enjoyed it and am going to check out more Italian crime flicks, although I think I might be starting out with the best of the lot.

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Some other stuff that happened....

Read COLD IN JULY, by Joe R. Lansdale, one of my favorite writers. A man wakes up one night to the sound of an intruder, whom he ends up fatally shooting. The intruder's father, who has just gotten out of prison, swears revenge. But then both men find out things are not what they seem...

That's not that great of a synopsis, but it is a fun little book. I have yet to be disappointed by Joe Lansdale--the first story I read by him was "Night They Missed the Horror Show" which I read at age 16 and basically warped me for life.

I finished a couple of Bill Bryson books. I don't believe I've finished anything else, but have a couple that I am almost done with.

Movies: Watched EASTERN PROMISES again. Also a documentary about Russian prison tattoos called THE MARK OF CAIN. Didn't see much else--we've had some very busy times this month that seem to finally be done with for a while. I'm not doing that good a job at this blog, I guess. Maybe next month will be better. I know I've seen other movies but can't remember much about them. I've had a lot of things I got on Netflix that I just let run in the background while doing something else. I don't think those really count.

The Call

WHAT I READ: The Call, by Yannick Murphy.
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: A small town veterinarian who has his son go into a coma after a hunting accident. A lot of other things happen too.
WHY I'M WRITING THIS WAY: The whole book is written like this, as a series of calls the main character gets, although sometimes the calls are not actual phone calls, sometimes it's his wife calling or someone else. Sometimes a call is only metaphorical.
HOW LONG I TOOK TO READ IT: Less than 24 hours, I started yesterday afternoon and finished this morning, probably a few hours total. It's short and the format makes it a quick read.
WHAT I THOUGHT: I really enjoyed it, the first really good book I've read this year that I wanted to keep reading. Interested to see her other books, although somehow I doubt they will be written like this.
OTHER BOOKS I REMEMBER LIKE THIS: The Cardboard Universe was a series of encyclopedic entries with two characters writing them and arguing throughout the footnotes. That particular author [can't remember the name, don't want to look it up] had another novel that had the same non-standard format but I never read it. Really enjoyed that particular book, though, it was a take-off on Philip K. Dick. sort of an alternate-universe where Phoebus K. Dank was an even less successful science fiction author.

Scoreboard for February...

The lack of holidays and focus on other stuff made this month a slow one for reading and watching.

Books read: 5 Movies watched: 9

Year to date:

Books read: 8 Movies watched: 23

Need to read more [have at least two books that I will probably finish this weekend, but still haven't found a book I've been nuts about.]

Watching Take Shelter....

..and it's like watching paint dry. I feel like I'm under the influence of sedatives.
I like some stuff abut it but it is very, very slow with not much happening. That seems to be the direction movies, especially indie movies, are going these days.

Finished A FAN'S NOTES, an autobiographical novel which I've been "working on" for years. It's by Frederick Exley and is nominally about a troubled man who lives in a small town and lives for alcohol and the New York Giants, especially Frank Gifford.
It's more than that, it's crazy houses and bad jobs, and lots of craziness. I like this picture of the author. He passed away about 20 years ago, wrote three books and a lot of articles. A FAN'S NOTES was the first of the three, I have not seen the others, although a couple of years ago I read a book called EXLEY that was about a kid whose dad was an obsessive fan of Exley and A FAN'S NOTES.

Deathstalker 2 (trailer)

Saw this sequel last night....even lighter in tone than the first, which wasn't exactly GAME OF THRONES. I think it might have been one of those Roger Corman specials where they'd shoot one movie and then shoot a cheaper one with the leftover sets and props. This is a lot smaller in scale than the first one, but a lot of fun. Wish the others would be availble on DVD or on streaming.

Good movie for beer drinking. I love how the closing credits end with the various warnings and disclaimers about the film's copyright being superimposed over a shot of the female lead's bare chest.

Also....

THE DEAD, not the 1987 John Huston film but a newish zombie movie set in Africa.

One of my favorite horror films is HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD, a zombie flick set in New Guinea. It's a terrible movie, but still has stuff that works, an overall downbeat feeling of dread. Part of what works is that the zombies are out in the jungle and just seem to materialize out of the bush. THE DEAD uses this to a great advantage.

The setting works for and against the film---one of the things that really makes zombie films resonate with people is the feeling of "What if..." and seeing a world that is not unlike the viewer's own world turned upside down. The African setting causes the film to lose that...the desert and savannah seem otherworldly, as do the zombies and survivors.

Still an effective film, and I enjoy the old style effects [no CGI that I could notice.] But I would not say it's "the best movie since the original DEAD films" as some have said. But I have thought about the movie since seeing it, and that is always a good sign.

Blood, breasts, blades, beasts....

This movie has everything, it was a staple of conversation back in 6th grade [mainly due to the large amount of nudity.] I revisited it in my college years and still enjoyed it, and just picked it up on DVD with a few other similar films. DEATHSTALKER is a lot of fun, a good antidote to more serious fantasy stuff. It holds up pretty well and doesn't look any cheaper than it did in 1983.

They don't make these kind of movies anymore, I guess they just assume people will watch Cinemax type stuff or just outright porn. My favorite part is the tournament with the little guy who wears horns on his head.

Warrior, come out and play.....

I love films about fighting, I guess I'm a closet macho steroid freak even though at the gym I stick to the weight machines and the recumbent bike. Today I watched WARRIOR which had a lot of good reviews. It was interesting in that it was about MMA instead of boxing, and I don't know if there have been a lot of good MMA movies. Wrestler Kurt Angle plays a vicious Russian fighter but he ends up kind of being a McGuffin.

The ending was kind of anti-climactic, but I still got into the movie overall. Nick Nolte basically plays Nick Nolte. I like that the movie went into a different direction than I expected, but the most exciting part for me was 15-20 minutes before the end.

MMA matches are so short that they are probably not as good dramatic fodder as boxing is, since there are only three rounds and generally MMA matches in the movies are way longer than most MMA matches are in real life.

Son of Frankenstein

Saw this on Me-TV with Svengoolie! I love the horror host shows, but most have to play the same nine or ten old public domain movies, but Me-TV or whomever pays for the Universal package of films. We had a "Scary movie" show on Friday nights when I was a kid but I could never stay up and watch it most of the time since it came on at 11:30. I remember once time as a kid I was able to stay up and I felt so proud of myself.

Anyway, this was one of the films that they often played. I have the Frankenstein films on DVD but this was the first time I'd seen this. It's surprisingly long for a film back then at 100 minutes. It's also strange in that the true villain of the movie is Ygor, who uses the Monster to strike back at his enemies. The Monster himself sort of takes a back seat.

It's also funny to watch and see just how many things were taken by Mel Brooks when he made YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN---right down to the giant knockers! Huh huh huh...

Finished two other books, House of Prayer No. 2 [a memoir] and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money which is about the antique trade. Enjoyed both, but I really inhaled Killer Stuff. I submitted a poem this week but don't know how it will turn out, it's for a literary journal and I sort of doubt it's good enough but I thought it was worth a shot.

Bird.

I always enjoy books about people obsessed with hobbies that are new to me. This is about birdwatching. A Big Year is an informal competition where birders try to spot as many different species as possible within their continent, state, or other region. This is the story of three birders who are going for the title [which is only for bragging rights.]

I've always enjoyed and noticed birds, so it appealed to me, although in the end they could not add much suspense to it.

I cannot find a book that really takes me away these days, but I keep looking.

CONTAGION

Just not as interested in putting up trailers/images for these bigger budget films, but this did get under my skin. I believe it was one of the first "bio-disaster" flicks to be produced with the cooperation of the CDC and various scientists.

I enjoyed it, it really brought home the whole idea from the Romero flicks that it doesn't take very long at all for everything to just collapse.

Battle: Los Angeles

More like Retreat: Los Angeles. My friend who played this for me said it reminded him of Independence Day, but this is on a much smaller scale, with most of the big stuff being shown through television broadcasts. A Marine regiment is charged with rescuing civilians from L.A. after an alien attack. It's a race against time as the Air Force is about to bomb the place. Of course they pick up a few civilians and some stranded members of other military units, and they end up finding a way to attack the alien command post.

It was strange in many ways...you don't really see much of the aliens who look more robotic, other than one scene where they find one of the creatures and try to determine its vulnerabilities. But it was really just 30 minutes of set up, 45 minutes of them trying to get away, and then 45 minutes of fighting back. The cast was small and not a whole lot really happens as far as the big scale of things.

I've noticed this about many of the bigger films of recent years. They build the entire film around something that would probably have just been a single sequence or two if it had been from a film during the 80s and 90s. The last Indiana Jones film was the same way, basically an extended jungle chase scene that took up most of the movie and might have amounted to maybe 15-20 minutes of one of the older films, but here it's pumped full of air and becomes the entire thing.

Come see how the vampires do it!

Saw it on TCM last night....didn't have anything else going on, and heard it was playing via a horror geek message board where I sometimes lurk.

I'm way too young to have caught the show other than through home video, and am probably going to go through the whole thing on Netflix. I remember being amused in the old days that Barnabas seemed to spend most of his time punishing Willie Loomis, and also that it was live and sometimes they'd flub lines and one time Barnabas was attacked by a fly.

The movie wasn't that great, very choppy and as the writer Tim Lucas puts it, "seems like it was edited by a chainsaw." I didn't mind it that much, it was good to put on while I was fooling around on the laptop. Love that dayglo red blood in HD!

Phenomena Trailer

Watched on 1/30-31, about half each time.

Has a very young Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasance,and a razor-wielding chimp. Argento is an acquired taste for me, I actually prefer Lucio Fulci for entertainment value even though Dario is the "better" filmmaker. Argento has a lot of good scenes and sequences, although the movies overall are usually not satisfying. I do like one thing he said once---"We rarely solve mysteries in life, so why should the movies be any different?"

I saw it once before at a university in Portland. I was vacationing there. I had seen in a local paper that there would be a screening and walked there, only to find that it was just a VHS tape projected on a screen in a classroom. And it was the cut American version! Still had an okay time.

I like SUSPIRIA and DEEP RED better, but this isn't bad.

MONTH-END SCOREBOARD:

Books read: 3 Movies watched: 14

Working on several books so February should be better.

Watched nothing....

....other than having a Stone IPA and watching most of 42ND STREET FOREVER VOL. 4: COOLED BY REFRIGERATION, but didn't watch all of it. I skipped the bad 70s comedy parts. I should investigate to see if there's some kind of trailer of sorts out there, although it would seem odd to have a trailer for a compilation of other trailers.

What I did do was finish another book: THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE by Kevin Roose. The writer transferred to Liberty University [the one founded by Jerry Falwell] for a semester and wrote about his experience there as an undercover non-believer. It was different than I thought it would be, he actually got quite involved with the people he met there, especially his dorm mates. However, he could not get past some of the crap they have in their curriculum especially regarding science, and one of the problems with the institution is that they view the academics of the school as secondary to the religious aspect.

I was amused that although he went to an Ivy League school he had a lot of difficulty with some of the coursework, especially the religious stuff because he had zero background knowledge of the Bible. It was also interesting that guys at Liberty spend a great deal of time talking about girls' boobs, maybe more than guys at secular colleges. I found it funny that although he felt more "spiritual" during his time there, he never really felt a desire to convert or get "saved." He learned to fake a lot of the talk and more or less passed, although some people suspected something was a little different about him.

So here's my story....I am a Christian, although very open minded and not sure about a lot of the evangelical tenets. When I was a junior in high school I transferred to a small conservative Christian private high school mainly just to get away from my small town public school. Pretty much every course had some kind of conservative religious talking point, even the sentences in the grammar exercises [we had to diagram things like "When will people realize the world does not owe them a living?"]
The education I got there was pretty poor, but at the same time I liked a lot of the people there and did admire some of the staff who were "missionary volunteers" and drew no salary. I ended up graduating from there. The school closed about eight years ago...they had a sex scandal in the late 90s and a lot of parents withdrew their kids. Enrollment never recovered and they shut down a few years later.

It was an interesting environment. There were a lot of missionary kids and kids from other countries, mainly Latin American and Japan. You also had a lot of kids who were sent there as some kind of punishment or because their parents couldn't control them.


I later spent a year at a Christian college [that was way less conservative than Liberty, although drinking, smoking, and dancing were still verboten] but wasn't happy there and transferred to a larger state university.

Anyway, THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE was a good read...it took me back to those times in my life.

Intruder Trailer

Look out, the trailer ruins the ending!

Realized I messed up and posted this to my old blog. Anyway, saw this on Thursday evening [I believe.] This was a movie I'd heard about for years and couldn't see in its uncut version, but now it's on Blu-Ray and has the "honor" of being the first Blu disc I've bought for a movie I haven't seen.

It's a little slow--they do a lot of "story development" involving the supermarket that is about to close. The slasher film isn't my favorite genre, but this was fun enough, although it was a little predictable.

It has a big reputation among horror geeks I think because an uncut film was hard to find and it also has the Raimis involved in it.

A lot of my movie buys are "for a rainy day...." There have been a lot of times where I'm in the mood for a movie and end up selecting something I bought years before and never watched. I don't know that this is something I want to watch over and over, but I'm sure I will someday.

Other things I watched on Jan 21/22

Ended up watching LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS, which I won't bother to post a trailer for.

Also caught MESSIAH OF EVIL via the "Creepy KOFY Movie Time" website. I love horror hosted shows and used to watch CKMT back when I lived in the Bay Area, so I'm happy to see I can still watch old episodes online.

MESSIAH OF EVIL had one thing I found pretty creepy....the idea of ordinary looking people attacking someone as a mob in a public place. A group of them [they are sort of like zombie-like cult followers that eat people] attack someone in the supermarket. The most effective scene has a young woman admitted to a movie theater, with the CLOSED sign put up right after she goes inside. She sits down in an empty theater, but then gradually more and more people show up sitting behind her, and she realizes something is wrong. She tries to leave but the doors are locked and at that point her fellow moviegoers get up and go after her....

It's one of those cult movies I'd heard about on various message boards but never managed to see until now.

Finally finished another book, THE BROTHERS SISTERS by Patrick DeWitt, a western of sorts about two brothers who are hired killers. Read it over a couple of days, it was a really good read. Second book I've finished this year, and the first novel.

Stake Land

Almost finished with this one....will write about it later.

Late on Jan. 20 I watched BEST WORST MOVIE, about TROLL 2.

Manos The Hands of Fate - Trailer

Yes, it's probably the worst movie ever made, at least in the low budget division. Personally, I think a lot of bigger movies are worse because they have the resources to do better, also more people are involved in making decisions who theoretically should know better. Still, this is pretty bad, and very hard to watch even with the Mystery Science Theater crew to help you through it. I've never tried to watch it in its unedited form, that would be the bad movie equivalent of the triple black diamond ski run.

It still has a creepy vibe at times...the idea of getting lost somewhere and not being able to leave. It's the bad movie Hotel California.

There's a great article about the making of the film [the fertilizer salesman who wrote and directed was convinced he was making a masterpiece, which is probably why this movie has endured among bad movie fans, nothing is for laughs.) The bad part is that it is harder to laugh at Torgo [the guy with the beard stumbling around] when you know the backstory....he allegedly was on acid through a lot of the shooting and took his own life not long afterward.

I only half watched this, though, I was fooling around on the laptop, but I suppose it still counts. This was actually watched on Sunday night/early Mon. morning.

Monday night we watched BLACK SWAN which I've seen three times now. I think that was the last film we saw in the theater, making 2011 the first year I didn't go to the movies at all. Was a little disappointed by the Blu-Ray, apparently it is grainy because the film was in 16mm [not a film buff, but that means it was intended to be grainy.] We mainly got the disc for the extras, though, so it was still worth it.

Think I'm only going to post trailers when I feel like it.

Suspiria International Trailer

For Jan. 15....watched it on my new Blu Ray player.

Also saw the DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK remake.

I never saw the original [was only a very little kid when it was broadcast] but this was only average. I can see why it didn't do well, although I cannot see why it got an R rating. Supposedly it was for "pervasive scariness." During the 80s the ratings people were really tough on horror films, and thing have seemed to loosen up over the past several years [and it's not been as big of a deal since whatever is cut out is made available on video] but maybe things are back to how they were. This really should only be a PG-13 which is what the filmmakers thought they were going to get.

Worth a rental I guess, but kinda blah overall.

Semi-watched MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (the MST3K version)

Chillerama - OFFICIAL TRAILER

Watched this on Tuesday.

Not nearly as good as it might seem--it's a Troma-esque version of GRINDHOUSE but seems overlong with four "mini-features" only three of which are that good, and the second "Curse of the Werebear" not really fitting and slowing things down a lot. One of the big reasons to watch these is for the gore and the T&A, but there isn't much of either until the last 20 minutes or so.

The third feature, "The Diary of Anne Frankenstein" is a case where the best joke is the title, but it's sort of neat for its faux-Universal vibe. It's sort of like Springtime for Hitler written by bored 12 year olds while in history class.

Could have been better...the Werebear segment didn't fit with the rest of it [a gay comedy combining the "teenage werewolf" from the 50s with the bear subculture] and would have been better on its own. I did like the connecting story of the drive-in and its patrons [who take center stage in the final segment, Zombie Movie] but that should have been given a little more time.

I'm an unapologetic lover of exploitation movies, so this at least was worth an instant viewing. Today's movie is going to be the most exploitative that I've seen for a while [assuming Netflix has it coming today....]

Yes, books too.

Decided to have books as part of the blog too instead of doing separate blogs for both.
Similar to my personal blog, it's more something for me to read, like a diary instead of something for others to read [although I don't care if they do.]

Finished CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS by Vine Deloria Jr.

Written in the late 60s, the book covers the issues and problems facing Indians in America [note that you rarely, if ever, see Indian people refer to themselves as "Native American."]

What I found especially interesting was his insistence that the Indian struggle was separate from the overall civil rights movement. He was very leery of the liberal tendency to lump all minority groups/issues together. Many would be surprised at a lot of other things he said too....he thought Indians should make use of the corporate model as a path toward greater sovereignty [I believe at one point he speculates that the corporate model was actually a representation of the traditional Indian way of life.] Bet the Occupy crowd would not care for that....

Deloria passed away in 2005, I've been looking to see if there's anything out there giving his opinions on what had changed and what hadn't. Some tribes have gotten more independence due to casinos and other business activities. My particular tribe has done well, although some of that might be due to our history of assimilation--we are probably more likely to embrace that kind of thing, although I think larger tribes like mine tend to make better use of casino revenues [basically the way any large government body should make use of revenue, to put it toward the community.]
I've seen smaller tribes here where I live torn apart--disenrolling members to get a larger slice of the pie.

I'll probably check out some of his other books over the course of this year.

The Business of Fancy Dancing Trailer

Sometimes the movie experience is more than just the movie. I'm a huge fan of Sherman Alexie, the Indian writer [poetry and novels.] He also wrote the screenplay for the excellent film SMOKE SIGNALS, and went on to write and direct this in 2002.

I rewatched it last night with the commentary by Alexie and lead actor Evan Adams [who played Thomas Builds-the-Fire in SMOKE SIGNALS.] When I first saw the movie on TV years ago I didn't like it so much, it seemed to ramble and seemed short on material even though it was over 100 minutes long. The commentary helped me appreciate it more [and was also very funny...Alexie is a hilarious speaker.] Alexie regards it as an unfinished film that succeeds in some places but not in others.

Indian movies that are actually created by Indians are hard to find---movies that portray Indians realistically are almost as scarce. SKINS is another good one.

Full disclosure: I'm somewhere between 5/16 and not quite a half Indian, from two different tribes. I identify as such even though I am not "obviously Indian." I'm from the paler part of the family, I have a lot of other family members who are pretty dark. I'm originally from a community that is majority Indian. Indians are obsessed with credentials, especially mixed bloods like myself.

Mystics In Bali 1981 - Trailer

Here it is....

On Jan 2....

Watched REEL INJUN, a documentary about American Indians in the movies.

Really liked it, but would have liked to see more Wes Studi [a distant relative.]

Was touched by the story Russell Means told about how he and the other Indian boys knew they were going to have to fight the white kids any time there was a Western playing at the movie theater. And I'm sure there were a lot of Westerns playing back then....

For Jan 1, 2012

This is Remembrances of Movies Past, basically a list of films I saw in 2012.


For New Year's Day: ONDINE. I will write more on it later.

It's about an Irish fisherman that finds a lady in his net who may or may not be a selkie [Celtic mermaid legend...a seal-woman who can shed her seal-skin and live among humans.]

The movie does a good job of causing you to want it to be true....and making you believe, even for a moment, that it might be.