Posters in the Lobby: Army of Darkness

Some pop art-inspired Japanese poster artwork for Army of Darkness. Dig the "Bruce Campbell" soup cans. Click for larger image.

In Memoriam: Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet was one of the great American filmmakers, responsible for over 40 films both classic and celebrated (12 Angry Men, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, and Murder on the Orient Express) to the unjustly overlooked (Fail-Safe, Family Business, and Find Me Guilty.) His 1962 film The Pawnbroker was one of the first U.S. pictures to openly deal with the Holocaust, and was instrumental in ending Hollywood's censorship laws regarding sexuality in cinema. He remained active in filmmaking well into his twilight years, ending his career with 2007's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which is perhaps the greatest film ever made by an octogenarian. He passed on today, in his Manhattan residence, from lymphoma.

Sidney Lumet's book, the aptly titled Making Movies, is one that, along with Frank Capra's The Name Above the Title and Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye, should be required reading for all young, aspiring filmmakers. It chronicles the creation of a motion picture from script to finished product, with all the technical details explained. (Chapter headings are titled like "Style: The Most Misused Word Since Love" and "The Mix: The Only Dull Part of Moviemaking.") The paradoxical role of the director is explained as both a world-is-your-oyster creative artist as well as a business-minded solver of a million little problems and a defeater of a thousand obstacles and stumbling blocks. As a quote from Steven Spielberg says on the back, "The craft of film would be a better place if every director were required to share with other romancers of film his process." I'd go further and say that if every working director in the world read Making Movies, there would be a whole lot of better movies being made.

Herschell and Henenlotter: Together at last.

Frank Henenlotter is an exploitation director with a passionate desire to share his love of the genre with others. His feature films, such as Basket Case, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage and the recent Bad Biology pay homage to grindhouse cinema while slyly subverting its traditions, and his work with Something Weird Video, much of which could be considered cinematic archeology, has brought forgotten oddities like Night of the Bloody Apes and The Curious Dr. Humpp to home video release. (He was also nice enough to agree to be interviewed for my documentary about Reefer Madness producer Dwain Esper.) It’s this same generosity of spirit that informs his latest picture, the documentary Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore. Almost every horror fan knows the name of H.G. Lewis, even if they haven’t seen one of his deliciously terrible, ketchup shortage-causing movies.

Lewis’s films are as known and loved for their Ed Woodian lack of technical craft as they are for their outlandish plots. Blood Feast concerns a mad Egyptian caterer who serves up dismembered women as sacrifices to his dark gods, whereas Color Me Blood Red features a tortured artist who paints with women’s blood, and Two Thousand Maniacs is about a Southern town that appears, Brigadoon-style, once a year, to seek revenge on any Yankees unfortunate enough to come their way. Frank and co-director Jimmy Maslon (producer of the Wizard of Gore remake as well as Lewis’s late-career return to filmmaking, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat) bring the man’s story to the screen in obsessive detail, telling the curious history of the off-the-beaten-path exploitation film in the process. Lewis and sadly now departed producing partner David F. Friedman recount how in the mid-fifties, the Supreme Court ruled that films featuring nudity alone were not considered obscene. This led the duo to create a string of “nudie-cutie” films either taking place at nudist camps or featuring protagonists with x-ray glasses capable of seeing beneath women’s clothes. As they were barred from showing sex in their films, they turned instead to violence as their main, exploitable element; first in grainy, bruised black and white, then in glorious, bloody color.

Blood Feast, the first of the cycle, was nothing if not "giving the people what they want." John Waters, the token "famous fan" interviewee, describes how the rhythm of the picture is like that of a porn film, citing the scene in which Fuad Ramses rips out a woman's tongue as its proverbial climax shot. Lewis, who narrates his life story seated before a green-screened slideshow presentation of promotional materials and film clips, recalls in his dry-witted Midwestern drawl how bottom dollar-driven he was in the creation of his films, going so far as to negotiate for fried chicken dinners for the crew in exchange for featuring shots of the restaurant's logo within the film. It's a fascinating testament to how motion pictures can be frontrunners and trend-setters (Lewis's films were some of the first to show violence of that level, predating Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch by several years) but also cash-minded commercial products.

Henenlotter and Maslon have searched far and wide for both footage and interview subjects for the film, which is a feast of snippets and outtakes from even Lewis's rarest movies. Almost everyone who ever worked on one of his productions was tracked down and interviewed, including the child actor who played the cat-strangling kid from Two Thousand Maniacs, now well into his 40's. David Friedman, still retaining that easygoing Southern carnival pitchman charm well into his eighties, almost threatens to steal the show in the picture's first half. (Of one of Lewis's early, early nudie pictures, the The Living Venus, he attests "Well, it wasn't the greatest film in the world, but it had holes up either side of the print and could run through the machine!") There are also remarks from from self-tutored Lewis experts such as the aforementioned Waters (who proudly shows off his collection of first-edition paperback novelizations of Lewis's movies,) Joe Bob Briggs, and Frank himself.

The film's celebratory tone makes it a real delight for cinephiles, and although it is not as star-studded, it is a little more focused and in-depth than last year's American Grindhouse documentary. It is well worth checking out when it arrives on DVD. I also highly reccomend the film Mau Mau Sex Sex for more background on David Friedman, less of a cult figure than Lewis but an equally amazing man

"Don't Trust the Trailer" is leaving the nest.

Don't Trust the Trailer is now its own website! We will be posting all our joint trailer analyses along with some interactive content over there, while continuing to post our reviews and miscellaneous musings here. Enjoy!

In Memoriam: Elizabeth Taylor

Yesterday saw the sad passing of one of Hollywood's greatest icons. Liz Taylor was perhaps the first modern super-celebrity, whose personal life arguably captured the imagination of the world more than any of any of the films she was in. This article from the archives of Vanity Fair perfectly captures this sea change and Liz's role in bringing it on. Fare thee well to a true legend who will never be forgotten.

When Liz Met Dick.

Happy St. Patty's Day!

Courtesty of the Brothers Coen. Enjoy!

Raconteur Reptile: Rango

Do people really mean it when they complain about the lack of originality in movies? After all, the very meaning of the word "genre" refers to the ability to categorize films based upon the traits that they share. The traditions and cliches of the shoot-'em-up actionier, the romantic comedy, the slasher film and the period costume drama each provide different factions of viewers with a warm blanket-like sense of comfort. Filmmaking is an art form, but it is also a business, and something of a gamble at that. A film based off of a concept or another piece of media that there is already some idea that audiences will like seems like a more lucrative prospect than a wholly original concept. What worked before will be milked and milked into working again until audiences appear to be sick of it, then possibly dusted off some couple of decades later and re-animated for the purposes of nostalgia.

Furthermore, almost all filmmakers are film buffs - otherwise, why would they want to be filmmakers? - and all of them seem to bring their influences to the table. But there is a difference between a director who lovingly fashions a patchwork quilt out of films and other media he reveres, and one who shallowly regurgitates the past six months' most recognizable pop culture references, YouTube clips, supermarket tabloid headlines and Pussycat Dolls songs. This type of cheap pandering to the lowest common denominator is what I believe people are really talking about when they complain about films' lack of originality. But I am happy to report that, with Rango, Gore Verbinski has created a beautiful example of the former.

Johnny Depp voices the titular lizard, who spends his days merrily acting out Shakespearean scenes with a wind-up toy fish and a headless Barbie, until he ends up separated from his human owners and stranded in the Mohave desert. After an encounter with a mysterious armadillo, and a Dali-esque hallucination set to songs from a Greek chorus of mariachi owls, he winds up in the desolate town of Dirt, populated by a ragged assortment of varmints standing in for numerous Western film archetypes. The denizens of Dirt treat water as currency, but due to its scarcity, their economy is in shambles and many of them have lost hope. The town's mayor seeks out Rango, who has already attempted to use his acting skills to pretend to be a tough cowboy gunslinger, and appoints him sheriff - although his motives may not be as pure as it seems.

Rango feels like the film that Verbinski - whom, based upon The Ring and the Pirates of the Carribbean films, I had previously thought of as merely a well-behaved studio journeyman - had been waiting his whole career to make. The picture is a love letter to the cinema from its most broad and obvious aspects (it looks and feels like a spaghetti western version of Wind in the Willows, and the plot points dealing with the shady corruption of water rights is cribbed directly from Chinatown) to its tiniest in-jokes (blink and you'll miss a cameo from animated versions of Hunter S. Thomspson and Dr. Gonzo). The ragged and even endearingly disgusting critters that make up its principal cast - many of whom look like something Beatrix Potter would dream up if she was wandering around the American desert whacked out on peyote - have a tactile, three-dimensional quality that is rare in computer animation. Coen Brothers DP Roger Deakins is listed as a visual consultant in the credits, and I mean it as no backhanded compliment when I say that the breathtaking vistas in this film rival the scenery in No Country for Old Men and True Grit.

Despite its numerous cinematic and cultural allusions - from The Big Sleep, Apocalypse Now, Dead Man and El Topo to Chuck Jones, Carlos Castaneda and the Muppets - I would have to say I disagree with the consensus of critics that Rango is a treat for adults that fails at its job of being a children's film. True, it's not likely its target audience will have seen many of the films that directly inspired it, but ideally, this film will serve as a gateway drug for budding cinephiles, much like the way that Star Wars inspired me, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, to go out and rent Metropolis, 2001, and the movies of John Ford. Additionally, like a kid-friendly Inglourious Basterds, Rango is a film that alludes to classic film genres to stress its message about what storytelling can mean to both an individual and a society. While its particular brand of subtle quirk, lived-in scruffiness and offbeat surrealism may not appeal to all, I guarantee that a sizable faction of young moviegoers will someday credit it as the picture that planted the unkillable seed of cinephillia inside their wee hearts.