... than to arrive. The image this time around is the title card from the 1961 movie Bloodlust, taken from that first-rate site Stephen Hills's Shill Pages. Imagine trying to follow this bloodcurdling image coming at you from a big screen with a movie worthy of the exclamation point! Not much chance, especially since Bloodlust! turns out to actually just be the 8,000th version of The Most Dangerous Game. I'd suggest that in many cases in the movie-going world the sense of anticipation beats the actual arrival of the movie, and maybe this is especially true during the end-of-year, prestige-pic Oscar season.

Since this is the time of year that critics end up dog-piling into one press-screening after another, I oddly find myself really enjoying their company; no one else but a film critic knows how bad it can get when they mudslide one half-baked 3-hour-long opus after another after another atop you, each one heavy with seasonal earnestness and watered-down political merit.

I'd say the best feature film of the year that had anything to do with the USA's political ordeal was Thank You For Smoking, precisely because it was about the hopelessness of using sentiment to win political arguments. Every professional arguer, whether they're a politician or a critic, ought to look into it. As this is a time of year when we put aside our petty differences and get together to make up Critics Circle lists, I thought I'd travel back in time to remember five particularly fun press screenings from my career:

Nothing like a weird double-bill on Turkey-Picking Friday (this holiday needs a proper name, doesn't it?) and my double bill was as weird as they come: Scorsese's The Departed with the late Robert Altman's 1974 Thieves Like Us. It would have been smarter to have hooked up Thieves Like Us with a movie it resembles, O Brother Where Art Thou? As in Altman's earlier film, the Coens start their story with the a break from a Mississippi chain gang. The Coens seem to have also based Michael Badalucco's Baby Face Nelson on John Schuck's Chickamaw from the Altman: Chickamaw being the most dangerous component of a trio of dashing, successful and generally non-violent bankrobber. Schuck has the same unstable exuberance that George Clooney's Everett diagnoses, in his cornpone way, as Nelson's bi-polar syndrome. (The line, from imdb.com: "Well ya know Delmar, they say that with a thrill-seekin' personality, what goes up must come down. Top of the world one minute, haunted by megrims the next.") Schuck's hearty killer is just as moody, because he's a hard drinker. Worse, at one point Chickamaw is drinking bootleg "jake" -- a patent medicine adulterated with neurotoxins, and here's a link to that bizarre piece of toxic Americana.

The Ivy Room in Albany, California is closing this weekend for good, he said in a voice that he hoped was something like the choked snarl of Howard Beale, mad prophet of the airwaves, It's closing, and how does that effect you? If you're a Bay Area musician, you'll know; it's one less stage for the San Francisco area roots rockers and folkies. Nationally speaking, it's just one more ancient, jolly, smelly neighborhood tavern going down, no doubt to be replaced by something more realtor-friendly: a blood freezing lounge with expensive vodka bottles, glittering coldly under fluorescent lights. I can see it now: It'll have a name taken from the Periodical Table of Elements or an algebra textbook and it'll have all of the warmth of Superman's Fortress of Solitude. A place where, in Steve Martin's words, rich men go to meet rich women so they can have rich babies.

At least we can still see what a proper bar looks like in the movies. While taking in the Ivy Room's irreplaceable decor -- farewell, smoke-stained wallpaper, adieu coin-operated shuffleboard machine -- I was struck with the idea that a film festival would be a great tribute. I imagine the line up looking something like the following (though of course, I'm hoping that guest programmers out there would have ideas of neglected films that need to be added to the schedule):

On August 15, Junichiro Kozumi, Prime Minister of Japan, will be commemorating the 61st anniversary of the end of World War II by worshiping at the Yasukuni Jinja shrine. It's already a matter of controversy, as 14 of the dead military leaders honored there were convicted of serious war crimes. While these enemies of mankind amount to only a few of the thousands of soldiers and sailors honored at the Yasukuni Jinja, the shrine's on-line brochure makes it clear that it considers any war criminals "martyrs," convicted of a "sham" trial by the Allied powers at the aftermath of the big war. Now, Kozumi has been to the Yasukuni Jinja before. And he's facing an election campaign against conservative hard-liners who want to prove that Kozumi is sweet on America. (I mean, there Kozumi was, bopping around Graceland.) But there's an argument to be made that this shrine visitation is part of the steady nationalist rewriting of World War 2 as something the Imperial government was forced into by circumstance.  I'm not sure if Kozumi is a regular reader of Cinematical, but if he really wants to do himself and the anniversary a honor, why doesn't he stay home and have a look at a war memorial anyone could admire: The Criterion edition of Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu?

To paraphrase Bugs Bunny, maybe we all took a wrong turn at the Coachella Valley. What else could explain the death-grip the Reagan era has on pop culture and pop music? I enjoy having all those tinny Casios back, and even though I suffered through the "I, Assassin" tour, I might even pony up to see Gary Numan if he comes to America, just for old times' sake. But when Depeche Mode gets to headline, maybe this 1980s nostalgia death trip needs to end. And yet, there is one figure of 1980s culture who is getting a deserved comeback, despite the critical and box-office lambasting of his recent Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World: Just released on DVD, Modern Romance, a vintage Albert Brooks comedy of 1981, demonstrates the man's unsurpassed gifts in the comedy of excruciation. As Robert Cole, a film editor by trade, and a torturer of his girlfriend by avocation, Brooks may never have been so utterly worm-like and spineless ... not even in his previous film, the classic Real Life. 

Image from legs.free.fr

The word "sour" is often used to describe It's Always Fair Weather, the 1955 MGM wide-screen musical at long last released on DVD. Pauline Kael described this film's tone as "a delayed hangover...sour." In his review of the boxed set Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory, a 5 DVD set that includes It's Always Fair Weather, the estimable Steve Daly of EW calls this cult musical "sour, cynical."  In Ethan Mordden's 1981 book The Hollywood Musical, Fair Weather is listed under the chapter "The Energy Peters Out."  And Mordden zeroes in on the sequence of buddies Dan Dailey, Michael Kidd and Gene Kelly singing about their loathing of one another as more than just the dissolving of a partnership; to Mordden, it's a sign of the end of the line for the classic Hollywood musical. 


Sour? Savory is more like it. There's no disputing palates, but Betty Comden and Adolph Green-scripted musicals were never completely gossamer dreams. New York-based cabaret-trained performers that they were, Comden and Green always included some razory satire of the entertainment business. They made a comedy out of the tensions of staying afloat in short-memoried showbiz in The Band Wagon, where 1930s icon Fred Astaire adjusts himself to the gaudy post-war world of Times Square, pulp fiction, and "Technicolor and stereophonic sound."  Singin' In the Rain is similarly about future shock, as sound technology comes in to mess up the comparative ease and order of the silent film world. The Comden-Green It's Always Fair Weather uses elements that's all over noir: post-war dissatisfaction, the Kefauver report on organized crime, and the pressures of conformity on the returning GIs. Golden hindsight reduces the 1950s in today's imagination to a decade-long dance night at Jack Rabbit Slim's. Cop a look at Peter Biskind's Seeing is Believing, not just to unearth the true meaning of 1950s monster movies as symbols of the nuclear menace, but of also to study the political strife between the radical right and the centrists that gave those bug-eyed-monster attacks deeper textual significance.  (President Dwight Eisenhower was a compromise candidate between these two political extremes. No wonder Ike was brought back as a figure of compromise in Why We Fight.) And no wonder Jacques Demy soaked up the undertones of the MGM musical and recreated them in his films, figuring it was appropriate to use musical comedy tropes in a story of a drafted gas station attendant and his pregnant girlfriend.

 
"Writing about cats casts a shadow on the most illustrious names," wrote poet Phillip Larkin, and making movies about them has to be even less honorable. Despite all the upcoming animated cat projects (Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties, and the Shrek spinoff Puss in Boots)  as live action movie actors, cats leave a lot to be desired. Photographers claim that their flat faces don't catch the light well, and the SPCA has stopped the old method of plying the beasts with a little ether to get them more in the mood for the camera. Still, as J.C Suares's book on Hollywood Cats shows, cats have done their share for pre-digital cinema. Suares' book is an excellent roundup of the furniture-shredding parasites including Milo from Milo and Otis (or was Otis the cat?); Don Corleone's pet tabby; Jones, the cat who has to go out just as the Alien is coming in, and Kim Novak trying (hopelessly) to out-sphinx a Siamese in the underrated Bell, Book and Candle).

As a Bond geek, my favorite is a shot of Telly Savalas' Blofeld staring into the eyes of his customary Persian. The uncredited still photographer caught both actors , the hairy and the bald, in unusually expressive moods. Likely the cat is thinking "Thy dawn, o master of the world, thy dawn" ... 37 years later, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is still the thinking-person's 007 movie, It's a film to recall, especially now that Eva Green is gallivanting around claiming that the new Casino Royale will represent the first time Bond falls in love.