Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Good-bye, Tura Satana

If you say you like movies and don't know who Tura Satana was, you have been watching the wrong movies.  


I was trying to capture the voice of Varla, Tura Satana's signature character from Russ Meyer's 1965, girls gone wild masterpiece, Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!  but I am hopeless at recreating Varla's sassy, nihilisism.

Tura Satana was a strong, outspoken woman who approached life with a (literal) no holds barred attitude that she infused into her characters.  Varla, the homicidal, invective hurling, Go-Go dancer, was chaos personified.  She dished out the attitude she wouldn't take from anyone else and anyone who tried, did so at their own risk.  Both Kali the Destroyer and Kamakhyer, goddess of love, passion and desire, in one, she shook, shimmied, and cut down anyone or anything that got in her way.  Tura played the role with such gusto that Varla became an icon of American cinema.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Harry Potter and the fall from Grace


Monday, November 29, 2010, 11:16am

NB: The film version of the seventh and final Harry Potter book,  Harry Potter and the Something something, part one,  has opened and I feel duty bound to watch  it.   In preparation for the final film chapters of the Harry Potter Saga, I will watch the six previous films and write about the experience.  There will be SPOILERS !

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, (2005, directed by Mike Newell) , the fourth installment of the Harry Potter franchise, is the darkest so far in the series. Several references to Biblical stories and characters add gravity to the story allowing comparison between events in the wizarding world and mankind's fall and pursuit of grace.

The muggle world doesn't make more than a cameo appearance, beginning with Harry already in the wizarding world. He f irst appears, waking up fr om a troubling dream, in the home of his magical, adoptive family, the Weasleys.

Like his twin from the Bible, Voldemort
brings evil to the wizarding world
Harry's dreams show Voldemort 's efforts to regain his power. Like a messianic figure , Voldemort wants to return to flesh and lead his followers to victory, bringing his apocalypse.Once reborn, his countenance resembles a large snake head.

Lord Voldemort's minions, known as Death Eaters, bear the Dark Mark. The Dark Mark closely resembles the Mark of Cain, placed on Cain by God for murdering Able, his brother. The Mark of Cain served two purposes; to signal Cain's cursed status and as a warning that no one could kill him, he was God's alone.

The senseless killing of Hogwarts student, Cedric Diggery at the film's climax, mirrors the first post-lapsarian sin of murder. By unwittingly helping resurrect Voldemort, Harry has brought about the fall of the peaceful wizarding world. When he brings Cedric's body back to Hogwarts, yelling that Voldemort had fully returned, he is announcing the fall of the wizarding world from its graceful state. The evil he sought to escape in the muggle world and had fought so hard to prevent in the wizarding world has been unleashed.
Ron, Harry, and Hermione ponder their future

Rule 34 picture
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ends with Harry and his friends preparing themselves mentally for the new, darker world that is being born.




The Child Molester

Wednesday, December 1, 2010 09:35 AM

This is the complete version of a post I sent over to Kindertrauma.  The following story is true.  The names have been changed to protect me from libel suits, but you know who you are!

Something so frightening happened to me as a child that for most of my life I  wondered  it was real or not. I was in a strange school's cafeteria with my mother. Instead of the happy, playful atmosphere that I had associated with places like this, it was grim and foreboding.There were other kids and mothers there, but no one I knew.  Mom kept me close to her side and I felt very alone.

Part of my anxiety came from the fact that I had no idea why we were there. The other part was from the look on Mom's face.  She had her “You're in trouble” look on her face.  Had I done something wrong?  Was I going to be punished in this frightening place?  

I was half right, I hadn't done anything wrong, but what I was about to experience was so frightening that it would seem like punishment. I think  Mom was concerned about what we were both about to go through and it showed on her face.

We were there to see a movie about two little girls who took candy from a stranger and got into his car.   A fat and greasy man kidnapped two little girls while they played by enticing them with candy. He took them to the woods and after satisfying his monstrous desires, killed them. The ending was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen; the girls' bodies lay, sprawled on the ground, looking like lumps of bloody meat wrapped in children's clothing. The tiny actors were dressed like real murder victims, whose bloody crime scene photographs were used.  The bloodied children's corpses drove home the point that THIS WAS NOT JUST A MOVIE, it was real.

This was why our  mothers were there, to calm the hysterical children after the most frightening experience of our young lives.  Although I am certain many of them had nightmares themselves.

I was never sure if this actually happened or was one of the frightening dreams I was prone to, until I found it by accident on the Internet. My recollections were correct, even down to the clothes the children wore. The movie was called The Child Molester, a public service announcement made by the Highway Safety Foundation in 1964, the year I was born. What I attended with Mom was evidently a traveling roadshow, where the film went from town to town to educate parents and children about the dangers of talking to strangers.

Just what every six-year-old needs to see.

The movie had one major flaw, its purpose was to frighten children away from a phantom terror.  Most children are abused by someone known to them, a relative or trusted family friend.  It makes national news when a stranger does it. When it is Mr. Battles on Linwood Avenue, it barely gets a mention on the local news, so great is the community's shame.

The Child Molester did its job well; forty years later, I am still queasy about taking candy from strangers on the street and I seldom allow myself to be driven to isolated places in the woods by them. If any parents are worried about these things happening to their children, they may want to consider showing it to them.

I found the movie at the Internet Archive, where it can be streamed or downloaded for free.

Friday, November 5, 2010

What I watched last night: The Great Rock and Roll Swindle

Friday, November 5, 2010, 10:14 AM
Last night I watched The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a somewhat fictionalized account of the birth, short life and demise of the band The Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols are considered to be one of the most influential bands in rock and roll, much more for the for their lifestyle and the controversy they created than for their musicianship. They were the anti-band; whatever it was, they were against it.
This was the closest I ever got to reading
about The Sex Pistols
Growing up in the small Midwestern town of Norwalk, Ohio, I was in my early teen years during the reign of the Sex Pistols. In the days before the Internet, to learn about anything exotic (anything outside the borders of Ohio),like punk rock, one had to go to the local public library and use the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to find magazine articles about it. It was dismaying to find that the Rolling Stone magazine that featured the Sex Pistols from October, 1977 had been heavily censored by the staff at the library. The article and any pictures had cut out of the magazine.
The librarian was nonplussed when I confronted her about this act of censorship. She clearly thought that it was the library's job to remove offensive material before making it available to patrons. That did it for me, if the Sex Pistols were against everything, then I was for them.
Today, like a deadbeat dads who desert their infant children the Sex Pistols ceased to be before they got the chance to know their absentee fathers.  But in post bicentennial America eir ill-behaved antics made headlines. Reactions to their outlandish behavior ranged from amused to outrage. The post hippy world didn’t know how to respond to this angry punk rock child.
Johnny Rotten,The iconoclast's iconoclast,
For me the Sex Pistols, with their destroy everything attitude, provided definition to the walls of my cell, giving me an object to butt my head against. At last, I could see what was confining me or so I thought.
Of course such a self-destructive, nihilistic force, does not produce cogent statements or a manifesto of belief beyond “I want to destroy everything.” Paradoxically while calling mass destruction, Johnny Rotten also elected himself as the leader of this movement, urging his fans to “Follow me!”
One of the miracles of our modern age is the Internet. Thanks to the Internet, finally, 30 years after its release, I am able I was able to watch The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a mockumentary about the Sex Pistols, as from the perspective of Malcolm Mclaren, their manager.
But thanks to the Internet I’m finally able to watch this film 30 years after its release. Up till now I only had a copy of the soundtrack (on vinyl). It is disorienting to see the still images from the record jacket and the sounds from the album put to life in a film. Seeing those boys from 30 years ago who wanted to destroy the world's icons (and refused to become icons themselves) didn't make me feel nostalgic and pine for days gone by.
But I did feel it was a vital part of my education.

 Here is the trailer on YouTube: 

Poor Sid, he took destruction to its end.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Thursday Morning and the Devil's Rejects

T hursday, November 4, 2010, 8:30 AM
I t is a beautiful fall morning in Oxford. The early sun is making everything glow with a golden light. Looking into our front yard, I see birds and squirrels going about their business in the trees. In the distance I hear the whistle of an approaching train joining the sound of chirping birds. I take the last swallow of my morning coffee and look around the living room:
T he Fat Bastard, also known as Thor, jumps up from his place on the couch and runs across the room, his big, orange and white belly swaying under him and causing Eloise to go into hyper alert mode. Stiff legged with her radio antenna like ears unfurled, she approaches the window, scanning the street for any signs of potential threat.
T he only thing she notices is that Thor has abandoned his place on the couch, which she promptly takes. Her ears twitch occasionally as cars and people pass our house, but she remains asleep.
L ast night I watched Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects (2005) , his sequel to 2003's The House of a 1000 Corpses . I saw The House of a 1000 Corpses and was not impressed with it, so I felt no urgency to watch the newer film. One thing that I did know about it was the Lynard Skynard song Free Bird was effectively used in the last gun fight. Since Free Bird was taking up space in my head last night as an ear worm, I decided to look for the film and watch it.
T o my frustration the only copy of the film I could get was a German dubbed version. Fortunately I was able to find English subtitles, but they was out of sync with the movie. The subtitles were about a minute behind the movie. Since the plot was  pretty straightforward and didn’t require have much in the way of narration, it was easy enough to follow. The story is pretty simple; the bloodthirsty, sadistic killers from House of a Thousand Corpses are fugitives from the law. That’s about it.
O n the plus side, the soundtrack was pretty cool, featuring great classic rock. Especially breathtaking was the final sequence, Free Bird playing on the soundtrack as the screen is filled with a montage of shots featuring the wide open spaces of Texas.
B ut there is plenty to not like about this movie. Two of the things that I had the biggest problem was #1 there is no clear insight into who these people are. Captain Spaulding, played with great zeal by Sid Haig, is the leader of this clan of misfits. He is the only one that has regular contact with outside society. He even has a job, granted he is an extremely creepy clown, and a girlfriend. The rest of the Firefly family are barely human and exhibit a psychotic rage that violence is their chief form of interaction with outsiders. The violence and sadism is so over the top that I quickly found myself desensitized to it.
My other big point for not liking this movie is the overt misogyny of the film. Why does every member of the Firefly Clan, including the two women, target females? Is it because they look better naked? I was surprised at how quickly I became inured to the site of yet another pair of blood splattered breasts.
I can’t say I would recommend this movie; its steady display of overt acts of violence quickly becomes boring and uninteresting. That was definitely 2 hours of my life I will never get back.
The waiting area at physical therapy is very small and if there’s more than one are two other people there, I feel like I’m in everyone’s way with my chair. I sat and the waiting room at physical therapy today for 15 minutes. Today there were four people in there, so I just parked my chair in the hallway and looked into the waiting room. There was a big, balding guy in gray sweats and what looked like brand new white New Balance sneakers sitting on the left side of the room , reading a Time magazine.
Directly in front of me was another, older guy in work clothes, talking animatedly on his cell phone. He wore ankle high, sweat stained work boots, faded khaki pants. The blue-collar of his shirt had been washed until it was nearly white. Underneath his baseball cap his broad nose supported thick glasses with wire rims and tinted lenses. When he spoke into his cell phone, he moved his body in a secret rhythm, dancing by himself in his chair. First he would nod his head from left to right, then whichever hand was holding the phone, that shoulder would jump up and down. he would jerk his body once and then his feet would stamp, one at time, on the floor. When listening his body was statue still, but as soon as he opened his mouth the solitary dancing began again.
It’s easy to tell who is there for therapy from those who are there to pick up patients; we patients arrive wearing our work out clothes. The other two occupants were one of each. The one closest to me was wearing red and white sweats, clearly there for her thrashing; the other woman had the look of a mother waiting for her child to finish before taking him back to school or returning home with them.
After such a clear and sunny start this morning, skies are now gray and dropping rain. And once again my pets is have taken up a sleeping positions around me.
8:52 PM

Can't sleep

Thursday, November 3, 2:11AM

Can't sleep again, thinking about stuff I would like to say.

I thought I was being original by coining the phrase "vomit blog," meaning a place for me to spew whatever is in my brain, but alas, I am exploring already charted territory.  I Googled the phrase "blog vomit" or "blomit" and "vomit blog" and found that each term had several, apparently unrelated definitions.  Many of them salacious.

But what I really want to say is that I am looking for a place to practice writing.  Anita Canterbury, my high school, freshman English teacher told us that if we weren't writing daily at this point, we would never amount to anything as writers.  However, at 45, I have a dream; I will never be a great writer, I may never even be a good writer, but if I work hard and practice, I can become a better writer (thanks to Bob Fosse's All that Jazz).

That is enough for now.  It is time to play with my settings.  And I don't mean that in a dirty way.

2:40PM