Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Salon vs. Slate
By Nicholas Stix
Are Salon and Slate the same blog? Has anyone ever seen those two in the same room together?
Monday, May 06, 2013
Fiat Video: This is Not the Sexy Fiat Commercial (Alert: Do Not View on a Full Stomach)
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Kirk Douglas, Jerry Goldsmith, and Dalton Trumbo: Lonely are the Brave
Thanks to valdez244.
By Nicholas Stix
Kirk Douglas has said that Lonely are the Brave (1962) was his favorite picture. And anyone who has seen this spare masterpiece, shot on a shoestring, about a 19th century cowboy, Jack Burns, set down in the middle of the tractor-trailer, interstate highway Southwest of the early 1960s, can see why.
The movie co-stars a youngish Walter Matthau on his way up and a beautiful, still young Gena Rowlands, and features a supporting cast that includes an unknown George Kennedy and William Shallert (the dad on The Patty Duke Show).
The score is by a then very young Jerry Goldsmith at the beginning of his composing career. It was influenced by Elmer Bernstein’s score to The Magnificent Seven (1960), but stands on its own as a classic Western score, and is very unlike Goldsmith’s later work.
I referred to this as Kirk Douglas’ Lonely are the Brave, even though he was not the official director. That would be Hollywood journeyman David Miller, who had a mixed record. But this picture has Douglas’ fingerprints all over it, while not even modern DNA testing can link Miller to it.
Douglas made a series of movies as an independent producer-star between The Juggler (1953) about the eponymous protagonist, a Jewish concentration camp survivor and Lonely are the Brave, all of which had a trademark humanity, in spite of having different directors, including the distinctly inhumane Stanley Kubrick in Paths of Glory and Spartacus. Some of his heroes were betwixt and between, as in The Indian Fighter 1955, others fought the good fight against impossible odds, as in Glory and Spartacus, while others—The Juggler and Lonely—were displaced persons in this world, with nowhere anymore to call home.
Several of the screenplays were authored by the Communist Dalton Trumbo, who had been justifiably blacklisted during the 1950s, when he wrote under a series of “fronts.” Trumbo was one of the greatest screenwriters the screen has ever seen (with Michael Wilson, Robert Bolt, Ben Hecht, Frances Marian, Preston Sturges, Robert Riskin, the pre-Soon Yi Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman, William Goldman, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and Ernest Lehman ).
In the same year that Lonely was released, Douglas produced and starred in the off-Broadway production of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, about wild man Randall McMurphy, in a society that will no longer tolerate such characters. Unfortunately, Douglas was unable to get financing for a film version, grew too old for the role of McMurphy, and handed off the rights to his son, Michael. Thus, Kirk’s Oscars ended up in Michael and Jack Nicholson’s hands.
Thus, it has long been clear to this observer that Douglas was much more than a vain star who produced his own pictures, in order to reap more money and power, and much more a David O. Selznick-type, who had an artistically ambitious, directorial vision, though rarely—excepting Glory and Spartacus—with a Selznickian budget.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
The New Batman-Superman Adventures (1997-2000) Opening Theme (and the Myth of Danny Elfman)
Thanks to Christopher Fluhr for the upload.
By Nicholas Stix
I used to watch this series with my boy when he was just a toddler, with this opening. The dark Gotham City/Metropolis, the laughing, sadistic heavies, bass line of hopelessness, and heroic horns in the opening thrilled me so that I remember it better than the series itself.
The show was a combination of re-runs from two animated kids’ TV series: Superman (1996-2000) and The New Batman Adventures (1997-1999).
I recall enjoying the Superman episodes (can’t recall any Batman stories), though being puzzled that there were apparently no white people in Metropolis. All of the characters, even Lois Lane, were colored light brown.
I’d always heard that the composer was Shirley Walker. Now, some self-appointed “experts” claim it was Danny Elfman. Although I love Elfman’s work, there is no basis for this claim.
Walker and at least two other composers worked on The New Batman Adventures: Lolita Ritmanis and Michael McCuistion. According to IMDB, all three were nominated for Emmys for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition in 1999, each for a separate episode of the New Batman Adventures.
Unfortunately, although IMDB has a “complete cast and crew” link for this show, it is incomplete. However, it does clearly state that Shirley Walker composed the theme. And it does not cite Elfman at all. Granted, IMDB is far from perfect, but it is still much more reliable than The Pretend Encyclopedia, aka Wikipedia, which lists Elfman as one of the show’s composers, and which is doubtless the source for those “experts” citing him.
A check under Elfman’s name at IMDB shows that he composed the theme for an earlier cartoon series entitled simply Batman, which ran from 1992-1995
Ah, but how do we know the opening theme to The New Batman-Superman Adventures wasn’t from the Superman half? Because the legendary Shirley Walker composed the themes for both shows! The only possible alternative is that IMDB completely blew it. More likely, the “experts” confused the earlier Batman series with the later one.
The First Honest Cable Company (Video; Language Alert)
Posted by Nicholas Stix
A tip ‘o the hate to Blazing Cat Fur and ExtremelyDecentFilms.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Have You Tried the Purina Dog Food Diet?
Posted by Nicholas Stix
So I'm at Wal-Mart buying a bag of Purina dog food for my dog. While in the check-out line, a woman behind me asked if I had a dog. Why else would I be buying dog food, RIGHT???
So on impulse I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again, and that I probably shouldn't because I ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in intensive care with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.
I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and all you do is load your pockets with Purina Nuggets, and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete, so it works well, and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story.)
Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no, I stepped off a curb to sniff a poodle's butt and a car hit me. I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack, he was laughing so hard. Better watch what you ask me, and be prepared for my answer. I have all the time in the world to think of crazy things to say.
[A big poodle butt sniff to Jeanine Klug.]
Sunday, August 05, 2012
American Beauty: An Anti-Nazi or a Pro-Nazi Propaganda Movie?
By Nicholas Stix
Spring (?), 2000
(Published at the time at various, since defunct Web sites, whose names I can no longer even remember correctly (The Opinion?) This is a slightly shortened version I found at Amazon, entitled, “Father Knows Best.”)
With the video release of American Beauty, now you, too, can rent or own this subversive satire of the hypocrisy, Nazism, and homophobia lurking among the freshly cut lawns and orderly subdivisions of suburban civilization.
In American Beauty, an expert Hollywood eye shows an American neighborhood for what it really is: the miserable businesswoman putting on a phony, cheery face; the degraded husband who, suffering a midlife crisis, fantasizes about his daughter’s girlfriend; the girlfriend, who brags of seducing older men; and best of all, the new neighbors, a retired Marine Corps colonel and his family. The homophobic colonel is of course a neo-Nazi and closet homosexual. Meanwhile, the one gay couple on the block is as sweet, decent, and tolerant as everyone else is screwed up, mean-spirited, and phony.
Bad enough, that director Sam Mendes and screenwriter/co-producer Alan Ball presume to be telling “the truth” about suburbia, but they think they’re doing director-screenwriter-producer Billy Wilder [alive in 2000, at the time of original publication] proud! They said so at the Oscars. This is clear, as well, through the gimmick, copied from Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard, of the dead protagonist’s (William Holden’s Joe Gillis) opening and closing narration. Mendes and Ball aren’t fit to carry Billy Wilder’s director’s chair. Indeed, today a young Billy Wilder would be satirizing them and their ilk.
Billy Wilder has never shown hatred toward the land that not only made him rich, but which saved the Viennese refugee from being turned into soap by his fellow Austrian, Hitler. And in contrast to the retired Marine Corps colonel on whom Mendes and Ball focus their hatred, see Wilder’s affectionate portrait of America’s fighting men in his Oscar-winning, 1953 movie, Stalag 17.
Wilder—considered anything but subtle in his day—wore silk gloves, in contrast to the hamhanded doings here. And though cynical, he didn’t ooze superiority over his characters. In Sunset Boulevard, for instance, Wilder depicted faded silent screen legend “Norma Desmond” (played by Gloria Swanson, herself a faded silent screen giant in a career-capping performance dripping in irony) as a monster, and yet, she was a monster for whom he clearly felt affection. Wilder, as screenwriter, gave Desmond the best line in the picture, which indicted the Hollywood of his time. When a police detective asks Desmond, “Didn’t you used to be big in pictures?,” she responds, “I AM big. It’s the pictures that got small.” They sure did.
Mendes and Ball confuse glibness and smugness with irony, with every character a mere prop in their anti-morality tale. They promote the adolescent notion that people are good, only to the degree that they do whatever they feel like at any given moment.
And yet, the picture does have its funny moments, most of which involve Spacey, one of only two characters for whom Mendes and Ball feel any sympathy. The other character is a young, drug-dealing, peeping Tom—but he’s authentic! (The gay couple can’t be counted: Their brief, superficial presence exists only to emphasize the evil of the homophobic colonel.) Much technical skill is in evidence. And the cast does marvelous work. Kevin Spacey, in particular, gives a performance for the ages, in this otherwise conventionally PC, Hollywood concoction.
American Beauty has two basic attitudes, each of which is anathema to Billy Wilder’s work:
• Political correctness. Wilder made a living skewering the sort of simple-minded notions that Mendes and Ball prize; and
• Authenticity: Younger fans of this film have said things like, “It’ll change your life!” They saw the film as saying that most people walk around already dead, but don’t know it yet. When protagonist Lester Burnham (Spacey) has an awakening, his life can never be the same.
But of course! In an Intro to Psychology lecture in 1978, wide-eyed with wonder, I heard about the philosophy that swept across America, after The War. The brainchild of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1977), existentialism teaches the ethics of “authenticity,” of consciously living under the shadow of death, without religious evasions or “bad faith.” Existentialism’s impassioned attack on hypocrisy has always made it attractive to young people. And yet, its premise—that life is led only in the face of mortality—is philosophy’s point of departure, not its destination.
Had Ball and Mendes known anything about existentialism, they would have known that it is inseparable from ... Nazism!
Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of life was of a piece with his politics. Like other Nazis, he was disgusted by the hypocrisy of bourgeois life.
And then there is American Beauty’s embrace of homosexuality, and insistence on an unholy trinity of Nazism, homophobia, and closet homosexuality.
One of the obscenities of revisionist, pc history is the assertion that the Nazis persecuted homosexuals, just as they did Jews. In fact, the second most powerful man in the Nazi Party, Ernst Roehm, was an open homosexual, as were all of his lieutenant/lovers. Roehm headed the Storm Troopers, who openly brutalized Jews and leftists. Among many Party members, Ernst Roehm was even more popular than the Fuehrer. That’s why Hitler, in an infamous “night of the long knives,” had Roehm and his lieutenants murdered.
It is understandable that gay activists would want to grind the history of Nazi homosexuality, and those who would tell it, under their jackboots. But Billy Wilder knew all about Roehm and Heidegger.
Having grown up in suburbia, I know its problems all too well. And as a Jew who lived for five years in West Germany (1980-85), and once got his nose bashed in by an old Nazi, I know something about the problem of authenticity, too. But Mendes and Ball are strangers to such problems, their jaundiced movie a self-righteous exercise in bigotry and ignorance.
In a just world, suburbanites would be able to make movies mocking Hollywood hypocrisy, say, “I Spend My Free Time and Influence Getting Murderers Paroled ... So They Can Kill Again!” Oops! That’s not a movie; that’s real life in Hollywood.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Doing the Dozens: The All-Time Champ
Posted by Nicholas Stix
Published on Jun 14, 2012 by teamcoco
CONAN highlight: Jack McBrayer & Triumph the Insult Comic Dog pay a visit to Chicago's infamously hostile hot dog stand.
[Thanks to the old buddy who sent this one in!]
