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After Images: The Junkman (1982)

By Richard von Busack (Subscribe to Richard von Busack's posts), Posted Jun 23rd 2008 8:02AM
Filed under: Action, Quentin Tarantino, After Image, Features, Cinematical



Quick, what do H. B. Halicki and Louis B. Mayer have in common? They both went "from junk cars to movie stars" as the poster for The Junkman put it; both were scrap merchants who got into the film business. Wrecking shop owner turned auteur Halicki's homebrewed hit Gone in 60 Seconds led the 1999 remake by Dominic Sena, who reputedly worked on the original The Junkman as a camera man. The Junkman, the follow-up to the original 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds, is an even more extravagant car-cruncher. It's a film that makes Tarantino's great car chase in Death Proof look like an also-ran. (QT refers to this original by having Kurt Russell's character keep a row of sunglasses on his dashboard, just like Halicki did.) The Junkman is an all-out demolition derby with Hoyt Axton providing the vocals, a co-starring role by a pet pig named Farah and a finale with the Goodyear Blimp buzzing the Cinerama Dome. As the price of a gallon of gas reaches the inevitable $5 mark, let us return to this uniquely decadent actioner.
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After Images: El Bruto (1953)

By Richard von Busack (Subscribe to Richard von Busack's posts), Posted Jun 14th 2008 2:03PM
Filed under: Classics, Foreign Language, After Image, Features, Cinematical


Can't get a ticket to The Hulk? Try The Brute. Movies give all kinds of different pleasures to all different kinds of people. But there's no substitute for the special dirty pleasure of class-card playing melodramas; this is a pleasure we usually deny ourselves. Our critical establishment, from wattle-shaking newspaper dinos down to acne-pocked bloggers, are very careful to detect a film's inhumanity to fictional evil landlords, conniving bosses and cruel millionaires.

Being a cartoon character, The Simpson's C. Montgomery Burns gets a pass. Burns is reputedly based on a real-life Hollywood type, but he has some other real-life predecessors. (Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller is one; he put a lot of people out of business, lived to be enormously old, and ... this is so Burns ... survived in his last years off the breast-milk of a hired wet nurse.)

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RvB's After Images: Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe...(1969)

By Richard von Busack (Subscribe to Richard von Busack's posts), Posted Jun 8th 2008 3:32PM
Filed under: Music & Musicals, After Image, Features, Cinematical


Uh-oh.

Submitted for your approval: a berk named Merk in bed with his bird. The fuzzy photo cannot really sum up what's going on here. The still I would have preferred is this film's money-shot: a red-cloaked Milton Berle conducting a Satanic mass in convincing Latin. Somehow this is not available on the Internet. Here, instead: a relatively chaste shot of quintuple threat Anthony Newley (actor/director/co-writer/singer/composer) grappling his real-life wife (the beeyoutiful and talented Joan Collins).

The still is a relic of what I've sometimes thought was the worst film ever made by a human being in world history. ReadReadRead
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Cinematical Seven: Even If Nobody Knows Anything, There's Seven Things To Know

By Richard von Busack (Subscribe to Richard von Busack's posts), Posted Jun 3rd 2008 11:02PM
Filed under: Cinematical Seven, Cinematical




Whether it's the critic leaving the screening room, flabbergasted at another mess ... the producer baffled at how much time and treasure and good intentions got squandered into an immense dog's egg ... or the actor who had some sort of a hunch that a film could be work, only to find out that there wasn't enough of him to fight the dozens working against him ... all can console themselves with screenwriter William Goldman's rule: 'Nobody knows anything." This is the consolation when sure fire things go wrong. If nobody knows anything, there's still 7 things you ought to know if you're making movies ...

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Scott McClellan Confesses: I Shilled Catwoman

By Richard von Busack (Subscribe to Richard von Busack's posts), Posted Jun 3rd 2008 7:02PM
Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Politics, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Movie News, Cinematical


So Defamer.com tipped me off to the existence of Hollywood Temp Diaries. I was a bitter temp for many years, a bitter experience which has poisoned my soul forever, leading me to a career of mockery, scoffery, pointless cruelty and the like. So I'm happy to see there is a forum for embittered production assistants and go-fers who are forced to fetch arcane pastries, admire the ugly children of producers, feign enthusiasm for disagreeable films and what not.

A highlight of this budding blog is this all too plausible item. It suggests that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan may have bent the truth even further than it first appeared. In what claims to be a missing chapter of his controversial memoir What Happened, the former spokesman cops to his most heinous bending of the truth: shilling Catwoman.

"We tried to sell the public that Catwoman was an action hero that young Americans could aspire to become. That the movie had all the elements --superb dialog, fantastic action, a charming love story ... then when I was to discuss it to the media, I misled them when they asked questions like 'Why were there eight rewrites of the script? '... I got drawn into the culture of deception." Hopefully, the healing can begin now.

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RvB's After Images: True Grit (1969)

By Richard von Busack (Subscribe to Richard von Busack's posts), Posted Jun 3rd 2008 6:02AM
Filed under: Classics, After Image, Western, Features, Cinematical



Before it opened, there was much public mulling over whether Harrison Ford had the stamina at age 65 to play Indiana Jones one more time. Apparently the box office grosses answered that question. It was an irrelevant question, anyway. In those Indiana Jones movies, the machinery is what mattered. Ford was there for the ride, just like the audience. I think what was missing in ...Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the elegiac qualities of a late period performance ... for example, the aging heroism in John Wayne's last great movie.

True Grit isn't just the sword outwearing the sheath, and the soul outwearing the breast, as Byron put it. It's also about remaining power in an old carcass. Wayne's rallying of that power in the film's memorable duel: blinking his one good eye at the shock of being called a fat old man, he takes his horse's reins in his teeth and rides down four gunmen. The film is often a comedy, with lines worthy of Mark Twain in it; so much so that the emotional content blindsides you. Every film class in the world quite justly talks about the end of The Searchers, John Ford's image of Wayne framed by a doorway, never at home or really at ease. True Grit has a scene to equal it: a gentle if tersely written scene at a snow-covered grave yard in the high country, with approximately the emotional fire power of the finale of James Joyce's The Dead.
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Twisted Balloon Doc Hits Big Time

By Richard von Busack (Subscribe to Richard von Busack's posts), Posted May 27th 2008 8:32PM
Filed under: Animation, Documentary, New Releases, Movie News, New Releases, Cinematical
Considering how much puffing is usually done to launch those "little movies that could," it's ironic that a documentary about blowing up balloons has made its way into the spotlight without an inflated media campaign. Sounds like the New York Times's Douglas Quenqua has noticed Sara Taksler and Naomi Greenfield's documentary about balloon twisting during its nationwide tour. After debuting at 2007's SXSW (Cinematical's Scott Weinberg notes the opening of Twisted: A Balloonamentary here), the film now has a solid run going at St. Louis's Landmark Tivoli theater.

Deer Park, Texas' Ralph Dewey, who uses balloon twisting as part of his gospel ministry, told the Times he isn't going to see the documentary on the grounds that there's too much uncleanliness in it. Unfortunately, some artistes twist the poor innocent balloon into hard-R and even unrated shapes, as you've probably seen at bachelorette parties and on cruise ships. The conflict between "gospel twisters" and "adult twisters" is unflinchingly depicted here, in accordance with the rule that every successful doc needs heroes, villains and conflicts. ("Michelle" seen above, supposedly paid for her house with the unholy art of adult balloon twisting.) Taksler, now a producer for The Daily Show, raised the money for the film by auctioning off the executive producer credit on eBay. And Jon Stewart himself hosts an animated sequence of the film. Twisted: A Balloonamentary opens in June in NYC.
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