Deep, Deep, Down

As journalists from over the world listen intently, Jimmy explains the mystical meaning of "a Mongolian clusterfuck."

Way back when theatres were periodically carrying movies bearing a “Francis Ford Coppola Presents” banner, the resulting films were generally good: The Black Stallion, The Grey Fox, The White Cabbage – wait, scratch that last one.

Francis picked the films (if not co-funded them with monies from his American Zoetrope treasury) and it was a form of branding: Coppola = Qvalitaats Film Produckte.

It's a very simple form of self-promotion under a quasi-benevolent aura, and soon afterwards, the procedure was oft-imitated by others for similarly part-genuine, part egotistical, part easy-money reasons.

An easy money example is Wes Craven whoring his name for crap like the Wishmaster cycle; partly egotistical is Quentin Tarantino using his name to instill himself among burgeoning cult film aficionados as the premiere screener and purveyor of things hip, cool, and cultish; and genuine is James Cameron’s guiding hand in the development of Sanctum [M].

Written by novice screenwriters John Gavin (who has a small part in the film) and Andrew Wight (who co-produced), the story is based on the latter’s real-life adventure when a team on a cave diving expedition in 1988 was trapped after a freak storm. That’s essentially the hook of the film, but unlike the 1989 documentary Wight produced on the incident (Nullarbor Dreaming), Sanctum’s six producers either mandated their own few cents of mandatory ‘creative suggestions’ or the writers simply patterned the script after Cameron’s own template, going as far as emulating his hokey dialogue.

When Cameron writes bad dialogue, it’s amusingly laughable (except in Titanic, where it’s interminable); when it’s imitated, it’s just plain bad, and therein lies the biggest challenge for viewers: if you can stomach the first 25 mins. of rubbish chatter & profanity (such as the aforementioned 'Mongolian clusterfuck'), and tolerate cardboard characters that never deepen nor blossom during the course of the film, it’s a passable adventure B-movie.

During it’s theatrical run, Cameron’s name was nail-gunned into every form of advertising, leading some to believe Jimmy made another watery movie, but while his influence is felt in the film’s script, the production and focus on diving minutia is more Wight, himself a veteran documentary producer on Things Oceanic.

Both Cameron and Wight have collaborated on several documentaries regarding iconic ships rusting on dark, benthic ocean plateaus (Titanic, Bismarck, and more guilt-studded, Titanic odes). One suspects that as Jimmy and the other four producers realized Wight was following Jimmy's own template and style during the final rewrite process, there was a collective sense the script was coming together just fine.

I’ve uploaded a review of Universal’s Blu-ray, which happily includes Nullarbor Dreaming among the extras. The doc’s been long off the radar since its rare airing on PBS stations, and cave diving fans stuck with terrible TV dubs can finally enjoy the eerie cinematography and compelling narrative of the vintage doc in its pristine tube camera glory. Ahem.

Oh, and just in case you’re still doubting, Sanctum has no monsters. It’s The Descent, minus bug-eyed creatures, aliens, mutants, viruses, underwater cabbage patches, etc. Just people slowly breaking under the stress of being trapped kilometers underground.

You know, Jimmy stuff.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Let’s go to Italy: Mimsy Farmer, Part I

"Leave Mimsy alone, you filthy swine!"

After appearing in several sexpot roles in the United States, Mimsy Farmer must have seen the signs that staying in Hollywood would either have yielded a lot of banal TV guest roles, or tumbling into obscurity, with the odd U.S. B-flick coming up now and then.

A good case in point is British actress Pamela Franklin, who began as a child actress in the classic shocker The Innocents (1961), had significant roles in her teens in film such as the lurid The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and made sure viewers cared for the terribly victimized psychic in Richard Matheson’s chilling supernatural shocker The Legend of Hell House (1973), but once she settled in Hollywood and began to appear in TV series, she slid away from feature films, and spent the bulk of her career wasting perfectly good acting chops in the Idiot Box – a role here, a mini-series there, but nothing memorable compared to her heyday in the sixties.

Farmer’s move to Italy probably began innocently – a few opportunities to work with new Italian talent, and a trip to Italy. Actors such as Frank Wolff (Salvatore Giuliano, The Lickerish Quartet [M]) and Brett Halsey (The Atomic Submarine, Four Times That Night) realized they could spend a chunk (the rest?) of their careers in more B-movies, or have fun making arty films, programmers, and B-films in Italy, with good food, wine, weather, and a slightly different pace of life.

For them, it became a no-brainer, and they enjoyed fairly steady work until the genres – giallo, spaghetti westerns, police thrillers, cannibal films, zombie films, etc. – had been exhausted by good and hack directors. Halsey went back to the U.S., whereas Farmer chose to stay until she probably felt it was time for a change; most likely, many of the more interesting directors from the late sixties and early seventies were no longer as active, and what remained were hack directors and TV work.

And maybe genre smasher Joe D’Amato, but he was the ultimate last resort for actors wanting to remain in film regardless of what they were doing.

Farmer eventually shifted gears after 1991, and now focuses her energies on painting and sculpting, but it is peculiar she’s never been approached by genre historians to discuss her work during a unique period when ex-pats were working quite actively in Italy, and for a while, having fun.

'Dinner is served.'

Like Franklin, Farmer’s early career included child and teen roles in TV series such as My Three Sons (1962), Lassie (1964) and Mister Roberts (1966) before making a splash as the high-strung, long-mane sexpot in Hot Rods to Hell (1967). Her shrill character is an experience rather than a performance for audiences, but her career opportunity changed when she appeared in Barbet Schroeder’s More (1969), Georges Lautner’s Road to Salina (1970), and Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971).

What followed was a flurry of roles in genre films, and among the more interesting was the little-seen 1974 giallo Perfume of a Lady in Black [M] (Raro Video) by newcomer Francesco Barilli, a screenwriter (Who Saw Her Die?), and perhaps influentially, a working painter and sculptor.

Perfume is one of the dreamiest gialli ever created, and Farmer’s perfectly cast as a woman who notices her reality is starting to crack into little jagged pieces. It’s also a film that upon first viewing will baffle; the second viewing, like Psycho (1960), yields little clues to the evil plot underway; and a third viewing will probably convince one that Barilli’s weird film is a mini-masterpiece.

It’s a giallo in the sense of a character tormented by a past horror that blossoms unconsciously and compels her to see, fear, and perform things new and awful, but it’s also an art film with a wonderful mood, superb early score by Nicola Piovani, and amazing cinematography. If Raro Video gets into Blu-ray, this has to be one of their first endeavors, because Perfume is one of the most beautifully lit, Bava-esque films around.

Mimsy is quite puzzled by sun spots.

1974 could be read as a turning point for Farmer, in terms of a career that was cresting, because where Barilli exploited what subtleties the actress could deliver to meet the demands of a giallo and create a sympathetic character, director Armando Crispino just used her body and femininity in Autopsy / Macchie solari [M] (1975), a junk giallo by a patented hack.

There’s no artistry or clever direction at play in Autopsy (Blue Underground), just a teasing concept that’s abandoned in favour of a weird misogynistic streak, where men are constantly in heat, and all women need to keep a machete in one hand in case they hear from behind a zipper being undone.

Crispino’s film has a fromage factor, but it’s such exploitive rubbish, and I’ve reviewed it for contrast: artistry vs. lecherous commerce, and the kind of choices actors had to face if they stayed too long in one groove, and their options narrowed severely.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Abandoned Matinees VI: The Regal Cinema, Camberley, U.K.

It’s been a while since the last Abandoned Matinees post, though not due to a lack of new finds, but merely time, and a strange phenomenon known as Klathwathiusmus Constrictus, which actually causes the months to move beyond the Earth’s rotation, pushing us from January to June. Pity the phenom is merely a freak of interstellar nature and cannot be harnessed to hasten moments of exceptional dullness.

The latest installment focuses on The Regal Cinema, which opened in August of 1932 in Camberley, U.K., under the ownership of the Robins Cinemas, then became an Odeon cinema, followed by the Cannon circuit until the idiot team of Golan & Globus overextended themselves, causing the collapse of their once potent indie company. (Jean-Claude Van Damme, Michael Dudikoff, Lucinda Dickey, and J. Lee Thompson could only do so much with Cannon scripts, you know.)

The Robins repurchased the cinema, and what was once a 1000+ seat single screen venue was twinned and tripled, uglifying the once beautifully exotic Art Deco building.

Most abandoned buildings tend to sit and rot, with passersby losing their curiosity and concern in favour of indifference, particularly when the edifice is part of a daily walk. To some, a dying building maintains an allure, and for urban explorers, an opportunity to check out the hidden and the forgotten knowing the wrecker’s ball will likely raze the building into rubble very soon.

Here, for example, is a snapshot of the Regal in 1980, with its façade painted stark white, and rebranded as The Classic Cinema. Now note its present condition in the first image of this set, taken in April of 2010. Compare that with additional angles (3) which gradually reveal the fires which destroyed significant portions of its superstructure.

Now lets examine the interior in this detailed set, taken in August of 2009, which seems to precede at least some of the more damaging fires set by vandals. Note the projector (near end) which is still standing… and was likely toppled (images 12 - 16) by vandals prior to April, 2010.

It’s a classic idiot teen moment preserved in pristine dust: ‘Hey! Look! A still-standing large object that appears heavy! Let’s make it fall over! Because if we can, it’s all brilliant! 20 years from now, the memories of that great day will feel as good as buying our first legal beer!’

While the building was still erect as of January, 2011, the fencing and demolition signage are likely precursors to the end. Every city has had a building like this, dying slowly and coming to an ignominious end.

Pity.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

The Car in Motion: Racing Films, Part I

This week saw the release of two major Formula One racing films on Blu-ray – Grand Prix (Warner Home Video) and Le Mans (Paramount).

I reviewed Le Mans way back in 2003 for Told You So Productions, a site whose content (mostly mine) was absorbed into what became KQEK.com. The mandate for the now-defunct site was to keep reviews under 500 words, which is why some of the older reviews written between 2001-2005 tended to be much more compact and free of blather.

I’ll cover the Le Mans Blu-ray in greater detail shortly, but let’s start with Grand Prix [M] (1966), because it’s the film that I’d frankly avoided until now because I was concerned its fusion of Grand Hotel-type melodrama would make an otherwise striking racing film interminable.

MGM had repeated the Grand Hotel formula from its 1932 classic into a number of variations, including Weekend at the Waldorf (1945) as well as the sappy adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel (1967), and while some could argue the melodrama in Grand Prix isn’t unique, screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur certainly evoked the formula, in which the lives of a handful of leading characters become intermingled with each other, as well as numerous secondary characters.

Arthur, though, used conflicts tailored to racers: their groupies, tired wives, not to mention leggy sports journalists who perhaps used their job to get into the jumpsuits of certain drivers.

James Garner, driving solo at 120 mph.

The character dramas in Grand Prix make up a third of the film’s content; the rest is docu-drama styled moments; and what may be the most beautiful widescreen in-your-face racing footage ever put on film.

Director John Frankenheimer really showed his knack for tackling a complex production by insisting problems be solved in order to put audiences in or alongside the driver’s seats of Formula One machines. The visuals, supervised by the great Saul Bass,  are extraordinary, and the sound of roaring engines gives a rush to car enthusiasts who like the sound, feel, and delight of moving fast in vehicles  they control all by themselves.

Released in single camera Cinerama (basically Super Panavision 70mm, exhibited in Cinerama using specially adapted prints for the curved screens). Grand Prix’s racing scenes are kinetic, elegant, and erotic because they were designed and executed by people who loved cars in a pre-CGI era.

At 176 mins., Grand Prix is arguably monstrous in length, but more than half of the running time involves some of the most amazing racing sequences committed to film.

Saul Bass' clean, simple title design begins with a Formula One roar.

I’ve reviewed the film in detail, and added a link to a rare interview with TVO's Elwy Yost and Saul bass regarding the making of the film. It's online, free for streaming, so check out the film review.

In the coming weeks I'll follow-up with Le Mans and several related racing films to show how different filmmakers at different periods in film history handled the car in motion.

What I do wish is that through the creation and release of these HD masters, the prints used for the Blu-rays are available for rental, because if you have the chance to catch Grand Prix on the big screen, as a car lover, it’s your duty to see it.

Anyone at the TIFF Bell Lightbox listening? The 70mm projection system needs some exercise…






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Mondo in HD

"More than the greatest love the world has known," says Riz.

Contrary to what the BBC may have envisioned, Human Planet [M] (2011) owes a great deal to Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti’s Mondo Cane (1962), the debut of what’s been branded the mondo genre.

A literal translation of the Italian film means ‘a dog’s world’ but it’s not the title that defined the genre, but the format: a travelogue documentary not unlike the early Cinerama films where exotic locales and odd cultural quirks were captured in widescreen glory. The emphasis was on authenticity, or at least conveying a sense of being party to things striking, exotic… and odd.

What makes a mondo film are globe-trotting locations, jumping from one group of odd human behaviour to another within a city or country, and making sure there’s a balance of the visually beautiful, bizarre, the shocking, and the serene. Contrasts for the sake of provocation. Cults or primitive tribes, and western values rational put upside-down. Man behaving like a wild creature, or learning from the wild world to gain a slight upper hand.

Why live in a world of extremes? Why get food that way? Why earn a living when it’s going to kill you faster than cancer?

Physical and cultural isolation, perhaps, and no need to adopt aspects of western lifestyles because it’s unsuitable or impractical. Not every village has electricity, and maybe living in a tree house is more satisfying without mortgage, utility and property tax payments.

Warner Home Video released Human Planet on DVD and Blu-ray, and fans ought to be happy it’s the U.K. version rather than the Discovery Channel edit (which is ostensibly the same series, retrofitted with a new narration track and music score because middle America only likes the Brit accent when it's packaged inside Miramax Oscar bait).

Mastered at 1080i, the series looks grand, and Nitin Sawhney’s music is a welcome stylistic change from the more orchestral scores that have dominated prior series such as Planet Earth (2006) and Blue Planet (2001). There was nothing wrong with George Fenton’s music; we just needed a fresh sound for this atypical BBC production.

Because it’s mondo!

And yes, this blog – mondomark – espouses to the odd, eclectic elements native to the mondo genre as they flow from my brain (which is quite big). I just haven't written an Oscar nominatable song yet to make the transition complete.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com