Just uploaded is a pair of soundtrack reviews:
- John Morris' Clue [M] (La-La Land), not as giddy as Haunted Honeymoon [M], but still amusing.
- Jerry Goldsmith's First Knight [M], an above-average, big scale orchestral score that happily bears no resemblance to that other big screen score also composed in 1995, Congo.
That is all.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
The Greek Experience, Dario Argento alerts, and Mondomark & KQEK.com join Twitter
1) Your mail will not arrive in a timely fashion in spite of what the government and Canada Post [CP] have said on camera, and in print. A co-worker asked our local letter carrier why we haven’t received a big bundle of mail, now that the strike is over.
Off the record, he said, the government has placed priority on ordinary mail, and has told CP to put everything else on hold, particularly any priority mail. To clear the backlog would require overtime, but since the gov’t doesn’t want to appear to be giving any extra money to workers just off strike duty, any express or priority mail – essentially shipping with a premium price – has no priority. Ergo, if you’ve been waiting for an express post package from anywhere, you’re not got to get it any faster than the Hydro bill, or junk mail from Fred’s Flatulence Clinic.
Somewhere in Mississauga, Ontario, lies a room resembling the end shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and buried in there are my review copies. As one nice lady said, expressing a modicum of discontent, "Barnacles!" At least the queen bees reported stranded in a postal warehouse were saved last month from mortal danger. Apparently CP will ship bees, whereas couriers will not. Who knew you could mail bugs?
2) Torontoist reported yesterday the Bloor Cinema isn't in fact doomed for some permanent closure or some condo for Stage One of The Bloor West Gentrification Project. Instead, Hot Docs and Blue Ice Film have acquired the building from the brothers Bordonaro, and when it reopens for mostly docs / still cult shows like the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), it'll have undergone some major renovations.
Mostly likely office, wiring, seating, sound, and use of space will be improved, but until it reopens (the article infers a possible fall date), it seems Rue Morgue has moved their monthly CineMacabre screenings to the Toronto Underground Cinema [TUC], which is great for its operators, because the cinema - which has the second largest seating capacity in the city - is buried away from the street under a condo, and deserves more exposure. In an ideal world, T.O. can sustain an eclectic set of indie, non-profit and corporate cinemas that cater to a number of audiences and types of entertainment.
Rue Morgue's next CineMacabre event is Tom Holland's Fright Night (1985), and to make the debut of the magazine & cinema's first collaboration, the 35mm print screening Thurs. July 21st at 9:30pm is FREE.
TUC also Tweeted on Aug. 25th CineMacabre will not only present a 35mm print of Near Dark (1987), but feature a Q&A with Lance Henricksen and Richard Crouse. Great movie, great Tangerine Dream score, great eyeball smooshing. More details are at RM, and note the very cool poster, which is a great tribute to the film's tone, and Henricksen's brilliantly bad attitude in the film.
3) And related to things Rue Morgue and Tweeting, I just uploaded the second RM blog concerning this past Saturday July 2nd screening of Fellini's "Toby Dammit" segment from Spirits of the Dead (1968) and Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
In Part 1, I blather about the screened prints, and why the Weinsteins are dreadful hoarders; and in Part 2, I blather about Argento's Opera (1987), which screened the same day. There's also links in Part 2 regarding audio excerpts from the Intro and post-Fellini / Argento screening discussion by Guillermo del Toro, who's in town for the next 1.5 years shooting Pacific Rim.
He likes our city, and had fun talking for what amounted to SIXTY MINUTES of incisive, amusing, and ribald matters concerning the giallo genre, and will probably return to the TBL for future themed screenings. If it includes more Argento prints on the big screen, all the better. Those who weren't aware of the screenings or weren't able to make it ought to mark off Sat. July 23rd, because TUC is screening Deep Red at 7:30pm, and the Argento-produced Demons at 9:30pm.
Lastly, just a short mention that I've set up a Twitter account, under the moniker of mondomark_kqek, which will contain more timely alerts, because as I've discovered, writing long blogs like this and proofing them for sthpellingk mithtakes takes a while, whereas typing "Reviews of America America & William Kyriakis + Radley Metzger's Dark Odyssey now online" takes like, what, a minute?
These bloated blogs will continue, though, as the Tweets are pre-blog alerts of newly uploaded reviews and editorial blather. Coming soon will be a Facebook account for KQEK.com, because I wish to expand my empire into your PC, your Mac, your mobile, and your bathroom.
Now then, let's get to the latest pair of uploaded reviews.
What an absolutely ugly publicity campaign.
Elia Kazan's Wild River (1960) screened this past Sunday and last night TIFF Bell Lightbox (this is why there's a lag in reviews & interviews - Toronto has too much to offer cineastes), and it's the 3rd film in its Montgomery Clift-Hollywood Classics series that spans June-August.
I reviewed Wild River not long ago via a Spanish DVD (note: it's also out in Fox's Elia Kazan box), and the second time around confirms it's one of my favourite films. I love the way its social commentary and historical facts support a slow-burning drama about lovers from two unlikely backgrounds who need each other to escape the doldrums of their respective lives.
Clift plays a Tennessee Valley Authority manager, and Lee Remick plays a window unable to leave her grandmother's island that's doomed to be flooded once the TVA's new dam project locks up.
I'm catching a number of Clift films in August, but it was nice to see the film on the big screen, where Ellsworth Fredericks' stunning cinematography revealed a forgotten artisan. There are shots in the film with truly remarkable lighting and deep focus detail. The best example is a simple conversation between Clift and Lee Remick in the doorway of a small house during a rainstorm. It's magic hour, and the lighting is graduated to show various amber hues inside the house, including a moving pattern of rain water cascading down an unseen window. One shot, multiple colours and textures, and ravishing in CinemaScope.
The 35mm print was grainy (like the U.S. release version of Visconti's The Leopard (1963), Fox used cheaper film stock, which boosted grain severely), but the print was in good condition, and there were details not quite evident in the DVD transfer, such as the straight-razor nicks on Albert Salmi's cheeks from a hasty shave prior to filming, and flies buzzing now and then into shots.
The sound mix was mono, but Kenyon Hopkins' light blues score fit the film and its characters to a T, and it's probably one his loveliest scores, screaming for a commercial release or an isolated score track. (Ahem: Twlight Time perhaps?)
The theatre was about 1/3 full, and most of the people wandered in 10 minutes prior to the film start, and they seemed to be pleasantly surprised by the superb script, its wit, and Kazan's careful direction that yielded string performances from major and minor actors (including baby-faced Bruce Dern).
This of course brings me to America America [M] (1963), Kazan's follow-up film which Warner Home Video released on DVD for the first time. Based in part on his Greek uncle's struggle to escape the poverty in Anatolian Turkey, it's one of the richest, most unpretentious chronicles of the immigrant experience on film, and is arguably Kazan's best film. Unlike most immigrant tales of poor folks reaching America and enduring brutal hardships to set roots, Kazan's drama focuses on the backstory - the reasons for flight, the unpredictable events prior to escape, and the years it takes to earn enough money to book a one-way ticket to a land and culture you know nothing about.
In a media-savvy global community, we can learn quite a bit about a future homeland, but imagine simply deciding, based on anecdotes and images in magazines, that you want to leave home and reach the shores of a new country where you don't speak the language, the food is strange, the culture is new, and there are plenty of people willing to exploit your weaknesses because your English vocabulary will take a while to mature. Kazan's tale deals with the opportunities and choices his lead character - essentially a teen - must make before a burning desire to extricate himself from a life he simply can't stomach mandates buying that one ticket.
It's also a rare chronicle of the Greek experience at a time when Greece and Turkey were generally portrayed by Hollywood as an exotic ancient place. Greece was the mystical tourist destination with treasure (Boy on a Dolphin [M]), and Turkey provided colour and thrills in caper films (Topkapi) and espionage (From Russia with Love) during the Cold War. Neither film told us anything about the cultures, and the few Greek-centric films focused on historical figures within the war or Biblical epic genres. Even the best-known Greek film at the time - Never on Sunday (1930) - was a fanciful comedy directed by American Jules Dassin.
Manos Hadjidakis' film score for Dassin's film was designed to be light and fluffy, whereas his sparse music for Kazan's drama is much richer in themes and atmosphere, and provided a better sampling of his composing skills. He knew when to drift in and out of scenes quickly, which is unusual for a nearly 3-hour film.
America America is also one of the best-edited film and feels exceptionally contemporary; Dede Allen managed to edit 3 hours into 2 without physically compacting the film itself. It just moves, and as I blather in the review, Kazan's film is a textbook example on how to cut an epic intelligently without sacrificing character, plot, dialgue, atmosphere, and visual beauty. It's an art that's lost today because the assumption is shots shouldn't last longer than a few seconds, and that's pure bullshit.
In 1958, indie New York City filmmakers Radley Metzger (The Lickerish Quartet [M]) and William Kyriaksi co-directed and co-wrote Dark Odyssey [M] (First Run Features / Image), a revenge film that has a Greek seaman hunt down the man responsible for his sister's suicide back in Greece. The real drama within the film is how a traditional villager reacts to first generation Greeks that emigrated from the homeland and assimilated into NYC's melting pot. There's a surprising among of cultural colour in the film, and it's a pity the movie didn't go anywhere when it was broadly released in 1961.
Where Kazan's film covers the backstory, Metzger and Kyriakis dealt with the present, as ordinary people deal with culture clashes Hollywood either didn't bother with at the time, or transformed into formulaic melodrama. There's more Greek culture in either film that Boy on a Dolphin or Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953), because the music and the dancing are subjugated in both films to background texture.
There. I proved the link between Metzger and Kazan.
Your'e very welcome.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
The Saga of Coffin Joe: Part I
It also doesn’t help that the original label (Fantoma) which carried two of the three proper Coffin Joe films, went under, and extant DVDs from Brazil and Europe use poor if not mediocre source materials.
The first film, for example, At Night I’ll Take Your Soul (1964), is available in what can best be described as Bullshit Stereo 2.0, and it’s a disaster. The only source for the original scratchy but intelligible mono mix are the out-of-print Fantoma and still-in-print Australian versions. It’s a classic case, not unlike Mario Bava’s Blood & Black Lace (1964), where there still isn’t a decent transfer made from the best elements available to the broadest spectrum of the home video market.
Note awesome artwork by Rue Morgue's Gary Pullin.
The second film, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), sounds even worse in Bullshit 2.0, and it’s maddening that the most accessible and value-added set of Marins’ work from Anchor Bay U.K. features these terrible transfers.
Most likely the reason the 9 film, 5 disc box set is selling for under 10 Pounds Sterling on Amazon.uk is due to a rejection of the set by the franchise’s key fan base.
The blame lies in the hands of the owners who authorized bad transfers, not the labels who licensed them because they simply wanted to get the movies back in circulation.
There’s a reason to complain, because scenes from the first two Coffin Joe films were intercut in select montages in the third and final installment of the trilogy, Embodiment of Evil (2008), and the clips look gorgeous. If the success of Part III can happen over the Blu-ray platform, then perhaps it’ll poke the owners to do what’s right, and not only release new HD transfers of the films, but add the generous extras from the 2002 Brazilian box set, each featuring multi-lingual translations.
Make one set available for all markets so Marins’ body of work gets the recognition it deserves.
So who is Coffin Joe?
He’s an arrogant, sadistic undertaker who abuses townspeople with absolute impunity. He’s funny, rabidly anti-religious, and thumbs his nose at the spirits of the people he killed or maimed. He also wants to be a daddy, and when resuscitated for the second film, the character was reshaped into a hellion determined to father a son who will begin a reign of terror (when he’s all grown-up, of course).
Joe’s also a sexist pig, so you have to wonder what the sonofabitch would do if the doctors handed him a baby daughter. He tests the women snatches from streets as potential mothers using a mass of tarantulas, snakes, facial disfigurement, and atrocious bedside manners.
The reason the character is so fascinating lies in the glee with which he accomplishes outrageous cruelties, and Marins’ directing style, which harkens back to the Universal monster movies of the forties and fifties, but adds a visual flair reminiscent of Mario Bava, surreal episodes recalling Alejandro Jodorowsky, and graphic violence found in some of Fernando Arrabal’s most vicious work.
Coffin Joe isn’t for all tastes, but the first film remains the best because it’s a complete portrait of a monster who gets his comeuppance… and like a classic Universal Frankenstein sequel, comes back in spite of seriously physical trauma.
I’ve reviewed the first two films, At Night I’ll Take Your Soul [M] and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse [M], and compare the 2007 Anchor Bay and 2001 Fantoma editions, including extras.
In Part II of this series, I’ll examine the subsequent films in which Marins’ malicious character appeared in lesser (and sometimes impressionistic) roles.
"For you, I think you need some snuggle time in my porcine sleepsack!'
Also uploaded is a review of Embodiment of Evil [M], in which the character is released from prison after 40 years, and falls straight into his old groove, using more modern methods of physical trauma.
It’s a mixed bag only because it will divide fans wanting the classical aspects from the original films, and those delighted that the gore – some real – is up to flesh-tearing contemporary standards.
Synapse’s Blu-ray + DVD combo edition looks and sounds great.
Coming soon: tales of the Greek immigration experience, as dramatized in Elia Kazan’s masterwork America America (1963), and William Kyriakis and Radley Metzger’s Dark Odyssey (1961).
Seriously. There’s a strong thematic connection between the two films, and I’ll prove it.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
John Huston’s Cold War Thrillers
Not your conventional old stogie.
If you’ve seen Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) – and you really should if you haven’t – it sort of encapsulates the director’s odd blend of filmmaking and adventurism. Huston went to Africa to make movies and shoot big game. In White Hunter, he wanted an African elephant; and in Nevada for The Misfits (1961), there was the gambling, and commandeering an over-budget production with three of Hollywood’s biggest and most expensive stars.
Filmmaking for Huston always seemed to be about the challenge, and having fun with a good cigar stuck between his grandiose, mischievous smile, or having an awesome drinking buddy like Humphrey Bogart (The African Queen) or Errol Flynn (The Roots of Heaven). One reason Huston didn’t get sick during filming in exotic locales is the booze: if you increase the alcohol percentage to borderline toxic, you make it impossible for bugs to survive long enough to infect you. (At least that’s the theory which worked with Flynn during the shooting of Roots.)
From Twilight Time comes The Kremlin Letter [M] (1970), a forgotten but really well-aged espionage thriller whose tone and meanness I swear were borrowed by John Frankenheimer and David Mamet for Ronin (1999). There’s some striking tonal similarities, but Kremlin is a much meaner film about desperate characters sharing pretty dismal futures – hardly elements that would’ve made the kind of box office hit Huston was hoping for.
The film’s been announced for a Region 2 DVD July 25 via Eureka Entertainment, but TT’s Region 1 disc (limited to 3000 copies) includes an isolated music track of Robert Drasnin’s bleak little score, and is available exclusively from Screen Archives Entertainment.
Those curious about TT’s upcoming Blu-ray and DVD editions of The Egyptian (1954) can read a detailed interview with Nick Redman at Blu-ray.com. Apparently the company’s licensed 100 films from Fox, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed some of those anamorphic CinemaScope productions out in Spain will finally get their due in North America. There’s no reason why The Roots of Heaven (1958) or Inferno (1953) can’t be released here. None.
Also reviewed is Huston’s second seventies espionage thriller, The MacKintosh Man [M] (1976), starring Paul Newman in a perfectly tailored role of a no-nonsense thief / spy. It as easy for the studio to package a trailer with plenty of money shots and quick quips, but selling the film was clearly tough for Warner Bros., because it moves from one genre to another within its first hour. It’s also a gem that deserves a peek, and Warner Home Video released it a few years ago as a standalone edition and in a Paul Newman-themed boxed set.
While we’re on the subject of Huston, I should also point out the late August screenings of The Misfits at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Eli Wallach, Kevin McCarthy, Thelma Ritter, Arthur Miller, and Alex North. Not a happy film, considering three of the leads were dead within a few years after the film’s release, but it’s a striking production that’ll look & sound great on the big screen.
Also announced in the TBL’s programme book is an upcoming salute to Grace Kelly, featuring Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), and Dial M for Murder (1954). I’m so there, but it would be amazing if the TBL could get their hands on a restored 3D print of Dial M. I’ve seen a worn print at the old Festival Cinemas’ summer 3D series, and even in WobblyVision & browning film stock, it still looked good.
Coming shortly: the saga of Coffin Joe.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Soundtrack Reviews + News
Just uploaded are a quartet of fun action & sci-fi scores for video games. La-La Land Recorss have released a pair of beautifully mastered 2-disc sets for hans Zimmer's Crysis II [M] and Bear McCreary's SOCOM 4: Navy SEALs [M], and Bioware's released Inon Zur's music from Dragon Age II [M]. I've also added a review of Zur's score for the first Crysis [M] (Sumthing Else Music) to rounf things out.
In a recent interview in May, Winifred Philips spoke to the Sound Byte Blog regarding life as a working film and video game composer. The Q&A runs a meaty 20 mins., and it's a genial piece where Phillips discusses her career, including recent releases such as Sim Animals (2008), Spore Hero (2009), and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010).
Lastly, Universal recently released Ridley Scott's Legend (1986) on Blu-ray, and the Digital Bits noted a few extras from the DVD weren't ported over. Missing are "the 3 animated storyboard sequences, the production notes (that help to provide context for some of the extras), the standard cast & crew bios and - most importantly - the DVD-ROM features which included a script-to-screen viewer." I reviewed the DVD when it emerged in 2002, and I keep having to clarify the following: the Tangerine Dream score is NOT isolated on the DVD; it's the album tracks dumped into a separate audio track *in mono*. It's a useless feature on the DVD and BR, and Universal most likely was told by The Dream's management not to isolated the score in stereo, rather than the studio being cheap.
Those interested in the BR edition can read a Q&A between Film Score Monthly's Andy Dursin and Special Features producer Charles de Lauzirika.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
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