Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys: Surprisingly non-NSFW Sherilyn Fenn edition

Darkness swallowed him up. He might have taken the time to saddle the horse or hitched up three spans of mules to a Concord stagecoach and smoked a pipe as it seems no one in the city was after him. He had mistaken the drummers for men.

“The wicked flee when none pursueth.”

(True Grit. Charles Portis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.)

I meant to see the new film version of True Grit last night, but the time got away from me. Watched Big Lebowski instead, so I kept my promise to Jeff Bridges at least. No regrets. I’ll get to True Grit eventually.

Daily Batman: Talk nerdy to me — third Nolanverse film rumor round-up

My Bat-ticipation has been kicked in to high gear since the announcement several months ago that Chris Nolan and his brother had completed the script for the third film in Nolan’s Batman Begins series. Stars are aligning, schedules are floating, and everyone and their dog thinks they have the inside scoop on the plot.

I can play that game, too.

Rumors and speculation, ahoy!

Rumor: The new film is titled The Dark Knight Rises. Potential truthiness: Total. The studio says yes, that’s the title, but Bale claimed while promoting his new film The Fighter that he wasn’t sure that would be the final title, saying that he’d wait until he “heard it from Chris.” The title is officially entered on IMDB as The Dark Knight Rises and I’d tend to think at this point will likely not change.

Rumor: Scripts will go to the actors in January, principal photography will begin in May, and the film will be in the can by November. Potential truthiness: This comes directly from Michael Caine, who is delightful and talented and a gift to generations of moviegoers, and who could still easily be completely wrong. Shooting will take place in New Orleans, which will give Gotham a seamier, heavier look than the crispy, boxy look of the grim Chicago Gotham we’ve seen in the last two films. The tragic poverty in the Ninth Ward would be a realistic backdrop for action in the Narrows, too.

Rumor: The Riddler will be the chief antagonist. Potential truthiness: Practically nil. This long shopped-around speculation has been pretty much permanently tabled due to some of the following rumors.

Rumor: Tom Hardy has been cast in the film. Potential truthiness: 100%, apparently. Awesome. The guy has great action chops and his looks are total female fan service. Aces in my book. The question of who he will play is where things get dicey for me.

Rumor: Tom Hardy will play Dr. Hugo Strange. Potential truthiness: Fair to middling — I’d say this rumor is at least on the right track, if not outright true. One of the first villains in the original DC comics, Dr. Strange is, in recent incarnations, a police psychologist who develops a bad case of bat-mania.

In the Legends of the Dark Knight comic series, in an arc which takes place roughly contemporaneous to the events of Year One, Long Halloween, etc., from whose stories the Nolans have taken inspiration in the first two films, Dr. Strange is employed by the Gotham City Police Department to help develop a profile of Batman in order to bring him to justice. The search is lead — and, of course, secretly hampered — by newly-promoted Commissioner James Gordon. The timing works out great and the plots match up well with where we left off in The Dark Knight. In fact …

Rumor: The Dark Knight Rises is based on the Prey arc from the Legends of the Dark Knight line. Potential truthiness: Somewhere between somewhat likely and “it would be a good idea if it is true.” This is a very recent rumor. Like, last week. It’s a plausible and good suggestion for the plot, but so was a fourth Spider-Man movie with Lizard as the villain and instead it’s back to high school like frigging chumps. I am cautiously optimistic about this rumor.

In the Prey story, Dr. Hugo Strange initially seeks to find Batman, who is Gotham’s Public Enemy No. 1 at this time, but grows to seek to be Batman, even successfully supplanting the vigilante and pulling some pretty whack shenanigans. He accomplishes this in part by brainwashing a fellow find-the-bat task force member, the mouthbreathing leg-breaker Sgt. Max Cort. Dr. Strange grooms Cort to become a vigilante, called Night Scourge, to flush Batman out of hiding.

This aspect of the plot dovetails very reasonably with the vigi-wanna-bes we saw plaguing Gotham City at the beginning of The Dark Knight. In the comic, Cort eventually kidnaps the mayor’s daughter under hynoptic suggestion from Strange. We met the mayor in the last film (Richard Alpert from Lost — that guy seriously gets around) so this, too, has conceivably got some decent groundwork already laid.

Hardy as British criminal Charles Bronson in Bronson.

Rumor that I am starting: If the former rumor is true, and the plot is based on Prey, then Tom Hardy is likelier playing Sgt. Cort than Dr. Strange. Potential truthiness: Probably zero. What the heck do I know? It’s just how I’d do it. The guy’s hunky and action-star-looking. He just seems a better fit for young, fit Max Cort than Hugo Strange, who is older, has a bald egg head, a phatty beard, and weird sunglasses. I’m admittedly coming at this from a shallow place: I really hope not to watch handsome Tom Hardy’s good looks get hopelessly mutilated to play the puppetmaster part. I’d rather see him play a hot hypnotized mouthbreather than shave his head again like he did for Bronson. I’m very shallow.

Rumor: Six actresses have been auditioned for two female roles. Reports are that one role is Bruce’s love interest and the other is a villain. The actresses are Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, Kiera Knightly, and, for some implausible reason, Blake Lively. Potential truthiness: Pfft. These same names, except Lively, and sometimes Marion Cotillard and Angelina Jolie, have been getting tossed around since before the script was even finished. It’s just fantasy comic movie casting — we all do it, and until I see a picture of Anne Hathaway and Natalie Portman sitting beside Christopher Nolan holding folders that say “Top Secret Batman 3 Screen Test Script,” I have no reason to believe that those names should get any more credence than the ones I come up with myself in the car at long red lights.

Now, the rumors about the characters are new and much more interesting. Catwoman does enter the Prey story; tantalizingly, so does the Scarecrow in a later Strange arc in the Legends of the Dark Knight series (more Cillian Murphy? yes, please). And I’ve been saying for, like, three years that it’s time for some Talia Al-Ghul up in this piece. I even said she should be played by Rachel Weisz.

Besides old and easily wrong favorites like Catwoman and Talia, other potential female characters being floated around are Julie Madison, the Year One actress and early girlfriend of Bruce Wayne, which has a strong possibility of being true, and Detective Sarah Essen, who was not Bruce’s but Jim Gordon’s love interest (he cheats on his wife, Barbara, who we’ve seen a bit of in the last two films) at an earlier point in Batman: Year One. I don’t see it. First of all, Sarah popped up when Gordon was still a lieutenant, which ship has now sailed thanks to his promotion into Commisioner Loeb’s old spot — you need Loeb around and alive for the thing to work because it was his discovery of the affair and subsequent efforts to blackmail Essen and Gordon that lead to Essen ending the affair and leaving for New York — and the whole sad affair thing does not really fit with the Gordon we’ve been given so far in these films. Unless they are planning to change everything we think we know about Jim Dandy, or divorce or kill off Barbara (he did eventually marry Sarah after he and Barbara had been divorced), I don’t think that Ms. Essen will be appearing in the Nolanverse anytime soon.

Oh, man, I’m tired of doing this. I got more to say about the Scarecrow angle but I’ll have to come back to all of it later.

Music Moment and Movie Millisecond: Don’t say I never gave you anything and please do have a laugh

Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2005). Jessica Alba portrays Nancy Callahan. Rescued from kidnap and rape in her youth by Detective John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), Nancy is now an exotic dancer at a divey downtown night spot guarded by my crowd-pleasing favorite character, Marv (Mickey Rourke).

Nancy as drawn by Miller in the original comics.

Things have been kind of heavy for me lately. Et tu? Seems like everyone I know is kind of down this week; guess Mars is in retrograde or some kind of similar jello salad. So I encourage you to hit “play” on the song below and watch in amazement as Nancy Callahan “dances it out” in the exact same beat at that there ol’ Kadie’s Club Pecos in fabulous Basin City, a sunny place for shady characters.

FIRST PLAY THIS:
Les Paul and Mary Ford — Goofus (1950).
THEN WATCH THIS:

Actually, it works with all kinds of songs, but “Goofus” is the one that struck an absurd and juvenile chord of laughter in me. If you’ve been feeling a little out of sorts today, please do have a laugh and promise to try and make some of your own fun.

Girls of Summer: Linné Nanette Ahlstrand, Miss July 1958

Photographed by Frank Bez.

From her name and slyly amused, distinctly un-cheesecakey pose and expressions, I figured that the lovely and talented Linné Nanette Ahlstrand would be that rare beast, the international Playmate.

I love nearly all of the shots in this pictorial, but this one here is tippy toppy favorite.

Color me all wrong. Ms. Ahlstrand was actually born in Chicago, Illinois, the hometown of Playboy and a city from which a substantial number of early and heyday Playmates hailed. The text which accompanied Ms. Ahlstrand’s pictorial alluded to having discovered her on the beach in Los Angeles but it is rich with malarkey and does not even bother to feature an interview with her, so I have my doubts.

The title of her write-up was “The Laziest Girl in Town,” which also lead me to expect to find her of some German or Swedish extraction. The title comes from the song “The Laziest Gal in Town” a Cole Porter tune, which was a longtime staple of Marlene Dietrich’s performing repertoire.

Adore the color in this shot — bathing suit, lips, parasol. (kissy-finger-pop gesture) Amazing.

Ms. Dietrich was a famously German-American international treasure who kept on ticking unlike her early celebrity companions such as Joan Crawford and the great Garbo and she had begun to tour live around this time (1958) in addition to continuing to appear in movies.

As an example, she made her biggest pictures after age 35, something like an early model of Meryl Streep. Witness for the Prosecution, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright were all made when Marlene was over 40 years old. That is nothing to sneeze at. I have an album on which she sings “The Laziest Girl in Town” and she still has such a wonderful husky strong accent that it sounds like “lay-zeh-est gell een tone.” Love it.

With that in mind, I figured they were establishing with the title of Ms. Ahlstrand’s article a link to Marlene and particularly one of her former screen characters to parallel Ms. Ahlstrand bieng of foreign extraction and languishing in the Western sun. See, Dietrich played diverse roles in her youngest years under Josef von Sternberg but became indelibly known by larger and more modern audiences for portraying a sexy bargirl in the Old West named Frenchy — despite her outrageously strong German accent — in the sweeping frontier film Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939).

The posters for the film claimed that it had “Corralled the greatest cast in cinema history!” Dietrich’s career-making part in Destry Rides Again was parodied by Madeline Kahn, departed queen of all that’s wonderful, in the 1974 Mel Brooks satire Blazing Saddles as the saloon singer Lili Von Schtupp (R.I.P., MK).

Of course all this conjecture came to nothing, like I said, when I realized that Ms. Ahlstrand was from Chicago and not of any exotic blonde overseas extraction. She moved from Chicago to New York to pursue modeling when she was younger, then out to L.A. and environs to dig in to acting in film and television.

Though Linné was best known by audiences for her work in television as a dispatcher on the program Highway Rescue, she was also in several films throughout the late 50’s and early 60’s, including Senior Prom, Beast from Haunted Cave, and Holiday for Lovers. Her most substantial big screen role was in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Living Venus, in which she played Diane.

Unlike the gory funfests for which Lewis later became known, Living Venus is more of a biopic. Related to this post, the subject of Living Venus‘s rise-and-fall story is a publisher very much like Hugh Hefner. Jack Norwall, the fictionalized Hef played by Bill Kerwin, starts a magazine called Pagan.

Pagan’s success leads him to leave his loving fiancee and take up with his lovely and talented model, a waitress he discovered while hatching the idea for the magazine. Ms. Ahlstrand does not play the model, but rather the jilted good girl. The model ends up leaving him and killing herself as he becomes increasingly arrogant and tyrannical due to his success, and Norwall comes to realize that being on top was not all he cracked it up to be. But too late, as he has lost for good his fiancee, best friend, and soul.

I’d like to point out that in my opinion the only part of Living Venus that really parallels Hef is Jack Norwall starting a successful nudie mag. Hef did not leave his wife for another woman; quite the opposite actually. So, no.

A little looker, Ms. Ahlstrand was 5’2″ at the time of her appearance in Playboy, which I believe puts her on an equal footing with Kai Brendlinger (bleah) for shortest Playmate until feisty pocket rocket Joni Mattis’s famously not-nude appearance (love her forever) and eventual eclipsement by Sue Williams who at 4’11” at the time of her appearance in 1965 is the pocketiest rocket of them all, aww — that we know of. It’s tough to say for sure because, prior to September of 1959, the Playmates were not required to complete a data sheet. So unless their height came up in the article or their contemporaneous stats appeared in parallel work elsewhere, the math is fuzzy.

Click below for scans of the original article.

Tragically Ms. Ahlstrand died of cancer in January of 1967. She was only 30 years old and had been married less than a year and a half. R.I.P. to such a young talent.

Movie Moment and answer to yesterday’s Blake trivia question: Manhunter (part 1) and nominal review of Red Dragon

ATTN: Spoilers like a bat outta hell. Stop if you’ve never seen nor read Red Dragon and Manhunter and are the kind of person who yells at people on the internet for posting spoilers of things that have been out for decades.

I was relaxing after dinner and I suddenly remembered yesterday’s random Blake trivia — forgot about that!

Okay, soooo, I used this picture yesterday in the “Tyger” post …

… because it comes from Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986). This is part 1 of its Movie Moment because I need to cover technical aspects a different day. Today I want to just sort of compare Manhunter and a more recent adaptation of the same fucked-up and riveting material. Manhunter is the original filmed adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon (1981), in which the writer William Blake plays a very large part of the dissociative disease that leads the antagonist to kill and sets off the action of the novel/film.

Manhunter, the original Red Dragon screen version.

In 2002, a different adaptation, whose title was the same as the book — Harris’s novels have a weird and haphazard history of screen-arrival in Hollywood — was released in light of the success of the year before’s screen adaptation of Hannibal (novel: Thomas Harris, 1999; film: Ridley Scott, 2001), a rather late-breaking sequel to the infamous film version of Silence of the Lambs (novel: Harris, 1988; movie: Jonathan Demme, 1991).

Red Dragon, second adaptation.

A totally different animal, not even attempting to remake in part the cinematic masterpiece that is the color-drenched, painstakingly-framed Manhunter, the alternate more recent film is what I consider a sloppy adaptation of Red Dragon. It is nothing like the very-admirable entry into the Harris genre that is Hannibal, which despite the replacement of Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster with Academy Award-nominee Julianne Moore as the infamous “[Hello,] Clarice” Starling managed, I think by virtue of Sir Anthony Hopkins’ reprisal of the sensationalist character of Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter combined with Scott Free productions’ attachment to the project in the wake of smash-hit Gladiator, to make quite the box office splash. As it ended up, that success was deserved.

Check out Vegetarian Times in the background. No. 1 favorite Hannibal still with A Bullet.

The Red Dragon revamp that followed it the next year, on the other hand, falls short of its predecessors due to cocky casting and the hasty pudding nature of the picture. It is almost unfair to stack it against such a stunning piece of eye candy and psychological discourse as Manhunter. But I’m going to anyway.

“The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun” — William Blake. Blake’s illuminated print-making process is actually still partially guessed at, as he never troubled to write down most of how he did it. Another post — I promise.

The novel Red Dragon, the first in the Hannibal Lecter series of books by Thomas Harris, has as its main detective not Clarice Starling, but rather a young FBI mindhunter named Will Graham. The book and 2002 film take its title from the antagonist’s personal inspiration (and devil with whom he dances) for his transformation to what he views as a higher being. This is a highly detailed, uniquely gnostic series of ritual murders which the “bad guy” bases around Blake’s work, particularly his illuminated manuscript print “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun.” The killer calls this multiply murderous, cleansing-by-blood process “Becoming.”

This antagonist is called the Tooth Fairy by the press, a name he loathes, but he’s tipped to the reader early on — by his preferred nomenclature as the Red Dragon — to be a shy and cleft-palated industrial photographic-development-expert named Francis Dolarhyde. Francis is an abused and orphaned soul with an unfathomably deep dark side due to psychosexual torture in his upbringing.

Meanwhile, young Will Graham is a bummed-out “good guy” chilling in Marathon, Florida with his family on the beach, trying to get his mojo back after unhappily closing the toughest case of his career as a profiler with the FBI: arresting former friend and consultant, reknowned psychiatrist, classical music fan, and noted long pig gourmand one Dr. H. Lecter — M.D., Ph.D., hella murderer.

As the action unfolds, the already tightly-strung Dolarhyde — who, as the Red Dragon, writes in supplication to Dr. Lecktor/Lecter appealing for help in his quest to purify his weak flesh and Become, further enmeshing the good doc in the plotohs — finds his demon not only hunted by highly-skilled semi-retired agent Will Graham and the FBI, but also must elude his own dark side’s brutal orders when he suddenly finds himself in an unlikely and empathetic mutual attraction with a plucky handicapped co-worker and falters in his faith in “Becoming.”

This complex character is played equally well by Tom Noonan in Manhunter and Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon. Noonan gets the edge for creepy wordless scenes such as rasing his head to the sunlight like an animal drinking in vital and engrammed diurnal directives; Fiennes has the advantage in the all-important following tattoo-revelation scene and Red Dragon cry of chagrined triumph at tabloid reporter and luckless human torch Freddy Lounds (Steven Lang, 1986; Philip Seymour Hoffman, ’01: winner Hoffman on that one — ♥ that dude’s freaky energy 4eva-evah).

YOU OWE ME AWE.

Totally disturbing scene.

Tormented by the demon with which he wrestles, Dolarhyde attempts to steal and eat the original Blake painting which has been, in his mind, masterminding his murders. He believes that by consuming the painting, he will stop the voices, visions, and impulses torturing his brain with which he valiantly argues.

He finds himself particularly rising in opposition to the Red Dragon’s orders that he murder Reba (infinitely worthy and perpetually underused Joan Allen plays her in Manhunter while shiny-eyed dope Emily Watson —I know it’s an unpopular opinion but this chick bugs the hell out of me — got the role in the revamp), the outspoken, sexually bold blind woman from the photo labs with whom he has fallen in love.

Punch Drunk Love, Cradle Will Rock, me shaking my head and saying “Boo.” (limited theatrical release)

Dolarhyde is a sadder, sympathetic and strangely more touching, conflicted character than the early Lecter (or even his later and in my book cheaply slapped together Hannibal Rising incarnation) and much more relatable than Dolarhyde’s equally compulsive 1988 series successor, Buffalo Bill — “it puts the lotion on its etc” — are ever portrayed to be, yet because of Dolarhyde’s disorderly mind and act-driven kills, the Red Dragon as a predator has scenes that are in some ways more resonantly chilling than any of the often-quoted histrionics hailing from either star of Silence of the Lambs‘ gruesome sideshow.

As an example, in the above screencap, the Red Dragon side of Francis’s beaten, slavish personality makes the nervous newly-dating Dolarhyde give blind Reba McClane a drink of water from a glass with not only ice floating it but also the anciently misshapen and hideously rotting false teeth of the author of his schizophrenia, Dolarhyde’s dreadful dead grandmother, which dental implements he fits in to his own mouth and bites his victims in a frenzy during his kills. (Hence the hated nickname.) That part is not a-okay with me.

Forensic expert showing an FBI-Atlanta PD task force meeting a plaster mold of Gramma Dolarhyde’s choppers.

Um. Yeah. All that biting and teeth stuff? And the yells from the Red Dragon and his grandmother to murder Reba before he accidentally tells her how they have him trapped in his own mind? That’s fucked up. And oh, god. When those teeth knock against the glass as Reba thanks him, raises it to her lips, and sips, there is not a cringe-free face in the room.

So. In Manhunter, the first jump of Red Dragon from novel to screen, Will Graham is played by William Petersen, and Brian Cox plays Lecktor — not a typo. The film spells it this way. (You may recognize my darlingest dearest awesome Mr. Cox, pictured below as “Lecktor,” from Rushmore, The Ring, or Supertroopers — he is a personal fave from Way Back).

In 2002’s adaptation of Red Dragon, Edward Norton performs the part of Agent Graham with Sir Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Dr. Lecter. Hopkins did get to have a little fun, for once off of his familiar smug game of “fava beans” and psychological bullshit, because this whelp of a wolf among the lambs has just recently been chained in the Red Dragon storyline.

The Lecter of Red Dragon is still a young and relatively vengeful Lecter, pacing a gym on a harness and leash for mandatory exercise to keep the other prisoners of his psychiatric facility safe (no mask just yet), unthinkably pissed at Graham for having caught him several years earlier, even lunging for him in an unguarded moment of rage — Lecter is not yet completely at home in the role of Fucking With the Po-lice as is the maturing character encountered in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

In spite of Hopkins’ fun stretching his wings, I still feel that Brian Cox plays him with a hair more dignity and better-hinged chilliness than Hopkins does, which gives Lecktor, vs. Lecter, that slender shoot of a just-germinating seed of polish-mixed-with-go-for-broke-ruthlessness which is so necessary for the character’s believable development in to who he is by Hannibal. I think Hopkins saw the chance to finally show the less-controlled, animalistic side of a character he’d been at home playing as an after-the-fact “tyger” — caged and angry but a careful planner — for a long time and jumped, maybe too high, at the opportunity for this gamier potrayal. Just an opinion.

“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, Dr. Lecter. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“But you still caught me.”
“You had certain … disadvantages.”
“Disadvantages? Such as … ?”
“You’re insane.”

You are correct to recognize Petersen from the original, Las Vegas-set television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Fun fact: for Halloween 2002, the producers deliberately teamed William Petersen up in his role as Gil Grissom, the brilliant but troubled detective able to get in to killers’ minds, in pursuit of a nemesis freaky killer performed in the October 31st episode by Tom Noonan (Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy) as a nod to their parts opposite one another in Manhunter. Noonan played a demented illusionist, escape artist, and master magician known as Zephyr. Near retirement, the Zephyr still had some scores to settle and a lot of pyrotechnic sleight-of-hand tricks up his sleeve before he was ready to call it a day. The episode actually ends in delightful ambiguity, but I will not spoil it.

Special thanks to wetpaint, a CSI: fansite, for the screencaps.

I used to wonder with great conflict why, having lost someone special to me to a real life version of this type of shit, I am okay with fare such as the Lecter film and novel shenanigans, CSI:, and the like when I am so vehemently opposed to so-called “true crime” and often even discussions of such stuff in company or on the news. I will leave the room on certain topics and I don’t consider that burying my head in the sand — I have seen all I want to see for now of what people will say “needs to be reported” like as some kind of lesson.

Fiennes and Watson in Red Dragon; my professor friend and I looked nothing like this during our deep conversation (below) — I just felt like I had not shown enough stills from it as opposed to Manhunter.

Not too long ago, I wound up one day in deep, private conversation after a where-am-I-going-in-life conference with a former professor I dearly love about Harris’s novels and perhaps Patrica Cornwell’s, or some line very similar, and I confessed that I felt conflicted about my reading of that type of material because of things I’d dealt with in the past. He surprised me by saying he’d also lost a friend to violent crime growing up and despised, as I did, the cult of violence and serial-killer-admiration that seems to grip the tabloid television shows and bestselling non-fiction shelves. Yet he, too, read with genuine enjoyment many series of fictional genre crime thrillers. He said that, like me, he’d often disgustedly questioned himself as to how he kept both opinions in balance, and why he differentiated between hating the one and being all right with the other.

We need this hero.

He said he’d read a great scholarly article just a few years earlier, and I cannot remember the writer he quoted because I am garbage and frankly slugging a margarita on the rocks right now (it’s hot where I live), which forever answered our question for him.

This psychological scholar and literary critic posited that the murder mystery — all the detective thrillers and suspense novels and cop vs. boogeyman films the genre spawns — even with a detailed portrayal of a base, disturbed and seemingly random monster like Lecter or Dolarhyde as their antagonist — far from the feeding of dark fantasy that we anxiously supposed, serves instead a need in humanity to see our fears realized (as we had already done in reality) but the conflict then resolved.

Couldn’t go the whole post without a Silence of the Lambs scene.

What he basically said was that every time he and I watched CSI: and Grissom caught the Bad Guy, or read a James Patterson book on the beach and cheered as Alex Cross brought in his latest nemesis, we were solving our friends’ murders and seeing the people who disrupted our lives brought to task for their wrongdoing. We were gaining our much needed closure. Even people who have not suffered loss but empathetically and logically fear it because they love people in their own lives and understand that the possibility of these lives being taken by cruel injustice is never far away, seek and enjoy that same positive resolution to this basic human anxiety as it plays out in genre crime fiction.

Lecter caged and contained, kept in by the Forces of Good and therefore shut up like a witch in a well of a fairy story. (temporarily in this case but you get my drift) The people of the village are Safe.

It blew my mind, and I almost wanted to reject it because it was so far from my self-loathing castigation, but it felt very true. I know he was right. I am no longer so guilty nor constantly probing myself for some latent and despicable, prurient interest in fictional depictions of things that in real life have caused me pain. I understand now that I am actually acting out in my mind, against a cathartic and safe backdrop, the conflict and agonized anxieties from which I shy away in real reports on the news, and deliberately seeking through a book in my hands a satisfactory resolution which will lay my mind at ease that justice has been reached — and, by extension, that justice can and will be reached in reality.

That strayed pretty far afield from Blake and Manhunter but I’m kind of not sorry.

All of this entry’s screencaps come from kpannier and thewadingegret on the lj; rottentomatoes forums; and personal grabs here and there over the years.

Movie Moment — Mean Girls Monday: Kälteen bars edition

The bizarre self-esteem and weight issues that the character of Regina evinces in this movie will be a recurring theme some other, better-researched day because, like the movie itself, those traits are satirically funny and cutting while still being devastatingly true, but today let’s focus on the great comedic timing of this specific Mean Girls movie moment.

Caps by me. Click to enlarge.

Daily Batman: ViewMasterrrr edition

Original ViewMaster slide via Jim Lucio, aka defekto on the flickr.

ViewMaster Batman set description via Mr. ViewMaster:

“A Greenway Production in association with Twentieth Century-Fox Television.

(R)GAF Corporation, New York, N.Y. U.S.A. T.M. Reg. U.S. Pot. Off. Marque Deposes. Marcc Reg. Printed in U.S.A.

SEE AND ENJOY OTHER STEREO PICTURES OF

Man on the Moon

Beverly Hillbillies

Star Trek

Land of the Grants

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Bonanza

The Mod Squad

Daniel Boone.”

Talk nerdy to me: Mean Girls Monday — Harry Potter edition

Don’t say I never gave you anything, nerds. It’s an all Harry Potter edition of Mean Girls Monday, by way of introducing my confession about the final films.

The below series of subtitled screencaps is based on the scene in Mean Girls wherein Regina George is described by various frenemies, classmates, and instructors.

So. Last night, while watching the Lost drive-you-crazy-with-anticipation-before-the-finale special that aired before the Lost legitimate finale with Gorgeous George and the Great Dane, the subject of the upcoming two-part Harry Potter final films arose. The Great Dane theorized that the bulk of the script was just going to be the characters running and hiding in the forest — much like Lost with the jungle, as Geo pointed out which may have started the conversation, or the reverse … I had a lot on my mindgrapes so it’s tough to call.

I folded my arms and, bloated on pizza and keyed up with anxiety for Lost, said flatly: “Look. I don’t care what else happens. All I want to see is Mrs. Weasley open a can of whupass on that fucking bitch Bellatrix Lestrange.”

Geo and the Great Dane laughed at my announcement and I said seriously, “No. I’ve been waiting. I don’t need to see all the little cheesey denouement stuff. Like, seriously? Just Mrs. Weasley spanking that Goth bitch. All I need. I could pretty much just leave after that.”

I then mimicked throwing up a peace sign to a packed theater and added, “Allow me to save you the time, y’all — Harry lives. I’m out!”

See, I know I called you hardcore HP guys “nerds” back there, but I must admit: no one kills a Weasley twin and gets away with it. Not on my watch. Those dudes are crazy-hot. Um, redheaded twins? with magic powers? and, P.S., they basically run the fantasy equivalent of a comic shop? Winner, winner, chicken dinner! So I’m looking forward to seeing some hardcore death-avengeance: Mom-style. Mmm, cursey!

SeaQuest out!

Movie Moment: A story in stills — I Tre volti della paura, aka The Three Faces of Fear, aka Black Sabbath

A touch of giallo and genuine fear in the rainy April. In honor of the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of his death, I declare this Mario Bava Movie Moment Week. He was a really terrific director of plenty of genres, though he is best known for his work in horror, with a good sense of fun AND fear, and a truly great gift for cinematic expression. His colors, lighting, and cinematographic choices are amazing. I look forward to highlighting some of my faves from him over the next seven days!

Bava big pimpin’! image via Thizz Face Disco right here on the wordpress.

Thought I’d start with I Tre volti della paura, aka The Three Faces of Fear, aka Black Sabbath (1963). It’s a story in stills edition, folks, so skip to the bottom if you don’t want spoilers!

(stills via proximity seamstress in the Nostalgia Party community on the lj. YOU ARE SO COOL!)

Arguably Bava’s masterpiece, Black Sabbath is broken in to three segments. I feel that each of the three segments explores a various type of terror: from the psychological, to the monstrous, to the uncanny. The only element of continuity between the three stories is a cinematic one: Boris Karloff, one of the kings of classic horror, comes out to introduce each segment in the version with which I’m familiar (though I’m told this is not the case with the original U.S. release), and plays a vampire in the second of the segments.

These screencaps are exclusively from what I’d term the strictly psychological thriller segment, “Part I: The Telephone,” a noirish story about wicked people with ulterior motives couched in deceit, coupled with the dramatic sexy violence and twists characteristic of giallo films. Set in Paris, the short is familiar pulp territory, with the titillating added thrill of bisexuality, but it’s shot with a Hitchcockian tension to the angles and edited with sustained, lingering frames interrupted by abrupt cuts that really ratchet up the anxiety level.

The story takes place in pretty much one location over a single evening, almost in real time, which contributes considerably — along with the short length of the segment — to a swiftly rising pitch in suspense.

This hot ticket is Rosy, played by mega-hottie Michèle Mercier. Rosy is a call girl whose boyfriend and former pimp, Frank, has just escaped from prison. As she testified against him in his trial, she’s understandably concerned after hearing the dramatic news of his escape that he is going to seek her out soon for reprisals.

(And you thought nervous girls getting all naked and wet was a trope that was invented for seventies slasher flicks. Silly you. Friday the 13th ain’t got nothin’ on Sgr. Bava!)

It seems Rosy’s concerns are well-placed, because she begins receiving mysterious, threatening phone messages from a gruff caller who says he is Frank and warns that he is coming to get her.

Rosy calls a girlfriend, Mary, to confide her fears. Over the course of the conversation, you realize, oh, snap! This is a girlfriend-girlfriend! And Rosy is now even hotter. A high-femme damsel in distress, she is relieved when her more strong, slightly domineering and weirdly “off” ex promises to hurry over to the apartment and help Rosy relax.

Mary’s “offness” is explained when she turns right back around and calls Rosy back, disguising her voice and pretending to be Frank — she is the one who’s been making the threatening phone calls that have Rosy so shaken up. Also, she is a very smart dresser, as you can see in the following still.

Look at you, girl! All a dominant and crafty lipstick sixties lesbian, all suited up and catty in your emerald green, all situated in the bed looking cosmopolitan with your little sherry glass — I said goddamn, Lidia Alfonso: haters to the left. She’s looking mighty good. That shit would sooo work on me.

Mary is just full of good counsel and reassurance for her frightened former lover. As an example, she suggests that Rosy put a carving knife under her pillow …

… and take a nutritious, delicious tranquilizer. Those are two things that always go together really, really well, especially in a film called The Three Faces of Fear.

Man. The trustworthy Miss Mary’s lifestyle tips are practically gold. She should start a magazine. How to Put Your Ladytimes Lover in Serious Danger: Accessories and Cocktail Suggestions for the Scheming Butch on the Go!

To Mary’s credit, once Rosy drops off, Mary pens her a letter which explains her motivations (something we’ve been curious about, too, since making prank calls saying you plan to end your lover’s life is kind of a sketchy thing to do).

Mary writes that she had missed Rosy terribly since their breakup and, when she heard about Frank the scary pimp’s prison break, she decided to use the opportunity to invent a scenario where Frank was threatening to murder Rosy so that Rosy would call Mary for help. After being around Mary again, the plan went, Rosy would realize the mistake of their separation and invite her back in to her life. Mary’s sorry it had to be done in a deceitful and scary way (which it didn’t, actually — that kind of convolution is pretty much strictly the logical provenance of giallo), but she writes that she loves Rosy and hopes to make it up to her.

Stop — Boris Karloff time! (Please, Boris Karloff, don’t hurt ’em.) I have inserted this interruption completely out of sequence. I just really wanted to throw it out there. Back to the story. Are you ready for the twisty turn of the screw?

While Mary is busy writing her love letter to the tranqued out Rosy, a man steals in to the apartment, clearly intent on murder. It is Frank, the pimp, now a genuine threat even though thirty seconds ago we thought he was not! He didn’t call but he was actually coming all along.

Crap! Mary, with whom we have just become totally sympathetic due to her big reveal of being a lover not a murderer, does not hear him because she is wrapped up in her lovey-dovey explanatory note-writing, and Rosy is asleep in the arms of Prince Valium in the other room.

He grabs the silk stocking off of the chair where Rosy discarded it earlier before her steamy I’m-scared-so-I’ll-strip bath and subsequent frightened call to Mary.

He sees the back of Mary’s dark head and, oh, no!, without seeing her face, begins to strangle her with the stocking. He assumes she is Rosy, his intended target.

The muffled thumps of Mary and Frank’s struggle Rosy slept straight through, but her lover’s death rattle finally wakes Rosy.

Maybe some kind of sympatico mental thing. She knows she has just heard something bad. She realizes it was Frank and deduces that he killed Mary. She is frozen in fear, looking at his face.

Suddenly, Rosy remembers the knife that poor dead Mary suggested that she stash beneath the pillow back when we still half-thought Mary might end up using it on Rosy herself.

Rosy stabs Frank with the knife, killing him, then breaks down sobbing and freaking out and crying, surrounded by the corpses of people she used to have sex with. I assume someone found her and stopped her screaming eventually. In any case, that knife sure ended up being a danged good idea. Why did you say it wasn’t? Sheesh.

Bava at work.

Mario Bava said repeatedly that this was the best of all his directorial work, placing it even above the classic La Maschera del Demonio/The Mask of Satan/The Black Mask (it is in Italian horror directors’ contracts that all their movie titles have at least three crazy names. Did You Know?). The man — Quentin Tarantino — has cited the narrative structure of Black Sabbath as his inspiration for the disjointed cinematic discourse in Pulp Fiction.

Why did I choose the least-flattering picture of QT ever? Answer: So that he will look at it and think I’m the best he can do and we can get married.

Seeing this motion picture on its release in Great Britain also inspired one Mister Ozzy Osbourne and his associate, a Mister Geezer Butler to change the name of their heavy blues/rock ensemble Earth to the film’s U.K. title: “Black Sabbath.” Previous band names included Mythology and effing Polka Tuck (I have a really hard time with that), so you may thank Sgr. Bava for inspiring one of the badassicalest band names in the history of rock-and-or-roll*, chosen by a group that would go on to become the Greatest Metal Band of All Time. Grazie!





*The worst band names ever are “Green Jellÿ”** and “The Alan Parsons Project.” Documented fact.

The first instance is the most idiotic use of an umlaut in recorded human history, and the second name sounds like a public access show about whittling that you watch by accident in a hospital because the batteries in the clicker have died and the only magazine in the deserted waiting room is a copy of People featuring Kathie Lee Gifford. Which you have already read since arriving. Cover to cover. Twice. (“Former ‘Brady Bunch’ star’s new lease on life — thanks to gem meditation!” “Dr. Mehmet Oz lists the surprising holiday foods that you can load up on!”)

image via the smart and sexy towleroad on the typepad.

Agree with me that the second cover story on that phantom hospital waiting room’s phantom Kathie Lee issue of People is: “Plus — Mario López: Why hasn’t TV’s most eligible (and ripped!) bachelor found a lady?” Oh, such a head-scratcher. Poor Mario! Sigh. Just like Liberace.

**In Green Jellÿ’s defense, they actively set out from the moment of their inception to be literally the worst band ever, beginning with their name. To my knowledge, the Alan Parsons Project was titled in earnest and has no such excuse.

It happens: Asia Argento NSFW Edition

Like she was not already a bombass superfly lady in her own right, she is also director Dario Argento’s daughter. I said goddamn, Asia Argento. You had me at buon giorno. Haters to the left!

A confession: I feel like this picture represents my attitude toward women up until recently: a lot of masculine posturing, deliberate naughtiness with a subsconscious eye toward alienation, and tightly concealed feminine anxiety (keeping your feelings secret from a woman is virtually impossible, and this is mainly terrifying to me — I feel that the sheer dress represents this vain and futile attempt to conceal my very real girly core, which is just as sensitive and emotional as all-git-out and I shudder to admit makes me as vulnerable as any other chick on the block). But I’ve been on this new quest to strengthen my pre-existing female relationships—I have close female friends without whom I could literally not live, yet I still insist that women don’t get along with me; clearly this is false or else is based on residual hurt from some distant past that I need to just plain get over—and hopefully forge some new ones, too.

I’m trying to overcome my shyness around women and be less of a geeky tomboy, or at least balance that trait, and to stop pigeonholing 51% of the world’s population as likely to dislike me. I am guilty of reverse discrimination: by assuming a girl is not going to “get” me or like me, I am not only doing my sex a terrible turn, but I am also depriving myself of the opportunity to meet and learn from a new person. So I am working on this.