While I’d be the first person to shout “Viva El Santo!” in a crowded Olvera Street bar, I’d also be the first to admit that Mexican masked wrestling doesn’t begin or end with El Enmascarado de Plata (The Man in the Silver Mask), aka Roberto Guzman Huerta (1917-1984).  I wrote about El Santo back in September but I’m here today to talk about one of his esteemed competitors/colleagues… Mil Máscaras.  READ MORE

For a completely non-religious person I seem to be entranced by movies which deal with the subject, at least in one particular aspect.  I’ve always been fascinated by supernatural occurences, and the world of religion is chock full of them.  One of these days I’ll have to write about the end-of-days scenario, a theme not unknown to the movies or to documentaries on The History Channel,  but today I’m thinking about miracles, mainly because the other day I saw again, for the first time in many years, a terrific movie from 1980 which I always liked but simply hadn’t seen for a while.  It’s 1980′s Resurrection, directed by Daniel Petrie, written by Lewis John Carlino, starring the great Ellen Burstyn as a woman who develops the ability to heal.

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By 1960 John Ford was near the end of the road. Grousing that standards were slipping, he was upset that many of the best production crew members were snapped up for television and unavailable. He harumphed that “Hollywood today is a market for sex and horror. I don’t want any part of that.”

The director, who tried to avoid explaining himself too much off screen, may have rejected the more sensationalistic aspects of the New Hollywood that was emerging as the old studio system disintegrated, but the lifting of restrictions on subject matter for mainstream movies may have helped to inspire his interest in the story of Sergeant Rutledge.

This coming Sunday, February 1st, marks what would have been the 105th birthday of the iconic director John Ford and the beginning of Black History Month. Coincidentally, after many years, I recently revisited one of Ford‘s most intriguing, late career films, Sergeant Rutledge (1960). It is among the least known of his many films. Perhaps it deserves a second look, for despite all its flaws, there is a remarkable presence and an uneasy conscience at the heart of this movie. As Ford pointed out in an interview, it was also one of his favorite movies, telling the story of the African-American “soldier, [who] played a great role in our history, and I wanted to tell that story…[b]ut the picture was not successful, because, I’ve heard, Warners sent a couple of boys on bicycles out to sell it.”

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My kids have been creeping me out lately.  READ MORE

The simplest yet most revealing filmmaking technique is the close-up, and yet it is a technique taken for granted because it is so familiar that we don’t notice it. Still, the close-up influences our sympathies and sense of identification with a character, making it a powerful technique. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the impact of the close-up. 

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The Norwegian horror film about Nazi Zombies, Dead Snow, had it’s U.S. premiere at Sundance. I always try to make at least one midnight screening at Park City’s Egyptian theater so as to be able to tap into the rowdy revelry of the late-show crowd, and the filmmakers for Dead Snow knew how to pack ‘em in. According to staff this sold-out screening was their busiest one in five years. Small wonder… the viral marketing for Dead Snow was so successful that I’d gotten three different trailers forwarded to me by friends who didn’t even know I was at Sundance. The filmmakers also know how to have fun with their screening in a way that would make William Castle proud; they had two guys dressed up as Nazi zombies playing to the ticket holders and, later, the crowd inside. The film was preceded by Treevenge, a disturbing and amusing Canadian short film about killer Christmas trees. READ MORE

That unlikely combination is just part of the quirky appeal of LURED, a 1947 mystery released by United Artists which is also equal parts comedy and romance (It was a remake of the French film Pieges [1939] by Robert Siodmak and starred Erich von Stroheim, Marie Déa and Maurice Chevalier). Most biographers of Lucille Ball and director Douglas Sirk have routinely dismissed it as an insignificant film in their careers but I think part of the problem was that critics and audiences expected a genuine thriller and got something else entirely. It is an eccentric original and highly recommended for anyone who wants to see Lucille Ball in one of her most underrated and accomplished performances as a dance hall hostess hired by the police as an undercover female detective and “bait” for a London serial killer.

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Over at Video WatchBlog, Tim Lucas writes that he has accepted a Premio Dardo Award for excellence in blogging and offered in “recognition of cultural, ethical, literary and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing.”  The award (which is accompanied by no prize other than the honor and the bragging rights) were created with “the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers (and) gratitude for work that adds value to the Web.”  READ MORE

We’ve talked here before about movies we watch even though we kind of hate them, movies we watch in spite of ourselves.   Movies that are a little boring, or more sentimental than we might normally like, but there’s a whole other category out there for me and I’m presuming I’m not the only person who has one of these.  This is the list of the movies that I will not watch, no way, no how, under any circumstances.  I’ve avoided them, purposely, because the thought of sitting through them so thoroughly makes my skin crawl that I would have to scratch my own eyes out before I’d do it.  I wouldn’t expect you to agree with mine, and I’m sure I’m probably dead wrong (or maybe not) on some of them, but I think you get my drift.

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