“In true travel, what matters are the magical accidents, the discoveries, the inexplicable wonders and the wasted time.” -Raúl Ruiz, paraphrasing Serge Daney in Poetics of Cinema

No director wasted time more spectacularly than Raúl Ruiz, who passed away last week at the age of 70. The restively prolific Chilean, who fled to Paris after Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power, made over 100 films, and was working on two at the time of his death (the Australian film journal Rouge compiled an invaluable annotated filmography through 2005). Obsessed with the multiplicative nature of storytelling, his work branched narratives, opened up parallel worlds and rendered dreams more real than reality. They often feel like a serial drama happening all at once, the plot twists layered one on top of the other in a dissolve or superimposition. Raised on robust American trash like Flash Gordon, Ruiz’s films are overflowing with wild incident (he later wrote scripts for the brash anti-realism of Mexican telenovelas). He embraced their  irruptions of logical narrative order, and also found delight in the “mistakes” of higher-budgeted productions :

For years I watched so-called Greco-Latin films (toga flicks, with early Christians devoured by lions, emperors in love, and so on). My only interest in those films was to catch sight of planes and helicopters in the background, to discover the eternal DC6 crossing the sky during Ben Hur’s final race, Cleopatra’s naval battle, or the Quo Vadis banquets. That was my particular fetish, my only interest. For me all those films, the innumerable tales of Greco-Latinity, all partook of the single story of a DC6 flying discreetly from one film to the next.

Ruiz always followed the plane, that is, he let the image determine the story, rather than vice versa. If a plane entered the frame, that dictated that a new tale had to be written: “It [the image-situation] serves as a bridge, an airport, for the multiple films that will coexist in the film that is finally seen.”

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As a former editor, I am annoyed that the items listed in the tagline above are not parallel: After all, it should be “Lesbians, Martial Arts, High Heels and Sciences.” But, then again, that is the least of the problems on the sellsheet for Minty the Assassin, a title offered by Cinema Epoch, which specializes in straight-to-DVD releases.

I work at Facets Multi-media, and part of the “multi-media” part is a vast video rentals service, which includes thousands of foreign, indie, documentary, and classic films. We regularly receive sellsheets from all manner of straight-to-DVD production companies, who want us to buy their titles for our rentals service or to sell via our online catalogue. While most major studios and DVD companies tend to announce and promote their offerings online, the companies that sell low-budget, exploitation titles still mail slick-looking sellsheets printed on nice paper stock. Periodically, I leaf through these sellsheets because they never cease to amuse—and amaze—me. Either the films are ludicrous, the taglines shameless, or the sell copy incomprehensible. I am simultaneously appalled by the poor grammar and punctuation and impressed by the cheekiness involved in promoting these movies.

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“This film has cross-over appeal that connects with progressive hippies and Tea Party members alike. It’s about government raids on local and organic farmers.” I’d had a long working relationship with the distributor who was telling me this over the phone, but in the past Jessica had been a broker for classics of the silent era as well as representing some of the biggest names in both the realm of foreign and contemporary arthouse movies. This was a very different and far cry from Dersu Uzala. It was a debut low-budget documentary called Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms.   READ MORE

My children returned to school this week. Which to my mind spells the end of summer.  Who cares what the calendar says, summer = not-in-school, end of discussion. And the end of summer, also, means the end of summer movie season. Some cinephiles welcome this transition. Not me.

You see, I like comic books. And I’m not one of those stuck-up toffs who thinks comics need to be graphic novels, all arty and grown-up and off-putting. No, I like superhero comics, and I like movies based on superhero comics. I like popcorn movies, I like movies who only aim to please, I like special effects.

In short, I’m easy to please. That being said, why am I so heard to please?

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In 1977, 20th Century Fox released a big-budget, star-studded science-fiction extravaganza and a cheap piece of crap chock-a-block with nobodies. The cheap piece of crap was George Lucas’ STAR WARS, which cost the studio a measly $9,000,000 and could boast among its cast no big names, unless you counted Debbie Reynolds’ daughter and the guy from THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI (1957)… which is to say, no big names. The stars of the $17,000,000 DAMNATION ALLEY, however, were established Hollywood leading man George Peppard from BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961), THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964) and THE BLUE MAX (1966), brash young man-of-action Jan-Michael Vincent from THE MECHANIC (1972), BITE THE BULLET (1975) and WHITE LINE FEVER (1976), alabaster-skinned French film actress Dominique Sanda (from Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST and 1900 and Vittorio de Sica’s THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS) in her Hollywood debut and feisty little teenager Jackie Earle Haley, who had made a splash as Jodie Foster’s irascible Little League teammate in THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976). Now that’s a cast, Jack! Guaranteed to generate buzz and put butts in seats. (Seriously, the casting agent who put these talents in the same room probably spent the next eight weeks on the Mediterranean as reward by Fox for a job well done.) If you’re old, as I am, you know how this story ends. STAR WARS was hugely successful and changed the shape of American, if not international cinema, while DAMNATION ALLEY, hobbled by a lackluster script, shoddy special effects and phoned-in performances from all involved, disappeared from the public consciousness in the time it took for the celluloid on which it was printed to spool onto the take-up reel. Guess which one I like better?

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Sir Sean Connery is celebrating his 81st birthday today and I thought it would be a great time to share my appreciation for his terrific performance in Basil Dearden’s entertaining thriller, WOMAN OF STRAW (1964). The handsome Scottish actor with a deep gravely voice and piercing dark eyes has appeared in more than 65 films during his long career but WOMAN OF STRAW is one of the few films where Connery was given the opportunity to shed his good guy image and portray a ruthless villain.

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As we’ve seen this past week on our Blondell Blog-a-thon, Miss Joan Blondell was a survivor.  Through her long movie career she always managed to come out on top, and her image as a plucky dame was one that audiences cherished and wouldn’t forget.  As her motion picture career began to slow down and she entered middle age — never a wonderful time for an actress, then as now — she was fortunate to still have some great career choices available to her.  Joan returned to the stage to much acclaim in the 1950s, and also began to appear on television during the same time, picking up roles on many of the prestigious dramatic  (and often live) anthologies of the TV’s early years.  In the first half of the decade she delighted audiences with roles on Schlitz Playhouse (as Calamity Jane), Suspense, Lux Video Theatre (with her A Tree Grows in Brooklyn co-star James Dunn), Fireside Theatre, Shower of Stars, G.E. True Theater, Shower of Stars, Playwrights ’56, Studio One, Playhouse 90, and The  United States Steel Hour.  The worst part about this fertile period in Joan’s career is that it’s pretty much impossible today to actually watch any of her performances in these very early TV series.  Our loss, for sure.

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Some actors have great talent but little charisma.  Charisma, that intangible quality so difficult to explain but so easy to spot, is something only the greatest performers possess and most of them, in the history of cinema, have fallen into the character actor/supporting player role.    So many of the most charismatic performers of the studio era, from Thelma Ritter to Thomas Mitchell, played backup to the star and so often it is their performances that outshine that of the star’s.   And when it happens with a newcomer, audiences and studio chiefs alike sit up and take notice.

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Joan Blondell made herself at home in the cinema. Regardless of the plot or set decoration, Blondell would adjust her sheer stockings and plop into a seat as if she was at a cuckolded boyfriend’s pad. This Warner Brothers working class goddess buckled knees with this studied insouciance,  a glamour of gum-smacking nonchalance. Our blog-a-thon has been counting down the days until the Blondell-bonanza on August 24th, her day on TCM’s Summer Under the Stars. Earlier this week Jeff discussed the James Cagney-Blondell pairing Blonde Crazy (1931), and today I’ll take a look at their subsequent film together, Howard Hawks’ The Crowd Roars (1932).

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