It’s a strange phenomenon, but when you’re younger you tell yourself that you’ll never be one of those old people that doesn’t know the latest movies, music and television.  You’ll always keep up and be one of those cool older people that’s hip to everything.  And then, well, you just don’t give a damn anymore.  On top of that, those older folks hip to everything suddenly look incredibly pathetic.

And that’s all understandable because that’s how life works:  We latch onto things familiar in older age while in our youth we grabbed a hold of anything new and fresh.  The odd thing is, I’ve always done the same thing with directors.  That is, I’m with them up to a certain point in their career and then, like a flash, I stop paying attention.   It’s hard to explain but, I suppose, the development of talent is more interesting to me than the establishment of it.  Whatever the reason, it happens.  Here’s my personal guide to famous directors whose work I admired and/or loved and followed their every new movie with great and fevered anticipation until, in an instant, they just didn’t interest me, anymore.  At all.

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In one of the stranger experiments in cable television history, Showtime’s 1994 Rebel Highway series commissioned ten filmmakers to remake a 1950s exploitation movie. It was the brainchild of Lou Arkoff (the son of American International Pictures founder Samuel Z. Arkoff) and Debra Hill (producer of Halloween). They gave directors $ 1.3 million and a 12 day shooting schedule, to roughly approximate the original shooting conditions (modified for inflation). Unlike the ’50s cheapies, though, they were given final cut, and could choose their own screenwriter, editor and director of photography. This proved irresistible to the (mostly) impressive list of talents who signed on: Robert Rodriguez (Machete), John McNaughton (Wild Things), Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary), Allan Arkush (Rock ‘N’ Roll High School), Joe Dante (Gremlins), Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused), John Milius (Conan the Barbarian), William Friedkin (The Exorcist), Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat) and Uli Edel (The Baader Meinhof Complex).

All of the filmmakers, except for Rodriguez, were old enough to have lived through the era of the film they remade, engaging the aesthetics and politics of the originals in strikingly different ways, alternating between affection and parody often in the same film. Since its original airing, the series has completely disappeared from cultural memory, but Netflix Watch Instantly, that haphazard repository of moving image detritus, is now streaming every entry, and it’s well worth sampling the project’s eccentric film-historical time travel. Below, some thoughts on my favorites.

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Françoise Pascal as the mesmerized "Girl" in Jean Rollin's THE IRON ROSE.

Friday night’s installment of Underground marks the TCM debut of French filmmaker Jean Rollin, known among horror movie cultists as a master of the lyrical, erotic, supernatural film.  Yet he remains a director with whom the general American moviegoing public is not well acquainted.           READ MORE

French animation boasts a long history, harkening back to Emile Cohl who produced the hand-drawn Fantasmagorie in 1908. What I like about the history of French animation is that it includes bold experimentation alongside commercial endeavors. While the history of American animation is equally as impressive, I wish contemporary Hollywood was less dominated by that computer-generated style typified by Pixar. Some contemporary CGI-generated cartoons are imaginative, well-written, and enjoyable for adults as well as children (Rango; Puss in Boots), but others rendered in photo-realist styles create doll-like human characters that are downright creepy (The Polar Express; the upcoming Arthur Christmas). Too bad the major studios give viewers so little choice. However, over the last decade, the French have gained an international reputation for beautiful, stylish, hand-drawn animation that Hollywood claims is dead.

In October, Chicago’s Facets Multi-media (where I work) held their annual Chicago Children’s International Film Festival. Over the years, the festival has hosted thousands of internationally acclaimed films, some of which went on to be major releases, including Whale Rider. Each year, many of the entries are animated shorts and features rendered in a variety of 3-D and hand-drawn styles. This year, a day was devoted to French animation, which included the features A Storytelling Show by Jean-Christophe Roget, Tales of the Night by Michel Ocelot, and the delightful A Cat in Paris by Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, which sold out the house.

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On November 9th at 7pm, in select theaters nation-wide, both TCM and NCM Fathom will screen a digital restoration of West Side Story to celebrate the film’s 50th Anniversary. This incredibly successful and highly acclaimed musical marked the first time Puerto Ricans were the focus of a mainstream cinematic production. This fact is not lost on film scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, who grew up in Puerto Rico and credits a viewing of West Side Story from his childhood as a primary reason for his academic interest in film. Acevedo-Muñoz is currently working on a book about West Side Story and, as part of his research, he was recently given access to the Robert Wise papers at U.S.C. I caught up with him upon his return to sit down for an interview, to discuss his book, and to share some of the discoveries he made while accessing the Robert Wise archive.  READ MORE

The cat is out of the bag–I had been under orders not to tell anyone until now that I provided the Vin Scully style play-by-play for both versions of Godzilla (1954/1956) on Criterion’s new Blu-Ray edition. I guess some Godzilla fans sensed something in the air, the way animals perceive a coming tornado, because I’ve gotten quite a few email inquiries about whether I was doing a commentary for the Godzilla vs Megalon Blu-Ray. Close, but not quite, fellas.

Over at the Criterion Forums, speculation about the Godzilla Blu-Ray led to this exchange:

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 7:43 pm 

What value does this have besides kitsch? This is an honest question; I’m not trying to troll anyone who likes this. I’ve never seen anything Godzilla-related, and I’m curious as to what the appeal is.

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 7:53 pm 

You have to look at the first Godzilla movie quite differently. It was a lot more serious in tone, a reaction to the bombings in WWII, the destruction of Japan, the hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that killed some fishermen (a newsreel on the BFI disc shows it).

Fair enough, but it does rankle me a tad how respect for the austere horror parable of Honda’s original Godzilla tends to come at the expense of the later, sillier films. The 1954 ‘Zilla is a masterpiece, a work of apocalyptic art. But the crazy sequels are fun, too, and I hate to see them thrown under the bus.

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Is it just me or is November 1st about the worst day on the calendar? No more Halloween for a year! With the passing of every All Saints Day I start doing the math. It’s the hardest 364 days of my life.  READ MORE

After the phenomenal success of VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (Marc Robson; 1967), Hollywood was eager to work with Jacqueline Susann again. Producers and studio executives didn’t have to wait long because the best-selling author quickly got to work on another novel, which was immediately optioned by Columbia Studios. The Love Machine was Susann’s third book and like Valley of the Dolls, it received plenty of negative press and lackluster reviews but that didn’t stop the enthusiastic public from buying it.

During Susann’s highly publicized writing career she used her experience in Hollywood as a would-be actress in the 1940s to write lurid tell-all novels that promised to shine a glaring light on the dark underbelly of stardom. Susann’s books avoided hot button issues like the war in Vietnam war and the growing civil rights movement while focusing on the glamorous and decadent lives of the rich and famous. These trashy tell-alls were more fiction than fact but they appealed to millions of readers who were eager for some escapist entertainment. When The Love Machine was released in 1969 it quickly became a bestseller and competed with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as well as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint for the number one position on the New York Times best-seller list before it was adapted for the screen in 1971.

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During the first years of a cinephile, that is to say, from the single digits through the early twenties, the idea is, essentially, to see everything possible.  When I first knew I loved movies more than any other art form, around seven or eight, I knew I was different than my friends.  They loved movies, too, of course, who doesn’t?  But they simply loved the entertainment value provided.  I loved everything.  The acting, the editing, the music, the sound and the cinematography.  All of it.  And I wanted to learn more, as much as I possibly could and as often as I could.   And so, from those early days of staying up late and watching lots of foreign films on PBS (I watched Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast on PBS when I was eleven and loved it) to watching new releases in theaters and on the earliest forms of cable tv and, finally, to VCRs, a gift from above for a young teen exploding with a passion for movies, I watched every thing I possibly could, from old to new, good to bad, domestic to foreign.   Frankly, I had a ball.   If I could do it all over again, I would, and I just may have to because, here’s the thing:  It’s thirty years later, and I’ll be damned if I can remember thing one about half the movies I’ve watched.

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