Posts Tagged ‘Movies’

MST3K’s 14th Season Fundraiser Going Slow

Monday, November 20th, 2023

You may have noticed that Joel Hodgson and MST3K gang are having a new kickstarter for the next season (for values of “kickstarter” that include “not on the Kickstarter platform”). There are five days left and they are only 38% of the way to the first goal of $4.8 million, which will be six features and six shorts.

The last two Kickstarters they had blew past their goals.

This one? Not so much. Despite announcing that Plan 9 from Outer Space will be among the riffed films.

Donor fatigue? The Biden Recession? Not doing enough promotion? Not enough boost from a non-Kickstarter platform? Disgruntlement over how long it took people to get their promised rewards from the last campaign?

I think it may be some combination of all the above.

Maybe the usual Turkey Day festivities will kick it into higher gear. But if they don’t, this may be the first MST3K fundraising effort to fail.

William Friedkin, RIP

Monday, August 7th, 2023

No director probably ever had three films back to back as good as William Friedkin (who just died at age 87) did in the 1970s. The French Connection, The Exorcist and Sorcerer are each truly great films that stand the test of time. The first two made a ton of money (justifiably). The third one didn’t, but has one of the greatest, tensest scenes of all time.

Friedkin let the success of those first two go to his heads, and then a string of flops (including Cruising, a film that, like The Last Temptation of Christ, alienated its only potential audience) put him out of favor in Hollywood.

He also directed a pretty swell episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone reboot.

He had a wealth of talent, I just wish we had more first rate films from him.

Library Addition: Signed First of George Romero’s The Living Dead

Friday, June 23rd, 2023

A little out of line with what I usually buy, but I thought the limitation was low enough to be worth picking up.

Romero, George A. and Daniel Kraus. The Living Dead. Short Scary Tales (SST) Publications, 2023. First edition hardback, 322 of 400 copies signed by Suzanne Romero, Daniel Kraus, Vincenzo Natali and Francois Vaillancourt, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Hefty 736 page original novel set in Romero’s Living Dead universe. Now sold out from the publisher, though I do have one copy available through Lame Excuse Books.

Library Addition: Two PS Publishing Firsts

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023

Two PS Publishing titles, both bought from the publisher at the usual discount.

  • Hughes, Matthew. Ghost Dreams. PS Publishing, 2022. First edition hardback, #55 of 100 signed, numbered copies, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket.

  • Wallace, Edgar (Stephen Jones, editor). Kong: An Original Screenplay. PS Publishing/Electric Dreamhouse, 2023. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. The original screenplay for King Kong, which evidently differs considerably from the final film. Slightly oversized (10 1/2″ high) and profusely illustrated, with a good 90 pages of notes from Jones, who worked from “Wallace’s personal copy of his original draft script with his own corrections and interpolations” plus “a boys’ story-paper adaptation of the film, preliminary production stills and art-work, and a colour portfolio of King Kong posters from around the world.” A couple of production sketches are from the lost spider pit scene.

  • I have both of these available through Lame Excuse Books.

    Wes Anderson’s Star Wars

    Thursday, May 4th, 2023

    I checked out of Star Wars after The Force Awakens was just “meh” and everyone told me the sequels were much worse and Disney proceeded to screw every single pooch. But here’s a Star Wars movie I would totally watch:

    Consider this your May the 4th post.

    Shoegazer Sunday: Beach House’s “Space Song”

    Sunday, January 8th, 2023

    It’s been a while since I did one of these, and more than seven years since I did a Beach House song, so here’s “Space Song,” featuring footage of a science fiction film I bet you’re familiar with.

    Library Addition: The Shining: A Visual and Cultural Haunting

    Tuesday, December 13th, 2022

    This is less a book than a weird art assemblage. Seeing this on Kickstarter, I figured that the overlapping Venn diagrams of crazy Stephen King fans and crazy Stanly Kubrick fans justified a purchase.

  • (King, Stephen and Stanley Kubrik) Oldham, Craig, editor. The Shining: A Visual and Cultural Haunting (Epiphany Edition). Rough Trade Books (via Kickstarter), 2022. First edition, printed pages and pamphlets loose in a decorated cardboard box, a Fine copy. It’s an elaborate production.

    The loose sheets:

  • 16 x typed replica sheets with All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy as discovered by Wendy in the film.
  • 120 x one-page pieces analysing, exploring, and extrapolating the films ideas, themes, influences, contexts and critiques.
  • 10 x original typewriter art portraits made using the same model of Adler typewriter used by Jack Torrance.
  • Some examples:

    Plus “Contributor Booklets” (which are more like brochures):

    9 x 8-page cultural contributor essays from a range of celebrated artists, musicians, authors, architects and curators designed to evoke the film’s intertitle cards.

    Original and exclusive piece from actor Dan Lloyd (Danny Torrance), an extraordinarily rare opportunity to share memories, stories and insights from this usually private person, as well as the coup of a rare interview with Shelley Duvall (conducted by Ryan Obermeyer) shedding light on her performance and experience of the film.

    Artist Gavin Turk examines myths, mirrors and mazes and looks at the film through art, whilst fashion designer Margaret Howell takes us through her iconic maroon jacket worn by Jack in the closing act of the film.

    Artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti on sound and the unfolding domestic violence within the film. Architecture expert and writer John Grindrod on the role of The Overlook Hotel itself and the impact of such spaces on our behaviour.

    Producer and Record Label head James Lavelle (UNKLE) tells of his enduring inspiration and love for Kubrick and his art whilst author Jen Calleja looks into Shelley Duvall, folklore and fairytales.

    And BFI Curator and Author Michael Blyth cross-examines the character of Wendy as she appears in both the film and the original Stephen King novel.

    3 x 16 page reproduced texts including essays from H.P. Lovecraft, Sigmund Freud, and a short story which was a key influence for Kubrick when developing the film.

    H.P. Lovecraft — Supernatural Horror in Literature An extract from the seminal yet largely overlooked essay that significantly influenced decisions not to explain the horrors which unfold at The Overlook.

    Stephen Crane — The Blue Hotel First serialised in 1898, the American author’s story was highlighted by Kubrick in interviews as similar to events unfolding in The Shining and offers an insight into the director’s read of the film.

    Sigmund Freud — The Uncanny Diane Johnson (co-writer of The Shining) cited Freud’s influential 1919 essay “The Uncanny” as a key text in Kubrick’s research. Freud explores many ideas that are woven through the film: retracing steps, recurring numbers and motifs, and the significance of the double. We will re-publish an extract from the essay.

    with:

  • Oldham, Craig, editor. They Live: A Visual and Cultural Awakening. Rough Trade Books, 2018. First edition (stated) trade paperback original, a Fine copy. A critical companion to the 1988 John Carpenter film. Bought as an add-in with the above.
  • Bought for £65 plus shipping through Kickstarter. You can buy them through their respective Amazon links above.

    Library Addition: First Edition of Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation

    Tuesday, December 6th, 2022

    Another Amazon purchase, one that came in as a first edition and blessedly free of of damage!

    Tarantino, Quentin. Cinema Speculation. HarperCollins, 2022. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Non-fiction book about the films Tarantino saw as a child in the 1970s, from Dirty Harry to Taxi Driver. Seems pretty interesting.

    One interesting thing about the book physically is that the cover has that rough texture that’s been all the rage recently…except the black and white photo of Steve McQueen and Sam Peckinpah on the cover, which is smooth. I’d never seen a book with two different textures combined like that before.

    Movie Review: Soylent Green

    Tuesday, September 13th, 2022

    It being 2022, the year the movie is set in, we thought it was high time to finally watch Soylent Green in a not-chopped-up-for-TV version.

    Title: Soylent Green
    Director: Richard Fleischer
    Writer: Stanley R. Greenberg (screenplay), Harry Harrison (for the novel Make Room! Make Room!)
    Starring: Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Edward G. Robinson, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Lincoln Kilpatrick
    IMDB entry

    A Neo-Malthusian dystopia, Soylent Green starts off by telling us that New York City now has a population of 40 million, and almost all of them look sweaty (Greenhouse Effect), depressed and desperate. Charlton Heston plays Detective Thorn, a cop more pissed off than depressed, sharing an apartment with his “book” Sol (Edward G. Robinson, in his last role; he died six days after principle photography wrapped), who does research for him. Their tiny, dingy apartment is crammed with books, no running water, and electricity so reliably unreliable that every now and then they need to climb aboard an exercise bike to keep their single bulb lit. When Thorn leaves for work, he has to step over dozens of homeless people sleeping in the stairwell of his building

    Thorn works two shifts to make ends meet, and he’s assigned to the murder case of rich businessman William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton) high in his swanky apartment. There he interviews Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), Simonson’s “furniture,” the beautiful young woman provided with the apartment, who seems to take a shine to Thorn, as well as assistant Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), upon whom his suspicion for being the inside man falls.

    The interesting thing about these scenes, despite the stark contrast between rich Simonson and the horrible grinding poverty, is how Heston’s Thorn, presented as a good cop working within a corrupt system, feels absolutely no compunction about stealing everything he can lay his hands on in the dead man’s apartment, including such unthinkable luxury goods as “soap” and “beef.” The body disposal guy also offers Thorn an agreed upon percentage for the body, and later Thorn tells his chief (Brock Peters) that the fee will come out of his share. Thorn’s also not above using his fists to beat answers out of people, and he knows how to project an air of menace.

    It turns out that Simonson worked for the powerful Soylent corporation, and Thorn’s chief tells him to drop the case. “There’s been 137 reported murders since then, and we won’t solve them either.” Assuming a 24-hour period, that works out to around 50,000 murders a year, a blood-drenched total not even pre-Guiliani New York City or modern Chicago can match. Naturally Thorn refuses.

    Thorn also gets assigned riot duty, and a riot breaks out when a Soylent outlet runs out of food. They bring in “The Scoops,” which are the dump trucks on the movie poster that unceremoniously scoop rioters up into the bed. What happens to them there is unclear, but given the state of the world, you can bet it’s not pleasant.

    All institutions seem corrupt, dysfunctional, and most often both. Thorn gets shot in the leg, and he refuses to take time off to heal. “If I’m gone 48 hours they’ll replace me.”

    Soylent Green lends itself to Neo-Marxist analysis more than most movies, but one thing that cuts against that is religion is the only institution that isn’t corrupt, but it’s still breaking under the strain. After taking a baby previously roped to the dead, knifed mother into a church filled to overflowing with homeless people, Thorn interviews the priest (Lincoln Kilpatrick) who heard Simonson’s last confession, and he’s so far beyond burnout that he has the dead stare of a PTSD sufferer who has numbed himself to the world for his own sanity.

    Priest: Forgive me. It’s destroying me.
    Thorn: What is?
    Priest: The truth.
    Thorn: The truth Simonson told you?
    Priest: All truth.

    Eventually Sol decides to kill himself in a suicide theater showing the lost wonders of the natural world, and shortly thereafter Thorn learns the dark secret of Soylent Green that I assume just about every reader of this review is already aware of.

    There are a few memes floating around listing the similarities between the 2022 of Soylent Green and our own, so let’s list a few:

  • People wearing masks
  • Homeless people living on the street
  • People living in cars
  • Greenhouse effect worries
  • Computer games (a version of Spacewar!)
  • New York falling apart
  • Every institution is corrupt
  • Riots (we could extend that to “over food” if it were set in Sri Lanka)
  • State-sanctioned assisted suicide
  • All that said, with all our problems, the world we’re living in is markedly better than the one depicted here, war notwithstanding, largely thanks to the green revolution in agriculture. Harrison’s novel depicted the world collapsing with 7 billion people, but this year population is scheduled to hit 8 billion (though I’m not sure if that includes China overcounting their population by some 100 million people or not), and we still don’t have widespread famine. (With the agricultural output destroyed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, next year may be different.) New York City’s population is closer to 8.5 million than 40 million, and appears to be shrinking.

    Director Richard Fleischer had an interesting career in the 1970s, with his most prominent films being Tora! Tora! Tora!, Charles Bronson action film Mr. Majestyk, Soylent Green… and Mandingo.

    The 1970s were a weird decade.

    Soylent Green has something of a mixed reputation, partially based on them changing Harry Harrison’s original ending. But I found it a very effective film, one that uses it’s obviously limited budget to good effect and succeeds on its own terms. Heston is very good, as always, and Edward G. Robinson nails his final role. All in all, I’d place it as the second-best SF dystopia of the 1970s, behind only Rollerball.

    Library Additions: PS Publishing Titles

    Monday, March 14th, 2022

    Several PS Publishing titles that arrived in January, one via a dealer order and the others via a discounted sale.

  • Coldiron, Katherine. Midnight Movie Monographs: Plan 9 From Outer Space. PS Publishing/Electric Dreamhouse, 2021. First edition hardback, #209 of 300 copies with a signed faux movie ticket laid in (along with a “Watch Bad Movies/Make Good Art” sticker), a Fine copy in decorated boards and a Fine dust jacket. A book-length study of Ed Wood’s infamous magnum opus of the same name, widely hailed (or derided) as the worst movie ever made, as featured in the Tim Burton film Ed Wood. Bought from the publisher at the usual discount. I have copies of this available though Lame Excuse Books.
  • Di Filippo, Paul. Aeota. PS Publishing, 2019. First edition hardback, trade edition, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Supplements a signed, limited edition. Bought for £5. I have one copy of this available though Lame Excuse Books.
  • Dowling, Terry. The Complete Rynosseros (Volumes I, II and III). PS Publishing, 2020. First edition hardback, a PC copy of 300 signed, numbered sets, all Fine copies in decorated boards and Fine dust jackets and a Fine slipcase. All Dowling’s Tom Rynosseros stories. An attractive production with Nick Stathopoulos art. Volume III features Dowling discussing the origins and developments of every story. Volume I even has an introduction by Jack Vance! Bought for £60 for the set, a considerable discount from the £150 offering price.

  • Ford, Jeffrey. The Best of Jeffrey Ford. PS Publishing, 2020. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. 550+ page volume. Bought for £5. I have one copy of this available though Lame Excuse Books.
  • Sholly, Pete Von. The PS Book of Fantastic Fictioneers: A History of the Incredible (Volume One Ackerman to Jackson and Volume Two: James To Wood.). PS Publishing, 2019. First edition hardbacks, Fine copies in Fine (One) and Near Fine (Volume Two, due to a 1″ slit along the spine edge) dust jackets. Profusely illustrated non-fiction book set covering creators of the fantastic, from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury to Jim Henson to Joel Hodgson. Bought for £20 for the set.