Film, Beethoven, Flash Mobs and Perfect Dinner Parties

By Steve Evans

Someone once asked me at a dinner party...who I would invite to a dinner party and what I would serve. The latter answer is easy -- filet mignon grilled fast in brandy and minced shallots, lobster tails slathered in drawn butter and lemon zest, grilled asparagus, roasted new potatoes with rosemary and crushed garlic cloves, and grapefruit salad dressed with sea salt and extra virgin olive oil.  Napa Cabernet Sauvignon and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc for the lobster. New York style cheesecake topped with ripe raspberries and port wine for dessert.

Then there would be cigars and cognac.

As for the guest list, that becomes problematic. Most of my heroes have left this plane of existence, but if we could resurrect them (and language was no barrier to our conversation), I would invite Jesus, Buddha, Aristotle, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, John Coltrane, Bill Evans (no relation), Cleopatra, Louise Brooks, Myrna Loy, Jean Renoir, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Cary Grant, Stanley Kubrick, Henri Georges Clouzot, Jeanne Moreau, possibly Richard III, definitely Abraham Lincoln and Ingmar Bergman, Grace Kelly if she was free that night, and Jimi Hendrix, because he was always Stone Free. If there was still room at the table I would welcome Ed Wood Jr., Phil Tucker (who directed Robot Monster, one of the most sublime and yet still awful films I have seen), Victor Hugo and Joan of Arc, Ghandi (he would pass on the fillets of beef, no doubt), and James Agee, who may be the most under-appreciated writer of the 20th century.

I think I would ask Marilyn Monroe for a date that evening, not for the reasons you might think, but because I might be able to pierce her shell ( I am good like that) and perhaps understand the demons that drove her. Plus, I am confident that I could kick Jack Kennedy's (or Bobby''s) ass into the street.

And by the time we got around to the cigars and brandy, I would ask Beethoven to perform for us all.

Here, then, is the coda on my perfect dinner party...wandering outdoors we would all encounter the most wonderful thing I have seen since the dawn of the Internet.

Life is beautiful. I would do well to remember that. So would we all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbJcQYVtZMo

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2014. By Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Plan 9 From Outer Space: Revisiting a Classic

By Steve Evans
Like many of the bonafide classics in my collection, I find myself revisiting this odd little picture at least once a year.

Plan 9 (1959) is surrealism on a budget. It is also twisted, completely insane, goofy-ass weirdness; yes, and a helluva lot of fun. I've come to see this picture and other titles in director Ed Wood's awful oeuvre as the work of a consummate confidence man who managed to churn out entertaining work in spite of himself. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood starring Johnny Depp is an interesting point of entry for the uninitiated. Brave hearts would do well to dive right in; rent Plan 9 from Outer Space and see for yourself what real guerilla filmmaking is all about.

Like Woods’ Bride of the Monster, Night of the Ghouls, Jail Bait, The Sinister Urge and his freshman effort, the semi-autobiographical Glen or Glenda?, Plan 9 is compulsively watchable, like rubber-necking a bad traffic accident. Wood’s dialog – he wrote all of his own scripts – spins around like a Moebius loop, saying nothing, going nowhere. Consider these choice Plan 9 samples:

“…and remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

Jeff Trent (a civilian): “I’m muzzled by Army brass!”

Air Force Captain: “Visits? That would indicate visitors.”

Lieutenant John Harper: “But one thing’s for sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible.”

Criswell: “Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it... for they will be from outer space.”

Yow. Has there ever been a broader spectrum of weirdos, wannabes and hangers-on than the people involved in this picture – in front of and behind the camera? Hell, morphine-addicted Béla Lugosi (at left) was billed as the star and he died after three days’ worth of shooting. Most directors would have scrapped production, but not Ed Wood. His novel solution? Wood hired his wife’s chiropractor and draped him in a vampire cape with instructions to keep his face covered. Nevermind that the chiropractor was a good 10 inches taller than poor Béla and looked nothing like him.

Examples of Wood’s ingenuity are the stuff of near-legend. Don’t have permission to shoot in a cemetery? No problem. Build one with cardboard tombstones that wobble when the actors walk by. Don’t have a budget for flying saucer special effects? Not to worry. Buy a couple of model kits, string them up on fishing line, and wave them in front of the camera. Stock footage is also helpful, both in saving precious production dollars and padding out the running time.

Sound harsh? Not at all. Let me be clear:

Plan 9 is not the worst picture ever made, as some critics have complained, and Wood is certainly not the worst director (imagine what he could have created with Michael Bay’s budgets). To condemn Wood for toiling in obscurity, with inadequate funding for his projects, is to miss the point. Wood endures (and endears) not because of his incompetence, but in spite of it. Those who would dismiss this great auteur are themselves mere jackals of bourgeois sensibility, snobs who cannot appreciate the not-inconsiderable achievements of a determined man with no talent and even less money who produced half a dozen pictures of such mesmerizing awfulness that all are fondly remembered more than 50 years later. Will anyone still watch Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor or Armageddon half a century hence?

Movie making is hard, damn work, with incredible financial risks. And like creating any work of art, releasing a film also requires thick skin. Critics are ready to pounce on a picture they are incapable of creating themselves.

For an alcoholic transvestite and hopeless dreamer, Ed Wood certainly had balls. He held grand ambitions in his heart. Wood was as dedicated to filmmaking as Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Alfred Hitchcock. He just wasn’t any good at it.

And so, I submit that the only sin a film can commit is to be boring. Plan 9 is anything but.

Personally, I'm holding out for a director’s cut with the Criterion treatment on a two-disc special edition.

Copyright © 2009 by Steve Evans // dba Cinema Uprising. All rights reserved.

Guilty Pleasures

“Learn to see the ‘worst’ films; they are sometimes sublime.”
— Ado Kyrou, Surrealisme au Cinema

By Steve Evans
What does bad cinema share in common with strawberries covered in Belgian chocolate? Beer-simmered bratwursts smoked over hickory and served with peppers and onions? Tortilla chips slathered with melted Monterey jack, jalapeño peppers and spoonfuls of extra-hot salsa?

Hell, I dunno. But I do enjoy a guilty pleasure now and again. Here's a short list of movies that probably aren’t good for you, but taste mighty fine:

The Horror of Party Beach (1964), directed by the incomparable Del Tenney, was billed as “the first horror monster musical.” I s’pose that counts as a recommendation, although it’s basically a retread of the Creature From the Black Lagoon on a wee budget. We do get good value for our entertainment dollars: Babes in bikinis go-go dancing. Bikers. Beaches. Beefcake brawling over Cheesecake. Radioactive sea monsters with their mouths stuffed full of bratwursts (see it for yourself, then believe). And the great surf-rock band The Del Aires (from Connecticut!) perform 6 rockin’ tunes, including the Zombie Stomp. A maid named Eullabelle saves the day. Verily, friends, this is one of the greatest movies ever made. Filmed entertainment just doesn’t come any better.

Point Break (1991) delivers terrific action set pieces and the greatest football game ever filmed at night on a beach, which almost compensates for the fact that this is one of the dumbest movies in cinema history. A pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves stars as the improbably named Johnny Utah, an FBI agent who gets so angry in the second act that he leaps from a plane -- without a parachute -- to pursue a bad guy getting away. Now that's square-jawed determination. Long before that ludicrous moment, we get some great surfing sequences, a bank robbery with crooks wearing rubber masks with the likenesses of ex-presidents, a rare opportunity to hear Arthur Lee's psychedelic band Love on a movie soundtrack, and a shoot-out involving drug dealers and a lawnmower. Patrick Swayze did his own skydiving stunts, but Gary Busey steals the film as a smart-ass Fed who likes Calvin & Hobbes and meatball sandwiches. Look fast for Anthony Keidis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as a surfer dude. Whoa.

Jaws: The Revenge (1987) is a ridiculous-looking giant, rubber shark with frequently visible control cables dangling from its belly. Michael Caine appears in a supporting role, looking decidedly embarrassed to be in this one. He has this expression in several scenes as though he just farted loudly and is hoping no one will immediately blame him for the crime. While Caine was filming this flick in the Bahamas, he passed on an opportunity to attend the Academy Awards in 1987, when he would win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters. Later, a reporter asked Caine if he realized how awful Jaws: The Revenge would turn out to be. Caine admitted candidly: “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

Mesa of Lost Women (1953). Jackie "Uncle Fester" Coogan plays a mad scientist (is there any other kind?) who wants to infuse beautiful women with the strength and agility of tarantulas. WTF?! Several ding-dongs land a plane on his mesa and start snooping around. Shot on a budget of about three dollars, the picture features the saddest-looking giant spider puppet yet committed to film. It was also the sad beginning of a long career descent for Coogan, a former child actor from the silent era whose mother and stepfather squandered his fortune. A millionaire at 7, Coogan was broke by the time he turned 18. That's more tragic than anything in this inept picture.

If you can endure the annoying-as-hell flamenco guitar and piano soundtrack that plays incessantly throughout this picture (and was also used by Ed Wood in his hypnotically awful Jail Bait), then the first round of beers is on me. Trivia note: the composer for this mind-numbing soundtrack was a young musician named Hoyt Curtin, who would go on to compose the familiar “Scooby Doo” jingle for the popular cartoon. Aren’t you glad you know that, now?

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) was a “blind-buy” I purchased for five dollars on the strength of the title alone. Seriously. Rare indeed is a film that lives up to its title: There are bee girls. They invade. Some of them prance around nekkid. Others hang out in a laboratory and say pseudo-scientific things while holding their instruments incorrectly and frequently upside-down. Bee girls will do that, don't you know? I got my money’s worth.

I also enjoy everything written or directed by Ed Wood, especially Bride of the Monster (1955) and The Violent Years (1956), which he wrote but did not direct. In the latter, a gang of delinquent girls runs amok. They break into their school and shove desks around, hold up gas stations and, in the scene that will have you staring in disbelief, they kidnap a guy in the park, drag him out of his car and into the woods, where they “have their way” with him, despite his strenuous objections. This sort of thing never happens to me.

I have no use for the jackals of bourgeois sensibility who would look upon these delightful movies with a disdainful eye. Those who criticize mindless fluff are mental lightweights themselves – too insecure to realize what they’re missing, much less to open their minds long enough such that they might experience some serious fun.

Pass the popcorn.

Copyright © 2009 by Steve Evans // dba Cinema Uprising. All rights reserved.