CrowdSourcing Experiment: Please Help me Identify a 1970s Western

Hey, so I got this idea from a Tumblr post by actor James Urbaniak from some months back. Basically, someone sent an email around asking for help identifying an obscure movie they had seen when they were a kid. The poor person had tried Amazon, cult film fan sites, and even the guy who ran the famous L.A. video store, Jerry’s Video, with no luck. Well, Urbaniak posted it and within minutes someone identified the film: Psychomania.

I have a similar dilemma. Some time in the mid-1970s (I would say 1976 or 1977), I saw a Western movie that left an impression on me. One character I distinctly remember is a young gunslinger everyone called "the Punk." He had a bad attitude and even shot a few guys during the film. I remember a scene where the streets of a town were inundated with mud, the only reprieve being a series of shoddy wooden "sidewalks."

What makes this dilemma tougher is that I saw the film in San Diego in a revival house that sometimes showed first-run films but mostly older movies. So the film could’ve been from anytime in the previous five or ten years. (It was in color and had a very distinct, post-Watergate, Vietnam-era vibe to it, though…)

Like the other memory-impaired film buff, I’ve had no luck tracking down what movie this was. For a while I thought it was Robert Altman’s 1971 anti-Western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Some of the scenes seemed familiar, and there’s a young outlaw called the Kid in it. But I saw the film again recently, and it doesn’t feel to me like it was the movie I’m thinking of. On the other hand, I’m quite to prepared to be told I imagined the whole thing. After all, I was only about ten years old at the time.

Anyway, I thought if I put it out there, maybe someone on the interwebs will know the film and identify it for me.

Anyone?

Next Tuesday: First Person Arts in the City of Brotherly Love

Next Tuesday, March 9, I will be appearing at the Philadelphia First Person Arts’ event, Warning: Graphic Content.

This year’s One Book, One Philadelphia program is centered around Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and W:GC features artists Daniel Heyman, Jamar Nicholas, and yours truly presenting our work, followed by a screening of the Persepolis film. (Isn’t it freakin’ cool that the whole city of Philly is reading and discussing a graphic novel?! And one as awesome as Persepolis, no less?!)

Prisoner abuse connected to the Iraq War has influenced the recent work of Philadelphia artist Daniel Heyman, who incorporates the words prisoners speak to him as he draws them. Philadelphia-based comics artist Jamar Nicholas is working on a new, graphic version of Geoffrey Canada’s powerful memoir Fist Stick Knife Gun. And I’ll be discussing A.D.

Marjane Satrapi’s two graphic memoirs were combined to make the film version of Persepolis. The film chronicles Satrapi’s childhood in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution, following her into young adulthood as she navigates the starkly different worlds of Western Europe and an increasingly conservative Iran.

Details:

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 7pm
Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 West Lancaster Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA
Tickets $15 ($10 for First Person Arts and BMFI members)

 

Some coverage of the event:

• Philly Metro
• Philadelphia City Paper

Get Out of My Dreams and Back Onto the Screen

Do you ever feel like your head is being colonized by Hollywood? Last night I had a fever dream which started out like The Big Chill, featured an interior exactly like Harrison Ford’s Chicago hideout in The Fugitive, and starred a character from David Milch‘s failed series John From Cincinnati — which I have never seen!

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

I just read a heartbreaking/uplifting profile of film critic Roger Ebert in this month’s Esquire. I knew he had been seriously ill a few years back, but had no idea that because of his 2006 illness, he lost his lower jaw and the ability to speak, eat, and drink. Just stop for a minute and try to imagine that…

I know Ebert is considered by many highbrows to be a "reviewer" and not really a "critic," but I’ve always valued his opinions and advice — and often find his tastes to echo my own. (And I’ve been reading his reviews and/or watching his TV show for going on 25 years.) Most of all, though, I’ve always been amazed at how generous a critic he is, how he always gives each film the benefit of the doubt. To me, he’s the opposite of most film reviewers, who seem to take a "guilty-until-proven-innocent" approach.

As evidenced by the Esquire piece, Ebert is a person with a wide range of references, someone who has a life outside of the movie theater. This breadth of knowledge, this appreciation of real life, has always shown in his criticism, even before the tragedy which befell him. Given the amount of movies he must see each week, I always wondered how he maintained such a fresh approach. Now I have a little more insight into that question.

So, thank you, Mr. Ebert, for all your fine work. As an avid filmgoer, I look forward to many more of your reviews in the future.

Watching the “Watchmen”

I went in to the Watchmen film with incredibly low expectations — and was very pleasantly surprised. My initial response to it was amazement at its faithfulness to the source, which was word-for-word in many parts — though of course the film left out some important parts, and radically changed the ending. That was a first. After all the previous fan-boy complaints about superhero films that made wholesale changes for the sake of “movie audiences,” this time there was nothing for the über-geeks to complain about!

Watchmen is definitely not a standard three-act structure film, and it breaks all sorts of film “rules.” It’s almost like an experimental film, and some of the things director Zack Snyder tried worked and some didn’t. I agree with many reviewers that the result is a rather embalmed or vacuum-packed experience. But overall the film gets the aura of the book exactly right: the campy/kinky pseudo-porno quality of the heroes and their costumes, and the pervasive the Cold War nihilism.

What it is sorely missing, unfortunately, is the regular human “bean” connection evoked by the news-vendor, his customers, and the comics-reading kid. But I hear all that will be back in the five-hour director’s cut!

Cloverfield = Adrenaline

Loved it! Pure visceral excitement!

I also like how the monster took on the vapid yuppie out-of-towners who’ve taken over Manhattan. Cloverfield is obviously a born Brooklynite.

718, y’all!!!

Josh… the film critic?!

I’ve been a movie fan for all my life, dating back to when my university professor-mom would screen films on a bedsheet in our living room. Years later, when I was a college student, I took a number of film criticism classes, most notably one focusing on movies about the Vietnam War (which was a special passion of mine). I wrote a number of papers about those flicks. Then, in the early 1990s, I actually published some movie reviews, in the progressive weekly In These Times.

Recently, I stumbled across some of those old reviews and papers, which I’ve added to the "And…" section of my website. It’s funny, even though only half the reviews I wrote back in ’91/’92 got published, I really got into the whole "film critic" thing, and spent just as much time on the pieces  I knew would never see print — just for the fun of it. That was a period in my life when I was searching for my true creative outlet, having temporarily given up comics in disgust (before I discovered the wonderful — and lucrative! ;-> — world of alternative comix). I distinctly recall the passion I felt about film criticism. I loved unpacking the films, trying to read their subtext, judging their socio-political relevance — essentially treating them as works of art and not just "entertainment." The whole enterprise seemed like a big puzzle, and if I could twist my brain into enough loops, I could figure it all out: the films, the world, my life. No "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for me — I pretentiously thought of myself as a critic; not a reviewer.

Of course, looking back on these pieces now, I fear they suffer from an overdose of PC moralism (I did go to Oberlin in the late 1980s, after all!). Nevertheless, I still feel they contain some degree of insight, and thus seem worth sharing. (The pieces on Full Metal Jacket, Eating, and Star Trek VI are probably the most interesting of the lot.) 

So if you’ve got a hankering to read about a random selection of almost-20-year-old movies, take a look…

TOP TEN MOVIES of… 1991?

I just found this in some old computer files, so in homage to the de riguer tradition of year-end top ten lists, here are my…

TEN BEST FILMS OF 1991! (compiled in 1991, when I was 24 years old)

Barton Fink (dir. by Joel Coen)
Cape Fear (dir. by Martin Scorsese)
Cyrano de Bergerac (dir. by Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
Dead Again (dir. by Kenneth Branagh)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (dir. by Nicholas Meyer)
The Silence of the Lambs (dir. by Jonathan Demme)
The Double Life of Veronique (dir. by Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Thelma and Louise (dir. by Ridley Scott)
Truly, Madly, Deeply (dir. by Anthony Minghella)

I fancied myself a bit of a film critic back then, and even published a couple of reviews in the lefty weekly In These Times. All the same, my tastes were fairly unsophisticated  (as they still are now!), tending toward the mainstream.

Some of these films I hardly remember anymore, not having seen them in 16 years. But some – Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise, for example — are considered modern classics. At least one film, Barton Fink, has not in my mind stood the test of time. I’m a big Coen Bros. fan, but that particular film doesn’t do for me what it did back then. (To give Sari her props, she hated it at the time!) And as a kid who grew up during the Cold War, I still love Star Trek VI, with its un-subtle allusion to Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And, just to be fair, here are what I considered the…

TEN WORST FILMS OF 1991!
Blowback (dir. by Marc Levin)
Defending Your Life (dir. by Albert Brooks)
Delusion (dir. by Carl Colpaert)
The Doors (dir. by Oliver Stone)
Eating (dir. by Henry Jaglom)
The Fisher King (dir. by Terry Gilliam)
Green Card (dir. by Peter Weir)
Jungle Fever (dir. by Spike Lee)
The Last Boy Scout (dir. by Tony Scott)
Regarding Henry (dir. by Mike Nichols)

What’s notable about this list is how many bad films there are by good directors. Oliver Stone, Terry Gilliam, Peter Weir, Spike Lee, Mike Nichols — they’ve all directed many great films. But none of these are them! (And Tony Scott deserves mention just because his brother made the top ten list for that year, while he made the bottom ten.)

Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist

A hoops buddy of mine is co-producer of the new documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, which is getting its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, starting this weekend. Also, the movie review show, “Reel Talk,” featuring Jeffrey Lyons & Alison Bailes, will be featuring Portrait of a Sequential Artist on this Saturday’s show, at 10 a.m. on NYC channel 4 (NBC). Word is that Lyons and Bailes loved the film! So if you can’t get tickets to the festival, be sure to check out “Reel Talk” for an advance peek of what is sure to be a fascinating study of the one of the most important cartoonists of all time.

Frank & I are going to the movies!

Frank Miller has invited me to a special IMAX screening of 300 tonight. I guess he didn’t read my review of Sin City! Nevertheless, I’m excited. I’ve never seen a feature on an IMAX screen before. And the after-party promises to be good. Like last time, I’m taking my friend Dani as my date, and we’re both hoping we don’t run into the “decrepit inker” again, though things seem to be looking up for him as I saw his work on a rather high-profile new DC title recently.

I’m a huge fan of historical fiction, particularly about the Hellenic Era, having grown up reading Mary Renault. So the subject matter of 300 — King Leonidas of Sparta’s last stand vs. Xerxes and the Persian Army — is right up my alley. I wasn’t particularly taken with Miller’s take on it in the original 300 comics, however, so my expectations for the movie are fairly low.

Which means I’ll probably enjoy myself!