dark side of Gene
My
Godkids
Music
I've turned into Gothgirl these last few months. Lately I've been especially sweet on Faith and the Muse, Faith & Disease, and This Ascension.
During Fall of 2000 I was going through a fairly intense Roxy
Music phase - which, in large part, had to do with
rehabbing a historic house, and needing to hear Bryan Ferry howling
“All of those heartaches!” from In Every Dream Home a
Heartache again and again.
In heavy-rotation at the Invincible Muffin Corporate Facility:
- I Wish - This Ascension: the hammered dulcimer can really ROCK!
- This Girl Called Harmony - Attrition: rocking harpsichord and a Buffy the Vampire Slayerly theme thing going on.
- 13 Years of Carrion - Death in June: pretty. Bleak, but in a gentle, laid back sort of way
- and bunches of tracks by Faith and the Muse
Movies: Great, Good, and Beautifully Bad
Great Movies
- After Hours
- “What if the date you thought would never end, didn't?” read the tagline - which is probably as good a description as any of this Martin Scorsese comedy about a yuppie trying to get laid after-hours in New York City. Also a beautiful, filmed example of Miller's dictum of the “lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything.”
- Apocalypse Now!
- Sweeping and brutal Vietnam war-epic. I just really, really like this movie, and have since I first saw it sometime around 1983. I also recommed Joseph Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness, which served as the basis for the film.
- Clockwork Orange
- When I first saw the ending of this film, my first reaction was to share the hero's feeling of triumph, followed immediately by the sickening recollection of just who I was happy for. A terrific piece of storytelling. The Manchurian Candidate, also on this list, also deals with behavior modification/thought reconditioning.
- Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb
- Pitch-black comedy about nuclear annihilation. Peter Sellers
in three roles. Great film
- The Manchurian Candidate
- This thriller about about a brain-washed presidential
assassin works equally as well as a black comedy about a roaringly
dysfunctional family. Angela Lansbury as the evilist mon ever!
- Repo Man
- The life of a repo man is always intense.
- Sweet Smell of Success
- Tony Curtis plays a sleazy publicity agent who, to curry the
favor of powerful, Walter Winchell-like columnist (Burt Lancaster), sinks
lower than even he dreamed he was capable of.
Dave M. - when you're done with All About
Eve, see this next.
"My right hand hasn't seen my left hand on thirty years."
J. J. Hunsecker - Sweet Smell of Success
- Third Man
- Hack director Carol Reed never made another film anywhere
near as good as this one. It is supspected that star, Orson Welles, and
writer, Graham Greene, double-teamed Reed and made him produce one of the
all-time great movies.
"In Italy, for thiry years under the Borgias they had warfare,
terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo,
Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they
had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy
and peace - and what they produce? The cuckoo clock."
Harry Lime - The Third Man
- Tribulation 99
- Brilliant. Dense, multi-layered exposè of the Quetzal conspiracy, as well as the the best movie about the Reagan/Bush era ever made.
Good & Recommended
Movies
- All About Eve
- Sure it's a classic. One of the all-time greats:
razor-sharp, superbly writing, Bette Davis at her peak. etc But it's
George Sanders' performance as poisonous theatre critic Addison De Witt
that landed this film on my Highly Recommended list.
Dave M. - see this film.
- Casino
- Martin Scorsese's brilliant critique of the patriarchy and the
institution of marriage, through his portrayal of the destruction of the
character Ginger. I have yet to find anyone who echoes my assessment of
Scorsese as a feminist filmmaker. And the rest of the movie is pretty good too.
- Dearly Beloved
- A kinky spoof of the American mortuary industry, this little-known
gem from the 1960's features Joanthan Winters and is worth a look if
you can find it. I stumbled across it one Saturday morning on American Movie Classics
(AMC) or Turner Classic Movies
(TCM) totally by accident. Look for Liberace's cameo. Ghoulishly
funny.
- Gilda
- Film noir classic from 1946 has Nazis, crypto-homoeroticsm, a
vast and evil conspiracy centering on tungsten (my favorite metal!),
obsession, and of course Gilda, played by stunning Rita Hayworth. Gilda
describes herself: “If I'd been a ranch they would have named me the
Bar Nothing.”
- Goodfellas
- Fascinating, scary, funny, true. Read the book it's based on;
Wise Guys, by Henry Hill.
- Godfathers I & II
- A quarter of a century before The Sopranos, this is the
original Mafia soap opera. “Leave the gun. Take the cannollis.”
What more needs to be said? The Godfather is the reverse corollary
to the proposition that good books always get turned into lousy movies.
Sometimes, a big ball of cheese can be made into a great movie.
- Kiss of the Spiderwoman
- I really liked this melodramatic weeper when it first came
out, and I saw it at the Nickleodeon in Burlington, Vermont more times than
I can remember. I wonder what I would think about it now.
- Swimming With Sharks
- The first movie I ever saw Kevin Spacey in. (Wait, did I see
that stinker Outbreak first? Incidentally - fun is watching
Outbreak with a carload of Cornell biochem students and pre-meds.
Rippety rippety, shred shred shred.) The film is uneven but Kevin Spacey
puts in a classic performance as the Monster Boss, a tyrannical Hollywood
producer. “These paperclips mean more to me than you do!”
(See entry for Action)
Bad Movies
The book Bad Movies We Love by Edward Margulies and Stephen Rebello
introduced me to a world of cinema I had previously steered away from. Far away.
Hollywood productions that had gone somehow completely haywire. For the
first time in my life I actually went out of my way to see Peyton
Place, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Doctor's Wives.
Some of these were exactly the kind of hooty trash the authors promised,
some were merely terrible, and some... some were inspirationally bad.
On the list that follows, Bad Movies We Love stand side by side with
some of the 'traditional' so-bad-they're-good type of films.
* Consult
Michael Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and The
Psychotronic Video Guide; the Torah and Talmud of Psychtronic film.
* See also
Paul Roen's High Camp, volumes 1 & 2 for the authoritative word
on camp film.
- Valley of the Dolls
- Dolls is so rigorously over-the-top, you have to give
the filmmakers credit. Every moment in a film represents a decision; 'is
this too tasteless?' 'is this too much?' 'too cliched, perhaps?'. “No,”
the filmmmakers reply confidently, “Nothing is too much for us. We are
creating the definitive film about a fashion model, a sex-bomb movie
starlet, and Broadway musical starlet going to Hollywood and wrecking their
lives and careers with bad decisions, bad relationships, and pills. A film
for the ages.” The resut is truly a wonder to behold.
(When I was in the 7th grade my reading teacher caught me reading
Jacqueline Sussan's Valley of the Dolls during free-reading time and
took it away for the day. In her opinion, it wasn't the sort of thing
impressionable minds should be exposed to. In my opinion, no mind should
be exposed to the lengthy fashion montage starring the model that occurs
about mid-way through the film and features the very height of jaw-dropping 1967
couture.)
- Black Lizard
- I just saw this insane 1968 Japanese gem again, and I adore it
as much as ever. Opening, as it does, with thrashing, gyrating go-go girls intercut with
Aubrey Beardsley drawings, the viewer is alerted immediately that this film
will attempt to set the bar for high decadence. In this, it succeeds
gloriously.
The suave-but-dedicated hero intones about the fabulously glamorous
villaness, “Black Lizard - you are an old-fashioned romanticist. In
this age soiled by corruption and murder you believe that crime should wear
a gorgeous gown with a train 15 feet long. Just like the primordial dreams
of lizards.”
Jewels are stolen. Beautiful young women are kidnapped. Expensive
furniture is buried at sea. Evil henchwomen assassinate nosy detectives by
hurling poisonous snakes at their throats. Yukio Mishima makes an
appearance as an exquisite corpse.
The password is:
“The sky grows purple as the sun sets.
Monkeys adorn the cow with candles.
Their sighing can be heard.”
You'll know it's me when I respond:
“Men are aflame.
The sea is aflame.”
- Glen or Glenda or "I Changed My Sex"
- The only film on this list to have caused me actual physical
injury. I laughed so hard while ironing cotton shirts I ran the iron over
my thumb. Forget Plan 9 from Outer Space - this is Ed Wood's true
magnum opus; his painfully sincere and hopelessly inept portrayal of the
life of a transvestite. (As Wood himself was. The director was notably
fond of angora.) Bela Lugosi gives an unhinged performance as the
Narrator.
- Night of the Lepus
- Out of the gazillion horror flicks wherein the local wildlife
mutates into people-eating monsters, one factor sets Night of the
Lepus head and shoulders above the rest: the local, newly-enlarged
wildlife happens to be rabbits.
Consider this a moment. Take a movie like Them, for instance. Giant ants - scary
stuff, right? An ant the size of a bus is a scary proposition. Dogs...
dogs could be scary. Look at Cujo. A giant turtle would scare me.
Turtles are mean even when they're normal-size.
But rabbits? No. Even if they grow to size of Clydesdales and you smear
red paint, er...I mean, 'blood', on their twitching whiskers. No, not even
dubbing in lion-roars for your bunnies will make them any scarier while
they're chomping on a truck driver delivering lettuce. This movie is so
wrong on so many levels.
“They're heading this way, killing as they come!”
- Can't Stop the Music
- The movie that buried disco and killed the '70's barehanded.
I love this bad movie. A fictional account of the founding of the
disco group, the Village People, this film is stunningly, awesomely,
powerfully bad. I haven't the space to get as deeply into it as it
deserves. Suffice it to say: “Wow.” The production numbers
alone are enough to propel this movie to the zenith of badness. My
favorite part is the throbbing, thumping, humping, pumping paean to milk
and milkshakes.
(“Chocolate....Vanilla....Strawberrrrryyyy!”)
Knitting
Television
- Action
- My favorite television program EVER as of June 20, 2000. It's about a
sleazy, Hollywood action-movie producer named Peter Dragon. What is it
about the scum floating atop the Hollywood pond that I find so fascinating?
(See entry for Swimming With Sharks)
- Mystery Science Theatre 3000
- Yeah, I know it's cancelled, but I love those snarky
robots. I don't know how long the Sci-Fi Channel will be keeping the show's webpage up. Satellite News is a good back up.
- The X-Files
The List of Lists of Things I Love 
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