Kimberly Linn - "The Sparks" (video)

"The Sparks" - song by Kimberly Linn / Video from "The Devil Bat" (1941) PRC Bela Lugosi classic, edited by Erich Kuersten - 4 mins - the story of a love between a bat and a mad scientist, and the power of the sparks to set them free.

"For Bela, and for madmen everywhere, the misunderstood, the unappreciated and the tyrants with no subjects who rage in their secret laboratories, creating their atomic supermen, and their music, and writing, and their art. And Kimberly, come out of hiding and continue your awesome music! Like Bela, and like Poe, you are and shall be.... avenged! "

Great 70s Dads: Roger Winslet at 2008 Oscars

 

Of all the key moments at the 2008 Oscars, who could forget the single shot of Kate Winslet's pa, way way back in the mezzanine, his big black slouch hat on, rosy cheeks, as cheery and unshowy about it as you could ask. A bit reminiscent of Jack Nicholson, whose easygoing rapscallion charm usually fills the front row (was he there that night? Who remembers!), without saying a word or even being seen clearly, Winslet's dad bested in the supporting imp category. Winslet won for THE READER, a film that to me epitomizes all  that's wrong with craftsmanship Oscarbait (see my Oscarbait checklist for the Reader here) but she deserved to win for her very first film, Peter Jackson's HEAVENLY CREATURES, a debut still as fresh as auld Auckland to this old codger's eyes, and for past life karmic merits earning her a salty dog of a 70s dad like Roger.

From the site Free Frank Warner 2-23-09

  Kate Winslet accepting the best actress Academy Award and wondering aloud where he father was in the audience.

"Dad, whistle or something ’cause then I’ll know where you are."
Roger Winslet whistled so loud everyone in the world heard him. (Dad is an actor, too, appearing in several television productions. Kate is 33. Dad is 69.)

The UK's Daily Mail ran a thing about Kate's childhood where she talked of being poor, fat and bullied, which proved in the face of it to be exaggeration:

Kate Winslet never seems to tire of repeating the story of her miserable adolescence. She says that she was fat, weighing 13 stone when she was 15 years old and nicknamed-Blubber' at school. She was picked on and bullied, mentally and physically, and even locked in a cupboard; or so she says. 'I was bullied for being chubby. Where are they now!' she tells this month's Marie Claire.

Class act: Kate Winslet who grew up in a working class family in Reading, Berks., pictured with her sister Beth and father Roger.

It is interesting that, now that she has won an Oscar as Best Actress, Kate feels that she wants to talk about her past misfortunes.

It rather gives a different dimension to her current achievements and acknowledged beauty: that she has suffered in earlier life makes her seem, perhaps, all the more likeable (sic).

But speaking to some of the friends from those early days, one can't help but become a little suspicious about just how very miserable it all was.

It is true that the Winslet family did indeed live in a small terrace house, and she shared a bedroom with her sister Anna while her father, Roger, took on all kinds of part-time work to supplement his faltering acting career.

And yet, despite a lack of ready cash Roger to this day drives an ancient Vauxhall car, the fact is that money was found to send both Kate and Anna to a private theatre school. Kate went aged ten to Redroofs, then based in Reading, at a cost of £1,000 a term. (more)

Still in a punk band and it's not weird? Yep, 70s dad

Now, why would such a childhood indicate a 70s dad? It's not the childhood, it's the remembrance and the freedom to talk about it. Were her childhood truly dismal, I don't think she would remember it the way she does, or feel so free to talk about it with journalists. Joan Crawford, on the other hand, is an example of the opposite -she has etched into her face, but Winslet's face beams. A great 70s dad, as I've discussed in past 70s dad entries, is a master of indirectly (but intentionally, on some deep grand, unconscious level) inspiring rebellion against himself; he provides for his kids while seeming to be louche and undisciplined; he frees the child from any neurosis that might be caused by parental expectations, anxieties and insecurities, as is so common today. If Kate knew their lives were semi-impoverished JUST SO she could go to a tony drama school, she might have decided not to go. Instead she seems to not make the connection at all, all the more power to the mighty Winslets!

Great 70s dads preach vice but practice virtue; they roll their eyes at the self-sacrificing martyr while doing them one better. Looking at those pics above. The truth is all there in the casual smiles, the relaxed atmosphere. At the Oscar podium Winslet didn't need to paint her father in noble colors; she just spake directly to him, "Whistle!" and he whistled immediately. He was right there, like a faithful steed. He seemed to be having a great old time, way the hell back in the audience but completely relaxed and needing no validation for raising an Oscar winner. He needed no 'credit' for her win the way micro-managing parents would. Not worrying if he would be thanked or not is why he deserves it. In that winning sense, he's a cross between Stella Dallas and Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara.

Lastly, you can tell he's a 70s dad by the persona of Winslet herself. Her keen thrilling sense of gravitas and lack of self-serious sanctimony? Only a real 70s dad can only be behind that, the kind of dad who gives his daughter even the space to freely criticize the way he brought her up. He doesn't measure himself by his parenting; he pursues his own (mostly TV) acting and music careers and isn't afraid to take a tumbler or two. In the process of being Roger, he created the space for a truly great actress to thrive, for children are like plants: you water them, give them access to sun, transplant as needed, and then step back and let them figure it out on their own, maybe prune back if they grow in bad directions, but otherwise go on about your business. Most stage parents prune and fuss and overfeed until the plant's a leafless wreck of DSM-IV shakes and TIN DRUM-style stunted growth (hence all those baby faces and eating disorders). Not the 70s dad. He leaves an invisible signature. You'd never guess he was even there - until it's time for him to whistle, and show an entire Academy audience the definition of ballsy 70s dadness. Bid them heed!

The War Against Normal: A STRAW DOGS remake and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

I just saw there's a remake of Sam Peckinpah's great misunderstood masterpiece STRAW DOGS. Take a look at this poster:

First of all, what is up with that reflection of a face when we can see clearly that the chunk of glasses where said reflection would be has broken off? Did this guy get a tattoo of a dude's face on his eye? Did only his reverse clip-on shades get broken? See the original poster below and wonder to yourself what kind of poster artist would think lenses that have broken off still reflect?

And of course, no crap remake poster would be the same without a meaningless tag line. Are they asking us or telling us about this breaking point? Have they tested every man for one? What about women?  Sexist bastards.... Deconstructed, the tag intends to align the viewer with 'everyone' - indicating the sneering contempt the copywriter feels for their target demographic: "Don't worry, the hero of this movie isn't going to get pushed around for long!" Chances are the author of that tag didn't even see it, or the original, or any movie made before 1993, the year punk broke! 

The original poster was terrifying since if you look at Dustin's expression it's calm, even smiling, and compacted down to resemble Roman Polanski after a night of some energy expenditure. His eye behind the broken glass is dead like a shark's, or as if its been gouged out at the pre-photoshop art department then pasted back in by a nervous intern hoping the boss wouldn't notice. Yet he's smiling.

The weird thing is most people don't realize that Peckinpah considered Dustin's STRAW DOG math professor 'everyman' (who breaks the point and kills a bunch of locals to protect a child murderer), to be the bad guy, a self-satisfied liberal who considers himself six cuts above the riff-raff of the icky rural England locale that he settles in with his hot young wife (Susan George). See, she's easily the cutest bird inside a 60 mile radius of this Cornwall dump. She was born there so everyone knows her; she even left behind several strapping ex-boyfriends when she escaped. Now she's back. Some call this a rape-revenge film, but Hoffman never finds out about her being raped (by her ex-boyfriend and his sadistic pal after they trick Dustin into going quail hunting with them and leave him stranded way out in the middle of nowhere, then double back to the alone and kinda terrified George) and his refusal to turn the caught-red-handed pederast (David Warner) over to the mob for a right proper lynching is what sets the bloodbath in motion. Mostly, I'm betting Hoffman goes ballistic because of the dead cat (discovered hanging in the closet) - that would surely get me fired up too. If someone killed my cat I'd probably raze the whole town.

Long lumped by the literally-minded critics (how small town riff-raffish of them!) in the category of vengeful ass-kickers like Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL, and Cameron Mitchell in any AIP biker film, one can only assume the complex shadings of self-righteous lefty nerd narcissism in Hoffman's smug everyman will be weeded out in the remake until he's American Average like "everyone" with their "breaking points."

I've been reading the new Pauline Kael collection, so forgive me if I sound astringent, but apparently the idea that the one educated man who stands alone against the many armed yokels might actually be the bad guy (or at least not a cut-and-dry hero) in a film is beyond the average (petit-bourgeois) movie critic unless it's spelled out with ominous music cues and sudden outbursts of misogynistic violence. It hasn't been done to death so they don't believe it even exists. The fools! The bombastic ignoramuses!

And then there's the reverse: sometimes the villain everyone presumes is evil is actually the only sane, sympathetic person around!

Kim Morgan and the Self-Styled Siren discuss one such film, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) across both Kim Morgan's site, Sunset Gun, and Siren's classic self-titled blog, and the realization that Gene Tierney's murderous bride is actually the complex heroine of the film, which is a kind of horror story about a beautiful bi-polar artist who gets trapped in a stiflingly normal marriage with a husband who hides behind Norman Rockwell facades and close extended family sing-a-longs to avoid being intimate (hinting he might not even know he's really gay). Here's a sample from Morgan's side: 

Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty, is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung. 

Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece! (more here - Siren)

 And from la Siren:

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium. (More here / Sunset Gun)

"Psychopath Cinderella" - awesome. And here's something I wrote (link here) on the same subject for Bright Lights in March of 2010 when Film Forum screened LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN for a special week-long revival screening:

Wilde's straight-edge kid brother gets killed first after he decides to hang around the lodge like a third wheel albatross on Ellen’s neck. The way Stahl frames this event, in the peace and quiet of the lake,  makes a great ironic comment on the production code-approved craze for “discovering the great national parks” that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse’s yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing compared to the glorious moment when Gene throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage (Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one). That's incredibly hard to do, and I think it's heroic, in its own twisted way, symbolic of her yen for flight and mastery over her own self-preservation instincts (I tried to throw myself down the stairs every week as a kid, to avoid soccer practice, and just physically couldn't--my body wouldn't let me).  Meanwhile if Wilde had bothered to pay attention to her in bed and maybe even give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary.

If we, living as relatively relative free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code extended family Americana hell hole like Gene's in HEAVEN, would we act any different? Or would we just quietly disappear–like Lea Massari in L’AVENTURA (1960)– before the bores could catch us and smother us back into Stepfordville? Maybe I’m just unusually squirrelly when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme “redefines mauve.” I hate mauve. It's telling that  Gene, whom Anderson calls “one of cinema’s most chilling psychopaths,” grew up with an intellectual, adventurous father who raised her far outside the claustrophobically chipmunk cheeked tedium of “sanitized” American small town life,  No wonder she can't adapt! Like those poor once-professionally employed heroines who had to give up their jobs, get married, and dutifully cook, clean, and obey their husbands, once the code took effect in 1934.

Where I’m going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema’s phony morals; the “as long as you feel bad about it, it’s okay to kill” sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in two roles played by Winona Ryder: HEATHERS, with Winona's refusal to 'enjoy' the killing of the evil jocks and janes nonetheless orchestrated by herself and Slater; and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise - Bright Lights 4/10/08), where she only drugs her sleazy would-be lovers into a restful coma from which they awake at the happy ending. We need more LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with prefab beige rusticity, and critics with the cajones to applaud them, to see purveyors of mauve domesticity as just as deserving of death as cannibal rapists. We had THELMA AND LOUISE to inspire us in this way for awhile in the early 90s, but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of Sex and the City gourmet shopping swept over that fire like a flood of designer bottled water and soggy Stepford ash is all that remains. 

Figures like Gene are essential because they blur the line of good and evil, and help us extoll revenge using art. A murder in the movies is not the same as real life, so let it be cathartic and wild. In this sense Ellen is just such a wild  artist, a frustrated panther goddess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman’s pre-presentation nightmare and busting out of the net through any means necessary. It’s just too bad she couldn’t take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her in its tranq dart credits. 

*****
That may sound hardcore, but I embrace the Camille Paglia/ Nietzschean vantage point --beyond good and evil, baby. So how about a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN remake, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Vera Farmiga as Ellen/Gene Berent? And thank God that there are still women out there like Kim and la Siren who aren't scared to call a spade a spade, and then bury you with it.  Sometimes when life gives you lemons it's far more noble--well, not noble, but certainly more exciting and cinematic--to put them in a pillowcase and beat someone up with them than to make lemonade... especially if you're all out of sugar. Ellen is all out of sugar, America,  so take your lumps!

Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #7: The Nordics ONLINE Now!

The Fall 2011 issue of Acidemic Journal of Film and Media is now active, on-line, and considered harmed and dangerous.We've got awesome work from an array of deep talent and warped visionaries. post-theorist Steven Shaviro (The Cinematic Body, Connected); Sweden's Daniel Ekeroth (Swedish Death Metal, Swedish Sensationsfilms); revered L.A. film and rock critic Kim Morgan (Sunset Gun, MSN); beloved film historian David Del Valle; sharp-eyed Budd Wilkins (That Obscure Object of Desire); the haunted Steve Tweed; the celestial Lucy Blodgett; sharp newcomer Molly Marie Wright; rising painter Audra Graziano, and topics ranging from the sleazy sex-snuff apocalypse of the Balkans and Swedish cinema's trailblazing sexual openness to the 'kicker' phone booth vandalism of mid 1980s Stockholm; 21st wave 70s feminism via German DEFA science fiction and the 1976 TV show, Star Maidens; Bob Hope meets Thriller: They Call Her One-Eye;  Let the Right One In vs. Twilight; Thor in the Gardens of Sebastian Venable, and of course some Nordic alien theory! Come and See, and behold a pale blonde horse and the name that rode on it was Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #7: The Nordics...

And also check out the August issue of Bright Lights Film Journal #73 also online, Acidemic's two-fisted older brother!