GUY MADDIN'S FILM "THE GREEN FOG" IS A GIFT IN A TIME OF CRISIS

Here is the trailer for the latest offering from Canada's most unique and iconoclastic cinematic genius.

You can watch the entire film for free on Vimeo, at this link. Witness for yourself why Maddin has earned a reputation as Canada's answer to David Lynch!

BULLET REVIEWS ~ FILMS I'VE RECENTLY SEEN

I've been focusing more on long-form projects like my concordances for Season of the Witch and In The Dust of This Planet, and also catching up on my movie watching lately... hence the paucity of updates at the Daily Dirt Diaspora, Kubrick U, The Mediavore, or anything other than "on this day" segments at the Useless Eater Blog. So I thought I'd throw up some filler content by doing short little bullet reviews of some of the movies that I've seen which I think are worth commenting on, one way or the other. So, in absolute random sequence and in no way related to the order in which I watched them, here are my thoughts on some of the movies, great and small, that I've recently watched! - Jerky

The Childhood of a Leader ~ This is "one of those" movies... the kind that really wowed me, but which I suspect will resonate powerfully with just a few, while the majority fart into their couch cushions and wonder what the hell they just watched. Which is too bad, really, because this is a top-notch thriller with one of the best musical scores of the new millennium, courtesy of Scott Walker, of Walker Brothers fame.

The story is deceptively simple, and rooted in real world history. Following the end of the First World War, an American ambassador, his French speaking wife and their young son are temporarily relocated to Europe to work on the Treaty of Versailles.The film's structure is based on a their son's transgressions, followed by his tantrums at being reprimanded, eventually leading to unexpected aftermath. These transgressions and tantrums become more brutal and disturbing as the film goes on.

If you do start in on this one, please do try to stick with it, because even though it feels as though the film is going to end without revealing anything, there does come a moment of shock revelation as the story veers with self-assurance into speculative fiction territory. One of my favorite films of 2018 so far.

***

The Bar ~ Spain's most prolific and adventurous genre director Alex de la Iglesia strikes again! Unfortunately, this time, the director of such classics as Perdita Durango, Day of the Beast, Accion Mutante, and The Last Circus doesn't have much to work with. Essentially a knock-off of the instant classic Spanish rage virus film [REC], only set in a small corner bar instead of a large, spooky apartment block The Bar swiftly succumbs to the limitations of its setting, not to mention the irrational and occasionally inexplicable decisions Iglesia is forced to have his characters make, simply to keep the plot moving forward. Despite being a fan of Iglesia's work in general, I'd recommend you give this one a miss. Go watch [REC] again, instead, and follow it up with one of Iglesia's better films (like any of the ones I mentioned above). 

***

The Shape of Water ~ As much as I love Guillermo Del Toro, and as much as I enjoyed this humanistic ode to the beauty of the broken ones, this lovingly crafted homage to the hypnotizing make-believe of old Hollywood, this exploration of deeply flawed people at an even more flawed time, the best of them trying and occasionally succeeding to make family and happiness where and however they can... I still couldn't help but think Dunkirk got robbed. And I'm not even a Nolan fan!

***

Thor: Ragnarok ~ A big hit with both critics and casual audiences, I have a feeling that time will not be kind to the third entry in Marvel's Thor cinematic saga, if only because of the decision to turn what should have been a somber, emotionally devastating event -- Ragnarok, the total destruction of Thor's homeworld of Asgard, including the grizzly deaths of numerous beloved friends and fellow warriors -- into a series of sight gags and mediocre jokes.

The formerly noble citizens of Asgard are here reduced to homely, obese, whiny, simple-minded, helpless fools who are in constant need of saving. Contrast this to the unironic celebration of "hotep" wish fulfillment tropes that Wakanda and its citizens embodied only a few months later in Black Panther, and it's not difficult to see how some alt-right bozos might have gotten the impression that there's something more than coincidence behind the joke-ification of Norse mythology, gussied up in Jack Kirby-esque comic book science-fiction flare though it may be, in Ragnarok.

Is it fun? Sure. Director Taika Waititi, who helmed the awesome vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows, does a more than decent job of crafting a cohesive narrative out of the disparate elements he's been given to play with. It was great seeing The Hulk, who's mostly been wasted since the first Avengers flick. And Jeff Goldblum being Jeff Goldblum is always a treat. But I can't help but wonder what could have been.

***

IT ~ Written at the height of horror-meister Stephen King's cocaine habit, the novel IT is mostly remembered for its length, the TV miniseries it spawned (featuring Tim Curry), and one of the most inappropriate endings in contemporary popular literature (a 13-year-old girl pulling a train of 'tweens in a sewer?!). Now that the first part of the cinematic version of IT has turned out to be a surprise late summer blockbuster in 2017 -- and that was without the benefit of Tim Curry's memorable turn as Pennywise the Clown -- maybe it will be remembered for something more. With the arrival of Part 2 next year, we'll know more.

To be honest, I don't really have much to say about this particular flick. I enjoyed it, for whatever that's worth, but it was mostly empty movie calories. The jump scares jumped, the rush scares rushed, there were a few genuinely freaky moments, but it was ultimately all so cliche'd and bound up in shopworn horror tropes that it's hard to get too enthused over the end results. It would probably be a really great movie to play in the background during a Halloween party, though, I'll give it that much.

***

Tommy ~ If you haven't seen Tommy yet, then what the Hell are you waiting for?! Get out there, find a copy and watch the damn thing! it's a goddamn rock opera masterpiece, with one of the most compelling plot lines in the history of prog! The music is great, the guest spots are great, the imagery is great (thanks Ken Russell!), Roger Daltry's performance is great, as are those of Ann Margaret and Oliver Reed... For a long time, this movie suffered a lot of hate, but NO MORE! Let its myriad charms wash over you and know the feeling of liberation that comes with playing pinball when you're deaf, dumb and blind!

***

Mom and Dad ~ Selma Blair and Nick Cage star as a typical, upwardly mobile middle class mom and dad with two kids and an Asian housekeeper. One day, the whole town is inundated with a signal that makes parents fall prey to an overwhelming rage and a need to destroy their own children (and ONLY their own children... other people's kids, they couldn't care less). Works both as gripping horror / black comedy AND as a bracing satire of the increasingly unbridgeable generational divide. Cage and Blair are both superlative, giving it their all for every second they're on the screen. A future classic. But, yeah, trigger warnings galore. 

HORROR REVIEWS ~ "GERALD'S GAME" & "THE VOID"

GERALD'S GAME (Netflix) - I went through an incredibly passionate Stephen King phase during adolescence, during which time I read every single thing he ever wrote. Good Lord, could that man throw a scare into me. There are images and moments in Salem's Lot, The Shining, and Pet Sematary that still give me goosebumps, and I'll argue for The Dead Zone's status as a Great American Novel to this day.

Sometime during my first year of university, however, I read The Dark Half, then Four Past Midnight, and both left me cold, at which point I gave up on King... as a writer of fiction, at least. This means I never got around to reading Gerald's Game, which if I recall correctly came out in a year when something like six or seven other Stephen King novels were published, and the man's legendary literary fecundity went from being a wonder to being a bit of a running joke.

Watching shit-hot indie horror specialist Mike Flanagan's stylish, assured version of Gerald's Game, I was reminded of what I loved so much about reading King's novels as a teen: His knack for telling stories that make you greedy to read more, his uncanny ability to develop extraordinary horror out of ordinary, everyday life circumstances, and his ability to create solid, believable characters via grace notes that say so much with so little... which, I realize, is ironic when discussing a writer who is often justly accused of logorrhea.

These little bullet reviews of mine are not meant to serve as film analysis or serious criticism. If and when I do start publishing more serious criticism on this particular blog... trust me, you'll recognize it. Mostly though, considering how many people read this blog (a couple dozen people a day at most), these reviews mostly serve as a way to remind myself of which movies I've seen, and whether or not I liked them. And, to my few readers, to maybe give an indication as to why I did or didn't like a movie, so that they can guess as to whether or not they might like it.

So, bottom line, I liked Gerald's Game. I liked it a lot. In fact, it instantly enters the ranks of my favorite Stephen King adaptations ever, putting it up there with Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, Reiner's Misery, Darabont's The Mist, and DePalma's Carrie. The acting is great. Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood are both, as usual, amazing. It spooked me. It impressed me with its visuals. It made me squirm in empathetic agony. It made me deeply uncomfortable. Even with its somewhat clumsy and tacked on coda, and despite its occasionally cavalier approach to incredibly touchy subject matter, this is a B movie that earns an A+ from me.

THE VOID ~ This... this is a tough one. As a lifelong horror fan, I'm generally predisposed to liking (and rooting for) films like The Void. It's a low budget affair, everyone involved is clearly game, the story contains some original ideas and a shit-ton of homages to (rip-offs of?) past movie favorites both well known and obscure, and it features some truly arresting visuals and occasionally impressive practical (i.e. non-CGI) special effects.

It's also a freaking mess, with an impossible to follow plot, way too many convenient coincidences, occasionally painful performances and dialogue, no likable characters worth rooting for, the occasional SFX fail that takes you right out of the action, and a first act jam-packed with some of my most hated cliche's and unforgivable genre movie sins.

Weird thing is, the deeper I got into this movie and the less sense it was making in terms of traditional plot and storytelling... the more I found myself willing to forgive its sins. Because, for some bizarre reason, once the filmmakers decide to give up on the "siege movie" motif of the first two acts -- it's pretty obvious they never really had their hearts in it -- and just let their freak flags fly with the surrealistic Lovecraftian nightmare of the extended third act... I gave up trying to make sense of the plot, or keep track of the characters and their motivations, and just let the movie wash over me in all its trippy, disgusting glory.

And you know something? If you'd asked me halfway through the movie how I felt about it, I would have expressed my extreme displeasure at having been taken in by the slick "80's retro" vibe of the music and the advertising and the Stranger Things font used in all the promo material, causing me to waste my time with such a greasy slice of cinematic sleaze. But when the end credits started to roll, I couldn't say that I was disappointed by it.

None of it makes a lick of sense, and I can't in good conscience recommend this to any cohort other than rabid horror movie fanatics, H.P. Lovecraft aficionados, fans of practical special effects, and lovers of Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci's somber late period films (The Beyond, for instance, which might be one of The Void's least obvious but most direct inspirations). However, if you don't mind when there's way more rough than diamond in your diamonds-in-the-rough, and you're okay with a movie where the whole is lesser than the sum of its best parts... then maybe give The Void a try.

You know what? Come to think of it, The Void might make for the perfect Halloween party background movie. Even if you pay attention, you won't really understand it any more than the people who don't, the first half is mostly silly and easy to ignore, and the all the best parts don't require that you understand what's going on in order to be fully enjoyed!

So, bottom line, The Void is a bad movie. But I really liked almost as many things as I really hated about it. Your mileage may vary, but I'd really love to know what other people think about this one. If you want, include your own bullet reviews in the comments section, below.

JODOROWSKY IN CONVERSATION WITH ARANOFSKY... WOW!

NEW WES ANDERSON TRAILER HAS LANDED!

Wes Anderson is a singular talent, with each of his films being utterly unique and distinct from each other, and yet always stamped with his highly controlled aesthetic. It's been a couple years since his last, the triumphant Grand Budapest Hotel, and now we know that he's chosen to follow up that triumph with his second run at stop motion animation after 2009's underwhelming The Fantastic Mr Fox. Fortunately, if the trailer is anything to go by, Isle of Dogs seems like an altogether different beast; less Beatrix Potter meets Oceans 11 and more George Orwell getting the contemporary Anime treatment. It seems to be set in a near future dystopian Japan where all the dogs have been banished to a trash island, where they have apparently learned to speak English. It's definitely at the top of my Must See list for 2018!

NEW GIALLO FROM THE MAKERS OF 'AMER'

Fans of gorgeously baroque, violent grindhouse/arthouse cinema, rejoice! Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have a new film coming out. It's called Laissez Bronzer les Cadavres ("Let the Corpses Tan") and it looks like a real humdinger!

TWIN PEAKS AND THE BLUE ROSE by Rocko Van Buren

We here at the Daily Dirt Diaspora family of websites are proud to bring you this illuminating Guest Post about some of the more obscure elements of the magnificent Lynch/Frost creation Twin Peaks by our brilliant friend Rocko Van Buren. Enjoy! - YOPJ

“Through the dark of futures past

The magician longs to see

One chance out between two worlds

Fire walk with me”

- Bob

TWIN PEAKS, BLUE ROSE, AND THE UFO PHENOMENON

In the first few moments of Part 12 of the ongoing Showtime television event, Twin Peaks: The Return, the audience finally learns definitively what “Blue Rose” means in the context of Dale Cooper, Gordon Cole and the rest of the FBI. This exposition comes in a scene with FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, Albert Rosenfield and agent Tammy Preston sipping fine wine while seated in a private room at a hotel in Buckhorn, South Dakota, surrounded by red curtains (reminiscent of the mysterious Red Room itself), Albert explains Blue Rose is a secret extension of the now-closed, real-world Project Blue Book conducted by the U.S. Air Force to investigate UFO phenomena.

As the Air Force describes in it's own documentation, some of which is now publicly available through the Freedom of Information Act and quoted here from Wikipedia:

Project Blue Book was one of a series of systematic studies of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) conducted by the United States Air Force. It started in 1952, and it was the third study of its kind (the first two were projects Sign (1947) and Grudge (1949)). A termination order was given for the study in December 1969, and all activity under its auspices ceased in January 1970.
Project Blue Book had two goals:
1 To determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and
2 To scientifically analyze UFO-related data.”

Prior to this revelation in Part 12 of The Return, fan-favorite character Maj. Garland Briggs from Twin Peaks original two seasons was the show's clearest connection to Project Blue Book and how the classified Air Force investigation connects to the White and Black Lodges of Twin Peaks lore.

Following a mysterious disappearance in Season 2 in the original run, upon which we will touch in greater detail later on, Briggs tells Cooper that even though Project Blue Book was disbanded, “There are those of us who continue in an unofficial capacity, examining the heavens as before, or in the case of Twin Peaks, the earth below. We are searching for a place called the White Lodge.”

Back in The Return, Albert explains to Agent Preston that Blue Book was shut down in 1970 as part of a “cover-up” that concluded the UFO phenomenon was not credible, and there was no resulting threat to national security.

“A few years later, the military and FBI formed a top secret task force to explore the troubling abstractions raised by cases Blue Book failed to resolve,” Albert explains. “We call it, 'The Blue Rose,' after a phrase uttered by a woman involved in one of these cases just before she died., which suggested these hazards could not be reached except by an alternate path we have been traveling ever since.”

Albert goes on to name the agents involved in this secret task force created by Cole – himself, lead agent Phillip Jeffries, Chet Desmond and the original show's main character, Dale Cooper. All of the special agents involved in Blue Rose, excepting Albert and Cole, have since disappeared. All this exposition is by way of recruiting The Return's newest FBI agent, Preston, into the fold of the Blue Rose task force. And thus we have the first explicit delineation from Project Blue Book straight to Blue Rose and the strange, occult aspects that surround the FBI's investigation into the murder of Laura Palmer in the Washington town of Twin Peaks (in the original TV series) and the murder of Teresa Banks in nearby Dear Meadow (in the film Fire Walk With Me).

While the original Twin Peaks run of 1990-921 owes much of its nostalgic love to its soap-opera-style story-lines, Cooper's frequent references to “damn fine coffee,” “the best cherry pie in the tri-counties,” and scenes like Audrey Horne engaged in a strange and seductive dance to music composed by Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, it is the lore and mystery of Twin Peaks that always attracted me most. And while this aspect of the story was certainly included in the original run of the series, it was never as prominent on ABC prime-time as it was later on in the show's darker, stranger cousin, Lynch's 1992 film Fire Walk With Me (which was my introduction to the world of Twin Peaks). Nothing in the Twin Peaks ecosphere compares to the dark strangeness of Fire Walk With Me (which was originally intended as a series of three films; however, part two and three were never filmed because of the poor critical and financial reception to its first installment). While the inability of Lynch to continue the story in the 1990s was certainly disappointing to hardcore fans, without that failure, we may not have ever been able to experience 2017's revival of Twin Peaks via The Return, in which Lynch and Frost have continued their legacy of breaking new ground in television entertainment.

OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE

Of the many oddities in Twin Peaks, the Black Lodge and its denizens, Bob, The One-Armed Man (aka Mike/Phillip Gerard) and The Man From Another Place (aka the arm) are it's most persistent and vexing. Where do they come from? What is their purpose? While there are many theories surrounding Twin Peaks culture about the meaning and origin of this place and its inhabitants, most of them ignore the connection to Project Blue Book, UFO phenomena and the possibility of alien life. My analysis will attempt to connect the line from Blue Book to Blue Rose, from the idea of UFO encounters and alien visitors to inhabiting spirits like Bob and his cohorts.

To understand this, we must first reconsider the popular conception of aliens – we are not speaking here about extraterrestrial beings in the sense depicted in Steven Spielberg's films E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These are not little green men in flying saucers, nor necessarily “Greys,” “Reptilians,” “Nordics,” nor any of the other alien races promulgated by popular culture shows like Coast to Coast AM. (although some images in The Return do bear a striking resemblance to the alien “grey,” notably the being credited as “The Experiment/Mother” in Part Eight, the being in the black box in Part One, and the first scene in Andy's vision from Part Fourteen).

Instead, we are speaking of aliens as inter/extra-dimensional beings that inhabit our world and adjacent worlds unseen, the type of spirits discussed in dozens of Hindu and Buddhist legends, and, most eloquently in 'western' society, by well-known UFO researcher and PhD Jacques Vallée. Vallée, not coincidentally, was the inspiration for Spielberg's character Claude Lacombe, played in Spielberg's film Close Encounters by François Truffaut.

In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove on the public television program Thinking Allowed, Vallée discusses his 1979 book Messengers of Deception:

ACD PICKS THE GREATEST COUPLES IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY!

It is always a pleasure to bring readers of the DDD family of blogs the wit, wisdom, and verve of one of our oldest, dearest pals, the venerable A.C. Doyle! In this enlightening and entertaining survey, Ace provides lovers of classic Hollywood a solid month's worth of programming choices, at least. Enjoy! - Jerky

There are a few on-screen pairings this past generation who have generated some heat and some laughs. Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Their oeuvres are largely somewhere between bad and forgettable–does anybody remember Joe Versus The Volcano or By The Sea or True Detective or Blended? Gere and Roberts have starred twice together, in pretty good films, Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride. And Brangelina became a pop culture term, but Mr. & Mrs. Smith–where they met on the set and she spirited him away from Ms. Aniston–and By The Sea, Ms. Jolie’s directorial debut, were fairly awful.

And most of these pairs have only starred in two or three films together. Compared to Loren and Mastroianni in 13, Taylor and Burton in 11, Hepburn and Tracy in 9, Astaire and Rogers in 10, Powell and Loy in 14, Farrow and Allen in 7 (plus he directed her in 6 more). Bogey and Bacall were only in four together, but what a four!

So it seems the Golden Era of paired actors and actresses across multiple films is largely behind us. Which is a pity, because there were some wonderful collaborations (on-screen and off, as often as not). Moreover, fine actors and actresses can develop a rapport and sense of timing, both comic and dramatic, that, like a fine wine, matures over time.

There’s also a modern conceit that showing a couple firing machine guns at bad guys then rolling around naked and sweaty in flagrante delicto is the only way to convey sexiness, desire, allure, magnetic attraction. Whereas Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert stringing up a line and draping a blanket over it in the fleabag motel so that they can’t see each other change into pyjamas and snuggle into separate beds (It Happened One Night, one of only three films to win the “Big Five” Oscars) is deliciously titillating and arousing.

So let’s take a walk down Memory Lane, and examine the great romantic/dramatic pairings. With the exception of a couple of Burton/Taylors when I was too young to see them, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, the Woody Allen films, and some Loren, most of these movies were produced well before I was born, and I’m in my mid-50s, so this nostalgic promenade will appeal to film buffs, but if you don’t watch anything before CGI and David Lynch, you might want to continue to the next article.

Let’s start with the flimsiest plots, and the least remembered movies nowadays, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.