A dream of Dune

Some Moebius landscapes to get lost in... The new Dune film will be here soon I'm told (in a theatre/living room near you), but I'm not expecting much - the trailer makes it look like one of the recent Star Wars films, and I didn't much like Blade Runner 2049 either. Instead I'll grumpily cling to my utopian dream of Dune as a multi-million dollar, internationally produced, 5-hour animated film based on the design work of Team Jodorowsky: Moebius, Giger and Chris Foss. This will mean I’ll have to sacrifice my dream casting of Donald Trump as the Baron Harkonnen, but God, wouldn't it be great to be excited again by the promise of a huge animated sci-fi fantasy a la Akira back in the day ?

I've been listening to the Dune soundtrack this morning, that strange nexus where Toto, David "Pop the Cow" Lynch (as he's referred to in the dedications on the album), the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Brian Eno meet. The author of the soundtrack's Wiki entry states Eno composed the Prophecy Theme for the film, but to me it sounds like music that was originally recorded for the Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks album, and later donated to Dune - it could certainly be used in any given moment during For All Mankind. The Wiki entry also says Eno "is rumored to have composed an entire earlier Dune soundtrack" which sounds rather fanciful - at least I've never heard of any such thing elsewhere...

I Played Misty For Me

I watched Play Misty For Me last night courtesy of Universal’s UK Blu-Ray, and am pleased that this is finally in the collection, reclaimed after too many truncated, indifferent TV screenings over the years. Seeing the film again in better circumstances, made it feel a lot fresher than I might have given it credit for in the past – the film has arguably been displaced within popular film culture by Fatal Attraction, but Misty remains a disarmingly visceral thriller and, notwithstanding the gothic shadings of The Beguiled and High Plains Drifter, the closest Eastwood has come to crafting a contemporary Horror film. I had actually forgotten that Misty was Eastwood’s directorial debut (Don Siegel’s bartender will do that) and the film is an impressive calling card, especially that spectacular helicopter shot that opens the picture. Some judicious editing would have improved the film, the picture is weighed down by an unnecessary amount of footage of Carmel, as if Eastwood was too much in love with Bruce Surtees’ landscape shots to cast them aside - I spotted one shot of waves battering the coastline that has a near imperceptible jump cut, suggesting some kind of 11th hour pruning. I’m tempted to imagine the contrasting locations were a metaphor for the two woman at the centre of the film – Donna Mills reflecting the safe, pastoral wilderness, and Jessica Walter, the tempestuous, relentless Pacific ocean, but perhaps in the end it’s all just pretty window dressing. On the other hand, the on-the-fly footage from the Monterey Jazz Festival, though rather superfluous to the plot is a real treat, and I was pleased to spot the great Joe Zawinul with the Cannonball Adderley band. My Blu-Ray edition is completely barebones (“not even a trailer” as they say!), and in the absence of Tim Lucas’ acclaimed 2020 commentary track on the Kino BR, and the contextual material that was available on previous DVD editions, I turned to Patrick McGilligan’s 1999 Eastwood biography earlier and I’m reminded of what an unpleasant read it is…

Harold Budd (1936 - 2020)

Very sad this morning to hear the news that Harold Budd has passed away. I’m not normally moved by the death of artists and such, but throughout this awful year I frequently turned to Harold Budd’s music to lift the spirits during moments when I carried a heavy heart. His gorgeous, dreamy music, his distinctive piano sound (as recognizable as Coltrane’s brassy tone) gave me considerable comfort when I felt anxious and afraid. So today, I will be listening to his albums and reflecting on his work and thanking him for creating a space to catch a breath to take shelter from the noise.

What’s Welsh for sinister ?

Friday the 13th came up in conversation last night and John Cale’s wearing of a white hockey mask in the latter half of the 70’s came to mind. I made a note to consult my copy of Cale’s 1999 autobiography What’s Welsh for Zen to find out the origin of the hockey mask, but disappointingly it gets only a cursory mention when Cale describes his idea for wearing costumes on stage to deepen the meaning of his songs. Tim Lucas suggested to me that Cale adopted the hockey mask after it made the front page of one of the American news weeklies, and I’ll go with that. I’m pleased to pick up the book again, not having looked at my copy in years, and I’m reminded of what a striking book it is, with the text laid over and meshing with photos, drawings and distressed image and typographic effects, as eccentric and erratic as Cale’s long discography. Looking for a mention of the damned hockey mask, I find myself drawn back into the book, as my eye scans over fascinating remarks about Eno, Lou Reed and quite candid revelations about his stormy, even harrowing marriage to Cynthia Wells of the GTOs...

René and Sara

I watched Don Siegel's 1970 picture Two Mules for Sister Sara on Friday night, and it's always nice to see a familiar name among the production credits - in this case look out for René Cardona's second unit director credit, a nice bit of work after Night of the Bloody Apes. When Iver Film Services released Apes on video in the UK in 1983, I think they missed a trick by not including on the sleeve the hype blurb "From the director of Two Mules for Sister Sara". Who knows, it might have saved the film from the DPP's eccentric selection of titles...

George Harrison's Electronic Sound

First album of the day, and it's turned my home office (ie. my kitchen table) into the Bell Labs, with the sounds of electronic birdsong, white noise and space-age whooshes drifting in from the living room. I watched Four Flies on Grey Velvet last week, and positioned prominently in the background of several scenes is George Harrison's 3rd album All Things Must Pass. I made a mental note to grab Harrison's album off the shelf, but this morning, in the mood for adventure, I pulled out instead, Harrison's 1969 album Electronic Sound. Putting aside the thorny question of the exact authorship of the pieces on the album, which Beatles writer Kevin Howlett addresses in the liner notes of the excellent 2014 reissue, the music here is utterly fantastic, and in places bridges the gap between the Barron’s alien soundscapes of Forbidden Planet and the free-form atonalities of early Throbbing Gristle. It’s a shame the album still remains unloved and neglected to this day.

Mank (2020, dir. David Fincher)

I watched Mank on last night and if ever a film should have been dedicated to Pauline Kael, it was this one. For the most part I enjoyed David Fincher’s film, but it fell well short of greatness, and in its own humble way, the 1999 film RKO 128 was a superior take on the making of Citizen Kane. Fincher’s film is well written and acted, but I was less pleased with his decision to shoot the picture in b/w, wishing instead he had homaged John Alonzo’s work on Chinatown rather than Gregg Toland’s on Kane. I visited the Hearst Castle in 2006, and my memory of the property, with its eccentric collection of bric-a-brac, is indelibly bathed in California sunshine, so much so, that when I saw it recreated in monochrome for the film, it felt like a stylistic overdrive. And the cue marks, charming in the first instance, became annoying after the third or fourth appearance - it’s as if David Fincher was treating American Cinema from this era as a sort of quaint museum piece. Also, I didn’t much like how the character of Louis B. Mayer was played, as a sort of diminutive cretin with a particularly sour look on his face, but perhaps I’m thinking too much of Michael Lerner’s studio boss in Barton Fink, who I think personified best the flashy studio-era movie mogul gangster…

Xmas AD: The 2000AD Annual

Christmas presents secured - check. Decorations retrieved from the darkest recesses of the attic - check. 2000AD annuals - CHECK !!! A December tradition I try to keep every year is taking some time to flick thru my remaining 2000ADs annuals - the galaxy’s greatest annual, which was always a huge part of Christmases-past. Reading David Bishop's 2009 book Thrill-Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000AD, I was dismayed to find out that the annual was a thorn in the side of the 2000AD staff, a hastily assembled rag tag collection of old strip reprints, short stories, wordsearch puzzles and quizzes, reader drawings and in the early annuals, Tomorrow's World style features on space travel, VCRs and home computers. All grist to the mill for this young earthling.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, dir. Dario Argento)

Four Flies on Grey Velvet came up in conversation a few days ago and my failure to say anything about this film prompted me to revisit Argento’s third film last night. My previous screening of the film was in 2009, when the botched MYA DVD first hit the street, so last night’s screening, courtesy of the German Koch Media Blu-Ray was long overdue. Sadly though, my inability to comment on the film was not so much down to my faltering memory, unreliable as it is, but the fact that Four Flies on Grey Velvet is rather dull and unengaging. Not having seen the film in over a decade I couldn’t recall going in who was tormenting Michael Brandon’s character and quite honestly, I gave up guessing about midway through, such was the insipid storyline and the leaden pacing - the suspense sequences in particular seem to take an age to unfold. Four Flies is a sort of oddball film at this point in Argento’s career, and it feels very self-conscious in a few respects. There’s some very show-off subjective camerawork as if Argento was flexing his muscles in an increasingly crowded murder-thriller genre that had found inspiration in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. And there’s some dismal comedy as if the director was deliberately trying to shake off expectations set by his two previous thrillers. The comedy would find greater expression in the sabbatical that was The Five Days of Milan, and if one follows the sequence of films, Four Flies…Five Days; Deep Red looks ever more like Argento’s great comeback film. Four Flies is probably a more enjoyable film to discuss than to watch, and there are ideas and elements in the film that would resonate for years to come across Argento’s work, even as far in to the future as Opera, and for that alone, the film remains an essential collector’s item.

Frightmare (1974, dir. Pete Walker)

I watched Pete Walker’s 1974 film last night, ahead of reading about the film in Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic, and thinking about Kim Butcher’s Debbie - British Cinema’s worst JD, M. Emmett Walsh’s line in Blade Runner came to mind: “Talk about beauty and the beast... she’s both”. In a film where all the principle characters are falling inexorably into a black hole, the directionless Debbie at least discovers her true calling in life, albeit to the whirling sound of a black and decker power drill.

Revisiting Frightmare after some years, I was surprised by the sheer nihilism of the film, and no doubt Pete Walker and David McGillivray delighted in sending audiences shuffling up the aisle of the cinema in awkward silence at the film's merciless climax. And speaking of awkward silences, seeing the film again remined me of a feature in the Spring '93 issue of UK quarterly fanzine Monstroid, containing a report from the Festival of Fantastic Films, held in Manchester the previous year. The organizers had come up with the brazen idea of reuniting Pete Walker and David McGillivray for a Q&A – brazen because both men had at that time not spoken to each other in 12 years, their partnership ending acrimoniously after Schizo. According to Paul Higson’s account it was a tension-filled night, with both men throwing jibes at one another, and Walker losing his cool at one point over a disputed claim in David McGillivray’s 1992 book Doing Rude Things that Walker’s films lost money. “I never said that” offered McGillivray, to which Walker, finally losing his cool, screamed: “YOU DID!” I wonder did Pete Walker and David McGillivray speak since ?