Art of Criterion

Criterion have a new coffee table book out for Christmas, which showcases 30 years worth of artwork from their early laserdiscs to the latest Blus. I've always found Criterion art very hit and miss, but one design that has always stood out for me is the in-house artwork for Le Cercle Rouge. Interestingly this cover shares quite a strong resemblance to a book that emerged in 1966 entitled The Naked Society (a book about surveillance) published by Penguin imprint Pelican, and featuring a striking cover design by Derek Birdsall. I wonder did it prove an inspiration for the Criterion sleeve ? If it's mention in the Criterion book, I'd love to know !

In space no one can drink Budweiser...

The pic below is a blowup of a still from Alien showing a can of beer (held by Tom Skerritt), featuring the Weylan Yutani logo. This little detail was a pleasant surprise as I assumed the whole Weylan Yutani intruige came with the later films, but it appears the mythology-weaving was already underway. By the way, the still comes from a page I found called Typeset In the Future, which examines every bit of typography seen in the film (and elsewhere, 2001 and Moon). Well worth checking out. I love this kind of fan scholarship.

The Mover

More Beat stuff... I'm reading Penguin's first collection of William Burroughs Letters (1945-1959) and found this astute description of Neal Cassady, in a 1949 letter Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg: "He is The Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another. Wife and child may starve, friends exist only to exploit for gas money... Neal must move"

Art Beat

Browsing thru an excellent Flicker page showcasing Kerouac book covers - here are four that caught my eye...

A Handsome Piece of Deformity

Now that we've rolled into December, I'm seeing the first flurries of Best Films of the Year lists, which are a painful reminder that I hardly ever see new films until well after they hit the bargain Blu-Ray section of Amazon. Godzilla and Gone Girl were my only excursions to the cinema this year (I liked both) so with little competition to fend off, my favourite film of 2014 is Under the Skin. I read Michel Faber's debut novel back in 2001 and was a fan. And one of the things I liked best about the film was Jonathan Glazer and Walter Campbell's radical reworking of the novel. A straight adaptation would have presented enormous hazards for any film maker - in the hands of a less talented director, the film might have ended up as just another absurd gimmicky gorefest (one could imagine Neil Marshall fumbling this one), but Glazer and Campbell have quite brilliantly forged a path through the book that is in every way as ingenious as David Cronenberg and Mary Harron's adaptations of Naked Lunch and American Psycho, two novels once considered "untranslatable". Dazzling stuff and a film that pays off with repeated viewings.

South Bank Show Originals

Very much enjoying Sky Arts' South Bank Show Originals series, a fantastic archive of early 80's-era interviews conducted by Melvyn Bragg, in conversation with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Some of my highlights of the series have been a cheerful Ingmar Bergman, a tipsy unpredictable Francis Bacon, Iggy Pop fondly recalling the incendiary performances of The Stooges, and one of my personal favorites, Norman Mailer discussing his writing habits, including the ritual of crossing a precariously hanging raised wooden platform to get to his writing room, because writing he feels should be infused with danger. My only complaint is that the interviews have been whittled down to 25mins or so from the 50-odd minute original airings. Still, in an age of TV dominated by cookery programs and talent shows, the South Bank Show Originals are my favourite thing on TV right now.

A Very Gallant Gentleman

Given his current career trajectory, Liam Neeson films are to be approached with caution but last night I caught his 2012 film The Grey about a band of oil workers marooned in the frozen wastes of Alaska and menaced by marauding wolves. I enjoyed this surprisingly tough, unsentimental muscular adventure film, dare I say cut from the cloth as Deliverance. One shot featuring the men struggling against blizzard winds reminded me of John Charles Dollman's famous 1913 painting A Very Gallant Gentleman which depicts Antarctic explorer Lawrence Oates gangrenous and frostbitten leaving his tent to walk into a ferocious blizzard and certain death, an act of supreme self-sacrifice so that his three companions might continue their journey to safety without him further slowing down the party. Legend has it Oates' final words to his companions before he left were "I am just going outside and may be some time"...

Thoughts on Season of the Witch

I caught Season of the Witch this weekend and that fulfills this Horror fan's contractual obligation to watch a Halloween film for October. About halfway thru the film, my wife wandered in and asked me what I was watching, to which I shrugged my shoulders and replied "just some horror movie". Not to condescend Tommy Lee Wallace's film but to explain that this was a Halloween picture would have been far too...complicated. After this screening I can definitively claim the film to be my favourite sequel of the series, and I hope I'm right in saying that the reputation of this much maligned misfit is finally turning. Despite my love for Halloween II (and, I suspect, a badly judged soft spot for the fourth film), I feel it a shame that the series didn't develop into the Twilight Zone style anthology that Season of the Witch promised. I wonder would the film had found a more appreciative audience had it not been released at the height of the slasher boom ? As much as I enjoy Halloween II's great opening scenes - those eerie steadicam shots of Michael Myers stalking the back lanes of Haddonfield, Season of the Witch almost immediately trumps its predecessor with a terrific opening 20mins, culminating in a sequence where a sharp suited gentleman enters a hospital and crushes a man's skull before casually dousing himself with petrol and setting himself alight. It's tremendously self-confident stuff and there's a rather brazen clip of the original Halloween, previewed on a TV set, just to dispel any hopes Myers might put in an appearance. Unfortunately audiences voted with their feet and series producer Moustapha Akkad shamefully arranged a belated recovery for Michael Myers for film number four.

Still, it's fascinating to speculate on how the Halloween franchise might have developed as a series of stand-alone films. Revisiting Season of the Witch, the film's meshing of sci-fi and horror elements put Prince of Darkness in mind and disregarding the Hallowe'en pivot of the projected series, I could almost imagine Carpenter's film as a future installment - if the series produced a film a year, perhaps there might have been Halloween 8: Prince of Darkness. Interestingly, Carpenter's self-penned screenplay for Prince of Darkness was credited to Martin Quatermass, a reference to Nigel Kneale who wrote the original screenplay for Season of the Witch, and later disowned when it was revised to amp up the gore. Consequently Kneale had his name removed from the final film but much of his spirit remains, like the Silver Shamrock company's manufacturing plant which has a neat correlation between the large industrial complex of Quatermass 2. Incidentally, I must disagree with New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby's presumably tongue-in-cheek assertion that the film is "anti-Irish". Being Irish myself I rather enjoy Dan O'Herlihy's Irish toy maker druid recounting tales in his finest Wexford accent of the old country running red with the blood of sacrifice... something I find terribly romantic...

Every Dog has its day

I must be still in a Spaghetti Western mood after Compañeros at the weekend... Last night I was fumbling around looking for something to read and picked up Rebellion's first volume of Strontium Dog reprints from early issues of 2000 AD (and its predecessor Star Lord). Strontium Dog follows the adventures of bounty hunter Johnny Alpha as he travels the spaceways in pursuit of murderers, thieves, gangsters, and other inter-galactic trash with a price on its head. I'd wager that Strontium Dog writers John Wagner and Alan Grant had the Leone's Dollar films in mind when developing the series, much of it takes place in a ravaged, post-apocalyptic 22nd century Britain or on far flung worlds which resemble the arid, dusty plains of an Italian Western, while the character of Johnny Alpha has a Man With No Name flavor - cynical, laconic, an expert gunslinger, and forever the doomed outsider due to his radioactive, mutant genes. In addition the series' chief artist, Carlos Ezquerra gave Alpha a get-up as memorable as Eastwood's poncho and cigars, with Alpha equipped with a large armored shoulder pad, and a helmet when removed revealing a shock of black hair, chiseled face, broken nose and a distinct Roman look.

Strontium Dog was one of 2000 AD's major series, second only to Judge Dredd, and 10 year old boys like me ate up the fast n' loose pulp sci-fi story lines, with Johnny Alpha squaring off against space pirates, alien brains, Harryhausen-style monsters, maniacal omnipotent computers, and even Satan himself. The writing was at times rather cheesy, like the inclusion of the metal-eating fur-ball alien sidekick known as the Gronk, but the series' outrageous levels of violence and the occasional mind-bending story, like Alpha time-travelling back to 1945 Berlin to arrest Adolf Hitler, made Strontium Dog a firm favourite. Incidentally, the production team that made the excellent 2013 fan short Judge Minty are currently in pre-production on a Strontium Dog film. Watch this space earthlings...

Compañeros

With summertime (or rather the unseasonably fine weather) now firmly on the back foot in this part of the world and with a prophetic sense of timing, I've been laid up with flu all this week which has left me feeling rather low down and depressed. And so today, in search of warmer climes and cheerful company, I looked to my modest stash of Italian Westerns and first out of the traps was Sergio Corbucci's film Compañeros. Made in 1970, Corbucci's film borrows to some degree the mismatched buddy plot from The Good the Bad and the Ugly, with Franco Nero's suave Swedish gunrunner and Tomas Milian's coarse bandit on a mission to return Fernando Ray's peaceful revolutionary leader to the town of San Bernadino for execution by General Mongo, the latest in a line of despots vying for control of  Mexico. Completing the incredible cast is Jack Palance playing Franco Nero's character arch-nemesis, perpetually toking on marijuana cigarettes and sporting a wooden hand and a pet falcon named Marsha (?). If that wasn't strange enough, Palance dubs himself in the English language version with a bizarre not-quite-Scottish lilt for no apparent reason.

Unlike Corbucci's other major contributions to the genre, Django and The Great Silence, Compañeros has a mischievous sense of absurdity. By 1970 the genre had become increasingly idiosyncratic and Compañeros features at least one scene to rival the weirdness of Django Kill, when Tomas Milian's character is left to die with an up-ended basket tied to this belly, and a possum-like creature inside - the idea being that the trapped creature would eventually burrow through Milian's stomach in a bid for freedom. Despite the plentiful gunplay throughout the film, the violence is given a ludicrous touch with Nero and Milian mowing down whole armies with apparent ease, Nero at one point commanding a gatling gun in perhaps a nod to his iconic role as Django. Still, Corbucci working from his own screenplay manages to smuggle in some political commentary including some sharp criticism of American designs on struggling mineral-rich countries, and ultimately it's the film's deft mix of comedy, action and left-wing politics that makes the film more wholly enjoyable than say A Bullet For The General, another great Italian Western of the era. Seasoned Spaghetti fans will of course be well versed in the film but for anyone looking beyond the Leone films, Compañeros comes highly recommended.