Tuesday's Overlooked Films and Other A/V: HOTEL; WTF and THE REALIST; MONITOR

Hotel is a film designed to displease many...particularly if one is not willing to take it on its terms, till its narrative threads appear or reappear. It's the account of a very troubled film shoot...an attempt to do a low-budget, Dogme 95 film version of John Webster's best-known work, The Duchess of Malfi, a play at least as invested in court politics and skullduggery as any of Shakespeare's, and as a result an organic metaphor for the goings-on around the production, which are as prone to outbursts of bad temper and the playing out of hidden agendas as anything in the play itself. The play has been dumbed down, in the film, by scenarist/actor "John Shirley" (played by Heathcoate Williams, who actually did help script the film, in one of writer-director Mike Figgis's many injokes; the actor playing Antonio in Malfi, Max Beesley, is a decent jazz pianist whose character in Hotel is offhandedly referred to as "Gerry Mulligan," after the saxophonist/pianist/bandleader). The producer (played by David Schwimmer) lusts after the director's paramour, and the star of the Duchess film (Saffron Burrows) and so hires one of the staff of the Venetian hotel where all the cast and crew are billeted to shoot his old friend, the director (Rhys Ifans, playing quite the indulged, tantrum-prone prat). The hotel is full of sinister goings-on, as the staff seems to be made up of possibly vampiric and definitely human-flesh-eating creatures, who are seen at the beginning of the film having tricked a foolish American tourist (John Malkovich) into joining their nightly feast, only to clearly become the main menu item for the next night.

As rather good bits of Malfi are shot throughout the film (and failed bits, as well), we see the further unraveling of the film crew's plans and work, not aided by the occasional interruptions and challenges of a Making-of documentary crew, mostly composed of the airheaded interviewer Charlee Boux (Salma Hayek) and her cameraman/soundman/producer (Lucy Liu's Sawika sweeps in to help that struggling effort along). The director, after being shot, is in paralysis for much of the film (blatantly misdiagnosed as a coma), and so the producer steps in, not only to woo the leading lady but to put his own amateurish stamp on the production.

The film is largely improvised, yet never loses structure (that it returns to the play regularly helps in this) and remains genuinely funny throughout, even as it manages to keep an edge of menace between the machinations of the staff and the interactions of the film people. That the cannibal hotel-staff tourguide (Julian Sands) yearns for the days of Italian fascism and is only one of several characters to openly mock Dogme film-making is among the many sly touches that help keep the good humor going; the multiple-screen approaches Figgis had previously explored in Timecode and the supernatural themes of Liebestraum come to fuller flowering here.

I must admit, it's a little odd for me to agree so strongly with Roger Ebert, who thinks it a brilliant film, and Elvis Mitchell, only slightly less enthusiastic, and to disagree so strongly with my friend Kate Laity, who is not alone in reviling the film (though I've yet to get a detailed pan from her).

from The Realist:


The most recent episode of Mark Maron's podcast, WTF, is an interview with Paul Krassner, he most sustainedly of The Realist magazine and newsletter, from 1958 to 2001 with a few years off for odd behavior. Maron is seeking large answers to large questions about what the ultimate meaning of Krassner's and Bruce's work is, and the nature of their challenge to society in particularly the 1960s (though of course both began their key work in the latter '50s)...which is as good an opportunity as any to drop in a plug for The Realist archive website, a comprehensive facsimile of the magazine's run. I only wished this hadn't gone up just after I'd blown my deadline for a long essay on The Realist for a collection of cult-magazine historical essays.

Monitor on-air staff

Meanwhile, since we're probing the '50s and '60s, here's an interesting archive of a rather more Socially Acceptable project, which nonetheless allowed for some interesting satirical and related work to be done within the confines of commercial network radio--the longform weekend project that was NBC's Monitor, from 1955 to 1975 essentially a weekend-long mixture of reportage, radio documentary and comedy (featuring Bob & Ray and many others, including Nichols and May early in their career together), and hardly conceivable outside public radio today...albeit with some of the slickness and a fair amount of the shallowness that commercial radio demanded. (Dom Imus, early in his career, was a host, as was Gene Rayburn...though Henry Morgan is remembered more fondly...)

"I really don't mind the scars." --a vignette

1: [another might follow later, or not. TM]

"But your breasts are fine...I mean, I wouldn't say they're your best feature, but..." he fumbled, flustered, not knowing how to press the case.
She didn't exactly shake him off, but replied matter-of-factly, "If I'm going make any kind of career, either in Hollywood or in the Valley, augmentation will only help."

#

Ludmilla, all six feet of her, reclined against the chair across the table from him. Her face betrayed nothing but mild amusement, but he knew that this was not all she felt...this was her default expression, carefully cultivated though probably also indicative of her assessment of life.
"Gino is a good man," she began. "I would not have married him, nor certainly had our Irena with him, if he was not. But he has a temper, and if anything was to happen to Irena or to myself, you realize that he will," she paused so very briefly here, "kill you, no matter at what cost to himself. But he is a good man, and that would be the end of it."
He waited, suspecting what was to come but having no answer to it yet. "However, I am not a good woman," Ludmilla continued. "If anything should happen to Gino, I will not stop at killing you. I will not stop at killing your wife, or your children. I will leave no living trace of you. And if anything was to happen to Irena, and I survive...it is best not to contemplate such matters at the dinner table."
She took a sip from her glass, her eyes never leaving his face. "I want you to understand this. It would be best for all concerned if you would put all thoughts of damage to my family aside, and indeed to do your best to ensure our continued prosperity. Or perhaps you should, if you must, make your move here, now."

#

"I want to look like Lady Gaga."
She rolled her eyes. "And how might you do that?"
"Practice, practice, practice," he said, only half joking.
"I'm glad you didn't claim you were Born that way..."

#

"I know you're afraid to go forward with this...it's only natural...but I can think of nothing in the world I want more than to have a child with you." She hoped she didn't sound as irrational as she felt.
His pause before replying was pregnant, she thought...not the sort of pregnancy she was hoping for. "You know what the doctors say." He nuzzled the back of her head as he spoke, her hair only slightly obscuring his words. She turned in his embrace and gave him a long kiss. Then: "I know I'm asking a lot...given the probable complications, and what might happen...but you remember what they also said...a Cesarean would in this case cut most of those risks considerably."
Not all the risks, she knew he was thinking. But there were no guarantees in this life...not a one.

#

They'd pulled her off the street two days before, at least she thought it was two days. Time wasn't passing as it did in the real world here, in this hell. The female officer sat impassively across the room; she wondered if the other woman was here simply as a sort of courtesy, some sort of pro forma attempt to conform to human rules of decency. Or if she was there simply as a trainee...she'd done nothing to meliorate the litany of torture. Perhaps she was there to keep her actual interrogator from simply repeatedly raping her and leaving matters at that. The waterboarding, the simple beating, the other procedures had not yet gotten her to name her supposed co-conspirators...the fake names she gave at one point were apparently insufficient. He was now explaining how he'd needed to search around for a smaller alligator clip to attach the auto battery to her clit, smaller than the ones he used to attach to her supposed comrades' scrotal sacs. He actually looked over at the woman officer at this point, as if offering her the honor of applying the device, then turned back to her, bound in her chair. "You realize," he said, with what could only be described as an attempt at solicitousness, "what a wreck we will leave of you." She summoned what saliva she could, and ineffectually spat, most of the spittle never quite leaving her lips.

#

The fannish tweet to the increasingly famous actress read exactly:
Olivia: My ["Wilde"]s for you, as does every other part of me. Surely you can't leave me in such a consumptive state. Think of the damage you do me.

#

The next line, in each case, in continuation or response, was:
"I really don't mind the scars."

The next line, in response, after, was, in some cases here,
"Very well."
In the others, it was,
"It's too bad that I do."

[the other vignettes in response to Patti Abbott's challenge to write one with the line "I really don't mind the scars" can be found indexed or hosted at her blog, Pattinase.]

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Robert Arthur, editor: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MONSTER MUSEUM revisited, among some other matters...

From the Contento Index:
Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum [ghost-edited by Robert Arthur] ed. Anon. (Random House, 1965, $3.95, 207pp, hc); all illustrations by Earl E. Mayan.

* · Introduction: A Variety of Monsters · [attributed to] Alfred Hitchcock · in
* 1 · The Day of the Dragon · Guy Endore · nv Blue Book Jun ’34
* 29 · The King of the Cats · Stephen Vincent Benét · ss Harper’s Bazaar Feb ’29
* 46 · Slime · Joseph Payne Brennan · nv Weird Tales Mar ’53
* 73 · The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles · Idris Seabright (Margaret St. Clair) · ss F&SF Oct ’51
* 79 · Henry Martindale, Great Dane · Miriam Allen deFord · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Mar ’54
* 95 · The Microscopic Giants · Paul Ernst · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct ’36
* 114 · The Young One · Jerome Bixby · nv Fantastic Apr ’54
* 144 · Doomsday Deferred · Will F. Jenkins · ss The Saturday Evening Post Sep 24 ’49
* 162 · Shadow, Shadow, on the Wall · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Imagination Feb ’51
* 174 · The Desrick on Yandro [John] · Manly Wade Wellman · ss F&SF Jun ’52
* 188 · The Wheelbarrow Boy · Richard Parker · ss Lilliput Oct ’50 (reprinted in F&SF, 1953)
* 193 · Homecoming · Ray Bradbury · ss Mademoiselle Oct ’46

As I'm slowly gathering up decent reading copies of all the "Hitchcock" anthologies, I just received my new copy of this, the first of the hardcover YA anthologies I've purchased (I had only read library copies and infrequently read one or two of the rather pointlessly abridged paperback copies previously), and so revisit this one after two years for FFB purposes. First off, what a fine book this is, with the generally handsome (and appropriately sinister) Earl Mayan illustrations and design running throughout, and a judicious selection of magazine fiction...if I hadn't been primed to love fiction magazines by early experience of them directly, anthologies such as this one might've done the trick by themselves.

Excellent choices by geniuses such as Benet and Wellman (one of the most resonant of his John the Balladeer stories), Bradbury and his mentor Sturgeon, and St. Clair...Miriam Allen deFord and Benet both represented by stories wherein there's some confusion as between human and dog and human and cat, but in such various means...and you simply, neither now nor in 1965, see too many reprints of Paul Ernst's work, a man who wrote solid, memorable stories such as this (about small humanoid creatures so dense they walk through the matter of the Earth as we might walk through water), even as questionable as the physics involved might be (it was in a 1936 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories rather than the somewhat more rigorous pages of a 1943 Astounding or even Sam Merwin's TWS of 1949)...Ernst wrote a lot of shudder pulp after and probably along with this story, and probably is remembered now, when at all, mostly for that (late bulletin: a little engine-searching turns up the datum that he might well be best-remembered for writing the lead novels for the hero pulp The Avenger). (One of the stories, along with the Endore, bumped from the paperback reprint...did the paperback editor see it as dated--it refers as a 1936 story to "the Great War," when it is set? Too grisly? "I've never heard of Ernst"?).

Altogether a delightful volume, as good to pick up now as when I was nine. Among the several more adult "Hitchcock" volumes I've picked up along with this one over the last week, my first hardcover copy of AH Presents: My Favorites in Suspense (1959), which reminds me that Patricia O'Connell ghost-edited at least this volume in the series, and which volume concludes with the Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel The Blank Wall...I hope to be able to further Ed Gorman's cause on behalf of a Holding revival some more in the near future.


And, as I'm gathering also all the Avram Davidson volumes I didn't already own, so as to have the stray story or variant and prefatory matter, I've finally looked at the 1971 Doubleday edition of his collection Strange Seas and Shores...which has an introduction by Ray Bradbury. Which fact is not mentioned anywhere on the clumsily illustrated cover, even in the dustjacket flap copy, nor is the Bradbury authorship mentioned on the title page nor Even in the table of contents nor credited in the copyright acknowledgments page...the marketing genius juggernaut that was Doubleday in the '70s retains its luster. Because what you want to do, if you go out of your way to have a Bradbury introduction to a 1971 story collection, is hide it as much as possible.

For more of today's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog for the links roll and more. Your servant, from the land of upper respiratory distress...

February's Forgotten Music: THE WEAVERS: REUNION AT CARNEGIE HALL 1963

In 1963, to mark their 15th anniversary as a performing unit, nearly all the Weavers (and all seven who'd recorded together...one Jackie Gibson had apparently tapped out almost immediately after formation in 1948) came onstage at Carnegie Hall for a second series of concerts, the first after a 1955 reunion concert to spit in the face of a McCarthyite blacklist of the diversely leftist band...after being the biggest hitmakers in the history of pop-folk music from 1948 to 1952, the unabashed Communist affiliation of Pete Seeger and Fred Hellerman was a very useful means of chasing them out of their Decca Records contract, off the charts and off the scene. But reform they did, and began recording for Vanguard Records, to their mutual benefit, both live and studio albums, and then Pete Seeger decided he wanted to leave the band, strike out on his own again...leading to his first replacement, the relatively slick but also rather dull Erik Darling, who would soon leave to be a solo act, then form The Rooftop Singers (their one hit being the bowdlerized "Walk Right In"), then the rather more congenial Frank Hamilton, and then for the final year of band's run, young Bernie Krause came in. The 1963 concert is thus almost the end of the band as a regular working unit as well as We're All Together Again for the First Time, and a fine set of songs it is, except for Darling's fairly dull solo "Train Time" (the man had chops on his instrument, but not a whole lot of charisma nor apparently much sense of the importance of the band he joined...to be fair, to be the New Seeger in the band was probably a bit more daunting than being, say, the New Pete Best). Despite such impressive predecessors as the Almanac Singers (which had included Seeger and Hays at times, along with Woody Guthrie and others), the Weavers basically created the commercial space for folk music in the marketplace, and the folk "revival" and efflorescence of the 1950s and later owes at least some debt at every level to what the Weavers did...

The Weavers in the first flush of their commercial success: the "Around the World" suite:


Also, no film or video footage exists of the 1963 concerts (as far as I know), but one of their best gospel numbers throughout their career is this:


Meanwhile, Pete Seeger, seeing that his old songwriting partner (and occasional Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine contributor) Lee Hays was going into a final spiral, gathered the original four together again for another reunion concert, an album and film, Wasn't That a Time, which will also be popping up again on PBS stations in early March in the US as a pledge-drive incentive:



Meanwhile, you can do worse than to gather these albums, and the documentary footage...few people, certainly few bands, have had such an epochal influence on those who followed.

For more of this month's "forgotten" music choices, please see Scott Parker's blog.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY

I've just heard, for the first time (on the archived link of The Big Broadcast from this Sunday), the 1940 Lux Radio Theater abridgement of His Girl Friday, and despite Claudette Colbert's fine subbing for Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson (with Fred MacMurray in the Cary Grant role, and Jack Carter sounding a Whole Lot like Ralph Bellamy as Bruce Baldwin), it inspires nothing so much as the desire to hear or watch the actual film.