Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais, RIP
Below, the links to reviews and citations, to what seems to me another unusually rich haul of a/v items this week (as with last week, relatively few of the reviews below are warnings, at least not in entirety).  As always, please let me know in comments when I've missed yours or someone else's...and, as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...

Bill Crider: Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (the original) [trailer]

B. V. Lawson:  Media Murder

Charlie Stella: Another Happy Day; Last Vegas; Atlantic City...and Atlantic City

Ed Lynskey: Plunder Road

Elizabeth Foxwell: Three Cases of Murder (and we are pointed to Jorge Didaco's nice brief analysis of the best segment of that film, "In the Picture"); Lloyd Alexander

Evan Lewis: The Cisco Kid and the Lady

Iba Dawson: Laughing Gas (1907)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: No Down Payment; Dante's Inferno; The Story on Page One

Jackie Kashian: Annabelle Gurwitch 

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Another Part of the Forest

Jake Hinkson: Twin Peaks...episode by episode; Norman Foster

James Reasoner: The Bible (2013 television miniseries)

Jeff Flugel: Sleuthathon

Jerry House: Tales of Frankenstein: "The Face in the Tombstone Mirror" (1958 pilot scripted by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, with input possibly from Jerome Bixby...)

Joanna Russ: A Boy and His Dog (1975 film)

John Charles: Dagon (2001 film)

Kate Laity: "Editing (and Improving) Wikipedia"

Kliph Nesteroff: The Adding Machine (1969 film of the Elmer Rice play); Allan Sherman at UCLA; The Jack Paar Show: Alexander King

Laura: Railroaded!

Lucy Brown: Double Indemnity

Martin Edwards: Point BlankJonathan Creek: "The Letters of Septimus Noone"

Marty McKee: The Americans (1960s US tv series): "The Guerillas"; Lovelace

Mike Tooney: Wagon Train: "The Trace McCloud Story"

Mystery Dave: Jayne Mansfield's Car

Patti Abbott: The Apartment

Prashant Trikannad: Jim Kelly, in Enter the Dragon

Rick: Goin' South; Kreskin

Rod Lott: The Lair of the White Worm; Primitive Love; Bad Milo

Ron Scheer: The Wonderful Country (forthcoming)

Sergio Angelini: Vienna (Series 1 collected for home audio)

Stacia Jones: Maverick (Season 4 on home video)

Stephen Bowie: The Play of the Week: "The World of Sholom Aleichem"; "The Dybbuk"

Stephen Gallagher: Saturn 3 and novelizations/freelancing vs. network work...

William Lengeman: Excalibur (among the Arthurians)

8 comments:

Prashant C. Trikannad said...

Hi Todd, thanks for the link(s). There is much to read. I see some new additions too.

Todd Mason said...

A couple, one courtesy Bill Crider (William Lengeman), one courtesy fortuitous discovery (Joanna Russ's contemporary review of the Ellison adaptation). Thanks for your continuing contributions, Prashant!

Yvette said...

Nothing from me today, Todd. Apologies.
As usual life got ahead of me. :)

Todd Mason said...

Not at all, Yvette...thanks for letting me know. I'm always happy to see something from you (and everyone), but it's hardly an obligation!

Sergio (Tipping My Fedora) said...

Some wonderful things there - and thanks for that great pic to remember the great Resnais

Todd Mason said...

Thanks, Sergio...I need to check into VIENNA...and Jackie Kashian namechecks me in the course of interviewing Annabelle Gurwitch, a small media crush of mine of some standing...heart flutters.

Todd Mason said...

And, as a result of the name-check (iirc during an attempt to recall which story or stories most inspired/best predicted the internet and the world-wide web):

OK, to live up as much as possible to the Rep, I'll suggest that the first hints at something like the internet (it really is The internet, grammatically, no matter what age one might be, notes J. Pecksniff, Prescriptive Grammarian) in sf with which I'm familiar would date to Edward Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD: FROM 2000-1887, wherein the relatively paradisical social democracy of 2000's US features among other amenities telephony with excellent fidelity, through which one can hear the orchestral work one chooses (Marconi and the radio crew were a decade or so out when Bellamy was writing). One could note that instead what Bellamy was predicting was Muzak, but let's not quibble. As the SF ENCYCLOPEDIA online reminds us, one of the best informed guesses of how things actually did work out was Will F. Jenkins's "A Logic Named Joe" (1946), which looked forward to a nearish future with a logic, which we might call a personal computer, in every home and them interconnected, and much of what we do on The Web is available through the network of logics (Jenkins, often publishing as "Murray Leinster," was one of the major figures in sf over the bulk of the 20th Century, helping to get alternate time-track fiction, aka counter-factual history, off to an early start with "Sidewise in Time" in 1934 among Many, many other contributions...Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and all the rest of the crew owed him). And, speaking of Clarke, he's probably the predictor of the net that AG is thinking of, as his "Dial F for Frankenstein" (1965) has been cited, also notes the SFE entry, by WWW co-creator Tim Berners-Lee as influential on his thinking...in the Clarke story, the worldwide telephone system has become so complex that it generates an artificial intelligence within. Sentient computers and robots were very old news in sf by 1965, but Clarke's mostly jocular story (as I remember it) might well've been the first to bring us an AI in the net.

Todd Mason said...

And I find myself realizing something (since I was writing my comments some eight hours after hearing the podcast, after my working day was over--I listen to podcasts and radio while doing my most left-brain work tasks):

Though it occurs to me that I might be a bit off-point above, since what Annabeth Gurwitch seemed most excited about with THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH was the shared experience of an alternate reality achieved through ingesting Chew-Z (as I recall) while playing with Perky Pat Layouts (or, why Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs were always on parallel tracks...Dick mixes peyote and dollhouses, LSD and Barbie) in that novel...the kind of perception of hidden realities that has been rife in fantasy and sf since at least William Blake (and, really, going back before Plato), since it's at the heart of fantasy, in many if not most ways...the metaphor of metaphor itself, the understanding of abstraction. And certainly examples of intentionally and unintentionally reaching such states of Heightened Awareness (and related delusion) are all throughout the literature...I'm trying to remember who (possibly Jenkins/Leinster) wrote the 1930s story about the cartoon character Willie Pan (possibly Willy) who would hypnotize theater audiences, and was such a kind of sf-fannish-hipster reference that it's name-checked in the Firesign Theater album-long sfnal psychodrama DON'T CRUSH THAT DWARF, HAND ME THE PLIERS...on up to such stories as Ray Nelson (or R. Faraday Nelson)'s "Eight O'Clock in the Morning", published the same year (1963) as the first Perky Pat story by Dick, the Nelson being the basis for the film THEY LIVE! (Nelson and Dick would collaborate on one novel together)...or all the 1940/50s drugs and perception stories ranging from Theodore Sturgeon's "Yesterday Was Monday" through Wyman Guin's "Beyond Bedlam" and on to Aldous Huxley's 1962 pro-drug novel ISLAND (his DOORS OF PERCEPTION phase having followed his revulsion toward psychoactive drugs in the earlier BRAVE NEW WORLD era) and such relatively shallow examples as Evan Hunter's "Malice in Wonderland"--which of course puns on one of the more famous perception fantasy novels. (Though I should add that the Sturgeon story, "Yesterday Was Monday" was all about seeing beyond the only apparently real without any drugging involved...though his similarly early and even more powerful "Shottle Bop" involves a magical beverage which allows the protagonist to see the ghosts all around us, and the ghostly environment they exist in, which we all wander through without being able to perceive it.)