FFB: THE OVERLOOK FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA: HORROR, edited by Phil Hardy (Overlook 1993); ROMANCING THE VAMPIRE by David J. Skal (Whitman 2008)

Here's the second and so far final edition (1993, after 1985) of one of the more impressive, if deeply flawed, reference/critical works in horror film; among the flaws is that the entries are unsigned, so that one can have the fun of trying to suss out if it was Kim Newman, Tom Milne, Paul Willeman, Julian Petley, Tim Pulleine or editor Hardy, or some combination, who are responsible for one opinionated entry or another. Another rests squarely with Hardy and his publishers and their editors: to make room for new content, two relatively minor films were dropped from this edition (albeit everyone who loves horror in my generation of USians has at least heard of Don't Look in the Basement), while all kinds of questionable inclusions (Sorority House Massacre, Three O'Clock High as examples from either end of the suspense film quality range featuring psychopaths) continue...and similarly quasi-relevant work (say, El Topo) is missing, or, like Kongo, only mentioned in the entry for a film it's closely related to, as in this case as a non-silent remake of West of Zanzibar. Less of a judgement call, the index is all but useless unless you know the title or the common alternate titles of a film they offer a primary entry for; it a title is only mentioned in the text of a primary entry, good luck finding it, as with Kongo. (They have cogent things to say about the most obvious horror and horror-related films of Ingmar Bergman, but no entry in the index for The Devil's Eye, or Wild Strawberries, with its notable nightmare-sequence beginning...which would be more forgivable without full entries for the likes of Fatal Attraction.) And, as almost everyone complains about this book, it's no dry simple compendium of facts, but an often self-contradictory repository of strong opinions; someone on staff really hates Robert Bloch's scripts (without noting how much they were meddled with by the likes of producer/directors William Castle and Milton Subotsky, which one would think might be the purview of a book such as this), while someone else makes a point of praising (justly, I'd agree) the likes of the mistitled (not by Bloch!) Torture Garden (someone presumably had a copy of Octave Mirbeau's novel kicking around the office).

But in this enumeration of some of the faults of the book, I think you might be gathering some of the virtues: it's by no means a comprehensive account of all horror films made (it misses a whole lot of video-only items, including such cult gems as Trancers and Subspecies 2, while noting others as it occurs to them to do so; Japanese and some other east Asian horror filmographies are given a reasonably good representation, but hardly a thorough one, and Korean films--admittedly a booming business in the years since--hardly represented at all), it is in its nearly 500 oversized pages full of informed consideration of a wide range of horror film, including any number of obscurities that might be new to all but the most knowledgeable fan/scholar. It's the kind of book that lends itself to an online or at least hypertextual sequel, and is worth your attention if you come across it. I can see why it's fetching such large prices on the secondhand market. Thanks to Kate Laity for the gift.

Meanwhile, David J. Skal's book is a charming example of what might even hold together better online, but would lose precisely its tactile gimmicks. Skal, who could write the text of this survey of vampires in popular culture in his sleep, has that rather deft (and non-automatic!) text augmented by even more illustration, all in full color when the original is, and with the kind of tipped-in paper ephemera that did so well for Griffin and Sabine and its sequels a decade or so back; as such, this must be, if not the most expensive book Whitman Publishing has ever attempted, then certainly the most elaborate I've seen. (It comes, in its conceit of being a true scrapbook, with an unattached male vampire face mask, as well as with postcards, film-strip-like photo arrays and more in pouches or taped onto the pages.) At 144 augmented pages, all but necessarily slipcased, it sure isn't a Big Little Book while certainly also being a rather fat big book, and given the number of copies available at the picked-over Borders stores I've been visiting, it probably didn't do well...like the Overlook/Horror originally priced at $50 (well, minus 5c and in 2008 rather than 1993 dollars), you can currently get one at a Borders so endowed for $3.75 (less if you have the discount card, which will no longer be honored after Sunday). Eminently worth the effort to take the look.

A redux post from 2011.

For more of Friday's Books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Joss Whedon on the TAVIS SMILEY show (PBS late night last Thursday)

Watch Writer-director Joss Whedon on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.

INDEPENDENT LENS: Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines; Susan Orlean on The JV Club

https://dai.ly/x6jhngc

Watch Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines on PBS. Video archived here.  See more from Independent Lens.

https://dai.ly/x6jhngc

Writer Susan Orlean interviewed by Janet Varney:
This week multiple literal and metaphorical doors are knocked on and opened when Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief! The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup! Many other amazing books and essays!) and special guest star, her son Austin, stop by to unsettle Scott the Dog. Plus, find out why Janet suggests Susan’s nickname be “Puddin.”

some Dan Aykroyd films...

Six Terrible Dan Aykroyd Films:
1941: everything that was wrong about The Blues Brothers and none of its virtues. Plus clumsy misogyny is hilarious, right? Well, no.
Neighbors: you know you're in trouble when the film's score attempts to serve as a laugh track.
Nothing But Trouble: an almost complete misfire...strange, incoherent, unfunny, and not even a good try.
North: not really Aykroyd's fault, but he doesn't help. Compare the Marx Bros. in The Story of Mankind. The late Roger Ebert's famous hatred of this one got me thinking about DA's film career.
The Twilight Zone: Aykroyd the best thing about this one. But the film actually managed to kill people, and was actually just one bad rehash after another. Lithgow did what he could, as did Robert Bloch with a novelization.
Exit to Eden: When one's coping with what one knows is a piece of garbage from beginning to end, and one simply means to acquit one's self as painlessly as possible...should we call it a Gershon? (as in Showgirls)


Six Worthwhile Aykroyd Films:
Stardom: Aykroyd's fine in one of the tougher roles in this satire of mediated lives.
Ghostbusters: Not perfect, but certainly solid.
The House of Mirth: I was half-asleep before I caught this one night some time back, so should see it again, but I remember DA doing well in a good film here.
Trading Places: Rather good till it goes stupid in the train sequence, and stays too broad for most of the rest of the film...still...
All You Need Is Cash: The kind of role he was born to play.
Gross Pointe Blank: The other kind of role he was born to play. John Cusack has made three or five too many machismic geek films at this point, but getting Aykroyd to play his friendly adversary was only sensible.

Bless Their Pointed Heads:
The Coneheads: even at its most blatant, I can't hate it. Though, of course, the concept was built for short sketch comedy.
Nothing Lasts Forever

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.

FFB: Joe Gores: SPEAK OF THE DEVIL (Five Star, 1999); John Simon: MOVIES INTO FILM (Dial Press, 1971); JOHN SIMON ON FILM: 1982-2001 (Applause, 2005)

Joseph Gores, 1931-2011.



From the Contento index:
Speak of the Devil: 14 Tales of Crimes and Their Punishments Joe Gores (Five Star 0-7862-2035-X, Nov ’99, $20.95, 200pp, hc)
· Speak of the Devil · ss
· The Second Coming · ss Adam Aug ’66
· Raptor · ss EQMM Oct ’83
· Plot It Yourself [“Detectivitis, Anyone?”] · ss EQMM Jan ’88
· Smart Guys Don’t Snore · nv A Matter of Crime v2, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli & Richard Layman, HBJ, 1987
· Watch for It · ss Mirror, Mirror, Fatal Mirror, ed. Hans Stefan Santesson, 1973
· Quit Screaming · ss Adam’s Reader Nov ’69
· Killer Man [“Pro”] · ss Manhunt Jun ’58
· Faulty Register · ss Two Views of Wonder, ed. Thomas N. Scortia & Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Ballantine, 1973
· You’re Putting Me On—Aren’t You? · ss Adam Bedside Reader, 1971, 1970
· The Andrech Samples · ss Swank Sep ’70
· Night Out · ss Manhunt Oct ’61
· Sleep the Big Sleep · ss EQMM Apr ’91
· Goodbye, Pops · ss EQMM Dec ’69

Joe Gores died the other day, and I have seen nothing but fond remembrance of him as a person, as a pro's pro, as a guiding light of a man. Of course, few run around insisting what a bastard the recently deceased might be, unless they are inarguably so, but this outpouring bespeaks of the kind of person one is utterly glad to have known. I tend, at least sometimes, not to want to disturb such folks with fan letters and such, assuming (probably incorrectly) that they might not need any more affirmation from random folks off the street. But a number of the stories collected in this volume are among the most influential fiction I've read, at very least "The Second Coming," which I read at about age ten in one of the adult Hitchcock Presents: anthologies, probably one of Harold Masur's (I could go look it up, and probably will). I hadn't thought too hard about capital punishment at that point, but was not fond of the concept; this story, about would-be hipsters thinking they're about to have a kind of strange lark in weaseling their way into being among the witnesses of a state execution, and how that experience affects them, certainly affected me. I have been a confirmed opponent since.

Other stories here have stuck with me over the decades, as well..."Watch for It" and "Goodbye, Pops" were also in AHP: volumes, and made Gores's curiously upfront name (he certainly knew how to hook up into one's gut) one to look for; I can't remember for the life of me where I first read "Quit Screaming" all those years ago. Sitting down with the Contento/Ashley and/or Stephensen-Payne indices would probably tell me that, too.

But for now, I'm just ready to buy a copy of this collection, and remind myself of some of the talent and compassion, the anger and grace of the writer we just lost. And, again, condolences to all those folks fortunate enough to know the man, as well.

My greatest obligation is to what, correctly or incorrectly, I perceive as the truth. It is also a genuine satisfaction to express the truth as you feel it should be expressed.
--John Simon, "The Art of Criticism (No.4)," The Paris Review, Spring 1997.




I've recently been re-reading Movies into Film, the first John Simon book I read, and the relatively recent (and still in print) John Simon on Movies, and it remains an enjoyable and compulsive pastime...to read a critic who is not wedded to a specific ideological framework, who is so clear in esthetic judgments and open about his biases but nonetheless strives to take the work in question on its own terms...if those terms are in the pursuit of what he sees as actually achieving art, or at very least intelligently-assembled amusements. His criteria can be questioned, of course, as every Barbra Streisand idolater will insist, but not his commitment; his wit and elegance and open-mindedness are models for me that I only infrequently begin to emulate.

It’s wonderful to be hated by idiots. A German writer whom I love and whom I’ve translated, Erich Kästner, gives advice in one of his poems to a would-be suicide. He tries to give this man various reasons for not blowing his brains out. The man remains unconvinced, so Kästner says, in essence, all right, the world is full of idiots and they’re in control of everything. You fool, stay alive to annoy them! And that, in a sense, is my function in life, and my consolation. If I can’t convince these imbeciles of anything, I can at least annoy them, and I think I do a reasonably good job of that. --ibid.

As with all good critics, even when you find yourself disagreeing with his conclusions, you can see where he's coming from. He mildly enjoyed Tootsie, a film which rather bores and annoys me; he utterly dislikes The Rapture and Before Sunrise, films I see virtues in, particularly the former. But his reactions are well-explicated and only very rarely wrongheaded--there is one instance in the newer collection where he clearly misunderstood what was being suggested by the film under review, but I don't have the book at hand and don't remember which it was (I'll slip that in later), but this instance is surprising in its near-uniqueness, in my experience. More often, part of what he so very good at is in isolating what is wrong with a deeply flawed film, whether it be Midnight Run or In the Company of Men, without losing sight of their strengths; in thoroughly castigating the dishonest film, such as Smooth Talk (where the greatest dishonesty is in how it traduces the career-making short story by Joyce Carol Oates that it supposedly seeks to adapt, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?") and celebrates the great, nearly perfect attempt to crystallize truth, such as Badlands. And he is not afraid to turn his analysis to the work of other critics, often demonstrating more virtues in Pauline Kael, for example, or even Andrew Sarris, than I might otherwise credit them with.

I think it's time I finally dug out his Acid Test, and picked up my own copy of Private Screenings, which I believe I've read but am uncertain. Dwight Macdonald's introduction to the first is probably worth the cost of admission in itself, or so I hope.

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog for a roundup.

Three films in the last fortnight: LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS, BLACK SWAN, the third Salander film, LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRANGDES (THE [WOMAN] WHO KICKED...)

So, I've seen three newish films in theaters in the last two weeks, if none on this busy weekend...and all three are about women with deficits who meet Good Men and/or Women, and in the case of the Salander film, the third of the Millennium Trilogy oddly mistitled in English, and Love and Other Drugs, the good men (and women) help out our heroine Salander and a young woman with Parkinson's and related commitment issues, to one degree or another, and in Black Swan, the good woman can't quite overcome the influences of the malefactors in the protagonist's life. Though Why women with deficits are consistently In Trouble, when men with deficits (see any Judd Apatow or Happy Madison production, or the likes of The Hangover) are Just Regular Guys, is a good question. One probably should ask why all the women leads in these films are suffering, one hopes only temporarily and role-specifically, from something akin to anorexia, as well...


The Salander films are all crowd-pleasers, with the Asperger's-spectrum heroine in this installment playing mostly by The Man's rules as noble public servants help her by rooting out the evil that government bureaus and consultants and patsies do. You can tell she's a Rebel because she wears a mohawk to trial, which would seem to be unhelpful to her case, but the suggestion here as with the other films is that we should be against the kind of condescension that retitles the novels and films in this language and this language only as The Girl..., except in the case of the second novel, wherein the Girl Who was actually a girl when playing with fire. I liked it a lot, as I did the second film also more than the first, just because the first seemed a bit more outlandish...the conspiracy that causally abuses Salander throughout the works is at least somewhat better delineated in the latter two films, both made for TV apparently rather than for cinematic distribution, as was the first.


Love and Other Drugs is also related to television, one could say, as the kind of subject matter that writer-director Ed Zwick loves to deal with in television series, ranging from thirtysomething through My So-Called Life, Relativity and, my favorite, Once and Again to the slightly disappointing web-series, later briefly televised, quarterlife. A pilot for CBS, A Marriage, was shot and declined without being shown, so far. So, instead of the kind of historical drama that Zwick has been doing for cinematic release, such as Glory and Blood Diamond, Zwick somewhat splits the difference with a romantic drama with comic bits (some perhaps broader than they need to be) and some serious subtexts involving caring for people with degenerative diseases, and the responsibilities of the "ethical" drug industry and how they are avoided (the film is loosely based on the memoirs of a pharma rep in the last years of their utter cowboy phase, ten to fifteen years ago...considerably if not sufficiently fenced in these days). Good performances, including from Judy Greer and the other smaller-role supporting players, including one of the last or perhaps the last performance by Jill Clayburgh. There are a few threads left dangling (not least in that a drug rep might well be able to provide discounted prescriptions for low-income patients), and I'm not sure whether I think it was deft to leave it vague as whether Anne Hathaway's character was a trust-fund baby or not...somewhat improbable that she can live the life she does without a financial cushion.


Black Swan is the least successful of the three, while probably the most ambitious. However, it doesn't help that there isn't a non-stereotyped character in the film, despite those characters being fleshed out by good performances by Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder among others. But, quite aside from the Fragile Diva, the Good-Sporty Potential Best Friend (and Manic Pixie Girlfriend, Free-Spirit Division), the Stage Mother, and The Bitter Dumped Star, the film as a whole will remind you, or at least it does me, of better films...not solely The Red Shoes, but also Repulsion, Persona, and a bit of the latter-day kind of horror of perception films such as Donnie Darko. Or, to some extent, Aronofsky's previous films...listening to Natalie Hershlag being interviewed about Aronofsky's attempts to create a Method rivalry between Kunis and herself did little further respect his intellect or professionalism. When the script features such Cleverness as the Svengali choreographer of the ballet troupe telling the fragile, overly-controlled, severely in need of apron-string-cutting protagonist that There will be no boundaries between them...ho, ho, So Telling! But it's well-shot, and as I mentioned, well-acted (even if, as actor Marcia Wallace notes on Jackie Kashian's podcast, "Portman" wanders throughout the film looking consistently startled, which helps the constant potential for goofiness tip in that directiton for at least some viewers). I've been told it's a love it or hate it film...it's just a good try, on the part of the cast, by me, and not bad...not nearly as bad nor good as you might've heard or read.