What' da expect, Chimes?

For the second time in 40 years I attempted to watch Orson Welles' attack on Shakespeare's histories, Chimes at Midnight. The sound, or lack of it, defeats me. The actor's voices emerge from a void. No room-tone, no presence, few sound effects. Considering his background in radio, where sound sells the scene, I would think he would not ignore that important aspect of his movie. I realize he had a tight budget, but couldn't he afford a dialogue editor? Couldn't he afford a Nigra sync recorder? I suspect he shot with a unblimped camera, perhaps with production recording as only a guide track. The dialogue is out of sync.

 All of his non Hollywood films suffer from this misfortune. It distracting, it detracts from the words. It looks amateurish. The deaf and blind "film critic" TCM hired to introduce Chimes declared it to be Welles' masterpiece, his best film; contrary to the usual declaration that Citizen Kane is his best film.

SHADOW OF THE HAWK - review, of novel by Ron Honthaner

There are few Western stories burned in the memory. THE BIG SKY, LONESOME DOVE and TRUE GRIT are three that come to mind. The choice few. All three are endowed with vivid settings, memorable characters, and dialogue that rings true. A forth novel may be added to that august list. 

 The story of SHADOW OF THE HAWK is the story Mike McCloskey and the story of the West; from the keelboats on the Ohio, downriver with the steamships to New Orleans, to the coming of the railroad in Montana. It is also the story of men like Mike McCloskey, good and bad, that populate this odyssey and make the West what it became, the good and the bad. We meet McCloskey as he pays the price for a good deed. The sort that never go unpunished. Like every tragic hero a single mistake changes his life and the lives of friends and foe alike. A posse can pursue him with the intent of taking his freedom, but his pride eludes them.

 Mr. Honthaner has constructed a door to the past and invited you to step through. Take that step. You’ll enjoy it. Ron Honthaner now joins the ranks of the likes of A.B. Guthrie, Charles Portis and Larry McMurtry. We can only hope this is the first of many novels.

ROGER EBERT: MAN OF MOVIES

“You can bark like a dog all your want, but you’re still a baboon.” Bertrand Russell to Roger Ebert. 

 I hate to complain, which begs the question, “why do you complain to much?” My answer? To get it right. Tonight my complaint concerns the CNN tribute to the late ego-bloated television personality, Roger Ebert. I give my limited exposure to this Ebert love fest thumbs down, or as The Ebert would put it, “half a star for being artistically inept”, and, “failing to achieve what it set out to achieve”, that being to convince the viewer he was nothing other than a shameless self promoter. (My understanding of what any movie sets out to achieve is simple: to make money.) 

 This lout had no other intention in newspaper work than to earn money. The regular newser “film critic” was out with the poorlyables while The Ebert was in grad school while newsing, until he stumbled into BONNIE AND CLYDE. That doctorial dissertation on English Lit. suddenly was as remote as his Catholicism was to the Avignon Papsacy. Given the choice between covering a wreck inside the Loop and sitting in a dark room for two hours then writing on a subject he knew little or nothing about was as clear as a summer’s day under an azure sky. It mattered not he did not know the difference between a jump rope and a jump cut; he was a “film critic!” (Good thing for him it wasn’t an opening for a ballet critic) Wow, Hollywood is famous for making instant experts on subjects the expert didn’t know existed but a few hours before. 

 “Tonight class, we will examine the importance of an actors eye line in the BEST FILM EVER MADE, CITIZEN KANE” (always the correct answer to any question in The Movies). He became famous when joined up with Gene Siskel (the reviewer who at times would find a film he was reviewing more interesting were it two reels of the leads eating lunch. Which brings to mind the lines from THE PRODUCERS: “Take money! Buy bullets! Shoot the actors!” “You can’t shoot the actors! They’re not animals!” “Oh no? Have you ever eaten with one?”). 

 Oh yeah, is a film thumbs-up, or thumbs-down or deserving of stars, one, two, three, four, or who gives a shit? It put films right up there with Mister Blackwell’s best or worst dressed list (to port or starboard) End reel one; pop,pop,pop, beep!

The Theory of Everything

Yesterday in History, X-ray tech, historian, film expert, and general know-it-all, John Welsh, stopped watching THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING after about 45 minutes. A film critic known for his high tolerance for boredom, he could no longer tolerate the acute tedium of a movie about Stephen Hawking that started out slow and declined to a stillness worse than death. Worse, the viewer got no sense of the great mind prisoner in a degraded body. The focus was on the soap opera like coverage on his marriage and home-life. Think gag and puke. All in all, the picture was a disservice to the greatest theoretical physicist since Einstein, and a challenge to the viewer to stay awake (the noted cinema critic did fall asleep).

Boss Obama

The executive action by the current occupant of the White House is the most outrageous political payoff in United States history. It is blatant vote buying of a sort that would make Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed blush with shame. Flimflamming the country is Obama’s ambition, whereas Boss Tweed limited his political patronage to New York City. One can only wonder as to Obama’s next move. Committees of naturalization? His immigrant constituency, having won round one in the quest to Balkanize the nation, will no doubt have even greater demands. And who can blame them? They’re on a roll. A fraction of the population is compelling the nation into a constitutional crisis. Boss Obama seemingly has ambitions to become Emperor Obama. His argument is simple. Unless the Congress passes a law granting amnesty, he will do an end run around the Constitution. He has stated on twenty-two occasions he lacks the authority to grant amnesty. His executive action is the most outrageous act of cynicism ever to come out of the Oval Office. He learned nothing from the results of the midterm elections. His action will hand the Republicans the next presidency.

An Evening With Philip K. Dick

Science fiction fans of my generation pretty much followed the same course of evolution in our reading. We discovered S/F around age 12 – 13. Andre Norton was our first discovery, she wrote for readers our age. The master Robert Heinlein remains the best storyteller in the generation of the Golden Age. STARSHIP TROOPERS and DOUBLE STAR would be the favorites until he gave us STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. Isaac Asimov’s massive FOUNDATION TRILOGY is to science fiction what THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE is to history. Arthur C. Clarke is the third of the Three Masters. He is best known for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (he hated Kubrick’s movie version), but his best story is THE STAR. It concerns an epiphany that comes to a Jesuit Priest/Astrophysicist. After an expedition to a solar system 3000 light years from Earth he concludes the star that shone above Bethlehem announcing the birth of Jesus was in fact a star that went supernova and destroyed a wondrous human-like civilization. The Three Masters set the standard for science fiction. Until Philip K. Dick that is. He literally took science fiction to a higher plane. In the universe he created the United States was controlled by mega corporations whose naked greed was beyond even what the robber barons of today aspire to. A class system where the correct color credit card was required for entrance to upscale shopping malls. Police unrestrained by the courts (Gitmo would fit right in). Psychiatrist in a box functioned to make a person crazy and unfit to be drafted to a dreary colony and pointless existence on Mars. People with precognitive abilities (precogs) were common, and worth more in the employment marketplace than a Harvard MBA. Death was not the end, just a transition of the mind to a computer hard drive where loved ones could converse with the deceased on the telephone. (Sort of like James Cagney talking to his Ma while he did his time in the big house. “Top of the world, Ma!”) For a while anyway. All of his stories asked the question, “What is real?” His mind truly had more bandwidth, and as it turned out in the end, he had more than he needed. My encounter with PKD began with a knock at the door of my room at the World Science Fiction Convention in LA in 1972. A friend and I had rented a room at the International Hotel where the convention was held. We were members of the Original Gonzo Japesters (We modeled ourselves after Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, although this was hubris. We did enjoy something of a bad boys reputation with the rest of Fandom. A reputation unearned but enjoyed. My room contained a small party, wild for the social outcasts that make up science fiction fandom. I did not ask for this party of louts but could not control them. Like an airborne virus they could not be kept out. 10 or 12 sat in a circle around a pathetic guitar player who assumed we would be enthralled with his nasty toneless drone. He was ignorant of the phrase “Eric Clapton is God”. A knock . . . I opened the door there stood Philip K. Dick. I said, “My friend and I were about to enjoy a pipe. Would you care to join us”? He joined my friend and I for a couple of hours of special adult smoking mixture prepared by my friend and smoked in a Dr. Grabow ‘Royal Duke’ pipe. I would like to report on a conversation with my science fiction idol, but such a report would be as much a product of an alternate reality as you might find in one of PKD’s novels. After forty years I just don’t remember. I do remember a pleasant time spent with an interesting, soft- spoken and imaginative writer. After a time his girlfriend appeared and spirited him away. It should be noted the hard-core science fiction fans enthralled by bad music did not recognize PKD. I doubt they would have known Asimov or Heinlein. Hardly surprising as they were the type of fan who dress-up in funny science fiction garb, standard attire for morbidly obese social outcasts that dominate the S/F fan census. In the spirit of full discloser I must admit several of the music lovers were dressed in Star Trek uniforms. This was the time before the Trekkies had their own massive conventions. Before STAR WARS characters began appearing at conventions. I remember assuring PKD they were dressed up like escapees from the Paramount wardrobe department, and not simulacra induced by our adult smoking mixture. After PKD was gone we continued to smoke, and the effect took real hold of me. I considered a verbal assault on the unwanted fatsos occupying my room like the SS in a French village, until I spied a phaser pistol in the belt of one of the Trekkies. I grabbed the pistol, took sloppy aim (the only kind allowed with a phaser as they lack sights) and disintegrated the guitar player. A collective moan emanated from the music lovers, Trekkies and non Trekkies alike. “You should have set it on stun.” “Shut your mouths and get out, or you’ll get what the wandering minstrel got. Time for Scotty to beam you out”, I told them. They made a mad dash for the door, all of them, including the reintegrated musician. I had a defective phaser! I never met Philip K. Dick again, but I had expected 20 years of new works by him. Alas, that was not to be. An epiphany, rather like a dance with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, led him to a mystic odyssey chronicled in his final three novels. Far too mystic for me. He was taken at far too young an age, but he left us a dozen or so novels and short stories that can be read over and over.

Cinema is my Religion

With “War Horse”, Mr. Spielberg brings to the forefront his publicity machine along with his great talent for self-promotion. Are we amazed his cloud of sycophants declare “War Horse” a sure Oscar contender while film is still running through the gate? We would be amazed if “War Horse” could claim ownership of a story with a beginning, middle, and a dramatic end, not just a place where he called a wrap as the music swells (“Lassie, come home”). 

His attempts at capturing the mood of the films of his sainted youth works occasionally as in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. In fact it works so well he rolls it out over and over again when he is in need of easy cash after a shot at the adults. “Is this a children’s film?” “I really don’t know the age of the filmmakers, Sir.” When Spielberg has a novel with an adult theme and good story, he ignores it in favor of a series of great looking sequences, which fit together like a badly cut jigsaw puzzle. “How was the film?” “Great dinosaurs”. 

Do we really need another “Jurassic Park” movie; not that Spielberg bothered himself with either of the stories Michael Crichton gave us. His attack on Philip K. Dick’s, “Minority Report” kept the title and little else. The screenplay failed to note the “Precrime” police unit could only exist in a police state in which the Bill of Rights had been discarded. Tom Cruise’s Precrime Chief John Anderson is shown to be a drug addict, but there it ends. His addiction adds nothing to the story. The biggest howler is the introduction at the film’s conclusion of the 1861 Smith&Wesson .32-short-caliber Model 2 revolver. It is claimed this revolver was given to Civil War generals at the war’s end, a fact generals Grant and Sherman failed to mention in their memoirs. Civil War officers, including general officers, preferred large bore, hard hitting .44 caliber revolvers. The Robert Urich series, “The Lazarus Man” tried to pass off similar nonsense with the Colt .31 caliber Pocket Revolver. 

There is no doubt about Wells’, “War of the Worlds”. Wells pointedly explained the social purpose of this novel in Chapter One. It is doubtful Spielberg read Wells’ novel. Doubtless he relied on the Cliff Notes of Hollywood, the story analyst’s report. Spielberg jettisoned Wells’ idea for yet another rehash of his “reuniting families” theme. “War of the Worlds” will survive this hack attack. We can only wonder why Spielberg employed François Truffaut as an actor in the absurdly dreadful “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, when he might have invited the Master to direct a film from a good script. A good script would preclude employment of his gallery of gag writers. To paraphrase Victor Hugo,''Cinema is our religion and the theater is our church.  Spielberg has desecrated the altar; he has blasphemed.