First drafts we're glad didn't get produced

For your consideration — "Olives for the martini" edition

Jim Emerson rebuts the premise behind Slate's Hollywood Career-O-Matic.

filmlinc: The Coen Brothers with Noah Baumbauch: Where and How to Begin a Film?

A.O. Scott: Ushering In Golden Age for Fans of Film — "And yet if we take off our rose-colored glasses and look around at the city and its screens, a different picture emerges, with startling vividness. The golden age of New York moviegoing is now."

streamingcriterions.com: Streaming Criterions is a self-updating list of all the Criterion films that are available to view via Netflix Instant Streaming. The site updates itself to reflect any recent changes made by Netflix, and also reflect any new movies being added to the Criterion Collection.

/Film: 70 Years Later, 'Citizen Kane' Coming to Blu-ray — "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: The Frame Within the Frame series

The New Yorker: Show the Monster — Guillermo del Toro’s quest to get amazing creatures onscreen

Brandon Watson at Sirius: Paradox of Fiction — "We human beings read, watch, and listen to a lot of fiction. We know that it is fiction. But we have emotional responses and attachments to the characters. So, according to Colin Radford, who first put it forward, this shows that there's something incoherent in our emotional responses: we feel for things we know don't exist."

J.L. Wall furthers that discussion: "We empathize with fictional beings not despite their unreality, but because of their possible reality."

Michael Caine Talks Like This

audible.com: Samuel L. Jackson reads Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to Sleep — As indicated by his intro before the reading, Jackson delivers it with the élan of a father who's been exactly there. Currently it's a free download. It's also up on YouTube here. Also also, via indiewire: Werner Herzog Tells Kids to "Go the F**k to Sleep" Tonight at New York Public Library New York Public Library, which likewise got YouTubed here.

Blastr: How the Thor movie REALLY should have ended

UCLA Film & Television Archive: Laurel & Hardy preservation effort and Another Fine Mess: Laurel & Hardy's Legacy

tumblr: Rory Williams is the new Chuck Norris. More at Reddit. — Doctor Who high neepery. (Spoilers.)

Jewcy.com: Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, nominates a moment when America got hip to the Jews: it's when M.A.S.H director Robert Altman cast Elliott Gould (with Jewfro and handlebar mustache) as Trapper John (a football hero from Dartmouth):

You read the coverage of Gould at the time—it’s all about how he's a Brooklynite, how he’s a street kid—but that’s not what the movies are telling you. The movies are telling you that in the better America we are now inhabiting—and in which we get to rewrite the history of the Korean war and redo Raymond Chandler—Elliott Gould is an American. Brooklyn born, but American. That America is, in its coolest and freest and most aristocratic stratum, maybe partly or secretly Jewish.

It all comes together in that first scene where Elliott Gould reaches into his army parka, pulls out an olive jar, and drops two olives into his martini. What’s that line? "A man can't really savor his martini without an olive."  Those olives put the mix back in mixology. They're miscegenating olives. In interviews Altman liked to pretend that he himself was "half-Jewish." He was a philo-semi-Semite.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Via The New Yorker

Pic pick: L&H

Laurel & Hardy, Liberty (1929, directed by Leo McCarey, produced by Hal Roach), looking down S. Broadway and Olympic Blvd., LA.

Avast, me hearties!

For me and Elizabeth, this weekend marks either our 16th anniversary or the 16th reel of our ongoing honeymoon rom-com. So yesterday we dashed out of Seattle like impetuous romantics* and headed north to the San Juans.

Now we're on Orcas Island overlooking Massacre Bay within view of Skull Island! I'm in my own private pirate movie!

(On a side note, I can also testify that deer are to Orcas Island what squirrels are to everywhere else.)


* Tom Hanks will play me in the film adaptation, dammit, although those who keep saying I remind them of Paul Giamitti can make their case with his agent.

For your consideration — "It's not shtump" edition

The Warren Report (video): As part of her promo junket for The Beaver, Jodie Foster reveals that she'll be starring in a science-fiction movie with Matt Damon, directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9). Lots more good stuff here too on clinical depression, mental groundedness, her kids, work as a survival tool, her approach to characters.... Warren was one of my instructors at TheFilmSchool and is among the best interviewers around. "Art gets me through, art and connection."

Self-Styled Siren: Anecdote of the Week: "That's Just Not an Orgasm" — When movie composer Dimitri Tiomkin got notes on how to score. "I like it, but it isn't orgasm music," said Selznick. "It's not shtump."

Roger Ebert's Journal: Godard's "Film Socialisme" in four minutes flat — "In connection with the premiere of this film at Cannes 2010, Jean-Luc Godard posted this four-minute version of it in fast-forward. He did not explain."

Jim Emerson: Into the Great Big Boring — "But now, 'boring' is hot, at least in overheated Interwebular film criticism circles, since the publication of Dan Kois' New York Times Magazine piece called 'Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,' in which he says..."

Also, Emerson revisits Days of Heaven after 20 years — "So, if you take the drama out of the dialog and the performances, where does it go? Into the world at large."

NYT: Ta-Nehisi Coates on X-Men: First Class — "When we left the theater, my son and I knew we had experienced the most thrilling movie of the summer. 'First Class' is narratively lean, beautifully acted and, at all the right moments, visually stunning. But I had experienced something else." He follows up on his Atlantic blog. Check the comments; on top of all his other smarts, the cat really knows his X-Men.

Slate: Slate's Hollywood Career-O-Matic — What Rotten Tomatoes data tell us about the best, worst, and most bizarre Hollywood trajectories.

Technology Review: The Five Worst (Hard) Science Fiction Movies Ever

Via Glenn Erickson: Backstage promo footage on the set of Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers

Neil Gaiman: A Fairly Humongous Doctor Who Q&A Mostly — Answering questions about scripting "The Doctor's Wife" (mostly).

io9: Hula hoops and fish grenades: two contenders for the worst ninja fight ever

Via The New Yorker.

Fountain Square, Indianapolis

Via io9.

Music: Ella Fitzgerald
Near at hand: "The Woman Who Broke the Moon," first draft

SIFF — The Names of Love

The Names of Love
Le Nom des gens
France, 2010
Official website

Until Midnight in Paris, we've gone so many years between good Woody Allen movies ('cuz God knows he wasn't making them) that it took other filmmakers to provide our "Woody Allen movies" for us. For instance, Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris from 2007 struck me favorably as a comedy that chimed several WoodyAllenesque bells. Now The Names of Love, a funny, sexy, very French comic romance struck me that way again and then some.

• A witty, character-based script? ✓  
• A serious-minded, uptight guy meets a kooky "free spirit" woman; they're hopelessly mismatched, yet they somehow discover their inherent rightness together? ✓  
• They occasionally break the fourth wall to wryly address us directly? ✓  
• Characters interact with younger versions of themselves or imagined figures from the past? ✓
• The cringe-comedy dinner scene that brings together their polar-opposite parents? Big ✓

The Names of Love manages to tick those boxes without feeling derivative or anything less than director Michel Leclerc's own, and it's one of my favorite movies on this year's SIFF roster.



While succeeding as a clever, briskly paced comedy, The Names of Love also dips its spoon into some heavy themes: generation-scarring family history, sustaining memories vs. sedating forgetfulness, Arab-Jewish relations, immigration, and the experiences of French Jewish families under the Nazi occupation of WWII. The origins of sexy young Baya's insouciant promiscuity, while handled well, will be a sensitive point for some viewers.

As Annie and Alvy Baya and Arthur, Sara Forestier and Jacques Gamblin are new names on my future Go See list. Forestier's flighty, impudent Baya is an uncontainable half-Algerian hard-lefty who engages her political activism by fucking right-wingers, thereby converting them to the side of good via that brief, vulnerable moment during love-making when a man is susceptible to redemption.

Granted, there's no getting around the trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Fille Manic rêve Pixie?), but Forestier commits to the part with such fearlessness (e.g., her obliviously nude scene in the Paris Métro) that it's worth seeing the type played out again so well. Also quite fine is Gamblin as the heretofore unruffled older man who endures much for the sake of (eventually) love, or at least its "quirky" approximation. The bumpy flight of their relationship ultimately lands on a tarmac that struck me as too sweetly safe and conventional, at odds with what came before. But it's still "nice" and probably secured the feel-good vibe it aimed for.

To get all the humor, non-French viewers might benefit from an annotated guide to the film's references, ranging from topics domestic (Gamblin's "Arthur Martin" shares his name with a line of French kitchen appliances of excellent repute), pop-cultural (French talk-show intellectual/philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is jarringly translated in the English subtitles as, yes, "Woody Allen"*), and political (immigration issues; former politico Lionel Jospin makes a funny appearance as himself; and it's a safe bet that the punchline name-checked Sarkozy won't be adding this title to his Netflix list).

Even so, The Names of Love made me happy and I recommend it with enthusiasm.

* Update: This has been corrected in the version of the film now available via Amazon streaming. 

SIFF — Sound of Noise

Sound of Noise
Sweden, 2010
Official website




"This is a gig! Listen and no one will get hurt!"

One of my "must see" festival favorites, although not quite an unqualified one.

A band of musician "terrorists" strike out to save their city from the "contamination of shitty music," notably the happy-whistling muzak piped everywhere through ubiquitous white speakers. They execute their city-wide four-movement Music for One City and Six Drummers with the stealthy intrigue of an Oceans 11 operation. By staging elaborate and dangerous guerrilla public performances, they make their point not with bombs or guns but with anarcho-flash-jam concerts created on the spot using whatever "instruments" happen to be nearby. Their first movement, a medico-rave piece in a hospital, uses a celebrity-patient prepped for hemorrhoid surgery as a precision-pitched drum — that is, until he flatlines, after which the defibrillator paddles provide their own new rhythm.

Tracking down the perps is a hangdog police detective (Bengt Nilsson) who is so profoundly tone-deaf that music is physically and mentally painful to him, the result of his ugly-duckling upbringing in a family of musical prodigies. (His parents named him Amadeus, and his brother is a renowned symphony conductor.) So naturally he's the right man for the investigations. "They're musicians, and they will strike again," he says as his colleagues scoff. Naturally, cracking the case becomes an increasingly, and painfully, personal experience. Amadeus' unexpected sort-of romance with the gang's lovely female leader (Sanna Persson) leads to a sort-of salvation for him, though not in the way I expected.

While Sound of Noise avoided the pat resolution I anticipated, the ending still fell flat for me. It works fine on a story level, but dramatically it lacks a good solid punch. As the film drives forward it becomes less about the musicians and their mission, and more (ultimately entirely) about Amadeus and his more intimate, less percussive needs. The narrative doesn't so much arc as narrow, like air moving through a tuba in the wrong direction. That said, the means by which Amadeus takes charge of getting those needs met is inspired.

Sound of Noise is catchy and bright, a film I recommend without hesitation even if it doesn't quite maintain its full allegro pulse.

SIFF — 7 films: Detective Dee, Young Goethe, Lovecraft, John Cleese, and more

The title links go to SIFF pages with trailers and info.


Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
International trailer at YouTube
China, 2010

Here's China's entry in the epic-spectacle, CGI-heavy, Pirates of the Caribbean/Lord of the Rings franchise sweepstakes, and as such it's a high-flying, sword-flashing entertaining fantasy. It's fun in an old-fashioned adventure serial mode, both dazzling and cheesy in ways that jolt my brain's Oh Boy Yeah gland.

The seventh-century Tang Dynasty is portrayed as a fantastical steampunk alt-history, a place of lustrous palaces, sky-scraping statuary, mighty anachronistic fleets in the harbor, an oracular talking deer, and a mysterious force that spontaneously combusts human beings in grisly CGI detail. (There are probably flying, fire-breathing dragons one kingdom over, but George R.R. Martin got there first.)

It's here where the legendary Detective Dee (Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau) is called out of exile by the hard-as-iron Empress Wu (Carina Lau) to solve the spectral problem threatening her power and her life. The thing is, it was Empress Wu who chucked this kung fu-capable Sherlock Holmes into a distant prison in the first place for leading a rebellion against her. So, yeah, their relationship is rocky.

The martial arts scenes (ample leaping, twirling, bashing, whip-lashing, and gravity-negating wire-fu) were choreographed by Sammo Hung, whom I miss from the days of Jackie Chan in his prime. Hung also supervised the art direction, which adds an even showier layer of gosh-wow on display throughout the film. And it was gratifying to see Tony Leung back as the bad guy.

This one was a candy treat; a bit draggy now and then ("let's get the story moving again, please"), but it looks gorgeous, the cast is a pleasure to see in action, and the clear sense that it's the beginning of a commercial franchise (a prequel is in the works) detracts from the fun only as much as you think it should. Recommended, absolutely.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, by the way, is only the latest iteration of a long-standing series of stories about Tang Dynasty crime-solver Judge Dee (Wikipedia), a character inspired by the historical figure Di Renjie (c. 630–c. 700), magistrate and statesman of the Tang court. In 1974, an American ABC-TV pilot, Judge Dee, starred Khigh Dhiegh (Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-O and brainwasher Dr. Yen Lo in 1962's The Manchurian Candidate) as the roving judge in seventh century China, deciding right and wrong and solving crimes. It didn't get beyond the pilot stage, alas.



Young Goethe In Love
Germany, 2010

It's like eating cotton candy in the shower.

I enjoyed Young Goethe In Love while I was in the act of watching it. It's pretty, it's amusing, and it hits some pleasant romantic notes (sometimes with a meat pounder, but still). Its cast is attractive (alt title: The Sorrows of Young Matthew McConaughey), more than capable, and all-around appealing.

However, afterward the whole experience dissolved from my mind, leaving no impression, the movie being such insubstantial airy sugar churned out of a machine.

Its English title is market-driven to remind us favorably of Shakespeare in Love*, and YGIL is so unabashed in its attempts to ape its Oscar-winning forerunner that the whole enterprise feels like a cynical, second-rate knock-off. That feeling isn't helped by the film's rabbit-out-of-a-hat climax, which drenches us in abrupt plot goo that aims for a feel-good closer but instead clangs a transparently manipulative "Oh, puh-leeze <eyeroll>" note.

It's good but forgettable, and the more you know about the authentic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the more you'll feel tempted to throw something heavy at the screen.


* On the other hand, its original exclamation-pointy German title, Goethe!, unsettlingly evokes a musical from the '60s or Marge Simpson's "Oh, Streetcar!"



The Whisperer in Darkness
US, 2011
Official website
Making-of blog

I'm a sucker for a Lovecraft adaptation, despite my experience with the poor ones outnumbering the good ones by a scary, one might say squamous, margin. Knowing that The Whisperer in Darkness came from Sean Branney and Andrew Lehman, the filmmakers behind one of the good ones, 2005's The Call of Cthulhu, made adding its midnight-movie world premiere to my schedule a no-brainer. (If you see what I did there, you win the brass Mi-Go.) While The Call of Cthulhu told its story in the ingenious guise of a silent film from the 1920s, Whisperer was shot and written as a 1930s Universal-style noir-horror film, another hook that reeled me right in.

(Full disclosure: I nodded off a time or two during the screening, though that may have been me inadequately caffeined up beforehand for a midnighter.)

A faithful (to a fault) adaptation of one of H.P.'s keystone stories, this modestly budgeted but ambitious and mostly successful exercise in fannish dedication packs in many of the groceries you want from a full-blooded Lovecraft film: sinister and profane rites, eldritch alien god-beings, a creepy New England setting, and a steadfast academic (Matt Foyer, very good) from Miskatonic U. who's doomed by not dropping his investigations when things start getting seriously weird (talking brains in jars typically being a useful tip-off).

But as usual, the script is the weakest link, and the special effects fail to convince at the climax right when we need them at their best. For an HPL film this is one of the good ones, yet it reaffirms my contention that the most effective Lovecraft movies are those that strive for quality "Lovecraftian" pastiche/homage rather than a punctilious devotion to ol' H.P.'s actual, you know, words and ragged plotting. (Book-a-Minute's "ultra-condensed" summation of HPL's collected oeuvre fits this and other Lovecraft films to a tee.)



Spud
South Africa, 2010
Official website

In my post on Submarine, I noted that "coming-of-age" is a genre as freighted with hoary conventions as Las Vegas in May. Spud proves the point by pulling out every trite, overdone convention in the box as if we've never seen them before. Indeed, if it were not so competently executed, it would come perilously close to being the Date Movie or Superhero Movie of the Disaffected Male Teen Coming-of-Age form.

Good thing it's well done then. Yes, this umpteenth iteration of that form is over-familiar and almost aggressively ordinary, but it's solid and good-looking aaaaaaaand it features John bloody Cleese (!) back again as the English boys boarding school teacher from Monty Python's Meaning of Life crossed with Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society. So there's that.

Set in 1990 South Africa, with Nelson Mandela's release and the slow dismantling of the apartheid system very much part of the background, Spud just rises above its old-shoe trappings through a fine performance from Troye Sivan as 13-year-old "Spud" (nicknamed by his mates for his pre-pubescent male under-enhancement), a sturdy script, and proficient production values across the board.

Spud is based on a best-selling South African novel of the same name, which practically guaranteed that it would be precision engineered for mainstream commercial appeal. The film plays it so straight and safe that it has its own postal code in the Comfort Zone. While director Donovan Marsh didn't freshen up those old shoes, he did manage to get some extra mileage out of them.

Prediction: Neither good enough nor bad enough to make an impression, Spud won't stir a single ripple in the cinema pond, and this will be last we hear about it.



Lys
Germany, 2010

Here's a good-looking but cripplingly underdeveloped and, even at only 52 minutes, wearisome eco-disaster parable.

In the near-future, a high-tech "clean" power plant goes catastrophically unstable as it draws mysterious "anima" life force energy from the earth. After an amnesiac teenager, Lys (Hanna Schwamborn), is found in the reactor core, her connection to the reactor and its anima force, a connection that dates back to the day of her birth, takes on alarming properties of creation and destruction.

The film's over-familiar cautionary message — essentially, don't mess with Mother Nature — remains a worthy one, but Lys struggles to express it compellingly, using its characters not as people but as movable type on a message board. Like the reactor at its center, Lys generates not raw power so much as a sparkly New Agey woo that throws fuzzy soft filters in front of any potentially thoughtful ideas. Basic storytelling elements such as narrative cohesion, suspense, and character development are short-shrifted, subordinated to the parable. A framing device — the scientist behind the project, held at gunpoint in a post-apocalyptic Berlin, tells the tale in a flashback confessional — feels tacked on to make up for those shortcomings, but falls way short.

I'd be more impressed by Lys if someone told me that it's a film-school senior-year student project. Lys is the feature debut of 31-year-old Krystof Zlatnik, who studied at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, so that might not be far off the mark. He has a good eye behind the camera, but his sense of narrative — plotting, character, structure — is clubbed to death by his desire for meaning-laden metaphor, and you can't effectively create the latter without mastering the former. (Readers following my SIFF reviews have heard me gripe about this before.)

At 52 minutes Lys is an awkward length (was it timed for TV broadcast slots?), and this is a rare film that I think would benefit from an additional 30 minutes of exposition and story, provided that a less mediocre, more fully fleshed-out screenplay came with the deal.

Lys came preceded by the thematically compatible Roman's Ark, a 24-minute Australian short tracking a survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Roman is a botanist who every five years emerges from his underground bunker and stasis chamber to check on the return of Earth's viability. During one of his ventures into the barren wastes, he rescues a woman. However, the stasis chamber isn't built for two. What he then chooses to do — and to sacrifice — sets up a final reveal that pleased me quite satisfactorily.

Although spanning over a 1,000 years of story time, this spare, wordless film held itself together better than Lys, again proving the value of shorts that fine-tune to multiple decimal places their focus and conciseness.



The Importance of Being Earnest
Presented by Roundabout Theatre Company, L.A. Theatre Works, and BY Experience
Roundabout Theatre's page

As a theater jock from way back, I'm twelve kinds of thrilled by the National Theatre Live series, which broadcasts live (in this case, digitally recorded) theater productions in high-def to cinemas. One of my most romantic evenings ever with Elizabeth involved a twilight stroll along London's Queen's Walk between two productions at the National Theatre, and I regret that we can't replicate that evening once a month or so. So the NT Live series has all kinds of pleasing resonances for me.

Under the aegis of NT Live, this production from New York's Roundabout Theatre, shown as a "special presentation" at SIFF Cinema, saved us a trip to Manhattan while still serving up one of the best Broadway shows I've seen. Earnest opened in January and is currently a Tony Award nominee for Best Revival of a Play, Best Performance by a Lead Actor (wonderful Brian Bedford, who also directed, as Lady Bracknell), and Best Costume Design.

Oscar Wilde's Earnest is an an easy play to enjoy, but a notoriously difficult one to put on well; that is, it takes a smart cast, plus a director fully tuned in to the play's tone and beats, to find its delicate fulcrum points without leaning into the humor until the whole thing topples over into the sort of "Look at us being all OscarWildey, wink-wink" burlesque that makes Wilde cry in Author Heaven. So one of the superb qualities here is the way director Bedford and his cast, not least of which being Bedford himself as the play's center of gravity, found the precise pitch of Wilde's witty, bon mot-festooned classic. This production sparkles, and Wilde's sharp satire of upper-class social twittery is allowed to speak clearly in meticulously funny but not vaudevillian ways. What Bedford can communicate through facial expressions alone deserves its own Tony.

David Hyde Pierce introduced the show, and during the intermission we got a dressing-room interview with Bedford and a discussion on the play between the actor Alfred Molina and a Wilde scholar.

For the rest of the day I went around speaking with pristine enunciation and clipped, round tones.

On the spot iPhone art by Elizabeth.

Music: Susannah McCorkle, "Do You Miss New York?" (Yes.)
Near at hand: Kai with Duck

"Her wings made it difficult for her to get into the car" — Strange paths to my address on Google Blvd.

Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL is my "mostly movies" blog, obviously. My main website is older (pre-blogmania), pretty much static, and serves as an extension of my business card and résumé. Recently I took a long look under the hood, specifically the Google Analytics logs. I wanted to check up on how traffic has been doing over there.

Well. The results were interesting/amusing/disturbing enough that I thought I'd share some of them here. So, as recorded by Google Analytics, here's a sample of search engine keywords that have led visitors to my main website's pages over the past twelve months:

First, the egoboo:

At the top of the list (by frequency) are general permutations of my name:

• mark bourne — with or without enclosing quotation marks
• mark bourne books
• mark bourne fantasy
• mark bourne seattle
• mark bourne website
• mark bourne writer
  

...and so on. Surprising yet gratifying how many times this has occurred.

Sometimes my fiction or other work has been searched out specifically:

• mark bourne action figures — My Realms of Fantasy story, or else a new line of toys I'm not getting royalties for.
• mark bourne boss "alternate tyrants" — Alternate Tyrants was the Resnick/Greenberg anthology with my Al Capone story, "Boss." One of my favorites, actually, in a book that received zero promotion as far as I could tell.
• mark bourne - brokedown — One of my Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine stories.
• mark bourne brokedown summary — Just read the fucking story, person from Budapest.
• mark bourne mustard seed — Another F&SF story.
• like no business i know mark bourne — My second Chicks in Chainmail story (I referenced those books recently here).
• mark bourne xora — A character in my second Chicks in Chainmail story.
  
• mark bourne the nature of the beast , the nature of the beast by mark bourne — An Aeon magazine story told from the point of view of an elderly Ann Darrow some decades after the events of the original King Kong.
• boss: an oral history of the rise and rise of president alphonse capone — That's the title of a fictitious Studs Terkel book within my Alternate Tyrants story "Boss." Odd that someone was looking for it specifically.
  
• mark bourne what dreams are made on — My Full Spectrum 5 and university textbook antho story.
• My Sherlock Holmes in Orbit story, "The Case of the Detective's Smile," is far and away the most popular published story I have on the site, with new pings almost daily. Search variations have included:
  • detective's smile — Dozens of 'em.
  • mark bourne the case of the detective's smile sherlock holmes in orbit
  • the case of the detective's smile amazon
  • the case of the detective's smile download
  • the case of the detective's smile audiobook
  • the case of the detective's smile mark bourne read online
• mark bourne short story collection — Looking for the OOP Scorpius ebook or a print collection (alas)?
• stories and mark bourne
• mark bourne star trek — My ST planetarium show?
• mark bourne ray bradbury — I directed a couple of his plays and corresponded with him back in the day.
• what are mark bourne books about? — I’d like to know the answer this person came up with.
• I've written over a half-million words for various venues on movies and such things (and have this "mostly movies" blog here), so related searches on record include mark bourne film critic, mark bourne film.com, "mark bourne" dvd, and mark bourne films.
• mark bourne dr. jekyll — I sure hope this referred to the appropriate movie write-up.

Additionally, star trek: orion rendezvous and star trek: federation science, both of which I was lead writer on, still get a surprising number of search hits.

Of course, there are plenty of Mark Bournes in the world, especially in the UK, so the site has received hits from strangers probably disappointed to find the wrong one:

• mark bourne architect in omaha
• markbourne comic book artist — I wish that were me.
• mark bourne medieval — not "...on your ass," alas.
• mark bourne football — So not me.
• mark bourne first christian church of merritt island  — Ditto.
• mark bourne looking for love — My favorite.

Now it gets amusing. Or just weird. Several of my pro published stories are archived at the site, and Google searches that land people on them can be … varied. Here are selected keyword sets that have led wayward netizens to various parts of my site. These are verbatim and unedited:

• "and a beautiful diaphanous girl willing to be turned into a chimpanzee"
• "and thence we came forth to see again the stars" dante means what?
• "let me tell you bout momo, the missouri monster"
• "the sign said" "harlan ellison"
• a man who's licked his weight in wild caterpillers
• a piece of something that drove a woman insane literature
• action figure that look like a fly 
• action figures pamela anderson — also "pamela anderson action figure" on four separate occasions.
• al capone still alive
• alien seed in her belly
• almost naked action figure
• and my younger brother received pigeon shit in one of his eye when he looked up in the sky to see if it was an aircraft or something else
• baboons fucking a human being
• the beast of titan his snout sniffed the air
• big bat like things that wrap their wings around people and liquefy them movie
• bloody roosters of cantaloupe isle
• bruce willis action figure doll
• building instructions for star trek space docking station
• bulging breechcloth
• captain dichario, star trek — (The name of the main character in Star Trek: Orion Rendezvous. Named after writer and Rochester, NY pal Nick DiChario.)
• cary grant swims from one backyard pool to another to get home
• casablanca movie vs antigone by anouih — (There's a college freshman I don't envy.)
• chritian groups og the 90'simage lord i've reached the mark once more
• cosmic irony in the love song of j. alfred prufrock
• cum sprite mistress elf
• deadly figures and pamela anderson
• des belles et une bete dog sex dvd
• detached from brain .... soul adrift
• did a human being think with his mind or his heart?
• disturbed woman and a beast of nature — (This one appears twice, from separate origins and dates.)
• does anyone remember that ghost story from in a dark, dark room? it’s the story about the little girl that had a ribbon tied around her neck, she had it throughout her whole life until she grew old and sick. when she laid upon her death bed, she asked her husband to untie the ribbon.. he did, and then her head fell off.
• don't tell me the moon is shining in russian
• dream hairy palms hairy wrists
• eating whipped shit
• everything about western literature
• fat couple action figure
• fat women action figures
• fiction he like to spread eagle hairy women
• floating giggling dirigible — (My Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine story "Being Human" has just such a character.)
• galactic wizard bus
• gardner dozois mark twain invented television   
• gates mcfadden legs
• gates mcfadden leg video  
• gates mcfadden long legs 
• gates mcfadden young
• giant man huge erection grew walked towards her screamed
• going to museums is very educational
• greek mythology believes that many millions of years ago men and women were adjoined. having 4 legs and 4 arms. believing that they had become too powerful, the gods decided to cut them in half. leaving them forever to search for their soul mate.
• "he kissed her" "she slapped him" "script"
• "her skull" "her brain" wires breasts cock
• her wings made it difficult for her to get into the car
• hollywood undead im sorry no nuther web.com
• how is it like being human?
• huckleberry finn link to cosmology
• "i entered him" -butch -rooster -fair -competition -cat -dog -race
• i got us an itinerary. afraid to fly girl, it's not that scary. i want to show you around the world. i only pick a few so that makes you a special girl. its somethin about the way you smile. those dimples in your cheeks just drive me wild
• i have the cape, i make the fucking whoosh sound
• i realize that i miss being human
• i would like the joke about different parts of the body wanting to be boss of the body , but only the asshole can be the boss.
• if it wasn't me but i really ferocious beast i would just take you and they would have to lock me up forever until i died and went to hell where i would finally learn my lesson and return as me who would never dream of doing that again. its good that i wouldnt.
• is philip glass a cat person or a dog person?
• jeff goldblum flirts
• jeff goldblum intensely private person
• jeff goldblum touch nose on subway
• judy garland wore prosthetic in nostrils in wizard of oz  
• jungle fuck a monster beast 
• king kong blonde tied to poles
• "king kong" hanging wrists "ann darrow"
• king kong tears away fay wray's dress 
• kong ann torn dress   
• kubrick movies sex with many women, cuckoo clock, kubrick 
• laser show slugs story faerie  — (Someone seeking my first "Chicks in Chainmail" story. I hope.)
• lawyer action figure
• mark proving god's love through the solar system
• metal tight body move my tried sit up mouth device
• movie about woman visit village and beast descending from hell
• photo of chimp dressed in denham  
• pics of guy goes so fast then stops his eyeballs fall out 
• picture of silver slug slime left behind  
• pictures of women with wrists bound by manacles and chains — (I'm not including similar search phrases that are more disturbing than this.)
• rachel sunk back in her chair, clutching her throbbing head. she picked up the roses and inhaled deeply the sweet sent. but there was nothing sweet about this gesture.
• retro sex movies 1922
• reverting to my unchained-beast like ways
• roles and responsiblites of the bridge staff on a federation starship  
• sexy adult fantasy action figures
• sexy posable pamila anderson toy action figure
• shitty action figures   
• short stories on difficulties of being human
• slugs laser show planetarium story — (And another search for that "Chicks in Chainmail" story. Again: I hope.)
• small bald spot crawling on back, head, top spine
• space chimps movie flesh devouring beast picture
• spock visine whale  
• sun palace has earned mark bourne — (From Bangkok. Being here in Seattle, I'd like a sun palace, yes, please.)
• tiny men being stepped on videos
• warlock summons a demon and she turns him into a girl
• wasn't jeff goldblum married a third time?
• what are the chances of our visiting mercury on a field trip without using the magic school bus?
• when da vinci saw saturn's rings — (DaVinci, Galileo, whatevs)
• where in the bible does it say that satan is wrapped in diamonds
• works of western literature, mark bourne
• yell at me. leave and come back to me. musicians, painters, poets, sculptors, actors, writers, all they who like me misplace their love, who stuff it into mirrors, shatter them into half-truths, and paint the pieces and hand them out. i am compelled by a desire for them. aren't you? legless birds. we are all just too funny, too ugly, our coughs too thick to ever be tired of. bark. bark. bark at nothing.

I only hope that these visitors enjoyed whatever landing pages my site offered them, and that otherwise they found the sites (or psychiatric care) they needed.

Music: Betty Carter, "You're Mine, You" ("femmejazz" playlist)
Near at hand: Glass of Argyle Brut

For your consideration — "monstrous, twisted and eccentric" edition

Vimeo via Dangerous Minds: Sam Fuller auditions for 'The Godfather II' with Al Pacino — "A moment of cinema history - legendary film director Sam Fuller auditions for the role of Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II. He reads alongside Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, and the pair are superb together. The part eventually went to Lee Strasberg (who was nominated for an Oscar for his interpretation), but Fuller's Roth has more genuine menace, and a surprising warmth, which Strasberg's depiction lacked. You sense Fuller's Roth could stab you as much as smile at you, and Pacino's Corleone seems genuinely awed."

Misfortune Cookie: Auteurist amusement parks — "Altman's Bumper Cars. Up to 30 people can ride it at once, frequently crisscrossing and interacting."

MakingOf: Aaron Sorkin: Reel Life, Real Stories — Breaking the back of the story. (video)

MakingOf: Insider Interviews: Screenwriters

The Guardian: Fictional scientists - in pictures — "...we present some of the most monstrous, twisted and eccentric scientists ever depicted in television and film"

Bob Green (CNN contributor): Are our small screens making big stars little? — "Damn," he said. "Cary Grant."

Speaking of Cary Grant, some years ago I was invited by editor Esther Friesner to contribute a story to Chicks in Chainmail, an anthology of Satirical Tongue-in-Cheek Feminist Sword-and-Sorcery Fantasy stories. That book was a hit, and when the sequel followed (Did You Say “Chicks”?!), the editor invited me into that one too. That second story, "Like No Business I Know," was a modern Hollywood satire. In it, Cary Grant is referenced twice in regard to the affected style of a character's speaking voice.

Not Gary.

Now the first three Chicks books have been collected into a single omnibus edition, Chicks Ahoy (yes, I know). However, apparently the original books were digitally scanned during the preparation of the new volume, a now-common practice that occasionally results in little errors of a typographic nature. So now, in Chicks Ahoy, the two lines in "Like No Business I Know" referencing Cary Grant have been altered to read "Gary Grant," thus killing the joke each time.

Unless, of course, there's some very high-profile guy named Gary Grant out there I've somehow missed and whose voice makes the lines work even better than before. I don't think a retired NBA point guard quite cuts it.

Glad I didn't mention Bumphrey Bogart.

NYT: 'The Hangover' and the Age of the Jokeless Comedy

Ebert Presents: Movies That Made Us Critics: Jacques Tati's Play Time — Yes.

Media Darlings: Disney's "Pinocchio"? Proceed With Caution — "But in truth, it again feels more like every parent and child's worst nightmare of abduction and permanent disappearance, the boys literally silenced as they weep for mother and plead for mercy. Once more, the context and circumstances of the abuse are allegorical, deeply cynical, and not easily understood by a child. Even an adult could find these scenes haunting."

The Final Edition (NYT parody): New Spielberg Holocaust Epic Awarded Pre-Oscar 

Balloon Juice: The Entire Upcoming Republican Primary Campaign in 3:30 (or, the Brits got there first, as usual) — A bit of Fry & Laurie. "I thought at one point he was going to say something that actually made sense." "Yes, he just avoided it." Before he was House, Hugh Laurie was already brilliant.

5-Second Films: Check 'em out at the website or as or as compilations at Cracked.com. These guys will be running Hollywood within five years.

Roger Ebert's Journal: "I texted! You threw me out! You're assholes!" — Austin's Alamo Drafthouse theater turns rude patron's rude voice mail into a promo video that would sell me on the virtues of patronizing the Alamo Drafthouse, were I in Austin. (There's worthwhile commentary over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.)

The Atlantic: Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism — Not movie-related, but fine writing is always worth sharing.

Music: Susannah McCorkle, "Do You Miss New York?" (Yes.)
Near at hand: Elizabeth typing

Screw CGI, no. 4: NASA’s Cassini Mission set to Nine Inch Nails

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Via Gizmodo. The Atlantic interviewed Abbas about the video here.

Because you know you want more, click through to Saturn Fly-Through Progression Using Only Cassini Photographs. It will realign your day in all good ways.

Remember John Carpenter's 'The Thing'?

Now get the story from the alien's point of view.

Peter Watts' The Things is available at Clarkesworld magazine in text and audio formats. Published in January 2010, it's currently a 2011 Hugo Award Nominee. It's also a 2010 BSFA Award Finalist, 2010 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, and 2011 Locus Award Finalist for Best Short Story.

Seriously, it's good.

Screw CGI, no. 3

Via Boing Boing

George Lucas Strikes Back in Revenge Fantasy About 'Star Wars' Prequels

via Wired.com

For your consideration — "She'd be 85 today" edition

NYT: 3-D Starts to Fizzle, and Hollywood Frets
&
Business Insider: 3D Movies Are A Bust — Honestly, who outside "the biz" didn't see this coming?

io9: First look at Guillermo Del Toro’s creepy-as-hell Pinocchio puppet

NYT: Growing Funnier Each Serious Minute — A piece on Richard Ayoade, whose Submarine I waxed favorably about here.

Slate: In Praise of Unknown Actors — Jessica Chastain's graceful turn in The Tree of Life and other amazing performances by newcomers and nobodies

Roger Ebert's Journal: Harold Lloyd: A rare early short and an interview

McSweeney's: I Regret to Inform You That My Wedding to Captain Von Trapp Has Been Canceled

In that alternate universe I like to visit, Marilyn Monroe is celebrating a happy 85th birthday today, after a long and diverse career:

Sunset Gun: MM: More Than the Silver Witch of Us All — Kim Morgan on Marilyn Monroe on the occasion of Norma Jeane's 85th birthday.

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: Marilyn in Action series

Life.com: Rare Photos: Marilyn in Training and more....

6/1/56 - MM on 30th birthday - Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Music: John Lee Hooker
Near at hand: Kai at my feet

SIFF — Littlerock, On Tour

A double-header this time.

Littlerock
U.S., 2010
SIFF's page
Official site



After their rental car breaks down, Japanese brother and sister Rintaro and Atsuko are stranded for two days in the dead-ender California town of Littlerock, where the chief commodities are "partying," throwing rocks, and (for the few forward-minded) dreaming about being anyplace else. They find themselves at a rowdy party of townies, drawing Atsuko, who speaks no English whatsoever, into a group of brodude locals. Two of the guys immediately set their eyes on her. One is Cory, the sort of awkward misfit who's likely doomed to be somebody's victim all his life. The other is handsome, laconic Jordan, for whom her feelings are, for a while, significantly warmer. The siblings split when Rintaro insists they continue their planned trip to San Francisco but Atsuko chooses to stay with her new friends that, she tells him, are unlike their friends back home.

Even at only 83 minutes, this small, quiet character piece stretches its quantity of story rather thin. But not long after I began wondering where all this was going the final moments arrived, and with them some pleasing resonances and a nicely restrained reveal about the purpose of the siblings' trip, which seeks to perhaps resolve a generation-scarring family history.

For Littlerock, director Mike Ott took the Someone to Watch prize at the Indie Spirit Awards, and I can nod agreeably to that. He frames some striking images, and he deftly handles a low-key mood that hums with a muted tension, pulling us through. His amateur cast also delivers plenty to feel good about here. The film is ultimately too slight to leave a lasting dent in my memory, but I can't deny that this warm look at dislocation and communication is well crafted and carefully performed.


On Tour
Tournée
France, 2010
SIFF's page
Official site



Here's my one significant SIFF disappoint so far, and the fact of that has me sitting here wondering where I went wrong as a viewer as much as where the film went wrong for me. 

Mathieu Amalric has been on my Go See list ever since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, so his presence here as not just the star but also the writer-director put On Tour near the top of my SIFF Go See roster. That and its milieu of live-stage showbiz performers, in this case a troupe of American New Burlesque stars — played by authentic American New Burlesque stars — touring the harbor towns of France with their troubled, self-destructive manager Joaquim (Amalric). Amalric derived his "dramedy" story from a memoir by Colette. At the 2010 Cannes Amalric took the main film critics prize as well as the Best Director Award for On Tour. You watch that trailer and how could you not put this one on your Oh-hell-yeah list? Everything here seemed sure-fire to reel me right in.

But instead, On Tour managed to feel wearyingly longer than its 111 minutes. Joaquim's personal conflicts with his past associates, the bridges he burned long ago now that he desperately needs one after an important performance venue has been taken away from him, came off as fragmented, under-supported and, by the three-quarter mark, just so much empty sound and fury. Amalric himself is quite fine as always, and imbues Joaquim, a selfish and self-defeating dick for the most part, with the charm of a once-great impresario now permanently on the skids he greased himself somewhere along the way. Yet the film could have got on just as well without Joaquim, I think, and I probably would have enjoyed it more had that been the case.

Because far more interesting are the burlesque performers, the true-blue artistes playing (after a fashion) themselves: Mimi Le Meaux, Kitten on the Keys, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Evie Lovelle, and Roky Roulette. They are independent-minded professionals getting by in a tough game through brassy tenacity, purposefulness, and their individual singing, dancing, tassel-twirling talents. They come through the screen with greater naturalism, life, and dimension than Joaquim, and with half the script wordage.

Early on, one of the performers shouts to recalcitrant Joaquim from the rehearsal stage, "We don't need you. The show is our show." If only On Tour had taken that as its premise and spine, bringing the performers and their stories to the fore while delivering on the potential of their separation from the manager whose personal failings are at best stalling their careers (their longed-for big debut in Paris is quashed by his unexplicated past history there). That would have been the movie I'd wanted to see.

For a "road movie," On Tour doesn't actually seem to go anywhere. There are hints and feints toward revealing backstory behind the character of Joaquim and, among his performers, soulful Mimi, but they remain loose strands only. The level of narrative we do get seems unconcerned with following through on whatever strands it presents. What's here isn't enough to prevent On Tour from feeling, to me, as though it's the rough and protracted middle third of a three-part story about choices, making good, and sequined showbiz grit.

It's a colorful but frayed feather boa with both ends clipped.

Music: Sondheim, Company (2007)
Near at hand: almond flax muffins

Pic pick: Screw CGI, no. 2

Click to embiggen (1744 x 600).

Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning

Credit & Copyright: Antti Kemppainen

January 2007, Perth, Australia, Comet McNaught. From Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Previously on Screw CGI.

SIFF — The Thief of Bagdad: Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.

Something else SIFF does that makes me happy: screenings of acclaimed vintage films along with all the new titles. This year we get Powell and Pressberger's Black Narcissus from 1947, Fellini's La Dolce Vita ('60), and this high fantasy spectacle from 1924 starring Douglas Fairbanks, who all but leaps from the screen to radiate sheer boisterous charisma like the Malibu sun.

The Thief of Bagdad: Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.
U.S., 1924/2011
SIFF's page with trailer

When this title first pinged my SIFF radar, my response was a mix of geeky excitement (my fondness for silent-era classics being what it is) and forehead-puckering curiosity. That E.L.O.? Jeff Lynne's overelaborate electro-orchestral pop group that, alongside Abba and Frampton, saturated the '70s airwaves like Chiffon margarine with "Livin' Thing," "Telephone Line," "Mr. Blue Sky"? Plus that Shadoe Stevens? (Okay, honestly, I had to look him up. Thank you, Wikipedia.)

Why? As The Stranger's SIFF Picks put it: Because shut up, that's why.

Actually, I'm on board with any project that exposes new audiences to the great movies from the 1910s and '20s, and this rollicking, ambitious Arabian Nights adventure-romance-fantasy, starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and directed by Raoul Walsh, is indeed one of the greats (albeit not one of my top faves from the era). This "re-imagined" version also came with a high buzz quotient from the SIFF programmers.

So I was particularly excited to catch this one on a big screen with a big audience. I was not disappointed.

I won't go deep into the particulars of the film itself (TV Guide and Movie Diva offer fine overviews). I will note that it presents Fairbanks, playing the roguish slacker-thief who must prove himself worthy of the Princess, at his most flamboyantly dashing — all bare-chested vim and lithe athleticism as he runs, leaps, bounds, scales walls, and fights a giant spider under the sea, stopping occasionally to woo his high-born love or strike a swashbuckling pose, fists on hips, head tossed back in a hearty laugh. At 42 (!) he looks damn good doing it and is undoubtedly having a hell of a lot of fun. Watching him here, it's not at all surprising that The Thief of Bagdad was his favorite of all his movies.

The story itself is rudimentary stuff: our hero races his comic-book rivals (princely suitors of an unambiguously odious lot) to collect Plot Coupons in a blithely dispatched quest fantasy to win the Princess. What props it up are the film's ageless fantastical attractions: the gorgeous story-book Bagdad built of curvy dreamscape minarets and willowy arcing interiors like an inspiration for Dr. Seuss; a magic rope, a flying carpet, and, in the spectacle-rich second half, episodes set in the Valley of Fire, the Valley of the Monsters, a Sirens' lair on the ocean floor, the Cavern of Enchanted Trees, the Abode of the Winged Horse, and the Citadel of the Moon.

The vast sets and their screen-filling ornamentation were designed by the great art director William Cameron Menzies, and their grace and opulence still impress. The Thief of Bagdad was one of the most expensive productions of the era, and you can see all over the screen that the money was well spent.

All the leads here, especially Fairbanks, display the highly emotive, florid pantomime acting style that by '24 was already heading out of fashion in favor of more naturalistic performances. But nobody gesticulated with snappy, robust gusto like Fairbanks and it's just petty carping to imagine him doing it any other way. His final screen moments deliver one of the most memorable Hero exits in cinema history, in a stunt that could have ended up crushing dozens of day-worker extras if that steel-plate Magic Carpet came crashing down instead of zooming with triumphant flourish over their heads and into the starry Arabian skies.

Silent-film buffs are also treated here to beautiful Anna May Wong as the sparsely clad slave girl aiding and abetting the villainous Yellow Peril Mongol Prince, and Noble Johnson (mostly wasted) as the Prince of the Indies.

The 145-minute print itself was in good shape for an unrestored public-domain master, with only infrequent reminders of the original's 87 years of age. The color tinting was handled with a mindful touch, reproducing the original ochers and blues to good effect.

As for the post-colon "Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.": The newly applied musical scoring worked, often very well, although if you're not a die-hard E.L.O. fan (I'm lukewarm on the subject) some of the choices are repetitive and probably won't dazzle you as being "like the music was written for the film" (as Stevens reports was Jeff Lynne's assessment of an early cut). As the lights came up at the end, a number of my fellow attendees expressed high praise for the doubly retro pop mashup, and I can't say I have firm grounds to disagree with them.

Afterward, as Elizabeth and I were chatting about it at a watering hole in Seattle's Pike Place Market, she said that for her the E.L.O. score was the least interesting part of the event. As a relative newbie to silent-era films, she felt that it was a keener pleasure just to see The Thief of Bagdad in a theater at all.

Stevens himself attended the screening, speaking before and after the show and sitting just a couple rows behind us. Still a SoCal shaggy-blond at 64, Stevens clearly has been allowed access to that secret Goldie Hawn Improbable Youth Extension Treatment Center we all know exists in Hollywood somewhere. To hear him tell it, his youthful enthusiasm stems directly from his first viewing of The Thief of Bagdad as a boy. That experience made a life-shaping impression, as great films are wont to do, and this "re-imagining" is the result of his 30-years-long "obsession" to give "this real piece of 20th century art" a "definitive, perfect-perfect absolute final" musical scoring. With it he can share both the film and his pure fanboy love buttressed by, as he put it, "fanaticism at its most absurd." Before the show started I overheard him tell someone, "I made it for myself," and that sincere fan-geeky passion showed through the frames, earning him the right to place his ostentatiously spelled name up there in the title.

Unfortunately, TToB:RbSSwtMoELO is not a commercial project for wide release outside festivals and special screenings, at least not yet. It's still a work in progress as Stevens solicits studio support and investment funds to refine it with a fully restored print and a new digitally processed color palette inspired by the paintings of Maxfield Parrish, whom Fairbanks had wanted originally for the film's artistic design team. It's a shame that Parrish didn't take the job, so I'd love to see what Stevens might do to help us finally see what might have been.

Stevens told us that over the past thirty years he has put together some fifty different versions of the film in his home studio, laying down music tracks from classical to rock to experimental in various combinations. The all-E.L.O. score is the one he's most satisfied with. Me, I'd snap up a DVD or Blu-ray that brought home The Thief of Bagdad with five or ten or twelve of the diverse audio mixes he's assembled over the years, each score shaping a different experience of the film.

That I woke up today with "Mr. Blue Sky" stuck in my head I won't necessarily count as a negative. But if it happens again tomorrow... well played, Stevens, well played, sir.

Music: Rolf Lislevand, Nuove Musiche
Near at hand: Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2011