Click images for desktop size: "Frankenstein" by Mike Ploog There was a comic in the papers today about how ugly February is . . .
There's a bright spot in the month. It appears that the new foster puppy will be with us Saturday! I am happy enough to have her here to overlook the circumstances of her arrival. This has my puppy overjoyed, although she has started laying down her rules of the house.
Her house rules seem to also take in the decorating. My puppy practices feng shui. She has taken all of her toys and very carefully placed them all over the house. A couple of nights ago we were playing and she ran to get one of her toys - to increase our fun I guess. She picked up a large teddy bear from the living room floor. She moved it to the kitchen and then went back to re-arrange the 7 or 8 other toys in the living room before running back, scooping up the teddy and attacking me with it.
When we were done playing she took the bear back to the living room and again rearranged the mess of toys.
How curious.
Despite requests I am not going to simply list all the songs I think of as great!
It would be like reading the acceptance speeches at the Oscars. A lot of names no one recognizes and the only joy coming when something sounds familiar, and huge disappointment when you realize that wasn't exactly the name you were thinking of.
But it is never too wrong to make a list of best films. I've seen so many great movies recently and I haven't made up a list like this in years.
It gives me something to think about at work anyway.
This is just fun!

10) Blood Of The Beasts (George Franju) & La Jette (Chris Marker) - Okay these are two films but they are both shorts. The two of them wouldn't fill an hour of TV! I thought about putting in a third short to make a 90 minute film - like Cocteau's "Blood of The Poet" or Bunel's "Un Chein Andalou" but those films weren't good enough.
"Blood of the Beasts" is a documentary. It presents the facts dispassionately, with beauty and clarity. Like anything of greatness it illuminates the world and makes our own world larger.
There are images in this little film that can only be called traumatic - the genuflecting horse that maintains more dignity than its killers, the abattoir where the killers sing pop tunes as they go about their work. A 12 year old girl narrating the travelogue style poetry.
The images almost outweigh the power of the movie, which places this carnage in our living rooms, in our hopes for the future.
"La Jette" is also concerned about the future. The film got a boost when they copped the plot of it for "Twelve Monkeys". They took the plot but forgot the poetry.
Marker tells his story in a series of rapidly flipping still images. They are seldom repeated. The scifi concept is that where the brain goes the body will follow, and we need to go to the past to stop ourselves from destroying our future.
And its a love story.

9) Dirty Harry - Don Seigal Seigal started out shooting montage sequences for big movies. He created those little elegiac 90 second moments that transitioned films and stories along, you know, like the calendar pages falling to the ground to show the passage of time.
His were so good and poetic he was given a chance to make features.
Who would have thought that a guy rooted in greeting card symbolism would make hard uncompromising films that loved people but despised the society that wouldn't let humanity evolve.
This is a cop drama. Its famous. It features one of the great performances in film history in Andy Robinson's psychopathic killer.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Stephen Youll (I was in a Thai restaurant in Los Feliz with Robinson and a group of actors. They were all talking about their careers (hey, its Hollywood) when Robinson mentioned he'd done a film with Clint Eastwood. He said he had a little part and then the conversation moved on.
I was tremendously embarrassed for everyone, including myself, because I didn't stand up and shout at everyone that this man gave one of the greatest performances in screen history in one of its best films.) Forget the Dirty Harry franchise and just examine this film, not only as a document of the time but as an indelible document about humanity and the choices we are forced to make rightly or wrongly in order to accept ourselves.
Harry is being pushed into accepting mythic status when he knows he is only a man. The film demonstrates his humanity over and over again while the mythic creature status all falls to the killer, even the killers home is presented not as merely a little nasty hovel but as the key to something enormous and spectacular.
Everything the killer does is abhorred but supported by society, by the law. Harry is spit on, forced to be tortured, to roll in the dust and dirt for the crime of trying to protect children.
People forget sometimes that a work of art is supposed to be entertaining. That's the only reason I can think of to explain why this film isn't held in the highest regards.

8) Shock Corridor - Sam Fuller
Fuller is one of those miscast directors. On his best pictures he was producer/writer/director and starred his wife, Constance Towers.
He was potent and created a world of admiration, men and women who could stand up for themselves and weren't afraid to believe. They could be independent yet still love another, even when they disagreed. "Shock Corridor" is based on a delicious improbable conceit; That the mad are prone to fits of sanity the same as most of us are prone to fits of insanity.
The interesting macguffin of a plot makes use of this but the real joy of the device is the rage, despair and horror that this allows the actors to display as they sink from madness to sanity then back to insanity.
The acting is impeccable and surprising as most of the leads are guys we know primarily through their work on second rate TV shows. The familiarity of their faces adds to the power of their work. It makes the situation more and not less real. It allows us to identify with the characters but also to step outside of ourselves and sympathize and empathize with them as well.
Constance Towers is brilliant, her wonderful and incredibly hot non erotic strip tease dance number is beguiling in too many ways.
Peter Best (The Big Valley) is smarmy, stupid, and then utterly incredible and always touchingly believable. Even when you find his character smug and annoying you never lose sight of that is what the character is and that is what will drag the character to the conclusion.
James Best (Dukes of Hazzard) is wonderful as the Korean defector who believes he is Civil War General Jeb Stuart.
But the most major find is Larry Gilbert who plays Palliacci, the opera singer. He's an enormously fat man who acts like a Greek chorus to the drama enfolding in front of us. He is attempting suicide by eating himself to death, to punish himself for murdering his wife with a song. He's an explosion who knows where all the pieces are going to land.
The film has great set pieces (The Attack of the Nymphos cannot be forgotten) that keep it grounded in reality as well as drama.
Beautifully shot by Stanley Cortez in tight black and white, it is interspersed with the madmen's delusions, shot in 16-mm color.

I'm tired. Next I'll do films 7-6 and 5. Promise.
Really.

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