The Long Goodbye

I've always felt that this movie poster, by longtime MAD Magazine cartoonist Jack Davis -- and, yes, it was actually used in the film's promotional campaign -- perfectly captured the spirit of Robert Altman's freewheeling 1973 adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel.

Punk Economics: The European Debt Crisis Explained

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_mW8mBzmHo&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Irish economist David McWilliams on the potentially disastrous fallout from the EU austerity plan.

A Public Service Announcement

Thanks to the good folks at Open Culture, this film, an early short by David Lynch, is just one of 450 films, including cinematic milestones like Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows; Hollywood classics like It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, and Royal Wedding; film-historical curiosities like Alfred Hitchcock's last silent film, The Manxman, Stanley Kubrick's long-supressed debut feature, Fear and Desire, and Quentin Tarantino's incomplete first film, My Best Friend's Birthday; cult favorites like Spider Baby and The Last Man on Earth; and a veritable cornucopia of silent, animated, avant-garde, and documentary films, all of which are available for free and are thoughtfully archived here.

An Emancipated Slave Writes:

To My Old Master

"Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance."

Read the whole thing.

John Dies at the End

Cracked editor David Wong's novel, an internet cult hit before being published in dead trees form, is a glorious mutant: a horror spoof that manages to be both funny and scary. It's a wild mixture of Lovecraftian horror, Cheech and Chong-style drug humor, gross-out gags, and outright mindfuckery. Judging from the above trailer, Don Coscarelli, the director of Bubba Ho-Tep and the Phantasm movies, seems like the perfect choice to bring it to the screen.

Alan Moore Meets the Occupy Movement

A Kiss is Just a Kiss, Part One: The Rise and Fall of the Production Code

Note: This is a new version of an old article I wrote several years ago for a website that no longer exists, and which I have repurposed somewhat rather than discard entirely.

Check out the above clip: not to spoil it for you, but it won't look like much to an audience accustomed to Judd Apatow comedies or The Jersey Shore. If you click on it you'll see a rather beefy, formally-dressed, middle-aged couple sitting side by side. The man, John C. Rice, smoothes back his mustache, puckers up, and then plants a wet one on his co-star, Mae Irwin. It's all over in a about a minute, but to audiences in 1896, Thomas Edison's The Kiss was hot stuff indeed—hot enough to incur the wrath of those guardians of public morality who were suspicious of what the upstart new medium of cinema might bring. Writing in the Chicago magazine, The Chap Book, publisher Herbert S. Stone fulminated, "Such things call for police interference. Our cities from time to time have spasms of morality, when they arrest people for displaying lithographs of ballet-girls; yet they permit, night after night, a performance that is infinitely more degrading.... The Irwin kiss is no more than a lyric of the stock yard."

Such old-fashioned prudery may seem quaint today, but as the recent defeat of the SOPA and PIPA bills attest, censorship has always been with us, so it might be worth looking at How We Got Here:

The earliest known official instance occurred in 1907, when New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham recommended that all nickelodeons be closed outright as a threat to public morals, a suggestion Mayor George McClellan was to attempt the next year until a coalition of exhibitors was able to obtain an injunction against him.

In 1907, though, movies were still largely a novelty, while in less than two decades they would become big business. The rise of popular media—not just movies, but radio and mass-market glossy magazines—increasingly brought conservative, small-town America into contact with urban sophistication in a manner that had been unprecedented before or since. And small-town America increasingly started to fight back. At first, producers ignored the patchwork of local censorship boards that sprang up around the country, inflicting their own often whimsical proscriptions on their product, cutting scenes of pregnant women in Pennsylvania, or of women smoking or drinking in Kansas; but with the wave of scandals that rocked Hollywood in the twenties, including the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, the death of actor Wallace Reid from a cocaine overdose, and finally the sensational Fatty Arbuckle rape trial in 1921, they could no longer ignore the outcry from the hinterlands accusing them of corrupting the nation's morals. By then the studios were expanding into distribution and needed to convince the Wall Street bankers whose capital they so desperately needed that they were respectable businessmen, and so they reluctantly decided it was time to, if not clean up their act, at least create the impression that they were doing so.

Enter Will Hays. Postmaster General, former Republican National Committee Chairman and a long-standing elder in the Presbyterian church, Hays was the perfect front man for the newly-formed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the forerunner of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which oversees movie ratings to this day. Although often caricatured as a know-nothing prude, Hays was in fact an able politician who managed to ward off many far stricter proposals by state and local authorities (48 between 1922 and 1927 alone) by such measures as convincing the studios to include morals clauses in actors' contracts and asking that producers forswear "unsuitable" subject matter.

Of course, the producers didn't always listen, since they soon realized one very important thing: sex, violence, scandal, and titillation sell tickets, and as participants in a highly competitive industry, they couldn't afford not to give the public what it wanted, and what audiences wanted were racy flapper comedies like It (1927), with Clara Bow, Erich von Stroheim's merciless portraits of decadent aristocrats like Foolish Wives (1922) and The Merry Widow (1925), and Cecil B. De Mille's historical melodramas with their hordes of scantily-clad extras ("studies in diminishing draperies", as his brother and fellow director William C. de Mille once quipped). After all, the Jazz Age was a time for testing limits, and despite Hays' efforts, the twenties continued to roar on screen and off. Even when he appointed former Colonel Jason Joy to review scripts in advance, most producers either made only the most cursory attempts to comply or ignored him all together.

Things started to change in 1930, with the introduction of the Production Code. The Code was the brainchild of Martin Quigley, the publisher of the Motion Picture Herald and a devout Catholic, who felt he could thereby strike a blow for decency and enhance his paper's prestige in one fell swoop. Building on Joy's list of "Don'ts and Be Carefuls", Quigley, working with Chicago archbishop Daniel Lord, came up with a list of specifically prohibited subjects, including profanity, nudity, prostitution, drug use, and miscegenation, and also asked that the Code's signatories more generally forswear any picture likely to "lower the moral standards of those who see it."

At first, the studios treated Quigley's proscriptions pretty much the way they treated Joy's—as suggestions to be ignored when they were inconvenient, since, even if the Hays Office disapproved of something, they could always appeal to the "Hollywood Jury", a panel of three West Coast producers chosen in rotation. Naturally, since any juror might one day find one of their own pictures up for review, there was a pretty strong incentive for them to go easy on any film on which they were asked to pass judgment.

Hollywood's moguls had other incentives to ignore the Code too. The expense of converting their production facilities and theatres to sound, coupled with the financial uncertainty that followed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, meant that in order to sell tickets Hollywood increasingly fell back on its old standbys—sex, as in the Mae West vehicles I'm No Angel or She Done Him Wrong (both 1933), and violence, most notoriously in the cycle of gangster movies that began with The Public Enemy and Little Caesar in 1931 and Scarface in 1932. Modern viewers, accustomed to the more sanitized pictures that were to prevail when the Code finally took hold, may be surprised at just how frank and modern the films of the early sound period can be. Take, for example, Jack Conway's Red-Headed Woman (1932), in which Jean Harlow plays a gold-digging stenographer who methodically sleeps her way up the corporate ladder. While, in a sop to the Hays office, she's sent packing at the end, she still has the last laugh and is seen at fadeout happily motoring off into the sunset in the arms an elderly French millionaire (while trading heated glances with his handsome young chauffeur—played by a young Charles Boyer—to boot!), something that would be unthinkable a couple of years later when any movie character who committed adultery would almost invariably be punished by death or social ostracism by the final reel.

The clampdown finally came on July 1, 1934, when Hays finally gave the Code some teeth by abolishing the Hollywood Jury and appointing Joseph Breen as Director of the Production Code Administration. This time it worked. After years of seeing Hollywood give only lip service to regulation, middle America had lost its patience, and the moguls suddenly found some big guns being trained on them, including the Catholic church, press baron William Randolph Hearst, and Iowa Senator Smith W. Brookhart, who introduced a bill to have the motion picture industry placed under the direct control of the Federal Trade Commission. Hollywood had no choice but to submit.

During the two decades that Breen served as the Code's chief enforcer, he was to all intents and purposes the most powerful man in Hollywood. A tough-talking former publicist with close ties to the Catholic church (which could be relied upon to throw the weight of its Legion of Decency behind his decisions if need be), he refused to be bullied by the moguls. He vetoed projects, rewrote scripts, and re-cut films and, despite some memorable battles such as those over Howard Hughes' heavy-breathing western The Outlaw (1943)—ostensibly the story of Billy the Kid, but largely sold as an ode to Jane Russell's décolletage—and Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), he almost always got his way (one memorable defeat was over the use of the word "damn" in the famous last line of Gone with the Wind (1939)—Breen refused to allow it, but Hays overruled him, fined producer David O. Selznick $5,000 for violating the Code to save Breen's face, and then had the Code amended so that "hell" and "damn" could be used sparingly in certain dramatically valid circumstances).

Breen's downfall, however, was to come in the unlikely form of The Moon is Blue (1953), a relatively innocuous romantic comedy by Otto Preminger, which nonetheless took an entirely too light (for Breen) approach to what was called at the time "free love", and whose script contained such forbidden words as "virgin", "pregnant", and "seduce", and lines like "You are shallow, cynical, selfish, and immoral, and I like you!" Breen demanded the offending material be cut, but after making a few token changes Preminger, declaring the Code to be "antiquated" and protesting that Breen had approved many far more offensive pictures, dug in his heels and declared that he would release it as is, with or without Code approval. Breen refused to budge, so Preminger made good on his promise with the result that Moon went on to become the fifteenth highest grossing film of that year. It was a major black eye for the Code and Breen finally retired the following year.

Preminger was able to do this because he was an independent producer and because his distributor, United Artists, wasn’t a Code signatory, but as the decade wore on the studios themselves began to rebel. Forced to sell their theatres by the Supreme Court's United States v. Paramount decision in 1948, which ruled that ownership was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, they no longer had a guaranteed outlet for their product. In addition, the new medium of television was breathing down their necks, forcing them to look for new ways to attract audiences. The surest way of doing so was to give them something they couldn't get at home, and while technical innovations like 3D or widescreen formats like Cinemascope might attract viewers through sheer novelty value, in the long run the surest bet was the time-tested solution of more adult subject matter.

After all, foreign films, such as Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1946) and Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948), which already dealt with adult subjects in a much more frank and open manner than most American films of the time, were already showing without Code approval in independent "art" cinemas. The Supreme Court's landmark decision in Burstyn v. Wilson in 1952, which declared New York's ban of Rossellini's The Miracle (1949) on grounds of blasphemy and obscenity was unconstitutional on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds, only further underscored how out of touch the Production Code Administration was. The times were changing, and if the Code was to survive, it would have to change with them.

To be continued

If Only It Were That Simple ...

Obviously this gorilla's scheme for world domination is doomed to failure. If he really wants to bend us foolish humans to his will, he should check out The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as well ...

I was a fan of the original series, which was quite groundbreaking in its own way, so it's interesting to see this test for an animated version that never got off the ground. The writing seems a bit clunky and obvious compared to that of the show, but one hopes that would have gotten ironed out had the cartoon been picked up, and the character design and animation aren't bad, at least by tv standards, and manage to capture a bit of its predecessor's flavor, even if, when all's said and done this still remains only an interesting curio.

Merry Whatever, Folks!

Re: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

It's not a bad movie, really. Truth be told, it's probably better than the original. Still, it's a bit dispiriting to think that someone like David Fincher, a preeminent visual stylist with a distinct directorial voice - someone with a legitimate claim to being the Stanley Kubrick of his generation and someone who's pretty much at the top of his game artistically and commercially right now - is in charge of this thing, no matter how good a job he's done with this one or how well he does on the other two. After all, when all's said and done, they're still just potboilers for all the hype, potboilers for which perfectly competent film versions already exist. Now, however, because Americans can't be bothered to read subtitles, we're going to have to wait another four or five years or so for another Zodiac or Fight Club.

The Naomi Klein #Occupy Quote Folks Need To See

Happy Labor Day

Yeah, I know, Americans don't celebrate the real Labor Day, even though the event that inspired the one the rest of the world observes happened in their country, but still ....

Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Charles Fort's renown rests primarily on four books -- The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents -- unclassifiable shaggy dog collections of old newspaper and magazine accounts of rains of frogs and other assorted critters, mysterious disappearances, unexplained phenomena of all sorts, and so forth, all shot through with wryly sardonic humor and a palpable sense of glee at tweaking consensus reality. Unlike Charles Berlitz, Erich von Daniken, or most of the other hucksters who peddled tales of the paranormal after him, however, he never took himself too seriously, occasionally offering half a dozen conflicting "theories" explaining his subjects in the course of a couple of chapters. In his own way he was a true skeptic, as likely to doubt the fantastic and the supernatural as much as received scientific wisdom (his legacy lives on in the pages of the magazine Fortean Times which concerns itself at least as much with why people believe in the paranormal as whether it's actually true or not).



Steinmeyer, a professional magician and historian of magic, doesn't add much to Fort scholarship that hadn't already been said by Damon Knight in his somewhat more critical Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained, but it's a lively, well-researched, and well-written portrait of a great American eccentric, and a good place to start for someone just getting interested in the man and his work.



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Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel by Jules Verne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


By now this novel's history is well-known: originally written by Jules Verne as a followup to his first bestseller, Five Weeks in a Balloon, it was rejected by his publisher, who had been hoping for another rollicking adventure story like its predecessor, rather than the rather dour dystopian story Verne turned in. Verne evidently took this rejection to heart and spent most of the rest of his career writing the slick, fast-paced, somewhat formulaic, if often highly entertaining, proto-SF novels with which his name has become synonymous, while this book was forgotten until the manuscript was found in a family safe where it had been gathering dust for 130 years.



On the whole it's more interesting as an artifact than a novel: the story, about a young man named Michel Dufrenoy, a sort of hippie avant la lettre who dreams of being a poet in an age (the far-flung future of 1960) that only cares about commerce and technology, is not much more than an armature on which Verne hangs his often prescient depiction of 20th century Paris (what he gets right and what he gets wrong are often amusingly at odds -- he predicts a sort of version of the internet, yet his characters still use quill pens); as such this belongs firmly in the "Grand Tour" tradition of SF, alongside Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey or Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, where the world in which the story takes place is as much the point as the story itself.



Nevertheless, there's still an interesting autobiographical aspect to this story: Verne, the son of a highly conservative provincial lawyer, was something of a bohemian in his youth. He worked for a while as a sort of gofer and hanger-on to Alexandre Dumas pere and tried his hand -- unsuccessfully -- at playwriting before turning to fiction, so it's hard not to see at least a little of him in Michel Dufrenoy, and to wonder if the rather more ambivalent attitude toward technology depicted here was something Verne really felt before he embarking on a career celebrating its wonders.



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Now, I Never Saw the Original Film ...

... nor do I have any particular desire to see this one, either, although I'd love it if it turned out that the reason there are no people in its universe is that they're actually sequels to Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive and that the cars had previously risen up and killed them all, perhaps revealing this development when, during the course of their zany misadventures, the cars run across an isolated group of human survivors holed up in a remote desert gas station and proceed to systematically slaughter them.

In a wacky, heartwarming way, of course.

Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology by James Patrick Kelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ironically, my only real complaint about this book is the concept behind it: I'm not sure that the term "slipstream" (coined by sf writer Bruce Sterling to describe superficially mainstream literary works that nonetheless incorporate genre elements) is really a useful or even meaningful term. For the most part works described as such seem to end up being defined more by what they aren't than what they are: science fiction whose "scientific" aspects are nonsensical or only tangential to the plot, fantasy whose magical aspects may be imaginary, horror that goes for the slow burn rather than the outright scare, "magical realism" not written by South Americans, and so on. Attempts to define it as a hard-and-fast category seem born out of the same geeky compulsion towards rating and categorization (affectionately parodied by Nick Hornby in HIGH FIDELITY), that leads indie music journalists to get into flame wars about who was the best country-ska fusion band of the mid- to late 80s or whatever.



That said, though, I also have to admit this is one of the best collections of short stories I've read lately. There isn't a dud in the bunch. The editors have chosen a superstar lineup of the best writers working this particular vein from both sides of the literary/genre divide, including Sterling himself, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Jeff VanderMeer, and others. Even though most of these stories would fit quite comfortably into anthologies of sf, fantasy, horror, or quirky New Yorker-type mainstream fiction, it was great to have them all in one volume, so if the term "slipstream" has any utility at all, this would be it.



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BIG CATS ON DOPE

Just as their smaller cousins like to get fucked up on catnip, Jaguars enjoy tripping their brains out on Ayahuasca.

Jaguar eating ayahausca
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Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal by Joe R. Lansdale

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Ever have a six year old tell you a story? ("We got in my fire engine, which was a space ship, and went to the moon and a gorilla fought a dragon and then we had cookies!") Well, these two related novellas seem to have been written with the same principle in mind. In the first one, "Zeppelins West", Buffalo Bill (or rather his disembodied head -- long story) takes his Wild West show to Japan as part of an undercover mission to rescue Frankenstein's monster and ends up on the Island of Doctor Moreau, while in the second, "Flaming London", Mark Twain and Jules Verne find themselves fleeing from an invasion by H.G. Wells' Martians. Oh, yeah, and the connecting character in both pieces is a superintelligent seal. Now I won't deny that these stories have a certain ADD-addled charm, due to their author's insistence on throwing in every steampunk trope he can think of, but at the same time, I'd be hard pressed to say they ultimately added up to much beyond their rather feverish name-checking.



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Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Admittedly, I picked this book up because of the tv show, since I was curious to find out just how much of it was based on actual fact. After reading it, I can say that the producers have generally stuck to the spirit, if not the letter, of the historical record, and although they've taken a fair bit of dramatic license with the material, it's not because Atlantic City's history lacks drama. From its early days, when it was planned as an upper-crust health resort (something that went by the boards pretty quickly after speculators realized they could make more money catering to the desires -- legal and otherwise -- of day-tripping blue-collar workers from Philadelphia and New York) to its boom years (roughly from the Gilded Age until the Second World War) as America's Vice Capital to its near death during the 60s to its recent resurgence since the legalization of gambling there in the late 70s, it's not a place that has ever lacked for colorful characters, certainly not as Nelson Johnson tells it (special bonus: Johnson really, really, REALLY doesn't think much of Donald Trump), and while the show's decision to concentrate on the years of Nucky Johnson's (fictionalized as Nucky Thompson in the series) reign as Atlantic City's political and criminal boss in the Roaring 20s makes for some great drama, this book proves that there are plenty more stories here to tell.



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