June 9th, 2009
If you’ve got some time to spare and you want a fascinating pop culture history lesson, swing your browser over to the continuously updated blog If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. It’s a collection of all sorts of images — film stills, publicity photos, movie posters, comic book panels, etc — that’s always fascinating to look at. Here are a few pix I pulled from recent postings, all film-related…
Four movie legends: Spanky McFarland, Oliver Hardy, Darla Hood and Stan Laurel
Great still from the film noir HE WALKED BY NIGHT
Dramatic poster for THE BIG HEAT, featuring Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford
June 9th, 2009
A tightly wound, somewhat repressed hero. His over-the-top, colorfully dressed alter ego. Exploding buildings. The Pixies’ song “Where Is My Mind”
As Erik Davis points out over at Cinematical, a new HBO promo for THE DARK KNIGHT (which premieres on the cable channel Saturday) makes it look a lot like FIGHT CLUB, the sequel. See for yourself here.
Image from Cinematical
June 9th, 2009
Over at his movie blog, The Kind of Face You Hate, Bill R. writes a short tribute to his favorite movie novel — and it happens to be my favorite, too. You’ve probably never heard of FLICKER, but if you love movies — especially weird old movies — you owe it to yourself to track this one down.
Written by Theodore Roszak, FLICKER is the strange story of Johnathan Gates, a young man who becomes a devoted film fan in the 1960s, largely due to the influence of Claire, a tough-minded film critic a few years older than him. Gates gets an ad hoc education in film history thanks to Claire and the run-down theater they practically live at. All the big names are mentioned in a great portrait of what being a movie fan must’ve been like in those exciting pre-video days, but Gates and Claire become obsessed with a forgotten director named Max Castle, whose resume includes such ominous titles as GHOUL OF LIMEHOUSE, QUEEN OF SWORDS, JUDAS EVERYMAN and SIMON THE MAGICIAN. Those film, in the rare cases they can be found, have an eerie power that neither Gates nor Claire can explain.
FLICKER is a long novel with a complex plot that spans decades, but the reason it works so well is that Roszak blends fact and fiction so skillfully that you aren’t sure what’s real and what’s not. It generates a genuinely creepy feeling as Gates watches more and more of Max Castle’s filmography and eventually stumbles onto a young director who seems to be using the same ominous techniques.
Intrigued? Here’s an Amazon link to the book’s page.
By the way, director Darron Aronofsky was long rumored to be working on a big screen adaptation of FLICKER. I don’t know if it’ll ever actually happen, but he might be one of the few guys who could actually pull it off. (David Fincher would be another.) Even so, any actual depiction of Max Castle’s movies couldn’t equal the versions you’ll make in your own head when you read this book.
