Alex Cox “introduces” Jabberwocky (Moviedrome)

Every now and then I do a search on Moviedrome, to see if any new (read: unearthed) introductions have popped up and it looks like there’s a handful of new ones. High time then to update my Moviedrome page then.

One of the more peculiar introductions by Alex Cox was the one for Jabberwocky. It’s not as much a movie introduction as it’s… no, that would be telling.

Who said Moviedrome wasn’t cult?

The Night Porter

Today an old review. I wrote this in August 2000 and had pretty much forgotten I’d written it… until I received a message on Facebook last week, thanking me for the review. This girl had read my review, watched the film and liked it enough to send this message. May Il Portiere di Notte by Liliana Cavani inspire you too…

Even though I was planning to watch something else that Saturday night, I came across BBC2 where The Night Porter was on and saw it once again. The first time I saw the movie I was a bit disappointed. I had heard so much about this movie that the film couldn’t live up to my high expectations. But some scenes found a place in the back of my mind and stayed there. The second time I saw it I was intrigued more and more and ever since I see it as the classic it should be.

If ever there was a difficult movie, it was The Night Porter. The pace is slow and the characters are all weird. There aren’t many movies where you get a homosexual Nazi wanting to be a ballet dancer and a sadistic Nazi still in love with love with a masochistic girl from the camps. (There’s more, but I don’t want to spoil the plot.) Only a spark of the plot could have been the subject for lots of raunchy exploitation movies, but “The Night Porter” manages to keep its class. The movies is set years after the war. Some Nazis were fortunate enough not to be caught and got on with their lives. Unfortunately one person has survived the camps as well. She immediately recognizes Max (Dirk Bogarde), her cruel S&M-master, and he (now a night porter in a hotel) recognizes her (Charlotte Rampling) as well. The only problem is that the other living Nazis cannot know she’s still alive, or they would assassinate her. The passion between Max and his former slave returns and the Nazis find out about their relationship. Max tries to keep her out of their hands, so madly in love that he wants to die for her. (Again, more information would spoil the movie.)

The Night Porter is one of the few movies where S&M-relationships aren’t immediately reduced to a bunch of idiots and losers playing around with whips and leather masks. It also dares to show you other Nazis than the Pavlovian dogs you normally get to see. And above all it stars Charlotte Rampling as Lucia. Watch her as she performs the dance of Salomé and gets a present from Max (know your Bible and have an idea of what’s to come). Watch her face and her near-skeletonlike body very closefully: that is how you should act disgust. Watch her as she locks herself in the bathroom and tries to hurt Max’s foot with some glass. Listen to the music, the perfect addition to this murky movie.

Due to the difficulty of the movie it’ll never raise above its status as cult classic and actually that’s a shame. Be brave and try it.

Here’s a YouTube clip by ScathinglyBrilliant that combines scenes from the film with a Billie Holiday song. It’s not the same as the other clips you find on YouTube, which I often found too much censored on the shock scenes (and the jam scene – which is a spoiler). So there you go… take it away, Billie.

P.S. On second thought, it made me wonder why I had never locked this film into the Kurtodrome Vault… well, better late than never: it’s in the Vault now.

Medium

It’s the Christmas of slashed budgets, or so it seems. Not much spectacular coming up for the yuletide season. Meanwhile I’m also busy as hell trying to fit two jobs and two projects into one life. Part of me feels ill, the other part very much alive. The stack of unwatched DVDs and VHS tapes remains spectularly impressive. About the only thing I can bear these days is the wonderful Danish show The Killing. More on that later, still on indefinite hiatus after all.

BBC2 used to treat us to seasons of films for the holiday season. I fondly remember the 50s sci-fi series ages ago, but even last year was nice with a handful of film noirs. All but one I’d seen, but that didn’t stop me from watching them again.
This year BBC2 manages to be the only station to interest me as well as disappoint me. Apart from a Christmas special of Doctor Who and the grand finale of Only Connect on BBC4, there’s not a lot of programmes I’m looking forward to. Yes, Have I Got News for You and Screenwipe will return for a festive treat, but no seasons of noir or anything?

Well, there is something… throughout the festive weeks BBC2 is showing an entire season of Medium. Season two, to be precise. Not having watched the first season but having heard good stuff, I tried my best to grasp what was going on during “previously on Medium” introduction, the first scene of the season treated me to a family dialogue on French toast.

During this wonderful dialogue, I was told french fries are called so because the original recipe was invented in France. Erm… not really…

What sort of nonsense is broadcast on our tellies these days? I’m not staying up for that. Bring back Invasion of the Saucer Men and Terror from the Year 5000.

No words, just music

Not a lot of time this week, so posts will be short and sporadic. But this might be a good time to give a shout out to 6music, the BBC radio station that heard the BBC will probably close the station at the end of the year (or next year). No fin de siècle doom if you tune in though, just of the better alternative radio stations out there. When 6music closes, people like me will be forced even more into the worlds of music blogs, Spotify, Last.fm and the likes.

One thing is good though: since the announcement the station’s listening figures seemed to have grown significantly (from 700.000 a year ago to just over a million now). In the words of former DJ Phill Jupitus (in an article for The Guardian): “As I listen to 6 Music today, I keep hearing tracks and thinking, where else would I hear this kind of radio during the day? The tragic answer to that question is nowhere. The end of 6 Music at this moment in the BBC’s history is not only an act of cultural vandalism, it’s also an affront to the memory of John Peel and a slap in the face to thousands of licence-payers.”

So don’t forget to tune in before it’s too late.

Edit (Jun 15): the Avenue’s computer is no more. All hail the new Avenue computer! I’m trying to get my sparkly new computer as ready as it should be. Which means the next update will be posted later than usual.

Dr Terror’s Vault of Horror

Remember this? I was browsing the net for old BBC2 idents and one search led to another. Finally I found this, Dr Terror’s Vault of Horror. Shown on BBC1 in the early 90s, I mainly remember not being too great of a fan of the ‘host’. Well, I was an adolescent: too scared to watch the really scary stuff and too above costume introductions. These days we’d kill for such a show…

More? Then watch this!

How all of us have become Richard Nixon

The BBC Four programme Newswipe, the satirical and cynical dissection of the news as done by Screenwipe‘s Charlie Brooker, is back for a second series. This week’s episode (debuted yesterday) includes a six and a half minute long mini-documentary by Adam Curtis, who’s become quite known ever since his documentary The Power of Nightmares. In just under 400 seconds Curtis will show us how we’ve all become Richard Nixon.

(Adam Curtis: “A Film about how all of us have become Richard Nixon” – as uploaded to YouTube by one Flo Welch)

P.S. The entire episode of Newswipe can be watched online, with thanks to xthemusic who has uploaded all of Charlie Brooker’s BBC material (with permission). Watch part one here.

It’s Only a Book by Mark Kermode

A mail alerted me that film critic Mark Kermode was on the verge of publishing a new book. Kermode is no stranger to this blog or indeed Delirium Vault: the man’s reviews have been mentioned more than once. So why shouldn’t I (in turn) alert you to the existence of Kermode’s latest book?

The name of the book is It’s only a movie and it offers a more personal view of the grand world of cinema. As the blurb would have you believe:

To avoid fainting, keep repeating

It’s only a movie
… only a movie
… only a movie
… only a movie

If you grew up believing that Planet of the Apes told you all you needed to know about politics, that Slade in Flame was a savage exposé of the pop world, and that The Exorcist revealed the meaning of life, then you probably spent far too many of your formative years at the cinema. Just as likely, you soon would have realised that there was only one career open to you – you’d have to become a film critic.

In It’s only a Movie, the incomparable Mark Kermode takes us into the weird world of a life lived in widescreen. Join him as he embarks on a gut-wrenching journey through the former Soviet Union on the trail of the low budget horror flick Dark Waters, cringe as he’s handbagged by Helen Mirren at the Bafta awards ceremony, cheer as he gets thrown out of the Cannes film festival for heckling in very bad French, and don’t forget to gasp as he’s shot at while interviewing Werner Herzog in the Hollywood hills. Written with sardonic wit and wry good humour, this compelling cinematic memoir is genuinely ‘inspired by real events’.

The book, out since yesterday (yes, we can be topical – just don’t force us), even has a website, onlyamovie.co.uk, which has a video introduction by Kermode himself, some audio clips (a.o. on Linda Blair, which may or may not mention The Exorcist – but since it’s Kermode, what do you think?) and the tour dates. Mark Kermode will spend most of February touring through the UK and promoting his book. The people from Southampton are lucky enough to be the first (Feb 6), the tour ends in Bath (March 2).

I was lucky enough to get a chance to read the prologue of It’s Only A Movie, which starts with a recollection of Kermode’s interview with Werner Herzog (who was shot during the interview). In less than two pages Kermode manages to drift from this anecdote via the thought this would definitely make it into a biopic about his life (if someone would ever make that) via possible casts to good and bad biopics. Highly associative and cleverly written, the book oozes Kermode’s love for cinema. And it oozes Kermode (for which he almost apologizes during the prologue, justifying himself that he could only write this book through his own eyes – while at the same time slagging off Tarantino, always worth bonus points here at the Avenue).

In chapter one It’s Only A Movie remembers how Kermode’s father advised Mark to learn how to talk properly and watch fewer films. It’s fair to say the advice wasn’t followed.

To Kermode, a movie isn’t just the movie. The experience also counts. He illustrates this with Silent Running, not only a sci-fi movie (and a Kermode favourite) but also a trip to the cinemas in 1972 with a school friend. In his adult memory Silent Running isn’t just the film, Kermode’s neck hairs still vividly remember the excitement of two young boys going to the film and his body painfully remembers the twisted position Kermode had to watch the film in, due to a Mungo Jerry lookalike sitting in front of him.

It’s Only A Movie is Kermode’s feature presentation, a recollection of the movie inside his own head, based on Kermode’s life interlaced with thousands of films. As he mentions on page 16: “I am to all intents and purposes the auteur of this book and the director of this ‘real life’ Movie of the Week [...] This is my movie and I get final cut – like Michael Cimino on Heaven’s Gate, only with more laughs and less roller-skating.”

It’s Only A Movie, published by Arrow Books, is 320 pages long and should cost no more than £11.99.

P.S. So which movie originally used “It’s only a movie” as its tagline? No, the answer is not The Last House on the Left, but William Castle‘s Strait-Jacket (starring Joan Crawford). Please do note the subtle difference between both taglines:

Just keep saying to yourself: “It’s only a movie… It’s only a movie… It’s only a movie… It’s only a… It’s only… It’s…” (Strait-Jacket)

To avoid fainting, keep repeating It’s only a movie… only a movie… only a movie… only a movie. (The Last House on the Left)

It’s dark outside (BBC2 goes film noir)

It’s the holiday season, which means BBC2 will try and make the extra effort to make you spend these dark and allegedly fun-filled days as superb as possible. Personally, I have the fondest memories of the years they showed 50′s sci-fi movies and film noirs. There’s just nothing like watching Terror from the year 5000 or From Hell It Came at 3am. This year the Beeb will go back to this old and much loved tradition and will shown a series of noir movies during the Christmas nights.

The series kicks off tonight at 1.25am (British time) with the hour long documentary The Rules of Noir, followed by Max Ophuls‘s classic noir The Reckless Moment. And from then on, it’s one noir a night, which – in my humble opinion – will chase the doctor away as well as an apple does. Here’s the schedule:

24/12 – 01.25: The rules of noir
Bogey, Bacall and Mitchum play it tough as Matthew Sweet celebrates film noir.
24/12 – 02.25: The Reckless Moment
Classic film noir. A man blackmails a woman whose daughter accidentally killed her lover.

25/12 – 02.10: Gilda
A drifter travelling through South America embarks on a risky affair with a married woman. Charles Vidor directs Rita Hayworth in the role of her life.

27/12 – 01.50: Build My Gallows High
Classic 1940s American film noir by Jacques Tourneur which tells a grim, complex tale of love and betrayal. Private detective Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) falls for Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer), the mistress of mobster Whit Sterling, when the mobster hires him to track her down in Mexico after she shot Sterling and stole 40,000 pounds from him. When she double-crosses Bailey and returns to the gangster, the detective changes his identity and drops out of sight as a garage owner. Sterling still wants his money back, however, and he and the duplicitous Kathie plot to lure the Bailey into a vengeful scenario. This unmissable noir is also known as Out of the Past.

28/12 – 01.50: Farewell My Lovely
Film noir classic adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name. Private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by ex-con Moose Malloy to find his girlfriend, embroiling the hard-boiled gumshoe in a plot which involves blackmail, murder, drugs and double cross. Edward Dmytryk directs.

29/12 – 01.40: Dead Reckoning
John Cromwell directs Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott in this mystery thriller about an ex-paratrooper who travels with his army buddy to Washington to be decorated for valour during World War II. His friend disappears from the train and the paratrooper, trying to find him, becomes caught in a tale of duplicity, intrigue and murder.

30/12 – 01.10: The Big Combo
Stylish film noir by Joseph H. Lewis about a police lieutenant, Leonard Diamond, who comes under pressure from a gang headed by a vicious thug. He is helped by the gangster’s wife, jealous at her husband’s affair with another woman, who supplies him with information to help him close the net on his foe. (Bonus: the torture scene was considered so graphic for 1955 standards the film was almost censored.)

31/12 – 00.55: On Dangerous Ground
Nicholas Ray‘s film noir about a tough cop sent to a small town, where he meets an affecting blind woman.

01/01 – 03.25: They Live By Night
Thriller by Nicholas Ray in which a naive young criminal (Farley Granger) falls in love with the woman who nurses him back to health after he is injured in a bank raid.

02/01 – 01.40: Crossfire
Edward Dmytryk‘s stark, claustrophobic thriller about racial intolerance. A detective lays a trap for an anti-Semitic soldier who murdered a Jewish war veteran. Robert Mitchum, Robert Young and Gloria Grahame star.

P.S. More of an Orson Welles fan? Then switch over to BBC Four, for lots of films and documentaries about the famous director.

The Book 100

They call me an avid reader even though I don’t even read a third of the amount of books I used to read. The BBC compiled a list of the 100 most beloved books in Britain. Occasionally on blogs you see this list with a twist. The books you’ve read yourself are in bold, the titles in italics are the ones you own but haven’t read. The rest is neither bold nor italic. Here’s my list (because it doesn’t always have to be about movies here). If you want to, you can list the numbers you’ve read in my comment zone below.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible (well, to some extent)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma- Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker (I was forced in school)
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables- Victor Hugo

Conclusion: I do read a lot of books, but apparently not the British favourites.

Mad Man

If anyone was expecting me to comment on the second series of Mad Men, I’m sorry but I can’t. I’d missed the first series, despite often hearing it was good. Right now, the second series has kicked off on the BBC. I did my best to watch the first episode, but failed miserably. Then came episode two. By now I’d remembered the show was broadcast on Wednesday nights just after midnight (11.20pm local time) and repeated on Saturday nights. I’d programmed my dvd recorder for the third episode, so that I wouldn’t miss it… after the show I turn on the tv and what do I see? Mad Men. Apparently the BBC wanted to show a documentary about Margaret Thatcher on the Mad Men slot (no points for making cheap puns now) and so the series was moved to 00.50am local time (which is nearly 2am my time).
Suddenly I remember why I never watched series one in the first place… if a show is broadcast on the most odd moments off the day, how do they expect people to watch it? I have no problem with a show being moved for a good reason, but a documentary on Thatcher could’ve just been shown every hour of the day.

Which brings us to the question “Why is there a need to show quizzes like QI three times a week?”. It all started with Have I Got News for You (which got one regular repeat and one with bonus footage) and Graham Norton Uncut (which contained material they had to bleep out pre-watershed), but now it seems business as usual to repeat every show at least twice, no matter how pointless that may be. (Also, do they change the scores on the longer versions of the show? Otherwise, it’s just banter to fill dead moments.)

The BBC have begun to be cruel to BBC Four programmes (which are repeated on BBC Two for people who don’t have access to the Beeb’s digital channels – still an overwhelming majority of the people). Take Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, for instance. They began to air the final episode of the series, then moved it to another slot on another day and started showing the episodes in a different order than announced, never showed the longer episode on screenplays and thus ended one week early, so they broadcast the final episode again.
Mad Men is also repeated, as I think I mentioned before. The late night repeat is shown on Saturday nights. I’m sorry, but that’s about as specific as I can get. It tends to start somewhere between midnight and 2am. The best way to make you sure you’ll be able to watch it is to take the entire night of programming and you’ll find it somewhere on your hard disk. This is also how you’ll discover BBC2 still broadcasts subtitled movies. They’re on most Saturday nights, somewhere after 3am.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like BBC2, but I hate the tendency of having to drag a magazine to my television to see where they’ve stuck a series now while they’re repeating other programmes incessantly, just to fill up dead air. By the way, next week’s episode of Mad Men will be shown on the regular slot. No doubt – in an attempt to be original – they’ll show that one in reverse.