By Matthew Clark Fantastic Four No. 1 came out in the late summer/early fall of 1961, and is recognized today as the start of The Marvel Age of Comics. Back then, I was still buying comic books off the magazine rack inside the long gone Irvington Pharmacy. This beloved institution... Continue reading

While you are waiting desperately for the next entry in this blog, here is a frame capture from 30 Rock a few weeks ago (episoce 6.9). It's the famous Leap Day episode, in part of which Jack is taken back to his childhood, where 8-year-old Jack is on the floor... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm By issue No. 9, the Spider-Man team were a well-oiled machine. Consisted of the tight, credited team of Stan Lee, Steve Ditko (doing both the pencils and the ink) and lettering by the under-appreciated Art Simak,0 they managed to come up month to month with interesting... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm I came across some interesting speculation on the World Wide Web about the late Stanley Kubrick, director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. According to writer and filmmaker Jay Weidner, Kubrick was approached by NASA after the Pentagon was impressed with Kubrick's ingenuity in making Dr. Strangelove. In order to mask advanced technology from the Soviet Union NASA wanted to fake its real moon landings, and hired Kubrick to stage sequences for all the Apollo landings. In return, Kubrick was given a deal in which he could make any films he wanted for... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm I was sitting on the bus the other day, heading downtown, when a conversation started up on the seats across from me that I couldn't ignore. It wasn't only that they people were talking loud, which is common on that bus line, but that they were discussing movies. Though the speakers were obnoxious and relentless, what they discussed did provide some insight. The topic of conversation was I Spit on Your Grave, which they called Spit on a Grave and a couple of other variations. The trio were older friends from a rehab center down the... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm Without stepping on the toes of Quin Benzel and his excellent review of Source Code, I would like to add a couple of random thoughts. First, the music by Chris Bacon, and the editing by long time Brian DePalma collaborator Paul Hirsch are excellent. Though Jake Gyllenhaal and the pixie-ish Michelle Monaghan are good, I did wonder if the chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt of The Adjustment Bureau would have improved the film even more. Source Code betrays a link with recent movies, especially those by Tony Scott (Unstoppable, Deja Vu, The Taking of... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm The craze for nordic police procedurals began long before The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The interest goes back at least as far as the 10 Martin Beck novels, about three of which have been turned into "major" motion pictures. Sporadically these were followed by Smilla's Sense of Snow and Insomnia. Denmark has gotten into the act with the terrific series Forbrydensen, soon to appear in an Americanized version on AMC as The Killing, and in 2006, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur adapted Arnaldur Indriðason's novel into the film Jar City. [AKA Myrin.] It has many of... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm The recent presumed public fascination with Charlie Sheen was only finally kicked off the airwaves, and no doubt only temporarily, by the threat of nuclear holocaust coming from Japan, where a combination of earthquake and tsunami conspired to wreck some nuclear power plants. Sheen's public utterances are generally given short shrift by interviewers. For example, Piers Morgan kept cutting him off in order to ask banal and leading questions, supposedly reflecting the banality of the audience listening. But Sheen has potentially interesting things to say about personal liberty, the role of corporations in the creation of... Continue reading

D. K. Holm The End of the title means the East End of London, where all the criminals come from. This documentary from 2008 by Nicola Collins about her dad and his friends is the 7 Up of gangster docs, and recently appeared on NetFlix for immediate streaming. It's a terrific film. Displayed in black and white, with intentional "distressing," it is a collection of talking heads. But what heads! The 16 or so gangsters profiled in the film through their own words are magnificent hunks of faulty physiques. Their heads are like Easter Island monoliths, their faces like sides... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm On a rainy, grim Friday night this past March 4th, several hundred Vanco-Portlanders headed to Dante's in downtown Portland for a varied line up of music that culminated in a terrific show by the Lords of Acid. It reminded me of those old shows from the days of the Beatles – you know, Paul's first groupies – when the band toured with something like 57 opening acts. Dante's, in case you haven't visited it lately, is the Satanically themed bar and rock club on 350 West Burnside, and it had real Beatle juice on stage that... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm Tomorrow's NT Times has a helpful guide to the 15 other "best" films, the documentary, animated and live fiction shorts. Technically, one doesn't have to actually see these films to pick the winners, though it helps, because the Oscar pool voter needs at least to know who made it. In that case, the likely winner for animated short is Day and Night, from Pixar, above, which almost always wins, in this case because it was tacked onto the front of Toy Story 3. The dark horse here is Bastien Dubois's Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage, which has... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm Since everyone is talking about Portlandia but basically saying the same thing, I thought I would point out another trend that seems to be Portland based. That is the weird limbo non-endings that are permiating movies made in or around the city. Cold Weather, the new Aaron Katz mumblecore movie, is a faux detective story that rather than ending simply stops. Meek's Cutoff ("cutoff" means "shortcut") is the new film from Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy) and not only does it eschew an ending, it doesn't even have a beginning. Could it be that... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm As regular readers may know, I wrote a book annotating Tarantino's Kill Bill, published in 2005. But given Tarantino's film-hunger and breadth of references, such a book is never truly done (is any book?). So in a sense I wasn't surprised today when I sat down to spend a football free Sunday re-watching Double Jeopardy, starring one of my favorite actresses, Ashley Judd. I hadn't seen the film since its release in 1999, but I remember it as, though a "genre piece," one of the several films in which she excelled with a naturalness that may... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm Word has reached us that Richard Beer, long time operator of the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon, has left his position there. We hope that he finds a new venue with which to do the kind of eclectic programing and openness to the public that he fostered at the Hollywood. Continue reading

By D. K. Holm On the day of the Oscar nominations it is customary for film writers to mount their soap box and pontificate on the latest batch of anointed ones. Is it permitted to say that I don't care? The resulting nominations announced today were as predictable as the titles on the list last year. There were some surprises last year among the winners. For example, that The Secret in Our Eyes was accorded best foreign film shocked those who assumed that The White Ribbon would take it. But of course, one has to really see all the films... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm Found in the crime thriller section of NetFlix, The Guilty is a clever little puzzle of a film in which awful people annihilate each other. It harks back to such films as The Internecine Affair, and is the cinematic equivalent of Mutual Assured Destruction. Anthony Waller's and credited screenwriter Simon Burke's 2000 film sets up a premise and then piles on a seemingly unceasing set of complications, that lock into each other like a fine timepiece. Nathan gets out of jail. His lousy friends try to get him in trouble minutes later. Instead Nathan wants to... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm Frozen, now available for streaming on NetFlix, is one of those recent "confinement" films, or tales of isolated people, with titles that range from 127 Hours to Buried to Nine Dead, this last having some "torture porn" elements. Written and directed by Adam Green, Frozen concerns three unlikable college students on a skiing excursion to "Mount Hollister." Through a series of machinations, the trio are trapped on the ski lift as the lodge shuts down for the night, and thus for the next five days. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. If a snow... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm On Friday night, Bill Maher, in his opening monologue on Real Time, made a joke about Charlie Sheen. It was arguably the 25th joke that Maher has made at Sheen's expense, and the audience greeted it with typical howls of laughter. Yet, less than a week earlier, Ricky Gervais made a similar joke, one that was much more tame and, indeed, obvious. It wasn't the most well-written joke in the history of comedy, and it telegraphed itself to anyone familiar with joke structure. Gervais's joke was the opening salvo in an evening of "Hollywood roast" style... Continue reading

By D. K. Holm If the point of art is to challenge and to undermine assumptions, than no film is more "challenging" than I Spit on Your Grave, the revenge thriller from 1978. But is it art in the conventional sense, or any conceivable sense? The original Grave was a low budget work with uneven acting and bad sound recording, in general looking like a drive-in exploitation film. In the mind of most people, this disqualifies Grave as a potential work of art, and in fact contributes to its outrageousness, its visual crudity transferring to its moral crudity. Grave was... Continue reading

As regular readers of my writings may know, I am a fan of the work of Robin Wood, the late British film scholar for whom I have been maintaing an unofficial bibliography.Wood's work first appeared primarily in the film magazine Movie, edited by (the now also late) Ian Cameron. One of my prized possessions is a complete run of the magazine, which I bought new as they were coming out with issue No. 19. Being a collector at heart (or maybe a hoarder; I used to have all the Marvel comic books), and being introduced to Wood via his book... Continue reading

One of the main drawbacks to conventional movie criticism is the reliance on the "well made film" with its unstated moral and cultural assumptions and its fashionable visual style which, like Victorian ladies boots, will seem out of fashion in the future. In other words, many if not most reviewers and of course most viewers, too, are not able to see beyond the surface poverty or unusual narrative strategies of many films, especially low budget or exploitation films. The viewer of whatever strip views these "deficiencies" as "mistakes" or failures of execution. As a rebuke to this kind of knee... Continue reading

D. K. Holm There are a lot of incredible cinematic things on the world wide web if one knows whom to ask or how to find it, or at least for now there is. There is good stuff and bad stuff, though probably more of the latter. Yet the bad stuff can have historical or socio-cultural significance. That significance is usually more interesting to read about later than view on its own. Take The Beast in Heat. Released in 1977, it's a mixed tale of Nazi medical experiments and Italian resistance fighting. It is a terrible, unpleasant, and lazy film,... Continue reading

D. K. Holm The new issue of Sight and Sound has arrived and the bulk of the issue is given over to commemorating the best of 2010. There is the lead article's polling of international film writers for their top five films, with the results ranging from the conventional to the comedy team of Christof Huber and Olaf Molller who rejoice in finding the world's most obscure movies, usually impossible to see anywhere, though their efforts to bring attention to the films is admirable. Sophie Mayer picked only films by female directors, a clever approach. But also in the spirit... Continue reading